7
The Magical Roots of Rhetoric

As we saw towards the end of the last chapter, there can often seem to be some very powerful similarities between magical practice and some understandings of the rhetorical situation. A number of modern scholars of rhetoric have noted this resemblance. Kenneth Burke (1969), for example, argues that early anthropology had failed to recognize the relationship between rhetoric and magic. The scientism implicit in the discipline had insisted on interpreting magic as primitive, misguided (and therefore ‘bad’) science. In reducing the interpretive field down to a simple dichotomy of ‘good science’ and ‘bad science’, Burke maintained that anthropology before Malinowski had denied rhetoric any “systematic location” (p. 41). Instead of seeing magic as an early failed science, however, Burke suggests that it would make more sense to see magic as a “primitive rhetoric” (p. 43). He argues that magic is a “mistaken transference of a proper linguistic function to an area for which it was not fit” (p. 42). The “realistic” function of language is “as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (p. 43). Magic, however, is a “faulty derivation” from this realistic, rhetorical function of language, “being an attempt to produce linguistic responses in kinds of beings not accessible to the linguistic motive” (ibid.). Burke’s perspective is prompted by a desire to properly place rhetoric within considerations of social anthropology and social evolution. While he still insists on seeing magic as fundamentally mistaken or “misapplied” (in a very similar way to Frazer, for example) he attempts to shift the grounds of this misapplication away from the proto-scientific realm and into the rhetorical. He is also careful to note that, though magic might be rooted in a “mistaken transference”, this does not deny its rhetorical role in contributing “variously to social cohesion” (p. 44). For unlike the unforgiving binary valence of a scientific perspective (“primitive” magic is incorrect, modern science is correct), a rhetorical framing of magic allows us to detect the ‘unrealistic’ nature of magic while at the same time recognising the power it has to create social cohesion.

Burke’s discussion of magic and rhetoric is important to us for a number of reasons. It derails longstanding debates around science and magic by insisting that magic is a form of misapplied rhetoric—the question of magic’s relationship to science is therefore largely bypassed. Magical thinking as enshrined in the laws of similarity and contact might be scientifically ‘false’, but that does not stop magic from having a powerful social role. This might also provide us with further food for thought when reflecting upon the marketing as ‘art’ or ‘science’ controversy—perhaps it is neither, perhaps it is simply rhetoric? Precisely due to Burke’s rather sketch-like development of his thesis here, he also goads us into thinking more closely about the relationship between magic and rhetoric. As we shall see, this relationship has, indeed, been pursued by some scholars attracted to the Sophistic tradition and for good reasons. However, before we venture back into Classical waters, we can prepare ourselves by considering the work of another modern rhetorical scholar who has argued for an even clearer connection between magic and rhetoric.

