SOURCE: Baumlin, James S. “Persuasion, Rogerian Rhetoric, and Imaginative Play.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17, no. 1 (winter 1987): 33-43.

[In the following essay, Baumlin explores the role of Rogerian group therapy in persuasive argument.]

Ideas can shape us, change us, and a change in beliefs enacts a change in self: witness, in an extreme literary case, Ebenezer Scrooge, or the man who admits, after years of self-deception, that he is an alcoholic. Yet teachers, preachers, politicians alike know that real change is rare and slow; we are, as a species, resistant to changes in our belief-structures. Reasons for this resistance are easy to find. When beliefs become reflexes, habits of thought engrained through a lifetime of unquestioned repetition, they become—as habits—hard indeed to change: so often we cling to a value or belief like the alcoholic to his bottle, afraid to question its effect on us, afraid of facing life without it. And logical appeal alone can never overcome such habit. There is yet another reason for this resistance, more subtle and more compelling: if we change with our beliefs, then surely our very identity, our sense of self, becomes threatened along with our belief-structures. For whatever security and certainty and stability we perceive in ourselves and in the world rests on the stability of our network or web of beliefs. Right or wrong, our beliefs give us our comforting sense of security in a stable, predictable, understandable world; they also contribute to our sense of a fixed, stable self.

We choose, therefore, to live in a Newtonian, indeed Platonic universe of fixed laws and stable phenomena—a universe of fixed identities. Need we wonder why? The alternative ontology, the universe described by the modern physicist Werner Heisenberg—or, for that matter, the ancient Sophist Gorgias—denies certainty and fixture: things change. And people change. And there is, for most of us, anxiety in such a recognition, a threat to our identities. Yet we have experienced the sad results when beliefs clash in their attempt to dominate, indeed define a “singular” reality: the more powerful ideology tyrannizes over the rest, treating them all rather as competitors for defining a single and stable reality than as collaborators in fashioning a world of greater complexity and potentiality. We fight for our beliefs as if our lives were at stake (and, since we define ourselves in accordance with our beliefs, in this real sense they are). We fight because in this arena we have not yet learned to play—I will explain this in later paragraphs—and we fight because we have forgotten that we can change ourselves, change each other, grow towards each other rather than apart. In this arena of beliefs and values, we can and should enjoy the capacity, at least, of persuading and being persuaded.

1

Speakers and audience alike rarely exercise their capacity for persuasion. Most speakers accept the resistance of an opposing audience as given, and changing the beliefs of such an audience is, in fact, rarely their goal. Many arguments do not even attempt to persuade but seek only to confirm an audience's adherence to beliefs they already hold. The strongest pleas often serve only to strengthen the believers—or alienate and anger more fully those who oppose. The strongest pleas may move our emotions and our wills to action (or reaction, if opposed); but rarely do they change us, converting those of no prior belief. This process of confirming an audience is not useless, of course. Most of us, on most issues, show a bored lack of concern, or show a bland, “intellectual” sort of adherence to a value or issue; we may agree “in principle” with philanthropy, but ignore the poverty in our midst, oppose apartheid “in principle” but not work toward its dismantling. Most of us, on most issues, at most times, live our lives in a passive state of disinterest toward issues, giving a numb sort of “yea” or “nay”—for we do not see our identities fully engaged and committed (or, conversely, threatened). And passive adherence must be turned to acts, involve our emotions and will—our whole self—in our beliefs. Catholicism provides an analogy: once one is baptized, one must be comfirmed in the faith. Confirmation, then, serves an important purpose for the speaker: to move a convinced audience toward action. But how can a speaker succeed when his goal is to change minds?

If there is confirmatio, where, in our discourse, can there be conversio—literally, the change in belief, change in self? Certainly it cannot occur in a model for discourse that envisions only the three audience responses of opposition, disinterest, and identification. Note, however, the continuum these responses form. Separating opposition from identification is disinterest, the refusal to engage or identify with an issue; one might not disagree with a belief or value here as much as simply ignore it. If one does disagree, it is a disagreement of words—and not of the heart; a person reacting in disinterest typically says “No; but I don't care.” Conversely, a person may agree with an argument, but not translate this agreement into a personal commitment or action. In either case, an emotional involvement is lacking. Emotional involvement occurs, rather, on the extreme ends of this continuum, in opposition and in identification. Here the whole man—mind, emotions, and will—is engaged in the argument and indeed identifies itself with the issue at hand. The world-views of speaker and audience become one: Kenneth Burke is right in equating persuasion with identification. Opposition, on the other hand, defines the self of the audience in its difference from the speaker's values and world-view. The audience's distinctive identity is asserted and preserved in its rejection of the speaker's argument.

The above model, though simplistic to the point of brashness, is a fairly traditional version of audience response. Its strength, if it has any, is that it observes two distinct features of this response: the extent of emotional engagement, and the way that the self is defined, either by identification with or in opposition to another's worldview. In each case, however, the self described by this model is fixed and singular, either this or that, and there seems to be no mechanism by which the self of the audience can be transformed from one of difference (or opposition) to one of identification with the speaker's world-view. Confirmation of belief remains possible—for the direction of movement in this traditional model is toward strengthened belief or opposition (and therefore towards an equal strengthening of one's self-identity). But in such a model the direction of one's belief appears unchangeable. Disinterest cannot mediate between the two poles of opposition and identification: it forms a chasm against rather than a bridge for change. True persuasion, in this particular model of audience response, is an impossibility.

There is another possible response, however, one in which the audience says—not “I agree” or “I disagree” (or “I don't care”), but, rather, “I understand.” Understanding (or imaginative play, as I shall soon call it) turns this trinity into a quaternity of responses, offering an alternative that can in fact mediate between opposition and identification—that can become a mechanism, in other words, for change or true persuasion. Psychologist Carl Rogers, who was the first to explore the role of sympathetic understanding in persuasion, suggests that “the major barrier to mutual interpersonal communication is our very natural tendency to judge, to evaluate, to approve or disapprove, the statement of the other person” (284). Of course we evaluate and approve (or reject) another's discourse in comparison with our own world-view. But if we foster in ourselves an attitude of understanding, we will, according to Rogers, “see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person's point of view … sense how it feels to him … achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about” (285). As a result of such an attitude we “will find the emotion going out of the discussion, the differences being reduced, and those differences which remain being of a rational and understandable sort” (286). Paul Bator elaborates: “a necessary correlate of acceptance (of another's view) is understanding, an understanding which implies that the listener accepts the views of the speaker without knowing cognitively what will result.”

Such understanding, in turn, encourages the speaker to explore untried avenues of exchange. Rogers explains: “Acceptance does not mean much until it involves understanding. It is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre—it is only as I see them as you see them, and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of your inner and often buried experience.”

(428-29)

The Rogerian strategy, in which participants in a discussion collaborate to find areas of shared experience, thus allows speaker and audience to open up their worlds to each other; and in this attempt at mutual understanding there is the possibility, at least, of persuasion. For in this state of sympathetic understanding we recognize both the multiplicity of world-views and our freedom to choose among them—either to retain our old or take a new.

To complete the model, then, and allow for the possibility of change in an audience, we must place as an alternative to disinterest and opposition the Rogerian attitude of receptive, sympathetic understanding. Given recent interest in Rogerian rhetoric, it should not be surprising to find understanding at the heart of any modern description of persuasion; through the rest of this essay, though, I shall explore some epistemological implications of Rogerian argument that have gone largely unnoticed by rhetorical theorists. For understanding, as I shall argue, can be achieved only in a world-view that conceives of self and reality as fluid and potentially multiple. And understanding demands not only a collaborative, as opposed to a combative or manipulative, rhetoric: it demands a rhetoric that is essentially playful or ludic in nature. Understanding, then, is possible only in a world of indeterminacy (and therefore of infinite potentiality), where the true homo rhetoricus is recognized as homo ludens. Thus, I would call understanding a realm of plural selves or identities. For we achieve this attitude when we sympathize with another's beliefs and world-view—when we role-play, in a sense, the life and values of another person. In a spirit of play and with suspended emotions we become that other person, taking on his value-system and trying out his world. Understanding requires, therefore, a temporary negation or effacement of self: we cease being only ourselves, cease reacting and thinking in ways we have become habituated to, and give ourselves over to an alien, often chaotic, inevitably unstable mixture of interests, values, desires. We mix another's values—we mix another's world—with our own. And out of the chaos we may see patterns of behavior and belief emerge that we can give fresh and perhaps full assent to. These beliefs were not originally our own; the self that emerges within these new patterns was not originally us—self invents itself anew in the free play of worlds.

