Neurons, Obama, and Rhetoric--Oh My!

Cooper, Marilyn M. “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” CCC 62.3 (2011): 420-49. Print.

Like Leff in my previous blog posting, Cooper examines rhetorical agency as an idea called into question and seeming more unlikely (even impossible by some accounts). But rather than specifically examining the role of tradition as a means to recuperate ideas of rhetorical agency like Leff, Cooper examines the possibilities of more recent notions, especially complexity theory and neurophenomenolgy to examine how agency is both autonomous and collective, both conscious and unconscious.

Complexity theory positions rhetorical agency within a system of multiple agents that interact with one another in a sort of perpetual “dance of perturbation and response” by which the agents influence one another (421). Neruophenomenology—which I must admit is a concept I need to reexamine more fully—“combines neuroscience and phenomenology to develop understandings of cognitive processes and brain dynamics as embodied nonlinear self-organizing systems interacting with the surround” (421).

Cooper uses this combination of ideas to analyze President Obama’s speech on race that he delivered in Philadelphia during his presidential candidacy. She argues, first, that rhetorical agency is both an active response by an individual to a particular situation (emergent) and a series of unconscious neurological processes and internalized contextual understandings (embodied). Second, she argues that both rhetors and audiences are active agents in the process of persuasion. Rhetors often view themselves somewhat incorrectly as causing action or persuasion, though she says this is necessary for our ability to act and to be willing to act as agents; instead, she claims that persuasion also rests in the audience members’ reception and evaluation of the rhetor’s language. Thus, while the rhetor does maintain certain, significant amounts of free will, she/he has a responsibility to the audience to view them “as responsive beings who [. . .] will understand or assimilate meanings in their own way” (441).

As a side note, though my grasp of neuroscience’s role in rhetoric is rather tenuous and too limited to offer a strong evaluation of Cooper’s use of it in her argument, I can say this is one of the more approachable pieces on “neurorhetoric” that I have encountered at this point. More to the point, despite some of the claims reminiscent of the cognitive arguments that developed at the height of the process movement and Leff’s analysis of classical rhetoric’s view of audience (see my previous blog post), Cooper’s article offers a sense of new directions in the considerations of rhetorical agency—ones that bring to bear the new understandings of the interactions of the biological, the psychological, and the social aspects of communication.