Dissension, Rhetoric, Controversy: Towards a Theoretical Relationship

• In Event: Controversial Rhetoric and Rhetorical Controversies: Reconsidering the Discourses of Stability and Change

Abstract

The increasing prominence of studies of controversy in rhetorical studies has generally begged the theoretical question of how controversy might be situated in terms of other related concepts. In this essay, I suggest that controversy needs to be differentiated from, though related to, two other concepts: dissension and rhetoric. Dissension, rhetoric and controversy can be thought of as distinct though nested concepts that traces the gesture of resistance and change from the potentiality for resistance (in dissension), the articulation of dissension (in rhetoric) and the unpredictable discursive and material consequences of rhetoric (in controversy). This line of reasoning derives from the work of Foucault, de Certeau, and Laclau and Mouffe and provides a lens for considering the various ways in which dissension is manifested rhetorically and the way this rhetoric is disseminate through the fracture of controversy.

Author

• Kendall Phillips, Syracuse University