Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being

By Thomas J. Rickert

In Ambient Rhetoric, Thomas Rickert seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the rhetorical tradition and its basic dichotomy of subject and object. With the advent of new technologies, new media, and the dispersion of human agency through external information sources, rhetoric can no longer remain tied to the autonomy of human will and cognition as the sole determinants in the discursive act.

Rickert develops the concept of ambience in order to engage all of the elements that comprise the ecologies in which we exist. Culling from Martin Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology in Being and Time, Rickert finds the basis for ambience in Heidegger's assertion that humans do not exist in a vacuum; there is a constant and fluid relation to the material, informational, and emotional spaces in which they dwell. Hence, humans are not the exclusive actors in the rhetorical equation; agency can be found in innumerable things, objects, and spaces. As Rickert asserts, it is only after we become attuned to these influences that rhetoric can make a first step toward sufficiency.
Rickert also recalls the foundational Greek philosophical concepts of kairos (time), chora (space/place), and periechon (surroundings) and cites their repurposing by modern and postmodern thinkers as "informational scaffolding" for how we reason, feel, and act. He discusses contemporary theory in cognitive science, rhetoric, and object-oriented philosophy to expand his argument for the essentiality of ambience to the field of rhetoric. Rickert then examines works of ambient music that incorporate natural and artificial sound, spaces, and technologies, finding them to be exemplary of a more fully resonant and experiential media.
In his preface, Rickert compares ambience to the fermenting of wine—how its distinctive flavor can be traced to innumerable factors, including sun, soil, water, region, and grape variety. The environment and company with whom it's consumed further enhance the taste experience. And so it should be with rhetoric—to be considered among all of its influences. As Rickert demonstrates, the larger world that we inhabit (and that inhabits us) must be fully embraced if we are to advance as beings and rhetors within it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: May 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780822978695

Book preview

PITTSBURGH SERIES IN COMPOSITION, LITERACY, AND CULTURE

David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr, Editors

Ambient Rhetoric

The Attunements of Rhetorical Being

THOMAS RICKERT

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2013, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rickert, Thomas J. (Thomas Joseph), 1964–

 Ambient rhetoric : the attunements of rhetorical being / Thomas Rickert.

    pages cm. — (Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture)

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-0-8229-6240-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

1. Rhetoric—Study and teaching. I. Title.

 P53.27.R534 2013

 808.0071—dc23                                        2013007086

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-7869-5 (electronic)

This book is dedicated to my three wonderful children:

Paul, Dylan, and Sophia.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION. Circumnavigation: World/Listening/Dwelling

Part 1. DIFFRACTIONS OF AMBIENCE

CHAPTER 1. Toward the Chōra: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on Emplaced Invention

CHAPTER 2. Invention in the Wild: On Locating Kairos in Space-Time

CHAPTER 3. Ambient Work: Networks and Complexity in an Ambient Age

CHAPTER 4. [e-mail]: Composing Ambience

Part 2: DWELLING WITH AMBIENCE

CHAPTER 5. Rhetoric, Language, Attunement: Burke and Heidegger

CHAPTER 6. The Rhetorical Thing: Objective, Subjective, Ambient

CHAPTER 7. Ambient Dwelling: Heidegger, Latour, and the Fourfold Thing

CHAPTER 8. Attuning to Sufficiency: A Preparatory Study in Learning How to Dwell

CONCLUSION. Movement, Heidegger's Silence, Disclosure

Notes

Works Cited

Index

PREFACE

Thank you for your wine, California

Thank you for your sweet and bitter fruits

—Rolling Stones, Sweet Virginia

Those who drink and read about wine frequently deploy a somewhat odd term: terroir. In an enological context, this French term refers to the vineyards from a particular region. It comes from terre, which viticulturists use to mean the land where the grapes were grown. The entire specific region is understood to possess a uniform soil type and receive the same weather, with its vintners operating in a similar manner, and this is supposed to impart a particular and recognizable character to the wines that result. This notion reflects a key difference between so-called Old World and New World wines: the latter are chiefly designated as varietals (i.e., the wines take their names from the type of grape used: pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and so on), while the former are named according to their territory of origin, known in both English and French as their appellation—that is, their terroir (e.g., Bordeaux, Burgundy, Côtes du Rhône, and many more). Thus, terroir prioritizes the somewhereness of the earth over the nowhereness of, say, only loosely sourced supermarket wines, to the extent of emphasizing the land even over the grape. We see this difference even in comparing good wines, for example, a 2005 Caymus cabernet sauvignon from Napa Valley, a designation that emphasizes the cabernet grape, versus a 2005 Château Montrose from Saint-Estèphe, which emphasizes Saint-Estèphe, a district within the Bordeaux region that warrants its own appellation. Vintners operating in such designated wine regions are highly regulated by law; wines designated as Bordeaux, for instance, can be made from only certain grapes, which include cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, petite verdot, malbec, carménère, and merlot. Some regions allow only one grape variety, as is the case for Beaujolais, but even here, where the land and grape can share the same name, the territory predominates. The grape matters but is ultimately secondary to the more holistic terroir, which conveys the materiality of the sky that nourished and the ground that grew the grapes.

