12. Rhetoric and Emotion
Isn't Emotion to be Mistrusted?
Probably the first place to start in understanding and analyzing emotional appeals in rhetoric is to recognize that the culture in which we are embedded tends to denigrate appeals to emotion as invalid, manipulative, and highly suspect. We hear slogans such as “Facts don’t care about your feelings” or even “Stop being so emotional.” We are socialized to mistrust emotional appeals as unpredictable, wild, propagandistic, or weak–the kind of thing that a rhetor resorts to when they don’t have better material to work with.
As psychologist James Averill explains,
Failure to recognize the creative aspects of emotional experience stems from deeply held cultural prejudices, dating back at least to the ancient Greeks, in which emotions have often been contrasted unfavorably with rationality, the presumed hallmark of humankind.
The common use of the word "pathetic" connotes corny, ineffective, or sad. But pathetic appeals (i.e., uses of pathos—appeals to emotion) don’t just get in the way of pure reason. Neither are emotional appeals necessarily illegitimate.
OK, but What is Emotion Anyway?
There are many definitions and classifications of emotion, most of which overlap considerably. But for our purposes, let’s use this list of primary and secondary emotions as our starting point and the rhetorical definition formulated by Lynn Worsham.
Let’s pause to explain the ideas embedded in Worsham’s definitional metaphor of the “tight braid”:
Affect (pronounced AFF-ect) is perhaps best thought of as the raw, embodied human capacity to feel that precedes being understood as any particular emotion. Have you ever said, “I felt it in my gut?” That is a description of the experience of affect. In Worsham’s definition, this capacity to feel is intimately connected to judgment, the ability to weigh competing views. In other words, feeling and thinking are not necessarily opposites but what and how we feel is connected to what and how we think.
Emotions circulate within groups and cultures; we learn about them from early childhood in living with and relating to other people. We learn names for complexes of particular sets of feelings that we experience in our bodies. We perform certain behaviors, which are associated in cultural contexts with names such as joy, grief, anger, resolve, outrage, and many others. These experiences can be shared and are not merely idiosyncratic to the individual
Affect by itself is a feeling in the body, but emotion happens when affect is invested with meaning and made a resource for rhetorical creation and shared experience. In the common conception, emotions are simply personal feelings, something experienced within individuals and (merely) subjective. While emotions are subjective in the sense that individuals experience them, they are also shared and culturally contextualized; therefore, they are not totally arbitrary or incapable of being analyzed.
Laura Micciche offers a related definition of emotion. For her, emotion is "an expression, experience, or perception mediated by language, body, and culture."
Again, notice that this definition is not just about individuals feeling private feelings. Micciche's and Worsham's definitions help us to understand that emotion is socially and culturally situated. It can be the basis of shared experiences--and therefore potential change via rhetorical action.
Indeed, as Celeste Condit puts it:
Although individual feelings have [a] subjective component, emotions are not merely warning signs within an individual, but rather they are generally also relational signals for co-orienting people. If emotions were not social messages, but rather just internal warning signs, there would be no explanation for many of their bodily manifestations—tears, glowering, reddening, volume shifts, chest expansion, etc. Although these signals are culturally modulated, suppressed, heightened, and perhaps even on occasion utterly unique fabrications of a particular culture, people in all cultures offer emotional signals about relationships with other people.
Micciche explains that emotion "binds the social body together as well as tears it apart.” This binding or tearing apart highlights two important considerations about building emotional appeals.
As Mark Garrett Longaker and Jeffrey Walker explain, a rhetor seeking to move an audience via emotion must attend to two considerations: “Typically, the [rhetor] must first present causes for emotion … to arouse, intensify, or change the audience’s emotion. Then the emotion functions as a reason for embracing an idea or taking action."
Patheme/Pathemeta
Longaker and Walker provide us with an important term: patheme (plural: pathemeta), which means evidence within the artifact of efforts to build emotional appeals, such as using powerful symbols with meaning for particular groups, building or reusing vivid images, and creating presence.
Averill highlights the connection between emotions and creativity, a connection that is especially important for rhetoric. As Averill contends,
[R]hetoric and emotion share two important features—namely, both are persuasive acts and both are occasioned by similar conditions [of coordinating action in the face of uncertainty]. To these two we may add a third similarity—namely, both rhetoric and emotion are inextricably linked to values. . . States such as anger, fear, love, guilt, and the myriad of other emotions recognized in ordinary language, are infused with value—they aim at what is worth doing or preserving.
Just as a rhetor must attend to particular causes for emotion and must connect those causes to an emotion that urges some change in the audience to create a rhetorical appeal, so too must the rhetorical analyst pay attention to the evidence of those efforts, reflected in particular pathemeta. The artifact is the evidence left behind of an actual situation in which the rhetor attempted particular emotional appeals.
Rhetorical Analysis of Emotional Appeals is Both Possible and Important
This orientation toward a shared, social conception of emotion as the source of inventing appeals to values (as opposed to a merely individual or idiosyncratic orientation) makes rhetorical analysis of emotional appeals not only possible but also crucial.
As Averill puts it, "it is through ‘emotional animation,’ not through rational determination, that cultural beliefs and values gain force."
It’s important to pay attention to how emotions and ideas about emotions circulate within cultural contexts.
Shari Stenberg urges us to develop our skills in
. . . examining the public rhetoric of emotion through texts and practices that help us to (1) make visible the social factors that result in seemingly natural ways of categorizing emotion and (2) examine the multiple ways emotions are read as appropriate or not when expressed by different subjects and in different contexts.
To illustrate what developing this skill can show, Stenberg uses the example of contrasts in news coverage of President Obama’s use of anger and Hillary Clinton’s showing vulnerability on the campaign trail. When Obama reacted angrily to large bonuses paid to financial firms bailed out by the government in the Great Recession, Stenberg explains, it was seen as a rhetorical strategy that the usually placid “No-Drama Obama” chose.
But when Clinton’s eyes welled up with tears in response to a question about how she keeps going on the campaign trail, some saw that as a possibly contrived response (fake tears), while others saw it as getting a glimpse of the “real” Clinton behind the highly driven public persona, helping her win the primary election in New Hampshire. Stenberg points out that these differing reactions to Obama’s and Clinton’s expressions of emotions illustrate cultural presuppositions and contexts of gender roles, emotion, and the context of each rhetor’s previous public image:
[I]n examining Obama’s anger versus Clinton’s tears, it becomes evident that Obama is seen as separate from his emotions. He is assumed to use emotion—pathos—to procure a particular rhetorical effect. Anger is therefore a rationally chosen strategy deployed to reach his audience. While there is some speculation that Clinton’s tears are contrived, they seem to be read, in any case, as having helped her secure a victory in New Hampshire because they assured voters of her “humanness.” They were interpreted, that is, as something within her that she finally allowed to surface. The difference, then, is this: Clinton has emotions and Obama uses emotions.
Stenberg argues that this example illustrates how “cultural and social contexts and expectations shape both expressions of emotion and our subsequent readings of them”; thus, examining emotion can result in “new knowledge.”
And it is possible to identify the basis of rhetorical appeals to isolate evidence of context, cultural presuppositions, and choices that rhetors make in creating a shared emotion. As Micchiche explains:
Emotion is crucial to how people form judgments about what constitutes appropriate action or inaction in a given situation. . . The idea here is that emotions, like reasons, move people to judge, decide, and act in certain ways, and that, consequently, emotion is central to rhetorical action.
In sum, as Averill argues, “emotions are social and individual constructions and hence subject to creative change.” Put another way, emotions argue—and can be argued about.
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