Читать книгу Available Means of Persuasion, The - David M. Sheridan - Страница 7

Introduction

The ‘magic’ of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, film making, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production.

—Mark Poster

First Things First

In 1964, something remarkable happened: a small segment of the culture industry decided to revolt. This group of “graphic designers, photographers and students” signed a “manifesto” calling for a “reversal of priorities” (Garland 154, 155). Entitled “First Things First,” this manifesto notes that the “skill and imagination” of creative professionals is typically harnessed for ridiculously trivial matters, “to sell such things as: cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorer, striped toothpaste” and other frivolous products (154). Thirty-six years later, a revised version of “First Things First” was published in various professional venues, such as AIGA, Émigré, and Adbusters. The revised text is more philosophical, proclaiming that

Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse. (Adbusters)

The authors of the manifesto propose “a reversal of priorities,” in which designers and other cultural workers eschew commercial discourses “in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication” (Adbusters).

The FTF statement draws attention to a key problem: that we are immersed in discourses produced by technically proficient and highly creative culture workers whose talents serve media institutions that are ultimately interested in profit. To address this problem, the FTF authors recommend revolt. Graphic designers, illustrators, videographers, scriptwriters—all of the specialists responsible for producing commercialized discourse should simply opt out, should refuse to place their talents in service of capital. This is an admirable response as far as it goes. The problem is that it assigns responsibility to a small group of highly trained specialists (cultural workers) and fails to address the larger structures of power in which those specialists are embedded.

This book is about a different solution. We propose that instead of leaving the work of cultural production to graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, videographers, and other creative specialists, this work should be considered the proper domain of ordinary people. In making this proposal, we attempt to connect the possibilities associated with multimodality to traditions in composition that emphasize, in Rosa A. Eberly’s words, the “praxis of rhetoric as a productive and practical art” (“Rhetoric” 290). Eberly argues that deploying a pedagogy founded on such an approach “can be a radically democratic act” and “can form collective habits” which in turn “can be experienced as pleasurable” and “can sustain publics and counterpublics—on campus and beyond campus” (290, 294). In this book, we argue for a more substantial integration of multimodal rhetoric into our collective public-rhetorical habits. As multiply-situated subjects positioned within various and overlapping publics and counterpublics, we contend that ordinary rhetors should appropriate the rhetorical tools of graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, and videographers in order to assume responsibility for the production of culture.

As Nancy Fraser observes, historically disenfranchised groups have the most at stake in addressing the problem of commercialized media. “In stratified societies,” Fraser observes, “unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles” (64). These inequalities are compounded by the fact that for-profit media control the conversation:

the media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit. Consequently, subordinated social groups usually lack equal access to the material means of equal participation. Thus, political economy enforces structurally what culture accomplishes informally. (64–65)

Fraser introduces the idea of multiple “subaltern counterpublics” as an alternative to the singular and exclusive liberal bourgeois public sphere outlined by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (67, 79).1 Subaltern counterpublics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (67). As many scholars have observed, subaltern counterpublics seek out a wide range of rhetorical practices as they oppose dominant discourses. For instance, in his contribution to The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, Houston A. Baker, Jr., explores the role of “music,” “spectacle,” and “performance” as tools for establishing publics and achieving the goals of the civil rights movement (19–22). Focusing “attention on issues of equality and justice,” according to Baker, requires “[r]adically new forms of visibility” (33–34).

The rhetorical practices Baker describes are not limited to the words-on-paper rhetoric that has historically characterized the writing classroom and the field of composition studies. Baker outlines an intensely multimodal, multimedial, multigeneric set of practices that exploit the full range of rhetorical potential available at any given moment. The question we want to ask is this: Is there a way for rhetorical education, as practiced in contemporary academic settings, to make itself relevant to the needs of rhetors who might want to use multimodal rhetoric in the various and overlapping publics and counterpublics within which they are situated? However, this question implies a prior question, one of rhetorical theory. An effective pedagogy will be one grounded in an effective model of how rhetoric happens. Therefore, the second question that occasions this book is, What, if any, revisions must be made to traditional models of public-rhetorical practice in light of multimodality?

