The discursive construction of reality

The discursive construction of reality in the context of rhetoric Constructivist rhetoric David Pujante In this chapter, I reflect on the rhetorical origins of the constructivist traditi

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The discursive construction of reality

in the context of rhetoric

Constructivist rhetoric

David Pujante

In this chapter, I reflect on the rhetorical origins of the constructivist tradition and its current revival in this latter discipline I begin with a brief history of the evolution of rhetorical thinking from its origin in antiquity, considering its subsequent conversion into a mere treatise on stylistic resources; this un-derstanding of rhetoric would last for centuries in the West, and would lead it

to its decline, until it later recovered during the twentieth century Its ment over the last hundred years is summarised on three levels: (1) restoration

develop-of the tradition inherited (inventory develop-of tropes and figures develop-of speech), (2) ery of all five rhetorical operations and their political and social reuse and (3)

recov-configuration of constructivist rhetoric This third level is my proposal I define

our understanding of the totality of discursive-rhetorical strategies, and the construction of diverse rhetorical speeches, as the way we make conscious our cognitive experiences

Keywords: rhetoric, constructivism, constructivist rhetoric, discourse analysis,

cognitive frame

Und was nun die Wahrheit betrifft, so gab und wird es Niemand geben, der sie wüsste in Bezug auf die Götter und alle die Dinge, welche ich erwähne. / Denn spräche er auch einmal zufällig das allervollendetste, so weiss er’s selber

doch nicht / Denn nur Wahn ist allen beschieden

Xenophanes (Diels 1903: 56–57)Über das Unsichtbare wie über das Irdische haben die Götter Gewissheit,

uns aber als Menschen ist nur Mutmassung gestattet.

Alkmaion (Diels 1903: 103)

1 Introduction

I believe that behind the complex rhetorical theory that covers the construction

of various types of public discourse – a theory that is based on the classic division

into the five rhetorical operations: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and actio

or pronuntiatio (Pujante 2003: 75) – lies an epistemological foundation that has

been neglected for centuries, and which coincides with modern constructivist approaches

The approach we know today as “radical constructivism,” which consists of highlighting and explaining how scientific, social and individual realities are

invented (or constructed), exposing the supposed objectivity of the knowledge

acquired, is in fact the final stage in a very old approach We can trace the gins of constructivism to antiquity, to the Presocratics such as Xenophanes (Diels 1903: 56–57) and Alcmaeon of Croton (Diels 1903: 103), through Pyrrho, to the Sceptics in general; and particularly to the Sophist thought (the origin of rhetoric) that subsequently inspired the Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and later to Giambattista Vico: in this chapter, we will endeavour to trace this historical line clearly down to the present day, to what we will argue is

ori-the final stage in modern rhetorical thinking, which we call constructivist rhetoric.

Although it is not directly related to ancient rhetorical thought (which is the subject that concerns us here), constructivism can also be found in Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, Carl G Jung, Jean Piaget, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and many other modern and contemporary philosophers and scientists (Watzlawick 1981) We are aware of modern current constructivist thinking through books such as Paul Watzlawick’s

anthology Die erfundene Wircklichkeit (‘Invented Reality: How Do We Know

What We Believe We Know?’) (1981), and the series of books that have shown

us the thought of the biologists Maturana (Maturana 1996 and 2006) and Varela (Maturana and Varela 1998), for whom, as Esperanza Morales-López summarises

in her chapter in this present work: “Cognition is not something separated from corporeality (our natural and physical surroundings) nor from the individual’s

subjectivity (emotions) nor from the communication processes (languaging)”; also,

the books by the neuroscientist Damasio (2010) and the thinker of complexity and theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra (1975 and 1996) have contributed to this line of thought

While the tradition of constructivism has been passed down to us from tiquity, as mentioned above, through fragments of Xenophanes and Alcmaeon of Croton, the thought of Pyrrho (Sextus Empiricus 1996) and the Sceptics in general, the constructivist tradition regarding social discourse comes from the Sophists, who in antiquity were superseded by the thought of the philosophers (Pujante

an-2003: 18ff, 2004), but whose tradition was revived by the Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Bruni, Salutari, Poliziano and Pontano (Grassi 1986), continued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Vico (1725, 1730), then revitalised for the contemporary world by the liberalising figure of Friedrich Nietzsche (Pujante 1997).

