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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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Once argument was torn loose from its position as an inferior derivation of formal logic, the implications of that change began to be traced. Robert L. Scott posited that if rhetorical and scientific logic were different then there must be a rhetorical way of knowing. The epistemic work sought to trace down the implication of practical reasoning on human knowledge.
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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 comes from 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. A final and fecund manifestation of the move is Raymie McKerrow’s notion of Critical Rhetoric. McKerrow attempts to domesticate Foucault’s critique to guide rhetorical study.
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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 move is fundamentally contextualist. Americans embraced this study through the dramatist’s principles of symbolic motivation reinscribed in culture. But as it has developed in European thought, this move’s roots philosophically reached back into orthodox Marx’s historical materialism with its philosophical mechanism and suspicion of rhetoric, refined through the neo-Marxist contextualist tradition called critical theory. Habermas writes in this tradition. So did Foucault. Its heroes include Gramsci, Althusser, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Its main elaborators are Edward Hall in Britain and Larry Grossberg in this country. 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. There is perhaps another question today even more vital: Critical theory and cultural studies were products of the 20th century with its emphasis on mass communication. Today as we enter a period when mass communication is in descendancy and public communication ascendant – the so-called “new media” – how does this theory adapt?
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| Unit | A/B | Assigned | Initial Meeting before . . . | Planning Conference before. . . | Website changes due | Bibliographic Essay Due | Discussion in Seminar |
| Symbolic Motivation | B | Jaclyn Bruner |
Sep 9 | Sep 18 | Sep 23 | Sep 30 | Sep 30 |
| Rhetorical Argument | A | Amanda Gogarty Winnie Okafor |
Sep 18 | Sep 25 | Sept 30 | Oct 7 | Oct 7 |
| Epistemic | A | Becca Alt Melissa Lucas |
Sep 18 | Sep 25 | Sept 30 | Oct 7 | Oct 7 |
| Public Sphere | B | Will Howell Janna Soeder |
Sep 25 | Oct 9 | Oct 14 | Oct 21 | Oct 21 |
| Domination & Freedom | B | Amanda Gogarty Melissa Lucas |
Oct 16 | Oct 30 | Nov 11 | Nov 18 | Nov 18 |
| Morality & History | A | Janna Soeder Jaclyn Bruner |
Oct 30 | Nov 13 | Nov 18 | Nov 25 | Nov 25 |
| Identity and Subjectivity | A | Will Howell Devin Scott |
Oct 30 | Nov 13 | Nov 18 | Nov 25 | Nov 25 |
| Critical Theory & Cultural Studies | B | Becca Alt Winnie Okafor |
Nov 13 | Nov 25 | Dec 2 | Dec 9 | Dec 9 |