Abstract
Wounds materialize in the wake of the event, when rhetoric inadequately indexes what is present in a situation. Such a position bypasses ethics from the transcendental ought or the purely descriptive is to an ethics grounded in an immanent occurrence. To give an example of this kind of rhetorical ethics, I turn to an example of a recent wound, the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the pathology of gun violence has created a wound that shattered our rhetorical sensorium. In the immediate aftermath, Emma Gonzales, a student and survivor of the Parkland shooting, seized upon this perspective on the wound to forge a new figure, the Parkland Kid, and with it new lines of argument. I argue her capacity to turn a wounding into a new subject illustrates a new rhetorical ethics that is inclusive; she became a subject of the shooting, the new Parkland Kid, that anyone is welcome to join. My contribution departs from the wound as a damaged attachment for its understanding as a productive force.
Gun violence might be thought of as a kind of pathology: a deadly, ever-mutating virus that expresses itself in outbreaks like school shootings. On 14 February 2018, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire at the high school he had once attended, murdering 14 students and 3 staff and wounding many others (Segarra et al., 2018). While the public had experienced previous school shootings as bloodless spectacles, the gun violence at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) in Parkland, Florida was particularly brutal (Bouie, 2018). Parkland gives us an opportunity to theorize a “wound,” which Jenny Rice (2015) usefully situated within “the material, sensorial, and epistemic spheres of rhetorical engagement” (p. 40). While the language of “wounding” may draw a focus onto absence, harm, or pain, which Parkland provides, I wish to focus on the wound as a propelling force that rips through the sensual fabric of the everyday, creating the opportunity for new ways of being.
I define a wound as the residue from experiencing an unpredictable element of a rhetorical situation that provides resources for advocacy. It is a motivating force that enjoins the body to persist against the friction of doubt. As the Parkland case study demonstrates, these unaccounted-for elements contain potential for novelty, yet their novelty is undecidable (e.g., was Parkland really that different?), courting skepticism from the public. When the kids declared they would be the last kids to experience a school shooting, it was the figure of the Parkland Kid that provided the basis for an entire generational challenge to the gun rights movement. Through an analysis of this rhetorical situation, I demonstrate that the wound equips a speaker with the motivation to persuade others of an event’s novelty when doubted. I conceptualize wounds as a supplement to rhetorical situations that recognizes some elements simply cannot be accounted for ahead of time. When these events come into being, they come with an obligation to persuade other in response to mountain skepticism. In maintaing fiedility to the truth of the event against doubt, the wound inherits its ethical obligation.
The Parkland shooting presented the same basic facts of every other school shooting: a disaffected teen brought a gun to school and death ensued. Thoughts and prayers were offered and the public was reminded that this tragedy could have been prevented if people had done their due diligence. Yet, the survivors seized upon the moment to fashion the Parkland Kid as a new identity that invited others to join their movement to change gun laws. The trace of the event supplies rhetors with a resource for advocacy; the students drew from their experience to advocate that Parkland was different. The wound’s normativity exists as neither the prescriptive of framework of ought nor the purely descriptive framework of is. A wound cannot be predicted because it exists outside of, yet immanent within, any given occurrence. An ethics of the wound bypasses the binary between what ought to happen, which imposes an ethical injunction onto a specific situation, and what is happening, which describes circumstances to account for contingency. A wound supplies a site of ethical for, because declaring fidelity in the face of uncertainty gives a subject ethical substance. The students adopted a militant ethical orientation and defended that this time was different despite the number of people who raised their doubts.
In the next section, I will contextualize the rhetorical situation within the wound’s ontology, which requires two moves: the first is to locate the rhetorical situation within Alain Badiou’s mathematical ontology. While rhetoricans have a number of different theories of the rhetorical situation, I will argue these are debates over “accounting” and essentially boil down to different language describing the same thing: enumerating a set that we call a rhetorical situation. But if we limit ourselves to an analytic definition of the rhetorical situation, then we miss how some rhetorical situations include unpredictable parts. What is known in set theory as an empty set—something that can never be counted. When those elements manifest, they trigger a new kind of rhetorical situation that marks a break from the past and puts an ethical demand on persaude others. The wound functions as residue of this unaccounted-for element that gives the speaker resources to advocate. I attend to an extended case study of the Parkland kids and how their school shooting became an extraordinary event. Although counted as another school shootings, for the Parkland students it was extraordinary, because it provided them with a unique opportunity to break with history and disrupt the gun debate through the creation of the Parkland Kid.
