Rhetoric and the Arts of Design

David S. Kaufer, Brian S. Butler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136686429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The design arts -- from the design of buildings and machines to software and interfaces -- are associated with types of knowledge and performance thought to be structured, modular, and systematic. Such arts have become increasingly prestigious in our technocratic society. Since Aristotle, the art of rhetoric was conceived as a loosely structured "practical" art thought to be limited in the extent to which it could mimic more precise subject matters. The art of rhetoric has been controversial since classical times, but its status has sunk even lower since the industrial revolution -- a point when civic cultures began to cede authority and control to the cultures of specialized experts. Many sympathizers of rhetoric have resisted its decline by calling for a civic art of public discourse to stand in opposition to a technocratic specialized discourse that has come, increasingly, to disenfranchise the ordinary citizen. This is the first book to question the rhetoric/technical knowledge split from a more fundamental perspective. To get some perspective on what is at stake in rhetoric's traditional classification as a "practical" art, the authors:
* explore the distinction between practical and design arts;
* enumerate the various criteria cited in the literature for qualifying a cluster of knowledge and performative skills to count as an art of design;
* show how the knowledge and performative skills associated with the art of rhetoric meet the major requirements of design knowledge;
* propose a general architecture of rhetorical design, one descriptive both of civic address and specialized academic argument;
* turn to the Lincoln/Douglas debates to embody and provide some empirical support and illustration for their architecture;
* demonstrate how Lincoln and Douglas can be thought of as expert designers whose rhetoric is highly structured and modular; and
* explain how the rhetoric of both rhetorical agents can be represented in the layers and modules that one needs to display plans for buildings, software, or other design artifacts.
These layers and modules are not just post hoc annotations of the debates; they also illuminate new and systematic ways for viewing the debates -- and by implication, other specimens of rhetoric -- in terms of strategies of artistic production. Kaufer and Butler conclude their presentation by citing some of the research and educational implications that follow from housing rhetoric within the family of design arts.

One
Rhetoric And Design: The Ancient Art Meets the Modern Science

Rhetoric is the art of finding the available means of persuasion.

—Aristotle (1991)

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

—Simon (1969, p. 159)

The Fall of Rhetoric and the Rise of Design

To moderns, rhetoric is a word of odium, signifying uses of language that are self-serving and unprincipled. Design, as Simon's statement hints, is a word of prestige, meaning the use of method to change "existing situations into preferred ones" (Simon, 1969, p. 121). In the global economy, design method has gained currency as the capacity to produce ideas and products meeting high standards of quality and consumer acceptance (Norman, 1988). As industrial societies have become increasingly professionalized and reliant on technology, rhetoric has become a popular signifier for the ideas and products of a society that cannot compete in a world of high quality design. It has come to depict markets in which verbal smoke and mirrors are peddled as feeble compensation for low-grade ideas and products. Even the ancient art of politics, reconfigured as the modern discipline of political science, seems to have left rhetoric behind. The international press associates the hot ravings of a political demagogue or a third-world strongman with "rhetoric," and the firebrand radio host as the purveyor of "hate rhetoric," but identifies the cool discourse of a major world leader with "professional diplomacy."

Rhetoric, in short, has come increasingly in the popular culture to be cast aside as a cultural anachronism, a practice out of step with the best of current thinking. It has come to stand for verbal posturing masquerading as genuine insight and innovation. It is shunned as the very antithesis of substance. Economies that can compete will win, we are told, like the Japanese and the quiet hero of Capra's Hollywood, in the silence of their actions, not the seduction of their words. Within this narrative, rhetoric is the villainy of the loose tongue, the modern emblem of dishonorable persuasion. The pejorative usage is so pervasive that it scarcely needs comment. Many politicians would rather admit to isolated crimes and misdemeanors than confess to the systematic use of "rhetoric" in their symbolic behavior.

