This is a follow-up to a previous Yack post, which explores doing philosophy of technology in Rhetoric & writing Studies (RWS). To read more about the ways in which philosophical frameworks of technology might benefit RWS, you can find the previous post here.
Diane Davis (2021) has already informed us of rhetoricity as “the fundamental affectability and responsivity already supposed in every tangible rhetorical exchange, every enculturating inscription, every effort to reach or touch the other(s)” (p. 195). To put it another way, rhetoricity is the existential condition that allows rhetoric to happen in the first place. Davis puts it beautifully when she describes rhetoricity as a “language without language,” a “pre-originary yes” (Davis, 2017, p. 440) that opens the scene of any rhetorical situation before it even begins. In simple terms, rhetoricity is the precondition for rhetoric to land—for it to be received, interpreted, or even to be possible in the first place.
In this piece, I would like to unpack another precondition for rhetoric—an onto-phenomenological one, namely, the structure of experience that makes symbols intelligible in the first place—to press the urgency of a postphenomenological turn in rhetorical studies. Rhetoric involves the use of symbols to communicate meaning. However, a symbol (like a word, gesture, or image) does not automatically persuade, communicate or mean something only by existing, unless it is interpreted within a meaningful context. That context is predicated on a structured orientation toward the world that allows the symbol to register. In other words, for symbols to be legible and affective, i.e. to be meaningful, a certain kind of experience—especially clear, stable, focused visual perception—must be in place. This means that experience precedes symbol-use, that meaning arises when the symbol is interpreted within the context of prior experience. This is Heidegger’s worldhood (Weltlichkeit): the background context in which beings show up as meaningful (Large, 2008, p. 42): the meaning-laden backdrop that allows something to show up as something. A symbol only becomes meaningful when it appears within a pre-existing world of practices, concerns, and affordances. Before signification can persuade, provoke, or move, symbols must first be seen, heard, or felt within a field of intelligibility. In this sense, rhetoric does not precede experience but presupposes it because it is through experience that the world becomes intelligible and affectively charged.
Consider the sight of a national flag—say, the French tricolore—flying above a government building during wartime. At the level of pure perception, the flag is merely a piece of fabric with color patterns flapping in the wind. It is not inherently persuasive, emotional, or even meaningful. It only becomes a symbol—of nationhood, patriotism, or resistance—when interpreted within a meaningful experiential horizon. The flag must first appear in a structured field of consciousness. One must see it clearly, from a situated bodily perspective and attend to it. The world must already be oriented in a way that allows the flag to show up as a thing-that-means-something. Without perceptual coherence, there is no symbolic function.
Along those lines, phenomenology (Zahavi, 2018) reminds us that experience is far from being inert. According to Brentano, all mental acts are directed toward something—there is no such thing as objectless experience (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2019). As Rosenberger and Verbeek (2015) explain, “we cannot just ‘see,’ ‘hear,’ or ‘think,’ but we always see, hear, or think something” (p. 11). This is called intentionality— the “aboutness” or “directedness” of experience. When you think, perceive, hope, fear, or remember, your mind is always oriented toward an object—real or imagined, present or absent, that is consciousness is always consciousness of someTHING. Edmund Husserl developed this concept of intentionality into a rigorous philosophical method, arguing that consciousness is always structured by a directional relationship between a subject and an object.
Nevertheless, Husserl largely ignored the role of technologies and instruments in shaping that experience—retaining a somewhat abstract and disembodied view of perception, or in fact “Husserl is missing his technologies” (Ihde, 2016, p. 16). Husserlian phenomenology has a more abstract, often technology-averse stance. It views technology as something that distances or alienates humans from authentic engagement with the world. Postphenomenology, instead, “takes us back ‘to the things themselves’: material technological artifacts that deserve explicit philosophical attention” (Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015, p.12). Rather than treating perception as a direct, unmediated relation to objects, postphenomenology draws on American pragmatism, phenomenology and technoscience, emphasizing that our experiential orientation is frequently co-constituted through technological artifacts (Coeckelbergh, 2018; Boschert & Blok, 2022 Rosenberger, 2023). One particular strength postphenomenology cherishes is that it attends to the specificity of technologies—not as general abstractions, but as distinct artifacts that mediate human-world relations in particular, situated ways. In fact, it “investigates actual encounters of humans and technological artefacts, and how in particular human perception and action is co-shaped by technological artefacts” (Benjamin, 2023, p. 20). Postphenomenology shifts attention from abstract, romantic theorizing to “empirically adequate descriptions reflecting the richness and complexity of modern technology” (Kroes & Meijers, 2000, p. xix). Another defining characteristic of postphenomenology is its relational ontology (Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015, p. 19): it rejects the notion of pre-given, autonomous subjects and objects. Instead, it understands both subjectivity and objectivity as emergent properties constituted through technologically mediated relations. In this view, the subject (the observer) and the object (the observed) are co-constituted through the material-semiotic entanglements that technologies make possible.
Back to our main argument, while rhetoric is strategic, symbolic, exigence-responsive, context-sensitive and audience-adapted, it is also fundamentally phenomenological: it unfolds within the horizon of what people can sense, feel, and make meaning of. Rhetoric is thus an utterly experientially grounded symbolic action. This experience, as postphenomenology suggests, is scarcely ever unmediated, but is rather invariably refracted through the prism of technological artefacts. As a result, it follows that technological mediation co-constitutes the very conditions under which rhetoric becomes either possible, legible, or effective. In fact, before rhetoric can do anything, there has to be a technologically mediated “how” of experience that makes that doing possible.
Allow me to provide an example here. Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, or Facebook use algorithmic curation systems to determine what content is shown to whom, and when. From a postphenomenological perspective, these algorithms do not just organize data but also actively structure the field of rhetorical visibility. A powerful, urgent tweet or video does not go viral solely because it is rhetorically strong; it goes viral because an algorithm made it visible to enough users. Conversely, a symbolically potent message may be buried by algorithmic suppression, shadowbanning, or simply not being prioritized in someone’s feed. What “lands” rhetorically depends on whether it is made available to appear within someone’s experiential horizon—a horizon now largely shaped by proprietary code. The algorithm acts as a nonhuman intentionality that co-determines what is “there” to be perceived, responded to, engaged with. The technological mediation of content delivery via algorithms conditions the rhetorical field— governing the visibility, circulation, and affective reach of symbolic action. In this way, algorithms do not just influence rhetoric’s spread but they co-constitute rhetoric’s very emergence as an intelligible and affective event.
Insofar as rhetoric presupposes a field of intelligibility or worldhood—a coherent horizon of meaning shaped by embodiment, sensation, and sociocultural history—it becomes incumbent upon rhetorical theory to interrogate the conditions under which such encounter is possible. Postphenomenology intervenes at precisely this juncture, not as an auxiliary perspective, but as a philosophical necessity for an age in which the phenomenality of the world is irreducibly mediated by technologies. Unlike classical phenomenology, which retains a tacit commitment to the transparency of perception and the primacy of subject-directed intentionality, postphenomenology foregrounds the non-neutrality of mediation itself: the ways in which technologies co-constitute the very structures of appearance, orientation, and sense-making. Here, the rhetorical is no longer a matter of mere symbolic address, but of disclosure—a revealing that is always already inflected by the affordances, constraints, and latent intentionalities of material artifacts. Rhetoric seems inextricably bound to the technological conditions of its emergence. Thus, postphenomenology does not merely supplement rhetorical theory but reconfigures its onto-phenomenological ground by showing that what can be said, felt, or thought rhetorically is inextricable from the technostructures through which the world comes to presence.
Finally, while tangential to the main argument in the piece, this point bears brief mention to avoid theoretical blind spots that rhetorical action, once underway, reflexively reshapes the very experiential horizons that first made it legible. In actual fact, rhetoric and experience exist in a dynamic, asymmetrical reciprocity wherein experience constitutes the transcendental—yet immanent—condition of rhetorical possibility, while rhetoric, once operative, reflexively reshapes the contours of experience itself. Before any symbol can resonate, it must appear within a horizon of intelligibility already structured by embodied perception, affective attunement, and sociotechnical mediation. Yet rhetoric, in disclosing new meanings or reorienting attention, retroactively alters the very experiential frameworks that once made it possible. Thus, rhetoric does not merely act within experience; it recursively acts upon it, revealing a quasi-transcendental entanglement in which the world is both presupposed and transformed by symbolic action.
References
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Bosschaert, M. T., & Blok, V. (2022). The ‘empirical’ in the empirical turn: A critical analysis. Foundations of Science, 28(4), 783–804. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-022-09840-6
Coeckelbergh, M. (2018). Philosophy of technology: An introduction. Polity Press.
Davis, D. (2017). Rhetoricity at the end of the world. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 50(4), 431–451. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/philrhet.50.4.0431
Davis, D. (2021). Rhetoricity, temporality, democratic nonequivalence. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 51(3), 193–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2021.1918506
Huemer, W. (2019). Franz Brentano. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brentano/
Ihde, D. (2016). Husserl’s missing technologies. Fordham University Press.
Kroes, P., & Meijers, A. (Eds.). (2000). The empirical turn in the philosophy of technology. JAI/Elsevier.
Large, W. (2008). Heidegger’s Being and Time: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh University Press.
Rosenberger, R. (Ed.). (2023). The critical Ihde. State University of New York Press.
Rosenberger, R., & Verbeek, P.-P. (Eds.). (2015). Postphenomenological investigations: Essays on human–technology relations. Lexington Books.
Zahavi, D. (2018). Phenomenology: The basics. Routledge.
