Rhetoric is situated within ideology, and for this reason, rhetoric is inherently ideological. Rhetoric can never be innocent or disinterested because it always serves competing ideological claims. Three popular rhetorics, namely cognitive psychology, expressionism and social-epistemic, may then be examined ideologically by focusing on three questions posited by Therborn: “What exists? What is good? What is possible?” (120). These ideological questions reveal epistemology (what does/does not exist), what is ethically/aesthetically pleasing and what is possible/impossible, respectively.

First, the rhetoric cognitive psychology presupposes ideological distance because of its seeming scientific, objective and empirical nature with regard to “mind, matter and language” (135). This rhetoric, however, easily adapts to certain socio-economic and political systems, namely corporate capitalist middle to upper management, priveleging this class at the expense of other classes under the guise of truth.

Similarly, expressionistic rhetoric seeks to criticize the corporate capitalist model (as reaction to current-traditional modes) by radically favoring the individual above all else. As a radically reactionary ideology, however, expressionism fails because it marginalizes those dissatisfied with and resistant to contemporary models, leaving them to protest the status quo in isolation. All the while, the notion of individualism is prized in capitalistic notions of the self-made entrepreneur, and so the expressionistic ideology is easily appropriated to fit this end (135).

Finally, social-epistemic ideology teaches ideology in the writing class. It is collaboratively resistant to the dehumanizing aspect of capitalistic society while offering a “a self-critical and overtly historicized alternative based on democratic practices in the economic, social, political and cultural spheres” (135). Social-epistemic rhetoric, in the Bakhtinian sense, is a novelized rhetoric: indeterminate, self-critical and revealing “knowledge as an arena of ideological conflict” (132). Social-epistemic rhetoric is interdisciplinary, collaborative, chaotic/unplanned, open-ended and liberatory, kind of like a group expressionism in which the collective voice is of central importance.

Karl Marx: "James Berlin's 'Ideas aren't in our control'"