This document outlines a presentation on rhetoric and theory. It discusses rhetoric as a techne or method according to Aristotle. It then examines rhetoric as a discipline and method according to Covino and Jolliffe. Next, it explores rhetoric's historical superficiality and critiques. It analyzes the work of Roland Barthes and Group Mu positioning semiology at rhetoric's deathbed. It also summarizes Bender and Wellbery's concept of "rhetoricality" and the modernist return of rhetoric. Finally, it considers whether post-theory involves characteristics of rhetoricality through entangled theoretical and rhetorical work with reflexivity.

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Rhetoric and/as/in Theory
Monica Westin
Theory/Post-Theory Conference
Rhetoric Department
University of California, Berkeley
April 18, 2014
Today's Date Outline
Rhetoric Semiology Rhetoricality Conclusion

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Today's Date Contents
Rhetoric Semiology Rhetoricality Conclusion
Contents
Rhetoric: Techne, Discipline and Method, Historical Superficiality
Semiology: Roland Barthes and Group Mu at Rhetoric's Deathbed
Rhetoricality: The “modernist return” of rhetoric
Conclusions: Does “post-theory” involve characteristics of rhetoricity?

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Rhetoric: techne, dunamis
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Rhetoric Semiology Rhetoricality Conclusion
Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric:
“Rhetoric does not deal with any one definite
class of subjects, but, like Dialectic [is of general
application]; also, that it is useful; and further; that
its function is not so much to persuade, as to find
out in each case the existing means of
persuasion.... Rhetoric may then be defined as the
faculty of discovering the possible means of
persuasion in reference to any subject
whatsoever”

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Rhetoric: Discipline, Method
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Rhetoric Semiology Rhetoricality Conclusion
Covino and Jolliffe, Rhetoric: Concepts,
Definitions, Boundaries
“not a content area that contains a definite body
of knowledge... the study and practice of shaping
content”
● Rhetorical theory
● Rhetorical criticism
● History of Rhetoric

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Rhetoric's Superficiality
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Rhetoric Semiology Rhetoricality Conclusion
● Topics of invention: common topics
● Sophistical vs. Philosophical rhetoric
● Superficial thinking vs. Superficial methodology
● Lack of theoretical commitments vs. counterpart
to theoretical commitments
● Foucault and the problem of “critical
rhetoric”

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Semiology at
Rhetoric's Deathbed
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Rhetoric Semiology Rhetoricality Conclusion
Roland Barthes, The Old Rhetoric: an aide-mémoire:“Old
rhetoric is set in opposition to that new which may not
yet have come into being...”
Group Mu, A General Rhetoric, 1981:“Today rhetoric
appears not only as a science of the future but also as a
timely science within the scope of structuralism, new
criticism, and semiology.... We shall see that all rhetorical
operations rest on a fundamental property of linear
discourse”

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Today's Date Sub Topic 3
Rhetoric Semiology Rhetoricality Conclusion
Rhetoricality:
“Modernist Return”
Bender and Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Returns
of Rhetoric” from The Ends of Rhetoric (1990)
“modernism is not an age of rhetoric, but of rhetoricality... of a
generalized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human
experience... bound to no specific set of institutions. It manifests
the groundless, infinitely ramifying character of discourse in the
modern world. For this reason, it allows for no explanatory
metadiscourse that is not already itself rhetorical. Rhetoric is no
longer the title of a doctrine and a practice, nor a form of cultural
memory; it becomes instead something like the condition of our
existence.”

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Conclusions & Inferences
Today's Date End Of Presentation
Bender and Wellbery, cont: “There can be no single contemporary
rhetorical theory... rhetorical study is irreducibly multidisciplinary.... No
single theory can detach itself.... Rhetoricality, then, also designates the
partial and provisional character of every attempt to know it”
Post-Theory: doing theoretical work under the conditions of rhetoricality?
Theoretical work entangled with rhetorical invention and rhetorical
analysis? A return to superficiality, with reflexivity?