June 28, 2005

Resuscitate

Jeff and Donna have already begun to take up Clancy on the suggestion that we rebegin our little rhetcomp carnival, and so this is a bit after the fact, I suppose. Nevertheless, anyone who's interested should pick up Richard Fulkerson's essay "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" from the latest issue of CCC:

I argue that examining two collections of essays designed for the preparation of new writing teachers and published twenty years apart provides some important clues to what has occurred to composition studies in the interval. Building on the framework I established in two previous CCC articles, I argue that composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared to be around 1990. The present article specifically addresses the rise of what I call critical/cultural studies, the quiet expansion of expressive approaches to teaching writing, and the split of rhetorical approaches into three: argumentation, genre analysis, and preparation for “the” academic discourse community.

Feel free to trackback this entry to alert us to contributions in your own space(s), or drop a link in the comments. Or Jeff's. Or Donna's. Or Derek's. Or Jenny's. etc.

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2005

A Final, Carnivalous Update

I want to thank everyone who commented, posted, tracked back, etc. in our discussion of The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. The post is going to be sliding down my slippery blogslope soon, and when it does, I'll add a link to it in my sidebar.

Lessons learned? It'd probably be useful to allow for a little more lag time between the announcement and the discussion itself. Several people missed the heart of the discussion because books were late in arriving. And if we weren't bumping up against CCCC and all the preparation that it entails, the tail end of the discussion would probably have been a little more lively.

In all, I was pretty happy with how this went. Anyone want to volunteer to host the next one? Chances are that we'll get to see some new books at CCCC, so maybe there'll be something there that peaks my/our/your interest.

Posted by cgbrooke at 08:40 PM | Comments (1)

March 14, 2005

Let the carnival commence

This entry is meant to serve a couple of purposes. First, below, I offer a quick chapter summary of Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. Presumably, when any of us engages his ideas specifically and closely, we'll provide citations, pull quotes, etc., but for those readers who are looking for the basic sweep of the book's argument, here it is.

Second, this entry provides a hub for the discussion. Please point your trackbacks at

http://writing.syr.edu/move/mt-tb.cgi/1017

or add links to your pages in the comments. Obviously, we'll be linking to each other as we build on and respond to each other's ideas, but ideally, this entry will collect it all. For convenience's sake, I'll leave this entry sitting at the top of my blog for a couplefew weeks. Any questions? I refer you finally to the house rules. And we're off...

Update: John has set up a hub over at jocalo for his own posts.
Update: Byron has responded to each of the eight chapters, and provides a hub of his own.
Timing Update: I've reset the date on this entry to π day (3.14), after which I'll be blogging from San Francisco at the CCCC.

Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication (Blackwell Books, 2004).

Booth offers a chapter summary in his Preface, but rather than simply replicate that here, I'll go chapter-by-chapter myself, and try to include as much in the way of keywords as I can. Also when I have the time, I'll try and work in links to specific entries as they show up here. Two quick prefatory notes. Booth defines rhetoric as "the entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another" (xi). And the claim that "unites" this book is that "the quality of our lives, especially the ethical and communal quality, depends to an astonishing degree on the quality of our rhetoric" (xii).

Part I: Rhetoric's Status: Up, Down, and -- Up?

Chapter 1: How Many "Rhetorics"?

The chapter opens with a survey of competing definitions of rhetoric and while Booth asserts that a certain amount of ambiguity is inescapable (9), he offers some additional distinctions. In addition to the rhetor/rhetorician distinction, he coins several terms: listening-rhetoric (LR), rhetrickery, rhetorology, and rhetorologist.

The chapter moves on to consider rhetoric's constitutive force. Booth outlines three "Realities": permanent truth, realities changed but not created by rhetoric, and finally, "contingent realities about our lives," which he subdivides further into Aristotle's deliberative, forensic, and epideictic. Finally, he coins "rhetorical domain" as a term that allows us to track the differences in rhetoric from one context to another. What is successful rhetoric in one domain may be completely inappropriate for another.

"The thesis of this book might thus be reduced to: Let us all attempt to enlarge the 'domain' of those who work to avoid misunderstanding" (21).

Chapter 2: A Condensed History of Rhetorical Studies

This chapter begins from the recent resurgence of interest in rhetoric, and then looks back at its "fall" as a central feature of education. Booth lists several factors, some of which he sees as causes for that fall, and some of which he is more cautious about defining that way: scientism, secularist humanism, reductionism, logicism, individualism, and historical determinism. A secondary list includes aestheticism, psychologism, economic determinism, the pedantic reduction of rhetoric to terminology, and possibly even democracy. The chapter closes with optimism for the continued "flowering" of rhetoric.

