Rhetorical Interventions (Ch. 6–10)

This section of the book considered the transformative nature of rhetoric for calling publics together, for engaging with local publics, for supporting the public work of others, and for circulating public discourse.

Ch. 6 - Rhetorical Engagements in the Scientist’s Process of Remaking Race as Genetic, Celeste M. Condit

Figure 5. International HapMap Project
(n.d.)

Celeste Condit noted the powerful influences exerted by the technical sphere upon paths of social change (p. 119) and described a series of four interventions with scientists on their own terms around questions of genetics and race. The New York Times articles linked here (below) contextualize some discussions of race and genetics that are in more broad circulation. Condit began her chapter by citing Nicholas Wade’s (2002) article which relied on a Stanford biologist’s claim that race is a valid way of categorizing genetic differences. After noting the predictable ways articles like these surface every few years, Condit asked, is there anything rhetoricians can do to preclude scientists from constructing these racist statements in the guise of scientific truth? (p. 119). Condit then narrated her team’s attempts which included participating in The Human Genetic Variation Consortium, publishing in scientific journals data about the impact of race-based medicine, presenting to genetics researchers on the harmful impact of race as genetic, working with scientists to relabel the International Hapolotype Map (Hap Map) with more carefully and precisely selected groupings, and participating in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) roundtable on race. The International HapMap Project (linked in Figure 5) documented genetic variants and how those variants were distributed across populations and geographies.

Throughout the piece, Condit’s own ill-ease and reflexivity were apparent, demonstrating that throughout her arguments in the scientific community, she has been engaged in the work of putting her own beliefs at risk (Ehninger, 1970). The value of this piece, then, is both in its case study approach to documenting the iterative, abductive rhetorical reasoning of venturing and testing a working theory (Flower, 2008) of wise rhetorical action and in its invitation to take up work that is well upstream of public scientific controversies (Crick & Gabriel, p. 203) where rhetorics of scientific discourse have been shaped and are shaping scientific knowledge among scientists.

Resources Related to Race and Genetics

"Race is seen as Real Guide to Track the Roots of Disease" (Wade, 2002)

"Brain May Still Be Evolving, Studies Hint" (Wade, 2005)

Importantly, Condit spent time making sense of the multiple and layered impacts of her team’s rhetorical work. Elsewhere, I have argued, in the context of an emergent community literacy partnership, that because rhetoric is a stochastic art and our impact is often unpredictable, ephemeral, and elusive, we need to consider what it might mean to take a process approach to determining rhetorical efficacy and rhetorical expertise (Clifton, 2013). I have argued that it is exactly in the most imprecise spaces that we need the most precise and rhetorically artful tools. These tools often yield different results in different contexts, and the tools we called on before may not be the tools we need in a new context. Further, because we are engaging in contexts we can not always predict ahead of time and where we never experience the same situation twice, we need thousands of tools and thousands of case studies of those tools in use in order to develop meta-level thinking across contexts. Over time, this meta-level thinking builds fast, intuitive, embodied expertise (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1988), enabling us to respond wisely and on the spot in a new context. In that case, we need more pieces like Condit’s and we need them to name the tools (Miller) and put our best theories to the test so that we begin to make sense of when and under what conditions our theories hold, and, when they don’t, what tools we must invent along the way.

Ch. 7 - Going Public—In a Disabling Discourse, Linda Flower

Ch. 8 - Sophists for Social Change, David J. Coogan

Ch 15 - The Prospects for the Public Work of Rhetoric: A Coda on Codes, Susan C. Jarratt

David Coogan’s chapter and Linda Flower’s chapter (as well as Susan Jarrett’s chapter which served as an Afterword) are perhaps best read as companion pieces not simply because each focused on marginalized teens, but also because they articulated distinct possibilities for sophistic rhetorical action, for conceptualizing publics and the work of publics, for weighing the role of rhetorical invention in the work of rhetorical intervention, and for considering the possibilities (and dangers) of an aesthetic turn in rhetoric.

Figure 6. Book cover of The
Public Work of Rhetoric,
showing the word
Sanctuary painted on the
wall of the teen center
Coogan wrote about.
(Ackerman & Coogan, 2012)

Coogan argued that sophists...do not use rhetoric to target change. They make middle spaces for placemaking and poetic world making. Then they get out of the way (p. 172). Coogan’s chapter opened with a community disturbed because a young woman was raped by four young men in a desirable gentrified neighborhood previously insulated from the everyday violence of a poor, Black neighborhood to the north. When a local councilwoman campaigning for re-election suggested a teen center to improve public safety in her district—which included the gentrified area and the larger African American community nearby—Coogan saw an opportunity to position the teens as rhetors in a public more accustomed to news stories in which they appeared as rapists and criminals (p. 158). Coogan articulated his role, arguing that he had become a sophist by creating a middle space (p. 159) where rhetors can question what has been commonplace and normalized. The chapter narrated a nebulous decision to paint the word sanctuary on an outside, publicly visible wall of the center (see the dust jacket of the book) and then describes Coogan’s work with teens to name what exists, what does not exist, the size or extent of what exists, and what might exist in the future (pp. 163-164). The chapter culminates in what Coogan labeled the publicity effect (p. 167): the circulation of the teens’ letters through the Richmond Times Dispatch and the subsequent overwhelming response of local residents.

