Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

Staging Masculinity

THE BODY, IN THEORY

Histories of Cultural Materialism

The Subject as Action: Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics

by Alan Singer

Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine under the

Roman Empire by Tamsyn S. Barton

Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness

by Stephen Bann

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser

The Deluge, the Plague: Paolo Uccello

by Jean Louis Schefer, translated by Tom Conley

Philodemus in Italy: The Books from Herculaneum

by Marcello Gigante, translated by Dirk Obbink

The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection by Francis Barker

Picturing Silence: Emblem, Language, Counter-Reformation Materiality

by Karen Pinkus

The Gay Critic by Hubert Fichte, translated by Kevin Gavin

The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World

by Slavoj Zifek / F. W. J. von Schelling, translated by Judith Norman

The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability

edited by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder

Constructions of the Classical Body edited by James I. Porter

An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze and Body in Early Modern Philosophy

by Miran Boiovic

The Pedagogical Contract: The Economies of Teaching and Learning in the

Ancient World by Yun Lee Too

Cutting the Body: Representing Woman in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's

Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis by Eliane DalMolin

Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World

by Erik Gunderson

Staging

Masculinity

The Rhetoric of Performance

in the Roman World

Erik Gunderson

Ann Arbor

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Gunderson, Erik.

Staging masculinity: the rhetoric of performance in the

Roman world / Erik Gunderson.

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Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2000 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @ Printed on acid-free paper

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criticism. 2. Psychoanalysis and literature - Rome.

3. Homosexuality and literature - Rome. 4. Homosexuality,

Male, in literature. 5. Body, Human, in literature.

6. Masculinity in literature. 7. Men in literature.

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gunderson, Erik. Staging masculinity : the rhetoric of performance in the Roman world I Erik Gunderson. p. em. - (The body, in theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-11139-6 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Speeches, addresses, etc. , Latin - History and criticism. 2. Psychoanalysis and literature- Rome. 3. Homosexuality and literature- Rome. 4. Homosexuality, Male, in literature. 5. Body, Human, in literature. 6. Masculinity in literature. 7. Men in literature. 8. Rhetoric, Ancient. 9. Oratory, Ancient. I. Title. II. Series. PA6083 .G86 2000 875 '.0109353- dc21

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Preface

EVERYONE KNOWS WHERE BABIES COME FROM. The same cannot be said

for men. Presumably they come from babies. The standard recipe is rather

vague: just add time. The theorists of ancient oratory were not content to

sit by idly and to wait for nature to take its course. They offered their own

formula for ensuring that a man became himself and attained to his mascu-

line station. One had to work at becoming a man, and, significantly, this

work involved learning how to perform masculinity. This book is a reading

of the ancients' precepts.

This is a book about rhetoric. It is also a rhetorical book. The text

contains numerous examples of anaphora, asydeton, and alliteration: is the

author not just reading oratory but also performing it? To some readers, all

of this will no doubt seem to be just so much rhetoric, an insubstantial and

hollow exercise. I would ask such a reader to consider that this study also

asks what it means to declare that an argument or even a style of argumen-

tation is a sham.

Scholarship has already provided levelheaded and accurate descrip-

tions of what the ancients said about oratory. Indeed, antiquity itself is

filled with just such accounts of its own rhetorical practice. This is a neces-

sary labor: a critical reevaluation of oratory is predicated on the hard work

of this sort of research. Ancient authors and some portion of the moderns

have warned what divergence from their descriptions and prescriptions

would mean: willful folly, crass deception, and worse. Breaking with the

familiar account, though, is not necessarily as radical as it might at first

seem: the body, gender, and authority show no signs of vanishing in the

face of a skewed reading of them. It would be impossible to stage an

account of the fringes of the dominant narrative without restaging many of

the central issues of that narrative precisely as central. To the extent that

my reading seems radical or disruptive, I can only remind the reader that

Rome did not fall in a day. Indeed, one perhaps still awaits the collapse. I

am implicitly arguing for a renewed study of Cicero and Quintilian as vital

viii PREFACE

to present purposes. One might justly comment about the conservatism of

such a move.

This book engages "theory." Such is usually taken as modern or even

postmodern. The ancients are often asked to be off there in the past, a

stable point that contemporary modes of thought have advanced from and

fought against. Surely we have liberated ourselves from that all but forgot-

ten age. Yet antiquity itself has a theory of bodies, perhaps even a theory of

the theory of bodies. The ancient discourse on discourse is by no means

naive, nor is it some well-wrought statue standing in stony silence, a dead,

"classical" piece of workmanship that we might admire as in a museum and

then subsequently ignore. It is worth asking, then, how modern are we?

The story of becoming a Roman man is not, I would argue, so unfamiliar as

some would hope. Nor, for that matter, is this process as automatic as

others might pretend.

In other words, this book would claim to be neither a piece of anti-

quarianism nor a postmodern translation of ancient oratory into an alien

idiom. If anything, it is a study of the literary critical buzzwords from the

past filled with the theoretical jargon of the present. Put positively, this is a

discussion of some of the problems involved in producing and performing

authoritative knowledge. Whom will we take seriously? What sort of argu-

ment do we heed? How are the two related?

Two sorts of readers may be expected to take interest in such ques-

tions, readers whose paths have perhaps diverged even as they continue

to run in parallel. First the student of antiquity will be asked to weigh and

consider the arguments of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan. To what extent

should such a scholar take these contemporary classics seriously? What

does the classical world offer to their theories in its turn? This is a ques-

tion particularly worth considering for a second set of readers, those who

are perhaps all too familiar with the doings of the French even if they

have not engaged with Cicero and his countrymen for some years. I hope

to convince each sort of specialist of the value of taking the trouble to

puzzle through the seeming obscurity of unfamiliar languages: it is worth

the trouble to understand the meaning of both phallologocentrism and

ingenium. Rather than having the last word, though, I hope only to

encourage others to pursue their own studies down some of the same

paths outlined here: the road to Rhetoric is not an easy one, and I do not

claim to have reached the summit.

Horace once complained that a picture that started as a woman on top

and ended as a fish below would make for bad art. Horace's forbidden

monster resembles epic's Scylla. Horace was no fool. He knew that there was

something to be said for mixing one's media, and some of his more unusual

creations attest to this. I hope that I have offered a study whose own outland-

PREFACE

ix

ish form will please rather than offend: the aesthetic of the exotic has an

ancient pedigree as well.

I wish to thank a number of parties who made this work possible. Without

the support, encouragement, and generous funding of the Department of

Classics of the University of California at Berkeley I would never have been

able to pursue my work and to see it to its completion. I owe a similar debt of

gratitude to my colleagues at The Ohio State University for assisting me both

intellectually and practically in the labor of reworking and polishing this text.

Institutions, of course, are composed of people, and I must thank in particu-

lar a number of individuals who were especially generous with their time and

ideas. Thomas Habinek, Mark Griffith, Catherine Gallagher, and Judith

Butler oversaw this project from its inception. Each offered an inspiring

model of scholarship, and I profited from their teachings, which were as

varied as they were uniformly excellent. Were panegyric not the most sus-

pect of all of rhetoric's forms I would gladly expatiate on the many details of

the kindness of each. I regret that I cannot thank by name the anonymous

readers at the University of Chicago and University of Michigan presses. I

hope that they note with pleasure the many improvements for which they are

responsible without feeling too pained at those errors that they were unable

to prevent. Lastly I must offer my sincerest gratitude to Victoria Wohl for

reading, rereading, discussing, improving, and generally enduring this proj-

ect over the span of so many years. I doubt that I shall ever adequately repay

her generosity with her time and her ideas.



Contents

Introduction

1

CHAPTER I. Reading and Writing

29

CHAPTER 2. Discovering the Body

59

CHAPTER 3. Self-Mastery

87

CHAPTER 4. Actors

111

CHAPTER 5. Pleasure

149

CHAPTER 6. Love

187

Conclusion: We Other Romans

223

NOTES

231

BIBLIOGRAPHY

251

GENERAL INDEX

261

INDEX LOCORUM

267



Introduction

WHAT DID ANCIENT ORATORY LOOK LIKE? This study started with this

question, but it does not end by answering it with a collection of bodily

facts. I offer neither a catalog of gestures nor a script to be used for

reproducing the ancient orator. At least, I hope that I do not offer these

things: this examination of performances is intended to raise the issue of

the implications of theoretical speculation upon performance.

It will be useful, though, to begin with a genealogy of the project itself

in order both to appreciate the origin of its subsequent concerns and to

understand why its original query will remain fundamentally unanswered.

The majority of the most important passages that might be used to reveal

the truth of the ancient orator's gestures can be found in the pages of this

book. If one were to extract and assemble all of the ancient citations, one

might swiftly come to appreciate such finer points of the spectacle of rheto-

ric as the following: the left hand was used sparingly; the orator tends to

put his weight on his left foot, though raising up the right foot is bad form.1

As interesting as these tidbits might be, they cannot be simply collected and

assembled until a body stands before us, a body patched together from

fossilized textual fragments, yet somehow also a faithful representative of

the species homo rhetoricus. There is a world of difference separating the

quick from the dead, and the orators themselves would be the first to point

out the problems of using dead letters to breath life into their practice. But

they were themselves no more deterred by this recognition than, in the

end, was I.

When I began my own inquiries, I felt that though I had read my share

of ancient orations, I had long neglected one of the most obvious elements

of these speeches, namely, that they were delivered before a public. The

performative aspect of ancient oratory is of course but one element among

several possible approaches to these texts: in fact, ancient authorities invite

the prospective author of an oration to attend to five aspects of a speech, of

which delivery is only one. And obviously a reading based on a literary or

aesthetic appreciation of any given speech is not only possible but usually

2

STAGING MASCULINITY

very rewarding. Likewise, a historical or a sociological reading of a speech

can itself yield a variety of fruits.2 But oratory as practice and performance

tends to be neglected, or treated only as an afterthought, both in the

canonical texts of antiquity and in much modern scholarship on ancient

rhetoric.

What comes of neglecting performances? And to what extent are

other possible approaches to ancient oratory complicated and comple-

mented by the performative aspect of oratory? The following study will

hopefully serve as a set of preliminary answers to these questions. I have

opted to approach the question of performance in ancient oratory by look-

ing at ancient theorists of oratory such as Cicero and Quintilian. This

reading leaves entirely to one side the question of what Cicero actually did

with his voice and body during one of his Philippics. This reading also

dodges the question of the difference between the preserved written texts

of a speech and the version actually performed. The text we have is by no

means a simple script for an earlier performance. The most famous exam-

ple of this is Cicero's own Pro Milone, where the speaker failed in public,

only to return to his desk to pen a speech that later generations would

proclaim a rhetorical masterpiece. While it would perhaps be a useful

exercise to try to imagine a specific performance in detail, one cannot

advance very far without falling into mere speculation. Instead of the specu-

lative, then, I have opted for the theoretical. To a certain extent such a

choice represents the embracing of necessity: since the preserved speeches

are not self-scripting, what was said of performance by contemporary schol-

ars of the craft? A careful reading of the theorists of oratory will help to

explain the impossibility of a precise restaging of ancient rhetoric. Our

ignorance cannot be wholly attributed to the accidents that can govern the

preservation of ancient materials.

Ancient rhetorical theory does not serve as a textbook or cookbook

for performance. In fact there is often great resistance to explicit and

detailed formulations of rhetorical performance: how can a text - mere

words on the page - either reflect or instruct such physical elements as

gestures or vocal modulations? Ancient rhetorical theory itself puts into

question any project that would read a speech and produce from that

reading the lived truth of the original performance. Rhetorical theory in-

stead forces the issue of the relationship between texts and bodies in mo-

tion or voices ringing through the air. Accordingly, it is not the particular

plight of the modern student of ancient oratory that performance is lost to

his or her eyes and ears owing to the centuries that separate us from the last

of the speakers of antiquity. Antiquity already senses this same loss.

Analysis and discussion of speeches in a theoretical light commence

with a mourning for the loss of the presence of the living voice and body. In

INTRODUCTION 3

fact, loss of the body in the text is mourned as early as Plato, Phaedrus

276a8, where the living voice (Xoybg E ~pxog) is pitted against writing.3

One can compare the remarks of Freud on loss and mourning: "Now in

what consists the work which mourning performs? I do not think there is

anything far-fetched in the following representation of it. The testing of

reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forth-

with that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this

object" (1963a, 165-66). Since the libido never willingly abandons its ob-

jects, a struggle ensues, and the ego experiences suffering. To the extent

that rhetorical theory acknowledges the loss of the living voice, it is a

fundamentally sad project: the theorist has to "get over" a circumstance

fundamental to his speculative position of distance, detachment, and objec-

tivity: performance is gone, it is out there. Yet the object of study is no

mere object, and hence the theoretical project also partakes of the melan-

cholic. That is, if melancholy is the unconscious loss of a love object experi-

enced in oneself (Freud 1963a, 166, 168), the theorist labors uncertainly

between recovery and relapse. He can never abandon the living voice

because it is that logos to which he aspires. He is himself in all probability a

speaker and a performer, not some disinterested academic. Moreover, the

speech he seeks to recover is one that I will argue embodies virile self-

presence and authority.4 Hence this is a speech with which the theoretical

ego identifies even as speech comprises a lost object (Freud 1963a, 170).

The theoretical ego lives an ambivalent life under the shadow of this lost

object: there is a sort of melancholic identification with performance even

as performance eludes theory's grasp.5

This complex relationship between text and life, words and the body,

means that one cannot simply "bring to life" an ancient text: antiquity itself

rebels against the notion. But the struggle to speak of speech and to repre-

sent its representations is itself a fundamental moment of any approach to

the history of rhetoric. Hence one pursues performance not just on a lark,

but rather because we find already in the ancient theoretical discourse a

recognition of the performative power of discourse and theory's power to

capture those performances. The endless turning around the question of

the performative within rhetorical theory is itself a miming of the melan-

cholic trope whereby identity is assumed at all (Butler 1997b, 167-68):

rhetorical theory thus "performs" its own impossibility relative to com-

passing full, authentic performance, and it performs this impossibility in a

manner homologous to a crisis of authenticity inhering within performance

itself. This difficult "distance" between theory and practice is a dimension

that must be carefully watched and measured: we can take for granted

neither the objectivity of the scholar nor, as we will see, the innocence of

the performer who has been asked to take up a theoretical position relative

4

STAGING MASCULINITY

to himself. Indeed if the melancholic process is an ambivalent movement

that sustains the topographical distinction between ego and superego (But-

ler 1997b, 174), then one might imagine as well that rhetorical theory

assumes its role as a "critical agency" relative to the rhetorical ego after the

same ambiguous process of loss and identification. Ultimately these same

questions will need to be asked of modern studies as well, but this is a

project I will defer until the conclusion of this book.

If there is an uneasy tension between the textual and the material, then

the problem of the lexicon, vocabulary, and syntax of the body as revealed

in the theoretical literature is opened up anew. In other words, if we cannot

trust the text as transparent or revelatory, how can we ready the body

found in the text simply, or the text as a documentary witness to ancient

bodies? This problem holds true both for a speech of Cicero and for Cic-

ero's technical works on how to write speeches. The body within these texts

needs to be reread, and read as a textualized body. The ancient theoretical

text is implicated in the production of a vision of the body more than it is a

simple witness to the "facts" of performance. The theoretical text generates

the body in the same gesture as it reveals the body. I will argue that the

process of the textual production or staging of the body within rhetorical

literature acts to construct and to socialize a certain kind of body. Thus the

body, a discursive body and a body that is a product of its own description,

finds itself swept up within a vast network of sociological implications.

These implications, though, were awaiting it from the beginning. This was

a body destined to be read as an element within this same network. The

body within the rhetorical textbook is accordingly never neutral territory,

and once again the "actual" body of performance remains lost to the extent

that it is never free from an interpretive apparatus that constrains its mean-

ings and valences in advance.

The study of ancient bodies in performance thus encounters a double

impediment to any simple, positive, or "factual" account. The original

commentators and theorists are uncomfortable with their own position and

productions: they are displeased with their own act of inscription. And,

furthermore, when, after an initial moment of hesitation, they do describe

the body, this description itself has the force of an institution of a vision of

the body: the body they write is also a body they make and one whose truth

is compromised by the problems of textuality. These problems arise around

issues of optics and perspective: where does one stand relative to physical

performance when textuality mediates this relationship? And one may ask

a related question that does not arise for the ancient author: is there such a

thing as a seeing that does not participate in or contribute to structures of

power and order?

A third and related problem of positions may be added to these two. If

INTRODUCTION 5

rhetorical theory is intended also as a means of training the orator and is

likewise produced by a man who professes to know how to speak, then

where is the place for objectivity in this discourse that is always about the

self? Naturally there is and can be no such objectivity. In fact, rhetorical

theory responds to the problems of theoretical complicity and compro-

mised objectivity by embracing them. Rhetorical theory declares itself to

be a theory of self-mastery. Thus, while the gaze of the theorist can be

critiqued as a constitutive exercise of power, this same gaze is turned upon

the speaker himself and turned into a positive discipline. The orator be-

comes a theorist of himself and his own spectator. In this guise, his inspira-

tion and model is the famous Demosthenes, imprisoned in a cave of his

own making and observing his performance in a mirror.

Against this self-mastery and discipline the rhetorical theorists pit wan-

ton pleasures. In other words, moral problems of propriety and impropriety

arise as the excluded opposites of legitimate knowledge. Thus rhetorical

morality is closely adjoined to the theoretical issues that have come before:

the "facts" of performance are always ethical as well. It would thus be

impossible to restage an ancient oration without also simultaneously revivify-

ing an ancient morality within whose terms the performance would be intelli-

gible. Such moral issues are interesting in themselves: why should perfor-

mances be an ethical matter rather than a question of success and failure or

clarity and obscurity? The theoretical discourse is itself articulated so as to

expose and to comply with the ethics of oratory. Thus theory also plays a role

in the production, reproduction, and hermeneutics of good and bad bodies.

The immoral body is contrasted to the known body, the authentic body to the

pleasurable body. Truth's antonym is vice.

If good performances are "true" ones, what about "mere" perfor-

mance or performances that only seem true? Is the orator just an actor?

Does he mean what he says, or is there a divide between the real man and

the meanings he produces? A crisis of authority arises in such a situation.

Into this breach the orator brings to bear his theoretical apparatus: the

theoretical position of self-observation and mastery is directly pitted

against a vision of uncontrolled public pandering in its absence. One op-

poses this self-relationship to populist and extravagant performances.

Here, in a sense, theory becomes a sort of enemy to practice and its

pleasures. Theory disavows the body in favor of the textual representation

of corporal virtue and a regulated relationship to one's own body. The

truest body becomes the textualized, self-knowing body whose ideal perfor-

mance is limited to auto-affection or a subterranean soliloquy. Inverting

the initial position of theoretical impotence and loss, the "theory of the

self" now provides the most potent, authoritative, and self-possessed posi-

tion to its subjects. And here the theory even embraces the ironies of the

6

STAGING MASCULINITY

grammar of subjection: one becomes subject to, subject of, and the subject

for whom.

These, then, I take to be the key issues within the theoretical literature

on performance within antiquity: what is the relationship between theory

and practice or text and deed? What is the body; how is it known; what are

the implications of this means of knowing the body? Where does the theo-

rist stand; and particularly, where does he stand in relationship to his own

practice? What are the ethics of practice; why is it ethical; and what are the

implications of such an ethics? I offer provisional and partial answers to all

of these questions in the first five chapters of this study. Each section is

intended to give a coherent account of a key issue within its own terms. In

the sixth, however, I hope to show how all of these issues, elements, and

problems come together in Cicero's De oratore, a text that presents its own

solutions to the intertwined themes of textuality, presence, performance,

authenticity, authority, and pleasure.

Rhetorical treatises offer to improve their readership. The anonymous

Rhetorica ad Herennium claims to be a text offering instruction on how one

is to speak (de ratione dicendi) (1.1), and it is ostensibly written in response

to a request by the addressee, Gaius Herennius. Cicero's De oratore is

likewise a record written so that Cicero's brother Quintus may know what

past Roman luminaries thought about how one is to speak.6 On the other

hand, this same goal of inculcating good speech can also be furthered by

looking to hypothetical models in addition to merely listing precepts: the

Orator is written to Cicero's young disciple Brutus and paints for him a

portrait of the ideal speaker, one who has perhaps never been seen.7 The

Brutus is similarly an evaluation of the orator, but this time done by way of

actual speakers.8 And Quintilian's encyclopedic Institutio oratoria presents

itself as a work designed to train the ideal orator; and this time the ideal

speaker and the ideal man are expressly conflated:

Oratorem autem instituimus illum perfectum, qui esse nisi uir bonus

non potest, ideoque non dicendi modo eximiam in eo facultatem sed

omnis animi uirtutes exigimus.

[I am training the consummate orator, a figure whose existence is

predicated on his being a good man (vir bonus). Accordingly I demand

of him not only an exceptional speaking ability, but all of the moral

and spiritual virtues.]

(Quintilian 1.pr.9)

Quintilian's formulation unites the man, his art, and his place in the world.

In fact, Quintilian expresses a sentiment nearly as old as Roman oratory.

INTRODUCTION 7

Quintilian tells us that, to his knowledge, Cato was the first Roman to write

on rhetorical theory (3.1.19), and Cato had himself defined the orator thus:

"Marcus, my son, an orator is a good man who is experienced at speaking"

(orator est, Marce fili, vir bonus dicendi peritus).9 The training of the orator

can never be dissociated from the ideas contained within the collocation vir

bonus, or "good man,"10 a fixed character who remains at the center of the

rhetorical enterprise from its beginning to its end.11

Who, or what, is a good man? Taken separately, the two sides of the

term bonus (good) and vir (man) can be analyzed by reference both to their

lexical entries and to the broader social discourse of Rome. Such a distinc-

tion is perhaps tendentious to the extent that words can never be segre-

gated from the society that uses them, but I would like to start from the

dictionary and proceed from there to demonstrate the social scope of this

phrase.

In Latin, a vir is an adult male. But the same word also signifies a man

who is a husband or a soldier. Thus, in "pregnant" uses, a man in Latin is a

real man, a manly man. The term also designates a position of authority and

responsibility: the adult is enfranchised, while the child (or slave) is not;12

the man rules his wife in the household; the soldier is the defender of the

safety of the state. In short, the term evokes more than mere gender.13 Maria

Wyke has discussed the imbrication of the physical enactment of gender and

the Roman social field, and she concludes of this relationship, "In the prac-

tices of the Roman world, the surface of the male body is thus fully impli-

cated in definitions of power and civic responsibility" (1994, 136).

On the other side of the phrase, bonus means "good." This goodness

can be very open-ended and impute a broadly positive moral, aesthetic, or

utilitarian quality to the term it modifies: a good person, a good painting, a

good tool. More specifically, though, this goodness may indicate that a

person is socially reliable or reputable: a good chap, a good citizen.14 And,

when used of men, it often indicates men of substance or social standing: a

prominent citizen, a leading citizen.15 Thus the masculine plural of the

adjective standing alone, boni, or "good (men)," also implies the wealth

that goes with station.16 Good, then, is not so much a bland qualifier as it is

a pointer to evaluation within a social context. In other words, a "good

man" is a man seen tout court in his full, dominant social capacity and one

who has proven himself valuable within this society. He is an asset to the

world, and in all likelihood has derived assets (bona) from the world. He is

the man on top of society, and the man most invested in it.

Having charted this semantic territory, I would like to explore briefly a

third term that has a prominent position within rhetorical discussions. This

term is auctoritas as a possession of the good man and as something evinced

in and by rhetorical performances. Auctoritas means authorization or the

8 STAGING MASCULINITY

responsibility taken for having given authorization. It also means guidance

or leadership. It means authority in general: the right to lead, prestige,

influence. Auctoritas can be rewritten as hegemony, or legitimate and recog-

nized domination. For the good man and good orator, then, auctoritas is

the term that ought to accompany both his station and the impression lent

by his speeches. Auctoritas is the performance of authority as a lived social

experience (cf. Hellegouarc'h 1963, 295-320).

When Cato and his successors speak of good men, then, they mean

something much more than a man who has done no wrong or a man who

can be trusted. When they speak of rhetoric as the provenance of good

men, they mean that rhetoric is the field of discourse in which good men

are the speakers. In the context of this study, rhetoric is the field in which

good men act and are enacted. Watching an orator, one ought to behold the

performance of the dominant, masculine subject and one ought to hear the

voice of legitimate authority. Where virility or social station is in doubt, a

performance fails: the orator has not been a good man, and whatever

experience he has in speaking has gone for naught. His authority evanesces

and with it his claim to that authority. If this proposition seems circular, it

is: good manliness and performative authority are a mutually reinforcing

dyad. The two require practice and iteration. Neither is given: they are

performed and lived.17

These handbooks that purport to aid one to speak well are thus hand-

books to the elite male self. Maud Gleason has elegantly summarized this

situation: "In a value system that prized rhetorical skill as the quintessen-

tial human excellence, and in a society so structured that this perfection

could be achieved only by adult males, arbiters of rhetoric were also arbi-

ters of masculine deportment" (1995, 104). The man who speaks and per-

forms well is, by this very fact, also the good man. In these handbooks one

learns both to recognize and to produce virile goodness. When an author

says, "Do this" or "Avoid that," he is always also teaching his reader about

the shape of the social space; and this teacher of rhetoric is likewise teach-

ing his student how to conform to this space. The man, his performance,

and the theory of this performance here form a triad that expands and

complicates the twofold relationship between being a good man and main-

taining the authority that accompanies hegemonic performances. The hand-

book forms the point of explicit and expressed knowledge from which one

comes to see and to know both good men and their authoritative perfor-

mances. One the other hand, the authority of oratory as a practice of good

men motivates the development of rhetorical theory. Herennius wanted to

know how to speak well. Cicero offers to his brother portraits of famous

authorities and their ideas on rhetoric. Quintilian offers his books as an aid

INTRODUCTION 9

to a father who would educate his son, books that will see a future orator

from his diapers to the peak of his art (1.pr.6). Thus rhetorical theory is by

no means a disinterested point from which to view rhetoric; instead it is a

full participant in the dialectic of the production, reproduction, mainte-

nance, and recognition of good men and their authority.

In her study of the Second Sophistic, Maud Gleason has not only admirably

analyzed some of the key details of ancient rhetorical training and perfor-

mance, but has also provided invaluable commentary on the community of

men that share this training and these performances as a common bond.

Gleason's own introduction offers a concise and clear formulation of rheto-

ric as a social practice. Theoretically influenced by the work of Peter Brown,

Michel Foucault's studies of antiquity, Michael Herzfeld's The Poetics of

Manhood, a study of a contemporary Cretan village, and Pierre Bourdieu's

sociology, Gleason's own investigation sets out to examine rhetoric as a form

of cultural and symbolic capital and rhetorical training as a means of ground-

ing the student within this symbolic economy (1995, xx-xxiv). Within this

sociology of rhetoric, she develops a theory of the construction of gender and

masculinity (59). Gleason argues that the opposition between masculinity

and femininity within the rhetorical context is actually a technique of divid-

ing men into two camps: the legitimate and the illegitimate (xxviii). Hence

contests over the definition of rhetoric become contests over the imposition

of styles of masculine comportment (104; cf. 73).

My own work covers many of the same issues as does Gleason's,

although there are a certain number of formal distinctions that can be

drawn. For example, Gleason focuses on vocal training (pronuntiatio),

while I concentrate mainly on physical delivery (actio). Similarly, Gleason

uses for the most part later Greek material; I am most interested in rela-

tively earlier Latin authors.

Much as the subjects of inquiry overlap in my own work and Gleason's,

so do we share a good deal of theoretical common ground. I also am inter-

ested in the sociology of rhetoric, including in particular its relationship to

gender. Indeed, our work shares as its founding premise the constructed

nature of gender and the subject.

At the same time, though, Gleason's book has not asked the same

introductory questions as has this study. Her work does not take the prob-

lems of reading performances through texts and producing performances

via texts as central to the investigation of ancient rhetoric. Instead, Gleason's

readings are aimed at a recovery of lost performances. Hence her approach

to the texts often is gauged so as to reconstitute the "participant ob-

server status" of an anthropologist (Gleason 1995, xi). While Gleason does

10 STAGING MASCULINITY

admirably succeed in giving a vivid and lifelike portrait of the many curious

practices of ancient speakers, in the process of restaging her characters for

us, certain issues of textuality get left behind.

My work also differs from Gleason's in its temporalization of the

relationship between theory and practice. Gleason sees the second century

C.E. as a hotbed of advice-manuals on the production of the elite self, and

in this abundance a sign that "the wordless replication of the elite habitus

could no longer be counted upon."'18 On the other hand, before this, "The

rhetorical performer embodied his civilization's ideal of cultivated manli-

ness. The young men who consciously studied his rhetorical exempla uncon-

sciously imitated the gestalt of his self-presentation. The result was, for

many generations, the smooth-flowing cultural reproduction of the pat-

terns of speech, thought, and movement appropriate to a gentleman"

(Gleason 1995, xxiv). This model can be compared to remarks of Bourdieu

that pose an even greater divide: theory actively destroys the immanence of

practice (1990, 58, 71).

While I agree with Bourdieu and Gleason in their basic sociological

outlook, I believe that we need not assume that all must "go without

saying." According to Bourdieu, "The body believes in what it plays at: it

weeps if it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not

memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life" (1990, 73).

