The key distinctions among the rhetoricians I discuss in chapter one concern differences in epistemologies and ontologies. Plato and Bitzer appeal to a defining and regulating "truth" outside of the rhetorical situation. In the case of Plato, this is an idealic "Truth" that humankind approaches (but never achieves) through discourse. For Bitzer, situations exist independently of rhetoric and are discovered (or not discovered) as a result of an appropriate "exigence"--an "imperfection" or catalyst that can be "corrected" with rhetorical action. Rhetors then fill situations with "fitting" discourse, which they present before an "audience" which has the potential of being influenced, and is governed by particular "constraints." On the other hand, Gorgias and Vatz both dismiss the possibility of a "truth" outside of the rhetorical situation. Gorgias thinks that all knowledge is relative to what rhetors and audiences can perceive in the physical world, and the meanings of these perceptions change according to the manipulations of logos by a rhetor within a given situation. Speech itself--not an appeal to the "truth"--is what persuades audiences, and good rhetors vary their speech to fit the situation. Vatz, in direct response to Bitzer's notions of the rhetorical situation, argues that situations are created by rhetors purely from discourse and are made "real" as a result of an audience's perception of them. In other words, situations do not discretely exist before rhetoric and they are not the result of an "exigence"; rather, rhetorical situations are the result of the language of rhetors and their influences on audiences.
But despite their differences, all four of these rhetors make similar assumptions about the stability of rhetorical situations and constituents. Each assumes that rhetorical situations can be divided into unique and discreet units (audience, rhetor, message, etc.) Each also presumes a single channel of communication within a given situation--that is, rhetors deliver messages that audiences receive. While audiences, of course, ultimately react to discourse (which may lead to different rhetorical situations), that reaction is depicted as the natural and inevitable result of the message of the rhetor, the "conclusion" of a rhetorical situation. Each of these rhetoricians also assumes a more or less definitive and physical space within which the rhetorical situation is contained. This is especially true for both Plato and Gorgias (as Richard Enos suggested), but I also think that it's true for Bitzer and Vatz. While these contemporary rhetoricians assume and understand the tools of modern media that problematize the assumptions the ancients were making about physical space (though neither Bitzer nor Vatz's positions on rhetorical situation account for the sorts of virtual situations created by the Internet), it seems to me that they are still assuming a static and fixed space that contains rhetorical situations. In other words, television, radio, film, etc. are for Bitzer and Vatz merely extensions of the physical (and limited) spaces imagined by Plato and Gorgias. Finally, each of these rhetoricians assumes "wholely contained" selves capable of independently receiving and transmitting messages (depending on their roles within a given situation, which are definitionally limited to either rhetor or audience), and also able to respond and react within a given rhetorical situation in an appropriate fashion. In other words, it seems to me the epistemologies of Plato, Gorgias, Bitzer, and Vatz assume that "whole" individuals are either principally rhetors or principally audiences within a given rhetorical situation, and never both equally at once.
What I am calling "immediacy" works against all of these assumptions. Based in what I will crudely call a "postmodernist" epistemology/ontology, immediacy and immediate rhetorical situations question the distinctions between audiences and rhetors, highlight the multiplicity of avenues of discourse within any given situation, and attempt to account for a discourse that seemingly takes place outside any physical situation and between fragmented/ contradictory/ multiplicitous selves. In short, immediacy is a much more fluid and dynamic reading of rhetorical situations that attempts to examine how discourse functions (or doesn't function) within a postmodernist, technologically-advanced mode where the static distinctions assumed by "modernist" rhetoricians like Plato, Gorgias, Bitzer, and Vatz are no longer valid.
This chapter is thus a response, informed by postmodernist thinking, to the theories of rhetorical situation I describe in the first chapter. In this chapter I outline several key articulations of rhetorical situation within a postmodern framework. I begin with a general definition of what I mean by this awkward phrase "postmodernism" and explain in more detail the ways in which the rhetoricians I discuss in chapter one are at odds with it. Then I examine some of the possibilities of rhetorical situation within a postmodern framework, notably Barbara Bisecker's application of Jacques Derrida to situation and my own readings of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. I conclude with what I hope is a useful synthesis of these various "postmodernist" positions and their relation to "modernist" articulations of the rhetorical situation.
I want to stress that my argument in this chapter (indeed, throughout this dissertation) assumes that the shift in the late twentieth century away from "modernism" to "postmodernism" has happened--that is, I am beginning with the position that there is a notable and important philosophical difference between what I will call "modernism" and "postmodernism." This is certainly an assumption that could and has been debated. But if we begin with taking as a given that "postmodernism" exists and is distinct from "modernism," what then is "postmodernism"? What are some useful means of distinguishing and defining these two broad terms?
It seems to me that the best place to begin is with an acknowledgement of the problematic nature of the term "postmodernism" itself. For one thing, as Fredric Jameson points out in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, it's hard to convey or evaluate postmodernism since we are within it, and any "ideological judgement on postmodernism today necessarily implies, one would think, a judgement on ourselves. . ." (62). Second, "postmodernism"--despite its current pervasiveness within rhetorical and cultural studies--is hardly a unifying and agreed-upon term. As Judith Butler points out in her essay "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism,'" any number of positions have been equated or conflated to be "postmodern" so that it becomes "understood as an indiscriminate assemblage of French feminism, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucaltian analysis, Rorty's conversationalism and cultural studies." This is all the more problematic to Butler because many of these various critical positions that are easily "lumped together" by American theorists are seen as quite distinct from one another by the theorists themselves (4). In fact, my own synthesis of analyses from Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard would undoubtably be viewed by them as something of a travesty.
