Gilbert Austin's "Chironomia" Revisited: Sympathy, Science, and the Representation of Movement
220
Gilbert Austin's "Chironomia" Revisited: Sympathy, Science, and the Representation of Movement
220eBook
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Overview
Austin did not simply categorize gesture mechanically, separating delivery from rhetoric and the discipline’s overall goals, but instead he provided a theoretical framework of written descriptions and illustrations that positions delivery as central to effective rhetoric and civic interactions. Balancing the variable physical elements of human interactions as well as the demands of communication, Austin’s system fortuitously anticipated contemporary inquiries into embodied and nonverbal communication. Enlightenment rhetoricians, scientists, and physicians relied on sympathy and its attendant vivacious and lively ideas to convey feelings and facts to their varied audiences. During the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, as these disciplines formed increasingly distinct, specialized boundaries, they repurposed existing, shared communication conventions to new ends. While the emerging standards necessarily diverged, each was grounded in the subjective, embodied bedrock of the sympathetic, magical tradition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780809337682 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Southern Illinois University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2020 |
| Series: | Rhetoric in the Modern Era |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 220 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Sigrid Streit is an assistant professor of English and the director of writing across the curriculum at the University of Detroit Mercy. She has published research in the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. This is her first book.
Read an Excerpt
Austin and Elocution in Context Gilbert Austin (1753-1837) is best known as the author of Chironomia; or A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery (1806) and, with this, as an important figure in the Elocutionary Movement. Typical of his era, Austin pursued multiple careers, in his case, one as an elocutionist, another as a clergyman, and a third as a chemist for the Royal Irish Academy; in addition to three articles for that amateur society, he also published one in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, the founding and foremost scientific journal of the day (Bazerman; Hawhee and Holding; Howell 251, 256). In these roles, Austin was involved in other intellectual activities as part of a circle of persons attempting to reform science and the British educational system. Their intellectual discussions also considered the relationship between mind and body and, with these, logic and rhetoric. Despite his varied interests and pursuits, Austin’s only work to receive scholarly attention is Chironomia and limited attention at that. According to the standard scholarship, Chironomia is an interesting and representative example of the Elocutionary Movement’s traditional delivery-centered approach to rhetoric. From this prevailing perspective, gesture is connected with the body rather than the mind, and it constitutes an emotional rather than a rational appeal. Delivery, when separated from the other rhetorical canons, invention in particular, becomes a peripheral rhetorical concern, albeit one worthy of historical attention and important to public speaking (Fredal 251). On this basis, the traditional scholarship suggests that Austin, despite his praise of delivery, separates it from the other rhetorical canons (Mc-Corkle, “Harbingers” 26, 35; Mohrmann, “Language” 116) and, in so doing, represents delivery as ornamental. Moreover, Austin’s treatment of gestures, according to this tradition, merely adapts Cicero and Quintilian (Howell 256); such a treatment of delivery is not only derivative but also mechani-cal.1 True, this scholarship acknowledges the popularity and influence of Chironomia; the text was used during Austin’s lifetime and throughout the nineteenth century to teach elocution in Great Britain and the United States (Mohrmann, “Real Chironomia” 113; Robb and Thonssen ix). But, in the twentieth century, as this scholarly perspective contends, Chironomia and the Elocutionary Movement seemed to “suffer an unusually severe reversal of fortune” (Mohrmann, “Real Chironomia” 18). Chironomia, then, is a “mechanical” sort of “curiosity” (Potter v), and the Elocutionary Movement to which it belongs is “special,” as Wilbur S. Howell puts it, that is to say, a historical oddity (6-7). This scholarship, our study argues, reflects uncritical, superficial readings of Austin’s work, readings that extract the text, as well as the canon of delivery, from the environment in which Chironomia was written and that ignore Austin’s other, scientific writing. Furthermore, although it acknowledges Chironomia’s historical significance and comprehensive character, this scholarship neither treats the work systematically nor considers it in light of Austin’s professional activities (Mohrmann, “Real Chironomia” 18); in his elocutionary, scientific, and educational works, Austin speaks to the ways in which human interactions incorporate a seamless mesh of movement, sound, and visuals beyond merely offering clear words on a static page. How fortunate, then, that recent rhetorical scholars have begun to ex- amine the Elocutionary Movement and Austin’s work in broader and more inclusive terms; in so doing, this newer scholarship draws attention to Aus- tin’s interest in a neglected and traditionally ill-perceived canon (Hawhee, Bodily Arts; Johnstone; Shortland). Some scholars have considered whether links exist between Austin’s careers as an elocutionist and a chemist, noting, among other matters, Chironomia’s relationship to the larger Elocutionary Movement and the culture of Foucauldian mechanisms for disciplining the body (Hawhee and Holding; Spoel); others have noted Chironomia’s debt to developments in print technology and literacy (McCorkle, “Harbingers” and Rhetorical Delivery). Yet still other efforts have connected Chironomia, as well as elocution, with current inquiries into the role the body plays in communication, more specifically, with issues of materiality, embodi- ment, and performance (Bolter; Fredal; Hawhee, Bodily Arts and “Review Essay”; Hawhee and Holding; Johnstone; Reynolds; Selzer and Crowley; Shortland; P. H. Smith, Body and “What”; Streit; Welch, Electric Rhetoric and “Reconfiguring Writing and Delivery”). From these fresh perspectives, Austin’s work reflects its historical context (George 102; Hawhee and Holding 264; see Goring on that context) as part of the Elocutionary Movement, an intellectually viable tradition in its time (Mohrmann “Language” and a”; Shortland). All