Rhetoric: You're Doing It Wrong

Reading Aristotle was slightly less cumbersome than Plato, but certainly had a more handbook like feel to it. It seems to be the text book for what was then the modern day Greek student. Did they cringe at the writing as much as I did? Probably not. Then again, our sense of writing style has sense evolved and I can't discount Aristotle too much for that: he had no idea people thousands of years in the future would be reading this.

The same can be said for writers today. They write with a specific audience mind and never think of the potentially endless tertiary readers out there. This nebulous field is a breeding ground for endless critique, but this isn't happening hundreds of years into the future. It's happening now. Take for instance of my favorite feminist websites, Jezebel. It's main goal is to put a snarky feminist twist on popular topics and articles floating around in the media and on the web. Recently, they posted a critique of a Fox News opinion article  that you can view here. The critique is entirely in gifs.

Given the audience, women of varying ages (though I would argue geared toward younger feminists and also men who are feminists or have an interest in gender issues) I would say that this is a rhetorical win.

Here's why: Aristotle says in book 1, chapter 2, "Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case to see the available means of persuasion. This is the function of no other art." The article on Jezebel is doing two things at once. One, it's persuading its viewers to see the ridiculousness of the Fox author's opinion and how outdated/close-minded/smug his opinions are. Two, it is also doing this through the use of very few words. I think this is a very smart technique because it requires the use of carefully selected clips of movies/tv (often no more than a few seconds) to portray what could be said in words. However, the choice of gifs makes the article that much funnier. It assumes the reader doesn't even need words to explain its choice of images.

Gifs kind of work as a universal language in the internet. I would argue that is transcends language to some extent and yet works so well with it. They used rhetoric in order to do this. In order for gifs to work as rhetoric, they have to come from well known scenes or convey meaning that the audience would readily latch on to. By that logic, they're sort of following Aristotle's second book when he details the different types of people and how to persuade them based on their personalities.  While Aristotle speaks a great deal on logic, I think these persuasive elements speak to a more "non-artistic" approach.

Images themselves can be interpreted in a vastly different manner depending on the viewer. But, the writer of this column has basically taken the Fox News Opinion article, chopped it up with gifs, and let the images speak for themselves and her critique about the writer. The main objective becomes this sense of mocking the original writer. The punchline comes at the end with the short line that the writer is a comedian followed swiftly by a gif of people laughing.

This sort of blending of mediums is what Jezebel does best, they adopt the rhetoric that the internet community uses and relies on to make a commentary about this rather smug article about this guy and his wife who waited until their honeymoon. His choice to write this opinion article speaks to the rhetoric of conversativism that Fox News consistently tries to create and Jezebel is the antithesis of that. When people usually hear abstinence talk, a disproportionate amount of responsibility is placed on a girl keeping her virginity. In fact, it can be down right creepy. Go ahead, google: purity balls.

Obviously, connecting someone's self worth to what is essentially a made up concept can be damaging and I think the point of this Jezebel article is to use the rhetoric of gifs (something considered fun and playful) to combat what can be a serious topic often bogged down by dogma.

Did they follow Aristotle's handbook to a tee? No, but they captured the key idea and that is to know one's audience.