UC Berkeley

When Aristotle labelled rhetoric as a techne, or technical art, it was because rhetoric involved observing particular acts of persuasion, and a subsequent theorization of the means through which those acts were achieved. Subsequently, rhetorical studies has concerned itself with the latter, the instruments of persuasion, for two-plus millennia, while neglecting the former: Rhetoric as study of compelling acts of artifice. Confusing techne for technology, rhetors have considered technical innovations in media as forms (e.g., literature, film, TV), ones with specific limitations and affordances for affecting public knowledge, belief, and action. However, the digital media forms of the twenty-first century reverse this historical trajectory. In becoming the rhetorical ecology of public discourse, this epoch of ubiquitous networked computing and participatory media confronts people with the unavoidable artificiality upon which their expressions of ideas and identity depends. This dissertation reconsiders the instrumental relationship between persuasion and technology by returning to rhetoric as techne—or craft guided by knowledge of that craft. Observing individuals who achieved rhetorical success with technologies in the period during which new media become dominant (roughly 2005-2020), this dissertation theorizes persuasion beginning with the fundamental technicity or artificiality of human being.

Insofar as stand-up comedians live in a condition between natural and artificial selfhood, their practice amplifies how the everyday experience of contending with the world, or oneself, is a matter of artifice that precedes any technological instruments or media. As such, they reveal that persuasion is a matter of conviction, effected through the artful presentation of oneself in one’s world, and not by convincing others via skillful use of through argumentative media. Taking stand-up comedians as interfaces, or technical media that do not mediate, this dissertation theorizes a tripartite process through which stand-up rhetoric qua techne intervenes in the normative cultural conceptions that ground social and psychic life. Comedic discourse arrests and deviates from what counts as normal, contributing original, provisional alternatives to the cultural fund of collective ideas that audiences draw from when realizing the always partial ground of their individual and public expression. The efficacy of stand-up as a personally and politically transformative practice lies, at core, in the destabilization and restabilization of depoliticized public discourses in which shared worlds are negotiated. This is true, too, of everyday eloquence in democratic cultures—from the agora of classical Athens to today’s digital global sphere.