Pérdida de gananciales en caso de separación de hecho

Aristotle’s conceptions of situation (deliberative, judicial and epideictic) suggest that audiences are primed for particular messages given particular situations. As a result, rhetors improve their chances of success if they craft messages that account for how audiences are primed regarding one of three specific situations. Recognizing that modern society affords a plethora of situations for citizen oration, F. Lloyd Bitzer expands our understanding of the rhetorical situation by theorizing exigence: that which calls rhetoric into being and justifies action on the part of an audience (Bitzer, 1968). He posits that the rhetors who understand the exigence driving a rhetorical situation increase persuasive efficacy. Identification of the

“complex of persons, events, objects, and relations” allows the critic to identify the rhetorical situation and provides the basis for criticism. Exigency also determines the audience. Bitzer notes that, “In any rhetorical situation there will be at least one controlling exigence which functions as the organizing principle; it specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected” (p. 7). Here, the exigence encompasses not just the context, but also the human capacity to understand the context, respond to it, and for the rhetor to identify those people who can enact the desired change. Bitzer further argues that the rhetorical audience is defined not by the individuals consuming rhetoric but by those capable of creating the change necessary to address the situation.

Scholars have long recognized that presidents have multiple audiences (Zarefsky, 2004).

When delivering an inaugural address, for example, the president attempts to bridge differences of proponents and opponents alike through calls of national unity (Campbell & Jamieson, 2008).

Cleavages within a larger audience that supports the president can also be addressed with specific lines of text, which can address factions within a larger audience that supports the president or suture together a group of bipartisan lawmakers. Public address scholars have identified attempts of the president to persuade particular audiences with specific proposals and we have critiqued extensively and maybe even exhaustively the choices that a president makes.

Despite specific attention to smaller, even minute audiences, that form a composite audience of

‘the American People’ for example, conceptualizing the challenges of creating an address for broader audiences is lacking. More significantly, when thinking about composite audience, we tend to conceptions of the domestic audience. While the president represents the people of the United States, as an actor in the international system, the president exerts agency with

considerable consequences for many that did not vote, did not seek leadership and that did not

grant the power for action. Yet the power of the institution allows for action to be taken nonetheless.

Ideology as a concept understood in relation to audience requires working through the theoretical advances in audience theory made by Richard Vatz and Barbara Biesecker. The critique of Bitzer is that the rhetorical situation is overly-deterministic in that it structures the exigence, the response and the audience; one is left to ask what type of valuable insights can be gained from criticism. Richard Vatz argues that there is little to be gained: “If one accepts Bitzer's position … then we ascribe little responsibility to the rhetor with respect to what he has chosen to give salience” (Vatz, 1973). Rather than premising rhetorical responses on rhetorical situations, Vatz argues that rhetors create situations through the rhetorical choices they make.

Vatz thus attempts to rescue the critic by suggesting that rhetorical situation and audience are constituted by the rhetor. Constitution in this sense refers to the selection process of the rhetor in choosing to create salience for particular situations. Choice, then, becomes the critical

component by which rhetorical critics can render judgment on both text and rhetor.

Yet rhetorical constitution remains problematic because –in the case of both Bitzer and Vatz – each theory of the rhetorical situation has an essentialized conception of the audience (Biesecker, 1989). Working through the deconstructionist theory of Derrida, Biesecker notes that the difference inherent to the subjectivity of individuals that compose an audience is overlooked.

Maurice Charland takes issue with Biesecker’s recommendations: “Consequently, attempts to elucidate ideological or identity-forming discourses as persuasive are trapped in a contradiction;

persuasive discourse requires a subject-as-audience who is already constituted with an identity and within an ideology” (Charland, 1987). Following the work of Black (persona), McGee (construction of a people) and Althusser (interpellation), Charland argues that rhetorical criticism

is ill-equipped to understand persuasion because rhetoricians do not have a theory as to how audience is constituted prior to entering the rhetorical situation. Charland argues that Black is fundamentally correct in recognizing that there are personas that people identify with, and it is this process of identification that leads to persuasion. However, he argues that what is missing from Black’s theory of persona is an understanding of how identification is possible in the first place. For an answer to this problem, he turns to Althusser’ s concept of interpellation and suggests that rhetorical processes of socialization constitute pre-rhetorical subjects that then identify with a persona once engaged in a rhetorical situation. Charland’s significant contribution to understanding audience, then, is to suggest that we can understand the formation of audience by examining the circulation of ideological narratives that constitute a person’s subjectivity.

The case for studying audience may seem dire at this point: a rhetor can’t know who the audience is because circulation is a known unknown; a rhetor can’t predict audience because few if any exigencies will be universal, and if such exigencies arise they are likely to be interpreted universally; a rhetor can’t prepare for all of the ways in which the subjectivity of the individual has been pre-positioned ideologically for identification with particular messages. However, by thinking through the implications of the cosmopolitan condition – a condition experienced by all according to Beck but for the purposes of this study certainly experienced by presidents – it is possible to read conceptions of audience out of the text while also providing insights into the mind of the rhetor and how that rhetor seeks to enter ideological discourses and influence circulating narratives. And when that rhetor is the president – an individual invested with incredible power on both a local and global level – attention is warranted.

2.3 Theorizing the Cosmopolitan Condition as Means to Engage Individuals and