A rhetorical and hermenutic analysis of alcohol use (translation)

This is a translation of parts of an article originally written in Spanish. It can be cited as:

Cronick, Karen (2005). El análisis retórico/hermeneútico de textos relacionados al consumo del alcohol [128 párrafos]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 6(3), Art. 8, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs050384.


A rhetorical and hermeneutic analysis of alcohol use

Rhetorical and hermeneutic analyses are related interpretative efforts. In this article I interpret texts from interviews done with people who have something to say about their experiences with the alcohol (both drinkers and non-drinkers). The interviews are the basic text I work with. In this paper, alcohol is considered a socially constructed object.

I have created a second text through my interpretative efforts. I have identified figures and tropes in these first texts, together with other persuasive elements of rhetorical nature. Through them I have had access to the first text, that is to say, what the interviewees said to me.

I have adopted the subject of alcohol drinking because it relates to many different kinds of dilemmas. One of them is the model used to construct knowledge that has to do with drinking (disease, vice, diversion, relaxation). Another dilemma has to do with how people use alcohol; it can be conceived as a sort of social menu of pre-elaborated customs from which people select their own habits.

For example, a person can abstain from any consumption at all or “drink socially". He or she can also take on the role of the happy-go-lucky drunk, or sink gradually into the loss of consciousness. In addition the subject can use discourse about this substance to achieve other aims. Other roles include: a) the functionary that maintains public decorum by jailing or otherwise controlling the disorderly, b) the doctors and psychologists that “cure” them, and c) the liquor-store and bar owners that supply the drinks.

Alcohol related discourse links up with the problem of agency. Akrasia appears in addiction, in the abandonment of responsibility, and in social situations that allow normally frowned-on activities (parties). Agency also appears in attempts to control the use of alcohol, both in an existential sense (I can control my consumption) and in an official sense (the isolation of addicted people in jails and hospitals). And finally, it appears in the dramatic decision that some addicts make when they have to choose between a vital impulse (Eros) and its opposite that leads to death (Thanatos). This decision involves one of the most arduous dilemmas that people ever have to confront.

Necessarily we must conclude that the life-world (HABERMAS, 1970a, 1970b, and 1987; SCHÜTZ, 1993) contains the possibility of Akrasia, self-deception and the other manifestations of “irrationality". We could say that they exist as structural "options" in the life world.

In our interviews, people give explanations for their own intoxication and that of others. Drunkenness appears as an identifiable and well-known social condition which is tied systematically to reasons that “explain” it. Le VOT-IFRAH (1989) and Le VOT-IFRAH and DELAINE (1989) had already proposed that intoxication is a social resource. People live in a culture that offers them intoxication models, but they are not the passive instruments of this culture. Everyone must “actualize" the existing models in his or her own terms, that is to say, "Chacun peut to choisir sa voie" p.22). [4]

I have used a quasi-ethnographic method to build a social context for the interviews. All the interviews took place in San Antonio de los Altos, Miranda State in Venezuela. Thus I have included some data obtained through observation.

In the section “The relation between the drinkers and the community”, I analyze three interviews with people who work with excessive drinkers: a psychologist, a police chief and a store owner.

In the second section “Personal relationships with alcohol” I include the texts of six interviews: a) a mother and her son, both strong drinkers who deny their habits, b) two members of Alcoholics Anonymous, c) a group interview in which one man talks about the camaraderie of self-destruction, d) a male social drinker, e) a man who substituted his alcoholic dependence for a project of self improvement, and f) a female social drinker.

Finally I analyze an interview with the mother of an addictive drinker.

Method

The use of rhetorical figures or tropes is intimately related to speakers’ intentions. Also, people choose what they talk about and their dilemmas from what is available in their life world.

Nevertheless, rhetorical analysis is not limited the use of figures or tropes. We can define rhetoric in Aristotelian terms, as PERELMAN and OLBRECHTS-TYTECA (1989) have done, and emphasize the persuasive elements of language.

Linguistic instruments that go beyond semantics (and that Billig and others have called the “babble" of common sense -BILLIG, CONDOR, EDWARDS, WINS, MIDDLETON & RADLEY, 1988) can also be considered parts of rhetoric. For example, when several of our interviewees said: "Initially I drank socially…“ they used a phrase that didn’t seem to contain rhetorical elements, that is to say, extra-semantic elements. In my first encounter with this phrase, I didn't notice its importance. However, when I related the phrase to the complete text, I could see that this person was preparing an argument to show that his dependence was not his own fault, that others were to blame. The repetition of this device in several other interviews was a clue to an analytical regularity.

Another instrument that has been useful is BURKE’S (1969b) notion of reverse genealogy. This means linguistic “labels” allow us to construct a succession of ideas that give rise to the history of a particular notion. People refer briefly to these labels in a way that goes beyond semantics. For example, a reference to "vice” carries with it a long history that leads to a moral model for excessive consumption.

Some readers might identify my method of analysis with some form of post-estructuralism because I suppose the existence of a linguistic organization and intersubjective understanding between the interlocutors. The possibility of a hermeneutic interpretation of a text is based on a theoretical presumption: the interpreter shares meanings, culture and history with his or her interlocutor. His or her work forces to him or her to enter the life world in which the original text took place (GADAMER, 1993).

Nevertheless, the interpreter cannot speak for his interlocutor, and his or her task is not to paraphrase the original text, or to supply what the speaker might have said. This kind of interpretation is an open and changing process. Interpretation is a kind of dialogue, and as such it is also a dialectic process of transformation. The interpreter must assume responsibility for his or her own role in this project.

From these basic principles that define the analytical field of this work, we can identify, generally, three rhetorical aspects:

a. Talk contains the culture’s history. This principle is derived from the idea of a genealogy within the speech, of a declarative series (BURKE, 1969b, p.92). Such words as freedom, responsibility, intention, sobriety and blame have complex histories.

b. Talk is argumentative and is made up of dilemmas. There are many ways to explain and to understand the world, A person can even mix contradictory points of view in one argument. Although a detailed reflection might disclose their incompatibility, such apparent confusion may be rhetorically useful for a speaker. Thus our interviewees mix models related to alcohol use: they may confuse moral and medical ideas in one phrase, or even include ideas about witchcraft.

c. People not only deliberate about their life word dilemmas, they use certain arguments and mechanisms to achieve certain aims. Thus they defend themselves or their habits, they promise to change, they accuse others of their discomforts. Also they compare, they try to convince, and they promote certain effects in their listeners and the world.


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Citation information
Cronick, Karen (2005). El análisis retórico/hermeneútico de textos relacionados al consumo del alcohol [128 párrafos]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 6(3), Art. 8, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs050384.

Complete article in Spanish: http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/24