Blogora Classic: Jim Aune on Your First Time? December 11, 2004

December 11, 2004

Your First Time?

I have been reading a lot of Greek stuff this past week, partially as a distraction from grading and partially to retool the first month of my history of rhetoric class next spring. Page DuBois, in her book Sappho Is Burning, discusses the centrality of pothos in the work of Sappho: "a yearning for someone absent, for a lost time, a lost pleasure, and her poems re-create, in a longing mode, that time, that person, those pleasures, but always at a distance, framed by the poet's voice in the present of the poem, recalling, recollecting" (29). DuBois then connects Sappho's pothos with her own stance as a classical scholar: "My desire is not to return to a world now lost, one in many ways more terrible than our own, marked by cruelty, torture, slavery, and misogyny, as well as by democracy, but rather a desire to know that world in all its complexity and ambition. It is the experience of loss and regret, of looking back . . . the look at another form of social and economic organization, one different from the commodified alienated relations we know, or the yearning characteristic of the 'imaginary,' nostalgia for the mirror phase, a time of fusion and wholeness--that pothos evokes for me" (29-30).

It's a weird thing, this studying of rhetoric. Although I have had a number of moments of doubt over the years about whether I am suited for an academic career, I have never doubted my initial impulse in wanting to study rhetoric--in fact that impulse is even stronger now than it was thirty years ago. But how, to use the Freudian terminology, did I or you, dear reader, get "cathected" onto rhetoric in the first place? If you have a stray moment in the next week or so, I'd like to hear from the Blogora's readers about the moment or process in which your "first time" with rhetoric came about?

Mine started in high school, with a particularly charismatic speech and drama teacher named Michael Tillmann, who first directed me as Mercutio (go figure. . .) in Romeo and Juliet during my junior year. Those were the days (and here my pothos begins) when interest in oral performance carved out a separate disciplinary space for speech, debate, oral interpretation, and theater. By my senior year, Mr. Tillmann had me reading Plato's Gorgias and most of the Greek dramatists. I'm not sure how much of it I understood, but I was "cathected" onto rhetoric by what now seems to be a burst of a Nietzschean sense of power: a shy person, unathletic in a town fixated on hockey, my first real experience of being powerful, in the sense of using my capacities to their fullest, occurred when I was giving a speech or performing in a play. When I went to college, majoring in what then was "Speech and Theatre," as well as in Religion, my next mentor, Jim Pratt, set me to reading Kenneth Burke, who not only confirmed my initial experience with the power of rhetoric but also gave me a way of looking at the world that--with considerable anxiety of influence along the way--I still have.

Enter the antagonist in the drama. By the time I was a senior, I was in third semester classical Greek, and we were translating the Gorgias. While reading that first section, where Socrates wants Gorgias to define "who he is," my Greek professor turned to me in front of the whole class and said,"Jim, you're majoring in speech. How can you justify that, given what Plato says here?" There were some stifled giggles at my expense as I stuttered an unsatisfactory answer to the professor's question. A similar set of experiences followed short thereafter; my political philosophy professor, who was most responsible for my interest in Plato, also embarrassed me in front of a class by saying, "Jim, why on earth would someone like you with such a good classical education, ever major in speech?" And a few others--from faculty incredulous that I had decided to go to graduate school in Communication Studies at Northwestern rather than to study historical theology, my other main interest at the time. This was all quite unsettling to me, but it did make me a much closer reader of Plato in general, and of the Gorgias in particular. All I needed now, I realized, was to point out to my Greek professor the fact that the dialogue ends with a long speech by Socrates in which he does allow a place for rhetoric in public life. (I know it's more complicated than that, especially since no one at Callicles' party appears to be paying attention to Socrates by that point.) So, again, there got to be something personal about my relationship to rhetoric: I studied it more intensely in order to fend off the criticisms of those misguided souls who had attacked "my precious."

Perhaps it's just as simple as that: we gravitate toward those subjects with which we associate enhanced "self-esteem." But I don't think it is that simple. Because the pothos remains: the desire to speak with the dead; the admiration for those past moments at which the yearning for political liberty, oratory, and the arts were connected; the hope for a better college curriculum in the humanities; the belief that public controversy could be better than it is.

What's your story, dear reader?

Posted by jim at December 11, 2004 11:44 PM

Jim asks, "What's your story, dear reader?" . . .

