10596-Splendor and Misery Semiotics

Don Paul Abbott

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Rhetorica, Vol. XXIV, Issue 3, pp. 303–323, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 1533-8541. ©2006 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re-served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

Splendor and Misery: Semiotics and theEnd of Rhetoric

Abstract: Beginning with Roland Barthes’ “The Old Rhetoric: an

aide-memoire” (1964–65), semioticians have shown a remarkable

interest in the history of rhetoric. Writers like Barthes, Tzevtan

Todorov, Gerard Genette, and Paul Ricoeur have offered accounts

of rhetoric’s past that invariably concluded with rhetoric’s demise

and its replacement with semiotics. These writers typically portray

rhetoric’s history as one of a brief rise followed by a very long

decline, a pattern, says Todorov, of “splendor and misery.” This

essay examines the semioticians’ predictions of rhetoric’s demise as

well as semiotics’ attempt to claim elements of rhetoric as its own.

The essay concludes by considering the present state of semiotics’

aspiration to supersede rhetoric as a theory of language and human

affairs.

In the Proceedings of the First Congress of the InternationalAssociation for Semiotic Studies held in Milan in 1974,Seymour Chatman asks if “there is a modern science or

group of sciences that deals with the subject matter of ancient rhetoric. . . or has that matter become so fragmented over the centuries thatthere is no virtue, other than a purely antiquarian one, in tryingto reunite its elements under some single rubric like ‘rhetoric’ or amore modern sounding term” “In other words,” continues Chatman,“shall we try to transform rhetoric as such into a science . . . or shallwe be content, in a merely historical way, to trace its breakdown andabsorption into a variety of fields . . . Does rhetoric have to be reassem-bled, like Israel, or shall we let its descendants remain in diaspora”1

1“Rhetoric and Semiotics,” in A Semiotic Landscape, ed., Seymour Chatman, Um-berto Eco, and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 103–12 (p. 103).

R H E T O R I C A304

Chatman is asking “whether rhetoric should be a modern discipline”or “will the very use of the name confuse modern discussions withundesirable antique overtones?”2

Chatman himself argues that alterations and adaptations arepointless, and thus the only productive course is to search for al-ternatives. The alternatives to rhetoric, as it happens, are the manyvarieties of semiotics. Chatman concludes that “the chief utility ofthe study of rhetoric to the semiotician is historical, that there is littlecurrent value in the models of the ancient discipline, but that some-thing, perhaps a great deal, can be gained from considering the kindsof problems with which it has struggled and some of the distinctionsit has uncovered, though almost all of these have to be reinterpretedin modern ways.”3 Chatman is typical of many semioticians whorelegate rhetoric to little more than limited historical relevance. In-deed, a remarkable number of semioticians preface their works witha history of rhetoric. These surveys usually begin with the emergenceof rhetoric in ancient Greece and proceed into the nineteenth centurywhen rhetoric finally expires. Conveniently enough, the expirationof rhetoric is followed by the discovery of semiotics in the early twen-tieth century by Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce.This is as it should be, because for many a semiotician, semiotics sim-ply supersedes rhetoric, incorporating anything of value that was tobe found in the rhetorical estate and relegating the rest to footnotes.

As a discipline semiotics displays an interesting ambivalence tohistory. It is self-consciously new, undiscovered before the nineteenthcentury, and yet to demonstrate this newness semiotics must demon-strate its superiority over older disciplines. Semiotics, as the scienceof signs, is also broad in scope; it potentially encompasses all humanactivity. Given this great breadth, it is natural that earlier thinkers,including rhetoricians, would have inadvertently and unknowinglytouched upon semiotic concerns. Thus semiotics is a new disciplinewith a long history, and rhetoric necessarily figures directly into thishistory. The intent of this essay, therefore, is to examine the relation-ship between semiotics and rhetoric, paying particular attention tothe semiotician’s historical accounts which detail rhetoric’s demise.

2“Rhetoric and Semiotics,” 102–103.3“Rhetoric and Semiotics,” 112. Chatman’s skepticism, if not hostility, toward

rhetoric is remarkable considering that for many years he taught in the RhetoricDepartment at the University of California, Berkeley.

Splendor and Misery 305

The semiotician’s history of rhetoric

The majority of semioticians who proclaim rhetoric’s demiseare followers of Saussure rather than Pierce, writers, that is, in theFrench rather than the Anglo-American tradition. Perhaps becausePierce designated as a branch of his system of semeiosis what hecalled “speculative rhetoric,” Peircians have been more reluctant todismiss rhetoric from the semiotic pantheon.4 Thus this essay is con-cerned primarily with thinkers like Roland Barthes, Tzevtan Todorov,Gerard Genette, Paul Ricoeur and Group Mu.5 All five offer historicalaccounts which, in varying degrees of detail, recount rhetoric’s de-cline and each declares, with varying degrees of certainty, rhetoric’sfinal collapse.

Perhaps the earliest of the semiotic histories of rhetoric is pre-sented by Roland Barthes in “The Old Rhetoric: an aide-memoire.”Barthes’ account was first presented in a seminar in 1964–65, thenpublished in Communication, and finally as the first chapter in L’aven-ture semiologique (1985).6 Barthes explains that when he wrote “TheOld Rhetoric” no such survey was available in France: “This isthe manual I should have liked to find ready-made when I be-gan to inquire into the death of Rhetoric.”7 Barthes avoids refer-ences and citations in part because he is writing from memory. Suchan effort is not especially difficult, says Barthes, because “it dealswith a common place learning: Rhetoric is inadequately known,yet knowledge of it implies no task of erudition; hence anyone

4For discussion of the place of rhetoric in Peirce’s work see John R. Lyne,“Rhetoric and Semiotic in C. S. Peirce,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (1980): 155–168and James Jakob Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), chap. 4, “Universal Rhetoric,” 78–108.

