a space of contacts, which are always changing and never discrete. The contact between two people on a busy city
street is never simply a matter of those two bodies; rather, the two bodies carry with them the traces of effects from
whole fields of culture and social histories. This is what it means to say that the social field is networked, connected,
rather than a matter of place, sites, and home. (10)
With this, we begin to see rhetoric as distributed (in Syverson’s understanding of the word) (13), to understand that “exigence is more like a shorthand way of describing a series of events” (8), and to recognize that “[t]he elements of rhetorical situation simply bleed” (9). This also means that we start “speak[ing] in terms of rhetoric as a verb: we do rhetoric, rather than (just) finding ourselves in a rhetoric. By extension, we might also say that rhetorical situation is better conceptualized as a mixture of processes and encounters; it should become a verb, rather than a fixed noun or situs” (13). Finally, we can see that “[n]ot only do…counter-rhetorics directly respond to and resist the original exigence, they also expand the lived experience of the original rhetorics by adding to them - even while changing and expanding their shape” (19)
Edbauer calls this understanding of rhetoric a rhetorical ecology (as opposed to a rhetorical situation). This “rhetorical model is one that reads rhetoric both as a process of distributed emergence and as an ongoing circulation process” (13).
Some of the values of this model are: (1) shifting “the way we view counter-rhetorics, issues of cooptation, and strategies of rhetorical production and circulation”; (2) “recogniz[ing] the way rhetorics are held together trans-situationally, as well as the effects of trans-situationality on rhetorical circulation”; and (3) “add[ing] the dimension of movement back into our discussions of rhetoric” (20).
Edbauer demonstrates a rhetorical ecology by applying this methodology to the Keep Austin Weird movement.
Key Terms
- Rhetorical ecology: “recontextualizes rhetorics in their temporal, historical, and lived fluxes”; “a revised strategy for theorizing public rhetorics (and rhetoric's publicness) as a circulating ecology of effects, enactments, and events” (9)
- Place: fixed, physically located
- Space: open, moving, changing