Politics and Rhetoric

A Critical Introduction

James Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134592647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rhetoric is the art of speech and persuasion, the study of argument and, in Classical times, an essential component in the education of the citizen. For rhetoricians, politics is a skill to be performed and not merely observed. Yet in modern democracies we often suspect political speech of malign intent and remain uncertain how properly to interpret and evaluate it. Public arguments are easily dismissed as 'mere rhetoric' rather than engaged critically, with citizens encouraged to be passive consumers of a media spectacle rather than active participants in a political dialogue.

This volume provides a clear and instructive introduction to the skills of the rhetorical arts. It surveys critically the place of rhetoric in contemporary public life and assesses its virtues as a tool of political theory. Questions about power and identity in the practices of political communication remain central to the rhetorical tradition: how do we know that we are not being manipulated by those who seek to persuade us? Only a grasp of the techniques of rhetoric and an understanding of how they manifest themselves in contemporary politics, argues the author, can guide us in answering these perennial questions.

Politics and Rhetoric draws together in a comprehensive and highly accessible way relevant ideas from discourse analysis, classical rhetoric updated to a modern setting, relevant issues in contemporary political theory, and numerous carefully chosen examples and issues from current politics. It will be essential reading for all students of politics and political communications.

1 The power of persuasion

It is difficult to imagine politics without persuasion. By its very nature politics requires choices to be formulated, options to be weighed and decisions to be made. Often the uncertainty or ambiguity of the world forces us to confront a plurality of contrasting perceptions of our situation and opposed views of how to act. At such moments – moments of dramatic crisis, perhaps, but also in the more routine, day-to-day choices – people need to be persuaded in order to proceed with any degree of confidence. If everything was certain and clear, if nothing were open to chance, it would be a world without choices, a strangely unhuman world devoid of the anxieties such choices generate. However attractive that sounds to you, it would be, nonetheless, a world without politics.

Persuasion is integral to politics because politics involves making judgements in contexts of uncertainty about what to do. To persuade in such contexts involves transforming, primarily by means of argument, a variety of possible options into a unified judgement, perhaps even a decision. There are many ways to persuade, no doubt, and threatening violence is one of the most common. But human communities are perhaps unique in their use of speech in making persuasion a matter not always or exclusively of brute force, but also of mutual understanding, shared perceptions and interpretations, however temporary or tenuous. The power of persuasion, then, can be just as effective as – if not more so than – the force of arms. Indeed, organized violence is usually accompanied by some effort at justification to make it appear the right thing to do. It would be fair to say, then, that speech – the ability to address others and to define problems and their solutions – is the dominant medium of persuasion in human societies. Knowing how to speak – whether in voiced words, written text or a combination of both – in order to successfully persuade may be the fundamental political knowledge or skill, arguably the original ‘political science’. The ancient name given to the body of knowledge whose object is the practice of speech and persuasion is rhetoric.

The purpose of this book is to introduce readers to the study of rhetoric in politics. That means grasping common ways in which techniques of persuasion operate in political life; how argumentative strategies are employed to shape judgements. But it also means understanding how the parameters of political debate are themselves conditioned, delimiting who can argue, about what and how. In this latter sense, rhetoric is more than just a collection of nifty techniques; it is bound up with wider issues in political theory concerning the nature of power, authority and citizenship.

Rhetoric, I am suggesting, reveals to us the character of the political; that is, how, in speech encounters of various kinds, the limits of human association are acknowledged, fabricated and contested. Speech aimed at persuasion – whether in private or in public – is a powerful channel of energies, one directed as much at fashioning human subjects and the conditions under which they make choices as it is at moulding their judgements. To harness these energies is to lay claim to a power to generate a force of some kind – perhaps a force of agency, public opinion or community – to confront the uncertainties of the world.

