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n the Proceedings of the First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies held in Milan in 1974, Seymour Chatman asks if there is a modern science or group of sciences that deals with the subject matter of ancient rhetoric . . . or has that matter become so fragmented over the centuries that there is no virtue, other than a purely antiquarian one, in trying to reunite its elements under some single rubric like rhetoric or a more modern sounding term In other words, continues Chatman, shall we try to transform rhetoric as such into a science . . . or shall we be content, in a merely historical way, to trace its breakdown and absorption into a variety of elds . . . Does rhetoric have to be reassembled, like Israel, or shall we let its descendants remain in diaspora1
1 Rhetoric and Semiotics, in A Semiotic Landscape, ed., Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco, and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 10312 (p. 103).
Rhetorica, Vol. XXIV, Issue 3, pp. 303323, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541. 2006 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
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Chatman is asking whether rhetoric should be a modern discipline or will the very use of the name confuse modern discussions with undesirable antique overtones?2 Chatman himself argues that alterations and adaptations are pointless, and thus the only productive course is to search for alternatives. The alternatives to rhetoric, as it happens, are the many varieties of semiotics. Chatman concludes that the chief utility of the study of rhetoric to the semiotician is historical, that there is little current value in the models of the ancient discipline, but that something, perhaps a great deal, can be gained from considering the kinds of problems with which it has struggled and some of the distinctions it has uncovered, though almost all of these have to be reinterpreted in modern ways.3 Chatman is typical of many semioticians who relegate rhetoric to little more than limited historical relevance. Indeed, a remarkable number of semioticians preface their works with a history of rhetoric. These surveys usually begin with the emergence of rhetoric in ancient Greece and proceed into the nineteenth century when rhetoric nally expires. Conveniently enough, the expiration of rhetoric is followed by the discovery of semiotics in the early twentieth century by Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. This is as it should be, because for many a semiotician, semiotics simply supersedes rhetoric, incorporating anything of value that was to be found in the rhetorical estate and relegating the rest to footnotes. As a discipline semiotics displays an interesting ambivalence to history. It is self-consciously new, undiscovered before the nineteenth century, and yet to demonstrate this newness semiotics must demonstrate its superiority over older disciplines. Semiotics, as the science of signs, is also broad in scope; it potentially encompasses all human activity. Given this great breadth, it is natural that earlier thinkers, including rhetoricians, would have inadvertently and unknowingly touched upon semiotic concerns. Thus semiotics is a new discipline with a long history, and rhetoric necessarily gures directly into this history. The intent of this essay, therefore, is to examine the relationship between semiotics and rhetoric, paying particular attention to the semioticians historical accounts which detail rhetorics demise.
Rhetoric and Semiotics, 102103. Rhetoric and Semiotics, 112. Chatmans skepticism, if not hostility, toward rhetoric is remarkable considering that for many years he taught in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
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For discussion of the place of rhetoric in Peirces work see John R. Lyne, Rhetoric and Semiotic in C. S. Peirce, Quarterly Journal of Speech (1980): 155168 and James Jakob Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), chap. 4, Universal Rhetoric, 78108. 5 Other names might be added to this list. Certainly many writers discuss rhetoric from what might be called a semiotic perspective. However, I am specically concerned with those writers who trace rhetorics demise historically and attribute that demise at least in part to the gures of speech. Thus Paul de Man is absent because in Semiology and Rhetoric, Diacritics (Fall 1973): 2733, he does not offer an extended historical analysis of rhetorics decline in the manner of those cited above. However, de Man does share with other semioticians the view that rhetoric is the study of tropes and of gures (28). Jacques Derrida, in White Mythology, also deals with some of the issues addressed in this paper: White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy, New Literary History 6 (1974): 576, especially The Flowers of Rhetoric: The Heliotrope, 4660. 6 R. Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988). 7 Semiotic Challenge, 11.
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can readily avail himself of the bibliographic references which are lacking here.8 Barthes point of departure is to confront the new semiotics of writing with the classical practice of literary language, which for centuries was known as rhetoric.9 The word old does not mean there is a new rhetoric today; rather old rhetoric is set in opposition to that new which may not yet have come into being; the world is incredibly full of old rhetoric.10 Rhetoric, says Barthes, is a metalanguage which was prevalent in the West from the fth century bc to the nineteenth century ad. This metalanguage was a veritable empire, greater and more tenacious than any political empire in its dimensions and duration . . . Rhetoric prevailed in the West for two and a half millennia, from Gorgias to Napoleon III . . . it has taken three centuries to die; and it is not dead for sure even now.11 Rhetoric was particularly inuential in education and its history can be seen in the rise and fall of rhetoric in the curriculum: Rhetoric is triumphant: it rules over instruction. Rhetoric is moribund: limited to this sector, it falls gradually into intellectual discredit.12 The reason for this discredit is the promotion of a new value, evidence (of facts, of ideas, of sentiments), which is self-sufcient and does without language (or imagines it does so).13 Barthes says that this evidence takes, from the sixteenth century on, three directions: a personal evidence (in Protestantism), a rational evidence (in Cartesianism), a sensory evidence (in Empiricism).14 Thus rhetoric died, but to say in a categorical way that Rhetoric is dead would mean we could specify what replaced it.15 Like Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov also presents a semioticians survey of rhetoric in Theories of the Symbol.16 Todorov, too, classies the entire history of rhetoric into two periods which he calls Splendor and Misery. The period of splendor extends from rhetorics beginnings in ancient Greece to Cicero, whom Todorov calls the last of
Semiotic Challenge, 12. Semiotic Challenge, 11. 10 Semiotic Challenge, 11. 11 Semiotic Challenge, 15. 12 Semiotic Challenge, 43. 13 Semiotic Challenge, 43. 14 Semiotic Challenge, 43. 15 Semiotic Challenge, 45. 16 T. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); French original, Theories du symbole (Paris 1977).
