In this acknowledgement of the need for visual rhetoric to address materiality and the embodied subject, Dickinson and Maugh take a crucial step in moving toward an embodied, visual-material rhetoric that is attendant to the impact of space and place on the body. For, as they note, to understand visual, multimodal representations and physical structures as concerned with more than their immediately apparent features—to understand them also as embodied—allows us “to locate our bodies in relation to other bodies in the world” (Dickinson and Maugh 272). This act of locating allows us to engage in a richer mode of rhetorical analysis that considers the broader consequences of the rhetorical situation—that allows us to understand visual-material rhetoric as a project of inquiry. As Dickinson and Maugh also note, to incorporate materiality into the study of visual rhetoric, or conversely, to incorporate visuality into the study of material rhetoric, can pose a challenge, for it requires once again a nuanced interpretive lens that can accommodate multiple ways of knowing and multiple sites of inquiry. It is thus one goal of this book to take up such a challenge.
To this end, I propose a methodological framework for understanding visual-material rhetorics that applies and extends Carole Blair’s theory of material rhetoric and merges that theory with Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. Foucault’s concept of heterotopias focuses on understanding spaces as heterogeneous, selective, contested, and culturally situated. Blair’s theory of material rhetoric then helps us better understand the consequences of different spaces on the body. While Blair speaks primarily of physical, material spaces, I describe how we may extend her theory to also account for visual and multimodal spaces and artifacts. In the next chapter, I take a closer look at discussions related to material rhetoric, situating among them Blair’s theory of material rhetoric and Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. I understand the ideas of Blair and Foucault as stepping stones that allow for a point of entry into the more important question of how a visual-material rhetorical approach can provide a window into the larger consequences that these artifacts have in the world. I maintain that an approach that merges and extends their theories can provide the foundation for a visual-material rhetoric that not only accounts for the multimodal, spatially-situated artifact but is also mindful of its impact on the embodied subject. Again, it is the acknowledgement and understanding of embodiment that I feel begins to situate visual-material rhetorics as a continued project of inquiry as opposed to a more insular and immediately available analytical tool.
2 The Visual-Material Spectrum
To understand the study of visual-material rhetorics as a sustainable project of inquiry that can provide a window into the larger consequences that these artifacts have in the world means uncovering an analytical approach that can account more explicitly for the ways in which visual-material artifacts and particular spaces can shape or influence the practices of the contextualized body. In other words, visual-material rhetorics must account not only for the cultural work of the spatially-situated artifact but also specifically for its impact on the embodied subject. To understand rhetoric as embodied is to explore rhetorical practice as it manifests through the action of the body, or “to follow the expressive ebb and flow of expressive energy through human bodily activities: through gesture, through contact with and manipulation of objects, through movement and space” (Marback 62). This chapter not only takes a closer look at conversations focused more explicitly on the idea of embodiment and material rhetorics but also sees Blair’s theory of material rhetoric and Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as appropriately situated when considered among them. Subsequently, I contend that the theories of Blair and Foucault can function symbiotically to allow for a more nuanced and embodied understanding of visual-material rhetorics as a mode of inquiry.
A Brief Note about Turns and Spectrums
As we begin to consider the relationship between visual and material rhetorics, it would seem plausible to question the need for a “material turn” within visual rhetoric. On the one hand, to consider the relationship of material rhetoric to visual rhetoric as constituting a “turn” seems almost obligatory, given the tendency of the humanities and social sciences to mark new conversations and disciplinary foci as such. On the other hand, to consider the notion of a “material turn” is to potentially misrepresent what I contend is a more integrated, already existing relationship between the visual and the material. W.J.T. Mitchell’s “pictorial turn,” 1 for example, helps us understand that it is possible to view a potentially increased focus on material rhetorics not as a full turn, per se, but rather as an already present component of visual rhetoric. For Mitchell, embodied knowledge and materiality are implicitly accounted for in the pictorial turn and its attendant modes of visual practice. He notes that however the pictorial turn may be defined, it is fundamentally a “postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” (16). Here, he describes the picture not as an artifact in and of itself but rather as implicated in broader cultural, relational, and physical contexts.
The analysis of photo 22727 in chapter one, for example, described the iconic image as situated in the discourses of the emerging environmental movement of the United States in the 1970s. When understood in light of the whole-earth discourse, the image may be read as prompting a more embodied experience that fosters a sense of personal responsibility toward the earth. To understand artifacts of visual rhetoric and cartographic representation as implicated in the pictorial turn is to view them as fostering embodied knowledge, as inviting a more intimate understanding of or connection to a particular place. We may see, then, that Mitchell’s acknowledgement of these interactions may indeed be read as accounting for materiality and embodied knowledge as a component of the visual—as part of the shift that already constitutes the pictorial turn. When understood in this light, the inclusive nature of Mitchell’s pictorial turn provides a useful starting point for envisioning the movement between the visual and the material as happening along a spectrum. I argue that to understand the relationship between the visual and material as such allows for a more inclusive mode of knowing that opens up rather than closes off interpretive possibilities—that accounts more readily for the movement between these modes and their interplay, such that we may more directly engage in the study of visual-material rhetorics as embodied knowledge and a sustainable project of inquiry.
Materiality, Space, and the Body
As described briefly in the introduction, a theory of material rhetoric, as conceptualized most clearly in Carole Blair’s 1999 study of five U.S. memorial sites, has at its core a focus on the impact of spatially-situated texts on contextualized, bodily experience. A closer look at recent work related to material rhetoric reveals that studies in this area may be understood as situated along a continuum. At one end of this continuum are analyses with a primary focus on physical space and a subsequent focus on the impact of those spaces on the bodies residing within them; at the other end of the continuum are analyses with a focus on the body first and foremost, and a secondary, contextualizing focus on the sociocultural contexts which make possible such analyses of the body. And of course, there are those analyses that are situated not along one end or the other, but someplace in the middle. In this chapter, I examine recent conversations explicitly related to studies of material rhetoric; included among them are the theories of Blair and Foucault, which I see as an integral component of any discussion and subsequent theory of visual-material rhetorics.
The earlier work of Carole Blair contains visible hints of what would later become