Friday, September 12, 2014

W3: The Rhetoric of 9/11

Prompt: What rhetoric do you remember being employed during and in the aftermath of 9/11? Perhaps make connections to rhetors we've been reading. Also, which of the introductions to rhetoric did you find the most useful, and why?


Although I know there was (and still is) a lot of rhetoric around 9/11, my mind always returns to the visual rhetoric. I see myself in the office where I worked being forced to watch the footage over and over again while newscasters repeated the same facts and speculations. We all wanted to know more than we did. We wanted to understand, to make sense of this tragedy; but all we had were a few snippets of footage and fear. I had this in mind as I read through this week's introductions, and I'll be honest; I had a really hard time seeing my memory of 9/11 visual rhetoric through these lenses. But here are my best efforts.

The Sophists are critiques for teaching how to prevail in an argument and, in a sense, that was what dominated our airwaves in those weeks and for months and years afterward. It wasn't really an attempt to win an argument; it was an attempt to win over a nation that we could endure and catch Bin Laden. There was a clear amplification of pathos involved, which is true of Sophists. However, Gorgias, Isocrates, and Plato all emphasized kairos, "the immediate social situation in which solutions to philosophical problems must be proposed" (Bizzell & Hertzberg, 2001, p. 81). Although I can't say that what we heard surrounding these terrorist attacks was logic, those producing the rhetoric were certainly addressing the audience and situation, which I'm understanding as kairos. The newscasters, the president, and anyone else who was in a position to gain air time wanted us to feel like they were in control and that we (America) would prevail. Winning + kairos = 9/11 rhetoric. 

As I am reviewing this week's reading, I am also seeing connections to Gorgias' belief that "human encounters with the world and the exchange of knowledge about it are necessarily limited, provisional, and shared experiences that rely upon a shared deception effected by language" (Bizzell & Hertzberg, 2001, p. 43). It seems that the media (and thus the visual rhetoric I recall) was all about creating a shared experience. We knew parts of it were true, but we now know other parts were biased at the least and deception at the worst. Although, at the time, we were made to believe all of what we were told was true and that decisions were logic-based. Aristotle would have been proud. I recall feeling (and even now feel) unqualified and uniformed enough to know what to believe and who to trust. So, if I try to filter this through Aristotle's belief, where does that lead me? According to Bizzell and Hertzbert (2001), Artistotle believes "Rhetoric functions in situations in which such rigorous analysis is not possible (because the audience is not qualified) or desirable (due to the exigency of the questions at hand). Instead of examining everything, rhetorical argument builds whenever possible on assumptions the audience already holds" (p. 170). Does this mean that the audience is, in a sense, pandered to if they are unqualified? Shouldn't that make us question what we are told even more? And if that is the case, and I believe time revealed that it was in some instances, then it seems like we (the undereducated audience) should be skeptical of rhetoric, whether coming from "trusted" sources or those with only their own (Sophist-like) interests in mind. 

In terms of what I introductions I found most useful, I'd honestly have to say all of them. Since I know so little of the history of rhetoric, each introduction helped me to better understand these steps. I'd say that Plato and Aristotle felt the most applicable, but that's probably just because they are closest to what we now think of as rhetoric. I do appreciate that each introduction recaps and connects the new content to the previous introductions we have read. That is very helpful for me.

4 comments:

  1. Yes, nice thinking about the visual rhetoric we witnessed. Was it important for each of us to witness much of it live through TV? Would the rhetoric have been different had it not come live, perhaps if both towers went down simultaneously rather than one by one? Interesting connections you're making here with relevance to kairos. Like you say regarding Gorgias, there was a shared experience with 9/11 that was created through visual rhetoric and a sense of kairos or liveness, and perhaps needed when at the time it was unclear who the opponent was. It became a war against all terror.

    Nice to see that the introductions were useful to you in different ways. I think it's useful to review the history of rhetoric from different vantage points.

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  2. Your thoughts run somewhat with mine. I spoke of the enthymeme as the main thrust of the speeches: what exactly happened, what were we going to do, how were we going to do it... nothing was in stone. Going back to last week's chat, it's was based on strong probability with a healthy dose of pathos.

    The visual rhetoric was, and still is, gruesome. Although, strangely, I haven't seen the media connect the visual rhetoric of 9/11 to ISIS - I expected this.

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  3. I think the best way to interpret Kairos is to look at it as the appropriate time to make a speech/write/etc. When thinking of kairos, it helps me to think about how we write academic essays. As scholars, our essays and publications have to coincide with a specific timing for them to be effective. This is essentially kairos as far as I know.

    I wrote about how Gorgias' view of language and its mutability effects how arguments are made and received. In your post, I can see parallels with mine as well. The visual, as well as the way language was used, seemed to make parts of 9/11 seem overbloated and distorted. Looking back we can see the places where rhetoric and PR might have clouded our perceptions of the actual event.

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  4. Hello, I'm one of Dr. Rice's undergraduate students. I found this piece extremely interesting. Come to think of it, the gory images of 9/11 deeply impacted our thinking about terrorism and the world. Even though terrorism was not an unfamiliar concept, it was only after 9/11 that the international community decided to act upon it. I guess that was the effect of the visual rhetoric used during the 9/11. I am suddenly reminded of a speech by Arundhati Roy called 'Come September' in which she talks about the 'War on Terror' and makes use of ethos, pathos and logos.

    I enjoyed reading this blog post and look forward to reading more of your work.

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