There’s a fascinating conversation happening in Britain right now on the rhetorical aspects of being overweight. The BBC just published an article that debates the merits of calling patients “fat” or “obese,” with health professionals evaluating which one will help move patients toward a more healthy weight:
The debate appears to hinge on motivation, with some health professionals advocating for the term “fat” with the argument that it will ostensibly shame them into improved weight management. The flipside, of course, is that the pejorative connotations could reinforce a negative self-image to the extent that is demotivates.
Professor Steve Field, of the Royal College of General Practitioners, makes an insightful remark about the rhetorical consequences of the term obese: “I think the term obese medicalises the state. It makes it a third person issue. I think we need to sometimes be more brutal and honest.” Field’s comment can be applied more broadly, I think, to the host of conditions that are now in the process of “medicalization,” with “disorder” being attached to a wide-range of conditions that not too long ago were tagged with more colloquial descriptors–and perhaps should remain as such. The DSM-IV is replete with new classifications like “personality disorder” and “caffeine intoxification disorder.” This trend toward medicalization is largely a rhetorical process and thus signals the need for understanding it along those lines, I would argue.
Five weeks ago I came across a quote by Henry Ford. It has remained close to the fore of my thoughts since then.
Speech is one of man’s most marvelous tools and there is a direct relation between the kind of speech which he uses and the kind of work he does.
A good engineer can tell what language a machine ‘been built in just by looking at it. There are some languages in which a machine cannot be built at all. There are some languages in which it would be impossible to efficiently manage a factory.
Ford’s speech has a distinctive directness to it. It’s quietly militant.
This might not surprise those who know Ford’s capitalist success story of the assembly line. There’s a steadiness to his prose that resembles the production line–just look at the repetitive evenness of the last three sentences.
Ford’s quote shows a remarkable grasp of the relationship between language and reality, between our knowledge and our actions. More specifically, it reveals in no uncertain terms how capitalism is successful in large measure because of our language choices.
Ford no doubt would find dreadful a society without “efficient” factories and engines–though we must understand that “efficient” in this context is heavily colored by a capitalist frame of reference. “Efficient,” for Ford* and many other capitalists, for example, means maximizing the externalization of costs, and minimizing accountability in order to maximize profit. “Efficient” will mean something quite different to a Marxist or an environmentalist.
But what Ford dreads is precisely what many are fighting for: a language that makes a capitalist economic model an impossibility.** The goal is a language which cannot support the flagrant exploitation of labor and environment.
Among those broadcasting this message are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, authors of Empire, Multitude, and most recently, Commonwealth. One of their principle claims is that a language of resistance is an integral part of any successful resistance movement. Of course, they’re not the only ones saying this, but they are perhaps the only ones saying it that have such a large constituency of readers.
I recently had the privilege of hearing Michael Hardt speak at the Nonstop Institute in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He was very gracious with his time and answers, always working hard to understand the questions as clearly as possible, while remaining sensitive to the questioner’s desires. In short, I was impressed and appreciative, along with many others.
When the microphone came around to me, there were two questions I had in mind, one that relates directly to Ford’s quote. Hardt and Negri use the phrase “production of subjectivity” to discuss how capitalism influences thought- and action-patterns that benefit its continuation. What I’m curious to know–and what I was lucky enough to ask Michael Hardt–is what happens when the key terms we use to critique capitalism are they same that have served its advancement so well? Production is a term very near-and-dear to the capitalist way of life (see, for instance, how Derrick Jensen defines it–premise #5). Do we reinforce certain lines of capitalist thought, even though we’re trying to critique it? When we say “production of subjectivity” do we invoke a frame a reference that is best (if not only) understood through capitalist means?
Check out the video to hear his answer–roughly around the thirty minute mark. (And please excuse my stumbling questioning.)
