Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality

In an oft-cited 1990 essay, Michael Calvin McGee argues forcefully for the significance of fragmentation as a defining feature of the postmodern condition, suggesting that it requires a reframing of rhetorical criticism to put the emphasis on con/text construction and critical rhetorical praxis¹ Writing during the same period, Fredric Jameson also appears preoccupied with the ways in which postmodernity fragments subjects and culture, delimits texts, and demands new reading and rhetorical practices.² For McGee, “‘texts’ have disappeared altogether, leaving us with nothing but discursive fragments of context.”³ In addition, he argues that “text construction is now something done more by the consumers than by the producers of discourse.”⁴ But as important as McGee’s argument has been to the development of critical rhetoric and bringing rhetorical theory into congruence with postmodernism and poststructuralism, his assertion of a major historical break ushering in a new era of fragmentation is problematic. It risks reinforcing a Eurocentric perspective on history and belies a commitment to modern/coloniality, which elides global heterogeneity.⁵

McGee’s perspective centers the modern/colonial assertion of homogeneity (even as he simultaneously asserts its postmodern undoing) in a manner that is blind to the colonial difference. In other words, McGee unreflexively reproduces a dominating narrative of Western/American centrality from within the borders of the modern/colonial world system.⁶ What happens to McGee’s thesis, however, if we approach fragmentation Otherwise? What happens when we approach rhetoric from, in Walter Mignolo’s words, “the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system?”⁷ What does it mean for McGee or critical rhetorical studies more broadly if “texts” have not disappeared, but rather never existed cohesively in the first place?

In this essay, I seek to delink McGee’s fragmentation thesis from modern/coloniality by rethinking the problematic of text/context circulation from a global perspective attentive to coloniality. I argue that critical rhetorical theory must better address epistemic coloniality (not merely colonialism as an economic-political system) to (1) deal more productively with situated public discourses as they circulate in the world and (2) enact more robustly its antisystemic functions/aims. My desire is not to debunk McGee, but to radicalize him—to enable his well-intentioned impulse to hear and be heard by different audiences. Following Chela Sandoval, my aim is to contribute to a “decolonizing theory and method” in approaching the problems and possibilities of fragmentation Otherwise.⁸ Framed in this way, the question becomes how better to situate us as rhetoricians to engage in our critical rhetorical praxis in the face of fragmentation. I contend that the answer has to go beyond McGee to draw from those for whom survival itself has depended on productively and creatively negotiating fragmentation. In what follows, I briefly review McGee’s argument and examine its similarities to and differences from Jameson’s argument about fragmentation. I also expand on some of the problems with McGee’s and rhetorical studies’ position vis-à-vis fragmentation, particularly with regard to questions of modern/coloniality. Finally, I turn to a corrective that may start critical rhetorical studies on a path toward delinking from modern/coloniality. In essence, I call for rhetorical studies to practice some degree of what Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience”⁹ so that we might all become decolonial rhetoricians.

Fragmentation in a (Post)modern World

McGee’s argument about fragmentation, which is an acknowledged central assumption of critical rhetoric and an implicit assumption of post-critical rhetorical praxis, rests on the idea that “the fragmentation of our American culture has resulted in a role reversal, making interpretation the primary task of speakers and writers and text construction the primary task of audiences, readers, and critics.”¹⁰ Frustrated by (especially literary, but also rhetorical) criticism’s preoccupation with “the text” and concomitant decentering of “speech,” McGee implores us to “stop whining about the so-called ‘post-modern condition’ and develop realistic strategies to cope with it as a fact of life,” especially insofar as this postmodern condition has brought about the fragmentation of culture, the subject...