Kauffeld, F. J. (2001a). Edwin black on the powers of the rhetorical critic. In J. A. Kuypers & A. King (Eds.), Twentieth-century roots of rhetorical studies (pp. 306). Westport: Praeger.
Edwin Black on the Powers of the Rhetorical Critic
Fred J. Kauffeld
Professor Edwin Black was born on October 26, 1929. In 1951 he completed undergraduate studies at the University of Houston, where he majored in philosophy and represented the University in inter-collegiate debate. He studied rhetoric and public address at Cornell University, earning a Masters degree in 1956 and a Ph. D. in 1962. His dissertation was directed by Herbert A. Wichelns. Professor Black began his teaching career at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he served from 1956 to 1961. He served on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh from 1961 to 1967. From 1967 until his retirement in 1994, Professor Black taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
I. Introduction.
The body of Edwin Black’s work as a rhetorical critic is composed of a set of essays. Characteristically, his publications are relatively short compositions unified by a central subject, reflecting the author’s point of view and providing a trial of the conjecture or approach under discussion.[1] The essay nicely serves Professor Black. It fits his view that “critical method is too personally expressive to be systematized” (Black., “Author’s Foreword” x), and it accommodates his belief that a humane understanding of persuasive discourse can best emerge out critical interpretation of “a body of rhetorical transactions that had actually occurred” (Black, Rhetorical Questions 186).
Professor Black’s essays have a well deserved reputation as seminal contributions to rhetorical criticism. His ground-breaking book, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method, is universally admired for liberating rhetorical criticism from a narrow and ossified set of practices. His critical studies on the Second Persona and the Sentimental Style have enriched the conceptual apparatus available to rhetorical critics. The latter essay stands as a model of generic criticism. His reflections on the “mutability of rhetoric” have profoundly enlarged the frame for the history of rhetorical art. He has illuminated ways in which rhetorically established conventions undergird the formation of ideologies. And he has deepen our understanding and appreciation of rhetors as diverse as Lincoln and Nixon. In essay after essay, Edwin Black has demonstrated what an insightful rhetorical critic can do to illuminate rhetorical discourses and to enlarge understanding of the potentials of rhetorical criticism.
However, Black’s reliance on the essay somewhat obscures his enduring contribution to our understanding of rhetorical criticism and its possibilities. The essay’s economy imposes on Black’s work the fragmented appearance of unconnected studies; whereas, careful consecutive reading reveals deep continuity, unity and development both in Black’s reflections on rhetorical criticism and in his work as a rhetorical critic.[2] In this paper I will attempt to elicit the coherence and development of Black’s teachings about rhetorical criticism. This effort will require that we draw out the underlying logic of our critic’s position. It will, I believe, enable us to better comprehend the continuing interest of studies which we might otherwise too hastily regard as “fully absorbed into the disciplinary consciousness” and may even help us to better comprehend the ongoing work of this important critic.[3]
In what does this unity consist? It is composed, I will argue, of an analysis of the inherent capacities of the critic and of a diagnosis of where those powers can and should be fully exercised in critical studies of persuasive discourse. Black’s fundamental contribution to our understanding of rhetorical criticism has three closely related parts: first, he delineates the fundamental powers of the critic; second, he shows that a narrowly instrumental focus on persuasive discourse, as exemplified by neo-Aristotelian criticism, stultifies exercise of the critic’s proper capacities; and, third, he demonstrates that study of the developmental power of persuasive discourse, e. g., the capacity of rhetorical discourse to shape its own conventions, affords opportunity for full and productive exercise of the critic’s intrinsic possibilities.
II. Black on the Inherent Capabilities of the Critic
Black’s conception of rhetorical criticism and its potentials flows from his analysis of the basic powers of critics. Where others focus on critical methods or methodologies, on how critics should do their work, Black’s discussion of rhetorical criticism is premised on an analysis of what critics, per se, are capable of doing. This important point is not immediately obvious. Black’s earliest and most extensive discussion in Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method seems, as the title of the book indicates, to focus on critical method, not the critic. Nevertheless, while the surface of that work is organized around a discussion of the generic functions of criticism and the author’s terminology includes frequent reference to “methods,” A Study in Method says remarkably little about how rhetorical critics are to penetrate a text or to fit a text into its context. The sort of exposition of critical method which Kenneth Burke provides in The Philosophy of Literary Form under the rubric “cluster analysis” is almost entirely absent from Black’s Study (Burke 14-137). Insofar as questions of method enter that discussion, they do so in order to show something about what critics can do or to identify where the critic’s inherent powers ought be exercised. Black’s subsequent reflections on rhetorical criticism focus quite explicitly on questions about the critic’s capacities and manifest a marked aversion to discussions of critical method.[4]
Black recognizes two capacities as essential to the critical process: the critic’s personal capacity to respond to the work of art and her ability to publicly instruct the larger cultural community she addresses. The critic’s personal response to the object of her criticism is perceptual, affective and intuitive (Black, “Note” 334; Study in Method 43 & 48). Through her public educational efforts, the critic enables her audience to understand, appreciate, and evaluate works of art. As an educator the critic can provide arguments for her conclusions and for the works she evaluates (6). In his early Study in Method, Black regards the critic’s personal response as an indispensable preliminary to criticism proper, which he takes to be an essentially public activity (43-44). This initial view is based on the idea that a critic’s report of her personal experience of a work does not provide her audience with reason to accept what the critic apprehends in that experience as the optimal interpretation of that work. Black subsequently comes to hold that reflexive statements, based on and expressive of the critic’s personal experience of the critical object can be framed so as to warrant claims upon the critic’s own audience (Black, “Author’s Foreword” xiii). This possibility connects the critic’s own experience of the work with the public argument she provides for her interpretation and, so, warrants inclusion of the critic’s intuitive apprehension of the work within the scope of criticism proper.[5]
In Black’s view, the most basic power of the competent critic is her intuitive, perceptual and affective capacity to respond appropriately to the object of her study. A critically interesting object, Black holds, “is so constructed that that there is a normative reaction to it”--an ideal response which in a sense re-creates what the artist achieved in constructing the critical object (Black, Study in Method 44). In “an undistracted and unmediated confrontation . . .with the work,” a competent critic can closely approximate that ideal response (48). As we will see, Black’s account of the competent critic’s personal capacity to engage the object of her criticism matures over the course of his studies, but it does not change fundamentally. Quoting Theodore Green with approval, A Study in Method holds that the critic can have “an immediate artistic experience in the presence of the work of art itself,” in which the critic apprehends “the content which its author actually expressed in it” and “feels” what the critic would judge (48). Somewhat later, in “Note on Theory and Practice in Rhetorical Criticism,” Black endorses emic criticism, premised fundamentally on the critics unmediated perception of the work, over and against etic approaches, which regard the object of criticism through the lens of some theory or prior conceptual framework.
Here is an approach to criticism in which, as a prerequisite to the interpretation of an object, the critic will undertake to see the object on its own terms--to see it with the utmost sympathy and compassionate understanding. This sympathetic explication is, of course, only a phase in the process of critical engagement. The emic critic may, and probably will, proceed from sympathy to distance, from the suspension of judgment to the rendering of judgment. But at some moment--probably early--in his or her engagement with an object, the emic critic will aspire to so sympathetic an account that the critic’s audience will understand that object as, in some sense, inevitable (334).
An etic approach, by comparison, would apprehend the critical object, not simply on its own terms, but a prioristically through the conceptual lens of some rhetorical theory. Both essays, the chapter in A Study in Method on “Rhetoric and General Criticism” and Black’s “Note on Theory and Practice in Rhetorical Criticism,” attribute to the critic the capacity to directly engage the work of art and to intuitively apprehend and affectively experience what the artist has managed to express in the work.[6]
It is important to notice that Black does not endorse naive apprehension of the critic’s object of study. To be sure, he describes the critic’s personal engagement with the work as “unmediated,” and he holds that at her best, the critic “tries to become, for a time. a pure perceiver, an undistorting slate on which an object or an event external to [her] can leave a faithful impression of itself, omitting nothing” (Black, Study in Method 4). Nonetheless, Black does not hold that in her personal apprehension of a work the critic is to nullify her sensibilities. She ought strive to be an undistorting, but not a blank, slate. A competent critic, in Black’s view, is a trained and sensitive instrument. Her experience with and study of the kind of artifacts which interest the critic have given her a discerning eye and ear; she “has that vague quality, taste”--a “set of scruples that refine the critic’s perception” (Black. “Author’s Foreword” xiii; Study in Method 67-68). The crucial requirement is that, at that phase in the critical process in which the critic personally apprehends the work and strives to re-create in her own experience what the artist has managed to express, at this key moment, the emic critic relies only on concepts which she has assimilated to her ways of perceiving. Discussing this point, Black writes,
Because only the critic is the instrument of criticism, the critic’s relationship to other instruments will profoundly affect the value of critical inquiry. And in criticism, every instrument has to be assimilated to the critic, to have become an integral part of the critic’s mode of perception. A critic who is influenced by, for example, the Burkean pentad and who, in consequence of that influence, comes to see somethings in a characteristically dramatistic way--that critic is still able to function in his own person as the critical instrument, and so the possibility of significant disclosure remains open to him. But the would-be critic who has not internalized the pentad, who undertakes to “use” it as a mathematician would use a formula--such a critic is certain (yes, certain!) to produce work that is sterile (Black. “Author’s Foreword” xii).
