Rhetorical circulation
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Rhetorical circulation is a concept referring to the ways that texts and discourses move through time and space. The concept seems to have been applied to texts sometime in the mid-1800s,[1] and it is considered, by most scholars, to be either subordinate to or synonymous with the canon of rhetorical delivery, or pronuntiatio.[2] It is something like newspaper circulation and magazine circulation in that it can involve print media, but it is not limited to these. In fact, any kind of media can circulate. Books can be loaned; Internet memes can be shared; speeches can be overheard; YouTube videos can be embedded in web pages. Some scholars have argued that speed, reach, and the materiality of texts and circuits are intrinsic to the ethics of circulation.[3][4]
Social theorist Michael Warner has suggested that rhetorical circulation creates audiences he calls 'publics'. According to Warner, a public is, in one sense, a "concrete audience". Any text that is created to address a public is intended for circulation, but not all texts are meant to circulate. Some, like love notes or bills, are meant to be private. At the same time, circulating texts are constitutive of a public, in which channels for circulation already exist. This view of communication complicates the traditional sender/receiver model, and makes way for new ecological metaphors for rhetoric.[5] In Composition Studies, scholars have argued that circulation is a helpful to models of composing that engage publics because it allows students to think more deeply about discourses, mediation, and ecologies of communication.[6][7]
As a new metaphor
Rhetorical circulation has recently been theorized as an alternative to the traditional Bitzerian notion of rhetorical situation. Jenny Edbauer suggests that rhetoric be seen as ecological rather than situational, where circulating texts constantly transform and condition composers, audiences, and each other. Like a biological ecology, a rhetorical ecology is not fixed or discrete, but fluid; it is constantly changing. It is therefore difficult to isolate audience, composer, text, and even exigence, because all are in constant flux, all are interacting with each other.[8]