Aristotle, rhetoric and modern media culture
Squeeze a slice of today’s society into a Petri dish, watch it for a while, and you’ll inevitably realize that most of those bright little clusters of color that flutter in the slime are driven by a powerful and barely visible impulse from to dominate. Raise the lens one or two more folds and you’ll notice that these same, now larger, multi-motivated groups spend virtually all of their time trying to penetrate, twist, and manipulate the minds of each of the millions of fools. free floating cells contained in the same great gray gelatinous slime that clouds the plate.
(Disregarding the metaphor for the sake of clarity: interest groups, political parties and corporations, in order to influence legislation / obtain financing / achieve power / generate income, need to present their positions and messages in a persuasive manner to attract the public support / maintain customer loyalty).
Roll back the time machine 2500 years and you will find that while technology is not quite what it is today, most of the best penetrating and twisted tactics have remained the same for millennia.
This is why Aristotle’s Rhetoric should be a must read for all complete modern professional communicators.
The introduction of a novel way of running society, democracy, in the 5th century BC. C. placed political power within the reach of all who could influence and kill juries and assemblies. Ergo, the demand for media training, the art of speaking and presenting persuasively, exploded (as, I imagine, sales training did when humanity originally became aware of the barter / trade business). Throughout the next century, textbooks on argumentation, emotional arousal methods, and select figures of speech flew off the shelves as fast as papyrus stalks were plucked from the ground.
According to the former professor of classics at the University of Toronto, GMAGrube, many of these works, in particular Rhetorica Ad Alexandrum, displayed completely cynical and amoral attitudes, worrying only about how to use arguments and rhetorical devices to achieve the best effect, regardless. of intention. It is like an attack against this amoral backdrop that Aristotle’s Rhetoric must be appreciated.
Plato, before Aristotle, said that if Rhetoric was to be an art, its practitioners required knowledge both of the human soul and its different parts and functions, as well as of the different types of arguments and their appeal to different types of men. Aristotle offers this in the first two books of Rhetoric. In the third, he deals with style, a very important topic, on which the rest of this article will stop, citing with some liberties, a series of selected examples of the advice offered:
These three things should point to: the metaphor (that is, the loss of the youth of the cities during the war was as if the spring had been eliminated from the year); antithesis (that is, crossing the Hellesport and digging through Mount Athos, they sailed on land and marched on sea); and liveliness.
Style and delivery, while really superfluous, must be displayed due to the depravity of the audience. The power of the written word depends on style rather than content.
The first principle of style is to use good Greek (English, French), also to use specific terms rather than general terms, and to avoid ambiguity, unless one is deliberately looking for it (that is, it has nothing to say). What we write should be easy to read and easy to speak.
Speech does not do its job unless it is clear. Current nouns, adjectives, and verbs contribute to clarity.
One must appear to be speaking in a natural and unstudied way, because what is natural is convincing, what is studied is not. People distrust rhetorical tricks as much as they distrust adulterated wine.
The epithets add something. They can emphasize the worst or shameful side of things, or how they look their best. Orestes, for example, can be called a matricide or his father’s avenger.
An audience always shares the feelings of a passionate speaker, even when there is nothing in what he is saying.
Metaphors, antithesis, humor, parody, clarity (or lack thereof), style, epithets (‘Branding’), passion, action, movement, music, rhythm, repetition, name recognition, shape your message for your audience , everything plays an important role in the business of persuasion, they were all originally identified by Aristotle. And while he may not have anticipated how technology now allows us to create worlds of competing Boorstinian pseudo-realities, much of his wisdom on rhetoric is at stake in the media culture we live in today.