Permeable boundaries: rhetorical delivery and the negotiation of obscenity.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20194507

Obscenity's dependence on location and situation reveals its delivery as rhetorical and, understood as such, provides a valuable site for rethinking conversations about rhetorical delivery and communication technologies. As a project of theoretical speculation through selective historical recovery, the three 'cases' in American obscenity negotiation presented by "Permeable Boundaries" offer analysis of obscenity as a site for epistemological reconception of rhetorical delivery. In sum these case studies reveal and reconstitute the relationship between rhetorical delivery and kairos, demonstrating how technologies--as varied as the mail, the radio, and the internet--force us to reconsider not just the available means for delivery, but the local-epistemic nature of propriety and the appropriateness and timeliness of rhetorical space. Each case study tackles a precept of kairos (propriety, decorum, timeliness) and demonstrates how these concepts facilitate rhetorical delivery. These kairotic precepts, when considered separately (as they are in each case study) reveal delivery to be more than merely transactional and transitive. This project ultimately urges a theoretical refiguring of delivery that not only moves beyond what Colin Gifford Brooke sees as "our commonsense definition of the term," but provides an alternative perspective to Brooke's own conception of delivery as performance, as well as extends Ben McCorkle's view of delivery as technological discourse.