The enthymeme as postmodern argument form: condensed, mediated argument then and now.

• Author: Aden, Roger C.
• Position: Special Issue: Condensed Mediated Argument

When Stephen Toulmin wrote The Uses of Argument in 1958, the modern age was in full bloom and television was in its infancy. Today, however, most scholars argue that we now live in a postmodern age, thanks in great part to the emergence of television as the primary communication medium in developed nations. Argumentation scholars have responded to these developments in a number of ways. Goodnight, for instance, posits that our more complex contemporary world has spawned three spheres of argument: the personal, the technical, and the public. The erosion of public argument, he claims, is due to the privileging of the technical and personal that occurs in a world fragmented with specialties. Willard (Argumentation; Theory), meanwhile, suggests that argumentation scholars should explore the multiple interpretations of argument made possible by the existence of multiple frames of reference in a postmodern age.

These and other responses, however, do not explore directly how public officials argue through the media to postmodern audiences. Jamieson (Eloquence) examines how the rhetorical style of public officials has changed in an electronic age, but she does not delve into the changes in argumentative style wrought by the new age. Her thesis, though, that whether it be through brief campaign commercials, decreasingly brief "sound bites" on the evening news, or appearances on talk shows in which topics change every few minutes, public figures' pronouncements are transmitted to audiences through media and in condensed forms, equally applies to the arguments found in those pronouncements. Understanding how these arguments are structured is an important step toward revising a conception of public argument that has evolved much more slowly than has public discourse itself. Such an exploration, which I initiate here, must begin with an understanding of how audiences in postmodern societies process condensed, mediated arguments. Ironically, today's postmodern audiences process arguments in a manner eerily similar to the classical audiences of ancient Greece. The implications of this notion on public argument raise some troublesome issues, only a few of which I can attempt to answer here. To develop these issues in further detail, I first compare the processing of postmodern and classical audiences. Next, I illustrate these theoretical similarities with a brief analysis of the rhetoric of David Duke. Then, I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this theoretical outlook.

The Convergence of Postmodern and Classical Theories

The postmodern condition, claims Collins, features a plethora of signs and symbols that circulate within a culture. "One of the key preconditions of the postmodern condition is the proliferation of signs and their endless circulation, generated by the technological developments associated with the information explosion (cable television, VCRs, digital recording, computers, etcetera)" (Collins 331). McGee calls these floating symbols "fragments," and argues that contemporary audiences primarily process new combinations of these previously articulated fragments. "The apparently finished discourse is in fact a dense reconstruction of all the bits of other discourses from which it was made" (McGee, 279). Similarly, Collins calls this process the comprehension of the "already said" in new forms. "What is postmodern in all of this is the simultaneity of these competing forms of rearticulation - the 'already said' is being constantly recirculated, but from very different perspectives ranging from nostalgic reverence to vehement attack or a mixture of these strategies" (Collins 333).

Postmodernism appears on television in a variety of forms, from self-reflexive prime-time programming (S. Olson) to network news reporters dishing up stories about how politicians attempt to manipulate those stories. Television, as a less-than-linear medium, is an ideal vehicle for postmodern communication. Television requires less attention than other media (Luke), yet fosters a sense of involvement (Gozzi and Haynes). Furthermore, its immediacy produces snap judgments from viewers: "Yet there is a crucial difference between the oral and the electric: The electric epistemology functions with interactions often distant in both time and space, and the checks and validating experiences available to the face-to-face oral epistemology are not readily applied" (Gozzi and Haynes 221). As a result, television viewers must rely on their own store of fragments to decode, interpret, and evaluate televised arguments.

When public arguments are presented on television, then, both the content and the form of the arguments encourage postmodern processing. That is, the content of arguments presented to the public consist of "already said" fragments, from which individuals construct their own interpretations. The televised form of the arguments further encourages such processing: viewers feel involved, but that involvement is more passive, fostering acceptance of the content more so than if the argument appeared in another medium. Both content and form suggest that arguments in postmodern cultures function deductively, relying upon audience agreement of what's already "known" to create further agreement.

Ironically, this form of argument processing mirrors that posited by Aristotle in his explanation of the deductive reasoning form he labeled an enthymeme. According to Aristotle, "to conclude from certain assumptions that something else follows from those assumptions . . . either universally or as a rule - this in Dialectic is called a syllogism, and in Rhetoric an enthymeme" (Rhetoric 10). Assumptions, Aristotle writes in Prior Analytics, can be either "probabilities" or "signs," but they depend upon audience acceptance of what the speaker takes for granted (158). This deductive form of reasoning is best suited for a "mass" audience since "the uneducated argue from their everyday knowledge," (Rhetoric 156), while educated persons such as scientists view induction as a superior form of reasoning (Posterior Analytics 199). Similarly, Aristotle's notions of topoi or commonplaces function as fragments to which speakers turn for agreed upon examples. "Ideas or lines of argument, the students of antiquity learned, are things that can be stored in 'places.' By returning to that 'place' where a bit of information was filed, the information might later be retrieved" (Nothstine 152).

Relying on Aristotle's Various descriptions of an enthymeme, Harper argues that "a complete enthymeme is constructed of (1) an observation, (2) a generalization, and (3) an inference" (306). Yet, most scholars of classical rhetoric agree, enthymemes are incomplete in that they omit at least one of the three parts - a part that is supplied by the audience. McBurney, for example, claims that "we can safely interpret Aristotle to meat, that the enthymeme usually lacks one or more of the propositions of a complete syllogism" (67), while Bitzer argues that the missing premise is interjected by the audience "out of its stock of opinion and knowledge" (407). Even Harper agrees that "an enthymeme may be abbreviated, and when it is, it is usually the generalization which is omitted as a commonly accepted 'fact' "(306).

In a postmodern age, elements of an argument can be omitted easily since audience members possess and/or believe in a larger number of"commonly accepted facts" (or, "already said fragments"). Moreover, enthymemes - especially in postmodern cultures - encourage individual interpretations. As Medhurst and DeSousa illustrate in their analysis of the enthymematic nature of political cartoons, individuals create their own understandings of these abbreviated...