Abstract

Although felt as a vague though often powerful sense of the world’s presence as we engage in a rhetorical situation, ambience is the highly complex and integrated totality of the world’s environmental, behavioral, symbolic, and temporal dimensions and their fields of objects, agents, relations, and forces of which we may or may not become aware and with which we may or may not intentionally engage. Although we may feel it so, ambience is not merely a vague, amorphous background to our conscious acts which gives it meaning; rather, it is itself highly organized and organizing, developing from our interactions with the world in a series of succeeding integrative levels, each with its own structures based upon and providing purpose to the lower, earlier developed structures it supervenes and each providing meaning to the higher, later developed structures that depend upon it.