Teaching the Post-Modern Rhetor Continuing the Conversation on Rhetorical Agency

In responding to Gunn and Lundberg's critique of her report upon rhetorical agency, Geisler uses their Ouija Board metaphor to undertake an analysis of what it might mean to teach the post-modern rhetor. In particular, one time the autonomous agent has been denaturalized, members of the profession of rhetoric have adequate supply to do in helping scholars first to engage with and then to participate in a more appropriately theorized rhetoric. Like the Ouija Board player, we may not be able to know in what way the results of our classroom teaching are related to our intentions. But-like each other rhetor-we need to recognize the take away froms of walking away from the game.

A compliment must be paid to Gunn and Lundberg for inviting readers to consider what Ouija Board experiences can run over us about rhetorical agency. although they have found little to compliment in my synthesis of the discussion of rhetorical agency at the ARS in 2003 I believe readers can find something interesting in pursuing their analogy between the Ouija Board and rhetoric.

My have time with the Ouija Board was short. Eight years of advanced age visiting a more sophisticated cousin, I gingerly touched the planchette with all the emotions Gunn and Lundberg's piece reawakened. As the planchette haltingly exorcismed out responses to my cousin's questions, my conviction grew that we were in contact with demonic forces. Finally, and above my cousin's protests, I plucked away... and I haven't been back since.

Gunn and Lundberg recommend that a fear of duplicity drives a great deal of the ambivalence we have feeling about the Ouija Board-we worry about being tricked into believing we have made contact with the world beyond. Mired in the humanistic belief that someone must be pushing the planchette, our unease extends as we cannot pin down the culprit. Like Ouija players, Gunn and Lundberg insinuate many rhetoricians do not perceive at ease until they can associate the cause of rhetorical move with a specific rhetor. This interesting analysis provides abundant food for thought as we continue the conversation upon rhetorical agency.

Rhetor as Post-Modern Agent

Before we dig a bit more into the Ouija metaphor, I want to address a certain quantity of concerns that Gunn and Lundberg have raised in their reply to my ARS report. From my perspective, they have engaged in an interesting misreading of my synthesis when they accuse me of an uncharitable treatment of rhetoricians who have embraced post-modern theory. Readers of the ARS papers upon agency (http://www.comm.umn.edu/ARS/) will find that it does not take drawn out to feel how long a shadow has been cast upon the discussion of agency through the debate over post-modernism. For this reason, in my synthesis, I portrayed post-modernism as the historical starting point for the issue of agency, beginning with Dilip Gaonkar's 1993 piece arguing against a humanistic "ideology of agency" and for a universal of agency more in keeping with the "postmodern condition." (263)

Rather than rejecting that critique, however, I indicateed that most of the interesting work at the ARS had taken it as a departure point, including my hold work describing rhetors as occupying "a make subordinate position strategically fragmented in order to obtain work done." Gunn and Lundberg appear to be both to acknowledge and agree with this analysis. Despite these agreements, however, abundant of their response is aimed at chastising me for singling Gunn on the outside as a representative of the post-modernist position and ridiculing him and other post-modernists for entertaining the claim that agency is illusionary.

I take as useful the one and the other Gunn and Lundberg's suggestion that post-modernism is too variable to pigeon-hole and that the mete itself may be inappropriate. on the other hand I would demur to their characterization that I "strongly argue[d] against what [I]/she dioceses as an unproductive response to the critique of the self-transparent, autonomous agent: the 'abandonment' of the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion or idea of agency." A more careful reading of my piece would insinuate that while I do report upon the discussion concerning the claim that agency is illusionary, I do not attribute this claim to Gunn alone, I do not identify this claim as a particularly postmodern claim, and I do not treat this claim flippantly. Indeed, I saw numerous participants at the ARS struggling with this possibility-in particular, I named Gondit as well as Gunn

Gunn and Lundberg refer to that no post-modernist ever seriously entertained the idea that "rhetors do not exhibit effects." Whether they consider themselves post-modernists, I cannot say, on the other hand the lack of rhetorical efficacy looks to me to be just the possibility that their Ouija Board metaphor invites us to consider:

As anyone who has "played" with a talking board will attest, the drollery orbits suspicion: either one deceives, or is deceived by means of the comedium, or one is relatively unable to locate the seat of agency: is my partner moving this thing? Am I moving it without knowing it? Is it possible that a certain number of unseen spirit-a passed relative or worse, an evil genius-is moving the planchette (and therefore, us)?