Quotes
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Chapter 1
- "apocalyptism does ideological work by offering intellectual sustenance to political activists...it actually connects political activity to Christian duty. The apocalyptic flavor of dominion theology--the belief that Christians can hasten the Second Coming by creating a Christian kingdom here on earth--motivates Christian activists to convert unbelievers. But it also motivates them to alter the ideological underpinnings of American democracy" (9).
- "Hegemonic discourses construct and inform community experience to such an extent that their assumptions seem natural...The very inarticulateness of hegemonic belief is a source of its power" (12).
- "fundamentalist adherents of ideologies project vices defined by their preferred system of belief onto those who adhere to other systems" (13).
- "the borders of a hegemonic discourse are defined by the limits of its power to interpellate adherents, to police their desire to accept or defeat" (21).
Chapter 2
- "rhetoric cannot thrive in polities where open disagreement is discouraged" (25).
- "any art of practice entitled to be called 'rhetoric' must intervene in some way in the beliefs and practices of the community it serves" (27).
- "The coercive goal of violence is deterrence. This makes it very different from rhetoric, where the goal is persuasion" (31).
- Rhetoric "did not readily adapt to...liberalism and science. Liberal and scientific thinkers located invention in encounters between individuals and nature rather than in the common language of the polity...In modern rhetoric, then, the quality of invention would depend upon the quality of the mind that produced it rather than on the quality of the arguments made available by language and culture, as ancient rhetoricians had maintained" (35).
- For good explanation of liberal rhetorical theory, see page 36.
- "If we conceive the relative availability of arguments as lying along a range or spectrum, its endpoints can designate arguments that can be imagined or desired but that cannot be constructed in a given cultural time and place" (49). (Reminds me of Marcuse)
Chapter 3
- "I distinguish ideology from hegemony rhetorically by asserting that ideological belief is relatively more open to controversy than is hegemonic belief. Another way to put this is to say that hegemonic discourses and practices 'go without saying.' They are so thoroughly naturalized, so imbricated in daily life, that they are seldom brought to consciousness. Ideological belief, on the other hand, is available for contest" (66).
- "Ideologies are constructed by connecting and disconnecting beliefs that circulate within a given ideology or among several ideologies" (75). An ideologic is what connects various beliefs across different belief systems.
- "When beliefs and ideologies are actually brought to consciousness, they become arguments" (75).
- "I hypothesize that the more densely beliefs are articulated with one another in a given belief system or across belief systems, the more impervious they are to rhetorical intervention. The pathways typically taken in some ideologics are so tightly connected with one another, so routinely and regularly traveled, that they become a sort of automatic 'first response' to encounters with new or countering beliefs and belief systems" (78).
- "In some cases disarticulation might require abandonment of an entire ideology or even a hegemony; such a sweeping change entails emotional upheaval and changes in identities, not to mention possible abandonment of communities that still cling to the discarded belief system...beliefs that threaten the integrity of a belief system must be highly resonant as well" (79).
- "Americans don't ordinarily frame disagreements as arguments about values. Our lack of explicit talk about values permits fraudulent value arguments to be accepted regularly" (88-89).
- "The distinction between fact and value poses a difficult problem for liberal argumentation, which of course relies on (liberal) values while pretending that it does not and while insisting that nonliberal values are inadmissable in public disagreements" (90).
- "In short, values are continually produced and reproduced by means of reflexive relations in the habitus, relations that obtain between and among individuals, cultures, histories" (91).
- "Collective fantasies perform persuasive work, such as defining who is an outsider" (97).
- Paraphrasing Slotkin: "myths are narrative and poetic, while ideologies are argumentative and prosaic" (97).
Chapter 4
- "Harding notes that secular intellectuals tend to discount the importance of apocalyptist thought on the ground that belief does not necessarily influence action (“Imagining 59). But as I argue earlier, this disjunction is theoretically and practically suspect. Jerry Falwell certainly does not separate belief from action, and neither should critics who are concerned about the political and ethical fallout from Christian apocalyptism" (116).
