The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy by Welsh Scott;

Author:Welsh, Scott;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Democratic Ends

Toward the end of his most active years as a writer, Kenneth Burke notes how his earlier rendering of speech as action was hardly innocent. Indeed, he argues that conceptualizing speech as action is itself an act, for when we regard speech as action we are invited to reduce utterances to their immediate, power-negotiating effects rather than see them as producing either truth or communication in pursuit of mutual understanding. Hence, he writes, “If action is to be our key term, then drama; for drama is the culminative form of action. But if drama, then conflict. And if conflict, then victimage.”[1] Or, if accepted as true, the construction of speech as action invites us to project dramatic conflict onto every act of speaking, even contributing to the production of the very sorts of destructive, victimizing conflicts that Burke devoted his career to ameliorating. Thus, Burke’s admission seems to reveal a pernicious irony at the heart of his account of rhetoric. The act of describing human speech as a contest for power—even though he does so in order to better understand and limit the damage that contests for power can do—may have the effect, in practice, of reifying the idea of rhetoric as nothing more than a contest for power.

It is then just a short step to understanding rhetorical politics as an unmitigated struggle between competing groups for political and cultural domination. What is especially interesting about Burke, however, is that he does not altogether disagree. Instead, he affirms that every utterance contains the seeds of such domination. As noted at the beginning of the previous chapter, Burke argues that every way of speaking effectively aims to induce particular kinds of cooperation and not others. Burke’s understanding of cooperation as “induced” is not unlike Nietzsche’s understanding of language as a “mobile army of metaphors,” transforming cultures and institutions as it moves across a landscape.[2] And understanding rhetoric as a conquering force is not an unreasonable metaphor. Even seemingly routine instances of symbolically induced cooperation produce consequences, many of them irreversible. Measured in individual human life spans, every lost opportunity is, indeed, lost forever. When roads are blocked for construction, businesses close and employees are put out of work. When additional land is required to add lanes, homes are claimed by the state and neighborhoods are transformed—forever. Each of these eventual consequences may have been the end result of a simple campaign pledge to bring more jobs to a community, which turned out to require improved access to a major highway to accommodate the shipping needs of a manufacturer persuaded to relocate (leading to a closed factory in the departed community). Thus, regardless of how cooperation was induced, the parties most negatively affected by the roadwork will experience the rumbling bulldozers as a dominating force.

The story can be extended even further, to what Burke calls “ultimate” ends.[3] Among those who lost their jobs, some will be unable to secure health insurance. As a result, many of those unable to afford insurance on their own will forego physician visits for as long as possible to avoid the expense.

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