Carolyn Miller does are incredible job digging through various essays and studies on rhetoric in order to better understand it. She gets perspectives from all sides so she may fundamentally break down the concept of rhetoric and genre and everything in between. She writes that “the urge to classify is fundamental.” While I think this is an interesting point, I believe it is fundamentally flawed along with the other arguments she presents.
Miller claims that her desire is to study rhetoric in “ethnomethodological: it seeks to explicate the knowledge that practice creates.” Furthermore, she emphasizes that genre cannot equal discourse. By doing this she is explaining the heart of her argument: while many of the people before her have tried to classify rhetorical genre taxonomically, she is trying to do so in a different way. Her main focus entails looking at people socially, and her form of classification (if you can really call it that) becomes much more broad.
She goes on to say that there are two major problems: understanding the relationship between the rhetoric and its context, and understanding how a genre fuses “its situational with formal and substantive features.” What this means is that, essentially, there are a significant number of factors one must understand in order to relate rhetoric to a genre. It goes beyond the typical genre of “form” (such as length, layout, etc.), and it is also the point where I began to question the purpose of her arguments.
Millers’ claims severely narrow the scope of rhetoric, and, as a result, hers becomes a very subjective classification. The impact of trying to understand rhetoric in its context, along with the other constraints she mentioned, is the creation of complex notions that are riddle with convulsion. I would argue that, based on her argument alone, drawing any consensus would be nearly impossible—and if there’s no consensus, then why did she set out to classify rhetorical genre anyway.
Later she says, “Studying the typical uses of rhetoric, and the forms it takes… tells us less about the art of the individual rhetors… then it does about the character of a culture or an historical period.” In context, Miller is attempting to demonstrate that perception is key to understanding rhetorical genre. With this I agree. But I believe this very argument makes her claims irrelevant. If two people from different time periods were to look at the same piece of rhetoric, their opinions would be swayed by their own perception, influence by time, and changed culture. By her own example, trying to classify rhetoric —even socially—would be flawed and impossible.
To attempt to study rhetorical genre and define it—even broadly as she tries to—seems to go counter to her entire argument. She admits that her argument is not one for taxonomy, that genre evolves, decays, and changes. But that, I believe, counters the entire purpose of her study. There is no consensus drawn, not even in the current time period, because there are so many influences to perception. If anything, I felt her arguments suggest that trying to classify genre in this way is not only impossible, but unnecessary.