Provocation: Rethinking Rhetorical Ontology: An Intersection Between the Work of James Arnt Aune and Bruno Latour in the Field of Rhetoric

Abstract

The Technocracy brethren were certainly very badly advised when they put no flavoring matter into their dose. H.L. Mencken (1933, p. 505) ... the current 'poverty of strategy' on the Left has something to do with the rejection of a tradition [rhetoric] that emphasized the study and practice of strategic J.A. Aune (1994, p. 5) When coming to terms with the legacy of James Amt Aune, I am struck by the extent to which Aune's thinking was almost constantly operating on multiple levels--the argumentative, the material, the practical. Aune engages economics in discussion of substantive questions in a way that rhetorical scholars rarely engage with texts. Aune's work breaks from the rhetorical mold in that it often engages directly with the material--one of the elements that marked Aune as a self-described old fashioned (Aune, 2001, xiii-xiv) or Marxist materialist. My contention in this paper will be that Aune's work reflects assumptions consistent with studies and ANT's ontology, and that a similar turn in rhetoric will help us make sense of Aune's writings about economics, as well as to better cope with topics including but not limited to economic and practice, climate science, gender, and anything else where empirical data and non-human objects are part of the conversation. Before I critically address Aune's work, I want to clarify what I mean by an project here. In political and sociology, recent scholarship has undergone what has been called an ontological turn, which is understood in reaction to a perceived division between political and factors and factors related to non-human objects, which can be understood broadly to refer to anything existing in the physical world (including, potentially, the human body, or at least the parts of it which are not thinking). This turn is often grounded in the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, a scholar whose work is largely classified as part of science studies, a branch of sociology interested primarily in observing the scientific method. However, scholars in the social sciences who focus on questions explicitly outside the scientific method--such as conventional political science, anthropology, and even rhetoric--have appropriated ANT's ontology to look at more conventional artifacts in a context that includes non-humans and scientific evidence. In this essay I examine Aune's economic scholarship as an instance of two important divergences from the rhetorical norm: its focus upon non-human objects that are hard (unlike, for instance, speeches and other written/spoken texts) to describe as humanistic artifacts; and its use of an ontology which assumes extant, permanent physical reality that remains regardless of its mediation by discourse. I suggest that Aune's methods make similar assumptions and reach similar conclusions to that of science students such as Latour, and that when working with Aune's work and with work on similar topics, rhetorical scholars will be well served by acknowledging and working with ANT and with object-oriented ontologies. AUNE'S MATERIALIST ECONOMICS: MORE THAN MARXIST MATERIALISM? A trend in Aune's scholarship was the connection of seemingly disparate topics and ideas, having the function of creating histories of ideas at the same time that he was critiquing specific articles of discourse. In Selling the Free Market: the Rhetoric of Economic Correctness, Aune does not merely analyse the discursive strategies used by the American right wing to sell unbridled capitalism to the American people--the stated goal of the book--but rather takes readers on a tour de force that gives insight into the economic ontology of libertarians (which he does not believe to be as objective as its proponents would claim). Perhaps most dramatically, Aune makes the case that libertarian theories about big government and its effect on politics and discourse parallel similar claims about false consciousness in Marxism, despite libertarianism's frequent claim to reflect a common sense understanding of the world in contrast to the Left's hermeneutics of suspicion, a trend which Aune critiqued in his previous book Rhetoric & Marxism (1994). …