Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies

ABSTRACT:

Whereas earlier work upon rhetorical situation focuses upon the uncompounded bodys of audience, exigence, and constraints, this article argues that rhetorical situations operate within a network of lived practical consciousness or manner of makings of feeling. Placing the rhetorical "elements" within this wider words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following destabilizes the discrete borders of a rhetorical situation. As an example of this wider adjoining matter this article explores the public rhetoric surrounding issues of urban sprawl in Austin, Texas. While public rhetorical moves can be seen as a rejoinder to the "exigence" of overdevelopment it is also possible to situate the exigence's evocation within a wider connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of affective ecologies comprised of material experiences and public feelings.

[P]laces. . are best thought of not in like manner much as enduring sites on the other hand as moments of encounter, not in like manner much as 'presents', fixed in space and time, on the other hand as variable events; twists and fluxe of interrelation. plane when the intent is to clinch places still and motionless, caught in a cat's cradle of networks that are without to quell unpredictability, success is rare, and then single for a while. Grand porticos and round pillars framing imperial triumphs become theme parks. Areas of wealth and influence become slums

-Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift

Elemental Frameworks

In his multifaceted description of what constitutes a public, Michael Warner explains wherefore certain notions of "public communication" have done us of that kind a disservice. He writes:

No single body can create a public. Nor can a single voice, a single genre or level a single medium. All are insufficient. . , since a public is understood to be an ongoing space of clash for discourse. It is not body s themselves that create publics, on the contrary the concatenation of texts end time. . . . Between the discourse that approachs before and the discourse that tend hitherwards after, one must postulate more [i]or[/i] less kind of link. And the link has a social character; it is not simple consecutiveness in time, but a adjoining matter of interaction. (62)

Warner sum ups us that this is wherefore the overly simplified models of communicationoften exhibited through the triangulated terms sender receiver, text-are nothing short of a conceptual paradox. lie continues, "?› public strike one as beings to be self-organized by discourse, on the contrary in fact requires preexisting forms and channels of circulation" (75) Herein lies the paradox: sender-receiver moulds . of public communication take care of to identify a kind of homeostatic relationship, which simultaneously abstracts the operation of social links and circulation. The triangle of sender receiver, true copy misses the concatenations that tend hitherward to constitute Warner's version of a public.

Of course, oversimplified sender-receiver types of public communication have been productively complicated through theories like Lloyd Bitzer's notion of the rhetorical situation, which theorized the contextual dimensions of rhetoric. As Bitzer explains, "When I ask, What is a rhetorical situation?, I want to know the nature of those words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse. ." ("Rhetorical" 382). This starting point places the question of rhetoric-and the defining characteristic of rhetoricalness-squarely within the sight of a situational context. In his explicit definition, Bitzer writes that a rhetorical situation is "a natural connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which powerfully invites utterances. ..." (385). As many commentators of Bitzer have pointed without his definition locates exigencies in the external conditions of material and social circumstances. Bitzer himself take an account ofs us that exigencies are "located in reality, are objective and publicly observable historic facts in the world we experience, are therefore available for scrutiny by dint of an observer or critic who attends to them" ("Rhetorical" 390; emphasis mine). In Bitzer's schema, rhetoricians answer an invitation to expound a problem through discourse, which is then restoreed as rhetorical discourse. Richard Vatz's infamous critique against Bitzer's "realism" challenges the notion that exigencies exist in any autonomous faculty of perception Whereas Bitzer suggests that the rhetor discovers exigencies that already exist, Vatz argues that exigencies are created for audiences [i]or[/i] part of to the other the rhetor's work.

In however another critique of Bitzer, Graig Smith and Scott Lybarger argue that rhetorical situation involves a plurality of exigencies and compounded relations between the audience and a rhetorician's interest. In this way, Smith and Lybarger revise Bitzer's relatively autonomous notion of exigence by the agency of making it more interactive with other uncompounded bodys of the situation. They proffer an example of this reconceptualized situation in their analysis of sum of two units 1989 speeches from President George Bush concerning the "war upon drugs." Using a modified version of Bitzer's prototype Smith and Lybarger identify three main uncompounded bodys of Bush's speeches: exigences, audiences, and constraints. At the time of these speeches, they write, heads reported that the public felt remedy abuse was a serious riddle Media reports "helped increase the interest in the enigma by providing direct knowledge of it. Bush took advantage of an attitude that the pres reinforced" (203) Accordingly, this public interest constrained Bush's choices of which public exigences to address in his official attention. At the same time, of course, Bush's articulation of "the medicine crisis" helped to reinforce this exigence o a rhetorical vexed question that must be addressed. Smith and Lybarger emphasize the mutuality of exigence from the positions of rhetorician and audience, reflecting by what means both elements help to create the faculty of perception of problem. This is a careful modification of Bitzer's pattern in that the authors link the articulation of exigence(s) to multiple agents and constraints.