Lost in Space

Last Friday, I was sitting on my couch, reviewing Perelman and thinking nervously about schema.  Per Dr. Graban’s blog post, a schema is a visual representation of how things are organized in relationship to one another.  That seemed to make sense until I starting thinking about Perelman and wondering how I was going to make one schema that represented the complexities of both Perelman’s work and its context. 

Perelman’s work is situated historically, as he positions himself in relation to Aristotle, to Descartes, and to many other theorists.  The New Rhetoric is both influenced by and influences a rhetorical tradition that is divided into both thematic and historical periods – just like our anthology and may others like it (the table of contents of which may, itself, represent a kind of schema).  Perelman’s work is also situated socially.  His attempt to provide the legal profession with a system of argumentation that governs value has the potential for serious social repercussions.  As Condit discusses, Perelman’s essay can be situated in relation to class and gender, as the essay stands as a representation of elitist and sexist language (97).  Within the work itself, Perelman’s system of argumentation can be situated in relationship to dialectic.  The essay’s breakdown of various objects of agreement lends itself to a discussion of how those objects relate to both orator and audience.  

Sitting on my couch that Friday, I was mulling over all of these relationships and looking forlornly at a sheet of paper.  How was that sheet of paper going to encompass a nearly endless network of relationships that extends years in either direction, that connects a myriad of social concepts, and that connects the many elements involved in something as complicated as value and morality?  In response, Megan and I used Prezi as an attempt to find a way to expand the space of the page, so that we could embed schema within schema.   The Prezi allowed us to emphasize connections between significant elements – history, Perelman, and technology, for example – while retaining the ability to discuss connections between smaller elements.  Even still, I am left with some questions – about both schema and Perelman – which I would like to address.

The Positions of the Orator and Audience.  When constructing our schema, Megan and I had plotted most of it before we realized that we had not included the orator.  At the time, in attempting to position Perelman in relationship to Bitzer or Barthes, I saw our oversight as confirmation of my attempt to align Perelman with Beisecker or Barthes rather than Bitzer in terms of the discussion of audience.   In retrospect, Perelman may actually closer to Aristotle but the spirit of Barthes.  Although Perelman is known for his emphasis on audience, that audience is still defined in vaguely Aristotelian terms:  devalued popular audience vs. valued elite audience.   Perelman writes that “techniques suited for persuading a crowd in a public place would not be convincing to a better educated and more critical audience” (1393).  Here, Perelman draws a distinction between the uneducated, popular audience and the elite, educated audience.  Aristotle makes a similar statement in writing that “argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.  Here then, we must use, as our modes of persuasion and argument, notions possessed by everybody” (180).  Although Aristotle’s distinction is perhaps not as direct as Perelman’s, both are speaking of a separation between the uneducated popular audience and the elite audience.   As such, Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s work, in its vision of the audience, is not as far removed from Aristotle as I had originally thought.

Previously, I stated that Perelman was Aristotle in the spirit of Barthes.  As we discussed in class, Barthes’ purpose in “Death of the Author” was to challenge conventional thinking about audience, to broach the idea that meaning was reader- rather than author-generated.  The same may be true of Perelman to a certain extent.  Perelman pulls focus, at least in part, away from the orator and more towards the audience (even if he does devalue them at times).  Like Barthes, Perelman perhaps provides an introduction to an idea, even if he does not “throw off the shackles” of the old as completely as Barthes (Condit 97).  Schematically, I have situated Perelman in a larger transition within the field of rhetoric in which focus shifts from rhetor to audience. 

The potential connection between rhetorical theory and space.  I am just throwing this one out there, as it is still barely a germ of an idea.  In this course so far, we have created two schemas and a trace.  We have spoken “through or alongside” texts (or at least attempted to) and have worked through strands.  Each of these phrases in some way signifies space or an object’s position in space.  In particular, the phrases imply a linear space.   And yet, I see rhetorical theory and we often discuss rhetorical theory as nonlinear.   In my work with Prezi, I had hoped to break out of linearity, but still keep some semblance of readability.   What I ultimately created was a layering of linear schemas, a layering that in and of itself is linear but in a more three dimensional configuration of space.  What might be the relationship between how we talk about rhetoric and how we conceive of rhetoric spatially?  How do I as a student conceive of rhetoric as something spatial and nonlinear through phrases that evoke linearity?