Rhetoric CFPs & TOCs

Rhetoric CFPs & TOCs
Photo: Kristoffer Trolle (creative commons)

Monday, October 7, 2019

Blogora Classic: Aune on Academic Style, 2006-07-17

Academic Style: Poetes Maudits, 

One good thing about blogging is that it gives one something to do at 3 a.m. when you can't get back to sleep, and the world is in chaos. First a Wikipedia definition:
--A poète maudit (French: accursed poet) is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit. The first poète maudit, and its prototype, was François Villon (143a1-c. 1474) but the phrase wasn't coined until the beginning of the 19th century by Alfred de Vigny in his 1832 drama Stello, in which he calls the poet “la race toujours maudit par les puissants de la terre.” Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud are considered typical examples.--
What I have come to find puzzling over the last ten years (it hit me with a vengeance the year I taught at Penn State), is the peculiar combination of academic careerism and the--er--"valorization" of a poete maudit's style of life. Examples: Foucault's "limit experience" being hit by a car while on opium, Bataille's pornography, Deleuze's death (once praised to me by a graduate student), Nietzsche's madness. 1960's versions: the breakdowns, addictions, and suicides of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman--the whole "confessional" school of American poetry. And the "popular" culture of the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, and on and on. For a young person of a certain temperament, this sort of thing is worse than crack.
It's not an ideology, because it is almost empty of argument--maybe "structure of feeling" is a better term. It has recurred steadily since the industrial revolution (Benjamin's "shock effects," I guess, as an aesthetic of coping with urban life). In its academic form: "a focus on the garbage of history," as Grossberg put it in at NCA last fall. It has developed into a particular--nod here to Hariman, il miglior fabbro--academic style.

Monday, September 2, 2019

Blogora Classic: Aune on Gouldner on Theory-Making, 2006-07-23

Gouldner on Theory-Making

I've been meditating today on this statement by sociologist Alvin Gouldner (probably the main influence on my own work):
"Much of theory-work begins with an effort to make sense of one's experience. Much of it is initiated by an effort to resolve unresolved experience; here, the problem is not to validate what has been observed or to produce new observations, but rather to locate and to interpret the meaning of what one has lived. . . . Theory-making, then, is often an effort to cope with threat; it is an effort to cope with a threat to something in which the theorist himself is deeply and personally implicated and which he holds dear" (The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, 1970: 484).

Monday, August 12, 2019

Blogora Classic: Aune on Sovereign Performatives, 2006-08-11

Sovereign Performatives

I continue to muse on the differences between rhetoric in English and in Comm; I suspect that by the time I retire there will be nearly complete convergence between the two institutionally, partially for good (it's only logical), and partially for bad (continued marginalization in NCA, and displacement of rhetoric by cultural studies/media studies as locus of humanities research in Comm departments). I am one of the few NCA rhetoricians of my generation to have been educated in a department that offered theater, oral interpretation, speech correction (!), and "speech" (a core of public speaking, argumentation, persuasion, and American public address)--in other words, a department centered almost entirely on performance. The model eventually failed everywhere, partially because of conflicting temperaments between "drama" and "communication" types, partially because of the rise of bad social science in NCA circles in the 1ate 1960's, and partially because of the inherent conflict between scholarship and a heavy emphasis on teaching undergraduate performance through extracurricular activities. Traces of the old model still survive at places like Memphis, where Communication is in a College of Fine Arts.
My department, which does a remarkably good job with undergraduate teaching despite our heavy research productivity and huge classes (e.g. 250 people in history of rhetoric), is charged--like the rest of A&M--to start planning for "enhancement of the undergraduate experience." At worst, this is going to mean some sort of testing/measurement of "outcomes," but it's a good conversation to have. Here's my problem: why is it that we cannot teach undergraduate performance effectively? There are two "skills" courses in speech: public speaking and argumentation. They are, for the most part, taught well, although they are staffed nearly 100% by graduate students, most of whom have very little background in oral performance themselves. From that point on, the most we have are group oral presentations in our 400-level classes, and, of course, oral reports in graduate courses. To put it bluntly: the skills aren't there, across the board, except for students with high school or undergraduate forensics experience (we do not have forensics at A&M). What is to be done?

Monday, July 29, 2019

Blogora Classic, Aune on Fascisms, 2006-08-11

Fascisms

Staying on message, both POTUS and Santorum used the term "Islamo-fascism" this week. I've posted on this before, but here again is a summary of Umberto Eco's classic essay on Ur-Fascism, for purposes of comparison:
1. Cult of tradition: there is some original wisdom (pre-philosophical) that we have lost:
a. Either "pure" (non-Jewish) Christianity or pre-Christian Indo-European mythology
b. Occult elements (hostility to science)
2. Rejection of modernity:
a. Rejection of science and technology (except as tools for warfare)
b. Suspicion of capitalism, especially big business, for destroying traditional communities
c. Rejection of liberty and equality as fundamental values (rejection of the Enlightenment)
3. Cult of Action for Action's Sake:
a. Hostility to intellectuals and intellectual life as subversive of traditional values AND as unconnected to the "real" world of toughness and action
b. Thinking is a form of emasculation
4. Dissent is betrayal: science proceeds by testing all hypotheses, liberal democracy by opening public issues to discussion and debate; no fascist can accept criticism.
5. Fear of difference (racial, cultural, ideological): everyone must think alike (or be eliminated from the community)
6. Springs from individual or social frustration: especially targets the frustrated middle class, envious of the rich but afraid of social pressure from below. The old "proletariat" or working class, having improved its lot in Europe and the U.S. post-WWII is now perhaps the greatest potential audience for a new Fascism, as it feels its economic gains slipping away.
7. Obsession with conspiracies: both outside the nation (xenophobia) and within (the perennial Jewish conspiracy from the inside).
8. Disciples must feel humiliated by the enemy's strength and power; paradoxically, the enemy is at once too strong and too weak.
9. Life is a permanent war; there must be a "last battle," "Armageddon," "final solution" after which an era of peace is created.
10. Scorn for the weak; "popular elitism": the people belong to the best people in the world, but there must be leaders, because the masses are like children, needing to be led.
11. Cult of death: the final reward for a heroic life.
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Fascist transfers his will to power onto sexual questions. This is the origin of machismo: contempt for women plus an intolerant condemnation of nonconformist sexual habits, especially homosexuality.
13. Populism: the "people" are no longer represented by the courts, the executive, and the legislature. Politics-as-usual is rotten.
14. Use of Newspeak (George Orwell, 1984): use of language to prevent critical and complex reasoning. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
--
Part of the original essay, with references, is here:

Monday, July 22, 2019

Blogora Classic: Aune on Method, 2006-08-19


Method

I'm finally getting down to work on my next project--on the Gastonia strike of 1929 and its fictional and scholarly representations. Here's a stab at describing my "method"; if anyone has a minute, please point out strengths and weaknesses:
A. Implicit rhetorical theory as recurring theme in my scholarship1. Political “languages” or ideologies address or imply
a. an ideal form of persuasion/communication, and
b. a model of how people change their minds.
2. Sometimes a rhetorical theory is explicit, as in Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, but in others (since the 18th century) it has to be reconstructed, usually by attention to these key moments in the text
a. representations of crowds and audiences,
b. representations of oratory and other persuasive messages, including the “repertoire” (Charles Tilly) of actors in contentious politics
c. signs of social anxieties about forms of communication (usually fear of the Mob or of deceptive elites)
d. representations of “sparks”—moments of popular mobilization or popular quiescence (e.g. Plato’s “beautiful lie,” or the neoconservative belief in the need of philosophers to lie to the democratic public)
3. Both fictional and philosophical texts can be studied this way.
4. Methodological influences:
a. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (especially the classic first chapter describing differing narrative strategies in Homer and in the book of Genesis).
b. Wayne Booth’s ethical criticism (The Company We Keep)
c. James Boyd White’s constitutive rhetoric (When Words Lose Their Meanings)
d Edwin Black on the “Third Persona”and Christine Oravec on the Whig and Jacksonian styles in antebellum American political discourse
e. Derridean deconstruction’s attention to moments of figural and conceptual instability in texts (or Althusser’s symptomatic reading—attention to the non-dit—the not-said—and moments of décalage—slippage).

5. For example, in Selling the Free Market (2001) I studied the fictional and political discourse of radical libertarians, demonstrating that libertarianism as an ideology has a distinctive, and highly limited, view of communication: communication and persuasion are reduced to information exchange and cost-benefit analysis, ignoring the “friction” created by social norms and emotions.
6. Rhetoric and Marxism (1994): Classical Marxism contained an internal inconsistency or décalage: why should anyone revolt if history follows a deterministic sequence of modes of production? An inability to theorize political persuasion itself led to efforts by later Marxists (especially the Western Marxists) to fill in the gap between “structure” and “struggle,” culminating in Habermas’ theory of communicative action.
B. Practice theory (getting from micro level of text to the macro structural level)1. Emphasize specific social practices, including rhetorical strategies and tactics (a la De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life—what kind of everyday “resistance” do the weak use?
2. Understand the “structure of the conjuncture”: structural changes occur through practice—the values learned in practice become the new structure. Social change often occurs through failed structural reproduction along traditional lines, in which new “meanings” become central to re-structuration.
3. Practices as efforts to resolve social, political, economic contradictions (Ortner on Sherpa monasteries in High Religion)
C. Big Theory questions:1. Is the Structure/Agency opposition a “constitutive” one? i.e., an ongoing debate within Western culture, because of its own inherent contradictions? (Bourdieu, in Pascalian Meditations, says rather cynically that the opposition persists because it’s part of the academic game to attain symbolic capital by locating oneself within a particular school of thought).
2. Explicit and implicit accounts of rhetorical action are especially fruitful to analyze in understanding Sahlins’ “structure of the conjuncture.”
a. Structure-oriented Marxists ignored issues of meaning and rhetoric—as Sewell writes, Marxist used to link “mere” and “rhetoric” the way they linked “rising” and “bourgeoisie.”
b. More action-oriented social historians have neglected the role of public rhetoric as an important nexus of the elite and the popular.
So, is rhetoric (discursive strategies and tactics) itself the primary site at which one can observe the structure/agency problem in social life?

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Blogora Classic: July 06, 2005, Aune on Textbooks

Blogora Classic:  July 06, 2005, Aune on Textbooks
Is this still true?  Since the publication of Joshua Gunn's textbook, I hope not...  --David

Tomorrow morning I'm off to San Francisco as part of a junket (I feel just like Tom DeLay) sponsored by a textbook publisher. About 10 teachers of public speaking are going to meet for two days in a posh hotel to be a focus group for improving textbooks.

