The First Shot of the Geisler and Lundbeg/Gunn Debate on Agency

Geisler, Cheryl. “How Ought We Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency?: Report from the ARS.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (2004): 9-17. Print.

Geisler claims her goal in this brief article is to recount the meeting of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies (ARS) meeting that addressed rhetorical agency. Specifically, this meeting developed into a discussion of how to combine the interpretive practices of rhetoric with its productive ones, especially in the wake of postmodern critiques of agency that had weakened or threatened the importance of rhetorical agency. As she “reports” on the meeting, though, she challenges those who claimed that rhetorical agency is illusory and ultimately argues that rhetorical agency is crucial for educating students and for the future of rhetoric as a discipline.

Scholars at the ARS meeting generally agreed on two issues. One was the definition of rhetorical agency: “the capacity of the rhetor to act” (12). The second area of agreement was the idea that postmodern critiques of the possibility against rhetorical agency necessitated renewed discussions of it. She notes that some of the postmodern critiques are applicable to public rhetorical agency, but she claims that the greater access to agency that “subaltern groups” have and the growing questions about agency because of new media are creating an atmosphere in which rhetorical agency may need to be considered in entirely new ways.

In addressing these critiques and the new directions of agency, the attendees addressed the illusions of agency, the importance of the rhetor’s skill, and the conditions of agency. The last two she covers relatively quickly. Regarding the rhetor’s skill, she addresses Jasinski’s claims of viewing the rhetor as an orchestrator who must bring together and respond to fragmented and contingent circumstances (a combination of autonomy and external influences). In her discussion of the conditions of agency, she mentions the discussions that centered on the material and historical constraints that influence rhetors today. But she focuses mostly on illusions of agency. She notes that some, like Joshua Gunn, argued that agency is an illusion and as such we should acknowledge this and “directly [confront] our irrelevance” (12). Such a move, she argues, not only makes the educational mission of rhetoric nearly impossible (if students don’t have agency, how are they to act through rhetoric?) but will also remove any potential for change and any meaningful responsibility for people to act. Thus, rhetoric cannot focus only on its interpretive mission; it must also include a productive mission as well.

While this article consists of fewer than ten pages of discussion, it is densely packed with some useful synopses of some of the most significant discussions about rhetorical agency that have been taking place over the last few years. She makes a strong case for the need to tie interpretive modes of rhetoric to productive ones, especially as they inform educational practices. Furthermore, she offers some sense of how postmodern ideas of contingency and fragmentation can and do work with notions of rhetorical agency. However, as I will address in my next blog post, some who attended the ARS meeting felt Geisler misrepresented some of the discussions took place.