Notice that this observation concerns the critic’s powers; insofar as the critic’s apprehension of the work relies only on concepts which she has fully assimilated to her mode of perception, she can engage the critical object in her own right with the possibility of apprehending aspects of the object which do not fit her preconceptions. However, insofar as the critic’s personal encounter with the critical object is trammeled by some cognitively managed method or methodology, her discoveries will be limited to whatever fits that conceptual frame.[7]
The critic’s capacity to personally experience what the artist has managed to achieve in the work, in Black’s view, is fundamental to honest and productive criticism. The need for re-creative personal engagement with the work is partly a matter of the requisites for valid evaluation of the work. The critic is in a position to fairly judge a work of art only when she, herself, fully apprehends what the artist managed to express in that work (Black, Study in Method 43 & 48). “Only then,” writes Black, “will the emic critic be in a position to judge the object, for only then would the critic have fully disclosed what it is that is the subject of judgment” (Black, “Note” 334). Of equal importance for Black, the critic’s personal engagement with the work is necessary to rescue her studies from potential circularity. If the critic does not engage the work emically, if she only reads the work through the conceptual screen of some theory or preestablished methodology, her criticism will find just what her theory or methodology ordained before hand. Her study will be circular.
A problem of applying any pre-existing theory to the interpretation of a rhetorical transaction is that the critic is disposed to find exactly what he or she expected to find. The epistemological constraints imposed by a theoretical orientation inhibit the critic from seeing new things, from making new discoveries. Such criticism tends much more to be a confirmation than an inquiry. It is, in the strictest sense, a prejudice (Black, “Note” 333-334).
As we have seen, Black is uncompromising and certain on this point.
The priority which Black assigns to the critic’s unmediated experience of the critical object helps to explain a curious aspect of Black’s remarks about criticism and rhetorical criticism in particular. When Black writes criticism, he is methodologically pristine. The arguments he provides for his conclusions exhibit a self-conscious awareness of evidentiary and inferential requirements. Yet Black’s own remarks about criticism repeatedly express disdain for discussion of critical methods (Black, Rhetorical Questions 17-18 & 98). This aversion to discussion of critical methodology in the work of a critic so conscious of the need for argumentatively adequate criticism can be explained, in part, by our critic’s belief that the critic must, at some point, engage the object of her criticism free from the direction of consciously held method or methodology. At that point in her work, even an unassimilated theory of reading or of interpretation would narrow and distort her intuitive apprehension of the work. Black’s aversion to methodological discussion involves two further points. First, when it comes to the argument the critic makes for her interpretation of the critical object, she may need to draw on a great variety of sources and kinds of argument in order to open her audience to that object’s structure and function. In general it can be said that the critic’s argument for her interpretation and evaluation of the work at hand must be grounded in the properties of that critical object, though her argument need not be limited to those properties. Beyond this important point, Black recognizes only a few abstract principles as generally applicable to critical interpretation and evaluation. Secondly, what warrants confidence in the critic’s conclusion is not the supposition that she has followed this or that methodology but, rather, the insight her criticism affords insight into the object of criticism. This brings our discussion to the public face of the critical process.
The critic’s capacity to educate the audience for her critique presupposes prior personal engagement with the critical object and is based on the critic’s ability to argue for her interpretation and evaluation of that object. In both his early and more mature views of criticism, Black regards the critic, first, as analogous to an instrument which perceives the critical object and, then, as an educator, who having thereupon formed an interpretation and evaluation of that object, proceeds to by reason and argument to direct her audience’s attention to a similar perception and evaluation. As Black explains in Study in Method, “The critic . . . . occupies the office of mediator, receiving from one source and conveying to another. The critic proceeds in part by translating the object of his criticism into the terms of his audience and in part by educating his audience to the terms of the object of criticism” (6) Looking back on his early Study, Black elaborates,
A critique represents a particular mind at work on an object: apprehending it, examining it, coming to understand it, placing it into history. A function of such writing is to bring its reader to corroborate an interpretive process--not necessarily the same one that the critic has experienced but in any case one that will finally bring the reader to the interpretation that the critique proposes (“Author’s Foreword” xiv).
Except in very rare cases, the critic’s ability to educate is not simply a matter of reporting her personal experience of the critical object. The critic is able to instruct her audience because she can provide an argument for her interpretation and evaluation of the critical object; by these means she can, at least in principle, put her public in a position to “verify for itself that the critical object can be apprehended as the critic proposes without offending reason, and should further find reason to believe that the critic’s way of apprehending the object yields moral understanding of it” (xii-xiii).
The critic’s capacity to educate depends in part on her ability to situate the critical object historically. Here the critic’s preliminary tasks consist in the authentication of artifacts, situating them in their temporal context, and ascertaining the expressive intent of their creators (Black, Study in Method 37-42). “The authentication of texts (and other artifacts) and their interpretation in light of biographical, social, and ideological evidence,” Black observes, “proceeds along lines prescribed by scholarly tradition” (37). Establishing the historical context for work may pose difficulties and care should be taken not to conceive context too narrowly (39). Determining the expressive intent of a work can be difficult. However, Black maintains, “that in the great majority of cases the aims and purposes of the communicator will be expressed, through conventional tokens, in his discourse” (17). So the speaker’s expressive purpose can usually be inferred from the discourse itself, and aspects of context serve as a guide. In principle, the critic’s work as a historian can put the critic and her readers in a position from which it is possible to commence interpretation of the critical object.
In Black’s view, the critic’s paramount capacity is her ability to interpret the work, enabling the reader to apprehend what the artist has achieved in creating the critical object. In this connection the critic’s analysis of the work will be part formal and part functional. Formally, she can offer a characterization of the work in terms of how its structure resolves a problem or difficulty facing the artist--how its structure enables the artist to express something. Functionally, she can identify how that structure enables a certain response to the work. Presumably, the response which the critic identifies for her reader is the normatively ideal response apprehended by the critic in her own engagement with the work (44). The burden of the critic’s argument is to defend her “reading” of the work over and against alternative readings as the interpretation which optimally accounts for characteristics of the work in formal and in corresponding functional terms (55). Thus, her interpretation stands as an argument for the work (49). It identifies the artist’s achievement, and places the critic’s reader in a position to appreciate that achievement.
Growing out of interpretation but extending beyond, the critic has the capacity to judge the works of art she studies (4-5 & 37). At the outset of his essay on “The Second Persona,” Black articulates his view of the importance of judgment in criticism.
. . . there is something acutely unsatisfying about criticism that stops short of appraisal. It is not so much that we crave magistracy as that we require order, and the judicial phase of criticism is a way of bringing order to our history. . . . It is through moral judgments that we sort out our past, that we coax the networks and the continuities out of what has come before, that we disclose the precursive patterns that may in turn present themselves to us as potentialities, and thus extend our very freedom (109).
The exercise of judgment, in short, is essential to the contribution which criticism makes to the humane “understanding of man himself” (Black, Study in Method 9).
Ideally, as the critical process unfolds, the critic’s personal engagement with the work, and the interpretation she is consequently able to communicate to her audience, put her in a good position to publicly and fairly evaluate the critical object both in terms of its form and its function. Formally, the critic has a view of the work’s inherent structure, of its constituents and their relationship to one another (Black, Study in Method 62; Rhetorical Questions 98). Functionally, she has experienced the response that structure serves to illicit. It is a basic tenant of Black’s view of the critic’s powers that where the emically oriented critic attains the normative response which the work is constructed to elicit, she both apprehends the formal structure of the work and experiences the response the work is designed to elicit. In principle, her interpretation of the work puts her audience in a position to similarly apprehend the structure of the work and to respond appropriately. Thus, in Black’s view, the basis for judgments of form and evaluation of function are intimately related; accordingly, he remarks that there “is a point beyond which the distinction between the formalistic and the pragmatic judgments is a quibble” (Black, Study in Method 73 & 67-68). Judgments of form and judgments regarding function are, however, distinguishable.
The critic is able to render formal judgments of the work independent of its effects because she has access to touchstones as a basis for comparison and because she has developed tasteful expectations about the potentials of the art she serves. It is important to note that Black accepts a sharp limitation on the critic’s capacity for formal evaluation. She will not be able to provide an exhaustive, generic definition for the evaluative terms she uses to appraise a critical object. She will not, for example, be able to provide a strict definition for “rhetorically good.” But she can use evaluative language meaningfully because she can define her terms by example. She can justify her “appraisals of specific discourses by recourse to generally accepted touchstones of rhetorical excellence--Demonsthenes, Cicero, Edmund Burke, for example—and can show the relative merit of a discourse by comparing it to these touchstones” (Black, Study in Method 67). Moreover, a properly trained critic’s selection of the touchstones for use in evaluation will be guided by her expectations about what can be achieved in the art she serves. Her familiarity with examples of past artistic excellence will have sharpened her perceptions and elevated her expectations. Her experience, in short, will have endowed her with a cultivated taste, and that capability will enable the critic to teach her audience to make appropriate demands of the critical object (68).
