Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion

Abstract

Rhetoric, even as traditionally conceived, offers routes out of many impasses in the ecocritical landscape. And when robust scientific knowledge is added to the rhetorical map, as Alex C. Parrish does in this ambitious book, the importance of rhetoric deepens significantly. Parrish draws on a wide range of disciplines—biology, ethology, cognitive psychology, semiotics, rhetoric—to show convincingly that many nonhuman animals practice rhetoric. He defines rhetoric as “the intentional communicative act of an animal whose purpose is to inform, or to manipulate the behavior of, one or more members of a real or imagined category of hearers called ‘audience’” (48). Rhetoric, he argues, is therefore “adaptive,” and it should be understood as a product of both biology and culture. Human rhetoric, understood bioculturally, is “a special form of animal signaling” (6). Parrish makes his case in two parts. The first, roughly a third of the book (Chapters 1–3), moves from a history of nature and animals in the classical rhetorical tradition to a rapprochement between science and contemporary rhetorical theory. This argument, including the point that nature and animals have nearly always been present in the literature of rhetoric, is valuable. However, Parrish's stitching across the nature/culture divide sometimes gets tangled. The book tends to accept criticisms of the humanities on thin or faulty premises. For example, Parrish condemns humanists as a sort of “priestly class” more interested in “their own theories” than in evidence-based argument, preferring the methods of scientists (31). But such tendentious claims distort how both the humanities and the sciences function. Some objectionable ideas are actually quotations from others and return for a more nuanced treatment later in the book. For instance, while Parrish's early quoted account of rhetoric as “human brains acting on human brains” (22) seems grossly reductive, Chapter 7 more clearly recognizes that thinking and rhetoric are embodied (e.g. 131). Such are the challenges of negotiating the contact zones among disciplines.