Third Persona - Definitions

Definitions

The third persona, according to Wander, is the audience negated or rejected by the speaker, speech, or situation. In each situation there is a speaker reaching an intended, "primary" audience, while also reaching an inadvertent, "secondary" audience. Wander's summation of his theory is succinct:

The Third Persona, therefore, refers to being negated. But "being negated" includes not only being alienated through language . . . . The objectification of certain individuals and groups discloses itself through what is and is not said about them and through actual conditions affecting their ability to speak for themselves . . . negation extends beyond the "text" to include the ability to produce texts, to engage in discourse, to be heard in the public space.

The third persona is "the 'it' that is the summation of all that you and I are told to avoid becoming, but also being negated in history, a being whose presence, though relevant through what is said, is negated through silence" and "measured against an ideal." It is the audience that cannot assemble nor protest.

There is an ethical concern in the concept of third persona since it applies to groups who have been historically denied human rights, those prejudiced against due to their status as "non-subjects" based on age, citizenship, gender, sexual preference, race, or religion, for example. It applies to those individuals who have suffered from objectification by what is said against them, the level to which they are ignored, and those conditions which deny them an ability to speak for themselves within the rhetorical dialogue.

In Wander's example involving Heidegger and art in society, the primary audience are those within a society where questions elicit official answers, the secondary audience are ideologues and censors already accounted for, and the tertiary audience (i.e., third persona) "may or may not have been part of the speaker's awareness, existing in the silences of the text, the reality of oppression, and the unutterable experience of human suffering, an audience for whom what was said was relevant in ways that traditional approaches to interpretation may overlook."