ABSTRACT
For some teachers of rhetoric and composition in U.S. universities today, there is an intense interest in the ways differences in gender, race, or ethnicity, particularly in a global era of postcolonialism (or neocolonialism), shape our assumptions about literacy. Thinking about Scottish rhetoric in this context raises a new set of questions. If Scotland can be described as a subject of what Hechter (1975) calls “internal colonialism,” how has its rhetorical theory been determined by specific historical moments in that relation? Where will we see the signs of political tensions and pressures, those distortions and invalidations of national speech, identity, and culture attendant on a relation of cultural subordination? The adoption of a discourse of sensibility in Scotland in the early and middle decades of the 18th century makes particular sense not only within the prevailing cultural and intellectual climate, as many have noted, but also in the historical context of the limited possibilities for Scottish participation in political decision making after the Union of 1707. Smith’s lectures on rhetoric, coming at the very beginning of his career and only a few decades after the Union, 1 offer a significant opportunity for observing the workings of larger discourses of national identity at an intersection of ethnic differences. Though Smith’s position on linguistic assimilation in the first four lectures is quite unequivocal, we get a more complex picture by asking these questions of the larger system Smith lays out and especially by looking closely at the references to painting. I will argue that 44the uses of painting in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Smith, 1971) create visual images of a condition of political distance as spectatorship articulated later in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1976) through the figure of the impartial spectator. My method is not to find explicit statements but to read the unconscious of the text for traces and contradictions—symptoms of the political condition under which Smith formed his intellectual projects.
