[In the following essay, Pounds presents a critique of the Rogerian rhetoric of love using Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of killing.]

But there is one aspect of the rhetorical tradition that so far as I can tell remains quite dead—its focus on public discourse. … a rhetoric is defined not just by its theory, but by the sorts of rhetorical problems it gives most emphasis to.¹

—S. M. Halloran

My title refers to the problem of idealism in contemporary rhetoric, and by “idealism” I mean ideas abstracted from the social matrix, which is always conflictive. This lack of social-historical context is what George Trow, in his critique of the vacuous human image created by corporate advertising, calls “the context of no context.”² Idealism of this sort reduces student and teacher alike to autonomous subjectivities operating in seeming omnipotence in personal dimensions but rendered impotent to deal with objectivity, the socio-economic dimensions of conflict. The problem is posed most accessibly by Rogerian argument and student-centered teaching approaches, which are all the more insidious in that they appeal to the naive good will of the liberal teacher. For evidence, I take the last of a series of seven essays on Rogerian argument which appeared between 1976 and 1985.³ I choose this essay because it culminates the series, summing up the previous work and asserting the limits of Rogerian strategies with the hope of transcending them. It tries to escape the gravitational field of argument by igniting the booster rocket of an intensified subjectivity, but it engineers only a flight into an ahistorical inane. The failure speaks more loudly than anything the essay says and reveals the inherent flaws of its philosophical basis.

To begin with, let the reader contrast two examples of rhetorical practice, one which appears to be a rhetoric of killing, the other which calls itself a rhetoric of love. Rhetor 1 takes up the case of “an old poet, libertarian and regicide, blind fallen on evil days,” who “in sullen warlike verse celebrates Samson.” Rhetor 1 considers, among the “uses to which Samson Agonistes was put, the poet's identification with a blind giant who slew himself in slaying enemies of the Lord. Identification … allows the poet a ritualistic kind of historiography in which, by allusion to a Biblical story, he can foretell the triumph of his vanquished faction. … Seen from this point of view, then,” says Rhetor 1, “an imagery of slaying … is to be considered merely as a special case of identification. Or otherwise put: the imagery of slaying is a special case of transformation, and transformation involves the ideas and imagery of identification” (RM 3, 19-20).⁴

Rhetor 2 has written an essay whose title I shorten to “Rhetoric as Love.” He takes up the case of “two nations” who “confront each other in … a shocked and total inability to understand or even to recognize each other, as in continuing conflicts between the United States and Russia,” and he suggests as a possible resolution that “we change the way we talk about argument.” “Argument,” says Rhetor 2, “is emergence toward the other …, an untiring stretch toward the other, a reach toward enfolding the other. … How does this happen? Better, how can it happen? It can happen if we learn to love before we disagree.”⁵

You will have observed that Rhetor 1, who is obviously Kenneth Burke, takes a case of conflict, killing, and finds that through a process of persuasion, which he calls identification, it works through to a resolution. Burke's concept is dialectical, involving an interplay of the opposites “identification” and “division.” He writes, “one need not scrutinize the concept of ‘identification’ very sharply to see, implied in it at every turn, its ironic counterpart: division. Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall” (RM 23). Rhetor 2, whom I take as the figure of the Rogerian rhetorician and therefore denominate Professor Fog, takes an even more extreme example of conflict, the threat of war, and in effect denies all conflict by asserting the priority of love. “Love,” which according to Burke should be a dialectical term, since it has a clear opposite, is treated instead as a positive term, a simple concrete noun like “apple” (PLF 93-95n.7). In Professor Fog's blanket usage the word “love” functions to conceal the existence of its opposite.

Frank Lentricchia has recently argued that Burke's contribution has been to rescue the vexed notion of ideology for use in “rhetoric, the literary, and the media,” or what Burke calls “adult education in America.”⁶ Though the diffuseness of Burke's arguments and his baroque terminology have made him famous for unwieldiness, in the three books I am primarily using here, chiefly A Rhetoric of Motives and to a lesser extent A Grammar of Motives and The Philosophy of Literary Form, functional, well-shaped tools lie at hand. In employing them to analyze the social meaning of Rogerian rhetoric, my interest includes not only Professor Fog but the uses of Burke for ideological analysis.

