Brad Lucas

Department of English
University of Nevada, Reno
brad@unr.edu

 

Thomas Rosteck, ed. At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. New York: Guilford, 1999.

 

The thirteen essays in Thomas Rosteck’s At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies discuss connections between the practices that constitute rhetorical studies and those that constitute cultural studies. Like any convergence of pathways, this book offers a place where travelers with different agendas and histories can meet and exchange ideas, but true to its metaphor, the intersection is also a locus of accidents, collisions, and wrong turns.

 

Of course, to begin such an enterprise, we would need to articulate not only a working definition of “rhetorical studies,” but also one of “cultural studies.” Working definitions of rhetoric are, at best, contingent upon rhetoric’s uses and the particular communities that claim its rich tradition and various branches of knowledge.¹ Rhetoric has been envisioned as an artful skill and a means of persuasion. It has also been conceived in terms of its dialectic counterpart: as an epistemological tool, as a means of knowing. A range of definitions emerges not only from the classical tradition, but also from the newer conceptions of rhetoric that position it in a postmodern age. Edward P. J. Corbett defines rhetoric as traditional “instances of formal, premeditated, sustained, monologue in which a person seeks to exert an effect on an audience” (3), whereas Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg offer the following possibilities for rhetoric: “the practice of oratory; the study of the strategies of effective oratory; the use of language, written or spoken, to inform or persuade; the study of the persuasive effects of language; the study of the relation between language and knowledge; the classification and use of tropes and figures; and, of course, the use of empty promises and half truths as a form of propaganda” (i). Among academics, as among the general public, rhetoric continues to mean any number of things. But while At the Intersection allows for this slippage in the term, it establishes some constraints by directing most of its discursive traffic toward those conceptions of rhetoric that have most relevance to communication studies.

 

But if rhetorical studies represents an uncertain or unstable sort of “discipline,” cultural studies often seems to escape the notion of discipline altogether. Perhaps this is its strength. According to Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg, cultural studies is more than an interdisciplinary enterprise: it is “actively and aggressively anti-disciplinary…. Cultural studies draws from whatever fields are necessary to produce the knowledge required for a particular project” (2). There is more to cultural studies than mere disciplinary mobility, however. Cultural studies is often self-reflexive, radically political, subversive of dominant institutions, and transnational in loyalties. With clear methodological attention to local conditions and particular contexts, cultural studies does not discriminate as to its object of study: in its most inclusive conceptions, it treats everything as a potential text to be read within the confines and discourses of various contextual configurations. While rhetoric pretends to hold court over any facet of existence that involves language and persuasion, cultural studies seems to claim all dimensions of being in the world as fair game for analysis, interpretation, and critique. Clearly, any discussion that brings rhetoric and cultural studies into play is bound to be messy: the intersection is busy, and traffic from both directions has the green light, so to speak.

 

Given these considerable difficulties, At the Intersection holds together with a surprisingly clear progression and conceptual unity. Fortunately, Rosteck acknowledges the particular scope of the essays, stating that the collection “emphasizes ‘textual’ approaches rather than either production-based studies or more anthropological perspectives on ‘lived culture'” (ix). Moreover, he asserts that At the Intersection aims to instigate discussions about rhetorical studies and cultural studies, rather than to lead to definitive conclusions or offer the final word on either project (or their possible combinations). He highlights the difficulties of bringing rhetoric and cultural studies into focus, but suggests common ground between them:

 

both aiming to reveal the relationship between expressive forms and the social order; both existing within the field of discursive practices; both sharing an interest in how ideas are caused to materialize in texts; both concerned with how these structures are actually effective at the point of “consumption”; and both interested in grasping such textual practices as forms of power and performance. (2)

 

What drives most of the essays is not a desire to synthesize the two into some ur-discipline; however, the possibility of a “cultural rhetorical studies” is offered as an “ideal relationship […] of mutual critique and transformation” (22). Rosteck explains that, taken as a whole, these discussions of cultural studies and rhetorical studies explain some of the costs and benefits of disciplinarity, the political dimensions of such studies, and the ever-pressing questions of methodology (3-20).