Multimodal Rhetoric and the Public Turn in Composition

As we use the term, multimodal rhetoric refers to communicative practices that integrate multiple semiotic resources. Films, for instance, routinely integrate music, moving images, still images, spoken words, written words, gestures, facial expressions, and more. A multimodal composition does not achieve its rhetorical effects through simple addition (text + image + sound = message). The holistic effect of a multimodal text is achieved through, to borrow David Blakesley’s word, the “interanimation” of semiotic components, resulting in a whole that is decidedly greater than the sum of its parts (112). Focusing on multimodality, as Rick Iedema observes, “is about recognizing that language is not . . . at the centre of all communication” (39). Multimodality “provides the means to describe a practice or representation in all its semiotic complexity and richness” (39).

Multimodality is not new. Humans experience the world through multiple senses simultaneously, and practices of sociality (including rhetoric) have always reflected this. A speech delivered in a public forum is a complex performance that involves not just words, but gestures, facial expressions, intonation, and more; young Cicero was trained by a theatrical performer (Hughes 129).2 Nor is public oratory, which figures so prominently in stories that emphasize the Western evolution of rhetoric, the only ancient category of rhetorical production. Angela Haas, for instance, explores the American Indian tradition of wampum as a rhetorical form that prefigures what we now call “hypertext.” Haas writes, “[A] wampum hypertext constructs an architectural mnemonic system of knowledge making and memory recollection through bead placement, proximity, balance, and color” (86). Haas sees wampum as a “digital” rhetoric in the sense that it pertains to the fingers (or digits); thus, wampum is both visual and tactile (84).

Part of Haas’s purpose is to critique narratives that depict hypertext as a Western “discovery” (83). Mindful of Haas’s critique, we want to be careful in making any claims about the newness of the communicative practices facilitated by the networked personal computer and other digital technologies. New technologies build on earlier traditions even as they broaden rhetorical options. Consider the way the tradition of storytelling has evolved in recent years. In The Moth performance series, individuals tell stories in front of live audiences, as humans have always done. These stories are recorded, broadcast on public radio, and podcast on the Internet. Listeners access these stories on personal computers, car radios, smart phones, iPods, and more. The Moth, then, blends ancient (live performance), “old” (radio), and “new” (Internet podcast) media. Similarly, the artist David Hockney “paints” landscapes with his iPhone and iPad. These paintings have been widely distributed via email and the Web; they are also enlarged (using special software that prevents pixelation) and then printed in sizes suitable for traditional gallery shows (Gayford). Bathsheba Grossman uses computer-aided design (CAD) software to design sculptures, then “prints” hard copies of her designs. Grossman uses a direct-metal printing process that converts the digital designs to fully-formed, three-dimensional sculptures made of a steel-bronze alloy (see Grossman). In all of these cases, traditional forms of multimodal human expression (storytelling, painting, and sculpture) are produced, reproduced, and distributed via processes that fluidly incorporate ancient and contemporary practices, older and newer media.

A rich body of scholarship in composition and rhetoric explores the potentials of visual, aural, and multimodal rhetoric.3 Not too long ago, Cynthia Selfe warned that “[t]o make it possible for students to practice, value, and understand a full range of literacies . . . English composition teachers have got to be willing to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic. And we have to do so quickly or risk having composition studies become increasingly irrelevant” (“Students” 54). Emerging alongside this interest in multimodality is a renewed interest in public rhetoric. Some have even referred to a “public turn” (Weisser) or better yet, in honor of rhetoric’s roots in communal life, a “public return” (qtd. in Mathieu).4

