1. What is Rhetoric?
Everyday Definitions of Rhetoric
The first thing to understand is how the word rhetoric is used in courses such as this is different from how that same word is used in everyday language. In everyday uses of the word, rhetoric is often a synonym for something like political spin, demagoguery, propaganda, bullshit, bombast, figures of speech, surface-level style, sales pitches, exaggeration, and other such types of communication.
The binary opposition underlying everyday uses of the term rhetoric is rhetoric vs. substance, with rhetoric as the inferior member of that particular pairing. Pay attention to how the word circulates in everyday contexts and see if you agree with the way I have characterized its ordinary usage.
Specialized Definitions of Rhetoric
People who study and analyze rhetoric use the term more broadly, encompassing more communicative situations than the (usually) negative ones that the common use of rhetoric assumes. In fact, it seems 🔗 that are as many definitions of rhetoric as there are rhetorical theorists and teachers in courses such as this one. Here is a small sample from among many competing definitions, some old, others much more recent:
Rhetoric is….
the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion—Aristotle
the study of misunderstandings and their remedies—I.A. Richards
the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents—Kenneth Burke
the function of adjusting ideas to people and people to ideas—Donald C. Bryant
the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their decisions or actions—George Kennedy
the art of linguistically or symbolically creating salience. After salience is created, the situation must be translated into meaning.—Richard Vatz
a form of reasoning about probabilities, based on assumptions people share as members of a community. —Erika Lindemann
the whole range of arts not only of persuasion but also of producing or reducing misunderstanding.—Wayne Booth
a craftwork for exercising humanity—Emmanuelle Danblon
strategic use of symbol systems using various modes of communication—language, still and moving images, and sound.—Lisa Blankenship
where reasonable disagreement may exist and persist indefinitely...rhetoric is a social practice that helps us choose.—Christian Kock
How We Will Define Rhetoric for our Purposes
What do those competing definitions, and countless others that might have been included, have in common? Definitions of rhetoric try to describe both what it is and what it does, even as they select and emphasize certain concepts instead of others.
Let’s break that out into its parts:
contextual, situated communication
Communication never comes out of a vacuum or goes into one; any attempt to reach an audience is necessarily affected by the particular interests, values, and histories of particular groups of people, as well as past, present or (anticipated) future events.
The words themselves are never enough. Even a banal statement such as "Here he comes" could signal enthusiasm, warning, dread, boredom, or other attitudes that are understandable only in context.
One core consideration of rhetoric falling under the idea of context is kairos, the sense of the right time, right place, the opportune moment, and the fitting response. After all, rhetoric that is not responsive to the moment or the backstory or "what we do in situations like this" is likely to fail. One way to begin to understand kairos is to contrast it with another sense of time: chronos.
Chronos is how we usually think of time: moments unfolding one after the other in a one-way sequence, earlier to later. Chronos is the root idea behind words such as chronicles or chronology, which describe a linear sense of time. Chronos is neutral: one thing happens, another thing happens, things age and die, etc. By contrast, kairos is value-laden and sensitive to context and culture. Kairos can reach back or look forward and is always concerned with what is fitting, acceptable, or just in the particular circumstances, within the scope of particular contexts, which might be immediate, or they might be influenced by events years ago.
John E. Smith, a philosopher, explained kairos this way:
There is, first, the idea of the “right time” for something to happen in contrast to “any time,” a sense that is captured nicely in the word “timing,” as when we say, “The Governor’s timing was poor; he released the story to the press too soon and thus lost the advantage of surprising his political opponents.” Second, kairos means a time of tension and conflict, a time of crisis implying that the course of events poses a problem that calls for a decision at that time, which is to say that no generalized solution or response supposedly valid at any or every time will suffice. Third, kairos means that the problem or crisis has brought with it a time of opportunity (kairos is translated by the Latin opportunitas) for accomplishing some purpose that could not be carried out at some other time. Implicit in all three meanings embraced by kairos is the concept of an individual time having a critical ordinal position set apart from its predecessors and successors.
Stated another way by rhetoric scholar Donovan Bisbee, "Attuning analysis to kairos emphasizes strategies that advance a particular sense of time that calls for movement and positions this moment as the time for action."
Another concept closely related to kairos is the concept of exigence (or exigency; I've seen it both ways). In a well-known article, rhetoric scholar Lloyd Bitzer defined exigency as "an imperfection marked by urgency...a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be." In other words, why is the rhetor speaking, writing, or creating this rhetorical effort? What are they trying to change, reinforce, or address?
made often (but not necessarily or exclusively) via language
Typical ideas of what counts as rhetoric usually involve speaking or writing, and much of what we have inherited over millennia as rhetorical theory assumes a spoken or written (that is, language-based) interaction.
But rhetoric operates outside the confines of language, too. Images; icons; symbols; volume; gesture; movement; sounds; hyperlinks; monuments, statues, or buildings; and even colors are just some ways that rhetoric operates in ways that do not necessarily make words the only game in town when it comes to crafting a message for an audience. The rhetorical analyst must learn to notice all that is there to be noticed and figure out how best to understand a particular message.
addressed to audiences
While you can try to argue to or persuade yourself, rhetoric is best thought of as communication that is addressed to a particular hearer, reader, viewer, or group, typically those with some sort of interest or stake in the subject. These audiences are primary or intended audiences.
Primary audiences need not be entirely homogenous—if a particular communication is addressed to, say, St. Edward’s students, it will likely contain evidence of an effort to appeal to what the various overlapping groups that make up the student body (traditional and non-traditional undergraduates, graduate students, veterans, international students, people of different genders, etc.) have in common.
But of course, especially now in the age of social media, messages can reach secondary or unintended audiences, some of which take up the message for the purposes of subverting, remixing, parodying, or resisting it. The rhetorical analyst must learn to notice and differentiate between primary and other audiences and avoid thinking of any audience as entirely homogenous.
designed for particular purposes
Rhetoric circulates to prompt audiences to do, think, feel, or believe something—to adhere to some idea. That idea might be laudable: honor our veterans, lower the cost of medication, affirm the values of a free society, etc. Or it might be insidious: obstruct the democratic process, divide the populace, preserve unfair advantage, etc.
Rhetoric has a wide scope. It’s all in there—rhetoric includes all the good, the bad, the “mixed good and bad,” the weird, the niche, the mainstream, the bizarre, the accepted, the avant-garde, and on and on.
For the rhetorical analyst, any effort to reach an audience for some purpose, whether that purpose is what most would consider worthy of praise (or of condemnation), combined with the analyst’s own curiosity, is possibly worth learning about.
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