Escaping the Prison House of Effects: The Persistence of an Anachronism in Rhetoric Studies

ABSTRACT

Persuasive effect will always be an essential part of rhetoric studies, but it should not be either its ready shorthand, identifying trait, or lodestar. The decades-long momentum to move beyond the identification of rhetoric with the production and management of effects should be pointedly encouraged, with many new rhetorical imaginaries (invitational, dialogic, agonistic, ecologic, etc.) providing ample resources for doing so. This paper will describe the self-limiting nature of an effects frame, show that there have always been alternatives within rhetoric’s traditions to move beyond it, outline the persistence of a first-order identification with persuasive effect in contemporary disciplinary history, and point to specific ways to put this habit in the rear-view mirror. The rhetorical appropriation of Foucault’s interpretation of parrhesia is explored as an example of a rhetorical practice that moves beyond the reductive straight-jacket of effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Effect
• Foucault
• Isocrates
• parrhesia
• persuasion

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Houck offers an account of this debate in rhetoric studies (283–84).

² I draw the last two capacities, respectively, from Frank 101 and Browne 123.

³ This is an experience that the German philosopher J. G. Fichte called an Anstoß, the check the world puts in the way of our encompassing egoism.

⁴ See also 197, 211, 213.

⁵ For a thorough exposition of this view, see Dews 72–95.

⁶ This would be, in its own context, the antithesis of Foucault’s care of the self.

⁷ Greene’s identification of emancipation with criticism is clear. His materialist rhetoric “opens the possibility of studying” rhetorical practices as “a geographical project committed to mapping” governing apparatuses (25).

⁸ Buzzfeed has the most thorough account of X’s troll campaign (Soteriou). For industry reaction, see Billboard’s post-scandal reporting (Kaufman).

⁹ Indeed this is precisely how the Situationists theorized the rhetorical function of such political spectacles (Plant 89).

¹⁰ See Thimsen, The Democratic Ethos, chapters 2–5.