Short Paper on Kellner

Laura J. Davies

May 23, 2007

CCR 720 – Agnew

Short Paper 1

 

            In his chapter, “After the Fall,” in the collection Writing Histories of Rhetoric, Hans Kellner maps out what he sees as the three paths a historian might take in writing history. Through his discussion, he argues what a history of rhetoric might look like, but whether or not that vision is possible (or repeatable or teachable through a method) is debatable; history writing is rhetorical, and therefore context-specific and shaped by the constraints of purpose and audience. The first type of historian is the traditional one, who approaches the past with reverence and attempts to fit together textual evidence like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The completed puzzle is a finished, comprehensible picture that tells a contained story of the past. This historian seems primarily concerned with his audience, as his aim is to create a narrative that can be understood. The first historian trusts his ability to translate the reality of the past through language. The second type of historian, on the other hand, approaches the reality of the past more hesitantly and critically. She sees the sources used by the first historian as markers for the untold stories, much like the tops of glaciers signal a much vaster, more complex structure beneath the waterline. This second historian is interested in recovering the repressed histories of the people who are not represented in the first historian’s chronicle. This historian is driven by her present purpose, and her ideological agenda shapes her reading of the past – what she looks to include in her history, what she ignores, and what she celebrates. However, even though the second historian might see herself in direct opposition to the second historian, Kellner points out that “all forms of historicization, and their number is legion, mythologize their subjects” (28). The cultural critic, in writing a history, does participate in hero-making just as much as the traditional historian; the difference is only who those heroes are and whether we now in the present designate them the winners or losers in history.

            The third type of historian, who Kellner likens to Victor Vitanza, is a rarity: it is an academic who sheds the stiff and serious academic style and instead finds truth through playing with language in a subversive discourse. This history, unlike the first two, relies almost completely on the individual historian and focuses on how language of the sources tells a story not contained in the overarching narrative of the history. It is a performance, whether it is written or proclaimed, and therefore, is not repeatable. It is like a play: the actors in the theater create meaning with each other and with the audience, but after the two-hour show, the magic in that space that led to profound meaning-making disappears. The truths that were understood in that dark theater cannot be captured in a bottle; what happened was an experience that cannot be repeated, only recalled by those who were there. The heights of what can be known through this third type of history cannot be reached by the other two historians, but because it is so unique and specific to the performer (the historian), a method cannot be made from it. And that is why, according to Kellner, “the victorious antirhetorical professionalism of the mid-nineteenth century won out because it made possible for scholars of very limited gifts to make usable (or, as historians like to say, ‘solid’) contributions to the enterprise…A program needs a method; charismatic sub/version, although it can be imitated, cannot be built upon” (Kellner 29).

            Kellner goes on to celebrate Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, which contains a chapter that discusses the history of the Dark Ages through a reading of Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, as an example of this third type of history. Auerbach was not just interested in what was happening in those chaotic times; he paid attention to how Gregory made meaning of that world – how Gregory used rhetoric to build a reality for himself and for his audience. Gregory’s prose showed, according to Kellner, “in its diction and syntax [his] struggle between the old and the new social worlds” (33). By focusing on the words and the construction of his history (on not just what he wrote about, but how he wrote it), Auerbach breaks through the barrier of evidence that holds back the first and second historian from seeing the depths that their sources contain. It is as if the first and second historians see the text as the lowest common denominator of evidence, like scientists who believed that matter could only be deconstructed to the point of the individual atom. The third historian is like Niels Bohr, who showed that the atom could be further dismantled into a dense nucleus circulated by tiny electrons. The third historian breaks down the text and sees it not as straight evidence, to be linked with other texts to form a chain of meaning, but rather as a history in itself, to be analyzed and understood rhetorically. For texts are not objective; they are shaped and formed purposefully by their authors, and contain worlds within their words.

