Visionary Rhetoric: Teaching Imagistic Communication

Petra Aczl
() rhetoric remains necessary for our social existence because in our origin, humans began to speak as rude poets, bound to their bodily passions. This moment in our history can never be effaced; therefore, a rhetoric that can speak to our bodies and passions remains necessary for civilized life.1

Prologue The Labour Leopard can't change its spots - even if it sometimes thinks wistfully of a blue rinse. said Margaret Thatcher in her speech given at the Conservative Party Conference in 1988. The British Prime minister, who passed away 25 years later, in 2013, was doubtlessly, a creator and rhetor of common visions. She, exploiting the conceptual metaphor politics is conflict2, was a systematic user of the fight metaphor, re-animating (after Queen Victoria) the myth of Boedicia, queen of the British Iceni tribe who attacked the occupying forces of the Roman Empire in the era of Nero. Thatchers vivid, strong metaphors dominant and most persuasive at the beginning of her political career stand for a non-concealing, straightforward rhetorical style, manifest a rather clear view of the world and a visually framed image of her concepts. Nevertheless, all successful, charismatic political leaders have a metaphorical, and thus an imagistic and ideological character, a character upon which their concepts can be seen and identified. Politicians hopefully are, to some extent, trained to speak with an imagistic capacity, a capacity needed for the audiences to retrospect and foresee. This training politicians shall go through is that of the rhetorical paidea, a practice and educational program based on the awareness of the situational forces and on the consciousness of symbolic needs. Rhetoric, as commonly defined, is the art of persuasion, but this simplified interpretation limits our understanding of how discourse unfolds persuasively in the audiences mind and eye, and creates community. This chapter aims to identify the kind of rhetoric that enables audience to envision, to see what is said and what is to be expected. Dwelling upon visionary speech we approach the rhetorical tradition from two convergent paradigms, that of the humanist and the symbolic in order to highlight the intense, imagistic, visionary character of rhetorical communication. The chapter challenges the classical system with the perspective of the visual and the spatial, attempting to cast light on long forgotten characters of the ancient discipline and then draws a visionary theoretical framework in order to reconceptualise the almost unchanged rhetorical paideia as the educational program for imagistic, visionary communication.
1

Catherine L. Hobbs, Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, Monboddo, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002, p. 60. 2 Jonathan Charteris Black, Politicians and Rhetoric. The Persuasive Power of Metaphor , Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 92.

Rhetoric: a multifariously defined concept As Bryan Garsten3 reckons,The term rhetoric has acquired a variety of meanings. Some scholars use it to refer to the characteristics of a particular community's discourse, such as that of economists, while others use it to refer to particular tropes and styles of poetry or literature; for others still, the term encompasses all of human communication. () I will follow a long tradition of understanding rhetoric as speech designed to persuade. Rhetoric after surviving a 2500-year-long disturbed period is still striving for a definition that resists democratic suspicion and scientific attacks. To this date, however, it has not succeeded to find a static one. Despite its currency in literary theory and criticism and its popular usage as the language of political deception, rhetoric is a fossil word, silently impressing its premodern cast into our modern and postmodern discourses.- as Hobbs interprets the way rhetoric survives. There seems to be a shift from rhetoric as a system to rhetoric as a language, still the debate continues about its scientific quality and reference4. Rhetoric, the classical faculty, once formulated to be the fundamental part of the democratic citizens education 5 is in the state of constant re-interpretation with foci either on content, context or culture, thus on speech, situation or society. What seems to be certain throughout its disciplinary history is that it is about human (verbal) discourse that has aesthetic, pathetic and ethic character. It is not until the recent years that rhetoric was discussed as visual communication; a new definition enriching the spaciousness of the concept. Even though rhetorical discourse was not described and systematized on the basis of its visual capacities, visuality has always been present in its theory and practice. Visuospatial aspects of the classical rhetorical system: memory, style, arrangement There are at least three properties of the rhetorical system in which visual and spatial thinking, apparently come to operate. The imaginative ars memorativa, the art of memory in classical rhetoric highlights the way rhetoric performers recoded their speech in pictures, in spaces, in visionary mental sites from where words and ideas could be recalled. With the urge to remember, they worked out the visuospatial experience of the text, enriched by colourful and memorable pictures. Hence, in the speakers memory the rhetorical text was visually and spatially recomposed to convey meanings, symbols and ideas in a persuasive way. Rhetorical
3

Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion. A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgement, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 110. 4 Although Karl Wallace speaks for tradition in limiting the domain of rhetoric to public discourse only, most contributors follow the lead of Richard McKeon in defining rhetoric as an architectonic art, organizing virtually all forms of language use under its aegis. Johnstone explicitly includes the discourse of philosophy, and Perelman that of science, in rhetoric's domain, and the three reports that conclude the volume all advance very broad definitions. Ehninger's committee argues that rhetoric embraces no less than all forms of human communication. Patricia Bizell, The Prospect of Rhetorical Agency, in T. EnosR. McNabb (eds.), Making and Unmaking the Prospects for Rhetoric: Selected Papers from the 1996 Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997, pp. 37-43, p. 37. 5 () we can see how far and wide is the domain of the orator who is capable of speaking on all things whatsoever with a splendid style and a plethora of ideas. () it is fitting that the future orator be educated among his peers so that, along with them, he may learn the common sense (). Giambattista Vico, The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae, 17111741), G. A. PintonA. W. Shippee (trans. and ed.), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, chapter 4., p. 9 and chapter 8., p. 19.

memory called for visual-spatial thinking and created a kind of semi-conventional code of translating texts to images and the reverse. The study of style is the other part of rhetorical theory that necessarily encompasses the visual domain. Style, born out of the third step of the compositional process of text production, elocution, used to be and despite of growing independence of stylistics continues to be a central category of rhetoric. Elocution is what brings the ideas into discursive, textual existence6. As Quintilian argues7 For the verb eloqui means the production and communication to the audience of all that the speaker has conceived in his mind, and without this power all the preliminary accomplishments of oratory are as useless as a sword that is kept permanently concealed within its sheath.8 Style is where the real faults and virtues of oratory are to be found stresses Quintilian9 and this echoes protractedly in the history of rhetoric. This approach to style rooted in the conviction that words do not only constitute the ornamented coverage of thoughts and ideas but do incarnate them. Even though critical discussions of style as dress of thought revealed an alternative paradigm, style has not ceased to be considered as a kind of physiognomy of ideas, either as the image of the soul or as a living body, a man10. Classical rhetoric worked out a complex categorization of style, developing the system of tropes, figures and schemes providing the rhetor with linguistic methods and forms of expression. The eloquent speaker was and is aware of the numerous ways language can be customized to both the thoughts and the audience. Tropes and figures are to enhance the expression and facilitate sensual and cultural experience. Many of them, either in their linguistic, structural quality (see for example reduplicatio, redditio, amplificatio) or in their meaning making capacity (metaphor, metonymy, irony) utilize analogical linkages and visual conventions, many of them are, in a way, instances of analogical representations. Metaphors11 constitute a special class of this system of eloquence manifesting the visual-analogical potential in rhetorical speech. Style, the exteriorization of the interior12 is also considered a way of seeing13 or a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe14. Style is an imitation of thought then, a faculty of speech that allows the audience to see the ideas, since style itself is the result of ones worldview. Memory and style prove that both the input and the output of speech are by nature imagistic and call for visual creativity.

Wolfgang G. Mller, Style, in T. O. Sloane (ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 745-757, p. 745. 7 The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, transl. by H. E. Butler, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959, 8, 15. 8 Vico puts it this way: "And eloquence, which is the discernment of what is to be said and what is to be left in silence, like a handmaiden, will easily follow upon wisdom, which is the guide of what is to be done and what is to be avoided." Ibid., chapter 8., p.19. 9 Quintilian, op. cit., 8, 17. 10 Buffon states that style is the man: Ces choses sont hors de l'homme, le style est l'homme mme. Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Discours sur le Style: Discours prononc l'Acadmie franaise par M. de Buffon le jour de sa rception le 25 aot 1753, ATHENA e-text: athena.unige.ch/athena/buffon/buf_disc.rtf 11 Metaphor in the classical rhetorical theory stands for a figurative transfer in meaning, thus a translation of an experience to another, a turn from a particular impression to a culturally fixed one. 12 Mller, op. cit., p. 753. 13 Walter Pater, Appreciations with an Essay on Style. London: Macmillan and Co., and New York, 1890. 14 Robert Dreyfus, Souvenirs sur Marcel Proust: Accompagns de lettres indites, Grasset: Paris, 1926, p. 292.

