Whereas Bitzer pushes for LaTourian rigidity in his definition of what constitutes a rhetorical situation, Edbauer pushes for LaTourian a complete reworking of the notion of rhetorical situation, arguing for a complete paradigm shift. Like LaTour, Edbauer goes against the grain, suggesting that the rhetorical situation doesn’t already exist: “[. . .] there can be no pure exigence [. . .] the exigence does not exist perse, but is instead an amalgamation of processes and encounters” (8). The language here echoes LaTour—exigence is not a given, and, thus, the rhetorical situation does not exist a priori (“the social does not reside in fixed sites” (9). We can only sense a rhetorical situation by examining the nodes within the network. These nodes include people, things, concepts, and feelings. Edbauer’s example of Austin Texas’ “weird” slogan is a terrific example.
I was also struck by Edbauer’s discussion of the city; actually she mostly cites Amin and Thrift. Edbauer, of course, uses the complicated notion of city as a metaphor for her revision of rhetoric. But it’s interesting to note that in his famous chapter “Walking the City” from his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau ponders the relationship between urban movement and writing. Certeau’s chapter here is more or less a direct response to Foucault’s “Panopticism” (itself modeled on Bentham’s notion of the panopticon). Whereas Foucault’s Panopticism examines power structures from the top down (power as tower-like, yet, strangely, decentralized and democratic (in the sense that all people tacitly agree to participate in surveillance of the public), de Certeau’s piece looks at the panopticon from the bottom up; he looks at how the subjects of the panopticon respond, and rebel, in their small ways. The idea of the city, de Certeau suggests, is an imposition of control. City planners create rigid grids that are designed to inscribe control (one must walk here, not there); clearly indicated street names act as markers to make sure that we do not get lost. However, people walk as they wish: they create shortcuts, they ignore the names of streets (or they make personal meaning out of a street name that has no connection to the meaning intended). In short, people resist the order imposed by the urban grid. De Certeau writes:
“Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse [de Certeau sees walking
discourse] [. . .] one can try another path: one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization” (96)
De Certeau’s language is pretty dense here (earlier in the piece, he refers to an “erotics of knowledge, which made me grimace in pain), but he’s essentially talking about the ways in which people carve out their own existences, despite the system that has been put into place. Later in the chapter, de Certeau compares walking explicitly to writing, which is interesting since it echoes Edbauer’s move from city to rhetoric. De Certeau writes, “The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (or tours) and detours that can be compared to “turns of phrase” or “stylistic figures.” Anyway, I’m sorry if most of this discussion has been dull or tangential, but anyone whose interest was piqued by Edbauer’s examination of the city might check out the de Certeau book/chapter.
Finally, the example of Cingular’s cooption of the anti-corporate “Keep Austin Weird” slogan reminded me of the earlier piece we read this term by James Gee: “The New Literacy Studies and the ‘Social Turn.’” In that piece, Gee questioned whether rhetoric is intrinsically progressive. His answer, of course, was “not always.” He devoted several rich and interesting paragraphs to examples of ways in which corporations use “the social turn” to increase their profit margins. Edbauer’s example of Cingular seems a prime example of a conservative group’s (in this case a corporation) absorption of radical discourse (Austin’s largely liberal, anti-“big business” slogan).
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