ABSTRACT
Rhetoric is multiple and mutable in the sense that there is more than one kind of rhetoric and any particular rhetoric is highly adaptable to the point that what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B. It is not safe to assume that we can account for rhetoric as a multiplicity or in its mutability. Despite an arsenal of terms to characterize rhetoric, how to talk about it as diverse?
This essay first conceptualizes material “diversity” and presents a borrowed term, polythesis, to give some character to the problem of rhetoric as ontologically one and many. Second, the essay discusses genealogy as an approach that enables the sorting of different rhetorics without producing a fixed taxonomy. Parsing rhetoric’s multiplicity requires mobile discriminations and should be paired with a methodology sensitive to ontological flux. As historical ontologies, genealogies of different rhetorics can produce meaningful distributions while emphasizing impermanence and changeability.
