April 27th: Last Day of Class

Plan for Today

Reminder that your Rhetoric/al Projects are due today at 11:00 pm…I’m too easy.

• Final Exam time–let’s all get on the same page
• Leftovers from last week
• Paulo Freire
• Knoblauch Ch. 5, 6, and “Afterward”
• Presentation Discussion

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. 5 “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. 6 “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.”

Presentation Discussion

Do your best. Sharing a PowerPoint seems to be working for us.

Next Class

Next week is our final exam time, and you’ll be doing your presentations. I want us to meet during our regularly scheduled class time of 6:00 pm-8:45 pm and not during the scheduled exam time for this class. Make sure you don’t have any conflicts.