“Adventures in Capitalism”
Another reading done by our rhetoric class was Ben Agger’s chapter called “Adventures in Capitalism” in which he talks about the uses of Capitalism in our postmodern world.
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Agger, Ben. “Adventures in Capitalism”. The Virtual Self: A Contemporary Sociology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007: 98-123.
Ben Agger, in his book called The Virtual Self, wrote a very interesting chapter called “Adventures in Capitalism”. He talks about how capitalism uses postmodern techniques in order to protect itself from a socialist world and environment and Agger uses Ethos, Pathos, and Logos to help the reader understand his credentials.
For ethos, the author mainly uses credentials such as giving examples of things that he has done in the past. For example, Agger states that in an earlier book of his, he “argued that in a ‘fast,’ postmodern stage of capitalism the boundary between the text and the world fades as books ooze out of their covers and into the world” (102). Because of the credential of his other book which has already been published and read by hundreds of other people, the author is able to trust him better, knowing that he is already such a successful author. Later in another sentence he says that what he really means is that “our lives are cluttered and commanded by all sorts of discourses” which he defines as “ways of talking about, and representing, the world” (Agger 102). Primarily, without the credential he gives about his earlier book, people may have strongly disagreed on the fact that our lives are cluttered around the things we use to make life more comfortable. But since he is no known as an established author, people are not going to disagree as much, and instead will think about what has been said by the author rather than defy him immediately.
Pathos was also used in Agger’s work. He states that in an ideal Marxist world, “people, when free, will make good choices about their lives. Their selfhood will be healthy, non-dominating, neither abused nor abusive…the environment will be treated with respect… animals will enjoy their rights… race and sex hatred will fade as police no longer apprehend drivers simply for being black and women run large organizations without male resentment” (Agger 108). Ironically, as nice as this world sounds, it is not the world we live in today. This is why Agger’s pathos paragraph full of sentences describing the ideal Marx world, bring an emotion of sadness. In the big picture, this helps Agger define the positive sides of a Marx community, and the negative sides of the Capitalistic community we live in today, which Agger makes is seem like the complete opposite of his pathos-driven paragraph.
Agger’s use of logos can be seen quite extensively in this chapter. In one example, the author uses an entire page and a half to describe the evolution of Marxism and its comparison with Capitalism. He even gives a definition on the same page and tells the audience that “according to Marx and Engels, ideologies produce false consciousness, a worldview that disqualifies radical social change as impossible and convinces workers to accept their present circumstances” (Agger 104). Agger goes on the describe the change of Capitalism through the years and states that “during the 1950’s and 1960’s, capitalism developed even more resilience” (105). He uses a lot of historical facts and logical reasoning to describe the changing of both Marxist and Capitalistic theories is such a logical and reasoning way that the audience is forced to compare the two together, a feat that Agger tries to accomplish in many other places in this chapter. Other places in this chapter holds the same type of historical based knowledge in order to educate his audience and use logos as his credential for his argument.
The methods that I found to be dominant are logos. Throughout the chapter, Agger uses logos and logical facts, usually in history, to make his point across to the audience. For instance, he states that “Thorstein Veblen (1979) talked about the leisure class and what sets them apart from those who simply toil” (Agger 117). Connections to other authors, historical facts, and defining terms is something that Agger does a lot throughout this chapter. This is beneficial to him because his audience consists mostly of those who are very intellectual and consistent with both Marxist and Capitalist theories. This kind of audience would want to know the logic behind Agger’s argument.
