Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics. Amy Propen
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Memorial.
Within the context of her study of these five memorials, which she sees as “not necessarily representative of all memorials” but rather as able to reveal unique ideas about material rhetoric, Blair poses five questions that help to redefine what counts as a text (24). She asks, for example: “(1) What is the significance of the text’s material existence? (2) What are the apparatuses and degrees of durability of displayed by the text? (3) What are the text’s modes or possibilities of reproduction or preservation? (4) What does the text do to (or with, or against) other texts? (5) How does the text act on people?” (30). Blair describes the ways in which a text’s physical composition will affect its durability, vulnerability, and possibilities for modes of preservation and reproduction. She compares, for example, the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) with the relative vulnerability of the fabric of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and the types of spaces engendered by the types of interactions that each invites. She also describes also how the use of black granite has become appropriated and has subsequently been reproduced indirectly in other memorials. For instance, to best understand the Kent State Memorial (KSM), it is first necessary to know that the VVM is composed of black granite. At the KSM, visitors follow a prescribed path of black granite into the memorial. The black granite composition of the KSM implicitly describes the shootings as embedded within the context of the Vietnam War. The physical composition of the VVM, then, not only becomes prerequisite knowledge for understanding the KSM but also encourages an intertextual reading of it. Similar to the intertextual relationships between visual texts, such as that of the Iwo Jima and Ground Zero photos, one consequence of the appropriation of physical features of material texts is that they begin to develop their own textual and intertextual identities over time. Blair describes how our reading and bodily experience of material texts can shape our perceptions of the events they represent in ways that allow for a fuller understanding of the consequences of these events on the mind and body. By exploring the material aspects of a text’s durability, modes of reproduction, and visibility, Blair not only implicitly builds on the goals of visual rhetoric projects but also taps into the materialist language about discourse that has for so long been a missing component of rhetorical analysis.
The study of visual rhetoric, then, when also understood in light of the questions posed by material rhetorical analysis, has the potential to help illuminate the spatial components of texts, places, and other physical artifacts. The idea of a rhetorical approach that merges visuality and spatiality is greatly appealing, for as someone particularly attentive to the intersections of rhetoric and geography, I have often understood visual and material artifacts largely through both a rhetorical and a geographical lens—as discursive objects that facilitate spatial understanding, are situated in time and space, and make important claims to knowledge. 5 Again, visual and material artifacts may include physical sites such as factories, public monuments, or art installations that function commemoratively to reflect or perform particular cultural moments, often guiding both the mind and body toward specific interpretations. They can also include multimodal technological devices such as global positioning systems (GPS), which, through their physicality, use of audio and visual cues, and the cartographic texts they produce, can function rhetorically to make specific knowledge claims, influence bodily practices, or guide movements and decision-making. To understand visual rhetoric as also concerned with studies of space, the body, and materiality will, as I argue in this book, allow us to more fully understand the broader implications and consequences of the rhetorical work of visual artifacts in the world. In short, it will allow for a more inclusive understanding of the sort of work that projects of visual rhetoric can accomplish.
In this book, I aim to cast a brighter light on the important connections between visual rhetoric, material rhetoric, space, and bodies, in order to show the value of these connections within and beyond the field of rhetoric; ultimately, I aim to create a unique space for material rhetorics along the spectrum of what I envision to be a visual-material rhetoric. Again, when I refer here to rhetoric, I am describing the idea that texts, artifacts, and discourses are “partisan, meaningful, and influential,” to the extent that they have the capacity for consequence and may influence our understandings of specific contexts in ways that impact both the mind and body (Blair 72, “Reading”). Compatible with this notion, material rhetoric considers the text from the perspective of its relative durability and reproducibility, its ability to work with and against other texts, and most important, its ability to understand space and place as rhetorical and as affecting both the mind and body.
When I use the terms space and place in this book, I borrow from Michel de Certeau’s ideas about how a particular space is composed of mobile elements that are in constant motion and relationship with each other. Subsequently, the interactions of texts, artifacts, bodies, and discourses within that space constitute a more specific sense of place as they move and interact with and against each other within particular contexts and configurations. Given this understanding, place may be viewed as happening within a space. Place, writes de Certeau, “is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions” (117). For example, the parks and public commemorative sculptures at the Lowell Mills National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts (the object of focus in chapter three of this book), may foster a specific sense of place largely because of the interpretation invited by their layout and constituted by the activities and movements of park visitors. Likewise, specific representations of the park as performed through the park map, or the features deployed within the map, may also be seen as constructing a more nuanced version of a place. To view a space as rhetorical, then, is to acknowledge the capacity for consequence borne out of the interaction of the texts, artifacts, bodies, and discourses deployed within it, and the sense of place engendered by those interactions. With these ideas in mind, this book progresses along a contextual continuum that explores and tests the value of visual-material rhetorics from three interconnected perspectives: that of the human body, the posthuman body, and the nonhuman body.
In chapter one, I begin by telling the story of visual rhetoric largely from the perspectives of geography and space. Specifically, I see visual rhetoric through the lens of critical cartography, a subdiscipline of cartography that sees geographic knowledge as tied to power relations, and understands mapping and the practices of visuality as informed by cultural contexts (Crampton and Krygier 11). Here, I situate visual rhetoric as able to help account for the spatial dimensions of texts, and I subsequently describe my understanding of space as rhetorical. I describe more specifically how maps function as rhetorical artifacts. Then, in order to better contextualize the intersections of visual rhetoric and critical cartography, I provide a brief analysis of Photo AS17–148–22727 (commonly referred to as photo 22727), the famous NASA photo of the whole earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972. As a visual artifact that functions as both iconic photograph and cartographic representation, an analysis of photo 22727 helps pave the road for a discussion of how visual rhetoric can be more attentive to the relationships between materiality, space, and the body. I then move on to identify some possible limitations in an understanding of visual rhetoric that does not explicitly consider a text’s influence on the body, and thus call for a mode of interaction with the text that more explicitly does so. Within the context of this call to action, I introduce Blair’s theory of material rhetoric in more detail and Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias, and I understand their ideas as providing a point of entry into a more embodied approach to visual-material rhetorics. As Katherine Hayles describes the concept, embodiment understands bodily experience as imbricated in and shaped by specific social, cultural, and temporal contexts (Posthuman). Because contextual experiences shape and perpetuate ways of knowing, embodiment may also be understood as contributing to embodied knowledge, or ways of knowing and discursive practices that are informed, perpetuated, and sustained by contextualized, bodily experience.
In chapter two, I take a closer look at discussions related more specifically to material rhetoric, situating among them Blair’s (1999) theory of material rhetoric and Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopias. Briefly put, a heterotopia may be understood as a heterogeneous, contested space that nonetheless includes identifying characteristics specific to that space. For example, the maps, green spaces, and sculptures at the Lowell Mills National Historical Park work with and against each other to represent and perform specific moments in Lowell’s history. Combining and extending the theoretical approaches of Blair and Foucault not only allows for an emphasis on spatiality as