Reading Rhetorical Theory

Reading Rhetorical Theory

Speech, Representation, and Power

Atilla Hallsby

University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing

Reading Rhetorical Theory Copyright © 2022 by Atilla Hallsby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Contents

Introduction
Atilla Hallsby

Contributors

Main Body

Chapter 1: What is Rhetorical Theory? Defining Rhetorical Theory Artistic Proofs and Genres Histories of Rhetorical Theory

Chapter 2: The "Origins" of Rhetorical Theory Part 1: Why Ancient Greece? Part 2: Sophistic Knowledge and the Encomium

Chapter 3: Propaganda and the Common Good Part 1: The Propaganda of History Part 2: The Common and the Good

Chapter 4: The Symbol Part 1: What are Symbols? Part 2: Rhetoric as Symbolic Action

Chapter 5: The Sign Part 1: Signs and Representations

Chapter 6: Rhetoric and Ideology Part 1: Ideology and Myth Part 2: Agency, Persona, and Speech Act

Chapter 7: Rhetoric and Argumentation Part 1: Key Terms and Definitions Part 2: The Toulmin Model Part 3: Logical Dependency and Fallacies

Chapter 8: Rhetoric and Narrative Part 1: Form, Genre, and Frame Theory Part 2: The Narrative Paradigm Part 3: The Problem of Speaking for Others

Chapter 9: Visual Rhetoric Part 1: Visual Culture Part 2: Genres of Visual Rhetoric

Chapter 10: The Rhetorical Situation Part 1: Defining the Rhetorical Situation Part 2: Analysis of a Rhetorical Situation Part 3: Rhetorical Ecologies

Chapter 11: The Settler Situation Part 1: Defining the Settler Situation Part 2: Incomunicable Part 3: Post-, De-, Anti-, and Settler-Colonialism

Chapter 12: The Secrecy Situation Part 1: Secrecy Rhetorics Part 2: Conspiracy Rhetoric Part 3: Psychoanalysis and Secrecy

Chapter 14: The Digital Situation Part 1: Defining Digital Rhetoric Part 2: Keywords for the Digital Situation Part 3: Digital Dystopia and Algorithms of Oppression

Assignments and Study Guides

Short Paper 1: The Encomium

Short Paper 2: Annotation Assignment

Short Paper 3: Rhetorical Analysis

Exam 1 Study Guide: Chapters 1-5

Exam 2 Study Guide: Chapters 6-9

Exam 3 Study Guide: Chapters 10-14

Appendix: Definitions of Rhetoric

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Introduction

Atilla Hallsby

Why this Online Textbook?

With the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic in Spring 2020, I began the process of transitioning course content from the in-person version of my large lecture, “Introduction to Rhetorical Theory,” to this platform. My intention was to create an accessible repository for teaching materials that would enable students to access the course remotely while minimizing the stress associated with this transition. After several semesters, I added recorded lectures, supplementary embedded videos, and guidance for written assignments. In its present form, the book now functions well for “flipped” modalities of teaching, both in-person and online. Given the significant labor cost associated with transitioning courses online, my hope was to (1) offload some of the effort of moving classes online by creating an open resource for other instructors to draw upon, (2) to provide a basis for instructors to justify the appropriateness of a rhetorical theory course for an online modality of teaching, and (3) to lighten the burden upon instructors and students at a time when online/in-person pivots are increasingly likely and unpredictable.

Reading Rhetorical Theory also provides a number of additional advantages over a conventional textbook.

There is no cost to either the instructor or the student.

It enables instructors to teach in a range of modalities, or to move between online and in-person administration as needed.

It is formatted for reading/watching/listening on mobile devices and computers.

The online format allows course content to be updated on the go, rather than releasing successive editions over time.

Chapters/entries offer multiple ways for students to receive the materials. The written chapters contain the same content as the posted recorded lectures (although occasionally, the recordings will be truncated (i.e., shortened) compared to material posted in the textbook to avoid excessively long lectures).

It provides a course shell that harmonizes with an ever-present need for online teaching in synchronous and asynchronous modalities while minimizing the amount of preparation required to teach.

Exam and quiz questions are currently available to confirmed course instructors on an individual basis. If you wish to access assessment questions, contribute to this resource, supply correction notices for content and/or broken links, or otherwise have feedback or requests regarding Reading Rhetorical Theory, please feel free to send a message to me using the email address listed at the bottom of this page. To avoid confusion while reading, please note! There is no chapter 13 in this book. Instead, Reading Rhetorical Theory skips from chapter 12 to chapter 14.

Why Speech, Representation, and Power?

When it is traced to Greek and Western European roots, the academic tradition of rhetorical studies is often divided into two categories, which correspond with its evolution as a tradition of higher learning: Rhetorica Docens and Rhetorica Utens. Rhetorica Docens is rhetoric as theory. Of the two, it is the earlier-occurring category and refers to an art (techne) of speech, spectacle, and fabrication governed by specific rules. This art is prescriptive in nature, in the sense that it offers guidelines for how speech can and should be organized and delivered. Frequently associated with the sophist Gorgias, the tradition of artful speaking diminished in importance between the 7th and the 15th centuries CE, displaced by the traditions of logic and dialectic. Rhetorica Utens is rhetoric as practice. Associated with Isocrates, it is a method of civic discourse that attends to the potential (dynamis) of speech and its enactment (praxis). It is a political process that organizes a population, guiding them toward prudent actions in the face of uncertain decisions.

As concerns Rhetorica Docens and Rhetorica Utens, this book is about rhetoric as theory AND as practice. Per the title, I expand upon these themes by offering three core understandings of rhetoric that progressively unfold over the chapters: Rhetoric as speech, Rhetoric as representation, and Rhetoric as power.

Rhetoric as an art of speech is often the most familiar form of rhetoric for undergraduate students. They frequently encounter rhetoric as a systematic account of how to deliver genre-defined oratory in public speaking and argumentation classes. Here, rhetoric is about speech insofar as it concerns the practice of suasive speaking and writing, the artistic proofs (ethos, pathos, and logos) employed by a given speaker, as well as the political consequences of speaking that are hard-wired into rhetoric’s suite of theories. Speech describes a mode of translating thought into action, of imagining the disposition of those spoken-to or spoken-about, and vigilantly attending to the ethical consequences of speaking in public.

Rhetoric as an art of representation expands upon speech by taking into account signs and symbols as vehicles for communication and persuasion. Representation requires a similar craft as spoken rhetoric insofar as signs and symbols are designed with an audience in mind. However, these audiences are often more sprawling and less easily defined than a physical audience, or people gathered in proximity to a single speaker. It also requires a different kind of literacy from audiences who regularly encounter signs and symbols because representations create an ideological matrix of belief and action. Representations are working upon us even when they do not appear to be doing anything at all; they describe ways of shaping the world, bringing forth thought and action at the level of the collective, the mass public, and the nation.

Rhetoric as a technology of power describes the way that communication, persuasion, speech, and representation work in tandem to create and dismantle a “natural” conception of lived reality. Rhetoric makes and unmakes social and symbolic hierarchies; it attunes us to (incorrectly) believe that social stratification is normal or natural and provides an available means of undermining the social hierarchies that have become entrenched parts of lived experience. As a technology of power, rhetoric alerts us to the fact that our experiences speech, representation, and force are vastly different from one another. My familiar way of understanding and navigating this world cannot be generalized. It is habituated, made familiar by systems that are beyond perception but not beyond change. Power varies vastly depending on our experience in this nation or in others depending, for instance, on one’s position relative to the history of colonization, human enslavement, and imperialism. Because power is distinct within different cultures, under different forms of governance, and within distinct racial and gendered regimes, rhetoric can help us to understand how power acquires the feel of being ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ and how a shift in speaking and action can recalibrate these force relations.

The plan of this book moves from rhetoric as an art of speech to rhetoric as a technology of power. The early chapters provide definitions and context for rhetoric as speech, middle chapters (e.g., on signs, symbols, visual images, argumentation, and narrative) describe rhetoric as representation, and the concluding chapters (e.g., on settler colonialism, secrecy, and digital rhetoric) elaborate on rhetoric as a technology of power. Of course, there is considerable overlap across these areas: the chapter on “rhetoric and ideology” sets the stage for later understandings of rhetoric as power; the chapter on “the rhetorical situation” hearkens back to the introductory understanding of rhetoric as speech. Additionally, there is only so much time in a semester and only so much ground a course can cover. Even so, my hope is to update and expand these chapters and to invite others to contribute their unique work and necessary perspective to the tentative foundation that has been laid here. This and related courses are available to peruse at the companion website to this Online Textbook. If you are an instructor or student who wishes to contribute to the resource, please do not hesitate to reach out at the email address provided below.

As a final note, although each chapter also includes a note on how to cite this book, I strongly encourage students to cite the linked sources within the text itself. One example is the term “persona,” which has a long scholarly history in rhetorical studies. Many of the folks who have contributed to this conversation are cited if not also hyperlinked within this book. The same goes for any number of other concepts. Please cite those original sources when possible! A key affordance of a resource like this one is that it makes a wide selection of scholarship readily available to students and instructors. These ideas are not my inventions: they are the intellectual yield of hundreds of rhetoricians, accumulated over many, many, many years. Rhetorical theory is not a finished project and our work here is ongoing. In the meanwhile, however, I wish you all the best in your teaching and learning.

Thank you for picking up this book!

I hope that it is engaging and useful. If you have feedback, we have also set up this survey for you to let us know what’s working and what needs additional care.

Dr. Atilla Hallsby

RhetoricalTheoryUnTextbook@gmail.com

www.atillahallsby.com

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Contributors

Editors and Editorial Assistants

My greatest thanks for making this book possible goes out to Shane Nackerud and Tina Tram of the University of Minnesota Libraries, who transitioned this manuscript from the website where it was originally posted into this open textbook. They formatted and edited each of these chapters, sought permissions, and found most of the images that are displayed here. Their labor is the reason why this book exists and I am greatly indebted to them for their semesters-long effort in creating this resource.

Makayla Hillukka was a Spring 2022 Dean’s First-Year Research & Creative Scholars (DFRACS) fellow and undergraduate research assistant for the UnTextbook at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities. Makayla’s recorded readings appear in Chapter 12: The Secrecy Situation and Chapter 14: The Digital Situation.

Milena Yishak was a Spring 2022 Dean’s First-Year Research & Creative Scholars (DFRACS) fellow and undergraduate research assistant for the UnTextbook at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities. Milena’s recorded readings appear in Chapter 8: Rhetoric and Narrative and Chapter 14: The Digital Situation.

Content Contributors

Dr. Michael Lechuga researches and teaches Latina/o/x Studies Communication Studies, Rhetoric, Migration and Settler Colonialism Studies, and Affect Studies. His research explores the ways migrants and migrant communities are subjected in the US by austere migration control structures and white nationalist ideologies. His current research focuses on the role that technology plays in border security assemblages and the ways alienhood is mapped onto migrant bodies through contemporary mechanisms of white-settler governance. His recorded lecture, “Incomunicable,” originally delivered at the Hugh Downs School of Communication at Arizona State University, appears in Chapter 11: The Settler Situation.

Dr. Emily Winderman specializes in the rhetorical study of a wide range of reproductive healthcare, including birth control, family planning, abortion care, and birthing practices. She generally approaches these topical areas through the theoretical affordances of affect theory and public emotion, rhetorical history, and public address. Specifically, her work asks “what emotions do” in order to constitute, shape, and manage different publics’ relationships to health. Her recorded lecture on “The Narrative Paradigm” appears in Chapter 8: Rhetoric and Narrative.

I

Main Body

1

Chapter 1: What is Rhetorical Theory?

This chapter offers a brief overview and definitions of rhetorical theory. “Theory” is sometimes imagined as abstract thinking or complex philosophy. However, in this class “theory” is something that all people do when they seek to apply a way of thinking about the world to real-life circumstances. It describes the imaginative and practical meanings that are applied to a surrounding world, and how we revise those meanings in accordance with perceived changes to that environment. Rhetorical Theory most often describes our ways of understanding practices of meaning-making and interpretation that rely on persuasion. As explained below, persuasion is traditionally associated with historical practices of speeches and speech-making. This is why Rhetorical Theory is often described as the “art of persuasion” or the “art of speechmaking,” although subsequent chapters will build on (and depart from) this foundation.

Please note that the audio recording for this chapter covers the same content as is presented in the chapter below.

Chapter Recording What is Rhetorical Theory? (Audio, ~12m)

Read this Next James, Joy. “Teaching Theory, Talking Community.” Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader, State University of New York Press, 2013, pp. 3-7. Handout: Definitions of Rhetoric

Defining Rhetorical Theory

The two Greek words that combine to form rhetoric are techne, as art or skill, and rhetor, or speaker. The two terms are not explicitly linked in fifth-century Greek texts, and there is no explicit reference to the art of persuasion in the first recorded use of the word. The word rhetor was a legal term denoting a specific class of people: those who often put forward motions in courts of law and in the general assembly.

Perhaps the most widely circulated definition of rhetoric still circulating today is from Aristotle: “the faculty of observing the available means of persuasion, in any given situation.”4 That means that rhetoric isn’t just how we persuade. It’s also the ability to stand back from the scenes where persuasion happens to understand how and why it is happening. Another popular definition of rhetoric is “the capacity to affect and be affected.” This means that rhetoric becomes the art of movement, or how people use their bodies to create movements and change. Both definitions capture the perspective that we can take when we think rhetorically: one that seeks to understand the way that influence and power move and the role of communication in creating common knowledge.

My preferred definition of rhetoric is “the active and retroactive organization of discourse.” This means that rhetoric is a way of creating a shared perspective on the past and future, a way of organizing speech to correct or realign a point of view. At its most basic, we might think of rhetoric as “the art of speaking” or even “the art of speaking well,” which is part of the reason why public speaking classes are housed in Communication Studies departments. Before Communication Studies existed as an academic discipline, most of these departments were named “Speech Communication,” which reflects rhetoric’s traditional emphasis on the theory, criticism, and practice of speech-making. That’s still a central aspect of the theory that rhetoricians are interested in, although these theories have also grown broader in scope.

In this class, rhetoric, as we understand it today, is a collection of humanist, literary, and political theories that explain how speech motivates human action and imagines possible futures. As developed in this un-textbook, it is a theory of how speech, representation, and power are instruments rooted in understandings of persuasion and its audiences. Persuasion is key to rhetoric because it is both the thing that rhetoricians study and the thing that rhetorical scholarship seeks to generate: the imagining of a more just world.

More important than just defining rhetoric is thinking critically about which definitions of rhetoric that we choose to embrace. Although he is among the earliest people to theorize rhetoric, Aristotle is not always the best authority because we would register many of the views he espoused as philosophy as categorically inhumane or racist.

It is important not only to situate rhetorical theory in the context from which it emerges but also to assess the utility of these theories according to the ethical standards that we would abide by in our own present-day. As the scholar and abolitionist Joy James writes:

Philosophy or theory courses may emphasize logic and memorizing the history of “Western” philosophy rather than the activity of creating philosophies or theorizing. When the logic of propositions is the primary object of study, how one argues becomes more important than for what one argues. The exercise of reason may take place within an illogical context — in which academic canons absurdly claim universal supremacy derived from the hierarchical splintering of humanity into greater and lesser beings, or the European Enlightenment’s deification of scientific rationalism as the truly “valid” approach to “Truth.2

In keeping with James’s statement, this class seeks to critically address how rhetorical theory has been made or built. It is not just about memorizing rhetoric’s ancient history. It does not seek to elevate a predominantly white or “Western” tradition as the only one that matters or exists.

