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ABSTRACT
Rhetorical theories of representation, caught in the logics of transcendence/immanence, have struggled to reconcile the need to move beyond representation with the political importance of critiquing representational effects. I argue that this tension can—and must—be addressed through a relational politics of representation that draws from antiracist and decolonial theory. Tracing poststructural critiques of representational ontology, epistemology, and politics, I demonstrate their dependence on racializing and colonial processes. I then describe how rethinking our theories of representation relationally figures both ontology and epistemology as inherently political, and opens the possibility for theorizing the human beyond Man. I argue that a relational politics of representation is an impossible necessity that must be continually (re)attempted though it will never be fully achieved.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dana Cloud, Joshua Gunn, Sohinee Roy, and Thomas Dunn for their comments on previous versions of this work, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and incredibly helpful feedback.
Notes
1 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
2 Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender, and Bodies Out of Place (New York: Berg, 2004); Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
3 Bradford Vivian, Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); Dana L. Cloud and Joshua Gunn, “Introduction: W(h)ither Ideology?” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 407–20; Jamie Merchant, “Immanence, Governmentality, Critique: Toward a Recovery of Totality in Rhetorical Theory,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 47, no. 3 (2014): 227–50.
4 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth,” 260.
5 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 12–13.
6 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology.
7 Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
8 Rachel A. Griffin, “I AM an Angry Black Woman: Black Feminist Autoethnography, Voice, and Resistance,” Women’s Studies in Communication 35, no. 3 (2012): 148; Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 13–14.
9 I reference the water protectors at Standing Rock as a conceptual example to support the theoretical argument being made. As this is not a rhetorical criticism, but a theory piece, I have chosen to make general references to the situation and context of the protests rather than to particular Native American rhetors or rhetorics.
10 Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000).
11 Vivian, Being Made Strange, x.
12 Ibid., 9.
13 Although these are not the only poststructural critiques of representation, for reasons of space I use them as primary examples. We could also consider origins, linearity, and interpretation, among others.
14 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 16.
15 Lowe demonstrates this in liberal humanism; Weheliye shows how this passes into poststructural theorizing, particularly in the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
16 Vivan, Being Made Strange, 13 emphasis added.
17 Ibid., xi.
18 Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Différance,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 110.
19 Kendall R. Phillips, “Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 39, no. 4 (2006): 310.
20 Ibid., 313.
21 Raymie McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91.
22 Joshua Gunn and David E. Beard, “On the Apocalyptic Sublime,” Southern Communication Journal 65, no. 4 (2000): 275.
23 Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 21–41. See also Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133–50.
24 Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism: The Rhetorical Subject and the General Intellect,” in Rhetoric, Materiality & Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 44.
25 To note, Greene also draws from Louis Althusser in his conceptualization of articulation, but a version of Althusserian theory coming from Judith Butler, who contests the sovereignty of the interpellating voice. Here, interpellation can be spoken back to.
26 Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism,” 56.
27 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 2.
28 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 157–79.
29 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 4.
30 Ibid., 24.
31 Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). Molina defines racial scripts as “the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another, even when they do not directly cross paths” (6).
32 Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation,” 114, 110.
33 Vivian, Being Made Strange, 13.
34 Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Communication 54, no. 4 (1990): 274–89; Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as an Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58, no. 3 (1994): 141–63.
35 Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric.”
36 For a notable exception, see Kenneth Burke on motion.
37 Vivian, Being Made Strange, 62.
38 Barbara Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 4 (1992): 351.
39 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehiman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 56; Vivian, Being Made Strange, 93.
40 Dana L. Cloud, “The Materialist Dialectic as a Site of Kairos: Theorizing Rhetorical Intervention in Material Social relations,” in Rhetoric, Materiality & Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 299.
41 See the discussion of Olaudah Equiano in Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 43–71.
42 Here I use “made” as does Molina, referencing the mutual relational construction of racialized groups (How Race Is Made in America).
