Interdisciplinarity in Public: The Rhetoric of Rhetoric

In Trial of (1988), late I.F. Stone addressed a chapter Socrates and Rhetoric. Speaking on behalf of Athenian public, he took sides against and for rhetoric. Rhetoric, he said, was a skill enabling citizens to protect their interests in assembly and in law courts (90), hence an essential tool of Athenian democracy, and that was what anti-democratic most mistrusted about it. The unspoken premise of Socratic assault on oratory was disdain for common people of Athens (92).1 In academic departments in humanities and social sciences, defense of rhetoric against a universalizing Platonic or scientific reason is not news. Among many who have lately been trying move rhetoric, in Stanley Fish's words, disreputable periphery necessary center, one can cite historians Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra, economist Donald McCloskey, sociologist Jean Baudrillard, and literary critics as otherwise diverse as Bakhtin, de Man, Wayne Booth, Terry Eagleton, and Fish himself.2 In anthropology, communications, philosophy, political science, law, and even medicine, and especially in interdisciplinary projects that connect them, revival of rhetoric has been proceeding for some time. Unfortunately, one cannot conclude from Stone's eloquent non-specialist defense that there has been a sudden conjunction of academic high theory with common sense of general or extra-academic reading public, which has heretofore tended take term rhetoric as a slur, a synonym for deceit, manipulation, and propaganda, for tyranny of words unchecked by truth of things.3 This essay will explore a more modest hypothesis: that Stone's grounding of rhetoric in democratic polis or offers a significant but also troubling analogy rehabilitation of rhetoric in university, which much contemporary opinion, left and right, of course opposes as specialized, professionalized, private. In brief, I will argue that if interdisciplinary move toward rhetoric moves scholarship in direction of public, and as such is politically desirable, phrase the public that I and others plug into our politico-disciplinary arguments at value-laden points like this is also a piece of rhetoric, and as such be examined carefully for its multiple, devious, and perhaps even unintended persuasive effects.