3.1. The Rhetorical Approach
3.1.2. Audiences
Rhetoric, as a form of com m unication, involves a speaker (or writer) and an au d ien ce. In o rd e r to e m p h asise the rh eto rica l d im en sio n of com m unication, I follow the lead of both Perelm an and Olbrechts-Tyteca and Billig in referring to the speaker as an 'orator' w ho addresses an audience in the process of m aking argum entative claims. The audience occupies a central role in a rhetorical approach. Indeed, we can identify a num ber of specific settings in which orators and audiences regard their relationship as defined principally in terms of rhetorical perform ance. The orator's perform ance is judged w ithin a set of relatively well know n and well defined param eters that relate to the characteristics of each type of
audience. Forum s such as parliam ent, the courtroom and the debating society spring to m ind here. Of course, audiences are not lim ited to such settings, as any form of com m unication involves some sort of audience. They can range in size from one person to an international television audience of billions. Some audiences are constituted for no m ore than five m inutes, w hereas others persist for centuries.
At this po in t then, an im p o rtan t distinction needs to be m ade betw een w h a t w e m ig h t call the 'actu al' audience w ho w itn ess the o rato r's addresses and the audience assum ed or 'im agined' by the orator. The two m ay well coincide, and classical treatises on rh eto ric em phasise the im p o rta n c e of m ak in g accu rate a ssu m p tio n s a b o u t an au d ien ce. N evertheless, a sep aratio n is w arran ted . There m ay be, for exam ple, circumstances in which the orator can at best only guess the nature of her audience. This is typified by the street corner orator addressing a fluid and variable public. H ow ever, even in settings in w hich an orato r m akes relatively safe and accurate assessm ents of his audience, the distinction betw een the actual and im agined audiences should still be m ade. The actual audience m ay react quite differently than the orato r may have hoped. C om m unication betw een an orator and an audience m ay enable the orator to adjust her assum ptions in reaction to audience responses.
As both Perelm an and O lbrechts-Tyteca and Billig argue, in o rd er to prepare the groundw ork for persuading an audience, it is necessary for the orator to establish com m onalities betw een herself and the audience. The com m unicative priority of any orator, according to K enneth Burke, is to establish an identification w ith an audience (Burke 1969). The orator m ust indicate to the audience that he is 'one of them ', 'on their side', or 'has th eir in te rests at h eart'. R elations of com m onality can be defined according to characteristics such as place of residence, political affiliation, ethnicity, gender, recreational hobbies, language, generation or favourite TV show . The construction of an im agined audience id en tity m ay be lim ited to a particular occasion, such as in the case of a funeral eulogy, or it may draw upon well established constructions of identity such as nation or religion.
By stressin g the im portance of audience com m onality, the rhetorical approach does not ignore the heterogeneity of audiences. On the contrary, d iv ersity w ith in au d ien ces takes on m uch significance in sh ap in g assu m p tio n s about com m onality. Differences betw een elem ents of the im agined audiences need to be taken into account in o rd er to assum e com m on characteristics. Inform ation ab o u t the ran g e of d iv ersity of audiences is therefore significant for orators in their attem pts to establish com m onality. If one is speaking on in d u strial relations to an audience that includes both unionists and em ployers, the repertoire of good reasons m ight include econom ic grow th, 'best practices', and the need to attract investm ent. We w ould expect the scope an d content of the rhetorical repertoire, how ever, to be significantly different if the audience consisted of only one of these groups. Indeed, orators frequently address a num ber of audiences or sub-audiences sim ultaneously. These m ultiple audiences can c reate b o th p ro b le m s a n d p o te n tia ls for th e o ra to r. The parliam entarian ostensibly addresses both the p arliam ent and the public, and to this we could add the press gallery and the p arliam entarian’s own party as identifiable audiences in the m ind of the orator. O rators need to be careful th at in m aking connections w ith particular audiences, they do not inadvertently alienate others.
A significant type of im agined audience is that w hich P erelm an and O lb rech ts-T y teca call the 'u n iv e rsa l au d ie n ce '. In v o catio n s of the universal audience are evident w hen the orator is concerned to deny the particularism of his claims. Phrases such as 'any reasonable person w ould agree', 'objective validity', 'hum an nature' and 'G od's will' are forms of com m on sense appeals to audiences deem ed to be u nencum bered by p a rtia l p e rs p e c tiv e s. As P erelm an a n d O lb rech ts-T y teca p u t it, '(a)rgum entation ad d ressed to a universal audience m ust convince the reader that the reasons adduced are of a compelling character, that they are self-evident, and possess an absolute and timeless validity, independent of local or historical contingencies' (Perelm an & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969: 32). The rhetorical force of such appeals, of course, depends upon the audience m em bers' w illingness to identify them selves as part of such a universal audience, rather than their capacity to reach the p articular conclusions
being proposed (this m ay require revelation or technical competence, for instance).
U niversal audiences sh o u ld be treated as historically and contextually contingent constructions in the sam e w ay as any audience defined in p articu larist term s. The appeal of arg u m en ts invoking N atu re, God or T ru th are no less p ro d u cts of historical and social construction than ap p eals to n atio n al, sectional or class in terests. T here are countless exam ples in which these particularist categories, such as class, nation and religion, are characteristically 'universalised' by those w ho invoke them in order to bolster their argum ents.
