Figures of entanglement: special issue introduction

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.

—Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of “new materialisms” scholarship both within and beyond the discipline of communication and rhetorical studies.¹ While generally sharing poststructuralist affinities, this turn aims to refigure meaning in less anthropocentric and more ecological terms. If poststructuralist critiques of subjectivity have highlighted the contingency and malleability of human discursive formations, thereby enabling previously foreclosed theoretical advances and political progress for many social groups, new materialisms argue that these important achievements have nevertheless all too often unwittingly bolstered an anthropocentric understanding of matter and meaning that undercuts the potential reach of those gains, imperils them by reinforcing our obliviousness to an emerging ecological crisis, and continues to foreclose similar gains for the large majority of nonhumans. In response, new materialisms call for an appreciation not only of the contingent dynamism and agency of the discourses, institutions and technologies that constitute an ostensibly discrete human domain but also of matter itself. In doing so, new materialisms insist that humans and human discourses are always ontologically enmeshed with more-than-human configurations and also often seek to better understand how other-than-human creatures, critters, things, actants, objects and powers behave as meaningful agencies in their own right. As such, new materialisms invite us to revisit longstanding and foundational questions about the nature and scope of language, meaning, subjectivity, and how these relate to questions of ontology, ethics, and political intervention.

While these questions are too complex and wide-ranging for any single paper or collection of papers in a special issue to do them justice, our hope for this special issue on “Figures of Entanglement” is to promote a rich and fruitful conversation on them in rhetoric and communication studies. We do so by organizing that conversation around what we view as the profoundly compelling and provocative notion of “entanglement” as presented by Karen Barad in her 2007 tour de force book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. In the broadest terms, and as elegantly expressed in the epigraph, Barad’s notion of entanglement refers to a thoroughly relational account of ontology in which entities never preexist as discrete, atomic individuals with determinate boundaries that then combine or interact with other preexisting individuals. Rather, as the quantum experiments that prompt this account demonstrate, not even atoms are “atomic” entities prior to their measurement or observation, but emerge as either particles or waves only intra-actively, that is, as part of mutually exclusive techno-scientific practices and discourses. Likewise, those practices and discourses do not fully precede their entanglement with atomic (or subatomic) agencies. From this posthumanist perspective, then, there is no outside of matter just as there is no outside of meaning, and thus ontology consists of “a multitude of entangled performances of the world’s worlding itself.”²

Barad’s work has been highly cited across an impressive array of academic disciplines outside of rhetoric or communication studies. We find it unfortunate, however, that to date her work has received scant attention in our field. In fact, sparked by Chris’s initial exposure to Barad’s work, we have ourselves been engaged in a spirited conversation over the past several years in which we have both become increasingly struck by the farreaching and vital contributions that her notion of intra-active entanglement could make to our discipline. In particular, we are drawn to this notion for its potential to bridge what currently exist as disparate accounts of materialism in rhetorical studies. That is, while to our knowledge there has been no effort to consider possible affinities between “standard” Marxist- and poststructuralist-influenced materialist rhetoric scholarship and the “new materialist” work presently emerging, we believe entanglement enables precisely such an illumination, as well as, at once, productively reconfiguring their points of divergence. Ultimately, our hope is that such an illumination will facilitate future efforts to explore the intra-active entanglements of other areas of scholarship as well, particularly those that continue to take for granted a radical division between domains of human meaning and identity and of other-than-humans and broader ecologies. Thus, when Josh was presented with the opportunity by Review of Communication editor Pat Gehrke to edit a special issue somehow addressing rhetorical materialism, we jumped at the chance to put Barad’s work more prominently into conversation with our field, in the belief that doing so would mutually and, in a key term of Barad’s that we discuss below, diffractively benefit both.

The remainder of the introduction proceeds in three main sections. In the first section, we recount rhetoric’s—always entangled—relationship with its past in order to highlight its origins in a metaphysics that divides meaning from matter according to a logic of supplementarity. We then turn to a brief discussion of contemporary scholarship that attempts to overcome that logic by identifying “third terms” that move us in the direction of an entangled understanding of rhetoric. In the second section, we build on this work in an explicitly materialist direction. Specifically, we offer a reading of how standard and new rhetorical materialisms identify “figures of entanglement” that illuminate increasing aspects of the generativity and dynamism of matter and rhetoric. In doing so, we also consider the points of overlap and divergence between these materialist areas of scholarship. Given the space limitations of this introduction, our discussion of this work is highly selective and partial (in both senses) and is intended as only one of several possible means of considering Barad’s intervention into rhetoric and communication studies. In the third section, we explore in greater detail the rhetorical implications of Barad’s intra-active account of materialism. In doing so, we provide a brief distillation of how we understand key aspects of the quantum physics basis for Barad’s theory of diffraction that, we argue, enables a rethinking of rhetoric, ontology and politics in irreducibly material terms. We conclude the introduction with a discussion of the papers in this issue and by acknowledging key entanglements that made this special issue possible.

