Persuadabiology
Rhetoric and persuasion in contemporary society have colloquially begun to merge into the same meaning. However, modern rhetorical theory highlights the distinction that rhetoric is a device that functions in conjunction with persuasion and surrounds our day to day lives. As a device rhetoric functions whenever persuasion is possible or in other words, rhetoric is inherently a part of any situation where people are capable of being persuaded. This persuadability can exist in any given situation and also isn’t exclusive to human beings but exists as an ecology for making meaningful decisions where rhetoric exists on a network of branching organisms and objects that link together through the medium of rhetoric. Moving forward, I want to focus on an example of rhetoric in our day to day lives that we all experience in one capacity or another to illustrate my point which is how we as living beings are persuaded to wake up.
I want to focus on this particular example for a few reasons, mainly that It’s something we all experience both humans and animals. However, I also wanted to focus on some part of our lives that exhibits rhetoricity that varies both from person to person and between living beings and objects. What I mean by that is that when, how and why we wake up has variety and that variety is caused by how we are persuaded. This persuasion goes beyond the boundaries of human to human interactions and branches into a form of rhetorical persuasion between natural, non-human organisms which is defined in by the work of John Muckelbauer as Heliotropism. For example, In order to wake up at all we need to sleep and sleep is a part of our biological functions which persuades us to rest whenever we become exhausted or over exert ourselves and need to recuperate. This biological persuasion is a part of the ideas proposed by Muckelbauer in his theories of rhetorical practice which also implicates inorganic objects into how we are persuadable. Furthermore, our biology also plays into this interaction considering how each person differs in areas such as how much sleep our bodies need, light sensitivity or even psychology that persuades us when we need to sleep/wake up and for how long. This can also be seen in how we sync our sleep schedules based on when the sun rises and sets which varies around the globe and shows how an inorganic object such as the sun is capable of persuasion.
However, we might see this link or relationship as rhetorical; it is important to understand the idea of intentionality plays into rhetorical interactions. As scholar Laura Gries argues, while we might see interactions as rhetorical, we cannot project the intentions of objects as rhetorical from our understanding. This intentionality is what drives the conflict that arises between thinkers that reason why objects can or cannot be rhetorical. As Diane Davis would describe that persuasion is an unconscious process that occurs with or without intention meaning that even something like the way the Sun, Earth, Sky or even the stars effecting when and how we fall asleep/wake up would exhibit rhetorical interaction despite the lack of conscious intention on one side. Another defense of objects being inherently rhetorical can be seen in scholar George Kennedy’s description of rhetoric as not necessarily an aspect of conversation that is restricted to verbal communication but as an energy that flows between people or objects that can have an increased or dampened effect on the other. For instance, someone asking for the time and being told that it is currently noon would have the same rhetorical interaction with a bell tower that chimes twelve times in the middle of the day which might also tell them it’s around lunch and persuade them to go eat or wait for the bus because it’s scheduled to come any minute. The same rhetorical energy can be seen between our bodies being told to wake up by the sound of an alarm clock and being rudely awoken by a family member.
All of this is to say that one aspect of our day to day lives that every living being experiences serves as a microcosm of a larger rhetorical process and ecology that demonstrates this effect in a way that can guide our understanding to the same effect happening on a grander scale.
Works Cited
Gries, L. E. (2017). “In Defense of Rhetoric, Plants, and New Materialism”. In Walsh, L., “Forum: Bruno Latour on Rhetoric” (pp. 431–437), Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol 47, no. 5, Routledge Taylor Francis Group.
Kennedy, George A. (2010). “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 25, no. 1, 1992, (pp. 1–21).
Muckelbauer, John. “Implicit Paradigms of Rhetoric: Aristotelian, Cultural, and Heliotropic.” Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things, 2016, pp. 30–41.
Tsai, Victoria. [@vickisigh] day 9 — dreamer 🐑☁️✨#inktober #inktober2018. Instagram. 9 Oct, 2018. https://www.instagram.com/p/BouZPLWlx_n/?hl=en