Rhetoric: my reviewed definition

If you've endured my ramblings about rhetoric and orality thus far, this might well be overdue. However, as I was thinking about the post right before this one, I realized that I never shared my definition of rhetoric with you. You already know about primary oral cultures, those in which no writing exists.

I have previously subscribed to definitions that privilege "effective symbol use." In light of what I said in my last post, I think I will now include notions of publics and public when I think of defining rhetoric. As an example, I consider rhetoric to be the effective symbol use in public. The focus of my current research can be considered as being centered on the effective public use of symbols in public as represented in Zimbabwean folklore.

I probably needed that clarification more than you.

Publics, public spaces, and rhetoric

One of the tougher distinctions to make in the communication discipline is the line between persuasion and rhetoric. Both rhetoric and persuasion involve attempts to influence attitude change. Both involve a degree of premeditated intent. That is to say both involve intentionality. Intentionality is important because it is what distinguishes persuasion and rhetoric from the broader conception of those human experiences and endeavors commonly known as "communication."

Fair enough.

But what distinguishes rhetoric from generic persuasion? I am not thinking here about a distinctive attribute in the polemic sense. My interest here is to establish an area of conceptual cleavage so that it is possible to focus specifically on rhetoric.

In my thinking about such a line, I have now been convinced by other rhetorical scholars that there are two aspects that are necessary for a communicative transaction to be signified as "rhetorical." Let me reiterate; I am not trying to delineate a concept of rhetoric that is separate from persuasion (that would be impossible to do).

The public is the first aspect I think is indispensable to a rhetorical act. A speaker can write a speech, or even perform one, without a public, it remains speech not a rhetorical act. This is not say that all rhetoric is spoken or verbal. So how is a public defined in this conception? Is it immediate as in the case of an audience to say a speech? Or is the concept of public more dynamically conceived?

I do not think a rhetorical public can be a narrowly conceived public. The rhetorical world, heck the real world, is much to complex too allow for a static concept of a public. What I am saying here is that one cannot say that a public is simply a group of people attendant to a rhetorical act.

The immediacy of a public can be problematic; consider for example John Jay Chapman's famous Coatesville Address delivered on 18 August 1912. Edwin Black in Rhetorical Criticism: a study in method astutely observes that only two or three people attended the actual performance of the speech. The speech went on to receive much critical acclaim long after the actual event. In a sense, this speech went public or more correctly, found its public indirectly, as a opposed to directly.

This example demonstrates the fluidity of the notion of the rhetorical public. The Lincoln-Douglas debates for their part were witnessed by an immediate public. So one can reasonably assert that the public that constitutes a rhetorical public is established in relation to a particular work of rhetoric. In other words the public is not an attribute of rhetoric; it is part of what defines rhetoric. Rhetoric does not assume the pre-existence of a public; rhetoric can only exists in the public sphere. This is unlike persuasion which can and does occur privately.

Perhaps the second aspect, public spaces, will make the first one more sensible. Public spaces, to simplify, are those spaces that are considered to be in the public domain. That is to say they are places or locations accessible to the public. If a public is a defining characteristic of rhetoric, public spaces become the irreducible venues for the rhetorical event. It is important to note once again what I am thinking of here is not a narrow concept of public spaces in relation to rhetoric. The Coatesville Address which went public mainly via transcript is another good example of the pliability of public spaces across different spectrums, not just the physical/geographical sphere. In the internet age, this post you are reading could be considered rhetoric on the basis of cyberspace as a public domain even though cyberspace is a far cry from physical space.

To summarize then, the relationship between publics, public spaces, and rhetoric, one can say that rhetoric is accessible to the public (publice event) because it is constituted in public spaces.

Christianity and consumerism: the dubious nexus

Apart from the function of rhetoric in oral cultures (because I come from a highly oral culture), I'm also fascinated by the often ignored relationship between our faith and capitalism. I tend to think that there's more causality in the relationship than we acknowledge. There are things in the modern expression of Christianity that are essential to not only to the succes of capitalism, but to it's establishment basic survival. Likewise, modern Christianity is largely influenced by what's going on on the market place. One need only look to the modern church's dependence on money, a key building block for a capitalism.