As for spatial intelligence needed in rhetoric, we shall discuss arrangement (disposition), the second of the classical five canons of rhetoric15, a source of power in persuasion, which used to be a heuristic device for argumentative effect, a method of building argument. Arrangement was, in fact, the way by which elements of speech (content) were structured into a composed whole. The study of arrangement concerns how parts of text (verbal, visual or multimedial) can be related to each other and ordered so that the recipients experience them in a sequence or configuration16. Arrangement requires identifying the parts and relations and entails a logic that is either dependent on content or on formal features. Texts are arranged forms of meaningful, discursive elements and they constitute, by convention, typical social-symbolic patterns, genres. Hence, arrangement is the architecture of rhetorical discourse17 that has to meet individual demands on the speakers side (intention for persuasion) and communal experience on the audiences side (genre)18. Rhetoric is architectonic and thus exploits the operations of spatial thinking19, spatial20intelligence21 in text producing22. Spatial thinking is an underlying skill in understanding the concept of scale and structure"23 and it definitely corresponds with composing skills. Grow24 stresses that

15

Disposition teaches the art of arranging the invented. () Disposition is twofold one is from art, the other from prudence. Vico, op. cit., chapter 24., p. 69. 16 Jeanne Fahnestock, Modern Arrangement, in T. O. Sloane (ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 44-50, p. 44. 17 In a different view the rhetor is a language tinkerer pasting together bits of linguistic material and persuasive strategy to meet the demands of the occasion. James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001, p. 329. 18 In oral cultures, the arrangement of speeches was informed by orally controlled thinking that was and is additive rather than subordinated, aggregate rather than analytic. Arrange for nonliterates is an exercise in the ability to relate as much as possible to the central issue. John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1990, p. 9. 19 According to the National Research Council (NRC 2006, ix), "Spatial thinking is one form of thinking based on three elements: 1. Concepts of space (estimating and calculating distance and direction between two objects), 2. Tools of representation (projections, diagram of a pulley system, cross sections of tissue or an organism, a map), and 3. Processes of reasoning (finding patterns, interpolation and extrapolation)." (see Douglas Llewellyn, Thinking Spatially: Taking Observation, Classification, and Communication Skills to a Higher Level of Reasoning, Science Scope, Vol. 32. Issue: 6, 2009, p. 69.) 20 "Spatial intelligence features the potential to recognize and manipulate the patterns of wide space (those used, for instance, by navigators and pilots) as well as the patterns of more confined areas (such as those of importance to sculptors, surgeons, chess players, graphic artists, or architects). The wide-ranging ways in which spatial intelligence is deployed in different cultures clearly show how a biopsychological potential can be harnessed by domains that have evolved for a variety of purposes." Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, New York: Basic Books, 1999, pp. 42-43. 21 "I now conceptualize an intelligence as a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture." Ibid., pp. 3334. 22 Visual thinking is also detectable in rhetorical arrangement. It refers to how we organize mental images using shapes, lines, colours, and compositions to make them meaningful. Visual thinking can occur at a number of levels of consciousness. It may be highly conscious with great, focused mental effort: or it may be barely conscious, as in daydreaming. In any case, one of the major uses of graphic language is to communicate the result of visual thinking to other people. Taewon Suh, V. Visual Persuasion and Visual Literacy, Communication Research Trends, Vol. 19. Issue: 3, 1999, p. 13. 23 Llewellyn, op. cit., p. 69. 24 Gerald Grow, Writing and multiple intelligences, Presentation given at the annual meeting of the Association for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication, 1990,ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 406 643. Web: <http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow>.

The spatial intelligence may play an important role in organizing writing. "Mind maps" and outlines are spatial methods of displaying the organizational structure of a thought. Through this kind of visual thinking, one can perceive how thoughts are related to one another, how realms of thought stack, overlap, or stand side by side. The terms used in outlining are generally spatial terms: Headings are placed "under" or "above" one another. Thoughts are arranged in "higher" and "lower" levels.