We should notice at this point that Black’s view of the critic’s capacity to evaluate a work’s form supposes that the critic’s intuitive apprehension of the work’s structure will provide the critic with an intimation of the work’s value. To be sure, full exercise of critical judgment involves inferences beyond the critic’s immediate perception of the work. Black does not believe that a critic should evaluate an object emically (Black, “Note” 334). Nevertheless, the critic’s taste--her assimilated experience of past instances of artistic excellence--sharpens her perceptions of the critical object. As a result, the emic critic senses the value of the critical object in her unmediated apprehension of what the artist has contrived to express. Accordingly, Black observes, “Beyond perception is appraisal; beyond seeing the thing is attaching a value to it. These two acts--perception and evaluation--distinguishable as they are in theory, are generally experienced as inseparable phases of the same process. That process is criticism” (Black, Study in Method 5). The critic’s re-creative experience of the work shades off into the critic’s judgment of the work (55). Thus, while the critic may not be able to provide generic definitions for her evaluative vocabulary, her judgments are linked to the object both by comparison to past examples of excellence and by her immediate intuition of the work’s quality.[8]
When regarding the work functionally, the critic has a capacity to provide both pragmatic and moral judgments. For the benefit of rhetorical critics habituated to a highly restricted exercise of critical judgment, Black stresses that a critic can pass a wide range of pragmatic judgments. The critic can evaluate the work in terms of the normative response the work would elicit and in terms of the actual response it evokes from particular audiences--even those remote in time from the production of work. The critic can further evaluate the way the techniques employed in the work would shape an appetite for subsequent works and, so, condition the conventions of an art. The critic may also evaluate the effects of the work on the artist and on other artists. She can, in short, assess all the differences the critical object “has made in the world and will make, and how the differences are made and why” (Black, Study in Method 74). As many of these judgments will reflect how the critical object shapes or would shape its audience, the critic’s will often be led to moral appraisal of the work.
III. The Proper Scope of Rhetorical Criticism.
For Black the scope of rhetorical criticism, the objects to which the rhetorical critic properly directs her attention and the interest she takes in them, is determined by two considerations: (i) the rhetorical critic’s inherited focus on persuasive discourse and (ii) the demands which humane interest in such discourse impose on the critic.
Black’s view of the proper object of rhetorical criticism evolves somewhat over the course of his studies, but throughout he maintains that the rhetorical critic is to focus on persuasive discourse. Maturation occurs in the terms Black uses to define and identify persuasive discourse. His early Study in Method conceives persuasive discourse in terms of the rhetor’s intent: “Rhetorical discourses are those discourses, spoken or written, which aim to influence men” (15). In this connection Black defends his identification of the rhetorical with persuasive discourse on grounds of tradition and current practice. “Essays in rhetorical criticism,” he writes, “focus on persuasive speakers or discourses, and the weight of rhetorical tradition too falls in that direction” (14). Some years later, in Rhetorical Questions, Black identifies the object of rhetorical criticism in structural and functional terms. Now the objects subject to rhetorical criticism are distinguished structurally as discourses which exhibit incongruities of the sort which occur “when public discourse is made to serve private motives” (3). In such cases, Black maintains, “there is a perceptible disparity between form and substance; . . . language is used to convey more than the literal sense of a claim and literal report of the evidence warranting it” (10). In terms of function, rhetorical discourse is to be found at work in contexts where the central claims of a discourse, the propositions or pieties it advances, “must be affirmed against the countervailing prospect of the decay or neglect or discredit of those claims” (14). This shift from intentional concepts to structural and functional terms reflects, as will later see, a refinement in Black’s view of the critic’s capacity to respond normatively to a work. And since a discourse may function persuasively even though it was not deliberately designed to work in that way, the movement from a conception of the rhetorical in intentional terms to a conception in structural and functional terms somewhat broadens the scope of rhetorical criticism. But across this evolution in Black’s views, the proper object of rhetorical criticism remains persuasive discourse (Black, Rhetorical Questions 2). Strictly informative discourse falls outside the scope of the rhetorical (Black, Study in Method 12-15; Rhetorical Questions 10). By tradition and training the rhetorical critic is prepared to deal competently only with persuasive discourse (Black, Rhetorical Questions 11).
While Black adopts a traditional view of the object for rhetorical criticism, he takes an explicitly modern view of the scope of the rhetorical critic’s interests. Commenting on the critics of classical antiquity, Black observes, “They assumed the mission of elevating intuitive acts of creation to the status of viable method. Their aim was to formulate technical principles that artists could use: to make creativity systematic. They wrote primarily, not for the critic himself, or for the auditor, but for the artist” (Black, Study in Method 2). The modern critic addresses a larger audience. Her critiques speak, not just to the artist, but to all who share a humane interest in the object of critical study. Where the ancient critic was concerned to formulate technical principles of art, the modern critic, “like other humanistic studies, seeks to understand men by of study men’s acts and creations. If the critic has a motive beyond understanding . . . that motive is to enhance the quality of human life” (9). Accordingly, Black assigns to the contemporary rhetorical critic a considerably broader interest in persuasive discourse than was typical of her classical counterpart.
To comprehend the scope of the interests which in Black’s view ought engage the rhetorical critic, it is useful distinguish between, on the one hand, a focus on the instrumental design of persuasive discourses and, on the other, a concern for their developmental powers. It is natural to regard persuasive discourse instrumentally, i.e., as discourse (apparently) calculated to influence the attitudes and beliefs of particular audiences to which it is primarily addressed. However, an instrumental orientation does not exhaust the interest a critic may take in how persuasive discourses function. Significant persuasive discourses may have consequences which ramify beyond the results they are apparently designed to produce: the style of a discourse may engender an appetite for similar discourses; the discourse itself may contribute to an on-going dialogue which unfolds into an indefinite future; the discourse may become a hallowed statement, oft repeated and formative of the very fabric of the polity; the discourse may become a model for subsequent discourses of that kind or serve as an exemplary modification of inherited patterns of rhetorical practice.[9] Thus a discourse may shape rhetorical conventions, contribute to the formation of rhetorical genre, promote traditions of rhetorical practice, feed an ideology, and so on. It is useful to think of these and other larger functions of the discourse as developmental: they all involve the gradual bringing into being, elaboration, stabilization, or reinforcement of patterns of attitude and belief, of discursive practices and conventions, of systems of interpretation, and so on. To be sure, a discourse’s instrumental design and its developmental powers may overlap and intertwine in complicated ways. Some developmental functions may be intended by the rhetor and achieved through his design, and it may happen that the production of functions which initially were accidental or otherwise unintended comes to be understood and sought for instrumentally. Nor is it the case that the instrumental design of a discourse is always pursued as a deliberate matter by the rhetor. Persuasive strategies become established practices which may be employed more or less mindlessly by rhetors who only dimly comprehend the calculations underlying their attempts to persuade. A rhetorical critic can, in one and the same study, attend both to a discourse’s instrumental design and also to its developmental powers. But it can also be, and has all to often been, the case that the critic only regards the discourse as an instrument designed to move some relatively well specified auditors toward acceptance of attitudes, beliefs, policies, doctrines, etc. advocated by the would-be persuader, while the neglecting the discourse’s larger potential to initiate, elaborate, reinforce social, psychological or artistic patterns.
Black holds that humane interests in rhetorical phenomena require attention, not just to the instrumental design of persuasive discourses, but also to their developmental powers. Rhetorical phenomena, he argues, are radically mutable: just as there have been “radical discontinuities in the history of consciousness,” so, too, “the ways in which auditors experience rhetorical communication have altered over time” (Black, Study in Method 125; Rhetorical Questions 172-173). Rhetorical phenomena change, Black observes, as the techniques used in significant persuasive discourse shape the sensibilities, appetites, and expectation of audiences with respect to subsequent discourse and, so, mold rhetorical conventions (Black, Study in Method 35). It is with respect to these developmental powers of persuasive discourse that rhetorical criticism can, in Black’s view, make its deepest contribution to humane understanding. For, he maintains, it seems entirely probable, that as the techniques employed in persuasive discourse, at least in the modern era, shape audience appetites and sensibilities, they mold the very structure of the audience’s consciousness, and that is to say that the techniques used in persuasive discourses have a formative impact on their audiences’ humanity (Black, Rhetorical Questions 112).
This insight that humane interests call the rhetorical critic to attend to the developmental potentials of persuasive discourses is a major and fundamental theme in Black’s reflections on rhetorical criticism and in his work as a practicing critic. As we will see in the discussion which follows, it undergirds his critique of rhetorical criticism as he found it in the middle of the twentieth century. While Black is not adverse to critical interest in rhetoric’s instrumental nature, he warns against narrowly focusing on persuasive discourse as means designed to influence the audience immediately addresssed. Through a critique of the critical practices which he identifies as neo-Aristotelianism, Black shows that a narrow focus on the instrumental nature of rhetorical discourse severely impairs exercise of the powers inherent in the critic’s office and, consequently, leaves the critic unable to address the developmental potentials of persuasive discourses. Interest in the developmental powers of persuasive discourse is apparent through much of Black’s work as a practicing critic. It is reflected in his attention to the sensiblities cultivated by forms of rhetorical discourse, to the rhetorical genre which thereupon emerge and, ultimately, to the ideologies and forms of consciousness fed by those persuasive structures. This deep connection between the developmental power of persuasive discourses and the formation of human consciousness commits the rhetorical critic, in Black’s view, to moral evaluation (Black, “Plato’s View” 374; “Second Persona” 109-113 & 119).
