Rhetoric and Social Relations

Dialectics of Bonding and Contestation

Jon Abbink, Shauna LaTosky, Jon Abbink, Shauna LaTosky

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789209785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

This volume explores the constitutive role of rhetoric in socio-cultural relations, where discursive persuasion is so important, and contains both theoretical chapters as well as fascinating examples of the ambiguities and effects of rhetoric used (un)consciously in social praxis. The elements of power, competition and political persuasion figure prominently. It is an accessible collection of studies, speaking to common issues and problems in social life, and shows the heuristic and often explanatory value of the rhetorical perspective.

PART I
POSITIONING

INTRODUCTION

RHETORIC IN SOCIAL RELATIONS

Jon Abbink and Shauna LaTosky

I bless the sacred powers of persuasion

That makes calm the storm in the body

The presence of God in persuasion

Draws the poison fangs of evil

Undoes the knotted mess of brooding evil

In the gentle combat of persuasion

Good wins over good with goodness

And none lose.

—Athena, in Aeschylus, The Eumenides

This volume presents a series of reflections and empirical case studies on a central, if not the central, domain of rhetoric and culture: human social relations. Indeed, nothing of rhetoric – neither the verbal strategies of persuasion and oratory (in the original Aristotelian view), nor in its wider sense, as a feature of the ‘new rhetoric’, being ‘the effective use of informal reasoning in all fields’¹ – is outside the field of social relations as the constitutive dimension, or rather fabric, of human behaviour and culture. In addition, the recent ‘rhetorical turns’ (cf. Simons 1990; Bender and Wellbery 1990; Mokrzan 2014; Meyer, Girke and Mokrzan 2016) show an underlying concern with the multi-dimensional linguistic, bodily and evolutionary phenomena underlying and associated with the forms and uses of rhetoric, seen as a quintessential human ‘faculty’ for living and surviving in society, as well as shaping, and being shaped by, its culture(s). The present series, Studies in Rhetoric and Culture, initiated by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler, is a prime example of it.

As George Kennedy already noted in his inspiring 1998 book Comparative Rhetoric, this faculty of ‘rhetoric’ is found among humans in all societies and is by no means a prerogative or art of literate societies only, although as a phenomenon it was conceptually and reflexively developed in the Western tradition after Isocrates and Plato’s Dialogues. We could also make an argument for extending the study of rhetoric into non-human domains, as in ‘bio-rhetoric’ (Kull 2001; Pain 2002), akin to evolutionary studies,² but we will not pursue this issue here. Partly addressed in this volume, however, is the role of non-verbal rhetoric, via sound or images (see du Mesnil’s chapter).

The concept of ‘rhetoric’ and its scope are not self-evident. Each of the preceding volumes in the Rhetoric Culture Project (RCP) series had to grapple with definitional issues, the intellectual relevance of which must be included here. Since the first volume in the series, Culture and Rhetoric (Strecker and Tyler 2009a), which proposed the theoretical and methodological foundation for research on the figurative and persuasive dimensions of social relations (Mokrzan 2015: 257), several innovative notions have emerged which demonstrate that the mutually constitutive nature of rhetoric and culture goes hand in hand with social relations, but also ethnography (Meyer, Girke and Mokrzan 2016: 10, 14). Rhetoric culture theory (RCT) insists that an ethnographic approach – following upon Kennedy’s comparative one – is fundamental for recovering multiple rhetorical traditions. Ethnography allows for active and long-term engagement; that is, a scientific rhetoric that begins with mutual respect and a commitment to listening and observing how ‘actors deal with the contingencies in their lives and their own awareness that words, deeds, and ideals do not usually match’ (ibid.: 14). RCT also demands that any understanding of culture and rhetoric must encompass ‘the whole spectrum of human sensibility’ (Streck 2011: 133), as well as the ‘oscillating forces of the cooperative and the confrontational in interaction’ (Girke and Meyer 2011: 9), as ‘dialogue is only one side of the rhetorical medal’ (ibid.). This corroborates our claim that rhetoric helps to make sense of what connects and disconnects people, and thereby must keep track of universals, or in the words of Robling, ‘anthropological invariants’ (Robling 2004: 8), that enable humans to engage at all in socio-culturally embedded rhetorical activity. While a great deal has been learnt in recent years about social relations and discourse, especially from the work of linguistic anthropologists (e.g. Haviland 2010; Irvine 2019; Gal and Irvine 2019; Duranti 1994), and in that of many cognitive anthropologists (e.g. D’Andrade 1995; Hutchins 2006; Bloch 2012, [2013] 2017; Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2007), few frame these issues explicitly in the connection between rhetoric and culture. Judith Irvine (2011: 35) is of course correct when she writes that ‘the moral life of language does not reside in the linguistic properties of utterances alone, nor only in the moment of interaction. The words not spoken, the discourse contexts, the interactional and societal histories, the responses by interlocutors, the conventions of genre, the regimes of language, truth, and knowledge that prevail in the interlocutors’ social worlds – all these are relevant as well’. However, according to RCT, what makes them relevant are their rhetorical qualities. Where RCT guides us is in its novel exploration of the emergent qualities of culture (Girke and Meyer 2011), or put differently, how culture emerges out of ‘rhetorical action’ (ibid.: 2). This perspective differs from the predominantly semiotic approach (e.g. Irvine 2019; Gal and Irvine 2019) and linguistic-social pragmatics of much of anthropological linguistics and communication studies (e.g. Duranti 2007).

