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Friday, April 22, 2005
Composition Without Rhetoric: John Guillory
English departments are constantly struggling to justify their existence in an increasingly results-oriented academic framework. What does studying literature prepare you to do? How will it help students get a job? We usually answer it with some version of “critical thinking and persuasion through written arguments,” which we hope will hold off the administrators for another year. But are the skills one uses to compose a compelling argument about George Eliot relevant at all to the kind of writing that dominates the corporate world? Why does it often seem that one is writing all the time—email after email after email—without actually involving oneself with the inner life of the language? In “The Memo and Modernity" (Critical Inquiry 31.1) Guillory draws on everything from Quintilian to Erasmus to The Handbook of Business English, to show the emergence of a massive genre of informational writing that is neither truly scientific nor rhetorical.
Guillory argues that the late nineteenth century saw the rise of the memo—a genre of bureaucratic writing that is, effectively, anti-rhetorical. It is a kind of writing that exists between two more frequently opposed genres, literary/journalistic and scholarly/scientific:
literary/journalistic----informational----scholarly/scientific
He makes a compelling argument that the middle term, “informational” writing, is in fact best understood as anti-rhetorical. In doing so, Guillory is directly opposing a dominant theory in composition pedagogy, that all writing is always in some sense rhetorical (“Everything’s an Argument").
It’s much more complicated than that. The benchmark text for Guillory is JoAnn Yates’ Control Through Communication, which works through the emergence of the memo historically, in the 1870s and 1880s. He uses Yates in several ways, but perhaps the key passage is the following one:
The Yates thesis, then, is that the memo emerged as a result of a new kind of managerial practice, and not as a development of rhetorical theory. On the contrary, the invention of the memo entailed a deliberate forgetting of rhetoric, an act of oblivion. The memorandum was not an evolution of the business letter but a new genre of writing. The term “memorandum” in this new generic sense began to be used in the later 1870s and early 1880s, although it did not become common until the 1920s, by which time the form of the memo was in widespread use. The idea of the memorandum as a “note to oneself” precisely captures the situation of internal communication within an organization. Hence Yates speaks of the memo as constituting an “organizational” memory. That this mode of remembering, displaced from individual minds to documents, was premised on the forgetting of rhetoric, underscores the little revolution in the history of writing Yates rediscovers.
The memo is thus a distinctive genre of writing, not merely a subset of rhetorical prose as traditionally understood. It is by definition a professionalized (or bureaucratic) mode of expression. For Guillory, its difference from the classical “business letter,” which was highly rhetorical, should not be dismissed:
The story of rhetoric’s demise has been told often enough to have provoked a revisionist history in which it never died at all, but was rather dispersed, in which the motives of rhetoric were hidden behind even the most scientific language. The revisionist history is credible if rhetoric, as the “art of persuasion,” is rediscovered wherever the motive of persuasion exists. The rhetoric that seems to be nowhere is then said to be everywhere. 26 Some very sophisticated reassertions of rhetoric have relied upon this line of argument, for which Nietzsche’s will to power is often invoked as a precedent, as the truth rhetoric tells about every speech act. Against this view, I would argue that if rhetoric is the art of persuasion, it makes a difference if the art disappears, leaving us only with persuasion. It must make a difference if information genres are founded on the deliberate suppression of rhetorical techniques. Such writing may fail to transcend the motive of persuasion, but it cannot fail to be different generically from what preceded it.
Guillory is going against the “everything’s an argument” philosophy that leads Composition classes to claim a kind of universal importance in American universities. For Guillory, the three genres of writing—literary, informational, scientific—are distinct from one another, and should not be confused.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the essay is the second half, where Guillory talks about the “internal contradictions” of information genres. One is the contradiction between concision (brevitas) and verbosity (copia). Modern writing fetishizes the former, and assiduously avoids the latter, to such an extent that most young people have already fully assmilated the logic of business-class brevitas before they even reach the college freshman writing classroom (where brevitas is usually immediately reinforced and amplified). The kind of copia that characterizes literary writing from earlier periods is hard for many students to understand: it seems like waste, or rambling, or showing off. It’s not impossible to convince students to appreciate elegance and style, but it takes time and effort (I often wonder how my Victorianist colleagues can get students to get into writers like Ruskin...).