Covino (1992, 1994), writing from the perspective of a scholar of composition, takes as his cue the work of O’Keefe (1983) who proposed a “social theory of magic”. Covino (1992) therefore starts from the assumption that “magic is not the instant and arhetorical product of an otherworldly incantation; it is the process of inducing belief and creating community with reference to the dynamics of a rhetorical situation” (p. 349). Conceiving of magic in such terms then allows us to interrogate the power matrices within rhetoric, to “analyze and critique the powers at work within the ‘plain rhetoric’ that mesmerizes audiences with its seeming clarity and simplicity”. For Covino, modern rhetoric has been stripped of its magical power and converted into a “plain style” of “discourse prepared for mass consumption” (ibid.). This is an evolutionary consequence of the sort of exorcism of rhetorical high style that we have already talked about in connection with the Royal Society’s campaign for plain style, as described by Stark (2009). Covino sees this as a reflection of “changing concepts of ‘phantasy’ and the limits of imagination” over time that have discouraged a “fertile, dynamic and fluctuant imagination”. He (1992) argues that before the Enlightenment “distinctions between literal and figurative identity are impossible to maintain because everything is both actual and symbolic: a talisman or a word signifies magic power and is that power” (p. 352). This was a conception shared by “sophistic, hermetic, gnostic, cabalistic, and patristic philosophers from antiquity forward” (p. 351). Of course, this is the “mistaken transference” identified by Burke, the idea that “minds exists in matter and language affects matter” (Covino, 1992, p. 352). Covino makes much use of Vickers’ (1986) distinction between the occult and the scientific traditions in Renaissance philosophy. Vickers contends that in the scientific tradition “a clear distinction is made between words and things and between literal and metaphorical language”, whereas in the occult tradition “words are treated as if they are equivalent to things and can be substituted for them” (Vickers, 1986, p. 95). Vickers traces a line of scientific mistrust of the magical/occult identification of word and thing that goes all the way back to Plato. He shows how the “Platonic-Aristotelian tradition of language as conventional and arbitrary” (p. 104) found its flowering in the Renaissance philosophers of the new sciences (Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo) and culminates with the anti-rhetorical campaign of the Royal Society and Locke’s description of what should constitute scientific language. While the Renaissance also saw a resurgence in the “occult tradition” of language, with figures such as Agrippa, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola offering systematisations of the universe based upon sympathy, contagion, and the identity of word and thing, this was but a short-lived revival. By the end of the Enlightenment, the “scientific tradition” and its clear understanding of the separation between language and the natural world had become the dominant paradigm in Western intellectual thought. Covino (1992) adopts Vickers’ narrative and extends it by noting the Romantic poets’ efforts to “reconstitute magic/rhetoric in the Western imagination” by appealing to “the ‘witchery’ of language” and aiming “to reform the public imagination by defining writing as a liberatory force that can construct alternate realities” (p. 355). He then further suggests that even though the Romantic project ‘lost’ to the “sterile and non-magical rhetoric of ‘public business’” (ibid.) it would not be correct to conclude that the connection between magic and rhetoric has been irrevocably sundered. Instead, Covino returns to O’Keefe’s and Burke’s argument that magical rhetoric exists in the, admittedly, “diminished cosmology” of language altering the “social situation”. Citing Austin’s thinking on the performative function of language, Covino (1992) goes on to state that “in the event that any of us employ powerful words to change a situation, or are ourselves changed by what we read or hear, we participate in a magical transactive transformation” (p. 355). Covino’s ultimate objective is to not persuade us that rhetoric is magical, for he regards this as clearly the case, but rather to convince us that there are two broad types of magical rhetoric, one which is “repressive” and “limits the possibilities for action” (ibid.) and one which is “liberatory”, “re-ordering discourse and reality” (p. 356) to create rather than restrict. Repressive rhetoric magically mesmerises the masses, lulls them into an unquestioning state of acceptance, and is characterised by a robbing of energy. Liberatory rhetoric, on the other hand, infuses an excess of energy, a creatively destructive level of energy, which feeds phantasies of possibility and serves to undercut established, rigid positions and perspectives.

For both Burke and Covino, the magical essence of rhetoric is to be found in the illocutionary and perlocutionary force that words can have upon social situations. Rhetoric can ‘magically’ command—in the sense that the uttering of words can function as a means of control. Covino (1992) remarks that nowhere is this more obvious than in advertising, which displays the “magic of authoritarian, simplistic incantations” (p. 356). This attitude towards the magical rhetoric of advertising will be more closely examined later in this chapter. It is worth noting for now, however, the way that Covino distinguishes between a simplistic, commanding magic and the far more positive, liberatory magic which can be generated through the undercutting of established discourse. In this he is reproducing the sort of good/bad, science/magic, rhetorical style/plain style dichotomies that we have been meeting throughout this chapter only this time we have the dichotomy within rhetoric itself.

In closing this section, I wish to now return to the beginnings of rhetoric and examine the way in which the very earliest rhetorical theorists, the Sophists, connected magic and rhetoric. In earlier parts of this book, I have used the Sophists (and their reception) to examine the deep roots of marketing—once again, I will return to the Sophists to explore the early connections between rhetoric and magic. For it is with Gorgias’ famous piece of display rhetoric, the Encomium for Helen, that we have the first clear attempts to present a relationship between these two topics.