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the ancients and rst of the moderns.17 Todorov then sees a period of misery emerging from the crisis of the Roman Republic. After the collapse of the Republic rhetoric passes from instrumental to ornamental, from functional to beautiful.18 This second period is rather long, to say the least, extending from Quintilian in the rst century to Pierre Fontanier in the nineteenth. Rhetoric, says Todorov, is a discipline in which such shortcuts are possible and even legitimate, so slow is its evolution.19 This second period is not a happy one for rhetoric: Between Quintilian and Fontanier, fortune does not smile on one single rhetoricianand this longest period in the history of rhetoriclasting nearly 1800 yearsturns out to be . . . a period of slow decadence and degradation, suffocation and bad conscience.20 Of course, says Todorov, history indeed does not stop with Fontanier . . . only the history of rhetoric stops there.21 Rhetoric, says Todorov, did not survive the nineteenth century, but, before it disappeared, it producedthrough a nal effort more powerful than any that had gone before it, as if to try to stave off imminent extinctiona body of reections whose quality is unmatched.22 This swan song of rhetoric began early in the eighteenth century, with Des Tropes (1730) of Cesar Chesneau Dumarsais and ended, a century or so later, with the work of Pierre Fontanier, whom Todorov regards as the last rhetorician.23 While Fontanier might not have been, in Todorovs estimation, the one to kill off rhetoric, his work represents the culmination of rhetorics degeneration. Fontaniers predecessor, Dumarsais, created a catalogue of tropes that proved to be a popular, inuential, and enduring work.24
Theories of the Symbol, 65. Todorov is here repeating the common claim that rhetoric suffered a decline after the collapse of the Roman Republic. For an alternative view see Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially part II, Rhetoric in Later Antiquity: A Short Revisionist History, 45135. Walker argues that although there certainly were changes in the sociopolitical conditions and rhetorical practices, there was no decline of rhetoric in any meaningful sense either in the Hellenistic or the Roman period (ix). 19 Theories of the Symbol, 69. 20 Theories of the Symbol, 70. 21 Theories of the Symbol, 79. 22 Theories of the Symbol, 84. 23 Des Tropes ou des differents sens. Figure et vingt autres articles de lEncyclopedie, suivis de LAbrege des Tropes de labbe Ducros, ed. Franoise Douay-Soublin (Paris: Flammarion, 1988). 24 For editions and abridgements of Des Tropes, see Oeuvres de Dumarsais in Des Tropes, ed. Douay-Soublin, 41314. An assessment of Dumarsais place in early
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Barthes says that for the eighteenth century, the most famous treatise (and moreover the most intelligent) is that of Dumarsais.25 Fontanier, as Dumarsais successor, used the latters Tropes as a point of departure for his own works. Thus Fontaniers rst work was Les Tropes de Dumarsais, avec un commentaire raisonne (1818) followed by Manuel classique pour letude des tropes (1821) and Traite general des gures du discours autres que les tropes (1827).26 The latter work, like Dumarsais Tropes, became a standard textbook on rhetoric in France. Todorov, who earlier praised the efforts of Dumarsais, Fontanier, and others as reections of unmatched quality,27 concludes his review of their work by asserting that every page, taken by itself, reeks of mediocrity. We are dealing with an elderly gentleman (rhetoric): he never dares to stray very far from the ideal of his youth (exemplied by Cicero and Quintilianalthough they were elderly gentlemen themselves, in their way); he does not notice the transformations of the world around him (Fontanier came after Romanticism, in its German manifestation at least). And yet there is something splendid about this old age; the old man has forgotten nothing of the twothousand-year history of his life. Better still, in a debate animated by many voices, notions, denitions, and relations are rened and crystallized as never before. Here then is the paradox: this sequence of lusterless pages, when taken as a whole, produces a dazzling impression indeed.28 The eighteenth century witnessed the culmination of rhetorics second crisis in which, at a single stroke rhetoric was acquitted, liberated, and put to death.29 So rhetoric has died again, a bit earlier than in Barthes account, and for a different reason. For Todorov the cause of rhetorics ultimate death is romanticism: romanticism sup-
eighteenth-century European rhetoric is offered by Jean-Paul Sermain, Le code du bon gout (17251750), in Marc Fumaroli, ed., Histoire de la rhetorique dans lEurope moderne 14501950 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 879943, esp. 926 36. 25 The Semiotic Challenge, 45. 26 For a modern edition of Fontaniers works see Les gures du discours, ed. Gerard Genette (Paris: Flammarion, 1968). Genettes introduction contains a useful discussion of Fontaniers treatise. See also Arlette Michel, Romantisme, literature et rhetorique, in Fumaroli, Histoire de la rhetorique, 104244. A comprehensive survey of rhetoric in nineteenth-century France is presented by Franoise Douay-Soublin, La rhetorique ` ` en France au XIXe siecle a travers ses pratiques et ses institutions: restauration, renaissance, remise en cause, in Fumaroli, Histoire de la rhetorique, 10711214. 27 Theories of the Symbol, 84. 28 Theories of the Symbol, 87. 29 Theories of the Symbol, 79.
