we begin to consider the relationship between visual and material rhetorics, it would seem plausible to question the need for a “material turn” within visual rhetoric. On the one hand, to consider the relationship of material rhetoric to visual rhetoric as constituting a “turn” seems almost obligatory, given the tendency of the humanities and social sciences to mark new conversations and disciplinary foci as such. On the other hand, to consider the notion of a “material turn” is to potentially misrepresent what I contend is a more integrated, already existing relationship between the visual and the material. W.J.T. Mitchell’s “pictorial turn,” 1 for example, helps us understand that it is possible to view a potentially increased focus on material rhetorics not as a full turn, per se, but rather as an already present component of visual rhetoric. For Mitchell, embodied knowledge and materiality are implicitly accounted for in the pictorial turn and its attendant modes of visual practice. He notes that however the pictorial turn may be defined, it is fundamentally a “postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” (16). Here, he describes the picture not as an artifact in and of itself but rather as implicated in broader cultural, relational, and physical contexts.
The analysis of photo 22727 in chapter one, for example, described the iconic image as situated in the discourses of the emerging environmental movement of the United States in the 1970s. When understood in light of the whole-earth discourse, the image may be read as prompting a more embodied experience that fosters a sense of personal responsibility toward the earth. To understand artifacts of visual rhetoric and cartographic representation as implicated in the pictorial turn is to view them as fostering embodied knowledge, as inviting a more intimate understanding of or connection to a particular place. We may see, then, that Mitchell’s acknowledgement of these interactions may indeed be read as accounting for materiality and embodied knowledge as a component of the visual—as part of the shift that already constitutes the pictorial turn. When understood in this light, the inclusive nature of Mitchell’s pictorial turn provides a useful starting point for envisioning the movement between the visual and the material as happening along a spectrum. I argue that to understand the relationship between the visual and material as such allows for a more inclusive mode of knowing that opens up rather than closes off interpretive possibilities—that accounts more readily for the movement between these modes and their interplay, such that we may more directly engage in the study of visual-material rhetorics as embodied knowledge and a sustainable project of inquiry.
Materiality, Space, and the Body
As described briefly in the introduction, a theory of material rhetoric, as conceptualized most clearly in Carole Blair’s 1999 study of five U.S. memorial sites, has at its core a focus on the impact of spatially-situated texts on contextualized, bodily experience. A closer look at recent work related to material rhetoric reveals that studies in this area may be understood as situated along a continuum. At one end of this continuum are analyses with a primary focus on physical space and a subsequent focus on the impact of those spaces on the bodies residing within them; at the other end of the continuum are analyses with a focus on the body first and foremost, and a secondary, contextualizing focus on the sociocultural contexts which make possible such analyses of the body. And of course, there are those analyses that are situated not along one end or the other, but someplace in the middle. In this chapter, I examine recent conversations explicitly related to studies of material rhetoric; included among them are the theories of Blair and Foucault, which I see as an integral component of any discussion and subsequent theory of visual-material rhetorics.
The earlier work of Carole Blair contains visible hints of what would later become the theory of material rhetoric set forth in her essay “U.S. Memorial Sites.” In an earlier essay, for example, Blair and her co-authors, Jeppeson and Pucci, describe the rhetorical impact of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, suggesting that its visibility has been enhanced through its reproduction in popular culture—ideas that then receive further treatment in “U.S. Memorial Sites” (“Public Memorializing” 263). While Blair and her co-authors do not yet use the term “material rhetoric,” their criteria for postmodern architecture are not incompatible with the goals of a material rhetoric. These criteria primarily focus on a memorial’s “melding of incompatible symbols, forms, styles, and textures within a particular structure,” and its integration of regional or historical characteristics and forms (267). Deborah Fausch takes further the idea of a postmodern architecture, forwarding the idea of a feminist architecture that is quite similar to how we might understand material rhetoric. An architect herself, Fausch feels that feminist architecture may be designated as such “if it fostered an awareness of and posited a value to the experience of the concrete, the sensual, the bodily—if it used the body as a necessary instrument in absorbing the content of the experience” (42). This idea too is compatible with the general goals of Blair’s later theory of material rhetoric, as outlined in the essay “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites,” in which she understands the action of the body as a necessary component in absorbing even a portion of a site’s meaning.
As described in the Introduction, L.J. Nicoletti incorporates what may be read as a Blairian framework in her creation of an assignment geared toward helping her first-year writing students cope with the events of September 11th and respond to the types of memorialization they were witnessing in the mass media. Again, while this is not necessarily a book about public memory, Nicoletti aptly points out that to uncover the arguments built into commemorative sculptures or monuments may also make us more attuned to the ideological agendas often perpetuated through particular renderings or portrayals of politicized events (53). Similarly, Barbara Biesecker writes that “claiming and representing the past is far from being an innocent affair” (“Remembering” 168). As Biesecker’s important analysis of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial (WIMS) demonstrates, a memorial’s ostensible goals may differ from its more subtle rhetorical work. On the surface, for example, the WIMS appeared to acknowledge the millions of women who have served in the U.S. military since the Revolutionary War (Biesecker 165). As a critical analysis of the memorial reveals, however, the memorial’s revisionist history served to alienate the women whom it was intended to valorize. Within the WIMS, an exhibit gallery that should have promoted the accomplishments of individual women soldiers functions more generally to “mark the regular rhythms and daily practices of our nation’s service women” (166). As a result, she writes, “typicality rather than rarity subtends the order of things” (166). Consequently, these artifacts have the effect of problematically implying a representative, universalizing narrative, perpetuating a “seemingly complete, unabridged history of women in the U.S. armed services” (166). Instead, Biesecker calls for something akin to a multimodal rhetorical approach characterized more so by its ability to foster embodied knowledge. A material rhetoric approach indeed makes room for the contextualized nuances of multimodal, embodied experience that influence the cultural moments in which we interact with rhetorical artifacts.
Barbara Dickson and Dan Brouwer each consider the ways in which material and visual rhetorics function within the contexts of the mass media and the public, though their objects of analysis are less concerned with public memory and national identity than with the processes that make possible specific representations of the body in popular culture. Brouwer examines the sociocultural contexts that inform the practice of wearing HIV/AIDS tattoos. Considered a form of “self-stigmatization,” the practice of wearing the tattoo is “a particular communicative and performative strategy grounded in visibility politics and practiced in the context of AIDS activism” (Brouwer 206). Noting its precariousness as a social act, Brouwer writes that the tattoo “simultaneously disrupts expectations of the appearance of health and challenges ‘norms’ of patient behavior, yet [. . .] also invites surveillance [. . .] and runs the risk of reducing the wearer’s identity to ‘disease carrier’” (206). Brouwer’s rich analysis not only illuminates the motivations behind this powerful social practice but also provides a more empowered and “sensitive understanding of the communication practices of marginal or stigmatized social groups” by understanding how “performative communication” illustrates the connections “between the margins and center of power” (217–218). Also focused on the sociocultural contexts