I don't think it coincidental that the exponential spread of Christianity has been closely matched by a similarly exponential growth of market capitalism. When the British colonized Zimbabwe, they rationalized western imperialism by claiming that colonialism brought the "Three C's" to the "dark continent": Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce. Maybe I am just a bitter post-colonial thinker.

Or maybe not.

It is striking to note that the mammon is the most frequent subject that Jesus talked about. He talked about it more than anything else with the exception of the kingdom itself! That those two rank one and two on Jesus' most talked about subjects doesn't suggest that they are or ought to be complimentary. On the contrary, Jesus talks about them because their antithetical to each other; they ought not to co-exist. Since I am not a theologian or a biblical hermeneutics expert, I will leave this subject to those worthy experts whose terrain this is.

I bring all this up because it there exits a dubious connection between our faith and rampant capitalism not only in our present epoch, but throughout time. In fact, there's a fair amount of evidence suggesting that the Christian work ethic and the Christian notion of complete emotional engagement were critical in establishment of conditions conducive to the emergence of the hyper-capitalism under which we live. Rodney Clapp, in this 1996 essay which appeared in Christianity Today eloquently frames the issues. Here's an excerpt:

Several essential features of today's capitalism were either unimaginable or positively condemned throughout most of Christian history. We no longer question the legitimacy of making money with money. But throughout church history, up through the Reformation, the charging of interest was proscribed. In earlier eras, the church would have regarded stock market speculation as nothing more than profligate gambling. We suffer no crisis of conscience, nor even a second thought, about consuming goods or experiences solely for relaxation and amusement. Yet Puritans and our Christian forebears of other strains understood consumption principally for pleasure as sinful indulgence....

...Much later, in the Boston of 1635, a Puritan merchant was charged by the elders of his church with defaming God's name. He was hauled before the General Court of the Commonwealth and convicted of greed because he had sold his wares at 6 percent profit, 2 percent above the maximum allowed by law.

One more example should suffice to drive home the point that capitalism and consumerism have not always been with us. Max Weber argued that while modern capitalist employers depend on the principle of increased "piece-rates," or more pay for more production, such a thing was not at all second nature to a traditional or precapitalistic way of life. Again and again, he says, employers in the early capitalist period found that raising piece-rates did not automatically raise production. For example, Weber observed that if a hired hand were offered an increase in wage per acre of hay mowed, he would not increase his production but would rather work until he made the same amount to which he was accustomed, actually reducing his production. "The opportunity of earning more was less attractive," said Weber, "than that of working less."...

...All this meant that, in the Christian-influenced West in which capitalism originated, for capitalism to succeed it required a theological foundation and legitimation. Capitalism had to be learned. Many important factors in addition to theology were at work, of course: technological innovations, the growth of cities, and other developments were necessary for capitalism to be born and to thrive. But pervasively Christian polities and people did not-in fact, could not-suddenly one day simply assume the rightness and goodness of profit-making, of taking interest on loans, of consumption for pleasure, of the accumulation of resources exceeding immediate needs.

The great article is here.

More on orality

I have been very intrigued by a discovery I have made regarding the shaping of discourse under either orality and literacy. In the section I'm reading in Eric A. Havelock's Preface to Plato, Havelock emphasizes the point that in literate societies, the written from of language embodies the highest form of linguistic expression. In other words, the prosiac nature of written discourse in literate societies becomes the prototype for how literate people tend think and express themselves. We don't go around reciting sonnets or evoking epic imagery.

In primary oral cultures, the poetic and epic--the easily rememberable--are the default formats. So the poetic form in the discourse of oral peoples is not (like we like to think) an out of the ordinary phenomenon. It is the archetype for self expression; it is ordinary, and not extraordinary.

This is an important disctinction to be aware of especially for those of us who are interested in understanding the function fo rhetoric under orality a condition different from that which we live in.

Practice as epistemology

Since my last post, I have been thinking about the practical implications of epistemology in primary oral cultures or what Walter Ong dubs "oral noetics. Think of a world bereft of text; no computers, no books, no pens, and no memory. Everything that is known is kept between the ears.

