reflective blog post 2

    Kristina Ratcliffe defines “listening” as a degree of openness, actively chosen by a person and measured against that person’s (the listener’s) culturally bound preconceptions and ethical demarcations. Ratcliffe’s theory of rhetorical listening appears to be a reflexive tool for understanding the many facets of a cross-cultural rhetoric. In establishing listening as the grounds for more apt cross-cultural interpretation, Ratcliffe reimagines the Burkean notion of identification, working it into a more modern version of itself, maintaining that in rhetorical engagement – persuasion – parties identify with one another, but asserting that despite the ability to mutually identify, there will always be difference among or between the parties. Recognizing that difference, and likewise accepting too the commonality between parties, rhetorical listening (combining Burkean identification and postmodern configurations of identification) exists in-between.

    Acting within the “margins” or overlaps between commonality and difference, rhetorical listening gains the otherwise difficult to achieve or even otherwise un-achievable means by which discourse can be interpreted without leaning on blame and guilt attribution, but on analysis of the cultural binds that determine the convergence and divergence of discourses. Acknowledging and examining the likenesses and opposites of, as well as the marginal spaces betwixt, a rhetorical listener unpacks cultural logics (ways of assessing truth and knowledge that are tied to one's culture) and better accesses the identification that Burke insisted was key to rhetoric.

    Ratcliffe believes that effective audiences should seek to understand, which goes a step beyond listening to the rhetor’s intent but attempts to broach the “self-interested intent” of the audience, listening to our listening (Ratcliffe 205). The goal of rhetorical listening is not simple identification, but it avers that identification is a very complicated and messy process that requires a lot of self-reflective thought, dealing with cross-cultural interpretation to reach a similar end. But the actual purpose (not necessarily the intent but the ultimate result) seems pure and progressive: that through the interpretations and reflexive processes that Ratcliffe affords us, we improve our rhetoric and discourse and our own ethical standing, not as culturally indifferent, but as sound in recognizing difference and understanding what that means for the parties, the text and the intent.