A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (4 page)

Contextual factors
have been written about much in the consideration of communication in the last 30 of 40 years. They are partly a result of the significance of time and place to communication, but they are also presented as a counterpoint to the overly inward and psychological theories of communication. The social dimension of communication requires that a consideration of context takes place. Who is speaking? To whom? About what? What is the motivation, purpose, and intention? What are the social and political situations of the interlocutors? How might the communication be different if any of these factors were changed? Context is particularly important to rhetoric because consideration of rhetorical dynamics starts not with the text, but with the social and political shaping of the text and the need for communication in a particular place and time. Contexts can range from immediate contexts (the people concerned, the time, the room in which they meet, the nature of the meeting, and the formal conventions at play) to wider contexts (the current political situation, economic constraints, etc.). It is important to chart what the contextual factors are in any act of communication and to map these factors in relation to each other so that a full picture of the nature of the communication is possible. Once the factors are understood, the communication can be shaped and adjusted accordingly.

Finally, in this catalogue of the constituent elements of contemporary rhetoric, what of
digitization?
Digitization has been over-egged in one sense. Particularly from the early 1990s onwards, the rise of digitization has heralded grand claims about what it can do and how it can transform lives, societies, and politics. In many senses, such changes have happened: we can transform
information
from one mode to another, repurposing it with ease. We can store huge amounts of information in small spaces, and examine it from different perspectives and via different lenses. It has enabled electronic social networks of various kinds. Much has been written about the power and potential of digitization. In rhetorical terms, its value is that it enables us to repurpose and reshape communication; it gives us a larger repertoire of media via which to communicate; and it provides unlimited storage space. In
chapter 12
, full consideration is given to the relationship of rhetoric and the digital.

The record of sitting in a café on a street in Berlin is, in one sense, simple: it is the observed recording, initially on slips of paper borrowed from the waiter, of what is happening in and around the café in a given short period of time. In another sense, it is complex: the record hardly scratches the surface of what is going on in the interactions between a hundred or so people who moved through that street and around that café on that day in September 2011. Not only are there physical and spoken
interactions; there are written rituals, like bills and receipts exchanged, as well as others who are recording on iPads, cell phones, or in notebooks. In addition, there is the material world of the street—buildings, cars, signs, baggage, and so on—some of which is inscribed with words, icons, logos, and images. Furthermore, there are the ambient sounds of the street: café music, the sound of radios from nearby apartments, and music percolating from headphones of passers-by.

In my initial notes, I mused that rhetoric is ever present in this scene, that the framing of the scene is virtually invisible, and that multimodality is present and ubiquitous, but insufficient to account for the wealth of communication that is taking place. The other elements of a rhetorical account—articulation, digitization, context, and the time dimension— were not considered at the time of initial recording and minimal reflection, but nevertheless play a part. Articulation is present in at least two of the senses of joining: first, in the
segues
between what we used to consider as genres or schemata (like the paying of a bill, with its own internal articulations) and the running
continuo
of experience (sitting in a café). This simple example will help to demonstrate that articulation operates to join one frame to another, one schemata to another. In this case, because the paying of a bill is part of the experience of sitting in a café, one frame is nestled within another. The line between the
continuo
of everyday experience, and the framed genre, is transgressable, fuzzy, and permeable. Articulation helps us to see the nature of those joins. Digitization is evident in a number of ways, many invisible to the eye. Had I been writing and sketching on an iPad, it would have been more evident. Even so, the instantiation of sound as mentioned previously; the wireless device via which the bill is paid at the table; the electronic navigating systems of cars that pass—all these and more are driven digitally, and transform information for particular purposes digitally. Context and time—in effect the immediate framing of space and the 30 minutes or so of sitting in the café—require some discussion. The context is not “framed” tightly, though the café itself is (even though it spills out on to the street). The café is situated on a street, and views each way are extensive: one way to a major road junction, the other way into a denser part of the city. The context is, if we take the widest aperture possible, limitless—we have to provide framings of some kind in order to be able to make sense of the place and the experience. We can term that framing
orientation
. We can also move between foregrounded activity and phenomena—the tea cup, the table—and much further distant contextual elements, like Berlin, Germany, Europe. Moving between the foregrounded phenomena and those at more distance is a process of positioning, of multiple framing, and articulation. Time is a less tangible, more elusive factor. Again, in one sense, it looks simple: I sat at the table on September 14, 2011, between 3:30 pm and 4:00 pm. If I had done the same thing half an hour later,
or a day later, would the experience have been different? Actually, I did go back the next day to test exactly that (and because it was an excellent café). Much was the same. I do not think that the account I wrote on the first day would have been very much different from that on the second day. There were different people (even the waiters), different cars; but the same buildings, same street, same signs, same city. The weather was slightly different, and, of course, if I came back in a different season, or in a different year, there might be more significant and noticeable changes: the café might no longer be there, I would be older or younger, and so on. The rhetoric of the scene would have changed.

