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Two thoughts on rhetoric.
First- the focus on agency in arguments. I have two examples. First, there was a person in my dorm who usually takes about 10 minutes to brush his damn teeth with the water running the whole time (I believe it's a question of narcissism, he seems distracted by the mirror). So, I told him he wastes a lot of water and he should stop. The response came as: "What are you going to do about it?" Which, seems like a very good question because of the way it works rhetorically. It acts like a shove in a physical fight would: it shifts the aggression back to you and you start backpedaling. This comes from the way agency changes: after raising a question of personal actions of someone else, suddenly you go up for questioning. The response has to be a 'shove' back. Again, you flip the agent back and re-establish the original question.
The second example. I got in a silly argument with someone online about Walmart. I don't think it's a particularly good idea to shop there and I made that clear. One response began with: "you shouldn’t let someone's socialist rant change your shopping habits..." I think this concerns the way that the term 'liberal' gets attached to speakers. By creating an issue out of the messenger or the agent involved in the argument, the use of this label creates a prior question to evaluating the arguments at hand by questioning whether the discussion should even begin in the first place, in terms of the speaker’s motivation. It again shifts the discussion in such a way to create a different calculus for evaluating the speech act/argument. It links the argument to broader social trends or ideologies that listeners may oppose, and also causes questioning of whether the listener should be personally aligned with the speaker.
OK, my second point. I think classes in rhetorical/communication theory should be a pre-requisite for writing in other disciplines particularly philosophy. Images and ideas should not be evaluated simply on face value, but also in the way they get communicated to other people. For instance: pornography. I read an article that argued pornography was wrong because the images showed people in abusive or violent situations that created male-centered pleasure in the scenes themselves. It avoided any question of how pornography was a media that ultimately focuses on the pleasure of the viewer rather than the people being filmed.
Duncan
Two thoughts on rhetoric.
First- the focus on agency in arguments. I have two examples. First, there was a person in my dorm who usually takes about 10 minutes to brush his damn teeth with the water running the whole time (I believe it's a question of narcissism, he seems distracted by the mirror). So, I told him he wastes a lot of water and he should stop. The response came as: "What are you going to do about it?" Which, seems like a very good question because of the way it works rhetorically. It acts like a shove in a physical fight would: it shifts the aggression back to you and you start backpedaling. This comes from the way agency changes: after raising a question of personal actions of someone else, suddenly you go up for questioning. The response has to be a 'shove' back. Again, you flip the agent back and re-establish the original question.
The second example. I got in a silly argument with someone online about Walmart. I don't think it's a particularly good idea to shop there and I made that clear. One response began with: "you shouldn’t let someone's socialist rant change your shopping habits..." I think this concerns the way that the term 'liberal' gets attached to speakers. By creating an issue out of the messenger or the agent involved in the argument, the use of this label creates a prior question to evaluating the arguments at hand by questioning whether the discussion should even begin in the first place, in terms of the speaker’s motivation. It again shifts the discussion in such a way to create a different calculus for evaluating the speech act/argument. It links the argument to broader social trends or ideologies that listeners may oppose, and also causes questioning of whether the listener should be personally aligned with the speaker.
OK, my second point. I think classes in rhetorical/communication theory should be a pre-requisite for writing in other disciplines particularly philosophy. Images and ideas should not be evaluated simply on face value, but also in the way they get communicated to other people. For instance: pornography. I read an article that argued pornography was wrong because the images showed people in abusive or violent situations that created male-centered pleasure in the scenes themselves. It avoided any question of how pornography was a media that ultimately focuses on the pleasure of the viewer rather than the people being filmed.
Duncan
posted by Duncan at 8:16 PM
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