But these same sentiments could actually be translated into imperatives

and inserted within an ancient rhetorical handbook. Ancient theory thus

requires the disposition to which some would think it inimical. Instead, an

important and durable social labor takes place in the act of explicitly

training the body, even if this labor is itself an insufficient representation

of actual, natural, unaffected practice. The intervention of theory into

practice complements social norms and does not represent their decay. I

would say that such an uncomplicated practice does not and cannot exist

so far as ancient rhetoric is concerned: rhetorical practice lives in a state

of symbiosis with its own theory. Rhetorical theory both observes and

changes rhetorical practice and the habitus of the elite male. But such a

role for theory means only that we cannot positively say what actually

happened and cannot read through these texts for true acts and gestures.

Instead we catch sight of theory as one of the partners in the game, an

active participant and not an impartial observer. One should hesitate

before accepting Bourdieu's remark that the theoretical stance produces

"disenchantment."19 In the case of rhetorical theory, a good deal of en-

chanting takes place.

The theoretical stance one needs to adopt relative to ancient theories

of rhetoric, though, ought to aspire to transcend the naive opposition

between objectivism and subjectivism (see Bourdieu 1990, 1-51). Objectiv-

INTRODUCTION 11

ist accounts of ancient rhetorical theory are all too easily produced: for

example, faith in the veracity of Quintilian will yield a compelling "con-

struct of the second degree," a "construct of the constructs made by the

actors on the social scene."20 That is, the contemporary theoretician of

rhetoric shall have reproduced both the contents of the ancient text and a

structural relationship to the object of the study qua object that will govern

the interpretation of those contents. The end product might be unimpeach-

ably accurate from a philological standpoint, but it would have failed to

account for practice as worldly and practical in the name of a "fetishism of

social laws" derived from rhetorical maxims (Bourdieu 1990, 41). Con-

versely it would be possible to give an account of ancient rhetorical practice

by way of a subjectivism that privileged a hypothetical speaker whose

choices were rational products of his willed intentions (Bourdieu 1990, 49-

50). Quintilian then becomes the author of a collection of pieces of advice

and an avuncular figure offering dos and don'ts.

While it is not clear that anyone actually reads ancient rhetoric exclu-

sively after either of these models,21 embracing the two approaches does

not solve the problems of either. Hence one can understand Bourdieu's call

for a reflexive sociology that transcends the opposition between objectiv-

ism and subjectivism by way of a sort of dialectical overcoming.22 Bour-

dieu's method, though, requires a reinvestment in the immanence of prac-

tice by way of habitus. While the power of this notion is undeniable, it is

precisely within the context of reading texts on practice that one should be

wary of deriving from them an account of a disposition that produces

responses "in relation to objective potentialities, immediately inscribed in

the present" (Bourdieu 1990, 53). An account of the lived ancient habitus,

"which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical

functions" (Bourdieu 1990, 52), cannot be produced from treatises that can

at best only claim to be accurate representations of practice. Put bluntly,

even if one believes in the notion of habitus, are we in a position to produce

an account of it?

Bourdieu's notion of habitus is itself derived from Roman rhetorical

thinking. Specifically it owes a debt to the theoretical accounts of perfor-

mance that are the governing concerns of this book. Bourdieu strives for a

term that will encompass a sort of unconscious mastery of the objective

structures of the social world and a set of dispositions that allow for the

automatic orientation of practice within this world. Yet it is precisely an-

cient rhetorical theory that suggests that practice may not be autonomous,

that it ought to have supplementation, and that it is even incomplete with-

out a theoretical component. Thus the "subjective" aspect of ancient per-

formance is to be consciously inhabited by an objectivist relationship to

one's bodily performances. The idea of the text needs to be returned to the

12 STAGING MASCULINITY

theory of performance in order for us to read our evidence for what it is,

textual evidence.

Moreover, textuality is not an obstacle to understanding autonomous,

lived performance but instead comprises a fundamental element of the

performative. Textuality is coordinated by way of a specific mode of theo-

retical apprehension that is itself aligned with virile self-mastery: the idea

of the body and of the text cannot be removed from an account of rhetori-

cal performance because the ancient account of performance has made

them indissoluble. While my representations of theory may smack of an

objectivist hypostasis or reification of the category "rhetorical theory,"

such a move is fully justified to the extent that the ancients were themselves

obsessed with the insertion of theory into practice. The lived subjective

truth of the world thereby becomes indissociable from questions of objectiv-

ist abstraction.

As a consequence of her relationship to the sociological orientation of

a Bourdieu, Gleason's identification of a crisis in the elite male turns theory

into an unnatural act that perverts authentic performance. In this sense, the

rhetorical theorist has already lost participant-observer status and hence

already shares the sense of loss of practice that Gleason herself claims to

feel. Yet this portrait of theory does not seem to correspond to the deploy-

ment of our preserved texts. In particular, rhetorical handbooks had long

offered explicit advice on performance. Certainly the earliest extant Latin

treatment of rhetoric, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, is quite explicit when it

comes to delivery: It by no means offers unconsciously imbibed gestalten.

Instead it proposes the explicit, wordy replication of elite performances.23

Moreover, Aristotle's own Rhetoric, while not particularly expansive, does

give specific advice for delivery, after complaining that it is a somewhat

neglected aspect of oratory.24 And, most broadly, the history of rhetoric

appears to be coincidental with the history of rhetorical theory. In other

words, the practice is never radically independent from the theory: Corax

and Tisias, the first teachers of rhetoric, are said to have been writers of

technical rhetorical works (r~Xvca).25

Gleason's position requires, in effect, that there be no theories of

rhetoric and performance before there is a crisis in a certain mode of being,

that theory begin where being fails. I would prefer to take up the idea of

ontological crisis and to install it at the heart of the rhetorical tradition.

Failures of being and the anxiety of nonpresence or nonidentity enable the

very calisthenics of manhood that Gleason so well describes. But these

failures and anxieties are not to be thought of as temporally contingent and

unique to a specific time or ethos. The philosophical consequences of these

problems are recognized from the outset. In other words, the elite male of

antiquity is never a given: the infant never passes into aristocratic manhood

INTRODUCTION 13

without mastering a variety of recognized threats and crises. Similarly, as

will be seen in a later chapter, the orator can never radically establish his

self-identity via his oratory: he is always ready to be confused with a mere

actor. Likewise, while the distinction between men and women within

oratory may be used as a foil for qualifying and disqualifying different

varieties of men, the problem of sexuality remains a prominent one within

oratory. Man is to woman as dominant is to subordinate, but this same

gendered axis immediately invites other issues: what kind of pleasure does

one give or receive? As Foucault put it, what is the proper use of plea-

sure?26 And, naturally, since the "men" and "women" in question are all

males, this is a question of the proper relationship to the continuum of

sentiments spanned by the terms homosexuality and homosociality (see

Sedgwick 1985). What is one to feel vis-a-vis his fellow men? These ques-

tions and problems are less crises that arrive to trouble rhetorical masculin-

ity than they are the building blocks of the discourse of masculinity itself.

This discussion of Gleason is not intended to detract from the value of

either her own work of the work of the anthropologists and sociologists

upon which it relies. Instead I would suggest that such methods need to be

complemented by attention to additional considerations. Similarly, atten-

tion paid to these additional questions will turn out to be, after its own

fashion, merely another way of tracking down the same set of issues raised

at the opening of this introduction. First, in order to understand the role of

the text that records, transmits, regulates, and reproduces rhetorical perfor-

mance, theorists of textuality should be brought to bear. Here the work of

Derrida will be particularly useful, as will that of Foucault. The production

of a knowledge of the body within such a textualized context can again be

better understood with reference to Foucault and also to the work of Judith

Butler, who has made performativity and subject constitution her special

study. This pair of theorists will next help to explicate the self-relationship

of the orator to his body within rhetorical discourse. Yet this same self-

relation occurs not just at the level of a discursive apparatus, but also at the

level of the individual psyche, and hence appeal will be made to the work of

Freud and Lacan. The gains made by engaging with the ideas of these

various thinkers in earlier sections will, I believe, help to round out the

discussions of performance and pleasure that come in the second half of

this study.

Only in the light of this fuller examination of rhetorical theory can we

overcome the insufficiencies of a purely sociological approach. By itself

always raising questions of authority and the body as performed and experi-

enced, rhetorical theory aspires to the very objective status relative to these

questions that a simple sociological approach would itself seek to attain: its

impasses and quandaries thus become those of an objective sociology in

14 STAGING MASCULINITY

general. Rhetorical theory thus straddles the question of the objective and

the subjective: it prescribes rules concerning internal experience while play-

ing a practical role relative to the objective social relations for which the

rhetorical subject prepares himself. A reading of this theory must not itself

seek to deduce a habitus from a text on habitus. Instead it must ask ques-

tions about the significance of textualizing the performative, questions

fundamental to the production of a theory of performing. In other words,

Quintilian and Cicero already occupy the metatheoretical plane at which

level Bourdieu argues in order to ground his own theories. They occupy the

position of the invested sociologist, not his primitive subjects. Thus Bour-

dieu becomes useful to us precisely where he discusses the production of

knowledge, the theory effect, and problems of objectivity in the social sci-

ences rather than as the student of primitive societies and their habitual

performances. On the other hand, Bourdieu's theory of social theory will

not be given the last word. Instead, philosophical and psychological ques-

tions of performance will be used to explore a philosophy of virile authority

that transcends the specific logic of practice of the Roman Empire.

Given this brief methodological outline of what is to follow, a few

words on my specific use of some of the major concepts contained within

the writings of this group of authors are perhaps in order.27 Before getting

into specifics, however, I would like first to insist that I do not at all pretend

to be giving comprehensive summaries of any of these theories. Rather, I

am taking up a set of questions and provisional answers within them, and

weighing them against observations and conclusions derived from a reading

of ancient source material. This I regard as the most practical and honest

approach to the matter. For, even if a methodologically narrow approach

were taken - for example a "strict" Lacanian reading - the question would

still arise as to which Lacan I was using and why. Instead, it is more helpful

to see each thinker's corpus as comprising a set of questions and issues that

are still in the process of evolving. The light that such considerations shed

upon the ancient texts in question is the only criterion for the selection of

any given theory or part of a theory. And, as no one theory exhausts the

intricacies of the rhetorical situation - nor, for that matter, are the theories

themselves exhausted by rhetoric - appeal is made to several at their most

useful points. Ultimately the relationship between contemporary theory

and ancient texts will not be unidirectional: critical readings of ancient

oratory call into question the modernity of the postmodern. The antiquity

of the concerns of modern theory thus ought to also raise questions as to

the possible associations with such suspect categories as aristocratic virility

and discourses of mastery.

Derrida's Of Grammatology, with its focus on writing as contrasted

with speech, offers a valuable set of observations for the problems of

INTRODUCTION 15

speech and writing that haunt rhetorical theory.28 Derrida champions writ-

ing against its disparagement relative to the authenticity and presence of

speech. Derrida presents writing's stigma as "the sign of a sign" as in fact

the most apt description of the action of language as a whole, a system that

is radically lacking a point of origin and wherein all meanings are derived

from appeals to other signs (see especially 1976, 7, 11-12). Partisans of

speech over writing lean upon the notion of a transcendental signified and a

theodicity wherein the soul is to the body as the logos is to writing (Derrida

1976, 20, 35). Within such a conception, "the ethic of speech is the delusion

of presence mastered" (139).

My own account of rhetorical theory will show within this theory a

similar disparagement of rhetoric's own inscription. At the same time, the

speech represented within such writings is a speech upon which presence is

predicated. This speech is the speech of the authentic man, the vir bonus.

Yet the vir bonus is himself called into question by any critique of the

phallologocentrism with which his speech is implicated. And such a critique

is immanent within the very texts that would reproduce the vir bonus, for as

texts they are necessarily affiliated with that writing which is the radical

other of speech and which designates nonpresence and diffirance for Der-

rida (1976, 56-57). Nevertheless, rhetorical texts act to give assurances that

writing can be brought under the sign of speech. Thus the rhetorical venue,

the stage upon which rhetorical theory gazes, acts as a scene of an impossi-

ble labor of consolidation of speech as presence against the forces inhering

within these theoretical texts, forces that would vitiate the authority and

self-presence of the speaking voice. Does writing of rhetoric help rhetoric

or harm it?

Preoccupied with the philosophical problem of writing, the handbooks

not surprisingly expend their energies trying to shore up a number of so-

cial categories that are dependent upon a prior ontology and the successful

positing of the subject as such. In this regard one can invoke on several

planes the notion of Derrida's dangerous supplement. For Derrida the

supplement has a twofold aspect. It adds itself in excess as a "plenitude

enriching another plenitude. . . . It cumulates and accumulates presence"

(1976, 144). At the same time, the supplement also "adds only to replace"

and "insinuates in-the-place-of" (145). It does so "by the anterior default of

a presence" (145). In this sense, then, the supplement is both savior and

ruin of that to which it is applied: as it piles up presence, it likewise

undermines it from below. For Derrida, there is no being as such, only its

eternal imputation.

I would like to suggest that the triad of notions I have discussed above,

the performance, the student, and the theory, play with and against one

another in a supplementary relationship. Performance requires the text as

16 STAGING MASCULINITY

its supplement or aid, but hates the text as its own effacement. Perfor-

mance likewise requires of the student that he be the supplement or efface-

ment of performance's "mere" performativity. The student here makes up

for the deficiency of performance by superadding to it his own presence

and authenticity. On the other hand, the student requires text as supple-

ment or as the assistant for his own self-mastery and self-presence. Yet this

student also requires performance as supplement or effacement of his non-

presence or incompleteness: he becomes and is the good man only as he

plays one. For its part, the text requires the student as supplement or

effacement of its death- a making present in the world and in speech of the

text. Similarly, the text requires performance as supplement or assistant to

its own incompleteness: performance means a putting of the text's precepts

into iterative and worldly time. In none of these cases, though, does the

supplement complete the thing to which it is applied: each complementary

gesture also contains within it a diminution of the authority of the item

supplemented. The task of this study, then, is not to pursue completion and

perfection, but to explore the shapes of these subjects, texts, and acts

precisely as incomplete and the practical consequences that ensue from

such incompleteness.

Within this eternal process of imperfection, the theoretical handbook

can be seen as a failed therapist within the Freudian paradigm. As will be

seen shortly, the consequences of such a failure are manifold, and they also

allow for the integration of the critiques of Freud within my portrait of

rhetorical theory. This failure, however, is meant to draw attention to the

labor of self-discovery that is enjoined upon the student. At the same time,

one never completes this process of self-discovery that I am likening to a

therapeutics. Nor, for that matter, does such a process ever offer a success-

ful psychoanalytic cure within Freud's own thinking. Instead, the student

has certain psychic elements dredged up and worked over and over in such

a way as to reinscribe certain dispositions rather than to overcome them.

Before getting into the details of this process of failed rhetorical ther-

apy as it relates to the Freudian corpus, I would like to lay out a few points

of Freud that I take as axiomatic starting points for investigation.29 First,

infantile life is suffused with desires that are thoroughly lawless so far as the

polite society that awaits the child is concerned. Thus, every child is a Little

Hans, a "paragon of the vices," as Freud calls him (1976, 57). Every child

can thus be justly accused of incestuous desires, homosexuality, heterosexu-

ality, and the rest. Likewise one notes that in part the production of such

vices is attendant upon the efforts of the same good people who are in some

measure scandalized by them, namely the family. For in Hans' case, his

parents were adherents of Freud and had destined their child for observa-

tion (Freud 1976, 48). Similarly, they themselves expressly utter the threats

INTRODUCTION 17

and injunctions that sexualize Little Hans' life.30 In other words, Hans does

not live in the state of nature, but is instead fully implicated in his culture.31

To the comparatively anomic desires of infantile life corresponds a

similar ambivalence in the structure of desire in the adult life: prohibited or

no, many more objects are invested by desire than any narrow heterosexual

paradigm can account for. While the inculcation and legislation of such

desires may be an important social project, there is nothing moribund in

the desires as such. Indeed, desire is an ineluctable fact of human life.

Further, one should accept the ideas of anaclitism and narcissism as intro-

duced by Freud as descriptive of a valid distinction. But it is not necessary

to adopt his hierarchy of modes of desire that devolves into a pathological

view of homosexuality.32 Furthermore, within the Roman context, male

same-sex desire is not itself ipso facto anathema; the age of the participants

and who did what to whom were far more pressing concerns (Parker 1997).

Yet even this relatively permissive configuration of male desire requires

key moments of refusal, and one must examine the psychic consequences

of this negation. Freud's view of the homosexual component of everyday

life will prove indispensable: the sublimation of homosexual desires into

homosocial ones is precisely the axis around which the rhetorical scenario

turns.33 Even if passive homosexuality is an anathema for the vir bonus, the

recognition of such a desire such that it may be prohibited or put under

erasure forms a vital move in the field of rhetoric.

The therapy offered by the rhetorical handbook plays upon the libidinal

structures of the psyche and reproduces the scene of the transference in

Freud. For Freud, the transference is an operation wherein the patient

transfers onto the person of the analyst desires whose fundamental structure

and origin lie in infantile sexuality (1970a, 105-7). Thus the scene of therapy

is a venue for the patient's rehearsal of the constitutive elements of his

capacity for love and desire. Freud insists that this structure is always repro-

ducing itself (1970a, 106), but that in the case of therapy, the analyst takes up

a definite position within a preexisting" 'series' already constructed in [the

patient's] mind" (107). Here again, rhetorical theory should be seen as only

one venue within a broader cultural labor of subjectivization, an endless and

overdetermined set of elements appertaining to the series of symbols operat-

ing within the Roman psyche. This reading is clearly a Lacanian one wherein

the Freudian transference is phrased in terms of signification in general (see,

e.g., Lacan 1982, 61-73).

Transference thus can inform any relationship between two subjects.

But it is, of course, keenest in a scenario like analysis, where the patient is

confronted by a subject to whom one must confess. Paradoxically this

confession will lead to self-knowledge, for behind the mirroring relation of

the analyst there lies a relationship to meaning in general (see Lacan 1988a,

18 STAGING MASCULINITY

273-87). The orator finds himself confronted with a similar scenario

whereby he is asked to know himself by way of a training that offers to

show him his own meanings within a broader context of signification. The

handbook even promises a means of controlling or containing signification,

as if language's protean forms could be wrestled into submission and a truth

extracted from it. In the rhetoric of rhetorical theory, the body is said to

signify as to the truth of its own bearer. The body comes to act as an

irreducible index of the truth that one is, in fact, a "good man." The

rhetorical handbook thus offers a bodily mirage and a discourse within

which to appreciate this image. The handbook's student is asked to accom-

modate himself to this body and this discourse in order to attain to this

ideal bodily self, this Idealich (see Lacan 1988a, 129-42).

Within psychoanalytic discourse, though, the transference, by appeal-

ing to structures of desire that precede the advent of the therapist, "pro-

vides the strongest resistance to the cure."34 The attainment to full self-

knowledge - to put for a moment a very lopsided gloss upon Wo es war, soll

Ich werden - is actually inhibited should the patient become captivated by

the alter ego with which he is presented and should he fail to move beyond

it into an understanding of meaning and desire as such. In fact, in the

countertransference, or the desire felt for the patient in return by the

therapist, one finds the possibility of a static circuit wherein there will be no

progress rather than a dialectical therapeutic advance.35

Rhetorical theory produces something akin to the transference by

reigniting prior structures of desire. In particular, one is meant to cathect all

over again to an image of virile authority and mastery, an image that is part of

the durable disposition of the subject. Rhetorical instruction is one of many

sites of the activation and reactivation of such desires: rhetoric is neither

radically originary nor radically derivative, even if it is in a unique position to

delve into the symbolic implications of the very virile authority that is every-

where presumed in Roman life.36 The handbook as failed therapist incul-

cates the same sorts of desires whose emergence within analysis Freud high-

lights. But in the case of rhetoric, these desires are cultivated without any

overcoming or getting beyond. The resistance to the cure that Freud sees in

the transferential admiration for the image of the therapist here becomes,

ironically, the cure itself. The orator is promised that his successive approxi-

mations to the body the text offers will lead him to acquire the authority in

general. And, obviously, this same authority has to be invested in the text as

itself authoritative and efficacious before the orator can even begin aspiring

to realizing the text's promises. From the outset, then, we find a sublime

body already folded into the speech of the text, an absent author who prom-

ises a mechanism to aspire to authority in general. If all of this seems ab-

stract, it is no accident: the trajectory of the performative ultimately extends

INTRODUCTION 19

beyond the material possibilities of any given performance. One reaches for

something that is never quite there.

As a therapist, the rhetorical handbook inculcates desire for the body

of a good man and the meanings that have been invested in such a body

but that also transcend it. The handbook modulates this desire, and it

moralizes desire in general. The handbook's self-knowledge is thus not a

release from a system of desires, but rather a refinement of the techniques

and tactics of that desire. We will in fact find a desire reaching out from

the handbook and the rhetorical teacher toward the student: the transfer-

ence and the countertransference thus suffuse the scene of oratorical

training. Moreover, the transcendental truth to which one might lead a

patient in analysis here becomes a striving for a place of privilege relative

to language and meaning. The orator is not offered a chance to appreciate

himself as the subject of language, some Es, but instead as meaning's

absolute master.

In the course of the handbook's therapy - a successful therapy to the

extent that it acts to produce a certain kind of subject - yet another Freud-

ian concept becomes relevant: repetition. Freud sees repetition as the ex-

pression in action of a desire that is being repressed by the patient in the

course of analysis.37 In the case of oratory homosexual desire is both re-

fused and likewise bound ever to return anew. Oratory is saturated with

problems of pleasure and desire felt between males. The good performance

of the orator and the one toward which he is educated is the enactment of

the body of the good man as a socially desirable entity, an entity that gives

pleasure specifically as a male and specifically to other males.

It is in many ways the function of rhetorical theory to "pacify" or

authorize these homosexual desires along more acceptable lines than the

potentially chaotic field of desire might otherwise offer. Rhetorical hand-

books routinely inculcate an oratory that is erotic, yet in the course of so

doing steer that Eros into such channels as are socially respectable. In other

words, Freud's euphemized homosocial pleasures are actively pursued, and

explicit homosexual ones are berated. The progress from homosexuality to

homoerotics is here not automatic or taken for granted, as in Freud: it is

the object of solicitude and deliberate labor. And the traces of this labor of

repression remain evident in rhetorical theory. Indeed rhetorical theory

thrives upon this process of concomitant incitement and refusal: for it is the

very desire that is prohibited that holds together the libidinal economy of

rhetoric in general.

Here one should compare Freud's essay on melancholia and the pro-

cess whereby one grieves over the loss of an object within oneself (1970b,

168). This process tends to produce a self-beratement that is a veiled cri-

tique of others (170). The student is asked to refuse traces of femininity in

20 STAGING MASCULINITY

himself, and this is an activity of active refusal that produces a lost object.

At the same time, this care for the self and beratement of effeminacy,

servility, and other illegitimate characteristics as found in one's own body

also contains a critique of the social order for being too servile or effemi-

nate. In other words, there is a desire expressed in this gesture for a world

populated only by hegemonic men, a pure field of homosocial desire. But

such a desire is a vain one precisely because the production of the ideal

male entails the production of illegitimate lost objects within the hege-

monic male. Indeed, rhetorical theory requires the constant revisiting of

this site of loss to secure that the illegitimate is berated all over again. The

handbook's therapy fails once again, and pure masculinity remains an elu-

sive and ephemeral dream. But again the failure is a success to the extent

that the process itself has useful social consequences that are served even as

one is cheated of the ostensible goal. Thus there is a melancholy that clings

variously to the performative as one of its fundamental moments and as a

sort of engine driving the compulsive repetitions of both performance and

the theory of performance.

As has already been indicated, this general portrait of psychic life

derived from Freud can be rounded out via the writings of Jacques Lacan,

and I would here like to make my debt to Lacan somewhat clearer. Lacan

allows us to unite the focus on language and being/nonbeing from Derrida

with the psychology of Freud. Lacan's theories thus provide a clearer under-

standing of the articulation of the ego relative to the field of language. In

fact, one may consider this to be Lacan's chief aim as a theorist. Lacan's

"mirror stage" explains the constitution of the ego in the realm of what he

calls "the imaginary."38 The subject's ego comes to compose itself from out

of a body in pieces and into a coordinated whole by reference to the image

of the other that confronts him in the mirror. We will in fact see this very

scene rehearsed within the rhetorical tradition as Demosthenes is posi-

tioned before a mirror by Quintilian and brought into mastery of himself

and his meaning by reference to his own image. This is the moment of

"seeing oneself see oneself" (Lacan 1981, 83) that marks for Lacan the

point at which the subject elides the gaze whose preexistence structures his

world and his position within it (1981, 72). In the case of the orator, his

theoretical apparatus acts as the preexisting and structuring gaze that disap-

pears in a moment of self-reflection in which the speaker actually most fully

accommodates himself to the structured space regulated by that gaze, the

gaze of rhetorical theory. Furthermore, this apparatus is also fully impli-

cated in the society that produces it, and hence it fully partakes of the

symbolic in Lacan's sense of the term: rhetorical theory offers a special and

highly evocative instance of a process whereby meaning is produced within

the world as a whole.

INTRODUCTION 21

Taking this as a brief summary of Lacan's version of the ego, we can

complement this portrait of the ego by evoking as well the unconscious and

the symbolic order.39 The axis of the ego for Lacan lies along the plane of

what he calls the imaginary. On the other hand, the symbolic order persists

on a separate axis from that of the imaginary and is so illustrated in all of

Lacan's diagrams. The unconscious is, as Lacan routinely stresses, the

"discourse of the other" (e.g., 1988a, 85; 1988b, 89). The unconscious is

structured like a language precisely because the emergence of the symbolic

is the irruption of language into the world. Thus, "the human order is

characterized by the fact that the symbolic function intervenes at every

moment and at every stage of its existence" (1988b, 29). Additionally,

"(the symbolic order) isn't constituted bit by bit. As soon as the symbol

arrives, there is a universe of symbols."40 Furthermore, the ego participates

within this order only as one more symbol within this order (1988b, 38).

Hence there is no special place set aside for the ego in Lacan's world.

Lacan profoundly decenters the ego, and demolishes the statement, "I'm

the one who knows that I am" (1988b, 224).

In the example of the orator, the Lacanian schemata are arranged in a

particularly potent fashion for the orator as ego. The rhetorical tradition

and rhetorical theory assume a position homologous to the symbolic order

as a whole. They thus arrogate for themselves questions of meaning in

general. Rhetorical theory hereby becomes a part of the orator's uncon-

scious. Or, put more precisely, this theory participates in the structuration

of the orator's unconscious. In this sense, one needs to take even more

seriously the orthopedics and calisthenics of manhood that these theories

impose upon their students. It is through these very techniques that the

orator loses his ability to say that he is the one who knows who he is even as

he labors to realize himself as the "good man, experienced at speaking."

For the orator and his theories, the symbolic order is always already

given and complete. But the orator's symbolic order is lived and repro-

duced by these same theories. The ego of the orator is given to theory's

gaze, and identification with this gaze implies an active accommodation of

the ego to the symbolic order. In the chronic labor of making the ego

present to itself that comes with submission to rhetorical theory, there is a

production of the sense of authenticity and interiority as a function of the

relationship between rhetorical theory and the student. To this psychoana-

lytic tale of self-discovery one should compare the discussion of Derrida

above. The constitutive elements of Derrida's term phallologocentrism are

all key aspects of the orator: virility, authorized speech, and social control.

In short, phallologocentrism is the student's goal, and rhetorical theory

purports to be the means to this end. The labor of establishing this authen-

ticity can naturally never be completed given that its consummation would

22 STAGING MASCULINITY

require an impossible closure of the symbolic and a collapse of the symbolic

and imaginary orders. But it is this very identification that is sought within

rhetorical theory: where the unconscious of theory was, there the ego

should be.

This formulation to which ancient theory invited its adherents ought to

give us some pause. It does not differ from the recipe for therapy offered

by psychoanalysis. In particular Lacan's portrait of the goal of analysis

plays off of Freud's famous Wo es war, soll Ich werden. In Lacanian terms,

this involves the movement of the Ego (je, Ich) into the position of the Id

(Sujet, Es, or, unconscious) (Lacan 1988b, 243-47). Clearly a similar move-

ment is sought by rhetorical theory as well, but the viability of this project

seems suspect. In Lacan's and Freud's terms, there ought to be some virtue

in communing with the unconscious and the symbolic. But the orator ac-

quires his "health" at the cost of reinscribing the legitimacy of virile author-

ity. To what extent does analysis itself offer a cure only by way of a funda-

mental complicity with the very order whose dictates and prohibitions have

caused so much distress?41 The desires that structure the world of antiquity

are thoroughly complicated by issues of mastery, misogyny, and xenopho-

bia. It is not clear that the modern world can argue a contrary case.

It might be possible to conclude that Lacanian therapy is somehow

genealogically connected with a tainted rhetorical predecessor. That is, the

discursive apparatus of which psychoanalysis forms a part would on this

reading be affiliated with techniques of the self whose origins can be traced

to the Greco-Roman world. Such considerations are worth entertaining,

but any notion that psychoanalysis is a "rhetorical" gambit should not leave

us blind to the notion that the psyche is itself rhetorical. And, within the

broader context of metaphor and metonymy and other tropological views

of the psychic apparatus, we find ancient rhetorical theory as an institution

ideally accommodated to the project of acting both upon and within the

self. Again, rhetorical theory stands in the position of a quasi psychoanaly-

sis. And if an analyst might wish to describe theory as having failed to

provide a cure, this failure is nevertheless vital to theory's own working: it

is a fertile failure.

