Rhetorical Minds

Minds are rhetorical. From the moment we are born others are shaping our capacity for mental agency. As a meditation on the nature of human thought and action, this book starts with the proposition that human thinking is inherently and irreducibly social, and that the long rhetorical tradition in the West has been a neglected source for thinking about cognition. Each chapter reflects on a different dimension of human thought based on the fundamental proposition that our rhetoric thinks and acts with and through others.

In recent accounts of rhetoric's storied productivity, commentators have implied, along systematically Kantian lines, albeit with the occasional protestation, that agency must be coextensive with subjectivity. But is that all there is (to 2,500 years' worth of hypothesizing about the ways in which communication might promote social change)? Les Belikian's answer, drawing not only on traditional and contemporary rhetorical studies but also on Deleuzean thinking, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology, takes the form of a quadruply contrarian thesis: Rhetorical agency inheres, irreducibly so, in subjectivity, in conventionality, in transcendence, and in materiality, all of which are themselves under production. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Chapter 1: Productivity as a Context for Theorizing Rhetorical Transaction - A Miscellaneously Self-Effacing Rhetorical Agency? - Rhetoricity Bound, Unbounded, and Both - Variegation (Not Conglomeration) - Chapter 2: A Four-Folded Rhetorical Agency - Tetradic Due Diligence - Disaggregating a Constitution - A Willfully Productive Rhetorical Agency - Assemblage-Theoretical Resources - Triangulation - An Investigative Itinerary - Chapter 3: Subjectivity in the Social-Structural Landscape - Co-Constructing Constraint - Can the Speaker Speak? - An Ineffectual Agency - Subtracting from Rhetorical Practice - What Else Is Wrong with This Paradigm? - A Chimerical Agency for a Colossal Agent - Chapter 4: Conventionality in the Rhetorical-Humanistic Landscape - De-Leviathanizing the Normative - From Normativity to Shared Values - A Tribe of Equals - Keeping Shared Values between the Ceiling and the Seat - Staying the Same by Doing Something Differently - Maximizing Assent by Minimizing Recalcitrance - Still Missing So Far - Chapter 5: Transcendence in the Existential-Transversal Landscape - Existence, Transcendence, and Transversality - Philosophizing for the Living by Getting Rid of Their Materiality - The Two Styles of Transcendence - The Fideistic Appeal - Correcting Forgetfulness through a Material Phenomenology - Rhetorical Agency and the Existential Self - On Pivoting, Transcendence, and Emergence - The Rhetorical Agent and the Original Body - A Re-Corporealized Transversality - Chapter 6: Materiality in the Material-Semiotic Landscape - A Parable of Materiality-and-Relationality - Assemblaging, Stratification, and Circulating Reference - Entering at Biblical Precept - Crossing over to Race - From Race to Gender - Rescaling the Envoy - And A'n't We a Meshwork? - Chapter 7: Agency in the Rhetorical-Theoretical World - No More Homogenization Now! - On Keeping Difference Different - A Fluctuating Rhetorical Agent

Rhetorical scholarship has for decades relied solely on culture to explain persuasive behavior. While this focus allows for deep explorations of historical circumstance, it neglects the powerful effects of biology on rhetorical behavior – how our bodies and brains help shape and constrain rhetorical acts. Not only is the cultural model incomplete, but it tacitly endorses the fallacy of human exceptionalism. By introducing evolutionary biology into the study of rhetoric, this book serves as a model of a biocultural paradigm. Being mindful of biological and cultural influences allows for a deeper view of rhetoric, one that is aware of the ubiquity of persuasive behavior in nature. Human and nonhuman animals, and even some plants, persuade to survive - to live, love, and cooperate. That this broad spectrum of rhetorical behavior exists in the animal world demonstrates how much we can learn from evolutionary biology. By incorporating scholarship on animal signaling into the study of rhetoric, the author explores how communication has evolved, and how numerous different species of animals employ similar persuasive tactics in order to overcome similar problems. This cross-species study of rhetoric allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing us with a deeper history of rhetoric that transcends the written and the televised, and reveals the artifacts of our communicative past.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume explores the constitutive role of rhetoric in socio-cultural relations, where discursive persuasion is so important, and contains both theoretical chapters as well as fascinating examples of the ambiguities and effects of rhetoric used (un)consciously in social praxis. The elements of power, competition and political persuasion figure prominently. It is an accessible collection of studies, speaking to common issues and problems in social life, and shows the heuristic and often explanatory value of the rhetorical perspective.

