Epideictics and Eternity: Functions of the Time-Present in Ritual Speech
Kathleen Glenister Roberts
Abstract
Aristotle’s notion that epideictic rhetoric is rooted in the present (unlike forensic, rooted in the past; or deliberative,
rooted in the future) has not had a strong influence on scholars interested in the form. Burke (1950) and Bryant
(1953) even dismiss the “time-present” characteristic of epideictic as an overly-schematic contrivance on Aristotle’s
part. But this paper revisits an opportunity introduced by a few rhetoricians who integrated ideas from speech-act
theory and ritual studies into their understanding of epideictic. I suggest that the time-present is emphasized anew
by these ideas, and may broaden approaches to rhetoric across cultures.
Keywords: epideictic, rhetoric, ritual, speech, oratory, specious present, liminality, eternity, culture
Introduction
Of the three forms of speech identified by Aristotle (forensic, epideictic, and deliberative), epideictic
(ceremonial speech) is least-defined. There is no single paradigm for epideictic rhetoric (Duffy, 1983), perhaps
because scholars neglect it in favor of political deliberative speech. Epideictic has been called “inferior” because of
its supposed lack of practical purpose (Cope, 1867, pp. 121-122), and judged as mere “images of hollow bombast
and gaudy verbal baubles” (Condit, 1985, p. 284).
However, epideictic genres are significant beyond the narrow cultural sphere (the North Atlantic) that
professes the canons of rhetoric. This paper offers a new perspective by considering epideictic’s manipulation of
time. Given that Aristotle described forensic as rooted in the past, and deliberative in the future, some thinkers have
concluded that locating epideictic in the present was simply a contrivance (Burke, 1969). But this paper argues
otherwise. Due to time and content constraints, I begin by assuming that it is possible recast epideictic rhetoric as
ritual speech. I am assuming that at a minimum, ritual speech contains the performatives identified by the linguist
J.L. Austin: words that “accomplish things” (such as “I now pronounce you husband and wife”).
The bulk of the paper will discuss the implications of this new description when set in a philosophical
context first proposed by James (1890) that the present is “specious,” perhaps even nonexistent. The skills of the
rhetor make the liminality of a ritual present to an audience, supporting Bourdieu’s (1977) assertion that ritual
depends on the manipulation of social categories.
Epideictic speech, the paper concludes, manipulates the social category we call time by discursively
constructing palpable phenomena like nostalgia, eternity, and liminality. Perhaps most significantly for the TSB5
conference, considering the time-present relevant to epideictic expands rhetoric’s global horizon. This is crucial,
because most rhetorical theory originates in the North Atlantic and yet ritual speech is prevalent in cultures
elsewhere that tend toward polychronic worldviews. Acknowledgment of these differences is important not just for
the study of speech but for larger phenomenological issues in postcolonial and similar contexts, as I will explain.
First, an exploration of the “time-present” and why it is so significant to ritual speech.
The Time-Present
Perhaps because of its uniqueness as a symbolic structure, the nature of time features prominently in
metaphysical philosophy. As a social fact, time is described in some cultures as “flying by” or “wasted” or
“spent.” We believe we are marking it on the clock and calendar (Read, 2002). But what actually constitutes it? If
we think of time as a series of “moments,” they are actually quite difficult to perceive within any dimension. Let’s
imagine the moments are really minutes. Well, these can be further divided into seconds. And what of seconds?
They can be divided still. Moreover, the more we think of stringing together “moments” or “milliseconds” or the
minuscule divisions therein, the more we come to understand that “points” in time really have no measure.
“Moments” seem too long when trying to divide up time into something tangible. So perhaps the word “instants”
carries our experience better? But now we really have a dilemma: time cannot be “composed” of instants, because
an instant has no dimension (Read, 2002). If we attempt to graph an instant, would it have any length or width? No.
It would be the tiniest, most miniscule point on a graph possible. And even if we filled the graph with billions of
these points, since they have no x/y axes measurement within themselves, they will not have created any length or
width. We will still have no dimension.