Gorgias’ aim in the Encomium is to “demonstrate the all-conquering power of persuasive speech” (Dylan and Gergel, 2003, p. 76). As Wardy (2005) argues, the Encomium “crosses genres” (p. 28)—it is at once a forensic defence of the figure of Helen and at the same time an epideictic celebration of logos. The core of the piece is a consideration of the what might have made Helen elope with Paris and so cause the Trojan war—as Gorgias says, “I shall set forth the causes which made it likely that Helen’s voyage to Troy should take place” (Dylan and Gergel, 2003, p. 78). There are a number of options to consider—perhaps the events were controlled by Fate, or the Gods, or perhaps Helen was taken by force, or persuaded by words, or possessed by love. Gorgias considers each possibility. If the Gods or Fate swayed Helen’s mind, then she is without blame as such forces are always “a stronger force than man in might and wit and on other ways” (p. 79) and cannot be resisted. If she was forced to elope with Paris, then it is clearly Paris who is to blame, for “it is plain that the rapist, as the outrager did the wronging, and the raped, as the outraged, did the suffering” (ibid.). Then Gorgias moves on to consider the possible role of speech in Helen’s actions, his real motivation for the entire Encomium. Gorgias first describes speech as “a powerful lord, who with the finest and most invisible body achieves the most divine works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity” (ibid.). As proof of this, Gorgias considers a few different types of speech. First, there is poetry, which is just “speech possessing metre” (p. 80). Poetry can induce strong physical effects in its listeners, “fearful shuddering”, “tearful pity”, and “grievous longing” because “through the agency of words the soul experiences suffering of its own” (ibid.). Of course, while poetry, per se, is not something that modern marketers might spend much time considering as a persuasive force, what Gorgias is talking about here is the powerful effect of the artfully turned phrase in bringing to life any narrative in a way that has an emotional effect upon an audience. The next form of speech that Gorgias considers brings us finally to the subject of this section of the book, magic. He reminds us that “inspired incantations conveyed through words become bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain” (ibid.) and they do this by ‘beguiling’ and ‘persuading’ the “opinion in the soul”. Furthermore, Gorgias states that the “twin arts” of “witchcraft and magic” rely upon the “the errors of the soul and deceptions of opinion”. Gorgias’ understanding of what magic is and how it works is extremely rhetorical in approach. Indeed, he then moves directly on from stating that magic takes advantage of a “deception of opinion” to discussing persuasive speech in general in the same terms. As we are unable to remember the past in perfect clarity, “consider the present” or “divine the future” we always find ourselves relying upon our opinion when making decisions. Opinion, though, is “slippery and insecure” and can be taken advantage of by those seeking to influence and persuade us. We hardly ever know the truth of a matter and so use our opinions to guide us, and that is reasonable because that is what we, as mortals, have access to. But, in relying upon opinion, we let ourselves open to the poetic, magical and persuasive forces of speech that can constrain the soul. If Helen were influenced, “against her will”, by the power of Paris’ speech, she would have been overpowered “just as if ravished by the force of pirates” (p. 81). There is no difference, Gorgias is arguing, between the constraint imposed by physical rape and that imposed by the influence of language. In either case, Helen is innocent of blame. Finally, Gorgias compares the power of speech over the soul with the power of drugs over the body. Some drugs can act for good and heal the body by getting rid of harmful secretions and are able to cure disease, while others can have quite the opposite effect and be used to end life. So it is with the power of speech, which can be used to “delight” or “embolden” the soul or to “distress” it, to “drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion” (p. 81). Speech as drug (pharmakon), speech as poetry, speech as magic, speech as persuasion—in the Encomium, Gorgias is, as Wardy (2005) observes, “at work on systematically obliterating distinctions between logoi” (p. 41). All speech that seeks to influence an audience (whether this is an audience who has elected to view a drama, someone who seeks out a witch or magician to effect a goal, the voters of an assembly, or the customers of a retailer) are manipulated through the power of speech to affect the soul through opinion. And through the soul, one affects the body. In praising the power of speech (while ostensibly seeking to shift blame from Helen), Gorgias, of course, is giving the more specific message that it is the rhetor who wields this power in society. Indeed, the conclusion of the speech makes it clear that the speech itself serves to demonstrate the power of rhetoric. Gorgias states that “I have through speech removed ill fame from a woman”—and this is not just any woman but one who had become a by-word in his society for treachery. The success of his rhetorical argumentation in favour of Helen works as proof of the remarkable, bewitching power of speech. As Wardy (2005) cogently summarises it—“when we ourselves are made to pity Helen and execrate Paris, are persuaded (perhaps) that persuasion is manipulation, enjoy the deception with which Gorgias amuses us even as we discern it, we feel in our own souls the seduction of rhetoric” (p. 51). The Encomium is an exercise in magico-rhetorical persuasion, a demonstration of how our souls can be led by the manipulation of opinion, bewitched by language.