A wounded rhetorical situation
My argument is that wound provides the rhetorical situation with an ethical force when something truly novel emerges. Following the work of Alain Badiou, I argue something new occurs only when it has never been anticipated. The problem with the contemporary rhetorical situation is the diagram is already known which precludes the emergence of novelty. Elucidating my argument involves unpacking two assumptions: first, all rhetorical situations are mathematical sets, and second, all wounds emerge in a rhetorical situation after an event unfolds.
The first assumption is a rhetorical situation, like everything else, is a mathematical set. Simply defined, a set is the idea that everything can be considered a collection of distinct objects. Badiou (2005) wrote, “every ‘object’ is reducible to a pure multiplicity, itself built on the unpresentation of the void: the part called set theory” (p. 14). 1 To be is to be multiple and each multiplicity comprises other sets of multiplicity. There is no such thing as a stable holistic entity, but rather only inconsistent multiples. Being, then, cannot be understood as a stable unification, but instead the multiplication of differences that contain an ever-growing set of multiplicities. Badiou (2005) extrapolated set theory as an abstract system to an ontological way of understanding ordinary life. Even though our senses perceive being as whole, this is a strategic selection, deflection, and reflection that creates a misperception of stability. Overlapping sets exist on different levels of scale and granularities. A body is a whole set composed of a multiplicity of organs, a classroom is a set composed of bodies, a building is composed of classrooms, and so on. Sets are imbricated, constantly overlapping upon one another as they move up and down ladders of abstraction. They are not organized or contained: there is no logic of the One. There is an infinite number of ways in which they can be organized and reorganized.
From this perspective, a rhetorical situation is another kind of set. According to Lloyd Bitzer’s (1992), a rhetorical situation consists of “persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterances” (p. 4). His writings sparked an extended debate on each of different elements, each theorist attempting to account for the same thing: a situation, which is a set, demanding this thing that we call rhetoric. For instance, while Bitzer might have thought the exigency was an organic whole, Richard Vatz (1973) demonstrated that it was also comprised of a rhetorical set of elements; similarly, while Bitzer might have thought the audience was an organic whole, Barbra Biesecker (1989) disputed the idea that the audience was a pre-defined set that existed before the situation. In one of the most-cited pieces in The Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Jenny Edbauer Rice challenged the entire premise of the set, or what she calls “elemental conglomerations.” Instead, she posits these different parts bleed into one another, she wrote, “situation bleeds into the concatenation of public interaction. Public interactions bleed into wider social processes. The elements of rhetorical situation simply bleed” (emphasis in original, Edbauer, 2005: 9).
For instance, when certain community members of Austin, Texas became concerned about rampant corporatization, Keep Austin Weird signs began to spread, like weather systems, across this city’s spatial terrain. This Keep Austin Weird campaign did not adhere to Bitzer’s situational categories of speaker and audience. Instead, the campaign spread public sentiment in myriad directions at once. As Rice argued, expanding our understanding from “the” rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies (plural) yields a more robust account for the ways public sentiment swelled across the city. Weird bumper stickers, shirts, and advertisements popped up and multiplied audiences, speakers, places, objects, and relations. If, she argues, we stayed committed to a static definition of the situation, then we may miss how a “situation” unfolds. The set takes into account different audiences and makers, and it concerns an exigency. For Rice, the indexing of categories is less important than accounting for the plurality of sets that emerge. She found new sets, nestled in different sets: when she peeked behind unification she found infinite multiplicity.
But, what appears like a discrete exigency, audience, and a speaker is a contingent configuration. It is, in Badiou’s words, the “state of the situation,” a hegemonic order of the contemporary moment. The problem with keeping a static model and not carving out space for the unknown is it just creates the present. This approach to the rhetorical situation does not truly make anything new, it just reifies that state of the situation. When activists gathered to figure out how to Keep Austin Weird, some missed how global capitalism creeped further into new supply chains through Weird shirts, bumper stickers, and other paraphernalia. The logic that you can “sell” the local came ready-made for the prevailing neo-liberal capitalist order that homogenized into profit, which only made Austin a more alluring place to live, driving up property values. As Badiou (2003) noted, “there is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory or territories” (p. 10). Perhaps, it’s not surprising, then, that the attempts to Keep Austin Weird and not corporate resulted in the opposite and that the city now suffers affordable housing crisis (Sauter, 2019). Far from moving beyond the “set” of the rhetorical situation, Keep Austin Weird just compounded it and organized the situation according to a neoliberal capitalist logic. Just because there is an infinite multiplicity, does not mean that no set exists; instead, it just means that the way in which we organize sets is guided by hegemonic logic.
