Conflict in Community Collaboration 2

Urban community groups are intensely rhetorical forums. They are a fitting place to study what classical rhetoric called the art of invention—the heuristic process by which people arrive at probable knowledge by posing problems, naming conflicts and questions, and building a persuasive case (Enos and Lauer,1992). Community groups give us a window on the deliberative process of consensus building that lets people construct productive knowledge for social ends. However, when the topic is the troubled relations between low income landlords (trying to maintain old buildings on limited resources) and tenants (trying to live on uncertain incomes) in inner city communities, these grassroots dialogues are not a place to look for easy consensus. Shaped by poverty, racial tension, a crumbling urban infrastructure, and local social history, the landlord tenant problem admits no easy answers. It is a prime example of an issue that can not be resolved by a technical art or science--what Aristotle called the "things about which we commonly deliberate." Although such discussions seem quite distant from the tradition of deliberative rhetoric prized in academic forums, the problems they pose stand as open questions. They call for the reasoned deliberation Aristotle describes in which rhetoric is not reduced to the mere persuasion of others present, but functions to discover "the available means of persuasion in a given case," to mount the arguments that best justify decision. As Plato predicted, debates often turn on those disputed ideas and terms (on which "the multitude is bound to fluctuate") that would seem to call for systematic analysis, the dialectic of division and collection Plato urged for getting at the heart of the matter. Even more clearly, the conflict between hard-to-call competing claims (such as equity versus community) calls for a balanced, even dispassionate consideration of alternatives, where debate can take the place of force (Perelman).