User:Altsalt/Rhetoric

Post-Enlightenment and Modernist

• conceding to a secondary or derivative role
• no role in the actual process of discovering such "truth" or "knowledge"

Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

Porrovecchio identifies the contemporary as:

1. "the community of rhetorical theorists who share an identifiable disciplinary history"
2. "the way this community has generated a distinctive set of issues and concerns, starting with the common assumption that public communication matters"
3. "the way in which this community has responded to larger questions - cultural, political, philosophical, and so on - in ways that are distinct and important"

Per "Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: a reader" a fundamental shift of focus occurred between 1967 and 1976, beginning with two articles, "The Rhetoric of the Streets" by Franklin Haiman and "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic" by Robert L. Scott. These pieces considered that rhetoric would soon need to applied to "unfamiliar activities" such as "television [becoming] the primary mass medium of public discourse" and "the emergence of significant grassroots social movements"[6]. Scott's essay argued that rhetoric "is not simply a means of making the truth effective, but is quite literally a way of knowing, a means for the production of truth and knowledge."

The next year, one of the "most often cited essays in speech communication journals in the 1970s and 1980s"[6] was written by Lloyd F. Bitzer, "The Rhetorical Situation". In this essay, Bitzer states that rhetorical discourse is "called into being" as a result of the relationship among three constituent elements: "exigences", "audiences", and "constraints". This framed rhetorical theory against a broad social situation or context, rather than viewing it from the speaker's intent.

All of this work began to coalesce at two conferences sponsored by National Developmental Project on Rhetoric (NDPR) in 1970, Wingspread in January and National Conference on Rhetoric in May. As well as in an important volume edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, "The Prospect of Rhetoric". At the end of this period, the conference attendees consisting of over forty of the leading male scholars came to a "consensus judgment" on the future of rhetorical studies consisting of four specific recommendations":

1. The technology of the twentieth century has created so many new channels and techniques of communication, and the problems confronting contemporary societies are so related to communicative methods and contents, that it is imperative that rhetorical studies be broadened to explor communicative procedures and practices not traditionally covered.
2. Our recognition of the scope of rhetorical theory and practice should be greatly widened.
3. at the same time, a clarified and expanded concept of reason and rational decision should be worked out.
4. Rhetorical invention should ber restored to a position of centrality in theory and practice.

Postmodern Rhetoric

• Barry Brummett, at the time a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, coined the phrase
• "Modernism features a commitment to scientism, and to objective, morally neutral, universal knowledge."
• "Postmodernism prefers interpretation over scientific study because it operates with the assumption that all knowledge is subjective and/or intersubjective, morally culpable, and local."
• Neo-Aristotelian criticism left no room for morality of outcomes
• "rhetoric was not 'the amassing of objective knowledge or the generation of purely abstract theory' but was rather a 'performance'"
• Thomas Farrell's 1976 essay, "Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical Theory" (Part II) broadens the definition of rhetoric as "a collaborative manner of engaging others through discourse so that contingencies may be resolved, judgments rendered, action produced."
• Generally agreed upon Bitzer's claim that "rhetoric and discourse are in some sense inherently and historically situated, rather than timeless and universal"

Key concepts

• "contingent situations occur when decisions have to be made and acted upon, but forced to rely upon probabilities rather than certainties"
• public vs technical vs private discourse
• "arguing instead that particularly in the context of social and political affairs, the manner and form of discourse was integral to the 'truth' of the thing being described and played a central role in shaping and motivating collective identity and action"
• classical focused on discourse as contingent, public, persuasive, and contextual, largest impact on contemporary has been "focus of attention on texts that address the public-at-large"

Critical Rhetoric

Described by Raymie E. McKerrow in the essay, "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis". McKerrow presents eight "principles" and two critiques to conceptualize rhetoric as an inherently critical act which, "seeks to unmask or demystify the discourse of power."

The two critiques presented were that of Domination and Freedom in regards to the discourse surrounding power. The former explains that it is, "the discourse ... which creates and sustains social practices which control the dominated." This is expanded upon by citing the works of Bisseret, Giddens, Therborn, Hall, Laclau, Charland, and McGee.

The critique of freedom is largely a Foucauldian reading which is re-enforced by the works of Rajchman, Kent, Clark, Fields, Fraser, Wander, Bersani, Laclau, Mouffe, Edelman, Engels, Hall, and Mullins. McKerrow specifically focuses on, "a never-ending skepticism, hence permanent criticism", "contract-oppression or domination-repression schemas", and the delimination of power, "rules of right," versus the concept of power producing and transmitting which in turn reproduces power, "effects of truth."

Features of Critical Rhetoric

• "divorced from the constraints of a Platonic conception"
• explores dominion and freedom as exercised in a relativized world
• "In practice, a critical rhetoric seeks to unmask or demystify the discourse of power."
• "shares the same 'critical spirit' that is held in common among the divergent perspectives of Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, and Foucault."
• "serves as a demystifying function by demonstrating the silent and often non-deliberate ways in which rhetoric conceals as much as it reveals through its relationship with power/knowledge."
• has consequences, whether establishing social judgment, or identifying possibilities of future action

Eight Principles of Praxis

1. "Ideologiekritik is in fact not a method, but a practice"
2. The discourse of power is material
3. Rhetoric constitutes doxastic rather than epistemic knowledge
4. Naming is the central symbolic act of a nominalist rhetoric
5. Influence is not causality, rejects culturalism and structuralism
6. Absence is as important as presence in understanding and evaluating symbolic action
7. Fragments contain the potential for polysemic rather than monosemic interpretation
8. Criticism is performance