Two of the above propositions—that rhetoric is a form of imaginative play, and that human personality consists of a dynamic multiplicity of selves—received not their first but surely their strongest formulation by Richard Lanham:

Rhetorical man is an actor; his reality public, dramatic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily histrionic reenactment. He is thus centered in time and concrete local event. The lowest common denominator of his life is a social situation. And his motivations must be characteristically ludic, agonistic. He thinks first of winning, of mastering the rules the current game enforces. He assumes a natural agility in changing orientations. … he has dwelt not in a single value-structure but in several. He is thus committed to no single construction of the world; much rather, to prevailing at the game at hand.

(4)

The multiplicity of value-structures and indeed of worlds is the sine qua non of persuasion, and indeed of rhetoric as a mode-of-thinking and a way-of-living. Human values, and human roles, change—and rhetoric itself is the effecting of change through language. This multiplicity of perspectives, and the ludic nature of rhetoric, are aspects of Lanham's thesis which I wholeheartedly espouse. But I hope to extend his thesis in a few significant ways. Lanham focuses almost exclusively on the speaker's ludic activity, ignoring the full impact of rhetorical play on audience. In addition, he emphasizes the antagonism and combativeness of rhetoric—elements that work, as I have argued, to confirm audience beliefs, but which cannot cause change. Actual persuasion occurs not through combat with an audience but through collaboration (though collusion, foregrounding lusus or play, is perhaps the more accurate term); as such, the notion of imaginative play can explain the workings of both Rogerian therapy and rhetorical persuasion. Finally, I would like to suggest an alternative to Lanham's model of human personality, which posits a number of dramatic, “rhetorical” selves arrayed around a serious, “central” self. I would argue (and I suspect Lanham would ultimately agree) that the central self, which each of us looks toward as the stable, unchanging core of our personality, is as much a “rhetorical” invention as the social roles/selves arrayed around it. The perceived stability and fixture of our central self becomes, in other words, an act of will, and not a part or an expression of our essence. A sense of fixed self provides us with a secure identity and with our sense of continuity, but this fixture and stability is nevertheless willed into existence—invented and maintained through patterns of language-use and general behavior. As such the central self, our sense of a fixed identity, becomes susceptible to rhetoric, capable of change. The following paragraphs will show debts to others besides Lanham, to literary theorists (particularly in reader-response criticism) and contemporary hermeneuticians. This is itself worth noting: in past decades, the most exciting research into audience-response has come not from students of rhetoric but from students of literature, philosophy, psychology. Rhetoric—traditionally the study of response and change—needs still to catch up with these disciplines.

2

In a recent PMLA article Marshall W. Alcorn and Mark Bracher survey critics “who argue that reading literature can influence if not actually mold the structure of the reader's self.” They cite Georges Poulet on the idea that when one reads a text, “one's own identity is set aside and the text constitutes a new subjectivity within oneself.” They quote Wolfgang Iser: “if reading removes the subject-object division that constitutes all perception, it follows that the reader will be ‘occupied’ by the thoughts of the author, and these in turn will cause the drawing of new ‘boundaries.’ … Every text we read draws a different boundary within our personality, so that the virtual background (the real ‘me’) will take on a different form, according to the theme of the text concerned” (342). We need simply add that this re-drawing of psychic boundaries can result from an interaction with any kind of discourse—surely with persuasive discourse—and that hearing, as well as reading, can have this effect. But we must still ask ourselves: what allows for this re-experiencing, this re-creating of self—this meeting and intermixture of two worlds? Doesn't the very admission of alternative worlds confirm Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy—and wouldn't this, in turn, foster the anxiety and insecurity that we all, very humanly, try at all costs to avoid in our lives? The realm of understanding is, after all, a realm of potentiality, and therefore of uncertainty: more than one course of action is admitted in understanding, more than one set of values—and this necessarily introduces contradiction, confusion. Indeed the realm of understanding (that is, of freely imagining and “trying on” another's beliefs) fosters at the same time a state of doubt (that is, of questioning the invincibility or even validity of one's own previously-held world-view). Put otherwise, to understand—to imagine freely another's experience and to admit its validity and truth and goodness—is, in some degree, to doubt the self and its seemingly secure world-view. So if understanding breeds, at the same time, uncertainty, why do we not simultaneously feel threat and insecurity?—and why shouldn't an audience's opposition follow, therefore, from such a threat to identity?