5Other names might be added to this list. Certainly many writers discussrhetoric from what might be called a semiotic perspective. However, I am specificallyconcerned with those writers who trace rhetoric’s demise historically and attributethat demise at least in part to the figures of speech. Thus Paul de Man is absentbecause in “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics (Fall 1973): 27–33, he does not offeran extended historical analysis of rhetoric’s decline in the manner of those citedabove. However, de Man does share with other semioticians the view that rhetoric is“the study of tropes and of figures” (28). Jacques Derrida, in “White Mythology,” alsodeals with some of the issues addressed in this paper: “White Mythology: Metaphorin the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History 6 (1974): 5–76, especially “The Flowersof Rhetoric: The Heliotrope,” 46–60.

6R. Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,1988).

7Semiotic Challenge, 11.


can readily avail himself of the bibliographic references which arelacking here.”8

Barthes’ point of departure is “to confront the new semiotics ofwriting with the classical practice of literary language, which forcenturies was known as rhetoric.”9 The word “old” “does not meanthere is a new rhetoric today; rather old rhetoric is set in oppositionto that new which may not yet have come into being; the world isincredibly full of old rhetoric.”10 Rhetoric, says Barthes, is a “metalan-guage” which was “prevalent in the West from the fifth century bc tothe nineteenth century ad.” This “metalanguage” was “a veritableempire, greater and more tenacious than any political empire in itsdimensions and duration . . . Rhetoric prevailed in the West for twoand a half millennia, from Gorgias to Napoleon III . . . it has takenthree centuries to die; and it is not dead for sure even now.”11 Rhetoricwas particularly influential in education and its history can be seen inthe rise and fall of rhetoric in the curriculum: “Rhetoric is triumphant:it rules over instruction. Rhetoric is moribund: limited to this sector,it falls gradually into intellectual discredit.”12 The reason for this dis-credit is the “promotion of a new value, evidence (of facts, of ideas,of sentiments), which is self-sufficient and does without language(or imagines it does so).”13 Barthes says that “this ‘evidence’ takes,from the sixteenth century on, three directions: a personal evidence(in Protestantism), a rational evidence (in Cartesianism), a sensoryevidence (in Empiricism).”14 Thus rhetoric died, but “to say in a cate-gorical way that Rhetoric is dead would mean we could specify whatreplaced it.”15

Like Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov also presents a semiotician’s sur-vey of rhetoric in Theories of the Symbol.16 Todorov, too, classifies theentire history of rhetoric into two periods which he calls “Splendorand Misery.” The period of “splendor” extends from rhetoric’s be-ginnings in ancient Greece to Cicero, whom Todorov calls the “last of

8Semiotic Challenge, 12.9Semiotic Challenge, 11.10Semiotic Challenge, 11.11Semiotic Challenge, 15.12Semiotic Challenge, 43.13Semiotic Challenge, 43.14Semiotic Challenge, 43.15Semiotic Challenge, 45.16T. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1982); French original, Theories du symbole (Paris 1977).


the ancients and first of the moderns.”17 Todorov then sees a period of“misery” emerging from the crisis of the Roman Republic. After thecollapse of the Republic rhetoric passes from instrumental to orna-mental, from functional to beautiful.18 This second period is ratherlong, to say the least, extending from Quintilian in the first centuryto Pierre Fontanier in the nineteenth. Rhetoric, says Todorov, “is adiscipline in which such shortcuts are possible and even legitimate,so slow is its evolution.”19 This second period is not a happy one forrhetoric: “Between Quintilian and Fontanier, fortune does not smileon one single rhetorician—and this longest period in the history ofrhetoric—lasting nearly 1800 years—turns out to be . . . a period ofslow decadence and degradation, suffocation and bad conscience.”20

Of course, says Todorov, “history indeed does not stop with Fontanier. . . only the history of rhetoric stops there.”21 Rhetoric, says Todorov,did not survive the nineteenth century, “but, before it disappeared, itproduced—through a final effort more powerful than any that hadgone before it, as if to try to stave off imminent extinction—a body ofreflections whose quality is unmatched.”22

This “swan song” of rhetoric began early in the eighteenthcentury, with Des Tropes (1730) of Cesar Chesneau Dumarsais andended, a century or so later, with the work of Pierre Fontanier,whom Todorov regards as “the last rhetorician.”23 While Fontaniermight not have been, in Todorov’s estimation, the one to kill offrhetoric, his work represents the culmination of rhetoric’s degen-eration. Fontanier’s predecessor, Dumarsais, created a catalogue oftropes that proved to be a popular, influential, and enduring work.24

17Theories of the Symbol, 65.18Todorov is here repeating the common claim that rhetoric suffered a decline

after the collapse of the Roman Republic. For an alternative view see Jeffrey Walker,Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especiallypart II, “‘Rhetoric’ in Later Antiquity: A Short Revisionist History,” 45–135. Walkerargues that “although there certainly were changes in the sociopolitical conditionsand rhetorical practices, there was no ‘decline of rhetoric’ in any meaningful senseeither in the Hellenistic or the Roman period” (ix).

19Theories of the Symbol, 69.20Theories of the Symbol, 70.21Theories of the Symbol, 79.22Theories of the Symbol, 84.23Des Tropes ou des differents sens. Figure et vingt autres articles de l’Encyclopedie, suivis

de L’Abrege des Tropes de l’abbe Ducros, ed. Françoise Douay-Soublin (Paris: Flammarion,1988).

24For editions and abridgements of Des Tropes, see “Oeuvres de Dumarsais” inDes Tropes, ed. Douay-Soublin, 413–14. An assessment of Dumarsais’ place in early


Barthes says that “for the eighteenth century, the most famous treatise(and moreover the most intelligent) is that of Dumarsais.”25 Fontanier,as Dumarsais’ successor, used the latter’s Tropes as a point of depar-ture for his own works. Thus Fontanier’s first work was Les Tropesde Dumarsais, avec un commentaire raisonne (1818) followed by Manuelclassique pour l’etude des tropes (1821) and Traite general des figures dudiscours autres que les tropes (1827).26 The latter work, like Dumarsais’Tropes, became a standard textbook on rhetoric in France.

