2. Why Learn Rhetorical Analysis?
This is a course in rhetorical analysis. It’s right there in the title: “Analyzing Rhetoric.” As a quick Google search will show, college courses in rhetorical analysis are common. Courses that have some assignment requiring rhetorical analysis, even if fairly simple, are even more common. And as more sustained research will show, people have been teaching, learning, and practicing rhetorical analysis for a very long time.
For instance, in Ancient Greece and Rome, to be educated was to be prepared for participation in civic life; thus, learning rhetoric (including some parts of what we might call rhetorical analysis today) was essential.
But why should you, here in the 21st century, learn to analyze rhetoric? To be educated is to be open to the possibility of being changed in some way. So what kind of person might you become if you learn rhetorical analysis?
The Weak Defense
One common reason to learn rhetorical analysis is that it will put you on guard against the manipulation of those who would do you harm via rhetoric by misleading you. In this view, rhetorical analysis is a kind of self-defense for the mind much as karate is self-defense for the body. While one can and should be on guard against trickery and deception, one problem with too much emphasis on the self-defense view of rhetorical analysis is that it rests on what theorist Richard Lanham dubbed the “Weak Defense” of rhetoric.
As Lanham describes it, this defense “argues that there are two kinds of rhetoric, good and bad. The good kind is used in good causes, the bad kind in bad causes.” The Weak Defense has a long tradition and even appears in one form or another in assignments that ask students to do rhetorical analysis.
But this defense has a significant problem because it is itself arhetorical. As you know, putting an “a” prefix in front of some words negates them, so “arhetorical” means “not rhetorical.”
The Weak Defense is arhetorical because it presumes that there is some place to stand outside of language, context, values, and particular situations to judge what counts as “good” vs. “bad" rhetoric. It’s really just the old rhetoric vs. substance opposition again. The Weak Defense sees rhetoric as a neutral tool that can be used or abused, just as a knife can be used to prep a special meal for your family, or to stab strangers for thrills. But rhetoric involves choices made in uncertain situations, each affected by context and purpose. It is complicated and layered. It is also unavoidable.
The Strong Defense
So mental self-defense, even if important, is not a sufficient justification for learning rhetorical analysis. In contrast to the Weak Defense, Lanham offers the Strong Defense. As Lanham explains,
The Strong Defense assumes that truth is determined by social dramas, some more formal than others, but all man-made. Rhetoric in such a world is not ornamental but determinative, essentially creative. Truth once created in this way becomes referential, as in legal precedent.
Thus, one wider reason to learn rhetorical analysis beyond the rather limited focus of self-defense against lying or bullshit is to understand how what even counts as true, good, desirable, bad, valuable, important, etc. in the first place gets created and maintained by the circulation and recirculation of rhetoric, both in the immediate moment, and across contexts.
To get audiences on board (or stay on board) with a set of ideas, rhetors must constantly try to call attention to what they position as worth pointing out, explaining, arguing, urging, or warning against. Rhetors must offer what particular audiences might accept as good reasons to do, think, feel, or believe something.
Rhetorical analysis can help you to see and understand the water that all of us human fish are swimming in, all the time. Here, the rhetoric is the substance, at least where communication gets things done in social contexts, bringing people together—or driving them apart.
As rhetoric scholar Celeste Condit puts it,
Rhetoric is the clay of which the social pottery will be made. The character of the clay itself determines the character of the vessel.
Gerald Hauser, another scholar, offers an even more urgent rationale:
Without rhetorical competence, citizens are disabled in the public arenas of citizen exchange—the marketplace, the representative assembly, the court, and public institutions—and democracy turns into a ruse disguising the reality of oligarchic power.
The rationale for this course
This is a course that helps you to develop your curiosity and skills in examining “the clay” that “the social pottery” is made of. Rhetoric involves taking a risk in communicating, a risk that the message might not be understood or might be misunderstood or subverted in ways that the rhetor cannot fully control. It involves making choices about what to say and how to say it, and it circulates in an environment of competing messages and purposes.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic reason for learning rhetorical analysis I can give comes from Kathleen J. Turner, a scholar and professor of rhetoric. Turner argues that
The symbols we use— for ourselves, for others, for objects, for situations, for concepts— both empower and constrain our possibilities. For me, the glory of rhetorical analysis is that it helps us understand the choices that not only can but also must be made, and the ramifications of those choices for rhetors, publics, and societies.
Rhetorical analysis is worth doing because it can help you to understand the choices that rhetors (and you are a rhetor, every single day) make in their efforts to get audiences to accept some idea, as well as the consequences of those choices and what might be applied in later situations.
Rhetorical analysis helps you to learn the possibilities, limits, and consequences of the choices that people--including you--make when speaking or writing.
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