Being an Individual in The System

How modernity fits into classical rhetoric (and not vice versa).

The twentieth century gave rise to the sciences of cybernetics and applied systems theory. These paradigms sought to go past the Newtonian view of the world as mechanical clockwork, toward a more organic vision of complex interrelations between many parts and wholes of strange shape. Perhaps, most popularly, this idea has been captured in the phrase “the butterfly effect.”

While the intention today of complex systems theory and ecology is to introduce nuance into understanding, I think that there is a major hang-up. This hang-up arises with the need for science to, first, rigorously conceptualize and, second, model phenomena in accordance with these concepts.

It’s like a a voodoo doll—if we can capture, in miniature or in simulation, the larger world, than we can stand over it with a god’s eye view; manipulate it top down! We’ve always known there’s something spooky about such representation.

If you’ve seen Hereditary, one thing you’ll remember is that this family is really, really bad at communicating.

My main issue these past two weeks has been the consideration of how these scary new sciences of modelling and control can be understood within our much longer and older Western traditions.

In their rapid development, have we forgotten something important?

Rhetoric, redux

I’ve spent the afternoon today trying to get a grasp on the origin of university philosophy departments. How did we end up with this literal school of thought? Philosophy strikes me today as being mostly dialectical. Conceptual. Abstract. What’s missing, largely, is the rest of the classical trivium.

The twilight of classical rhetoric occurred during the movement from oral examination toward writing in the 19th century. This followed on the gradual transplantation of its first two stages—discovery and arrangement—into the field of dialectic (logic) beginning in the 17th. The result was a reduction of this complex art into mere stylish embellishment at best—and an affront to simplicity, directness, and truth at worst.

And rhetoric’s parts were variously sold-off thereafter into English departments in academia, and advertising firms in business. The only popular, living vestige of rhetoric today are the annual public speaking competitions still held in elementary schools—as an extracurricular activity.

Today, were you to ask someone which field studies and understands language, they’d sooner indicate linguistics than literary studies or composition or poetry or songwriting—and certainly sooner those than rhetoric, elocution, marketing (!) or speech-writing!

Yet, it is a main assertion of the Less Mad project that language is itself the most complex medium out-of-which representations of anything and everything can be made. And that language does more than merely model things—language is not a subset of math. It is a superset. It is poetical and it is proportional to us as human, embodied speakers.

Likewise, rhetoric and grammar—the two complementary parts of the classical trivium which stood in balance with dialectic (logic)—were more unified and coherent super-sets of the various uses of language which are now arbitrarily parceled across schools and disciplines today. Linguistics and composition and psychology and… and… and… are just rhetoric’s scattered fragments.

Rhetoric today, as a school subject, is totally dead. This cannot stand if we’re actually putting sanity back on the national menu.

Yes, this is going to end well.

Whereof one cannot speak…

I’ve been reading a popular rhetorical textbook from 1759 titled A System of Oratory by John Ward. A few excerpts from early in volume one ought to illustrate my arguments quite well.

Imagine you attend a school system where everyone is being taught, to various degrees of rigor, the art of rhetoric according to the classical pattern.

But, I suppose, it will be readily granted that great learning and extensive knowledge are a noble fund for invention. Indeed Crassus, the Roman orator, carries this matter much farther, when he sais: I think, that no one ought to be accounted an orator, who is not thoroughly accomplished with all those arts, which are fit for a man to learn…

An orator therefore should be furnished with a stock of important truths, solid maxims of reason, and a variety of knowledge, collected and treasured up both from observation, and a large acquaintance with the liberal arts; that he may not only be qualified to express himself in the most agreeable manner, but likewise to support what he sais with the strongest and clearest arguments.

It’s practically common sense. You aren’t an orator until you know a great deal about a great many different things. Yes, yes, of course. But are we taught that explicitly? In a uniform curriculum, as a main tenant of the branch of education which deals with how to speak and write? We threw off the shackles of needing to know what the hell we are talking about a long time ago.

But the greatest help to invention is, for a person to consider well before hand the subject, upon which he is to speak, and not to venture to affirm anything concerning it, which he has not first a clear notion of himself.

Again, on the one hand: no duh? And yet, a social-order built on the quantification of “public opinion” and its virtues requires the input of as many people as possible regardless of whether they have “a clear notion” of the topic at hand. We have been trained for generations to share our opinions on everything because, if we don’t, we are rendered ineffectual and mute. The new markets of “content creators” rely entirely on constantly generating opinions quickly on every random occurrence, hoping to capture and drive opposing audience sentiments toward violent dialectical collisions.

Do Your Own Research

But there’s more to rhetoric than just demanding you be well-educated. A curriculum must assume that the student is not.

But because all are not born with a like happy genius, and have not the same opportunity to cultivate their minds with learning and knowledge; and because nothing is more difficult than to dwell long upon the consideration of one thing, in order to find out the strongest arguments, which may be offered for and against it; upon these accounts art has prescribed a method to lessen in some measure the difficulties, and help every one to a supply of arguments on any subject. And this is done by the contrivance of common places, which Cicero calls the seats or heads of arguments, and by a Greek name topics.

