on slogans, taglines, enthymemes, and figures of brevity in general

“Recently, a task force of top execs at a large technology company was brainstorming about a new leadership initiative,” write Dan and Chip Heath, the authors of Made To Stick, in a Fast Company article titled Made to Stick: The Anti-Slogan Argument

In Made to Stick—a useful book, one that I assigned in a rhetoric course once with mixed results—the Heath brothers make a great noise about operational claims like “It’s the economy stupid” and “We are the low-fare airline” (Northwest Air’s famous slogan—er, tagline—er, non-slogan I suppose).

They do this in the first section of the book, a section titled “Simplicity.”

Is “It’s the economy stupid” not a slogan? Will the Heath bros. retract their claims about slogans in the second edition of Made to Stick?

The Heath bros. continue:

[The task force] wanted the company’s managers to spend more time developing their people and less on giving orders. To make this happen, the firm would have to change the way those managers were groomed, paid, and evaluated. Yet, facing these epic changes, the task force felt the need to hammer out a slogan. It was a doozy (mildly disguised for confidentiality): “360-Degree Leadership: Because we all matter.” Just then, all the employees in the universe rolled their eyes.

Think about that for a second. These were smart, senior people, each with 20 to 30 years of experience, and they’re debating whether “Because we all matter” or “Because we all matter” is crisper. If every actor secretly wants to direct, then every manager secretly wants to pen ad copy.

What is the lesson the Heath bros. want me to draw here? That senior people can’t write? Or that they should leave writing to the professionals? Yes, the slogan sucks. But how is an awkward slogan an indictment against slogans anymore than a cloying wine means that all wine is bad?

Here would be another smart, senior person sweating blood over the lexical content of a slogan:

[...] In a former letter, writes Leon Trotsky in an excerpt from a letter to Andres Nin titled Spain, On The Slogan of Soviets, I expressed several ideals in this con-nection. I have developed these much more amply in an article I sent you on workers’ control in Germany. It appears that the slogan of “juntas” is associated in the minds of the Spanish workers with the slogan of Soviets; and for this reason it seems to sharp, too decisive, too “Russian” to them. That is to say, they look at it in a different light than did the Russian workers at a corresponding stage. Are we not confronted here with a historical paradox in that the existence of Soviets in the USSR acts to paralyze the creation of Soviets in other revolutionary countries?

This question must be given the utmost attention in private conversations with workers in the different parts of the country. At any event, if the slogan of Soviets (juntas) fails as yet to meet with response, then we must concentrate on the slogan of factory committees. I dealt with this topic in the above-mentioned article on workers’ control. On the basis of factory committees we can develop the Soviet organization without referring to them by name [...]

So, um, set aside for a moment that Trotsky is surprised that the term junta fails to move his republicano comrades. All power to the juntas? Yikes. That sounds unpleasant. But just what is a soviet, by the way. I put this question to my class from time to time and never get a straight answer. Soviets are cells, councils, or revolutionary committees, spontaneous organs of self or direct government, and according to Arendt in her On Revolution, they are the “lost treasure” of the “revolutionary tradition,” a tradition that includes the Jeffersonian ward system (never implemented), the French revolutionary sections, and the workers councils of the German revolution of 1918 and 1919.

For Trotsky and the professional revolutionaries of his era, social organization and organizational communication were part of a single method to achieve a single goal. You communicated to organize (in this case, slogans that called to action), and you organized to communicate. The developing and testing of slogans—and the inquiry that obtained, inquiry that included “private conversations with workers” and other means—were a part of that method. Jean-Marie Domenach, in a Public Opinion Quarterly article titled “Leninist Propaganda,” describes the divsion of communicative labour for the professional revolutionary and the genres of discourse that it supported. In the Leninist system according to Domenach, a distinction was drawn between agitators and propagandists.

