Theorizing Audience

Audience is tricky. So much depends on a plethora of factors, that makes it virtually impossible to convincingly articulate what, exactly, audience is. We can contextualize it, and make valiant theoretical attempts, but we might never get to a real understanding of what it "really" is. And I'm okay with that. At least until I have to theorize it on my own.

Mary Louise has asked us to contextualize our "communicative audience" -- i.e. the audience for whom we are writing. I've never been asked to do this before, and while I welcome the challenge, I'm a bit at a loss. So here goes.

The academic audience is a fickle group. Generally, academic audiences are highly educated (obvious) and are thus familiar with highly complex ideas, texts, and writing. In addition, this echelon of society usually enjoys reading these complex texts. Perhaps it's a value of sorts. Academic audiences tend to be "good" readers; that is, they are patient, usually forgiving, and devote ample time to work with texts/ideas. For writers they might represent a version of the "ideal" audience: people who will stay with you no matter what.

Criticism of the academic audience tends to focus on the fact that academic audiences reproduce --and, in fact, admire -- obscure, inaccessible, and well, just, bad writing. I've seen a great deal of it in my day, and even done quite a bit of it as well. Part of the reason for the criticism is that many of the concepts are too difficult to explain concisely. Many academic writers don't want precision; Derrida and Foucault, for instance, try to write outside the conventional (academic) apparatus. That can't be done neatly. Others write complexly but cleanly. (I'm thinking here of Anne Wysocki, Jane Gallop, and Susan Edmunds, whose writing is stunningly precise). I'm aiming for clean, clear, elegant writing, because I think we've too long ignored the potential for beauty in academic prose.

However, this is not to say that all academic audiences are the same, or that they will always cut you slack. There have been several academic audiences in my experience that have -- and I hate to say this -- not even paid attention to my arguments or ideas because they disagreed with my approach. While this is to be expected (you can't please everyone all the time), my reaction was, come on! You guys read worse stuff than this! And you don't hate it! But approach, then, does matter, at least to some audiences.

But these audiences are likely rare. The particular academic audience I perceive now is a forgiving audience with just the right amount of skepticism. They play Elbow's "doubting game," for sure, but they are nonetheless open to experimentation. More specifically, I perceive an audience that is looking for new ways to work through ideas; they value unconventional, or resistant, ways to write, think, speak, and act. In some cases, we might think of this audience as rhetoricians, but even that's too broad. I'm talking here about audiences that consider argumentation, writing, rhetoric as actions with social consequences.

So then where does this leave me? How would my essay respond to these concerns? Since there is a traditional standard of "academic writing," a set of conventions that are expected of viable writing, it would be remiss to ignore these conventions entirely. At this (early) point, I am imagining something blending anecdote and theory; something that begs the question: does the personal inform the theory, or the theory inform the anecdote? Jane Gallop poses this question in her brilliant Anecdotal Theory. I don't want to steal her fire, and anyway I wouldn't be able to, at least not as eloquently and elegantly as she does. But I want to start with that question. And, I want to figure out how it can be deployed to think through issues of the everyday/ordinary, the writing classroom, and rhetorical invention.

High stakes, these.