A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (5 page)

The last part of the book is devoted to some of the key aspects of rhetoric that have been mentioned previously: multimodality and digitization.
Chapter 11
addresses multimodality as a set of resources that are available for communication and specifically looks at the case for backgrounding multimodality with social semiotic theory. Similarities and differences between social semiotic theory and rhetoric are discussed.
Chapter 12
looks at the impact of the digital revolution on rhetoric, in particular at the transformative power of the digital to recast one form of information into another. These chapters are followed by two final chapters: one on rhetoric and education, which draws out the pedagogical implications of
rhetoric; and one on the future of rhetoric, which casts a critical look at the nature of contemporary rhetoric and whether it can provide a sufficiently comprehensive theory of communication to be of real use to other disciplines and in practical, everyday situations. This final chapter, then, discusses rhetoric as one of a small number of key disciplines or metadisciplines that, while not returning to the medieval
trivium
of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, might provide a toolkit for making sense of contemporary communication as part of a wider field of knowledge production and use.

2

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a good place to start in an exploration of the etymology of rhetoric—which will, in turn, reveal aspects of the meaning of the term and its uses over the centuries. First,
rhetoric
is defined as “the art of using language so as to persuade or influence others; the body of rules to be observed by a speaker or writer in order that he [sic] may express himself with eloquence.” Immediately we can see that the traditional definition is inadequate to contemporary needs.
Language
, if associated with words only, is too narrow a term to compass the range of rhetoric in a multimodal world;
persuasion
and
influence
may be Aristotelian formulations of the function of rhetoric, but these intentions are only part of a wider, more generous conception of the art, which includes other functions of communication, such as informing, clarifying, and delighting (and a range of others). The
body of rules
indicates a form of rhetoric that is not appropriate to the present. What it suggests is a reified set of prescriptions in the form of a manual of discourse. Such formulations fossilize quickly, and as they become outdated, give rhetoric a bad name: that of a textbook, quasi-scientific approach. As we indicated as the end of the previous chapter, the metaphor that is more appropriate is that of light scaffolding rather than a body of rules. A
speaker or writer
might be better replaced by the notion of a “rhetor” or “maker” or “composer”—someone who has all the repertoire of resources available and who uses them to communicate a message to someone else (or to a group of people). The gendered “he” is clearly inappropriate, though it probably suggests not only convention but could refer to the supposedly male-centered nature of rhetoric as opposed to rhetorics, which embraces diversity. In this book, we use he/she or he and she alternately to indicate that the rhetor might be anyone—and we address issues of gender and rhetoric in the chapter on power. Finally,
with eloquence
does not do justice to the stylistic range that rhetoric offers. While eloquence might be appropriate in certain circumstances, as clarity would be in many more, the rhetorician is able to choose what degree of eloquence or clarity is
appropriate for the purpose in hand. In almost all respects, then, the key terms of the traditional definition are no longer fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

The pejorative or depreciatory sense of rhetoric has almost as long a history in England, dating back to the fifteenth century, as does the adoption of rhetoric in the more general and positive sense. The second of OED's definitions characterizes rhetoric—perhaps because of its close associations with persuasion—as “language characterized by artificial or ostentatious expression.” The distaste for rhetoric would also have been not just a matter of style and linguistic register, but also of the use of rhetoric to persuade for less than worthy purposes and/or to mask a poor argument. Current uses of “mere rhetoric” to mean cant, vacant arguments and flummery date back to this period, and possibly beyond.

A subdefinition, not in pejorative terms, links rhetoric with the “expressive action of the body in speaking” and with the “persuasiveness of acts and looks.”

Another subdefinition, this time of the adjective
rhetorical
, refers to the rhythm of prose “as distinguished from metrical rhythm.” Arcane and mostly obsolete variations on the term
rhetoric
include
rhetoricaster
(a poor rhetorician), to
rhetoricate, rhetoriously
(with colors of rhetoric),
rhetorisms
, and
rhetory
(cf. oratory). None of these are worth adding to the range of technical terms in charting a new theory of rhetoric, partly because they refer to the outdated conception of rhetoric as a catalogue of persuasive techniques, discussed previously, but also because the new rhetoric does not need such a catalogue of technical terms. Perhaps the only derivative term that is of use is
rhetor
, to indicate that the originator of a message need not be a speaker or writer of verbal language, but may be using the wider range of resources (image, moving image, gesture, choreographed moves, etc.) in seemingly monomodal or actually multimodal combination.
Rhetor
does not sit easily in the diction of contemporary communication.
Composer
is probably the more generally applicable term, except where there are specific modes being used, when
writer
,
speaker
,
designer
,
artist
, and so on are more appropriate.

Preminger, Warnke, and Hardison (1986) give a concise account of the history of rhetoric in Europe. A less objective but fuller account is given by Barthes in his essay “L'ancienne rhétorique: aide-mémoire” (1988), prefiguring the debate between semiotics and rhetoric in the 1970s and 1980s. I will come back to the Barthes essay later in this chapter, and in due course throughout the book, as the discussion of rhetoric is characterized by what Barthes sees as a pivotal moment between “the old rhetoric” and the “new semiotics of writing” (11).

While Aristotle is seen as the father of rhetoric, his take on it is as “the art of persuasion” designed for public engagement and debate in an Athenian
society. Three types of rhetoric are posited: one that appeals to the audience's feelings (
pathos
), one that is an appeal to the speaker's character or set of values (
ethos
), and one to argumentational proof (
logos
). The different genres of speech need not concern us here, as they pertain to Athenian social and political structures; nor the largely logical enthymemic micro-structures, which, I have argued elsewhere, do not apply when scaled up to the mezzo—and macro-levels—and which Toulmin (2003) moved away from in
The Uses of Argument
. What is of interest to the contemporary world of communication is the notion of
topoi
or “places” of argument. In
Argumentation in Higher Education
(2010), I focus on
topoi
, particularly with regard to the points of dispute in a discipline, which are the places to drill down to if rich discussion of tensions in any field are to be explored. So while the types of rhetoric and the speech genres of classical Athens can be discounted in a theory of contemporary rhetoric,
topoi
remain an area of continued interest, particularly in educational and academic debate.

