This article was downloaded by: [Western Kentucky University]On: 16 October 2014, At: 08:08Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

Western Journal ofCommunicationPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwjc20

Context in critical theoryand practiceStephen Howard Browne aa Professor of Speech Communication , PennState UniversityPublished online: 06 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: Stephen Howard Browne (2001) Context in criticaltheory and practice, Western Journal of Communication, 65:3, 330-335, DOI:10.1080/10570310109374709

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570310109374709

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,

reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of accessand use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Wes

tern

Ken

tuck

y U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

08 1

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

Western Journal of Communication, 65(3) (Summer 2001), 330-335

ResponseContext in Critical Theoryand Practice

Stephen Howard Browne

P ERHAPS THESE THINGS go in cycles: twenty years ago, Michael Leffnoted that the inaugural meeting of this symposium was marked

by a "uniformly pessimistic diagnosis of the situation," yielding, in hiswords, "an impressive catalogue of woes besetting the field of rhetoricalcriticism." By 1980, that rhetoric of lamentation had given way to amuch more positive embrace of the discipline's multiple possibilities,and if there was no little ambivalence about the limits of such plural-ism, there yet remained an unmistakable optimism about the state ofthe art. A decade later, that tone itself had given way to a more divisivedebate over texts and contexts that was to define the grounds ofcriticism for years to come. The present incarnation seems to evinceneither the misgivings of 1957, the ecumenicism of 1980, nor the agonof 1990, and so we are led to ask whether a kind of happy consensushas settled upon the field. In fact the work of our five critics is con-spicuous for what it holds in common: all retain a robust interest inwhat I might call text-ness; all ground their observations with refer-ence to case studies; all remain committed to a sense of textual agency;all declare the importance of situating texts within inter-textual fieldsof some kind; all recognize the need for or at least the legitimacy ofexpanding our sense of what gets to count as appropriate objects ofcritical inquiry; and none, significantly, is remotely manifestic.

These identities notwithstanding, we have grounds for asking whatit is that distinguishes these positions. Clearly, they are marked bydifferences of habit, background, style, and motive, but for purposes ofdiscussion to follow I'd like to gather and organize these distinctionsunder considerations of CONTEXT. Each of the essays, on reflection,invests in context considerable explanatory force, and each is notablefor the ways in which context is invoked as a necessary category for thework of interpretation and suggests how it can function to advance,enrich, and ultimately redeem the practice of rhetorical criticism. Wehave reason, then, to suppose that our panelists are in effect handing

STEPHEN HOWARD BROWNE (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is Professor of SpeechCommunication at Penn State University.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Wes

tern

Ken

tuck

y U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

08 1

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

Summer 2001 331

us a map for terrain not yet charted, and I'd like to squint for a whileat just what that map looks like and to ask where they are taking usand why.

To that end, I want synoptically to identify what it is that context ispresumed actually to do for the work of criticism as suggested by eachof the panelists: thus for Leff, context regulates interpretive claimsabout the production of meaning in texts; for Ceccarelli, it coordinatesthe essential categories of rhetorical criticism generally; for Blair, itfunctions as a trope of proximity; for Hassian, it serves to complicatereceived knowledge; and for Jasinski it restores the possibilities ofcritical judgment itself. Together, these formulations help us chartwhat lies ahead—so let's see if we want to tag along for the ride.

Professor Leff's avowed aim is to "open," in his words, a "space forconstructive interaction between neo-classical criticism and some ofthe currently fashionable approaches to text and context." He has, ofcourse, been attempting something like this for thirty years now,indeed for so long that these "fashionable approaches" have themselvescome and gone; Leff has in any case held his ground, and held itconvincingly, even as he returns to it time and again as a vantage pointfor his critical practice. We see now and again one more return trip,where he undertakes to re-read Lincoln's Cooper Union Address inview of recent attacks on that position. The reading is resolutelyintentionalist, evidence, if any were needed, that he "understands thetext-context ratio largely in relation to our understanding of therhetor's desires and designs." The text is accordingly conceived tostand in iconic relationship to its context, and so invites the critic toaccount for its formal integrity. The "instrumentalism" to which Leffunapologetically appeals, far from inhibiting access to intertextualfields, grants him entre to whatever is necessary for realizing hiscritical aims. In this respect, then, context is taken to be a generalizedstructure of intentions, available for governing the interpretation ofinstantiated rhetorical acts. The intertextual field within which thatact is located is here viewed as articulating a more or less coherentbody of convictions and motives that can be accessed to confirm claimsabout the formal production of meaning in texts.

On this score, at least, the alleged binary between text and contextthat so worried panelists a decade ago collapses in on itself. Putcrudely, it costs Leff nothing to acknowledge the play of context, ofperformative traditions, or cultural articulations, etc., because thoseintertextual determinants function not to disperse or diminish theobject, but to in-form his reading of textual form. What's the problem?I don't think there is one, and there never really was.

