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Still Life with Rhetoric
A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics
By Laurie E. Gries University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-978-4
CHAPTER 1
Current Matters
An Introduction
Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language. They want neither to be leveled into a "history of images" nor elevated into a "history of art," but to be seen as complex individuals occupying multiple subject positions and identities.
— W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?
April 27, 2006, is an important date for visual rhetoric. On this date, Hollywood actor George Clooney, Senator Sam Brownback, and then-Senator Barack Obama were holding a press conference at Washington's National Press Club. Clooney had just returned from a trip to Darfur and was publicly demanding that the US government act more quickly to stop the ongoing genocide. On the sidelines a photographer for the Associated Press (AP) sat, intending to capture photos of Clooney in an important political performance. Little did the photographer know, when he turned his camera toward Obama, that he would capture one of the most iconic images to surface in recent US history.
The photograph taken by Mannie Garcia is now familiar to those of us who closely followed the 2008 US presidential election, have paid attention to US popular culture over the last few years, or have simply passed the image captured in the photo on the street one day while walking to work. For the image in Garcia's photograph transformed into the now-iconic Obama Hope image designed by street artist Shepard Fairey (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The Obama Hope image in its "Faireyized" version (henceforth referred to as simply Obama Hope) entered into circulation in late January 2008 in an effort to help then-Senator Obama become the 44th US president. Today, digital manifestations and remixes of this image can be found on more than two million websites while numerous physical renditions can be found tattooed on human bodies, plastered to urban walls, and waving at protests across the globe. As it has circulated both within and beyond US borders, this image has played a plethora of rhetorical roles ranging from political actor to advertising agent to social critic to international activist. Today, its materialization in Fairey's Hope poster is also widely recognized as a cultural icon and national symbol. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl (2009) has gone so far, in fact, as to deem Fairey's Hope poster the most efficacious political illustration since Uncle Sam Wants You.
How has this particular image come to lead such an extraordinary rhetorical life? How did it go from materializing in one among hundreds of photographs taken at a press conference in April of 2006 to a cultural icon, national symbol, and powerful rhetorical actant in just a few short years? When asked how the Obama Hope image gained the wide recognition needed to become a cultural icon, Fairey himself said the image simply "went viral." Made popular with the boom of the Internet in the mid-to-late 1990s, "going viral" is a common means of explaining how ideas, trends, objects, videos, and so forth spread quickly, uncontrollably, and unpredictably into, through, and across human populations. Such explanation is linked to a ubiquity of tropes and concepts related to epidemiology that has become part of the US American social imaginary in the twenty-first century. As Chad Lavin and Chris Russill (2010, 67) have argued, this imaginary has manifested in response to an anxiety constituted, in part, by a destabilized sense of space and time produced by an unprecedented emergence of global economic and communicative networks. Deeply entrenched, this epidemiological imaginary can be thought of as "the logic of the viral," which helps makes sense of not only the spread of diseases but also the spread of culture in a networked social landscape (Seas 2012, 6). According to this logic, a thing is commonly said to be viral when it is perceived as being socially contagious due to its capacity to garner mass attention and spread via word of mouth and media. In common parlance, then, we say something like a video has gone viral based on the sheer speed at which the video has attracted a wide viewing, often, but not always, because it has circulated widely across media, been remixed, and inspired imitative spinoffs.
In an attempt to explain how something such as Obama Hope can go viral, Fairey explained in a Terry Gross (2009) interview on Fresh Air that a viral phenomenon is made possible by first creating an image that is highly desired and admired, and second, by ensuring that a broad audience has access to that image so it can be redistributed. The Internet makes viral campaigns especially possible as images and messages can reach audiences dispersed across the world in a matter of seconds. With the recent emergence of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media sites, the capacity for an image and message to circulate widely has only been amplified. Thus, as an explanation of how the Obama Hope image has become a cultural icon, "it went viral" might seem like an easy-enough-to-understand answer. This answer, however, offers little theoretical and practical understanding of how images actually circulate, transform, and replicate in both physical spaces and cyberspace. In an increasingly participatory culture in which a variety of groups produce and distribute media for their collective interests (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, 2), such an answer particularly elides the logics, structures, practices, collectives, and platforms that enable images to circulate and transform widely. This answer also offers little understanding of how things become rhetorical as they circulate and transform with time and space and contribute to collective life. From a new materialist perspective, things become rhetorically meaningful via the consequentiality they spark in the world. By accepting Fairey's explanation of how Obama Hope has become a cultural icon, then, we miss the opportunity to learn how an image such as Obama Hope becomes an important rhetorical actor as it materializes and actually effects change in our daily realities. Or in simpler terms, by accepting the explanation of "it went viral," we miss learning how Obama Hope has made and continues to make (rhetorical) history.
