The destruction of rhetoric in the 18th century

The following is a speculative narrative, at once too general and too specific, repeating points others have made and not backing up whatever original claims it makes:

Addison quotes a French author in his "Pleasures of the Imagination" series in The Spectator. Fréard is talking about architecture, and the necessity of introducing "grandeur of manner" into buildings.

Addison explains this particular "grandeur" as what makes the dome of the Pantheon more impressive than a Gothic cathedral, even though the latter is larger: the general plannedness, or designedness of the structure is carried out across the large structure, while the cathedral is just large (indeed much larger) and supplemented by ornamentation. Design trumps bulk, or rather bulk is created where there is no design.

But there still remains the question of why the ornamentation (little figures and such) doesn't make up for the lack of planning, or why it doesn't signify design as much as the coffering of the Pantheon. Fréard says the following, which Addison quotes:

...that will have but a poor and mean effect where there is a redundancy of those smaller ornaments, which divide and scatter the angles of the sight into such a multitude of rays, so pressed together that the whole will appear but a confusion.
-The Spectator, #415 (Thursday, June 26, 1712)

In short, ornament is seen not as an addition anymore to something that is lacking. It is seen as adding to what is already a plenitude. This makes it into something that scatters: if the eye is already being directed, adding something else will direct away from what was the unadorned direction. Or even more accurately, it will pull the eye away while also pulling the eye away while also soliciting it to follow the original direction: the view is scattered because it is split.

Who would have thought ornament could be seen as something so violent, when just a century before, it was considered to only enhance beauty if not carried too far? The general line of thought here is to convert this into a point about rhetoric as well: what is usually characterized as the 18th century destruction of classical rhetoric, beginning with neoclassicism and ending with the reformation of the educational system and the creation of public schools (which no longer stressed the classics, but stressed the need for general intelligibility), is not so much a destruction as a transformation of its role, which centers on the devaluing of its ornamental role (it should be noted that this general characterization has already fallen apart with due attention to the transformation of political rhetoric surrounding the Civil War, and can even be pushed farther back to the late 16th century, when the use of classical rhetoric was at its peak (see the work of Walter Ong on the rise of the idea of information).

But in order to convert this into a point about rhetoric, one also has to consider how, a century before, even ornament in rhetoric was less ornamental than it appeared. It was generally seen as the structure given to argument--that is, design. And if this is so, well, what we're talking about is not so much a destruction as a return of rhetoric. But how could it return in such a different guise?

One answer comes from yet another art, situated between literature or verbal argument and architecture: painting. The 18th century increasingly saw both architecture and (what is often harder to even think about today) literature as similar to painting (though Addison actually tries to retain the primacy of architecture over painting: I think we can still see he succumbs to this rubric however, which is why I started with his remarks on the Pantheon etc.). This is a bit unreal to us, who are more used to seeing literature in particular in terms of cinema--if anything. So what roughly happens is that the design given to argument had to become more visible. And this meant seeing what were essential aspects of classical rhetoric, like tropes, as things that popped out of the discourse. This was helped by the classicists' tendency to categorize rhetorical figures, which could easily allow them to be abstracted out of the linguistic medium. While this abstraction was once seen as more natural, or more accurately as something to be naturalized or internalized by education and made into a skill, the increasing tendency to see the verbal medium like paint strokes made naturalizing them unnecessary (I am arguing this instead of the general argument that proceeds by seeing this conversion of rhetoric into ornament rather than skill as a product of declining standards of education or emphasis on more public goals--an argument that is, I think, either unnecessarily pessimistic or unnecessarily nostalgic, and at its worst either undemocratic or Luddite, and tends to turn this transformation we are tracing here back again into destruction). So while skill is reinterpreted as involving, not the deployment of internalized knowledge, but something more explicit--namely, the arrangement of ornament--it also made ornament more obtrusive, less transparent, since it did not proceed from some background intention or knowledge.

(One could also say that the process of proceeding-from-background-knowledge has changed as well, since in Locke it becomes association, not expression. The notion of memory, considered not as preconscious but non-conscious knowledge, then also becomes more important: this is what produces the division in Addison between primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination.)

The explicitness of design, then, naturally produces another movement to eliminate ornament as superfluous to that design. The neoclassicists held on to the notion somewhat, trying to play with ornament as arrangement. But the increasing explicitness seems to have also made the notion of design expand beyond what mere arrangement can produce. Or rather, arrangement itself transforms to become the arrangement elements that are both smaller and larger than anything resembling the size of the classical rhetorical unit (which was either small trope--a few words--or a large rhetorical plan--considered as the relation between a block of sentences and the preceding block). I would say that this is the point at which we get the vague early-mid 18th century notions of design like variety, novelty, and the picturesque, and then more concrete notions of design as animating authorial intention, like genius (in Young), the general (in Johnson), and imagination (in Coleridge's sense). But the whole point of my little history here is that it would be a mistake to see this as an all-out retreat from design, a complete forfeiture, as many people do who are either not schooled in the 18th century (particularly its middle), or give too much credence to the notion that rhetoric relies on skill, considered as implicit knowledge that is then deployed (that is, the educational argument). What has happened is that design now appears in units which simply have less relationship to traditional rhetorical units, and a different function--one that is much more in keeping with the idea that using language is painting. But this means that rhetoric, far from being destroyed, is actually still at work: it just appears as that part of the text which can be traced to an origin or function, or rather to what gets called a "whole." Rhetoric has not lost, but regained much of its functionality. The only thing different is that language, in which rhetoric takes place, has become a thicker medium, incorporating the visual in painting. Thus, if you don't exit language and consider the history of other art forms, this will of course appear as a destruction, a thinning out.