Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics. Amy Propen
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rhetorics, but also provides the foundation for what I then call a visual-material rhetorical approach, one that not only accounts for the multimodal, spatially-situated artifact but is also mindful of its impact on the embodied subject. With these ideas in mind, the following three chapters work to better understand how a visual-material rhetorical approach that accounts for embodiment can illuminate the rhetorical situation, or more pointedly, how conceiving of visual-material artifacts as rhetorical and embodied reveals a more nuanced understanding of the particular moments, events, and debates—and the consequences of each—that these artifacts set out to represent.
In chapter three, I account for the impact of visual-material rhetorics on contextualized, bodily experience. I draw from a combination of observation, interviewing, and archival research to conduct a visual-material rhetorical analysis of the maps, wayfinding devices, green spaces, and public commemorative sculptures at the Lowell Mills Park. The chapter not only demonstrates how the park’s spatially-focused, cultural artifacts engage visitors and facilitate their navigational decision-making, but also how these artifacts reflect and perform the impacts of the mills on the lives of the Mill Girls who labored there in the early 1800s. I demonstrate how a visual-material rhetorical approach can help create room for more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the contexts in which these women lived and worked, thereby allowing audiences to engage with greater empathy in the lives and struggles of tangential groups, such as, in this case, the lives of the Mill Girls.
In chapter four, I again explore the ways in which visual-material rhetorics can help account for contextualized, embodied experience, this time considering the rhetorical actions of drivers who navigate their routes with the assistance of GPS devices. Drawing on interviews with GPS users, I explore the ways in which GPS technology helps mediate particular experiences, or how GPS users work with and against the technology to make purposeful decisions that sometimes foster, and sometimes constrain spatial understanding. In this sense, I see visual-material rhetorics as able to function in the service of advocacy—to function rhetorically in such a way that enhances informed decision-making and influences our capacity to understand our worlds. A visual-material rhetorical approach helps reveal the processes that shape these levels of interaction and their implications for the technologically-mediated, posthuman body. Hayles writes that we ought to understand the posthuman body as able to interact with information technologies without necessarily being seduced into “fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality”—that we must understand modes of being as inextricably linked to the material world (Posthuman 5). Likewise, for Collin Brooke, a posthuman rhetoric entails “a return to embodied information, [and] involves a revaluing of partiality” (791). Moreover, I would add that understandings of the posthuman body and the idea of a posthuman rhetoric need not be constrained solely to the consequences of rhetorical action on human animals. For, as Cary Wolfe notes, our understanding of the posthuman is also tied to larger issues of “nonhuman modes of being” (193). Given these views, then, understandings of the posthuman body may extend beyond human ways of knowing to the consequences of rhetorical action on nonhuman animals such as, for example, marine mammals, as chapter five helps show.
In chapter five, I show how a visual-material rhetorical approach can help advocate for the bodies of nonhuman animals who may otherwise be unable to advocate for themselves within a specific rhetorical context. Set within the context of a recent federal court case between the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), this chapter explores how the map, as an artifact of visual-material rhetoric, can function as a mediating device in policy-making, or as a persuasive tool in debates between institutions. In this case, the map functions rhetorically to illuminate competing knowledge claims about contested space in order to influence a contemporary debate about environmental policy and marine mammal protection, and advocate for nonhuman bodies who cannot be physically present in the setting of the debate. From a rhetorical perspective, then, I understand advocacy both as referring to the ways in which texts, artifacts, and discourses have the potential to promote new knowledge among certain groups or individuals, as well as support or promote the interests of tangential voices, underrepresented groups, or groups who may otherwise be unable to advocate for themselves within the setting of a particular debate.
Finally, chapter six concludes the book by considering how these three cases, when understood together, demonstrate the implications of visual-material rhetorics for the body, the posthuman body, and the nonhuman body. Viewed holistically, I show how these cases and the theories underpinning their analysis help demonstrate how visual-material rhetorics can illuminate the contexts that shape our various lived and embodied experiences. I discuss the implications of visual-material rhetorics for rhetorical analysis and understanding rhetoric as advocacy work, as well as consider future directions for research and undergraduate and graduate pedagogy. Subsequently, as I hope readers will find, visual-material rhetorics, when understood as embodied knowledge, can work across rhetorical situations in the service of advocacy to constitute a sustainable project of inquiry.
1 Visual Rhetoric and Spatiality
In this chapter, I tell the story of visual rhetoric largely from the perspective 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). A story is of course a subjective account, and I have been interested here in crafting a narrative that demonstrates how visual rhetorics, when considered through a geographical lens, can help account for the spatial dimensions of texts and artifacts, and subsequently allow for an understanding of space as rhetorical, and of rhetoric as spatial. After describing more specifically how maps function as rhetorical artifacts, I contextualize the intersections of visual rhetoric and critical cartography by providing a brief analysis of 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 not only helps situate visual rhetoric relative to critical cartography but also paves the way for a discussion of how visual rhetoric can be more attentive to the relationships between materiality, space, and the body. This discussion of visual rhetoric and spatiality, however, is a means to a greater end, for I link the two in order to suggest that there exist some possible limitations in an understanding of visual rhetoric that does not explicitly consider an artifact’s contextualized engagement with the body. I thus call for a visual rhetoric that more expressly accounts not only for a rhetorical artifact’s material and spatial components but also for its subsequent impact on the body. Within the context of this call to action, I introduce Blair’s theory of material rhetoric and Foucault’s theory of heterotopias, which, in chapter two, I then describe in more detail as helping constitute a sustainable theory of visual-material rhetorics that provides a point of entry into a more embodied rhetorical approach—one that can help demonstrate the value of visual-material rhetorics both within and beyond the field of rhetoric.
Visual Rhetoric as a Project of Inquiry
As described in the introduction, my interest in the intersections of rhetoric, visual studies, geography, and critical cartography has allowed me to arrive at an understanding of visual rhetoric compatible with what Cara A. Finnegan describes as “a project of inquiry, rather than a product” (“Review Essay” 244). Again, this conception allows for two related research trajectories within visual rhetoric (244). These trajectories function 1) to focus on the study of the artifact itself, and 2) to explore the significance of visuality for rhetorical theory. Finnegan feels we need to be more mindful of how the practices of visuality influence, affect, or shift understandings of rhetoric (245). Visual rhetorical analysis, she writes, “should recognize the influence of visual artifacts and practices, but also place them in the contexts of their circulation in a discursive field conceived neither as exclusively textual nor exclusively visual” (245).
The question of how to work analytically with visual artifacts should not be minimized, though at the same time it should not be cause for paralysis either. While scholarship in visual rhetoric has rightly begun to acknowledge the interplay of the verbal and the visual, moving past older references to the verbal/visual dichotomy1, acknowledgement of the interplay between textual, visual, and material ways of knowing does not make for a methodological