Audience has gone from a somewhat neglected concept in composition studies (see Lisa Ede, 1979) to being one of the most widely discussed.  Any treatment of audience in as brief a space as this article will if necessity be limited.  Thus, I make no claims to a comprehensive treatment: rather, I will limit this discussion to this aspects of audience theory which are relevant to the immediate discussion.

Mary Jo Reiff points out that “Audience is an unstable referent, a floating signifier” (407).  The terms has had multiple meanings throughout the history of rhetoric, complicated in particular by the shift in focus from oral to written rhetorics.  Whereas classical notions of “audience” focused on a concrete, present listeners, often in specific situations, modern and postmodern views of “audience” have focused more on the less defined potential readers for a piece of writing.

Classical rhetoricians recognized the importance of audience in shaping a speech.  R.J. Willey argues that the Sophists “dealt with audiences in a more complex way than first impressions might suggest,” and in ways that may have foreshadowed the addressed/invoked binary that would later arise in composition studies (26).  The relationship between rhetor and audience was often agonistic, informed in particular by the somewhat pessimistic view of humanity common in Pre-Socratic philosophy. Willey argues that Sophists often called upon their listeners to adopt particular roles (usually that of the student).  In the Phaedrus, Plato calls for an understanding of the various types of souls, and argues that the successful orator will understand what will appeal to each type, and deliver accordingly.  Aristotle “seems to respond to the call of his former headmaster” (Willard and Brown 43) in classifying potential listeners according to such characteristics as age and station, and examining what might appeal to each (Rhetoric 2.12-17).  Aristotle, in fact, identifies audience as perhaps the salient aspect  of the rhetorical situation: “Of the three elements in speech-making - speaker, subject, and person addressed - it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech’s end and object” (1.3).

While considerations of audience fell somewhat by the wayside as rhetoric became increasingly preoccupied with style, Brown and Willard posit a re-emergence of audience-centered rhetoric in the late 18th century, with the theories of “Hugh Blair, Adam Smith, Richard Whately, and especially George Campbell” (60).  Douglas Ehnigner argues the rhetoricians of this period considered argument “through an analysis of the mind of the listener-reader, premising the doctrine upon assumptions concerning the ways in which men come to know what they know, believe what they believe, and feel what they feel” (Brown and Willard 60).  However, as Sharon Crowley points out, much 18th-century epistemology asserted “the uniformity of human nature” (29) - that is, that all readers/hearers would come to know, believe, and feel in the same fashion.  Thus, the concerns of an individual audience need not be scrutinized.

It is roughly in this time that the shift from a focus on oral rhetoric to written rhetoric begins to manifest in the theoretical considerations.  However, much of the implications of this shift on considerations of audience remain relatively unexplored until the latter half of the 20th century.  Even Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s considerations of audience in The New Rhetoric conflate listener and reader.  The concept of the “universal audience,” which has received much critical attention, anticipates the notion of the audience as a “created fiction” (Long 225) of the writer/speaker, but does not explore the role that writing as a technology might play in such a concept.

Walter Ong was among the first to explore the impact of medium on concepts of audience, making the assertion in 1975 that “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.”  Ong points out the writers do not have an “audience” in the sense of a collective group present in one time and place, but only “readers,” a concept that lacks any sense of collectivity.  He then asks, “Where does [the writer] find his audience?” and answers that “He has to fictionalize them” (11).  Ong’s argument is that the writer imagines an audience suited to the purpose and subject matter, and then calls upon his or her reader through various textual cues to play that particular role.  While Ong’s examples are mainly literary (Hemingway’s use of the definite article to construct a kinship with the reader), he posits that “what has been said about fictional narrative applies ceteris paribus to all writing” (17).