There are a number of really good rhetoric and composition textbooks out there, reflecting the seriousness with which our English comrades take pedagogy. There is not, to put it bluntly, a single public speaking text that is worth the price. When I teach Honors Public Speaking (the only version I get to teach these days) I usually put together a packet of readings or else use Karlyn Campbell's The Rhetorical Act. What I can't figure out is why publishers think that these texts need to be so visually stimulating. I wonder if a better alternative might not be some kind of computer software, an expanded and improved version of powerpoint, that included examples and exercises for audience analysis, outlining, evidence, reasoning, and delivery--the delivery part could work like foreign language cd-roms now, with audio files of correct pronunciation.

I guess one of the reasons why these texts are so bad is that a significant number of the teachers of the basic course are graduate students who themselves lack sufficient skills in oral performance to design a unique course adapted to their university. The texts thus need to be recipe-like in order to make it easier to lecture and do assignments.

Any thoughts?

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Blogora Classic: July 02, 2005, Aune on Scholarly Pleasures

Blogora Classic: July 02, 2005, Aune on Scholarly Pleasures

I'm working on an essay on Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, so I've been plugging some holes in my knowledge of the culture and politics of the period (1848-1851). It's been nice to discover a scholar I hadn't been familiar with before--the Marxist art historian T.J. Clark, who is an absolute model of what the engaged critic should be in his two books: Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution and The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851. I also have been reading Balzac--first Pere Goriot, and starting on The Wild Asses' Skin. Great, enjoyable reading--vocation and avocation together, as Frost puts it in "Two Tramps in Mudtime":

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Monday, May 13, 2019

Blogora Classic: Aune on I Heart Adorno Part Zwei, May 03, 2005

May 03, 2005

I Heart Adorno Part Zwei

The Ashton translation of Adorno's Negative Dialectics into English is notoriously riddled with problems. I just found this terrific website with a complete English translation and study guide. N.B. the section on rhetoric at the end of the Introduction.
I'm working on a (perhaps unpublishable) set of reflections on rhetoric, aesthetics, and politics in imitation of Adorno's paratactic writing. Some preliminary notes follow. Comments are very welcome, even if just to tell me not to quit my day job.
Rhetoric, Aesthetics, Culture
In Lieu of a Preface [A problematic rhetorical form, at least since Hegel’s Phenomenology. Each paragraph of the preface announces a theme that will be taken up in subsequent chapters. Composition in parataxis first gains the good will of a certain kind of audience, just as hypotactic composition does another. I want to persuade both, but the audience for paratactic discourse is a “harder sell.”]
Christian Wolff invented a technical language for German philosophy. Baumgarten coined the term “aesthetics.” Kant posed the problems subsequent philosophers of aesthetics would try to solve, all the way down to Adorno.
This work is written amid the ruins of Adorno’s Aesthetics. It rejects the whole “German” isolation of aesthetics from other arts of language, especially rhetoric, yet even in that rejection it must make its arguments speak German—if only because—if there remains anyone yet with an open mind capable of being persuaded—it would be a good thing if the Germans learned to speak the language of Greek and Roman rhetoric that they destroyed in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries.
Only a mutilated reality is capable of missing what rhetoric once meant to culture.
The strategy, then, is bound up with the canon of Disposition: paratactic reflections imitating Adorno, or—going back further—the aporetic early dialogues of Plato, yet unlike Adorno, culminating in an oration on the classical model: exordium, partitio, confirmatio, refutation, digressio, peroratio.
Only out of the most radical program of cultural reaction will we find resources for an exodus from the administered world, a newer form of the Great Refusal. The name of this program? Ciceronian Marxism. [This is not a Burkeian perspective by incongruity. Perhaps Marxist Republicanism would be better, but by personifying Communism and Republicanism in their two most important rhetors, the figure stresses agency and personality—two factors which, if rejected, in the name of scientific socialism or post-structuralist interpellation, lead to the Cult of Personality.]
Out of the ruins of liberalism—in its statist and its laissez-faire varieties—and out of the ruins of Communism, a renovated republicanism proposes an end to Empire, a new order of the ages, a new virtue. [This book also is composed in the shadow of two academic best-sellers: Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude. In fetishizing constituent power, out of a dubious reading of Spinoza, they neglect the necessity of the Constitution. They refuse the Written Constitution—the American innovation—and thus the rule of law, without which every revolution founders.]
From Adorno: the figure of the constellation. What pattern emerges out of the conjunction of rhetoric, poetics, aesthetics, ethics, politics, law as they move at different speeds through the only history we know? What content will find its form both in the world and separate from it? In Invention, the prospect of thought endlessly circulating to avoid compromising its revolutionary goal helps imagine a different kind of audience, a virtuous audience capable of taking up arms for the republic.
Another constellation: the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, 1848, the Paris Commune, St. Louis, 1905, 1917, 1989. We are not yet done representing these moments, or understanding the forces of attraction and repulsion they still exert on each other.
We will not be afraid to use the word “Bourgeois.” [It is so much easier to hate them now—the bourgeoisie. Will the role of hatred and revolutionary violence in this book seem dangerous or, at best, the gauchiste reflections of an armchair socialist? I hope not, and, like Marx and Engels themselves, I refuse to rule out the possiblity of a peaceful evolution toward socialism, even in the U.S., which is capable of mounting the greatest bourgeois resistance. My emphasis on the rule of law and Constitutional—rather than “constituent”—power is intended to check those forces which prolong revolutionary violence beyond the amount that is absolutely necessary.] But we may be skeptical about the word “Proletariat”—in part because of the mixing of linguistic and historical codes, yet mostly because of the disintegration of a proletarian public sphere—if not of the Proletariat itself. For the first time, the Proletariat does not recognize itself as such. [Let us avoid any ethnocentrism here, by noting that across the Globe some proletariats continue to recognize themselves as such. In contrast to Lenin, who attacked capitalism at its weakest link, I propose attacking capitalism at its strongest link: the United States and, particularly, the rural and Southern United States. Revolution in “America” means, a fortiori, revolution everywhere else. Revolution in Texas means, a fortiori, revolution throughout the U.S.] The perennial search for new subjects of revolution, since at least Marcuse, begins anew. This time, however, the task is to persuade the subjects that, like the branch bent by the water, they were always whole, and always stronger than it appeared. [from Robert Bly, Sleepers Joining Hands]
As Timpanaro observed, one finds in the poetry of Leopardi the possibility of secular solidarity—in the struggle of humanity against nature. See the conclusion of La ginestra: La Ginestra O Il Fiore del Deserto (Broom Or The Flower of the Desert) (tr. Eamon Grennan)
[conclusion]
[Nature]: She's the one he calls the enemy,
And believing the human family
Leagued to oppose her, as in truth it is
And has been from the start, he sees
As allies all men, embraces all
With unfeigned love, giving and expecting
Prompt assistance, useful aid
In the many hazards and lasting hurts
Of the common struggle [Della guerra comune]. And he believes
It sheer madness
To arm your hand against another,
Lay snares or stumbling blocks for your neighbor,
As mad as, in a state of siege--
Surrounded by enemies, the assault at its height--
To forget the foe and in blind rage
Turn your force upon your friends,
Smite with the sword, sow havoc and panic
Amongst those fighting on your own side.
When ideas such as these are clear,
As once they were, to the common people,
And when the terror that first forged
For human beings the social bond
Against the savagery of nature
Shall, in part, be again restored
By a true grasp of things as they are, then
Justice and mercy
And an open, honest civil life
Will no longer take root in those swollen fables
On which our stolid common morals
Are mostly grounded, and where they stand
As steady as anything built on sand.
Posted by jim at May 3, 2005 10:26 PM

