Techne
For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading and thinking about definitions of techne. The term is used in various ways in discourse about rhetoric, and each writer’s definition of course centers on their particular needs. Most writers don’t go into any depth about their peculiar usages, and as a whole I’ve been pretty puzzled by it. Like logos, it’s a term whose luster has definitely worn off as it has become currency.
George Kennedy, in Classical Rhetoric & its Christian and Secular Tradition and A New History of Classical Rhetoric, consistently uses techne to refer to the “handbook” tradition in rhetoric. Kennedy suggests that there were three strands of rhetorical inquiry—that of the techne logon, or handbook, sophistic rhetoric which was taught largely by example, and philosophical inquiry into rhetoric which stressed its relationship to dialectic.
However, nowhere does Kennedy even attempt to define the term beyond its ordinary relations with art, knack, or skill. The subtle point that seems to exist between the lines is that techne is implicated in “rules,” which follows from the Lain ratio, which in turn is built from the Greek logos. In the later New History, Kennedy seems to collapse the tripartite “inquiry” into two distinct strands of pedagogical practice—that of the techne of handbook writers compared to the techne of practitioners, the sophists, who taught by example alone. He claims that these two strands begin to weave together by the fourth century in the school of Isocrates.
April 18, 2005 9:27 AM | Comments (1)
Remembrance
James VanDerZee, Memorial to Rachel VanDerZee, 1927
Several things intrigue me about this montage by James VanDerZee. It is a memorial to his daughter, who died at age 19 from peritonitis. He has composited her image in the window, alongside a religious scene. Unlike most of his mortuary portraits, he has not opened her casket.
And the photograph includes a text—most of “Crossing the Bar” by Tennyson. But the second stanza is missing; I am not sure if he excised it or it is a feature of the edition he ripped the page from.
Regardless of editorial insight or lack of it, it seems to me that post-mortem photography is involves both past and future remembrance. It is hard to get my head around the idea that we paradoxically remember the future—remember what has yet to happen. Anticipate a need for some artifact to place the past in perspective—not the perspective of now, but the perspective of the future.
History is not limited to an attempt at controlling the present, but also embraces anticipation of a future we would want to remember.
