Rhetoric, community, and cyberspace

Abstract

Traditional notions of the rhetorical community as the locus of shared beliefs and values have been challenged increasingly and from several directions-from radical and postliberal democratic political theory (Miller; Mouffe), from cultural studies and cultural criticism (Brantlinger 1-3, 54-59; Harris), and, most recently, from the perspective of the ill-defined and elusive place called cyberspace (Selfe and Selfe, Politics; Selfe and Selfe, Writing; Stone 110-11).1 At the heart of these challenges is the problem of the relationship of the community to those outside it or on its margins, an uneasy relationship that is variously characterized as a tension between communitarianism and liberalism (Mouffe 71-73), between ourselves and Others (Brantlinger 2-3), between a culture and its marginalized individuals (Selfe and Selfe, Politics 482-84), and as a complex relationship between the One and the Many (Miller 79-80). Contemporary notions of the rhetorical