Rhetorics in Unusual Places: From my "Military Leadership" class, at Marquette University's ROTC program





Monday, May 6, 2019

Rhetorics in Unusual Places: From my "Military Leadership" class, at Marquette University's ROTC program



Blogora Classic: Aune on Weaver, March 26, 2005

March 26, 2005

Rhetorical Concepts V: Richard Weaver

Richard Weaver (1910-1963): The study of rhetoric as a cure for the cultural crisis engendered by science, industrial capitalism, and “mass” education/communication.
I. Life:
A. Grew up in Asheville, NC, and Lexington, KY. Attended U of Kentucky, where he joined the Socialist Party.
B. Attended Vanderbilt, where he studied with the Southern Agrarians (I’ll Take My Stand) John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate. They argued against modern science and industrial capitalism, defended an agriculture-based society like that of the Old South (but without slavery).
C. Taught at TAMU from 1937-1939, where he “encountered a rampant philistinism, abetted by technology, large-scale organization, and a complacent acceptance of success as the goal of life. Moreover, I was here forced to see that the lion of applied science and the lamb of the humanities were not going to lie down together in peace, but that the lion was going to devour the lamb unless there was a very stern keeper of order.” As he drove back to College Station in the fall of 1939 he realized he didn’t have to go back, and instead turned around and enrolled at LSU for his PHD.
D. Taught at U of Chicago for many years, primarily lower-level writing courses (which he enthusiastically volunteered for). Author of Composition: A Course in Reading and Writing (1957); Ideas Have Consequences (1948); The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953); and Visions of Order (1964).
E. Helped found Modern Age and National Review, as well as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (publisher of Intercollegiate Review—if you want a free subscription, ask me). Like Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind), he was a supporter of the “traditionalist” wing of American conservatism, as opposed to “libertarians” and “fusionists,” who were most concerned about free enterprise and anti-Communism, respectively. Traditionalists believe the central problem facing us today is cultural decay.
II. Some core ideas:
A. Defense of rhetoric:
1. “Language is sermonic”: a critique of the social-scientific, journalistic, and general semantics view that you can have neutral, “objective,” “scientific” communication. ALL acts of communication take a point of view and attempt to persuade

2. Healthy cultures have a balance of dialectic and rhetoric. “Dialectic is abstract reasoning on the basis of propositions; rhetoric is the relation of the terms of these to the existential world in which facts are regarded with sympathy and are treated with that kind of historical understanding and appreciation which lie outside the dialectical process” (Visions of Order, 56). Education or journalism that is only negative, always questioning assumptions is destructive.
3. My favorite definition of rhetoric (from his essay on the Phaedrus): “So rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain leading up to the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and only the soul have affection for. This is the truly justified affection of which no one can be ashamed, and he who feels no influence of it is truly outside the communion of minds. Rhetoric appears, finally, as a means by which the impulse of the soul to be ever moving is redeemed.”
B. A healthy culture:
1. Has a “tyrannizing image”: the idea of a culture’s excellence, embodied in ritual, scripture, literature, codes of conduct, enforced standards of value and exclusion: “A culture integrates by segregating its forms of activity and its members from those not belonging.” Culture satisfies a deep-seated psychic need. (Note that TAMU has the lowest crime/violence rate of any US university.)
2. A healthy culture has style: recognized in:
a. Elaboration: more than the merely functional—it is “over the top” in some way
b. Rhythm: clear marking of beginnings and endings
c. Distance: a sense of grandeur, monuments, courtesy