Since the mainstreaming of computers in the 1960s, science has grown to depend ever-more upon the development of models for simulation. For capturing systems so as to study them—their geometry, their physics, their forces; whatever it is that the swath of reality under consideration consists of.

But if you and I are human beings, and if we can communicate with each other, and furthermore if our senses, through practice, are trained to take in and represent more and more of the outside world—if these things are true, then are not words the primary means by which we accomplish these things?

And if a large problem today is misinformation or people attempting “critical thinking” (a dialectical-flavoured term invented by John Dewey, one of the fathers of modern education, around 1910) by “doing their own research,” then are there any classical resources which could be applied to help clear the air of smog?

When I first encountered the topics, figures, and other enumerations of mechanical parts of speech were the most boring and uninteresting elements of classical rhetoric. As it turns out, they slowly became the most important and curious.

I didn’t care for them at all when reading Corbett’s hasty account. But reading Ward’s long, systematic overview of the topics has turned me around quickly. They’re so damned practical and useful that they may as well serve as the primary approach to doing one’s own research. That’s what the first stage of rhetoric, inventio or discovery, is all about.

As I mentioned above, inventio and dispositio were, in the 17th century, moved out of rhetoric and into dialectic—things were thereafter discovered and arranged not to be spoken about, but to be logically rationalized. Or, a little later, to be opposed to each other in dialectical synthesis. And, now, to be fed into a computer simulation.

The typical arrangement of topics in modern dispositio.

I think we need to fix that. We should be discovering and arranging things in order to talk about them, not to feed abstractions which then capture us. We should do this quickly.

Do Your Own Research

Let’s consider the topics, which are the handy tools for discovery, or inventio, which rhetoric provides students. You have a subject to discuss—what is it about that subject which you need to research?

There are two categories of topics, internal and external. To begin with the internal, topics, or topics innate to a thing itself

Cicero and Quintilian make them sixteen; three of which comprehend the whole thing they are brought to prove; namely Definition, Enumeration, and Notation;

The second two of these are the detailed lists of all a things parts and the etymology or origins of its name.

…and of the remaining thirteen some contain a part of it, and the rest its various properties and circumstances, with other considerations relating to it; and these are Genus, Species, Antecedents, Consequents, Adjuncts, Conjugates, Cause, Effect, Contraries, Opposites, Similitude, Dissimilitude, and Comparison.

Okay, this is getting silly, is it not? You probably understand why I found this all so boring. But again, just imagine that we were all taught from a young age to research all these things before feeling confident to give our opinion or argue a case! Imagine we felt guilty if we hadn’t, or were at least afraid of the shame of being called out.

For the sake of completion, I’ll tell you that the external topics, also called Testimonies, are Writings (i.e. laws), Witnesses, and Contracts. Matters such as ambiguous interpretations, conflicts, and hear-say are all gotten into here—it is worth remembering that rhetoric developed primarily in judicial courts more so than courts of public opinion.

The topics, like every other long list of elements of Rhetoric in these old textbooks, are exhaustive. We’re talking about the collective result of thousands of years of nerds analyzing each others arguments and systematically enumerating all the parts of right and good speech.

We’ve long figured out that everything that can be well-said can be broken down into some of these parts, and now here they are, just laying around in 300 year old books to go spend a few months with! So why, when everyone is searching for new approaches toward “critical thinking” or tackling “misinformation” are these repositories of strategy left neglected?

There are, I think, two reasons.

We are now Collective

In a review of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism which is often interpreted as bizarre and unfairly vicious, Marshall McLuhan contrasts the then-new formalization of literary archetypes with the classical figures of rhetoric.

The Frye’s approach to criticism as a science turns from the training of taste and discrimination by literary means to the collective producer-orientation of the new mass media of the electronic age. The archetypal approach is the groove of collective conformity and of group-dynamics, which may explain why a uniquely opaque and almost unreadable book should have become a book-of-the-month choice.

McLuhan opens the paper with reference to a new strategy of television producers to pay municipal works department to measure the flow of sewage during commercial breaks, so as to gather city-wide data on home audiences.

In the language of cybernetics, McLuhan was furiously witnessing the development of cybernetic feedback loops based on models of the collective psyche. Today we adorn ourselves and our homes with sensors to pick up and capture as much data as we can for our digital twin—who is today strewn apart many incompatible systems and metrics but which may soon be amalgamated into our very own externalized, commerce or state-directed puppeteer.

