Critical Rhetoric

The critical rhetoric project began in the early 1980s in the communication discipline principally with the work of Raymie McKerrow and Michael Calvin McGee. The phrase critical rhetoric in particular owes its genesis to McGee. Work by Phillip Wander, Michael McGee, Maurice Charland, Robert Hariman, and Celeste Condit, among others, was instrumental in building the arguments that led to the publication of the essay “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis” by McKerrow in 1989. While the designation of a critique of domination and critique of freedom, and the principles that encompassed a new formulation of rhetoric's provenance, may have been seen as original or new, they were premised on the ongoing conversation among scholars begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Reason, in all of its forms, has had a dominant role in Western theories of rhetoric. Derived from both Plato and Aristotle, the sense that rhetoric should be reasoned discourse lives on in the work of deliberative democracy theorists in the 21st century. While not seeking to eliminate reason or rational discourse from the playing field, a critical rhetoric perspective recognizes that not all communication between people will be, or necessarily should be, “reasoned,” especially if the sense of rationality that is meant is that dictated by those “in charge.” The power of the entrenched establishment in determining who can say what to whom and in what way is not to be ignored. But it is to be challenged, and that is, from the outset, the orientation of a critical perspective on rhetoric's role. As noted above, the critical practice encompasses two distinct (yet not mutually exclusive) perspectives: What is styled a critique of domination is oriented toward emancipation and may be best seen in terms of a “freedom from” domination. On the other hand, what is styled a critique of freedom is an attempt to place the focus on a not-yet-determined future, captured as a freedom to become other than we are at this moment. A focus on power relations (derived from Michel Foucault's analysis) places repressive power in the camp of domination, while a productive sense of power—what it can create in positive terms—is placed in the camp of freedom. While seeing these as two sides of the same coin is appropriate, they may function in a blended perspective, wherein one both seeks to escape (freedom from) and, at the same time, considers what one might be free to escape to.

In addition, the hope is that the critic is willing to go beyond a simple criticism to interrogate the very assumptions on which either domination or freedom rests. Nothing is privileged in an ultimate or permanent sense in the process of critiquing present reality. Thus, the grounding assumptions [Page 235]underlying democracy, for example, become subject to examination. This implies a commitment to recursivity, or constant critique: that which is “decided” as a preferred state of affairs for a people becomes, once instantiated, the subject of renewed examination. Nothing is held constant—unless one wishes it to remain. That is, critique is not committed to change as the only outcome but is committed to a reexamination of social relations (wherein power is seen as relational). What is “critical” in this scene is that, once advocacy stops and change is instantiated, it becomes a subject for continual critique. The constancy of a continual critique does not, in and of itself, blind one to ever taking action. Action may be the outcome of a specific critique at some point in time. The changes that occur in relations between people may be “a better world” (as one might hope in advocating a change), but that better world is not, by virtue of that change, a perfect place for all people.

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