I’ll leave you with the same questions, as I don’t have any answers right now. There are pros, cons, and in-betweens to all these choices. What does a language of resistance sound like, read like, feel like? On whose shoulders does it fall to create and sustain this language? Should we be spending our energies elsewhere?
hmmm…
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* Perhaps the most notorious admirer of Ford’s commitment to “efficiency” was Hitler, who told a Detroit News reporter in 1933, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.” Indeed he did: a framed picture of Ford hung in Hitler’s office and he’s the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf. This should indicate clearly enough the devastating consequences of a subjectivity that fetishizes a certain type of “efficiency.”
** On this end of the spectrum we find yet another spectrum: there are those who argue the factory should be owned by the workers and there are those who argue the factory shouldn’t exist at all, no large-scale production facilities period, as they almost invariably support unsustainable economic models. We literally cannot continue an economic system of ravenous extraction and perpetual growth and sustain the ecosystems that make life possible. The fact of this isn’t up for debate–but what we do in response to it most definitely is.
Right now there are a gaggle of imaginative and intelligent students at Ohio State working on Critical Rhetoric Videos, an assignment that takes Raymie McKerrow’s concept of “Critical Rhetoric,” but uses digital video instead of print to perform the critique.
(go to www.elementsof276.blogspot.com to learn more about this assignment)
In attempting to better identify which rhetorical appeals will work best for their target demographic (mostly those between the ages of 19 and 26), we consistently come back to humor. This has me contemplating the potential value of a “precursor project”–more specifically, a parodic precursor–that would focus on the strategic use of humor before moving on to a project like the Critical Rhetoric Video.
So I thought I would share with you some great examples of parody, a term the Greeks used to describe works that imitated the epics in humorous fashion, poking fun at the style of master narratives. (Just consider the etymology: para (along side of) + ode (as in “lyrical ballad”).)
These examples are astounding for their efficiency in revealing the rhetorical structures of the genre they’re poking fun at, while engaging the audience with their own set of smooth rhetorical maneuvers:
(thanks to Alex Speck, who tipped me off to this bit-o-genius)
I remember when British Petroleum changed their name to “Beyond Petroleum” in 2000. When pressed about it, I bet most could, which means that their $200 million advertising campaign worked. (Ogilvy & Mather won the 2001 PRWeek award for “campaign of the year,” if you need additional support for its effectiveness.)
One of the most successful greenwashes of all time, the rebranding of BP has led them to be viewed as one of the most “environmentally aware” oil companies. The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is putting pressure on this perspective, of course, but there’s good reason to believe that BP’s image will recover. They’re veterans, don’t forget: of oil clean-ups, congressional “interrogations” of weak safety measures and poor environmental records, and–most importantly–PR disaster management.
(Eric Dezenhall recently wrote about when a “late public-relations honcho for a big petrochemical company” once told him “that he knew it was time to retire when, after a spill, the CEO’s first call was to him: ‘Get up here, Harry, we’ve got a PR problem.”)
PR disaster management is where rhetorician mercenaries spring to action; these are the Navy SEALS of rhetorical situations where making the weaker argument appear stronger seems nearly impossible. The documentary Our Brand is Crisisreveals some of this rhetorical mercenary work:
So after having spent enough time vacillating between rage and despair while reading accounts of the (continuing) oil leak in the Gulf, I thought it best to go to Derrick Jensen for some words of wisdom. In Endgame (Volume 1) Jensen discusses BP’s name change, which they framed as a “statement of priorities.”
This particular type of smokescreen has been most fully developed by a public relations consultant with the appropriately named Peter Sandman. He has been nicknamed the High Priest of Outrage because corporations hire him to dissipate public anger, to put people back to sleep. Sandman has explicitly stated his self-perceived role: “I get hired to help a company to ‘explain to these confused people that the refinery isn’t going to blow up, so they will leave us alone.’”
He developed a five point program for corporations to disable public rage.
First, convince the public that they are participating in the destructive processes themselves, that the risks are not externally imposed. You asked for it by wearing those clothes, says the rapist. You drive a car, too, says the PR guru.