Rhetoric: from deficient supplement to figure of entanglement

Insofar as it is traced to classical Greek metaphysics as conventionally understood, rhetoric originates in decidedly nonentangled terms. Rather than emerging as an integral part of a dynamic and mutually constitutive constellation of terms, rhetoric formally enters “Western” discourse, in the form of an abstract noun in Plato’s Gorgias,³ as an utterly equivocal notion structured by a “logic of supplementarity.”⁴ According to such a logic, one term is cast as an intrinsically meaningless supplement that acquires its meaning and identity only in relation to an intrinsically and absolutely meaningful, nonsupplemental term. In the Gorgias, Plato invokes precisely this logic in his characterization of rhetoric as a deficient—and potentially dangerous—supplement to philosophy. Rhetoric is deficient, he says, because it is a mere “knack” acquired experientially and therefore confined to the illusory domain of bodily senses and opinion, whereas philosophy is able to access and facilitate knowledge of the preexisting, timeless, and immaterial truths of the prelapsarian soul. Thus lacking epistemic grounding of its own, rhetoric is dangerous, according to Plato, because it is a “species of flattery” whose practitioners masquerade as genuinely knowledgeable philosophers seeking to edify while instead beguiling their listeners’ souls with mellifluous half-truths or falsehoods in pursuit of personal or political gain. Moreover, this relationship of supplementarity also underlies the dialogue’s description of the identities of those who practice rhetoric and philosophy. That is, against the temperate, balanced souls of philosophers that are content and self-contained given their propinquity to absolute truth, the souls of rhetoricians are depicted as intemperate, perpetually unsatisfied and “leaky” given that they are driven instead by fleeting earthly passions and hedonistic desires.⁵

Aristotle, as is well known, subsequently assigned rhetoric to its own proper and rightful domain of practical knowledge by defining it as the ability to discover the means of persuasion in the civic arena. While often seen as attenuating much of rhetoric’s danger in Plato’s conception of it as an epistemic nomad, Aristotle’s conception nonetheless preserves its supplemental status. In particular, and in sharp contrast to the philosophical domain of absolute, universal and transcendent truths and to the perfect reasoning ability of philosophers, Aristotle characterizes the civic arena as inescapably imbued with probability and contingency given that many of the people and topics addressed in it are simply not amenable to reason. As a result, rhetoric cannot produce real knowledge and remains a deficient version of philosophy, constituting the best possible means of persuading a reason-deficient public in the realm of mere opinion. Thus, although Aristotle characterizes rhetoric as a counterpart to dialectic, as both begin from provisional premises, the latter, he says, pursues those premises with perfect reasoning in pursuit of genuine knowledge, while rhetoric’s reasoning remains conditional, fallible and therefore inferior. In vividly highlighting that inferiority, Jasper Neel states, in his book chapter “The Degradation of Rhetoric,” that rhetoric for Aristotle becomes justifiable only “because the disabled, incapable, weakminded, slow-witted, coarse, vulgar, burdensome, uneducated, boorish, and diseased mob cannot rise to the demands of dialectic.”⁶ In short, much like in Plato’s conception, Aristotle’s rhetoric can at best act merely as a supplement to help make preexisting philosophical truths more clear or palatable to the deficient hoi polloi.

In the writings of both Plato and Aristotle, then, rhetoric is conceptualized in terms of a logic of supplementarity. As such, in both accounts rhetoric becomes the name for that which must be identified, reduced to a mere supplement, and negated, in order to constitute the ostensibly sovereign domain of philosophy.⁷ Rhetoric thus functions as what Derrida aptly calls a “constitutive erasure” that, through its simultaneous presence and absence, marks those aspects of knowledge that are marred by the material domain of deficient imitations (sensible Becoming) in order to establish the intelligible, philosophical knowledge of the unmarked, immaterial domain of generative meaning (Being or the ideal Forms).⁸ In so doing, rhetoric for both Plato and Aristotle acts not only to elevate the knowledge of philosophers above the knowledge of rhetoricians but also, implicitly, to position the characteristics of the Greek, male philosopher as the unmarked ideal of human identity itself, thereby acting to “metaphorically condense” all other sensible, material bodies as themselves deficient supplements against that immaterial ideal as well.⁹ Given its function as an overdetermined supplement, it should be no surprise that rhetoric assimilates unto itself and has since been variously associated with the characteristics of all of the other supplemental terms, including embodiment and disability,¹⁰ femininity and seduction,¹¹ “blackness,”¹² transsexuality,¹³ and animality.¹⁴ Nor should it be surprising, then, either, that, the subordination of rhetoric to philosophy, has played an integral part in the larger economy of power and signification underlying the history of colonialism and violence committed against bodies that deviate from dominant Western standards and ideals of race, class, sexuality, ability, and humanness.¹⁵

Rhetoric’s relationship to a logic of supplementarity, however, always exceeds the performative relations in which it is emplaced. Consistent with its function as a kind of metasupplement whose negation is necessary for constituting not only the opposition between itself and philosophy but indeed all of the other implicated oppositions as well, rhetoric has a contemporary history of being read in relation to a number of shifting and polymorphic “third terms.” In this poststructuralist approach, one locates a particular “figure” or “trope” that cannot be reduced to either side of a particular dialectical opposition, but whose erasure was necessary for establishing that opposition. In doing so, oppositional terms that had been permanently locked into a logic of supplementarity and normativity are now revealed to be mutually constitutive. As a result, a dimension of meaning that had been rendered timeless and immutable is recast as fluid and dynamic, and to that extent, rhetoric and philosophy emerge as generative of one another as well. In her book, Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure, Michelle Ballif illustrates this entangled logic by reading the figure of Helen in Gorgias’ famous encomium to her as a third term that is not reducible to either a subject or object of desire. In doing so, she argues that “Gorgias makes a proto-postmodern move to displace common assumptions of active/passive, subject/object, being/not being by recasting Helen as a woman with a seductive figure, which eludes capture and mastery.”¹⁶ Furthermore, in embracing a reading of Gorgias’ encomium as aligning Helen with rhetoric itself, Ballif argues that just as Helen and rhetoric had previously colluded in order to position both woman and rhetoric as deficient supplements, in Gorgias’ figuring of Helen as a third term, they now collude to recast both woman and rhetoric as seductive figures that perpetually eschew these dualisms.¹⁷ Consequently, a dimension of rhetoric and identity that had been disparaged as merely and immutably supplemental is now recast as generative and dynamic, while the sovereignty of philosophy is therefore undermined.

