Public Relations and the Rhetoric of Civil Society

Public Relations Rhetoric


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Public Relations and the Rhetoric of Civil Society



Steve Mackey
School of Communication & Creative Arts, Deakin University




Abstract

The intention of this paper is to build on a book by Anne Surma (2005).
It takes some of Surma’s ideas probably beyond what was originally
intended in order to suggest their logical conclusions for the practice of
public relations. Surma argues that writing and reading of every type
enables or otherwise facilitates or restricts imagination. Further, this
shaping or inflection of the imagination leads to the shaping or the
inflection of the type of ‘ethic’ which we are able to hold in our heads
about the world which surrounds us. If this is the case then public
relations writing, which has the very raison d’etre of influencing
thought, must lend itself to important analysis in this regard. This paper
presumes the reader has a basic understanding of Charles Saunders
Peirce’s notion of semiotics.

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Introduction

Surma (2005) explains how the different sorts of ‘ordinary’ writing which we produce and
encounter in everyday life have consequences for the ethics of our world:

…ethics, imagination and rhetoric are necessarily interwoven in writing… our first
and foremost interpersonal, moral and creative social (humanities centred) practice is
not only limited by, but can challenge and change those discourses that preclude us
from using our imagination when we write to and for one another. (p. viii-ix)

Surma argues that how we write and how we are encouraged to read by the way others write
limits, opens, distorts or encourages the flowering, or the shutting down of all of our
imaginations in particular ways. For Surma, writing, any writing, is an engine which may
build, pervert, provoke and otherwise fashion thinking – behind the scenes of the conscious
mind as it were – in all sorts of positive or worrying ways. This quality of writing to shape, or
to at least to tend to shape thinking is what is meant by the term ‘rhetoric’. But as Surma
convincingly argues, it is not just the high or low art of the novel or pulp fiction which seeds
our thoughts rhetorically. Rather, all writing does this. For instance the mundane job
specification of a building engineer is laced with the complex subject positions of
competitive capitalism when they tell a client where safety exits should be located. I take
‘subject positioning’ to mean: how is the company regarded (seen) by the client who reads
the report? – How does the building engineer ‘appear’ in her reports to her professional
engineering colleagues? – How does she appear to the marketers, or those concerned with the
finances in her own company when those internal audiences read their copy of the report?
And then, how are those internal audiences ‘hailed’ or ‘cast’ as subjectivities, that is, what is
the shape or type of subjectivity which is presumed or intended to be induced by the
particular writing as an effect of the designed discourse - on those internal audiences? In
other words: What is the rhetorical effect of the writing? Take another of Surma’s examples:
The report of geothermal engineers has to negotiate a careful path through what it might be
ethical and legal to allow a client to imagine about a prospective project which may be
considerably lucrative for the engineers’ company, but which may end up like the geothermal
project which caused earthquakes in Basel, Switzerland in 2006 (AAP, 2007). How do the
writers of the geothermal report regard their audiences? What effects on the imagination are
these writers intending to (rhetorically) produce in their potential clients’ minds? How do the
writers hope the clients will end up weighing the risks versus the environmental benefits in a
way which is created by the particular facts which are given, the emphasis on different facts
and the environmental contexts in which the (selected – emphasised or de-emphasised) ‘facts’
are couched? Or is the environmental context ‘boosterised’ at all? Are the risks properly
explained? What is ‘proper’ risk explanation in this case? What sort of a (slightly changed?)
person goes home that night from the client organisation’s office after reading the report?
How has her subjectivity changed: that is - her outlook on life, her imagination of what may
be or what may not be the case or the possible case? Or has it changed at all? In another case
study Surma implies that an Australian government report on the Stolen Generationi may be
written in a way which tries to steer the imagination towards: ‘stolen generation is a false
ideological term invented by black armband activists who want a current generation to pay
for something they had nothing to do with.’ – Can such a style of discourse, albeit a discourse
replete with valid ‘facts’, affect, or ‘close down’ the thinking of the reader in such a way that
their subjectivity, their possible ways of imagining Australia, becomes unsympathetic to this
series of atrocities? In another case study Surma explains how a prime ministerial or
presidential web site may be constructed pictorially and semantically to convey the rhetoric
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of calm command and order. – As far as our imaginations are (should be) concerned: ‘We
live in nations which are in safe hands’. In another she shows how e-democracy online
facilities may have the same authoritative-authoritarian-patrician: “Don’t you worry about
that.” – ‘Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen’ii alter-castingiii rhetoric as the presidential and prime
ministerial web sites of the previous example. Or by contrast - with different rhetoric, - that is
with different discursive design, those same government agency web sites may be
constructed in ways which set out facts and understandings in contexts which invite and
facilitate the development of a practical imagination about how government, politics and
society could be more open, more egalitarian.