Todorov, who earlier praised the efforts of Dumarsais, Fontanier,and others as “reflections of unmatched quality,”27 concludes his re-view of their work by asserting that every page, taken by itself, reeksof mediocrity. We are dealing with an elderly gentleman (rhetoric): henever dares to stray very far from the ideal of his youth (exemplifiedby Cicero and Quintilian—although they were elderly gentlementhemselves, in their way); he does not notice the transformationsof the world around him (Fontanier came after Romanticism, in itsGerman manifestation at least). And yet there is something splendidabout this old age; the old man has forgotten nothing of the two-thousand-year history of his life. Better still, in a debate animatedby many voices, notions, definitions, and relations are refined andcrystallized as never before. Here then is the paradox: this sequenceof lusterless pages, when taken as a whole, produces a dazzlingimpression indeed.28

The eighteenth century witnessed the culmination of rhetoric’ssecond crisis in which, “at a single stroke” rhetoric was “acquitted,liberated, and put to death.”29 So rhetoric has died again, a bit earlierthan in Barthes’ account, and for a different reason. For Todorov thecause of rhetoric’s ultimate death is romanticism: romanticism “sup-

eighteenth-century European rhetoric is offered by Jean-Paul Sermain, “Le code dubon gout (1725–1750),” in Marc Fumaroli, ed., Histoire de la rhetorique dans l’Europemoderne 1450–1950 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 879–943, esp. 926–36.

25The Semiotic Challenge, 45.26For a modern edition of Fontanier’s works see Les figures du discours, ed. Gerard

Genette (Paris: Flammarion, 1968). Genette’s introduction contains a useful discussionof Fontanier’s treatise. See also Arlette Michel, “Romantisme, literature et rhetorique,”in Fumaroli, Histoire de la rhetorique, 1042–44. A comprehensive survey of rhetoric innineteenth-century France is presented by Françoise Douay-Soublin, “La rhetoriqueen France au XIXe siecle a travers ses pratiques et ses institutions: restauration,renaissance, remise en cause,” in Fumaroli, Histoire de la rhetorique, 1071–1214.

27Theories of the Symbol, 84.28Theories of the Symbol, 87.29Theories of the Symbol, 79.


pressed the necessity for regimenting discourse, since now anyone,by drawing upon personal inspiration, without technique or rules,can produce admirable works of art. Thought is no longer divorced—or even distinguished—from expression; there is no longer, in a word,any need for rhetoric.”30 Todorov asks the question posed by manyof rhetoric’s critics: why did rhetoric, an untenable system, some-how survive for nearly two millennia? His answer is that rhetoricwas the product of a repressive society which regimented discourse.Todorov finds rhetoric’s persistence so inexplicable that he dismissesit as something akin to a cultural “mental illness.”31

For Todorov, then, the history of rhetoric is one of “splendor andmisery” much as Barthes before him characterized the same historyas “triumphant and moribund.” Other semioticians share much ofBarthes’ and Todorov’s view of the history of rhetoric and typicallydiffer from the histories just recounted only in the level of detail. Thusin his Figures of Literary Discourse Gerard Genette offers what he calls a“cavalier account” of rhetoric’s history, which he admits would needto supplemented by an “immense historical investigation” along thelines of the one already sketched by Barthes.32 Like Todorov andBarthes before him, Genette appears to believe that little of usesurvived the “great shipwreck of rhetoric.”33 Genette, too, featuresDumarsais and Fontanier as the key figures in the “later stages”of rhetoric’s decline. Genette acknowledges Fontanier’s “taxonomicintelligence” and calls him “the Linnaeus of rhetoric.”34 For Genette,rhetoric’s career has been a “historical course of a discipline that haswitnessed, over the centuries, the gradual contraction of its field ofcompetence . . . from Corax to our own day, the history of rhetoric hasbeen that of a generalized restriction.”35 For Genette, this “generalizedrestriction” is a movement from rhetoric, classically conceived, to atheory of figures, to a theory of tropes, to a final “valorization” ofmetaphor as the surviving heir of the rhetorical tradition.

Like Barthes, Todorov, and especially Genette, Paul Ricoeur seesrhetoric as having followed a course of gradual decline from its clas-sical origins to its present moribund state. In The Rule of Metaphor,

30Theories of the Symbol, 80.31Theories of the Symbol, 79.32Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1982), 104.33Figures of Literary Discourse, 114.34Gerard Genette, “Introduction: La rhetorique des figures,” in Fontanier, Les

figures du discourse, cited in n. 26 above, p. 13.35Figures of Literary Discourse, 103–104.


Ricoeur offers an account of rhetoric’s career that concludes with its“dying days.”36 One cause of rhetoric’s death was its reduction to“parts,” that is, the figures. Ricoeur decries the taxonomic tendencyof rhetoric, as exemplified by the lists of figures, largely becausethese taxonomies are, in his view, “static.” The more crucial prob-lem is that the taxonomies contributed to rhetoric’s “severing” itselffrom argument. Ricoeur recognizes that Greek rhetoric was “broader,more dramatic, than a theory of figures.”37 After all, says Ricoeur, be-fore taxonomy there was Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and, moreover, “beforerhetoric was futile, it was dangerous.”38

Rhetoric’s decline from dangerous to merely futile is in largepart attributed, yet again, to Fontanier.39 When he turns to Fontanier,however, Ricoeur modifies his view that a chief cause of rhetoric’sdecline is its reduction to the figures. Ricoeur dedicates the chapter onrhetoric’s decline to Gerard Genette because Genette argues that “theprogressive reduction of the domain of rhetoric” was its undoing.40

Ricoeur agrees with Genette that “since the Greeks, rhetoric dimin-ished bit by bit to a theory of style by cutting itself off from the twoparts that generated it, the theories of argumentation and of compo-sition. Then, in turn, the theory of style shrank to a classificationof figures of speech, and this to a theory of tropes.”41 Although heagrees with this analysis, Ricoeur does not regard the reduction totropology as the “decisive factor” in rhetoric’s demise. The emphasison the reduction of rhetoric is not useful because “the problem is notto restore the original domain of rhetoric—in any case this may bebeyond doing, for ineluctable cultural reasons—rather, it is to under-stand in a new way the very workings of tropes.”42 For Ricoeur, then,rhetoric’s alleged reduction to a theory of tropes was less debilitatingthan rhetoric’s inability to develop a theory of tropes that proveduseful.

