The aesthetic turn and the rhetorical perspective on argumentation.

• Author: Greene, Ronald Walter
• Position: Special Issue: The Epistemic View, Thirty Years Later

INTRODUCTION

The declaration of a Nietzschean inspired aesthetic turn in rhetorical studies (Whitson & Poulakos, 1993) marks the newest attempt to forge a different theory of rhetorical effectivity. The aesthetic turn is symptomatic of a thirty year struggle to assemble a constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity. A constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity focuses on the role of public discourse in the process of world disclosure. A constitutive model concerns itself with how, for example, subjects, personas, situations, and problems emerge as the effects of rhetorical practices. A constitutive model is in opposition to a theory of rhetorical effectivity based on a "logic of influence." A logic of influence model prefigures the relation between a speaker and audience as a form of persuasion or goal oriented activity. The influence model reduces the question of rhetorical effectivity to the epistemological-ethical implications of a speaker's success or failure to accomplish his/her persuasive goal.

For Cherwitz and Darwin (1995), the aesthetic turn is part of a disciplinary movement that they identify as rhetoric as performance. Rhetoric as performance focuses on how rhetorical practices generate "fictions" or worlds that subjects might inhabit. They argue that rhetoric as performance is displacing the disciplinary problematic of rhetoric as epistemic. Cherwitz and Darwin challenge this shift in disciplinary problematics on ethical grounds claiming that the stakes are no less than the "raison d'etre of rhetorical studies" (1995, p. 189). They contend that any attempt to distance oneself from the epistemic status of rhetoric is inherently paradoxical since all purposive symbolic action deploys a propositional structure advancing claims about what humans know and how they know it. For Cherwitz and Darwin, rhetoric as performance risks a radical aestheticization of symbolic influence that destabilizes the coherence of a message. In so doing, rhetorical practices attenuate the ethical imperative to act because the reception of a paradoxical message creates paralysis.

In this paper I will argue that rhetoric as performance makes possible the ethical problematization of rhetorical practices, but does so based on a constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity. Cherwitz and Darwin fail to see this form of ethical problematization because they are unable to abandon the idea of rhetoric as a form of persuasion. The constant repetition that rhetoric is a form of persuasion fails to account for how a constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity privileges identification over persuasion as the key to unpacking the rhetorical nature of public argument. Cherwitz and Darwin's inability to abandon an influence model of effectivity prevents them from understanding how the constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity makes possible the very production of an ethical-political criticism.

The first part of this paper will trace the emergence of the constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity. I will begin this disciplinary history with Robert Scott's (1967) essay, "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic," and end with Biesecker's (1989) post-structuralist reading of the rhetorical situation. The second section of the paper will return to Joseph Wenzel's (1990) three perspectives on argumentation in order to explicate how the constitutive model re-specifies a rhetorical perspective on argumentation.

THE CONSTITUTIVE MODEL OF RHETORICAL EFFECTIVITY

Robert Scott's (1967) essay, "On Viewing Rhetoric As Epistemic" travels far with very little philosophical cover fire. The primary claim supported in this essay is that "rhetoric may be viewed not as a matter of giving effectiveness to truth but of creating truth" (p. 12). The essay supports this claim in four sections: The first section begins with Toulmin's distinction between analytic and substantive arguments. For Scott, the importance of this division of argument forms is that rhetoric exists in and through substantive arguments and substantive arguments circulate as attempts to manage the contingencies of human existence. The second section discusses how Ehninger and Brockriede's (1963) book Decision by Debate fails to appreciate the normative implications of Toulmin's program. For Scott, the key to understanding how humans reach decisions by debate is not the process, but the "human commitment and energy and skill to make that commitment meaningful" (p. 13). The third section returns to the sophistic emphasis on dissoi logoi in order to tease out the epistemological implications of debate (or what the Ciceronians might call controversia). For Scott, the classical roots of debate are to be located in sophistic skepticism concerning the ability to know. The lack of certain knowledge does not mean that human action becomes impossible, but that human beings (must) act in order to know. For support of this metonymic reversal Scott turns to Pierre Thevanaz' article in the 1962 collection What is Phenomenology: "Man [or Woman] acts and speaks, before he [or she] knows. Or better, it is by acting and in action that he [or she] is enabled to know" (p. 14). The fourth section of Scott's paper turns to the ethical implications of his claim. Scott resists suggesting that the ethical solutions to epistemic rhetoric can be drawn from abstract principles. Instead, Scott suggests three ethical guidelines result from the view that human beings must act in the face of uncertainty: toleration, will, and responsibility. The importance of Scott's move into ethics suggests that uncertainty does not prevent the ethical imperative to act but instead rhetoric is ethically demanded by the contingent nature of human existence. Scott writes, "Inaction, failure to take on the burden of participating in the development of contingent truth, ought be considered ethical failure" (p. 15).

In Scott's hands rhetoric becomes a particular form of human action with ethical consequences. The ethical problematization of rhetoric follows from Scott's view that rhetoric entails the ability to create situational truths which give meaning to collective human behaviors. Human agents should be held ethically responsible for what they say, how they say it and whether they say anything at all. At this point, rhetoric is a unique cultural practice, exhibiting an exemplary form through debate, locating the substance of rhetorical knowledge in the creation of a situational truth. Scott's turn to the sophistic tradition re-activates the ethical and epistemological consequences of an Isocratean-Ciceronian thread in the tapestry of rhetorical theory. Scott allows for a rhetorical epistemology that is future oriented; moreover, the ability of rhetorical practices to imagine a future is at the heart of Scott's initial gambit. Scott's emphasis on imagining a future sets in motion a standard of rhetorical effectivity that can be understood as a constitutive model in opposition to an "influence model." The point I want to emphasis here is that Scott's articulation of the Isocratean-Ciceronian rhetorical tradition to phenomenology emphasizes how rhetoric becomes a human action of world disclosure. Since we can only imagine the future consequences of particular policy options, the "epistemic" function of rhetoric is to draw a portrait of this future. My claim is that the rhetorical process of world-disclosure marks the emergence of a constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity. Those readers familiar with Habermas (1987) might suggest that an emphasis on a constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity requires an aesthetic appreciation of rhetoric. I would agree, but to appreciate how speech communication acquired an aesthetic sensibility for its constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity it is necessary to turn to Edwin Black.

As rhetorical studies moved through the 1960s the civil unrest of the times contributed to a critical desire to make moral judgments about rhetorical practices. The problem associated with effective rhetors generating bad consequences was often dismissed as the rhetoric of demagogues who distorted the emotions of an audience at the expense of reason (Logue & Dorgan, 1973). In the aftermath of Tet and the occupation of college campuses by student radicals, rhetorical scholars were faced with the unnerving task of trying to disentangle the morality of a message from its successes and failures. Edwin Black offered a solution by reworking the concept of audience as a persona.

In 1970, Edwin Black published the "Second Persona." In this essay, he explicated the anxiety associated with making moral judgments about rhetorical practices. Yet, he advanced the claim that moral judgments must be made if we were "to bring order to our history" (p. 109). Drawing analogically on Wayne Booth's concept of author as persona, Black argues that every discourse implies an audience - a second persona. Black advanced a form of rhetorical reading that is symptomatic - that is, it investigates the stylistic tokens...