The Rhetorical Turn in Social Theory

During the past two decades, the “linguistic” or “rhetorical” turn has emerged as an important intellectual movement in the human and social sciences. It has become a commonplace that society can be viewed as a text and that social and cultural reality, and the sciences themselves, are linguistic constructions. In this view, reality and truth are formed through practices of representation and interpretation by speakers and their publics. This view can be located in the contexts of sociolinguistics, sociology of knowledge, poststructuralism, feminist theory, critical rhetoric of inquiry, and social studies of science, as well as several other intellectual traditions. All these tendencies of thought reject the simple bifurcations of reason and persuasion, discovery and invention, or of thought and its expressions. Instead, knowledge, and human experience itself, are viewed as poetically and politically constituted, “made” by human communicative action that develops historically and is institutionalized politically.

In this view, realistic representations become true descriptions not by correspondence to noumenal objects, but by conformity to orthodox practices of writing and reading. These practices are largely guided by root metaphors that define the basic character of a world and all that it might contain. Indeed, insofar as a representation is regarded as objectively true, it is viewed that way because its metaphors and methods of construction have become so familiar that they operate transparently. Absolutist conceptions of truth are made plausible only by those modes of metaphoric representation that have “made it” socially and thence deny their necessary partiality.

Thus, for those who follow the rhetorical turn, distinctions between fact and fiction are softened because both are seen as the products of, and sources for, communicative action; both are viewed as representations of reality that also represent various groups, interests, ideologies, and historical impositions. By untangling the relationship between objectivistic, metaphoric, and political practices, rhetorical (that is, poetic and political) analysis helps us gain insight into the ways in which the true has been fashioned and could be refashioned anew.

In the presence of such a relativization of formerly privileged discourses of truth, many people feel nostalgia for a lost foundation for lawlike knowledge or ethical absolutes. That is, even after metaphoric or deconstructive criticism has done its work, we still are faced with the challenge of establishing cognitive authority and inventing affirmative values as central elements of any rational moral polity. The research program of the linguistic turn, therefore, includes the critical assessment of the deconstructivist, rhetorical effort to date, a clearer understanding of its dialectical relationship to intelligibility within historical communities of discourse, and an analysis of how academic discourses both reflect and influence their larger political contexts of production. In other words, rhetorically oriented social thinkers need to analyze the methods by which people encode and create what is taken as real, normal, and to be accepted without question and even without awareness. In this sense, the “new rhetoric” goes beyond classical rhetorical theory in three ways. It makes the ontological claims that representation and communication help to make that which is represented and communicated. It extends the scope of rhetoric to all representation, not merely political or public address. And it is critical in showing how anything stated could be otherwise represented.

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