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pressed the necessity for regimenting discourse, since now anyone, by drawing upon personal inspiration, without technique or rules, can produce admirable works of art. Thought is no longer divorced or even distinguishedfrom expression; there is no longer, in a word, any need for rhetoric.30 Todorov asks the question posed by many of rhetorics critics: why did rhetoric, an untenable system, somehow survive for nearly two millennia? His answer is that rhetoric was the product of a repressive society which regimented discourse. Todorov nds rhetorics persistence so inexplicable that he dismisses it as something akin to a cultural mental illness.31 For Todorov, then, the history of rhetoric is one of splendor and misery much as Barthes before him characterized the same history as triumphant and moribund. Other semioticians share much of Barthes and Todorovs view of the history of rhetoric and typically differ from the histories just recounted only in the level of detail. Thus in his Figures of Literary Discourse Gerard Genette offers what he calls a cavalier account of rhetorics history, which he admits would need to supplemented by an immense historical investigation along the lines of the one already sketched by Barthes.32 Like Todorov and Barthes before him, Genette appears to believe that little of use survived the great shipwreck of rhetoric.33 Genette, too, features Dumarsais and Fontanier as the key gures in the later stages of rhetorics decline. Genette acknowledges Fontaniers taxonomic intelligence and calls him the Linnaeus of rhetoric.34 For Genette, rhetorics career has been a historical course of a discipline that has witnessed, over the centuries, the gradual contraction of its eld of competence . . . from Corax to our own day, the history of rhetoric has been that of a generalized restriction.35 For Genette, this generalized restriction is a movement from rhetoric, classically conceived, to a theory of gures, to a theory of tropes, to a nal valorization of metaphor as the surviving heir of the rhetorical tradition. Like Barthes, Todorov, and especially Genette, Paul Ricoeur sees rhetoric as having followed a course of gradual decline from its classical origins to its present moribund state. In The Rule of Metaphor,
Theories of the Symbol, 80. Theories of the Symbol, 79. 32 Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 104. 33 Figures of Literary Discourse, 114. 34 Gerard Genette, Introduction: La rhetorique des gures, in Fontanier, Les gures du discourse, cited in n. 26 above, p. 13. 35 Figures of Literary Discourse, 103104.
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Ricoeur offers an account of rhetorics career that concludes with its dying days.36 One cause of rhetorics death was its reduction to parts, that is, the gures. Ricoeur decries the taxonomic tendency of rhetoric, as exemplied by the lists of gures, largely because these taxonomies are, in his view, static. The more crucial problem is that the taxonomies contributed to rhetorics severing itself from argument. Ricoeur recognizes that Greek rhetoric was broader, more dramatic, than a theory of gures.37 After all, says Ricoeur, before taxonomy there was Aristotles Rhetoric, and, moreover, before rhetoric was futile, it was dangerous.38 Rhetorics decline from dangerous to merely futile is in large part attributed, yet again, to Fontanier.39 When he turns to Fontanier, however, Ricoeur modies his view that a chief cause of rhetorics decline is its reduction to the gures. Ricoeur dedicates the chapter on rhetorics decline to Gerard Genette because Genette argues that the progressive reduction of the domain of rhetoric was its undoing.40 Ricoeur agrees with Genette that since the Greeks, rhetoric diminished bit by bit to a theory of style by cutting itself off from the two parts that generated it, the theories of argumentation and of composition. Then, in turn, the theory of style shrank to a classication of gures of speech, and this to a theory of tropes.41 Although he agrees with this analysis, Ricoeur does not regard the reduction to tropology as the decisive factor in rhetorics demise. The emphasis on the reduction of rhetoric is not useful because the problem is not to restore the original domain of rhetoricin any case this may be beyond doing, for ineluctable cultural reasonsrather, it is to understand in a new way the very workings of tropes.42 For Ricoeur, then, rhetorics alleged reduction to a theory of tropes was less debilitating than rhetorics inability to develop a theory of tropes that proved useful. Barthes, Todorov, Genette, and Ricoeur all offer accounts of rhetorics history that culminate in rhetorics demise sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. While these critics differ on the precise cause of death, all (with the exception of
36 P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. R. Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 28. 37 Rule of Metaphor, 12. 38 Rule of Metaphor, 1011. 39 Rule of Metaphor, 4851. 40 Rule of Metaphor, 44. 41 Rule of Metaphor, 45. 42 Rule of Metaphor, 45.