The most useful student of the fertility of power, failed or no,42 is

Michel Foucault. At first glance a use of Foucault may seem to conflict

with the discussion above, as Foucault was himself a vocal critic of psycho-

analysis. I hope to make it clear, though, that my portrait of rhetorical

theory as a failed analysis fits well with Foucault's own observations on

power. Additionally, I would like to indicate certain points in Foucault's

own thinking at which psychoanalysis is not subverted but rather becomes

a necessary supplement to Foucault's thought if we are to explain the

situation of ancient oratory. In other words, Foucault himself reaches

INTRODUCTION 23

certain theoretical impasses that are best solved by assistance derived

from outside his own work.

Foucault dedicated two of his full-length studies to ancient topics.43 I

would prefer, however, to use Foucault's work with a particular emphasis

on his techniques and observations derived from studies of other, later

periods. I hope that the present project will bear out the conclusion that

many of Foucault's ideas were actually applicable, if only in a partial sense,

to periods in which he did not himself see them as acting. Implicitly such an

approach also acts as a partial critique of Foucault's thinking regarding the

classical period as being somewhat incomplete within his own terms: for

example, panopticism should have been retained as an analytic tool in the

later volumes of the History of Sexuality even though the architectural

apotheosis of the same would have to wait for centuries. If Foucault's

account of antiquity is incomplete, this is not necessarily just a function of

his lack of technical training in classical scholarship.44 Instead ancient ora-

tory brings to light questions of the subjects's self-relation that extend

beyond the descriptive capacities of Foucault's own models. Indeed it is

precisely the failure of a text like The Care of the Self to engage with the

ironies and ambiguities of its chosen topic that renders Foucault's argument

rather bland and descriptive, whereas his earlier work is remarkable for its

bold insights. Strangely, Foucault seems to have taken antiquity at its word,

whereas students of rhetorical theory ought to always worry that the an-

cients knew the art of dissimulation as well.

But let us return to the orators. Their fertile and failed theoretical

project parallels the institutional critique leveled at psychoanalysis by Fou-

cault in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. Much as sexuality is

compelled to "speak verbally of its own silence" and is put into a triad of

power, knowledge, and pleasure,45 so also are pleasure, effeminacy, and all

illegitimacy brooded over within the rhetorical setting. The other parallels

between Foucault's portrait of modern sexuality and ancient rhetoric are

striking. Within ancient rhetoric as well, there was an "institutional in-

citement" (1990a, 18) to speak about the forbidden and excluded side of

oratory; "an effort of elimination that was always destined to fail and

always constrained to begin again" (41); a forcing of the forbidden objects

"into hiding so as to make their discovery possible" (42); and in general, a

confessional mode of sexuality. Foucault argues, though, that Rome had an

ars erotica and not a scientia sexualis (1990a, 57-90). I would assert, on the

other hand, that there is in fact a scientia sexualis enfolded into the study of

rhetoric.

Foucault's Discipline and Punish best explicates the techniques of

knowledge and power that subtend this situation. Here Foucault explicitly

informs us that "the body is also directly involved in a political field; power

24 STAGING MASCULINITY

relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it,

torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs"

(1979, 25). The same might be said of the orator's body within the political

field that it occupies. The rhetorical handbook plays the part of active

agent of production of meaning and legitimacy within this scheme, the

agent of knowledge that is the obverse face of power in Foucault's power/

knowledge dyad (see especially 1980a, 50-51). In such a context, increased

knowledge actually reflects an increase in the opportunity for the effects of

power:46 the more explicit and detailed the study of a performer's body, the

more one can detail the tracings of power upon this body. The constitution

and extraction of knowledge of the body occur in the very process of the

examination of this body. 47 In the end, knowable man appears as the prod-

uct of a process of an ever-increasing analytics that makes him both better

known and more subject to the power that knows him (Foucault 1979,

305). The man who emerges at the end of this process is the "true" man.

That is, the truth of the order of discourse structured by power has as its

effect man (Foucault 1980c, 93, 98).

Such a reading when turned toward ancient rhetoric has a couple of

important consequences. The first is that one needs to take rhetorical

theory very seriously indeed: it is a discourse of truth. But it is not true in

the simple sense of reflecting what actually happened when a speaker arose

to deliver his words. Rather, rhetorical theory is true in the sense that it

participates in a vast network of truth-producing structures within antiq-

uity. It is true to the extent that the knowledge that it produces, a knowl-

edge everywhere suffused with power, has the quality of constraining the

truths of antiquity. Second, this reading immediately invites the question of

self-reflexivity. What is the significance of rhetorical theory as a knowledge

that is produced and consumed by the same set of men? It is a knowledge of

the hegemonic male produced by him and applied to himself. What differ-

ence does this make within Foucault's schema?

The self-reflexive is actually a point of crisis within Foucault.48 At the

same time, it is a point to which his thinking seems to aim. Foucault grap-

pled with the problem in both of the later volumes of The History of Sexual-

ity, even entitling the third volume The Care of the Self Yet self-reflexivity

has emerged as an important thesis already within Discipline and Punish.

Subjection to the "ceaseless gaze" (Foucault 1979, 105) of the panopticon

produces a situation where the exercise of power becomes unnecessary,

because power has been inscribed within its bearers (201). This inscription,

though, is a self-inscription: "(the prisoner) inscribes in himself the power

relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the prin-

ciple of his own subjection" (202-3). Given this last example, the scene of

rhetorical training resembles not only the practices and the care of the self

INTRODUCTION 25

outlined in The History of Sexuality, but also the panoptic scenario. The

orator is constrained and determined by a faceless gaze that he feels always

and everywhere upon him. By way of meeting the demands of this gaze, the

orator inscribes himself within a power relation in which he becomes the

principle of his own domination. His self-mastery emerges as a response to

an imagined inspection that must be forestalled and mastered by way of a

scrupulous and complete self-inscription within its dictates.

Such a situation, however, is highly reminiscent of Lacan's tag above

about the elision of the gaze by the sense of seeing oneself seeing oneself

(1981, 83). This homology suggests that Foucault's own theories are not so

radically opposed to psychoanalysis as one might have suspected at first

glance. In fact, by complementing Lacan's symbolic with Foucault's paral-

lel notion of power, both theories are enriched: Foucault is given a struc-

ture within which his optics may be related to the ego along the axes that

bind the symbolic to the imaginary; and Lacan has attached to his symbolic

Foucault's strong emphasis on the fertility of power.49

Lacan complements Foucault in yet another useful direction: Lacan's

rigid definition of the symbolic and the real as that which resists significa-

tion would help Foucault avoid such confusing moments as occasionally

occur within the History of Sexuality. For example, in the Jouy we see

something that appears to be a moment radically outside of the structures

of power and knowledge permeating the rest of the text (Foucault 1990a,

31-32). During his account of the simpleton and his "bucolic pleasures"

who is transformed into child molester at the hands of the law Foucault

loses the ability to critique the normative by producing unconvincing por-

traits of exteriority. Jouy is given a position exterior to power and sym-

bolization even though a closer reading reveals that he is clearly participat-

ing in a variety of symbolic structures: rusticity does not imply anarchy.

Similarly Jouy's naive innocence is purchased at the price of the girl's savvy

complicity. One can also compare to this Butler's critique of Foucault's

reading of the case of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin (Butler 1990a,

94-106). In both instances, Foucault's radical others and unthinkable souls

need to be critiqued within the order that refuses them. As Butler reminds

us, the subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity need to be thought

within the terms of power itself (1990a, 30). Such will be my own approach

to reading the unlivable bodies produced within rhetorical discourse: the

outside is used to normative effect by the inside. The "unthinkable" is thus

fully within the realm of culture, only it is excluded from participation in

the dominant culture (see Butler 1990a, 77; 1993, 3).

Failed orators and other, untenable bodies may well represent opportu-

nities for an alternative or counterhegemonic reading of antiquity, but they

should not be taken as moments of authenticity falling outside the law and

26 STAGING MASCULINITY

waiting for a new, modern narrative to apply its alchemy, to transform their

discursive evaluation, and to exchange their base metal for one nobler. One

needs to exercise permanent vigilance over the question of making a no-

blest and best account of bodily truths, for such is the very end to which

rhetoric itself steers us. A mere inversion of terms is unlikely to affect the

structural conditions that orient our understanding at a more basic level,

conditions that require the interconnection of truth, the body, and virtue.

The orator participates in this whole debate of good and true bodies as

an actor whose performances have the profoundest implications for both

himself and his world. This role, though, is neither fixed nor rigid. Rather it

represents a fertile and creative moment. The orator's performance and his

training for performance offer points where power is staged and repro-

duced, but it is not for that totalized. Rhetoric needs performativity to

secure its status as a lived modality of power. The performance, though, is

never complete. Nor, in its turn, is performance even adequately or exhaus-

tively described by the theory that would encompass it. Thus the world of

performance and the descriptions of performance have between them and

within them a potential space for queer-in the fullest sense of the term-

and revolutionary consequences. Indeed, both performance and theories

of performance routinely produce their own queer obverse. Here again we

have rhetoric's failed analysis and therapeutics, again its fertile failure, but

in this case we see more clearly the extent to which it could never have

succeeded.

Judith Butler is an important theorist of these very issues. Butler

makes the notion of performativity central to her understanding of subjects

and subjectivation. Thus her work is immediately amenable to application

to the realm of ancient actio and theories of performance. In the ancient

setting, we find authors who take performance just as seriously as a found-

ing moment for the subject, and also thinkers who act upon this belief to

produce a body of knowledge that will constrain performances to certain

meanings. Thus, while for Butler performativity is an incomplete yet com-

pulsory materialization of the body through time (1993, 1-2, 9), the rhetori-

cal theorists take up a similar stance and rework it for their own ends. This

incompleteness becomes an injunction to eternal study and labor, to end-

less self-subjection within the terms of the law. The orator and his theories

are implicated in a situation that invites the endless citation of the law in

order to reground both the authority of the law and its bearers.50 The law

cited in this case is the law of power or the symbolic. Yet this notion of

citationality also entails an endlessly derivative relationship to this law; and

hence there is no law as such, only its own citations. One thinks again of

Derrida's critique of ontology. If the subject is a work always in progress,

rhetorical theory has found a way to keep it always busy and out of trouble.

INTRODUCTION 27

At the same time, though, the law and the truth of rhetoric cannot be

hypostatized as a prior essence: it is the task of rhetorical theory and

rhetorical training to produce the fiction of just such an essence. Thus my

own discussion of "rhetorical theory" as monolithic and reified could be

described as itself complicit with the rhetorical project. I intend only to

borrow what might be called an "indigenous category" and to show how

this structure itself structures the world.51 I understand rhetoric, the theory

of rhetoric, and the bodies of the orators as all part of an ongoing project

designed to produce meaning even as the truth of that meaning and the

hegemony of the good man remain incomplete and elusive.

In forestalling the perils and pitfalls of nonpresence, the orator none-

theless finds himself routinely enacting the constitutive exclusion of the

unlivable domain. Thus in the process of securing the legitimate order, the

illegitimate is chronically produced and then exiled. The performances of

the rhetorical subject are iterations that are constrained both to mark their

own authority and to banish the specter of an illegitimacy that is always

haunting the legitimate order. Butler reminds us that "since the law must

be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstates

the possibility of its own failure" (1993, 108). Yet for the orator, his hand-

book proposes that the failure lies within the student. The student need

only accede more to the law by subjecting himself to the further study of it

in order to overcome the performative failings he may evince. The orator's

self-beratement can be compared to the "tacit cruelties which sustain co-

herent identity, cruelties that include self-cruelty as well, the abasement

through which coherence is fictively produced and sustained (Butler 1993,

115). In the case of rhetoric, though, we find that the cruelty is highly

verbal, and it reproduces itself as an often explicit project of securing

identity by way of rhetorical fictions that aspire to the condition of truth.

And, to the extent that "truth" is a matter of iterated performances, actio

and the theory of performance are vital aspects of the truth of masculine

identity at Rome.

This theoretical survey has been intended to offer not only a justifica-

tion for employing certain methods when reading ancient rhetorical texts,

but also to demonstrate that a certain number of questions circulating within

contemporary theoretical debates already comprised a vital set of concerns

within antiquity. In other words, the questions that arise within ancient

rhetorical theory and that are themselves partially addressed within this

same theoretical apparatus remain pressing theoretical questions to this day:

what is the validity of a text relative to an actual performance? What is the

proper relationship between textuality and performativity? What is a perfor-

mance of or for? What is the desire lived in performance? On the other hand,

ancient rhetorical theory offers the opportunity for a close and detailed

28 STAGING MASCULINITY

examination of active interventions into this same set of questions. Rhetori-

cal theory and practice and their interrelationship thus offer an overt ex-

ample of the process of subject production. The commandment to be a good

man experienced at speaking is not one to be taken lightly: an entire technol-

ogy of subjects in the world is herein implicated.

CHAPTER 1

Reading and Writing

ANCIENT RHETORICAL THEORISTS TEND TO RECOGNIZE five branches of

study requisite to the proper study of the art. While some Greeks may have

divided the question up differently,' the Latin tradition is marked by una-

nimity.2 A student needed to learn how to discover his arguments and

argumentative stances; he had to organize his speech; he had to determine

the (appropriate) verbal expression for his arguments; he should study

memory so as to be able to say what he had decided upon when the time

came; and he had to consider the physical performance of his oration.

When it comes to performance, we find an inherited problem of termi-

nology: Latin authors use either actio or pronuntiatio, but prefer to use one

over the other. The first, actio, specifically evokes the movements of the

body during a speech, the second the modulation of the voice. Each term,

though, unless its meaning is specifically refined for a particular argument,

is used generally to express both elements. I prefer to use actio because I

am most interested in the use of the body, but likewise will employ the term

in its broader sense. It must be kept in mind, then, that the rhetorical

tradition has, to its own eyes and especially to our own, curiously fused two

very distinct qualities (sight and sound) into a single issue.3

Any thorough rhetorical handbook will eventually have to discuss the

physical presentation of speeches. But tradition has presented the author of

a handbook with a problem that extends well beyond a question of terminol-

ogy: how can a book train the body and the voice by means of its written

dictates? One might argue that the handbook never stood alone, that there

was always accompanying it the schoolhouse, and that the books' failings

would inevitably be made good in person by the teacher. This observation

should not be forgotten. It does, though, tend to gloss over questions that

the authors of handbooks asked themselves, questions whose implications

have far-reaching consequences for lived experience and its capacity to

make good on the defects of a text.

We should not let the notion of the schoolhouse obscure the fact of the

text: one of the reasons Quintilian writes is because he knows that people

29

30 STAGING MASCULINITY

are already learning from flawed "bootleg" copies of his lectures (1.pr.7).

There is a veritable hunger for texts on the part of the audience. Quintil-

ian's problem presents only the most striking case of a condition presup-

posed by the text: the author is absent; these words will have to do; one

tries to make them as good as possible. Merely attending school is not

enough, and it is easy to note among the consumers of the rhetorical

handbook students who could not hear their teacher, students who wished

to have him ever to hand, full-grown orators who no longer needed lessons,

and lastly, other scholars of oratory.4

The author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium5 assigns to delivery a promi-

nent place, on equal footing with the other four divisions in the art of

oratory. He begins his discussion by saying, "Many have said that delivery

is the most useful thing for an orator and that it lends the most to persua-

sion. We, for our part, should not have readily said that a single element

from the five parts of oratory was particularly effective."6 The author is

actually being rather ungenerous relative to many other accounts from

antiquity. This moderate declaration and the subsequent reserve about the

"marvelous" power of delivery are both at odds with the oft-repeated

anecdote about the three foremost elements of oratory according to Demos-

thenes: delivery, delivery, and delivery (see Quintilian 11.3.6; Cicero, De

oratore, 3.213).

The author offers the following justification for treating the topic in

his text:

Quare, <et> quia nemo de ea re diligenter scripsit - nam omnes vix

posse putarunt de voce et vultu et gestu dilucide scribi, cum eae res

ad sensus nostros pertinerent - et quia magnopere <ea pars> a nobis

ad dicendum conparanda est, non neglegenter videtur tota res con-

sideranda.

[Accordingly, both because nobody has written carefully on this

topic - for all thought that one could hardly write clearly concerning

the voice, facial expressions, and gestures, as these things pertain to

our physical senses - and because we must carefully provide for this

element when we speak, it seems that the whole topic ought to be

considered with some care.]

(Ad Herennium 3.19)

Delivery has presented something of a challenge to the authors of the

handbook: it is essential, yet it remains elusive. Delivery has proven a little

too "real" for many to wish to compass it with mere words. Delivery, then,

offers to rhetorical theory a sort of limit-point that might possibly lie be-

yond its own capacities. Despite our author's line of thought, he neverthe-

READING AND WRITING 31

less proceeds to make good a long-standing debt of language. He proceeds,

that is, to put delivery into words. A detailed discussion of various ele-

ments of delivery follows. The author hereupon dedicates roughly 8 of his

192 pages to this issue.7 Then he concludes thus,

Non sum nescius, quantum susceperim negotii, qui motus corporis

exprimere verbis et imitari scriptura conatus sim voces. Verum nec hoc

confisus sum posse fieri, ut de his rebus satis commode scribi posset,

nec, si id fieri non posset, hoc, quod feci, fore inutile putabam, prop-

terea quod hic admonere voluimus, quid oporteret: reliqua trademus

exercitationi. Hoc scire oportet, pronuntiationem bonam id

perficere, ut res ex animo videatur.

[I am not unaware of the extent of my undertaking when I tried to

express the movements of the body in words and to imitate the voice in

writing. But neither did I feel I could write of these things adequately,

nor, if in fact I couldn't, did I think that whatever I did achieve would

be useless. Therefore, in this place I wished to give advice on appropri-

ate delivery; the rest I will leave to actual training. Nevertheless, one

ought to know this: good delivery achieves as its effect that everything

looks as if it comes straight from the heart.]

(Ad Herennium 3.27)

This text lacks confidence in itself, and it highlights the impossibility of its

task.8 Despite repeated qualifications, the Ad Herennium eventually did

provide us with a set of prescriptions even where these might actually prove

to be useless: delivery could not be passed over in silence; this will have to

do. Perhaps we even find an echo of this ancient awkwardness surrounding

writing performance in a modern work such as Lausberg's massive hand-

book on oratory: in over six hundred pages of analysis, less than one page

is devoted to delivery (1990, 527). Martin likewise writes several hundred

pages of which just over two are dedicated to performance (1974, 353-55).

They had to mention performance, but each would apparently prefer to

spend his energies on surer subjects.

Even as the problem of writing on performance is foregrounded the

author casts doubts on the refusal of other handbooks to discuss delivery

carefully. As has been mentioned, Aristotle discussed delivery, but his

treatment is by no means systematic (Rhetoric 1403b20ff.). Aristotle's suc-

cessor Theophrastus is noted for writing explicitly on gestures (Kroll 1940,

1075; Solmsen 1941, 45-46). On the Roman side, we know from Quintilian

that Plotius Gallus and Nigidius wrote about gestures.9 Suetonius cites a

passage from a lost letter of Cicero that says that Plotius was the first to

teach in Latin and that when Cicero was a boy all of the youths were

32 STAGING MASCULINITY

flocking to Plotius (De grammaticis et rhetoribus 26). Hence, the key word

in the account the Ad Herennium makes of its own project is "carefully"

(diligenter). Hitherto people have had something to say, but theoretical

knowledge of the body nevertheless remained inadequate in his eyes. We

will see in the next chapter whether or not such knowledge could ever be

made sufficient.

A thorough analysis of oratory requires that something be said con-

cerning delivery, that delivery be investigated and described. Failing to

mention delivery would be akin to neglecting to discuss word choice or

composition. A handbook, then, has failed the body and voice of its

orator if it remains silent; but, as the author of the Ad Herennium also

makes clear, even where it is verbose, the handbook has not compassed

the problem of delivery or sufficiently instructed the student: writing

cannot adequately deal with questions of the senses. In fact, the prescrip-

tions of the Ad Herennium appear to have even been scaled down some-

what in order to offer some generally useful rules of thumb, since definite

precepts appear beyond this medium. This text may be careful, but it is

not particularly systematic, nor is it exhaustive. Even though Clarke will

repeat with some amusement and impatience the fruits of the "pedantic

method" of the author, scorning this work as a textbook (1963, 35-37),

the author sees himself as restrained and general when it comes to deliv-

ery. That is, we may read and reread this section as often as we please,

but the author does not expect that we will actually become great orators

from it. Even did he wish to provide an idiot's guide to gentlemanly

delivery, the author does not believe that such would be possible: the

book is better than nothing; it is necessary even; but it is not enough. One

can compare the tone of exasperation of Victor, who despairs of produc-

ing a man with a real savoir faire out of a student who does not already

possess a good deal of practical know-how. When it comes to explaining

the question of fitting expression (elocutio), Victor says, "But I feel that

my labor on these points must be in vain, for neither do we instruct the

man who does not know how to speak, nor is it to be hoped that he who

cannot speak good Latin is going to speak ornately, nor that he who does

not speak intelligibly is able to speak something to be admired."10 In

Bourdieu's terms one might say that the elite habitus and the finer points

of cultural consumption, production, and reproduction remain usefully

sublime and ineffable (1984, 9-98).

"But if we speak earnestly and without pause, we should use swift

movements of the arm, lively facial expressions, and a zealous counte-

nance."11 To what end are we given such detailed advice? Ultimately, the

most that will be offered is a very general point: be convincing. One's

oratory should seem heartfelt (res ex animo videatur). The audience is

READING AND WRITING 33

supposed to feel that the orator has shown them his soul. The author of the

Ad Herennium starts with the problem of writing as it relates to perfor-

mance, and he ends with an invocation of the inner man. I would like to

begin my own investigation of the problem of writing performance and the

performance of writing a rhetorical handbook by noting this nexus between

writing, performance, and the soul as the troubled point to which rhetorical

theory repeatedly returns. It is the subject who is at stake in the lacuna that

persists between the word and the deed.

The rhetorical handbook fails to capture performance, and there is a

second failure related to this first one: it fails to capture the good orator as

well. Quintilian in his preface writes:

Sit igitur orator vir talis qualis vere sapiens appelari possit, nec

moribus modo perfectus (nam id mea quidem opinione, quamquam

sunt qui dissentiant, satis non est), sed etiam scientia et omni facultate

dicendi; qualis fortasse nemo adhuc fuerit, sed non ideo minus nobis

ad summa tenendum est. . . . Nam est certe aliquid consummata elo-

quentia neque ad eam pervenire natura humani ingenii prohibet.

Quod si non contingat...

[So let the orator be such a man as can truly be called wise, not only

perfect in point of character (for this, in my opinion - though there are

those who disagree - is not enough), but also perfect in both his knowl-

edge and his capacity for every manner of speaking, a man such as

perhaps has yet to have lived. But we are not for this reason to aspire

the less toward perfection. . . . For there is surely such a thing as

consummate eloquence; and the nature of man's intellect does not

prohibit that one arrive at it. And even if this does not come to

pass... ]

(Quintilian 1.pr.18-20)

Here we have no promise of reaching true eloquence: neither Demosthe-

nes nor Cicero, it would seem, can claim to have attained to the summit of

oratory (cf. Heldman 1980, 9). Still, the labor of oratorical training, like

that of the philosophy appropriated in Quintilian's analogy, is in a way its

own reward. We are meant to be satisfied with an endless progress toward

an unreachable goal. Quintilian himself posits his orator as imagined (sit)

rather than as extant (est). The rhetorical handbook that cannot capture

performance likewise should not be expected to capture the ideal per-

former. And Quintilian is hardly the first to use the trope of impossible

oratory. Cicero had made the same argument: the consummate orator

exists only as imagined within the pages of Cicero's De oratore.12

Thus, at the furthest level of remove, at the level of the status of the

34 STAGING MASCULINITY

project of oratorical training itself, there remain a number of open ques-

tions that might strike us as points of crisis. For the handbooks, though,

these questions do little to interrupt their discourse. They even seem to

provide it with points of orientation around which their discussion crys-

tallizes. These rhetorical texts produce, reproduce, and leave unsolved

such issues as oratory as an art, the possibility of the perfect orator, or the

validity of textual inculcation of one of the key elements of oratory. Our

texts seldom provide solid answers in one direction or another. There are

bald assertions of opinion like Quintilian's mea opinione; arguments and

counterarguments are left open in Cicero's dialogue form; and the Ad

Herennium can tell us "neither. . . nor. .." without ever offering a posi-

tive precept. Likewise these works endlessly reproduce in lesser form simi-

lar ambiguities with frequent appeals to the je ne sais quoi of a quiddam or

a prope; with polar divisions spanned by an indefinite number of steps

between them; with contradictions on details when specific chapters are

compared; with impossible debates like the cantus obscurior (more subtle

rhythm) in Cicero and Quintilian; with problems of terminology (is actio or

pronuntiatio the right name for delivery?); and with other like points that

swiftly give way if pushed too hard for deep, fundamental truths that might

be hoped to lie within them. Nevertheless, the texts seem surprisingly

secure as to the very issue of their own existence in the midst of the

qualifications that they themselves raise and that they seem to have no

fundamental interest in resolving. That is, beyond the isolated crisis mo-

ment here and there, they go on their untroubled way, setting out the rules

to be followed by the good orator.

Although an analysis of these individual "failures" and the smaller

details of all of the handbooks is in its own right a rewarding task, I would

like to begin instead with the problem of the fact of the text. What sort of

text can dispense with the various forms of validation jettisoned by the

handbooks? What sort of text does not need rigorous consistency or a

definitive exploration of its own objects of inquiry? Whose interests are

being served here? What sort of reader does this text require? Better yet,

what sort of reader does it produce?

The Rhetorica ad Herennium makes the writing of delivery into a problem.

Yet performance is discussed at great length in Quintilian's eleventh book.

Similarly, in the course of Cicero's various theoretical treatments of ora-

tory, much is written on the topic of good delivery. Verbosity in these cases

does not represent an increase in the confidence we ought to have in the

writing of performance or in textuality per se; rather it represents an in-

crease in textual effects. The increase in the details of a text represents an

increase in the opportunity of a technology of bodies to lay hold of the

READING AND WRITING 35

performer's physical self.13 Similarly, the deployment of new texts and

textual forms represents the putting into the world of new bodies to the

extent that the body and the text can be confused. Hence authorship of a

rhetorical handbook is a vital sociopolitical event.

Whether it is in the case of the dialogue or the list, the Latin theoreti-

cal work on oratory depends on a certain kind of readership. In each case,

the goal is to inflect and guide the reader, to make meaningful the reader's

own appreciation of the inevitable practice of oratory after a particular

fashion. In this manner, then, one can see that the handbooks need not

promise their readers any real progress or attainment, since the indispens-

able logical core of the text is actually pitched at a different target: the

meaning that the reader will impute to his practice as orator and the prac-

tice of others as orators.

The handbook thus offers a special variety of "reading lessons" de-

signed to impart specific hermeneutic techniques. Other texts become em-

bedded in the rhetorical handbook, and the manner in which one is asked to

read these works indicates the style of interpretation required of the student

by the rhetorical treatise as a whole. Though there are a certain number of

complaints about the manner in which performance has been taken for

granted by other authors, the art of reading for bodies forms a second and

related skill that must also be imparted. The student of the body must read

for bodies, and he is even taught how to read for them. Furthermore, the

political heritage and destiny of rhetoric necessarily provokes oratorical

texts that themselves become political acts, texts that, even if they are not

overtly always and in every way practical rhetorical works, are nevertheless

always practical political ones: the bodies they produce and contain are the

bodies to which one will accord political recognition.

If imposing actio on the body is the text's primary goal, a second major

effect is the rendering of a world calibrated to appreciate this actio, a world

generating bodies after its fashion and a world reading them of its own

accord, a world that keeps histories of gestures and that insists upon restor-

ing them to where they "must" have originally been. Quintilian's Institutio

oratoria is deeply engaged with other texts and makes vital assumptions

about them. That is, one can the more thoroughly explore the paradox of

textuality by attending to the relationship of Quintilian's text to writing in

general. Where the Ad Herennium makes us cautious about writing, Quin-

tilian develops techniques of reading and readership that allow him to

evade the aporia of his predecessor.

Quintilian's reading of Vergil provides a useful point of entry into this

problem of textuality. Quintialian invokes the Aeneid so as to offer an ex-

ample of the proper punctuation of Latin, reading Vergil's epic such that one

may appreciate where to pause in speaking and for how long. Although first

36 STAGING MASCULINITY

introduced in terms of a pronunciation exercise/example, Quintilian's treat-

ment of the opening line of the Aeneid has broader implications.

secundum est, ut sit oratio distincta, id est: qui dicit, et incipiat ubi

oportet et desinat. Observandum etiam, quo loco sustinendus et quasi

suspendendus sermo sit, quod Graeci Jno&otoorov vel TooTLytiv

vocant, quo deponendus. suspenditur "arma virumque cano," quia

illud "virum" ad sequentia pertinet, ut sit, "virum Troiae qui primus ab

oris," et hic iterum.

[Second, your speaking should be distinct; that is, a speaker ought to

start and stop at the appropriate place. You must also take note of the

place to pause your speaking and, as it were, to suspend it - the Greek

terms are wO&obLoTXoio or 3TootLyi - and you must know where to

stop entirely. There is a suspension after arma virumque cano, because

the virum pertains to what follows, the sense being virum Troiae qui

primus ab oris, whereupon one pauses again.]

(Quintilian 11.3.35-36)

Like so many passages of Quintilian, this one seems innocuous enough at

first sight: Quintilian asks us to speak such that we might be understood. He

uses one of the most famous lines of Latin literature to illustrate his point.