Yet even with these difficulties, I think it is possible and useful to distinguish and define "postmodernism" and "modernism" in general terms as they apply to immediacy. In a sense, what I mean by "postmodernism" is "not modernism," but this of course begs the question "what is 'modernism?'" In the introduction of his anthology From Modernism to Postmodernism, Lawrence Cahoone suggests that the "modern" in Western civilization "is generally characterized . . . as capitalism, a largely secular culture, liberal democracy, individualism, rationalism, and humanism" (11). It is a positive and presumptive self-image that assumes Western culture's "humanistic" goals of scientific (and therefore rational) knowledge, social progress through hard work, and understandings of "truth," "freedom," and "justice" are simply correct (12). Modernism thus assumes that individuals are more or less "sovereign" over their worlds and potentially unified by the presumed commonality of Western goals.
The most important implication of this as far as rhetorical theory is concerned is that modernism (as Sharon Crowley says in her book The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current Traditional Rhetoric) privileges "human reason as the source and foundation of knowledge, its concomitant reduction of the functioning of human nature to principles of similarity, and its isolation of the primary function of language as a representation of thought" (4-5). Modernism, Crowley continues, assumes that the "individual mind, working at its best, [can] analyze its experiences of the world in unique and original ways in order to produce new and heretofore unthought knowledge" (5) because mankind (and my gendered word-choice here is intentional) is capable, through reason, rationality, and science, of fully understanding and conquering the world. Crowley argues that this modernistic privileging of reason above all else assumes differences between identities are minimal (that is, what is "reasonable" is more or less the same for everyone in every culture) and also that history itself is knowable, permanent, and infinitely applicable:
Thus, for example, a modern thinker can quote Plato as a source for this or that point of view, as though he spoke with perfect articulation to the modern age, as though he inhabited an intellectual milieu so similar to the present one that any difference existing between our age and his own are so small to be negligible. In short, the modern worldview, in order to privilege reason, must hypostasize human consciousness and, in doing so, collapse history into an eternal present (8).
While saying that "postmodernism" is "not modernism" is simplistic, pointing to the contrasts between the two seems a reasonable place to start. As Lester Faigley writes in Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition, the key difference between the two is that "modernism posited a tension between the transient and the eternal, between low culture and high culture, between the vernacular and the elite, while in postmodernism this tension is lost" (4). Indeed, all of the assumptions about modernism I've already discussed--the presumably universal goals of "humanism," "democracy," and "justice," the ability of the individual mind to control the world and solve problems, the high value on reason, the permanence of history, etc.--are questioned from the position of "postmodernism." As Faigley says, the key assumption that motivates the postmodern critique is that "there is nothing outside contingent discourses to which a discourse of values can be grounded--no eternal truths, no universal human experience, no universal human rights, no overriding narrative of human progress" (8). In short, the previously assumed presumptions of modernism are rejected.
Absent these unifying assumptions, postmodernist thought assumes possibilities of multiplicity, the discourse between various "truths" from a variety of different cultures, politics, and ideologies. Postmodernism focuses, as Mary Poovey suggests in her essay "Cultural Criticism: Past and Present," on "language as a system of relations, the instability of meaning, the artificiality of truth, the contradictory nature of identity, the generative capacity of language, and the de-centered subject" (620). Where modernism explores the assumption that "mankind" is bound together with the universalistic goals of seeking and attaining knowledge and truth, postmodernism begins with the assumption that peoples' goals of knowledge and truth are different, are influenced by complex cultural, political, and ideological forces, and are frequently contradictory. Postmodernism is not an exploration of the "Self" in the traditional, Western sense; rather, it posits and explores de-centered and fragmented "selves." Postmodernism is not about rational and universal attainment of "truth" or about dichotomous, "either/or" relationships between knowledge; it instead suggests multiple and simultaneous "and/and" relationships in which many "truths" can exist within the same rhetorical space.
I think there are two further refinements of this loose definition of "postmodernism" that are useful considering my purposes regarding immediacy. First, Faigley draws a distinction between discourses about "postmodernism" that are largely a philosophical and academic concern, and "discourses that propose an era of postmodernity, the dislocations of postmodern theory are claimed to be indicative of a more general cultural condition" (9, italics his). To prove his point, Faigley reviews many of the commonly-cited examples of contemporary Western (American) culture, including the easy adoption of the term "postmodern" in the popular media (everything from popular advertisements to television shows like Postmodern MTV), the visibility of futurists such as Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt, the proliferation of cable and satellite television systems that make huge quantities of information and entertainment easily attainable, the availability of exotic consumer goods in even the most provincial cities, and the expanding diversity of "new" religions that question and problematize previously assumed transcendent truths (10-13). While similar to the "academic" discourses of postmodern theory, "discourse[s] on postmodernity often speak of the fragmentation of the subject, the loss of faith in science and progress, and a rising awareness of irrationality and chaos. . ." attributed to major economic and cultural shifts (9). I am not as comfortable as Faigley is here in drawing a distinction between an academic/philosophical concern with postmodernism and a cultural/popular concern with postmodernity (i.e., the "ivory tower"/"real world" dichotomy). However, Faigley's point about the pervasiveness of postmodernism in American society is an important one in terms of immediacy and its applications. My goal in considering immediacy and its relationship to rhetorical situations is an effort to understand a wide variety of discourses in the larger culture, and I am assuming that postmodernity is indeed the condition of that culture and not merely an academic phenomenon.