Though the focus here is on Rogerian rhetoric and limited to an examination of one representative text, I mean the argument to have wider implications. The reader should remember Richard Ohmann's 1976 critique of the reduced figure of the student in our standard rhetoric textbooks. In English in America Ohmann showed that with few exceptions the student of our textbooks was a figure without history, society, or limiting context. There is no difference between the forlorn vapor Ohmann describes and the figure of the student in Rogerian treatment. From the standpoint of theory, the model of this idealism is the commodity structure, as Lukacs pointed out sixty years ago:

It is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. … the structure of commodity-relations [can] be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them. …

The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a “phantom objectivity,” an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.⁷

The fundamental problem of idealism, Lukacs argues, the dualistic separation of subject and object, has its prototype in the structure of commodities, in which products appear as objects divorced from the workers who produce them. In current composition pedagogy in the United States, the rhetoric textbook and Rogerian argument join with modern advertising in the commodification of the student, proliferating an idealized image devoid of content and context.⁸

In using Burke to talk about Rogerian rhetoric, three terms suffice: transformation, identification, and representation. These terms are a subset of a fourth term, symbolic action, which is introduced in The Philosophy of Literary Form in a familiar passage: “poetry, or any verbal act, is to be considered as ‘symbolic action.’” In introducing the phrase Burke emphasizes “action” over “symbolic” and is careful to disassociate his concept from any sense of “symbolic” which would imply the ineffectiveness of symbolic action. Before proceeding, it may help to explain the three terms and link them together syntactically. The formula produced may lose a degree of Burke's complexity, but it should gain a corresponding degree of utility, demonstrating that this section of Burke's terminology may readily be appropriated for practical criticism.

Transformation, the first term, is simply a way of talking about the effect of the text on the reader. Transformation does its work through identification. The latter term is frequently taken to mean “persuasion” but Burke is clear that he means “identification” as a complement to (not a substitute for) “persuasion” in order to “develop [his] subject beyond the traditional bounds of rhetoric” into the contested “area of expression that is not wholly deliberate, yet not wholly unconscious” (RM xiii), the contested terrain otherwise known as ideology. Burke mentions specifically his reading of Marx's The German Ideology as the source of his dissatisfaction with the limits of the older term “persuasion.”⁹

Transformation works through identification, and it also works through representation. This last term is most easily understandable as the figure of synecdoche, a trope for the part-whole relationship. The coercive power of representation is that any representation makes a claim that some part stands for the whole. Frank Lentricchia has traced the problematic nature of representation back to the Poetics of Aristotle, in which “the proper representation of character, its ‘necessary’ and ‘probable’ mimesis according to the dictates of human nature, is stipulated by bringing forth the examples of women and slaves,” the one said to be inferior by nature and the other, by the same standard, said to be shiftless. “Aristotle is saying that if you would represent women and slaves in a fashion that would satisfy the conditions of human nature, if you want to persuade reason's tribunal, philosophy itself, then you must not give them the qualities appropriate only to a free male.”¹⁰ Conversely, if you want to represent free males you must ignore the qualities of women and slaves. For Burke, “representation” is a sign of the inseparability of the aesthetic and the political; the aesthetic is always involved with political power. Burke says, it is “no mere accident of language that we use the same word for sensory, artistic, and political representation” (PLF 23).

Here then, in capsule, is the simplified Burkean formula I propose: Transformation works ultimately through identification. It works to produce, among other things, representations. The process of this work, or production, is symbolic action.