Rhetorical arrangement refers not only to the sequencing of parts into a linear composition, but to the method of building up a discursive unit with awareness of relations and possible cognitive and signifying movements. Similar to a building, speech serves as a context that frames our sense of reality and privileges certain ideas and omits others. Speeches are themselves symbolic (discursive) spaces: that of the meeting of minds25 and of our cultural memory. Arrangement follows invention, first in the rhetorical canon, that is, the discovery and creation of idea by intellect or imagination. Invention is defined either as a process or the result of it and its place in rhetorical theory is questioned from as early as the age of Petrus Ramus (16. century). Nevertheless, invention as the power to create and arrangement as the memory- and audience-oriented process to structure, display that creation and disposition of the content were preeminent to the verbal formation and articulation of speech. These two steps have therefore operational resources of non-linguistic, visual and spatial thinking as well. Visionary speech Visionary speech is a concept almost non- or, at least, vaguely defined. For the purposes of the present project and at the risk of oversimplification we shall consider visionary speech as a discourse that leads before the eye, a kind of communication that facilitates seeing, envisioning, that offers a view and manifests a perspective. Aside from the records of transcendental visions and the genre of visionary texts we endeavour to introduce visionary as an imagistic character of speech, a faculty of discourse that encourages audiences to imagine what is communicated or to identify what is shown. Visionary speeches express images of the future that is to be foreseen and pictured. A visionary speech is prophetic in that sense and thus it is rhetorical. Speeches of visionary nature emerge out of non-literate, oral thinking and constantly refer to the concrete life of community, they are never abstract in the sense literate thought is.26 A visionary speech then uses a pictorial language that makes everything mentioned present in a concrete and/or symbolic way. Visionary rhetoric inspires action, giving a picture of the present and of the future and applying common associations, commonplaces. It is figural and pictorial and it is based on sensory images. A visionary speech is immediately a showing discourse with imaginative and metaphoric language, a language that forms reality and community. We argue that visionary speech and imaginative language are rhetorical and visionary rhetoric is the medium of learning imagistic communication.

25 26

Cham Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, p. 11. Schaeffer, op. cit., p. 9.

Theoretical background: the humanist and the symbolic paradigm The theoretical frame in which visionary rhetoric shall be interpreted is provided by two scholars of rhetoric and communication. Giambattista Vicos humanist approach in the eighteenth century and Ernest Bormanns symbolic convergence theory of the second half of the twentieth century seem to converge at the concept of rhetorical vision. It is not by accident that these two paradigms intersect as both focus on the rhetorical capacity of community, Vico with his key term of sensus communis (serving as the standard for all prudence and eloquence) and Bormann with his central notion of fantasy theme chains. However distant in disciplinary history these two theories are, they are capable of being merged by their view of rhetoric as expressive of experience and formative of community. Giambattista Vico27 the fiery opponent of Cartesian thought was the advocate of rhetoric that takes more into account than reason and intellect. In his view as summarized by Hobbs28 a healthy civilization requires a rhetoric that can address the whole wellspring of human motivation and emotion, a body of eloquence capable of embracing the sensus communis. He as a humanist (and untimely cultural anthropologist) in the age of Enlightenment argued against the pretension of the new Cartesian logic and the educational program based on it29 and criticized the exclusion of the study of topics, imagination and memory. Vico posits that the exclusive and massive study of logic deprives young students of the creative powers of mind requisite for the creation of original thoughts and arguments 30. He, instead, advises students to study with humanistic rather scholastic methods. Vico suggests an image-centred training that involves both the spatial and figurative imagination helping the student learn to creatively imagine the structure of an oration and the expression of speech. He also insisted that musical features (e.g. rhythms) develop language production, and acting helps training not only the voice but also the body. Vico held a strong belief that rhetoric not only is a practical art, holding the auditors by truth, but also an oral performance transporting the listeners via the orator's body with its voice and rhythms, truly a sublime, passionate art of the whole.31. In his glottogenetic quest32 he found that the origins of language (and mind) are sensory, imagistic and expressive and thus is language fundamentally metaphorical. He believes that human speech due to the operating power of imagination and metaphor precedes logical and rationalistic thought. The driving force of this language is ingenium
27

