Words Apart
Why do some celebs survive scandal when others end up in ruin? It’s all down to branding and soundbites explains journalist Sam Leith in his provocative new book on rhetoric in the celebrity and political realm.
Anne Sexton, 24 Nov 2011
“New Labour learnt a lot from Clinton – the whole thing about trying to find a way beyond left and right. That’s another classic rhetoric manoeuvre – presenting your opponents as locked in an old binary while you’ve invented a new thing that’s completely different.
“With New Labour it was done so consciously and technically. It wasn’t like spin hadn’t happened before, but they thought harder than previous administrations had about media cycles because we were entering the age of 24-hour news cycles and the internet. They talked about spin-doctors and sound bites in a quite naked way. That was bad spin. You don’t want to see the mechanics. The vocabulary became so public. It made them seem insincere.”
Leith is at pains to point out that while rhetoric can be used to hoodwink, it is not, in itself, a bad thing. After all, he says, it’s given us Western civilisation.
“I don’t think that’s overstating it, at least not by much. The central institutions of Western civilisation are the law courts and the parliament and they are put in place by language. The institutional framework – the law and participatory democracy – is about rhetoric. Even in despotism it is, finally, rhetoric and language that are the means of control. I mean, Kim Jong-il cannot personally beat up all his opponents. He has to maintain himself in such a way that people are afraid of him and his word is law.”
We tend to think of speeches as dull and tiresome, but if they are, that is a failure on the part of the speaker. The three goals of rhetoric are to teach, persuade and delight.
“Before we had Xboxes, people used to listen to speeches for pleasure. You’d go down and watch what was happening in the law courts. For thousands of years, people have thought both analytically and with pleasure about how rhetoric works and yet in the last 150 years this huge body of knowledge has all but vanished. We’re arguably more surrounded by rhetoric than ever before. It’s like we’re all driving cars but nobody studies mechanics.”
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