1967 10th Grade English. The teacher is Barney Selzner, retired Marine sargent, gruff, no fear, lives at the Y. We're discussing a character named Jem (perhaps from To Kill a Mockingbird?). He asks me what the name might mean. I don't know. He asks me what a gem is. I reply, "a precious stone." He says, "not quite; a precious stone *in the rough*." Metaphor, with precision. Something turns over in my head. Later in the term, we are to do oral interpretations of literature. Students chose from a list of suitably literary works. I take the open option and do kiddie lit and Beatles lyrics. I'm really into it--feeling things I haven't experienced before: art, performance, the power of the word. The class is looking at me like I've lost my mind. I look to the back of the room and there is Selzner, grinning from ear to ear. The moment is incredibly rich: perhaps the first truly personal validation of my life, from a wholly unexpected source, who is not whom others think him to be, who is welcoming me to a new world that the others in the room will never enter or even see, a world of art and argument and intellectual community.

Fall 1969, sitting in a seat waiting for my first college class to commence. It's a speech class, which I picked in homage to Selzner. The period begins, but no prof. Then we hear him coming down the corriidor, speaking loudly--he has begun his lecture before he's even in the room. Then he sweeps in, a pile of books and papers in one hand, a cigarette in the other, talking non-stop about language and reality. It's Roger Mosvick giving an over-the-top performance of the life of the mind. My mind is blown. I wanted to be part of the show.

I of course took courses in other departments and several faculty there became very important to me, but the hook was set. And, like Jim, I also experienced the negative reactions when my major became known. This only helped: as far as I could tell, the animus toward rhetoric was a distinctively academic prejudice. Anything which brought out that reaction from reason itself must be worth knowing.

There still was the question of whether to do rhetoric or some other version of comm. studies--until the Kennth Burke seminar during the spring term of my first year of grad. school. That is where the door finally swung all the way open to reveal what later generations would know as post-structuralism. The vocabulary was not as extensive or analytically precise or powerful as what came later, but the experience of intellectual transformation was not to be missed. And yet, something had been lost, and necessarily so. The encounter now was with books, not charismatic teachers. The task was not to revel in the joys of learning but to become a professor.

I don't want to end on a note of nostalgia. The teachers were decisive, and the writer also was decisive. We need both teachers and writers. And we need what is prompted by Jim's question: commitment to the art that they and we share.

Posted by: Robert Hariman at December 12, 2004 08:34 PM

Great thread!

When a professor shares what he found so engaging about his particular discipline that he decided to devote the rest of his life to it, that brings a sense of life to the field that as an undergraduate I find compelling.

All of you should make an effort to share these sorts of stories with your classes.

Posted by: Matthew Wilkins at December 13, 2004 09:17 PM

I once heard (or thought I heard) a professor refer in a lecture once to the "Rhetorician's epistemological crisis." I wasn't able to get that point elaborated at the time, but I've often thought about what that might mean.

For some of us, the encounter came in a classroom, particularly a basic speech or composition class. To the extent that these are crises of conversion they may fit that phrase, but more often it seems to be an awareness of (or rather a recognition and desire for recognition of) power in ourselves (Jim) and in others (Bob).

In my case, I tested out of both basic courses through high SATs and drama credits. For me the conversion came after leaving school, in a work situation, before I knew what rhetoric was. I was working in New York right after college for a tiny PR firm some guy ran out of his Upper West Side apartment that publisized charitable donations to PBS programs. PBS in turn relied on their underwriters to help publicise the programs.

This led to some interesting corporate relations issues . . . like when General Electric supported a "National Audubon" special about the environment that didn't shy away from controversial issues, like free grazing on public land. The GE answer line flooded with calls from young children asking "why are you taking away my Daddy's ranch?", etc., as you can imagine. The host for that episode was Peter Coyote, and as you might imagine it was a surreal sight to see the former Digger on satellite feed arguing the issue, while trying to work in GE's name into the interview as much as possible (my boss would dilegently count these occurences, almost as if he was getting paid per mention).

Later, we got the Nature contract, and we sent out George Page to do some Thanksgiving Day themed interviews . . . ironic (or "allegorical" if you prefer) because the program they were promoting was an attempt to represent in mockumentary fashion the continent before the white settlement began. My job was to write a release to the local news shows we were pitching this thing to. In a moment of either naivete or citizen critical praxis (or both) I included in the release the observation "perhaps this cooperative moment between settlers and native Americans was a "Road Not Taken" between the two cultures."

My boss and his assistant went down to DC for the taping, I manned the phones. About 7, I got a call. The feed had gone smoothly, George had ably memorized the menu of the 1st Thanksgiving, and trotted it out on cue each time in his melliflous voice. But these was one odd thing about the day: "I think it was the sixth time a reporter asked "George, was Thanksgiving a 'road not taken?'" when we realized something funny was going on."

