Hi Anne,

I, too, think that Robbins offers a way forward on a number of fronts. 

But I would also like to preserve a distinction between rhetoric and conversation, because, as Robbins points out, this latest return to rhetoric is about how disciplines might contingently negotiate their own authority and relations with one another, not the creation of a totalizing interdisciplinary rhetoric (or conversation) that would stand apart from the disciplines and judge them in the name of the public (cf. 115). 

Such a permanent subordination of the disciplines to an all-encompassing, monolithic public would ultimately be anti-rhetorical.  Rhetoric is what leaves open the possibility of the upending of hierarchies, the weaker (argument) defeating the stronger.

Here is a key formulation in Robbins's argument:

[Rhetoric] has offered its tools of analysis to other, more authoritative
disciplines beginning to problematize their own rhetoric, and it has
claimed a central place in politically-charged interdisciplinary projects
like "cultural studies," whose collapsing of the elite/popular divide and
democratizing of subject matter give it a self-evident claim to public
responsiveness (104).

So the crucial move for Robbins, I think, lies in his conceptualization of the multiple, constitutively incomplete publics and disciplines that address and inform one another.  His term for this revisionist rhetorical practice is "public-making":

This task could be described as "public-making": making public or visible, opening to a variety of perspectives and judgments, but also the interdisciplinary fashioning of new publics, new instances of judgment, new collective viewpoints (116).

So how do we reconcile this notion of public-making (and its "new instances of judgment") with what we already know about education and inquiry?

DM