This essay joins with others in exposing and critiquing problems with neoliberalism in the orchestration of society. Using rhetorical theory both ancient and contemporary that relates rhetoric to the gift and giving, this essay shows the inhospitable rhetorical dynamics of neoliberalism and explores the rhetorical possibilities of transformation through allo-liberalism, a turn to the other with liberality, generosity, and love.
Rhetoric and the Gift, taking as its starting point the Homeric idea of the gift and Aristotle's related rhetorical theory, explores rhetoric not only at the level of the artful response but at the level of the call and response. Mari Lee Mifsud takes up a number of questions crucial to thinking about contemporary communication: What does it mean that communication is a system of exchange with others? How are we to deal with questions of ethics in an economic system of power and authority? Can exchange ever be truly generous, and can communication, then, ever be free? Is there a more ethical way of relating and communicating, and might there be a different self-other relationship more conducive to a free people? As a historian of ancient Greek rhetorical theory, Mifsud examines these questions of contemporary significance by turning first to Aristotle's many citations of and references to Homer in order to discern the emergence of a system of exchange thought to be appropriate for a democratic polis. As she elucidates, the Homeric system of exchange — gift-giving — was used by Aristotle as a metaphor for rhetoric's function, as he distinguished the gift as a system of exchange within the functioning of the polis, operating between individuals and society to bind people to people and cultures to cultures. These ancient ideas are shown to relate directly to our modern arguments concerning exception and exceptionalism as they play out in politics, law, and culture. Such questions of exchange, thus, are shown to reverberate and continue to circulate through conversations in philosophy and communication, ranging across a great deal of recent study. Mifsud's discussion of a variety of contemporary thinkers, together with her historical and theoretical approach, offers rich possibilities for new trajectories of relating the self and other, providing the critical, hermeneutical, and theoretical resources for thinking otherwise about rhetorical conceptions of relational ethics in communication, on both a personal and political level. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1206/thumbnail.jpg
In this essay, I explore the possibilities of rhetoric as gift. I begin with the Homeric gift economy and the rhetorical resources of this economy. My use of "economy" here is not reducible to a monetary exchange system, but rather a more general system of practices orchestrating cultural identity and relations. As Georges Bataille suggests, studying a general economy may hold the key to all the problems posed by every discipline (1991, 10). For Bataille everything from geophysics to political economy, by way of sociology, history and biology, to psychology, philosophy, art, literature, and poetry has an essential connection with economy. So, too, rhetoric. Henry Johnstone once defined rhetoric as the art of getting attention (1990, 334). We cannot attend to everything at once, so something must call our attention, invite our focus, and this something is rhetoric. Rhetoric's desire to dispose its audience to invest in the object of attention connects rhetoric to economy. Rhetoric can be said to enact a disposition to invest, or a cathexis, a certain kind of savings. As such it is subject to economic movements and displacements, a dimension seen as well through Lyotard's figure of the dispositif (1993, x.).
A Revolution in Tropes is a groundbreaking study of rhetoric and tropes. Theorizing new ways of seeing rhetoric and its relationship with democratic deliberation, Jane Sutton and Mari Lee Mifsud explore and display alloiōsis as a trope of difference, exception, and radical otherness. Their argument centers on Aristotle's theory of rhetoric through particular tropes of similarity that sustained a vision of civic discourse but at the same time underutilized tropes of difference. When this vision is revolutionized, democratic deliberation can perform and advance its ends of equality, justice, and freedom. Marie-Odile, N. Hobeika, and Michele Kennerly join Sutton and Mifsud in pushing the limits of rhetoric by engaging rhetoric alloiostrophically. Their collective efforts work to display the possibilities of what rhetoric can be. A Revolution in Tropes will appeal to scholars of rhetoric, philosophy, and communication. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1201/thumbnail.jpg
Our view of tropes is that they are rhetoric's own unique resources, but for ineluctable historiographical reasons have been more or less closed off from the production of theory. Our "trope project" began simply enough. If the workings of tropes could be identified in a new way, then the aim and purpose of rhetoric could be retheorized in terms new to democratic deliberation. Working under the slogan "Yes, tropes-but all of them," we attempted a new classification system based on the Greek roots of hundreds of tropes listed in various old and new sources such as Bernard Dupriez's A Dictionary of Literary Devices, A-Z and Richard Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, respectively.
We begin with critical reflections on rhetoric as the antistrophē of dialectic. Here is the first line of Aristotle's Rhetoric: "Rhetoric is the counterpart [antistrophos] to dialectic." What this means exactly has been a point of some controversy over centuries of study in the rhetorical tradition. As John Rainolds said, "There are as many interpretations of this little word . . . as there are interpreters." However, we see something other, namely that these "many interpretations" of rhetoric as antistrophē are actually "one." The result is an amplification of the face of rhetoric to look, act, perform, and affect change like dialectic. Antistrophē is the trope that dominates and amplifies the rhetorical tradition as civic discourse. Set in this conceptual contextualization, rhetoric's dialectical face is a "catastrophe" for rhetoric, for difference, and for democratic deliberation. Why and how this is so involves an inward-looking investigation into how antistrophē encapsulates rhetoric in terms of argument and style. In this chapter, we also offer a way out of this traditional sensibility by troping rhetoric otherwise. Traditionally, tropes and figures are cast as tools to be used by agents. But Hayden White has detailed how tropes operate on and within discourse and, structurally speaking, determine the modes-e.g., argument, style-of discourse. In our analysis, the trope of antistrophē, because it defines what rhetoric is, testifies to the fundamental structure of rhetoric. There are other tropes. Tropes are rhetoric's opportunity for enlarging rhetoric's structural relation with contingency through difference. Our reliance on tropes is committed to using rhetoric's resources so as not "to betray our opportunity," something Giles Wilkeson Gray warned rhetoricians about as early as 1923.
This essay encounters configurations of "woman" in the space of rhetoric and democracy. By "configuration" we mean how a woman is postured and positioned in this space. We deal in ancient Athens recognizing that an ancient conceptual space called rhetoric, an art or techne of civic discourse, is embedded in the contemporary lived space of American civic discourse always constructing the rhetorical figure of woman and continuously under construction. We explore this conceptual space rhetorically, that is, not to articulate the feelings or meanings the space would have had for the ancient Athenians, but rather to articulate how this conceptual space still figures "woman." The articulation of conceptual and lived spaces is therefore our framework for seeing power relations and exploring communicative relations in terms of gender, sexuality, and citizenry. Drawing from such diverse fields as philosophy, rhetoric, architecture, classics, archeology, mythology, and women's studies, we theorize space, experiencing it as active, energetic, and productive, rather than as a backdrop, or a scene, or a place in which things happen(ed). Our lived experience of rhetoric and democracy is shaped by the agora, the civic space of ancient Athens. We are struck by the Temple of Hephaestus, which sits above the bouleterion, the place of civic deliberation and persuasion for the ancient Greeks. We experience the domination of "woman," both in terms of physical space and conceptual space. Our experience of this domination entails an act of seeing (ie. theorizing from the Greek theorien, to see) her capture, trade, domestication, commodification, and silencing in the space of rhetoric and democracy. Moreover, we see, hence we theorize, the ways in which this domination of "woman" is considered necessary to create civilization, hence how this domination came to be celebrated, lucrative, virtuous, ideal, and prized. Our act of seeing exposes how the space of rhetoric and democracy has traditionally dominated "woman," and in our exposé, we become aware of the wares and ware of civic exchange. We experience this awareness as a limen, a space of intersection where woman can affirm woman.