Transformation works ultimately through identification, but it works mediately through ambiguity or ambiguous terms. “It is in the areas of ambiguity that transformations take place,” says Burke; “in fact, without such areas, transformation would be impossible” (GM xix). Ambiguity may function constructively or viciously. “What we want,” says Burke, “is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise” (GM xviii). Such, it seems reasonable to assume, are Burke's own terms, including those I am employing here. The vicious use of ambiguity is for a mystifying or ideological persuasion, which operates by occluding the opposite of any dialectical term so that the term is no longer dialectical but positive or monological.

Two such terms, “love” and “history,” call attention to themselves in Prof. Fog's essay. Taken as a pair, the terms pose the contrasting pairs “subject” and “object,” or, as Burke formulates it, “psychology” and “economics” (PLF 263). Each of Fog's terms is in itself dialectical. Love is the simplest kind of dialectical term, defined by its opposite, but it has already been noticed that in Prof. Fog's essay the dialectical playing field of love-hate is covered over by the monolithic use of the term “love.” This is not to say that there is no notion of conflict in his essay. It is there—indeed it provides the basis for his assertion of the limits of Rogerian argument—but it is stripped of all public, social reference and reduced to purely personal dimensions.

Fog, arguing for the limits of Rogerian argument, says that it cannot deal with conflict, and he quotes an earlier writer in the series of essays on Rogerian argument who says that Rogerian strategy is effective when students “encounter non-adversary writing situations” (22).¹¹ Another writer in the series included racial and sexual conflict in her 1976 formulation of the fields of Rogerian effectiveness, but, as if in recognition of similar limits, she has dropped the reference to “racial and sexual matters” from the latest edition of her textbook.¹² Fog sees his own contribution as going beyond Rogerian limits to tell the arguer how to deal with situations that are adversarial or conflictive.

As examples of conflict, Fog mentions the pro-life movement, farm subsidy issues, and war between Middle Eastern “tribes.” But the meaning of these issues is determined by the way he defines conflict: “I mean … the kind of setting in which contention generates that flushed, feverish, quaky, shaky, angry, scared, hurt, shocked, disappointed, alarmed, outraged, even terrified condition I have mentioned” (25). The socio-economic dimensions of the conflicts have disappeared; conflict is confined within the individual organism and is perceived as psychosomatic reactions.

Rogers, to whom Fog confesses himself “much indebted” (Fog 23), makes his presence felt here, for these hypothalmic responses are reactions to what Rogers calls “threat”—that which calls individual identity into question. Thus, in the context of no context, public, social conflict is immediately reduced to two red-faced people each absorbed in his or her psychosomatic reactions.

If “love,” rightly considered, is a simple dialectical term, “history” is a complex one, not defined by a simple opposite but containing within it a multitude of oppositions: past and present, present and future, subject and object, personal and public. Here a supplementary definition from Burke is helpful: dialectical terms “refer to ideas rather than to things. Hence they are more concerned with action and attitude than with perception …” (RM 185). Burke connects ideas to actions, a move directly counter to Fog's formula: “argument is not something to present or to display. It is something to be. It is what we are …” (Fog 26). What happens to history in Rogerian argument? It becomes personal history, and objective or public history becomes impossible. Fog begins his essay by asserting that we are “All authors, to be sure, we are more particularly narrators, historians, tale-tellers. … None of us lives without a history; each of us is a narrative” (16). History is personal history, the narrative of a person's life, and each of us has one. As to “an objective, externally verifiable history,” it “is not possible anywhere” (17).

The critical reader may well wonder what this last sentence means. On the one hand, and perhaps this is Fog's intention, it might seem to be the familiar hermeneutical assertion that we are always involved in interpretation. But in the context of no context, where we autonomous agent-subjects are always, as Fog says, “inventing the narratives that are our lives” (17), there is no subject-object dialectic and thus no constraints to prevent subjectivity from taking over the whole discursive field. He cites the following passage, supposedly from the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb:

Whatever “truth or validity” adheres to history … does not derive, as the conventional historian might assume, from an “objective” world, a world of past events waiting to be discovered and reconstructed by the historian. For there is no objective world, no historical events independent of the experience of the historian, no events or facts which are not also ideas.