            But can historians of rhetoric take Auerbach’s history as a model? Or should they strive to fashion themselves as clones of Vitanza? This road, though it might seem logical, is illogical for future third historians. Only Auerbach can read Gregory as he does; only Vitanza can write as he does. Instead of looking at their words in the hopes of deducing a method to repeat their genius, historians of rhetoric should, in the spirit of the third historian, look to “read crookedly,” as Kellner says. Kellner doesn’t want an all-encomopassing history of rhetoric, whether in the traditional or in the critical model. He sees the future of the history of rhetoric as a collection of spectacular, individual contributions that see truth not in wide expanses of the past but instead, in small, perhaps seemingly unimportant or mundane, but completely human moments. We learn most from a history that reflects an individual’s own ideals and perspectives; what matters is not the chronicle of the past displayed, but rather the interpretation of what is important, for human truth can be found in small circumstances.

 

 

Notes from Writing Histories of Rhetoric

These are just my own notes – probably not anything comprehensible to anyone else.

Schlib “Future Historiographies of Rhetoric and the Present Age of Anxiety”

Lists the anxieties of historians of rhetoric – “taxonomies, philosophies, canons, heritages, and disciplines” (135)

 

Histories of rhetoric that rely on negative critique have just as much “assurance” as traditional histories. “The ‘task,’ if anything, is to make lack of ‘assurance’ a constructive partner in our work” (138)

 

When we categorize, we begin to focus too much on the differences between the categories instead of the differences within the categories (129)

 

We like dividing things into three categories (129)

 

 

Rhetoricians have an obsession with establishing canons – “rhetoric encompasses a wide range of discourse: not only scholarly texts, but also the transactions of everyday life” – then why do we want to make a canon of classics? (131)

 

“One of deconstruction’s most illuminating moves is, in fact, to avoid simply reversing classic ethical dualisms and instead to question dualism itself” (132)

 

We should also be wary of drawing on the past (golden age thinking) when we want to revolutionize – battle cries, names invoked, etc. But why do we do that? Isn’t there something human about that? What if we didn’t do that?

 

What did students learn from the classics of rhetoric? What are we missing? (134)

 

Enos “Recovering the Lost Art”

Graduate students’ contributions are “often judged by how telling the criticism is; that is, the quality of a student’s performance is adjudicated by how well he or she can deconstruct the work of another rather than an orientation that encourages students to advance their own findings, to make their own contributions” (14)

 

“Much of our current work in the history of rhetoric is based on the idea of ‘close readings’ of works, confusing this act with the philological labor of textual criticism or the painstaking scholarship required to provide a careful translation. Analysis as ‘close readigns’ that presuppose the text to be the only source of knowledge has attractions. The work is facile, one does not need to go across the world seeking evidence, but only to slide one’s chair over to the book case and reach for a volume. Most scholars agree, however, that works are best understood when viewed not as isolated and autonomous events but as intertextual, that even discrete texts are part of a diachronic chain of being” (14)

 

Cool! Figure out the arguments of the British side of the Revolutionary War (16)

 

It is essential that we start to do historical research.

 

“All that is necessary for ignorance to prevail in our discipline is for historians of rhetoric to forget their primary job of doing history” (19)

 

 

How to enact all this rhetoric? Kellner provided an example, but pointed out that it was impossible to duplicate exactly – there is no method.

 

Kellner

History

 

All history is hero-making – who is your hero?

 

Rhetoric breaks down the documents like parts of an atom.

 

History is a projection of the historian.

 

A good history of rhetoric contains the individual historian.

 

We learn most from a history that reflects an individual’s own ideals and perspectives; what matters is not the chronicle of the past displayed, but rather the interpretation of what is important, for human truth can be found in small circumstances.

 

Three ways of viewing history.

 

“All forms of historicization, and their number is legion, mythologize their subjects, either by showing how unnatural a discursive system is in order to transform it, as in the case of Marx, or to show how adequately it conforms to the ‘order of things,’ as with Ranke or John Quincy Adams” (Kellner 28).

