May 3rd: Knoblauch. Ch. 6, 7, and “Afterword”

Cy Knoblauch’s Rhetorical Perspectives

Knoblauch doesn’t give us quick, concise definitions of these rhetorical perspectives. Instead, he takes us through his thinking about them in each chapter. Knoblauch spent many years considering these perspectives. In 1988, he published an article that discussed four of the six he has in his book: ontological rhetoric, objectivist rhetoric, expressivist (expressionist) rhetoric, and sociological rhetoric. The article was mainly focused on discussing education and literacy studies at the end of the 1980s and how these perspectives might enhance composition classes.

Below I have attempted to capture concise definitions of Knoblauch’s perspectives from Discursive Ideologies (2014) and his 1988 College English article “Rhetorical Constructions: Dialogue and Commitment”:

• Magical Rhetoric
  • “Magical rhetoric…refers to the discourse of the sacred, a theory and practice of language conditioned by the assumption that the world is” created by a divine being. (p. 26–Discursive Ideologies)
• Ontological Rhetoric
  • “Philosophically, the ontological argument presumes an absolute distinction between the concept of ‘language’ and the concept of ‘reality,’ the second prior to the first and denoting an intrinsically coherent “world” (that is, metaphysical order) to which language ‘makes reference’ so as to enable human communication….”
    “In this view, language use is largely irrelevant to the substance of knowledge although crucial for its transmission.” (p. 128–College English)
  • “Ontological rhetoric deals with the nature of being and privileges the view that “language derives its power to signify from its relationship to an intrinsically and purposefully ordered, that is, teleological, exteriority.” (p. 51–Discursive Ideologies)
• Objectivist Rhetoric
  • “The objectivist statement locates knowledge in human intellectual activity as it acts upon experiential information. Its challenge to the ontological view is its assertion that knowledge depends upon discourse or language use, on the human search for significance, rather than on an intrinsically rational, ‘revealed’ order of things.” (p. 130–College English)
  • “Objectivist rhetoric is comprised of empirical inquiry, driven by a cycle of hypothesis and experiment, which leads to defensible assertions linked to previous, similarly tested assertions in a temporally evolving pattern of data-driven argument.” (p. 79–Discursive Ideologies)
• Expressivist Rhetoric (he calls it “Expressionist” in the College English article)
  • “…expressionist rhetoric, a theory that locates the source of knowledge not in sensory experience but in the processes of human imagination.” (p. 130–College English)
  • not concerned with “objective reality independent of the perceiving subject,…but rather what…[it] means to the perceiving subject.” (p. 105–Discursive Ideologies)
  • “The issue is human intelligibility, while the status of objects in themselves is as irrelevant as it is undecidable.” (p. 105–Discursive Ideologies)
  • “People identify the preferable…by experience, and they seek to persuade those who hold different views that their advantage lies in accommodating conventional agreements about the preferable.” (pp. 105-106–Discursive Ideologies)
• Sociological Rhetoric
  • “…privileging the social as the conceptual starting point for our understanding of discursive practice and the making of knowledge.” (p. 130–Discursive Ideologies, emphasis added)
  • “…the ground of meaningfulness in sociological rhetoric is what I call intersubjectivity, the social consciousness that groups of people compose through verbal and other signs in the ceaseless production of human reality.” (p. 132–Discursive Ideologies, emphasis added)
  • “Language is regarded as a social practice rooted, as are all social practices, in material and historical process….Society is to be sure a human construct, but the individual is also a social construct: one’s sense of “self” is made possible through the essentially social identifications-family, home, country, culture, religion, ethical orientation, school-that allow selfhood to define itself” (p. 134–College English)
• Deconstructive Rhetoric
  • Are we surprised there’s no concise way to articulate this perspective?
  • “…deconstructive rhetoric valorizes irreverence and critique, the powerful mischief of play….deconstructive rhetoric can subvert hegemonic ideas or institutions while lacking the energy and determined commitment, the confident sense of agency, necessary to sponsor (or even envision) change for the better.” (p. 199–Discursive Ideologies)

Knoblauch Ch. 6 “Sociological Rhetoric”

Drawing heavily on Karl Marx and Thomas Kuhn, this chapter identifies the intersubjective framework governing the meaning of meaning without substituting one socially constructed framework as the grand narrative. Although reductive and in desperate need of qualifications, as a starting point, I would claim that this perspective combines objectivist rhetoric and expressivist rhetoric. Immutable, objective reality could be an intersubjectively held position, but communities share rules for appropriately recognizing and organizing experiences–not an individual free for all.

