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| It would be nice, though, if we could be surer of these distinctions. Another way to go about the task is to try to describe one valid relation between rhetoric and composition while acknowledging the difficulty as well as the limitations of doing so. If there is any commonality at all in the definitions and redefinitions of rhetoric that populate the historical tradition, it seems to me to be in the shared assumption of a teleological point of view. Whatever differences prevail, rhetorical descriptions and prescriptions share the principle that the province of rhetoric is what is done in discourse according to the needs of some kind of purpose, end, or intended effect. Them are many things one could say about discourse, or inquire into, that no rhetoricians--or anybody else studying discourse as such--has ever bothered with, such as: "How many times does this speech use the letter L?" or "Why is it that my text of Cicero's Verrine orations has chocolate stains on page 97?" or "What is the product of the number of nouns on the left-hand margin multiplied by the number of verbs on the righthand margin?" or "Why does the word aluminum never appear in the Old Testament?" These are questions that have answers. Nothing is stopping anyone from asking and answering them, or millions of others of equal irrelevance. Many questions might legitimately be asked about discourse by sociologists, typesetters, bookbinders, proprietors of bookshops, tax accountants, or recyclers, from their respective interests, that would be of no necessary interest to a rhetorician. Why? Because the rhetorician, despite an equally diverse range of interests in discourse, restricts those interests to aspects of the work that may be assumed to have been under the control of an author for the purpose of attaining some end. Whether the rhetoric in question is the way in which the discourse responds to a situation, the way in which the argument is invented, the way in which the language is constructed, or the way in which the nouns and verbs are proportioned (or any other way), the kind of inquiry that deals with rhetorical features chooses those features for discussion on the assumption that they constitute a way. The assumption most basic to a rhetorical point of view, then, is the assumption of authorial control (however that is defined) over the possible or available ways in which the discourse might be constructed in order to make a difference. (I do not intend this description to preclude usages such as "social rhetoric," "class rhetoric," or "gender rhetoric," since such phrases will designate, at some level, the productions of authors circumscribed by the society, class, or gender. Indeed, rhetoric in this sense already acknowledges that authorship is a social construct.) "Make a difference" for whom? In addition to the assumption that the means of discourse are chosen by a writer as a way of attaining some kind of end, rhetoricians tend to assume that that end is situated in the response of an audience, whether it is a desired response or a potential one. Rhetoric, by this analysis, is about the relation of authorially controllable means to the end of potential and possible responses by an audience. This composite definition is not one that I want to say, again, constitutes what rhetoric really means. But few, if any, treatments of rhetoric are without this teleological perspective. If this is the case, rhetoric can indeed encompass all of the features of discourse, potentially. But it will encompass them from the point of view of their relation to the whole purpose for which they are adapted. Rhetoric, as a perspective, entails a process of reasoning down from wholes to functional parts. Rhetoric sees parts in terms of wholes. Composition applies to more than just the composition of discourse and in such applications always implies an action of building up, or putting together. The word comes to us as the noun form of the Latin verb componere, to put together. In the OED, the first meaning listed is "the action of putting together or combining. . . of things as parts or elements of a whole." Thus, it refers as well to the building of a box or a chair out of a specified number and kinds of parts, as it does to the building of an essay (or poem) out of an indefinite number and kind of parts. But parts, as such, constitute the material on which composing is performed. Composition also potentially encompasses all the features of discourse insofar as they can be built upon and combined with other features. The result is a whole. But the perspective of composition entails a process of reasoning up from constituent parts to wholes. Composition sees wholes in term of parts. Subject to all the vagaries of logomachy I have reviewed in this essay, this difference at least accords implicitly with many of the usages that prevail, and may well provide a way of distinguishing them without imposing unintended meanings on them. If this is not the case, then this distinction at least provides us with a justification for continuing to use the phrase rhetoric and composition without reducing either term or without meaning something other than and. Both terms by this means keep their largeness. But they keep their difference also. If each perspective, as a mode of reasoning, illuminates the other, then neither will supplant the other. In these senses, any mode of composition will be as good as the rhetoric that justifies it, and any mode of rhetoric will be as good as the composition it enables. This does not solve the inherent problem of ambiguity, of course, but it may rescue the field of rhetoric and composition from the need to solve it. |
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