Abstract
In the closing moments of Phaedrus, Socrates announces rhetoric’s last gasp: “And now the play is played out; and of rhetoric enough” (2006, 69). Of course, news of rhetoric’s death has been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the death and subsequent rebirth of rhetoric have been declared countless times, and debates surrounding the nature and character of rhetoric— from antiquity through the renaissance and even into the modern day— seem to continue almost interminably. In the contemporary context, such debates often flow inexorably from a constitutive indecision that marks rhetorical studies’s complicated relationship to a foundational definition of rhetoric. More often than not, after a brief foray into debates surrounding rhetoric, many theorists retreat, opting, following Robert Scott (1973) to “not define” rhetoric at all, producing an implicit rather than an explicitly conceptually articulated definition of rhetorical theory and practice, albeit in a manner that often opens up as many problems as it solves. When rhetorical theorists do take up the task of defining rhetoric, definitions often vacillate between one of two basic gambits: one stratagem frames rhetoric as the codification of a relatively banal insight about human life together (people have interests, opinions, and investments, and one should take each of these things into account if they would like to persuade or to understand why others are persuaded); the other frames rhetoric as a globally constitutive social ontology in its own right. It may be that a portion of this ambivalence is a historical accident; nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that this ambivalence is part and parcel of the project of rhetoric. In defining rhetoric one potentially also swims in the discursive equivalent of Heraclitus’s river: every definition