This is a paper I wrote for Dr. Carl Herndl’s New Materialism and Rhetoric class in the spring of 2023. It was Carl’s last class before he retired after over 4 decades of teaching.
CAN SUBALTERN STUFF SPEAK?
1. Introduction
Since I came from an engineering/preventive medicine/environmental background, I always had Rachel Carson in the back of my mind as I was reading the new materialism books of Jane Bennet, Karen Barad, Thomas Rickert, and Bruno Latour. One of the dominant new materialism concepts is that of the assemblage, which manifests itself in various forms depending on the linguistic predilections of the author. Bennett defines assemblages as an “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts” that “are living, throbbing confederations…not governed by any central head” that have the “ability to make something happen” (23-4). But assemblages aren’t immortal, they have “a distinctive history of formation” and a “finite life span” (Bennett 24). Bennett wants humans to eschew hierarchical and simplistic thinking so prominent and fundamental in the human approach to the world and see anew the myriad elements that compose seemingly infinite assemblages and create action, sometimes unintentional, like her explication of a failed electrical grid. Bennett’s new materialism conception of a complex, flattened world of unstable, vibrant matter assemblages acting out, resonates with the human/non-human actant networks of Latour, the intra-acting entanglements of Barad, and Rickert’s world of human/non-human attunement. As Rachel Carson stated in this section’s epigraph – and I’m sure Bennett, Barad, Latour, and Rickert would agree – the challenge is for humans to “to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.” Carson is critiquing the “mastery of nature” as an immature delusion of humans and states the challenge is for humans to master themselves and cease the childlike “war against nature” which will only end in human self-harm. Carson is suturing a Baradian agential cut between humans and nature while toppling the Great Chain of Being hierarchy so that it lies flat, just like Latour’s flatlands. She’s making this de facto new materialism declaration in 1964, decades before Bennett’s 2010 Vibrant Matter, Barad’s 2007 Meeting the Universe Halfway, Latour’s 1993 We Have Never Been Modern, and Rickert’s 2013 Ambient Rhetoric.
In her landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring, Carson defined the assemblage/network that created the opportunity and agency for the vibrant matter of DDT, a chemical insecticide, to intra-act with multiple non-humans and humans longer than desired killing unintended beneficial insects while causing genetic damage as well as cancer. There was a distinct lack of human attunement with non-humans affected by DDT resulting in humans conducting war on themselves not some othered “nature.” Furthermore, as a rhetor trying to reach a target audience to affect change, Carson states in her author’s note that she doesn’t want “to burden the text with footnotes,” but she does include a “my principal sources of information, arranged by chapter and page, in an appendix…at the back of the book” (Silent Spring). Despite being a woman in a scientific world dominated by men and having a “soft science” background in biology, Carson was instrumental in the eventual banning of DDT. Carson was telling – in an effective rhetorical way – what Donna Haraway referred to as a “good enough story” in her Anthropocene lecture. Carson’s story that led to a positive change in the world (banning DDT) showed humans were “being responsive to the possibilities that might help us and it flourish” while showing a case study for humans taking “responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s differential becoming” (Barad 396). Since I see Carson’s work as not only a rich rhetorical text but also a precursor of new materialism, I was surprised to see that Carson was not referenced in the books previously mentioned for Bennett, Latour, or Rickert. Barad does make a singular reference to Carson and Silent Spring as a response to biomimicry, but it’s only one sentence that cannot possibly convey the depth of Carson’s contributions to the assemblage of new materialism (365).
While I’ve only been exposed to new materialism for a few months, I’ve come to appreciate that its tenets have played a significant part in my professional life. After studying and researching hypersonic stability and earning a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 1995, I suddenly realized how specialized and out of fashion my area of study had become. Yes, just like any academic field, topics go in and out of fashion in engineering. Ronald Reagan, the champion for the National Aerospace Plane (NASP), proclaimed in 1986 there would be a “new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within 2 hours” (Johnson). I started my experimental fluid dynamics research at NASA Langley in 1992 working in a unique Mach 6 Quiet Wind Tunnel, but Congress cancelled the NASP due to technical and budgetary concerns in 1994 before a full-sized prototype was built. Reagan gave a speech about his NASP vision, which was necessary after the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion on January 28, 1986. From a rhetorical perspective, the Challenger disaster was an exigence that Reagan couldn’t ignore, but his vision was far beyond the technical capabilities of the time; however, the NASP did its job to put a goal in front of the American audience to restore its attunement – I mean this in the Thomas Rickert sense – to the promise of technology.
