What is (Material) Rhetoric?

Cynthia BatemanUniversity of South Carolina

Lines of Inquiry

•Is rhetoric, itself, material?

•Is it the study of a material’s rhetoric?

•Is it the study of material effects?

History

•How has the concept of material rhetoric been taken up by scholars thus far?

•Michael Calvin McGee’s “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric” (1982)

•Rhetoric as object, as social or political force

•“A theory of rhetoric can be legitimate only when measured...against the objects it purportedly describes and explains.”

•George Kennedy’s “A Hoot in the Dark” (1992)

•Rhetoric as force

•“Rhetoric...may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication.”

•Ronald Walter Greene’s “Another Materialist Rhetoric” (1998)

•“Rhetorical materialism”-a technology of deliberation (“logics of articulation”)

•Rhetoric as an activity that has multidimensional effects and is articulated in diverse and often unexpected ways

•Rhetorical Bodies (1999)- Jack Seltzer and Sharon Crowley, eds.

•“If the question of materiality has indeed been deferred in rhetoric, why is that so?”

•“How would a material rhetoric permit us to rethink what is, and what is not, the province of rhetoric?”

•Marita Gronnvoll’s “Material Rhetorics Meet Material Feminisms” (02/2013)

•Jeremy Packer and Stephen Crofts Wiley’s “Strategies for Materializing Communication” (03/2012)

•Matthew Bost and Ronald Walter Greene’s “Affirming Rhetorical Materialism: Enfolding the Virtual and the Actual” (2011)

Latest Works

•Hesse, Sommers, and Yancey’s “Evocative Objects: Reflections on Teaching, Learning, and Living in Between” (03/2012)

•Cooper’s “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted (02/2011)

•“Addressing Animals” Forum (2011)

•Hawhee and Holding’s “Case Studies in Material Rhetoric” (2010)

•Is matter persuasive? Is that persuasion rhetoric?

•How does matter perform rhetoric?

•Is it possible to discuss matter apart from the discursive?

•What might a rhetoric look like that considers the material and the discursive?

My Questions

Karen Barad•Agential realism- relata do not

precede relations but are the effects of intra-actions (the cutting together/apart of difference) within phenomena and are observation-dependent.

•Primary semantic units are not words but material-discursive practices.

Material-Discursive• “Materiality is discursive (i.e., material

phenomena are inseparable from the apparatuses of bodily production: matter emerges out of, and includes as part of its being, the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as discursive practices are always already material (i.e., they are ongoing material (re)configurings of the world)” (151-152).

•Specific material (re)configurings of the world through which “the determination of boundaries, properties, and meanings is differentially enacted” (148)

•Discursive practices are “boundary-making practices.”

•Discursive is inseparable from material

What is the discursive?

•“The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment... Neither is articulated/articulable in the absence of the other...” (152).

•Matter and meaning are mutually articulated.

Material-Discursive•Definition- causal agential intra-

actions through which matter is iteratively and differentially articulated [in the emergence of boundaries and meanings], reconfiguring the material-discursive field of possibilities in the ongoing dynamics of intra-activity that is agency (170).

Implications •Can we think about rhetoric as

Barad’s material-discursive practices?

•If so, then we cannot have an immaterial rhetoric.

•So, all rhetoric has always been material...material-discursive.

So What?•The term “material rhetoric(s)” is

redundant.

•We must approach any “object” of rhetorical study that has been, is being, or will be performed as simultaneously material and discursive.

AND•Rhetoric as material-discursive

practices situates rhetoric as the practices by which we cut together/apart the world (including ourselves). Rhetoric is ethico-onto-epistemological.

•Everything is rhetoric.

•We have a lot of work to do.

Thank You