In many ways, this dissertation is nothing more than an odd and well-documented personal essay, a "creative" work designed to help me (via the process of writing and the product that results) come to grips with and then to understand the quickness, the sheer and dramatic speed around me, the world's immediacy.
I cannot say factually when this concern with immediacy began, but with full hind-sight, I have decided that I was first struck by what I call "immediacy" on January 16, 1991 during the national evening news, when the bombing of Baghdad began. Operation Desert Storm had been brewing for months, but the real beginning of the war for me was on the evening when Peter Jennings asked correspondent Peter Arnett to hold the phone out the window of his downtown Baghdad hotel so that "we" might better hear the war, so that we might get some audio to correspond with the dramatic video of anti-aircraft fire filling the sky with blue-green streaks of light. It was a personal experience--not, I would argue, in the same sense that the actions of nation-states in war have always had personal effects on citizens, but rather in its intimate and immediate presentation. I was there, live. I was experiencing this event in "real time," and with millions of others around the world I listened to the crackle coming over Peter Arnett's hotel phone. It wasn't news being "reported" in the traditional sense because there was no editing or focus on the "meaning" of the event; rather, it was a discursive event that ("virtually"?) put us as an audience there with Peter Arnett. I identified with the reporter and wondered whether or not he/we would get our gas masks on in time, whether or not he/we would survive the air attack. It was frightening, but it was also an exhilarating viewing experience. As Laurie Anderson describes it in her song "Night in Baghdad," "It's like the Fourth of July/ It's like a Christmas tree/ It's like fireflies on a summer night."
I was reminded of my Gulf War viewing experiences two years later by the Susan Smith story of child abduction that turned into a confession of murder--an obviously different but somehow similar feeling event. On October 25, 1994 Smith reported to Union, South Carolina law enforcement officials that an African-American man approached her stopped car with a gun and demanded that she get out. The man allegedly drove off with Smith's two toddler sons-- Alex and Michael--securely fastened in their car seats. David (Susan's former husband and the boys' father) and Susan Smith were soon making appeals for their children in newspapers and on television news and talk shows, while a search for the two boys that "touched a nation" was conducted by local, state, and federal authorities. But ten days after she had reported the carjacking and only hours after she had appeared with her husband on two major network morning shows, Susan Smith confessed that she had fabricated the entire event. She had killed her children by driving her car into a lake and allowing the two boys to drown. The citizens of the "touched nation" that had held prayer vigils for her and her sons were now calling her a "baby killer" and demanding her execution.
As tragic as Susan Smith's crime was, I cannot stop being fascinated by how easily and suddenly the "touched nation" became the "outraged nation," angered not so much by the actual murder of her two children but rather by the disturbing and disruptive violation of the intimate narrative Smith had constructed. Her role in her narrative changed radically--from victim to murderer--and the national audience that had been so eager to accept her original story realized that they had been duped, victimized by their own willingness to accept Smith's story. They were mad about this ruined narrative, so in an effort to "solve" this violation, to close this "rupture" in the discursive event, the previously accepting national audience became highly critical rhetors occupying a "storytelling" role similar to the one that had been previously held by Smith. The same newspapers that had eagerly and uncritically reported Smith's story from the beginning ran columns and editorials that claimed "we knew it all along."
Numerous commentators tried to occupy a space somehow outside of the discourse that had been unfolding in print and on television in order to claim that anyone with any "sense" had recognized very early in the Susan Smith saga that she was lying. Then the "touched-turned-outraged" nation learned that Susan Smith herself was not the "all-American girl" as previously thought, but rather, a psychologically-troubled and sexually-abused divorced woman, someone so obviously different from "ourselves" that "we" no longer had to worry about the previously assumed intimate connection. In the end, I think the "disruption" of Susan Smith's story was closed and normalized for the "touched-turned-outraged" nation by a series of articles that appeared in national news magazines and newspapers that essentially claimed "this happens all the time"--that is, parents (especially mothers) murdering their children, while of course tragic, is not near as uncommon as generally thought. In other words, the "disruptive" act of Susan Smith drowning her own children and then lying about it on national television was portrayed after the event as being not "disruptive" but "normal," thus resolving the discomfort of the national audience.
Susan Smith's story is an example of immediacy for me because it demonstrates the fragility and interconnectedness between situations and how suddenly the assumed borders between audiences, rhetors, messages, and "truths" can be crossed, blurred, and re(con)figured. It also suggests that in postmodern America, rhetors, especially those able to access the communication apparatus of the information age, can find/create the rhetorical situation necessary to convey a message that can "touch" a huge and diverse audience. Smith's story fed upon and was fostered by the narratives of fear and confusion that are described by and perpetuated in contemporary television and print news. She was an "all-American" white girl in a small southern town who suddenly became the victim of a car-jacking, a crime that no longer just happens in the cities. Worse yet, the criminal in her story--a black man--had kidnapped her two blonde, cherub-like toddler boys. The not at all subtle "meaning" of this tragedy--that there are no clear boundaries between safe and dangerous places, that we're all potential victims, that this "really could happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time"--seems to me only possible in a time where all of "us," the "touched/outraged nation," can be made a part of the situation simply by turning a channel. And just as quickly--again only possible in postmodern, high-tech America--we turn from saddened to angered to disinterested.