C. Types of argument:
1. Argument from definition: analysis of Lincoln: In dealing with slavery, other leaders looked to law, American history, or practical expediency. Lincoln asked: “is the negro a man?” William F. Buckley’s favorite definition of conservatism: “The true conservative is one who sees the universe as a paradigm of essences, of which the phenomenology of the world is a sort of continuing approximation.”
2. Argument from circumstance: basing conclusions on standards such as: will it work, is it useful? Analysis of Edmund Burke, who argued against firm principles in politics (the attack on Burke was part of a debate in American conservatism in the 1950's about the relevance of English conservativism to the American experience).
3. The abortion debate is a classic example of a conflict between argument from definition and argument from circumstance.
Posted by jim at March 26, 2005 03:37 PM

Monday, April 29, 2019

Rhetorics in Unusual Places: From my "Military Leadership" class, at Marquette University's ROTC program



Blogora Classic: Reading Hardt and Negri's Multitude? March 25, 2005

March 25, 2005

Reading Hardt and Negri's Multitude?

The Political and Social Theory Reading Group at Texas A&M; is taking on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude this month. As part of our ongoing experimentation on the Blogora with new ways of discussing books, I will periodically post some comments and questions on Multitude, and I hope others will join in.
A full text of Paolo Virno's Grammar of the Multitude (by one of Negri's associates on the Italian far left) is available here.
I believe the work is of interest for rhetoricians for four reasons:
1. For better or for worse, Hardt and Negri are now the most widely-read Left theorists in the world, so understanding the sources and popularity of their influence is important for those studying the rhetoric of social movements.
2. Building on Potere operaio's concept of the "social" worker from the late 1960's, Hardt and Negri contend, persuasively I think, that contemporary capitalism enlists all of social life--especially communicative labor, the production of affects--in capitalist production and reproduction. The result is that, although the industrial working class remains important, the "multitude" as potential revolutionary subject is much larger in scope than in classical marxism.
3. Their work is an effort to replace previous philosophical foundations of Marxism with post-structuralism--Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari replace Hegel. Here, I believe, is where they go wrong: Hegel was essential to Marx's thought, especially his Logic, and any effort to de-Hegelianize Marx ends up rejecting Marxism itself.
4. And, to invoke the ongoing theme of my own writing, Hardt and Negri continue to disappoint by undertheorizing persuasion.
Posted by jim at March 25, 2005 10:22 PM

Comments

I haven't finished the book yet, and while I have some problems with their arguments in general, I should add to Jim's "why this is of interest" that they offer an interesting account of publics--or, what they call the multitude. My question, as always, is "is this 'democracy'"? Even by their own definition? ("government for all by all") If their best example of the multitude in action is the WTO protests--admittedly an inspiring event of multiple interest groups sharing common ground--was that "democracy"? Did those protest groups get into the WTO and did they get to voice their opinion to decision makers? Did they get to participate as decision makers themselves? Even if we say that they reached the general public with their message, did that general public have any power to act on their message??? I think not. If there is no opportunity to make decisions within the Empire, then how can the Multitude be the answer? Isn't it always about power afterall? I think that their "Empire" represents the classical definition of corruption--it enforces law and order, but is subject to none itself--how do we stop corruption? Historically, hasn't the answer been revolution, not working within the corrupt empire?
Like I said, I haven't finished the book yet, but these are my nagging questions about 2/3s through.
Posted by: jen m at March 26, 2005 10:41 AM
I haven't even started _Multitude_ (since _Empire_ makes me want to toss the book across the room; "new barbarism" my arse!), but your comments about the de-Hegelizing of Marxism are very apt. To combat that move we can enlist Zizek, and should, as the newer and emerging voices in rhetorical studies are very busy zapping mediation . . . Social movement theory can continue to de-Hegelize rhetoric only at the expense of rhetoric (though, I admit I do very much admire the efforts of Ron Greene and others to create visions of rhetoric without dialectics; I simply fear that rhetoric, which I still contend is a logic and phenomenon of mediation, evaporates).
Posted by: Josh Gunn at March 26, 2005 12:29 PM
I like that, Josh: rhetoric as a logic and phenomenon of mediation. Oh, hell, do I finally have to take Zizek seriously (insert smiley face here)?
Posted by: jim at March 26, 2005 11:25 PM
I think, Jen, that H/N would say that all power generates its own resistance, and that the more globalized the power is, the more globalized the possibility of resistance is.
The WTO protests in Seattle might have been exciting to a lot of people, but I'm not sure one can stake revolutionary possibilities on that one action, and there have been mighty few since then.
I believe that we need to be able to "toggle" back and forth from actions by the multitude to more conventional political acts (increasing foreign aid, a la Jeffrey Sachs' new book, promoting the rule of law and fighting torture, making the Bush Administration take the Bill of Rights seriously). It's not a question of either/or (as a certain kind of American radical continues to think).
Posted by: jim at March 26, 2005 11:29 PM
Yes, I agree that theirs is a concept of resistance, which seems to be Foucauldian for them. But, what is resistance to the corruption of Empire? I'm re-reading William Freehling's Road to Disunion right now for my grad seminar and H&N;'s resistance seems an awful lot like slave resistance as F. describes it--when the terror of the despot is so complete both psychologically and physically (H&N;'s biopower) all the oppressed can do is find ways to "bother" The Master. True resistance is futile because the costs are too great and often unthinkable because the conditioning is so complete. Resistance may slow down the wheels of the machine, but does it stop the machine? Does resistance result in freedom? And, when the wheels of the machine are so odious, what would Mario Savio have us do? Throw our bodies against the gears and the levers until the machine breaks. Or, until the machine is accountable to the wishes of the multitude. And, that is the rub for me. How can we make the corrupt, despotic Empire accountable to the multitude? Where is our seat at the table? (and, damn could I use more clichés??)
I'm proud to be an American radical: good company I'm in! But, I'm just asking for what we've been promised: Democracy. I suppose democracy is radical afterall, esp. since we're so far from it now. If H&N; are right about the Empire, then we really have moved so far away from what could be a democratic society, that it is once again a radical, revolutionary struggle.
Posted by: jen m at March 27, 2005 11:19 AM