Second, convince them that the benefits of the processes outweigh the harm. You could never support yourself without me, says the abuser. How would you survive without fossil fuels?” repeats the PR guru.
Third, undercut fear by making the risk feel familiar. Explain your response and people will relax (whether or not your response is meaningful or effective). Don’t you worry about it, I’ll take care of everything. Things will change, you’ll see, says the abuser. We are moving beyond petroleum and toward sustainability, says the PR guru.
Fourth, emphasize again that the public has control over the risk (whether or not they do). You could leave anytime you want, but I know you won’t, says the abuser. If we all just pull together, we’ll find our way through, says the PR guru.
Fifth, acknowledge your mistakes, and say (even if untrue) that you are trying to do better. I promise I will never hit you again, the abuser repeats. It is time to stop living in the past, and move together into the future, drones the PR guru.
Speaking to a group of mining executives, Sandman, who also consults for BP, stated, “There is a growing sense that you screw up a lot, and as a net result it becomes harder to get permission to mine.” His solution is not actually change how the industry works, of course, but instead to find an appropriate “persona” for the industry. “Reformed sinner,” he says, “works quite well if you can sell it…’Reformed sinner,’ by the way, is what John Brown of BP has successfully done for his organization. It is arguably what Shell has done with respect to Brent Spar. Those are two huge oil companies that have done a very good job of saying to themselves, ‘Everyone thinks we are bad guys…We can’t just start out announcing we are good guys, so what we have to announce is we have finally realized we were bad guys and we are going to do better.’ … It makes it much easier for critics and the public to buy into the image of the industry as good guys after you have spent awhile in purgatory.”
Here’s some “reformed sinner” performance, punctuated with blame-framing and blame-shifting. It’s rather remarkable that right after Senator Wyden says, “And the company always says the same thing after one of these accidents: ‘We’re gonna toughen up our standards; we’re going to improve management; we’re going to deal with risks,’ and then another such accident takes place,” BP executive Lamar McKay responds with the exact same formula just outlined: “We are changing this company. We’ve put in management systems that are covering the world in a consistent and rigorous way.”
But why depart from the template that has worked so well and so consistently for so long?
If you find such behavior and responses (both by oil executives and the “legal personhood” of a corporation) to be best described as pathological behavior, then you might find useful the documentary The Corporation, which uses some of the key symptoms of psychopathy as outlined by the DSM-IV as an analytical lens for understanding corporate behavior:
callous disregard for the feelings of other people
the incapacity to maintain human relationships
reckless disregard for the safety of others
deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit)
the incapacity to experience guilt
failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law
Oil has brought us some nice things and (to borrow another phrase from Derrick Jensen) all other things being equal, I’d like to have some of the things that are the result of oil.
“But all other things aren’t equal, and I’d rather have a living planet.”
“[My questioning of norms] has not only been made possible by but is constantly in contact with very classical, rigorous, demanding discipline in writing, in ‘demonstrating,’ in rhetoric … The fact that I’ve been trained in and that I am at some level true to this classical teaching in rhetoric is essential … whether in the sense of the art of persuasion or in the sense of logical demonstration.”
Unlike Marx, Derrida would probably be more inclined to play with his label of “deconstructionist” rather than out-and-out deny it. But as Booth points out in The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, Derrida is just fine with being labeled a rhetorician.
“If you really understand Kenneth Burke, you don’t need Derrida as much.”
~ J. Hillis Miller, Interview, Criticism in Society, 1987
Rhetoric-centric journals are popping up all over the web these days. Take note of the newcomers:
The Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects (JUMP) “is an electronic journal dedicated to 1) providing an outlet for the excellent and exceedingly rhetorical digital/multimedia projects occurring in undergraduate courses around the globe, and 2) providing a pedagogical resource for teachers working with (or wanting to work with) ‘new media.’ The journal is designed to be not only a repository for quality multimedia scholarship—bringing together some of the most rhetorically creative and rhetorically impactful works produced/composed by our undergraduates—but also, unlike its digital brethren (i.e., mega repositories like YouTube), it seeks to also offer a critical perspective” (from “about The Jump“).
Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society “is a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues through a rhetorical lens. In addition to examining these subjects as found in written, oral and visual texts, we wish to provide a forum for calls to action in academia, education and national policy. Seeking to address current or presently unfolding issues, we publish short articles of no more than 2,000 words, the length of a conference paper” (from “about Present Tense“).
Relevant Rhetoric: ANew Journal of Rhetorical Studies “is a refereed online journal created to publish pieces of academic rhetorical criticism that are of value not only to academic scholars and historians interested in persuasion, but also to the educated lay-public. The journal seeks to further our understanding of and conversation about modern persuasive practices with the largest possible audience” (from their “about” page). “The emphasis of Relevant Rhetoric: A New Journal of Rhetorical Studies is on the context of discovery rather than the context of justification. This means that the writing and editorial conventions practiced by most academic journals is modified so that the focus of each article is on the author’s findings, conclusions, interpretations, or suggestions, rather than previous literature and research methods” (from their submissions page).
Our choice of words helps facilitate certain thoughts and empowers particular logics, while disciplining others. This is a foundational principle of rhetorical studies and probably nothing new to many of this blog’s readers.
Every once and awhile, though, I realize just how high the stakes really are.
The video below was found at WikiLeaks, “a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors. Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents” (wikipedia entry). It is a classified US military video that shows the shooting of a dozen people in a suburb of Baghdad. Among the victims were two Reuters news staff. Two children are also involved.
Please take caution: this is raw footage, complete with the Army’s audio, of people being shot.
I deliberated on alternatives for “being shot” for quite some time. Perhaps–”this is raw footage of people being murdered.” Or “slayed.” Or “wrongly identified and accidentally fired upon.”
In the video you hear the military personnel saying, “We just engaged all eight individuals.”
It’s important to note that the video’s opening frame is a quote by Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”:
[Political language is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Elsewhere in that essay Orwell writes, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” I think the assumed interpretation of this is meant to indicate the government’s defense to the public. This language is then, of course, picked up by the body politic, replicated by supporters to other members of the public. This language becomes the banal standard, the terms we use–whether we’re for, against, or indifferent–to communicate.
But I wonder if we might think about how we use smokescreen language like this on ourselves, to psychologically shield ourselves from what we know is “indefensible,” which could be translated here as “unconscionable.”
So when the soldier in this video says, “I’m just trying to find targets again,” we could say it’s because it’s what allows him “to do his job” (another phrase of justification, used to pass accountability to another realm). Can you imagine it rephrased?
“I’m just trying to find a breathing body that has hopes and dreams like you and I to send a piece of metal through so that his blood will mix with the sand.”
This isn’t a piece about placing praise or blame on soldiers. This isn’t the forum for such a critique; and having known several veterans of Iraq, I would never hastily condemn the individual without knowing more. (For instance, what if the person doing the shooting ultimately found such an act reprehensible and leaked the video himself in a courageous attempt to right a wrong?)
This is a forum about language and its consequences.
Military speak is an extreme example of language that shields its users from discussing the indefensible. It’s easy for us to assume that we are separate from those who must use linguistic mirrors to either do what they’re told or justify daily action. But if you find this use of language chilling in its brutal efficacy, perhaps you’re willing to try something…
Let’s search for all those terms that displace our own accountability. Let’s identify them, interrogate them, and reframe them for the better. And let’s do it in a public forum.
Habitat lossandendangered species perform the same function that collateral damage and enhanced interrogation techniques do. They are terms that permit–indeed facilitate–thinking that directs us away from a frame of accountability.
And so I’m calling on all rhetoricians, language-lovers, and wordsmiths to raise the stakes a bit, and using the emotion generated by the video below, to take ownership of language in such a way that it becomes infused with accountability and agency.
Before I condemn the BBC for severe lack of tact, I thought it best to run it past you all first to see if I’m way off base. Check out the picture chosen to accompany an article on the US military changing it policy on “don’t ask don’t tell.”