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Todorov) regard the reduction of rhetoric to the gures and tropes as an important contributing cause. This consensus is one of the most obvious features of all these histories: they all decry the tropological impulse and yet all are fascinated by the gures. They present histories in which the gures play a prominent role and, despite rhetorics demise, they agree that the gures have survived. This, in turn, presents one of the incongruities of these histories: how can rhetoric have died, if the greatest portion of its body has continued to live While they often decry the concentration on the gures, all appear to want the gures to be prominent in the discipline that succeeds rhetoric.
Group Mu
Despite the pronouncements of Barthes, Todorov, Genette, and Ricoeur that rhetoric is dead, these semioticians do not seem quite certain that it is buried. As Barthes notes, for rhetoric to be truly dead, there must be something to replace it. The obvious choice to replace rhetoric is, of course, semiotics. But neither Barthes nor the others offer a clear vision of just how, or in what ways, semiotics will replace rhetoric. The task of integrating rhetoric into semiotics was undertaken most fully by six scholars at the University of Liege calling themselves Group Mu.43 Their work, Rhetorique generale (1970), remains probably the most ambitious attempt to fashion a rhetoric in accord with semiotic principles. Despite the title, the work is not, as many have noted, a general rhetoric; rather it is a work primarily about the gures. As Group Mus translators explain: the book is mostly a study of rhetorical tropes and gures, what classical rhetoric called elocutio. It attempts to set forth the basic principles by which all gures of language and thought are derived and can be explained. The translators conclude that this study represents the rst time that the complex variety of gures has been systematically and coherently derived; moreover, the method adopted here brings elocutio into the range of modern linguistics.44 Thus unlike Barthes, Todorov,
43 The six authors explain that we have chosen as our symbol the rst letter of the Greek word designating the most prestigious of metaboles. Group Mu (J. Dubois, F. Edeline, J.-M. Klinkenberg, P. Minguet, F. Pire, H. Trinon), A General Rhetoric, trans. P. Burell and E. Slotkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), xix. 44 A General Rhetoric, Translators Preface, xiv.
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and the others, Group Mu does not simply proclaim the end of rhetoric, they propose a specic replacement for the old rhetoric. An examination, therefore, of their attempt to bring elocutio into the range of modern linguistics provides a singular test of the signicance of the semiotic challenge to rhetoric. Despite the translators claims for the novelty of Group Mus project, A General Rhetorics gurative and taxonomic emphasis invites comparisons with the elocutio of classical rhetoric. Perhaps mindful of their apparent similarity with the rhetorical tradition, Group Mu, like Barthes and Todorov, emphasize the historical discontinuity between their approach and that of traditional rhetoricians. At least in France, says Group Mu, rhetoric was dead in thought if not in practice.45 So dead was rhetoric that a dozen or so years before the publication of A General Rhetoric anyone claiming that rhetoric would again become a major discipline would have been laughed at.46 This is because rhetoric was never a very coherent discipline; historically it degenerated into a sclerotic tradition which eventually gave up the ghost.47 But Group Mu believes that rhetoric, despite its unfortunate decline, deserves resuscitation by semioticians. After all, as the translators note, rhetoric was once an important and respected discipline.48 At the time Group Mu began to conceive of A General Rhetoric, the discipline of rhetoric was showing at least some signs of its former vitality. Today, says Group Mu, rhetoric appears not only as a science of the future but also a timely science within the scope of structuralism, new criticism, and semiology.49 Group Mu credits the revival of rhetoric to Barthes and Todorov, as well as Roman Jacobson and Chaim Perelman. But despite the reemergence of rhetoric within a structuralist and semiotic context, Group Mu makes it clear that they would not restore all of the rhetorical tradition: no one thinks seriously of bringing her back with all the old debris. We must avoid the bric-a-brac. Group Mu agrees with Genettes claim that classical rhetoricians had a mania for naming. In Group Mus view the endless nomenclatures of the gures, while perhaps not the underlying cause, has been the evident sign of rhetorics demise.50 Group Mu concedes that despite
A General Rhetoric, 1. A General Rhetoric, 1. 47 A General Rhetoric, 4, 5. 48 A General Rhetoric, Translators Preface, xiii. 49 A General Rhetoric, 1. 50 A General Rhetoric, 2.