The book draws from the both ancient and extremely topical theoretical schema of
rhetoric to argue that these influences on imagination, mediated by writing, translate into
potent effects on our lives. Surma is concerned with the massive output of commercial and
organisational writing by governments, corporations and by simply you and me, writing
which pervades our world and our minds. Surma accepts that:

…the post-structuralist view of language as a signifying system, in which signs are only
definable by their relationship to and difference from other signs, means that rhetoric and
writing do not reflect the ‘real’ world unproblematically, but instead help to construct (a
provisional version of) it. (p. 10)

This paper will suggest how the theory of Surma may be taken further to bolster the claim
that semiotic theory can be usefully employed to speculate about how public relations
influences imagination and influences the consequent ethic and ethics which civil society
holds.

Notions of rhetoric can be improved by current notions of sophistry
Some people from a professional communication background might find it hard to resist
describing much of Jacque Derrida’s work as hard to understand to say the least. One can
sense a similar irritation which Plato expresses under the guise of “Stranger” in the dialogue
‘Sophist’:

He then, who traces the pedigree of his art as follows–who belonging to the conscious
or dissembling section of the art of causing self contradiction, is an imitator of
appearance, and is separated from the class of phantastic which is a branch of image
making into that further division of creation, the juggling of words, a creation human
and not divine–anyone who affirms the real sophist to be of this blood and lineage
will say the very truth. (Hutchins, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., & University of
Chicago, 1952, p. 279 )

Derrida is clearly “an imitator of appearance” of the way “creation” can be spoken about –
how understandings can be reached on creation via a “juggling of words” – rather than via
“divine” means. In Derrida’s terms, understandings of the world have to be approached
linguistically, rather than via the inner essentialism – the extra-linguistic special humanness
or ‘logocentrism’ implied by philosophers including Husserl and Plato (Mautner, 1997, p.
132), (Rivkin & Ryan, 2004, p. 300). Derrida’s textual “deconstructive” approach implies
that: “…hypothetically, one may envisage an endless regression of dialectical interpretations
and readings without any stable, essential meaning.” (Cuddon, 1992, p. 223). For these
reasons and others, Derrida’s work is compared to that of the sophists: (Jarratt, 1991, pp, 7-
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8), (Herrick, 2005, pp. 253-256). There is no space to detail the history and scholarship of
sophistry in this short paper. Rather the reader is asked to accept that current prejudices are
sufficient for us to understand 5th century BCE sophists as ‘verbal alchemists’. They were
players with words, symbols and cultural expressions. Many of them were itinerants and
foreigners to Athens. As such they could see how ‘realities’ were constructed and ‘spoken’ in
the words, symbols and mythologies of various contrasting societies. Their stock in trade was
the destabilisation and reinstitution of the very meaning of expression in ways which won
them accolades in the toughly fought rhetorical contests of the post-Periclean legal and
political democratic processes. But if both Derrida and the sophists show that what appears as
‘reality’ is dependent on the way reality is expressed – then the way reality is expressed is, to
say the least, rather important! For the ancient Athenians the ‘winning’ reality – the apparent
reality which was acted upon – was expressed through the rhetorics of the most able sophists.
Perhaps the ‘winning’ realities about global warming and the war in Iraq – the apparent
realities which are being acted upon – are those expressed by the most skilful public relations
programs? This approach is not fanciful. It fits the position of current scholars of sophistic
rhetoric:

