A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (2 page)

Even in more public contexts, the rhetorical design of communication can be unconscious, especially if the genres of social interaction are well established. A student attends a class in a school, college, or university. The timetable is set, defining when the class begins and ends as well as the space in which the class is to take place. Other students make their way to this classroom or lecture hall, and where they sit partly determines the kind of social interaction that is to take place. The teacher, lecturer, or professor engages the students; different kinds of interaction may take place (or not); the students leave the space, hopefully wiser than when they entered it. They may have spoken to the teacher and/or fellow students and perhaps taken notes. Many do not question the nature of the interaction, politically or rhetorically.

Rhetoric is, however, present in these occasions and in most other human social interactions, from the personal to the public. It is behind the design of who is talking with whom about what, and how. Rhetoric does not often ask the additional question: why? It sees that as part of philosophy. Rather, it operates in the everyday world, in all its communicative manifestations, to provide a framework for designing, making, and understanding discourse. It follows that once rhetoric is recognized and defined, it can be learnt and/or taught, thus enhancing the power of rhetoric to
improve
the quality of communication.

In some cultures, and in some uses, the term
rhetoric
has negative associations. It is associated with sophistication, political cant, hypocrisy, and a masking of the truth in persuasive language. It has acquired this reputation through a narrowing of the definition of rhetoric to “the art of persuasion.” In turn, resistance to persuasion has taken the form of a distrust of persuasive language and, thus, of the narrowly conceived notion of rhetoric.

The current book takes a more generous view of rhetoric, seeing it as the art behind choices in communication of all kinds. Choosing to write a short story to capture a particular moment or issue is a rhetorical choice; the genre of the short story (in all its forms) helps to determine the writing and its reception by an audience. The writer has the choice as to whether to meet the conventional demands of the genre, or whether to experiment. In a chance encounter on a street, someone walking along has the choice as to whether to say a brief hello to a passerby that he or she half-recognizes, whether to engage in a fuller conversation, or whether to say nothing at all. The gaze between the two walkers is also rhetorical.

It is not just in speech and writing that rhetoric operates. There is a range of modes—the image, the moving image, sound, gesture, movement—in addition to the verbal arts, and these can be (and usually are) used in combination. Such multimodality is now recognized as prevalent in society. At the same time, there is proliferation in a range of media that carry the coded messages of the modes: books, television screens, computer screens, mobile devices, tablets, live speech in the air. This book addresses the range of modes and media as part of its attempt to compose a theory of contemporary rhetoric.

Why do we need a new theory of rhetoric? Part of the answer is that the vestigial classical rhetorics are now no longer fit for purpose. They were designed for public fora and the art of persuasion and have been adapted as guidance in the art of academic and political writing. Their value cannot easily be applied to a wider set of social needs, especially when we move from the public to the personal domains. Second, we need to be able to make sense of (and provide a rationale for) the range of discourses that take place in the contemporary world, in a range of modes, media forms, and languages. Third, the very nature of multimodality,
now well established as a way of understanding the resources and affordances available to communication, requires another dimension of theory in order to situate it in political and social contexts and to complement its grounding in social semiotics.

Rhetoric is not just about the analysis of communicative acts in their social and political contexts. It is also about making and designing from a wide range of possible resources. More specifically, it is about making and designing a message with certain materials in a particular context for a particular audience. Part of the challenge of rhetoric is choosing the right forms for the communicative needs of the particular situation, being open to dialogue and dialectical exchange, and ensuring that communicationtakes place efficiently, elegantly, and purposefully.

Finally, rhetoric thrives in democracies. Indeed, it helps to make democracies work by framing arguments and difficulties and helping us to understand and, if possible, resolve them. These are not democracies that are peddled for commercial gain as empire-building enterprises, but democracies that connect individual lives and aspirations to public networks and institutions; democracies that accept that differences exist and that aim to tolerate and resolve them through argumentation; democracies in which freedom of expression is respected but also where the content of that expression can be challenged.

It is in the spirit of freedom of speech—but also freedom in a wider range of modes of expression—that the present book has been conceived and composed. Freedom implies responsibility for the quality and ethics of communication. Rhetoric provides a background theory for communication of all kinds, with application in a number of fields. This book may not cover all the possibilities, but it may provide a basis for future discussion and development in the arts of discourse and communication.

1

I am sitting in a café on a street in Berlin.

First, the words. Every car is named—VW, Audi, Renault—and all have number plates that carry as many letters as numbers: country of origin within Europe, the European stars, regional identification. Shop signs are in German and English. With a mix of words, telephone numbers, and invitations to go beyond for more information: Twitter, Facebook connections. There are banners announcing new shops and cafés about to open. On lampposts, there are road signs and political advertising (there must be an election soon). People pass by with clothes and bags that
carry brand names. In the café, people are reading menus, books (novels, guides) newspapers, and magazines.

In speech, there are groups of two, three, and four in the café. Some people, on their own, are talking into cell phones. There is more than one language: a mix of languages sometimes. Some of the people walking by are on cell phones, too.

Sounds: voices, laughter, car horns, ringtones, the sound of tires on cobbles and on tarmac, the noise of the café kitchen, the rustle of papers.

Beyond words are clothes, car designs, road design, buildings, and scaffolding indicating that a building is being restored.