While the hypersonic experiments I did at NASA tended to highlight the political and academic aspects of the NASP assemblage, the work I did as a U.S. Army preventive medicine officer on the demilitarization of chemical munitions was quite similar to Carson’s DDT work and highlighted the intra-action of chemical weapons within a military assemblage. During WWI, chemical weapons (e.g., blister agents, nerve agents, blood agents) were considered efficient mass casualty weapons that would kill thousands and maim many times more leading to an overrun of the enemy’s medical resources leading to a concomitant drop in morale and fighting spirit – why fight if there’s no health care? America produced tons of chemical agents and stored them in metal containers housed in concrete bunkers. Fast forward to the 1980s and chemical weapons had been outlawed, and, more importantly, the metal containers were starting to leak. The Army decided to demilitarize the agents by incineration, and part of my job was to track the fate and transport of these agents through the incineration process similar to the way Carson tracked the fate and transport of DDT. In my case, I’d calculate how trace amounts of agent that made it past a bank of 7 carbon filters would impact the cancer risk of a child whose mother consumed fish daily from a lake where those particles landed. If the cancer risk was less than one-in-a-million, then the risk was acceptable. To the U.S. military. What my reflection on this work revealed to me was chemical agents could be considered Bennett’s vibrant matter that “act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” and my job was to predict these (viii). Turns out, I’ve been a new materialist for quite some time.
Just as we can and must go back in the past to collect material to add to the growing assemblage of new materialism, such as Carson’s DDT work and my own work in experimental fluid dynamics and chemical munitions demilitarization, what I will do in this essay reconsider some elements of new materialism and rhetoric in general in an attempt to make them more inclusive and integrated – to make the assemblage tighter. At the end of her book, Barad states that humans “are of the universe – there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming” (396). I will consider this approach for the digital world and its becoming as it is a new part of the universe. Using Bennett’s ideas, I will make the case for vibrant, digital material in cyberspace since the digital world is presently being treated as a separate entity from humans just as nature was in the past (note that I, too, treated cyberspace as a separate entity prior to my study of new materialism). Carson called out the folly of pursuing the mastery of a separate nature (as does new materialism), and today we should also recognize the folly of pursuing the mastery of a separate digital world. Per new materialism, humans have always been nature, and it follows that humans are now digital, too. To explore these new digital intra-actions, I will discuss my concepts of cybershrines and autorhetoric using new materialism concepts to show how digital material, similar to DDT, can cause harm when not treated with the maturity that Carson warned us about in 1964.
2. Subaltern Stuff
This is a quibble in the new materialism taxonomy, but I’d like to suggest the alternative word “stuff” for non-human due to the privileging of “human” in the word “non-human.” In his quest to de-privilege humans, topple the Great Chain of Being, and create a flatlands, Latour used the term actant in part to escape immediate human connotations and present a more neutral word with greater applicable to the spectrum of his nonhumans. So, it seems odd he would offer the human/nonhuman binary in his analysis. The nonhumans for Latour are “things, or objects, or beasts” or, to put it another way, everything under humans in the Great Chain of Being (13). Perhaps Latour was using nonhumans as a term to show the problem of the Work of Purification where nonhumans/nature are separate from humans/culture and the Work of Translation with its networks and hybrids don’t exist (11). The problem with such a word as nonhuman is its human-centered connotation and its unfortunate proliferation in the scholarship of new materialism. Imagine if Gender Studies were renamed Nonmale Studies, or if all minority studies were lumped together under Nonwhite Studies. The “male” in nonmale is privileged, visible, and obscures the actual study subject in the same way that white in nonwhite does. Sometimes the “nonterm” becomes so ingrained that its bias is no longer noticed. This is the case with nonfiction, where all STEM work is lumped together as the opposite or the negation of privileged fiction. This shouldn’t happen with everything outside of the human realm, but the term nonhuman has taken on a vibrant life of its own in the assemblage of new materialism scholarship: Latour uses nonhuman/nonhumans 73 times in his book, Rickert 94 times, Bennett 116 times, and Barad 261 times. I don’t think any of these authors were intending to privilege humans, but the linguistic problem is there. There’s still plenty of time to find a new word before the next cohort of young academics with something to prove start the Second Wave of New Materialism. As the title of this paper implies, I suggest the word “stuff” as an equivalent replacement for nonhuman as it’s generic enough without the linguistic baggage of nonhuman. Everything on this planet is assemblages of stardust stuff. How to categorize stuff? I’ll address that in the Rhetorical Proximity section.