One way to think beyond this tradition is what rhetorical theorist Molefi Kete Asante calls “Afrocentricity.” Afrocentricity describes a worldview that is “pro-African and consistent in its beliefs that technology belongs to the world; Afrocentricity is African genius and African values created reconstructed and derived from our history and experiences in our best interests.” Asante argues that Afrocentricity is essential to understanding rhetoric for the following reasons:

“Maulana Karenga argues that “no people can turn its history and humanity over to alien hands and expect social justice and respect” (Karenga, 1979). Language is the essential instrument of social cohesion. Social cohesion is the fundamental clement of liberation. All language is epistemic. Our language provides our understanding of our reality. A revolutionary language must not befuddle; it cannot be allowed to confuse. Critics must actively pursue the clarification of public language when they believe it is designed to whiten the issues. We know through science and rhetoric; they are parallel systems of epistemology. Rhetoric is art and art is as much a way of knowing as science.” 2

This course is about rhetorical terms and concepts. It is also about why it matters where and when we start rhetoric’s story and why rhetorical criticism is still a useful theory of practice. In this un-textbook, we will return to ancient Greece, but with a specific purpose: to highlight the ways that rhetoric signaled a broken or unhealthy state of public and political affairs. By telling this ancient story in this way, we may also bear witness to how the characteristically unjust patterns and practices of those times live on for us in the present day.

Artistic Proofs and Genres

Let’s talk about some of the most commonly discussed concepts in rhetoric and rhetorical theory: ethos, pathos, and logos, which are also known as the artistic proofs. The phrase “artistic proofs” means that they are the elements of persuasion that originate from the speaker, rather than from inartistic sources, or the data the speaker uses but did not ‘originate,’ ‘invent,’ or ‘create.’ Entire courses on rhetorical theory have been built around these concepts. They correspond to the major premises of Aristotle’s book, the Rhetoric, and form three pillars that much present-day rhetorical theory is built upon.

Ethos, or the appeal to authority. These are the ethical proofs derived from the moral character of the speaker.

Pathos, or the appeal to the emotions. The objective of pathos is to put the hearer into a certain frame of mind using what the speaker already knows about their audience.

Logos, or the appeal to reason, logic, and the word. These are the proofs contained in the speech itself when a real or apparent truth is demonstrated. The two modes of logical proof that Aristotle describes are induction and deduction. Induction refers to “bottom-up” reasoning; deduction refers to principles applied from the “top-down.”

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=5#oembed-1

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=5#oembed-2

Aristotle’s explanation of logos also describes three genres of rhetoric, which correspond to different “tenses” in which a speech may be made. These include the forensic, the epideictic, and the deliberative. In each of these, rhetoric manages some uncertainty: uncertainty over what is and what is not; uncertainty over whether to praise or to blame; and uncertainty over what one should or should not do.

The Genres of Speech

Forensic	Epideictic	Deliberative
The Past	The Present	The Future
Facts: whether a thing did or did not happen.	Values: whether to issue praise or blame.	Policy: whether we should or should not take action.
Judiciary or the Courts	Punditry or Eulogy	Legislation and Law

The forensic genre of rhetoric is about matters of fact, what is and is not, what did or did not happen. The forensic corresponds to the past. The site of forensic arguments is typically the judicial system and the courts. Today, the word “forensic” has meaning specifically in a criminal justice context. There, and on “forensic” science television shows, the problem is reconstructing the past, what did or did not happen, who did or did not perpetrate the act.

The epideictic genre of rhetoric is about matters of praise or blame, whether to celebrate or to denounce. It corresponds to the now, the place between past and future. Epideictic speeches are traditionally speeches like eulogies, special-occasion speeches, or toasts; other versions of epideictic could include newspaper opinion-editorials, news-comedy hybrids, or pundit pieces that try to offer ‘spin’ to politicize a person or issue. They can also be speeches, images, and text that highlight a “now” as a particularly urgent or important moment of transition or change.

The deliberative genre of rhetoric is about policy and what should or should not be done. The deliberative corresponds to the future and the course of action that should be taken to attain it. It is traditionally associated with lawmaking and legislature. A speech about the decision to impeach, for instance, is a deliberative one: it is a question of policy and the path that people should pursue.

This rhetorical terminology — ethos, pathos, and logos; forensic, epideictic, and deliberative — is just some of the basic language that is most often associated with the history and discipline of rhetoric. If you take classes in rhetoric elsewhere in the university, you will very likely encounter these foundational terms again. Histories of Rhetorical Theory The last thing I want to talk about is the organization of this course and how it relates to the history of rhetoric. Most of the time, rhetorical theory classes start in Classical Greece, where the term was allegedly invented. They might then move through Rome into Western Europe. Many times, such classes end in the 20th century when speech communication departments began appearing in American universities around 1914. Sometimes these courses also cover the 20th century and the developments of structuralist, post-structuralist, and materialist theories. In Communication Studies, this could also include accounts of the functionalist, constructivist, and critical traditions. This course has a little bit of each of these approaches, and we will talk about each of them as the semester goes on. The first two weeks are devoted to the so-called “origins” of rhetorical theory, its deeply troubling beginnings, and the idea of the “common good.” We start here because this history helps us to define rhetoric and illustrates how problems within a rhetorical culture illuminate similar problems that resonate with us in the early 21st century. We then turn to several foundational 20th-century communication concepts: the symbol, the sign, ideology, and argument. These theories describe two ways of thinking about what communication is and how it occurs. They also account for shared structures of belief and agreed-upon ways of making claims and establishing facts. The following weeks address key commonplaces in rhetorical theory: narratives, visual rhetoric, the rhetorical situation, and the settler-colonial situation. The final two weeks are dedicated to specialized topic areas that reflect some of the topical interests of rhetorical scholars today: secrecy and digital rhetorics. By the end of this course, I hope to have made the following rhetorical ideas clear. First, that speech, words, and language have consistent and long-lasting effects. Second, that rhetoric describes a theory of the speaker and their ability to invent persuasion, a theory of the audience, and the scenes where rhetoric is received or taken up. It is also a theory of meaning-making and representation that gives text a viral life of its own. Finally, we will learn that rhetoric is a tool for ethical world-making that allows us to make more deliberate and inclusive choices about our speech. Additional Resources Ira Allen, “Presentation and Rhetorical Theory” and “Fantasies of Rhetorical Theory“ James, Joy. “Teaching Theory, Talking Community.” Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader, State University of New York Press, 2013, pp. 3-7. Handout: Definitions of Rhetoric

Joy James,

, Albany: State University of New York Press, p.4.

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Chapter 2: The Origins of Rhetorical Theory

This chapter opens with the following questions: When was rhetoric invented, and by whom? What values do we endorse when we begin rhetoric’s history there? How do we decide when academic traditions ‘start’ or ‘begin’?

The first section of the chapter addresses the conventionally-told early history of rhetoric in Ancient Greece. The purpose of starting here is to draw attention to the incorrect assumptions that tend to stick to this story. The second section discusses “the sophists,” who were allegedly some of the first Greek practitioners of rhetoric. It also covers “the encomium,” a kind of sophistic speech that seeks to rescue a person or topic from defamation.

Watching the video clips embedded in the chapters may add to the projected “read time” listed in the headers. Please also note that the audio recording for this chapter covers the same tested content as is presented in the chapter below.

Chapter Recordings Part 1: Why Ancient Greece? (Audio, ~15m) Part 2: Sophistic Knowledge and the Encomium (Audio, ~17m)

Read this Next Donovan, Brian R. “The Encomium of Helen by Gorgias of Leontini.” Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, 1999, https://faculty.bemidjistate.edu/bdonovan/helen.html. Jarratt, Susan, and Rory Ong. “Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender, and Colonial Ideology.” Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition 1995 (1995): 9-24.

Written Assignments Assignment Description for Short Paper 1: The Encomium

Part 1: Why Ancient Greece?

In the last lecture, we introduced the term “rhetoric” by drawing on Greek terminology. Beginning rhetoric’s history in ancient Greece is a common choice, but it is not rhetoric’s only starting point. We could, for instance, “start” our history of rhetoric in 1914 with the invention of “speech communication” in American universities. (That is also how we came to have Communication Studies Departments at universities around the country). Alternatively, we could also begin in China, Egypt, South America, or Mesopotamia. In these places, documented evidence that persuasion was a studied and practiced art existed even before the Greek invention of the word “rhetoric.”2 As Carol L. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley argue, when we think about rhetoric as the art of persuasion, it may take many different forms depending upon the original cultural context we start from.

The classical rhetorical system has built within it an understanding that ethos and pathos are central factors in the success of a text (along with logos), and that ethos and pathos must be appropriately suited for the particular audience. It’s not much of a stretch to look at rhetoric as contextualized culturally, with practices and values and norms differing in different cultural settings. Indeed, in the field of rhetoric and composition, the term alternative rhetorics is being used to describe rhetorical approaches in particular cultures that differ from the dominant paradigm.12

Where we choose to start rhetoric’s history is important for other reasons. Greece is sometimes treated as the “first” democracy or as the birthplace of philosophy. This chapter starts in ancient Greece because I would like to challenge some of those common assumptions. Ancient Greece presents ideas about democracy and philosophy that are very different than those that are common today. Additionally, we will learn how the ancient Greek invention of rhetoric teaches us about communication problems and social inequalities that mirror the distress in our own political culture.

This chapter is also critical of the ancient Greeks because they only recognized the personhood of adult, property-owning men. These people alone were allowed to participate in democratic governance, which means that it was not a truly egalitarian democracy, which presumes the equality of all stakeholders or participants. Ancient Greece generally (and ancient Athens specifically) excluded foreign-born non-citizens, women, and enslaved or indentured persons from participating in the political life of the city-state (or polis). Ultimately, if we start the history of rhetoric with ancient Greece, then we also need to think about how the deep social inequalities of that society are reflections of related problems in the present-day United States.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=33#oembed-1

The Invention of “Rhetoric”

The previous chapter discussed how “rhetoric” combines the words “rhetor” and “techne,” each of which describes a kind of speaker and their technique or art. According to rhetorical scholar Edward Schiappa, Plato invents the word “rhetoric.”2 Apparently, Plato also invented many words in his dialogues that are difficult to locate elsewhere in the Greek historical record, such as “eristic” (or point-scoring debates) and “anti-logic” (or debating both sides of an issue).

But why does Plato invent the word rhetoric? What was his purpose in giving a name to “the art of the speaker”? Who would have counted as a “rhetor” or “speaker” for Plato and his contemporaries? Who did the word “rhetoric” exclude?

One answer is that Plato invents the word rhetoric to describe a kind of teaching that was common when he and his teacher, Socrates, lived. According to Plato, rhetorical teaching was administered by a group of people called “the sophists”. Plato was deeply skeptical of the sophists, and so he used the word rhetoric to describe speech that was dangerous and disingenuous. “The sophists” were teachers of speech and argument who would train “ordinary” citizens in the art of persuasion. The sophists were like early professors, each with their own schools and following of students. Much like today, the sophists advertised themselves as individuals who offered tools for upward mobility. By learning to speak well in public, a person could win court cases or steer public opinion. Plato and Socrates believed these teachers and their rhetorical teachings were dangerous because they promised anyone the ability to make compelling arguments in courts and the assembly without a clear sense of the values that should guide this kind of speech. However, as Plato also argues, the sophists primarily catered to people who could afford them. This means that “ordinary” must be put in scare quotes because the people who benefitted from the sophists’ instruction were in all likelihood wealthy aristocrats.

Plato attacks the sophists a lot. In the dialogue entitled the Sophist, he describes the sophists, or rhetoric teachers, as “paid hunters of rich men” who have expertise in no particular subject but claim expertise in all subjects. In Gorgias, Plato says that rhetoric is not a true art but a “knack” of creating artificial appearances or illusions with speech. That’s also where Plato allegedly invents the word rhetoric, where Plato calls sophists out – primarily the sophist Gorgias – for being opportunistic liars and charlatans.

Rhetoric, according to Plato, is dangerous because it is a way of producing a “fake” reality. He argues that it is not a true art form, but a “knack” or aptitude for creating a misleading illusion. He says that it is less like medicine than “cookery.” If rhetoric were a true art, it would heal the political body of the polis. But because it is just “cookery,” rhetoric often sounds, looks, tastes, and smells good while in fact worsening the health of its listeners.

Tastes good, but is it good for you?

A strange twist in this story is that no sophist ever used the word “rhetoric” to describe their public speaking lessons. It is a word invented by Plato to call the sophist out for unethical teaching. For that reason, it is not clear that Plato is an entirely credible source on the sophists – or rhetoric. Why? Because Plato’s act of pejorative naming used rhetoric to persuade people that the sophists could not be trusted. Although he dismisses rhetoric, his comparison to “cookery” is an example of rhetoric, employing persuasion to make a point. In that way, Plato is more than a philosopher; he is also a kind of sophist. He stands apart because he writes about the sophists as persuasive object lessons about the dangerous effects of rhetoric.

That is one way the Greek context reflects contemporary communication problems: Just as Plato blamed the sophists for the problems of the ancient Athenian polis, bad or disingenuous rhetoric is often blamed for creating “fake news,” conspiracy theories, and disinformation. This book is about reading and practicing rhetoric. It also widens the scope of what rhetoric can be, beyond spoken persuasion. It is about the uses and function of rhetoric as a practical strategy of persuasion, much like the sophists taught. However, it is also about knowing rhetoric when we see it. In the case described above, this means understanding that Plato uses certain persuasive techniques to criticize the sophists, an ancient Greek group of professional persuaders.

Athenian Democracy ≠ Contemporary Democracy

Ancient Greek democracy was also very different from the structure of representation in a present-day democratic republic. Our structures of government do not look at all like Athenian democratic institutions. Before democracy in Athens, the government was based on family ties.2 By 450 BCE, early Athenian leaders Kleisthenes and Ephialtes had instituted two political reforms in Athens, the “hallmarks” of its democracy. However, these reforms also indicate just how different this democracy was relative to a present-day American context.

The lottery reforms of Kleisthenes. Kliesthenes’ reforms eliminated the aristocratic, family-based government and replaced it with a representative democracy based on wealth and land ownership. High offices were entrusted by lot — random selection followed by a vote — only to citizens perceived as fit. In addition to excluding women, enslaved persons, and those who did not own property in the Athenian polis, the government retained policies of ostracism, whereby selected individuals perceived to be too dangerous for the political life of the city-state were exiled for approximately ten years.

The court reforms of Ephialtes. Ephialtes’ court reforms reduced the role of court magistrates and replaced them with common courts where decisions were rendered by juries chosen from the citizenry. The consequence of this second set of reforms (Ephialtes) was that any citizen could bring a suit against any other, and except for sacrilege or homicide, would be decided by an Athenian jury. But, in this new court system, citizens always represented themselves and had to argue their own cases. There were no lawyers in the modern sense. Additionally, juries consisted of 200+ members, and deliberations were considerably more public than they are today.

In the assembly and the courts, the ability to be eloquent was very desirable. That’s “why” rhetoric, the art of the speaker, may have been both desirable and dangerous. Among the many things that the Sophists claimed to teach, public speaking was the most sought after.

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Social Inequalities in Ancient Greece

Perhaps the most prominent parallel between ancient Greece and today are deep social inequalities. This was especially true because the reforms mentioned in the previous section didn’t eliminate status or the privilege of inherited family wealth. Democracy just created a situation whereby these privileges could be neutralized by the influence a speaker might possess. It is no small irony that, because the sophists charged such large fees, mostly the wealthy could afford the instruction. Beyond wealth inequalities in ancient Greece, there is evidence that Athenian culture was not an ideal democracy where all people were equal and “the people” made decisions in common. This is also why Greece holds a mirror up to our own problems: it shows us how problems with our own rhetorical culture may be tied to entrenched social inequalities.

