rhetorical listening- a trope for interpretive invention and a

8/3/2019 Rhetorical Listening- A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a

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Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a "Code of Cross-CulturalConduct"Author(s): Krista RatcliffeSource: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Dec., 1999), pp. 195-224Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/359039 .Accessed: 25/09/2011 12:54

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KristaRatcliffeRhetorical Listening: A Tropefor Interpretive Inventionand a "Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct"In the beginning was not the word. In the beginning isthe hearing.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

My hearing depends on detailed differences orsimilarities.... And sometimes and in varying degrees,I can choose the mode of my conscious listening.

-Alice Rayner, "The Audience"

And once we have a vocabulary for explaining whatwe do when we listen, it is easier to convince others tolisten the way we do-and to change the way welisten ourselves.

-Peter Rabinowitz, "Fictional Music:Toward a Theory of Listening"

Reading, writing, speaking, and listeningwere cornerstones of Western rhetoricalstudies for more than 2,000 years. Butin the 20th century recovery of rhetoric within composition studies, read-

ing and writing reign as the dominant tropes for interpretive invention;1speaking places a respectable third; listening runs a poor, poor fourth.Krista Ratcliffe is an associate professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI.She teaches writing, rhetorical theory, and women's literature. Her scholarly work emerges atthe intersections of rhetorical theory, feminist theory, and reading/writing pedagogy, as evi-denced by her book Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition(s): VirginiaWoolf Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich and her articles in RhetoricReview, Studies in the LiteraryImag-ination, and The Writing Instructor. Her current book-length study explores how rhetoric andcomposition studies may recover listening in theory and praxis in ways that promote a femi-nist literacy-a literacy in which awareness of gender is complicated by other cultural catego-ries, such as "race" (including whiteness). The purpose of such literacy, she argues, is tofacilitate cross-cultural dialogues in the classroom and beyond.

CCC51.2/December 1999 195


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196 CCC 1/December999Indeed, listening has been neglected. That's not to say listening has neverbeen mentioned within 20th-century scholarship. It has. For example,James Phelan and Andrea Lunsford employ listening to explore voicesspeaking or not speaking within written texts. Phelan posits listening as ameans of constructing "some conceptual model for defining and investi-gating voice in written discourse,"particularlynarratives (132), and Lun-sford offers listening as a means for reclaiming "the voices of women inthe history of rhetoric"(6), voices of women long dead who need no long-er be silent if only we know how to listen for them.2 Yet these scholars' fo-cus on voice elides sustained theorizing about listening. Victor Vitanza alsoemploys listening not to discover individual voices but rather to play with/in texts. By pondering Nietzschean, hermeneutic and poststructuralistconversations about listening and the ear, Vitanzapromotes listening as ameans of questioning the logosand exposing its "duplicity"/"triplicity"/"complicity"within language (165-69). But despite the work of theseprominent scholars,the dominant trend in our field has been to follow thelead of popular culture and naturalize listening-to assume it is somethingthat everyone does but no one need study. The implication for composi-tion studies is quite simple: listening has almost ceased to be theorized ortaught as a rhetoricalstrategy.For some time I have been wondering how listening may be recoveredso as to inform our field theoretically and pedagogically. In this article, Iwant to suggest that rhetorical listening may be imagined, generally, as atrope for interpretive invention, one on equal footing with the tropes ofreading and writing and speaking. Although rhetorical listening may beemployed to hear discursive intersections of any cultural categories (ageand class, nationality and history, religion and politics) and any culturalpositions (child and parent, patient and doctor, clergy and parishioner,teacher and student) (see Pradl67-72), my particularinterest lies in howit may help us to hear discursive intersectionsof gender and race/ethnicity'(including whiteness) so as to help us to facilitate cross-culturaldialoguesabout any topic. Thus, I want to suggest that rhetorical listening may beimagined, specifically,as what Jacqueline Jones Roysterhas called a "codeof cross-culturalconduct."4

My purpose in offeringthis definition and this particularfocus is not toconstruct a totalizing definition of listening; such an endeavor is impossi-ble. Rather,my purpose is to invite further conversations on how listeningmay inform composition studies. Tothat end, I make the following movesin this article: (1) I briefly trace how rhetorical listening emerged in mythinking; (2) I explore disciplinaryand cultural biases that subordinate lis-tening to readingand writing and speaking; (3) I speculate why listening isneeded; (4) I offer an extended definition of rhetorical listening as a trope


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 197for interpretive invention; (5) I demonstrate how it may be employed as acode of cross-culturalconduct; and (6) I listen to a student's listening.The Emergence of Rhetorical Listening, or How I Started to HearMy thinking about listening and its potential applicationshas emerged notjust from an abstract, scholarly interest in the intersections of rhetoricaltheory and feminist theory but from several intertwining threads in myacademic and personal lives. Two related threads demonstrate the difficul-ty of and the need for listening, particularlywhen intersections of genderand ethnicity intrude on cross-cultural conversations. The first threademerged when I presented a paper about Mary Daly at a Womanist Spiri-tuality Conference in Columbia,Missouri. An African American woman inthe audience told me afterwards that she refuses to read Daly because Da-ly's critique of women in patriarchyis really just a critique of white wom-en in patriarchy, one that excluded this audience member by erasingdifferencesmong women, a chargemuch like the one levelled againstDalyby Audre Lorde ("AnOpen Letter"70). The second thread emerged whenI taught a special topics course called "TheRhetorics of Women's Autobi-ographies."A young white woman in class said that, although she was ex-tremely moved when reading excerpts from Audre Lorde's cancerjournals, she didn't want to read any more of Lorde'swritings. When Iasked her why, she cited Lorde's last line: "Ifone Black woman I do notknow gains hope and strength from my story, then it has been worth thedifficulty of telling" (A BurstofLight295). The student felt that Lorde,byspecifying "Black woman," was excluding her by erasing commonalitiesamong women.While I understand each woman's decision and recognize the power dif-ferentials of each situation, I find these threads troubling.Not only do theyexpose each woman's difficultyin imagining simultaneous differencesandcommonalities, they also resonate as metonymic echoes of larger culturaldiscoursesrepeated not just by other students but by people all across ourcountry.What troubles me is that such reactions negate the possibilityforcross-culturaldialogue not just about gender and ethnicity but about anysubject. Although I certainly respectan individual'srightto refrain from di-alogue at a particularmoment in her or his life, I do not acceptour culture'sdearth of discursivepossibilitieseither for articulating ntersections of gen-der and ethnicity or for promoting cross-culturaldialogues.Listening,it seems to me, might serve as one such possibility.But listen-ing is hardly a simple solution; indeed, it raises many questions: Why is itso hard to listen to one another? Why is it so hard to resist a guilt/blamelogic when we do listen? Why is it so hard to identify with one another


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198 CCC51/December 1999when we feel excluded? Why is it so hard to focus simultaneously on com-monalities and differences among ourselves? And how do the power dif-ferentials of our particular standpoints influence our ability to listen? Anydefinition of listening must account for these questions.A third thread complicates the first two by exposing an all-too-oftenmissing component in gender/ethnicity discussions and in cross-culturaldiscussions of any topic. Thatmissing component is whiteness. While writ-ing my book about Anglo-American feminist theories of rhetoric, I waschallenged by Susan Jarrattto consider how race informed gender in thetexts of VirginiaWoolf, Mary Daly,and Adrienne Rich. So I considered twoissues: one, the attitude that these women's texts expressed and represent-ed about race/ethnicity and, two, the influence that whiteness played ontheir texts. Yet when I completed the project, I was left with more ques-tion than conclusions. I wondered: What exactly is whiteness? How doesit function rhetorically,especially in relation with gender? And for whomis whiteness (in)visible? And personally, I also wondered: How does mylife as a white woman affect my actions as a teacher at MarquetteUniver-sity, as a scholar in composition studies, as a mother who shops at PigglyWiggly in Cedarburg,WI, after work? What lessons am I (un)consciouslysending to my students, my readers,my neighbors, my daughter, myself?A fourth thread provides language-a category-with which to con-template one specific application of listening: articulatingintersections ofgender and ethnicity to promote cross-cultural communication. WhenJacqueline Jones Royster gave her opening keynote address at the 1997Feminisms and Rhetorics conference in Corvalis,OR,she challenged us allto construct "codesof cross-culturalconduct,"rhetoricalstrategiesfor fos-tering cross-cultural communication. Royster's challenge resonated withme. Suddenly I saw an opening for my interest in rhetorical theory (theabsence of listening) to merge with my interest in feminist theory (the in-tersections of gender and ethnicity) as a means of doing my own gender/race work, both professionally and personally.5 By weaving the abovethreads together, I have created a place from which to ponder listening, orrather what I have come to think of as rhetoricallistening.Why Neglect? or How Disciplinary and Cultural BiasesDisplace ListeningOne disciplinarybias that explains our field's neglect of listening may befound, most obviously, in the work we do: we have appropriatedWesternrhetorical theories to theorize writing and the teaching of writing. Becausewe focus primarilyon written discourse and because listening is common-ly associated with oral discourse, we have been slow to imagine how lis-


