Theories of deliberative democracy have faced the charge of leading to the unjust exclusion of voices from public deliberation. The recent rhetorical turn in deliberative theory aims to respond to this charge. I distinguish between two variants of this response: the supplementing approach and the systemic approach. On the supplementing approach, rhetorical modes of political speech may legitimately supplement the deliberative process, for the sake of those excluded from the latter. On the systemic approach, rhetorical modes of political speech are (...) legitimate within public deliberation, just so long as they result in net benefits to the deliberative system. I argue that neither of these two approaches adequately meets the unjust exclusion charge. Whereas the supplementing approach does not go far enough to incorporate rhetorical speech into public deliberation, the systemic approach goes too far by legitimising forms of rhetoric that risk only exacerbating the problem of unjust exclusion. More constructively, I draw on Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric, as an art that is a counterpart to dialectic, to argue for a constitutive approach to rhetoric. I show how this approach provides a more expansive notion of deliberation that remains normatively orientated. (shrink)

This article reviews the recent work of Alan G. Gross , with prominent notice, as well, of works by Leah Ceccarelli, Celeste Condit, and Jeanne Fahnestock, among others, in order to sketch out developments in the rhetoric of science.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------.

This paper addresses semiotic elements of ritual in human encounter. The notion of an essential ritual presence in the existential/communicative connection of persons has been established in the work of Langer, Gadamer, and Jakobson. Yet, as Richard Lanigan maintains, vital aspects of Jakobson’s model of communication are typically missed in the application of his work, a consequence of which is that social science no longer differentiates between “communication” and “information”. As such, everything perceived as meaningful is reducible to “message”, and (...) thus, effective communication means merely “finding the right message”. The regression to our current cybernetic world, along with the intellectual paradigms enabling it, was never a foregone conclusion, but the entrenchment of social science in information theory makes it clear that an epistemological commitment to a semiotic phenomenology of communicative existence—and the visibility of ritual life—may well be our only way out. (shrink)

Once upon a time, there were no academic disciplines. There were no definitions, either, at least as we understand them. Plato and Aristotle changed both of those situations in ways that continue to influence Western thought. If Plato's and Xenophon's accounts are to be trusted, Socrates and Prodicus also deserve credit for early efforts to define words, thereby helping to formulate the classic Socratic/Platonic question "What is X?" And here we are, twenty-four hundred years later, still occasionally wrestling with how (...) to describe rhetoric, philosophy, and the relationship between the two.Drawing on my thirty-five years of thinking and writing about the classical and contemporary mediation of philosophy and... (shrink)

The rhetorical tradition has long been concerned with how to negotiate the discursive juncture between mass and elite audiences. Such a concern has contributed to what might be characterized as the rhetorical tradition's anxiety with regard to its own status. In this article I suggest that this anxiety parallels an ontological conception of the elite as second-order in relation to the first-order mass. I use the standoff between novelist Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey in 2001 as a running example of (...) status tensions in the public sphere, arguing for a theory of vernacular as language that talks and of specialized language as language that talks about. Finally, I suggest that the separate claims to status of vernacular and specialized language might be resolved by thinking further about Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia. (shrink)

In his 2002 Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, distinguished professor and legal theorist Richard Posner laid out for an academic audience his claim that intellectual engagement and conversation are increasingly the province of the academy and no longer torches carried by intellectual figureheads out into the public sphere. Two years later, in 2004, the best-selling Swiss writer Alain de Botton published a work of accessible nonfiction for a popular audience called Status Anxiety. In it, he argues that anxiety about (...) our status—our position in society—“possesses an exceptional capacity to inspire sorrow” (2004, ix). The two books—one from an elite academic calling fellow cognoscenti to engage the masses, the .. (shrink)

Google Ngram metadata reveal that the English phrase “rhetorical theory” is not that old, appearing on the scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and then picking up dramatically with critical and literary theory in the 1960s. How do we square this with familiar arguments that rhetorical theory is much, much older? In this forum contribution I argue that the long view applies to our contemporary rhetorical theory only if we equivocate. Much of what currently falls under the (...) heading “rhetorical theory” has little or nothing to do with the systematic conceptualization of persuasive discourse (i.e., the long view)—general, posthuman, eco-, and materialist rhetorics are the most prominent counterexamples. Instead, around 1900, Gertrude Buck develops what I call the short and sharp view that prevails to this day: rhetorical theory offers reality figured by way of its alternatives. (shrink)