Joined a friend’s podcast and did all the things I know shouldn’t be done when you are giving a talk in an online format, but it was still a pretty good time. Used it as an excuse to put off all the actual work I need to be doing, yet again. Good times. 

The podcast is a good idea, merging science fiction, fantasy, and critical thought about technology and the world together in one place. I’m lucky to have the chance to be on it, and I hope to be on it more in the future. Great shows, you should have a listen.

Public-facing rhetoric instruction is exceedingly difficult, always a lot more difficult than teaching in the classroom. The dominance of psychology, philosophy, and other fields mean that whatever we rhetoricians offer, the audience always turns to familiar claims from these feilds or the tropes of these fields. I think Aristotle has a good line about that – rhetoric is best when it is invisible, or “less about itself” – something like that, I don’t have the exact words right here in front of me, but the point is that if someone detects rhetoric they are less likely to be moved by what you are saying. They are less likely to be caught up in what you are moving them to think or do. Instead, they then use their detection of that structure to scurry up the scaffolding and watch your persuasive attempt from the meta. Best seats in the house, but they are not in the best position to say “I agree” from up there. They usually say, “I agree,” But mean it in the terms of “I agree with what you are trying to do here to other people who are not me.” This is to be avoided if you want to move the audience, not have them comment on an imaginary audience somewhere that “might have been moved.” Not an enviable position, but also pretty cool because people have a lot of defenses up for being persuaded these days. Not something to decry, honestly. 

This is really just me working out my ideas about how to approach the public with rhetorical theory, or rhetoric as it is practiced and taught by scholars now. As of this writing, I’m deeply concerned with the combination of two things: 1) how critically consumptive the receptive public is about what they take in and 2) how shallow the field of rhetoric is when it comes to such criticism. 

On the first: Most intellectually-oriented publics are engaging with ideas and texts from a critical mindset: How does this interact, gel with, engage what I already know and experience about and in the world? So people are looking at new insights in terms of how they fit with what is already confirmed. Not a big insight by any means here, but it’s important. The most receptive people are only going to accept what you are saying if they can find hooks, or handholds that they expect will be there from previous insights. Everything taken in is compared and contrasted to life experience and other things that have a strong narrative power (explanatory power). They want to take something in (consume it) and have it robustly interact with their own understandings and also supercharge those understandings in the making of an orientation or perspective on things. 

Audiences are interested in new perspectives that help them make sense of their experiences. They are using criticism to forge, create, establish new linkages out of what they hear and read for the purpose of creating new narratives about the meaning of those experiences. 

So the second concern enters here – if we simply offer the simplistic criticism “look at how unstable meaning is,” this is not going to seem deep, interesting, or helpful for people who are looking to craft a narrative that “makes sense” out of the world and gives some guidelines on how to approach it. Instead, we should abandon our critical efforts and return to the rhetorical tradition of production, invention, and crafting of argument. I think that might be a lot better and received a lot better than the critical tradition that would be our first go-to when addressing the public. 

Something to think about and perhaps connected to why rhetoricians don’t appear in the media too often. I think we consider ourselves critics of meaning and can only point to meaning’s constructed nature, or its instability. Justified, right, but not helpful to audiences. Rhetorical criticism seems more interested in the scope and scale of meaning’s instability rather than the prescriptive construction and creation of stability (even in the strange possibility that one wants to create a very stable understanding of instability in some situation, i.e. “We cannot get involved because we don’t really know what’s happening; the situation is always changing”).

Instead, giving them the tools to worldbuild might be the way to go. Lots of good, rich stuff in the history of rhetoric to play with here about making stuff. That’s what rhetoric is really about, making meaning.  

The classical tradition of the progymnasmata (preliminary rhetoric exercises) or stasis might be more interesting than the contemporary rhetorical critic’s take for most audiences. Even really great, deep, and insightful rhetorical criticism will be understood and articulated as “history” by most public audiences. Give them some tools to make something or ideas for what to make out of what they already have, and we’ll have a lot more of the kind of traction we might want.

Did I just describe a TV cooking show? Somewhere Socrates must be pleased with that.