During my oral defense for my comprehensive exams, I was asked by my committee to articulate my ideas for a dissertation project. I had been thinking in abstract terms about developing a methodology to study material rhetorics for some time, but I could not clearly articulate a rationale at that time. Instead, after, according to one mentor, I came off sounding “new age,” another mentor advised me to go back and look over all the work I had done before to regain a sense of what I was interested in. I gathered from the look on my mentor’s faces that they thought I had totally lost sight of the emerging scholar I had worked so hard to become over the last two and ½ years.
Taking that advice, I recently went back and read: my statement of intellectual interests generated for my CCR application; the seminar papers I wrote during coursework; my conference presentation abstracts; and my comprehensive exams. As I read each text, I marveled at the scholarly identity I was attempting to craft for myself and came to realize that although the sites of analysis and the theoretical frameworks in each text are different, I could indeed trace a path that led me to my current interest in developing a methodology to study the circulation of material/visual rhetorics. I trace that evolution for you here.
Entering the Program:
When I entered CCR, I came with the intention to take up the following inquiry: How do both representation of the “other” and self in language and media contribute to systems of inequality and subordination? In my master’s program, I had discovered post-colonial theory, socio-epistemic rhetoric, cultural studies, and visual rhetorics; I came into the program determined to understand how language, especially visual images, contributed to hegemonic systems, which at the height of the Bush administrations’ gross abuse of executive powers, I saw as necessary for helping take back a U.S. democracy I perceived to be failing. Evidence of my commitment to these efforts were obvious in prior conference presentations at my old university, my master’s thesis, my composition curriculum, and my CCCC presentation that year, which argued for using Burke’s dramatistic pedagogy for teaching students to critically analyze military recruiting rhetorics in civic minded comp classrooms.
My First Year:
The first semester, I took a class from Louise Wetherbee Phelps on rhetorical theory. Most of the class readings were far over my head; but I was determined to develop a strong theoretical foundation in rhetoric. For our final seminar papers in this course, we were asked to choose a scholar who is not considered a rhetorical theorist and make an argument as to why that scholar ought to be considered as making a strong contribution to our field or whose theories had the potential to make useful contributions. I chose to write about Suzanne Langer, who I’d been introduced to by LWP during course readings and was fascinated by her theoretical work on presentational or non-discursive symbolism. I worked very hard in crafting my seminar paper to understand Langer’s theories and ultimately argued that her scholarship could inform our understanding of pathos as a rhetorical strategy used in visual metaphors to deepen our understanding of self. Although I was unsuccessful in convincing Louise of my main argument, my commitment to understanding how “non-discursive” rhetoric operated and to what effect was strengthened.
During this same semester in my introduction to comp scholarship with Eileen Schell, I became interested in transnational feminist theory and wrote my final paper on identifying what I perceived to be a distinct ethic at work in the emerging scholarship of transnational feminist rhetorics in our field. I was particularly interested in their ethics of methodology—more particularly their strong focus on how academic practices contributed to ongoing systems of domination; what methods these scholars used to study hegemonic visual representations—rhetorical witnessing, integrated cultural analysis, rhetorical analysis, etc.; and most importantly, their focus on how rhetoric operates beyond our own borders and contributes to the unequal labor and cultural dynamics at work in our increasingly globalized world. It was writing this paper that I first became interested in studying rhetoric beyond our own national borders.
This interest influenced the choice I made to write about Moche burial practices in my course on classical rhetoric and its modern conceptions with Lois Agnew that I was taking at that same time. In that paper, I drew on modern Western conceptions of epideictic rhetoric to argue that the burial practices of the ancient Moche could be interpreted as rhetorical acts taken to maintain sociopolitical order and sustain ancient Moche cosmological beliefs. This paper was well received for its unique site of analysis, and I felt compelled to continue working on this paper in other classes.
Spring semester of my first year, I took a course in modern comp, which I was less interested in than my other courses on visual rhetorics and literacy and transnational imaginaries. By this point, I had clearly chosen the cultural rhetoric tract in our program, and I began to see the whole world through a rhetorical lens.