 

“Still, we should not fail to note that, whatever its flaws, the victorious antirhetorical professionalism of the mid-nineteenth century historiography won out because it made it possible for scholars of very limited gifts to make usable (or, as historians like to say, ‘solid’) contributions to the enterprise. Rankean history was not all built by masters like Ranke. Nor were all Ciceronians geniuses like
Cicero. A program needs a method; charismatic sub/version, although it can be imitated, cannot be built upon” (Kellner 29).

What good is knowledge that cannot be built upon?

What is the aim of historiography? Can only a few people do it right? What does that do to multiple perspectives?

 

How historians read: “This mode of reading sees the text as a document, a piece of information in a mass of knowledge, a thread in a ‘strand of meaning’ that must be untangled, straightened out. To do this, the first step, almost inevitably, is to repress the textuality itself, to eliminate the rhetorical joker from the deck” (Kellner 31).

Rhetoricians must look into the context and how the text was made, not just what the text is about. Looking only at content is like having only one leg on a three-leg stool; atom analogy

 

“Rhetoric and reality, as everyone knows, are oil and water; rhetoric is precisely the existential projection of our inability to apprehend reality. If we had reality, if we could hold and share it, why would we need rhetoric at all? Or history?” (Kellner 36).

 

“Historiographical progress does not take place through the amassing and ordering of an ever-broadermass of information, or ever-more-refined theories of social or political development. Historical discourse progresses, if that is the right word, by producing classics, in all their individuality and, often, wrongness” (Kellner 34).

What makes a classic?

 

Berlin  “Revisionary Histories of Rhetoric”

Narratives outside of the traditional trajectory of the history of rhetoric: “Disruptions in this trajectory, of repeating the past while discovering the already prefigured new in it, are historical aberrations, temporary displacements. These are to be explained away as the products of failed cultures – the most frequently named being that of the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century” (112)

 

Berlin tries to resist making the heroes villains and the villains heroes when writing history (114)

 

“The mission of the revisionary historian of rhetoric I have in mind is to resist the notion of rhetoric as a unified, coherent, and univocal collection of texts stretching over time, texts that support either truth or virtue on the one hand, or error and vice on the other” (115).

 

Instead, we must locate the moment in history and investigate all the rhetorics that took place at that time – dominant and repressed.

 

Good historical study of rhetoric realizes that rhetorics are created in a specific historical/economic/social context, and “they reflect and, of equal importance, refract the conditions of their creation and functioning…They codify who can and cannot speak…what can and cannot be said…who can and cannot listen and act…and the very nature of the language to be used” (116) These decisions are made by the power structures in play.

 

The problem with the traditional history of rhetoric (Corbett, Kennedy): they present their history as if the “reader need look no further” (119) They are incomplete and the reader needs to know that.

 

The historian needs to “acknowledge the principles – primarily ideological in nature – that are to govern [his] interpretation” (121) It’s about the historian as much as the history. That’s how we decide what’s important, what to include, exclude, etc.

 

“I am arguing finally for a dialectic between past and present. Our conceptions of the present guide us in looking at the past, but in looking for our other we discover disruption in our conceptions so that past and present are simultaneously reconceived” (123) This process never ceases – it is always necessary, as the present changes, to reconceive the past.

 

History cannot be sweeping – it is only local, offering small local truths. “Postmodern turn” (124)

 

“Any investigation of human behavior must be historically specific in its methods and materials, never resting secure in any ahistorical, universal mode of thought” (127)

 

Berlin’s historiographic method: It “demands honesty of the historian, a candid acknowledgement of her ideological stance, her conception of perfect economic, social, and political arrangements, her vision of utopia. The historian is never simply writing an account of the past. She is also writing an account of the present and, of equal importance, a hope and vision of the future. In telling us what happened, the historian is telling us what ought to happen now and tomorrow” (127)

That’s what all historians are doing, though. Is
Berlin just arguing with the politics of the traditional historians, who probably disagree with his view of what’s important – now and in the past? What good is small, situated truths?

