(Not) Speaking of Egypt

As I listened to coverage of events in Cairo (mostly on Democracy Now!--theirs was the best), I heard experts from a variety of fields share their opinions: historians, political scientists, philosophers, comparative literature people etc. Our discipline was conspicuously not represented among the scholarly types media tapped to help breakdown the revolution. MSM would much rather interview a "professional" pundit than bother to engage a academic rhetorician. Nothing new there. A couple of years ago Richard Vatz noted that

The reason that rhetoricians have never preponderantly been the primary sources that media go after is that we are just one of many competitors interpreting reality, and often we are looked at as purveyors of ‘‘mere rhetoric”

Fair enough. After all, our experts don't just rely on MSM to disseminate their opinions on current affairs. That's what blogs are for right? That's what I thought.

Late last week I trolled around the "rhetorical blogosphere" (the RSA Blogora has a decent blogroll) wanting to see
what shape the "Egypt discussion" was taking among scholars of rhetoric. In the communication studies rhetorical tradition Aristotle is deity; we kneel at his alter by reminding ourselves (and our students) that democracy is the "rhetorical form of government." Since this was a democratic revolution, I expected the revolution would generate some buzz among our bloggers. Surprisingly, I found very little attention to Egypt on our blogs. Only one blog had multiple posts dedicated to the Egyptian situation (Robert Hariman & John Louis Lucaites' No Caption Needed). On many of the blogs I checked out (I visited every single blog on the Blogora blogroll), Egypt was mentioned only in passing if at all. Initially, I attributed the lack of opinions on Egypyt to provincialism: the February 9th Pew Research Center for the People & Press poll reported that 73% of Americans said they were "more concerned with what is going on in the United States" than about events in Cairo.

Of course this reading is too simplistic. That I did not find enough blogs discussing Egypt is no grounds to accuse the discipline of provincialism. Still, I could not help wondering why our blogs didn't reflect the excitement the rest the world felt about the end of the Mubarak regime. As I thought about it, I realized that the reason Egypt has not (yet) featured prominently on many rhetorical blogs is more complex than mere provincialism.

This brings me to "trained incapacities." Burke (drawing on Veblen) used trained incapacity in reference to the idea that proficiency at one thing necessarily entails deficiency at another thing. Since incapacities are blind spots in our "normal" way of seeing things, one must first realize what orientations are dominant in the discipline in order to understand how trained incapacity plays out in the study of rhetoric. The KUAR membership reflects what are to me the two dominant paradigms in the study of rhetoric: the pedagogical (Rhet. Comp), and the persuasion (COMS) paradigms. Since I cannot speak to the former, let me illustrate my point using the persuasion paradigm.

My advisor likes to remind his students that Aristotle's definition and theories of rhetoric are only one model that has thus far won the battle of institutional endorsement in academy. As evidence he points to how often Aristotle's definition of rhetoric, "discovering the available means of persuasion," is often (and incorrectly) touted as the definition of rhetoric too see how dominant Aristotle is today. In many of our undergraduate and graduate classes we equate rhetoric with persuasion or producing a desired effect. Similarly, much of the "traditional" scholarship in our journals has focused on the "speaker-audience" encounter (consider Bitzer's "The rhetorical situation" or Black's Rhetorical Criticism: A study in method both of which are canonical). My mentor then shows students that definitions of rhetoric always reflect the interests of those doing the defining. My point here is that despite its sacrosanct status, the Aristotlean/persuasion paradigm has its incapacities. These incapacities become clear when one encounters discourse that does not match up with the assumptions of the persuasive paradigm.

This, I believe, was the case with Egypt. The persuasion paradigm tends to have a preference for the treatment of discourse in retrospect. Egypt, as the Obama administration learned, is an incredibly fluid and dynamic situation which is still ongoing. Therefore critics in keeping with paradigmatic assumptions might think it is still too soon to attend to the revolution (the first essay on Obama's 2004 DNC address appeared in QJS in 2007). Further, the Egyptian revolution was not exactly exemplary for its speeches. Look at how poorly the speeches given by Mubarak and his deputy faired. As Yasmine El Rashidi reminds us:

This revolution, for the people of Egypt, may turn out to be less about a leader than about hope, pride, and the sense of possibility. For three decades we have suffered in different ways by the antics of a totalitarian leader and a regime ridden with corruption and brutality.

Without suggesting that one could not conduct meaningful analysis of the Egyptian revolution from the persuasion paradigm, I think the revolution is more amenable to analyses through critical approaches that do not privilege posterity and the speaker-audience dynamic as much as the persuasion view does. Hariman & Lucaites who's blog I cited above are visual rhetoric scholars.

I'm not as steeped in the rhet-comp tradition, but if I were to hazard a guess, it would be that the dominant paradigm(s) in the pedagogical tradition have incapacities which affect responses to the grassroots-up movement we have witnessed in Cairo too.

I'm not saying these incapacities are necessarily bad. I think we will all be better off if we are reflexively aware of both our strengths and incapacities.