On the Sublime: A Field Model for Understanding the Affective-Rhetorical Event

ABSTRACT

This essay re-reads Longinus’ On the Sublime via Deluzian affect theory, uncovering an implicit model that aids scholars in the analysis of intensely affective sparks and their subsequent rhetorical events. This model teaches scholars to analyze the field of potential for the generation of affect, determining the limits of that field by considering the rhetorical flaws that preclude the affect’s occurrence. The model extends beyond sublimity to other affects and thereby offers insights for critics who focus on the affective aspects of texts and contexts. Supplementing these foci, the model instructs critics to begin with affect in order to diagram the range of rhetorical moves within which different affects become potentialized. The example of soccer star Megan Rapinoe’s “audacious” statement about visiting the White House illustrates the model’s usefulness for understanding rhetorical emergence and consequence. The essay concludes by arguing for the import of similar sparks and of the field model for helping to understand rhetorical circulation today.

Notes

1. See https://twitter.com/8by8mag/status/1143595809910530048?lang=en. Retrieved 08/09/2021.

2. Most scholars consider Longinus’ contribution to rhetorical theory as part of a heritage that adds little more than other conventional manuals, especially because Longinus’ offers much in the way of quotation but little in analytic explication. According to Robert Duran, for instance, there exists a “widely accepted view” that Longinus’ import rests in its generative function for the concept of sublimity while otherwise having “no lasting substantive or theoretical influence” (2015, 9). Likewise, many rhetorical scholars consider On the Sublime a conventional manual. Donald Russell (1995, 152), George Kennedy (1994, 191–92), and Jeffrey Walker (2000, 118) each group the text with other manuals of the time, claiming that Longinus represents a tradition or treating it as one of many treatises on the “high style.” Much of this reception concludes that Longinus’ contributions to rhetorical theory are minimal, with his technical elucidation being mostly inadequate and circular. For instance, George Walsh depicts the text as equivocal and never “purified of errant intuition” (1988, 269), and Guerlac contends that Longinus offers a tautological version in which “sublimity comes from sublimity” (1985, 277). Phillip Shaw draws a similar conclusion, even claiming that, despite Longinus’ stated intent, “it is easy to conclude that the author secretly regards his subject as formally unteachable” (2006, 12). Ned O’Gorman disagrees to an extent, instead celebrating the text for allowing rhetoric to “come into its own” because “Longinus made rhetoric itself into a sublime object” (2004, 84). In O’Gorman’s read, On the Sublime constitutes a crucial moment in rhetorical history that valorizes rhetoric for direct a/effects rather than reducing rhetorical judgment to various ends like persuasion or identification. However, O’Gorman likewise considers the text’s technical aspects to be highly circular. Longinus “is so free with his vertical vocabulary that it becomes tautological: ‘sublimity (hypsos) lies in what has been made lofty (diarmati)’” (O’Gorman, 2004, p. 75).

3. These various definitions come from Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.com

4. https://www.sbnation.com/soccer/2019/7/12/20691508/megan-rapinoe-leads-by-example-and-love

5. https://www.8by8mag.com/megan-rapinoe-visionary/

6. https://onenewsnow.com/culture/2019/07/10/america-tired-of-rapinoe-politicized-athletes

7. https://twitter.com/anonamomm/status/1153697653714239488?s=20https://twitter.com/Rtan1984/status/1139963375285182464?s=20

8. https://twitter.com/Photogcars80078/status/1146604168360136704?s=20