Braiding Concepts of Rhetoric

Relationship Between Agency, Audience construction, and Exigence

In Campbell’s essay on agency, she describes an instance of the use of agency as rhetoric.  Since agency is discourse as effected by society and culture, one might tweak another’s dialect to magnify a social response—as was done with Sojourner Truth’s Dutch dialect in her spoken speech “The Truth Calls Me”, taken down in writing by Olive Gilbert in a southern black dialect.  It is because of this that Truth’s speech had a larger impact than it ever would have in her original Dutch dialect.   This intertwines with audience construction.  Audience construction is simply this: dropping the needle on a group of people via agency.  Agency alone belies audience construction—discourse as affected by your society and your culture will appeal to your society/culture.  The writer designs its reader through agency, and thus, also through exigence.  Exigence is the motivation behind discourse.  The interaction between exigence and agency are undeniable—the actual discourse (agency) must have exigence in order to exist.  Without motivation behind discourse, there is no reason for said discourse.  And so all aforementioned concepts of rhetoric perpetuate each the others, and so forth.  All are vital parts of the creation of rhetoric.