Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's U.N. Address

Chapter Two. The Chief Prosecutor and the Iraqi Regime: Intertextual Ethos and Transitive Chains of Authority

45 chapter two The Chief Prosecutor and the Iraqi Regime: Intertextual Ethos and Transitive Chains of Authority x Ethos, like postmodern subjectivity, shifts and changes over time, across texts, and around competing spaces. —Nedra Reynolds, “Ethos as Location,” 1993 S everal sources have suggested that George W. Bush deliberately chose Colin Powell to deliver the U.N. address because Powell, unlike other members of the Bush team, had a sterling public reputation. As Isikoff and Corn (2006) put it: “The idea—not a subtle one—was to attach Powell’s credibility to the case for war” (174). Similarly, Unger (2007) argues that the lack of evidence in Powell’s 46 Chapter Two presentation was compensated for by the fact that “the presentation was being made by a man who had . . . become the most admired and respected person in America” (285). Unger reports that, at the time of his speech, 86 percent of the American public approved of Colin Powell.1 Indeed, he writes, Powell came “before the U.N. as a voice of reason, as a man who appeared to have unassailable moral authority ” (285). Finally, in his examination of Powell’s presentation, rhetorical scholar David Zarefsky (2007) repeats this sentiment, claiming that Powell’s “reputation as a skeptic on Iraq, if not an outright ‘dove’ within the administration, enhanced his credibility” (279). In the end, Zarefsky argues, “the credibility of the source” was able to “outweigh internal deficiencies in the evidence” (298). These sources point to the importance of Powell’s ethos—a term that encompasses character, credibility, and authority.2 In the Aristotelian tradition, ethos is conceptualized as an artistic creation, a discursive display of character that rhetors construct for themselves. As Garver (1994) explains, “The chief way in which one displays character is by presenting an argument” (195). When rhetors choose appropriate lines of reasoning, they effectively exhibit “practical wisdom [phronesis], virtue [arete] and goodwill [eunoia]” (Aristotle 2007, 2.1.5). However, Aristotle also recognized the non-artistic ethos of the “moral virtues,” the “accumulation of previous praxis” that results in the speaker’s “ethical reputation” (Garver 1994, 193). This is sometimes called “prior ethos” (Amossy 2001) or “prediscursive ethos” (Maingueneau 1999). And it potentially determines whether a speech will carry any conviction with an audience. As Isocrates (1929) puts it: “The argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words” (Antidosis 278).3 We tend to view both prior ethos and artistic ethos as manifestations of the self. Thus, we talk about how people “earn” their reputations, presumably as a consequence of their moral habits. And we think of artistic ethos as a persuasive strategy of “self-presentation” (Anderson 2007, 91, emphasis added), something we enact discursively for ourselves and by ourselves. However, traditionally speaking, ethos is composed socially, not individually. In fact, the Greek word ethos originally signified not just personal character, but a “habitual gathering place” (Halloran 1982) or communal “dwelling place” (Hyde 2004a).4 As Reynolds (1993) argues, this latter definition of ethos calls to mind public congregations and suggests that ethos construction is negotiated between rhetor The Chief Prosecutor 47 and community (328). In other words, one’s ethos is co-constructed by many people within a social group. And, as Reynolds emphasizes, this “social group is not necessarily made up of like-minded individuals who gather in harmony” (329). Instead, it is characterized by “differences and conflict” (330), and one’s ethos is always subject to “competing representations ” (335). Aristotle (2007) certainly recognized that ethos can be disputed in the public arena. As he remarks in the Rhetoric, we, as speakers, are “able to make both ourselves and any other person worthy of credence in regard to virtue” (1.9.1, emphasis added). Here, Aristotle confirms that we have the power to build a positive character for others in public rhetorical performances. However, Aristotle didn’t just advise rhetors to make others “worthy of credence.” He also suggested that rhetors should assign blame to others through insults and invective (1.10.41). In fact, as Kennedy (2007) points out, the ancient Greeks tended “to view life in competitive terms,” and they considered it natural to discredit personal “enemies” (83). Thus, in Aristotle’s contentious world, character was naturally a matter of debate for rival speakers in the agora. In our technological culture, ethos is debated not in the...