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, and it is considered, by most scholars, to be either subordinate to or synonymous with the canon of rhetorical delivery, or

pronuntiatio Pronuntiatio was the discipline of delivering speeches in Western classical rhetoric. It is one of the five canons of classical rhetoric (the others being inventio, dispositio, elocutio, and memoria) that concern the crafting and delivery of ...

. 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 YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

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 Ethics is the philosophy, philosophical study of Morality, moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates Normativity, normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches inclu ...

of circulation.

Creation of publics

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. In

Composition Studies Composition studies (also referred to as composition and rhetoric, rhetoric and composition, writing studies, or simply composition) is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college leve ...

, 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.

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.

Marx's ''Grundrisse''

Economics

Theorists have connected rhetorical circulation to the Marxist idea of circulation, as articulated in the ''

Grundrisse The ''Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie'' (, ), often simply the ''Grundrisse'' (, ), is an unfinished manuscript by the German philosopher Karl Marx. The series of seven notebooks was rough-drafted by Marx, chiefly for purposes ...

''. Marx critiques the theories of

classical economics Classical economics, also known as the classical school of economics, or classical political economy, is a school of thought in political economy that flourished, primarily in Britain, in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th century. It includ ...

, where economists like

David Ricardo David Ricardo (18 April 1772 – 11 September 1823) was a British political economist, politician, and member of Parliament. He is recognized as one of the most influential classical economists, alongside figures such as Thomas Malthus, Ada ...

and

Jean-Baptiste Say Jean-Baptiste () is a male French name, originating with Saint John the Baptist, and sometimes shortened to Baptiste. The name may refer to any of the following: Persons * Charles XIV John of Sweden, born Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, was K ...

proposed a model of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. In reality, Marx claims, commodities circulate, but a commodity is more than simply an object. Instead, a commodity is something like an embodied social process, and it is always conditioned by two factors: its

use value Use value () or value in use is a concept in classical political economy and Marxist economics. It refers to the tangible features of a commodity (a tradeable object) which can satisfy some human requirement, want or need, or which serves a usef ...

and its exchange value. The use value of something refers to its potential to satisfy human needs, independent of how it is produced. The exchange value, on the other hand, refers to how something stacks up against other commodities in terms of value: what it will exchange for. These two factors are always out of balance.

Distribution

When we apply economic theories such as this one to rhetoric, some changes are inevitable. Richard Lanham has postulated an economics of ''attention'' rather than monetary currency. When we consume and forward texts, we "pay" attention to them. But with the unbalanced nature of use and exchange values in texts, circulation can be difficult to predict. We cannot know, for instance, the exchange value of a text, when understood as its relative value as compared to others in the marketplace of attention. Because of this, some theorists consider circulation to be separate from distribution, because it involves an element of unpredictability. For instance, a publisher of newspapers can distribute them to an intended audience, like residents of metropolitan Chicago. However, a photo might be snapped of a typo on the front page, and posted to

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

: this is circulation. There is disagreement, however, about the degree to which a researcher can productively distinguish between the two.

Transformation

Scholars have also shown that rhetorical circulation, understood through a Marxist lens, involves transformation. First, ideas transform into texts, or products. After this transformation, texts can also transform into other texts. For example, a scientist might have an idea for an experiment, and that idea might transform into a research proposal. Later, the research proposal might transform into a journal article, and then a news release. Recently, scholars have demonstrated how the circulation of internet memes participates in the transformation of science and environmental communications for digital publics.

References

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