Ben McCorkle: Dissertation Abstract

Tongue, Nib, Block, Bit:

Rhetorical Delivery and Technologies of Writing

[T]he essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it.--Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"

ABSTRACT:

"Tongue, Nib, Block, Bit: Rhetorical Delivery and Technologies of Writing" argues that the rhetorical canon of delivery is inherently a technological discourse. That is, theories of delivery have historically fostered the cultural reception of emergent writing technologies by prescribing rules that cause old and new communications media to resemble one another, a process known as remediation. This dissertation is not a project of historical recovery, but rather one of reinterpretation, one that considers various historical "case studies" throughout the Western rhetorical tradition to offer an analysis of rhetorical delivery as a site wherein given technologies of writing (chirography, print, or hypertext) enter the cultural sphere. Such key moments of technological and epistemological flux include: 1) the shift from an oral to a literate culture in Ancient Greece, 2) the early modern Western European shift from manuscript to print culture, 3) the growth of print into a dominant communication medium in the nineteenth century, and 4) our current shift away from the hegemonic influence of print to the proliferation of electronic and digital media such as television, radio, film, and the Internet. These emergent technologies are fostered by the surrounding rhetorical treatises and handbooks of the time, which apply features and conventions idiomatic to the new technology to the pre-existing technology (and vice versa) so that culture more readily accepts this shift in technological dominance.

In classical Athenian culture, where oral performance was the paradigmatic mode of communication, delivery was deemed of the utmost importance, but as alphabetic literacy gained currency, that importance began to wane. The Attic orator Demosthenes is purported to have listed it as the first, second, and third most crucial elements of any speech, while Aristotle called delivery the "vulgar" portion of the art in his treatise on rhetoric. Shortly after the introduction of Gutenberg's movable type printing press, the impact of Peter Ramus's treatises in the mid-sixteenth century left rhetorical theory with little to call its own, and although delivery was included in that domain, it became overshadowed by a poetic approach that focused on composing figurative language. Concurrent with the rise of belletrism in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, the elocutionary movement brought about renewed interest in how the voice and body could be employed to deliver literary and poetic texts. Current-traditional rhetorical approaches to teaching composition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries focused primarily on the classical rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, and style, leaving delivery (along with the remaining canon of memory) to fall under the purview of newly formed speech departments. Highly mechanized approaches to standards of spelling, penmanship, and elocution, along with the codification of many new, "self-evident" genres of the time, are in part a reflection of the explosion of print culture occurring in the nineteenth century brought on by a number of technical innovations in the printing process.

Contemporary rhetorical theory finds itself faced with yet another reassessment of delivery's role in rhetoric, with several scholars of note attempting to redefine the canon at a moment when several new digital and electronic technologies of communication proliferate into our culture. Whereas traditional conceptions of delivery have dealt primarily with the embodied speech act, these scholars tend to equate delivery with medium, or the manipulation of extra-textual elements within a particular medium. For example, Kathleen Welch's Electric Rhetoric focuses on descriptive rhetorical theory aimed primarily at decoding the generic elements of a particular medium (i.e., reading a network newscast in terms of lighting, editing, commercial selections, etc.), while John F. Reynolds' "Classical Rhetoric and Computer-Assisted Composition: Extra-textual Features as 'Delivery'" advocates a more active approach in teaching students to experiment with non-alphabetical capabilities of word processors (font size, color, layout, etc.). Kathleen Jamieson's Eloquence in an Electronic Age analyzes the ways that radio and television have led to a more intimate, "feminized" oratorical style and ethos in presidential speech-making, whereas writers like Robert Connors and Sam Dragga examine the ways that the ethical character of the (absent) writer is conveyed through such print-biased values as strict adherence to manuscript preparation or conventional displays of graphical information, respectively, in the book collection Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication.

Contemporary redefinitions of delivery by the likes of Welch, Jamieson, and others posit an interesting connection between rhetorical delivery and technology that stops short of looking beyond our current moment in history. What these new theories of delivery do not acknowledge is that this interaction with technologies of communication has happened throughout the history of rhetoric as a discipline. To assume that digital/electronic technology has somehow "allowed" us to make such a connection glosses over the various ways in which delivery has functioned as a kind of discursive and institutional validation of newly emerging technologies at various moments in Western culture. This dissertation reinterprets rhetorical delivery as a site wherein a given technology enters the cultural sphere. By considering several historical moments throughout the rhetorical tradition that coincide with the emergence of new writing technologies, I suggest that the relationship between rhetorical theorizations of delivery and shifts in technologies of writing is not simply tangential, but historically reciprocal.

An analysis of this sort is predicated upon a Heideggerian view of technology, one that sees its "essence" not in terms of the evolution of technics and machinery, but primarily in the "relational" aspects of a society that allow such machinery to present itself to our world in a particular way. First and foremost, then, technology is cultural, and as such, it is a construction supported by certain types of discourses, institutions, and power relations between individuals-relationships that often go unquestioned. With specific respect to technologies of communication, rhetoric has historically stood in an optimal position (as discourse, institutionalized discipline, and embodied practice) to serve as a kind of external support for these emergent technologies. I argue that rhetorical theory helps to reconcile cultural misgivings or unfamiliarity with a newly emerging technology by adapting to that technology in order to foster its dominance and naturalization. Such adaptive maneuvers can be theorized as mechanisms of remediation, a theory of formal media interaction coined by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin. Whereas Bolter and Grusin's theory is more concerned with this interaction as it occurs on the formal level, I use the concept to refer to the discursive and cultural context surrounding a particular technology: namely, the complex interplay of long-established and newly emerging technologies of writing with rhetorical theories of delivery.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW:

Chapter One includes a literature review of recent scholarship that re-theorizes the rhetorical canon of delivery as medium in order to characterize the current state of the field. It offers a rationale for rereading the history of rhetorical delivery as inherently technological, a rationale grounded in a Heideggerian reading of technology and extending theories of media/technological interaction posited by Bolter and Grusin, Steven Johnson, Kathleen Welch, and others. Chapter Two looks at how the increasingly literate culture of Ancient Greece develops theories of rhetoric that, though meant ultimately for oratorical performance, manifest decidedly logocentric, or "writerly," tendencies that begin to eclipse central tenets of oratorical delivery. Examples of these remediating tendencies can be found not only in the developing rhetorical practice of logography, but also in concepts such as the Isocratic sentence or Aristotelian generalized theories of audience. Chapter Three examines how rhetorical treatises during the height of manuscript culture up until the advent of the printing press (ca. 1450) become increasingly attenuated to written rhetorical practices, eventually to the point of delivery's near-erasure by Ramus in the mid-1500s. Chapter Four argues that the belletristic and elocutionary movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are tandem attempts to come to terms with the growing print culture of the time by inventing the concept of taste, creating epistemological rationales to explain new writing forms and genres of the time, and naturalizing the print interface by applying its attributes to handwriting and embodied rhetorical performance. Chapter Five returns to the modern era, situating contemporary scholarship on delivery (Welch, Jamieson, Reynolds, Connors, etc.) within a broader context of postmodern and poststructuralist rhetorical theories and experimentation with print that call into question traditional constructs of logic and subjectivity. This context anticipates the nonlinear, nonhierarchical, associative characteristics of hypertextual/digital modes of communication.

Sample Bibliography