A possible answer to such questions, one developed progressively by J. Huizinga, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Richard Lanham, is that sympathetic understanding and persuasion result from imaginative play, and that by appealing vividly and directly to the imagination—by making one's case within the playground of the audience's mind—a speaker can control, even reduce the perception of threat. Perhaps rhetoric is best explained as a mental activity of “playing man” or homo ludens, as J. Huizinga describes our species. “Play,” Huizinga notes, “creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” (10). Play, in other words, is world-building, and allows for imaginative transport out of one's self “without, however, wholly losing consciousness of ‘ordinary reality.’” Thus the playing child's—and I would add the rhetorician's—representation of a game-world “is not so much a sham-reality as a realization in appearance: ‘imagination’ in the original sense of the word” (14). Most significant, Huizinga observes that playing together fosters identification:

A play-community generally tends to become permanent even after the game is over. … the feeling of being “apart together” in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game.

(12)

Isn't this description of imaginative play—of voluntary imaginative activity taking place within prescribed limits of time and place, apart from the world but genuinely affecting the spirit of the participants—a description also of Rogerian and indeed of most methods of psychotherapy? Doesn't therapy allow one to “play out” otherwise threatening conflicts within the secure confines of a “game situation” (i.e., the analytic session)? Alcorn and Bracher have made this very claim for literature, which—like psychotherapy—can “promote greater tolerance of unfamiliar and potentially traumatic experiences. Meissner observes that experiencing potentially overwhelming emotions in a safe and supportive context ‘can have an effect similar to desensitization, so that the patient is much better able to tolerate these affective experiences and to integrate them with the rest of his experiential life’” (344-45). Though their evidence comes from W. W. Meissner rather than Carl Rogers, the implication is the same: the controlled, game situation of therapy, like other forms of imaginative play, offers a “safe and supportive context” for exploring the “unfamiliar and potentially traumatic.” And by freeing the patient from fear and habitual patterns of response, such play gives the patient freedom to accept what was once unfamiliar and perhaps even threatening, and to integrate it into the self.

Whether it occurs from our interaction with literature or with other forms of discourse—including the dialogue of psychotherapy—imaginative play reduces the threat we feel when facing alternatives; it does not, however, reduce the seriousness or the risk involved in the choices themselves. Paradoxically, play emphasizes the necessity of choice even as it affirms our freedom to choose among alternatives. As Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, a person engaged in the play of imagination

still has the freedom to decide one way or the other, for one or the other possibility. On the other hand this freedom is not without danger. Rather the game itself is a risk for the player. One can only play with serious possibilities. This means obviously that one may become so engrossed in them that they, as it were, outplay one and prevail over one. The attraction of the game, which it exercises on the player, lies in this risk.

(95)

The risk Gadamer speaks of is that game can become actuality, that choices made in play can become choices of life. The game can outplay us. In fact we do not play the game: the game plays us, taking over our world, making its rules of decision and conduct our own. And as Gadamer suggests, reading and response to literature enacts just such a serious game: “the work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience changing the person experiencing it” (92).

