UC Riverside

This dissertation focuses on development of sophistic rhetoric methodology and application of this methodology toward cultivation of arts-based, bodily focused critical pedagogy that can intervene in neoliberal rationalities and subjectivities. The teaching outlined in this dissertation facilitates development of critical-imaginative modes through the figure of the artist-educator. It potentially can disrupt static experiences of self by facilitating student engagement with processural modes of becoming. At the same time, it can open alternatives to neoliberalism’s speculative instrumentalization of future with a creative, non–market based future orientation of critical imagination and practice. In response to neoliberal pedagogy and rhetoric, I forward a neosophist pedagogy that applies the rhetoric and pedagogy of the ancient Sophists to developing critical pedagogy. A core concept of this pedagogy is the pharmakon as critical heuristic toward a techné art-of-living set of practical skills centered on bodily oriented, aesthetics-based phronesis, kairos, and mētis intelligences. Working from a sophistic methodology that conceptualizes cognition and meaning as bodily based and collaborative, this dissertation asks: How can we use habituated and conditioned perceptual, linguistic, and bodily orientations against themselves, in order to disorient and then re-orient sensorium, perceptual, and attention apparatuses, to prime the body for different modes of perception and thus different ways of thinking and being/becoming? In addressing this question, I draw on theorists in rhetoric studies, including Susan Jarratt, Richard Enos, and Sharon Crowley; theorists of affect, perception, and mind-body cognition, including Alva Nöe, Bernard Stiegler, Brian Massumi, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; and, critical pedagogues including L.S. Vygotsky, Paolo Freire, and Augusto Boal. This dynamic lens of rhetoric methodology is applied to outlining pedagogy that can effectively respond to neoliberalism understood as a multimodal, transdisciplinary project of rhetoric and public pedagogy. I draw from a diverse field of aesthetic and theoretical approaches. The diversity and scope of this lens is reflected in the areas of aesthetics examined in my case studies, which demonstrate how these areas are especially relevant to countering neoliberalism. These areas include: The contemporary Chican@ art of Harry Gamboa, Jr.; Post-1968 Latin American Narratives of Neoliberalism; and Post-World War II Science Fiction.