SOURCE: Pounds, Wayne. “The Context of No Context: A Burkean Critique of Rogerian Argument.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17, no. 1 (winter 1987): 45-59.

In the following essay, Pounds presents a critique of the Rogerian rhetoric of love using Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of killing.

But there is one aspect of the rhetorical tradition that so far as I can tell remains quite dead—its focus on public discourse. … a rhetoric is defined not just by its theory, but by the sorts of rhetorical problems it gives most emphasis to.¹

—S. M. Halloran

My title refers to the problem of idealism in contemporary rhetoric, and by “idealism” I mean ideas abstracted from the social matrix, which is always conflictive. This lack of social-historical context is what George Trow, in his critique of the vacuous human image created by corporate advertising, calls “the context of no context.”² Idealism of this sort reduces student and...