A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (29 page)

If rhetoric is the overarching theoretical concept in the arts of communication, what is the principal process, given that framing is a key aspect of composing and “receiving” communication? Because we have expanded the repertoire of modes and media of communication beyond the verbal,
writing
is no longer either the actual description of the process, nor is it even suitable as a metaphor for the range of communicative possibilities. We have already identified
composition
(
chapter 4
) as a better way of describing the making and receiving processes, but composition does not necessarily include the aesthetic or dramatic dimensions we have been exploring in the current chapter.

Design
is a helpful construct when it comes to describing the part played by the rhetor in dialogic communication. Emerging from the fields associated with drawing and with spatial representation, such as furniture design, stage design, and fashion design, the term brings with it not only making and composition, but
conscious
and
aesthetically driven
creation for a particular real-world purpose. That is why the term is separated, but also often yoked with, “art,” such as in Art and Design courses, and sometimes seen as an inferior, less pure field than “fine art.” The aesthetics
of design carry one more aspect than those they share with fine art: that is the area of functionality. Good design for a kitchen knife or a stage set or a shirt will usually include fitness-for-purpose as well as a pleasing (i.e., harmonious) look. That design derives from the visual-spatial world and is practical as well as beautiful, which makes it suitable for inclusion in a repertoire of subsections of rhetoric. It acts as a counter-point to the more abstract symbolizations of writing.

And yet design and writing are complementary. Design applies to the shape, look, and functionality of an object or creation in its context. Writing applies to the inscription as part of the design, but also to the way the design relates to (is interpreted, is mediated by) its human discoursal context.

Any rhetorical moment is designed. In other words, the need for expression and communication is chosen from a repertoire of possibilities. It is intended to have an impact on the real world—on relations between people—and it has an aesthetic dimension. Indeed, rhetoric is the theory within which aesthetics and functionality are brought together. The better designed communication, the more effective; the more effective, the better designed.

What are the tools of the rhetorical designer? These are best thought of, first, through the metaphor of the director and stage designer in the production of a play. They have a script they are working with, and they have actors at their disposal. They have a space within which they are working, however informal or formal that space is. They may have to define the space. They can certainly redesign it, if required for their purposes. Once the basic elements are in place, they begin by working out what aspects of time and place they wish to convey and how those dimensions fit into their overall conception of the meaning of the playscript. These decisions, in turn, drive the work of the set designer who creates a set to fit the overall intention. Set design involves not only what the overall structure of the set will be, but what props—furniture—and what lighting (in collaboration with the lighting designer) will be needed. The conception of the design of the whole also sets the tone for the costume design.

In concert with the decisions made about setting, the director works with the actors—taking cues from them as well as deliberately directing them to fit in with the overall design—asking them to work in a particular way, using the tools at their disposal (body, facial expression, gesture, movement, voice) and the relations between them (choreographic design) to engage in action that will convey to the audience the overall effect. The actors will come with their parts learned; they often do not read the whole play, but work toward that wider knowledge in rehearsal. The script thus emerges for them into a production, on the whole, like photographic images in an old-fashioned developing tray. Some actors will read the whole play to get a sense of their part in it; and if their reading is a fully
engaged one, they may have suggestions to put to the director about the direction in which the play might go. But it is the director whose design of the whole informs the approach the actors will take and the specific tone, modulation, pace, rhythm, and interactive dynamic that is created.

Such close analogy between rhetoric and theatre is not meant to suggest that rhetoric operates in the shadow of the real world, or that it is concerned with illusion. Rather, that the conscious decisions taken by directors and set designers to compose, shape, and design an experience, and to transform words on a page into actions in time and space, are exactly what speakers, writers—rhetors—do on a daily and frequent basis in order to get the day-to-day business of the world transacted and in order to nurture and strengthen human relations. Rhetoric, it is argued, provides the fullest theory that marries the abstract/conceptual and the practical, that enables description and analysis of the aesthetics of communication in social and political contexts, and that is core to democratic processes as well as to human interaction. Drama and theatre, with their inclusive, comprehensive, multimodal, and core properties for a range of media representations, offer both an analogy to the more theoretical conception of rhetoric, and also a tangible insight into possible worlds of action and representation. In that sense, we are all actors in a production. Where that notion takes us is not to “higher” and more ethereal explanations of being, but to issues of power in its relation to design, and to both in relation to the aesthetic, to argumentation, and to moving on in the world.

In the final chapter of this book, we look at the future of the field and how rhetoric might stand in relation to the other major domains of knowledge; but first we will look at rhetoric in relation to multimodality, digitization, and education.

11

It is one of the significant leaps forward in communication theory that multimodality is increasingly accepted as a norm in thinking about the resources for meaning-making. The work of Kress (e.g., 2003, 2010) has been central to this movement. He positions multimodality as an aspect of the theory of social semiotics. Social semiotics, we could say, has emerged from a combination of sociolinguistics; the turn to the social in studies of cognition, culture, and learning (exemplified, for example, in the work of Vygotsky); and from the natural development of semiotics into
social
semiotics on the assumption that the social is prior, but that the social and sign systems shape and inform each other.

It is the aim of this chapter to argue that a social semiotic view of multimodality is complementary and close to an exploration of the relationship between rhetoric and multimodality and that social semiotics, as a theoretical frame, is not far from rhetoric in its scope and values. Both social semiotics and rhetoric see the prime mover in communication as being the social. Both are interested in how, ontologically and culturally, social patterning affects communicative systems and practices. Both value the individual expression and reception of speech, writing, and other modes, as well as the more social, collective patterns that emerge and change over time. Both see a dynamic interaction between sign systems and functionality.