Monday, April 22, 2019

Rhetorics in Unusual Places: From my "Military Leadership" class, at Marquette University's ROTC program




Blogora Classic: Leopardi, "La Ginestra" March 20, 2005

March 20, 2005

Leopardi, "La Ginestra"

From my spring break reading, a lovely poem by Leopardi--the basis of a common, secular political ethic:
La Ginestra O Il Fiore del Deserto (Broom Or The Flower of the Desert) (tr. Eamon Grennan)
[conclusion]
[Nature]: She's the one he calls the enemy,
And believing the human family
Leagued to oppose her, as in truth it is
And has been from the start, he sees
As allies all men, embraces all
With unfeigned love, giving and expecting
Prompt assistance, useful aid
In the many hazards and lasting hurts
Of the common struggle [Della guerra comune]. And he believes
It sheer madness
To arm your hand against another,
Lay snares or stumbling blocks for your neighbor,
As mad as, in a state of siege--
Surrounded by enemies, the assault at its height--
To forget the foe and in blind rage
Turn your force upon your friends,
Smite with the sword, sow havoc and panic
Amongst those fighting on your own side.
When ideas such as these are clear,
As once they were, to the common people,
And when the terror that first forged
For human beings the social bond
Against the savagery of nature
Shall, in part, be again restored
By a true grasp of things as they are, then
Justice and mercy
And an open, honest civil life
Will no longer take root in those swollen fables
On which our stolid common morals
Are mostly grounded, and where they stand
As steady as anything built on sand.
Posted by jim at March 20, 2005 01:32 PM

Blogora Classic: Aune on Hermeneutics, March 19, 2005

March 19, 2005

Rhetorical Concepts IV: Hermeneutics


I. Meaning of "hermeneutics":
A. Greek word "hermeneia"=
1. Interpretation by "speech" itself, since language interprets what is in a person's mind.
2. Translation from an unintelligible language into an intelligible one (e.g. the hermeneia of tongues in I Cor. 12:10)
3. Interpretation by commentary and explanation.
4. Note the connection with the god Hermes.
B. Issues:
1. Does "original intent" matter? Or the "significance" to readers in future contexts? How creative may the interpreter be?
2. What about texts with alleged divine AND human authorship? Is there a deeper principle for framing interpretation, e.g. Luther's distinction between identifying the "law" and the "gospel" in every biblical text?
3. Does every act of human communication involve, to a greater or lesser degree, the "hermeneutic" problem?
4. The hermeneutic circle? (Schleiermacher, 19th c. German theologian, taught that in order to interpret part of a text one must understand the whole text, and vice versa.)
C. Current debates:
1. E.D. Hirsch: "meaning" and "significance" must be distinguished in textual interpretation; Hirsch famously said "I do not wish to be part of an enterprise in which it is impossible to be wrong," and so one can, as part of literary study, reconstruct through historical evidence the author's "meaning" as "intention."
2. H-G. Gadamer: interpretation is a "fusion of horizons" between text and interpreter--the reader "goes native" in the text.
3. Derrida: texts are profoundly unstable entities in which the authorial intention is often subverted by choice of figures or examples.
4. In US constitutional law, there is an ongoing struggle between those who rely on original intent, text (plain meaning), and institutional structure to construe the constitutional text, and those who treat the constitution as an "evolving" entity, more like the common law itself--adapting to new circumstances through creative application by judges. On these issues, see especially Philip Bobbitt, Constitutional Fate.

