It's simple to imagine a theoretical city as a series of processes of import and export, travel around the city, random contact with others -- basically, what it takes for everyone to get through their day, made up of multiple stops, journeys and meetings along the way. But these actions are different every day. Sure, Sears is going to important five bajillion HD radios every day and the radio station is going to play the ads for them five bajillion times every day, but each person's path around the city alters each day, each week, each month. In spite of this, New York doesn't stop being New York -- the version we see in Mad Men is still recognizably and somehow spiritually related to the modern city we think about, visit, live in, or do. It's aged, but it's the same city, in that I am the same person I was when I was four -- vitally different, but intimately connected and interrelated.
On the other hand, many people argue that Austin has stopped being Austin. The processes are different; it's not as weird anymore. Something altered between 1990 and today involving different people, different work, different land use and public structures, which took the alteration too far; something was added to the mix that changed everything in a different way than the expansion and change of New York changed New York.
The problem with pinning down a rhetorical situation, or rhetoric as an activity, is that its existence as a network does make sense, but this network is constantly changing shape and constituent parts. How can something with a different structure, at a different time, for a different audience, in a different place, still be rhetorical in the way that the Edbauer piece was rhetorical? Not only is rhetoric not the sum of its parts, but it's the same sum out of different parts every time, like New York.
Back on the other hand, maybe rhetoric is a simple verb which creates its own rhetorical situation out of opportunity. A homeless prophet is not going to be able to create his rhetorical situation out of scratch, but there are many different kinds of situations we would identify as primed for powerful rhetorical action -- the Wisconsin protests, Libya, a sympathetic professor's office hours. You have to do a lot of the initial work of creating the situation -- gathering people together, putting them in the right frame of mind, etc -- but you also rely on extant factors, like you being the kind of person someone would listen to or the presence of a large rock to stand on. Rhetoric builds from both ends, with different materials at each end every time. Rhetorical situations exist halfway into the possibility of the grid: they're not actually there yet, but we can see how we would make them out of what's available., halfway between possibility and potentiality.
EDIT: not that it matters since I clearly got something very abstract from it, but I read "Unframing" instead of "Executive Overspill."
I liked reading your post and the different view you had on rhetoric as a verb rather than a noun. When I first read it, I agreed with Edbauer, but after I read your post, I'm not too sure if I do. Like you said, each of our days are going to be different, we may do the same things, but there's no way of telling that the path is going to be the same as the day before.
ReplyDeleteI think it was Aristotle, or maybe Walker, who talked about my next point (sorry for confusion). One was saying that each emotion has an opposite emotion that we can all be dragged toward one or the other. So, I think this can connected to the whole city view because a rhetorical strategy will never work a 100% the same way on each person. Like Aristotle/Walker? said, we can be dragged to or from a certain emotion, depending on how we hear or feel about the rhetor.
Interesting take on rhetoric as a verb - this goes back to what I said about rhetoric during the "Hoot in the Dark" reading. Specifically, I think that rhetoric is any action done that can influence thought; it's all around us, a constant factor in our lives, and as a result what we're given to work with and the eventual results will always be different.
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