Rhetorical force

In this discussion, Marx refers to commodities of a practical nature, such as a garment, railroad tracks, or a house. Yet the model that he proposes is useful for understanding alchemy, even if the commodity—gold—is not something whose potentiality can immediately be exploited. Put another way, in the labour-process, therefore, man s activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, effects an alteration, designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon. The process disappears in the product (Marx 1867, 180). Isn t this precisely what the traditional alchemist struggles against with all of his rhetorical force ... 

With the recent appearance of twelve-step programs not only for food and relationship junkies but also for those hooked on debt or on the internet, perhaps these words have lost some of their rhetorical force. Still, the caveat is well taken we should remain wary of the tendency to conflate devotion and addiction, temptation and compulsion. 

VS. written, spoken vs. gestural) is transformed into a new modality for new audiences. This framework allows us to see how individual documents have a rhetorical force that influences future policy and procedures. It shows how writers can manipulate risk on paper, shifting the focus of institutional atten-tion and influencing future policy. 

Accidents have a particular rhetorical force within agencies. Because they draw media attention, they provide emotionally laden demonstrations of the failures of safe practice. A spike in accident rates can also serve as evidence... 

Ultimately, The Rhetoric of Risk argues that rhetoricians must develop, study, and adopt documentation practices that will have the same rhetorical force and authority that we now associate with the written word. The rhetoric 1 imagine will not see gesture as additive, but it will help us understand how writers and speakers integrate many different forms of knowledge—ana-... 

The ecstatic tenor of Khunrath s rhetoric is itself perhaps modelled on the spiritus rhetoricus of Erasmus early hermeneutics in which he had explored the spiritual sense of a text as being a force of divine grace that could spontaneously transform the reader. It was the personal experience of the sense of scripture that Erasmus had favoured in the Enchiridion Hence, also the outcries of Hallelujah and Lob Herr that punctuate, or conclude, Khunrath s writings. 

In the 1960s the rhetoric of war began to be applied to the effort to overcome social problems. The first well-known example was the War on Poverty proclaimed by the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. And when Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, he called for a war on drugs. He had little patience with the complexity of the problem, declaring that, The country should stop looking for root causes of crime and put its money instead into increasing the number of police. Immediate and decisive force must be the first response. 

Freud s work suffered from two fatal scientific defects, which his brilliant rhetoric could not overcome. One was the absence of relevant brain science, which he knew was indispensable and would some day force revision of his theories. For this he cannot be blamed. He was a creature of his time and his ambition pushed him a century ahead of that time. But because Freud was trained as a biological scientist, we can in all fairness ask why he was so careless as an observer. Why were his data so limited Why was his focus so narrowly fixed ... 

Many other large-scale resettlement schemes can be subjected to much the same analysis. If, in the Tanzanian case, Chinese and Russian models as well as Marxist-Leninist rhetoric play an important ideological role, we should not imagine that these were the only sources of inspiration for such schemes. We could as easily have examined the huge forced removals under apartheid policies in South Africa, which were far more brutal and economically destructive. We could also have analyzed any number of the many large-scale capitalist schemes for... 

The point is not that Marx erred on this or that specific point it would have been surprising if he had not. Rather I want to emphasize the a priori nature of his reasoning - the speculative, teleological strand in his thought. The summit in this respect is reached in the assertion that these classical revolutions "reflected the needs of the world at that time rather than the needs of those parts of the world where they occurred, that is England and France". True, the statement leads up to a denunciation of the provincial character of the Prussian March revolution, and may to some extent be seen as a rhetorical device. Yet it fits in very well with Marx s general tendency to explain the classical revolutions in terms of final causes - by looking at their achievements rather than at the social forces that set them in motion. 

Psychiatry, like religion, is an institution for the regulation of human behavior—by rhetoric and repression, that is, by propaganda, persuasion, the threat of force, and the use of force. A person may abide by rules voluntarily or he may be compelled to do so by individuals or institutions authorized to use force. Medicine, especially psychiatry, now fulfills many of the existential and social functions previously fulfilled by religion. 

Deutsch gets caught here in the same trap that ensnares all who treat the rhetoric of oppression as if it were a dialogue between equals. The accused—witch, Jew, mental patient—must be at fault or guilty, or else he would not be accused by honest men. What such reasonable critics of mental health practices as Deutsch fail to see is that in a relationship where one party controls another by brute force, the former forfeits all possibility of a dialogue with the latter and, before a critical observer not subject to his power, he forfeits all claim to credibility as well. 

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