Second, I think it is important and intriguing to consider the differences between the "negative" and "positive" implications of the postmodern condition on society as discussed by various theorists and philosophers. Jameson, as Faigley discusses him, sees the breakdown of assumptions of modernism causing a "kind of cultural schizophrenia" (13) where, because there is no autonomous, unified subject, there is no transcendent or unifying "meaning" to bring society together. While Jameson is quite clear that he is not anxious to return to the "older machinery" of a modernistic culture, he does see "postmodernism" as a condition to be escaped through a human subject made "whole" so that "we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion" (Postmodernism, 54). Baudrillard (as I will discuss later in this chapter), and Jean-Franç ois Lyotard (who I will return to in more detail in chapter four) similarly lament the loss of a previously unified and autonomous subject and see postmodernism as a philosophical and cultural problem that needs to be "solved."
However, this bleak view of the postmodern is hardly universal. I think, for example, that both Faigley and Poovey are ultimately arguing that the lack of an easily identified and unified "self" creates opportunities for revisioning the assumed divisions in culture and society. In fact, the desired "solving" of the postmodern "problem" can certainly be read as an effort at retaining the unity, coherence, and ultimately the power of modernism by those who have benefited the most from it: Western men of a certain intellectual and class status, like Jameson, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. As bell hooks says in her essay "Postmodern Blackness," "The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance" (514). Many argue that it is explicitly because of this lack of grounding and autonomous subjectivity that the postmodern condition is not a problem to be solved, but rather an opportunity to be embraced. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux define what they see as the liberating potential of postmodernity in Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism:
Postmodernism views the subject as contradictory and multilayered, and rejects the notion that individual consciousness and reason are the most important determinants in shaping human history. It posits instead a faith in forms of social transformation that understand the historical, structural, and ideological limits that shape the possibility for self-reflection and action. Postmodernism points to solidarity, community, and compassion as essential aspects of how we develop and understand the capacities we have for experiencing the world and ourselves in a meaningful way. More specifically, postmodernism offers a series of referents for rethinking how we are constituted as subjects within a rapidly changing set of political, social, and cultural conditions (117).
In this sense, postmodernity represents a new opportunity in building communities in society. Instead of casting ourselves as unified subjects that must unite behind dominant societal goals and "meanings," postmodernity offers previously disenfranchised peoples the opportunity to experience the world in a multiplicitious and dynamic fashion, one that allows for the posibility of change and the respect for competing goals and meanings.
Given the openness of my definition of postmodernism up to this point, it would be oddly reductive to suggest that postmodernism is either a "good" or a "bad" thing. Rather, keeping the views of postmodernism as a "problem" or a "solution" in dialog with each other seems fitting with my conceptions of immediacy and its implications in rhetorical situations. Immediacy itself is neither "problem" nor a "solution" to the rhetorical situation within a postmodern context; rather, immediacy highlights the problems created by "neatly" theorizing divided and assumed roles within rhetorical situations. Immediate rhetorical situations are potentially chaotic and destructive because of the lack of definitions of and divisions among rhetors, audiences and discourses. At the same time, immediate rhetorical situations are potentially intimate and empowering because of the same lack of definitions and divisions.
Given this loose definition of "modernism" and "postmodernism," I'd like to briefly return to the claims I made in the opening of this chapter: that the rhetors I discussed in chapter one do not theorize about "kairos" and rhetorical situations in postmodernist terms. It seems to me that both Plato and Gorgias would have to be described as classical or "pre-modernist" in the sense that while neither Plato nor Gorgias are modernist, neither of them are necessarily postmodernists either. Plato is, of course, assuming an ideal that is beyond the individual and merely approachable by humanity. Modernism certainly makes appeals to the "objective reason" of Platonic philosophy (as is evident in the above quotation from Crowley). However, modernism places the source of knowledge not in an idealic, objective realm beyond the attainment of the sovereign individuals, but rather within the "whole and contained" rational subject.
Gorgias is much more difficult to neatly categorize. His emphasis on the power of language itself certainly seems much closer to the rejection of truth-claims posited by postmodernism. As I said in chapter one, a host of "neo-sophistic" rhetoricians have made interesting connections between Gorgias and other sophistic rhetoricians and postmodernisms. However, it is important to point out (as Richard Enos does) that Gorgias and his ancient Greek contemporaries had a very specific and literal conception of rhetorical space, and to separate them from that context would be committing the modernistic error of collapsing history into an eternal present that Crowley warns against. Gorgias and his contemporaries thought that rhetors and audiences understood language through the "human media" (see chapter one, page 24), through the human senses of autonomous individuals within a given (and confined) physical space. Further, as Untersteiner writes in The Sophists, Gorgias assumed a distinction between the logos of "the mob" and the logos of "the poets," and that while rhetors may "deceive" in order to persuade, they don't "lie," which suggests that Gorgias was willing to make some distinctions regarding "truth" (see chapter one, pages 21-23). In short, while Gorgias' conception of "kairos" and rhetorical situation might not be described as "modernist," I don't think it is "postmodernist" either.
Bitzer and Vatz clearly fall within the confines of "modernism" as I've defined it here. Bitzer is suggesting a clear distinction between "situations" and "discourse" in the sense that situations must precede discourse and they become "appropriate" (the definition of which Bitzer assumes all rational people would agree with, so he does not bother to elaborate on what this means) rhetorical situations when they are filled with the "appropriate" discourse. Such a theory posits a cause, an "exigence" or "imperfection in the world," followed by a logical and rational effect, a "fitting" rhetorical situation. As Barbara Biesecker writes in her essay "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Diffé rance," "Clearly, the traditional concept of the rhetorical situation forces theorists and critics to appeal to a logic that transcends the rhetorical situation itself in order to explain the prior constitution of the subjects participating or implicated in the event" (111). I would describe such appeals as "modernistic."