However, upon reflection, this seems a somewhat unusual task: should it not

be more or less obvious whether or not one is comprehensible? Given that

lessons on making any sort of sense are probably less necessary than Quintil-

ian intimates, the more important feature of this passage is the effort at the

regulation and regularization of speech. The pauses have to have precise,

measured values; they must fall in the right locations. In short, mere intelligi-

bility could be obtained otherwise - a somewhat irregular set of suitably

spaced pauses would ensure this - but Quintilian is pushing for the proper

intelligibility. There is, apparently, a right and a wrong way to read Vergil;

and Vergil's poem has had inserted into it this right reading that it might be

brought out by Quintilian. Or, rather, the notion of the right reading of a text

inserts into the Aeneid the legitimate reading of the text in the same gesture

that this reading is elicited.

If all of this seems to be laboring a simple speech exercise, another

look at the use of Vergil will be helpful.

adspectus enim semper eodem vertitur quo gestus, exceptis quae aut

damnare aut concedere aut a nobis removere oportebit, ut idem illud

vultu videamur aversari, manu repellere:

di talem avertite pestem -

haud equidem tali me dignor honore.

READING AND WRITING 37

[One always looks in the same direction that one gestures. There are

exceptions when we need to condemn or concede14 something or to

drive something away from ourselves: we turn our face away and drive

it off with our hand.

Gods, avert such ruin!

Indeed, I think myself not worthy of such an honor. ]

(Quintilian 11.3.70)

Again Vergil is cited by way of illustrating a point that is extraneous to the

message of the poem's verses.15 There is, though, a convenient play be-

tween aversari in Quintilian and Vergil's avertite: an orator's averted gaze

suddenly alludes to an epic moment of divine turning. And again the

message lying beneath Quintilian's usage is that there is, in fact, a proper

way to deliver Vergil. Moreover, a performance of Vergil would be suscep-

tible to the same criticism as would be an oratorical performance. In short,

good Latin, which is always the object in rhetorical texts and is an idea

embedded in an innocuous-looking word like Latine, which in these con-

texts never just means "in Latin," is the constant concern of its legitimate

users. Speakers of Latin must reveal their legitimacy in the way they space

their words and clauses, and in the way they move their bodies. And, as

Victor said above, the choice of words, including even the proper deploy-

ment of a loaded term such a Latine itself, betrays the "goodness" of a

speaker.

When confronted with a text, one necessarily imputes to it its suitable

gestures, the gestures that must be embedded in it that the social station of

the text may emerge as well in the performance of its reading, considered

as a physical whole. When one encounters a text, immediately a speaking

subject is imputed to the text. Quintilian's speaker, though, is clearly al-

ways also a vir bonus. He bestows a good man upon the text; and the text is

brought to life by this special social entity. Indeed, the text is given not only

a voice, but even the body of a performer. There were performances of

Vergil, and I do believe that they also included gestures. One notes as well

that gestures in Roman comedy are likewise of interest to Quintilian: lan-

guage is conceived of as having gestures embedded in it at every level, and

these are themselves coded for class, place of birth, gender, and profes-

sion.16 Hence we should not be surprised that the orator would be such a

devoted student of Vergil. The orator will find in the epic's text the body

and the self that he would arrogate for himself: high art is the legitimate

provenance of the upper class and a venue wherein he continually discovers

himself as he reads (cf. Bourdieu 1984, 56-57).

Quintilian's techniques of reading have philosophical consequences

38 STAGING MASCULINITY

that extend beyond their sociological import. Quintilian reads in a manner

that evokes the ideas of Derrida on the problems of reading and writing in

Western philosophy. 17 Derrida focuses on the philosophical disparagement

of writing in the name of a metaphysics of presence that imputes being only

to logos and speech: the letter is dead and empty, whereas the voice is living

and full (see especially 1976, 11-14). In the case of Quintilian, writing and

the ontological threat that Derrida sees in writing are overcome by the giving

of a speaker to the text. This implied speaker vouches for the text and puts it

into the register of logos and speech. There is thus no text that does not have

the living body as its implied referent.

Nietzsche long ago observed that "the true prose of antiquity is an

echo of public speech and is built upon its laws" (1989, 21). He was no

doubt thinking of passages like the one in which Aristotle says that written

texts ought to be composed so that they are readily converted into speech.18

Svenbro notes that because the Greeks read aloud, "the reader is a vocal

instrument used by the written word. . . in order to give the text a body, a

sonorous reality."19 Thus Aristotle's discussion of the "written style" (kXtg

y txi) (Rhetoric 1413b4ff.) ought not to be taken as an argument for a

fundamental division between speech and writing: rather the written style

forms a special subset of the speaking voice. Quintilian will even speak of

the prose rhythm of "relaxed" varieties of speech (oratio) such as conversa-

tion (sermo) and letters (epistulae): the page is never mute.20 As Habinek

has argued, inscriptions also ask to be read aloud (1998, 109-14).

Derrida characterizes the logocentric position's relationship to writing

by way of a paired set of analogies: the soul is to the body as the logos is to

writing (1976, 35). In the rhetorical version, writing is itself bodily. But this

time writing and the body are brought together to assist the authoritative

voice of the orator and to enable him to produce a speech that seems to

emanate from his soul: res ex animo videatur. Reading for Quintilian is an

act that helps to constitute and to reconstitute a philosophy of bodies and

bodies as presence. In this philosophy, writing is not an act that is opposed

to the logos, since it is subsumed within it. Or, rather, writing has an

indexical relationship to speech: writing itself gestures toward a living,

speaking, and, of course, gesturing body. In the Ad Herennium there was

an anxiety expressed as to the text's efficacy at inscribing gestures. But such

did not approach a radical Platonic doubt covering writing as a whole; it

instead expressed a concern that things might not turn out for the best after

all. For Quintilian there are also signs of hesitation, but such will not

prevent him from impressing the text into the service of speech, and the

good man for Quintilian refuses to read without already hearing and seeing

the good man he was looking for all the time.

For Derrida "the ethic of speech is the delusion of presence mastered"

READING AND WRITING 39

(1976, 139). The rhetorical handbook participates in the further inculcation

of this illusion as the text is made to serve the project of the speech of the

orator. In fact, the text is also intended to secure speech as authorized,

hegemonic discourse and to constitute speech as both mastery and presence.

One can also note that this voice is a gendered one: the voice of the text is

male, as is the structure of worldly power in whose name this voice speaks.

Derrida would find such a use of writing to be rather ironic, since writing is

the point at which his deconstruction of Western ontology can begin. But

even as Quintilian uses writing-as-being to secure his project, fissures appear

in the relationship between the two registers, destabilizing the mastery and

presence that textuality is being asked to serve.

Quintilian cannot automatically assume the bond linking writing to

presence. Quintilian instead educates his students to be good readers of

bodily writing. His own text thus inculcates the very dispositions that are

necessary to the positing of a writing that is tied to being. To this end he again

invokes Vergil. Returning to pronunciation, he takes as his evidence a vari-

ety of Vergilian passages:

accedit enim vis et proprietas rebus tali adstipulatione, quae nisi adsit,

aliud vox, aliud animus ostendat. quid, quod eadem verba mutata

pronuntiatione indicant, adfirmant, exprobant, negant, mirantur, in-

dignantur, interrogant, inrident, elevant? aliter enim dicitur:

tu mihi quodcumque hoc regni

et cantando tu illum?

et tune ille Aeneas?

et meque timoris argue tu, Drance

et ne morer, intra se quisque vel hoc vel aliud quod volet per omnis

adfectus verset: verum esse quod dicimus sciet.

[Conformity of (idea and pronunciation) produces vigor and appropri-

ateness. Unless there is agreement, one's voice makes one point, one's

intention another. Isn't it true that the same words, with a change in

delivery, indicate, affirm, reproach, deny, marvel, are angry, question,

mock, belittle? The following are variously spoken:

You upon me this poor kingdom...

and By singing you (vanquish) him?

and Are you that Aeneas?

and And me do you accuse, Drancus, of fear?21

40 STAGING MASCULINITY

To make a long story short: turn for yourself any word you please

through the whole gamut of emotions, and you will see the truth of

what I say.]

(Quintilian 11.3.175-76)

Quintilian's point is an obvious one: there are a lot of different ways of

saying "you." However, the implications of this point are manifold. First,

we cannot know what the right delivery of each fragment of a Vergilian

line should be without knowing the whole line, the context of the line, and

the emotions of the passage as a whole where we impute emotions to these

verses in our reading of Vergil. Quintilian throws us back on an assumed

orthodoxy of interpretation, a traditional reading to which we must appeal

in order to decode the right reading of his own text. Reading has a commu-

nity and a tradition that vouch for it.22

Texts like Quintilian's, though, help to constitute these traditions and

communities that make reading into a natural act. Quintilian trains his read-

ers into the disposition required by his own text. In actual practice, Quintil-

ian's readers were almost certainly reading his work aloud to themselves or

having it read to them by one of their slaves. This structural homology that

subsists between Quintilian as reader and Quintilian's audience as readers

subtly reinforces the theme of the speaking text. Thus, the whole project is

multiply mediated: Quintilian is recovering an "original" Vergil, and Quintil-

ian's readers are trying to recover his voice rendering Vergil's. This project

can only work given an underlying assumption that there really is a fixed,

correct reading, that one does not merely attribute this (oral) reading to a

text, but one rather is genuinely engaged in getting the reading right or

wrong. One assumes, then, that different readings of the same passage are

not also different performances of it that themselves nuance differently the

text's message about performance (cf. Martindale 1993, 17-18). Instead a

singular voice of the vir bonus is invoked as the touchstone of accuracy; and

all interpretation reinvokes this persona and consolidates its authority and

presence. Ironically, it is probably safe to assume that the right delivery of

Vergil was itself a highly contested topic, and that Quintilian's confidence in

citing a performed text of Vergil actually glosses over serious practical prob-

lems felt by performers of his day.

Texts speak naturally to us; but then again they don't. There is a

chance that, without training, we will misread. Reading the page's dead

words thus is and is not a problem. In Quintilian's world texts are pre-

sented as eminently readable, or at least readable after rules of reading are

in place. Moreover, the first step toward success is knowing in advance the

sort of voice one will find within the text. Quintilian's own reader has been

positioned to read and recover (properly) Quintilian's meaning: the author

READING AND WRITING 41

is confident that such is possible and that his readers will learn from reading

him how they are to read. Quintilian thus makes reading possible in theory

but impossible in practice barring the support apparatus of his own text,

even though the text can obviously never perfectly achieve its own ends.

One needs to study it ever more closely to make sure that the lesson has in

fact been properly learned. This is in its own way just the problem of the

indispensable but impractical handbook as a whole redone in a different

register. The handbook makes no grand promises to its reader: even were it

sufficient of itself, you might misread. It only promises that you will fail

without it.

This, then, is a world into which we are being trained, but into which we

ought already to have been trained, a world of readers and a world where

some readings are better than others. Quintilian speaks from a position that

would construct the conditions and circumstances of knowability; but Quin-

tilian simultaneously calls upon his readers to know already the meanings,

the gestures, the sounds embedded in other texts in the world around them.

Thus, while possessed of an authorized and authorizing voice, in practice

Quintilian is not himself a sufficient cultural authority, despite his project of

cultivating the total man. This text cannot provide you with the full requisite

cultural training, but it can and does call upon its students to make further

divisions, subdivisions, and refinements. There is no longer any room for a

naive being-in-the world of the Roman gentlemen: the unconscious auton-

omy of the elite habitus will prove insufficient. Quintilian imposes new

burdens and new standards: reflection, self-reflection, and the whole aes-

theticization of the world of speech and movement lead beyond a normative

aspiration toward a well-delivered Vergil and into a scrupulously evaluative

world of authoritative performances in general.

These arguments can be remade, expanded, and supplemented by an

examination of further uses made of another author's texts within Quintil-

ian's own. Quintilian makes extensive appeals both to Cicero's theoretical

works on oratory and to the published texts of Cicero's orations.23 The

citations number in the hundreds.24 Quintilian is a zealous student of Cic-

ero's speeches, his theoretical works, and even letters.25 Cicero's speeches

become the models for Quintilian's precepts; and Cicero's theoretical writ-

ings are likewise subsumed within Quintilian's own theoretical apparatus.

At times Quintilian seems only to parrot the words of another authority

prior and superior to himself. Herni Bardon makes it clear that Cicero

himself was reconstructing performers and performances in the course of

his praise of older orators (1952, vol. 1.58). Thus Cicero's relationship to

much of his material is the same as is Quintilian's relationship to Cicero.

We must describe Quintilian's practice as traditional rather than as the

fevered imaginings of a man who could not do, and so taught.

42 STAGING MASCULINITY

Cicero is no mere orator, he is a prize as well. But since Cicero died

well over a century before Quintilian wrote, Cicero is not so much an

orator for Quintilian as he is a collection of texts. Quintilian's Cicero thus

resembles Cicero as we find him today. But in the course of reading Cicero,

Quintilian produces the self-present voice of the orator for which his whole

course of education strives: the absent Cicero is the point toward which the

student labors, guided there by an author who himself is not there and an

author who never himself heard Cicero. Reading the lost Cicero and bring-

ing him back to life becomes a part of the process of subject formation, and

textuality modulates being.

When Quintilian reads Cicero, he produces embedded, inevitable ges-

tures. A body is bestowed upon the page. When Quintilian describes how a

certain effect is to be achieved or how one ought to deliver a certain

moment of an oration such as the narration of facts, he will evoke passages

from the orations of Cicero. These examples are, for the most part, concen-

trated in 11.3.162-69. Quintilian begins,

narratio magis prolatam manum, amictum recedentem, gestum dis-

tinctum, vocem sermoni proximam et tantum acriorem, sonum sim-

plicem frequentissime postulabit in his dumtaxat: "Q. enim Ligarius,

cum esset in Africa nulla belli suscipio," et "A. Cluentius Habitus

pater huiusce." aliud in eadem poscent adfectus, vel concitati "nubit

genero socrus," vel flebiles "constituitur in foro Laodiceae spec-

taculum acerbum et miserum toti Asiae provinciae."

[The narration will very frequently require the hand to be extended

further, the toga to fall back, precise gestures, a vocal manner bor-

rowed from conversation, only a bit more earnest, and a uniform tone.

At least, such is required in these cases: "For Q. Ligarius, since there

was no suspicion of war in Africa," and "A. Cluentius Habitus, this

man's father." Different emotions in the same speech will require a

different delivery: excitement for "the mother-in-law marries her son-

in-law"; pathos for "a spectacle painful and piteous to the whole prov-

ince of Asia was set up in the marketplace of Laodicea."26]

Notice first how easily description has moved into prescription. A familiarity

with these segments of these speeches might convince one that, indeed, they

were narrations of a certain emotional register, but Quintilian has fixed these

registers for us. Next, Quintilian has added physical movements and vocal

modulations, elements that the texts of Cicero were not about to suggest of

themselves. At the same time, one may still distinguish here between a sense

of "this is how one ought to read this text" and "this is how the text was

READING AND WRITING 43

performed"; it is just that the space between these two ideas has been

collapsed such that one assumes that the two coincide for Quintilian.27

Later on in this same section, the fusion/confusion becomes particu-

larly pronounced. By the time Quintilian reaches 11.3.169 his advice to

orators is indeed resting upon an assertion as to the actual Ciceronian

delivery:

est his diversa vox et paene extra organum, cui Graeci nomen amari-

tudinis dederunt, super modum ac paene naturam vocis humanae

acerba: "quin conpescitis vocem istam, indicem stultitiae, testem pauci-

tatis?" sed id, quod excedere modum dixi, in illa parte prima est: "quin

conpescitis."

[There is a tone different from these and almost exceeding the capaci-

ties of the human instrument, to which the Greeks have given the

name of "bitterness." This tone is piercing in the extreme, and it lies

nearly beyond the natural capacities of the human voice: "Why don't

you stifle those cries of yours, documents of your stupidity, attesta-

tions to your isolation?" But that bit that I called "excessive" is in the

first part: "Why don't you stifle . .."]

Quintilian has illustrated his argument by adducing Cicero's Pro Rabirio

perduellionis reo 6.18. Quintilian seems not to have reproduced the exact

phrasing of the Cicero. The manuscripts of Cicero read, "Why don't you

restrain cries that testify to your stupidity. . . ?" (quin continetis vocem

indicem stultitiae.. . ?) Quintilian substitutes a more vivid expression of

roughly the same idea, giving "stifle" for "restrain." Quintilian also adds an

emphatic, even contemptuous, istam. If Quintilian's version is in fact in

error, he has stacked the deck in favor of the impassioned delivery he is

claiming to report. Quintilian is depicting a very special vocal effect, and

thus he is not indicating that Cicero probably spoke this passage in this

manner. Quintilian has phrased his argument so as to dispense with such

qualifications, and he is making a simple illustration via a concrete example.

At every turn legitimate readings, readings whose speculative quality

has been excised, recur in Quintilian. Other texts speak of themselves,

furnish witness to his points in their own voices, and require only that they

be repeated in order to corroborate Quintilian's argument. Though one

translates vox in the quote from Cicero as "cries," it is nevertheless the

same word Quintilian has just used: "voice." Thus where Cicero shouts

down a foolish voice and a scant voice, Quintilian takes this same passage,

fills it with a new voice, and makes it speak to the plenitude and wisdom of

his own teaching.

44 STAGING MASCULINITY

Following a procedure akin to his treatment of the opening of the

Aeneid as a pronunciation study guide, Quintilian furnishes his readers

with a reading of the opening of Cicero's Pro Milone as an illustration of

how to vary the tone of one's delivery within the compass of a single

passage so as to avoid the vice of iovorov a, "monotony" in its etymologi-

cal sense (11.3.47-51). In this instance, as opposed to the "you" (tu) ex-

ample above, Quintilian has to make his argument via an appeal to the

sense of the text. He begins with a rhetorical question: "Though it is always

the same face, isn't it as if the countenance had to be altered at nearly every

turn?"28 By "same face" Quintilian means the general emotional cast of the

speech's opening or exordium. The varied countenance provides lower-

level variations within this same general emotional register. Quintilian usu-

ally seeks to govern the body in terms of a rhetorical discourse; here it is

rhetoric that becomes good and intelligible in terms of the body. It is by

such double moves that Quintilian can create the impression of a natural

fusion or confusion of the two spheres. The orator, his oration, and his

body are always both linguistic and corporeal: each stands in a metaphoric

relation to the others. As far as Quintilian's rhetorical question goes, then,

it has to be answered yes: monotony is a bad thing; Cicero was not monoto-

nous. Not only has monotony been banished from the orator, it has also

been exiled from Cicero's pages, and we inevitably find Cicero's voice to be

such when we read him with Quintilian at our side.

Of course, we could be perverse and answer Quintilian that we believe

that Cicero stuck to a steady, vigorous delivery that packed a punch for its

very relentlessness. And then we could use the very techniques of Quintil-

ian against him by citing Cicero. Cicero says that he himself once employed

a delivery similar to this: "I used to deliver everything without slacking,

without variety, at full volume, and straining my whole body."29 Quintilian

would doubtless respond, "But that was the young Cicero, as Cicero him-

self says. The Pro Milone was the product of his mature genius: it would

have been delivered differently." But if we engage in this debate with

Quintilian, we accede to the game of reading, writing, inquiring, and justi-

fying that Quintilian's whole text perpetuates and exacerbates.

Moreover, as soon as delivery is called upon to account for itself in

detail, it will no longer be able to readily sustain the illusion of simple and

steady passions; instead it becomes entangled in regulation that is always

inclined to become overregulation. The task of the handbook, a genre that

may well be considered to be as old as rhetoric at Rome, is to ask the orator

to answer its stylistic questions, to train him to ask them of himself, and, in

effect, to normalize oratory and the semiotics of the orator while promising

only to be offering assistance, helpful hints, ways of avoiding embarrass-

ment and ensuring success.

READING AND WRITING 45

Quintilian proceeds into the text of the Pro Milone going clause by

clause, evoking the emotions of the text and the circumstances of the

original "performance." Thus, we are told that the whole opening is re-

strained and subdued (contractum atque summissum), but that the words

"on behalf of a most honorable man" (pro fortissimo viro) require some-

thing fuller and bolder (fortius et erectius). The critical vocabulary here is

filled with an elaborate psychology. Recovering Cicero's speech involves

reconstituting an entire sociology of bold men and bold texts. In order to

read Cicero, the text and the world must be brought into harmony: one

must speak in a manly fashion when uttering the words "on behalf of a

man." And, at the next level of abstraction, readers of Quintilian must be

able to take his writings as supplementary to a world of learned oratory.

But supplementarity here is Derridean in nature: Quintilian's text comple-

ments the world of oratory and the oratorical self-present subject in the

same gesture as it insinuates itself in the place of the subject and the world.

Quintilian's readings replace the lost world of Cicero with a new tex-

tualized version of the subject, a version where inscription is a fundamental

aspect of the lived experience of oratory. The manly boldness (fortis,

erectus) of the commentator vouches for and takes the place of the manly

delivery of Cicero. And Cicero himself was speaking on behalf of/in the

place of (pro) a most manly man (fortissimo viro); or, rather, Cicero wrote

on behalf of Milo, and then he tried to deliver his own text. The relation-

ship to the manly original is multiply mediated.

This recovery of Cicero's delivery, which we might as well call a discov-

ery or an invention instead, is riddled with other impossible difficulties:

"Now the second breath ought to grow owing both to a certain natural

impulse, whereby we speak less timidly what follows, and because the great

courage of Milo is displayed. . . . Then there is something of a reproach of

himself.... Then more invidiously.... This while, as they say, opening

up all the stops. . . . For the following is broad, even and diffuse." Quintil-

ian brings forth in a jumble natural impulses, tendencies of the subject

matter, attributed psychological effects (or at least imputed rhetorical ef-

fects designed to reveal psychology), and musical metaphors. Not all of

these are ideas from which technical advice on delivery could be derived:

pulling out the stops and letting the breath swell are useful upon some

reflection and interpretation; but Quintilian assumes we already know how

to provoke malice and the tones by which hidden thoughts are expressed.

Cicero as written needs a Quintilian to walk us through his text in

order to find the living word again. At the same time, Quintilian's own text

falls short of giving us a complete indoctrination into the vicissitudes of

lived speech. As Quintilian breathes life into Cicero, so must Quintilian's

reader bring something to Quintilian. Here we have the obverse of the

46

STAGING MASCULINITY

supplementary relation between the orator and the rhetorical handbook as

discussed above. In this case the rhetorical student learns to supplement

Quintilian from his master's relation to Cicero's text. The centered subject

inserts himself into the rhetorical handbook in order to make up for its

shortfall. And again this supplementation acts as a replacement: the reader

stands in for what is written.

Between these two supplementary relations, then, we can see a vital

trope in the gambit of being. Neither orator nor rhetorical literature lives

independently. Each helps to secure for the other an illusion of presence. In

the process both rhetorical discourse and orators are reproduced, but they

are reproduced in an always provisional and incomplete manner. Neither

party can consolidate its being because of this dependence upon the other.

Moreover, fundamental shifts in the nature of both are attendant upon

rereadings and rewritings: new texts and new orators go hand-in-hand.

Quintilian concludes this section by saying, "I have pointed this out in

order to make it clear that not only in the phrases of the case, but even in

the individual words there is a certain variety to pronunciation, without

which everything is undifferentiated."30 Quintilian has left us underneath a

dark star indeed: any given word is a possible locus of trouble: should it be

varied? how? Delivery can founder at any moment. Any word, either read

or spoken, can be a source of trouble. Quintilian's text does less to solve

these difficulties than it does to exacerbate them. But in the process of

disclosing this hazardous terrain, Quintilian installs a hermeneutics with

far-reaching implications. The student needs to read a text like Quintilian's

to begin reading oratory. He also needs Quintilian in order to speak for

himself. But he is asked to speak as he reads Quintilian reading Cicero. In

this fashion Quintilian needs his student, and the student enables Quintil-

ian just as Quintilian produces his student. The handbook, by exposing the

perils of the body in performance, allows for a perpetual bond to be forged

between writing and the soul. The two are bound together in an un-

closeable quest for being.

Of course the greatest irony of this whole passage in Quintilian is that

the Pro Milone as we know it was not actually delivered: Ausonius tells us

that Cicero became flustered and suffered a lapse when he delivered the

initial lines of his speech.31 Quintilian uses the idealized, retooled product

of Cicero's study, and thus he reveals a preference for a speech that of itself

is a sort of handbook furnishing the shape of a superlative oration. The Pro

Milone is a text that makes up for real failure of the voice of performance.

The text that has to speak well because it is Cicero's was never spoken

because it is the Pro Milone. This is a text that supplements a worldly

defect. Quintilian's own text latches onto another text that promises writ-

ing as a supplement to life.

READING AND WRITING 47

The confusion between the written word and the sounds that writing

suppresses is naturally exacerbated by the nearly inevitable oral experience

of texts. That is, every text was almost certain to be turned back into

sounds before one was to experience it, and, from the very routineness of

this process, the latent assumption creeps in that this procedure is not itself

a problem, that one has heard a text correctly (where we would say it has

been read correctly). But Quintilian, while often resting on this casual

assumption, is simultaneously putting in question the whole system: he is

enforcing the reception of the text of Cicero as often as he is merely

presenting the expression of the Ciceronian word as unproblematic. In this

crypto-prescriptive mode, though, he is reproducing a contemporary ortho-

doxy of which he is both the font and the spokesman, the legislator and the

representative. This is a project carried out, as might be expected, under

the standard of what Bourdieu would call the "doxic," or common sense.

Thus, the conflict does not even look like a conflict.

Within this very misrecognition of the trouble of the text, Quintilian

has omitted without comment another trouble that he could never have

personally had anyway, namely, the delivery of his own text. Quintilian

needs to have the largely untroubled and untroubling world of other texts

so that he may reproduce for his heirs the same misplaced confidence that

his own sounds and movement can be recovered. A further contributing

element to this misplaced confidence is the practical observation that the

handbook does not exist without the supporting apparatus of oratorical

training proper and active schooling, as the Ad Herennium would remind

us. Thus, we should automatically know of what Quintilian speaks owing to

our daily training to receive knowledge of exactly this quality. However,

the daily training itself requires an authorized theoretical and analytical

support that explains and justifies this practice and shapes the evaluation of

the exercises.

I do not use the notion of authorized theory casually: as has been

mentioned, in his preface Quintilian claimed that he had to write his own

Institutio oratoria because two books composed of notes on his lectures had

already begun circulating under his name (1.pr.7). This unauthorized dis-

semination points to a longing on the part of the students of oratory for

legitimate theoretical training. The homegrown or provincial orator who is

unreflectingly eloquent has been lost. The fantasy of the father effortlessly

passing to his son a legacy of eloquence does not correspond to the reality of

rhetoric as we find it (see Cicero, Brutus 210). And how could such a home-

spun eloquence emerge in an environment where the audience's aesthetic

critique of an orator has been informed in prescriptive detail by the authorita-

tive handbook? The unquestioned reproduction of the elite habitus within

such social structures as the family cannot be taken for granted once the

48 STAGING MASCULINITY

analytic gaze of theory has arrived upon the scene. This, though, does not

imply that theory itself will not enchant oratory or that it will not tend to

reproduce the relations of domination rather than offering equal linguistic

opportunities to all who are literate.

Just as Quintilian's reading of Vergil and Cicero produces an implied body,

so also does Quintilian find bodies in "the rhetorical tradition." This phan-

tasmatic tradition comprises a second source from which to impute the

lived word to Quintilian's writings. By invoking tradition, text and body

can be fused in a timeless outside-the-text within Quintilian's own text.

Quintilian thus presents himself as a recorder of traditional bodies, not as

an author of novel bodies.

Quintilian's exegesis of various orations routinely implies an authority

that lies beyond Quintilian himself. In one instance Quintilian merely uses

Cicero to illustrate how the division of the clauses falls and how each might

be punctuated with a gesture (11.3.108, using Pro Ligario 1.1). In another,

when Quintilian tells of the gestures suited to a richer, more luxuriant

element of a speech, he explicitly evokes only the content of the Ciceronian

passage with his "as in that passage . . ." (ut illud), while leaving implicit

an idea that the passage in question was in fact accompanied by the ges-

tures he is describing (11.3.84, evoking Cicero, Pro Archia 8.19): Quintil-

ian repeats his practice of 11.3.162 with its multiple citations of Ciceronian

narratives. Quintilian likewise depicts outstretched arms in 11.3.115, where

Pro Milone 31.85 is impressed into service. However, the following is of a

different order entirely:

est et ille verecundiae orationi aptissimus, quo, quattor primis leviter

in summum coeuntibus digitis, non procul ab ore aut pectore fertur ad

nos manus et deinde prona ac paulum prolata. Hoc modo coepisse

Demosthenen credo in illo pro Ctestiophonte timido summissoque

principio, sic formatam Ciceronis manum, cum diceret: "si , iudices, ingeni mei, quod sentio quam sit exiguum."

