Week 1: The Purpose of Language and Motivation of the Sciptor

The concept I most grappled with while reading and discussing Aristotle and Quintilian (and, eventually, Barthes) was the purpose of language.  (Note: For the purpose of this post, I am going to conflate rhetoric and language.)  Thinking about the purpose of language for each of the authors also helped me clarify and rephrase a question I asked on Tuesday.

For Aristotle, language is used to persuade.  To take Jenn's analysis, Aristotle's rhetor begins with an accepted (at least accepted by a particular audience) truth and builds on the truth to persuade the audience to accept a new, adapted truth.  Aristotle's persuasion, then, seems very similar to manipulation, particularly if we take the view that Aristotle's definition of truth is fluid (see Kendall and my exploratory for an argument of this view).  In that view, a rhetor is not persuading his audience in order to help them see Truth; rather, the rhetor persuades the audience to believe what he wants them to believe, be it truth or not.  So, for Aristotle, are manipulation and persuasion the same?



Quintilian's texts, meanwhile, might be suggesting that language is used to teach one how to be a good man.  Learning to be a skilled rhetor is important, yes, but since rhetoric is speaking well (and do to this one must first be a good man), it stands to reason that a large part of a rhetor's education is to become a good man.  The rhetor's educator, then, is using language to teach his pupils to become good men.  The hitch comes in when one moves to thinking about the rhetor's purpose for speaking to his audience.   If a rhetor speaks to help his audience to see truth (as Ashley implies in the phrase, "see the side of truth"), is part of his job to show them how to be good men?  Does accepting the truth (through the rhetor's speech) lead the audience to become good men?

Finally, for Barthes, the purpose of written language seems to be entirely for the reader to be able to find meaning.  In class, I asked, "What is the role of the scriptor?"  After reflecting on this question, I want to clarify and rephrase my question. What I was truly asking was this: What is the scriptor's motivation to write?  If a scriptor has no original ideas, why put "his" ideas out there?  Even if he believes he has a new configuration of past quotations, what encourages him to put those ideas onto paper to be read and interpreted by another?  Barthes writes, "Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred" (147).  If, as was stated in class last week, we can use the author's background (which would include a possible motivation for writing the text), then why does Barthes seem to remove from the scriptor the ability to possess (as he "no longer bear [them] within") "passions, humours, feelings, impressions"?  In this view, does the scriptor become a robot who hits simply the randomize button on old writings?  If there is a creative aspect to the scriptor, from where does this creativity stem if not his "passions, humours, feelings, impressions"?  Are we to go back to Bitzer and believe that the scriptor writes only when there is an external exigence for writing?