Images and Fluid Identities Shaking Things Up

Lunsford and Ede’s dismantling of the four distinctions they set up between Modern and Classical rhetoric offered a nice, thorough review of Classical Rhetoric and its relationship with the authors we’ve read since the start of class.  While reading, the proposed distinction between audience and rhetor relationship as changing threw me off a bit; it was clear to me, reading Aristotle, that his idea of rhetoric had something to do with a dialogue.  I did not find a clash with Aristotle while reading later theories from Burke and Bakhtin, both which rely heavily the exchange between rhetor and audience. Though Aristotle did emphasize the speaker (and hence, the “practice” part of rhetoric), he had a clear understanding of the relationship between rhetor and audience (why certain strategies would work in certain circumstances, etc).  We’ve noted in class that Aristotle’s strategies are tied to various occasions—occasions provided by the social arena-- and we’ve used this as a sort of distinction of our own in trying to understand his relationship to the others we’ve read.  Lunsford and Ede challenge this a little bit when they explain Aristotle’s emphasis on language: interdependence of rhetor and audience, and his “goal of rhetoric” as “interactive means of discovering meaning through language” (44). Put that way, one might more easily connect Richards to Aristotle (despite the fact that Richards claimed himself that he was introducing a new rhetoric). Though they might form different shapes, they are both using the same kind of play dough to sculpt.

            In summary, Lunsford and Ede critique the distinctions made between fundamental or internal aspects of rhetoric, i.e. what’s at the root of goals and strategies; they do not, however, fail to note how the external aspects like medium, setting, even occasion of rhetoric change how the fundamentals play out in the modern world.  For instance, though both classical and modern rhetoric emphasize language as means of persuasion, Aristotle’s came from an oral society and most of our language communication occurs in print (45).  Meanwhile, with Zappan’s introduction of digital rhetoric, we are starting to see a change in medium once again.  We still have the same rules about language, but language appears not in print but on a screen. Not only that, but many of our messages come at us via images instead of words.

            Zappan says that today’s rhetorical scholarship, due to the introduction of digital media, will analyze “how traditional rhetorical strategies function in digital spaces and suggest how these strategies are being reconceived and reconfigured within these spaces” (319).  My understanding is that perhaps language will become less of a focal point, and our classical tools of analysis (like ethos, pathos, and logos, finding the enthymeme, etc) must be understood with a visual, rather than verbal, set of terms for description.  The difference between the society that brought the printing press and the society that spends hours each day on the Internet is that we rely more thoroughly on visual aspects of communication. Not that Aristotle relied only on language; I'm sure the rhetor's posture was important to him. I know the rhetor's age was, and that's partly visual... Still, I think visual communication is more prominent, thanks to the photograph and the arrival of motion pictures.   We can rhetorically analyze films, photographs, and videos with the same strategies introduced by the classical rhetoricians, but we will have to develop a new set of vocabulary in order to accommodate for the visual aspects of the argument we’re analyzing. I’m guessing that vocabulary has already been developed by now for the most part.

            Zappan also notes the way that identities morph in the digital sphere, and so, as we’re all prone to conclude after we’re introduced to a new rhetorical theory, things do get a lot more complicated once rhetors get to hide who they are, especially in terms of their dialogue with an audience.  I’m thinking mostly of internet trolls, here—people who like to go around and stir up arguments, drawing motivation from the fact that nobody knows who they are.  We are able to manipulate our identities and how people perceive us now more than ever before.  This definitely complicates things—how much of our response to a dialogue depends on what we know about the person we’re in dialogue with?  I’m sure this was always true—that in rhetorical dialogue, notions of the participators change while the dialogue continues, but the digital space must amp up the fluid relationships between identities of rhetor and audience.