Rhetoric as a sociological problem.

AuthorSimonson, Peter
PositionReport

Before he left us too soon, Jim Aune did a lot of important work. Some materialized as scholarly publications. Some of those publications attracted significant attention. Some apparently didn't. That imperfect gauge, Google Scholar, tells us that his two books were fairly widely cited--in late July 2013, 124 citations for Selling the Free Market (2001), 97 for Rhetoric and Marxism (1994). His articles are a different story. His most cited essay, "How to Read Milton Friedman," which, interestingly, appeared in an edited collection on corporate social responsibility and organizational communication, had 15 hits. All his other articles had 14 or fewer. Included among them were first-rate pieces like "An Historical Materialist Theory of Rhetoric" (7), "Rhetoric after Deconstruction" (4), "Modernity as a Rhetorical Problem" (1), and "Coping with Modernity: Strategies of 20th-Century Rhetorical Theory" (0). I was shocked when I first saw these numbers. They struck me as fodder for an illuminating study in the sociology of knowledge in contemporary rhetorical studies.

Aune would have been interested in such a study, even if he was too modest to want his own work to be featured in it. He had what C. Wright Mills (1959) would have recognized as a well-developed sociological imagination. It became more explicitly developed in his later years, but it was there in some form since the 1970s, a function I suspect of long affinity for critical theory, graduate study with Tom Farrell, and a communitarian disposition culturally forged within the Lutheran branch of upper-Midwestern progressivism. In this paper, I want to focus on one of its more concentrated and potentially productive expressions, in his provocative but apparently overlooked late essay, "Modernity as a Rhetorical Problem" (2008).

In that essay, Aune offered "a framework for normative and empirical investigation" and "critical and comparative analysis of different rhetorical cultures" (pp. 404, 410). He situated it within a longer intellectual history of rhetoric as a subject of scholarly discourse in modernity. It cast rhetoric as a discipline articulated with historical and contemporary sociology, political economy, media studies, and anthropology. As he conceived it, rhetoric emerged in a space structured by institutions, social practices, communication media, and cultural rhetorics-the particular shape of which varied across societies and history. He laid groundwork for situating rhetorical practice within the complex of factors involved in "modern social systems as a whole, which include the economy, the polity, and social institutions such as the family, schools, religious and ethnic organizations, and, most crucially for contemporary social systems, the entire apparatus of the culture industry, including the news and entertainment 'media'" (p. 403). Like Aune's other work, it's an essay that holds up to multiple readings.

Since I first encountered it, I've been struck by the potential of Aune's model and the ways it gives sociological texture to materialist views of rhetoric. If we took it seriously, it could significantly enrich rhetorical theory, research, pedagogy, and reflective practice. To help start that process, I want to do three things: historicize, explicate, and critically engage his project. Each is an intellectual move Aune himself excelled at. I have no pretense of living up to the standards he set for us, showing in the process how "the pursuit of excellence in a way that extends human powers is at the heart of human life," as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it in After Virtue, one of Aune's intellectual touchstones (1981, p. 199). I'll start by situating Aune's project against the historical backdrop of one of the distinctive aspects of twentieth-century rhetorical theory-its turn toward the categories of the social and the cultural. Next, I'll unpack his sociological model and draw out its key elements. Finally, I'll address its thin understanding of culture, whose shortcomings I'll supplement with contemporary anthropological views as a kind of dialectical contribution to the continued growth of Aune's thinking.

RHETORIC'S SOCIAL AND CULTURAL TURNS

Twentieth-century rhetorical theory was historically distinct in casting rhetoric not simply as an art practiced by individuals but as a broader and fundamental force within society and culture. To be sure, there were precursors (see Meyer, 2009). But when Dilip Gaonkar (1993) observed that rhetoric had become "a hermeneutic metadiscourse," he was merely giving voice to developments that were more than a century old, signaled in different ways in the nineteenth-century philosophical turns to rhetoric by Charles Sanders Peirce and Friedrich Nietzsche. They were intellectual outliers, though, early adopters of ways of thinking that wouldn't begin to organize themselves in earnest until the 1920s and '30s--and that wouldn't be fully recognized within rhetorical studies until the late 1960s, just before Aune came into the field as an undergraduate.

Rhetoric's sociological consciousness crystallized between about 1967 and 1971. Douglas Ehninger's "On Systems of Rhetoric" (1968) offered a sweeping historical taxonomy of rhetorical theory-the ancient as "grammatical" (focused on the speech act), eighteenth-century as "psychological" (focused on the speaker-audience relation), and twentieth-century as "social" or "sociological," (seeing rhetoric "as an instrument for understanding and improving human relations" [p. 137]). Ehninger found these impulses in Kenneth Burke and I.A. Richards and advanced them himself in a functionalist vocabulary that cast rhetoric as an instrument of social cohesion and control. Lloyd Bitzer (1968) meanwhile brought them into middle-range rhetorical theory, arguing that social situations and their exigencies are the sources of rhetorical action. Sociological views were prominent at the Wingspread Conference and Bitzer and Edwin Black's edited Prospect of Rhetoric (1971), most notably in Hugh Dalziel Duncan's "On the Need to Clarify Social Models of Rhetoric," but elsewhere as well (see Enos & McNabb, 1997; Porrovecchio, 2010). As rhetoric's social dimensions were made publicly obvious in the politics of the street and other reform efforts of the era, published work like this opened new space for conceptualizing rhetoric's sociological contexts, consequences, and functions. Among those leading the way theoretically were Bitzer's student and Aune's advisor Thomas Farrell (e.g. 1976), and Aune's later colleague and long-time interlocutor, Michael McGee (e.g. 1975).

Outside the field of speech communication, sociologists and literary scholars had been developing more sociological accounts of rhetoric since at least the 1930s. Burke is obviously a key figure here, with Permanence and Change (1935) laying the groundwork for Rhetoric of Motives (1950) and later work that expanded the realm of rhetoric and cast it as a fundamental force in maintaining and altering social life. Burke both influenced and was influenced by the symbolic-interactionist sociology developed at the University of Chicago, some of which would turn to rhetoric explicitly (Kenny, 2008). This was particularly true of Duncan, whose Introduction to the 1965 republication of Permanence and Change helped make a sociological (as opposed to literary) Burke available to rhetorical scholars (Simonson, 2010a). Sociologists outside the Chicago lineage also developed ways of thinking about rhetoric as a social force, most notably Columbia's Robert K. Merton, whose Mass Persuasion (1946/2003) used classic and early-modern rhetorical theory to probe the popular entertainer Kate Smith's all-day radio war bond drive, extending it with analyses of social structure, collective images, and mass mediated audiences (Simonson, 2010b; 2010c).

Overlapping but analytically distinct from these social turns in rhetorical theory, we can parse out streams of thinking about rhetoric and culture. These too help contextualize Aune's sociological project. One stream ran through symbolic interactionism, with culture indexed by the first term (symbols) and society by the second (interactions), a point I return to below. The idea of "symbols" was prominent at Wingspread and after (Blair, 1997), which marked off one kind of culturally inflected rhetorical study, influenced also by the...

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