Influence and Intent

What begat my foray into this project to begin with was this strange and strangely seminal (or ovarian, as Dr. Cary would say) piece by Sally Gearhart in '79 called "The Womanization of Rhetoric." The oft quoted line goes something like this: "any intent to persuade is an act of violence." The three key terms here are intent, persuade, and violence. Most of the feminists I have read pick up or take issue with the violence torch. I have followed that debate and explored that idea a lot, but I've also been hung up on the "any intent to persuade" part.

I feel like today I became unhung. And it might be obvious and it might make no appearance in my actual paper, but it felt like a breakthrough in my thinking. You can tell me if you think I'm being perceptive or not.

First of all, it's not the persuasion that is violent but the intent to do so. She has to say that because her discipline is persuasion, and besides, persuasion makes the world go 'round. To get things done, we either have to agree, be persuaded to agree, or be coerced.

Second, and pardon my TV cliches here as I attempt to to debunk "any intent," but her adjective choice is superlative and overreaches. ANY intent? What about persuading someone who is about to jump off a bridge that life is worth living, or the stereotypical man with a gun who doesn't really want to hurt anyone, he just wants money for his kid who needs an operation... you can't tell me that the intent to persuade them to do otherwise is violent.

What makes intent so bad anyway? I'm not really sure what Gearhart's answer to this is. Or maybe I am and I don't remember. But here's what I came up with today. Again, might be totally obvious.

We all think we are right, it seems natural that you want to be right and to convince others of the right as well. I think maybe an initial intent to change is OK. What else moves us to speak our minds if we didn’t believe that what we had to say could contribute to some kind of change in the world? And I generally believe people don't manipulate others for the fun of it, at least not on the big things, maybe to win a game of UNO if you happen to be my brother. There is usually a basic belief of rightness. The difference between manipulation and persuasion (the similarity of these two terms has always made me a bit uneasy, mostly because I couldn't define the difference) comes down to respect. (This is the lightbulb part.)

With manipulation there is a total loss of respect for the listener's agency and a lack of belief in the listener's abilities to make their own decision "correctly." At the basis of manipulation is pride and ethnocentricity. At the foundation of persuasion is respect. If you value the agency of others, you respect their resistance to your ideas even when you think they are wrong. And I think to be a responsible teacher, politician, purveyor of ideas, minister, mother, or whatever, you have to recognize this basic “intent” to change others and actively work on retaining respect for our students, constituents, listeners, parishioners, children, or whatever. They have agency and they have brains. Make Aretha proud!

That said, I'm not sure if a lack of this respect is in itself violence, but it DOES lead to violence. I agree with Gearhart that we need to “change our own use of our tools” (196). But “our attempt to educate others in that skill [of changing others]” (196) has never been why I see rhetoric as important. I always saw the benefit of rhetoric as a deconstructive tool—as a faculty cultivated to help in cutting through crap. Because crap is always violent. ANY intent to crap is violent. But more on that later.

g'night.