Contexts and Networks

Each of this week’s readings reminded me of my eighth grade journalism teacher who was fond of saying that quotes were never truly “out of context,” quotes were just being placed temporarily in a different context. “You could never,” she would repeat, “be outside of a context.” Bitzer might have said, yeah, but you have to admit there was a “natural context” (or an original one, situated somewhere, the principal’s office, perhaps, where an interview about dress code first occurred) and this natural context was comprised of “persons, events, objects and relations.” Vatz might have sided with my teacher and said, yeah, “but one never runs out of context. One never runs out of facts to describe a situation. . .the facts or events communicated to us are choices, by our sources of information. . .any rhetor is involved in this sifting and choosing” (so my jr. high principal, like Keith Richards last week, can’t really complain that his comments were taken out of context just because they reappeared in a different one) (Vatz 156). Edbauer would seem to expand beyond my teacher’s implications and say, yeah, and you’re not just putting the principal’s quotes into one new fixed context, either—you’re just a point of distribution; we’re always in myriad contexts, and we’re also within and between myriad contexts. The (1) original taped interview and (2) whatever you think you’ve made salient by quoting for your article (in the old Bitzler view) are just two nodes of the many already in existence.” This would have taken longer for my teacher to articulate, though, and I know now her contract was already set for termination, at least partly because she didn’t think we should get so hung up about the original context of quotes.


Another connection I’m still thinking through. . .

Edbauer includes Biesecker’s “problem with many takes on rhetorical situation[s],” which is essentially (or anti-essentially) imagining rhetoric for an audience of “already-formed, already-discrete individuals” already limits the possible “potencies” of what rhetoric can hope to do in a situation. As Becker clarifies, the problem with this configuration is that rhetoric may only be used to “influence an audience, to realign their allegiances, but not to form new identities” (Edbauer 2; Biesecker 111). This seemed to account for some of our lamentation over Crowley’s rhetoric. For instance, Crowley states that “fundamentalists” are “unwilling to meet” conditions in which they run the “risk” of having their “beliefs altered” by exchange in a rhetorical situation in which “everyone is accorded the respect due to participants,” whereas “a liberal’s identity” is “not necessarily threatened by a change in belief” (196). Edbauer might argue that both the liberal’s identity and the conservative / fundamentalist / apocalyptist’s identity cannot be situated or as fixed as Crowley renders them (supposedly) for the sake of finding potential stasis for a rhetorical situation between the two. It would seem that both sides are already “trans-situationally” linked in a shared ecology of buzzwords, platform stands, Darwin vs. Jesus Fish car decorations, etc. It would also seem that Crowley only succeeds in trying to fix the identities and the sites of rhetorical interaction in ways that “mask the fluidity of rhetoric” as it’s lived daily, beyond the confines of what is made salient by a few dominant news organizations and spin doctors (Edbauer, page 13ish on my print out).


Another related thought. . .

Vatz, arguing conversely with Bitzler, concludes that “rhetors choose or do not choose to make salient situations, facts, events, etc.. . .after salience is created, the situation must be translated into meaning” (160). This idea of who or what makes things salient (and is everyone who adds a distribution point, in Edbauer’s construct, a rhetor? Or even interested in Vatz and Bitzler’s conflicting notions of saliency?) also becomes interesting in the age of using your cell phone’s video function to create a TMZ.com event, and / or “ecology” of situations online. I think it’s easy for us to think of politicians (a president, his speech writers, his party’s platforms, his lobbyists, his pollsters, his machine, etc.) choosing events to turn into crises not because these events offer inherent exigence (Bitzler) but because the president et al. chose to make certain salient features into a crisis for perceived political gain (Vatz, Burke and motive, etc.). However, it’s maybe more interesting to think through Edbauer’s observations when it’s not the president but the guy who had his phone above his head in time to catch Michael Richards’ racist meltdown, Britney challenging our notions of public decorum, etc. etc.

Selling the recorded event to TMZ. Com could still be seen as a result of profit motive, but the “rhetor” here, if we’re limited to older models, is not even making commentary so much as downloading and forwarding an event—one point of distribution—that will then fan out wildly over the literal network of the internet and the figurative network of public discussion (Has he/she gone too far?), office chatter, blogs, YouTube copies of copies, parody sketches, Daily Show and late night jabs, appropriations into different political platforms, and a wildly diverse “rhetorical-event neighborhood” that seems akin to semioticians talking of “free-floating signifiers” (though, even then, many semioticians posit that there was an “original signified” from which the signifier, or recorded event, has come untethered, and this may bring us back to how structurally or poststructurally we like to think of / locate / fix an “original context”).