Indenture and Enslavement. One often-unacknowledged aspect of ancient Greek history concerns ancient Greek practices of slavery (doulíā), which is part of rhetorical terms like epideictic. The peoples of ancient Syracuse are, for example, the reputed originators of epideictic or commemorative speech that brings persuasion “before the eyes.” In its earliest recorded form, epideictic was a mode of secret sign-language communication among the enslaved peoples of Syracuse.11 It was necessary for the people of Syracuse to communicate in secret because the tyrannical rulers of Syracuse, Hieron and Gelon, had prohibited people from speaking aloud. Epideictic, in other words, originates as a language made up of physical gestures, but then, much later, curiously appears as a name for an important genre in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

Denial of Citizenship to Women. As rhetorical scholar Jane Sutton notes, patriarchal governance in the ancient polis coerced women into contradictory and repressive roles.5 They were also systematically excluded from the history of philosophy and the teaching of rhetoric. Misogyny was also perpetuated by the belief that women “cannot be controlled or possessed.” Helen of Troy, for instance, was often depicted as a seductress or else denied that she possessed agency at all.7 Greek men also openly appropriated women’s intellectual contributions. In their article on Aspasia the sophist, Jarratt and Ong argue that Plato “insinuated … that women would gain their status primarily from association with well-born men.” He also “chose a form that typically referred to women only … as reproducers of warriors.” Plato also argued that his dialogues are a kind of “maieutics,” or midwifery, which was Aspasia’s own avowed profession. Plato “appropriates reproduction for the male philosopher,” denying Aspasia (and potentially other women sophists) credit by claiming her inventions as his own.

Colonialism and Xenophobia. Ancient Athenians were reportedly suspicious of outside influence and were hostile to foreign-born non-citizens. Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong also describe Ancient greek xenophobia as the rejection of foreigners from the Athenian polis. Foreignness was a way to exclude people from participation in ancient Athens for another reason: some non-citizens were suspected of being spies. For example, Aristotle, who was not born in Athens, fled into exile to the isle of Lesbos because he was suspected to be a Macedonian spy. This was also the case with the sophists, who most often taught outside of the city limits.

Foreigners had no more than a distant relationship to any country because they were wanderers … Athenians … were situated on the land that had created them.”2

One reason why we should be skeptical of the idea that ancient Athens was an “ideal” democracy was that there is significant evidence that shows that the members of its society were far from “equals.” As is also true in the contemporary United States, ancient Athens had deep problems related to inclusion. Only citizens — that is, wealthy, land-owning men — had the ability to participate in government. Often, those who did not have that status had their ideas and labor stolen from them. It was not an ideal democracy because it privileged those who had already accumulated wealth, power, and property.

Ultimately, we shouldn’t believe that Athens was the city-state (or polis) in Greece that presents an “ideal” model of democracy because philosophers literally took ideas from people who had lesser status. All people who lived in the polis were not equals. Instead, Greek culture embraced regressive ideas about who did not count as a ‘person’ based on status, gender, land, and ownership.

Part 2: Sophistic Knowledge and the Encomium

This section goes into greater detail about the sophists. Who were they? What did they teach? What kinds of persuasion are they famous for?

The sophists emerged in Ancient Greece as teachers of general wisdom and were most valued because of their ability to teach public speaking. They emerged out of a culture of competition and valued poetry as a key way to keep a common record of important historical events.

Before the sophists, poets like Pindar had stood at the sidelines of athletic contests exalting the sons of aristocrats and praising heroic deeds and ideals.2 The poet was an observer to such competitions. However, the Sophists, like other athletes, musicians, and dramatists in their era, thought of themselves as competitors. They sought to achieve victories by overpowering adversaries with their words.6 With this change from observation to participation in place, to be an orator meant both to accept and issue symbolic challenges.8 It also meant to engage in the production and critique of rhetoric, a kind of verbal combat in which no point of view remained unopposed for long. It meant that a prevalent argument was prevalent not because of its historical status or its compelling logic but because it had been tested by and withstood the attacks of the opposing side(s). Importantly, one of the criticisms of the sophists is that a “both sides” style of teaching is not a good way to impart virtue or ethics to students or listeners.

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The sophists also lived in an oral culture and at a time of emergent literate culture.6 Oral cultures refer to cultures that spread knowledge primarily by way of the spoken word and whose techniques of communication and memory are centered upon the delivering of speeches used for (for instance) trials, commemoration, legislation, and the recording of history.

(1) Orality describes a mode of information transmission that primarily occurs through speech. It has the following characteristics:

Orality is Low-fidelity. This means that information is passed around like a game of “telephone.” As information is passed around from person to person, the transmitted knowledge is not identical to the source.

Orality is a means of Information Storage and Transmission: Mnemonic devices, meter, and rhyme are ways of recording and remembering information. Poetry is not just a way of making speech eloquent; it was a functional way of ensuring that the past carried forward into the future.

Orality is a Social Function of Memory: telling history is an entertainment event, and public speaking is a shared public ritual. Ancient Greek plays, like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone, had a similar function of entertainment and were consistently organized around the “chorus,” an audience to the play that was also a participant to the play, which would act as a kind of moral conscience, spelling out the ‘lesson’ for the attending audience.

(2) Literacy describes a mode of information transmission that primarily occurs through writing. It has the following characteristics:

Literacy is High-Fidelity. This means that the transmission of knowledge became significantly more consistent from one telling to another because literacy enables the copying of one text repeatedly. For example, Homeric epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey begin in an oral culture, where they were much more variable, changing between different tellings. With literate culture, these stories became “rigidified” in form and content and more consistent in their different ‘parts.’

Literacy makes possible the inscription of laws: writing allows for the codification of a common code that is now generally enforceable. It also makes mercantile relationships and the inscription of fixed laws possible using ledgers and established legal codes.

Literacy increases social emphasis upon logos or ‘the word’ as a fixed and unchanging object: “logos” literally means both ‘the word’ and ‘reasoning,’ which writing allows audiences to inspect, review and consider over a longer stretch of time than just the performance. When Socrates writes about literacy in the Phaedrus, he is critical of it because it means that words suddenly have a life beyond their authors and that the “dead letter” may be picked up and examined by people who have no understanding of the word and how it is tailored to the soul of the listener. This may also be related to the fact that the sophists distributed handbooks of their teachings, meaning that any literate person might be able to make strong arguments without necessarily considering the weight or consequences of their arguments. Plato also argues against writing in general because it makes memory unnecessary; it will install “forgetting,” he says, because it makes the soul lazy, reducing its need for recollection. Given that we are at the beginning of a digital era ourselves, you might be able to think of similar criticism about “millennial” or “zoomer” online culture today.

Resemblance: The Sophist’s Epistemology

The word “epistemology” refers to “the study of knowledge.” Split into its Greek roots, epistemology combines episteme (knowledge) + logos (reason or logic). When we talk about epistemology today, it most often means “how we know what we know.” The scientific method is an example of epistemology: it is a way of knowing what we know about the surrounding natural world. When we say “the sophist’s epistemology,” we are asking the following question: what did the sophists know, and how did they know it?

Generally speaking, the ancient Greeks gathered knowledge in a very different way from how we think of it today. They relied on a foundational concept of resemblance, in which a fundamental association between dissimilar objects revealed something true about the world.4 One example is how the ancient Greeks associated walnuts with healing the human head. The walnut resembles the brain with a hard exterior and a folded interior and resembles the cerebrum’s appearance. For the sophists, the visual resemblance between objects in the natural world dictated an important or essential connection between them.

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Another example of resemblance is how the ancient Greeks associated the lives of animals, humans, and the Gods. The actions of humans mirrored actions that occurred among the gods; other times, animals displayed characteristics that resembled the characteristics of men. The quality of metis, or cunning intelligence, was a kind of knowledge gotten from resemblance.4 Metis was a trait displayed by animals like octopi and foxes, who were capable of making traps and laying in hiding until the right moment. That was metis: an ability to look beyond the situation or envision the opportune moment before it happened. But a person, animal, or god could also use their metis to blend into the background or wait until just the right moment arrived. Among the gods, metis allowed the gods always to be outmaneuvering one another, inventing strategies to get the best of their opponents.

As rhetoric, metis allowed people to seize the right moment through the gift of foresight. As important as what to say was when to say it and to anticipate the moment at which speech was both appropriate and effective. This foresight might dictate when to speak or when not to speak, disguising oneself with words like an octopus changes their appearance. This intelligent foresight amounts to “knowledge” in Greek thought because it was possessed by animals, humans, and the gods. The way these worlds mirror one another offers an example of how the Greeks thought in deeply rhetorical terms, namely, by transforming resemblances into apparent knowledge of the world.

Plato’s definition of rhetoric in Gorgias2 is an object lesson in Greek resemblance. To define what rhetoric is, Plato has use resemblances. In other words, he has to compare the art of rhetoric to other arts that either are — or are not — similar to it. According to Plato, there are four “true” arts of bodily health and four “lesser” arts considered to be their counterfeit reflections. Rhetoric is one of the allegedly “lesser” arts. All of the arts “resemble” one another to the extent that they improve health or create a false impression of health. The different categories also reflect each other because in each case, Plato’s argument builds from arts that are for the individual body to arts that are for a collective body-politic:

Gymnastics, which improves the health of the (individual) body.

Medicine, which improves health by rehabilitating the (individual) body.

Legislation, which improves the health of the (collective) body-politic.

Justice, which improves health by rehabilitating the (collective) body-politic.

The lesser arts are about appearances rather than truth. He calls rhetoric a ‘knack,’ not even a true art, and states that it “flatters” and “impersonates” the art of justice. These lesser arts give the human body and the body-politic what it desires, but not what it needs to survive.

Cosmetics, which creates the illusion of (individual) bodily health.

Cookery, which makes food to (individual) taste, but not for rehabilitation.

Sophistry, which creates the illusion of legislative competence for the (collective) body-politic.

Rhetoric, which creates the illusion of serving justice for the (collective) body-politic.

These four arts are the mirror image of the first four. They resemble each other because they are all “corrupt” in related ways. Plato ends his criticism by referencing the resemblance between “cookery” and “rhetoric”: Why should we mistrust the sophist? “What I say rhetoric is, then – you’ve heard it. It corresponds to cookery, doing in the soul what cookery does in the body.” The reason to dismiss rhetoric is that it resembles cookery: it tastes good but won’t make you well.

The sophists also developed their own methods for knowledge-making through what we would call a “switch-sides” debate. According to the sophist Protagoras, one could only truly know an argument if they could argue both sides of the case.2 For that reason, the sophistic instruction called the dissoi logoi, or “opposed reason,” is typically attributed to Protagoras. The dissoi logoi claims the ability to “make the weaker argument [into] the stronger [one]” and is grounded in the presumption of humankind’s total ignorance of what happens in the celestial or heavenly realm. According to Protagoras, “one cannot know the gods.” The examples provided in the dissoi logoi include “the good and the bad,” asking questions like “are they the same or not?” and “on proper and shameful taste,” asking the question, “can the same thing be [in good taste] and [also] shameful?” This attention to “both-side-ism” is also one way that the Greek context strongly resembles our own; it is one of the reasons that the philosopher Plato provides for strongly disliking the sophists and for his belief that they have nothing to offer except for lies and illusions.

The Encomium of Helen

The Encomium of Helen, written by the sophist Gorgias, offers one way to understand the sophists’ way of understanding rhetoric to create or constitute social reality.6 Sometimes, the sophists’ creation of a shared fantasy is described as a “deception” because the speaker misleads the audience into believing false information. Other scholars have claimed that what the sophists did was not “deception,” but rather that they “[placed] all possible representations of reality on equal epistemological footing,” creating the opportunity to compare different kinds of knowledge.8

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Why did it ever occur to Gorgias that Helen was in need of a speech in which she would be “rescued”? As described in the video above, this belief stemmed from the common and misogynistic belief among the ancient Greeks that Helen had caused the Trojan war. Many attributed the start of the war specifically to the fact that Helen, wife to Menelaus, had been taken by Paris of Troy immediately after the Trojans and Greeks had signed a peace treaty. It is a suspicious rumor for many reasons. When the Greeks went to war, in other words, it was not the war-making Menelaus – or even Helen’s kidnapper, Paris — who are most often held responsible. Instead, the Greeks conferred blame on the kidnapped Helen. The encomium of Helen is the sophist Gorgias’s spoken challenge to this common story. He writes the following:

“either by will of fate and decision of the gods and vote of Necessity did she [Helen] do what she did,

or by force reduced

or by words seduced

or by love possessed.”

In other words, Helen “left” Greece because the gods made it so, because she was forced to, because Paris seduced her, or because the madness of love possessed her. Of course, if the Encomium of Helen “rescues” Helen from this blame, it’s important to note that it does so in a way that is itself deeply misogynistic because it reduces her freedom or agency. By Gorgias’ account, Helen is passive and cannot assume responsibility for a path she could not have chosen. Helen is redeemed, in his eyes, because she can be made a non-agent; she cannot be responsible for her actions because her only option was to acquiesce to more powerful forces.

According to Gorgias’s reasoning, if the speech can rescue Helen, it also illustrates how speech (and rhetoric) can create a shared social reality, moving people toward a new common sense.

Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft. There are have been discovered two arts of witchcraft and magic: one consists of errors of soul and the other of deceptions of opinion. All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument.

To understand that persuasion, when added to speech, is wont also to impress the soul as it wishes, one must study: first, the words of astronomers who, substituting opinion for opinion, taking away one but creating another, make what is incredible and unclear seem true to the eyes of opinion; then, second, logically necessary debates in which a single speech, written with art but not spoken with truth, bends a great crowd and persuades, and third, the verbal disputes of philosophers in which the swiftness of thought is also shown making the belief in an opinion subject to easy change. The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.

The final segments of the speech unify the audience with Helen by drawing a parallel between their supposed intoxication with Gorgias’ speech. ‘Being persuaded by speech’ is made ‘unfortunate,’ a decision imposed rather than chosen. If persuaded by Gorgias’ own claim to non-truth, the audience must accede to the claim that Helen herself was constructed falsely, or misconstrued, in Homer’s familiar narrative.

Additional Resources Bender, John, and David E. Wellbery. “Rhetoricality: On the modernist return of rhetoric.” The ends of rhetoric: History, theory, practice 27 (1990). Farenga, Vincent. “Periphrasis on the Origin of Rhetoric.” MLN 94.5 (1979): 1033-1055. Flores, Lisa A. “Between abundance and marginalization: The imperative of racial rhetorical criticism.” Review of Communication 16.1 (2016): 4-24. Foley, Megan. “Peri Ti?: Interrogating Rhetoric’s Domain.” Philosophy rhetoric 46.2 (2013): 241-246. Jarratt, Susan, and Rory Ong. “Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender, and Colonial Ideology.” Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition 1995 (1995): 9-24. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense.” Truth: Engagements across philosophical traditions (2005): 14-25. Schiappa, Edward. “Rhêtorikê: What’s in a name? Toward a revised history of early Greek rhetorical theory.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78.1 (1992): 1-15.

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Chapter 3: Propaganda and the Common Good

This chapter addresses propagandistic persuasion and ideas related to civic virtue. The first section covers deception, a distant Greek relative to the concept of propaganda, as well as how Greek history has been used as a destructive form of propaganda in American history. The second section addresses how rhetoric was thought to be opposed to common well-being (or civic virtue) as well as how certain ideas related to civic virtue became a part of early theories of rhetoric.