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 199tening might inform our discipline. We have more readily paired writingwith reading and, to a lesser extent, with speaking. We pair writing withreading because many teachers assume that improving students' readingskills improves their writing skills. And although speakingis not our field'sprimary province, we also pair it with writing. It haunts our theories andpraxis either as an invention strategy (students' talking with peers in re-view sessions and with teachers in conferences), a proofreading strategy(students' reading papers aloud to check sentence flow), or as an influen-tial metaphor (voice). As a result of these pairings, our field's dominanttropes for interpretive invention have been writing and reading andspeaking. I am inviting us to consider rhetoricallistening as another effec-tive trope for interpretiveinvention.A second disciplinarybias that explains our neglect of listening is thatWestern rhetorical theories themselves have traditionallyslighted listening.Classical heories foregroundthe rhetor'sspeakingand writing as means ofpersuading audiences; these theories are only secondarilyconcerned withhow audiences should listen and hardly at all concerned with whatMichelle Ballif calls the desires of particularaudience members. Granted,Aristotle's Rhetoricassures students who study his rhetorical theory thatthey will learn not only how to producenthymemes but also how to analyzethem (I. 12), and in a culture whose texts were primarilyoral,such analysisimplies listening. But Aristotle's theory never delves into how to listen.Moreover, his production/reception linkage is more complicated than hisassurance allows. Although most writingteachersand students link produc-tion (writing) with reception (reading), they also recognize differences-most students are more comfortable with reading than with writing. Andalthough writing teachers and students may link strategies of production(speakingwith writing) and strategiesof reception (readingwith listening),they ascertain differences here too: speaking is second "nature"for moststudents,but writing is not; some students learn betterby readinginforma-tion, others by hearing it explained. Yet classical and modern theories ofrhetoricrarelydelineate or question such production/receptiondifferences.Although poststructuralist heory calls such differences into question, itinadvertently serves as a third disciplinary bias in our field's neglect oflistening. Jacques Derrida'sproject to deconstruct Western metaphysicsreverses Plato's celebration of speaking and suspicion of writing. Conse-quently, deconstruction champions writing as a trope that more accuratelydescribes how we use language and how language uses us; moreover, itcollapses reading into this equation by arguing that writing is reading iswriting. But because it denigrates speaking as the trope that fosters ametaphysics of presence, poststructuralisttheory in the wake of Derridafinds itself suspicious of speaking and, by association, of listening, even


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200 CCC51/December 1999though Derridapays tribute to listening as a means of substitutingthe eth-ical for the ideal in his essay about Emmanuel Levinas (Derrida 99).

One culturalbias that may partiallyaccount for our field'sneglect of lis-tening is exposed in the work of Deborah Tannen. Citing personal obser-vation, other researchers' case studies, and her own linguistic theory,Tannen claims that in our culture speaking is gendered as masculine andvalued positively in a public forum while listening is gendered as feminineand valued negatively. Tannen further argues that our culture socializesmen and women to listen differently: men often listen by challengingspeakersto a verbal duel to determine who knows more and who is quick-er on his feet; women often listen by smiling, nodding, asking questionsand providing encouraging verbal cues (yes, uh huh, is that right?, hmmm)(142). In other words, men are socialized to play the listening game via thequestions "'HaveI won?'" and "'Do you respect me?'" while women aresocialized to play it via the questions "'Have I been helpful?'" and "'Doyou like me?'" (129). Thus gendered, listening subordinates not onlywomen to men but listening to speaking.Another cultural bias that may inform our neglect of listening emergesin the writings of Nikki Giovanni, who argues that listening is not onlygendered but informed by ethnicity. Specifically,Giovanni argues that lis-tening is not as necessary in our culture for white people as it is for peopleof color;she also argues that this general trend can be complicated by classdifferences. Toillustrate her point, Giovanni imagines a fictional scenario,a poet's internal dialogue with herself while composing a talk for the372nd Annual Convention of Black and White Women in America:

I supposewe shouldn't even talk about how the women's movementwouldn't isten to the Blackwomenwhen we triedto saythat the averagewhite woman didn'tunderstand ermaid.I mean, [inthe movieAnImita-tionofLife]whenLanaTurner aidto Annie,"Ididn'tknowyou belonged oa lodge,"JuanitaMoorereplied,"Well,MissLaura sic],you never asked."Therewas no women'smovement; here was a white women's movementand Blackwomenneverwere,norfelt,included. t'sall been an imitationflife o us,and the ongwalkhomewon'tchange hat.(85-86)Giovanni points out that Lana Turner'sLoraMeredith wears the blindersthat privilege affordsprivileged people, in this case the blindersthat whiteprivilege affords white people. Despite the fact that Annie is privy to theintimate details of Lora's ife, Lora has not imagined her maid's life, AnnieJohnson's life, beyond the services visibly rendered in their apartment.One question that may be asked of this scenario is: how may Lorachangeher complicity in the structural and personal racism that haunts all theirlives if she cannot see it?


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 201This question exposes a third cultural bias that may have influencedour field's neglect of listening-our culture'sprivileging of sight, our pref-

erence for interpretive tropes that proceed via the eye, what Martin Jaycalls ocularcentrism.6 The question that emerges is: what are the limits ofocularcentrism? As any camera operator will confirm, the limitation ofsight is that when one object is foregrounded, other objectsblur, fade intothe background,fall outside the field of vision. Tocarrythis metaphor fur-ther, I believe that the sight tropes of reading and writing may sometimesperpetuate our difficulty of bringing into focus two differences, such asgender and ethnicity. Adrienne Rich admits the difficulty of such a move,even as she exhorts us to "watchthe edges that blur"("Contradictions" 9):Sometimes feel I have seen too long fromtoo manydisconnected ngles:white,Jewish,anti-Semite, acist,anti-racist,nce-marriedesbian,middle-class, feminist,exmatriate outherner, plitat the root-that I will neverbring hem whole.I would haveliked, n thisessay, o bring ogether he meaningsof anti-Semitism nd racism s I haveexperiencedhem and asIbelievetheyinter-sect n theworldbeyondmylife.ButI'mnotableto do thisyet. ("Split t theRoot" 122).

This difficulty is exemplified in Lora and Annie's situation: Lora does notunderstand Annie because the cultural "blinders"of white and classprivi-lege impede Lora'sability to "visualize"Annie's life beyond how it "visi-bly" intersects with her own. And I believe this difficulty, in one way oranother, haunts all our lives. Despite this difficulty,Rich admonishes us tokeep trying to understand by bringing blurred intersections together andthen acting accordingly: "we can't wait to speak until we are perfectlyclear and righteous. There is no purity and, in our lifetime, no end to thisprocess"(123). So for those times when we run into difficultywith blurredintersections, I suggest we switch from a sight trope to an auditory oneand see, or ratherlisten to, where it may lead.