2 The epistemological basis of ancient sophistry

(constructivism Avant la Lettre) and its historical disrepute

In antiquity, rhetoric emerged at the same time as democracy, in order to teach the free citizen to use public speeches to express his opinions on various present, past and future social problems in the best way possible Is it wise to make war on the Persians? Is a man who has stolen an apple so that his children do not die of hunger a thief? Is the new wall around Athens worthy of praise? Today they could

be formulated as follows: Is the war in Syria wise? Should we expel from Europe the immigrants who have arrived? Has there been enough public spending on education and health in recent years? In other words, rhetoric was created as a tool

to establish the discourses that help to make decisions on the future, present or past truth of societies, and the interactions between their creators (human beings) and their surroundings; these discourses are interpretative linguistic constructs of society In the background, there is a problem of epistemology, that is, the means

of access to knowledge

Early rhetoric made no distinction between practical knowledge (then the property of the Sophists or the rhetoricians) and speculative knowledge (then the

property of the philosophers) As Cicero reminds us in De Oratore:

[…] the subjects that we are now investigating were designated by a single title, the whole study and practice of the liberal sciences being entitled philosophy Socrates robbed them of this general designation, and in his discussions separated the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together (De orat III XVI 60; Cicero 1982: 49)

Once the division between Sophists and philosophers had been firmly established, philosophical antiquity gave us the dual way of understanding access to knowledge represented by Plato and Aristotle Since then, tradition has divided the Western world into Platonists and Aristotelians Platonists have always considered the truth

to lie inside them, and knowledge as something to be discovered within The side is a world of appearances Aristotelians, by contrast, have seen the world in which we live as reality, and our senses as an objective instrument for discover-ing it The details that our senses give us are classified and categorised to obtain

out-knowledge of this reality Both Plato and Aristotle thought in terms of out-knowledge

of absolute truths, truth with a capital T, and went in search of the Truth

Before them, the other philosophers, the so-called Sophists (the rhetoricians),

remained in the sphere of doxa, or opinion, because they did not seek access to

transcendent truths, but instead social ones Protagoras said: “As to the gods, I have

no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge: both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life” (Diogenes Laertius 1925: 465)

In this approach, language became the instrument par excellence – the

medi-um through which the world was interpreted, a world restricted to questions sible to man, naturally “Furthermore, in his dialectic he neglected the meaning in favour of verbal quibbling,” Diogenes Laertius (1925: 465) also says of Protagoras, calling to mind the advent of Heidegger many centuries later

acces-One can see the widely different approaches of philosophers and Sophists The latter were also in fact philosophers, as we have seen Cicero would say, and they would also be considered as such by Diogenes Laertius, who also reports that Protagoras was a disciple of Democritus But let us make the distinction between the two groups to continue the tradition; their diverse approaches made Aristotle believe that only demonstration leads to science, while considering that dialectics (the method of rational deduction, as used by his master Plato) and rhetoric (a method of persuasion) had the appearance of philosophy

This means that, when Aristotle wrote his Rhetoric, he was not interested in the

link between truth and speech, but instead focused on the communicability of what the speaker says Moreover, the plane of reference of discourse lies not in things,

but instead involves opinions (doxai) or the community’s belief system (písteis).

Aristotelian approaches successfully achieved continuity in Western history, reaching their zenith during Cartesian rationalism By contrast, the rhetorical line became increasingly diluted (consequently the approach of Vico, who lived in the centuries when Descartes prevailed, was discredited), and rhetoric became, in-creasingly, clearly separated from everything that meant reflection and knowledge There was a significant breach, on the one hand, between dialectical and herme-neutical procedures, and on the other between the logical and experimental scienc-

es – a major distinction that brings us to the twentieth century: the arts as against the sciences, the speculative as against the scientific (Gadamer 1960: 293–308)

This separation was in fact long-standing, and had been noted in Roman times A

book by Cicero from which we have quoted above mentions it clearly This is De Oratore, in which the author considers the dire consequences of this separation

In it, Cicero advocates a redefinition of rhetoric in the earlier manner (the one

prior to the split with philosophy), and he considers it to be the art of thinking and not the art of speaking (which then became the exclusive art of good writing)

Cicero thereby distanced himself from the rhetorical masters of his age, for whom

rhetoric simply meant learning a set of rules for making speeches In De Oratore,

Cicero proposes to restore the link between oratory and philosophy However, as Edmond Courbaud tells us in his introduction to the edition of Cicero’s treatise (in the French translation and with the critical Latin text):

[…] malgré l’autorité de sa parole, Cicéron n’a eu aucune influence […] Chose curieuse, son influence a été médiocre même sur lui-même, et le Cicéron des discours ne s’est pas assez souvenu du Cicéron théoricien de l’art oratoire

