The Specificity of the Rhetorical: Four Strategies

by Dilip Gaonkar

In Gorgias, Plato (c.428-c.347-e) sets the “specifying” game in motion by demanding that rhetoric identify itself. He puts the identity question bluntly to Gorgias: “Who are you?” (447). “With what class of objects is rhetoric concerned?” (449). As the dialogue unfolds, Socrates poses a series of interrogatories regarding rhetoric's identity and domicile, and predictably, neither Gorgias, nor Polus and Callicles who successively undertake to respond, give a satisfactory answer. It is not so much the amorality of rhetoric, but rather the inability of its teachers and practitioners to give a coherent account of it that finally delegitimizes rhetoric.

In this paper, I argue that both historically and in the present there are four dominant strategies for reading and responding to Plato's critique: the “foundationalist” thesis, the “unavoidability” thesis, the “oratore perfectus” thesis, and the “contingency” thesis. Of the four strategies, the first two are distinctively modern in their formulation whereas the latter two have ancient lineage. In this paper, I will discuss how each of these four strategies deals with the problematic of “unspeciafiability.” However, my discussion of the four strategies is not equally detailed. I focus on the strategies of “unavoidability” and “contingency” because they are the two most influential positions from which rhetoric is defended today. As for the “foundationalist” thesis, it has only a few adherents left as the mood in the rhetoric camp has become decidedly anti-foundationalist in recent years. Although the “oratore perfectus” thesis was historically the most dominant response to Plato's critique, its presence in contemporary rhetorical theory (dominated by Aristotle) has been negligible. Only in the last decade or so there has been a revived interest, especially among rhetorical critics of public discourse, in developing some modern versions of that thesis.

For the purpose of this conference presentation, I will focus on the “unavoidability” thesis for two reasons: First, my account of the “contingency” thesis is already in print. Second, the “unavoidabilty” thesis is based on the claim that language is necessarily tropic and that tropes cannot bridled by recourse to a metalanguage.