rhetoric

LEVI LINKED to Scot Barnett’s REVIEW of Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics. I commented briefly at Larval Subjects but should do so again here.

I can’t claim to have been following the whole of recent philosophical developments in the rhetoric/composition field, but I do know there have been interesting things going on.

In the past, any mention of “rhetoric” in the vicinity of continental philosophy generally had an anti-realist agenda. It was about speech acts, performativity, anti-essentialism, and so forth.

Even in Aristotle, who is so masterful in his treatment of the enthymeme, it’s a “people thing”: rhetoric is a matter of human moods. And that’s the direction in which Heidegger continues to take it— rhetoric as a matter of Dasein’s everydayness.

My own key to escaping that standpoint was McLuhan, for whom rhetoric is not a matter of human moods at all, but of the total environmental background that is so much deeper than any distracting content that fixes our gaze.

But I’m going to wait and see what the rhetoric pros are going to do with all of this, because they’ve already said some things that wouldn’t have occurred to me.