The Commentaries

The commentaries on IRRS present a mixed lot. Some, like Kaufer's and King's are interesting but largely tangential; perhaps this is why they are included in a section marked "Extensions" rather than "Dissensions." For example, Kaufer and Keith define rhetoric as a design art, and bring to rhetoric the metaphor of reverse engineering. Drawing on complexity theory from cognitive science, Kaufer presents a theory of his own, designed to account for the results of a rhetorical artifact, which he applies to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Jasinski, also focused on the public address tradition, examines the dominant understanding of context or rhetorical situation in studies that presuppose human agency. Like Kaufer and Keith, he seeks a "reconstructive" version of translation or interpretation of rhetorical artifacts. In a book whose keynote essay takes the RS literature as its test case, King's lament on the decline of a "grounded civic discourse, rooted in that many-sided, multi-roled creature, the citizen," seems also to be of peripheral value here.

Fuller offers a fascinating commentary on Campbell's work which has implications for rhetorical criticism generally, but which bears only a little on the soundness of Gaonkar's IRRS. The nub of his complex and richly embroidered argument is that typical readers of scientific (or other) texts such as Darwin's Origin of Species don't necessarily interpret those texts as rhetorical critics do. Thus, the theory of reading most closely associated with the humanist tradition and classical rhetoric in particular may be sheer hubris. Here is an invitation to an intriguing program of empirical research on reader reception.

From my perspective, the biggest hitter in defense of a globalized rhetoric is Charles Willard, and the biggest issues in this connection concern invocations of the term "rhetoric" as applied, say, to critical analysis of scientific discourse, absent the deployment of the "classical rhetorical lexicon" (CRL). The matter is complicated because, as previously noted, Gaonkar believes that the appropriately "thin" vocabulary of the performative rhetorical tradition may not be adequate for critical/hermeneutic purposes, but the failure to utilize that admittedly thin vocabulary and still be counted as a rhetorical critic signals a problem of another kind: namely, that virtually any reading of virtually any human practice can retrospectively and casuistically be adjudged a rhetorical reading. Paradoxically, according to Gaonkar, Alan Gross largely succeeds as a reader of scientific discourse by using Aristotelian categories loosely or not at all, while Lawrence Prelli, inventor of an elaborate topical system for the analysis of scientific discourse, modeled after Cicero, offers translations that "tend to be highly abstract and arcane without enhancing explanatory power." (68) By way of defense, Gross insists that his readings are warrantably rhetorical because they are imbued with Aristotelian "sensibilities." But what of Kuhn? And what of the science studies crowd in sociology? Are they "rhetoricians of science"?

Willard's response is that Gaonkar has set up globalization, and RS in particular, to fail. We have already seen the bind Gaonkar has placed the critic in: damned if she uses the thin CRL, damned if she doesn't. Underlying this and other artificially imposed binds, says Willard, is an Aristotelian essentialism from which Gaonkar cannot seem to break loose. Other fields--cultural anthropology for one--face the same problems of ubiquity and polysemy, and turn them to advantage. Rhetoric should do likewise, and not simply for reasons of academic or cultural politics.

Debunking claims to epistemic authority is, I submit, an indispensable skepticism in a democracy. It very much matters how knowledge claims are taken in the fuss and hustle of political life, whether they are trusted blindly, or shaped and formed by political agendas, or interrogated knowledgeably....The architecture of knowledge claims is a complex issue, certainly, that in all likelihood will demand the theories and methods of many fields. But about discourses that deny or camouflage their own rhetorical character, one would think that people blessed with rhetorical sensibilities would have much to say, and much the world needs to hear." (179)

But can rhetorical critics, inhabited as they allegedly are by Gaonkar with an age-old "ideology of agency," effectively engage the texts that they seek to "translate," when, in our postmodern age, we realize (or should realize) that there are structures which govern human agency: language, the unconscious, and capital? Says Gaonkar, the governing feature of the humanist paradigm is the positioning of the rhetor (the agent) as the generating center of discourse and the constitutive source of its power. In this model of intentional persuasion, "the agency of rhetoric is always reducible to the conscious and strategic thinking of the rhetor." (48-9)

Gaonkar avers that the ideology of agency infects both "Big" and "Little" rhetoric and, predictably, he evokes critical responses from both camps. Leff maintains that Gaonkar's notion of agency is unreasonably rigid; Miller, that the classical tradition is far from univocal on this issue. Campbell, whom Gaonkar credits with having "graduated" from a naive view of Darwin's rhetorical autonomy to one of intertextuality, nevertheless offers a powerful defense of intentionalist readings. Turning Gaonkar's invocations of Gadamer to his own rhetorical advantage, Campbell adds that we can put aside Gaonkar's "binary distinction" between the rhetor as "point of origin" and the rhetor as discursively produced "point of articulation" and recognize that "from different perspectives the speaker can be described accurately one way or the other as a tensional fusion of both." (133)

In my view, the discussion prompted by Gaonkar's critique of the ideology of agency is quite useful. But is the critique, if valid, fatal to RS or to rhetorical theory and criticism generally? Farrell thinks not (323) and I agree. One line of defense is to celebrate rhetorical theory's presumptions about human agency. Here, as before, Charles Willard proves eloquent:

Yet there in the midst of it all are the social treatises, wherein interested actors pursue their quests for advantage, frame their intentions, weigh their alternatives, draw opposite conclusions, haggle and compromise, and presumably affect events. One can infer from this jostling, hustling world, despite the famous claim to the contrary, that rhetoric and dialectic together have a subject matter. They are about human agency, about action concerning matters that can be other than they are. The realm of practical affairs lies on the horizon of uncertainty, a place where truth needs help to triumph over its opposite. Among the arts, Aristotle says, only rhetoric and dialectic draw opposite conclusions; and the only reason to do that, presumably, is that human deliberation counts for something. (189)

Let us grant, then, that the agent--and here the critic can be included as well--may be constrained by language, by power, by the personal and cultural unconscious, and perhaps by much else as well. Still, borrowing from both Marx and Freud, the agent has freedom within the realm of necessity. Moreover, even if agentic freedom is an illusion, it is a powerful illusion, one that even a determinist cannot ignore in accounting for cultural formations.

Hence, rather than dismissing rhetorical agency as myth, let us seek better to understand the perception of agency, perhaps bracketing the question of whether rhetorical intentions "exist." We will discover, I believe, that rhetorical intentions are to some degree predictable: that they are inferable from knowledge of role requirements and role dilemmas. This has been the thrust of my theorizing on the rhetoric of social movement leaders (Simons, 1970; Simons, Mechling and Schreier, 1984), and I have extended it to the rhetoric of scientific research reports (Simons, 1993). Caught between pressures to "tell it like it is" and to "put one's best foot forward," I have hypothesized, a supreme test of the researcher is the capacity to appear to be "telling it like it is" while at the same time putting his or her "best foot" as far forward as a discriminating readership might be expected to allow. Latour (1987) has provided vivid illustrations of the manner in which that dilemma is routinely managed in citational work within the physical and biological sciences. Says Latour (1987:75-6):

Like a good billiard player, a clever author may calculate shots with three, four or five rebounds. Whatever the tactics, the general strategy is easy to grasp: do whatever you need to the former literature to render it as helpful as possible for the claims you are going to make. The rules are simple enough: weaken your enemies, paralyze those you cannot weaken, help your allies if they are attacked, ensure safe communications with those who supply you with indisputable instruments, oblige your enemies to fight one another; if you are not sure of winning, be humble and understated. (5)