Page 78 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

62 Rhetoric

exploitation of particular social groups and the unequal distribution of

limited resources are expressed, justified, and maintained through every-
day language and public discourse.
As academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences turn their
attention toward public discourse and take what is often referred to as the
interpretive turn – the awareness that the beliefs and practices that structure
any form of human activity are socially constructed and inevitably serve
the political interests of one group rather than another – the concerns of
rhetorical studies and cultural studies increasingly intersect. Both are
invested in issues of power, performance, popular discourse, textuality, and
interpretation and concerned with the ways people struggle for agency
within economic and political structures using symbolic resources such as
everyday language and artistic expression.
Fight Club is an example of a text that is concerned with the role rhetoric

plays in contemporary society. It portrays the conflicted conscience, and
consciousness, of a man who has achieved material success in the corporate
world, yet finds himself tormented by a feeling of emptiness when the

consumer goods he has acquired fail to provide him with a sense of meaning
and purpose. Indeed, the protagonist not only lacks a spiritual sense of self,
but also literally has no identity except that which is provided by cultural
products: he refers to himself only as “ Jack, ” a name he sardonically
borrows from a series of mass market self - help books he fi nds moldering
in the basement of an abandoned house. The message is clear to the specta-
tor: we have no intrinsic, “ true ” selves, but rather, we are formed by the
texts we consume. In a capitalist society like America, the rhetorical purpose
of those texts is often to convince us we are lacking something (e.g.,
physical attractiveness, ideal health, social respectability, or sexual organs
of reasonable size or shape), and then to persuade us that buying a certain

item will fill that lack. To illustrate this, in one scene we see prices material-
ize onscreen as Jack moves through his apartment. In a voiceover, he tells

us that he ’ d flip through catalogs and ask, “ What kind of dining set defi nes
me as a person? ” Jack has been persuaded by the rhetoric of advertising,
and hopes to in turn create rhetorical “ advertisements for himself ” using
the things he owns. The fi lm encourages us to question: are there no such
things as truth, virtue, or beauty that transcend the cynical world of con-
sumer capitalism? Is our worth as human beings equivalent to our worth
in material assets? We hear echoes of Plato ’ s lament to the Sophists, who
were, you ’ ll recall, the slick marketers of their day, promising to increase
the social status of their clients in exchange for money.