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Show 121 container of meaning that can be discovered from what McGee calls a "vertical" approach. From an actor-network perspective, the critic becomes a cartographer that maps the ideograph's relations with the objects it encounters. This is not a new argument. DeLuca and Johnson both advocated for a stronger synchronic approach to ideographic criticism. DeLuca (1999) declared that McGee and others (e.g., Condit & Lucaites, 1993; Lucaites & Charland, 1989; McGee, 1980b) "neglect" "the synchronic structure" that requires a "linking of ideographs," which "points to a certain lacuna in McGee's theorizing" (p. 37). This led him to suggest that Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) articulation theory as a supplement that gives ideographs "rhetorical force" (p. 44). Johnson (2007) demonstrated the uses of a Deleuzian standpoint. Attempting to retrieve the synchronic capacities of the ideograph, she uses McGee's buried "horizontal" perspective to develop a theory about the meme as "a supplement and alternative to the ideograph" (p. 28). The meme is an object of surface rhetoric that functions on a geographical spectrum as a unit of analysis for how rhetoric functions within contemporary culture. Her argument is compelling. However, it is quite evident that she gives up on the ideograph, unlike DeLuca, as a useful tool for rhetorical criticism because it has been too compromised by "representational traditions of thought" (p. 33) that render the ideograph useless for horizontal, or synchronic, traditions of criticism. At best, Johnson creates an irreconcilable ideograph-meme binary. Recognizing the ideograph as an inscription preserves the utility of the ideograph as a rhetorical instrument, but does so from a geographical perspective. This necessarily avoids the vertical reasoning employed by McGee (1980a, 1980b) and Condit and Lucaites (1993), which assumes ideographs are mere "containers of meaning." As an |