Importantly for a discussion of rhetoric, though, the time-present “feels” real. From phenomenological and
psychological perspectives, all our ideas regarding time emerge through experience. How is it that I can rationally
accept that time is dimensionless, yet feel that it is “real”?
William James (1890) offered a breakthrough by asking us to imagine listening to a song, or watching a
meteor shower. According to James, the only time-measure we experience is “present” because we are noticing a
change – the last note of the song, or the disappearance of the last meteor. But this “present” is itself not real: it is
only the end of the past, and the beginning of the future. It is a “co-terminus.” By itself it is nothing: we would not
notice it but for the end or the beginning of something (a change). And our ignorance of this is what leaves us
terribly imperceptive regarding time, said James and his contemporaries.
James (1890) thus presents us with a significant label for what actually happens in the time-present of
epideictic rhetoric. He calls our failure to perceive the “coterminous” of past and future the specious present. The
specious present is merely a marker in our perception that a phenomenon has finished (a musical note, a meteor) and
something else instantly begins (silence, darkness). We would not know this “present” except for the past and
future, so clearly the present is specious. It is a fiction, the faculty by which we lie to ourselves and experience
“time.”
My argument is that epideictic rhetoric is that fiction writ large, made (in)visible by communicative acts.
Ritual, Bell (2009) has noted, must hide its own invention. Ritual speech is a central component to that (in)visibility
of the present. Ritual “time” is still constrained by the same metaphysical processes explained above, but because it
is a social act shaped by persons, the experience of time is different. Leff (1988) explains:
Our sense of present time is potentially ambiguous. On the secular level, it is an irreversible moment of somewhat
arbitrary duration that divides past from future. On the sacred level, however, the present becomes recoverable as a
return to origins, as an eternal now, as a still moment when primal truths emerge (p. 29).
I should stress that this idea of how time “feels” is not emotional but phenomenological. In her global
study of rituals Bell (2009) pointed out the need to interrogate vernacular practices and discourses regarding
"feeling" in Europe and the US. Rituals aren't transubstantial because they "feel good" but because they accomplish
something. They transform individuals and groups, they shape social categories, or they connect the human and the
divine through both space and time.
Metaphysically, perhaps it is true that time is “composed” of nothing (Read, 2002), and that “instants”
themselves do not really exist. But an instant can be named. If the present is specious, then epideictic rhetoric is far
more of a challenge than forensic (rooted in the past, which is describable) or deliberative (rooted in the future,
which is exhortable). Time is dimensionless, but rituals give the present dimension and duration. Epideictic
rhetoric is, I argue, the public enactment of the “lie.” Against all metaphysical laws, against all rationality, ritual
speech gives the time-present length, width, and mass.
This is not mere interpretive speculation on my part: we know that skilled rhetors accomplish this. Social
scientists have observed that certain individuals are more astute with their interaction with time. In many
anthropological circles, of course, it is assumed that ritual is accomplished through external factors like
hallucinogenic drugs, starvation, dehydration, sleep deprivation, or social coercion. The present project is more
interested in discourse, because therein time is “customized” (Flaherty, 2011) interpersonally or within the rhetorical
sphere. This is known as “time work” (Flaherty, 2011, p. 133): some individuals have more “temporal intelligence”
than others and can influence time’s duration and allocation, and the frequency and sequence of events. A
successful epideictic rhetor must have a keen sense that time is both a social fact and an internal consciousness.
Time is, after all, constructed linguistically (Kiewe, 2011, p. 148).
This is happening in ritual speech. Previous studies of epideictic rhetoric have brought time as a useful
framework for commenting on artful speech (Leff, 1988; Lake, 1991). But I am taking this a step further. Like
Kiewe (2011), “I suggest that at issue here is not the role of time in rhetoric but of time in or within discourse”
(Kiewe, 2011, p. 147). Ritual speech is a subgenre of epideictic rhetoric that makes the time-present factor (first
articulated by Aristotle) not simply complementary to a past-future matrix for other types of rhetoric, but an
essential feature of its role in the public sphere. Rituals are a vital component of communication in social groups.