The title of this paper – Can Subaltern Stuff Speak? – is an obvious riff on Gayatri Spivak’s notoriously inscrutable (for me) essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Her essay can be seen as a commentary on colonialism where the colonizer speaks and has only selective hearing for the subaltern, the colonized. Certainly, the subaltern can speak, but the better question is “Who Will Listen to the Subaltern?” If we consider humans to be the colonizers of the planet, then subaltern stuff is everything aside from the human colonizers – Latour’s nonhumans. As I was reading our assigned new materialism texts, I couldn’t help but notice that nearly all were a variation on the theme of asking readers to listen to subaltern stuff – from cups to speedbumps to steel to electrical grids to atoms to light to damned dammed fish. For example, Rickert’s book is nothing if not a treatise on attunement, but what is the purpose of attunement? For me, it’s a not-so-subtle demand that we human colonizers listen to subaltern stuff and allow Barad’s intra-action to enhance and alter our mutual becoming. The term I coined for this in my master’s thesis was cultural montage, but I was only looking at the becoming of humans via the intra-action with other humans, to put it in new materialism terms. Now I see I must expand my cultural montage concept to include all that surrounds us: subaltern stuff. To put it in Baradian terms, my intra-action with the subaltern stuff of new materialism scholarship has altered my becoming, and that’s a good thing.
3. The Interpretation Imperative
It’s been said that one purpose of rhetoric is to make meaning, but meaning can be thought of as the endstate of messy interpretation processes. If rhetoric is the sausage, then interpretation is the proverbial sausage factory. Although the colloquial phrase “no one wants to see how the sausage is made” tends to minimize the interpretation process in favor of a definitive outcome/product, interpretation is obviously imperative for scholarship, especially for new materialism scholarship where all subaltern stuff, respirating or not, is equally subject to interpretation. To riff off the “no doer before the deed” feminist creed, there is then “no scholar before the interpretive deed” and especially “no new materialism scholar before the interpretive deed.” Typically, interpretation is an overt activity, such as Annemarie Mol’s research of atherosclerosis which she defines as “a study into the coexistence of multiple entities that go by the same name” in her book The Body Multiple (151). Mol interpreted atherosclerosis as a collection of entities depending on how near or distant (in a Heideggerian way) the human observer was from “atherosclerosis.” The molecular biologist was nearest, the public health professional was most distant, and the general practitioner and surgeons were somewhere in between. Mol’s work is reminiscent of anthropologist Clifford Geertz’ “thick description” approach in that Mol is simultaneously conducting thick descriptions of atherosclerosis for a variety of medical and patient cultures. But the new materialist could see Mol’s interpretation of atherosclerosis as a starting point for further interpretation rather than the end. In defining his rhetorical situation, Lloyd Bitzer defined constraints as “made up of persons, events, objects, and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence” (8). It is these objects and relations that can be seen as the exigences for new materialism as it seeks to reimagine the human relationship to the world. The molecular biologist’s microscope, the public health professional’s podium, the general practitioner’s examining table, and the surgeon’s scalpel are all material more than worthy of interpretation for the new materialist scholar using Bennett’s vibrant matter approach to “raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed” (12). In fact, this Interpretation Imperative for new materialism is endless, and that’s the point: to cognitively topple the Great Chain of Being, humans must be willing to spend their most precious, limited commodity – time – to wonder rather than subjugate the world and objects around them. It is only through wondering, which Marilyn Cooper describes as “a habit of asking questions and speculating” that the Other becomes familiar and equality becomes a possibility (9). The simple act of deciding which objects to wonder about makes humans cognizant of the infinity of material around them and the folly of attempting to master it all.