Terroir imparts not only specific flavors but a sense of connectedness rooted in a wine's place and time of origin. Sky and ground embrace, surround, nourish, even gift. Place comes to bear up and impart meaning through practices and discourses that conjoin all the disparate but interconnected viticultural and enological elements: earth, sun, vine, and weather; cultivating and harvesting the grapes; fermenting the juice; blending, aging, and distributing the wine; discussing the vintage; and ultimately drinking the wine, with all the sensory subtleties and conviviality doing so brings. Indeed, the strong social and ritualistic aspects of wine invoke even the divinities, regardless of one's religious convictions. The complex, unpredictable, and impossible to fully control interactions of all these variables set winemaking beyond solely human craft, inviting deep respect and appreciation for mystery, for what transcends the human. Anticipating later arguments in the book, we might say terroir thereby convokes a fourfold of earth, sky, humans, and the divine as the various mutually conditioning elements that bring wine into being and fit it into the everyday world.

Terroir conveys a great deal about the subject of this book, which is ambient rhetoric. Rhetoric, while traditionally taken as a discursive, intentional art, can and indeed must be grounded in the material relations from which it springs, not simply as the situation giving it its shape and exigence, but as part of what we mean by rhetoric. Rhetoric in this sense is ambient. It surrounds; it is of the earth, both in the most mundane of senses and in the Heideggerian idiom, as that which withdraws from meaning and relationality, which I will address later in the book. Rhetoric impacts the senses, circulates in waves of affect, and communes to join and disjoin people. It gathers and is gathered by things not as a denial of the social but as an essential complement to it. Rhetoric may give priority to the expressly salient, but the salient must take part in and emerge from the ambient. We can think this in terms of Richard Lanham's notion of rhetoric as the economics of attention, provided we expand the concept of attention beyond that which is limited to the subjective, intentional, or merely cognitive; attention would thereby come to include the materiality of our ambient environs, our affective comportments, the impact of that which escapes conscious notice, and the stumbling block presented by the finitude of knowledge when facing the plenitude of the world and its objects. Attention attends to the salient, but the bringing forth of salience is itself a complex activity that has ambient dimensions. This poses a problem, as I will show, when the salient is taken for all that there is or all that matters. It poses a problem precisely because it excludes from discussion how the ambient dimensions of a rhetorical situation constitute the ways things emerge and show up for us in the first place. Thus, to attend to the sensory and meaningful characteristics of a wine (or any food or drink, actually) leads from subjective experience back to the surroundings and settings, as Amy Trubek puts it in her discussion of terroir (4).

The notion of terroir, however, may seem to be less than illuminating in that it smacks of postmodern marketing, being but a cynical ploy to create a sense of connectedness and authenticity amid an overflow of shrill branding competition—or as Trubek relates, to sell the sizzle and not the steak (5). In other words, terroir is in the last instance a suspect commercialized discourse mediating our experience precisely as, according to the advertising guru David Ogilvy, all ads do work: They are tasting images (qtd. in Twitchell 126). Discourses and images mediate and thereby shape our experience of something. Indeed, this is apropos of wine culture in general. It has long been noted that the litany of terms wine critics use to evoke wine flavors and scents suggests verbal sorcery. Some elements are desirable: eucalyptus, vanilla, tea, plum, burnt toast, chocolate, and even tar; some, less so: green beans, natural gas, dust, mushrooms, mold, and barnyard (in large amounts; small amounts are acceptable if not desirable). We invoke an age-old problem here when we wonder when the terms simply divulge what is really there in the wine and when they reflect the discourse that shapes or mediates the experience of the wine. I will be arguing against this understanding of the mediation of experience. But it is important to point out that rhetoric obviously has much stake in this debate, and we might recognize how it plays out today as the opposition between forms of realism and of idealism, or between representational theories of language and social constructionist ones (Cherwitz's collection addresses such conflicts directly).

I adopt none of these positions, and I see the concept of terroir as illuminating other concepts—chōra, kairos, world, thing, the fourfold, sustainability, and additional ones I will deploy in this book—that confront us with the possibility of pursuing rhetorical theory across a different problematic. This makes attending to materiality be no simple matter; it is not a transformation we can make without concomitant shifts in other aspects of rhetorical theory, some of them far-reaching. We cannot attend to what is salient concerning materiality without necessarily also extending our sweep to the ambient environs and the numerous objects therein, all of which help scaffold our ability to generate what is salient. In other words, ambience takes on the order of a medium (not mediator), as Jean-Paul Thibaud argues, being a necessary constituent of perception, thought, and action and therefore influencing the shape, direction, or style in which they issue forth (10).

