Edbauer Rice's writing on affective ecologies was an extremely intriguing read. The entirety of this course has been expanding my horizons on what the realm of rhetoric actually is -- and Rice expands it even further. What we learned in lower-division rhetoric classes of the speaker-text-audience triangle is far too simple now; Rice has colored in the triangle and connected it on a page full of rhetorical triangles.
For me, it's always been true that rhetoric was more intricate and complex than the simplistic vocabulary we had for it. In order to "take the audience into account," it would be necessary to understand all of the context and kairos and details and connections to really understand who it is you're writing to and how to frame your text towards what they need to hear. An exigence was never just a problem or a call to action: it included the history, the potential, and all the other details.
Rice has given a framework to what we already knew but didn't know how to describe -- a rhetorical situation is movement, complexity, encounter. But now it is an affective ecology, the context and the history, the speakers, the counter-rhetoric, the movement: all an amalgamation of events and encounters too complex to be explained away simply.
I think in the end, Rice offers up the correct takeaway for this new way of thinking in rhetoric -- this radically changes our rhetorical pedagogy. The way we learn about rhetoric can no longer be the simplistic rhetorical triangle, but we must now look at "rhetorical situations [as an] amalgamation and mixture of many different events and happenings that are not properly segmented into audience, text, or rhetorician" (pg. 16). Rhetoric now "also engages processes and encounters" (pg. 18).
However, I think that the implications of this new rhetorical pedagogy can reshape the connotation and understanding of what rhetoric is to the general public. If rhetoric really is an affective ecology, an amalgamation of all encounters and movements and processes, then it reaches much further than what we generally believe. Not even just about persuasive speech and argument, but even beyond just communication -- rhetoric is a study of the entirety of movement in reality. Connections, encounters, speech, audience, context, situation are all a part of rhetoric. We engage in rhetoric with every word, every movement, even the reactions in our bodies. It is something that we DO. With this understanding, perhaps rhetoric is no longer a minor study, no longer something that only Presidents and preachers use, but something that deeply shapes the way that we understand and move in the world.
If you haven't done so already, I recommend looking into Dr. Spinuzzi's course on Designing Text Ecologies (RHE330C). As I mentioned on Suzi's blog, investigating how texts are created and used in response to certain exigencies made me realize just how "alive" rhetoric is and that it cannot be constrained into a singular definition a la Bitzer. Rhetoric isn't just structured, thought-out responses to a situation, it's communication as a whole be it in a 12-page paper or in the form of a post-it note on the fridge.
ReplyDeleteI agree. “Taking the audience into account” is something completely different for rhetors today than it was for rhetors back in history. Back in the day, the internet wasn’t around, cutting a rhetor’s audience down considerably. They really only had to worry about their intended audience. Today, a rhetor not only has an intended audience but also those who actually encounter his or her writing. Our blogs are a great example of this. If we didn’t have the internet or technology, we would probably be required to respond to the readings on paper and, as a result, Professor Davis would probably be the only one to read them. However, our blogs are read by people we don’t even know as well as Professor Davis. In composing a blog, it is difficult for us to take our audience into account as we don’t even know who exactly our audience is.
ReplyDeleteI like the direction you're going in. We have to take into account so many more "obstacles," then the set triangle. Our Audience is moved by such great different things now then they would have been then. To say we are in the era of the "hipster" is a huge factor of moving an audience. Every person and kid has an opinion of their own and has to have a different approach at being persuaded.
ReplyDeleteGreat last paragraph as well. I don't know if you're saying that in every encounter we have we are trying to persuade people, but I think the majority of the time we are. Whether it's towards liking what we like or wanting to go to a certain party, or saying how your class is the best, it seems like any encounter we have, like you said, is dubbed over with rhetorical intentions.