Generally rooted in postmodern sensibilities, however, existing scholarship that reads rhetoric in relation to third terms tends to uncritically confine its project to a preexisting domain of human culture or symbols.¹⁸ As a consequence, this reading strategy implicitly reproduces an opposition between an exclusively human realm of meaning and a meaningless realm of passive matter. As we discussed, however, rhetoric’s supplemental status in relation to philosophy is thoroughly implicated in the association of rhetoric with the deceptive, shifting domain of sensible materiality. Moreover, it is precisely their materiality that all of the nonnormative bodies associated with rhetoric’s disparagement share in common and that therefore underlies that disparagement as its condition of possibility.¹⁹ Hence, while third terms promote a reading of rhetoric in partially entangled rather than supplementary terms, in our view the assumption of human discursive exceptionalism that has tended to guide such an approach cannot but end up reinstalling a meaning/matter dualism that greatly curtails our ability to appreciate the dynamism of the more-than-human world or of our entanglement with it.²⁰

In more thoroughly transforming rhetoric’s enduring relationship to a logic of supplementarity, then, we argue that we must grapple with the role of matter in making possible the opposition between symbolic meaning and meaningless materiality that structures rhetoric’s supplemental status. In the remainder of the introduction, we seek to do so through a reading of standard and new materialist rhetoric scholarship that demonstrates how they variously locate “figures of entanglement” that enable the recasting of particular dimensions of matter and rhetoric from meaningless supplements into generative and dynamic terms. In place of third terms, we propose “figures of entanglement” for its stronger emphasis on the deferred material dimensions of symbolic meaning, given its derivation from the work of Barad. Our aim in the reading that follows, in short, is to illuminate the extent to which these projects promote an entangled account of rhetoric themselves and with one another. We then turn, in the subsequent section, to Barad’s reading of quantum physics to show how we think it supports and affirms rhetorical materialism by promoting diffraction as a figure of entanglement.

Tracing figures of entanglement in standard and new materialist rhetorics

The first attempt to formulate rhetoric as a problem of rhetorical materialism is generally attributed to Michael Calvin McGee in his 1982 essay, “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric.”²¹ Beginning from the Marxist axiom that praxis precedes consciousness, McGee critiques Plato not simply for denying rhetoric epistemic status but also for the idealism underlying that denial that positions human nature, along with the principles of human persuasion, in a timeless domain of meaning that is both unaffected by the movement of material history and, however ironically, inaccessible to rhetoricians. In our reading of it, then, McGee’s critique is not only or primarily that Plato reduces rhetoric to a mere supplement in relation to philosophy but that he permanently suspends that supplementary relationship fully beyond material, historical change. On this basis, McGee admonishes many of his rhetorical predecessors for their preoccupation with attempting to disprove Plato by either demonstrating that rhetoric always has, in fact, had the idealist epistemic standing that Plato denies it, or by establishing that standing themselves.²² In either case, argues McGee, such efforts take for granted Plato’s misguided view that a genuine rhetoric ought to function, like philosophy, according to a “product-model” guided by timeless, ahistorical principles grounded in knowledge of the equally timeless and ahistorical human condition. Against these efforts, McGee advances a “process-model” of rhetoric instead, which seeks to demonstrate inductively that human discursive meaning always emerges as an integral part of a shifting and dynamic material history. In doing so, McGee effectively treats “historical human experience” as a figure of entanglement whose erasure was necessary for establishing the opposition between timeless, immaterial meaning and meaningless material change in the first place. As a result, a dimension of Plato’s meaningless matter now emerges as partly generative of meaning, while, conversely, Plato’s immaterial and immutable meaning emerges as at least partly material and mutable.

Rather than fully disrupting a logic of supplementarity, however, McGee’s project ends up unwittingly reinstalling part of this logic in a new location. In figuring rhetoric’s materialization as a “species of coercion” that symbolically “sublimates” physically coercive expressions of power, Ronald Walter Greene argues, in his touchstone essay, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” that McGee implicates a logic of “expressive causality” that positions the category of historical experience as itself outside of production.²³ As an alternative to this dialectical logic, Greene reconceptualizes rhetoric’s materiality through the Foucauldian language of an apparatus. Defined as a “technique that makes meaning possible,” apparatuses function as Greene’s figure of entanglement by emphasizing rhetoric’s role in the materialization of elementary units of ontological meaning.²⁴ In contrast to McGee, then, who casts history as an entanglement figure that nonetheless remains outside of its own material and discursive production, Greene shows how the category of history itself is produced by apparatuses. Thus, by advancing an overdetermined logic of production that Matthew S. May has recently labeled “immanent causality,”²⁵ Greene’s project successfully obviates the possibility that any dimension of human discursive meaning could exist outside of its relational and iterative production by material apparatuses. Put differently, by refiguring rhetoric’s materiality as a “publicity effect,” or retroactive materialization of power, Greene’s aim is to demonstrate how meaning itself is always entangled with its own interactive, performative, and mutually constitutive logics of production that are never reducible to representational frameworks.

