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Show 120 since it is an utter impossibility to touch our "messy" real world directly. In Laboratory Life, Latour and Woolgar (1976/1986) define instruments as "any set-up, no matter what its size, nature and cost, that provides a visual display of any sort in a scientific text" (p. 68). Instruments produce inscriptions, and these devices keep certain types of relations together, however, they are oftentimes mobile because they allow "new associations, translations, and articulations to take place" (Latour, 1999; Mlekuz, 2013, p. 114). Rhetorical critics also use inscriptions to analyze objects of study. Obviously we use computers, articles, and books to perform our criticisms, but we also use certain tropes such as metaphors, metonymy, and synecdoche to help us identify rhetorical strategies since rhetoric itself would lose significance if we did not have tools to help us discuss general strategies and measure effects. The ideograph is an inscription that helps scholars discuss the tensions, negotiations, and contestations of language in political contexts. It helped McGee (1980) realize how material rhetorics influence everyday political conversations. It helped Condit and Lucaites (1993) realize how white majority leaders conflated "liberty" with "property" to prevent African Americans from achieving social and economic equalities in the early years of our American history. It helped Hasian (1996) study how the ideograph "eugenics" came into relation with "necessity," "voluntary motherhood" and other controversial discourses to interrogate traditional modes of doing science. The ideograph has proven its value to rhetorical criticism, but how can this inscription be used for new purposes? Assuming the ideograph as an inscription means that rhetoric no longer involves a structure of representation. In other words, the ideograph is an actant that exerts force in singularity with other objects. Although it may sustain particular articulations, it is not a |
