Available Means of Persuasion, The. David M. Sheridan
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they are available, affordable, and easy-to-use. These are questions that pertain to the infrastructural accessibility of a given rhetorical form. Alternatively, we might ask whether or not 3D rhetoric can accommodate the kind of persuasive strategies (e.g., arguments from pathos, ethos, and logos) that we desire. These questions pertain to the semiotic potentials of the rhetorical form. We might also ask whether or not 3D rhetoric is valued in the personal, academic, professional, and public contexts within which we hope to succeed. These questions pertain to the cultural position of the rhetorical form. Finally, we might ask whether or not teachers trained in the field of writing properly have any business teaching 3D rhetoric. If 3D rhetoric is to be taught at all, shouldn’t it be taught by engineers and industrial designers? These questions pertain to the practices of specialization associated with a given rhetorical form. We argue that these topoi or commonplaces can help open up kairotic opportunities for stakeholders.
While the heuristic we offer can be used in specific rhetorical contexts, we see it as most useful in generating broader inquiries and dispositions pertaining to the design of curricular structures (e.g., syllabi, courses, programs) and co-curricular structures (e.g., multiliteracy centers, humanities computing labs, living-learning communities) that might facilitate a robust praxis of multimodal public rhetoric. But rhetors working in specific situations will require more concrete strategies to facilitate what Jeffrey Walker calls “kairotic inventiveness”—strategies that form the focus of chapter 3 (49). Based on our reading of several cases of rhetorical intervention, we argue that kairotic considerations need to include questions that emerge before the rhetor commits to words on paper as well as questions that pertain to what happens after the composition is complete. Before they commit to words on paper, rhetors need to consider a wide range of options, including written and spoken words, moving and still images, music, ambient noises, color, typography, layout, diagrams, charts, graphs, and more. Rhetors also need to anticipate and plan for the way their compositions can be reproduced and distributed after those compositions are complete. A color photograph might work well on a webpage, but might be totally ineffective as part of a brochure that is destined to be reproduced using a cheap black-and-white photocopier. These considerations of reproduction and distribution force us to reconfigure existing models of rhetorical invention. We go one step further, arguing that rhetors not only need to anticipate reproduction and distribution, but to involve themselves in processes of reproduction and distribution.
The multiple and related shifts we explore in this chapter—from alphabetic rhetoric to multimodal rhetoric, from composition to circulation, from the discursive to the material—ultimately lead us to conclude that rhetors need to see themselves as part of a larger web of considerations that include audience, exigency, modes, media of production, media of reproduction and distribution, infrastructural resources, other collaborators, and other compositions. Rhetors participate in complex networks of human and nonhuman actors. We draw on and reconfigure Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar’s understanding of the rhetor as “point of articulation” to capture the rhetor’s participation in this complex network (263).
In chapter 4 we continue our exploration of how rhetorical compositions circulate. We introduce the term rhetorical velocity to account for the speed and direction of compositions as they travel through material-cultural spaces. Related to rhetorical velocity is the concept of rhetorical recomposition, which refers to the way compositions are reused by subsequent rhetors. Our reading of three rhetorical interventions suggests that considerations of rhetorical velocity and recomposition inform the composing processes of successful rhetors. At the same time, rhetors never have full control over what happens to their texts once they enter into circulation.
Chapters 2–4, then, explore a number of complexities that are arguably overlooked by traditional rhetorical theory. In this reconfiguration, rhetoric is not a function of a single rhetor designing texts in response to exigencies and audiences. Instead, it emerges from a larger ecology: linguistic, aural, and visual semiotic resources; multiple technologies; multiple humans; multiple compositions and recompositions; multiple channels of reproduction and distribution. One risk of this ecological understanding of rhetoric is that rhetorical agency seems to evaporate. Rhetorical action is no longer the result of a rational autonomous subject who achieves a desired result by strategically adopting the right rhetorical techniques. Instead, it’s the uncertain outcome of a web of contingencies, many of which are beyond the control of a single rhetor. Indeed, at times rhetoric fails to happen, as the case of “Cotton Patch” suggests.
In chapter 5, therefore, we turn to the problem of rhetorical agency. We draw on discussions of agency that are informed by postmodern conceptions of subjectivity, ideology, and discourse to theorize the way agency “exceeds the subject” (Herndl and Licona 142). We then draw on actor-network theory to more deeply understand the way agency is distributed across networks of human and nonhuman actants. This reconfiguration of agency, however, has important implications for pedagogy. In the second half of this chapter, then, we explore ways rhetorical education might productively be transformed to address the challenges faced by rhetors as points of articulation, the challenges that result from orchestrating or “choreographing” (Cussins) multiple actors, multiple compositions, multiple modalities, and multiple infrastructural resources. How can we help students confront the challenges associated with rhetoric’s radically distributed nature?
Having explored the complex web of contingencies that surround processes of rhetorical invention, production, reproduction, and distribution, we focus our attention, in chapters 6 and 7, on the composition itself, seeking to understand the way the peculiar dynamics of multimodal rhetoric articulate with previous models of public rhetoric. We start by invoking traditions of rhetorical ethics. Kairos, after all, dictates that a rhetorical response be not just effective, but also fitting. In chapter 6 we explore distinctive ethical considerations that emerge in the context of multimodality, focusing on a particular multimodal composition used by the prosecution in the trial of Michael Skakel. We demonstrate the ways the particular dynamics of multimodality were exploited by the prosecution to create a “fabricated confession” (Santos, et al. 67). Based on cases like “Cotton Patch” and the Skakel case, we conclude that existing models of rhetorical ethics need to be reconfigured to account for multimodality. Moreover, if teachers want to encourage ethical practices in students, they will need to find ways for students to explore the ethical challenges distinct to multimodality.
As we explore rhetorical ethics, however, we want to avoid the narrow and limiting construction of public rhetoric that sometimes results from the “goal of reaching a rationally motivated agreement” (Habermas, Moral 88). Too often, public-sphere theorists sacrifice important communicative practices in the name of the “rational.” Pathos, visuality, and even rhetoric itself are often excluded in rigid and impoverished understandings of public discourse as rational-critical argument. In this narrow model, there is little room for multimodality to flourish.
In chapter 7, therefore, we explore an alternative model in which public rhetoric is conceived broadly as “the making of culture” (Spellmeyer 7) or “poetic world making” (Warner 114). In this model, rhetoric becomes “the mobilization of signs for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, communities, publics, and cultures” (DeLuca 17). As such, rhetoric is more than a rational-critical means of shaping public opinion. It fundamentally shapes our identities and the way we experience the world. We see this alternate model as a useful foundation for establishing a richer tradition of multimodal public rhetoric.
Finally, in chapters 8 and 9, we attempt to bring all of these strands together, to synthesize the various facets of our argument about the practice and teaching of multimodal public rhetoric. We offer a close reading of one large-scale rhetorical intervention—the D Brand (an attempt by a non-profit organization to rebrand Detroit)—that attends to all of the considerations we have been exploring. The D Brand, we suggest, takes seriously the task of poetic world making and offers compelling strategies for confronting rhetoric as complex ecology.
In chapter 9 we describe a particular approach to teaching multimodal public rhetoric that attempts to address the various concerns raised throughout the book. This approach attempts to provide students with an expanded understanding of kairos, with opportunities to make kairotic assessments of modes, media, and technologies of production, reproduction, and distribution. It asks them to think beyond single