Why Listening? or What the EarHas to OfferBefore offering an extended definition of rhetorical listening, I feel com-pelled to carve out a space for listening. For of all the questions that havehaunted this project, one keeps coming back to me from reviewers andaudience members: How does listening differ from reading? When I pre-sented a version of this articleat the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee'sRhetoric and Composition Lecture Series, a graduate student responded,prefacingher remarkswith, "Ofcourse, what you're really talking about is


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202 CCC 1/December999a kind of reading."No, I tried to explain, I am not. I am talking about in-terpretive invention, a way of making meaning with/in language, withtwo different kinds being reading and listening. For if listening is to be re-vived and revalued in our field, it must occupy its own niche. Ratherthanbe subsumed by reading, it should rank as an equal yet intertwining pro-cess of interpretiveinvention, for sometimes the ear can help us see just asthe eye can help us hear.7But I am not surprisedat the graduatestudent'sresponse. It is informed not only by the disciplinaryand cultural biasespreviously mentioned but also by what I believe is the organizingprincipleof these biases: the divided logos hat MartinHeideggerclaims we have in-herited in the west, the logos hat speaksbut does not listen.One need not fully subscribe to Heidegger's philosophical project ofdasein,or being in the world, to recognize the aptness of his divided logostheory. In general, the logos s a system of discourse within which a cul-ture reasons and derives its truths. Although the Greeks had differentconcepts of logos (Jarratt42-61), Heidegger argues that these conceptsimply both speaking and listening. He further argues that "thisnature oflanguage remains hidden from the Greeks. They have never expressedlystressed it, much less raised it to the level of a problem. But their state-ments operate in this realm" (What202). To explain his claim, Heideggerexplores the relationship between the Greeknoun logosand its verb formlegein,which in its fullest sense means both "saying"and "laying"(198).The second meaning, "laying,"entails laying others' ideas in front of us inorder to let these ideas lie before us. This laying-to-let-lie-before-us func-tions as a preservation of others' ideas (194-215) and, hence, as a site forlistening.But because we have inherited a divided logos,we inhabit a culturewhere "saying"has assumed dominance and "laying"(and, thus, listen-ing) has been displaced.Thus separatedfrom a consideration of otherness,"saying"quicklybecomes masterly expression; writing, a means of master-ly expression;and reading,a means of mastering-the-masterly-expression.And all three quickly subsume listening. But listening is not totally erased,just displaced...and almost always diminished from its potential as legein.Sometimes it is acknowledged because it cannot be physically ignored, asin the fields of psychology, theology, and communications. Sometimes it isassumed to be a naturalprocess that we need not study, as in compositionstudies. Sometimes it is mistaken for silence, as in patriarchalhistories ofwomen and non-dominant ethnic groups. And sometimes it goes by an-other name: reading,as when we read for tone, rhythm, voice, silence anda plethora of other elements associatedwith a h(ear)ring metaphor.8In The OtherSideof Language:A Philosophy f Listening,Gemma CorradiFiumara calls for both a reinterpretationof our logosto expose its divided


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 203nature and a restoration of a fuller logosbased on the Greek action legein(11-17). Such reinterpretationsand restorations would result in a philos-ophy of listening, which would offer us other codes for conducting our-selves in the world. For as Fiumarasuggests, a philosophy of listening "isan attempt to retrieve the functions of listening which may allow for truerforms of dialogue"(13). Thatis, in a divided logos(one that speaksbut doesnot listen), we commonly employ dialogue as Hegelian dialectic whereinthe posited thesis subsumes the acceptable aspects of the antithesis withthe unacceptable excess being exiled from the dominant logic. In an undi-vided logos(onethat speaks and listens), we would employ dialogue as adialectic-that-questions-dialectic, enabling a metonymic coexistence ofideas (Fiumara15, 17).Thus, I would like to echo Fiumara's call for listening by issuing a simi-lar one in composition studies. Forjust as all texts can be read, so too canall texts be listened to. As a trope for interpretive invention, rhetorical lis-tening differs from reading in that it proceeds via different body organs,different disciplinary and cultural assumptions, and different figures ofspeech. And as Fiumarasuggests, listening maps out an entirely differentspace in which to relate to discourse:we may become "apprenticesof lis-tening rather than masters of discourse" (57). For when listening withinan undivided logos, we do not read simply for what we can agree with orchallenge, as is the habit of academic reading (in its multiple guises). In-stead, we choose to listen also for the exiled excess and contemplate its re-lation to our culture and our selves. Such listening does not presume anaive, relativisticempathy,such as "I'mOK,You'reOK,"but rather an eth-ical responsibilityto argue for what we deem fair and just while simulta-neously questioning that which we deem fair and just. Such listening, Iargue, may help us invent, interpret, and ultimately judge differently inthat perhapswe can hearthings we cannot see.In this more inclusive logoslies a potential for personal and social justice.Hence, rhetorical listening as a trope for interpretive invention has thepotential to function productively as a code of cross-cultural conduct.Perhaps through listening we can avail ourselves with more possibilitiesfor inventing arguments that bring differences together, for hearing dif-ferences as harmony or even as discordantnotes (in which case, at least,differences are discernible). Admittedly, we cannot hear everything atonce (the din would no doubt madden us), yet we can listen to the har-mony and/or discordant notes, knowing that more than meets the eyelies before us.

Obviously I am not arguing that we abandon reading, writing, andspeaking. I am, however, suggesting that we recognize their limits and re-think them within an undivided logos,one that includes listening.


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204 CCC1/December999Rhetorical Listening as a Tropefor Interpretive Invention,or How to "Break the Back of Words"An example of rhetorical listening emerges in Marge Piercy'spoem, "TheBook of Ruth and Naomi." Even though Ruth and Naomi are born intodifferent ethnic groups (Ruth is Moabite; Naomi, Judean),9 they forge arelationship that, for centuries, has represented an ideal friendship be-tween women. Piercy attributes the success of their relationship, in part,to each woman's desire to whisper:

Showme a womanwho doesnotdreama double,heart'swin,a sisterof the mind n whoseear she canwhisper. 277)

Yet this desire to whisper is predicatedon the alreadyexisting possibilityofanother woman, one whose ear may hear the whisper, one wholistens...and understands. Yet despite the fact that listening is a necessarycomponent of these women's relationship, listening is backgrounded inthis poem, in its Biblical source, in much of our cultural consciousnessand, as I have alreadyargued, in composition studies.Toforegroundlistening in our field, I offer rhetoricallistening as a tropefor interpretive invention, one that emerges from a space within the logoswhere listeners may employ their agency-which StanforddramatheoristAlice Rayner defines as both "capacity"and willingness (7)-to situatethemselves openly in relation to all kinds of discourse, whether written,oral, or imagistic.The rhetoricallistening that I am promoting is a perfor-mance that occurs when listeners invoke both their capacityand their will-ingness (1) to promote an understandingf self and other that informs ourculture'spoliticsand ethics, (2) to proceed from within a responsibilityogic,

not from within a defensive guilt/blame one, (3) to locate identification indiscursivespaces of both commonalitiesnd differences,nd (4) to accentuatecommonalities and differences not only in claimsbut in culturalogicswithinwhich those claims function. As such, rhetorical listening enables us tohear textual strategiesassociated with a h(ear)ing metaphor, such as voiceand silence; relatedlybut more encompassingly,it enables us to hear whatToni Morrison calls "the sound that [breaks] the back of words" (Beloved261), thus enabling us to question the logosas we know it. What follows isan explanation of the above definition, an explanation indebted to Phelanand Lunsford,to Vitanza and Heidegger,and to Raynerand Morrison.By employing understandings an end of rhetoricallistening, I recognizethat I am invoking a troubledterm. Understandingas a complicatedhisto-ry in narrative studies and in philosophical studies in that it is often cou-pled with authorial intent.10And as many scholars caution, this coupling


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 205often gives birth to a naive idealism. For example, Julia Kristeva claimsthat because Westerners "are entitled only to the ear of the virginal body[of Mary]...., there arisesa possible tendency to eroticize [and, hence, ide-alize] hearing, voice or even understanding"(173). And Steven Maillouxclaims that coupling understandingand intent often circles "back o all theproblems of textual realism and readerly idealism and ignores the specificrhetorical contexts of power-knowledge" (148). By posing understandingas an end of rhetorical listening, I am not proposing that we idealize un-derstandingor authorial intent: my purpose is neither to promote a "tex-tual realism"wherein a text is perceived as a repositoryof the truth nor tocelebrate a naive "readerlyidealism" wherein the contexts of speaker/writers are simplified and the contexts of reader/listeners erased. Rather,my purpose is to wed Giovanni'sreal to Piercy'sideal, to collapse the real/ideal dichotomy into a third ground where rhetorical negotiation is ex-posed as always already existing and where rhetorical listening is positedas one means of that negotiation.Granted,such a purpose resonates with remnants of idealism. But I liketo consider them strategic.Just as GayatriSpivak justifies subalterns' em-ploying a "strategicssentialism"in their critique of post-colonial oppres-sion (205), andjust as Amy Schumanjustifies ethnographers' employing a"strategicRomanticism" when constructing and analyzing the subjects oftheir studies, I am advocating a strategicidealism when listening with theintent to understand. Strategicidealism implies a conscious identificationamong people that is based on a desire for an intersubjective receptivity,not mastery, and on a simultaneous recognition of similaritiesand differ-ences, not merely one or the other. The idealism is strategic in that weshould recognize the difficulty and dangers inherent in such a project...and proceed knowingly.