[This gesture is most suited to reserved language: with the thumb and

first three fingers gently converging to a point, the hand is brought in

toward the body and near either the mouth or the chest; and then it is

relaxed with the palm turned downward as it is gradually advanced. I

believe that it was in this manner that Demosthenes began that timid

and restrained opening of his speech on behalf of Ctesiophon, and that

Cicero's hand was thus formed when he said: "If I have any talent,

though I know how scant it is . . ."32]

(Quintilian 11.3.96-97)

READING AND WRITING 49

After first pausing over the gesture itself, elaborate and awkward by con-

temporary standards, one ought next wonder as to who has been keeping

this history of gestures. What leads Quintilian to believe that he knows the

choreography of the openings of these speeches? As will be shown in more

detail later, the entire rhetorical tradition appears to be riddled with odd

little details of this sort, and teacher passes on to student an acquired

knowledge of lost bodies. For present purposes, take the following as

exemplary: Quintilian says that Cleon is believed to have been the first

man at Athens to smite his thigh by way of an oratorical gesture.33

If we believe these histories of gestures, histories that are centuries old

by the time Quintilian relates them, we must regard them as tokens of the

fetishization first of gestures themselves, wherein they become almost ritu-

alized, and second of the process of collecting and recounting the exem-

plary anecdotes through which these gestures are endlessly reinvoked. It is

not necessary even to accuse Quintilian of inventing the use of this gesture

of the four fingers in the context of the speeches of Demosthenes and

Quintilian. The repetition of the "I believe" (credo) here and "is believed"

(creditur) in the Cleon anecdote look like signs that Quintilian is repeating,

with a very slight hesitation, received knowledge. Rather than see new

fictions, it is preferable to imagine that the tradition insists upon having the

gestures be present and so has either preserved them or inserted them at

some point in the transmission of the "traditional" body of oratorical lore.

Quintilian is thus not radically original in his production of a knot between

text and body. Quintilian inherits from rhetorical tradition an insistence

upon binding the two.

When he redeploys this tradition, Quintilian legitimizes the use and

preservation of this gesture: performances become citational reinvocations

of the legitimate authority of departed "good men skilled at speaking." The

process makes self-conscious Butler's notion of citationality's relationship

to performativity (1993, 12, 14), and both speaker and audience ought to

recognize the authoritative bodily allusion. Furthermore, the better versed

one is in tradition and the more detailed one's knowledge of all the points

of oratory, the more likely it is that one may eventually recover the rest of

the performance that anecdote has left out. The body is always amenable to

study, reflection, and analysis.

By bridging equivalent rhetorical moments and their corresponding

gestures from Demosthenes to Cicero to Quintilian's own day, Quintilian

dehistoricizes gestures themselves and likewise adds to the sense that they

are by no means arbitrary, that there is a one-to-one relationship between

sense and movement. Quintilian even goes so far as to declare that "amid

such a diversity of language among all peoples and nations, gesture seems

50 STAGING MASCULINITY

to me to be the common speech of all mankind."34 In this apparently

timeless environment, imputing right readings to texts is wholly justified:

the general (aristocratic) economy of sounds and signs remains a shared

one. The simple application of the laws of good oratory allows for the ready

supplementation of the absent physical dimension of old texts with modern

equivalents. Quintilian is the sort of authority to teach us these laws. The

whole of Quintilian 11.3 contains gestures and vocal descriptions of unparal-

leled detail. This project of the highly differentiated body is legitimate in

that it appears to reproduce knowledge of the same kind as has been

preserved by anecdote, knowledge whose own legitimacy rests in its au-

thorlessness and in the prestige of the men of whom it treats. Here it is not

just the reader or the author as vir bonus who supplements the text, but the

whole universe of all the good men who have ever lived.

This, then, is the problem of the fact of the text on delivery, and one

particular solution to the crisis implicit in it: deny for the most part that the

problem even exists; make writing into presence and presence into writing.

The apotheosis of this theme awaits us in the final chapter of this study,

where Cicero's De oratore takes center stage. At present, though, we need

to make a survey of the variety of texts and textual stances available in the

Roman world in order to appreciate the variety of techniques by which the

body was made to and into matter. Bodies and souls are inscribed within

rhetorical theory. And, conversely, the body and soul are rendered legible

objects by this same theory. They are things to be read and read for.

Indeed, reading is a required act. A second and closely related field of

inquiry is the question of style. The format of any rhetorical discussion is

political in that it represents bids of varied direction and intensity upon the

political subjects that comprise its audience. Styles of reading and writing

on delivery participate in broader economies of the subject.

There are a variety of ways of writing on oratory. However, the most

fundamental stylistic break lies between the dialogue form of Cicero and

the methodical descriptions and prescriptions of the rest. The prescriptive

branch is subdivided in its own right: the author of the Ad Herennium uses

bald definitions. A typical snippet of his text reads thus: "The 'invention' of

an oration is comprised of six elements: the exordium, the narration, the

division of the subject matter, proofs, refutations, and the conclusion. The

exordium is the beginning of the oration, whereby the mind of the auditor

is made disposed to listening. The narration is . . ."35 Fortunatianus has a

list of questions and their answers rather than just the bare list of ideas. For

example, when it comes to defining the orator, Fortunatianus writes,

"What is an orator? A good man skillful at speaking."36 Victor strings

together his definitions and lists somewhat more fluidly, but his occasional

READING AND WRITING 51

first person is indicative of a rather insubstantial framework holding to-

gether the same old raw statements. Quintilian presents a full-blown first

person and speaks in a magisterial voice, a voice that prescribes, moralizes,

sides with Cicero and takes up arms against Seneca, while furnishing essen-

tially the same basic material as do all the other authors, sometimes present-

ing it even in the same phrases of simple definition.

Let us begin with "the rest," the authors less read and less famous than

Quintilian and Cicero. The construction of the project in terms of definitions

betrays a certain kind of interest and enforces a certain kind of reader. The

propositional format, resting essentially on an endless string of statements

having the form "a = b" (est) fundamentally elides history and contestation.

Rhetoric is left timeless, the orator subject to a list of laws that, does he wish

to retain his title, he would do best to obey. The tropes of authority rely upon

the existential use of is and uses in which identity is established. There is no

problem of presence or supplementarity a la Derrida in such formulations.

On the contrary, these expressions forestall any such crisis. Patrick Sinclair

(1993) has offered a valuable commentary of the maxims (sententiae) that

hold together the sort of speech that the author of the Ad Herennium advo-

cates. For Sinclair these precepts "appear to present an 'obvious' principle

that can be accorded 'tacit approval' among audiences who hold the Roman

aristocratic code as the ultimate authority."37 The handbook's own maxims

thus dovetail with the structure of the rhetoric to which it trains its student.

Sinclair argues that the struggles over the right to deploy such maxims in a

speech and to have them win recognition are social struggles over who will

be allowed to typologize the world. A corresponding labor takes place in the

handbook itself, where the student is forced to accept without contest the

text's propositions about the truth of propositions. Thus the author himself

says, "a sententia is a statement drawn from life that concisely illustrates

either what is or what ought to be a fact of life."38 Yet one could say the same

of his own practice and put into his mouth a statement of the following shape:

"My advice is drawn from rhetoric, and it concisely illustrates either what is

or what ought to be a fact of rhetoric." The circular citationality of life

vouching for life corresponds to a rhetoric of the rhetorical treatise vouch-

safing rhetoric in general. Furthermore these two paradoxical and self-

referential relationships each rely upon the other, as we find both a rhetoric

of life and a life lived rhetorically.

The Ad Herennium highlights the institution of rhetorical exercises,

and Sinclair argues of these exercitationes that they assist in the durable

inculcation of the shared values of the community of orators (1993, 568-

69). The theoretical text that assists in these exercises thus also becomes a

sort of theory of society. The rhetorical self-presence of the orator that the

handbook assumes is manifested in the world by way of exercise. For the

52 STAGING MASCULINITY

Ad Herennium the art of oratory is not an impossible one in itself; and

Quintilian's problem of the consummate orator does not form a part of this

author's opening thoughts. Rather, the art of oratory is asserted to be more

accessible than one might have otherwise believed.39 There is, in fact, an

"art" (ars) to be imparted, but one that the Greeks have cluttered and

obscured (see Ad Herennium 1.1). This theoretical aspect of oratory has as

its necessary complement practice (exercitatio), and this idea comes up two

sentences later:

Nunc, ne nimium longa sumatur oratio, de re dicere incipiemus, [sed]

si te unum illud monuerimus, artem sine adsiduitate dicendi non

multum iuvare, ut intellegas hanc rationem praeceptionis ad

exercitationem adcommodari oportere.

[Now, lest I enter upon a long oration, I will start addressing the

subject proper after first offering this warning: theory does little good

unless you speak all of the time; and thus you may understand that

these precepts ought to be adapted to practice.]

(Ad Herennium 1.1)

The author fears that he might get carried away and make a long oration on

oratory. He draws himself back and instead imparts a single concise maxim:

"practice makes perfect." The handbook is a guide, a regula vitae by which

one may measure oneself. The handbook prepares you for your practice,

supports it, guides it. The contents of the practice as well as practice's

precipitate in the form of bodily hexis can be accounted for only in terms of

the text. Thus, the text provides the conceptual apparatus in whose terms

the actual practice of oratory is to be described. At the same time, this

apparatus is absolute and naturalized owing to a number of rhetorical

tropes within the handbook itself, including the endless deployment of est.

Both practice and the book that guides practice are described in an idiom of

presence and being. The written text is confident in its own declarations of

what "is." Meanwhile the text implies of practice and performance that

they can and will fail, that one must train constantly in order to enact

successfully the teachings of the book. A performance will become good

only when it embodies the essential truth of the handbook. One finds in

such a vision of number of ironies of ontology and tense: the "real" body's

authoritative performances exist only as a future potentiality; the absent

text "is" authoritative regarding performance, and its presence is every-

where assumed in the training of the orator.

Though the handbook is in a sense thoroughly parasitic on the practice

of oratory - for men were, after all, eloquent before the advent of the

oratorical handbook - these works have now rendered impossible any pas-

READING AND WRITING 53

sive attainment to eloquence. In fact, such arche-eloquence was like a tree

falling in the woods without anyone there to hear it: if there is no technol-

ogy of rhetoric, eloquence is wholly other than it is after the advent of a

science of speech. Rhetorical theory does not allow for nontechnical elo-

quence. Even Homer can be called up as a rhetor, a professional teacher.

Quintilian illustrates his advice on how to behave just before speaking with

an image from Iliad 3.217:

hoc praecipit Homerus Ulixis exemplo, quem stetisse oculis in terram

defixis immotoque sceptro, priusquam illam eloquentiae procellam

effunderet, dicit.

[Homer uses the example of Ulysses to teach this. Homer says that he

stood with his eyes fixed on the ground, holding the scepter motionless

before he poured out that tempest of eloquence.]

(Quintilian 11.3.158)

For the world of the handbook and for the world the handbook would

create, the neutral fact that someone is an accomplished speaker (peritus

dicendi) is no longer sufficient. This attainment has been accounted for, a

ratio has been given. Homer teaches (praecipit): we just need to learn how

to listen to him.

Of course, the handbook will have gotten oratory right precisely to

the extent that it can succeed in convincing its readers to adopt the view

of oratory that it espouses. Furthermore, if the handbook or the over-

seers of the young orator's practice inculcate these standards, the whole

body of orators will share a scheme for self-evaluation and mutual evalua-

tion. The hermeneutic circle is tightly closed. Once Quintilian has told

you how to stand when you are about to speak, the aesthetics of pre-

elocutionary stances has been opened up as a formal topic of inquiry. One

no longer happens to stand agreeably before a speech, even if this agree-

ably was in its own right a tacit accommodation of the speaker to the

norms of the social body and the performative context. Now the tacit, the

doxical is opened up into an object of contemplation and contestation;

orthodoxies and heterodoxies can now be imposed upon it. The handbook

forces the contents of its myriad subdivisions to become the spoken and

explicit units of oratory. Furthermore, there is always the possibility of

proceeding by analogy into subdivisions and more detailed analyses. At

the same time, there is an endless competition between handbooks, a

struggle over the legitimate units of oratory, over constituting the orator

who gets his oratory right.

Although Crassus and Antonius argue in the De oratore as to the

54 STAGING MASCULINITY

existence of an art of oratory (1.92, 2.5, 2.30ff.), this is a debate that is

either passed over in silence or gotten past. This is a dispute that seems to

have little affected the idea of the study of oratory, only the grounding of

one's precepts: Cicero, Quintilian, and other authors have not been si-

lenced by it. This is to say that the text expresses an effort to constitute the

subject, and this effort participates in an always preexisting struggle over

oratory and the orator. The texts are in general very unified as to the

grounding of their discourse in the truth of est. There is such a thing as

oratory; there is such a thing as the orator. The rhetorical handbook "is"

itself both a fact and the arbiter of facticity. The handbook's prosy exis-

tence effects the modulations of the phallologocentric ontology at whose

center one finds the good man skilled at speaking with a voice that seems to

come from the soul. The handbook offers "the delusion of presence mas-

tered" by inculcating the same authoritative speech that it enfolds within

the confines of the handbook's own textuality.

The varied styles of writing about oratory diverge in a number of

internal particulars: shadings are given to the individual units; divisions are

made and not made; sides are taken. These choices represent a struggle

over the vir bonus, the (socially) good man, that is conducted by way of an

evaluation of good oratory. To become the partisan of a certain handbook

or to champion a certain style of handbook is to commit to a certain kind of

self-definition and to engage, to undertake, or to perpetuate in a different

register more general social conflicts over Roman aristocratic in-group/out-

group politics.

Quintilian, though, has gone far beyond preparing his student for a

day in the courts or a session of the senate. Quintilian has totalized his

discourse and the subject circumscribed by it so as to attempt to com-

pass the whole span of the individual's life. He wants to monitor, to shape,

and to train his pupils from cradle to grave, overseeing their education and

training, preparing them for each successive stage. Quintilian wants to

build his candidate from the ground up. He has coordinated all of the

scattered apparatuses of aristocratic life and training and set them all

under the banner of oratory. This represents the culmination of the tenden-

cies of a text like the Ad Herennium. Oratory becomes not just a trope

whereby one pleads to be taken seriously within a specific role, namely to

be respected as an orator, but oratory becomes the mechanism whereby

one understands the whole of a human life. Quintilian offers a handbook

to the self in the fullest sense of the term, a handbook that bestows a

discourse of the self as well as that self to which this discourse aims. This

identity is made to live and to breathe by way of the dead word on the page

that nevertheless promises that life itself can and should cite the written

word and the absent authority subtending it.

READING AND WRITING 55

Little of what holds for the rest of the tradition is true of Cicero. The

form, the politics of form, and tactics employed to legitimize the form are

all significantly varied from those of the rest of the texts of the tradition. In

the final chapter we will look at Cicero's De oratore, a work heralded by

the rhetorical tradition as a masterpiece of rhetorical literature. That discus-

sion will link the form of the dialogue to the various themes of self-mastery,

acting, and pleasure that are discussed in the intervening chapters. For the

present, though, let us look in general at the politics of form in Cicero and

the grounding of the rhetorical subject by way of this form.

One need not fall into the familiar vice of assuming that other hand-

books are representatives of so-called Silver Latin (or even baser metals in

the case of some of the authors discussed). Nor is their often pedantic form

also "degenerate." When Cicero was younger he wrote the De inventione,

and for it he employed the tedious style of the Ad Herennium.40 Similarly,

one may presume that Cicero's predecessors Antonius and Crassus wrote

works that were of a like structure:

hoc loco Brutus: quando quidem tu istos oratores, inquit, tanto opere

laudas, vellem aliquid Antonio praeter illum de ratione dicendi sane

exilem libellum, plura Crasso libuisset scribere; cum enim omnibus

memoriam sui tum etiam disciplinam dicendi nobis reliquissent. nam

Scaevolae dicendi elegantiam satis ex eis orationibus quas reliquit,

habemus cognitam.

[At this point Brutus said, "Since you praise so earnestly those ora-

tors, I wish that Antonius had wanted to write something beyond his

Treatise on Speaking, a meager work indeed, and that Crassus had

wanted to write more as well, as they would have left for all a memo-

rial of themselves, and for us lessons for speaking. For the elegance of

Scaevola's speaking is sufficiently known to us from the orations he

left in writing."]

(Cicero, Brutus 163)

Brutus reproduces the fallacy of the text that speaks for itself in the case of

Scaevola. But more than this, Brutus is also describing and stigmatizing the

rhetorical works of Antonius and Crassus. The real failing of these works is

not so much in their technical aspect - though it is suggested that this too

might have been elaborated - but in their failure to memorialize. That is,

such productions ought to do a double duty of general inculcation and

personal valorization. The text should reproduce the rules of rhetoric by

being filled with the spirit of its author. The text must live.

Cicero, the author of Brutus' complaint, has ensured that he will not

be held liable to such a charge. The Brutus is itself a grand work of

56 STAGING MASCULINITY

memorialization, a collection recording and preserving all of Rome's elo-

quence. It also serves as a goad to the young Brutus, eloquence's heir. In

this sense, it is memorialization with a point. The living text contains the

community of good men who call out to the reader who would become

one of their number. Furthermore, the work as a whole also acts as a

grand memorial of Cicero himself. Within this work Cicero is being con-

structed as the greatest orator Rome ever knew. Moreover, Cicero comes

to occupy the position of arbiter eloquentiae: the question of what makes

for good oratory is decided by Cicero. Cicero surveys all of the Roman

orators, praising this speaker and blaming that one.

Within the Brutus there is a good deal of technical training (disciplina)

that crops up in the illustrations of several orators' virtues and vices. This

instruction is as technical as any to be found in Quintilian's less subtle

encryption of oratorical lore. However, memorialization (memoria) has defi-

nitely won out as the Ciceronian theme of the day. Yet there is, I would

suggest, a natural connection between the two that Brutus' interjection is

right to bring forward. The learning that an orator is meant to employ is in

effect a set of legitimated practices that ought to be mastered that one may

secure recognition as a legitimate orator, as a speaker who can win a hearing,

who can use the accepted tools of the social body to address and influence

that body. Memorialization, here conceived of as self-memorialization, is a

bid at establishing a version of the history of a group or individual in a

particular and privileged relationship to the larger society to which they

belong. Thus to double one's project after the fashion recommended in and

enacted by the Brutus is to engage in a doubled and mutually reinforcing

project of operations with and on symbolic capital. As in the merely proscrip-

tive handbooks above, being here doubles for mastery: but this time "it is"

(est) is turned into "I am" (sum) or "I was" (fui). As Habinek and Svenbro

would remind us of this last case, the monument speaks that its maker might

not have always to be speaking. The real difference between a Cicero and a

Quintilian, then, is the degree to which the problem of being participates in

the grammar of the first person: Who is the "I"? How is he foregrounded or

left implied?

Cicero's reader is confronted with the same problem as was Quintil-

ian's: how may the dead words of the page be turned into proper speech?

Quintilian implies that reading is not really a problem but at the same time

problematizes reading by modulating, among other things, breathings and

inflections. That is, Quintilian builds up the idea of the legitimate reading

in the process of his readings of others. But Cicero's text has no such

devices within it. The text must be performed, but the only cues that it

furnishes within itself are the general evaluative terminology universally

deployed to speak of any orator. Thus, when we are told that someone's

READING AND WRITING 57

speaking style was grave, pleasant, manly, or the like, we already have to

have an idea of an aesthetic substance that underlies these terms. A proper

performance of the text - which is in practice demanded of any proper

(oral) reading of the text-is a performance that does not evoke the con-

demnation of the reader in any of the terms deployed within the text. And

the text itself defines the relevant terms for an analysis of delivery. Again

the hermeneutic world closes upon iself.

Cicero's text, then, by importing the dignity of oratory into discussions

of the dignity of oratory is "useless" as a recipe for ready-made rhetorical

attainment. Although Quintilian's Institutio oratoria and the Ad Heren-

nium are themselves useless in that they cannot and will not promise that

the consummate orator shall emerge as a product of their own texts, they at

the same time have overtly marked themselves as incomplete. The Cic-

eronian text can only educate those who would emulate it and those who

are already so positioned as to emulate it, namely a figure like Brutus.41

Cicero pursues a double goal, educating the already educated and memori-

alizing oratory in terms of himself. Memory, though, has to be taken as a

cipher for the presence of the author. Quintilian promises us that he is

training a new Cicero, while evoking Cicero after a wholly different and

pedantic project. Quintilian excerpts and reuses segments of the Cic-

eronian dialogues in his overtly descriptive and prescriptive accumulation

of lore and using a mode that has a fundamentally different logic and

efficacy from that of the dialogue. In so doing Quintilian is in one sense

solving this very problem of the difficulty of the Ciceronian text. But, while

making Cicero accessible, he has also both lost and reconfigured much of

what we might consider to have been the essence of the "real" Cicero.

In both cases reading and writing help to ground the illusion of oratori-

cal presence and self-presence. But in Quintilian the voice brought to life

to supplement the text is the student's. In Cicero this voice is Cicero's, and

its recovery becomes the sign of the student's own coming to mastery of his

art. Cicero's voice as uttered by his reader is the guarantor of his own text,

a text that explicitly linked the person of the author and memorializing

inscription as necessary components of good rhetorical literature. Rhetori-

cal literature makes up for the loss of its author's voice in the world. Cicero

means to cheat death with his textual monuments. But we have seen that

we must take this wish in its fullest sense: reading and writing cheat a death

that is always threatening the self-present authority of any speaker.



CHAPTER 2

Discovering the Body

AN ORATOR MUST STUDY DELIVERY.1 In order to perform effectively, the

orator needs to have a thorough knowledge of every physical aspect of

performance: vocal qualities, movements, even dress and grooming. In the

process of acquiring this knowledge, the orator takes up a special theoreti-

cal position: the oratorical student becomes a student of himself, of his own

body and voice. Mastering this knowledge will make him master of his own

body and the truths of his own flesh. Knowledge of the body thus becomes

a special case of self-mastery. No good man experienced at speaking can

hope to succeed without this knowledge.2

In this chapter, I would like to take Quintilian's Institutio oratoria as

my prime exemplar of this process of exposition and reflection and to which

the orator subjects himself. Quintilian published his massive work some-

where around the nineties C.E. In his encyclopedic survey of the depart-

ments of oratory he collects, sorts, and comments upon centuries of Greek

and Roman thought on oratory. Quintilian's discussion of performance is

the fullest extant, and it represents a crowning moment of a whole tradition

of corporeal knowledge.3 It is of the utmost interest that Quintilian has

outdone his predecessors, interesting in that this excellence leads at once to

the consideration of the question of motives: what was failing in those other

texts? Why was there a poverty of knowledge about the body? How was it

that the body should need a longer and more detailed description? Quintil-

ian's whole Institutio is constructed after a pattern whereby this author

gathers the works of others, adjudicates between diverse opinions, and

supplements these opinions where insufficient care to detail has been pro-

vided by his predecessors. In other words, Quintilian promises little nov-

elty, and certainly no innovations of "substance," only those of detail.

Quintilian acknowledges and justifies just how detailed he can get in

1.7.34-35: many great speakers have spent much labor on what would

seem to be the least details of oratory. Quintilian even praises Messala as a

man who dedicated whole books not just to individual words, but even to

single letters.4 In effect Quintilian would not mind being thought the

59

60 STAGING MASCULINITY

Messala of the body: the importance of delivery cannot be underestimated,

no discussion of it too thorough.

The social stakes of the body of the good man remain ever to the fore,

and hence Quintilian's is no neutral or disinterested learning. Knowledge

of the body is no mere knowledge; and the extension of this knowledge

represents the extension of the potentialities for the exercise of power on

the body. As Foucault would remind us, "The exercise of power perpetu-

ally creates knowledge, and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces ef-

fects of power. . . . Knowledge and power are integrated with one another,

and there is no point in dreaming of a time when knowledge will cease to

depend on power" (1980a, 52). When Quintilian looks ever more closely at

his student, he subjects the body to an analytics that leaves discipline

additional points of purchase for the operation of its power.5

Even though Quintilian's method may seem somewhat pedantic, never-

theless he is striving to consolidate an idealized male body: something

grand and splendid ought to appear before our eyes as we read these pages.

On the other hand, as Quintilian labors toward knowledge of the body, he

reveals a body that is more process than essence, more a soldier on cam-

paign than an idle aristocrat easing in his villa: this body is always and only

sustained via a hostile and negative relationship to other bodies. Quintilian

opens up a space for the possibility for the increased policing of the body,

yet the task of the more informed gendarme is never completed. Ironically,

then, while Quintilian has a vision of authentic male presence, his efforts to

find and fully know this essence only expose it as unstable and chimerical.

We must not see this failure to establish an essence of the authoritative

male body as a failure to properly apprehend some more basic truth of the

body, a failure to effectively describe the body that was "really there." Nor

is Quintilian's failure but another moment for the postmodern critic to

smile bemusedly at the naivet6 of antiquity: "Of course he didn't find the

body . .." Rather we ought to note that Quintilian's is a productive fail-

ure, a fertile practice producing illegitimate bodily selves, and a practice

that endlessly repudiates these illicit bodies in the name of an authorized

law of oratorical bodies. The cop needs the crook that he may win his own

daily bread. Foucault sensibly asks us why the infinite labor of prisons and

criminology is never completed and what the interests are that must be

served by this same failure.6 Or, as that Cassius was fond of asking, "Who

stood to gain?" (cui bono).7 In this case, the answer is orators themselves.

In order to appreciate the stakes in the game of the deployment of the body

in public oratorical performance, we first have to take seriously the idea

that the orator is a good man, a vir bonus. As was discussed in the introduc-

tion, Cato lays down the definition that the orator is the good man skilled

DISCOVERING THE BODY 61

at speaking, and the social morality of his definition persists throughout

Latin literature. The positing of a prior and virtuous presence to the orator

has profound consequences for the orator's body: this body must represent

the virtue of the character who bears it. Appearances must always corre-

spond to some socially sanctioned vision of reality. This body is not so

much a material substance, as a social one.

Not only the bodies of good men, but all bodies in general are subject

to this primary acculturation. The body therefore cannot be seen as raw

material upon which some fully present and conscious agent acts, giving

order to the chaos of his corporeal aspect. There is no fundamental facticity

to the body, a body before the law or a body that enters into a relationship

with the symbolic order as an equal partner. The body is not raw biological

material that is given its particular meaning by the unique, individual per-

sonality of its bearer: instead the body is just another symbol in a world of

symbols over which the subject cannot be master (see Butler 1993, 32-55).

Returning to the rhetorical theory of the body, we can reformulate

these reflections in a Roman idiom. The body of the orator must be the

body of the good man. This body is good to the extent that it betrays itself

to be a mere vessel, given its virtue and value by the soul of the good man

of which it is the bearer. Bodily excellence cites and performs the authority

of the good man: Quintilian does not want to train an actor, but a man who

is genuinely good; and the orator's body will be good precisely as it reveals

the goodness of the orator himself.8

Quintilian would argue from this position. He does not wish to con-

sider the forces that constitute the good man as a legible social entity. He

does not wish to consider the body as a symbol whose radical possibilities

include misperformance and illicit allusion. Quintilian recognizes that there

is a sociology of rhetoric and that meanings can be treacherous, but he

struggles against these possibilities. Quintilian applies himself to regulating

the body; he proliferates the sites of bodily knowledge. In this prolifera-

tion, though, there spring up new, unforeseen crises of the body. The

application of power to the body that it would master reveals a protean

slave who refuses ready domination.9 The masterful soul of both theorist

and student discovers in this auto-affective relationship of lordship and

bondage that the bondsman is not a good slave. The body is a wily subject,

a servus callidus. The body is in need of constant vigilance, in need, then,

of the exercise of more mastery on the master's part. The soul that would

govern the body discovers itself as masterful precisely in the context of such

a labor. The master needs his slave.

We must, then, pause to consider the social constitution of the soul

before considering any qualifying adjectives such as good that may be

made to adhere to it. Both the body and soul share a conjoint ficticity, both

62 STAGING MASCULINITY

produced elsewhere yet used to substantiate one another. Yet the body is

itself one of the key sites at which this inscription and this reading of the

soul takes place. And, significantly, one of the vital moments in the emer-

gence of each is its relationship to the other, a relationship marked by

hierarchies of the dominant and subordinate, the inner and the outer, the

true and the seeming.

In seeking to secure a special social status for the orator's body as

exclusively a good and virile body, Roman rhetorical theorists such as

Quintilian make new and special appeals to and readings of the truth of the

body. The ancient theorists want to take the body of their student and

secure for it a distinct and exclusive reading. The rhetorical theorist secures

for the good man his goodness and his masculinity and protects the speaker

from a potential collapse into illegitimate effeminacy (see, e.g., Quintilian

11.3.180-84). The rhetorical theorists are forced to return to the scene of

investment of the body and to make new and special appeals to and read-

ings of the truth of the body. In the process of doing so, though, the theorist

reveals the lines of power that trace the surface of the body, giving it its

legible contours.

While theory may wish to derive the meaning of its body from the ante-

rior principle of the good soul, by ourselves reading this reading of the body,

we can see instead a body that is shot through with the effects of the matrix of

knowledge/power, a matrix that allows for the transcription of the meanings

onto bodily surfaces. And this same knowledge/power that delineates the

body also delineates a soul for the body, a bodily soul set off against other

possible and possibly corrupt souls. Theoretical speculation upon the body

thus serves as part of a strategic production and reproduction of the subject

as a whole, a subject read in both his physical and metaphysical aspects. The

orator is asked to recognize himself in these telling descriptions: he is met

with a hailing such as Althusser describes as the inaugural moment of sub-

jectivation, the moment of interpellation. The theory of the body thus be-

comes a hailing of both a body and a soul that inaugurates the two within a

sociality that was always waiting to catch them up (Althusser 1971).

In the theoretical depiction of the body, a discovery of the body takes

place. This is a discovery in two senses. First, the body is disclosed:

"truths" are revealed about the body. Of course, these truths are vital

fictions, products that themselves produce a social reality with real material

consequences. This is the second sense in which discovery can be used: the

revelation is an innovation. In this sense the theorist is making up the body

as he goes. The body revealed is revealed as specifically thus or so. The

body that the theorist beholds is a body that has been constituted as legible,

a body made for reading. The shapes that have been discovered are arbi-

trary to the extent that other knowledges of the body could be imagined,0

DISCOVERING THE BODY 63

but they are specific and specifically efficacious to the extent that these

readings of the body have real and worldly effects.

