Generative Rhetoric and Public Argument: A Classical Approach

Abstract

This essay seeks to establish grounds in the classical tradition for the concept of generative rhetoric, an approach to argument that finds the means of social change in the generative capacity of language itself After introducing the concept of generative rhetoric and its effect on our understanding of socially constructed terms like the “public,” we turn to the classical tradition and examine generative structures in the Greek system of invention. These structures include the Platonic definition of dialectic, the relation of rhetoric to dialectic in Aristotle, where rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic, and the generative structure of the enthymeme. Finally we turn from classical to social intervention, suggesting that the capacity for invention is embedded in a similar process of variation on existing forms that belongs to language as such, and that differentiation within public discourse is not only inevitable, but required in order to generate innovation.