As I employ it, then, understanding eans more than simply listening fora speaker/writer's ntent. It also means more than simply listeningfor ourown self-interested ntent, which may rangefromappropriation employinga text for one's own ends), to Burkeanidentification(smoothingover differ-ences), to agreement (only affirmingone's own view of reality).Instead,un-derstandingmeans listening to discourse not for intent but with intent-withthe intent to understand not just the claims, not just the cultural logicswithin which the claims function, but the rhetorical negotiations of un-derstandingas well. Toclarifythis process of understanding,we might bestinvert the term and define understanding s standing under-consciouslystanding under discourses that surround us and others, while consciouslyacknowledging all our particular and fluid standpoints. Standing underdiscourses means letting discourses wash over, through, and around usand then letting them lie there to inform our politics and ethics.


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206 CCC51/December 1999Standing under our own discourses means identifying the various dis-courses embodied in each of us and then listening to hear and imagine

how they might affect not only ourselves but others. The question thatarises,of course, is the same dilemma that haunts Lora Meredith:How canwe know what is so naturalizedfor us that it is no longer visible to us? Asone answer to that question, at least in terms of theater performances,Al-ice Rayner offers listening. In many ways, her claim echoes Hans-GeorgGadamer'sbelief that "the primacy of hearing is the basis of the herme-neutical phenomenon" (420): that is, we speak because someone is listen-ing. If we pull Rayner's theory into composition studies, we may arguethat those of us listening to our own discourses return our discourses toourselves somehow unchanged but changed. To exemplify this process,Rayner points to VirginiaWoolf, who writes of a longing to hear the echoof her own words. Rayner deems Woolf's desire asthe need fora return(echo)of speechandgesture,a return hatoccurs ntime as openness,not in a static mageor closedmeaning.The echo is life-givingbecausewhile it is rooted n the past, t is not fixedby thepast.It re-turns hevoice to thespeaker,he samebutdifferent.21).

Because our returning discourses may look the same but resonate differ-ently, we need to cultivate both our eyes and our ears.Standing under the discourses of others means firstacknowledging theexistence of these discourses;second, listening for the (un)conscious pres-ences, absences, unknowns; and third, consciously integrating this infor-mation into our world-views and decision-making. The question thatarises here is: how may we listen for that which we do not intellectually,viscerally, or experientially know? Or as Pocahontas sings to John Smithin that travesty of a Disney movie, how will you "learnthings you neverknew you never knew?" Again Rayner provides a way of thinking aboutthis issue that may be borrowed for composition, a way of thinking thatheeds Heidegger'sreminder that in addition to silence, hearing is also apossibility of discursive speech ("Phenomenology" 234). Rayner arguesthat a theater audience (not as a collective whole but as a collection of in-dividuals) should listen to a performance,perceiving it "not as a referentialintention but as a desire to be heard as meaningful or as meaningfullybreaking the conventional frames. The emphasis...is on the attempt andeffort, not success or failure"(18), at least not as defined by dominant so-cial conventions. This "desire to be heard" echoes not simply as a con-scious use of a discourse but also as all the unconscious, socializingfunctions of a discourse.If we meet this "desireto be heard" with counter-desires-pretending the desire to be heard does not exist, hoping it will


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Ratcliffe/RhetoricalListening 207disappear,or waiting for someone else to handle it-we stymie potentialdialogue. But by standing under the discourses of others and rhetoricallylistening to them, we may transpose a desire for mastery into a self-con-scious desire for receptivity;this process both invites the desires of othersinto our consciousness and accords these desires a place in which to beheard (Rayner 18).Standingunder discourses does not guarantee agreement; it should notguarantee idealization; it does, however, offer the possibility of hearingwhat we cannot see. In this process the unknown becomes not a perpetu-ally purloined letter-"an irretrievable absence or gap which symbols re-place and displace, as in the Lacanian formula," but rather and "moresimply and more radically a limit to understanding" (Rayner 14). Limitsmay be moved and re/moved. Accordingto Rayner,the agency for movingand re/moving such limits involves a "capacity"and a willingness (7): lis-teners possess that capacity and what we must supply is the willingness.This focus on willingness, on conscious action, on listening does not denythe socializing power of discourse on people's unconscious. Rather,it sim-ply articulatesthe space within which we may interjectour own agencies,albeit partialand complicated, into our own socializations.

The goal of understanding is a broader cultural literacy within whichwe may negotiate our daily attitudes and actions, our politics and our eth-ics. Rayner provides theater-goerswith a definition of one such literacy,adefinition that might be appliedmore generally to composition studies viarhetoricallistening:It is perhapsa borderlandmorethan a boundarybetweenthe capacity ohearand theobligationolisten owhatone cannot mmediately nderstandorcomprehend.And t leadsto the learningf community...in he exchangeof signs....Atthevery east,suchchoice nvolvesadecision o recognize ndbecomeself-consciousoward he limitations f [one's]own 'imaginary'er-sion of self and other-a limitation hat does not acquiesceo...an unknow-able,but takes thatunknowableas a pre-conditionwithinwhich action sstillnecessary nd a confrontation ith another nevitable. 18-19)

Even if-and perhaps because-confrontation is inevitable, this literacyhas the potential to effect more productive discourses about, and across,differences and commonalities. Acquiring such literacy is both a politicaland ethical issue for people wielding power and for people lacking it.Positing political action as another end of rhetorical listening fore-grounds the realm where rhetoric intersects ethics. This connection maybe easily discerned but not so easily acted upon. That is, we may not al-ways choose or control the discourses that socialize us; neither may we


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208 CCC51/December 1999choose or control our unconscious responses to them. But once we con-sciously articulate our socializations and choose to respond to them, webecome responsiblefor our words, our attitudes, our actions. And becauseit is through words, attitudes, and actions that we negotiate our conven-tional truths as well as our behaviors based upon these truths, Diane Davisargues that:

What is needednow is an ethics f decision; o the extent thatwe maynolongersimplybeguidedby ontologicalTruth, y lightorlogos, ecisionshaveto be made.Andanyethicsof decisionnecessitates irsta "hearing"-doubleentendrentended: t necessitates otha listeningandajudging.Rayner agrees, claiming that listening as presence and as judgment pre-sumes "an ethics of relation not simply power over" (21). That differenceis the mediation of discourse through the listener, whether other or self-as-other. In this way, the other becomes a necessary onsideration in themaking of meaning for both the speaker/writer and the listener." Thus,rhetoricallistening opens up not only possibilities, but responsibilities,forinterpretive invention, for making meanings via language via others. Al-though rhetorical listening does not guarantee that everyone will concurabout definitions, intersections, and applications of the political and theethical, it does guarantee that such considerations will be at the forefrontof meaning-making.By championing a responsibilitylogic, not a guilt/blame one, rhetoricallistening offers us the possibility of getting past the guilt/blame tropes ofaccusation, denial, and defensiveness-all of which are associated with au-thorial intent and all of which usually result in a stalemate that preservesthe status quo. By championing a responsibilitylogic, rhetorical listeningasks us, first,to judge not simply the person'sintent but the historicallysit-uated discoursesthat are (un)consciously swirlingaround and through theperson and, second, to evaluate politically and ethically how these dis-courses function and how we want to act upon them.By locating identification in discursivespaces of commonalities and dif-ferences, rhetorical listening juxtaposes traditional and postmodern rhe-torical concerns. Traditional heories of rhetoric celebrate commonality, ametaphoric common ground, a Burkean sharingof substance, as the placeof identification and, hence, of persuasion (Rhetoric 5). Postmodern theo-ries of discourse question the possibilityof substance and common groundand, instead, champion a metonymic juxtaposition of differences as theplace of identification (Fuss 3; Butler 93-121). The problem with tradi-tional identification is that differences are often glossed over or erased, leftoutside the circle of consubstantiality;the problem with postmodern iden-


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 209tification is that commonalities are often perceived as impossible or as im-possibly naive. Rhetorical listening interrupts this binary opposition bypositing both commonalities and differences as possible metonymic placesfor rhetoricalexchanges. In these places, discourses (not substances) con-verge and diverge. In these places, dialogue emerges as a dialectical con-versation that questions the process of dialectic,a conversation that "seeksnot the clarification and rigidificationof difference [or commonalities] butratherthe murky marginsbetween, those margins of overlap which inau-gurate and which limit the very functioning of dialectic" (Williams218).Within such borderlands,rhetoricallistening helps us to analyze such con-vergences and divergences. Thisanalysis, in turn, helps us to articulate oursocialization and also to communicate about-and across-both differenc-es and commonalities.

