Thinking about my diss., subject-position, Rhetorical Listening Gloss

At one point in my prospectus, I say something like, “autism cause a convergence between my personal and professional life.”  I say something like “I was asking questions about autism discourse that I learned to ask by studying rhetorical theory.”  Really, I wasn’t trying to over-think it, it just happened.  Anyway, I’m now trying to smartly articulate exactly what those questions were . . .  a project for another day.

 

Anyway . ..

 

            There is no doubt that this project on autism occurred to me because subject-position as both a parent and rhetorician.  I suppose everyone’s projects and undertakings become salient places for inquiry because of places they’ve been and experiences they’ve had.  So, I’m not all that different.  But I still think that this convergence of the most important consideration in my personal life (JD) with the most important thing in my professional life (the diss.) is worth wringing out a bit.  Reason being, I think my personal narrative  (all the listening I’ve had to do) is the conduit or the reason why Rhetorical Listening feels so right. 

            But, I also want to this realization of the powerful influence of subject position is important, too.  In “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own,” Jacqueline Jones Royster argues for that subject position is important and is something we should recognize and foreground in our scholarship.  Here’s Royster, who articulates it so well, and so perfectly for my project, I think:

Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging dialectical perspectives.  Subjectivity as a defining value pays attention dynamically to context, ways of knowing, language abilities, and experience, and by doing so it has a consequent potential to deepen, broaden, and enrich out interpretive views in dynamic ways as well. . . . In a fundamental way, this enterprise supports the sense of rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies as a field of study that embraces the imperative to understand truths and consequences of language more fully. (29-30)  

What a great word: Kaliedoscopically!  Yes, it’s clear that rhetoric, literacy, writing studies—all those methods by which I’ve learned to ask questions can—should—go there: into autism.  If you pay attention, you start to notice that (mainstream media) public discourse about is pretty tenuous, the same old oversimplified thing all the time.  But, dig a little deeper, you find that it’s dynamic, polemical, dense, vibrant, intractable.  It needs to be listened to deeply, objectively, subjectively, passionately.  After reading Kurk’s post, I feel like I want to say that it needs to be contemplated and enjoyed, too.

 

Okay, below, I’m trying to articulate what/why rhetorical listening (in 3 pages or less—orders from the director because she knows I’m long winded and I’ll go on for 10-15 pages if left to my own devices.)  Probably not my final draft.  Just the work I did today.  Thought I’d post it.

 

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            The need for more listening has been a primary focus of a few rhetorical theories that look to bridge differences, overcome silences, or reestablish rhetoric as a positive social tool.  One notable example is Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, the landmark text in which Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike appropriate the techniques of psychotherapist Carl Rogers to develop a rhetorical approach that facilitates understanding through the elimination of threat. Young, Becker, and Pike’s approach necessitates that interlocutors each attempt to first demonstrate that the other’s position is understood and represented fairly thus enabling communication and, perhaps, persuasion.

            In a kindred way, Cheryl Glenn examines silences that occurs as a result of threat and uneven power dynamics. Glenn looks at times in history when silence has been used as a necessary, and intentional, rhetorical technique, and she also looks at times when silence has been a forced result of power or cultural dynamics (i.e. when people have been silenced).  Approaches to rhetoric like Glenn’s invites us to “listen” for voices that are not present in our rhetorical theories and traditions.

            In another attempt to infuse listening into rhetoric, Wayne Booth advocates for “Listening Rhetoric” in his final book The Rhetoric of Rhetoric.  According to Booth, Listening Rhetoric aims to “pursue to truth behind our differences.”  Booth divides listening rhetoric into five degrees, including hope for dialogue (LR-a), dialogue despite the beliefs of the interlocutor (LR-b), listening as a strategy for “Winning Rhetoric” (LR-c), self-censorship (LR-d), and dogmatic listening (LR-e).  Each variations foregrounds listening as a foundation for rhetorical productivity.