Indeed, we can more narrowly specify what attending to ambience might entail. The project suggests we take as provisional starting points the dissolution of the subject-object relation, the abandonment of representationalist theories of language, an appreciation of nonlinear dynamics and the process of emergence, and the incorporation of the material world as integral to human action and interaction, including the rhetorical arts. Pursuing these ideas means, for this book, expanding and realigning rhetorical theory as a situated art (i.e., embodied and embedded), including rethinking many key concepts and precepts. In so doing, I hope to show at least some of the limitations of basing rhetorical theory and practice on a mundane view of materiality and various dualities, such as subject/object, mind/body, and nature/culture (physis/nomos). The perspective I offer as an alternative has multiple names and sources, but I gather them together as ambient. Thus, terroir figures and materializes an ambient perspective to the extent that it brings together nature and culture, earth and body, the materiality of the produced, fermented grape and the sensibility of wine culture, discourse, and gathering.

The following is thus my attempt at a succinct statement about the book: in arguing that rhetoric is ambient, I am claiming that rhetoricity is the always ongoing disclosure of the world shifting our manner of being in that world so as to call for some response or action. World as thought through Heidegger's work would be the mutually achieved composite of meaning and matter; what is disclosed—that is, what presents itself to us through our doing, saying, and making—is disclosed as already fitted into material environments and holistic forms of significance. (And as I will discuss, we cannot relegate disclosure solely to human beings; all engagement, by and through all things, brings some amount of disclosure, albeit as conditioned by what and where something is.) World in this sense is not just the material environs, that is, the mundane bedrock of reality, but also the involvements and cares that emerge within and alongside the material environment and that in turn work to bring to presence the environs in the mode that they currently take. World, then, is simultaneously immanent and transcendent to each agent—and that includes nonhuman elements. But world also includes its own withdrawal from involvements, relations, and meaning, though without thereby becoming any less real. Disclosures are always partial, enmeshed in what presents itself but also buoyed up by what withdraws. An ambient rhetoric continually attunes itself both to what is present and to what withdraws: they are the conditions that give rise to our ongoing perceptions and understandings of the world. Note the difference between this and what in chapter 5 I label the extraction model of rhetoric, where, like the comedian extracting what is comical from life's situations, the rhetorician extracts what is persuasive from situations. Such a model expects salience to address all problems, persuade all comers, give adequate bearing to all rhetorical theory. I argue that it accomplishes none of these things.

The transformations that are accomplished through rhetoric can and often do lead to actions, however one understands rhetoric to proceed. That is, performing rhetorical acts does not require completely grasping all that is entailed in the performance. Getting a better grasp, however, offers insight, opportunity, and other advances—about rhetoric, about human being, about the world. So it is important to point out that all rhetorical work stems from our being together in the world, including how we see ourselves going forward in that world. Rhetoric accomplishes its work by inducing us to shift, at least potentially, how we dwell or see ourselves dwelling in the world. Rhetoric does not just change subjective states of mind; it transforms our fundamental disposition concerning how we are in the world, how we dwell. I use the term dwelling here to mean how people come together to flourish (or try to flourish) in a place, or better, how they come together in the continual making of a place; at the same time, that place is interwoven into the way they have come to be as they are—and as further disclosed through their dwelling practices. From this perspective, issues pertaining to the affects (the pathēs) and the role of material environment are elevated in priority; they are no longer simply complementary to rhetorical theory but rather absolutely integral to it. In this respect, recent attempts to reinvigorate the role of emotion and materiality resonate extensively with this book (see Edbauer; Micciche; Gross, Being-Moved and Secret History; Biesecker and Lucaites). There are important technological and material changes at work here, too, including a profound externalization of media and their saturation of everyday life, a growing dispersion of human agency through technologies, and new theories and practices of spatiality. All these, moreover, have still further connections to new conceptions of system, including ideas about emergence and ecology according to which the interactions of numerous agents mutually form and condition a chaotically dynamic system (ecology) such that a catalytic event can transform the system in unpredictable ways. By calling it unpredictable, I call attention to how the new systemic arrangement is emergent; the new arrangement cannot necessarily be predicted from the previous arrangement. An ambient rhetoric is inseparable from considerations of emergence. Our theories and practices at any given time are by their very nature unreliable for predicting outcomes. Thus, rhetorical theory is itself a variable in its own system (if I may continue to use that term), so that changes in rhetorical understanding unpredictably alter how we inhabit and practice rhetoric in the world. And vice versa. Spinning off Marx's classic statement that capitalism eventually outgrows the framework of production that sustained it, we can see rhetoric as evolving systems, or ecologies, of theories, practices, (social) relations, and technologies that continually outgrow current frames of practice and theoretical explanation. However much rhetoric preserves through history, it is nonetheless also made utterly distinctive by the manner in which it is inhabited at any given time and place.