In politics, then, speech mobilizes the power of persuasion. In the chapters that follow I offer a rhetorical approach to politics aimed at illuminating how persuasive speech garners this power and how rhetorical tools can help us understand it. But rhetoric – like politics itself – is riven with controversy and sometimes confusion. In the remainder of this chapter, I argue that its controversial nature alerts us to the intrinsically political dimension of persuasive speech and communication, the way in which these simultaneously disclose and mask relations of power. I then set out the approach to rhetoric adopted in this book and sketch the content of its chapters.

What is rhetoric?

The word ‘rhetoric’ derives from the ancient Greek rhetorike, meaning the ‘art’ (tekhne, or skill) of persuasive discourse undertaken by a rhetor (an orator or speaker) (see Burke, 1969: 49–55). It refers simultaneously to instruction in this practice and to the persuasive qualities of a discourse itself. That makes it – perhaps rather oddly – both a mode of enquiry and the object of that enquiry. Studying rhetoric can mean either learning about the skills of persuasion (that is, taking instruction in communicative techniques in order to achieve persuasion) or finding the persuasive element in a discourse (that is, examining ‘its’ rhetoric). Consequently, it is difficult wholly to separate subject and object, the human skill of persuasion from the intrinsic persuasiveness of a discourse. This raises a number of questions. When we are persuaded, is it because an idea or an argument just is persuasive? Or is persuasion a consequence of purposeful manipulation on the part of the speaker? Does the force of persuasion derive from a technique (that can be mastered by anyone) or from an independent quality (that only the gifted can know)? These questions, arising from the definition of rhetoric, underpin a deeper, fundamental uncertainty that haunts politics more generally. What is happening when people form their judgements? Why do they believe what they do? How can we know they are the right judgements? Can people be persuaded of anything?

These questions about the sources and validity of persuasion have come to warp our perception of the practice itself. Today the study of rhetoric remains present largely on the margins of democratic life, the preoccupation of classics scholars and, sometimes, nostalgic journalists. The word has an unfortunate, musty aura reminiscent of the book titles in the darker quarters of a university library. Indeed, more often than not these days the term is associated with speech oriented primarily towards deception, superficiality or manipulation. ‘Rhetoric’ is routinely contrasted with speech that adheres to ‘reality’ or with the ‘truth’ that can be found ‘behind’ words, the truth of real ‘interests’ or intentions that are deliberately obscured by language.

That rather negative use of the term is not how rhetoric is understood in this book. But let us not dismiss it without a thought. For it gives a clue to the ambivalent feelings we frequently have for persuasion in democracies, where speech is simultaneously an essential ingredient of politics but, quite often, the perceived source of its decline. Clearly, democracy means little without the opportunity to speak freely in public, to air our views, to persuade others of their value, to hold to account our politicians and governments and demand answers from them, perhaps even to become leaders ourselves and speak to, and on behalf of, our fellow citizens. Free speech, from this point of view, is not just a luxury in a democracy: it is its sine qua non, that without which popular judgements would be unable to influence public authority. But, at the same time, we are forever wary that free speech can result in the dissemination of the most ill-informed, repulsive and sometimes injurious views as contenders for public judgement. Democracy permits the spiteful, the prejudiced and the plain small-minded to have their say as much as it does the noble, the wise and the eloquent. It allows politicians to talk in simplistic ‘soundbites’ or grey, technocratic jargon so as to evade serious scrutiny. When they aren't pandering to public opinion, don't politicians regularly get accused of offering only ‘hot air’ precisely because we know it doesn't usually translate into practical change?

In modern democracies we despise and fear speech just as much as (if not more than) we honour it. We curse the ‘liars’ and the deceivers just as we desire inspiration and eloquence from our leaders. For every Rev. Martin Luther King Jr or Sir Winston Churchill there are many more, sadly less inspiring politicians to hand. Worse still, there are demagogues and firebrands only too willing to seduce us into endorsing the most despicable choices. Each uses the medium of speech, but how do we tell them apart? Persuasive speech, we might say, functions as both poison and cure to democracy. By consequence, the skill of rhetoric, where speech is deliberately manipulated to render it persuasive, is quietly cherished but – more often than not – dismissed and derided.

