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Show 89 images, and rhetoric for that matter, as atomistic containers of meaning. Latour would ardently oppose such an approach because to him, actants such as images do not represent anything else. They are utterly singular and defined only by their relations. The full potentials of recognizing rhetoric as a force are not yet recognized.19 For Latour, an actant is the one that does the talking, translating, and mediating. And they should not be expected to be civil - as if actants could possibly be trained to the humanist ideal of morality. As Latour puts it, a force becomes potent only if it speaks for others, if it can make those it silenced speak when called up to demonstrate its strength, and if it can force those who challenged it to confess that indeed it was saying what its allies would have said" (1991/1993, p. 197). To borrow from Ian Angus (2000), rhetoric as a primal scene of communication constitutes social relations through its own materiality. In the context of rhetoric, force escapes reason and establishes its own energies, movements, and relations without the knowledgeable critic and his crafty toolbox of theories, methods, quills, and scrolls. Moreover, Latour encourages rhetorical critics to take the object (and its relations) seriously. Whether Latour tends to reduce objects to their relations is a question for another day (see Harman, 2009, p. 187). But for now, if we must reduce objects to texts, 19 Admittedly, even this dissertation is compelled to reduce corporate actants to words that follow a particular form sanctioned by the University of Utah Graduate School, which might be understood as a modernist institution that compels PhD students to follow their formulaic rules (see footnote 11). This limits the objectness of the corporate subject and kills the possibility of form being argumentatively forceful. While we can scratch our heads and ponder about what a non-anthropocentric, primal ontology would look like, or may have looked like before the Graduate School violated this dissertation, we are moreover confronted with the narrow-minded, violent traditions of academic research that expects researchers to reduce actants to words in dissertation binders, conference papers, and journal articles. As DeLuca (2008) asks: "What would changed practices mean for the products of our [academic] practices?" (p. 670). |
