Part 3: Power

When we understand rhetoric as a function of power, it means that we acknowledge the effects that speech and representation have over a person, a community, or a public. As Kenneth Burke reminds us, rhetoric unites and divides; it allows a person to see their likeness in another person and it enables them to view their difference from others as a rationale for dissociation, alienation, and dehumanization. As theory, or a lens through which to see the world, rhetoric also offers us something more than a technique by which powerful agents exercise their influence. It also offers us a way to analyze how power is distributed, exercised, pooled, and deployed; it allows us to see that power is often not a matter of one person, institution, or group exercising unilateral control over a situation, but a complex coordination of many agents who wield leverage and control over a means of producing representations for a mass public. Often, power’s exercise is not felt but apprehended after the fact. The chapters collected under the heading of “power” are intended to offer frameworks for understanding different forms of communicative hierarchy and the subtle ways they exercise social control.