ARTICOLI / 7 / di Panagiotis Christias
Politics and common passions presuppose a collective institutional framework, a media space for everyone to expresses himself through passion and reason. Persuasive strength and the ability to mobilize common passions are specific characteristics to the rhetorical art. Rhetoric could be defined as the strategic art of positioning through reason in the game of political passions. In today’s social-historical landscape, urban space and the media link the various communities in an accelerating form of information flows. Acceleration, however, as a process, renders all informational content transitory. It is more information as an empty form, as a pure medium that matters, not this or that specific piece. The characteristic of our time is the eviction of reasoning in the common decision making under the simultaneous effect of the acceleration of time and media. Therefore, we need rhetoric as a way of reasoning with political passions in all mediatic forms of public messaging.
