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Show 118 "All entities are on exactly the same ontological footing" it is an actant "deployed in…[its] relations with the world" (Harman, 2009, p. 19). In other words, the ideograph is an actant that is literally defined by its relations. It gains force by the strength of its allies and negotiations, not from a magical Aristotelian substance discovered by the critic (Harman, 2009, p. 20). This pushes rhetorical critics to unpack the relations of the ideograph black box that has been used for too long to reduce the complicated, messy relations of rhetorical engagement to a self-contained block used to make broad conclusions about what rhetoric is, rather than what rhetoric does. Rather than trying to "be reasonable and to impose some pre-determined [sic] sociology on the sometimes bizarre interdefinition offered by the writers studied" (Latour, 1984/1993, p. 10), the critic should map the networks, forces, and translations that occur between objects to determine how actors pragmatically build networks. Ideographs Require Translation Translation is the continuity of displacement and transformation. Michel Callon (1999) states that "to translate is to displace…but to translate is also to express in one's own language what others say and want, why they act in the way they do and how they associate with each other: it is to establish oneself as a spokesperson" (p. 81). Acknowledging that academics constantly translate ideographs as they bring them into relation with other objects is quite different than assuming ideographs are "containers of meaning" as Johnson (2007) argues, or that they somehow represent a primordial layer of truth. Ideographs, like all other actants in the world, are constantly negotiating with other actants in "utter singularity." In a footnote Latour (1984/1993) states that translation "means drift, betrayal, |
