Cultivating new materialist habits for visual rhetorics
Breaking down destructive binaries that position humans over non
human matter
Visual rhetoric
"how visual things circulate and acquire power to
co-constitute collective life" (86)
Principles of new
materialist rhetorical
approach (86-87)
Principle of Becoming
open process of mattering and
assemblage
Principle of Transformation
Rhetorical transformation
of things as they
materialize in different
spatiotemporal
configurations
Principle of Consequentiality
consequences that
emerge once matter
is initially produced
Principle of Vitality
Ability of things to exert
material forces and trigger
changes via various
assemblages
Principle of Agency
actancy/dynamic dance enacted by
diverse entities intra-acting within
and across assemblages
Principle of Virality
tendency of things to spread
quickly and widely
Importance: Enables a
visualization of how to employ
materialist rhetorical
approaches to research
Research Actions
Following
Tracing
Embracing Uncertainty
De-scribing
"is a composing act (de-scribing) that entails replying visual
actants as networks of mediation in such rich detail that little
theoretical explanation is needed to account for how their actions
are distributed across" (101)
"investigate how a wildly consequential
a visual thing is, we cannot help but
confront materiality's radical opens and
flux no matter how much uncertainty
such research creates" (97).
"exterior relations so they can disclose the
process whereby an image circulates,
materializes in different versions, intra-acts with
other concrete and abstract entities, and triggers
changes" (94).
Discovering why
technological systems or
inventions fail to material
"how it plays a significant role
in generating, sustaining, and
influencing the continual
assemblage and reassemble
of collective existence" (89).
Accounts for an image's diachronic movement, complex
relationally, and distributed materialization and impact.
Corina Lerma and Sidouane Patcha Lum
Latour
"actants themselves can make everything,
including their own frames, their own
theories, their own contexts, their own
metaphysics...even their own ontologies"
(103).
"If no trace is produced...they offer no
information to the observer and will
have no visible effect on other agents"
(94).