(Cicero 1985: xv)[‘Despite the authority of his word, Cicero has had no influence […] Curiously, his influence has been limited even on himself, and the Cicero of the speeches does not remind us very much of the theoretical Cicero of the art of oratory.’]For centuries, knowledge was in the hands of philosophical reflection with a ra-tional basis, and its key notion, the concept; it distanced itself from the word and the metaphorical processes of language The origin and value of discourse, which recognised and diagnosed social problems by linking thoughts and words, was forgotten Novelty and freedom of thought were no longer considered to be dis-

played in the condensation of speech (in the tropologisation that occurs in speech

acts), and there alone

3 The beginnings of the recovery of rhetoric in the twentieth century

The twentieth century saw rationalism and logocentrism (the discourses of truth that rationalism constructed, intending them to be immovable) fall into disrepute Above all, the entire century witnessed the revival of language as the primary object of study in both philosophy (the philosophy of language) and philologi-cal fields, with new linguistics and new literary theory (the theory of literature which began with the Russian formalists and continued in schools such as the

Stylistic school and New Criticism, until the important post-structuralist period

of Derrida’s deconstructionism, and everything that has been termed the Nietzsche renaissance) (Derrida 1978; de Man 1979; Fish (1989); Pujante 1997: 167ff) This

whole line of thought had an exceptional precursor: Friedrich Nietzsche

In his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche considered the problem of

access to knowledge – what it is possible to know and how the experience of that knowledge is expressed In other words, although it resembles a book by a clas-sical philologist, a study of ancient tragedy, the study of this aesthetic expression

in fact leads Nietzsche to an epistemological and ontological consideration that is inseparable from aesthetics Let us briefly explain this perplexing entanglement.According to Nietzsche, there are two types of experience – the Apollonian and the Dionysian The Apollonian leads us to knowledge of the world of ap-pearances in which we find ourselves These are a series of unstable, momentary appearances that inevitably come to an end This experience is recounted with the language that we humans usually use – Apollonian language, the language of masks As opposed to experience and Apollonian language, there is the Dionysian experience, which occurs when the veil of Maya, the veil of appearances, is torn away, and we can see behind it This transcendent experience (which may be ei-ther of the awful or of an absolute void) requires another language to express it, and Nietzsche concludes that man has only occasionally achieved this special expression, relating it to aesthetic speech, such as that of ancient tragedy With this approach, Nietzsche debunks rational language as a language of absolute truths and further calls for special languages to speak what is unspeakable with rational language (Pujante 1997)

Nietzsche was also the first to restore rhetoric as an alternative to the tion of rational discourse on society when the prestige of rhetoric was at its lowest,

imposi-on the occasiimposi-on of a course he taught imposi-on rhetoric in Basel in the summer of 1874 (Nietzsche 2000) He thereby recovered two important foundations of rhetoric related to its epistemology: the interpretative discourse of the world, as the only way of understanding both it and ourselves within it, and language as a powerful and mysterious source of that interpretative power – a power which had already

been recognised in The Encomium of Helen by Gorgias (2003: 76–84).

There is a whole Romantic line of thought (and the last Romantic in that spect is Nietzsche) which emphasises special aesthetic speech, specifically that of the poets, as the truest and deepest Perhaps the paradigm is Hölderlin, to whom the second Heidegger dedicated important reflections (1936) Nietzsche himself considered him his favourite poet from a very young age, wrote about him when Hölderlin was still a poet in disgrace and, as a result of such an unfortunate choice, was reprimanded by his tutor Today, we know that this was a great insight into Nietzsche’s part From Hölderlin, he learned the profound lesson of one who is able

re-to think while poeticising: the word he thinks of is also the basis of the rhere-torical thought we are considering in this reflection

Hölderlin’s poem Andenken (Remembrance), which is paradigmatic in the

peculiar art of that poet’s transitions (which are not logical but instead associative

transitions, thereby better suggesting the dark and mysterious aspects of speech) contains one of the lapidary concentrations of his thought – the fourth sentence,

which Heidegger mentions in Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry: “Was bleibet

aber, stiften die Dichter” (‘But what endures, the poets found’) The poet constructs the only thing that remains, using his special language The twentieth century was very important for the writing of poetry as well as for the theoretical reflection that emerged from it Poetry was considered a way to create new worlds, as well as the

linguistic instrument par excellence for reality to acquire some specific significant

profiles by means of analogy, metaphor and tropologisation in general: a range of discursive procedures that establish correspondences through language within the events that constitute our experience (Pujante 2003: 170)

