Strategy  Studies

Explications  of  Rhetorical  Performance

John S. Nelson

Poroi, August, 2003

He who masters rhetoric,
            serves ego to a fault.
He feeds on gullibility
            and leads his prey about.
Beware of those who use their prose
            in devious endeavor.
For if they knew of simple truths,
            they’d need not wax so clever.¹
                                        — Johnny Hart

Rhetoric is the art of manipulation by words and deeds.²  At any rate, this is the principal definition of rhetoric for politics in western civilization.  The capacity for flattery, ornament, and outright deception goads critics who dream of clear ideas and plain speech to condemn rhetoric as predatory.  From Plato onward, people fear or disparage rhetors as wolves.³  The same goes for the rhetoricians who study or advise them.⁴  Especially these are wolves in sheep’s clothing.  Mythically they combine the rapacious teeth and claws of a predator with the insidious strings of a puppetmaster who stays concealed in background guises.  The ordinary disrepute of rhetoric, evident in Hart’s doggerel for the daily newspaper cartoon BC, traces to this popular impression.

People who use language have every reason to recognize that such sinister capabilities of speech cannot be severed from its constructive powers of communication.⁵  The sweetness of persuasion cannot always be stopped short of seduction.⁶  The rationality of logic cannot always be kept from coercion.⁷  The play of meaning that enables precision and invention also produces distortion and deception.⁸  The performance of gesture that enacts subtleties and complications also enforces effects or interpretations.⁹  Rhetoric explores and, yes, exploits these capabilities.

Some idealists who spurn politics as sin denigrate the art of manipulation as the practice of force and fraud.¹⁰  Some realists who play politics for keeps celebrate it just the same.¹¹  Both camps regard manipulation as the exercise of Archimedean power:  leveraging people to do what they otherwise would not have done.¹²  The trouble is that this makes manipulation into a simple machine.  It would pry at a particular target until successful, or not, then move to another object.  Rhetoricians know better.  Steeped in the republican tradition of prudence, they appreciate how manipulation configures many-dimensional fields of space, time, and imagination to construct situations for action rather than compelling elements of behavior.¹³  Emphasizing the art as much as the manipulation, rhetoricians often pursue their discipline as studies and practices of strategy.

Probably as old as the guidebook and the compendium of examples, the strategy study endures as an indispensable project of rhetorical inquiry.  The purpose is to explicate strategic aspects of a specific rhetorical performance.  The object of analysis could range from a single speech to a sustained campaign of oratory, from a telling gesture to an entire course of action, from a particular locution to a full network of discourse, from an individual ruling to a complete policy of governance.  Whatever the target, the strategy study treats it as a coherent whole that serves larger ambitions of political significance.  To discover and display those ambitions, the strategy study identifies the stratagems that comprise the object.  A study explains how each of these rhetorical moves could be expected to realize overarching ends to be served by the strategy.  It considers how the ends cohere, or don’t, then it examines how each move comes to fruition or goes astray.  The study measures these outcomes by the strategy’s own ends, but it also assesses them by the arguably more appropriate ends that the analyst might recommend.

Many a familiar form of scholarship can suit strategy studies.  They can fit forms usually devoted to reporting results, making arguments, synthesizing scholarship, or reviewing methods of study.  Strategy studies may appear as stringent criticisms of the ends or the means.  They may offer detailed appreciations of strategic visions or inventions.  They may take shape as carefully balanced commentaries on strengths and weaknesses.  David Zarefsky’s dispassionate dissection of the legal reasoning in the Supreme Court’s decision of Bush v. Gore is a vigorous example of the strategic commentary.¹⁴  The appreciation is familiar to scholars from the Festschrift essays that pattern the career contributions of distinguished professors.  The critique, of course, is what every scholar learns incessantly to do in graduate school.  The twist is to concentrate on strategy.

The need, therefore, is to clarify the rhetorical sense of strategy.  To do this, let us pursue two strategies in tandem:  specifying the chief components and explaining the key contrasts.  An exposition is bound to entangle the two, because people sometimes conflate strategies with their components.  Strategies include purposes, priorities, visions, devices, standards, and tactics.  A strategy study also addresses the strategists, their ambitions, and their evolving circumstances in order to judge both strategies and strategists.  Good rhetorical analysts avoid mistaking strategies for priorities, tactics, or especially plans.