Flower, who worked with ten high school students labeled Learning Disabled and ten college students, instantiated a markedly different sophistic approach, drawing on techne to engage in intercultural inquiry about the difficulties of going public about Learning Disabilities. This work ultimately culminated in an intercultural problem-solving dialogue among nearly sixty diverse stakeholders. Flower discussed the ways the quiet tool of the LD label oppress[es] people by ’defining them’ (p. 135) and asked, in the face of such prolific and institutionalized oppression, So how do students, as rhetors in a discourse not of their choosing, respond to the dilemma of going public? (p. 141) and If going public with a disability is hazardous for your identity, putting you at risk of being mediatized, medicalized, and institutionalized, how might a speaker... challenge ‘the politics of representation’? (p. 144).

Resources Related to the Discourses of Disability

Flower, then, analyzed transcripts of sessions of collaborative rhetorical invention at different stages during the Community Think Tank process to document and theorize the rhetorical agency of youth labeled with Learning Disabilities. She noted three significantly different kinds of rhetorical moves the youth used—expressive, interpretive, and dialogic—to [re-]interpret themselves to a public and to draw that public into deliberative dialogue (p. 147). Finally, Flower articulated a vision of public work for collaborative-critical activists: to help call local publics into being, to nurture the rhetorical agency of marginalized speakers, and to use the power of rhetoric to document agency and expertise in a way that challenges and perhaps even transforms the discourses it enters (p. 153). The Community Think Tank Process culminated in a report, Naming the LD Difference, linked above. Additionally linked is Underwood's (1999) article that demonstrated the language used to describe dyslexia and those with disabilities (as cited in Flower, p. 139).

Interestingly, Coogan tried to lay claim to a normative view of sophistic work, a move (echoed later by Jarrett) that is neither necessary nor productive as we consider Ackerman and Coogan’s earlier claim that [w]e are not all building the same things for the same reasons with the same tools in the same public (p. 8). In fact, the value of these contrasting versions of the public work of rhetoric is in their productive grist; one need not be held up as more vividly hopeful (Jarrett, p. 293) than another. This is, after all, to deny the rhetoricity of the public work and the situatedness of the local public. For Coogan, sophistic rhetorical action is primarily about making middle spaces (p. 159) where others might do rhetorical work or poesis; for Flower, sophistic rhetorical action is deeply tied to rhetorical invention, deliberative publics, and prophetic pragmatism. These are radically different views of rhetorical intervention and in the balance are significant disciplinary conceptions of the nature of rhetoric and rhetorical invention (Is it well-tooled and design-oriented or more emergent? Or somehow both?); of the capacity of rhetoric (What can rhetoric do?); of the value of rhetoric (What is rhetoric good for, anyway?). These two chapters also raised serious questions about the role of the critical-collaborative activist-scholar in community literacy and civic engagement and about the link between rhetorical education, rhetorica docens, and rhetorical practice, rhetorica utens.

Most importantly for this collection, these two chapters also articulated contrasting versions of publics and public life: one that is more amorphous and that prizes the circulation of discourse and another that is more specific and that prizes deliberation. While Coogan marked a sharp contrast between the two, clearly valuing public circulation over public deliberation, in his treatment of public responses to the teens’ writing, it was clear that the two are not mutually exclusive. When one commenter raised a point of stasis around the lack of follow up on solving crime here and suggested that the city officials’ lack of attention to problems that should take the same priority as in any other part of the city (p. 170), Coogan remarked that Most readers… did not waste time debating who was really to blame (p. 171). This woman framed a point of stasis that interrogated the mechanisms of power and aimed to construct a shared concern not only about this one teen writer’s difficulties but also about the structures in place that created a host of challenges for many more people living in the same area. While this is not work that Coogan has taken up in this piece, Flower’s decades’ worth of rhetorical invention with Community Think Tanks, like the one featured in her chapter in this collection, have offered rhetorical tools for engaging and possibly transforming such fraught intersections. Coogan’s version of the public work of rhetoric got some things done but not others; likewise, Flower’s work achieved some ends but not others. Interestingly, Fleming’s chapter in this collection referenced Coogan’s (2006) previously published approach to a materialist rhetoric to guide public engagement, one in which get[ting] out of the way (p. 172) was not what was most needed (as cited in Fleming, p. 216). In engaging in the complex work of street phronesis where each new context is distinct, we need a whole host of ways of performing the public work of rhetoric because we cannot, until we are knee-deep in the work, know which models, which ends, which techne we will ultimately need. Perhaps, most important, was Bruner’s point about healthy publics (and we might add, healthy disciplines): they encourage a proliferation of subaltern counterpublics.

