Magic and as Rhetoric Outlines of a History of Phantasy

8/12/2019 Magic and as Rhetoric Outlines of a History of Phantasy

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Magic And As RhetoricOutlines o a History of PhantasyWn UAM A. COVINOy counterposing magical and non-magical formulations ofcomposing

in 1981, Janet Emig identified the process movement in composition studiesas a reaction against writing-as-magic. In Non-Magical Thinking: Presenting Writing Developmentally in Schools, Emig connects current-traditional rhetoric with magical thinking, and reinvented or new rhetoricwith non-magical thinking. In the magical classroom, writing is a silent,solitary product fully-formed in the writer's consciousness, and it materializes on demand. In the non-magical classroom, writing is an erratic processof gradual, constant revision according to changing factors such as purposeand audience and the advice of collaborators.

For Emig, magic means the inexplicable and spontaneous materialization ofa finished product; this is the familiar rabbit-out-of-a-hat definition.I f we consider an alternate definition, grounded in anthropological andsociological conceptions of magic,we allow for a significant reversal ofwhatmagical and non-magical mean, a reversal that preserves the spirit but not theterminologyofEmig's distinction. Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe synthesizes themajor modern social theories ofmagic inStolen ightning inorder to proposethat magic is the audacious individual use ofexisting powerful symbols inwhich there is always a curious tension between the traditional and thesurreptitious, and hence between syllogism, implications from acceptedtruth, and an enthymeme that bends consensus to private ends (73, 85).Such tensions define a social context in which magic ''works because peopleagree it works (%). Stopping short of concluding that magic is rhetoric,O'Keefe defines magic with rhetorical terms, and he concludes that acomplex of social/rhetorical contingencies account for its effects. Magic isnot the instant and arhetorical product of an otherworldly incantation; it istheprocess of inducing belief and creating community with reference to thedynamiCS of a rhetorical situation. Magic is a social act whose medium ispersuasive discourse, and so it must entail the complexities ofsocial interaction, invention, communication, and composition. Thus, magic becomes aterm through which we can address, as John Briggs points out, the rhetor'spower over audiences and subject matters, the power of audiences and


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350 Journal of dvanced Compositionsubject matters over the rhetor, the power of particular kinds of discourses"363).Understanding magic as a social and discursive process allows us toanalyze and critique the powers at work in the "plain rhetoric" that mesmerizes audiences with its seeming clarity and simplicity (see Covino, "Magic").Further, such a conception of magic may lead us to prefer a "magic rhetoric,"if this means preferring a fertile, dynamic and fluctuant imagination to itsopposite. In this essay, Iwish to introduce some elements of such a rhetoricthrough a historical survey of pre-Enlightenment relationships betweenmagic and rhetoric' Specifically, I want to propose that the rise of currenttraditional rhetoric coincides with the destruction and disappearance of themagical consciousness that makes participatory, exploratory, generativerhetoric possible. Before about 1700, rhetorical and magical invention werecomplementary and in some ways identical processes; recognizing theirsimilarities may lead us to believe in magic again. To begin, I offer threepropositions which, examined in the following order, suggest a chronology ofmagic/rhetoric marked by changing conceptions of "phantasy" and the limitsof imagination:

1) Through the Renaissance,words possess actual (rather than symbolicpoweras agentso magic, and theireffects are understood to varywithchanging contexts.2) By 17oo,achangingconception ofmind and language eliminates bothrhetorical invention (with its "cosmology" o opoi and treatises onmagic with their cosmologies of natural and supernatural powersand phantasms) as authorized discourses.3) In this century, an ostensibly non-magical "plain rhetoric" informsdiscourse prepared for mass consumption.

The Power or WordsMagic formulas are, on the one hand, formulaic. That is, they are "rigidlyscripted" (O'Keefe62-78). But at the same time, every particular effect thatthe magus seeks requires a particular formula; that is, there would seem to bea lack o "all-purpose" formulas. For example, The Greek Magical Papyri(just over five-hundred spells surviving from antiquity) contains sixty-fivedifferent love spells. There is a love spell to be "performed with the help ofheroes or gladiators or those who have died a violent death," a love spell tobe recited "over myrrh which is offered," a love spell to be uttered "inconversation, while kissing passionately," and so forth 64, 137). Theimportance o making one's magic agree with circumstances continuesthrough Marsilio Ficino's Three Books on Life, one of the most influentialand popular statements of Renaissance magic. Ficino warns that even theslightest change in heavenly constellations affects both human behavior andthe powers that magical discourse can invoke:


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Magic ndl s Rhetoric 351ObselVe the daily positions and aspects of the stars and discover to what principalspeeches, songs, motions, dances, moral behavior, and actions most people are usuallyincited by these, so that you may imitate such things as far as possible inyour song, whichaims to please the particularpart of heaven that resembles them and to catch an influencethat resembles them. (3.21.69-74)

Ficino's guide here to obtaining life from the heavens resembles the call forsystematic alertness to changing circumstances that defines rhetoric fromantiquity through the Renaissance, a call initiated by Aristotle's famoussweeping definition of rhetoric as the process of finding in each case theexisting means of persuasion (1355b), and by Cicero's proposal that Thereal power of eloquence s such that it embraces the origin, the influence, thechanges of all things in the world, all virtues, duties, and all nature, so far asit affects the manners, minds, and lives of mankind De Oratore 3.20). In thecontext of such definitive statements, natural magic (which includes astrology, medicine, and alchemy) is a rhetorical practice: the magus must align theelements and the right words and the pathsofthe stars, with a variation in anyone of them affecting all the rest.

For Renaissance magicians, inventing cosmic harmonies required abroadsynthesis ofreligious magical, and secular philosophies, and promisedto expand the powers of human nature. This is the promise of Pico dellaMirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, which Francis Yates hascalled the great charter ofRenaissance magic Bruno 86). Pico draws fromChristian neo-Platonism, Orphic hymns, Chaldean oracles, Hermeticism,and Zoroastrianism, giving most prominence to the invocatory power oflanguage through his emphasis on the Cabala. The Cabala is constituted bya body of speculative philosophy which holds that specific combinations ofletters and words contain and convey spiritual energy. A text of hiddenmeaning s available to the trained Cabalist, who is also able to invoke andcontrol natural forces. Francis Yates summarizes the cabalistic traditionthat Pico calls the best established philosophy concerning nature (Oration64):

The Cabala as it developed in Spain in the Middle Ages had as its basis the doctrine ofthe ten Sephiroth and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The doctrine ofthe Sephiroth is laid down in the Book of Creation, or Sefer Yetzirah and it is constantlyreferred to throughout the Zohar, the mystical work writ ten in Spain in the thirteenthcentury which embodies the traditions of Spanish Cabalism ofthat time. The Sephirothare the ten names most common to God and in their entirety they form his one greatName. They are thecreative Names whichGod called into the world, and the createduniverse is the external development of these forces alive in God . [W]hen words werecalculated into numbers and numbers into words the entire organization of the worldcould be read off in terms of word-numbers, or the number of heavenly hosts could beexactly calculated as amounting to 301,655,172. Bruno 92-93)

Beliefs about the magic powers of words occupy sophistic, hermetic,gnostic, cabalistic, and patristic philosophers from antiquity forward. In


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35 Journal o dvanced Compositionapproximately 415 D.C.E., Gorgias writes that the power of speech can alterthe soul:

The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugsover the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from thebody, and some bring an end to disease and others to life so also in the case of speeches,some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and somedrug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion. (41)

Nearly two-thousand years later, the most famous ofthe Renaissance magicians, Cornelius Agrippa, reaffirms this power in his OccultPhilosophy:Words therefore are the fittest mediumbetwixt the speaker and the hearer,carryingwiththem not only the conceptionof he mind but also the vertue of the speaker with a certainefficacy unto the hearers, and this oftentimeswith so great a power that oftentimes theychange not only the hearers, but also other bodies, and things that have no life. (1.69.211)

Here Agrippa affirms a central tenet in the history of magic, which is also apresupposition throughout the pre-modern history of rhetoric. Mind existsin matter, and language affects matter: words and things are themselvesvolitional forces, and the magus attempts to invoke and participate withthose forces, to enter his or her own mind into the constant flux of mindedelements and signs (Berman 69-113). Distinctions between literal andfigurative identity are impossible to maintain because everything is bothactual and symbolic: a talisman or a word signifies a magic power nd is thatpower. AsBrian Vickers explains in his essayon the Enlightenment rejectionofoccult symbolism, in magic the sign is the thing t represents, and as suchit works in us, and we can use it to work on the world. The reification isfunctional, performative The lute strings affect each other, the star'simage affects us; by wearing a magic amulet we can tap the health-givingforces in the invisible world (123).The Twin Suppression of Magic and RhetoricThe shift from a magical to a mechanical model of the universe, virtuallycomplete by 1700, coincides with a determined effort toeliminate fantasticalrhetoric, and its attendant magical cosmology, and to establish a stable,absolute language. Vickers observes that by the late seventeenth century,thosewho held to the main linguistic and rhetoric tradition [drew ttention

to the occult's subversion of it (117).Those preserving the rhetorical tradition are decidedly reactionary,advocating a new model of a mechanical universe in reaction to the threatening scope of the imagination that is allowed by magic and by classicalconceptions of rhetoric. In this mechanical universe issuing from theEnlightenment, mind existsapart from matter. Theseparationofsubject andobject grounds empirical science and an emerging logical positivism, andrequires a clear observation language (Berman 110). From the appearance


