Diversifying Rhetorical Methods, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Hubris
by Steven S. Vrooman
Presented at the Engaging
Pedagogy Conference, Seguin, TX, May 17, 2017
Aristotle’s three modes of rhetoric
were ethos, pathos and logos, but these are, with apologies, inexact.
Although rhetorical criticism has
often been taught as an application of various “methods,” these tend to
produce, in the words of my doctoral advisor, Cheree Carlson, “cookie-cutter”
projects that stamp the pentad or Symbolic Convergence Theory. This is not the
same as what Janesick (1994) calls methodolatry,
but it is in the same family. Janesick is talking about the kinds of specific
methodological practices in ethnography, which, in contrast to most rhetorical
criticism articles, is usually far more honest about how it does its work.
Rhetoric, by erasing the conditions of practice by which a piece of criticism
is undertaken, shifts its methodolatric burden onto its theorists, who become
magic totem words that are supposed to tell us exactly what is happening. You
know the words. Burke. Bohrmann, Fisher.
We diversify this list, when we do
so, by carting over loads of ideological criticism, which, to be fair, people
like Burke were doing on the sly anyway, but this leaves us with a decidedly
problematic set of methodolatries. As Grossberg (1997) argued years ago, in
between NCA panels where he wondered why so much cultural studies work was “so
fucking boring,” we typically just find domination and resistance exactly where
we expect to find them.
What is the epistemological status
of a Burkean critic who sees the world as ripe for slicing with Burke’s box of
knives? We can build an alternative rhetoric using, say, Anzaldua, but all of
these approaches verge on hagiography. Anzaldua at least has cool words we can
use to label our practices for us and allow us to explain to advisers what our
“method” is. But what of lesser-known scholars, who don’t have five keywords to
bold before the abstract? We risk the possibility that there is “real”
rhetoric, with systems and models and names for things, and “fake” rhetoric,
which is clearly an attempt to open up the canon, but seems to carry a
different standard for how much it can lift. If it were good, wouldn’t there be
steps like this other stuff we see in the Foss books, a student might ask?
And they will ask that even more in
my class, which has, by this time, already taken students through a set of
detailed tables of options for exploring and applying schemes, figures and
tropes, as well as argument structure and fallacy (see the vast charts at faculty.tlu.edu/svrooman). I do find that students
experience everything to follow in the class as less intellectually rigorous
than what they’ve worked through in the tables.
So I feel it my task in this to
generate those tables. There is something to struggling with Butler or West or
Irigaray and then leaving them to float in a pool of confusion when asked to
pick a method out of the bunch. And Stacey Waite’s (2016) hilarious account of
reading passages from Judith Butler with her students shows that struggling
through those moments with them can be pretty great.
This semester I played both sides by
doing this intellectual kick into the deep end of the pool that reminds us all
so fondly of graduate school seminars but then moving to the clearer set of
charts. I know. I know. Butler’s approach cannot be reduced to such blankety
blankety schemes, and it just reifies the kind of blankety blankety privilege
her work stands against by reducing it in this way.
Does it, though? How do you teach
Butler? Make them read? They don’t, btw. You give them some ideas before they
start to guide their reading? Critical guiding questions? Then you do reading groups
or pull the class into a circle for a discussion? Maybe you eventually are
dramatically compelled to rise to the chalkboard in a moment of transcendent
joy which you will use as your Facebook status about how wonderful your
students are later that afternoon. You grasp the chalk and begin to . . . what?
Write words. Then more words. Now you have a spatial diagram. Perhaps you use
an arrow or two. Maybe you even number some concepts for them so that you have
an answer when they tell you, “I’m still not sure exactly what we are supposed
to do for this project.”
See what you did, with all the haze
of constructivist and dialogic and postmodern and decentered teaching? You
faked it. You made it look, to the students, like they did the work. But, you
know, they don’t buy it. Either you explained it clearly enough that they think
you are a genius and are so glad for the privilege of taking courses with you,
or, worse, that you are a bore and they left confused. Rarely, as a classroom
body, do they think they did this or could do it again without you.
This drives me nuts. This is fake
pedagogy. Fake democratization.
I would prefer to cut out that bit,
read the hard texts for them, process it into outline form and provide it to
them in a form that they can immediately begin applying. I see that as far more
empowering.
And I regularly see nonmajors in my
introductory rhetorical methods class do better work with these tools than what
I see in the journals or in conferences.
Back to Aristotle.
I break the pieces of rhetoric into
interlocking funnels:
Schemes build structure (think
Michael Leff). Narratives build genre. Arguments build ideology. Okay. But we
know that’s not the whole story. Ideology, for example, is composed of, well,
everything. So that’s what the grey circles are for. We start the class with
schemes and they figure out how to do original research to analyze a structure.