Well, maybe that's not entirely true, if only because certain dis-course communities persistently rely on fictions that keep separatewhat ought not be torn asunder. Of these, it would be difficult to

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Wes

tern

Ken

tuck

y U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

08 1

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

332 Content in Critical Theory and Practice

identify a more entrenched set of assumptions about what counts asrhetorical and what not than those associated with scientific practice.Leah Ceccarelli's effort to contest and reconfigure those assumptionshas produced an important body of scholarship on the accessibility ofscientific texts to rhetorical critics, and in this she offers a suggestivevariation on a theme noted above. Where Leff convincingly integratescategories of text-context, Ceccarelli establishes an account where theputative distinctions between public and scientific spheres are made toso overlap that any such distinctions are exposed as false and perni-cious. It seems crucial to our understanding of her argument that wenote how she positions herself—and us—in front of claims about therecalcitrance of nature, the exegetical equality of scientific practice,and the institutional nature of scientific production. At work here isnot just the sense of text being advocated, but what is required torender an optimally rhetorical reading of such texts. For Ceccarelli,text-ness operates within the play of the complex relationship betweenthe discursive and the nondiscursive, it re-presents an encounter be-tween words and things, between the linguistic and the material. Butit is not this definition alone that beckons the work of rhetoricalcriticism—it is, rather, the supposition that the critic can summon anarray of contextual determinants in such a manner as to make good onthe promises of such inquiry. One clue to the analysis at work here isto note how frequently Professor Ceccarelli invokes terms as conver-gence, interaction, cooperation, relation, balance, and orchestration.The prospects of criticism, in other words, of science or any otherdiscursive practice, rests on our capacity to coordinate the text withina constellation of con-texts, most importantly other texts, authors,subject matter, and audiences. Withal, she contends, "a balanced ne-gotiation between text and context is required if we are to make themost of our critical practice."

As with Leff, then, Ceccarelli breaks through the impasse with alogic of assimilation that is pretty hard to argue with. But I would askas I would ask of Leff s position, whether this logic in effect edentatescontext as an interpretive category. That is, the assumptions aboutbalance, harmony, and orchestration that drive the analysis wouldseem to rig the game in such a way that it is equally hard to envisionhow texts might not figure into the constellation, to acknowledge theinexplicable, the unaligned, unorchestrated, and just plain messyworld of rhetorical practice. The critic as maestro?

For Ceccarelli, the critic as maestro; for Hassian, the critic asmuckraker. Either way, of course, the work involves alignment, thestrategic composition of textual and contextual details in such a way asto render the account, if not the phenomena, coherent. But Hassian is,as Blair would say, a disturber, and what he is disturbed about is ourfailure to make good on the claims of the Wingspread conference of1970. In this case, however, the point is not so much to simply broaden

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Wes

tern

Ken

tuck

y U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

08 1

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

Summer 2001 333

the spectrum of what gets to count as a rhetorical text—bumperstickers, the Internet, street theater—but to take much more seriouslythe work of recovery attendant to social criticism. To this end, Maroufmay be said to reverse the axis of inquiry: where Leff and Ceccarellimove from text to context and back again, he tends to move fromcontext to text and back again. The result, not surprisingly, is a criticalpractice less concerned with distinctive rhetorical form than withaggregates, units of discourse that are to be read in the main, asgeneralized expressions that code and make effective discrete rhetor-ical acts. Whatever else we might say of this orientation, it worksunder the assumption that there's no such thing as context—there areonly contexts, overlapping, complex, competing, and frequently self-masking. His reading of vernacular legal rhetoric in postbellum Amer-ica may thus be taken as evidence of what can—and must—be gainedby shifting our gaze from one context to another; as he well knows, ofcourse, that is no easy matter, if only because stars made brighter thanothers tend obscure those made dimmer. But he knows, too, thatlooking at one can bring the other into view, and we have here anilluminating example of how that works. I think it important to notethat in pursuit of the vernacular Hassian never allows the dominant todrop from site; indeed, he requires an analysis that will integrate bothinto a more general and fulsome explanation of how elites and subor-dinates co-produce these discourses and the laws by which they aregiven force, range, and limit.

The scale and scope of Professor's Hassian's project quite rightfullyprompt questions about how the task he sets before us is to be met, andI think here we have an interesting puzzle. We need to get to or createcontexts of a different kind; to do so, Hassian suggests, we need tomake space for marginalized others; that space making is risky, henotes with reference to Blair, Brown, and Baxter, because of thestrictures of academic writing. What follows, however, is a fifty-pagemonograph that virtually exemplifies scholarly research, prose, andargumentation as those values are currently endorsed. That's not acriticism—from me, anyway, it's high praise, but more importantly,the question is whether current models of rhetorical inquiry are up tothe task of recovering contexts as recommended, or are they not.Hassian's eyes say no, but his words say yes.

