On the Nature of Audience

Cleaning Out My Journal Collection:  Snippets from the Best Articles in the Journals I am Donating to the Department Library

Greg Dickinson (2005) Selling democracy: Consumer culture and citizenship in the wake of September 11, Southern Communication Journal, 70:4, 271-284, DOI: 10.1080/10417940509373334

The traditional view of the relation between rhetoric and audience suggests that audiences and rhetors exist prior to the rhetorical act (Charland, 1987). These audiences are more or less conscious of their position as audiences and, as such, make rational, conscious decisions about the arguments the rhetor makes. The rhetor, like the audience, is also conscious of her/his position as rhetor and strategically constructs arguments designed to appeal to the audience. Aristotle's (1991) definition of rhetoric as the "ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion" (p. 36) encodes this rationalistic form of rhetoric. Rhetorical and critical theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries finds this conceptualization of the rhetoric/audience relationship unsatisfactory. Perhaps most prominent in shifting this rhetoric/audience relationship is Burke's (1969) move to include identification as a crucial term in rhetorical theory. In the Rhetoric of Motives, Burke (1969) argues that persuasion underestimates the ways rhetoric functions, often at an unconscious level, to create identification or connections between individuals. Rhetoric as identification functions far more globally than does rhetoric as persuasion and often does the prior work of creating the groups to which persuasive messages can then be directed. Charland (1987) in his germinal essay "Constitutive Rhetoric" takes up Burke's notion of identification and the emphasis on rhetoric's ability to create audiences. "Theories of rhetoric as persuasion," Charland writes, "cannot account for the audiences that rhetoric addresses" (p. 134). Charland argues that becoming a subject (i.e., an audience member) is to take up a position in the discourse. This "taking up" is not, however, entirely or even mostly voluntary. When individuals enter a rhetorical situation and acknowledge or recognize the rhetorical address, they become the audience member the text calls forth. However, as Charland points out, this hailing is not a onetime action, but is constantly repeated. "This rhetoric of identification is ongoing, not restricted to one hailing, but usually part of a rhetoric of socialization. Thus, one must already be part of the audience of a rhetorical situation in which persuasion could occur" (p. 138). Each rhetorical act draws on preexisting discursive positions and, in addressing the audience, recreates those positions. Rhetoric as constitutive both creates and recreates the audience itself.