choices and we always find a few students in every class who are in fact militantly on guard against external assaults on their identities. But on the other hand, many students underestimate how skillfully those who fashion off-the-rack identities for them manage to ingratiate themselves through the use of humor, irony, self deprecation and self-revelation, and numerous other devices designed to disarm them. In approaching the relationship between argument and identity, thus, it is important to respect students’ position and experience in this area and to take it slowly at the outset. We like to begin the discussion of identity with a look at some of the most prevalent techniques used by those with prefabricated identities to sell, techniques to which none of us are invulnerable.
Consider, for example, one of most effective devices used by advertisers, political consultants and management gurus to disarm American audiences: the appeal to rugged individualism. Whether it is the politician who professes to ignore the polls and follow his gut, the manager who scoffs at conventional wisdom and dares to be great, or the male model dressed in cowboy garb who lights up a cigarette and laughs at death, Americans have long been susceptible to the charms of the rugged individual in all his many guises. Indeed, the easiest way to sell a mass American audience on behaviors or choices that have questionable consequences is to present that choice as an expression of rugged individualism. Rugged individualism constitutes what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call a loci, “premises of a general nature that can serve as the bases for values and hierarchies” (84). The premise represented by the model of the rugged individual is perhaps most economically summed up by the categorical imperative of the code hero: “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” One listens to one’s inner manhood to intuit the best course of action and follows that guidance in the face of convention, popularity, lawfulness and personal risk. Like all loci, the model of the rugged individual draws its life from many streams, in particular, American history and American popular culture. A country born of revolution and nurtured on the “conquest” of a receding frontier, a country whose economic system is based on risk taking and competition, a country whose entertainment industry has provided a steady stream of cowboys, private dicks, rags to riches entrepreneurs and gang bangers in every medium—this is a country with rugged individualism buried deep in its DNA. Which is why the simple act of associating a brand, a product, a choice, a person, a candidate, or a proposal with rugged individualism has been so effective down through the years in forwarding the interests of its sponsor. But in the act of choosing whatever it is that the sponsor wishes us to choose, we further the hold of that identity on the national imagination, ensure its continued repetition and reinforce the rugged individual’s status as a behavioral model.
But those who use the rugged individual understand that the ur-vision of the rugged individual—call it the John Wayne version—has limited appeal for denizens of various boxes on the psychographic grid and so they craft variations on the central model that speak most saliently to those to whom they are pitching their product. For some, the macho version of non-conformity is a turnoff and so they require a kinder, gentler version. Consider for example the charming, mildly amusing ad campaign for Apple Computing featuring personifications of the “MAC” and “PC” computer lines. Whereas the PC is personified as a plump, stuffy suit, with an exceedingly narrow view of his job description and a tendency to whine about his users’ need to demand too much of him, MAC is personified as a skinny, hip, stylishly rumpled younger guy open to new possibilities, puzzled by PC’s complaints about his users’ demands and bemused by the PC persona. It is a classic conflict, albeit a soothingly muted one, between the staid “company man” and the edgy rebel, the bureaucrat and the innovator.
The current ad is a far tamer version of the classic Apple Super Bowl ad of 1984 introducing the Mac line of computers, featuring a woman eluding storm troopers to shatter a huge television screen where Big Brother is pontificating before an auditorium full of bowed figures. (While it might be tempting to see the advertisers’ choice of a female figure for the role of rugged individual as a sign of advanced social awareness, it is more likely a reflection of their concern to hit a particular demographic.) The earlier version of the “rebel v suits” advertisement suggests that a good deal more is at stake in the choice between conformity and individualism and, by implication, between the choice of Apple and the unnamed establishment brand of computers. One’s choice of computer is a political, not merely a practical or lifestyle choice. Given the outsider status of the Apple brand in 1984 when IBM dominated the market, the difference in tone is understandable. The ideological implications of the rugged individual stereotype in advertising tend to be ever more foregrounded the riskier the choice consumers are being asked to make (hence the Marlboro Man).
There is nothing inherently evil about Apple’s imaginative use of stock characters from the American imagination to sell their product. Like all mythic simplification, it undoubtedly overstates the differences between the two products, not to mention the differences between two very large American corporations, but all advertising is understood to be delivered with a wink, and overstatement is hardly a sin. The mischief lies in the elevation of a questionable premise to an unquestioned assumption, and of a role that all of us are occasionally asked to play to an essentialist ideal that all should aspire to be. The mischief also lies in the constant reinforcement of individualist over communitarian values. If the values represented by “MAC” seem innocuous in the context of the ad, they may seem less so when extended to the realm of civic virtues. Rugged individuals, after all, do not play well with others. Their questioning of authority seldom appears to extend to questioning the authority of their own core values. However much good they may do heeding the words of the bumper sticker, “Question Authority,” they are ill-prepared by their credo for actually assuming authority themselves, for questioning the ends to which authority is best put, and for promoting collective action that secures a common good. Yet the ability or inability of politicians to sell themselves plausibly as rugged individualists has been an important predictor of political success in this country throughout much of the last three decades.
In the above analysis of the ad, we ourselves are making an assumption about identity that not everyone, certainly not all our students, may find agreeable. We assume that identity is what Burke calls “parliamentary” and variable as opposed to being unitary, essential, and fixed. In this view of identity, we play many roles and authenticity is not so much a matter of remaining true to a central self as it is a matter of consciously selecting the roles we play and being fully engaged in those roles. Rhetoricians’ assumptions about human identity are as basic to the way they practice their art as the neo-classical economists’ assumptions about identity—personified in neo-classical economists’ default model of identity, homo economicus—are basic to their own practice. The literal truth of either discipline’s assumption is always open to conjecture, though contemporary rhetoric’s assumptions about identity appear to square better with those currently dominant in the fields of psychology, philosophy and psychology. The economists’ assumption that human agents make decisions solely on the basis of rational self-interest, comports well with nineteenth century utilitarian assumptions about human nature, but appears often to be at odds with actual human behavior. Still, for all its admitted flaws, the model continues to work well enough to serve as a starting point for micro-economic analysis and continues to be used even by skeptics, albeit with increasing amendment and modification. While we are prepared to defend the validity of rhetoric’s regnant model of human identity, we should not feel that we have to prove it beyond a doubt to our students or to colleagues in other disciplines. Like the economists’ far more simplified model, it serves to explain a number of behaviors observed in rhetorical analysis and to provide a clear framework for rhetorical theory.
So just what are some of the implications of the “parliamentary,” non-essentialist model of identity? First and foremost, the model implies a strong sense of agency on the part of every rhetorical actor. The model assumes that people have the freedom to make choices, not just choices of behavior, but of identity, and that rhetoric is a primary means by which those choices can be systematically examined, made, and defended. The freedom assumed by rhetoric, can be seen from an essentialist standpoint as a curse, insofar as one is never quite “finished” and safe; like Sartre’s existential hero, homo rhetoricus is “condemned to freedom.” Hans Blumenberg contrasts