There are some differences, however, between rhetoric and social semiotics that must be addressed. They could be seen as a matter of emphasis, but I think they are important to define as they help us to see how the two bodies of theory could be related and what application such a relationship could have to the practices of communication in society and education.

The first is that rhetoric is more avowedly political than social semiotics. Unless we coined an approach that might be termed, by analogy with critical literacy and critical thinking,
critical social semiotics
, social semiotics
per se
has a social rather than a political set of parameters. Rhetoric, on the other hand, had its origins in politics and power relations in the pre-Athenian Mediterranean and in Africa. These origins tended to focus on
one particular mode of communication: speech, and more specifically as an oral genre, political speeches in public forums. Today, rhetoric continues to be associated with politics, often to its detriment: “political rhetoric” is universally decried as misleading, over-persuasive, low on evidence, and high on party political ideology. At worst, it is seen as the egocentric outpourings of politicians with power but insufficient knowledge in language, dressed up in over-persuasive garb. Social semiotics could apply itself to the analysis of political discourse—and it does—but that is the application of a theory and technique to a particular social practice, not a politically and socially informed theory of communication.

Second, there is a difference in starting points. Rhetoric starts with the politico-social need to communicate. Social semiotics starts with the sign and its social significance. The difference is masked by the fact that both theories are interested in the relationship of the social to signs, but they start at different points in the universe of communication. The differences can be characterized partly by their origins, as suggested previously, and partly by the fact that semiotics is a science of sign
systems
. Any scientific theoretical enterprise becomes concerned with categorization and technical terms—that is partly what distinguished it as a science. Social semiotics is no stranger to classificatory terms and systems: affordance, coherence, cohesion, design, discourse, functional load, genre, materiality, modality, transduction, and so on. Some of these are created to serve the field of social semiotics itself; others are borrowed or emerge from previous theoretical formulations in linguistics, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, and other related fields or disciplines. Rhetoric has tended to classificatory systems and extensive glossaries in phases during its history, particularly during the Renaissance and in rhetoric manuals. But it is at its strongest and most flexible when it finds a balance between a simple set of tools for analysis and sufficient clarity and distinctiveness in its definitional terms to make them useful in theoretical and functional (real world) terms. However, the point remains that rhetoric starts with the socio-political nexus; social semiotics with signs and systems. The
language
of rhetoric is about positioning, contextual factors, social dynamics, and the deployment of particular multimodal combinations for particular purposes. The
language
of social semiotics denotes the available resources and tools for the creation and reception of meaning. Perhaps that is one of the Achilles heels of rhetoric—and has certainly been one of the abiding battles that rhetoric has fought, cast as it was in Greek civilization as counter to philosophy, the science of meaning (see Vickers 1989). This does not mean that rhetoric is agnostic about meaning—far from it—but that meaning is the read-off of social interaction, the generation of a web of conceptual filigree that is continually negotiated by agents in society. It is about
how
something is communicated between, at its most simple, two people, not essentially about
what
.

Third, rhetoric—as hinted in the last paragraph—is more generative than social semiotics, which tends to be reserved for analysis. Rhetoric affords designs for the rhetoric or maker on the one hand, and the receiver, reader, or audience on the other. It is intimately interested in the relationship between the rhetor and the receiver of the message, and plies its trade between these two poles. Social semiotics is more interested in the traces of communication, the actual materiality of communication. Rhetoric, then, can offer the maker the resources and means via which to communicate via the heuristics of framing, multimodality, and agency; it is more akin to the arts of discourse. Social semiotics offers more of a scientific means of analysis, informing multimodality and framing via its rich account of the sign systems available.

The respective histories of rhetoric and social semiotics are very different. Rhetoric as a meta-discipline and theory has its origins in pre-Athenian (African/Mediterranean) emergent democracies, though attained one of its first major consolidations in the work of Aristotle and others in classical Greece. The conventional Western history of rhetoric, however, seeing Athens as the progenitor of the rhetorical tradition and Greek democratic operations as the testing ground for the discipline, needs to be put in a more global context. One of the key analyses in this regard is by Blake (2009), who, in
The African Origins of Rhetoric
, identifies African principles of ethos, morality, and values in the governance of social relations. He goes back to Battiscombe Gunn's (1906) translation of
The Wisdom of the East: The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and The Instruction of Ke'Gemni
to source the principles of rhetoric in pre-Athenian times (and further back from the pre-Athenian Mediterranean traditions, for example, Corax in the fifth century
BC
). This move to resurrect the significance of African rhetoric is partly spurred by the need to get beneath the cultural carapace of colonialism.
The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep
was written 3,000 years before Corax, and partly to establish the founding principle of rhetoric on moral grounds. Blake further argues that there is a close connection between the revival of rhetoric studies in Africa with African national development, thus positioning the debate in relation to development studies.

The
moral
dimension to rhetoric is worth considering in relation to an emergent theory of contemporary rhetoric. The ultimate purpose of rhetoric is to service the pursuit of the truth, through an emphasis on integrity, clarity of communication, a belief in the power of discussion and debate to understand and resolve problems, and a drive toward consensus for action for good in the world. In this sense, rhetoric is not a cynical or even skeptical theory of communication: it can expose cynicism, cant, hypocrisy, and the split between meaning and delivery. Its drive is toward transparency of intention and a balanced relationship between intention and action. Its operation within a society is for the common good and to service democratic exchange and representation. It can be deployed to
explore the relationship between the discourses of faith, secularism, and action. The emphasis is always on the discourses because its principal interest is in the web of communication that acts as a means to the end: the end being good relations between people, governance of social and political life, charting and appreciation of the inner landscape of spiritual and moral life in relation to the work of the world.