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 CONCLUSION CONCLUSION Free citizenship presupposes the ability to fight—openly, with commitment, and about things that really matter— without fanaticism, without seeking to exterminate one’s opponents. That ability contrasts both to the ruthlessness of homo faber, ready to eliminate whatever stands in his way (including people), and the spinelessness of the animal laborans and of the parvenu, so anxious to accommodate that he cannot bear open disagreement. —Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social When Berlin published “Rhetoric and Ideology,” he laid out a deeply problematic taxonomy, making a monolith of classical rhetoric, obscuring the distinction between models of perception and models of cognition, ignoring traditions like rhetorical humanism and pragmatism, and implying that practice and theory are necessarily connected . In a certain sense, none of those criticisms matter. His intention, almost certainly, was not to promulgate the taxonomy, but to raise the issue of the relation between epistemology and rhetorical practice. He therefore succeeded to the extent that people became more self-conscious about epistemological assumptions implicit in various practices (and vice versa), rather than to the extent that people used his categories. In my darker moments , however, I think he succeeded more in the latter than the former— that, for many people in rhetoric and composition, he settled the very question he was trying to raise, and his categories are set in stone. My work might be usefully described as an attempt to revisit Berlin’s question, but with political theory rather than epistemology the uncovering term, and my work is subject to the same criticisms. My taxonomy  CONCLUSION makes a monolith of each of the models discussed, obscures important distinctions, ignores various traditions, and implies a necessary connection between theory and practice. Needless to say, this is not my intention . My categories are arbitrary, and I can easily imagine someone usefully collapsing distinctions I have made and insisting on ones I have failed to make.The last thing I want is for my very ad hoc definitions to be reified. Nor do I believe that rhetoricians must simply get our theories straight and our practice will follow. As a very smart friend once said, ideas have consequences , but they do not have necessary consequences.Theory and practice have the potential to be mutually critical, but they also have the potential to exist independently. That is, one might (as I often have and probably still do) advocate a certain theory, while engaging in a practice that implies an absolutely contradictory one.Thinking carefully about the relation of theory and practice ought to enable me to see such contradictions and work to resolve them, either by revising the theory or practice— neither should be seen as the immutable foundation of the other. In a perfect world, theories and practices engage in agon with one another, serving as critiques and countercritiques. If Burke is right, and there is no discourse without injustice, then the impulse to hierarchy in language similarly leads us to inherent hierarchies in rhetorical theory and practice. Our theories and practices are always unjust to someone or something. The task of the rhetorical critic, Burke says, is to argue for whatever has been dismissed. In terms of teaching, there is necessarily a similar hierarchy; the limited time we have means that we pay attention to some things and not others. The task of rhetoric is to argue for the value of those things to which we are not currently paying attention . If we choose the agonistic approach to public discourse, then we should try to hear at our backs the liberal model’s insistence on universality . If we choose the liberal model, then we should hear the deliberative model’s arguments for particularity. A less agonistically based claim for the mutual critique of theory and practice is Fulkerson’s, that combining different principles of composition leads to unreflective and muddled practice (“Four Philosophies”). His example is a teacher who gives expressivist assignments while using rhetorical grading criteria. It seems to me similarly confusing to tell students that interlocutors can and should evaluate proposals in a neutral fashion and that they should imagine their audience in terms of socio-  CONCLUSION economic interests, or that they write to a general audience and respond to peer reviews, or that a fact is a verifiable and noncontroversial statement that is not necessarily true, and so on. This is not to say that eclecticism is necessarily doomed; because my divisions are closer to...

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