Vatz's argument against Bitzer's position suggests a rejection of presupposed and objective causes for rhetorical situations, which in turn implies that the discourse of rhetoricians themselves causes "the rhetorical situation"--that is, situations aren't discovered, they are created. In one sense, then, Vatz could be read as a rhetorician theorizing from at least the influence of postmodernism because he is rejecting the modernistic assumption that it is possible to appeal to an observable and agreed-upon truth. However, Vatz--like Bitzer--is assuming a dichotomous, cause and effect relationship between rhetoric and situations, a condition that Scott Consigny recognized and problematized in his essay "Rhetoric and Its Situations" (which I discuss in the closing pages of chapter one). Further, Vatz is clearly assuming divisions between rhetors, audiences, and messages (after all, he is arguing in no uncertain terms that rhetors cause situations as a result of their discourses), and thus is implying the autonomous subject that is constructed outside of the rhetorical situation itself (as Biesecker suggested in the quoted passage above). Finally, Vatz's direct reaction to Bitzer in and of itself suggests a dramatic privileging of the subject who contains this knowledge, Bitzer. As Biesecker puts it, "Vatz's statement is a response to Bitzer's essay; Vatz reads 'The Rhetorical Situation' as itself a situation with an exigence that invites a response" (114).
Given the "modernistic" assumptions of the theorists of "kairos" and rhetorical situation I have discussed so far, it seems to me necessary to turn to postmodern theoreticians and philosophers in order to approach a theory about rhetorical situations that might be advantageous in understanding immediacy. I've chosen to focus on some particular portions of the work of Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard for two main reasons. First, I think the work of these three theorists--particularly Derrida and Foucault--represents a highly significant contribution to postmodern thought to date. It would be more than reductive to say this is the most significant contribution; there are obviously other postmodern theorists who would be applicable and useful here, but it seems clear to me that the theories of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard represent an excellent place to start. Second, while I doubt the theorists themselves would agree with this, I think their critiques considered together offer an interesting and useful synthesis regarding the function of discourse within immediate contexts. Synthesized together, these three positions--Derrida's concern with the nature of diffé rance and signification, Foucault's considerations of the cultural, social, and ideological effects on discourse, and Baudrillard's examination of contemporary media technologies and the "simulacra"--offer what I think is an intriguing depiction of rhetorical situations and their relationships to immediacy.
In considering Derrida and rhetorical situation, I am relying heavily on Biesecker's essay "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Diffé rance" in part because it is performing the task I am attempting to accomplish here--re-visioning the rhetorical situation through postmodernist thought--and also because it is one of the few texts that I know of that explicitly seeks to challenge and re-examine rhetorical situation as debated by Bitzer and Vatz. Biesecker argues, as I have in this chapter, that conceiving of rhetorical situation as "an exchange between consummate individuals" limits discourse's powers to merely persuading or realigning an audiences' allegiances. Her goal in rethinking the rhetorical situation through Derrida's themes of diffé rance is to revitalize discourse as able to "form new identities" and as "radical possibility" (111).
While it is a central theme in all of Derrida's writings, particularly his earlier books and essays, diffé rance is not a basic or simple concept to grasp. As Peggy Kamuf points out in her introduction to the essay "Diffé rance" in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, diffé rance must first be understood as a word-play within the context of modern French. "Unlike English, French has not developed two verbs from the Latin differre, but has maintained the senses of both to differ and defer in the same verb, diffé rer. Also, unlike English, in French no noun formed from this verb carries the sense of deferral and deferment." The variation that Derrida has introduced to suggest a combination of the notions of "differ" and "defer" is diffé rance, which is indistinguishable in pronunciation from the familiar word diffé rence. As Kamuf says, "so as to underscore the relation Derrida sees between diffé rance and writing in the general sense he has worked out, he recalls that which for the audience at his lecture would have been self-evident: the difference between diffé rence and diffé rance is silent" (58).
The "play" between these notions of "differ" and "defer" is what makes signification for Derrida possible in the first place. Derrida describes it this way in his essay "Diffé rance" as it appears in Kamuf's A Derrida Reader:
What is written as diffé rance, then, will be the playing movement that "produces"--by means of something that is not simply an activity--these differences, these effects of difference. This does not mean that the diffé rance that produces differences is somehow before them, in a simple and unmodified--in-different--present. Diffé rance is the nonfull, nonsimple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. Thus, the name origin no longer suits it (64, Translated by Alan Bass).
As Biesecker writes, "Only to the extent that we are able to differ, as in spatial distinction or relation to an other, and to defer, as in temporalizing or delay, are we able to produce anything" (117), including meaning, action, influence, or identification from rhetorical situations.
Biesecker applies this notion of diffé rance to reconfigure a theory of rhetorical situation in two obviously related ways: in terms of the perceived role/category of rhetors, and in terms of the perceived role/category of audiences. Diffé rance and Derrida's "deconstructive displacement of questions of origin into questions of process" break rhetors free of the role of reading and defining rhetorical situations as either the result of an objective and discrete situation or as the result of the intentions of the autonomous rhetor. Indeed, the complex paradox of diffé rance demands that rhetors read "rhetorical discourses as the 'interweaving of different texts (literally "webs") in an act of criticism that refuses to think of "influence" or "interrelationship" as simple historical phenomena.'" In other words, as Biesecker goes on to explain, viewing rhetorical situations through the lense of diffé rance forces rhetors to recognize that "neither the text's immediate rhetorical situation nor its author can be taken as simple origin or generative agent since both are underwritten by a series of historically produced displacements" (121).
