1 - Ideology as rhetoric

Summary

When a bit of talking takes place, just what is doing the talking? Just where are the words coming from?… An “ideology” is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it.

Burke, LSA

Rhetoric has assumed a prominence unimaginable a generation ago. True, it is still mentioned pejoratively in everyday conversation and the media. But among theorists one now sometimes runs across the opposite extreme. Stanley Fish, for instance, in Doing What Comes Naturally, tells us that its basic message is that “we live in a rhetorical world.” Normally not part of the training of contemporary theorists, rhetoric is instead something encountered on the terrain of contemporary discourse, where it sometimes is and sometimes is not recognized by name. Samuel Ijsseling finds appeals to rhetoric – “direct or indirect” – in strategies used to bring traditional philosophy into question in “Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, and… in Heidegger and the various French authors who have been inspired by these thinkers, e.g. J. Derrida, R. Barthes, M. Foucault, J. Lacan and L. Althusser.”

Fish writes in “Rhetoric,” published for the first time in Doing, of some of the theorists responsible for the current rise of rhetoric, including “Kenneth Burke, whose ‘dramatism’ anticipates so much of what is considered avant-garde today.”