Publics, public spaces, and rhetoric

One of the tougher distinctions to make in the communication discipline is the line between persuasion and rhetoric. Both rhetoric and persuasion involve attempts to influence attitude change. Both involve a degree of premeditated intent. That is to say both involve intentionality. Intentionality is important because it is what distinguishes persuasion and rhetoric from the broader conception of those human experiences and endeavors commonly known as "communication."

Fair enough.

But what distinguishes rhetoric from generic persuasion? I am not thinking here about a distinctive attribute in the polemic sense. My interest here is to establish an area of conceptual cleavage so that it is possible to focus specifically on rhetoric.

In my thinking about such a line, I have now been convinced by other rhetorical scholars that there are two aspects that are necessary for a communicative transaction to be signified as "rhetorical." Let me reiterate; I am not trying to delineate a concept of rhetoric that is separate from persuasion (that would be impossible to do).

The public is the first aspect I think is indispensable to a rhetorical act. A speaker can write a speech, or even perform one, without a public, it remains speech not a rhetorical act. This is not say that all rhetoric is spoken or verbal. So how is a public defined in this conception? Is it immediate as in the case of an audience to say a speech? Or is the concept of public more dynamically conceived?

I do not think a rhetorical public can be a narrowly conceived public. The rhetorical world, heck the real world, is much to complex too allow for a static concept of a public. What I am saying here is that one cannot say that a public is simply a group of people attendant to a rhetorical act.

The immediacy of a public can be problematic; consider for example John Jay Chapman's famous Coatesville Address delivered on 18 August 1912. Edwin Black in Rhetorical Criticism: a study in method astutely observes that only two or three people attended the actual performance of the speech. The speech went on to receive much critical acclaim long after the actual event. In a sense, this speech went public or more correctly, found its public indirectly, as a opposed to directly.

This example demonstrates the fluidity of the notion of the rhetorical public. The Lincoln-Douglas debates for their part were witnessed by an immediate public. So one can reasonably assert that the public that constitutes a rhetorical public is established in relation to a particular work of rhetoric. In other words the public is not an attribute of rhetoric; it is part of what defines rhetoric. Rhetoric does not assume the pre-existence of a public; rhetoric can only exists in the public sphere. This is unlike persuasion which can and does occur privately.

Perhaps the second aspect, public spaces, will make the first one more sensible. Public spaces, to simplify, are those spaces that are considered to be in the public domain. That is to say they are places or locations accessible to the public. If a public is a defining characteristic of rhetoric, public spaces become the irreducible venues for the rhetorical event. It is important to note once again what I am thinking of here is not a narrow concept of public spaces in relation to rhetoric. The Coatesville Address which went public mainly via transcript is another good example of the pliability of public spaces across different spectrums, not just the physical/geographical sphere. In the internet age, this post you are reading could be considered rhetoric on the basis of cyberspace as a public domain even though cyberspace is a far cry from physical space.

To summarize then, the relationship between publics, public spaces, and rhetoric, one can say that rhetoric is accessible to the public (publice event) because it is constituted in public spaces.