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its demise many of its old duties survived and were co-opted by the eld of stylistics. Stylistics, unlike the old rhetoric, is not concerned with learning to write or crafting a persuasive message, but rather is intent upon discovering how and why a text is a text.51 Thus the study of rhetoric becomes an effort to discover literary meaning. For Group Mu literature is rst of all a singular use of language. It is, in fact, the theory of this usage that will constitute the rst objective of general, and perhaps generalizable, rhetoric.52 Thus rhetoric is, not surprisingly, rooted in language. More specically, rhetoric is a set of operations made on language necessarily dependent on certain characteristics of language. We shall see that all rhetorical operations rest on a fundamental property of linear discoursethat discourse can be decomposed into smaller and smaller units.53 In Group Mus analysis these gures are, for the most part, the familiar ones of classical rhetoric. The gures, or metaboles as Group Mu calls them, are classied into four different elds: metaplasm, metataxis, metaseme, and metalogism. Metaplasms are gures that act on sounds or graphic aspects of language. Metataxes are gures that act on the structure of the sentence. Metasemes are gures that replace one seme, or unit of meaning, with another. And, nally, metalogisms are gures of thought that modify the logical value of sentences. Each metabole, or gure, is also categorized into one of four different linguistic operations: suppression, addition, suppression-addition, and permutation. The various traditional gures are classied within the intersections of these four elds and four operations. For example, metaplasm includes aphaeresis and apocope; metataxis includes zeugma and parataxis; metaseme includes synecdoche and antonomasia; metalogism includes litotes and hyperbole. Up to this point in the analysis Group Mu has been content to say that gures act upon or modify language in some way. But if they are to meet their goal of rigorous linguistic analysis, they recognize that they must go beyond such vague terms and explain just how gures function. To do so, Group Mu offers several operating concepts including the crucial concept of deviation. Group Mu denes gures as signicant alterations, or deviations, from a linguistic norm: the rst stage of rhetoric consists in an authors creating deviations, the second stage consists in a readers
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deciphering them.54 Thus gures deviate from a norm, but not so much that the reader is prevented from engaging in the interpretation or autocorrection of the alteration. The centrality of deviation in the gurative process requires that Group Mu dene the norm from which the gures deviate. That norm, says Group Mu, is degree zero. Group Mu denes degree zero, not as a colorless or neutral language, in the manner of Barthes,55 but rather in terms of semes, the smallest possible units of meaning. Thus absolute degree zero . . . would be a discourse reduced to its essential semes . . . that is, to the semes that we could not suppress without at the same time depriving our discourse of all signication.56 Such discourse is univocal, that is, it lacks the redundancy typical of most language. But absolute degree zero remains an ideal, whereas the norm from which rhetoric would deviate is practical degree zero: utterance containing all the essential semes along with a number of contiguous semes reduced to a minimum as functions of the possibilities of the vocabulary.57 Degree zero is, admits Group Mu, an often ungraspable norm which they themselves have difculty dening. Degree zero is at least partially dened by the readers expectations as determined by the interplay of language, culture, and context. Figures, by deviating from this norm in often unpredictable ways invites interpretation (autocorrection) on the part of the reader and it is this deviation and interpretation that is at the heart of the gurative experience. Group Mu, however, does not regard all deviation as rhetorical: in the rhetorical sense we shall understand deviation as the detected alteration of degree zero. Or, to put it another way, we shall agree to call rhetorical only those operations trying for poetic effect . . . and found especially in poetry, jokes, slang, and so on.58 Thus rhetorical deviation requires intent, although gures can also occur in the absence of intent. Rhetoric, then, as Group Mu denes it, is
A General Rhetoric, 34. R. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). Despite the title of this work, Barthes discusses degree zero only on pp. 45 and 7678. For Barthes, in contrast to Group Mu, degree zero is not a linguistic norm but rather a deliberate technique: an attempt towards disengaging literary language which results in a style of absence which is almost an ideal absence of style (7677). 56 A General Rhetoric, 30. 57 A General Rhetoric, 30. 58 A General Rhetoric, 37.
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based on the double movement of the creation and reduction of deviations.59 How successful was Group Mu at creating a new rhetoric in harmony with semiotics? Even semioticians like Ricoeur appear unsure. Writing about Group Mus work Ricoeur says that the new rhetoric at rst glance is nothing but a repetition of classical rhetoric, at least that of tropes, only at a higher level of technicity. But this is just a rst impression. The new rhetoric is far from being a reformulation of the theory of tropes in more formal terms; it proposes instead to restore the entire breadth of the theory of gures.60 And perhaps Ricoeur is correct, if one accepts his contention that rhetoric was ultimately reduced to the tropes, and thus largely ignored the gures until these were revived by Group Mu. Yet Group Mus identication of deviation as the foundation of the gures cannot but make the link between Group Mu and classical rhetoric very clear. As Ricoeur himself admits, every one agrees in saying that gurative language exists only if one can contrast it with another language that is not gurative.61 Indeed, the agreement that gurative language is only meaningful when contrasted with the non-gurative spans the centuries. In the Institutio oratoria Quintilian says a commonly accepted meaning of the term gure is that which is poetically or rhetorically altered from the simple and obvious method of expression. It will then be true to distinguish between the style which is devoid of gures . . . and that which is adorned with gures.62 Later rhetoricians would follow Quintilians denition of a gure as a change in meaning or language from the ordinary and simple form.63 Thus in the Renaissance George Puttenham says: Figurative Speech is a nouelty of language euidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from the ordinarie habit and manner of our dayly talke and writing and gure it selfe is a certain lively or good grace set upon words, speeches and sentences to some purpose and not in vain, giving them ornament or efcacy by many manner of alterations in shape, in sounde, and also in sense.64 Some two centuries later the ubiquitous Hugh Blair maintains that gures of speech always imply some departure from
A General Rhetoric, 36. Rule of Metaphor, cited above n. 36, p. 136. 61 Rule of Metaphor, 138. 62 Institutio oratoria, 9.1.14 (trans. H. E. Butler). 63 Institutio oratoria, 9.1.11. 64 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968), 13233.
