D'Angelo and Empire

I have been reading around in the 601 blogs tonight, and one particular thread caught my attention: the one that Terri and Trish are pursuing on their blogs about D'Angelo's article. I posted a response to Trish's blog that I'll take a bit further (and I excerpt it below, too) What got me worked up in the D'Angelo piece was the theory of rhetoric that was linked to his meditation on consciousness and composing. There is a universalist notion of rhetoric behind this. I'll repeat the line from his essay: “The function of rhetoric, therefore, is to guide individuals who are distinct and separate toward greater unity and identification of purpose and action” (D'Angelo 148).

This is interesting statement in a time of global empire, globalization, and war. It is interesting in relation to the repeated cycles of genocide in the 20th/21st century (see my entry on the Armenian genocide). It is interesting statement in light of continued interest and commitment to human rights discourses in the face of repeated denials and travesties committed against human rights. I am speaking of large trends and patterns, but I think we have to think big if we are to take on D'Angelo's big statement about rhetoric's function. I want to test it not only in its own context (1978 and a time when composition studies is forming research paradigms and professionalizing), but I want to test it against our times and also against its own times. In D'Angelo's case it was the Cold War, continued after-shocks of the Nixon Presidency, Carter in office, the Iran Hostage "crisis," feminism, putting into practice key civil rights legislation, higher education contraction and expansion at the same time. So a desire for unity and universalism in a Western framework, but that framework fragments and breaks up into ruins as we move further toward the end of the 20th century with the fall of the Soviet Empire and the emergence of the U.S. as the sole global superpower,

So there are interesting tensions here: a tension between a universalist and unifying notion of rhetoric and a world that is increasingly fragmented by economic disparities, war, genocide, preventable epidemics (preventable if there is political and economic will). This is, I guess, my "dark" blog post. I prefer a rhetoric of solidarity across differences rather than a rhetoric of unity. This aligns me with the discussion of the "new rhetoric" and "social epistemic rhetoric" that is being discussed on Tanya's blog.




FROM MY POST to Trish:

Your ruminations are useful here, Trish. It is useful also to think of how the field of neuroscience reframes many of the issues that D’Angelo raises. What does current brain research show that supports and defeats these arguments?

I think at base here is also a question about what D’Angelo thinks rhetoric is for, and this fits in with his views of mind. He argues that the goal for evolution if “hothing less than universal convergence” (148). Rhetoric must also move toward universal convergence: “The function of rhetoric, therefore, is to guide individuals who are distinct and separate toward greater unity and identification of purpose and action” (148). That sounds pretty good if you are a universalist and you want to talk about mankind as a universal category, but is it really the case? Isn’t rhetoric’s purpose to also create division? To separate and name differences, create identification with some groups and division with others? I’m thinking of Burke here and thinking of contemporary politics in the U.S. and on the global stage. A “rhetoric of Empire” could be that universal impulse–do we want that?

Quoting Teilhard, D’Angelo argues that “the men (yes, men) of the future will form, in some way, but one single consciousness” (148). This is the dream of a greater humanity united by a set of values and a common consciousness. Yet we can see that we are so far from that right now that a statement like that seems like a strange note in a bottle that has floated in from a distant shore.

Recognizing that he can accused of evolutionary determinism, D’Angelo quickly defends by noting that free choice is possible. But isn’t choice conditioned by economics, politics, social contexts, etc? I go back to the mid-section of the article and think that he needs to stick to some of Neumann’s insights about the egocentricity of “mankind.” The assertion of the will of the few on the wills of the many. This is not what Neumann said exactly, but he seems to have a bleaker view that I find appealing given D’Angelo’s tendency to wax universal.