Accumulating Character: Time and Ethos in Rhetorical Theory

Abstract

“Accumulating Character” develops a theoretical framework that highlights the rhetorical and interrelated workings of character and time. In rhetorical scholarship, character—or ethos—is typically construed as either fleeting or fixed. This dissertation makes explicit the links between these two temporal extremes, identifying the ways that ethos accumulates rhetorical force over time. To attend to the temporal dimensions of ethos, I first construct a rhetorical model of accumulated time. Here, I conjoin Aristotle’s definition of chronos in the Physics with the scholarship of Karen Barad to craft a complex picture of accumulated time as a rhetorically significant materialdiscursive force that emerges from the deep entanglement of nonhuman and human ecologies. In Chapter 2, I sketch a framework for understanding how a rhetorical sense of accumulated time underscores the temporal dynamics of ethos. To make visible the ways that this cumulative ethos operates, I analyze multiple classical texts concerning the trial of Socrates and demonstrate the cumulative rhetorical effects of Socrates’ ethos on the city of Athens. In Chapter 3, I examine how the accelerated circulation of online media disrupts the temporal regularity that often governs the evolution of cumulative ethos. To account for these temporal complexities, I develop the paired concepts of rhetorical saturation and rhetorical rupture and explain how they function in dialectical tension with each other. I then elucidate how these twin ideas contribute to the irregular accumulation of character by analyzing Kanye West’s ethos as it circulates across a variety of online platforms. In Chapter 4, I investigate how cryptocurrencies test the limits of rhetorical character by disrupting the timeline for its accretion and decentering cumulative ethos from human subjects. By studying Bitcoin through the lens of cumulative ethos, I foreground the centrality of both character and time to commerce as well as the consequences of attempting to replace a complex rhetorical figure like ethos with a mechanical facsimile like the blockchain protocol. In sum, “Accumulating Character” emphasizes the importance of accumulated time to rhetorical activity, and especially to the concept of ethos. This, in turn, makes visible the complicated ways that character accrues rhetorical influence as it negotiates shifting temporalities.