Review of Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation by Debra Hawhee.

Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation by Debra Hawhee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Sean McCullough, TCU

(Published March 13, 2018) 

Since the (new) material turn, scholars in rhetorical studies have sought to better account for the material-discursive networks that scaffold human expression and agency. While many have allocated significant attention to humans, objects, and forces, few have given nonhuman animals their due. This is one oversight that Debra Hawhee aims to correct in Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation. Often left out of the conversation surrounding rhetorical action and agency, Hawhee demonstrates the pivotal role animals played in early Greek and Roman rhetorical instruction, in effect, drastically revising rhetoric’s anthropocentric, logos-centric history. That animals do not currently figure into our social, networked understanding of rhetoric today points to the need for works such as Hawhee’s that illuminate animals’ erasure from rhetoric. Taking a similar historiographical approach to scholars like Cheryl Glenn and Susan Jarratt, who rewrote histories of rhetoric to better account for silenced women (Glenn) and sophistic rhetoricians (Jarratt), Hawhee expertly resituates nonhuman animals and highlights their rhetorical roles in seminal texts written by rhetoricians including: Aristotle, Cicero, and Erasmus. Beyond this re-historicizing, though, Hawhee also re-theorizes human logos and nonhuman animal alogos, arguing for a consideration of the two as complementary and not characterized relationally by presence and absence of speech/thought, respectively. Together, these two goals substantiate Hawhee’s call for greater attention to the kinds of “transactional, cross-species partnerships” (170) that can productively complicate our conceptions of language and sensation.

In advancing such a complication, Hawhee first grounds her theory of animals in/as rhetoric ironically in Aristotle’s definition of man, the logos-having animal, and the role sensation (aisthesis) plays in both connecting human and nonhuman animals and energizing speech, logos. Thus construed, nonhuman animals’ alogos, a discourse we have negatively characterized as purely sensuous and a-rational, does not merely function as a form of absence. Rather, its sensuous appearances in works by Aristotle and other rhetoricians reveal ways in which animal imagery can energize language, making it active, memorable, and easy-to-imagine, which has broad implications for historical and current theories of style. Recuperating aisthesis from absence of speech or thought, Hawhee theorizes a continuum between nonhuman animal alogos and human logos, a recursive loop that imbricates sensing animals in a process of “filling logos with life” (15).

Augmenting arguments against configurations of sensation and reason as diametrically opposed, Hawhee delineates Aristotelian conceptions of aisthesis and logos that are complementary. According to Hawhee, three types of perception—feeling aisthesis, deliberative aisthesis, and phantasia—frame rhetorical acts (18-20), and she provides ample evidence to support a reading of Aristotle’s inclusion of children and nonhuman animals in his Rhetoric as a means of situating aisthesis and logos as mutual steps in an energetic expressive process: Before one speaks, she senses, makes judgments about the phenomena she senses, and then imagines connections between sensed objects. Effectively dismantling the logos/alogos binary, Hawhee substantiates a need to reread the nonhuman animals rhetoricians such as Aristotle, Demetrius, Longinus, Cicero, and Erasmus wrote into their rhetorical manuals on style, giving them their due in traditions of rhetoric and proposing a “zoostylistics” that speaks to the ways humans have relied on animals to invigorate their discourse. Crucial to such a move, Hawhee also illuminates early theorists’ and pedagogues’ uses of nonhuman animals in early rhetorical instruction manuals and formal models such as the progymnasmata and paradoxical encomia. Building on the energizing capacities of animals in discourse, Hawhee takes the second half of her text to determine and define the affordances of nonhuman animals for medieval memory arts (Carruthers, Yates), the rhetorical process of accumulatio (Erasmus Copia), and a rhetoric beyond logos.

In her re-historicization of nonhuman animals’ roles in rhetorical expression and inquiry, Hawhee simultaneously responds to and builds away from George Kennedy’s call for rhetoric scholars to examine nonhuman animals in relation to human acts of persuasion (“A Hoot in the Dark”). Hawhee constructs a theory of rhetoric that accounts for the ways that nonhuman animals augment humans’ persuasive efforts, and she also demonstrates that animals have been a part of rhetorical theory and instruction since the classical period. Rewriting rhetoric’s zoological history through historiography, Hawhee brings unrepresented and underrepresented rhetorical artifacts to the fore, at times providing her own translations and analyses. This work enables Hawhee to situate her theory of a sensuous, energetic rhetoric in historical precedence, ultimately adding to the exigency of her work—especially as contemporary scholarship continues to challenge anthropocentric rhetorics. In addition, Hawhee’s dedication to digging into primary sources exonerates her from a tendency in historical scholarship to mistake criticism for historical research (Enos 10).

