Argument in Composition. John Ramage
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as they fall along the self-interference continuum, we begin with propaganda and advertising. These practices are, Burke maintains, very much “addressed” insofar as they are obsessively focused on audience. It is an asymmetric relationship with the advertiser or propagandist having at least some control, in the case of some propagandists, a virtual monopoly, over their audience’s access to information and understanding. While both propagandists and advertisers are quick in their public pronouncements to lavish praise on their audiences, particularly their intelligence, their own advice to each other about how to win over audiences manifests scant regard for the people they are pitching, particularly for their intelligence. Both groups spend a lot of time and extraordinary amounts of money exploring the psyches and emotional soft spots of their audiences. No other group among those who practice the arts of persuasion comes close to spending as much time as advertisers and propagandists figuring out ways to exploit their audience’s vulnerabilities. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, for example, is both a classic of propaganda theory and a thoroughgoing analysis of audience psychology. Noting Hitler’s skill at manipulation of his audience, Burke calls attention to the very calculated way “he gauges resistances and opportunities with the ‘rationality’ of a skilled advertising man planning a new sales campaign. Politics, he says, must be sold like soap—and soap is not sold in a trance” (Philosophy of Literary Form 216). Contemporary advertisers, meanwhile, are relentless in the pursuit of connections between demographic and psychographic information—there are sixty-four distinct groups of consumers arranged in a psychographic grid used by advertisers—and consumer buying habits. While old style behaviorist theories are out of favor with most academic psychologists these days, advertisers and propagandists are still in the business of manipulating stimuli to get the desired response. Like engineers who still rely on the old Newtonian paradigm to build bridges and skyscrapers, the propagandists and behaviorists seem to find that their outmoded mechanistic paradigm works just fine when it comes to selling soap and politics.
While all propaganda is by definition predatory in ways suggested above—we will consider recent uses of propaganda more extensively later in the book—advertising embraces a wider range of practices, some of which are fairly benign. Advertising is, for example, used to promote charitable contributions as well as soap. Indeed, within every category of persuasive practices one will find a range of practices that are to varying degrees advantage-seeking on the one hand or “standoffish” on the other. Some advertisements may do little more than feature positive references to their product by disinterested third parties. At times, even propaganda may serve an altruistic public policy goal; and instead of telling “the Big Lie” as Goebbels famously recommends, it may simply withhold information that would complicate its argument. But taken as a whole, these practices do not promote self interference in any serious way. Only to the extent that one alters one’s script in recognition that a different script is more likely to find favor with one’s audience does one interfere with one’s impulses. But this is more a matter of subordinating one form of gratification to another; in the end, one’s audience is always a means to one’s ends.
As one moves toward the center of the continuum, legal persuasive practices serve as our model. While there are many who would place lawyers’ arts farther to the left on our continuum, legal argument is considerably more constrained in its ability to seduce or dupe its audience than are propaganda and advertising. There is, moreover, considerably more parity between arguer and audience in the legal arena than there is in the political and consumer arenas. Withholding information, for example, which might be applauded as part of a virtuoso campaign to spin things in the realms of politics and advertising, can be a punishable offense in the realm of the law. Because of the adversarial nature of the legal system, the various lapses in one’s arguments are vulnerable to disclosure and exploitation. (Our political system is also nominally adversarial, but there are few rules or judges to control political discourse, and the public tolerance for fallacious reasoning and even outright mendacity does little to encourage self interference among politicians.) The law offers all sorts of formal constraints on the desire of lawyers to manipulate their audience. The closest lawyers can come to the use of demographic and psychographic information to gain some advantage for their point of view is restricted to the use of jury consultants who use elaborate schemes to select sympathetic juries. For all its flaws, legal reasoning imposes various forms of interference on participants in the legal system all the way to the top of the system where Supreme Court Justices hope to write opinions for posterity.
Burke uses the curious metaphor of writing a book to explain his “purest” form of persuasion, the equivalent of a great courtship. Here, the principle of self-interference is neither imposed by concerns about audience nor by rules, conventions and fears of punishment or disclosure. The restraint required of pure persuasion is entirely self-imposed. An author’s self-interference is in response to the demands of book he is creating, “demands conditioned by the parts already written, so that the book becomes to an extent something not foreseen by its author, and requires him to interfere with his original intentions” (Rhetoric 269). This interference is not so much ethical as aesthetic, and the purity of pure persuasion is the formal purity of “art for art’s sake” more than it is the moral purity of saintliness. That said, Burke attributes to pure persuasion “a high ethical value” (271) insofar as it imposes a different order of obligations on those who experience it, something like “truth for truth’s sake.” The purest forms of argument are dialectic in nature, a working out of ideas that have a momentum and integrity of their own, heedless of the needs and desires of an audience. Just as an art for art’s sake movement often produces art that strikes its audience as indifferent or hostile to its expectations, argument at the far right end of the continuum may enjoy scant success in the marketplace. But like the best works that emerge from an art for art’s sake movement, purely persuasive arguments may eventually enjoy a belated acceptance by audiences, in part because they have changed the way people think about the issue at hand.
In the end, of course, pure persuasion of this sort is not a goal for students of argument so much as it is a tendency within argument, a counter-balance to opposing tendencies toward an exclusive—and all too often predatory—focus on audience. In introducing students to the concept of pure persuasion, we like to remind them of an alternate meaning of the term argument—the “gist” or “essence” of an extended piece of discourse. Looking for the argument, the central point, of any piece of discourse is a habit of mind common to all critical readers. The more complex the piece of discourse we are reading, the more likely it is that the argument we tease out of the prose will be the product of opposing ideas, not an unambiguous thesis or major claim always appearing—where so many of our students have been taught to look—in the last sentence of the first paragraph. A gist is a synthesis of disparate ideas and a joint product of the reader/viewer/listener’s interpretive powers and the properties of the discourse they are interpreting. It is not what remains after one idea trumps another, a trophy or laurel leaf that goes to the victor, it is a creative act, a rhetorical version of the ontologist’s essence. In the end, it is why we teach argument: To complicate our students’ thinking about the world, to help them learn how to withhold judgment (to cultivate the art of “standoffishness”) of their own ideas as well as others,’ long enough to test them against opposing ideas and to respect what emerges from that combination.
Why Students Need Argument
Up to this point, we have offered a definition of argument congruent with our disciplinary imperatives and personal beliefs. In this next section we shift our focus to what students might hope to get out of a writing course concentrating on argument. What unique role does the study of argument serve in the curriculum and in their lives? As we design our courses and our assignments we need to keep that role in mind and to shape our pedagogy around it. In what follows, we will focus on three particularly crucial functions of argument: as a vehicle for teaching the most readily transferable set of skills one might learn in a writing course; as a vehicle for constructing and defending identity; and as a vehicle for ethical reasoning.
Argument and Critical Literacy
While there is no single name for the highly mobile cluster of skills students might learn in a writing course focused on argument, we will refer to them here as “critical literacy.” Critical literacy remains a somewhat amorphous concept, and for reasons we will soon cite, a somewhat