Audience and Creating Legitimacy

I often had difficulty contextualizing Aristotle, because scholarship today has a foundation in written, not oral, communication. One concept Aristotle spends time discussing is how to legitimate a speaker---how to prove the speaker is someone worth listening to and taking advice from.

Continuing forward with Michel Foucault, he also discusses the speaker of a text, who at that point was referred to as the Author. He explains that the importance of an Author came into being once writing began to have the ability to be transgressive. The Author had importance because the Author may have needed to be punished.

How does this all relate to Ong, and The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction?

One way to complicate the focus on legitimacy Aristotle and others had is to think about how many texts we read that have authors we know next to nothing about. I have no idea whether or not Walter Ong was a respectable or ethical person, I can and am only judging his work, (and by extension him) based on a single text. I think the reason this is acceptable is due to what Ong refers to as audience construction.

"At one point, the speaker asks the members of the audience all to read silently a paragraph out of the text. The audience immediately fragments. It is no longer a unit. Each individual retires into his own microcosm. When the readers look up again, the speaker has to gather them into a collectivity once more. This is true even if he is the author of the text they are reading," (Ong 11).

Reading is a solitary process, and no matter what we know about an author, how they address us in a text is what we will immediately be considering when choosing an interpretation.