Re: nascient
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Fri, 12 Mar 1999 13:13:58 -0500
Sprat was the spokesman for the (British) Royal Society. He said lots
of disparaging things about "rhetoric," apparantly entirely unaware of
his own complicitness in the scheme he was critiqiuing ("we cannot
utter one destructive preposition . . . "--poststructuralism really is
just the latest in Sophistry).
He wrote a history/charter for the Royal Society in the 1660s (it was
reprinted fairly recently) that detailed the attack on rhetoric. The
movement (not the only one of its type) scorned the florid extremes of
rhetoric because language became ambiguous, frivolous, a-reasonable.
In one sense, the project is innocent enough--it seeks primarily to
keep rhetorical flourish to a minimum. But the goal of the project
clearly (that is, unmistakably) envisioned a use of language in which
all ambiguity could be eradicated. Language *could* be a transparent
medium in which to communicate about the things themselves--the things
as they are outside of language.
The current business of rhetoric and theory is, of course, to point
out the futility of such a project. I am on the bandwagon. It's
curious, isn't it, that the west seems to be trotting blithely back
and forth between the two poles of opinion--from Sophistry to the
Enlightenment to (neo/post/new-) Sophistry...
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu