Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal

“I think one of the things I’ve learned is that sometimes words have consequences you don’t intend them to mean.” –George W. Bush

I find the concept of intention fascinating. I adhere to the lessons of speech-act theory and my revision of it. In my dissertation I account for the role of rhetoric in the illocutionary act in order to demonstrate positive and intended links between it and the perlocutionary act. In other words, I demonstrate how accounting for the role of rhetoric in ordinary statements allows us to map intention from those statements to results, i.e. what the auditor does with the communication.

I accept that all human communication is rhetorical in the sense that it is intended to make some change in the world, to do some work. As J. L. Austin claimed, to speak is to do.

If I say to you “Shut the window,” I commit an illocutionary act. That illocutionary act may be understood as F(p), in which p is the propositional content and F is the illocutionary force. In this case, the F of “Shut the window” (p) is directive. I am directing you to shut the window.

What do I intend? From some theoretical perspectives, I intend that you should understand p and its directive force, i.e. I intend that you understand the statement in a conventional sense within an appropriate context. For example, we may be sitting in a room with an open window and a cold breeze is blowing through.

By accounting for the role of rhetoric in the illocutionary act, I claim that my intention is not merely communicative except as communication is necessary to get what I want. I intend for you to get up off your lazy butt and shut the friggin’ window. That’s the change I want in the world. And I may employ many different rhetorical tools to get it while using the same F(p).

I might ask sweetly. I might scream. I might repeat myself until the nagging drives you crazy. These rhetorical choices not only help bring about the perlocutionary act (what the auditor does with communication) if I use good kairos, they also signal my intentions. If I scream “SHUT THE WINDOW!” I cannot hide from my intentions and later claim to have intended something else. The rhetoric–in this case simple volume–gives me away.

President Bush is quite correct. Sometimes we fail to communicate for any number of reasons, including choosing the wrong words in the wrong situations. Such mistakes are, however, often rhetorical and political, i.e. you intended it but probably should have kept your mouth shut instead (bad kairos). As I acknowledged in my research, just because the speaker intends something doesn’t mean the auditor will understand or comply. Auditors also have intention. But we may still accurately describe the speaker’s intention based on the rhetoric employed, the F of (p), and the context within which the statement is made.

[My work on this theory is confined to conventional statements in clearly defined contexts--a necessary condition to assert and test it. Certainly, the more complex the statement and the more complex the context the more difficult it is to describe the intentions of speakers and auditors. But I contend that we can make accurate descriptions and map illocutionary acts to perlocutionary intentions if not perlocutionary acts.]

President Bush is kidding himself if he thinks he intended less by “Bring them on” than we noticed. He did not object at the time to its interpretation as “defiance.” It’s right there in the rhetoric (including his voice inflection and trademark smirk). Bush says of his intentions:

“I was really trying to rally the troops and make it clear to them I fully understood what a great job they were doing. Those words had an unintended consequence. Some interpreted them to be defiance in the face of danger. That certainly wasn’t the case.”

I believe he intended both. I believe this is easy to demonstrate. The latter intention is now politically uncomfortable given the unfolding of events. Had events unfolded differently, he wouldn’t be committing this particular illocutionary act with its clear political intention.