 

Each of the book’s essays is worthy of attention. In many respects, At the Intersection provides something for everyone, a convergence of roads of interest: studies of cultural artifacts, from tourist sites to popular film and works of art; discussions of theory and practice for rhetorical or cultural studies; and the disciplinary concerns of communication studies. Ultimately, the intersection of these audiences holds the greatest potential, and in many respects At the Intersection highlights the obstacles cultural studies faces in attempting to maneuver through the disciplinary entrenchments that beleaguer higher education.² The collection is organized in two sections: “Part I: Reading the Popular and the Political: Converging Trajectories of Textuality, Method, Context,” and “Part II: Envisioning the Alternatives.” A review of these essays according to their approach or merit could convey a better sense of the collection’s content, but the progression of the discussions is itself rhetorical, and of course, it reveals much about Rosteck’s assumptions about language, audience, and culture in general.

 

Carole Blair and Neil Michel’s “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial” begins the collection–with a readily identifiable cultural studies approach–by investigating the Astronauts Memorial at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Their initial analysis implements the rhetorical tools necessary to “read” the cultural text as a memorial, and takes additional steps to specify how it reflects (literally and figuratively) the ideology of NASA and invokes the larger tropes of the American space race. Blair and Michel are self-reflexive about their critical practice and the recursive nature of their methodology. However, when they cannot account for the lack of viewer/audience interest in the memorial, they re-assess the Visitor Complex within the larger context of sightseeing in Florida, which radically alters their initial rhetorical reading of the site. They see rhetoric as largely indifferent to cultural studies’ concerns about audience reception or authoritative readings, and they attempt, with some success, to overcome that weakness here by coupling their reflexive methodology to audience analysis.

 

In “Catching the Third Wave: The Dialectic of Rhetoric and Technology,” James Arnt Aune addresses the impact of new communication technologies on public discourse. In his study, he draws on late twentieth-century political discourse ranging from that of figures such as Newt Gingrich to the rise of popular narratives reflected in the work of cyberpunk writers William Gibson and Allucquere Rosanne Stone. Aune sees “the new world information order” as an ideal site for the methodological intersection between rhetoric and cultural studies: rhetorical studies is formidably well suited to analyzing political discourse, while cultural studies is better able to manage issues of gender, desire, and performance in relation to popular media (85). Aune also suggests hopefully that a new understanding of class might emerge from this disciplinary hybrid, a paradigm better able to assess the transformative potential of the “universal class” being produced by information-based culture.

 

Stephen Mailloux’s “Reading the Culture Wars: Traveling Rhetoric and the Reception of Curricular Reform” takes Syracuse University as his object of rhetorical analysis, wherein he traces the debates over the undergraduate ETS (English and Textual Studies) major within the larger context of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. Mailloux couches the discourse surrounding the ETS curriculum as a replay of classical philosophy-rhetoric debates: Plato and the proponents of absolute truth at odds with the relativism of the Sophists. Mailloux argues for further studies of the interconnection between language and ideology, calling for a better understanding of rhetoric’s crucial role in politics. More importantly, he sees the negotiation of politics as a significant challenge for any future work in rhetoric and cultural studies, and he envisions “reception narratives” such as his essay playing “a prominent role in a cultural rhetoric studies wishing to avoid the pitfalls of various orthodoxies on both the Cultural Right and Left” (114). Aune’s and Mailloux’s contributions, taken together, suggest ways in which a cultural rhetorical studies might be useful for approaching binary oppositions in public discourse.