This “standard” materialist account of meaning, as developed by McGee and Greene, has exerted a powerful influence over rhetorical studies. In addition to spurring a larger materialist conversation in the discipline that centers on what Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites have termed “rhetoric’s materiality,”²⁶ this line of scholarship has converged with an “interactional” political agenda that emphasizes the racialized, classed, and sexualized dimensions of publics.²⁷ In part, these streams of inquiry have advanced such a view by drawing out the role of what Judith Butler calls the “constitutive outside” in the materialization of public identities.²⁸ In such an account, the publicity effect made possible by apparatuses not only performatively sutures and articulates the gaps between different elementary units of ontological meaning, as in Greene’s initial formulation, but also results in the economization of a “surplus” by overdetermining how particular bodies materialize in praxis.²⁹ Given that this “surplus” invariably comprises the nonnormative, “supplemental” identities that must be violently erased in order to produce and sustain normativity, this scholarship demonstrates that “supplemental” identities and norms are always mutually constituted and entangled. In doing so, it also highlights the political need to “queer” the meaning of nonnormative identities and bodies in order to transform and rearticulate the larger normative logic into terms more capable of affirming and valuing otherness.³⁰ Nodding to a recent special issue of Review of Communication, we could characterize this overdetermined logic of social change as contributing to what the editors of that issue call “rhetorical multitudes.”³¹

Independent of these “standard,” interactional materialist approaches, more recent scholarship has emerged that identifies itself with a “new materialist” project. While comprising heterogeneous streams, new materialisms are generally distinguished by their commitment to understanding meaning and identity in nonanthropocentric terms through an emphasis on the agency and vitality of matter itself. Thus, if standard materialisms have brought attention to the role of apparatuses and publics in fabricating human history and meaning, new materialists show how the oppositions between human and nonhuman or nature and culture are likewise produced by a “publicity effect,” which is therefore not reducible to an exclusively human domain of apparatuses and technologies.³² In the most fully developed new materialist account of rhetoric to date, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, Thomas Rickert greatly advances such a project by demonstrating how the fabrication of publics is not only never reducible to humans but also always premised on a necessary and generative role of “withdrawal.” Similar to Butler’s “constitutive outside,” withdrawal becomes a figure of entanglement that emphasizes how coming-to-matter always involves the production of a particular dynamic reserve of indeterminacy that can always partially manifest itself again and thereby constitute the world anew, through a novel withdrawal. In extending such a notion in a posthumanist direction, however, Rickert demonstrates how that dynamic reserve is not limited to human identities or bodies that discourse fails to fully capture; rather, it encompasses the larger ambient, material ecology whose ongoing withdrawals constitute us and condition our discourses. In doing so, Rickert’s project exemplifies how new materialist work can greatly expand and transform the purview of materiality in rhetorical studies. Thus, if McGee formally inaugurated the rhetorical materialism conversation by arguing that “rhetoric is ‘material’ by measure of human experiencing of it, not by virtue of our ability to continue touching it after it is gone,”³³ then new materialisms bring this account full circle by demonstrating how matter itself is, in fact, the fully tangible condition of possibility for human and more-than-human experience and rhetorical meaning.

However, while new materialist scholarship calls our attention to the entanglements of human meaning and other-than-human materialities, to date there has been no effort within rhetorical scholarship to place this work into conversation with existing standard materialist accounts of entanglements among humans.³⁴ This compartmentalization is unfortunate given the myriad entanglements linking nature, gender, race, class, sexuality, and ableism.³⁵ As Mel Chen argues,

vivid links, whether live or long-standing, continue to be drawn between immigrants, people of color, laborers and working-class subjects, colonial subjects, women, queer subjects, disabled people, and animals, meaning, not the class of creatures that includes humans but quite the converse, the class against which the (often rational) human with inviolate and full subjectivity is defined.³⁶

It is precisely with the aim of illuminating such links, as well as their implication of matter itself, that we wish to consider Barad’s contribution to the rhetorical materialism conversation. More specifically, through a broad and incisive cross-disciplinary approach, Barad extends both a Foucauldian notion of an apparatus and Butler’s account of the constitutive exclusion in a new materialist direction. In this way, as she puts it, she “circumvents the problem of [inherently] different materialities”³⁷ and helps us develop an onto-historical account of rhetorical materialism that demonstrates how any unit or dimension of meaning (whether human or otherwise) is, in fact, always actually entangled with that which it attempts to exclude from meaning. Below we outline how Barad helps us develop such an account through her diffractive reading of matter in quantum physics. We then conclude by summarizing how each of the contributors to this special issue pursues Barad’s intra-active ontology in their own respective directions.

