Edbauer, Jenny Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation

Edbauer, Jenny “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to
Rhetorical Ecologies” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25.4 (2005).

“Vatz argues that exigencies are created for audiences through the rhetor’s work” (6).
“Phelps’ critique seeks to recontextualize these 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” (8).
By placing the rhetoric in the time in which it was written, under the circumstances for which it was written, and the situation of those to whom it was directed, allows us, then, to view it far more effectively.
“The exigence is more like a complex of various audience/speaker perceptions and institutional material constraints” (8).
Perception is the key. Perception of the rhetor of the audience, audience of rhetor, and audience of the issue.
“That is, the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (8).
Fluid. Rhetoric. Situations. It’s all fluid, which is why it is always the same and different.
“The exigence is more like a complex of various audience/speaker perceptions and institutional or material constraints” (8).
“Consequently, the concept of “rhetorical situation” is appropriately named insofar as the models of rhetorical situation describe the scene of rhetorical action as “located” around the exigence that generates a response. We thus find a connection between certain models of rhetorical situation and a sense of place” (9).
In the case of conduct books the “exigence” would be keeping women in their place while at the same time not letting them know that this is what is really going on.
“To say that we are connected is another way of saying that we are never outside the networked interconnection of forces, energies, rhetorics, moods, and experiences” (10).
I wonder why it isn’t “a networked”?
“By extension, we might say that a rhetorical situation is better conceptualized as a mixture of processes and encounters” (13).
“The intensity, force, and circulatory range of a rhetoric are always expanding through the mutations and new exposures attached to that given rhetoric, much like a virus” (13).
“A given rhetoric is not contained by the elements that comprise its rhetorical situation (exigence, rhetor, audience, constraints). Rather, a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field” (14).
Our rhetoric is infused with the ideas that are prominent at that time, and perhaps, from the past.
“Rhetorical situations involve the amalgamation and mixture of many different events and happenings that are not properly segmented into audience, text, or rhetorician. We must, therefore consider whether our popular models reflect the fullness of rhetoric’s operation in public” (20).
Consequently, though rhetorical situation models are undeniably helpful for thinking of rhetoric’s contextual character, they fall somewhat short when accounting for the amalgamations and transformations—the spread—of a given rhetoric within its wider ecology” (20).