I am thus arguing that rhetoric is less a symbolic practice or an extraction exercise than an art buoyed up by and delivered over to ambience. Granted, the advent of postmodernism and advances in media and telecommunications technologies have already changed many of the conversations about rhetoric—and indeed, that is part of my point. Transformations go hand in hand with difference in habitation, in how we dwell. But I wonder why such a sweeping transformation in our conversations has not yet grabbed hold of us as profoundly as it could have. Where is the deeper sense that such world change does in fact change human being and hence also our sense of world and how we are to dwell in it, a sensibility that comes forth not as a discursive leitmotif dotting our scholarly and pedagogical activities but as an ongoing event calling us to question, to think, and to practice differently than heretofore? On this view, rhetoric is not only epistemic, as Robert L. Scott puts it, suggesting in part that rhetoric depends on a relation between discourse and knowledge; nor is rhetoric only evolutionary and hence more than epistemic, as argued by George Kennedy. Nor still is rhetoric only epideictic in Jeffrey Walker's expanded sense, where rhetoric derives from the poetic tradition, is not confined to argument or practical pursuits, and thrives equally in public and private life (viii). I use the qualifier only because these remain important and productive approaches. Kennedy and Walker in particular have opened up fresh territory that invites further exploration beyond our customary origin stories, beyond what we invest in as knowledge, and even beyond the human horizon in general. Thus, they help prepare for approaches such as ambience.

An ambient approach makes the further claim that rhetoric is itself ontological, having to do with being and not just knowing. Here too ground has been prepared, for other recent work, much of it indebted to Heidegger, seeks to establish rhetoric's ontological nature (Gross and Kemmann; Hyde; Scult; P. Smith; compare D. Davis, Inessential; Grassi; Muckelbauer). In conceiving rhetoric as ontological, then, I engage with questions concerning not just how human beings generate and negotiate knowledge, how rhetoric reflects conceptions of human sociality, or how rhetoric advances life but how human beings and the world are. This ontological perspective inquires into the conceptions of being that we have and the concomitant ways in which beings emerge in the world. I argue for a richer, more dynamic, and materialist understanding of rhetoric that declines to zone rhetoric within symbolicity (and in this I am congruent with Diane Davis, who also sees rhetoric as prior to symbolicity). On this approach, rhetoric cannot be understood as suasion attempted between discrete or among aggregate subjects embedded in a transitive, subject-driven view of rhetorical situations. Rhetoric is not, finally, a shift in the mental states of subjects but something world-transforming for individuals and groups immersed in vibrant, ecologically attuned environments.

In terms of materiality, ambience grants not just a greater but an interactive role to what we typically see as setting or context, foregrounding what is customarily background to rhetorical work and thereby making it material, complex, vital, and, in its own way, active. I explore this ambient dispersion and entanglement of agency, considering how it transforms important concepts in rhetorical theory and suggesting ways it can benefit thinking about invention, persuasion, agency, technology, and social action. I am, to put this reductively, arguing that we must come to see that the human or human arts cannot exist in a manner ontologically distinct from material and informational spaces, including technology (see Barad; Wheeler; Bennett, Agency and Force; Clark, Natural; Dourish). Doing so necessitates an ecological shift in what it means for rhetorical agents to inhabit and interact in an environment. This theoretical move from rhetorical subjects to ambient environments connects to scholarly studies in computing, music, cultural and media studies, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and information science (see Cai, Aarts and Marzano, McCullough). I do not think it is an accident that diverse fields are converging on a new sense of human being and its inhabitancy in the world. Much of that interdisciplinary research will show up in the following chapters.

But the move to ontological rather than epistemic considerations has more import than shifting conversations away from, say, issues of truth and falsehood or the problem of knowledge versus opinion. For instance, an ambient rhetoric opposes the rather entrenched idea that we all have worldviews, or different ways of seeing the world dependent on the cultural or ideological lenses through which it appears. An ambient rhetoric attends to ways of being in the world, whereas such being, while it can certainly cultivate a sense of worldviews, cannot rest there. There is no my way and your way of seeing the world, no epistemological windows on a (stable, objective) world out there that in turn substantiate cultural relativisms. Rather, world is already implicated, and hence it both generates and participates in who we are. Worldviews, then, as ways of seeing an already preexistent world, are not originary but derive from this more fundamental weddedness to world. In fact, the notion of worldviews is the dominant Western understanding of world that we in turn apply to other cultures (Ingold). Indeed, our judgments of other cultures often fall along these lines: are such cultures sophisticated enough to adopt the notion of worldviews, or are they utterly immersed in their more primitive engagements? Do we then cast them as lesser than us, or do we romanticize their engagements in the face of Western desacralization? Rhetoric is fully implicated here, at the levels of both practice (how we deploy rhetoric and in service to what) and theory (how our theories of rhetoric affirm dominant Western assumptions about world and human being). However, the issue is not to overcome such ontological reification, as if this were a simple matter of changing the Western way of dwelling en masse, but to bring a profound questioning of it back to our very sense of what rhetoric is and can be. Nevertheless, the stakes remain high enough, and the issues complex enough, that I can at best sketch out a horizon, chart some key moves. Much will remain to be done.

