The Rhetoric of Signs

By Robert Perinbanayagam

The Rhetoric of Signs is a collection of essays that seeks to integrate the ideas of Charles Sanders Pierce, Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke to develop a comprehensive theory of communication. It examines how Piercian semiotics, Bakhtinian dialogism and Burkes dramatism are used jointly in the construction of various genres of speech to achieve successful communication in both everyday interactions and in momentous international relations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: May 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480860803

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Copyright © 2018 Robert Perinbanayagam.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-6620-1 (hc)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018903380

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/25/2018

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1   The Rhetoric of Signs

In which I seek to integrate the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke and apply them to various acts of communication. Signs are in fact addressed to a dialogic other and such addresses achieve a certain clarity and potency if they are couched in Burke’s grammar and takes account of its rhetorical structure.

Chapter 2   The Rhetoric of Charisma

In which I examine the semiotic and rhetorical processes by which agents come to be treated as being endowed with superhuman or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities, in Max Weber’s words. I discuss the life Jesus of Nazareth and Mohandas Gandhi as exemplars of the rhetorical process by which this came to pass.

Chapter 3   Dialogues and Dramas in Everyday Life

In which I apply Burke’s grammatical theories and his rhetoric ones and Bakhtin’s dialogism to various acts of dialogic interaction. Everyday conversations are dialogic exercises in which Burke’s grammar of motives are deployed in order to achieve successful communication with the other. Just as Bakhtin’s dialogism is enriched by infusing it with Burke’s dramatism, the latter is made more empirically viable with a strong dose of dialogism.

Chapter 4   Theaters of Emotion

In which I consider various situated occasions – theaters—in which human agents give play to their emotions with a particular focus on the playing and the watching of games. The playing of games and watching them being played are in fact, in Burkean terms, acts performed in delimited scenes by self-conscious agents with selected agencies, manifesting attitudes of either loyalty or hostility in order to experience emotions.

Chapter 5   The Dialogic of Motives

In which I examine the manifestation of Burke’s grammar of motives in three different instances: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the uses of astrology in Sri Lanka and Azande witchcraft and seek to show that the various terms of Burke’s grammar of motives are used rhetorically not only retrospectively, as has been discussed in the literature but prospectively as well.

References

PREFACE

In this work, in an aggressively integrative mood, I examine, by using various examples, how Peirician semiotics, Bakhtinian dialogism and Burkean theories of the grammar of motives and the rhetoric of motives are used in the construction of various genres of speech to achieve rhetorically effective dialogic communication. Charles Sanders Peirce developed an elaborate semiotic theory in which three central concepts played key roles: icon, index and symbol. These sign-vehicles manifest themselves as representamen which, when addressed to others, enables them to create an interpretant. Such acts of representation and subsequent interpretation, occur indubitably, in ongoing dialogic processes as described by Bakhtin. He claimed that human agents address speech genres to others and entertain rejoinders of one sort or another. Michael Holquist (1990), one of the commentators on Mikhail Bakhtin’s monumental work, has stated flatly that human existence is dialogue, and Ivana Markova (2003) declared that dialogicality is the ontology of humanity.

Kenneth Burke, in the course of his own equally monumental work has provided the most comprehensive approach to the study of human conduct as opposed to the rather truncated approaches adopted by other theorists, Human agents he argued undertake acts that bear attitudes in given scenes using one instrumentation or another in order to achieve one purpose or another.

He further argued that in the course of performing these acts in given situations agents will use various sign-vehicles persuade others to respond in a certain way – that is they are all rhetorical maneuvers. Human agents then, it could be claimed, use signs as agencies in dialogic interactions to act in defined scenes to indicate various attitudes in order to achieve one purpose or another.

The work of these three theorists, all of them devoted to the uses of language and other forms of symbolism in everyday life, have had their work flow in parallel streams and in this work I am seeking to unite their work so that they flow together into a confluence that will help us in the explication of human communication.

While these essays have a definite line of thematic continuity each one stands alone and pursues a different problem, and at times, I use the same relevant quotations from various authors in order to make different points –indicating that there is more to social acts than can be subsumed by one mode of analysis. Further, I have used some of these anecdotes in earlier publications but are reading them here through a Burkean lens. Burke enunciated the use of representative anecdotes to make theoretical claims —though he refers to them as vocabularies and terminlogies— as follows:

Dramatism suggests a procedure to be followed in the development of given calculus, or terminology. It involves the search for a representative anecdote, to be used as a form in conformity with which the vocabulary is constructed (1969a:59).

Each chapter stands alone and citations from one chapter may appear in another in order to support the relevant argument. Further, while some of the anecdotes are drawn from published sources I have also used records of conversations that occurred in an office and in the meetings of a book club.

