Common Places and commonplace

I've just received an interesting looking book 'Eloquence du Roman' by Cristelle Reggiani.

As my French is very new and very poor, I'm reading it veeeerry slowly.

However it is interesting that she focuses on the common places as the central pedagogic vehicle for learning/teaching rhetoric as a method of inventio. And so when the Common Places are reframed as commonplaces, ie as public cliches that do not express the inner subjectivity or uniqueness of an author, rhetoric is positioned as the enemy of discourse. The explicit pedagogy of rhetoric is seen to be mechanical, rigid, and cliched - because it is explicit. By contrast, true expression is natural and untutored, from the soul/esprit, and an expression of pure meaning-making uncontaminated by language or language training.

[For those unfamiliar with traditional rhetoric, Common Places referred to a practice of having Headings for finding ideas. Places were where you went to invent ideas needed for a speech or text. The Places that were common were generic and applied to any situation or discursive setting, compared with Special Places that were domain specific. Common Places were headed as questions: How When Where Why What for In whose interests? etc or under very general headings: person, act, motive, purpose, circumstances etc. Places did not provide an answer; they are not encyclopedia entries. They provide a question or angle for looking at the matter at issue.]

However, it is important to note that during the Renaissance, the practice of Commonplace Books developed, whereby students were encouraged to collect short pithy quotes under a whole range of likely headings. Erasmus is the key figure in this development I think.

So perhaps we really do have here the practice of places/topio as a method of invention being materially transformed into the intertextual practice of collecting quotes for rote learning or copying. In other words a change in the medium of inscription changing the meaning and use of a practice: from Common Places to commonplace books to commonplace ideas.


So, too in English there is a shift from 'Common Place' to 'commonplace', just as there is from sensus communis to commonsense. Both shifts downplay the social reality of mind replacing it with a internal individualised mind.

Progymnasmata as epistemological positions

Thought:
We can think of the progymnasmata as guided training in taking up a structured path of epistemological positions (or chronotopes, bakhtin), that guide the student from the pre-ontic realm of oral rhetorical discourse (see Smith's Original Argument) to the rationalist discourse of written epistemological culture. Each genre opens up, discloses, a mode of Being-in-the-world, an angle or stance, a fundamental way of 'taking' and interpreting human life that is a 'whole', that is a liveable, inhabitable, mode of being in the world. (This is starting to feel like Hegel's dialectic ... and what's wrong with that?)

If this is in any way right, the progymnasmata should recapitulate the movement from Homer to Aristotle, a la Havelock (whom Smith explicitly adduces in his Heideggerian account of the ontological priority of rhetoric over dialectic and demonstration).

The advantage of approaching Learning academic literacy this way is that it institutes a path between oral casual conversation and theoretical discourse, rather than just positing a simple binary contrast - oral-written, verbal-nominal, static-processual, dialogic-monologic, etc.

It would also be important to compare the progymnasmata with Jim and his colleagues' efforts to unpack the developmental path of History, Science and Geography, etc. The difference is that they see this as a 'natural development' (perhaps!!), whereas the ancients viewed it as a structured pedagogy of formation of the Being-in-the-world of the student.

Capturing the traditional rhetoric curriculum

The first thing to say about the traditional rhetoric curriculum and its place in the educational spectrum of the times is that it was the ONLY curriculum. There were no others. Thus it did not define itself as concerned with some aspect or domain of reality or social life as opposed to some other curriculum that dealt with some other aspect. So rhetoric was not a discipline in the sense that we think of a discipline; that is, a specialised field of study stream-lined to deal with a limited slice of reality.

Rhetoric of the whole curriculum. It educated the whole man - yes! unfortunately, man! It was designed to produce 'men', to produce adults who could take responsibility for the world, for their people, for everything - in so far as men had a say in what was, is and will be. So, it was designed to turn boys into men, men of power, mean of words, men of action, men of thoughtfulness, men of judgment and moral responsibility, men who could disclose the issues and lineaments of a situation demanding a response, men who could win consent with their words.

- a curriculum of being, not just of knowing or acting or doing.

Starting again again??

Talking to a close friend about how my rhetoric studies no longer have a connection to my practical life and therefore have lost any motivation for pursuing in a serious way, I later thought it would be a pity not to try to squeeze something out of the studies I have done over the last few years. So, while walking into the city this morning I 'resolved' (not the shudder quotes) to begin a 'Towards a contemporary Rhetoric curriculum' here on the blog.
At least that should give me a context to keep working on it.