Chapter 3: Judging Rhetoric

Chapter 3 opens with a consideration of ethics, which underlies Booth's definition of rhetoric. or rather his definition of good rhetoric. Skillful rhetoric can be deployed in any direction, but defensible rhetoric strives for the kind of listening that Booth advocates (43). Much of the chapter is taken up with laying out an ethical spectrum of different types of rhetoric:

The rest of the chapter attempts to trace out the difference between listening and thereby accommodating one's rhetoric on one hand, and simple spin or preaching to the choir on the other.

All good rhetoric depends on the rhetor's listening to and thinking about the character and welfare of the audience, and moderating what is said to meet what has been heard. To repeat again: the good rhetor answers the audience's questions before they're asked (54).

Chapter 4: Some Major Rescuers

Chapter 4 offers a quick overview of those thinkers, both disciplinary and extra-disciplinary, whom Booth sees as having rescued rhetoric, including Michael Polanyi, Susanne Langer, J. L. Austin, Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, John Dewey, I. A. Richards, Deirdre McCloskey, Steve Covey, Chaim Perelman, Lucie Albrechts-Tyteca, Kenneth Burke, Jacques Derrida, Richard McKeon, and Pierce Bayle. The chapter closes with a long list of other rescuers whose work goes uncovered in the chapter.

Part II: The Need for Rhetorical Studies Today
Part III: Reducing Rhetorical Warfare

Forthcoming soon

Posted by cgbrooke at 06:41 PM | Comments (19)

February 26, 2005

Rhetrickery = Cookery?

Mike caught me in a bit of sloppiness in a comment over at his site this past week, and I thought I'd see if I couldn't redeem myself here. While I can't claim the background in classical rhetoric that Mike has, I'd like to explore my intuition that Booth is making a move toward Platonism in RoR. The original passage where he self-identifies as Platonic is fairly qualified:

The history of philosophy has been full of debates about whether some value judgments deserve to be added to this category of hard, unchangeable fact. Saving that issue for chapter 4, I must confess here, as much of my previous work reveals, that I am strongly on the "Platonic" side: torturing a child to death for the sheer pleasure of it is always wrong, and that fact will never be changed by any form of rhetoric. Slavery will always be wrong, no matter how many cultures practice it. Though rhetoric is needed to change minds about such truths--they're only in effect discovered through centuries of catastrophe and discussion about it--they are still for me part of unchangeable reality (13).

It's fair, I think, to say that, over at vitia, I placed more weight on the word "Platonic" than it was intended to bear. And yet. And yet.

This is only partly facetious:

Booth: Can we agree that rhetoric is "the entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another" (xi)?

Brookus: Why, surely that is an eminently fair definition.

B: And can we agree further that, even as they are expressions of value, that there are certain of these expressions, such as those about child-abuse or slavery, that are inarguable? That is, can we say that such expressions carry the force of fact?

Br: I cannot imagine someone who would argue for these practices, so it would appear that they do indeed carry such force.

B: Then surely we can agree that, among the "entire range of resources," there are some that produce effects that lead towards these inarguable facts, and yet others that obscure them?

Br: Yes, that makes sense to me, Booth. You yourself say that this "range" spans from effective to sloppy, from ethical to immoral (xi).

B: And yet, far too many consider "rhetoric" indicative only of the more pejorative end of the spectrum, viewing it as "little better than the crippled servant of true thinkers" (ix).

Br: That is certainly the case.

B: Would it not be better, then, to distinguish between that form of rhetoric which obscures and produces misunderstanding, often for unethical ends, and that form which strives instead for the understanding of those ethical truths which we have identified as unchangeable?

Br: That would seem to clarify things mightily.

B: Then let us define that former, more ethically questionable rhetoric as rhetrickery and the latter instead as rhetorology.

* * * * *

There are probably people out there who can do this better than I, but my point, as I hope is clear here, is that, in describing Booth as Platonic, I'm picking up on a vibe and a series of strategies that strike me as more explicitly Platonic than I've experienced in Booth's previous works. Donna left a comment comparing Booth's strategies to those of Habermas, and that really clicked for me. What I see in this book is the elevation and abstraction of the idea of understanding--it becomes Understanding, and listening-rhetoric the route to it. And it's hard for me to see how this differs substantially from Plato's advocacy of Truth and philosophical dialectic as the route.

Of course, one main difference is that, rather than splitting into philosophy and rhetoric, Booth offers us two species of rhetoric, but I'm not certain that this is a difference of kind.