(28)

According to Fog, he is quoting Himmelfarb from her essay “Supposing History Is a Woman—What Then?” But this quotation, asserting the impossibility of history, does not represent Himmelfarb at all; rather, it is her paraphrase of the philosopher-historian Michael Oakeshott, whose view of history she is attacking. The thesis that “whatever ‘truth or validity’ adheres to history … does not derive … from an ‘objective’ world” is Oakeshott's, and Himmelfarb criticizes it for its “inhibiting effect” on the practice of writing history.¹³ If Oakeshott's thesis makes history writing impossible, as Himmelfarb argues, the rhetoric of Fog blankets the abyss with an impenetrable euphoria in which each person becomes the unconstrained historian. “We are always,” Fog says, “inventing the narratives that are our lives” (Fog 17), but he does not recognize at what cost. Lukacs argues that when the values of the self “draw their justification only from the fact of having been subjectively experienced,” the price of “this immoderate elevation of the subject” is the “abandonment of any claim to participation in the shaping of the outside world.”¹⁴

“We are always … inventing the narratives that are our lives,” says Fog. He means the word “invention” first of all in its rhetorical sense, but in the context of no context invention becomes a solipsistic omnipotence. Invention, says Fog, first opens us to the other. In the Rogerian scenario, however, the other is the empathetic “congruent” listener—not an adversary or opponent. Invention is thus free to expand outward like a released gas and envelops the world of the other. Fog pursues, “Beyond any speaker's bound inventive world lies another: there lie the riches of creation, the great, unbounded possible universe of invention. All time is there, past, present, and future” (29). The language images the bourgeois subject as the original cornucopia, an unbounded plentitude whose omnipotence encompasses “past, present, and future,” collapsing them into an eternally present now. This fantasy of the omnipotent ego is the extreme of idealism. To get a fix on our position in this weird space it may be sufficient to recall a famous text from the opposed tradition: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.”¹⁵

To return to Burke's term “transformation,” in Fog's essay we the readers are transformed or acted upon by means of the ambiguous terms “love” and “history.” In the familiar pattern of our cultural schizophrenia, we are moved to accept an illusory subjective omnipotence, which has the effect of reconciling us to our real objective impotence. Transformations, I said, work mediately through ambiguity and ultimately through—the second term to be highlighted here—identification. In Fog's essay both the reader and the author are identified with an undifferentiated “we.” How do we, the actual readers of Fog, identify this “we”? (Note the useful ambiguity of the word “identify”: as unresisting readers, we are likely to make an identification with; as resisting or critical readers we may make an identification of. That is, we may identify—in the sense of find out—the hidden persuasion of identification.)¹⁶

The “we” in Fog, I have already implied, is unitary and homogeneous. It has two variant terms, “I” and “the arguer,” neither of which leaves any streak in the uniform vanilla of “we.” “I” is the voice of sentimental reason—reason in the empathetic mode, ready to love first so that the reader cannot disagree without making himself seem a surly dog such as I may appear to be. The arguer is of course the unconstrained agent-subject at whose will the cornucopia of invention spills forth. Consider these three sentences or sentence groups with “we” as the subject. The first is one cited earlier: “All authors, to be sure, we are more particularly narrators, historians, tale-tellers” (16). The second: “Each of us is a narrative. A good part of the time we can live comfortably adjacent to or across the way from other narratives” (18). The third: “We have not learned how to let competing normalities live together in the same time and space. We're not sure, we frail humans, that it is possible” (30).

In these sentences “we” are autonomous agent-subjects, unconstrained in our invention of personal history. These personal histories, as adjacent but separate units, provide an area in which “we live comfortably,” a sort of segregated suburb of personal stories in which the neighbors all keep quiet and mow their lawns once a week. This suburb—which may remind us of the rings of armed white suburbs that encircle our major ghettos—is segregated not because of any specifiable act or system of injustice but because “we” have not yet learned some moral wisdom which would make us more tolerant of differences. But this lack on our part reflects no objective social fault capable of amelioration; it reflects, rather, the human condition, something which “we frail humans” are unable to do anything about.

