Page 331 - Gabrijela Kišiček and Igor Ž. Žagar (eds.), What do we know about the world? Rhetorical and argumentative perspectives, Digital Library, Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana 2013
P. 331
challenges of rhetoric in the era of “bytes and likes” 331
ascendant scientific objectivity with values of transparency and neutrali-
ty; a new emphasis on individual originality and authorship; liberalism’s
displacement of republicanism in political theory; the dominance of lit-
eracy over orality; and the rise of the vernacular language nation state.
With the recession of this rejection, rhetoric managed to regain its sig-
nificance. This shift was caused by those phenomena which character-
ized modern, postmodern scientific thinking, and global communica-
tive culture. With the advent of new media technologies, a lingua fran-
ca, of influential communication, was reclaimed. New spaces of demo-
cratic debating called for a global language through which epistemolog-
ical pluralism and individual voices were manifested.
Through the capacity to relieve scientific and moral paradoxes of
postmodern societies, to perform playfulness in communication, and to
fulfil global communicative exigencies and objectives, rhetoric managed
to retrieve its practical and theoretical status amongst disciplines of dis-
course and returned (again) to the contemporary cultural and scientif-
ic landscape.
3. Rhetoric
As Aristotle put it, rhetoric, is “the faculty of observing in any given
case the available means of persuasion” (1355b). Debated as a science, it
was defined as being either a faculty or a virtue referred to mainly as
art. However, its verbal persuasive function was accepted widely and,
with a growing rational suspicion, it was labelled agonistic. In the mean-
while, its reduction, to the techniques of elocution, led to the pejorative
use of the term rhetoric. In order to escape the inhibiting limitation of
rhetoric to the study of persuasive speech and to lessen the democrat-
ic fears, towards its subjectivity and influential nature, modernist and
postmodernist copings with rhetoric (see the works of Kenneth Duva
Burke; Chaïm Perelman; Ivor A. Richards; Henry Johnstone Jr.; and
Colling G. Brooke) sought new horizons to interpret rhetoric in a more
integrative way. Thereby, rhetoric was legitimized to function as a di-
mension of communication and its meta-representations.
Rhetoric’s scope was widened to provide a framework of all symbol-
ic, societal and mediated functions. Reboul (1991) pointed to the broad-
ening of modern rhetoric by emphasizing its expansion from the ver-
bal to the visual; and from the conscious to the non-conscious. In desig-
nating new directions for rhetoric in everyday life, Nystrand and Duffy
(2003: ix), assumed that rhetoric ought not to refer to “the classical arts
of persuasion, or the verbal ornamentation of elite discourse, but rather
ascendant scientific objectivity with values of transparency and neutrali-
ty; a new emphasis on individual originality and authorship; liberalism’s
displacement of republicanism in political theory; the dominance of lit-
eracy over orality; and the rise of the vernacular language nation state.
With the recession of this rejection, rhetoric managed to regain its sig-
nificance. This shift was caused by those phenomena which character-
ized modern, postmodern scientific thinking, and global communica-
tive culture. With the advent of new media technologies, a lingua fran-
ca, of influential communication, was reclaimed. New spaces of demo-
cratic debating called for a global language through which epistemolog-
ical pluralism and individual voices were manifested.
Through the capacity to relieve scientific and moral paradoxes of
postmodern societies, to perform playfulness in communication, and to
fulfil global communicative exigencies and objectives, rhetoric managed
to retrieve its practical and theoretical status amongst disciplines of dis-
course and returned (again) to the contemporary cultural and scientif-
ic landscape.
3. Rhetoric
As Aristotle put it, rhetoric, is “the faculty of observing in any given
case the available means of persuasion” (1355b). Debated as a science, it
was defined as being either a faculty or a virtue referred to mainly as
art. However, its verbal persuasive function was accepted widely and,
with a growing rational suspicion, it was labelled agonistic. In the mean-
while, its reduction, to the techniques of elocution, led to the pejorative
use of the term rhetoric. In order to escape the inhibiting limitation of
rhetoric to the study of persuasive speech and to lessen the democrat-
ic fears, towards its subjectivity and influential nature, modernist and
postmodernist copings with rhetoric (see the works of Kenneth Duva
Burke; Chaïm Perelman; Ivor A. Richards; Henry Johnstone Jr.; and
Colling G. Brooke) sought new horizons to interpret rhetoric in a more
integrative way. Thereby, rhetoric was legitimized to function as a di-
mension of communication and its meta-representations.
Rhetoric’s scope was widened to provide a framework of all symbol-
ic, societal and mediated functions. Reboul (1991) pointed to the broad-
ening of modern rhetoric by emphasizing its expansion from the ver-
bal to the visual; and from the conscious to the non-conscious. In desig-
nating new directions for rhetoric in everyday life, Nystrand and Duffy
(2003: ix), assumed that rhetoric ought not to refer to “the classical arts
of persuasion, or the verbal ornamentation of elite discourse, but rather