[deconstruction]…calls into question knowledge/discourse configurations. Scholars in
speech communication as well as in composition theory, rejecting a view of rhetoric
dependent on non-verbal object knowledge [logocentrism] as a precondition for
discourse about reality, have revived a rhetorical epistemology originating in the
sophists. (Jarratt, 1991, p. 8)

If the above gives the reader a feeling of modernist certainties slipping away, all one can say
is: Welcome to the world of the postmodern and its intellectual profession par excellence:
spin doctoring, excuse me… public relations.

It is arguably the above sort of postmodern conceptualisations which are needed for a
genuine theory of public relations’ role and effects. Understandings of the ‘New Rhetoric’
approaches of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969); of the
‘Argumentation Theory’ of Stephen Toulmin (Toulmin, 1958); and of the ‘Discourse Ethics’
of J rgen Habermas (Habermas & Outhwaite, 1996: Ch. 15: "Discourse Ethics".) could also
be coopted as bases for a rhetorical theory of public relations. However, these latter three
approaches imply modernist philosophical presumptions. They are about using ‘normal’ (i.e.
non-sophistic, non-deconstructive) dialectic with which to try to get behind the ‘norms’ in
which that same ‘investigating’ dialectic is couched. There is no radical break with the basis
on which the whole critique is ‘read’ and ‘spoken’ as there is in the approach of Derrida; in
the approach of allied postmodernism theorists; and in the approach of the sophists. However,
how is the practical theorist of public relations able to ‘anchor’ as it were the spiralling
textual deconstruction upon textual deconstruction, - the seemingly infinite polysemy which
is implied by Derrida? How can we constrain, or get under control the implication of endless
multiple textual significations with endless rhetorical consequences in writings? How can we
constrain deconstruction without resorting to modernism, essentialism and logocentrism?
Doesn’t postmodernism and post-structuralism inevitably imply critique upon critique of
texts leading to infinitely fragmented imaginings with infinite and thus consequently NO
ethical positions? How can an infinitely delinquent sophistry be tamed and schooled into
manageable, usable and describable rhetorics which might be recognisable in terms of
Surma’s project?


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Semiotics and post-structuralism need cautious examination

Again the full answer to the above question must await another paper. However the outline of
that paper can be indicated in the space which is available. Derrida’s and allied post-
structuralist theoretical approaches emerged from the late 20th century critique of semiology
and the exposure of the problems surrounding the structuralist linguistics approach. These
debates have been endlessly described, eg: (Fiske, 1990); (Eagleton, 1996); (Hawkes, 2003)
and will merely be indicated here. Essentially structuralist linguistics was self-referential. The
logic of structuralism was that codes of language needed to appear all at once in order to
comprise the subject’s thinking processes, and then the subject was trapped within this
‘prison house of language’ where signification could only be made in terms of the sign
systems which already comprised thinking. See inter alia: (Jameson, 1972); (de Man, 1979);
(Nietzsche, passim). Post-structuralism tries to fix this problem by allowing for multiple
readings or multiple connotations of the sign, inter alia: (Barthes, 1994); (Eco, 1979);
(Derrida, 1970). But it is not clear how these ‘multiplicities’ can be anchored or limited. In
other words, the question is, cannot Surma’s writers of all types have their writings
understood in limitless ways? Cannot any meaning, any inflection be ‘read into’ writing by
any reader who brings their own conceptions, their own lifeworld contexts, their own mental
significations to their linguistic or other symbolic ‘readings’? As we have seen above in
Surma, despite this difficulty, post-structuralism continues to claim legitimacy as a theory of
the way the world is signified by signs despite the implications for indeterminacy or
polysemy. Now, as has been said, post-structuralism emerges out of semiology which is
accused by Deely (2001, 2003) of being the last gasp of modernism: That is, despite
Derrida’s work, Deely still claims post-structuralism requires a logocentric or ‘essential’
subject – a mental essence which is comprised of linguistic codes. According to Deely
(2001):

…from Saussure through Barthes to Derrida, to see the possibilities of semiology in
their true light, a larger and deeper understanding of the sign is necessary than the
original semiologists had the intellectual resources or historical consciousness to allow
possible. (p686)

Deely’s understandings come from a lifetime of tracing semiotics – as opposed to semiology.
Deely says semiotics did not originate with Aristotle. It originated with the discussion of
signs by St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 C.E.) in Augustine’s ‘On Christian Doctrine’
(Augustine, 1952, p. 657). This founding saint of semiotics ☺ had previously been Professor
of Rhetoric at Milan. The study of signs progressed through the Latin Scholastics, notably
Duns Scotus, Ockham, Soto, Fonseca, Suarez, Poinsot and others before it was taken up by
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) . Peirce refers to the scholastics but not to the most
advanced study of semiotics by the scholastics in Poinsot aka John of St Thomas (Deely, &
Powell, 1985). Deely argues for a realist notion of ‘semiotics’ and is opposed to the way the
label ‘semiotics’ is used by post-structuralists who arise in the semiological tradition and who
can be argued to remain logocentric and thus nominalist.

So how can we anchor the Derridean infinite regress, or as Plato might have seen it – the
baseless word play of sophists intent on overturning every anchor of solid knowledge? How
can we produce a workable theorisation of public relations, writing, imagination and ethics
which explains rhetorical processes in civil society without lapsing into the solipsism of
infinite semiosis? The answer to this problematic must lie in Peirce’s notion of pragmatics
and in the notion of ‘mental habit’, or ‘habitus’ as this latter concept is sometimes expressed
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throughout the history of ideas from Aristotle to Bourdieu. Peirce’s ‘Pragmatic Maxim’ states
that:

Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the
objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of
your conception of the object. (Misak, 2004, p. 3)

…which for the purposes of the present paper is interpreted as follows: All we can know –
the whole of our conception of anything – does not appear directly as a conception of an
object. Instead our ‘knowing’ comes about during the process when our conception of an
object is mentally ‘related to’, or ‘debated’ dialectically with others of our conceptions. These
other conceptions are the conceptions or thoughts which comprise our original thinking or
subjectivity, or which in general comprise the thinking and identity-subjectivity of the
particular lifeworld or culture which we glean our subjectivities from. The new conception
presents itself to the previously existing conceptualisations – which we can also regard as
Peirce’s “interpretant” (Peirce, Weiss, & Hartshorne, 1974:passim). The interpretant bases
much of its reaction or reception of the new concept on ‘what-has-been-found-to-be-the-case
previously’, i.e. on existing habits of thought and behaviour. Thinking reactions are always
moderated or edited in this reflexive, post hoc manner by our habits of reaction and
associated thoughts. That is, unless we are deliberately set on having fictional mental
adventures, or there is some pathology at work, we always conceive thoughts by comparing
new inputs for a logical fit among the existing myriad of possible interpretations which arise
in terms of existing ‘habits of our mind’. Of course often adding new concepts to old
concepts results in the acceptance of fresh understandings. But the important point is that
‘habit of thought’ imposes a limit. There is a check. There is reflexivity. There is a dialectic
process of considering the ‘best fit’. In this way we can argue that. Far from being infinitely
polysemous, or ‘victim’ to ‘infinite semiosis’ – our conceptions are directed by an ‘economy
of understanding’ - by how our culture and circumstances orient us to think about the
something which was the ground of the new conception.

