Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class

Citation
Berlin, James. "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class." College English vol. 50, no. 5, 1988, pp. 477-494.

Summary
"More recently the discussion of the relation between ideology and rhetoric has taken a new turn. Ideology is here foregrounded and problematized in a way that situates rhetoric within ideology, rather than ideology within rhetoric. In other words, instead of rhetoric acting as the transcendental recorder or arbiter of competing ideological claims, rhetoric is regarded as always already ideological." (477)

Three rhetorics in classroom practice - "rhetorics of cognitive psychology, of expressionism, and of a category I will call social-pistemic" (477-478), each occupying a different position in relation to ideology. "This third rhetoric is the one I am forwarding here, and it provides the ground of my critique of its alternatives. In other words, I am arguing from ideology, contending that no other kind of argument is possible" (478)
 * "The rhetoric of cognitive psychology refuses the ideological question altogether, claiming for itself the transcendent neutrality of science.
 * "Expressionistic rhetoric [...] has always openly admitted its ideological predilections, opposing itself in no uncertain terms to the scientism of current-traditional rhetoric and the ideology it encourages.
 * ""Social-epistemic rhetoric is an alternative that is self-consciously aware of its ideological stand, making the very question of ideology the center of classroom activities, and in so doing providing itself a defense against preemption and a strategy for self-criticism and self-correction."

Drawing on work of Goran Therborn from The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, which in turn draws on Althusser (on ideology) and Foucault (on power) - though, unlike Althusser, does not see ideology and scientific truth as opposed, but ideology as all-encompassing (i.e., there is no perspective that can claim outside neutrality and objectivity)

"Ideology for Therborn addresses three questions: 'What exists? What is good? What is possible?' [...] Ideology thus interpellates the subject in a manner that determines what is real and what is illusory, and, most important, what is experienced and what remains outside the field of phenomenological experience, regardless of its actual material existence. Ideology also provides the subject with standards for making ethical and aesthetic decisions [...] Ideology provides the structure of desire, indicating what we will long for and pursue. Finally, ideology defines the limits of expectation." (479)

-Movement from epistemology to ontology to phenomenology to ethics and aesthetics

Additionally, ideology proposes how power should be distributed and used in society. And finally, ideology is pluralistic - always in competition with other ideologies

Cognitive Rhetoric
The "heir apparent of current-traditional rhetoric [...] that appeared in conjunction with the new American university system during the final quarter of the last century" (480).

Attention to cognitive psychological approaches to writing and composing in the classroom; "For cognitive rhetoric, the structures of the mind correspond in perfect harmony with the structures of the material world, the minds of the audience, and the units of language" (480) - stressing process over product in writing classrooms. Under this framework, "Writing becomes [...] just another instance of 'problem-solving processes people use every day,' most importantly the processes of experts" (481, quotation from Linda Flowers' textbook)

Recall again that cognitive rhetoric side-steps the question of ideology and takes a scientific view of the composing process; concern is with process and product, but not ethics or values (whether it is good to do things in a certain way).

Heuristics as strategies to resolve problems, "discovery procedures that 'are the heart of problem solving.' Significantly, these heuristics are not themselves rational, are not linear and predictable - 'they do not come with a guarantee.' They appear normally as unconscious, intuitive processes that problem solvers use without realizing it, but even when formulated for conscious application they are never foolproof. Heuristics are only as good or bad as the person using them, so that problem solving is finally the act of an individual performing in isolation, solitary and alone." (482)

"Cognitive rhetoric [...] in its refusal of the ideological question leaves itself open to association with the reification of technocratic science characteristic of late capitalism. [...] The existent, the good, and the possible are inscribed in the very nature of things as indisputable scientific facts, rather than being seen as humanly devised social constructions always remaining open to discussion" (484).

Expressionistic Rhetoric
Descended from the "elitist rhetoric of liberal culture, a scheme arguing for writing as a gift of genius, an art accessible only to a few, and then requiring years of literary study. In expressionistic rhetoric, this gift is democratized, writing becoming an art of which all are capable" (484)

"For this rhetoric, the existent is located within the individual subject. While the reality of the material, the social, and the linguistic are never denied, they are considered significant only insofar as they serve the needs of the individual. All fulfill their true function only when being exploited in the interests of locating the individual's authentic nature." (484) Aimed at discovery of the self, whether in writing (about the self) or reading (in order to learn more about the self that authored the text, or the self that is reading the text)

-Compare with Burke on mere relativism? Expressionistic rhetoric seems to provide no grounds for evaluating

Pedagogically, extremist expressionistic rhetoric aimed at creating experiences for students that resisted hegemonic interpretation of experience" - getting back to a pre-Nietzschean language?