Politics, power and the political

The suspicion displayed by many towards rhetoric is a reminder that persuasion involves the exercise of power. But what kind of power is it? Not one whose effects and limits are always easy to define objectively. At one level, persuasion is a process whereby we are invited freely to give our assent, or not, to a point of view or claim. As the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke wrote: ‘Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only in so far as he is free’ (Burke, 1969: 50; italics in original). Unlike propaganda or physical force, persuasion requires some independence of judgement, an ability to weigh up or assess an argument and choose or refuse to endorse it. In short, persuasion involves letting oneself be persuaded.

Yet, at another level, to be persuaded is a way of submitting to another. While we usually don't mind being persuaded by people we trust, or when little is at stake, in politics it is often relative strangers who seek our support, sometimes on matters of great significance. As Burke also points out, persuasion invites us not only to agree abstractly but, often, to identify with the point of view of someone separate from us: ‘If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity’ (ibid.: 22). Yet because of this urge to identify or create a sense of unity between speaker and audience, we may also be conscious that to affirm another's arguments is also to approve of their authority over us – perhaps their superior intelligence or their right to make decisions in our name – or to link us to further judgements of which we may disapprove. Persuasion in politics is often a way of achieving or keeping office, of using resources in specific ways, of weakening opponents or sustaining alliances. To seek or to be the subject of persuasion is therefore to engage in subtle relations of power and to be complicit in some way with them. This complicity is all the more binding because we freely choose to accept it.

Uncertainty over the power of persuasion directs us towards a fundamental theoretical distinction that is of increasing significance to contemporary social and political theory and that will guide the discussion in this book: the distinction between ‘politics’ and the dimension of ‘the political’. Hostility to rhetoric, I want to suggest, often represents an urge to minimize or remove altogether the political dimension from politics, to empty speech of the sense of power, contingency and controversy that the political arouses and to isolate judgement from the risks of possible manipulation. But first, what is the difference between these two terms? The distinction could be said to be between established social institutions and practices and the wider principles that ‘ground’ the polity and define its parameters and purposes (see Mouffe, 2005: 8–9). Politics refers, broadly, to the activities of administering and bargaining between organized interests, forming coalitions, developing policy and taking decisions on the basis of instituted relations and procedures (or the ‘rules of the game’). The political, on the other hand, denotes the abstract frames or principles that define, for example, who gets represented, what kind of issues are legitimate topics of dispute and which social groups are recognized as ‘acceptable’ participants in politics, or not. The political names a dimension of controversy and, potentially, violence where some options are ruled in and others ruled out. It is sometimes argued to be ‘ontological’ in that it concerns the being – or basic identity – of social and political existence (, 2007). Thus we might say that the routine work of assemblies and parliaments, politicians and activists, government officials and civil servants largely comprises politics, while ideas about sovereignty, freedom or justice invoke the political.

Politics is always premised on the partial settling of political questions. Without some idea of what politics is for (to serve the common good, protect liberties or increase national glory, for example) or how different agents relate (as equal parts in an organic whole, a rigid hierarchy or a diverse plurality), politics would collapse into random exchanges lacking any coherence or durability. Politics therefore depends upon the political dimension to define limits to what can legitimately be said and done, not just in terms of law but also in terms of the ideals that inform the law. The political is not therefore a separate domain but a horizon inside which the myriad activities of politics are given coherence. Beyond the horizon, however, lies uncertainty and the threatening (or liberating) realization that politics might be done quite differently.

One reason why rhetoric is viewed with such suspicion, I want to suggest, is that it is frequently a marker of the contingency of our political horizon, its essentially groundless nature. That is to say, the basic structure of all political relations – the constitutive principles defining the space and time given over to the exchanges of politics – is founded not on eternal truths set in stone but on historical, fundamentally arbitrary and hence contentious decisions about who citizens are and how they relate to each other and the world. Judgements on these decisions are always, in principle, open to contest and reformulation, reflecting power relations that can be challenged and changed. But their contingency is something that is often resisted for fear that social order will be undermined.