43 Bergland, The National Uncanny, 13.
44 Tristan Ahtone, “How Media Did and Did Not Report on Standing Rock,” Al Jazeera, December 14, 2016. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/12/media-report-standing-rock-161214101627199.html.
45 Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” 357.
46 Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse,” 153–54.
47 Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “Commitment to Telos—A Sustained Critical Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 59, no. 1 (1992): 48.
48 Ibid., 50, 52.
49 Ibid., 56.
50 Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism,” 45.
51 Matthew Bost and Ronald Walter Greene, “Affirming Rhetorical Materialism: Enfolding the Virtual and the Actual,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 443.
52 Matthew S. May, “Orator-Machine: Autonomist Marxism and William D. ‘Big Bill’ Haywood’s Cooper Union Address,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 45, no. 4 (2012): 431.
53 Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” 36.
54 Barbara A. Biesecker, “Whither Ideology? Toward a Different Take on Enjoyment as a Political Factor,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 446.
55 Ibid., 446–47.
56 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 3, 7, 8.
57 Ibid., 24.
58 John M. Sloop and Kent A. Ono, “Out-law Discourse: The Critical Politics of Material Judgment,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 30, no. 1 (1997): 54.
59 Griffin, “I AM an Angry Black Woman,” 148.
60 Edward Schiappa, Beyond Representational Correctness: Rethinking Criticism of Popular Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).
61 Molina, How Race Is Made, 8.
62 Vivian, Being Made Strange, 169.
63 Bernadette Marie Calafell, “The Future of Feminist Scholarship: Beyond the Politics of Inclusion,” Women’s Studies in Communication 37, no. 3 (2014): 268.
64 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 10.
65 Darrell Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 654 original emphases.
66 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 5.
67 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 21.
68 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015), 14.
69 See Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan, eds., “Figures of Entanglement,” Special Issue, Review of Communication 16, no. 4 (2016).
70 I appreciate this work for encouraging me to pull out my old quantum mechanics textbook and leaf through it. Richard L. Liboff, Introductory Quantum Mechanics, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Addison Wesley, 2003).
71 Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” 650.
72 Flores asks that both scholars of color and white scholars begin centering race in our work, and states, “I cannot imagine why we would not” (“Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 17–18).
73 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines.
74 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 8.
75 Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 26.
76 Ibid., 32.
77 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 3.
78 Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
79 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 32.
80 Ibid., 35.
81 Vivian, Being Made Strange, xi.
82 Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 32–33.
83 Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” 654.
84 Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 142.
85 Walter Mignolo, cited in Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” 648.
86 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 13.
87 Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994), 99–100.
88 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 65.
89 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 132.
90 Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 99–100.
91 Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 14–15.
92 Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 60–72; Radha Hedge, “Fragments and Interruptions: Sensory Regimes of Violence and the Limits of Feminist Ethnography,” Qualitative Inquiry 15, no. 2 (2009): 276–96.
93 Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 98.
94 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 10.
95 Jenna N. Hanchey, “All of Us Phantasmic Saviors,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 144–60.
96 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 2, 5.
97 Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 100.
98 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 19.
99 Schiappa, Beyond Representational Correctness.
100 Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 60.
101 Ibid., 77.
102 Calafell takes Carrillo Rowe’s relational politics a step further to argue that “points of relationality could allow us to [link] across affects of Otherness, regardless of our various positionalities.” Bernadette Marie Calafell, “(I)dentities: Considering Accountability, Reflexivity, and Intersectionality in the I and the We,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 9, no. 2 (2013): 7.
103 Jennifer Daryl Slack, “Duel to the Death?” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 336–42.
104 Ibid., 340.
105 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 26.
106 Lisa M. Corrigan, “On Rhetorical Criticism, Performativity, and White Fragility,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 87–88.
107 For example, see Dana L. Cloud, “On Dialectics and ‘Duelism’: A Reply to Jennifer Daryl Slack,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (2008): 102.
108 Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines, 4.