A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (39 page)

Related to this last point about first and additional language learning is a final and significant advantage of rhetorical theory for the future of language education. Rhetoric is not attached to any one language. It can see that the emergence of four main global languages in the twenty-first century (English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic) is a result of economic
and political power. Rhetoric allows comparative studies between these languages as well as an overview of how languages operate in relation to each other. It also protects the space for post-colonial, national, and regional languages (e.g., French, Polish, Portuguese, Thai, Swahili) to flourish in a wider economy of languages, while foregrounding the need for one or more global languages to be taught within curricular frameworks of each national educational jurisdiction. Language policy, therefore, can be informed by rhetoric, in that the needs of the citizens of a particular country as it finds its place in the global community can be met by a judicious selection of what can be taught (increasingly, from the age of 7) in the school curriculum. The advantage for rhetoric of not being attached to any one language is that it can provide a non-partisan basis for communicational need; at more advanced academic levels, it can provide the basis for comparative study of the particular characteristics of different languages.

It is hard to imagine a future without the affordances that rhetoric offers. In educational terms, such an absence would mean an uncritical acceptance of how communication takes place; in many situations, it would mean no communication. We would be living in a world where decisions were made outside our own powers, and we would be unable to question them. It would be hard to reach consensus for action because there would be no conception of disagreement or difference. Language and communication would become meaningless and without point, other than in the most clichéd maintenance of the status quo. Furthermore, the emphasis on the arts of discourse in the present book has been deliberate, in that there is an aesthetic dimension to communication. Without this dimension, communication would become functional in the most reductive sense. There would be no framing of experience with principles of design and unity at play; no sense of beginning or end in discourse; no pleasure in the act of communication.

Ultimately, rhetoric is not important. It is a high-level theory for understanding the relations between communication, intention, and action; it helps in linking communicational first and second order systems to operation in the real world; through its subcategorical fields, such as argumentation, it serves democratic processes; it provides a perspective on the spectrum of resources (modes) and delivery mechanisms (media) via which communication takes place and meaning is made. It acts as a mediating resource at key and ritual moments of life and death: birth, social practices of union between people, moments of celebration, death. But it is a mediating phenomenon, enabling consensus to be reached so that action can take place; providing the means by which ritual events can take place; providing a human dimension to experience and incorporating the abstract and ethereal within the materiality of everyday life.

The limitations of rhetoric have been pointed out
passim
. In summary, these are that rhetoric deals with the arts of communication and discourse. It does not purport to cover areas of philosophical or religio-spiritual experience that “cannot be named,” though the expression of these fields in discourse (for example, hermeneutics) does entail rhetorical consideration. It has little application in fields that are intensely practical: horticulture, forestry, physics, for example, though again each of these is subject to rhetorical consideration in
how
and via which modes aspects of the field are classified and communicated. In real world hardship that occurs in poverty, war, or famine, it helps little, other in being able to analyze how messages about these disasters are communicated, and with what effect, to the rest of the world. Nor does it help you in navigating across Mongolia without a map; in the supply of water and aid to torment-stricken places; in how to build a fire for survival in a wilderness. There are few areas of experience and places in the world, however, where rhetoric does not play some part. The book ends with a look beyond the confines and influence of rhetoric—all the more important to consider, as they help to define what is inside the field of rhetoric, and its significance for human communication and relations. Ironically, this poem—almost inevitably— is framed in words.

1.
There is much more to Prior et al.'s (2013) argument that is not discussed here, particularly in regard to socialization processes and the Platonic conception of rhetoric as “the leading or formation of people's
souls
through discourse” (15). Readers are recommended to look at Prior et al.'s piece in its entirety.

1.
Harold Rosen was a radical English teacher and teacher educator at the Institute of Education, London, notable for his championing of the diversity, depth, and range of everyday language in the curriculum, and, latterly, for his celebration of narrative.

1.
David Kirkland—see acknowledgements and Kirkland (2012).

2.
LSO, conducted by Valery Gergiev, 15 May 2012, London Barbican Arts Centre:
Rite of Spring
and
Oedipus Rex
.

3.
See also Matisse,
Open Window
, Collioure, Autumn 1914; Matisse,
Interior with Egyptian Curtain;
Matisse,
The Inhabited Silence of Houses
, 1947; Matisse,
Letter to George Besson
, 30 March 1918; Bonnard,
Still Life with Lemons
, circa 1917–18; Bonnard,
The Window
, 1925; and Camoin,
Lola on the Terrace of the Hotel Bellevue in Toulon
, 1920.

4.
Henry Moore,
Late Large Forms
, Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London, May 31–August 18, 2012.

1.
But see the narrative with which the present book begins. The café as a site for social schemata is only part of the picture. A wider frame would take into account the street and the immediate environs of the café, especially where there are tables on the street.

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