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cal grammar is involved in both. In any case the similarities may help restore some of the dynamic power to Greek literary theory which has been weighted down by centuries of formalistic investigations of the classics and their co-option by conservative political and educational systems. |
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A case in point is how modern treatments of ancient rhetoric emphasise the purely analytical aspects of its study in the later Greco-Roman world. Yet its origins in fifth-century Greece indicate that rhetoric was originally conceived as a mechanism of power in the emergent democracies. The significance of the "science" of oratory was not lost on Thucydides, Plato, or Isocrates: the Word was intended to master, not just map, the world. The term "Persuasion" only masks what we nowadays might describe as the imposition of ''hegemony" (à la Gramsci) or "privileging" or (in different times) "hypnosis" or "brain-washing" it is au fond the exercise of power through any language but the language of physical violence. Gorgias had frankly described it as "force" and compared it to magic or the administration of drugs in his exculpation of Helen. The dilution of the prime purpose of oratory and rhetoric in the later etiolated analyses of rhetorical handbooks and the unreal exercises of the schools is analogous to the change in the purpose of Science from mastering (Bacon would say "torturing") the physical world to the supposedly disinterested enquiries of "pure" research. |
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The excessive concern of ancient critics after Plato and Aristotle with the stylistic analysis of poetry and prose, especially oratory, substituted the study of the means for the study of the end. This was sometimes protested, but even those protests, as Tacitus's Dialogus makes clear, had to recognise the underlying realities of power, hierarchy, and even censorship inherent in the new political vocabularies. Aristotle's intensive analysis of the art of rhetoric was prompted by the belief that the techne of oratory is at the service of political ends, not least the class struggle between rich and poor endemic in every civic polity, as he frequently points out in his Politics (e.g. 1226a). The power of words could be the impulse to political change, as is evident enough in Thucydides' analysis of the corruption of language in the interests of revolution and reaction. The historian remarks in his description of the prototypical Corcyrean revolution: "to fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings" (3.5).42 |
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If knowledge is power, then mastery of the definition of knowledge would confer even greater power. Who controls the language controls the forms of thinking about politics (and everything else) in privileging certain terms over others. Political discourse has action as its ultimate end, and the inhibiting of free speech is effectively a deterrent to political action, whether as promulgated in Plato's ideal Republic or as lamented by Tacitus in his discussion of the decay of political theory under autocracy. |
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42 For a discussion of Thucydides' (and Gorgias') belief that language was to be used for mastering the world of events, see Parry (1970) 15. |
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