I am Matthew Williams and You are Not

The goal of C. Glenn's Rhetoric Retold is to re-imagine, remap, and rewrite the history of rhetoric to include the role, impact, and influence of women. This is more than mere "tokenism" as her task is to not just simply "include" women, but to join the task of inclusion with the task of retelling. For Glenn, a rhetoric that includes the influences of women cannot be the same rhetoric that excludes them. The act of including women means reconfiguring how we understand the history of Rhetoric. To do so, she considers three methods: plotting resistant readings by women and men of the paternal narrative, consideration of female authored rhetorical works compared to male-authored works, and broadening definitions of rhetoric to move it an exclusionary to an inclusionary enterprise (4). From there, she considers three angles by which these methodologies can be understood: historiography (questions how one defines "rhetorical history), feminism (situating females within the rhetorical tradition), and gender studies (understanding gender not as a hierarchy but as a category of understanding and interpretation) (4). The results of such scholarship are pretty straightforward to Glenn: "I had to come to an understanding of what I wanted my map, my history, to do. I wanted to challenge the male-dominated story of rhetoric by telling a story of Aspasia that illustrated just how the various renditions of her configure an emblem of Woman (and women) in rhetorical history. I wanted to tap many of the same secondary sources that have validated Socrates, for whom we have no primary sources" (5).

While the rewards of Glenn's project are, without doubt, sorely needed, Glenn herself is not deaf to the possible risks and dangers inherent in her project. As she notes, "We must risk, then, getting the story crooked. We must look crookedly, a bit out of focus, into the various strands of meaning in a text in such a way as to make the categories, trends, and reliable identities of history a little less inevitable, less familiar" (7). It is exactly this risk of "getting the story crooked" that threatens the rewards of such scholarship. Glenn herself recalls the debate of Schiappa and Poulakos and is cognizant of the risks. But, for her part, "[she] wanted and needed to see sophistic rhetoric so that [she] could see beyond it, beyond the Sophists, beyond the scraps of texts that have insufficiently represented them" (8). But this want and need of Glenn's does not dismiss the objections raised by Schiappa in regards to sophistic rhetoric.

The problem Schiappa sees with those who were pushing for a theory of "sophistic rhetoric" is that this definition or theory is not supported by actual historical "fact." For him, the danger is larger than just getting the facts wrong. If we accept loose standards as to what is "true," then "…Ronald Reagan's history of the Vietnam War is as reliable as that of Stanley Karnow, and his account of the Iran-ContraAffair is as good as that of Bill Moyers" (Sophistic 13). Instead, some sort of foundationally grounded standard must be retained so that we can compare and evaluate competing interpretations. In Glenn's case, one might object to her entire project by claiming it is only through our own contemporary needs, desires, and interpretive frameworks can she even begin to speculate on the role that women such as Aspasia and Diotima had in forming rhetorical theories later spoken by men. It is a leap of conjecture that is not supported all that strongly by the written record we have to work with. Of course, as Glenn herself notes, this conveniently overlooks the fact that we have done exactly that with Socrates (who left no written record himself) for the past 2,000 years (8).

For his part, Schiappa seems to be confounded as to why we would want to put history into service for contemporary needs when we should really "skip the detour and move directly to the contemporary sites of social and political struggle" (14). I don't think Schiappa would, as a whole, object to Glenn's work. Later in his essay, he does write that "If we want to empower certain contemporary discourses with identifying labels, then let us use labels that are more straightforward: feminist rhetoric, oppositional discourse, and cultural critique are three examples" (15) . His beef seems to be mostly with the label "sophistic" as completely and wholly ahistorically constructed. Yet, the fact that Glenn's work uses "sophistic rhetoric" as a rather important starting point is troublesome. Troublesome because it suggests that if we are to agree with Schiappa, then work like Glenn's will always have to carry the moniker "feminist rhetoric" as opposed to just "rhetoric." The term "rhetoric," of course, need not state what is becoming obvious, which is when we say "rhetoric" we are really saying "masculinist rhetoric." Whether or not Schiappa intends it, forcing the term "sophistic rhetoric" to instead be labeled "neosophistic" or "modern sophistic" denies access to the privileged and institutionally validated area of the "History of Rhetoric." While this may seem benign, when we apply the same principle to Glenn's work, the results become simply incommensurable with our current, contemporary understandings of ethics and morality. Cheryl Glenn is more interested in using her angles to "identify previously unseen and unconsidered problems of 'foundational' knowledge, in this case the tradition of rhetorical history. Therefore, 'The History of Rhetoric' is quickly displaced by questions. Whose history? Whose rhetoric? Which rhetoric? All necessary challenges to a canon that continues to be so unrelentingly elite and male" (5). If Glenn's attempts to rewrite, regender, and remap the History of Rhetoric are relegated to be labeled "feminist rhetoric" or "contemporary ahistorical feminist interpretations of the rhetorical canon" (which, is what they are), then the very precepts Glenn is attempting to challenge are upheld and (masculinist)Rhetoric once again wins the day. Or, to put it more starkly, this enforcement of labeling reasserts the masculine hierarchy that "feminist" rhetorics (rightfully) seek to destroy by naming these rhetorics as being something other (and potentially outside and lesser) than Rhetoric.

Another way of looking into the danger of constructing hierarchies through labels is to consider the dispute over the role of intention in historical scholarship, not only the intention of the scholar, but the (assumed) intent of the writers being studied. For example, Aristotle did not intend to create and offer a justification for slavery that could be used by others, but just happened to discuss it while discussing different constitutions in his Politics. So can we use this discussion of slavery against Aristotle? The consensus seems to be we can, as long as we are clear that we're not actually talking about Aristotle, but something outside of the text. Or, that we're using the texts for something other than what they were originally intended to be used for. I get the feeling that this is why Glenn spends considerable time discussing her method at the outset of her book. And, in one sense, this seems prudent. If we are to forget the role of intent when considering other writers, we run the risk of distorting, ruining, and misunderstanding what another writer means. No one wants their own words to be taken out of context and used against them. Because Aristotle died a couple thousand years ago, does that make it acceptable to do the same to him when we'd never do it to a colleague who works down the hall? Yet, using Aristotle as a means to understand and reinterpret things we currently believe about slavery (and perhaps race) might be incredibly beneficial to shedding light on situations that perplex us. If we must continually declare this is what we're doing, how much is enough? And, by apologizing for doing this sort of scholarship, do we undermine the persuasiveness of the work by instantaneously claiming that, while this might be interesting historical scholarship, it is not Historical Scholarship in all its privileged form? In my own opinion, I fear that we do. That the gold standard of historical scholarship stays within the text, and other methods utilize an unholy mixture of historical texts washed through current political wants and desires. Glenn's scholarship, since it requires our contemporary understandings of how gender functions, or starts with an admittedly political agenda of reinserting women into the canon, fails this test: too much post-modernism, not enough New Criticism.

For Schiappa, "we need not turn to Athens to find strategies of oppression and marginalization; we need only look around us" (14) Granted. But what Glenn seems to realize is that understanding the Rhetorical History as a history of oppression, silence, and marginalization gives us an incredibly powerful platform from which to understand how one history (Rhetoric) has and continues to tell the story from only one perspective. And it is exactly this empowered platform that contemporary struggles against (masculinist)Rhetoric can begin to succeed. Telling a different story of rhetoric, enabled by contemporary understandings, wants, and needs, allows this to happen. To disallow these retellings to dwell in the same space as Rhetoric protects more than we ultimately may want to protect.