Poeisis
and Praxis in the Cultivation of Rhetoric
One of the very first things I
noted when we started to talk together about our charge was the designation of
a persona for the group’s assigned
conceit rather than for an activity –
“farmer” instead of “farming”. This
places an emphasis on the personal agent, on the subject rather than the
predicate, and by analogy, on the speaker.
There is something in the analogy of the farmer that helps me place
rhetoric in the economy of Aristotle’s disciplinary logic. The circularity that is so salient in the
mythology of agriculture – the farmer’s labor that puts food on the table, the
perennial irrigation, seeding, growth, harvest and dormancy of crops – parallels
the self-reflexivity of rhetorical theory in recent years that calls into
question the strict borders between speaker, speaking, and speech All things, as Socrates says in the Theaetetus, “are in process of becoming,
as a result of movement and change and of blending one with another” (152d). Thus Heidegger famously announced, “Sprache spricht” (Language speaks), and
he elevated the work of art, the poetic word, to a high status as the carrier
of a general culture, while he demoted the subject, who is bounded by
mortality, self interest, and perspective limits to something more like a
being-in-the-world. My mentor Gadamer
picked up on this recalibration of agency and called it tradition. The tradition of the word carries and
circulates agency in ways that a speaker-centered model of rhetoric misses. I want to explore the lines between the
speaker, speaking, and speech that, picking up on the model of responsible
farming, applies a more circular approach to the cultivation of rhetoric.
The distinction between agent and
work becomes an important issue when Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, draws a clear line between poeisis and praxis,
between the making of a thing, a work, of a statue or a cabinet, and of the
habitus of the person which results in no object, but rather simply manifests
happiness, the highest good, since it has no purposes other than itself. Praxis and poeisis are distinct from theoria,
because they work in the realm of contingency:
“The class of things that admit of variation includes both things made
and actions done.” Nevertheless, “making
is different from doing.”[1] Every art (techne), he says, “deals
with bringing something into existence,” but ethical conduct “is not Art . . .
since making aims at an end distinct form the act of making, whereas in doing
the end cannot be other than the act itself: doing well is in itself the end.”
(ibid.). Since Aristotle calls rhetoric
a techne, this would seem to place an
insuperable barrier between it and practical action. But Hannah Arendt makes the original claim
that Aristotle was ambivalent on the distinction in practice: “[H]e thinks of acting in terms of making,
and of its result, the relationship between men, in terms of an accomplished
‘work’ (his emphatic attempts to distinguish between action and fabrication,
praxis and poeisis, notwithstanding).”[2]
Arendt makes the distinction
between work and action one of the central axes of her theory of the human condition,
but she tries to understand the Greek concepts in their own cultural context
first. The division between praxis and poeisis in Greek culture, she says, is that the Greeks valued above
all the performative actualization (energeia)
of life in words and deeds, the manifestations of life in the beautiful deed,
the noble act, the graceful gesture, the courageous word, the intelligent
strategy (arête). The excellence of life is concentrated in the
“activities that exist only in sheer actuality” which are “non-tangible, and
always utterly fragile meaning” (208, 196).
This kind of life could be nurtured only in a unique and fragile cultural
space such as the polis, which was designed precisely “to enable men to do
permanently, albeit under certain restrictions, what otherwise had been
possible only as an extraordinary and infrequent enterprise” (197). The polis was set up in such a way as to be
“the place of their daring” (199).
Arendt asserts that this invention may the reason for the brilliant
moment of Athenian genius: “One, if not
the chief, reason for the incredible development of gift and genius in Athens,
as well as for the hardly less surprising swift decline of the city-state, was
precisely that from beginning to end its foremost aim was to make the
extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life” (197). The polis was not so much a physical space as
a social arrangement, since “action and speech create a space between the
participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere”
(198). Thus its organization shared a
similar rarity and ephemerality, and “could not survive the moment of action
and speech itself” (198).
This is
why, in Arendt’s interpretation, the Greeks gave less value to work, the domain of techne, even though
it had a crucial function, which was to create durable products that “bestow a
measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of moral life and the
fleeting character of human time” (8).
