Authorizing Tropes and the Structure of Style

• In Event: Reading Texts Rhetorically

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of authorizing tropes in the history of rhetoric: claims that are intended to justify why some speakers are heard instead of others, which in turn shape the stylistic qualities of speech. Authorizing tropes respond to the problem of rhetorical asymmetry: they claim to justify unequal access to “the rostra”—the orator’s pre-eminent public role—under conditions of political inequality, in which the many listen while the few speak. Such tropes might include the claim that the orator’s role is distinctively risky, that the orator authentically understands a given audience, or that the orator can be meaningfully sanctioned by the audience.

I develop these claims by taking Cicero’s De oratore and several of his speeches as a case study, with special attention to the ways in which reading between the lines of these texts can illuminate Cicero’s conflicts with contemporary populares over the nature of rhetoric and republican politics. Drawing on this case study, I advance three arguments about authorizing tropes. First, they emerge across a range of political and rhetorical contexts, enabling us to compare contexts in terms of their relevant tropes and to study rhetorical history via changes in tropes over time. Second, they often develop in response to pressure “from below” on elite political figures. And third, they shape the formal qualities of oratory, offering a bridge between the study of material political conditions and the study of style, which can help us read texts rhetorically. Rhetorical authorization, I argue, is not a one-off agreement to allow an orator to speak; it is a condition that must be continually met in order for an audience to keep listening, and so it must work on the level of style (the consistent qualities of a text or discourse) in order to be effective.

I conclude by arguing that authorizing tropes represent an important methodological contribution to the study of rhetoric and the history of political thought. Rather than beginning from a normative or strategic evaluation (usually implicit) of a speaker’s aims, and then reading that evaluation back into our assessment of the speaker’s rhetorical techniques, we can use authorizing tropes to investigate style in a more materially grounded way, asking how speakers reinforce or challenge prevalent tropes, which sets of tropes have proved especially influential, and how prevalent tropes change over time.

Author

• Rob Goodman, Toronto Metropolitan University