What makes this rhetorical?

Hello, everyone.

Some of your comments and questions during today's class discussion left me thinking, hard, about how we might justify community-based research as "rhetorical." Of course, Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater advocate for most writing activity as rhetorical, and they understand fieldworking and ethnography as persuasive acts. But I'd like to synthesize some ideas from your blog posts and today's class discussion in order to answer that question robustly, perhaps to help us think differently about persuasion. Several of you pointed out a potential dissonance between persuasion and our attempts to be objective, transparent, and ethical:

• Community-based research (as it is enacted through fieldworking and ethnography) is rhetorical because it relies on a careful negotiation of both "emic" and "etic" perspectives, relating to the perspective of an insider while also representing the perspective of an outsider to a culture (FW 16, 17, 20, 76, 500).

• It involves a systematic training in "seeing", i.e., through Samuel Scudder's principle of "looking at your fish" (FW 86-90) and various other notetaking methodologies. This seems to resonate with the Aristotelian notion that rhetoric is "the ability, [in particular cases] to see the available means of persuasion" (Rhetoric, published 32 BCE, translated into Latin in 13th century, later translated into English).

• It involves the shaping of discourses for various purposes and audiences (FW 75), and hence even a process like notetaking can be done so as to show more explicitly how those discourses are shaped.

• It implies a structure and a form, which is to say that it contains a series of steps or processes that build on one another toward an argumentative end (are end-focused).

• It is transformative, especially inasmuch as it may allow a researcher to adapt or revise her beliefs or a writer to adapt or revise his perspectives.

• It is triadic, which means it is grounded simultaneously in credibility (ethos), in the emotions and psychology of the audience (pathos), and in patterns of reasoning (logos) (FW 75). This seems suspiciously like our triangulation principle, which we have only just begun to understand.

• It is, by and large, an ethical endeavor, which is not to say moral, but rather concerned with the relationship between reader, writer, and subject and with making those relationships visible. (Maybe this is why we should understand all of the positions that act on any moment, experience, or reading.)

• It involves the articulation of nascent ideas (FW 75).

• It is reflexive or promotes reflexivity (FW 88).

• It considers the possibility that dissonances can be made from language and delivered through language.

That is all I can come up with, but I'd love to hear more of your justifications, either in class or by commenting below. Thank you for the mental challenge.

-Professor Graban