I never heard anything more about it after that day. But when I was laid off soon afterwards (not for writing the release but for forgetting to pick up some dry cleaning) I wondered what was meant by the impact, as also vaguely why I recoiled from it almost instinctually, because I didn't understand what it was that I was doing (simply put, if it was naivete, citizen praxis, or both).

Before I knew was in grad school, and reading Kenneth Burke, and all the pieces seemed to fall together. (Isn't it funny how Burke has had that effect on so many of us?)

Posted by: jolt at December 16, 2004 04:53 PM

Additional Q's for rhosa from one once (and future) mediaci to another.

I saw rhetoric as explaining my estrangement from (im)media practice. You report an estrangement coming from others because they didn't see how rhetoric explained and deepened your comittment to those media. Is this an accurate assessment of your R.E.C? Does the E stand for ethics?

Posted by: jolt at December 17, 2004 07:47 AM

Like Wayne Booth before me, I first became acquainted with rhetoric in all her varieties as a young and zealous Mormon missionary. I knew then as well as I know now that the variety of rhetoric one chose had deep ethical implications, though I could not then delineate Win-Rhetoric from Bargain-Rhetoric, or Listening-Rhetoric from Rhetrickery. Even earlier, of course, I was intrigued by the rhetorical, like at fifteen when I first saw Kenneth Branaugh's Henry V and rewound the St. Crispin's Day speech a thousand times. Or when I was a smart-ass jock in Mr. Doze's English class (I kid you not, that's his real name), acting too cool for rhetoric even though I secretly devoured every single word of Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame and found incredible joy in studying for the weekly quizzes out of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.

The moment I knew I was going to be a rhetorician came later, it was Saturday April 10, 1999 when, as an undergraduate, I attended a panel on free speech at SSCA. It was my first experience with a conference panel. The meeting was in a huge conference room, capable of seating 200 easily, and yet there were only six people in the room sitting around in a circle. (I learned later that was typical, but it felt very strange to me.) Anyway, Dale Herbeck and Jim Aune ended up in a discussion about free speech and I remember distinctly walking out of that panel wanting desperately to be able to talk that way. I couldn't put my finger on what I had just seen, but I knew that it was something extraordinary, something that took years to prepare for and yet seemed effortless, celebratory, in short, everything I had hoped all my life intellectual encounters could be. That's it, that's when I knew I wanted to take part in the communion of minds. I've been trying to do just that ever since . . .

Posted by: David at December 23, 2004 01:04 PM

Blogora Classic: Jim Aune on The Case for Conservatism, November 16, 2004

November 16, 2004

The Case for Conservatism

Having now caught up on the various comments on Blogora about the election and political rhetoric generally, I want to post some excerpts from a paper I gave at NCA on Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth's "debate" in their recent book Recognition or Redistribution. I see some rumblings about political "bias" on Blogora, so in the interests of argument I want to see if I can make a good case for the conservative position in U.S. politics. (I leave out foreign policy concerns from the argument, mainly because they complicate things. One can, for example, be a social democrat and still support war with Iraq.) My understanding of the conservative argument is that it rests on two potentially contradictory theses: one on the value of the free market and the other on the importance of "subsidiarity." 

The free market argument is best represented by Millian classical liberals like Richard Posner and Deirdre McCloskey: the genius of modern capitalism is that has addressed issues of redistribution and recognition simultaneously. We will never know how much economic growth in post-WWII U.S. and Europe was advanced or retarded by government intervention, whether in the form of Keynesian fiscal policy, the legitimation of collective bargaining and unionization, or the creation of a social safety net for the poor, aged, and disabled, but the evidence suggests that these “mixed” economies (from the relatively less regulated U.S. to the heavily regulated Scandinavian countries) were more successful in reducing poverty, expanding the middle class, and creating educational opportunities than any other socioeconomic systems in history. Well-functioning markets redistribute wealth efficiently by allowing resources to flow to their most-valued uses, and by providing the tax base for government aid to the less fortunate. Social security and the earned-income tax credit, for example, have been effective tools of redistribution largely because of the popular perception that they reward those who work, and they are universal in application (as opposed to less-popular policies that have been equally redistributive, such as the role of affirmative action in expanding the black middle class, but are perceived as beholden to “special interests”). Why would one want to make a revolutionary leap into the socialist void and jeopardize the very real achievements of “actually existing” Western democracies? One might want to raise taxes on the wealthy to levels of, say, the 1950’s, when economic growth was even higher than now, but partisan differences about taxation levels don’t negate the classical liberal contention that economic growth per se is a positive good.