However, by recognizing there are elements in the rhetorical situation that cannot be accounted for ahead of time, it creates space for the emergence of novelty. Since there is no unification in the flux of multiplicity, there is the potential for multiple sets to be counted among itself, or the creation of “a reflexive set” (Badiou, 2005). The circumstance of a reflexive set is impermissible, but ontologically possible; set theory calls it extraordinary, and Badiou called it an event. Events manifest in novelty, when an ordinary speaker is able to go beyond the state of the situation and glimpse things otherwise—it renders the present contingent. More plainly, it is when something that might be considered an ordinary occurrence somehow feels different than the rest: something else was there. But, the event is always ambiguous and will always be met with skepticism. In a flash, an event leaves a wound, a tendency that provides a resource for future advocacy.
For Badiou, an event may exist within an ordinary rhetorical situation as an unaccounted doubling in a set that ruptures into multiplicities. Badiou (2001) wrote,
A truth is the material course traced, within the situation, by the eventual supplementation. It is thus an immanent break. “Immanent” because a truth proceeds in the situation, and where we else—there is no have of truths. “Break” because what enables the truth process—the event meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation. (pp. 42–43)
Badiou (2001) has cataloged a number of events across four broad categories including art, politics, science, and love. Meeting someone, for instance, is a mundane occurrence, yet when you meet a lover, this novel experience reshapes the trajectory of your life. Such experiences can be considered events. The energy from the first meeting for lovers, the wound leaves its marker in the way couples retell their origin story and it gins up allure. For Badiou, each of these events carries the potential to change the trajectory of the world since they escape the hegemonic logic of the present. Yet, it is precisely because you cannot predict these events, since they are unaccounted for, that give them their power to reshape things.
The second assumption that it constitutes a new rhetorical situation can only be determined after the event unfolds. If the new rhetorical situation involves a reflexive set that can only be subjectively registered after, then it is up to speakers to spread the word about the event. A wound is the residue of the event left upon the body supplies speakers with the resources to persist. It is a force that pulses and propels bodies forward to advocate. It provides the fuel to sustain them in the face of increased doubt. Once the wager that something new from the event happened, it is through an ongoing process of declaring fidelity to the event that a subject is held together. A subject is not the discrete, psychological individual. Rather, like everything else in Badiou’s ontology, it is a set, a multiplicity, and it “enters into composition of this subject but once against it exceeds him (it is precisely this excess that makes it come to pass as immortal)” (p. 43). A subject is a set instead of a single individual; it is available for many individuals to claim. It is not an I, but rather a we. Such an event-based ethic “is offered to all, or addressed to everyone, without condition of belonging being able to limit this offer, or this address” (Badiou, 2003, p. 14). Ultimately, Badiou claimed this is a communist ethic, because everyone, regardless of prior commitments, can declare fidelity. It is indifferent to difference, since this subject is composed of a moment in time and not transcendent categories.
The ethical subject is thus an effect of both the wound and the wager (Dean, 2017). The wound provides the resources to wager to others that the event occurred. After the event, the decidability of the event will lead many to wonder if it was truly something worthy of being called an event in the first place. And, this new subject will no doubt question it themselves. There is no resolution even after the wounding event has passed, but “the process of the event to which it responds, manifesting not certainty but fidelity” (Badiou, 2001, p. 160). The ethics, however, emerge in a sustained conviction despite the proliferation of doubt.