The craftsman’s products create structures of permanence for us: “Within its borders each individual life is
housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all”
(7).
In Arendt’s
schema, the “work-of-art” (Kunstwerk)
sits in a peculiar in-between place, sharing in the beauty of the act without
suffering from its ephemerality, or from the second-class status of the
reifications of craft and labor. Because
art memorializes the ephemeral excellence of the beauty of a life, Arendt’s
description of the work of art sits in the “IV.
Work” section of The Human Condition
rather than in the “V. Action”
section, but it is the last sub-section of the fourth section and serves as an
introduction to section V. The ‘object’
that a work of art is is distinguished from other works by being “strictly
without any utility whatsoever” (167).
Its practical uselessness is compensated for by an “outstanding
permanence,” which, although it “can never be absolute, achieves a
representation of its own” (167-68). The
word representation here (Vorstellung)
is from Hegel’s theory of art, which Arendt parses as “a premonition of
immortality,” as “the non-mortal home for mortal beings” (168). Its function in representing thought and
feeling transforms the work of art qua
work, by virtue of the fact that it carries thought and feeling forward through
time, into a portal between mortality and immortality.
This theory
of the work of art has excited a great deal of confusion because of the way it
sits rather opaquely between the categories of work and action. But the same stance is explicated in Gadamer,
who explains this intermediate place of the work of art between energeia and ergon slightly differently. Aristotle’s energeia (something that “is still under way, has not yet arrived”)
is different from an ergon
(“something that has its existence through an already completed production”).[3] The work of art, paradoxically, has the former characteristic because it “will
speak over and over again” to always new audiences in new and different ways,
so it is always emerging despite its fixed textual nature (212). The benefit of both Arendt’s and Gadamer’s
interpretations is that they resolve the ambiguous tension in Aristotle’s troubled
division of praxis and poeisis.
Created works, in this hermeneutic interpretation, are divided in two;
enduring artifacts of craft (techne),
and works of art (poeisis).
The In-Between of Farming
and Rhetoric
My thesis is that this three-part
distinction (praxis, techne, poeisis)
can help us sort out the in-between position of rhetoric in Aristotle’s system,
which he calls a techne, but which,
as performative speech clearly describes the self-actualizing performance of
excellence that Arendt attributes to the ideal of arête. Rhetoric has all
three attributes in different ways. By
deploying the triple designation of praxis,
poeisis and techne we can even bridge
the speech-composition divide in rhetoric, since it will allow us to speak
consistently about the relation of the energeia
of the polis and the ergon passed
down in its memorialization.
To do this I will need to supplement
Arendt and Gadamer with Paul Ricoeur’s idea of narrative identity, which says
that our person is not some lasting essence, but the sum of our life stories
that we tell about ourselves and that are told about us. Ricoeur is emphatic about weakening the
borderline between agent and work: “We
must stop seeing the text as its own interior and life as exterior to it.”[4]
This formulation spreads agency in both directions, giving persons some agency
over their own lives, but acknowledging that we are born into cultural
narratives that ‘speak us’. Thus work
and person are reciprocal. Poeisis (making) and praxis (doing) in this scheme are
co-dependent. Ricoeur wants us to work
hard to undermine the ontological barriers between the works we create and the
people we are.
I don’t want to pretend that there
is no useful skill training in rhetoric.
The techne will always be necessary, and we will always need to use
rhetoric instrumentally. Rhetoric is
intermediate between techne and poeisis, between art as skill or craft
and art as metamorphosis. It is often
confusing to read in English about Plato’s and Aristotle’s distinctions between
the various forms of making because our word “art” is often used to translate
both techne and poeisis. But perhaps this is
a good ambiguity and will always remain a productive one. The modern curriculum has not been able to
preserve cleanly Aristotle’s distinction between the arts that he described in
the Rhetoric and the Poetics, so that oscillation and tension
is our heritage.
