Edbauer Rhetorical Ecologies notes

“Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to

Rhetorical Ecologies”
Rhetorical Society Quarterly
Fall 2008, Volume 35, #4 pages 5-24
(Edbauer )

6 discussion of Lloyg Bitzer’s definition of a rhetorical situation

This seems like an important or foundational definition
Cite in the article “a natural context of persons, events, object, relations, and
an exigence which strongly invites utterances…”

Exigent: urgent, pressing

“Whereas Bitzer suggests that the rhetor discovers exigencies that

already exist, Vatz argues that exigencies are created for audiences
through the rhetor’s work” itals there.
Seems like another version of Plato versus Isocrates: exists already versus
action

7 “According to Bieseeker, the problem with many takes on rhetorical

situation is their tendency to conceptualize rhetoric within a scene of
already-formed, already-discrete indidivuals.”
The subjects are already fixed. How can rhetoric then impact them or their
nature?

8 Edbauer quoting Phelps “how an element (e.g. the writer as “ethos”) is

discriminated from a flux and perceived as invariant, stable, and
autonomous…Natural and traditional categories acquire greater depth and
scope when we …temporalize them, interpret them as metaphors, expand
their range of variation, multiply their interpretants, pursue their logic to
the limit, or treat them in historical institutional terms. “ ( emphasis is
Edbauer’s)
Perhaps this can be considered and compared to the work of Lanham and
oscillation; instead of attempting to define fixed points, making the flux and flow of
rhetorical skill or ability the point of writing or composition classes.

“Rather than seeing rhetoric as the totality of its discrete elements,

Phelps’ critique seeks to recontextualize those elements in a wider sphere
of active, historical, and lived processes. That is, the elements of a
rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which
they move.”
Not treating specific things as things but rather as verbs or events.
This reminds me of Zen ala Watts.

8 Smith and Lybarger emphasize the importance of perception

When discussing Smith and Lybarger, Edbauer states, “The exigence is not
properly located in any element of the model. Instead, what we dub
exigence is more like a shorthand way of describing a series of events.
 Edbauer Rhetorical Ecologies notes

The rhetorical situation is part of what we might call, borrowing from

Phelps, an ongoing social flux.”

9 when discussing Shaviro, Edbauer quotes him, “Rather, the force of all
messages, as they accrete over time, determines the very shape of the
network. The meaning of a message cannot be isolated from its mode of
propagation, from the way it harasses me, attacks me, or parasitically
invades me. (24—Edbauer’s emphasis). (Edbauer 9)

[Connected, or what it means to live in a networked society]

10 the social field is not a series of fixed or set sites which are limited situations; the
social field is events that are shifting and moving and connected with other events
(revisit article—nearly a quote)

12 reference to Amin and Thrift’s description of a city as an amalgam of processes

and that sites “are sustained by the amalgam of processes, which can be
described in ecological terms of varying intensities of encounters and
interactions—much like a weather system” (quote of Edbauer discussing A & T)

19 “Not only do these counter-rhetorics directly respond to and resist the original
exigence, they also expand the lived experience of the original rhetorics by adding
to them—even while changing and expanding their shape.”
The very nature of the rhetoric is to flux, flow, impact, and engage and alter
one another.

Fluidity and viral spread are terms that are used

21Rosa Eberly: rhetoric as a process—get

Richard Marback: rhetoric of materiality—get, material theory of rhetoric

21-22 Edbauer’s notion of generative research

22 documentation creates social effects

Doing that consciously and intentionally

22-23 “Bringing this logic into the realm of our own rhetorical pedagogy, we are
reminded that rhetorically-grounded education can mean something more than
learning how to decode elements, analyze texts, and thinking about public
circulations of rhetoric. It can also engage process and encounters. Not “learning
by doing,” but “thinking by doing.” Or, better yet, thinking/doing—with a razor think
slash mark barely keeping the two terms from bleeding into each other” (italics are
Edbauer’s; Edabauer 22-23).
Edbauer Rhetorical Ecologies notes
 Edbauer Rhetorical Ecologies notes

Can this riff with the Lanham in terms of moving back and forth through the
networks intentionally? Recognizing that the oscillation is the very nature of the
networks, and that by choosing to oscillate with specifics or intention, then they are
refinforcing and reshaping the very nature of the network as quote chunked from
pg. 9 of Shapiro.

If we are currently acting and engaging as if the rhetorical situation of academia is a

fixed locus, a situs (get exact latin definition, but for now the Edabuer as linked to
irginary position of object and implied bordered, fixed space-location), then we are
ignoring the networked nature of the rhetorical situation as proposed, discussed,
and elaborated by Edbauer in her article.
If, instead, we are living in a network ala Shaviro, and those messages do
have the impact, what are the very messages that we send out about our
profession? About academia? And the very purpose of learning? What network are
we constructing?

As Kumaravadivelu critiques in his text Beyond Methods, there are several

professional issues. Examining our profession at the Macro level, Kumaravadivelu
presents three primary pedagogies. This simple yet clear depiction demonstrates
the heart of the profession, and it clearly shows how few of the pedagogies deal
with their classrooms as places of movement, of flux, of where change and forces
meet and mix.

An additional expression of this tension, of the fixed nature is the very nature
of the word and the application of the tools methodologies. Kumaravadeivelu
provides his own, as well as cites others, dismissal of how accurate or true to
methodologies teachers are. This is important because teachers and programs
operate as if these tools, these boxes, are effective tools for managing the situation.
Instead they are working at odds with the nature of the rhetorical situation.

Instead, while maintaining the Isocratean vision of a paideia which educates

the whole person, which engages and encourages citizens to participate in their
state, we need to use new tools which are harnessed by post-method pedagogy, a
vision of active Lanhamian oscillation within the networks of academias’ rhetorical
situation—to treat scholasticism as a verb not a noun—and recognize the very
power and presence of Web 2.0, with its ability to generate intentional communities
of interest regardless of distance, time, and space, is a new option for facilitating
the developing of online Polises, online city states.
As academics, an effective strategy is to not treat the current sinking literacy
rates and lack of working skills as a pitched or fixed battle over some set turf.
Regarding these struggles in such a fixed way ignores other perspectives which
could provide useful strategic, practical, and visceral pedagogical and personally
political modes.