Barney Frank’s most recent rhetorical refusal is a great case in point. This video is everywhere online now, partially because I think everyone who can think critically is quite annoyed with the assertions that Obama is like Hitler and expanding health care is Nazism or Socialism. And Frank, rather than engaging and defending his support of health care reform, refuses the norms of question and answer sessions. In effect, he is asking his audience (others in the room, viewers of the YouTube video) to make a judgment about another audience: those who believe the radical misrepresentation of health care reform promoted by certain right wing pundits. Rather than trying to engage these folks, as many of us desire to do, we should judge them as the type of person with whom civil dialogue and persuasion on the topic are impossible.

The annual marches ultimately accomplish two things: They entertain those of us—gay and straight—who already wholeheartedly support the cause of equal rights for the LGBT community, and they feed into the rotten stereotypes of bigots, the same people who fear gay Boy Scout leaders and consider same-sex marriage “deviant.” The LGBT community has every right to claim its place in the civil rights struggle. But in such a politically important year for the gay community, perhaps it’s time for its members to start taking some cues from the civil rights movement of old.

[. . .]

I wish I could say that no bigots are going to use pictures of a few men in thongs in San Francisco to write off millions of gay, lesbian and transgender people, but I can’t. There’s a lot at stake right now. The community is on the verge, perhaps, of a tipping point for rights and acceptance. Maybe, just once, the LGBT community should try abandoning the scant costumes and embellished sexuality and “do two.” They could march down the center of America’s great cities in all the clothes they regularly wear, exposing themselves for what they truly are: normal human beings. It wouldn’t be as fun as past parades, and it’s not fair. But for now, that’s life.

compare to Barney Frank (in a different context):

I am not seeking your approval. Your approval of the way in which I live is not terribly important to me. [. . .] This is not a request for acceptance. We don’t want it and we don’t need it…

By quoting Frank, I’m not saying he is some flaming ‘mo out celebrating Pride in a thong (and I have no idea where he stands on carnivalesque pride events). But his point, while defending the need for hate-crime legislation, is poignant here—and really, a central question of rhetoric. How much do you want to change yourself (or, more accurately, your ethos) in order to change the beliefs or actions of others? And how much do you want to change your ethos for incidental or secondary audiences? One of Jim Porter’s points in Audience and Rhetoric, to simplify it a bit, is that a rhetor in a way becomes her audience—not completely, but identifies with the discourse style of her audience (or, more accurately, discourse community). What is at stake… and what is lost… in this identification?

At last I’ve written something that doesn’t bring up adverbs and conjunctions (like “rather” and “however”) as large words!

My friend who sat next to me thought they were egotistical or narcissistic, thinking they deserved attention and weren’t giving their attention to the drag queens on stage. Perhaps there is some truth to this statement. But what I saw was a lot less simple than this. Perhaps there is some narcissism in refusing to give the performer on stage full attention. (But perhaps there is more in checking your phone for texts throughout the show?) But the flow of energy in that room wasn’t solely from the traditional deliverer of a message, but rather from her, from the music, from the crowd, and toward all sectors, between “audience” members, and toward the performer.

This queer participation is also raced: most of the dancers were people of color. Most of the docile bodies were white (my own included). I was reminded of an article I read and discussed in a reading group a few years ago about the male gaze and movies. A professor asked what assumptions about movie-going audiences were being made in the article, and we soon realized that the author was assuming a proper, orderly, middle class, white audience—a receptive audience. What about movie theatres with “disruptive” audiences who talk back to movies? What about drag shows where the audience dances instead of watches in the traditional manner? Who really is the performer and the audience?

A textbook based on a community perspective valuing audience and ethics would begin much differently [than textbooks that start with "Writing is an important means of expressing yourself"]. Maybe like this: “You have a duty and an obligation to write, not because you have ‘the truth’ and must share it with others, but because we need to discover truths and we need all the help we can get, yours included. You write because you have an obligation to do so. (Porter 123, emphasis in original)

Porter, James E. Audience and Rhetoric: An Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992.

• While in NYC, I visited Printed Matter, a great store with all sorts of zines, old books, artwork, prints, and magazines. I picked up the book Queer Zines, which is a catalogue of various zines with some articles about queer zine practices, history, and theory. I’m excited to read it, if I can ever get through my homework.

• Teaching went really well today. We had a great conversation about cultural assumptions regarding literacy technologies. I think students are starting to pick up on what I’m talking about for their second paper — though we still need to discuss narrative in more detail, among so many other things. Writing classes = trying to cover too much, as always. Even with a theme, I find it impossible to fully narrow down the scope. It’s like my own writing: too much too much too much. Narrow, focus, and define!

• Something really interesting was said in one of my graduate seminars today, but for the life of me, I can’t remember it. I remember thinking: I want to blog about that! I didn’t write that down, so I am not blogging about it. Plato was right: writing hurts memory. Plato was wrong when he claimed this is a bad thing. Writing is memory! (So it doesn’t actually “hurt” memory.)

• I feel that this blog needs a new look and feel to it. Also, in case you missed it, this blog is boring. Roger Wilson says so.

• I’ve been thinking about audience recently again. Perhaps I should focus my paper for 584 (Postcritical Perspectives in Literacy Studies) on audience instead of my previous topic (authenticity, related to Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man. Not sure. But how does audience change in electric/digital writing — that is, does our (composition studies’) conception of audience need revisited, post Ede/Lunsford? Not sure…

I wonder if some “texts” online aren’t akin to how Jean-François Lyotard views his book Libidinal Economy. In Just Gaming, a conversation between Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Lyotard notes that his book “is generally taken to be that of the rhetorician,” which, since Plato, “is precisely the one who seeks to produce effects that the other does not control” (4). But Lyotard doesn’t see himself as in control of the effects of the book. Instead, he sees his Libidinal Economy as “the delivery of a mass of statements barely controlled in themselves,” a “bottle tossed into the ocean” so that the effects are not returned to the author, himself (4-5). Like a poet, he isn’t concerned with entering into dialectic “in order to establish whether or not [others] understood him” (5). For Lyotard, his book is rhetoric, or persuasion, but not in a way that controls his audience or asks for a response: “This is a book that aims to produce effects upon the reader, and its author does not ask that these effects be sent back to him in the forms of questions” (4).

Part of modernity, for Lyotard, is writing without an addressee, like a bottle sent out in the ocean without a knowing where it is going (9). “One writes only in the reader’s absence. [...] The reader’s solicitation, or what one imagines it to be, must be suspended, and, in a way, one must have no interest in it” (8). “[A]s to what may happen to the book, what its actual reception may be, no one really knows” (9). He continues that “if the artifact produced is really strong, it will wind up producing its own readers, its own viewers, its own listeners [...] it will produce people to whom it is destined. It will elicit its own addressees” (10).

It seems that much — though certainly not all, and I would hesitate to say even most — of the discourse online isn’t directed toward an addressee. Much “speech” online is “the delivery of a mass of statements barely controlled in themselves,” bottles tossed into an digital ocean. “Intended” audience is ambiguous online. Lyotard’s translator in Just Gaming explains in a footnote, Lyotard believes that modern texts address the volk, the “people,” whereas postmodern texts “have no assigned addressee” (16 n.*).

Matt wonders if “the field of Rhet/Comp really needs more work on audience,” and I share some of his wondering. Outside of work on public sphere stuff, I can’t think of much that’s been written that directly relates to audience, except for Elbow (sometimes you gotta ignore audience!), Ong, and Ede and Lunsford.

Perhaps this is something to return to. Right now I should be working on a paper for class.

Lyotard, Jean-François, and Jean-Loup Thébaud. Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 20. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.