Watching the video clips embedded in the chapters may add to the projected “read time” listed in the headers. Please also note that the audio recording for this chapter covers the same tested content as is presented in the chapter below.

Chapter Recordings Part 1: The Propaganda of History (Audio, ~20m) Part 2: The Common and the Good (Audio, ~20m)

Read this Next Mirhady, David C., and Yun Lee Too. “Against the Sophists.” Isocrates I. Vol. 4. University of Texas Press, 2000, pp. 61-66. Critchley, Simon. Tragedy,the Greeks, and Us. Vintage, 2020.

Part 1: The Propaganda of History

The phrase “The Propaganda of History” is the title of a chapter of W.E.B Dubois’s Black Reconstruction in America. As Dubois explains, it is important to recount history truthfully and as fully as possible. This is because history, told untruthfully, may be put in service of dangerous beliefs, naïve idealism, and the idea that our history is continuous with only positive developments. These, Dubois says, are pitfalls of telling history “unscientifically” or inaccurately.

If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation. If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish. It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is ‘lies agreed upon’; and to point out the danger in such misinformation. It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action. Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?2

Ancient Greek Storytelling as “Deception”

One aspect of Ancient Greek history, especially as told by the Ancient Greeks, is that it blurs the line between fiction and what Dubois would call the “scientific” account of past events, which renders the with past clear and concrete evidence. With the grand, epic poems, such as those commemorating the Trojan War, details might change from speaker to speaker while retaining the pivotal moments: Helen, the horse, Achilles.

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See also: “Diary of the guy who drove the big horse back from Troy,” The New Yorker, August 2021

As Simon Critchley, author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, explains, the knowledge that such stories communicated was more critical than a faithful retelling. That’s why Critchley says that tragedy is an invention and an institution; it served a function then that we cannot relate to today insofar as it was a way to create shared stories and community. That’s also why he says it’s anachronistic and self-consciously fictional; it is out-of-sequence, and the details never seem to stay the same. Especially consistent in Greek tellings of history and poetry were tragic knowledge and the ruse of deception. According to Gorgias, author of Helen’s Encomium, tragedy creates “a deception in which the deceiver is more honest than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the non-deceived.” Today, we would consider that position categorically immoral, in part because it is possible to have a truthful rendering of history. Often, the tragedy of history surpasses the tragedy of fictional events. But, among the Greeks, history was self-evidently a fiction or propaganda: an engaging story designed to teach a lesson.

When I say that the Ancient Greeks thought of history as tragedy and a story that teaches a lesson, it also tells us something about the play Oedipus Rex, which Critchley also describes and is sometimes synonymous with “Greek tragedy.”

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An animated 11-minute retelling of the plot of Oedipus Rex. TW: Graphic Themes, Violence, Incest

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The author of “The Fault in Our Stars” discusses Oedipus Rex. 14 minutes.

The point of Oedipus Rex is that the audience is always “in” on the information that fate will reveal to the main character, namely Oedipus’s family of origin. In effect, when Oedipus learns his last name he also discovers the crimes he has committed against his own family. When Critchley describes how Oedipus “doesn’t hear what is said to him and doesn’t see what is in front of his eyes,” it is because the audience is there, hearing and seeing him ignore a lesson that is very obvious to everyone else who is watching the play.

The point of tragedy is the lesson: to witness how a person may go through life with the truth in front of them, unable to see it. For the audience, the point is to learn how to rid ourselves of Oedipus’s kind of stunted perception. By allowing ourselves to be “deceived” – suspending disbelief or pretending as if the fictional actions on stage were real – tragedy allows us to learn something about ourselves. By watching tragic knowledge dawn on a fictional someone else, the audience becomes more able to anticipate moments when tragic knowledge dawns upon them, to change how they act, and to handle such moments with greater courage.

Ultimately, that is what Critchley and Gorgias mean when they celebrate rhetoric as “a deception in which the deceiver is more honest than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the non-deceived.” By watching the fictional story unfold, the audience may learn something by pretending that the represented events really happened.

Classical Greece as Propaganda about Democracy

I want to turn to two examples of how Ancient Greek history can be – and has been – used more literally as propaganda in the contemporary sense. A first example is classical iconography and architecture supporting a white telling of history and racist institutions. As Carl J. Richard explains:

“when the history and imagery of ancient Athens finally achieved popularity in the United States, that popularity, at least in the South, was based partly on its social inequalities.”2

In other words, in the United States, classical Greece has offered a popular myth that supported American racism. Comparing the United States to ancient Greece showed how deep social inequalities had always coexisted with democracy; not because the Greeks had finally overcome these problems. Affluent white Americans, seeking to emulate the Greeks, identified fully with this vision of the past and present.

For example, when Greek history, culture, and architecture became a mainstay in the pre-Reconstruction American South, “most abolitionists responded by arguing that slavery had been the greatest flaw of Athens and the other classical republics.” There is, in fact, a direct connection between how “the advocates of slavery viewed Athens as an ideal society” and the present-day glorification of warlike Greek city-states like Sparta. Sarah E. Bond writes that ancient Greek culture has, even in recent years, been a source of deeply coded and racist beliefs about, for instance, eugenics and immigration policy:

Not all modern depictions are accurate illustrations of Sparta, however. While the movie 300 focuses on the fight for Greek liberty in the conflict with Persia in the early 5th century BCE, it also neglects to tell the audience that Sparta also took liberty from others. Sparta was a slave society dependent on unfree workers, called helots, who were tied to the land to work the fields. They were not chattel slaves (i.e. they were not the property of the Spartans), but were still unable to leave or to participate as citizens. The use and abuse of helots is what allowed Spartan citizens the time to train — at least until 371 BCE, when Sparta was defeated by Thebes at the Battle of Leuktra.2

Bond highlights the film 300 as an especially problematic source of beliefs regarding the glorification of Greeks’ warlike culture. Like the adoption of Greek iconography in the pre-Reconstruction American South, the infatuation with Sparta may transmit a desire for violence. As Bond argues, adopting an image of oneself or the nation as the defensive and warlike “Spartan” may reflect a greater national obsession with racist or xenophobic violence. Platonic Propaganda: The Allegory of the Cave A final way that Ancient Greece intersects with familiar ideas related to “propaganda” is Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave,” presented in Book VII of the Republic. Although he does not speak explicitly about rhetoric or the sophists in this passage, he does say that the people trapped in the cave are “no different from us.” Although “us” is addressed to himself and his companion, Glaucon, it is reason enough to reflect on how or whether the Allegory remains a relevant story today. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=70#oembed-4 Imagine people living in a cavernous cell down under the ground; at the far end of the cave, a long way of, there’s an entrance open to the outside world. They’ve been there since childhood, with their legs and necks tied up in a way which keeps them in one place and allows them to look only straight ahead, but not to turn their heads. There’s firelight burning a long way further up the cave behind them, and up the slope between the fire and the prisoners there’s a road, beside which you should imagine a low wall has been built – like the partition conjurors place between themselves and their audience and above which they show their tricks. Imagine also that there are people on the other side of this wall who are carrying all sorts of artefacts. These artefacts, human statuettes, and animal models carved in stone and wood and all kinds of materials stick out over the wall; and as you’d expect, some of the people talk as they carry these objects along, while others are silent. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” explores the nature of knowledge and its proper objects. The world we perceive through the senses, Socrates argues, is illusory and deceptive because it depends on a realm of separately existing Forms organized beneath the Form of Good. Forms are the ideal or highest possible organization of an object. They are not accessible through the senses but only through rigorous philosophical discussion and mathematical reasoning. Measuring, counting, and weighing all bring us closer to the realm of Forms than poetry. All art can only mimic or create inferior representations of the true Forms. Rhetoric especially can only lead further away from the truth into a world of illusion and deception. As a general explanation for how “deception” and “illusion” are still basic functions of rhetoric, how else might we update the allegory of the cave for our present moment? Part 2: The Common and the Good If there are valuable ideas drawn from Ancient Greek thinking about rhetoric, one place to look would be the terms “common” and “good.” Although we would be hard-pressed to translate the terms topos, or ‘commonplace,’ and eudaimonia, or ‘flourishing’ as “common good,” each of these roots teaches us something about the art of speaking well and the kinds of goals that this art may have. Topos refers to a “commonplace,” a site or location, most often invoked in speech, that is cited to be recognizable to a large audience. “Helen of Troy” would have been commonplace in ancient Athens because audiences would have known who this person was when a speaker would bring them up. Topoi are essential to rhetoric. Without some shared sense of what the speaker and audience are discussing, communication cannot happen. Communication between a speaker and an audience relies on translating experience. The speaker has to tell the audience that they know and understand their experience to be credible or worthy of attention. The audience has to recognize some aspect of their own experience in what the speaker is saying. That site of mutual recognition, the place of commonality, is a topos. The plural of topos is topoi. Topoi allow us to compose writing and imagine speeches because they put us in the frame of mind where we have to consider what is similar between us and our imagined audience. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=70#oembed-5 A five minute description of eudaimonia and ancient Greek philosophical debates over it. Eudaimonia refers to “flourishing” and is sometimes translated as “the good life” or “happiness” as a principle of morality. The Greek term “eudaimon” is composed of two parts: “eu” means “well,” and “daimon” means “divinity” or “spirit.” Therefore, to be eudaimon is to live in a way that is well-favored by a god. But Aristotle never calls attention to this etymology in his ethical writings, and it seems to have little influence on his thinking. It means the attainment of one’s highest self and an orientation toward the preservation of life. For Aristotle, Eudaimonia is the greatest end for man collectively and individually. One task of this class is how to construct, create, and imagine better pro-social rhetorics or better practices of communication that could stand in place of those we are trying to criticize or place in context. That is the function and purpose of drawing attention to the words topos and eudaimonia, which allow us to think about what kinds of commonplaces we must draw upon in our political rhetoric today; and how that rhetoric must be oriented toward human flourishing, in the sense of confronting social problems and charting a better way. Why was Isocrates “Against the Sophists”? Let’s turn now to Athenian philosopher Isocrates. A first and frequent question is whether Isocrates is the same person as Socrates. The answer is no. Socrates was Plato’s teacher and is featured as the main character in Plato’s dialogues. Isocrates was a teacher of rhetoric at about the same time that Aristotle was a figure in Athenian life. Isocrates taught speech but did so in a way that he designed to support the Athenian city-state. He is significant because his idea of “the common good” was service to the state and its institutions. Classical Rhetoric Timeline by Bridie McGreavy Isocrates was born in Athens in 436 and remained there until his death at the age of 97. His career spans Plato’s lifetime, the great Athenian orators of the late fifth century, and most of the fourth century. When Aristotle opened his school at the Lyceum, he found himself in competition with Isocrates for the best minds of the Athenian youth, and there is evidence that he was acutely aware of that fact. Isocrates’ works “were clearly intended to provide a model of eloquence he held to be so crucial in the conduct of public affairs. More than that, they were the vehicles for his notion of the true “philosophy,” in which wisdom in civic affairs emphasizing moral responsibility and equated with mastery of rhetorical technique. Like Protagoras and Gorgias, Isocrates believed that human knowledge is limited. In every case, knowing the right course of action is “one of the impossibilities of life” (Against the Sophists 2). He also says, “it is not in the nature of man to attain exact knowledge (episteme) by which, having it, we can discern clearly what we should do or say. … [instead], those who are wise are those who are able by [changing public] opinion (doxa) to hit upon what is, for the most part, the best course of action.” For Isocrates, rhetoric is a means to heal and nourish the collective. Sophistic rhetoric promised social mobility in the polis because it gave individuals the ability to ‘make it’ by speaking well in public. Isocrates was very familiar with this. Maybe his most famous writing is the Antidosis, a word for a legal procedure that results in an exchange of property. If a citizen accepted the legal challenge of antidosis, the wealth of the loser would be transferred to the winner. Another Athenian, Megacleides, attacked Isocrates’s character by raising some doubt about his teaching. Isocrates then wrote the Antidosis in response. It was his way of saying, “try and see what happens.” One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=70#oembed-6 Isocrates also believed that the art of oratory was a finished project — because the sophists had figured that much out. Isocrates’s school had a term of study lasting three to four years. According to Isocrates, technical instruction should be supplemented by the speaker’s own good moral character and involvement in public affairs, as would be fitting for the good citizen who possesses civic virtue (arete). This was a key charge against the sophists: they are irresponsible and bad teachers who swindle their students into knowing a handful of tricks. The sophist, by his account, teaches rhetoric “as simply as they would teach the letters of the alphabet, not having taken the trouble to examine the nature of each kind of knowledge.” In Isocrates’s words: “To obtain a knowledge of the elements out of which we make and compose all discourses is not so very difficult if anyone entrusts himself, not to those who make rash promises, but to those who have some knowledge of these things. But to choose from these elements those which should be employed for each subject, to join them together, to arrange them properly, and also, not to miss what the occasion demands but appropriately to adorn the whole speech with striking thoughts and melodious phrase — these things require much study and are the task of a vigorous and imaginative mind.” But little by little, as the Athenian empire began to crumble, Athens and its rhetoric were turning toward tyranny. When we get to Isocrates’s historical moment, we should imagine an Athens yearning for days past. It is where education is born and is immediately merged with the interests of the city-state. Isocrates has a kind of politics that wants to push the state back on track and educates the people who will allow that kind of policy to come to life. On the other hand, Plato believes that it will take more than the most influential members of the polis to change the city-state’s government. Until many people see the same sort of Truth, there can be no state. The plans that Plato and Isocrates bring were, therefore, responses to the gloomy circumstances facing Athens. There is some dialogue between the two, but they are both after the same thing: drastic reform. Aristotle, Pathos, and the Golden Mean The last thing I want to talk about in this recording is the concept of pathos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Aristotle’s concepts of “the good” and “flourishing” usually depend upon striking a balance or harmony between extremes. This is the basis both for Aristotle’s system of virtue ethics and his rhetorical theory of pathos, which appears in his book, the Rhetoric. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is an important source for many definitions of rhetoric that are still in use today. He defines rhetoric as “the counterpart of dialectic,” or an art that supports the philosophical testing and creation of true knowledge. By his account, rhetoric is both an art of persuasion and a mode of observation. By defining rhetoric as “the faculty of observing/the available means of persuasion/in any given situation,” Aristotle explains that rhetoric deals with changing conditions of public influence and that it deals with common knowledge, with the way a speaker draws upon topoi or commonplaces, to both observe and create compelling speech. The Rhetoric offers a systematic explanation of what rhetoric is and how a rhetor may use it. For that reason, it reads a bit like a VCR manual, a set of instructions for an ancient machine. In Rhetoric, we encounter the terms logos, pathos, and ethos – in that order. Logos, which describes the speaker’s choice of “words,” their reasoning, argument, and arrangement, is by far the most privileged term in Aristotle’s work. Historically, it has received the greatest share of attention. In this section, Aristotle declares that logical forms of argument, including the syllogism and the enthymeme, have not been nearly considered enough. These “forms” have been important for the study of, for instance, mathematical and symbolic logic, as well as modern forms of debate and argumentation. The topic of pathos is a bit different. This “chapter” of the rhetoric has separate sections for distinct emotional pairings like anger and mildness. Pathos is usually understood as the “appeal to emotion,” which creates the impression that a speaker is trying to generate a specific feeling in an audience, for instance, to make them sad or make them laugh. But that is not the same thing as pathos. The object of rhetoric is to produce judgment in the hearers. For that purpose, the ‘demonstration’ of logos, or reason, alone is insufficient to produce conviction. The speaker must produce within the judge a particular frame of mind receptive to the judgment. Pathos, therefore, refers to the disposition of hearers concerning judgments that cause them pleasure or pain. “For Aristotle, the principles that govern emotional excitation can be examined completely apart from the contexts in which real orators had produced specific passions.” Pathos gives the speaker the job of knowing the extremes of their audience’s emotions. Knowing where their audience already is, pathos is the waxing and waning of these emotions, with well-known extremes. For instance, anger and mildness mean that the speaker’s ability to observe may allow them to make an angry audience get angrier. Alternatively, the speaker may seek to cool their hot tempers. Mildness is “the quieting and appeasing of anger.” The admission that one is worthy of punishment tends to defuse anger, since “we punish more severely those who contradict us and deny their offense, but cease to be angry with those who admit that they are justly punished. Aristotle writes, “to deny what is evident is disrespect, and disrespect is slight and contempt.” This movement between the ‘extremes’ makes pathos resemble Aristotle’s notion of virtue ethics. This concept, sometimes also casually referred to as “the golden mean,” similarly seeks a point of balance between two “extremes” of behavior as the correct or most virtuous course of action. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=70#oembed-7 Ultimately, Aristotle helps us understand steering the emotions requires a unique skill set because speech allows the speaker to move collective emotions. Speeches do not just affect us individually; they can urge a group of people to action. When contemporary scholars of rhetoric Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites theorize public emotion, they make similar assumptions. A public, like a person, can experience emotions, but these emotions support that group or collective in ways that are different from individual wellbeing. For the public, emotions may foster participation, identification with leaders or the nation and calls for more-or-less inclusive norms of citizenship. Like Aristotle, however, they set public emotion apart from rationalization, maintaining the traditional separation of logos and pathos. Introducing Rhetoric in the 20th Century Between 1914 and 1917, Rhetoric departments were new in the United States. These departments were unique from other disciplines because they studied speech instead of a literary canon, and sought to define themselves apart from English departments. The argument that the early students of rhetoric made in the United States was that the study of speeches deserved to be considered apart from the study of literature. Literature might impart social values, but speeches were a reflection of the values of the speaker. At the very least, speech constituted a very specific kind of literature that required its own independent consideration. Members of the early “Cornell School” of rhetoric included James Wichelns, Alexander Drummond, Harry Kaplan, Evertt Lee Hunt, to name just a few. Over time, Rhetoric and Speech Communication departments spread across the United States, primarily housed in major public universities. These departments were among the first to study rhetoric as communication. Even today public speaking courses are predominantly housed within Communication Studies departments in public universities around the country. Graduates of the Cornell department carried speech communication to doctoral institutions and small colleges across the country. One prominent example of the kind of criticism that these early departments performed is Herbert Wichelns’ “The Literary Criticism of Oratory,” an essay that has been widely reprinted and is clearly one of the starting points for the 20th-century rhetorical criticism. This essay argued that classifying oratory and other modes of public persuasive discourse as literature was to completely miss the point. Instead, these speeches reflected the political priorities of the time and reflected a unique kind of invention on the part of the speaker. To analyze these speeches, many early speech communication professors drew upon Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which they argued contained a set of principles by which effective and persuasive speech could take place. Speeches either did or did not conform to Aristotelian principles, and rhetorical criticism consisted in explaining how these persuasive concepts were brought to life by a speaker. This framework of analysis was called neo-Aristotelianism Scholars like Wichelns also argued that speech and oratory deserved consideration as a unique subject of study. According to Wichelns, oratory was also concerned which own says with permanent values and ideas that endure beyond the historical moment. Even in the present, the endurance of these values is evident because speeches are still intelligible to present-day audiences. Writing some time after Wichelns was Ernest Wrage. His focus was significantly more on the history of speeches and telling a history of ideas using speech as the primary evidence. According to Wrage, the study of speeches should not be focused on just the techniques of persuasion or dissecting a speech for its basic Aristotelian elements, but telling history with a rhetorical sensibility, drawing upon individual speeches in chronological sequence. Rhetorical criticism is specifically the investigation that uncovers a common public attitude. Wrage is one of the first who organizes American political speeches according to genre, theme, and debates. Additional Resources Mirhady, David C., and Yun Lee Too. “Against the Sophists.” Isocrates I. Vol. 4. University of Texas Press, 2000, pp. 61-66. Critchley, Simon. Tragedy, the Greeks, and us. Vintage, 2020. Du Bois, W. E. B., and ProQuest. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 714. Richard, Carl J. The Golden Age of the Classics in America Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Bond, Sarah E. "This Is Not Sparta: Why the Modern Romance With Sparta Is a Bad One," Eidolon Journal May 7, 2018.