The second contradiction Guillory talks about relates quite directly to the fierce debates we are (always?) having, about clarity (claritas) vs. jargon (which Guillory refers to as “technicity"). This is a huge question for us in literary studies, as we are often aggressively accused of over-reliance on a mystifying professional jargon. Many literary critics respond to these charges (as GZombie has recently done, on his blog, and in comments here and at Crooked Timber) with the argument that literary analysis is a specialized kind of skill, which requires training. Literary critics can and should use their jargon in the same way that our colleagues in the Genetics Department or Computer Science use it. (If he were to respond to this, I imagine that Guillory would argue that literary/journalistic and scientific genres of writing are distinct from one another. The advent of “technicity” in literary studies is therefore fallout from its attempt to fashion itself as science.)
Guillory’s article speaks to this question (obliquely), and also, interestingly to the question of how it is that Composition has come to be merged with English, despite the seeming divergence of information-oriented composition pedagogy from the traditionally more rhetorical orientation of literary studies. I’ll end with a quote from near the end of Guillory’s essay that brings all of this together:
These tensions were interestingly played out in the twentieth century in the teaching of business and professional writing. The first attempts to teach business, professional, technical, and scientific people how to write were by and large undertaken by persons in those fields. The aims of this pedagogy were very close to those expressed by the originators of the memo form: to break with the old rhetoric, and to fashion new genres of writing. Even as late as 1929, Philip McDonald complained in his English and Science about the way in which English was taught in the schools, which he saw as promoting obscurity, pomposity, and ornateness. (89-100) But McDonald means to indict a rhetorical style. His conclusions favored the continued segregation of technical writing from English departments. Yet after the second world war, business and technical writing came under the province of English and composition teachers, who were naturally more disposed to favor the norm of clarity descending from belles lettrist culture than the norm of technicity regnant in the professions. The technical fields put up little resistance to this transfer of teaching authority because they were themselves increasingly troubled by the tension between technicity with clarity.
The reassertion of a literary norm within the field of informational writing seemed to respond to a perceived decline in the communicative effectiveness of writing that paced the explosion of information and media. The tension between clarity, which posits a hypothetical general reader, and technicity, which assumes a specialized addressee, has never been resolved. The failure of modern writing to achieve clarity brings technicity into disrepute; but technicity is an inescapable requisite of modern writing and is not, in itself, incompatible with clarity or communication. An analysis of informational writing that fails to recognize the complex relation between clarity and technicity is unlikely to yield a composition pedagogy adequate to the demands upon writing in modernity. The reassertion of clarity by the literary professoriate, like the reassertion of brevity, forgets the inaugural act of information genres, forgets the forgetting of rhetoric.
Comments
To me anti-rhetorical tech or business writing is much like anti-rhetorical science writing.
Many tech people cannot write at all, and many writers are Luddites. I have a friend who wrote manuals for Techtronics for decades, and he claims that he was their only tech writer who understood the tech very well—it was assumed that none of the tech people could write, or wanted to.
I have been told, and believe, that someone who has learned to write will have an advantage in almost aby field he chooses to go into. It’s just that being able to write per se is mostly useless; you have to have an additional trade.
In several fields (law, advertising, PR) writerly skills are very valuable. It’s just that a simple one-step structural transformation is required. The truth-telling skills you have learned from Flaubert, Joyce, Orwell, et. al., have to be put at the service of different sorts of ideas, the “truth” of which you should take care never to ask about. (As if there were such a thing).
Very interesting post, Amardeep. But, as with a lot of Guillory’s stuff, in the end, even though I feel generally sympathetic to him, I’m not sure I get it. I think it’s plausible to see the memo as a relatively new and unique kind of writing, with special demands that can be handled well or badly. And I think it’s intersting to consider that those demands might be actively in conflict with the demands made by other genres. But it’s hard for me to see this is an earth shaking discovery. That may be ungenerous or just slow witted and I haven’t even read this essay yet. But I don’t really see the point.
But whatever the main stakes are, this claim strikes me as particularly implausible:
“I would argue that if rhetoric is the art of persuasion, it makes a difference if the art disappears, leaving us only with persuasion. It must make a difference if information genres are founded on the deliberate suppression of rhetorical techniques. Such writing may fail to transcend the motive of persuasion, but it cannot fail to be different generically from what preceded it.”
I don’t see that at all. Sounds like a weird kind of generic idealism. Isn’t it like claiming that when poetry abandoned iambic pentameter it ceased to be poetry? It’s different, yeah, in the sense that it’s not exactly the way it was before, but everything changes. What does it mean to say it’s _generically_ different. Or to put the question another way around, doesn’t Guillory’s remark here mean that when Bush gives the next State of the Union he won’t be engaging in rhetoric because he never studied the tradition? That’s obviously wrong. It’ll be a bad and noxious speech for sure. But it’ll still be a speech.
