My Major Concerns

1. IRRS is oddly structured. There is not much development of key terms and propositions. Instead, the essay moves quickly through a series of questionable representations to engage a handful of essays in some detail.

a. Translatability (i.e., intelligibility) comes to stand for all hermeneutic criteria.

b. Aristotle (to a lesser extent Cicero) comes to stand for the entire classical rhetorical tradition.

c. Rhetoric of science comes to stand for the globalization approach.

d. SCA (NCA) rhetoric of science scholarship comes to stand for all rhetoric of science scholarship.

e. Selected essays by Gross, Campbell and Prelli come to stand for all SCA (NCA) rhetoric of science scholarship.

f. A few features of these essays (e.g., ideology of agency) come to stand for the essays as a whole.

IRRS is thus exceptionally vulnerable to questioning of its representations and linkages at all stages of its complex argument. Why, it can be asked (and by some respondents is asked), "translatability"? Why not "interpretation" or "dialogue"?, asks Miller. And what exactly is "translatability"? Why Aristotle, asks Willard? And couldn't Gaonkar have shaken free of Aristotelian essentialism even as he positioned Aristotle's rhetorical theory as central to the tasks of rhetorical criticism? Why, if classical rhetorical theory's performative vocabulary is "thin" for critical/hermeneutic purposes, don't rhetoricians develop newer and more appropriately hermeneutic rhetorical theories? (This seemingly obvious question apparently escaped the attention of nearly all the respondents, for reasons that are not obvious to me. Gross is an exception.) And what is "thin" really? Does it mean lack of depth? lack of subtlety? If so, lack of depth and/or subtlety for what purposes?

These and a host of related questions needed to be addressed and addressed carefully before Gaonkar directed his attention to the RS literature. As it stands, the impression given by the essay of combined breadth and depth is illusory.

2. IRRS commits a formal fallacy in using rhetoric of science as the test case for globalization. This is a very serious problem that goes apparently unnoticed by Gaonkar's respondents.

Let's concede for purposes of argument that rhetoric of science (RS) is the Mount Everest of globalization. Thus, in accordance with appropriate a fortiori reasoning, we might conclude that if a globalized hermeneutic rhetoric could climb its Everest, it could also ascend easier peaks, such as the rhetoric of history, of film and television entertainment, of law, of news, of pedagogy, of social movements, etc. (If X, then Y. X, therefore Y.) However, it doesn't follow that these other peaks can't be reached if the trip up RS fails. (If X, then Y. Not-X, therefore not-Y is invalid). At most, one would have to conclude of the globalization mountain range: Science Mountain, no; the other mountains very possibly.

I don't concede, by the way, that the RS project has failed, or--in Gaonkar's words--that it has "stalled." Gaonkar's arguments about RS leave the globalization project virtually intact. (More about this later.)

Nor am I convinced that the metaphor of "toughest case" is entirely appropriate. Is it tougher to show that there is an ineliminable rhetorical component in scientific writing than, say, to show that formal logic is a rhetorical construction (Margolis, 1995), or that language use is inherently rhetorical in the sense of reflecting "partisan-angled seeing"? (Fish, 1976) No, these challenges for a globalized rhetoric are different, not tougher or weaker.

3. IRRS offers a series of damning claims about NCA-style rhetorical scholarship for which he offers not a shred of evidence.

a. Neo-Aristotelian historical-critical scholarship "eventually collapsed under the weight of its own failure." (31)

b. Critical studies inspired by phenomenological, structuralist, dramatistic, etc. theories were "as a whole no more insightful than an average neo-Aristotelian study. Even studies inspired by Burke's dramatistic theory of motives failed to leave a decisive imprint" (32).

c."We place (somewhat frantically these days) things under the sign of rhetoric more to make rhetoric intelligible than the things subsumed under it." (34)

I share some of Gaonkar's dismay over the value of NCA-style scholarship, but I believe Gaonkar needed and failed to fulfill his burden of proof in respect to these sweeping claims. As Willard observed, Gaonkar's mood of "Ecclesiastes-scale weariness...functions as data and warrant for many of the arguments." The arguments themselves can be "best dismissed for lack of evidence" (190).