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), Italian philosopher of history, rhetorician, professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples, author of, among other writings, Scienza Nouva, 1725 (New Science). 28 Hobbs, op. cit., p. 60. 29 Vico, instead, reiterated the classical sense of logos as the making of meaning in language. Thomas P. Miller, Eighteen-Century Rhetoric, in T. O. Sloane (ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 227-237, p. 229. 30 Indeed, were you to apply the geometric method to life, you would succeed only in trying to be a rational lunatic, steering in a straight line amid lifess curves, as though caprice, rashness, chance and fortune held no sway in human affairs. Moreover, to construct a public speech according to the geometric method would be to deny its effectiveness, and to demonstrate only what is quite obvious. It would be as though one were to present an audience with nothing not already chewed over, treating them like children: in a word, to act like a pedagogue rather than an orator when making a speech. Giambattista Vico, On the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, in L. Pompa (ed., transl.), Vico: Selected Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 7, 5., p. 71. 31 Hobbs, op. cit., p. 82. 32 Marcel Danesi, Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993.

that capacity in man which can meet urgent needs through its acumen33, the original and generating power of mind that enables humans to translate what they sense into the order of their expressions. The original language has a poetic logic34, it is immediate, illuminating, indicative, and on the basis of its figurative, metaphorical character this language has an original pathetic essence35. Vico disagrees with contemporary rationalist accounts of humans as being fully reasonable creatures and argues that the preeminent language is poetic and immersed in the senses. In his view, analogical thinking stemming from the senses is the formative principle of language and reckons that metaphoric thinking is the basis for all three types of languages36 he introduces.. Vico also claims that there are, based on the naming of the natural world, imaginative class concepts (genere fantastico) which can serve as starting points for further attributions (similarly to fantasy themes in Bormanns approach).37 Ernest G. Bormann38, rhetorical critic and researcher of small group communication was from a very early professional stage insistent on finding new ways to study discourse. Pursuing rhetorical analysis in the examination of abolitionist speeches, he undertook to answer what makes a speech successful in its own socio-historical context. In the meanwhile in his small groups-research he realized that collected data facilitates qualitative rhetorical study. He set up the Rhetoric Circle, an informal group of young student researchers with whom he discussed papers and a talked about fantasy themes analysis and the formation of rhetorical communities. He was interested in the philosophy of rhetoric and open to adopt the assumptions of symbolic interactionism (G. H. Mead) and dramatism (K. Burke). Putting aside the influences he gained from contemporaries, we may trace back Bormanns symbolic convergence theory to Vico39. Vicos concepts of the language (and myths) that is immediate, and of the image that becomes social reality in a dynamic manner contributed significantly to Bormanns discovery and description of fantasy sharing. In a nutshell, Bormanns s ymbolic convergence theory (1972) is a message-centred approach and analytical method that presumes that meaning, emotion, motive for action are in the manifest content of a message. The message itself provides the location or locus of meaning40. He assumes that reality is
33

Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy. The Humanist tradition, J. M. Krois, A. Azodi (transl.), University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980, p. 14. 34 Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun in a metaphysics which was not rational and abstract, like that of the learned today, but sensed and imagined, as that of these first men, devoid of reason and wholly composed of powerful senses and vigorous imaginations () must have been. Giambattista Vico, The Third New Science, in L. Pompa (transl. and ed.), Vico: Selected Writings, Book 1. sec. 3, 375, p. 197. 35 Grassi, op. cit., p. 21. 36 These three types correspond to the ages of gods, heroes, and humans: the hieroglyphic or sacred language with signs based on natural objects, the symbolic or figurative heroic language of Homer's age, and the vulgar language with instituted signs belonging to humans. Hobbs, op. cit., p. 69. 37 See also Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 203209. 38 Ernest G. Bormann (19252008), professor of communication at the University of Minnesota, best known for the formulation of symbolic convergence theory (SCT). 39 Moya Ann Ball, Ernest G. Bormann: Roots, Revelations and Results of Symbolic Convergence Theory, in J. A. KuypersA. King, Twentieth-Century Roots of Rhetorical Studies, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001, pp. 211235, p. 217. 40 "The conventional wisdom of communication theorists that meanings are in people not messages is much too simple for the critic who wishes to study the rhetorical vision of a movement, an organization, or a

