ABSTRACT
ABOUT THE MIDDLE of the sixteenth century there is a parting of the ways. The medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric is breaking up and its parts are being reassigned. But before being a meeting of three ways, the trivium formed the lesser “half” of a dyad existing between it and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music: knowledge was first divided into a quadrivium of “sciences” and a trivium of discursive arts. Roland Barthes used to suggest that the sense of the commonplace or trifling conveyed by our word “trivial” came not just from the inferior position of the trivium within the medieval model but also from the idea that the intersection of three ways was a place of frequentation, a common place that was also a beat, the locus of prostitution. 2 It would be at that point or by those means that commerce and usury were introduced into human intercourse; it would be therefore the place of corruption in general. One can imagine, from the rhetorical point of view, the space of the prostitute being shared by that of some generic sophist, with the expected attendant degeneracy of discourse. The rhetorical art of “setting forth” one’s ideas or discourse would thus be indistinguishable from the “putting oneself forth” that constitutes, etymologically at least, the solicitation of a prostitute.
