Rhetoric’s Pragmatism: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics by Steven Mailloux (review)

Pragmatism’s star in the field of rhetorical studies continues to rise, with more and more scholars mining the depths of figures such as Dewey, James, Addams, and beyond for rhetorically useful material. Part of the challenge comes from the complex historical context that such thinkers are embedded in; another challenge stems from pragmatism’s own commitment to praxis over the production of abstract—and all too often academic—theories divorced from the historical-material conditions of their emergence. Often, its best thinkers are those who both engage in political practice and guide criticism instead of those who exclusively write scholarly books removed from the world of praxis. Steven Mailloux is one of the current group of scholars attempting to recover and promote this pragmatist tradition, both in his activities as a theorist and as a critical practitioner, especially as it affects rhetorical studies and implicates allied disciplines. Rhetoric’s Pragmatism is his latest attempt to flesh out what pragmatism means for those thinking about, and often practicing, the transdisciplinary arts of rhetoric and criticism, and how we are to make sense of pragmatism in its theoretical guises and in concrete practices of interpretation and sense making. Mailloux’s book is a wonderful new entry in the growing body of work that explores what pragmatism means for rhetoric, and what rhetoric means for those who study pragmatism.

Rhetoric’s Pragmatism collects fifteen of Mailloux’s previously published essays, largely focused on the interplay between rhetoric and interpretation, and forms a new exploration of “rhetorical pragmatism.” This becomes a “rhetoricized form of neo-pragmatism” that extends the philosophical thought of figures such as Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and others (1). In the introduction he indicates that the work as a whole explicates the idea of “rhetorical hermeneutics,” or the orientation that “claims that all interpretation involves rhetoric (we make our interpretations through figure and argument) and all rhetoric involves politics (power relations both condition and are affected by our arguments)” (18). The complexity and methodological diversity of the chapters that follow are explained in short order by Mailloux in the following catchy, but perhaps perplexing, slogan—“rhetorical hermeneutics often uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history” (1). What this maxim gets at is Mailloux’s engagement with history, a history of thinkers and theories and practices of communication, all of which require his interpretive activity and that putatively shed light on larger and more abstract questions about the nature of interpretation in general. Both the compact statement and his explorations in this book reveal the various integrations that Mailloux strives to present his readers with, many of which involve interpretative maneuvers such as reception studies and close readings of specific texts, as well as more abstract philosophical theorizing. This transdisciplinary and diverse approach makes the book both a challenging and a rewarding read.

The book is divided into four main sections dealing with a range of topics that include rhetoric and ontology, rhetoric and interpretation in global contexts, comparative rhetoric and Jesuit “theorhetoric,” and rhetorical pragmatism’s connection to reception history. The first section is loosely defined by the intersecting concerns of human ontology, rhetoric, and interpretation. The first chapter investigates the challenges of interpretation and hermeneutic activity (taken to be largely the same sort of activity for Mailloux) from the complementary realms of rhetorical action and legal judgment. Mailloux’s approach in this chapter employs his strategy of engaging specific texts and practices to both use interpretative frameworks and to theorize such frameworks (and their entailments) in a more abstract sense. This explains why he explicates the theoretical dividends of rhetorical pragmatism by turning toward the historical events that form a line from Huckleberry Finn, and its reception history, to influential court decisions on equal rights. Mailloux insists that our theoretical claims and interpretative judgments recognize the dependence of our claims on historical contexts: “Rhetorical hermeneutics claims that all interpretation involves rhetoric . . . and all rhetoric involves politics” (18). We...