We are the Blog...Resistance if Futile

Of the four articles we had to read this week, three of them (Aune, Shome, and Blair et al) had to do with incorporating marginalized voices into the discipline of Rhetoric, but one of them (Asante) dealt directly with a reconceptualization of the discipline entire. Asante calls his theory “Afrocentric,” which does not primarily speak to a black or African enthronement of hegemony, but rather of a new way of conceiving Rhetoric and Rhetoric’s importance as a scholarly subject. Asante chooses “Afrocentrism” to describe a relational way dealing with people and subjects. Rather than seeing academia as a compartmentalized, cordoned-off, ice cube tray of an organized phenomenological structure, Asante re-envisions academia (and consequently Rhetoric) as one organic part of a larger organic whole. This larger whole is namely humanity.
Asante poses that in the scholar’s zeal to be smart, to advance, to distinguish him or herself from her peers, and to definitively break from other elements of the grander social tapesry, that universal human characteristics get overlooked. The fact of the matter is that from John Wayne to John Wayne Gacey, we are all of the species human—from the best of us to the worst of us, from the gendered to the transgendered, the righteous to the infamous, the remembered and the forgotten. Asante points out that in Rhetoric this very simple and yet often railed against, vitriol-inspiring truth, is especially done a disservice. Not only does Rhetoric decide what is legitimate and illegitimate within its own scholarly position, it also cuts up communication like a fisherman chums the ocean. Rhetors decide where the boundaries are, the values of, the intents, the functions, and any number of critical, judgment-generating propositions which de-threads the human tapestry until one thread is seen to be so separate that certainly they must seem to come from different cloths. Hickson, among others, push universal human characteristics off the wall, and then claim to have discovered a mass grave of rhetorical body parts ripe for dissection.
I believe in the humanizing, communication-inclusiveness, of Asante. It strikes me that for Rhetoric to finally stop quibbling with itself and get down to business—the business of finding truth, inspiring minds, and bettering people—the subject must find some sort of Master or Uber Rhetoric which includes ALL MODES OF DISCOURSE PERFORMED BY HUMANS. This means the gays…the women…the blacks…the Marxists…the post-colonials…the cheese and mayonnaise eating prig like Hickson…and whoever else can string two words together in a cogent fashion. Rhetoric does not have to be nice, official, sanctioned, proper, or anything other than communicative. Once this is accomplished, I believe Rhetoric can be seen as the unifying force that it is and then begin to tackle a second goal: coming at one’s thoughts, one’s culture, one’s identity, and these qualities all other humans have in different and hopefully more productive ways. Rhetoric should be about asking many, many, questions, instead of being the tin star of the speech police.
I am reminded of Susan Jarratt’s Rereading the Sophists (Hi Susan, first-time caller, longtime fan!), and her desire to break down the classically inspired snobbery of method, action, and participation that led to over 2000 years of elitism when it came to viewing what human knowledge is or isn’t. “We must reject system-based normalities for those which cut across or rise above specific systems. Communication man by his very nature is a creature apart from the narrow confines of a limiting view of the world” (CRT 557). What Asante poses and I herald is a Master Rhetoric inclusive of all human communication. This might be a system, but I would envision it as a system that includes all others—the way the universe includes everything in it. Only then, perhaps, humanity can begin to examine our similarities rather than to point fingers and missiles at our differences.