Peter Elbow as a moderate expressionist (pushing back against the more extreme version, above); does not deny the community, but only insofar as it exists to benefit the individual. Public existing for the sake of the private. Also compare with Dana Cloud's therapeutic rhetoric - aimed at the individual's healing, over social and structural reformation?

Resistance is an individual thing; cannot be collectively undertaken, for fear of subsuming the individuals involved. Thus, while it seems contradictory that this kind of rhetoric would flourish in institutions, it's actually very easy to co-opt, since its mode of political resistance is disorganized to the point of incoherence

Social-Epistemic Rhetoric
A politically diverse group of scholars, but brought together "because they share a notion of rhetoric as a poltical act involving a dialectical interaction engaging the material, the social, and the individual writer, with language as the agency of mediation. Their positions, furthermore, include an historicist orientation, the realization that a rhetoric is an historically specific social formation that must perforce change over time; and this feature in turn makes possible reflexiveness and revision as the inherently ideological nature of rhetoric is continually acknowledged" (488)

The real located in "a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence. Knowledge is never found in any one of these but can only be posited as a product of the dialectic in which all three come together. Most important, this dialectic is grounded in language [...] This does not mean that the three do not exist apart from language: they do. This does mean that we cannot talk and write about them - indeed, we cannot know them - apart from language." (488)

"In studying rhetoric - the ways discourse is generated - we are studying the ways in which knowledge comes into existence. [...] We are lodged within a hermeneutic circle, although not one that is impervious to change." (489)

-This does not result in relativism, but it does mean that we cannot accept without question arguments based on "the permanent rational structures of the universe or on the evidence of the deepest and most profound personal intuition" (489)

-Questions that social-epistemic rhetoric asks are about the relation of knowledge and power; what effects does knowledge have, how does it organize and distribute power, and in turn structure social relations?

-Because of this historicist orientation, a built-in mechanism for self-criticism and self-revision; if human actions are always already ideological, they are always already interpretations that can be revised

Ira Shor as social-epistemic rhetoric-based pedagogy - recognizing the ways in which individuals and students "begin to see the economic and social system that renders them powerless as an innate and unchangeable feature of the natural order. They become convinced that change is impossible, and they support the very practices that victimize them - complying in their alienation from their work, their peers, and their very selves." (490) Shor's pedagogy recognizes and attempts to counter these forces.

"The object of this pedagogy is to enable students to  'extraordinarily reexperience the ordinary' as they critically examine their quotidian experience in order to externalize false consciousness" (491) - W131's emphasis on representation. A mutual pedagogy that requires equal participation from teacher and student, not student becoming receptacle into which teacher pours knowledge (compare with Plato/Socrates on education and love)

An interdisciplinary approach - Shor's example of studying a hamburger, "no only involved English and philosophy in our use of writing, reading, and conceptual analysis, but it also included economics in the study of the commodity relations which bring hamburgers to market, history and sociology in an assessment of what the everyday diet was like prior to the rise of the hamburger, and health science in terms of the nutritional value of the ruling burger" (491)

-Has the potential to lead to "the unveiling of hidden social history" (492)

Attitude required - "behavior that is always open-ended, receptive to the unexpected, and subversive of the planned. Most important, success in this classroom can never be guaranteed. This is a place based on dialectical collaboration [...] and the outcome is always unpredictable. Yet, as Shor makes clear, the point of this classroom is that the liberated consciousness of students is the only educational objective worth considering, the only objective worth the risk of failure. To succeed at anything else is no success at all." (492)

-And here we reach the critical of this critical pedagogy! Unveiling, with the goal of liberation. How do we become post-critical in our pedagogy? Is this a sequence - we must first become critical, then post-critical? Are our students pre-critical, critical, or post-critical already? (Compare with Bartholomae, inventing the university, and discourse communities - are students more initiated in academic or theoretical conversations, such as around gender performativity? Maybe yes... but does that mean they are better able to apply or do creative things with that discourse?)