For Hawhee, many classical rhetoric scholars, such as Kennedy, Bruce Boehrer, and Donald Clark, have addressed animals in relation to Greek and Roman rhetoric, and many of these scholars have even published scholarship on the progymnasmata exercises; however, none of these scholars has theorized more animal-equitable rhetorics through the abundance of animals in the progymnasmata tradition. Situating nonhuman animals within the preliminary rhetorical instructional methods allows Hawhee to substantiate claims concerning the ways that nonhuman animals impact, influence, and invigorate human rhetorical endeavors. Building from extant animal studies work as well, Hawhee challenges readings of animals in works such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric that end with cries of egregious anthropomorphism or mistreatment of animals (4). While indictments of those natures certainly merit critical attention, Hawhee seeks to move past such injunctions, to more productively (for both nonhuman and human animals) theorize animalistic imagery and acts of ethopoeia as moments where nonhuman animals reinsert themselves into the expressive continuum between aisthesis and logos.

Beyond providing a theoretical mechanism and historical evidence for reconfiguring nonhuman animals’ roles in the rhetorical tradition (past and current), Hawhee also offers a more accurate account of rhetorical education, granting greater significance to the progymnasmata exercises—and the nonhuman animals therein. While it perhaps seems controversial that in ancient Greece rhetoricians such as Aristotle perceived of children and nonhuman animals as “partners in alogos” (82), prisoners of sensation and lacking speech, Hawhee venerates these marginalized entities—and their texts—illuminating nonhuman animals as the most relatable and complementary guides to help human children transition from alogos to logos. Moreover, as guides, or teachers, nonhuman animals’ lessons never vanish from logos-driven rhetoric. In fact, the fables and exercises contained in the progymnasmata tradition provide a theoretical framework for sensuous, fantastic rhetorical memory and invention arts.

While scholars have most often treated the progymnasmata curriculum as “a mere precursor to more elevated forms of learning” (113), Hawhee asserts that the exercises had more significant and lasting implications for rhetoric and the types of knowledge(s) that it makes available, influencing the “more advanced” stages of rhetorical education for adult male Greek and Roman citizens—and also theory and instruction in the medieval tradition. Hawhee derives her evidence for such a reconfiguration of the progymnasmata curriculum through examining rhetoricians’ theories of memory from Aristotle through Albert the Great, which all situate sensation—as opposed to reason—as vital to memory arts. With sensation at the fore, Hawhee not only galvanizes dynamic, kinetic nonhuman animals as integral to early discussion and instruction in rhetorical memory, but she also demonstrates a history of drawing on nonhuman animals—precisely for their energizing capacities—to make discourse that is more memorable.

Striking, mobile animal imagery, Hawhee contends, has the ability to accomplish more discursively than traditionally-defined rational language. In her examination of animal testicles as mnemonic images in medieval texts, Hawhee demonstrates how these small body parts, through named associations with larger animals, help create a memorable, visible image. In [pseudo-]Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herrenium, for example, the author describes a man who has been poisoned, holding a ram’s testicles on his fourth finger (121). While not an active image, the male ram’s testicles exert a kinetic force: these tiny organs exude virility and sexual potency. The act of procreation gets proverbially set into motion, and the testicles seem to grow a body—“one complete with—and complemented by—a pair of threatening horns” (123).

Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw presents a strong argument for reconsidering nonhuman animals’ roles in the rhetorical tradition. However, while the text expertly integrates nonhuman animals into popular treatises that scaffold rhetorical theory and instruction today, asking readers to suspend their reservations about the problematic ways animals have been figured in past and present discourse, it does not address how scholars and teachers can reconcile the advancements nonhuman animals bring to rhetoric with humans’ linguistic and physical mistreatment of them. If scholars and pedagogues are to engage in cross-species partnerships, to better understand all agents’ histories of rhetoric, then this suspension of moral judgment must come to an end soon. Although, perhaps Hawhee, a historiographer, excises from her text any ethical criticism as an act of encouraging the scholars she mentions from fields such as animal studies to take up her work to address those issues.

Similarly, while Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw offers a productive reconfiguration of the alogos/logos binary, situating nonhuman animal alogos as integral to both sensation and reason, it does not offer much of a discussion of the ways competing pedagogies, such as those featured in the first and second Sophistic movements (Enos, Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle; Roman Rhetoric), also contributed to nonhuman animals’ perceived challenges to logos-centric rhetoric. Instead of parsing between different movements associated with rhetorical theory and practice, though, Hawhee provides a thorough analysis of the ways nonhuman animals invade common (and not so common) rhetorical treatises and artifacts—all to ultimately substantiate a reconfiguration of rhetorical instruction as sensuous and lively. Thus, while she does not draw attention to competing theories of rhetoric and epistemology per se, she does convincingly challenge longstanding assumptions of rhetoric as purely human, demonstrating how nonhuman animals and sensation figure into Aristotle’s theories, extend into the progymnasmata tradition, and, consequently, frame adolescent and adult rhetors’ eventual uptake of logos.

As posthumanist scholarship continues to challenge traditional ontologies and epistemologies, scholars have to confront the animal question. While it is easy to interpret rhetoricians such as Aristotle and Kenneth Burke as divorcing nonhuman animals from the rhetorical tradition, Hawhee challenges readers to reimagine rhetoric through the lens of a cross-species relationship. In their race to account for objects, networks, and forces, posthumanist scholars have neglected nonhuman animals, and Hawhee demonstrates the extent to which such negligence perpetuates inaccurate understandings of rhetoric.