A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (13 page)

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The birth of rhetoric was associated with power. If there is a correlation between rhetoric and the maintenance of democracy, then rhetoric's function is to ensure that argumentation is available in a society and that through argumentation a consensus can be found that will enable action. That power is the power to argue; to marshal words and other modes to make one's case; to persuade; to defend one's position; to hammer out a policy and see it through into action. Rhetoric thrives in a democracy, and a democracy needs rhetoric. It is a mutual relationship. Only in autocracies, tyrannies, and other forms of undemocratic governance does rhetoric not find a place—except when those in power seek to impose their will upon others with the distorted use of rhetoric.

In the present chapter, various aspects of rhetoric and its relation to power will be explored: rhetoric in autocracies; rhetoric as depicted in fictional autocracies (
Nineteen Eighty-Four
); rhetoric in democracies; the abuse of rhetoric and power; minority group rhetoric; and rhetoric and the media.

Why is rhetoric so closely related to democracy? Democracy—the voice of the people—resides in a principle that each individual has a part to play in society and that he or she has a voice in how that society determines itself. In terms of governance, any organization—from a family to a local club, from a regional body to the government of a state, from a collection of states (e.g., Europe) to an organization that is international in reach (e.g., the United Nations)—has to find a balance between the voices of individuals on the one hand, and what and whom they represent on the other. There are other interstices: between the individual and the local organization, between the individual and the state.

In short, living in a democracy means living within a number of frames of different sizes, all of which relate in some way to the individual. Even if the individual were not part of this elaborate series of Russian dolls, there
would still need to be commerce between the different levels, or different sizes of organization. But with the addition of the individual dimension and agency, the singular voice finds that it must engage with other people and thus with private (intimate) and public discourses.

Engagement between these various levels of organization requires communication; it requires argumentation to reach consensus as a basis for action; it requires storytelling; it requires clarification through categorization, description, verification, and distinction; it requires dialogue. Although there are set patterns and conventions for behavior, schemata for everyday discourse, and habitual aspects of “getting by” in the democratic world, the other requirement for anyone living in a democracy is negotiation. Examples are the negotiation that takes place in the permission that is sought (and debated) regarding demolishing an existing building and putting up a new one; the negotiation between the doctor and patient as to which medication, if any, is appropriate for a particular condition; the negotiation to get a bill through parliament or Congress regarding a new health care system or a reform to the existing provision for education.

Communication, engagement, negotiation: these are the elements of social interaction, and they are also the elements of political interaction in a democracy. If the values of a democracy are humanistic (and they usually are, given the individual person that defines the unit that makes up a democracy), those interactions function to understand, tolerate, and resolve difference within the social and political system. It is through difference that the democracy keeps alive and “progresses”: the status quo is challenged, an oppositional point of view is established, matters are discussed and debated and then resolved. Rather like a Hegelian process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the dynamic process of challenge, negotiation, and resolution provides the socio-political basis within which rhetoric thrives.

If there is no scope for such negotiation, there is no democracy and no rhetoric. Laws are made; they are enacted and observed. Transgression means censure and sometimes punishment.

The particular function of rhetoric in a democracy is that it is the private and public process of negotiation through whichever modes of communication are required by the situation and/or available to the participants. A decision, however small, is discussed by a family and decided upon; a course of action follows. At the governmental level, a bill is proposed; it is debated, revised, reconsidered, and finally passed as an Act, becoming law. Rhetoric is so much a part of the processes of democracy that, for most of the time, we do not see it. The rhetoric is persuasive; but that persuasion (the core of Aristotelian rhetoric—the “art of persuasion”) is more fundamental than one person trying to persuade another to his or her point of view. Rather, it is part of a dialogic and often
dialectic negotiation of the decisions that are made on a daily basis, such as whether to catch a bus at 9
AM
or 9:15
AM
to get to an appointment on time, what to spend money on, whether to holiday in a particular year or not, and if so, where? As will be evident, many such decisions take place on an individual basis via an inner dialogue or dialectic. These inner debates, as Vygotsky represents them, were at one time “real relations between people” before they became “thought”; that is, societal and politically shaped actions that determine the lineaments of the higher orders of thinking.

Thus, rhetoric is about human negotiation through the available means of discourse, and the choices made by individuals, groups, states, and international bodies (including relations between all these levels of interaction). Rhetorical choices, and the aesthetic dimension of the way those choices are framed, lead to action founded (ideally) on the best rational and value-based principles and operations.

What happens when a minority group tries to establish a discourse of its own, or with a hegemonic, majority group? Does it have to adopt the majority discourse, or can it develop its own discourse and still argue its corner in a society? A recent book by Banks (2006), working within a tradition of African American rhetoric, makes the case that the digital divide in the United States is aligned with a racialized divide and thus further depresses the chances of African Americans to play an equal part in society. The complex relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage, lack of access to new technologies at home or in schools, and not playing a full part in the digital discourses of new media provides a cocktail of injustice. The argument, put succinctly, is that “rhetorical and technological education must take up all three of [the] axes in theory, pedagogy, and practice with the focus of helping students employ each and all toward access and/or transformation of the spaces they occupy as they see fit” (Banks 2006, 7). Furthermore, “technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories in its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advances its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political and economic relations” (10).

