More Materialist Rhetoric

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Notes

[1] Ronald Walter Greene, Another Materialist Rhetoric, Critical Studies in Media Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 21–42.

[2] Prior to my work on the later Foucault, others had noted the implication of Foucault's approach to the materiality of discourse and its disruptive effect on our taken for granted assumptions about rhetoric and power. See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Foucault on Discourse: Methods and Temptations,” Journal of American Forensic Association 18, no. 4 (1982): 246–57; Carole Blair “The Statement: Foundation of Foucault's Historical Criticism,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 51, no. 4 (1987): 364–83; Martha Cooper, “Rhetorical Criticism and Foucault's Philosophy of Discursive Events,” Central States Speech Journal 39, no. 1 (1988): 1–17; Carole Blair, “Symbolic Action and Discourse: The Convergent/Divergent Views of Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault,” in Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: Rhetoric in Transition, ed. Bernard L. Brock (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 119–64; and Barbara A. Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 4 (1992): 351–64. Foucault's theory of discourse had already secured rhetoric's materiality by approaching rhetoric as a discursive event instead of as symbols and signifiers. In light of differences in approaching rhetorical effect and power among different critical idioms, however, Foucault's later work on governmentality provided an opportunity to return to the question of materiality. AMR was the first essay, I believe, to isolate the importance of Foucault's interest in governmentality in an NCA journal.

[3] For example, see John M. Sloop and Kent A. Ono, “Out-Law Discourse: The Critical Politics of Material Judgment,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 30, no. 1 (1997): 50–69; Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, “Judging Parents,” in Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, Indeterminacy, ed. John M. Sloop and James P. McDaniel (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 196–216.

[4] For the question of jurisdiction for the spatial organization of governance, see Zornitsa Keremidchieva,” Congressional Debates on the 19th Amendment: Jurisdictional Rhetoric and the Assemblage of the US Body Politic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 99, no. 1 (2013): 51–73. On the performative order that articulates the distinction between the discursive and nondiscursive, see Nathan Stormer, “Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90, no. 3 (2004): 257–84. On how a governing apparatus is affected by shifts in institutional form in a control society, see Joshua S. Hanan, “Home is Where the Capital is: The Culture of Real Estate in an Era of Control Societies, “ Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 7, no. 2 (2010): 176–201; and Catherine Chaput and Joshua S. Hanan, “Economic Rhetoric as Taxis: Neoliberal Governmentality and the Dispositif of Freakonomics,” Journal of Cultural Economy 8, no. 1 (2015): 42–61.

[5] Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” 35. Many of those Grossberg influences Sloop speaks of concerned the formation of what my cohort at Illinois came to know as spatial materialism. See Lawrence Grossberg, Bringing It All Back Home: Essays in Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); James Hay, “Between Cultural Materialism and Spatial Materialism,” in Thinking with James Carey: Communications, Transportation, History, ed. Craig Robertson and Jeremy Packer (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, “Spatial Materialism: Grossberg's Deleuzean Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 63–99; and Ronald Walter Greene, “Spatial Materialism: Labor, Location, and Transnational Literacy,” Critical Studies In Media Communication 27, no. 1 (2010): 105–10.

[6] Matthew May, “The Imaginative-Power of ‘Another Materialist Rhetoric’,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1071306

[7] Ibid., doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1071306

[8] Ibid., doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1071306

[9] William C. Trapani, “Materiality's Time: Rethinking the Event from the Derridean spirit d'a-propos,” in Rhetoric, Materiality & Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker & John Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 321–46; and Christian Lundberg, “On Missed Encounters: Lacan and the Materiality of Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric, Materiality & Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker & John Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 161–84.

[10] May, “Imaginative-Power,” [page #]

[11] Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 188–206.

[12] Kristin A. Swenson, “Being in Common: In Celebration of Ronald W. Greene's Woolbert Award,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1071307

[13] Ronald Walter Greene, “Y Movies: Film and the Modernization of Pastoral Power,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 19–36; Ronald Walter Greene, “Pastoral Exhibition: The YMCA Motion Picture Bureau and the Transition to 16MM,” in Useful Cinema: Expanding the Contexts of Film Culture, ed. Haidee Wasson and Charles Acland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 205–29; and Ronald Walter Greene, “Lessons from the YMCA: The Material Rhetoric of Criticism, Rhetorical Interpretation, and Pastoral Power,” in Communication M@tters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks, ed. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley (NY: Routledge, 2012), 219–30.

[14] John M. Sloop, “Illuminating Greene's Materialist Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1071308

[15] Occasionally a rhetorical scholar finds the Y work useful for its theoretical explanation of the “modernization of pastoral power.” See Joshua Gunn, “Speech's Sanatorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 18–33. For media and film scholars my YMCA essays are more recognizable as contributing to three different threads of scholarship: the governmentality of media, the material histories of communication technologies and/or a “non-theatrical” circuit of film exhibition. See Julie A. Wilson, “A New Kind of Star is Born: Audrey Hepburn and the Global Governmentalization of Female Stardom,” Celebrity Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 56–68; Jeremy Packer, “What is an Archive? An Apparatus Model for Communications and Media History,” The Communication Review 13, no. 4 (2010): 88–104; Charles Acland, “Curtains, Carts, and the Mobile Screen,” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 148–66; and Haidee Wasson, “Moving Images: Portable Histories of Film Exhibition,” in The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies: Media History and the Foundation of Media Studies, ed. John Nerone (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 367–84.

[16] Sloop, “Illuminating Greene's Materialist Rhetoric,” doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1071308

[17] Ibid., doi: 10.1080/14791420.2015.1071308

[18] For an approach to love-rhetoric as a constitutive labor infusing a radical political ontology see Eric S. Jenkins and Josue David Cisneros, “Rhetoric and This Crazy Little ‘Thing’ Called Love,” The Review of Communication 13, no. 2 (2013): 85–107.