Action-Rhetoric

    Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Rhetoric outlines three types of rhetoric: winning-rhetoric, bargaining rhetoric, and listening rhetoric. Supporters of winning-rhetoric seek to use rhetoric to win an argument or to prove others wrong. Advocates of bargaining-rhetoric aim to use rhetoric to find common ground between two sides, and practitioners of ideal listening-rhetoric pursue the truth between two sides’ different stances. There is, in my opinion, another type of rhetoric, perhaps aptly called action-rhetoric. This is not the rhetoric found in scholarly essays or textbooks; action-rhetoric takes place as real people communicate in real places. It is an attempt to initiate a new dialogue where a previous dialogue has failed; an example would be the so-called “Tank Man’s” stand against authoritarianism in front of a column of tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Action-rhetoric is the most powerful of all of the “rhetorics,” because it relies not on dialogue that can be ignored, nor on listening which is all too-often inadequate to produce change.

    Action-rhetoric is most effective in situations where organized discourse has failed, because action not only persuades others to believe in a cause, but contributes tangibly to that cause itself. In many ways, winning-rhetoric and bargaining-rhetoric can be self-defeating. Although words may go a far distance, there are those who simply will not listen to traditional forms of rhetoric. Although the U.N. and the U.S. adopted an ethically sound position in 1994 by opposing the Rwandan genocide, winning-rhetoric failed to prevent the deaths of almost a million people. Booth defines winning-rhetoric as “my goal is to win because I know that my cause, my case, my convictions are, like Jefferson’s, right.” Clearly genocide is wrong and opposing it is a warrantable belief. But no amount of winning-rhetoric would have stopped the Rwandan militia from killing half a million Tutsi men, women, and children. In the same sense, bargaining-rhetoric is often ineffective. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s attempt to bargain with Hitler is often seen as one of the most spectacular failures of the twentieth century. 

    Action-rhetoric, however, does not rely on dialogue that can be ignored. Not only is it pivotal in changing public opinion, but it also delineates the problem and makes it explicit for all to see. In 1941, a photographer captured a famous moment of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, walking to class with her books. In the background can be seen a vehement group of people, one of whom seems to be yelling. Her actions (or rather, non-actions) were a testament to the resiliency of the Civil Rights movement and served as inspiration to demonstrators in years to come. 55 years later, the yelling woman appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to publicly apologize to Eckford herself. By maintaining her calm, Eckford made explicit the reality of racism in America, an example of action-rhetoric that endures to this day. 

    Another reason action-rhetoric is compelling is that it does not merely rely on listening, something that is ignored all too-often. Instead, it operates on the senses and the emotions themselves. To protest the British rule of India, Mohandas Gandhi frequently went on hunger strikes either while in prison or at his home. Such an action roused the sentiments of the Indian people and compelled British authorities to concede to his demands on several instances. Note that this did not require any direct listening on behalf of the citizenry. The power of imagination—specifically, what Gandhi was enduring for the sake of his country’s independence—was persuasive enough for the Indian populace. Not only did action-rhetoric in this case influence public opinion, it was enough to produce change of its own.