What is procedural rhetoric?

15 January 2012

Ian Bogost argues that procedural rhetoric reveals how persuasive and expressive strategies are embedded within complex processes of not only video games, but also inherent in any social system. He defines it as the following: “Procedural rhetoric is a subdomain of procedural authorship; its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In computation, those rules are authored in code, through the practice of programming” (“The Rhetoric of Video Games” 2008).

Alex Reid, in a blog post, compares/contrasts Bogost’s procedural rhetoric to Richard Fulkerson’s use of the same term in a 2005 article “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”. Reid quotes Fulkerson’s definition of procedural rhetoric as:

an axiological commitment to judging writing by suitability to the context (“situation and audience”), including concern for classical issues of pathos, ethos, and logos. Its theory of the writing process says that writing is a complex extended set of (teachable) activities in which a wide variety of invention procedures may be valuable, and an equal variety of drafting and revision activities….Epistemologically, adherents of this view believe that values and decisions are reached through dialectic, but they do not take a radical antifoundational view.

While Fulkerson suggests that procedural rhetoric resides within the mode of various ways of print-based writing (rules of content-making/epistemological), Bogost suggests that it resides within any dynamic process (rules of being/doing/ontological), grounding his exposition in the computation-based video games. Reid suggests that Fulkerson’s pedagogical take on teaching writing processes carries a theme of Bogost’s definition, where “… there is an argument that would suggest that all texts are procedural. Books carry with them rules of behavior. Reading a book is a procedure, and a procedure that must be learned. Different books demand different procedures.” Reid continues by saying, “As such, one might argue that Bogost’s distinction between the ‘construction of words or images’ and the ‘authorship of rules’ does not fully hold.”

Bogost has received some criticism on this front and has responded in The Journal of Electronic Publishing saying:

Procedural rhetoric was never meant to be a theory specific to videogames, or even to computation, even if I do connect those two forms to the idea in Persuasive Games. Procedural rhetoric is a kind of argumentation and expression that represents processes or systems with processes or systems. In that sense, it has possible use well outside of games. . . certainly in computation more generally, but also in domains that use modeling as their representational mode.

Based on what materials on the subject I have engaged with, Bogost is suggesting that authoring “the rules of behavior” is the authoring of the ontology of the system, the ways of being, and what role(s) (non)humans play in such a rule-based system. To be a player, playing a game, in Bogost’s case, he argues that a person can reveal their “ontological position” by testing the boundaries and rules of the game by residing within the “simulation gap” of the system; a product of the system’s procedural rhetoric. Fulkerson, in a slightly different way, is concerned with the processes inherent in the traditional, epistemic work conducted in Rhet/Comp–a discipline that has arguably been devoted to the printed page and the operations to write with the aim of adherence of minds in mind, if you will. Simply put, Fulkerson is not thinking about models of the social (that includes nonhuman actors) when he talks about procedural rhetoric, while Bogost, I would argue, is.

So, when a person is grounded in a specific network/system, s/he can arguably engage with the rules of the said network/system as a rhetor, trying to figure out his/her role(s) and ways of being and knowing. This would be the ontological grounds of procedural rhetoric. Afterall, even Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca in The New Rhetoric (1958) claim that some common established ground must be met prior to argumentation, providing Alice in Wonderland as an example, which would be a very interesting post for the future, I might add. But, perhaps, procedural rhetoric can lend us new ways of seeing how, in the case of Alice, she needed to understand the procedural rhetoric of the system, the actors and the undergirding logics of the system, prior to critiquing or constructing any such epistemic work in acceptance or refusal of it. I agree with Reid that procedural rhetoric undergirds what we do in Rhet/Comp, and I wonder if his intention is to create room for more complexity without sacrificing coherence. Is this possible without computers to enact such simulations?

Here, I think there is room for future explorations of the intersections and potentialities of Latour’s ANT and procedural rhetoric, trying to reach toward how an actor (re/de)composes one’s role within a network, as well as how Hawk’s Counter-History of Composition starts to make those moves with invention and complex vitalism as well, but that will be for another day. My eyes are beginning to cross. X-)