Rhetoric and Jillian.

This class has opened many new doors for me in regards to language. Not only is it important to be able to speak and convince well, but it is also important to be able to decipher through the convincing means of others. I still agree that rhetoric is a container and not a thing to be contained, but there are so many ways of approaching it--it’s helpful to know some of the techniques and apply them to everyone from car salesmen to news reporters to some butt-hole on campus who tries to stage a fake anti-war rally and then laughs and says “Just joking! I‘m for the war!” It’s great to be able to decipher motives. Or try to, rather. Seriously, his only telos was to offend the people he tricked…though I must admit I wasn’t there.

At any rate, I shouldn’t be surprised at just how many people have studied and broken down the art of rhetoric, but I think I must be a bit. Like some others in the class (I think Annie had it in her post) I have heard many people say “that’s rhetorical” and not had a clear definition. I think when I have heard someone say the word they were thinking back to the Sophist’s, and didn’t know. I even have a copy of Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” though unfortunately, I bought it in a thrift store when I was younger and never read it. It’s now on my reading list for the summer, however. No ethos for me!

I don’t know very much about Michel Foucalt, but I was slighty surprised to find him in “Contemporary Perspectives.” He’s along the lines of Derrida and Bataille, right? I guess once we learned that rhetoric can take many forms, and then after reading Burke’s symbol system, it started to make more sense. Words are symbols that bring to mind a new set of symbols within the hearer or reader…and if you fine-comb not only your speech/movie/poster/
commercial/editorial, etc. but also your audience, you actually CAN lead people along a path to arrive at a destination chosen by you.

My roommates are all conspiracy buffs, for better or worse, and through discourse with them over what I have learned this semester, coupled with my own observations and the examples of history, the most important thing that has stuck out to me is that rhetoric can be used to mislead people. I think most of my previous blogs have discussed this, though, so I won’t repeat myself. It’s just refreshing to think I may have a bit of a grasp on the certain techniques. For example, I was suckered into trading in my paid-off car at a dealer (where it was just having the alarm fixed) for a brand new expensive car and now I’m in debt. If I had taken this class last semester, I would have been able to see that they were being deliberative when they said my car would eventually break down (in like fifteen years!) and they were playing with my emotion when they hyped up the coolness of having a new car. I’ve never been a car buff or ever even cared about cars and if they were fast, etc. Except for about forty-five minutes that day. Le sigh. It’s like I knew they were trying to sell me a car, but I wasn’t armed to fight their arguments and so I lost. My ethos just keeps diminishing, doesn’t it? =)

The biggest gain from this class, however, is a more critical eye of news. It’s given me a platform with which to evaluate not only their presentation, but also to look more closely and see if things are truly as they say. (And, for all the Darfur presenters, I have a friend taking speech at Tri-County Tech and was able to convince her to give a persuasive speech about Darfur and why people in her class should donate money.) A lot truly does go on behind the scenes with words, and it’s a great art to study for any philosophy, English, communications, and similar majors. Anyone who is in school in an area where they don’t learn a trade but, rather, are instead taught to think and evaluate for themselves will find rhetoric to come in very handy.

"Civilization is measured by its power to create and enforce distinctions." ~ Weaver