James Arnt Aune

The Scholastic Fallacy, Habitus, and Symbolic Violence: Pierre Bourdieu and the Prospects of Ideology Criticism

One disturbing feature of academic discussions of ideology or hegemony is a lack of reflexivity. In other words, there is an implicit but unjustified assumption that the academic has somehow escape...

Modernity as a Rhetorical Problem: Phronēsis, Forms, and Forums in Norms of Rhetorical Culture

Th omas B. Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture (1993, 6) remains both a masterly synthesis of previous constructive work in rhetorical theory and the essential starting point for anyone committed to reconciling the practical impulses of Aristotelian rhetoric, ethics, and politics with the critical imperatives of modernity. In what follows, I try to make a very simple point about Farrell’s recuperation of Aristotelianism: he neglects matters of social causation and institutional design that were essential to Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric. In turn, by displacing the social in favor of the cultural—a displacement characteristic of much recent work in the human sciences (Schudson 1997)—Farrell lacks a coherent account of the gap between the normative aspirations of classical rhetoric and the empirical characteristics of public life in modern liberal democracies. Th e problem appears most clearly in chapter 7 of Norms : “Criticism, Disturbance, and Rhetorical Community.” Farrell defi nes culture as “the common defi nition of places for the invention and perpetuation of meaning. A culture off ers to those who live in it symbols and families of practices that Modernity as a Rhetorical Problem: Phronēsis , Forms, and Forums in Norms of Rhetorical Culture

Democratic Style and Ideological Containment

In the introduction to Political Style, Robert Hariman draws an analogy between political style and musical style: “It is easy to think of the world of music according to basic, collective styles of composition,” including baroque, romantic, and modern classical music, and country, rock, and jazz popular music. Political style, like musical style, “draws on universal elements of the human condition and symbolic repertoire but organizes them into a limited, customary set of communicative designs.”1 Since Hariman’s book was designed to start rather than conclude a conversation, I want to modify and extend his view of style in three ways. First, because of Hariman’s interest in constructing a provisional set of ideal types in the Weberian sense, he pays little attention to the sociological basis of political style, thus missing the opportunity to connect the analysis of political style to the critique of ideology. Second, it may be useful to pursue a deeper analysis of style in music and the other fine arts as a way of making sense of political style. Third, because classical rhetoric separated invention, disposition, delivery, and style, a more thoroughly modern or postmodern understanding of style would require redefining it as form—thus incorporating elements of argument, organization, linguistic structure, trope, and performance. In this essay, I argue that the role of rhetorical form in a political style is to arouse physical and emotional responses in an audience and then exploit those responses to maintain or change the current distribution of power. Because the democratic style exhibits the physical and emotional aspects of rhetoric in its most intense way, democratic style functions within political style generally as a perennial enemy to elite power that must be resisted or contained. In Counter-Statement, Kenneth Burke famously defined “form” as the creation of an appetite in the mind of an audience.2 This appetite may be filled with a number of different types of form: the syllogistic form of the detective novel, the incidental form of a stylistic device such as antithesis, the conventional form of the Christian Eucharist, or the qualitative form of the wellcrafted novel, as in Tolstoy’s use of railroad references to foreshadow Anna’s tragic end in Anna Karenina. Burke’s notion of form thus integrates the traditional concerns of the canons of invention, disposition, and style.3 Burke’s discussion of incidental form illustrates the rhythmic, bodily basis of rhetoric and aesthetics: when one hears the first clause of an antithesis, one feels compelled to complete the figure with the second clause. Although this

Justice and Argument in Judaism: A D'var Torah on Shofetim

In the form of a commentary on passages from the Torah and the Talmud about the death penalty, this essay identifies unique characteristics of the Jewish concepts of justice and of argumentative dialogue. The Jewish concepts of justice and argument potentially serve as a useful corrective to some current efforts by conservative Protestants to bring religion into the public sphere.

Witchcraft as Symbolic Action in Early Modern Europe and America

One of the stranger beliefs about witches in the heyday of the European witch hunts was that they had nearly complete control over the human imagination. Their power of praestigium, or illusion, extended to imaginary castration. In Malleus Malificarum (the “hammer of witches”), that influential compendium of witch-hunting lore by the Dominican priest Heinrich Kramer, we find the following tale, told entirely without irony:

Review essay: The work of rhetoric in the age of digital dissemination

CREATING A NEW CIVILIZATION: THE POLITICS OF THE THIRD WAVE. By Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1995; pp. 112.

A Ciceronian Sunburn: A Tudor Dialogue on Humanistic Rhetoric and Civic Poetics (review)

14.95; paper

The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra: A Reply to Ron Greene

7.95. DATA TRASH: THE THEORY OF THE VIRTUAL CLASS. By Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein. New York: St. Martins Press, 1994; pp. 160.

The Argument from Evil in the Rhetoric of Reaction

16.95. AN ECOLOGY OF EMBODIED INTERACTION: TURN‐TAKING AND INTERACTIONAL SYNTAX IN FACE‐TO‐FACE ENCOUNTERS. By Leslie Hope Jarmon. Diss. University of Texas at Austin, 1996. CD‐ROM. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1996. THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE. By the Critical Arts Ensemble. New York: Autonomedia, 1994; pp. 85.

Three Justices in Search of Historical Truth: Romance and Tragedy in the Rhetoric of Establishment Clause Jurisprudence

7.00. THE ELECTRONIC WORD: DEMOCRACY, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE ARTS. By Richard A. Lanham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; pp. xv + 285.