Ç THE SAME THING BUT WITH MOVIES | Main | A REVIEW OF FLESH AND BLOOD BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM È
July 15, 2008
I HAVE A MASTERS IN ARTS
I passed my thesis defense! With flying colors (or with colors, I suppose; there were no letter grades, but everybody gave me the "passed with no corrections" deal. In order to prepare (in the height of some anxiety), I decided to prepare a spiel that would explain my thesis: my introduction to the subject, why I chose it, how it evolved, and a general summary. It's probably pretty sloppy, but here 'tis:
(I imagine this will become the least-read blog post in the history of Andytown, which will rank it among the least important cultural documents in the history of the world)
As part of a Senior-level colloquium I was teaching at Westminster Academy, I more or less stumbled on THE FEDERALIST PAPERS. The class was a pretty ambitious hodge-podge of ethics, aesthetics, philosophy, epistemology, religion, science, economics, existentialism, and of course, politics. A sample oral essay question that might be asked on a semester exam asked the students to postulate what might happen if, rather than four self-righteous Hebrews, were confronted by John Stuart Mill, Aristotle, and Nietzsche. How would they counsel Job? It was highly ambitious, mildly successful, and as a part of a four-teacher panel, I got more out of it than any of the students, particularly when I re-engaged FEDERALIST 10.
FEDERALIST 10 struck me on several levels: initially as an ur-text of the type of libertarian principles that I went around badgering my friends with at bars. But mostly I was pleased with James Madison as I would be a student writing a paper for one of my classes: he made an argument; he defined his terms; he knew his history and anticipated rebuttals.
It took me a while to wrap my head around Publius, and as I proceeded to devour both the PAPERS in their entirety and Ralph Ketcham's dry but meticulous biography of Madison, I learned more about the later schism between Madison and his FP co-author Alexander Hamilton. That made the concept of Publius - a pseudonym that sacrificed personal claims to authorship for the sake of a consensual argument. As a trope, it was fascinating. Publius was not only arguing representation, he was representation - in his existence, he was providing of the very thing he hoped to see actualized in the Republic.
And so, rather than reading Publius just as a justification for my libertarian tendencies, I began to see him as an ideal rhetorician. As I began to dive more into the eighteenth century and its rhetorical practices, and became obsessed with the battles between philosophy and rhetoric (particularly through the perplexing lens of Immanuel Kant), I realized that Publius was carrying on a tradition that embodied both classical rhetorical practices as well as established rhetorical ideals - papers like #37, where Publius established the need for "perspicuity" and yet noted that there was an "unavoidable inaccuracy" in language finds itself in the rhetorical mid-section I found as characteristic of the mid 18th century. The Lockean/Royal Society arguments against rhetoric and movement toward a language of certainty became the impetus for projects like Blair's Belles-Lettres, Reid's Common Sense, and, in America, John Witherspoon's lectures at Princeton. When I found that Witherspoon's most apt pupil was one James Madison, I knew I was on to something.
It was then that I began asking, how does Publius persuade? What was Publius' strategy? Who is Publius responding to, and what inspired his style? This led me to Blair, Witherspoon, Addison, and modern scholars like Sandra Gustafson and Michael Warner whose extensive examinations of the discursive projects of the 18th Century tell us much about the way power was established through publication and public presentation in the public sphere.
I was struggling, I admit, because my initial secret motive was to elevate James Madison as a writer over the despotic-minded Hamilton. But I realized this contradicted my project as whole - to show that two men of wildly different backgrounds and contradictory beliefs could nonetheless come together to argue for the same principle.
