"it sends a message"

I read an influential book by an equally influential rhetorician named Barry Brummett. The book was titled, "Rhetorical Homologies." In his book, Brummett describes what rhetorical homologies are and how they shape our thinking, action, and understanding. One of the more engaging uses of his analysis is in exploring the ways that warfare and rhetoric were practiced through history to find the homologies that existed between them.

Firstly, a homology is akin to an analogy in suggesting that one experience or object is like another. The only additional requirement is something structural, such as a sequence of steps or the types of  subjectivities furnished by an activity or relationship existing in both areas. These form the homology that exists between the two distinct entities or experiences. Brummett continues by explaining that homologies are a formal resemblance or "a pattern found to be ordering significant particulars of different and disparate experiences" (p. 2). These formal patterns shared among disparate experiences have a deep structure. That is, they are behind empirical (observable) reality. They derive their rhetorical power by offering or suggesting a course of action. In other words, if one were to experience a homologous relationship between two experiences the resolution to act chosen in the presence of one experience would resemble the action chosen in the presence of another.

By analyzing the structural similarities between warfare and rhetoric through history Brummett develops a blueprint for homology research. In this analysis he finds compelling connections between communication--message sender, message receiver, and the means of message conveyance--and warfare technology. Each broad era of rhetoric had an attendant theory of communication, which suggested how messages and meaning worked and the nature of the relationship between two interlocutors. As each model of communication or rhetoric changed so did the predominating means of warfare. One necessarily did not follow the other. Instead, rhetoric and warfare shared deep structural relations. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke elaborates upon these relations when he describes warfare as a "perversion of community" in that warfare and communication both require that its participants coordinate the meaning of each act. And so warfare, in its then-modern sense of nation-state versus nation-state, is premised upon a set of rules for knowing when and how to conduct war. These occur through formal declarations, which are a subset of the communication, broadly defined, which has modeled similarities with the methods of warfare.

Technology changes our battlefield relationships, specific to how we wage it. Simply, the means through which we attack and kill our enemy are mediated by a technology, be it through the dispatch of an enemy at close range, using a stiletto or lobbing lead slugs at an opponent at gunpoint. Similarly, prevailing technologies and philosophies inform how we view persuasion and how we practice it. During the Renaissance era, rhetoric was part of a classical education whereby one learned the aesthetic conditions for persuasion and used these in much less public spheres to influence others. Likewise, warfare in the Renaissance era was a personal affair. Prior to the pitched battles of a later era, politicians and their operatives dispatched their political foes by knife at very close range.

By the time we reach the modern era, warfare is organized around the musket and the rules of probability. The prevailing form that this warfare takes is of two opposing forces marching in formation to maximize deployment efficiency and spread as each army launches salvo after salvo of bullets at each other Likewise, at this time rhetoric--communication theory--saw each of us as individual minds to be influenced through the telepresent actions of a communicator, forming the right message to reach its target. Like the muskets on the battle field, the messages in this sphere had to be aimed and strike their target in order to persuade.

And so we reach the abrupt end of our journey only to see this relationship between the gun and persuasion still practiced. When people adamantly proclaim that killing sends a message they are invoking several rhetorics all of which coalesce around a subjectivity furnished by the wielding of a gun. First, a dead body is undeniably real and consequential to most of us. Using a dead body as a way to convey the consequences of one's actions hammers that point home as forcibly as can be done. That is, if one were to set the individual and his/her body as the standard target for persuasion, putting that target on the ground in a pool of its blood is an ultimate 'no.' Invoking that dead body as a meaningful and unambiguous message is a rhetoric of reality. It also performs for the gun wielder a subjectivity couched in a philosophical and legal view of the indivisible subject, its inviolable rights to liberty, and the attendant freedom to protect this liberty and this subjects property through any means, including the gun. The second rhetoric relies upon that homology defined above. Except now it has reached its logical and final conclusion. When the bullet finds its body is when the message has been sent effectively.

Now, I only brought this up because so many invoke the need to 'send a clear message' to whomever it is: the enemy nation, terrorists, criminals, and so on. And so many see the gun and the dead body as a means to 'send' this 'clear message.' This was applied to a hostage situation where a deranged man held a child at knife point only to be shot point-blank in the head by a police officer. My question became, "how do we send a 'clear message' to the deranged, to those who do not always have a grasp on the reality that you and I share?" The chilling answer suggests a very strong bias toward the gun wielder to subject an interlocutor to his meaning. This logic of the 'clear message' isn't being sent if most of us resort to the ultimate act of violence under great psychological stress. Much like the insane person, those of use under duress or under the influence or both are not thinking about the consequences so much as we are absorbed in the moment when the conclusion to send a 'clear message' comes to us.

So what?

We live in an era of 'message sending.' Most of it is impersonal. Does our penchant for sending 'random texts' or flaming anonymously offers us a suggestive new horizon for the gun? Maybe ours is an era of remote violence, where the gun shot is not heard by the person pulling the trigger. People have bullied people online to suicide. The United States has used drone aircraft to target and kill enemies. Sometimes, people with guns shoot randomly at strangers. This sort of homology falls apart as a clear message. Errors creep into the system. The heat signature of bodies in the drone's sensor array may be misidentified. Maybe the person being targeted for random violence is saved by a ricochet only to have that bullet strike another? There is no clear message just more error, more randomness. Chaos enters this universe of sending clear messages. Now, we want to deputize ourselves through conceal and carry legislation so that we can send one clear message to any perceived foes. Gun in one hand and cellular in the other; we've reached the tail end of our homology.