Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being

Conclusion: Movement, Heidegger’s Silence, Disclosure

271 ibegan this book discussing terroir, a French term describing not simply ground or soil but the close-knit relation among grapevines, the earth, and cultivation techniques that imparts a unique quality to a wine (as the French have it, le goût du terroir, the taste of place). I even sketched, in germinal form, how terroir gathers the fourfold (earth, sky, divinities, and mortals) and stays them in the wine. Terroir remains an excellent example of ambient rhetoric actualizing worldly affectability. The “taste” of place arises not from a point of view or worldview about the essential contributions of place, production, and experience but from a way of life c o n c l u s i o n movement, heidegger’s silence, Disclosure Something calls to me— The trees are drawing me near I’ve got to find out why Those gentle voices I hear Explain it all with a sigh —The Moody Blues, “Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)” A delicate tissue of ethicality runs through the marrow of being. There is no getting away from ethics—mattering is an integral part of the ontology of the world in its dynamic presencing. Not even a moment exists on its own. “This” and “that,” “here” and “now,” don’t preexist what happens but come alive with each meeting. . . . If we hold on to the belief that the world is made of individual entities, it is hard to see how even our best, most well-intentioned calculations for right action can avoid tearing holes in the delicate tissue structure of entanglements that the lifeblood of the world runs through. . . . Meeting each moment . . . is an ethical call. —Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 272 conclusion that emerges over several centuries across numerous constituencies. The agents involved include grapes, wines, consumers, writers, chefs, farmers, producers, restaurants, lawmakers and laws, and more. This ensemble of entities forms a material-social-hermeneutic ecology, that is to say, a way of life spoken through an evolving sensibility to the mutuality of meaning and materiality (see Trubek 18–44). Further, it well exemplifies not just the vitality of place but how the most dynamic practices emerge from a profound respect and even reverence for what we do not know and cannot predict. As I have shown, this mantra was prominent in Heidegger’s work, and it is prominent in the deep ecology movement: to shepherd, care for, and even nourish what we do not know. This attitude takes form in perhaps the key mantra of contemporary environmentalism, a point that was continually at work in chapter 8, on automobiles, which is that one can never do just one thing; there are always unknowable consequences for every action, multiplied across the complex webs of interdependence that constitute the world (Thiele, Indra’s viii, 21–23). Yet here, at the end of the book, I wish to emphasize a countercurrent that I have been developing alongside these ideas concerning how we dwell. In elevating terroir as an example of sustainable practices closely knit to the land, I might seem to be advocating if not rustic at least rooted kinds of communal life. Where, in other words, do we see advocacy of movement and change, hybridity and otherness? And in critiquing the automobile, with mobility written into the word, I again seem to side with immobility, with slowness, with staying in place. Such a position can appear to resurrect rustic nostalgia, to say no to technological advance, to advocate an odd conservativism. Falling into this mindset certainly poses a danger, as does, even worse, imposing this rootedness on the earth itself, as if it calls us to a place, so that a people forms by deriving some originary and fundamental identity and life tied to that place. This kind of formation, of course, is implicit in the politics of blood and soil, particularly the horrors of fascism. But look more closely at the example of terroir. Here is an important anecdote: in the late nineteenth century, a tiny destructive insect known as phylloxera, picked up by European botanists bringing back vine samples from the Americas, established itself in catastrophic numbers across Europe , especially in France, wreaking great devastation. Over two-thirds of European vineyards were destroyed, and the European wine industry was brought to its knees. (The emerald ash borer recently served a similar role in the United States; the “Don’t move firewood, it bugs me” bumper stickers constitute a response to the problem of this nonnative pest’s ability...