rickert

It should come as no surprise

that these ideas concerning
production, in whatever form—
aesthetic, rhetorical, scientific,
political—should show up for us
abundantly once we start looking
for them.
Rhetor
ic/Situ
ation/
Heur
istic/
Edbauer

In other words,
despite their
differences, these
various takes on
rhetorical situation
tend to be rooted in
the views of
rhetorics as
elemental
conglomerations.
 edbauer

This grammatical oddity parallels

the ways we speak 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. This
kind of foregrounding within an
affective field offers the
possibility of a vocabulary that
reveals a wider context for public
rhetorics.
 edbauer

At the same time, of course, the

“weird rhetoric” receives an
increased circulation through
these kinds of affective
transmission.
 edbauer

Not only do these 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. The
anti-weird rhetorics of Austin add
to the “weird rhetoric” ecology
through a practice of mixture and
encounters of extended
proximity.
 edbauer

Our rhetorical theories can thus

acknowledge the affective
channels of rhetorical
communication and operation by
“testifying” to them. Such
testimonies would invent new
concepts and deploy them in
order to theorize how publics are
also created through affective
channels.
 The writer writing in
network culture is
not alone, being
always linked to or
haunted by others,
some familiar, some
strange.

rickert
 rickert

An ambient rhetoric (which

attends to how we-use-ianguage/
language-uses-us, as opposed to
a logic, which attends to
functionalities) would begin from
a theoretical space that
understands the world as its own
best representation, and in this
sense it would accrue not only a
kind of agency (much as
language speaks us), but a kind
of intelligence (see Ulmer).
 rickert

Not only does the local

environment “start to tell you
what you are doing,” as Eno
would have it, but we begin to
see that what a subject thinks
and does is not simply a
response to that
environment.Rather, an
environment is always a
situation, and that situation, in its
absolute singularity, calls a
subject into being—or, put
differently, carves out the
panoply of actions possible in
real time engagement.
 If writing and writers
are codependent
with things and all
sorts of others, then
metacognition and
reflective practice
(both entrenched in
humanist notions of
a literate self) have
the potential to
become bad habits,
since each
reflective exercise
persuades a writer
to separate herself
from all those things
with which she is
codependent.
boyle
 boyle

As these relations accumulate

within an ecology, each of which
are rife with nonconscious
tensions, we continually work to
resolve differences between
techniques in any given set of
tendencies, building up
capacities of response for future
engagements. We do not
withdraw a prior experience to fit
with an event but are habituated
by having had to resolve related
events and become disposed
toward composing fitting
responses.
 boyle

Meta, however, had alternate

uses. In Greek, meta also signals
“post” or “after” and has
connotations with “among.” That
is, instead of meta as only
meaning “about,” it also harbors
other relations that occur
between “among” or “after.”
Consider metamorphosis,
metastability, or metastasize.
Each of these words in their
regular use emphasize not
reflective or privileged distance
but instead a perception for
moving among.
 Nevertheless, the
point is that the
circumstances of
rhetoric for each of
Aristotle"s species
were always
situations in which
an individual person
would address a
group in speech.

Muckelbauer
 muckelbauer

We begin to see that arguments

—and even language—may not
be the fundamental grounds of
persuasion […] So while I might
likely never be fully aware of all
the multiple forces that constitute
the rhetorical dimensions of a
situation, this does not mean
they are irrelevant or that
rhetoricians can simply continue
to ignore them in favor of
focusing on the recognizable
argument.
 muckelbauer

The point, for me, is that if we

can break out of the implicit
paradigmatic commitments of
Aristotelian rhetoric, the line of
thought that follows from this
break will lead to an image of
rhetoric that does not require a
formal setting, a legalistic
orientation, an argument.
language, or even the presence
of an intending subject.
Arola & Arola

how can one repeat

cultural gestures
while maintaining
the continuity and
identity of culture
without insisting on
an essence to
which one is
beholden?
 Arola & Arola

To repeat creatively but

consistently requires that one
repeat by attending to the
specificities of the current milieu,
so as to create new ways of
thinking and experiencing in the
present circumstance, but disrupt
in a manner that resonates with
disruptions or deterritorializations
caused by pow wows of the past.
 Arola & Arola

Our style is what provides

consistency, and it is also what
permits us to improvise without
losing all sense of identity.
 Arola & Arola

There is both the neighborhood

of existing meaning and the
possibility for transformation.