Bad news.
And more bad news.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Monday, April 9, 2007
Three Versions of Rhetoric
It's interesting to read the three articles assigned for this class, and look broadly at their views of rhetoric. In each one, rhetoric is articulated as something different, and each holds different social implications.
Bitzer's article seems to delineate rhetoric the way Plato and Gaonkar did--as something suited for persuasion, and nothing else. He takes it for granted that rhetoric is used when persuasive language is needed, which is limited to a specific set of situations.
Vatz acknowledges this as a primary difference between them, and tries to render Bitzer's position untenable by showing its roots in the Platonist tradition. Clearly rhetoric can't be situational, and must be constitutive of meaning, because rhetors seem so clearly able to create emergencies and other situations where rhetoric is heightened.
Edbauer seems to work more from Vatz's tradition, but to modify it with the same kind of horticultural metaphor offered by ANT, and its heterogeneity. Rhetoric, like the ANT conceptions of the individual and the world, exists in the confluence of too many influences for it to have tidy borders and guidelines.
Exigence seems to be the pivot point that facilitates these different definitions, and it also implies divergent definitions of rhetor and audience. All of the above hearken back to earlier readings; Vatz and Edbauer seem to both be working from a position that might be shared by Berlin, LeFevre, and Crowley, of rhetoric as ubiquitous and constructed in socially constructed selves.
Bitzer's article seems to delineate rhetoric the way Plato and Gaonkar did--as something suited for persuasion, and nothing else. He takes it for granted that rhetoric is used when persuasive language is needed, which is limited to a specific set of situations.
Vatz acknowledges this as a primary difference between them, and tries to render Bitzer's position untenable by showing its roots in the Platonist tradition. Clearly rhetoric can't be situational, and must be constitutive of meaning, because rhetors seem so clearly able to create emergencies and other situations where rhetoric is heightened.
Edbauer seems to work more from Vatz's tradition, but to modify it with the same kind of horticultural metaphor offered by ANT, and its heterogeneity. Rhetoric, like the ANT conceptions of the individual and the world, exists in the confluence of too many influences for it to have tidy borders and guidelines.
Exigence seems to be the pivot point that facilitates these different definitions, and it also implies divergent definitions of rhetor and audience. All of the above hearken back to earlier readings; Vatz and Edbauer seem to both be working from a position that might be shared by Berlin, LeFevre, and Crowley, of rhetoric as ubiquitous and constructed in socially constructed selves.
Contexts and Networks
Each of this week’s readings reminded me of my eighth grade journalism teacher who was fond of saying that quotes were never truly “out of context,” quotes were just being placed temporarily in a different context. “You could never,” she would repeat, “be outside of a context.” Bitzer might have said, yeah, but you have to admit there was a “natural context” (or an original one, situated somewhere, the principal’s office, perhaps, where an interview about dress code first occurred) and this natural context was comprised of “persons, events, objects and relations.” Vatz might have sided with my teacher and said, yeah, “but one never runs out of context. One never runs out of facts to describe a situation. . .the facts or events communicated to us are choices, by our sources of information. . .any rhetor is involved in this sifting and choosing” (so my jr. high principal, like Keith Richards last week, can’t really complain that his comments were taken out of context just because they reappeared in a different one) (Vatz 156). Edbauer would seem to expand beyond my teacher’s implications and say, yeah, and you’re not just putting the principal’s quotes into one new fixed context, either—you’re just a point of distribution; we’re always in myriad contexts, and we’re also within and between myriad contexts. The (1) original taped interview and (2) whatever you think you’ve made salient by quoting for your article (in the old Bitzler view) are just two nodes of the many already in existence.” This would have taken longer for my teacher to articulate, though, and I know now her contract was already set for termination, at least partly because she didn’t think we should get so hung up about the original context of quotes.
Another connection I’m still thinking through. . .
Edbauer includes Biesecker’s “problem with many takes on rhetorical situation[s],” which is essentially (or anti-essentially) imagining rhetoric for an audience of “already-formed, already-discrete individuals” already limits the possible “potencies” of what rhetoric can hope to do in a situation. As Becker clarifies, the problem with this configuration is that rhetoric may only be used to “influence an audience, to realign their allegiances, but not to form new identities” (Edbauer 2; Biesecker 111). This seemed to account for some of our lamentation over Crowley’s rhetoric. For instance, Crowley states that “fundamentalists” are “unwilling to meet” conditions in which they run the “risk” of having their “beliefs altered” by exchange in a rhetorical situation in which “everyone is accorded the respect due to participants,” whereas “a liberal’s identity” is “not necessarily threatened by a change in belief” (196). Edbauer might argue that both the liberal’s identity and the conservative / fundamentalist / apocalyptist’s identity cannot be situated or as fixed as Crowley renders them (supposedly) for the sake of finding potential stasis for a rhetorical situation between the two. It would seem that both sides are already “trans-situationally” linked in a shared ecology of buzzwords, platform stands, Darwin vs. Jesus Fish car decorations, etc. It would also seem that Crowley only succeeds in trying to fix the identities and the sites of rhetorical interaction in ways that “mask the fluidity of rhetoric” as it’s lived daily, beyond the confines of what is made salient by a few dominant news organizations and spin doctors (Edbauer, page 13ish on my print out).
Another related thought. . .
Vatz, arguing conversely with Bitzler, concludes that “rhetors choose or do not choose to make salient situations, facts, events, etc.. . .after salience is created, the situation must be translated into meaning” (160). This idea of who or what makes things salient (and is everyone who adds a distribution point, in Edbauer’s construct, a rhetor? Or even interested in Vatz and Bitzler’s conflicting notions of saliency?) also becomes interesting in the age of using your cell phone’s video function to create a TMZ.com event, and / or “ecology” of situations online. I think it’s easy for us to think of politicians (a president, his speech writers, his party’s platforms, his lobbyists, his pollsters, his machine, etc.) choosing events to turn into crises not because these events offer inherent exigence (Bitzler) but because the president et al. chose to make certain salient features into a crisis for perceived political gain (Vatz, Burke and motive, etc.). However, it’s maybe more interesting to think through Edbauer’s observations when it’s not the president but the guy who had his phone above his head in time to catch Michael Richards’ racist meltdown, Britney challenging our notions of public decorum, etc. etc.
Selling the recorded event to TMZ. Com could still be seen as a result of profit motive, but the “rhetor” here, if we’re limited to older models, is not even making commentary so much as downloading and forwarding an event—one point of distribution—that will then fan out wildly over the literal network of the internet and the figurative network of public discussion (Has he/she gone too far?), office chatter, blogs, YouTube copies of copies, parody sketches, Daily Show and late night jabs, appropriations into different political platforms, and a wildly diverse “rhetorical-event neighborhood” that seems akin to semioticians talking of “free-floating signifiers” (though, even then, many semioticians posit that there was an “original signified” from which the signifier, or recorded event, has come untethered, and this may bring us back to how structurally or poststructurally we like to think of / locate / fix an “original context”).
Another connection I’m still thinking through. . .
Edbauer includes Biesecker’s “problem with many takes on rhetorical situation[s],” which is essentially (or anti-essentially) imagining rhetoric for an audience of “already-formed, already-discrete individuals” already limits the possible “potencies” of what rhetoric can hope to do in a situation. As Becker clarifies, the problem with this configuration is that rhetoric may only be used to “influence an audience, to realign their allegiances, but not to form new identities” (Edbauer 2; Biesecker 111). This seemed to account for some of our lamentation over Crowley’s rhetoric. For instance, Crowley states that “fundamentalists” are “unwilling to meet” conditions in which they run the “risk” of having their “beliefs altered” by exchange in a rhetorical situation in which “everyone is accorded the respect due to participants,” whereas “a liberal’s identity” is “not necessarily threatened by a change in belief” (196). Edbauer might argue that both the liberal’s identity and the conservative / fundamentalist / apocalyptist’s identity cannot be situated or as fixed as Crowley renders them (supposedly) for the sake of finding potential stasis for a rhetorical situation between the two. It would seem that both sides are already “trans-situationally” linked in a shared ecology of buzzwords, platform stands, Darwin vs. Jesus Fish car decorations, etc. It would also seem that Crowley only succeeds in trying to fix the identities and the sites of rhetorical interaction in ways that “mask the fluidity of rhetoric” as it’s lived daily, beyond the confines of what is made salient by a few dominant news organizations and spin doctors (Edbauer, page 13ish on my print out).