This cultural/ideological constraint and commensurate reflection in terms of habit is, to
repeat, a post hoc process – a reflective after-the-fact process. It contrasts with the ‘before the
fact’ or ‘in the moment’, non-reflexive process of immediate correlation or connotation or
denotation implied by post-structuralism. The post-structuralists emerge out of the Saussurian
logocentric, semiological tradition where ‘habit’ is not emphasised. This compares with the
importance of the ‘habitual’ component to thought which is emphasised throughout in Peirce.
See for instance:

First [belief] is something that we are aware of; second it appeases the irritation of doubt;
and third it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a
habit: Peirce (1955, p. 28)…

And

Now the identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act…What the habit is
depends on when and how it causes us to act…Thus we come down to what is
[habitually found to be] tangible and conceivably practical, as the root of every real
distinction of thought, no matter how subtile it may be; and there is no distinction of
meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. (p. 30)
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What Peirce is implying here is that our very whole-mind and bodily orientation is, as it were
pre-programmed by previous semiosis. This coincides with the notions of habitus in
Bourdieu (1977). The implication is that thoughts may be changed, but they will only change
within the pragmatic set of reference of the subject’s mind-body, or the mind bodies in the
extant culture. Peirce develops his theory from the Scholastic tradition which also emphasises
habit of thought. See for instance William of Ockham (c. 1280- c. 1349) (1957ch. I & II). In
these chapters entitled: ‘The notion of knowledge or science’ and ‘On epistemology’ the
notion habitus is used repeatedly by Ockham in the sense:

For after someone has frequently apprehended an indifferent proposition, he finds
himself more inclined to apprehend and think about this proposition than he was
before. Therefore he has now a habitus inclining him towards acts of apprehension.
The fact that there is also a habitus inclining one towards acts of judgement is clear
from the statement of the Philosopher [Aristotle] in the sixth book of the Ethics. (p19)

The Scholastics drew heavily from Aristotle who also uses the notion of habit of thought.
Ockham is here indicating Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book VI. See also Books I and II
for references to where virtuous or ‘incontinent’ habits of thinking are implied, eg: “…while
moral virtue comes about as a result of habit…none of the moral virtues arise in us by nature”
(Aristotle & Ross, 1952, p. 348) In contradistinction to the semiotic tradition arising via
Peirce, the approach of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) does not emphasise the notion
‘habit’. de Saussure was a Swiss linguist who was perhaps not as au fait with this notion of
‘habit’ in the history of ideas as was US philosopher and logician Peirce. Consequently post-
structuralism does not have this buffer against unmanaged polysemy - against infinite
semiosis.

So, what practical implications does the above approach to semiotic theory have for
public relations writing and other public relations activity? Does this theory help us to
understand the alleged power of this industry’s deliberately organised use of rhetoric in many
facets of civil society? The major claim for the above exposition is that: if we understand
semiotics as a post hoc process – that is as a process where incoming signification is always
engaged in a dialectical – that is a ‘negotiation’, a ‘debate’, or a quasi-reasoning ‘dance’ with
extant signification in the individual or her lifeworld, then, what actually happens in public
relations processes in terms of semiotics becomes more clear. What happens is this: Public
relations activity is about changing minds. But any invocation of new thinking, and change to
the orientation of imaginations has to start by taking account of the situation that there are
already ingrained, habituated patterns or relationships of signs and sign matrixes which
already comprise the individual subject or her culture. Of course these sign relations and the
matrixes or complexities of these sign relations – these ‘interpretants’ in Peirce’s terms – are
not all stable. Many of them oscillate, or ebb and flow, many of them are prone to toppling.
However others are solid and stable. A great weight of these signifying systems HAVE to be
stable or in homeostasis. Otherwise there would not be human society. Instead there would be
a pathological lifeworld-cultural mess. Now, what happens in public relations, rather like as
advocated by Aristotle in his Rhetoric (1991), is that existing signification, i.e. how people
think – how the target public thinks – is assessed and measured by the quantitative and
qualitative methods of surveys and focus groups and the like. What these research methods
are measuring is the habitus of the subjectivities targeted. In a professionally planned public
relations campaign it is after this sounding of the extant semiotic constitution of the subject
that the semiotic intervention is devised. In other words the ‘signs’ of the message, for
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instance the writing, is devised in such a way that the ensuing ‘negotiation’ between the
interpretant sign systems of the habituated subject with the incoming signs of the new
argumentation (the campaign) is ‘reasonable’. That is this ‘negotiation’ has to be seen as
PRACTICAL in terms of a dialectical process intended to alter, however slightly, the target
subjectivity or subjectivities. To re-emphasise: this process is post hoc, and reflexive. This is
NOT a cybernetic, immediate, automatic, knee jerk activity to do with immediate correlation,
connotation or denotation. Instead semiotic activity in the subject proceeds in terms of
retrieved experience-memories. This is my understanding of what Peirce intended by his
notion of pragmatism or pragmaticism as he later called itiv.


