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Being-in-the World: Edward Schiappa's Challenge to “Representational Correctness”

In the epilogue to Contemporary Rhetorical Theory (1999), John Lucaites and Celeste Condit remind us that the rhetorical perspective offers a ‘‘third alternative’’ to the problematic assumptions that modernism and postmodernism pose to ‘‘being-inthe-world.’’ Neither the absolute ‘‘timeless truths’’ of modernism nor the contingent ‘‘perpetual critique’’ of postmodernism allows critics to ‘‘employ the experience and understanding of a highly diverse citizenry as the most important component of communal decision-making’’ (p. 610). It is precisely this steadfast commitment of rhetoric to the changing climates of democratic politics that permeates Edward Schiappa’s latest volume, Beyond Representational Correctness: Rethinking Criticism of Media Culture (2008). Schiappa is concerned that much of the current rhetorical criticism of the popular media discounts the complex reception of cultural artifacts by diverse audiences, and, thus, separates academic and non-academic audiences, limiting the political influence of academic work on citizen agency. Instead, much rhetorical criticism offers academically expert readings which inevitably find the cultural artifact performing gendered or racial ideologies that reinforce oppressive, categorical, and stereotypical representations of a social group. Schiappa argues that such expert readings seek ‘‘representational correctness’’ in cultural works, something, he takes pains to demonstrate, they will never find. Furthermore, these expert readings assume audience receptions of texts without having surveyed actual audiences. Schiappa does not seek to discredit this criticism, but to posit methodologies which will enhance culture critique by producing more complex understandings of how cultural artifacts such as television sitcoms and film act in the