Another related thought. . .
Vatz, arguing conversely with Bitzler, concludes that “rhetors choose or do not choose to make salient situations, facts, events, etc.. . .after salience is created, the situation must be translated into meaning” (160). This idea of who or what makes things salient (and is everyone who adds a distribution point, in Edbauer’s construct, a rhetor? Or even interested in Vatz and Bitzler’s conflicting notions of saliency?) also becomes interesting in the age of using your cell phone’s video function to create a TMZ.com event, and / or “ecology” of situations online. I think it’s easy for us to think of politicians (a president, his speech writers, his party’s platforms, his lobbyists, his pollsters, his machine, etc.) choosing events to turn into crises not because these events offer inherent exigence (Bitzler) but because the president et al. chose to make certain salient features into a crisis for perceived political gain (Vatz, Burke and motive, etc.). However, it’s maybe more interesting to think through Edbauer’s observations when it’s not the president but the guy who had his phone above his head in time to catch Michael Richards’ racist meltdown, Britney challenging our notions of public decorum, etc. etc.
Selling the recorded event to TMZ. Com could still be seen as a result of profit motive, but the “rhetor” here, if we’re limited to older models, is not even making commentary so much as downloading and forwarding an event—one point of distribution—that will then fan out wildly over the literal network of the internet and the figurative network of public discussion (Has he/she gone too far?), office chatter, blogs, YouTube copies of copies, parody sketches, Daily Show and late night jabs, appropriations into different political platforms, and a wildly diverse “rhetorical-event neighborhood” that seems akin to semioticians talking of “free-floating signifiers” (though, even then, many semioticians posit that there was an “original signified” from which the signifier, or recorded event, has come untethered, and this may bring us back to how structurally or poststructurally we like to think of / locate / fix an “original context”).
Genesis of Rhetorical Action
Vatz’s problems the Rhetorical Situation were ethical and philosophical in nature. They were not very practical – a more practical approach realizes that without some variation on the rhetorical situation, studying discourse becomes incredibly difficult. I can’t imagine writing an analysis of a particular speech without using the term “situation” at least incidentally. But as I wrote previously, I do tend to disagree with the way the situation is purported to bring all discourse into being. I believe other factors must be considered. So does Bill Benoit, who challenged The Rhetorical Situation, and most theory about genre, with his theory of the “Genesis of Rhetorical Action.”
“Rhetorical discourse is called into existence by situation,” wrote Bitzer (p. 9). He granted even more power to the situation when he wrote, “The situation controls the rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the answer and the problem controls the solution. Not the rhetor and not persuasive intent, but the situation is the source and ground of rhetorical activity-and, I should add, of rhetorical criticism. (p. 6). Benoit (2000) has adopted and adapted Burke’s pentad in order to demonstrate that there are indeed factors other than the rhetorical situation that bring discourse into being.
Basically, Benoit used Burkean ratios to argue that scene, or situation, was not the only thing that could inspire an act. The purpose-act ratio, the agent-act ratio, and the agency-act ratio could also be responsible for generating a body of discourse. A rhetorical critic should approach a text by considering the influence of each other pentadic term on the act. The critic may find that the rhetor’s purpose best explains the creation of a discourse, and accounts for the specific nature of that discourse. It is also possible that this use of the pentad will only confirm that the scene is indeed the term with the most explanatory power over a particular message. Still, the value is in systematically considering each ratio before falling back on the rhetorical situation as Bitzer would have.
Admittedly, Benoit’s system, because it relies on Burke’s pentad, is guilty of the tendency in communication studies to rely on “elemental conglomerations” for describing and explaining discursive processes. Jenny Edbauer cites Louise Weatherbee Phelps as a major opponent of this sort of approach. Still, I believe the theory of the Genesis of Rhetorical Action is useful for opening up a universe of alternative explanations not only for why a piece of discourse exists, but for what that piece of discourse does, and how it does it.
Benoit, W. (2000). Beyond genre Theory: The genesis of rhetorical action. Communication
Monographs, 67(2), 178-192.
“Rhetorical discourse is called into existence by situation,” wrote Bitzer (p. 9). He granted even more power to the situation when he wrote, “The situation controls the rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the answer and the problem controls the solution. Not the rhetor and not persuasive intent, but the situation is the source and ground of rhetorical activity-and, I should add, of rhetorical criticism. (p. 6). Benoit (2000) has adopted and adapted Burke’s pentad in order to demonstrate that there are indeed factors other than the rhetorical situation that bring discourse into being.
Basically, Benoit used Burkean ratios to argue that scene, or situation, was not the only thing that could inspire an act. The purpose-act ratio, the agent-act ratio, and the agency-act ratio could also be responsible for generating a body of discourse. A rhetorical critic should approach a text by considering the influence of each other pentadic term on the act. The critic may find that the rhetor’s purpose best explains the creation of a discourse, and accounts for the specific nature of that discourse. It is also possible that this use of the pentad will only confirm that the scene is indeed the term with the most explanatory power over a particular message. Still, the value is in systematically considering each ratio before falling back on the rhetorical situation as Bitzer would have.
Admittedly, Benoit’s system, because it relies on Burke’s pentad, is guilty of the tendency in communication studies to rely on “elemental conglomerations” for describing and explaining discursive processes. Jenny Edbauer cites Louise Weatherbee Phelps as a major opponent of this sort of approach. Still, I believe the theory of the Genesis of Rhetorical Action is useful for opening up a universe of alternative explanations not only for why a piece of discourse exists, but for what that piece of discourse does, and how it does it.
Benoit, W. (2000). Beyond genre Theory: The genesis of rhetorical action. Communication
Monographs, 67(2), 178-192.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Austin City Limits
One thing that I thought about last week with Latour and that has come back to mind again as I read Bitzer, Vatz, and Edbauer is what role--if any--the work of J. L. Austin could play in an understanding of how utterances themselves function, either in a network (as with Latour and, seemingly, Edbauer) or a rhetorical situation (Bitzer and Vatz). In How To Do Things With Words, Austin presents a speech act theory in which not all utterances are simply truth-evaluable--some actually perform the function described, an action of binding power. Obvious examples include legal sentencing, marriage ceremonies, the reading of wills, the christening of ships (and perhaps naming, in general). (Judith Butler appropriated Austin's work in describing how gender is produced as an effect of a regulatory discourse--one that requires ritualized repetition of behavior, including performative utterances).
I thought about this last week in terms of Latour because it occured to me that utterances are themselves included as actors in networks and that, following Austin, they very well should. My thoughts returned to Austin this week when Bitzer talks about rhetoric as "a mode for altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action" (3). This sounded very much like Austin to me. Bitzer then qualifies his formulation, of course, by going on to say that the rhetor "alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change" (4); and Bitzer grounds the power of rhetoric in a situation that calls it forth--the situation is "the very ground of rhetoric" (5). If anything, reality determines the meaning of an utterance for Bitzer, rather than the utterance performing and giving meaning--"rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation..." (5). But Bitzer also gives both rhetorical discourse and the rhetor their due places in what might be dubbed a kind of network. On page 8 he concludes his remarks on the constituents of the rhetorical situation by saying that, "These three constituents--exigence, audience, constraints--comprise everything relevant in a rhetorical situation. When the orator, invited by the situation, enters it and creates and presents discourse, then both he and his speech are additional constituents."
Vatz's argument does a 180 and goes the other way, of course: he argues against Bitzer's claims in such a way that he passes Austin and moves close to what Latour bemoans as social constructivism in the passages I discussed last week. Vatz asserts that "meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors" in a "translation" that conveys not a "situation's reality, but... the rhetor's arbitrary choice of characterization" (157). Meaning, thus, is not "intrinsic to situations" as Bitzer contends, but rather meaning is "a consequence of rhetorical creation" (158), "Thus rhetoric is a cause not an effect of meaning" (160).