Central to our own idea of a dialectic of bonding and contestation is the ‘constant productive tension’ referred to above, a tension that sustains and constrains social relations and which is closely linked to another genuine innovation of RCT: chiasmus. This figurative, cognitive and comparative tool, as well as a mode of ethnographic reflection (cf. Wiseman 2009: 87), has served to underline the series and RCP. When Tyler and Strecker (2009: 29) refer to the ‘chiastic spin’, what is meant here is not only the rhetorical energy generated and exchanged in social interactions, but also the power of metaphor and other important figures and tropes for stimulating and persuading others to act (Meyer, Girke and Mokrzan 2016: 8).

While we build on these and other innovative ideas of the RCP, including a return to embodied rhetoric, as we discuss later in this Introduction, at the same time we push these insights further, as connections to newly evolving domains of research have to be made (see the sections below entitled ‘Contestation’ and ‘Beginning with the End, Ending with the Beginning’).

The first challenge for the present volume was to first delineate the two themes, ‘rhetoric’ and ‘social relations’, both very comprehensive concepts. Despite recognizing their relevance and inherently wide scope, the danger is to extend them too much and to lose critical edge.³ We begin by saying that: (a) all human social life is relational and constituted in relationality on various levels, from kinship units to wider, imagined units such as ‘the nation’ or a religious community; and (b) that all rhetoric, as a form of communication, is rooted in the social and has at its core figuration and persuasion strategies (cf. Strecker and Tyler 2009b: 3), although not all persuasion in social life is rhetoric: think of direct physical force and intimidation – when used they are usually quite compelling, not discursively persuasive; (c) these rhetorical persuasion strategies, however, refer to a (partly shared) reality that is explored and tested in supplemental rhetorical operations, that is, they have plausibility claims. This is where the ‘rhetoric-as-epistemic’ – that is, ‘knowledge-forming’ – argument comes back. Even as rhetoric is not to be equated with ‘rational discourse’, it does produce implicit claims to knowledge.⁴ Persuasiveness in whatever form may flout realities beyond rhetoric, and rhetoric’s ‘arguments’ and intended meanings may be challenged. Apart from that, as the ancient Greeks already mused, rhetoric often ‘fails’: it does not always win audiences or redefine social reality. This is in contrast to Athena’s noble words, cited at the beginning of this Introduction. We see social relations as the entire spectrum of engagements that humans enter into as members of a society, relations that by nature are cooperative as well as fractious and competitive. The social relationality of humans – a natural phenomenon – necessitates rhetoric action, both cognitive and expressive. This does not imply that all aspects of social relations (or of culture) are to be studied merely in their verbal-linguistic, discursive dimensions, as quantitative research on descent and kinship, settlement patterns, energy use and so on also has a role to play. The culture concept is ill-defined in the RCP, but we see it here in the standard anthropological sense as the dynamic body of shared and transmitted patterns of behaviour, values and templates marking a human group’s way of life.⁵ More specifically: culture is a dimension of human functioning, and constitutes ‘repertoires of meaning’, constructed and (re)produced in social interaction. So we follow no essentialist conception of it, because cultural repertoires are open and dynamic.⁶ Humans are quintessentially verbal-discursive in social relations: ‘culture’ may be a rhetoric construct, but it is embedded, located, within human sociality; that is, social relations are primary in having conditioned culture, as symbolic/meaning systems composed by rhetoric action. Sociality is our evolutionary past, our kinship, our embodied mimetic practices for survival.

