Barnett Paper

 

Toward a History of Attunement

Scot Barnett

Indiana University

scbarnet@indiana.edu

Should I think a piece of land better cultivated, in which the owner should show me lilies, and violets, and anemones, and fountains playing, than one in which there is a plentiful harvest, or vines laden with grapes? Should I prefer barren plane-trees, or clipped myrtles, to elms embraced with vines, and fruitful olive-trees?

--- Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory (8.3)

It’s hard not to romanticize the figure of the farmer. Having grown up amid several small family farms (though never having lived or worked on a farm myself), I often tend to associate “the farmer” with pastoral images of rusticity, earthliness, and cultivation. The farmer works the land but is also in tune with the land in ways unavailable, and perhaps unimaginable, to the non-farmer. The farmer manages, organizes, and harvests the land, but s/he is also the land’s custodian and caretaker. If not harmony, then at least some kind of fundamental attunement shapes and informs the farmer’s relationship to the land, an attunement, as Heidegger might suggest, that is “in each case already there . . . like an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves in each case and which then attunes us through and through” (Fundamental 67). Attunement, in this sense, not as a possession or subjective mood of an individual but as a concernful way of being with one another (being-in-the-world) that is at once immerse, responsive, and constitutive.   

Of course, despite their allure, romantic images such as these hardly do justice to the realities of farming today, particularly as the small family farms that once defined the agricultural economy in the U.S. have been all but replaced by industrialized factory farms that far too rarely have the earth’s best interests in mind. (Indeed, deforestation and methane emissions from livestock are among the leading contributors to global warming.) When it comes to the economics of large-scale farming, where the ends always seem to justify the means, the romantic notion of the farmer who cultivates a responsible and personal attunement to the land seems increasingly foreign and perhaps even in direct conflict with the corporate ethos and bottom line that drives industrial farms and agribusiness generally.

When I began to think about the farmer as one of rhetoric’s conceits, then, I was immediately drawn to this tension between the farmer as representative of a pastoral (and possibly nostalgic) tradition in rhetoric, where rhetoric might be understood in close connection with the earth and nonhumans generally, and the exploitative reality of modern industrial farming and what this transformation in farming—in the farmer—has meant for the land, our climate, and our future. While I can’t claim to have to fully explored the consequences of all of this, I can say this much: In as much as it reveals pressing ethical and political questions about poverty, hunger, and sustainability, the tension at play in the conceit of the farmer also makes visible a question lurking at the margins of this conference and our explorations of “rhetoric’s conceits,” namely, what kind of farmer are we talking about? More to the point, if our charge here is to take seriously the analogy between rhetoric and farming, between rhetor and farmer, then it seems to me we need to consider (perhaps before anything else) what kind of farmer we want to be, not in the sense of good or bad (we’ve been down that road before), but in the sense of the kinds of attunements that have differently disclosed the earth to us and that dispose us to earth in such and such a way (Heidegger, Fundamental 67). Rather than attempt to distinguish yet again good rhetoric from bad rhetoric, in other words, we might instead ask, What attunements do we as rhetoricians already have to the earth, to our being with one another in the world, and what attunements might we hope to awaken anew? As I suggest in what follows, the question of attunement invites both historical and ethical modes of inquiry into how earth has been differently disclosed throughout the rhetorical tradition and what these disclosures suggest about our abilities to cultivate more humane and sustainable relationships with the earth going forward.

