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Show 116 After all, if democratic egalitarianism is an objective of rhetorical practice (Dewey, 2012; Goodnight, 1982), then it is quite obvious that corporations are champions of democracy. The problem, however, is that our own rhetorical tools are not yet fit for the job of analyzing how nonhuman entities such as corporations employ networks for rhetorical advantages, because rhetorical communication scholars are taught to deal with human, rational, speaking subjects. The ideograph, from an actor-network perspective, enables us to develop a more comprehensive understanding of equality in an age of corporate citizenship. Michael Calvin McGee (1980a) first developed the ideograph as a means for determining how material discourse functions in American culture. As a link between discourse and ideology, ideographs are found in common discourse and have the capacity to control publics. McGee famously said, An ideograph is an ordinary-language term found in political discourse. It is a high-order abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal. It warrants the use of power, excuses behavior and belief which might otherwise be perceived as eccentric or antisocial, and guides behavior and belief into channels easily recognizable by a community as acceptable and laudable. (1980a, p. 15) An ideographic analysis thus involves analyzing the way abstract terms such as "equality," "law," "liberty," and "necessity," function in concrete ways to encapsulate certain phenomena. As "unique ideological commitments" and "building blocks to ideology," ideographs are infused with meaning that "condition" human beings "to a vocabulary of concepts that function as guides, warrants, reasons, or excuses for behavior and belief" (p. 6). As Condit and Lucaites (1993) later described them, "ideographs represent in condensed form the normative, collective commitments of the members of a public, and they typically appear in public argumentation as the necessary motivations or |
