“Introduction”

Contemporary Rhetorical Reader: A Reader

By John Louis Lucaites and Celeste Michelle Condit

In the beginning…

Referencing to classical rhetorical theories developed in Greece by iconic figures such as Isocrates, Aristotle, and Plato, provides the necessary framework to treat the study of rhetoric as a discipline with a particular historical development. Specifically, they restate Isocrates’ notions of rhetorical education as an “art of discourse,” a highly valuable “power of speech,” and the ability of persuading each other, which separates humans from other living creatures (1). While clearly stipulating that their intent is not to historicize “rhetoric,” Condit and Lucaites do attempt to provide a description of what they conceive as relevant concepts from classical antiquity that have influenced the development of “contemporary rhetorical theory.”

Following a typical practice in the field, they highlight ancient rhetorical theorists from Greece and Rome because their “focus on rhetoric typically emphasized the public, persuasive, and contextual characteristics of human discourse in situations governed by the problems of contingency” (2). The authors then go on to define these concepts as follows:

“Contingent situations occur when decisions have to be made and acted upon, but decision makers are forced to rely upon probabilities rather than certainties …  one must rely upon judgments derived from the probability or likelihood of “truth” rather than on certain knowledge” (2).

“… public discourse focused attention on communicative acts that affected the entire community and were typically performed before the law courts, the legislative assemblies, and occasional celebratory gatherings of the citizenry-at-large … The ability to contribute to public policy debates and to affect the direction and life of the community through public discourse was taken by classical teachers of rhetoric as an essential attribute of the educated citizen and thus very highly valued” (3).

“… persuasion, that is, its ability to affect belief and behavior through the power of symbolic interaction … particularly in the context of social and political affairs, the manner and form of discourse was integral to the “truth” of the thing being described and played a central role in shaping and motivating collective identity and action” (3).

“… meaning as contextual. This is to say that the meaning of a particular linguistic usage (e.g., tropes, figures of speech, narratives, examples, etc.) derived from the particular speaker at a specific moment in time … language usages are also rooted in broader historical and cultural contexts” (3-4).

Using Winston Churchill’s speech to British troops titled “War Situation I,” the authors attempt to provide an example of the importance of considering these concepts and how they play out in public discourse, especially in terms of a specific context, and the persuasive power of the speech, in this case to boost confidence for an eventual triumph. In their own words: “From the rhetorical perspective, where attention focuses on the persuasive potential of public discourse, the emphasis is not on the truth or falsity of language, but in the power and effectiveness of the performance to interpret and evaluate, to envision new possibilities, to call a community together and to motivate it to act in the name of shared values and interests” (5).

To continue their delineation of periods that influenced a development of contemporary rhetorical theory, Condit and Lucaites point to the marginal role that the study of rhetoric played in the Enlightenment and modernist eras, “generally subordinated to the study of science and philosophy,” (6) which motivates them to consider recent work that reinterprets, or revives, a classical rhetorical tradition that “contributed to the institutionalization of communication studies as an academic discipline” (7). The contrasting perceptions of rhetoric are useful in proposing a chronologic and motivated development of the field, and the kind of work that is considered as contemporary rhetorical theory.

Twentieth-century “communication studies” were motivated by “forward-looking intellectuals and educators like John Dewey” who were “concerned about the ability of the citizenry to participate effectively” in a mass democratic society with Progressive-era politics, and who considered “public speaking” as “essential to being an effective citizen” (7).  The study of communication in this era “focused on the historical examination of classical and civic humanist models of persuasion and governance” (7). It was useful, then, to adopt “Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as the faculty or power ‘of discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion” in order to create “effective speakers along the lines of fairly classical models represented most fully by Quintillian’s vir bonus, ‘the good man speaking well’” (8). This was the goal of the emerging discipline from the 1920’s through the 1960’s, when  “dissatisfaction with this approach to rhetoric began to grow” (9).

By the mid 1960’s new rhetorical theories were needed to be able to deal with the phenomena of television, which “altered the ways in which public discourse was conducted …  what it might mean to be a ‘public,’ as well as to the problem of how public discourse was received and interpreted by the mass and multiple audiences that attended to it [and] grassroots social movements … which began to question the effectiveness of classical models of rhetoric and communication for the increasingly vocal, oppositional, and marginalized groups concerned to infiltrate and overturn what they perceived as rigid social and political hierarchies and hegemonies” (8).

Some of the work that the authors highlight is that of Franklin Haiman and Robert L. Scott, which calls for careful consideration of our interpretations and evaluations of “‘contemporary rhetoric of the streets’” and considering rhetoric as a “way of knowing, a means for the production of truth and knowledge in a world where certainty is rare and yet action must be taken” (9). They also reference Lloyd Bitzer and Douglas Ehninger. Bitzer described three constituent elements of discourse: exigencies, audiences and constraints, defined the rhetorical situation as ‘a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence’ and located “the essence of rhetoric in the broader social situation” (9). Ehninger “argued that rhetoric was a function of its culture, and thus encouraged increased attention to the multiple forms and functions of rhetorics at different times and in different places” (9).

The ideas in these essays, along with subsequent work in the late 1960’s, were crystallized in two significant conferences (sponsored by the National Developmental Project on Rhetoric) that would put forth a ‘consensus judgment’ with specific recommendations:

1) The technology of the twentieth century has created so many new channels and techniques of communication, and the problems confronting contemporary societies are so related to communicative methods and contents that it is imperative that rhetorical studies be broadened to explore communicative procedures and practices not traditionally covered.

2) Our recognition of the scope of rhetorical theory and practice should be greatly widened.

3) At the same time, a clarified and expanded concept of reason and rational decision should be worked out.

4) Rhetorical invention should be restored to a position of centrality in theory and practice.

The postmodern epistemology challenges modernism’s neutral and objective figurations of the universe, with a preference for subjective and local interpretation, in a highly complex and ever-changing universe. Disagreement from a modern perspective is attributed to ignorance, whereas in a postmodern view it is considered a natural “result of different social, political, and ethnic groups, with different logics, interests, and values living together and competing for limited or scarce resources… social discord is not a pathology to be cured but a condition to be productively managed” (11). These two schools of thought have greatly influenced the kind of work that is published in the field of rhetoric. Condit and Lucaites reference tensions generated around Nixon’s speech about the Vietnam War, as it was taken up from these two perspectives.

They also pose that work questioning women’s liberation and equal rights also calls into question issues of “substantive and the stylistic formulae for theory construction” as they suggest that “there is little agreement today on what constitutes a feminist rhetorical theory, but this body of theoretical work continually exerts pressure for broader perspectives to be taken upon the general theories of rhetoric that are most widely circulated” (12). This kind of work was important in broadening our understanding of rhetoric and social change and its focus on marginalized groups.

Before closing this introduction, the authors mention that the theoretical focus was greatly emphasized by the work of Michael C. McGee and Thomas Farrell, who “embodied the renewed emphasis on rhetorical theories as a means for understanding contemporary social and political life, [and] encouraged increased contact and conversation with the emergence (in translation) of a growing community of continental social theorists who were beginning to focus attention on discourse and communication theory” (12). The continental theorists that they take up are Marx, Hegel and Habermas, which are typically associated with a cultural studies perspective.