Publics and counterpublics

T the readers of this journal, it is quite clear that rhetorical studies within the disciplinary matrix of speech communication in the United States is dominated by rhetorical criticism, and that criticism in its various practical forms takes "public address" as its privileged object of study. Theory, history, and pedagogy, although recognized as integral parts of rhetorical studies, do not command the same attention as rhetorical criticism and its substantive twin, public address. Moreover, the practice of rhetorical criticism regards oratory, especially political oratory, as the paradigmatic genre of public address. This is largely because rhetorical criticism since its inception in the early decades of the twentieth century has drawn its conceptual orientation from the classical Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions, especially from Aristotle's tripartite schema. To be sure, the privileging of public address and political oratory (and the frequent collapsing of that distinction) has been under revision and challenge for the last three decades, if not longer. This revisionary movement is most evident in the determined effort to extend the object domain of rhetorical criticism beyond oratory. Starting with palpable oratorical analogues, such as pamphlets, public letters, manifestoes, the category of public address has been extended to include various genres of discourses: fictional, disciplinary (including those of the natural sciences), journalistic, audio-visual, architectural forms, multi-media events, spectacles, and so on. The desirability of that extension is signaled by the preference given to the phrase "public discourse" over "public address" in designating the object domain of rhetorical criticism. Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that such an expansion and the concomitant shift in terminology has not altered the paradigmatic status of oratory because the same conceptual resources and strategies originally fashioned to analyze oratory are used without significant modifications in analyzing genres of public discourse that are not analogous with oratory. Such an analytic procedure has the effect of reconfiguring a given discursive object/event as an oratorical analogue when it is not. This disjuncture between the expanding object domain and the traditionally grounded analytic/critical procedures has not gone unnoticed. The practice of rhetorical criticism in the last three decades also is marked by a persistent attempt at theoretically informed methodological explorations. Those explorations, initially goaded by the exemplary critical theory and practice of Kenneth Burke, have cleared a space for a dialogue between the critical vocabulary of classical rhetoric and the newly emergent languages of criticism in the humanities, such as "new criticism," hermeneutics, ideologie-critique, critical theory, structuralism, reader-response theory, reception theory, deconstruction, new historicism, and the like.