Since I was very young, I have been interested in the Romantic imagination

as a mechanism of knowledge used by the Romantic poets to illuminate the dark areas of the world that operated within rationality (Pujante 1990) This led me to believe that there is a way of thinking through poetic language that is necessary as

a complement to rational thought, and which obtains knowledge outside ality Then came my readings of Nietzsche, to which I have already referred, with his proposal of ancient tragedy as a special aesthetic linguistic expression (albeit a more complex one, due to its inclusion of singing and public spectacles) – the only one which succeeds in conveying the Dionysian experience And of course, as a literary theorist, I have been influenced by all the formalist thought that considers the link between form and content to be indissoluble I summarise this as follows

ration-in my Manual of Rhetoric:

The problem of the matter/form dichotomy (aggravated by the form/structure chotomy) is of paramount importance in Russian formalist thinking, in European

di-stylistic thought and in New Criticism (that is, in the major creative movements in

literary theory in the first half of the twentieth century) and in the neoformalism

of the following two decades For these movements, matter and form are the face and the underside of a leaf – they are inseparable Indeed, the form makes the

matter We say what we say because we say it how we say it (Pujante 2003: 191)

However, something which was so strongly advocated by the formalism of the early twentieth century, and which has been maintained by literary theorists in the field

of poetry, appears not to have permeated other discourses (Pujante 2012: 175–188).Returning to the famous final line of Hölderlin’s poem “Remembrance,” this is essential for an understanding of the transition from the first Heidegger (who was still a philosopher in the traditional sense and a thinker trusting in Apollonian speech) to the second Heidegger, by which we mean the Heidegger who sees that the philosophical limitations in his first period lie in the language he uses He goes on to consider the language of artists, poets and painters, but especially the

poetic language of Hölderlin, as a deeper one, unrelated to the obvious fissures

in the logocentric constructions of the Western philosophical tradition down to Kant (Steiner 1978)

Nor must we forget the most significant philosopher of language of the

twen-tieth century: Ludwig Wittgenstein While his Tractatus shows the limitations and

failings of rational speech: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent) (1921: 202–203), his lessons in aesthetics reject logical-rational explanations for aesthetic experiences A Beethoven sonata cannot be explained with a logical parallel text (a major error that persists in the world of criticism of the arts); we can simply convey the feelings we experience when we play it or hear it, we can only convey our aesthetic experience of the work of art, and nothing else The work is the work, and the Beethoven sonata is the Beethoven sonata If art is a work of art, aesthetics

is talking about art, but talking about art explains nothing about art; at best, it sheds light on the aesthetic experience of others Trying to explain a work of art with non-artistic speech leads to failure, because it is a mistake “[…] to think that meaning or thought is something that only accompanies the word, and that the word is not important” (Wittgenstein 1992: 100)

On what do all these reflections agree? On the hegemony of the word They converge on the common experience that the realities with which we deal are constructs of language: the word makes the thought Because the first instrument for response by humans, in each of the various situations in life in which they find themselves, is not abstract or conceptual thought, but instead language It would

be inconceivable if we were obliged to give a rational answer for any of life’s periences Life requires a flexibility of response to the experience considered, and faced with conceptual formulation, which would require us to delay, we respond with linguistic formulas that are as rapid and flexible as required by the situation

ex-in which the response is requested The ex-ingenium of which the humanists spoke

(Grassi 1986: 51) is what gives us flexibility in our response – the ability to find the linguistic formula that best outlines an appropriate interpretation of all new and unexpected individual and collective situations in life

Language therefore formulates the realities with which we live and in which

we believe, as well as those we enjoy They are realities at various levels, which exist while their constructs are created: we can talk about Beethoven’s music and

Cervantes’ Quixote as human constructs, but this also applies to all the discourses

that interpret the world in the events related – both historical discourses and those concerning present and future possibility, because there is no possible distinction here between discourses for reality and discourses for fictionality Perhaps the

great leap is in the discourses which seek to express the other, the Dionysian, the

transcendent: the discourses of the mystics, the discourses of the prophets, the discourses of the visionary poets Otherwise, the procedures for construction of discourses, whether they are interpretative of human societies or with a purely fictional intent, are similar – they encounter the same difficulties in expression and differ only in their goals However, it was somewhat difficult (or perhaps impossi-ble) to consider this line of understanding of discourses, and the construction of reality with them, while the concept overshadowed the metaphor, during the long exodus through the desert, mercilessly enlightened by the exclusive sun of reason, and by theology before that.

