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Condit, Celeste. "Kenneth Burke and Linguistic Reflexivity: Reflections on the Scene of the Philosophy of Communication in the Twentieth Century." Brock. 207-62.
Pepper, Stephen C. World Hypotheses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942.
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1) Rhetorical form. They punctuate accounts of rhetorical transactions with the help of rhetorical form. This constructs coherence in rhetoric around patterns in discourse rather than around the rhetor. Thus, they study the clustering of language forms in a culture.
2) Symbolic action. These theories primarily locate rhetoric in directing the flow of social action rather than the initiation of action or theories of knowledge. Consequently motivation is a central concern. In the heyday of behaviorism, motivation had been understood as located in biological drives and had been punctuated as an account of the initiation of behavior. A sociological school -- the symbolic interactionists -- offered an alternative. They began by rejecting the completeness of the biologically based theory, arguing that humans had essentially identical biology yet in any given situation humans react many different ways. Then, they asserted a methodological point: the most interesting questions of human motivation are to be answered not with an account of the initiation of action but with an explanation of the variety of human action.
3) Culture-creating power of language. In these theories, motivational patterns are tied to cultures rather than to biological individuals or the species in general.
On these three linchpins developed a theory of human motivation as symbolic. Because symbols were given a central place in motivation, the methodological moves of the symbolic interactionists had opened the opportunity to study the clustering of rhetoric in forms, and the practical accomplishment of rhetoric as an invoking of these forms to influence human action.
Preparation Guide for this Unit
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Preparation Guide for this Unit
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Preparation Guide for this Unit
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The heart of Habermas' critique lies in his concept of legitimacy -- patterns of discourse must underlie a public identity which guides relationships of public life. In doing so, his work contrasts with those who see themselves as political scientists, and most sociologists of our century who view public life in terms of structures and institutions. At the same time there is a second reorientation involved here which connects "public" more broadly than to government. Government is merely a particular solution to the public problem. Typically today politics is viewed as a subject of study in social contexts from the family to the office to the nation-state. Viewed this way, problems of social identity are fundamentally problems in our rhetoric. This opens up so many new ways of thinking about social relationships and political communication that the studies are practically reinvented. The diagnosis has now crossed from the academic to the public media. Laments for the low state of public discourse are a part of editorial pages and talk shows. It is a part of the same movement.
Given the locating of the problem in the quality of discourse, the theoretical issues which follow have to do with the preconditions and praxis of a satisfactory public discourse. Habermas' approach to addressing this problem has been markedly different from American approaches. You will read both. The European reading will be difficult because of the vocabulary and theoretical differences. Work through it carefully.
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Classical rhetorical theory featured the liberating power of rhetoric. Men (they were in those days, right?) achieved power over others through their voice. Of course, such liberation for speakers implicates the question of when the exercise of liberating power becomes the domination of others. Contemporary rhetorical theory has substantially explored this problem. And it has complicated it. It has bracketed the assumption of a human controlling other humans by drawing the locus of rhetorical power broader than the individual. Having moved the locus of rhetoric from the individual speaker making the rhetorical decisions to address an audience to communities of discourse within which socio-political life proceeds, theorists began to understanding language's powers of power and domination along dimensions other than volition. But what if this greater circumference is itself too narrow? What if the power of language to guide human action gives language sufficient power to constrain that action?
These questions run through contemporary rhetoric. Is rhetoric a means of domination? Much of this work answers "Yes" but adds that rhetoric also contains the power of freedom from that domination. So freedom and domination becomes a central dimension of theorizing about rhetoric.
Once this framework is established then questions about the conditions of domination and rhetoric's work in them come forward. In 1969, Robert Scott and Donald K. Smith charged rhetorical critics and theorists to consider that traditional rhetoric entailed assumptions of oppression. Foucault has been a major figure in this move. Another central critique is the feminism. Of course, the intellectual movement we call "feminism" is as multifaceted as any other movement. There are political feminists, cultural feminists, radical feminists, marxist feminists, and so on. Not all are amenable to a role for rhetoric. The ones we will read take the feminist critique as a rhetorical problem.
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In addressing the practical reasoning problem, theorists had discovered that one of the most important advantages of rhetorical logic was its more powerful account of morality in human action. The initial development here was the concept of an advisory rhetoric: as individuals we use rhetoric to provide moral advice to others. But then, with the growth of the constitutive rhetoric, attention turned to rhetorically constituting morality. The rhetorical construction of morality became a central problem just as the rhetorical construction of reality was a problem for the social epistemics.
Similarly, history could be seen not as a study of material events told in language, but as a construction brought textually into rhetorically constituting the moment. But on what terms?
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This movement begins in the neo-Marxist tradition called critical theory. Habermas writes in this tradition. Critical theory attacks concepts of "theory" that are abstract rather than concrete (the critique it gets from Marxism). It is, therefore, a theory which forces praxis. But Marxism is a modern theory. Does postmodernism call for something more? That has given rise to concepts of critical rhetoric where theory is set aside.
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Three stages have conceptualized this problem in contemporary rhetoric. It began with the problem of identity formation in the individual, tied to communication by George Herbert Mead’s ideas that identity was formed in communication with others. Because communication was an inherent part of identity-formation, so was a notion of the social. Thus, it was a small extension to begin to question how social identities were formed. This notion that social identity was constructed in rhetoric then became a focus of theory. Finally, the problem of power began to mix into identity with the notion of rhetorical subjectivity. Identity, individual and social, creates the power of voice and audience in symbolic action. Thus, this move ponders ways in which people can have access to the power of discourse and take that power into social, political, and economic relationships.
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| Unit | A/B | Assigned | Initial Meeting before . . . | Planning Conference before. . . | Website changes due | Bibliographic Essay Due | Discussion in Seminar |
| Dramatism | B | Jim Gilmore |
Sep 7 | Sep 14 | Sep 14 | Sep 18 | Sep 25 |
| Rhetorical Argument | A | Alyssa Samek Tom Geary |
Sep 25 | Oct 2 | Oct 2 | Oct 2 | Oct 9 |
| Epistemic | A | Heather Adams Terri Donofrio |
Sep 25 | Oct 2 | Oct 2 | Oct 2 | Oct 9 |
| Public Sphere | B | Sheri Parmelee Elizabeth Gardner |
Sep 25 | Oct 2 | Oct 2 | Oct 9 | Oct 23 |
| Rhetoric & Power | B | Alyssa Samek Terri Donofrio |
Oct 9 | Oct 16 | Oct 16 | Oct 23 | Nov 6 |
| Morality & History | A | Sheri Parlelee Elizabeth Gardner |
Nov 6 | Nov 13 | Nov 13 | Nov 13 | Nov 20 |
| Critical Rhetoric | A | Jim Gilmore Tim Barney |
Nov 6 | Nov 13 | Nov 13 | Nov 13 | Nov 20 |
| Identity and Subjectivity | B | Heather Adams Tom Geary |
Nov 6 | Nov 13 | Nov 13 | Nov 20 | Dec 4 |