Bjørkdahl Kristian - Rhetorical Animals

Rhetorical Animals

Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI

Advisory Board

Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Hannes Bergthaller, National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan; Zlia Bora, Federal University of Paraba, Brazil; Izabel Brando, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Simo Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopeck, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Serpil Oppermann, Hacettepe University, Turkey; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Julia Tofantuk, Tallinn University, Estonia; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany.

Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists.

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Rhetorical Animals

Boundaries of the Human in the Study of Persuasion

Edited by
Kristian Bjrkdahl and Alex C. Parrish

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Contents

David R. Gruber

Hayley Zertuche

Kelin Loe

Jennifer Saltmarsh

Ellen Gorsevski

Dustin Greenwalt

Iklim Goksel

Alex C. Parrish

Emily Plec and Susan Hafen

Jake Dionne

Marilyn Cooper

Andrea Gutirrez

Kristian Bjrkdahl

Kristian Bjrkdahl and Alex C. Parrish

Picture, for a moment, one of the paradigmatic sites of ancient rhetorical performance: the Pnyx of ancient Athens, the assembly area where public meetings took place beginning in the early fifth century BCE. We can easily imagine the rhetor , perched on the platform at the base of the hill. And we can probably call forth an image of hismostly landed maleaudience, an assembly of anywhere from 6000 to 13,000 of the speakers citizen peers. To make the picture more concrete, let us say that the speaker, in this instance, is no lesser celebrity than Pericles, who is about to give his last speech to the city before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war. Among them came forward Pericles, son of Xanthippus, wrote Thucydides about the event, the first man of his time at Athens, ablest alike in counsel and in action.

If we can create a mental image of this scene without much difficulty, that is because scenes like these are part of the mythology of rhetoric. As such they reveal what we intuitively tend to include in rhetorical tradition, but they also illustrate what is not there, what we do not necessarily see when we imagine, to our minds eye, a paradigmatic rhetorical situation. Among the many groupswomen, slaves, foreignerswho are famously absent from this scene, another conspicuous absence is that of animals . There are no nonhumans in this scene, nor does it acknowledge much animality in the human actors. In fact, the origin myths of rhetoric tend to imagine rhetorical performances as the pinnacle of our species capacity, humans at our most human. From Isocrates to Habermas, public discourse has been seen as a paragon of human civilization, and the ability that engenders this activitylanguage, speechis the mark of the human. No animals speak, therefore no animals persuade, therefore rhetoric is exclusively human.

What does the we of rhetoric look likeand why does it take this shape? And is there any way to imagine that nonhuman animals could form part of that community? These are the central questions of this book. The issue at stake, then, is how animals and their various forms of communication might somehow be of interest, or even inspiration, to rhetorical scholars and practitioners. Because of the relative novelty of this idea, we cannot start from preconceptionsand what follows is first and foremost an exploration . We know this from the start, however: If the prospect of a nonhuman conception of rhetoric should materialize, that would undoubtedly require a departure from the traditional image we have both of ourselves and of rhetoric. But what reasons do we have for not makingor at least testingsuch a departure?

The democratic polis of ancient Athens was notoriously exclusive: No more than 10 to 20 percent of the population took active part in public politics. The principle of isgora (), the equal right to address the assembly, was held in high regardindeed it was seen as one of the basic principles of democratic practice. Today we are perhaps more inclined to think that the ancient Greek conception of isgora was actually something of a smokescreen for highly un equal access to the public sphere. In this book, we direct the same sort of doubts at the established notion that humans are the superior, if not to say exclusive, rhetorical animal. Is this idea simply a smokescreen for other, nonhuman, forms of communication? What would happen if we cleared the air, as it were, and began to consider all forms of communication as equally interesting? What happens when we start to imagine that rhetoric is more than human ?