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Show 88 force that is ontologically singular, then our tools for reducing and purifying the text are no longer sufficient. Rather than reducing Robinson Crusoe's island to an intelligible island, we should embrace the jungle from "Friday's point of view and set things irreduced and free" (p. 154). Sure, jungles are dense and untamed, but isn't that precisely what makes rhetoric so exciting? We are dealing with unchartered territory here, since not many have approached rhetoric from a Latourian perspective that grants objects evental authority. A few have begun to use Latour for rhetorical purposes (e.g., Benoit-Barne, 2007; Besel, 2011; Graham & Herndl, 2013), but most of these analyses have either utilized Latour as an STS critic rather than a continental philosopher, or have failed to embrace the full capacity of rhetoric as an ontological force. Finnegan and Kang (2004), for instance, draw from Latour's concept of "circulation" in order to develop a more "iconophilic" approach to public sphere theory. However, their use of Latour is ephemeral and theoretically inconsistent with the rest of his work. While they use the term "circulation" to expand the idea of the public sphere, they fail to fully embrace the possibilities of a networked perspective, which would approach images as ontological forces that exceed tools of rationality such as the concept of the public sphere. Latour would outright reject this concept because it is a "black box" that reduces the complexities of the world to an oversimplified category of what counts as the social. So even though the authors advocate for a more "iconophilic" approach to public sphere theory, and accomplish this by attacking other rhetorical critics for not meeting their modernist definition of an iconophilic public sphere (which is itself an act of iconoclasm because they seemingly attempt to control the image), they still assume a logic of representation that holds |
