Rhetorical Listening (extremely long, non-linear post)

I’m going to pick up where I left off at the end of last post by explaining my understanding of Rhetorical Listening and why I think it’s perfect for my project on the discourses of autism. First, I want to talk about why the idea of listening appeals to me (as a method, as an anchor, as an exigence for my project). Then, I want to try to work through some complex ideas in Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening theory. Then, at the end, I’ll try to summarize everything.

I want to go back a few months to when I originally pitched this project to a few people–to my writing group, to the director, and to my second reader. It’s difficult to describe the profundity that led up to that pitch. I’ve said in several places that my worlds to collided, my personal life met my professional life. All the training I had in rhetoric, literacy, writing studies, new media (virtually every scholarly area I consider myself versed in) seemed to give me a certain take on events that were happening in my personal life: namely, the diagnosis of my son with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Rachel’s and my concerted effort to learn everything we could about autism and everything that goes along with it.

Within two weeks of JD’s diagnosis, I attended CCCC’s, and how’s this for serendipity: we checked in, went up to our hotel room, and I opened up my conference program to a panel about autism that started in fifteen minutes. I went downstairs to the panel and heard a take on autism that I’d never heard before. I was introduced to the idea of neurodiversity and the neurodiversity movement which argues that autism is a difference and not a disorder or disease or devastation or fill in the blank. I was amazed. In all the reading and research I’d done (for practical, not scholarly reasons), I had never come across arguments like this; I’d never know about this kind of advocacy. Sure, I’d paid attention to the causation debates, the questions of whether vaccines have anything to do with triggering autism. I knew about the different approaches to therapy and about some of the writhing debates surrounding them. I even knew that the notion of an “autism epidemic” might be a bit suspect, since methodologies and awareness had changed over the past couple decades. But, the panelists at CCCC complicated my thinking/understanding even more.

The next morning, I went to another panel on autism! In it, Ann Jurecic talked about students who are “on the spectrum” in writing classrooms. (In June, her article, “Neurodiversity,” which covers and theorizes her experience came out in College English.) Another panelist discussed visual representations of autistic people, both in magazines (like Time) and in movies (like The Squid and the Whale). In both panels, I was able to ask questions and join in the discussions that followed. Before CCCC, I had noticed the diversity of the rhetorical landscape. At CCCC, I learned more about it. But more importantly, I saw rhetoricians doing actual projects about the discourses of autism. I felt a very profound identification because some of my tacit and contemplated feelings about about the very discourses I was swimming in in my personal life were being articulated and theorized by rhetoricians. I could not quit thinking about it.

It was a couple days later, as Rachel and I were eating dinner at a restaurant off of Time Square, that I told her that I was changing my dissertation project to “autism.” I didn’t quite know how I would unpack autism as a rhetoric project, but I knew I wanted to be somewhere in that ballpark. When I got home from CCCC, I got to work. I didn’t want to screw it up by casually pitching this project idea to the director or anyone else. I wanted to be careful–to make a well thought out argument for why such a topic could be dissertation worthy. I spent a few days typing up a document that layed it out: all the debates and diversity amid the conversations about autism, all that I had learned and completely bought into about neurodiversity and social justice and acceptance of differences. I identified good guys and bad guys, us-es and thems. In my eagerness, I drew some pretty strong conclusions.

Then, I emailed it around. To my delight, the project idea was received well (I think I told five people about it). Importantly, both the director and the 2nd reader thought it had definite potential. At the same time, they both said “Whoa, Nelly!” (in their written comments). I remember the director (who’s very directive) told me not to draw conclusions, that I was getting way ahead of myself. She said I needed to ask research questions, set up a study, determine how I was going to collect that data, and what methodology I was going to use to make meaning out of my data. What a buzzkill, right?

Actually, she couldn’t have been more right. Instead of jumping to a claim–the what’s what–I needed to be asking why questions and how questions. Like, “Why are there so many different perspectives, so many different meanings of autism?” In fact, I remember that in the original document that I circulated, I had made the statement that, from my point of view, autism has so many meanings (i.e. vast array of manifestations) that it really has no meaning at all. The director circled that statement and in the margin wrote something to the effect of, “Sure it does [have meaning], you just have to find out how it means.”

She was absolutely right. Autism always has meaning, everytime it’s used. Many times it means in completely different ways. And that’s what I’m interested in. Not so much the single word, but the discourses that surround, envelop and invoke that word; the discourses that are often invisible. Between my own research, my experience at CCCC, my trips to various doctors, my roamings around the blogosphere, my experience at the ASA national conferences, I’ve heard many difference meanings of autism, often subtle, often not. Rarely are these different definitions involved in dialogue.

In my project, I’m not trying to push the one and only definition or view of autism. I want to understand how reasonable, or loving/caring, even charitable, often professional people can disagree or have different understandings about autism. That’s where Rhetorical Listening comes in. As I mentioned in the last post, I read Krista Ratcliffe’s book a couple years ago, and then again for my comps, and I thought it was one of the two best books I read in grad school. I had thought about it’s applicability to this project several times, but as I was mired in the writing/articulation-of-the-project process, I never quite had the clarity to see just how necessary it is. But, after the director and I discussed that my project was really emerging as a “rhetoric project,” it clicked. My projects was about listening, about trying to make sense of, about how world-views are often created by and embedded in language. Listening to these discourses, I think, has a lot to offer those who want to better understand rhetoric and also those who need to understand what’s going on with all the people talking about autism.

To summarize it kind of quickly before I delve into it, Ratcliffe defines Rhetorical Listening is several key ways. She first explains that listening is a neglected fourth leg of rhetoric (the other three being reading, writing, and speaking.) Listening is often assumed to be something everybody does already and not meritting study. So, a foundational premise of Rhetorical Listening is that the task of the rhetorician is to theorize not just writing/speaking but also listening. We should listen critically to our own discourse, the discourse of our academic research and the discourses of others.

Ratcliffe explains that listening can be beneficial trope to rhetoricians in many ways. Here’s several that are mentioned:

• Rhetorical Listening can generate dialogue and understanding across cultures and across differences.
• Rhetorical Listening can be a trope for interpretive invention: interpretive because we can learn about different standpoints; invention because we need heuristics to get to these other standpoints.
• Rhetorical Listening challenges us to become apprentices of discourse rather than masters of a discourse.
• Rhetorical Listening helps us to develop a broader cultural literacy “which affords opportunities for negotiating daily attitudes and actions, our politics and ethics.”
• Rhetorical Listening is necessary because we are all–rhetoricians especially–accountable for recognizing that “none of us lives autonomous lives . . . [and] all people have a stake in each other’s quality of life. . . [and that] our standpoints are not autonomous points of static stases but rather complex webs of dynamically intermingled cultural structures and subjective agency.”
• Rhetorical Listening allows us to “focus on the present, with attention to the resonances of the past.”
• Rhetorical Listening allows us to see ties between the personal (a person’s claim) and the political (a cultural logic).

Whew! (There’s a lot more, but that should give you the gist.)

Ratcliffe argues that rhetorical listening is about listening “with intent to hear troubled identifications, instead of listening for intent of an author” (46). To me, that means that discourse–an given utterance, even–is always messier than “author’s intent”–the simplistic “what is being said.” No, discourse is “troubled” by much more than that; there’s much more for us to hear than merely what is being said. In discourse, we can hear histories, power dynamics, cultural logics, ignorance, stereotypes, desperation. When we intend to do h(ear)ing, not just reading and receiving, we use our rhetorical and intellectual sensitivity to understand more fully. Rhetorical Listening is different from Rhetorical Speaking or Rhetorical Writing (that which so often gets the full attention of us rhetoricians). Rhetorical Listening is about putting understanding–not necessarily as the end in itself, but something to be achieved before persuasion.

Let me explain that a little more: Ratcliffe makes clear that Rhetorical Listening is not just about an “I’m OK, you’re OK” empathy disposition. It’s not a “can’t everybody just get along” type of statement. Rather it’s an ethical imperative, and “accountability logic” as Ratcliffe explains it, that can take us beyond guilt/blame, good guys/bad guys–beyond what she (following Heidegger) calls the divided logos–a discurive point of view that we have inherited in the West. She explains that Heidegger claimed that logos implied both speaking and listening, and, to that end, he explored

“the relationship between the Greek noun logos and its verb form legein, which in its fullest sense means both ’saying’ and ‘laying’ The second meaning, “laying,” entails laying others’ ideas in front of us in order to let these ideas lie before us. This laying-to-let-lie-before-us functions as a perservation of others’ ideas and, hence, as a site for listening’ (23-24)

In a divided logos, however,–which is a culture we have inherited, according to Heidegger and Ratcliffe–”’saying’ has assumed dominance and ‘laying’ (and, thus, listening) has been displaced” (24). What, I ask, are the consequences of displaced listening? I think there are many consequences to displaced listening. (Isn’t listening what we try do get students to do in writing classroom when we do ethnography projects, rhetorical case studies, exploratory essays?)

Though Ratcliff unpacks displaced listening and Rhetorical Listening by focusing on race, gender, and whitness, I think displaced listening can be seen really well by looking at autism. But, as soon as I say that, I recognize that it’s not that simple (and I’m not implying that Ratcliffe represents RL as that simple, either. To the contrary, she admits that it’s often messy). Why is listening displaced among autism stakeholders? I think it has a great deal to do with power dynamics, history, media, ethos issues, cultural logics, and many, many other complex things.

At the heart of Rhetorical Listening is the idea of identification, Burkes and others’, too. Of course, most rhetoricians are familiar with many of Kenneth Burke’s contributions to rhetoric, but especially his notion of identification. Burke theorized the psychological leg of rhetoric (i.e. what happens in people’s minds when persuasion happens) exhaustively. He threw a lot of stuff at the wall, but what sticks with most non-Burkean rhetoricians is this idea of identification or consubstantiality, a phenomenon in which one is persuaded or feels a solidarity with the rhetorical message on a subconscious level. Because rhetoric operates also at a subconscious level and is not limited to the an individual rhetor, Burke is able to broaden rhetoric as an inherently social phenomena. (I know that this is a drastic oversimplification here. Deal with it.)

The point is, because KB was the most important and influential and smartest (I argue) twentieth century rhetorician, his idea of identification (which is one of his most accessible ideas) gets a lot of circulation. However, Ratcliffe argues that Burkean identification is limited because it sacrifices all for commonality. That is, it foregrounds sameness and backgrounds differences. Put another way, any differences that might exist between speaker/audience, group/member, society/citizenship are sacrificed/cast-off/grayed-out for the sake of identification.

Of course, it is faulty to assume that any time identification happens it’s a clean, just, neutral, egalitarian phenomenon. The visual metaphor for identification is the Venn diagram, the overlapping circles, with the overlap representing the area of identification between individuals and/or communities. But the partial overlap of the circles begs the realization that the overlap is, in fact, partial. In what ways does that which is not inside the overlap affect the overlap? Probably more than we like to think.

However, rhetoricians, just like many other people, know that things like power differentials, prejudices, cultures affect world-views, memberships, and identifications. Because of this, Ratcliffe argues that we need to interrogate troubled identifications: not just identifications that are troubled by history or power or cultural differences, but also disidentifications in which “identification has been made and denied in the unconscious”–that is, when someone overtly does not identify with someone or something based on inaccurrate stereotypes or misunderstandings. Ratcliffe uses the example of Xenophobia “when, say, an American disavows an identification with a Syrian, which the American is only able to do because she has first identified with the Syrian, or, more precisely, with what she imagines a Syrian to be” (62). (Now, I haven’t exactly done the formal research yet, but I suspect (know) disidentifications abound amongst autism advocates!)

The big point is this: Identification is fallible, and we need to recognize that. Identifications often occurs at the expense of someone or some community, and disidentification often occurs based upon deeply flawed identifications. We should look closely at that particularly. As Ratcliffe puts it,

“If such disidentifications can be brought to consciousness (and obviously not all of them can), then places for negotiating coexisting commonalities and differences may emerge. Such a project is far from simple. For identifications and disidentifications are always evolving, always slippery.”

But where/how exactly does Rhetorical Listening fit in with identification? Besides listening for “trouble” among identifications and disidentifications, Ratcliffe encourages us to look at places of non-identification, as well–places where no agreement does not exist. In other words, let’s listen for differences not just commonality. Rather than (arrogantly?) graying out differences for the same of sameness, let’s make some space where we can appreciate, and study, and negotiate differences, too.

One way we might begin to listen better (to both difference and commonality) is to refresh our visual representations of identification–the psychological impact of discourse. Instead, of overlapping ciricles, ingestion, and the like, Ratcliffe suggests thinking of identification as occurring in an energy field. Because I like her explanation, I’m quoting at length:

Like rays of sunlight, discourses are invisible to the human eye and yet may simultaneously permeat multiple bodies as when millions of people view a movie, read the same book, or listen to a presidents speech. Depending on a person’s psychical and historical/cultural locations, he or she may internalize the discourses differently. In this way, a person is contually socialized into general cutlrual discourses while particularlized as a subject. . . .