4. Gaonkar attributes thinness of language to the failure of rhetorical critics to achieve a "legitimate disciplinary consensus," but I think the problem stems not from our rhetorical lexicon primarily, but from multiple and conflicting criteria for evaluation. (In this respect, by the way, globalized rhetoric is no different from other "meta-discourses, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis.) In a chapter on myth and narrative, for example, Craig Smith (1998) begins by claiming--even boasting--that "rhetoric is the discourse of the non-rational." Yet later in that same chapter, he cites Fisher approvingly as arguing that rhetorically effective narratives require "rationality, coherence and fidelity." Smith is not alone. In Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1988) selects out Reagan's Pointe du Hoc speech--intermixed with another Normandy speech in the Reagan campaign film, "A New Beginning"--as the epitome of the "new electronic eloquence." Says Jamieson approvingly, "The dramatization [of this segment from ANB] was compelling, the staging unsurpassable, the visual argument politically potent" (163). Yet, in Dirty Politics (1992), Jamieson castigates the Pointe de Hoc speech as "storytelling, not argument" (207).

5. Gaonkar greatly oversimplifies "the RS project" when he writes of its "idea" (rather than its ideas), its "general aim" (rather than its general aims), its "perspective," and so on. Contrary to Gaonkar, there are many rhetorics of science (even within the corpus of RS scholarship by self-styled--i.e., "explicit"--rhetoricians), pursuing a variety of aims, and exhibiting divergent perspectives. Not everyone is obsessed with demonstrating that "the discursive practices of science...contain an unavoidable rhetorical component," (39), and surely very few rhetoricians have taken up Gross's challenge to show how "science is rhetorical all the way down" (40). Even within the two volumes emanating from my conference on "Case Studies in the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences" (Simons, 1989a; 1990), one finds eulogistic conceptions of rhetoric (e.g., Miller, 1990), dyslogistic conceptions (e.g., Signorile, 1989) and an array of more "neutral" conceptions. Gross (1990) entertains the possibility of a rhetoric of science "without remainder," but Lyne (1990) contests it. Similarly, Sanders (1990) characterizes the conversation analysis literature as rhetorical in the "weak" sense rather than the "strong" sense, and Keith and Cherwitz (1989) call for nothing more than a "managerial" view of rhetoric, one that concedes the possibility of scientific objectivity. In my introductions to these volumes, I point out that different rhetoricians select out very different strands in the rhetorical tradition: e.g., argument for Billig, style for Geertz (Simons, 1989a; 1990). Their ranges of concern vary as well: from a particular rhetorical device (Katriel and Sanders, 1989), to a particular controversy (Czubaroff, 1989), to "a rhetoric" (Lyne, 1990), to an entire school of thought (e.g., Fuller, 1989), to disciplinarity in general (Hariman, 1989). Miller (1990) is not primarily concerned with showing how decision science is rhetorical; rather, she is interested in demonstrating why it is worse off for failing to incorporate a theory of rhetoric as deliberation (Miller, 1990, 174). My own case study was designed primarily to advance the mental health profession's consideration of psychotherapy's relationship to its so-called placebos (Simons, 1989b). In so doing, however, I aimed also at illustrating rhetoric's relationship to various ideologies of "the real," rhetoric's role as an instrument of legitimation and delegitimation, the generic character of professional rhetorics, the relationship between perceived legitimacy and effective rhetorical practice, and the utility of recasting various disciplinary issues as though they were arguments about varying conceptions of rhetoric. One finds similar variations in definition, scope, perspective and ambition in other collections of case studies within "the RS project" (e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Klamer, McCloskey and Solow, 1988); Nelson, Megill & McCloskey, 1987; Myers, 1989; Roberts and Good, 1993; Selzer, 1993.