When I saw the clips of Gov Rick Perry’s recent speech in New Hampshire (you know, the one where he talks and looks all kinds of loopy), I was instantly reminded of the Dean Scream. Both speeches became instant hits on YouTube, both were boiled down and reduced to their most outlandish features, and both were absurd in large part because of how we, as a majority of the American public, were not hailed as an audience during the original rhetorical act.
As I watched coverage of the Perry speech last week, an NBC reporter remarked the speech seems strange and out of context because it was in direct response to the immediate audience—that of a small group of big GOP donors in New Hampshire. The audience there loved it, the reporter remarked, and Perry was catering to his audience. In response to comparisons drawn between Dean’s Scream of 2004 and Perry’s performance of last week, Republicans have been quick to point out differences, albeit inaccurate ones. In a recent CBS News report, GOP strategist Ed Gillespie notes Perry got “rave reviews” and a “standing ovation” from the audience in attendance. Gillespie also remarks Perry’s speech has been the victim of extreme editing, making it appear more outlandish than it was. Sure, I buy it, because the same thing also happened to Dean in ’04. Remember? He was talking to a rally of very fired-up supporters after his defeat in the Iowa Caucus. He was attempting to inspire and motivate. Footage of this speech shows an animated crowd on their feet, waving signs, and cheering. Like Perry, Dean was responding to his immediate audience. However, like Dean, Perry has made a tremendous error in playing to his immediate audience at the expense of his greater, extended, delayed and dispersed audience. Tsk-tsk. We don’t like to feel left out and we don’t appreciate a candidate’s failure to acknowledge our role in any discourse. Chalk it up to our increasing cultural narcissism perhaps. More pointedly, I think this example reveals some interesting things about the nature of the rhetorical act in contemporary discourse, including who participates in the act, as well as where and when.
Contemporary rhetorical texts are perhaps best characterized by their diffuse and fragmented nature and both Perry and Dean’s speeches are examples of this. These fragmented, diffuse texts mean it is difficult to talk about things like “author/rhetor” or “audience” in a singular, finite way. In 1990, McGee provided an example of fragmented texts:
“Foreign policy expert Henry Kissinger may have chosen 8,000 words to express in Foreign Affairs his opinion of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The debater, the public speaker, the journalist, the legislator, or the essayist, however, will represent that discourse in 250 words, reducing and condensing Kissinger’s apparently finished text into a fragment that seems more important than the whole from which it came. This fragment is said to be ‘the point’ Kissinger was trying to make. . . . “(p. 70 of “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture”)
Twenty-one years later, McGee’s observations are exponentially more relevant. The internet for example, and more specifically user-generated content, acts as a prism through which already fragmented texts are further fractured and dispersed in various hues across the landscape. When I think about McGee’s quote, I want to adjust it to incorporate such growth:
The blogger, the youtube clip, the digg post, the RSS feed will represent Kissinger’s discourse in less than 100 words—in fits and starts of links and splices, with the addition of a soundtrack, interwoven video, and other editing effects, reducing and condensing Kissinger’s apparently finished text into a series of altered fragments that may entirely misrepresent the whole from which it came. This fragment is adopted as the essence of Kissinger’s discourse and the reason it is remembered.
And we can see exactly this happening with both Perry and Dean’s speech. Who cares about the original and “the whole”? We rarely confront or consider “the whole” anymore. We adopt fragments and assign them meaning. We are the audience that matters, because we are also the authors and rhetors. To forget this increasingly relevant truism, as we saw in the case of Dean, can be perilous to politicians.
