ABSTRACT
Shaping a nation requires, in rhetorical terms, a process of popular argumentation, together with and beyond the process of public argumentation. The latter rests largely on single “orators,” whose function is (as discussed earlier) to deliberate and to perform, to argue and to show the way, to give a nation a stock of tropes that policy can be said to reflect or detract from, in the process of national upbuilding. In contrast to this, and also beyond the largely ritualistic and controlled “mild voice of reason”1 at work in both constitutional and reconciliation rhetoric, popular argumentation, in order not to be a fiction, needs to be disseminated, multiauthored, “mediatic,” insofar as the media plays the role of relay between “people’s voice” (as the commonplace goes) and the initial inventio brought into action by “orators.” The process can be termed epideictic. The people are led not so much to reflect, ponder, and deliberate as to “demonstrate”—to “show off”—their phrasing of communal values; and by the same token, to perform these values, to give them rhetorical substance, to “own the process.” This epideictic coil ensures in turn a sense of legitimacy for those who control the medium by which it is channeled, whether this control is exercized by the print or audiovisual medias, or the politicians themselves.