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Chapter 4: The Symbol

A collection of symbols.

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This chapter covers the concept of the symbol. The first portion of this chapter defines the symbol and presents several philosophies of language developed in the 20th century by Kenneth Burke, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Important concepts from these philosophies/philosophers include identification, the “I” and the “me,” and the icon, index, and symbol. The second part of this chapter addresses Burke’s framework of “Rhetoric as Symbolic Action,” discussing the terministic screen, the dramatistic pentad, and demagoguery.

Please note that some of the written materials (specifically, the section on icon, index, and symbol) presented in this chapter do not appear in the same order as in the official recording for the class. Also included in the textbook below (but not in the recordings) are written descriptions and YouTube videos about early 20th-century American propagandists. This added material is useful context for symbols as 20th-century American propaganda, but it also provides more detail than is presented in the recordings.

Watching the video clips embedded in the chapters may add to the projected “read time” listed in the headers. Please also note that the audio recording for this chapter covers the same tested content as is presented in the chapter below.

Chapter Recordings Part 1: What are Symbols? (Video, ~40m) Part 2: Rhetoric as Symbolic Action (Video, ~35m)

Read this Next Burke, Kenneth. “Definition of Man.” The Hudson Review, vol. 16, no. 4, Hudson Review, Inc, 1963, pp. 491–514. Solomon, Martha. “The rhetoric of dehumanization: An analysis of medical reports of the Tuskegee syphilis project.” Western journal of speech communication 49.4 (1985): 233-247.

Part 1: What are Symbols?

The concept of “the symbol” comes from an ancient Greek word, “symbolon,” which is the union of the words “thrown” and “together.” The ancient use of the word “symbol” had an important social function: they were objects that represented a pact, treaty, or agreement between people and the state. Receiving a “symbolon” was more than receiving a gift or a token: they indicated the presence of a specific relationship between an individual and an institution. This chapter continues this line of reasoning by considering the kinds of relationships created by prominent symbols in the 20th century. This section covers the concept of identification, different 20th-century theories of the symbol, and continues an ongoing discussion about dangerous propaganda from the previous chapter.

Kenneth Burke and Identification through Rhetoric

Between 1939 and 1945, Kenneth Burke’s theories of identification and symbolic action changed the study of rhetoric by bringing new attention to the powerful effects of speech. Rhetoric and rhetoricians adopt a new framework that considers rhetoric to be a mode of symbolic action, in which speech is primarily understood to unify and divide a mass public. Whereas rhetorical scholarship had previously concerned itself with effective persuasion, Burke introduces the idea of identification. As persuasion, rhetoric happens in or as a speech and relies upon the speaker’s conscious choices, their historical circumstances, and the timeliness of the moment. As identification, rhetoric is about influence. It concerns communicating a meaning that reflects something that the audience shares with the speaker and other listeners.

In other words, identification is a way of talking about rhetoric as collectivizing, or as creating the audiences that it addresses. It is about bringing people together using symbols. When we identify with or around a symbol, we may come to share a similar system of values, assessment of social hierarchy, and rules of communication. The symbol is how we make not just any meaning but a shared meaning that we all hold in common. A related concept is consubstantiality, or the creation of sameness or likeness between different members of a group. Identification is not just about persuading with the right words. It encourages us to think about groups coming together around a symbol, how it moves the group, and how this symbol comes to mean something similar for everyone within it.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=76#oembed-1

X Gonzalez’s March 24, 2018 Speech at the “March for Our Lives” Rally. An Example of Identification.

The speech above offers a good example of identification. The silence that spans the majority of the recording symbolizes the school shooting that X Gonzalez experienced for the gathered audience. The silence in this speech creates shared meaning with which this audience may identify. Identification does not happen all at once, however. Gonzalez begins the speech with the following statement:

Six minutes and about twenty seconds. In a little over six minutes, seventeen of our friends were taken from us, fifteen were injured and everyone, absolutely everyone in the Douglas community was forever altered. Everyone who was there understands. Everyone who has been touched by the cold grip of gun violence understands. For us, long, tearful, chaotic hours in the scorching afternoon sun were spent not knowing. No one understood the extent of what had happened. No one could believe that there were bodies in that building waiting to be identified for over a day. No one knew that the people who are missing had stopped breathing long before any of us had even known that a code red had been called. No one could comprehend the devastating aftermath or how far this would reach or where this would go.

For those who still can’t comprehend because they refuse to, I’ll tell you where it went, right into the ground, six feet deep. Six minutes and twenty seconds with an AR-15 and my friend Carmen would never complain to me about piano practice. Aaron Feis would never call Kiera Ms. Sunshine. Alex Schachter would never walk into school with his brother Ryan. Scott Beigel would never joke around with Cameron at camp. Helen Ramsey would never hang out after school with Max. Do you know Montalto would never wave to her friend Liam at lunch? Joaquin Oliver would never play basketball with Sam or Dylan. Alaina Petty would never, Carol Lungren would never, Chris Hixon would never, Luke Hoyer would never, Martin Duque Anguiano would never. Peter Wang would never, Alyssa Alahdeff would never, Jamie Guttenberg would never, Meadow Pollick would never.

At that stage in the speech, Gonzalez pauses for the entire length of time that the students at Stoneman Douglas had to remain silent while an active shooter was in the building. Gonzalez’s silence is uncomfortable for some listeners, who cheer and make noise as if encouraging them to speak.

Since the time that I came out here. It has been six minutes and 20 seconds. The shooter has ceased shooting and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest. Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.

Identification describes the creation of a shared experience around the symbol. In this case, Gonzalez’s symbol is silence. This silence, which disrupted the expectation that they would speak, represents Gonzalez’s specific traumatic past experience, which also lasted six minutes and twenty seconds. Identification is clear in the discomfort and uncertainty of the audience during this long silence, simulating the disorientation characteristic of the event itself. Audiences – including its distant viewers on YouTube – come to identify with X because they come to understand the relationship between the speech and the scenario that the symbol represents.

Of course, identification does not always work. When this happens, it is called failed identification: when a meaning that a speaker wishes to share with a wider audience does not create the intended effect. During his 2012 US Presidential election campaign, Mitt Romney was widely criticized for using a false accent in his southern speeches. According to some critics, the former Massachusetts governor and US senator’s choice to use a southern accent was an example of unsuccessful pandering:

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=76#oembed-2

Mitt Romney’s “Grits” Moment. An Example of Failed Identification.

As Romney’s clip illustrates, disingenuous or inauthentic rhetoric may lead to effects of failed or (dis-)identification. The intent of this kind of speech may be to create an audience that shares the speaker’s understanding and worldview. However, a speaker who chooses symbols that challenge or their existing ethos also risks distancing themselves from their listeners.

In review, rhetoric emerges at the beginning of the 20th century as the study of public address, or as, again, the study of speeches and the systematic way they persuade. But at the same time, there’s also a second notion about rhetoric that is emerging that rhetoric is a mode of identification, that it requires symbols that everyone interpreting the same way.

The Symbol and the Philosophy of Language

There are two early American philosophers of language who independently develop theories of the symbol. The first is George Herbert Mead, who coins the phrase symbolic interactionism. The second is Charles Sanders Peirce, who develops a theory of representation based on the icon, the index, and the symbol.

George Herbert Mead argues for a fundamental difference between “the I” and “the me” to explain how social expectations surrounding symbols are created. The “me” is the self that exists in relationship to a generalized, non-specific other. It is the generic response that I would expect from someone else when I execute a gesture or say a phrase. If “the me” says “how are you doing?” to a stranger on the street, they might expect them to say, “I’m fine, how are you?” or “none of your business!” depending on the customary expected response within that social environment.

The “I” describes individual reactions inflected with freedom and unpredictability. If “I” wave to someone on the street, I might (as “the me”) expect them to wave back or acknowledge my hello. But the I is all of the actions that could happen: they could run up to me and confront me or suddenly run in the other direction. The sense of freedom that is characteristic of “the I” is, in this case, all of the different ways that this other person interprets my gesture differently or in a way that is opposed to the intention of the symbolic gesture I used to interact with them.

A second mid-20th-century philosopher of language who develops a theory of the symbol is Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “purse”). Peirce is the inventor of linguistic pragmatism, in which the meaning of an idea may be understood as the totality of possible observations about it. According to Peirce, meaning must have an actual value; it must be taken from empirical observations. This is “value” occurs in one of three registers: “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness.”

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=76#oembed-3

Informational Video on Peirce’s Philosophy of Language

Imagine thinking of nothing but the color blue, not thinking about the color or addressing questions about the experience. The idea would be to perceive one thing alone. This is Peirce’s concept of firstness, the contemplation of the essential qualities of something, the color blue. But we cannot purely experienced this before some secondness (the sun, the landscape) a quality distinct from the blueness that you first perceived enters your consciousness. Perhaps something different or distinct from the original phenomenon, in relation to the foreground of background appears as a secondness. Perhaps it could be a sound. It could be another color or it might be an object that appears in the midst of that color. [It could be] something in a contrasting color that makes it distinguishable, that has characteristics, such as a shape. Finally, Perice recognized that what you experience in your mind is thirdness, the mediation of signs that occurs as a mental process of your experiences, thoughts or ideas. He called this an interpretant. An interpretant is a being with the potential to interpret signs [and who occupies the position of thirdness relative to firstness and secondness]

Signifier, Signified, Referent

Peirce employs three-part distinctions like firstness, secondness, and thirdness throughout his philosophy of language. One related framework is the distinction between the signifier, the signified, and the referent. The signifier is the graphic mark before it comes into contact with a specific meaning. It is also called the ‘shape’ of the word and the sound image. The signified is the meaning of the signifier, or the concept the word invokes. It is the ideational component of the word or the shared and similar thought that a word conjures for a person or people. Finally, the referent is the actual, literal object, which exists in the world.

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For example, “the White House”: the signifier is the phonemes and sounds that combine to form this phrase. The signified is what this phrase “means,” such as the office of the American presidency that symbolizes the authority of the executive branch. Finally, the referent is the literal building or structure that exists in Washington D.C.

Icon, Index, Symbol

A final three-part distinction related to representation is the icon, the index, and the symbol.

The icon resembles its referent, the literal thing to which it refers. The image of rocks falling is an icon because the thing it warns us against, rocks falling, is represented as a literal depiction of rocks falling.

The index is associated with a referent by cause or inference. When we see an index, we can deduce what it means. An image of smoke in the distance means that there is a fire; reasoning rather than a natural resemblance gives away the meaning of the index.

Finally, the symbol is related to the referent by convention. The biohazard symbol means that there is radiation present. However, there is no natural resemblance between a biological hazard (such as radiation) and this symbol; this danger does not “look like” anything we can easily represent. Additionally, we cannot use reasoning or deduction to infer that the biohazard symbol means that radiation is present. The symbol does not, for instance, show what the effects of radiation might be, like the image of smoke. Instead, the symbol means “radiation” through convention, circulation, and use.

