A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (30 page)

Throughout its long history, it has oscillated between being the foreground of attention and playing a secondary role to philosophy (philosophy being the generation and examination of ideas; rhetoric being the means via which those ideas are communicated). It tends to flourish when there is relativism in a society or civilization, or during a period of rapid change when assumed verities are questioned. It also plays an important role in the discussion of ideas that help societies work toward consensus and action. In other words, it is an essential operational and functional element in democracies: a cornerstone of democratic values, and a means by which difference is understood, tolerated, and resolved in order to “move society on.” The high points of rhetoric as a unifying theory of communication, following Athenian and Roman democracies, have been the Renaissance and the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is no coincidence that there has been a rise in interest in rhetoric during these periods. For a particular moment in the history of rhetoric that is not unrelated to the history of social semiotics, see
chapter 3
for an extensive discussion of the split between rhetoric and English studies in the late nineteenth century in England.

Social semiotics, on the other hand, has a history of just more than a hundred years. Saussure's (1983) lectures between 1906 and 1911 at the University of Geneva, published later as
Cours de Linguistique Générale
, are generally agreed to be the starting point for structural linguistics. It would be interesting to read an account on the context in which Saussure generated his theory of synchronic relations and system-internal relations of difference. The assumption can be made that the theory is counter to (but also complementary to) the diachronic approach of historical linguistics in the late nineteenth century, which included lexicology, philology, etymology, studies of language variation in dialects, and the history of the development of languages, as well as developmental studies in the acquisition of language in relation to contemporary advances in cognitive psychology. Saussure's emphasis on synchronic relations (we will not go more deeply into other aspects of Saussurean theory here) paved the way for studies in linguistics and semiotics that took the
sign
(and its division into the
signifier
and
signified
) as its basic unit of classification and analysis. The genesis of
social
semiotics or “semiology” was already there in the work of Saussure, as indicated in the following:

It is … possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology,
and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek
semeíon
, ‘sign’). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge. (Chandler 2013)

Fifthly, rhetoric is distinguished from social semiotics in general usage by having pejorative associations of sophistry and distortion. It is hard to determine the beginnings of such a depreciatory sense, but the Oxford English Dictionary has it going as far back as Chaucer. This sense that rhetoric can be used to define artificial or over-elaborate expression— and, by implication, artificial and distorted ideas—goes with the territory. It probably stems from a suspicion of words and other forms of communication to misrepresent ideas and meaning (a suspicion going back to Plato and Aristotle)—a conundrum, as meaning is only expressed through communication. Social semiotics carries none of this baggage. Rather, it comes with associations of a systemic science: one that is cool, objective, and dispassionate. As in the work of Bakhtin (1982) and others,
rhetoric
is used in this book in the more ameliorative sense of the arts of discourse and communication, but often the term needs to be rescued from its too-close association with politicians and cant.

Lastly, rhetoric and social semiotics can be distinguished in terms of their position in relation to what we will call, for the moment, the “outside/ in, inside/out” relationship. “Outside/in” perspectives privilege the wider, social, political influences on behavior, discourse, and systems. The notion that “the social is prior” would seem to share this perspective. It would also be behind Vygotskian theories of historical and social relations informing cognition (which is generally thought to take place “inside” the head of the individual). Rhetoric, of the two theories or disciplines (more on this choice later), is the more inclined to address the social and political determinants of individual action and communication because it always sees the participants in any act of communication as being “prior.” Social semiotics, despite the “social” qualifier and Saussure's conceptions of “signs as part of social life,” has more of an “inside/out” perspective. That is to say, it starts from a premise that the sign systems themselves, in whichever modes or combinations of modes, are interesting and worthy of study. These are informed by the social nexus and context, but are nevertheless examinable as sign systems in their own right. They also, as systems,
determine the parameters of
social interaction in a way that rhetoric rarely conceives.

Breaking down binary formulations such as “outside/in” and “inside/out” helps us to see that rhetoric and social semiotics are more closely
related than we might have acknowledged, although the Mu Group, founded in 1967, developed a structural version of rhetorics and visual semiotics.

In order to do so, we would need to move, in Hegelian style, from the thesis of social instigation of communication and its antithesis of psychological or individually generated communication to a synthesis in which the categories of “inside” and “outside” were no longer deemed significant, but where the arts of communication were seen to be inevitably about the link between the two dimensions of experience. To use an analogy: if rhetoric is a plain glass window through which we see inside or outside a house, social semiotics (because of its derivation from linguistics) is more of a stained glass window where we are also interested in the passage of light through the window itself (from either the social side or the semiotic side). A third position—the synthesis—would be to open the window and to admit no impediment between the outside and inside worlds.

Another way of conceiving the relationship between rhetoric and social semiotics is to see the latter as a theory and discipline—a way of looking at a particular aspect of the world and its actions. The former could be conceived as a meta-theory and meta-discipline, operating as a higher level of abstraction and generalizability, and including social semiotics as one of its repertoire of frames through which it sees the world and its actions. From this more hierarchical point of view, rhetoric would re-assume its seat as one of the small number of meta-disciplines that once informed the Renaissance curriculum in schools and universities (the others being grammar and logic). While logic might sit alongside it as the progenitor of mathematics, grammar would be subsumed as one of the operational syntagmatic and paradigmatic subsections of verbal and visual languages. As such, grammar could be replaced by analytic philosophy as one of the meta-disciplines.