Barthes, Todorov, Genette, and Ricoeur all offer accounts ofrhetoric’s history that culminate in rhetoric’s demise sometime inthe late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. While these crit-ics differ on the precise cause of death, all (with the exception of

36P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. R. Czerny (Toronto: University of TorontoPress, 1977), 28.

37Rule of Metaphor, 12.38Rule of Metaphor, 10–11.39Rule of Metaphor, 48–51.40Rule of Metaphor, 44.41Rule of Metaphor, 45.42Rule of Metaphor, 45.


Todorov) regard the reduction of rhetoric to the figures and tropesas an important contributing cause. This consensus is one of the mostobvious features of all these histories: they all decry the tropologi-cal impulse and yet all are fascinated by the figures. They presenthistories in which the figures play a prominent role and, despiterhetoric’s demise, they agree that the figures have survived. This, inturn, presents one of the incongruities of these histories: how canrhetoric have died, if the greatest portion of its “body” has continuedto live While they often decry the concentration on the figures, allappear to want the figures to be prominent in the discipline thatsucceeds rhetoric.

Group Mu

Despite the pronouncements of Barthes, Todorov, Genette, andRicoeur that rhetoric is dead, these semioticians do not seem quitecertain that it is buried. As Barthes notes, for rhetoric to be trulydead, there must be something to replace it. The obvious choice toreplace rhetoric is, of course, semiotics. But neither Barthes nor theothers offer a clear vision of just how, or in what ways, semiotics willreplace rhetoric.

The task of integrating rhetoric into semiotics was undertakenmost fully by six scholars at the University of Liege calling themselvesGroup Mu.43 Their work, Rhetorique generale (1970), remains probablythe most ambitious attempt to fashion a rhetoric in accord withsemiotic principles. Despite the title, the work is not, as many havenoted, “a general rhetoric”; rather it is a work primarily about thefigures. As Group Mu’s translators explain: “the book is mostly astudy of rhetorical tropes and figures, what classical rhetoric calledelocutio. It attempts to set forth the basic principles by which all figuresof language and thought are derived and can be explained.” Thetranslators conclude that “this study represents the first time that thecomplex variety of figures has been systematically and coherentlyderived; moreover, the method adopted here brings elocutio intothe range of modern linguistics.”44 Thus unlike Barthes, Todorov,

43The six authors explain that “we have chosen as our symbol the first letter ofthe Greek word designating the most prestigious of metaboles.” Group Mu (J. Dubois,F. Edeline, J.-M. Klinkenberg, P. Minguet, F. Pire, H. Trinon), A General Rhetoric, trans.P. Burell and E. Slotkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), xix.

44A General Rhetoric, “Translators’ Preface,” xiv.


and the others, Group Mu does not simply proclaim the end ofrhetoric, they propose a specific replacement for the “old” rhetoric.An examination, therefore, of their attempt to bring “elocutio intothe range of modern linguistics” provides a singular test of thesignificance of the “semiotic challenge” to rhetoric.

Despite the translators’ claims for the novelty of Group Mu’sproject, A General Rhetoric’s figurative and taxonomic emphasis in-vites comparisons with the elocutio of classical rhetoric. Perhapsmindful of their apparent similarity with the rhetorical tradition,Group Mu, like Barthes and Todorov, emphasize the historical dis-continuity between their approach and that of traditional rhetori-cians. At least in France, says Group Mu, “rhetoric was dead inthought if not in practice.”45 So dead was rhetoric that a dozen or soyears before the publication of A General Rhetoric “anyone claimingthat rhetoric would again become a major discipline would havebeen laughed at.”46 This is because rhetoric was “never a very coher-ent discipline”; historically it degenerated into a “sclerotic tradition”which eventually “gave up the ghost.”47 But Group Mu believes thatrhetoric, despite its unfortunate decline, deserves resuscitation bysemioticians. After all, as the translators note, rhetoric was once “animportant and respected discipline.”48 At the time Group Mu beganto conceive of A General Rhetoric, the discipline of rhetoric was show-ing at least some signs of its former vitality. “Today,” says GroupMu, “rhetoric appears not only as a science of the future but also atimely science within the scope of structuralism, new criticism, andsemiology.”49

Group Mu credits the revival of rhetoric to Barthes and Todorov,as well as Roman Jacobson and Chaim Perelman. But despite the re-emergence of rhetoric within a structuralist and semiotic context,Group Mu makes it clear that they would not restore all of therhetorical tradition: “no one thinks seriously of bringing her backwith all the old debris. We must avoid the bric-a-brac.” Group Muagrees with Genette’s claim that “classical rhetoricians had ‘a maniafor naming.”’ In Group Mu’s view the “endless nomenclatures” ofthe figures, while perhaps not “the underlying cause,” has been “theevident sign of rhetoric’s demise.”50 Group Mu concedes that despite

45A General Rhetoric, 1.46A General Rhetoric, 1.47A General Rhetoric, 4, 5.48A General Rhetoric, “Translator’s Preface,” xiii.49A General Rhetoric, 1.50A General Rhetoric, 2.


its demise many of its old duties survived and were co-opted by thefield of “stylistics.” Stylistics, unlike the old rhetoric, is not concernedwith learning to write or crafting a persuasive message, but ratheris intent upon discovering “how and why a text is a text.”51 Thus thestudy of rhetoric becomes an effort to discover literary meaning. ForGroup Mu “literature is first of all a singular use of language. It is, infact, the theory of this usage that will constitute the first objectiveof general, and perhaps generalizable, rhetoric.”52 Thus rhetoric is,not surprisingly, rooted in language. More specifically, rhetoric is “aset of operations made on language necessarily dependent on certaincharacteristics of language. We shall see that all rhetorical operationsrest on a fundamental property of linear discourse—that discoursecan be decomposed into smaller and smaller units.”53

In Group Mu’s analysis these figures are, for the most part, the fa-miliar ones of classical rhetoric. The figures, or “metaboles” as GroupMu calls them, are classified into four different “fields”: metaplasm,metataxis, metaseme, and metalogism. Metaplasms are figures thatact on sounds or graphic aspects of language. Metataxes are fig-ures that act on the structure of the sentence. Metasemes are figuresthat replace one seme, or unit of meaning, with another. And, fi-nally, metalogisms are figures of thought that modify the logicalvalue of sentences. Each “metabole,” or figure, is also categorizedinto one of four different linguistic operations: suppression, addi-tion, suppression-addition, and permutation. The various traditionalfigures are classified within the intersections of these four fields andfour operations. For example, metaplasm includes aphaeresis andapocope; metataxis includes zeugma and parataxis; metaseme in-cludes synecdoche and antonomasia; metalogism includes litotes andhyperbole.