The implications of diffé rance on the role/category of "audience" is similar to that of the role/category of "rhetor," though more profound for Biesecker. She argues that "both Bitzer and Vatz presume the presence of an audience that finds, in any rhetorical situation, its ontological and epistemological foundation in the notion of a sovereign, rational subject" (123). Diffé rance, since it brings into play the notion of how meaning is derived, problematizes this idea of autonomous subject, presents the possibility of a subjectivity which is always in a process of differing and deferring, and demonstrates that audiences are "forever in process, indefinite, controvertible" (125). Through the thematic of diffé rance, Biesecker argues that:
"it becomes possible to read discursive practices neither as rhetorics directed to preconstitutied and known audiences nor as rhetorics 'in search of' objectively identifiable but yet undiscovered audiences. Diffé rance obliges us to read rhetorical discourses as processes entailing the discursive production of audiences, and enables us to decipher rhetorical events as sites that make visible the historically articulated emergence of the category 'audience'" (126).
In other words, Derrida's notion of diffé rance problematizes the meaning of signification at the most basic level of language itself, which thus raises questions about the meaning of presumed roles within rhetorical situations. "Audience" should not be understood as a known and pre-existing "given" that is influenced simply by the rhetor. Rather, the category of audience (like that of rhetor) should be conceived as always in the process of being both distinct and deferred, by its being temporary and always in process. Biesecker's reading of diffé rance as applied to an understanding of rhetorical situations--which I am obviously inclined to accept-- thus opens and questions the distinctions of the presumed categories within rhetorical situations and their possibilities.
I think Foucault is similarly questioning and problematizing modernistic and subjective identities, though his work is much more focused on the relationships between "knowledge," "power," and the "discourses" that mediate/regulate them within a larger historical/ideological framework. While most considerations of Foucault seem to focus on the dynamics between "knowledge" and "power," I'd like to examine what he seems to mean by "discourse" in an effort to suggest that Foucault's notions of "discourse" also seem applicable to a postmodern conception of rhetorical situation in general and immediacy in particular.
In their discussion of Foucault in Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, Sonja Foss, Karen Foss, and Robert Trapp suggest that "discourse" is the plural form of the "statement," which is made up of independent units of "signs or symbols to which a status of knowledge can be ascribed" (237). This conceptualization seems both supported and rejected in Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge, within which a "statement" is indeed called the "atom of discourse." However, Foucault goes on to point out that in using such a conceptualization, a "[p]roblem soon arises: if the statement really is the elementary unit of discourse, what does it consist of? What are its distinctive features? What boundaries must one accord to it?" (80) The statement--as Foucault sees it--is thus paradoxical. While the statement is a singular unit of meaning that "exists therefore neither in the same way as a language. . . nor in the same way as the objects presented to perception" (86), it is "neither visible nor hidden" because it can only be defined in the traces it produces in discursive events (108-9). But, returning to Foss, Foss and Trapp's interpretations for a moment, if we assume that discourse consists of a group of distinct statements (which are themselves distinct units of knowledge), then it seems to me that discourse and knowledge are interrelated components--discourse "contains" knowledge (much in the same way that rhetorical situations can be said to "contain" discourse), and it also "mediates" knowledge in the sense that knowledge is conveyed through discourse. To interpret Foucault in this way suggests Foucault is implying our understanding of the relationship between "power" and "knowledge" is a result of the process of discourse.
Discourses, acting to both "contain" and "mediate" knowledge, interact with each other within a complex "web of things" (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 48) which seem the result of what Foucault calls "rules of exclusion." "We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything," Foucault writes in "The Discourse on Language," "that we cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we like; not just anyone, finally, may speak of just anything" (216). Not unlike the theories of "kairos" and rhetorical situation I discussed in chapter one, Foucault is suggesting here that the appropriateness of any rhetorical action is determined by the rhetorical situation itself. However, I think Foucault's argument regarding discourse and the interpretations of rhetorical situations differs from Bitzer's and Vatz's in two significant ways. First, Foucault is arguing that what is "fitting" within a given situation is governed by complex cultural and ideological influences on the participants (i.e., they do not "objectively" exist nor are they statically defined absent history). Second, I think Foucault is suggesting that in order to understand the relationships between "power" and "knowledge," we need to forgo static constraints of situations and explore the points of "rupture" within discourses--that is, instead of focusing on the continuity of situations, we should focus on their fissures.
Foucault argues that while the borders that define discursive systems of exclusion are always subject to change and are curiously subjective (he says that in the Middle Ages in Europe, "the words of a madman were either totally ignored or else were taken as words of truth"(217)), they are nonetheless always clearly present and apparent to the members of the community in question. These rules of exclusion are powerful to the extent that they themselves define what can potentially count as falling within the realm of "truth." For example, "People have often wondered how on earth nineteenth-century botanists and biologists managed not to see the truth of Mendel's statements" (224). But as Foucault explains, it was because Mendel imagined the functioning of hereditary traits in a way that fell outside of the defined realm of biological discourse. He was speaking with "prohibited words," thus appearing "mad" and upsetting the discourse community's "will to truth." Foucault claims that "Mendel was a true monster, so much so that science could not even speak of him." And yet, once the "deployment of a totally new range of objects in biology" took place, it became as impossible for the discipline to speak of Mendel as wrong (224). This is not to imply that the ideological constraints of "acceptable" discourse are universal--far from it, in fact. However, Foucault is arguing that there are constraints on discourse that are beyond the realm of the "subject" and the particular rhetorical situation itself, constraints that are widely accepted within a given culture and are also quick to change.
I don't think that Foucault is arguing against this "power" that controls the discourse used to mediate/create knowledge. After all, power is inevitable, is traversable, and can be beneficial. "If power were never anything but repressive," Foucault asked in Power/Knowledge, "if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?" (119) Rather, Foucault is suggesting a new conception of discourse (and I would also add rhetorical situation) and its study in order to expose the relationships between "power" and "knowledge." He says in the "Discourse on Language" we should treat discourse as a "discontinuous activity," as "a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them" (229). In The Archaeology of Knowledge, he elaborates further:
We must renounce all those themes whose function is to ensure the infinite continuity of discourse and its secret presence to itself in the interplay of a constantly recurring absence. We must be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption; in that punctuality in which it appears, and in the temporal dispersion that enables it to be repeated, known, forgotten, transformed, utterly erased . . . Discourse must not be referred to the distant presence of the origin, but treated as and when it occurs (25).
In other words, discourses should not be examined in terms of their continuity and "completeness," as I think both Bitzer and Vatz are suggesting. Rather, Foucault is arguing that in order to understand how discourse functions as a means of containing and mediating "power" and "knowlege," we need to examine it within the context in which it is functioning, and we need to focus on discourses as discontinous.
While I don't want to equate Foucault's conception of "discourse" as I've outlined it here with my conception of rhetorical situations within a postmodern framework, I do think it is useful to consider the conditions of rhetorical situations as analogous to "discourse". Foucault's articulation of the "statement" as a building-block of "discourse" simultaneously recognizes the distinguishable components or "atoms" of knowledge and the impossibility of definitively naming those components. If we see "rhetorical situation" and "discourse" as analogous terms, then I think it's possible to recognize the "components" of rhetorical situation--rhetor, audience, message, place, time--as having the characteristics of "statements:" abstractly distinguishable, but impossible to separate in practice.
Further, just as "discourse" is governed by a complex and ever-changing "web of things" which are based on the cultural and ideological assumptions of the participants of what is "acceptable," the practices of audiences and rhetors within rhetorical situations are also governed by the "rules of exclusion" of given cultures. Just as meaning is not made by the "sovereign subject" within a rhetorical situation, rhetorical situations themselves are interrelated and dependent on each other--that is, the interpretation and meaning of any rhetorical situation is tied to the dynamic "web of things" composed of other situations, problematizing the possibility of an autonomous rhetorical situation.
Finally, and most significantly for my purposes here in defining immediacy, just as Foucault's insistence that "discourse" must be examined not as a continuous activity but must be explored at its points of rupture, as and when it occurs, rhetorical situations should not be examined as contained and completed "wholes" but as tenuous, fluid, and potentially explosive events. Thus, we should attempt to explore and accept rhetorical situations not after they have reached a point of closure (an illusion of "wholeness"), but rather as they are happening. We should problematize the efforts designed to give an illusion of continuity and instead investigate the sources of the rupture in order better understand the place of any given rhetorical situation within specific cultural contexts.
I've briefly considered Derrida's conception of diffé rance as it applies to rhetorical situations to suggest that the problem of meaning differed and deferred creates dynamic opportunities within rhetorical situations to reconfigure the roles of constituents and identities. Foucault's notions of discourse suggest rhetorical situations must be seen within a complex web of other meanings and situations--that is, there is no such thing as an autonomous rhetorical situation--and we should try to focus on the points of rupture and disjunction at the moment they happen, not through the unifying themes of "rhetor," "audience," "message" (for example), and not after the rhetorical situation has reached closure. Baudrillard's concerns with simulation, the simulacra, and hyperreality--especially as he applies them to contemporary media--further these postmodern examinations of the rhetorical situation by problematizing the notions of the location and existence of "real" rhetorical situations.
Baudrillard, a self-described "intellectual terrorist," is a difficult theorist to approach and apply. As Douglas Kellner writes in his introduction to Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, Baudrillard is a nihilist whose "postmodern mind-set exhibits a contradictory amalgam of emotions and responses ranging from despair and melancholy, to vertigo and giddiness, to nostalgia and laughter" (12). Madan Sarup points out in his critique of Baudrillard in An Introductory Guide to Post-Structualism and Postmodernism that:
He seems to have a conservative nostalgia for face-to-face communication, which implies that face-to-face communication is superior to other forms. . . . He abstracts media from the social system and fails to see that media in contemporary society are a contested terrain, an arena of struggle, in which social conflicts are worked out (167).
Because of his contradictions and playfulness, it's difficult deciding whether or not Baudrillard intends to be taken seriously, which of course is part of the point of his critical approach. And, not unlike Derrida and Foucault, the prolific Baudrillard has expressed a myriad of concerns and theories for nearly thirty years, which makes the idea of summarizing "Baudriallard's approach" to the postmodern particularly ludicrous.
However, Baudrillard's more recent concerns with simulation, simulacra, and the hyperreal seem particularly relevant to my concern with immediacy. Simulation, Baudrillard explains in Simulacra and Simulation, differs from "representation" in that representation is a modernistic and utopian "equivalence of the sign and of the real." Simulation "stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference" (6, italics his). What Baudrillard is calling here "representation" has a clear reference, "whereas simulation threatens the difference between the 'true' and the 'false,' the 'real' and the 'imaginary'" (3). The simulacra furthers this notion of simulation in that it is a simulation of a simulation-- that is, a "re-production" of something that had been previously divorced from its referent. Baudrillard suggests the relationship between simulations and simulacrum thusly:
Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as simulacrum.
Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum (6).
The "space" that allows for the simulation and simulacra to occur is what Baudrillard labels "hyperspace" or the "hyperreal." Baudrillard considers this the inevitable result when "all metaphysics" are lost, when there is no longer any sense of a division between "the real and its concept":
The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control--and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. (2)
Hyperreality, as Timothy W. Luke argues in his essay "Aesthetic Production and Cultural Politics: Baudrillard and Contemporary Art," "rises from this elimination of the representational differences between true and false, concept and object, real and representation, much like the unrelenting flow of 24-hour television headline news which creates unstable stylized narratives to report 'what is true' by merging videotaped reality and cable feed representation in an electron haze" (214). However, Baudrillard's own perceptions of hyperreality go beyond television news. Most of the components of the contemporary culture exist for Baudrillard within this realm of the hyperreal, at least in some fashion. In fact, the majority of Simulacra and Simulation consists of critiques of the popular culture--television, cinema, and even the infamous Pompidou Center in Beaubourg, Paris. And, as the title of his short book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place suggests, Baudrillard sees even the global-political actions of nation-states as hyperreal. As Sarup writes,
In Baudrillard's world everything is 'hyper'--in excess of itself. Being hyper means dissolving the old oppositions, not transcending or resolving them. When the borderline between the real and imaginary is eroded, reality is no longer checked, called to justify itself. It is 'more real than real' as it has become the only existence (166).
Making any sort of meaning in such a hyperreality where simulations and simulacra are indistinguishable from the "real" is obviously problematic at best. Baudrillard writes that within this system "where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist," where everything is "unhinged" by simulation, "all determination evaporates, every act is terminated at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and having been scattered in all directions" (16). In his introduction to his translation of The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Paul Patton effectively summarizes what Baudrillard sees as the dangerous effect of the Gulf War being played out in the hyperreal field of contemporary television:
This is not a war but a simulacrum of war, a virtual event which is less the representation of real war than a spectacle which serves a variety of political and strategic purposes on all sides. Here, the sense in which Baudrillard speaks of events as virtual is related to the idea that real events lose their identity when they attain the velocity of real time information, or to employ another metaphor, when they become encrusted with the information which represents them. In this sense, while televisual information claims to provide immediate access to real events, in fact what it does is produce informational events which stand in for the real, and which "inform" public opinion which in turn affects the course of subsequent events, both real and informational (10).
The hyperreal--especially as mediated by the field of television--erases the distinction between the "real" event and a simulation of the event, which effectively erases the "real" for Baudrillard. Thus, the Gulf War as a "real" phenomenon didn't take place (at least for the vast majority of Americans who encountered the war via CNN); rather, a simulation of the Gulf War took place.
Now, I think it is important to engage Baudrillard's discussion of simulation, simulacra, and hyperreality cautiously. It seems to me that seeing everything as hyperreal is the same as seeing nothing as hyperreal, so I am skeptical about Baudrillard's broad applications of his theories. After all, while the Gulf War was arguably a simulation for the majority of Americans who experienced it through television and other contemporary medias, it was certainly experienced by the participants in a very different manner. For example, I am quite sure the Kuwaitis whose country was pillaged and burned by the invading Iraqi army, the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians inadvertently killed by the "smart bombs" of the U.S. led coalition, and the many Gulf War veterans who have experienced the mysterious physical ailments collectively known as "Gulf War Syndrome" encountered a very different version (an "unsimulated"/"nonhyper" one) of the Gulf War.
Furthermore, as I pointed out earlier, Baudrillard's critique of the hyperreal is inevitably negative and reactive. While he is "consistently inconsistent" in his readings of the outcome of the impact of the interaction of simulations and simulacra, he also seems to me to be longing for a once-present "real" to make things clear and "true" once again--in other words, Baudrillard's critique is one that aims to "solve" the "problems" of postmodernitity. As I said in my loose definition of postmodernism as it relates to immediacy, I don't think such a reductive position is informative.
However, while I question the consequences of simulation, simulacra, and hyperreality, I do think these concepts have important implications in my understanding of immediacy. Baudrillard exposes and obsesses over the medium through which discourse passes and makes clear that issues of "place" are crucial in understanding rhetorical situations. He begins with McLuhan's mantra of the "medium is the message" and, because of the constant presence of the hyperreal, argues that the "medium itself is no longer identifiable as such . . . it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real" (Simulacra and Simulation, 30). That is, the medium or the place that governs the rhetorical situation--the market square, the courtroom, the television news broadcast, the Internet--is ultimately inseparable from the rhetorical situation itself. Further, with advanced communication medias such as television or the Internet that turn rhetors, audiences, and messages into simulations and simulacra, immediate rhetorical situations exist in particularly volatile and uncertain categories where defining the "real" in any sense is impossible. In other words, Baudrillard's concern with simulation, simulacra, and hyperreality as a result of contemporary communication technologies suggest that rhetorical situations simultaneously contain and create a multitude of messages, rhetors, and audiences.