By focusing on the differences and commonalities within textual claimsand their culturallogics, rhetoricallistening ties the personal (the claim) tothe political (the cultural logic) without totally collapsing differences be-tween the two. Although both claims and culturallogics are rhetorical con-structs,our argumentsand our analyses of argumentstoo often focus onlyon claims: "I'mright."vs. "No, you're not." If we recognize not just theclaims but the historically-groundedcultural logics enveloping other peo-ple's claims, we may still disagreewith the claims, but we may better un-derstand the personal and cultural assumptions (dare I say, values andbeliefs) that guide other people's logics. And if we also recognize howclaims and cultural logics are rhetoricallyconstructed, we may better ap-preciatethe reasoning powers of others even when we disagreewith them.While there are obvious benefits of rhetorical listening, there are alsocaveats. First,listening with the intent to receive, not master, discourses isnot a quick fix or a happy-ever-aftersolution; rather,it is an on-going pro-cess. It will not result in an ideal world in which listening, or rhetorical ne-gotiation, is no longer necessary. Such hopes are not only naive butdangerous. Instead rhetorical listening is another way of helping us con-tinually negotiate our always evolving standpoints, our identities, with thealways evolving standpoints of others. It is also another way of helping usrecognize that our standpoints are not autonomous points of static stasesbut rather complex webs of dynamically intermingled cultural structuresand subjectiveagency.Second, although listening with the intent to receive, not master, dis-courses can motivate a particularlistener to take political/ethical action,this listener's desire cannot control how other readers, writers, speakers,and listeners will, in turn, receive her desire, her discourse, her actions.One should certainlynot expect a pat on the back either for rhetorical lis-tening or for speaking, reading, or writing based on rhetorical listening.


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 211But when I began thinking about whiteness, I found myself echoing theclaims of Adrienne Rich ("Split"122), Ruth Frankenberg("WhenWe AreCapable"11), and Becky Thompson ("TimeTraveling"95): Nothing in myeducation, academic or otherwise, had preparedme to recognize (see) orarticulate (say) whiteness in myself or others, and certainly nothing in myeducation had provided me with strategiesfor resisting certain versions ofmy whiteness that may privilege me but not others.So I decided to find strategiesfor conceptualizingand articulatingwhite-ness. I reasoned that if I could not seethe way whiteness worked, perhapsIcould hearit. Thus,I came to link rhetorical istening with articulatinggen-der and ethnicity concerns, particularly gendered constructions of white-ness. The question that emerged next, of course, was: What should I listento? Given my thinking about rhetoricallistening, the obvious answer was:to the discourses of myself and others. For my purposes, I settled on threetypes: autoethnography,academicresearch,and the storiesof others.My interest in listening to autoethnography'2 initially emerged from afascinatingdiscussion that suddenly erupted a few years ago in my under-graduaterhetoricaltheory class. In response to Cornel West'sRaceMatters,an exasperatedwhite student told the class, "Idon't see what the big dealis. I don't wake up every morning, look in the mirror,and say, 'Hey,I'm awhite man.'" I paused for a moment, letting the tension in the room build,and then I asked him, "Doyou think that is West's point? Thatyou don'thave to think about race but he does?" What followed was the longest si-lence and then the most lively debate I have ever encountered in an un-dergraduateclassroom,a debate about gender, race, and ethnicity that stillechoes in my ears.When I listen rhetorically to the textual strategies associated with ah(ear)ing metaphor in this exchange, I hear echoes of multiple voices: Ihear the young man's tone of authority and frustrationalong with an un-derlying defensiveness (he seemed to think he was expected to keep quietabout such ideas); I hear the cultural voice of a white America that imag-ines itself racially unmarked; I hear the silence of the classroom, of stu-dents not knowing whether and/or how to speak; and I also hear myteacherly tone, questioning yet subsuming the young man's thinking backinto West's. Such listening creates a space in which it becomes possible toquestion the logosas it plays out in myself, in the students, and in our cul-ture. For example, would I have modelled a better listening technique if Ihad asked the class a less slanted question, such as "Whathappens whenwe lay this response alongside West's text?" And, how implicated am I inthe fact that students felt they had few strategiesfor talking about genderand ethnicity, particularlywhiteness? And, how often do I actually createpedagogical spaces that encourage such discussions?And, how frequently


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212 CCC51/December 1999am I just as dismissive of how my own racialmarkings complicate my be-havior, gendered or otherwise? And, why is white America so vested inbeing racially unmarked? Without this opportunity for listening, theyoung man and those who agreed with his ideas would never have beenchallenged, nor would have those students who whole-heartedly agreedwith West, nor would have I.

This young man reminded me of an important lesson: we learn by lis-tening to those who do not agree with us, provided the listening occurs inthe context of "genuine conversation"(Copeland), where there is a desirein all parties to move our understandingforward.If the context is not oneof genuine conversation, then refusing to listen may be appropriate.Thetrick is recognizingthe differences as well as the possibilitiesfor transform-ing the latter into the former.As a result of this young man's comments, Inow try to see beyond my own reflection by listening to the discoursessurrounding me in order to ask myself how being a white woman affectsmy being in the world. In this way, I try to bringbits of my own embodiedsexism and racism to consciousness and become responsible for dealingwith them one question at a time.Though valuable, autoethnography is admittedly limited in perspective.So to explore whiteness further, I decided to listen to academic research.Instead of readingto master the knowledge or to find a point of agreementand/or attack,I listened to studies of whiteness, laying them alongside myown lack of knowing. I wanted to understand how whiteness functionswithin our contemporaryculturalmatrix, specificallyin the U.S., and howit is inscribeddifferentlywithin all of us. The following arejust a few ideasI uncovered.Like all culturalcategories,whiteness is a trope, a category,a social con-struct that we employ to name people and practices. Yet a "conditional"

relationship exists between white people and white practices in that noteveryone can be classified as a white person but everyone can performwhite practices, albeit with varying degrees of success (Keating 907). Al-though whiteness (like all cultural categories) is historically grounded(changing over time and space) and multiple (including lots of subcatego-ries), in the U.S. it has consistently signified "privilege";as such, it has re-sisted and denied difference (Frankenberg, Social 236-37). While thisprivilege of whiteness has been translated into great achievements forsome, it has also been translatedinto "dominance,"even violence, for oth-ers. Functioningas a culturalnorm (Hill 1;Dyer 2; Keating904), whitenessand its privilegesare often invisible to white people yet very visible to peo-ple of color.Although impossible to understandapartfrom its intersectionswith gender, class, sexual orientation, age, etc. (Thompson 94), whitenessis often a missing ground in our cultural conversations even as it appears


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 213in census reportsand college applicationforms.PerhapsAnnLouiseKeatingsays it best: whiteness "-whatever it is, and I would argue that at this pointno one really knows-" is slippery (916).When I listen rhetoricallyto this research,I also hear competing cultur-al logics: the status quo (which ignores whiteness) and the above critics(which promote whiteness studies). Further,I hear differencesamong thelatter.I hear a tone of adamantauthority in Frankenberg,an attempt to le-gitimize the study of whiteness within academic discoursesby arguingthatwe must foreground this often invisible ground of our cultural discus-sions."3I also hear a more tentative authority in Keating,a care taken withwords such as "conditional"and "whatevert is" in recognition of both thevalues and dangers of studying whiteness. For despite the fact that white-ness studies has become a highly touted research area in literary studies,sociology, history, art, film studies, anthropology, etc., even proponents ofwhiteness studies voice concerns. Some feminist scholars question thestudy of whiteness, fearing it may be a politically conservative move inthat it returns discussions once again to white people, especially whitemen, (Hill,"Introduction" -8), and some ethnicity scholarsquestion suchstudy, fearing as Michael Eric Dyson says, it may be "a sneaky form ofnarcissism... [that shifts] the focus and maybe even the resources back towhite people and their perspectives (qtd. in Talbot 118). Others fear thatstudying whiteness risksreifying and perpetuating false categories of race(Keating 913). Listeningto this research to question the logos nvites me toconsider the (im)possibilities of studying whiteness: it will not solve alldiscord; indeed, it may incite more. But it may also help us imagine bet-ter ways of articulating the political/ethical permutations of gender andethnicity-and the ways they are rhetoricallyconstructed and negotiated.Listening to this research also makes me aware of the strategic idealismunderlying such a claim.By listening to autoethnography and academic research, I can test oneagainst the other. But this juxtaposition also has its limits. Although bothare useful means forunderstandinghow gender and ethnicity merge in ourculture, these means should not be used or taught unreflectively, norshould they be the only modes of criticalthinking that we pass on to ourstudents. For although autoethnography is becoming more common (justnote the number of 1998 CCCCpreconvention workshops on the topic), itriskslapsinginto a narcissisticconfessional solipsism-and a privilegedoneat thatl4-unless we tie the personal to the cultural in ways that exposehow our experiences speak metonymically for larger cultural issues andunless we make such storytellinga viable option for all academicians,notsimplya select few. Moreover,forthose of us trainedin the academy,schol-arlyresearchtoo often resembles Tannen'sdefinition of men listening: that


