Civic Jazz asks us to expand our understanding of what it means to say that jazz is an American art form. While Clark is clearly a fan, with an intimate knowledge of jazz, its culture, and community, this book offers more than anecdote and description, which is so common in jazz studies. Rather, this well-crafted book extends and offers a theoretical basis to the idea, put forward by Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and most recently Barak Obama when speaking (...) at the 2016 International Jazz Day Concert, that jazz expresses the American spirit. Clark finds his theoretical armature in Kenneth Burke’s blurring of the boundary between rhetoric and poetic. As Clark argues, Burke’s works articulate a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Farrell’s MoodsMaurice CharlandIt is difficult to write of the dead and their work, especially when one counts them as friends but does not wish to engage in simple epideictic. Scholarship might well be an unending conversation, but death limits speaking privileges. This undermines the conversational ideal. It certainly has robbed Thomas Farrell of his right to reply to anything that I will now say. For he and his legacy (...) to be treated well, the burden of speaking justly falls to others, who cannot count upon him to offer gentle correctives or collegial objections.In reflecting upon Thomas Farrell’s work, I am struck by the fact that he was simultaneously one of the field’s most respected and yet underappreciated theorists. The esteem in which he was held requires little by way of demonstration. Those who knew him will attest to his erudition and ease with theory. He is oft cited and was regularly called upon to discuss movements or developments in philosophy and rhetoric. Indeed, the very fact that this issue is dedicated to his thought testifies to the regard in which he was held. And so, why do I consider him underappreciated? Quite simply, because few of his colleagues have sought to take up fully his work on its own terms.There are several reasons for this, which I will elaborate briefly below, but they ultimately follow from the fact that Farrell was engaged in a [End Page 337] philosophical project in a field not well disposed to philosophical treatise. I am certain that this sounds odd. More than most fields in communication studies, rhetorical studies has a philosophical patina, and rhetorical scholarship is philosophically informed. Furthermore, philosophy and rhetoric meet regularly on the pages of this journal. Nevertheless, I contend that in the “field,” by which I mean the community of scholars of which Farrell was a part, mostly identified with “speech communication” or the National Communication Association, the development of full-blown philosophies of rhetoric is a marginal pastime. This should not be surprising: philosophers are concerned with very general questions, whereas rhetoricians focus on particulars. Philosophers seek to develop comprehensive representations of grand systems, whereas rhetoricians are pragmatists who focus on practical debates, and given that contingent practical questions are always more pressing that speculative ones, philosophies of rhetoric are for the most part of little immediate interest in rhetoric unless they offer a lever for doing criticism.And so, philosophy typically only has two modes of appearance in rhetorical studies: (1) as a bad object in the neurotic repetition of rhetoric’s foundational gesture, when Plato’s condemnation is reanimated to again be refuted; and (2) as an authoritative excerpt or fragment appropriated to bolster arguments regarding rhetoric’s ontic and epistemic status. Rarely is rhetoric’s nature systematically scrutinized in order to rewrite rhetorical practice. Rhetorical theorists, even when informed by philosophy or by “Theory” (aka French and German thought in ethics, hermeneutics, poststructralism, and philosophy) usually do little more than develop and elaborate a small number of concepts that can then be deployed in the analysis of texts. While each of these is subtended by philosophical commitments, be it to the role of reason or to the relationship of texts to the real, these are usually only alluded to or treated summarily in short “forum” articles that counterpoise grand categories, such as empiricism, postmodernism, and so forth. Hence, rhetorical theory in large measure appears taxonomic to the novice. Directed toward oratorical or critical practice, rhetorical theory presents itself initially as a catalog of situational and textual concepts, such as audience, exigence, enthymeme, style, trope, ideograph, and so on. Though rhetorical theorists and critics are quite adept in deploying these concepts, to either identify the salient elements of a speech or make a claim regarding some aspect of rhetoric’s effectivity, greater questions are usually bracketed or deferred.Baldly put, rhetoric is case bound: theory construction depends on the analysis of rhetorical episodes. Rhetorical analysis is typically directed toward understanding or theorizing a case rather than constructing a theoretical [End Page 338] edifice. This norm in rhetorical studies colors habits of reading and works against a full appreciation of Farrell... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Gerald Early's remark that black people are seminally important to the modern world because they created the blues is examined as a contribution to the politics of recognition that deviates from the liberal model that dominates in political theory. Central to this deviation is the politics of honor and Paul Corcoran's distinction between formal and aesthetic recognition. The politics of aesthetic recognition is examined here through Hans-Georg Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutics in Truth and Method as well as through Martin (...) Heidegger's phenomenology and philosophy of Dasein, inspired by Aristotle's Rhetoric, and his writings on art. The significance of art and specifically of the blues to the politics of recognition goes beyond the representation or the relaying of others' voices, in that it calls forth modes of being-there over against difference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 119-134 [Access article in PDF] The Constitution of Rhetoric's Tradition Maurice Charland Rhetoric is not a discipline. That is to say, as a domain of theoretical and practical knowledge, rhetoric is weakly institutionalized, lacking a centralized arbiter and standardized set of procedures for establishing truth claims. It also lacks the basic characteristics that Michel Foucault defines as disciplinary, for while we can identify "groups (...) of objects, methods, their corpus of properties considered to be true, the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools," these are neither universally admitted, nor do they "constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available to whoever wishes, or whoever is able to make use of them, without their being any question of their meaning" (1972, 222). On the contrary, despite the fact that rhetoric is usually figured as offering practical and, indeed, positive knowledge, the meaning of its terms is always being questioned and at stake. While we might, by considering terms loosely, seek to identify rhetoric in terms of objects such as "persuasion," or "discourse," these are not exclusively its province. Furthermore, the ends of rhetoric are themselves unclear. Is rhetoric really the art of discovering the available means of persuasion? Or is it an art of citizenship? Or a method of enquiry? It has at times been defined as each. Consequently, none of these methods can fix its identity. At most, we can say that "rhetoric," as a domain of knowledge, signals a commitment to the idea of agency in discourse.Rhetoric, while not disciplinary, nevertheless "hangs together" as a domain of knowledge even though it does not cohere conceptually. It is, or comes close to being, a "discursive formation." That is to say, we can identify a field that produces statements concerning discourse and its operations, which is characterized by certain regularities that articulate with the term rhetoric itself. The first such regularity is the gesture of negation. Rhetoric refuses philosophy (or acts out having been refused by philosophy). [End Page 119] Rhetoric further is defined against other intellectual genres: rhetoric is not poetics, is not political science, is not ethics, though it may "speak" to them. Ultimately, though, this tells us very little about the nature of rhetoric's difference, for while refusal is effective in positing the existence of a boundary between rhetoric and other domains, the location of that boundary and what it contains remains unspecified. Rhetoric must also be attributed an at least provisional sense. This is accomplished by rhetoric's second gesture, which initially appears more substantial. Rhetoric is framed in terms of the positivity of a foundational "tradition." Indeed, the gesture toward tradition is ubiquitous. Consider, for example, both the title and principles of organization of Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg's (1990) anthology, George Kennedy's (1998) recursion to the idea of "tradition" even as he attempts to present rhetoric as a natural and cross-cultural phenomenon, recent feminist works that explicitly address "the tradition," 1 the routine citation of Classical authorities and examples, the recurrence of "new" rhetorics, including Burke's dramatism, Perelman's theory of argumentation, as well as Barthes' semiotics, which are offered as supplements to tradition's lacks, and, finally, the energy devoted to the study of the history of rhetoric. The rhetorical tradition, as something bequeathed or put in play by ancient teachers, appears to offer rhetoric a substance, a literature, and a set of problems, particularly through variants of two other principles of discursive formation identified by Foucault, commentary and the author-function. Even so, the gesture toward tradition does not imply the existence of a historically rooted