IV. The Critique of neo-Aristotelianism’s Narrow Instrumental Focus.
Perhaps Professor Black’s best know service to rhetorical criticism is his critique of the orientation which dominated rhetorical criticism at the outset of his career. He baptized that critical approach “neo-Aristotelianism,” because it relied heavily on “techniques of criticism derived from Aristotle’s Rhetoric” (Black, Study in Method 27). Tracing the origins of this school to a misreading of the program for rhetorical criticism set out by Herbert Wichelns in “The Literary Criticism of Oratory,” Black carefully documents the influence it exercised over rhetorical criticism at mid-century.
It is generally agreed that Black’s critique of neo-Aristotelian criticism is both devastating and liberating. Thomas Benson summarizes the impact of Black’s critique in these terms.
Until the early 1960’s, perhaps the most influential book for students of criticism was Lester Thonssen and A. Craig Bard’s Speech Criticism, published in 1948. But in 1965, Edwin Black published his Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. Black’s book, originally a dissertation directed by Herbert Wichelns at Cornell, directly attacked the methods, assumptions, and results of what he called the neo-Aristotelian critics, whose mission had been defined by Wichelns in 1925, exemplified by the Brigance and Hochmuth studies in American public address, and described as method by Thonssen and Baird. Black voiced many of the dissatisfactions that had been gathering with the field. Implicitly, his title shifted the center of studies from speech to rhetoric, and hinted at new directions (Benson 5).
Dillip Goankar’s estimate is more trenchant. “Neo-Aristotelianism eventually collapsed under the weight of its own massive failure. But the privilege of writing its obituary belonged to Edwin Black who, in his influential book Rhetorical Criticism, offered a brilliant diagnosis of how its critical failure stemmed from a flawed conceptual apparatus” (Gaonkar 31; Lucas 241).
Black provides a clear and succinct characterization of neo-Aristotelism rhetorical criticism. Considered in general terms, neo-Aristotelianism has these features. First, it regards persuasive discourses as instruments designed to effect an immediate audience: on the whole “the new-Aristotelian critics tend . . . to comprehend the rhetorical discourse as tactically designed to achieve certain results with a specific audience on a specific occasion” (Black, Study in Method 39), and they are pre-occupied with judging the discourse in terms of whether it achieved the immediate results intended by its source. Secondly, in their analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of persuasive discourse, neo-Aristotelians rely on the lexicon of rhetorical art developed in classical antiquity.
The primary and identifying ideas of neo-Aristotelianism that we can find recurring in the critical essays of this school are the classification of rhetorical discourses into forensic, deliberative, and epideictic; the classification of “proof’ or “means of persuasion” into logical, pathetic, and ethical; the assessment of discourse in the categories of invention, arrangement, delivery, and style; and the evaluation of rhetorical discourse in terms of its effects on its immediate audience (31).
Thirdly, the neo-Aristotelian critics “ignore the impact of the discourse on rhetorical conventions, its capacity for disposing an audience to expect certain ways of arguing and certain kinds of justification in later discourses that they encounter,” and “the neo-Aristotelian critics do not account for the influence of the discourse on its author” (35). In short neo-Aristotelians narrowly focus on the persuasive discourse as an instrument designed by the would-be-persuader to influence the specific audience immediately at hand; they rely on a lexicon of art inherited from classical antiquity, and they ignore the larger contexts in which persuasive discourses function and the developmental impact such discourses may have.
A narrowly instrumental focus, as instanced by neo-Aristotelian criticism, has a strong and inherent appeal as an approach to critical study of persuasive discourse. In the first place, it fits the nature of much persuasive communication. A good deal of the persuasive discourse which publicly addresses individual and community decisions of political and economic importance is calculated to influence the attitudes, beliefs, and commitment of particular audiences in specific situations. It is only natural to interpret and evaluate such discourse in terms of its immediate instrumental value. Secondly, whatever the limitations of the conceptualization of rhetorical art provided by classical sources, the ancient treatises do provide a convenient lexicon which seems on its face to characterize the instrumental character of persuasive discourse.[10] And, finally, it is not obvious how rhetorical critics can engage persuasive discourse on terms other than those dictated by its instrumental nature. The appeal of a narrowly instrumental focus on persuasive discourse is general, as is the force of Black’s critique of neo-Aristotelianism.
The crucial defect of neo-Aristotelianism is that its restrictive interest in the instrumental value of persuasive discourse does not sanction a rhetorical critic’s personal engagement with her critical object. Black, it will be recalled, regards an unmediated personal response on the part of the critic, which approximates the normatively ideal response appropriate to the critical object, as indispensable to productive criticism. Neo-Aristotelianism attenuates the critic’s attention and directs her to concentrate on the immediate audience’s response to the work. As the critic is not in her own right a member of that audience, this restricted focus makes her response to the work irrelevant. Black, quoting T. S. Eliot, explains in Study in Method, “Rather than seek an interpretation of the discourse that realizes all that is in it and that aims ‘to see the object as it really is’, the neo-Aristotelian critic attempts to make an estimate of the historically factual effects of the discourse on its relatively immediate audience. The critic’s own sensitivity may or may not disclose anything” (43). Later in the same work, he elaborates this important point.
The neo-Aristotelian critic is preoccupied with the immediate audience of the discourse; in a sense, his eye is where that audience’s eyes are: on the issues of the discourse, on its doctrines on the ideas to which the audience is asked to assent. And insofar as his focus is thus, then his own responses to the discourse will have no place in the critical performance (57).
In sort, a restricted concern with the instrumental value of the discourse deflects the critic’s attention from her proper critical object and renders her intuitive response to that discourse irrelevant. This orientation, which precludes a normatively proper recreative response on the critic’s part, renders her unprepared to exercise other powers inherent in her public office.
The neo-Aristotelian critic is able to situate the persuasive discourse historically and to provide her audience with an account of its context and expressive intent. However, even here, in the exercise of powers which are principally those of the historian, the neo-Aristotelian critic is inclined to a highly restricted view of the discourse’s context and, so, is apt to underestimate the complexity and reach of the expressive intent which may animate the persuasive discourse. Neo-Aristotelian critics habitually identify the discourse’s context as the situation which prompts the speaker to address her immediate audience and to restrict her conception of the speaker’s communicative purpose to an intention to effect the beliefs, attitudes, commitments, etc. of that audience. In A Study in Method, Black offers two examples which support this complaint. The first is provided by critical studies of Lincoln’s “First Inaugural Address.” The narrow instrumentalist is inclined to situate this address singularly in the context of events leading directly to the Civil War and to overlook Lincoln’s preoccupation with his discourse as a longer run “force in American culture” (40). For his second example, Black provides a critique of John Jay Chapman’s “Coatsville Address.” Delivered in 1912 to an audience of three, the “Coatsville Address” would be of little significance to a critic who focused narrowly on its effectiveness in persuading its meager immediate audience. But this discourse, Black argues, is properly situated “as joining the dialogue participated in by Jefferson, Tocqueville, Lincoln, Melville, Henry Adams, Samuel Clemens, Santayana, and Faulkner--a dialogue on the moral discussion of the American” (33-34). Seen in this light the proper context for the address includes contemporary America. A narrow focus on persuasive discourse as an instrument for effecting some immediate audience blinds the critic to the larger historical context. This is particularly unfortunate because the fragmentary nature of persuasive discourse makes proper historical situation of the work of great importance to rhetorical criticism (39).
The neo-Aristotelian critic’s tightly circumscribed focus has still graver consequences for her ability to interpret the persuasive work. Given the powers inherent in her office as critic, the rhetorical critic should be able to (i) provide an interpretation of the discourse which enables her audience to apprehend what the rhetor has managed to express in the work and (ii) offer the critic’s audience an argument grounded in the work and supporting the critic’s reading. However, the neo-Aristotelian’s critical orientation impairs her capacity to perform these tasks.
In the place of a sensitive reading of the discourse, a neo-Aristotelian critic’s attention is drawn away from her proper critical object and directed to what the critic can learn about the immediate audience’s understanding of the discourse. As noted earlier, the critic’s own apprehension and response to the discourse, are from the standpoint of neo-Aristotelianism, irrelevant to interpreting the discourse. The neo-Aristotelian’s narrowly instrumental view focuses on “rhetorical discourse as an arrangement of tactics adapted to the relatively immediate audience” (49). The interpretation of the discourse relevant to this critical interest is that audience’s understanding of the work. A critic with this orientation would support her interpretation by reference to data about the audience’s response and not primarily by reference to the discourse itself. Her attention is driven from the work, to external data about the response of the audience specifically addressed. The closest a neo-Aristotelian critic can come to an interpretation grounded in the work, Black argues, would be to attempt to reconstruct “the interaction between the work and its immediate audience” (54).
This reconstruction involves the critic’s thinking and feeling himself into the thoughts and feelings of the rhetor’s immediate audience, so that he can empathize with that audience and attempt to gauge their reactions to the discourse. In this procedure, the critic’s own reactions to the discourse play a decidedly subordinate role. He apprehends the discourse, insofar as he is able, via the minds of others. The success of the reconstruction turns on the suppression of the critic’s own responses (56).
Black denies that the critic can reasonably expect to succeed in so reconstructing discourses from the past. “No matter how vividly the critic may make the past live in his pages, no matter with what incorruptible verisimilitude he may present it to us, it is still the past. The voices we hear speak from the grave” (52).