II. The Jewish tradition:
A. Distinction between guide to action (halakhah, the "way" or "path"), which is seldom revisable or adaptable to new circumstances; and the actual biblical narratives, which were interpreted very freely: midrash (creative interpretation, for preaching purposes).
B. Example: Numbers 25: 6-13. The men are busy whoring with the Moabite women. and the women entice the Israelites to worship Baal-peor, their false god. ."One of the Israelites came and brought a Midianite woman over to his companions, in the sight of Moses and of the whole Israelite community who were weeping at the entrance of the tent of meeting. When Pinchas [the name means "Nubian," or "Negro," interestingly enough], son of Eleazar son of Aaron the priest, saw this, he left the assembly and, taking a spear in hand, he followed the Israelite into the chamber and stabbed both of them, the Israelite and the woman, through the belly. Then the plague against the Israelites was checked. . . . Hashem spoke to Moses saying, 'Pinchas, the son of Eleazar son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the Israelites by displaying among them his passion for me, so that I did not wipe out the Israelite people in my passion. Say, therefore, 'I grant him my pact of friendship. It shall be for him and his descendants after him a pact of priesthood for all time, because he took impassioned action for Hashem, thus making expiation for the Israelites." One rabbinic commentator, troubled by the brutality of the passage, claims that Pinchas knew that this man and woman were "beshert," that is, soul mates for all eternity, and killed them immediately that they might be together forever.
III. Medieval Christian tradition:
A. Familiar couplet:
Littera gesta docet; quit credas allegoria;
moralis quid agas; quo tendas anagogia
B. Four senses; useful as a way of generating sermon ideas
1. Literal: Moses leading the people Israel through the Sea of Reeds
2. Allegorical: "Prophecies" the Christian notion of "baptism"
3. Moral: How has the congregation personally been led out of danger into salvation?
4. Anagogical or eschatological: This passage prefigures our live in Heaven, the "Promised Land." [In his Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke discusses the notion of "socio-anagogic" interpretation, in which a literary work is seen to symbolize the resolution of class conflicts.]
IV. The Protestant Reformers:
A. Attacked excessive allegorical interpretation (although believed that events in the Hebrew Bible did prefigure the "New" Testament). (Anglicans were less troubled by allegorical interpretation, and elaborate speculations about the biblical text.)
B. Emphasized the "literal" and "moral" sense.
C. Puritans' attitude toward the literal and emphasis on the "plain style" affected their preaching and, later, the attitude of many early Americans toward the notion of a written constitution, which they wanted free from the interpretive chicanery of lawyers (who were viewed much like the overly ingenious Catholic and Anglican preachers).
D. We are thus, as Sanford Levinson points out in Constitutional Faith, fighting out a battle between "Catholic" and "Protestant" interpretation.
Posted by jim at March 19, 2005 05:28 PM

Monday, April 8, 2019

Blogora Classic: Aune and Gunn on Rhetorical Concepts II: Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca, March 01, 2005

March 01, 2005

Rhetorical Concepts II: Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca

A few weeks ago I suggested that the Blogora periodically introduce key concepts/theories in rhetorical studies. Here is an outline of some key aspects of Chaim Perelman/Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric.
Chaim Perelman (1912-1984), professor at the University of Brussels; Olbrechts-Tyteca (1900-1987), research associate.
A. Method:
1. Rejection of logical positivism (truth=formal proof or empirical verification by scientific method) for leaving value choices in the realm of interests, passions, prejudices, and myths.
2. Rejection of an a priori scheme in favor of analysis of cases of successful argument.
3. Rhetoric and dialectic are a single whole for them: dialectic as the theory of techniques of argument, and rhetoric as a practical discipline indicating how to use them to persuade people. Definition: “the study of the discursive techniques allowing us to induce or to increase the mind’s adherence to the theses presented for its assent.”
4. Causes of the decline of rhetoric [note the implicit death-resurrection metaphor]
a. Ramism
b. “bourgeois” thought’s emphasis on “evidence” [i.e. inartistic proof], including both the personal evidence of salvation required by Protestantism and the “sensible evidence” of empiricism
B. Audience:
1. “the ensemble of those whom the speaker wishes to influence by his argumentation” ; note that this is a mental construct
2. Particular vs. universal audience: “those who are competent and reasonable.” The universal audience is “every reasonable being”; each speaker has a different conception of the universal audience, as do different cultures and time periods. Works as an inventional tool as well as a norm for differentiating good and bad arguments. [I would be inclined to redescribe this as the “reasonable person” test in the common law, or perhaps as the difference between Kantian Moralitaet and Hegelian Sittlichkeit]
3. Philosophy emerges out of the epideictic genre of oratory, which seeks to strengthen a consensus around certain values (20).
C. Where argumentation starts: with premises about the “real”: 
1. facts (individual data) and
2. truths (broader principles, such as scientific, philosophical, or religious conceptions that connect facts).
3. presumptions (expectations of what is normal or likely), imposing the burden of proof on those who would dispute it; can be “common sense” or established formally (as in law).
D. Premises about “what is preferable”:
1. values: concrete and abstract. Defenders of the status quo tend to base arguments on concrete values (Edmund Burke: “the rights of Englishmen”; “Frats are contrary to the Aggie spirit”) and radicals tend to begin with abstract values (“liberty, equality, fraternity”).
2. value hierarchies (which is more important, liberty or equality?).
3. Loci (similar to Aristotle’s topoi): highly general preferences that can be used as guides to choice:
a. Locus of quantity: “Greatest good of the greatest number” arguments; “Protection of a small number of spotted owls is ridiculous compared to the number of people it would throw out of work.”
b. Locus of quality: Challenges strength of numbers: “The spotted owl’s ecological value is unique and irreplaceable. “
c. Locus of the irreparable (J. Robert Cox)
d. Locus of order (what is earlier is better than what comes later)
e. Locus of the existent (what is possible is better)
f. Locus of the person (important of autonomy, dignity, self-worth)
g. [I have added the locus of the “inevitable” in the analysis both of Marxism and of Third Wave arguments about globalization]
E. Selection of data and “presence”: the importance of engaging the imagination in argumentation (bringing before the eyes); can also work in reverse (helping us NOT see something). Establishing communion with the audience. (Figures of speech an essential part of creating a sense of presence/communion.)
1. Caesar’s bloody tunic as brandished by Antony
2. Photos of aborted fetuses or executed prisoners as "data" for a moral argument; do they help or hinder argument?
F. Techniques of association or liaison (linking premises and conclusion):
1. Quasi-logical, deductive arguments--closed or fundamentalist systems of thought tend to argue on the basic of quasi-logical deductions
a. establish an incompatibility in the opponent’s argument: “Hate is not a family value”
b. definition of terms
c. reciprocity and the rule of justice (treat like cases alike)
d. parts and wholes
e. probabilities
[f. I would add here the use of models in the social sciences, especially in economics: e.g. the supply-demand curve that “proves” that an increase in the minimum wage causes unemployment]
2. Arguments based on the structure of reality:
a. Liaisons of succession: causality, correlation, slippery slopes
b. Liaisons of coexistence: argument from authority
c. Symbolic liaisons: attack the flag=attack the US
3. Argument by:
a. Example: presupposes certain regularities of which the examples provide a concretization
b. Illustration: creates presence plus builds an inductive argument
4. Analogy and metaphor:
a. Mathematical proportion posits the equality of two relations (a/b=c/d), while in analogy we affirm that there is a similitude: a is to be as c is to d. a-b=the THEME of the analogy; c-d=the PHOROS. Phoros comes from a region different from the theme and better known than it. [Mind is to brain as software is to hardware. What does this analogy leave out? What does it help us see that previous analogies did not?]
b. Metaphor is a fusion of the domain of the theme with that of the phoros, a condensed analogy. Philosophy is always based on metaphors.
G. Techniques of dissociation:
1. Introduction of division into a concept the audience previously regarded as a single entity. “Genesis is a religious document, not a scientific document.”
2. Term I=appearance; Term II=underlying reality: this is the fundamental philosophic pair out of which the others proceed: rhetoric/dialectic, nomos/phusis, langue/parole, competence/performance.
H. Fullness of arguments and strength of arguments: each type of philosophy favors certain kinds of arguments and discounts others. Utilitarians view arguments from consequence alone as valid.
Posted by jim at March 1, 2005 09:04 PM