Chapter 5
- Conservative Christian theologians have long preferred deductive argument as a means of reasoning. One variety of this is called "presuppositionalism, which asserts that the discernment of first principles is an act of faith. In this view every thinker, religious or not, has only faith to go on as an assurance that the principles, that is, the presuppositions, from which she begins are true and accurate" (143).
- "one finds in reality what one expected because one notices what one expected to find, Difference, the unexpected, doesn t resonate because difference is hard to notice; it is hard to notice because in a densely articulated ideology of the same, awareness of difference provides little or no emotional stimulation. Repetition of the same, however, does stimulate emotional response, and because this resonance can be mistaken for experience, emotional response comes to be associated with reality" (146).
- "In ethical terms a refusal of ambiguity and complexity allows no space for negotiation, no way to generate alternatives or gradations. In rhetorical terms the ideology of clarity opens few spaces for invention; the only modifications permitted are those necessary to adapt the structure to new historical developments" (147).
- Hardisty notes that “when the right mobilizes intolerance against a minority or an out-group (such as lesbians and gay men, welfare recipients, or teenage offenders), it blames and demonizes the hated group, and, at the same time, draws anger away from real sources of social ills. By displacing anger onto such decoys, the right allows for greater dominance by elites, while creating the impression of increased empowerment for those expressing their intolerance (51) (161).
- "The theological distinction between the elect and the nonelect has morphed into an “friend-enemy dichotomy in conservative Christian political discourse, creating exactly the sort of threat to democracy forecast by Chantal Mouffe (Democratic 104)- Christian activists do not merely wish to pose their positions as alternatives; rather, they want to erase sent altogether, to insist that those of us who disagree with their policies (“place ourselves avowedly with them") (164).
Chapter 6
- "foucauldian skeptical analyses are ordinarily convincing only to other skeptics, few committed apocalyptists will be persuaded by any skeptical reading'-liberal, scientific, or postmodern-that attacks the super-rational foundation of their belief system. In fact apocalyptists are on the lookout for skepticism, and they furiously police the borders of their belief system against invasion by it "(166).
- "IneflfoUU the true and the real by means of deduction from ineffable first premises. Contact with the real is certified by its resonance with beliefs already in place. In addition, many citizens now realize that reason, the liberal measure of truth, is in the service of power. Finally* postmodern thinkers insist that there is no longer any argumentative ground beyond the pull of competing interests from which one can assert a claim to truth. When ordinary standards for measuring truth-telling are under assault, whatever those standards may be in a given time and place, conspiracy thinking can flourish" (172).
Chapter 7
- "I will hazard, that new or countering beliefs are more likely to be heard and considered by subalterns, those who are subjected to rather than subjects of a hegemonic discourse. That is to say> counterhegemonic beliefs may be taken up more readily among those who are not included in a dominant subjectivity who are reckoned by and within it as different" (192).
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Summary
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Chapter 1
- We can't talk about current events because everything is articulated through 2 discourses: fundamentalist Christianity and liberalism.
- Rhetoric is suited to help negotiate "objective" argumentation of liberalism and faith/belief/desire based argumentation in apocalypticism, but rhetoric requires a post-modern reconstruction.
- Fundamentalist Christian beliefs challenge liberal discursive hegemony
- All belief systems are foundational, and the people who subscribe to those foundations see them as universals whose primacy reduces those who don't hold them to a lesser value (13).
- Fundamentalism is to take foundationalism (a universal principle) and apply to it a primacy in all scenarios. It's not just that they attend to an all-encompassing truth, but that those truths are unquestionable and anyone questioning them must be dispelled. In current times, then, fundamentalism is a stance or practice of defending unevaluated ideals against criticism and evaluation.
- In presenting the blurring of the public and private spheres, Crowley cites Arendt's use of Athenian democracy. To be able to rule meant one had to be able to transgress the bounds of nature, the Oikos, which was needed to provide for biological needs. In contemporary society, the two realms are viewed differently by liberals and apocalyptists. Liberals eschew any value-based discussion from public debate, and apocalyptisists base all discussions on value. Value in Athens was a public deliberation for the community, but now value is off limits for the public sphere because it conveys private concern or is overlaid with the public based in theonomy.
- Crowley leans on Mouffe's use of Derrida to argue in favor of a political embrace of difference over consensus.