No external memory. That is to say, there is no knowledge without the"knower." There is no separation between knowledge and people like we have it now. All knowledge is personal but not in the same way that we think of "personal." In primary oral cultures, personal does not mean private, it means "involving a person."

For all the times that you "looked up" something today, you would have to have engaged a person. Every single time you have relied on anything incorporating writing, you would have had to talk to another person. In the absence of "text" there'd be no cell phones so talking to someone literally means face to face communication.

That changes things. It makes me reconsider my faith.

I happen to think that the most radical change would occur our experience of God. Imagine (for some of you this might seem sacrilegious but indulge me) Christianity without the Bible (for there would be none under orality!). This is not too much of a stretch; there are many Christian who have no literal knowledge of God around the world today.

In this conception, John 1:1 (Amplified version) becomes meaningful in way that it cannot be under scriptographic/typographic Christianity:

IN THE beginning [before all time] was the Word (^[a]Christ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ^[b]Himself.^(A)

Again: in orality there is no knowledge apart of the embodiment of that knowledge. There can not be a knowledge of God separate from God, "in the beginning was the Word..."

Here's another verse I think assumes an enlarged depth under orality. 1 John 4:8 (Amplified again):

He who does not love has not become acquainted with God [does not and never did know Him], for God is love.

There can be no knowledge of love apart from love. To know God is to love God; to love God is love humanity. People become as Buber encourages "Thous" and not it's. There are no love letters to be written, no conferences or big speeches on love. Love becomes not a thing but an act; a perennial abiding act.

In orality, you speak and act what you know. The greatest homage one can pay to any wisdom is to literally "re-call" that wisdom. Without separate repositories for all that we know, what know assumes a real world immediacy unknown to our times. Dan Taylor in his statement on character in Tell me a story hints at this idea when he writes, "Character is values lived" (p.53). Word is "act" as it is in the Hebrew dabar.

I don't often think of the activities of my life as acts of knowledge per se. Perhaps there's a sense in which I can learn what I know from observing the things I do and things I re-call (i.e. say).

Knowledge is not dead, it is real, lived, and experienced...Hence in orality practice is epistemology.

Word: a media ecology critique of the "technologizing of the word"

Over the last few weeks I have spent a lot of my time reading about the concept of the word. By word I don't mean isolated forms or specific languages/diction; I am thinking much more generically about the importance and function of language as relates to humanity's existential quest. Let me clarify what I am thinking about here more clearly. When I say "language" or "word" most people (self included) immediately jump a conception that is based on something (linguistic, text, literary, whatever) that is other than people. In our modern sensibilities, we tend of think of language, of the word as an abstract construct; something that exists independent of and (most importantly) in isolation from people's lived experience. This peculiar condition is the result of modern humanity's impact and use of words, it hasn't always been this way.

Legalistic tendencies in contemporary societies are extreme manifestations of how cold, calculated, and closed our autocratic ideas about language and words have become. As an example consider how Christendom treats the Bible as literally the Word(s) of God. Hence, the Bible in many Christian circles is parochially defined as the complete manual and or standard by which Christian ought to live their lives. The impetus to "live by the book" has become the ultimate standard for many a Christian.

I'm starting to disagree with this set up more and more.

The Bible is not God; it cannot and does not contain the entire spectrum of the experience of Christianity. As a matter of fact, those leather bound books filled with somewhat cryptic notations put there by a printing press, are just that dead symbols. They are merely indicative relics of the existence of an encoder/source (of the symbols) and a decoder/receiver. I realize that by evoking the sender/receiver model I have conjured up notions of the Sender/Message/Receiver model of communication. This is not at all what I intend to show. My present focus is the simple, but oft overlooked fact that, the dynamism (Greek: dunamis) of the "The Word," and indeed every word/language depends something/someone outside of it for its creation, encryption, and decryption. In other words, the intrinsic value of words is extrinsically sourced. Words are symbols.

Humor me with a brief exploration of the etymology of the term "word." According to Fr. Walter On in Orality and Literacy (p.32) the Hebrew term dabar means both "event" and "word." Walter Fisher in Human Communication as Narration (p.5) provides the Greek equivalent, logos, which meant "story, reason, rationale, conception, discourse, thought." Both these classical forms of our contemporary term ("word") connote a sense of the term much wider than our current use.

What happened? When exactly did the dunamis of the word separate itself from the action, from the "story, reason, rationale, conception, discourse, thought" of humanity makings words objects unto themselves, in a word, creating the logocentric reality?

Recede with me to quaint antiquity all the way back to the middle of the 4th century BC. There we a find a world unencumbered by a task you and I find mundane, hardly noteworthy, indeed a task so trivial that the contemporary world has automated it and made it as painless as possible; this task is simply writing. Yet it is not a minor or disposable task; writing is one thing our society cannot do without.

It is the task that called out Gutenburg's printing press from the higher recesses of the human mind; this printing press quickly gave rise to capitalism, reformed Catholicism, and Protestantism all in which in some form are at the core of human existence in many parts of the world today; the printing press also heralded the arrival of what Neil Postman in Amusing ourselves to death fashions the "typographic" era in which books became ubiquitous and as a result indexing came to being. Indexing is important to this discussion as it the predecessor of the dictionary which as we know embodies the final step in the separation of dunamis of words from being anthropocentric to being logocentric. In short, writing gave us words, at least in the sense that we understand them today.

While writing brought many benefits to humankind, it also wrought unnumerable, irreparable damage to the intrinsic worth of our species. Peter Preuss notes in the introduction to Nietzsche's On the advantage and disadvantage of history for life that:

Man, unlike the animal, is self-conscious. He is aware that he is alive and that he must die. And because he is self-conscious he is not only aware of living, but of living well or badly. Life is not wholly something that happens to man; it is also something that he engages in according to values he follows. Human existence is a task.

It is my contention that words (in the dabar, and logos sense) are tools for the task of humanity's existential quest. In letting their original dunamis evolve from something outside of ourselves (i.e. from words themselves as in logocentrism), we surrendered an important part of what distinguishes us from a herd of cattle or a swine of pigs. In a sense, writing debased us.

The efficacy of these words that you are reading right now is in you and not in the words on the screen. Without you they are mere vacuous symbols.

Difference

I was involved in two conversations that centered on the subject of differences between people. Which got me to thinking.

In the earlier conversation we discussed the question of difference as it applied to the church context. It is no surprise that Sunday morning is probably on the most segregated time in America as churches gather (and this is ironic) to preview what will be like in then end. Often times congregants think and speak nostalgically about the time when people from every tribe and tongue will finally get along.

Question: if the ultimate goal will be lived mutually with people from diverse backgrounds, why aren't we interested in engaging that aspect of the future now? I know you've heard the other critiques about the foolishness of racial discrimination in the church so I bore you with that.

The other party in this conversation hinted that there is a sense in which an appreciation for that which is different permits minimal contact. We were talking here about phenomenon that is happening at churches across the Twin Cities metro where caucasion congregation meet in the morning and a non-white group uses the facilities for services later on in the day.

The other conversation I was part focused on the processes and experiences of being an outsider in the confines of a social majority. Those of us who happen to be outsiders in this particular context were asked about what insiders should know to ease the process.

This brought me back to thoughts I've had in the past about the relationships in a communal community. Here's an excerpt:

The community paradigm is a much better model of operation. From the very roots of the word—common unity—there is a deep regard for the value of each being. You can’t have common interests if you don’t individual interests. Notice, it’s about unity itself not unity around something else. Whatever community you can think of exists for the reason of unity. This allows the community approach to be more inclusive than the team approach: anyone, regardless of how or what they can do for cause is open to join the community because it exists for the unity of the interests of all individuals. Implicit in this is the idea that each individual and the premium they place on the goal is important. The community idea, because it draws from those things that you and I have as human beings, lends itself accessible to all people regardless of ability, race/gender or creed.

These thoughts together with Buber's opinion on the actualization of the "Thou" in human interaction have me thinking that the best appreciation of difference in community comes when we can welcome, nurture, and appreciate difference in community. This demands close proximity and sacrifice.

We should value difference from close up. What say you?