Comments

I was rethinking through the differences between P/OT and K. Burke and realized how complementary their work is. The differences touched on in our last class concerning the "experiential" focus of Burke as compared to the European "system building" and that model seems to lay out quite nicely over Burke and P/OT. The uniqueness of P/OT to some of the other European systems is its fluidity (or "relativism" for those lovers of extremism).
For me that seems where Burke and P/OT are complementary. Burke's terministic screens mights subsume some of the systems built by the linguists and other Euro-system builders, but P/OT's heavy dependence on audience and consensus make it harder to fit into a terministic screen. Rather, it adopts terministic screens according to the audience.
Posted by: Joshua at March 1, 2005 10:59 PM
Very perceptive comment, Joshua. I think you're right about P/OT's flexibility. A Burkeian or more radical poststructuralist would contend, in response, that even a "pluralist" view is still a "screen," even though it is a "thinner" one as opposed to a "thick" one.
Posted by: jim at March 2, 2005 09:07 PM
Yes, you are right, and I would actually fall into that camp of folks who would say it is impossible to not see through a "screen." Though I'm optimistic that any "screen" can be altered or changed (very few people, it seems, see everything in the same way throughout their lifetime).
A visual metaphor that comes to mind for P/OT is the old View-Master picture reel. The theory itself would be the mechnanism that would "turn the pictures" and the pictures themselves would be the different "screens" adopted toward a given audience. Something like looking through screens-within-a-screen. The most radical poststructuralists, I think, would still complain about the "fixedness" of the P/OT model as the "view-master" but for the more pragmatic theorist, it seems to offer the most number of "screens" without having to constantly deconstruct your own apparatus for critical analysis.
To me, it seems a good balance between the overzealousness of complete objectivity and complete subjectivity because it allows for change without making change the only viable achievement.
Posted by: Joshua at March 3, 2005 08:47 AM

Monday, April 1, 2019

Blogora Classic: Aune on Executing Juveniles, March 01, 2005

March 01, 2005

Executing Juveniles

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court now forbids the execution of juveniles: Roper v. Simmons
Scalia's dissent is stinging, and, I fear, correct. Let me explain. I am opposed to the death penalty, largely on the grounds that European nations are: it is barbaric, discriminatory, and does not deter crime. Executing juveniles and the retarded is particularly barbaric. But my value position does not therefore automatically translate into support for the majority in Roper v. Simmons. Why?
1. We live in a democratic republic. We "left-liberals" who populate rhetoric programs support greater citizen participation in public issues.
2. The Supreme Court is a "counter-majoritarian" institution. The more "democratic" we are, the more we should trust legislatures, the Congress, and other deliberative (not judicial) bodies to make decisions. Some leftists, notably Mark Tushnet (Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts)contend that we should eliminate judicial review in the US entirely, opting for legislative supremacy as in the UK and most of the rest of Europe. I am a centrist on these questions, defending judicial review when it targets discriminatory legislation that blocks minorities from representation: racial segregation, state-sponsored prayer, and sodomy laws are examples of laws made on the basis of systematic blockage of minority representation (my view is best described by John Hart Ely in Democracy and Distrust).
3. The Constitution is intended to be a clear document for "citizens," not lawyers. While common law reasoning allows for judicial innovation, constitutional law is best interpreted in as simple and a direct a way as possible--otherwise it will not be a "teachable" constitution, but rather a constitution for lawyers alone. The Constitution clearly permits the death penalty. No amount of casuistric stretching can create an interpretation of "cruel and unusual" that would forbid executions, short of amending the constitution itself.
4. While activists might find it more efficient and useful to target the appellate courts for making "legislation," the more we rely on the courts the more we disempower legislatures and Congress. The great paradox of US politics is that during the New Deal the Left defended legislative supremacy, while the Right defended judicial "activism." Now the camps are reversed (although if the American public ever gets in an economically redistributive mood again, look for the Right to discover the virtues of judicial activism).
Categories: Legal Rhetoric 
Posted by jim at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)