The analogy with farming works
beautifully as an analogy here, as long as we stick with the classical image of
farming. The corporatized industrial
farming that we have chosen for our brave new world in the age of the world
picture is a managerial and exploitative monoculture, and it fits better with
the Enlightenment conception of rhetoric as manipulation. Wendell Berry’s farmer may be an idyllic
fantasy, but it describes an ecology of farming that rebalances the
relationship of producer and product. We
are merely stewards of the earth, not its masters. It is not there principally for us to be dominated and controlled,
but rather exists as a shared being that we support as it supports us. In cultivating the land, in rotating the
crops, in diversifying the seed, in sharing the produce, in passing on the productive
practice to the next generation, the farmer stands in service. Farming gives the farmer an identity, not a
commodity.
Likewise rhetoric’s techne is a
mixture of poeisis and praxis. We are
the sum of our works and days. The wise
speaker “plants and sows his words founded on knowledge, words which can defend
both themselves and him who planted them, words which instead of remaining
barren contain seed whence new words grow up in new characters, whereby the
seed is vouchsafed immortality” (Phaedrus
277a).
Fretting the border between speaker
and speech has disciplinary implications.
I worry that the academy has taught rhetorical critics to think of
rhetoric as rhetorical texts, as artifacts, and that we as critics stand in a
position of observer over these texts.
It seems to me we ought at least to question the metaphor of the text
when we appropriate it into speech-communication. Rhetoric in the speech tradition is
performative; sometimes we create texts as an aid to speech, but we also want
to teach our students the very difficult art of speaking extemporaneously, to
organize their thoughts for effect when they speak impromptu, etc. We need to continue to be suspicious of the
reification of rhetoric as artifact. To
be sure, we also want our students to become aware of the traditions out of
which they speak, the ideologies that shape their thoughts, and the culture that
narrows their range of perspectives. So
performance is a collaboration between poeisis and praxis, and we are making
and unmaking ourselves by creating the collective work that lasts beyond each
of us. To put this in Ricoeur’s terms,
we “might even go so far as to say that for thinking there is a vanishing point
where invention and discovery can no longer be separated” MR RR (153).
For all these reasons, the farming
analogy may be a good one for rhetoric, because farming is something
intermediate between making and doing.
If work (not labor) for Arendt is the creation of artifacts, whose
durability “gives the things of the world their relative independence from men
who produced and use them,” then farming is not this, because we consume the
product of the farmer’s labor, it spoils quickly unless we consume it, and it
is immediately assimilated into us (137).
For millennia and still in Southeast Asia human feces is a major part of
the fertilizer of the rice paddies, a quite literal expression of the passing
on, sedimentation, and return of the cycle of nature. Rhetoric likewise has this intermediate
place, since it operates as direct intermediation of human beings (inter homines esse) that the polis as a cultural performance represented
to the Greeks, but it also bleeds over into the creation of the Roman
conception of institutions, which are anonymized and collectivized reifications
of attestations, promises, curses, etc. in the form of texts (contracts, wills,
mission statements, constitutions).
You must digest what you have
consumed (devoraris) in varied and prolonged reading, and transfer it by
reflection (mediatione) into the veins of the mind (in vaenas animi),
rather than into your memory or your notebook (indicem). Thus your
natural talent (ingenium), gorged on all kinds of foods, will of itself
beget a discourse (ex sese gignat orationem) which will be redolent, not
of any particular flower, leaf, or herb, but of the character and feelings of
your own heart (indolem affectusque pectoris tui), so that whoever reads
your work will not recognize fragments excerpted from Cicero, but the image of
a mind replete with every kind of learning.[5]
[1]
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, H.
Rackham, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1926), 335-37; VI iv 1140a-b.
[2]
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 2nd
ed., (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998),
196.
[3]
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Artwork in Word and Image,” The Gadamer Reader, Richard E. Palmer, trans. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2007), 210.
[4]
Paul Ricoeur, “Mimesis and Representation,” A
Ricoeur Reader, Mario J. Valdés, ed. (Toronto, U of Toronto P, 1991), 151.
[5] Desiderius
Erasmus, Ciceronianus or A Dialogue on the Best Style of Speaking, Izora
Scott, trans. (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1908), 105.
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