Rhetoric Has a Shadow

So I wrote this more than a year ago when it took great self-control and every brain cell I had left to divert energy from gestating to writing my Master's Report. It's a rushwrite, of course. And it has it's moments, at least in the opening. And yes, "Rhetoric has a shadow" is the grandiose title of the .doc (blame it on the hormones or something) Feel free to comment.

Catherine Lamb stole my introduction. But Kenneth Burke stole my metaphor before I was born. But just because I didn’t write them first, doesn’t mean I have to abandon them. Besides, we’re all just footnotes to Aristotle and Plato anyway, right?

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for awhile, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment, or the gratification of your opponent, depending up on the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
--Kenneth Burke (The Philosophy of Literary Form 110-111)

“When I read this passage as a feminist, however, I ask questions that make me less comfortable about it. The “you” in it takes it for granted that he is invited and can enter the parlor; he also seems to have no doubts about being able to speak, using the proper forms, and being listened to once he speaks. His challenges are only those of timing and strategy. I, on the other hand, ask who has been invited and who has been left out. Why should only these forms be used and not others? Must we assume an antagonistic relationship between participants? What other parties can we imagine that might continue the conversation?” (Lamb 155).

Rhetoric has a shadow. Always the figure lingering in the dark alley. A threat. Or more often it is dismissed as “cookery” or “mere rhetoric.” A bag of tricks. Manipulation. Disassociated with the truth, so it must be full of lies.
And so we turn to what is safe, or if not safe, than established, about rhetoric—argument. Argument is all that is rhetoric is, or all that is salvageable, to most people.



I have a bone to pick with argument. I'm just not sure which bone. No, that's not true. I know which bone(s). I'm just too much of a pansy or a peacemaker or something to suck it up and actually pick at it/them. So here's to sucking!