A New Rhetorical Ecology of Rhetoric-Culture:
Genre in Particular
by Richard Coe

        Based in the work of Kenneth Burke, Gregory Bateson, and the new genre theorists, the first part of this presentation will offer a brief overview of the principles, practices, and implications that arise from the New Rhetoric when Bateson is used to extend Burke's concepts of recalcitrance and adequacy (which he “spins” from Malinowski's fertile term, “symbolic action”). From the perspective Bateson called the “ecology of mind,” rhetoric-cultures form and are formed in accordance with both natural and rhetorical selection (neither to be confused, of course, with "survival of the fittest"). The second part of the presentation will assert richness of examining Rhetoric-Culture from the perspective of an ecology of rhetoric by discussing genres as both complexly interactive manifestations and contingent shapers of rhetoric-culture and subject positions, ergo of identity and consubstantiality. Genres are especially effective ideological persuaders because they are imagined as “empty” containers; genres are often also, in Bateson's terms, optimal entry points for initiating change.