De Romilly (1975), in her influential treatise on the links between magic and rhetoric in ancient Greece, has written convincingly of the way in which Gorgias’ own style reflects liturgical or magical incantation. She traces a line of development in which poets began to use the style of religious chant and magical incantation in their verses in order to produce a magical effect. From the example of the poets, then, the early rhetors began to use the same techniques in order to spellbind their audiences and achieve their rhetorical goals. De Romilly (1975) notes that Gorgias was the pupil of Empedocles, a philosopher who was renowned both as a magician and as a poet, and who chose to convey his philosophical teaching in poetry of the “inspired style” (p. 14). Indeed, some authors have argued that Empedocles is more correctly understood as a magical, shamanistic figure rather than as a philosopher at all (Kingsley, 1996). Furthermore, in Gorgias’ culture there was much fluidity between the concepts and practices surrounding of poetry, drama, sacred ritual, and magic. As de Romilly (1975) points out, one of the Greek words used by Gorgias for magic,, was “first used for the magical ritual of summoning the dead” (p. 15), but it also came to be used to describe tragic poetry, a form which “possesses and beguiles the listener’s soul” (ibid.). Later still, she notes, Plato uses the word to define rhetoric when he has Socrates ask in the Phaedrus, “isn’t the rhetorical art, taken as a whole, a way of directing the soul by means of speech, not only in the lawcourts and on other public occasions but also in private?” (261a)—the word is here translated by Nehamas and Woodruff as “directing the soul”. It seems reasonable to let this fluidity of meaning point to some fundamental similarities of understanding regarding the relationship between magic, poetry and rhetoric.

But what characterises this magical style of language? If poetry, tragedy, magic, and rhetoric can all display similar effects (direction of the soul) what is the nature of the language that they use to do it? De Romilly (1975), through a comparison of poetry and tragic verse that was designed to imitate magical incantation as well as ancient Greek sacred liturgy and Gorgias’ own rhetorical style, outlines “the means of magic” (p. 16). In listing them we find a startling similarity to those figures examined by the advertising researchers we have discussed above. There is the “haunting repetition of words” (p. 17), the “play on similar forms of words, equal in length and structure”, “obstinate” rhythmic patterns, alliteration, rhyme. De Romilly notes that Gorgias’ originality of rhetorical style was to be found in his use of just these devices, which “were meant to subdue the audience and produce in the listeners’ souls such and such a feeling” and which “derived from the wonderful power that they had in magic song and that some poets had already imitated with a thrilling and impressive effect” (p. 19).

Importantly, it must be understood that de Romilly (1975) is not claiming that Gorgias’ use of magical language means that his rhetoric is magic. Rather than this simple identification, she argues that Gorgias, “while emulating the magician” sought to change “magic into something rational” (p. 20) precisely by making it an art, a techne, something to be taught and to be used in public (and commercial life). In other words, rhetoric is an evolved, rational, practical instantiation of the magical power of speech. Gorgias, argues de Romilly, seeks to elevate this power of speech away from its dark, inspired, irrational roots, into a systematic, teachable, secularised technique—a technique that will allow its possessor to persuade and constrain the soul of the audience. Yet, in attempting to make use of the magical patterns of language while loosening it from the influence of the irrational, inspired essence of magic, de Romilly (1975) argues that Gorgias originated the separation that was to so obsess philosophers from Plato on—the division between the irrational or the magical and the rational or empirical—between science and magic. In admitting that “the very principle of the art of speech was to deceive” (p. 25), Gorgias, the epitome of the rhetorical magus, thus sows the seeds of Plato’s critique of rhetoric and magic (as well as poetry and tragedy) as practices that threaten to hide the truth rather than expose it, a critique which goes on to become fundamentally embedded in the Western intellectual enterprise.

This division, as we have already seen, has been tremendously powerful over the millennia since Gorgias’ death. Modern science was in many ways born from attempts to expunge magical rhetorical style from natural philosophy. It defined itself in opposition to philosophy couched in the ‘high’ style that made use of metaphor, metonymy, incantatory patternings, and matrices of symbolism. The Royal Society’s promotion of a plain style for scientific discourse is an attempt to ground intellectual exploration in concrete certainties, to move it on from the spiritual, and magical, systems of contagion and sympathy that had come to dominate it in the Renaissance. Language had to be stripped of its magical power if it was to be used to describe the world as it actually was. It is, then, clear that while Gorgias might have inadvertently instantiated this central split in the Western understanding of how we see and explain the world, and while Plato might have then set out the battle lines in the clearest way possible, the division between science and magic has been continuing back and forth ever since. It was not won with Plato, it was not won with the Royal Society, it was not won with Logical Positivism, and it most certainly was not won with Shelby Hunt.