Honneth attributes progress in recognition-theoretical terms to the three forces of “love,” “law,” and “merit” arising with liberal democracy. To these we might also add the market itself. The same features of the market that trouble Fraser (its invisibility, its role in exploitation) actually enhance recognition. In the most famous passage from Philosophical Letters, Voltaire observed, "Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt." One is less likely to be oppressed as a woman, gay, etc. in the most powerful enclaves of corporate capitalism, both because of corporate support for affirmative action and the need to find markets. Gay men and lesbians are consumers, and thus their money is “as green as everyone else’s.” Money and a liberal-rights regime allow cultural orders to flourish on their own terms, often without state intervention; e.g. Orthodox Jews in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, gay men in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston, or Arab Muslims in Detroit.

A Burkeian conservative or traditional Roman Catholic social theorist might argue that neither redistribution nor recognition are effective social policies without the following: a consensus on core values, grounded in the “little platoons” of family and neighborhood; a commitment to “subsidiarity,” the idea that public actions should take place at the social level that directly effects citizens. Burke put it this way: To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of publick affections." (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.) In Pope John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus he criticized the “social assistance” state for contradicting subsidiarity and depriving society of its responsibility. This “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.” Having been a client of the social assistance state for over 16 years now because I have two autistic boys, I can attest to the accuracy of the Pope’s characterization. The increase in crime, homelessness, family breakdown, and drug addiction characteristic of the past thirty years reflect the breakdown of the family system. Unregulated capitalism and an ideological commitment to free trade have perhaps contributed to the financial instability of American families, as reflective conservatives such as Patrick Buchanan or Allan Carlson have noted. Lack of voter participation and the “legitimation crisis” of Western institutions are caused by the increased bureaucratic centralization of power in Washington or Brussels. The only answer U.S. liberals have to social problems is increase federal government power, thus disempowering states and local governments as laboratories of democracy, in Brandeis’ famous phrase. A radical federalism, combined with the use of “faith-based” institutions to deliver the traditional welfare functions of the government, as well as a commitment to maintaining stable two-parent families, are solutions to the problems of both maldistribution of income, as well as to failures of recognition. Parental control of neighborhood schools, whether they be African-American, Islamic, or Southern Baptist, would restore a sense of “recognition” lacking in the "red states" targeted by Republicans.

These two points are what I take to be the core of the conservative position, as thoughtfully articulated by Michael Novak or Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, among others. I happen to think they're both wrong, and also that an unregulated market cannot coexist with the kinds of family values espoused by social conservatives, but I think our political debates would be richer if we took these arguments seriously.

Posted by jim at November 16, 2004 04:00 PM

The possible "contradiction" you point to is one that becomes really manifest in the systems argued for by secular libertarian/anarcho-capitalist types (i.e. Ayn Rand). Of course, for them, the moral issues involved with materialism and consumerism aren't that important.

On the other hand, the two people you cite (Novak and Neuhaus), would I think acknowledge the possible confluence between a sort of lassez-faire capitalism (or radical free trade) and the decline of cultural and moral values. This point of possible "contradiction" in the interests of conservatives is precisely why capitalism needs moral underpinnings.

One question to raise is whether the decline of cultural and moral values is catalyzed more by the free market than it is by socialism. I happen to think that the structures themselves tend to provide the framework within which it is more or less likely to have a virtuous society, but that it is not a simple equation whereing capitalism = a virtuous populace. From a Christian perspective, I think, the moral makeup of the people is achieved through the work of the church (e.g. salt and light) and not via the coercive power of the State OR through the persuasive power of the market. At best, the power of the State is limited to preserving a form of civil good, but its preservational ability is limited by the makeup of its citizenry. It's hard to imagine a functioning society in which the majority of the citizens committed murder regularly, for example.

The importance of the free market and the need for subsidiarity, when combined with an emphasis on personal responsiblity and moral virtue, thus become complementary theses, neither of which are fully adequate without the other.

For more on this, I suggest "Toward a Free and Virtuous Society," by Rev. Robert Sirico:
http://www.acton.org/publicat/occasionalpapers/virtuous.html

Posted by: Jordan at November 18, 2004 10:14 AM

I regularly read materials from the Acton Institute. It is a subject of intense amusement to me to read a Catholic priest arguing for subsidiarity in light of the pedophile scandals in the Church. As the parent of two autistic boys I now can look forward to a Republican future in which they are beaten by Baptists or raped by priests in faith-based institutions after I die. . .