In addition to the overt interpretation in new materialism scholarship, there is also an implied, meta, performative approach to interpretation that invites the reader to become an active participant in The Interpretation Imperative. One example is Rickert’s slippery definition of attunement. His first mention of it is not to define it but to put it in italics and state that “rhetoric is one of the modalities for attunement to the world” and then state that “Attunement reflects ambience in that both terms bring the world into rhetorical performance” (xviii). Since the reader doesn’t precisely know what he means by attunement or ambience, it is only through the context of rhetorical performance that readers can interpret his taxonomy and make sense of it on their own. Similarly, in defining an apparatus Barad states that “apparatuses are specific material configurations, or rather, dynamic (re)configurings of the world through which bodies are intra-actively materialized” (169). She realizes this is vague and immediately attempts a clarification: “to put it another way, apparatuses are material (re)configurings or discursive practices that produce material phenomena in their differential becoming” (170). The reader is not quite sure what “differential becoming” means, so the clarification isn’t that clarifying. In both cases, Rickert and Barad are asking readers to interpret their work of interpretation of the world using layered context. It was only after I realized this “meta” aspect that I was able to understand the books of Rickert and Barad function like avant-garde films: the audience interprets the books/film while experiencing the rhetorical texts and then applies this interpretive skill to see the world – and its objects – anew.
4. The Vectors and Fields of Rhetoric
While the interpretation imperative is nothing new, the drive to create something new in rhetoric is evergreen; thus, we have something called “new materialism” that explicitly embraces newness while ignoring the fact that anything “new” now will not age well. To use the new materialism logic of Barad, there appears to be an agential cut between traditional rhetoric and new materialism, which rejects “old rhetoric” as not only too limiting but seemingly wrong. In his argument for an ambient rhetoric, Rickert even states that “rhetoric cannot be understood as suasion attempted between discrete or among aggregate subjects embedded in a transitive, subject-driven view of rhetorical situations” (xv). These kinds of dramatic proclamations rejecting the past make for boisterous conferences and an orgy of scholarly citations beneficial for name-making and tenure, but is there a way to suture the bloody agential cut between traditional rhetoric and the rhetoric of new materialism?
Perhaps a turn to the scientific world (which new materialists should embrace as Barad does) would help, with its language of vectors, which could represent finite traditional rhetoric, and fields, which could represent an infinite environment for the rhetoric of new materialism. In this model, traditional rhetoric coexists peacefully as a subset of the rhetoric of new materialism. As a research engineer who has worked in both hypersonic and subsonic fluid regimes, there is not a struggle to reject one fluid regime in favor of another dominant regime. In different situations with different assumptions, the applicable equations will change, but even in hypersonic flow there are areas where subsonic flow still applies. Are there then by analogy areas in the rhetoric of new materialism where traditional rhetoric still applies? I think there are.
The model I use for traditional rhetoric could be considered a vector as it has force and direction. In this vector model, rhetoric is a force that “functions ultimately to produce action or change in the world” (Bitzer 3), as shown in Figure 1.
In this model, there are 6 elements of traditional rhetoric starting with a real or imagined exigence, a rhetor, a constrained rhetorical text, the performance/distribution of that text, an audience, and an action resulting in a change to the material world. This is an “interaction” model between elements, rather than Barad’s “intra-action” model, which “rejects the presumed inherent separability of observe and observed, knower and known” (429). While Barad might accept an “action” from traditional rhetoric as one possible result of the entanglement of the entities in Fig. 1, she would probably prefer to think of these elements using Kenneth Burke’s famous pentad of motivation: “what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency) and why (purpose)” (xv). Reimaging the elements of the rhetorical vector in Fig. 1 inspired by Burke’s pentad results in a rhetorical hexagon of Baradian intra-action in Fig. 2:
Throughout his book, Burke defined “ratios,” which were dyads of the elements in his pentad; e.g., the scene-agent ratio. For Barad, limiting entanglements to simple dyads of the elements in Fig. 2 would surely be insufficient. Barad would expect entanglements of dyads, triads, tetrads, pentads, and, of course, a hexad all intra-acting simultaneously on their way to “differential becoming.” Note that the simple hexad starting with exigence and proceeding clockwise ending at action – the rhetorical vector – is only one possibility, a simplifying assumption to remove the complexity of intra-action. Furthermore, Barad would add that this rhetorical hexagon does not operate in isolation. There would need to be a field of these hexagons all intra-acting with each other such that any element of one could influence any element of anther in the field. Conceptually, this rhetorical field could look something like this:
Of course, this rhetorical field would extend to infinity in all 4 directions, extend in three dimensions, and change over time due to the “differential becoming” of the elements. That the rhetorical field is vibrant with activity is an understatement. The rhetorical field presented in Fig. 3 is only one way of attempting to visualize Barad’s entanglements, but it does illustrate that traditional rhetoric can exist as a special case within the rhetoric of new materialism if a series of simplifying assumptions are made as is done regularly in the scientific world.