Indeed, when we consider the division by looking all the way back to Gorgias, perhaps it is no longer surprising that marketing has been so obsessed with it. In Gorgias we see the attempt to marry magic and rationality in the service of a flexible, practical, public persuasion. Marketing, as I have been arguing, is the true heir to this system of persuasion. But it is also heir to the inherent tension between rationality and irrationality, between empirical systematisation and bewitching ritual, between science and art, between sober prescriptivism and inspired improvisation, that lies at the heart of Gorgias’ enterprise. I would therefore suggest that marketing will never be able to resolve this tension and still do the job of marketing. The tension is implicit within its nature. It was, perhaps, the case that Gorgias himself understood these tensions and was comfortable with them. His teacher, Empedocles, after all, saw the universe as subject to the two opposing forces of Love and Strife which in their interchange form “a ceaseless round, sure and unmoving in the style of a circle” (trans. Lombardo, 2010, p. 36). The broader Sophist pedagogical approach rested upon the use of contradiction and shifting reversals as embodied in the dissoi logoi and the kata-ballontes of Protagoras (Cassin, 2014). The dichotomy between seeing words as tools of magical inspiration, on the one hand, and the means for plain empirical description, on the other, is not a dichotomy for the Gorgian tradition because they are both at the service of the persuasive power of communication.

Aristotle attempts to re-write Socratic rhetoric as a pure techne without recourse to magical inspiration or bewitching seduction of the irrational—a one-sided rhetoric, as it were. De Romilly argues that such purgative attempts are never entirely successful, that there remains a resistant line of magical rhetoric that longs “for things that Aristotle cast away (1975, p. 77). The struggle between the two trends can be discerned “in all literatures and at all times” (p. 85), though, notes de Romilly, none of those movements standing as alternatives to the Aristotelian paradigm ever tried to return entirely to the pre-Gorgian state of language, “counting only on magic and on inspiration” (p. ibid.). Well, none until “our present time”. For, de Romilly is convinced that, with the early years of the twentieth century, (manifesting initially in Symbolist poetry and then in the Surrealists) some movements appeared that attempted to do just that—treat language as if it were entirely magical. She suggests that this resurgence came from the “most irrational of all sources” (p. 86), the unconscious self expressing itself in “spontaneous language” via automatic processes, such as Breton’s ‘magic dictation’ and Dali’s ‘paranoiac critical’ method. The punning that was such a feature of Gorgias’ style becomes endemic across the Surrealists and those influenced by their paradigm. Structuralists and postmodernists abandon the pretence that language is objective and transparent and instead celebrate the infinite, shifting diversity of interpretation and connotation.

Heady stuff, and fascinating to muse upon. However, as we shall see, some writers anchor this return of the magical rather earlier and in a more, shall we say, prosaic milieu—the marketing and advertising that evolves with the industrial revolution. For them, advertising is magic and they mean it in a most distinctively pejorative way. Before we move on to deliberate upon the reasons these critics have for linking the two so strongly, it is worth thinking about the way that magic and rhetoric are linked to control.

References

Burke, K. (1969). A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Cassin, B. (2014). Sophistical Practice: Towards a Consistent Relativism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cole, T. (1995). The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Covino, W. A. (1992). Magic And/As Rhetoric: Outlines of a History of Phantasy. Journal of Advanced Composition, 12(2), 349–358.

Covino, W. A. (1994). Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

de Romilly, J. (1975). Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dylan, J., and Gergel, T. (2003). The Greek Sophists. London: Penguin.

Kingsley, P. (1996). Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lombardo, S. (trans.). (2010). Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock.

Moore, K. R. (2014). Plato’s Puppets of the Gods: Representing the Magical, the Mystical and the Metaphysical. Arion, 22(2), 37–72.

O’Keefe, D. (1983). Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic. New York: Vintage.

Schiappa, E. (1990). Did Plato Coin Rhetorike? American Journal of Philology, 111(4), 457–470.

Stark, R. (2009). Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.

Vickers, B. (1986). Analogy Versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680. In B. Vickers (Ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 95–163.

Ward, J. O. (1988). Magic and Rhetoric From Antiquity to the Renaissance: Some Ruminations. Rhetorica, 6(1), 57–118.

Wardy, R. (2005). The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and Their Successors. London: Routledge.