 

In perhaps the weakest contribution to At the Intersection, Barry Brummett and Detine L. Bowers attempt to fuse rhetorical and cultural studies in “Subject Positions as a Site of Rhetorical Struggle: Representing African Americans.” Drawing on what they dub “subject position theory,”³ Brummett and Bowers argue for only three possible types of subject position, and offer the insight that “some subject positions, especially those concerning race, are constructed in so damaging and repressive a manner that they are best understood as object positions” (122), thereby undermining the attempts of bell hooks (and others) to re-cast the terms for critical discussions of race. Brummett and Bowers seem to believe that before they arrived on the scene little attention was directed to the way subject and object positions are discursively created. Their attempt to describe the process of discursive construction leads them to propose a dubious taxonomy of textual characteristics (authority, narration, anonymity, and noise), and then, by way of illustration, to perform a rather obvious reading of the film The Air Up There, whose narrative of an African man recruited to play basketball for an all-white school makes it hard to miss the objectification of “the Other.” From their perspective, such interpretations would not have been possible without a cultural studies approach, because critical studies⁴ “is only lately emerging from a preoccupation with the alleged determinisms of class, race, or gender to grasp the essentially rhetorical concept of texts as sites of struggle, in which signs and reading strategies are used by people toward competing suasory ends” (136). Clearly, from this vantage point, rhetoric has always already been cultural studies, and incorporating the race/class/gender triumverate is all that’s required for a cultural rhetorical studies of the future, albeit one that remains, in the final analysis, rhetorical studies.

 

Taking a detour from the near collisions of rhetoric and cultural studies, Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling reflect on their own critical practices in “American Cultural Criticism in the Pragmatic Attitude.” By focusing on “the pragmatic attitude,” they question the causes, motives, and consequences related to criticism itself, and explain that the goals motivated by the pragmatic attitude are aligned with the goals of American cultural studies. With detail and clarity, they articulate their working assumptions about the pragmatic critic: she or he (1) assumes that reality is socially constructed; (2) privileges local knowledge, everyday experience, and folklore; (3) begins criticism with a dense text; (4) “plays” with that dense text; (5) seeks patterns in intertextual connections; (6) looks for “artful texts” or the “artful dimensions” of a text; and (7) “wants to make a difference in the world” (140-51). Mechling and Mechling take their pragmatic attitude to a critical reading of the film Braveheart to question the historical epic romance and the discourses of both masculinity and nationalism; by doing so, they situate the film’s market success in the historical moment of its release and reception. Their approach “interrogates all positions, including those of cultural studies critics and of rhetorical critics practicing ideological criticism” (166). This attitude is perhaps the most fruitful approach born out of the intersecting branches of rhetorical and cultural criticism.

 

Celeste Michelle Condit likewise interrogates the historical dimensions of cultural studies and rhetorical studies in “The Character of ‘History’ in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies.” She is careful to acknowledge her specific focus on the field of (speech) communication and its uses of rhetoric, illustrating the two dominant camps of “neoclassical” and “critical rhetoric” in the field. More importantly, she moves into a provocative discussion of a materialist conception of language, in terms of which historical narratives must be seen as “more than simply products of the ideological agendas of narrators” (177). By acknowledging the exigencies and material forces that constrain history, Condit argues for attention to historical narratives as “meaning-full” cultural practices situated in the time-stream of past, present, and future. Condit’s contribution to this collection is perhaps one of the most useful and compelling, for it offers a theoretical consideration that has direct impact on methodologies for both rhetorical studies and cultural studies.

 

The positioning of Henry Krips’s “Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Gaze” in this collection is somewhat enigmatic, but this in no way detracts from the strength of his discussion on its own. While it’s not altogether clear how this essay contributes to the larger discussions of rhetorical and cultural studies, it certainly offers a clear example of a critical approach that is transdisciplinary and rhetorical, one that can change the way we look at the world. Bringing together “screen theory,” Lacan’s notion of the gaze, and Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, Krips weaves a cogent analysis of text-audience dynamics and the ideological dimensions of criticism. In some ways, Krips bypasses congestion at the intersection: rather than simply discuss cultural studies and rhetorical studies, he utilizes both. Thus, section one is neatly framed with dynamic readings of texts, from the current trends in memorial studies to more traditional art criticism.