Agitators spoke to small groups, generally face to face, using slogans and watchwords upon which they would expound. Their purpose was to draw connections between the lived reality of workers and larger issues. Propagandists addressed larger groups but by other means. They published their revelations (or denunciations) in pamphlets and newspapers. These denunciations were arguments that attempted to “demystify” appeared random, arbitrary, or a part of the natural course of things. They were attempts to connect the issues that affected the workers to larger social and political concerns. Hence the propagandist completed the work of the agitator. The agitator lived among the workers and attempted to draw their private suffering into social fact through pointed expression. The propandist organized those facts into argument, understanding, and calls for action.

Similarly, Trotsky as agitator allows his contact with the lived experience of the Spanish people to challenge Trotsky as theorist or propagandist. He allows what he learns to challenge his assumptions about historical laws and revolutionary processes. This is important. “Are we not confronted with an historical paradox?” Trotsky asks, and in asking opens the possibility that any doctrine of continuity between world revolution and the Russian revolution requires urgent review and perhaps revision in light of facts discovered on the ground in Spain. Set aside your views on Trotsky or his analysis or the success of Trotsky’s enterprise. This is rhetoric as method, it is the very definition of a rational process, and it is dialectical in character in the classical sense of dialectics. This is a community engaged in review, interpretation, and argument, in the form of communicators testing their arguments in live conditions.

This division of labour resembles the Aristotelian enthymeme and paradigm, the 2 species of rhetorical argument. What Trotsky describes is enthymematic reasoning. For Trotsky, All power to the juntas is deficient because it seems “too sharp, too divisive” for the mixed, and often international formations of the Spanish republicans. An enthymeme is distinct from a dialectical syllogism to the degree that its intended audience supplies its premises. In this case a key value premise of  All power to the juntas—continuity or solidarity with the project of the 1917 revolution— is not shared by its intended audience. Trotsky’s task as he specifies it is to return to the soldiers and workers themselves to develop slogans—enthymemes, arguments—that derive from their values and their experience. Whether and to what degree this results in a

Enthymemes tend toward brevity—they are instances of brachylogy. They are by definition figures of brevity as they generally omit or suppress a premise or conclusion. Paradigms are more deliberative and tend toward copia or surplus—they are means to develop an argument using examples, models, illustration—thus: they are instances of macrology. The one, for Aristotle, is to provide witness for the other. Together they are the pulse of persuasive discourse, contraction and dilation.

(I like to cite Trotsky, Lenin, and others when I discuss slogans because too often slogans are associated with contemporary advertising discourse.)

So what have we established? That a slogan or a soundbyte or a tagline should be a part of a overall communication regime or plan. That ideally it should be a part of a larger inquiry into the lived reality those whom you want to reach out to. And that your plan should begin with argument.

Back to the Heath bros., who continue where we left them:

This type of slogan-virus also thrives in the nonprofit world. Civic Ventures is a social enterprise that promotes the idea of an “encore career,” a second career beginning in one’s fifties or sixties that’s driven by the desire to give back. (It’s a good idea: See page 114.) At an event that celebrated the Purpose Prize winners — people who had chosen an encore career — we gave the audience a challenge: how to persuade other seniors to do what they’ve done.

There are a variety of approaches to make the case. Tell a story about someone who has found a renewed sense of purpose via an encore career (such as Bill Gates).

A story is a paradigm, just as would be any sort of example, model, or illustration.

Back to the Heath bros.

Appeal to the desire of older workers to leave their mark on the world. Draw distinctions between encore career people and their more conventional, boring peers — If you can’t wait to retire so you can golf five times a week or catch up on your soaps, this ain’t for you. But if you’re willing to give something back, society really could use your talents.

The Heath bros. also offer as an alternative to a slogan an enthymeme in the form of an if-then conditional:

If you can’t wait to retire so you can golf five times a week or catch up on your soaps,

THEN

this ain’t for you.

The enthymeme is followed by a disjunction that leads into a second enthymeme

If you’re willing to give something back,

THEN

society really could use your talents

So, hence, thus, we would argue, and in conclusion, what the Heath bros. oppose are not slogans. They close on 2 slogans in the form of if-then conditional clause enthymemes. Rather, what they oppose is sloganeering disconnected from lived practice, and sloganeering void of argumentative substance.

yours &c.
g.