Abstract

Life can be frustrating. For others, not for me. I am thinking of “others” faced with me, the rhetor(ician). Let me explain this: so far I have lived my rhetor(ician)'s life by observing others getting caught in a state of “admiration.” Whenever I reply to the unthinking question “And what do you do?” with “I am a professor of rhetoric,” I wait for the reaction, I smile inwardly, sometimes pour myself a drink, and watch “admiration” enfold. Descartes: “Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul that makes it focus its attention on objects that seem rare and out of the ordinary” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxx, my translation). When, adding insult to injury, my interlocutor tries to get things back on an ordinary track and persists, asking “I see [do you?], you mean [no, I don't] like [bad start for a definition] ‘communication’ [here, substitute a string of annoying approximations, as you please]?,” I don't loosen the snare but rather tighten the noose: “No, rhetoric, just as the word says.” And I see how frustrating life can be for those who think and believe they know what rhetoric is—including that peculiar brand of unconfessed pedants: English teachers. I am at my worst, of course, when I am asked, “In French?” (they assume I teach elocution at a charm school).Indeed for Descartes “admiration” is one of the six architectonic passions. So, I make it my philosophical duty not to let my interlocutors off the hook on which they have snagged themselves. I should let go, I know, but I won't. I want to exploit the kairos. The energy of “admiration” literally lies in “surprise” (and materially in Cartesian physiology); that is how the soul is “caught” unawares, forcing it to reset itself and its atoms, if it can. That energy (see how relentless Descartes is) is made of two components: novelty and forcefulness (“insofar as the impulse it triggers is powerful right from the start”). In sum: admiration has a knock-out effect, like a tennis backhand coming from nowhere and applied with full power right on contact, never mind the follow-through and all those courtly frills. So, after a while I let the victims go, yet not without providing them, for the road, with one striking example of “rhetoric” applied to current news, so that no doubt be left in their mind that they are not dealing with something they can reduce to what they think they know but with something actually “admirable,” in sum “novel” and “powerful.” Life need not be frustrating.For some time now I have been testing publicly the impact of this uncompromising proselytizing, and I have learned a great deal about perceptions of rhetoric among an educated public, which in France we call the “honest public” (the assumption being that uneducated folks are dishonest by mistake, while educated ones should know better). I write a regular column for a leading French online, public intellectual magazine, Les influences (www.lesinfluences.fr). My blog is called Le rhéteur cosmopolite (The Cosmopolitan Rhetor). During the recent French elections, Le nouvel observateur plus asked for my collaboration—which caused some stupor among readers but created somewhat of a fleeting sensation. I call a spade a spade. I am a rhetor and I am cosmopolitan. I refuse to take a leaf from Stanley Fish's acribic blog in the New York Times, The Opinionator: I do rhetoric, not opinion. I am still hoping the Onion will run a spoof of Fish and call it “The Onionator.” Professor Fish is very smart indeed at peeling off onion layers of opinions, until what is usually left are the bitter tears of his contrite liberalism defeated by illiberal public arguments. In my own blog I never let my political opinions color my analysis: I also peel onions, but I do not expect anything in return (except fans, like a mysterious “Corinne,” who followed me from my previous blog on Mediapart, Les oies du Capitol [The Capitoline Geese], to Les influences when I got contracted). My own opinions are private; they are long-standing prejudices that have hardly changed since I reached the age of reason, and they are unlikely ever to alter. Like ancient, imperious Gods they command me when I cast my ballot or get involved in politics. Otherwise I keep them in check. It makes for uneasiness, but that is the destiny of those who keep Sextus Empiricus on their bedroom pedestal. A commentator, on another site, chastised me on account of my “pessimism.”Be that as it may, “Le rhéteur cosmopolite” led to a book (Paroles de Leaders, [2011]) and then to another (De l'art de séduire l'électeur indécis [2012]), as I watched the word “rhétorique” pass through phases of public “admiration” and become implanted, as it were, in current parlance. I say “current” because here again Descartes is right on the money when he describes who is more likely to be struck by admiration: “In any event, although the intellectually challenged are not by nature inclined toward admiration, it does not follow that clever people are always prone to it, unlike those who in general have enough common sense but not a very high opinion of their own capacities” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxxvii, my translation).Descartes, having lived in Holland where weighing gold was akin to weighing thoughts to the smallest ounce, offers a fine observation of life and of public life. The last part of his definition is, in my view, a rather neat description of commentators on social networks and, to be frank, the rank and file of journalists. So, I have been observing how professional media persons or social media interjectors “admire” rhetoric, how they awake out of