I found many of the readings for this week and the past week interesting in that many of them agree on the priority of practice or the analysis of rhetoric over theory-building. Yet those same authors are engaging almost entirely in theory-building in these pieces. Of these two weeks readings, I perceive Baskerville, Leff, Leff and Sachs, McGee, and Condit as making that prioritization. Yet the way they write – their focus on theory and method – implicitly suggests that theory is a prior question to analysis.

Almost all of them insist that theory-building and analysis are simply two different tasks within Rhetoric as a discipline and argue for pluralism. Yet this pluralism elides issues of prioritization, which each of them explicitly or implicitly articulates, and which each of them contradicts in their form by focusing on theory. As much as they claim to be pluralists, they make normative arguments about the desirability of one particular theory or of theory in general. Given those normative claims, I think it’s too charitable to separate these explications of theory from the rest of their work where they deploy the theory. In fact, making such a separation presumes precisely that implicit suggestion of these pieces that theory-building is a prior question that must be resolved before one can engage actual texts.

I suspect the tension I’m perceiving is similar to what Condit points out in Leff and McGee. Each of them have pursued the “purity” of their own theories, and in so doing they’ve reintroduced the split between form and content. Condit is referring here to text and context, but I think there’s a more fundamental form/content divide between the form of theory-building and the content of deprioritizing theory.

My personal opinion is that certain texts lend themselves to certain methods of analysis. For example, neo-classicism is often well suited to analysis of traditional political oratory like presidential speeches, but (contra Hariman) can’t tell us much about vernacular discourse. Put another way, the particular text should dictate the method of analysis. So any normative position on a theory or meta-theory leads inevitably to neglect of the text. I think these readings illustrate that.

This raises a few questions, which I can’t answer and maybe one of y’all can: What is the value of meta-theory about not engaging in theory? Is this difference between form and content an issue of pedagogy – that is, elaborating a method that students can follow or providing analysts with tools they can use? What is the difference between this and the debate over method that dominated in the 70s and 80s?