Not all commentators on global digitization see a digital divide (see Haythornthwaite 2007), and not all societies see a racial divide as polemically as Banks. First, the “digital divide” can be seen more accurately as a digital spectrum of access and use. There is inequity in access to new technologies hardware as well as to broadband width and to technology. Banks points out that we can define material access (e.g., to hardware); functional access (in effect, use); experiential access, in which we may
well have technical access to new technologies but do not actually experience or use them much (perhaps more as readers than as composers); and critical access, in which we are aware of the politics of use. Then, in terms of use, there can be highly competent and inventive users of relatively primitive technologies on the one hand, and very basic and/or partially competent users of state-of-the-art technologies on the other. The “digital divide” is a binary formulation that masks the complexity of the picture of digital access and use.

From another perspective—that of racialized politics—the black/white distinction is an ideological duality: depicted as one of suppression, self-empowerment, disadvantage on the one side and hegemonic assumption on the other. In the United States, the political rhetoric casts Black and Hispanic groups in a power game with the White “majority,” but the changing ethnic demographic, the nature of social mobility, patterns of migration that are linked or not linked to ethnicity, intermarriage, and other factors work to variegate the racialized picture, moving it away from a polarized and dualistic conception to one more based on social class than race.

Why is it that those groups that see themselves as “minorities” (of whichever nature) choose to “tell their own stories,” to use
narrative
as a rhetorical mode of expression rather than argumentation or other means? One reason could be that the group in question is disenfranchised from mainstream societal discourses, which tend to favor argumentation as the means for exploring and resolving problems. These discourses favor the powerful, as the “ownership” of logic and access to data that converts to evidence when informed by propositions is controlled by (in Toulminian terms) the warrants that allow claims and evidence to speak to each other. These invisible but powerful warrants suggest, for instance, that certain kinds of evidence (numerical data or data drawn from experimental controlled trials in research, or key witness statements and documentary evidence in law) count more than other kinds. If access to and use of these modes of argumentation enable not only participation in the discourses of the powerful, but also a direct influence on actions that arise from such exchanges, then surely such access is desirable for all minority groups. Why, then, the emphasis on telling one's own story, on the power of narrative to transform lives and life-chances?

Narrative does not transform in the same way as argumentation in our predominantly rationalistic, liberal, democratic, and fast-capitalistic world. Narrative empowers, but in a different way. It provides an inclusive, bonding function for groups (“we share the same stories”); it provides counterpoint (“there may be a hegemonic meta-narrative, but we can tell our own story too”); and it cannot be gainsayed: you cannot “disprove” a narrative. It thus preserves a space for freedom of expression and, more powerfully, freedom to define one's own histories and
identities. Ultimately, though, the reversion to narrative is a position of weakness because it has accepted defeat in the politics of discourse. It is the resort of the minority to depend on narrative in a world where the powerful determine the grand narratives by which we live and exist.

Rather, access for all via a wide range of discourses and modes of expression taken to the highest level possible, rhetorical dexterity in being able to choose from a wide repertoire the best means of expression for a particular situation and purpose, access for “majority”
and
“minority” groups to the discourses of power, and a critical understanding of the affordances of the different modes of expression and how they best serve a democratic society that is concerned with social justice—all these are prerequisites for rhetoric to be able to thrive and provide the citizens of a country or of the world with the means of communication they need. To add one further dimension to the present argument: it is not only the ability to
read
the range of discourses that is important for citizens and for education to provide. It is also important to be able to create such discourses, whether they are in print or oral format, and/or in digital format. The highest levels of literacy are now those where the rhetor is able to compose in a range of genres, across a spectrum of digital platforms, and in a number of modes.

A classic depiction of the power of rhetoric in fictional autocracies is the world of discourse created in Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949). Not only is the fictional world created by Orwell a rhetorical construction— like all fiction—but this very world has its own discourse, its own rhetoric. Survival in such a world requires adherence to the discourse. On the third page of the novel, after a conventional opening in which the setting— “London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania”—and the main protagonist, Winston Smith, are established, we are introduced to the language of the fictional world, Newspeak, and are directed toward a footnote: “Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology, see Appendix.” The Appendix, titled “The Principles of Newspeak,” sets out the purpose of Newspeak:

not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. … Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods … To give a single example.
The word FREE still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or `intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. … Newspeak was designed not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. (303–4)

The oppression represented by Newspeak is subtle and invidious. Its design is to limit thought itself (and its products) but also the very processes of thought. As the language of Newspeak gradually replaced English in Airstrip One, so the range of thought and intellectual experience would be limited. The exercise of power to delimit rhetoric is itself an act of rhetoric, as any selection of diction of the “language of the tribe” would be; but in this case, the reduction of language to one level of meaning only (no metaphorical and/or abstract usage) is a highly political act that deprives its subjects of the power to think or create. In such a world, where vocabulary and expression are so limited, rhetoric ceases to have any influence.