In one sense, this book is an attempt to get at these how inquiries. Chapters 6–9 present a four-part case study that makes visible how, since 2006, Obama Hope has influenced cultural, political, and economic materialities and thus, in Bruno Latour's (2005a) terms, "reassembled the social." However, while this book may begin with a focus on the Obama Hope image and spend much time throughout discussing its rhetorical life, throughout most of the chapters, Obama Hope ironically acts as a representative anecdote in that the theories and methods included herein have been constructed around the Obama Hope phenomenon. In addition, alongside other images such as the Mona Lisa and the Raised Fist, Obama Hope acts as an example to help accomplish the book's ulterior purpose. As Brian Massumi (2002) draws on Giorgio Agamben to note, the example is an "odd beast" (17). The example is one singularity among others, yet, simultaneously, the example "stands for each of them and serves for all." As a singularity, the example is neither general nor particular. It belongs to itself and simultaneously extends to everything else with which it might be connected (17 — 18). As both a representative anecdote and an "odd beast" in this book, then, while the Obama Hope image tells its own unique rhetorical story, the image also exemplifies what we can learn by taking a new materialist approach to studying the futurity of visual rhetoric. For another important purpose of this book is to articulate what a new materialist approach to visual rhetoric might entail and how it might contribute to rhetorical and circulation studies at large.
New Materialism
First coined as a term in the latter half of the 1990s and independently of one another by Rosi Braidotti and Manuel De Landa, new materialism or neomaterialism is an emergent interdisciplinary theory informed by contemporary scholarship emanating from the intersections of science studies, feminist studies, and political theory. From a definitional standpoint, new materialism is difficult to pin down. In one sense, new materialism is not new at all in that new materialists build on the work of scholars such as Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze, and Guattari and can thus simply be thought of as an extension of a longstanding monist tradition (Dolphijn and der Tuin 2012, 94–95). Furthermore, new materialism is not a unified shared inquiry, especially since it is being taken up across multiple fields such as political science, women's studies, social science, history, and, as of late, rhetorical studies. Nonetheless, new materialism can be thought of as part of a nonhuman turn taking place across several disciplines as scholars challenge the modernist paradigm (heavily influenced by Descartes and Kant) that perpetuates dualist kinds of thinking, which many scholars find reductive and unproductive. As Latour (1993) explains in We Have Never Been Modern, modernity tries to divide the world into separate, opposing spheres with humans/subject/culture on one side and things/objects/nature on the other. New materialists reject such dualism, arguing that any bifurcation of humans and things, culture and nature, object and subject fails to acknowledge the ontological hybridity that constitutes reality. In order to make sense of the complex material realities we face in the twenty-first century, then, new materialists focus on what Donna Haraway (2003) has called "naturecultures," or what Latour (1993) calls "collectives," to acknowledge the significant, active role nonhuman things play in collective existence alongside a host of other entities.
New materialism, in part, is an ontological project in that it challenges scholars to rethink our underlying beliefs about existence and particularly our attitudes toward and our relationships with matter. In a broad sense, new materialists conceive of matter as vital, transformative, and morphogenetic; in this sense, as Tianen and Parikka (2010) have argued, matter is both "self-differing and affective-affected." New materialism is also a philosophical project as it works to develop new concepts that can help develop new insights about collective matters. In any tradition of inquiry, a common discourse is needed so scholars can communicate and build on each other's knowledge. As such, new materialists are developing a lexicon filled with neologisms such as intra-action and new concepts such as body multiple that push us to think otherwise about matters we tend to take for granted. Yet new materialism is also a methodological project. Like all parties involved in the nonhuman turn, new materialists critique linguistic and social constructivisms and "the overconfidence about human power that was inadvertently embedded in the postmodernisms of the 1980s and 90s" (Bennett 2012). Karen Barad (2007), perhaps, states this problem best: "Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretive 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" (132). As such, new materialists are developing new modes of analysis that give "material factors their due in shaping society and circumscribing human prospects" (Coole and Frost 2010, 2 — 3), modes that often offer a broader and messier perspective than representational approaches typically offer.
