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Show 92 that they have on their terms. In doing so, we might begin our textual assemblages by asking what our objects want. What do they want? Well, it is impossible to say for certain without "speaking for the other" (Biesecker, 1992; Spivak, 1998), but an educated guess might say that they want to be noticed. For centuries after the Enlightenment, humans have colonized the objects of the world by taxonimizing (see Foucault, 1966/1994) them into orderly stacks of knowledge. How brutal! Moreover, if we are to take objects seriously, we must find them and listen. What do they say? How do they travel? What do they do in the world? In other words, we need to trace their movements and look for the alliances that they create. And then we might begin to create a network that before too long takes on a life of its own that mobilizes legions of rhetorical actants all by itself. This assemblage is our text (if we must call it that), which began with traces and fragments, sniffs and glances, and soon enough turned into a bona-fide monstrosity that says more about the world than any post-Enlightenment inquisition could say over the last 400 years. How have these neo-Enlightenment traditions of colonialism contaminated our rhetorical traditions? Well, as DeLuca has demonstrated on numerous occasions, Shannon and Weaver's (2002) transmission model of communication (sender, encoder, medium, decoder, receiver) still treats texts as instrumental, intentional, prepackaged boxes of meaning that can change the opinion of rational actors. We also read texts hermeneutically, as if reasonable interpretations will eventually jump out at us and shout, "here I am, thank God I have finally been discovered by a reasonable human!" But we ought to know better: Enlightenment reason does not drive the force of rhetoric! Both of these traditions are indebted to reason and rationality because they each assume human |