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214 CCC 1/December999is, let's duel verbally or in writing so that I can prove how much I knowand, hence, you'll respect me.15Consequently, we need to listen and offer students the opportunities tolisten to the stories of others-all others. This realization echoes bellhooks' claim: "Ihave gone back to 'confession' not as a need to tell myown story in public or to be narcissistic,but because I now realize thatpeople really learn from the sharing of experience" (Childersand hooks77). Such learning occurs not only when we listen to the claims in otherpeople's stories but also when we listen to their cultural logics, or ratherthe competing culturallogics that such stories expose.To understand how whiteness is inscribed within white bodies,'6 weneed to listen to stories such as Lillian Smith'sreflections on her childhoodin Killersof theDream:

The mother who taught me what I know of tenderness and love and com-passion taught me also the bleak rituals of keeping Negroes in their "place."The father who rebuked me for an air of superiority toward schoolmatesfrom the mill and rounded out his rebuke by gravely reminding me that "allmen are brothers,"trained me in the steel-rigiddecorums I must demand ofevery colored male. They who so gravely taught me to split my body frommy mind and both from my "soul,"taught me also to split my consciencefrom my acts and Christianity rom southern tradition. (27)

If I listen to the strategies in this text, I hear the contradictory sounds andrhythms in the first sentence: the mellifluous vowels in "tendernessandlove and compassion"juxtaposed with the harsh consonants of "bleakrit-uals of keeping Negroes in their 'place.'" I also discern voices of competingcultural logics: the status quo vs. social activism. By teaching Smith to"split"the inscriptions of gender, class, sex, religion, regional tradition,that are interwoven within her young body, Smith's parents un/con-sciously perpetuate what Rich calls "white discourse" ("Distance" 182),wherein whiteness is a privilegednorm split from other culturalcategoriesin ways that render it invisible, hiding its violence behind parlormannersand polite language. By listening to question the logos, have to ask myselfif and how this version of white discourse is still being played out in myown life and culture, masked by middle classmanners.Tounderstand how whiteness is inscribed within non-white bodies butin ways that precludethese bodies fromfully participating n the privilegesof whiteness, we need to listen to stories like Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston'sin Farewell oManzanar. n her reflections on her family's life at Manzanar,a World War II Japanese-American internment camp, she remembers astory about her brother:


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Ratcliffe/RhetoricalListening 215"[m]y oldest brother, Bill, led a dance band called The Jive Bombers.... Hedidn'tsing Don'tFenceMeIn out of protest,as if tryingquietly to mock the au-thorities. Itjust happened to be a hit song one year,and they all wanted to bean up-to-date American swing band....

Oh, give me land lots of landUnder starryskies above,Don't fence me in.Letme ride through the wideOpen country that I love (73-74)

Listening to the textual strategies, I hear Wakatsuki Houston's disclaimingsisterly tone, denying any political intent on her brother's part; I also hearher more savvy writerly tone, using this "nonpolitical" incident to exposethe political intent of white America as well its taken-for-granted privileg-es, like roaming. Though Bill desires to be non-political, his body is politi-cized, marked simultaneously by his Japanese ancestry and by his desire tobe all-American. In the textual moment of Wakatsuki Houston's reflec-tions, I hear competing cultural logics of the Manzanar camp culture andthe dominant white culture. From her perspective as a once wrongfullyinterned American citizen, she hears "Don'tFence Me In"very differentlyfrom how most white America heard it at the time of its release or fromhow most Americans hear it today in EmbassySuite commercials.For her,the role of the masculinized roamer rings falsely from the mouth of Bill, ayoung American imprisoned solely because his ancestry differed from thecultural norm.17 So while his desire to be all-American functions as ametonym for the white discourse of his time, the ancestry classificationswithin that white discourse preclude his full participationin the privilegesof whiteness and, hence, the fulfillment of his desire. Indeed, within 1940swhite culture, Bill's ethnicity trumps his gender even as his gender privi-leges him within the Manzanarcamp. Listeningto this passage in ordertoquestion the logos, I not only question the fairness and legality of Jeanne'sand Bill's situations, but I also have to ask myself, once again, if and how Iever participate n white discourses in ways that might unknowingly erasethe desires and materialexistence of others?

A Pedagogical Instance, or Listening to a Student's ListeningToillustrate how rhetorical listening plays out pedagogically,let me sharean experience I had with a white student named Rachel Weber. For whileRachel was writing her second paper for our women's literature course,she put rhetoricallistening into action as a trope for interpretiveinvention


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216 CCC51/December 1999and as a code of cross-cultural conduct. By listening to her listening, I wasable to pull together the threads in my definition. During one class sessionwe read aloud from Toni Morrison'sBeloved, pecificallythe first telling ofthe shed scene where the escaped slave Sethe attempts to kill her childrenand herself before her former owner Schoolteacher can recapture themall. Narrated from four white men's points of view, this scene perfectlycaptures how white slaveholders justify slavery: they liken slaves to ani-mals and, consequently, deem beatings not inhumane, merely nonproduc-tive. After our class discussion, Rachel emailed me about a possible papertopic, one that would relate our class discussion to a guest lecture in herpolitical science class, which she had attended earlier in the day.

Hi! Something "strange" just occurred, and I was wondering if I couldbounce it off you because the oddity of the situation just intrigues me, and Ican't quite see how to put it into perspective, so I'm hoping you can help.(Quite a sentence!) Firstoff, we just finished with class, and for you to un-derstandthe story,you have to know that I have Dr. [X's] Correctionsclassrightbefore yours. (I'm a Poli Sci and Crimmajor.)

Okay,well today in that class,we had a guest speaker.... Now the manwas entertaining and informative, and I enjoyed the classand his lecture im-mensely (one of those people who appear so energized you can't help butwonder how much coffee they drink in a single day--but still, they are funto listen to as energy is infectious). Now to the point...He started his lectureby asking how many people believed in parole and whether it was a goodthing or not. The class was overwhelmingly against it (typical), and the over-all opinion was that it was kind of a necessary evil (due to overcrowding,etc.). Well, to give us an example of one main reason parole and institutionslike it were a necessity, he told a metaphor. The metaphor was one about amean dog in the neighborhood who gets into trouble. If you chain the dogup and keep it on a short leash and punish it for it's [sic] wrongs, you areonly causing the dog to become more angry.He comparedthis to prisonerswho are kept in high security/maximum prisons. He then went on furthertosay that chaining someone/thing up for a long time and punishing it is onlygoing to allow its hate and anger to grow, and that once the "dog" s let offthe leash, it would be a mess to see what the reaction to society and the com-munity would be. Therefore,parole and institutions like it are necessary toreward those who attempt change and reformation, because if you just re-sort to a strict punishment approach, the "dogs"that are returned to thecommunity will be beyond human reason and will only seek vengeance.Now if you haven't figuredit out already,the reason I'm bringingthisup is because it shares a striking similaritywith the words that the school-teacher says to his nephew aboutbreakingSethe, as well as having a connec-


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 217tion to the idea of people as animals. I'm sure this man that was speaking isa very nice guy, and maybe I'mjust jumping onto this because the two class-es were juxtaposed right next to each other, allowing for the realization ofthe similar aspects to occur, but this just seems amazing to me. I was plan-ning to write my paper #2 on something entirely different,but now this justseems to be completely interesting. I suppose it would work into how slaveswere treated as prisonersand how prisoners are in turn treated like animals(as slaves were also), but I just find this similaritytoo shocking to let it go.I'm wondering if you think there is a connection I could make and I guesshow you think I could go about this. (The quote was on page 149 in Belovedis what I'm referring to.) If there is a weak connection in his metaphor,please just say so. I just am wondering if there is rather a distinctly definiteone which ties into the fact that [the guest speaker] is white and that thischapter [in Beloved] was the only one written in the white perspective. I seewhy he used his metaphor, yet at the same time, I find it striking that hecompared criminals to dogs and that schoolteacher compares slaves to ani-mals and both are referencing to treatment. Hmmmmmm.... Well, I just re-ally felt the need to get another person's perspective on this, and youdefinitely are the person with the most knowledge into what Beloved is"saying."So if you could help, I 'd appreciateit. Sorrythat this explanation wasso long-I didn't intend it to be! (I hope it all is clear too!) Anyways, thankyou for thinking it over.

