I genuinely commend you on many of the realizations you gleaned from our first exploratory. There are several reasons why I asked you to schematize The New Rhetoric, but one principal reason is to remind us that any claim we make about a figure, text, or theory -- whether revisionist or not -- is itself always "in respect to," and that any re/reading of these treatises requires our being willing to let the text speak on its own terms as well as through the terms of specific secondary scholarship or primary/secondary histories with which we identify. By the same token, any intervention we wish to make into theories of argument is both a revisionist reading and a critical reflection on our own reading apparatus.
For example, by looking closely at "audience adherence" and the "universal/particular" distinction, we are both questioning the Aristotelian basis of P&O-T's treatise and considering that Perelman's rereading of Aristotle might reveal a level of performativity to the Rhetoric that other histories have neglected or overlooked. (Cf. Roland and Womack's "Aristotle's View of Ethical Rhetoric" for another insightful reading of the Rhetoric; they claim that A's system is a-moral and can function separately from any inherent ethical value on the part of the audience, but that if the rhetor starts with phronesis, then acting with it will result in an ethical conclusion on the part of the audience.)
You have shown that this is a different process from taking a relativistic stance towards these texts (i.e., different from concluding that "everything is always old and new" or "nothing is ever completely stable"), because at any moment in our teaching or our scholarship, we have to be able to set the parameters on the conversation we are having -- to articulate what is influencing our interpretation and what we are aware we might be leaving out. Realizing Condit's theoretical grounding helps us consider a bit more why she would say that P&O-T's treatise neglects reason in its fullest sense. It's likely that her definition of "reason" carries some connotations that reinforce certain beliefs about Cartesian Dualism even while destabilizing others.
Two passages from The New Rhetoric come to mind for me in making this point:
"We combat uncompromising and irreducible philosophical oppositions presented by all kinds of absolutism: dualisms of reason and imagination, of knowledge and opinion, of irrefutable self-evidence and deceptive will, of a universally accepted objectivity and an incommunicable subjectivity, of a reality binding on everybody and values that are purely individual" (B/H 1376).
"The logician, inspired by the Cartesian ideal, feels at home only in the study of the proofs that Aristotle qualified as analytic. ... As a result, reasoning which is foreign to the purely formal domain escapes logic, and consequently escapes reason too" (P&O-T I.3, as qtd. in Dearin 358; but see footnote 51 in Dearin's article for the full genealogy of this translated passage).
Again, I saw these critical moves at work during yesterday's discussion, and I commend you for them. Well done.
My own failure in managing our class time means there is still much ground we did not cover. For anyone interested in how these theories have evolved, however, I can make some quick recommendations:
- John Gage's edited collection, The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, offers an excellent collection of thoughtful essays on P&O-T's work, as well as their various contexts.
- M. Jimmie Killingsworth's very teachable text, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-Language Approach, reinvents the idea of "rhetorical appeal" by taking into account the many and varied embodiments of argument in 20th- and 21st-century rhetorical practice
- David Kaufer's classic essay, "A Plan for Teaching the Development of Original Policy Arguments" (in CCC), employs something very much like P&O-T's "philosophical pairs" in outlining a pedagogical approach the centers on "5 Causes of Policy Conflicts": sense of reference; frame of reference; conflicting evidence; conflicting local values; and conflicting global values.
- If you have ever taken or taught a composition or writing-intensive course that employed argumentation, you might have learned about Stephen Toulmin's warrant-based method as one that contrasts with P&O-T's dissociative method, though there are some areas of overlap in that they both challenge a purely syllogistic (formal logic) way of reasoning. (Cf. a handout I created for us but didn't have time to share; it's in Canvas for anyone interested.)
- Walter Ong's "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" (in PMLA), and Lisa Ede's and Andrea Lunsford's "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked" (in CCC), lend another dimension to conversations of audience, though they are not dealing with logic/argumentation theory, per se, so they will explain the evolution of "audience" more in terms of itinerant technologies.
Finally, as promised, our brief and collective board notes are here, and I'd like to divvy up our reading of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria in the following fashion:
- B/H 359-364 -- everyone (obviously)
- Book II, Ch. I-VII (B/H 364-376) -- Kamila, Michael, Parisa
- Book II, Ch. V-XIV (B/H 374-385) -- Jessi, Mandy
- Book II, Ch. XIII-XVIII (B/H 383-395) -- Amanda, Rob
- Book II, Ch. XVI-XXI (B/H 389-400) -- Angela, Katelyn
Have a good week-end!
-Dr. Graban