Up to this point in the analysis Group Mu has been contentto say that figures “act upon” or “modify” language in some way.But if they are to meet their goal of rigorous linguistic analysis,they recognize that they must go beyond such vague terms andexplain just how figures function. To do so, Group Mu offers several“operating concepts” including the crucial concept of “deviation.”Group Mu defines figures as “significant alterations,” or deviations,from a linguistic norm: “the first stage of rhetoric consists in anauthor’s creating deviations, the second stage consists in a reader’s

51A General Rhetoric, 96.52A General Rhetoric, 7.53A General Rhetoric, 25.


deciphering them.”54 Thus figures deviate from a norm, but not somuch that the reader is prevented from engaging in the interpretationor “autocorrection” of the alteration.

The centrality of deviation in the figurative process requires thatGroup Mu define the norm from which the figures deviate. Thatnorm, says Group Mu, is “degree zero.” Group Mu defines degreezero, not as a “colorless” or “neutral” language, in the manner ofBarthes,55 but rather in terms of semes, the smallest possible unitsof meaning. Thus “absolute degree zero . . . would be a discourse re-duced to its essential semes . . . that is, to the semes that we couldnot suppress without at the same time depriving our discourse ofall signification.”56 Such discourse is “univocal,” that is, it lacks theredundancy typical of most language. But absolute degree zero re-mains an ideal, whereas the norm from which rhetoric would de-viate is “practical degree zero”: “utterance containing all the es-sential semes along with a number of contiguous semes reducedto a minimum as functions of the possibilities of the vocabulary.”57

Degree zero is, admits Group Mu, “an often ungraspable norm”which they themselves have difficulty defining. Degree zero is atleast partially defined by the reader’s expectations as determined bythe interplay of language, culture, and context. Figures, by deviatingfrom this norm in often unpredictable ways invites interpretation(“autocorrection”) on the part of the reader and it is this deviationand interpretation that is at the heart of the figurative experience.Group Mu, however, does not regard all deviation as rhetorical:“in the rhetorical sense we shall understand deviation as the de-tected alteration of degree zero.” Or, to put it another way, “we shallagree to call rhetorical only those operations trying for poetic effect. . . and found especially in poetry, jokes, slang, and so on.”58 Thusrhetorical deviation requires intent, although figures can also occurin the absence of intent. Rhetoric, then, as Group Mu defines it, is

54A General Rhetoric, 34.55R. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (New York: Hill

and Wang, 1968). Despite the title of this work, Barthes discusses “degree zero” onlyon pp. 4–5 and 76–78. For Barthes, in contrast to Group Mu, degree zero is not alinguistic norm but rather a deliberate technique: an “attempt towards disengagingliterary language” which results in “a style of absence which is almost an idealabsence of style” (76–77).

56A General Rhetoric, 30.57A General Rhetoric, 30.58A General Rhetoric, 37.


“based on the double movement of the creation and reduction ofdeviations.”59

How successful was Group Mu at creating a new rhetoric in har-mony with semiotics? Even semioticians like Ricoeur appear unsure.Writing about Group Mu’s work Ricoeur says that “the new rhetoricat first glance is nothing but a repetition of classical rhetoric, at leastthat of tropes, only at a higher level of technicity. But this is just afirst impression. The new rhetoric is far from being a reformulationof the theory of tropes in more formal terms; it proposes instead torestore the entire breadth of the theory of figures.”60 And perhapsRicoeur is correct, if one accepts his contention that rhetoric was ulti-mately reduced to the tropes, and thus largely ignored the figuresuntil these were revived by Group Mu. Yet Group Mu’s identifica-tion of deviation as the foundation of the figures cannot but make thelink between Group Mu and classical rhetoric very clear. As Ricoeurhimself admits, “every one agrees in saying that figurative languageexists only if one can contrast it with another language that is notfigurative.”61

Indeed, the agreement that figurative language is only meaning-ful when contrasted with the non-figurative spans the centuries. Inthe Institutio oratoria Quintilian says a commonly accepted meaningof the term figure is “that which is poetically or rhetorically alteredfrom the simple and obvious method of expression. It will then betrue to distinguish between the style which is devoid of figures . . .and that which is adorned with figures.”62 Later rhetoricians wouldfollow Quintilian’s definition of a figure as a “change in meaningor language from the ordinary and simple form.”63 Thus in the Re-naissance George Puttenham says: “Figurative Speech is a noueltyof language euidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from the or-dinarie habit and manner of our dayly talke and writing and figure itselfe is a certain lively or good grace set upon words, speeches andsentences to some purpose and not in vain, giving them ornamentor efficacy by many manner of alterations in shape, in sounde, andalso in sense.”64 Some two centuries later the ubiquitous Hugh Blairmaintains that figures of speech “always imply some departure from

59A General Rhetoric, 36.60Rule of Metaphor, cited above n. 36, p. 136.61Rule of Metaphor, 138.62Institutio oratoria, 9.1.14 (trans. H. E. Butler).63Institutio oratoria, 9.1.11.64George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Menston, England: Scolar Press,

1968), 132–33.


simplicity of expression.”65 Blair adds that “though Figures implya deviation from what may be reckoned the most simple form ofSpeech, we are not thence to conclude, that they imply anything un-common or unnatural. This is so far from being the case, that, onmany occasions, they are both the most natural, and the most com-mon method of uttering our sentiments. It is impossible to composeany discourse without using them often; nay, there are few Sentencesof any length, in which some expression or other, that may be termeda figure, does not occur.”66 By explaining the figures in terms of de-viation Group Mu follows a view well established in the long historyof rhetoric, according to which the figures are defined as departures,alterations, and deviations from a norm.

