Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Abstract

A brief for eloquence might be expected to be an exercise in nostalgia. Whether confronting mass culture, digital media, or populist demagoguery, one may have difficulty avoiding reverie and thus fail to speak to the present moment. Rob Goodman is willing to risk failure in Words on Fire and places that risk at the center of both eloquence and the democratic project. By taking up the problem of whether the tradition of rhetoric can be adapted and renewed with respect to modern processes of mechanization, he is able to provide insight and perhaps encouragement regarding the prospects for public speech.It is comforting to mythologize rhetoric as the natural form of democratic speech, with codification of the art making the means of persuasion available to all. Both ancients and moderns knew better, and obvious asymmetries in rhetorical skill and social capital could make the concept of democratic rhetoric an oxymoron—as well as the pathway to demagogic subversion of democratic institutions. Goodman separates the structural distinction between mass and elite from the discursive distinction between speaker and audience, and he offers an ingenious argument regarding what he terms the rhetorical bargain (6). The key feature of a sound rhetorical transaction is that both the speaker and the audience put themselves at risk. Audiences always risk being manipulated, deceived, and exploited, but speakers can risk failure, humiliation, and other negative consequences. When this bargain is kept, it can serve the democratic ends of ameliorating structural inequities while empowering the public. And the stakes are high: “Political ‘tribalism’ is a justifiable response to a broken rhetorical bargain” (18).But why would a speaker take such a risk? The answer sets up the two major themes of the book. One is that, without symmetrical risk, eloquence is not possible. Nor need one aspire to eloquence for its own sake as it alone provides the greatest influence regarding the most difficult problems. It does so because of the way language works, the way the art of rhetoric works, and the way democracy works. Risk is built into language use because of the inherent ambiguity and instability of words as they are polyvocal and grounded in interpretation. Risk is built into rhetoric because persuasion is grounded in decorum, the fitting together of speech and situation and of artistry and historical conditions. Risk is built into democracy because one needs to engage the public if it is to be persuaded and publics can be critical, unpredictable, and unruly—and the more powerful for that.In an ideal (and, by the way, not classical) world, we might stop there. But the same properties that enable democratic speech also provide means for its undoing. Not taking a risk one can avoid is a sensible option and certainly one available to many elites. Hence, Goodman’s second theme, that the tradition of rhetoric also provides the means for offloading the risk in the rhetorical bargain. The key resource is the systematization of discourse (32), and making rhetoric into a machine is a theme that runs from the classical handbooks to contemporary algorithmic technologies. Thus, although the rhetorical bargain produces the egalitarianism essential for democratic legitimacy, a codified, technical rhetoric produces the performative asymmetry between speaker and audience that aligns with forms of domination. In Goodman’s history of rhetoric, the choice between these two tendencies can come down to an ethical conception of failure and the value placed on style and other forms of verbal abundance.To tell this story, Goodman first turns to Cicero. In contrast to the handbook tradition, he argues: “Resistance to rhetorical systems and ‘learnable codes’ of eloquence is integral to the Ciceronian orator’s self-conception” (24). In contrast to more sweeping conceptions of rhetorical power from Gorgias onward, Cicero emphasizes “the absence of predictable and manipulable links between speech and audience response” (25). Thus: “In Cicero’s rhetorical theory, neither eloquence nor the public is systematized” (26). These claims are demonstrated by comparative readings of De oratore and Julius Caesar’s De analogia, a response to Cicero on behalf of a stylistically limited and politically attenuated model of public speech. Although promoting clarity and reason, Caesar’s codification of everyday speech undercut the democratic audience. No longer either ideal or dangerous, it became “inert and manipulable”: “[R]hetoric would be done to such a public, not done with it” (47).Cicero understood that “the harm in systematized persuasion is its tendency to minimize rhetorical risk” (32). Against the idea that speech should be routinized to make information accessible and responses predictable, he held out for polyvocality and stylistic agility. Indeed, Goodman argues that style—“a quality of language in excess of argument” (13)—is crucial for situational adaptation and collective empowerment. Ornamentation acknowledges the autonomy of the audience and requires that the speaker take risks. The question of political efficacy then comes down to the concept of frank speech: in our terms, which style is better for speaking truth to power? Drawing on Cicero’s appreciation of Demosthenes, who was known for both stylistic virtuosity and frankness, Goodman offers a reconstituted norm that does not require the “flattened” rhetorical culture (53, 62) preferred by Caesar (and wannabe Caesars). It also points toward the democratic potential of indirect speech and debunks the appeal to sincerity that is used across the political spectrum today.Even if one considered these matters to be settled, the larger question of decorum arises. Can the classical tradition work in the modern world? Were its essential properties tied too closely to its specific historical conditions such that now it can have only aesthetic value? The rest of the book takes up this question by considering three different attempts at reconstitution: Edmund Burke’s, with respect to deliberation and political judgment; Thomas Babington Macaulay’s, with respect to historiography and public culture; and Carl Schmitt’s, with respect to how public speech and parliamentary democracy have been incapacitated by modern market and institutional practices.Burke is the transitional figure who looms largest in Goodman’s book. A Ciceronian thinker, he is known more as a political conservative than as a rhetorical radical, yet he was both. While Burke’s contemporaries believed that modern, rule-bound governance required rule-bound speech that was “factual, restrained, dispassionate, and even happily mediocre” (15), Goodman reconsiders key elements in his thought to provide a theoretical model for dealing with modern problems of political dysfunction. The theme of mechanization is taken up via Burke’s critique of defective deliberation, featuring especially civility, abstraction, and limited conceptions of scale. By focusing on the language of Burke’s speeches and his philosophical treatise on the