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Show 96 representations of audiences that necessitate exact forms of rhetorical engagement in order to evaluate its uses in particular socio-political contexts. But we can see that this form of criticism is not rhetorical because it remains instrumental, positivist, and neoenlightened in form. Indeed, public sphere research, like ideological criticism, works hard to tame the force of rhetoric by reducing it to fixed representations of human discourse rather than listening to the object itself and engaging with its forces as a democratically equal actant rather than a neo-Aristotelian sovereign (see Gaonkar, 1990). We can say that, beginning with Black (1970), audiences are imagined "out of thin air" to render judgment on the moral undertones of the text. But this problematically assumes that the critic is in a morally superior position, capable of observing the justices and injustices of the world. As such, traditional approaches to rhetoric remain indebted to humanist assumptions that somehow endow us, primarily the West, with instrumental powers of rationality. Taking poststructural assumptions seriously, particularly Latour's metaphysics, means that rhetoric should abandon humanist assumptions and work harder to decenter the critic during the critical act. Critics are in no position to construct audiences for moral (Black, 1970; Hartnett, 2013a, 2013b) or ideological (Wander, 1983) valuations because rhetoricians are on the same ontological footing as all the other actants in the world. The audience, in other words, disappears as a distinct category because it cannot be separated from the forces of assembled relations. All we have are networks that assemble actors as subjects. Assuming audiences are not external from rhetorical networks is similar to Charland's (1987) argument that rhetoric constitutes audiences through a process of interpellation where subjects identify with particular subject positions. To him, |