Classification of the figures

Just as Group Mu accepts deviation as the operating principleof the figures, it also organizes those figures in a manner that isreminiscent of classical rhetoric. A consistent criticism of semioti-cians is that traditional rhetoric had been excessively concerned withclassification in general and with the organization of the figures inparticular. (This may seem a curious criticism in light of Peirce’sproposed 59,049 classes of signs).67 Barthes contends that ancientrhetorical texts, “especially the post-Aristotelian ones, show an ob-session with classification (the very term of partitio in oratory is anexample): rhetoric openly offers itself as a classification (of materials,of rules, of parts, of genres, of styles).”68 Todorov puts it succinctly:“The rhetoricians never cease to classify, but they classify badly.”69

In response to these complaints Group Mu might have beenexpected either to avoid classification altogether or to establish ataxonomic system at odds with the classical notions. Yet here, too,Group Mu’s approach reveals classical precedent. Winfried Noth,noting Group Mu’s four categories of fields and operations, observes

65Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding (Car-bondale: Southern Illinois University Press), vol. 1, 272–73.

66Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 273–74. Perhaps anticipating Genette,Todorov, and others, Blair recommends Dumarsais as “one of the most sensible andinstructive writers” on figurative language (pp. 272–73, note).

67Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, augmented ed. (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 2001), 23.

68Semiotic Challenge, cited above n. 6, p. 47.69Theories of the Symbol, cited above n. 16, p. 107.


that “Quintilian also set up four general categories of deviation (mu-tatio) which reappear with modification in modern semiotic systemsof rhetorical figures.”70 In Book 1 of the Institutio oratoria Quintilianidentifies four classes of solecisms: addition, omission, transposi-tion, and substitution. As Noth suggests, these four classes conformclosely to Group Mu’s four “operations” of deviation: addition, sup-pression, permutation, and suppression-addition. Three of the fourcategories of Quintilian and Group Mu share either similar or identi-cal labels. Even Group Mu’s “suppression-addition,” which at firstglance seems not to correspond to one of Quintilian’s four categories,is similar to his category “substitution.” In “suppression-addition,”Group Mu explains, “an element of one class is substituted for an-other class.”71 These two four-part classifications are similar, but notidentical. Quintilian is discussing “solecisms” or errors in language,which, he says, writers typically have dealt with in a fourfold divi-sion. Although solecisms are errors of language, Quintilian makes itclear that many figures closely resemble solecisms.72 While Quin-tilian is primarily talking about errors of language, Group Mu’s“operations” are employed to explain the deviations which producevirtually all the figures.73

While the fourfold divisions of Group Mu and Quintilian dif-fer significantly in scope, the categories nevertheless remain sim-ilar. For Quintilian and Group Mu, and countless rhetoricians inbetween, have faced the need to organize the figures into categories

70Winfried Noth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1990), 341. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 1.5.37–42.

71A General Rhetoric, cited above n. 43, p. 75. This statement refers to the operationof suppression-addition within the “field” of “metataxes.”

72Institutio oratoria, 1.5.40–41.73In the twentieth century Roman Jakobson derived a system of tropes from

language “disturbance” aphasia. Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language(The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 76, claim that the varieties of aphasia “oscillate” betweentwo polar types: metaphor and metonymy. According to Jacobson and Halle “thedevelopment of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: onetopic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity.”That is, discourse develops either metaphorically of metonymically. Their reductionof tropes to two archetypal forms was widely influential. The reduction of the tropesto a few prototypical forms had been proposed at various times by rhetoricians. Inthe early eighteenth century Giambatista Vico advocated four fundamental tropes:metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. See Michael Mooney, Vico in the Traditionof Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 79–80. In 1945 KennethBurke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 503–17, proposed “Four Master Tropes.” These were once again metaphor, metonymy,synecdoche, and irony (although Burke makes no mention of Vico).


that render them more useful and understandable. If semioticianshave found these classificatory efforts frustratingly elusive, so, too,have rhetoricians. Quintilian notes that in his own time there wasconsiderable disagreement among rhetoricians about the names ofthe figures and the ways to classify them. After discussing tropes inBook 8 of the Institutio he turns in Book 9 to the figures, and beginsby noting the similarity of these two concepts. “Many authors,” hesays, “have considered figures identical with tropes, because whetherit be that the latter derive their name from having a certain formor from the fact that they effect alterations in language . . . it mustbe admitted that both these features are found in figures as well.”74

Quintilian says further that tropes and figures have “a general re-semblance” because “both involve a departure from the simple andstraightforward method of expression coupled with a certain rhetor-ical excellence.”75 Although Quintilian synthesizes the classificationsoffered by his predecessors, perhaps anticipating the semioticians, hetoo reveals some impatience with the “quibbling” about the distinc-tion between tropes and figures. In discussing irony Quintilian notesthat some regard it as a trope and others as a figure and, he says, “Iam aware of the complicated and minute discussions to which it hasgiven rise,” but “these artifices will produce exactly the same effect,whether they are styled tropes or figures, since their values lie not intheir names, but in their effect.” He concludes that it is best “to adoptthe generally accepted terms and to understand the actual thing, bywhatever name it is called.”76

The historical record

All of the histories reviewed here share a common interpretationof the history of rhetoric. Barthes, Todorov, Genette, Ricoeur, GroupMu, all portray the history of rhetoric as a long period of declinewhich culminates in rhetoric’s “death.” And yet all seem to suspectthat they have exaggerated that death. The semioticians’ own ex-tensive accounts of rhetoric testify that rhetoric, in some form, didindeed survive into the twentieth century. The argument that rhetoricwas displaced from its historically favored position in European edu-cation is quite credible. But the claims go well beyond rhetoric’s edu-

