Abstract

From its origins in ancient Greece, Western rhetoric has been embodied in city life. Save for his walk with Phaedrus, Plato's Socrates only practiced his dialectical rhetoric within the walls of Athens and then only for the ennoblement of the republic. So in the Apology, Socrates defends one version of life in the city against another, explaining that in his talk with others, he had been trying to persuade each of you not to have a greater concern for anything you have than for yourselves, that each of you may be the best and wisest person possible, nor to consider the affairs of the city in preference to the well-being of the city itself' (36c5-9; trans. in Kennedy 44). For Plato the one best hope for Athens was embodied in cultivating the character of its citizens. Cultivation of self and the well-being of the city were so closely linked, a link so prominent in classical rhetoric, that Cicero could monumentalize rhetoric's civic dimensions through the figure of the orator's open hand: a gesture of conciliation and cooperation, of civic responsibility and democratic possibility. The open hand of the Ciceronian orator still has hold of imaginations, embodying hopes of communitarianism, democracy, and mutuality. Thomas Farrell, for example, has explained rhetoric's open-handedness as our partisanship for the familiar and, from within the world of the local and particular, movement toward the other (279). Ideally we would always approach others with outstretched arms and open hands. Yet open-handedness no longer embodies the rhetorical activities, perspectives, and values of persons who share life in cities. In the United States, material conditions and mass media representations of postindustrial urban space, as well as expressions of difference, questions of identity, and conflicts over multiculturalism, have overwhelmed the figure's resonance. Suburban sprawl, the proliferation of privatized consumer spaces, and the fortification of inner cities materialize inequalities that empty the open-handed appeal of its genuineness; at the same time, mass media representations of urban spaces as dangerous, decaying, and violent fuel suspicion and caution people against open-handed appeal. Informed by the material and representational realities of cities, the global sameness and commonalty suggested by the open-handed gesture become expressions of a