Bringing Aristotle back in

influenced by various factors of the given situation and the broader societal context. The speaker’s interpretive skills are prerequisite to his or her rhetorical act, and the audience’s rhetorical

capabilities are in turn inherent to the interpretation of the utterance; meaning is constituted in this dual rhetorical-hermeneutical process.

The interdependency of speaking and interpreting forms the basis of the constitutionist approach to meaning formation. In the constitutionist view social knowledge arises in situations that are always already constrained by prior knowledge and expectations as well as other contextual factors. While the constraints limit the range of possibilities available to the actors, these very limits are also what facilitates choice and as such makes action possible. When given a constitutionist foundation rhetoric is inherently interpretive, and the aim of rhetorical criticism is to understand the communicative constitution of meaning on its own terms.

careful repositioning of rhetoric within the framework of Aristotle’s general theory of knowledge formation.

Ramírez’ basic contention is that the articulation of meaning is a rhetorical praxis, that meaning is created in and through its specific formulation under particular circumstances. This claim is grounded in a re-examination of Aristotle’s understanding of knowledge. In the Aristotelian knowledge scheme there are two basic kinds of knowledge: episteme is the theoretical and certain type of knowledge that is the object of the natural sciences, and doxa is the practical kind produced in the multiple settings of social life. As mentioned earlier, Aristotle thinks rhetoric is productive of the second type of knowledge. Ramírez makes no attempt to counter this view and concentrates his investigation at the level of socially contingent knowledge formation. This level of knowledge is again divided into a productive (poíesis) and a practical (praxis) way of knowing and acting. The purpose (telos) of the former mode of knowing is the realisation of something by means of something else; the fulfilment of production lies outside the scope of the individual action, and it has technical ability (tekhne) as its form of knowledge.⁵ The latter type is conducted for its own sake, and its knowledge form is practical wisdom (phronesis)⁶ (Ramírez, 1995, p. 8). Whereas poíesis is instrumental, the performance of praxis implies the simultaneous realisation of the act and its telos, or put differently the act is the purpose. Figure 2 presents an overview of the relationships between the ways of knowing and forms of knowledge.

ACTIVITY KNOWLEDGE FORM

Figure 2: Ways of knowing and types of knowledge (adapted from Ramírez, 1995, p. 8)

Aristotle classified rhetorical knowledge and knowledge of rhetoric as tekhne (Conley, 1990, p. 14), but Ramírez argues that rhetoric also has a dimension of phronesis and thereby of

5 The typical example here is the construction of a material object. When one builds a piece of wooden furniture, for instance, the individual acts of sawing, hammering, etc. are all directed at producing the furniture, but the purpose is only realised in the finished product that exists independently of the process by which it was created.

6 Praxis is not as easy to exemplify as poíesis, but think of the declarative performatives of Austin’s famous speech act theory (‘I name this ship’), and more specifically think of the illocutionary force of an utterance as opposed to its perlocutionary consequences (Austin, 1962). The comparison with speech act theory foreshadows the important point that rhetorical acts, according to Ramírez, are simultaneously productive and practical.

Theory Episteme

Poíesis Tekhne Praxis Phronesis

D o x a

praxis. In so doing Ramírez reforms Aristotle’s notion of rhetoric, but he does so from within the broader Aristotelian categorisation of the different forms of knowledge. The connection between rhetoric and praxis is established by way of a pragmatic understanding of language according to which phronesis is articulated in logos, defined broadly as both thoughts and words. The telos of speech is the creation of meaning and as such it is realised in and through the utterance, but the rhetorical act also retains the instrumental aspect of expressing its meaning through this or that choice of words. As Ramírez puts it, “logos is the creative force, the activity which, in order to intervene in the world, must be objectified and reified. Praxis is expressed in poíesis” (Ramírez, 1995, p. 204, my translation). Meaning is not identical with the words that express it, yet it can never arise independently of the words.⁷

Having established a link between praxis and poíesis, Ramírez can redefine rhetoric as knowledge of “…how the words and the world become meaningful” (Ramírez, 1995, p. 255, my translation). In its concrete articulation the rhetorical act unites an ethical dimension with the aesthetic endeavour of expressing something by means of something else, and only in this unison does meaning arise.⁸ Or, to put the matter in the simplest possible terms, the specific meaning of an utterance is constituted in and through its unique combination of content and form. When

constructing the particular utterance the speaker chooses from a variety of different styles and arguments, and Ramírez sees these topoi – the places from where arguments and expressions are obtained – as providing an inventory of possible significances. Meaning, however, is only created as the merger of form and content in the particular moment of articulation.⁹ Thereby, the choice of topos is connected with kairos, the opportune moment, and the phronetic rhetorical act, the

communicative interaction that fulfils its own telos, may be finally defined as the choice of the right

