In 1990, Bender and Wellbery published a book entitled _The Ends of Rhetoric_(Stanford).

The lead off essay should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand where we now stand with respect to traditional rhetoric. I take it as well established that the ancient world and the medieval world practiced something we can recognize as 'rhetoric.' But that practice no longer makes sense for us because of two major events in Western history: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Because of these two developments, what we recognized as rhetoric has become a 'strangely contracted form as a subject taught in universities.' The reason that we have a hard time understanding this practice is that we have forgotten that "the cultural hegemony of rhetoric as a practice of discourse, as a doctrine codifying that practice, and as a vehicle of cultural memory, is grounded in the social structures of the premodern world." Since we now live in the modern world, it is difficult for us to understand why rhetoric was so important to our ancestors. Those who practiced rhetoric in the premodern world/s now look to us as doing something rather exotic.

The primary reason for this, as I said, is the advent of rationalism. Social life is less a matter of shared symbols and more a matter of rational procedure. The 'content' of social life has been divested of power, while the process has been fine tuned for ratio and proportionality. Furthermore, the societies that we left behind were essentially stratified, while ours is now operating in functional terms.

Consider Francis Bacon's critique of idols. As a champion of induction and amassing facts, his authority rested on the conviction that we can attain clear statements of matters of fact. Speaking, writing, and thinking were now less about plausibility and more about digging up new facts. Complicating this process is the objectification of nature that Galileo championed. Galileo sought to dispell 'religious dogma and oppression' in order to present the world 'as it is.' Discourse now had to justify itself before the Tribunal of Reason; without that type of certification it was mere confusion or gibberish. If you add the Age of Print to this development, you witness how 'rhetoric drowned in a sea of ink.'

Rhetoric's Second Death:
Another blow caused rhetoric a great deal of damage: the evacuation from cultural memory of the topoi(those dense and finely branched semantic clusters that had since antiquity governed discursive invention)coincided with the rise of Romanticism. Writing and speaking were no longer about rememorative conservation--service to a tradition--but about originality. Not the rhetor, but the author. "Romanticism produced the author function in its modern form." (p.16)Genius is now the vital term, the antithesis of rhetorical invention. Genius is conceived as a singularity; there is nothing quite like a genius!

But now...rhetoric has returned!

All the modernist categories are now in trouble. First, there is no objectivity or neutrality; science has discovered its own lack of foundations. "Modernism has witnessed the crumbling of the ideal of scientific objectivity and the loss of faith in the neutrality of scientific and practical discourse." (p.23) Second, another French
Revolution has propounded the death of the author; from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, "je est un autre" [I is another]. The Enlightenment model of clear communication has yielded the opposite: "mass society...is a cauldron of advertising, marketing, propaganda, public relations...a place where money does more talking than any rhetor." Print is on the way out with the emergence of visual rhetoric and the computer. National languages, finally, are in decline with the rise of the global community.

Rhetoricality: the keynote of our era

Bender and Wellbery's characterization: Modernism is an age not of rhetoric but of rhetoricality. We now live in an era of generalized rhetorical activity that 'penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience.' (p. 25) Rhetoricality is not bound to ANY institutions we are familiar with; the term manifests the groundless, infinitely ramifying character of discourse in the modern world. "For this reason, it allows no explanatory metadiscourse that is not already itself rhetorical. Rhetoric is no longer a doctrine or a practice nor a form of cultural memory; it is the condition of our existence. As such it resists every effort on our part to dominate it. We live on its terms, not on our terms: whether those terms be poetry, metaphor, objectivity, science, demystification of tradition, whatever. Again, rhetoricality represents a kind of 'immemorial process'--it escapes our efforts to find it--we speak of it in the manner of negative theology--we know what God is not. "Rhetoric loses in Nietzsche its instrumental character and becomes the name for the rootlessness of our being." (p.27)

Styles today:
There is a rhetoric of science... there is a connection between rhetoric and linguistics...a connection to psychoanalysis...relevance to mass communication...a connection to pragmatics...and supplement to literary criticism. Ending on a note satisfying to any pluralist: "There can be no single contemporary rhetorical theory: rhetoricality cannot be the object of a homogeneous discipline." (p.38)

MGGreer