749.1.2–3.759.1.3–4.769.1.7–10.


cational displacement. The claim is that rhetoric is actually dead—orat least terminally ill. All, too, share a general agreement about thecause of rhetoric’s death: the reduction of rhetoric to the figures.But, here too, there is uncertainty. The figures, the cause of rhetoric’sdemise, emerge as the most useful survivor of rhetoric’s demise. In-deed, it seems reasonable to say that the semioticians are as obsessedwith the figures as are the rhetoricians whose works they dismiss.Group Mu’s work, a self-proclaimed attempt to integrate rhetoricwith contemporary linguistics is, after all, a work of elocutio.77

The semioticians’ fascination with the figures may perhaps bepartially explained by the fact that their histories are derived fromthe particularities of the rhetorical tradition in France. Todorov, forexample, admits that his own analysis looks exclusively at the “lastcenturies of rhetorical activity in France.”78 Thus the prominenceof Dumarsais and Fontanier in French education may be expected tohave caused the semioticians to privilege the figures in their accounts.Yet the course of rhetoric in France may not be entirely generalizableto the history of rhetoric in general.

George Kennedy maintains that the work of Dumarsais “culmi-nated the tendency toward regarding rhetoric as the study of literarydevices of style, begun in France with Ramus.” Kennedy contin-ues that “although Dumarsais’ work was translated into English,rhetoricians in Britain in the later eighteenth century, where oratoryhad a significant role in public life, viewed rhetoric in somethingcloser to the classical sense, with a secondary application to literarycomposition. The result has been a division between the Europeanunderstanding of rhetoric as primarily a matter of the use of tropesand figures, taken up by teachers of English in Britain and Amer-ica, and an American tradition among teachers of speech viewingrhetoric as civic discourse, derived from classical sources and othereighteenth-century British rhetoricians.”79

While national experiences may help explain semioticians’ pointsof view, the French tradition may not be as excessively figura-tive as these histories maintain. Indeed, Todorov concedes thatthere is another tradition in France represented by Etienne Bonnetde Condillac: “A rhetoric such as Condillac’s grants an important

77It is interesting to note that Group Mu’s more recent work has focused on visualrhetoric and is far less dependent on classical rhetoric than is A General Rhetoric. SeeGroupe Mu. Traite du signe visuel: Pour une rhetorique de l’image (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

78Theories of the Symbol, cited above n. 16, p. 108.79G. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient

to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 276.


place to the figures (or ‘turns’), but does not eliminate all the rest(that is, considerations regarding the construction of discourse ingeneral).”80 Similarly, Genette notes that his claim that rhetoric inFrance is “above all a rhetoric of elocutio” has been challenged byAnton Kibedi Varga’s Rhetorique et literature. Varga’s entire book, saysGenette, demonstrates “the interest shown by certain seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rhetoricians in the techniques of argumentand composition.”81 Genette attributes the difference in interpreta-tion to “relative emphasis and proportion” given to various rhetori-cians. However, says Genette, that part of French rhetoric devotedto elocutio, “even when it was not the largest, was already at that timethe most vivid, the most original in relation to ancient models andtherefore the most productive.”82

Genette recognizes, as do others discussed here, that classicalrhetoric encompassed much more than the figures. But virtually allargue, nevertheless, that the figures represent “the most productive”part of the rhetorical tradition. Ricoeur acknowledges that Greekrhetoric was “broader, more dramatic, than a theory of figures.”83

Barthes, in particular, shows great familiarity with the breadth ofclassical rhetoric, describing in considerable detail what he calls “thenetwork,” “the rhetorical machine,” that is, the apparatus of theancient art.84 Barthes knows that elocutio is more than tropes: “Thearguments found and broadly distributed in the parts of discourseremain to be ‘put into words’: this is the function of this third partof the techne rhetorike known as lexis or elocutio, to which we areaccustomed to pejoratively reducing rhetoric because of the interestthe Moderns have taken in the figures of rhetoric, a part (but onlya part) of Elocutio.”85 And yet when Group Mu offers an alternative to

80Theories of the Symbol, 107. It should be noted that Todorov does claim thatCondillac is the sole representative of this tradition of “discourse in general” al-though “he is linked to certain manifestations of rhetorical thought at the end of theseventeenth century, most notably in the Logique ou l’art de penser, by Antoine Arnauldand Pierre Nicole, and in the Rhetorique ou l’art de parler by Bernard Lamy.”

81Figures of Literary Discourse, cited above n. 32, p. 104, n. 7. See Anton KibediVarga, Rhetorique et literature. Etudes de structures classiques (Paris: Didier, 1970).

82Figures of Literary Discourse, 104.83Rule of Metaphor, cited above n. 36, p. 12.84Semiotic Challenge, cited above n. 6, pp. 51, 47.85Semiotic Challenge, 83. It should be noted that not all semioticians analyze

classical rhetoric exclusively from a figurative perspective. An alternative analysisis presented by Giovanni Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity, trans. C.Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Manetti maintains that“the consideration of signs rests at the heart of inventio, that is, when proofs must


the obsolete classical rhetoric, that alternative looks remarkably likeclassical rhetoric. A General Rhetoric is a work that fits readily intothe figurative tradition. The figures themselves are given the familiarnames of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and the rest. GroupMu departs from conventional terms with its “fields” of figures:metaplasm, metataxis, metaseme, and metalogism. (But even thenames of these fields have comfortingly familiar Greek roots). Indeed,so similar is Group Mu’s effort to traditional approaches that Barthescalls it a “revalidation” of the old rhetoric.86

