In response to the liberal bourgeois public sphere introduced by Habermas—in which public opinion is formed through rational-critical debate—we draw on Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser, and others to paint a picture of multiple publics and counterpublics characterized by what Warner calls “poetic world making” (114).
In chapter 2, we use the case of 3D printers as a starting point for examining what we might call, the problem of newness. In a time of rapid technological change, we as a field and as a culture are continually confronted with new modes, media, and technologies. Faced with this newness, it is not always easy to discern the kairotic opportunities that confront us. Are 3D printers revolutionary or irrelevant? Should we redesign our curricula to account for them or should we simply ignore them? These questions are important, in part, because they speak to the issue of access: will 3D printing remain the purview of a small group of specialists (industrial designers and engineers) or will it be appropriated by the students who fill our composition classrooms? We turn to the case of two “old media” technologies—the still camera and the movie camera—in order to demonstrate the way multiple material and cultural pressures open up certain opportunities and foreclose others. Scholars who have examined the case of still and movie cameras have demonstrated that the potential of those technologies to function as tools of multimodal public rhetoric was severely limited by a variety of cultural forces.
As Eric Charles White says, “kairos regards the present as unprecedented, as a moment of decision, a moment of crisis, and considers it impossible, therefore, to intervene successfully in the course of events merely on the basis of past experience” (14). If past experience is our only guide, 3D printers are a non-starter. In the past, composition has been about the spoken and written word, not about the production of fabricated plastic prototypes. But kairos forces us to suspend the habits, routines, and attitudes that characterize our thinking and ask, How is this moment different? What new possibilities present themselves?
To help facilitate the kinds of inquiry that lead to locally situated and provisional answers to such questions, we offer a four-part heuristic aimed at helping stakeholders (rhetors, students, teachers, administrators) confront the problem of newness. Faced with new rhetorical technologies like 3D printers, we might ask whether they are available, affordable, and easy-to-use. These are questions that pertain to the infrastructural accessibility of a given rhetorical form. Alternatively, we might ask whether or not 3D rhetoric can accommodate the kind of persuasive strategies (e.g., arguments from pathos, ethos, and logos) that we desire. These questions pertain to the semiotic potentials of the rhetorical form. We might also ask whether or not 3D rhetoric is valued in the personal, academic, professional, and public contexts within which we hope to succeed. These questions pertain to the cultural position of the rhetorical form. Finally, we might ask whether or not teachers trained in the field of writing properly have any business teaching 3D rhetoric. If 3D rhetoric is to be taught at all, shouldn’t it be taught by engineers and industrial designers? These questions pertain to the practices of specialization associated with a given rhetorical form. We argue that these topoi or commonplaces can help open up kairotic opportunities for stakeholders.
While the heuristic we offer can be used in specific rhetorical contexts, we see it as most useful in generating broader inquiries and dispositions pertaining to the design of curricular structures (e.g., syllabi, courses, programs) and co-curricular structures (e.g., multiliteracy centers, humanities computing labs, living-learning communities) that might facilitate a robust praxis of multimodal public rhetoric. But rhetors working in specific situations will require more concrete strategies to facilitate what Jeffrey Walker calls “kairotic inventiveness”—strategies that form the focus of chapter 3 (49). Based on our reading of several cases of rhetorical intervention, we argue that kairotic considerations need to include questions that emerge before the rhetor commits to words on paper as well as questions that pertain to what happens after the composition is complete. Before they commit to words on paper, rhetors need to consider a wide range of options, including written and spoken words, moving and still images, music, ambient noises, color, typography, layout, diagrams, charts, graphs, and more. Rhetors also need to anticipate and plan for the way their compositions can be reproduced and distributed after those compositions are complete. A color photograph might work well on a webpage, but might be totally ineffective as part of a brochure that is destined to be reproduced using a cheap black-and-white photocopier. These considerations of reproduction and distribution force us to reconfigure existing models of rhetorical invention. We go one step further, arguing that rhetors not only need to anticipate reproduction and distribution, but to involve themselves in processes of reproduction and distribution.
The multiple and related shifts we explore in this chapter—from alphabetic rhetoric to multimodal rhetoric, from composition to circulation, from the discursive to the material—ultimately lead us to conclude that rhetors need to see themselves as part of a larger web of considerations that include audience, exigency, modes, media of production, media of reproduction and distribution, infrastructural resources, other collaborators, and other compositions. Rhetors participate in complex networks of human and nonhuman actors. We draw on and reconfigure Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar’s understanding of the rhetor as “point of articulation” to capture the rhetor’s participation in this complex network (263).
In chapter 4 we continue our exploration of how rhetorical compositions circulate. We introduce the term rhetorical velocity to account for the speed and direction of compositions as they travel through material-cultural spaces. Related to rhetorical velocity is the concept of rhetorical recomposition, which refers to the way compositions are reused by subsequent rhetors. Our reading of three rhetorical interventions suggests that considerations of rhetorical velocity and recomposition inform the composing processes of successful rhetors. At the same time, rhetors never have full control over what happens to their texts once they enter into circulation.
Chapters 2–4, then, explore a number of complexities that are arguably overlooked by traditional rhetorical theory. In this reconfiguration, rhetoric is not a function of a single rhetor designing texts in response to exigencies and audiences. Instead, it emerges from a larger ecology: linguistic, aural, and visual semiotic resources; multiple technologies; multiple humans; multiple compositions and recompositions; multiple channels of reproduction and distribution. One risk of this ecological understanding of rhetoric is that rhetorical agency seems to evaporate. Rhetorical action is no longer the result of a rational autonomous subject who achieves a desired result by strategically adopting the right rhetorical techniques. Instead, it’s the uncertain outcome of a web of contingencies, many of which are beyond the control of a single rhetor. Indeed, at times rhetoric fails to happen, as the case of “Cotton Patch” suggests.
In chapter 5, therefore, we turn to the problem of rhetorical agency. We draw on discussions of agency that are informed by postmodern conceptions of subjectivity, ideology, and discourse to theorize the way agency “exceeds the subject” (Herndl and Licona 142). We then draw on actor-network theory to more deeply understand the way agency is distributed across networks of human and nonhuman actants. This reconfiguration of agency, however, has important implications for pedagogy. In the second half of this chapter, then, we explore ways rhetorical education might productively be transformed to address the challenges faced by rhetors as points of articulation, the challenges that result from orchestrating or “choreographing” (Cussins) multiple actors, multiple compositions, multiple modalities, and multiple infrastructural resources. How can we help students confront the challenges associated with rhetoric’s radically distributed nature?
Having explored the complex web of contingencies that surround processes of rhetorical invention, production, reproduction, and distribution, we focus our attention, in chapters 6 and 7, on the composition itself, seeking to understand the way the peculiar dynamics of multimodal rhetoric articulate with previous models of public rhetoric. We start by invoking traditions of rhetorical ethics. Kairos, after all, dictates that a rhetorical response be not just effective, but also fitting. In chapter 6 we explore distinctive ethical considerations that emerge in the context of multimodality, focusing on a particular multimodal composition used by the prosecution in the trial of Michael Skakel. We demonstrate