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simplicity of expression.65 Blair adds that though Figures imply a deviation from what may be reckoned the most simple form of Speech, we are not thence to conclude, that they imply anything uncommon or unnatural. This is so far from being the case, that, on many occasions, they are both the most natural, and the most common method of uttering our sentiments. It is impossible to compose any discourse without using them often; nay, there are few Sentences of any length, in which some expression or other, that may be termed a gure, does not occur.66 By explaining the gures in terms of deviation Group Mu follows a view well established in the long history of rhetoric, according to which the gures are dened as departures, alterations, and deviations from a norm.
65 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), vol. 1, 27273. 66 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 27374. Perhaps anticipating Genette, Todorov, and others, Blair recommends Dumarsais as one of the most sensible and instructive writers on gurative language (pp. 27273, note). 67 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, augmented ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 23. 68 Semiotic Challenge, cited above n. 6, p. 47. 69 Theories of the Symbol, cited above n. 16, p. 107.
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that Quintilian also set up four general categories of deviation (mutatio) which reappear with modication in modern semiotic systems of rhetorical gures.70 In Book 1 of the Institutio oratoria Quintilian identies four classes of solecisms: addition, omission, transposi tion, and substitution. As Noth suggests, these four classes conform closely to Group Mus four operations of deviation: addition, suppression, permutation, and suppression-addition. Three of the four categories of Quintilian and Group Mu share either similar or identical labels. Even Group Mus suppression-addition, which at rst glance seems not to correspond to one of Quintilians four categories, is similar to his category substitution. In suppression-addition, Group Mu explains, an element of one class is substituted for another class.71 These two four-part classications are similar, but not identical. Quintilian is discussing solecisms or errors in language, which, he says, writers typically have dealt with in a fourfold division. Although solecisms are errors of language, Quintilian makes it clear that many gures closely resemble solecisms.72 While Quintilian is primarily talking about errors of language, Group Mus operations are employed to explain the deviations which produce virtually all the gures.73 While the fourfold divisions of Group Mu and Quintilian differ signicantly in scope, the categories nevertheless remain similar. For Quintilian and Group Mu, and countless rhetoricians in between, have faced the need to organize the gures into categories
Winfried Noth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 341. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 1.5.3742. 71 A General Rhetoric, cited above n. 43, p. 75. This statement refers to the operation of suppression-addition within the eld of metataxes. 72 Institutio oratoria, 1.5.4041. 73 In the twentieth century Roman Jakobson derived a system of tropes from language disturbance aphasia. Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 76, claim that the varieties of aphasia oscillate between two polar types: metaphor and metonymy. According to Jacobson and Halle the development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. That is, discourse develops either metaphorically of metonymically. Their reduction of tropes to two archetypal forms was widely inuential. The reduction of the tropes to a few prototypical forms had been proposed at various times by rhetoricians. In the early eighteenth century Giambatista Vico advocated four fundamental tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. See Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 7980. In 1945 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 503 17, proposed Four Master Tropes. These were once again metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (although Burke makes no mention of Vico).
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that render them more useful and understandable. If semioticians have found these classicatory efforts frustratingly elusive, so, too, have rhetoricians. Quintilian notes that in his own time there was considerable disagreement among rhetoricians about the names of the gures and the ways to classify them. After discussing tropes in Book 8 of the Institutio he turns in Book 9 to the gures, and begins by noting the similarity of these two concepts. Many authors, he says, have considered gures identical with tropes, because whether it be that the latter derive their name from having a certain form or from the fact that they effect alterations in language . . . it must be admitted that both these features are found in gures as well.74 Quintilian says further that tropes and gures have a general resemblance because both involve a departure from the simple and straightforward method of expression coupled with a certain rhetorical excellence.75 Although Quintilian synthesizes the classications offered by his predecessors, perhaps anticipating the semioticians, he too reveals some impatience with the quibbling about the distinction between tropes and gures. In discussing irony Quintilian notes that some regard it as a trope and others as a gure and, he says, I am aware of the complicated and minute discussions to which it has given rise, but these artices will produce exactly the same effect, whether they are styled tropes or gures, since their values lie not in their names, but in their effect. He concludes that it is best to adopt the generally accepted terms and to understand the actual thing, by whatever name it is called.76
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cational displacement. The claim is that rhetoric is actually deador at least terminally ill. All, too, share a general agreement about the cause of rhetorics death: the reduction of rhetoric to the gures. But, here too, there is uncertainty. The gures, the cause of rhetorics demise, emerge as the most useful survivor of rhetorics demise. Indeed, it seems reasonable to say that the semioticians are as obsessed with the gures as are the rhetoricians whose works they dismiss. Group Mus work, a self-proclaimed attempt to integrate rhetoric with contemporary linguistics is, after all, a work of elocutio.77 The semioticians fascination with the gures may perhaps be partially explained by the fact that their histories are derived from the particularities of the rhetorical tradition in France. Todorov, for example, admits that his own analysis looks exclusively at the last centuries of rhetorical activity in France.78 Thus the prominence of Dumarsais and Fontanier in French education may be expected to have caused the semioticians to privilege the gures in their accounts. Yet the course of rhetoric in France may not be entirely generalizable to the history of rhetoric in general. George Kennedy maintains that the work of Dumarsais culminated the tendency toward regarding rhetoric as the study of literary devices of style, begun in France with Ramus. Kennedy continues that although Dumarsais work was translated into English, rhetoricians in Britain in the later eighteenth century, where oratory had a signicant role in public life, viewed rhetoric in something closer to the classical sense, with a secondary application to literary composition. The result has been a division between the European understanding of rhetoric as primarily a matter of the use of tropes and gures, taken up by teachers of English in Britain and America, and an American tradition among teachers of speech viewing rhetoric as civic discourse, derived from classical sources and other eighteenth-century British rhetoricians.79 While national experiences may help explain semioticians points of view, the French tradition may not be as excessively gurative as these histories maintain. Indeed, Todorov concedes that there is another tradition in France represented by Etienne Bonnet de Condillac: A rhetoric such as Condillacs grants an important
77 It is interesting to note that Group Mus more recent work has focused on visual rhetoric and is far less dependent on classical rhetoric than is A General Rhetoric. See Groupe Mu. Traite du signe visuel: Pour une rhetorique de limage (Paris: Seuil, 1992). 78 Theories of the Symbol, cited above n. 16, p. 108. 79 G. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 276.