7 The affinity between this position and the starting point of Judith Butler’s study of Excitable Speech is striking. Writes Butler: “We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both ‘what’ we do (the name for the action that we

characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences” (Butler, 1997, p. 8). While I agree perfectly with the understanding of language Butler advocates here, my analytical focus is different from hers. Butler aims at understanding the doing and its effects, whereas I wish to explain the act and its prerequisites. However, even these diverging purposes are joined in the common understanding that the explanatory aims are best met in the investigation of how acts are performed.

8 This conception has much in common with the view expressed in Thomas Farrell’s work on the relationship between rhetorical theory and social knowledge (Farrell, 1976 and 1993). Farrell’s position is of special interest to the present study because it is based on a rereading of both Aristotle’s classical rhetorical theory and Jürgen Habermas’ present-day philosophical-sociological conception of society.

9 To Ramírez, significance is the sense of an expression which can be established independently of the particular context in which the expression is employed; meaning, on the contrary, only arises through the dynamic fusion of text and context (Ramírez, 1995, p. 222). Others have defined meaning as the stable element and viewed significance as the alterable dimension (see Hyde, 2001, p. 333), but I prefer Ramírez’ distinction and shall adhere to it in the following.

expression at the right time (Ramírez, 1995, p. 266).¹⁰ Thus, a mutually constitutive dynamic of the meaning and its articulation is established: the right utterance is that which enacts its telos, but the telos only becomes known in and through the utterance. There is no way of knowing which meaning is right in advance of its articulation, and no way of evaluating the rightness of the meaning independently of the articulation.

Ramírez’ humanistic theory of action provides the main inspiration for the rhetorical perspective that informs this study. The theory, I believe, explains well why the art of persuasion should be regarded as an interpretive study of the creation of meaning, and it justifies the

explanatory potential contained in this view. The reconsideration of Aristotle’s knowledge scheme and the redefinition of rhetoric as praxis expressed in poíesis enhance and refine the constitutionist position. The communicative creation of meaning may now be understood as both a reproductive and a creative process, the use of pre-existing norms and expectations to create new understandings and opinions. Moreover, meaning is conditioned by the situation in which it is articulated; it arises in the contextually bound meeting between speaker and audience and is thus a thoroughly social phenomenon. The ensuing understanding of the rhetorical act makes processes of meaning formation available for rhetorical study, and at the same time it points to the character of such rhetorical investigations and their results. Commonly acknowledged meanings are the goal of both the practical rhetorical act and the analytical rhetorical endeavour. The analyst cannot claim any privileged position from which certain knowledge can be announced; instead the rhetorical critic is committed to and bound by the acts of meaning formation that he or she seeks to explain. The meaning formation of the analyst is hermeneutically aligned with that of the practitioner.

In adhering to Ramírez’ action-theoretical explanation of the link between rhetorical utterances and the creation of meaning, I am also provided with conceptual tools for the analysis of rhetorical meaning formation. The introduction of telos, topos, kairos, and the interrelations

between them as central to the constitution of meaning offers clues as to how the meaning formation of rhetorical utterances may be discovered and explained. The three concepts will be central to the analysis of the debate on the future of Europe, and they will be discussed further before being employed (see chapter 6). However, the time has not yet come to unfold the specific analytical practices, as I still need to attend to the question of how the rhetorical perspective relates

10 The mutually constitutive relationship between concrete utterances and general norms that follows from this view is consistent with the position expressed in Carolyn R. Miller’s influential work on “genre as social action” (Miller, 1984) and her later elaboration on “the cultural basis of genre” (Miller, 1994). Although I shall not pursue the generic

perspective in the present study, it is evident that the issue of how a certain utterance is shaped in order to express a specific meaning is inextricably linked to the expectations of the genre to which that utterance belongs.

to other disciplines that are of relevance to the study of the European debate. In the following I shall first establish the general interdisciplinary potential of the rhetorical perspective. Then I will discuss social scientific and rhetorical conceptualisations of legitimacy, identity and public opinion, the three notions that in this study serve as focal points within the overarching rhetorical-constitutionist approach to the formation of meaning.