The Roman contribution—Cicero, Quintilian, and the
Rhetorica ad Herennium
—further refined the structural categories of rhetoric, particularly with regard to arguments. The division of speeches into five parts was an advance of Aristotle's notion of statement and proof. Thus,
inventio
(invention),
dispositio
(arrangement),
elocutio
(style),
memoria
(memory), and
pronunciatio
(delivery, presentation) were posited and provided a textbook-like structure for the compositions of orators. Of these, invention, arrangement, and delivery, with some reference to style, characterize the contemporary need. Memory is hardly needed, and invention is replaced in the present book by “composition.”

Interestingly, Greek and Roman rhetoric generated various formulae for the arrangement of speeches and other compositions: from Aristotle's two-part notion of “statement and proof” (the basis of argumentational structure, as modeled later in Toulmin's “claim” (proposition) and “grounds” (evidence)); through three-part generic structures like “beginning, middle, and end,” which have become staple in textbooks; to four-, five-, six-, and seven-part structures, which at their most elaborate contain an introduction,
narratio
(the facts of the case),
divisio
(definitions, a “division” of terms), the propositional core of the argument, evidence to support it, the
refutatio
(refutation of counter-arguments), and a conclusion/
peroratio
(peroration). The four—to six-part versions simply missed out some of the elements—for example, a good argument could be put forward without the
divisio
or the
refutatio
—and even, in some cases, without the evidence if the argument was logically strong enough to support itself. Such forensic power, used in legal contexts as well as public oratory and written arguments of any kind, has general and contemporary relevance as the structures consist of a greater number of elements. As Quintilian remarked, the art is to find the structures that suit the purpose of the proposed communication.

In many ways, the revival of interest in rhetoric in the Renaissance was powered by the invention of the printing press and the wider range of humanistic discourses available as the Church weakened its grip on cultural exchange and on the discourses/genres of human behavior and interaction. Rhetoric was remade with an increased focus on its creative and logical components: invention and arrangement. Logic and dialectic came to the fore, and language began to be separated, reforming around the notion of grammars to teach correctness, clarity, and rhetorical style. We can see in this division a diminution in the power and scope of rhetoric, despite the proliferation of textbooks and grammar schools. Indeed, I would argue that the establishment and authorization of rhetoric in the form of grammar created a fossilization of the discipline and contributed to its decline, at the very moment of its revival. If rhetoric is separated from logic and dialectic, it becomes mere eloquence, mere style, and mere delivery: a theory of tropes and figures.

The reduction in scope of rhetoric continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, first in the separation of literary from linguistic studies in England (the one branching off into the field of ‘English Literature’ and subsequent variations; the other to historical and synchronic linguistics and its derivatives), and then again in attempted revivals of rhetoric, but from a narrow Aristotelian base, like Burke's (1969) consideration of literature as persuasion. The creation of poetics—discussed in more depth in
chapter 9
—has been an attempt to build for literary and poetic works an overarching theoretical structure through analogy with rhetoric. But the very existence of a field of study like poetics separates the literary from the documentary, from stylistics and from socio-linguistics, and thus diminishes each. I will argue in
chapter 9
that Eagleton's notion of rhetoric as a political literary criticism is a way of recombining rhetorics and poetics.

One could say, in the emphasis on invention, arrangement, narrative, argumentational, and other structures, that the project to redesign rhetoric is an essentially
structuralist
one. Such a view can be refuted by drawing attention to the fact that rhetoric is not only interested in the grammars (at every level) and structures of discourse, but also in their informing social relations (not structures). There is a continual to-ing and fro-ing between the socio-political and the instantiation of such relations in tangible discourses. Rhetoric is no longer interested in a fixed set of structures that can be taught; rather, it is focused on the understanding and use of flexible and multiple structures (cf. fram
ing
) to make meaning. To the extent that it is interested in structures, these would be of a light, disposable kind, intended to make communication effective.

Finally, in this brief history of rhetoric—insofar as it pertains to the thesis of the present book—the emphasis on rhetorical analysis in the twentieth century, particularly as applied to literature, is too narrow in
two senses for our present purposes. First, because of its concentration of the literary at the expense of the documentary, despite claims to the contrary; and second, because rhetoric as currently conceived, is both generative and analytical. In other words, rhetoric not only provides tools for analyzing discourse, it actually provides tools and orientations for the production and generation of utterances, texts, and other forms of communication.

Why is rhetoric particularly appropriate now? Why is it needed? Let us go back to the brief working definition of rhetoric as “the arts of discourse.”
Discourse
is a useful general term for types of communication, originating in speech but applicable to any form of dialogic exchange. Its more tangible form—text—can be made up of any number of modes in combination or seemingly on their own (later in the book, we will address the question of implied multimodality in the seemingly monomodal). We can accept the fact that discourses range from simple everyday and brief exchanges in speech, text form, email, letter, and so on, to monumental and large-scale public discourses like the meetings between government heads of state and their set speeches and declarations. On another axis, mentioned previously, discourses range on a spectrum from the non-fictional to the fictional, from the literal to the metaphoric. Given the range of different media via which communication can take place across the world, the proliferation of communication is a matter for interest, study, and attention—not least in an attempt to improve its quality. Given, too, that discourse implies power relations (at least in critical discourse analysis, but now in any consideration of discourse), the focus on discourses is comprehensive in its range.