Revisiting the Future of Meaning

Abstract

This essay takes up Raymie McKerrow's “Research in Rhetoric Revisited,” exploring the relationship between the contemporary history of critical rhetoric and the problem of meaning. In it, I argue for a conception of rhetoric that is not reducible solely to questions of meaning, intersubjective negotiation, and propriety. I conclude by exploring an alternative trajectory to the vision of rhetoric avowed by McKerrow, focusing on a number of options for articulating a vision of rhetoric beyond meaning.

Keywords:

• Rhetoric
• Context
• Meaning
• Propriety
• Affect

Notes

[1] Raymie E. McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric: A Glance at our Recent Past, Present, and Potential Future,” Review of Communication 10, no. 2 (2010): 197.

[2] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” www.marxists.org, trans. Ben Brewster, accessed August 1, 2014, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.

[3] McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric,” 198.

[4] McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric,” 205.

[5] McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric,” 206–7.

[6] Nancy Streuver, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2.

[7] Raymie McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111

[8] McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 94.

[9] McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 96.

[10] McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 105.

[11] McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 105.

[12] McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 109, 106.

[13] McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric Revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 151–61.

[14] McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric Revisited,” 154.

[15] For a treatment of the argument about rhetoric's uniqueness, see Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar “Object and Method in Rhetorical Criticism: From Wichelns to Leff and McGee,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 290–316.

[16] McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric Revisited,” 155.

[17] Barbara Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Differnace,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 110–30.

[18] Diane Davis, “Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2008): 123–47 and “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38, no. 3 (2005): 191–212.

[19] David Lewis, “General Semantics,” Synthese, 22, nos. 1–2 (1970): 18–19.

[20] Lewis, “General Semantics,” 19.

[21] Jacques Lacan, “The Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2006), 6.

[22] Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX) ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1999), 56, and Jacques Lacan, “Une Pratique de Bavardage,” Ornicar? Bulletin Périodique du Champ Freudien, 19 (1977), 7.

[23] Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Thomaselli (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1988), 307.

[24] Lacan, Ego, 307.

[25] Lacan specifically invokes the rhetorical tradition's conception of inventio as discovery:

you cannot fail to see that in the celebrated expression of Picasso, “I do not seek, I find,” that this finding (trouver), the trobar of the Provençal troubadours and trouvères, and all the schools of rhetoric, that takes precedence over the seeking.

Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York, W.W. Norton, 1997), 118.

[26] Lacan, “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” 6.

[27] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: W.W. Norton XI, 1998), 20–21.

[28] Lacan, “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” 31.

[29] Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 20.

[30] Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2006), 85.

[31] For a fuller elaboration of this argument see Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), especially chapter 3.

[32] The idea of the “context of the context” is inspired by Lawrence Grossberg's Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

[33] Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of American Culture,” www.mcgeefragments.net, accessed August 1, 2014, http://mcgeefragments.net/OLD/text.htm.