11 by rhetorical, I refer to something’s ability to induce change in thought, feeling, and actions;
organization and maintain collective formation; exert power etc.
7 Rhetoric, in this framework, is conceived as not only the faculty one has to create and deliver a
persuasive object of some sort but also as the object itself, whether it is delivered in the form of a
speech, a text, or a picture.
visuals, images, pictures
Visual: I consider a visual to be ‘that which we think we see’ whether that is interpreted as an
alphabetic letter or a cloud or a political poster… that which we perceive is never reality; it is always a
mental configuration that emerges as an end result of a complex perceptual process that begins with
a detection of light in the eye and proceeds as different parts of the brain interpret… (9)
“you can hang a picture but you can’t hang an image” (9)
A picture is an image that ‘appears in a material support,’ which includes photographs, posters,
digital reproductions, murals…(9)
18 while authors and artists can attempt to account for rhetorical velocity by anticipation the
third-party re-composition of their own work (Ridolfo and DeVoss 2009), they can never fully control
where or how the things they produce will circulate
19 circulation, as defined herein, refers to spatiotemporal flows, which unfold and fluctuate as things
enter into diverse associations and materialize in abstract and concrete forms
Xiii: I am particularly curious about the relations we develop with things and the active roles they
play in (re) arranging collective life as they weave in and out of various relationships.
41 repetition and imitation constitute the fabric of social reality
43 Mikhail Bakhtin: a chronotope refers to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial
relationships artistically expressed in literature
43 from a new materialist perspective, this chronotopic understanding of time is key to conceiving of
and studying how a single multiple image becomes rhetorical over its lifetime as it materializes in
different versions, each with their own spatiotemporal configuration.
48 Blair claims that in order to broaden our studies of rhetoric beyond effect (or goal fulfillment) to
the actual consequences that emerge from material action, we must ask not what a text or artifact
means but rather we ought to be asking what a text does and what happens as a result of its
existence
49 Disclosure is a term I use to give name to a methodological strategy that can help account for the
material consequences that emerge in a distributed reality. 49 I deploy disclosure as a means to shed
light on not only a single image’s divergent actualizations but also on the divergent meanings that
propagate as material consequences of a single multiple image’s varied relations.
51 the methodological enterprise is especially difficult because a single multiple image’s rhetorical
meaning is unforeseeable. 51 event horizon of meaning: the boundary between an actualized image
and its consequences
52 It is only in tracing a single multiple image’s transformations that unfold with time and space that
we can discover what divergent consequences emerge and thus know for certain what rhetorical
meanings have materialized.
52 a new materialist perspective holds that things exist independently from our conception of them.
53 the things we study are complex paradoxes. They both exist in their own right and come into
being when we encounter them.
25 we still think of composed matter as static, stable things that circulate in the world as fixed
entities. Such a perspective reinforces a static model of discourse structure in which we ‘view
meaning as an object contained in the text, accessible to an objective description, capable of
spatialization and and thus open to simultaneous comprehension of all its parts”
26 in a viral economy, in which both intended and unintended audiences play such an interactive
role in remixing, appropriating, and spreading images, we know that ‘delivery’ is not something so
direct or controlled. We also know that digital things are rarely stable in and of themselves.
28 to think intuitively in a general sense is to perceive reality as change, as mobility
28 while intelligence is concerned with the static and makes of change only an accident, intuition
sees everything as mobility, as change.
29 meaning is not something, then, that can be fleshed out from an actualized image, nor is it ever
stable, as an image is constantly transforming change and rearranging space
32 the power of discourse lies in its ability to move the individual self (and thus a democratic public)
towards unknown possibilities.
36 such a perspective is especially productive when trying to track the rhetorical life of images such
as Obama Hope, which may not have experienced as much transformation as Mona Lisa has over
the long haul, but whose speed of circulation and frequency of transformation over the short haul
have certainly been more intense.
37 things do not just move inconsequentially and unchanged through space and time; they are both
impacted by and impact that which they encounter.
38 Actualization is, in other words, a mode of constant (but not continuous) individuation in which
multiple varieties materialize with time and space