Ballif Paper

Rhetoric’s Conceit:  Farmer

A Rhetor’s Almanac and/or A Farmer’s Rhetoric

“Only the impossible can arrive”—Derrida

In what might articulate a commonplace of rhetorical studies, Thomas Cole has defined rhetoric as “a speaker’s or writer’s self-conscious manipulation of his medium with a view to ensuring his message as favorable a reception as possible on the part of the particular audience being addressed” (The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece ix).  This widely accepted definition foregrounds that traditional theorizations of rhetoric begin and end with a self-conscious rhetor who—by way of techne—can manipulate media and, by extension, audiences. Despite various critiques of such a rhetor-centered conception of rhetoric, the belief in the rhetor’s power to “seize” opportunities and to master language and audiences prevails.

Coupled with this prevailing presumption is the lore that identifies the so-called birth of rhetoric as coincidental with the birth of democracy.  Both assumptions, of course, serve a disciplinary purpose:  rhetoric must be a science, one that can be mastered by a rhetor, or it would not be teachable, and hence there would be no need for departments of rhetoric or English or communications.  And rhetoric as a discipline needs this edifying belief to obfuscate rhetoric’s complicity with instances of barbarism, capitalism, commodification, reification—and any number of forms of epistemic violence.  But there is no need to rehearse these criticisms for this group, many of whom have published books and essays on this very score.

But how might we begin, again, to retheorize rhetoric—pushing against or applying pressure on these traditional presumptions---through the conceit of the farmer?

By, I am suggesting, considering the following, related (non)points:

•  The first, which I won’t address here, since I have attended to this question on so many previous occasions:  The farmer invests a great deal of energy into manure management: what to do with the remains?  That is the question that remains.

•  The farmer lives a rural life, outside of the agora, the public marketplace, the public space of deliberation and commodification of knowledge, goods, and peoples. Indeed, one might say the farmer and/as rhetoric inhabits the pagus, outside of the polis.  Victor J. Vitanza’s Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric explores rhetoric and/as the pagus in provocative detail, arguing that such is theorized as a “wild/savage practice” that destabilizes the polis:  “The pagus (the savage place of ‘some more’ linkage) is a frightening place . . . of ‘affirmative desire’” (321), which is the space of “rich growth, fruitfulness, fertility; copiousness, abundance,” what exceeds the dialectical machine and repression (321), which the marketplace and citizenry of the polis depends on, with its classifications and divisions that render language and subjects “Greek” or “barbarous,” and, therefore, guarantee, politically,

what rhetorics will be heard and granted civilized status and what bodies will be protected or otherwise recognized as “human.”  Erik Doxtader writes:

As imagined and then mythologized in the name of codifying Hellenism’s homotropia, the barbarian sits at the edge of logos and the culture that it claims to sponsor. Sometimes inside and sometimes outside, the barbarian’s barbarism can mark an animal or inhuman lack of language, an incompetent, gibberish-sounding performance of language, an infelcity that corrupts language’s law and value, and an attack on language—a violence against the word wrought by an incomprehensible voice. (“Coming to Terms with a Declaration of Barbarous Acts” 119).

So in contrast to the traditionally conceived concept of rhetoric as the public art of deliberation (and the agora as the site of such deliberation), rhetoric and/as the farmer is an art of disruption—of language, of politics—that takes place in a liminal state, but most certainly not “in” the confines of the polis.

History tells us that farmers, before Agriculture with a capital “A” became a special interest group that waged significant collective power in DC, were in ancient Greece purposively isolated from the agora. According to the research of Victor Hanson, Greek literature notes that many farmers “never went into Athens at all” (The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization).  (Indeed, Hanson argues that the “countryside, not the polis proper; farmers, not urban elites; changes in agricultural practice, not pottery designs, metals, graves, urban crafts, [or] overseas trade” are the conditions of possibility for political life, for rhetoric.  In short, he argues: the philosopher-king is a symptom of the farmer.  In this way, the pagus is not seen as an aberation of the polis, but rather its very condition of possibility.

If one, then, presses this to think of a rhetoric outside of the agora, beyond the polis, one might be pressed to think of rhetoric as allegory.  Etymologically, this would mean to “speak about something else” (allos) from agoreuein (to “speak openly, speak in the assembly”) (http://www.etymonline.com/)--to speak about something else outside of the agora.