Frye’s book, along with many other lists of archetypes, address elements of our mind which are fundamentally imagistic or organic or… well, everything in our psychology or body which is not words but something more base. More animal—herd animal to be more precise. By contrast, in the review’s closing paragraph McLuhan says,

Professor Frye is not, perhaps, sufficiently cognizant of one major resource adjacent to his enterprise. The world of ancient and medieval rhetoric was vibrant with archetypes referred to as “the figures of rhetoric.” These figures are, it is true, postures only of the individual mind which had become accessible to observation and control after phonetic writing. The written word arrested the mental and verbal flux of the fast-talking Mediterraneans and gave them the means of classifying hundreds of mental postures such as chiasmus, catachresis, and scatalogie.

McLuhan’s analogy to postures is useful in appreciating his later formulation of media as extensions of man’s body. Words are more than what they are as writing—they are spoken too. Orated. As we speak with our posture, so too do the mental postures we take to say what we want to say speak for us too. Rhetoric is more than just ornament, it is the equivalent of standing upright! It is only without the physical body—when the printing press allowed words to travel absent the speaker—that the figures of rhetoric began to become annoying.

These figures or postures of the mind were like so many whales left immobilized amidst the shallows and sands of the written word. And in due time their odor began to be abroad in the land.

The bitter cynicism of McLuhan’s ironic endorsement of the “scientific enterprise” of reducing us all to dream-possessed robots is, you’ll see, a powerful posture in the following prose. He explains the neglect of rhetoric on account of its flawed preference for clear, individual thought over submergence into the group-think desired the advertising firms on New York City’s famed Madison Avenue.

Writing, however, as a means of capturing, or perhaps of fashioning, the postures of the individual mind has proved to be fatally committed to the fostering of individual expression and eloquence. It is flawed by preference for the humanistic and might well prove to be but a feeble prop for a scientific enterprise such as that of Professor Frye. As it is, even without the aid of such a pipe-line of natural gas from the farther shores of rhetoric, Frye has secured a vehicle which by-passes all rhetorical expression of this personal type, and makes possible the deploying of the total resources of pre-literate culture on to the Madison Avenue testing ground. This in turn will greatly hasten the mopping up of remnants of private awareness and expression such as now give a confused and unsettled character to the literary and educational scene. So that what has here begun as a momentary flush-profile of literary postures will develop into a genuine chain reaction, and the remnants of a decadent form of personal expression can be dispatched down the drain.

Logic and Dialectic Live On!

The primary victim of systems thinking is, I think, our bodies. We conceive of our thoughts and identities and opinions as existing within larger systems, but not our whole selves. I’ve argued at length that this is because we ignore the computer for its content, but let’s get at this subject another way.

Conceptual models and systems are the content of computers. And we love projecting them onto the world. We learn a new concept and then we see it everywhere—we argue from its premises and we take them apart in our minds.

While McLuhan said that “visual space” was giving way to acoustic and tactile (or schizo/post-modern space), that never meant that anyone was giving up trying to see the world in rigid terms.

What did cognitive science do when it ran into “combinatorial explosion” and infinite regresses in the topology of it’s formal models? It formalized those too! And then waited for computers to get fast enough to brute-force them.

Philosophy, too, has become a matter of studying systems and throwing them against each other dialectic ally. At risk of hurting a very nice lady’s feelings, I’m very happy today to have dropped out of high school philosophy class in favour of a spare period. I learn more about the Socratics studying education, literary studies, and the trivial arts than I think I could get from a reduction of their “great ideas” or “debates” or their place in a tradition of “ideas” in philosophy class. Fuck ideas in the abstract. Fuck concepts. give me the words people were actually saying and writing.

Rhetoric and Grammar

And so these two things—the recession of rhetorical figures in favour of archetypal analysis in the humanities, and the explosion of projected concepts everywhere—have left us in quite the quandry. I think we can do a great deal of good by getting back to where we were with language before inventing new ideas or embodying new roles and aesthetics.

Rhetoric is, I’ll claim, formalization at the correct level of analysis. It’s the formalization of how we think and rationalize in words. It systematizes our spoken and written utterances. It gives us parts to dissect the very medium of communication itself.

And contrary to what I’m saying, McLuhan did not prescribe a return to the study of rhetoric. He asked us to study the world, and the word, as grammarians.

I’ve written this essay in a rather straightforward manner. My last essay, on the other hand, was definitely a schizo-post. McLuhan asked us to interpret the signs of where he saw our thought going thanks to television. He knew people wouldn’t flock to libraries in the electronic environment.

Decades later, with the internet at our fingertips, I think we can do better. You are already reading. Albeit shallowly, albeit on a screen—our books have never been so accessible.

Plus, the interpretation of analogy which grammar demands is, has never been so widespread. Everyone is becoming a culture-critic, studying signs and symbols. Forget that—you’re already good enough at it, as is every fan-theorist dissecting possibilities and hidden messages in their favourite made-up fictional universe.

We’ve gotten our fill of grammar. Go study language as a rhetor. Go do research like you had to give a speech about it. Because eloquence in speaking about anything, using metaphor and right posture, transcends what can be communicated through any formal model of the thing. The way out of the system is to behold it more than it beholds you.

The race is on.