Rhetoric (Dis)Appearing

Abstract

The institutional history of rhetoric is isolated to appreciate its future value to critical communication and cultural studies. Four institutional encounters are highlighted: 1) its role in the creation of this journal under the auspices of the National Communication Association; 2) its shape shifting character as disciplinary knowledge, practice, and process for engaging democratic imaginaries; 3) its governmentalization under the sign of communication; 4) its ability to escape the ways institutions govern.

Keywords:

• Rhetorical Studies
• Cultural Policy
• Government
• Democracy
• Everyday

Notes

[1] Kent Ono was the primary author and key advocate of NCA sponsoring the journal Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. At the time the National Communication Association voted to sponsor the journal (in 2001), Kent Ono was the Chair of the Critical Cultural Studies Division of NCA. This division and journal came out of the political work of the Critical/Cultural Theory and Praxis Division before it changed its name to Critical and Cultural Studies. Some other key participants in this history and struggle include: Douglas Thomas, Ann Chisholm, Melissa Deem, Barbara Biesecker, Carole Blair, Raka Shome, Chris Kamrath, Benardo Attias, Thomas Nakayama, and me. It is no coincidence that key rhetorical scholars with leadership roles in NCA (Bill Balthrop and Raymie McKerrow) supported the journal. Furthermore, the first two editors of the journal, Robert Ivie and John Sloop, had deep connections to rhetorical studies.

[2] H-Rhetor “SCA Call: Critical/Cultural Discourse Theory and Praxis Division” discussion logs January 1997, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgibin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=hrhetor&month=9701&week=d&msg=V8F3bL83ZJU6NUBZoT4vQ&user&pw (accessed 27 January 1997). Kathleen Ann Chisholm was credited with posting the call. Thanks to Bernardo Attias for finding and sharing this post with me.

[3] Carole Blair, “'We Are All Just Prisoners Here of Our Own Device.” In Making and Unmaking the Prospects For Rhetoric, ed. Theresa Enos (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997), 29–36. Subsequent references cited in text with page numbers.

[4] “Proposal for a New Journal Sponsored by the National Communication Association.” Legislative Assembly Packet, National Communication Association (2001): 81. Kent Ono provided me with a copy of the proposal.

[5] “Proposal for a New Journal Sponsored by the National Communication Association,” 84.

[6] In way of intellectual biography, Larry Grossberg introduced me to the work of cultural policy studies (he was also my advisor). My introduction was made specifically through Tony Bennet's Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990) and “Putting Policy Into Cultural Studies” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, & Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge), 23–37 and a prepublication manuscript of Toby Miller's Well Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993). Finally, by following footnotes, I tracked down Ian Hunter's Culture and Governnment: The Emergence of Literary Education (London: Macmillan, 1988).

[7] “Report of the Committee on the Scope of Rhetoric and the Place of Rhetorical Studies in Higher Education” in Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project, ed. Lloyd Bitzer and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), 210.

[8] This paragraph riffs off of Tony Bennett's “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies” and Culture: A Reformer's Science (London: Saga 1998) and some of my own work: Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, “Lost Convictions; Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Citizens,” Cultural Studies 19.1 (2005): 100–26; Ronald Walter Greene “Lessons from the YMCA: The Material Rhetoric of Criticism, Rhetorical Interpretation, and Pastoral Power” in Communication M@tters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks, ed. Jeremy Packer and Steven B. Crofts Wiley (New York: Routledge 2012), 219–30.

[9] Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-Liberal Governance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4.3 (2007): 327–31.

[10] § 100.29 Electioneering Communication (2 USC. 434(f) (3)) Title 11- Federal Elections, Code of Federal Regulations, www.gpo.gov.

[11] Meaghan Morris, Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998), 116. This argument is in the context of her critique of cultural policy studies.

[12] Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” Trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), 384.