5. Rhetorical Proximity
Using the field theory approach to rhetoric, we are thus surrounded by rhetorical subaltern stuff and face endless choices in what stuff we interpret and what we don’t. Simply due to the overwhelming density of the rhetorical field and our entanglements in it, most subaltern stuff stays just that – subaltern stuff, unprocessed objects. Martin Heidegger seemed to wrestle with subaltern stuff, which he called objects, and things, which had meaning to him. “The things thing” is a Heidegger trope, but he’s defining a word using the same word which simply evokes The Interpretation Imperative in readers (174). Note he doesn’t state that “the objects object” – objects are seemingly incapable of actions that matter. But objects are just as vibrant as things according to the rhetoric of new materialism, it’s only the perception of humans and the choices they make which determine whether objects gain thing status. This is what he means to me when he states “everything present it equally near and equally far” (177). Things are a choice as are objects. Things thing near us, and immaterial objects are simply distant. While distance can be physically distant and nearness can be physically near no matter whether the stuff is object or thing, how I interpret his near/distant binary is in terms of rhetorical rather than physical proximity.
Rhetorical proximity refers to the ability of stuff to influence/persuade us humans to change or take some action we otherwise wouldn’t. In Fig. 4, we start with subaltern stuff, which is similar to Heidegger’s objects in that they are rhetorically distant. From a new materialism perspective, they are vibrant matter and have lives worth interpreting but have no rhetorical force that would affect a human without the human choosing to allow it. This subaltern stuff is “ready-to-hand” to use another Heidegger term in that humans don’t notice it as long as it’s performing as expected and subsequently stays in the rhetorical background. For instance, the wireless system streaming a Winnie-The-Poo cartoon isn’t noticed until it fails and the cartoon freezes. On the other end of the rhetorical proximity spectrum is the rhetor that makes its presence known – it has the ability to evoke action from the human. The stuff is no longer subaltern. It’s speaking. This is comparable to Heidegger’s “present-at-hand” concept where subaltern stuff becomes “things.” A distant bear killing its prey becomes a rhetor once it turns it head toward the human, makes eye contact, and roars. Humans will respond to this rhetoric. In the middle between rhetors and subaltern stuff is subjects who can oscillate in the middle rhetorical space. Here, subaltern stuff makes its presence known occasionally, but doesn’t evoke action from the humans. Consider a streaming show of a circus bear where the show pauses for a few seconds buffering the video and then resuming. The buffering made the presence of the wireless system known, but it withdrew to subaltern stuff status once it was “ready-to-hand” again. What rhetorical proximity does is acknowledge the impossibility of the human brain to process/interpret/make present all the subaltern stuff competing for attention in the world’s rhetorical field and place it on a spectrum. One of the future challenges of New-and-Improved New Materialism will be to prioritize which subaltern stuff gets to speak, why, and what percentage of a human’s time should be spent “wondering” especially when authoritarian politicians are working feverishly to transform Othered humans and their literature into subaltern stuff.
6. Vibrant, Digital Stuff
While the preceding discussion has revolved around the physical world, new materialism sensibility appears useful for explicating the subaltern stuff of the digital world. Bennett states that she promotes the vitality of matter to counter “human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” which is consistent with Carson’s critique of the human desire to master nature (ix). Bennett claims that human attunement to vibrant matter will allow humans to experience “(seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies…which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us” (ix). For Bennett, this vibrant matter “is not the raw material for the creative activity of humans or God” alone but is part of an assemblage that includes a seemingly endless list of nonhumans (ix). And in the “knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself” (Bennett 13). There is a limit to vibrant matter, though, and Bennett excludes “Structures, surroundings, and contexts” (30). Although this suggests a human-sized-or-less scale for vibrant matter, Bennett then contradicts this in her discussion of an electrical grid, a rather massive structure, giving it rhetorical power when she states that “Thus spoke the grid” as it failed (36). For Bennett, vibrant matter is something physical that has a life typically unrecognized by humans with the potential to affect them by circulating within human bodies, and this circulation could be as trivial as a feeling. When I think of Bennett’s vibrant matter, this meme tends to sum it up:
The digital realm, while perceived as an ethereal alternate universe by many humans, is fundamentally composed of a complex network of physical vibrant matter akin to the electrical grid Bennett discusses. From the undersea servers exploiting the cool ocean water to keep temperatures down on sensitive electronics, to the vast network of computers forming an assemblage for the transport of data packets, to the glowing screens impacting human eyes, to the tactile human interfaces of the keyboard and mouse, cyberspace is intensely material. What new materialism asks us to ponder is not so much the near elements that affect us, but to consider the possible effects of the subaltern stuff – the digital subaltern stuff – and how these hidden elements are “circulating around and within human bodies” (Bennett ix). However, we shouldn’t focus solely on conscious circulations, since Rickert states that “at any given time we are only partially conscious of what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what will result from it” (36).
