This conversation is starting to steer us in the direction of our "marginal" disciplinary status.
I guess when making my claims on the status of a philosophy of history "in rhetoric" I was thinking more of a perspective than a discipline. So when a Foucault or White deny/deconstruct German historicism, they are being "rhetorical" by my all-encompassing, linguistic-turn notion.
I think both of you are right on what makes up a discipline, though. I just talked about this with my class, reading Michael Leff's Habitation of Rhetoric. While we agree with a "Neo-sophistic" notion that rhetoric is everywhere, the "Neo-Aristotelian" focus on speech texts has served as a centering mechanism. Leff uses the term "decorum" to talk about that which is rhetorical, the fitting application of the general theory/philosophy/ideology to the specific situation. A speech text serves as the model not because it has some privileged status, but because it best fits and demonstrates this situated speech. So, as both of you say, our theory & method tends to emerge from a range of texts that demonstrate certain "situated" characteristics. He prizes the oratory because an immediate audience responds in the moment to such speech. Even if I studied an amoeba, as a rhetorician speaking to rhetoricians, I would talk in theoretical/methodological terms that reflect the speech traditions that inform my perspective. This is interestingly played out in my side of the discipline when folks to visual rhetoric studies or public memory studies, and stretch terms to fit new objects.
But then Leff's perspective/definition may be limiting to some folk's projects/views?
And so where does this leave us? Disciplines give us jobs and a perspective for our work. I guess as long as we can embrace philosophies and theorists that fit with the perspective of our theory/method, this "problem" becomes less obtuse.
Is there, then, a philosophy of history that fits this discipline-perspective matrix? I would again have to posit some very probability-based relativist-pragmatic one: the better of two arguments, as interpreted by an audience, often becomes socially-constructed meaning and reinforces/determines the course of events.
But those of you who work more squarely within the history and philosophy of rhetoric may be able to go further?
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
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A lot of what you say here resonates with me--I'd be curious to know more about the process through which theories fit specific situations, or are made to fit. And is the purpose of that fitting (there's a spanish tragedy joke there, for anybody who likes 16th century drama) to understand the situation better, its context, etc. What I mean about the discipline-ness, though, is something more than just perspective, but also determination. In the sense that John Swales, in his book Research Genres (and other places), and also Latour and Wolgar, who he cites, thinks of what we do as the production not even of knowledge per se, but of actual documents--I know you're acknowledging that when you say that we fit (again) our beliefs etc into a framework of disciplinarity, but I think that discipline also serves a generative function we might not always be conscious of. Not sure that this answers your questions, or takes things any further--though I would add that in our case it may be the process that's becoming notable more than where we're getting to!
ReplyDeleteOK-i ask more about this in a later post, but here's my question--could we tweak your definition so that the success of an argument is actually judged twice, once by the audience at the time, and once by the course of subsequent events? The better argument insofaras it sways the audience can turn out to have been the worse argument insofaras it leads to the disintegration of the republic. Perhaps this is where our historical work lies?
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