ReCooperating Audience Agency

During our discussion of the rhetorical situation as theorized in Bitzer, Vatz, and Biesecker, agency seemed to be a recurring--and slippery--concept. Following the discussion, we put forward the questions, What is an agent in rhetorical situation? How do we theorize agency? Though we did not explicitly address these questions during our discussion of Aristotle, Quintilian and Barthes, I think these questions are important to consider in relation to rhetor and audience. For the purposes of this post, I’ll use the following definition of agency from the OED: “Action or intervention producing a particular effect; means, instrumentality, mediation.”

Megan K. asks two questions in her post that work well as a starting point for thinking about agency. Of Aristotle’s text, she writes, “In that view, a rhetor is not persuading his audience in order to help them see Truth; rather, the rhetor persuades the audience to believe what he wants them to believe, be it truth or not.  So, for Aristotle, are manipulation and persuasion the same?”  Similarly, in discussing Quintilian’s text, she asks, “If a rhetor speaks to help his audience to see truth (as Ashley implies in the phrase, "see the side of truth"), is part of his job to show them how to be good men? Does accepting the truth (through the rhetor's speech) lead the audience to become good men?” Both of these questions seem to get at a question of agency, implicitly assuming agency for the rhetor who is “acting on” the audience with his speech to produce a particular effect in them. My question is, can we (and how might we) also see Aristotle and Quintilian imagining agency on the part of the audience?

We seem to agree that Aristotle focuses on rhetoric as a means of persuasion, and as Megan points out, this persuasion is tied to what the rhetor wants the audience to believe. However, I wonder if agency on the part of the audience could be recovered if we consider what Aristotle means by saying that “we must use, as our modes of persuasion and argument, notions possessed by everybody” (180; emphasis mine). Might we read this as also implying that the audience must actively participate in being persuaded? If the rhetor must rely on the audience’s bringing these “notions” to the rhetorical situation, then can we still say that the rhetor is merely producing an effect in a passive audience? Does this activity on the part of the audience help us to answer Megan’s question about manipulation and persuasion in the negative?

My argument that the audience has agency and participates in their own persuasion comes from Marilyn Cooper’s recent article (viewable in Prezi form) on agency as emergent and enacted. Cooper synthesizes a variety of sources to put forth the argument that “agency [is] the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their structure in response to the perceived consequences of their actions” (420). Cooper’s conception of agency is not tied only to the rhetor, then, but to the audience as well. Rhetors “act into the world,” but this alone does not produce an effect in the audience. Rather, audience members can “change their structure” in response to the rhetor’s actions. Cooper’s definition helps us to see that audience members “produce an effect” in themselves—that the act of persuasion requires audience participation, even if the audience isn’t aware of this activity.

I’m not certain that this understanding of agency helps to answer either of Megan’s questions, but I think that it does help us to see that if an audience is persuaded, they are not merely manipulated. Similarly, if Quintilian’s rhetor is one who helps the audience “see truth” by “speaking well,” the audience’s seeing truth is dependent on their making meaning from the rhetor’s speech and responding to that meaning through their own actions. In other words, the audience can “become good men,” but not passively as an effect of hearing the rhetor speak. 

Just as Barthes’s reader is the “the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost,” I think the rhetorical audience is the “destination”  where the speech’s “unity lies” (148). Aristotle and Quintilian both describe the process of invention as being one that relies on commonplaces and imitation (see: Progymnasmata), which seems strikingly similar to Barthes’s description of “text” as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146).  This “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” fits the classical process of invention, as far as I can tell (Barthes 146).  Thus, Vatz’s claim that the rhetor is involved in “sifting and choosing” as a process of meaning-making  seems applicable, but only if we also apply that claim to the audience as participatory in process of making meaning for themselves (Vatz 156). 

Cooper, Marilyn. "Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted." College Composition and     Communication 32.4 (2011): 420-49.