Conclusion: Implications of public relations for the ethics of civil society

So how does all the above translate into theorising the ethical effects of public relations and
associated writing on contemporary civil society? Well the implication of the above is that
our subjectivity – i.e. who people are and how people think – is created in large degree by the
rhetorical processes which are explained in terms of semiotics above. This would mean that
how the planet is being destroyed environmentally; how many of earth’s inhabitants live
unpleasant lives and die young; or are devastated by war; is ‘normalised’ for many by the
way our subjectivities are regarded and negotiated by business and political forces which use
powerful rhetorical apparatuses. A leading apparatus is public relation which includes
lobbyists and issues managers who are paid well for devising the significations, for instance
the writing, which will be the most effective in producing our subjectivities. Peirce describes
this ‘subjectivity building’ process in innocent, academic terms when he revises ancient
dialectical approaches to the explanation of how people grasp reality – how they attempt to
grasp logic and decide what is ‘reasonable’, including what is ethical in this particular
society. When this activity is deliberately engaged in by the public relations industry however
it is often anything but academic or innocent.

Clearly then what is needed is a much better understanding of the topic of this paper by:
public relations people; by what is sometimes referred to as their ‘target audiences’; and by
those who set the policies for how civil society is regulated. There can be no justification for
opposing much better regulation of public relations and similar ‘subjectivity forming’
practices. Nobody can even get up in the morning without encountering how civil society is
regulated in infinite ways in order to avoid harmful or toxic effects. There are the electronics
regulations governing the construction of the alarm clock which wakes you; the building
regulations to do with the house you live in; the regulations of the food you eat for breakfast;
the road, motor vehicle or other transport regulations which impinge on your trip to work.
Finance, politics, family and sexual activities, in fact all aspects of our lives, are all regulated
in vastly complex ways. Every part of civil society is regulated. Consequently there should be
no argument against constant, careful consideration of regulation of the semiological-
rhetorical forces which rule over the whole mountain of imaginings and the related ethics
which shape, propel, retard, police, that is which form our entire civil society. This is
obviously a huge area which this already word-limit-exceeded conclusion can only point
vaguely towards. Clearly one of the keys is a much better education of all those involved in
these matters.




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Endnotes


i The label given by critics of 19th and 20th century Australian government organised removal of children from
aboriginal families into officially sanctioned community homes or adopting families. Such homes were often
run by religious authorities and nearly always controlled by white people.
ii Catch phrase attributed by critics to this unusual, right wing, past Queensland Premier known for his patrician
and patronising style of rebuffing anyone who questioned him or his policies.
iii Alter-casting: A term which Louis Althusser (1918-1990) was fond of meaning ‘casting’ – as in casting in a
play alter, or ‘the other’. A related term was ‘hailing’ i.e. some deliberately designed, or even accidentally
shaped discourse may have the affect of creating particular thinking in the other person – that is altering their
subjectivity.
iv Incidentally the implication for memory in this post hoc process signals questions about the disappearance of
the concept ‘memory’ as one of the important planks of rhetorical theory in former centuries. This now lost
component of rhetorical theory is usually flagged in terms of the importance of mnemonics to remembering
speeches. However it appears there may be an importance for memory at a deeper level for rhetorical theory in
terms of the rhetoric-influenced formation and stability of subjects and their lifeworlds.

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Communications, Civics, Industry – ANZCA2007 Conference Proceedings

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Public Relations Rhetoric


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Communications, Civics, Industry – ANZCA2007 Conference Proceedings

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