Fog's “we” is an example of what Burke calls a “unitary term” or “merger term.” In the section of A Rhetoric of Motives called “Marx on ‘Mystification,’” Burke writes, “as regards the purposes of rhetoric, [a Marxist analysis] admonishes us to look for ‘mystification’ at any point where the social divisiveness caused by property and the division of labor is obscured by unitary terms (as with terms whereby a state, designed to protect a certain structure of ownership, is made to seem equally representative of both propertied and propertyless classes.)” We do not have to accept all Marxist claims, says Burke, in order “to apply the Marxist diagnosis for rhetorical purposes. … It is enough for our purposes to note the value of the admonition that private property makes for a rhetoric of mystification, as the ‘ideological’ approach to social relations sets up a fog of merger-terms where the clarity of division-terms is needed” (RM 108-09). From this last phrase, “a fog of merger-terms,” I have drawn the name I have given to the figure of the Rogerian rhetorician.

If in the quotations of Fog's unitary “we” a moment ago, you as the reader felt yourself resisting inclusion, what you were conscious of was the force of representation, which troublesome term may now be considered. Fog's use of the term “we” is a good example of how representation works by fusing social difference into uniformity; or, to recall the example from Aristotle again, in representing free males Fog prudently excludes the condition of women and slaves. How then do the oppressed fare in Rogerian argument? We have already had occasion to notice one representation of woman in Fog's text; the reference, in fact, is three-fold. The woman is present in Gertrude Himmelfarb; she is suggested in Himmelfarb's title “Supposing History Is a Woman—What Then?”; and as the muse Clio she is represented by History herself. I have mentioned already the violence Fog does to both Clio and Himmelfarb. Clio is deprived of existence in the public sphere, reduced to a subjective vapor; Himmelfarb is deprived of her own voice, of her assertion of the possibility of history, and in its place appear the words of Michael Oakeshott, attributed to her, declaring the impossibility of history.

So that I don't seem to exaggerate what may have been only a simple error of ascription, notice the other representation of woman in Fog's text. I have already cited the passage where Fog gives examples of “seemingly hopeless” adversarial situations, including pro-life and farm subsidy issues and Middle Eastern conflict. I didn't point out, however, that these items of public import are given in the form of a gradatio whose climactic term is “a beautiful Jewish woman encounter[ing] an aged captain of guards for Dachau” (Fog 25).¹⁷ That is, the series of struggles in the public sphere culminates as a “conflict inside the head of a single lonely man or woman”—a single lonely man who can only be Fog himself—and the psychological conflict determines the meaning of the series. The gradatio thus serves to shrink the public and collective to the personal and individual, and it shrivels the century's greatest conflict and holocaust to a private psychomachia.

Himmelfarb's title, “Supposing History Is a Woman—What Then?” directs the reader to search for the woman in Fog's text, and the “beautiful Jewess” is her most striking representation. As a holocaust survivor, she combines the condition of both of Aristotle's figures, woman and slave. In Rogerian rhetoric, however, she is reduced to a personal history, which she like each of us possesses, and she thus becomes another indistinguishable integer in the uniform mass. It is impossible to conceive a greater violation of the woman than this reduction which strips her of the context which alone gave meaning to her brutalization. She is left possessing only the one attribute the male was willing to allow her to keep—her looks, which qualify her to be a commodity for male consumption. And if we understand the Jewess as violated history, how do we understand the captain of the guards except as a demonic type of the Rogerian rhetorician, the violator of history, the imperial ego whose violence in Fog's text has been precisely to strip the Jewess of culture and history?

