A Singleton Definition of Rhetoric

Really curious and committed to finding a crisp, condensed, and coruscating definition of rhetoric that synthesizes our divergent and heterogenous pedagogical practices? If so, be with me till this blog ends. I ask you to quantify how many definitions of rhetoric we have. In that case, you will undoubtedly be in an awkward situation because we have countless definitions of rhetoric. When memorizing some striking definitions of rhetoric to make our rhetorical practices progressively consistent, we often tend to mug up only those definitions that have been replicated by several practitioners of rhetoric since the time of the Sophists and Aristotle. Out of many definitions of rhetoric, don’t we choose the definition of Aristotle? Of course, we do. After all, who can escape from the influence of the issue of Stagira (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagira_(ancient_city). The truth is, practitioners and scholars of rhetoric are bound to supplicate to the son of Stagira as they bog down to any hefty and hectic deadlock during any dialogic gridlock and rhetorical suck. If we count the history of rhetoric and composition as a dome, and if we take rhetorical plurality as an august canopy crown of that dome, isn’t Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric—as a faculty of exploring the available means of persuasion (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html)—the central pillar of this dome? Forgive my indulgence in this metaphoric magnetism. Let me be specific and zoom in on what I will do in this blog.

Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is indeed an axis of authority. By the same token, it is no less evident that this definition has undergone gradual definitional permutations and combinations because our field has to borrow fresh theoretical insights to cross-fertilize its existing pedagogical paradigms. Just a survey of how rhetoric unfolded from Stagira to Stony Brook is enough to prove this. So much has happened. We have added many gadgets and gizmos to the warehouse of rhetoric and composition. Are you ready to count what has been added to the rampart of rhetoric and the crescent of composition? If not, take a few seconds and jiggle your fingers up and down to count. We have disability rhetoric, cultural rhetoric, multimodal rhetoric, new media studies, composition studies, writing studies, environmental rhetoric, intercultural rhetoric, neuro-rhetoric, the rhetoric of science, and medical rhetoric, to name just a few. Don’t we have a rainbow of rhetoric in the sky in the second quarter of the twenty-first century? Needless to say, we have. It is evident that from the ‘Kalpavriksha’ (https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/oasis/kalpavriksha-the-tree-of-life-1063674.html) of rhetoric and composition, so many branches have been growing and extending outward, making rhetoric and composition a seductive rendezvous of all kinds of knowledge-lovers. With this unbacked postulation, I have gone too far. Let me make a cut on the flight of my fancy and be down-to-earth.  

Beset profusely by so many definitions of rhetoric, don’t we feel beleaguered? Aren’t our students up in the air, having been exposed to this rainbow of rhetoric? Yep. I feel so. But who knows what others think? You may feel undaunted. Given this situation, in which multifarious and various definitions of rhetoric are all set to mangle and mold our understanding, it is good to have a singleton definition of rhetoric. At the present moment, our field needs to be integrated and synthesized. Our multifaceted research practices, too, need to be coalesced without resorting to totalization. My friends, you may ask: why do we need a singleton definition of rhetoric in the age in which we have been thriving under the oasis of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)?

I, too, subscribe to the same conviction regarding your quizzical query. Doubtless, DEI is the hallmark of our rhetorical molding, compositional cumulation, and ethical accumulation (https://youtu.be/akn7cIFYqHI). But I need to craft a coherent definition to give our students an all-encompassing definition of rhetoric. Rhetoric is a faculty that explores available and unavailable means of persuasion in online and onsite contexts and entails using tools and technology.

For Sophists, rhetoric was a play on language and a site for the enactment of relativity (https://www.jstor.org/stable/465507). For Aristotle, it was analogous to quantifying available means of persuasion. There are always unavailable means of persuasion, which Aristotle merely mentioned. For Roman rhetoricians, rhetoric was an effective method of communicating ideas and thoughts. From the twentieth century, rhetoric was lavished with epistemic blessing. It has its epistemic aura and ambiance. Thomas Kuhn, R.L. Scott, and Stanley Fish baptized rhetoric and put it on an epistemic pedestal (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20865760). With the diffusion of practices such as transversality, materialism, new materialism, speculative realism, circulation studies, object-oriented ontology, and ambient attunement, rhetoric ascended to the throne of ontology. Let me be lucid and crisp in my reflection. Rhetoric became the site of an ontological disclosure.