Here’s another example, an image of a bicycle, a skull and crossbones, and the infinity symbol. The bicycle is an icon because it literally resembles the object. The skull and crossbones are an index because the audience may infer that consuming the object will lead to death. Finally, the final image, the leviathan cross, is a symbol because it does not refer specifically or reverentially to an object, and an audience cannot easily infer its meaning. Although it symbolizes protection and balance, this meaning is only attached to the symbol through convention and use. A tree decorated with several Nazar Boncuk (“bon-juk”) medallions The final example of icon, index, and symbol is the Nazar Boncuk. It is an ornament that hangs in many homes to ward off the “evil eye”; many of you may have seen it or own them yourselves. It is an important example because it illustrates how the icon, the index, and the symbol can be part of a single object. It is an icon because the object resembles an eye. It is an index because, most often, when it is placed in a home, it hangs above the doorway as a message for guests: someone is always watching, so behave yourself as if you were being watched. Finally, it also has a symbolic value because its meaning is only learned by convention. When I grew up with this symbol in my home, I only realized that it was there as a symbol of protection because it was part of a story that was communicated to me by my family and which is part of a larger cultural tradition of hanging these symbols in homes. However, just seeing the symbol by itself doesn’t necessarily communicate this shared, well-known meaning. Symbols and 20th-Century Propagandists The last bit of historical context about the symbol that I want to provide is political propaganda in the early 20th century. Propaganda is an important feature of the early 20th century that still lingers with us today. This time in the United States created a class of professional persuaders whose job was to create symbols and shared identifications on behalf of corporations and government. Several important figures for the history of propaganda in the United States are George Creel, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann. Edward Bernays is widely regarded as one of the founders of the field of public relations. (1) George Creel. Seven days after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, a propaganda agency acting to release government news, sustain morale in the US, administer voluntary press censorship, and develop propaganda abroad. Creel was named the head of the committee, and he created 37 distinct divisions, most notably the Division of Pictorial Publicity, the Four Minute Men Division, the News Division, and the Censorship Board. The Division of Pictorial Publicity was staffed by hundreds of the nation’s most talented artists. They created over 1000 designs for paintings, posters, cartoons, and sculptures that instilled patriotism, fear, and interest in the war efforts. Creel himself said that the images were “something that caught even the most indifferent eye.” Between the News Division and Censorship Committee, Creel and the CPI could control the flow of official war information. Creel sought to portray facts without bias, though most pieces of news were “colored by nationalistic assumptions.” Creel’s committee may have produced biased news, but he hoped that the US could avoid rigid censorship during the war, as Creel’s views on censorship were “expression, not repression.” Under Creel’s direction, the CPI sought to repress material that contained “dangerous” or “unfavorable” ideas to avoid demoralizing the population. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=76#oembed-4 (2) Edward Bernays was born in Vienna, Austria. In 1891 Bernays’s family moved to New York City. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays often consulted his uncle’s work. He was the first to incorporate psychology and other social sciences into PR, yet where Freud sought to uncover motivations, Bernice sought to mobilize them. Bernie’s clients were companies rather than individuals. In one instance, the American Tobacco Company asked him to expand sales. He responded with a campaign (see below) that marketed cigarettes as “torches of freedom” and sought to associate tobacco consumption with the women’s suffrage movement. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=76#oembed-5 One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=76#oembed-6 (3) During World War I Walter Lippmann, an American journalist, became an adviser to Woodrow Wilson and assisted in drafting Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech. He sharply criticized George Creel, whom the President appointed to head wartime propaganda efforts at the Committee on Public Information. While he was prepared to curb his liberal instincts because of the war, saying he had “no doctrinaire belief in free speech,” he nonetheless advised Wilson that censorship should “never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression.” Lippmann examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems. He and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, stated that The New York Times’ coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution was biased and inaccurate. In addition to his newspaper column “Today and Tomorrow,” he wrote several books. He was also the first to bring the phrase “cold war” to a common currency in his 1947 book by the same name. Lippman also argued that people, including journalists, are more apt to believe “the pictures in their heads” than to come to judgment by critical thinking. He wrote that humans condense ideas into symbols, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public. Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed “the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.” One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=76#oembed-7 Part 2: Rhetoric as Symbolic Action Symbolic Action describes the construction of social reality through symbols that foster identification. If rhetoric-as-symbolic action is the expressive human use of symbols, then social reality is the reality that we perceive through symbols, as well as the rituals, habits, and practices that use symbols. Additionally, symbolic action must involve identification because symbols allow people to see themselves as a group based on common interests and characteristics. Groups may also be broken apart using symbols, for instance, by claiming that some group members hold on to symbols that threaten the whole group’s identity. Symbolic action also occurs in public, out in the open. It means that symbols are leveraged to move people as a group to do things that they otherwise might not do. Symbols move people because they identify with them — because they see something at stake in protecting symbols and see similarity (or difference) in those who cling to them. Let’s place some firm definitions on this terminology, starting with Symbolic Action. Symbolic Action describes the making or construction of social reality through symbols that foster identification. It is expressive human action, the rhetorical mobilization of symbols to act in the world. Rhetoric is the use of symbolic action by human beings to share ideas, enabling them to work together to make decisions about matters of common concern and to construct social reality. A rhetor is any person, group, or institution that uses symbolic action. A symbol is an arbitrary representation of something else, a word, an image, or an artifact representing a thing, concept, or action. Verbal Symbols are symbols found in language, whether spoken or written. Visual Symbols are symbols that include pictures, images, objects, recordings, enactments, demonstrations, and other collective actions. Identification, finally, “is a communicative process through which people are unified into a whole based on common interests or characteristics.” It is how symbolic action allows a rhetor to connect with the audience on a psychological level. Kenneth Burke’s theory of symbolic action revolves around his “definition of man.” (see the additional readings for this week). Although the word “man” is both a dated and imprecise way to say “human,” Burke’s definition is significant because it defines the human in terms of their capacity to use symbols (“the symbol-using animal”). Burke points out that animals can understand symbols; birds, for example, interact with symbols regularly. Wrens use food as leverage to goad hatchlings to leave the nest. However, humans manipulate symbols to advance their own purposes and create social groups, which sets them apart. Burke’s “definition” has five parts. The first is that humans are symbol-using (and misusing) animals. As Burke writes, “What is our reality for today but all of this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present. In school, as they go from class to class, students turn from one idiom (like mathematics or chemistry) to another (like Communication Studies or Rhetoric). The various courses in the curriculum are in effect but so many different terminologies. And however important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced first-hand, the whole over-all ‘picture’ is but a construct of our symbol-systems.” Humans have the capacity to recognize symbols, but they also have the capacity to put them out into the world. They can use these symbols to destructive ends, and most often, substitute symbols for one another, such that a new symbol may carry on the work of an older one. The other aspects of this definition are important as well: Inventor of the negative refers to how symbols are exclusive; for example, a group of people may gather around a symbol like a religious text or a conspiracy theory while excluding others, making them the “negative” of their symbolization. The idea that humans are separated from their natural conditions by instruments of their own making symbol-use can delude a people; how we may become ‘detached’ from reality based on the stories we elect to read or the news that we choose to watch. It also recalls the famous Clausewitz quotation that “diplomacy is war carried out by other means,” similarly, language allows for a kind of violence that sometimes stands in for acts of physical aggression. Goaded by a spirit of hierarchy refers to the tendency not only to separate other people who are not part of our same symbol system or social group but to think of groups in terms of relative importance or as more and less deserving of recognition or rights. It describes how humans put some principles, ideas, and even people ‘first’ and subordinate others to those in that category. The final part, rotten with perfection, describes how creating these hierarchical and exclusive orders is often the opposite of creating a ‘perfect world.’ The idea of American exceptionalism, for instance, that America is completely or wholly unlike any other country because it is ‘perfect’ in its ideals can be a way to legitimize oppressive laws or violent policing. That brings us to Martha Solomon’s Article on the “rhetoric of dehumanization,” which discusses the misuse of symbols. Using Burke’s concepts, Solomon argued that the Tuskegee progress reports, printed in major medical journals from 1936 to 1973, functioned as “rhetoric of dehumanization” (p. 231). Specifically, the symbols used in the report show how Black men were treated as less human than the scientists who were conducting the study. The scientists’ “neutral” scientific language normalized inhuman practices of human testing, resulting in the deaths of patients who doctors never told that they were receiving placebos. What was the Tuskegee Project? (from the CDC’s webpage documenting the Tuskegee Project) In 1932, the Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for Black Americans … The study initially involved 600 black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease. The study was conducted without the benefit of patients’ informed consent. Researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In truth, they did not receive the proper treatment needed to cure their illness. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance. Although originally projected to last 6 months, the study actually went on for 40 years. Now that we’ve established what the article was about and how it is related to the topic of ‘symbolic action,’ we will return to Solomon’s article to show other aspects of symbolic action at work. The Terministic Screen The Terministic Screen describes how symbols distort reality or create a partial ‘lens’ to interpret the world. It is connected to the idea from Burke’s “Definition” that symbols create a social reality that may be at odds with the way that other people perceive it. Burke defines the “terministic screen” using the trio of terms “reflection,” “selection,” and “deflection.” In his words, [Humans] “seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. Any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.” First, language reflects reality or provides a vocabulary that has scope and breadth to account for things that happen in the world. Language then selects reality, placing a sliver or snapshot of the real world under a microscope and elevates it to the status of the ‘whole thing.’ Finally, language deflects reality. Humans use language to discard what doesn’t fit within the version of reality they have become accustomed to. Burke’s examples include a color filter on a camera and the interpretation of the ‘same’ dream by psychotherapists who come from different traditions of dream interpretation. A color filter deepens the yellows, reds, and blues while also pushing out other wavelengths. A Freudian interpretation of dreams might likely focus on the patient’s parents; a Jungian one on their religion and mythical beliefs. Ultimately, the terministic screen is a way that symbols are used to filter our reality. One example is the “national security state,” a framework not just for international relations or the FBI but also for how we think of and organize our homes. The national security state is built on the idea of surveillance, or watching — and that we are somehow safer when there is more watching. The national security state is a terministic screen because it has become a part of schools, hospitals, cities, and homes. Even “smart home” technology assumes that intelligence means we can watch everything at once. New parents can take this to new extremes by putting cameras literally everywhere. That idea — that when we’re watching, helicoptering, surveilling, we are somehow more intelligent, more in control — is a terministic screen. Suddenly the national security state isn’t just a way to look at how we pass through airports, but a way to organize our lives. In “The Rhetoric of Dehumanization?” Solomon connects the terministic screen and “neutral” scientific language. According to Solomon, [scientific language] is a “way that symbols are used to filter our reality” that “is constituted by terms through which humans perceive the world,” and “that directs attention away from some interpretations and toward others.” Solomon condemns the dehumanizing characteristics of scientific writing, which often removes the author from the essay with the passive voice. (This is also why I don’t discourage students from writing using “I,” it involves the writer as a participant in the writing process, rather than just as a neutral observer.) Because the Tuskegee reports “avoided emotionally connotative language,” researchers emotionally dissociated from patients and deflected attention from human suffering, racism, and the possibility of intervention (pp. 237-238, 244). The terministic screen of the Tuskeegee report also displays “four features of scientific investigation that “are accepted almost without question.” These include The scientific method encourages the perceptions of distinctions and the investigation of their significance. Objectivity and detachment are [wanted or needed] characteristics of the people who administered the Tuskeegee study, Science assumes knowledge as a primary value, rather than the wellbeing of the patient, and finally, The scientific approach is consistent across subject matter areas. These four characteristics were the ‘screen’ that allowed the Tuskeegee patients to be dehumanized. Dramatism Dramatism is a theory that describes instances of communication as if they were staged as a play or a fictional human drama. According to Burke, we read and understand the world rhetorically (i.e., as a narrative or theater performance). We process communicative phenomena through a restricted set of categories that Burke likens to a stage-act, consisting of a scene, actors/agents, and agency. Dramatism tells us that we are not just symbol-using animals but story-telling animals who use dramatistic elements in many different ways. Dramatism makes two assumptions: First, language is primarily a species of action rather than an instrument of definition. (i.e., its primary function is NOT denotation or to establish the literal meaning of things). Second, that the best way to understand human relations and motives is to analyze symbolic action. There are five elements of dramatism that constitute a “pentad.” These include: The Agent – the person or kind of person who performed the act; The Act – what took place in thought or deed; The Agency – how the act was accomplished; The Scene – the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred; The Purpose – the justification for the act. Dramatism is like a detective drama, where the rhetorical critic tries to figure out the motives of the people who perpetrated the symbolic act. What is most important about this framework is NOT ‘finding’ these five elements but understanding their relationship to one another. This relationship is what Burke called the ratio. In a ratio, one is the ‘container,’ and the other is the ‘thing contained’. The meaning of the second term depends on the meaning of the first. The scene/act ratio, for instance, requires some explanation of ‘where’ the act happened to explain ‘what’ happened. The inventor of anesthesia, for instance, discovered ‘oxygen’ but called it “dephlogisticated air.” Unless we know something about the historical “scene,” this “act” of naming would be hard for us to understand. The scene/agent ratio describes how the “who” is over-determined by the “where.” We might be puzzled by the fact that Brittany Spears has withdrawn from public life and developed increasing hostility toward the paparazzi, for instance, until we recognize the larger ‘scene’ in which such actions have been set: the fact that she has for years been able to go out in public without confronting a sea of microphones, and that she and others have been fighting relentlessly to retain conservatorship of her estate. Without that “where,” we lack a clear understanding of the “who.” The act/agent ratio describes how a person’s ethos is over-determined by an act attributed to them. In the courtroom, a plaintiff may be symbolized as a ‘criminal’ by repeatedly drawing attention to the “act.” Alternatively, if you send a friend or colleague a basket of baked goods after hearing that they are having a particularly tough day, this act can configure or reconfigure that person’s impression of you as a person. In “The Rhetoric of Dehumanization?” Solomon provides several additional examples: the agent/agency and the agent/scene ratio. In the first case, the AGENT (or “who performed the Tuskegee experiments”) explains the rationale for the AGENCY, or how “the experiments were done.” The agents are ‘noble’ doctors pursuing knowledge, and the “means to an end” are the patients. Doctors dehumanized the patients because they were only the “agency” for the doctors (the “agents”) the means of completing the medical experiment. In the second case, dehumanization occurs because the disease is the AGENT and the patients’ bodies become a SCENE. This choice of language is significant because this ratio erases the fact that the doctors were, in fact, the ones doing harm. Demagoguery The last part of this recording is devoted to the topic of Demagoguery, which is exactly the kind of symbolic action that Kenneth Burke is concerned about when he talks about the “misuse of symbols.” A demagogue is a dangerous speaker who perpetuates conspiracy theories and acts as a political salesperson. They attract an audience by spreading lies that divide a group of people from another group. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=76#oembed-8 Before World War II, Kenneth Burke was concerned with the rhetoric emerging from Nazi Germany and saw a similar pattern of thinking and speaking emerging in the United States. Disturbed by what he saw in Germany, he applied his framework of symbolic action there. He said he identified several key features that were hallmarks of demagogic speech. These features were used to ‘constitute’ a people using language that is similarly hateful to the speech that was delivered by the staged demagogue in the clip just shown. The demagogue encourages “the division of the attention of a people” by focusing on a convenient but phony scapegoat. He noted specifically the treatment of the Jewish people in Germany. The demagogue also fashioned themselves like a religious pattern, using patterns like rituals, and made themselves into a paternalistic ‘father-like figure who would lead the ‘feminized’ public to salvation. These were above all dangerous characteristics because they are so easily picked up and used elsewhere. When analyzing the dangerous speech itself, Burke also came up with the following characteristic progression of ideas. First, Inborn Dignity. This stresses the “natural born” dignity of a group elevated above all others while other people are described as innately inferior. Then, the Projection Device. This gesture associates the target audience’s problems with a scapegoat. If one can attribute their problems to a “cause” outside the self, they can battle an external enemy instead of an enemy within. Then, Symbolic Rebirth. Rebirth involved a symbolic change of lineage by voting oneself and the members of one’s group as different and less-than. Finally, Commercial use. This provides a macroeconomic interpretation of economic problems, such that depression/recession is due to the actions of a particular social group rather than to larger structural forces. Demagoguery is still prominent in American culture. Watching this final clip, consider the elements of demagoguery and how they are played out in “Dwight’s Speech” from the popular television show, The Office. In this clip, Dwight is delivering a speech to North Eastern Salesmen after winning an award. He has been given a speech that strongly resembles and was adapted from one by Benito Mussolini. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=76#oembed-9 In the clip, Dwight quickly runs through Burke’s criteria: inborn dignity, a projection device, symbolic rebirth, and commercial use. He appeals to inborn dignity when he says that North Eastern salesman stand apart from other people, that they are special and unique because of the difficulty of their work. Next, he appeals to a projection device when referring to “door-to-door charlatans” and those who would be nasty to salespeople in principle. He then tells the audience to “unite” in opposition to these ideas, corresponding with “symbolic rebirth.” Finally, he pushes them to the ultimate purpose: more sales, more money, bringing his speech to its commercial use and application. Additional Resources Burke, Kenneth. “Definition of Man.” The Hudson Review, vol. 16, no. 4, Hudson Review, Inc, 1963, pp. 491–514. Fernheimer, Janice W. “Confronting Kenneth Burke’s Anti-Semitism.” Journal of Communication Religion 39.2 (2016): 36. Solomon, Martha. “The rhetoric of dehumanization: An analysis of medical reports of the Tuskegee syphilis project.” Western journal of speech communication 49.4 (1985): 233-247.

