College Composition and Communication, Vol. 20, No. 5 (Dec., 1969), pp. 288-2966
"The open hand might be said to characterize the kind of persuasive discourse that seeks to carry its point by reasoned, sustained, conciliatory discussion of the issues. The closed fist signify the kind of persuasive activity that seeks to carry its point by non-rationale, non-sequential, often non-verbal, frequently provocative means" (288).
Corbett revisits Renaissance education's interest in rhetoric, and notes that Renaissance rhetoricians "placed the greatest emphasis on the cognitive approach to invention" (288).
In assessing the move from orally driven rhetorics of the Renaissance and Common Sense, Corbett, reading Marshall McLuhan notes how technology--this time print/ mass print--changed the game. "But the predominance of dynamic personalizing sound soon gave way, in the academic world at least, to the frozen, silent, impersonal matrix of print. As Marshall McLuhan has been telling us, print served to detribalize man, to remove him from the group, to make him more independent, more solitary, more inner-directed" (289).
Essentially, print called for rhetors to change their means of communication to account for a larger audience they could not see.
"I hope, however, that this abrupt transition will not create the impression that the reasoned, highly structured, elegant manner of discourse that prevailed in the Renaissance changed suddenly into the new style of rhetoric. There were all those intermediate stages, all those contributions to the development of a 'new rhetoric' made by Peter Ramus and Omer Talon...but time simply does not allow for a tracing out of that history here...Let us see what some of the characteristics are of this new rhetorical activity to which I have attached the metaphor of the closed fist" (291).
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Many are non-verbal: demonstrations, boycotts, sit-ins, take-overs, riots "have taken on a new currency in our time, and if they need a label, they might be called "muscular rhetoric" of "nody rhetoric."
"Aside from the broadsides that issue form the mimeograph machines, written words mainly appear as slogans inscribed on posters or as graffiti painted on walls. In the oral medium, single words or phrases are chanted endlessly in unison...But body rhetoric has set the stage for the nitty-gritty of negotiation, and in the last analysis, body rhetoric is the medium that has conveyed the main message" (292).
What then is the new body rhetoric? Can we fill cyber [public] spaces? Change profile pics in solidarity? Do retweets constitute a form of banner or chant? Were the stripped down methods of earlier body rhetorics just different ways to increase rhetorical velocity?
Citing McLuhan again, Corbett stresses electronic media's culpability in moving the new rhetoric in a certain direction. "the electronic media have expanded and intensified the human sensoria. Aural, visual, and tactual images have an immediacy, an intensity, a simultaneity about them that words strung out one after the other on a page can hardly achieve" (292).
Is this not rhetorical velocity?
Corbett seems to think that a move away from the written word is similar to the move away from Renaissance, logic driven rhetoric. He seems to imply that this "new" rhetoric is one of passion and emotion.
"Another characteristic of the rhetoric of the closed fist is that it tends to be a group rhetoric, a gregarious rhetoric. Tradition rhetoric was designed for the solitary speaker or writer addressing a captive audience. The solitary speaker or writer held forth, as I am doing now, for an allotted time of space. Today...a good deal of rhetorical activity is conducted in groups" (292).
Corbett once again looks to McLuhan, who argues that television has retribalized men instead of making them passive consumers, making hem "want to act in concert with others" (292).
Corbett argues that body rhetoric is coercive more than persuasive.
"Leland M. Griffin sees rhetorical activity become coercive rather than persuasive when it resorts to the non-rational, when it is dependent, as he puts it, on 'sear of the pants' rather than on 'seat of the intellect'" (293).
"And in densely populated, highly complex societies, like ours, the individual is such a cipher that he thinks it presumptuous of him to demand the sustained attention of an audience, but he realizes that his anonymity acquires a powerful voice when it merges with the group" (293).
Corbett cites James R. Andrews saying that the relationship between rhetoric and coercion is directly proportional to the "limits the viable alternatives open to the receivers of the communication" (293).
"People are likely to resort to coercive, non-rational, even violent tactics to gain their ends when they feel that the normal channels of communication are ineffectual or unavailable" (293).
"a good deal of contemporary rhetoric is non-conciliatory...whereas speakers and writers once took special pains to ingratiate themselves with their audience, today many speakers and writers seem actually to go out of their way to antagonize or alienate their audience" (294-95).
"The younger generation may regard the open hand as bearing too much of a resemblance to the glad hand; they may see the civility, decorum, and orderliness of the older mode of discourse as a facade behind which the establishment in all ages has perpetrated injustices on the have-nots" (296).
"The open hand and the closed fist have the same basic skeletal structure. If rhetoric, is, as Aristotle defined it, 'a discovery of all the available means of persuasion,' let us be prepared to open and close that hand as the occasion demands. Then maybe the hand-me-down from the dim past can lend a hand-up to us poor mortals in this humming present" (296).
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