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place to the gures (or turns), but does not eliminate all the rest (that is, considerations regarding the construction of discourse in general).80 Similarly, Genette notes that his claim that rhetoric in France is above all a rhetoric of elocutio has been challenged by Anton Kibedi Vargas Rhetorique et literature. Vargas entire book, says Genette, demonstrates the interest shown by certain seventeenthand eighteenth-century rhetoricians in the techniques of argument and composition.81 Genette attributes the difference in interpretation to relative emphasis and proportion given to various rhetoricians. However, says Genette, that part of French rhetoric devoted to elocutio, even when it was not the largest, was already at that time the most vivid, the most original in relation to ancient models and therefore the most productive.82 Genette recognizes, as do others discussed here, that classical rhetoric encompassed much more than the gures. But virtually all argue, nevertheless, that the gures represent the most productive part of the rhetorical tradition. Ricoeur acknowledges that Greek rhetoric was broader, more dramatic, than a theory of gures.83 Barthes, in particular, shows great familiarity with the breadth of classical rhetoric, describing in considerable detail what he calls the network, the rhetorical machine, that is, the apparatus of the ancient art.84 Barthes knows that elocutio is more than tropes: The arguments found and broadly distributed in the parts of discourse remain to be put into words: this is the function of this third part of the techne rhetorike known as lexis or elocutio, to which we are accustomed to pejoratively reducing rhetoric because of the interest the Moderns have taken in the gures of rhetoric, a part (but only a part) of Elocutio.85 And yet when Group Mu offers an alternative to
80 Theories of the Symbol, 107. It should be noted that Todorov does claim that Condillac is the sole representative of this tradition of discourse in general although he is linked to certain manifestations of rhetorical thought at the end of the seventeenth century, most notably in the Logique ou lart de penser, by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, and in the Rhetorique ou lart de parler by Bernard Lamy. 81 Figures of Literary Discourse, cited above n. 32, p. 104, n. 7. See Anton Kibedi Varga, Rhetorique et literature. Etudes de structures classiques (Paris: Didier, 1970). 82 Figures of Literary Discourse, 104. 83 Rule of Metaphor, cited above n. 36, p. 12. 84 Semiotic Challenge, cited above n. 6, pp. 51, 47. 85 Semiotic Challenge, 83. It should be noted that not all semioticians analyze classical rhetoric exclusively from a gurative perspective. An alternative analysis is presented by Giovanni Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity, trans. C. Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Manetti maintains that the consideration of signs rests at the heart of inventio, that is, when proofs must
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the obsolete classical rhetoric, that alternative looks remarkably like classical rhetoric. A General Rhetoric is a work that ts readily into the gurative tradition. The gures themselves are given the familiar names of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and the rest. Group Mu departs from conventional terms with its elds of gures: metaplasm, metataxis, metaseme, and metalogism. (But even the names of these elds have comfortingly familiar Greek roots). Indeed, so similar is Group Mus effort to traditional approaches that Barthes calls it a revalidation of the old rhetoric.86 Sufcient time has passed since Barthes rst issued the semiotic challenge to permit an assessment of the semioticians claims for the fall of rhetoric and the rise of semiotics. Jonathan Culler, in a new preface to The Pursuit of Signs, offers such an assessment of the relationship between semiotics and literature. Culler observes that when he wrote The Pursuit of Signs in 1981 it seemed possible that the idea of a general science of signs, a semiology or semiotics, might revitalize the humanities and social sciences in general, not just literary and cultural studies.87 He concludes that the ambitious program of a science of signs did not succeed. He attributes this failure to the excessive ambition of semiotics: the attempt to take all knowledge as its province may have been doomed from the start, but it certainly made it harder for semiotics to succeed in any particular area of endeavor. Wherever it ventured, it could not help but seem an imperialistic interloper seeking to claim this area for its vast putative empire.88 Culler notes that in A Theory of Semiotics Umberto Eco offered a list of concerns of the eld that is almost comical in its range and disorder: Zoosemiotics, olfactory signs, Tactile communication, Codes of taste, Paralinguistics, Medical semiotics, Kinesics and proxemics, Musical codes, Formalized languages, Written languages, Unknown languages and secret codes, Natural languages, Visual communication, Systems of objects, Plot structure, Text theory, Cultural codes, Aesthetic texts, Mass communication, Rhetoric.89 Eco himself admits that such an
be found to convince the court of the guilt or innocence of the accused (140). Thus Mannetti concentrates his analysis of both Greek and Roman rhetoric on invention and says very little about the gures. Although semiotics is usually dened as the science of signs, Manetti is one of the few semioticians explicitly to examine signs in the context of classical rhetoric. 86 The Semiotic Challenge, 46. 87 Pursuit of Signs, cited above n. 67, p. x. 88 Pursuit of Signs, ix. 89 Pursuit of Signs, ix.