In Iswari Pandey’s course on literacies and transnational imaginary, my interest in rhetorics operating beyond and across the U.S. border intensified. I wrote my final paper on the problematic rhetorics I saw at work in the promotional materials for a local organization called Pro-Literacy that offered literacy programs for women and their communities across the globe. In that paper, I drew on transnational feminist and visual rhetorical theory and employed rhetorical analysis to reveal the imperialistic and patriarchal representations of “third-world” women “in need” at work in the material used to “rescue” these same women from poverty and illiteracy. I delivered this paper at the Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference the next fall on a panel of which I was the only one to show and to an audience of three—my prior mentor from U of M and two random female scholars who only came because they saw I was alone and felt sorry for me. Hah! I was disillusioned by this confernce experience but also by the lack of power my own scholarship could have in changing the problematic practices I saw at work in advocacy rhetorics. Yet, at the same time, I was intrigued with the notion that rhetoric travels and does actually affect policy in international and transnational contexts.
In my visual rhetoric course during this same semester, I wrote a paper about the recent cultural phenomenon of war porn, which I delivered at a Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference held the following spring. In that original multimodal essay, I defined the genre of war porn ( without having even heard of genre analysis as a method) and drew on visual rhetorical theory and rhetorical analysis to argue that war porn was an effective means of democratic participation despite the seemingly uselessness of what some called the “ barbaric” imagery from Abu Ghraib. I was, in essence, arguing against Sontag and Baudrillard, who claim that the Abu Ghraib war porn had no real use than to reveal the gross and shameless behavior of the U.S. military gone awry. I was also arguing against other scholarly claims that war porn made no impact on public culture. This paper marks my first attempt at turning my back on using my scholarship to reveal hidden representations at work in visual images and instead to begin to actually trace what uses and functions visual images had in the communities in which they were circulating. I discovered the use of Internet, especially Google Images and on-line databases and archives, as a research vehicle and began to learn how I could actually use the internet to locate actual rhetorical responses to warporn. I didn’t really understand at that point, however, just how important this method of tracing would actually play in my future role as researcher until later.
That summer, I took a course on historiography with Lois Agnew and grew very interested in the way that rhetorical history gets written. I was very much influenced by feminist historiographic methods that questioned whose stories get told, recovered women’s rhetorics, and researched obstacles that prevented women from gaining rhetorical agency. I was also very interested in discussions around truth, evidence, and methodology. I grew convinced by conversations that suggested the need to use interdisciplinary methods to study previously unexplored rhetorics. I was also very much taken with the principles I later claimed in my historiography exam to constitute the foundation of revisionary scholarship– All histories are grounded in ideology, rhetoric, and context; Rhetorical history is ever changing, ever unfolding, and largely uncharted; and Sociopolitical influences are inherent in particular conceptions of rhetorical theories, concepts and practices. I began to see that my own work could contribute to revisionary scholarship, especially if I worked to recover and theorize about “non-Western,” non-verbal rhetorics. I felt as if my scholarly career was unfolding. For my final paper in that class, I wrote a literature review of modern conceptions of epideictic rhetoric, which I needed to strengthen my article on Moche Burial practices that I wanted to take toward publication.
For the rest of that summer, I worked on that article and for the first time gained a real sense of what it meant to be both a rhetorician and a scholar.
My Second Year:
During my fall semester of my second year in CCR, I dropped a course on feminism and geography, giving up on pursuing a certificate in Women’s Studies, and instead took a course with LWP on the influence of linguistics and semiotics on modern composition, a methods course with Collin Brooke, and a social history of rhetorics course with Eileen. At that time, I realized I did not even know what other methodological choices existed for studying rhetoric beyond rhetorical analysis. This semester was key to deepening my interest in methodology and visual/material rhetorics. LWP and Collin also hammered in the notion that ideological critique had “co-opted” rhetoric–the ramifications of which I began to seriously consider.
