General Reflection

This week's readings seem to center on the role of rhetoric in producing personal identities in various outlets. While the authors differ on their view of rhetoric as a hinderance or assitor in creating identities and persuading audiences, they are similar in that each work does not deny the power of identifying and persuading with different rhetorical strategies.

Rak, for instance, focuses the discussion on rhetoric's ability to create identity in online spaces. With rhetoric, people are increasing their display of the self in unique ways such as weblogs. Not only are they discussing personal experiences in a public space in a format that is more reflective of the self as an audience, individuals are also using the digital sphere to create and understand their identities with the responses of others. What was once a private experience is now being produced as an attempt at public discourse. As Rak explains, digital blogging, some argue, is similar if not identitcal to the tradtional mode of journaling or writing in a diary. Instead of a pen and paper, the writing utentsils of the author now involve technology. In a way the private sphere has merged into the public.

This public aspect of blogging on the web opens up to the author to a multitude of threats. While Gearheart does not explictly discuss the Internet as a venue for rhetoric, she does concentrate on the changes surrounding the role of rhetoric. In the past, rhetoric was viewed in an Aristotelian fashion. Rhetoric's role was to be a tool which assisted the orator in persuading their audience to a particular position by attempting to identify with various characteristics of the listeners. The chief manager of the process was the speaker. Thus, some people have argued that rhetoric/persuasion is a malicious and manipulative act. Gearheart argues that we must begin viewing rhetoric in more feminine terms: guiding, mothering, delivering. The orator is not the authoritarian but instead the vessel from which a message is delivered.

Thinking of rhetoric from this perspective, the rhetor is perhaps trying less to persuade and more to identify. But, can the terms be separated? Are they two sides of the same coin? Burke, in "Rhetoric of Motives," explains that rhetoric is often defined as persuasion. In so doing, the significance and role of identifying with the audience is often forgotten. Instead, it is impossible to completely persuade a person, but it is possible to identify with an audience and seek identification with rhetorical strategies that assist in increasing the likelihood of persuasion. We must remember the how identification and division invite comparisons with one another. One of the most pertinent points of Burke is his explanation of identification and division. Burke writes, “Identification is armed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man’s very essence” (p.22). Thus, rhetoric then is the means by which we understand where rhetors and auditors are divided and identified. Rhetoric is also the process that we employ to ultimately overcome the division and place more emphasis on the identification so that persuasion is possible. Overall, we must look to an individual's language to understand his/her motives and the moral judgements contained within.

The importance of understanding Burke's idea of division/identification/consubstantiality is illustrated in Susan Well's piece about the MOVE report. By looking at the report's language, one is able to better the motives of the report's authors as well as the engineer (Goode) of the document. The purpose of the report was to minimize the catastrophe of the MOVE incident by utilizing language which communicated the MOVE members as violators of public good, criminals of society, and villians of authority. Choosing to not issue individual names of the victims except to spotlight the culprit of the incident, illustrated the motivation to dehumanize the subjects. By giving human qualities (such as a name) to the victims, the public would be more likely to see them as individual beings who had died fighting for a cause instead of the more negative pictures that was the goal of the document. Furthermore, the discourse within the document is reflective of an administrative piece-a business situation. Thus, the actual moral issues of death, killing, and victimization are less identifiable by the readers. Instead the piece is read as an administrative report with subjects that are difficult to relate to.

Overall, the readings for this week are significant in their ability to highlight the importance of understanding rhetoric's role in discourse. A few questions that arise in thinking about the pieces are: Is it more a symbol of manipulative violence or a representation of dialogic interaction? Should the rhetor focus more on identifying with the audience than the divisions that separate them? Is it immoral to want to achieve identification in hopes of changing the audience members?