Additionally, changing the grounding assumptions about rhetoric can be a slow process, even if there is a reason and desire to change it. Rhetorical studies remains predominately focused on the status, role, and intentions of speakers; their mastery of discursive and performative techniques; issues pertaining to institutions, technologies, and the body; and various factors that generate persuasive effects in an audience—logic, emotions, credibility, identification, common ground, and so on. This paradigm acknowledges context primarily as a discursive, social, and cultural formation within which a rhetorical agent works to achieve the effects she or he intends, but as I stated earlier, in an important sense the agent precedes that context; the context is simply the situation within which rhetorical activity occurs, a backdrop for rhetorical work and not a robust participant in itself. Thomas Farrell provides a typical statement: Much of the world comes to us as already assembled culturally meaningful configurations of phainomena, and while these configurations raise practical questions, they remain already ordered cultural ‘givens’ (25). Materiality is appearance as shaped in advance by culture, and only in this guise, where valence is established with emotion, conviction, and judgment, is it rhetorical. Of course, as I have indicated, some scholars argue against such a paradigm, particularly those now working on bodies, technologies, and institutions. Still, it is uncertain what such work will accomplish, and more important, we need to begin consolidating and integrating that work into a more general theory of rhetoric. In part, change is difficult because our theories inevitably outstrip the larger will of the field, which is itself an ambient phenomenon, ensconced in knowledge, practices, journals, books, conferences, organizations, environments, and people. The grounding practices and assumptions we invoke and from which we think themselves both generate and mitigate change. Rhetoric is involved with its own forms of disclosure and cannot be sundered from them. Once again, then, to attune rhetoric to ambience is also to change how we inhabit the field of rhetoric, whether as a body of theoretical reflections or as an engagement with others, and it is thus to resituate rhetoric regarding how we will dwell with and within it.

While I focus primarily on rhetoric in the present and what the past brings to it, our ambient environments have always been at issue, in various ways, going back to our earliest theories of rhetoric. In Plato's Protagoras, the eponymous character's statements to Socrates concerning the city as a teacher of virtue can be seen as a germinal awareness of the ambient dimensions of everyday life. It may thus be obvious to point out that we live in a surrounding and sustaining material world but nevertheless invigorating to get a bead on the way rhetorical theory continually strives to understand our relation to that sustaining world and learns how to marshal and navigate its forces, capacities, and material in fresh ways. That is, rhetoric as a living practice has always been embroiled with such concerns, called upon for understanding, creating, and interceding in community, sensibility, and action.

We can put this differently and say rhetoric is one of the modalities for attunement to the world. Such a statement indicates that rhetoric does not reside solely with human beings. As Kennedy has argued, even animals can practice some form of rhetoric. In claiming that rhetoric serves an evolutionary function, Kennedy opens the door for ambience, since evolutionary theory describes the transformations that occur in species as they fit themselves into the world just as the world fits them into itself. Thus, the world also takes part in attunement. It is not a subjective or individualist pursuit. Attunement reflects ambience in that both terms bring the world into rhetorical performance. For an ambient rhetoric, rhetoric cannot be considered solely human doing; we are only participants, albeit particularly important ones. My opening wine example exemplifies the continual attuning required for making good wine, with terroir being a term that captures the material, nonhuman elements and forces that go along with it. Persuasiveness inheres in this sense of attuning to the world. As Diane Davis has intimated, moving rhetoric out of an exclusively human domain forces us to understand persuasiveness as prior to symbolicity. Attunement further includes the material environments we inhabit and thus describes a fundamental rhetoricity invoked by our originary weddedness to the world, as well as the ongoing pursuits that transpire within it. Attunement is not an I fitting into the world in order to do, say, and make, but an I-world hybrid already replete with an a priori affectedness. Rhetoric emerges in being there in the world, ambiently.