In many ways this is companion volume to my recently published The Rhetoric of Emotions: a dramatistic exploration. (Transaction Publishers).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Prof. Doyle McCarthy for reading some of these chapters and giving me very helpful suggestions. Prof. Veronica Manlow read the work too and gave me vauable suggestions. Ms. Terry McCarthy converted my handwritten version into typescript and as usual did a splendid job. Ms. Lynn Cross brought her exemplary skills as editor to make my manuscript into a readable work. I thank them all.

CHAPTER

1

The Rhetoric of Signs

PEIRCE, BAKHTIN, AND BURKE

When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master—that’s all." Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland.

INTRODUCTION

There are many contributions to the study of verbal and visual vehicles in the conduct of everyday communication between human agents, each of them flowing in parallel streams, without finding occasions to reach a confluence. One can, however, attempt to create such a confluence, though some diehards may consider it a fruitless endeavor. Nevertheless, one can seek to integrate the dialogic theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and the rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke with the semiotic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce and examine whether, in the practical activities of everyday life, such a confluence does occur. Charles Sanders Peirce described the semiotic process very succinctly:

A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign … I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object (1955: 99).

He expanded this statement later: "There is the intentional interpretant, which is a determination of the mind of the utterer …" That is, as the utterer constitutes a representamen, he or she intentionally interprets it as it is addressed. The recipient of this address then does his or her own work and produces "the effectual interpretant, which is a determination of the mind of the interpreter." That is, the recipient of the address constructs his or her own interpretant. Once this is done, a communicational interpretant, "… emerges which is the determination of that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place. (1977: 197). Peirce calls the latter process the cointerpretant. He then gives us a preliminary classification of signs: icon, index, and symbol:

An Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not… . Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual, or law, is an Icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it (1955:102).

He then defines an Index:

… a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object… .In so far as the Index is affected by the Object, it necessarily has some Quality in common with the Object, and it is in respect to these that it refers to the Object. (1955: 102).

And finally, Peirce writes: "A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object" (1955: 102).

If one were to examine these trichotomies as they become representamen and are used by human agents to address somebody so that it creates in the mind of that person an equivalent or more developed sign—an interpretant—so that a cointerpretant can be jointly constituted with which the minds of both can be fused, they must display an additional quality: Insofar as agents select a representamen—icon, index, or symbol—on their own and then address it to somebody, so that it has a good chance of becoming a cointerpretant, they must perforce have some special quality. This quality is what Bakhtin called addressivity. He wrote:

An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance in its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity. As distinct from signifying units of language—words and sentences—that are impersonal, belonging to nobody and addressed to nobody, the utterance has both an author (and consequently, expression …) and an addressee (1986: 95).

Expanding on this idea of addressivity, Bakhtin commented: Both the composition and, particularly, the style of the utterance depend on those to whom the utterance is addressed, how the speaker (or writer) senses and imagines his addressees, and the force of their effect on the utterance (1986:96). In other words, speakers must have an initial conception of the person or persons who are being addressed, take the role of the other, as George Herbert Mead put it (1934), and fashion and shape their articulations in such a way that they have the maximum chance of being interpreted with some measure of accuracy and given the proper rejoinder.

In his influential work on the grammar of motives, Burke asked: What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? and went on to claim that in rounded statement about human you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed),and another that names the scene(the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred);also you must indicate what person or kind of person(agent)performed the act, what means or instruments he or she used(agency)and purpose.(1969a[1945]).In a later essay he added attitude to this pentad of terms and thus making it a hexad(1968).

Indeed this grammar is as complete a description of ordinary human conduct as you can find in the literature of social and psychological sciences. It takes into account all the features of human conduct. In producing conduct an individual becomes an agent of various acts, that indicate attitudes which he or she accomplishes by using one instrumentation or another in defined scenes — which in fact have an influence on the nature of the act and the particular instrumentation being used—in order to fulfill one purpose or another. Burke then went on to describe what he called the rhetoric of motives. He wrote the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents … (1969b: 41). He expanded on this as follows:

For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols (1969b: 43).

Burke stressed that rhetoricity is rooted in language as such, but at the end of this statement in which he was defining rhetoric, he expanded it to symbols. That is to say, rhetoric is rooted in the function of symbols of all kinds and not just the linguistic ones. Burke himself acknowledged this: "For if a man can mollify us or enrage us saying gentle or arrogant things respectively, then it is more likely that gentle or arrogant conduct can have the same effects" (1969b: 297, my italics).

The grammar of motives that Burke enunciated is really about composition – composing conduct or texts or, conduct itself as text —, whereas the rhetoric of motives is about how such a grammar can be used to address others to maximum effect. In other words everything that a symbol-using human agent puts into play, when he or she is dealing with others in the world, has a rhetorical dimension to it. As he or she uses symbols he or she is in fact seeking to persuade himself or herself as well as those to whom they are addressed to accept a particular position, claim, line of thought, argument, submission etc.