Rhetoric and Power: The Freedom/Domination Problem

Contemporary rhetorical theory moves the locus of rhetoric from the individual speaker making the rhetorical decisions to address an audience to communities of discourse within which socio-political life proceeds. But what if this greater circumference is itself too narrow? What if the power of language to guide human action gives language sufficient power to constrain that action? Foucault makes this move.

The question that opens up runs through contemporary rhetoric. In 1969, Robert Scott and Donald K. Smith charged rhetorical critics and theorists to consider that traditional rhetoric entailed assumptions of oppression. Traditionally rhetoric has been punctuated as a means of individuals exercising power over other human beings. This raises the problem of the distinction between power and domination: Is rhetoric a means of domination? Much of this work answers "Yes" but adds that rhetoric also contains the power of freedom from that domination. Once that move has been made, however, then the problem of whether rhetoric's power is best seen as a power of the individual or of the culture comes to the foreground. So freedom and domination becomes a central dimension of theorizing about rhetoric.

Once this framework is established then questions about the conditions of domination and rhetoric's work in them come forward. One of the critiques generated from this perspective is the feminist critique. Of course, the intellectual movement we call "feminism" is as multifaceted as any other movement. There are political feminists, cultural feminists, radical feminists, marxist feminists, and so on. Not all are amenable to a role for rhetoric. The ones we will read take the feminist critique as a rhetorical problem.

Clusters: Discursive formations; Postmodernism; Feminism; Ethnocentrism; Afrocentrism

Additional Thoughts and Reading Questions from Jodi Saunders, Fall 1997

A Foucault Dictionary

Questions to stimulate thought:

Texts to consider for November 6:

The Freedom/Domination moves "chains out" -- to borrow Bormann's language -- in a variety of ways, engaging such issues as the rhetoric of the body, institutional authority, power issues in institutions, and hegemony and resistance. Each of the links below engages one of these facets. Review the links before our November 6th class and come prepared to discuss 1) what issues within the move the link is engaging, 2) the power dynamics operating at each of these sites, and 3) how each link extends, evidences, or refutes the aspects of the theory you are reading.

Basic Readings:

* Readings for October 30 (Inquiry)
** Readings for November 6 (Discussion)
# Readings for November 13 (Argument)

Additional Reading:

Recent Work: (Selected by Alyssa Samek and Terri Donofrio)

 

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