H aving outlined some of the considerations to be taken into account by the orato r in her im agination of an audience, th ere is an additional elem ent that is integral to any rhetorical context. N ot only are there those w ho are to be persuaded, there are also those w ho are located beyond the b o u n d aries of persuasion: those w ho are to be ignored, alienated or provoked. These tw o com ponents of the im agined audience are closely interconnected. Identification w ith an audience identity sim ultaneously constructs a category w hich is o utside the b o u n d s of th at identity, a shadow cast by the light of identity. As well as paying attention to the ’w e’, the audience to w hom the orator appeals, the picture is not com plete w ith o u t considering the rhetorical 'they' w hich is created at the sam e time. An audience identified as A ustralian invokes the state of 'non- A ustralianness'; an audience identified as 'concerned parents' calls into being those w ho are unconcerned. Even the m ost universalist constructs of audiences have in m ind a contrasting category which collects the chaff once the w h eat has been separated. A ppeals to 'all reasonable people' su g g ests the p o ssib ility of u n rea so n a b le p eo p le w ho are bey o n d persuasion. Similarly, God's will is not intended appeal to those who are beyond redem ption, while the term 'natural' alerts us to the existence of u n n a tu ra l behaviours. Any construction of id en tity is sim u ltan eo u sly inclusive and exclusive.
Identification of the commonality that binds an audience defines the scope of rhetorical resources available to the orator. Billig uses the term 'comm on sense' to denote a repertoire of shared stan d ard s of evaluative
criteria that can be used in order to identify w ith or persuade an audience. The contents of this repertoire are w hat Billig refers to as 'the seeds of arg u m en ts' th at o rators can d raw u p o n (1987: 196-7). The rhetorical deploym ent of comm on sense usually does not require justification, due to its taken-for-granted character.
Particular audiences are associated w ith particular repertoires of common sense. We m ight, for exam ple, identify elem ents of the comm on sense of Seventh-Day A dventists, or of m em bers of the C anberra press gallery, or of electric guitarists. Clearly, w hat is taken for granted by any one of these audiences will often be problem atic or irrelevant to other audiences. In ord er to illustrate this feature, I will use the case of the anti-abortion activists as a useful exam ple. Thom pson, Ellis and W ildavsky describe their cam paigners as attem pting to 'discom fort their prochoice opponents and appeal to those on the fence'. In setting the scene in this w ay, they in ad v e rte n tly d raw our atten tio n to the fact th at these activists are engaged in the activity of addressing a particular audience. This audience could be a parliam entary com m ittee, or it m ay be a national television audience. Im agine a different context in which the anti-abortionists are speaking at a church m eeting, in order to rally su p p o rt for their political activities. We w ould not be surprised if no m ention of rights w as m ade in this context at all, and that argum ents w ere draw n from them es such as church teaching or the w ord of God. Such argum ents are the type which T h o m p so n , Ellis an d W ild av sk y w o u ld co n sid er c o n so n a n t w ith hierarchical values.
N eed this difference in norm ative language deployed in the tw o contexts indicate inconsistency, bad faith or disingenuity on the part of the right-to- life activists? Q uite clearly, the tw o arg u m en ts are d irected to w ard s different audiences in different arg u m en tativ e contexts. R ather than focusing on the character of those advancing the argum ents, this crucial difference suggests that it w ould be a good idea to pay m ore attention to the character of the audiences. Rather than gravitating to an analysis of the norm ative character of individuals and groups, a rhetorical approach shifts the focus of atten tio n to the sh ared ev alu ativ e s ta n d a rd s of audiences. For exam ple, a particular individual m ay be em ployed as an
engineer, as well as being part of a church congregation, a shareholder in a public com pany and a m em ber of a m unicipal council. As a result, this individual is potentially part of audiences constructed according to quite different assum ptions.
If we adopt this audience-based focus, then the 'varying' behaviour of the anti-abortionists no longer appears as odd or perplexing. In both the public forum and the church m eeting, the anti-abortionist argum ents draw on stan d ard s of comm on sense. In the first case, the language of rights was used in order to appeal to the general public or policy m akers, while in the second, a select range of them es was deployed in a setting in w hich the speakers could reasonably assum e them to be salient. The language of rights m ay be less appropriate in the second setting than the language of C hristian authority, b u t these Christian values are even m ore likely to be counterproductive w hen addressed to the general public, or w hen directed to an audience of policy makers. Audience diversity shapes the repertoire of com m on sense th at can be used. The language of rig h ts can be considered as useful precisely because it enables orators to address a broad and diverse constituency.
Appeals to common sense leave plenty of scope for rhetorical m anoeuvre. The crucial elem ent of Billig's argum ent is that common sense repertoires should not be regarded as internally coherent system s of thought. On the contrary, Billig suggests th at it is w orthw hile to think of any stock of common sense as containing num erous conflicting themes. Billig uses the term 'd ilem m a' to denote co n trad icto ry them es th at co-exist w ithin com m on sense rhetorical repertoires (Billig 1987: 207), and argues that dilem m as are em bedded in language. The dilem m atic aspect of common sense is ap p aren t in situations in which elem ents of the repertoire are used to su p p o rt opposing evaluations. For instance, a parent m ay be faced w ith a choice between allowing and preventing their child to take part in a p o ten tially d an g ero u s b u sh w alk in g ex p ed itio n . On one side of the argum ent, caution and prudence could be draw n from parental common sense to justify not allow ing the child to go. On the other hand, the encouragem ent of independence could be draw n from the sam e common sense repertoire. W ithin this parental repertoire, prudence m ay be given a
rather different quality as over-protectiveness, and independence could be p o rtray ed as recklessness. This 'double-sided' character of m otives is a fam iliar resource to the professionally trained rhetorician, and is referred to by K enneth Burke as the 'proving of opposites' (1969: 25). Instead of p ro v id in g u n am biguous solutions to dilem m as, com m on sense plays a significant role in the construction of dilem m atic circum stances. The sharing of a repertoire of common sense, therefore, is not in any way to be m istaken for consensus of interpretation.