Rhetoric no longer remained an effective communication method, nor was it confined to its epistemic comfort zone. Surprisingly enough, it occurred as a site of revelation. To put the point the other way around, rhetoric emerged as a manifestation mode. It began to manifest how matter impacts our writing, how space operates in our compositional practice, how design incentivizes our creative bent of mind, and how invisible, unseen, and untapped forces contribute to our rhetorical and compositional practices. In Karen Barad’s words, “nature is taken to be revealed by…” (41). The revelation is possible if innovative and ground-breaking rhetorical practices are identified, manifested, and then set toward their effective utilization. Manifesting unavailable means will be a decisive part of rhetoric’s magnifying magnitude (https://www.dukeupress.edu/meeting-the-universe-halfway). In the same line of adding force to her perspective, Barad has said, “Theorizing is… a material practice” (55). Another idea of attunement has come in line with rhetoric’s entanglement with the modality of manifestation. A crown of circulation studies and digital tracking, the concept of attunement is another rhetorical trick of triggering what lies beneath the surface. Laurie Gries popularized the idea of attunement as an approach to manifesting the vibrancy of matter (https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwuet/858/). Related to this idea of attunement is Thomas Rickert’s rhetoric of ambient, which treats a being’s embeddedness in environs as a strategy for disclosing the un-manifest means of persuasion (https://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-4/book-review-rickerts-ambient-rhetoric/).

I am rambling in the above paragraph, digressing from the moot point toward theoretical thickness, right? If so, my apologies. But I am not on track with deviation. With so much insight into the rhetoricity of materiality, spatiality, and transversality, it will be easy to illuminate how rhetoric is geared toward unearthing what lies beneath the veneer of vapidity. Other things remain the same: disciples of rhetoric and commoners of composition always hunt for fresh and fructifying means of persuasion. In addition, this hunt renews with great fanfare if pilgrims of Stagira are befuddled and beleaguered by an excess of available means of persuasion. Hence, rhetoric is the art of exploring available and unavailable means of persuasion.

So far, rhetoric has been restabilized in search of manifest and unmanifest means of persuasion. A query popped up in my head before I started to augment this definition. I think your minds are also fraught with queries aplenty.  The question is, where lies the means of persuasion? They seldom hang in the air. Do they exist in the void and vacuum? With sharp certainty, I can say they don’t. Undoubtedly, they exist in some place, in some location, in some situation, don’t they? Let’s use the term ‘context’. Both available and unavailable means of persuasion exist in context. A host of buzzwords—situated cognition, situated knowledge, cultural rhetoric, societal practice, a community of practice—have made the field of rhetoric and composition resound with vibrancy and poignancy. Thus, it won’t be out of the ordinary if I conclude that both seen and unseen means of persuasion lie in context. Please, offer me a morsel of the privilege of reiteration here. Rhetoric is a faculty of exploring both available and unavailable means of persuasion in context.

Folks, bear with me a bit. I no longer like to exhaust your patience with this raw reflection of mine. I need to add a slight chunk to the new definition of rhetoric I am weaving. We all know how dependent we are on technology, don’t we? Technology is to our world as the Nile is to Egypt. Our unfettered leverage of technology for writing and the availability of plenty of social media space have jointly given rise to the concept of a virtual world, online community, online context, and online system (https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/teacher_and_tutor_resources/teaching_resources/remote_teaching_resources/technology_in_the_writing_classroom.html). In connection with this shifting notion of context, it can be added that context can be both online and onsite. That means the context where our rhetorical practices and compositional pedagogies are enacted would be online (synchronous and asynchronous classes) and onsite when the instructor is in a real classroom in person. Here, I do not want to bore you with yawning by repeating what you already know, as we all have a bitter experience of teaching and being taught during the last pandemic in an online context. With this accepted assumption, let me be crisp and concise and hazard a somewhat blown definition of rhetoric, which explores both available and unavailable means of persuasion in online and onsite contexts. Whoops! I am nearing the end of my venture to craft a singleton definition of rhetoric. Let me give it a finishing touch. Pardon me for reminding you again how we are overwhelmed by the deluge of buzzwords such as digital media, digital storytelling, new media composition, computer and composition, digital humanities, visual literacy, and multimodal composition (https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/csu-fyw-rhetoric/chapter/7-2-what-is-multimodality/). All of this boils down to the customized use of the tools and writing technology. As claimed by Collin Gifford, technology is not a means but an end (https://www.enculturation.net/ecologies-of-new-media-practice). Doesn’t it show how deeply steeped we are in the imperative of technology’s use in our writing classrooms? Whatever the context of our rhetorical and compositional practices, the tools and the technology of teaching and learning have exceeded being just a means to being an end in themselves. Our context, be it online or onsite, entails the imperative of using tools and technology. The context for applying rhetoric and compositional strategies is increasingly technology-inflected.

Let me briefly sum it up. In light of all these developments in rhetoric and composition, let me present a chiseled and checkered definition of rhetoric. Rhetoric is a faculty of exploring available and unavailable means of persuasion in online and/or onsite contexts. It entails the imperative of using technology not as a means but as an end. Isn’t this definition integrationist? Doesn’t it merge all the threads of rhetorical developments into a single garland? What/how would you think about it? Finally, does it meet your expectations well? For the smooth and relentless evolution of the field, it would be imperative to organize best practices around the spirit of the singleton hypothesis. Hence, I hope this blog makes us aware of this direction.