Kennedy

This piece did not resonate with me because I felt that it forcefully incorporated rhetoric as a function of it's argument. What I interpreted to be the point of this piece, and what I feel Kennedy says quite explicitly, is that by studying behavioral and communicative characteristics of animals the evolution and development of rhetoric can be better understood. I can presumably follow that argument, and can also see potential for it having intriguing characteristics; however, I find myself a bit unclear on how this is an expansion of what we already know about rhetoric. Kennedy states "This brief discussion is intended to direct attention to animal communication as a way of understanding some basic features of rhetoric that might be restated as general rules" (p.20). I fail to see where he outlines anything that isn't logical, and in terms of rhetoric (which I personally feel is a subject that often over extends its boundaries and application) is imaginative or insightful. The general consensus that I came to roughly halfway through this piece was that Kennedy was effectively forming a logical manipulation of the principles of rhetoric in order to apply them to the behavioral and communicative characteristics of animals. I feel that this quote was almost an admittance of my accusation:

"Using the traditional parts of rhetoric as a basis for discussion may be objected to by some as analogous to ethnocentrism in anthropology, the imposition of a later, and Western, structural scheme on phenomena that in their natural state might be related in different ways. My response to this criticism is to agree that the categories of traditional rhetoric may not be a satisfactory basis to describe animal communication and I do not use them for that purpose. What I am looking for are features of animal communication that resemble categories of traditional rhetoric and that therefore suggest that these categories, though conditioned by cultural conventions, represent the survival of certain natural phenomenon" (p. 14).

I find the notion of "the survival of natural phenomenon" interesting on its own, but after reading this piece I did not feel like the imposition of rhetoric as an explanatory characteristic gave me greater insight on this topic. Kennedy presents some conceptually sound arguments which link rhetoric to animal life, yet in my opinion fails to develop anything more than that. He has managed to fit rhetoric into a mold, yet has failed to give it any meaning. Just because you can formulate a relationship between subjects does not mean that the relationship has anything to offer in terms of expanding an understanding of the subjects being related. Part of me feels that there is something to be said about examining the evolution of rhetoric in terms of survival strategies, yet I felt the approach taken by Kennedy was an effort to (in my opinion unnecessarily) give rhetoric an artificially higher calling.

This manifests itself most obviously in some of Kennedy's language choices. I found some of his arguments to be suggestive, rather than actually founded. I question his fourth thesis which claimed "The function of rhetoric is the survival of the fittest." Does he mean "A function of rhetoric"? I also question his logic here:

"...the claim of Aristotle (Rhetoric 1.1.14) and his successors that the function of rhetoric is not persuasion but observing the available means of persuasion. A speech may not succeed, but in Aristotle's view may still be the best possible speech and demonstrate the speaker's rhetorical skill. Of course a speech, though ineffective with an audience, may successfully fulfill the speaker's need to speak--to put himself 'on record' as it were; a bird that gives a cry indicating a predator fulfills a need to express that, even if the bird is mistaken or ignored by others. A speech that is not successful at the moment may affect future conditions indirectly" (p. 8).

I understand the connection... A human speaker has a need to speak as he feels his words hold a meaning that must be said, and a bird fears a predator and feels the need to indicate danger; despite the success of either "speaker," their motivation is in a similar vein? I just feel that if I break down this excerpt all he is really doing is establishing his ethos as a rhetorical authority and then loosely incorporating a hypothetical situation involving a bird's instinctual fear of a predator as some sort of relevant rhetorical function. It seems that rhetoric's relevance in this logic is suggested more than substantiated, and contrived rather than necessarily insightful.

This quote is in my opinion very indicative of Kennedy's attempt to stretch rhetoric's application in what seems to me a bizarre attempt to glorify its importance:

"In theory, one might even seek to identify some quantitative unit of rhetorical energy--call it the "rheme"--analogous to an erg or volt, by which rhetorical energy could be measured. I leave that to the experimentalist" (p. 2)

Is this not a rather desperate attempt to link rhetoric and science in a completely unjustifiable way? I found his qualifier ("I leave that to the experimentalist") particularly hilarious. I guess I just don't find many profound, thoughtful implications within this piece that resonate outside of the egocentric misguided logic, and the rather suggestive language that dominates (for me) its entirety. Someone please explain the point of posing some sort of measurable rhetorical energy "rheme" as being anything other than an attempt by Kennedy to give his reasoning and profession a sort of self fulfilling pseudo-scientific application.