Finally, the neo-Aristotelian critic has an acutely limited capacity to prepare her audience to appreciate the value of persuasive discourses. She is left with no basis on which she can argue for any reading other than actual reception of the work by its immediate audience. “A literary critic,” Black observes, “may argue for a poem so convincingly, illuminating its merits and the skill of its execution, that the poem comes to be accepted as fine literature and may even pass into the category of accepted touchstones of literature where the burden of critical proof passes to the poem’s detractors” (49). A narrowly instrumental focus does not enable the rhetorical critic to argue for the discourse she interprets; this critical orientation “does not yield a sanction for saying that one should have been persuaded by a speech” (44). In fact, a narrow instrumentalist is so bound to the immediate audience’s response as basis for her critical orientation that, were she to successfully argue for a contemporary persuasive message, thereby effecting the reception of that discourse by its immediate audience, she would, on her own premises, be guilty of distorting the basis for evaluation of the discourse.
In summary, a narrowly instrumental reading of persuasive messages leaves the critic without personal basis for apprehending what the rhetor has managed to express in the discourse. Accordingly, the critic has very limited capacity to appreciate discourses which do not conform to her theoretical preconceptions. At her best, she can try to reconstruct the immediate audience’s response to the work, but such a reading does not enable her readers to recreate and experience the work for themselves. In the end, a narrowly instrumental focus on persuasive discourse leaves critic without grounds for arguing for the work as an artistic achievement in any terms other than the work’s success in securing understanding on the part of its immediate audience.
Nor has the neo-Aristotelian a vigorous capacity to evaluate rhetorical discourses. She is, one would presume, prepared to do that work. She has carefully studied the history of her art and is familiar with its past achievements, so one would suppose that she is in a position to intuitively recognize the quality of the techniques used by the rhetors in the discourses she studies, and she has at hand notable examples of rhetorically good discourses which she can use as touchstones to argue for her evaluation of the particular discourses which she deems worth judging. But her narrowly instrumental focus so hamstrings her efforts that she is unable to exercise her critical abilities in significant judgments.
Here, too, the neo-Aristotelian critic is impaired by the supposition that her own response to the work is irrelevant. An educated observer of persuasive discourse, she might herself clearly apprehend the power of what the rhetor has managed to express, and she may intuitively recognize the good quality of the techniques the rhetor has employed. But these intuitions are not to color her judgment. Insofar as she evaluates the discourse in terms of its power to evoke a response, she is preoccupied with the response of the audience immediately addressed. If she is concerned with the quality of the rhetorical means employed in the discourse, and she may well be, she has no auditors other than the rhetor’s immediate audience, whose response might be considered pertinent to her judgment.
The priority a narrow instrumentalist perspective assigns to the immediate audience’s response forces the rhetorical critic to accept a false opposition between formalistic judgments and pragmatic ones. Among Black’s most important insights into the internal logic of neo-Aristotelian criticism is his observation that the neo-Aristotelian critic’s restricted view of persuasive discourse compels her to choose between a starkly pragmatic judgment of the discourse’s immediate effectiveness and an impossible formalism divorced from consideration of rhetorical function. The neo-Aristotelian critics in the first half of this century, Black observes, fall into two schools concerning the evaluation of persuasive discourse. A pragmatic school, following what Black regards as a misreading of Professor Herbert Wichelns’s seminal essay on rhetorical criticism, holds that the effect of the discourse on an immediate and specific audience is “the prime criterion of rhetorical criticism” (Black, Study in Method 61; Rhetorical Questions 17). A formalist school, represented by Wayland Maxfield Parrish, holds that the rhetorical critic should judge the quality of the discourse as a “self-contained unit” without regard for its effect on any particular audience (Black, Study in Method 61-62). Carefully examining this division among neo-Aristotelian critics, Black advances two objections.
First, the opposition between pragmatists and formalists involves a false dichotomy forced on neo-Aristotelians by their narrow preoccupation with the immediate audience.
There is a point beyond which the distinction between the formalistic and the pragmatic judgments is a quibble. That point is defined by the critic’s very conception of effect. When the effects of a discourse are understood by the critic to be only those that discourse has on the beliefs of its immediate audience, then the distinction between the formalist judgment and the pragmatic judgment is a substantial one. It is substantial because the pragmatic judgment limits the critic’s view to the circumscribed transaction between a rhetor and an audience isolated in time, while the formalistic judgment tends to ignore the specific audience entirely, having invoked what is assumed to be timeless standards. When, however, the conception of effect comprehends more than the immediate audience, the judgment rendered comes increasingly to resemble the judgment of formalism (73-74).
The argument implicit in this passage is worth unpacking. The neo-Aristotelian formalist starts from the supposition that evaluation of a persuasive discourse solely in terms of its effect on the immediate audience is an unsatisfactory basis for estimating the quality of the discourse. But working from the narrowly instrumental focus she shares with her pragmatic cousin, the neo-Aristotelian formalist does not (and perhaps cannot) conceive any other audience whose responses to the discourse might be relevant to her judgment; accordingly, the neo-Aristotelian formalist elects to evaluate the persuasive discourse’s quality independent of the discourse’s effect on any audience. Thus, neo-Aristotelian critics are forced to chose between a position which evaluates the discourse pragmatically in terms of its effect on some immediate audience or a position which judges the discourse formally independent of the response on any audience. Black holds that this choice, if it can be called one, is falsely imposed on the neo-Aristotelian critic by her narrowly instrumental focus. Were the rhetorical critic able to conceptualize an ideal auditor capable of a normative response to the discourse, she could comprehend judgements of form and function, not as alternatives, but as interrelated.
We now come to Black’s second complaint. Should the neo-Aristotelian critic elect to evaluate persuasive discourse formally, attempting to apply standards which are independent of the discourse’s effect on any particular audience, she will have adopted a stance which cannot be consistently maintained. The conceptions of quality which neo-Aristotelians offer as divorced from consideration of effect, Black argues, turn out on closer inspection to be based on pragmatic calculations. Thus, where the neo-Aristotelian formalist claims to evaluate persuasive discourses using standards which are “different from and more important than effect,” the criteria she applies are fundamentally pragmatic.
According to Black, neo-Aristotelian formalists base their conceptions of rhetorical quality on tradition and on a property called “persuasiveness.” The standards derived from both sources, Black maintains, reduce to pragmatic considerations. To make this point Black first considers the warrants provided Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian for the principle that persuasive discourses ought to be clearly organized. His review of these classical sources argues that classical recommendations regarding the organization of speeches are based on ideas about how the parts of a speech function to effect its audience (68-72). Classical principles of disposition, on this showing turn out to be pragmatic, not strictly formalistic, standards. What is true of organization, Black suggests, is probably also true of other neo-Aristotelian principles of judgment. Accordingly, he concludes, “When the neo-Aristotelian critic appraises the quality of a discourse in terms of criteria derived from the Aristotelian tradition, the ultimate justification of these criteria is effect.”[11]
The second notion of formal standards to which Parrish appeals, but does not explicate, suggests that rhetorical discourses are to be evaluated in terms of whether they possess elements of a quality which Parrish calls “persuasiveness” (63). In an extended analysis of senses of the term “persuasive,” Black argues that we have no ordinary conception of a discourse as persuasive which is not based on some idea of the discourse’s effect.[12]
Finally, the narrowly instrumental critic is hamstrung by her inability to evaluate the rhetor’s ends and objectives. Because she is committed to considering the discourse as an instrument calculated to effect an immediate audience, the neo-Aristotelian critic is to take the rhetor’s objectives as given.
Let us be reminded once again of the focus of neo-Aristotelianism. It is on the discourse as an instrument serving the objectives of the rhetor. These objectives are taken by the neo-Aristotelian critic as they are given by the rhetor. They are not themselves the objects of appraisal. Rather, they are the stable underpinnings of the methodology. If the neo-Aristotelian critic would assess the later discourses of John C. Calhoun, and Calhoun’s principal objective in these later discourses is to justify the institution of slavery, then this objective is accepted by the neo-Aristotelian as a standard from which the discourses can be assessed. The objective itself is not evaluated, not even in its rhetorical aspects (77).
A narrow focus on the instrumental character of persuasive discourses leaves the critic without grounds on which to evaluate the ends those instruments are used to implement. “A critical methodology,” Black writes of neo-Aristotelian criticism, “that induces its practitioners to efface themselves and yield an essential aspect of judicial criticism to other hands has abdicated some of its responsibility” (78).
In summary, the neo-Aristotelian’s narrow focus on the instrumental value of persuasive discourse grievously impairs her capacity to exercise the powers which inhere in her office as a critic. She must disregard her own intuitive apprehension of and felt response to the discourses she studies, no matter how sensitive her reading and cultivated her rhetorical taste. She is inclined to take a highly restricted view of a discourse’s context and, so, is prone to a limited view of the rhetor’s expressive intent. At best, she can try to interpret a discourse through the eyes and ears of its immediate audience, but she has only marginal access to that perspective. And she is left without a coherent basis for evaluating a discourse other than its effect on the audience immediately addressed.
