Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies

Networks, Affect, Electracy

Sean Morey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317407089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Rhetorik

This book theorizes digital logics and applications for the rhetorical canon of delivery. Digital writing technologies invite a re-evaluation about what delivery can offer to rhetorical studies and writing practices. Sean Morey argues that what delivery provides is access to the unspeakable, unconscious elements of rhetoric, not primarily through emotion or feeling as is usually offered by previous studies, but affect, a domain of sensation implicit in the (overlooked) original Greek term for delivery, hypokrisis. Moreover, the primary means for delivering affect is both the logic and technology of a network, construed as modern, digital networks, but also networks of associations between humans and nonhuman objects. Casting delivery in this light offers new rhetorical trajectories that promote its incorporation into digital networked-bodies. Given its provocative and broad reframing of delivery, this book provides original, robust ways to understand rhetorical delivery not only through a lens of digital writing technologies, but all historical means of enacting delivery, offering implications that will ultimately affect how scholars of rhetoric will come to view not only the other canons of rhetoric, but rhetoric as a whole.

Part I
What is Delivery?

I imagine one day viewing a biopic on Demosthenes. His story, at least what we know of it, has all the dramatic elements to make an uplifting story, but also a tragic one. Although born into a fairly wealthy family, Demosthenes loses his parents while he was a young boy and stands helpless as his uncles steal and squander his inheritance (initial obstacle for the hero to overcome). As he grows to young adulthood, he schemes to take his uncles to court and sue them to recoup what they have taken. However, due to his speech impediment, he must work hard to overcome his physical limitations. During his youth, he watches the great orators of his time: Callistratus, Isocrates, and Isaeus, noting their intonations, gestures, facial features, word choices, lines of argument, figures of speech, appeals to emotion, use of clothing. This film might even include a Rockyesque montage: Demosthenes shouting to the surf, speaking with pebbles in his mouth, exercising to increase his endurance, practicing with the various contraptions he builds to improve his posture, and writing and rewriting speeches. Ultimately, Demosthenes wins against his uncles, and the next act begins.

Such a story reveals much about Demosthenes himself, but also the work that goes into delivery before one ever sets foot before the assembly. Delivery requires a materiality, a physicality, a development, a network. This film would show the interplay of actors and audiences in a rhetorical situation, how exigency emerges for a young boy who is treated unfairly, and how rhetorical engagement can be used to solve problems (Demosthenes doesn’t seek to revengefully murder his uncles in some Shakespearian fashion; he sues them). This anecdote, of course, only presents the first act of the story, and so this section presents only the first part of a new narrative about delivery, itself only a part of rhetoric as a whole. Given what I write in the introduction, the overall goal of this book is to investigate what an electrate delivery could look like. While Ulmer devotes most of his writing to invention and memory (and to some degree, implicitly, arrangement and style), he never addresses delivery directly (although one could argue, as I will at the end of the book, that his latest projects—Electronic Monuments and Avatar Emergency—skirt this canon). What, then, are some of the conditions for an electrate delivery that is emerging as we speak, a development that needs some investigation if electracy can (or should) make use of this part of rhetoric.

However, before further exploring some of these implications, we have to ask and attend to a basic question (not that we will answer it fully): What is delivery? We have to start with this question since it’s one that is hardly asked when making theoretical claims about delivery. Other arguments about delivery often take as given that delivery has some underlying essence, or make basic assumptions that link delivery to classical constructions, a definition through which current theorizations are made, attempting to extend the definition into modern writing technologies and practices. However, if we ask what delivery is all by itself, outside of any particular writing technology, how might we answer (could we answer)?

If we were to ask a modern-day Demosthenes about the most important aspect of rhetoric—assuming it’s still delivery—how would she answer? What would the thrice-spoken term be? To ask these questions also requires that we have some criteria for identifying a digital Demosthenes, which I explore in part II. This section, however, explores “delivery” as a term that needs to be declassified, reclassified, and finally re-Classified. Part I probes this question through several routes. Toward reclassifying, the first chapter offers a choragraphic approach to tease out the different ways we understand the term “delivery” and interrogate what those meanings tell us about delivery as a rhetorical or communicative act. As a whole, this section is also conductive, a mode of inference that operates in tandem with choragraphy. As Ulmer explains, conduction provides a fourth mode of inference to supplement induction, deduction, and abduction. As a particularly electrate logic, conduction will help push the limits of theorizing delivery and open a few new avenues. Even if some of these paths prove to be dead ends, the scenery helps us to think about delivery’s potential (and how it can be made kinetic). Chapter 2 then rethinks the classical Greek term hypokrisis—which, like delivery, is often oversimplified and without rigorous investigation—and examines its overlooked meanings to reveal what has been missing from many conversations about delivery.

1 Declassifying Delivery

Delivery, also known as hypokrisis, actio, or elocution, has suffered from a sort of disciplinary schizophrenia over the millennia.

—Ben McCorkle¹

When you’re writing, you are robbed of your delivery.

—Calvin Trillin

In his chapter about delivery in Lingua Fracta, Collin Brooke suggests that—due to a keynote address by Andrea Lunsford, Kathleen Blake Yancey’s collection Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon, and articles by James Porter and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss—“we are rapidly approaching a time where we can dispense with prefacing discussions of delivery by bemoaning its neglect.”² Approaching, perhaps, but we have still not arrived. Proportionally, given the number of books traditionally written about the other canons, delivery is neglected, but I do not bemoan this—there are good grammatological reasons why delivery is (and has been) neglected. However, I do agree with Brooke when he writes, “One of the factors that interferes with our ability to reconceive delivery in light of new media, however, is our tendency to view the canon through the lens of our commonsense definition of the term.”³ Indeed, if we are to take into account Burke’s concept of the terministic screen, the term delivery limits how we understand the rhetorical action based not only on the commonplace definition, but the very term itself, now bogged down by transitive understandings of delivery even as Brooke attempts to break them out with his treatment of delivery as performance.