Posted by: jim at November 18, 2004 12:23 PM

Since I'm not Catholic, I don't feel bound to defend the hierarchical structure of the Roman church, which I think tends to promote the sort of abuses to which you refer.

Of course, it should be of even greater amusement to you then that JPII places such great emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity, as you point out in your post (sans vitriol) since he's the earthly head of the Church...someone with a bit more control over the structure and activity of the Church than a priest.

And as far as Baptist beatings, I'm not really sure what you are talking about. If you were taking the arguments of the conservatives seriously, however you would know that this hypothetical "Republican" future you reference certainly wouldn't require you to commit your boys to any particular institution.

I'm sure you could find a program run by some nice atheists who wouldn't mistreat them. And you'd be free, in fact, encouraged, to place them where you chose.

At least you'd have options that wouldn't otherwise be available to you, as in a situation where you have to rely on the state and "a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending."

In any case, I wonder if your response is indicative of an approach which takes the conservative "arguments seriously." Do you read the Acton Institute materials seriously or only for your "intense amusement"?

Posted by: Jordan at November 18, 2004 01:18 PM

I am most emphatically not an atheist, I must point out. I attend religious services regularly and contribute to my religious organization financially and with service. My boys also have been served well for 16 years by hard-working, underpaid, and underappreciated public school teachers and aides. All the group homes for the disabled in my community are now in the process of being closed down by the state, because of no money. As Jesus said, "By their fruits shall ye know them."

Posted by: Jim at November 18, 2004 02:27 PM

I'm sorry that you inferred I meant to call you an atheist. I was merely attempting to describe a hypothetical future situation in which you wouldn't have to rely on Baptists or Catholics. There are myriad other options beyond the Baptist-Catholic-athiest triumvirate, of course. Your derision for the former two seemed to revolve around their "faith-based"-ness, so I chose to use an example that was as far removed from such odious "faith based"-ness as I could.

Posted by: Jordan at November 19, 2004 10:59 AM

Re: the claim that an unregulated market economy cannot exist alongside the kinds of family values that social conservatives desire. I have two questions for Jim:

First question: If the welfare state (or any apparatus--socialist, interventionist, statist, local, federal--ensuring “security” from the market’s inequities and its volatilities) lures the material wolf from the door by guaranteeing protection from hunger, early death, etc., then does socialism in the end promote an environment where “family values” truly can be debated? (I guess this is a variation on Hannah Arendt’s claim that if the oikos is secured for all citizens, the public space of action can grow to its deserved prominence.)

Second question. If ensuring security removes material issues from the rhetorical table, then did western mixed economies create the conditions for the kinds of alliances that we see in contemporary conservatism: social values driving the discussion with free-market policy tramping along in the empty railcars? In short, does the welfare state make “family values” the principal issue while libertarian policies sneak along under the rhetorical radar?

These are real questions that I have. They’re raised by my recently having read Inglehart’s _Modernization and Postmodernization_, a theoretically thin but statistically fat volume mapping the rhetorical terrain of “advanced,” welfare-state democracies like the US. His conclusion is that the welfare state does take the wolf from the door, allowing recognition to trump redistribution. I’m wondering what to make of this in light of your arguments about taking conservatism seriously.

Posted by: Mark G. at November 19, 2004 12:21 PM

Blogora Classic, Jim Aune on A Rhetorical Agenda, November 21, 2004

November 21, 2004

A Rhetorical Agenda

One of my friends remarked at NCA last week that the Blogora is a sign that ddd, rhosa, and jim seem to have an awful lot of time on their hands. The implication, I guess, was that blogging is somehow separate from the "real" work of the teacher-scholar. In addition, though, to connecting rhetorical concepts and methods with daily life in the public sphere, I hope we can have some extended conversations about "what should rhetoric be now?" (I'm reminded of a book published a few years ago entitled What Should Political Theory Be Now? )

In just the last ten years we have developed a critical mass of folks interested in rhetoric in both rhet/comp and in Communication, with a smattering of others in political science and elsewhere. Rhetorical studies, however, is still all over the academic map, without a clear research trajectory. I got into some trouble a few years ago at Penn State when I suggested that doctoral students in rhetoric should connect their dissertation work with the research program of their advisor (I found out I was accused of wanting to create "clones"--go figure). My point was that academic fields progress when attention-space is relatively narrow, and there are a common set of questions and debates with which everyone is familiar. One reason for the greater success of the social sciences in Communication, I think, is their insistence on coordinating research programs. A more practical problem develops when scholarship is all over the place: people don't buy each others' books, which has led to a recurring problem with book series in rhetoric at various university presses. I don't want to belabor the point, but rather to get to my discussion question: what would be a list of focused topics in rhetorical studies that we could look back at ten years from now and say we've made some progress? The best example of what I'm talking about is the string of books and articles published in Presidential Rhetoric in the last ten years; we now know a lot about American presidents and their rhetorical leadership.