In Diane Davis’s recent work on the subject of allegory, she notes:

Allegory is not a trope, according to de Man, because it doesn’t involve a substitution in meaning, “the transport,” as Avital Ronell puts it, “of a sense from one signifier to another” (Stupidity 158). To the extent that it involves no substitution, its operations are not figural but “parafigural” and irreducible to the trope (which it also installs) of intentional consciousness. For de Man, allegory “represents one of language’s essential possibilities,” Derrida notes, “the possibility that permits language to say the other and to speak of itself while speaking of something else; the possibility of always saying something other than what it gives to be read, including the scene of reading itself.” Allegory is therefore “also what precludes any totalizing summary—the exhaustive narrative or total absorption of a memory” (Memoires 11).  Saying the other while speaking of itself or vice versa, allegory resists comprehensive appropriation. (“Autozoography: Notes on the Rhetoricity of the Living.”)

Hence, rhetoric retheorized as allegory, as “speaking otherwise,” as acknowledging rhetoric’s always already capacity to say something other than what it (purportedly) says challenges the very founding assumption of the rhetor self-consciously manipulating language and certainly challenges the assumption that a “reception” of a pre-determined message could be “guaranteed.”  Of course, Derrida had much to say on this score by way of “différance,” “dissemination,” and “destinerrance,” and the errancy of distination.  Plato, as we know—in the Phaedrus—blamed such occurances on “insensible” farmers (and insensible rhetors) who sow their seeds willy nilly (276b—277a).

Another (non)point to consider:

•  The farmer’s “art” is highly dependent on a temporality that s/he cannot control. Kairos is not something that can be “seized,” as it can only be recognized—if at all, after the fact. Indeed, such “opportune moments” are dependent on rhythms of seasonality and lunar and solar movements, none of which can be determined with surety at moments requiring decisive action.  Unlike theorizations of the so-called “rhetorical situation” that suggest that the rhetorical moment can be either seized or made salient (Bitzer vs. Vatz), the farmer and/as the rhetor, acknowledges that “rhetorical” moments are as fleeting as rain forecasts and frost warnings.  The weather, like language, can be predicted but never guaranteed.  Of course, the point I’m making is that any rhetorical situation is just as volatile and unpredictable as the farmer’s situation.

Hence, the farmer has no sure knowledge: to plant or not to plant; to breed or not to breed.  Rather, the farmer acts by way of “divination,” of reading the “signs” that point to—but never guarantee—ideal conditions for growth, reproduction, harvesting. So, two points, which I’ll repeat: there is no way to know—knowledge always arrives too late, and the rhetorical “art” of the farmer is more akin to alchemy than science, more telepathy than rational deliberation. And this telepathic communication exceeds mere “human” to “human” contact:  the farmer telepathically communicates with the dirt, with the livestock, with the weather, with the moon. Of course, Farmer’s Almanacs attempt to codify this communication, render it predictable and patterned, just as Aristotle’s Rhetoric or any other handbook of communication attempts the same.  But telepathy is beyond codifiable knowledge.  Indeed, as Derrida writes in his essay of the same name: “Everything, in our concept of knowledge, is constructed so that telepathy be impossible, unthinkable, unknown. If there is any, our relation to Telepathy must not be of the family of ‘knowledge’ or ‘nonknowledge’ but of another kind” (244). Telepathy, or telepathies—in the plural, according to Nicholas Royle, introduce[s], retroactively, a force of feeling, a register of experience, over and beyond the perhaps more abstract-seeming or dry . . . language of writing, posts, and telecommunications” (“Telepathies” viii).  That is—and this is our point:

Deconstruction [what I am here calling rhetoric and/as the farmer] has to do not only with writing, regimes of representation, the postal principle, and so on, but also with feelings (“-pathies”), with the force of a thinking which reckons with an experience of presence or life as never full, haunted by

difference and deferral, interruption and interference, the unconscious, death or the entirely other, the desire and intervention of the impossible. (Royle viii)

To further quote Royle and to emphasize the untimely nature of rhetoric and/as the farmer and its anachronistic experience of temporality: “Telepathy entails strange upsets in the experience of time, in particular as regards its entanglements with fortune-telling and prophecy. It has to do, among other things, with the slippages and stallings of ‘what . . . happen[s] by the very fact of being predicted or foreseen’ [Derrida, 227]. Telepathy or telepathies will have been ‘without full presence’” (viii-ix).

“Only the impossible can arrive,” Derrida writes; and of course, it never arrives, as full presence never arrives, or at the least, one can never recognize its arrival, as it is beyond any “knowledge.”  In any event, as it were, if rhetoric and/as the farmer can disabuse itself of tidy assumptions about rhetor, message, audience, and deliberative knowledge, rhetoric and/as the farmer can retheorize itself as an art of cryptology or hermetics.  Certainly, not a practical art, but such a retheorized notion of rhetoric and/as the farmer acknowledges the impossibility of controlling time and networked forces beyond any rhetorical situation or rhetor, and invites a hospitality toward the wholly other, and at least attempts to resist its complicity with barbarism and violence.