created symbolically through dramatic communication and symbolic reality is the result of the convergence of symbolic meaning. Symbolic convergence is created by fantasy theme chaining and has a dramatistic form. Using Bales41 term of fantasizing, Bormann views fantasy themes (a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph) as the dramatic structural (and analytical) 42 elements of a collectivitys symbolic reality functioning to present a common experience and to shape and evolve that experience into symbolic knowledge. When fantasy themes, the story lines of the dramatic communication are shared, and begin to chain out, certain assumptions and values are made visible to the minds of the communicators, reflecting and resembling a meeting of the minds.43 Fantasy themes are evoked by symbolic cues (letters, gestures). Fantasy types are repeated fantasy themes and from them rhetorical visions emerge. Rhetorical vision is a structural term of the theory. It is a composite drama that involves44 large groups of people into a common symbolic reality. Rhetorical visions such as the Cold War, the Perestroika or the Y generation, or religious ones just as the Puritan rhetorical vision45 are dramatic being comprised of five elements; the person, the plot, the scene, the sanctioning agent and a master analogue46. Visions fail to occur or lose impact in case of boredom, banality and explanatory deficiency. Rhetorical visions and dramatic communications provide individuals with the sense of community in groups or in public, fostering them through the stages of consciousnesscreating, consciousness-raising, and consciousness-sustaining communication.47 Vico and Bormann both investigated the communicative ways of humans getting to know their natural and social environment and identifying themselves as members of a community through a revealing, naming, imagistic language use. As rhetoricians, they actually proposed an alternative view of persuasive speech (that is, persuasive for the speakers own sake) and opened the horizon for interpreting visionary rhetoric. This visionary rhetoric could be reinforced and reproduced through the classical rhetorical paideia.

Rhetorical paideia Rhetoric can be considered as a teaching tradition, the pedagogy of good, ethical and pathetical (influential) speaking. It has taught a rhetorical consciousness that is required whenever there is communication. According to Johnstone48 to be conscious of something is
community. Ernest G. Bormann, Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social Reality, Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 58., 1972, pp. 396407, p. 405. 41 Robert Bales, Personality and Interpersonal Behavior, New York: Holt, Rinehart. 42 The explanatory power of the fantasy chain analysis lies in its ability to account for the development, elocution and decay of dramas that catch up groups of people and change their behaviour. Ibid., p. 399) 43 Ball, op. cit., p. 218. 44 It is when The tempo of the conversation would pick up. People would grow excited, interrupt one another, blush, laugh, forget their self-consciousness. Bormann, op. cit., p. 397. 45 The Biblical drama that supported the vision of the Puritans of Colonial New England. was the journey of the Jews from Egypt into Canaan. Bormann, op. cit., p. 402. 46 John F. Cragan Donald C. Shields, Symbolic Theories in Applied Communication Research: Bormann, Burke and Fisher, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1995, p. 39. 47 Ball, op. cit., p. 219. 48 Henry W. Johnstone, The philosophical basis of rhetoric, in G. A. Hauser (ed.), Philosophy and rhetoric in

