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