I hope that in pursuing the idea of rhetoric as an ambient art, I can help revitalize conversation about some of rhetoric's basic concepts and cherished notions. Many of them remain enmeshed in older conceptual frameworks that are at odds with contemporary advances in other fields of knowledge and, perhaps even more important, increasingly unsuited for contemporary practices. The networking, digitizing, and externalizing of information does not just challenge us to develop a new battery of practices but has already transformed rhetoric in ways we should strive to understand, theorize, and advance. The growing problems of ecological sustainability, to which I turn at the end of the book, also call us to attune rhetoric in and as part of the world. The fact that rhetoric is an at least 2,500-year-old art is no excuse to rest on previous laurels, which puts lauding in service to gatekeeping. Postmodern theory, media studies, and deep ecology, of course, have already done much to galvanize new conversations and introduce new theories and concepts. But this work has only begun, and in that light, this book, too, is only such a beginning. I have in mind Farrell's claim that the very aim of rhetorical theory has always been to define and articulate a vision of what the highest potential of rhetorical practice might be (3). This book, while leery of a false sense of stability achieved through definition or articulation, joins with the evocation of a speculative call, always staying mindful of practice and its disclosures in advancing toward a better vision of what rhetorical theory can bring for being together in the world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book on ambience will have much to acknowledge—people, events, places, music, moods, and more. First and foremost, I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who at various key times provided invaluable help. Diane Davis, Daniel Smith, and Nathaniel Rivers gave me very generous readings of chapters; their insights and acumen helped make the book much better. Additional thanks go to Diane Davis for persuading me to keep with persuasion. Patricia Sullivan read the whole manuscript (wow!) and provided excellent commentary. Other readers who have encouraged and inspired me are John Ackerman, David Blakesley, Joshua Gunn, Byron Hawk, Diane Keeling, Derek Mueller, Jenny Edbauer Rice, and Victor Vitanza.

Thanks also to those with whom I have discussed the project or who asked for the manuscript in draft form, including Scot Barnett, Casey Boyle, Jim Brown, Marilyn Cooper, Greg Goodale, Carl Herndl, Dennis Lynch, Marc Santos, and Christopher Yeomans. Steve Mailloux talked with me extensively about the project on a warm fall night in South Carolina; that conversation was quite helpful and enlightening.

Others who have been very helpful and supportive include Geof Carter, Debra Hawhee, and Kelly Pender. Jeff Rice provided inspiration in beer and beer tips. Michael Bernard-Donals and Victor Vitanza wrote letters of support for a 2008 Purdue Center for Humanistic Studies Fellowship that gave me a semester off for writing at a crucial time in the project. I also wish to thank my students in our 2011 Posthumanism and Rhetoric class at Purdue; discussing the texts and issues was tremendously generative for finishing and revising the manuscript.

More thanks go to John Muckelbauer and my second, anonymous reviewer, both of whom provided generous and insightful commentary on the manuscript. Joshua Shanholtzer has been a steady guide as Pittsburgh's acquisitions editor, and I am grateful to David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr for once again publishing my work.

An early version of chapter 1 appeared as "In the House of Doing: Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambience" in JAC 24.4 (2004); an early version of chapter 2 appeared as "Invention in the Wild: Locating Kairos in Space-Time," in Christopher Keller and Christian Weisser, eds., The Locations of Composition (2007); an early version of chapter 3 appeared as "Towards the Chōra: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on Emplaced Invention," Philosophy and Rhetoric 40.3 (2007); and an early version of chapter 4 appeared as [e-mail]: Composing Ambience, in The Writing Instructor (May 2010) (http://www.writinginstructor.com/rickert). I thank those publications for permission to reproduce this material in revised form.

A number of locations have proved to be important for writing and revising this work, and a book on ambience would be remiss in not noting a few of them: Greyhouse Coffee Shop, Scotty's Brewhouse, and my basement, with its vintage 1970s stereo (AR-98LS and now Snell Type A III speakers) and a large selection of ambient, electronic, prog, and jazz vinyl. Contributions above and beyond noted for Selim Sivad, One Brain, and KS and the Berlin school.

The seed essay for this book, In the House of Doing, was written in 2004 while I was on prednisone for an allergic reaction, and oddly, in 2012, at project's end, I find myself again on prednisone.

And finally, I give thanks to my wife, Jenny Bay, who supported me throughout this project with patience, care, and her own deep insights. She is in all ways my love and joy.

ABBREVIATIONS

KENNETH BURKE

AH         Attitudes toward History

LSA       Language as Symbolic Action

PC         Permanence and Change

RM        Rhetoric of Motives

GRAHAM HARMAN

TB        Tool-Being

PN        Prince of Networks

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

BCAP    Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy

BT        Being and Time

BW       Basic Writings

DT       Discourse on Thinking

EGT     Early Greek Thinking

FCM    The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

HR       Heidegger Reader

IM        Introduction to Metaphysics

LH        Letter on Humanism"

MFL      The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

O          Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity

OET      On the Essence of Truth"

OWL     On the Way to Language

P          Parmenides

PLT       Poetry, Language, Thought

PR         The Principle of Reason

QCT      The Question concerning Technology

TDP      Toward the Definition of Philosophy

WCT     What Is Called Thinking?

Z           Zollikon Seminars

BRUNO LATOUR

PH        Pandora's Hope

INTRODUCTION

Circumnavigation

World/Listening/Dwelling

There's you, the time, the logic, or the reasons we don't understand.