I went back and looked through my notes for Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, and I will say that it's easy for me to see how the rhetoric of assent turns into listening-rhetoric, but as I read through MD, I came across a few places where I think I see a shift in Booth's thought:

Once we give up the limiting notions of language and knowledge willed to us by scientism, we can no longer consider adequate any notion of "language as a means of communication" or as "one of many forms of conditioning." It is, in recent models, the medium in which selves grow, the social invention through which we make each other and the structures that are our world, the shared product of our efforts to cope with experience (135).

The supreme purpose of persuasion in this view could not be to talk someone else in a preconceived view; rather it must be to engage in mutual inquiry or exploration (137).

Now, Booth does "believe" that "rhetorical questions pursued honestly will finally lead to a God-term" (136), but I guess I see a marked difference between this model (which is bottom-up, as he himself notes) and the model offered in RoR, which starts from first principles and reasons top-down. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but it is an approach that privileges certain definitions, and undercuts his discussion of rhetorical contexts (as any discussion of first principles must) later on.

I'll stop there, I think, and hope that I've done a better job of identifying the Platonism that I see in RoR. My only additional note is that the constitutive view of rhetoric in MD bears a strong similarity to Richard Lanham's work, and to my mind, Lanham is one of the most glaring omissions in chapter 4. I can understand how, given Booth's neglect of technology, The Electronic Word might have passed beneath his radar, but Motives of Eloquence? For me, that's pretty glaring.

Posted by cgbrooke at 04:35 PM | Comments (1)

February 21, 2005

Internettery

I've got several lines of thought I'm looking to trace out, but I'm going to start with what's a relatively minor point, one that allows me to get a little snark out of the way. The listening that Booth advocates is largely undifferentiated in RoR--in other words, there's little account here of the fact that, even in deeply committed listening, we bump against what Burke (following Veblen) calls our "trained incapacities." A kinder way of describing this phenomenon is to say that our radar is more alert to some things than to others.

As for me, well, my radar is always tuned to pick up references to technology, and they are few enough in Booth's book. The first I saw:

Various studies have shown that the average child spends almost as much time watching TV as attending classes. Many spend additional hours receiving half-baked or utterly false information on the Internet. And even among those who finally get hooked into serious reading, too many are barraged with books and articles and pamphlets proclaiming outrageous doctrines and "confirming" hate-ridden myths, with no internal hint of how the assertions might be challenged (96-97).

This is from a section titled "Miseducation Outside the Classroom." And from "Conscious, Deliberate Miseducation,"

Mammon's skill in destroying objectivity is especially clear in the case of CNN...The present competition for ratings between FoxNews and CNN has driven each to "take sides" while radically changing their formats. They now exhibit a much flashier, hipper, more Internet-like style, in order to capture a larger audience. Their objectivity in reporting has certainly declined...(137-138).

This is a minor snark, and it won't be my only contribution. Promise. But in a book that advocates listening, what I see hear is a pattern of treating the word "Internet" as a replacement for the dismissive version of "rhetoric." In this model, the Internet is a vastly inferior version of the library, without standards, without quality control, without ethics, etc. Every time the word appears, I wonder that "Internettery" isn't a synonym for rhetrickery--that's certainly the way it comes across.

Now, I'm fully willing to accept that this is, in part, a generational thing. But I get a lot of good information out here, and a lot more besides. Is there crap? You betcha. Is it universal? Not even close. But it also deserves a heck of a lot better than it gets in RoR.

Without the Internet, I couldn't point you to Jay Rosen, whose blog will tell you that the destruction of objectivity began well before the hip, flashy Internet came a-calling. I can't point you to David Weinberger, who will explain how "the Web, a world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance and time, is showing us who we are - and is undoing some of our deepest misunderstandings about what it means to be human in the real world." If rhetoric is, at its best, the art of removing misunderstanding, then the Internet as a rhetorical site has at least as much potential for doing so as any other medium. In Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Weinberger writes that words are the stuff of the Web, and that means that rhetoric is, too. Without the Internet, I'd have far fewer examples of people listening to each other, and to the culture at large. Sure, there's WR out here, and BR, but there's also plenty of the best kind of LR, and I have yet to see the proof that the ratios among them are any more skewed towards misunderstanding online than they are offline.

So, snarky as it may be for me to say this, I have to work a little harder to take this book seriously, when it treats the Internet so dismissively.

I'll get over it, of course. This book isn't the first and won't be the last to ignore the Internet, or to treat it like the spastic black sheep of the information age. And I'll be back, with some comments that are a little more direct in their address of RoR.

That's all, for the moment.

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)