Rhetorical Methods and Critical Studies

I’ll admit, I read the title of chapter 3, Rhetorical Methods in Critical Studies and had no clue what I was about to read. The overall concept is complicated, but this chapter wants us to realize the importance of meaning in text and be able to argue for a perspective, or against another perspective. When we attempt to be rhetorical, we struggle over meanings in order to actualize them. There are two schools of thought over this topic, the Birmingham and the Frankfurt schools. If you adhere to the Frankfurt theory, you might think that pop culture is a means to control a population. The Birmingham believers, however,  might say that the people control the text or the culture, adapting it to their own sensibilities despite what they are fed. An example might be the popularization of the punk subculture through the decades. The culture was dredged up from the underground and watered down. Its values were subverted and turned into a mainstream marketing ploy that was spoon fed to the masses, but it was originally created by the common people. It is meant to be open to interpretation by the individual, and to represent the human condition of the subjugated or average person. The meanings of the culture are multiple, and often contradictory as Brummet claims is inherent to the struggle of meaning.