These two major trajectories of conversation within composition-rhetoric and adjacent fields, however, do not often intersect. Many scholars explore the relationship between digital technologies and the public sphere, but these discussions tend to ignore the implications of multimodality. Discussions of “e-democracy” and “digital democracy” tend to focus on undifferentiated conceptualizations of “information,” “communication,” and “knowledge” without attending to the specific forms (aural, visual, alphabetic, etc.) this material takes. Katrin Voltmer, for instance, observes that “[w]ithout reliable information, it would be impossible for citizens to use their power effectively at election time, nor would they be aware of the problems and issues that need active consideration beyond voting” (140). Similarly, in their introduction to Digital Democracy, Barry N. Hague and Brian Loader provide a list “of the key features of interactive media that are claimed to offer the potential for the development of a new variety of democracy” (6). The list includes “Interactivity,” “Global network,” “Free speech,” “Free association,” “Construction and dissemination of information,” “Challenge to professional and official perspectives,” and “Breakdown of nation-state identity” (6). But there is no reference to multimodality (or associated concepts of visuality, aurality, multimediality, etc.) as one of the assets afforded by new media (for a similar list, see Hacker and van Dijk 4). In her recent study, Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web, Barbara Warnick provides a useful overview of how public rhetoric changes in light of the Internet. While Warnick alludes to the use of multimedia on the Internet, she does not explore the implications of this in any detail. Instead, she focuses on the categories of credibility, interactivity, and intertextuality. Even the New London Group, so instrumental in drawing attention to visual, aural, and multimodal literacies, is strangely silent on multimodality in its discussion of “changing public lives” (13–15).

On the other hand, discussions of multimodal (or, more typically, visual) rhetoric occasionally invoke the idea of a “public.” For instance, W. J. T. Mitchell devotes a chapter of Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation to “Pictures in the Public Sphere,” and Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites explore visual rhetoric and “public culture” in No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. These works, however, focus primarily on visual rhetoric that emerges from commercialized, professionalized, and centralized media channels. One example that Hariman and Lucaites examine, for instance, is the famous Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima photograph, but this photograph was taken by a professional photographer (Joe Rosenthal) employed by an official institution of the commercial media (Associated Press) and was distributed to the public through technologies of distribution owned by the commercial press (the AP wire service, newspapers, and other media). In this vision, public conversation is driven by centralized, for-profit media institutions rather than by the participation of lay actors.5

Our book, then, is positioned at the intersection of the field’s interests in multimodal rhetoric, on the one hand, and in public rhetoric, on the other. We contend that these two strands of the conversation need to be read in relation to each other. Multimodality raises distinctive complexities and challenges for the theory and practice of public rhetoric; and the public nature of public rhetoric raises distinctive concerns for multimodality. As our exploration of the FTF manifesto indicates, at stake here is nothing less than who owns culture. We can continue to conceive of public rhetoric as a largely word-based affair, but to do so would cede large portions of the culture to commercialized media. What we explore here is a model in which public rhetoric is conceived of as “the making of culture” (Spellmeyer 7) or “poetic world making” (Warner 114), a model in which all public rhetors, not just well-capitalized corporations, play a role in the production of culture through imaginative and ethical use of words, images, and sounds.

Problems Introduced by Multimodality

We argue that to realize the full potential of multimodal public rhetoric, the field of composition and rhetoric needs a wide range of solutions to a number of intellectual and practical problems. One set of problems pertains to our ability as a field and as a culture to confront the wide range of options available to us. Once we look beyond writing, we find a dizzying array of choices. Teachers need to decide what to teach. Rhetors need to decide what to use in any given situation. These decisions are made more complex and more urgent by the reality that options continually change in response to new cultural practices and new technologies. What is off limits one day is routine the next.

Additionally, multimodality gives new urgency to considerations of what happens when the composition is done. Deciding whether or not to use a given mode or medium requires going beyond the question, Can I make it? We must also ask, Once I make it, how will it get where it needs to go in order to do the work it is meant to do? Questions about the circulation of rhetorical compositions quickly foreground material considerations that have typically been elided in discussions of rhetorical theory and pedagogy. As rhetors struggle to choreograph a wide variety of resources that include money, space, time, technologies, and collaborators, rhetorical practice begins to feel less like a cognitive-symbolic activity (Would an argument from ethos work here? An enthymeme?) and more like a set of arcane project-management skills. Rhetorical agency, in turn, needs to be reconfigured, understood in relation to a web of contingencies that are largely beyond the control of the rhetor.

A different set of problems pertains to the distinctive way semiosis happens when words, images, and sounds interact. In multimodal compositions, the whole exceeds the sum of the parts, resulting in both challenges and new possibilities. Some of these challenges concern a set of ethical considerations that emerge from multimodal semiosis. Some of the potentials concern the reality that culture itself is multimodal, as are the cultural products of identity and consciousness.