always to interrupt the unity of the transaction between subject and object. Consciousness confronts the person with something radically other than himself. It is the relevant distance and distinction between subject and object, between the person and what is communicated. Rhetoric is the evoking and maintaining of this consciousness. Rhetorical teaching tradition is ethically-based, the speaker should be a doer of deeds and is oriented towards a wisdom in civic affairs and moral responsibility. Phronesis, the practical wisdom, the situational knowledge and the relational awareness is in the heart of the rhetorical paidea. Richard Lanham, in his generic portrait49 of the almost unchanged rhetorical paideia (program of education), lists the main principles that oriented and directed teachers and students in their rhetorical studies. Lanham emphasizes the systematization of dramatic skills, focusing more on the intellectual emptiness than on the richness of the traditional methodology. Drawing upon his summary, however, the most important principles of teaching rhetoric are the following: o Start your student young. o Teach him a minute concentration on the word how to write it, speak it, remember it. o Stress visuospatial memory in a massive almost brutalizing way. o Stress behaviour as performance: reading aloud, speaking with gesture, and music o Require no original thought. o Demand an agile marshalling of the communal (proverbial) wisdom on any issue. o Categorize the wisdom into pre-digested units, commonplaces, topoi. o Dwell on their decorous fit into situation. o Nourish an acute sense of social situation. o Raise awareness towards the contingency of the social, rhetorical situation. o Develop a skill for arrangement. o Let him translate not only from one language to another, but from one style to another. o Stress the need for improvisation, the coaxing of chance. o Train with continual verbal play, empathy, imagination and concreteness. o Urge the student to go into the world and observe its doings from the perspective of the actual situation. o Fill public life, forum, agora, court with men similarly trained. Lanham also raises the questions What kind of world would such a training create? What kind of man would homo rhetoricus be?50 His notion of homo rhetoricus refers to some previous and upcoming contrasts and distinctions drawn between the rational (real, dialectical) and rhetorical (ingenious, metaphorical). He states that there are two contrasting types of life. One is built upon the flattering quasi-arts. It is the rhetorical ideal of life while its opponent, based on knowledge of human nature is the philosophical life. In Lanhams opinion the rhetorical mans common denominator is a social situation. For him reality is what is accepted as reality; a symbolic reality. The rhetorical view of life begins with the
dialogue, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, pp. 15 27, pp. 2123. 49 Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance , Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004, p. 23. 50 Ibid., p. 39.

centrality of language built on experience and common sense. He feels and holds the eros of language and plays for advantage but pleasure, too. He is not, like the serious man, alienated from his own language51. The power of Lanhams picture of the rhetorical ideal encourages us to realize that the rhetorical paideia requires in accordance with Vicos humanist and Bormanns symbolic approach the acceptance of the immediacy of the situation and of the language, the centrality of the experience and the intention to reinforce common sense. The homo rhetoricus is visionary because he/she is a sensuous builder of convergent symbolic reality, using inspiration, imagination and improvisation to create the sense of community. Therefore, the basis of rhetorical pedagogy should be comprised of the sense of situation, the usage of figurative-metaphorical language, the chaining of fantasy themes, the coaxing of chance, the translation of images and styles and the acceptance of a shared wisdom. Epilogue Visionary speech is definitely not a novel concept, however, in the classical tradition of rhetoric the persuasive, verbal character has long veiled, if not smothered, the significance of the imagistic, visual and spatial features in the rhetorical system and of the influential speech. Drawing on these properties the present chapter aimed at reframing persuasive speech in the context of the visual and visionary. A visionary speech is an act of discourse that fills the senses and resonates in the common sense. This kind of rhetoric is based on, aside linguistic and verbal intelligence, visual, spatial and interpersonal intelligence and thinking. When revisiting the classical rhetorical canon we must realize how multimedial logic is allowed to operate in the formation and expression of speeches, and it is what leads the audience to share a vivid experience. This vivid experience is stemming from the usage of a vivid language that is emotionally interesting, imagery-provoking, and proximate in a sensory, temporal, or spatial way.52 Intense, imagistic and figurative communication exemplifies this language in which metaphor plays an important, dominant role. Metaphors according to the meta-analytic review of Sopory and Dillard53 produce greater attitude change than their literal counterparts, that the use of large numbers, when there is high familiarity of the target, when they are heard or seen, rather than read. These findings support the view that metaphors are most successful in oral speeches and in the context of common wisdom; a view that is theorized in both Giambattista Vicos rhetorical and philosophical treatises and in Ernest G. Bormanns symbolic convergence theory. Because of the former being, in some rhetorical aspects, the forerunner of the latter, the humanist and symbolic paradigm reinforces theoretically the need to revisit and re-introduce those principles of rhetorical education that facilitate visionary, imagistic communication.

51 52

Lanham, op. cit., p. 5. Richard Nisbett Lee Ross, Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgement. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980, p. 45. 53 Pradeep SoporyJames Price Dillard, Figurative Language and Persuasion, in J. P. DillardM. Pfau (eds.), The Persuasion Handbook: Developments in Theory and Practice , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 407426.

The intellectual venture presented here attempted to cast light on the theoretical and practical character of visionary rhetorical speech and the way it is taught in order to offer a counterargument for rhetoric as mainly verbally persuasive.