It’s probably worth a longer post over at my site, but for the moment, I want to second Sean’s comments and add a couple.
I need to give Guillory’s article another read before I say too much more, but right away, some difficulties suggest themselves. In the epigraphs for the second section, for example, as best as I can tell, the word “rhetoric” itself is being used in two different ways. Curtius (I think) is speaking specifically of the disciplinary status of rhetoric, which in a sense had no place (although you had to ignore Kenneth Burke and I.A. Richards, to name two, to say so). While the Handbook writers seem to be using the word in the pejorative sense, the way people use “mere rhetoric” to describe flowery, empty, unnecessary language. In addition to rhetoric-as-discipline (which has waxed and waned) and rhetoric-as-pejorative, I’d add rhetoric-as-practice, which encompasses more than just persuasion. That’s the Aristotelian def’n of rhetoric, and a reductive version of it besides, that the last 50 years of rhetoric scholarship has done a lot to complicate, extend, and challenge in various ways. And it feels like “rhetoric” slips among these various definitions in this essay.
It also sounds as though Guillory is arguing that “rhetorical technique” is something added to language, such that it’s possible to achieve a zero degree of rhetoric, and I wouldn’t be alone in disagreeing with that (Lanham’s later work is pretty clear on that score). The “suppression of rhetorical technique,” being deliberate, is itself a rhetorical technique. But then, I’m a big-R rhetoric person myself, and so I find the Yates thesis (that the memo didn’t emerge from rhetorical theory) kind of trivial. I wouldn’t agree with the position that this thesis claims to break from, and I don’t think I’m atypical in that regard.
Maybe I’m being a little defensive, but then it’s hard for me to ignore the sneer behind Guillory’s dismissal of my field of study as “a subject that would appear to be of less than universal current interest,” not to mention that there are plenty of us in that less than universal discipline who both feel responsible for and are actively working on that second, “larger” question with which he ends his essay…
Anyhow, thanks for the link and the entry, Amardeep.
cgb
"The reassertion of a literary norm within the field of informational writing seemed to respond to a perceived decline in the communicative effectiveness of writing that paced the explosion of information and media.”
Has Guillory no shame? If he’s trying to convince people, couldn’t he at least pretend he’s a human being writing for human beings about work that other human beings have done?
How about “It seemed that writing was declining in clarity at the same time that it was vastly increasing in quantity”? I have a feeling that it could be phrased better, but at least I haven’t said “communicative effectiveness”.
I wonder if the move towards drab (and frequently dull and unclear) writing was part of a general mistrust of pleasure and emotion.
I agree with Nancy Lebovitz and seem to have found, independently, the same truly egregious passage she cites. Prof. Singh’s post simply doesn’t pass the laugh test. I have more to say on my site here. I’ve been following the assertions on The Valve that there is a corporate form of informational writing which is lower than others with interest. It seems to me that this is a statement about diction, corporate low, academic high, which is simply not supportable and in fact not literary, insofar as everyday speech is often regarded as worthwhile and important.
The passage may not be the most eloquent, but it’s quite clear that Nancy’s paraphrase leaves out important information, particularly the concept of “literary norm.”
But Iucounu always passes the laugh test.
So OK, then, let’s go on with the passage and see if we get other important information. “The tension between clarity, which posits a hypothetical general reader, and technicity, which assumes a specialized addressee, has never been resolved. The failure of modern writing to achieve clarity brings technicity into disrepute; but technicity is an inescapable requisite of modern writing and is not, in itself, incompatible with clarity or communication. An analysis of informational writing that fails to recognize the complex relation between clarity and technicity is unlikely to yield a composition pedagogy adequate to the demands upon writing in modernity. The reassertion of clarity by the literary professoriate, like the reassertion of brevity, forgets the inaugural act of information genres, forgets the forgetting of rhetoric.” This apparently in the context of what Amardeep Singh admires enough to quote, “the invention of the memo entailed a deliberate forgetting of rhetoric, an act of oblivion.”
How, pray tell, did the inventors of the memo, as distinct from the business letter (completely synonymous as far as I can tell) deliberately forget anything? This is a contradiction in terms—tell someone to forget something and they remember it.
These folks should find honest work someplace.
John, I don’t think there’s a confusion of thought here, only a bizarre word choice. According to Yates, memo-writing began with a conscious attempt to eliminate “the polite but wordy conventions of the letter-writing tradition.” For some reason, Guillory chooses to call this the “deliberate forgetting of rhetoric.” Why he can’t use “eliminate” instead of “forget” (as Yates does), I don’t know. But then, his entire prose style doesn’t inspire confidence. It’s like walking into a shop class and discovering that the teacher is missing most of his fingers.
