by Brian Stone
In rhetorical studies, rhetoric has traditionally been conceived of as a communicative act; bound up in notions of communication are implications concerning signification and meaning. Recently, the linguistic turn in the humanities has complicated this conversation by challenging signification and demonstrating the instability of, if not the indeterminacy, of meaning in communicative acts. However, scholars such as Daniel Smith and John Muckelbauer have challenged the necessity of thinking in terms of rhetoric as a communicative act. Instead, they suggest rhetoric deals in making people ‘do’ things, rather than, or alongside, understanding them. Through engagement with classical rhetoricians, they have demonstrated rhetoric as possessing an asignifying dimension.
Following the work of these theorists, I argue that such notions of rhetoric were always already prevalent in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, particularly in his theory of pathetic appeal. In Aristotelian studies, there has been a longstanding debate concerning both Aristotle’s work on rhetoric and ethics as to whether or not pathe is subject to logoi, or logoi subject to pathe. In this paper, I suggest that logical appeal entails pathetic appeal in as much as pathetic appeal entails logical appeal and that thinking this problem in terms of dialectical negation has led to an endless proliferation of oscillating positions. Within the Aristotelian tradition there is indeed an asignifying dimension of rhetoric.
Biography
Brian Stone is a doctoral candidate studying Classical and Medieval rhetoric at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His dissertation research examines the use of rhetorical handbooks by scribes in early Irish monastic communities and the role those handbooks played in the composition of myth.