 

While the character of the book’s first half is difficult to determine–and perhaps rightly so–its second half clearly addresses the possibility of fusion, of coalition, and of a transdisciplinary venture that might go by the name of “cultural rhetorical studies” (but which is emphatically not a “rhetorical cultural studies”). This section begins with an essay by Cary Nelson–a figurehead for American cultural studies and longtime critic of disciplinary turf battles and political quibbling in the academy. Nelson recounts the origins of cultural studies and its reliance on close readings of texts, reaffirming the value of such readings in departments of English, rhetoric, and (speech) communication. Nelson also highlights the role of language and “linguisticality” in cultural studies, using the field of English to illustrate the perceived threat of cultural studies to literary studies. To resolve such conflicts and further dialogue between these–and other–areas of study, Nelson calls for a return to a “rhetorical analysis that focuses on historically delineated struggles over meaning and form” (224). Doing so would allow participants to bring together various texts and discourses situated within temporally aligned frames of reference, and this rhetorical struggle over meaning is what Nelson sees as the proper domain of cultural studies.

 

The struggle over meaning, however, promptly becomes the struggle for domain. Thomas Rosteck’s contribution to his own collection, “A Cultural Tradition in Rhetorical Studies,” suggests that there has always been a critical attention to culture in rhetorical studies, and he focuses on excavating “this latent cultural tradition” through selected essays, and on identifying common ground in the history of modern rhetorical criticism. His exemplary models of rhetorical criticism–those with sustained concern for matters related to culture–can serve a “cultural rhetorical studies” in the future, one that can surpass the problems he envisions with cultural studies itself. The essay that follows includes, among other commentary, a rejoinder to Rosteck. In “Cultural Struggle: A Politics of Meaning in Rhetorical Studies,” John M. Sloop and Mark Olson contest Rosteck’s assertion that rhetorical studies has always already been doing the work of cultural studies: they see such moves as undermining the potential of cultural studies (251). Consequently, Sloop and Olson offer a thorough discussion of “culture” in its various configurations in communication circles, cautioning against the politicizing of rhetorical studies and the damaging effects of conflating cultural studies with rhetorical studies. Taken together, these two essays indicate the degree to which cultural studies stands as a threat to communication studies in terms of its self-definition and its future practices–an emerging theme that returns in the book’s concluding essay.

 

Bruce E. Gronbeck’s “The Triumph of Social Science: The Silent Language as Master Text in American Cultural Studies” traces the work and influence of Edward Hall in the context of American intellectual circles, the Old Left, and social science. As a “master text,” Gronbeck claims Hall’s The Silent Language opened up criticism to temporal and spatial orientations for different societies, and articulated a notion of “interpersonal space” (278-79). Gronbeck illustrates how Hall influenced American cultural criticism into the present era, though Hall’s influence is often neglected as such. Gronbeck’s attention to the romance and pitfalls of dichotomies, particularly the camps of rhetoric-as-political-analysis and cultural-studies-as-ideology-and-politics, leads him to conclude with an appeal for the power of dialectic in dichotomous conflict (289).

 

Patrick Brantlinger’s “Antitheory and Its Antitheses: Rhetoric and Ideology” explains how such dichotomous dialectic plays out in theoretical circles. In what should be a companion piece to Condit’s discussion of history, Brantlinger focuses on the use of theory, or, the “trends and ‘-isms'” that “came to be called just ‘theory,’ in the singular” (292). In a careful elucidation of the theoretical and anti-theoretical impulses in “theory,” Brantlinger argues that the dominant tendencies in theory work toward either rhetoric or ideology (which echoes Mailloux’s platonist-sophist debates), explaining how theories about–or against–theory came to be theorized and continue to thrive. This compelling discussion could serve as a fitting end to the collection, offering insight for the future and leaving questions to generate further discussion.