Quentin Meillassoux (2011) provided an exceptionally clear and lucid example of the model through one of Badiou’s favorite examples, May 68. He explained that when historians reflect on May 68, it is more than the facts that make up the set, the “student demonstrations, the occupations of the Sorbonne, massive strikes, etc.” (p. 2) that give May 68 its meaning. There is something more that gives it substance, and this “something more” can be located in the people who proclaimed that importance of May 68; it is within that tautology that resides the heart of Badiou’s project. Some may challenge that the May 68 occupation was just another student movement, and others may say it was an important moment that reshaped the French intellectual landscape and argue it ripples into our contemporary moment, even into this essay.
In October 2017, a couple of months prior to Parkland Shooting, Las Vegas, Nevada—just a mile or two from where I presented this specific paper at “Mediating Civic Encounters: A/Dressing Civic Wounds Conference”—was the site of the Harvest Festival Shooting, where a 64-year-old man killed 58 people and injured 869. In a supposed safe space, a concert, people’s cell phones caught the event and disseminated it online (Kreps, 2017). Both incidents share the same basic set of facts as the public watched in horror as the media followed the same script. Yet, despite the obvious similarities between both mass shootings, there was something different about Parkland. As Michelle Cottlett (2018) quipped in the Atlantic, “Got a few hours to kill? Just google Parkland and different for an avalanche of news and commentary.” Perhaps, its location could account for some of the difference, but the wound, the event, was something different than simply the facts of the case.
The Parkland event
Our contemporary understanding of a “school shooting” comes from the 20 April 1999 Columbine High School tragedy in Littleton, Colorado. Since then, the school shooting as a media event has existed in the public imagination—it describes a multiplicity. Although there are some notable exceptions, the death and destruction is diluted and only understood secondhand, through visual displays of grief and vocal affections. The coverage mostly follows a consistent knot of sanitized images, oral testimony, and abstracted diagrams. Candlelight vigils, hopes, prayers, and predictable debates ensue. To the public, school shootings are bloodless affairs. The storylines become so familiar, so repetitive, that they blend together and are skewered in popular satirical periodicals like The Onion. The gun’s agency—or lack thereof—figures as the pivotal question in the public debate about the best way to protect schoolchildren. For gun control advocates, the gun exercises agency by increasing the potential for violence. Their solution to ending school shootings, then, is to restrict the number of guns in a school. Conversely, gun rights advocates insist guns are a passive tool and their capacity for good or evil is tied to the user. As such, the best answer to school shootings is to increase the number of guns in schools. In either formulation, students are relegated to the background of the scene for an unfolding debate about the gun—students are no more than passive objects who do not get a say in their future (see Eckstein & Partlow, 2017).
The MSD shooting actualized a potential that has always been interwoven in the fabric of everyday life. Prior to the shooting, many of the Parkland students believed that Cruz could one day be a shooter (Haag & Kovaleski, 2018). When that day came, it still represented an unbelievable horror; what was once abstract potential leaped into being. Students exercised their agency by turning to Snapchat to broadcast the event, live. Students took pictures, shared video, and took control of their narrative. Cell phones connected students to wireless networks, allowing them to upload sound, video, and text and share these narratives with their friends, bypassing traditional models of dissemination. The students accessed and employed new technologies and techniques for connectivity, like hashtags and the Snap Map, which turned private snaps into a publicly accessible content. The Snap Map captured and indicated clusters of high-frequency usage to direct the public’s attention to an unfolding event.
The public sensorium felt intimately connected to that sense of vulnerability of what it might be like to be a kid, the notion it could be any kid. Whereas the public might have thought of the school shooting as a unified narrative before, the snaps recorded by the MSD students presented the event as chaotic and distributed—a multiplicity erupted through the sheen of a set. There was not a unified story, but instead a number of different experiences reflexively multiplied. There was not a singular school shooting, but rather many disparate shootings that occurred. A number of different perspectives and ways of knowing sprung into being. Disparate snaps circulated and looped in immersive digital environments that become proxies for kids—perhaps something unaccounted for, realized. As Hoda Kotb, co-host of the Today Show, said, “There’s something about seeing that video that puts you exactly where those kids were” (as cited in Stelter, 2018). There was something about this event that did not fit neatly within our epistemic, sensual, or material spheres for school shootings. Instead, it revealed a multiplicity that existed outside of our sensual framework, forcing us to confront the inadequacy of our state of affairs.
