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Show 95 aggregation that follows a logic of influence (see Greene, 1998). As Charland (1987) observed, audiences do not exist outside of rhetoric. In our case, audiences do not exist outside of the network. Traditions of rational-based audience research can be traced back to Ancient Athens when Isocrates, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all assumed audiences are reasonably minded humans influenced by logical arguments. In contemporary communication studies, Bitzer (1968) used this assumption to develop what he called, "the rhetorical situation." To him, a rhetorical situation is a fixed exigency that invites instrumental uses of rhetoric on behalf of the rhetor. Whereas Bitzer privileged the rhetorical situation, Vatz (1973) privileged the speaker. Fortunately, Biesecker (1989) interevened, reminding us that deconstruction is always a political intervention, and observed that the audience is a non-origin origin that is only understood by the thematic of Derrida's differánce. The audience is thus not a static object external to rhetorical production because the speaker and the audience mutually constitute one another in an intricate, "playful" relationship. Importantly, Biesecker attempts to move criticism past the logic of influence and toward the logic of articulation, which, as Laclau and Mouffe (2001) have it, recognizes that all identities, including audiences, are contingent elements of articulation rather than essentialized, nonpolitical entities. Biesecker thus demonstrates that if either the situation (Bitzer, 1968) or the speaker (Vatz, 1973) can have an origin, then origin itself loses its metaphysical privilege. But the concept of fixed audiences and ideal, instrumental models of communication did not end with Biesecker's Derridean intervention. Indeed, traditional public sphere scholarship (Goodnight, 1982; Gross, 2012) continues to privilege |
