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Show 97 …audiences do not exist outside rhetoric, merely addressed by it, but live inside rhetoric. Indeed, from the moment they enter into the world of language, they are subjects; the very moment of recognition of an address constitutes an entry into a subject position to which inheres a set of motives that render a rhetorical discourse intelligible. These subject positions are bequeathed by the past, by yesterday's discourses. Furthermore, the contradictions between discourse as well as the dialectic between discourses and a changing concrete world open a space for new subject positions. Tensions in the realm of the symbolic render possible the rhetorical repositioning or rearticulation of subjects. (p. 147) Charland's theory of constitutive rhetoric thus recognizes that subjectivity is a fluid rhetorical process intricately connected with the rhetorical forces that give it agency. Charland, however, assumes ideology is the manner in which subjects are produced. Following Althusser, he acknowledges, "…the power of the text is the power of an embodied ideology. The form of an ideological rhetoric is effective because it is within the bodies of those it constitutes as subjects" (p. 143). At the end of the day, then, Charland's subject could potentially be read as a Marxian subject reduced to material forces of production, in the last instance. Althusser, after all, is a structural Marxist. A networked orientation to the audience avoids the possibility of this Marxian ideological conundrum because it flattens the world unto an immanent plane of consistency that outright rejects the logic of representation. Audiences are not interpellated by ideological apparatuses; they are actively part of the general assemblage that keeps the network alive. Additionally, rhetoric does not have sole agency in constituting subjects. Any object can produce subjective relations. Rereading the case of the Peuple Québécois (PQ) from a networked approach, therefore, would offer the advantage of accounting for a broader range of rhetorical agency from human and nonhuman actants. The White Paper, for instance, which was the 1979 document that declared the PQ's political sovereignty from Quebec, was the catalyst for setting the PQ |
