Brummet

Brummet

1. the wold is like such that we can know it through communication

   • What is "truth"?
     • rhetoric is methodological
       • agonistically: Contest between competing ideas
         • audience POV
       • Pedagogically: make truth effective by someone who already has knowledge
         • teacher to hoi polloi (masses)
           • get people to see truth
         • Rhetors POV
         • dialogic
     • reality
       • objective
         • rhetoric not only discovers but creates reality and knowledge about reality in the social sphere of ethics, politics, morals, religion, etc (Brumment 3)
           • social reality: plural and relative
         • material reality
       • unitary
         • only one reality; one truth. No disjunction between social and material reality
           • Science seeks unitary realities
       • discovery
     • apprehension of reality or discovery?
     • rhetoric is embodied and materially instantiated, Grounded in human agency
   • What is the relationship between rhetoric and human activity?
     • Ontolocial: rhetoric creates all of what there is to know
       • meaning is a thing created and shared in discourse, particularly rhetoric; so reality is a thing created and shared in discourse
       • all of what people do is in some way rhetorically shaped and, in its turn, rhetorically influential on others
       • creating truth
   • What is the status of rhetoric as a discipline?
     • not real subject matter; concerned with making clear the subject matter of other disciplines
       • Rhetoric has not changed since classical times
     • Rhetoric is co-equal with other disciplines
       • all the disciplines study dimensions of experience.

2. World's shortest Lit review: Aristotle assigned the realm of the contingent (social) to rhetoric. Later one, the Ramists moved areas of knowledge out of the social realm into logic or philosophy, where those issues could be decided with more certainty and rigor. Eighteenth century rhetoric’s stress on psychology “slid” more issues back into rhetoric. Nineteenth and twentieth century logical positivists tried to identify more and more social and political questions as material, arising from neurological or physical conditions and admitting of certain, scientific’s solutions, thus beggaring rhetoric again. Today, scholars seem to be assigning more issues to the contingent, social sphere again. Brummet 4-5

3. Atomization of Rhetoric

   • What and how rhetoric means
     • rhetoric is worldview; it is underlying philosophy and tacit understanding
       • r, it is by acting and in action that people are enabled to know
     • Image and word
   • And yet atomization separates, bifurcates, siloizes. Atomization necessitates a particularized and specious division of multivalent, polymorphous, polycontexts. Atomization comfortably compartmentalizes—culturally, philosophically, theoretically—meaning and being. It ameliorates our need to explore through the practice of exploding contexts. It assuages our uncertainty, allows us to reduce writing to this, visual to that, performance to here, orality there. Consequently, atomization draws lines, then builds fences, then erects walls, borders, and territories.