CONCEPT
Rhetoric of Practice
The practitioner's specific, contextual way of speaking through action—distinct from the system's strategic rhetoric. Selection, refusal, inflection, enunciation: the operations that transform the model's generic output into the builder's particular voice.
De Certeau distinguished between the rhetoric of systems and the rhetoric of practitioners. Systems speak in general patterns: the city's grid, the recipe's instructions, the AI model's statistically optimized outputs. This is strategic rhetoric—language designed to work for populations, optimized for average cases, stripped of the particular. Practitioners speak through their use of systems: the walker's specific route, the cook's adjustments to taste, the builder's selections from the model's output. This is the rhetoric of practice—particular, contextual, inflected by biography and purpose. The practitioner's rhetoric has four characteristic operations. Selection: choosing what to keep from the system's offerings. Refusal: discarding what does not serve. Inflection: adjusting the generic toward the specific. Enunciation: transforming language-as-code into language-as-practice, said by someone to someone. These operations are invisible to analytics but determine whether AI-assisted work lives or lies inert on the page.
In The You On AI Field Guide
De Certeau developed the concept of enunciation from linguistics—particularly Émile Benveniste's theory that language exists