Receiving Rhetoric: Language and Democratic Politics

This dissertation is a study of the political significance of rhetoric in democratic contexts. I explore both the uttering of language (the domain of rhetoric) and the interpretation of language (the domain of hermeneutics), to examine the discursive power of rhetoric and the role that rhetoric might play in facilitating acknowledgment, critical reflection and evaluative judgment in audiences. I distinguish three interpretive frames, which I call dissonant, resonant and disruptive, through which audiences receive rhetoric and consider how rhetoric might differently prompt those frames. I highlight dissonant rhetoric – rhetoric that marries aesthetic attunement with affective turbulence. Dissonance, I argue, has the transformative capacity to spark moments of critical reflection – potentially emancipatory instances of transcendence from conventional discourses and perspectives. Dissonance, thus, has a role to play in a robust rhetorical democracy, prompting audiences to actively question or acknowledge what was once taken for granted. The first chapter of this dissertation argues for a hermeneutically informed conception of rhetoric as world-disclosure and looks to the critical implications of this view. Chapter two provides an exegesis of Nietzsche’s reflections on rhetoric and attends to its actual deployment in Nietzsche’s works. I argue that Nietzsche’s rhetoric is often intentionally dissonant and oriented toward facilitating receptive effects. In the third chapter, I situate the argument between rhetorical theories that call for prejudicial attunement, the “systemic approach” to deliberative democracy and Arendtian judgment theory, to propose a theory of rhetorical democracy that foregrounds rhetoric’s receptive effects. I argue that the contemporary literature insufficiently engages with the receptive dimension of rhetoric and therefore does not capture the full range of world-building effects of rhetoric. The fourth chapter draws on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self to examine the reception of rhetoric. Using the NFL “take a knee” protests as a case study, I point to the transformative potential of the act of “kneeling” against injustice and consider the different ways this protest may be received by audience members: as a dissonant, resonant or disruptive form of rhetoric. Chapter five looks to comedic rhetoric as particularly promising for soliciting dissonant responses in audiences.

Department dc:contributor.department

Political Science

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Lambek, Simon Peter Solway

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kohn, Margaret

• Democratic Theory
• Dissonance
• Hermeneutics
• Political Theory
• Reception
• Rhetoric

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/121503

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/121503