The social stakes of the orator's body, not surprisingly, involve it in a

variety of efforts aimed at forcing the body to live up to all of its promise.

The body needs to be fused to the soul. Additionally, the messages of the

body need to be naturalized and shown as authentic expressions of a sub-

ject rather than arbitrary cultural artifacts. The consequences of the text

itself, though, need to be taken into account. Reading and writing are

activities designed to reveal, to act upon, and to supplement the logos of

the soul. The rules of this textualism produce a condition where descrip-

tions take on a legislative effect. These textual legislations participate in a

disciplining of bodies. At the same time they also regulate bad bodies,

bodies that are brought to light only to be subsequently refused.

Quintilian's discussion of performance yokes the body to the soul.

Quintilian hopes to secure the validity of his enterprise by assuring that the

soul remains both the prison and the jailer of the body. Quintilian routinely

asserts that the "inside" of the orator is reflected in the appearances he

produces, that good oratory is a matter of true appearances.1' The meta-

phor of diagnosis is employed to get at the inner man:

lam enim tempus est dicendi quae sit apta pronuntiatio: quae certe ea

est quae iis de quibus dicimus accommodatur. Quod quidem maxima

ex parte praestant ipsi motus animorum, sonatque uox ut feritur.

[Now it is time to define suitable delivery. It is surely that which is

accommodated to those things about which we speak. For the most

part this is produced by the very movements of our souls; the voice

rings as it is struck.]

(Quintilian 11.3.61)

The voice is the musical instrument; the soul the player. A radical reading

of this advice would obviate the need for Quintilian's own text, as one

would need only to feel a thing in order to speak it. This is in fact the

position of some of Quintilian's nameless theoretical enemies: "If they

think it is enough to be born for a man to be an orator, they are entitled to

their opinion. I hope they will pardon my efforts, though, as I think that

nothing is perfect where nature is not supplemented by labor."12 However,

the next sentences of 11.3.61 forestall any commitment to automatic, unre-

flective performance by asserting that some passions are genuine but need

art to shape them. Conversely, fictions suffer from the lack of passions to

inspire them. In the latter case, Quintilian's advice is to begin imagining for

onself thoughts that would inspire the passions one would feign and so to

64 STAGING MASCULINITY

be moved by one's own fictions.13 Thus even in the case of assumed pas-

sions, if they are to be done well, they should have a kernel of truth to

them. We should always weep heartfelt tears, crying for some other loss if

we cannot truly weep for a vicious client's lost honor.

The structure of Quintilian's arguments here and elsewhere has an

important consequence for his student: the contest between affectation and

belief can never be decided. Quintilian has preempted the reading of his

orator for affectation with has natura and cura formulation whereby he

insists that "nothing is perfect where nature is not supplemented by labor."

Belief is now always also a matter of affectation rewritten as cura. That is,

one can really believe only after first learning, investigating, and knowing

his own body. This discipline supplements the nature it discovers and com-

plements it, but discipline also insinuates itself in the place of nature. Once

again we find our handbooks acting according to the logic of Derrida's

"dangerous supplement."14 The rhetorical handbook then becomes a neces-

sary prop for subjectivity and a tool without which the orator is lost to

himself. The text insures that there will be no body without the text, and

accordingly, that there will be no soul without the theorization of the soul.

A preliminary requirement of both text and body is legibility. As was

discussed in the preceding chapter, Quintilian requires the ready conver-

sion of textual precepts into bodily effects. Conversely, the physical world

is itself easily read and interpreted. The process of decipherment of a body

qua visual text is itself nearly automatic. Quintilian argues to this effect in

11.3.65-67. In the case of paintings, sometimes the image says more than

words could. Brute beasts are readily understood because of their move-

ments alone. A dancer may tell a story without using a single word.'5

Quintilian is shoring up any gaps between the body and the soul.

Quintilan makes gestures coincide in spirit with the voice, and both move-

ment and sound are servants of the soul: "[A gesture] both itself harmo-

nizes with the voice and along with it yields to the soul (animus)."16 As a

soldier yields to his general, so do voice and gesture serve the bidding of

the soul that governs them. On the one side the orator's soul is evinced by

his delivery; but, on the other, this delivery will affect the audience in the

same vital organ, namely their inmost passions, their own souls. Quintilian

claims of paintings that their images "penetrate into our inmost passions

(adfectus)."17 We have here a fantasy of pure and efficacious signs, a denial

of language or the need for language, and both of these conceits tending

toward the direct interaction of souls. This efficacy of performance illumi-

nates why pleasure in general and acting in particular produce a crisis: if

the game is played at the level of the soul, imitators or panderers are

serious moral threats.18 One fears lewd psychic intercourse.

Quintilian next extends still further the scope of the psychic mecha-

DISCOVERING THE BODY 65

nism of oratory. Against this vision of natural and efficacious expression

Quintilian introduces the possibility of discord, of voices and faces that do

not go with the words of a speech. Quintilian gives, then, a contrary case as

centered not around the soul, but the words. Thus, in the first part of the

paragraph, Quintilian is resolutely spiritual, in the conclusion, verbal. The

effect of this slide in the argument is first to render the authentic bodily

performance one that is a performance of the soul, but then in the next part

of the argument the words of the speech are silently yoked into the service

of the soul, just as the voice and gestures had been before. Everything

about oratory, then, is always supposedly tending to the same end, the

presentation and representation of the soul of a good man. The orator is

both his text and his body.19 A gesture that dissents from the text of a

speech is in discord as well with the soul of the speaker. And we have seen

how Quintilian's own text mistakes itself for a bodily text. Where text,

body, and soul form a nexus in Quintilian's discussion of gesture, so also

does Quintilian's own text participate in a similar performance targeted at

the level of the soul.

Quintilian's descriptions have a legislative effect. When he examines

the orator, Quintilian finds an authorized body and soul only where certain

given conditions are met. And the "giving" of these conditions is one of the

fundamental aspects of Quintilian's work. By giving I do not mean to imply

that Quintilian needs to be radically original in his impositions. Even where

he only reproduces the sentiments of other and earlier authors, the signifi-

cance of Quintilian's argument and the genre of the rhetorical handbook as

a whole lies in postulating the very object that one is discovering, the

production of the object of inquiry at a specific textual moment within a

specific author. An appeal to "tradition" on our part would not explain

Quintilian's process; it would only reify the rhetorical body as produced in

other theories. This traditional body of the good man would "explain"

Quintilian's text away. That is, there would be a bodily truth subsisting

beneath his pages and validating their contents. Such an interpretive move

grants to Quintilian his key premise: even as it seems to render him deriva-

tive, the point of derivation is the same as Quintilian's and as theoretically

suspect.

While Quintilian exhorts his student to perform well by exhibiting his

good soul, Quintilian is himself engaged in a project of discovery. He is

engaged in the production and reproduction of that same soul.20 Althusser

(1971) notes that the reproduction of the relations of production are vital

for the securing of a social and political order and that the ideological state

apparatus is the key site for the securing of this reproduction in the person

of the subject inaugurated into this order by ideology. In hailing this good

soul and commanding it to present itself to the world, Quintilian first gets

66 STAGING MASCULINITY

his student to say, "Yes, it's me; that is my soul." In doing so the student

takes up the burden of this soul, its truths, its constituent exclusions, its

denials, and makes them his own.

Judith Butler has recently offered a critical rereading of Althusser that

takes account of the difficulties, ambiguities, excesses of meaning, and sup-

plementations entailed by such a process. She seeks to accommodate

Althusser's trope of the turning toward assujettissement without reinscribing

his divine performative as the model of domination (Butler 1997b, 106-31).

This revised version of the interpellation allows us to reread Quintilian

without ourselves becoming fixated by a legalism of description. Quintilian's

educative apparatus does not have the constative force of the law; it is not a

unique, privileged authority; it does not produce a performative utterance, a

"You are Peter" that would miraculously sculpt an orator from the raw stone

of the material body. Quintilian does, though, speak from a position that

would arrogate for itself many of the powers and privileges of the divine

position. Thus the hail he sends out to his student participates in the same

structures as does the more general hailing of the law. But Quintilian's

citation of this law allows for our own reevaluation of him as doubly deriva-

tive. Quintilian would teach his student how to become the principle of his

own subjection and to set up in himself a superego whose voice is that of

Quintilian citing the law in the name of subjecting the bodily ego. The

student has been asked to live the moment of Althusserian subjection; the

stage has been set; the stakes have been laid out; and the rewards have been

made explicit. The orator is taught to perform his own subjection, to adopt a

certain soul and a specific body, and thereby to become a good man. The text

mediates this process, but in so doing it also serves as a metaphor for the

mediation the body itself provides relative to the truth of the soul.

Despite promises to the contrary, texts and bodies are fallible. In

11.3.67 Quintilian makes clear the costs of failures of performance: per-

formative failure destroys authority (auctoritas) and confidence (fides).

Where the text does not match intention, Quintilian finds contradiction.

He could have spoken of lesser lapses, of happy men who looked too

happy, or the like. Instead the text represents discord only in the guise of

total failure: sorrow seems joy. These failures are presented as ridiculous.

But even were they less egregious, the orator would still have to watch out

for his authority and the confidence that he inspires. Indeed the very last

words of Quintilian's eleventh book are actually a threat laid against the

principle of authority conceived of as the good virility of the orator:21

Sed iam recepta est actio paulo agitatior et exigitur et quibusdam

partibus conuenit, ita tamen temperanda ne, dum actoris captamus

elegantiam, perdamus uiri boni et grauis auctoritatem.

DISCOVERING THE BODY 67

[But contemporary taste has adopted and demands a rather more ex-

cited delivery, and in some instances this is suitable. Still, it must be kept

in check lest while we seek the elegance of the actor, we lose the author-

ity of the good and serious man.]

(Quintilian 11.3.184)

In other words, the sanctity of the vir bonus is always at stake in every

performance. And the foundation for his authority rests in the relationship

of harmonized subordination that his voice, body, and text bear to his soul.

The motions of the body and the modulations of the voice serve as

their own sort of language, a sermo corporis.22 Accordingly the body itself

is opened up to the full critical vocabulary of the rhetorical tradition. All

concerns and regulations that may have been directed at the orator's verbal

style can potentially be rethought with regard to the physical aspect of

performance as well. Textual authority and bodily authority are homolo-

gous, and the fetishism of the language in which oratory participates thus

becomes a fetishism of bodies. As is the case with any fetish, this new

"linguistic" body is invested with mystical potency. Yet the source of this

power is ultimately disavowed and deferred. Bourdieu and Boltanski say

the following of linguistic fetishism:

Si l'on ajoute que, de toutes les especes de capital incorpor6, le capital

linguistique est, avec l'hexis corporelle, celle qui a le plus de chances

d'apparaitre comme constitutive de la personne meme de son porteur,

de sa nature, bref comme un "don" de la personne, on comprend que

les d6bats en apparence les plus futiles sur la langue mobilisent tant

d'6nergies et de passions. (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1975, 12)

Extending this notion of the fetishism of language to the eloquent body,

Bourdieu's observation helps to underscore the process of naturalization of

the social truth of the body and the relations of domination that the orator's

body incorporates. Similarly Bourdieu exposes why the body might be

looked at with such intensity and vigor: the stakes of a misdeployed eye-

brow extend far beyond the disruptions of a moment in a speech. The

cultural capital that is deposited in the orator's speech and body is always

on the brink of suffering a loss. Furthermore, for the ancient orator there is

no disjunction between his linguistic, his symbolic, and his bodily capitals.

The orator's high social standing arises from the mystification of his

cultural capital as a "gift" that naturally adheres to his person, to his inmost

self. And the technical manual participates in the bestowing of this gift

while ostensibly only discovering truths about performance, a natura that

cura supplements: we are being taught how to become ourselves, not how

68 STAGING MASCULINITY

to pretend to be good men. It is by the text's cura that the student's body

becomes naturalized and acquires that prestige for which it was destined.

At the same time this cura or discipline revolves back on the question of the

gift as a whole, exposing the basic ficticity of the soul that animates the

capital-rich performer.

If the authority of the body devolves upon the soul, it must be remem-

bered that this soul is itself qualified, being necessarily a good and manly

soul. Against this soul and its body stand other and unwanted souls. The

sociology of these illegitimate bodies is itself a major project of Quintilian's

text. He is routinely discovering in the orator a nascent tendency to

misperform, to present oneself as ignorant, feminine, rustic, or otherwise

illegitimate. The discovery of the body and the tale it tells is thus also a

discovery of the perils of the body, of potential truths about the body that

have to be first unearthed, if only to be more securely reinterred. Again

Bourdieu can help us see the method and stakes in this process of descrip-

tion and definition by way of opposition and exclusion:

The vision of the social world, and most especially the perception of

others, of their bodily hexis, the shape and size of their bodies, particu-

larly the face, and also the voice, pronunciation and vocabulary, is in

fact organized according to interconnected and partially independent

oppositions which one can begin to grasp by examining the expressive

resources deposited and preserved in language, especially in the sys-

tem of paired adjectives employed by the users of the legitimate lan-

guage to classify others and to judge their quality, and in which the

term designating the properties ascribed to the dominant always re-

ceives a positive value. (1991, 92)

Quintilian's texts codify those sets of exclusions that usually remain implicit

cultural categories in need of the exposition of a sociologist like Bourdieu.

In the act of making explicit the implied logic of the world, Quintilian

invites his readers to identify with the structures of domination presented,

to say, "Yes, that is right." Furthermore Quintilian's text offers itself as a

model whereby the logic of domination and its operations can be imbibed

as a consciously held principle. The student can offer a rational account of

the privileges that his voice and body enact.

Useful as Bourdieu's observations are, they will not enable us to under-

stand fully the implications of the specific antagonisms and hostile pairings.

In other words, an explanation of the process of domination and its mystifica-

tion has been offered, but not an account of its specificity in the orator's case.

Most importantly, we need to examine the question of the anxiety of the text:

the text shows that bodily hexis cannot be taken for granted. The body has to

be noted, observed, analyzed, corrected, approved, and trained. The body

DISCOVERING THE BODY 69

to which this orthopedics has been applied then returns to the status of a

fetish and imperceptibly enacts the structures of domination that one seeks

as the body's possession. This orthopedic project thus aspires to the condi-

tion of Bourdieu's habitus, but we would be wise to avoid according it a

success it neither deserves nor has earned.

Even with the corrective assistance of the handbook the body is always

on the verge of failing; it needs a prop and training. The theoretician's gaze

catches within its scopic field a body that is always in need of reworking

within the terms of that same vision. In this sense, Quintilian is a producer

of knowledge/power, and he stands against the nameless others of 11.3.11

who thought it enough to be born in order to be a good orator. These

authentic orators are able to participate in Bourdieu's schema without

feeling any pangs of anxiety. They would seek a symbolic domination that

"goes without saying." Quintilian balks at this. Quintilian always needs to

supplement nature with effort. In so doing he exposes the body to a differ-

ent regime of truth, one of discipline and surveillance, even if discipline's

ultimate goal is the salvation of the authentic good man. The irony of

Quintilian's process, then, is that the endless process of training and threats

of failure make the category vir bonus fundamentally unstable. But Quintil-

ian's loss is also his gain: by making the body a problem, he can enjoin his

orator to a conscious regime of bodily and performative iteration and

enactment of the principles of domination of which the orator's body is

representative and bearer.

Judith Butler has explored the possible space for a subversive politics

that emerges within the normative performances of the dominant discourse

(1990a, 1993). Quintilian, though, stands directly opposite Butler's queer

performances. Quintilian trains the body to thwart its own queer possibili-

ties: he saves us from ourselves. On the other hand, Quintilian's instruction

also explicitly opens up a space of contestation. He offers to train the

bodies of men that they might be more themselves. In so doing Quintilian

also exposes a latent crisis in the authoritative man: the vir bonus cannot

automatically assume that he will successfully be himself without Quintil-

ian's aid. In this sense Quintilian would agree with Butler: drag queens

really do matter since the political stakes of bodily performances are always

high, and so too are they also a question of the manliness of men.

If we take seriously the proposition that the body has a language and that

its message is of vital social interest, then it should not be surprising to find

that the body becomes a site of so much interest and observation. Observa-

tion of the body will allow the student to modulate his own physical self-

presentation. But then the text that teaches this observation also teaches a

technique of self-knowledge. The text inscribes a truth of the body that is a

70 STAGING MASCULINITY

political truth. And the investment of this good body requires the simulta-

neous disinvestment of other bodies. As observation and self-knowledge

collapse, Quintilian ensures that spectatorship is a socially significant act.

In fact, it is a cruel one, an activity always implicated not just in evaluation,

but in hostile evaluation.

The orator's body is open to constant observation. In discussing meth-

ods of constructing arguments, Quintilian shows that the body's surface is

readily legible for evidence of character:

Personis autem non quidquid accidit exsequendum mihi est, ut plerique

fecerunt, sed unde argumenta sumi possunt. Ea porro sunt:... habitus

corporis, ducitur enim frequenter in argumentum species libidinis,

robur petulantiae, his contraria in diuersum...

[I have no need of rehearsing, as many authors do, the varied fortunes

of characters and characterization, but only from whence one may

adduce pieces of evidence. These are, moreover: . . . the bearing of

the body (habitus corporis), for often beauty is taken as evidence of

lust, strength as a token of impudence; and the opposites of these

qualities are taken as evidence in the opposite direction ...]

(Quintilian 5.10.23-25)

Quintilian refuses to make a catalog of personal qualities.23 Instead he

decides to examine these qualities as they may be used to draw conclusions

about a person's character. Each quality offers a foothold for the student of

character, a point from which a more profound truth may be opened up. It

should be noted in Quintilian's account of the body that seemingly innocu-

ous or even desirable qualities, beauty and strength, are taken as evidence

for vices. In other words, this example of the reading of the body has latent

within itself hostility. The body can and will be read against its bearer. A

body that consists of mere appearances, even if these appearances might be

pleasing, is exposed to attack. There is something cruel or at least poten-

tially cruel in the act of observation.

The orator needs to bear in mind that he is watched with more atten-

tion than are others. The orator's body is a public object, the object of

close public scrutiny. Care must be taken to make sure that appearances

are kept up. As far as his clothing is concerned, the orator should keep the

following in mind:

Cultus non est proprius oratoris aliquis, sed magis in oratore con-

spicitur. Quare sit, ut in omnibus honestis debet esse, splendidus et

uirilis: nam et toga et calceus et capillus tam nimia cura quam negle-

gentia sunt reprendenda.

DISCOVERING THE BODY 71

[There is no particular dress for an orator, but in the orator's case it

attracts more attention. Accordingly it should be - as is proper in the

case of all well-bred persons - resplendent and manly: for when it

comes to one's toga and shoes and hair excessive care as well as negli-

gence are equally blamable.]

(Quintilian 11.3.137)

Quintilian follows these words with a detailed description of personal

grooming and its varied significations. But in this introduction to the topic

he points out a crucial dilemma. First, people watch the orator carefully,

examining him from head to toe. Accordingly, the orator ought to look

good. But in looking good, he should look like a good man: this is our vir

bonus again. He must look neither disheveled nor like a dandy. Splendidus,

translated as "resplendent," means bright and attractive, gleaming, spot-

less, even showy. This Latin adjective is therefore somewhat unsure ground

upon which to stand. It is only by the intervention of the virile adjective

and the qualifying clause that follows that Quintilian's meaning can be

secured as unthreatening.

In this passage, the orator learns both that he is watched, and then

that he is to present himself to be watched. He is to present himself to be

watched both as a spectacular or arresting figure (splendidus) but also as a

figure that is securely masculine. Likewise this virility consists neither in a

coarse nor a refined relationship to one's attire and grooming. In short,

this attractive virility is an art that conceals itself and that must conceal

itself, a discipline that evanesces into a natural appearance. If observation

is aggressive, then one ought to offer an appearance that is an essence,

one that offers no purchase for the critical eye: how can one find fault

with reality?

When a good performance is seen, the body that is presented is mysti-

fied. The proper performance and the character it presents, the vir bonus,

somehow eludes simple and positive description. Claims to the potency of a

proper performance can only be debunked; positive precepts cannot be

offered. So, at any rate, does Quintilian round out his discussion of perfor-

mance. After giving many and detailed pieces of advice, threats, and behav-

iors to avoid, Quintilian concludes his precepts with a disavowal of the

possibility of a truly positive efficacy for his text. His discussion apparently

is valid only in its diagnosis of disease and disorder:

Vnum iam his adiciendum est: cum praecipue in actione spectetur

decorum, saepe aliud alios decere. Est enim latens quaedam in hoc

ratio et inenarrabilis, et ut uere hoc dictum est, caput esse artis decere

quod facias, ita id neque sine arte esse neque totum arte tradi potest.

72 STAGING MASCULINITY

[I have one thing to add: though one pays particular attention to

decorousness (decorum) in performance, often different things suit

(decere) different speakers. For there is a certain latent and inexpress-

ible logic to performance; and, just as this maxim is true, namely that

the principle point of study is to be becoming (decere) in whatever you

may do, so also is it true that this cannot happen without study, nor can

the whole of it be transmitted via study.]

(Quintilian 11.3.177)

The orator is commanded to be seemly and becoming (decorum, decere).24

He is observed for this quality. Indeed, his entire labor tends toward allow-

ing him to project such an air. At the same time, his labor does not secure

his goal. The oratorical project is always incomplete, and the orator's

existence is "a kind of permanent exercise" (Foucault 1988a, 49). The

consummate student will only have assured himself that he has a chance of

not failing, not that he has actually succeeded. What is becoming always

remains elusive.

On the other hand, there are certain advantages to the mythology of

decorum: the common man can never expect a formula or recipe that

would allow him to transform himself into a man of substance. Ineffability

hence can serve as a guarantor against unregulated social mobility. Ken-

nedy and Habinek have argued that the expulsion of the Latin rhetoricians

in 92 B.C.E. was partially motivated by political concern in the face of

rhetorical training that was too accessible and too easy (Kennedy 1972, 90-

95; Habinek 1998, 60-61). Restricing access to rhetoric offers one means of

ensuring the noble art's nobility. Yet the state apparatuses are not only

limited to the repressive sort. So too can we find an ideology of the natural

speaker. One cannot make a critique of proper performances because they

succeed along the ways indicated by Bourdieu: the physical bearing in

these cases seems to be a gift of the person, a natural and inalienable

possession that confirms the legitimacy of the domination of his station.25

Of course, Quintilian intervenes to qualify the autonomy of this notion of

natural grace: it is natural only by way of being acculturated through the

discursive apparatus of the institution of rhetorical training.

The orator is always on the straight and narrow, traversing a perilous

path between illegitimate morphologies. Even in the cut of the toga, failure

will lead to deformity and hence to catastrophe.26 One associates deformity

with illegitimacy, and this link is about as old a one as we can find. In the

Iliad Thersites is a shameful, ugly, and disorderly speaker whose body is as

foul as his words (2.212-69). Thersites does not fare well at the hands of

the good men who surround him: the noble Odysseus scowls at him

(2.245), gives a speech of rebuke, and then beats Thersites to a bloody pulp

DISCOVERING THE BODY 73

with the speakers' staff (oxitxQov). So much for telling an aristocrat some-

thing he does not want to hear. Homer literalizes the metaphorical domina-

tion and violence of the orator and his oratory.27 In Quintilian and other

authors, though, this same fundamental social violence persists in a euphe-

mised form. And given that Quintilian sees Homer's stagings of Odysseus

as fodder for rhetorical precepts at 11.3.158, perhaps the situation is not so

entirely euphemistic after all.

Bourdieu helps explain why society takes the unsightly body so

seriously:

socialization instills a sense of the equivalences between physical

space and social space and between movements (rising, falling, etc.)

in the two spaces and thereby roots the most fundamental structures

of the group in the primary experiences of the body which, as is

clearly seen in emotion, takes metaphors seriously. For example, the

opposition between the straight and the bent, whose function in the

incorporated division of labor between the sexes has been indicated,

is central to most of the marks of respect or contempt that politeness

uses in many societies to symbolize relations of domination. (1990,

71-72)

The body is thus a lived experience of social truths, and in the bearing of the

body one can always descry meanings that are referable to incontrovertible

social meaning: "The body believes what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief.

It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it

enacts the past, bringing it back to life. What is 'learned by the body' is not

something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but some-

thing that one is" (Bourdieu 1990, 73). The orator brandishes his body in the

social field, convinced both of the validity and legitimacy of the hegemony of

viri boni and of the hopelessness of other bodies.

In the same gesture that the dominant fractions learn of the sublime

status of their own decorum, they learn other lessons as well. First, this

decorum can be secured only by study and labor: it is not a truly arbitrary

trait. The mere fact of having been born does not make a person a good

speaker. But the orator has also learned a science of unauthorized bodies.

The student has been taught to look at the body for the indecorous and the

illegitimate, to force the body to answer up in all of its details and divisions

to the demand to not be inappropriate. This establishes a relationship to

knowledge that produces a specific relationship to one's own body. And

this relationship is a suspicious and hostile one.

I would like to take this opportunity to expatiate somewhat on the body as

observed and made subject to a knowledge and power that watches ever

74 STAGING MASCULINITY

more carefully and critically. I would like, that is, to spend some time on

Quintilian's catalog of the body and the voice in order to show in detail that

the body as figured within his text is a body that has been made the object

of a careful sort of knowledge. In subsequent portions of this chapter, we

will take up the question of the excisions and exclusions that this process

also entails, but here we will first examine the layers of analysis.

The general situation of observation and self-observation reaches a

sort of logical extreme in the case of the analysis of the body. The prolifera-

tion of the body parts observed produces more knowledge of the speaking

body, but it also leaves that body the more liable to the same questions of

legitimacy and illegitimacy that have dogged it all along. That is, now the

general impression or tenor of a performance is not enough; even the eye-

brows must be observed, evaluated, and found acceptable. Thus the prolif-

eration of body parts examined by no means serves as a promise of author-

ity for the student as he crosses off items on his to-do list. Instead, the more

his body is known in detail, the more it is liable to failures and in need of

prohibitions and regulations. The expanded analysis of the body is less

helpful than it is monitory.

Quintilian's detailed discussion of the body of the orator has two

extended passages. First he describes the face and its elements (11.3.72ff.),

and he later moves from the head downward (11.3.82ff.). In addition to

these two sections, the proper use of the hands is a constant bodily theme.

It is this last portion of the anatomy that I would like to take up first. The

observation due the hands serves as a case study for the regard due all of

the body's elements.

The hands are a locus of such keen interest owing to their amazing

expressive capacities. "One can hardly describe how many movements the

hands have. Without our hands delivery would be maimed and debilitated,

since they nearly equal the very wealth of our words."28 In other words, the

more invested a site is with meaning or potential meaning, the more knowl-

edge and discipline come to surround it. The supposed eloquence of the

hands necessitates special concern and attention to the hands. If the hands

can all but speak of themselves,29 then the rhetorical theorist is duty bound

to speak of and for them, and to speak exhaustively if at all possible.

Quintilian recounts over a dozen specific hand gestures between

11.3.92 and 11.3.104.30 Each gesture is defined, delimited, regulated, and

often moralized. Knowledge and obligation proceed in tandem (cf. Fou-

cault 1979, 180). Take, for example, the use of the hand described at

11.3.100: "Admiration is appropriately expressed by that gesture in which

one turns the hand lightly upward, folds in the fingers one after the other

starting from the smallest, and then in a reverse movement, simultaneously

unfolds them and turns the hand back over."31 This would be a case of both

DISCOVERING THE BODY 75

definition and regulation: the master tells us to note what the hand does

when it expresses admiration; such a movement at other times would be

inappropriate. Quintilian is not only defining and delimiting, he is also

instructing both actor and audience. The language of the body is being

taught and reproduced for both parties alike. And while the language of

the body has been described as universal and easily intelligible in passages

like 11.3.65-67, the vocabulary of bodily speech actually finds its reproduc-

tion and inculcation in passages such as this.

More than taxonomy is at stake in this detailed examination of the body.

A social morality is immediately attached to the speculative project. Quintil-

ian does not provide a systematic theory of gestures with the hands; he

instead offers a laundry list of gestures. Yet Quintilian has more to say of the

hands than just listing some of their gestures: the hands must be restrained

from illicit social allusions. The moral definition and legislation of these

specific and specified gestures can be seen in 11.3.103: "There is also that

gesture where the hand is held cupped and spread-fingered and lifted above

the height of the shoulder with a certain movement: this has a hortatory air.

Such a use of the hands is more accepted by foreign schools; it is tremulous,

and stagy."32 The hands may have their own language, but this language can

be "unspeakable" for a good man. This passage consolidates the notion that

foreigners, effeminates, and actors are parodic and despised agents whose

movements the Roman orator specifically does not reproduce.

It is not enough to make a few choice hand movements; the hands

must also be carefully coordinated with the rest of the speech. Indeed all

elements of oratory are bound by a law of homology that insists that every

part be consonant with the whole. As the body had to be in accord with the

text (11.3.67), so also should the hands move along with the sense, accom-

panying the meaning of the verbal aspect of the performance. The regula-

tion of the hand also extends to having it perform differently in the differ-

ent logical sections of a speech. The hand begins an oration with one set of

movements, and it ends with another (see, e.g., 11.3.158, 11.3.159,

11.3.161-62). Within an individual sentence, one needs keep to the follow-

ing rule: "The hand should begin and end its movements along with the

sense: otherwise there will be a gesture either before or after there is a

sound, both of which occurrences are unsightly."33 At the same time, the

hand should not be subject to the rigid rule of one gesture per three

words.34 This proposition, called "too subtle" (nimia subtilitate) by Quintil-

ian, is rejected first because it is declared impossible. The three-word rule

is, however, well-intended as it avoids the two failings of a lazy hand

(otiosa) or endless movement.

