What does it imply to study rhetoric today? The current moment is characterized by
many societal – often binary – divisions, by a lack of identification with others, and an
unwillingness to move beyond communicative echo chambers, often restricted within
the digital sphere. At the same time, many people are increasingly pushing back against
these divisions and are exploring ways to move beyond the moral panic and
reappropriate digital and real-world affordances to create (digital) spaces for common
ground, to react, to create meaning, and to renegotiate our rhetorical understanding of
the world. In this paper, we aim to explore how the study of rhetoric can respond to and
engage with these often contentious dynamics.
We aim to do so by moving forward with Kenneth Burke and will explore how his
conceptual framework can help us to navigate in the current moment. For example, his
claim that ‘all human beings are poets’ helps us consider how “the poetic orientation
asks people to see the world as a work in progress to which they contribute and, hence,
see themselves as composers rather than a passive audience” (George, 86). By
redefining humans as poets, Burke argues the need to move beyond individual actions
or societal structures and to orient ourselves to the complex networks that create
meaning and constitute identities. Indeed, Burke’s lifetime in politico-aesthetic thinking
taught him (and us) that “‘citizens in a democracy’ […] are charged with paying attention
to the ‘ambiguities of identification’ that are always inherent in ‘that tiny first-person
plural pronoun, ‘we’” (Burke 50, qtd. in Weiser 10). As “we” is promoted as both the
problem (us vs. them) and the solution (all of us together) to today’s binaries, how do
“we” as rhetoricians understand its changing roles?
Contact: Kris Rutten & Amanda Adam, Ghent University,
