Thanks to Jan Holmevik, Cynthia Haynes for hosting me and Greg Ulmer at Clemson University last week. The occasion was a seminar and symposium on games and rhetoric, organized thanks to Victor Vitanza and his Pre/Text journal. I enjoyed lively conversation with students and faculty alike. Somehow it was the first time I’d met Ulmer, who gave a thought-provoking talk about the avatar as a concept in his longstanding theory of electracy. It was also the first time in ages I’ve driven rather than flown to an event. Further conversation should be taking place in a special issue of Pre/Text.
By happenstance, this morning I logged on to find a blog post by Jim Brown on Rhetoricians and Software. Brown offers the following diagnosis:
The subfield of digital rhetoric has not dealt with software in detail. Rhetoricians in technical communications have certainly discussed software, but the pages of RSQ and other rhetorical theory journals have essentially avoided the question of software altogether. We study texts that happen to be online or on-screen, but we haven’t really considered the rhetorical nature of the software processes generating those texts. Ian Bogost’s book Persuasive Games brings rhetoric into this conversation, but rhetoricians themselves haven’t done enough work in this area.
I agree with Brown, and not just because he name checks me. He goes on, in fact, to explain that rhetoricians ought not to be afraid of software, even if they fear that they are unable to grasp it fully by virtue of not being adept programmers. Says Brown, “we don’t have to be engineers, we merely have to take the time to understand some of the basic concepts of software design.” This sentiment very much mirrors the one Nick Montfort and I advanced in the afterword of Racing the Beam, as well as that in Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing (as Brown himself notes).
I suppose one could look at things in reverse, too: the field of rhetoric is perhaps too cloistered to change significantly. I’m not a rhetorician, in the sense that I don’t work in a department or degree program with that name, nor do I teach courses in rhetoric or in composition. But I do offer a fairly coherent and (I think) novel theory of rhetoric in Persuasive Games (procedural rhetoric), one that has enjoyed relatively successful adoption in a variety of areas, including those reaching beyond videogames.
Rhetoric, after all, is everywhere. Ask any rhetorician and he or she will agree. And yet, rhetoric itself, as a deliberate study or practice, is very much not everywhere, despite its incredible success producing scholars and teachers in great numbers.
Comments
Carl
I think part of the issue is that philosophers have had, since Socrates, a deep suspicion of rhetoric. Indeed, one can argue that Kant, Hegel, and their successors are popular in part because of their lousiness as rhetoricians. That said, it would be good if philosophers thought more about what kind of rhetoric has what kind of impact. If nothing else, they should dissect the phenomenon that theyâ??re up against. Too often, philosophers interested in change will track the influence of â??an ideaâ? from Descartes or whoever up through the ages, but a better analysis would be to say that a particular rhetorical strategy had gained prominence and thence influence. Rhetorical strategies are harder to kill than ideas, and they shape the ideas we stumble on in our investigations of the world.
Ian Bogost
A provocative idea!
Carl
Alas, not an original one. The theory goes that Kant came upon his lousiness in the Critiques naturally but thereafter in German at least bad writing became a sign of “seriousness,” “difficulty,” etc. and praised for its own sake.
Ian Bogost
Jim, thanks for the response and sorry it got stuck in spamville for two months!
You’re right that rhetoric is an unseen hero, so to speak. But it’s interesting to note that other fundamentals are so much more frequently mentioned or discussed even in casual conversation. If we think about the old trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, it’s only rhetoric that people misunderstand, misconstrue, or ignore so frequently. Or think of mathematics instead. Why is that we acknowledge these other foundations, which are also built into our basic modes?
Jim
I had completely forgotten what I wrote. 🙂
Many rhetoricians would answer your question with one word: Ramus. But most would also agree that Ramus stands in for a complicated tradition of rhetoric’s restriction. We could even blame the Enlightenment for labeling rhetoric as ornamentation (covering over truth), but there are plenty of culprits. The bottom line is that rhetoric has always had a fraught relationship with “truth,” and grammar and logic have had a much easier relationship with the “t” word.
Also, I think Bender and Wellbery’s The Ends of Rhetoric (collection of essays) does the best job of explaining both of the things we’re talking about. For B and W, the onset of modernity signals a return of rhetoric as “rhetoricality” (their word). While rhetoric is a set of practices, rhetoricality is a “generalized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience.” Perhaps this is why we don’t talk about it. It’s more embedded than the other two thirds of the trivium.
At any rate, it was great to continue this conversation, no matter how long it took!
Ian Bogost
Jim, it’s certainly true that rhetoric suffered a “dark period” that perhaps still afflicts it. I suppose it goes back not just to the Enlightenment, but to Socrates. Your suggestion that the relationship with truth troubles rhetoric most is its tendency to parry with truth, but it’s also true that persuasion (and indeed manipulation) are often discussed matters in business, psychology, and other areas, yet hardly ever in terms of rhetoric. And yet, when I first advanced my theory of procedural rhetoric, it was the psychology and cog-sci folks who found it worth engaging with first; the rhetoricians are still catching up.
I’m willing to be swayed, but I never found B&W’s concept of rhetoricality persuasive (as it were). It seemed to me like a strange attempt to whitewash everything into rhetoric. The “always already rhetorical” move doesn’t leave me with either theoretical or practical tool. It just feels like a parlor trick.