- Crowley employs a decidedly post-modern take on deliberation in democracies. Since hegemonic discourses encourage adherents to see others as enemies to be destroyed (within or from without the state), we should see others, not as enemies, but as adversaries who aren't irrational but rather adhere to a different hegemonic than our own. They have legitimate claims within their belief system. Accomplishing this requires a subjective conversion who can utilize passions, a call Crowley sees as the need for rhetorical intervention.
Chapter 2
- Though rhetoric can be used for ill--like all arts--it contains the ability to intervene productively in disagreement. However, for it to work, it must be used in a state of being where open and free discussion is allowed to proliferate.
- Crowley hopes that teaching rhetorical theory (a rhetorical performance viewed from a distance) can affect the practice of civil discourse and allow for the invention of arguments outside the hegemonic discourse.
- Verbal coercion is not rhetoric; no persuasion takes place. People can be forced but not be persuaded by that force that what they're forced to do is the right thing.
- Liberal rhetorical theory presumes a free-thinking subject who develops arguments from empirical observation of a value-neutral environment and persuades through understanding. But understanding doesn't equal persuasion. Also, liberal rhetorical theory removes value from "nature," from that outside of the sovereign individual. Therefore, to perform some agentive capacity outside of oneself, value must be suppressed and reason must reign supreme.
- Liberal rhetorical theory holds that failure to persuade someone is a failure on the audience's part to correctly utilize a universal mode of intelligence and understanding. There's no such thing as embodied, or affected personal histories or experiences, or cultural ways of knowing that go unnoticed.
- Crowley argues against the ability of empathy or understanding results in a failure of imagination and ultimately leads to irreconcilable disagreement.
- Crowley has no faith in the ability of "tolerant deliberation" to achieve consensus because consensus requires the elimination of dissent.
- Crowley uses mistranslations of doxa as individualistic and inferior opinion to show how ancient rhetoric must be rescued from its absorption into a modern lexicon.
- Crowley cites Protagoras's "man is the measure of all things." Since all things are recognizable logoi that have within them "clashing opposites." Man then is the measure of all things, "because it is they who perceive, evaluate, choose, and express from among the plenitude of logoi thrown off by things in the world" (48).
- Rhetorical situations, doxa, create rhetors. "rhetorical subjects are outcomes, invention is located within...a rhetorical event" (51). Rhetorical performances produce a rhetor, a power aligned with dynamis and Aristotelian potential.
- Crowley positions rhetorical power as a kind of potentiality that embraces kairotic awareness. Uses known techniques (style) to "open other paths in doxa" (52).
- Crowley advocates for a "good rhetoric," an ethical rhetoric that doesn't shut down possibilities in argumentation, that isn't univocal or myopic. This reminds me of Foucault's ethical differentiation in bad uses of parrhesia and Marcuse's call for two-dimensional man.
- A person's value judgment or good argument doesn't mean that the person is a good, or bad, person.
Chapter 3
- In rereading the offices of rhetoric (teach, delight, move), Crowley expands beyond simply providing evidence to add an audience respect for the rhetor (ethical) and the audience's affective qualities: "Cicero suggests, then, that rhetorical effect is achieved by means of affect: the beliefs and behavior of audiences are altered not only by the provision of proofs but by establishment of ethical, evaluative, and emotional climates in which such changes can occur" (58).
- Arguing against liberal idealism, and citing Zizek's contribution to ideology, Crowley argues that "ideology, fantasy, and emotion" are the prime persuaders (59).
- Ideologic articulations are different than liberal reason. Reason is empirical while ideologic articulations are built on belief, emotion, affect, etc. They are also woven into frequently habituated community discourses and mythologies.
- Crowley grounds her arguments about the suasive effects of emotion and affect in Bordieu's habitus (and nods to Foucault's discursive formations). For extended def see 62. They are essentially practiced, products of history that could be seen as a milieu.
- Crowley's connection of belief and ideology is interesting. Beliefs are moments of ideology (ideology then precedes belief, moments are firmly situated in a history of use within a range of discursive contexts 64) and ideology is a medium wherein articulations (connections) occur. In short, a belief is a hint of ideology. Multiple beliefs, while disparate, can be connected (articulated) via the medium of ideology.
