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Abstract
Theoretical discussion of the rhetorical situation has been dedicated largely to questions of its ontology and of how it is constituted. Where this ontological orientation has inclined theorists to treat the concept as a theoretical premise, an institutional orientation would instead frame constructivist accounts of the rhetorical situation as a political-pedagogical commitment and treat the ethical obligations that arise from any given situation as bound to specific institutional forms. From an institutional perspective, the rhetorical situation is to conscience as the institution of school is to education. The distinction of both rhetorical situations and schools lies not in their contrivedness per se, but in the inventional capacities their contrived qualities sustain.
Acknowledgements
She wishes to thank John Lucaites and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and direction. She also thanks Robert Terrill for his guidance on earlier drafts and mentoring. An early draft of this essay was presented at the 95th National Communication Association Conference.
Notes
1. Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 1–14.
2. Scott Consigny, “Rhetoric and Its Situations,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 7 (1974): 175–86; Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 5–24; Mary Garrett and Xiaosui Xiao, “The Rhetorical Situation Revisited,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23 (1993): 30–40; Ronald Walter Greene, “The Aesthetic Turn and the Rhetorical Perspective on Argumentation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (1998): 19–29; Donna Gorrell, “The Rhetorical Situation Again: Linked Components in a Venn Diagram,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 30 (1997): 395–412; Kathleen M. Hall Jamieson, “Generic Constraints and the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 162–70; Richard E. Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 154–61.
3. Michael J. Hyde and Craig R. Smith, “Hermeneutics and Rhetoric: A Seen but Unobserved Relationship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 355, 363; For an extended discussion of Heidegger's notion of being-with-others and its connection to rhetoric, see Michael J. Hyde, The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 28–29.
4. Hyde and Smith, “Hermeneutics and Rhetoric,” 350.
5. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 28.
6. Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Différance,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 118. Drawing on Derrida, Biesecker refers to the placement of signs in relation to one another as an economy of différance.
7. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation,” 126.
8. Ian Hunter, “Assembling the School,” in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 147.
9. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 46–56.
10. Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, “Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Citizens,” Cultural Studies 19 (2005): 100–26; Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication (1998): 21–41.
11. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” 22.
12. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation,” 126.
13. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Book, 1972), 229.
14. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 13.
15. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 129.
16. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 137–39, 149.
17. Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-Education and The Community of Scholars (New York: Vintage Books, 1962); Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Calder & Boyars, 1971).
18. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 78, 152.
19. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 178; Iain Thomson, “Heidegger and the Politics of the University,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 541. Heidegger's disparaging attitude toward school may stem from his disillusionment with the direction of the German university under the National Socialists, although Thomson argues that Heidegger always retained hope for the institution even while he sought to move education beyond its boundaries.
20. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 62; Michael J. Hyde, The Ethos of Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), xvii; Michael J. Hyde, “The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 27 (1994): 374–96. Hyde quotes the full passage in his introduction to The Ethos of Rhetoric and quotes shortened versions of the same passage in his 1994 essay and 2001 book.
21. Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 143–67. See Foucault's discussion of the psychiatric asylum.
22. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 146.
23. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 114.
24. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 61.
25. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 44.
26. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 59; Hunter, “Assembling the School,” 147.
27. David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel, The Diversity Myth: “Multiculturalism” and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 1995), 3.
28. Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 19.
29. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 163.
30. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 133.
31. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 130. Throughout their book, Sacks and Thiel disparagingly use the term “the multiculture” to refer to the wide-ranging subjects of their critique. To avoid confusion, I have changed this term to “multiculturalists.”
32. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 133.
33. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 3; Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 185, 191. Sacks and Thiel are not consistent in characterizing the danger as social engineering, and in places, they express alarm over the essentialism suggested by some multicultural arguments, one of which was that “[w]hat one may know is determined by the circumstances of one's birth.” Brown notes this inconsistency within liberalist discourse that sometimes frames liberalism as anticultural while at other times anti-essentialist.
34. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 45. They write, “[M]ulticulturalism is a symptom of the retreat of the 1960s left, of its unwillingness—indeed, its inability—to participate in the marketplace of ideas that is the hallmark of a successful university and of a healthy society.”
35. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 83.
36. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 17.
37. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 60.
38. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 59.
39. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Mary Lefkowitz, Not out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
40. Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 129–67.
41. Kate Willink, “Domesticating Difference: Performing Memories of School Desegregation,” Text and Performance Quarterly 27 (2007): 21. See also Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4.
42. Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 293.
43. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 74, 81. See, for instance, the analogy they draw between multiculturalism and phrenology. They unwittingly undo this analogy when they note with sarcasm that “[n]ot just any minority or female faculty would be [qualified to teach] the new curriculum—pigmentation, accent, surname, or chromosomes are not enough. Only those with the proper ‘intellectual and academic perspective’ need apply.”
44. Tom Horne, letter to the editor, Arizona Republic, February 3, 2007. In May of 2010, Arizona's governor Jan Brewer signed into law legislation banning ethnic studies programs in Arizona's public schools. The premise for that piece of legislation is similar to Sacks and Thiel's grievance against multiculturalism at Stanford. Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne who agitated for the bill argued that ethnic studies classes promote ethnic chauvinism by associating certain biological traits with certain cultural histories (i.e., teaching histories of Mexican Americans and Chicanos to Mexican American and Chicano students), and that, consequently, ethnic studies comes at the expense of the American belief in individualism.
45. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 33.
46. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 190–91.
47. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 83.
48. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 26.
49. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 59.
50. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 83.
51. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 84.
52. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 84.
53. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 229.
54. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 227.
55. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 241.
56. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 230.
57. Brown, Regulating Aversion, 203; Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 247. Their claim that civilization is the antidote to multiculturalism is reflective of what Brown calls an “anti-culture” attitude that runs through liberalism. As Brown explains, liberalism promotes the civilizing effects of education that overcome inferior cultural or vulgar natural drives. But what at first appears to be a constructivist argument on behalf of the transformative potential of education becomes in the final turn a defense of a superior human nature—one free of cultural impositions.
58. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 247.
59. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 28.
60. Stanley Fish, “Take This Job and Do It: Administering the University without an Idea,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 271–85.
61. Fish, “Take This Job,” 280.
62. Fish, “Take This Job,” 279.
63. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” 22.
64. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). Fish's argument revives a vision of the university first proposed by Kant in which the “lower faculties,” which included philosophy, maintained a disinterested stance.
65. Fish, Save the World, 121.
66. Fish, Save the World, 66.
67. Fish, Save the World, 40; Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 84. Sacks and Thiel use the same analogy when dismissing multiculturalism.
68. Fish, Save the World, 71.
69. Fish, Save the World, 101.
70. Fish, Save the World, 123. Fish notes the irony of proposals that seek greater partisanship among the faculty in the name of depoliticizing the university.
71. Fish, Save the World, 87.
72. Fish, Save the World, 24.
73. Fish, Save the World, 25.
74. Fish, Save the World, 51.
75. Fish, Save the World, 18.
76. Fish, Save the World, 58.
77. Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben, eds., Debating Moral Education: Rethinking the Role of the Modern University (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
78. Fish, Save the World, 85.
79. Fish, Save the World, 123.
80. Fish, Save the World, 154.
81. Fish, Save the World, 34.
82. Fish, Save the World, 11, 12, 20.
83. Fish, “Take this Job,” 280.
84. Fish, Save the World, 135.
85. Fish, Save the World, 137.
86. Fish, Save the World, 138.
87. Fish, Save the World, 145, 146.
88. Fish, Save the World, 146.
89. Sacks and Thiel, Diversity Myth, 246.
90. Plato, Gorgias, trans. T. Irwin, Clarendon Plato Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
91. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar, Self-Reliance, Compensation (New York: American Book Company, 1893), 33.
92. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 113.
93. Hyde, Call of Conscience, 111.
94. Fish, Save the World, 13.