Benson searches for relationships between rhetoric and film

Tom Benson was a triple winner at last year’s NCA convention in Chicago. He was presented with a Presidential Citation for his work in establishing, editing, and nurturing CRTNET News, the longest-running computer listserve in the communication discipline. He was named the Douglas Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar for his career of work in rhetoric, and he was named an NCA Distinguished Scholar, the association’s top scholarly prize for cumulative work in the discipline.

Benson’s work has focused on the relationship between rhetoric and film, but he says that he never thought of himself as a film critic. Rather, he saw himself as a generalist, as did a number of scholars who were trained at that time. A graduate of Cornell’s famed program in rhetoric and a student of Herbert Wichelns, one of the founders of NCA, Benson took coursework across the breadth of the discipline, including film. But, there were no obvious connections between his film study and his work in rhetorical criticism. The latter was focused at the time on the study of individual speakers and their speeches, and the dominant critical method was neo-Aristotelianism. This method was speaker-centered and attempted to determine from biographical and historical information what led speakers to say what they did, and with what effect.

Benson’s early publications centered around analyses of individual speakers and social movements, but he kept investigating how his interest in rhetoric and his interest in film could be connected. He finally found some connections through analysis of the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, films that were not obviously didactic but which Benson found to be “profoundly reflective about social life and institutional power.”

Yet, it was probably his 1981 Quarterly Journal of Speech article, “Another Shooting in Cowtown,” where Benson found a critical voice that startled the field. The article, which was written in narrative form, described a political campaign in the American Southwest and in particular looked at the process of shooting a filmed advertisement for one of the candidates. It was too long by far for a standard journal article, and QJS Editor Herman Stelzner at first followed the advice of his reviewers and rejected it. Three months later, however, Stelzner wrote Benson, told him that he had been thinking a lot about his article, and had concluded that he was wrong. The article turned out to be one of the longest that QJS ever published.

In the article, Benson assumed the role of a naïve professor who accompanies a former student on a film shoot. According to Benson, the narrator is “in some ways a fool and is astonished with what he sees.” The tone of the piece was ironic and attempted to peel back the layers of a political campaign to reveal both how cynicism drove campaign advertising, as well as “what the study of rhetoric was about, in its largest sense.” Insisting that the piece was “not a stunt,” Benson claimed that he wrote it for his daughter to show her “what her father did for a living.” Though it was not the first ethnographic study to be published in the field’s journals, “Another Shooting in Cowtown” helped to clear the way for other qualitative work to be published in communication.

Since that time, Benson has worked with a wide variety of texts and “pose interesting questions about how we make and respond to political action and aesthetic forms.” “It seems to me,” Benson said, “that we have inherited an attempt to bend to our own uses symbolic practices that create our identities, shape our knowledge, and tempt us to influence one another. The results, when we notice them, we call art and politics. Mostly they are invisible and routine.”

Benson has also been active in encouraging development of the field’s scholarship through his editorial activities. He edited the Quarterly Journal of Speech for a three-year term, but his more lasting contribution is surely a twelve-year stint as moderator of CRTNET News, an electronic mail newsletter devoted to communication theory and research. Over the years there were a number of discussions via this medium that influenced the field’s scholars, but two stand out. In the tradition of “Cowtown,” Benson encouraged publication of on-the-spot reports of news events, particularly descriptions of how these events were being covered by local media. During the Gulf War, CRTNET News readers were glued to their screens with daily descriptions of life in Tel Aviv during the SCUD bombings. These descriptions attracted national press attention and later became a book, which was published by Southern Illinois University Press. The other discussion arose at the end of Benson’s term as sole moderator and focused on the issue of autoethnography as scholarship, an especially spirited debate touched off by the publication of “Sextext” in Text and Performance Quarterly. At the end of the “Sextext” discussion, Benson passed the daily operations to the NCA staff, though at NCA’s request, he has continued to serve as Editor-in-Chief, functioning as a decision-maker of last resort when it is unclear whether a submission should be posted.

Of his scholarship, Benson says, “My daily life is the experience of confusion and mystery, and on a given day I don’t know what to think about something. So, I try to work it out.” Over the years, Tom Benson has demonstrated amply that he has worked out many things and keeps finding more and more confusion to unravel.