[lbo-talk] On the Limits of Rhetoric

Stannard67 at aol.com Stannard67 at aol.com
Sat Nov 27 19:05:46 PST 2004


Recent (brilliant and unapologetically Marxist) work by Dana L. Cloud, and less recent work by Phillip Wander and others, kind of lays to rest the pure speaker-audience transactional model, and even places Lloyd Bitzer's "rhetorical situation" in a decidedly more materialist framework. Few rhetorical theorists today think they can ignore Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model, Marx, or Gramsci. There are some neo-Aristotelians left, but they're in short supply.

Kenneth Burke, of course, was a card-carrying communist before McCarthyism forced him to turn his theoretical work towards "dramatism" and other much less radical-sounding paradigms.

Probably the most important article on the ideological turn in rhetorical criticism is Wander's "The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism," Central States Speech Journal 34 (Spring 1983): 1-18. Wander refutes both neo-Aristotelianism and postmodern criticism in that article. Most good rhetorical critics today think we have a responsibility to point out the lies of those in power, even if that forces us into a problematic (but very defensible) ontological dualism.

stannard

In a message dated 11/27/2004 12:14:08 PM Mountain Standard Time, furuhashi.1 at osu.edu writes: Carrol wrote:
>But in this post I'm going to assume that in most, perhaps all, uses
>of the term (not just on this list but by, e.g., Kenneth Burke,
>Deirdre McCloskey, or Wayne Booth) its original senses still operate
>powerfully -- and all those original uses of the term (Aristotle,
>Cicero, Quintilian, Renaissance rhetoricians) make two assumptions:
>(a) that speaker (usually speaker, not writer) and listener
>(audience rather than readership) directly confront each other in a
>framework agreeable to both (e.g., a parliament) and (b) that there
>is _almost_ complete agreement on all the important issues between
>speaker and listener. The "almost" is of great importance, for the
>difference is of course the reason for speaking; but the "[nearly]
>complete agreement" is the context within which the persuasion
>proceeds. The whole of the art is directed to demonstrating that
>this large shared agreement dictates that the speaker's position on
>the small area of disagreement should prevail.

In other words, rhetoric is about narrowcasting, rather than broadcasting. Think about each rhetorical situation* first of all, and then present the ethos, pathos, and logos of your persuasion accordingly.

* <blockquote>Some elements of the rhetorical situation include:

1. Exigence: What happens or fails to happen? Why is one compelled to speak out? 2. Persons: Who is involved in the exigence and what roles do they play? 3. Relations: What are the relationships, especially the differences in power, between the persons involved? 4. Location: Where is the site of discourse? e.g. a podium, newspaper, web page, etc. 5. Speaker: Who is compelled to speak or write? 6. Audience: Who does the speaker address and why? 7. Method: How does the speaker choose to address the audience? 8. Institutions: What are the rules of the game surrounding/constraining numbers 1 through 7.

<http://rhetorica.net/kairos.htm></blockquote>

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