Rhetoric, Embodiment, and the Ethos of Surveillance: Student Bodies in the American High School investigates the rhetorical tension between controlling student bodies and educating student minds. The book is a rhetorical analysis of the policies and procedures that govern life in contemporary American high schools; it also discusses the rhetorical effects of high-security, high-surveillance school buildings. It uncovers various metaphors that emerge from a close reading of the system, such as students’ claims that “school is a prison.” Jennifer Young concludes that many of the policies governing contemporary American high schools have come to rhetorically operate as a “discourse of default” that works against the highest aims of education, and she offers a method of effecting a cultural shift for going forward. Specifically, Young calls for an explicit application of intentional rhetoric to match discourse to audience and suggests that the development of empathy as a core value within the high school might be more effective in keeping students safe than the architectural and technological approaches we currently employ.

"In a book that will change the way we read Renaissance rhetoric, Wayne A. Rebhorn shows that the issues at stake are not dialogue and debate but power and control. Looking closely at what rhetoricians themselves said about their art, Rebhorn explores the profound engagement of rhetoric with some of the major cultural concerns of the time, including political authority, social mobility, gender relations, and attitudes toward the body." "As he reads texts by Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Carew, Tirso de Molina, Machiavelli, Rabelais, and Moliere, among others, Rebhorn offers a new model for the rhetorical reading of literature. Renaissance literature, he maintains, subjects rhetorical discourse to examination and evaluation and in the process exposes its many contradictions and evasions." "According to Rebhorn, rhetoricians imagine orators ambiguously, both as absolutist rulers who employ rhetoric to help maintain the status quo, and as base-born outsiders who use it to promote their own social advancement or even to resist authority. Renaissance rhetoric is equally ambiguous when it confronts issues of gender, for it identifies itself as simultaneously male and female, both "masculine" in its power and "feminine" in its procreativity and adornment. Finally, Renaissance rhetoric conveys a contradictory vision of the body, for although it is most typically aligned with the body image associated with elites, it simultaneously identities itself with the ethically suspect, grotesque body linked with the lower classes."--BOOK JACKET

An innovative approach to Dewey's view of rhetoric as art, revealing an "ontology of becoming" In Democracy and Rhetoric, Nathan Crick articulates from John Dewey's body of work a philosophy of rhetoric that reveals the necessity for bringing forth a democratic life infused with the spirit of ethics, a method of inquiry, and a sense of beauty. Crick relies on rhetorical theory as well interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, history, sociology, aesthetics, and political science as he demonstrates that significant engagement with issues of rhetoric and communication are central to Dewey's political philosophy. In his rhetorical reading of Dewey, Crick examines the sophistical underpinnings of Dewey's philosophy and finds it much informed by notions of radical individuality, aesthetic experience, creative intelligence, and persuasive advocacy as essential to the formation of communities of judgment. Crick illustrates that for Dewey rhetoric is an art situated within a complex and challenging social and natural environment, wielding influence and authority for those well versed in its methods and capable of experimenting with its practice. From this standpoint the unique and necessary function of rhetoric in a democracy is to advance minority views in such a way that they might have the opportunity to transform overarching public opinion through persuasion in an egalitarian public arena. The truest power of rhetoric in a democracy then is the liberty for one to influence the many through free, full, and fluid communication. Ultimately Crick argues that Dewey's sophistical rhetorical values and techniques form a naturalistic "ontology of becoming" in which discourse is valued for its capacity to guide a self, a public, and a world in flux toward some improved incarnation. Appreciation of this ontology of becoming—of democracy as a communication-driven work in progress—gives greater social breadth and historical scope to Dewey's philosophy while solidifying his lasting contributions to rhetoric in an active and democratic public sphere.