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Magic And As Rhetoric 353of Peter Ramus' attacks on classical rhetoric in the 1540s through the 1660establishment oftheRoyal SocietyofLondon for Improving Natural Knowledge, rhetoric is reduced from the exploration of changeable truths to theproduction ofdirect, transparent propositions. The rhetorwho once participated in a world of tentative perspectives (topoi), alert to the Greek doctrineof logos as magic (DeRomilly), is replaced by the technician f Xed on clarityand precision, forwhom words are lifeless (Covino,Art82-83; Couliano 183).As loan Couliano explains in Eros and Magic n the Renaissance, Thetransition from a society dominated by magic to a predominantly scientificsociety is explicable primarily by a change n the imaginary xix). Coulianoconcludes that theRenaissance conceivedofthe natural and social world asa spiritual organism in which perpetual exchanges of phantasmic messagesoccurred. Thatwas the principleofmagic ... The Reformation destroys thisstructure of phantasms in motion; it forbids the use of imagination andproclaims the necessity for total suppression of sinful nature (221). Thephantasm that Couliano mentions here is something like an imaged archetype, a non-linguistic element of common sense which resides in the souland-through the mediation of imagination-determines, or interprets, thelanguage of the exterior world: Imagination translates the language of thesenses into fantastic language so that reason may grasp and understandphantasms (11).2 A magic world populated by myriad phantasms-imagesthat constitute a cosmology of interactive powers-offers the possibility forphantasy, for an imagination consistently engaged in the transfiguration ofthe soul, in the interplay of phantasms.

The play of the intellect and the spirit, that activity of the alchemist andcabalist which is licensed in a magical world, was repressed in the course ofthe Reformation and the Enlightenment. One of the most fierce denials ofthe phantasmic intellect came from Peter Ramus, who challenged themnemotechnic practice, central to classical rhetoric, of converting senseperceptions into phantasmic images, replacing this mode of imaginationwith imageless dialectical order (Yates,Art 231-36). Ramus's decimation ofphantasy coincides with his elimination of rhetorical invention (Murphy 12-13). Couliano emphasizes the cooperative effort by Catholic and Protestantforces to censor phantasy in the Reformation: They seem to be at oneconcerning the impious nature of the culture of the phantasmic era and theimaginary in general (203).In The Reenchantment of he World, Morris Berman recognizes that theestablishment ofthe Royal SocietyofLondon for Improving Natural Knowledge is the culmination of a developing fear of mystical enthusiasm ; amagical epistemology was seen as a radical affront to the Protestant andrationalist establishment of new hierarchies (see also Thomas 641-47).Eventually, even those in the elite class who had once given credence tohermetic, cabalistic, and alchemical philosophies (Isaac Newton, for one)became opponents of magic:


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54 Journal o Advanced Composition

From 1655 onward there was a series of conversions to the mechanical philosophy ymen who had previously been sympathetic to alchemy.These conversions were thus part of the reaction against enthusiasm on the part ofthe propertied classes and leading members of the Church of England, groups thatcoalesced in the Royal Society itself. Thomas Sprat, in the earliest history of the Society(1667),viewed the mechanical philosophy as helping to instill respect for law and order,and claimed that it was the job of science and the Royal Society to oppose enthusiasm.(Berman 123-24)

s Karin Johannisson has pointed out, the appearance of the Royal Societypunctuates the twin suppression ofmagic and rhetoric,leaving plain styleas the only province of rhetoric, and sending magic underground (254-55).Themagic and rhetoric that disappeared-with their emphasison imagination, phantasy, and amplif ication-wereprogressive forces. In the context

of the Enlightenment, they became subversive forces. Magic survived insecret societies such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons (Johannisson 253-60). A rhetoric with imaginative scope and a cosmology of phantasmsemerged in the poetry and poetics ofRomanticism, in the languageofmagic.The Romantic movement was an attempt to reaffirm the magical propertiesof language. s Anya Taylor points out in Magic andEnglish RomanticismRomantic thinkers turned to magic in order to recall pre-Enlightenmentconceptions that licensethepowers ofimagination, and to find a language forintellectual and political revolution:

