On Strategic Communication

Kenneth Burke writes that a strategy is a response to a situation. And a situation is a shorthand-term for a structure of motives. By “structure” we mean that any situation comprises many motives. Some are aligned, some are at direct conflict, some are mixed with elements of alliance and opposition, and some are simply indifferent to each other. A “motive” can be said to describe the stance, character, or aim, of a whole, integrated individual person; an organizational point of view or office; a cultural or political bloc; or a motive can be said to partially constitute a larger structure of motives within any person, office, point of view, or bloc. In the latter sense, each of us as individuals or as “representative” of an office, institution, or social grouping is always made up of diverse motives, sometimes unified into one purpose, oftentimes at odds and stymying clear action.

The drama is the most concise representation of strategies operating within situations. Taken broadly, “drama” can be extended to the ancient forms of legend, myth, folk or fairy tale, or religious narrative. Wherever humans conceive characters, differing in motive, interacting with each other, we find strategic communication.

The explanation is a didactic exposition or analysis of strategic communication, derived from the drama, aiming at the understanding of abstract principles after the fact. Explanations, analyses, and interpretations can here be taken as synonymous terms. Because the action of situations unfolds in real time, often more quickly than the mind can conceive of effective strategies, explanations allow for a kind of cognitive “intermission” after the exigence of a situation has cooled down, allowing the analyst to evaluate mistakes, internalize lessons and principles, and prepare for new, not yet emergent situations.

Actors and Analysts

When we engage in our daily communications, including listening or reading, we are acting. When we pause to evaluate the choices we’ve made and their outcomes, we are reflecting or analyzing our behaviors and those of others in our shared situations. We might determine that we’ve scored a “victory” or a “loss,” depending on our motives and measurement of outcomes. Yet many of our actions can be deemed “experimental” with the right attitude. We learn even from our “failures” so long as we have an interpretative mechanism to incorporate lessons as a guide for future action. And thus our framework for analysis, our “psychology of information” through which we filter, arrange, and order the data of our experience, becomes a kind of incipient action or character-building. Experience becomes education, which in turn prepares us and situates us for better, more effective action in the future.

Kenneth Burke calls such an apparatus of self-improvement the “comic frame of acceptance.” We, in a sense, forgive ourselves and even forgive others as a way of compensating for human weakness and partiality. In truth, we can never have perfect knowledge of any situation. We can hardly even grasp our own motives, so much of the influences bearing upon us lying outside the range of our consciousness. We rely on others’ input or advice, the mutual dependence of working in teams or organizations, but most importantly we have a kind of “faith” in advance that even if we work in the right manner, we can, over time, improve, if not perfect, our abilities.

A Program of Study

A curriculum for strategic communication can and should be both multi-disciplinary, and driven by student interests and talents. I here presume “strategic communication” to exist within the confines of institutional (rather than strictly personal) situations . Internally and externally, institutions are built upon relationships, and, as noted above, relationships are some level of harmony or conflict among motives. [Note: I here assume “motives” to be the consciously formulated objects assumed by a human will—humans may also be affected by impulses, reflexes, stimuli, and sheer force, but a theory of communication may reasonably restrict itself to the more-or-less conscious intentions that drive human behavior, because it is precisely these conscious intentions that may be articulated by language]. While diversity of contexts and purposes, must always “receive” different applications in an educational program of strategic communication, the attempt to deduce more-or-less “universal” principles will not be in vain.

Motives of Power

Considered in his natural, or “fallen” state, man can be said to be both blind and ever striving for power. Most, if not all, worldly motives involve the will-to-power, and the types of power can be generalized into categories. Different people will doubtless strive for different types of power, but we can generally assume everyone will strive for at least one type of power, and generally several. As an impromptu list, here might be a starting point for types of power. In some kind of classical sense, these may be even styled “universal goods.” We can be content to call them motives of power:

· Money, Wealth, Financial

· The Law, Legal

· Military, Constabulary (Police)

· Health, Strength, Fitness, Beauty

· Education, Knowledge

· Fame, Reputation, Popular Opinion

· Religion, Spiritual

· Kinship (Family), Ethnic, Racial, National Identification

· Sexual

· Fashion, Style

· Technological

· Ethical, Moral

· Regional, geographical identification

Generally power is subjectively felt as self-aggrandizement, an increase in the range and possibility of action. But even “altruism” or selflessness confers a form of power to those who participate in it, and selfishness, taken to an extreme, can often lead one down a path of isolation and weakness. The above list is not meant to judge the quality or righteousness of any given power-motive, but rather to identify some of the most common actual, real human motives. For instance, one might assume in a for-profit corporation, the financial motive would be primary; but other considerations may either intrude upon, complicate, or compliment the desire for monetary gain.