For the students who experienced the tragedy, the events of 14 February were as awful and horrible as every other school shooting. The students immediately turned much of their sadness, uncertainty, and pain into advocacy. Emma González, for example, gave a gun reform speech the day after attending a vigil for her best friend. The wound supplied a visceral, motivating force for her advocacy: kids need to change the debate on guns. When she declared “B.S.” on the current gun regime, González (2018) said,
We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we’re going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because, just as David said, we are going to be the last mass shooting.
González’s language of statistics, coupled with the repetition of “mass shootings,” illustrates how Parkland fits the typical profile of a school shooting in America. What González started by “calling B.S.” was a truth process, declaring herself a subject of the Parkland event. She recognized the novelty of what happened and that something that deserved to be written about in textbooks. Her invention demonstrates that the event meets all of the typical criteria for a school shooting—it could count as a statistic—except this one had one unaccounted-for element: the Parkland Kid—which placed them outside of every other statistic. What turned this into an ethical opportunity was the need to take this truth and defend it against the claim just another example to be employed in partisan bickering. The viral speech provided a language and substance to an idea of the Parkland Kid that radiated and circulated far beyond González (for more on this speech, see Eckstein, 2020).
Days after they went to work planning the March for our Lives in Washington D.C., a series of other smaller demonstrations, and other actions to call for gun reform. The Parkland kids’ wager is that MSD is different than any other school shooting. This is neither an externally imposed principle onto the situation that told González what to do, nor is it a descriptive analytic rendering the situation contingent. It is rhetorical stance used to unify disparate groups under the header of a fragile and novel subject. Isabel Fattal (2018) observed how the experience of the shooting supplied many of the students with an embodied experience that motivates them to advocate, coordinate, plan, strategize, and organize the March for our Lives for gun reform. The wound provided a pulsating force that radiated out from individuals to the public at large. The experience was not just tied to the people in the halls of the MSD, but as it became a public event that reverberated through the snaps and propogated through speeches, the public felt connected and unified as more people began identifying with the figure of the Parkland Kid. The Parkland Kid was not a single person, but it was a set, reverberating of elements.
As the figure of the Parkland Kid took shape, the survivors of the MSD argued no other previous identity marker mattered. As an exemplar of this kind of ethical rhetoric, consider González’s opinion editorial, published in Teen Vogue the night before March for Our Lives. Here, she makes a similar argument as the “We call B.S.” speech, where she ascribes guns agency to define a generation and offers that as a reason for kid’s leadership: since the kids are produced through the gun, they are uniquely suited to respond to it. She wrote, “After all of this pain and all of this death caused by gun violence, it seems as if the kids are the only ones who still have the energy to make change” (González, 2018). She continued,
The problem of gun violence goes beyond the countless demographic differences between people. Any way you cut it, one of the biggest threats to life as a teen in the U.S. today is being shot. People have been shot to death en masse in grocery stores, movie theaters, nightclubs, and libraries, on school campuses and front porches, and at concerts — anywhere and everywhere, regardless of socioeconomic background, skin color, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, geographical location. (González, 2018)
“Gun violence” appears here and 12 other times in the short article. The turn of phrase ascribes the act, violence, to the noun, the gun. Gun violence’s potential impinges upon the ordinary lives of everyday teens, as they live in “constant fear of being gunned down in places you feel the most secure” (González, 2018). Throughout the Vogue article, she consistently argues that the gun impacts daily life as “the biggest threats to life as a teen.” The violence does not need to materialize for it to exert a force on a student’s coming of age. Even if a shooter never manifests, it organizes the banal practices of everyday life: security guards in schools, clear backpacks, shooter drills, after-school specials, viral videos, rumors, in-class debates, the news media, and so many other spaces and places that the student is constantly surrounded by it. The mere fear of potential violence is sufficient to impact public life. The gun is the agent; the kid is the effect. Now, through the wound and the emerging figure of the Parkland Kid, it is time for that effect to become the agent and lead.