A critic so impaired, Black argues, has a very limited capacity to speak to substantial humane interests in rhetorical discourse. Black observes, as a matter of fact, “The neo-Aristotelians ignore the impact of the discourse on rhetorical conventions, its capacity for disposing an audience to expect certain ways of arguing and certain kinds of justifications in later discourses that they encounter, even on different subjects” (35). His analysis of neo-Aristotelianism shows this neglect of the developmental powers of persuasive discourse to be a product of the limitations of that school’s narrowly instrumental focus. The neo-Aristotelian simply is ill-prepared to study potentials of rhetoric which Black deems to be of paramount humane interest.
On Black’s account of the critic and her powers, inherent in the neo-Aristotelian’s narrow focus on the instrumental value of rhetoric lurks the strong possibility that the critic will arbitrarily impose prior theoretical concepts on emergent forms of discourse, instead of comprehending their development. If the rhetorical critic is to entertain the prospect that rhetorical phenomena are radically mutable, she must be able to recognize and respond to forms of discourse which, from the perspective of inherited rhetorical theories, appear novel. This, on Black’s analysis, the neo-Aristotelian critic is poorly positioned to do. Her critical orientation, it will be recalled, renders her own direct and immediate apprehension of the discourse irrelevant to her interpretation. Insofar as she might aspire to an experience of the discourse relevant to her highly restricted view of its instrumental nature, she must undertake to reconstruct the discourse through the eyes and ears of its immediate audience, a task which Black holds to be futile. Thus the neo-Aristotelian critic has little choice but to approach the discourse from an etic perspective and to interpret the discourse through the lens of inherited theoretical concepts. This focus limits her capacity to recognize and attend to aspects of the discourse which do not fit her preconceptions; consequently, she is apt to miss those features which would engender in audiences an appetite for new, theoretically unanticipated possibilities. By working in a fashion which tempts circular confirmation of inherited rhetorical theories, the neo-Aristotelian critic runs the risk of overlooking the mutability of rhetorical phenomena and neglecting the developmental powers of persuasive discourse (Black, “Note” 333).
Black argues in some detail that the neo-Aristotelian’s orientation not only tempts, but actually leads, rhetorical critics to seriously misconstrue significant modern and contemporary discourse and, consequently, to neglect the contribution which persuasive discourse makes to the formation of ideology, social identity, and the structure of consciousness. In her critical practice, the neo-Aristotelian critic habitually relies upon a lexicon borrowed from classical theories of rhetoric. This application of classical conceptions of rhetoric to modern and contemporary discourse is, Black argues, a doubtful enterprise.
We can hardly expect the principles of rhetoric formulated two thousand years ago to be uniformly germane today. The nature of political institutions and the modes of communication have drastically changed in twenty centuries. It would be naive to suppose that there would not be concomitant changes in the character of rhetorical discourse, particularly when we know that more subtle modulations in society are echoed in rhetorical discourse. The world changes, and the uses of language with it (Black, Study in Method 124).
Nevertheless, the neo-Aristotelian proceeds as though the kinds of persuasive discourse practiced in modern societies were limited to those developed in classical antiquity and as though the range of persuasive techniques employed by contemporary rhetors were limited to the persuasive art found in the rather more tribal communities of Greek antiquity. Moreover, Black argues, insofar as the neo-Aristotelian critic relies specifically on Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric, she adopts a “restricted view of human behavior” which neglects discourses “which function in ways not dreamed of in Aristotle’s Rhetoric” (131). Committed to a critical orientation that allows “the critic little room for interpretive originality,” the neo-Aristotelian critic is poorly prepared to help her audience comprehend the emergence of novel forms of modern and contemporary persuasive discourse (Black, Rhetorical Questions 17).
Black’s indictment of neo-Aristotelian criticism is directed to the methodology of a specific body of rhetorical critics working in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Critics, of course, may take a narrowly instrumental view of persuasive discourse without adopting a specifically Aristotelian point of view. However, Black’s analysis penetrates so deeply into the logic of the neo-Aristotelian position as to raise serious and general questions as to whether a narrow focus on persuasive discourse as an instrument calculated to effect a specific immediate audience can serve as adequate orientation for rhetorical critics. From Black’s account we learn that the narrowly instrumental critic has a severely limited capacity to explore the development powers of persuasive discourse and, so, is unable to speak to important humane interests in rhetorical discourse.
V. Black’s Positive Contributions to Developmental Studies of Persuasive Discourse.
Professor Black has not only sustained a highly influential and liberating critique of neo-Aristotelian criticism; he has also contributed positively to our understanding of rhetorical criticism and to its practice. He has identified a focus for rhetorical criticism which affords the critic opportunity for full exercise of the interpretative powers critics inherently possess, and in his own critical practice, he has shown that by exercising those powers rhetorical critics can contribute to a humane appreciation of persuasive discourse.
It is not enough to diagnosis the infirmity of neo-Aristotelianism; one must also show that the full complement of a critic’s powers can be exercised by the rhetorical critic To the critic with a narrowly instrumental focus, the liabilities which Black identifies in neo-Aristotelian criticism seem to be dictated by the pragmatic nature of persuasive discourse itself. Responding to this objection, Black argues that the limitations of neo-Aristotelianism are a consequence, not of the nature of rhetorical discourse, but of the neo-Aristotelian’s myopic critical perspective. If the critic takes a larger view of the instrumental potentials of rhetorical discourse and if the critic attends to the developmental powers of persuasive communication, she finds ample latitude for exercise of her interpretative capacities. Black’s defense of this claim is the core of his positive contribution to our understanding of rhetorical criticism.
At issue is whether the instrumental design of persuasive discourse imposes blinders on the rhetorical critic, which need not be worn by her counterparts in the fine arts. As a rule, aesthetic objects have an appeal which transcends the immediate context of their production, so critics in the fine arts can respond directly and profoundly to works which originate at great cultural distances from the critic. Persuasive discourse, the neo-Aristotelian maintains, is characteristically addressed to particular audiences which do not number the critic among their members. The situations to which persuasive discourse responds are often historically remote, and from the critic’s point of view, the issues addressed may be archaic and without vitality. The neo-Aristotelian critic is inclined to suppose that these pragmatic aspects of persuasive discourse preclude the possibility of significant response from persons outside the immediate audience. She may be inclined to doubt whether she has the power to personally and intuitively respond in critically relevant ways to historically removed rhetorical objects.
Black denies that the pragmatic, situated nature of persuasive discourse precludes the possibility that the rhetorical critic can directly and intuitively engage such discourse in ways which yield insights relevant to interpretation and evaluation of her critical object. His response is complex and evolves over the course of several essays from a position initially articulated in A Study in Method.
Black’s first argument for the possibility of personal critical engagement with persuasive discourses focuses on the alleged contrast between aesthetic objects and the more pragmatically oriented objects of interest to rhetorical critics. Some critics have tried to articulate a “categorical opposition of fine art and rhetorical activity” by contrasting poetry and rhetoric (Black, Study in Method 46). Responding to this line of thought, Black denies that there is a sharp distinction between imaginative literature and rhetoric. No sooner is such a distinction drawn than it must be qualified to the “vanishing point” (47). There are rhetorical elements in poetry and poetic passages in rhetorical discourse. Moreover, Black observes,
We have discourses that fall exactly between the “realms” of imaginative literature and rhetoric. . , and these discourses solicit the attention of the critic as imperatively as any other. The Gettysburg Address is one such; Chapman’s Coatesville Address . . . is another. One may also think of The Grapes of Wrath, or Crime and Punishment, or Gulliver’s Travels, or the Annals of Tacitus, or the Symposium of Plato, of the whole literature of social protest, of the genres of parody and satire, of countless sermons and epideictic discourses, even of such examples of “pure” poetry as Paradise Lost with its rhetorical object of justifying “the ways of God to man” (47).
It follows that, although many persuasive discourses which fall in the range between rhetoric and poetic may have originated in contexts quite remote from the rhetorical critic, she can still personally and directly apprehend their force. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” for example, and much of his other public discourse, is designed to speak not just to his immediate audience but to subsequent generations as well. And it is part of the power of Lincoln’s discourse that it still speaks to us (Black, “Gettysburg” 22; Study in Method 40-41). Other persuasive discourses, such as Chapmann’s “Coatsville Address” contribute to ongoing debates that stretch over centuries and continue to the present (Black, Study in Method 33-34). In these cases the issues addressed continue to have vitality for the critic, and she may regard herself as part of the rhetor’s audience. So, the idea that, unlike fine literature and other aesthetic objects, rhetorical discourse cannot reach beyond its context of production is not true for a wide range of persuasive discourses. Where it does the rhetorical critic can aspire to a full and sensitive personal reading.
This first answer, however, does not adequately resolve the challenges which the pragmatic nature of persuasive discourse pose for the rhetorical critic. While she may hope to personally and intuitively engage persuasive discourses which fall in the range between rhetoric and poetic, still there are, as Black recognizes, many critically interesting persuasive discourses which fall clearly into the rhetorical, contextually bound, end of this spectrum. Here one encounters discourses designed to effect the commitments of audiences often remote from the critic in time and place and addressed to issues which the critic can no longer find vital and immediate. And it is generally true, Black admits, “that the work of rhetoric is fragmentary outside its environment; it functions only in a particular world” (39). On the face of the matter the doctrinally archaic, situation bound, nature of such discourse seems to pose an insuperable difficulty for any critic’s effort to intuitive apprehend and personally experience what the rhetor has managed to express.
