Post by jjnickell on Mar 23, 2016 0:04:45 GMT
Something that has long bothered me in my understanding of rhetorical scholarship has been the question of what, if any, forms of meaning-making are excluded by the term “rhetoric.” While traditional or neo-classical rhetoricians might have an easier time drawing boundaries between rhetoric and other discourse or sense of meaning, it seems that most critical rhetoricians (including myself, certainly) define rhetoric broadly to refer to any means through which meaning is produced or negotiated. I don’t dispute such conceptions, but as the beginning of this post suggests: What is NOT rhetoric, then? Indeed, this is something Scott and I were discussing just yesterday.
Now, after reading Ahmed’s piece, I think I might have an answer to this question. She painstakingly defines the affect of happiness early in her essay, and then draws a distinction between this more phenomenological concept and social conceptions of happiness. The experience or orientation of something like happiness is not rhetorical. Her example of the man who likes grapes is illustrative of this: the man likes grapes, their taste brings him happiness, and as a result, he attaches meaning to the grapes. While this is an example of the negotiation of meaning, it is not in and of itself rhetorical. Rhetoric doesn’t enter the picture until people begin to use their senses of affect to organize themselves in terms of their alignment for or against different objects/concepts due to the affect those objects/concepts produce. Of course, then, failure to understand affect in the same way as certain others results in social disagreement, alienation and marginalization, the formation of disparate groups, etcetera – all the implications we rhetoricians love to discuss.
Does this make sense? For me, reading this produced a lightbulb type of moment, but: Am I just pointing out the obvious? Finally, is there another way to understand what is NOT rhetorical?
Now, after reading Ahmed’s piece, I think I might have an answer to this question. She painstakingly defines the affect of happiness early in her essay, and then draws a distinction between this more phenomenological concept and social conceptions of happiness. The experience or orientation of something like happiness is not rhetorical. Her example of the man who likes grapes is illustrative of this: the man likes grapes, their taste brings him happiness, and as a result, he attaches meaning to the grapes. While this is an example of the negotiation of meaning, it is not in and of itself rhetorical. Rhetoric doesn’t enter the picture until people begin to use their senses of affect to organize themselves in terms of their alignment for or against different objects/concepts due to the affect those objects/concepts produce. Of course, then, failure to understand affect in the same way as certain others results in social disagreement, alienation and marginalization, the formation of disparate groups, etcetera – all the implications we rhetoricians love to discuss.
Does this make sense? For me, reading this produced a lightbulb type of moment, but: Am I just pointing out the obvious? Finally, is there another way to understand what is NOT rhetorical?
