The Kennedy reading was pretty difficult for me to take seriously. At first, I was interested in what Kennedy had to say about the physical energy of rhetoric, that rhetoric is largely focused on the emotional and physical energy of what is said or of the actual speaker. However, when it became clear that his illustration on "animal rhetoric" was not just an illustration but the core of his theory, I began to question more and more the foundation of what his many theses were built upon. Not that I am such a great rhetorician or even that I did an extremely close reading of Kennedy's "Evolution of General Rhetoric," but my natural intuition is to basically reject almost everything he said about rhetoric.
First of all, Kennedy predicates all of his theses on the assumption that rhetoric is some kind of "energy," whether the physical energy of speaking the words or the emotional energy motivating the speaker. However, Kennedy does not do a good job establishing this premise of energy, simply giving a few examples and explanations. In general, the majority of Kennedy's theses and thoughts on rhetoric are relatively contrary to the traditional sense of rhetoric, so one might think it would be important to establish the foundation of rhetoric as "energy" well before building upon it. The idea of rhetorical "energy" in itself is an interesting theory, but when Kennedy tries to legitimize it with examples from "animal rhetoric," that is when he begins to lose me.
Somehow, Kennedy makes the jump from rhetoric to mean the basis of all communication, when the traditional sense of rhetoric would likely fall under the umbrella of communication. There are clearly ways to communicate beyond vocal noises -- touch or movement or what have you. Although the thesis of "rhetoric is prior to speech" may be an idea to explore, Kennedy's reasoning of seeing it in animal communication doesn't do a good job of establishing it as a thesis.
Even disregarding the entire animal rhetoric and rhetorical energy points, I also cannot accept Kennedy's second thesis: "the receiver's interpretation of a communication is prior to the speaker's intent in determining the meaning." Kennedy does not, at all, persuasively establish the truth of this theory. Again, it is something interesting that could be explored, but not with the examples of songbirds. It is difficult for me to accept Kennedy's ideas that the most basic response without intent or belief is the most prevalent thing in rhetoric and communication. After taking a philosophy of language class, it's clear that language and communication is extremely complex, and the speaker's meaning has a lot to do with the meaning of a phrase of language.
Even assuming that Kennedy is speaking about emotion as a base response to rhetoric or the energy of emotion as the basis of rhetoric, he neither proves nor argues well for the most fundamental principles of his theories. Generally, he doesn't touch on emotion much. Although there may be insights to be drawn from animal communication, suffice it to say that it is probably a stretch to apply the observations of animal "rhetoric" to the full level of human rhetoric, which includes such intricate and complex parts as invention, memory, delivery, arrangement, and style. Perhaps I missed the point, but animal rhetoric just doesn't have that much bearing on human rhetoric as I know it.
I've been running from blog to blog this week defending Kennedy's argument, so I'll make my piece short and sweet. In discussing "animal rhetoric," Kennedy isn't referring to rhetoric as a developed spoken or written argument, but rather as anything that might serve to persuade the audience, whoever or whatever that might be. We're already familiar with the idea of visual rhetoric through things like advertisement, so why can't that same concept be applied to the animal world as well - isn't the male peacock's courtship display a form of advertisement for a product (sex) in this case too? What about mating dances, or the decorations made by the bower bird?
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that Kennedy is approaching this concept from a different angle, and that animal rhetoric involves the same amount of invention, memory, delivery, arrangement, and style as it's human counterpart - we just don't quite understand it as well.
My qualm with Kennedy's argument was less that, to use your example, "the male peacock's courtship display a form of advertisement" is an illogical claim, and more that it was irrelevant and hardly provisional of any unique insight. I feel that his entire argument is an attempt to cram rhetoric into a box that he has manipulated it to fit in, without really saying anything meaningful. It seems he was trying to argue that through the study of animal behavior and communication we can gain new perspectives on the evolution and development of rhetoric however, he went off on too many tangents which were unsubstantiated and distracting. He devalued the only profound concepts he had by under developing them and combining them with copious amounts of nonsense. As a consequence I didn't take much from this piece. I am still very unsure what the grand implications of Kennedy's argument are, if there are any at all.
ReplyDelete"Somehow, Kennedy makes the jump from rhetoric to mean the basis of all communication, when the traditional sense of rhetoric would likely fall under the umbrella of communication." I'm so glad you included this!
ReplyDeleteIn my own blog post, I discussed how Kennedy calls all communication rhetoric, and how his definition of rhetoric fundamentally describes the communicative process at large. He calls rhetoric "the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expended in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message." Essentially, all he is saying is that rhetoric is the conception of an idea, the coding of an idea into words, the actual utterance of those words, and the listener's interpretation/decoding of the words. He seems to have stripped away the persuasive element of rhetoric, which blurs the line between rhetoric and communication, and robs rhetoric of its rich historical tradition.
The fact that Kennedy is a rhetoric professor only makes it all the more shameful.