We can thus say about the case of the Berlin café experience in relation to rhetoric that it helps us to define a spectrum of possibilities with regard to a theory of contemporary communication. At one end of the spectrum, we can use rhetoric to account for micro- and mezzo-social encounters, like the paying of a bill or a brief conversation with a stranger. There are formalities to observe with the bill: the customer requests the bill, orally or by gesture. The waiter calculates it and brings it to the table. There may be a pause. In due course, the customer pays the bill in one of a range of different ways, and either personally to the waiter, in his or her absence, or at a central till. The transaction is completed with a greeting, with thanks, or simply in silence. This example is close to a social schema, and the rhetoric of the situation is largely prescribed. In a brief conversation with a stranger, there are fewer
rules
. One person initiates it by finding common ground for talk; the other reciprocates fully or not; the parameters of the conversation will be set by mutual agreement. There is a range of such speech, written and multimodal genres from the personal to the wider public sphere.

At the other end of the spectrum is the total experience of the period in the café in the Berlin street. By
total
experience, I mean not only the total perceived and necessarily selective experience of one person and their observations, but the totality of the communicational networked scene in that place and at that time. The scene frames a multitude of social and communicational encounters, all framed, more widely, by the economic and political contexts that allow people to spend time in a café on a Wednesday afternoon in a European city. Within the chosen frame of the scene on the street, the communication could be charted. An exhaustive record of every conversation, every sign, every written transaction, every photograph, every physical movement—all in relation to the fixed phenomena of buildings and the moving objects of cars, bicycles, and so on—could be attempted and would be interesting. It would lend itself to multimodal discourse analysis. Behind that possibility are the instruments and dimensions of rhetoric (multimodality, articulation, framing, digitization, context, time) that allow a somewhat broader analysis in terms
of how the political interfaces with the social and communicational. The broadness does not mean that the tools of analysis and creation are more abstract; rather, that they can be deployed at macro-, mezzo-, and microlevels according to the purposes of the analysis. They are tools of process rather than of product. Their scaffolding is light: it can be constructed and taken down quickly.

Social network theory needs only be deployed if the relations in any field of analysis (any framed social encounter) are such that they affect the communication—because rhetoric's focus is on the communicational dimension. But social network theory meshes well with a rhetorical perspective. Its vocabulary of
nodes
and
ties
has application in considerations of where the clustering takes place in any social network, and where the strong and weak ties of communication are (and what the nature of communication along those connections is). In relation to the previous discussion, what were termed macro-, mezzo-, and micro-levels of communicational encounter can be mapped on to notions of whole networks—in this case, a section of a street in Berlin—or more limited perspectives, like the personal network of connections observed by the person in the café. If the limitations of scope of network analysis—and of the wider rhetorical picture—are bounded by the extent of data that can be collected, then analytics could help process a wider set of data that has been possible previously, and so the wider rhetorical perspective can be taken. The advantage of positioning rhetoric in relation to social network theory and analysis is principally that both can look at loosely bounded and hybrid social encounters as well as more conventional social patterns
(genres
as social action). While network analysis is more interested in the extent to which the structure and composition of ties affects social norms, rhetoric focuses on the agency of the actor/rhetor and his or her audiences, and the socio-political determinants of their communication. Rhetoric is both productive and analytical. There is more room for individual and group
agency
in rhetoric, as well as a longer tradition of adapting rhetoric to contemporary circumstances.

In order to explore the potential of rhetoric to account for the contemporary world, the book moves next to a historical account of why rhetoric is relevant, and how it comes to be in its present state.
Chapter 2
explores this dimension in depth, arguing that classical rhetoric has had too strong a hold on twentieth-century discourses and that we need to fashion a new theory that is fit for purpose. The third chapter looks at rhetoric in relation to English studies, one of its traditional partners in epistemological boundary-making. In particular, the break-up of the field of English studies into first and second language learning, literary studies, film and media studies, and so on, is seen in the light of the potential unifying theory of rhetoric—which also has the advantage of not being
associated with only one language. Consideration of the lasting influence of the work of Moffett (1968) forms a large part of this chapter.
Chapter 4
addresses the practical issue of the nature of composition in a theory of contemporary rhetoric, linking the putting together of ideas in the verbal arts to that in the visual, aural, and spatial arts. The centrality of composition to a theory of rhetoric is reaffirmed, but not without a separation of the concepts of rhetoric and composition as currently conceived in many writing courses in higher education institutions.
Chapter 5
concentrates on the political dimension of rhetoric and, specifically, on issues of power that influence and inform communication. Notions of critical literacy and critical discourse theory are addressed, and the suggestion is made that “critical” is an epithet that has outrun its usefulness (the same is argued in relation to “literacy”)—and that discourse and rhetoric are clearer, more useful, and more technically precise terms. This chapter looks outward to media representation of politics itself to show how rhetoric operates in the public sphere.

The relationship between rhetoric and argumentation is discussed in
chapter 6
. As argumentation is often foregrounded in rhetorical theory, the chapter asks why this is and what part argument and rhetoric play in contemporary democracies. This chapter is followed by one on framing— already discussed initially—which is seen to have a crucial part to play in the creation of meaning as well as the definition of what is made, what is studied, and what is analyzed. The case for rhetoric's contribution to pedagogic theory is made here and again in
chapter 13
.
Chapter 8
focuses on multilingual rhetoric, acknowledging that rhetoric does not confine itself to a single language but can be applied to any language. The interest is largely on world languages (English, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic), but languages spoken by fewer people are also considered. Language policy and globalization are issues that are addressed here, with an account of how rhetoric can unify the field of inquiry and practice. The next two chapters address the fictional and literary dimension of rhetoric: first, in looking at form as a rhetorical device in relation to poetics; and second, in exploring the relationship between rhetoric and theatre.