Engaging Good Reasons

Looking back to the kind of work we were doing in class last week – questioning the scope and variance of a “rhetorical situation” (Grant-Davie), wondering how the audience and rhetor relationship worked, text as rhetor, etc – I feel that Fisher and Porter’s articles take big steps in the direction of answering our questions.

THE AUDIENCE’S ROLE IN MAKING MEANING AND INTERPRETATION

In some of my comments on other blogs, I posed the idea of “interpretation,” or the interplay between the rhetor and the audience – the simultaneous experience of composing and interpreting. Porter’s article remained close to the idea of intertextuality – that new knowledge and meaning come from a mesh of different sources, that there is no such thing as the “lone author” and the lonely act of writing. When we think of intertextuality in terms of ITexts, the collaborative experience of writing a group homework assignment or the multiple efforts that go into creating a film or tv show, I think this idea really stands out. I would argue that because of the collaborative experience, we act as rhetors and audience-members at all times during the process, in a multiplicity of ways. Porter goes farther to say that the audience creates the discourse community, or the rules and regulations that rhetors must follow in order to be listened to in the public sphere, by saying, “Thus the intertext exerts its influence partly in the form of audience expectation. We might then say that the audience of each of these texts is as responsible for its production as the writer. That, in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse” (38). He argues that the audience creates texts because of the preemptive expectations they inflict upon the rhetor to adhere to rules and expectations of format, style, truth, etc, but I would argue that it also includes the ideas that they bring to the table and collaboratively engage in with meaning – be it through the form of comments, answering questions in class, etc. They can turn the direction of the argument not only passively through expectation, but through the dual-engagement of interpretation. Fisher seems to support these ideas when he states, “From the narrative perspective, the proper role of the expert in public moral argument is that of a counselor, which is, as Benjamin (1969) notes, the true function of a storyteller. His or her contribution to public dialogue is to impart knowledge, like a teacher, or wisdom, like a sage. It is not to pronounce a story that ends all storytelling” (390). While a counselor may impart knowledge or begin the course of discussion, the audience has the ability to interpret those “facts” as they will, change the course of the argument, and make conclusion and decisions to enable their activities as they choose.

THE NARRATIVE PARADIGM

Fisher also makes important points about the discourse community through the idea of his “narrative paradigm.” Porter makes statements about the discourse community as well, but claims that the audience is the main source of direction and understanding for the rest of the community and for those wishing to enter into the community.

I think it is important to consider his point, “narration is as it is considered now: a type of human interaction – an activity, an art, a genre, or mode of expression” (Fisher 381), with the key term of “human interaction” in order to tie these ideas back to Porter, the audience’s role, and to the larger discourse community. Storytelling has come to be and always has been the greatest and most intimate form of human interaction. If traditional rhetoric has been so focused on making logical arguments, then stories are all the more important, as Fisher explains: “In short, good reasons are the stuff of stories, the means by which humans realize their nature as reasoning-valuing animals.” (Fisher 383)