and fixed corpus or model: "Tradition" is a vague term, there is no unproblematic canon of texts to be commented upon, and tradition itself, rather than Aristotle, Plato, or Cicero, stands as "author." What we debate is the meaning of the "tradition," the uneasy relationship between Socrates and Sophists, Plato and Aristotle, but as positions rather than personae. Furthermore, in the name of rhetoric, ancient and modern texts are often read against the grain, and what is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 248-263 [Access article in PDF] The Incommensurability Thesis and the Status of Knowledge Maurice Charland The view that inquiry can be understood in terms of rhetorical theory can be traced to Thomas Kuhn's influential work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn is often cited by scholars concerned with the discursive strategies by which the natural and social or human sciences justify themselves and (...) their specific claims. Kuhn's legacy is well captured by Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey in the opening essay of The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (1987) where they link him to Stephen Toulmin and Chaïm Perelman as instigators of the study of the Rhetoric of Inquiry. In their words, Kuhn's landmark classic "challenges philosophy to account for the actual operation of scientific communities—their professional devices of communication and socialization, their political structures, their reliance on aesthetics, and their rhetorical dependence on persuasion" (Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey 1987, 12). Despite this reaction, however, Kuhn's project was in many ways modest. He was not seeking to develop a sociology of science or a rhetoric of inquiry. He sought only to account for the form of modern science's history, which is not marked by linear progress, but by a succession of dominant frameworks, or what he termed paradigms.As I will argue in this essay, Kuhn's conception of paradigms is incompatible with rhetoric, except during scientific revolutions or under conditions of incommensurability. Incommensurability is a problematic category, however, for the opening it affords rhetoric ultimately undermines the very idea of paradigms. Consequently, locating rhetoric within normal science either undermines the very category distinctions that provide science with its specificity, or reduces rhetoric from a particular genre of discourse directed toward human agency to "rhetoricality," an aspect of all discourse. As we shall see, such blurring of genre distinctions is itself fundamentally [End Page 248] problematic, for science and rhetoric as discursive genres and practices are themselves incommensurable, even if not in Kuhn's terms. Rhetoric and revolution Kuhn observed that modern science is characterized by the bracketing of major disagreements regarding basic assumptions except during periods of "crisis." While pre-modern inquiry saw the contemporaneous co-existence of fundamentally incompatible frameworks, each competing for adherents, modern science normally excludes such divisions. Instead, modern science is characterized by a succession of frameworks. Only at periods of transition that are temporally bounded, for which Kuhn coined the term "scientific revolutions," does more than one framework have currency within a given sub-specialty (1962, 10-22).Kuhn accounts for this curious historical phenomenon by arguing that modern science is precisely constituted through an enforced bracketing of debates over first principles. The first principles, or paradigm, of any field are more than a set of epistemological or ontological assumptions. They are the set of rules constitutive of science as an activity. They orient scientists in their work, providing background assumptions, methodological principles, criteria of validity, a research agenda, and so on. The hegemony of a paradigm frees scientists from having to justify their work philosophically, socially, or politically. As Kuhn observes, normally science has the form of puzzle solving (35-42). He even likens it to a game, and like any game the participants need not concern themselves with the extrinsic validity of its rules or of the game itself. As Kuhn notes: Though many scientists talk easily and well about particular individual hypotheses that underlie a concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen at characterizing the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems and methods. If they have learned such abstractions at all, they show it mainly through their ability to do research. That ability can, however, be understood without recourse to hypothetical rules of the game. (47) Paradigms render modern science possible by producing practitioners and practices rather than by providing explicit knowledge of the principles such practices instantiate. In Foucault's language, we could say that practices are discursive formations (see Foucault 1972, 31-39). They are productive: [End Page 249] they give to knowledge... (shrink)