—Yes, Close to the Edge

What I see is thinking; what I hear is thinking, too.

—Atom Heart, Abstract Miniatures in Memoriam Gilles Deleuze

Existence is not an individual affair.

—Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

As we move into the second millennium, we enter a time when new and often digital technologies are increasingly enmeshed with our everyday environment. Computer and telecommunications technologies are not only converging but also permeating the carpentry of the world, doing so in networks and technological infrastructures, houses and buildings, manufactured products, various sorts of content, and more. Information is not just externalized; it vitalizes our built environs and the objects therein, making them smart, capable of action. These innovations call us to reflect anew about our surroundings and the dispositions through which our rhetorical work emerges. We are entering an age of ambience, one in which boundaries between subject and object, human and nonhuman, and information and matter dissolve. While postmodern theory has contributed much to these shifts, contemporary science, digital production, radical connectivity, and ubiquitous technology push us still further. They not only impact our environment and how we interact with and within it but transform our knowledge about self and world.

Such issues are not confined to academies, laboratories, think tanks, and boardrooms. Popular culture is replete with them, as the following two examples suggest. First, in the film Minority Report, database-driven ads liberated from their confinement to computer screens address citizens everywhere. In one scene, Tom Cruise's character, fleeing from authorities, is confronted by a lively American Express ad that points out, It looks like you need an escape, and Blue can take you there. Such ads exemplify the externalization of information, for they are ubiquitous, interactive, and smart. Second, in M. T. Anderson's adolescent novel Feed, children implanted with digitally connective wetware develop with immediate, internalized access to futuristic equivalents of our mobile phones and their various functions, including messaging, chat, and the transfer of various sorts of content, such as film, video, and music, thus replacing earlier methods of data access, including gaming platforms, radio, the Internet, and libraries—although in the novel these distinctions no longer apply. Just as in Minority Report, such technology also interacts with and monitors the citizenry. Looking at store merchandise immediately results in personally tailored sales pitches; trying to access certain kinds of data leads to investigative probes by obscure administrative authorities. Those who lack this technology are considered lesser humans. As the novel (troublesomely) makes plain, the convergence of informational, communications, and biological technologies changes what it means to be human and creates new distinctions in what it means to be different.

These examples are significant not simply because they come from popular culture but because, given that origin, they already speak to everyday concerns. What is fictional and fantastic here permeates our everyday world, albeit without any sense of wonder or space for reflection. Both these examples portray imagined transformations in our senses of human being and how people interact in their environments, and as they do so, they elicit a small sense of celebration and a greater sense of unease. While this unease is not unwarranted, I would rather use it as a window on the fact that both examples involve communicative exchange and persuasion, and they do so in ways that challenge us to rethink accepted notions about these processes. In the Minority Report example, advertising is fully mobile and interactive; it is smart because it can assess, adapt to, and influence emerging situations, such as a man on the run who has been identified by networked computers accessing circulating data that are empowered to capitalize on his predicament. Who are the agents here? It would be arbitrary if not simplistic to assign agency solely to the human programming of computers. What technai are at work? Can the traditional emphases on sociality, discourse, intention, and so on suffice to describe such a rhetorical situation? In the Feed example, where can we locate rhetorical work and exigence? Given the far-reaching technological extensions of humankind's cognitive processes, it again seems simplistic to relegate rhetorical powers to humans alone. Does it not seem that rhetoric circulates through both human and nonhuman elements in these examples? If so, how can rhetoric be understood to suffuse the entire situation if its traditional definition largely confines it to the persuasive (and symbolic) activity of human subjects?

These questions open us onto the main claim of this book, which is really quite basic: an ambient age calls us to rethink much of our rhetorical theory and practice, indeed, calls us to understand rhetoric as ambient. Rhetoric can no longer remain centered on its theoretical commonplaces, such as rhetor/subject, audience, language, image, technique, situation, and the appeals accomplishing persuasive work, at least as they are predominately understood and deployed. Rather, it must diffuse outward to include the material environment, things (including the technological), our own embodiment, and a complex understanding of ecological relationality as participating in rhetorical practices and their theorization. Of course, a growing body of scholarship seeks to rework these commonplaces for rhetorical theory and practice, and I will engage much of it, but the challenge remains focused on determining how to come to a more comprehensive understanding. An ambient rhetoric is just such an attempt.

