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?