ABSTRACT
Just a few steps more and we also can see the basis for rhetoric’s current fashionability across a range of disciplines. Thinkers like Derrida and Barthes have made us comfortable with applying the term “symbol” to a variety of forms, so it would be typical of our times to see studies of rhetoric that focused not just on language or voice or gesture, but also images, music, and narrative-or scents, dress, and décor. Marx and Foucault have taught us to understand the struggle for power as a ubiquitous dynamic of human interaction, so it is nothing strange to take a rhetorical view of advertisers, as well as statesmen, clergy, scientists, and, yes, academics. With our recently acquired appreciation for the ways that reality is constructed by the tools we have devised to express it (courtesy of scholars from Geertz to Einstein), we are able to see that rhetoric can claim legitimate province over not only television commercials but also scientific treatises, revolutionary manifestos, and tenure decisions. I hope, then, that readers can begin to see why many contemporary thinkers are allied with a “globalized” concept of rhetoric: “Rhetoric’s ‘globalization’ can best be understood as a project or intellectual movement, at the center of which is a proposed disciplinary reframing: from the study of rhetoric as a delimited object of study-as circumscribed by the classical tradition-to rhetoric
as a perspective or set of perspectives on virtually all human acts and artifacts” (Simons 2006, 154; see also Best and Kellner 1997; Fish 1990).
