Post by jjnickell on Feb 3, 2016 8:20:42 GMT
Sadly, it looks like McKerrow and postmodernism are catching a lot of shade in these articles. Greene (1998) is pretty explicit in his dislike for McKerrow’s politics of representation. Rhetoric can (and does) have materialist consequences, but it is symbolic at the end of the day; thus, it must inherently function through representation. Greene prefers the Foucauldian notion of rhetoric as technology, but doesn’t offer much of a justification as to why we scholars must be wed to Foucault – something that seems problematic to me, considering that he bashes McKerrow for not more precisely drawing on Foucault when discussing power, freedom, and knowledge just because McKerrow uses those terms. Greene’s focus is clearly on processes by which rhetoric may be used in structures of governance, but his drawing on Althusser and structuralism fails to acknowledge the source of the material apparatuses through which governance occurs. Neither RSAs nor ISAs are inherent to groups of people; they are constructed out of ideological principles that form the bases of society, and how else would these principles become expressed and shared if not through rhetoric? I will never claim that materiality is not important, or that it should be ignored. However, I think several authors would do well to consider that material structures come to be through rhetorical force, even if they later become sources of rhetoric themselves. (the preceding was obviously written based on a fundamental misreading of Greene's first piece).
Cloud’s (1994) characterization of postmodernism (p. 150) is also pretty unfair. Postmodernism does not seek to deny the existence of the real world. As she explains in the previous section in her essay, a bomb dropped on Baghdad civilians had a real impact even if a critic was not able to see it; however, this is not a statement with which a postmodernist would disagree. Rather, a postmodernist perspective acknowledges that while that bomb dropped and had a tangible impact on life, it would not have a meaningful impact on me unless I was present or learned about it through the news or word of mouth – in which cases, I would derive meaning from the experience through my own subjective perception of reality that is influenced by frameworks of thought generated through shared ideologies. In other words, postmodernism does not dismiss the real world. It interrogates the processes through which we make sense of phenomena. Moreover, the way we make sense of phenomena guides decisions that we make when speaking and acting, which in turn can result in material consequences. I think McKerrow and Brummett are pretty clear on these questions.
Cloud’s (1994) characterization of postmodernism (p. 150) is also pretty unfair. Postmodernism does not seek to deny the existence of the real world. As she explains in the previous section in her essay, a bomb dropped on Baghdad civilians had a real impact even if a critic was not able to see it; however, this is not a statement with which a postmodernist would disagree. Rather, a postmodernist perspective acknowledges that while that bomb dropped and had a tangible impact on life, it would not have a meaningful impact on me unless I was present or learned about it through the news or word of mouth – in which cases, I would derive meaning from the experience through my own subjective perception of reality that is influenced by frameworks of thought generated through shared ideologies. In other words, postmodernism does not dismiss the real world. It interrogates the processes through which we make sense of phenomena. Moreover, the way we make sense of phenomena guides decisions that we make when speaking and acting, which in turn can result in material consequences. I think McKerrow and Brummett are pretty clear on these questions.