On contigency

I've recently gained a new appreciation for the ability to hold one's tongue in the midst of contentious and controversial discussions. Part of this appreciation is a direct function of the reality that many of my friends are intellectuals who are engaged in the consciousness of being human. This often means that arguments and agreements often abound in our conversations.

Sometimes, one can only listen and contemplate, left behind in the debris of fast moving conversation. I found myself in such a place yesterday.

The topic at hand was the issue of the multiplicity of doctrine and dogma in Christianity. "Why can't we all just understand things the same," was the question that was asked. Why is "truth" so contentious? Being the rhetorical scholar, this got me thinking about the possible value that contingency has in spurring engagement.

The value, in fact the very existence of rhetoric (however you want to define that term), relies on the existence of uncertainty. Politicians and marketers can spin messages at us in attempts to influence to vote for them because they cannot guarantee they have our support. Conversely, people don't by ad time during prime to broadcast their views over the possibility of the sun rising tomorrow. Once an understanding of the earth's orbit around the sun was established, that issue spoke for itself. Gone were the days that people sat around and debated the issue. In other words, rhetoric (regarding that particular matter) became obsolete.

Rhetoric imposes on us in ways that we cannot avoid. It invades our psyche with a pervasiveness that our best rationalizations sometimes cannot outlast. Rhetoric transforms our emotional state. This transformative nature of rhetoric demands we engage it; that we find reasons of our own either to go along with rhetorical appeals or resist them. In short, reasoned thoughts are the antidote to rhetoric. However, when rhetoric evanesces the needed to protect oneself from it dissipates too. You and I don't go around conjuring ways of rebutting arguments that the sun won't rise tomorrow because no such appeals are addressed at us.

It is this engagement, this need to respond to contingency that makes contingency valuable. If there was no variance of vision for what the ecclesiastical community ought be like, why would we care about engaging the question of what the church ought to be like? If, hypothetically speaking, this country knew for sure that Ralph Nader is going to be the next president, what need would there be to listen to any of the other candidates?

It is precisely in the contingency, in the uncertainty that you and I find impetus to engage in the issues of our day.

Discrete rationality

Over the last view days I've become increasingly aware of notion of discrete logic and how in some ways, many ways, my life is comprised of a confusing mesh of an unending number of mutually exclusive rationalities rather than being a symbiotic amalgam of ideals all flowing from one core. To demonstrate what I'm trying to describe I offer this hypothetical: Lets say I go out to lunch and decide to order takeout. On my way back to the office, let's say I encounter a homeless person who forcefully relieves me of my lunch. How am I to react?

On the one hand, I'm instinctively incensed because of the violation of my person and the fact that my sustenance is jeopardized by the loss of my food. In fact the whole notion of restitution upon which much of our society's legal system rests encourages that I not only be incensed, but also go ahead and a payback for my losses. Yet on the other hand, I'm called to be sacrificial; rejoice in that I've been able to relieve the suffering of another human being and that's an honorable thing to do.

Still the question; what to do in that situation?

In the persistence of that question, we are forced to address a narrow ethical dilemma. This dilemma is "narrow" in that there isn't much else in the way of pre, con, and post-text to the hypothetical situation I just proposed. There is no room to contemplate the situation from a broader perspective. The entirety of my person is parochially reduced to the status of being an ethical being; nothing more. Information about whether and when I would had last had food would shed an interesting light on this situation. Likewise, finding out more about the person and their story would aid one's analysis of the situation.

This is not how we are trained to think. Society indoctrinates children with discrete logics about language, math, science etc. starting at a very young age. Interestingly, it seems to me that little effort is put into acquainting these kids with notions about a holistic outlook in life. The same is true on the job for adults, very few companies take cross training as seriously as they take divvy up the task at hand into spheres of specialty. "Niche marketing" is the term given to the development of discrete sales pitches. The whole field of ethics is contest of discrete ethics that sometimes are at odds with each other

Who's responsibility is it to tout the whole, the non discrete? How do we keep ourselves from falling witlessly into the parochialism that dominates our world today? How far back do we need to step back?

I hope these questions are not only rhetorical, but can also serve as guides for the times when we're pressed into a discrete take on a situation.