Reading :: Rhet Ops

Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare
Edited by Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson

A while back, when Bill Hart-Davidson began tweeting about Rhet Ops (or is it RhetOps?), I asked him to clarify the concept further:

@billhd can you bottom-line the difference between #rhetops and propaganda?

He replied:

not clear to me in practice, but we use #rhetops to mark invocation of our disciplinary knowledge about the practice 

Bill is one of the smartest people in our field, and this is a reasonable distinction: "rhet ops" is not a phenomenon or existing type, it's an analytical concept meant to rhetorically examine arguments made by states (and perhaps nonstate actors) for military purposes. Or as they say in the introduction:

by mid-summer 2016 the project began to feel urgent as we collected an increasing number of stories under #RhetOps, a hashtag to mark convergences between digital rhetorical theory and military operations, that pointed to broader militarization of social media and the concomitant questions concerning the vulnerability of democracy (p.vii).

They explain that in this collection, they assemble "a diverse group of authors writing about the contemporary use of digital rhetoric by both state actors and military organizations as well as non-state actors whose motives involve carrying out violence" (p.5). They argue that military agencies are increasingly interested in digital rhetoric, and in addition, actors are increasingly using nonhuman agents in digital networks (p.6).

This concept seems like a good starting point. But after reading this collection, I still don't have a good idea of how RhetOps is operationalized. Each contributor seems to be working with a slightly different concept. For instance, John Gagnon lists 11 Minerva Initiative-funded projects that "clearly intersect in some way with rhetoric studies" (p.84)—these mainly seem to be grounded in psychology or sociology, although the author does not specify, and I strongly doubt that any of them involve rhetoric scholars. Based on this list, Gagnon speculates that "the Pentagon hopes to use such research for the purposes of weaponizing rhetorical knowledge" (pp.84-85). Fair enough: so did Pericles. In the next chapter, Brad Lucas claims that Vietnam War-era antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society "weaponized" the mimeograph machine and referred to the produced texts as "shotgun pamphlets," which Lucas characterizes as "textual weapons" (p.96). But I'm unclear whether Lucas' concept coheres with Gagnon's, or how rhetorical theory provides a deeper understanding than more established frameworks such as PsyOps.

I think that Angie Mallory comes closest to putting her finger on the central challenge in this collection. She explicitly discusses PsyOps (styled here as PSYOP) and attempts to define RhetOps against it (p.201). As she learned more about PSYOP, she realized that "they were oblivious to rhetoric and drew their entire background from psychology, and yet rhetoric was all about persuasive communication, which is what PSYOP experts do" (p.203). Yes: Other disciplines study persuasive communication, especially psychology but also other social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, and economics. Rhetoric doesn't own persuasion and argumentation, and must demonstrate that it actually brings something to the table if it is going to participate meaningfully in this discourse. It's not just a matter of "guarding the borders of our academic fields so tightly," as Mallory adds (p.203)—it's a matter of delineating our unique contributions, and demonstrating that they are useful and  compatible with those of other disciplines.

Does this collection do that? Like many, it's a mixed bag. Some contributions do seem to provide principled analysis that is grounded in or unique to rhetoric. For instance, in their chapter on ISIS, Marcellino and Magnuson tie RhetOps to cultural understanding, and say that "one possible way to frame this rhetorical battle being fought in the Middle East is as a dialogue" (p.125). The authors offer a rhetorical analysis by comparing lexical and lexicogrammatical strategies (p.126). Similarly, Michael Trice uses genre ecologies to map out the discourse in GamerGate. These have potential to interface with other, more established social sciences.

But as a whole, RhetOps seems like an initial orientation rather than an operationalizable concept—and to be fair, I think that's Bill and Jim Ridolfo conceived this collection, as the beginning of a conversation that might eventually develop an operationalized concept. At least that's what I think its central contribution is—and I hope this conversation continues. If you are interested in joining this conversation, this collection is an important starting point.