EP6: Daniel M. Gross: Being-Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening

Live Theory

Daniel M. Gross, Professor of English at UC Irvine, Campus Writing and Communication Coordinator, and Director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication, joins us to discuss his newest book, Being-Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening (University of California Press, 2020). If rhetoric is the art of speaking, who is listening? In Being-Moved, Daniel provides an answer, showing when and where the art of speaking parted ways with the art of listening—and what happens when they intersect once again. Much in the history of rhetoric must be rethought along the way. And much of this rethinking pivots around Martin Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric where his famous topic, Being, gives way to being-moved. The results, Gross goes on to show, are profound. Listening to the gods, listening to the world around us, and even listening to one another in the classroom—all of these experiences become different when rhetoric is reoriented from the voice to the ear.
Attendees
Daniel M. Gross
Sarah O'Dell
Steven Mailloux
Susan Jarratt
Vorris Nunley
Meridith Kruse
Ryan Leack
Selected Sources Referenced
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism, 2011.
Borsch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, 1992.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech, 1997.
—. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, 1996.
Cooper, Brittany. “Black Women’s Eloquent Rage: A Lecture from Brittney Cooper,” 2021.
Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972.
Fiumara, Gemma C. The Other Side of Language, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1953.
Gleason, Maud W. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome, 1995.
Gross, Daniel, and Kemmann, Ansgar. Heidegger and Rhetoric, 2006.
Gunderson, Erik. Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self, 2003.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 2009.
Lucian. Rhetorum Praeceptor, c. 160 CE.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, 2011.
—. Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception, 2015.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, 2017.
Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974.
Plutarch. Exercises Suitable for Scholars, c. 110 CE.
Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening, 2005.
Weil, Abraham. “Trans*versal Animacies and the Mattering of Black Trans* Political Life,” 2017.
Notable Quotes from Daniel
“I started to think increasingly about the ways in which the long traditions of many different sorts focused primarily on the prestige of voice, what it is to embody and identify with the speaking and writing agent, the power of voice, the power even to manipulate, to form other people’s psyches by way of that agency, the activity involved, and at the same time I wondered, okay, with all of this speaking, vocalization, writing, who’s listening?”
“The irony, of course, is that all of those folks, all of us—speaking, writing, acting—just sort of flip around 180 degrees and we’re on the other side. We are listening, we are reading, we are learning, we are being affected, and the puzzle as a historian of rhetoric and someone also thinking about the classroom is why this disconnect, and it struck me pretty quickly as a kind of psychological puzzle. There seemed to be a profound identity with the agent position, the position of voice, writing, and activity, and a disavowal of the other side.”