In my social history course with Eileen, I was very much interested in the methods scholars in our field used to write social histories in various “subfields” of cultural rhetorics. The course readings on Native American rhetorics, especially the work of Malea Powell, Scott Lyons, and others, as well as the theorists they were drawing on, particularly Vizenor, deeply resonated with me. For our archival project, I deepened my interest in material rhetorics and how Native Americans used material objects rhetorically to gain agency in their own lives and to rewrite the histories that had been told about them. I became further convinced that recovering “non-Western” non-verbal rhetorics, like the indigenous rhetorics I was attempting to recover from Peru, could make a significant contribution to revisionary scholarship. Damian Baca’s visit to our class solidified my interest in rhetorics of the Americas, and I became very interested in subaltern Latin American theories forwarded by Dussel and Mignolo, who deepened my understanding of how rhetoric can act as a colonizing force.
I began my archival project looking for examples of material rhetorics I could write about and worked my way from the archives in downtown Syracuse to Albany to Cornell and finally to an art gallery in Ottawa, Canada to locate the material rhetorics of Carl Beam, whose work I encountered along my research path. For my final seminar paper, I drew on the theories of Vizenor, Powell, and others as I attempted to employ semiotic and rhetorical analysis to recover the rhetorics of survivance employed by Beam in his art. I was particularly intrigued by his attempt to rewrite history through material rhetorics and felt his argument against Western ways of reasoning and seeing rung true for own study of rhetoric. From Beam I became committed to the notion that “there is more than one way to view [rhetoric] and not be threatened” and that our field needed new ways of seeing and doing rhetoric that avoided the longstanding practice of academic imperialism, which I saw being sustained through inappropriate efforts to speak for others in the act of interpretation, and, in our own field, erasing or ignoring histories of “non-western” peoples and not acknowledging the actual rhetorics that co-evolved alongside Euro-American rhetorics. The irony here, of course, was that even as I was attempting to be as careful as possible in my analysis of Beam’s work by relying on Beam’s own words and drawing on Native American scholars’ theories, I was interpreting Beam’s work (using my metalanguage to reveal its metalanguage) as I was enacting the very practice I felt our field needed to avoid. I felt conviction for the project’s objectives but conflicted for my own desire to create my own scholarly “homestead” (see Powell) in Native American rhetorics.
It should be noted here that in this same class, I was accused of “multi-culturalism” for arguing that while attention to difference within specific cultural rhetorics is necessary and valuable, there is also value in identifying common values, beliefs, and ways of communicating employed across cultures in order to foster transcultural communication. I felt deeply misunderstood and began to seriously question my motives and efforts as a white, female scholar to recover “non-Western” rhetorics.
At the same time, in the course I was taking a course from LWP, we spend a lot of time discussing semiotics, structuralism, and spent much time discussing the relationship between rhetoric and ideology, particularly that LWP perceived to be the hijacking of rhetoric by cultural studies and socio-epistemic rhetoric. In this class, we also spent a lot of time discussing theory as method and what it means to be a strong scholar in our field. LWP spent a lot of time discussing her own scholarly evolution, the larger goals she attempted to achieve as a philosopher in our field, and encouraged us to get to the root of what we were really interested in discovering about rhetoric and language during our life as a scholar. I realized here that at its deepest level, my academic purpose (presently conceived) was to spend my scholarly life trying to understand how non-discursive signs function rhetorically, make meaning, affect change, and afford agency in particular moments of use. Very much influenced by socio-semiotics and the methodological work being done in that field to trace the “life” of material objects, I wanted to devote my work in trying to understand, in other words, how material objects operate and affect change in various contexts.