the opiate slumber of “information” and confess “admiration.”It all began early in 2010 when Sciences humaines, a respected monthly mainly read by the teacherly professions, ran a two-page-long eulogy of my Hyperpolitique (2009) titled “Un grand discours vaut mieux qu'une petite phrase”; it carried a catchy center-page insert that read “Rhetoric was a Jesuits' diabolical invention of persuasion.” An advance copy of the article (richly illustrated by orators at full throttle in the old Third Republic chambers) triggered commentary on prime-time radio (France-Inter [“Revue de presse,” 26 Jan. 2010]) by an anchor who dedicated his program to “political talk.” He addressed three ideas that he claimed came out of my book: that in Britain public speaking is a like a tennis match, that in the United States it is “soft and hypocritical” (!), and that in France it is a “theaterocracy.” My telephone started to ring. Everyone listens to that program: it gives the chattering classes something to sound smart about, for a day. I hardly recognized the arguments of the first chapter of Hyperpolitique but was keen to see how the journalist (who attended a top school and is a philosophy major) managed to summarize it against the grain of public opinion: Gallic stereotypes are that British are underhanded, Americans pugnacious, and the French clear thinking. Clearly, my argument about rhetorical cultures, however bent by him to create controversy, had led him to revise his opinions about universals of public speaking in democratic cultures (oddly, he left out what I wrote about the German rhetorical world).Then something unexpected happened, as the press awoke from its information-induced opiate sleep—management journals and financial magazines began taking an interest in my book. Le nouvel économiste (25 Mar. 2010), a leading, salmon-pulped, financial weekly, interviewed me and ran an article titled “Le goût de l'éloquence” misspelling “rhétorique” as “réthorique” (as did the French C-Span, LCP, in a ticker during a broadcast in which I was invited to comment on the Socialist Party's primaries). It gained momentum. “Rhetoric” was being adopted by business people who, had they read analyses in Hyperpolitique about the “delirium” of “labor talk” and the rhetoric of trust or contract management, may have realized I was on their case and not on their side. It was my turn to be struck with “admiration.”What made the surprise all the more novel and forceful was the fact Le nouvel économiste article, uniformly laudatory and actually well written (except for the displaced “h,” but copy editors are no longer what they used to be), appeared in its “Leadership and Management” section and placed the emphasis on “eloquence” in its title. It highlighted three key points or catchphrases set in inserts that, read in sequence, produced the following syllogism: rhetoric teaches that social life is a transaction of arguments, transaction is good, and thus rhetoric should be taught at school. I was stunned by the boldness of the enthymeme. Soon after, a professional newsletter for senior staff at state agencies, hailed “rhetoric” as a new tool for labor relations (“Rhétorique à la rescousse,” Lettre du cadre territorial, 1 June 2010). Rhetoric had reentered public awareness where I did not expect it, in that very audience who, we are so often told, controls and understands “the real world”: the world of finance, of demand and supply, of accumulation of capital and return on investment. Yet, not under the guise of rhetoric as such but still draped in the quaint nobility of “eloquence.” Striking such a pose is rather typical, I often find, of the conservative dowdiness of financiers who entertain obsolescent images of high culture, even when they collect cows dipped in formaldehyde solution—to them “eloquence” spoke of artful elevation and of cultural capital.The grafting of “rhetoric” onto public idiom was taking and, to size up the change over the years, I simply needed to look back at what Les Échos, France's main daily financial paper, read by stock-exchange people, had written back in 2006 (in its supplement “Les enjeux,” Apr. 2006). A columnist had asked a rhetorical question, “How does a HR manager tell workers they are being laid off?” Her answer was a laundry-list of self-help tips in public address, appended with a substantial list of secondary reading—a motley of manuals, ancient and modern, among them my Art de parler (2003). However, my book is not a manual of persuasive writing. It is nothing like the unrivaled Hodges' Harbrace Handbook (2009). It is not even a primer for public address—both are the sort of books French elite professionals, trained in grandes écoles, dislike and distrust and despise and abandon to the college-educated crowd. L'art de parler is a historical anthology of rare and, to the noninitiate, complex manuals of rhetoric. “Eloquence” does fit in Les Échos' readers' idea of high culture and social codes of distinction, but it is actually an unpractical notion if the purpose is sweet-talking workers unions. As Les Échos declared Art de parler “illuminating,” I wondered, “Of what?” Not of “rhetoric” for the word “rhetoric,” let alone the concept, was absent in that self-help article. I got an answer after the publication, that same year, of my Mahomet (a history of narrative topoi about the founder of Islam): two leading Arab philosophers, Malek Chebel and Abdelwahab Meddeb (author of The Malady of Islam), reviewed it who acknowledged its belletristic and cultural value but stopped hesitatingly at the doors of the ivory tower, as it were—Meddeb just hinted at the possible, hermeneutic value of “rhetoric” in public affairs (in this case, the debate about Islam in France). Later on he and I had a lively public exchange. Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, it became clear to me that it all evinced a desire and a lack, that is, a lack of knowledge as to what the lack actually is or was.By the time in mid-2011 that my blog had become a regular feature, its essays were being taken up by other online magazines (often lifted without even my knowing, always a good sign), and invitations to contribute elsewhere had become routine. Paroles de Leaders was out. Mentions in the press acknowledged “admiration,” spoke now of “rhetoric” in curious, somewhat inquisitive tones—gone was pejoration. They responded to the novelty and force of the surprise in two ways.On the one hand, notably feminist or women writers wrote of “manipulation,” describing me as “cantankerous” and as “filling [my] fountain pen with Pastis” (Le Monde, 18 Aug. 2011) or (in an otherwise level-headed and well-intentioned interview) as a master at explaining “wondrous jugglery” (Terrafemina, 14 Oct. 2011): they played out stereotypes commonplace in some feminist circles that men exert persuasive power through hectoring or dazzling display or self-inebriation of speaking, while women's rhetoric is irenic and conversational and coactive (see my Gender Rhetoric [2009] for contrasting views on the subject). On the other hand, leading magazines mostly read by the financial professions spoke of “rhetoric” as a novel, surprising, forceful, and desirable management tool (which, I guess, would reinforce the just-mentioned stereotype). Here is a florilegium: for Les Échos (7 Oct. 2011) Paroles de Leaders is “ruffling and lifts the veil on the mystery of leadership”; in L'express (16 Nov. 2011) the star column “Tendançologie” (“Trendology”) hailed this new approach on “how to become a leader.” The September 2011 L'expansion Management Review, a quarterly of reference only sold by subscription, judged the book “indispensable.” The lesson easily drawn, with hindsight, from these punchy reviews is clear: the medias and their audiences no longer shunned the word and the idea of rhetoric and gave rhetoric, properly spelled, a prime spot. I asked the marketing department at one of my publishers (Bourin) if they had a hand in it. “No, the financial press just likes what you write; it is new, and they see its usefulness.” Descartes was possibly correct in judging who is more prone to “admiration.” I have taken part in a number of national television and radio broadcasts in which the word “rhétorique” was cast about generously, like aspersions at mass, yet not without an ever-so-slight hesitation, the sort one has when tasting a new dish, and I even discerned a twinkle of daring in the eye of the show host. It amuses me always to see the word rising on the horizon and popping up, not in derision or pejoration but as an intellectual evidence, a lack-filler.If I have retraced this short history, a surrogate confession of information opium eaters and their discovery of rhetoric as a management and public affairs (ephemeral) panacea, the reason is not vanity. Rather, it has to do with identifying our place in the lack, with how, as rhetor(ician)s, we interact with public affairs, how we are placed.The bracketed “-ician” is an indication of our unstable place, of an instability that should be, for us, a matter to ponder. Say “rhetor” and one risks confusion with “orator”—the risk is that popular perceptions will infer from the denomination itself our purported ability to persuade, as if specialists of rhetoric ought to be better shod than when it to our public And the same perceptions will also in of being and smart to be if it that, we are persuasive in of public say and it in a that is, as professional as the French it The will but we will be at to explain what we actually Here is an it has to me over and over again when a to a that I have to tell the at that I am not a professor at the and rhetoric is not a I get a as if I were to something about my On another getting a at my I had this in is as it on my and what I had never a what rhetoric, think came a smile of followed by this from the I and I was not as I had just a on the rhetoric of on at and was my thoughts on rhetoric as the de The “-ician” because it to a and in a as in de a has two main to create a of and to is what the and the were me, me. I am a be that as it rhetoric is not a it is a and a that the as it is the lesson at the very of the lesson of the and the rhetoric is but in need of and (a is to in a by in the of under the “Rhetoric or a and Rhetoric Rhetoric is also a to the world as because it is the of the fact that is as I to call it. may explain management is so in for all its on that are and in to if not the is usually to explain this which one have possibly are indeed they were would be and and would not to those who to that are or as they are of it, in the of is to In my I to rhetorical idiom to in public affairs, a I also to show that on the of rhetorical can be I do so without any for the of I where the lack is at the word and the of to that which one has without its idea by in his as a key notion for is no I in or our idiom to to that is to what be of to The public out of “admiration,” some of our idiom and some of it. The of course, is to see our idiom to what in an culture like the French this is than in a culture where self-help is over The risk however is to be in public as who may become to and commentators on I believe that, to being eaters of our own we ought to size up the value of the to the and to attention to the of life.