Aune's leadership: hegemony and the rhetorical perspective on argumentation.

• Author: Greene, Ronald Walter
• Position: Report

At the heart of James Amt Aune's approach to rhetorical theory and criticism was John Dewey's (1927) project of improving the "methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion" (as cited by Aune, 2001, p. 146). Aune was hopeful that learning how to improve the ways and means of argument might help "left leaning coalitions" overcome their "recent fragmentation" (2011, p. xiv). As such, Aune advocated a "red rhetoric" (1994, pp. 143-149), a mixture of Marxist critique and classical republicanism, in an effort to leverage a sprit of "constant vigilance and free spaces for deliberation, discussion, and debate" as an antidote to the "corrupting influence of centralized power and a taste for it" (Aune, 1994, p. 146). The rhetorical in rhetorical argumentation was embedded in a humanist process of self-fashioning and a political process of cultivating the virtues of moral and political leadership.

Aune's red rhetoric imagined arguments as more than effective or ineffective devices for persuading audiences, but imagined the art of rhetoric as making one's participation in debate and discussion a creative practice that had the power to (re)invent the ethico-political resources of a community in order to bring a wider transformation in the political community. Aune's red rhetoric blended the instrumental, the constitutive, and the critical dimensions of argument (Greene, 1998) into a potent force for enhancing a common life. Arguments are ways to build a common life because they require interlocutors, points of stasis, and shared points of reference. One such conceptual point of stasis and shared point of reference for critical scholars interested in the rhetorical perspective on argumentation is the concept of hegemony. Reading Gramsci (2011) in light of the intellectual tendency of Marxist theory to displace the rhetorical tradition, Aune isolates hegemony as a bridge that can productively create a red rhetoric. To do so, we will argue, entailed a strong defense of rhetorical practice as a positive form of mediation suspended between structure and struggle. As a positive mediation, Aune imagines rhetoric participating in a form of hegemony that challenges the dominant structures of power (positive) by cultivating a moral and political leadership worthy of consent.

The purpose of this paper is to learn from Aune's leadership about the positive character of hegemony. Yet, we will argue that the concept of hegemony will need to be less tied to mediation. As we will argue, the problem of mediation limits our rhetorical understanding of hegemony to an epistemological-political horizon that inadvertently fails to appreciate how hegemony may work in affective and technological ways. This broader dimension of hegemony suggests that to participate in the argumentative process can be independent of what one argues for or against. As such, we should attend more to how debate generates sensations and perceptions to better account for argument as a method and condition of revolutionary change.

HEGEMONY AS THE STRUGGLE FOR MORAL AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

Aune (1994) turns to Gramsci's notion of hegemony within a narrative about the problem of mediation in Marxism after Marx (pp. 46-49). He describes the problem of mediation as the "the classical contradiction between structure and struggle" (Aune, 1994, p. 144). The contradiction is that the struggle (revolution) cannot be guaranteed by the structure (the mode of production). Economic precarity and immiseration may make organizing more difficult not less; therefore, any claims to the historical inevitability of socialism must be abandoned. Mediation describes the intervening actors and forces between structure and struggle that make someone align with or challenge the current system. For Aune (1994) "Gramsci's Marxism solves the problem of mediation created by classical Marxism with an emphasis on praxis and creative activity.... One of those necessary mediations [to direct life] is the art of rhetoric, an art whose traditions are most compatible with Gramsci's version of Marxism" (p. 74). Nothing is guaranteed by the structure, or in more direct Marxist terms, there is no guarantee that the contradictions of capitalist...