A few years ago I looked around Central Oregon for a lawyer who could advise me regarding the use of real people's identities in published work. I found no one. Perhaps someone with a background in art law has settled down here since then. I don't know. But even if there is one, it's hard to imagine paying big bucks for someone to review material that will not actually make the client who hires that lawyer -- myself of the Scottish heritage -- any money.
To be perfectly honest I did put a lawyer on retainer once, 15 years ago, but in another situation entirely. (I still carry her card around but have no idea if she is even in town.) In that situation I pretty much paid her $400 for the hour during which I told her my story. It turned out that that the concern over which I worried never developed. Nevertheless, it was useful to have her there in her office, sitting like a big watch dog on the back porch of my mind. Her presence was kind of like the weaponry I carry in the car every time I travel. It eased my mind in case of . . .
In case something that "no one could have predicted" or "anyone could have predicted" happens.
Which phrase is chosen depends on the rhetorical point the communicator in question wants to make. The person who says about an unexpected consequence that "anyone could have seen" said result arriving is often trying to show his or her greater knowledge and awareness and/or trying to shame or put down those who acted in spite of such obvious risks. Contrariwise, the person who articulates the unpredictability of the universe is usually trying to display a degree of consubstantiality with those caught in the backdraft of events.
Consubstantiality. This is a term I have never taught in my classroom and used only sparingly in my own writing. It's important in Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory. It means "of the same substance" and its use is most notable, before Burke, in the Christian theology of the Trinity. There's a very thoughtful discussion of the Burkean term in Syracuse rhetoric student Allison Hitt's blogpost of a year ago.
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| Neural Pathways in Decision Making |
To the true rhetorician, almost all communication is persuasive. This is because almost all communication displays its identification with one way of being or another and calls on us to accept its construction of the world as that way. But what do I mean by "true rhetorician"? This is my tautological term to describe a person who has fallen into the study of rhetoric after growing up within a family system that very early on showed that there are always at least two sides to every issue and that each family member was required to pick one side or the other and that once a side was chosen it required symbolic defense. Thus true rhetoricians are people who have the struggle of symbol systems pressed into their neural pathways at an early age. If such people are lucky enough to have a "good" education they may discover in later life that this constant clash of symbols may be defined and understood through the study of rhetoric.
I'm not sure, however, that I personally believe that there is any communication that is not rhetorical. Burke himself thought that sometimes people expressed symbolic messages as birds do, for the sheer pleasure of making the sound. But do birds ever sing for pleasure? Do people ever express symbols without purpose? If a tree falls . . .
What makes any issue regarding the interpretation of symbols so challenging, of course, is because meaning lies in the minds of both the creator and the consumer of the symbol. And thus we get back to the riskiness of any form of public expression. As Jesus (the Rhetorician) makes so clear in the parable of the Sower and the Seed, the value given any message depends on the mind on which it lands.
Thus unexpected consequences are always part of the expectable outcome of any utterance.
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