My impulse is to say that while I found Bitzer's contentions intellectually unsatisfying at best, Vatz's critique bottoms out towards the end. His statement on page 160 that "one cannot maintain that reports of anything are indistinguishable from the thing itself" adequately summarizes what I object to--and an example he gives that "the killing of a president of this country at this time is not a real threat to the people in any measurable way" spells out on its face my objection (whatever you exaggerate you weaken). I think both formulations are simple-minded--rhetoric does not create reality, a slope that I feel Vatz slips towards, any more than reality calls forth rhetorical statements. Edbauer seems to split the difference, much in the same that I'd say Latour does in his own way. I'll expand on that in my next post.
I thought about this last week in terms of Latour because it occured to me that utterances are themselves included as actors in networks and that, following Austin, they very well should. My thoughts returned to Austin this week when Bitzer talks about rhetoric as "a mode for altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action" (3). This sounded very much like Austin to me. Bitzer then qualifies his formulation, of course, by going on to say that the rhetor "alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change" (4); and Bitzer grounds the power of rhetoric in a situation that calls it forth--the situation is "the very ground of rhetoric" (5). If anything, reality determines the meaning of an utterance for Bitzer, rather than the utterance performing and giving meaning--"rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation..." (5). But Bitzer also gives both rhetorical discourse and the rhetor their due places in what might be dubbed a kind of network. On page 8 he concludes his remarks on the constituents of the rhetorical situation by saying that, "These three constituents--exigence, audience, constraints--comprise everything relevant in a rhetorical situation. When the orator, invited by the situation, enters it and creates and presents discourse, then both he and his speech are additional constituents."
Vatz's argument does a 180 and goes the other way, of course: he argues against Bitzer's claims in such a way that he passes Austin and moves close to what Latour bemoans as social constructivism in the passages I discussed last week. Vatz asserts that "meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors" in a "translation" that conveys not a "situation's reality, but... the rhetor's arbitrary choice of characterization" (157). Meaning, thus, is not "intrinsic to situations" as Bitzer contends, but rather meaning is "a consequence of rhetorical creation" (158), "Thus rhetoric is a cause not an effect of meaning" (160).
My impulse is to say that while I found Bitzer's contentions intellectually unsatisfying at best, Vatz's critique bottoms out towards the end. His statement on page 160 that "one cannot maintain that reports of anything are indistinguishable from the thing itself" adequately summarizes what I object to--and an example he gives that "the killing of a president of this country at this time is not a real threat to the people in any measurable way" spells out on its face my objection (whatever you exaggerate you weaken). I think both formulations are simple-minded--rhetoric does not create reality, a slope that I feel Vatz slips towards, any more than reality calls forth rhetorical statements. Edbauer seems to split the difference, much in the same that I'd say Latour does in his own way. I'll expand on that in my next post.
Rhetorical Ecologies
I liked the way Jenny Edbauer traced the rhetorical ecology, or the “range of processes and encounters” (6) of “Keep Austin Weird.” I thought this might be a good assignment for students – trace the rhetorical ecology of something. Some ideas: Trace the way brands become commonplace names for things (I think there's a word for this), like Kleenex or Xerox. You could also trace how TV or movie catchphrases are circulated (e.g. “yadda, yadda, yadda” or “I'll be back”) In fact, lots of things from popular culture would work – re-makes of movies, covers of songs, how books influence authors. One example I thought of would be our own Mike Kardos' piece on the Missouri Review blog about how people have co-opted the title of Carver's “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Politics might be a fruitful angle as well. I'm thinking specifically of how the phrase “partial-birth abortion” was created by the pro-life movement and then circulated into commonplace usage.
Edbauer and de Certeau
Whereas Bitzer pushes for LaTourian rigidity in his definition of what constitutes a rhetorical situation, Edbauer pushes for LaTourian a complete reworking of the notion of rhetorical situation, arguing for a complete paradigm shift. Like LaTour, Edbauer goes against the grain, suggesting that the rhetorical situation doesn’t already exist: “[. . .] there can be no pure exigence [. . .] the exigence does not exist perse, but is instead an amalgamation of processes and encounters” (8). The language here echoes LaTour—exigence is not a given, and, thus, the rhetorical situation does not exist a priori (“the social does not reside in fixed sites” (9). We can only sense a rhetorical situation by examining the nodes within the network. These nodes include people, things, concepts, and feelings. Edbauer’s example of Austin Texas’ “weird” slogan is a terrific example.
discourse] [. . .] one can try another path: one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization” (96)
My On Again/ Off Again Relationship with The Rhetorical Situation
The Rhetorical Situation is a tricky thing. I’ve tried to remove it from my own understanding of rhetoric quite a few times, but I haven’t been successful. It seems to be rather indispensable. I genuinely agree with Vatz’s articulation of the academic and ethical problems with The Rhetorical Situation. Still, every time I conceptualize discourse in my mind, the rhetorical situation sneaks into my design.
Like Vatz, I believe that rhetors are capable of creating exigences. Exigences don’t exist until someone points a public’s attention in a particular direction. There exists no shortage of contemporary social and political examples of groups racing to define an issue so that they can demonstrate how their solution best solves the problem or responds to the situation. When Bush tried to reform social security, you could usually predict a person’s opinion on the issue based on whether they thought his program was designed to “privatize” or “personalize” social security. To define/describe/create an exigence or a situation is to prescribe a response.
Still, while meaning certainly lies in people and not situations, I believe rhetors craft messages that rely on situations for their meaning and value. No utterance can be interpreted without context. This is so natural that when we hear a comment for which we have little or no context, we usually create ourselves so that the comment makes more sense. Socio-political context cannot be overlooked when crafting a message. There are indeed limits or constraints to what a speaker can get away with. It might be important to recognize that those constraints are also rhetorically constructed, but that doesn’t make them any less important or influential in any set of circumstances.
While I would disagree with Bitzer’s idea that the Rhetorical Situation determines discourse, I would argue that rhetor’s necessarily look to situational factors when generating discourse. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the “search for the available means of persuasion” and even though artistic proofs might come from within the rhetor, she must still look to audience and context to discern which persuasive techniques are most likely to work. The entire field of rhetorical criticism was originally based on this idea. Traditional or neo-Aristotelian methods of criticism have certainly fallen out of favor, its hard to begin to understand what a speaker has done, or how she has done it without first accounting for situational elements.
If this blurb seemed to chase its own tail, then I think I have accurately reproduced the way the Rhetorical Situation dilemma spins around in my mind. I can try to summarize by saying that I take issue with the determinism expressed by Bitzer, but I still see the situation as crucial to the production and study of rhetoric. In actuality, I think my relationship with the rhetorical situation is way more complicated than that. But we'll work it out.
Like Vatz, I believe that rhetors are capable of creating exigences. Exigences don’t exist until someone points a public’s attention in a particular direction. There exists no shortage of contemporary social and political examples of groups racing to define an issue so that they can demonstrate how their solution best solves the problem or responds to the situation. When Bush tried to reform social security, you could usually predict a person’s opinion on the issue based on whether they thought his program was designed to “privatize” or “personalize” social security. To define/describe/create an exigence or a situation is to prescribe a response.
Still, while meaning certainly lies in people and not situations, I believe rhetors craft messages that rely on situations for their meaning and value. No utterance can be interpreted without context. This is so natural that when we hear a comment for which we have little or no context, we usually create ourselves so that the comment makes more sense. Socio-political context cannot be overlooked when crafting a message. There are indeed limits or constraints to what a speaker can get away with. It might be important to recognize that those constraints are also rhetorically constructed, but that doesn’t make them any less important or influential in any set of circumstances.
While I would disagree with Bitzer’s idea that the Rhetorical Situation determines discourse, I would argue that rhetor’s necessarily look to situational factors when generating discourse. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the “search for the available means of persuasion” and even though artistic proofs might come from within the rhetor, she must still look to audience and context to discern which persuasive techniques are most likely to work. The entire field of rhetorical criticism was originally based on this idea. Traditional or neo-Aristotelian methods of criticism have certainly fallen out of favor, its hard to begin to understand what a speaker has done, or how she has done it without first accounting for situational elements.