Topics for Invention in Strategic Communication

Aristotle and other rhetoricians in his wake devised different “common” and “special” topics that could be drawn upon by speakers in formulating a speech. Special topics pertained to certain common arenas, viz., in politics, law, or ceremonial occasions. Examples might be questions of war and peace, guilt and innocence, or honor and ignominy. Common topics are more strictly “logical,” and may find a place in all kinds of discourses involving human reason, such as the numerical more or less, qualitative stronger or weaker, the possible, the probable, the past and future, the near and remote. Common topics generally correspond with Aristotle’s logical categories.

Certainly these ancient topics apply in any effort to generate and conceive of communicate messages. Yet it is also worthwhile to brainstorm topics that might particularly apply in the 21st century public environment, where institutions daily operate within complex economic, legal, and political situations and the behemoth Public Opinion ever sways this way and that in an increasingly bewildering technological mediascape. I have divided my list of topics into aesthetic, ethical, and technical categories.

Aesthetic

· Historical Principles and Origins

Every “classic” civilization has a uniform and permanent type in all the arts, whether architecture, music, visual arts, plastic arts, religious iconography, even mathematics and astronomy. Likewise any cultural phenomenon—and all institutions, whether governments, universities, corporations, or media franchises, are cultural phenomena—have quasi-mythological origin stories more-or-less shrouded in a hallowed aura. To the extent these institutions succeed and permanently embed themselves in popular consciousness, they become “classic,” in the way that a 1950s Chevrolet or a 1980s Apple Computer might be a “classic.”

Historical examples might be the “Founding Fathers” and the United States of America, the Civil War and Emancipation, the Era of the World Wars in the 20th Century, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the Era of Space Exploration, the Cold War, etc. Each of these evokes an array of topics, commonplaces, familiar moments and figures that are more-or-less deeply embedded in popular and common consciousness.

Industrial or business examples might be the Age of European Mercantilism and Colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, Railroads, the History of Banking and Finance, the Modern Corporations (Standard Oil, U. S. Steel, Sears-Roebuck, Piggly Wiggly, IBM, “Ma Bell,” electrical utilities, Holiday Inn, automobile manufacturers, international hotels, Wal-Mart), the rise of the Computer, Internet, Social Media, and Video Games.

Each “classical type” provides a constantly fresh pedagogical source, in that we are always fascinated to go back and contemplate how revolutions and innovations in society, warfare, government, transportation, literacy, communication, commerce, etc. came about and how their influence persists in different forms today.

· Classical Art and Grassroots Criticism

Just as education must be founded upon some “canon” or other of historical models (which canon is constantly re-negotiated and contested in every generation), so we must turn to the diversity of students and popular opinion in formulating and re-formulating opinions of the great iconic examples.

The power of the grassroots lies in its idiosyncrasy, depth, and its inherent lack of assimilation to prevailing institutional norms. The “word on the street” is often best articulated through young people and those at the margins. In this area, the particular genius of each student will have more authority than the teachers and textbook writers. New proposals and arguments for canonical types arise from the grassroots margins, and when they are tested against the proven examples of classical types, the principles of both permanence and change are sustained.

· Curiosity and Interest

Peoples’ receptivity to communication depends on the arousal of their curiosity and interest. Oftentimes it is too obscure to discern or unravel particular motives in a given individual or bloc, but people reveal their curiosity by the questions they ask. They reveal their interests by the courses of action they pursue, their visceral responses to stimuli, the way they spend their money. A skilled communicator will learn to become sensitive to the interests of those with whom they share vital situations.

Ethical

· Ethics and the Good Life

Just as above, a list of power-motives was likened to “universal goods,” such as wealth, health, family, knowledge, etc., everyone has a more-or-less clear conception of the “good life,” and the very concept of the “good life” should always be present as an ethical lodestone and sub-stratum. As with the audience’s interest above, the skilled communicator will sharpen his or her sensitivity to the parameters of the “good life” imagined by those with whom one deals strategically. Sometimes, as with advertising, audiences can be awakened or conditioned to new possibilities in the “good life,” of which they may have been previously unaware, skeptical, or even hostile.

· Trust and Good Will

Aristotle’s principles of ethos were good sense, good judgment, and good will toward the audience. He also wrote that ethos is the strongest rhetorical appeal. An audience will not consider the logic of arguments, and will not be moved emotionally, in relation to a speaker whom they feel has ill intentions toward them.

· Respect and Transparency/Honesty

Building off the previous point, I know there are situations historically in which speakers say one thing and mean another, whether they intend the audience to pick up on the irony or not. I suppose none of us can ever hope completely to avoid or shun the “white lie” for the sake of protecting our self-interest. And, I have no doubt whatsoever that the “real world” is full of duplicity and outright self-serving deception. On the one hand, it is prudent for students of strategic communication to understand the battlefield and “weaponization” of language. We should also be humble in realizing that we are no more inherently righteous or honest than another. We may stridently, even honestly swear to something that may turn out to be incorrect. I won’t try to prescribe a formula for reconciling the metaphysical dilemma between truth and the lie, which has always lain and will always remain at the very center of rhetorical study. But I cannot endorse the principle of willful deception as a pedagogical principle. The teacher must admonish toward the moral imperative of truth-telling, or we have no society at all.

· Transcendence of Conflict

Aristotle wrote that it is painful to be angry, and we are usually angry only with those whom we love or care for on some level. Whereas hatred is the desire for a person or group of persons simply not to exist. Again, doubtless we have all and will again experience the emotion of hatred, where we simply wish another person or category of persons out of existence. But as with falsehood, no genuine pedagogy can endorse the principle of hatred. Anger, on the other hand, can be a kind of honest conflict. I don’t mean that we should lose our temper, but anger can genuinely be a frustration at a perceived wrong, and the desire to correct that wrong. So when we ourselves experience anger, or we perceive anger in those others with whom we share a vital situation, let us make efforts to reconcile and make peace. Again, I cannot simply offer a formula for conflict transcendence, expect to proffer the possibility itself of transcendence. Perhaps it is a matter of bringing our interests in closer alignment, in perceiving our “common ground,” or in finding ways to live peaceably when our interests will remain oppositional.

· Empowerment

Return to my list of power-motives above, if we acknowledge that our interests on some level lie in our respective wills-to-power, we might try to identify ways to achieve “win-win” outcomes. Many times, in institutional settings that corresponds to financial empowerment, but as we’ve seen, money is not the only or even the primary form of power. Strangely but truly, communication itself can become a kind of empowerment. The ability to express oneself and receive sympathy, the mere feeling that your interests and point of view are acknowledged, goes a long way into restoring a sense of well-being to people. Of course it does take “more than words,” but usually the more tangible forms of power are achieved through communication, and productive communication is usually the best (if not the only?) pathway to mutual empowerment.

Technical

· Explanation and the Psychology of Information

This is a topic I am currently working on in my research on Kenneth Burke and Fyodor Dostoevsky, along with recent scholarship in the Communication field on “information.” It is exceedingly complex, and I by no means have any final pronouncements to make in the present document. I can, however, return to my introductory notes on the drama.

The drama critic William Archer noted in 1912 that every dramatist, when presenting a play to the public, must get around the problem of providing “background information” to the audience to help orient them to the situation unfolding on stage. The skillful dramatist would minimize direct exposition, and “reveal” all the necessary data in the action of the characters. Each playwright, say Shakespeare or Ibsen, had different methods of disclosing the necessary information. In fact, novelists, poets, story-writers, and even journalists or the news media have the same problem. They want to engage their audiences and involve them emotionally and mentally in the dramatic action of a narrative. They want to “bring along” the consciousness of the listener, reader, or viewer in the same way that a successful orator attempts to bring an audience to an inevitable judgment.

But as George Campbell demonstrated in the 1770s, humans’ capacity to exercise the will depends on a substratum of understanding. We must know and understand the situation as best we can before acting within a presented range of possibilities. This has always been true, but it’s gotten more difficult since the rise of empiricism and the scientific method as the dominant form of public knowledge. The facts are exceedingly numerous and complex, often appearing contradictory. The rhetorical battlefield more often than not seems to be a mere “information war,” in which the main struggle is simply to establish a common ground of reliable facts. Thus our courts, our Congresses, and even our entertainment. The meaning of words themselves change so rapidly, and the unpredictability of meaning just intensifies the virulence and frequency of rejections and acceptances that make up the ever-shifting battlefields of our public and private situations.

The communicative principle that can organize meaning within this welter of information is the concept of the explanation. An explanation is a psychological organization of information. It puts facts and data into a moral and hierarchical order. It provides reasons and causes where there may be none self-evident in the external observation. Thus our mania for detective stories, in fiction and reality. I am convinced that the best way to study the principle of the explanation is to look to the masters of fiction, for they deliberately focus on the art of story-telling in order to reveal its principles, whereas as “real world” story tellers on the television news, editorial pages, and social media threads are merely scrambling to accomplish some particular goal. I am aware that strategic communication is itself a scrambling to accomplish a particular goal, but the principles of strategic communication can best be located in fiction; or, if one prefers at least the “classical” real-world examples that have accrued the aura of fiction (as say George Washington’s role in founding the United States or Bill Gates’s role in founding Microsoft). Once reality passes into the realm of “legend” or canonical lore, it assimilates more and more to the universal human principles of story-telling. Those canonical examples, whether derived from history or “fictional history,” serve as the most stable models of educational study.

· Technical Knowledge

The principle of explanation must account for, augment, and ultimately accommodate itself to the understanding of the audience. The same holds for technical explanations, as, viz., the functioning of a bureaucracy; the vacillations of financial markets; the operations of computer codes or cyber-security; the political mechanisms of elections and delegation of power; legal proceedings of any kind; machine-processes, environmental processes, chemical or biological processes, etc. Oftentimes strategic communications must relay some extent of technical knowledge. But all these elements of technical knowledge must be embedded in the above aesthetic and ethical contexts in order to have plangent meanings shared by the interlocutors. Just as the will operates upon the foundation of the understanding, the understanding can only receive explanatory meanings in the context of its own will. Observe for yourself in your immediate surroundings, and you will find people opening and shutting their minds and ears first on their perceived self-interests, i.e. their wills-to-power, and positively seeking the explanations that will feed the understanding they desire.

· Statistical Probability; or, the Use and Abuse of Data

This is the problem I have encountered most frequently, and it is the most trenchant problem I have observed over many years teaching basic Composition and Public Speaking courses. In our scientific/empirical age, people take a bare statement of statistical fact (observation, measurement) as a moral imperative. I won’t even give any examples because the phenomenon is so pervasive. I have read a book recently entitled Aristotle and Information Theory by Lawrence Rosenfield that has stated the issue more clearly than any other work I have encountered.

The gist of Rosenfield’s argument is to distinguish the animism of Aristotle, in which everything in nature (including humans) has an inherent cause or telos, from the absolute randomness of quantum physics and thermodynamics left to their own devices. In modern science, which includes the philosophy of statistical measurements and calculation of probability, you can measure a given closed system at a given time, and measure it repeatedly, and that gives you a reasonable sense of how predictable that system is. But you can never know what causes that order or disorder. You can only measure it. Statistical probability rules out the positive attribution of cause. You can manipulate a given system, keep measuring it, and “tinker” with it in order to approach desired outcome, and so you in a sense apply your own purposeful causation to that system. Very few students (or anyone today, for that matter) seems to understand the depth of this truth. They want to retain their classical animism, where things themselves have an inborn causality, but they also want to “test” and “experiment” as if there was no determinate cause and nature could somehow operate randomly.

· Arguments of Truth vs. Arguments of Value

The way to reconcile our statistical schizophrenia is through restoring the ancient philosophical distinction between theory and practice, or the difference between truth (theory) and value (practice). A “theory” is what we see, what we perceive to be true, through our observations, calculations, and perceptive reflections. A “practice” is what we do, and the question of morality is always practical. Just because you tell me how something is, does not automatically imply a moral argument about what should be done.

A Multi-Curricular Approach to Strategic Communication

So much for principles and topics. If you scan the pages above, you will see that the entire university can become involved in a pedagogy of strategic communication. For the principled analysis of drama as a conflict and arrangement of various motives, we have not only literature, but all of history, culture, and the arts for material. I’m sure the philosophers might want to quibble about various points I’ve raised, and I tremble at how the theologians might peer into the soul of what I’ve written.

As for practical application, students may turn to as many fields of study as there are institutions. Do not hospitals, law firms, governmental bodies, social engineers, technologists, and natural resource managers need strategic communication? Well, then students desiring to enter those fields must study biology, medicine, the law, politics, sociology, computer science, engineering, and geology. You get the idea. As many departments as there are in the university, there are practical institutions in the world to “bureaucratize” those scholarly imaginations and discoveries.

Concluding Remarks

The preceding document has been an effort to conceive of a whole program of study in strategic communication at the university level, arising from the author’s own background and (moderate) expertise in literary study and rhetoric. The most often cited authorities are Aristotle and Kenneth Burke, whom I suppose are my intellectual masters. As a career university instructor, it has been my normal procedure to adapt myself to curricula and student bodies that I encounter at various universities in my professional journey. I offer the preceding in hopes that you will see I bring a novel perspective to a universally necessary field of study, but I also wish to assure you that I can learn teaching methods from others, and I am perfectly willing to begin a given course by adopting a syllabus that has already proven more-or-less successful at a given institution in the recent past. In fact I wish to begin by adhering as closely as possible to the already established norm, and the idiosyncrasies of my personality and background will invariably work upon the given template to adapt it in a new direction (see “Classical Art and Grassroots Criticism,” above). Thank you for reading!

Sincerely

William Schraufnagel

April 15, 2023