sublime, Goodman sets out several strong claims, among them that his language was over-the-top because “the obscure and the uncanny can in fact help us to see political problems more clearly” (98), that this realm of the sublime was literally lifesaving as “excessive immersion in custom, habit, and regularity means depression and even death” (107), and that the Ciceronian conception of decorum “was never a notion of stable and static propriety, but of a dynamic moderation that appears stable because it is a permanent adaptation to flux” (114). Most important, this revaluation of eloquence as a disruptive artistic capability on behalf of sustainability counters the tendency of a political class toward “atrophy of imagination and abdication of judgment” (117).With Macaulay, one is more distant from Cicero while facing the new phenomenon of the mass public. As rhetoric becomes defined by public relations and propaganda, political institutions are less capable of supporting public judgment. Enter the public writer: Macaulay’s History of England (1848) was a bestseller designed for civic education. Goodman identifies the intention and the means, including a historiography that featured arguments rather than actions as well as the use of polyvocal texts to cultivate public memory and imagination. Macaulay’s public audience also is developed over time, going beyond a situational conception of rhetoric, and extending the role of the orator in public life. Goodman also brings in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime and the French Revolution (1856) to raise the stakes: Tocqueville provides an antirhetorical historiography and a fatalistic theory of mass communication. In this worldview, impersonal processes of centralization and dispersion combine to limit persuasion to domination and pit distended publics against practices of secrecy. This model remains all too legible, but Goodman suggests that it scraps rhetoric too soon and that Macaulay’s cultivation of a viable public remains a real option.Many today would see this belief in a deliberative public capable of sound judgment as optimistic claptrap; for a rationale they can draw on Schmitt. Set against the tragedy of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Schmitt’s analysis was structural: sound political deliberation required speaking on behalf of the common good, whereas democratic speakers represented specific interests. The only solution also was structural: a prior imposition of hierarchy. Goodman has no sympathy for Schmitt’s authoritarianism, but he finds in the harsh critique of modern democratic speech an insight into the role that ritual can play in democratic sustainability and renewal. This turn might seem odd. Would ritual not be a leading example of mechanization? As with Burke and the uncanny, another reconstitution is provided. Ritual is defined not as a specific code or a routinized practice but as an understanding of how pattern can be maintained amid indeterminacy. This perspective includes a shift from structure to performance, where occasions—and symmetrical risks—are created anew and the obvious artificiality of rhetoric becomes part of its aspirational quality, not least in creating the conditions for eloquence. It also underscores the continuing failure of the handbook, that is, of how codification remains dependent on variable applications that inadvertently can generate unruly publics.Goodman’s intention was to display “a coherent tradition of eloquence” that could be understood with respect to the political conditions of its formation and that might be useful for addressing contemporary problems of democratic legitimacy. He admits that his exemplars are a series of “rearguard actions” (193) and rightly cautions against any classicism that would undermine constitutional democracy. He also illustrates the benefit in learning about rhetoric from the disruptions of the tradition. One can, of course, supply caveats and criticisms. For example, the critique of mechanization could be started and developed more theoretically in the Greek texts (not least Isocrates’s Against the Sophists and Plato’s Phaedrus, which is mentioned), and more application to contemporary speakers and practices would have been welcome. Goodman does what he set out to do, however, and provides plenty of arguments and insights that can be taken forward by others.Let me close by suggesting three additional areas for further development of Goodman’s project. The first is recuperating eloquence as a topic for rhetorical studies. It was not that long ago that it was taken for granted, but that may not have been the best approach. The concept has rightly been demoted by practices and aspirations for democratization at many levels, and it certainly should not be used to shut that door again. Eloquence is an end of rhetoric, however, whether in the Roman Senate, the venues of ordinary democracy, the media arts of popular culture, or the most recent viral imagetext. In a time of demagoguery that reduces politics to determinations of group identity, it might be time to take up eloquence as a democratic ideal. Goodman rightly points toward the relationship between these two forms of democratic speech. If eloquence is “an emergent property of certain rhetorical relationships—in particular, the ones characterized by mutual risk” (184)—then it can be a vehicle for democratic renewal, and its loss leads further down the pathway to mechanized risk avoidance, defective speech, polarized audiences, and violence.A second consideration, also following Goodman’s example, is the need for reconsideration of style and of the plain style. After many generations of Strunk and White, writer’s workshops teaching bestseller minimalism, and short-form composition spreading across advertising and social media, modern Atticism certainly has proved its worth. Like Caesar, however, these developments also may have helped flatten rhetorical culture. From the era of the New Criticism to today, they certainly have helped maintain literature and politics as largely separate realms and audiences as consumers more than citizens.Finally, Goodman’s repositioning of Burke within the rhetorical tradition could contribute to a reconsideration of form and formalism as these can be modes for political engagement. The concepts being considered have direct application, for example, to problems such as climate change and global wealth inequity that involve extreme extensions of scale and routinized practices of denial. As Goodman notes, Burke was tuned in to the propensity to try to offload the duress of making political judgments (89)—which was one reason he valued institutions—but today any attempt to cultivate good judgment has to depend more on public culture and, therefore, on artistic forms. Like decorum, form can appear both static and dynamic, self-evident and enigmatic, mechanical and deeply resonant. By endorsing stylistic abundance, mutual risk, and an attempt to articulate the uncanny, Goodman identifies essential conditions for artistic innovation, political participation, and a revitalized public imagination.