A 2005 JAC article I co-authored with David Sheridan and Tony Michel, “Beyond Snap, Crackle, and Pop: Toward a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric,” was judged in 2008 “to be one of the most outstanding articles on technology published in JAC over the last two decades.” Consequently, it was reprinted in Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric and Culture in a Posthuman Age. Moreover, this collaboration helped to spur my second book in progress, The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric, also co-authored with David Sheridan, Tony Michel, and under advanced contract with Parlor Press (expected 2010). This work expands on our original JAC article, including a wide range of new, pedagogically significant multimodal case examples.
Project Overview
Current models for understanding public rhetoric suffer from a common flaw: they fail to account for multimodality. They fail, that is, to confront the enormous rhetorical potentials that derive from the integration of textual, aural, and visual semiotic resources. Indeed, it is not overstating the case to say that we can only realize the full power of public rhetoric—its ability to increase understanding across differences, to address concerns of social justice, to change attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors—by exploiting the affordances of multimodality.
While much has been written about the ways emergent technologies like the Internet are changing the nature of public participation, most discussions of “e-democracy” or “cyber-democracy” tend to focus on word-based communication or speak generically of “information” and how it can be accessed, shared, and used (see Jenkins and Thorburn, 2003; Pendakur and Harris, 2002; Poster, 1995; Warnick 2007). At the same time, much has been written about multimodal rhetoric (see, for instance, Cope, 2000; Elkins, 2007; Handa, 2004; Hill & Helmers, 2004; Kress, 2003; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Manovich, 2001; Selfe, 2007; Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, Sirc, 2004), but most of these discussions do not address the way multimodality articulates with specifically public
concerns. Our book brings together these two trajectories of conversation within composition/rhetoric and adjacent fields. We explore two fundamental and related questions:
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What new possibilities and challenges does multimodal rhetoric present for participation in the public sphere?
How can rhetorical education be transformed so that citizens exploit these possibilities and confront these challenges effectively?
We begin by examining an important prerequisite for an efficacious public sphere, what Seyla Benhabib (1985) calls the “symmetry condition” or the ability of all stakeholders to participate (p. 87). This symmetry condition has historically been lacking in relation to multimodal rhetorical practices. Until recently, important venues for multimodal rhetoric—such as film, TV, radio, and advanced print compositions—were limited to a few producers, while the rest of us were relegated to the role of consumers. But emergent technologies increasingly allow non-specialists to deploy multimodal rhetoric effectively: to produce, reproduce, and distribute compositions that combine written, aural, and visual semiotic resources. This moves us closer to achieving the symmetry condition—but only if rhetorical education assumes responsibility for preparing citizens to take advantage of these new technologies and the rhetorical practices they enable. If, as we argue, a multimodal public sphere is emerging, what do we stand to gain by embracing this development? What’s at stake? We turn to these questions in Chapters 2 and 3, arguing that by effectively deploying multimodal rhetoric, ordinary citizens can potentially represent their social conditions with greater richness, can make their ideas about common concerns more compelling, can communicate their perspectives with more per-
suasive power, and can engage audiences more holistically—not as narrowly “rational” machines, but as multidimensional, embodied, emotional beings for whom belief is, as Sharon Crowley (2006) says, a “visceral” matter (p. 87). Indeed, the ability to use multimodal rhetoric allows citizens to intervene more directly and more powerfully in the
production of culture itself. If mass media reproduce the dominant culture through the images, metaphors, ideographs, and narratives circulated via film, TV, radio, print, and new media, we contend that ordinary citizens can now “speak back”—not just through written critiques, but through alternate multimodal representations that reflect their own views, desires, and lived experiences.
We theorize this newfound rhetorical flexibility in terms of the classic concept of kairos, “the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the time, place, speaker, and audience involved” (Kinneavy, 1986, p. 84). We argue that this concept can be expanded to include rhetorical decisions not just about discursive strategies, but about modes, media, and technologies. But if multimodal public rhetoric is both possible and useful, it also introduces new problems—the focus of Chapter 4. After examining the concerns of skeptics like Postman
(1986), we show how the particular challenges raised by multimodal rhetoric can be addressed through established traditions of rhetorical ethics as well as ongoing discussions in photography studies and visual anthropology.
Throughout our discussion, we refer to the need for a richer understanding of the complex relationship between rhetorical composition and processes of rhetorical circulation: production, reproduction, distribution, and consumption. In Chapter 5, we examine three cases of multimodal rhetorical activism which collectively illustrate broader principles that can guide public rhetors who hope to achieve maximum rhetorical effect.
All of the issues discussed so far have important implications for the way society provides rhetorical education to citizens. In Chapters 6 & 7 we explore the transformations to rhetorical education that will likely foster a robust multimodal public sphere— transformations to localized classroom practice as well as to larger institutional structures.