Week 6: Ratcliffe, Watson: Rhetorical Listening/Silence

Assignment: Pay attention to how people interact in a context of your choosing (class setting, chat room, political talk show, etc.) and, drawing on Ratcliffe’s theory, describe listening practices employed there.

This week we read Krista Ratcliffe's book Rhetorical Listening, in which she contrasts the rhetorical silence ("and/or, at best, awkward conversations" [16]) that dominates nation U.S. discourses about race (in particular) with her idea of a tactical rhetorical listening that  listens with the intent of understanding, with a "conscious choice to assume an open stance in relation to any person, text or culture" (26).  Though racial relations are Ratcliffe's chief example, she also takes up gender and further notes that rhetorical listening can be employed more broadly, that is, in relation to any person, text, or culture (17).

Ratcliffe sees rhetorical listening as an opportunity to negotiate different cultures and identities and "analyze discursive convergences and divergences" (33). It "negotiate[s] our always evolving standpoints, our identities, with the always evolving standpoints of others" (34) and opens spaces of dissonance where we allow ourselves to be challenged and listen with intent to others' truths and cultural logics.

Just as readers compose texts when reading them, so Ratcliffe argues that listeners make an act of aural reception (hearing) into an act of interpretive invention and production: rhetorical listening, she says, "constructs a space wherein listeners may employ their agency...to foster conscious identifications that may, in turn, facilitate communication" (26).  Instead of only looking to the rhetor for agency (i.e., asking the listener to interpret the author's intent), Ratcliffe hands the listener agency, so that rhetorical listening is "listening with intent to hear troubled identifications" (46).  Rhetorical listening involves observing how the desires of both the speaker and listener harmonize or create dissonance.

By contrast, the rhetorics of a dysfunctional silence is not just an absence of voices: it is an absence of ears that are willing to listen (see also Watson's description of the silences rhetorically employed by Denmark Vesey within a system that afforded him no rights and silenced his agency, and within a broader culture that silenced slaves in general).  Rhetorical silence (1) obsesses on negatives in order to dismiss them, (2) uses cultural logics to mask coexisting commonalities and differences and instead relies on binary either/or reasonings, (3) offers three dysfunction stances of denial, defensiveness, and guilt/blame, and (4) reads others metaphorically, instead of metonymically (seeing others as exactly representative of their cultures, instead of simply associated with their cultures).

My example of rhetorical listening/silence comes from Season 7, Episode 54 of the Colbert Report.  The following snippets of an interview Colbert recently held with A.C. Grayling, author of The Good Book: A Humanist Bible, are scripted pieces of rhetorical silence (which Colbert presumably uses on his show as a satirical representation of the rhetorical silences that largely dominate political discourse and, more specifically, rule cable network news and punditry).

Colbert: It's a bible.  How can there be no God in this bible?  That's just a book.

Grayling: That's exactly right, because the word "bible" means book

C: It means God book.

G: I've seen cooking bibles, and plumbing bibles...

C: All of those are sanctioned by God.  Do you not include God in the humanist bible, or do you deny that there is a God in your humanist bible? Are you against God?

G: There's nothing in this book that is against religion. It's just a different take on the question, how we think about good lives.  It's about ethics, really.

C: But you have to pick a side.  You have to be with God or against God.  Jesus himself said, you're either with us or against us.

[. . .]

C: The real Bible is pretty much the best-selling book of all time.  Did you name it this [The Humanist Bible] to try to trick people into buying it?

G: It doesn't attack the Bible, or try to displace it.  What it does do is try to bring together this extraodinary trove of great wisdom insight that a lot of people in both Eastern and Western traditions have offered us, and which have pretty well been forgotten.  The only people who read this stuff are philosophers and classicists, and it really should belong to everybody.

 This satirical conversation is interesting in its representation of how a dysfunctional conversation about a humanist bible (which an ultraconservative evangelical Christian, for instance, could possibly see as threatening to their Christian bible) could proceed.  The following bullet points are some observations on how this conversation represents dysfunctional silence:

• Binary reasoning: Colbert is hung up on the idea that it has the word "Bible" in the title, which to him signals that a book must be religious.  As he says, it has to be with God, or against God.  He doesn't see how the book can exist in a space separate from religion (that is, how the book can simply choose to ignore religion).  While Grayling maintains that the book doesn't threaten religion in any way, but merely exists alongside it, for Colbert the book is either choosing to challenge religion or supporting it.
• Defensiveness: Colbert sees the word "humanist," and the idea of a set of ethics existing outside of religion, as threatening.  This is connected to binary reasoning: this must be threatening my religious beliefs if it's not agreeing with them.  And so Colbert uses defensive language that doesn't get to as true an understanding of Grayling's perspective as it could.
• Metaphoric identity + Negatives: As a humanist, Grayling is somewhat tokenized and generalized by Colbert.  He must be anti-religious, Colbert seems to think, as he's a philosopher and intellectual who doesn't invoke God when developing his set of morals and ethics.  And because he doesn't invoke God or a set of religious principles, his book poses a potential threat to Colbert's own (satirical) Christian beliefs.