In conjunction with this course, I was taking Collin’s course on methods. In this course, we learned about various methods one could use to study a particular site. We also learned how to read for method. I was very much influenced by Sanchez’s The Function of Theory in Composition Studies, in which he argued that composition studies theorists and instructors have adopted a rhetorico-hermeneutic disposition that “limits composition theory’s ability to characterize writing as anything more than a technology of representation, a means by which to either transmit or generate that which is considered noumenal, abstract or conceptual…” (3). This limited disposition, as I noted in my visual rhetoric exam, guarantees the reproduction of the philosophical/ideological insistence that ‘something else lurks behind the veil of writing, something that is the job of thought to perceive and writing to record or secure” (Sanchez 32). I saw Sanchez making the same argument as Louise that much of our field is obsessed with uncovering ideology and problematic representations. I realized that much of my own way of teaching and studying rhetoric was guilty of this same, limited way of doing rhetoric. I still acknowledged the importance of such work, especially in communities in which misrepresentation is still very much an issue; I just found myself really wanting to do something different. I learned in Collin’s class that our methods shape what we learn from our research; I wanted to, as Beam suggested, see and do rhetorical study in different ways to see what else I could learn about how visual /material rhetoric actually functions and affects change in specific rhetorical contexts. I began, in other words, to really think about new modes of questioning and positioning ourselves in relation to our texts.
Our major assignments in Collin’s course were to trace the methods being used in two or three articles and to develop a research portfolio in which we imagined what different methods we might use to study one particular site and to articulate how that method might be enacted and what insights it might afford. For my methods analysis essay, I traced the methods used in a collection of essays that employed a socio-semiotic perspective to study material rhetorics. I saw potential significance in tracing the “social life” of a material object and the actual rhetorics that circulated around the production and distribution of specific material objects. These scholars were using discourse analysis, ethnography, phenomenological approaches and empirical coding methods to trace the actual rhetorical effects material objects create in specific contexts. Rather than simply analyzing the strategies at work within material objects that created potential to affect change, these scholars were actually documenting actual changes that the material objects afforded. They were also tracing the different uses of one material object.
This project made me realize that I could study material objects differently to locate their rhetorical effects and that maybe the tracing I was doing with the warporn actually had some valuable merit. I saw that I didn’t simply have to rely on rhetorical analysis and interpretation. In my research portfolio, I tried to imagine different methods for studying the tapestries of a Peruvian weaver, whose work I was interested in. After writing this essay, I spoke to Collin about my work, and he pointed out that I have a tendency, or might I say bad habit, to over-rationalize and exaggerate the potentiality of my own projects in addition to challenging the field to do things differently (aka—paradigm shifts). In other words, he pointed out that rather than making passionate pleas for the value of my work and its potential to reshape how we do things in our field, I simply need to let my work speak for itself and make its own contributions. I don’t have to carve out a space for myself in the field through passionate cause, in other words. I can let my work demonstrate its own importance. At the same time, we also further discussed my desire to study rhetoric differently than I had been and to find a methodology to actually demonstrate the powerful effects the material objects that I was interested in studying had in specific moments and across time. I told him about my work with warporn, and he seemed interested in what I was trying to do there.
The next semester, which was my last, I only needed to take two courses. My conversation with Collin described above influenced my decision to take an independent study with him on theories and philosophies of the visual. I also was taking a course with Iswari Pandey on Cross-Cultural Rhetorics. In my independent studies course, I began with Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, which really helped me see a fruitful direction my scholarship could take. I saw actor-network theory as a way to reposition material objects as social actors in a network of relations with human beings. Rather than passionately speaking about the rhetorical power of material objects, I saw a methodology for locating the actual effects that material objects as mediators enacted through their encounters and interactions with human beings.
That March, I was presenting my essay on Warporn that I had written in visual rhetorics course at a popular culture conference in San Francisco. I reworked my original argument, taking out much of the semiotic analysis and instead drew on Latour’s theory to ground the empirical research I had done to trace the actual effects warporn stimulated in terms of protest art, military policies, public debate, etc. I had being tracing those actual effects previously, but now I realized I had a theory to ground my work in. I felt as if actor-network theory was the rationale for what I intuitively wanted to do with my own rhetorical study.