The dismissal of rhetoric is one symptom of that concern. Sometimes it reflects an anxiety about what are regarded as ‘basic truths’ collapsing into ‘mere politics’ – that is, sacred principles being exposed to the amoral cut-and-thrust of party advantage and strategy. Thus the desire to eliminate rhetoric often comes in the form of a longing for certainty and security about these truths or via the image of a purified language that can eradicate scurrilous manipulation from judgement-making (see Garsten, 2006; Fish, 1989: 471–78). Or it might even take the form of a politics reduced to technocratic problem solving, removed from public life altogether and untroubled by controversial questions. At an extreme, such anti-political longing emerges as a violent refusal to accept that the organizing principles by which any group or society creates its shared world could or should ever be put into question. As we shall see later, eliminating rhetoric has been a feature of anti-political thinking for centuries.

Indeed, it is when the dimension of the political is brought into view – that is, when politics is understood as premised upon contingent decisions over basic principles – that the potential violence underlying human association is dramatically revealed. Such was the case, for example, during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, when a politics instituted around dictators was challenged by publics who no longer acquiesced to their rule. The political dimension that infuses all institutionalized politics is an uncomfortable, sometimes inconvenient reminder that such arrangements are premised not on nature, identity or universal agreement but, rather, on past decisions to coerce, exclude, suppress or ignore alternative arrangements. Often, public discourse can itself help repress such decisions, especially when such discourse is restricted to empty rituals, narrow routinized exchanges or formal procedures. But, as the rebels and protestors of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (among others) demonstrated, new discourses can also reactivate the political dimension, exposing the habits and customs of institutionalized politics to the threat of their own dissolution.

Rhetoric is often dismissed because implicit to it is the nagging realization that there is always another argument to be made, an alternative point of view, that threatens consensus and order. It reveals public judgements to consist of certainties that have to be actively made, not assumed, and hence politics is ultimately a risky, uncertain and rather inconclusive business. But instead of eliminating the political from speech and persuasion, we could instead try to restore it and face up to its challenge. Rhetorical persuasion might properly be understood as a form of mediation between politics and the political. That is to say, argumentative practices link routine politics to essentially contentious judgements about the basic dimensions and limits of human association, reinforcing, contesting or even repressing them in varying degrees. In that respect, there is always a trace of violence (whether real or implied) that surrounds political rhetoric because ‘matters of principle’ invoke the limits of what is thinkable and do-able. As Slavoj Žižek has remarked, although language is often perceived as the medium for mutual recognition and peaceful exchange, ‘there is something violent in the very symbolisation of a thing’ (Žižek, 2008a: 52). Language, he argues, carves up the world into meaningful ‘things’, inserting them within one symbolic frame rather than another. In politics, the fundamentally arbitrary character of that frame is, to some extent, always partially exposed. We are never very far away, therefore, from the ‘unconditional violence’ – as Žižek puts it – which underscores all language and threatens to manifest itself materially in state repression, ‘terrorism’ or resistance, rebellion or dissent.

We can detect this underlying political dimension at work in rhetoric when the basic limits of association are perceived to be at stake, giving rise to controversy and a sense of unease or danger (see Marchart, 2007: 38–44). International politics is replete with such situations in which a precarious order is brought into question. Think, for instance, of Winston Churchill's wartime speeches as British Prime Minister in the 1940s. His powerful, sombre orations before parliament and on public radio are now widely admired for their steadfast determination to defeat the Nazi enemy ‘at all costs’ and to protect the independence of the United Kingdom. At stake here were the very foundations of civility, sovereignty and freedom. Churchill's rhetoric is routinely invoked as an exemplary patriotic and inspirational voice, rising above the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The power of persuasion
• 2 The truth of rhetoric
• 3 The rhetorical citizen
• 4 Techniques I: discovery and arrangement
• 5 Techniques II: style and delivery
• 6 Rhetorical political analysis
• 7 Democracy, rhetoric and the emotions
• 8 Media rhetoric: speaking for the public
• 9 Embodied speech: rhetoric and the politics of gender
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index