by Samuel Day Fassbinder
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Communication
The Ohio State University
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Columbus OH 43210
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Paper presented at the Western Speech Communication Association convention, February 16-20, 1996, Pasadena CA
This essay attempts to understand "doing epistemology" in terms of the philosopher Michel Foucault's performance of a rhetorical "archaeology of knowledge" in The Order of Things, and discuss Foucault's (1970) project as having some coherence in terms of a rhetoric-as-epistemic conception that its authors call "relationalism." Foucault, furthermore, outlines a tropics of discourse that points to the forms of epistemic claims, as they appear historically, as comprising paradigms for the rhetoric of inquiry that he calls epistemes.
In reading The Order of Things for its value to a rhetoric-as-epistemic conception of the rhetoric of inquiry, I reject the Sophistic denial of "truth" implicit in later Foucault as well as in a "critical rhetoric" which ranges itself in debate against the rhetoric-as-epistemic doctrine, and I offer a guarded endorsement of Foucault's skepticism as providing the basis for his one-sided investigation of the episteme (as the tropic basis for the making of epistemic claims) as it appears in The Order of Things.
I also treat, briefly, Raymie McKerrow's formative essay "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis" (Communication Monographs 56 (1989) 91-111) as a Foucauldian rhetoric that offers a Sophistic, rather than a skeptical, view of rhetoric, arguing that the skeptical view of rhetoric is better because it keeps linguistic truth-relations in view rather than discarding the possibility of rhetorical truth altogether.
The conclusion of this essay attempts to lodge Foucault's epistemic rhetoric in a postmodern discussion of the "culture of reading" (Ritchie 1993), which is itself read against the grain to show how Foucault's notion of historical rupture in the rhetoric of inquiry must give way to a cumulative notion of truth-claims.