Reading Barad and materialist rhetoric diffractively

While not addressing “rhetorical materialism” directly, Barad’s intervention into materialism broadly is particularly compelling given that she approaches the conversation as both a theoretical physicist and a feminist philosopher. Whereas most scholars engaged in this conversation are steeped in poststructuralist concepts such as Butler’s constitutive outside or Foucault’s notion of the apparatus, Barad is also able to read these insights through quantum physics.³⁸ The result is a full-blown posthumanist or new materialist account of ontology and politics that establishes a new “figure of entanglement” for understanding rhetoric’s materiality: diffraction. In what follows, we discuss key aspects of the quantum physics basis for this extension in order to show how the resulting logic of diffraction extends the entanglement reading of standard materialism and new materialism that we presented in the previous section.

As Barad discusses in detail, quantum physics emerged out of debates in the early 20th century over seemingly contradictory evidence regarding the nature of light. At that time, classical physics maintained that all objects in the world objectively preexist their measurement or observation as either a wave (an extension in space) or a particle (localized in space). While defined in mutually exclusive terms, studies increasingly yielded evidence suggesting that light exhibited the characteristics of both waves and particles. Against explanations seeking to preserve the basic classical assumption of absolute independence between a preexisting object and its observation, however, a quantum account proposed that the object and agencies of observation are somehow, in fact, inextricably tethered. Accordingly, the conflicting findings could be reconciled by allowing that light simply exhibits mutually exclusive characteristics when observed using mutually exclusive experimental arrangements or apparatuses. Over time, this quantum account has prevailed as sufficient experimental replications have empirically confirmed its accuracy. Moreover, while originating in debates over the wave–particle duality of light specifically, the quantum physics account has since also been extended to findings demonstrating the same basic duality in matter (e.g., atoms, electrons, neutrons) as well.

Yet while a quantum account of matter has since become the consensus view among physicists, to date there is no consensus as to which of the numerous competing interpretations may most accurately explain just how the act of observation affects the observed object. Crucially, based on an extremely rigorous reading of the relevant literature, Barad argues foremost for the ontological interpretation proposed by Niels Bohr. In contrast to other quantum accounts, including those proposed by Heisenberg and Schrödinger, Bohr maintains that the act of observation does not simply alter or obscure our knowledge of the object; instead, observation invariably plays an integral role in coconstituting the object. Thus, it is not simply that matter exhibits the characteristics of waves or particles under respective experimental conditions but that matter really is either a wave or a particle under those conditions. This allows Barad to argue that apart from the agencies of observation, or apparatuses, which make possible the very opposition between knower and known, matter is not determinately wave or particle; it is, rather, ontologically indeterminate. This indeterminacy gets resolved only through the particular ontological “cuts” of specific apparatuses, albeit only ever contingently, as each new cut also excludes something else as indeterminate. In short, and parallel with Butler’s rendering of the discursive production of human bodies, that which is excluded constitutes a dynamic reserve of indeterminacy that can always play a role in determining or rearticulating matter and meaning anew.

Based on this understanding of matter itself as intrinsically and dynamically indeterminate, Barad develops her new materialist extension, at once, of the theories of both quantum physics and poststructuralism. Whereas quantum physics has demonstrated its greater precision and accuracy than classical physics at not only the microscale but also the macroscale, physicists have been reluctant to fully pursue that logic, which Barad attributes to a residual element of humanism. Thus even Bohr, who recognized that human discourses and concepts emerge from and are entangled with the “specific material arrangements” of particular apparatuses,³⁹ nevertheless circumscribed that material–discursive entanglement within an exclusively human space of the scientific laboratory radically separate from the rest of nature. In doing so, Bohr ends up positioning humans, against the implications of his own argument, as objective observers of a relational, entangled quantum reality.

Yet, as Barad teases out in her writings, Bohr’s own account suggests something significantly more posthuman than he was perhaps willing to accept. Specifically, because there is no absolute or radical outside of the universe as a whole, there is “no way to describe the entire system.”⁴⁰ “Description,” thus, “always occurs from within: only part of the world can be made intelligible to itself at a time, because the other part of the world has to be the part that it makes a difference to.”⁴¹ And as part of the fully intra-active “exuberant creativity”⁴² of the universe ourselves, this perspective entails that humans cannot simply observe quantum entanglements through our apparatuses but are also and at once produced by them. Barad’s engagement with quantum physics thus helps us appreciate the ontological role of apparatuses not only in fabricating meaning in the human realm, as Greene has argued, but also in making possible the dynamic and performative production of boundaries between humans and nonhumans as well.

It is out of this particular reading of apparatuses that Barad is able to move the political and ethical implications of poststructuralism in fully posthumanist, new materialist directions. That is, by demonstrating how apparatuses are always entangled with that which they attempt to exclude from meaning, Barad shows how the regulatory production of human bodies cannot be extricated from the materialization of nonhuman bodies. In doing so, she highlights how human bodies and human meaning are always produced as part of the physical material world. Barad’s account of power therefore complements and advances the aims and objectives of standard materialists such as Greene, Butler, and Foucault. Unlike these latter theorists, however, Barad carefully illuminates how power cannot be limited or restricted to a human only social domain. As a consequence, Barad enables an intra- rather than an inter-actional politics in which power is always produced through the dynamic movement of the material cosmos itself.⁴³ That movement, moreover, may or may not involve humans, as apparatuses are certainly no less intelligible or meaningful in our absence.⁴⁴