Sudden change is made possiblebychanging the words and thus the categories in whichmen think, and words can becbanged by those most skilled in their use-those poetswhocan weave words together in irresistibly arousing sounds, songs and rhythms that willalter the listener even when he thinks he is not conscious of changes within him. (193)Drawing elemental forces into communion is the activityof the Romantic magical imagination, coerCing all things into sympathy (Wordsworth2.390). Romantic writers called themselves magi, and their major critical

theses-Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads Coleridge's BiographiaLiteraria Shelley's Defense o Poetry-claim that the time has come to reactagainst scientific reductionism with visionary scope; like alchemists forgingnew realities, they call up a sympathetic universe. With the supernatural ashis vehicle, Coleridge declares in theBiographia that Iwill cause the worldof intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise upbefore you (13.7-8). Shelley writes in the Defense that the alchemy ofpoetic imagination produces new lexicons of thought, new associationswhich eventually resonate in the political reorganization of SOCiety: poetrymarks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates theirapprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time,signs for portions or classes of thoughts which effect revolutions inopinion (111-15). The mythologies ofBlake, the enchanted dreamscapesofColeridge in Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan and Keats


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Magic And/As Rhetoric 55inEndymion, the Faustian desires ofByron inManfred and Shelley inAlastorall appeal to the ''witchery'' of language, and aim to reform the publicimagination by defining writing as a liberatory force that can constructalternate realities (Taylor 38-63).Magical Thinking and Liberatory RhetoricThe Romantic effort to reconstitute magic/rhetoric in the Western imagination was supplanted by what DeQuincey recognized as the sterile and nonmagical rhetoric of public business, with its reliance on external facts,tangible realities, and circumstantial details (97, 227). In the post-Romantic modern age, the dissociation of magic and rhetoric seemed complete. Iwould propose, however, that rhetoric and magic remain synonymous, set ina diminished cosmology. Performing magic has always involved issuing acoercive command ; insofar as such commands are intrinsic to language,and really do make and re-make reality, we do magic when we dorhetoric, and vice-versa (Covino, Magic 25-26; Burke 5). For the Greekorator, the Renaissance magus, the Romantic poet, and the variety ofpresent-day institutional authorities who invoke a cosmology of sanctionedforces in every act ofofficial discourse, language alters the social situation.Consider, for instance, the especially potent force ofperformatives statements that by themselves create a new state of affairs (O'Keefe 54). WhenGeorge Bush issues a performative declaration of war against Iraq, we arereminded that all such declarations, from I pronounce you husband andwife to the professor's Your final grade is anA to the boss' You're fired,are instances in which saying makes itso (Austin, especially151-64). In suchcases, the speaker/writer (the rhetor) performs magic by effectingreal actionthrough the use ofexisting powerful symbols (O'Keefe 25,73). In the eventthat any ofus employ powerful words to change a situation, or are ourselveschanged by what we read or hear, we participate in a magical transactivetransformation.What is at issue then is not whether rhetoric is magic, but what kinds ofmagic/rhetoric produce what kinds of effects. Still enclosed in the Enlightenment privileging of plain, unambiguous maxims, we are too often victimsof a repressive magic that limits the possibilities for action. Coulianoassociates such magic with the hypnosis induced in a police State, incontrast to the flexible but inefficient magician State :

But the essential difference between the two, the one which works altogether in favor ofthe [magician state1, is that magic is a science of metamorphoses with the capacity tochange, to adapt to all circumstances, to improve, whereas the police State alwaysremains just what it is: in this case, the defender to the death of out-of-date values, of apolitical oligarchy useless and pernicious to the life of nations. The system of restraintsis bound to perish, for what it defends is merely an accumulation ofslogans without anyvitality. The magician State, on the other hand, only expects to develop new possibilitiesand new tactics, and itis precisely excess ofvitality which impedes its good running order

(105-06)