In the remainder of this chapter, we briefly illustrate each of these problems by examining three examples or cases. Indeed, this book relies heavily on our interpretation of case examples as a means to convey ideas about rhetoric, pedagogy, publics, and new media. This kind of evidence has its own limitations and affordances, as James E. Porter has noted. Drawing on Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, Porter observes that any “principles derived in such a way [i.e., through case analysis] do not hold ‘universal or invariable’ status, but they do have heuristic power” (Rhetorical 20). This book aims to develop heuristic strategies for teachers, scholars, and practitioners by examining multiple cases of multimodal public rhetoric.

Case #1: 3D Printers (Or, What Forms of Composing Are NOT Relevant to Writing Courses?)

There’s a new kind of printer on the market, a rapid-prototyping technology that prints fully-formed three-dimensional objects. Inkjet and laser printers, like typewriters before them, place a layer of ink on the surface of paper. 3D printers spray a very thin layer of plastic and then continue to add layer upon layer until the composition is rendered complete with height, width, and depth. Some commentators have claimed that this turn to desktop manufacturing will be just as “revolutionary” as desktop publishing has been (see Gershenfeld 42; Morris).6

Should composition and rhetoric participate in this revolution? We routinely ask students to print papers. Should we ask them to print 3D compositions as well? We suspect that many readers will be skeptical about the relevance of 3D printers for the composition classroom or the field of composition studies. Indeed, skepticism toward new rhetorical forms is historically typical. Plato was skeptical about writing. More recently, those who have explored the importance of visual, aural, and multimodal rhetorics have found it necessary to address various forms of skepticism. Writing eight years after the New London Group drew attention to the importance of visual, aural, and multimodal literacies, Bruce McComiskey begins a discussion of visual rhetoric by recounting conversations with colleagues who claim that visuality is irrelevant to writing (“Visual” 188).

Intellectual skepticism is healthy when it engenders critical reflection. It is counterproductive, however, when it forecloses emergent rhetorical forms that students might usefully deploy in the publics and counterpublics with which they identify. So how do we, as a field, tell the difference between new rhetorical forms that we can safely ignore and forms that force us to reconfigure our pedagogies? The question is an important one. Those of us who help facilitate rhetorical education are assigned the sobering task of deciding which rhetorical practices, forms, and tools are valued in the classroom and which ones are not. The set of values we install in classroom contexts, to some degree, shapes the broader culture outside the classroom. So how do we decide what to value? Maybe it’s okay for rhetorical education to ignore 3D printers. How would we know?

While we find 3D printers interesting, our goal here is not to advocate their use in the writing classroom, but instead to raise an important intellectual problem that rhetors, rhetorical theorists, and rhetorical educators need to face. Given that we are continually confronted with new rhetorical modes, practices, and technologies, how do we decide what to teach and use? As we map a theory and pedagogy of multimodal public rhetoric, we find it essential to address this question.

Case #2: Not a Box (Or, The Distribution of the Message Is the Message)

Dutch designer David Graas is known for innovative designs that exemplify sustainable practices. One of his designs is the Not a Box—a lamp made from a cardboard box (figure 1). In a gesture of postmodern humor, the sides of the box contain cutouts in the shape of a traditional lamp. When the bulb inside the Not a Box is turned on, the cutouts light up. To understand the rhetoricity of the Not a Box, we need to see that the package for the product (the cardboard box) is the product. The Not a Box is an example of no-waste packaging; as such, it functions to raise awareness of sustainable practices. The rhetorical message embodied and performed by the Not a Box might be paraphrased as we need to (and can!) find creative ways to avoid waste.

Figure 1. David Graas’s Not a Box. Photograph by Tim Stet. © 2010 David Graas. Used by permission.

Traditional models of rhetorical theory and pedagogy are of limited use in helping to facilitate a critical reading of the Not a Box. The rhetorical success of the Not a Box cannot be accounted for based on compositional considerations alone. It’s a simple cardboard lamp, a novelty item. Imagine that the Not a Box was submitted by a student in response to the assignment, Produce a composition that helps raise awareness about sustainable practices. Teachers who sought out the message of the Not a Box through the usual methods—by examining the composition—would be forced to conclude that there was no message. The Not a Box would certainly receive a failing grade.

