I think we made an interesting distinction between kinds of rhetoric—the first theoretical, and the second performative—based on our observations about how rhetoric has been used by men and women throughout history. Both theoretical and performed rhetoric have merit, but, interestingly, the latter works toward tangible cultural change while the former typically concerns itself with abstract, and important, but generally less useful, pragmatically speaking, concepts.
I'd argue the largest problem with theoretical rhetoric, besides the fact that the forum wherein it takes place is generally reserved for those of some privilege, is that it can often seem to implicitly ignore language's collective, or shared nature, at the very least in practice. I don't know a whole lot about Bakhtin's life or works, just what we learned from Wednesday's presentation by Brittany, but I think he, more than most of the male scholars/rhetoricians we have read thus far, attempts to bridge this gap: "language is half somebody else's." I think this was, sort of, the primary critique of Plato's, that knowledge isn't created (or discovered) discursively, with rhetoric, but forced on an audience thru the dark arts of persuasion, but his dialectic suffered the same problem and never seemed to engage with anybody without a significant amount of privilege.
Ultimately, I think knowledge is created discursively regardless of whether or not communication between speaker/writer and audience is direct, but if, like in writing, communication is indirect, than you contend with the nature of interpretation, which makes "the" truth more malleable. The words are as much the reader or listener's as they are the writer or speaker's.
Performed rhetoric, which can be both direct or indirect communication (spoken or written), is much more focused toward specific change, and, in being so, has to be aware of its audience in a way that theoretical rhetoric doesn't. Also, especially for those who not in a place a privilege, there is a lot of rhetorical maneuvering that has to happen to build one's ethos and avoid the scorn of their audience. Take the stylistic differences between Christine de Pizan and Peter Ramus for example: Ramus is incredibly combative and possesses an assumed ethos while Pizan carefully builds her ethos, using classical figures, and only critiques patriarchy subversively, focusing her arguments on woman's education.
For whatever reason, I think this all comes back to the Sophist vs. Plato debate about the nature of truth, and languages place as its mediator (or maybe I just like to think so). I think any change starts with the recognition of some "t" truth, and therefore, whether abstractly reaching towards truth directly thru language, or attempting to affect some change thru language, you have to, at some level, come back to that. And, to push, again, against Plato, logic alone will rarely convince anybody of much, so, being honestly aligned with your sense of truth (using logic to make sense of it), and then using pathos and ethos appeals (I struggle a bit with ethos) to convince others isn't inherently unethical. Rhetoric, and we have said this quite a few times but I might as well repeat it, is amoral until used.
Work Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emmerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981.
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