But with anonymity, how does that change the rhetorical strategy? The pseudonym, as I note in my paper, was not Madison, Hamilton, and Jay's invention, but it comes at a time when such anonymity was used for literary, rather than deliberative purpose. But the use of published works to establish persona, I found, was a common tactic among 18th Century writers - from Jonathan Edwards' manipulation of David Brainerd's posthumously published diaries to Franklin's numerous ironic advice columns. There seemed to be an effort to create character, in a rhetorical sense, of the ethos necessary not only for the assemblyman but also the citizen. What Publius was doing was not only presenting a political argument, but arguing rhetorical values. As I note in the text, in a point I may have articulated crudely, but that most reflects my subjective feeling toward both my approach to the project and the Papers as a text, is that by liking the text, you like Publius. This corresponds to Aristotle's guiding notion that character is produced not only through past deeds, but also through the vehicle of the speech itself. Madison and Hamilton had character, but they were also associated with the (symbolic) aristocratic robes they wore in public. Publius, on the other hand, had none of this. His ethos was the speech itself, and this became a unique way to look at rhetoric, as both theory and a model.
But what was Publius up to? It wasn't until I read the passage from #15 that became the basis for my title and chapter structure that I realized he was telling me what he wanted to do. To be a guide holding a light on a road gave me the categories I needed. The light was his rhetoric, the road was his narrative, his role as a guide the persona he wanted to establish.
My first chapter, on The Light, was informative, but ultimately unoriginal. All I was doing was restating the practices of the period. I admit I got lost on this. I originally wanted to begin with Phaedrus and Plato's symbolic lovers, work my way through Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine, the rhetoric curriculums of the Renaissance, and end with the 18th Century tension between certainty and symbol that found its synthesis in Hugh Blair and John Witherspoon. This has formed the basis of a future project, but ultimately was the most distracting of all the chapters I chose to write. I became so fascinated with the history as reported by Thomas Conley and Brian Vickers that I wanted to retell the story they had already told. But it still fit my thesis, and the FP found a stylistic medium that the eighteenth century found necessary.
My second chapter came out of my full reading of all the Papers. After reading 1-10, I noticed that Madison's paper was not only the most articulate political analysis perhaps in American history, but also the solution to the problems that 1-9 outlined. The papers, while harried and rushed, still gave me some sense that it was a narrative. But as I started asking myself questions about the validity of this theory, I realized the complexity of the question I was asking, and the potential it offered in reading the papers: was I reading the narrative because I was conditioned to read narratives, or were the Papers genuinely structured in such a way? I turned to two theorists on different ends of the spectrum - Roland Barthes are Gerald Genette (the latter recommended by my advisor). Both offered the possibilities I was looking for and, while, what I ended up with is a question I may have never answered (I admit I rode the fence), I believe I definitely found the potential for texts like the FP to take the form of a narrative, even by the stylings of its day. In its similarity to a jeremiad, it offers the move from sin to salvation - a narrative move if there ever was one. This chapter is an introduction to something I will continue to explore; it is fascinating the way public rhetoric can be read as a narrative even if it isn't, but also there's the possibility that these brilliant thinkers, in all their foresight and planning, realized the narrative progression that Barthes sees as innately structural. And further, that they realized the progression and sequencing (Barthesian terms) were necessary to their mode of persuasion.
Finally, and this was my original point, I wanted to explore the motive of Publius. Was there some goal behind his writing other than just to persuade a form of government or a constitutional agenda? As I continued to read, I decided that Publius was modeling the rhetoric he wanted to establish for his new nation, and that was built in the "candid" climate of a Republic rather than the chaos of a democratic assembly. I've spoken about this already, but much of this has to do with Kenneth Burke's concept of identification as a central (if not THE central) motive of rhetoric - that in rhetoric the speaker passes off shared values that cause an audience to identify, and that identification leads to persuasion. And taking that into consideration, as well as the nascent tendency for publication to influence personality (or try to), made me see the agenda of Publius as something more than political. It was rhetorical. What was remarkable to me, as I noted at the beginning, was that the politics and rhetoric were so ideologically cohesive, strangely so; each required the other. The philosophy of the new breed of American republicanism could be converted into a rhetoric suitable for its continued existence, and in writing that, Publius could model that rhetoric.
In his closing letter, Publius asks us to judge the success of his project. I chose to avoid the typical debates - its influence over ratification, its validity as constitutional interpretation, its political theory and influences, its aristocratic intentions. For me, Publius is first and foremost a rhetorician, and one of the best of his kind.
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