Fragment on Rhetoric

One of the tragedies that the advent of modernity caused is the gradual neglect of rhetoric as an academic discipline. This abandonment of rhetoric has caused a proliferation of misguided and mis-aligned concepts to emerge as "explanations" for the current state of discourse, Internet-based or otherwise (i.e. "fake news," "post-truth," "conspiracy theory," etc.). This, I think, is symptomatic of the prevailing ideology that delimits the horizon of topics that are available to contemporary discourse; that we unconsciously assume that the speaker in front of us possesses the same experiences, ideas, and faculties as us (in other words, under the aegis of Western formulation of individuality, which is implicitly race-, class-, and gender-coded) is a prime example of this.

Two contributions by a pair of diverging philosophical schools has opened the right path for the re-entry of rhetoric: Marxist social criticism, with the concept of "ideology," as it is perfected by both Althusser and Žižek; and the ordinary language philosophy practiced, in particular, by J.L. Austin, specifically his taxonomy of utterances (the constantive and the performative; the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of a speech act).

Another strand of thought worth considering is the practice of esotericism. The particular concepts that are worthy of attention are the usage of silence and indirect speech as modes of communication. These have seen use by prominent philosophers (Wittgenstein used the former to end his first book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, while Heidegger used the latter after the Kehre in his career), but we must excavate these tropes to their source, and to assess the prevalence of the esoteric mode of speech in contemporary discourse.