A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (31 page)

Framing is an important tool for rhetoric in that it helps to define the parameters of the communicative experience. In most encounters, it is taken for granted because it is accepted by both parties in the communicative act. But it becomes a more conscious construct when the analysis as to why communication has not happened well is explored. One person might come to an encounter with a particular set of expectations in mind; another might have another set. Let us take the example of a five-minute presentation that is required before an interview (itself a tightly framed social schema). Unless the presentation has been specified tightly, one interviewee may provide a written statement that he/she reads out to the interviewing panel. Another might provide a Powerpoint presentation. Yet another might simply speak to the panel without notes. These communicative choices are rhetorical choices. They can set the right tone, if the rhetorical moves are well-judged and meet the expectations of the panel; they can also get the interview off on the wrong foot if the rhetorical choices made are inappropriate, like standing up in a round table, informal-style interview, or lolling back in a chair in a more formal set-up.

In many cases where schemata are clear and conventional—in other words, where the frames are clearly defined and have become the expected norms—we do not think about the frames. We simply operate within them. But as social conventions blur at the edges, the act of framing rather than the frames themselves become more important. Framing is thus seen as a critical, creative act that aids communication; it is an operation that both rhetor and audience can play a part in. Frame-breaking is also an important possibility, not only in theatre and the arts, but in social situations where convention has become stultifying.

Much of the history of rhetoric has been concerned with Kinneavy's more recently expressed notion of rhetor, audience, and subject matter. That is to say, the assumption has been that the speaker/writer/composer “sends” the substance of the message, via different modes and media, to a listener/reader/audience who “interprets” it—either perfectly or imperfectly. Rhetoric, from this perspective, is seen as the arts of how best to convey that message and its intentions.

Recent studies in multimodality, however, have begun to question the nature of the relationship between rhetor and audience and, as a consequence, the nature of the “sending” and “receiving” model of communication. The compression of the communicative act is further brought about by digitization. Jewitt (2011), in an article on “Technology and Reception
as Multimodal Remaking,” challenges the communication orthodoxy and argues for a more considered view of the receptive end of the process, preferring to call it “remaking” and suggesting a more dynamic creation of meaning than is the case in the conventional model. Rejecting communication models that operate on the stimulus-response and Iinear, verbal-only basis as being biased toward the author, she argues that such a model does not “acknowledge the situated, social and agentive work of communication” (99). A sense of the inadequacy of the linear model is also shared by reader response theory (e.g., Iser 1980), Bakhtinian dialogic theory (e.g., Bakhtin 1982, 1987), and other aspects of reception theory that privilege, or at least recognize, the work of the “receiver” in making meaning. In other words, such theories, including social semiotic theory, do not see the meaning inhering in the message or text but in the overall social construction of meaning between all parties concerned.

A contemporary theory of rhetoric sits well in relation to these more balanced theories of meaning-making. First, rhetoric does not assume that communication inheres or is fully embodied in the text. Rather, it sees the “text” as a means to an end, and once the moment of communication is enacted, as a trace or repository of the meaning that was transacted. Second, rhetoric is grounded not only in social relations, but in power relations, too. It charts the framework for the operation of meaning and communication in any social situation. Third, and more philosophically, it does not conflate “meaning” and “communication.”
Meaning
is seen to be the accrued and shared social capital that is generated by communication;
communication
is the means by which that social capital is built up. Fourth, and more pertinent to our discussion of the relationship of multimodality to rhetoric, meaning is constantly
remade
in the act of social communication (and, we could add, in the act of learning).

A
propos
this last point: a constant remaking of meaning, implied by multimodal theory and enacted by rhetorical principles, suggests a restless and provisional world in which meanings are not fixed, and consensus is constantly negotiated before action takes place, often via argumentational processes (Habermas 1984). Such a world privileges rhetoric in a positive sense because economic uncertainty, social fluidity, and migratory cultural practices require constant renegotiation through a range of multimodal discourses in order to fabricate consensus for action. However, there are risks in such a world, as rhetoric without evidence or a grounding in backing and warrants (Toulmin's [2003] terms) becomes deracinated and “beyond proof,” thus making itself subject to ideology and assertion. In such a world, claims cannot be connected to evidence, nor can the means by which such connections are made (the “warrant” for the argument) be made transparent and therefore be critiqued. Rhetoric, if it is associated with such unsatisfactory modes of communication, becomes a pejorative phenomenon.

Jewitt's argument is that digital technologies compress the relationship between rhetor and audience, thus further exposing the limitation of theories that privilege the author. For example, the creation of an interactive website, a cloud-based shared document, or a blog, by very nature, invites the reader to become a writer/composer, both practically and in the generation of received meaning. We are thus moving to a position in which it is becoming increasingly unhelpful to distinguish between the rhetoric and his/her audience. Rather, we see the rhetor/reader (the terms are being deliberately interchanged for variation, but also to signify the range of roles) communicating with other rhetors/readers through the media and modes offered by the semiotic resource bank.

