Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik
If memory molds our perceptions and experiences from an early age, then the rhetorical canon of memory might be said to precede invention and arrangement, as personal and collective modes of perception and cognitive processes. Memory might even be considered a trump canon. Semantic, procedural, and episodic memories undoubtedly contribute to style as an acquired sense of the relationship between words and feelings. And, at the risk of appearing to be comprehensive for the sake of comprehensiveness, I also note the relationship between memory and the iterative nature of delivery.
The rhetorical quality of delivery from generic conventions to widely recognized performative rituals is heavily influenced by the fact of their repetition and our memory of that repetition. A generic convention of professional writing is persuasive because it appeals to our expectations as pre-existing cognitive templates. Similarly a performative ritual such as a sacred union, rite of passage, or initiation ceremony is largely meaningful, legal, and/or sacrosanct because of the fact of its repetition over generations, and unique because of variations on an established theme.
Though we tend to associate issues of perception with conscious cognitive processes, perception is influenced by all three types of memory. Over time perception becomes habitual, procedural. Also perception is influenced by emotion- and value-laden experiences as episodic memories. What is more, we are largely unaware of these influences as all these types of memories or traces can become unconscious (Solms 161).
As a means of self-regulation for survival, the purpose of cognitive processes is to reflect on the emotions. However emotions are also brought to bear on cognition in cases of psychological conflict, conscious deliberation, and virtually all value judgment. Indeed affective neuroscience suggests that emotions are the prime movers of all conscious brain activity. Both cognitive and affective processes can be consolidated into unconscious (procedural) memory, and these subcortical traces can subsequently influence perception and cognition without entering consciousness.
Emerging neuroscientific evidence for the existence and influence of unconscious processes has myriad ramifications for rhetorical theory and practice, though the challenge of integrating theories of unconscious with theories of rhetoric presents a unique challenge.