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agenda may give the impress of arrogant imperialism on the part of semioticians.90 This arrogance, combined with a grandiose design for subsuming an immense array of disparate disciplines, probably made the semioticians program futile from the outset. Culler observes that people afliated with semiotics wrote interesting articles on the topics suggested by Eco, but semiotics never became a sufciently powerful presence in any one of these areas to make much headway.91 With regard to literary studies Culler concludes that today it would be pointless to champion poetics as a central enterprise of semiotics (since semiotics scarcely gures in the theoretical landscape anymore).92 Cullers conclusion about semiotics and poetics could readily be applied to semiotics and rhetoric. In the last three decades of the twentieth century the study of rhetoric deed the predictions of the semioticians and continued the revival begun in the middle of the century.93 Rhetoric, of course, has a very long history of surviving attacks from formidable opponents. The uneasy relationship of rhetoric and philosophy provides the most compelling example of rhetorics survival skills. Ricoeur observes that while rhetoric is philosophys oldest enemy and its oldest ally . . . philosophy was never in a position to destroy rhetoric or to absorb it.94 Like philosophy
U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 6. Pursuit of Signs, x. 92 Pursuit of Signs, xiv. Of course, not everyone would agree with Cullers assessment. In the Encyclopedia of Semiotics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ix, editor Paul Bouissac declares that semiotics remains a credible blueprint for bridging the gaps between disciplines and across cultures, most likely because of its own intellectual diversity and pluridisciplinary history, as well as its remarkable capacity for critical reexivity. Although this encyclopedia includes an entry for the Rhetoric of the Image, it does not include traditional rhetoric within the realm of semiotics. In contrast, an earlier encyclopedic work, Noths Handbook of Semiotics, cited above n. 70, classies rhetoric as a subdiscipline of text semiotics, itself a major branch of the eld of semiotics. 93 Despite the resurgence of interest in rhetoric in the late twentieth century reports of its death continue to appear. A relatively recent example is John Bender and David Wellbery, eds., The Ends of Rhetoric (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). In the preface the editors present The End of Rhetoric: A Historical Sketch in which they conclude that the classical rhetorical tradition effectively ceased (6). However, they contend that rhetoric has returned as something called rhetoricality, a generalized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience (25). This rhetoricality is apparent in many modern disciplines including Rhetoric and Modern Linguistics (2931). Their examples of rhetoricality in linguistics includes Group Mu, in whose work the inherited taxonomies of rhetorical theory are respected in their specicity, but the displacement of tradition is nonetheless perceptible (30). 94 Rule of Metaphor, cited above n. 36, pp. 1011.
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before it, semiotics has made little progress in either destroying or absorbing rhetoric.95 While rhetoric can certainly take some solace in its resiliency, it cannot afford complacency. Its critics are too many, too varied, and too persistent to be ignored. Semiotics may have seen its theoretical cachet diminished, but the critiques of Barthes, Todorov, Genette, Ricoeur, and others retain their power. These writers were too eager in their anticipation of rhetorics demise and too obsessive about the gures of speech. Nevertheless, their criticisms are often discomfortingly close to the mark. In particular, the frequently repeated claim that rhetorics reduction to the gures led to its decline warrants consideration. It seems likely that a truncated rhetoric, deprived of either elocutio or inventio, is vulnerable to its opponents predations. Even semioticians recognize much of value in a complete theory of rhetoric. Barthes admits to the conviction that many of the features of our literature, our instruction, of our institutions of language . . . would be illuminated or understood differently if we knew thoroughly . . . the rhetorical code which has given its language to our culture. But, he concludes, neither a technique, nor an esthetic, nor an ethic of Rhetoric are now possible.96 For rhetoricians, then, the semiotic challenge is to prevent reducing rhetoric to the rank of a merely historical object97 by continuing to validate rhetorics remarkable ability to illuminate the institutions of language.
95 Brian Vickers has charted many of the conicts between rhetoric and philosophy in In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. Territorial Disputes: Philosophy versus Rhetoric, 148213. Vickers does not include semiotics among the territorial disputants but he does take to task both Roman Jakobson and Paul de Man for what he regards as their serious misunderstandings of the tropes (pp. 44269). 96 Semiotic Challenge, cited above n. 6, p. 92. 97 Semiotic Challenge, 93.