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Show 86 let us now discuss how Latour's philosophy changes our conceptualization of rhetoric, the text, and the audience. Mapping the Network: A Geographical Approach to Rhetoric Latour's Actor-Network Theory has a lot to say about rhetoric even though not many have used his work in this way.17 We know that Latour's subject is a trace within a network that is constantly articulated and rearticulated by assemblages to which it belongs; so the question now is what to do with this subject when performing rhetorical criticism. To entertain this inquiry, this section will outline what Latour's subject does for rhetoric. In doing so, I have organized this section into three subsections. The first discusses what it means to consider rhetoric as force. The second talks about the assemblage of the text. The third parleys the territories of audiences. Altogether, I hope to detail a geographic approach to rhetoric that grounds this dissertation's analysis of corporate subjectivity. Rhetoric is Force A Latourian conceptualization of rhetoric18 begins by understanding rhetoric as an ontological force. As such, rhetoric cannot be reduced to paradigms that invoke logics of 17 Benoit-Barne (2007), Besel (2011), Finnegan and Kang (2004), Graham and Herndl, (2013), and Pfister (2015) have all attempted to use Latour rhetorically. 18 Latour mentions the term "rhetoric" on several occasions, but especially in Science in Action and Reassembling the Social. However, Latour does not seem to know much about American traditions of rhetoric and tends to reduce the concept to flattery. Thus, the purpose of this section, and this dissertation in general, is to demonstrate that Latour's continental perspective has much insight to offer to our discipline. As such, I intend to show what a reassembled rhetoric may look like if we consider Latour as a poststructural thinker. |
