Brummett, Barry. Rhetorical Dimensions of Pop Culture

Brummett, Barry. Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Cultures. Alabama UP: Tuscaloosa. 1991.

Media determinism may be defined as the belief that the content of a culture (its habits of thought, typical concerns, vocabulary norms and values, key symbols) is dictated by the inevitable domination of a medium of communication” (5). =E

Conduct books fell within that realm. They were using the most popular and prevalent method of the day which was books, tracts, etc.

“A media determinist finds formal or structural links between a medium and a culture” (6). =B & E.

“Medium refers to patterns of social usage of communication technology in a particular culture” (6). =B

“Walter Ong (1967), writing in the tradition of Harold Innis (1951), diplays deterministic leanings in his argument that the dominant medium in a culture will strongly influence the habits of thought in that culture (6). =B & E & A.

So, when books were the dominant medium (16, 17th centuries) that produced the most influence. Images are now the most dominant medium, aren’t they? So the images of the starving children carry a great deal of influence.

“Postman (1985, p. 130) argues that television induces its audiences to see al problems as quickly solvable throught the application of commodities grounded in modern technology” (13).

“The relatively small size of the television screen makes it in appropriate for depicting large panoramic scenes. Close-up shots of smaller objects are therefore needed to allow the medium’s primarily visual codes to work . . . An icon particularly well suited to such close-up depeiction is the human body, particularly the face. Therefore, television focuses on character over action . . ., and the actor has primacy. . .” (15).

This makes TV and print media very good for save the children type ads.

“As we have seen, the audience (in capitalist America) is urged to think in terms of commodity solutions toward life’s problems, to think inpersonal terms rather than broader public terms (which would lead one to consider such issues as class, distribution of power among groups, and exploitation of whole classes of other people)” (16). =E

“Television is also intimate in the sense that it is placed within familial contexts and is almost always viewed domestically. . . Picirillo . . .argues that this insertion of television into the daily routine intensifies televisual realism because it makes television presentations seem as normal and taken-for-granted as the domestic surroundings” (15).

Books can do this as well. They are very intimate objects.

“Television encourages narcissistic preoccupations with personal appearance, but it also fosters widespread personal empathy for starving Ethiopians thousands of mailes away”(21).

Save the Children ads.

“How the public is wooed by competing interests to render the decisions that it has made throughout history has been the province of rhetoric” (36). =B & E
“rhetoric is essentially a complex, multilevel social function that is carried out through correspondingly complex manifestations” (37). =B & E

“As a necessary function of societies, rhetoric is thus a dimension of any life lived under social influence; thus, rhetoric is that part of an act or object that influences how social meanings are created, maintained, and opposed” (38). =E

That social function, that influence, is what made the rhetoric of conduct books so pervasive in society. It became the social norm.

“At one end of the continuum, rhetoric serves an exigent function: it addresses exigencies of the moment, pressing problems, perceived quandaries, and frank questions (Bitzer 1968)” (39). =B

“The exigent is carried out by certain manifestations of rhetoric, which I will call interventionist manifestations. When rhetoric is manifested as interventionist, it has at least three characteristics: 1) People are consciously aware that a rhetorical function is being performed because it is manifested in signs that suggest explicitly suasory intent” (40). =B
“2) Because rhetors know that they are specifically attempting to influence meanings, they take (or are in a position to be expected to take) responsibility for doing so. It is clear that someone has made an intentional, planned, and strategic effort to address a problem” (40). =B
“3) interventionist messages take the form of discrete texts defined by their sources” (40). =B

“The middle of the rhetorical function continuum I am calling the quotidian, for here are managed the public and personal meanings that affect everyday, even minute-to-minute decisions” (41). =B

This is where there is no “immediate need” where the rhetoric influences actions and ways of thought that are continuous, not a one time deal. Conduct Books.

