Rhetoric and the Arts of Design.

• Author: Laffoon, E. Anne

by David S. Kaufer and Brian S. Buffer, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum 1996; pp. xvi + 322.

The rescue of rhetoric from its imperilled position in the academy, a redemption of rhetoric from its status as a practical, instrumental art, and a more systematic treatment of rhetorical processes of invention, David Kaufer and Brian Buffer promise us. They try to make good on their word by arguing that rhetoric is a member of the family of arts "associated with modern design" such as engineering, architecture, graphics, and computer science. Defining rhetoric as a productive design art, they argue, corrects the image of rhetoric as a misfit - either too practical for the liberal arts or too liberal for the practical arts (12). Like "computer software, instructional, and graphic arts," rhetorical products are the symbolic artifacts of a productive design art. Therefore, like the design arts, rhetorical processes may be modularized and examined systematically as lone components that when integrated create a complete product.

While a burgeoning area of study in our field is the influence of cultures upon the design of technology in general, and communication technologies in particular, few have made what the authors admit may be an "exotic" claim: rhetoric is a design art. Rather than exploring the rhetorical or argumentative aspects of design such as a semiotic analysis of architecture or a rhetorical analysis of computer-assisted decision making processes, these authors assert that these design processes should inform, in both a normative and descriptive sense, rhetorical theory and practice. Therefore, they maintain, we should conceptualize the production of rhetoric as we would the production of buildings, software, or graphic arts for clients. Their argument inverts the relationship of rhetoric as a way of interpreting the influences of technology upon culture to becoming a technology itself. It is clear how, from this perspective, it appears reasonable to assert that placing rhetoric in the liberal arts or social sciences is akin to a category mistake, that rhetoric is a misunderstood discipline because we have simply been located in the wrong intellectual niche in the university. Instead, rhetoric may be better situated in the academy alongside architecture, engineering, and computer science. Relocating the academic home of rhetoric holds several advantages. The authors tell us, for example, reconceptualizing rhetoric's rightful place in the academy as a design art gives persons in disciplines outside of communication a better understanding of rhetoric, making it more accessible to a broader range of people. Were we only to recognize our ties to and reunite with our "true" family, we might reclaim our disciplinary potency. Whether or not this is a Faustian bargain in which rhetoric gains intelligibility by identifying with the familiar but loses its connection to history, philosophy, and poetics except in the most tangential sense remains to be seen.

This book is well-written and well supported by careful, detailed analysis. It makes two primary contributions. First, they aspire to offer us a new paradigm - an integrative, broad theory of rhetoric that encompasses different "schools" of rhetoric while at the same time improving the rigor of rhetorical analysis (56-7). The real risk they ask us to take is in rethinking the nature of our art. We must, they believe, adopt a "modular organization [that] transforms rhetoric into a full-bodied discipline of study" to counteract the balkanization of different modules of rhetoric into other disciplines where "plans become the province of psychology; tactics, the province of political science and management; language events, the province of linguistics" (57). So rather than arguing that these disciplines are making a discursive or linguistic turn as a means to point to the importance of studying rhetoric, these authors contend we should turn to yet...