Once again, isn't this description of imaginative play also a description of rhetoric's impact upon an audience? Surely the first great rhetoricians of antiquity, Gorgias and the Sophists who followed him, recognized both the existence of a manifold reality and the ludic nature of persuasive speech. As Gorgias asserts in his “Encomium to Helen,” speech “has the power to put an end to fear, to remove grief, to instill joy and increase pity” (8); what gives speech such power over an audience is its ability to create mental images—to substitute images in the mind for palpable phenomena—and in this way give imaginative reality to that which is as yet only possible. Play, being non-threatening, allows the potential and hypothetical to come to temporary imaginative life in the mind of the audience. That which is imagined is only potential; it is up to the audience to give life to a thought—to embody a belief or adopt a course of action, ultimately, as its own. That which is “unthinkable” or perhaps even threatening to the rigidly-defined, single self poses no danger to a fluid self engaged in imaginative play; that which one imagines is, once again, only potential—a vain bubble if rejected, an exciting prospect if we give it our assent. And we can explore issues more courageously in our imaginations than we are willing to do in the actions and thoughts of our daily lives. Thoughts freely and imaginatively pursued involve little threat, then, to the thinker—much less, at any rate, than the muzzle of a gun or a picket line, other more palpable, though generally failed means of persuasion. The classical rhetorical concept of enargeia, which Chaim Perelman resuscitated in the notion of “presence,” is thus instrumental in establishing an attitude of understanding: potentially new worlds, potentially new roles—potentially new selves—are given imaginative presence in the mind of the audience, revealing for examination and choice a new realm of experience. Again, the logic of discourse may convince; yet the extent to which discourse invites such imaginative participation and mixing of worlds will determine its success or failure as persuasion.

Like poetry, persuasive discourse can rely heavily on the compelling image to draw our imaginations into new worlds and new roles. It does not surprise, then, that the histories of rhetoric and poetry have been intertwined since antiquity. Gorgias, for example, looked upon his speeches as prose-poems, and both Isocrates and Cicero claimed a close kinship between the orator and poet. Undoubtedly, that kinship tie is their mutual grounding in imaginative play. For poesis, as Huizinga suggests, “is a play-function. It proceeds within the playground of the mind, in a world of its own which the mind creates for it. There things have a very different physiognomy from the one they wear in ‘ordinary life,’ and are bound by ties other than those of logic and causality” (119). Poetry, therefore, and fiction are among the most powerful tools in creating new worlds, and inviting understanding; so much so that there are, quite possibly, elements of poesis (and certainly of enargeia) in all truly persuasive discourse. Indeed the distinctions made throughout this essay between “literature” and “persuasive discourse” prove more apparent than real: the literary response, like the response to persuasion, rests squarely on imaginative play.

3

Finally, we exercise our freedom when participating in another's discourse—for otherwise we respond with disinterest or opposition, boredom or indignation. The realm of imaginative play, then, allows us to maintain our freedom while we explore new roles. More importantly, it is only in the realm of imaginative play, of understanding, that we actually make choices about who we shall be. In a state either of opposition or of identification the self is single and fully, indeed rigidly, defined. Only in a state of play, of unlimited potentiality, is the self equally fluid and changeable. In addition habit, emotion, and previous structures of belief—those elements of personality that sustain our illusion of a single, fixed self—become constraints upon our freedom, constraints upon our ability to create a new self and a new world to live in. Only in a world of play can such constraints be thrown off. Paradoxically, then, in our recognition of and sympathy toward the other we realize our own freedom to change—that is, to re-create our selves along new lines. The value of discourse itself lies ultimately in this ability to lead us into a realm of potentiality and of fluid, changeable identity, where we can actualize the limitless potential that man has for self-creation. I am arguing, in fine, that persuasion is impossible in any model of discourse that views the self as a single, fixed entity. This, rather, is persuasion: to open up a new world to the imagination of an audience and to free the audience from rigid structures of habit and belief. And while persuasion has often been connected with manipulation and coersion, it should in fact return freedom to an audience; it should return to them the ability to invent themselves and assume responsibility for creating their selves and their world.

Reference

Alcorn, Marshall W., and Mark Bracher, “Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the Re-Formation of the Self: A New Direction for Reader-Response Theory.” PMLA 100 (1985), 342-54.

Bator, Paul. “Aristotelian and Rogerian Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication 31 (1980), 427-32.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1950.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.

Gorgias. “Encomium of Helen.” In The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamund Kent Sprague. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972.

Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958.

Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950.

Lanham, Richard. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.

Perelman, Chaim, and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971.

Rogers, Carl. “Communication: Its Blocking and Facilitation.” In Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1970, pp. 284-89.