One topic I would like to see more about is the historiography of rhetorical theory. We continue to produce great monograph-style works on key texts and moments in the history of rhetoric, but we still lack a synthesis of what rhetoric in the European tradition has meant, how it has changed, etc. The birth-death-resurrection metaphor I learned in graduate school just doesn't work well any more. What could replace it?

Categories: The Profession 

Posted by jim at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

Blogora Classic: Aune on Method

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 scholarship


1. 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.


Method Part II

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?

Blogora Classic: Professional Ethics, November 03, 2004

November 03, 2004

Professional Ethics

I again today am bedeviled by an ethical question that has bothered me my entire professional life: to what extent should I reveal my own personal political convictions in class? For about 15 years I have adopted the rule to keep my undergraduate students guessing about my beliefs while being quite open in my graduate classes. The only belief I regularly discuss openly is my First Amendment absolutism. I decided on this policy for two reasons: 1) Too many students adapt to professorial prejudice and thus fail to think for themselves; 2) My reluctance to use my "power" to persuade(such as it is--I can't get them to do the assigned reading 2/3 of the time, much less brainwash them). Since moving to Texas and teaching at what the Princeton Review ranks as the number one conservative campus in the U.S. (above both Brigham Young and Liberty University), I have also done so for reasons of prudence. There are crazy groups out there, like the Young Conservatives of Texas, that target faculty who take controversial views.

But what do I do today if students ask me for my take on the election?

A related question has to do with Blogora itself. I have been waiting for someone to raise the accusation of "liberal bias" about the postings thus far. To which I respond: it is not hard to create unanimity in a professional group when you consistently attack the values they stand for: freedom of speech, science and the Enlightenment, reasoned argument. There are plenty of intelligent British-style conservatives and libertarians out there in rhetoric-land. I am pretty sure that Tri-Delt, Rhosa, and I differ significantly amongst ourselves with respect to politics and pedagogy--not to mention rhetorical theory. So we hope to hear from opposing views across the political and cultural spectrum. Really.

Posted by jim at November 3, 2004 07:41 AM

But what do I do today if students ask me for my take on the election?

First you ask them for their thoughts. Then you tell them yours. Repeat until people begin to repeat themselves. Don't always have the last word.

Then you ask how the conversation--any and all parts or dimensions of it--might be framed, analyzed, explained, and criticized from various points of view. These points of view might provided by their, and your, reading in rhetoric, philosphy, ideology critique, etc. There will have been much food for thought, e.g., about democratic politics, political speech, etc., if you will but set the table.

As for the conflict between professional role and advocacy: yes, there is one, at least to the extent that you should not abuse power. But you can not avoid power, so give up that pretense. Furthermore, the study of public address is sterile if it lacks a vital relationship with political thought, and teaching it well requires voicing one's considered opinion. Indeed, you have a professional responsibility to model engaged and responsibile citizenship. Keeping quiet, even to preclude violence, is no virtue in that context.

That's how it looks on paper--well, on the screen,actually. How any progressive can teach without cracking today, I do not know.

Posted by: Robert Hariman at November 3, 2004 08:43 AM

The question is a vexing one that I have to contend with at LSU, another "conservative" university (the commencement addy last year was given by "W" himself). For most of my students, it is so obvious where I'm leaning that I usually don't have to say anything: they know.

On election day, I ditched the prepared lecture and asked the class to separate: on the left side of the class Kerry supporters sat, on the right, Bush's, and in the back, the "undecided." I then framed a "discussion" by saying that all of this "division" rhetoric coming from the mass media is a subtle pedagogy of silence, and that if there is anywhere in the U.S. that we might have a good, civil, and respectful discussion, it was the classroom. You may not be able to talk religion and politics at the dinner table, but the classroom should be a place where that can happen.

They loved it. They spoke their minds but remained respectful. They seemed geniunelly thrilled to have the opportunity. No one tried to persuade the "other side"--people simply chatted about who they were voting for and why (the undecideds, it turned out, were really Bush supporters).

At the end of the discussion I asked rhetorically, "is anyone unsure about where I stand on the candidates?" They giggled.

