Page 45 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
Yet, upon closer inspection, you will realize that no 'road' can
actually 'take' you anywhere, for you have to do the travelling
yourself. Besides, 'road' is a word - not a thing - and cannot aid
your journey any more than the word 'bread' could satisfy your
hunger or need of money, or the word 'water' could quench your
thirst on a hot day. Isn't this rhetoric, too?
The present chapter examines some definitions of rhetoric,
drawing attention to its stylistic, philosophical and ideological
connotations as a phenomenon that does not simply adorn
meaning but actually shapes it. The central argument pursued in
this chapter proceeds from the premise that rhetoric should not be
viewed as a specialized and somewhat deviant form of language
because rhetorical mechanisms pervade the whole of language.
This can be demonstrated on two levels. Firstly, the devices asso-
ciated with rhetoric, and often thought of as poetic or fictional
tricks, do not only feature in poetry and fiction but also in
everyday sign systems such as advertising and political slogans.
Moreover, virtually any utterance could be read rhetorically as
well as literally. This has largely to do with the fact that, given
some ingenuity and linguistic curiosity, even the most referential
sentence may become ambiguous. What is an advertisement
offering accommodation for a 'professional non-smoker' really
telling you about the type of tenant required? Is s/he supposed to
be someone who holds a profession and also does not smoke? Or
is s/he supposed to be someone who has made not smoking into a
profession? 'Supervise children while using this bag'; 'Please ask if
you need assistance'; 'Prams must be carried on the escalator'; and
'I like Indians without reservations' are also worth playing around
with. A favourite is the case of the jogger who, training in the
vicinity of Regent's Park, London, was asked by a man sporting a
ginger bob, pea-green blazer, scarlet leather pants and leopard-
patterned loafers if he was 'all right for the Zoo'.
Secondly, rhetoric is based on the displacement of referential
meaning through images. This is true, in a basic sense, of language
at large, for words never refer in transparent ways to objects and
ideas but rather displace them by translating them into abstract
and arbitrary signs. All words, after all, are metaphors. What
lends them a certain referential solidity, argued Friedrich
Nietzsche, is our tendency to forget that they are indeed meta-
phors. The pages that follow explore the theme of rhetoric with

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