Selzer, Jack, and Sharon Crowley, eds. Rhetorical Bodies. Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P, 1999. Print.
Selzer, Jack. “Habeas Corpus: An Introduction.” Rhetorical Bodies. Eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P, 1999. 3-15. Print.
In this introduction Selzer explains the focus of the anthology, saying:
It is a sustained meditation on material rhetoric in both senses of the term-a meditation on the material aspects and groundings of language as rhetorical action as it is traditionally conceived, and on the rhetorical nature of material realities, whether they are literate realities or not. Without opposing too firmly the material and the literate, the contributors together consider what it might mean to take very seriously the material conditions that sustain the production, circulation, and consumption of rhetorical power (whether that power is in a text or speech or some other physical form), and the book accordingly sustains two complementary general propositions. First, the contributors insist that material, nonliterate practices and realities-most notably, the body, flesh, blood, and bones, and how all the material trappings of the physical are fashioned by literate practices-should come under rhetorical scrutiny. Second, they demonstrate how literate practices-the speeches and texts that are the traditional staple of rhetoric, as well as the ads and virtual spaces and languages associated with the new media-ought to be understood in the serious light of the material circumstances that sustain or sustained them. (9-10)
This drive to understand how rhetoric and material reality work together is described by Selzer’s discussion of Burke.
While it is true, as Burke was explaining from the first moments of social constructionism, in his Permanence and Change (1935), that people can never get outside the constructions and conventions of discourse, it is also true(as Burke noted in the same book) that neither can we construct ourselves outside the materiality of everyday life: “The universe is not merely the product of our interpretations. For the interpretations themselves must be altered as the universe displays various orders of recalcitrance to them …. Our calling has its roots in the biological, and our biological demands are clearly implicit in the universal texture” (256). Nevertheless, material moments of rhetorical action like the ones I have described have largely remained beyond the reach of rhetoricians, who have traditionally (and understandably) been most attentive to oral and written discourses, narrowly conceived. Even though rhetoric has long been concerned with the situatedness of literate acts and the real effects of discourse rather than with ideal possibilities, the relationship of rhetorical events to the material world that sustains and produces them has not often enough been fully elaborated or clearly articulated. (9)
Here’s two interesting questions Selzer asks at the end of the introduction: “Should something substitute for the notion of the ‘material’ that has prevailed under the aegis of Marx? If ‘materialism’ now takes us to bodies and to tangible physicality instead of to Marx, what happens to Marxist categories?” (10).
Blair, Carole. “Contemporary US Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality.”Rhetorical Bodies. Eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P, 1999. 16-57. Print.
In this essay, Blair asks readers to consider the materiality of rhetoric by moving away from the traditional notions of rhetoric as a means to achieve the goal(s) of a specific writer/speaker. Due to liberal humanism (and the location of several rhetoricians within humanities departments) rhetoric is often seen as symbolic (or symbolizing or symbolic communication) as well as a set of practices for one actor to achieve a specific goal. Often the goal is to persuade, or influence, or to communicate effectively, which for Blair is all well and good; however, she explains that while these models are “reasonably accurate description of the motivations people have for engaging in rhetorical practices…it describes a motivation rather than an essential or definitive characteristic of rhetoric” (21). More importantly, this way of conceptualizing rhetoric “creates additional difficulties for rethinking rhetoric as material” (21).
For Blair the thinking of rhetoric as material means thinking of rhetoric as having some type of consequence beyond what the speaker/writer intended, and simultaneously, having an effect on experiential reality, too.
