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Show 93 knowledge has the authority to nominalize the exterior world and scientifically reveal meaning. Rather than reducing every living and nonliving object in the world to intelligible structures of reason, we should ask how these objects speak to one another and create assemblages that may or may not involve humans. This humbling process of map-making asks how subjects are constructed through their forceful rhetorical relations rather than assuming subjects are critical rational, phonocentric humans that can "touch souls" with the right communicative technology (see Peters, 1999). As Graham Harman (2009) notes, "harmony is a result, not a guiding principle" (p. 21). Stability is a rarity. In some ways, this process resembles Davi Johnson's (2007) cartographic approach to mapping the meme, which "attaches to and detaches from various discursive configurations, entering into diverse relationships with other memes and ‘memeplexes,' or interdependent collaborations with memes. ‘Meaning is thus just one possible effect of memetic activity, not its animating force" (Johnson, 2007, p. 38). As she continues, she directly addresses the question of rhetorical force: "The question of rhetorical force becomes an empirical question: successful memes are selected for (they must get our attention), and they replicate by altering cultural environments so as to increase their own chances of survival" (p. 40). In other words, memes are objects, or actants, that perform rhetorical strategies all on their own. Rhetorical critics are the "conduits" (p. 42) and not the producers of their efficacy. Power has not disappeared; it has just changed. Rather than a disinterested and sovereign substance, power is an accumulation of assemblages that have allied together to produce networks that are more forceful than others. In other words, power get things |
