Biesecker, Barbara A. Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation

Biesecker, Barbara A. “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Difference”
Philosophy and Rhetoric 22.2 (1989).
“if we posit the audience of any rhetorical event as no more than a conglomeration of subjects whose identity is fixed prior to the rhetorical event itself, then we must also admit that those subjects have an essence that cannot be affected by the discourse. Thus, the power of rhetoric is circumscribed: it has the potency to influence an audience, to realign their allegiances, but not to form new identities” (111).
But it does have the ability to form new identities. Have allegiances swayed creates a new personal outlook, and thus, a new person.
"That is to say, the “rhetorical dimension” names both the means by which an idea or argument is expressed and the initial formative intervention that, in centering a differential situation makes possible the production of meaning” (112).
“If both situation and speaker can stand in for cause, “if either cause of effect can occupy the position of origin, then origin is no longer originary; it loses its metaphysical privilege (115).
“there is invariably a moment in the text ‘which harbors the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed simply as a contradiction.’ This textual knot or inadvertent ‘sleight of hand’ marks the rhetoricity of the text and, in so doing, enables us to locate the unwitting and interested gesture that finessed differance in such a way that the writing could proceed” (121).
"Yet, even in essays explicitly seeking to develop a theory of the rhetorical situation (with audience invariably identified as one of its constituent elements), the concept of audience itself receives little critical attention: in most cases, audience is simply named, identified as the target of discursive practice, and then dropped (122).
“Derrida deconstructs the subject by showing us how the identity of any subject, what I earlier called the core of the human being, like the value of any element in any system is structured by differance. This forces us to think of subjectivity not an essence but as an effect of the subject’s place in an economy of difference” (124).