Introduction - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 5

rhetorical critics saw persuasive force in all things. Symbol and language
use is deployed strategically to emphasize specifi c concepts and minimize
others. Those following in the wake of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca
could study both the clearly persuasive messages embedded in discourse
and the subtly persuasive ones. They argued that actual neutrality, lan-
guage or symbols without rhetorical force, simply does not exist. Further,
languages that appear neutral, like mathematics or science, may be even
more interesting as objects of study, because we do not always clearly per-
ceive the power behind symbols used in those endeavors.
This broader notion of rhetoric is often connected to the work of R. L.
Scott. For Scott, “rhetoric may be viewed not as a matter of giving ef ective-
ness to truth but of creating truth.” 8 Given this frame, rhetoric “is a way of
knowing; it is epistemic.” 9 This idea has been expanded by other scholars,
to the end that “one of the assumptions implicit in much of contemporary
rhetorical theory is that there is no way to ground representations of reality
(rhetoric) in a reality independent of discourse.” 10 Functionally, this means
that rhetorical analysis shif ted from identif ying how to persuade to examin-
ing the strategic function of symbol use in certain contexts. In the wake of
Scott's work, “rhetoric is a unique cultural practice” predicated on “locat-
ing the substance of rhetorical knowledge in the creation of a situational
truth.” 11 Scholarly focus shifted from “how one resides in a framework of
meaning and interests” to “how one articulates and uses these.” 12 The gen-
eral perspective behind this way of looking at rhetoric is that “everything,
or virtually everything, can be described as 'rhetorical.'” 13 In the end, rhet-
oric changed. No longer relegated to advising speech students about how
to craft the best speeches or necessarily placing the focus on persuasion,
rhetorical analysis can be seen as a way of thinking about how knowledge
is produced and deployed strategically. Rhetorical analysis is a tool that
can be used to investigate how situational truths are constructed and what,
in turn, those newly established truths function to do. Rhetorical analysis
seeks out how messages create meaning, lead to identifi cation or division,
persuade, or circulate ideas.
For those who have embraced a turn toward 'big rhetoric, ' 14 rhetoric
is more like a perspective than a subject with the distinctive objective of
studying speech. David Zarefsky writes that, as the number of 'texts' rheto-
ricians have sought to analyze has expanded, the dynamic “in ef ect identi-
fi es rhetorical criticism with a mode or perspective of analysis, rather than
with a distinctive critical object. Rhetorical critics bring to any object the
focus of making arguments about how symbols infl uence people.” 15 For
Zarefsky, the two key questions to ask while engaging in rhetorical criti-
cism are “what's going on here” and “so what.” 16 Anything can be analyzed
rhetorically through a critical examination of the dynamics of the message,
but it is the 'so what' that separates quality insights from basic observa-
tions. In the end, “rhetoric of ers another perspective, one that accounts for
the production, circulation, reception, and interpretation of messages.” 17