Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
80. the "problem of the one and the many" are still "relevant today, capturing for us the elusive goal at the center of a series of troubling issues, political cultural, theoretical, pedagogical....should community standards prevail over freedom of expression in matters of obscenity or nudity? can we claim that a single language, a single cultural tradition, ought to form the basis of public education? what standards and goals should prevail in higher education--those of disciplinary authority, those of students' 'home communities,' those of the capitalist-industrial community of which those students want to become members?"; main claim: "rhetoric should take seriously its social grounding by exploring and using the concept of community more fully and more critically"
81. "plato rejected rhetoric as inevitable demogoguery because it is grounded in community: rhetoric can only say what an audience already knows or wants to hear; rhetoric panders, manipulates, deceives"; community--esp. "discourse community"--has become important in comp: "in social constructionism, the 'one' and the 'many' are complicated and interdependent: individuals are constructed in important ways by the social milieu in which they develop, and knowledge concepts, even 'reality,' are all seen as distinctively social products"
83. bitzer defines community alongside public: "as a communiy, a public must be maintained by the arts of communication and must have a fund of common, or public, knowledge that it authorizes"--he questions whether such a public exists today when rhetoric has such "vicious circularity"--"good" is what the authorities say it is & tell us to believe it is: "a good reason is a reason that will be accepted as a good reason."
87. the problem w/rhetoric & liberalism: "liberalism promotes anomie and disaffection and ultimately the conviction that reasoned argument is not possible, because each individual is entitled to his or her own conception of the good, incommensurable by definition with everybody else's." (in walter's words, on 88, it is "a self-subverting doctrine" (15) because it "distains its own traditions" (14))
89. modern & postmodern pluralism are not the same; in the latter neither "individuals or communities can be unities" as both are "inherently full of conflict"
90. metaphors for this pluralism include young's model of "city life" as "the being together of strangers": "in living together, city dwellers have 'some common problems and common interests, but they do not create a community of shared final ends, of mutual identification and reciprocity' (238)"; others are mouffe's definition of "radical democracy" and corlett's "politics of extravagance"
91. miller's suggestion: "perhaps we should seek a rhetoric of play, of experiment, of advocacy that is both tentative and committed, of dialogic agonism that is exploratory and possessive"--the danger is that "postmodernism may leave us with a community that is so fragmented, perforated, intermittent, and attenuated that it no longer performs any rhetorical work....but...a rhetoric that does without community will be impoverished--certainly it will be neither fully social or political" & so the tightrope must be walked: "the problem of the one and the many has a rhetorical solution. the task of a new political rhetoric will be to construct one out of many, over and over again."