Strategies are easily but disastrously misunderstood as plans, particularly in times when universities strive to follow firms into the business of “strategic planning.”  Plans are blueprints for execution on selected sites or application to distinct situations.  Plans are informed by overall purposes but seldom announce, explain, or defend them.¹⁵  The plans for this journal include the detailed formats for presenting its authors, contents, and contributions.  We apply a template for each kind of item every time we prepare information for publication in a new issue.  Nothing in a format explains the reasons for its colors or arrangements, even though the planning took hours for one detail after another, in part because these would be fixed for many issues to come.  Every nuance we could anticipate needed to be planned with excruciating care.  Plans are not especially porous, and their tiniest details can command application because they face knowable situations.

Strategies clarify priorities among their purposes because they ready devices for action in highly uncertain circumstances.  The journal’s strategies include publishing occasional features such as myth scapes, film takes, and word tours.  The primary purpose is to promote important kinds of rhetorical analysis and invention, while the secondary purpose is to generate a regular and expanding readership.  Unable to know what submissions might appear, we leave the journal open to these and other kinds of rhetorical contributions as they arrive.  Strategies are especially flexible, loose, porous.  Another of the journal’s strategies is to take advantage of the flexibilities permitted by online publication to diversify the lengths and forms of contributions along with the lengths and schedules of issues.  The main goal is to let the journal follow the scholarly rhythms its interdisciplinary communities, a further aim is to encompass a greater range of inquiries and inquirers, and a bonus turns out to be prompter publication than paper journals can manage.  Yet the success of such strategies depends on choosing well among a wealth of devices and tactics to act on the strategies in ever-changing terrains of scholarship.

Categorically more confident of their settings, plans can cut to the chase.  Plans specify most components of each outcome and how those go together to form it.  By clear implication, plans also prescribe the component activities for producing their products.  This leaves plans more like tactics than strategies.

Tactics should complete strategies in the ways that situational learning must complement insightful generalization.  A tactic is tactile, in touch with the situation rather than sensing it from a distance. Strategies see the big pictures, the full fields of action; tactics respond to the intimate textures of telling details and particular moments.  Strategy studies analyze tactics principally for their larger patterns and implications.  Tactics pursue the lesser, proximate ends that try to cohere as means to the larger, ultimate ends of a strategy.  Karl Rove mistrusts welfare states and wants Republicans to limit or dismantle America’s.  To serve that overarching purpose, one of Rove’s strategies is to mobilize religious fundamentalists to support Republicans.  His tactics include publicizing the religiosity of George W. Bush, preventing government support for research on stem cells that fundamentalists oppose, and providing government funds for faith-based services that replace government efforts.  Another of Rove’s strategies is to seek large tax cuts and debts that minimize government resources for social programs.  These are not plans because they lack applicable specifics that tell what taxes to cut and how or which debts to balloon and when?  As strategies, they do admit of tactics that include campaigning against Congressional recalcitrants of both parties, presenting tax cuts as remedies for economic ills of the moment, and renouncing the GOP’s long-standing doubts about government deficits.¹⁶

So far this sketches a distinction between Rove’s strategies and tactics.  A strategy study would consider as well their consequences in prospect or action.  How well are Rove’s strategies and tactics working by his standards?  How well are they doing by other standards arguably more fitting?  What accounts for these results?  Eventually a strategy study would judge the tactics, the strategies, the strategist, and their encompassing politics – in principle and in practice.  Along the way, it would take care as well to identify the strategic vision and strategic themes.  These relate the standards and understandings that configure a strategy.

Ambitions may drive strategies, but visions inform them.  (Yes, this is “the vision thing” that the elder Bush and his administration notoriously lacked, leaving it with aims and tactics in search of strategy.)  Strategic visions give us a good sense of where we are starting, where we are going, and why.  These visions enable us to recognize what we need to know from one situation to the next.  Especially they help us apprehend the contexts for each element and each strategem, evoking how these cohere into meaningful patterns.  Karl Rove’s political vision is less capitalist or libertarian or republican than populist.¹⁷  In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore pursued a populist strategy, of us little people against the special interests in power, but his political vision has been environmental and neoliberal – in the sense shared by Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council.¹⁸  Entering the 2003 recall election in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger made the populist argument and sounded the populist theme that independent wealth would keep him governor of all Californians, by removing him from special-interest bidding.  Yet a theme or an argument is not a full-fledged strategy, nor is a strategy the same as a vision to inform and be served by it.  A politician who sees every situation as a reason for tax cuts is a Johnny One Note, a monomaniac – and not even a visionary, let alone a strategist.  Strategy studies analyze how commitments on these many levels of action cohere (or don’t) to succeed (or not).