“Meanings are managed and people are influenced by a flow of signs, including table settings, a spouse’s facial expressions, styles of dress, forms of greeting and farewell, small talk, the ambiance of a restaurant, the severe architecture of a court building, elevator music, rap music coming from a neighborhood window, and the decoration of a dentist’s office” (41). =E

“To perform the quotidian function, people appropriate phrases, slogans, actions, nonverbal signs, etc., that are already available in the society or organization within which one is acting” (42). =E

So, where conduct literature is concerned, we pick up on the “speak” of where we are wanting to fit in. Young women adopted and adapted to the expectations of these works.

In contrast to interventionist manifestations, people are 1) relatively (recall that we are dealing with a continuum) less consciously aware that the management of shared meanings is under way” (42). =E

“Because people are less consciously aware that meaning is being managed, they are 20 less likely to take or assign responsibility for a rhetorical effort” (42). =E

If they are less aware that meaning is being managed then they are also less aware that they, their opinions, and their actions are being managed. This is definitely hooked to conduct literature.

“Because the construction of texts is relatively less consciously and clearly defined by a responsible source, the appropriational manifestation of rhetoric involves 3) diffuse rather than discrete texts” (43). =E

“The quotidian level is where a group’s common sense is managed. ‘Common sense’ is not a unified or simple category; it includes whatever people take for granted as well as assumptions that they come to question (43). =E

Thus, people (scholars and laity alike) develop a habit of regarding rhetoric as not a dimension of experience but as an exclusively interventionist manifestation: a whole, discrete text, a separate class of actions or events “ (50). =E

Rhetoric does not have to be a “discrete text”, but can be something much more pervasive, and something that we don’t “see” as readily as a discrete text.

“To restrict the term ‘rhetoric’ to but one manifestation of but one level of a social function is to ignore the broader placement of that level and that manifestation within a whole social system” (56). =E

So, it is not simply a manner of finding a “means to persuade”, but also figuring out who is doing the persuading. The persuasion can come from outside the text, but within the social system.

“Becker’s model suggests that this is how all of us experience communication when we are not deferring to a source’s definition of discrete texts: We move through an environment of “bits” of information, bits contained in media broadcasts, posters, comments heard or overheard, writings on cereal boxes, the physicial condition of buildings or streets, the weather, etc. And as we move through this environment, we assemble bits into messages which Becker described as ‘mosaics” (64). = B & E

The idea of the mosaic is extremely interesting when thinking of rhetoric. We assume a simple idea or way of framing an idea does all the work. This is untrue. In conduct books the bits of the mosaic were made up of not only what the ladies read, but when they lived, with whom they associated, the social “norm”, etc.

“We have seen how traditional rhetorical theory treats rhetoric as a set of discrete texts rather than as a complex function manifested in complex ways” (67). =B
“As rhetorical scholars we need to preserve a sensitivity to the full range of functions and manifestations” (67). =B & E

“So when we speak of mosaics here, we are at the same time speaking of kinds of rhetorical manifestations and the functions they perform” (72). =B

“Rhetoric which is the struggle over meaning management, is thus also a struggle over which patterns to employ in making meaning” (75). = B & E

“Let us read “bit” for “event”, and understand that by bit, I mean an event, an object, a person, in short, any experience of sensations that we perceive as a unit, a package, an entity, because we have been socially influenced to so perceieve them” (77). =B & E

Bits are parts of mosaics.

“It should be clear than some patterns will serve the interest of some groups in society while other patterns serve other interests” (80). =A & E.
‘people themselves are extensions of the field of bits, texts and cultural artifacts which is ordered into mosaics” (80). =B & E

“To see text and experience as distinct is the work of a mosaic; I am arguing that apart from that work, text and experience distinct in any absolute privileged sense” (85). =B

A mosaic takes separate pieces to create a whole which runs together indistinguishably from the bits.

“I have defended here a vision of the human being as a social and ordering creature. In ordering experience, the form that guides the ordering also situates and creates the subject. The subject is thus continuous with the world that is being ordered, and the subject is an agent for expanding the mosaic, the order or meaning achieved backward and forward in time because the subject supplies the context for the creation of the mosaic text" (104).

The “bits” flow through the timeline as do the people who are the subject.But what does time do to either?

“This theory is keyed to the term homology, the formal linkage underlying structuring and unifying a mosaic” (111). =B