• p. 131: “…society is simply the assemblage of independently conscious individuals–perceivers who amass composite perceptions, thinkers who share their knowledge, speakers who join in conversation.”
  • “…the practices of language are a priori social practices defining the very possibility of individuation.”
• p. 132: “social ratification, the collective understanding that something is true.”
  • “Signification is the architect of the human world.”
• p. 133: “Kuhn’s position, contrary to that of classical objectivism, is that science does not develop historically…as though progress were a single, unbroken arc of intellectual achievement.”
  • Paradigms from Kuhn
• p. 136: “There are no one-person world views….The construction of new knowledge…is achieved only by communities.”
• Kenneth Burke’s pentad
  • Act: What is going on?
  • Scene: Where is the action taking place? What’s the location?
  • Agent: Who or what is carrying out an action?
  • Agency: How, by what means, is an act completed?
  • Purpose: Why is the act being done?
• p. 137: The Burkean “rhetor is socially enveloped within the ‘scene’ of language (symbolic action), and socially positioned by means of myriad identifications, differentiated interests, and hierarchical orders.”
• p. 140: “Dramastic method is evidently grounded in dialectic, the give and take of opposing views.”
• p. 141: From K. Burke–“‘the basic function of rhetoric’ is ‘the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents’ (p. 41).”
  • “Rhetoric…becomes a medium for socialization.”
• p. 142: “…modern media make it more appropriate to consider the constructed nature of an audience, a group ‘carved out’ of the social fabric, as market analysts contrive the groups that are most likely to desire commercial products.”
  • “…there are no unrhetorical uses of language.”
• p. 145: From a Marxian perspective–“…the human species differentiates itself from other animals through the character of its work, which is not merely instinctual but conscious and motivated.”
  • I, of course, question how conscious we are…
• p. 146: “…human beings…derive our individuality from the social realities in which we already and necessarily participate. Our labor exists within a network of productive relations.”
• p. 147: “The life-world is better understood as a process than as a condition, the continuous reconstruction of social reality as humanity applies its labor to the satisfaction of its needs.”
• p. 151: “…language always preexists the specific user and is only meaningful because its meanings are already collectively shared.”
• p. 152 (top): “We create the illusion of personal ownership, including the sense of distinctive voice or style…failing to hear our utterances as echoes of the speech practices existing everywhere around us.”
• p. 153: “Meaning in dialogue cannot reside, therefore, in the words themselves, or in the ‘soul of the speaker,’ or in the ‘soul of the hearer.'”
• p. 157: Commenting on Raymond Williams–“the production of cultural meanings and values is far from a rigidly constrained, uniform, or one-directional social process leading to or supporting monolithic ideological formations.”
• p. 158: “…hegemony explains how ideology becomes ‘common sense,’ no longer articulate but pervasive in social consciousness.”
  • “It has become ‘the sense of reality for most people in the society’.”
• p. 160: “Actual writers…are always surrounded by voices they hear in their heads from the recollected speaking and writing of others that form their consciousness.”

Knoblauch Ch. 7 “Deconstructive Rhetoric”

Well, keeping with the tradition of Derrida and postmodernism, this perspective is both meaning maker and critique of the assumed meanings–the traces of knowledge and meanings–privileged by particular groups. Unlike ontological or magical rhetoric, which have absolute grounds for truth, this perspective is more concerned with explaining how slippery meaning and affixing meaning can be.