In that same course, I also read WJT Mitchell’s What Pictures Want?, which was making a similar argument to Latour, in that we need to recognize the social agency that pictures have in the various collectives in which they assemble. I also recognized a similar argument being made about the need to let pictures speak for themselves; that scholars don’t have to assign meaning to pictures. Images such as Magritte’s Pipe have the power to theorize about themselves. In this text, Mitchell also situates images as a “subaltern,” whom have no voice to speak. This notion, in conjunction with Latour, made a significant impact on my view about the role of interpretation in rhetorical analysis. I began to wonder about my project with the Moche burial practices. Was it methodologically responsible to assign that burial practice a precise rhetorical and epideictic value when I had no actual, empirical proof that they had that effect on particular audiences in that ancient context?
At the same time of taking this independent study, I was taking a course on cross-cultural rhetorics with Iswari and reading LuMing Mao’s arguments about the need to study rhetoric on their own terms and in their own contexts. We were also reading George Kennedy’s Comparative Rhetorics, which I already knew was problematic but realized for the first time, with the help of Iswari, that situating ancient Moche burial practices in epideictic terms was itself problematic. How, Iswari pressed me, could I situate ancient Moche burial practices on their own terms? How, I asked myself, could I let those practices speak for themselves? How could they demonstrate their own agency to us? Could I really rely on the suppositions of Western archaeologists’ interpretations ground my entire argument about their rhetorical efficacy?
For my final seminar paper in Iswari’s course, I reworked my entire Moche article, abandoning the argument about the burial practices’ epideictic role. Instead, I proposed that when studying non-verbal cultural artifacts from beyond the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, we listen to the embodied discourse in the ancient practices themselves to un-cover the rhetorical actions of those very practices. Extending W.J.T. Mitchell’s theory that images have a meta-language of their own, I argued that if we listen close enough, we can hear those artifacts speak to us and render the terms with which we can begin to un-cover their rhetorical actions. To illustrate this point, I described the ritual symbolic construction of the burial chambers evident in the intentional placement of certain artifacts such as human bodies, earthenware, and gold and silver ornaments. I argued that these tombs are a rhetorical genre in and of themselves, which constitute the Moche rhetorical actions of duality, concealment, and inversion. I drew on Moche studies scholars to demonstrate what purpose a rhetorical analysis of these ancient cultural practices might reveal. However, I then interrogated my own rhetorical analysis and ultimately argued that we must practice self-restraint in assigning rhetorical meaning to those rhetorical acts. As rhetorical scholars drawing on archaeology and history to help un-cover pre-Columbian rhetorical traditions, I advocated and even lauded the move in the field of rhetoric and composition to embrace and theorize the genre of these rich rhetorical traditions; however, rather than jump quickly into assigning the purpose and meaning of these ancient rhetorical traditions, I suggested that we move slowly and carefully and let them demonstrate to us their actual rhetorical functions.
To gain a sense of where my current interests are, it is important to understand that the objective of this article was not primarily to recover ancient Moche burial practices—although that certainly is a secondary objective. The main objective is methodological in nature, as evident in the title PRACTICING METHODS IN ANCIENT CULTURAL RHETORICS: UN-COVERING RHETORICAL ACTION IN MOCHE BURIAL RITUALS. I am ultimately concerned with the methods we use to study material rhetoric. I do not buy into the notion that everything in the world is a “text,” which can be accessed through the same means as we access print and oral language. I believe as Mitchell says that pictures “want equal rights with language,” not to be considered the same as language. Consequently, in order to understand how visual/material objects operate and function rhetorically, they need to be studied in different ways than we study print or oral language. I see my work as potentially contributing productive ways to study visual/material rhetorics.