New materialism is motivated to a great extent by an emergence of complex phenomena such as climate change, genetically modified foods, and ewaste, all of which are constituted by a complex, dynamic assemblage of intermingling and historically produced discursive, material, natural, social, technological, and political actants — an entanglement that Andrew Pickering (1995) might call a "mangle." But new materialists recognize that mangles are not specific to such recent phenomena of pressing concern. As Susan Hekman (2010) notes so succinctly, "Mangles are everywhere. They construct the world we inhabit in all of its complexity" (126). Such complexity cannot be investigated via methodologies that give too much weight to language's ability to account for reality, agency, and ontology. Nor can such complexity be "understood in the modern metaphysics that distributes Nature and Society into pure ontological zones ... and allows us to disavow our responsibility for the consequences of our sociotechnical activity" (Herndl 2012). For new materialists, then, new kinds of empirical investigations that foreground distributed relations and attend to the nonlinear processes of materialization are needed to make sense of our contemporary existence. In a manifesto-like tone, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010) claim that, in fact, "foregrounding material factors and reconfiguring our very understanding of matter are prerequisites for any plausible account of coexistence and its conditions in the twenty-first century" (2).
Across the humanities, new materialist approaches such as Jane Bennett's work with vital materialism and Barad's and Hekman's feminist work with agential realism and social ontology, respectively, are emerging to help give material factors their due. While each mode of inquiry is distinct, all consider reality to be collectively, materially, and semiotically constructed via a variety of actants that have equal ontological footing. New materialists thus acknowledge the vital and transformative characteristics of matter — characteristics typically reserved for humans alone. In this agential sense, new materialists embrace what Levi Bryant (2011) refers to as "parity reasoning" — a form of reasoning that, in refusing to grant one sort of agency control of development, emphasizes distributed causality (201). Thus, while discourse clearly plays a role in many phenomena, parity reasoning forces new materialist scholars to extend their analysis to a variety of different causal factors in any given phenomenon (202). Here, then, agency becomes a distributed enactment of entangled things intra-acting within phenomena (Barad 2007, 235). In addition, such new materialist scholarship insists on investigating "materialization as a complex, pluralistic, relatively open process" (Coole and Frost 2010, 7). As such, the notion of becoming that is found in process philosophies undergirds many new materialists' sense of time and space. Such materialization will be explained in more detail in chapter 2 in order to help readers better understand the theories driving the new materialist notions offered herein. Important to simply note here is that because matter is conceived of as a productive, dynamic, and resilient force that shapes reality, new materialists take things — stuff, if you will — seriously. New materialists specifically wonder, "What happens when the 'propensities, affordances, and affectivities of nonhumans' are included in the action of assembling our collective common world?" (Herndl 2012).
Still Life with Rhetoric argues that such inquiry is productive for rhetorical and circulation studies at large, but it is especially important for visual rhetoric. Instrumentalist frameworks of rhetoric often focus on human agents producing and delivering persuasive discourse in a situated context to an immediate audience (at the very least in the imagined sense). Rhetoric, in this framework, is conceived as not only the faculty one has to create and deliver a persuasive object of some sort but also as the object itself, whether it is delivered in the form of a speech, a text, or a picture. In such latter cases, rhetoric is thought about in the transitive sense (Brooke 2009, 176). Much like everyday products, rhetoric is an already-produced and already-delivered object. Hence, in visual rhetoric, much scholarship is synchronic in that it focuses on the still life of rhetoric and works to identify how an already-materialized image makes communication and persuasion possible in a limited snapshot of time. As Obama Hope's rhetorical life makes visible, however, rhetoric is not as still as we may think. Rhetoric prevails beyond its initial moment of production; once unleashed in whatever form it takes, rhetoric transforms and transcends across genres, media, and forms as it circulates and intra-acts with other human and nonhuman entities. Rhetoric also moves in nonlinear, inconsistent, and often unpredictable ways within and across multiple networks of associations. In addition, as rhetoric becomes part of various collectives, a multiplicity of often unforeseeable affective and rhetorical consequences materialize that, in turn, spark other consequences. As such, rhetoric, especially in a digitally mediated environment, is more like an unfolding event — a distributed, material process of becomings in which divergent consequences are actualized with time and space. In this intransitive sense, rhetoric is everything but still. Many studies of visual rhetoric simply do not acknowledge that once rhetoric is initially distributed, there is still much life with rhetoric and thus neglect to account for this dynamic eventfulness.
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Excerpted from Still Life with Rhetoric by Laurie E. Gries. Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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