Material Rhetoric

Dr. Will Kurlinkus

Course Schedule
1.  Material Rhetoric 6.  Bodily Rhetorics

2.  Precarious Rhetorics 7.  Emotional Rhetorics

3.  Rhetorics of Display 8.  Rhetorics of Disability

and Memorials
9.  Rhetorics of Making
4.  Spatial Rhetorics
10.  Rhetorics of Sound
5.  Protest Rhetorics
11.  Environmental
Rhetorics
Course Assignments
¡  In-Class Presentations

¡  Weekly Analyses/Applications

¡  Material Analysis Midterm

¡  Final Paper

Take Notes For Exams

(1) Record useful questions you have. (2) Record new key terms and
theories—especially if rhetorical terms come up. (3) Connect what you’re
reading both across the week and the semester. (4) Think very carefully
about how what your reading relates to what you plan to write about in
your final paper this semester. (5) Finally, take note of how your favorite
readings are written. What goes in an intro, lit review, body, and
conclusion? How are examples and theories balanced? What do theses
look like? Even if you are not leading discussion, you are being evaluated
every class period on whether you come in with questions and issues to
discuss.
Who are you?
New Materialism
What did you read/write about?
New Materialism: Key
Concepts
¡  Philosophies of Technology
¡  Instrumentalism
¡  Determinism
¡  Social constructionism

¡  Scale (Macro + Microcosms)

¡  “Atoms are assembled in the kind of macrostructures
we experience in the condensed matter of the
perceptible world, their subatomic behavior consists
in the constant emergence, attraction, repulsion,
fluctuation, and shifting of nodes of charge” (11).
New Materialism: Key
Concepts
¡  New Materialism Works in Networks, Ecologies, and
Systems
¡  Hates dualism (mind vs. body), hates isolation

¡  Vitalism: Things are always moving in these systems,

not fixed, not static.
¡  “They often discern emergent, generative powers (or
agentic capacities) even within inorganic matter, and
they generally eschew the distinction between organic
and inorganic, or animate and inanimate” (9).
¡  Marback and “empathy for objects”—poking the eyes
out of family photos
¡  Matter becomes

¡  Boarders and boundaries: We use them to make

the world simpler, but they’re artificial and always
being crossed.
New Materialism: Key
Concepts
¡  Posthumanism: What happens when the boundaries between human
and object break down. (Marback’s “rhetorical vulnerability”).

¡  Object-oriented ontology: move philosophy away from a single-minded

focus on epistemology by expanding the philosophical conversation to
include not only questions of how we know the world but also questions
of what the world is.
¡  Flat ontology: no object should be granted special status.
¡  Assemblages: all objects exert autonomous agency. Objects are autonomous
but also always made of other objects.
¡  Inherent withdrawal: the unknowability of parts of every object. Never
understand the alien experience.

¡  Critical materialism: “scholars pay attention to the production and consumption

of goods, to the uneven effects of globalization on differently located citizens, to
the management, distribution, and legitimization of unequal life chances, and to
the operation of power at state and quotidian levels” (28).
¡  Biopower: the control of human bodies by the state
¡  Micropolitics of the everyday
What does a
materialist
reading of grad
school look like?
Materialism and Rhetoric

¡  “If technology is in some fundamental sense concerned with

the probable rather than the necessary—with the
contingencies of practical use and action, rather than the
certainties of scientific principle—then it becomes rhetorical in
a startling fashion. It becomes an art of deliberation about the
issues of practical action” —Richard Buchanan

¡  “If, for example, biotechnological developments have

potentially far-reaching political, economics, and ethical
implications, is there not a need for more public, political
dialogue about the goals, uses, and ownership of research? Yet
if science is brought explicitly into a public forum, what kinds of
arguments are to be accorded merit: those informed by
secular science, or economic interest, or religious faith?” (19).
 What is
Rhetoric?
What is rhetoric?
Contingent
Public
Persuasive
Contextual
The History of Rhetoric
¡  Sophists>Aristotelian>Romans>Medieval>Enlightenment>Handbooks>Neo-
Aristotelian “New Rhetoric”>Po-Mo Rhetoric
¡  “conscious identification among people . . . is based on a desire for an intersubjective
receptivity, not mastery, and on a simultaneous recognition of similarities and
difference, not merely one or the other.”

¡  “Since the persuasive is persuasive to someone . . . and since no art examines the
particular . . . but for persons of a certain sort . . . neither does rhetoric theorize about
each opinion—what may seem so to Socrates or Hippias—but about what seems true
to people of a certain sort. . . . rhetoric [forms enthymemes] from things [that seem
true] to people already accustomed to deliberate among themselves. . . . And we
debate about things that seem to be capable of admitting two possibilities . . .”

¡  “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by

nature respond to symbols.”

¡  “On the matter of what is good and what is bad contrasting arguments are put
forward in Greece by educated people: some say that what is good and what is bad
are two different things, others that they are the same thing, and that the same thing is
good for some but bad for others, or at one time good and at another time bad for
the same person.”
Playgrounds and
Parks
Final Thoughts on Grad
School