The materiality of discourse as oxymoron: A challenge to critical rhetoric

“Research in Rhetoric” Revisited

“…While the commitment is to a relativized world, this does not mean, as Dana Cloud has argued, that "a critical rhetoric that loses sight of the material realm threatens to make critical judgment inconsequential." 33 The relativism that is implied does not suggest that no decision can ever be made, but that when made, it needs to take into account the specific framework the critique engages. In this time and place, given the specific practices of the social under examination, and the cultural mores in effect, I may judge a discursive act as implicating oppression, as moving toward a "freedom from" or as engaging, as a further action, a possibility of a "freedom to" enter into new social relations of power.…”

Rugged Practices: Embodying Authenticity in Outdoor Recreation

“…9 In the wake of such poststructuralism-influenced rhetorical scholars collapsing discourse and materiality, Dana Cloud warns, ''a reminder is overdue that discourse is not the only thing that 'matters' in'' the critical project. 10 However, her emphasis is not on physical forms of materiality but rather on intangibles such as economic structures. Such abstract structures have physical manifestations, but Cloud does not suggest that we conduct analyses of the decaying building or of people dumpster diving for dinner.…”

Orwellian Language and the Politics of Tribal Termination (1953–1960)

“…Applied to the ideological function of language, McGee (1984McGee ( , 1982 and Wander (1984Wander ( , 1983 contend that discourse serves agents of social and economic power. Critics, thus, should fashion their interpretative capacities to understand, in Cloud's (1994) words "how political and economic power is mediated, reinforced, perpetuated, and challenged in the texts we study" (p. 143). Here I am less concerned with relative truth or falsity of termination rhetoric than its plausibility, or fidelity to capitalist ideology.…”