[music] what do you think is the most underused tool of being a great communicator ? what's the rhetorical equivalent of a superpower hiding in plain sight? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't have to do with your mouth. It has to do with your ears. The best rhetorical moves come not
from speaking but from listening. The tools of speaking will help you make
your message effective up to a point, but listening can help you get the message right. I don't mean listening in general, but a specific process of invention generally called listening rhetorically, or "listening rhetoric." We usually think of listening as
some sort of biological process where our ears pick up some information, our brains process and sort that information, and then we use it later. That makes it seem passive, reflexive and something we can
do on a barely conscious level like smelling or sneezing. The problem with treating listening like a reflex is that it leads to some really
lousy human communication. it also leads to one of the biggest problems of cross-cultural communication
in our neck of the world, which is that our culture does
not teach people to listen to understand each other but only to respond. Rhetorical listening doesn't
mean doing it passively or impersonally, it doesn't mean listening purely so that you can find a weakness to exploit, but it also doesn't mean letting someone get hurt or being complacent in the face of injustice, or making yourself into a doormat. As a matter of fact there are a lot of instances
where deep rhetorical listening could be putting you in harm's way. Remember that debate can only happen between two parties acting in good faith. Deep rhetorical listening to an
abusive partner, for instance, is a really bad idea. An oppressed person means listened to, not talking at. Part of our listening problem lies in
the Greek and Roman rhetorical traditions that we use in our corner of the world. Aristotle, Cicero, Quintillian and the others more or less just assumed listening was there without ever specifically addressing it. You can read all the Aristotle you want, but you're not going to find a
chapter on how to be a good listener. Sometimes rhetoric manuals
discuss the topic [listening] like the audience is a static element and not humans in community. So, if you aim well enough you
might get close to the bullseye. Egocentrically, we often feel
like it's our job to speak, and it's the other person's job to listen, and what little listening we actually do turns the listener from a human
being in community with us into a target. So, now that we've talked about
what rhetorical listening is not, then what is it, really? Rhetorical scholars have been
puzzling through that idea for quite some time, and they
have some really great answers. At its most basic level, rhetorical
listening is a form of invention. It's deeply experiencing another
person's perspective of the world so that you and your opponent can
come closer to finding the truth. You deepen your understanding of the subject by tapping into others
experiences with the same thing, which gives you a much more rounded perspective than only having your own. But it's a lot more complicated than just that. Both Wayne Booth and Krista Ratcliffe discuss how much more complex and rewarding that true listening rhetoric can be. Booth, for instance, defines
what he calls "deep listening" as using all the tools of rhetoric to remove misunderstanding. Specifically, it's a kind of listening that leads to moving beyond original beliefs to some new version of the truth. In its best form, Booth says, both sides are pursuing not just victory but a new reality— a new agreement about what is real. In comparison, Krista Ratcliffe calls
her formulation "rhetorical listening." Instead of just removing misunderstanding as Booth's version of listening does, Ratcliffe goes a step further and sees "rhetorical listening" as
actively building understanding. As she explains, "Such listening presumes an ethical responsibility "to argue about what we deem fair and just "while simultaneously questioning
what we deem fair and just." but we also need to consider
what Booth and Ratcliffe mean by "understanding." Ratcliffe explains that in
her rhetoric of listening, "understanding means more than simply listening "for a speaker or writer's intent "or listening for our own self-interested intent. "Instead, understanding
means listening to discourse, "not for intent, but with intent." for Ratcliffe, listening isn't just a
tool for furthering one's own argument but creating a space of negotiation and understanding through listening intently. bell hooks and others also
note that listening— or not— has a cross-cultural component: specifically, that listening
across the racial lines isn't valued as much by the dominant culture. The same goes for listening in
gender and listening for class. "Certainly for black women," hooks says, "our struggle has not been to
emerge from silence into speech "but to make a speech that compels
listeners, one that has heard." I know this all might sound bizarre, but the
kind of listening that Ratcliffe and Booth and brooks are talking about is completely intertwined in
the rhetorical enterprise. We've talked before about how
rhetoric is a relationship between two people mediated by a message. We imagine this as a speaker,
a listener, and a text, but conversations are never
static things, are they? When an author creates a rhetorical act and sends it out, that audience gives a response. you've just become your audience's exigence, their reason to respond. They want to change your
behavior and beliefs now as well, and probably with the same level of conviction. So the audience becomes an
author, with their own message, and our one-sided speech becomes a multi-dimensional conversation. For this reason, it might be better to think of the rhetorical triangle
as more of a rhetorical trapezoid. Conversations in the wild have a give and take, a constant listening reshuffling of one's position as your audience listens and reformulates and responds to your message. This means that, at the most
fundamental of rhetoric imaginable, to be an author means
simultaneously being a listener. You don't have to look hard
to find listening inscribed into every part of the rhetorical project. With ethos, you need to know
what your dialogue partner uses as the basis of trust, and whether or not the larger context has made it easier or harder for them to trust you. And with pathos, it's hard to focus on creating an emotional response in your audience if you don't know what they respond to, or how. And with logos, even good logic