No matter how vividly the critic may make the past live in his pages, no matter with what incorruptible verisimilitude he may present it to us, it is still the past. The voices we hear speak from the grave. We do not have the power of choice with Clay’s compromise on the Wilmot Proviso. Our assent is not being solicited; our convictions cannot be engaged. The doctrines embodied in Clay’s speech are historical archaisms, and the modern audience cannot stand in the same relation to them as to the humblest aesthetic object (52).
What, if any, basis for response does doctrinally dead discourse afford the critic?
What responses can a contemporary critic have to a rhetoric discourse of the past? How can the critic respond to, say, Clay’s speech of 1850 when, as we have argued, that speech is doctrinally archaic? Is it even possible for any critic, for any contemporary, to experience a reaction to a substantively dead discourse (56)?
On Black’s account of rhetorical criticism, this question must be regarded as crucial to the possibility of full and productive exercise of the critic’s capacities in studies of persuasive discourse.
We come now to Black’s second argument for the possibility of direct critical engagement with persuasive discourses. In response to the challenge substantively dead discourse poses for the rhetorical critic, A Study in Method argues that, even where a persuasive discourse is ideologically archaic, the critic may still have an immediate response to the rhetorical techniques employed in that discourse. In a passage which foreshadows much of Black’s own work as a critic, he explains.
The critic who believes that some techniques of argument can have an effect independent of the substance of argument is able to experience an immediate response to the discourse. If, in other words, a critic were to see any rhetorical discourse as working to make certain techniques conventional, to shape an audience’s expectations for discourses that they will later hear or read, to mold an audience’s sensibilities to language, then that critic would be in a position to respond with immediacy, even to a doctrinal archaism. He will be able to do so because, we shall assume, rhetorical techniques do not become archaic in the way that doctrines and issues become archaic; a rhetorical technique will almost always stand as a live possibility at any point in history (56-57).
By focusing on and responding to the persuasive techniques in a work, the rhetorical critic can personally engage and be affected by the work in those ways which Black regards as an indispensable first step in the critical process; she can recreate in her own experience the impact of the work’s technique.
In his work as a practicing critic, Black recognizes some limits to a critic’s capacity to respond to culturally remote persuasive technques. Soon after affirming that “a rhetorical technique will almost alway stand as a live possibility at any point in history,” Black’s study of Daniel Webster as an exemplar of the sentimental style brings our critic up to the limits of our capacity to respond to Webster’s style. Focusing on Webster’s epideictic discourse, and specifically “The Bunker Hill Address,” Black encounters a discourse which is not only doctrinally, but also stylistically archaic. “Webster,” Black observes, “is excessively didactic.”
He over instructs. Permitting no chance response, he prohibits spontaneity. To be the people he wants us to be, to honor the claims he makes on his auditors, we must totally surrender ourselves to his speech; we must feel only what he wants us to feel. And since we cannot bring ourselves to so total a surrender, we stand to some extent outside the speech. We understand what it asks. Hence, we understand that we are not its auditors, we are merely spectators. We are standing apart from a rhetorical transaction, observing it. This orientation enlists our spectatorial responses (Black, “Sentimental Style” 79).
Contrary to Black’s earlier optimism, Webster’s discourse presents our critic a style from the past which he (and we) can engage only as a spectator and not as participant. So, the view that rhetorical critics can respond as ideal auditors to the persuasive techniques in doctrinally archaic discourses must admit of limitations; at best, “a rhetorical technique will almost always stand as a live possibility at any point in history” (My emphasis). But even in the case of Webster, the critic’s efforts to personally engage the discourse bear fruit. As a sympathetic observer Black is able (i) to identify, and to enable his reader to recognize, the response Webster demands of his auditor, (ii) to understand how Webster’s style could function to produce that response and also (iii) to recognize the limits of the critic’s own capacity to respond to Webster’s Address. Thus, Black’s interpretation of Webster’s style shows that, even when confronting an archaic rhetorical technique, the emic critic’s attempt to respond sensitively to a discourse, though inhibited, can nevertheless yield significant insight into the discourse’s structure and functions.
Still there is a crucial difficulty in Black’s initial conception of the rhetorical critic’s capacity to respond to culturally remote persuasive techniques, a difficulty which Black does not resolve until later in his studies. The difficulty lies in how the critic is to situate herself and her reader so as to apprehend the discourse in its own terms “with the utmost sympathy and compassionate understanding.” The critic aspires to experience the discourse’s techniques as an ideal auditor. But in what capacity is she, and her reader, to attend to the discourse. According to Black, it will be recalled, a major limitation of neo-Aristotelian criticism is its inability to conceive any audience for persuasive discourse other than the historical audience to which the discourse was immediately addressed. Consequently, the neo-Aristotelian critic does not aspire to the experience of an audience or auditor whose response to a persuasive discourse approximates the normatively ideal response which the discourse solicits. But Black’s critic faces a similar challenge. Who is the auditor capable of responding fully to the discourse at hand? Out of the myriad of capacities which the critic might bring to bear in apprehending the discourse’s persuasive techniques, which configure into an ideal auditor for that discourse?
This difficulty is not resolved by the insight that critics have a capacity to respond emically to the persuasive techniques employed in a discourse. The capacity to respond is a situated capacity. The ideal auditor for a discourse may have an identity, may exercise capacities, and may have response potentials which are within the conceptual and experiential range of the rhetorical critic and her readers; however, if critic and reader are to aspire to the ideal normative response to the discourse’s techniques, she must know, and be able to convey to her reader, in just what capacities the discourse’s techniques ideally solicit a response. Accordingly, the critic needs a conception of the ideal audience for the discourse at hand, and that conception must approximate the position she attains in her personal engagement with the text, it must support an interpretation of the techniques employed in the discourse, and it must enable her to argue for her interpretation of the discourse by reference to evidence from the text. This problem of how to conceptualize the ideal auditor for a rhetorical discourse is not explicitly addressed in A Study in Method, and Black’s earliest critical essays deal with the problem in ways that are less than entirely satisfactory.
Black’s initial attempts to position his own reader as the discourse’s ideal audience invite the reader to interpret the rhetorical discourse from the perspective of the audience as envisioned and addressed by the rhetor. This solution requires that the critic make inferences about rhetor’s expressive intention based on the text of the discourse, and then, given this specification of the rhetor’s communicative purpose, the critic’s reader is invited to infer the response ideally expected of them. For example, Black’s interpretation of the Coatsville Address proceeds, first, by positing four possible responses to the vicious lynching which formed the subject of the speech: “there would conceivably be those who would perceive the event as a righteous act of vengeful justice; there would be those who would perceive it as a hideous expression of mob violence; there would be those who would perceive it, clinically, as the concrete illustration of an abstract sociopathic idea; there would be those who would refuse to perceive the event at all, who would dismiss it and put it out of mind” (35). Black then proceeds to identify the function of the address on the basis of a conjecture about Chapman’s intentions in relation to these four possible responses: “Of these four reactions, we can infer that Chapman regarded the first and last of them as wrong, and the second and third of them as requiring emendation. The function of his speech was to provide this emendation--to shape the appropriate reaction to the event” (85). Black’s readers, then, are to rely on Chapman’s intentions in determining the ideal audience for the Coatsville address and the function of that address for this audience. This would be a defensible procedure for, as Black argues, “in the great majority of cases the aims and purposes of the communicator will be expressed, through convention tokens, in his discourse” (17). So the speaker’s expressive purpose can usually be inferred from the discourse itself, and in the unusual case aspects of context will serve as a guide.
However, while an estimate of the speaker’s intentions, his expressive purpose, would be relevant to the critic’s identification of what the speaker has managed to express in a persuasive discourse, it could not satisfactorily serve as the sole or arbitrating desideratum for the critic’s interpretation of the form and function of the techniques employed in the discourse. The speaker’s expressive achievement may or may not coincide with his intentions. Sometimes achievements exceed all expectations; sometimes a speaker’s achievements may be other than his intentions; one can achieve a quite unexpected and unplanned result. Indeed, as Black observes in Rhetorical Questions, the expressive power of a work may reflect the artist’s subconscious struggles (12- 13). A rhetorical discourse may engender appetites and sensibilities quite different and divergent from the rhetor’s strategic calculations. Critical practices which rely primarily on speaker intentions to identify the perspective from which the critic argues for her interpretation of the work would, to put the matter simply, drive the critic’s work in the direction of instrumental interpretations, sometimes at the expense of understanding the work’s developmental potentials.
Subsequently, Black’s study of “The Second Persona” provides a more satisfactory solution to the problem of how the critic is to position herself and her readers in relationship to the work for purposes of interpretation. There Black extends Wayne Booth’s observation that the structure of a work implies certain characteristics of its author, which may in turn be deduced from features of the work. Black identifies this implied author/speaker as the first persona in rhetorical transactions, and he observes “that there is a second persona also implied by a discourse, and that persona is it its implied auditor” (Black, “Second Persona” 112). There are two parts to Black’s conception of the second persona. First, this persona is inferable from the discourse. The concept of an implied auditor, Black writes, “. . . does not focus on a relationship between a discourse and an actual auditor. It focuses instead on the discourse alone, and extracts from it the audience it implies” (112). The nature of the implied auditor is typically inferable from stylistic tokens in the text of the discourse. Second, the implied auditor identifies a “vector of influence” (113). The critic can apprehend in the response a discourse would elicit from its implied auditor “a model of what the rhetor would have real auditors become” (113). The implied auditor, then, is a hypothetical auditor whose response to the discourse corresponds exactly to the response which, according to Black, the critic ought to approximate in her preliminary recreation of the work. The concept of a second persona, in short, provides Black’s critic with a vehicle for translating her personal intuitive response to a work into a publicly accessible audience perspective which can be identified and defended directly by reference to the linguistic indicators found in the text.
