On Rhetorical Circulation

As I understand it, circulation impinges on every aspect of rhetorical theory and criticism. From Michael Warner’s insight that circulation begets communities¹ through Michael McGee’s important work on fragmentation² and Lester Olson’s observation that recirculation always involves the repurposing of texts,³ to Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPalma’s argument that by performing and circulating performances of institutions and social roles those institutions and roles are created,⁴ it is clear that the logics of circulation are fundamental to the study of public address.⁵ Public address scholars, though, do not always place their work within the context of those logics. The authors in this forum take that endeavor as their starting point, seeking to understand how questions of circulation impel and impede our work as rhetorical critics and theorists. They examine questions of purpose and of repurposing; they explore the ways texts fragment and combine; they attend to issues of authorship and audience. Most interesting, to me, is that each essay entails an argument about the ethics of producing and criticizing texts. The essays included here range across time, from Jacksonian America to the contemporary presidency. They include discussions of sound bites, presidential speeches, indigenous authorship, the implications of a decolonial perspective for rhetorical theory, cartoons, documentary film, twitter, and civil rights–era photojournalism. They combine to provide a rich discussion of the ways circulation can serve as an organizing principle for rhetorical theory and criticism.

Megan Foley begins the forum with the interesting claim that the condensation of public address in fragmentary sound bites has not dissolved public address but has instead increased its power, as the reduction of words has intensified the affective attachment to public speech. She argues that sound bites, by mobilizing both substitution and condensation, also create a sense of both loss and longing for political oratory. That loss and longing, in turn, heightens our commitment to public address.

Stephen Heidt finds in the presidency one locus of such attachment. For him, the presidency is best understood as a permeable space through which the logics of circulation that both constitute the institution and allow presidents to constitute the nation can be observed. Textual fragments offer, for Heidt, insight into the discursive logics that underlie the formation of political communities. He argues that focusing on the logics of circulation also allows us to understand the presidency as a scene of rhetorical action that invites critics to attend to, without being captured by, the instrumental aspects of presidential speech; to use the vantage point of the presidency to observe and analyze discursive communities created by presidential rhetoric; to focus specific attention on the ethotic aspects of the institution; and finally, by treating the presidency as a site of rhetorical collation, to analyze the ways in which presidents serve logics of democratic representation.

Questions of representation are also at play in Jason Edward Black’s essay. By examining the circulation of a speech attributed to Chief Seattle, Black focuses on the ways indigenous voices can be appropriated and made to serve colonialist ends. For Black, the processes of circulation and recirculation are important because of the ways that these repurposing of texts can be used to manipulate and co-opt the authenticity of those texts, thus providing justifications for actions that are unrelated, if not actively opposed, to the intentions of the original rhetors, and create a kind of rhetorical decay concerning both those intentions and those rhetors.

In a similar vein, Darrel Wanzer approaches circulation “Otherwise,” adding a global perspective to questions of circulation and recirculation as they pertain to coloniality. Directly addressing himself to McGee’s work, Wanzer argues that the logics of fragmentation McGee identifies are not an artifact of the contemporary, technologically driven era, but are instead a product of coloniality. Wanzer thus seeks to delink logics of fragmentation from coloniality and place them in a more inclusive context.

Brandon Inabinet shows us that these questions run throughout our national history. Employing a tropological analysis of the political cartoons of Jacksonian American, Inabinet demonstrates the ways in which flow, circulation, invention, and judgment are interrelated...