- Crowley also asserts that beliefs extend from bodily practices. Citing Zizek, she argues that "embodied belief is...belief before belief." That is, arriving at a consciousness of a belief was preprogrammed and the awareness or acceptance of it is a formality.
- Identities emanate from a habitus and hide difference. They aren't rigid, but they serve to demarcate the boundaries of a community (fashion, speech, bodily movement). Here Crowley extends belief to the ancient use of commonplaces that don't have to be true but are true to the extent that they are extant and in circulation. Commonplaces are shared among people who maintain the same identities. Hegemonies try to minimize the number of times an adherent encounters difference, as difference is the means by which such falsities or inconsistencies are laid bare.
- Beliefs can never be singular or held privately since they emanate from a habitus and discourse.
- Crowley argues against the old notion that emotion pollutes rationality by providing examples wherein emotion and reason are reciprocally connected.
- Crowley provides an extended dive into how affect and belief work in a habitus and how this relates to ancient rhetoric's use of enthymemes.
- Crowley points to the birth of liberalism, specifically Locke, as a signpost for the removal of values from communally held invocations to privately held, internalized associations of pleasure and pain. In so doing, liberalism privileges facts, but facts do not say what is to be done about an existing fact or whether they are good or bad.
- In theorizing about a rhetoric of desire, Crowley grounds herself in Lacan, based on his the three registers that create subjectivity (symbolic, imaginary, and real). When people become aware that they are symbolically cut off from the real they fantasize (desire) substitutions, which are metaphors for the real or represent them metonymically by extension (a raise instead of a promotion). Citing Zizek: "Fantasy...tells desire how to structure itself" (94). I fantasize about eating a cake informs my desire to eat cake, not something else. Cake is how the desire should be manifested. This is not to say that my fantasizing means I need to eat cake, only that I'm hungry, but it must manifest hunger in the symbolic (cake), so that is what I desire. (allusion here to capitalism's ability to create Marcusean "false needs" through this process of fantasy-desire-need). Crowley connects this to rhetoric by showing how people can fantasize about themselves in relation to others, which means their fantasies emanate from a habitus. Beliefs then can be so strongly felt because the beliefs might psychologically be linked to representations of themselves in metaphorical or metonymic ways (pro-life people envision themselves as fetuses). Citing Zizek, the manifestation of desire, "staged in fantasy," is an expectation of what is expected of the person doing the desiring. If a person desires to harm an Other based on skin color after a terrorist attack, this could be traced to a communal expectation about who belongs and who doesn't, which when fantasized about means that the racist should act on the fantasized danger. These are, then, collective fantasies.
- Myths also perform persuasive work by generalizing history so that the moral is more important than actuality; they also appear during times of social disruption and act as "sutures."
- Taken together, Crowley's investigation into affect, desire, myth, emotion, etc. in this chapter argue against a liberalism that sees reason as rhetoric par excellence. This could be used in rebuttals of idealistic civil discourse (Habermas).
Chapter 4
- Crowley begins by explicating apocalyptism's theological bases and then moves into how certain actors utilize political systems to disseminate their message (evangelical political committees and think tanks 116).
- Crowley's case study mostly examines LaHaye, author of Left Behind series and fundamentalist-dispensationalist thinker. His arguments, Crowley notes, lean heavily on literalist Biblical inerrancy that work enthymemetically or even tautological. The warrant goes unstated.
- Fundamentalist Christians negotiate the ability of anyone to read and understand the Bible and the multiple meanings apparently contained within in by asserting a "common sense" that reaches back to Enlightenment faculty Psychology, wherein there was one "common" sense that "controlled each of the physical senses and...mulled over evidence" (122). However, only some people possess the right knowledge of what is "ordinary" and "usual" in their interpretations. Prophecy interpreters cherrypick verses to support their interpretations regardless of context.
- The "prophecy industry" supplies believers with ready made warrants of how to read geopolitical and current events and how they can act out their private beliefs in the public realm. That is, it prescribes an ethics, a sense of right action and ethos.
- Christian fundamentalism presents a problem for rhetoric in its universal, non-contingent truths that "transcend temporal and local contexts....[which] shuts down the search for available alternatives" (130).