Same for arguments, although their theses tend to be of fairly small scope. All
the rest of rhetorical criticism builds accounts of how all of this fits
together, but so often it seems a kind of narrative + genre + ideology +
structure question.
In the bad old days I used Burke and
a social movements rhetoric textbook to explore these issues.
To build a version of the good new days,
I, as I indicated, first just gave them articles or chapters and we struggled,
disingenuously, as a class, to develop methods from them. Plenty were about
being excluded from the rhetorical canon or even from public discourse, so that
helped to process the perceived problem of “Why don’t we have these in chart
form if they are so great?” We built methods with them:
For
their final project they simply had to choose one of the 9 articles to use for
what we were calling the MashUp section of the course. The project, which is
course cumulative, used schemes, Perelman’s argument typology, fallacies, the
material which used to be Burke (now MashUp) and the social movements book.
This had, in the past, been a different social movement for each student. This
time, all students had Black Lives Matter. Each student selected a different
set of data (some social media content, some video content and some press
coverage). They did a final presentation and paper, which they uploaded to a
shared class blog (http://comm274.blogspot.com/) for potential aggregation into a
larger project.
At a basic level, given that before
100% of the students used Burke, a dead straight white male theorist, this time
around only 12.5% did. I included a Burke reading as part of the diverse
MashUp.
A more complex analysis of these
results requires a bit of understanding about Burke, Burke’s connection to
social movement theory, and the unique structure of the Black Lives Matter
movement. Burkean analysis has many parts, but given his dramatistic framework,
the typical elements used for the final project are either his frames or his
notion of perspective by incongruity and its relationship to rhetorical
bureaucracy. A quick and vaguely inaccurate version of these ideas is that
Burke values either tragic framed movements (like the peace movement of the
1960s, morally rejecting the evil Establishment) or the comic (Gandhi, MLK,
etc., which use civil disobedience to educate the foolish, not evil, system). Perspective
by incongruity is akin to Gramscian hegemony analysis, which is interested in
how power-laden discourses are stretched by power structures and cracked by
resistance. In Burke’s case, he highlights the use of irony and satire in such
cases.
This all connects with social
movement theory largely built on a Burkean framework that privileges clear
moral conflict. Other, non-Burkean elements of social movement theory involve
clear leadership structures, internal communication rituals, etc. When it is
all put together, the ideal movement is almost exactly the opposite of the
less-structured, social media-driven, just name their names style of BLM, what
my students called “hashtag salad”:
Let's not forget the mothers of: #Oscar Grant#TrayvonMartin #MichaelBrown#TamirRice#SandraBland #BlackLivesMatter— Libby Edwards-Warner (@LibbyEdwards100) May 14, 2017
I had a feeling that if I had
assigned this kind of movement using Burkean analysis, as usual, the result
would have been just like the two previous times individual students chose BLM
or three times they chose similar less-structured movements (WTO, Occupy Wall
Street) for their final project – they suggested the movement was unclear and
disorganized and thus would not be successful. In this case, the results were
more mixed, with 5 students concluding that BLM was making errors that were in
keeping with Burkean judgments, 6 suggesting that their different structure was
an asset and the other 5 members of class arguing more complex theses like:
There is a boomer-millennial divide
in terms of strategy, and suspicion of old leadership style, “respectability
politics,” is important, because those models led to civil rights settling for
not enough. They are stuck in mestizaje stage in connections between
generations, but are struggling to develop nepantla.
or
BLM and others use fallacies, and
their unorganized hierarchy allows them to exploit fallacies that are popular
and funny enough to get attention but to be able to deny the ineffective or
things that cross lines, which is a kind of turn to mdw nfr instead of Aristotle, which helps to pull in people who see
news and just get angry.
In
these kinds of examples, students were able to use the MashUp article concepts
not just as an alternative to the traditional 60s-fetishizing vibe of classic
rhetorical social movement theory, but as a key lever in mediating a more
complex conversation between that and BLM, and, in many cases, other methods in
the class, like fallacies.
Okay. All good. But….
In talking with other faculty
interested in diversifying readings and ideas in their classes, there was some
resistance to my idea of simplifying these texts down into a set of tools in a
table. So I sought to open the class process and let them develop it. I remain
skeptical of both the honesty of that approach and the relative lack of agency
it gives the students. Although my more top-down table method has problems, it
is the better option, all the things considered, I think. My plan is, for
Spring 2018, to give the students the table and some of the readings and
problematize the whole concept with them. The idea is that I admit that my
readings and table entries are simplifications and the class is based on
testing them out as much as using them, with the students rewarded for what
they can read or generate for the readings that are new. This style can work
exceptionally well if the instructor is committed to it. Let them know that all
of this is contingent and incomplete. There is always more to do.