Rachel sent me this email me, she later told me, because she had sharedher idea with a good friend and he thought she was crazy, reading moreinto the situation than was really there. Was she?, she wanted to know.Her friend thought she was accusing the speaker of being a hypocrite. Shewas not, she assured me. She simply wanted to understand the discoursessurrounding her.

Coincidentally, Rachel emailed me a few days before I spoke about rhe-torical listening at UW-M. By listening to her listening, I not only heard butbegan to see possibilities for rhetorical listening. For Rachel, by laying theguest lecture and Belovedin front of her and letting them lie there, was at-tempting to invent topics and arguments for her second essay, hence rhe-torical listening as a trope for interpretive invention. And Rachel wasproceeding with her project for a number of reasons. First, she wanted tounderstand the discourses surrounding her so that, when she graduatedfrom college, she could act ethically as an employee within whatever sys-tem she found herself. Second, she wanted to avoid a guilt/blame logic. Herintent was not to nail the guest lecturer for hypocrisy; in fact, she went togreat lengths in paragraph two to describe the guest speaker positively,


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218 CCC 1/December 999even later calling him a "nice guy" in paragraphthree. Her intent was towork within a responsibility logic, wherein she could question his dis-course and, albeit limitedly, participate n her own socialization.Third,shewas intriguedby the commonalities and differences in the two discourses:both liken people to animals and justify behaviors on the grounds of pro-ductivity, yet Schoolteacher perpetuates a belief that some people are ani-mals while the guest lecturer resists this notion. Moreover, Rachel heardcommonalities and differences in their cultural logics:both seem hauntedby privileges of whiteness and gender even as Schoolteacher reinscribes aninhumane slave economy and the guest lecturer tries to reform the Wis-consin prison economy.Was Rachel'slistening process as neat and orderlyas the previous para-graph makes it appear? Of course not. You can tell that from listening toher email. She notes that something "'strange'" s haunting her, which shecannot pinpoint for herself. She is hesitant about her ideas so she waitsuntil paragraph wo to announce "Nowto the point"although she followsthat assertion with an ellipsis,which signifies a gap, an absence (of clarity?connection? confidence?). And although Rachel is quite articulate, sum-marizing the guest lecture and noting its possible connections to Beloved,she feels the need for someone else to put it into perspective; she hasheard the commonalities and differences, but she cannot see the connec-tions clearly.The two discourses are lying before her, but she cannot con-nect them for herself in ways that make sense within her concept of thelogos.Because part of my job as a teacher is to help students conceptualizetheir thinking processes in relation to largercultural logics, I analyzed here-mail for method and experienced the serendipitous pleasure of havingmy thinking about rhetoricallistening clarified,which in turn enabled meto offer her a perspective on her topic.

So what perspectivedid I offerRachel?Did I think she was crazy?Obvi-ously not. I think she has a definitetalent,not for "readingmore into the sit-uation"as her friend had suggestedbut for listening to the exiled excess inour daily dialecticaldialogues, for hearing what Morrison calls "the soundthat [breaks]the back of words" (Beloved 61). And I think this talent wasspurred, n part, by Rachel's iterallyhearingthe two discoursesside by sideand then letting them lie before her, echoing in her ears. So I encouragedher to write the paper,even offeringher some of my thoughts and readings.When I read her paper,I found her most interesting writing (at least interms of my thinking about rhetorical listening and pedagogy) occurringin the final paragraph:

It seemsthatwhite"rule-abiding"ocietycouldbe sufferingromfear.Theycouldbe worried hatboth criminals nd blacksareinherentlyno different


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 219thanthemselves,and with thatas fact,how do they makethemselves eelsuperior?feveryone s equal, heyare the same,and if whites arethe sameas blacksand"rule-abiding"itizensare the same ascriminals, ow canwecompare urselveso an Other?How can we bolster hefeelingof superiori-ty over the inferiorgroupsof peoplewho are usta bit behindus evolution-arily,f theyarereallynotinferior revolutionarilyehind?Thequestion s:why do we need to feel superior?Whatdoes thissayaboutus?Whathavewe become?

Rachel's conclusion intrigues me on many levels. One is its pronoun us-age. In thinking through this cultural concern, Rachel has trouble withpronoun shifts, not in terms of grammatical agreement but in terms ofwho-is-what. Her category of "white rule-abiding society"is a theyto her;yet because she is a white rule-abiding citizen herself, the category is alsoa we.But that implicationis not yet articulated in Rachel'swriting, perhapsbecause she does not see herself as being someone who needs to makeothers feel inferior. While she can listen to her guest lecturer and ToniMorrison, she seems not yet able to listen to her own text, at least nothere, hence the importance of teaching rhetorical listening as a trope forinterpretive invention that applies not just to the discourses of others butalso to the discoursesof one's self.A second level that intriguesme is her useof questions. She concludes with questionsthat we, as teachers,might tradi-tionally suggest should occur in her introduction as a frame for her paper,around which her paperwould be developed. Although Rachel had initiallydesired to answer these questions in her paper,she could not, she told mewhen she handed in the paper,because the questions-especially as they re-lated to whiteness-were so new to her world view, hence the importanceof teaching rhetorical istening as a code for cross cultural conduct.

When I firstlistened to Rachel's email and paper,I was richly rewardedin that she helped me clarify my thinking about rhetoricallistening. WhenI revisited her texts during the writing of this piece, I was challenged to bea better pedagogue. For what echoes in my ears is her email phrase: "hetold a metaphor."It signifies both her awareness that language functionstropologicallyand also her assumption that tropes are something that canbe told, added on for explanation or decoration. As a teacher, my chal-lenge is to reinforce in students the former idea and disabuse them of thelatter. Forunderstandingthe tropologizingfunctions of language, not sim-ply as a manner of style but as the very "nature"of language itself, is oneway of understanding how conflicting discourses can lie before us, rever-berating with the potential to be negotiated via rhetorical listening. Assuch, teaching rhetorical listening is one way of tackling the pronounproblem that haunts all our lives: how to see we in theyand they n we. It is


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220 CCC 1/December999also a way of emphasizing for students the importance of keeping ques-tions in play, maybe even using them as/in a conclusion.So Where Does That Leave Us?Defining rhetoricalisteningas a trope of interpretive invention not onlyemphasizes the discursive nature of rhetoricallistening but also plays withthe etymology of the term tropeas "a turning." For rhetorical listeningturns hearing (a reception process) into invention (a production process),thus complicating the reception/production opposition and inviting rhe-torical listening into the time-honored tradition of rhetorical invention.18Second, rhetoricallistening turns the realm of hearing into a largerspace,one encompassing all discursiveforms, not just oral ones. Third,rhetoricallistening turns intent back on the listener, focusing on listening with in-tent, not for it. Fourth, rhetorical listening turns the meaning of the textinto something larger than itself, certainly larger than the intent of thespeaker/writer, in that rhetorical listening locates a text as part of largerculturallogics. And fifth, rhetoricallistening turns rhetoric's traditionalfo-cus on the desires of speaker/writerinto a harmonics and/or dissonance ofthe desires of both the speaker/writerand the listener.

In sum, rhetorical listening broadens our possibilities for interpretiveinvention. When employed as a "codeof cross-culturalconduct,"rhetori-cal listening has the potential to generate more productive discoursesabout and across both commonalities and differences, whether these dis-courses be narratives or arguments, whether they be in academicjournalsor over the dinner table. As such, rhetoricallistening responds to the needexemplified by Annie and Lora and promotes the possibility exemplifiedby Ruth and Naomi...and Rachel.Acknowledgements:or helping me think through this project, I would like to thank the 1998participantsof the Summer Seminar in Rhetoric and Compositionat MillikinCollege; my writ-ing group members Alice Gillam and VirginiaChappell;CCC eviewers Cheryl Glenn, CynthiaLewiecki-Wilson, and GordonPradl;and my 4Cs co-panelists on listening, Michelle Ballif andDiane Davis.