The experience of Parkland reconfigured the set of what is considered “acceptable” gun violence. In the past, the media narrative only focused on some instances of spectacular gun violence, while ignoring other the mundane everydayness, based on some factors where it seemed banal or expected. But, when the narrative became grounded in gun violence, it dissolved difference like “socioeconomic background, skin color, age, ethnicity, religion, gender,” (González, 2018) and so on. González advocated ignoring the traditional concerns that determine what counts as “relevant” considerations in demanding media attention, the same structures that order and prioritize certain characteristics. These include what places are considered “safe,” like schools in affluent suburbs, or ignored, like so-called “high-risk” neighborhoods like the Southside of Chicago. Everyone, González demonstrated through her advocacy, is vulnerable to gun violence and the public should focus on the gun itself. If the Parkland Kid is adopted, it becomes an expansive set that counts all demographics. This inclusivity is consistently highlighted in their messaging: In the March for Our Lives, “they are marching for every kid: past, present, and future” (Seelinger, 2018).
Yet, not everyone accepted that Parkland is different. Others attempted to say that Parkland—and, by extension, the Parkland kids—are just more of the same old partisan politics. Brandon Morse (2018), in the popular conservative periodical Red State, supplied a good example of this strategy. People like González are, in his view, pawns in a partisan game “to put on a performance aimed squarely at painting Republicans and one of their biggest campaign donors as irresponsible and evil, and making it easier for Democrats to get elected.” He favored Kyle Kashuv, another Parkland survivor, who is “friendly to Republicans as well as Democrats, puts the blame on the failure of law enforcement agencies who didn’t do their jobs, and lives in the realistic world where guns are here and likely aren’t going away” (Morse, 2018). In contrast to González, Kashuv is reasonable and seeking “bipartisan” solutions. Gun control is not a generational issue, as the “kids” are not unified around the best possible solution. The equivocation is clear: the kids are representative of the same old partisan discourse.
Conclusion
While previous discussions of the rhetorical situation might be a predictable set of things, this essay created space for something unpredictable: the Parkland Kid who proclaimed novelty and gave rise to the movement. As the students faced doubt, they drew from the wound—the trace of the situation that gave them the motivation to go out and advocate. The wound also supplies an ethical framework: obligations emerged from what they believed was their truth. It emerged from their unique convictions to protect a fragile new figure, the Parkland Kid, against the doubt in the world and potentially use it to change the gun debate. The wound, thus, gives us a new kind of rhetorical ethics that comes organically from the rhetorical situation when we create space for an unaccounted element in the set that might not be predicted.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) did not handle the swell around the Parkland kids very well. As Rolling Stone succinctly put it, Wayne Lapierre
delivered a rambling paranoid address at CPAC; spokeswomen Dana Loesch was heckled at a CNN town hall, and the organization’s top lobbyist Chris Cox, had to be horridly dispatched to the White House to talk the president out of supporting sweeping gun reform measures. (Stuart, 2018)
And these initial impressions have only grown over time; the NRA has decreased in popularity as Slate reports: “For the first time in nearly two decades, polling indicated that more Americans held a negative view of the gun lobby than a positive view” (Tesfaye, 2019); although at the same time here has also been a spike in gun sales (Levine & McKnight, 2019). Say all of this has occurred because of the figure of the kids is overly simplistic, yet it is undeniable that the kid played a role in reframing the debate and providing new topoi that allowed the gun debate to move forward. The Parkland Kid entered into a network of existing gun activists that helped them organize their march and disseminate their message (Watts, 2018) and a public already trending to support their message (Watts, 2018).
Nevertheless, the ethics of the wound does raise some interesting questions and concerns for any theory of democratic pluralism. If it is grounded in some politics of conviction and an ethical obligation to persist, then it raises questions how to square it with liberalism’s concern with reasonableness. If both sides are resolute with the ethical mandate to persist, then how can reason mediate a disagreement? At the conclusion of his book Ethics, Badiou (2001) gave one potential answer in the form of debate:
As every generic procedure is in reality a process that can perfectly well be deliberative, as long as we understand that it invents its rule of deliberation at the same time as it invents itself. And it is no more constrained by a pre-established norm that follows from the rule of deliberation. (p. 117)
In other words, Badiou left open the potential for the emergence of deliberation as a way for partisan groups to mediate disagreements. However, the norms, like his ethics, must emerge out of the situation. What might that look like? How can we combine these different projects? There is a wealth of research in the vein of the normative-pragmatic school of argumentation that looks at how ordinary people naturally generate their own rules of normativity from ordinary situations (e.g., Eckstein, 2018; Goodwin, 2007). Perhaps, more research should take seriously how ethics might be derived from these situations and the everyday ways in which people might discover something meaningful in these interactions.