One of the best-known accounts of rhetoric’s relationship to the earth appears in the opening pages of the Phaedrus. Eager to hear more about Lysias’s argument about the lover and the nonlover, Socrates invites Phaedrus to choose a location outside of the city for them to hear and discuss the speech. As they walk barefooted along the Illissus in search of the very tall plane tree that will provide the shade, breeze, and grass for their conversation, Socrates confesses to being “out of place” (atopos). A “lover of learning” (philomathēs), whose particular subject of examination is the self, Socrates repeatedly counters Phaedrus’s lyrical and mythical invocations of nature with a disinterested if not outright disparaging view of the natural world (and presumably, by implication, those who live in the countryside outside of Athens [see Kmetz 338-339]). “The country places and the trees are not willing to teach me anything, but the human beings in town are,” he laments. For Socrates, the polis is where thinking and reasoning belong because the city, presumably, is where people live and dwell. And it’s only by participating in philosophical refutation with other people that one learns about oneself and the world. Though this brief exchange marks an important acknowledgement of the significance of place for rhetoric—that place matters for rhetoric and that rhetoric indeed takes place, as Nedra Reynolds and others have observed—at the same time it reveals and embodies distinctions that have long informed discussions of rhetoric from antiquity to the present, i.e., between nature and culture, subject and object, and human and nonhuman. For all of the attention he pays to place, in other words, Socrates can’t help but conceive of “nature” as an entirely separate realm, one where trees dwell and cicadas sing but where all of the dramas of human life are absent or, at the very least, out of place.

As troubling as we may find these dichotomies (the overall logic of which I would characterize, after Bruno Latour, as rhetoric’s “modern constitution”), getting past them does not mean that we have to choose one domain over the other (which is often the constructivist’s solution), or even accept the reality of the oppositional structure in the first place. As Latour argues, to be modern is at once to purify nature and culture (to conceive of them as separate ontological zones) and to produce mixtures of natures and cultures. (Think of Boyle’s air pump, which assembles science and politics into a new forms of representation that make room for the testimony of nonhumans.) This, of course, is modernity’s dirty little secret: even as we insist on clear differences between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, we routinely employ, produce, and appeal to a wide range of hybrid actors. Thus, we have never been modern, as Latour’s famous thesis has it. Meaning that we have never succeeded in fully realizing the dream of modernity, which, beginning at least with Plato, would have us keep the realm of human existence separate and distinguishable from everything outside of the cave. In the face of this impossible dream, what we have managed to do instead is awaken and cultivate different, and sometimes contradictory, attunements to the earth. And much like the hybrids and collectives Latour analyzes, these attunements themselves have a history, not necessarily in the sense of a rational and progressive trajectory from past to present (from self-imposed immaturity to understanding, or, more basically, from bad to good), but in how rhetoricians have historically sorted out elements or attunements belonging to different times. As Latour says, “It is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting” (Modern 76).

So how does this practice of sorting emerge in the history of rhetoric, and how might we begin to engage it not as a story of progress but as one of differing attunements that have served to entwine rhetoric (however obliquely) with the earth? There are many ways to answer this question, but a conceit such as “the farmer,” I think, offers a tangible and particularly evocative window into this other history of rhetoric. In contrast to Socrates’s disparagement of the country, Cicero, for example, attempts on several occasions to merge the rhetorics of the country with those of the polis. (Let me note in passing that Cicero’s blending of country [chōra] and city [asty] rhetorics further accentuates rhetoric’s connectedness to earth insofar the chōra is both the boundary of the city and what lies beyond that boundary. Thus the chōra emplaces us, but in ways that reveal and trouble distinctions between inside and outside, subject and object, nature and culture [see Kmetz; on the chōra as a rhetorical concept, see Rickert and Derrida]) As Marcia Kmetz notes, these efforts helped Cicero craft a politically advantageous “dual identity” as “both rural and urban, rustic and urbane, trained according to the oratorical style of the city yet maintaining an allegiance to the people and places of Aripinum” (335).

More to the point, Cicero’s rural civic ethos brings rhetoric into close proximity with the earth, with earth constituting the fundamental grounding and condition of possibility for rhetorical being. Noting his deep familial and spiritual ties to his home estate in Aripinum in Book Two of The Laws, Cicero describes his attunements to earth in the following way:

It is because, if we are to tell the truth, this place represents to myself and to my brother our own native country. It is here that we were born of most ancient lineage. Here are our sacred family ties, here is our origin, here are the numerous memorials of our ancestors . . . Therefore, deep in my heart and soul I feel an indescribable emotion, which endears this spot to me all the more. (2.3.27-40; qtd. in Kmetz 337-338)

