Peitho taking Eros to Venus and Anteros Wikipedia.org
Can having a few of us spread around in various American universities possibly be a good thing?
I usually leave puzzlement in my wake if I tell acquaintances that my job involves teaching rhetoric and working as a rhetorical critic. It’s as if I announced that I’m officially the Resident and Redundant Professor of Pomp and Pomposity who also holds the Bernie Madoff Chair of Lies and Lying. Use the “R” word just once and people aren’t sure they really want to know any more. The faint bewilderment seems to hint at the hope that I might might someday take up a more useful line of work. After all, isn’t rhetoric always preceded by the word “mere?” Can explorations of its nature tell us anything we must know? And can having a few of us spread around in various American universities possibly be a good thing? Indeed, after showing up in England on an academic exchange I was promptly told to go register with the police. You can’t be too careful.
It helps to set the record straight if I can add that most of what humans say to each other falls into the purview of rhetorical scholars. Even though the term rhetoric suggests inflated and eminently disposable prose (never our’s, of course; always other’s) it actually has an impressive lineage that runs at least from Aristotle to Marshall McLuhan to John Stewart.
In fact we are all rhetorical beings. Talk is our link to the worlds inside and outside our heads that matter. The only way to avoid coming to terms with the centrality of language is to render yourself mute. We are not only the most loquacious of animals, we draw a finely adjusted bead on the word choices others make. As rhetorician Kenneth Burke observed, we are all critics.
It’s something of a bonus that studying how we go about the tricky business of influencing each other is enormously rewarding. Only after learning the secret handshake and passing the necessary exams did I began to realize what a bracing enterprise rhetorical analysis could be.
We think in language. We judge others in the words we choose. And what we know about the world is largely filtered through the evocative language embedded in narratives we tell ourselves.
The characteristic work of human existence is communication. The goals we seek in our daily lives do not always terminate in movement, but in rhetorical action. Communicating through language is the meaningful thing we do. Ask a business or civic leader what their job is, and it frequently comes down to effectively connecting with others. Someone examining the rhetoric of science, or health care or religion is engaged in discovering how these distinct realms of discourse create identity, acceptance and support for their sources.
Because our rhetoric is less photographic than additive–language use is more a projection of the self than a “perfect copy” of reality–we use it to bend impressions to match our unique view of the world. It’s little wonder that a person’s stories about a vacation are almost always more interesting than their pictures. The stories are more fully them.
This general idea of worlds verbally created suggests a whole host of questions that point to the primacy of rhetoric. Some examples:
There are about 15 minutes of actual play in a nearly three hour-long football broadcast. In fact, the narrated game itself is the rhetorical spectacle. If that seems impossible, why did so few who watched an experimental presentation on NBC a few years ago avoid the game that was broadcast without commentary?
Why are we compelled to describe the motives of others, even when they have not disclosed them?
Pick a social context (i.e., wedding, funeral, a party you’re attending with work associates ). Do you find yourself rehearsing what to say and what to suppress?
Every field has its tropes: routine patterns for expressing ideas. What are the most common ones that reappear in real estate marketing? Popular music? State of the Union addresses? Romantic fiction?
What effect does it have on readers when journalists “mark” their subjects by inserting adjectives in front of the names of certain newsmakers?
Why are we so frequently the intellectual captives of metaphors like the “war on drugs” or “social media?
All of these questions suggest why rhetorical analysis can be so useful.
Besides, how many fields of study can claim their own goddess? You can’t say that about accounting, electrical engineering or computer science. Peitho, the goddess of persuasion was the companion of Aphrodite. It comes as no surprise that the mythology of love has long been entwined with the mythology of rhetorical seduction. Both represent forms of human action that define our species.
Five Witnesses Will Usually Have Divergent Accounts of the Same Event Wikimedia.org
We should be impatient if the reporting from a given medium asks us to settle for just one “story.” The better option is to expect that there are at least several.
As people in my line of work are fond of saying, ‘language sometimes does our thinking for us.’ Word choices are tracks that inevitably point us in specific directions. So when we talk about “media”—because it is a plural term—we are primed to acknowledge significant differences between individual outlets. That’s as it should be, and a way of thinking we need remember when we are acting on the basis of any single version of events.
For most of us, the concept of a “story” could not be clearer, setting up an expectation that we will take in a running version of events that can stand on its own. This is all well and good if we are talking about one individual’s experiences. We are all entitled to our stories. They function to make life understandable and meaningful. They are also useful barometers of our own mental states.
Narrative fiction and films have our attention because they fulfill what we seem hardwired to need: figures to empathize with, and the continuity and simplicity of a single of perspective. This is the rhetorical form of the synecdoche: when one example stands in for a whole class of people or events.
The mistake is when we accept the adequacy of singular form as a tool for understanding the real world. The cable-news anchorperson asks a reporter in the field, “What’s the story?” A headline launches a short version of events usually defined by its internal coherence. An editor or producer presses a reporter to find a single experience that encapsulates a larger trend. As news consumers we are attracted to narrative continuity over reports that ask us to consider “competing realities.” Complexity tends to get written out of accounts that need to be boiled down to one and half minutes of air time or 600 words of reporting.
But in actual fact, human events usually contain multiple and contradictory stories: accounts that are often diverse in their details and frequently inconsistent with each other. We easily recognize this when we compare notes with family or friends about key events that we’ve shared about some earlier experiences of our ancestors. We expect to add details another missed, or to add alternative interpretations of a participant’s motives, or to pass on an observation that is completely new to others. In those settings we are not surprised to learn that one version of events is not enough. Eventually all the pieces put together form a kind of intersubjective truth that works at least for those who participated.
The same is true in the current news environment. The ongoing conflict between the state of Israel and Palestinians living on its borders does not permit the luxury of one narrative, but many. The controversial implementation of the Affordable Care Act cannot be contained in one personal experience. We know there must have many, reflecting the range of responses by individuals and the states where they reside. Even when we think we have some clarity on the “aggression” of the Russian Federation in reclaiming Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, we can easily be surprised by long-form accounts from the region that can force us out of what seems like a settled narrative.
We are smarter if we expect that news reports and other kinds of nonfiction accounts should come to us in uneven waves. In terms of conventional communication analysis, we usually look for a “preferred narrative:” the kind of account that comes from official sources and takes hold of the popular imagination. But we also expect to find that there are “alternate” or “counter-narratives” as well, and often a series of them. These may come from the less powerful or the marginalized who were caught up in the same event. It’s not unusual that years later they emerge as the new preferred narratives.
Charles Dickens started a novel with the famous lines, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” The thought reflects his savvy as a narrator of the human condition. We need to expect that there may be a plurality of perspectives that will undermine the coherence and psychological comfort that comes with a single account. “Reality” is often best represented in a Venn diagram of overlapping accounts. We need to remind ourselves to be impatient if reporting about human events seeks an unearned consensus by insisting on a single truth.