Energy-field imagery clearly represents how such discursive identifications and disidentifications provide people lenses for seeing the world. Consider how the competing discourses of “the good mother” may permeate all our bodies and socialize us. Such discourses abound in the U.S. whether in books, movies, or families’ oral traditions. Though all these discourses are external to people’s bodies, they also permeate bodies and become embodied. Whether I identify or disidentify with these discourses, they affect my attitudes and daily interactions with my daughter, my husband, my friends, and even students in my classes. And because my daughter, husband, friends, and students are exposed to similar if not identical discourses, my encounters with these people are also informed by their encounters with “the good mother” discourses. These discourses are multiple with definitions differing depending upon the people and/or instutitions promoting each discourse. Moreover, these discourses compete with other socializing discourses, such as those of individualism and self-affirmation.

. . . Once discursive energy fields bcome embodied in people, the discourses are channeled and changed–sometimes greatly, sometimes minutely–by the bodies they occupy. In other words, people may reinforce, revise, and/or resist the discursive energy fields in which they find themselves.

Energy-field imagery makes visible the functions of metaphoric identifications and disidentifications that are sometimes mystified by images of interlocking circles or ingestion. First, energy-field imagery makes visible the doubled function of discourse: That is, discourse both socializes us and enables us to talk back to our socialization. Within the play of this energy-field imagery, discourses permeate us, and we permeat them, each being changed by the other. (my emphasis).

Ratcliffe also explains that we might get further down the road by going beyond what might be simplistic “metaphoric concepts of identification.” Identification can be conceived of by metaphorically, overlapping circles, gravity, ingestion, infection, or shared energy fields. As Ratcliffe uses Fuss to explain:

To the extent that identification is a desire to be like or as the other, to the extent, in other words, that identification is fundamentally a question of resemblance and replacement, metaphor provides the most direct point of entry into the internal workings of a complex cultural and psychical process. (67)

But, the thing about metaphor–any metaphor–is that it’s based on commonalities. Using our metaphors, we can identify and study these commonalities/identifications. But how might we study non-identification? i.e. when the the circles don’t overlap even though different parties are involved in discourses. I’d say that the energy-field metaphor gets a little further down that road, but we need to press further–find more techniques–if we’re going to listen to differences.

What if, instead of the metaphor trope, we used metonymy? As Ratcliffe explains, “The differences between these two figures are important. Metaphor foregrounds resemblances based on commonalities, thus backgrounding differences; metonym foregrounds resemblances based on juxtaposed associations, thus foregrounding both commonalities and differences.

Metonymy signals a juxtaposition rather than overlap or shared space. Using the metonymy trope, we can acknowledge can be associated/juxtaposed/bound by common discourses, even if they don’t identify with each other. We can recognize a margin between. A margin between, Ratliffe says, can “

provide a place of pause, a place of reflection, a place that invites people to admit that gaps exist. Admissions of gaps may take the form of I don’t know you,” “I don’t know what I don’t know about you,” or even “I don’t know that I don’t know that you exist”–whetehr you you is a person, place, thing, or idea. In some cases, rhetorical listening in the place of non-identification may precede new identifications; in other cases, it enables us to revisit former identifications and disidentifications . . . .

What’s important is the process of non-identification, however, is that people recognize the partiality of our visions and listen for that-which can-not-be-seen, even if it cannot yet be heard. Althought the tactic of listening rhetorically in metonymic places of non-identification cannot guarantee successful results in every situation, the concept of non-identification is imporatnt to rhetoric and composition studies becuase it maps a place, a possibility, for consciously asserting our agency to engage cross-cultural rhetorical exchanges across both commonalities and differences (72-73).

Metonymy allows us to see “subjects who are juxtaposed but not necessarily on common ground, as subjects who are encountering the same socializing discourses but processing them very differently”–or even slightly differently. Either way, difference is not negated.

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Okay, so this post has gotten a bit out of hand. But, really, I’ve just needed to type through some of this stuff. In my next post, I’m going to discuss autism specifically and how rhetorical listening might be applied to its discourses.