Let us illustrate this with discussion of a project that involved a number of composers/editors (to use a different configuration of author/audience). A number of writers and editors were gathered to bring about a third edition of a series of Shakespeare plays, designed for school use. The first two editions, in the 1990s and 2000s, were created by single or joint authors working independently, then submitting their manuscript to the publisher where editors worked on it to produce the final text for publication. In the 2010s, the third edition involves “authors” and “editors” working much more closely together on what could be described as a palimpsest rather than a text. Their collective energies and input are used to create a refreshed and updated third edition—also redesigned—that will “speak to” a new generation of school students. The printed edition is accompanied by an e-book, applications (“apps”) that allow access to the texts via cell phone, and a website that keeps teachers and students up to date with ancillary material, changing exam board specifications, current performances of Shakespeare, international developments that pertain to the “reading” of the plays, and other resources. Not only is the distinction between writer and editor blurred by such a process, but also the readers of the new editions are invited to “lift the script from the page,” enact it, and transform it multimodally into action, voice, gesture, moving image, and so on. As Jewitt (2011, 109) points out, layering and hyperlinks are other ways in which the stabilized author-reader relationship is disturbed; and “mashing” and “remixing” are evidence of the new interactive relationship between the rhetor, his/her audience, and existing material. Finally, the fact that the third edition of the series is being considered for translation into a bilingual English/Chinese version suggests again (
chapter 8
) that multilingual rhetorical theory is required to make sense of the initiative.

In summary, we could say that the social semiotic and rhetorical traditions have run alongside each other, both gaining prominence in the period from 1990 onwards as linguistics faded into niche inward-looking interests in
specific
systems
of language production and form. Social semiotics and rhetoric start from somewhere else:
signs
, the
social
, the
political
. They also embrace the range of modes of communication in a world where these have become more evident as digitization, and digital media, have brought about a communication revolution. They share an interest in how
action
is brought about in the world as a result of the deployment of semiotic
resources
and how that
social action
—including speech acts and other modal
acts
—in turn affects future communicational acts. Internally, they see the social and political construction of identities as informed by social, historical, and political influences.

Their differences are to do with their starting points: social semiotics is most closely identified with social relations, social network theory, and the disciplines of sociology; blending that trajectory with the semiotic tradition. Rhetoric is more closely associated with social
and
political relations; it assumes a close relationship between social and political developments (and thus historical ones) in relations to the formation of identities and selves. Its emphasis on the political associates it with governance issues, with public discourses, and with the framing of individual communicative acts. It is thus less scientific than social semiotics in that it does not—in its contemporary forms, at least—associate itself so closely with systems, categorization, and classification. On the other hand, it is more inclined to the
arts
of discourse as manifested by social and political relations. Whereas social semiotics might define itself in relation to (and in opposition to) linguistics, rhetoric defines itself in relation to philosophy.

12

In a seminar held at the London Knowledge Lab at the Institute of Education in December 2011, titled “New Media, New Literacies, New Learning,” a number of position papers were given, largely of a theoretical nature. Although the term
rhetoric
was not mentioned, the gradual emergence of
textual practices
as the principal focus for the communication dimension for the digital age was evident. This term emerged from a dissatisfaction with notions of the appendage “literacy” and/or “literacies” to denote areas of communicative practice in the digital world.

Literacy
and its pluralistic version
literacies
are terms that have carried a great deal of weight, particularly from Hoggart's
The Uses of Literacy
(1957) through the work of Street (1984, 1993, 1995, 2001; Street and Lefstein 2008), Barton (2008), and the UK's National Literacy Strategy (see, for an overview, Andrews 2008b). What characterizes the conceptions of literacy in these academic studies is the social embeddedness of reading and writing in a range of situations; in comparative terms, an ethnographic dimension that links reading and writing to ecologies of practice and an embracing of the diversity of literacy forms in various contexts. Such generosity of range was countered in the UK's National Literacy Strategy (circa 1996–2007) by a common (and narrower) model of literacy, distilled (reduced) to a pedagogical device at its most narrow as “the literacy hour” in which teacher presentation of some aspect of reading and writing was followed by group and individual work, and then completed by whole-class convening by the teacher.

Such tensions in the field of literacy/literacies (from here on, the term
literacy
is used to suggest both) are productive, and a result of differences between narrow conceptions of literacy—”the ability to read and write”—and wider conceptions that embrace social literacies, diversity in literacy practices, multilingualism, and “digital literacy.”

However, the terms
digital literacy
or
digital literacies
seem now anachronistic, largely because of the stretch between the two terms in the compound phrase. On the one hand, the “digital” and all that it suggests, from the instantiation of information in digital form to the potential
transformation of that information across modes and media, represents one dimension of signification. On the other, “literacy” in all
its
forms and situations represents another, embedded in the actualities of communicative form. We know
vaguely
what digital literacy might mean, but its very vagueness does not help conceptual clarity, thinking, or communication with others. “Literacy” in this sense—as with “computer literacy,” “media literacy,” “emotional literacy,” or “physical literacy”—means little more than capability or competence.
Literacy
is too closely associated with the reading and writing of verbal text to be a useful or clear term to denote what is going on in terms of contemporary communication.

Before we abandon the term
literacy
for the contemporary, multimodal, and digital age of communication, what might we lose? “Literacy” has been used, not only to broaden and deepen the conception of what it means to read and write, but to explore the operation of power in communication. In particular, it has helped to highlight inequalities in society: between the genders, between societies, and between power groups and the oppressed within societies. The term
critical literacy
, like
critical discourse analysis
, has been coined to ensure that the power dimension is not forgotten when literacy practices are examined. But the “critical” dimension can be retained without terming it as such and without yoking it together with “literacy.”