Rhetoric's decline in the west has a history, of course, and that history has been chronicled in many places. As Roberts and Good (1993, p- 85) observed, rhetoric's decline is not a "simple occlusion," but a more subtle suppression, where groups in power have come to rely on a curious rhetoric of antirhetoric, disclaiming all "rhetorical antecedents or affinities." Ruegg (1993) chronicled this rise of an antirhetoric rhetoric in 19th century German social science; Salazer (1993) offered a comparable analysis in his account of the rise of social science in 19th century France. Cahn (1993) noted that rhetoric in the 18th and 19th century shifted its focus from public speaking and persuading to a more staid form of textual interpretation in order to secure a footing in the evolving university structures of Europe.

The most cited and celebrated account, that of Ong (1971), associated the fall of rhetoric with the rise of print technology. The notion was that print promoted a natural selection toward longer, more complex, and more technical ideas, ideas fixed in the mental space of private individuals rather than in the public space of oral/aural memory. The ideas favored by this selection came eventually to support a document-centered law, science, and technology. Such ideas, moreover, fixed in print, captured a precision in detail that could not be supported by an oral art. As the ideas native to print grew in importance to society, the oral/aural art of rhetoric fell into disrepair.

Elsewhere, one of us (Kaufer & Carley, 1993a) has argued that Ong's thesis, left unqualified, seems not quite right, especially insofar as Ong framed his history as a cognitive hypothesis, one suggesting that print attuned our inner consciousness to think of words as spatial patterns more than bursts of sounds. As Kaufer and Carley argued, it is fantasy to assume that an external technology, like the printing press, could change, in the course of a few generations, fundamental structures of mind.

One strand of the print hypothesis seems, however, more sustainable: the association of rhetoric's downfall with the imposition of one standard for disseminating cultural ideas over another. The original standard might be thought of as classical persuasion, fundamental to ancient rhetoric. In classical persuasion, the speaker uses the premises of the audience as a standard against which to measure the quality of the ideas presented. In classical persuasion, cultural ideas are of high quality because of their cultural resonance and wide social acceptance. The quality of an idea is tied directly to its cultural reach.

The cultural standard that came to replace classical persuasion in prestige circles, one accompanying the rise of Enlightenment science and technology, might be called novelty.¹ Bender and Wellbury (1990, pp. 1—39) traced the fall of rhetoric in the Enlightenment to five causes, all of which inform the antirhetoric rhetoric of novelty. These causes are the rise of science, the emergence of authorship and subjective expression, and the rise of liberalism, of the nation-state and national languages, and print.

Supported by each of these antecedents, advocates of the novelty standard came to utilize the absence of an idea's cultural precedent as the basis for assessing its potential quality. The potential value of an idea, in other words, is based on its being not fully accepted or anticipated in advance, on its setting its own historical precedent in the culture. On a novelty standard, the question of an idea's potential quality is thought of prior to and independent of its eventual cultural acceptance. The speaker trying to be new wants to persuade audiences; however, on the novelty standard, persuasion means little if it is not also seen as innovation, as ideas pushing the boundaries beyond what is currently known or archived.

Spreading new ideas would be hopeless, of course, if the long term for acceptance were too long and if the ideas disseminated were not in a medium durable enough to guarantee even the possibility of a long term. Here is where print fits into the story, because print specifically colludes with the novelty standard, and the novelty standard, with print.

Print, and the electronic modes of communication, claimed three important properties for making "newness" a feasible standard for cultural dissemination. The first property is archivability. Archivability is the capacity to store and retrieve huge quantities of information in the exact form in which it was composed. Ancients and medievals stored information in hand-written documents, but even the most careful of scribes introduced errors and corruptions as one copy was made from another. Print added mechanical reproducibility. This capacity allowed ideas to be fixed across time, space, and cultures. Print's role in bringing about such fixity has been commented on at length by cultural historians such as Ong (1971) and Eisenstein (1979).

The second property is boundedness. Boundedness means that a text contains all the content it will ever contain at the time it is composed. Readers bring their own learning and background experience into their reading of a text. But the texts that circulate among readers are not themselves augmented by this learning and experience. The textual content remains physically fixed across readings. Like archivability, boundedness is a property of documents, but the speed, scale, and lowered costs of printed documents made boundedness a material reality for an expanding market of readers. Kaufer and Carley (1993) argued that boundedness speeds the human potential to access new information. This is not because new ideas are unavailable in face-to-face interaction. It is because, in face-to-face interaction, new ideas compete in an ocean of commonly shared, ritualistic information. Face-to-face interaction evolved to perform many functions for the survival of collectives; the imparting of new information is only one of these functions. Interaction with written information has a much shorter history and a much smaller set of functions to perform for human survival. Because of the boundedness of texts, moreover, the sharing of new information becomes a prominent textual function. Boundedness allows texts to be artificially constructed to minimize the amount of ritual that passes between author and reader and to contain the reader's search for new information.

The third property of print that supported the novelty standard is speed. Kaufer and Carley demonstrated that print (and, in general, media that support one-to-many communication) can greatly decrease the time it takes new ideas to diffuse across a society. Their mathematical argument rests on an intuitive one—if you can reach 10 readers at the same time, you will soon reach many more readers than if you need to address only one at a time.

Through these three material properties, print made it possible to foreground novelty as a new paradigm for the cultural dissemination of ideas. We do not mean to suggest by this that print alone subverted classical persuasion and enshrined novelty as a new standard of communication. Strictly speaking, the older rhetorical standard of persuasion was never overthrown as much as reinterpreted. We suggest rather that print was a powerful factor in what came to be the reinterpretation of an older rhetorical standard in terms of a newer scientific one. Print, and especially the explosion of print capacity during the industrial revolution, made it a feasible expectation from the mid 19th century on that the prestige cultures of persuasion could, and should, also be cultures of innovation.

Not coincidentally, we think, the reinterpretation of classical persuasion in terms of novelty in prestige circles of cultural communication brought with it the decline of rhetoric and the ascension of design. In the post-Enlightenment world, design has come to be known as what innovators must do to persuade. Scientists design theories and experiments in order to uncover the design in nature. Richard Dawkins (1986), in his book The Blind Watchmaker, identifed the fundamental problem of biology as explaining nature as a "complex design" of random convergences. Engineers design machines. Architects design buildings. Politicians design policies and programs. Novelists, poets, and playwrights, asked to speak to the innovations in their writing, now talk about the design of character, image, mood, and scene. Until the mid 19th century, rhetoric was the central discipline for teaching speakers how to motivate and direct organizations. Now we have management science, where MB As are trained how to design optimal organizations and procedures. In every case where design has overtaken rhetoric, the agent of study, and sometimes even the object (nature), is recast as an innovator who seeks to work with an audience, but only through a design.

In an era that makes design the privileged site of prestige persuasion, rhetoric is either an important absence or an outright failure of design. Rhetoric has not comfortably survived the Enlightenment because it is seen as bald persuasion, persuasion outside of the innovative context of design, or bad persuasion, relying on a failed or seriously flawed design.

The Recent Reemergence of Rhetoric

Recent developments, however, have altered this picture of rhetoric and design as arts in opposition. Such developments have tried, self-consciously, to incorporate older notions of rhetoric and argument into the leading edge of novelty cultures. Serious students of the design process, for example, have come to recognize that reflective processes are an important and recurring element in guiding the productive aspects of a design, and that these reflective processes often rely on the strategic uses of language consonant with rhetorical practice. Schon (1983) was the first to make this point in book length. The case for language, even rhetoric, in design was explored with even greater specificity by Fisher, Lemke, and McCall (1991). These researchers posited that the design process is divided between constructing things and using language to discuss, analyze, and finally advise the constructive process as the design evolves. When multiple designers favoring different priorities are involved, the language in design must be explicitly rhetorical, adapted to persuade other agents about the direction in which the design should go. In this more recent understanding of the relationship between rhetoric and design, commentators are willing to acknowledge that persuasive words can profitably direct design. This view gives rhetoric a more honorable face. This face of rhetoric is given more prominent exposure still in two movements that came to the fore in the 1980s: the rhetoric of inquiry (Bazerman, 1988; Lyne, 1985; McCloskey, 1985; Nelson, McGill, & McCloskey, 1987), and writing in the specialized disciplines (see Kaufer & Young, 1993, for a review). Both movements make it common practice to expose rhetorical activity both in the informal practices of science and in the formal channels of published research.