I guess I would agree stumping for Kerry in the classroom is an abuse of power. But I also think--given my cultural studies training--that educators should be free to admit their subjective views on the world. Of course, we've long moved past the classroom as a space of "objective knowledge"--but many of my students haven't come to terms with that fact. As a rhetorican commited to contingency, I think being honest but not dogmatic about one's politics is one of many ways the ethics of contingiency gets taught.

Posted by: Josh Gunn at November 4, 2004 08:30 AM

This semester has proven to be exciting for me as I become more and more ambiguous about my political persuasion. Of the utmost importance is that I NOT persuade, nor express, in any explicit way, what position my students should take. Sometimes a waffle; sometimes I skate around the issue, but whatever I do, it is to provoke discussion. This sounds simplistic to some, but I want my students to think through the issues; I try my best to problematized issues, and even if "it ain't" broke I feel it incumbent to seriously listen to other sides.

Posted by: Rick at November 4, 2004 01:51 PM

How Superman would End the War

Blogora Classic: Representing Rhetoric, February 20, 2005

February 20, 2005

Representing Rhetoric

I've been taking notes for a long time on references to "rhetoric" in poetry and also to representations of speeches and/or persuasion in literature. I don't know where the notes are going--perhaps towards a very modest troping of Auerbach's Mimesis.

A few examples: some familiar, some obscure. Any other examples you can think of?

1. Alexander Pope, Dunciad IV: 21-26: Beneath her [Dulness] footstool, Science groans in chains,/And Wit dreads exile, penalties and pains. / There foamed rebellious Logic, gagged and bound,/There, stripped, fair Rhetoric languished on the ground,/His blunted arms by Sophistry are borne,/And shameless Billingsgate her robes adorn.

2. Wallace Stevens, "Add This to Rhetoric" [selections]: It is posed and it is posed. /But in nature it merely grows. /Stones pose in the falling night; / And beggars dropping to sleep, /They pose themselves and their rags. . . . /In the way you speak/You arrange, the thing is posed,/What in nature merely grows. . . ./Add this. It is to add.

3. Samuel Butler, Hudibras: For rhetoric, he could not ope/His mouth, but out there flew a trope. (Part i. Canto i. Line 81.) For all a rhetorician's rules/Teach nothing but to name his tools. ( Part i. Canto i. Line 89.)

4. Thomas McGrath, "The Rituals at the Chapel Perilous: for the black revolutionaries Henry Winston & Angela Davis": Then the limber artillery of the orators/Was trained on that butterfly of speculation/The Historic Moment: which exists, for rhetoric/Forever, like the flower in the heart of the lotus."

5. There is a punk group called Welt with a song called "Rhetoric" on their album Broke Down (but I can't hear the words on any of the music the kids play these days. . . )

Posted by jim at February 20, 2005 12:14 PM

Eavan Boland, "Writing in a Time of Violence":

In my last year in College /
I set out /
to write an essay on /
the Art of Rhetoric. I had yet to find /

the country already lost to me /
in song and figure as I scribbled down /
names for sweet euphony /
and safe digression.

(And it goes on.)

Boland talks about her interest in rhetoric here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?011029on_onlineonly01a

Posted by: Donna Strickland at February 21, 2005 09:10 AM

Blogora Classic: Demographic Anxieties, November 07, 2004

November 07, 2004

Demographic Anxieties

What made "moral issues," specifically abortion and same-sex marriage/civil unions such a (to use the ugly poli sci word) salient issue for a significant number of voters in this election?

Having taught for most of my life at religious colleges (and the one I've been at the longest, Texas A&M;, is perhaps the most religious of all, even if nominally a public institution), I am well aware of the religious objections to both abortion and homosexuality. I have the greatest respect for pro-life Catholics like the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who argued for a "consistent ethic of life," opposing abortion, the death penalty, and war. Also, from the standpoint of traditional moral theology, "lust" (under which, I guess, one would subsume homosexuality) is clearly the least deadly of the deadly sins (see Dante's Purgatorio, for example), even if it is a "sin." But what accounts for the peculiarly "obsessive" emphasis on these two issues in the election?

The seeds of an answer occurred to me last spring when teaching Foucault in my 20th century rhetorical theory class. His discussion of biopower in the early modern period as centering on the state's interest in "population" (Malthus and all that) made me wonder if there is some essential demographic anxiety that underlies the Christian Right's rhetoric. I do not know how one might "falsify" an argument like this (yes, I am a closet social scientist), but it seems worth exploring. The argument proceeds as follows:

1. Homosexuality and abortion threaten "the family." At a superficial level, this seems odd; how do my GLBT friends affect my family, for example? But at a deeper level, the family is threatened because the net number of children is reduced if homosexuality and abortion are widely practiced.