If this blurb seemed to chase its own tail, then I think I have accurately reproduced the way the Rhetorical Situation dilemma spins around in my mind. I can try to summarize by saying that I take issue with the determinism expressed by Bitzer, but I still see the situation as crucial to the production and study of rhetoric. In actuality, I think my relationship with the rhetorical situation is way more complicated than that. But we'll work it out.
Edbauer
Edbauer
This article was great! I love articles that make me think and rethink any situation, and this one had me thinking about all manner of things, from Latour to the classroom. In speaking about Phelps’ critique she states, “That is, the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (3). She then goes on to explain, “The rhetorical situation is part of what we might call, borrowing from Phelps, an ongoing social flux. Situation bleeds into the concatenation of public interaction. Public interactions bleed into wider social processes. The elements of rhetorical situation may simply bleed (3). This, of course, made me think of Latour and his network, or ANT. However, I think she “invented” in my mind something a bit different from Latour.
She states, “Rather a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field. Moreover, this same rhetoric will go on to evolve in apparallel ways:” (6). While Latour’s notion of networking evolves from a star burst—lines shooting from a central blast—Edbauer makes me wonder if he hasn’t gotten his metaphor a little off. Think of it this way, rather than lines shooting straight out from a star, how about a large rock in a pond or lake. As the concentric circles move away from the point of impact the circles still maintain their original shape, but they grow in size and in ability to effect things beyond that first impact. The network is maintained, but rather than a straight shot there is a circle of growth and mutation as growth is maintained. The original survives as it mutates, creates, and perhaps corrects. She states, “The intensity, force and circulatory range of a rhetoric are always expanding through the mutations and new exposures attached to that given rhetoric, much like a virus” (5).
She also made me wonder about the universities composition program. She quotes Margaret Syverson, “Our theories of composition have been somewhat atomistic, focusing on individual writers, individual texts, isolated acts, processes, or artifacts” (5).
We see young writers as budding in composition, and then through other writing intensive courses as flowering. But I wonder what would happen if we broadened our horizons and theirs. First year students would take English 1000, but in the junior year, after having taken some of those writing intensive course, would take another course in composition. The point of this being that by adding lived experience, knowledge obtained through classes, we could encourage this more developed writer to take the skills further. Incorporation of lived experience and academic knowledge into what they have written about. Finding out what connections these students may find between History and Literature and the development of Literature. What types of thinking learned through college algebra have they learned that might spark better writing. Rather than simply teaching them basic academic writing, bring life experience in to create a course that asks them to synthesize this knowledge with a new, perhaps grander, writing experience.
That’s all.
This article was great! I love articles that make me think and rethink any situation, and this one had me thinking about all manner of things, from Latour to the classroom. In speaking about Phelps’ critique she states, “That is, the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (3). She then goes on to explain, “The rhetorical situation is part of what we might call, borrowing from Phelps, an ongoing social flux. Situation bleeds into the concatenation of public interaction. Public interactions bleed into wider social processes. The elements of rhetorical situation may simply bleed (3). This, of course, made me think of Latour and his network, or ANT. However, I think she “invented” in my mind something a bit different from Latour.
She states, “Rather a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field. Moreover, this same rhetoric will go on to evolve in apparallel ways:” (6). While Latour’s notion of networking evolves from a star burst—lines shooting from a central blast—Edbauer makes me wonder if he hasn’t gotten his metaphor a little off. Think of it this way, rather than lines shooting straight out from a star, how about a large rock in a pond or lake. As the concentric circles move away from the point of impact the circles still maintain their original shape, but they grow in size and in ability to effect things beyond that first impact. The network is maintained, but rather than a straight shot there is a circle of growth and mutation as growth is maintained. The original survives as it mutates, creates, and perhaps corrects. She states, “The intensity, force and circulatory range of a rhetoric are always expanding through the mutations and new exposures attached to that given rhetoric, much like a virus” (5).
She also made me wonder about the universities composition program. She quotes Margaret Syverson, “Our theories of composition have been somewhat atomistic, focusing on individual writers, individual texts, isolated acts, processes, or artifacts” (5).
We see young writers as budding in composition, and then through other writing intensive courses as flowering. But I wonder what would happen if we broadened our horizons and theirs. First year students would take English 1000, but in the junior year, after having taken some of those writing intensive course, would take another course in composition. The point of this being that by adding lived experience, knowledge obtained through classes, we could encourage this more developed writer to take the skills further. Incorporation of lived experience and academic knowledge into what they have written about. Finding out what connections these students may find between History and Literature and the development of Literature. What types of thinking learned through college algebra have they learned that might spark better writing. Rather than simply teaching them basic academic writing, bring life experience in to create a course that asks them to synthesize this knowledge with a new, perhaps grander, writing experience.
That’s all.
Bitzer vs. Vatz
When I began reading the Bitzer article I began disagreeing with it. He makes good points about the influence of context, etc., but his idea that “situations” invoke or create the rhetoric just didn’t suit me. While I’ve since read the Vatz and the Edbauer, at the time I had my own arguments. I’ve met people who create crisis through rhetoric. These are not highly public people, but people that belong to my small circle of those I’m acquainted with. By phrasing something in a particular way, e.g., “The neighbor is intoxicated”, as opposed to, “So and So is having a drunken fit” the situation takes on a different tenor. Rather than the rhetoric fitting the situation, the situation is made to fit the perception of the person uttering the words. Bitzer states, “Thus the second characteristic of rhetorical situation is that it invites a fitting response, a response that fits the situation” (Bitzer 9). While this can be true, I don’t believe it to be true in all situations.
Vatz states, “The world is a scene of inexhaustible events which all compete to impinge on what Kenneth Burke calls our ‘sliver of reality’” (Vatz 156). So, in effect, he is agreeing in part with Latour. Everything strikes out in one way or another to have an impact on that which surrounds it. Vatz goes on to speak of meaning, “Therefore, meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors” (Vatz 157). So, the meanings from the “scene of inexhaustible events” merges with our “sliver of reality” to create a rhetor who creates meaning. He goes on to tell us, “In short, the rhetor is responsible for what he chooses to make salient” (158). This, to me, creates a more “salient” role of rhetoric within the academic, public, and private versions of the lives we live.
That’s all.
Vatz states, “The world is a scene of inexhaustible events which all compete to impinge on what Kenneth Burke calls our ‘sliver of reality’” (Vatz 156). So, in effect, he is agreeing in part with Latour. Everything strikes out in one way or another to have an impact on that which surrounds it. Vatz goes on to speak of meaning, “Therefore, meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors” (Vatz 157). So, the meanings from the “scene of inexhaustible events” merges with our “sliver of reality” to create a rhetor who creates meaning. He goes on to tell us, “In short, the rhetor is responsible for what he chooses to make salient” (158). This, to me, creates a more “salient” role of rhetoric within the academic, public, and private versions of the lives we live.
That’s all.
Saturday, April 7, 2007
Message “parasitically invades” students
Bitzer's view of rhetorical situations also made me think about the way that advertisers convince you that you need something. They tell you that you need, say, the Ipod with the TV screen or the Thighmaster to be happy. Bitzer is like the guy who sees an ad for a Blackberry and is convinced that he can't live without it – he's certain there was a set of circumstances in his life that necessitated its purchase. Vatz is like the guy who realizes the power of advertising – that such needs are “created” and not “found.” They convince you that there was a rhetorical situation there already, when in fact they created it.
I use the concept of the rhetorical situation to respond to students who don't like my standards for grading. I teach personal writing, which many students perceive as “what I think” and “what I feel.” For example, a student told me last week that topic sentences are too constraining on her writing. I try to get them to see that personal writing is a rhetorical situation like any other where one must take into account audience and constraints, etc. Reflecting now on this practice, I realize it's more Bitzerian than Vatzian because I tell them that in the “real world,” you will always need to write for a certain audience under certain conditions. This always seems deeply unfair to them.
I too wondered why Jenny Edbauer called Vatz “infamous.”
