[As I was writing my last post, there were a few things that I ended up leaving out, so I thought I’d pick up some of them here…]

Several years ago, I got it into my head to write a general audience book about rhetoric, pieces of which I might then use in the courses I teach. I don’t remember where now, but I recall an editor of one of our field’s journals saying that everyone had to go through their “What is rhetoric?” phase (and that many of them would send an essay to that effect to that journal, the vast majority of which got quickly rejected.). Rhetoric is an unusual field1 in that way—I don’t think that there are many other academic disciplines that are plagued with this sort of self-absorption. I could easily be wrong about this, but I don’t imagine that there are too many chemists, psychologists, or art historians who feel compelled to interrogate their own disciplinary existence the way that academic rhetoricians seem to.

The other piece of this is that, as a program with an undergraduate major in Rhetoric and Writing, our students are much more likely to come to us with passion for the latter and nary a clue about the former. There’s a part of me that would love to ask graduating seniors how they define rhetoric. (If I could do it without having it feel like a year-end pop quiz, I might.) My guess is that the answers would be all over the place, and perhaps not entirely positive.

I’ve been thinking about “definitions of rhetoric” specifically in light of Adam Przeworski’s definition of democracy as “a system in which parties lose elections.” This economical formulation made me think of one of my favorite definitions of rhetoric, which comes from early 20th century writer I. A. Richards, who wrote that rhetoric was, or rather should be, “the study of misunderstanding and its remedies.” Kenneth Burke doesn’t put it as pithily as Richards, but the underlying idea is similar; his Rhetoric of Motives treats “identification” as the goal of rhetoric, but only because partisanship is our default. The book “considers the ways in which individuals are at odds with one another:”

The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the War of Nerves, the War2 (23).

I’ll get into these ideas a bit more below, but before I drift too far away from the “dictionary definitions” offered above by Google, it’s only fair that I explain why they’re basically garbage. Neither is purely awful, but they’re both misleading in a particular way. The first, whereby rhetoric is the “art of effective communication,” suffers from the same problem that I have with the idea of folks describing themselves as or aspiring to become “influencers.” That is, this so-called definition assumes an (ideal) outcome for the activity itself. It would be no less accurate to describe rhetoric as the art of ineffective speaking or writing; speakers and writers are no less rhetorical if they fail. As the financial industry reminds us, past results don’t guarantee future performance. They can only point us towards likelihood. (and that last bit following “especially” is equally meaningless—a speech’s or an essay’s effectiveness has no direct relationship to its use of figures of speech.)

The second “definition,” for all that it’s a pejorative usage, does at least have the virtue of being more descriptionist3. There are plenty of people who use the word “rhetoric” that way, as an antonym for truth or meaningfulness. The one thing I’d concede to that definition is the verb “designed”; otherwise, though, it also depends on a particular outcome, one where the audience deems the language insincere.

The problem with both definitions is that effectiveness, sincerity, and meaning are not intrinsic to the language (or to rhetoric) itself. They are only determinations that we can make of language in a specific context. In recent years, we’ve become familiar with the social media playbook for legislators who ally themselves with the NRA. Following the all-too-frequent mass shootings in our country, they will generate some variation on “thoughts and prayers” and accuse others of politicizing tragedy. But neither of these strategies are intrinsically awful—it’s only in the context of gun violence episodes (and their repeated, unvarying deployment) that this rhetoric comes to seem as empty as it does. Effectiveness is the same way: sometimes we expect tried-and-true answers; others we expect new language to meet the needs of an unprecedented occasion. Context is always shifting, in part because it includes all of the contexts that have come before. Those values that are implied by both definitions are situation-dependent.

My friend Jen Mercieca has been performing rhetorical analyses of the current regime’s language for several years now. She’s an ace at identifying the various rhetorical strategies that make their policies and positions difficult to oppose. But those “tricks” are more properly “deployed by Authoritarians” than they are authoritarian in and of themselves. A healthy section of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger is devoted to teasing out the way that the right wing in our country has used the language of the left to create “Mirror World” distortions. She critiques this as “the normalization of the disassociation between words from reality,” which simultaneously disempowers necessary critiques even as it cloaks the extractive, exploitative politics and economics that have led us to our current moment. And like it or not, all of this belongs to rhetoric as well4.

What is rhetoric, then?

I don’t know that my definition is necessarily superior to any other, but I do have the virtue of having narrowed it down to a single(ish) word, and that’s

It does require a little explanation, I suppose, and a qualification. As best as I can capture it, I believe that experts in rhetoric study the interplay between discourse and its contexts. That discourse doesn’t just happen through language (and that’s my qualification), although that tends to be the default focus for academic rhetoric (even as there are people who explore non-linguistic rhetorics). And worlds/contexts operate at scales that range from national and global all the way down to individuals scribbling in their diaries (or on their Substacks).

We’re always operating in a vast multitude of contexts, some of which may align at any given time, but which mostly do not. Our knowledge and understanding is deeply shaped by context and the language we use to express it, but we also have some imperfect agency to shape those contexts (and in some rare cases, even the language) ourselves. Our contexts are always shifting, and the strategies that we use to negotiate them shift as well (albeit more slowly).

The double-edged sword of this is like the Chinese proverb of living in interesting times. On the one hand, there’s never a shortage of ideas for the rhetoric scholar to consider. On the other, though, rhetoric is not something you “master” in the way that we typically think of academic disciplines. “Context” here is paradoxical: it’s a set of (spatial, temporal, interpersonal, medial) boundaries that provides us with a provisional stability, but as soon as we act, speak, write, or design within it, we’ve changed that context. And we only have a certain amount of control over the consequences of that change.

