Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being

Chapter 6. The Rhetorical Thing: Objective, Subjective, Ambient

191 Rhetoric has always dealt with things, which is to say that rhetoric has not ignored the material realm. The field’s historically predominant focus on rhetor, audience, and language may obscure this point, but contemporary rhetorical theory in particular attends to materiality. For instance, the field has firmly incorporated Marx’s notion of dialectical materialism and its attendant critique of ideology. In addition, substantial contemporary work has investigated technology, institutions, and bodies. Indeed, even the notion of materiality is increasingly thematized in its own right as worthy of direct scholarly attention (Biesecker and Lucaites, Kochin). But the problem has always been how and to what extent materiality itself matters. As a long tradition has had it, rhetoric, being one of the seven liberal arts and crucial for the formation of what we call the humanities, is most fundamentally an affair of human beings and their dealings. It is overwhelmingly discursive, a verbal art. So, yes, things matter, but as objects of concern for rhetoric or as part of the c h A P T e R 6 The Rhetorical Thing objective, subjective, Ambient Only when man becomes the subject do non-human beings become objects. —Martin Heidegger, Parmenides “Words and things” is the entirely serious title of a problem. —Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge Objects themselves, far from the insipid physical bulks that one imagines, are already aflame with ambiguity, torn by vibrations and insurgencies equaling those found in the most tortured human moods. —Graham Harman, Tool-Being 192 chapter six infrastructure shaping either how rhetoric is occasioned, pursued, and accomplished or, going further, how it comes into service of material conditions and infrastructures to shape human subjectivity (gender would be a particularly fraught example). In an odd chapter simply entitled “Things,”MichaelKochinexemplifiestheseaspectsofrhetoric’srelationto materiality and things by claiming, “That notorious pair, speech and deed, constitute the two linked means of showing things to be the way you say they are and making things be the way you say they are” (79). Words present things and have priority over them, to the extent, at least for Kochin, that we can speak of “making” and “being”: we can make things be the way we want to through language. Such a statement invokes, without arguing for, a representationalist theory of language and a social constructionist view of reality. Kochin never makes such claims directly; they manifest themselves through his erudite marshaling of the rhetorical tradition, and what we ultimately get is a dance between an assumed reality of things and an idealized sense of them achieved between people through language. Kochin’s words clearly illustrate how rhetoric relies on things yet nevertheless excludes them from having a role in how we conceive rhetoric . That is, in line with the opening epigraph from Foucault, the relation between word and thing is seen not as a serious problem but as an occasion for shoring up rhetorical doxa (Archaeology 49). To recognize this problem , moreover, is to see a further exclusion that operates on the idea that rhetoric works solely within a human province and therefore that things matter only insofar as they manifest themselves through human concerns, categories, and responses. Even more basically, such an exclusion emerges directly from our assumed theory of the relation of language to “reality,” an issue I addressed in terms of language via Burke and Heidegger in chapter 5. But it is still worth emphasizing here that the various dominant contemporary positions on this issue are themselves commonplaces: language either “reflects” a preexisting reality or is in some fashion integral to and efficacious for reality. Either language gives us access to things by naming and representing them correctly, or we recognize in some vital sense how it constitutes things, how it gathers and lays them out, making them available against the blue blooming buzz of an undifferentiated physis. Of course, these capsule descriptions are abstractions, and most of our theories find some modified position between the two poles. For instance, there are many permutations, most relatively untheorized, of a modified social constructionism that would grant the world its reality but insist that, for human beings, language is and must be the primary means of ac- the rhetorical thing 193MMM cess to the world. The notion that rhetoric is epistemic would be emblematic of this position to the extent that it puts knowledge in the driver’s seat. It would thus still be difficult to employ...