Todd Oakley (Cleveland)


Attention and Rhetoric

Modern rhetorical theorists examine "the means by which speakers and writers influence states of mind and actions of other people" (Williams 1998: 3). Rhetoric then is the study of mental simulation, a process whereby speakers or writers try to make the semiotic world disappear to its interpreters; or, more accurately, they make interpreters disregard the mediated nature of speech and writing and attend to and interact with a 'fabricated reality' in its stead. How human beings can accomplish this semiotic slight-of-hand necessitates an answer to an underlying question: How can one person hold another person's attention long enough to guide her reasoning?" his essay provides a initial formulation of an answer to this question, based on recent work in the cognitive sciences.

In the first section, I offer a brief description of the components of attention (focus, sustain, and control)as employed in cognitive psychology and theoretical neuroscience (cf. Parasuraman 1998) and show how they relate to rhetorical theory. More specifically, I will argue that the control of attention is a fundamental (though implicit) conceptual scaffold for Chaïm Perelman's and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's (1969: 115-183) notion of presence, Kenneth Burke's (1958: 58) notion of identification, and David Kaufer & Brian Butler's (1996: 62-64) notion of rhetorical design space.

In the second section, I link the general discussion on attention and rhetoric to three cognitive processes: memory, valuation and categorization. Memory refers to the mental mappings of an immediate environment used to simulate and attend to scenes not present in the immediate environment. Valuation refers to the phenomena individuals care about and how those valuations propagate collectively, the so-called "ratchet effect" of cultural learning. Categorization refers to the perceptual and conceptual representation of entities, events, actions, and relations in the world that, once in memory, are subject to evaluation and reevaluation. Categorization provide reference points for understanding the larger and more abstract complexes of events, actions, relations in real, imagined, past, present, or future scenes. The components of attention drive day-to-day acts of remembering, evaluating, and classifying.

In the third section, I introduce a model of semiotic analysis known a mental space and blending theory (MSBT) and show how it aids rhetorical theory and analysis. First developed by Gilles Fauconnier (1985, 1994, 1997) and elaborated in collaboration with Mark Turner (1996, 1998, in press) and a growing network of researchers, mental spaces are small, partial representations of those real or imagined, past, present, or future scenes discussed in the previous section. I will argue that MSBT is the preferred descriptive model because it handles with equal ease the micro and macro structures of meaning construction, providing a subtle, real-time account of rhetorical activity. The results of this research suggest strongly that the same cognitive principles operate at the highest levels of abstract thinking as they do at lower elementary levels of perception, thought, and action. I further argue that mental spaces and blending theory is can be explicitly linked to rhetorical theory via the notions of presence, identification, and design space.

One benchmark for assessing the value of any theory of meaning construction is that its speculations stand up to empirical scrutiny. To this end, I present two case studies in the fourth section. The first case study is of the slogan created by the United States Census Bureau soliciting participation in the year 2000 census. It reads: This is your future. Don't leave it blank. The second case study is of a pictorial scene appearing on the August 1998 issue of The New Yorker. It depicts a waiter wearing a mortar board and using it as an additional bus tray. Although my analysis is typical or post hoc text interpretation (an approach often criticized for advancing strong claims based on 'atypical' and 'sparse' evidence), it has three virtues: first, the data are real (not fabricated); second, they exploit different media (the first verbal, the second pictorial), suggesting that the same theoretical model can account for a broad spectrum of semiotic manifestations with little or no modification; third, each datum is strikingly different in medium, content, and purpose that the context sensitivity of this model will emerge as a desideratum of the case studies themselves.

In the concluding section of this essay, I offer some prospects for future research on the role attention may play in the rhetorical construction of the world.

References

Burke, K. 1969 [1950]. A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fauconnier, G. 1994 [1985]. Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, G. 1997. Mappings in thought and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, G & Turner, M. 1998. Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science, 22, 133-187.

Kaufer, D. & Butler, B. 1996. Rhetoric and the arts of design. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates.

Parasuraman, R. 1998. The attentive brain: Issues and prospects. In R. Parasuraman (Ed.), The attentive brain (3-15). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Perelman, Ch. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. 1969 [1958]. The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. J. Wilkinson & P. Weaver (Trans.). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. [Original in French.]