Question: In 200 to 250 words describe how you encounter rhetoric in your daily life. Refer to concepts covered in class and Herrick this week. For example, you might write about the social functions of rhetoric: how do you experience them in your life? Or how are you aware of rhetoric’s use of symbolic meanings?
SPC3230_CH11_PPT_final-1.pptx
Contemporary Rhetoric III: Texts, Power, Alternatives
Chapter 11
Contemporary Rhetoric III: Texts, Power, Alternatives Review
Postmodern criticism
Feminism and rhetoric: Critique and reform
Comparative rhetoric
Tokenism
Postmodern Criticism
Reaction to intellectual values of European Enlightenment
Distrusted:
Fixed meanings of symbols
Trust in sense perception
Direct observation
Authority of individual seeking truth
Nietzsche (God is Dead)
Deconstruction -> Reconstruction
Simulation, as French theorist Jean Baudrillard puts it, “is the generation of models of a real without original or reality”. We live in an age where cultural signs float in popular culture in a complex web of meaning, where images abound so quickly as to take on new and different sign-meanings. We now live in a world that Baudrillard calls “hyperreality,” where we have a hard time of telling what’s real apart from what’s a simulation–or a simulation of a simulation.
Philosopher, historian, semiotician, and social critic.
# main areas of writings:
History of the notion of insanity
Development of human sciences
Power, knowledge and discourse
Michel Foucault
Investigated relationship
Pondered how power installs itself and produces material effects
Sees power as complex ways in which language is employed
Power and Discourse
Power depends on which ideas prevail at the moment:
Who is criminal?
Who is mentally ill?
How do we speak about them?
How should these people be treated or punished? Who decides?
Discourse and Knowledge
Power
Flows from discourse
Inseparable from knowledge
Matter of which ideas prevail
Discourse
More than symbolic representation of objective facts
Partially produces reality
Systems of discourse control
How we think
What we claim to know
(You may know something but no one cares or considers it important)
Escape and Surveillance
We are constantly under surveillance by wielding power
Panopticism
Sought to reveal how knowledge and power constrain freedom
How to escape constraints
Culture’s collective discourse was an archaeological artifact
Archaeology as the description of an archive
Sought to demonstrate that the present is not inevitable
How we talk, how we think, what we say reorganizes knowledge
– e.g. discourse on mental illness, race, sexuality – what can be said
Archaeology of Knowledge
Discourse that is controlled by being prohibited
Only that which can be discussed can be known
Excluded Discourse
Jacques Derrida
French philosopher
Advanced a wide-ranging analysis of hidden operations of language
Language cannot escape built-in biases of cultural history that produced it
Goals in developing deconstructive approach:
Reveal hidden mechanisms influencing meaning
Demonstrate concealed power of symbols
Underline how no one escapes elusive qualities of language
Purpose
Reveal blind spots of argument
Examine opposition embedded in discourse
Reveal logical incoherence of central concepts
Deconstruction
Habermas
Modernist project establishing supremacy of rationality
Seeks to stabilize discourse
Derrida
Postmodern in undermining foundation of Western rationalism
Seeks to deconstruct discourse
Derrida vs. Habermas
Responses
Critics of this approach:
Misinterpreted as warranting dismantling of written texts
Theory likened to an intellectual computer virus
Nothing more critical to traditional disciplines than assumption of fixed meanings
Feminism and Rhetoric
Vast majority of writers shaping field of study were men
Foucault’s work has served to free readers for
New possibilities of self-understanding
New modes of experience
New forms of subjectivity, authority, political theory
Loss of Women’s Voices
Rhetoric
Destructive influence on fortunes of women in West
Effectively created perception that women function best biologically
Supporting patriarchy
Sonja Foss
Women’s experiences different from men’s
Women’s voices not heard in language
Inquiry into rhetorical process is inquiry into men’s experiences
Women not incorporated into language
Perceptions
Experiences
Meanings
Practices
Values
Foucault would argue
Women denied voice in culture; denied access to power and rhetoric
Women and Language
Loss of women’s meanings
Loss of women as members of social world
Prevented from passing on tradition of women’s meanings to world
Cannot be equal participants if language code doesn’t serve them equally
Impact of Exclusion of Women
Feminist perspective on rhetoric
Reconceptualize traditions established without consideration of gender
Extends to other marginalized groups
Reconceptualizing Rhetoric
Seeks to change silence or degrading of women
Feminist rhetorical criticism is activist
Designed to improve women’s (people’s?) lives
Constructing Gender Rhetorically
Call into question the standard, male-dominated history of rhetoric
Rhetoric propounded by male theorists
Persuasion – trying to change people
Makes rhetoric aggressive and violent
Rhetoric as Conquest
Works, Texts, and the Work of Reading
Feminist rhetorical criticism
Excavating and revaluing women’s texts
Draw out dominant meanings that suppress alternate meanings
Textual deconstruction
More than one reading of an artifact
Reading text in way that exposes dominant culture
Assists in generating resistant readings that modify dominant meaning
And now…where I am annoyed by our text…
Comparative and African Rhetoric
Comparative
Western rhetoric values the authority of single speaker, Individual in possession of knowledge
Other cultures reveal this model as only one of many possibilities
African
Men sit together
Praise-singing
Hailing heroic deeds of ancestors
Northern Ghana
Bagre: speech arranged in story form
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