5

Chapter 5: The Sign

This chapter introduces the concepts of representation and the sign. These are counterparts to the theory of the symbol, and seek to account for the way that language acts both at a given historical moment and across different moments of time. The first part of this chapter adapts premises developed in the textbook Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon.

The first (somewhat longer) section of this chapter addresses representation and the basic components of the sign, as theorized by Ferdinand de Saussure. It then describes the role of metaphor and engages the idea that the President (of the United States) functions as a sign for the reading, listening, and viewing public. The second part of this chapter is a recorded lecture from Dr. Belinda Stillion Southard of the University of Georgia. Dr. Stillion Southard addresses the relationship between language and beliefs by drawing upon the example of the suffragists and how they can teach us to be attentive to our language choices.

Watching the video clips embedded in the chapters may add to the projected “read time” listed in the headers. Please also note that the audio recording for this chapter covers the same tested content as is presented in the chapter below.

Chapter Recordings Part 1: Signs and Representation (Video, ~40m) Part 2: Change the Language, Change the Beliefs (Video also embedded below, ~14m)

Read this Next Norton, Anne. “Chapter 3: The President as a Sign.” Republic of signs: Liberal theory and American popular culture. University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Part 1: Signs and Representations

Here is a simple exercise about representation. Look at any familiar object in the room. You will immediately recognize what it is. But how do you know what the object is? Now try to make yourself conscious of what you are doing – observe what is going on as you do it. You recognize what it is because your thought processes decode your visual perception of the object in terms of a concept of it that you have in your head. This must be so because, if you look away from the object, you can still think about it by conjuring it ‘in your mind’s eye’.

Now, say what it is. The concept of the object has passed through your mental representation of it to me via the word for it which you have just used. The word stands for or represents the concept. It can be used to reference or designate either a ‘real’ object in the world or indeed even some imaginary object, like angels dancing on the head of a pin. This is how you give meaning to things through language. This is how we make sense of the world of people, objects, and events. It is also how you express complex thoughts about those things to other people in a way they are able to understand. That brings us to our first definition of representation.

Definition 1: Representation is the production of the meaning of the concepts in our minds through language. It is the link between concepts and language which enables us to refer to either the real world of objects, people or events, or to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people, and events.

Definition 2: Representation means using language to say something meaningful about (or to represent) the world meaningfully, to other people. By this understanding, representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture.

How does the concept of representation connect meaning and language to culture? We will look at several theories about how language is used to represent the world.

Approaches to Language and Representation

We will distinguish between three different accounts or theories: (a) the reflective, (b) the intentional, and (c) the constructionist approaches to representation. In other words:

Reflective: Does language simply reflect a meaning which already exists out there in the world of objects, people and events (reflective)?

In the reflective approach, meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, idea, or event in the real world, and language functions as a mirror, to reflect the true meaning as it already exists in the world. As Gertrude Stein once said, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” In the fourth century BC, the Greeks used the notion of mimesis to explain how language, even drawing and painting, mirrored or imitated Nature; they thought of Homer’s great poem, The Iliad, as ‘imitating’ a heroic series of events. So the theory which says that language works by simply reflecting or imitating the truth that is already there and fixed in the world, is sometimes called ‘mimetic’. Language from this point of view is primarily denotative; it indicates the objective status of things.

Intentional: Does language express only what the speaker or writer or painter wants to say, his or her personally intended meaning (intentional)?

The second approach to meaning in representation argues the opposite case. It holds that it is the speaker, the author, who imposes his or her unique meaning on the world through language. Words mean what the author intends they should mean. This is the intentional approach. Again, there is some point to this argument since we all, as individuals, do use language to convey or communicate things that are special or unique to us, to our way of seeing the world. From this perspective, a speaker controls the intended meaning of their language, and correspondingly, steers how an audience might see or perceive them.

However, as a general theory of language, the intentional approach is also flawed. Our words sometimes have consequences that we do not anticipate. Other times, we can say more than we mean. What, for instance, is the role of intentions when we translate trauma experienced in one domain of our lives into words that we project onto other people? We cannot be the sole or unique source of meanings in language, since that would mean that we could express ourselves in entirely private languages. But the essence of language is communication and that, in turn, depends on shared linguistic conventions and shared codes. Language can never be wholly a private game. Our private intended meanings, however personal to us, have to enter into the rules, codes and conventions of language to be shared and understood. Language is a social system through and through. This means that our private thoughts have to negotiate with all the other meanings for words or images which have been stored in language which our use of the language system will inevitably trigger into action.

Constructionist: Or is meaning constructed in and through language (constructionist)? What kind of constructions are at play?

The third approach recognizes this public, social character of language. It acknowledges that neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning in language. Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems – concepts and signs. Hence it is called the constructivist or constructionist approach to meaning in language. According to this approach, we must not confuse the material world, where things and people exist, and the symbolic practices and processes through which representation, meaning, and language operate. Constructivists do not deny the existence of the material world. However, it is not the material world that conveys meaning: it is the language system or whatever system we are using to represent our concepts. It is social actors who use the conceptual systems of their culture and the linguistic and other representational systems to construct meaning, to make the world meaningful, and to communicate about that world meaningfully to others.

Additionally, there may be several different kinds of constructions that are at play in a given instance of representation. One kind of representational construction is semiotic, which is based on language and shared meaning-making. Another kind of representational construction is discursive, which is a manifestation of power being exercised. Consider the clip below. Are the representations conjured by words like “freedom” and “terror” semiotic, discursive, or both?

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=88#oembed-1

George W. Bush’s 2001 Declaration of the “War on Terror”

The above clip from 2001 shows George W. Bush declaring “the war on terror” which initiated America’s 21st-century interventions in Afghanistan. Bush reuses words like “freedom” and “terror” over and over to create a web of representations and language that support the idea of an emergency or imminent threat. The argument that words construct our lived realities is brought to life here because Bush’s speeches constituted a reality of actual and ongoing warfare, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people and a failed search for weapons of mass destruction. The representations conjured through this language created an impression of threat, danger, and fear. In turn, these representations produced a social reality that authorized an “endless” war.

Ferdinand de Saussure’s Theory of the Sign

Representations create a shared conceptual map for a body of people to use symbols to refer to similar ideas which are held in common. This shared conceptual map must be translated into a common language so that we can correlate our concepts and ideas with certain written words, spoken sounds or visual images. The general term we use for words, sounds or images which carry meaning is signs. These signs stand for or represent the concepts and the conceptual relations between them which we carry around in our heads and together they make up the meaning-systems of our culture.

The theory of the sign is most often attributed to the work and influence of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure. who was born in Geneva in 1857, did much of his work in Paris, and died in 1913. For our purposes, he is important for his general view of representation and the way his model of language shaped the semiotic approach to the problem of representation in a wide variety of cultural fields.

The production of meaning depends on language. As [Saussure] writes, ‘Language is a system of signs.’ Sounds, images, written words, paintings, photographs, etc. function as signs within language ‘only when they serve to express or communicate ideas … [To] communicate ideas, they must be part of a system of conventions ….” (Culler 1976, p. 19)

In an important move, Saussure divides the sign into two elements.

First, there is the “concept” or “meaning” of the sign; a shared idea. This is the signified. Every time your read, hear, or see “poodle,” it correlates to the concept of a floofy dog.