and reasoning require context you can only get from your audience. What can you learn from them? What
mental modes drive their reasoning? The parts of rhetorical arrangement also have listening built in. Ideally, you would need to
learn about your audience in all four parts, but these two in particular require careful listening by the author: You have to craft your argument in a way that the audience will respond to it, and you can't craft a counter-argument
until you know what the other side thinks. You can see it in almost all
the rhetorical situation, too. Obviously you have to listen to your
audience's history for the audience bit, but your audience may not respond to genre the same way that you do. Also, the same setting is experienced differently by different people. You need to ask your audience about that, too. And finally, Do you and your dialogue
partner have the same purpose? Yep! You need to ask them about that as well. Even stasis theory depends on listening. You can't find stasis with
your conversation partner until you understand what they think, how they interpret the facts, and what needs done. If you want to get the gist of Wayne Booth or Krista Ratcliffe's idea of listening rhetoric, you need to think of it
less as an act of cognition and more as a kind of head space you inhabit. There's that old trite saying about walking a mile in another person's shoes, but in this case, it's more like renting out room for the
other person to camp out in your head. Scholars are probably going to hate this analogy, but if you have a favorite
book or movie or game series that you love so much that
you mentally inhabit it, you've probably been listening
rhetorically already. You've allowed someone else's
reality to inhabit your head and influence your reality. Giving the same amount and kind
of head space to real-life people and their perspectives of the world
who disagree with us, however? That feels far less safe. Unlike our fictional worlds, real people actually demand things of us. We don't actually have a responsibility to go out and fight Thanos. Dumbledore isn't going to tell us that we've been wrong all along. Real people do all of these things because our life impinges on theirs. A rhetorical opponent's
views directly pertain to us. They have opinions on us specifically or our worldview that criticize
ours or make it feel wrong. It's super easy to fall into cycles of guilt or blame with this kind of listening, and it's uncomfortable because
the rhetorical relationship now requires you to act. The hardest part of rhetorical listening is de-centering your perspective in
the rhetorical landscape enough to make room for hearing others Just like getting lost in a great story, good rhetorical listening means
we have to stop making ourselves the center of the narrative for just a little bit. De-centering also means believing
another person's experience. It means that we need to shift from saying, "This can't be true because I've never seen it," to saying instead, "this could be true because
this other person has seen it." Let's switch to a visual metaphor for this. It's a lot like taking a parallax view, which is the optical principle that
makes this wigglegram on the left look three-dimensional. Parallax is the idea that the same object when viewed from two different perspectives will appear to move relative to its background. This person's line of sight on
the duck is going to put the duck at a slightly different angle
and in front of pine tree. But this other person's line of sight, standing only a few yards away, is going to place it next to the oak tree. The parallax between their views
changes the image that they see. Parallax is the reason those cheesy
tourist pics of the Leaning tower of Pisa look so funny if you move
just a few feet to one side, but we also use parallax images to
harness a pretty cool superpower. As far back as the 19th century, people
were making double-lensed stereoscopes to view a slightly different picture
of the same subject with each eye, making the image pop out into three dimensions. these were the earliest versions of
the little red ViewMaster cameras, and eventually they'd become 3-D films. But the key is that parallax views will only create a full-depth image if both perspectives are held as equally important and rendered in the same amount of detail at the exact same time. You can communicate with this kind of depth too, but you have to take the
parallax view of the issue using all perspectives so that your response is informed and crafted by
the multiple perspectives that are in the conversation. So, to compare regular and rhetorical listening, you're going to go from evidence gathering to listening specifically to understand. Instead of just listening to claims and evidence, you're going to also listen
to a person's narrative and their habitus as well. You will also shift from being agonistic to being more diplomatic, working for a solution more than
struggling against each other. Instead of focusing on just your own perspective, you'll find yourself becoming more
cross-cultural in your thinking. You'll move away from focusing on just winning to actively wanting to find
progress between sides. Instead of keeping an emotional detachment, you'll find the conversation
deeply tied to ethics and justice. Okay, so, how do you do this? First of all you listen to understand, not to find problems with the arguments but to really figure out their perspective. When you ask questions,
make them generous questions that allow for more dialogue, not defensive questions that pick holes. Don't take the conversation personally either, because you're going to be discussing
things that hit close to home, so that means that the conversation
is going to be uncomfortable. Hold on to that parallax view! Make sure that you understand both sides well enough to round out your argument. Also look around to see who isn't speaking and invite them into the conversation. You don't want to miss out on
another perspective on the problem. And when you do all these things, it will open a space for negotiation. Good, deep listening is therefore
something transformative to you and them, and it's hard to listen if you're
afraid that they might change your mind. Remember that in a rhetorical situation, you want to affect the beliefs
or behaviors of another person because you honestly believe
that you have the right answer. If you have another person acting in good faith they're going to want the same thing for you. Alright, I'll catch you in the next video. [music]