As I describe later in this chapter and in chapter 4 in regard to prehistoric cave art, even some of our earliest practices were ambient. That is, the external environment was an integral aspect of ancient people's practices. So ambience here refers to the active role that the material and informational environment takes in human development, dwelling, and culture, or to put this differently, it dissolves the assumed separation between what is (privileged) human doing and what is passively material. The prehistoric cave paintings discovered in Europe at Altamira (Spain), Lascaux (France), and other places in the late nineteenth century—and subsequently discovered all over the world, from China to Africa—are typically hailed as some of humanity's earliest visual artworks, evoking tremendous respect and passion. In just the last decade, however, interpretations of this wall art have shifted. The images are now understood as not just visual but multisensory artifacts. A singular focus on visual representation blocked access to that insight for nearly a century; indeed, even the term wall art betrays the visual bias.¹ A new form of archaeology concerned with acoustics and sounds in the ancient world has discovered that the visuals are carefully placed for aural accompaniment, so that the sites are better understood as immersive and interactive, or ambient in the sense I am developing here (Blesser and Salter 74).² Further study has demonstrated the importance of the characteristics and layout of the cave walls and spaces, such as the famous painting of the bird-man shaman at Lascaux, which is located at the bottom of the Shaft, six meters below one of the main forums, the Apse.³

An important lesson here is that humans have always attended to the ambient, even if we are only now gaining self-reflexive access to that insight. Today, as the digitization and externalization of information through networks and other media accelerate, and as ubiquitous computing (also called ambient intelligence, among other labels) comes into its own and promises further radical transformations of the built environment, we are confronted quite strikingly with the question of our relation to that technologized world—and its relation to us (Aarts and Marzano, Greenfield, Morville). As I intimated already, to say that such transformations challenge long-established theories and concepts concerning rhetoric would be an understatement. Ideas about subjectivity, agency, context, invention, persuasion, and even discourse and its operations stand to be revised yet further in subtle and not so subtle ways. If discoveries such as that of the cave paintings at Lascaux can significantly revise our sense of the capacities of early humans, what in turn does the discovery of their sophisticated deployment of ambient sound and spatial technē suggest about them? While it certainly asks us yet again to revise our understanding of early humans, more pertinently for my project, it suggests changes in our contemporary self-understanding. In short, why did this insight, so long obscured, suddenly become available? I am suggesting that issues raised and questions posed by ambience are in the air, as it were, because culturally we are inundated by ambience.

The question of ambience is thus also a question of perception, recognition, or, as Heidegger might say, wakefulness (O 12). To take another example from Neolithic cave art, while the art was first recognized as prehistoric in the late nineteenth century, the caves were known and visited long before that. The art was frequently seen and sometimes noted; graffiti in the caves goes back to 1602. But the art was not recognized. As Mats Rosengren points out, as late as 1861 the scholar Dr. Felix Garrigou, on seeing the wall markings, wrote in his notebook, There are drawings on the wall; what could that possibly be? (83). Indeed, Rosengren goes on to show that the art at Altamira was not actually recognized by Don Marcelino de Sautuloa, the first scholar to publish on the cave art (in 1880), but by his daughter, whose questions sparked his curiosity (82, 84). While the scientists of the time knew much, they had not yet cultivated a relation to the past that allowed drawings on cave walls to show up for them as prehistoric cave art or really as significant in any sense; the images did not register as meaningful to them. Rosengren concludes that this is an example of the primacy of doxa over epistemē, but that seems untenable. Rather, it is an issue of ambience in a twofold sense. First, ambience conveys what Heidegger describes as the background of intelligibility and practical coping from which we work; that background had to change before the cave drawings became disclosed to us in a newly meaningful manner. Second, ambience invites us to understand the complex give-and-take we have with our material surroundings, as I have been describing, but this brings us back to include background intelligibility, that in which and from which we dwell (akin to the en hō and ex hou Plato attributes to the chōra—see chapter 1). Such intelligibility is inseparable from its materiality. Ambience, then, becomes a useful distillation of ongoing dynamic shifts in a vibrant, robust environment that we seek to understand, explain, and work through; ambience is itself ambient, meaning, in part, that ambience, even in such seemingly subjective forms as recognition, is not solely human doing. The work of ambient disclosure includes ambience, too.

But perhaps I am getting ahead of the story and should ask, more basically, what ambience has meant. Where did the word come from? In the rest of this introduction, I will lay out the basic meanings of ambience, address some central terms, such as attunement, and then work through the thought of some of the key theorists, researchers, and practitioners who underpin the rest of the book. Finally, as a preview to the more detailed argument of the book, I examine Thomas Cole's self-admittedly conservative definition of rhetoric, using a brief but specific example to demonstrate its differences from a definition of rhetoric as ambient. I am not looking for a supersession, however, simply replacing or countering older, more traditional understandings of rhetoric with an ambient one. Rather, I am attuning us to what those earlier understanding exclude and what the costs and stakes of such an exclusion might be.

The Concept of Ambience

According to the OED, the word ambience comes from the Latin ambientem, the present participle of the verb ambīre, meaning to go about (amb-, on both sides, around, about + īre, to go). It encompasses various shades of meaning, but largely it refers to what is lying around, surrounding, encircling, encompassing, or environing. Labeling an environment ambient, then, at the very least picks out its surrounding, encompassing characteristics. When the