This essay redefines rhetoric in a manner that takes seriously the suasory character of matter-energy. Specifically, rhetoric is defined as the capacity of the thing-symbol—via its aesthetic qualities and signifying practices—to generate affect and discourse, whose intertwined sensory and cognitive processing elicit presence and meaning effects in a particular space-time. After charting and explaining the key relations among the constituent elements that comprise this conception of rhetoric, the advantages of studying rhetoric’s materiality in critical practice are discussed.

Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them.... Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.