Search for Meaning

Narrative is our path through experience. Paths of all kinds are naturalized but not natural. Nature, like experience, is temporary. Our paths, our stories, our language – so necessary to make sense of our lives – are also temporary. 

Rhetoric practices, from original oral traditions to the inscriptive interlude to the current digital discourse, have continued to be the basis of the way we transfer ideas from person to person. Collin Brooke posited an update to the classic canons of rhetoric to align better with the advances in technology and the way this influences our interactions.

Brooke has exchanged invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery for proairesis {preference would have worked and remained consistent with his alliteration, but maybe he was giving a respectful nod to the Ancients} pattern, perspective, persistence, and performance.

Rhetoric practice, while it does create, also serves to manage and contain. This is an important point regarding our digital communication. In many ways, rhetoric has become a content management system, and a movement away from the Cartesian and mechanization of human experience that coincided with the rise of written communication and the obsession with objectivity seen in scientific inquiry. 

So dominating have the ideas of the past 500 years been that any dissent or dissoi logoi put into practice are summarily squashed. It has left us wandering around blind, or if not blind then seeing only what we want to see, in a confirmation bias overdosed state with our head lolling to the side and drool pooling at our feet. 

My eyes are open…and I see exactly what I expect to see.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The return to more oral and classic ideas allows for a resurgence of Romanticism and Gestalt visions where the whole is greater than the parts or at least we shouldn’t ignore the forest because we are focused on a tree. It allows for a remixing of ideas and parts to provide novel perspectives. This though is resisted by those clinging to the comfort provided by the Cartesian compartmentalizing of our human experiences. There is a fear in loss of ownership and authorship proposed by the combining of components from different sources. But the movement toward collective and crowdsourced forms of communication seems akin to the amphitheaters of old, or speeches looked upon with reverence from suffragist and civil rights movements that made the streets, memorials, and public squares the venues for change.

Change is a collective practice and rhetoric is a vehicle. I wonder if we will bear witness to the intersection of the three principle kinds of public speech in the digital realm: Speech that makes judgment about the past, speech that strengthens our beliefs or enhances our collective memories, and speech that moves us toward future action. The flexibility of rhetoric, especially digital rhetoric, would seem poised to shoulder such devoirs. Giambattista Vico hinted at such when he discussed how rhetoric embraces probability and argument, which can lead to responsible civic action. 

For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best…

Viktor E. Frankl

I. A. Richards identifies how we derive meaning by relating the present to the past. Memory then, as a classic canon is not to be easily dismissed, though it seems to often occur. Mnemosyne’s gift should not be discarded or seen as a binary of either present or absent. Brooke in his idea of memory as persistence honors Mnemosyne and how memory is interactive and gives shape and meaning to rhetoric practice because it allows us to [re]collect and [re]link our experiences.

Rhetoric is the means by which we narrate our lives and make sense of our lives. Rhetoric is the means for connecting with others. Rhetoric is the means for revealing meaning.

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