Abstract

As an epistemological project characterizing rhetoric as a productive knowledge brought to bear through discourse production, this study addresses questions that reach the core of what rhetoric is and how it is practiced. It examines legal practitioners' and consumers' critical awareness of disciplinary knowledge and situational exigency using the discourse of antitrust law, conceiving rhetoric as deliberative and productive, and rhetors as conscious agents operating at the intersection of theory and practice who critically negotiate their dialectical relationship. This helps explain the relationship between formal knowledge and practical knowledge as they constitute productive knowledge , and, by extension, rhetoric itself. By importing Aristotelian epistemological concepts to sites of present day discourse production, this neo-Aristotelian rhetorical theorizing performs interpretive work that casts these concepts according to the productive knowledge implicit within their contemporary discourse. ;Chapter 1 elaborates a model for productive knowledge that lays the conceptual groundwork for studying legal techne in subsequent chapters. Within it, phronesis surrounds and pervades episteme , and techne exists, evolves, and is brought to bear through their dialectical interaction. Techne as I conceive it here is the shared space of episteme and phronesis that is "embodied" by episteme and suspended within phronesis. ;Chapter 2 analyzes the discourse productions of an Antitrust Law class to reveal the intellectual phronesis of a renowned legal practitioner who recognizes the numerous flaws in his disciplinary knowledge while remaining constrained by them. Despite his awareness, this vantage point within the law and its episteme constrains his legal production inside Law's disciplinary box. ;Chapter 3 studies the consumer-user's engagement with legal discourse from the Microsoft Antitrust Case to reveal a sophisticated consciousness of and concern for legal production from within the marketplace. This positions the consumer as a collaborator in legal production who is responsive to the problems raised throughout Chapter 2. ;Chapter 4 uses the late 19th century antimonopoly movement to theorize a communion between the legal practitioner and consumer-user that completes legal techne and reveals its dialectical nature. Finally, Chapter 5 elaborates the crucial role played by consciousness in legal techne