• theorizing

The Juice has posted a useful draft of an encyclopedia article on "Agency" on his blog. (I apparently believe in "dialectical agency"--nice to have a label finally.) As I gear up to teach a graduate course on presidential rhetoric (for the very first time) this fall, I am pondering what seems to be the problematic twin of agency, namely "effect," which has dogged us since Wichelns named it back in 1925. In presidential studies recently, George Edwards has argued (in On Deaf Ears) that presidential rhetoric doesn't do much of anything, occasioning much whimpering from public address scholars. So how do I talk about this issue? My own position, which, following Marshall Sahlins, might be described as "historicist structuralism," is that structures do usually faithfully reproduce themselves, but there is sufficient contingency in nature and society for structural reproduction occasionally to break down, allowing scope for "normal" and contentious politics (including rhetorical action) to attempt restructuration. I have always been more interested in careful description and analysis of those larger blocks of discourse known as "ideologies" (e.g. Marxism or free market capitalism or, for that matter, that weird little Massachusetts farmer William Manning) or "political languages" (in the Pocock/Skinner sense). I have remained an agnostic about effect, as a result. But I can't really escape the problem. The best social science recognizes that we cannot name any "laws" of human behavior (except perhaps at uninterestingly high levels of abstraction, of the sort one finds in price theory) but we can identify a repertoire of "causal mechanisms" (see Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior). We in fact identify all sorts of causal mechanisms in beginning speech and composition, most designed to improve audience comprehension and retention of information. Similarly, there are certain characteristics of the US mass audience, especially in the red states, that seem to be givens: one must appear to be an "evangelical Christian" in order to be President, no matter how theology-free that label is (I've been restraining myself from blogging about the first presidential debate hosted by Rick Warren); Americans believe they should rule the world but never visit foreign countries or speak a foreign language (smacks of "elitism"); and so on. Such CW is neglected by presidential and other political figures at their peril.

So, here's my question: partially directed at my post-humanist friends, what does "effect" look like after our recent theorizing(s) of agency? How do I talk about our sense of "effect" in rhetorical studies to the political science graduate students who stray into my class?

• Jim Aune's blog
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