Rhetoric’s diverse materiality: polythetic ontology and genealogy

ABSTRACT

Rhetoric is multiple and mutable in the sense that there is more than one kind of rhetoric and any particular rhetoric is highly adaptable to the point that what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B. It is not safe to assume that we can account for rhetoric as a multiplicity or in its mutability. Despite an arsenal of terms to characterize rhetoric, how to talk about it as diverse?

This essay first conceptualizes material “diversity” and presents a borrowed term, polythesis, to give some character to the problem of rhetoric as ontologically one and many. Second, the essay discusses genealogy as an approach that enables the sorting of different rhetorics without producing a fixed taxonomy. Parsing rhetoric’s multiplicity requires mobile discriminations and should be paired with a methodology sensitive to ontological flux. As historical ontologies, genealogies of different rhetorics can produce meaningful distributions while emphasizing impermanence and changeability.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetoric
• ontology
• polythesis
• genealogy
• new materialism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the editors and reviewers for their constructive commentary. He also thanks Bridie McGreavy for her significant contributions in the early stages of this manuscript’s history. He is forever thankful to Naomi Jacobs who tends to him as lovingly as she does her gardens.

Notes

1. Edward Schiappa, “Second Thoughts on the Critiques of Big Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001): 261.

2. Ibid., 360.

3. Dilip Goankar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” Southern Communication Journal 58, no. 4 (1993): 258–95.

4. Schiappa, “Big,” 267–72.

5. Diane M. Keeling, “Materialist Ontologies in Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism,” presentation at the National Communication Association, Washington, DC, November, 2013. Diversity does not cognize rhetoric’s expansion as universalization for purposes of critique, as Gaonkar discusses. For a parallel but different contrast of big rhetoric to new materialism, see Ehren Helmut Plfugfelder, “Rhetoric’s New Materialism: From Micro-Rhetoric to Microbrew,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 5 (2015): 441–61.

6. Nathan Stormer, “Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2004): 257–59, 275–77.

7. Scott S. Graham and Carl Herndl, “Multiple Ontologies in Pain Management: Toward a Postplural Rhetoric of Science,” Technical Communication Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2013): 110.

8. See Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); and Scott S. Graham, The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

9. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 158–59.

10. Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 83–84, 84; also see Graham, Politics, 23–65.

11. Erin Manning, Always More than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 28–29.

12. Robert L. Scott, “A Synoptic View of Systems of Western Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 4 (1975): 439–40.

13. Also see George A. Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 1–2.

14. Graham and Herndl, “Multiple,” 110.

15. Stormer, “Articulation,” 258, 277; Nathan Stormer and Bridie McGreavy, “Thinking Ecologically about Rhetoric’s Ontology: Capacity, Vulnerability, Resilience,” Philosophy and Rhetoric (forthcoming, 2017).

16. Homology here means similarities of potentiality expressed dynamically, not comparisons of separate entities. See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 88.

17. Rodney Needham, “Polythetic Classification: Convergence and Consequences,” Man 10, no. 3 (1975): 350, 357; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), 35–36.

18. Needham, “Polythetic” 356–57.

19. Jonathan A. Silk, “What, If Anything, Is Mahāyāna Buddhism? Problems of Definitions and Classifications,” Numen 49, no. 4 (2002): 390.

20. Ibid., 387–88.

21. Needham, “Polythetic,” 367; Robert L. Scott, “On Not Defining ‘Rhetoric’,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6, no. 2 (1973): 93–94.

22. Needham, “Polythetic,” 367.

23. Ibid.

24. This resonates with John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), Kindle edition, chapter 7.

25. Mol, Body, 84 (emphasis added).

26. Silk, “What,” 388.

27. Mol, Body, 115.

28. Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1988): 46.

29. Mol, Body, 143 (emphasis added).

30. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 405–6.

31. P. F. Stevens, “Metaphors and Typology in the Development of Botanical Systematics 1690–1960, or the Art of Putting New Wine in Old Bottles,” Taxon 33, no. 2 (1984): 176 (original emphasis).

32. Manning, Always, 17–19.

33. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 7, 20.

34. Manning, Always, 16; also see Rickert, Ambient, 254.

35. Bruno Latour, An Enquiry in Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 39.

36. Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, 41–81 (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), 59.

37. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: Toward a Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 68.

38. Kennedy, “Hoot,” 2.

39. Pheng Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialism,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 79; also see Rickert, Ambient, 280–81.

40. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1966), 88–90.

41. Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 99; also see Rickert, Ambient, 107.

42. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), Kindle edition, 108–10.

43. Bennett, Vibrant, vii–19.

44. Barad, Universe, 384–91.

45. Graham, Pain, 214.

46. Ibid., 208, 212.

47. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture: Philosophy as Philological Genealogy, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 250.

48. Foucault informs Barad significantly as well. I am not extending her reading so much as reinterpreting his salience.

49. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 144, 145.

50. Foucault, “Critique,” 64.

51. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: Overview of a Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 238.

52. Ibid., 237 (emphasis added).

53. Blondel, Nietzsche, 241.

54. Barad, Universe, 175–79.

55. Foucault, “Nietzsche,” 148.

56. Bennett, Vibrant, 20–38, 104; Whitehead, Process, 287.

57. Bennett, Vibrant, 100–104; also see Blondel, Nietzsche, 245.

58. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), 113; also see Blondel, Nietzsche, 53.

59. Whitehead, Process, 310.

60. Barad, Universe, 175–79.

61. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 44–46; Barad, Universe, 361.

62. Foucault, “Critique,” 64; also see Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 52.

63. Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomginton: Indiana University Press, 1999), 42 (original emphasis).

64. McWhorter, Racism, 52.

65. Barad, Universe, 388.

66. Ibid., 139 (original emphasis).

67. Ibid., 388.

68. Ibid., 389, 391.

69. Ibid., 390.

70. Foucault, “Critique,” 65.

71. Foucault, “Enlightenment,” 111.

72. Ibid., 115.

73. Ibid., 116.

74. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6–11.

75. Spinoza, Ethics, 104.

76. Stormer, “Articulation”; Nathan Stormer, “Recursivity: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Mnesis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 1 (2013): 27–50.

77. Davis, Inessential, 114–15.

78. Timothy Morton, Hyprobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 29, 43, 64, 70, 83.

79. Stormer, “Recursivity,” 42.

80. Nathan Stormer, Sign of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion, 1800s to 1960s (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).

81. Graham, Pain.

82. Foucault, “Critique,” 65.

83. Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (London: Continuum, 2010), 59.

84. Needham, “Polythetic,” 367.

85. Colebrook, Deleuze, 59.