I use the concept of the rhetorical situation to respond to students who don't like my standards for grading. I teach personal writing, which many students perceive as “what I think” and “what I feel.” For example, a student told me last week that topic sentences are too constraining on her writing. I try to get them to see that personal writing is a rhetorical situation like any other where one must take into account audience and constraints, etc. Reflecting now on this practice, I realize it's more Bitzerian than Vatzian because I tell them that in the “real world,” you will always need to write for a certain audience under certain conditions. This always seems deeply unfair to them.
I too wondered why Jenny Edbauer called Vatz “infamous.”
Friday, April 6, 2007
Bitzer and LaTour as Buddies? Maybe?
Lloyd F. Bitzer published "The Rhetorical Situation" in 1968, but I swear I hear premonitions of LaTour. It is easy, I am guessing, from our post-post-modern positions (postmodern children that we are) to critique Bitzer from forty years' difference (Bitzer finds comfort in the "real," the objectively verifiable), but consider the excerpt from Bitzer's piece:
"Any exigence is an imperfection marked by urgency...An exigence which can not be modified is not rhetorical...thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed...are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical."
Am I the only one who hears echoes in LaTour? Simply replace "exigency" with the word "the social." Bitzer's discussion of what constitutes a rhetorical situation sounds a lot like LaTour's discussion of what constitutes the social. For Bitzer, a rhetorical situation exists when there is mediation ("an exigence which can be modified only by means other than discourse is not rhetorical; thus, an exigence is not rhetorical when its modification requires merely one's own action or the application of a tool, but neither requires nor invites the assistance of discourse"). For LaTour, the social only really exists when the players involved are true mediators. Is Bitzer arguing for anything radically different? Okay, in some ways yes? But Bitzer seems to be pushing for the same LaTourian rigidity in asking that a rhetorical situation be filled with full-fledged mediators.
I'll have more to say about Bitzer (and Vatz) later, but I was pumped after noticing the LaTourian turn forty years before such a turn actually turned.
"Any exigence is an imperfection marked by urgency...An exigence which can not be modified is not rhetorical...thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed...are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical."
Am I the only one who hears echoes in LaTour? Simply replace "exigency" with the word "the social." Bitzer's discussion of what constitutes a rhetorical situation sounds a lot like LaTour's discussion of what constitutes the social. For Bitzer, a rhetorical situation exists when there is mediation ("an exigence which can be modified only by means other than discourse is not rhetorical; thus, an exigence is not rhetorical when its modification requires merely one's own action or the application of a tool, but neither requires nor invites the assistance of discourse"). For LaTour, the social only really exists when the players involved are true mediators. Is Bitzer arguing for anything radically different? Okay, in some ways yes? But Bitzer seems to be pushing for the same LaTourian rigidity in asking that a rhetorical situation be filled with full-fledged mediators.
I'll have more to say about Bitzer (and Vatz) later, but I was pumped after noticing the LaTourian turn forty years before such a turn actually turned.
Just some things....
So far, and before my computer dies....
Vatz could introduce a quote with ANYTHING but "As ______________ says/states/writes" and it wouldn't drive me up the wall.
We SHOULD use nouns as verbs. We should also use "concatenate" a lot, as that really IS what we're called upon to do in virtually every course, paper, or discussion. And finally, "the elements of rhetorical situation simply bleed" (9) is, I think, brilliant. And true.
While I taught "the rhetorical stance" this semester, and I think my students found it helpful, it's still in an elemental form. I also noted that most, if not all the kids in both of my sections hadn't even seen my (crude) version of the sort of triangle system referred to--I think I roughly sketched the "speaker"---"message"---"receiver"---"feedback" loop, when we were discussing Booth's article, but I wonder whether talking about ecologies would have been better?
I guess my thinking, in terms of getting the students to concatenate (anything) is that BOTH might be the way to go. Haven't finished Jenny's piece yet, so maybe she'll tell me. My query to you all then, is what parts of this do you actually use in the classroom/plan to use in the classroom....and for Mark in particular, what sort of schema are they teaching in Comm? While I remember public speaking, it was poorly taught (by the soccer coach at school...d'oh) and althought we got a badly sketched diagram, I wonder what's really going on....
Down to almost no battery at all, gotta get this to post.
Concatenate.
Vatz could introduce a quote with ANYTHING but "As ______________ says/states/writes" and it wouldn't drive me up the wall.
We SHOULD use nouns as verbs. We should also use "concatenate" a lot, as that really IS what we're called upon to do in virtually every course, paper, or discussion. And finally, "the elements of rhetorical situation simply bleed" (9) is, I think, brilliant. And true.
While I taught "the rhetorical stance" this semester, and I think my students found it helpful, it's still in an elemental form. I also noted that most, if not all the kids in both of my sections hadn't even seen my (crude) version of the sort of triangle system referred to--I think I roughly sketched the "speaker"---"message"---"receiver"---"feedback" loop, when we were discussing Booth's article, but I wonder whether talking about ecologies would have been better?
I guess my thinking, in terms of getting the students to concatenate (anything) is that BOTH might be the way to go. Haven't finished Jenny's piece yet, so maybe she'll tell me. My query to you all then, is what parts of this do you actually use in the classroom/plan to use in the classroom....and for Mark in particular, what sort of schema are they teaching in Comm? While I remember public speaking, it was poorly taught (by the soccer coach at school...d'oh) and althought we got a badly sketched diagram, I wonder what's really going on....
Down to almost no battery at all, gotta get this to post.
Concatenate.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Ritualized Salience
Vatz's article succinctly presents Bitzer's, and lists his reasons for disagreeing with Bitzer. The wonderful Jenny Edbauer calls it "infamous," which is intriguing, and makes me wonder what its overall impact has been, if anyone happens to know and feels like sharing :). He seems to start from the position that we create meaning, and to call different aspects of Bitzer's article into question based on that given. The idea that we're socially constructed seems to underly his position, which ties his vision in with those of most of the authors we've read for this course, with the exceptions, possibly, of Gaonkar and Latour.
His arguments bring up a really basic question that ties in to rhetoric's pedagogical applications. Can the significance of absolutely every situation be thought of as rhetorically constructed, when some situations seem to be thought significant in virtually every discourse community? His discussion of assassination started me wondering what discourse community exists where the death of a leader would not be thought significant. Can we always say that historic events gain significance because of "ritualized salience"? If we think so, believing rhetoric to be the source of meaning, can we teach the approach?
His arguments bring up a really basic question that ties in to rhetoric's pedagogical applications. Can the significance of absolutely every situation be thought of as rhetorically constructed, when some situations seem to be thought significant in virtually every discourse community? His discussion of assassination started me wondering what discourse community exists where the death of a leader would not be thought significant. Can we always say that historic events gain significance because of "ritualized salience"? If we think so, believing rhetoric to be the source of meaning, can we teach the approach?
Monday, April 2, 2007
Collaborative Text Editing (via SubEthaEdit)
Here's the program I was talking about during class that we'll be using at the "Reach and Teach the Digital Native" conference tomorrow--it sounds intriguing. From Brian S. Brookes, Associate Dean of the School of Journalism (here at MU):
"During the Digital Campus Institute @ Missouri we’ll be working together to explore ways to “Reach and Teach the Digital Native.” SubEthaEdit is a text editor that facilitates collaboration through Apple’s Bonjour technology. With SubEthaEdit many participants will be able to edit the same text document, live, in realtime. Every user is able to type anywhere in the text without locking parts of the text for other users, making SubEthaEdit just as easy to use as a traditional text editor."
A free 30-day trial version of SubEthaEdit can be downloaded from http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit
"During the Digital Campus Institute @ Missouri we’ll be working together to explore ways to “Reach and Teach the Digital Native.” SubEthaEdit is a text editor that facilitates collaboration through Apple’s Bonjour technology. With SubEthaEdit many participants will be able to edit the same text document, live, in realtime. Every user is able to type anywhere in the text without locking parts of the text for other users, making SubEthaEdit just as easy to use as a traditional text editor."
A free 30-day trial version of SubEthaEdit can be downloaded from http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit
Redefining networks
Court's post about the multiplex and uniplex conceptions of social networks got me thinking about the varied uses of "network" as a term. I'm wondering whether the different meanings (social network, computer network, actor network, etc.), all somewhat similar to begin with, are coming to overlap--maybe it's just that they're overlapping in my thinking. But Donna's observation about web 2.0's increased resemblance to a Latourian network got me thinking that at least those two are merging.