In casting apparatuses as irreducible problems of material–discursive entanglement, Barad provides us with a new figure of entanglement for understanding the materiality of rhetoric: diffraction. In classical physics, diffraction refers to the resulting pattern when two or more preexisting waves intersect and become one, novel entity with larger peaks and smaller troughs. Once this occurs, it is no longer possible to disentangle or separate out the individual waves as they existed prior to their intra-action. Quantum physics demonstrates, however, that not only waves but particles, too, constitute intra-active entanglements that cannot be individually distinguished as preexisting objects. Moreover, because there is no absolute boundary or outside to the scientific laboratory, Barad demonstrates how quantum diffraction applies to all entities, whether human or otherwise. Thus, while diffraction overlaps with what May has recently described as “immanent causality” insofar as both agree that any apparatus or system and their parts are mutually constituted through particular cuts or exclusions, Barad’s diffraction can never be limited to a preexisting, self-contained or sovereign domain of human meaning-making.⁴⁵ In Barad’s posthumanist elaboration, that is, the ostensibly human domain is also always diffractively entangled with what is more than human.

In advancing diffraction as a “figure of entanglement” for conceptualizing the material production of meaning, we believe that the contributions of Barad to rhetorical materialism could not be more profound or important. If rhetoric’s supplementary status emerged in classical Greece in relation not only to a hierarchy of human bodies but also and at once to anthropocentrism premised on a division of matter and meaning, then a Baradian materialist approach brings our discussion of rhetoric in the previous sections to fruition. Through an empirical demonstration of the entangled fate of humans and nonhumans, Barad shows that so long as we continue to figure matter or rhetoric as intrinsically meaningless supplements that must be erased in order to establish the meaningful domain of human discourse, bodies will invariably continue to be locked into normative hierarchies accordingly. Human bodies, that is, will continue to be defined as more or less deficient based on their alleged proximity to or resemblance of matter and nonhuman bodies will continue to be banished to a domain of utter meaninglessness. Conversely, insofar as we affirm and embrace the dynamic generativity of matter, we foster an understanding of otherness as internal and constitutive, and thus, of bodily differences as, likewise, generative rather than deficient. Human identity categories such as race, class, sexuality, and ability, then, can no longer be understood as structured against norms that ostensibly transcend matter; instead, all bodies, whether human, animal, plant, or toxin, emerge as meaningful and mutually generative material differences.⁴⁶ In such an account, rhetoric emerges as the irreducibly material name for the performative patterns and formations of the cosmos intelligibly diffracting itself. Ultimately, we are left with a robust ecological understanding of meaning and identity in which what is excluded becomes as important and integral a part of our ethical and political concerns as that which is included. Such an account, moreover, could not be more timely or relevant for responding to the economic and ecological crises currently unfolding.

Exploring the special issue’s essays

The five essays in this special issue all very impressively demonstrate and develop, in their own directions, the contributions that Barad’s intra-active entanglement account can make to rhetoric and communication studies.

In her essay, “Breast Cancer’s Rhetoricity: Bodily Border Crisis and Bridge to Corporeal Solidarity,” Annie Hill deftly performs a novel, intra-active rhetorical criticism of breast cancer with farreaching implications. Hill begins by challenging an account of breast cancer that seeks to divest it of its social stigma by defining it in purely material, non-metaphorical terms as an intrinsically meaningless disease that fully precedes its social, political, and cultural production. In developing an alternative account, Hill demonstrates how breast cancer in fact always materializes in and through a multiplicity of material–discursive apparatuses that are structured by gendered, racialized, classed, and (dis)abilty norms. Consequently, Hill illuminates how breast cancer’s extrahuman identity as a foreign and invasive agent cannot be disentangled from the political and economic cuts and exclusions that constitute and sustain the idealization and devaluation of particular female bodies (which includes, as she shows, even the respective breast cancer rates of and medical care received by those bodies.). In doing so, Hill not only makes important contributions to rhetorics of science and technology but also articulates a posthumanist political vision of “transmaterial solidarity” that refigures and affirms bodies and their differences through an appreciation of their generative materiality.

In his essay, “Rhetoric’s Diverse Materiality: Polythetic Ontology and Genealogy,” Nathan Stormer argues for an account of rhetoric that is always intra-actively multiple, mutable, and emergent. Stormer undertakes this project by arguing that, at the level of ontology, rhetoricians should resist approaching rhetoric as a unified identity that can be broken into discrete categories that all share the same essential and defining characteristic or trait. He argues that this is how rhetoric was rendered during the globalization debates when all objects of criticism were described as having the same “rhetorical” quality. As an alternative, Stormer suggests conceptualizing rhetoric’s ontology as an “adaptive multiplicity” and thus as always in a state of becoming something other than itself. Stormer supports this account, at the methodological level, by drawing on Michel Foucault’s and Karen Barad’s respective notions of genealogy in order to develop his own rich and robust account of “entangled genealogies.” As a fluid yet coherent means of tracing and understanding the relative historical permanence and flux of particular rhetorical ecologies, entangled genealogies offer a way of approaching rhetoric in its fully intra-active material diversity.