Second, there is the signifier: the form or sound-image (the actual word, image, photo, etc.) that consists of the different sounds that combine to create a word (P-O-O-D-L-E). can also be an image, such as the one shown below. The signifier is the material dimension of the sign. It may consist of the actual sounds we make with our vocal cords, the images made with cameras, the marks we use to write words or paint on canvas, or digital 1s and 0s we transmit electronically. In his original diagram of the sign, Saussure places the signified over the signifier and separates them with a bar. This bar is meant to illustrate that the signifier (or sound-image) is only associated with the signified (or the implied concept) by convention. There is no necessary relationship between them. The bar is a visual reminder that a signifier (a word or series of sounds) may come to mean something different. Across or at a precise moment in time, a signifier may have different signifieds. Saussure also encloses the sign in an ellipse. This ellipse illustrates how the signifier and signified appear as if they are fixed. If I say the word “tree,” the meaning (a leafy living organism) seems as though it is permanently attached to this word. However, the sign illustrates that this association is only ever temporary at best. Both the signifier and the signified are required to produce meaning, but it is the relation between them, fixed by our cultural and linguistic codes, that sustains representation. The sign is the union of the signifier and the signified. Although we can talk about them as if they were distinct or separate entities, they only exist as components of the sign, which is the central fact of language. He also introduces a distinction between the “diachronic” and “synchronic” axes of language. The diachronic refers to the transformation of signs over time. This is represented by the “vertical” (y) axis in the figure below. It is the time during which a language transforms and evolves. The diachronic axis draws attention to the sign’s meaning for all time. It describes the distinct associations of signifiers and signifieds across time and traces a path between them. As a given signifier acquires and sheds distinct signifieds, it may remain in use but with new meanings, uses, and effects across history. The synchronic refers to “horizontal” or immediate time in which the sign exists. It is the “horizontal” (x) axis that refers to the individual synchronic snapshots of language’s meaning. These are the individual moments in time where the meaning of signs appears stable, natural, and normal. The synchronic dimension of language isolates the meaning of the sign as a relationship to other, related signs in a specific and historically defined instance. The synchronic meaning of the sign is what it means at a particular moment in time, and not what it means for ‘all time’. Consider, for example, how many words there have been since the 1990s to describe the aversive emotional impact of the digital age: people have accused the age of the internet of causing information overload, the too-much-information effect (now just ‘TMI’), information anxiety, and (most offensively, but nonetheless a real term that was once used) infobesity. Each of these invokes a similar concept, anxiety at the quantity of information that is out there because of the internet. But the sign is arbitrary because in each case it is attached to a different signifier. “Each language produce a different set of signifiers, articulating and dividing the continuum of sound (or writing or drawing or photography) in a distinctive way … each language also produces a different set of signifieds; it has a distinctive and thus arbitrary way of organizing the world into concepts and categories” (Culler, 1976, p. 23). The language system that is the raw material of signs is used here in a very broad sense. Cultural norms of pronunciation and signification make Spanish, Swedish, Basque, Turkish, and English ‘languages’. However, photographs, cinema, and medical imaging (e.g. x-rays), all possess their own unique “languages” as well. Similarly, we might say that mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, and biology share similar “languages.” Other, less academic genres share a “language” that is not ‘linguistic’ in any ordinary sense. For example, the ‘language’ of facial expressions or of gesture, the ‘language’ of fashion, of clothes, or of traffic lights. Music is a ‘language’, with complex relations between different sounds and chords. When this language represents a meaning for a subject, it becomes a sign. Saussure divided language into two parts. He called the underlying rule-governed structure of language, which enables us to produce well-formed sentences, the langue (the language system). This consisted of the general rules and codes of the linguistic system, which all its users must share if it is to be of use as a means of communication. The rules are the principles that we learn when we learn a language and they enable us to use language to say whatever we want. For example, in English, the preferred word order is subject-verb-object (‘the cat sat on the mat’), whereas, in Latin, the verb usually comes at the end. For Saussure, the underlying structure of rules and codes (langue) was the social part of language, the part which could be studied with the law-like precision of science because of its closed, limited nature. It was his preference for studying language at this level of its ‘deep structure’ which makes Saussure’s model of language structuralist. ‘La langue is the system of language, the language as a system of forms’ (Culler, 1976, p. 29). The second part consisted of the particular acts of speaking or writing or drawing, which — using the structure and rules of the langue – are produced by an actual speaker or writer. He called this parole. The second part of language, the individual speech-act or utterance (parole), he regarded as the ‘surface’ of language. There was an infinite number of such possible utterances. Hence, parole inevitably lacked those structural properties — forming a closed and limited set — which would have enabled us to study it ‘scientifically’. “Parole is actual speech [or writing], the speech acts which are made possible by the language” (Culler, 1976, p. 29) Perhaps the most important aspect of the sign’s use in language is that the meaning of the sign is always determined differentially. That means that The meaning of the sign is fixed based on the relative meanings of the other signifier/signifier combinations that exist relative to it at a given moment in time. For example, the meaning of “panther” is stabilized, for instance, by signs like “cat,” “lion,” “feline,” and “ocelot.” But it is also stabilized by its relationship to other signs like “Wakanda,” “Fred Hampton,” “Kwame Ture,” and “COINTELPRO.” The meaning of a sign depends on other, related signs. The difference between signs ultimately determines many of the concepts we share in common. Ultimately, language is a social phenomenon. It cannot be an individual matter because we cannot make up the rules of language individually, for ourselves. Their source lies in society, in the culture, in our shared cultural codes, in the language system – not in nature or in the individual subject. Metaphor Transfers Meaning between Signs Metaphor describes a relationship between signs. It fits with our discussion because it supports the constructivist view of representation. We experience reality through the language our shared language community uses. Metaphor is part of our basic capacity to construct this reality. It allows us to focus on certain aspects of reality while avoiding others. And different metaphors can depict and transform the *same* reality, so that two people can look at, read, or hear the same thing and come away with a different interpretation of reality. The word “metaphor” is older than the theory of the sign and is often attributed to Aristotle, who mentions it explicitly in the Rhetoric. In Greek, it is the composite of meta (over) and phereas (to carry). It can be defined as a figure of speech in which two dissimilar things are said to be similar, offering a new perspective on a known issue. Metaphor provides “perspective” by activating a range of cognitive associations. Metaphors are “Non-literal comparisons in which a word or phrase from one domain of experience is applied to another domain.” Most importantly, they transfer the characteristics of one object (a vehicle) onto a second object (the tenor). For example, if I were to say “my roommate is a pig!,” pig (sign 2) would be the vehicle because I am attempting to transfer characteristics of ‘pig-ness’ onto them. My roommate is the tenor (sign 1) because they are the literal person, subject, or topic that I am trying to describe.	Sign 1	Sign 2
Signifier	Signified The concept of a roommate The concept of a pig
The social construction aspect of metaphors enters the picture when we habitually or even unconsciously begin to use metaphors that texture our reality. We could think, for instance, of how often we describe social or professional situations in terms of implied violence or hostility, thereby setting the expectation and reflecting the reality that our social and work lives are violent. When life is war, we conceive of aspects of our reality in warlike terms. “They attacked my argument” or “I shot down her point” are ways of imagining oneself as a speech-combatant in which the other person is the enemy. When debates or arguments are battles, then they are framed implicitly as things to be won and lost, rather than spaces for shared understanding. If for instance, we moved to metaphors where arguments were a dance, then this vehicle would allow us to instead imagine ourselves as partners who are practicing for the purposes of collaboration. This is also the direct tie-in to Part 2 of this recording by Dr. Belinda Stillion Southard. Dr. Stillion Southard argues that it is possible to change beliefs by changing language and that the metaphors we use directly guide the values that we support. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=88#oembed-2 An example of an extended metaphor. TW: Strong language As a final example of metaphor, the above clip displays John Mulaney’s “Horse in the Hospital” sketch. The “horse” is the vehicle for an extended metaphor. Although he doesn’t explicitly name his tenor, you will likely be able to deduce it. As John Mulaney notes at the beginning of the clip, the President represents a larger body of people and values. In other words, the President is a signifier for a shared set of public meanings. Once you’ve watched the clip, let’s turn to Anne Norton’s chapter, “The President as Sign.” The President as Sign Norton makes the point that Americans are so extensively wedded to the idea of representation that it would be nearly impossible to think of our culture without the many ways that Americans represent themselves to themselves: Americans represent themselves in public documents and private letters, diplomas and diaries. In education, institutions, and the mundane practices of everyday life, Americans read and write themselves (as they read and write their nation) into being. This self-conscious being in language does not replace being in the flesh. The constraints of the body are partially evaded, but the needs and desires of the body are enhanced and elaborated in writing and in these written selves. (Anne Norton, “The President as Sign” in Republic of Signs, p.3) All of these are “signs,” documents, letters, diplomas, diaries, reading, writing, and bodies are sites of representation, of meaning-making. To that end, the president is a very good example of the theory of the ‘sign’ in practice. The President represents a lot: “the nation, the government, the executive branch.” The President is assumed to represent the nation to itself in many ways. “The embodiment of the presidency enables the President to present an image of the people to itself: singular, united, with a common material form and a single will.” (p. 121) On the one hand, as the elected “representative” of the people, the President often seems to stand in for the popular will, even if they do not win the popular vote. The character of the President is understood to reflect the character of the voting public. The policies of the President reflect the values of their electors and the vision of the future they would like to see. The President also represents the nation when they engage with other leaders abroad, where they strive to erase the idea that there are many ‘meanings’ competing for attention and publicity in the United States. The fact that the President cannot represent “everything” but must represent “something” is precisely what makes them a sign; their body and individuality act as the material support for a multiplicity of meanings competing for national attention and accountability. That responsibility is, in the words of philosopher Jacques Derrida, both necessary and impossible. It is necessary because governing to benefit the widest population possible. It is impossible because the interests of the population appear to conflict, because the interest of some is to be against governance, or because some interests are refused. That is also why it is so important that the person elected be capable of understanding the obligation of the position to the public. Using Ronald Reagan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as examples, Norton demonstrates the “variety of representative strategies made available to Presidents through the interplay of signifier and signified in the sign” (93), and revealing the complex history of personality traits and circumstance that help shape presidential history. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=88#oembed-3 Roosevelt, whose mobility was limited due to polio, took office during the Great Depression. His prominent disability was analogous to the hardship the entire nation faced, and when he spoke of national recovery he could therefore be trusted. When the United States eventually emerged from the Great Depression, Roosevelt garnered comparisons to Lincoln, as the nation’s second savior. The President’s sick body — and his ability to apparently overcome it — was a sign of the nation’s economic sickness, and the chutzpah it would need to overcome it, albeit in a deeply ableist way. Roosevelt could be recognized as a representative without recourse to that faith in abstractions that the collapse of central economic significations had undermined. The multiple referents Roosevelt entailed as signifier played a crucial role in determining the meaning of his presidency. The nation was economically paralyzed. Roosevelt was paralyzed. But Roosevelt came from a family of great wealth, power, and prestige. He possessed these himself. This apparent contradiction. in Roosevelt as signifier enabled him to simultaneously represent and subvert the image of the nation as paralyzed and impotent. (p.106) Reagan’s authority and reputation as president in part derived from his career in acting. Though he had not served in actual combat, he had portrayed it on screen, lending credibility to his calls for military action. Reagan’s self-aggrandizing bears resemblance to the boasting of Davy Crockett, frontiersman turned congressman. Reagan’s own boasting alludes to this history of the mythic Westerner, explaining the personal exceptionalism that allowed him to transcend from actor to president. As President, Reagan’s own “personal exceptionalism” became an “American exceptionalism,” an idea that America is beholden to no one and nothing, creating tremendous national debts while rallying his voters in the name of white and evangelical values. Consider the following advertisement, which presents a famous example of “American exceptionalism” as nostalgia for a version of American life which, for many, has never existed: One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=88#oembed-4 Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” Campaign Advertisement As Reagan and Roosevelt illustrate, the office of the presidency holds meaning as a result of those who have previously held office, personality traits, and simultaneous political contexts. This is made possible as a result of the president’s visibility to the public, as the president is seen by the public they are able to see themselves reflected in the president “singular, united, with a common material form and a single will” (121). That is why the president is a sign: different versions and visions of a “whole” of the people, the “whole” of the nation. One of the last points that Norton makes is about Richard Nixon and the way that the Watergate controversy changed the character of the president-as-sign. One of the things that are at least as true today as it was during the Watergate scandal is that the people are subjected to power as a function of sight. As Norton writes, Those who watched the Watergate hearings saw those who held power brought unwillingly into the public eye. They saw them subjected to the gaze, their actions, their words, their secrets revealed. All who watched participated directly in this exercise of the power of surveillance’ a power they held collectively. Those who watched knew that they watched with their compatriots. They knew that their watching was a sign and an exercise of a power held (as it was then exercised) collectively. The President, the President’s men’ and the congressional committee came under the watching eye of the people. In the following clip from the film Frost/Nixon, which depicts a famous series of post-presidential interviews with Richard Nixon, you can see how Nixon moves from being the “watcher” to being “the watched”: One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=88#oembed-5 Part 2: “Change the Language, Change the Beliefs” A Lecture by Dr. Belinda Stillion-Southard This lecture continues the discussion of representation by explaining what kind of work language does and how changing our vocabularies can make tangible differences in our world. Dr. Stillion-Southard is a scholar of American feminist rhetoric in the United States and primarily discusses historical instances of speech that sharply contrast with public and political speech today. One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://open.lib.umn.edu/rhetoricaltheory/?p=88#oembed-6 Secondary Readings Norton, Anne. “Chapter 3: The President as a Sign.” Republic of signs: Liberal theory and American popular culture. University of Chicago Press, 1993 Additional Resources De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in general linguistics. Columbia University Press, 2011. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies: Selected and Translated from the French. Translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972. Culler, Jonathan D. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Cornell University Press, 2002. Silverman, Kaja. “Liberty, maternity, commodification.” New Formations 5 (1988): 69-89. 6 Chapter 6: Rhetoric and Ideology This chapter is about ideology and myth. It will connect the theory of the sign to the concept of ideology. The first part of the chapter will cover the materialist theory of ideology, offering some background on some of its major features, including value and exploitation. Then it will discuss the transition from the theory of the “sign” to “myth.” Finally, it will explain the ideograph as an example of how rhetorical scholars have adapted it. Watching the video clips embedded in the chapters may add to the projected “read time” listed in the headers. Please also note that the audio recording for this chapter covers the same tested content as is presented in the chapter below. Chapter Recordings Part 1: Ideology and Myth (Video, ~30m) Part 2: Agency, Persona, and Speech Act (Video, ~30m) Read this Next Hall, Stuart, “From language to culture: linguistics to semiotics,” In Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Vol. 2. Sage, 1997. Walter Greene, Ronald. “Rhetorical capital: Communicative labor, money/speech, and neo-liberal governance.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4.3 (2007): 327-331. Written Assignments Assignment Description for Short Paper 2: Annotation Assignment Part 1: Ideology and Myth	The Materialist Theory of Ideology
Idealism Materialism DETERMINE DETERMINE A formal distinction between (Hegelian) Idealism and (Marxist) Materialism One common way that Marx’s materialist theory of ideology is often summarized is as “flipping Hegel on his head.” In other words, Marx conceived of his own project as a transformation of the Hegelian “idealist” framework. In Hegel’s worldview, the world is composed out of ideas. The “psychic” or “ideational” world of the “soul” takes precedence and shapes the ways in which individuals understand themselves, and determines the physical world which is just an expression of logic and consciousness. In a crossed-out portion of The German Ideology, Marx summarizes this position himself: Hegel completed positive idealism. He not only turned the whole material world into a world of ideas and the whole of history into a history of ideas. … All the German philosophical critics assert that the real World of men has hitherto been dominated and determined by ideas, images, concepts, and that the real world is a product of the world of ideas. This has been the case up to now, but it ought to be changed. … According to the Hegelian system ideas, thoughts and concepts have produced, determined, dominated the real life of men [sic], their material world, their actual relations. (crossed-out portion of The German Ideology, p. 30) Marx’s view is the opposite of Hegel’s. He argues that the world is materialist in the sense that there is an objective reality outside or beyond our ideas about it. The purpose of Marx’s project is to demonstrate that our empirical, material reality determines our conceptual, ideational experience of that world. More concisely, how the individual “subsists” or provides for themselves determines culture. Economic structures organize this physical, material life to create our “psychic,” (internal, cognitive, or mental) life and correspondingly, the relationships that exist between human beings. If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. (Marx, The German Ideology, p.42.) The “camera obscura” quotation is especially famous because it also “flips” Hegel’s established hierarchy in which “ideas” determine “material” existence. It may look that way, but in fact, the material world generates and constrains our ideational, mental life. The metaphor of the camera is also deeply significant because it invokes a connection between our consciousness and the technologies available to describe it. For Marx, we are all little cameras: looking at the world as if our ideas created what was in front of us, when in fact, the world creates and limits what we can — and cannot — think and do. If in Hegel ideas are determinative of the real world, in Marx, the real, material world is determinative of our ideas. The camera is therefore more than a metaphor; it is a way of using rhetoric to describe how the invisible part of human vision creates the limit of what can be thought. The formal relations of materialism as represented through the visual metaphor of the camera obscura. Ultimately, the “flip” that we will be attentive to is the “flip” from idealism to materialism, paying close attention to the way that actual, real, and lived experience creates social consciousness. This is also how the materialist theory of ideology links to our previous weeks’ discussions: the theory of ideology argues that our material conditions determine the signs we use, the symbols we share, and how we imagine and represent ourselves to ourselves, for instance, as free and independent from the systems that we are a part of. What is Ideology? In this class, we will define ideology as the religious, artistic, moral, and philosophical beliefs contained within and perpetuated by a society or culture, and which are determined by the material circumstances that occasion them. Ideology may also be explained in terms of an economic structure in which material is hoarded by a ruling ‘superstructure’ to produce the collective consciousness of the proletarian ‘base’. According to Marx, in any society, the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class. According to Ziyad Husami, however, even if this is true, this does not mean that other modes of collective consciousness do not ALSO exist, and that contained within these other ideas are other notions of justice that would render the whole of capitalist ideology unjust or immoral. Basic premises of “ideology.” Marx’s theory is often (over-)simplified in the following way: (1) Ruling classes control the material organization of the world (2) Ruling ideas are imposed on lower classes, who internalize it and (3) Each ‘class’ has its own ideology. For that reason, ideology is often called a theory of class consciousness. It describes our consciousness as a function of class hierarchies. Stuart Hall specifically expands upon the idea that ideological consciousness is particular to distinct groups of people, refusing a blanket characterization of the proletariat as a single homogenous group. Different people internalize ideology differently, even if it is the *same* ideology that they have internalized. Let’s watch this old-timey cartoon about Marx’s theory of class consciousness, and which also helps us to connect the theory of the ideology to some ideas we’re already familiar with, namely, the theory of the sign. Labor Value and Labor Exploitation Marx distinguishes between three kinds of value, “exchange value,” “labor value,” and “use value” in the following way. “Exchange value” is the price of a commodity, and represents the purchaser’s ability to command labor, to compel its production. “Use value” describes the tangible features of a commodity that can satisfy some want or need. Use value serves social needs, but it does not represent the social relations of production. “Labor value” or “labor power” is the value of the labor required to produce a commodity. The value of labor covers not just the value of wages but the value of the entire product created by labor. Capitalism functions by hoarding “exchange value” at the expense of “labor value.” Although it’s sometimes presumed that the exchange value of an item — the price we pay — is equal to its labor value — or the cost of producing it — wealth depends upon extracting a greater exchange value from a commodity than the labor value used to produce it. Ideology would consist, in this case, in the convictions that arise because of contradictions like this one, and how individuals reconcile the fact that their labor is less valuable than the cost of the goods and services that they produce. In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1884, Marx theorizes labor not to be liberating, but as a source of estrangement. The logic of estrangement is rooted in political economy, more specifically a labor theory of value. Additionally, under capitalism’s designations of private property, workers add value to raw materials via their labor, creating commodities to be bought and sold. For Marx, labor cannot liberate as it is inherently coercive. Individuals must work to survive, and in doing so generate profit for their employers. Marx argues that labor estranges the individual from their material, physical experience in four ways: (1) It estranges them from the product of their work; such that the producer of consumer goods doesn’t relate to what they make as a “craftsman” but instead as an “interchangeable part” in the production process. (2) estrangement from the activity of production; such that they do not have control over their labor schedule, the procedure for ‘making’ goods, the rules of the organizational hierarchy to which they belong, or the parts of the production process that are separate but related to their own. (3) estrangement from species-being; meaning that they lose touch with other people who may inhabit other jobs or live in different places who have a related existence related to their own work. If we can imagine a worker at a “General Mills” factory who thinks of themselves as opposed to another person in their own position at “Nestle,” that gets us close to this kind of estrangement. What these folks can’t recognize is the fact that they are in the same or a similar position. (4) estrangement of “man to man.” Beyond identification with other people who occupy similar or related positions, labor estranges us from other people in general, regardless of where they stand or what their social position is relative to ours. We become less available because labor stifles our ability to relate to one another, to empathize, to see others as part of a common community. Work does not help an individual come to understand the world, and their place in it, but actually obscures it, entrenching them within a partial and illusory version of it. Marx is explicit that liberation requires revolution, or, practical change to things in the physical world. Marx reaches this conclusion in The German Ideology, in which he lays out a materialist conception of history. “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men [sic] — the language of real life” (42). From Sign to Myth As discussed in earlier chapters, the theory of the sign is often attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure, whereas the theory of the symbol is attributed to the 20th-century rhetorician Kenneth Burke and the 19th-century philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced ‘purse’). As we have discussed, Saussure is known for connecting the theory of the sign to general rules of language, whereby the sign gives a form to shared social meaning and its transformation. Peirce: What is a Representation/Symbol? da Saussure: What is a Sign/Language? Sign-as-Icon: likeness/perception Langue: a system with finite, determinate rules.