Our Project

Our project is consonant with efforts to move an older rhetoric into the center of creative activity that animates the novelty cultures of today. There are also notable differences between our project, the rhetoric of inquiry, and writing in the specialized disciplines. At the risk of oversimplification, the purpose of the latter projects is to show how rhetoric, as a practice, is pervasive in sciences that are thought to be "mature" enough to have surpassed, to have evolved beyond, rhetoric. Within the scope of these projects, rhetoric is "exposed" in places that have attained their eminence by denying their reliance on rhetoric. Work in the rhetoric of inquiry and writing in the specialized disciplines tries to show, in sum, how rhetoric, assumed to be a loosely knit and relatively unstructured bundle of practices, finds its way into disciplines considered too highly structured to need rhetoric.

Significantly, work in both these areas tends to view rhetoric as a common meta-knowledge needed to understand where the logical and methodological foundations of a discipline fall short and where discursive practices of speaking, writing, and persuading begin. As a lingua franca, rhetoric is cast as a way to foster intellectual exchange across disciplines that otherwise share little in common. Like a Cicero holding together Rome's warring factions, rhetoric is portrayed as offering the open hand of a civic culture to close-fisted specialists. But even within these positive constructions, rhetoric itself remains without an intellectual center or an indigenous founding knowledge. Rooted in atheoretical practice, it is judged "ill-suited to founding theories." It is rather "an antiepistemological epistemology that breaks down the walls dividing disciplines" (McCloskey, 1995, p. 17).

We certainly don't diagree with McCloskey's characterization of rhetoric if rhetoric is touted to be, or to rival in logical systematicity, an axiomatic science. Rhetoric never has defended itself or could defend itself, against the charge that it does not proceed, lawlike, from universal assumptions to universal conclusions. But rhetoric has paid a higher price for this absence than perhaps even Plato could have imagined. An implication of rhetoric's decline in the modern academy, we later argue, has been to diminish it into a caricature of itself, into a practical art, serving the ends of persuasion, but lacking a substantive basis beyond the value of the ends sought.

Our project begins with the concession that rhetoric is not axiomatic science. But we go on to suggest that such a concession need not force rhetoric to flatten itself from a body of knowledge into a bridge. We argue that rhetoric has remained institutionally unstable as an indigenous knowledge because the academy has failed to place it where it deserves to be placed—in the family of design arts. Our project, in short, is to reconceive rhetoric as an art of design, and to present a theory based on that reconception. Our reconception, and the theory drawn from it, in no way threatens the aims and uses of rhetoric in writing in the disciplines and the rhetoric of inquiry. On the contrary, it promises to bring a more systematic and centered notion of rhetoric to those enterprises. But our reconception and theory also strive to situate rhetoric, as an art of design, in activities that go beyond the walls of the academy. We hope to show how even traditional expressions of rhetorical knowledge, public address in civic forums, meet the requirements of highly structured design knowledge, a knowledge needed to create "new" artifacts from the creative oragnization of known materials. Design knowledge is the knowledge associated with the architect, engineer, and computer specialist. It is standardly described as (a) modular, able to be broken into parts; (b) cohesive, allowing the parts to be related back into a working whole; and (c) problem-focused, allowing persons with the knowledge to apply it to do so for pragmatic ends.² Our thesis is that rhetorical knowledge, whether practiced in civic communities or by schooled professionals, is a type of design knowledge.

The requirements for design knowledge are seldom articulated, but in chapter 3, drawing from the work of Goel and Pirolli (1992), we enumerate them and compare them with the knowledge underlying the rhetoric of public address. We use this comparison to propose an architecture for rhetorical design (chapter 4), and the rest of the book is an effort to demonstrate the viability of that architecture.

Why does such a project matter? It matters because in the modern revival of rhetoric, we have often mistaken rehabilitating rhetoric with salvaging it for the ivory tower. The thinking is that rhetoric for the world remains fallen, but its academic reputation can at least be restored by showing how traces of it show up in academic argument. Such thinking slights rhetoric's historical tradition and recurring potential as an a...