Definition:
A modern (or postmodern) view of rhetoric as an inherent feature of language or as a condition of our existence as language-using creatures rather than a conventional academic discipline or an overarching theory of discourse.
Etymology:
Term introduced by Bender and Wellbery, 1990 (see below)Observations:
- "Rhetoric is no longer the title of a doctrine and a practice, nor a form of cultural memory; it becomes instead something like the condition of our existence. . . .
"In general, then, what are we to conclude about the shape of rhetoric today, following its return? This question elicits a double answer, both parts of which point to the decisive transformations that rhetoric has undergone. First, the very object of rhetorical analyses and theories has changed. We are dealing no longer with a specialized technique of instrumental communication, but rather with a general condition of human experience and action. We have designated as 'rhetoricality' this new category--the category that opens the field of modern rhetorical research. Second, there can be no single contemporary rhetorical theory: rhetoricality cannot be the object of a homogeneous discipline. Modernist (and postmodernist) rhetorical study is irreducibly multidisciplinary; one cannot study rhetoric tout court, but only linguistic, sociological, psychoanalytic, cognitive, communicational, medial, or literary rhetorics."
(John Bender and David E. Wellbery, "Rhetoricality," in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Stanford Univ. Press, 1990) - "The consequences of this emphasis on 'rhetoricality' for the possibility of knowledge are far-reaching. . . . The social fictions we create are inescapable because they are endemic to language itself, which is the only tool we have to comprehend our world."
(Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric. Routledge, 2007)