Rhetoric is naturally multimodal. It does not confine itself to verbal language(s). It is eclectic in its relationship to modes and media. It assumes that in the act of communication a number of modes will be at play and that their inter-relationship is crucial to understanding how communication works. The aesthetic dimension of rhetoric is also an aspect of multimodality that is important to consider. The combination of modes is a conscious decision, driven by design. Where it is unconscious (say in a face-to-face conversation), the modes at play in the rhetorical moment can be analyzed.

But rhetoric is not a “dimension” of multimodality, confining itself to political discourse or (more generally) issues of power. Rather, it is the other way round. We have discussed previously the similarities and
differences between social semiotics and rhetoric. Multimodality plays a part in both theories and is a matter of the deployment of semiotic resources for a particular communicative purpose. If we accept the definition of rhetoric as the “arts of discourse,” then multimodality contributes to those arts.

As Kress points out (2010, 26–7), the rhetor's interests in any act of communication need to be fully acknowledged. He or she stands in relation to a world of resources (print, image, sound, physical movement, and gesture) wishing to communicate to a particular audience about something. For example, the father of a bride at a conventional European wedding takes center stage for part of the reception. Conventionally, he makes the first speech at the wedding reception. Although there are conventions shaping and framing the occasion (e.g., welcoming the guests, saying nice things about the daughter, giving “advice” to the groom), there are other constraints to be borne in mind: don't go on for too long, and don't cover the ground that the best man might cover (e.g., amusing stories about the groom).

Such a speech can take some time in gestation. It has to be “right”; in other words, it must not offend, it must continue the joyous momentum of the wedding, and it should not bore the guests. It is a semi-public performance, designed not so much to persuade as to mark a ritual. It is given, then disappears, as is the case in many speech genres. Although it is often prepared as a script, it is done so in a way that makes space for improvisation and for “natural” spoken delivery. It is delivered at an appropriate part of the reception meal, while dessert is on the table and just after the cake has been ceremonially cut by the bride and groom (allowing the cake to be taken away for cutting up so that guests could have a piece later). The guests know that speeches will follow at some point; they are suitably primed. We could say on this occasion, and many similar ones like it, that the audience is ready to listen and to be amused, moved, and informed.

The actual delivery often involves stepping up on to a small stage so that guests can see the “rhetor.” The pace is slow enough to be able to articulate clearly. In multimodal terms, there is the combination of speech, gesture, dress (formal wedding attire), the setting (wedding reception in formal room), and the expectation that this speech will be followed by at least two more—the best man, the groom, and possibly the bride—thus providing a string of after-dinner entertainment, each speech having a different function, a different speaker. In essence, a written script becomes a delivered oral speech in a highly visual setting.

Although the genre of the wedding speech runs along fairly wellgrooved tracks in a particular culture, there is an element of remaking and consideration of fitness-for-purpose that cannot be underestimated. There is no off-the-shelf package that would fit the bill. The speech has to be personal, for the particular occasion, and of the moment. When the
tracks are less well-defined, in situations that are unstable or unpredictable, the rhetor's work is harder in that he/she has to construct the frame for delivery and interpretation. Such framing (as an active verb) becomes more conscious, more essential, and more pressing if communication is to be “successful.”

As expressed in
Re-Framing Literacy
(Andrews 2011) and in
chapter 7
, framing is a key act in composition, particularly in an age where uncertainties about the audience or about the social conventions that bind the rhetor to the audience are not clear or conventional. Framing, like multimodality, is one of the resources available to the rhetor as he/she makes choices about the act of discourse. It is not always a matter of adopting existing frames from the repertoire of social communication. Rather, it is sometimes a matter of constructing and/or adapting frames that can provide the parameters of communication.

Framing is a creative and necessary act. It operates in space and time, mostly invisibly, to define the parameters of a social situation and the communication that will take place within it. First, space. A situation can be framed by a room in which an encounter takes place. Let us take a coffee shop as an example. It is an established space for drinking and social engagement. Chairs—perhaps sofas—are laid out so that customers can drink and socialize at the same time. They might seem like customers to the business that is running the coffee shop, but the participants themselves see this as a space in which they can relax, talk, and refresh themselves. The actual orientation of the seating is crucial to the nature of the communicative encounter. It partly defines the encounter (sitting alongside is different from sitting opposite each other; sitting at a angle to each other is different again; and three people sitting sets up a different dynamic; and so on).
¹
Second, time. Even an encounter in a coffee shop is time-limited. But more formally time-limited are classes in school or university, appointments with doctors, assignations at the school-gates, or the catching of trains, buses, and planes, where the timetable determines the encounter. Time, like space, is elastic so that tightly defined framed time slots, as described previously, are at one end of a spectrum. At the other end are “moments” and longer periods of time that are not measured by the clock, but by other means (days, weeks, months, years, etc.; time as measured by the experience, rather than quantified, for example, Shakespeare's seven stages of development, or the duration of a love affair).

It can be seen, then, that framing plays a central part in social life. It defines the parameters of a social and communicative encounter. But frames can also be transgressed and broken, according to need. A production in a theatre that breaks down the border between the actors and
the audience by placing actors in the audience, or taking a member of the audience on stage—or any such transgression of convention—is playing with the notion of framing.