The lost cause of rhetoric

by David Metzger

In this study of the relationship between rhetoric and geometry, David Metzger poses and answers questions of major significance to the field of rhetorical studies. By asking what rhetoric is, he examines why it has always been difficult to define and to determine its purpose and value. He seeks to ascertain how rhetoric can be more clearly valued and therefore better understood, both on its own and as a set of tools with which to write and think. Metzger explores the nature of knowledge in terms of what is created in the relationship between rhetoric and geometry, noting how rhetoric is eliminated in the epistemology of Western culture and how it can be replaced through geometry in the places vacated by philosophy. He argues that the dismissal of rhetoric (and thus the dismissal of the "here and now" itself) takes the form of two basic philosophical moves: the onomastic (which dismisses rhetoric because it is not philosophic, not geometry) and the genealogical (which dismisses rhetori