In my major exam in the global and ethnic rhetorics, I wrote about the shift I see in our field toward attending to the ways in which rhetoric is defined, produced, and circulated in the global arena rather than just the national arena. I wrote much about the work being done in transnational feminist rhetorics and the attention given to the circulation of rhetoric across transnational borders. I also spoke about the growing awareness of how rhetorics produced across the globe have co-evolved alongside Euro-American rhetorics and how scholars are beginning to attend to material rhetorics produced across the globe as well as some of the emerging methodological tensions that arise from taking up this work. I also spoke about new emerging understandings of rhetoric in spacio-temportal terms; yet really did not fully understand the implications of even my own claim.
In my historiography exam, I wrote in part about how revisionary scholarship is moving us away from thinking of “speakers” in terms of rhetoric altogether. As revisionary scholarship recovers the rhetorical practices of writers, singers, artists, and craftswomen, all of whom produce rhetoric through different means than traditional notions of speech, the “I say,” in other words, which has historically grounded rhetoric, has now become “I write,” “I sing,” “I inscribe,” “I weave,” “I needlepoint” Therefore, whereas once “speaker” was the most convenient terms for referring to those that produce rhetoric, more pluralistic concepts and theories of the rhetor are reshaping the way we talk about rhetorical actors. Some revisionist scholars, such as myself, are even giving agency to non-human objects, which if investigated as one actor among others in a complex network of communication, reveal the potential to speak on their own terms and affect change through persuasion. Rather than “speakers,” however, cultural material objects, in Bruno Latour’s terms, can be thought of as mediators that have the agency to produce rhetoric and shape culture in their own right.
In that same exam, I also wrote about the changing nature of how we define “text” and also that while “text” and “form” connotates discrete, fixed, verbal acts of communication, much of the discourse now being used in revisionary scholarship in leiu of texts such as “symbolic behaviors,” “action,” and “processes” connotates performative and moving acts or events of rhetoric. This discourse, I pointed out, reveals an emerging attention to the movement or circulation of rhetorics, which revisionary scholarship is just beginning to attend to (See Goggin, Tolar Collins). I also pointed out how the notion of rhetorical context or situation is being complicated by scholars attending to spatiality and embodiment. I was thus very interested in altering notions of how our environment and our bodies located within our environments shapes conceptions and studies of rhetoric.
In my comprehensive exam for my minor in theories and philosophies of the visual, I attempted to articulate how a postphemenological perspective might offer a productive way to reposition ourselves into relations with objects so that we can begin to see them in a different light. Jenny Edbauer’s articles was instrumental in deepening my understanding that material/visual rhetorics circulate in various rhetorical ecologies and that there is a need to account for the fluidity and circulation of rhetoric as it is embedded in the “ongoing social flux” that constitutes society (See Unframing Models of Public Distribution”). As she draws on Nedra Reynolds, L.W. Phelps, and others to demonstrate, rhetoric is not a fixed site but rather a “process of distributed emergence and…circulation” (my 6). My burning methodological question after reading this article and thinking more deeply about the implications of this conceptual understanding of rhetoric became: How can we trace this process of distributed emergence and circulation so that we can account for the fluidity and circulation of rhetoric as it weaves in and out of complex associations with other actors in specific collectives? And what conceptual tools can we develop to help us account for the postphenomenological phenomena we encounter?
I see this inquiry as the current driving force of my dissertation research. It is a question I am interested in for several reasons. One, on a personal level, seeking the answer affords me the possibility to study visual/material rhetorics differently than I have done thus far. Rhetorical analysis of a discrete, fixed object will not suffice for investigating rhetoric conceived as process. Other methods must be utilized to trace the process in action. Two, and more importantly to the field, different methods used to study rhetoric affords different insights into rhetoric. Our field has been pushing for us to diversify our methodological study of rhetoric for some time because we can learn new things about rhetoric and/or gain a different perspective about rhetoric by altering our habits of study. Developing a methodology to trace rhetoric as a process of distributed emergence and circulation affords the potentiality to deepen our understanding of rhetoric itself.
