months pregnant and wearing nothing but diamonds” (297). Dickson questions whether the representation of Moore’s pregnant body can be seen as “liberat[ing] the feminine body,” as Moore claimed it did in her description of the photo as a “feminist statement” (297). Dickson understands the photo as a “textual event” and considers the cultural contexts that shape its “production and reception” (299). A material rhetorical analysis of these “bodily, visual, and textual” inscriptions allows Dickson to better understand the hegemonic discourses that inform bodily inscription and how such inscriptions get instantiated materially (311–312).
Building on Blair and Dickson’s approaches and giving more equal treatment to spatial analysis and the impact of physical space on the body, Mary Lay Schuster’s material rhetorical analysis of Baby Haven, a free-standing birth center in middle America, describes the consequences of the center on the minds and bodies of clients who come there seeking an “ideal birth,” or one that resists “the construction of their pregnant bodies as risky entities best managed by medical experts” (3). Schuster describes Baby Haven as a rhetorically powerful space that allows clients to “rewrite cultural inscriptions” that construct the body, in order to forward an understanding of the birthing process that works against the hegemonic biomedical model (30). Also affording more equal treatment to physical space and its impact on bodies, but discussing in addition the material component of textual artifacts, Christina Haas analyzes the work of a Permanent Injunction posted on the front door of an Ohio abortion clinic. The Injunction is meant to deter abortion protesters and create a safe space for women who seek to have an abortion performed (Crowley 359). Haas describes the Injunction in terms of its material rhetorical and cultural dimensions, but frames the document more so as a mediating device that helps to make tangible the “conceptual distinction between public and private” (234). Through its articulation of spatial boundaries that clarify where protests may be staged, the Injunction acts on the bodies within and outside of the abortion clinic to protect the employees of the clinic, thus fostering a better sense of safety among clinic workers (224).
Multimodality as a Component of Materiality
In addition to material rhetoric’s focus on physical space and the built environment, fields related to composition and media studies have begun to acknowledge the materiality of multimodal texts and digital artifacts. Hayles, for example, argues for a multimodal, material literacy in her keynote address at the 2002 Computers and Writing Conference. While the recent focus on visual rhetoric is a clear step in the right direction, she says, “we need to develop modes of critical attention responsive to the full range of [. . .] signifying elements in electronic work, including animation, sound, graphics, screen design, and navigational functionalities” (“Deeper” 371). In acknowledging that our vocabulary for analyzing printed text is insufficient for the critique of digital texts, Hayles broaches the intersections of digital texts and materiality (373). To this end, she first notes that electronic texts require a “critical language” sensitive to the interplay of word and image; she then sees this interplay as indicative of larger issues related to the broader practices of multimodality: “This new critical vocabulary,” she says, “will further realize that navigation, animation, and other digital effects are not neutral devices but designed practices that enter deeply into the work’s structures; it will eschew the print-centric assumption that a literacy work is an abstract verbal construction and focus on the materiality of the medium” (373). Aligned with Hayles, Barbara Warnick notes that “the material form of a representation is an intrinsic dimension of the user’s experience of it, and so critical approaches need to take into account the materiality of the text, as well as its content and style of expression” (328). The GPS, as I will describe in chapter four, is one example of a multimodal, material artifact that not only epitomizes the variety of content, contexts, and styles of expression that the text may produce but also helps illuminate the value of a visual-material rhetorical approach for the study of multimodal artifacts.2
Similar to the discussions of material rhetoric that I’ve described here, this book focuses on analyses of specific spaces, the artifacts that contribute to the rhetorical power of those spaces, and consequently the impact of those rhetorical spaces on the bodies that inhabit or once inhabited them. Again, this book also moves across visual-material artifacts such as spatial representations of mill life, park memorials, and maps, in order to more overtly call attention to or reconcile versions of contested space and show the value of visual-material rhetorics within and beyond the field of rhetoric. Through a consistent focus on these artifacts’ selectivity; their material, visual, and textual composition; and their subsequent impact on human, posthuman, and non-human bodies residing or once residing in the spaces they represent, this book understands these sites as visual-material rhetorics of heterotopic space. To arrive at such an understanding then requires that we acknowledge the ideas of Blair and Foucault as part and parcel of a theory of visual-material rhetorics.
In Foucault’s Theory of Discourse, an Understanding of Space as Rhetorical (Or, En Route to a Visual-Material Rhetorics of Heterotopic Space)
While Foucault is of course no stranger to scholars of rhetoric, his concept of heterotopias is not one that is frequently invoked within the field; rather, it is more common, especially among new graduate students of rhetoric, to read Foucault’s work within the context of his theory of discourse. Because his work on heterotopias focuses more directly on his theory of spatiality, it is often more familiar to those who study geography or critical cartographies. Nonetheless, Foucault’s theory of discourse and his theory of space share some common themes; in fact, the curious reader may notice the seeming stylistic and thematic similarities between these two areas of his work. Moreover, readers may account for these similarities by noting the close chronological proximity of his initial articulations of these ideas. That is, the ideas underpinning Foucault’s essay, “Of Other Spaces,” preceded publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge by only two years. While “Of Other Spaces” was officially published in 1984 as “Des Espaces Autres” in the French journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité, it was in March of 1967, in France, that Foucault first gave the lecture that would then serve as the basis for this essay, in which he posits his theory of heterotopias (22). Only two years later, in 1969, The Archaeology of Knowledge, or L’Archeologie du Savoir, in which Foucault sets out much of his theory of discourse, was first published in France. Subsequently, to read these two works side by side—especially to read “Of Other Spaces” alongside “The Unities of Discourse” within The Archaeology of Knowledge—quite seemingly invites a reading of space as discursive. As Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg write in The Rhetorical Tradition, Foucault’s theory of discourse
[seeks to] restore to discourse its character as an event. [. . .] [It] describes the relationship between language and knowledge; the functions of disciplines, institutions, and other discourse communities; the ways that particular statements come to have truth value; the constraints on the production of discourse about objects of knowledge; the effects of discursive practices on social action; and the uses of discourse to exercise power. (1127)
Likewise, Foucault’s theory of space may be understood as an active endeavor—one that is concerned with teasing out the relationships between space and knowledge, understanding how spaces may constrain meaning by appearing simple while also concealing knowledge, and understanding how “our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down” (“Of Other Spaces” 23).
Foucault’s theory of heterotopias asks that we take a close look at our hierarchic “history of space,” which he notes may be traced roughly to the Middle Ages—we must understand this hierarchic ensemble of places in order to expose the different relationships that delineate them—this “ensemble of places,” he says, includes “sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places. [. . .] It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement” (“Of Other Spaces” 22). Today, he says, this space of emplacement “has been substituted