Are we being lead to believe that these two military men are holding hands? My guess is that their arms simply appear aligned from the perspective of camera; cropping out the hands at the bottom helps cement this view.
So why this picture? Why are we being lead to associate this policy change with open-hand holding amongst military personnel? How does this picture help frame the article’s message and how we interpret the policy itself?
Right now I’m more than a bit disgusted with such a maneuver, which seems beneath such a respectable organization like the BBC. This is something we might expect from FOX, but c’mon–the BBC?!
I just opened a letter from one of my credit card companies and was immediately put on guard: something just seemed different.
Unlike many of my friends (but perhaps not those who consider themselves professional rhetoricians) I’m in the habit of actually reading credit card policy updates and other fine-print heavy documents, like contracts, nutritional notes–you know–”enlarged to show texture”-type stuff. It certainly isn’t born out of some rigid sense of responsibility; it’s much more of a perverse delight in how much communication is swept under the proverbial rug. (If you’d like to catch this bug, I suggest you spend sometime at Mouse Print, a site dedicated to exposing the fine-strings-attached in 8 pt. font.)
So when I read through this letter I was tickled (not sure if that’s the right word) to find out that part of its purpose was about, yep, fine print.
One of the main changes? Font size. After years of years the fine print, this one looked almost childish with it massive, clumsy 12-pt font!
Although it’s not the language that is used in the legislation, the Obama administration has been promoting a rhetoric of “Plain Language in Plain Site.”
Credit card contract terms will be disclosed in language that consumers can see and understand so they can avoid unnecessary costs and manage their finances … These disclosures will help consumers make informed choices about using the right financial products and managing their own financial needs.
Something like this is very easy to make fun of when touted as “real reform,” but I’m in a generous mood and right now I’m of the persuasion that this is a step in the right direction. For instance, who is really going to take the time to read through something like this and connect the dots:
Don’t those call-out boxes, bolded terms, and line-breaks just naturally guide your eye?! They basically interpret the information for you! Unless you’re a fine-print-freak (like moi), this statement probably goes right in the recycling bin. (Which is probably why people are shocked to discovered their rates get jacked every year without them really being aware.)
Right now my class and I are finishing up a project on data visualization, so I’m thinking about how much our credit/debt-lifestyles would change with some powerful graphs that displayed the same information in compelling ways. For example, what if you were given a graph that compared your payment to the amount of time it would take for you to get out of debt? Take data like this …
… and render it visually persuasive? What if we had info-graphic specialists that worked in conjunction with consumer protection agencies to present this information in such a way that actually made people cognizant of where their money was going?
Perhaps something like this, but even better?
(Dennis Campbell: Center for Plain Language Symposium)
What if we started to radically reimagine the use of info-graphics and data visualization to improve daily practice toward something more sane and sustainable?
What if every plastic bottle had a visually compelling graphic of how long it would stay in the earth (roughly 5,000 years) compared to how long most people usually use it (less than five minutes)?
What if every gas station pump had a bar chart that revealed peak-oil information? Perhaps a timeline of when oil actually went into mainstream production for automobiles along side a graph that showed how much is left in the earth? Maybe include how long it took to actually make the s**t?
What if trash bins had graphs that showed the amount of garbage we put in the earth? Maybe even put a mirror next to it so the person could look themselves in the eye before they committed? (Or what if trash cans were renamed to be more accurate: LANDFILL containers?)
What if instead of just the name of the country your shirt was stitched in it actually had a map with the country highlighted? Perhaps put in a dotted line that showed how far it had to travel to be put on your back? Or maybe it could have a mandatory comparison graphic that revealed how much the worker was paid to the cost of the shirt to the profit made through it?
And what if we didn’t wait for anyone else to start doing this? What if we took it upon ourselves to inform others through creative measures? What if we bettered our communities through something as simple as a compelling graphic? What if we worked together to do it?
