A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric

Richard Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136471858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric describes, explains, and argues the overarching theory of contemporary rhetoric. This current view of rhetoric brings together themes in the communication arts, including political literary criticism; bi- and multi-lingualism; multimodality; framing as an artistic and sociological device for composition and interpretation; literacy in the digital age; and the division between fiction and 'non-fiction' in language/literature studies. Chapters explore the implications of rhetoric for particular aspects of the field. Discussions throughout the book provide illustrations that ground the material in practice.

As an overarching theory in the communication arts, rhetoric is elegant as a theoretical solution and simple as a practical one. It asks such questions as who is speaking/writing/composing? to whom? why? what is being conveyed? and how is it being conveyed?

Acknowledging the dirth of recent works addressing the theory of rhetoric, this book aims to fill the existing theoretical gap and at the same time move the field of language/literature studies forward into new territory. It provides the keynote theoretical guide for a generation of teachers, teacher educators and researchers in the fields of English as a subject; English as a second, foreign or additional language; and language study in general.

1

Introduction

Prelude I

Berlin

A city of memorials, a crossroads in time.

So much memory, it is impossible

to live in the present. You either re-live the past

or stare blankly into the future.

Blood, spirit, intellect are separate.

Obsession with the body.

Over-reliance on the rational.

A soul-less interest in the material.

Only in the Tiergarten,

away from the regimented suburbs and

the epic gateways, the Potsdamerplatz

and the Reichstag, are the pleasures

of bike tracks that intersect through the trees,

the distant sound of chamber music,

birds in the trees, and the promise of coffee

and conversation at the very centre of Europe.

Prelude 2

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.

The Limitations of Words

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.

Judt (2010) suffered from a variant of motor neuron disorder: one that deprived him of speech in his last years. But the relationship between clear communication and the articulation of thought continued to be a preoccupation. In reference to the debate between philosophy and rhetoric, his dependence on language was countered by a loss of control of words, and yet “they still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts … Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my inner re flections” (153–4). This latter phrase has my italics (the others are Judt's). As testimony from an active mind in the grip of a loss of oral articulacy, it is a telling tribute to the power of rhetoric to map the nature and direction of thought—as if the outside, public channels and patterns of communication had lent shape to the formulation of thought. Stronger justification comes from the final paragraph of the essay: “No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were [sic] a public space in their own right” (154).

It is partly Judt's inspiration that has led me to write this book in words only, eschewing the chance to produce a multimodal text. It is a decision that has consequences, some of them in limiting the scope of the book itself. But in other ways, it has forced me to try to articulate a theory of contemporary rhetoric and to translate what I have wanted to “say” in other modes into words.

The social and political raison d'être of rhetoric with regard to the maintenance of the republic for the public (“the arts of social and political discourse”) is reinforced by Judt's inspirational account. His emphasis on words is pre-multimodal, but the principles he outlines would apply to the multimodal as well as to the modes and sub-modes of verbal language: clarity of expression, sharp distinctions between words, and a belief in rhetoric (“from the spartan to the baroque”) as a means to effect communication. As was the case for Pound, the loss of clarity and distinction in language is a loss of clarity of thought and ultimately a loss to civilized life. Such responsibility of the part of all language users emphasizes the socio-political nature of Judt's vision: a republic in which the citizens are responsible for its quality of communication as well as for its mores, practices, and infrastructures. Rhetoric's vision is similar: no individual exists outside the society that he or she inhabits. All have a responsibility to maintaining and developing the tools of communication that enable the society to operate. But words are not “all we have” (Judt 2010, 154). There are others resources at our disposal, and these are set out more fully in chapter 11, “Rhetoric and Multimodality.”

Indeed, the limitations and affordances of words need to be set out so that we are clear, from the start, that contemporary rhetoric is more than just a science or art of verbal language. Words—verbal language, whether it is spoken or written and in any language—are abstractions from the real, material, perceived world. The nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs are conceptual in that they offer an idea of a range of possibilities in that category (green, for example, covers a multitude of actualities). They can be combined into endless permutations, with the help of “joining” words like definite and indefinite articles, prepositions, modal verbs, and conjunctions, and modulated by tense to give a sense of a position in time (in some languages). The special characteristics of verbal language can be said to be its flexibility of use (charting degrees of abstraction), its ability to link concept to concept (for example, in argumentation), its physicality (in voice), its potential for further abstraction (in written form), its potential subtlety, and its economic virtues (in normal circumstances, its relative low cost as a resource in terms of production and reception). We should also note its propensity to modulate between the relative closeness to reality (descriptive, functional, manual-like uses) on the one hand, and metaphorical uses (on a macro-scale, in terms of degrees of fictionality and distance from the real world) on the other.

Conversely, what are the limitations of verbal language? We should be cautious here, as the affordances of language can be stretched and adapted to cover what other modes can more readily achieve (for example, a painting can be described in words). But we can say that words find it more difficult to chart space; to convey close physical feeling; to replicate touch; to communicate the direct, visceral nature of the seen, whether in photographic or painted or sculpted form, or simply in the perceived everyday world; and to convey movement. On first consideration, it would seem that words cannot match the senses or combinations of sensory experience in terms of their directness. The very abstracted nature of the word removes it at one stage from the immediate experience of everyday life. This general point holds true, even though we can all provide examples of where verbal language had a direct, physical, visceral effect on a situation or state of being: a declaration of love, a decision of “guilty” or “not guilty,” the communication of failure or success. We also know from speech act theory that small words (“I do” in a marriage ceremony, for example) can have long-reaching personal, legal, spiritual, financial, and public consequences. Nevertheless, we must accept that words alone do not constitute the entire communicational repertoire; thus, they should not determine the scope of rhetoric. One of the main points of the present book is that we need a new theory of rhetoric because we have come to realize that words alone do not represent the full range of communicational resource available to us to make and convey meaning.

To reinforce the point about the limitations of words, consider the following scenarios. The direction of gaze in a crowded room, especially when two sets of eyes meet, can communicate mutual interest and engagement. Hunched shoulders and a stooped physical posture in any number of sports can indicate the acceptance of defeat and the end of team effort. In a dance, the intricate positioning and repositioning of bodies in relation to each other communicate an expressive, aesthetic kind of meaning to an audience that is not expressed in words. A music composition, or the sound of wind in the trees on a winter walk in a landscape devoid of verbal language both convey the structure of feeling and perception, and the read-off of meaning, that may be partially shaped by previous verbal encounters and repositories, but in their immediate state, do not call on words for their communicational power. A final example: the construction of a city, its architecture and its layout, although partially constructed with the help of words, depends also on mathematical calculations, spatial considerations, and the sheer deployment of physical materials to “make a statement.” Rhetoric, because it is the theory of the arts of discourse and communication in any mode (and, verbally, in any language), has the power not only to delineate and explore the internal workings of those separate fields and modes, but also to link them.

Reflecting on the Berlin Street

If words themselves are inadequate to the task of providing an overarching, explanatory theory for the experiences on the Berlin street, and if, too, “there is more than multimodality here,” how could rhetoric describe and explain the phenomena? Further, how would a theory of contemporary rhetoric begin to make sense of the scene?

One could circumvent and short-circuit the argument by saying that a description of the scene in words defeats itself from the start. There is more to the scene than words. But we have already accepted that words in themselves—and the whole repertoire of verbal language—can perform certain functions and not others. So we need to set a more demanding challenge. If multimodality acknowledges the range and combinati...