Available Means of Persuasion, The. David M. Sheridan
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the Arts and Humanities. I am grateful to all of the many people who, over the past several years, have been willing to engage with me in conversation about the issues we take up in this book. I’m reluctant to name names, for fear of leaving someone out. I do, however, want to say a special word of thanks to Bump Halbritter, Bill Hart-Davidson, John Monberg, and Terese Monberg, who read early drafts of various portions of this book and provided useful feedback. Additionally, I would like to thank Ann Folino White for graciously sharing her research on “Cotton Patch,” an example of multimodal public rhetoric that we discuss in the introduction. I am indebted to Adam Sheridan for drawing my attention to Bruno Latour’s “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” I would like to thank Mark Sleeman for agreeing to share the SearchMTR materials we discuss in chapter 9. Finally, thanks to my coauthors and to my family for putting up with me throughout the process of writing this book. I know I wasn’t always easy to deal with. —D.M.S.
When I was a MA student at Michigan State University, I started to argue and pick fights with Dave Sheridan. These arguments were some of the most productive and enjoyable moments of my graduate experience and this book is a record of some of them. I’m thankful to Dave for taking the time to argue with the younger version of myself and guiding the transformation of those discussions into this book. I’m also indebted to my graduate faculty at Michigan State, specifically Julie Lindquist, Malea Powell, Jeff Grabill, Dean Rehberger, Dànielle DeVoss, Bill Hart-Davidson, and Ellen Cushman, as well as my undergraduate mentors Libby Miles and Bob Schwegler. Their mentorship and support has been a constant source of strength for me. I would also like to acknowledge my life partner Janice Fernheimer for her love, encouragement, and sense of humor during the duration of this project. Janice, thank you. —J.R.
It would be impossible to locate the moment when our collective work on this book began, let alone the many people who have supported me in the process. I am particularly grateful to David Sheridan, the architect of this project, and Jim Ridolfo, who, as both rhetorician and activist, inspired it. In addition, I owe a debt of gratitude to the many faculty, students, and staff at the institutions where I have been fortunate enough to work over the past ten years, including Michigan State University, California State University, Fresno, and Avila University. I am particularly grateful to the faculty and students with whom I worked for four amazing years at Fresno and over the past five years at Avila. While there is not adequate space to name all of the people who deserve my gratitude, I would be remiss if I did not make mention of a few people without whose extraordinary generosity I would never have had the opportunity to do the kind of work I love so much. I am particularly indebted to Daniel Mahala who introduced me to the field of composition and rhetoric almost two decades ago and who has had no small impact on the work in this book. I am also grateful Dean Rehberger, Diane Bruner, Rick Hansen, Jody Swilky, Jeff Myers, and the members of the “Rhetoric Society” at California State University for their enduring support and intellectual generosity. Finally, this work would not have been possible except for the love, encouragement and support of my parents, Anthony N. and Leone L. Michel, and my two beautiful children, Leo and Kate. —A.J.M.
We are grateful for permission to reprint portions of this book that were previously published in “Kairos and New Media: Toward a Theory and Practice of Visual Activism.” Enculturation 6.2 (2009): n. pag. and “‘The Available Means of Persuasion’: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric.” JAC 25.4 (2005): 803–844 (Reprinted in Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric, and Culture in a Posthuman Age. Ed. Lynn Worsham and Gary Olson. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008. 61–94).
Introduction
The ‘magic’ of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, film making, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production.
—Mark Poster
First Things First
In 1964, something remarkable happened: a small segment of the culture industry decided to revolt. This group of “graphic designers, photographers and students” signed a “manifesto” calling for a “reversal of priorities” (Garland 154, 155). Entitled “First Things First,” this manifesto notes that the “skill and imagination” of creative professionals is typically harnessed for ridiculously trivial matters, “to sell such things as: cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorer, striped toothpaste” and other frivolous products (154). Thirty-six years later, a revised version of “First Things First” was published in various professional venues, such as AIGA, Émigré, and Adbusters. The revised text is more philosophical, proclaiming that
Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse. (Adbusters)
The authors of the manifesto propose “a reversal of priorities,” in which designers and other cultural workers eschew commercial discourses “in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication” (Adbusters).
The FTF statement draws attention to a key problem: that we are immersed in discourses produced by technically proficient and highly creative culture workers whose talents serve media institutions that are ultimately interested in profit. To address this problem, the FTF authors recommend revolt. Graphic designers, illustrators, videographers, scriptwriters—all of the specialists responsible for producing commercialized discourse should simply opt out, should refuse to place their talents in service of capital. This is an admirable response as far as it goes. The problem is that it assigns responsibility to a small group of highly trained specialists (cultural workers) and fails to address the larger structures of power in which those specialists are embedded.
This book is about a different solution. We propose that instead of leaving the work of cultural production to graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, videographers, and other creative specialists, this work should be considered the proper domain of ordinary people. In making this proposal, we attempt to connect the possibilities associated with multimodality to traditions in composition that emphasize, in Rosa A. Eberly’s words, the “praxis of rhetoric as a productive and practical art” (“Rhetoric” 290). Eberly argues that deploying a pedagogy founded on such an approach “can be a radically democratic act” and “can form collective habits” which in turn “can be experienced as pleasurable” and “can sustain publics and counterpublics—on campus and beyond campus” (290, 294). In this book, we argue for a more substantial integration of multimodal rhetoric into our collective public-rhetorical habits. As multiply-situated subjects positioned within various and overlapping publics and counterpublics, we contend that ordinary rhetors should appropriate the rhetorical tools of graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, and videographers in order to assume responsibility for the production of culture.
As Nancy Fraser observes, historically disenfranchised groups have the most at stake in addressing the problem of commercialized media. “In stratified societies,” Fraser observes, “unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles” (64). These inequalities are compounded by the fact that for-profit media control the conversation:
the media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit. Consequently, subordinated social groups usually lack equal access to the material means of equal participation. Thus, political economy enforces structurally what culture accomplishes informally. (64–65)
Fraser introduces the idea of multiple “subaltern counterpublics” as an alternative to the singular and exclusive liberal bourgeois public sphere outlined by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (67, 79).1 Subaltern counterpublics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities,