Controlling Topics

To introduce controlling topics (alternatively, "controlling values") and how to distinguish them in networks, I use everyday cultural narratives—clichés are effective because of their everyday familiarity—to help students understand the dynamics behind how a value might “control” or “govern” ways people think and act.

For instance, I ask my students what might be the controlling topics surrounding “Barbie.” After students share what they already know about these values (some version of “being perfect/beautiful brings success” versus “acceptance leads to happiness”) I explain that there are two parts to a controlling topic, a context, or problem, and a purpose, or solution.

The purpose operates as a valued compensation for the persistence of the context (a problem that continues to assert itself in multiple situations); the context then acts as a warrant for the purpose, a sufficient reason for the rhetor to pursue the worthy aim of the purpose. I then explain that the negative context and positive purpose may both be articulated as some way of being, doing, or having that results in a consequence: an unpleasant consequence for the context, and for the purpose a desirable end.

Distinguishing and articulating the context and purpose of a controlling topic is only one portion of the process. Next comes the inventive and critical process of inferring the parts of an opposing controlling topic.

The goal is for students to see how the context of a controlling topic acts as a warrant that triggers the purpose into action as a claim.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-up.”

Thus, a version of the purpose of the Barbie controlling topic could be:

“being perfect and beautiful will result in getting Ken, the house, and clothes (i.e., material success and love/admiration, celebrity status).”

Students work to think through how this purpose compensates for a context that could be worded as:

“ugliness (imperfection) results in rejection.”

I ask students to infer what weakness another point of view might see in the purpose of the Barbie controlling topic. Again, because of the clichéd nature of this particular cultural narrative, students quickly see that

“seeking to be perfect in the eyes of others will lead to an empty life,”

thus converting the Barbie purpose down into an opposing controlling topic’s context.

This then serves as a warrant for an opposing purpose:

“accepting yourself as you are will bring you peace and fulfillment.”

The final move is to then show how the Barbie controlling topic will convert this opposing purpose down into its context, which in turn allows students to understand and articulate how a network of controlling topics works in an endless dialogic fashion with multiple turns and various revisions.

Origins 

I began formulating a method of using the controlling topic (originally called "controlling value") as a tool for invention in writing when I encountered it in a chapter from Robert McKee’s book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. In chapter 6, “Structure and Meaning,” McKee elaborates the persuasive nature of story structure, wherein a narrative structure works to deliver an experiential conclusion that a controlling idea (as he calls it) appears to guide in every consequential beat, or unit of a film. The progression (the trail) of units engages the audience in the controlling idea regardless of whether they can articulate it in language or not. However, my interest is in articulating and emphasizing the value that controls the idea. Thus, the controlling value.

McKee sees the controlling idea as that which describes “how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end” (115). Itself structured as a “value plus cause,” McKee’s controlling idea “identifies the positive or negative charge of the story’s critical value at the last act’s climax, and it identifies the chief reason that this value has changed to its final state” (115). The value that wins in the end has done so over and against an opposing value that appears negative from the point of view of the dominant value. The means by which the dominant value “wins” is the cause, and it must appear to be a sufficient one if it is to be persuasive.

As another instance, here is a network of the controlling values one may see as operative in the film The Matrix. The dominant purpose appears to be “coming to know one’s real nature leads to freedom,” or even more simply “knowledge leads to freedom.” That is the value that dominates and “wins” by the end of the film. This purpose appears to respond to the context of “ignorance leads to slavery and exploitation.” From the point of view of freedom, the conditions of slavery provide the exigence, the urgent need to bring change to the conditions.

But here comes the tricky part: the opposing controlling value possesses a point of view that sees itself as equally justified in fulfilling its purpose to eradicate an exigence it sees in a given context.

Thus, within a narrative such as The Matrix, the opposing controlling value’s context is the converse of the dominant controlling value’s purpose: “knowledge leads to pain and great suffering.” Compensating for this is the purpose could be various forms of “ignorance leads to bliss.”

Both the Barbie and The Matrix examples illustrate the dialectic conversation the dominant controlling value has with what opposes it (follow this link to see this dialectic conversation unfold in a Power Point animation). The diagrams help us to see how the context of one controlling value could in fact be the purpose of another turned inside out, which purpose in turn views the original controlling value’s purpose as a context. A controlling value’s context, which always and already corresponds to a compensatory purpose, provides the necessary exigency (like an irresistible itch) the purpose cannot help but correct. Exigency provides the occasion for the purpose to assert its hegemony (dominance), if possible, despite incessant domination struggles with the opposing controlling value.

Distinguishing a controlling value operative in a text then becomes the chief tool for writing summaries of arguments, for approaching those texts critically, and then for creating ways to bring various texts into dialogue with each other. However, while the statements that make up the contexts and purposes of each controlling value at first appear simple and reductive, I coach students to treat such statements as mere starting points in need of extensive development. It is a practice of invention, and of further development.

Pedagogical Rationale

My pedagogic aim in introducing students to this practice of distinguishing networks of controlling values is not merely to teach them techniques for performing summary, critical thinking, and dialogically executed research. At the heart of this pedagogy is a method disruptive of the drive for certainty, which invites students to explore what it means to be rhetorical through experiencing a process Kenneth Burke termed “perspective by incongruity,” wherein one’s orientation within the world undergoes a disruptive challenge, and consequently falls into a devalued position in relation to another orientation, if but temporarily.

As Burke argues in Permanence and Change, perspective by incongruity is a kind of rhetorical act that effects the revision of any orientation. Here is how it works: any given orientation is always “right” within its point of view, but when another orientation reads the first according to terms alien to the original orientation, the fundamental sense of “rightness” falls into question and a corresponding affect (a dis-eased orientation, so to speak) ensues in the individual who until then lived “piously” within the original orientation. According to Burke, piety is the moral principle that guides the formation of interpretations according to an orientation, and so serves the functions of a given style to coordinate actions, determine meaningful relationships, and permit transference between situations. As such, a style’s piety permits any given orientation to possess its own consistent logic that appears illogical and impious to other orientations. Because piety works to build systems, supplying “a desire to round things out, to fit experiences together into a unified whole,” and is “the sense of what properly goes with what” (74), as soon as a disorientation occurs by virtue of perspective by incongruity, a revision, or reconfiguration of the original orientation and its piety results. The premise I follow then calls for me to create situations in which students repetitively practice undergoing perspectives by incongruity throughout the course.