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356 Journal o Advanced CompositionWithin a paradigm that privileges machine virtues such as good runningorder, and values stability and efficiency, the discourse of slogans is thesorcery that prevails. The most obvious examples ofsuch discourse comefrom advertising: in a recent Nike commercial, all of the reasons not to buyathletic shoes and start exercising disappear with the injunction, JustDo It.This is the kind of magic that Emig implicitly identifies with currenttraditional rhetoric, the magicofauthoritarian, simplistic incantations passedfrom salesperson to consumer, from teacher to student, incantations thatidentify preferred public discourse as instantaneous, formulaic, and absolute.Countering such sorcery means disrupting it by employing the preEnlightenment magical/rhetorical belief in a cosmology of possibilities forre-ordering discourse and reality, through writing that creates new phantasms, new magic rhetorics. One of these new rhetorics is Mary Daly'sWickedary a dictionary for witches which reminds us-in its vicious parodyof Webster s patriarchal dictionary and the sexist epistemOlogy itenforces-that the root of the word grammar is grimoire, that languageis a book of spells, that each spell is as Kenneth Burke says, a strategycalculated to address a situation in the name of a certainpower (3-4). ForDaly, a new cosmology of powers requires a new lexicon, as wickedly funnyas it is insistent upon wild intellectual play. Here s her definition ofMetapatriarchal Metaphors :

Metaphors, Metapatriarchal (metaphor derived ro Gk. metapherein to transfer, change,fro metapherein to bear-Webster s): words that function to Name Metapatriarchaltransformations and therefore to elicit such change; the language/vehicles of transcendent Spiraling; words that carry Journeyers into the Wild dimensions ofOther-centeredconsciousness by jarr ing images, stirring memories, accentuating contradictions, upsetting unconscious traditional assumptions, eliciting Gynaesthetic sensingof connections,brewing Strange Ideas. N B : Metapatriarchal Metaphors are by no means to beconfused with the mere figures of speech that are described in textbooks on composition. Rather, they are bearers of complex multiple meanings which reflect thecomplexity and diversity of life itself. (82)

Alertness to the historical, conceptual, and practical correspondencesbetween magic and rhetoric motivates Daly's call for a new celebration ofcomplex multiple meanings, which entails the magical disestablishment ofarchetypal mummy terms that are reiterated in the halls ofacadementia(242). Hers is a radical recognition that magical thinking can coincide witha liberatoryrhetoric, and a warning tha twe choose well the discourse, and theattendant powers, that we invoke.University o IllinoisChicago Illinois


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358 Journal o Advanced CompositionFicino, Marsilio. Three Books on Life Ed. and Trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark.Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1989Gorgias, Encomium of Helen. Trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague. he Rhetorical Tradition:

ReadinlP from Classical Times to the Present. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg.Boston: Bedford, 1990 40-42.Johannisson, Karin. Magic, Science, and Institutionalization in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Hermeticism and theRenaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult inEarly Modern Europe. Ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus. Washington: Folger,1988.251-64.Murphy, James J. Introduction. Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian. Trans. CaroleNewlands. DeKalb, IL: Northern I1Iinois UP, 1986 1-63.O'Keefe, Daniel Lawrence. Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory o Magic. New York: Vintage,1983Peters, Edward. The Magician The Witch and theLaw Philadelphia: U ofPennsylvania P,I978.Picodella Mirandola, Giovanni. Oration on the DignityofMan Chicago: Regnery Gateway,1956Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Works o Percy Bysshe Shelley. Vol. 7 New York: Gordian,1965Taylor, Anya. Magic and English Romanticism Athens: U of Georgia P, 1979Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Dec/ine o Magic. New York: Scribner's, 1971Vickers, Brian. A n a I O ~ Versus Identity: he Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580-1680.Occult and Scientl c Mentalities in the Renaissance. Ed. Brian Vickers. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 19 . 95-163.Ward, John. Magic and Rhetoric from Antiquity to the Renaissance: Some Ruminations.Rhetorica 6 1 (1988): 57-118.Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Holt,1954.Yates, Francis A The Arto Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966. Giordano Bnlno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964

Kinnea Y Award Winners Announcedhe James L. Kinneavy Award for the most outstanding essay in volume11ofJAC was awarded to Patricia Sullivan for Writing in the GraduateCurriculum: Literary Criticism as Composition. Professor Sullivanreceived a cash award and a framed citation.

Joseph Petraglia received an honorable mention for Interrupting theConversation: he Constructionist Dialogue in Composition and alsoreceived a framed citation.he award is generously endowed by Professor Kinneavy, BlumbergCentennial Professor at the UniversityofTexas, and was presented by him

at the meeting of the Association of Teachersof Advanced Compositionat the CCCC Connvention in Cincinnati.

Magic and as Rhetoric Outlines of a History of Phantasy

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