It is only when one takes into account how the lamp was distributed—that the lamp was its own package, and therefore generated zero waste—that the Not a Box communicates a socially relevant message. This case points to the relationship between composition and distribution—between the message and how that message travels through material-cultural contexts. In this case, composition anticipates circulation. Graas didn’t design a lamp and then inquire into how it could be shipped. He first inquired how it could be shipped and then created a design that exploited that process. Considerations of composition follow considerations of distribution.

As we map a theory and pedagogy of multimodal public rhetoric, we find that it is essential to revise models of rhetorical invention so that they adequately account for the relationship between composing and the processes of reproduction and distribution that happen when the composition is done. While the relationship between composition and distribution is particularly pronounced in the case of Graas’s Not a Box, we contend that this relationship is always an essential one. Based on cases we explore below, we go one step further, claiming that the composing process is exceeded by the rhetorical process. The work of rhetors is not done when the composition is done, but continues in the labor rhetors invest in processes of circulation.

Case #3: “Cotton Patch” (Or, The Latourian Mystery of Page 48)

Our third case is a bit more involved. It concerns a New Deal-era theatrical vignette called “Cotton Patch,” as explored by theater historian Ann Folino White. Belonging to the “living newspaper” genre, “Cotton Patch” offers a theatrical rendering of current issues of the day. Specifically, it focuses on the irony that results when government programs undermine each other. An African-American farmer named Sam has received a mule through a government loan program, but because Sam owes taxes, a sheriff is sent to repossess the mule. As the sheriff leads the mule away, he asks Sam what the animal’s name is. “Guv’ment,” Sam replies—a gesture that, according to White, “characterizes the Roosevelt Administration a jackass” (246). “Cotton Patch,” White concludes, “represents the national situation as inane” (247). In many ways, then, “Cotton Patch” conforms to a standard model of public rhetoric; it is a vehicle used by citizens to critique social issues of common concern.

“Cotton Patch” appeared as part of Triple-A Plowed Under, a production of the Federal Theatre Project, one of the arts programs sponsored by Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. It premiered on March 14, 1936 at New York City’s Biltmore Theatre, but was cut from Triple-A after opening night and was not included in subsequent Biltmore performances. According to White, the only direct explanation for the cut can be found on Page 48 of an archived copy of the script, which contains a typed note from Director Joseph Losey:

We are not using this scene as it was impossible to get actors to play it with the necessary simplicity. The scene is conceived to be played entirely without props, with vaudeville technique, but not to be played up or plugged. If this scene is to be used, it should be played in front of a cyclorama [i.e., a neutral screen often used as a backdrop] framed with blacks [i.e., black curtains], and the subsequent Sharecropper Scene, should be played in front of Blacks. (qtd. in White 244)

White’s account takes the form of a detective story. The mystery concerns why “Cotton Patch” was cut from Triple-A, and the note from Joseph Losey is the principal clue. White examines this clue from a variety of angles, offering various possible interpretations, but none of these interpretations is altogether satisfying; the mystery is ultimately unsolvable. We could, for instance, take Losey at his word and assign blame to the actors. This becomes problematic, however, when one considers that the script itself seems to demand a comedic style derived from conventions of “light minstrel comedy” (246). Sam’s character is established through song, pantomime, and “stereotypic dialect that abounds in ‘sho’nuffs’ and syntactical disorder,” making it difficult to reconcile with Losey’s direction that the scene is “not to be played up or plugged” (246). The script, actors, and director seem to be at odds with each other.

While the case of “Cotton Patch” uses the traditional tools of theater rather than the digital tools of new media, it illustrates the important reality that multimodal public rhetoric often emerges from a complex network: multiple actors, multiple technologies, multiple discourses, and multiple semiotic resources. Traditional models of rhetorical production tend to emphasize stable relations between rhetor (usually a single, rational, autonomous subject), message, and audience, but the mystery of Page 48 points to the limitations of this model. Page 48 is mysterious, as White cleverly shows, because it lies at the intersection of a hundred threads in a material-cultural-performative-semiotic web that includes various collaborators (director, writers, actors, stage designers, and audience members), theatrical genres (vaudeville, minstrelsy, political satire, and other dramatic forms), and staging technologies (cyclorama, black curtains, and no props). “Cotton Patch” cannot be theorized in terms of a single rhetor’s purposeful actions. Instead, “Cotton Patch” emerges from a complex network of human and nonhuman agents. In chapter 5 we draw on actor-network theorists like Bruno Latour, John Law, and others to explore the distributed nature of rhetorical agency.