Sufficient time has passed since Barthes first issued the “semi-otic challenge” to permit an assessment of the semioticians’ claimsfor the fall of rhetoric and the rise of semiotics. Jonathan Culler, ina new preface to The Pursuit of Signs, offers such an assessment ofthe relationship between semiotics and literature. Culler observesthat when he wrote The Pursuit of Signs in 1981 “it seemed possiblethat the idea of a general science of signs, a semiology or semiotics,might revitalize the humanities and social sciences in general, notjust literary and cultural studies.”87 He concludes that “the ambi-tious program of a science of signs did not succeed.” He attributesthis failure to “the excessive ambition of semiotics: the attempt totake all knowledge as its province may have been doomed fromthe start, but it certainly made it harder for semiotics to succeedin any particular area of endeavor. Wherever it ventured, it couldnot help but seem an imperialistic interloper seeking to claim thisarea for its vast putative empire.”88 Culler notes that in A Theory ofSemiotics Umberto Eco “offered a list of concerns of the field thatis almost comical in its range and disorder: ‘Zoosemiotics, olfac-tory signs, Tactile communication, Codes of taste, Paralinguistics,Medical semiotics, Kinesics and proxemics, Musical codes, Formal-ized languages, Written languages, Unknown languages and se-cret codes, Natural languages, Visual communication, Systems ofobjects, Plot structure, Text theory, Cultural codes, Aesthetic texts,Mass communication, Rhetoric.”’89 Eco himself admits that such an

be ‘found’ to convince the court of the guilt or innocence of the accused” (140). ThusMannetti concentrates his analysis of both Greek and Roman rhetoric on inventionand says very little about the figures. Although semiotics is usually defined as “thescience of signs,” Manetti is one of the few semioticians explicitly to examine signs inthe context of classical rhetoric.

86The Semiotic Challenge, 46.87Pursuit of Signs, cited above n. 67, p. x.88Pursuit of Signs, ix.89Pursuit of Signs, ix.


agenda “may give the impress of arrogant ‘imperialism’ on the partof semioticians.”90

This arrogance, combined with a grandiose design for subsumingan immense array of disparate disciplines, probably made the semi-oticians’ program futile from the outset. Culler observes that “peo-ple affiliated with semiotics wrote interesting articles” on the topicssuggested by Eco, “but semiotics never became a sufficiently pow-erful presence in any one of these areas to make much headway.”91

With regard to literary studies Culler concludes that “today it wouldbe pointless to champion poetics as a central enterprise of semi-otics (since semiotics scarcely figures in the theoretical landscapeanymore).”92 Culler’s conclusion about semiotics and poetics couldreadily be applied to semiotics and rhetoric. In the last three decadesof the twentieth century the study of rhetoric defied the predictionsof the semioticians and continued the revival begun in the middleof the century.93 Rhetoric, of course, has a very long history of surviv-ing attacks from formidable opponents. The uneasy relationship ofrhetoric and philosophy provides the most compelling example ofrhetoric’s survival skills. Ricoeur observes that while “rhetoric is phi-losophy’s oldest enemy and its oldest ally . . . philosophy was neverin a position to destroy rhetoric or to absorb it.”94 Like philosophy

90U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 6.91Pursuit of Signs, x.92Pursuit of Signs, xiv. Of course, not everyone would agree with Culler’s as-

sessment. In the Encyclopedia of Semiotics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ix,editor Paul Bouissac declares that “semiotics remains a credible blueprint for bridg-ing the gaps between disciplines and across cultures, most likely because of its ownintellectual diversity and pluridisciplinary history, as well as its remarkable capacityfor critical reflexivity.” Although this encyclopedia includes an entry for the “Rhetoricof the Image,” it does not include traditional rhetoric within the realm of semiotics. Incontrast, an earlier encyclopedic work, Noth’s Handbook of Semiotics, cited above n.70, classifies rhetoric as a subdiscipline of “text semiotics,” itself a major branch of thefield of semiotics.

93Despite the resurgence of interest in rhetoric in the late twentieth century re-ports of its death continue to appear. A relatively recent example is John Bender andDavid Wellbery, eds., The Ends of Rhetoric (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).In the preface the editors present “The End of Rhetoric: A Historical Sketch” in whichthey conclude that the classical rhetorical tradition “effectively ceased” (6). However,they contend that rhetoric has returned as something called “rhetoricality,” a “gen-eralized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience” (25). Thisrhetoricality is apparent in many modern disciplines including “Rhetoric and ModernLinguistics” (29–31). Their examples of rhetoricality in linguistics includes Group Mu,in whose work “the inherited taxonomies of rhetorical theory are respected in theirspecificity,” but “the displacement of tradition is nonetheless perceptible” (30).

94Rule of Metaphor, cited above n. 36, pp. 10–11.


before it, semiotics has made little progress in either destroying orabsorbing rhetoric.95

While rhetoric can certainly take some solace in its resiliency, itcannot afford complacency. Its critics are too many, too varied, andtoo persistent to be ignored. Semiotics may have seen its theoreticalcachet diminished, but the critiques of Barthes, Todorov, Genette,Ricoeur, and others retain their power. These writers were too eagerin their anticipation of rhetoric’s demise and too obsessive about thefigures of speech. Nevertheless, their criticisms are often discomfort-ingly close to the mark. In particular, the frequently repeated claimthat rhetoric’s reduction to the figures led to its decline warrantsconsideration. It seems likely that a truncated rhetoric, deprived ofeither elocutio or inventio, is vulnerable to its opponents’ predations.Even semioticians recognize much of value in a complete theory ofrhetoric. Barthes admits to “the conviction that many of the featuresof our literature, our instruction, of our institutions of language . . .would be illuminated or understood differently if we knew thor-oughly . . . the rhetorical code which has given its language to ourculture.” But, he concludes, “neither a technique, nor an esthetic,nor an ethic of Rhetoric are now possible.”96 For rhetoricians, then,the “semiotic challenge” is to prevent reducing “rhetoric to the rankof a merely historical object”97 by continuing to validate rhetoric’sremarkable ability to illuminate the institutions of language.

95Brian Vickers has charted many of the conflicts between rhetoric and philos-ophy in In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. “TerritorialDisputes: Philosophy versus Rhetoric,” 148–213. Vickers does not include semioticsamong the territorial disputants but he does take to task both Roman Jakobson andPaul de Man for what he regards as their serious misunderstandings of the tropes(pp. 442–69).

96Semiotic Challenge, cited above n. 6, p. 92.97Semiotic Challenge, 93.

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10596-Splendor and Misery Semiotics