            While Young, Becker and Pike, Glenn, and Booth all take important strides in establishing the necessity of listening, Krista Ratcliffe theorizes listening most thoroughly in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. She argues that listening is an all but neglected leg of rhetoric and has not been overtly theorized by rhetoricians in the same ways that speaking and writing and even reading have been. She notes that it’s often assumed that everyone knows how to listen already and so it doesn’t merit studying.  But Ratcliffe argues that this inattention to listening has created a society that privileges utterance at the expense of understanding.  As a result, many of the differences among people or groups in society seem so irreconcilable that attempts for dialogue or negotiation are nonexistent.  Even when people are willing to understand and negotiate differences, it is difficult.  The breakdown of listening between interlocutors perpetuate person, cultural, and political divides that are nearly impossible to overcome through argument alone. Thus, the difficulty of listening is exacerbated a culture that undervalues it and, hence, under-theorizes it.  For these reasons, Ratcliffe demonstrates that listening is a rhetorical skill that people must consciously engage in and work to sharpen.

            Ratcliffe describes Rhetorical Listening as a “trope for interpretive invention:” interpretive because by listening we can we can learn about different standpoints; inventive because we often need to take a heuristical approach to fully understand other points of view and cultural logics.  Rhetorical Listening implies a “stance of openness” that leads to a more productive “code of cross-cultural conduct” (1). But, as Ratcliffe explains, Rhetorical Listening is far more complicated that simply learning about other individuals or cultures or simply being willing to listen.  As she shows, when we examine other points of view, we discover messy, complicated identifications that are entrenched in language and history, knots that are not easily untangled.  In Rhetorical Listening, however, she shows how rhetorical listening can be employed to 1) better understand self and other; 2) make one more accountable for one’s point of view and claims; 3) better understand commonalities and differences; 4) recognize that claims must be understood in the context of their cultural logics.

            Of course, rhetoricians are familiar with the importance identification has for persuasion, identity and community, with Kenneth Burke’s notion of consubstantiality being the most well-known and influential point of reference.  But Ratcliffe points out that notions of Burke’s theory of identification foregrounds commonality at the expense of differences.  Burke teaches us much about why people come together by feeling a common bond that is often subconscious.  Ratcliffe notes that we often represent this kind of identification visually with overlapping circles, the overlap representing the identification.  Using this model, differences are literally marginalized; they are, ostensibly, unimportant because commonality has established identification.

            But Ratcliffe points out that only recognizing points of identification is insufficient because identifications are often are often troubled or wrought by uneven power dynamics, history, or ignorance.  Perhaps even more trouble are what Ratcliffe calls disidentifications: that is, times when people or groups consciously choose not to identify with another person or group based on a flawed subconscious notion (Xenophobia is Ratcliffe’s example of this).  In other words, there are times when subconscious identification is affected by ignorance, where “identification has been made and denied in the unconscious.”  In short, Ratcliffe points out that identification is fallible and must be rigorously interrogated in the places it is found.

            Even more important to Ratcliffe, however, are the places where identification does not exist, where cultural discourses diverge and non-identification occurs.  Ratcliffe argues that we must be accountable to examine our differences, not just our sameness, because only by appreciating our differences can we negotiate different standpoints.  Discourses, she says, are like rays of light: invisible to the eye but simultaneously permeating many bodies.  We must be mindful not only of what deeply ingrained dominant discourses tell us about people and cultures, but also how these discourses have affected and been internalized by individuals today and throughout history, how discourses subtly socialize us into ways of thinking, for ill or good. 

            Interrogating the identifications, disidentifications, and non-identifications of contemporary autism discourse will explain both the size and diversity of autism advocacy.  Advocacy efforts are an especially fertile place to find overt identifications, since they represent efforts to concertedly act on behalf of another party.  In order to make the arguments that advocacy requires, a collective view of the cause/exigencies/need must be put forth.  In the case of autism, advocates must account for autism as a devastation, a difference, or somewhere in between.  Additionally, offer standpoints that suggest and ethos, sound evidence, or authority to speak.  The utter incompatibilities between many strands of autism advocacy—the disagreements that exist between conscientious people who have a desire to improve the lives of people with autism—suggest that rhetorical listening is both a warranted and responsible approach for someone like myself who want to understand these discourses for personal as well as academic reasons.