On Politics, Power and Persuasion: The New Roles of Rhetoric

Because it is difficult for me to do a quality synthesis of all of the texts in one post, following some of you, I'm writing my response this week in pieces so that I can do a better job of responding for my own archival purposes of thinking about these texts. In other words, when I write with many texts in mind, I often find that I write in ways for the purpose of folding in all of the texts, rather than doing each of them justice and making connections that are more meaningful to me and, I hope, for others.

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So, in this post, I'll start by discussing the Crowley and Miller & Charney texts and discuss what I take to be a tension between their their notions of rhetoric and, more specifically, the role of persuasion. While Crowley's text is written as a critique of a particular notion of rhetoric as conservative, I'm interested in how Crowley imagines the function of rhetoric and how that may be cutting across some of what Charney & Miller suggest about the role of persuasion and how me might most usefully understand persuasion's role in rhetoric.

In her article "Communications Skills and A Brief Rapprochement of Rhetoricians," Sharon Crowley responds to Nancy McKoski's claim that rhetoric is regressive. McKoski's claim that rhetoric is tied to conservatism is troubling to Crowley because she rejects the evidence pointed to by McKoski (that rhetoric is tied to New Criticism, Neo-Thomism, Neo-Humanism, etc.) to support this claim. Crowley also finds McKoski's valuing of the social sciences as relatively more progressive problematic because she states, "rhetoric can be put to all sorts of political uses. It is true enough that for most of its history rhetoric was deployed by members of elite classes as a means of preserving their economic and social privilege. But it has also been used, as it was by Mary Wollstonecraft and Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr., to dislodge oppressive political and cultural practices" (99). What Crowley goes on to do, then, is to juxtapose McKoski's claims that rhetoric is conservative and a supporter of the status quo with the institutional and disciplinary positioning of rhetoric and rhetoricians as marginalized or subordinated. Crowley seems to be doing this work in an attempt to get rhetoricians within both English and Communication departments to see the importance and mutual dependence of each others' work despite the disciplinary divides and to, in an analysis that seems almost Marxian, urge rhetoricians to look to the places in their own departments where rhetoric is being constructed with disciplinary baggage that is not necessary. For Crowley, rhetoric, a field that gives us access to critique of power structures through being able to "determine when and how an argument is fishy," is in danger and this danger stems, in part, from the ways in which rhetoricians are being positioned and positioning themselves within institutional and departmental apparatuses.

In their chapter, "Persuasion, Audience and Argument," Miller and Charney frame their insights with the concept of persuasion arguing that all texts, of course, are persuasive. What was most interesting for me in this chapter, was the break down of approaches to persuasion that occurred from pages 591-592. This breakdown was interesting to me because I've seen these approaches in various texts I've read and embedded within the kinds of arguments that people make; however, considering Crowley's text, I'm particularly interested in Crosswhite's rhetoric of reason or what Miller and Charney term, "descriptive approaches to rhetoric" and how those fit within Crowley's stance on the place of rhetoric within English and Communication arguments.

Let me back up for a moment to discuss how Miller and Charney seem to be fleshing out prescriptive versus descriptive approaches to rhetoric. Firstly, Miller and Charney describe "truth-seeking theories of argumentation...which have traditionally had a strong prescriptive bias". While many "truth-seeking theories" seem quite dated, there are also ethical standards, for example, focusing more on "empowerment and justice than on truth (591). Feminists, in a different strain, can argue that any form of argument or persuasion is "an act of violence" (591); yet, not all feminists hold this position. After discussing these (and other) prescriptive approaches to persuasion and argumentation, Miller and Charney go on to offer descriptive approaches (those of Crosswhite, for example). Descriptive approaches to evaluating argument seem fruitful because the evaluation of the arguments is based in the audience. I'm interested in descriptive approaches to rhetoric; yet, I wonder about their potential to fold out into relativism (although I won't go into that here).

Given Crowley's position on the role of rhetoric and the function of and place of it in the university, I'm interested in how what she asserts seems to be hinged upon an ethical notion of argument that is more closely aligned with truth-seeking rhetorics than descriptive rhetorics. To be clearer, Crowley seems to be suggesting that there is an emancipating function of teaching rhetoric; that rhetoric can be used to subvert oppression and that, like she says in her concluding paragraph, to be able to "determine when and how an argument is fishy". Despite the appeal of descriptive rhetoric, then, is there something about the ethical ways in which rhetoric functions within contexts such as the university that seem to be less context based and connected to universal-ish kinds of ideas about ethics (although universal isn't the right word because ethics, of course, are also hinged on context)? I guess my point here is that although thinking about rhetoric in descriptive ways seem most appealing to me sometimes, because it seems to afford more nuances, I can see the necessity of holding on to a sense of ethics as Crowley does.

I'm interested, too, in what sense of persuasion seems to underpin the other articles we've read thus far and how that all factors into the history of rhetoric as it is so often narrated to us.