As I suggested in the introduction to this dissertation, I see immediacy as a synthesis of theories on rhetorical situation and as a small (personal?) means of coping with rhetorical context and situations as they function within a postmodernist condition. Up to this point, I have examined a variety of theories on kairos and rhetorical situation and have drawn connections between these theories and my sense of immediacy. To that extent, it seems to me that my definition of immediacy consists of these first two chapters taken as a whole. In an effort to offer a yet more "workable" definition to apply more concretely in chapter four, where I examine the immediate rhetorical situation of the Internet in some detail, I'd like to close this chapter with a summary and synthesis of the analysis I've offered so far as it specifically applies to my conception of the immediacy.
Plato's and Gorgias' conception of kairos and Bitzer's and Vatz's articulation of the components of the rhetorical situation seem a good place to start naming the components of immediacy. These closely related concepts both begin with the existence and identification of the "right" or "critical time," which involves a "message" or "speech" delivered by a "rhetor" to an "audience" within a given "time" and "place" in order to "persuade." Of course, I put all of this terms in quotes to suggest the problems with these categories (especially as suggested by postmodernism in general and the approaches of Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard that I've just discussed). Nonetheless, I think that these categories represent a necessary and inevitable starting point for questioning and examining rhetorical situation.
As I suggested in the beginning of this chapter, the key difference between theories of kairos and rhetorical situation offered by Plato, Gorgias, Bitzer, and Vatz is one of cause and effect. Plato and Bitzer argue that the source of the "right" or "critical time" for the discursive act is outside of the rhetorical situation, while Gorgias and Vatz see the "right" or "critical time" as the creation of the "rhetor" to fit his or her needs. Immediacy begins by abandoning this dichotomy: immediate rhetorical situations are first and foremost those which can not trace their origins to any singular external or internal cause. While such a conception of rhetorical situation may have been appropriate during the age of "modernism" when the categories of the rhetorical situation existed in a more or less agreed-upon and stable form, the "postmodernism" of the late twentieth century irreversibly upsets these previous assumptions. As a result, the source of the "right" or "critical time" within immediate rhetorical situations is not located neatly within either an objective or idealic truth or within the "wholely contained subject" of the "rhetor," but is instead within a more abstract, negotiated realm between all of the categories. Similar to the argument that Consigny seems to be making about the necessary interdependencies between all of the categories of the rhetorical situation (as I discuss in the closing pages of chapter one), the source of origin of the "right" or "critical time" simultaneously exists in a number of locations and is made manifest by the immediacy of the rhetorical situation itself.
Immediacy also assumes a postmodernistic view of the fragmented subject, which problematizes the previously assumed and clear categories of "rhetor" and "audience," and ultimately the categories of "message" and "speech" as well. Diffé rance as I've articulated it here plays with the notion of signification that makes the autonomous subject possible and also changes the possibilities of the rhetorical situation. Instead of viewing rhetorical situation as a definitive context within which an audience is potentially persuaded, Biesecker suggests that rhetorical situations can take on the creative task of creating new identities and types of identification between rhetors and audiences. Given this, my definition of immediacy views the distinctions between "audiences," "rhetors," and "messages" within any given rhetorical situation as in a constant state of flux. In immediate rhetorical situations, "audiences" also generate "messages" and discourse that must be interpreted by "rhetors," and "rhetors" in turn, by necessity, have to assume the simultaneous role of "audience."
Not only are the subjects within immediate rhetorical situations fragmented and in a dynamic state of change, but the "messages" and the "rhetorical situations" in relation to other situations and events are in constant flux. I think an analogy between Foucault's notion of discourse and the concept of the immediate rhetorical situation suggests that no one rhetorical situation is autonomous from any other. Rather, immediate rhetorical situations (like discourse itself) exist within a complex web of meanings exemplified by mutually understood--yet ever-changing--"rules of exclusion" that are tied to specific cultures and histories.
Because of this lack of "wholeness"--not only in the subjects of "rhetor", "audience", and the "message" shared between them, but also the lack of "whole" and closed rhetorical situations--I am suggesting that immediate rhetorical situations be approached in the same way that Foucault advocates approaching discourse. Instead of assuming rhetorical situations are governed by themes of unity, immediate rhetorical situations need to be examined at the points of rupture and difference to understand the relationships between rhetorical situations within the complex web of meanings.
Immediacy also attempts to explain and examine rhetorical situations that seem to take place absent the modernistic concepts of "place" and "time." Immediate rhetorical situations take place within (and indeed contribute to) the realm of the hyperreal suggested by Baudrillard, which is made up of simulations and simulacra that fog meaning and raise questions about the "real." My concept of immediate rhetorical situations, thus, is targeted toward understanding the exchanges of "messages" between "rhetors" and "audiences" that come about seemingly absent a "real" "time" or "place," especially as exemplified by contemporary, high-tech communication technologies, such as the Internet (which I will discuss in more detail in the next two chapters).
Finally, immediacy tries to allow for and embrace the richness of the possible implications of rhetorical situation within this condition. Like postmodernism, immediate rhetorical situations are not inherently "positive" or "negative." They are dangerous in the sense that the lack of the "whole subject" makes social action and the definition of agreed-upon and productive meaning difficult (as Jameson discusses it), and they distance us from the "real" through a never-ending series of chaotic and meaningless simulations (as Baudrillard laments). At the same time, immediate rhetorical situations--because of the lack of the blurred boundaries between constituents within the situation--are creative and dynamic opportunites for intimacy. As Aronowitz and Giroux suggest, the re-vision of the previously assumed hierarchies and definitions of "subject" open the possibility of new alliances, allow for recognition of previously marginalized groups, and increase our capacity to understand and experience our world in meaningful ways. Immediacy thus replaces the dichotomies of good/bad and chaotic/harmonious with multiple possibilities.