![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Despite calls to give greater attention to bodies and infrastructures, and despite the development of facial recognition software and face replacement apps, not to mention medical face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic and a long history of political faces in the news, rhetoric has not directly nor adequately dealt with the face. I offer a new materialist rhetorical theory of the face, drawing on the concepts of hyle and iwi to argue that the face is a bio-social conglomeration both human and nonhuman. I look specifically to biometric data collection and to artist Zach Blas’s algorithmically designed masks from his project, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” to illuminate how the face is rhetorical and how faces might resist facial recognition suppression. The study urges rhetoricians to think carefully and ecologically about the face.
Notes
1 I’d like to thank RR reviewers, Chris Mays and Alex Reid, for their insightful comments and feedback.
2 For discussion of the “micro-rhetorical stance,” see CitationPflugfelder, 2015.
3 “Intra-active” derives from CitationKaren Barad, 2007. Her usage refers to a mutual co-developmental relation with all things such that we are “Becoming,” in the sense that CitationGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use the term, but specifically emphasizes how we are always transforming and changing into something new, so the terminology is a reference to emergence.
4 For more on intersectionality, see CitationCrenshaw, 1989.
5 See the promotional introduction to her book, per the cover text.
6 I start with hyle to appeal to the Western rhetorical tradition and to avoid presuming too much about Rarámuri experience even as I hope to propose another way of thinking about the face and invite new ecologies of thought to expand the field. The risk of colonizing iwí must be given attention, however, and this is why I set out to use iwí in a self-reflexive but substantive way that shows the inadequacies of the Western tradition; I invite reflection and revision.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David R. Gruber
David R. Gruber is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.