A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric Read Online Free PDF Page B

encounters, all framed, more widely, by the economic and political contexts that allow people to spend time in a café on a Wednesday afternoon in a European city. Within the chosen frame of the scene on the street, the communication could be charted. An exhaustive record of every conversation, every sign, every written transaction, every photograph, every physical movement—all in relation to the fixed phenomena of buildings and the moving objects of cars, bicycles, and so on—could be attempted and would be interesting. It would lend itself to multimodal discourse analysis. Behind that possibility are the instruments and dimensions of rhetoric (multimodality, articulation, framing, digitization, context, time) that allow a somewhat broader analysis in termsof how the political interfaces with the social and communicational. The broadness does not mean that the tools of analysis and creation are more abstract; rather, that they can be deployed at macro-, mezzo-, and microlevels according to the purposes of the analysis. They are tools of process rather than of product. Their scaffolding is light: it can be constructed and taken down quickly.
    Social network theory needs only be deployed if the relations in any field of analysis (any framed social encounter) are such that they affect the communication—because rhetoric's focus is on the communicational dimension. But social network theory meshes well with a rhetorical perspective. Its vocabulary of
nodes
and
ties
has application in considerations of where the clustering takes place in any social network, and where the strong and weak ties of communication are (and what the nature of communication along those connections is). In relation to the previous discussion, what were termed macro-, mezzo-, and micro-levels of communicational encounter can be mapped on to notions of whole networks—in this case, a section of a street in Berlin—or more limited perspectives, like the personal network of connections observed by the person in the café. If the limitations of scope of network analysis—and of the wider rhetorical picture—are bounded by the extent of data that can be collected, then analytics could help process a wider set of data that has been possible previously, and so the wider rhetorical perspective can be taken. The advantage of positioning rhetoric in relation to social network theory and analysis is principally that both can look at loosely bounded and hybrid social encounters as well as more conventional social patterns
(genres
as social action). While network analysis is more interested in the extent to which the structure and composition of ties affects social norms, rhetoric focuses on the agency of the actor/rhetor and his or her audiences, and the socio-political determinants of their communication. Rhetoric is both productive and analytical. There is more room for individual and group
agency
in rhetoric, as well as a longer tradition of adapting rhetoric to contemporary circumstances.
    In order to explore the potential of rhetoric to account for the contemporary world, the book moves next to a historical account of why rhetoric is relevant, and how it comes to be in its present state. Chapter 2 explores this dimension in depth, arguing that classical rhetoric has had too strong a hold on twentieth-century discourses and that we need to fashion a new theory that is fit for purpose. The third chapter looks at rhetoric in relation to English studies, one of its traditional partners in epistemological boundary-making. In particular, the break-up of the field of English studies into first and second language learning, literary studies, film and media studies, and so on, is seen in the light of the potential unifying theory of rhetoric—which also has the advantage of not beingassociated with only one language. Consideration of the lasting influence of the work of Moffett (1968) forms a large part of this chapter. Chapter 4 addresses the practical issue of