Three, as Arjun Appadurai makes clear in his introduction to The Social Life of Things, things–as the stuff of material culture–have social lives. And as anthropologist Igor Kopytoff makes clear, things move through different phases in their social life—they weave, in other words, in and out of rhetoricity. Take Mannie Garcia’s photograph of President Obama, then Senator Obama, taken in April of 2006, which I have been tracing for the last few weeks. This picture “acquired” by AP Press originally functioned as a news photo documenting George Clooney’s meeting at a National Press Club Event with Senator Obama and Brumback about his recent observations made during a trip to Darfur. While this picture played this particular role on numerous on-line news sources, it also appeared on entertainment blogs and provided evidence of the humanitarian and political work Clooney was doing. In addition, the picture appeared on other on-line news sources to show contrast between the presidential candidates and websites devoted to informing the public about presidential election candidates.
This image also digitally and rhetorically transformed into a poster developed by Sheppard Fairey who had acquired Obama support to create the image. Three hundred and fifty posters of the image with the word “Progress” were sold for $40 as a screen-printed, grassroots poster on Fairey’s ObeyGiant website and another 350 were distributed by Fairey et al. on the street. With the money generated from sales of that poster, another 4,000 posters of the image with the word “Hope” (one of which I own) were printed and distributed at political rallies around the country before Super Tuesday. From there, as Fairey says, the poster went viral, meaning it began to take on a life of its own. The image appeared as facebook images, email signatures, and on MySpace pages. It showed up printed on paper in people’s offices and began to replicate itself. The initial “Hope” posters also acquired exchange value and began to sell on the internet for $2000-$6000 dollars.
The social life of what I call the Obama Hope image is just a very, very small fraction of its life in circulation. Among other things, that image transformed into other political posters used directly by the Obama compaign, stickers, t-shirt; acquired a space in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; landed on haute-couture dresses for women; and gained iconic status in less than a two year span. Today, that image is embroiled in a lawsuit between AP Press and Fairey over copyright infringement. It also stimulated was in known as the Obama Poster Mystery Case, in which several actors around the country sought out the original photograph appropriated by Fairey, which was not known to by Garcia’s photo for a long time. (By the way, the Mannie Garcia photograph is now selling for $1200 in a gallery in NYC and has thus transformed itself in terms of genre and purpose as well.)
As you can see from this small glimpse alone, the tracing of the Mannie Garcia image and the Obama Hope image has the potential to make visible the distributed emergence and circulation of rhetoric in various networks of association, which is not a linear and entails a complex history of relations with various actors and functions, some of which are rhetorical and some of which would be categorized as aesthetic, expressive, exchange, capital, just to name a few. Also potentially made visible through tracing the image are the actual diverse, rhetorical effects the image stimulated in the process of distributed emergence and circulation.
Another case study I am interested in is tracing the life of an artifact from the ancient Moche culture in use before and while it assembled in the Lord of Sipan burial chamber as well as its life after it was uncovered from the earth over a thousand years later. This could be useful for tracing rhetorical history as it unfolds across time and culture…and coevolves alongside and in interactions with other social actors. Genre does not fluctuate here. But location, time, culture, and use does. This case study could demonstrate how we can follow material objects as they experience various phases of their lives, some of which are rhetorical and others of which are not. Tracing an object as it moves through various phases of its life demonstrates that while not all material objects are rhetorical at all moments of their social lives, they do become rhetorical in specific assemblages as they interact with other human and non-human artifacts.
Of course, I am really just beginning to think through ideas here, but I think such a methodological project has the potential to make significant contributions to emerging discussions in our field about the circulation of rhetoric, which despite recent attention by Trimbur, Edbauer and others has largely been undertheorized. I also believe that this methodology has the potential to contribute to contemporary discussions about rhetorical historiography. Inquiries that arise for me include: Why have the social histories of material objects such as these iconic images been largely left out of rhetorical history in our field? How might attending the history of material rhetorics emerging and circulating in a complex network of associations with human and other non-human actors alter the way we tell history in our field? How can we begin to provide a more complex history of rhetoric that more fully acknowledges the role material/visual rhetorics play throughout history?