 

 

Atwill “Contingencies of Historical Representation”

“Histories do not simply provide windows on the past; rather, they perform signifying functions in the present” (109)

 

“Alternative histories of rhetoric will not be written until alternative subjects begin both to define the function of those histories and to alter the conditions in which they are produced…WE will only begin to redress the silences created by histories when we are willing to allow our own disciplinary idioms to be challenged” (110).

 

These histories will not and cannot be stable or give stability. They only rock the boat further.

 

She uses the disciplinary categories of semantics, pragmatics, and syntactic to describe three ways to write history. Semantic = traditional; Pragmatic = context-driven, Syntactic = language

 

Semantics focuses on the relationship between sign and referent (content)

Pragmatics focuses on the relationship between the text and its users (audience) – it is not objective

Syntactic focuses on the language being used by the addressor (ethos) and how that establishes authority. The subject changes constantly. Customization. Subversive. Individual.

 

May 24th Response

            All the readings for today were from Victor Vitanza’s 1994 collection, Writing Histories of Rhetoric. As a whole, they were attempting to determine what a history of rhetoric is – what it looks like and what methodologies could be used to write it. Writing a history of rhetoric is more complicated than writing a “straight” history, the authors argue. It requires balancing multiple perspectives and voices from the past and paying attention to how language is used in the writing of a history.

           
Berlin, in his chapter, “Revisionary Histories of Rhetoric,” points out the importance of writing histories outside the traditional trajectory pursued in the history of rhetoric. This does not mean to just reverse the binaries of hero/villain; that is, to elevate the “losers” of history and turn them into the “winners” by focusing attention on them and vice versa. Rather, he argues that we must break down these binaries and instead of seeking a “unified, coherent, and univocal collection of texts stretching over time,” we must locate the moment in history and investigate all the rhetorics that took place at that time. Rhetoric is dependent on context, Berlin claims, and therefore good histories of rhetoric take into account the social/economic/cultural/historical circumstances of the past and reflect and “codify who and cannot speak…what can and cannot be said…who can and cannot listen and act…and the very nature of the language to be used” (116). These aspects of the past should be present in the history, for they reflect the power structures in play at the time. Since history-making is so contextual,
Berlin argues that it can never be all-encompassing or universal – a history can only attempt to explain a small, local truth. Histories that try to do more are ahistorical. However, it seems to be a human desire to have these universal truths and narratives that explain large concepts. If it is an innate desire to have coherence and understanding, does it make sense to write our histories with such disjuncture and interruption? How are these histories interpreted? Do they satisfy their audiences? What is repeatable – or to be learned – in situated truths?

            Schlib, in “Future Historiographies of Rhetoric and the Present Age of Anxiety,” picks up on the same thread as
Berlin when he argues that the “’task’ [of the writing of the history of rhetoric], if anything, is to make lack of ‘assurance’ a constructive partner in our work” (138). Schilib points out that negative critique, a popular tool of analysis taught in graduate schools and employed by current historians of rhetoric (as argued by Enos in his chapter), can be just as dogmatic and all-encompassing as “golden age” histories of rhetoric. Thus, we need a new methodology – we can’t just turn the hero narrative of Aristotle/Plato/Cicero upside down and transform it into another hero narrative of the Sophists and the other ignored figures throughout the history of rhetoric. Our methodologies must “question dualism itself” (132). Schlib wants to avoid all golden age thinking because it lends itself to supporting binaries in history, but again, it seems to be an innate human desire to create and revere heroes. Schlib mentions that during every revolution, the revolutionaries, right before they destroy their present world, which was built on a foundation of the past, turn to the past as inspiration, using slogans and names that reflect the traditional heroes of history. It’s a curious move to be sure, but I don’t think we should dismiss it as elementary or wrong – if it does occur, which it does, it must happen for a reason that shouldn’t be immediately critiqued and thrown out. Is there truth in common history? Is there a hope in universal understanding that doesn’t appear in small, situated, and individual truths?