spatial dimensions of texts and artifacts, and subsequently allow for an understanding of space as rhetorical, and of rhetoric as spatial. After describing more specifically how maps function as rhetorical artifacts, I contextualize the intersections of visual rhetoric and critical cartography by providing a brief analysis of photo 22727, the famous NASA photo of the whole earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972. As a visual artifact that functions as both iconic photograph and cartographic representation, an analysis of photo 22727 not only helps situate visual rhetoric relative to critical cartography but also paves the way for a discussion of how visual rhetoric can be more attentive to the relationships between materiality, space, and the body. This discussion of visual rhetoric and spatiality, however, is a means to a greater end, for I link the two in order to suggest that there exist some possible limitations in an understanding of visual rhetoric that does not explicitly consider an artifact’s contextualized engagement with the body. I thus call for a visual rhetoric that more expressly accounts not only for a rhetorical artifact’s material and spatial components but also for its subsequent impact on the body. Within the context of this call to action, I introduce Blair’s theory of material rhetoric and Foucault’s theory of heterotopias, which, in chapter two, I then describe in more detail as helping constitute a sustainable theory of visual-material rhetorics that provides a point of entry into a more embodied rhetorical approach—one that can help demonstrate the value of visual-material rhetorics both within and beyond the field of rhetoric.
Visual Rhetoric as a Project of Inquiry
As described in the introduction, my interest in the intersections of rhetoric, visual studies, geography, and critical cartography has allowed me to arrive at an understanding of visual rhetoric compatible with what Cara A. Finnegan describes as “a project of inquiry, rather than a product” (“Review Essay” 244). Again, this conception allows for two related research trajectories within visual rhetoric (244). These trajectories function 1) to focus on the study of the artifact itself, and 2) to explore the significance of visuality for rhetorical theory. Finnegan feels we need to be more mindful of how the practices of visuality influence, affect, or shift understandings of rhetoric (245). Visual rhetorical analysis, she writes, “should recognize the influence of visual artifacts and practices, but also place them in the contexts of their circulation in a discursive field conceived neither as exclusively textual nor exclusively visual” (245).
The question of how to work analytically with visual artifacts should not be minimized, though at the same time it should not be cause for paralysis either. While scholarship in visual rhetoric has rightly begun to acknowledge the interplay of the verbal and the visual, moving past older references to the verbal/visual dichotomy1, acknowledgement of the interplay between textual, visual, and material ways of knowing does not make for a methodological non-issue. In fact, to acknowledge this interplay and its attendant multimodal epistemologies invites a new set of methodological questions. On the one hand, as Finnegan notes, “labeling as ‘visual rhetoric’ artifacts such as photographs, memorials, art, images, and advertisements creates a false category,” in that many of these artifacts include textual or linguistic characteristics (244). Thus, to place such artifacts under the rubric of visual rhetoric “ignores the often untenable distinction between the visual and verbal in practical discourse” (244). On the other hand, visual and material artifacts arguably require specific methodological treatment, thus necessitating that we acknowledge such categorical and analytical distinctions within our analyses.2 I suggest that it is possible to understand the textual, visual, or material qualities of rhetorical artifacts as functioning along a spectrum, without necessarily creating the false categories about which Finnegan cautions, so long as we are attendant to the nuanced readings that such artifacts require. Such mindfulness will only serve to further our understandings of how multimodal contexts and artifacts can influence, affect, or shift our understandings of rhetoric.
Moreover, the idea that the study of visual artifacts and practices should be contextualized within their discursive field is, to my mind, not incompatible with an understanding of visual rhetoric as always already concerned with embodied practice. In How We Became Posthuman, for example, N. Katherine Hayles describes the idea of embodiment as related to but different from the body; the difference, she feels, is linked to a consideration of the cultural contexts in which the subject is situated:
Embodiment differs from the concept of the body in that the body is always normative relative to some set of criteria [. . .] In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. [. . .] Experiences of embodiment, far from existing apart from culture, are always imbricated within it. (196–97)
To understand visual rhetorics and the rhetorical study of visual, spatial artifacts as embodied practice not only allows us to more explicitly consider the contextualizing features of “place, time, physiology, and culture” that Hayles describes but also requires that we understand the visual as concerned with space, place, and the body (196). In other words, to fully understand the broader implications and consequences of the rhetorical work of visual and material artifacts in the world, we must understand visual rhetorics as also concerned with and receptive to studies of space, place, and the body.
Space as Rhetorical
To engage in a study of visual-material rhetorics from a vantage point that understands space as rhetorical requires a brief review of how space and place may be understood to function in this book. As mentioned earlier, I borrow from the ideas of philosopher Michel de Certeau, who has familiarized the notion that “space is a practiced place” (117). Space, he notes, “is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. [. . .] Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by its walkers” (117). These “walkers,” or the subjects residing within a space, also give that space its sense of “place.” Subsequently, place is concerned with relationships among the elements within the space and the ways in which they interact and coexist (117). In this sense, space and place function together and may be understood as constituting the power relations that make possible particular ensembles of movements and intersections of mobile elements. Again, de Certeau understands a place as “an instantaneous configuration of positions” (117). For example, the green spaces and public commemorative sculptures at sites such as the Lowell Mills Park (the subject of chapter three) may foster a specific sense of place largely because of the interactivity invited by their layout and subsequently by the activity of their “walkers,” or the movements of visitors within the park. Likewise, specific representations of the park as performed through the park map, or the features deployed within the map, may be seen as constructing more nuanced versions of a place. Human geographers have also suggested that certain places engender a specific sense of place, or particular feelings or emotions associated with a place (McDowell and Sharp 210).3 To view a space as rhetorical 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.
The Map Can Take Us from Here to There
The idea that space and place are socially produced and contextually relevant has implications for cartography as well. A discussion of cartographic representation serves as an ideal point of entry into understanding how visual rhetoric can be more attentive to the relationships between space and the body. Scholars aligned with critical cartography, for example, not only take as given that the cultural work of the map relies on multimodality and intertexuality but they also understand the map as rhetorical, and as always already shaping and shaped by the cultural contexts in which it is immersed. Contemporary cartographic practice has largely begun to acknowledge that mapping, while historically understood as an objective, scientific practice,4 is also a cultural practice that may impact “how the space is perceived and what action takes place within it”; in other words, mapping may also “represent an exercise in power” (McDowell and Sharp 25). As geographers Jeremy Crampton and John Krygier note, mapping invites participation and dialogue: “If the map is a specific set of power-knowledge claims,
