SRR 1: Jenny Rice
SRR 1: Jenny Rice
Drawing on the work of Michael Warner, Craig Smith and Scott Lybarger, and Louise Phelps, Jenny Rice critiques Bitzer’s “rhetorical situation,” noting in particular that a “situation” is static, enclosed within stable boundaries. In place of this understanding of rhetoric, Rice proposes “a revised strategy for theorizing public rhetorics (and rhetoric’s publicness) as a circulating ecology of effects, enactments, and events by shifting the lines of focus from rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies” (9). The concept of rhetorical ecologies enables us to recognize and think through networks, which are, in Steven Shaviro’s words, “the predominant form of human interaction” (9). Unlike discrete situations, networks operate through movement (circulation?) of people, events, and rhetorics; thus, even the physical “sites” that we would consider static and enclosed “are made up of affective encounters, experiences, and moods that cohere around material spaces” (11). Rice further complicates “rhetorical situation” by building on Syverson’s conception of writing as “emergent ecological processes” to reframe rhetorical situation as a verb (13). To illustrate these claims, Rice offers an analysis of local businesses in Austin’s campaign to “keep Austin weird,” which was followed by counter-rhetorics to “keep Austin normal.” She traces the complex of events, people, places, and rhetorics that led to this campaign and considers how the counter-rhetorics likewise grew from “an amalgamation of events” (20). Rice closes by considering “rhetorical ecologies” potential effect on pedagogies and offering an example of “generative research” –research that is presented on blogs/websites as it’s being conducted to quicken the circulation of knowledge that usually takes place after the research is completed.
Rice’s argument resonates with me because I was similarly troubled by Bitzer’s “rhetorical situation” when I first read it a year ago. Like Rice, I was drawn to Biesecker’s critique of Bitzer because her discussion of audience as not composed of persons-with-stable-identities aligned with the understanding of audience I took away from Marilyn Cooper’s “rhetorical agency as emergent and enacted.” While I agree that the rhetorical situation is a productive framework for making sense out of rhetoric—particularly, in my experience, in the FYC classroom—I also agree that “situation” implies a certain stability that I don’t experience as a person in the world on a daily basis. In particular, I like Rice’s claim that rhetorical ecologies enable us to “recognize the way rhetorics are held together trans-situationally, as well as the effects of trans-situationality on rhetorical situation” (20). Her focus on “trans” and “between” situations encourages us to remember that social relations/the social field is always in flux, and that reducing these interactions to the perception of discrete elements of a single situation reduces the meaning that we are able to make.
While I am persuaded by Rice’s justification of extending the rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies, I am also perplexed as to how one does this in research. Fortunately, I think that Lillis provides a very clear example of how researchers, like Roz Ivanic, have studied writers and their literacy practices. Her discussion of the tools that researchers take up—like observation, journals/logs, etc—helps to show what taking an ecological approach to researching writing actually looks like.