When in comes to gazing at objects in context, Carole Blair standsalone, so to speak, in the fields of rhetorical criticism. Over the pastdecade or so, she has literally transversed the cultural landscape insearch of just those spaces where the comforts of context are not soreadily evident. Blair's work disturbs, that is, not because of the objectsshe examines but because she won't give us a direct answer about whatit even means to put those objects in context. That makes her a tourguide of a peculiar kind, I suppose, but the trip is bound to be prettyinteresting. Like Hassian, Blair seeks to redeem the promises of 1970

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Wes

tern

Ken

tuck

y U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

08 1

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

334 Content in Critical Theory and Practice

by expanding and deepening our sense of the rhetorical, even as shecontinues to press on traditional questions about standards of judg-ment, meaning and doing, and the ethics of practice and inquiry. At theheart of her analysis, however, is a striking insistence that we takemuch more seriously the play and place of the body in our criticalassumptions. As I understand it, the point is not so much to render thebody into a signifying system or site—to make of it a text—but toliterally in-corporate it into the contexts of our criticism.

What does this mean? I think it means in part that we really haveno vocabulary as yet to describe and evaluate the experience of rhet-oric. That's an odd thing to say—what about pathos, or receptionstudies, or wires taped to temples? Well, that's not what Blair istalking about—she is rather talking about the differences that mustobtain between the experience of encountering an object, say a com-memorative artifact, and a hermeneutics devoted to giving a rationalaccount of that artifact. This is very complicated business, and I canonly mention a few implications that I see arising from such work.Blair's focus on the body as a locus of experience suggests at points akind of longing for immediacy, of presence and the lived engagement,that, if I didn't know better, seems close to something like nostalgia.That's not a sensibility I usually associate with her work, so I suspectI am way off base here, but her argument does pose important ques-tions for the rhetorical criticism of historically distanced texts as wellfor the virtual world we engage now through the computer screen. Ata minimum, it requires that we ask again what it is that such areconception of context gets us—thus embodied, it would seem to makeof that category as unstable, as fleeting and unpredictable as the bodyitself.

It is an interesting feature of the papers so far that, although nonewants to use the word much, they are inescapably concerned withproblems of method. That may be because they don't need to, soobvious are the implications; perhaps it's because talking aboutmethod is almost always a tedious matter. We've done too much of it,and no one, after a certain age, really cares much anyway. Perhaps.But Professor Jasinski reminds us that it's not an issue that will goaway, if only because the "what now?" question remains unavoidable.I personally don't agree that method "continues to be of prime concernto most critics," as Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland claim, nor withJasinski's complaint that "method rules" (ruled, perhaps). I don't seemuch preoccupation with it these days, and the criticism I read, in-cluding by those on this panel, is marked by considerable rigor withoutbeing "ruled" at all by method. Be that as it may, Jasinski provides uswith a useful narrative of the various twists and turns the methodproblem has been made to take. The "what now" question he answersby appealing to "conceptually oriented criticism," a kind abduction, ashe calls it, "which might be thought of as a back and forth tacking

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Wes

tern

Ken

tuck

y U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

08 1

6 O

ctob

er 2

014

Summer 2001 335

movement between text and the concept or concepts that are beingsimultaneously investigated." Although neither of us has much time todwell on it here, the argument is actually quite complex and compel-ling. If I understand Jasinski's thinking, he offers us a way to leapfrogthe prescriptive logics associated with method-driven criticism by en-gaging in a kind of hybrid of textual analysis and history of ideas—without assuming the alleged limitations of either. The key, of course,is the tacking back and forth, as if on each return trip either the textor the concept gets appreciably thickened. What this insight providesby way of our thinking of context I admit being not entirely clear, andthat's troublesome because Jasinski's essay describes precisely whatI've been trying to do for the last fifteen years. Part of my problem,which I will now project onto Jasinski, who's better with these things,is that such the approach somewhere has to sustain a binary distinc-tion between text-concept that for me at least is very difficult to handle.I await his counsel.

To conclude, I will just add that there are of course a great manymore stasis points that unite and divide these essays into rhetoricalcriticism, and I've mentioned the play of context only as a way ofdrawing out assumptions that, arguably, shape the work of thesedistinguished critics. I will hold to this, that what we have here isevidence of what criticism looks like when it is unfettered by the falseissues that have plagued this discipline for so long. The future islooking better already.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Wes

tern

Ken

tuck

y U

nive

rsity

] at

08:

08 1

6 O

ctob

er 2

014