I’m entitled not to have to bend over backward to understand Yates, it seems to me. And “letter” has long been synonymous with “memo” in business, I think; it’s a question of terminology. If all we’re doing here is playing cute word games—which it seems is what we’re doing; it’s OK to use “forget” to mean “eliminate”, but not OK to use “letter” to mean “memo”, then I repeat, time for some folks to look for honest work.
The objections to the Guillory article and my post raise good points, and I’m not going to defend all of his choices (especially the “deliberate forgetting” phrasing) here. I think the best thing to do is to temporarily pretend that Guillory means “writing” when he says “rhetoric.” I agree with some of the early objections (Sean’s especially) that he doesn’t do nearly enough to prove that Business English is perfectly devoid of persuasive intent or rhetorical tropes. At most, I would accept that rhetoric complexity is reduced in modern business writing writing.
But to prove his claim convincingly, Guillory would probably have to have studied actual examples of business memos, would he not? Reading Yates and The Handbook of Business English is interesting, but not conclusive. (Especially when the writers of those books are not using the word “rhetoric” the way he is.)
Here’s what I liked in the Guillory piece. It’s possible to read Guillory (perhaps slightly against the grain) as arguing that even literary/journalistic writing in the modern era (which I guess began in the 1880s) has been largely informatized. I think his enumeration of two “internal contradictions” he sees in a range of modern writing are too good to be coincidental in this regard—clarity/technicity and brevity/copia.
On clarity/technicity. Literary critical writing in most scholarly journals has been overrun with technicity, yet most literary critics spend a fair amount of their time advocating clarity in both their English lit. and composition classes. Most are in fact quite capable when writing and arguable in public, without jargon, and yet are professionally discouraged from doing so.
Guillory’s argument allows us to generalize that phenomenon (technicity as the “professionalization” of writing). It’s not something that happens just in literary criticism, but in all modern writing. The turn to technicity is disturbing for some people in literary studies because many people thought of literary analysis as a space that was to remain immune to “professionalism” (a synonym for corporate culture).
On brevity/copia. We are told at every turn that brevity is essential, yet there has never been a moment in history where people write more than they do now. We go on and on and on. It might be a charitable reading of Guillory to say that the difference between the way we moderns elaborate and the way the “ancients” did so (think: everyone from Johnson to Ruskin) is that we moderns (both literary critics and business-folk) do so, generally, with less style.
This is exactly what Guillory says it is, namely a contradiction. He doesn’t really specify what we might do with it, perhaps because it doesn’t quite rhyme with the more dramatic-sounding lines about the “deliberate forgetting of rhetoric.” Perhaps a more plausible way to describe our current schizophrenia is as following: we are constantly given the injunction to be as brief as possible (what’s the point?!), but we nevertheless elaborate at every turn.
As for the historical argument—the part about the advent of the business memo (the whole first half of Guillory’s essay). We can also read Guillory’s loose history into the Weberian story of bureaucratization. The memo is what Weber might call the rationalization, modernization, and maybe even disenchantment of writing.
The 1880s is not an especially implausible date if you accept Weber’s definition of “modernity.”
John, I agree you shouldn’t have to bend backwards to understand either either Guillory or Yates. But I don’t think it’s cute word games; I think it’s just bad writing. I would have said the ideas were interesting, and maybe the history is worthwhile. But having read it more thoroughly, it seems to me like the discussion at the end is pretty empty.
I agree that Guillory writes in something like a startling post-human style, but as to Sean & Collin’s complaints (roughly kindred to my eye) that he threatens to claim that a certain kind of writing could escape rhetorical technique or that language is only secondarily rhetorical, what about this: the kind of argument that insists on all language as rhetorical is useful or interesting only when there’s someone naively insisting that neutral writing exists somewhere. Call this arguing for the deepness of rhetoric. When this deep rhetoric is acknowledged, however, doesn’t continuing to insist on it in fact hinder further analysis, the kind of analysis that would, say, point out the emergence of a genre predicated upon a certain avoidance of rhetoric?
In this case reminding everyone that, nope, rhetoric goes all the way down! misses the point, which is, in this case, to pay attention to the contours of generic difference. I don’t know enough to defend Guillory’s claims beyond this, but it does seem he addresses a distinction like the one I’m making when he distinguishes the “motive” from the art of persuasion.
I suppose I’m suggesting that the deepness argument can sometimes amount to a professional hysteria--but prove me wrong.