Even rhetorical critics, whose own role is reception, return their readers to questions of invention, contextual contingency, and the construction of the rhetorical text far more than they ever deal with what happens to or with a text, once it has been. produced. Rarely is consequence taken up as the central focus of our study. When it is addressed at all, it is typically advanced as a reason to study the construction (production values, if you will) of a particular text; and it is frequently understood narrowly as “success” or goal fulfillment. That is, critics typically argue that a particular rhetorical text is worth our attention because it was successful: it achieved the goal of its maker. Such an argument refers us to the goal of the rhetor as if it were the only possible or legitimate measure of effect (Cherwitz and Theobald-Osborne 56)…Nonetheless, the narrow study of effect, understood as goal fulfillment, diverts us from the partisau character of rhetoric, except for the constricted arena of ends-means assessments…How do we begin to theorize materiality, in the face of these obstacles? If the material character of rhetoric is not reducible to its symbolicity, and if materiality implicates us in issues of consequence aud partisanship beyond that of the rhetor’s goals, where do we begin? Two answers are already available in the question itself. If rhetoric’s materiality is not a function of its symbolic constructions of meaning, then we must look elsewhere: we must ask not just what a text meaus but, more generally, what it does; aud we must not understand what it does as adhering strictly to what it was supposed to do. Both these directives open a vast field for us to contemplate, and thus I believe that we can begin most effectively by attending to instances of rhetoric aud what they can tell us about their own materiality. (21-22, 23)
To begin thinking about the materiality of rhetoric (this seems to be an exercise for herself as well as her reader), Blair considers five memorial sites (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the Civil Rights Memorial, Kent State University’s May 4 Memorial, and the Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial) while using five questions to guide her exploration of each as a rhetorical text. The five questions are:
(1) What is the significance of the text’s material existence? (2) What are the apparatuses and degrees of durability displayed by the text? (3) What are the text’s modes or possibilities of reproduction or preservation? (4) What does the text do to (or with, or against) other texts? (5) How does the text act on people? (30)
Blair also stresses that
In raising these particular questions, I do not mean to imply that others might be less important; moreover, each of the issues raised by these questions is a complicated one, deserving far more attention than I can give it here. It is my goal, however, not to exhaust this topic but to stimulate further discussion of it, so my hope is that the exemplars will provoke such exploration. (30)
The overall message of the article is very consequentialist, something akin to Porter’s work in Meaning, Language, and Time. Meaning changes with time, various audiences, and even what cultural or emotional baggage individual audience members bring with them to each site; moreover, all of this can be affected by the material conditions of the memorial site on the day of the visit. Time is not panchronic nor is a rhetorical act static. In turn, this means rhetoricians must see rhetoric as more than production by a single rhetor, and moreover, that the rhetorical effects of a text go beyond the rhetor’s intended (and limited) goals. Rhetoricians must conceptualize how rhetoric changes and is diffused throughout a given rhetorical ecosystem.
Haas, Christina. “Materializing Public and Private: The Spatialization of Conceptual Categories in Discourses of Abortion.”Rhetorical Bodies. Eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P, 1999. 218-238. Print.
In this essay, Haas uses a grounded theory approach (or GTA, described in full on page 221) to articulate (a la Greene) the rhetorical and discursive connections between the Permanent Injunction posted on a clinic’s doors; the US Supreme Court; the work of Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, and Nancy Fraser; and the transformation of an abstract concept–privacy–into a physical, spacial reality affecting the lives of staff, patients, and protesters. According to Haas, the specific case at Womens’ Choice Services demonstrates “the distinction between public and private in spatial terms works not only in theory but also in practice. It is a truism in many humanistic disciplines that ‘discourse constructs reality,’ but seldom can such construction be taken so literally: the text of the Schenk ruling establishes that ‘privacy’ (in some circumstances, at least) is a literal, actual, material space at least fifteen feet wide”(232)(by the way, through this the spatial metaphors deployed by Arendt, Habermas, and Fraser are seen to be more material than poetic).
Section dealing with Arendt, Habermas, and Fraser 225-229.
The root metaphor for conceptualizing public and private in the work of these three very different theorists is space-not process, or force, or commodity, or any of the other ways that this distinction might be conceived of, but space. The public is a space, a sphere, an arena; the private is a realm, a zone, an area. In sharply delineating public and private spaces, the “author” of the Permanent Injunction invokes a metaphor that, however complex and fraught it may be, has a great deal of cultural currency. And, just as Arendt, Habermas, and Fraser acknowledge the historical and empirical reality of various public spaces, the Permanent Injunction “works” by specifically delineating actual spaces for public activities (protest) and private activities (inside the clinic, on the sidewalks approaching the clinic, in workers’ homes). (229)
Privacy defined in this case as the right to reproductive freedom-has been legally established not just conceptually and metaphorically, but literally and materially. “Privacy” is a space at least fifteen feet wide, but less than three hundred; its shape is a rectangular area in front of clinic entrances, not a bubble around individual persons. (232)
The Supreme Court rulings, understood in broad historical context, lend credence to Bryan Turner’s claim that under circumstances of great political anxiety and confusion, there arises a cultural obsession with the material and the bodily (2-6). (232)
The desire of an individual to be “let alone” is strongly tied to the embodied, spatially oriented existence of that individual-an existence that, though indisputable, is extremely difficult to articulate. Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, suggests that “the relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented influences the ease or difficulty with which that phenomenon comes to be politically represented” (12; emphasis in original). It may be that the increasing literalization of the spatial metaphor and the increasing materialization of privacy are reactions to the Court’s difficulties in verbally and politically representing this important but elusive right. (233)
Like any conceptual construct, the public/private dyad oversimplifies. And, like other common dichotomies, it can be and has been used to perpetuate or enforce insidious political distinctions. (233)
