| Summary: | Critics ancient and modern regularly stereotype classical rhetoric as style-play, contrivance, and persuasion. Rhetoric—as this three-fold stereotype would have it—concerned medium at the expense of message; emerged as a mercenary knack born of specific cultural conditions; and aimed chiefly to persuade. This thesis unmasks each as inapposite: rhetoric was understood as the metalanguage for cognition. Dozens of texts by Gorgias, Isocrates, ps.-Demetrius, Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, ps.-Longinus, and Hermogenes upend each stereotype. Firstly, rhetoric was never about mere style: the rhetoricians understood verbal phenomenality—what we often call ‘style’—as arbiter of meaning and substrate of consciousness. This is an empiricism. As arbiter of meaning: language works synchronically—or in the speech act—as a series of acoustic images triggering pre-noetic response patterns. Meaning emerges in the interplay between the two. As substrate of consciousness: these innate response patterns work diachronically—or in acculturation—to make the mind writable: through them, the discourse that the subject hears and sees sticks to the blank slate. Like meaning, consciousness itself is determined by the interplay between inborn pattern and exogenous discourse. This dialectic produces the interlinked sensations that the contents of heteronomic language are one’s own and veridical. Secondly, rhetoric from the eye of the informant was no historico-cultural contrivance: the rhetoricians proceed as though their metalanguage maps real cognitive phenomena embedded in natural language. This first-order language is the cognitive territory: it comprises the verbal media that non-specialist members of the speech community regularly use non-consciously. Rhetoric’s metalanguage maps these topographs as schemata, tropes, and other forms. Both languages are transhistorical in part: the response patterns to verbal media are innate. Both are historical in part: the community’s doxastic system gives these media syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic order. Thirdly, persuasion—or applied rhetoric—was only part of the story: the will to knowledge preceded the will to power. The rhetoricians were anthropologists first and tacticians second, for they developed their metalanguage as a science of culture and assumed that reliably felicitous persuasion needed it in any case. Pure rhetoric becomes applied rhetoric, then, in giving rhetors the map to manipulate normally tacit verbal media in the persuasive perlocution.
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