Instead of obeying some ready mathematical formula the orator's ges-

tures need to observe the "lurking beats of speech" (latentes sermonis

76 STAGING MASCULINITY

percussiones).35 Such an argument reinstalls gestures into a natural and

naturally harmonized role vis-h-vis language. The language itself dictates

the movements of the hands, and the gesture that follows the sense is

actually the one closest to nature. The orator sets himself to the study and

reproduction of signs given by nature. Labor again is a process designed to

complement nature and fulfill a teleology latent within it. If the orator lives

up to the nature of language, the problem of a lazy or overly busy hand

need no longer be considered. Those who would impose decisive rules will

only impose an apparatus divorced from nature and one that will endlessly

clash with it. Thus Quintilian's project, while producing and reproducing

knowledge and self-knowledge at every turn, pushes the source of its own

legitimacy back into an unassailable register. And the apotheosis of the

project of submission to Quintilian's dictates is presented not as a mastery

of the laws of oratory but as a fulfillment of the dictates of nature. In other

words, good gestures have a natural authenticity and efficacy that is put out

of reach of critique, revision, and revolution. The consummate student is

not only a good man but is a "natural" one as well.

The rest of the body receives a treatment much akin to that of the hands.

As no one element of the body is quite as invested with meaning as the hands

are, it is only as an ensemble or collection of prescriptions that the injunc-

tions made to the rest of the body fully resemble those given to the hands.

Nonetheless, the logic that regulated the hands holds true for the rest of the

body, and this body is equally susceptible to ever finer degrees of analysis,

description, and prescription.

Quintilian's examination of the body starts with the head: "As with the

body, so with delivery: the head is most important; it plays a principal part

with respect both to that decorum I have discussed and also to the convey-

ance of meaning."36 From the head Quintilian moves to the face as the

head's dominant feature. The face is itself subdivided into the eyes, which

are its most important feature, the eyebrows, and lastly the lips and the

nostrils. Leaving the face and head, Quintilian continues downward, dis-

cussing the neck and then the shoulders. Moving out now rather than

continuing down, Quintilian passes on to the arms and then gets into the

hands in some detail as discussed above. The perusal of the body is thus

fairly orderly (11.3.72-84).

In the course of this survey, Quintilian stops at each feature long

enough to describe its potency and its dangers. The face is almost as good

as words (11.3.72). The spirit shines forth from the eyes (11.3.75). Misus-

ing the eyes and showing them filled with pleasure is a failing that is

beneath even an idiot (11.3.76). The eyebrows must not become comic and

dissent from what is spoken (11.3.78). Hardly anything good can come of

the lips and nostrils; here restraint is the best course of action (11.3.80).

DISCOVERING THE BODY 77

The neck ought to be straight, and poor use of the neck lends an impression

of servility (11.3.82).

Each time Quintilian turns his eyes upon the body it is invested with

both significance and risk. The body is first defined as telling, and then it

threatens to misspeak and ruin its bearer. The more of the body that is

given to be seen, the more labor is required of the student. With each

division come new and increased obligations. Clearly the logic of analysis

could be taken further, and still more minute elements picked out. The

earliest preserved rhetorical handbook in Latin, the Rhetorica Ad Heren-

nium, makes relatively simple injunctions to the body, and in contempo-

rary editions of the work the Ad Herennium requires only a few pages to

makes its survey of performance. On the other hand, the discussion of

delivery in an edition of Quintilian today covers scores of pages each of

which is filled with the most minute bodily details. By the same token,

if the increased knowledge derived from Quintilian is not enough to guar-

antee security, might not further analysis be in order? The proliferation of

body parts has not given more security, but only opened up more pros-

pects for failure, more sites to examine and find wanting, more parts that

must be harmonized with a whole, and more telling elements whose tale

must be kept under watch. More nature (natura), that is, requires more la-

bor (cura). And not even Quintilian's massive tome is sufficient to live up

either to nature or to discipline.

Not only is the body carefully articulated in its parts, it is also coordi-

nated and organized such that its elements will be orchestrated into a

harmonized whole. So the body is first broken into pieces, and then it is

reassembled into an ensemble that must give a unified performance. We

have already seen that the hands must match up with the passage delivered.

This is the harmony of movement and text. But the body should also

correspond to itself, its parts moving together and harmoniously. For ex-

ample, one's flanks have this task imposed upon them: they ought to be in

concord with the other gesturing taking place (11.3.122). A more elaborate

package of movements can be seen in the following: "A restrained voice,

moderate gestures, a toga resting on the shoulder, and a slight motion of

the trunk from side to side while the eyes turn to face in the same direction

will often be becoming."37 This whole passage contains collections of other

coordinated movements, looks, voices, and gestures: a variety of little

scenes have been staged,38 offering not only examples of good bodies but

also consolidating the principle of careful coordination of all of the body's

lately discovered parts.

To this carefully orchestrated harmony of this body, Quintilian opposes

a variety of bodily failings. At 11.3.160 Quintilian enumerates a number of

errors of excess. In these instances, the speaker apparently seeks to be a

78 STAGING MASCULINITY

good and serious man, but instead comes off as too severe and takes himself

too seriously. The stance and face become hardened and harsh. The care-

fully poised body becomes bent out of its proper shape. The well-placed feet

drift apart. These affectations are all intended to make the spectator take the

orator and his passions seriously, but they dispel the "easy" and "natural"

gravity that Quintilian recommends. The ideal oratorical body, a body that is

taken seriously by an audience, thus conforms to Bourdieu's schema

wherein the body is "something that one is." This presence should appear

neither artificial nor intemperate, neither sterile and contrived nor wild and

undisciplined.

The practice of rhetorical theory compromises this goal of naturalism:

nature is always supplemented by labor. However, some supplements defy

nature and dispel the illusion of presence: the vir bonus disappears, and a

fidgeting Greek or a terrifying ogre appears in his place (11.3.160). Proper

supplements, though, allow for the improvement of nature and the realiza-

tion of one's destiny. In this sense, more knowledge of the body is easily

joined to the goal of a more natural and true body. Since this true body is

always a socially true body, a body is true precisely to the extent that its

investment in the social space is and can be taken seriously. This knowl-

edge produces more effects of power in the same gesture that it effaces the

traces of power from the surface of the body. This effacement renders the

effects of power as part of the register of the natural and true. Put differ-

ently, this is the production of natura in the space of discipline's cura. This

time we have more labor producing more nature and the obverse of the

situation described above.

Several of the preceding examples from Quintilian open up the theme

of space in general. The movement of the orator's body through space is a

carefully regulated affair. His gestures should have boundaries; his steps

should be kept within certain limits; his left and right halves must be

carefully regulated. It is not enough, then, to successfully control one's

voice and face or use the fingers on one hand skillfully. These expressive

motions must themselves be deployed within delineated spatial boundaries.

Keeping in mind the notion that the space of the body is an enactment

of social categories, we can see that bounding and limiting the movement

of the orator is another version of keeping the orator in character and

ensuring that his use of the social space is in accordance with his social

station and gravity. We have already seen above the problems surrounding

the hands. The hand must keep within certain clearly defined spatial bound-

aries. Traversing these lines ruins good oratory. The same will be true of

other parts of the body. Everywhere the orator's body is bounded by lines

of decorum, defining, constraining, and restraining him. Does he overstep

his spatial boundary, he fails to be a good man. In order to become more

DISCOVERING THE BODY 79

fully the master of both himself and the space in which he deploys his body,

the orator turns to the supplement of the text.

A great deal of labor is expended on the task of seeing to it that the left

and right sides of the body behave appropriately. 39 The stakes accordingly

must be rather high. In fact, if we examine Greek medical writings, it

would appear that the left/right problem is one that participates in the

division of sexes. Bourdieu has already prepared us to see homologies and

parallels imposed upon and between such paradigms and divisions as left/

right, up/down and male/female. In the medical tradition, the male child is

the product of the right side of the womb, and the female the product of the

left side. In one passage, several elements of the body are set against one

another along a rigid correspondence between left and female and right

and male:

1va Luv JtXELo'tv EXEL TLtObg, OpOacbg& 6iog, tavtcL tov xitw,

xac Ott E !tE VXE tOLOL &E LOLL tL LQOEVa.

[The right breast and eye, and it is the same with the lower parts of

the body; moreover male children are sown in the right part of the

body.]

(Hippocrates, Epidemics 2.6.15)

The association of the female with the left side fits in nicely with the careful

regulation of the left side by the orator. If the orator is consigned to always

being male, then he accordingly must take precautions when performing to

use this side of his body properly.

The place of the left foot in one's posture is an important affair. Putting

one's weight on the wrong foot or putting the wrong foot forward is not

tolerated. The left foot may be put slightly forward, but parallel feet are

preferred (11.3.159). If you put your right foot forward, do not gesture with

your right hand (11.3.125). Of course, since gestures with the left hand

alone have been forbidden (11.3.114), anyone standing with his right foot

forward has boxed himself into something of a corner. Putting weight on the

right foot is occasionally acceptable, but this is a rather comic movement

(11.3.125). And if your weight is on your left foot, do not raise up your right

foot or stand on your toes (11.3.125). And once the feet have been properly

planted, it is important not to rock back and forth upon them, vacillating

before your audience (11.3.128), as this is indecorous (indecora).

In general the body as a whole should maintain an even and erect

posture such as the use of the adjective rectus has recommended. Most

deviations from a stationary position held on a line perpendicular to the

ground are condemned: as with the vacillation described above, tossing the

80 STAGING MASCULINITY

shoulders around must be prevented at all costs, even at the price of self-

mortification (11.3.130). Walking around is only permitted where there are

many judges and you wish to put some fire into each of them individually

(11.3.130). Bending away to talk to friends or assistants is improper and

makes one appear more as a patron than an orator (11.3.131). Inclining

toward a judge is acceptable only where one gives instruction on an ob-

scure point, while bending toward an opposing advocate is overly hostile

(11.3.132). And it is precious to fall into the arms of attendants unless truly

exhausted (11.3.132). These affectations will all be received like a dash of

cold water by the judges (11.3.133).

Quintilian's explanation of the situation provides only prohibitions

and threatened consequences while omitting any governing logic. In all of

these instances, though, it would appear that the proper body occupies for

the most part a carefully circumscribed space and follows a stable and

upright line. Deviations from this line can dispel the efficacy of the stage

presence of the orator as vir bonus.40 Only by knowing his body and its

parts and then carefully bounding them can the orator become and remain

what he must be. Within these lines he is a good man and beyond them he

is nothing or worse.

Many entries are excluded from the orator's bodily lexicon, or if they are

allowed, it is with the implied tag, vulg. or colloq. As Bourdieu says of so-

called popular language, "The notion of 'popular speech' is one of the

products of the application of dualistic taxonomies which structure the

social world according to the categories of high and low" (1991, 93). In

other words, these vulgar or illegitimate gestures are admitted only so that

they may then be made to bear the trace of the principle and structure of

domination that excludes them from the register of the proper. One of the

primary actions of Quintilian's text is the reinscription of the body as a

terrain divided, a space populated by authorized or unauthorized and ac-

cordingly abjected sounds and movements. For example, we learn that gait

reveals station (11.3.112); drawing in one's neck is servile (11.3.83); the

head must not be barbarously inclined (11.3.69); and the movements as a

whole should seem martial, not taken from the stage (1.11.18). The task of

Quintilian's student is to examine his own body after these same principles,

to cleanse from his person these unauthorized traces of other and illegiti-

mate selves. This situation produces an obsession with the meaning of the

body as social meaning and concomitantly an obsession with securing one's

own body as meaning what it must mean. The student of oratory, the

student who is assumed to be a vir bonus yet who is also always in the

process of laboring to produce and reproduce for himself and others this

being, looks into himself, discovers a body that is not necessarily either

DISCOVERING THE BODY 81

good or manly, and sets to work disciplining his body and excising from it

these illegitimate elements.

The orator's voice is a virtual microcosm of the social world.41 The

training of the voice, accordingly, is the disciplining of this aspect of the

body such that the voice rings out with the tones of a vir bonus and no

others. If one plays on the passage cited above where the voice rings as it is

struck, then the training of the voice contributes to the socially recognized

illusion that there is a manly essence striking the vocal chords and lending

them its tones.

The care of the voice begins with good eating habits: observing and

watching one's diet is important, because one has need of a voice that is

fortis (11.3.23). The positive description of the voice is centered around

virility and manliness. Fortis means healthy, strong, or brave. When ap-

plied to a man as a whole, a virfortis, the adjective forms a collocation with

the noun that means "war hero." The adjective, then, can be translated as

simply referring to the physical health or vigor of the voice, but this would

be an undertranslation. The term is readily used to make the voice the

voice of a good and manly man. This voice is going to be the voice of a

rugged and hardy performer and not that of a prissy voice professional, a

phonascius. The phonascius has a soft and tender voice (molli teneraque),

while the orator is a man of hard study and hard labor, a man who toughs it

out and breaks a sweat (in sudata veste durandum). The voice is fortis once

again at 11.3.64, where it is used in exhortations or calls to action

(adhortationibus). The function of exhortation is a hegemonic one, and the

adjective fortis in its more martial or virile associations "naturally" adheres

to the situation.

Not surprisingly, then, the negative description of the voice is con-

structed around failures of manliness and authority. Already in 11.3.23 we

have seen that the fortis voice was opposed to a soft and delicate one. This

softness is the softness of effeminacy, and mollis when applied to another

man is intended to be as hostile and unflattering as the use of the term fairy

is today. Quintilian concludes in 11.3.24 from his arguments of 11.3.23 that

"accordingly we should not soften our voice with delicacies nor let it be-

come steeped in those habits it might desire. No, its training should be like

its use. . . . it should be made sturdy by practice."42 It requires an act of

will to train the body: it would like to go soft; one must get it used to hard

labor. As with the parts, so does Quintilian argue of the whole: the adjec-

tive mollis makes another appearance when the sum of performance is

discussed: "One must flee like the plague a mollis delivery, such as Cicero

says Titius had. Because of it a certain sort of dance was even called the

Titius."43

This advice is practical for being first ethical. The delights that would

82 STAGING MASCULINITY

not be part of the public life of a vir bonus are forbidden his voice as well.

In other words, he is always in character, even when he is offstage.

Moreover, this character is predicated on renunciation, renunciation of

pleasure and the feminine. And this renunciation extends not just to his

personal habits and practices, but also to his treatment of individual ele-

ments of his body.

The voice needs constant protection against the gender troubles that

assail it. The orator, in order to ensure the good care of his voice (vocis

bona cura) needs "a solid body lest our voice be attenuated down to the

meagerness of eunuchs, women, and the infirm."44 This solid body "is

provided by walks, rubdowns, sexual abstinence, ready digestion, in other

words, frugality."45 If the voice strays from its manly ideal there ensues a

corresponding corruption of the body. The threat is specifically sexual:

castration and effeminacy must be avoided. And then another term is

added, illness. Now we can see another trope of authority: the orators are

good men and good speakers because they are healthy, they are not defec-

tive like women or eunuchs. The path to securing this good health and

manliness, though, requires "frugality." This observation and modulation

of the whole of one's life again has sexuality introduced into it: sexual

abstinence secures for the man a manly voice. By refusing carnal love, the

orator gains sublime pleasures from his fellow men: he has the satisfaction

of properly gratifying them.

A regime of discipline is again invoked as a safeguard to a fallible

nature. Without discipline, a man may lose even his gender. Quintilian

describes good pronunciation and the proper use of the voice in some detail

in 11.3.30-32. This passage is a veritable fugue on the sociology of the

voice and the sociological dangers that adhere to it. All of the threats and

dangers are piled on at once, and we see that not only gender, but even

one's place within the city of Rome is always in jeopardy. Only discipline

will prevent such a catastrophe, and this discipline is explicitly predicated

on self-denial: pleasure and indulgence threaten one's being, while regula-

tion and abstinence offer by way of pain and refusal the legitimate joys of

being a good man. Sexuality keeps recurring in this scene, but it is always

hustled offstage. Still, in the process the vir bonus has been sexualized even

if his is a love that dare not speak its name.

Much as was the case for the orator's voice, Quintilian restricts his

expression of approval for the body as a whole to a limited set of terms,

terms that themselves closely parallel those of the voice. And we again find

that these terms are opposed to a set of socially exclusionary ones. The

semblance of autonomous aesthetic purity in the first case should not oc-

clude the fact that this independence is predicated upon a prior act of

vigorous erasure made in the social register.

DISCOVERING THE BODY 83

The evaluation of performance returns again and again to the trope of

deauthorization and silencing. There are legitimate bodies and then those

that fall short of the status required to receive a hearing in the political

space. Not surprisingly, the deauthorization of gestures extends to rival

authors and orators. Attacks on their teachings are necessarily attacks on

the bodies they recommend. And the substance of the attack remains the

threat of political impotence produced by a failure to manifest the body

borne by those who belong to the hegemonic classes:

Vitia quoque earum subicienda sunt, quae quidem accidere etiam

exercitatis actoribus solent. Nam gestum poculum poscentis aut

uerbera minantis aut numerum quingentorum flexo pollice efficientis,

quae sunt a quibusdam scriptoribus notata, ne in rusticis quidem uidi.

[Failed uses of the hands must also be given. These failures can even

befall practiced pleaders. For I have never even seen a bumpkin make

the gesture of a man demanding a cup or threatening a beating or

making the number five hundred by bending the thumb, although

these gestures have been described by certain writers.]

(Quintilian 11.3.117)

The orator is never free from the threat of bodily failure. Even practiced

hands may go astray. Furthermore, the authority of other handbooks and

other authors cannot be trusted: their gestures may be worse than gauche

and rustic; the technical literature teems with gestures of its own fancy;

don't believe everything you read. We ought to entertain some of the same

considerations when reading this practiced authority as well.

One likewise sees here an issue that will later be explored in more

detail: these gestures described in 11.3.117 all seem to be very explicit or

vivid, miming the very thing that they represent. In other words, not even a

rube would pantomime his meaning with his gestures. This argument will

be redeployed with as much spleen and more elsewhere in Quintilian's text

when he is discussing the relationship between the actor and the orator.

Set against these effetes and boors is the man of the city, the good

Roman. Yet urbanity is not merely a neutral nor even a positive quality. In

these same passages we have been discussing, the use of the term urbanus

and its derivatives occurs only in hostile contexts. Thus the good man in his

charmed circle is also always a man on the attack, actively protecting his

exclusive territory. Quintilian's text marks out the space of the urbane as a

place where one man assaults another, cutting at his opponents' perfor-

mance, authenticity, and authority. 46

The two occurrences of the adverb urbane in Quintilian's discussion of

84 STAGING MASCULINITY

delivery are both found in contexts where Quintilian lauds a witticism of

one Roman made at the expense of another.47 Thus in 11.3.126 Verginius

Flavos asks an opponent who is moving around too much, how many miles

he had declaimed that day. Here we find the punitive side of the regulation

of space from above: too much movement leaves you ridiculous. At the

same time, the man who punishes the transgressor and launches the barb

that reveals the offense for all to see wins his own title: he is urbane. He

wins his claims to recognition when someone else loses theirs. Similarly in

11.3.133 space is violated, a man is ridiculed, and another is praised. The

rule of not crossing over toward the opposing counsel's bench is being laid

down. Quintilian illustrates his law with an anecdote wherein Cassius

Severus urbanely demands that boundary lines be put down on the ground

to ward off an opponent's advances. The barb makes the adversary's meta-

phorical assault on his space into a literal one. It also shows the fellow

boorish in that he needs a physical line to point out to him the proper

spatial bounding of the Roman orator.

The man of the city is always hostile, sneering and jabbing at his

opponents. The vir bonus may be socially good, but this goodness is se-

cured via constant aggression. Likewise, Quintilian's own text with its

eternal attacks on failed bearing and movement constructs the vir bonus via

this same aggression. Quintilian assaults his readers' bodies, beating them

into manly shape and threatening transgressors with castration and exile: if

I speak without following Quintilian's dictates, I might not be urbane or I

might appear soft. For the orator the aggression by which he forcibly

distinguishes himself from ordinary men always leads back to himself, as

the next chapter will argue explicitly. The orator is enjoined to turn his

aggression outward in order to confront the rest of the world with it. For

example, in the preceding passage, the rules of space that the orator im-

poses upon himself must also be forced upon the rest of the world. Those

who cross the lines that are invisibly or visibly laid down thereby reveal

themselves impotent and illegitimate.

The more the body is discovered, the more footholds there are for this

kind of thinking and this kind of assault. The knowledge of the body that is

herein produced is a knowledge that is used to provide an orthopedics and

correction. Yet with this correction there comes pruning and excision. The

self is taken as the principle of its own domination. The body is invested

with a soul and populated with it. But only by strict and rigid disciplining of

this same body can the validity of the soul be secured. This body thus

becomes the prison of the soul, though this same soul is charged with

policing its own prison.48 We will never get to a first principle by following

these logical gyrations. Instead one should note the relationships in gen-

DISCOVERING THE BODY 85

eral. There is an injunction to more knowledge of the body and closer

observation, yet this knowledge produces more insecurity than confidence.

So much, then, for the orator's body. The manual on training has no

simple or direct value. After reading Quintilian, one does not walk away a

consummate orator, a Cicero or a Demosthenes. A vocabulary of the body

is learned, but this new language is not one of simple analysis and descrip-

tion, nor is it even a vocabulary comprised of precepts aimed at helping an

orator be more clear in his movements or his pronunciation of words such

that whatever meaning might be conveyed, it is conveyed more effectively.

Instead the description and analysis of the body are at once and inseparably

fused with a social morality and invested with profound ontological conse-

quences. The social stakes invested in the body result in a body that is

always in a state of negotiation. The body cannot be left alone to mean

what it may. Instead the body and its relationship to the self and world

needs to be constantly thought and rethought: Is that speaker a good man?

Is he acting like one? Does he have the hands of a good man? Do his words

match his gestures? Does his voice or his stance reveal him to be a woman

or a rustic? One asks these aggressive questions not only of others but also

of oneself: Am I a good man?

Quintilian's text relies heavily on the imputation of being to the soul of

the good man, and Quintilian uses this soul as the agent that gives form to

the unruly mass of the body. Yet Quintilian's own arguments destabilize the

centered subject. By opening up logical paradoxes, the cura/natura formula-

tion compromises the vision of a subject who is the author of his own

meanings. Nature requires labor and labor fulfills nature. This is straight

out of Aristotle: TExv helps 1patg achieve itself fully. But labor and

labor's observation have a way of producing more or different natures,

particularly when illegitimate morphologies are discovered within the ora-

tor's own body. The problem of labor makes nature an open and un-

closeable category. The vir bonus can never fully consolidate his being

because of the infinite quality of his labor.

Quintilian cannot be read as a simple guide to good voice and gestures.

Quintilian's descriptions always act as prescriptions. In the course of his

discussion, Quintilian is creating a body and legislating its bearing and mean-

ings. This technology of the self serves not to describe but to create and

control a masculine body and a relationship to that body. The instructions he

offers serve to help construct the orator as a certain sort of social agent as set

against and above other members of society. The social place of the orator in

the Roman world is secured as part of a thoroughgoing corporeal project.

With the consolidation of his gender, so also does the orator find in the same

moment the sanctity of his station. Moreover, the truth of the gendered body

86 STAGING MASCULINITY

cannot be dissociated from these other truths, as the station of a man be-

comes conflated with the virility of station per se. The labor of this discovery

of the body, accordingly, is more than a theoretical one; it is also immanently

practical and has important worldly consequences.

With his arguments on labor, Quintilian points toward Butler's theses

on the body. Butler has insisted on a performativity that acts as a process

that is necessarily enacted over time. And the performative subject is an

accretion formed via these iterations. Furthermore, the possibility and

consequences of performative failure are the same for both Butler and

Quintilian: the subject's very being is at stake. Quintilian, though, sets

himself up as a guardian against the queerness that Butler is glad to see

ever waiting in the wings.

Quintilian's panopticism, his observation and discipline, have done

nothing to render impossible the bodies and souls he fears. His scopic

mechanism acts to reproduce the secure male, but in so doing it also

constantly reproduces the possibility of its failure and points out sites of

and for contestation. Quintilian's technology of the self and the truth

games of the body that he teaches are not decisive ones: there is not an end

to study and a good man who thereupon emerges. Instead this whole

process is successful only in reproducing itself and its anxieties. This analyt-

ics becomes the site of a labor designed to secure being, but a labor that is

always ready to fail, a labor that can never be completed, and a labor that

could always be queered.

In subsequent chapters we will explore some of the critical avenues

down which thought on the body travels. The orator's relationship to actors

is used to consolidate his own impossible presence. The problem of plea-

sure and the excitement that the speaker's body provokes and arouses is in

its own way the retelling of the problem of unwanted sociology from the

standpoint of a morality of desire. And finally there is the question of good

society and good pleasures, the construction of the secure space into which

this contested body may at last and after infinite labor be fitted. The

orator's body is no product of nature but instead a project and a process.

There is no fact of the body. The body is always a body seen and evaluated,

a body performing profound truths. And this body cannot be left to per-

form these vital truths on its own.

CHAPTER 3

Self-Mastery

QUINTILIAN OPENS HIS INSTITUTIO ORATORIA with a confession that his

work does not aspire to novelty. Indeed, many of the finest minds of both

Greece and Rome have already treated oratory in great detail (1.pr.1).

And while Quintilian despairs of being able to contribute much of original-

ity, he does propose to offer his own judgment when various authors have

written variously on the same topic (1.pr.2).1 Where the basic contents are

concerned, then, Quintilian has made very restricted claims. Yet, so far as

the scope of his discussion is concerned, Quintilian will pretend to original-

ity: his predecessors too readily assume that their readers are already ac-

complished in every other variety of learning and are now only putting the

finishing touches upon their education. Furthermore, these authors either

scorn the pursuit of these lesser studies as falling beneath the level of their

own pursuits, or, as Quintilian thinks is the more likely case, they shun

describing activities that, though necessary, are far removed from ostenta-

tion and the favor that they hope to win for themselves (1.pr.4). Quintilian

aims to lead the prospective orator from both his own swaddling clothes

and those of the art all the way to the summit of oratory (1.pr.7): nothing

will be omitted. The orator will not just need to have a mastery of rhetori-

cal techniques and tropes, he will also have to be a good man, or vir bonus,

and to possess every virtue of the soul (1.pr.9).

Oratory is first and foremost a moral virtue, not a mere technique of

speaking. After expatiating upon the moral and philosophical demands

made upon the orator, Quintilian concludes with the following somewhat

striking remark:

Sit igitur orator uir talis qualis uere sapiens appellari possit, nec mori-

bus modo perfectus (nam id mea quidem opinione, quamquam sunt

qui dissentiant, satis non est), sed etiam scientia et omni facultate

dicendi; qualis fortasse nemo adhuc fuerit, sed non ideo minus nobis

ad summa tendendum est: . . . Nam est certe aliquid consummata

eloquentia neque ad eam peruenire natura humani ingenii prohibet.

87

88 STAGING MASCULINITY

Quod si non contingat, altius tamen ibunt qui ad summa nitentur

quam qui praesumpta desperatione quo uelint euadendi protinus circa

ima substiterint.

[Thus, let the orator be such a man as can truly be called wise, not only

perfect in point of character (for this, in my opinion - though there are

those who disagree - is not enough), but also perfect in both his knowl-

edge and his capacity for every manner of speaking, a man such as

perhaps has yet to have lived. But we are not for this reason to aspire

the less toward this summit. . . . For there is surely such a thing as

consummate eloquence; and the nature of man's intellect does not

prohibit that one arrive at it. And even if this does not come to pass,

nevertheless they go higher who labor toward the summit than those

who, in despair of arriving where they wish, stop at once at the foot of

the mountain.]

(Quintilian 1.pr.18-20)

Two difficulties arise here. First, a rift between the relationship between

character (mores) and training has been exposed. Thus, even though Quin-

tilian makes the former a necessary but not sufficient quality, a quality that

the orator must possess in order that he may be a "perfect" orator, others

seem to think that a good character is itself the only important quality to

possess.2 That is, the performance of a good character - in the sense of a

performance made by such a character and a performance that is likewise a

revelation and manifestation of a good character - is all that such men

would demand of the orator. Second, though Quintilian will prescribe the

regimen to be imposed upon and subsequently assumed by the orator from

his earliest childhood all the way through to his dotage, none of these

injunctions guarantee ultimate success. Indeed, it would seem that there

has yet to have been an orator as good as one is commanded to become.

It is precisely at this moment of difficulty that I would like to take up

the problem of authenticity in Quintilian. Or, rather, I would like to exam-

ine how this text describes and prescribes a regime that will produce an

authentic and efficacious subject who will be able to lay exclusive claim to

the title of orator.3 Moreover, by assigning the highest military, religious,

and political roles to the orator, Quintilian ensures that this already prized

social category is recognized as an exhaustive category in the sense that it

tends to appropriate to itself all of the other hegemonic social functions

(see, e.g., Quintilian 12.1.25ff.). In other words, the good orator is merged

with the socially good man. At the same time, though, this positive content

is founded upon a number of exclusionary injunctions.