Brooke also notes how easy the transitive and intransitive forms of delivery can be conflated; that is, the delivery of an object versus the delivery of an action. Although I’m sensitive to the need for terminological tidiness—to avoid conflating similar terms or misusing terms—my intention is to conflate and deflate all (or many) of the ways that we understand the term delivery and what each of those deliveries might entail for how we could or should understand delivery as a rhetorical act. Working conductively and choragraphically, I examine all these meanings already in the English term delivery and terminologically untidy them for a moment. While the rest of this chapter gets messy, I hope the mess provides necessary muck to fill in some gaps.

Delivery Unleashed

One sense of delivery refers to “the action of setting free,” often in the term deliverance. One who delivers in this sense is either freeing herself, or perhaps freeing another. The deliverer, then, performs a hero function (assuming that this freeing is a good thing, or perhaps at least from the perspective of the one who is bound). Heracles delivers Prometheus from his suffering of being de-livered, a punishment predicated on another kind of delivery, giving fire (knowledge) to humans. Princess Leia was rescued, and thus delivered from Darth Vader, by Luke, Han, and Chewbacca. The sinner finds deliverance through the grace of his deity or the religious intuition that supports Him or Her. This kind of delivery often occurs in death as the soul finds deliverance from the body and is free to leave. Traditional gospel music, such as the song “Deliverance Will Come” (also called “Palms of Victory” and “The Way-worn Traveler”), frequently employs the figure of Christ as the deliverer of pain and suffering via a passage to heaven after a long life of suffering. The physicality of the body, its ability to be delivered, to be restricted from deliverance, and its ability to suffer, play important roles in the act of delivery. This physical journey may be one reason why James Dickey chose “Deliverance” for the title of his book, for the quartet of men undergoes a variety of physical trials and tribulations.

However, this deliverance also occurs in the middle voice, especially in classical Athens. If accused in a court of law, Athenians could not have lawyers speak for them, but instead had to speak for themselves. Alan Boegehold discusses the need for ordinary citizens taken to court to show at least a cursory understanding of delivery, “to look as well as sound as though they were themselves, i.e., private citizens pushed into court through no fault of their own and certainly not through any specially developed skills.”⁴ Such citizens needed to act without art, as they would in any public or private space outside of court and not seem like they were keen on delivery. If they were expert, or had some tutelage in delivery, then they needed to hide it, appearing to be absent of delivery while enacting a purposeful craft of delivery. Thus, we might say that delivery happens underneath or behind the curtain—it has to remain hidden. Their speech had to contain an unspoken element of delivery (which is, of course, itself a mode of delivery).

The relationship between the written word and public performance also had to mirror this subterfuge. As Alcidamas notices, “those who write for the lawcourts seek to avoid this pedantic precision [of writing], and imitate the style of extempore speakers; and they make the most favorable impression when their speeches least resemble written discourses. Now, since speeches seem most convincing when they imitate extemporaneous speakers, should we not especially esteem that kind of training which shall readily give us ability in this form of speaking?”⁵ Here, we can surmise that Alcidamas prefers the fluid, though sometimes discontinuous delivery of unrehearsed, unprepared speech, or as Boegehold writes, “utterances that are not in tight compliance with the rules of syntax defining formal written prose: it is a medium in which sentences can change subjects in mid-course and where whole clauses can be left to the improvisatory skills of a litigant/performer, to be expressed by gesture, or not.”⁶ Demosthenes, in On the Crown, had to deliver for himself why he was worthy of such an undemocratic gesture by Ctesiphon. However, he could not directly deliver for someone else through his own speech but instead helped others’ delivery through his work as a logographer, offering words he could not speak himself, much as Cyrano wrote the words that Christian delivered to Roxane in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Delivery as freeing, then, is not transitive in the sense that some “thing” is delivered to someone else, but a condition that makes possible some other action or outcome. Rhetorical delivery is not simply the transmission of information from a rhetor to an audience, but laying out the conditions by which the audience may discover or realize deliverance, whatever this means for their particular situation. Like Prometheus, the deliverer may help spark an insight that frees a blockage toward solving a particular problem. The act of delivery might also unburden the deliverer, allowing her to finally speak her mind, free a weight from her chest, or any other metaphors we use when describing the outpouring of an uncontainable utterance. Of course, we usually don’t think of delivery as only such uttering, as only speaking or writing for an audience, but doing so with some technique in mind that goes beyond speaking. Delivery, even in this one way of understanding the term, becomes a more nuanced and multi-stage process than we might initially consider for the rhetorical act, whether live before an audience or through the clicks of a mouse. Or, as Raúl Sánchez suggests about writing, delivery, like writing and bound up in and with writing, is not simply representational of thought, speech, or reality, even though it initially seems to serve a representational function. Instead, Sánchez writes that the “most salient feature of writing is therefore not its representational function but its ability to proceed as if it has a representational function.”⁷ As I will explore in the last chapter, delivery’s ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Rebirth of Delivery
• PART I What is Delivery?
• PART II Who Delivers?
• PART III How to Deliver?
• Postscript: The Death of Delivery (and Other Transitions)
• Index