• p. 163: “The process of signifying has no starting point, no termination, no textual boundaries, and most important, no exit from the network of significations that sprawls from any and every point.”
• p. 165: “There is no outside, no extraverbal, transcendent source for our images. ‘We’ are all endlessly constructed as images by the textual mirrors themselves.”
• p. 165: “The pieces on the chess board have no meaning outside the game.”
  • “The game is a coherent system of interrelated positions and moves, values that regulate the details of play.”
  • Speaking of games, let’s consider dice as tools vs signs.
• p. 167: “Intertexuality, the endless dependency of meaning upon meaning across all boundaries of signification, from the word to the book, phoneme to the discourse, begins from Saussure’s assertion about language as a system of differences.”
• p. 168: “Belief in the transcendental signified as a meaning that lives beyond the games of language is ‘logocentrism’.”
• p. 173: “It’s the nature of signs to refer only and always to other signs: presence is not less elusive in one than in another.”
  • Metaphysics of presence is Derrida’s phrase for Western civilization’s privileging of (the assumption) of immediate access to meaning and not deferred access to meaning captured in the concept différance.
  • Arche-writing is Derrida’s concept of writing that comes before speech and writing.
• p. 176: “…writing has been historically implicated in the rise of empires, the creation of castes and classes…”
• p. 179: Thinking of metaphors, writing is both supplement and substitution.
• p. 181: “Through practices of irreverent reading, texts are turned against themselves and interrogated for their claims of transcendent coherence, clarity, and sufficiency.”
• p. 182: Devaluing higher education–“Quaint concepts like ‘the training of minds,’ ‘learning for learning’s sake,’ and ‘communal inquiry’ are losing their claims to public attention.”
• 20 years ago, I heard learning for the sake of learning reflected middle class privilege…
• p. 183: “Any language, understood as practice, is comprised of a multitude of language games.”
• p. 187: “language as ritual combat, an agonistic male fantasy about supremacy and subordination, where dialectic—argumentation—is the metaphorical weapon of choice.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Knoblauch explains Lyotard’s contribution to deconstructive rhetoric (pp. 180-186), specifically as it relates to the rhetoric of science and technology. I used to assign Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition in Rhetorical Theory, but I reserve that for “The Rhetoric of Technology” (coming Spring 2023!).

The following terms are important to Lyotard’s discussion:

• technocracy: the condition of regulating society (and its institutions) to reflect the spirit of the late Industrial Revolution and 20th century efficiency values
  • from wikipedia…
• modernism: turn of the last century “condition” that observers and scholars claim influenced Western civilization; key attributes of art, architecture, and life are
  • sense of alienation
  • mass public; masses
  • drive for efficiency
  • apotheosis of technological solutions
  • militarization
• high modernism: the period between WWI and WWII; often considered a more mature modernism than that of the historical avant-garde movements of Futurism, Vorticism, Imagism, Rayonism, and others of the 1910s
• praxis: putting theory into practice
• paralogy: against an established way of reasoning
• pragmatics: linguistic field studying how context mediates/contributes to meaning
• dialectics: dialogue, discourse, discussing between two, usually opposing, speakers attempting to come to truth through reason or (what’s considered established, valid) logic
• didactics: having to do with instruction; pedagogy
• positive science: value free or neutral science; how things are in absolute terms
• positivism: the theory that science and scientific views reign; one can directly access the natural world through one’s senses (or technological protheses)
• cybernetics: the study of structured systems and networks
• Kant’s categorical imperative: an ethical philosophy that motivates a person’s action (or inaction) based on presumed duties (see also deontology)
• catastrophe theory: mathematical study into the nature of how changes can or cannot effect the equilibrium of a system

There are probably more, but this is a good list to start with.

What’s this got to do with Rhetoric

I’m glad you asked. Rhetoric, as we’ve discussed, is about understanding the way(s) information is conveyed, how meaning is mediated by language and culture. Lyotard is mixing the two–language and (the subculture of) science. Here’s an important quotation on this:

• “The scientific solution….is dialectical or even rhetorical in the forensic sense: a referent is that which is susceptible to proof and can be used as evidence in a debate….as long as I can produce proof, it is permissible to think that reality is the way I say it is.” (p. 24)

Discussion Questions/Points

Lyotard has lots to say in a pretty short space. I’ve come up with a few themes we ought to consider:

• Legitimation
  • Pragmatics of Narrative (p. 21)
    • The 3 speech acts that constitute the social bond:
      1) of the speaker
      2) of the listener
      3) of the party referred to
    • The 3 compentencies
      1) know-how
      2) knowing how to speak
      3) knowing how to hear
  • Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge
    • “Sender should speak the truth about the referent” (p. 23)
    • “The addressee…[may] give (or refuse) his [or her] assent to the statement [heard]” (p. 23)
    • “The referent…is supposed to be ‘expressed’ by [the speaker’s] statement in conformity with what it actually is” (p. 24)
  • What is false, non-legitimated narrative or scientific knowledge?
• Technocracy
  • What makes our culture technocratic?
  • What are some examples of a technocratic worldview mediating decisions or life, in general?
  • What can we say about ideology and technology?
• Performativity
• Access to information
  • Who has access?
  • Who creates knowledge?
• Who defines “important” research of the last century “condition” that observers and scholars claim influenced Western civilization; key attributes of art, architecture, and life are
  • sense of alienation
  • mass public; masses
  • drive for efficiency
  • apotheosis of technological solutions
  • militarization
• Education (time permitting because I doubt we’ll have much to say…)
  • Student’s role…in the presence of the master!
  • My path to teaching
• Insider information on moving through the academy
• Jameson’s introduction: “non-class formations such as bureaucracy and technocracy” (p. xiv)

Anything else?

Key Points in the Text

We could discuss this work for several class periods. I’m hoping the above is a way to get a handle on it, but we can also pick key quotations and run with them. Time permitting…

• p. 4: “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.”
• p. 11: “The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output–in other words, performativity.”
• p. 14: “Access to data is, and will continue to be, the prerogative of experts of all stripes. The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers.”
• p. 26: “A statement of science gains no validity from the fact of being reported. Even in the case of pedagogy, it is taught only if it is still verifiable in the present through argumentation and proof.”
• p. 39: “Stripped of the responsibility for research (which was stifled by the speculative narrative), they limit themselves to the transmission of what is judged to be established knowledge, and through didactics they guarantee the replication of teachers rather than the production of researchers.”
• p. 46: “Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.”
  • p. 47: “This is how legitimation by power takes shape….It is self-legitimating, in the same way a system organized around performance maximization seems to be.”
  • p. 47: “the criterion of performance is explicitly invoked by the authorities to justify their refusal to subsidize certain research centers.”
  • Guess what types of “research centers” are being funded now? Let’s come up with some key words.
• p. 49: “the ‘democratic’ university…which was modeled along the principles of emancipationist humanism, today seems to offer little in the way of performance.”
• p. 57: “In pragmatic terms, [the idea that nature is indifferent] means that in the natural sciences ‘nature’ is the referent–mute, but as predictable as a die thrown a great number of times–about which scientists exchange denotative utterances constituting moves they play against on another.”
  • From IEP: “The “denotative” is an utterance which attempts to correctly identify the object or referent to which it refers (such as ‘Snow is white’).” (b. “The Postmodern Condition,” para. 3—http://www.iep.utm.edu/lyotard/#H4)
• p. 60: “We no longer have recourse to the grand narratives–we can resort neither to the dialectic of Spirit nor even to the emancipation of humanity as a validation for postmodern scientific discourse.”
• p. 63: “Rights do not flow from hardship, but from the fact that the alleviation of hardship improves the system’s performance….the system seems to be a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity.”

I don’t think we should conclude that Lyotard calls for an anti-science nihilism. Instead, he (and others) are arguing against replacing devotion to a deity with devotion to a Grand Narrative of Science–an institution that answers all questions and leads to truth. Be aware of the game of science, but don’t dismiss the fact the sea levels are rising!

Next Class

That’s it! We have no next class. I hope you enjoyed this semester’s readings and conversations. Don’t forget your Rhetoric/al Projects are due tomorrow (5/04…May the Fourth Be with You) at 11:00pm, and your 9-10 minute presentations are due next week (5/10, 11:00pm).

Further thinking…

• Noam Chomsky: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history”
• Then & Now: Putin’s Sense of History