Although these issues extend throughout the tradition of rhetorical

literature and throughout the text of Quintilian himself, I would like to

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89

here focus on them in relation to performance. It is in performance that

one acts out this authentic essence, that one performs the vir bonus; here it

is exposed and evaluated, appreciated or derided. This performance,

though, will require the most thorough attention to detail and the most

thorough self-regulation. Here Quintilian often appeals to Demosthenes as

his example of successful self-mastery. Quintilian deploys the example of

Demosthenes in these sections to transform the Greek pleader into the

ideal image of self-domination. We will see that this is a domination that

has both paranoid and masochistic qualities, yet a domination that is never-

theless a necessary precondition of the assumption of the persona of the

elite Roman male. Even in the notion of a persona, though, we already

find an image saturated with the themes of performance: in Latin persona is

not just personal "character" but also the mask that a character on the

stage wears, a mask that is stylized and revelatory of character. Becoming a

good man implies learning to assume one's own face as a mask. We ought

to look closely into the psychic life of the rhetorical theater.

Oratorical performance is ideally the performance of the vir bonus. This

performance is not merely the donning of a mask or semblance, but a

performance that ought to lend credence to the notion of a truth, of an

essence underlying appearances. Thus one is in a sense making manifest

to the world a soul, a fact of the person. Similarly, this soul needs to be

seen and appreciated by other souls, by other Romans. One assumes of

this audience as well that they are who they seem to be, that they are not

mere masks, but are instead "real," authentic people. The orator requires

of his audience an existence in relation to which he can establish his own

being. The existential qualities of the "I" in any statement of the form "I

am ..." is mediated by considerations of an other or others, consider-

ations of "you."

The problem of the soul and its relation to presentations and per-

formances is a tangled one in Quintilian. Let us, then, examine some of the

more relevant points of his treatment of the relationship between perfor-

mance and being. First, Quintilian makes this communion of affective

experiences relatively transparent provided that one's performance is satis-

factory. Good performance naturally penetrates into the inner man. In

fact, Quintilian seems to endorse a psychology in which external representa-

tions impinge upon the psychic realm automatically.:

Cum sit autem omnis actio, ut dixi, in duas diuisa partis, uocem

gestumque, quorum alter oculos, altera aures mouet, per quos duos

sensus omnis ad animum penetrat adfectus, prius est de uoce dicere,

cui etiam gestus accommodatur.

90 STAGING MASCULINITY

[All performance is, as I have said, divided into two parts, voice and

gesture: the one moves the eyes, while the other moves the ears; and it

is through these two senses that every affect (adfectus) penetrates into

the soul. It is our first task to speak of the voice, to which the gestures

are also accommodated.]

(Quintilian 11.3.14)

Adfectus is a complex word. It is used abstractly to describe a mental or

emotional state or cast of mind where one could render the term in English

with "emotions" or "passions." Quintilian, though, is speaking broadly: the

senses are the royal road down which travel mental conditions on their way

to the soul. Quintilian posits a progress into the psyche of external images:

the world of semblances animates our own mental life. The politics of

forms and the legislation of appearances accordingly shape our internal

experience.

Whose affects are we talking about here? The performer's body stirs

the senses, and then this motion itself stirs up the journey of affect into the

soul. Clearly the sentiment the spectator feels is in a sense given to him by

the performance. A poor performance will interrupt this communication,

but a fitting one will effect a sort of emotional mastery upon the auditor/

spectator:

Habet autem res ipsa (pronuntiatio) miram quandam in orationibus

uim ac potestatem: neque enim tam refert qualia sint quae intra

nosmet ipsos composuimus quam quo modo efferantur: nam ita

quisque ut audit mouetur.

[Yet the matter itself (pronuntiatio) has a certain marvelous force and

potency in orations; and what sort of things we compose within our-

selves matters little relative to the manner in which these things are

brought forth: for as each hears, so is he moved.]

(Quintilian 11.3.2)

Proofs avail naught if they are not attended by vehement assertion on the

part of the speaker.4 A man composes thoughts within himself, but his per-

formance must also arouse the senses of his audience. The images that stir

within have to be so shaped as to appear without and thereby to penetrate

into the heart and mind of another. Where the senses are unmoved, the

affects do not move toward the spectator's soul. The precise mechanism of

communication does not preoccupy Quintilian, and the problems entailed

by this movement of meaning from one psyche to another are seldom much

to the fore. Quintilian routinely represents communication as a problem of

delivery alone: "The voice, like an intermediary, will give to the souls of

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91

judges that disposition it receives from us" (sic uelut media uox, quem

habitum a nostris acceperit, hunc iudicum animis dabit) (11.3.62).

In a similar observation, Quintilian proceeds to document the affective

force of this passion on the part of the speaker, but he also withdraws a bit

from the simple maxim of "as each hears, so is he moved" as championed

at 11.3.2. Instead, he restates his position in terms of a fallible (positive)

transmission of passions. Moreover, leaving a listener cold is always easy:

adfectus omnes languescant necesse est, nisi uoce, uultu, totius prope

habitu corporis inardescunt. Nam cum haec omnia fecerimus, felices

tamen si nostrum illum ignem iudex conceperit, nedum eum supini

securique moueamus ac non et ipse nostra oscitatione soluatur.

[The entire emotional content will necessarily languish unless it is

ablaze in the voice, the visage, in nearly the entire bearing of the body.

For though we have seen to all of this, we are nevertheless fortunate if

the judge takes up that fire of ours; and it's still less likely that we shall

move him if we are laid back and carefree, and our yawning will have a

soporific effect on the judge too.]

(Quintilian 11.3.2-3)

Even if the judge may not be kindled by the same flame that burns within

the speaker, the point to be noted here is that oratorical communication is

not merely one of compelling arguments and proofs, but also of inner

passions (adfectus). Before we were occupied with the audience's affects;

here we see that these are a function of emotions felt first by the speaker

himself. The emotions need to blaze in his physical bearing and voice.5

When these adfectus are clearly seen and heard, then they can move the

judge. If we make this passage and 11.3.2 coincide, then we are to imagine

the following series of events: first the speaker's soul conceives of an

adfectus. This feeling is next communicated to his body and voice. The

speaker delivers himself of his thoughts. Then the physical performance of

the speaker impinges upon the senses of the auditor. The auditor's sensory

experience produces an adfectus that corresponds to the original sentiment

as conceived by the speaker. This adfectus then makes its way into the

spectator's soul.

Such, then, is the ideal version of the interaction between the orator

and his audience. But there are many complexities within this portrait.

What about simulation or dissimulation? More importantly, what sort of

self-knowledge is required to coordinate the soul with the body, even

where a speaker is earnest? And what are the various social inflections that

must be evinced by a performance, and hence must also be resident within

92 STAGING MASCULINITY

the soul? Correspondingly, what must be seen in a performance of the soul

in order for us to recognize and give heed to the speaker?

Let us take up the problem of inauthentic performances first. Later we

will find Quintilian asserting that the surest way to represent a quality is to

actually possess it. And, in its own way, this notion underlies the entire

argument of Quintilian's twelfth and final book. In other words, authentic-

ity makes for the strongest argument. Even though authenticity may be the

surest way to moving the audience, simulation is not for that reason to be

discounted as a potentially effective tool. Take, for example, the case of

stage acting:

Quod si in rebus quas fictas esse scimus et inanes tantum pronuntiatio

potest ut iram lacrimas sollicitudinem adferat, quanto plus ualeat

necesse est ubi et credimus? Equidem uel mediocrem orationem com-

mendatam uiribus actionis adfirmarim plus habituram esse momenti

quam optimam eadem illa destitutam.

[If delivery has such an effect in matters that we know to be idle and

fictive that it provokes rage, tears, and anxiety, how much more must

its force be where we also believe? Indeed, I would assert that even a

mediocre speech recommended by the vigor of its delivery will have

more effect than a superlative one whose delivery has left it in the

lurch.]

(Quintilian 11.3.5)

Here Quintilian repeats an anecdote concerning Demosthenes, an anec-

dote that seems almost obligatory in a rhetorical treatise: Demosthenes is

asked what aspect of speaking was most important. He answers, "Deliv-

ery" (pronuntiatio). He gave as well the second and third prizes to delivery,

until he was no longer asked to assign rankings, such that he seems to have

judged delivery to be, not the most important quality, but the only one.6

The stakes involved in a discussion of delivery, then, are unambiguous.

No sentiment and no speech, no matter how well crafted, can hope to travel

from orator to audience without delivery. Furthermore, the affective con-

tent of the performance impinges upon the audience naturally in accordance

with the constitution of the human senses. Yet there is a twofold danger here.

First, an orator may fail to make the delivery of his speech equal to

the contents of his own soul. Second, and more significantly in its ultimate

consequences, the surface of the delivery may outstrip the contents of both

the sentiments and the character of the performer. It may fail to represent

what the orator is, presenting instead some unintended content that is like a

performative slip of the tongue, a peek into the unconscious. Such a reading

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93

follows from the arguments of the preceding chapter, provided that we now

read from the perspective of the inner man.

Quintilian's text will not grow too anxious over the question of vice

until the final book, where he vehemently, repeatedly, and hence uncon-

vincingly rejects the possibility of a bad man who is a good orator. Never-

theless, a moralized regulation of the contents and qualities of performance

follows immediately from Quintilian's construction of the situation: perfor-

mance engages questions of the soul, of the orator's and of his audience's.

The qualities manifested by a performance must be comprehended within a

certain regulated moral sphere that they may fill the audience with the

proper sentiments. Additionally, these proper sentiments will be appropri-

ately provoked only where the orator is manifesting himself as a vir bonus.7

Where we ourselves lack these sentiments that we aspire to provoke in

others, the most effective fiction will proceed from first propagating within

ourselves the appropriate mental images and then producing them at the

level of the body via voice and gestures:

lam enim tempus est dicendi quae sit apta pronuntiatio: quae certe ea

est quae iis de quibus dicimus accommodatur. Quod quidem maxima

ex parte praestant ipsi motus animorum, sonatque uox ut feritur: sed

cum sint alii ueri adfectus, alii ficti et imitati, ueri naturaliter erum-

punt, ut dolentium irascentium indignantium, sed carent arte ideoque

sunt disciplina et ratione formandi. Contra qui effinguntur imitatione,

artem habent; sed hi carent natura, ideoque in iis primum est bene

adfici et concipere imagines rerum et tamquam ueris moueri.

[It is now time for me to say what a fitting delivery is: a fitting delivery is

certainly that which is adapted to those things of which we are speaking.

For the most part this is produced by the very movements of our souls;

the voice rings as it is struck.8 But while some feelings are true and

others are fictive and imitated, the true ones burst forth naturally (for

example, those of men sorrowing, raging, or indignant), but they lack

art; and for this reason they need to be shaped by rational discipline and

training. On the other hand, the products of imitation, well, they have

art, but they lack nature; and for this reason in their case the first order

of business is to actually feel them, to conceive mental images of the

issues, and to be moved as if they were true.]

(Quintilian 11.3.61-62)

Notice that regardless of the direction from which one proceeds, starting

from either passion or indifference, artifice and sincerity must meet up for

a successful performance. The impassioned man needs to apply "disci-

pline" (disciplina) and "reason" (ratio) to his feelings, while the unengaged

94 STAGING MASCULINITY

speaker needs to agitate himself internally with affecting images of the

proper emotions. There is no radical distinction, then, between authentic-

ity and self-observation. For a man to communicate his true feelings, he

must discover and shape them. One cannot merely be what one is; a study

of the soul is required to coordinate our performances with our psyche.

Moreover, only a student of the mechanics of the soul can manipulate his

internal affects with the proper images such that he performs as he ought

to. And here one notes a clear affinity between the way the spectator is

meant to be influenced by watching the orator and the way in which an

orator stages an internal spectacle for himself that bestirs his soul: images

instruct the passions in both cases. A psychic spectacle precedes the exter-

nal one. It is perhaps not a good idea to ask precisely how the mental

apparatus must be divided up and compartmentalized such that all of this

can happen. Indeed, the construction of the Latin sentence is resolutely

unhelpful and impersonal. But this ambiguity of the mental apparatus is a

useful one even where it is not convincing: calculation and sentiment can-

not be ultimately disengaged.

Quintilian, as opposed to other authors of whom he is himself aware,

has mooted the question of authenticity. The "authentic" and perfect ora-

tor is a hybrid of nature and culture, or in his own words a hybrid of natura

and cura:

Sunt tamen qui rudem illam et qualem impetus cuiusque animi tulit

actionem iudicent fortiorem et solam uiris dignam, sed non alii fere

quam qui etiam in dicendo curam et artem et nitorem et quidquid

studio paratur ut adfectata et parum naturalia solent improbare, uel

qui uerborum atque ipsius etiam soni rusticitate, ut L. Cottam dicit

Cicero fecisse, imitationem antiquitatis adfectant. Verum illi persua-

sione sua fruantur, qui hominibus ut sint oratores satis putant nasci:

nostro labori dent ueniam, qui nihil credimus esse perfectum nisi ubi

natura cura iuuetur.

[Nevertheless, there are those who judge as more forceful and alone

worthy of a real man an artless delivery and one such as the impulse of

the individual's soul has produced. But these men are usually none

other than those who are wont to reproach in oratory care, art, splen-

dor, and whatever is procured via study, as being affected and not

natural enough; or else these fellows are the ones who strive to imitate

antiquity via the rusticity of their words and even of their very pronun-

ciation, as Cicero says Lucius Cotta did. If they think it is enough to be

born for a man to be an orator, they are entitled to their opinion. I

hope they will pardon my efforts, though, as I think that nothing is

perfect where nature is not supplemented by labor (cura).]

(Quintilian 11.3.10-11)

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95

Quintilian's presentation and critique of the other camp reproduces on

their side the very confusion of natura and cura that is an enabling condi-

tion for his own argument. These others, introduced by Quintilian's for-

mula of anonymity that expresses only existence (sunt qui. . .), appear to

be devotees of pure authenticity: they follow only the autonomous pulsions

of the spirit as a guide to expression. Yet these same men can often be

caught affecting antiquity by modulating their vocabulary and expression

so as to make it appear removed from common parlance. Quintilian's

characterization contains the barb that this remoteness is merely spatial

(rusticity) and not temporal (antiquity), where the former complaint in

aesthetic criticism is a traditional and devastating rejoinder to any aspira-

tions toward the latter quality: the rustic is a hick, whereas the ancients

have been hallowed.9 Quintilian's sarcasm is palpable as he states, "I hope

they will pardon my efforts." In the opposite camp we find such necessary

and desirable qualities as sanctity, authority, and virility, but no acknowl-

edgment of a cura that Quintilian nevertheless sees haunting their acts.

According to Quintilian, these others have a theory of oratory, and it

would be more honest to offer a systematic account of the art, such as he

provides.

Even as the question of sincerity becomes a vexed issue, those perfor-

mances that dispel the gravity of the oratorical moment must be avoided at

all costs. An example of this latter difficulty is seen in 11.3.58, where

Quintilian forbids a singing delivery:

Quid uero mouendis adfectibus contrarium magis quam, cum dolen-

dum irascendum indignandum commiserandum sit, non solum ab his

adfectibus, in quos inducendus est iudex, recedere, sed ipsam fori

sanctitatem tludorum talarium licentia soluere?

[What is less likely to stir emotions than when sorrow, rage, indigna-

tion, or pity are called for, not only to retreat from these emotions into

which the judge must be led, but even to dissolve the very sanctity of

the forum with the license of the (textual crux).1°]

Like all of Quintilian's violent prohibitions that are laden with sarcasm and

socially charged terms, one can assume that there were many who prided

themselves upon performing in precisely this "flawed" manner. For Quintil-

ian, though, while the place of speaking is a venue of emotion and passion,

it is also a circumscribed field that does not admit of foreign sentiments.

The orator is therefore an actor who is enjoined to play one, and only one,

part. We will explore this specific proposition in more detail in the next

chapter. The forum, then, is the stage upon which the orator plays out his

role; but this stage admits of only one kind of theater. In the preceding

96 STAGING MASCULINITY

chapter we saw that the orator's body was constrained to always be itself, a

manly and authoritative corporeality. Here this body meets its proper

venue. But more importantly, this venue, the forum and its stage pieces,

will become also the point to which the body from that chapter is always

aiming. The specter of the forum constrains the orator, both body and

soul-or, rather, as a bodily soul in the psychoanalytic sense-with its

imagined sanctity even when the orator is alone with himself. If he is to

be who he truly is, if he is to live his authoritative and manly essence, then

he also lives it as a man of the forum even when he is away from it. Thus

while Roman oratory teems with slurs made against opponents' private

peccadilloes, more "private" literature such as the letters of Pliny also

frequently mentions the necessity of living a serious and literary life when

away from the forum's public stage."11 The maxim that all the world is a

stage finds two crucial modifications in the case of the orator: for him this

stage is the forum, and so too is the very notion of this forum bound up

with the ordering of his psychic life.

Both authenticity and its compromised standing as an interpretive category

serve as structurally useful points to support the whole project of oratory

and the oratorical handbook. The gulf instituted between the soul of the

speaker and the soul of the audience, though traversable, can only be

bridged by an attention to the concrete aspects of the orator's public pres-

ence. Yet this imperative to attend to performance acts as an imperative to

a self-observation. Additionally, this self-observation depends upon living

up to the exigencies of an imagined audience. That is, in order to produce

the successful regime of self-presentation, the orator has to impose upon

himself a sort of inner guard that regulates the movement of the inner

affects toward the physical presentation. And the orator's "perfection" is a

function of the degree of success in the subjection of nature to study,

although Quintilian will call this same relationship an alliance rather than

mastery.

In any event, Quintilian's position echoes Beauvoir's famous maxim:

one is not born a man, one becomes one. Nature is in need of supplementa-

tion that the gulf between a socially prescribed destiny and an inadequate

natural dispensation may be closed. Notice that this labor is crucial and

explicit only in Quintilian's project: the partisans of the "natural" orator,

so far as their own professions are concerned, have a self-grounded, vigor-

ous, masculine subject (vir) who need only speak in order to manifest

himself as being just what he was born. This sort of subject defends the

notion of habitus as a mystified possession. But one does so in explicit

rejection of the sort of analysis that a critic like Quintilian brings to bear on

the body. Thus we once again find that the naive self-relation favored by

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97

Bourdieu so that he may read the habitus for its unacknowledged structur-

ings does not represent the state of affairs at Rome: one can only be

ignorant in the face of a competing discourse promising knowledge.

Quintilian has made a fatal observation against his opponents' position

on the grounds that it evinces an unacknowledged study and affectation.

Shifting our own critical vocabulary somewhat, though, we might consider

the distinction between the position of these men and that offered by

Quintilian as a difference between a group who presuppose an effortless

interpellation elsewhere and before and a critic who proposes a constant

and worried labor of hailings and self-addresses nevertheless designed to

secure the same ultimate subject. The dispute thus turns around the time

and the place of the names orator and man: is one always already a man,

living in a present guaranteed by an efficacious and divinely performative

prior hailing? Or is the relationship to the name man rather asymptotic, a

relationship of repeated efforts at self-naming?12 Here we would have a

sort of tragedy of the oratorical subject: he can only become who he must

be by embarking on a project that ensures that he can never actually exist.

Quintilian's orator needs to perform a self that is true to its gender,

class, privilege, and authority. So too must this orator explore himself in

order to perform himself. And the orator's fidelity to this self that he both

discovers and enacts comes at the price of rejecting or even abjecting

others who cannot presume to the perfect convergence of these traits. As

was discussed in the preceding chapter, the essence of the orator's status as

Roman, as man, as aristocrat, et cetera, is produced and performed at the

level of the body. The body matters and is made material, but the process

of bodily inscription and legibility has associated with it an elaborate tech-

nology of the inner man.

The engine driving this technology is cruelty. An orator's status is

under constant attack from his peers; and the precise grounding of this

status, its cultivation, and its defense are therefore vital issues to which the

orator as subject and self-subjected must attend. Quintilian assures his

reader that he can expect at any moment mockery and abuse from the

audience of his peers. The choice is either to torment oneself or submit to

tortures at the hands of others. Ultimately, of course, we will find Quintil-

ian to be the cruelest and most biting critic; and we will likewise find that

only by assuming this same cruelly critical perspective in relation to himself

will the orator be able to emend sufficiently his performance of the self.

Self-cruelty is the guarantor of the effective performance of impeccable

masculine authority.

Quintilian is happy to record some of the more memorable barbs in

the tradition of rhetorical handbooks that he might promote his own argu-

ments. But, by way of a brief external example, let me cite a recollection of

98 STAGING MASCULINITY

Seneca the Elder. Cassius Severus once told Seneca how he lost his pa-

tience with one Cestius, who was all the rage with the students of the day:

Memini me intrare scholam eius cum recitaturus esset in Milonem;

Cestius ex consuetudine sua miratus dicebat: si Thraex essem, Fusius

essem; si pantomimus essem, Bathyllus essem, si equus, Melissio. Non

continui bilem et exclamavi: si cloaca esses, maxima esses. Risus

omnium ingens; scholastici intueri me, quis essem qui tam crassas

cervices haberem. Cestius Ciceroni responsurus mihi quod responderet

non invenit, sed negavit se executurum nisi exissem de domo. Ego

negavi me de balneo publico exiturum nisi lotus essem.

[I recall that I entered his school when he was going to make a reading

against (Cicero's) Milo. As usual, Cestius was full of himself; he was

saying: "If I were a gladiator, I would be Fusius; if I were a panto-

mime, I would be Bathyllus, if I were a horse, I would be Melissio." I

didn't restrain my gall, and I cried out, "If you were a sewer, you

would be the city's central." Everyone laughed loudly. The rhetoric

students looked at me to find out who was this fellow who was such a

boor. Cestius, who was going to make a response to Cicero, did not

find an answer for me; he said he would not continue unless I left his

house. I said that I would not leave a public bathhouse unless I were

washed.]

(Seneca Maior, Controversiae 3.pr.16)

This is all happening after Cicero's death. Cestius attracts followers with

his replies to the published speeches of Cicero. Severus has just com-

plained that students will not even read Cicero's speeches except those to

which Cestius had replied. The well-timed interruption made by Severus is

formulated as an attack on the speaker's performance such that this perfor-

mance is desanctified and looses its patina of authority. It is not so much

that Cestius will not continue with his performance; rather, he cannot

continue while the man who makes him into a laughable sewer is standing

in front of him. The slur dispels the illusion of manly, aristocratic, emo-

tional presence and instead reinscribes the performance in the register of

the ridiculous and subpolitical.13 Some in the audience may think the inter-

ruption somewhat thick-headed, but this does not keep it from being effec-

tive. Severus has ensured that there will be no oratory or orators in this

salon become bathhouse. The air of sanctity borrowed from the forum has

been dispelled.

In order to deploy his own prescriptive tenets, Quintilian evokes anec-

dotes containing similar charges being leveled against various orators. But

in this case Quintilian is not a precocious young man who deflates a pomp-

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99

ous windbag and his turgid rhetorical figures. Quintilian speaks as a master

to his students. He threatens and ridicules their bodies in the name of good

rhetoric and the forum's gravity:

Procursio oportuna breuis moderata rara conueniet: iam et ambulatio

quaedam propter immodicas laudationum moras, quamquam Cicero

rarum incessum neque ita longum probat. Discursare uero et, quod

Domitius Afer de Sura Manlio dixit, "satagere" ineptissimum: ur-

baneque Flauus Verginius interrogauit de quodam suo antisophiste

quot milia passum declamasset.

[Stepping forward will be appropriate, but only if it is well-timed, a

short, measured distance, and infrequent; and sometimes one walks to

and fro because the audience's applause can produce lengthy delays,

even though Cicero says that one should do this rarely and not traverse

much space. But it is totally incompetent to run around and about or,

as Domitius Afer said of Manilius Sura, "to bustle." And Flavus

Verginius cleverly asked of a certain opposing speaker how many miles

he had declaimed.]

(Quintilian 11.3.126)

The invocation of bustling by Domitius Afer changes the scene from the

political arena to the comic stage by using a verb (satagere) associated with

farce. Flavus Verginius in his turn transforms his opponent's performance

into a pompous hike, thus converting the delivery into a ridiculous spec-

tacle and a mere rhetorical showpiece (declamare) rather than a vehicle of

affective communion between performer and audience. What one snide

Roman once said of another's body Quintilian now repeats as universal

prohibitions applicable to all bodies that would aspire to excellence. Of

similar spirit are the following jabs:

Reprehendenda et illa frequens et concitata in utramque partem

nutatio, quam in Curione patre inrisit et lulius, quaerens quis in luntre

loqueretur, et Sicinius: nam cum adsidente collega, qui erat propter

ualetudinem et deligatus et plurimis medicamentis delibutus, multum

se Curio ex more iactasset, "numquam," inquit, "Octaui, collegae tuo

gratiam referes, qui nisi fuisset, hodie te istic muscae comedissent."

[One must reproach as well that constant and agitated bobbing from

side to side that Julius derided in the elder Curio, asking who was

speaking in a skiff. Sicinius mocked it as well: Curio's colleague sat at

his side, and the man was bandaged up and smeared with a good

number of medicines owing to ill health. Meanwhile Curio was as

usual throwing himself around a great deal. Accordingly Sicinius

100 STAGING MASCULINITY

said, "Octavius, you will never be able to thank your colleague

enough: if he weren't here, today the flies would have devoured you

where you sat."]

(Quintilian 11.3.129)

The plight of Curio puts further twists on the problems Quintilian has

been addressing. Suppose an orator is ardent, and the images have kindled

up his own soul, but his performance errs. It need not even fail outright;

rather, it only has to be susceptible to a successful ridiculous redefinition by

another performer. The orator needs to be able to foresee every potential

attack. He needs to adopt a self-reflective stance if only to anticipate and

thus to eliminate any assailable points of his delivery. The authenticity of

his ardor is not sufficient, and another blow has been struck against those

theorists who would have a man only be born to be an orator. Thus, if one's

passions lead to an overly agitated performance, this same performance

can be reread by hostile members of the audience in such a way as to

expose the performance as not having been one of an aristocratic and

manly essence, but to have been instead the comic ravings of some

boatsman or the like.

Thus, one is assured, it is only by a thorough and continuous self-

mastery that one can succeed in being what one is. In order to consolidate

this point, recourse is often made to Demosthenes, a man declared to have

been one of the two greatest orators to have ever lived. In fact Demosthenes

himself was once afflicted with the agitated performative style of a Curio.

Demosthenes is said to have corrected this fault in his own delivery by

menacing himself with a spear while practicing, such that only by keeping his

movements moderated would he avoid its prick (Quintilian 11.3.120).

While Cicero, his precepts, and his speeches all serve as an invaluable

store for Quintilian, Demosthenes is in his own way a more useful figure.

There are no technical works preserved under Demosthenes' name; and

Quintilian only has Demosthenes' speeches and certain anecdotes that have

the orator's name attached to them. While a study of Quintilian's use of

the speeches of Demosthenes would be interesting in its own right,14 let

us take up instead the problem of Quintilian's use of anecdotes about Demos-

thenes. We are dealing not with a real Demosthenes but with an exemplary

Demosthenes. These anecdotes are deployed as emblems of the proper

discipline to be observed that one might equal and eventually surpass this

orator who is at one point called "the leader by far and almost the law of

orating" at Athens (longe princeps. . . ac paene lex orandi) (10.1.76).

Of course, one does not easily attain to the condition of the law. First,

Quintilian's generosity to Demosthenes should not be seen as obligatory.

Plutarch's biography of the orator includes some critical remarks on De-

SELF-MASTERY

101

mosthenes' style of delivery attributed to Eratosthenes and to Demetrius of

Phaleron. This master of delivery was accused of frenzied, Bacchic perfor-

mances and performances that appealed to the vulgar masses rather than

the better sort of citizen (Plutarch, Demosthenes 9.4, 11.3). Obviously the

politics of delivery remains remarkably consistent in discussions of rhetoric

from every period: is the performance noble? Is it vulgar? Quintilian,

though, does not wish to admit any of the ambiguous descriptions of De-

mosthenes into his own discussion. Instead he selects from the traditional

stories told about Demosthenes so as to describe a superlative figure whose

perfection requires of us that we aspire to it even as we despair that we

shall ever equal it. This Demosthenes is a master of discipline.

Demosthenes is repeatedly represented as training himself vigorously

off in the wilderness. This solitary toil leaves the orator alone to himself

and the self-imposed dictates of his discipline. In order to train himself

to maintain his composure and to stick to his text when speaking amid

the tumult of the assembly and the courts, Demosthenes practices before the

waves crashing into the shore (Quintilian 10.3.30). In order to expand the

capacity of his lungs and accordingly to augment his ability to deliver long

rhetorical periods in a single breath, Demosthenes practices by reciting as

many verses as possible while running uphill (11.3.54). Always either train-

ing or performing, the orator cuts himself off from human society only that

he may return to it a greater master of its rules. And Demosthenes shows

that even nature can be impressed into the service of the orator's cura:

geography is made to reproduce a society from which one retreats in order

to return more fully its master.

Of the anecdotes recounted, Quintilian passes over the traditional

description of Demosthenes as a man who, very unusually for someone of

that age, drank only water and no wine. If one aligns drunkenness with a

loss of self-control, then the import of the practice becomes clear. Simi-

larly, if we suppose that Demosthenes sought to spare his voice the debilitat-

ing influence of alcohol, we again find a man ever and always thinking

about his oratory and his body as his oratorical instrument even at the

expense of other social roles such as the affable bon vivant.

Quintilian neglects to offer the juiciest version of Demosthenes' cave:

Demosthenes, having shaved half of his head so as to make public appear-

ance impossible, imprisons himself in a subterranean chamber to practice

his craft to perfection. For this see Plutarch, Demosthenes 7.6 (cf. also

[Plutarch], Lives of the Ten Orators 844d):

6E Tx iOUTOV xUTayeLov Ev oLxobo loaL [EXETr11WLOV, 6 oil e-

ouero xaL xaO' fl~otg, vcav0a 6b ntavtcwg sEv ExaLoIg i@tacG

xanorvLa O k