Western Journal of Communication, 58 (Summer 1994), 164-181 2 Must We All Be Rhetorical Theorists?: An Anti-Democratic Inquiry JAMES DARSEY Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither. —William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality Frees YEARS AGO Barnet Baskerville warned against the diminishing range of rhetorical scholarship. ‘[I]n our enthusiasm for rhetorical criticism—narrowly regarded as the examination of individual works of art leading to enhanced understanding and appreciation or to normative critical statement, or broadly conceived as pronouncing a judgment upon the persuasive effects of almost anything—we may neglect important scholarly responsibilities.” Even as Professor Baskerville was lamenting the eclipse of rhetorical history by criticism, another tendency in rhetorical scholarship was emerging that, a decade and a half later, might be seen as having done to criticism what criticism, in Baskerville’s eyes, did to history. Turning from “the examination of individual works of art leading to enhanced understanding and appreciation or to normative critical statement,” rhetorical scholars, enamored of social science, began to look at artifacts, not in themselves, but as exempla of general principles. The study of rhetoric was seduced by the covering law model and rules theory. In the very issue of Quarterly Journal of Speech in which Baskerville made his complaint, one of his béte noir in the history v. criticism debate, Ernest Bormann, examined speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Bormann studied Lincoln’s speeches, not because they were deemed worthy of “enhanced understanding and appreciation” in their own right, but because they represented what he believed to be an important “fantasy type” in American public discourse.’ In his essay, Bormann announced Karlyn Campbell’s ‘enduring criticism” as his ideal, a criticism based on “the JAMES DARSEY (Ph.D., 1985, University of Wisconsin) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210. He would like to thank Roderick Hart, Valdan Pennington, his colleague Mary Garrett, and the editorial board of the Western Journal of Communication for advice and encouragement at various points along the way.Summer 1994 165 analysis of recurring patierns,” “explicating the essential processes of human symbolization.’’* Bormann’s move was hardly pioneering. It was symptomatic of a trend that had been incipient for a decade. John Waite Bowers provided perhaps the clearest, and arguably most influential, early articulation when he set forth the “pre-scientific” function of rhetorical criticism.® Like Baskerville and Bormann, Bowers saw criticism as traditionally concerned with the individual, the particular, “with the explication and evaluation of a single piece of work in a single context,” and he sought to supplant this focus with a “much nobler end” for criticism: “to contribute to an economical set of scientifically verifiable statements accounting for the origins and effect of all rhetorical discourses in all contexts.’’® Douglas Ehninger, in reprinting Bower's essay, aptly identi- fied the players in what has become a contest rather than a happy coexistence of two moieties, as rhetoric and communication theory. Today, the lines of opposition appear relatively stable; the vocabulary, as reflected in a Quarterly Journal of Speech “Forum” organized by David Henry, is recognizable in the tension between “text” and “theory,” though it is clear that “theory,” now equated with critical rhetoric, has gone some distance from Professor Bowers’ conception. The “theory” that Bowers had in mind was what Michael Leff terms a “modernist” idea, “based in conventional social scientific notions of theory.”® The new theory is postmodern.® What it has in common with the old, modern theory is a radical urge toward democratization, toward anonymity, toward essences; all productions become equal. Both stand opposed to the distinctive, the characterful. The anonymous survey response in the old social science has its parallel in the collectively produced artifact of the postmodern era. Postmodern theory may exhibit a political agenda that was absent or hidden in modern theory, but both stand against the “privileging” of any particular text, against the practice of criticism as Baskerville saw it and, more importantly, against the practice of criticism as it still exerts influence on those, like Leff, who remain concerned with “the unique integrity of the oratorical text.” Leff seems not to recognize the degree to which he has become the old, modern, conventionally social scientific theorist. In the process he transforms the debate from one between traditional, humanistic criti- cism and social scientific theory to one between old theory and new theory. Leff’s proposal to examine individual texts in controversy (a proposal that looks remarkably like Wrage and Baskerville’s model for the study of public address as intellectual history)! preserves, in its attention to details, the illusion of maintaining the integrity of the text, but, in taking these texts as “representative anecdotes,” as “paradigm texts,”!? the very motive of the investigation shifts toward the typical, Leff’s denial notwithstanding; details should not be confused with particulars. A text may be both representative and atypical, but our research models restrict our ability to consider both aspects simulta-166 Must We All Be Rhetorical Theorists? neously. And having tacitly surrendered to the old social scientific idea of the significant as representative, Leff lacks adequate bases of compari- son for discerning just what in the text is typical and what is idiosyn- cratic. Among the most important consequences of this failure is that Leff’s inability to achieve his announced aim of “deal{ing] with these texts in their full complexity and treat[ing] them as substantive wholes,” because he cannot talk meaningfully about what is most idiosyncratic, most characteristic about the text, its ethical component, the ethos behind it.'® Leff attempts to achieve the goals of criticism, traditionally conceived, according to the justifications allowed by theory, old or new. This is the source of his self-confessed “textual psychosis.’”!* What has been lost in this capitulation is a close look at the traditional justifications for both criticism and theory. Restricting the debate to one between old theory and new theory is arbitrary and shortsighted. Criticism, in such a debate, in fact has no voice. Structured as Leff and his critics have structured it, the debate leaves unaccounted for the rationale behind Samuel Johnson’s Life of Dryden, William Hazlitt’s On Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge writing on “the tenets peculiar to Mr. Word- sworth,” and Goethe on Byron or Moliére, or any of hundreds of other critical texts that might be adduced and whose value is generally assented to in our culture. We cannot adequately or fairly judge the value of the critical tradition according to the outcome of a pretexted debate between old and new theory. According to W. J. Bate, “[t]he great justification of criticism at any time is that it can help to bring into focus ‘and emphasize the function of the arts and of the humanities them- selves.... And the activity that subserves the humanities—critical theory—fulfills its purpose only if it is as fully aware as possible of the aim and character of what it subserves.””!® The issue here is not one of methods or means, it is a question of motive. A genuine debate between criticism and theory asks us to examine the purposes of our scholarship, and it revives ancient ques- tions about the essential nature of the humanities and the sciences. It is easiest, perhaps, to recover the aim or character of criticism by contrasting it to its most prominent and established rival, the rationale of science generally, and of the social sciences in particular. By Leff’s own reckoning, the best articulation of “conventional social scientific notions of theory” in rhetoric are two essays by Roderick Hart.'® While citations in the current debates reveal their influence, these essays have received no direct examination, spawned no conversations, even though their author invited same. In 1986 when Hart’s “Research Editorial” was published in these pages, I was in Chicago where I was taking a year’s sabbatical from scholarship in order to spend time at the symphony, the opera, the theater, the museums, and wandering streets generally acknowledged to be the finest showcase for twentieth-century architecture in the world.