The concept of a second persona rounds out Black’s view that by focusing on the persuasive techniques in a discourse, the rhetorical critic finds space for full exercise of her interpretative powers. Black is now able to work free of exclusive reliance on the rhetor’s persuasive intent as a guide for the critic’s orientation to the text. Instead, the critic can deduce, from the discourse itself, the orientation the discourse’s ideal auditor would adopt in responding to the discourse’s style and other persuasive techniques. Moreover, the critic can situate her reader as the discourse’s implied auditor and can guide her reader to the normative response which presumably the critic has attained in her own engagement with the discourse.
Our attention now turns to Black’s own work as a rhetorical critic. Two observations are in order. First, Black own practices as a working critic exercise the interpretative powers which he holds to be inherent in criticism generically considered. Second, drawing on those capacities, Black has been able address the developmental powers of persuasive discourse which he considers crucial to humane appreciation of persuasive discourse.
It is important to speak cautiously about Black’s practices as a working critic. In reflecting on Black’s critical studies, it would be a mistake to speak of his “methods” or his “methodology.” He repudiates the idea that insightful criticism can be reduced to methods, much less methodologies. His own practices as a working rhetorical critic are too flexible and variable to qualify as regular and systematic procedures, nor does Black rest his claims on the grounds that he arrived at them by use of this or that method. But it is possible and useful to see in Black’s work as a critic certain practices--habitual and polished ways in which he interprets and evaluates rhetorical discourses. As a working critic, Black exercises the powers which his analysis attributes to critics per se, bringing those powers to bear on just those aspects of persuasive discourses which his reflections on rhetorical criticism mark out as available and suitable for serious study. We can, then, better understand and appreciate Black’s teachings about rhetorical criticism as we see them embodied in his critical practices.
According to Black’s analysis of the powers of the critic, she should be able to directly engage the work apprehending the interstices of its form and function, and her interpretation should give the critic’s reader access to the work from the vantage point of the work’s implied auditor, enabling the reader to apprehend the structure, at least of the techniques employed in the work, and to sense their function. Black’s critique of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a pyrotechnical display of rhetorical criticism, nicely illustrates critical practices which realize the promises of Black’s analysis of the critic’s inherent powers. We may presume that our emic critic has attained, in his own, right an intuitive and affectionate experience of the discourse which, to his satisfaction, approximates that of an ideal audience. We may also presume that this experience informs the interpretation of the discourse which he presents to us, his readers. However, our critic does not appeal to that experience, per se, in the course of his critique; there are no first person singular references in this essay, though there are critically important first person plural references. Personally and as an individual, the critic intrudes in this essay only to the extent that its tone implicates an authoritative reading on the part of the critic. In stead of appealing directly to his prior experience of Lincoln’s Address, the critic invites us to jointly engage the discourse with him, therein guiding our attention and response. The essay speaks to a question about the function of the discourse, “How does the Gettysburg Address function rhetorically” (Black, “Gettysburg” 22). In order to answer this question Black deduces from evidence in the text the audience implied by Lincoln’s address, the address’s second persona. That audience Black concludes, “transcribes a movement through the speech from unspecified universal . . ., to national . . ., to local . ., back to national again” (24). This section of the essay provides a detached analysis of the structure of the discourse, no explicit reference is made to the critic or his readers. The next section of the essay, subtitled “The Movement of the Address,” carefully connects Black’s analysis of the overall structure of the address, first, to an account of the functions of that structure and, then, to a characterization of the response those functions would elicit from the implied audience. This discussion of function and response is initiated by a shift in the relationship between the critic and his reader. Having identified a position from which both the critic and reader can engage the text, Black directly addresses his readers using the first person plural, thus merging both the critic’s orientation and his reader’s orientation with the orientation attributed to the implied auditor. The reader is now to regard the discourse as addressed to an ideal audience which includes both critic and reader. The overall structure of the address, Black argues, pivots on the first sentence in the address’s third paragraph. Paragraphs one and two lead the audience on historical and moral grounds to conclude that “it is altogether right and proper” that the audience gather on this spot to dedicate a portion of the battle-field “as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” Following this conclusion “a normal extrapolation” would lead to an utterance performatively dedicating the cemetery. Lincoln violates this expectation with the line opening paragraph three, “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground.” Black describes this sentence as the beginning of a process of rejection. Writing in the first person plural, he says,
Our past has led us to the point of declaring this burial ground sacred; but yet, we demur. Why? Because we have neither the right nor the duty. A moral intervention prevents the fulfillment of conventional form; a customary itinerary has been deflected. Our right has been superseded by those who have died. Our duty is elsewhere; it is to take up the task left unfinished by the dead (24).
The critic offers a description of the structure of the address which includes us, his readers, among the address’s audience, that structural description has already begin shade into a description of function: the structure has effected a rejection: our attention has been redirected and our expectation of fulfillment has been denied. Black parallels this discussion of function with an account of the corresponding affective experience of the audience. Black invites us to consider this movement in terms of what, following Berenson, he calls “respirational values.”
We can appreciated that the speech is temporarily arrested at the point of maximum contraction. The narrowing of the location from continent . . . to nation . . . to battle-field . . . to portion of that field . . . to resting place . . . finally pivots with “but” even to a rejection of our capacity to affect “this ground.” Then, . . . a movement recommences, and an expansion continues to the end (24).
Thus, Black argues, the “structure of the Gettysburg Address imposes a corresponding form on the experience of its auditor. That experience is composed of initial tension, followed by tightening, followed by progressive exhilaration” (26). “We are,” he writes, “coiled by the Address, and then sprung. The structure of the Gettysburg organizes the auditor’s energy” (27). Until, at the end, in a moment of dedicatory release and with experience of soaring elevation, “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” (21). Carefully detailing this structure and its functions, Black provides a highly nuanced and compelling interpretation of Lincoln’s enduring Address.
Black’s reading of the Gettysburg Address fairly represents how our critic argues for his interpretation of a discourse.[13] Here and elsewhere Black tries to enable his reader to apprehend both the structure and function of the techniques employed in a discourse. Relying on evidence from the text, Black situates his reader in a position approximate to that of the ideal auditor implied by Lincoln’s Address. From that vantage point, Black prompts his reader to attend to salient features of the discourse and invites his reader to at least recognize the response those features invites from the discourse’s ideal auditor. Thus our critic provides the reader with an argument for his interpretation of the discourse which is designed to communicate to the reader what Black presumably experienced in his own unmediated engagement with the work. It is apparent, and ought not be surprising, that Black’s critical practice reflects his mastery of the very powers which his analysis identifies as inherent in the critic’s office.
We should also notice that these critical practices enable Black to work autonomously as an emic critic. His interpretation of a discourse typically draws on a wide variety of corroborating sources and on a wealth of data external to his critical object, and his discussion of the functions of a discourse typically extrapolate speculatively to identify functions well beyond the response which Black claims the discourse immediately invites.[14] His account of the sentimental style, for example makes reference to six nineteenth century oratorical instances of the sentimental style, Alex de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, various historians of the period, Freud, Mathew Arnold, Walter Benjamin, Hanna Arendt, biographies of Oscar Wilde, and anthologies of English and American melodramas (Black, Rhetorical Questions 195-196). These resources are needed to arrive at the far reaching general conclusion that the sentimental style functions “to subordinate all values to aesthetic values. As such, it is the fallible sign of an evasion of moral responsibility” (109). But this larger interpretation (and judgment) is anchored by the emic reading, discussed earlier, of a key passage in Webster’s Bunker Hill Address (pp. 27-28 above). Similarly Black’s study of the “Idioms of Social Identity” ranges over texts from the period of the American Civil War, Nazi Germany, and the Civil Rights Crisis of the mid 1960’s. His conclusions in the study are supported by an extended conceptual comparison of the terms used to articulate a social identity on the basis of heredity as contrasted with the language used to base a social identity on convictions. Ultimately, the essay offers a general characterization of the rhetorical components of American social identity. These extended reflections start from a critical interpretation of key passages in then President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights speech of 15 March 1965 (Black, Rhetorical Questions 24-29). Confronting a discourse which is part of a long and on-going national dialogue, Black situates his reader historically and directs his reader’s attention to how Johnson’s language powerfully aligns national values with the cause of justice for “American Negroes” and against racism and Southern sectionalism (24-29). The emic character of the reading is most apparent in Black’s comments on Johnson’s portrait of the poverty stricken Mexican Americans children which he, as a Southerner, taught in his first job out of college. The auditor, Black directs, must “be moved by such a depiction or reject it” (27). The reader is to apprehend Johnson’s text as a historically situated second persona and to, at least, recognize the response its stylistic techniques would elicit from its ideal auditor. In these and other essays, Black exercises critical autonomy in that he claims an evidentiary basis for his argument which is available to his reader independent of any prior theory or conceptual framework. Having situated his reader in a position approximating that of an ideal auditor, Black rests his case on what he can bring his reader to apprehend of the