In this book we, perhaps obviously, focus chiefly on rhetoric in expressive forms as produced in social relations, primarily but not exclusively verbal-discursive. We thus see rhetoric as the basic human register of interactive discursive action in society, with inherent dimensions of persuasion and argument directed to an audience, and appealing to a body of shared (social) values or identity. More specifically, we might start with the short definition by Thomas Farrell (1993: 15), seeing rhetoric as ‘the practice of public practical reason’ in human society. Farrell was against the ever-extending definitional scope of rhetoric and chose a more classic position. He described rhetoric as a collaborative art, ‘directed towards making ongoing sense of experiences by expressing them as themes and arguments, inviting decision, action, and judgement’ (ibid.: 25). This is the stuff of social life, and points to both the informal, pragmatic ‘real life’ aspects of human social discourse and to the ongoing efforts people make to influence and convince others, via the entire range of figurative, symbolic and ‘cognitive’ utterances/messages that mark human discursive action (also including ritual). In the current rhetorical turn – perhaps to be called the second one, after that of the 1980s and confirmed by work done in the Rhetoric Culture Project – the concept of rhetoric has reverted to its original broader meaning, and escaped its reduction, since the Romantic Age, to (the study of) elocutio, the mere production/delivery of figures of speech (cf. Sperber and Wilson 1990: 140). So rhetoric for us refers to a core characteristic of human functioning, and to the ensemble of discursive utterances and strategies used in social interaction, marked by efforts at persuasiveness, in many registers.⁷ This is not ‘a Western conception’ of rhetoric, as some critics would have it (Bate 2014: 541–42, 544). The ethnographic examples in this volume are telling in that all of them exhibit (un)conscious strategies of persuasion, this regardless of the wider question that rhetoric may very well be rooted in evolutionary processes of embodied cognition, for example via chiasmic structures. Indeed, as Pelkey demonstrates in Chapter 1, chiasmus is a basic model and structure in social rhetoric, occurring time and again in many domains.

We concur with the thesis that rhetoric in the wider sense is thus constitutive of culture, that it calls (or at least affirms) a common, collective cultural identity into existence, and we look at this via the lens of social relational settings that delimit the scope, depth and time frames of rhetorical activities and strategies. Rhetoric, as creative, persuasion-oriented discursive practice in the service of social cognition and symbolic meaning-making, does not proceed from conceptual or ideological blueprints or mind models, but is pragmatic and adaptive – a ‘collaborative art’ (Farrell 1993). It is rooted in ordinary discourse, practice and real communities (White 1985: 701), and speaks to the indeterminacy of social life. Seen in its social settings, however, this does not mean that rhetoric is arbitrary, opportunistic or relativistic in its effects: shared meanings, ‘theories’ and knowledge of the social and of the world are indeed produced, which are ‘tested’ against reality and adjusted. We do not agree with the postmodern notion that reality is (entirely) a rhetorical construct, nor do we see the future of rhetoric studies in a social constructivist approach (cf. Simonson 2014: 107–8).

In assessing the settings or context of rhetorical performances/expressions, there is also the issue of whether an ‘identity’ of a social group needs to exist before rhetoric practice can have its effects or impact. The underlying assumption of the Rhetoric Culture Project is posited upon the chiasmic figure that ‘just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric’⁸ – ‘culture’ is being produced by rhetoric and rhetoric has a cultural basis, that is, it induces members of a society into specific features and figures of speech and into cultural references that create difference, identity and plurality. Surely rhetoric always speaks to notions of the shared ‘background knowledge’ of the interlocutors. Kenneth Burke already tied the exercise of rhetoric to processes of identification (cf. Davis 2008: 128) – otherwise rhetoric would not ‘work’. Important to note, however, is that people are not ‘prisoners’ of the rhetorical conventions of their social or cultural group; they argue within it in a dialectical fashion and create new linkages and insights beyond it. This points to the universalist basis that is found in the human rhetorical faculty across cultures and which creates conditions for the apprehension of common truths about reality, for example via science, despite the various rhetorical constructions about it (which may differ).⁹

In current rhetorical theory, including rhetoric culture theory, we may see a gradual fusion of two of the classic forms of discourse as identified by Aristotle (c. 330 BC [2004]: 1356a): of rhetoric as observation and practice of the available means of persuasion, and of dialectic, the practice of (dialogic) argument and debate to reach shared insights or truths.¹⁰ This fusion is a fortuitous development that allows us to stave off the, what we could call, eternal ‘Sophist threat’ of seeing and using rhetoric as only a set of persuasive strategies, as a contentless, ‘non-virtuous’ means (Plato) merely to gain discursive victory, often amounting to deception. This is Plato’s version of it in his dialogue (against) Gorgias. Rhetoric is more than that; it has social and cultural resonance, and usually refers to shared meanings and truths beyond the oratorical construct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Part I. Positioning
• Part II. Bonding
• Part III. Contestation
• Index