I am going to produce a draft of a
table below here for you, but I struggle with all the things that I think you’d
hope I’d be struggling with here:
1. Does he have sufficient training to
represent these ideas with any degree of fidelity?
2. Especially given that his embodied
experience in the world has been one of vast rafts of privilege.
3. And the hubris of this table is
EXACTLY the sort of reductive thing we’d expect in that case.
Let me take these totally legit
criticisms in turn. Not to dispute them, but to explore their implications a
bit.
One. I have had a lot of training.
My coursework, teaching and research in Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies and
African American studies have helped me here. Of course, I’ve been doing Burke
stuff for 25 years, so I will likely reduce him to table form far more
accurately, so this is a fair point. However, I’d like to underline that this
is just not my problem alone. Part of the reason I want to do this project is
that NO ONE has the right training for this if we entertain the possibility,
even for a bit, that critical academic work does not have to exist in
non-step-oriented postmodern form. We have to give it form for the students. We
also hope we teach them to supercede our training wheels. And we put those
wheels on for other methods. The Foss textbook give plenty of steps to even
such mush as “genre criticism.” Why does the Burgchardt textbook give us a
history piece and a cultural studies/ideological criticism piece as 2/3 of the
“feminist criticism” section? When we strip diverse critical practices of the
possibility of being abstracted into method, we reify something terrible. All
our postmodern huffing and puffing will not blow down the methodological parts
catalog of positivism. Thus we have “real” rhetoric on the one hand and
something squishier on the other. It’s what we heard about feminist theory in
an unfortunate graduate seminar years ago. The prof suggested that it would be
more accurate to call feminist theory poetry or something instead, since it
didn’t have the specificity and rigor one would expect of “real” academic work.
I swear Kristin Hibler actually had steam come out of her ears, like in the
cartoons, in response to this.
All of which reminds me that we are
also putting an enormous burden on young faculty and graduate students to
prepare, anew, every time, this stack of methods that swirl in their heads and
experiences, this orbit of complexly written text that they need to sift and
choose to help students to sift and choose. Of course, they also have other
things they’d like to apply their skills and consciousness to, as well, in
their departments, schools, communities, the world. Maybe they need to have a
bigger voice in the union or faculty governance or a community organization.
Maybe they need to have more time to write and publish and compete in a
positivist model of scholarly presentationpublicationproduction that unfairly
allocates privilege. Maybe they need to, as my friend was told at a Research
One school, “spend less time with his students” in order to get tenure. He
didn’t. So he didn’t. What if we could be better about not policing our own
reductivism in the extended form of ideological purity texts we like to inflict
on each other in the left.
Two. My privilege has been a titanic
raft. This is true. Thus, it is entirely likely that I will get the nuances of nepantla wrong. But EVERYONE gets
Burke’s Pentad wrong. Everyone. I have never seen or heard a piece of pentadic
criticism that doesn’t have giant howlers of errors in the method. We just
don’t care about that as much, I guess, although old Burkeans will read you the
riot act if you happen to define “division” in a new-ish way, so maybe I’m
wrong. This critique is true. But only someone with my unique combination of
hubris and privilege would try this thing. Most others out there diversifying
rhetoric kind of abandon the systematization gig in their syllabi. I think this
is a waiting game. Eventually all the ancient Burkeans will die off, leaving
their lumbering reptilian methods to the fossil record. But that ultimately
abandons rhetoric to cultural studies and ideological criticism. And I don’t
like that. I find so much of that work just dishonest enough to be grating. It
lacks methodological openness while preaching openness and thus Grossberg’s
twin critiques tend to be true: it’s boring and predictable.
Three. Look, tables, right? It’s not
ideal. I can only speak for my students. Know how many people learn Perelman in
their classes besides me? I am not all-seeing, but there are almost no other
examples. He’s, as Dr. Carlson said back in the day, quaint and too hard. Ha!
Aristotle is quaint but we still teach that stuff. Perelman is too hard to make
accessible so we don’t try. We turn to methods that we can easier gloss for our
students. It’s why we still use psychoanalysis in feminist cultural criticism.
It’s wrong. But it has clear methods. And if we know how wrong it is going in,
we can use that as a helpful lever even as the method illuminates stuff for use
to critique. We are building a toolbox of methods, as another old prof of mine,
Dr. Hasian, used to say. Except, it’s not enough to know when to use a wrench
and when a hammer. We have to know that the whole box is a problem at the
outset. But, really, don’t you already think that about EVERYTHING anyway?
Anyway, I turned Perelman into method and am preserving the Mishnaic tradition
of Judaic argument analysis for the WASPish world of most rhetorical method,
with some error. Always some error. Tables work. They help students to do work
faster. Our job is to help them process the implications of what the tables
leave out. But remember, they are NOT reading for your classes. You are doing
that with chalk daily anyway. Or on a PowerPoint. This version gives the
students more power in the equation. And, to bring the shibboleth of assessment
to critical scholarship, aren’t student outcomes the things that matter most
here?
