: the quality of being easily understood
: the quality of being expressed, remembered, understood, etc., in a very exact way
While the definition appears to stress accuracy and a lack of any gray areas, I know this is not the case. What may be clear to the writer doesn't always translate when someone else reads, or listens, to the rhetoric. Memes, tropes, slang, and other devices are misunderstood across cultures, even within what may be a homogenized audience. My own personal slant on clarity is cutting through the rhetoric (written, spoken, visual, etc.) and finding the true meaning OR if there is any meaning at all. The first steps in clarity is understanding. Do I really understand the topic I'm about to discuss? Am I speaking through a filter based on my conception/preconception of the topic? Does my topic hold any interest with the audience? For example, if I speak on the visual rhetoric of a military uniform, my knowledge of the topic is different, as a retiree, than someone who did one enlistment, or someone who has never served. My filter may see the historical significance and inclusion into a specific area of society, but someone else may see regimentation, a projection of militaristic power, and sublimation of individuality. That lens - how I see it and how others see it - is vital.
My journey for clarity starts with the philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Locke, Vico, and Campbell (B+H). Understanding and using psychology to affect the audience was nothing new, but the Enlightenment rhetors began to dissect the motivations of the audience (though still from a Western viewpoint) as daily life changed as new science and technologies emerged. Today, with political battles played out in social media outlets and allegations of bias against mainstream news, clarity is lost amid six-second soundbites and weekly memes. And how do these snapshots translate to China, or Finland, or Nigeria? A Syrian refugee will have a different opinion of President Obama's speeches of US involvement worldwide than me, or someone in Utah, or someone in Australia.
Perhaps that's the center of it all; there's really no "exact way" to communicate across cultural boundaries. However, if a rhetor - someone trying to get a point across - *doesn't* look for clarity through multiple lenses, or doesn't recognize his or her own lens and bias, then clarity is merely a buzz word. And that's why my personal philosophy of rhetoric is to first recognize my own lenses, then understand others' views, and finally try to bridge the communication gap.
Do avoid referencing the dictionary in your final essay. It's okay here, but definitions are by their very nature without developed context, and what we want is something which involves more critical thinking. I like your focus on finding the true meaning. This is something the classical thinkers were most concerned with, and that notion of truth moved from ideal to practical. But we still have this problem in many classrooms today, where teachers teach content, and the best ways of knowing that content, but they don't teach it within the context of solving problems, so it's ideal information rather than practical information. I think you're getting to this when you write about understanding and using psychology to affect audience. Good inclusion of multicultural ideas here in your blog; I'd love to see that in your formal writing too, Lancia. Nice thinking about recognizing our own lenses; very important in solid research, too.
ReplyDeleteI have a book chapter I fairly recently published that may be of interest to the line of thinking that I had when making this assignment. It may be useful to skim as you massage your thinking on this assignment. See the second chapter of http://wac.colostate.edu/books/eportfolios.
Lancia, When reading your first example, I immediately thought of an encounter I had with one of my students last week. He is a veteran and is writing a rhetorical analysis of an image of a room full of wounded vets waiting for medical treatment for very serious injuries. (Many are amputees, on crutches, or in wheelchairs.) As we talked through the image, he mentioned that there were two men in uniform, but I only noticed the one in brown camp. However, there was another man off to the side who was in what I'd assume was workout gear, but it was, in fact, army specific. My interpretation of his clothing was different based on my lack of experience, so I suppose I was less informed and therefore reached less of the truth.
ReplyDeleteI think your overall idea is a very interesting one; it's one I struggle with. Can we actually encounter/discover a "truth" if "truth" is so variable? Our earlier readings about different cultural definitions of rhetoric emphasized this for me even more. How can we even purport to teach "rhetoric" if we are really only teaching one definition of the term? How can we say our goal is to see truth when truth is relative? I'm curious to see where this leads you!
Lancia--If you haven't already, as it's hard for me to tell unless I review every blog post and comment again, please offer your thoughts on students' blog posts from those in India. Thanks. Students there need to focus on issues surrounding the canons of rhetoric, in particular, as well as the appeals. A lot of these students do use very descriptive writing. Perhaps that's a difference--the tendency to tell a story or a narrative seems greater in India than in the US in terms of rhetorical differences.
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ReplyDeleteI agree with the fact that the understanding of rhetoric is subjective in nature.
ReplyDeleteLanguage is a type of signifier, according to Wittgenstein. Each word is tied to objects and he says that 'Objects are simple'. The word is the signifier and the object is the signified. A proposition describes a state of affairs which is itself a collection of objects. Statements describe 'cases'. His theory describes the relation between language and the world. It is similar to that of the signifier and the signified.
Since you are looking into the element of clarity, you might look into his Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. He says about the book :
"What can be said can be said can be said clearly, what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
It is on the limits of language(and hence thought) in terms of clarity.
Context and the understanding of the world is explored by Heidegger in his Being and Time. Subjectivity in terms of context can be understood by looking into the process of perception. Since perception is the determining factor in understanding, it influences what can be thought and hence, said. An amazing read:
"...the linguistic constructions concerned—which involve hyphenations, unusual prefixes and uncommon suffixes—reveal the hidden meanings and resonances of ordinary talk."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#TLP
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#BeiTim