Finally, it should be noted that in the Philosophy of Literary Form representation is but one of a series of metonymic substitutions for symbolic action. Among this series are such terms as “strategy,” “magical decree,” “fetish,” and “medicine” (PLF 3, 5, 23, 264). In the present context, the last term must give us pause. Rhetoric as medicine has two uses, prophylactic and therapeutic, with the common element underlying each being the consolation of philosophy.¹⁸ “Consolation,” dialectically considered, implies a pre-existing disconsolation which, following Freud, may be taken as the personal malaise produced by collective repression. Russell Jacoby, in his critique of conformist psychology, shows that the Rogerian therapist sees this malaise as a psychological need left over after material needs are filled:

The clear distinction between material and psychic needs is already the mystification; it capitulates to the ideology of the affluent society which affirms the material structure is sound, conceding only that some psychic and spiritual values might be lacking. Exactly this distinction sets up “authenticity” and “fulfillment” as so many more commodities for the shopper. … Rogers accepts the fissure and prescribes a double dose as the cure: after a hard day on the job, the weary are to unwind with a little “authenticity.” This is the same message forced in through every pore by media; the attention of the discontented is diverted from the source to the surface.¹⁹

The question of therapy, broadly stated, is the question of the construction of subjectivity, in which process schools are a major site.²⁰ In the idealist context of no context, in the absence of any consciousness of social conflict and the constraints of social structure, the individual—the student or teacher—learns to personalize problems and thus is prepared for the role of Rogerian client.²¹ Essentially, the student learns to blame herself because she accepts the ideology which locates the source of all action and value in the individual self. The subjectivism of Rogerian argument posits the human subject without objective history, without a world. History is only personal history, which exists without any capacity to bring about change in the objective world. Public or social history is impossible. Both students from the oppressed and those from the oppressing classes are thus co-opted into a passive view of history as a force outside human control.

Only a view of history as conflict can show how human beings create history; only such a view makes social change possible. The necessary corrective is supplied by the later Sartre, who is one of the sources of the existentialism, however shrunken from the Sartrean original, that undergirds Rogerian argument. “We were convinced,” says Sartre of his generation,” at one and the same time that historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history, and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality.”²² The subjectivity we cultivate in our students must be complemented with history; otherwise, we will never get beyond the ephemeral compulsory communities based on ego massage and never create real communities based on genuine social purpose.

I hope I am not misunderstood. I don't recommend we ignore individual psychology where its use is to empower the student for action, as in the work of Kenneth Bruffee and Ira Shor.²³ What I object to is a psychological practice which enfeebles students by adjusting them to collective repression. For a critical rhetorical theory, the notion of love is a fragment of a social theory and a misconception of argument. As a social theory, Rogerian idealism darkens the objective social relationship of love into an impenetrable fog of subjectivity. A proper understanding of subjectivity must recognize its objective basis, as Volosinov (Bakhtin) asserts: “Individualistic confidence in oneself, one's sense of personal value, is drawn not from within, not from the depths of one's personality, but from the outside world. It is the … interpretation of one's social recognizance … and of the objective security and tenability provided by the whole social order, of one's individual livelihood.”²⁴ Or, as Jacoby restates the necessity, emphasizing the dialectic: For subjectivity to attain itself, to become subjective, it must achieve self-consciousness: insight into the objective reality that falsifies the subject.”²⁵ As a theory of argument, “Rhetoric as Love” not only contradicts the adversarial tradition of argument (a point made by other writers on Rogerian rhetoric²⁶); it ignores that the traditional Western understanding of argument as conflict is based on a fundamental social dynamic. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate that “the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing.” Metaphor, in their understanding, is not a simple linguistic epiphenomenon; rather, our conceptual system “is fundamentally metaphorical in nature,” governing “how we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.”²⁷

To conclude by returning to the rhetorics of killing and love, the Rogerian rhetoric of love turns out to be a rhetoric of collective repression because it precludes the social, the principle of which is a dialectic of division and unity. What Rogerian rhetoric offers as love is a co-opted subjectivity incapable of insight into the objective reality that falsifies the subject. Burke's rhetoric of killing, on the other hand, includes a rhetoric of love, because it implies a social context in which love is possible. “We need never deny the presence of strife, enmity, faction as a characteristic motive of rhetorical expression. We need not close our eyes to their almost tyrannous ubiquity in human relations;” yet “identifications in the order of love are also characteristic of rhetorical expression” (RM 20).