In her essay, “Of Turning and Tropes,” Diane Marie Keeling develops an intra-active account of the ubiquitous yet, to date, surprisingly underexamined ritual of invoking academic “turns” by exploring their entanglement with larger political economies. Taking the centennial issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech as her text for developing this contribution, Keeling demonstrates, first, that even otherwise poststructuralist-friendly scholarship often figures academic turns according to a prevailing neoliberal apparatus. Second, she argues that this neoliberal apparatus is entangled with a classical ontology that imagines disciplinary interventions as singular, unique, completed events moving along a path of linear progress. Drawing on Barad, Keeling argues instead for understanding academic turns in quantum terms as moving recursively, having multiple beginnings that are always open to being rearticulated, and that cannot be understood according to an absolute or predetermined notion of progress. In doing so, Keeling brings much needed critical attention and consideration to how what is often reflexively treated as a neutral, taken-for-granted concept actually implicates farreaching material and political consequences. She concludes her essay by discussing the resulting ethical implications of a quantum refiguring of academic turns.

In his essay, “Entangled Exchange: Verkehr and Rhetorical Capitalism,” Matthew W. Bost provides an intra-active reading of Marx and Engels’ materialist theory of exchange. Focusing in particular on Marx and Engels’ discussion of exchange in the “German Ideology,” Bost provocatively argues that this narrative can be read not only as a critique of capital’s attempt to universalize a particular classed account of the human, but also as harboring intra-active, posthumanist implications. Bost further elaborates on this reading by placing Marx and Engels in conversation with Kojin Karatani and Karen Barad. In diffractively reading their insights through one another, Bost helps to clarify the stakes of a fully intra-active politics by articulating important connections between race, gender, sexuality, anthropocentricism, and a capitalist drive toward immortality. In doing so, Bost makes an important contribution to the aim of this special issue to bridge standard and new materialist perspectives.

Finally, in the closing essay, “Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic,” Thomas Rickert incisively and rigorously develops an intra-active understanding of rhetoric that directly challenges the rhetorical tradition’s tendency to draw a dividing line between a “formal” history beginning in classical Greece and a “prehistory” prior to that beginning. Building in part on Jeffery Walker’s argument that classical rhetoric derives from and is thus entangled with an epideictic tradition of oral poetry reaching back at least to Homer, Rickert ventures back significantly further in human history in order to argue that even Paleolithhic humans can and should also be understood as having developed and enacted elaborate rhetorical practices of their own. In further developing his previous arguments about the ambient entanglement of rhetoric, Rickert draws on and introduces to the field recent scholarship about Paleolithic cave art in order to demonstrate how, even there, rhetoric and materiality are constitutively entangled with humans and their performances. In doing so, Rickert greatly extends and contributes to transforming prevailing accounts of rhetoric and its larger ecological entanglement.

As editors of this special issue, we could not be more excited about the collected essays, all of which perform their own creative and impressive diffractions of Barad’s work in novel and productive directions. In doing so, each paper also makes very significant contributions to an emerging new materialist understanding of rhetoric by illuminating and transforming entanglements in areas that have long been presumed to be divided and separate by strict and unquestioned boundaries. We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to be part of such an important and exciting project that has resulted in a collection of papers that have far surpassed our highest hopes, and we eagerly look forward to the future diffractions and entanglements this work will undoubtedly spark.

In closing, we would first like to acknowledge the ground-altering work of Karen Barad for inspiring the probing conversations that eventually led to this special issue. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to those colleagues who were kind enough to provide their time and expertise to reviewing essays for this special issue: Catherine Chaput, Diane Davis, Thomas R. Dunn, S. Scott Graham, Attila Hallsby, Kate Lockwood Harris, Debra Hawhee, Byron Hawk, Claire Sisco King, Jamie Merchant, John Muckelbauer, Damien Smith Pfister, Davi Johnson Thornton, and Jeffery Walker. Every one of them provided invaluable feedback from which this special issue greatly benefited. Finally, we would like to thank Pat Gehrke for inviting us to edit this special issue. Pat gave us the freedom to develop our own vision for this project while at the same time providing extensive insight and support during the various stages of bringing the special issue to light.

Notes

1. Within communication studies, see, e.g., Diane Davis and Michelle Ballif, “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Pushing the Limits of the Anthropos,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014): 346–53; Laurie Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015); Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). More broadly, see, e.g., Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Stacy Alaimo, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ed. New Materialisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2010); Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 183–207; Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). For a more comprehensive list of sources advancing a “nonhuman turn,” see Luciano and Chen, Queer Human, 203–5n30.

2. Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 121–58, 133.

3. See Edward Schiappa, “Did Plato Coin Rhetorikē?,” American Journal of Philology 111, no. 4 (1990): 457–70.

4. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1976); “Plato's Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63–171. See also Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Rhetoric and its Double: Reflections on the Rhetorical Turn in the Human Sciences,” in The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 341–66. However, whereas Gaonkar describes efforts to “escape from” or “revolt against” rhetoric's supplementary status, we seek to embrace that status as a constitutive exclusion, in order to illuminate how rhetoric and philosophy, along with all other disciplines, are mutually and intra-actively constituted.

5. See Plato, Gorgias, 492e–494a.

6. Jasper Neel, “The Degradation of Rhetoric; Or, Dressing Like a Gentleman, Speaking Like a Scholar,” in Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism, ed. Steven Mailloux (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 73.

7. See, for example, Victor J. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997).

8. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 109.

9. See, for example, Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Atwill seeks to counter this normative move by linking Aristotle's conception of rhetoric as contingent to a pre-Platonic notion of productive knowledge. On “metaphorical condensation,” see Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 78–82.

10. See, for example, James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, “Disability, Rhetoric, and the Body,” in Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, eds. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 1–24; Brenda Jo Brueggeman and James A. Fredal, “Studying Disability Rhetorically,” in Disability Discourse, eds. Mairian Corker and Sally French (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999): 129–35; Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014).