If there’s a deeper problem with those dictionary definitions above, it’s that they miss the forest for the trees. If rhetoric is as context-dependent as I believe it is, then it’s kind of silly to imagine that there’s something called “effective writing” that can be extracted from its immediate circumstances. Similarly, the belief that we can label something “rhetoric” as the opposite of “truth,” absent any contextual information, leads to the kind of Orwellian dumpster fire our current regime is engaged in.

Is there such thing as “bad” rhetoric?

Surprisingly enough, I think so. But it has nothing to do with “effectiveness,” nor does it correspond to that pejorative definition above.

There are ethical implications to Przeworski’s definition of democracy that overlap with rhetoric. According to that definition, majority parties (and/or election winners) have to ensure a certain level of fairness. If those who lose elections see no point in trying again, then they’ll turn to non-democratic means of achieving power. In the United States, with its two-party system, that’s always meant making space for minority positions, bipartisanship, compromise, etc. If you want your opponents to play by the rules, you have to honor them yourself, even if it means risking future elections. (Obviously, this is a huge issue with the current regime.)

There’s an old book by James Carse called Finite and Infinite Games. Carse distinguishes between the two games of the title: the point of finite games is to win; the purpose of infinite games is to allow play to continue. It’s an interesting distinction, and one that sits at the heart of this particular perspective on democracy. For decades, our country has relied on unwritten customs and norms to preserve an “infinite” democracy, norms that are currently under assault. It’s not about the “other side” having its way, but about their erasure of the structures, institutions, and rules that preserve (however imperfectly) our political way of life.

Venkatesh Rao posted a piece about intelligence several years back that draws on Carse’s distinction, and his application of finite and infinite games makes a great deal of sense to me:

Most definitions of intelligence are functional. Intelligence is construed as a tool or instrument, a means to ends, a capacity for problem-solving and surviving in increasingly complex environments and varied scenarios. Viewed from a functional intelligence perspective, thinking is something you have to do to achieve your ends; a behavior which should cease when those ends are achieved, and avoided entirely if they are achievable without thinking. But what if thinking is viewed as an autotelic behavior? Something you get to do, and would do for pleasure even if you didn't have to? Surprisingly, despite the facts that many of us truly enjoy thinking, and that the output of thinking for pleasure has driven much of modern history, this perspective has not been explored much. It suggests a very different, non-instrumental definition: intelligence is the ability to think interesting thoughts.

That’s a longer chunk of text than I usually cite here, but I think it’s worthwhile, and relevant not only to rhetoric, but democracy as well. Functionally, democracy is a backdrop against which our politicians run for office, and their success is largely described in terms of wins and losses. But a great deal of what makes America “great” is its tradition of democracy as autotelic (i.e., as an end in itself, from the Greek auto (self) + telos (end, goal)).

Similarly, we can understand rhetoric as functional (the dictionary definitions above) or autotelic, and I’m suggesting that it’s the latter understanding that both Richards and Burke rely upon. We are flawed beings, armed with partial and fractional knowledge of the worlds around us; we use rhetoric functionally all the time, in order to persuade others, to build reputation, to accomplish goals, etc., but those results only ever temporarily override the vast array of differences that exist among ourselves. We also change our minds regularly, due to other people’s opinions, additional evidence, or even discovering that our own opinions are ineffective or unsustainable. Most of us (I assume) prefer to change our minds for the better, and the only way to do this is to engage with ideas, opinions, and/or information that we don’t already hold.

So if there’s an implicit ethics to the infinite/autotelic perspective on rhetoric, it’s twofold. First, rhetoric commits us to seeking out those alternatives, if only as a means of testing our own beliefs and opinions. This has become more difficult in recent years, as we withdraw from social (physical) interactions and conduct more of our lives through screens. And algorithmic engagement farming (filter bubbles, echo chambers) has only accelerated this withdrawal.

The second piece of this, for me, is that this search/engagement has to be done in good faith. That is, when I seek out other opinions, I have to commit to what I’ve described before as probity, an openness to ideas (and people) that may change the shape of my thinking. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate this quality more and more, not only for myself, but in others5. I’m more likely to trust those who are honest about how much they know (and don’t) than those who refuse to learn, think, or deliberate.

The greatest danger to an autotelic understanding of rhetoric is someone who’s relentlessly (and ruthlessly) functional, and we might say the same with respect to democracy (and thinking), given where we’re at right now as a country. The ideal form of functional rhetoric is perhaps the conspiracy theory, a perspective that’s simplified, partial, and encompasses all possible evidence, without any room for adjustment or development. That’s not to say that there’s no such thing as conspiracies, but conspiracism (of the sort that’s run rampant across our country over the past decade) strikes me as perhaps the most opposite-of-rhetoric thing I can imagine at the moment.

This has gotten pretty long, and it’s ended at a point that I hadn’t really anticipated. Rather than go longer, I think I’m going to pause here, and take it up later. I’ve got a couple of episodes on deck: there’s a fictional book called The Forever Argument that prompted some of this reflection for me, so I want to talk about it. I’m also thinking about how much of the fuss over Ai has relied upon a purely functional definition of writing, so maybe there’ll be some Ai content brewing here in the next week or so. More soon.