Page 216 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

RHETORIC

As regulation often has direct or indirect consequences for the
distribution of wealth, it is seen by some as interference in the
workings of the market. Deregulation is based on the assumption
that the market alone ‘can do better’ and is advocated, in many cases,
on the grounds of regulatory failure.
One approach within cultural studies has been to interpret and
engage with the institutional frameworks that govern culture,
including regulatory frameworks and process. Bennett (1992: 397)
maintains that cultural practices should be seen as governmental, and
defined in terms of ‘the specificity of the governmental tasks and
programs in which those practices come to be inscribed’. ‘Govern-
ment’ in this context is taken to mean the action of governing,
controlling, ordering, commanding and systematising. As Rose (1999:
3) writes, it is ‘the invention, contestation, operationalisation and
transformation of more or less rationalised schemes, programmes,
techniques and devices which seek to shape conduct so as to achieve
certain ends’. In this sense, regulation is an explicit framework that
informs and influences conventions and interaction. Regulation can
be seen within a wider set of established spoken and unspoken rules,
boundaries and codes through which we are urged to curb behaviour
and negotiate communication (see also Foucault, 1977; Cunningham,
1992; Hawkins, 1993).

RHETORIC

The practice of using language to persuade or influence others and the
language that results from this practice; the formal study of oratory,
exposition, persuasion. Rhetoric was a formal branch of learning in
medieval Europe; one of the seven liberal arts or sciences, the others
being grammar, logic (dialectics), then arithmetic, geometry, astron-
omy and music. It fell into serious disrepute and did not survive the
Reformation. Rhetorical figures have survived, however, along with
certain rhetorical terms (see for example, metaphor) that have
achieved the status of ordinary language.
Since structuralism began to disclose howmuch of what we
knowand experience is structured by the sign systems we inhabit and
encounter, there has been a noticeable revival of interest in rhetoric.
There are two good reasons for this. First, rhetoric as a branch of
learning requires us to attend to the sign system itself (whether verbal
or visual), and to concentrate on the devices and strategies that operate
in texts themselves – it offers a well-established and elaborate set of

201