11. See Michelle Ballif, Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001).

12. See Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Complicity: The Theory of Negative Difference,” The Howard Journal of Communications 3, no. 1 (1991): 1–13, 3; The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), esp. chapter 2.

13. Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 71–82.

14. Shannon Walters, “Animal Athena: The Interspecies Mētis of Women Writers with Autism,” JAC 30, no. 3–4 (2010): 683–711.

15. See, for example, McPhail, Rhetoric of Racism. Critiquing this economy and the role of philosophy's subordination of rhetoric in producing it, McPhail seeks to “reconceptualize [rhetoric] in a manner that allows for the affirmation and acceptance of difference”, which he calls “rhetoric as coherence,” 97. However, due in part to the influence of Plato and Aristotle, rhetoric has often played a role in enabling colonialism by embracing many of the norms and ideals of philosophy and imposing them on nonnormative bodies as well. For work critiquing rhetoric for playing this role and that proposes various strategies for transforming its norms and ideals, see, for example, Raka Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An ‘Other’ View,” Communication Theory 6, no. 1 (1996): 40–59; Darrel Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 647–57; Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72.

16. Ballif, Seduction, 66.

17. Ibid., 66–67.

18. See, for example, ibid. where Ballif embraces a view of “materiality (and subjectivity and sexuality) as a metaphor,” or as “symbolic inscription.” 25.

19. See Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, esp. chapters 1 and 2. Dolmage discusses the mutual disparagement of the materiality of nonnormative human bodies and of rhetoric and develops an “embodied rhetoric” based precisely on an appreciation of the generativity of those bodies.

20. See Chen, Animacies, for a noteworthy recent exception, however, which treats “animal figures” as a third term in the development of a new materialist project, 102.

21. Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” in Explorations in Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, ed. Raymie McKerrow (Glenview, IL: Scott-Foresman, 1982), 23–48.

22. Ibid., 28.

23. Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Sutdies in Media Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 15–16. See also Matthew S. May, “The Imaginative-Power of ‘Another Materialist Rhetoric,'” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): 399–403. In this article, published in a recent forum devoted to Ronald Walter Greene’s “Another Materialist Rhetoric” essay, May offers a helpful breakdown of the different logics of influence in rhetorical studies. He distinguishes between transitive causality, expressive causality, and immanent causality. In the case of expressive causality, which is the framework McGee's materialist project falls into, elementary units of meaning are conceptualized as microcosms of an ordered system or totality. This view is residually essentialist because it posits an underlying principle of unity (e.g., a Hegelian spirit) such that all of the parts cohere within a larger whole. May contrasts this view with an Althusserian logic of “immanent causality,” which conceptualizes the parts and whole as mutually constituted against that which remains deferred and absent.

24. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” 30.

25. See May, “Imaginative-Power.”

26. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites, eds. “Introduction,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 4.

27. On the notion of “radical interactionality,” see Karma Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), esp. chapter 2. Chávez critiques intersectionality for figuring identity categories as fixed, as preexisting individual experiences, and thus as separable from one another. In contrast, her notion of radical interactionality advances an entangled account of human identities given that, as she states, it “highlights the complicated and dynamic way in which identities, power, and systems of oppression intermesh, interlock, intersect, and thus interact,” 58. See also Lauren Gail Berlant, The Queen of American goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen, eds. Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

28. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011). See John M. Sloop, Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary US Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), for an application of Butler's approach in communication studies.

29. On the relationship between apparatuses and the production of surplus, see Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 188–206; “Orator Communist,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39, no. 1 (2006): 85–95; “More Materialist Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): 414–17; Kristin A. Swenson, “Being in Common: In Celebration of Ronald W. Greene’s Woolbert Award,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): 404–9. For an application of the notion of overdetermination in rhetoric studies, see Matthew S. May and Daniel Synk, “Contradiction and Overdetermination in Occupy Wall Street,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 74–84.

30. See, for example, Isaac West, Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Erin J. Rand, Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014); Chávez, Queer Migration Politics.

31. Jeffrey A. Bennett and Charles E. Morris III, “Rhetorical Criticism’s Multitudes,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 1–3.

32. See Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), which conceptualizes nonhuman agencies and actants in the language of publics. See also Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers, ed. Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 2015).

33. McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception,” 23.

34. See Luciano and Chen, Queer Human; Chen, Animacies, for two examples of such work outside of rhetorical studies.

35. Ibid.

36. Chen, Animacies, 95.

37. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 211.

38. See, ibid., e.g., 25 on this “diffractive reading strategy.”

39. Ibid., 196, 329.

40. Ibid., 351.

41. Ibid., 351 (italics in the original).

42. Ibid., 235.

43. See, ibid., esp. chapters 5 and 6, for examples of this intra-actional analysis.

44. Ibid., see, e.g., discussion of brittle stars, 369–84. For a consonant argument in rhetorical studies as it pertains to all living beings, see Diane Davis, “Autozoography: Notes Toward a Rhetoricity of the Living,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014): 533–53.

45. See May, “Imaginative-Power.”

46. See Chen, Animacies, for a recent development of such an argument outside of rhetorical studies through an incisive critical engagement with dominant “animacy hierarchies” utilizing numerous contemporary examples. See Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, for such an argument within rhetorical studies pertaining to (nonnormative) human bodies.