James Berlin's Social-Epistemic Rhetoric, Ideology, and English Studies





Berlin defines social-epistemic rhetoric as "the study and citique of signifying practices in their relation to subject formation within the framework of economic, social, and political conditions." (83)





Ideology in Rhetoric





Berlin suggests us to examine the ideological predisposition while considering any rhetoric. His starting point is that "no set of signifying practices can lay claim to a disinterested pursuit of transcendental truth; all are engaged in the play of power and politics, regardless of their intentions." (83)



"Ideology interpellates subjects-that is, addresses and shapes them - through discourses that offer directives about three important domains of experience: what exists, what is good, and what is possible." (84)

"Ideology always brings with it strong social and cultural reinforcement, so that what we take to exist, to have value, to be possible seems necessary, normal, and inevitable- in the nature of things." (84)



Berlin finally claims that, "Ideology is minutely inscribed in the discourse of daily practice, where it emerges as pluralistic and conflicted. A given historical moment displays a wide variety of competing ideologies, and each subject displays permutations of these conflicts, although the overall effect is to support the hegemony of dominant group" (84)



An individual in such a situation is a site of a variety of significations, an intersection and influence of various conflicted discourses- discourses about class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, religion and the like.

An individual in addition to being a location is also "an agent of change, not simply an unwitting product of external discursive and material forces. The subject negotiates and resists codes rather than simply accomodating them" (85).

Social Constructionist Rhetoric

Social Constructionist Rhetoric position acknowledges the "influences of social forces in the formation of the individual" (85). This rhetoric sees the "critical examiation of the subtle effects of signifying practices as key to egalitarian decision making." (86)
example: communiction course after World War II, Rhetoric of public discourse during 1960s and 70s.

Social Constructionist Rhetoric is flawed if viewed from the postmodern perspective. "While this rhetorical approach emphasizes the communal and social constitution of subjectivity, it never abandons the notion of the individual as finally a sovereign free agent, capable of transcending material and social conditions." (Berlin 86).

In short the major flaw of this rhetoric is that "it is incapable of examining its own ideological commitments mistaking them for accurate reflections of eternal truths. It accepts its own signifying practices as finally indisputably representative if things-in-themselves." (86-7)

Social-Epistemic Rhetoric

Social-epistemic retains alot from earlier social rhetorics but its departures are not less significant.
The first is that it revived the process rhetoric that "writing is... discovery and invention, not mere reproduction and transmission" (87). The second departure is that this rhetoric used the postmodern critique of Enlightenment conceptions of signification, the subject, and foundational narratives. Poststructuralism provided a way to more adequately discuss fully the operative elements of social-epistemic rhetoric. In other words, social-epistemic rhetoric informs and is informed by the poststructuralism.

Another most important point about this rhetoric is that it is self-reflexive. It acknowledges "its own rhetoricity, its own discursive constitution and limitations. This means that it does not deny its inescapable ideological predispositions, its politicality and situated condition" (88). While it contains a "utopian moment, a conception of the good democratic society and good life for all of its members.. it is (also) aware of historical contingency, of its limitations adn incompleteness, remaining open to change and revision." (88)

This rhetoric does not hold as many other rhetorics do that "the subject of the rhetorical act is no the unified,coherent, autonomous, transcendent subject of liberal humanism. Instead for this rhetoric, the subject is "multiple and conflicted, composed of numerous subject formations and positions" (88). Similarly, a subject of a discourse is " a construction, a fabrication, established through the practices. This means that all of us have multiple selves as Berlin says, "Each of us has available a multiplicity of selves we might call on, but not all of which are appropriate for every discourse situation" (88). The point here is that we can have multiple positions and personas depending on situations and contigencies. "Each of us displays a measure of singualrity"(88), claims Berlin adding that "our own separate position in networks of intersecting discourses makes for differences among us as well as possibilities for political agency, for resistance and negotiation in responding to discursive appeals" (88). Thus "the subject is a construct of signifying practices, so are the material conditions to which the subject responds". (88). Since the reality as well as the self ar constructed in and through language, "the subject that experieces and the material and social conditions experienced are discursively constituted in historically specific terms" (89).

For social-epistemic rhetoric, language is the site of conflict and contention where different groups struggle to make certain meanings and certain ideological formulations.

so critique of ideology is at the center of this rhetoric.

Audiences are also discursive formations- formations that include race, class, gender, ethnic, sexual orientation and age designations belonging to different discourse communities. Thus, members of an audience are both members of communities and separate subject formations. That's why their responses are never predictable.

Berlin finally briefly summarizes the function of social-epistemic rhetoric as:
"The work of social-epistemic rhetoric, then, is to study the production and reception of these historically specific signifying practices to arrive at a rich formulation of the rhetorical context in any given discourse situation through an analysis of the signifying practices operating within it. Thus, in composing or in interpreting a text, a person engages in an analysis of the cultural codes operating in defining his or her subject position, the positions of the audience, and the constructions of the matter ti be considered." (90).

writing and reading, for social-epistemic rhetoric, are both acts of textual interpretation and construction, and both are central to social-epistemic rhetoric.

literary/rhetorcal binary

literary- imaginative, aesthetic, creation, indeterminate, open, sacred, priestly, beauty and truth


rhetorical- scientific, objective, practical, political, representation, determinate, profane, utiliarian, commonplace

"Language is a social construction that shapes us as much as we shape it".( 92)

Berlin blurs the rhetoric/poetic binary by saying that, "the signifying practices of a poetic or rhetoric are always historically conditioned, always responses to the material and social formations of a particular moment." (93) Berlin believes that there are no disinterested use of language as all signifying practices both reading and writing are imbricated in ideological predispositions.