Bourdieu (1977) offers a definition of ritual that is remarkably similar to our understanding of rhetoric. He says that
ritual is the manipulation of cultural categories in order to meet situational needs. Time is surely one of these
manipulated cultural categories:
The very ability to conceive time differently and via different metaphors point to its elastic position in the rhetorical
process as the anchor that pivots and sustains the claims made… Temporality needs to be understood as a significant
variable in rhetoric’s arsenal (Kiewe, 2011, p. 149).
In my larger book project on epideictic rhetoric, I am offering examples of how very lethal that arsenal can
be. We must admit that the deconstruction of time is highly convincing. Everything about the “present” is false:
specious, spurious, and seemingly inconsequential. The ability of rhetors to call attention to “instants” which ought
not to exist, and to make palpable or mythical the very “moments” that are mere cotermini of other describable and
exhortable times, is something worth exploring on a global scale.
The Rhetorical Instant
If we accept that one of the functions of epideictic rhetoric is to “stop time” or otherwise draw attention to a
nonexistent “instant,” then we might ask: why is this important?
There are a number of possibilities. First, there is a basic sense in rituals that something “needs” to be said.
Johnson (1970) describes this as a kind of “maintenance value” (p. 275) in epideictic that fulfills neither the need to
persuade nor the need to praise. Condit (1985) takes a different view, emphasizing the role of ritual as one of
comfort for the community. This is vital when a “troubled event” (p. 288) has taken place.
Both of these reactions to epideictic situations’ need for ritual speech – the idea of an event exigency being
satisfied, or comfort lent in times of trouble – are rather intuitive. Hauser (1999) recalls Aristotle’s assessment of
his own public realm as unstable and emotional (p. 8). He then endorses Aristotle’s prescription: the praise and
blame that emerge from epideictic speeches, since they form the vocabulary needed for a more stable and rational
public sphere. Epideictic rhetoric teaches citizens how to form a healthy civil society.
Consubstantiality is another useful term to describe the importance of the rhetorical instant. Sullivan (1993)
uses it to explain epideictic rhetoric wherein speaker and audience “share a common mental or spiritual space…
[Consubstantiality is] the experience of members of an audience who find that the speaker is saying exactly what
needs to be said, who find that they are being caught up in a celebration of their own vision of reality” (pp. 127128).
How is this sense of being “caught up in” a moment achieved? What is the rhetorical instant? Carter’s
(1991) focus on ritual itself is pertinent: ritual (and ritual speech) achieves its value “precisely because it breaks the
rules of ordinary behavior” (p. 212). He was careful to stress that this is true for all cultures, and that much of this
“rule-breaking” happened in unusual word-choices, artfulness, and other forms of speech.
Indeed, ritual theory expresses the extraordinary action of epideictic quite well. We should note well that
the “rhetorical instant,” as I call it, is a manipulation of time that defies utterly the phenomenon of the “present.”
The rhetorical instant could be considered one of (if not the) most potent example of how the specious present is
enacted: it is the ultimate “lie” we tell ourselves about the co-termini of the past and future. For audiences are
indeed swept up into a “sacred place” or consubstantial experience of a moment. If a moment/instant is defined by
change – because something has ended (past) or something has begun (future) – then the present is neither this nor
that. Liminality, that “in-betweenness” expressed so eloquently in ritual theory, is similarly neither this nor that: one
is neither single nor married, for example, or neither child nor adult, in the liminal moment of a ritual. One is no
longer (past) a child but not yet (future) an adult. And yet, impossibly, that liminality lingers. This is achieved
through speech and through nonverbal communication that is epideictic and rhetorical.