2. Texas this year (about 5 years ahead of schedule) was the first year in which the white population ceased to be the majority. California hit that threshold a few years ago. Whites aren't reproducing enough to retain demographic and, hence, political power. One commonly accepted explanation for Tom DeLay's gerrymandering of Texas congressional districts is that it was an effort to forestall the political impact of the coming Hispanic majority in the state.

3. One also hears arguments from "minority" (we're going to need another word soon) advocates that homosexuality threatens "the race"; Molefi Asante, architect of "Afrocentrism," makes the argument that gay men must give up their sexual orientation for the good of the race. Arafat frequently argued that the future of Palestine lay "in the wombs of Arab women," because the Palestinian birth rate is so much higher than the Israeli Jewish birth rate.

4. So do abortion and homosexuality in this year's election, like everything else in America, eventually come down to race?

I'm not sure, but I wanted to try out the argument. I think we need generally to account for the phenomenon of social anxiety as we continue to refigure our understanding of the role of emotions in political rhetoric.

Posted by jim at November 7, 2004 11:09 AM

I think you are on to something. There was a 2002 article in Mother Jones magazine on Evangelical Christians trying to convert Muslims where the following quote appeared

"A former missionary himself, Larson fears that Christianity might be losing the race for world domination. "Islam is biologically taking over the world," he says. "They're having babies faster than we are."

The rest of the article is available at: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/05/stealth.html

This type of thinking also supports the pro-war stance of the evangelical right. 

Posted by: Karen McCullough at November 7, 2004 05:58 PM

I've actually heard this kind of thing a lot here in texas--the notion that only those who SHOULD get abortions, don't (eg: those who are in the lower socio-economic brackets and not white).

Posted by: ddd at November 7, 2004 06:22 PM

I doubt that the primary effectiveness of the argument comes at the rational (i.e., demographic) level, as you imply here; instead it's largely code, I think, for the sexualization of the Other -- which in turn ties in with the argument that Jim makes below about "the crisis of masculinity" going on currently in the US.

Posted by: Randy Cauthen at November 7, 2004 07:47 PM

It has more to do with an underlying view of the structure of societies with respect to families than with an unspoken racism or classism.

To a large extent, a form of Abraham Kuyper's "sphere sovereignty" doctrine of the social realm has been imbibed by generic American evangelicalism, and more explicitly so by Reformed Christians (subsequently communicated to the broader evangelical world via persons like Charles Colson, for example).

This follows a long line of Protestant thought which emphasizes the centrality of institutions like marriage and family to the structure of a healthy and well-functioning society. These institutions, of course, are to be biblically normed, thus the exclusion of gay "marriage." And I would think it is self-evident how abortion undermines the long-term viability of a family structure.

The effects you point to as primary in your analysis end up as second- or third-level consequences. With respect to the Christian vs. Muslim argument, that doesn't seem to square, since the traditional Muslim view on issues of homosexualism and abortion are generally in line with the evangelical Christian.

Posted by: Jordan at November 8, 2004 10:17 AM

Some proof that the emphasis on marriage isn't a 20th century Nazi invention, from Luther's Table Talk:

Then he began to speak in praise of marriage, the divine institution from which everything proceeds and without which the whole world would have remained empty and all creatures would have been meaningless and of no account, since they were created for the sake of man. “So Eve and her breasts would not have existed, and none of the other ordinances would have followed. It was for this reason that, in the power of the Holy Spirit, Adam called his wife by that admirable name Eve, which means mother. He didn’t say ‘wife’ but ‘mother,’ and he added ‘of all living.’ Here you have the ornament that distinguishes woman, namely, that she is the fount of all living human beings. These words were very few, but neither Demosthenes nor Cicero ever composed such an oration. This is the oration of the very eloquent Holy Spirit, fitted to our first parent. He is the one who declaims here, and since this orator defines and praises [marriage] it is only right that we put a charitable construction on everything that may be frail in a woman. For Christ, our Savior, did not hold woman in contempt but entered the womb of a woman. Paul also reflected on this [when he wrote], ‘Woman will be saved through bearing children,’ etc. [I Tim. 2:15]. This is admirable praise, except that he uses the little word ‘woman’ and not ‘mother.’ ”

Luther, Martin. Vol. 54, Luther's Works, Vol. 54: Table Talk. Edited by Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann. Luther's Works. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999, c1967. P. 223.

Posted by: Jordan at November 11, 2004 02:25 PM