Rhetoric Becomes You: Aristotle and Erving Goffman

Follow me on Twitter: / electricdidact
If all speech is by nature expressive of some interest to persuade, then do our bodies also count as speech?
###
Works Cited:
Aristotle (trans. George A. Kennedy), Rhetoric
Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz, Everything’s an Argument, 1999, Bedford St. Martins
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1973, The Overlook Press
###
Assets:
Damon Wayans at the Improv comedy club in Houston, Ed Schipul, CC BY-SA (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...)
Vishnu Vardhan in conversation with Iolanda Pensa regarding Wikimedia India, Subhashish Panigrahi, CC BY-SA (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...)
European Voices: A Reading & Conversation with Swiss Author Christian Kracht, Center for the Study of Europe Boston University, CC BY-SA (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...)
In Conversation with Dr Joanne Liu of Médecins Sans Frontières, Chatham House, CC BY (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...)
Fishbowl conversation, visualpun.ch, CC BY-SA (www.flickr.com/photos/visualp...)
###
Music:
“Facticity,” Nihilore, A Human Work, CC BY (freemusicarchive.org/music/Nih...)

[@mikebennett4469]

Thanks, Jedd. With all the "moving parts," it's amazing effective communication and persuasion can happen at all! I am blessed to be working in the more two-dimensional world of the written word, and my forays into the video space have not been much to write home about. As you said, it pays to think about how to communicate and persuade effectively. It does involve understanding of the audience and what they care about and their aspirations, hopes and dreams. Thanks for sharing this.

[@paulbermo]

Beautifully explained sir.

[@ElectricDidact]

Why thank you sir.

[@ZootTM]

thank you Jedd for another great episode! The Goffman-quote about appearance and being rang some Pavlovian bells in my head - its interesting to think about how staging and appearing can cause one to be become that stage persona. For example, a young business students who starts wearing "signifiers" of managerial roles (tailored suits etc.) internalizes this role because he has an easier time seeing himself as "being" that role, and others will reinforce this process. On a second level, you can go with poststructuralists like Butler and ask whether one can "be" a certain role/character or whether one can just perform it. As a critical technique, rhetoric can then also be used to persuasively deconstruct the naturalness of roles (I'm thinking about gender here, e.g. persuasive performance of transgender roles or persuasive parodies of gender roles).

[@ElectricDidact]

Yeah Goffman's work is supremely interesting in its take on these questions. He argues that "sincerity" and "cynicism" (i.e., our own belief or disbelief in our performance) are sorta things we slide back and forth between over the course of everyday life.

[@NSBarnett]

1:58 : anger, fear, sadness and what?

[@timothyfoster8297]

very interesting, in one sense I wish I could always view my own actions and speech from the outside, as in the analysis of this video, but that is not an easy thing to accomplish, it's hard to be in the moment and speak but also be on the outside and analyze, so either no one speaks or no one thinks, may be what actually happens? Can we possibly be completely genuine, where we change ourselves so that we don't just act/speak a rhetoric but we change ourself so that our rhetoric is always genuine?

[@yourordinaryme]

Unpopular opinion incoming: Yes, it is possible, and I think that a strategy of at least making some progress toward this goal is by means of social isolation. It appears to be very difficult to be "mindful" when you find yourself in a social situation, where a lot of instinctive behaviour seems to unconsciously kick in with the aim of maintaining some sort of social position within the group. Of course, the most effective strategy to maintain a position within a group will not always be in alignment with that which we consider to be "rational". In isolation however, you may create a conversational partner with whom you need not compete, and hone your skills by having it ask you questions. In my case I'm referring to "the voice in my head". Of course there's a lot more to discuss here hidden behind this array of symbols, but it's definitely something worth thinking about

[@GameLimbs]

Ugh! Service jobs and company rhetoric. I used to work retail and I cannot count the number of times I just wanted to tell customers "look, this sucks, but it's the company's policy, I'm just here to enforce it" (in fact, I probably did that a bunch of times, ha!).

[@ElectricDidact]

Yeah it stinks. I think for me the worst is the bodily/emotional rhetoric you're told to perform. "Remember to smile!"

[@ZootTM]

and this inauthentic performance and emotional labour can also come with great psychological costs, as demonstrated in countless studies. I've recently read a paper describing how this sales(wo)man role can be parodied by performing it exaggeratory (that's rhetoric, too, right?).

[@johnercek]

Real curious if you've read up on the stoics and their use of the word "logos" and how their interpretation of that word is different from the one you present here. I suspect part of this was brevity on your part, and part of it our cultural disconnect from how the greeks understood life (by which i'm trying to say the only way for us to get the "full picture" of how greeks viewed logos is by applying a synthesis of metaphorical examples, i.e. Logos= a cross of a respect for reason, an assumption that reason will provide the answer, and a dao-like or even religious like faith in it's inevitablity) sorry - I'm grasping a little for the sake of an example. another possibility is that the concept of logos evolved from 400 bc to 100 ad?

[@ElectricDidact]

Good question! So, I'm only cursorily acquainted with the Stoics' views, but I am familiar with the semantic field of "logos" as you've outlined it. It's true that as a Greek term, its semantic field evolved quite a lot through its various stages of philosophical use, from Heraclitus onward. And it was used in different ways concurrently by different discourse communities. My use of it is really a modern one. Rhetoric scholars generally start explicitly with Aristotle's model of communication, and the logos-ethos-pathos trifecta is a modern extrapolation from the observations of Aristotle; the terms, though, are not really his, from what I understand.

[@strategiccommunication3756]

Great video! Do you happen to know some studies/books that compare Goffman's work with the rhetorical studies?