 

However, what in fact concludes At the Intersection is a nod to the past and an appeal to tradition–an essay that uses, as a point of departure, a barroom disagreement at a communications conference as a problem to be mediated. In “Courting Community in Contemporary Culture,” Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing attempt to find a middle ground between (1) what they see as rhetoric’s reliance on structures and institutions and (2) cultural studies’ resistance to such systems of hierarchy and power. They do so by synthesizing the work of Kenneth Burke and Victor Turner, thereby offering a unifying vision of not only structure and communitas but also community and fragmentation. Drawing attention back to the importance of ritual and oratory, they rally for the most pressing issue facing rhetorical and cultural studies today: the fragmentation of community. They call for a new interdisciplinary space to address this issue; however, this locus appears to be bigger and better than either rhetoric or cultural studies: “The first task, somewhat ironically, is for these two fields to move beyond their own split to an interdisciplinary community as a collective base of operations” (341). The obvious answer is that the resolution-space in question is indeed cultural studies, as it has already been conceptualized and envisioned. However, considering their initial concern for “barroom antipathies” at their professional conferences, for Frentz and Rushing it seems that, like some bartender’s call to “take it outside,” any negotiation or compromise must necessarily take place outside their discipline–leaving communication studies, and its traditions, intact.

 

As the capstone to this collection, Frentz and Rushing’s conclusions are at once gratifying and disturbing. While time may prove “interdisciplinarity” to be mere fashion (doubtful), it is difficult to argue against it at this historical moment. Within the disciplinary boundaries of communication and mass-media studies–not to mention virtually all other fields in the humanities and social sciences–there is a growing consensus that interdisciplinary work can yield great epistemological rewards, enable political engagement, and foster a sense of praxis in the academy. While it threatens existing structures of academe, cultural studies also opens new vistas of possibility for those of us who operate within those structures.

 

Frentz and Rushing’s piece nonetheless makes a fitting end to the collection in one respect. While the book makes important contributions to general questions of theory and method, as well as offering some fine cultural-rhetorical analyses of specific texts, its emphasis ultimately is on cultural studies’ past and future impact on communication studies. At the Intersection is probably more compelling and provocative for scholars who reside in departments of communication than for others across the disciplines, but given its perhaps overambitious aims, it does a fine job. It will serve as a useful guide through one of the many disciplinary crossroads made possible by the advent of cultural studies.

 

Notes

 

1. The roots of rhetoric run deep in Western civilization, roughly 2500 years to the Athenian polis and the lineage of thinkers beginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Almost from the outset, rhetoric has been counterposed to dialectic, or the philosopher’s method of inquiry. The practitioner of rhetoric has been valued either as a person of high morals who speaks on behalf of Truth, or as an opportunistic relativist out to persuade audiences based on whatever “truths” are at hand. Over the centuries, rhetoric has been expanded and collapsed, watered-down as well as extrapolated for a variety of causes, and today its position in the academy is shared by several disciplines, and many of rhetoric’s academic configurations are contingent upon its uses. Of course, rhetoric still holds ground in departments of philosophy and classics, and in English departments, rhetoric is paired with composition studies all too often as a mere subsection of English-literary studies, rather than a discipline itself. (Ironically, the “belles lettres” that became literature emerged from 19th century rhetoric.) In departments of (speech) communication, rhetoric often refers only to public discourse, and rhetorical analysis is considered a disciplined methodological approach to texts ranging from public speeches (for the more classically trained) to mass media studies (for later scholars widening the aperture for notions of “public” and “speech”). There are numerous organizations and agencies that have emerged working to bring the various arms of rhetoric into one place.

 

2. The contributors to this collection are all written by scholars with positions in the academy. Working against such bias is a crucial part of the cultural studies project, and this largely goes unnoticed by the editor or contributors.

 

3. The uncritical, unflective, and reductive labelling of several critical approaches under the rubric “Subject Position Theory” is indicative of the writers’ overall presumptiveness and inability to reflect on their own positions of power.

 

4. Brummett, in Rhetoric in Popular Culture, prefers the term “critical studies” over “cultural studies,” not for any particular reason, but for “the sake of convenience” (71).

 

Works Cited

 

• Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford Books, 1990.
• Brummett, Barry. Rhetoric in Popular Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
• Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
• Nelson, Cary, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg. “Cultural Studies: An Introduction.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 1-16.