Strategies and plans do not cohere in the same way.  Plans are fabrics, with the elements woven tight into cloths ready for cutting and sewing.  Strategies are networks, with the webbings left loose to catch or otherwise direct to their purposes part of what passes near.  The components of plans are specific rules and measures that define and dictate particular deeds.  The aspects of strategies are prudential principles and moves that might be made, depending on the emerging circumstances.  Plans are pre-determined; strategies are opportunistic.

That is why we need both words at once in “strategic plan,” and why the term can be an oxymoron.  Strategic plans are to be “plans” in specifying the products and processes.  They are to be “strategic” in articulating the purposes, priorities, and tactics for this production in terms of an overarching vision that heeds the horizons for action.  Institutions that privilege the formation and application of plans make strategic planning into a rationalized, bureaucratized process from the pages of Frederick Taylor, Max Weber, or Franz Kafka.¹⁹  Organizations that emphasize the conception and commitment to strategies turn strategic planning into an entrepreneurial, project-based politics worthy of Peter Drucker and Thomas Peters.²⁰  A pitfall for the strategy analyst is to display the intermediate and eventual consequences as evidence for pat execution of a master plan.  Instead the strategy analyst strives to trace a coherent interplay of priorities, opportunities, and tactics.  All the while, the analyst must remember that coherence in strategy guarantees only meaning, not success.  This is because strategies confront uncertainties too categorical for plans.

Once I had a small part in building a house by strategy rather than blueprint or other plan.  The builder was a fellow graduate student in political theory who had enough friends for labor, funds for land, and time for flexibility.  He had learned that abandoned houses were available for scavenging due to a new dam soon to create a lake in a nearby county.  He could not know well in advance what materials his volunteer laborers would glean, so he could not build from a plan.  “I believe in books” was his mantra, and they gave him a general sense of how to proceed plus a source of specific instructions for particular tasks.  He also reserved money for a finish carpenter to help with the hardest moves.  On the whole, however, my friend made his house from a vision of how to fit a structure onto his land, a set of priorities for the kinds of rooms and coordinating looks, and an evolving sense of what could be done with the materials and skills coming to hand.  We contributors admired the house mightily, and the builder’s daring may have been even more amazing.  But as the house took shape under his generalship, the most persistent experience was learning in detail what he had asserted in principle:  that the uncertainties and surprises were too great to permit effective plans.  Only strategies could suffice, and fortunately they did.

By etymology from ancient Greek, strategy is military ( strategós) leadership ( ágein).²¹  If anything goes in war, as Thomas Hobbes explained, it is because everything is uncertain.²²  The same is true of politics, at least in modern times.  The principal engines of uncertainty are others, iterations, and communications.  People surprise us, time moves on, and “words are the source of misunderstandings.”²³  Fortuna is the term that Niccolò Machiavell made famous for all this.²⁴  Strategies must reach across many people, possible situations, and modes of communications if they are to enjoy any prospect of success in the face of Fortuna.  That is why military models of leadership, discipline, and vision came to Machiavelli’s pen in illustrating principles for strategic action.  It is also why strategies enter into performance as sustained campaigns of conduct open to many tactics along the way.  Campaigns respond to evolving conditions rather than defending a firm stand regardless of what may come.²⁵  Strategists are like generals, and to analyze their work is to judge their generalship.

Likewise to pursue even a part of a strategy is to carry out an overall mission rather than acquit a particular task or execute a specific plan.  When Fortuna intervenes, amendments must be made to fulfill the mission.  To create good strategies, generals must tap the local knowledge of commanders in the field, both to match priorities with changing conditions and to provide the leeway that actual operations are apt to require.  To consummate good strategies, soldiers must stay responsive to unfolding situations and responsible for mission parameters.  To confront the complications introduced by fundamental uncertainties is the strategic order of the day.  Plans can allow for contingencies; strategies must face oppositions and other systematically unsettling dynamics.  The temptation for analysts is to reconstruct strategies into Mission Impossible plots:  where every move dovetails perfectly, and great planning or improvisation turns the intrusion of Fortuna to strategic advantage.  ’Tis a template resolutely to be resisted.  Strategy stories often need to stay ragged to be truthful and telling.

