spaces” (56). While this is not a book about the rhetorics of public memory per se, it is clear that an interest in memorializing or commemoration often serves as a catalyst for the creation of many public sculptures, exhibits, and other multimodal displays or artifacts. When planning their own memorials in response to the events of September 11, for example, Nicoletti asked her students to consider design components such as “symbolism, setting, audience, scale, permanence, and inscription,” thus reflecting the idea that appropriation, intertextuality, and social knowledge are important components of commemoration (56). Moreover, the consideration of design elements such as scale and permanence speaks to the physicality and spatiality of rhetorical artifacts that are not only visual but also material in composition. Visual artifacts that are also tangible and spatial, and invite engagement not only with the mind but with the whole body, can then be understood as objects of material rhetoric.
Like projects of visual rhetoric, material rhetoric seeks to understand physical artifacts and sites such as memorials, parks, or green spaces, and even multimodal artifacts such as the GPS in the context of the questions of rhetorical theory, while also reconsidering rhetorical theory relative to the challenges brought about by the study of materially rhetorical artifacts. Like the projects of visual rhetoric, material rhetoric too seeks to uncover the power and knowledge dynamics related to the study of rhetorical artifacts that incorporate visual, textual, physical, spatial, or other multimodal components. The relationship between these different generic modes is likewise seen as inviting new interpretive possibilities. Finally, building on those criteria of visual rhetoric projects, and fully compatible with them, material rhetoric seeks to more explicitly understand the influence of rhetoric on the body.
As chapter two describes in more depth, material rhetorical analysis has at its core a focus on the impact of rhetorical artifacts on contextualized, bodily experience. Carole Blair’s approach to understanding material rhetoric, one that underpins much of the work of this book, provides a toolkit for analyzing visual texts that also have material and spatial components. In her landmark essay and important project of material rhetoric, “U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality,” she begins from the point of acknowledging that within the field of rhetoric, “we lack an idiom for referencing talk, writing, or even inscribed stone as material”—that we struggle with “the lack of a materialist language about discourse” (17). To better understand rhetoric’s materiality, she examines five memorial sites: the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the Civil Rights Memorial, Kent State University’s May 4 Memorial, and the Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial.
Within the context of her study of these five memorials, which she sees as “not necessarily representative of all memorials” but rather as able to reveal unique ideas about material rhetoric, Blair poses five questions that help to redefine what counts as a text (24). She asks, for example: “(1) What is the significance of the text’s material existence? (2) What are the apparatuses and degrees of durability of 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 describes the ways in which a text’s physical composition will affect its durability, vulnerability, and possibilities for modes of preservation and reproduction. She compares, for example, the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) with the relative vulnerability of the fabric of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and the types of spaces engendered by the types of interactions that each invites. She also describes also how the use of black granite has become appropriated and has subsequently been reproduced indirectly in other memorials. For instance, to best understand the Kent State Memorial (KSM), it is first necessary to know that the VVM is composed of black granite. At the KSM, visitors follow a prescribed path of black granite into the memorial. The black granite composition of the KSM implicitly describes the shootings as embedded within the context of the Vietnam War. The physical composition of the VVM, then, not only becomes prerequisite knowledge for understanding the KSM but also encourages an intertextual reading of it. Similar to the intertextual relationships between visual texts, such as that of the Iwo Jima and Ground Zero photos, one consequence of the appropriation of physical features of material texts is that they begin to develop their own textual and intertextual identities over time. Blair describes how our reading and bodily experience of material texts can shape our perceptions of the events they represent in ways that allow for a fuller understanding of the consequences of these events on the mind and body. By exploring the material aspects of a text’s durability, modes of reproduction, and visibility, Blair not only implicitly builds on the goals of visual rhetoric projects but also taps into the materialist language about discourse that has for so long been a missing component of rhetorical analysis.
The study of visual rhetoric, then, when also understood in light of the questions posed by material rhetorical analysis, has the potential to help illuminate the spatial components of texts, places, and other physical artifacts. The idea of a rhetorical approach that merges visuality and spatiality is greatly appealing, for as someone particularly attentive to the intersections of rhetoric and geography, I have often understood visual and material artifacts largely through both a rhetorical and a geographical lens—as discursive objects that facilitate spatial understanding, are situated in time and space, and make important claims to knowledge. 5 Again, visual and material artifacts may include physical sites such as factories, public monuments, or art installations that function commemoratively to reflect or perform particular cultural moments, often guiding both the mind and body toward specific interpretations. They can also include multimodal technological devices such as global positioning systems (GPS), which, through their physicality, use of audio and visual cues, and the cartographic texts they produce, can function rhetorically to make specific knowledge claims, influence bodily practices, or guide movements and decision-making. To understand visual rhetoric as also concerned with studies of space, the body, and materiality will, as I argue in this book, allow us to more fully understand the broader implications and consequences of the rhetorical work of visual artifacts in the world. In short, it will allow for a more inclusive understanding of the sort of work that projects of visual rhetoric can accomplish.
In this book, I aim to cast a brighter light on the important connections between visual rhetoric, material rhetoric, space, and bodies, in order to show the value of these connections within and beyond the field of rhetoric; ultimately, I aim to create a unique space for material rhetorics along the spectrum of what I envision to be a visual-material rhetoric. Again, when I refer here to rhetoric, I am describing the idea that texts, artifacts, and discourses are “partisan, meaningful, and influential,” to the extent that they have the capacity for consequence and may influence our understandings of specific contexts in ways that impact both the mind and body (Blair 72, “Reading”). Compatible with this notion, material rhetoric considers the text from the perspective of its relative durability and reproducibility, its ability to work with and against other texts, and most important, its ability to understand space and place as rhetorical and as affecting both the mind and body.
When I use the terms space and place in this book, I borrow from Michel de Certeau’s ideas about how a particular space is composed of mobile elements that are in constant motion and relationship with each other. Subsequently, the interactions of texts, artifacts, bodies, and discourses within that space constitute a more specific sense of place as they move and interact with and against each other within particular contexts and configurations. Given this understanding, place may be viewed as happening within a space. Place, writes de Certeau, “is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions” (117). For example, the parks and public commemorative sculptures at the Lowell Mills National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts (the object of focus in chapter three of this book), may foster a specific sense of place largely because of the interpretation invited by their layout and constituted by the activities and movements of park visitors. Likewise, specific representations of the park as performed through the park map, or the features deployed within the map, may also be seen as constructing a more nuanced version of a place. To view a space as rhetorical, then, is to acknowledge the capacity for consequence borne out of the interaction of the texts, artifacts, bodies, and discourses deployed within it, and the sense of place engendered by those interactions.
