Free A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric by Richard Andrews Page B

rhetoric. This is not the rhetoric of a single orator expounding to a passive audience; it is the rhetoric of exchange.
    Moffett's conception has more in common with Vygotskian notions of social constructionism in the making of meaning and the development of thought than with Piaget's notion of an autonomous biological entitybeing gradually socialized. And yet it is the Piagetian idea of increasing
abstraction
from the particular that provides the structuring of Moffett's proto-theory, particularly as Moffett believes “that development of symbolic expression depends on nothing less than general mental growth” (18). This is not the chapter in which to debate further the cognitive psychology allegiances of Moffett's thinking (he seems to tend toward Piaget, as suggested also by the diagram on page 68 that has the “biological” as the “largest or most universal context” for determining the individual's language), but it is worth noting that the peculiar concoction of his model is one between dialogism on the one hand and abstraction on the other. It is as if elements of Vygotsky and Piaget are combined, from different perspectives. If we associate rhetoric more closely with Vygotsky and public discourses, Moffett makes the connection between
two
planes: between the
I-you
dimension of “talking with someone …” and the
I-it
dimension of “… about something.” The notion of abstraction emerges from the
I-it
dimension. Abstraction is not the aspect of the conception that we will pursue in the rest of the present chapter. Rhetoric is more interested in the
I-you
perspective.
    Nevertheless, the process of abstraction in Moffett leads us to a deeply rhetorical place: the classification of types of discourse based on the dual perspectives of the distance between people in the
I-you
relationship and the abstractive distance between particularities in space and time at the lowest level of verbal abstraction and generalities and theorization at the highest levels. To compress the argument and with a self-acknowledged “tautological transforming” (35), the formula comes out as demonstrated in Table 3.1.
    This formula, once it is arranged as a curriculum sequence, sees drama as the lowest level of abstraction and the starting point for all discourses and educational exchange. The natural move is upward from there to narrative, and thence to exposition and logical argumentation. I have rearranged the categories to depict the relative levels of abstraction. But the movement is also the other way: higher categories subsume lower ones and frame or bring meaning to them. Hence the arrows move in both directions. I stress that this arrangement, and the addition of the arrows, is my take on Moffett and not his own representation of the relationship
Table 3.1
A Two-Way Approach to Moffett's Levels of Abstraction

what may happen — logical argumentation — theorizing
what happens — exposition — generalizing
what happened — narrative — reporting
what is happening — drama — recording
    and sequence of the different categories; but their mutual relationship needs to be represented by such a depiction.
    The advantage of the two-way depiction, with the notion of “what is happening” as the basis of the relationship, is not only that various elements of Moffett's emerging theory are brought together, but also that the pattern as a whole, at the whole-text or whole-discourse level at which it operates, is revealed as rhetorical in the positive sense. We must assume a dimension in which the audience is present in every engagement, whether manifested in other people or in terms of an interior dialogue. What is evident, once we have assumed this dialogic dimension, is that “something of every level is found at every other level,” and “likewise, the three main logics—chronology, analogy and tautology—operate at every level” (48). What is more, the fictive dimension (yet another dimension that does not appear in