Ritual theory is so valuable here – and beyond the funeral orations of Athens or the sociology of Eliade – if
we consider ritual behavior and ritual speech globally. Beale (1978) had it right that the unification of form does not
precede the uniqueness of a ritual event: form follows function. Carter (1991) also had it right about the palpability
of broken rules that occurs during ritual. Sullivan (1993) understood the functions of ritual to express and establish
order and creativity. Within it is nothing less than a map of the cosmos and a road to creation.
To conclude this paper, I offer a few global avenues for further study of the “rhetorical instant.”
Conclusion
First, a few ritual basics: performatives harness time-present moments to distinguish other cultural
categories (such as male-female, adult-child) publicly (LaFontaine, 2004). Second, ritual distinguishes “times” that
do not belong under the category “history.” Messianic time “conforms to a divine calendar in which social agents
cannot change prophesied ends, only hasten their coming” (Vivian, p. 17). Likewise, nostalgia is the “recovery of
consciousness” that happens independently of history (Crowell, p.90). Commemorative rituals may recall history,
but they do so in a way that “invokes the original events as ongoing acts of God” (Bell, 2009, p. 107) even in secular
societies.
Third, in more complex terms, ritual speakers can manipulate time to assert identity. In one example, Lake
(1991) contrasts Native Americans’ polychronic, cyclical worldview against the Western cultural linear metaphor
“time’s arrow.” He observes that Native American protest rhetoric shapes time in this cyclical manner, making past
injustices present. This is not just an important aesthetic difference: it helps explain the continued misunderstanding
between Anglo Americans (who want to “move on” from the atrocities their ancestors committed during the
nineteenth century) and Native Americans (who very much experience that past as present). As Irwin-Zarecka
(1994) observed: “If the historical moral accounts have never been settled… time collapses” (p. 77).
Insistence on collapsing the past into the present is also important for some marginalized groups because
they may place more credibility in orality than in literacy. For instance Johnson (1970) analyzed speeches in
Samoa, where literacy has had a relatively short existence, and noted that orality is the primary carrier of the past.
Samoan ceremonies, though, are very much cherished because they bring the past into the present in a “repeal.” He
means this archaically, after Levi-Strauss: to repeal is “to call back, as from exile” (Johnson, 1970, p. 265 – n20).
Fourth, epideictic rhetoric can “transcend” time in its presence. Certain faith traditions observe the timepresent as a singularity, an opportunity to commune with the divine. This is possible in their worldview because in
the time-present, hyperawareness of the singularity of the moment is likened to the monolithic extratemporal nature
of their deity (Lewis, 1966). But this transcendence can also be seen in secular traditions. As Loraux (1986) argues
about Athenian funeral orations, the speeches had to include both “the marks of the speaker’s present and of a
tradition’s timeless orthodoxy” (14).
Perhaps one can cite some pernicious examples of this fifth way in which epideictic ritual speech
manipulates the past in a supposed “transcendence.” Walters (1980) analyzed those ancient speeches at Athens,
finding their central purpose was to recast Athenian aggression as benevolence and protection over the rest of
Greece. This is a contemporary feature of epideictic in the U.S. as well (Vivian, 2006). The reification of
hegemony in examples like these are what led to Foucault’s goal of “destroying, transforming, or revolutionizing the
present” (Danisch 2006, p. 297). Sullivan (1993) agrees, calling much of what happens in epideictic “A rhetoric of
assent, a rhetoric of orthodoxies” (p. 117).
While these observations are astute, they tell just one side of the story. Perhaps as often as the present
reifies hegemony, the subaltern voice pushes back. The symbolic inversion that occurs in festivals, for instance, is
dependent on the “time out of time” aspect of ritual (Falassi, 1987) and this often happens through speech. This is
why the carnivalesque is hazardous to the status quo: it can ignite social revolution. The time-present may be a
powerful form for marginalized groups in the reclamation of identities, an insistence on the truths of history, and the
production of counter-hegemonies. To recognize that, scholars need to broaden their sense of rhetoric to include
global ritual speech forms and to pay special attention to the manipulation of time into “rhetorical instants.”
Notes
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