Considering subaltern digital stuff is just what I’ve done in my development of cybershrines and autorhetoric in my essay entitled “Our Digital Composition: The Legacy Drive, Cybershrines, and Autorhetoric.” In the essay, I state that a cybershrine is “composed of not only an individual’s digital interactions with others in cyberspace but also an individual’s private collection of digital media, whether online or off.” It can all be considered subaltern digital stuff. The unconscious effect of a cybershrine is that it provides the human a sense of symbolic immortality that circulates within thereby assuaging the anxiety/terror of mortality salience per social psychology’s Terror Management Theory. To put it another way, humans know they’re going to die, so they try to project themselves into a future they know they won’t be a part of by betting on the immortality of their subaltern digital stuff. One unintended effect of cybershrines is they become vibrant digital matter creating feedbacks loops in traditional rhetoric. Following is my model of autorhetoric where our former selves persuade our present selves:
Since humans are seeking immortality via cybershrines, there is a cybernetic homeostasis at play in the feedback loops of the audience members as well as the rhetor in Fig. 6 that unconsciously resist change. Due to this hidden and deleterious effect of subaltern digital stuff, I claim humans in cyberspace tend to “stay who they were” leading to a very limited and often absent “differential becoming” that Barad spoke of. The result is the formation of impenetrable rhetorical bubbles humans populate in cyberspace. Thus, using the new materialism approach to interpreting distant subaltern stuff in cyberspace revealed an important, unconscious autorhetoric that is disabling and degrading us as Bennett warned could happen if we ignore vibrant matter.
7. Conclusion
This essay opened with an epigraph from Rachel Carson warning of the hubris and childish assumption that humans had mastered nature. Prior to its banning, DDT was vibrant matter with a life of its own that came back to physically harm humans. The essay ends with the hubris and childish assumption that humans have mastered cyberspace, but subaltern digital stuff is similarly vibrant matter leading a life of its own that has come back to psychologically harm humans. In both cases, it is the interpretation imperative of new materialism to examine the distant stuff we tend to ignore. While in some cases humans may refuse to interpret subaltern stuff, the reality is we exist in a dense field of rhetoric and only have limited time to devote to interpretation activities. As Carson said, the challenge for humans is to master ourselves, know our limitations, and minimize the harm we do to ourselves and the stuff that is only “subaltern” to us. There should be no subaltern. We should all be stuff becoming.
Works Cited
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 1, 1968, pp. 1-14.
Blanchard, Alan. (2021). Montage Music Videos: Racial Utopianism vs. Abstract Cowboys and the Question of Cultural Montage, University of South Florida. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/9073/
Blanchard, Alan. “Our Digital Composition: The Legacy Drive, Cybershrines, and Autorhetoric” alanblanchardphd.com, 6 Dec 2022, https://alanblanchardphd.com/autorhetoric/#AUTORHETORIC
Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. University of California Press, 1945.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Mariner Books, 1962.
Carson, Rachel. “The Story of Silent Spring,” NRDC, 13 Apr 2015, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/story-silent-spring.
Cooper, Marilyn. The Animal Who Writes. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.
Haraway, Donna. “2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series: Donna Haraway,” YouTube, 25 May 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWQ2JYFwJWU&t=1274s. Accessed 20 Mar 2022.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, 1971.
Johnson, Kaitlyn. “Around the World in 60 Minutes (Or Less!),” Aerospace Security, 17 Jan 2018, https://aerospace.csis.org/around-world-60-minutes-less/.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple. Duke, 2002.
Rickert, Thomas, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Die Philosophin, vol. 14, no. 27, 2003, pp. 42–58, https://doi.org/10.5840/philosophin200314275.
This page last updated on December 2, 2023