A Bridge to Next Week
There are several places in which Latour makes comments that support or hint at a couple key rhetorical concepts. The first is Lloyd Bitzer’s notion of the rhetorical situation, which is assigned reading for next week. A second, and related concept is that of rhetorical genre.
Latour writes, “When, for one reason or another, you happen to come to the stage, you become quickly aware that most of the ingredients composing the scene have not been brought there by you…” (p. 165-166). Basically, we are constantly prompted by and encouraged to respond to particular complexes of people, things, events etc. These situations are not of our own creation, but we must navigate them nonetheless. Bitzer (1968) went so far as to basically suggest that all human interaction was dependent on the details of the rhetorical situation. Our task in any rhetorical situation is to fashion our discourse in such a way that it fits the constraints of that situation and remedies the exigence or imperfection that moved us to respond in the first place. Of course Bitzer’s explanation is much more complicated than that, but I believe Bitzer and Latour are seeing our position as actors within a collective very similarly.
Genre theory, which is typically based in the rhetorical situation, also suggests that the scene has a major influence on our actions and behavior. Edwin Black (1965) wrote, “First, we must assume that there is a limited number of situations in which a rhetor can find himself…Second, we must assume that there is a limited number of ways a rhetor can and will respond rhetorically to any given situational type…Third, we must assume that the recurrence of a given situational type through history will provide the critic with information on the rhetorical responses available in that situation” (p.133). Basically, genre theory and practice, by helping us understand and predict social interaction, can be understood as a helpful aid to tracing associations.
To understand the “ingredients” in any situation seems to be part of the task for ANT. Latour writes, “Yes, we should follow the suggestion that interactions are overflowed by many ingredients already in place that come from other times, other spaces and other agents; yes, we should accepts the idea of moving away to some other sites in order to find the sources of those many ingredients” (p. 171). ANT obviously has different, and perhaps grander goals in mind, so maybe instead of arguing that genre theory fits some of ANT’s criteria, it would be more useful to argue that genre studies could be improved by using some ANT. But then again, I already have a final paper topic.
Latour writes, “When, for one reason or another, you happen to come to the stage, you become quickly aware that most of the ingredients composing the scene have not been brought there by you…” (p. 165-166). Basically, we are constantly prompted by and encouraged to respond to particular complexes of people, things, events etc. These situations are not of our own creation, but we must navigate them nonetheless. Bitzer (1968) went so far as to basically suggest that all human interaction was dependent on the details of the rhetorical situation. Our task in any rhetorical situation is to fashion our discourse in such a way that it fits the constraints of that situation and remedies the exigence or imperfection that moved us to respond in the first place. Of course Bitzer’s explanation is much more complicated than that, but I believe Bitzer and Latour are seeing our position as actors within a collective very similarly.
Genre theory, which is typically based in the rhetorical situation, also suggests that the scene has a major influence on our actions and behavior. Edwin Black (1965) wrote, “First, we must assume that there is a limited number of situations in which a rhetor can find himself…Second, we must assume that there is a limited number of ways a rhetor can and will respond rhetorically to any given situational type…Third, we must assume that the recurrence of a given situational type through history will provide the critic with information on the rhetorical responses available in that situation” (p.133). Basically, genre theory and practice, by helping us understand and predict social interaction, can be understood as a helpful aid to tracing associations.
To understand the “ingredients” in any situation seems to be part of the task for ANT. Latour writes, “Yes, we should follow the suggestion that interactions are overflowed by many ingredients already in place that come from other times, other spaces and other agents; yes, we should accepts the idea of moving away to some other sites in order to find the sources of those many ingredients” (p. 171). ANT obviously has different, and perhaps grander goals in mind, so maybe instead of arguing that genre theory fits some of ANT’s criteria, it would be more useful to argue that genre studies could be improved by using some ANT. But then again, I already have a final paper topic.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Social Determination of facts, inscriptions, and other points of clarification
By points of clarification, I mean, of course, for myself, but one always hopes that one's writing is both received well and that it is somehow productive for others. There have been a few spots where Latour references his earlier work (I discussed one such instance with We Have Never Been Modern last week); one such instance in Part II occurs on page 223, when in footnote No. 305 he states that, "I introduced the expression of inscription devices in Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1986), Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts."
The subtitle of that (seminal) work led me (and Latour, it seems) back to some choppy waters in Part I, in which Latour distinguishes ANT from social constructivism (starting on page 88, in a section entitled "Constructivism vs. social constructivism"). Latour outlines what it means to be "constructed" according to ANT, something very different than what it means in social constructivist modes of critique; and Latour hints that this is a distinction that he has maintained all along, going back to his work in Laboratory Life, which I myself have since turned to in order to try and parse it out. On page 91-2, Latour appears to be discussing the lumping of ANT with the so-called "strong programme" of what might be productively distinguished as social determinism (thought it's often referred to as "social constructivism") in science studies (though Latour explicitly uses social constructivism in the social sciences and humanities). Latour--if I'm understanding him--takes exception to this association:
Latour, then, distinguishes ANT from social constructivism in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as (it appears any way) the strong programme in science studies: in a footnote--No. 116--on page 93, Latour asserts that the critique made against ANT that it "attack[ed] 'even' matters of fact and of not 'believing' in 'Nature' or in 'outside reality'" was "offered during the 'Science Wars'." I have since realized that I've been hung up on this distinction between ANT and the strong programme for a while in reading the first part of Reassembling, but turning to Laboratory Life and putting it in context with some back story in the history of the philosophy of science, I think I might have a hold on it now. So I want to try to flesh out a bit how ANT in general and Latour's work in particular is distinct from social constructivism (or, alternatively, social constructionism--or sociological constructionism--or simple constructivism--or radical constructivism... an examination of any of these would be seemingly interesting).
First, some back story: in An Invitation to Social Construction, Kenneth J. Gergen points out that as early as 1929--when Karl Mannheim published his Ideology and Utopia--a competing notion that scientific knowledge is socially constructed had challenged the essentialism or naturalism of science, this idea that science is a neutral, value-free quest for Truth. Mannheim, for example, observed that theoretical committments on the part of scientists may be attributed to social rather than empirical motivations, that groups of scientists often emerge around theories and that disagreements over theories are therefore matters of group conflict, that what is taken for granted to be scientific fact is a byproduct of a social process. Mannheim's work was highly influential, and soon other social critiques of science followed: Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science (1946), George Gurvitch's The Social Frameworks of Knowledge (1966), and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966) built up a tradition of socially critiquing science. Berger and Luckmann, for example, traced the scientist's interaction with the world to the social sphere, proposing that we are all socialized into "plausibility structures," conceptual understandings of the world and rational supports which help foster the belief that these structures are natural, that reality as we experience it should be taken for granted (from page 26):
To me, this sounds a whole lot like ANT, at least superficially (Berger and Luckmann, for example, include an account of how clocks have altered the way we experience time and order our lives accordingly), but this is part of the tradition that Latour seemingly is rejecting in Reassembling. Although he doesn't refer to him (or indeed, any of the names I have cited so far), Latour also appears to reject Thomas Kuhn's work along the same lines. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was at the center of the so-called "Science Wars", and indeed that work makes some interesting claims in terms of scrutinizing science as a social activity, and it interrogates (forgive me) the Enlightenment-inherited assumption that science is progressive, that with continued research and testing we will eventually arrive at the Truth (from 170: "Perhaps... scientific progress is not quite what we had taken it to be.... We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth").
For any one who wants a (vulgar) summary of what I think is relevant here, Kuhn asserted that scientists work from "...some accepted examples of actual scientific practice...[which] provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research"--these models are what Kuhn refers to as paradigms. Kuhn argued that science is a kind of puzzle-solving activity which is always subsumed in a belif system, the dominant paradigm ("normal science"). Removing the heretofore-present blinders of cumulative histories, disciplines could view thier histories in terms of these non-cumulative theoretical paradigms of "normal science," followed by accumlations of anomalies that are incommensurate with the dominant paradigm; once enough of these anomalies accumlate a critical mass is reached at which point a "scientific revolution" occurs, leading to new normal science. (It might be worth mentioning that Kuhn speculated that the social sciences--and certainly the humanities--are "pre-paradigmatic").