Finally, these chapters raised questions about an aesthetic turn of rhetoric. Coogan celebrated the sanctuary mural and Jarrett (2010) noted that sophistic tactics include artful linguistic and rhetorical play and include—the pied, multi-colored, mottled, intricate, changeful, unstable, wily ways (p. 292)—ways, she argued, that have been more visible in electronic media than print or face-to-face contexts. Readers interested in this debate may find useful Glynda Hull and Mark Nelson’s (2010) chapter in The Future of Literacy Studies, Literacy, Media, and Morality: Making the Case For An Aesthetic Turn where they argued not for an artful wily-ness but for an artful morality, considering the potential of media to constitute a moral public space (p. 199) where aesthetics, or one’s sense of what is beautiful or right (p. 199) is a central organizing feature. The danger of an aesthetic turn, of course, as Ackerman and Coogan noted in composition’s disciplinary history with the process movement and with expressivism, is the risk of losing site of the rhetoricity of the aesthetic and the shared invention of a situated public aesthetic.

Ch. 9 - Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation: The Pedagogy of Engaging Publics in a Praxis of New Media, Ellen Cushman and Erik Green

Extending Ellen Cushman’s (2006) previous work regarding a praxis of new media, Cushman and Erik Green forwarded a pedagogical framework that structured their knowledge work as rhetoricians in a Multimedia Writing class, partnering with the Cherokee Nation to create educational resources about the allotment period. In a praxis of new media, they argued, students learn the ways in which infrastructures influence their composing, especially with regard to authorship, ownership, and representation. Casting their work at the intersection of critical, community, and digital literacies with the goal of knowledge production, they extended the New London Group’s (1996) pedagogy of multiliteracies, grounding the rhetorical work of knowledge production with community partners in Aristotelian phronesis and in the action-reflection of Freirian pedagogy. Cushman and Green argued and illustrated that pedagogies related to a praxis of new media expand the New London Group’s (1996) pedagogies of situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice and include material and rhetorical considerations of audience and infrastructure in the context of composing for public audiences and their rhetorical exigencies.

Ch. 10 - On Being Useful: Rhetoric and the Work of Engagement, Jeffrey T. Grabill

While it is common to think of our students’ rhetorical work in the classroom, when we turn to community engagement, Jeffrey Grabill argued, we more often think of ourselves—the work that we are doing, the impact that we hope to have, and the way that our presence changes a community (p. 191). In his own work, Grabill has taken a different tack, arguing that the public work of rhetoric might be to support the work of others. Where Ackerman helped us see our universities in the contexts of multiple economies, Grabill helped us see Writing Programs as sites of productive knowledge building capable of supporting institutional critique (Porter et al., 2000). Grabill advanced a two-part methodology of engagement—assembling a public and supporting performances—that serve as a kind of treatise on what it might mean to be useful to everyday knowledge workers. Re-contextualizing Latour’s (2004) work on Thing Theory, Grabill argued that contemporary public work of rhetoric involves gathering and caring for things and that things, like publics, communities, groups, and aggregates are gathered and cared for through assembling, which is itself movement, activity, association, and re-association. Grabill both theorized and made visible the multiple and layered activities of assemblage as well as the role of an engaged public rhetoric in assembling (p. 199). In considering what it might mean to support others’ rhetorical performances, Grabill focused on a rhetor in the midst of a meeting where the deck is stacked against the rhetorical work she’s been laboring to accomplish. In a freeze-framed moment, Grabill reminded readers of the performative nature of rhetoric and of the material rhetorical realities in which everyday rhetors work, recognizing the difficulty and fragility of doing anything worthwhile when institutional power is rendered material, visible, normative, and seemingly monolithic. What, in these most daunting of contexts where everyday rhetors must break their backs to make something as delicate as a thing (Grabill, p. 203), does it mean to care for an assembly and to support others caring for what they’ve assembled? Importantly, Grabill drew attention not only to the rampant everyday need for this public work and the stochastic nature of this rhetorical work (Clifton 2013) but also to the need to measure rhetorical outcomes of gathering and caring for assemblies.