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Besides considering the rhetoric on a theoretical level and thinking about the orator and the audience and their relationship to rhetoric, there are also questions about content that we need to keep in mind. What should the orator speak about? Can the orator speak poetically and with emotion, or must the orator stick to cold hard fact? Furthermore, how do we reckon with, as Barthes describes it, the fascism of language?
Poetic and Passionate Language
Good oration should, generally speaking, include poetic and passionate language as appropriate. My theory of rhetoric would never seek to prevent an orator from using emotion, because, as feminist theory has emphasized to me, emotion and experience are a vital and wonderful aspect to humanity. Poetic speech and passionate appeals make the orator a more effective rhetorician. In fact, Tacitus went as far as to say that the ideal orator would be a poet, because poetry is the origin of eloquence (76). Cixous, too, would likely agree: "But only the poets-- not the novelists, allies of representationism. Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women" (1235). Novalis, too, sees how inherent poetry is to good rhetoric. He writes that we are all compelled to speak, that it is the work of active language within us. Language speaks through us (2). The poet, "the man who has a fine feeling for [language's] tempo, its fingering, its musical spirit, who can hear with his inward ear the fine effects of its inner nature and raises his voice or hand accordingly, he shall surely be a prophet" (Novalis 2). Furthermore, language is inherently poetic. As Nietzsche observes, words themselves are metaphors. They are the images of a nerve stimulus, the first metaphor, and sound is the second" (3). At its very base level, language is creative, poetic, and active. Because of this, orators should be able to use poetic language and long as the goal of rhetoric to advance knowledge and educate others is met.
For similar reasons, orators should also be allowed to appeal to the passions in their rhetoric. Referencing and perhaps causing emotion is, I believe, part of what makes rhetoric democratic and community-building. Rhetoric is at the heart of the human condition, as is emotion. We have already reviewed the centrality of the audience and the importance of audience adaptation, but to further recognize how passions play a role, it's worth noting that "It often happens that people unmoved by forceful and compelling reasons can be jolted from their apathy, and made to change their minds by means of some trifling line of argument" (Vico 15). Passionate appeals are helpful for the purposes of education, which is, as I define it, a central goal of rhetoric. Some may claim that appeals to the passions are manipulative, but my understanding of rhetoric maintains that such appeals are another tool for the orator to us. So long as the orator focuses on the goal of rhetoric without being swept off track by the passions, emotional appeals can be very humanizing and helpful. These appeals engender empathy in audiences.
Literature
Literature
Barthes warns of the fascism of language, which in its essence is hierarchical. It is a form of classification, and with language that has been shaped largely by those in power, it can be a tool of oppression. However, Barthes offers us a way out, a "salutary trickery, this evasion, this grand imposture which allows us to understand speech outside the bounds of power, in the splendor of a permanent revolution of language": literature (6).
Literature is vital to rhetoric's ability to be democratic and interpersonal. It engenders empathy, it is not altogether bound to reality, it has freedom. Literature educates and advances knowledge. As Cixous (and I) maintain, literature and writing offer an escape from oppression and, in Barthes' opinion an escape from fascism. The woman who "writes herself" is not influenced by past male rhetoric (Cixous 1235). She is not influenced by phallic or otherwise oppressive ideology (Cixous 1235). She writes with white ink, with corporeal knowledge; she is an escapee. She loves herself and other women (Cixous 1234). It is this ability, to love and to build community in response to oppression, that is rhetoric's greatest gift, in my opinion. By rhetoric we come to know ourselves, to educate other, and to advance knowledge. Rhetoric, good rhetoric, gives, and creates something that gets up and walks off of the page.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland and Richard Howard. "Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977." The MIT Press, 1979.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Laugh of the Medusa."
Nietzsche, Frederich. "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense."
Novalis. "Monologue." Translated by Joyce Crick, 1798.
Tacitus, "Dialogue on Orators."
Vico, Giambattista. On the Study Methods of Our Time. Translated by Elio Gianturco, Bobbs-Merrill Company.
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