The Presidency as Pastiche: Atomization, Circulation, and Rhetorical Instability

Scholars who study presidential rhetoric are increasingly interested in questions surrounding how rhetoric circulates within particular discourse communities, its constitutive functions, and what logics of circulation imply for presidential attempts to engage in public persuasion.¹ The significance of this problem is amplified by the increasing speed at which messages are instantaneously disseminated across digital networks, the ever-partial, fragmented nature of presidential texts and the meaning divined from those texts, and the quotidian pressures of cultural exchange in an increasingly postmodern world.² In the simplest terms, the scene for presidential speech has become overwhelmed by a glut of messages, the result of which manifests in a public sphere increasingly noted for its attention deficit and inability to process even the simplest political debates.³ This altered scene poses a challenge for presidents and critics because presidential messages are more fragmented than ever, audience reception more partial, and the persuasive task of presidential speech near impossible. If the president’s job is to keep the public informed as to the affairs of the state and execute constitutional functions to build support for legislation and conduct foreign policy, as well as generate unity, remembrance, forgiveness, and legacies, then one wonders how such functions are accomplished in a world of utter fragmentation.

In this essay, I argue that presidential scholars lag behind disciplinary trends and need to better conceive of the problem of fragmentation of presidential messages, especially in defining presidential texts, the circulation of those fragments in public space, and theorizing the president’s subject position as a “permeable space” both produced by discourses and a source of recirculated discourses. In undertaking this effort, presidential scholars can systematically understand how audiences receive presidential messages, the rhetorical work those messages perform on those audiences, and how the recirculation of those messages work on the president.

The Atomization of Presidential Messages

Problems related to the fragmentation and circulation of texts became apparent with the rise of postmodernity. In the 1980s major theoretical developments related to the circulation problem emerged: Michael McGee’s ideograph, Maurice Charland’s constitutive rhetoric, and Raymie McKerrow’s critical rhetoric.⁴ Each of these developments offers insight into the circulation problem as it pertains to the presidency: McGee, by identifying the building blocks of ideology, advanced the claim that certain fragments move about cultures and perform specific functions in the service of ideological goals. Charland argued that the deployment of a specific rhetorical text interpellated audiences into a narrative that constituted their identities and didactically animated their political activity. McKerrow, positioning rhetoric and criticism as a practice aimed at resisting domination, decentered the emphasis of criticism from a single text in favor of the amalgamation of texts—discursive formations. These theorists share a similar set of concerns—namely, audience, reception, and rhetorical effect—encapsulated in McGee’s observation that not only are messages received in part but that fragmentation extended to modern culture itself and that audiences construct texts on their own from the fragments with which they interact. The implication, offered by McGee and others, is that texts are increasingly ephemeral, “radically more fragmented,”⁵ and “but the temporary and proximate site” for rhetorical transaction.⁶ These observations led Dilip Gaonkar, quoting Samuel Becker, to conclude that messages are “scattered in time and space” and that fragmentation “shifts the burden of making sense . . . upon the receiver,” a vexing challenge to presidents who wish to direct public attention and meaning and rhetoricians who wish to understand such efforts.⁷

Public address scholars carried these observations forward, typically in a direction away from single speech texts. Roderick Hart, for example, suggested the circulation problem belied single speech texts because “we live in a soup of rhetoric.” He proposed a chaining effect—arguing that fragments link to other fragments, we “consume” them, and our world then becomes defined by “discursive shards,” the leftovers of public address.⁸ The notion of discursive shards, perhaps, suggests a possibility offered by Stephen Browne: that public address should ignore the “distinctive rhetorical form” in favor of “aggregates, units of discourse” that speak more accurately to how...