By the twentieth century, though, people had every reason to know that uncertainty is the human condition.  Certainty is the impossible dream of discredited idealisms, foundationalisms, literalisms, metaphysics, fundamentalisms, and more.²⁶  Hoary strategy comes to the fore as the response.  Actions move from focal targets to dispersed arrays and fields full of plays, players, rules, standards, obstacles, inventions, and sometimes referees, but only siren songs of certainty.  Proofs give way to games:  language games from Ludwig Wittgenstein, economic games from John von Neumann, political games from organizational theorists, and so on.²⁷  Bridges collapse, roads corrode, and ivory towers lean close enough to their grounds and foundations to spot at last how holes and gaps, cracks and crevices abound.  When we no longer pretend to abolish aporia, we turn to poroi:  practical ways and means for proceeding through the uncertainties of the abyss or interstice.  To coordinate such resources, we generate strategies.  Thus strategy becomes the postmodern counterpart of classical poesis.  It is how we make-to-do:  rhythming our words and deeds in pervasively uncertain times.

Uncertainties complicate the assessment of strategies.  Sophistication in a rhetorical sense is essential to judging them.  Strategies are intentional, and this makes strategists responsible for their strategies.  Intentions can go astray, accountably or unaccountably – as analysts of strategy should detail.  Strategy studies do take account of intentions, but not always at a personal level.  They may assume the modern premise that we humans use words to speak and motions to act. Or they may accept instead the postmodern presumption that discourses speak through our human utterances, as practices act through our human gestures.  They might even trace interactions of individual and institutional intentions.  On one level or another, though, analysts conventionally connect strategic intentions to the tools, settings, and results for action.

Analysts do this to judge the strategists as well as the strategies.  Strategy studies argue judgments.  Even a nonpartisan commentary evaluates the strategies and strategists.  A strategy study without judgments is like a pie without fillings:  all crust and no content.  Accordingly the proper length and depth of a strategy study should follow the rule for sizing a pie crust:  make it just wide and thick enough to support a good baking for all the ingredients, crust included.  Mega pies may make a feast, but mini pies can be a treat, while something in the middle could please both Goldilocks and Aristotle.  With intentions and conclusions at issue, strategy studies may be more personal and political in tone than has become standard for scholarship that reports findings or considers possibilities but shies away from the putting analysts on the spot of judgment.

How does this work when the “strategist” is an impersonal entity like a culture, discourse, ideology, or institution?  Then the strategy study approximates a system analysis.  The strategies are not ideational but structural; the intentions are not personal but functional.  Various analysts treat the American polity as populist rather than democratic, liberal, or republican.  On this basis, a strategy study might explain how populist politics rely on visions of popular participation unto upheaval, strategems of political spectacle and government cynicism, devices like primaries and regulations and scandals, plus tactics such as demagoguery or opinion polls or press exposés.²⁸  A strategy study of populism in America could analyze how it has responded to uncertainties of economy and policy along with surprises from art and technology.  How might the Civil War, the Great Depression, the World Wars, the Cold War, globalization, and terrorism play into populist politics?  As a culture, discourse, or ideology, populism neither is nor has a plan; it is too diffuse and dynamic for that.  To treat populism as a strategy or even its own strategist, by contrast, is to consider how it moves coherently to confront uncertainties as opportunities.  The analyst and the audience have much to learn from explicating such strategic modes of rhetorical performance.

© John S. Nelson, 2003.

Notes

¹     Johnny Hart, BC, syndicated newspaper feature, December 8, 1989.

²     See William H. Riker:  The Art of Political Manipulation, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986; The Strategy of Rhetoric, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996.  Also see John S. Nelson, “Political Theory as Political Rhetoric,” What Should Political Theory Be Now? Nelson, ed., Albany, State University of New York Press, 1983, pp. 169-240.

³     See Plato, Phaedrus, Robin Waterfield, tr., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.