Notes1. By using the term interpretivenvention,hope to demonstrate the necessary iptersec-tions between interpretation,which is thedominant term for makingmeaning in philo-sophical hermeneutics, and invention,whichis the dominant term for making meaning inrhetorical studies.2. In his foreword to Lunsford'sReclaimingRhetorica, ames Murphy claims that the au-

thors of the essays "point to new places tolook" for rhetoricalhistory, theory, and prac-tice (xi). His claimreflectsthe dominant trendin our field of employing a sight metaphor.Lunsford's use of an auditory metaphor, lis-tening, supplements this trend.3. For a history of genderas an analyticalcategorywithin academicscholarshipand fora discussion of whether gender studies


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Ratcliffe/Rhetoricalistening 221should replace or supplement feminist stud-ies, see Showalter (1-13). Although I use theterm race, I recognize that it is a highly con-tested term in that it is a trope for that whichdoes not exist but which has become ideolog-ically "real" in U. S. culture. See Lerner for ahistory of the term's usage in the U. S. andfor an excellent discussion of current think-ing about alternatives to its usage (184-98).Also see Dyson, who defines race as follows:"Race is not a card. It is a condition. It is a setof beliefs and behaviors shaped by culture,rooted in history, and fueled by passions thattranscend reason" (42).

4. Royster is not alone in calling for "codesof cross-cultural conduct." Michael Eric Dys-on argues that articulating such codes is nec-essary because "[w]e still don't know therules of race" (8). But by "rules of race" Dys-on refers not just to codes of cross-culturalconduct but also to "the unwritten codes ofconduct within black communities" (8). Iagree with Dyson. I would argue further thatwe need to explore the unwritten codes ofgender and ethnicity within other communi-ties as well and that we need to explore thefunctions of whiteness in every community.For too often the functions of whiteness areinvisible in our culture; we rarely think ofwhite as a "color" (as evidenced by the termswomen of color and people ofcolor), and too of-ten the functions of whiteness create a dou-ble-bind in certain circles succeeding inschool can be perceived as "acting white").5. My assumption here is that becausesexism and racism are structurally embeddedin our culture and, hence, ourselves, they af-fect us all in our daily lives; consequently, weall have gender and race work to do if we arenot unconsciously to replicate old patterns ofthinking, being, and doing.6. Martin Jay provides a definition, histo-ry, and critique of "ocularcentrism" in orderto argue for a hermeneutic revival of hearingvia Wagner, Nietzsche, and Heidegger: "ourincreasing interest in the truths of interpreta-tion rather than the methods of observationbespeaks a renewed respect for the ear overthe eye as the organ of greatest value (57).Other philosophers have set the stage forJay's claims. Hegel locates hearing as an ide-al, arguing that hearing "does not belong tothe sense of action [sens pratiques] but thoseof contemplation [sens th6oriques]; and is, infact, still more ideal than sight" (qtd. in Derri-da 100). And Emmanuel Levinas, an anti-

Hegelian who champions the ethical, not theideal, also elevates sound over sight: "theglance by itself, contrary to what one may beled to believe, does not respect the other....This is why Levinas places sound above light"(Derrida 99).7. I am indebted to Doug Day for callingthis idea to my attention.8. Gordon Pradl pointed out in his reviewof this article that Louise Rosenblatt intro-duced a method of reading that closely re-sembles what I am calling listening in thather method also works to preserve the ideasof others within one's interpretation.

9. Their cross-cultural listening may befurther complicated by the animosity be-tween their cultures. Scholars disagree aboutthe date of the book of Ruth, a disagreementthat has implications for the degree of ani-mosity existing between the Judeans and theMoabites: As the New English Bible notes:Some scholars consider Ruth a postexilic lit-erary creation, though perhaps based on anolder tale; on this view, it was intended tocounteract the harsh decrees of Ezra and Ne-hemiah against foreign wives (Ezra 10. 1-5;Neh. 13. 23-27). Other scholars, however,date it much earlier, during the reigns of thefirst kings of Judah, before bitter enmity to-ward Moab had developed...." (277)

10. For a brief history of the term under-standing in narrative studies from Brooks andWarren to the mid-1990's, see Phelan andRabinowitz (5-11). For an accounting of therelationship between understanding and inter-pretation in classical hermeneutics, see Ble-icher (11-26) and Bruns (21-138). My use ofstanding under does not reflect the founda-tional meanings that KI(ennethBurke ascribesto John Locke's use of the Greek term hy-postasis, which means, "literally, a standingunder": Hence anything set under, such asstand, base, bottom, prop, support, stay;hence metaphorically, that which lies at thebottom of a thing, as the groundwork, sub-ject-matter, argument of a narrative, speech,poem; a starting point, a beginning. Andthen come the metaphysical meanings...:Subsistence, reality, real being (as applied tomere appearance), nature, essence" (Grammar23). Standing under implies a place, a loca-tion, a standpoint for listening.11. In our current theoretical milieu, otheris a loaded term. For example, in her feministcritique of Lacanian theory, Elizabeth Groszdescribes the other/Otheras follows: for Lacan,


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222 CCC1/December999the "other is the object through whom desireis returned to the subject; the Other is the lo-cus of signification which regulates themovement by which this return is made pos-sible" (80). In other words, "the Other is nota person but a place, the locus of law, lan-guage, and the symbolic" (67). As such, it "isunderstood here in two senses: as a socio-symbolic network regulated according to lan-guage-like rules; and as a psychical structure,representative of this social Other, internal-ized in the form of the unconscious" (117).As I use the term other,I am invoking Lacan'ssmall "o" other, specifically as a person otherthan the listening subject or as the listeningsubject listening to itself. My goal for listen-ing is an intersubjectivity, not a continuedsubject/object relationship.12. For a discussion of how autobiographyand ethnography may merge to create astrategy of autoethnography, see Watson,who argues that women may learn to articu-late their own stories if they learn to readtheir bodies as culturally inscribed texts; alsosee Clough and Deck.13. For other arguments on why white-ness needs to be articulated in our culture,see Fishkin, Davy, Dyson, Hill, Ignatiev,hooks ("Representations"), and Morrison(Playing).14. For excellent discussions of how au-thorization and privilege (or lack thereof)function in academic discourse and howtheir consequences play out, see Roof andWeigman's collection, which explores thequestion that is also their title: Who CanSpeak?

15. Marshall Gregory describes scholarlydebate as warfare: "So much critical dis-course in the humanities-at least since thecontemporary culture wars began abouttwenty years ago-is conducted in ascorched-earth, take-no-prisoners tone thatat first irritates, then pains, and eventuallynumbs everyone's professional nerves, leav-ing the main combatants (and many of the

rest of us as well) worn out with struggle andwondering if internecine warfare is reallywhat we meant to sign up for when we en-thusiastically and jauntily set out for gradu-ate school years ago" (89).16. What constitutes a "white" body and a"non-white" body changes over time andplace as demonstrated in Ignatiev's How theIrish Became White.

17. Audre Lorde calls such a cultural norma "mythical norm" and defines it as "white,thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian,and financially secure ("Age, Race" 116).18. Karen LeFevre cites four categories ofinvention: (1) a private apprehension oftruth, based on Platonic theory; (2) an inter-nal dialogue of selves, based on Freudiantheory; (3) a group of people's collaborativeconstruction of truth, based on George Her-bert Mead's theory; and (4) a collective anal-ysis of how cultural codes socialize people'sbehaviors and attitudes, based on ImileDurkeim's theory (48-50). Like LeFevre'scategories of collaborative and collective in-vention, rhetorical listening is concernedwith how people construct meanings as wellas with how cultural codes socialize peopleand how people both employ and changethese codes to negotiate with one another.Like classical and neo-classical invention,rhetorical listening asks questions of texts; italso asks questions of the cultural logicswithin which these texts exist. Like postmod-ern invention, rhetorical listening searchesfor the gaps, the omissions, the unknowns,the contradictions, the questions not in orderto reconcile them but in order to imaginewhere they may lead. Like a cultural studiesinvention, rhetorical listening also locates in-terpretation within particular moments andplaces to demonstrate how time and place af-fect interpretation. And given my particularinterest, rhetorical listening may be em-ployed as a feminist invention process to ex-pose how gender intertwines with ethnicityand other cultural categories.

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