My old philosophy prof, Jasper
Blystone, who taught a class called “Postmodernism,” gave us Lechte’s 50 Key Contemporary Thinkers book. It’s
like a Cliff’s Notes to current theorists. He admitted, sheepinshly, that this
wasn’t the same as reading, say, all of Foucault, but, who does that anyway if
they are also reading all of Derrida and Freud and Haraway, etc. He argued that
that’s what the European model of graduate education does. The ideas are more
important than struggling with every text. He might have been right. But he
taught postmodernism, so we will never know J.
Plus, this only works if we give
them the texts. I’ve got hyperlinks below. These usually exist on the
interwebs. The students get a quick summary from me and if they want to use a
method they have to drop in on the full, complex text and have a longer visit.
Thus, the table, in its current form
is below. It is not at all complete. It will, honestly, never be complete. But
it’s a start. Note that we could throw the usual suspects like Burke and
Bohrmann and Fischer on here, too, and I will, but we already know what that
looks like.
Biesekcer’s
techne
|
“by
scrupulously working within and against the grain of the the word's
historically constituted semantic field, techne can be used to refer to a
kind of "getting through" or ad hoc "making do" by a
subject whose resources are necessarily located in and circumscribed by the
field within which she operates, but whose enunciation, in always and already
exceeding and falling short of its intending subject, harbors within it the
possibility of disrupting, fragmenting, and altering the horizon of human
action out of which it emerges.” (p. 155)
|
|
Camp
|
Perfomative
queer sensibility with special focus on:
1) Irony
2) Aestheticism
3) Theatricality
4) Humor
|
|
Cyborg
theory
|
We are
cyborgs, multiple and contested. Look for:
1) Places where boundaries bleed.
Infections.
2) Signs of excess. Appendages.
3) Trickster narratives of flows of
control.
|
|
Double
jeopardy
|
If
oppressions multiply effects instead of add effects, how do those play out?
|
|
Gossip
|
The queer
practice of “illicit imagination” involves reading into texts, between the
lines, etc., for things that could not be said.
|
|
Hauntology
|
We live
with “complex personhood” and are haunted by contradictions. The ghost is the
mostly hidden visitation of organized structures of power that work to be removed from
memory
|
|
Medu nefer
|
Ancient
Egyptian “good speech” suggests that ethics and truth are, unlike Aristotle,
not separable – rhetorical effectiveenss and ethics are inseperable
|
|
Mestizaje
|
Multiplicity
is a new subjectivity – a synthesis of structures of oppression and freedom.
|
|
Multiple
definition
|
Persuasion
requires definition of concepts mutually acceptable to all before further
proceeding.
|
|
Nepantla
|
Mestizaje
identity pivoted to critique all categories.
|
|
Nommo
|
Vocal
speech in the African tradition creates worlds, and both build community
while also delivering imperative to it, call and response. It is not
separable from the concepts “behind” the word, as in the European tradition.
|
|
Rhetorical
conversation
|
Women,
excluded from the public sphere, developed a particular rhetoric which
expands the values of good private conversation to public discourse directed
to “gaining the audience,” not “gaining the applause.” Key values are:
1) Wit: Gentle humor allows strategic,
planned communication to enter with goodwill and spontaneity
2) Elocution: Attention to politeness and
truthfulness matching idea, voice and body.
|
|
Ruthless
critique
|
“Radicalism is therefore the epistemological
work of shattering the political
unconscious of terror that structures the
boundaries of common sense and consensus.” (p. 182)
|
|
shame
paradox
|
Decreasing
visibility from others serves to actually increase visibility of self/acts.
|
|
The ethic
of caring
|
Black
feminist wisdom offers these three things for us to care about in interacting
with the world
1) Individual uniqueness
2) Emotion-laden dialogue
3) Empathy
|
I
know. It’s not nearly good enough. Wanna give me a hand? I am feeling a
textbook in this.
References
Grossberg,
L. (1997). Dancing in spite of myself:
Essays on popular culture. Durham: Duke University Press.
Grossberg, L. (2005, Nov.).
Comments. In J. Hay (Chair), Critical and cultural studies now – A forum. Panel
conducted at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Boston,
MA.
Janesick, V. J. (1994). The dance of
qualitative research design: Metaphor, methodolatry, and meaning. In. N. K.
Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.) Handbook
of qualitative research (pp. 209-219). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Waite, S. (2016). The unavailable
means of persuasion: A queer ethos for feminist writers and teachers. In K. J.
Ryan, N. Meyers, and R. James (Eds), Rethinking ethos: A feminist ecological
approach to rhetoric (pp. 71-88). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press.