The case of “Cotton Patch” also reveals that ethical issues are often at stake in rhetors’ struggles to confront multiple contingencies. In this case, a failure to effectively choreograph a constellation of human and nonhuman actors could result in the promotion of racist perceptions. If the actors, with guidance from the director, do not effectively transmediate the script provided by the writers, the portrayal of rural African-Americans will slip from productive social commentary to the pernicious representational practices of minstrelsy. While representational ethics are implicated in all rhetorical actions, many of the challenges here derive precisely from the multimodal and distributed nature of the performance: the particular configuration of disparate elements of theatrical production (song, dance, props, make-up, costumes, and performed script). As we map a theory and pedagogy of multimodal public rhetoric, then, we find it crucial to confront a set of peculiar ethical considerations raised by multimodality.

Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric

We begin, in chapter 1, with a discussion of kairos and public sphere, two keywords that will inform our exploration of multimodal public rhetoric throughout this book. Kairos is often defined as “the opportune moment,” but this is shorthand for a complex and generative concept that helps us accomplish three major objectives: (1) to explore certain aspects of the rhetorical context that have often been overlooked; (2) to adopt a critically reflective disposition toward new possibilities in a given situation that may not conform to received wisdom; and (3) to examine not just the efficaciousness of various rhetorical responses, but ethical dimensions as well.

Equally generative, the public sphere has come to signify a social space for addressing “issues of common concern.” Public sphere, however, is a highly contested term that warrants careful consideration. In response to the liberal bourgeois public sphere introduced by Habermas—in which public opinion is formed through rational-critical debate—we draw on Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser, and others to paint a picture of multiple publics and counterpublics characterized by what Warner calls “poetic world making” (114).

In chapter 2, we use the case of 3D printers as a starting point for examining what we might call, the problem of newness. In a time of rapid technological change, we as a field and as a culture are continually confronted with new modes, media, and technologies. Faced with this newness, it is not always easy to discern the kairotic opportunities that confront us. Are 3D printers revolutionary or irrelevant? Should we redesign our curricula to account for them or should we simply ignore them? These questions are important, in part, because they speak to the issue of access: will 3D printing remain the purview of a small group of specialists (industrial designers and engineers) or will it be appropriated by the students who fill our composition classrooms? We turn to the case of two “old media” technologies—the still camera and the movie camera—in order to demonstrate the way multiple material and cultural pressures open up certain opportunities and foreclose others. Scholars who have examined the case of still and movie cameras have demonstrated that the potential of those technologies to function as tools of multimodal public rhetoric was severely limited by a variety of cultural forces.

As Eric Charles White says, “kairos regards the present as unprecedented, as a moment of decision, a moment of crisis, and considers it impossible, therefore, to intervene successfully in the course of events merely on the basis of past experience” (14). If past experience is our only guide, 3D printers are a non-starter. In the past, composition has been about the spoken and written word, not about the production of fabricated plastic prototypes. But kairos forces us to suspend the habits, routines, and attitudes that characterize our thinking and ask, How is this moment different? What new possibilities present themselves?

To help facilitate the kinds of inquiry that lead to locally situated and provisional answers to such questions, we offer a four-part heuristic aimed at helping stakeholders (rhetors, students, teachers, administrators) confront the problem of newness. Faced with new rhetorical technologies like 3D printers, we might ask whether 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 modes and single compositions—indeed, to think beyond the moment of composition to the ways their work might circulate through channels that are simultaneously material (in their reliance on the body, on geography, and on technologies) and cultural (in their reliance on structures of sociality, ideology, and legitimation). We situate this approach in a tradition of teaching what Eberly calls the “praxis of rhetoric as a productive and practical art” (“Rhetoric” 290). Along with Rosa A. Eberly, James A. Berlin, Bruce McComiskey, and others, we hope that teaching rhetoric as productive art “can be a radically democratic act” that “can sustain publics and counterpublics—on campus and beyond campus” (Eberly, “Rhetoric” 290, 294).