Rhetorical Listening
A methodology for better disagreements
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In her seminal article, “Rhetorical Listening,” the rhetorician Krista Ratcliffe tells a story about a time she was at a conference, presenting on the work of the feminist scholar Mary Daly.
After the presentation, a Black woman in the audience told Ratcliffe she liked the presentation, but refused to read Daly because Daly erases differences between women. She was perhaps thinking of Audre Lorde’s famous critique of Daly’s work, which makes a similar argument.
Later, when Ratcliffe was teaching a special topics class, she had her class read excerpts of Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals. A white student in the class told Ratcliffe that she enjoyed the readings, but wouldn’t be reading any more of Lorde’s writing. According to the student, Lorde erases commonalities between women.
Both of the individuals in the story have decided not to engage a perspective they disagree with. Neither of them seems to be imagining a world where similarities and differences can coexist. Reflecting on both of these conversations, Ratcliffe asks, “why is it so hard to listen to people we disagree with?”
In western culture, listening is often neglected in favor of reading, writing, and speaking. The former is regarded as a “passive” process, while the latter are all considered active. But this isn’t quite correct: listening can frame, confirm, or change how audiences feel about something. It can be generative. It can be an expression of agency.
Listening is Not “Close Reading”
It’s easy to confuse rhetorical listening with “close reading,” a method associated with Biblical exegesis, literary criticism, and ideology critique. But rhetorical listening is not a way of reading. It involves different sensory organs and a different set of assumptions.
Close reading is a mode of interpretation that closely scrutinizes a text to reveal its ideological assumptions or create new knowledge. Rhetorical listening, in contrast, draws on Martin Heidegger’s theory of divided logos – a Greek word that can mean “saying” (i.e. “rational discourse” or dialectic) but also “laying,” in the sense of ‘laying another’s ideas down in front of us.’
With close reading, the reader starts from the assumption that the text is hiding something. Combing through the minutiae of a text allows one to discover its “hidden meanings.” But with rhetorical listening, our orientation toward the speaker or the text is one of restraint.
Specifically, we’re resisting the temptation to pick the text apart or search hidden assumptions and biases. We’re (temporarily) refusing to consider counterarguments or compare the text to other texts we’ve read on the same topic.
In short, the goal of rhetorical listening is to facilitate a different kind of understanding.
“Standing Under” Texts
In the western literary tradition, understanding is often synonymous with mastery. It’s linked to the “author function” and frequently assumes a “correct” interpretation of a given text. That’s not what Ratcliffe is offering here. She’s advocating “strategic idealism”
To help clarify what she means by this term, Ratcliffe inverts the word “understanding” and asks readers to “stand under” the texts they encounter. Texts are like umbrellas. We use texts to protect ourselves from the world. They function as an escape, or a source of shelter.
In fact, that’s often one of the explicit ideological functions of a text. In this respect, rhetorical listening is related (but not synonymous) with ideology critique. The crucial difference is that ideology critique seeks to strip away this shelter and leave the subject unmoored. They’re exposed to the “truth,” but in the same way a person without shelter is exposed to the elements.
Rhetorical listening is about sharing that shelter, even if only temporarily, to better understand why people seek refuge in certain beliefs or perspectives in the first place.
Rhetorical Listening as Methodology
Ratcliffe doesn’t outline a lot of specific steps for rhetorical listening, because it’s more of a methodology than a method, but she does say it involves:
Acknowledging others
Listening for presences, absences, and unknowns and
Integrating what you hear into the decision-making process.
This means approaching texts on their own terms. Labeling a work of theory “good,” “bad,” “right,” or “wrong” doesn’t tell us anything about how the text is functioning rhetorically. Those are value claims. They don’t tell us anything about how the text intervenes in a larger conversation or the effect its having on audiences.
A Better Disagreement
When Ratcliffe says rhetorical listening involves paying attention to “the historically grounded cultural logics enveloping other people’s claims, she’s not suggesting we should be looking for the hidden meaning of the text.
In fact, the word “envelop” suggests we should be doing the opposite. We should be trying to understand (or “stand under”) the explicit values, beliefs, and experiences that shape how an audience hears and interprets a speaker’s message.
A good example of this would be dog-whistle rhetoric, which is when someone speaks in two different registers at the same time. One group hears something innocuous; the other recognizes the veiled threat or insult. If close reading reveals the hidden meaning of the text, rhetorical listening involves thinking about how different groups will hear and interpret the same message differently.
The upshot of rhetorical listening is a better disagreement. Like stasis theory, rhetorical listening allows people to disagree more productively. When we do disagree, it should be with a deeper understanding of the cultural logics that make it easy or difficult for audiences to accept out claims.
The downside of rhetorical listening is that it’s risky. If you’re listening in good faith, you’re opening yourself up to the possibility of being persuaded. Even if you don’t reverse your position, some amount of cross-contamination is inevitable. The experience of listening to a text you disagree with will change you. And you can’t control what that process feels like or who you’ll be when it’s over.
Good luck with your writing!