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Not a subordinate, but a coordinate relation between the terms would have different implications. I said earlier in this essay that any terms one might use in the place of rhetoric or composition would be susceptible to the same kind of lexical variance that I have been illustrating, and I will now say why I think this is the case. The terms must be multivariant and polysemous because the activities and products to which they refer are related to each other in a complex web of nonlinear interconnections. Let me illustrate what I mean by these "interconnections" and how some different senses of rhetoric and composition fall into them. Given that what I have tried to illustrate here is a circle of circles, I could start anywhere in describing it and "get around" to the rest. By "the rhetoric people use" on the left-hand side of the illustration, I mean the talk, speech-making, writing, and other acts of discourse that people actually perform. This is the world of activity that Kenneth Burke has called "symbolic action" as opposed to "non-symbolic motion." He says that "Action, so defined, would involve modes of behavior made possible by the acquiring of a conventional, arbitrary symbol system" ( Burke809). Notice that the dots I have enclosed in this circle (to represent any possible feature of this discourse) are randomly arrayed, except for a few that have some kind of "order" to them. This is to signify that whatever is done in this realm is done in ways that are as various as the kinds of real situations, audiences, subjects, discourse conventions, and creative intuitions that might pertain to and constrain symbolic activities, which are multivarious yet derive from some kind of "symbol system," in Burke's sense. Before there was rhetoric in the sense of a body of theory about using language effectively, there was rhetoric in the sense of effectively used language. Homeric speeches give evidence of the existence of rhetoric in this sense before the Greeks invented rhetoric in the other sense. Yet those speeches also show that "the rhetoric people use" is itself orderly, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on what conventions prevail in the "natural" or unself-conscious production of discourse and under what circumstances. Hence my dots are not entirely random. Any such language act, or composite of such acts, may become the subject of analysis, the means by which "the rhetoric people use" becomes "the 'art' of rhetoric." Analysis cannot look at everything that occurs in the language act or acts being studied, so it is also a process of selecting from all of the many features of such acts those that are considered by the analyst to be salient and relevant. What conditions this selection is, of course, a matter of what the analyst is attempting to describe. Consequently, the same language acts might give rise to different analyses. Any analysis, furthermore, might give rise to an "art" of rhetoric. By "art of rhetoric" I mean that body of knowledge about "the rhetoric people use" that results from its analysis. Not only does this "art" constitute a selection of features, but it also constitutes the arrangement of those features into a pattern or hierarchy of significance. Aristotle's "ethos," "pathos," and "logos" were the result of such an analysis, and his apparent preference for "logos" was the result of such an arrangement. Aristotle also adopted the standard categories of "forensic," "deliberative," and "epideictic" as a means of arranging knowledge of the activity of making speeches. These categories persisted among rhetoricians in the Latin tradition, while many of his other categories proved less useful to others' analytic purposes and disappeared for centuries (see Conley13-17). Any body of knowledge that can be abstracted by means of analysis can be taught by means of prescription. Consequently, teaching is the means by which knowledge of what does happen in discourse (according to a given analysis) is transformed into the creation of symbolic actions that are purposeful recreations of that knowledge. The category I have called "the 'art' of rhetoric people use" is distinguished from the one I have called "the rhetoric people use" because in the former case the resulting discourse is a product of what the person has learned about the "art." In this case, notice that most of the dots I have enclosed in the circle (the features of such productions) are orderly, while a few random ones occur. I have done this to indicate that no matter how self-consciously one attempts to put a body of knowledge about composing into action, the result will contain features that are not accounted for by that body of knowledge. One reason for this is the partiality of the "art" in the first place, in relation to all the possibilities of "the rhetoric people use." But another reason is that the teaching of any "art," and hence the application of its principles, will itself be partial. No one can speak or write in such a way that every feature of the "art" one is attempting to perform will be realized. "The 'art' of rhetoric people use" is not restricted to school exercises, but is restricted to those symbolic actions one performs for the sake of learning to use them. Hence, in addition to school exercises, the category might contain those kinds of performances, or parts of performances, that one does after study of the principles involves. But there comes a time when one no longer self-consciously applies the principles that are prescribed by teachers (from the principles described by analysts), and goes on to use whatever means are at one's command to get a job of discourse done. This is what I mean by "practice," the actual creating of discourse, with whatever has been learned by application, internalized to whatever degree it will or can be. The result, of course, will return us, theoretically, to "the rhetoric people use." But this time around, presumably, that rhetoric will include a slightly different mix of orderly and random bits. But at any rate, what was artificial has become "natural" by virtue of being used for real, as opposed to imitative, purposes. The cycle I have described may be seen as a way to account for the variety of rhetoric used and taught, since different features will emerge from analysis, teaching, and practice to result in different permutations of form. It might be used, furthermore, to account for the way in which people's abilities to perform symbolic actions change as a result of the influence of prescriptive application. It might even be used to account for the endless inventiveness of rhetoricians, teachers, and practitioners and their attempts to keep up with each other. But for the purposes of the present essay, it might account for the variety of ways that composition and rhetoric intersect, since at each of the critical points one of composition's meaning might be used in place of one of rhetoric's. The fact that one or the other feels more right at any given point on the chart simply indicates that we have grown accustomed to the terms having certain familiar connotations, even though we find it difficult to defend them. Rhetoric, for instance, seems to me to "belong" in the circles, while composition seems to me to "belong" on the chart in association with the activities of "teaching," "practice," and (with less certainty) "analysis." In this case, the terms would be mutually informing and complementary. And they would need not be confined to one of the narrow meanings cited earlier to have this reciprocity.
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