ABSTRACT
If rhetorical inquiry moves us to consider how responsibility is threaded through rhetorical situations, then rhetoric at its core is an ethical art, one deeply concerned with the power discourse-and rhetors, by extensionhold in shaping understandings of reality. As we saw in the previous chapter, this was the conclusion reached by Robert L. Scott and Barry Brummett in their respective accounts of epistemic rhetoric: If we understand rhetoric as a knowledge-making art, as a key factor in determining how we understand ourselves vis-à-vis social reality, then the question of responsibility (who is responsible for the world being what it is?) needs to factor into our considerations of public discourse. One of the reasons why responsibility emerges as a central concern for Scott and Brummett is because their epistemic theory places so much emphasis on human rhetors as the primary sources and recipients of rhetorical knowledge. Given what we have learned over the course this book about rhetorical realism and its ability to accommodate epistemological and ontological approaches to reality, however, such a xation on the human subject is, if anything, an outlier in the history of Western rhetoric, a point perhaps not lost on Scott and Brummett who, I argued, can also be read as attempting to accommodate realist theses with their otherwise anti-realist conception of epistemic rhetoric. Yet for all of epistemic rhetoric’s limitations, I believe it is worthwhile to take its sense of responsibility’s centrality to rhetoric seriously, particularly in the context of rhetorical realism which directs our attentions to the limits of knowledge and the natures of rhetorical being-in-the-world. If rhetoric constitutes more than an art of human persuasion or expression-if, indeed, it is dened by the entanglements of beings and relations, as I have argued-then it is reasonable to ask what the ethical implications are for this conception of rhetoric. Indeed, one often hears questions of this kind when the topics of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism come up. Why should we care so much about nonhumans, one is sometimes asked, particularly when there is so much human suffering and injustice happening in the world all around us? With all of the challenges and tragedies that plague human existence, why should we turn our attentions to things? I hope the preceding chapters offer something of an answer to this question. In a word, however, I would say that my answer to questions of this kind is ethics. Specically, I
would say that attending to the vibrancy and otherness of things is not only a speculative endeavor, it is an ethical project of the highest order, one that, as Adorno suggests, is in good keeping with concerns about alterity and responsibility that have characterized so much of the work on ethics in the postwar period. As I hope to demonstrate over the course of this nal chapter, care, tenderness, and attention are not nite resources; it is possible-and desirable, I argue-to do two (and more) things at once.
