Unframing Models of Public Distribution¹: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies

In order to rethink rhetorical publicness as a context of interaction, this chapter proposes an augmentation to the popular conceptual frameworks of rhetorical situation. Rather than primarily speaking of rhetoric through the terministic lens of conglomerated elements, it looks towards a framework of affective ecologies that recontextualizes rhetorics in their temporal, historical, and lived fluxes. The chapter proposes a revised strategy for theorizing public rhetorics as a circulating ecology of effects, enactments, and events by shifting the lines of focus from rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Like Barbara Biesecker, Louise Weatherbee Phelps, and Michael Warner, it adds the dimensions of history and movement into the visions/versions of rhetoric’s public situations, reclaiming rhetoric from artificially elementary frameworks. The chapter argues that this ecological model allows to more fully theorize rhetoric as a public(s) creation. One implication of conceiving rhetorics in ecological or event-full terms relates to rhetoric and composition pedagogies.