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Show 90 then the least we can do is make maps that identify the traces of actants within their unruly network to assemble, if even only temporarily, a stable production of meaning or an evental line of flight (Delueze & Guattari, 1980/1987). The Assemblage of the Text The text is no longer a hermeneutically sealed discourse. Actually, it is not even reducible to discourse. Rather, the Latourian text is an assemblage of networked forces that has come alive through mediations, translations, and negotiations with other objects. This process never ends, and it is the job of the critic, as McGee (1990) once argued, to piece together the fragments and traces of rhetorical context that actants have left behind. Because critics cannot have a final mastery of the text, we must work as decentered actants that have become entangled in the webs of our actor-networks. This means that we are political actors, but we can no longer suggest a humanist perspective when writing and assembling textual relations. Furthermore, rhetoric is no longer an instrumental tool in the service of reason, which has failed us on countless occasions; it is an animated force that challenges assumptions about rationality when studying the public sphere (see DeLuca & Peeples, 2002; Finnegan & Kang, 2012; Watson, 2013), social movements (see DeLuca, 1999b; Haiman, 2006; McGee, 2006; Windt, 2006), and arguments (see Blair, 2001; DeLuca, 1999c; Hauser, 1999; Middleton et al., 2011; Pezzullo, 2003). Although some thinkers already made the point that form is more important than content (Derrida, 1978/1993, 1974/1990, 1967/1998; McLuhan, 1964/1994), a Latourian approach to rhetoric takes things even further by looking beyond discourse entirely. Derrida, for instance, deconstructs Western phonology by working from the margins, but he is constrained in |
