What is rhetoric ?

• 
  The study and practice of effective communication.
  The study of the effects of texts on audiences.
  The art of persuasion.
  An insincere eloquence intended to win points and manipulate others.

Defined broadly in our own time as the art of effective communication, the "rhetoric" studied in ancient Greece and Rome (from roughly the fifth century B.C. to the early Middle Ages) was primarily intended to help citizens plead their claims in court. Though the early teachers of rhetoric, known as Sophists, were criticized by Plato and other philosophers, the study of rhetoric soon became the cornerstone of classical education.

Modern theories of oral and written communication remain heavily influenced by the basic rhetorical principles introduced in ancient Greece by Isocrates and Aristotle, and in Rome by Cicero and Quintilian. Here, we will briefly introduce these key figures and identify some of their central ideas.

"Rhetoric" in Ancient Greece"The English word 'rhetoric' is derived from Greek rhetorike, which apparently came into use in the circle of Socrates in the fifth century and first appears in Plato's dialogue Gorgias, probably written about 385 B.C. but set dramatically a generation earlier. Rhetorike in Greek specifically denotes the civic art of public speaking as it developed in deliberative assemblies, law courts, and other formal occasions under constitutional government in the Greek cities, especially the Athenian democracy. As such, it is a cultural subset of a more general concept of the power of words and their potential to affect a situation in which they are used or received."(George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric, 1994).

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Retention of knowledge

Walter J. Ong's devotes most of his second chapter of his book Orality and literacy to a brief account of studies done by Milman Parry and Eric Havelock on the noetic characteristics of oral cultures. After summarizing Parry's investigation of the tradition of the oral epic and his writings on Homeric poetry, Ong states that we cannot but be convinced that Parry was correct in concluding that "the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained in principle to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier- to put it more bluntly, the cliché" .
According to Ong the Greeks of Homer's age relied on such formulaic uses of language to aid in the retention of knowledge. Without writing, if thoughts were not expressed in easily remembere d forms and were not constantly repeated, they would be lost.

Ong then explains that Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato, extended Parry's conclusions to include the entirety of ancient Greek culture. In Ong's words, Havelock shows how "Plato's exclusion of the poets from his Republic was in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggregative, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis or dissection of the world and of thought itself made possible by the interiorizat ion of the alphabet in the Greek psyche".

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Jean-Philippe Pastor

Print encourages closure

With the development of print, Western culture moved even further away from a hearing dominated sensory world to one governed by sight.

More than writing, "print suggests that words are things" says Walter J. Ong's in his book Orality and Literacy. With the interiorization of this view writing/printing was no longer done with the intent to recycle knowledge back into the spoken world (as it was in, for example, Medieval university disputations); things were no longer necessarily written in order to be read out loud.

In addition, print embedded the word in space more absolutely than did writing . Through print, words become things that can be arranged on a page as they are in indexes, tables of content, lists and labels (an extreme example being the arrangement of w ords in the poetry of e.e. cummings).

Finally, Ong suggests that print encourages closure, a feeling of finality that was never present in, for example, oral storytelling.

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New relationship between orality and literacy

Gregory Ulmer:

The EmerAgency is a virtual consultancy, testing a practice of deliberative reason for the Internet.

This practice allows netizens (capable of egency within electrate subject formation) to participate in decision-making on public policy issues. Deliberative (practical) reason decides at light speed within the apparatus of electracy, supported by the invention of an image metaphysics that is to digital media what the categories introduced by Aristotle are to literacy.

Policy debates until now have been structured by an impasse — the confrontation between the modalities of thought (metaphysics) created within each of the previous apparati: Religion, faith, obedience (Orality) / Science, knowledge, proof (literacy).
The key to understading the aporetic character of policy problems in modernity is to note the incommensurability of these modalities, and their respective institutionalizations. Another version of the impasse, more revealing of its irreducibility, is the pair Pain/Fact.

Electracy proposes the possibility of a third institutional practice, based in an image metaphysics native to digital media, capable of mediating, negotiating, bridging the aporia organizing the relationship between orality and literacy. The dimension of thought institutionalized and therefore brought to the table of policy debate supported within electracy is expression.

One purpose of this blog is to design and test a practice of expression that is to the Internet what belief is to Religion and knowledge is to Science. The expression equivalent is affect and its political stance concerns well-being (wellness). The premise to be tested is that electracy augments the dimension of human motivation.

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Decentering of the text

Individual textual units can exist in their unity and yet are at the same time connected to other textual units in hypertextual collage which can be entered from any point.



Commenting on the multiple reading paths possible in an hypertext environment, George Landow notes that hypertextual format brings to surface the dependence of the main text on other texts, thereby reconfiguring the text, the reader, and the author. The decentering of the text dissipates the textual as well as authorial uniqueness. The greater autonomy of the reader comes with greater responsibility to create a coherent narrative or meaning out of the dispersed and decentered text. The reader can trace her own path through the interlinked texts so that her reading constitutes a type of writing. The emergent nature of the actualization of hypertextual space, which is situated in the present act and transformed by successive transformations in context, has led theorists to see the similarities hypertext has to oral literature. Walter Ong argues that electronic technology has introduced the age of "secondary orality", which is very similar to preliterate oral cultures in "its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even of its use of formulas". Since both reading as well as writing in the hypertextual environment involves active encounter and traversal, the reader becomes an integral part of the topological space created by the interaction she has with the multiple texts.



In fact, hypertext reading/writing can be regarded as a sort of body writing --the path the reader traces marks the materialization of her nomadic subjectivity (from Jaishree K. Odin).



Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/
See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts