Dale,
I'm flattered that people are still reading "On the End of Rhetoric." Your questions are pertinent, but I'm not sure how helpful my answers will be. Here goes. (You may use what follows in any way you see fit.)
Michael
> >1. Do you think TER reflects a postmodern position (without the >terminology) or is it really still modern?
This of course depends on how you define "modern" and "postmodern." When I wrote TER I wasn't particularly self-conscious about the term "modern," and I don't believe I had even heard the term "postmodern." Among the writers by whom I was influenced is George Steiner, and I think his views focus heavily on what you might call the disappointment of enlightment/romantic idealism -- the recognition that all the science and rationalism and democratic revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could not prevent WW II and the holocaust. I suppose that this line of thought might be labelled "late modernism."
> >2. Is it perhaps existential? If so, where does existentialism fit in the >modernism/postmodernism world?
I was very definitely influenced by existentialism in writing TER, specifically Sartre, Camus, and the other absurdist writers to whom the essay refers; it may be pertinent that the essay began in the first chapter of my dissertation, which was a study of Samuel Beckett's language. Somewhat more tentatively, I was drawing on Heidegger; Hofstadter's _Truth and Art_, on which a major part of the argument of TER depends, is strongly Heideggerian. Also Maurice Natanson, whose views on rhetoric I believe should be seen as existentialist. I'm not sure where existentialism fits into the modernism/postmodernism business. To me existentialism represents most importantly a style of confronting one's experience of the world. It attempts to divest experience of all presuppositions, and in this sense it tends to undermine the confidence in reason that characterizes what you might call "high modernism." So I guess maybe existentialism is a kind of precurser of postmodernism.
> >3. Finally, is the fragmentation of the author the key to postmodernism, >and if so, what can ethos be in a postmodern world?
You may have picked up from my answers to the other two questions that I'm not particularly comfortable using the term "postmodernism." I think there are two reasons for this: First, I haven't studied the literature of pm with any seriousness. Since finishing my dissertation, I've devoted most of my energy to the history of rhetoric and to the rhetoric of scientific discourse. Second, the term "postmodernism" suggests to me that "modernism" is done with, that we can safely put all its accomplishments on a shelf in the library.
Your question "what can ethos be in a postmodern world" is crucial. When I was invited to write the essay that turned out to be "Further Thoughts on the End of Rhetoric," I welcomed the opportunity to revisit the problems raised in TER, but I'm not particularly happy with the result. My "further thoughts" don't go further enough, or maybe the problem is that "further" was the wrong direction to try to go in. I think that in writing TER I sort of peeked into an abyss of sorts, and I've been recoiling from what I thought I saw ever since. The understanding of ethos that I articulate in TER is clever, but I don't think it's at all satisfactory. It's too narrowly individual to support any kind of common life. And if the "postmodern world" is one that has moved even farther away from the enlightenment dream of just and rational society, then I can only conclude that ethos can't be much of anything in such a world.
There are much smarter and more ambitious rhetoricians than I who share my unease with postmodernism. See, for example, Thomas Farrell's _Norms of Rhetorical Culture_, or go to just about any conference paper by Michael Leff. For myself, I think that much of what I've written since TER has been an attempt to refute it, or at least to back away from it. Probably the most obvious example is "Aristotle's Concept of Ethos," which, while it doesn't say so explicitly, pretty much repudiates TER's concept of ethos. And the two essays in which I try to make some use of the notion of ethos ("The Birth of Molecular Biology" and "On the Ethos of Historical Science") draw much more clearly on the allegedly Aristotelian understanding of ethos developed in the later essay than on the one developed in TER. Right now I'm working at trying to rehabilitate some ideas from eighteenth-century rhetoric, most particularly the concept of taste.
Whether the fragmentation of the author is the key, or a key, to postmodernism I don't know. Maybe. Certainly fragmentation is a "fact" of contemporary experience, one that needs to be recognized and accounted for by rhetoricians. But for me it's not a particularly happy fact. What unsettles me about so much of the explicitly "postmodern" theorizing that goes on today is the breezy way it tends to celebrate facts like the fragmentation of the author, as if the enlightenment and romanticism were just childish fancies that we have to get over. I'm afraid I don't want to get over modernism.