Lastly, I have been thinking a lot about Mitchell’s identification of pictures as “subalterns” who and Walter Mignolo’s argument that denial of coevalness is at the foundation of modern, Eurocentric thought, from which, as the master locus of enunciation, writing and universal history was argued to have evolved. And that by denying coevolutionary histories and writing processes, colonial expansion and the civilizing mission was and still is warranted from the Eurocentric and now Americentric perspective (Darker 329). I wonder if there is room to play with the implications of denying the denial of the coevalness of material/visual rhetorics as a theoretical framework in some regard. What use, in other words, would the methodology I am hoping to create serve in making visible the coevalness of material rhetorics? As mentioned before, I have been thinking a lot lately of the circulating life of the artifacts in the Moche burial chambers, some of which began as ornamental dress, transformed into markers of class and identity and potentially and politically motivated actions, then after being buried for over a thousand of years, came to life again as commodities, educational tools, art, and artifacts, and sites of analysis for a host of academic disciplines.
Also, in terms of the subaltern status of visual/material rhetorics, I am interested in developing a methodology and way of writing about visual/material rhetorics that does not perpetuate their subaltern status. I recently stumbled upon No Caption Needed by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. Interestingly, they trace the ways in which iconic images– such as Dorthea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” “Times Square Kiss,” and the image of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima—have been produced, circulated, and appropriated in attempt to show the role icons play in shaping public culture. More specifically, they aim to demonstrate how tracing the transformation of icons can elucidate how photographs “fulfill several functions in U.S. public life” (7)—namely, “reproducing ideology, communicating social knowledge, shaping collective memory, modeling citizenship, and providing figural resources for communicative action” (9). By demonstrating how iconic images are social actors on their own right with “no caption needed” to affect change in U.S. public culture, they hope to join DeLuca, Peeples, and others who attempt to show just how powerful visual rhetorics are in shaping our democracy. In terms of achieving their own rhetorical purpose, I do think they succeed in demonstrating how iconic photographs are complex individuals that “occupy multiple subject positions and identities” (Mitchell’s What 47) and play an active role in shaping our culture as they assemble and circulate in society. However, even as Hariman and Lucaites reveal the complex lives of iconic images, they assign rhetorical agency through interpretation to the icons rather than let the iconic images speak for themselves with “no caption needed.” In addition, in Latour’s terms, throughout their analyses, Hariman and Lacaites slip into situating icons as intermediaries rather than mediators—a move that creates an assymetrical relation between humans and non-humans in a network of associations and thus reifies the state of “alterity” and “inferiority” to which images have been assigned for so long in our field.
In my dissertation, I want to draw on actor network theory and employ a variety of qualitative methods to trace the rhetorical lives of visual icons and other material objects to make visible how things actually do play an active, symmetrical role in affecting public change within specific networks of associations and without perpetuating their subaltern status as intermediaries. I want to give serious attention to thinking about rhetoric in temporal terms–as a process of becoming. Too often, even when we think of rhetoric in ecological terms, the spatial logic or our spatial perspective of rhetoric overshadows our understanding of rhetoric’s temporality. What gets lost when we think of rhetoric in spatial rather than temporal or spacio-temporal terms? What would it mean to look at rhetoric in temporal terms? How does think about rhetoric in temporal terms alter the way we understand rhetorical history? These are some of the questions I want to attend to….
This dissertation, obviously, in and of itself is a process of becoming….I am curious to see how it will unfold…
I think what is difficult for me here is to think about what I can and cannot accomplish in next 15 months and how to frame such a project in ways that situate this project in our field in the most useful ways. I think you will all be glad to hear that I have given up notions of changing the entire field’s way of studying rhetoric. (I promise not to use the word “paradigm shift” in my dissertation; I know you would never let me anyway. Hah!) I simply want my work to make a small methodological contribution to the study of material/visual rhetorics, historiography, and rhetorical theory and show that, as Carl Beam taught me, “there is more than one way to view rhetoric and not be threatened.” I am looking for suggestions and guidance obviously…
