Posthuman feminism and the rhetoric of silent cinema: Distributed agency, ontic media, and the possibility of a networked historiography

ABSTRACT

This essay pursues a pressing question in the study of posthuman rhetoric: Now that distributed agency has, to a degree, been theorized, to what use can it be put by feminists? In attempting one provisional response, the essay argues on behalf of the importance of a posthuman conception of ontic media, recuperating feminist agency not within a particular historical individual but, instead, in the relationships between her mediational networks and their nodes. Taking as its primary artifact Anita Loos’s groundbreaking 1916 film His Picture in the Papers, the essay historicizes and articulates Loos’s particular brand of indirect-qua-distributed feminist agency. In doing so, the essay gestures more broadly toward the role of such networks in the recovery of feminist critiques previously resistant to historicization due to their distributed nature.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist rhetoric
• posthumanism
• ontology
• historiography
• silent film

Acknowledgments

Jason Barrett-Fox is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at Weber State University. He would like to thank Rob Topinka, Frank Farmer, Bryan Moore, Michael Wutz, Kundai Chirindo, Mitch Reyes, Dave Schulz, and Jaclyn Howell for comments on earlier drafts of this article. He would also like to thank Barbara Biesecker and her anonymous reviewers for their care and guidance in bringing this article to print.

Notes

1. Though I prefer this more perspicuous translation, the film is also often translated as The Vanishing Lady.

2. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 115, 118.

3. Ilene Whitney Crawford, “Rhetoric as the Study and Practice of Movement,” in Rhetorica in Motion, eds. Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 82.

4. John Muckelbauer and Debra Hawhee, “Posthuman Rhetorics: ‘It's the Future, Pikul,’” JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, Politics 20, no. 4 (2000): 768.

5. Crawford, “Movement,” 71.

6. Jason Barrett-Fox, “Rhetorics of Indirection, Indiscretion, Insurrection: The ‘Feminine Style’ of Anita Loos, 1912–1925,” JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, Politics 32, no. 2 (2012): 221.

7. Counterpropositional rhetorics are rhetorics that circumvent traditional propositional exchanges through various types of genre coding or other indirect means, making impossible for the target of one's critique to argue back. I mention this in relation to Loos's critique of H. L. Mencken's In Defense of Women in her satire Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

8. Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Rhetorical Tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 7.

9. Diane Davis and Michelle Ballif, “Guest Editors' Introduction: Pushing the Limits of the Anthropos,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014): 347.

10. Davis and Ballif, “Introduction,” 347.

11. Enoch, Jessica. “Finding New Spaces for Rhetorical Research,” Rhetoric Review 30, no. 2 (2011): 115.

12. Many thanks to Kittler's cotranslator, Michael Wutz, who graciously talked me through this insight.

13. Barrett-Fox, “Indirection,” 221.

14. Stuart Jeffries, “Friedrich Kittler Obituary,” The Guardian, October 21, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/21/friedrich-kittler.

15. Jeffries, “Obituary.”

16. Friedrich Kittler, “Toward an Ontology of Media,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, nos. 2–3 (2009): 24.

17. Kittler, “Ontology,” 27.

18. Kittler, “Ontology,” 25.

19. Kittler, “Ontology,” 25.

20. Kittler, “Ontology,” 25. Interestingly, Kittler relates Aristotle's sensitivity to the medium back to his father's role as a physician.

21. Nicholas Gane, “Radical Post-humanism: Friedrich Kittler and the Primacy of Technology,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 3 (2005): 25, 29.

22. Kittler, Gramophone, xl–xli.

23. Kittler, “Ontology,” 23.

24. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, translators' introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), xii.

25. Winthrop-Young and Wutz, “Introduction,” xiv.

26. Winthrop-Young and Wutz, “Introduction,” xv.

27. Rebecca Dingo, Networking Arguments (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 7.

28. Kittler, Gramophone, xix.

29. Joshua Gunn, “Canned Laughter,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014): 18.

30. Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 349.

31. Bennett, “Force,” 351.

32. Bennett, “Force,” 350.

33. Bennett, “Force,” 351.

34. Bennett, “Force,” 353.

35. Davis and Ballif, “Introduction,” 349.

36. For various perspectives on how scholars have broached the question of emergent feminist materiality see the following: Sarah Hallenbeck, “Toward a Posthuman Perspective: Feminist Rhetorical Methodologies and Everyday Practices,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 15, no. 9 (2012): 9–27; Jrssica Enoch, “Finding New Spaces for Rhetorical Research,” Rhetoric Review 30, no. 2 (2011): 115–17; Barbara A. Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 2 (1992): 140–59; Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 2002; and Roxanne Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 2003.

37. Hallenbeck, “Posthuman,” 12.

38. Hallenbeck, “Posthuman,” 12.

39. Hallenbeck, “Posthuman,” 16.

40. Hallenbeck, “Posthuman,” 16

41. Hallenbeck, “Posthuman,” 17.

42. George Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997).

43. Technical communication has been at the forefront of discussion of posthuman rhetorical distributions of agency. For further reading in that domain, I would recommend the following: Andrew Mara and Byron Hawk, “Posthuman Rhetorics and Technical Communication,” Technical Communication Quarterly 19, no. 1 (2009): 1–10; Carl Herndl and Adela Licona, “Shifting Agency: Agency, Kairos, and the Possibilities of Social Action,” in Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse and Organizations, eds. Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 2007), 133–54; Carolyn Miller, “Forward,” in Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication, ed. Stuart A. Selber, ix–xii (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010).

44. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century,” in An Introduction to Cybercultures, ed. David Bell (New York: Routledge, 2001), 292, 293.

45. Haraway, “Cyborg,” 293.

46. Haraway, “Cyborg,” 293.

47. Haraway, “Cyborg,” 294.

48. It is hard to know whether the cyborg gave birth to distributed agency or whether agential distribution gave birth to the cyborg, though since temporality is but one facet of larger and more complex networks, the question may be moot, or at least directable back into the networks that produced it. In any case, what a feminist orientation that grapples with posthumanism and the new materialism offers is an ear, what Thomas Rickert calls an “attunement,” to the ambient features of rhetoric and its networks that sensitizes us to a world constantly emerging into “ongoing differentiation.” Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press). Building upon the foundation laid three decades ago by Haraway, Samantha Frost articulates the need to move discussions of feminist agency and epistemology away from frameworks where “the agency of bodies and material objects is understood largely as an effect of power” to one where “causation is conceived as complex, recursive, and multi-linear.” Samantha Frost, “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology, in Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, ed. Heidi E. Grasswick (New York: Springer, 2011), 71. In both cases, the formerly humanist subject of feminism is not lost: she is distributed, mediated, and agentially feathered into highly complex environments.

49. Haraway, “Cyborg,” 292.

50. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 164.

51. Nathan Stormer, “Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2004): 264.

52. Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1978): 202.

53. Granovetter, “Strength.”

54. Granovetter, “Strength.”

55. Stephanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon, introduction to Postfeminism, eds. Stephanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 19.

56. Genz and Brabon, 19.

57. The literature on feminist signage and oratory is extensive, but these resources give a sense of the breadth of the subject's coverage in rhetorical studies from the nineteenth century to the present. See Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Consciousness-Raising: Linking Theory, Criticism, and Practice,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2002): 45–64; Carole Blair, “Contested Histories of Rhetoric: The Politics of Preservation, Progress, and Change,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78, no. 4 (1992): 403–28; Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement Since 1970 (Philadelphia, PA: University Press of Pennsylvania, 1996); Suzanne M. Daughton, “The Fine Texture of Enactment: Iconicity as Empowerment in Angelina Grimke's Pennsylvania Hall Address,” Women's Studies in Communication 18, no. 1 (1995): 19–43; Shirley Wilson Logan, ed. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth Century African-American Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995); and Mari Boor Tonn, “Militant Motherhood: Labor's Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 1 (1996): 1–21.

58. Anita Loos, A Girl Like I (New York: Viking, 1966), 101.

59. Richard Schickel, His Picture in the Papers (New York: Charterhouse, 1973), 3.

60. Anita Loos and John Emerson, His Picture in the Papers, Film, Triangle/Fine Arts, 1916.

61. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Noonday Press, 1990), 40.

62. Loos, Girl, 98.

63. Hugo Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A Psychological Study,” in Hugo Münsterberg on Film, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2013), 46.

64. Laura Frost, “Blondes Have More Fun: Anita Loos and the Language of Silent Cinema,” Modernism/modernity 17, no. 2 (2010): 297.

65. Loos, Girl, 102.

66. Frost, “Blondes,” 297.

67. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 291.

68. Dingo, Networking, 7.

69. Rickert, Ambient, xiii.

70. Kittler, Gramophone, 16.

71. Kittler, Gramophone, 16.

72. Kittler, Gramophone, 145.

73. Kittler, Gramophone, 146.

74. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 8.

75. Massumi, Parables, 4.

76. Massumi, Parables, 7.

77. Massumi, Parables, 12.

78. Massumi, Parables, 13.

79. Massumi, Parables, 86.

80. Stormer, “Articulation,” 264.

81. Kittler, Gramophone, 117.

82. Rickert, Ambient, 1.

83. Peter Simonson, “Rhetoric, Culture, Things,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 1 (2014), 120.

84. Simonson, “Rhetoric, Culture, Things,” 122.

85. Simonson, “Rhetoric, Culture, Things,” 122.

86. Simonson, “Rhetoric, Culture, Things,” 122.

87. Simonson, “Rhetoric, Culture, Things,” 122.

88. Dingo, Networking, 7.

89. Massumi, Parables, 3.

90. Massumi, Parables, 5.

91. Hallenbeck, “Posthuman,” 25.