While the Gulf War and the Susan Smith Story are both examples of immediacy, the Internet (the vast global computer network) is simultaneously an example and a medium that creates immediate rhetorical situations. Ownerless, borderless, and essentially absent of time and space, it nonetheless provides, creates, and perpetuates the rhetorical and literal context for the exchange of a variety of messages for an ever-increasing variety of rhetors to ever-increasing multifaceted and fractured audiences. The Internet erodes the boundaries between rhetor and audience by allowing for multiple and simultaneous exchange, and by reconfiguring the definitions of cause and effect, space, and time. Indeed, the Internet dramatically problematizes the notion of a "rhetorical situation" itself. If messages can be delivered and received immediately and simultaneously by multiple audiences and rhetors without regard to physical time or space, how can we determine and define "context"?
"Immediacy" then, the subject of this dissertation, is my personal term and effort to come to some understanding about the nature of rhetorical situations and contexts in a postmodern world, and how immediate rhetorical situations are altered by the technologies employed to deliver the messages. I am trying to understand how discourse functions (or doesn't function) when the immediacy of a particular event blurs boundaries, when rhetors and audiences are thrust into particularily intimate/chaotic situations. Like a typical dictionary definition of the word "immediate," immediacy suggests a lack of division, as having nothing coming between, with no intermediary, a lack of or an ill-defined separation of space, time, order, cause and/or effect, or inference. In this sense, "immediacy" simultaneously suggests intimacy and closeness between rhetors, audiences, and messages, as well as confusion and chaos in defining hierarchies and roles within a rhetorical situation.
As will become evident as I progress, what I mean by "the immediacy of rhetoric" is not particularly new in and of itself. Rather, my efforts at building a theory of immediacy are more or less a synthesis of a variety of texts and ideas put into dialogue with one another in order to understand how the suddenness of our everyday existence alters our conceptions of how rhetoric functions in different contexts. In the course of my dissertation, I will be examining competing notions of rhetorical space and opportunity ranging from Plato and Gorgias, to Lloyd Bitzer, Richard Vatz, Scott Consigny, and Barbara Biesecker. I will also consider the validity of the rhetorical contexts they suggest in light of conflicting visions of postmodernity from Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Lester Fagiley, Henry Giroux, and others. Ultimately, I will construct a theory that hypothesizes connections between competing ideas of context and postmodernism in an effort to reach some (personal?) understanding of how rhetoric and discourse are affected by postmodern ideologies and technologies.
The first part of this dissertation (chapters one and two) will define and explore the terms "rhetorical situation" and "immediacy" in light of ancient, modern, and postmodern philosophers and rhetoricians. I necessarily begin with an extended discussion about the ancient Greek notion of "kairos" in order to examine the connections and disconnections between the ancient past and the postmodern present and to set the context of contemporary debates on the rhetorical situation. Once this context is established, I speak more directly in chapter two about the relationship between "immediacy" and "situation" within our contemporary postmodern condition, where the assumed distinctions between the roles of rhetors, audiences, and messages have been questioned, where the "wholly contained" self has dissolved, and where differences between the "real" and the "hyperreal" and simulation are indeterminate.
The second part of this dissertation (chapters three and four) puts the theory I articulate into practice. As I hope is clear by my first few pages about the Gulf War and the saga of Susan Smith, I think there are numerous events and contexts that could be read as exemplifying "immediacy." One of the most obvious and important examples in contemporary mid-1990s America is the international computer network commonly referred to as the Internet. The Internet is simultaneously a contemporary example of an immediate situation and a "site" or context for creating immediacy. Since what counts as "the Internet" or the "Information Superhighway" is very much in a state of flux, chapter three defines as clearly as possible what I mean by "the Internet" and identifies the rhetors and audiences that currently who have access to and who inhabit this environment. Chapter four is a synthesis of what has come previously: that is, given my theory of immediacy and my definition of the Internet, chapter four is my detailed presentation about why the Internet is a dramatically immediate rhetorical situation. I close this dissertation with a discussion of what I see as the implications of immediacy in general and the Internet in particular. I think there are great dangers and great potentials for this and other communication technologies that we need to be speaking and teaching about in conventional "brick and mortar" schools and in real and "virtual" communities. Ultimately, the questions I consider in the close of this dissertation--and indeed throughout this document--are the same sort of questions Laurie Anderson asks in her song "Same Time Tomorrow": "Are things getting better/ or are they getting worse? Can we start all over again?" and, more provocatively suggesting the need to re(con)figure the questions themselves, "Is time long or is it wide?"