Response to Anjeli's Metamorphosis, Cookery, and Justice

In her insightful post discussing a former rhetorical showdown, Anjeli mentions that relative, contingent information suits the cause of her friend, “the better arguer,” and thereby that information becomes the opponent’s “truth.” I really enjoyed that Anjeli took on this baffling facet of rhetoric that seeks to generate relative truths, similar to what Ramage explains as the indelible task of Rhetorical People who get between Laws of Contradictions, as opposed to the Serious People. It seems a precarious task at best…constantly generating the wisdom to know we can’t always have all the answers, and even when we do, there are intangible properties of conversation that virtually or perceptually trump the existence of a more “accurate” truth simply because it was “better argued,” as Anjeli shows us. I think what most intrigues me about her reaction to this phenomenon, though, is the inclination to associate rhetoric’s properties with an allegiance to subjective knowledge. I mention this because where I currently come from, in the conversation of rhetoric, is a very uncertain place of what constitutes subjective knowledge, or if such a category is even adequate to describe the nature of epistemology as it morphs into relative rhetorical truths. Hold tight, brb…

I was a bit amused to encounter George Kennedy’s work in this first week of class after initially being introduced to him in another work: “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins” by Natasha Seegart. Though Seegart laments the limited attention Kennedy’s article received for its expansive and inclusive definition of “rhetoric as energy,” she also explains in her work a reason why perhaps this definition didn’t hold prolonged sway—it was simply too expansive. General physical laws of the universe shows us that all matter is comprised of compressed energy, and thereby the definition of rhetoric as energy is sweet for its open invitation to the playground, but it is not realistically helpful because literally everything would be rhetoric. Seegart alternatively defines rhetoric as a “relational force of signals,” which, to me, captures the expansiveness rhetoric deserves, without creating futile, limitless boundaries.

 This brings me back to the binary of objective and subjective knowledge because I absolutely concur with definitions of rhetoric that attribute agency to not just human subjects, but virtually anywhere a “signal” can exist. Notions of subjective and objective knowledge are constructs of human perception, but what precedes these constructs are faculties of the mind, or signals sent, that are able to conceive of such a construct in the first place, and therefore I don’t believe either category is fully adequate to describe the nature of knowledge as both can be rhetorically conceived. I also believe this means we have to attribute rhetorical agency to the faculties able to construct knowledge, allowing us to explore the constructs of rhetoric in the first place. If we know “there is no recipe (EVER) that can guide the slow-food cooking” (Ramage 31) of rhetoric, then there is something undeniably subversive about claiming the constant truth of inchoate recipes describing knowledge, and therefore rhetorical objectivity and subjectivity implode.

--Kimbo Hoover