And then, beyond these designed and made forms are beings themselves: the human form in all its variety, dogs, birds hovering in the trees, the blue sky and clouds passing at a high level after a storm the previous day.

All these notes I am making with a biro on a waiter's notepad headed “Rossler. Ihr Getranke-Specialiist. Ihr Partner in Berlin und Brandenburg.” Then I transpose them into type on a Macbook Air in my hotel room, via a conventional (at least for the twentieth century and first part of the twenty-first) QWERTY keyboard. I am conscious, every now and then, of Christopher Isherwood's “I am a Camera,” of
Goodbye to Berlin
, of the layered pre-history of voices and history and literature that precedes me and that informs my own perceptions and communications.

The time dimension is hardly touched on, otherwise.

This is the rhetoric of the street. It hardly begins to account for the interlinked rhetoric of communication in an ordinary street in Berlin. I have hardly engaged with the people or the street, except to order a cup of tea, drink it, pay the bill, and leave. But even the bill is a record of a simple and also complex social interaction.

Rhetoric is ever present in these moments in a number of ways. It preserves the balance of human communication, reflects the schemata,
is
the schemata (in a speech act theory sense), enables the world to move on in a small way, and combines highly rational behavior with bodily needs (eating) and pleasures (drinking Darjeeling tea). Even the type of tea brings another part of the world, its production and economy, into the frame.

The frames are invisible, though we could trace their parameters. The occasion described above is that of the “stop for tea” or refreshment. As it's specifically tea on this occasion, the ritual of the infusion, then the milk, then the infusion again (unusual for a Briton). The German/English encounter is managed adequately with minimal linguistic resources. Tea and coffee houses punctuate the streets of the city. There are enough people to fill the pavement tables of this particular café on a Tuesday afternoon in September. There are economics behind that: economics of time, resource, attention, choice, and intention.

There is multimodality here, but also more than multimodality. Multimodality is ubiquitous: sound, printed words, spoken words, images, moving image, moving objects, gesture, the physics of the situation. There is also a range of media at play. The contact of the natural and physical worlds is a perpetual interplay. Symbols attach themselves to things or operate free of attachment, though always physically grounded.

Booth (2004) defines rhetoric as “
the entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another
; effects ethical, practical, emotional and intellectual [parentheses omitted]. It is the entire range of our use of ‘signs’ for communicating, effectively or sloppily, ethically or immorally.” (xi) However, part of the problem with this definition is its emphasis on “resources” and “producing effects on one another.” The view is materialistic and rhetor-centered and runs close to the edge of the definitions of rhetoric that invite pejorative readings. Such cornering of rhetoric is not Booth's intention, but the definition allows such a reading. My own emphasis is on the arts of discourse, thus giving the listener or reader or viewer—the receiver of the message—as much power as the rhetor (speaker, writer, producer). Rhetoric inhabits the space between communicators. And although Booth attempts to refine definitions of actors in rhetoric via a number of specific terms—listening rhetoric, rhetrickery, rheterology, rhetorologist—it is only the distinction between
rhetor
and
rhetorician
that I think is helpful: the rhetor being the communicator, the rhetorician being the student of rhetoric. The other terms are modish and serve to make the field less unified, more subject to superficial critique, and more like a quasi-science. Rhetorically speaking, they serve to weaken the defenses of the theory in their very attempt to stake out new ground.

Rhetoric, throughout its history, has been associated with words. Words, whether spoken or written, listened to or read, have been central to its development. They still are. The affordances of words are several: in speech, in most cases, they are a naturally occurring feature of human communication; they can be combined in countless combinations to make and communicate meaning; they are relatively economical in terms of production (unlike, say, film or still images); and, albeit that words differ from language to language, and even from dialect to dialect, they can be translated. Even with the “turn to the visual,” they have survived.

Judt (2010), in an essay on words, extols their virtues as a self-confessed, articulate lover of the mode. Regarding articulacy, he talks of it as being typically regarded as “an aggressive talent” (149) but notes, too, that rhetorical flexibility “allows for a certain feigned closeness—conveying proximity while maintaining distance” (149–50). The essay notes that words
may deceive, especially where form transcends content, and that “sheer rhetorical facility, whatever its appeal, need not denote originality and depth” but that “
inarticulacy
surely suggests a shortcoming of thought” (150). The core of the argument that good rhetoric revealed clear thought and expression is contained in the following:

For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And ‘style’ was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst. (151)

The relationship between language and thought moves the debate to the philosophical domain and asks the following question: what exactly is the relationship between thought and communication? This and related questions of what we might term the
ontology
or
proto-genesis
of rhetoric are not dealt with here, as they are more than adequately addressed in Vickers's
In Defence of Rhetoric
(1989) where he explores the Platonic Aristotelian axis and the continuing paradigm war between philosophy and rhetoric (ideas and the expression of ideas). It is not the case that such debates need not concern us here; rather, that our attention is focused more pragmatically on the choreography of everyday, professional, and academic discourse. The position of the present book is that the thesis and antithesis of the philosophy-rhetoric debate is a tired dialectic and that the synthesis of the two positions allows us to focus more sharply on not only the inextricable nature of communication and thought, but on contemporary practices and the generation of new theory that will shed light on the patterns of these communicative practices.