A New Way of Doing Rhetoric

     Like Amy states in her blog, the main differences between this rhetoric and what we have seen before are power, subversion, and the play of language. I see Gates and Holmes conceiving of rhetoric in a similar way to Burke in that they pay attention to the sign and the symbol and the ways in which signs and symbols participate in a larger language system that is both inclusive and exclusive. However, adding not just a new population, but one that has been historically, institutionally, and linguistically marginalized, nuances our attention to the entire system, to what Kress would call social semiotics. Signifyin(g), as a literate practice, reveals the way in which our relationship to the system is shaped by social factors and  a new way in which we might subvert that system. For Burke, the system is something one must become aware of and then understand the ways in which it acts on the individual for the individual to have agency. However, in the model offered by Gates and Holmes, AFAM rhetoricians who practice signifyin(g) are always already aware of the system and the ways in which it acts on those who use, misuse, and are used by it.

     I found Gates’ conclusion particularly interesting because it emphasizes intertextuality in the process of Signification. He states: “When one text Signifies upon another text, by tropological repetition and difference, the double-voiced utterance allows us to chart discrete formal relationships in Afro-American literary history. Signifyin(g), then, is a metaphor for textual revision” (1581). This offers, I think, a new way of doing rhetorical analyses of rhetorical performances. A text works to undo another (through language play and sign-doubling) and emphasizes the position of an utterance within a network of other utterances under an umbrella of a social-semiotic system. This, like other methodologies, changes the circumference of research in interesting and powerful ways.

     

     What I find most interesting and important in this theory of rhetoric is the understanding of the audience.   Instead, here is an audience that talks to and talks back to the rhetorical performance, that becomes a part of the performance itself. Indeed, Holmes pays particular attention to the embodied responses and reactions that the audience usually has to the rhetoric. This is a fundamentally different audience position than we have seen before. In the classical understanding of rhetoric, the body is merely the tool of delivery for the rhetor. Here, the body is both the vehicle of rhetoric and the vessel that receives it. The rhetorical process is in and of the body, instead of in and of the mind (like Ramus would suggest). That, I think, is what this addition/edition to the rhetorical tradition adds most to my personal theory of rhetoric: the importance of the body in the entire rhetorical practice.