Notes

1. Michael Halloran, “Rhetoric in the American College Curriculum: The Decline of Public Discourse,” PRE/TEXT 3 (1982): 263.

2. George Trow, Within the Context of No Context (Boston: Little and Brown, 1981), passim. I have profited from Ann Clark's application of Trow in “Resisting False Consciousness in the 80's: The Girl,” unpublished paper, 1986.

3. Maxine Hairston, “Carl Rogers' Alternative to Traditional Rhetoric,” College Composition and Communication 27 (1976): 373-77; Andrea Lunsford, “Aristotelian vs. Rogerian Argument: A Reassessment,” College Composition and Communication 30 (1979): 146-51; Paul Bator, “Aristotelian and Rogerian Rhetoric,” College Composition and Communication 31 (1980): 427-32; Diane C. Mader, “What Are They Doing to Carl Rogers?” ETC 37 (1980): 314-20; Maxine Hairston, “Using Carl Rogers' Theories in the Composition Classroom,” Rhetoric Review 1 (1982): 50-55; Lisa Ede, “Is Rogerian Rhetoric Really Rogerian?” Rhetoric Review 3 (1984): 41-48; and Jim W. Corder, “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” Rhetoric Review 4 (1985): 16-32.

   Not all of these writers are advocates of Rogerian argument. Mader questions whether the Rogerian approach can be viewed as a form of argument (314), and Ede goes as far as to suggest something (undefined) “potentially harmful” in a Rogerian pedagogy (41).

4. Citations from Burke are made in the text as follows: GM: A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: U. California P., 1969); GR: A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: U. California P., 1969); and PLF: The Philosophy of Literary Form, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1957).

5. Corder, 25-26. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Fog.

6. Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: U. Chicago P., 1983), p. 23. Like Lentricchia's, my evaluation of Burke's uses for ideological analysis is more positive than that of Frederic Jameson. See his “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis,” Critical Inquiry 4 (1978): 507-23.

7. George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, tr. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 83.

8. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), p. 151; Trow, passim; and Crane, passim.

9. Kenneth Burke, “Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment,” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 403.

10. Lentricchia, pp. 153-54.

11. Bator, p. 430.

12. Hairston, “Carl Rogers,” p. 373; and A Contemporary Rhetoric, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), p. 346.

13. Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Supposing History Is a Woman—What Then?” The American Scholar 53 (1984): 502.

14. George Lukacs, Theory of the Novel, tr. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 117. For a more systematic treatment, see Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1982), pp. 123ff.

15. Karl Marx, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 320.

16. Lentricchia, p. 149.

17. Could Fog have found this encounter in E. L. Doctorow's “False Documents,” The American Review 26 (1977): 229? Fog cites Doctorow's essay but to the same effect he cites Himmelfarb's: to reverse the meaning of a writer committed to the possibility of history.

18. Lentricchia, p. 155.

19. Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), pp. 48-49.

20. Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983), p. 78.

21. “Often, [Paolo] Freire says, students unaware of the connections between their own lives and society personalize their problems.” Kyle Fiore and Nan Elsasser, “‘Strangers No More’: A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum,” CE 44 (1982): 116. Freire's insight recurs in a different context in Richard Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-75,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 212.

22. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 21. Jameson notes an emphasis on the act links “Sartrean praxis philosophy” with Burke's dramatism and “explains the affinities of both for a certain Marxism” (513).

23. Kenneth Bruffee, “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” CE 46 (1984): 635-52; and Ira Shor Critical Teaching and Everday Life (Boston: South End Press, 1980). I have also admired Mary C. Savage's “The Material Conditions of Writing in the College Classroom,” unpublished paper, 1985.

24. V. N. Volosinov [M. M. Bakhtin], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 89.

25. Jacoby, p. 128. This is also Paolo Freire's argument in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1970), pp. 35-36.

26. Mader and Ede. See note 3 above.

27. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1980), p. 5.