Kuhn argued for the social construction of scientific change and the consequent incommensurability of successive paradigms. Kuhn also emphasized the networks of interrelated commitments and practitioneers whose peer judgment provided consensus for establishing and elaborating theories. Again, Kuhn's work seems to echo rather than run against that of Latour's. But Kuhn doesn't have much to say about the actual social organization that is involved with a paradigm-shift; and his examples of paradigm-shifts are taken from classical science: the Copernican Revolution is the archetype example; and so Kuhn's examples cover centuries rather than the decade-to-decade or even year-to-year revolutions that occur in contemporary science. This acceleration or exhaustion might to similar developments that Latour outlines and this could thus be what distinguishes Latour's project from what has come before. Kuhn has lamented (much like Latour does above) the reception of his work, however; he included a postscript to the 1970 revision of Structure that made it clear that his work was received in a more radical light than he cared for (and maybe intended) and he has since expressed his regrets for this reception (see, for example, The Essential Tension, 1977).
Aside from the inclusion of networks, another possible bridge between Kuhn and Latour is Joseph Rouse's Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science. Rouse imagines a "radical Kuhn" who replaces "communities of practioners" with "communities of believers," thus foregrounding that competing theories are evaluated not by comparison to one another on their own merits, but rather with a "history is written by the winners" mentality (32). Rouse argues that science is to be understood as a field of practices rather than as what Latour himself (in Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society) refers to as "ready-made science," science already reified for textbook consumption. Latour (and Rouse) advocates "science in the making," the practice of scientific work itself, a process that is never predictable or controllable in advance (4). If nothing else, however, Gergen points out that these social determinist or contructivist arguments underscore the importance of interpretive communities in shaping heretofore naturalized scientific practices (35). But as Latour gestures, these arguments have often been taken to the extreme ("the absurd theories with which we appeared to be associated"), and so ANT and other modes of critique have increasingly sought to foreground the relational processes that emerge from actants (persons, objects, surroundings--Society and Nature). Rather than being constructed by social forces, science is the product of scientists, technologies, spaces, ideas, etc. acting as full participants in a complex relationships out of which mutual understanding is achieved.
Here we finally arrive back at the footnote (No. 305) that prompted me to write this out for myself (and any one else who might benefit): "the expression of inscription devices" that Latour casually mentions on page 223. In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, these inscription devices are part of a larger process of conscriptioin that Latour discusses in terms of how a scientific fact is determined. Conscription (literally, "writing with"--an interesting gloss, but also think of conscription in terms of drafting soldiers) is the process of appropriating support for a preposed fact and silencing detractions from it. Any statement can be proposed as fact, but on its face it's not convincing--any number of objections can be raised. The problem of the scientist is to enlist support and silence dissent; and support is conscripted from four domains: allies, a social network of those who support one's interpretations, enlisted to do so through social practices within science; former texts, the established repetoire of "what is known" is drawn upon in a type of argument from authority; rhetorical devices [interesting for our purposes here], prestige forms that convey a "truth-telling capacity" such as the use of numbers, graphs, and arcane formulations that establish and reinforce the authority of the scientist by moving the reader further and further away from an understanding of what's being argued; and, finally, the inscription devices that Latour mentions in the footnote. Inscription devices are the machines and instruments used in science which produce non-linguistic representations to "write the world"--as long as science is accepted as truth, how these devices "measure the world as it is" stands in for the phenomenon itself.
"Scientific facts," then, emerge within actor networks that include both the social and natural world, both humans and technology and these facts are thus dependent on these networks. If one questions a scientific fact, one encounters a network of allies to defend it, a network of former texts that support it, as well as rhetorical and inscription devices that legitimate it as part of the assemblage. Each of these actants, then, is like a black box: if one tries to open it, to question its validity, one is directed to another black box and these black boxes exist in an interlocking assemblage of actants. Latour, it seems, wants to be careful here not to be associated with social constructivism because he does not question the reality of scientific facts, rather he wants to bring more reality to them("constructivism was for us a synonym for an increase in realism," 92)--to remove the mysticism from science and the claims that it is beyond scrutiny or interpretation or somehow above culture. If one substitutes "the social" for "science" (Latour was dealing with the social make-up of science) then one might see how, it seems, Latour wants to do away with Nature and Society, the categories "which had been invented to reveal 'behind' social phenomena what was 'really taking place'" (93). These categories collapse into each other when it's demonstrated that they actants from within each domain are interconnected in various assemblages.
This is how I've reconciled the history of social constructivism with ANT for myself, using Latour's words in Reassembling and elsewhere, but I may be way off. If so, I hope someone will help me out.
The subtitle of that (seminal) work led me (and Latour, it seems) back to some choppy waters in Part I, in which Latour distinguishes ANT from social constructivism (starting on page 88, in a section entitled "Constructivism vs. social constructivism"). Latour outlines what it means to be "constructed" according to ANT, something very different than what it means in social constructivist modes of critique; and Latour hints that this is a distinction that he has maintained all along, going back to his work in Laboratory Life, which I myself have since turned to in order to try and parse it out. On page 91-2, Latour appears to be discussing the lumping of ANT with the so-called "strong programme" of what might be productively distinguished as social determinism (thought it's often referred to as "social constructivism") in science studies (though Latour explicitly uses social constructivism in the social sciences and humanities). Latour--if I'm understanding him--takes exception to this association:
On the one hand, it seemed easy enough to reclaim a sturdy meaning for this much maligned term construction: we simply had to use the new definition of social that was reviewed in the earlier chapters of this book.... 'constructivism' should not be confused with 'social constructivism'. When we say that a fact is constructed, we simply mean that we account for the solid objective reality by mobilizing various entities whose assemblage could fail; 'social constructivism' means, on the other hand, that we replace what this reality is made of with some other stuff, the social in which it is 'really' built. An account about the heterogenous genesis of a building is substituted by another one dealing with the homogeneous social matter which is built. To bring constructivism back to its feet, it's enough to see that once social means again association, the whole idea of a building made of social stuff vanishes. For any construction to take place, non-human entities have to play the major role and this is just what we wanted to say from the beginning with this rather innocuous word.
But obviously this rescue operation was not enough since the rest of the social sciences seemed to share a completely different notion of the same term. How could that be? Our mistake was that since we had never shared the idea that construction could mean a reduction to only one type of material, we produced antibodies against the accusation that we had reduced facts to 'mere construction' only very slowly. Since it was obvious to us that 'social construction' meant a renewed attention to the number of heterogeneous realities entering into the fabrication of some state of affairs, it took years for us to react in a balanced way to the absurd theories with which we appeared to be associated. Even though constructivism was for us a synonym for an increase in realism, we were feted by our colleagues in social critique as having shown at last that "even science is bunk'! It took me a long time to realize the danger of an expression that, in the hands our our 'best friends', apparently meant some type of revenge against the solidity of scientific facts and an expose of their claim to truth. They seemed to imply that we were doing for science what they were so proud of having done for religion, art, law, culture, and everything the rest of us believe in, namely reducing it to dust by showing it was made up....
No wonder that our excitement in showing the 'social construction of scientific fact' was met with such fury by the actors themselves!... The substitution of the social with other stuff seems to every actor a catastrophic loss to be adamently resisted--and rightly so! If, however, the word social is not used to replace one kind of stuff by another, but is used instead to deploy the associations that have rendered some state of affairs solid and durable, then another social theory might become audible at last.
How could there be, we wondered, such a divide in the basic duties of social science? This is why it slowly dawned on us that there was something deeply flawed not only in the standard philosophy of science, but also in the standard social theories used to account for other domains than science. This is what made ANT scholars at first look either too critical--they were accused of attacking 'even' matters of fact and of not 'believing' in 'Nature' or in 'outside reality'--or much too naive--they believed in the agencies of 'real things' that were 'out there'. In effect, what ANT was trying to modify was simply the use of the whole critical repertoire by abandoning simultaneously the use of Nature and the use of Society, which had been invented to reveal 'behind' social phenomena what was 'really taking place'. This, however, meant a complete reinterpretation of the experiment that we had conducted, at first unwittingly, when trying to account sociologically for the production of science.