Ong’s argument establishes a prominent theme in considerations of audience: what Ede and Lunsford identify as the binary between “audience addressed” and “audience invoked.”  Following Lisa Ede’s 1979 call for greater attention to audience in composition studies, new considerations of the role of audience in writing, particularly as applied to the writing classroom, began questioning the ways in which audience was conceptualized and taught to students.  Acknowledging that binary was somewhat artificial, Ede and Lunsford identified the notions of invoked and addressed as the dominant conceptualization of audience in the current theory.  They defined “audience addressed” as emphasizing “the concrete reality of the writer’s audience,” and claimed that theories which followed this paradigm “share the assumption that knowledge of this audience’s attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible (via observation and analysis), but essential” (170).  This view of audience would seem to dominate composition textbooks, teaching students to break down audience according to demographics and posit their likely attitudes from those characteristics.  The assumption that demographics will relates directly to attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not unproblematic: human beings are generally far more complex than a simple survey would reveal, and assumption can easily give way to stereotype.

Theorists who follow the “audience invoked,” according to Ede and Lunsford, “stress that the audience is a construction of the writer,” primarily following Ong’s arguments (174).  Ede and Lunsford argue that “little scholarship in composition takes this perspective” (174) (citing only Ong and Russell Long). I would argue that “audience invoked” has gained in popularity in scholarship as theorists seek to complicate the notions of audience taught in composition classrooms - and possibly, as Reiff points out, due to the influence of Ede and Lunsford’s article (408).  However, such complicated notions do remain rare in actual composition textbooks.

Later considerations of audience have questioned and complicated the binary of “addressed/invoked,” as well as notions of audience itself.  Barbara Tomlinson contests Ong’s theory “to the degree that it causes us to overlook the readily apparent effects of specific living persons on individual writers and writing communities” (86).  Using the example of the writing and review process for a piece of research in composition studies, she points out in particular the ways in which real readers can resist the roles imposed on them by the text: far from being Ong’s cooperative reader, these real readers “insist on being individuals, with individual concerns” (87).  Tomlinson also points out the differing roles that readers may play - that is, that they may reader with purposes other than those inscribed in the text.

Still other theorists point also point out the multiplicity of purpose, calling on social theories of reading the writing to remind us of the diversity of any audience, addressed or invoked.  Reiff examines the “multiple subjectivities of the audience members” (410), a theme Tomlinson echoes when she points out the “most of us participate in a number of discourse communities” (89) and thus bring a number of knowledge sets, assumptions, and purposes to any piece of writing.  Wetherbee Phelps further complicates audience in arguing for the blurring lines between author and audience, and invoking Bahktinian notions of dialogism.

Some theorists attempt to address the complexity of audience in the notion of “discourse communities,”  which Bennett Rafoth argues “compels one to consider the broader social and political implications of language’s role in conformity and diversity, participation and exclusion” (140).  The notion of discourse community, a group centered on and constructed by exchanges of text, usually held to have “shared expectation, shared participation, commonly (or communally) held ways of expressing” (140) does allow for a more dialogic view of writing, one in which participants may varyingly hold the roles of writer and audience.  Indeed, Rafoth argues that “discourse communities are not governed solely by established texts, but also through the give-and-take of writers and readers” (145).  However, as Rafoth points out, “empirical descriptions of discourse communities are difficult at best” (140).  Joseph Harris argues that discussions of discourse communities tend to be “at once sweeping and vague, positing discursive utopias that direct and determine the writings of their members, yet failing to state the operating rules or boundaries of these communities” (12). Far from being stable, fixed entities, discourse communities are often fluid both in terms of their membership and their ideologies and practices: as Tomlinson and Harris both point out, many people participate in multiple discourse communities, which they move in and out of as their interests and needs encourage.  Thus, the discourse communities “themselves…are in a state of flux” (Tomlinson 89).

The complications to audience conceptualizations and construction posed by writing are frequently attributed to the distancing effect of writing.  Ong points out that “for the speaker, the audience is in front of him.  For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both” (10).  The result, according to Martin Nystrand, is that “writers must often be reminded of their readers,” unlike speakers, “who can never escape the concrete fact of their ever-present listeners” (4).   What happens, then, when the “ever-present” audience is reinserted through a common discursive space?  And how does the virtual nature of that space complicate our conceptualizations of audience?