Points of Difference in the Study of More-than-Human Rhetorical Ontologies

For decades, rhetorical scholarship remained significantly concerned with human epistemology, or how rhetoric as a symbolic art constructs and defends knowledge about the world.¹ As Robert L. Scott famously argued, truth is “the result of a process of interaction at a given moment,” and rhetoric, then, “may be viewed not as a matter of giving effectiveness to truth but of creating truth.”² For a discipline concerned with the persuasive symbolic practices of human beings, an epistemic orientation to rhetorical studies offered productive affordances; it meant that humans imagine their future, construct their past, and relate to other geographies, cultures, and the self through rhetorical practices. Fields of scientific knowledge, including science and history, which otherwise made claims to objectivity, could be understood as shaped by a constellation of persuasive practices and rhetorical tropes.³ This perspective also buttressed critical practices: if knowledge remained tied to historical power relations, the critic could unpack that discourse to uncover its implications for human relations at a particular time and place.⁴ Other traditions, including the Burkean notion that language presents a terministic screen shaping human attention, reinforced the predominant epistemological focus of rhetorical theory and criticism.⁵

Inquiries into more-than-human rhetorical ontologies remained present, even if muted. Although rhetorical theory tended to maintain anthropocentric ontological principles, scholars nonetheless undertook efforts to rework the ontologies of rhetoric in a way that challenged such assumptions.⁶ George A. Kennedy, for instance, theorized rhetoric as a mode of energy, arguing rhetoric exists before speech in the evolution of species and is also present in the action of animals and plants.⁷ Richard A. Rogers indicated a theory of nature that resists human efforts to order its movements, critiquing constitutive approaches to communication that, while undermining essentialist positions that justified racist, sexist, and hetero-sexist practice, contributed to an overdetermination of cultural and discursive agency at the expense of nature’s liveliness.⁸ Debra Hawhee extended Kennedy’s work, emphasizing the rhetorical capacities of animals by drawing upon the insights of Aristotle, and Diane Davis outlined a responseability common to corporeal existence.⁹ Such efforts to theorize rhetorical ontology widened consideration of who and what participates in rhetorical relations, and in doing so, suggested the significance of ontological theorizing in a field that had largely assumed that the human, culture, and discourse remained at its center.

Currently, movements are under way in rhetorical studies and related fields that further this conversation, due in large part to the presence of object-oriented ontology (OOO), the new materialisms, and actor-network theory, all of which, in different ways, posit that the capacity to act rhetorically on others extends beyond the human or discourse and, in doing so, challenge and expand upon the tenants of the constructivist turn. In the remainder of this essay, I review four books that together outline the tensions at stake in such efforts to theorize more-than-human rhetorical ontologies. The first, Rhetoric, through Everyday Things, edited by Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle, combines theoretical arguments and detailed case studies to rethink rhetorical ontology in a way that is inclusive of nonhumans, including objects that are otherwise considered sentient and immobile. The second, Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers, builds connections between rhetorical theory and the nonmodern ontology and methodology of Bruno Latour. Third, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human, by...