As Kmetz’s careful reading make clear, passages like this accomplish more than simply “setting the scene”; they also contribute to Cicero’s long-term crafting of an ethos that is both rusticus and urbanitas, These intentions not withstanding, we should note lose sight of the very particular attunements Cicero reveals here and that are, presumably, awakened for him in his Aripinum villa. Prior to any future usefulness as a rhetorical appeal, earth reveals itself through specific moods or emotions that, as Cicero suggests, “endears this spot to [him] all the more.” Indeed, as Atticus’s reply to Cicero puts it, “I cannot tell you how this affection [to place] arises, but certainly we cannot behold, without emotion, the spots where we find traces of those who possess our esteem or admiration.” While Cicero may well have used his rural roots to craft a dual ethos, it is likely that his lifelong attunements to the land were what initially disclosed this possibility to him in the first place.

Attunement connects us to the earth by disclosing the chiastic relations we share with the world and with other beings in the world. As Thomas Rickert argues recently in Ambient Rhetoric, attunements such as the ones awakened in Cicero and Atticus are not simply the subjective experiences of an already preexisting individual. Following Heidegger, Rickert argues that moods or attunements (Stimmung, for Heidegger) are ontological (and, indeed, rhetorical) in nature, taking form “in the intelligible background necessary for us to make sense of, experience, and interact in the world” (Rickert 146). This means that attunements are not necessarily “inside us,” but neither are they entirely “outside of us.” An attunement is rather an immersive and emergent state of mind that “discloses Dasein in its thrownness” and that is itself the kind of Being in which Dasein “constantly surrenders to the ‘world’ and lets the ‘world’ “matter” in such a way that somehow Dasein evades its very self” (Heidegger, Being 278). Attunement, in other words, is “the way of our being there with one another” (Fundamental 67), the way the world is disclosed to us as something we are concerned about and that holds sway as a constitutive and transformative force in our lives.

Returning to my opening question, we can now see that the question, what kind of farmer do we want to be, is as much a historical question as it is an ethical one—perhaps even more so. Though careful historical work may help us uncover differing attunements in the rhetorical tradition, it will ultimately be difficult for us to make the subsequent, and perhaps obvious move, from the historical to the ethical. This is particularly true if attunement is understood as a pre-reflective mood that assails us, emplaces us, and transforms our conditions of possibility. Such a mood cannot be easily grasped by the rational principle or instrumentalized for the better moving of the will. The ethical question we need to consider, then, is whether foregrounding attunement—i.e., awakening attunement in our theories of rhetoric, place, and earth—is enough to counter the dominant world picture that defines earth as little more than a resource or standing-reserve (gestell) for human comforts and desires. Maybe, maybe not. As much as there is a history of Being, or at least the question of Being, so too is there a history of attunement. Like Being, however, some of the attunements traceable in rhetoric’s history may no longer be available to us or may no longer hold the same disclosive power they once did. Thus, we may well find that history and ethics are indeed incommensurable, at least when it comes to the issue of attunement. For his part, Heidegger offers “thinking” as a way to bridge the gap between history and ethics. Turning the emphasis toward thinking, he argues, has the effect of recasting what is otherwise the ethical question par excellence—What shall we do?—as a largely historical question: How must we think? (“Turning” 40). According to Heidegger, by thinking creatively and historically—that is, about the essence of things—“we first learn to dwell in the realm in which there comes to pass the restorative surmounting of the destining of Being, the surmounting of Enframing” (41). Of course, thinking as Heidegger envisions it may not be as useful for us in rhetoric as we attempt to build connections between the historical and the ethical. Nevertheless, as we continue to investigate the processes of sorting that have given rise to rhetoricians’ various attunements to the earth, it is critical that we find our own ways to negotiate the tensions between history and ethics, between what we are and what we may yet become.  

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Trans. David Wood. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Print.

---. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1995. Print.

---. “The Turning.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 36-49. Print.

Kmetz, Marcia. “‘For Want of the Usual Manure’: Rural Civic Ethos in Ciceronian Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 30.4 (2011): 333-349. Print.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.

Rickert, Thomas. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2013. Print.