Available Means of Persuasion, The. David M. Sheridan
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participants in various and overlapping publics (115).
As we demonstrate in chapter 7, critiques #3 and #4 are crucial to our own argument about multimodal public rhetoric. If we limit the definition of the public sphere to the social space where rational-critical debate leads to public opinion, we are likely to dismiss multimodal public rhetoric as of very limited value indeed. In such a case, multimodality would be relegated to a supportive role: charts, graphs, diagrams, and figures meant to lend clarity to word-based arguments. But if the proper function of public-sphere practice is poetic world making that shapes consciousness and identity through the captivation of attention, multimodality becomes quite relevant indeed. Films, animations, fabricated objects, games, virtual reality compositions, and mixed media performances—these multimodal forms might play central role in public-sphere practices. Byron Hawk, for instance, explores the ways a punk rock album (Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come) functions as “both an example of and a call to create a public rhetoric through poetic world making . . .” (11).
Critique #5: The nature of agency. Habermas has been widely criticized for embracing a “modernist” understanding of the subject as an autonomous, rational agent. The philosopher Noëlle McAfee, for instance, draws on Julia Kristeva’s notion of “subject-in-process” to develop an alternative model of agency as relational (153–54; see also MacAvoy’s review). For Warner, agency is vexed, fragile, and problematic on several levels. Warner rejects the Habermasian model in which publics appear to derive agency through rational deliberation. Moreover, Warner is insistent that no single rhetorical act can bring a public into being. Texts never exist in a vacuum, but are read in relation to other texts, forming an intertextual network, much of which is beyond the control of single individuals or groups. “Every sentence,” Warner writes, “is populated with the voices of others, living and dead, and is carried to whatever destination it has not by the force of intention or address but by the channels laid down in discourse. These requirements often have a politics of their own, and it may well be that their limitations are not to be easily overcome by strong will, broad mind, earnest heart, or ironic reflection” (128).
In our discussion of kairos above, we began to explore the notion of agency as struggle within various local and global contexts. In chapter 5, we revisit the concept of agency in the context of ideology and technology. We synthesize conceptions of agency offered by Warner with models offered by postmodern conceptions of the subject and with actor-network theory.
Conclusion
In this book we describe a kairotic approach to public rhetoric, by which we mean an approach that seeks to discover in each situation what kind of rhetorical action is appropriate. In our deployment, kairos refers to a struggle between rhetors and their contexts. Many of the factors in this struggle are beyond the control of any one individual or group; all situations demand kairotic inventiveness from prepared rhetors.
Public-sphere theorists have outlined a wide range of practices that are available to rhetors. A kairotic approach to public rhetoric means being aware of available options, aware of possibilities and constraints that operate at any given moment of action. The work of Habermas, Warner, Fraser, and others helps increase awareness of some of those possibilities and constraints. In this book, we continue to use the term “public sphere” despite the problems that inhere in that term. We certainly do not mean to emphasize “formally elegant, inherently rational, self-completing and self-regulating entities” (qtd. in Brouwer and Asen 4). Indeed, in many ways even network or web are too neat, calling to mind the elegant symmetry of a spider web or the efficiency of information traveling through the Internet at the speed of light (Latour, “On Recalling” 15–16). We continue to use the term public sphere, as many scholars do, not as a zero institution, but self-consciously as a shorthand expression for a set of social practices that are complex, multifaceted, and dynamic—often chaotic and inelegant.
To exploit the potentials of multimodal public rhetoric, we need to move past a narrow model of the single, universal public sphere constituted by physically co-present interlocutors who engage each other in rational-critical debate for the purpose of forming public opinion. Synthesizing the post-Habermasian models described by Fraser, Warner, and others, we have sketched a version of the public sphere that accommodates multiple publics whose identities and desires lead them to exploit a wide range of expressive forms: erotic, corporeal, extravagant, performative. This notion of a public is consonant with DeLuca’s definition of rhetoric as “the mobilization of signs for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, communities, publics, and cultures” (17). Thus, we see the public sphere as inherently rhetorical. For us, referencing the public sphere is a way to avoid the repeated awkwardness of saying something like, a set of contested and complementary, affective and desire-laden imaginary social phenomena brought into being through multiple acts of rhetorical poesis, addressed to strangers and occurring over time and in spaces that are simultaneously discursive, cultural, and material.
PART II: Kairotic Inventiveness and Rhetorical Ecologies
2 Multimodal Public Rhetoric and the Problem of Access
Public rhetoric is increasingly dominated by centralized commercial media. Many important channels of communication—spanning across film, TV, radio, and print media—are owned and operated by a small number for-profit firms. This reality severely limits who can enter into public conversations and on what terms. Conditions dictating access, however, are not fixed, but are always shifting, always in a state of flux. Changes in cultural practices and in communication technologies open new opportunities even as they foreclose others. The nineteenth century saw the invention of the camera, for instance, potentially opening up new forms of visual expression for public rhetors. A kairotic approach demands that we see each moment as, to some degree, new—characterized by new opportunities as well as new constraints. But this is much easier to say than to do. In this chapter, we attempt to confront the complex and shifting nature of access as it relates to material, cultural, and pedagogical conditions.
The Wonder of It All: Confronting Rhetorical Options in a Moment of Crisis
In our introduction, we called attention to a new kind of printer that outputs fully-formed, three-dimensional plastic prototypes. We posed a few questions for rhetorical practitioners, theorists, and educators: Do you plan to integrate 3D printing into your rhetorical practices, models, and classrooms? Why or why not? How would you make such a decision? Why should printers that output ink on paper be privileged over printers that output 3D plastic prototypes?
We use the 3D printer as an example precisely because it combines the familiar with the strange. Printers have become a normalized technology in writing instruction, evolving seamlessly (or so it might appear) from earlier technologies like the typewriter. Yet we expect that many readers will laugh at the proposition that this new kind of printer—which produces not words on a page, but 3D plastic prototypes—is relevant to composition students, teachers, or theorists.
We are not interested, here, in advocating for the adoption of 3D printers. Rather, we aim to focus on the broader intellectual problem that scholars and practitioners face when confronted with new rhetorical options in an era of rapid cultural and technological change. Technologies (like 3D printers) that appear marginal, esoteric, and laughable one day appear mainstream, common, and important the next. Given that, how do we decide what to emphasize in our rhetorical theories, pedagogies, and actions?
This is a sobering question to us—partly because it speaks to the question of access. We can’t teach everything, especially in an era when new technologies continually make available new options. But the decision to teach certain genres, modes, media, and technologies instead of other available options constitutes an important cultural intervention. Every time we select a particular rhetorical option to teach, we intervene in two ways: we give students opportunities to practice that option and we normalize it. Conversely, when we decide not to teach an option, we withhold from students the opportunity to practice that option and we marginalize it. Whether or not rhetors see 3D rhetoric as a productive rhetorical option depends in part on whether the sum total of their educational experiences has provided them with the necessary knowledge and competencies to use 3D rhetoric effectively. But it also depends on