Latour, then, distinguishes ANT from social constructivism in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as (it appears any way) the strong programme in science studies: in a footnote--No. 116--on page 93, Latour asserts that the critique made against ANT that it "attack[ed] 'even' matters of fact and of not 'believing' in 'Nature' or in 'outside reality'" was "offered during the 'Science Wars'." I have since realized that I've been hung up on this distinction between ANT and the strong programme for a while in reading the first part of Reassembling, but turning to Laboratory Life and putting it in context with some back story in the history of the philosophy of science, I think I might have a hold on it now. So I want to try to flesh out a bit how ANT in general and Latour's work in particular is distinct from social constructivism (or, alternatively, social constructionism--or sociological constructionism--or simple constructivism--or radical constructivism... an examination of any of these would be seemingly interesting).
First, some back story: in An Invitation to Social Construction, Kenneth J. Gergen points out that as early as 1929--when Karl Mannheim published his Ideology and Utopia--a competing notion that scientific knowledge is socially constructed had challenged the essentialism or naturalism of science, this idea that science is a neutral, value-free quest for Truth. Mannheim, for example, observed that theoretical committments on the part of scientists may be attributed to social rather than empirical motivations, that groups of scientists often emerge around theories and that disagreements over theories are therefore matters of group conflict, that what is taken for granted to be scientific fact is a byproduct of a social process. Mannheim's work was highly influential, and soon other social critiques of science followed: Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science (1946), George Gurvitch's The Social Frameworks of Knowledge (1966), and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966) built up a tradition of socially critiquing science. Berger and Luckmann, for example, traced the scientist's interaction with the world to the social sphere, proposing that we are all socialized into "plausibility structures," conceptual understandings of the world and rational supports which help foster the belief that these structures are natural, that reality as we experience it should be taken for granted (from page 26):
I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them... The language used in everyday life continuously provides me with the necessary objectification and posits the order within which these make sense and within which everyday life has meaning for me... In this manner language marks the co-ordinates of my life in society and fills that life with meaningful objects.
To me, this sounds a whole lot like ANT, at least superficially (Berger and Luckmann, for example, include an account of how clocks have altered the way we experience time and order our lives accordingly), but this is part of the tradition that Latour seemingly is rejecting in Reassembling. Although he doesn't refer to him (or indeed, any of the names I have cited so far), Latour also appears to reject Thomas Kuhn's work along the same lines. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was at the center of the so-called "Science Wars", and indeed that work makes some interesting claims in terms of scrutinizing science as a social activity, and it interrogates (forgive me) the Enlightenment-inherited assumption that science is progressive, that with continued research and testing we will eventually arrive at the Truth (from 170: "Perhaps... scientific progress is not quite what we had taken it to be.... We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth").
For any one who wants a (vulgar) summary of what I think is relevant here, Kuhn asserted that scientists work from "...some accepted examples of actual scientific practice...[which] provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research"--these models are what Kuhn refers to as paradigms. Kuhn argued that science is a kind of puzzle-solving activity which is always subsumed in a belif system, the dominant paradigm ("normal science"). Removing the heretofore-present blinders of cumulative histories, disciplines could view thier histories in terms of these non-cumulative theoretical paradigms of "normal science," followed by accumlations of anomalies that are incommensurate with the dominant paradigm; once enough of these anomalies accumlate a critical mass is reached at which point a "scientific revolution" occurs, leading to new normal science. (It might be worth mentioning that Kuhn speculated that the social sciences--and certainly the humanities--are "pre-paradigmatic").
Kuhn argued for the social construction of scientific change and the consequent incommensurability of successive paradigms. Kuhn also emphasized the networks of interrelated commitments and practitioneers whose peer judgment provided consensus for establishing and elaborating theories. Again, Kuhn's work seems to echo rather than run against that of Latour's. But Kuhn doesn't have much to say about the actual social organization that is involved with a paradigm-shift; and his examples of paradigm-shifts are taken from classical science: the Copernican Revolution is the archetype example; and so Kuhn's examples cover centuries rather than the decade-to-decade or even year-to-year revolutions that occur in contemporary science. This acceleration or exhaustion might to similar developments that Latour outlines and this could thus be what distinguishes Latour's project from what has come before. Kuhn has lamented (much like Latour does above) the reception of his work, however; he included a postscript to the 1970 revision of Structure that made it clear that his work was received in a more radical light than he cared for (and maybe intended) and he has since expressed his regrets for this reception (see, for example, The Essential Tension, 1977).
Aside from the inclusion of networks, another possible bridge between Kuhn and Latour is Joseph Rouse's Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science. Rouse imagines a "radical Kuhn" who replaces "communities of practioners" with "communities of believers," thus foregrounding that competing theories are evaluated not by comparison to one another on their own merits, but rather with a "history is written by the winners" mentality (32). Rouse argues that science is to be understood as a field of practices rather than as what Latour himself (in Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society) refers to as "ready-made science," science already reified for textbook consumption. Latour (and Rouse) advocates "science in the making," the practice of scientific work itself, a process that is never predictable or controllable in advance (4). If nothing else, however, Gergen points out that these social determinist or contructivist arguments underscore the importance of interpretive communities in shaping heretofore naturalized scientific practices (35). But as Latour gestures, these arguments have often been taken to the extreme ("the absurd theories with which we appeared to be associated"), and so ANT and other modes of critique have increasingly sought to foreground the relational processes that emerge from actants (persons, objects, surroundings--Society and Nature). Rather than being constructed by social forces, science is the product of scientists, technologies, spaces, ideas, etc. acting as full participants in a complex relationships out of which mutual understanding is achieved.
Here we finally arrive back at the footnote (No. 305) that prompted me to write this out for myself (and any one else who might benefit): "the expression of inscription devices" that Latour casually mentions on page 223. In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, these inscription devices are part of a larger process of conscriptioin that Latour discusses in terms of how a scientific fact is determined. Conscription (literally, "writing with"--an interesting gloss, but also think of conscription in terms of drafting soldiers) is the process of appropriating support for a preposed fact and silencing detractions from it. Any statement can be proposed as fact, but on its face it's not convincing--any number of objections can be raised. The problem of the scientist is to enlist support and silence dissent; and support is conscripted from four domains: allies, a social network of those who support one's interpretations, enlisted to do so through social practices within science; former texts, the established repetoire of "what is known" is drawn upon in a type of argument from authority; rhetorical devices [interesting for our purposes here], prestige forms that convey a "truth-telling capacity" such as the use of numbers, graphs, and arcane formulations that establish and reinforce the authority of the scientist by moving the reader further and further away from an understanding of what's being argued; and, finally, the inscription devices that Latour mentions in the footnote. Inscription devices are the machines and instruments used in science which produce non-linguistic representations to "write the world"--as long as science is accepted as truth, how these devices "measure the world as it is" stands in for the phenomenon itself.
"Scientific facts," then, emerge within actor networks that include both the social and natural world, both humans and technology and these facts are thus dependent on these networks. If one questions a scientific fact, one encounters a network of allies to defend it, a network of former texts that support it, as well as rhetorical and inscription devices that legitimate it as part of the assemblage. Each of these actants, then, is like a black box: if one tries to open it, to question its validity, one is directed to another black box and these black boxes exist in an interlocking assemblage of actants. Latour, it seems, wants to be careful here not to be associated with social constructivism because he does not question the reality of scientific facts, rather he wants to bring more reality to them("constructivism was for us a synonym for an increase in realism," 92)--to remove the mysticism from science and the claims that it is beyond scrutiny or interpretation or somehow above culture. If one substitutes "the social" for "science" (Latour was dealing with the social make-up of science) then one might see how, it seems, Latour wants to do away with Nature and Society, the categories "which had been invented to reveal 'behind' social phenomena what was 'really taking place'" (93). These categories collapse into each other when it's demonstrated that they actants from within each domain are interconnected in various assemblages.
This is how I've reconciled the history of social constructivism with ANT for myself, using Latour's words in Reassembling and elsewhere, but I may be way off. If so, I hope someone will help me out.
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