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ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory » April 29th: Knoblauch. Ch. 6, 7, and “Afterword”

April 29th: Knoblauch. Ch. 6, 7, and “Afterword”

Your Rhetoric/al Projects are due Friday, 5/1, 11:00pm on Canvas.

Plan for Today

  • Cover Photo of Knoblauch’s Book
  • Gladiatrices at Pompeii?
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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)
        • “…magical rhetoric valorizes belief, faith, and spiritual transcendence…”
          (p. 199–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 valorizes certainty, stability, and commitment…”
          (p. 199–Discursive Ideologies)
        • “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)
        • “…objectivist rhetoric valorizes dispassionate knowledge and technological progress…” (p. 199–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)
        • “…expressivist rhetoric valorizes freedom, individualism, and creativity…” (p. 199–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)
        • “…sociological rhetoric valorizes justice, collective responsibility, struggle for change…” (p. 199–Discursive Ideologies)
        • “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?
        • “In the world of deconstructive rhetoric, a text is not a mirror held up to nature, as it was in the ontological tradition; it’s a mirror held up to other mirrors. Discourse is a house of such mirrors, texts facing other texts, words reflecting and refracting other words.” (p. 163–Discursive Ideologies)
        • “…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.”
        • “According to sociological rhetoric, human persons, material beings, form their subjectivities out of a dialectic between physical needs, which
          they project into the world, and preexisting social affiliations…ideological values, along with the means of signifying those affiliations, which they internalize from the world.”
    • p. 132: “social ratification, the collective understanding that something is true.”
        • “Signification is the architect of the human world.”
        • “…the ground of meaningfulness in sociological rhetoric is what I will call intersubjectivity, the social consciousness that groups of people compose through verbal and other signs in the ceaseless production of human reality.”
    • 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.”
    • p. 134: “…scientific communities establish the identity of the individual scientist. What identifies the community meanwhile is its collective agreement about the substance and form of its paradigm, a network of laws, theories, hypotheses, operating procedures, and modes of instrumentation, the appropriate understanding or manipulation of which is critical to the comprehensibility and acceptance of additional theoretical ideas or experimental results.”
    • p. 136: Changes how we perceive the world–“The very concept of scientific progress, then, is synonymous with paradigm replacement, understood as a struggle inside the scientific community, not to add the latest new discovery to universal knowledge but to reconstruct its internal, historical consensus about how to see the world…”
    • 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.”
    • pp. 137-138: “…rhetorical criticism, the close reading of literary as well as other documents in order to understand, through parsing the subtleties of their language, the complex of motives that drive interpersonal conduct (including the production of texts).”
    • 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. 144: According to Marx and Engels, “consciousness” is defined “as human beings’ collective awareness of the nature of their participation in the material world.”
    • 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.”
    • pp. 147-148: “Human beings, however, are agents of their history, conscious of their relations to their environments and motivated, as their needs require, to change the conditions of their life-worlds.”
    • Compartmentalization???
    • p. 148: “…[Marx] tells a story about the inevitability of socioeconomic change as human beings experience the degeneration of their work from collectively producing their life-world to producing “property” for the benefit of others in exchange for wages.”
    • p. 149: “Communism represents, for Marx, an inevitable historical evolution,
      the next (but not necessarily the last) step in the emergence of social consciousness…”
    • p. 149: “Marx’s story…identifies change rather than stasis as the natural human condition and that locates the processes of change not in abstract thought or in the rare actions of heroic individuals—the scientist, the poet—but in the material, collective labor of ordinary people.”
    • 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. 154: “Discourse always simultaneously constrains speakers and also changes through their material speech.”
    • 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: “Culture, [Raymond Williams] insists, better understood as a dynamic process than as an achieved reality, and as a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous work in progress. Culture is both limits and pressures…”
        • “…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’.”
        • “What did you dream / That’s alright we told you what to dream”
          –Pink Floyd. “Welcome to the Machine.”
    • p. 159-160: Volosinov and social construction.
    • 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: “Intertextuality, 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.”

“Afterword”

    • p. 196: “Ideologies articulate ways of being in the world, and the six perspectives on rhetoric…have materially shaped European, including American, discursive practices.”
    • p. 197: “Invoking the botanical metaphors of romanticism, we celebrate the individual child’s growth but we also prepare her for the stultifying assembly line or the groupthink of corporate middle management.”
    • p. 199: “Rhetoric endlessly mediates these values in the spheres of actual public discourse, creating webs of meaning that give our institutions, along with our individual behaviors, their distinctive character.”
    • p. 199: “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. 200: “As rhetorical beings we live in and through language, creating, borrowing, using, misrepresenting, contradicting, and abandoning texts as our primary strategies for learning….Our obligation is not to transcend self-interest but to disclose it.”
    • Any rhetorical analysis can consider, propose, debate, etc. the ways in which meanings are embedded into texts.

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 a future “Rhetoric of Technology” class (coming soon). But, because I have notes already, I’ll include them for context.

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
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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)

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 that empirical evidence leads to probabilities.

Videos…

I came across a gem today…

  • Angel Rose “Woke Teachers” (11:15) (19:30)

Next Class

All that’s left is the Final Exam!!! On, Wednesday, May 6th, 6:00pm, we’ll do presentations. I hope you enjoyed this semester’s readings and conversations. Don’t forget your Rhetoric/al Projects are due, Friday, 5/01, 11:00pm on Canvas. Also, if you create a PowerPoint of your presentation, it might be best to email that to me, so I can transfer it to the podium computer for your upload your 9-10 minute presentations by May 2nd.

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