When the logocentrism of the epistemological tradition that triumphed in Europe for centuries was finally criticised by thinkers, theorists of literature and the arts, philosophers and philosophers of the twentieth-century history, when the nooks and crannies of those discourses of absolute value were examined, two alternatives were clearly visible: (1) social discourse that constructs social truths and realities of time and space and (2) profound discourse (poetical-visionary, religious, mystical) constructing what remains

Whether or not we believe in the second type of discourse (the Sophists never entered this uneven terrain), it is time to engage in tropological construction, and

it matters little whether we call the original mechanism ingenium or intuition,

because what is important is that ‘the Word happens to us’ (“Das Wort geschieht uns,” Jung 1997: 43)

4 The revival of rhetoric and constructivism: The return to elocutio

and the third level of revival of rhetorical thinking

I believe that the inevitable encounter between the revival of rhetoric in the tieth century and constructivism was simply a matter of time, as the constructivist approach is the epistemological cornerstone of ancient sophistry, and the origin

twen-of rhetorical thinking It is also the common, unifying feature twen-of this volume, in which the construction of reality through discourses is adopted as a common premise (Salvador 2014)

Today, we can speak in terms of three evolutionary stages in rhetorical proaches throughout the twentieth century, which was the century of its resto-ration During the twentieth century, rhetoric made the transition from being initially a mere source of stylistic explanations for good writing and good speech, its ancient legacy being considered as an inventory of rhetorical tropes and fig-

ap-ures, based on the concept of sermo ornatus (Pujante 1999: 159ff), and once again

became (in the second stage) a powerful mechanism for the construction of social

discourse, which it was in its historical beginnings (Albaladejo 1989: 43–57; Pujante 2003: 75–79) Consequently, it is the basis for the good practice of public discourse, and simultaneously a good analysis of the ideological arguments that constitute

it (Pujante and Morales-López 2008; Pujante 1998) However, more recently still (and this would be the third stage we name and define in this chapter), rhetoric has revealed, with the recovery of its original ontological and epistemological approaches, what lay alongside the twentieth-century thought about language (philosophy of language, linguistics, pragmatics) and about the theory of poet-ic-literary language (the formalist and neoformalist schools) It thereby shows that rhetorical-discursive construction is not a pure technique for making speeches

of social persuasion (if this technique is considered to be something alien to the construction of meaning); instead, and on the contrary, the key to interpreting the world and our relationship with the world in which we live lies in discursive construction Discursive-rhetorical construction therefore enables us to become conscious of our personal and social experiences That consciousness is the vision

of the reality of the subject – a reality constructed in discourse In our research

project, we call this third stage constructivist rhetoric.

Indeed, after the long, ancient era of the simplification of rhetorical operations had passed, we owe the twentieth century a debt for its recovery of the entire mechanism of construction of various types of public discourse It is a complex

mechanism, which is based on the classical division into five operations: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and actio or pronuntiatio:

In a very elementary way, rhetorical discourse basically requires one operation that finds ideas, another that orders them, a third that expresses them linguisti-cally, a fourth that safeguards what has been constructed until that point from oblivion, and finally an operation that gives everything a voice and gesture

(Pujante 2003: 75)However, a further step was still necessary – a step that other outstanding disci-plines of the twentieth century had taken, and which, surprisingly, had not oc-curred in studies of rhetoric The third level of the three to which we referred at

the beginning of this section, and which we call the constructivist rhetoric level,

rectifies this oversight Thanks to the constitution of this third level of ing of rhetoric, the entire formal reflection of the indissoluble relationship between matter and form, which had been consolidated for the study of poetry through-out the twentieth century (both in the formalist schools – Russian Formalism, Stylistics, New Criticism – and in the contribution of post-structuralism and with

understand-the Nietzsche-Renaissance) is transferred to understand-the rhetorical device In fact, we have

to admit that rhetorical speeches contain no special discovery and arrangement

of ideas (matter) without the elocutive discoveries and arrangements (form) that

express them Thinking of Vico, we can summarise that the tropologisation of course creates discursive thought, transposing the foundation of formalist thought

dis-to the sphere of rhedis-toric Both the inventive operation (the set of ideas) and the arrangement (the construction of the meaning of an event) occur precisely in the

process involved in carrying out the third rhetorical operation Without it tio), they (inventio and dispositio) are meaningless, pure entelechy, because they

