Affect and Agency: Complicating the Web

As one might expect after reading my post last week, my interest in approaching Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca this week was in their construction of audience. I set this concern aside as Jason and I began discussing possible ways to organize our schema. We considered making a map, kicked around the idea of using a networking schema, and ultimately came to rest on the construction of web because, as we state in our explanatory prose piece, P and O-T claim that “nonformal argument consists…of a web formed from all the arguments and all the reasons that combine to achieve the desire result” (1396). A web seemed like the best approach, not only because they specifically use that metaphor in their own text, but also because we were interested in showing movement and non-hierarchical relationships between each “node” on the web.

We were satisfied with our design until it came time to place the orator on the web.

It seemed obvious that we would make the orator a spider—after all, the orator is responsible for spinning a web of discourse using the objects for argument, the particular audience’s “beliefs” (1393) and “values” (1394), and the structural elements of “all the arguments and all the reasons” that can be used to bring an audience into adherence with the orator’s aims (1396). Given this, having the orator occupy a position of control made sense. However, we were not certain what this meant for the audience—the particular audience. We had already positioned both the particular and the universal audience as nodes on the web of the theory of argumentation, and that made sense to us because the orator relies on both the construction of the imaginary “universal” audience and the particular audience to form his argument. It also seemed, to me, that the particular audience should be represented again, as the physical, historically grounded audience to which the orator is speaking. I did not feel comfortable maintaining the spider web metaphor at this point because representing the particular audience as a fly caught in a spider’s web seemed inappropriate. Putting forth the claim that the particular audience was lured into the web worked against the agency that I have wanted to argue the audience has. Unable to work past this tear in our metaphor, we simply chose not to represent the actual particular audience—the one who is physically present.

Reading Condit’s critique of Perelman’s new rhetoric has helped me to better understand that impasse that we reached with the physical presence of the particular audience. Condit’s critique of Perelman is that he focused too much on reason, at the expense of ethos and pathos: “[B]ecause Perelman literally suppressed any treatment of emotion, and chose the term reason as the legitimating sign of the new rhetoric, he merely reproduced the dominance of the term reason over emotion, and left the practice of rhetoric subject to the objection that it is merely “rationality lite” (98; emphasis in original). Thinking about this critique within the context of our spider web metaphor, I can now see that the particular audience’s being present in the web is justified by the emphasis on rationality—the orator’s rationality. The actual particular audience, at least from Condit’s view, is not represented because one cannot represent an actual body of people without considering emotions. And this brings me to the question that I am now left with: What effect does affect have on agency?

To maintain coherence with my previous post, I will continue to draw on Cooper, who claims that emotions precede both intentions and action in an individual’s response to the “formation of short and long term goals” (429). If Cooper and the scientists from whose work she draws are right, then this only serves to show how salient Condit’s critique really is. Appealing to an audience’s emotions is critical if one is to win their adherence; however, Condit’s creation of the concept “pawre,” which attempts to fuse the binary “reason” and “emotion,” enables us to see that appealing to “emotions” is not enough (108). If we were to revise the theory of argumentation web with this in mind, I’m not certain what it would look like. Many of the terms that are represented separately (despite their relations), such as values, presumptions, hierarchies, and particular audience would need to be fused. Traditionally I’ve imagined these terms falling under the umbrella of Discourse, which James Gee defines as “a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or social network” (29).* In Perelman’s conception, it seems like the orator has to know which Discourse he’s working with, so it seems to me that charting a relation between the orator and the Discourse of the audience might be an effective way of visualizing not only values, presumptions, hierarchies, truths, and facts, but also of accounting for the emotions of the audience, emotions that are guided by the Discourse and articulated in the common language of the Discourse members.

*More recently I’ve been drawn to David Russell’s discussion of “activity systems,” but I’ll save that for another post.

Cooper, Marilyn. "Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted." College Composition and Communication 32.4 (2011): 420-49.

Gee, James. “What is Literacy?” Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers. Eds. Peter Vandenberg, Sue Hum, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 2006. 29-39.