⁴     See Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, New York, Bantam Books, 1974, pp. 81 and 377-388.

⁵     See Jean Beaudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, Sylèvre Lotringer, ed., Bernard and Caroline Schutze, trs., New York, Semiotext(e), (1987), 1988.

⁶     See Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, Brian Singer, tr., New York, St. Martin’s Press, (1979), 1990.

⁷     See Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981.

⁸     See N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1990.

⁹     See Ferdinand Mount, The Theatre of Politics, New York, Schocken Books, 1972.

¹⁰    See Greg Bear, Heads, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1990; Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Thomas McCarthy, tr., Boston, Beacon Press, (1994), 1997.

¹¹    See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Robert M. Adams, ed. and tr., New York, Norton, 1977.

¹²    See John S. Nelson, “Power and Violence in Mediated America,” paper for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2000.

¹³    See Robert Hariman, ed., Prudence, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.  Also see John S. Nelson, “Commerce among the Archipelagos:  Rhetoric of Inquiry as a Practice of Coherent Education,” The Core and the Canon, L. Robert Stevens, G. L. Seligmann, and Julian Long, eds., Denton, TX, University of North Texas Press, 1993, pp. 78-100.

¹⁴    See David Zarefsky, “The Structure of Argumentation in Bush v. Gore,” Arguing Communication and Culture, G. Thomas Goodnight, ed., Washington, DC, National Speech Communication Association, 2002, pp. 537-546.

¹⁵    Obvious exceptions were the pseudo-plans for central-command economies in the Soviet style.  But those were exercises in symbolic gratification as much as genuine plans.  They combined talk of exalted purposes with fanciful processes and fraudulent targets of production.  They were less for application or execution than inspiration or propaganda.  On symbolic gratification, see Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, (1964), second edition, 1985.

¹⁶    See Nicholas Lemann, “The Controller:  Karl Rove Is Working to Get George Bush Reëlected, But He Has Bigger Plans,” New Yorker, 79, 11, May 12, 2003, pp. 68-83.

¹⁷    Ibid.

¹⁸    Also see Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1992.  Charles Peters, “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto,” Washington Monthly, 15, 3, May, 1983, pp. 8-18; Bill Clinton, “What Good Is Government, and Can We Make It Better?” Newsweek, 125, 15, April 10, 1995, pp. 21-25.

¹⁹    See Fredrick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, New York, Harper, 1911; Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” From Max Weber, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trs., New York, Oxford University Press, 1946, pp. 196-244; Robert Hariman, “A Boarder in One’s Own Home:  Franz Kafka’s Parable of the Bureaucratic Style,” Political Style, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 141-176.

²⁰    See Peter F. Drucker:  Managing for Results, New York, Harper and Row, 1964; Managing in Turbulent Times, New York, Harper and Row, 1980; Innovation and Entrepreneurship, New York, Harper and Row, 1985; Managing in a Time of Great Change, New York, Harper and Row, 1995.  Also see Thomas J. Peters:  In Search of Excellence, New York, Harper and Row, 1982; A Passion for Excellence, New York, Random House, 1985; Thriving on Chaos, New York, 1987; Liberation Management, New York, Knopf, 1992.

²¹    See John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins, New York, Arcade, 1990, p. 505.

²²    See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Michael Oakeshott, ed., New York, Collier, 1962.

²³    See Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, Katherine Woods, tr., New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1943, p. 67.

²⁴    See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Robert M. Adams, ed. and tr., New York, Norton, (1977), second edition, 1992.

²⁵    See John S. Nelson, Tropes of Politics, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, pp. 205-230.

²⁶    See John S. Nelson, “Political Foundations for Rhetoric of Inquiry,” The Rhetorical Turn, Herbert W. Simons, ed., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 258-289.

²⁷    See Ludwig Wittgenstein:  Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M Anscombe, tr., New York, Macmillan, third edition, 1958; On Certainty, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, eds., Denis Paul and G. E. M Anscombe, trs., New York, Harper and Row, 1969.  Also see John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1944; James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations, Bergen, Universitetsforlaget, 1976; Françoise Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, Wlad Godzich, tr., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, (1979), 1985.

²⁸    See William H. Riker, Liberalism against Populism, San Francisco, W. H. Freeman, 1982; Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988.