(elocu-cannot even be grasped, except in theoretical and abstract terms This is something that occurred to García Berrio, who made it abundantly clear that the successive division in rhetorical operations is pure theory and that discourse is created in the simultaneity of these rhetorical operations:

The distinction made by García Berrio […] between the theoretical rhetorical component and the rhetorical operation itself opens our eyes to the wealth of

genuine interrelated activity in the rhetorical operations inventio, dispositio and elocutio in comparison to the poor simplification involved in an isolated and

successive consideration of each of these operational mechanisms

(Pujante 2003: 193 and 329–330; see also García Berrio 1979 and 1979a: 156)

To this, we should add the fact that the realisation of discursive text is the result solely of the third rhetorical operation, although discourse is the sum of the mem-

orised text of the discourse plus the acting voice and gesture (actio or tio); and if given on any public platform, the final rhetorical operation (the actio)

pronuntia-influences the effectiveness of the discursive text Above all else, constructivist rhetoric requires that the third rhetorical operation be the basis for the construc-tion of discourse, and that tropological and figurative mechanics be considered

as the interpreters for relationships between the elements of the world referred to

in the discourse, inasmuch as the subject producing the discourse is able to find and establish these relationships

The return to the elocutio must undoubtedly be a return to confidence in the

word as being able to say what we feel to be most true The same defence of guage can be found among the Italian Renaissance humanists or by the Spaniard Luis Vives (Grassi 1986: 111–114; Vives 1531), as well as in the thought of Gracián and other Baroque thinkers, in both the Spanish Golden Age and the European Baroque (Porqueras Mayo 1968; Anceschi 1984; García Berrio 1968) This defence was also present in antiquity, not only in the rhetorical sphere, as can be seen in some pages of Sextus Empiricus Indeed, the demand for the grammarian as an interpreter, which we find centuries later in Poliziano (Grassi 1986: 63; Poliziano 2015), was already present in the ancient sphere of thinking that favoured the poetic word and rhetorical speech, as presented by Sextus Empiricus (although he subsequently took the opposite view), with the following words:

lan-And that poetry furnishes many aids to happiness is plain from the fact that the best and character-forming philosophy had its original roots in the gnomic sayings of the poets, and on this account the philosophers, when giving exhor-tations, their injunctions were always stamped, as it were, with phrases from the poets […] That the rest of the philosophers do this is not paradoxical, but we shall find even those accusers of grammar, Pyrrho and Epicurus, acknowledging its

necessity (Against the Professors I XIII 271–272).

(Sextus Empiricus 1949: 153–155)

In Pujante (2012), I considered that elocutio could no longer be understood simply

in terms of a linguistic transfer of what had previously been conceived by the mind,

a simplified understanding of the elocutio as a mere operation of linguistic ing on the content On the contrary, it is necessary to understand the elocutio as

veneer-a complex operveneer-ation in which other rhetoricveneer-al operveneer-ations converge, which veneer-are validated in the culminating act that this level of manifestation represents In the ancient rhetorical tradition (prior to the reductionist era that makes it an inven-tory for stylistic devices), it was not merely a simple linguistic veneer on what had

been conceived by means of the two previous operations (inventio and dispositio),

but instead was an act that made all the previous potentialities effective and gave them a material essence

Quintilian, who was the great compiler of classical thought on rhetoric, but who was nevertheless quite conservative in his approach, seems to be quite certain that there is a close relationship between the first two operations and the third This appears to be the case throughout his treatise, not only in its definition of the trope (Pujante 1999: 196ff), but also at other times, when he shows us prosopo-poeia – an elocutive figure for heightening the emotions (it takes this form in

IX.2.31 of the Institutio Oratoria) – as well as a resource in the inventio in VI.1.25

(Qvintiliani 1970; Pujante 1999: 121ff) This example, among others that can be found in Quintilian’s treatise, shows us the permeability between the first two

operations and the third: the elocutio The figure of speech in the elocutive field,

which we call prosopopoeia, which is traditionally considered the manufacturer of discursive ornamentation (the formal aspects), inevitably forces us to relate it to the

content of the discourse as it also appears in the inventio in Quintilian’s treatise

The dual area in which prosopopoeia operates in Quintilian, therefore, once again

calls into question the concept of sermo ornatus which has been attributed to the

thought of Quintilian and to other rhetoricians of classical antiquity, according

to the interpretation that has become consolidated over the centuries In other words, it is considered merely as an ornamental quantification of language (an ornamental extra) which constitutes figurative discourse, as well as its counterpart, literary discourse