- Apocalyptists believe the present era begins after Christ's death, which causes them to focus on Pauline texts rather than Christ's teachings. Christ serves a vengeful purpose in his return. Crowley believes this presents a doctrinal danger and a democratic danger. Doctrinal because they believe themselves to be the only true Christians, and democratic because those who express no interest in being saved are evil and enemies, and whoever listens to them is threatened with eternal damnation.
Chapter 5
- The Christian Right emerges in the 70s and 80s in response to Civil Rights, feminist movement, Roe v Wade, challenges to private school segregation, Equal Rights Amendment, prayer in schools, etc.
- Crowley outlines the evolution of the Christian Right from Reagan on and how they successfully came to power in America.
- Crowley explains the reasoning behind the Christian Right as deductive presuppositionalism: first principles are acts of faith: the major premise is outside of human reasoning. "reality is presumed to accord with God's premises" (144).
- Presuppositionalism and fundamentalist Christianity, since they believe those who are saved with understand and be spoken to by God through their heart not their sensory experiences and reason, stand opposed to the guiding tenets of liberalism. Political position aren't derived from human reason or time but by divine reason and God-time; they exist outside of empirical data.
- Crowley explicates the compelling political vision for the Christian Right and then turns to the usefulness of Dominionism theology, which interprets Biblical passages to mean that humans should bring the earth and all of its institutions under Christian control and command.
- Crowley makes and interesting turn in this chapter from a previous argument. Earlier, fundamentalists were associated more heavily with the faculty psychology of common sense philosophers and Enlightenment thinking that forwarded and external-internal dichotomy. Here, however, Crowley shows how the Enlightenment philosophy that encouraged the Constitution has come under fire from the Christian Right for its Godlessness, especially the Establishment Clause. Fundamentalists, in turn, use the Establishment Clause to attack secularism, claiming that it is a religion.
- Crowley explains Fundamentalist's views using Aristotle's two kinds of signs or proofs, those factually based in empirical reality and those constructed by a rhetor. Fundamentalists "analogize the relations that obtain in human behavior (wisdom accompanies justness) to the true and valid relations that obtain in empirical reality (fever accompanies sickness, mothers’ milk accompanies childbirth)" (159). Reasoning from the fallible depends on probabilities.
- The Christian Right manifests a persecution complex that targets liberl pluralism and tolerance.
Chapter 6
- Crowley begins this chapter by treating skepticism broadly. Both scientific, liberal skepticism and fundamentalist skepticism "tolerate many kinds of warrants" (169). Scientific skepticism could also accelerate fundamentalism. Since scientific skepticism makes claims about what can and can't be assessed with scientific rationality, even if the same methods are used, skepticism opens up all arenas for verifiability.
- Crowley links the reasoning inherent in fundamentalism and conspiracy thinking.
- In reviewing the 9/11 conspiracy theories, Crowley performs a generous reading of evidence and methodologies propelled in conspiracy investigations. In so doing, Crowley problematizes the ways reason can be deployed and used, even by liberal-minded, rational people. Therefore, when the evidence is the same for all sides, rhetoric, persuasion, motivates how that evidence should be read. In other words, it isn't just about unadulterated information and facts, but instead about persuasiveness.
Chapter 7
- Persuasion does happen, but it first requires recognizing a counter-claim.
- Crowley believes subalterns are better disposed to identify and acknowledge counter claims. Echoing Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, Crowley states that "single-minded" people "seldom hear or read arguments that carry sufficient force to change their beliefs" (193). Single-mindedness breeds in its isolation and privilege. Therefore, "those of us who want change should challenge privilege and isolation in whatever ways we can find or invent" (194).
- Crowley calls on non-fundamentalists of all stripes to take up the argumentative burden because they are more versatile and open to difference, which is to say that they can more easily engage in deliberative rhetoric.
- Crowley provides a few avenues of persuasion for progressive rhetors: narratives as evidence, opening a shared vision and working backward. That is, invoke a community desire, praise it, or criticize its opposites. In addition, rhetors could disarticulate supposedly universal conception with contingency using the discourse and values of the other.
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