DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT

Diversity Management



Abstract

The discussion of rhetorical agency revolves around the question of where agency lies; who has agency and how is it asserted? Raising this question implies critique of the tendency of classical rhetoric to align agency with the rhetor and to see him(!) as exerting his free will through the rhetorical utterances. That is, a showdown with the cult of intentionality. While some have sought to reassert the role of intention by arguing that rhetors are free to choose between “…various options for the enactment of agency” (Foss et al., 2007, p. 206), others have discarded the idea of intentionality altogether (Rand, 2008) and argued for the primacy of the agency that texts and contexts assert over rhetors (Gunn & Cloud, 2010; Lundberg & Gunn, 2005). In suggesting a study of the role of agency in text-audience relations we align ourselves with the latter position and foreground the agency of texts as well as the effects that texts may have on the agency of audiences. The focus on text-audience relations invokes a move from what people do with words to what words do to people, and we believe that the concept of performativity as developed by Judith Butler may be conducive of this move. Performativity addresses the conditions of possibility of agency (Lovell, 2003), and thereby accomplishes the theoretical and analytical shift from individual human agents to the agency offered by discourse: What subject positions do texts offer their audiences? And what room for action do such offers provide?

Diversity Management

Introduction

Performativity, in Butler's conceptualization, should be “…understood not as a singular or deliberate 'act', but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (Butler, 1993, p. 2). The concept refers to the agential potential of performance rather than to specific performances (Allen, 1998), and this implies a move beyond the seeming demand of the interpellation towards the more open position of an invitation (cf. Jasinski & Mercieca, 2010). Performativity, then, is a potential to be realized; it is an offer of a subject position that the audience is invited to take up and act out, not a description of the actual ways in which people play along with or act up against the invitation.

When viewed through the conceptual lens of performativity, specific utterances may be seen as indications of the conditions of possibility of their audiences. Moreover, specific utterances may reproduce boundaries of intelligibility, the lines between subject positions that are deemed to belong to or be differentiated from the social groups to which the utterances speak (Butler, 1993). This means that performances that fall outside of a given norm do not necessarily challenge or reform the norm. Instead, such performances form the “constitutive outside” (Butler, 1993, p. 3), the realm of subjectivity that cannot be recognized as belonging to the group which adheres to the norm, but instead reinforces the norm—and the group identity—by demonstrating what “we” are not.

Discussion and Analysis

The interpellation of a subject position—or the invitation to ...