of this scholarship calls for continuing the research into Austin’s work as an interdisciplinary corpus, into the Elocutionary Movement, and into the canon of delivery. Our study answers this call by analyzing Austin’s scientific and rhetorical works within their immediate intellectual and disciplinary contexts, and by considering how Austin’s body of work informs contemporary scholarship on delivery, rhetorical history and theory, gesture, and embodied communication. As we describe it, his system of rhetorical delivery does not simply categorize gesture mechanically, while separating delivery from rhetoric and the discipline’s overall goals. Instead, Chironomia provides a theoretical framework that characterizes delivery as central to effective rhetoric and civic interactions; delivery shares the stage, as it were, with words and images. And Chironomia’s theoretical framework depends on Austin’s use of an older model of human health, science, and communication—the sympathetic model—as well as his actio-based understanding of delivery from ancient rhetoric. The resulting theoretical framework attempts to integrate words, sounds, images, and movements in seamless communicative action and interaction with an audience. In offering his system of elocution, Austin was responding to broader theoretical debates of his day involving language, science, and medicine. For Austin, the body takes center stage in human communication and, to that end, its systematic use is the best, in fact the essential, means of embracing all the elements that effective communication requires. Thus, his system balances the variable physical elements of human communication (human behaviors and feelings, the objective and subjective, and the body’s voluntary and autonomic actions) as well as the precise hat effective communication, in science especially, demands. To fulfill the theoretical mission of his elocutionary treatise, Austin takes a pedagogical approach, one that extends efforts by various sister arts to develop a system of notation for representing movement and sound on the page. His approach not only pursues his goal of showing students how to move properly to elicit an appropriate response from the audience; his approach also speaks to the needs of his student audience, who li n a socioeconomic milieu deeply altered by the Industrial Revolution. Austin’s model does not, in our view, fully succeed in fulfilling his goal of showing movement on the static printed page; he and his scientific and rhetorical peers lacked an adequate conceptual vocabulary and the technological know-how with which to fully reconcile these mental and physical realms. Although Austin attempts to represent movement by integrating textual descriptions and illustrations, a disconnect nonetheless separates the two modes: his illustrations only partially succeed in their argumentative efforts. As part of this attempted reconciliation, Austin’s elocutionary work was also responding to broader concerns about delivery’s proper societal values by placing the canon squarely in an educational system designed for young male professionals. To more practical ends, Chironomia was designed to teach students to be good rhetors, civilized men who would be fit to participate in the moral, social, and professional realms of eighteenth-century British society. Thus, in its conceptual and practical aims, Austin’s system makes delivery integral to effective communication rather than a rhetorical canon akin to style and, hence, divorced from the realm of logical arguments. This chapter provides the context for our analyses of Austin’s works, both individually and as parts of his comprehensive, interactive scheme of human communication. We begin by introducing key issues and individuals associated with the history of delivery up through Austin’s time. Within this history, both prior to and in Austin’s day, we then situate struggles between science and rhetoric to shift their disciplinary characters from a largely shared model to one of separate identities; this separation, moreover, required that each discipline, rhetoric and science, develop appropriate means and modes of communication. Our discussions of context, of elocution and proper communication, also address new eighteenth-century print technology and the notion of sympathy, a traditional means of explaining unseen natural phenomena through analogy to the visible body. As perceptions of the human body, explanations of the natural world, and effective communication shifted in Austin’s day, many thinkers questioned the efficacy of older notions of science grounded in sympathy and magic; rhetoric, style, and delivery remained linked with this older approach. In contrast, the newer vision of communication was associated with the scientific method.
Austin and his generation of scientists and rhetors inherited these concerns with bodily movement, communication, and disciplinary status; while each discipline was developing its own institutional communication standards, the emergent sets of divergent disciplinary standards understandably retained some elements of the older interdisciplinary tradition. Austin’s works in elocution and science reveal these tensions and his own attempts to manage them.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and TableAcknowledgments
Chapter 1. Austin and Elocution in Context
A Brief History of Delivery
The Scientific Method versus the Sympathetic Message
Sympathy Represents Science and Medicine Sympathy and Language Debated
Science and Sympathy
Rhetorical Sympathy Revisited
The Split
Chapter Outline and Conclusions
Chapter 2. Austin’s Scientific Publications in Context
A Brief History of Scientific Articles
The Air-Pump as an Example
Austin’s Scientific Publications
Summing Up Austin’s Scientific Papers
Chapter 3. Chironomia Revisited
Chironomia’s Mission
Separate but Equal Languages
Voluntary and Involuntary Gestures
Taste, Vivacity, and Sympathy
Improper Movements and Failed Communication Conclusions
Chapter 4. Portraying Movement in Chironomia
Austin Acknowledges His Notational Challenges
Artistic Models of Actio
Music Notation
Dance Notation
Austin Introduces the Practical Half of Chironomia
The Foundation
Poses of the Feet and Lower Legs
Adding Arms and Motion
Plate 3
Plate 4
Plate 9
Adding Hands
Head, Eyes, Shoulders, Body
From Static Positions to Tracing Movement
Conclusions
Chapter 5. Teaching Social, Professional, and Gender Ethos
Austin and His Audiences
Status and the Culture of Politeness
Professional Status for Austin’s Audiences
Impoliteness
The Ideal Speaker
Women as Models for Public Oratory
Sarah Siddons (1755–1831): An Exceptional Appearance
Conclusions
Chapter 6. Beyond Chironomia: Movement as Actio
The Future of Notational Systems
What Is a Gesture?
Body Language and Ethos
Embodied Technology and Ethos
Conclusions
Notes
Works Cited
Index