Summer-Fall 2001

Wilson Cracks Communication Codes

by Mary Shafer

Kirt Wilson was in junior high when his mother worried that her only child was spending too much time watching television.

"So Mom enrolled me in night school," recalls Wilson, now assistant professor of Communication Studies. "My choices were chess or computer language."

Wilson chose the computer language course--and that, he says, was the beginning of his continuing and avid interest in computer technology and programming code, so much so that--even after completing a master's degree in rhetorical studies at Purdue University--he thought he might one day find his professional home in the computer industry. At the same time, though, he found himself "turned on to rhetoric as a political exercise," he says. So he completed a Ph.D. at Northwestern University, doing a dissertation on the Civil Rights Act of 1875. He joined the U faculty in January 1996.

Today, Wilson is both a scholar passionately interested in deciphering the rhetoric of political discourse and a self-confessed "Linux geek," who maintains his department's Web site and posts links to computer-related interests on his own home page.

If this 21st-century avocation seems somehow at odds with his scholarly bent toward rhetoric, Wilson makes it seem eminently natural. Both venues excite his voluminous curiosity.

A born lecturer, he loves exploring his theories about how leaders explain and argue their political decisions. Not so much interested in the motives or ideology behind political decision-making, he likes to grapple with the discourse--the filter that mediates the terrain between motives and decisions.

Put another way, Wilson says, if "x" is the motive behind a political decision and "y" is the decision itself, "z" is the vast, constantly changing terrain that makes up public discourse. Take a critical look at those "z's" in any era and you can uncover the political culture.

"Political judgments," Wilson says, "result from all kinds of things--back-door deal making, lobbying, whatever--but you understand the judgment itself by how people, in the moment of debate, explain their decisions. Rhetoric defines what the public believes, and those beliefs make up the political culture. Rhetoric is about the 'horizon of the possible,' that is, what people are ready to accept."

His doctoral dissertation about the Civil Rights Act of 1875 is a case in point. "By 1875-76 the politics of equality had changed," he says. "Following the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, it had become indecorous to disregard equality. You couldn't silence an African-American in the Senate chamber because African-Americans were elected to be there.

"For Southern Democrats, the question was, 'How do we institute the old power?' The answer was to institute a rhetoric of place that could resist the politics of equality. Before the Civil War, equality was not a reality in any sense. Now they could say, 'African-Americans have political equality because we gave it to them, but they have never been socially equal. Legal equals, yes; political equals, yes; social equals, no.

"Segregation said blacks couldn't be in the same place as whites because they didn't have social rights. Social rights were defined as private rights--the right to make friends, to go where you wanted to go. Take public space and turn it into private space and the train becomes personal." And so, says Wilson, although the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, a modified rhetoric of place won the war--in effect, keeping African-Americans "in their place."

Even though Wilson's expertise is in historical rhetoric, given his fascination with technology, it is impossible not to ask him about the role of rhetorical leadership today. Can anyone at all shape the political culture of our technological age?

In reality, he says, rhetorical theories--with a single notion of voice, of ethos--don't accommodate today's technological advances. On the one hand, he says, "we are fragmented, and so rhetorical leadership may be impossible. On the other hand, there's incredible consolidation on an economic level, with only a handful of companies controlling the major media--not to mention the vast majority of the Internet. So we may not be as fragmented as we think."

And what about that notion of equality? "We're not really equal in front of the screen," Wilson says. "The reality is that it's an expert's specialized language. Open software reveals its guts to those who can read the language. They get to see what makes it run. Most people never get to see the Wizard with Microsoft."

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