to be read in relation to each other. Multimodality raises distinctive complexities and challenges for the theory and practice of public rhetoric; and the public nature of public rhetoric raises distinctive concerns for multimodality. As our exploration of the FTF manifesto indicates, at stake here is nothing less than who owns culture. We can continue to conceive of public rhetoric as a largely word-based affair, but to do so would cede large portions of the culture to commercialized media. What we explore here is a model in which public rhetoric is conceived of as “the making of culture” (Spellmeyer 7) or “poetic world making” (Warner 114), a model in which all public rhetors, not just well-capitalized corporations, play a role in the production of culture through imaginative and ethical use of words, images, and sounds.
Problems Introduced by Multimodality
We argue that to realize the full potential of multimodal public rhetoric, the field of composition and rhetoric needs a wide range of solutions to a number of intellectual and practical problems. One set of problems pertains to our ability as a field and as a culture to confront the wide range of options available to us. Once we look beyond writing, we find a dizzying array of choices. Teachers need to decide what to teach. Rhetors need to decide what to use in any given situation. These decisions are made more complex and more urgent by the reality that options continually change in response to new cultural practices and new technologies. What is off limits one day is routine the next.
Additionally, multimodality gives new urgency to considerations of what happens when the composition is done. Deciding whether or not to use a given mode or medium requires going beyond the question, Can I make it? We must also ask, Once I make it, how will it get where it needs to go in order to do the work it is meant to do? Questions about the circulation of rhetorical compositions quickly foreground material considerations that have typically been elided in discussions of rhetorical theory and pedagogy. As rhetors struggle to choreograph a wide variety of resources that include money, space, time, technologies, and collaborators, rhetorical practice begins to feel less like a cognitive-symbolic activity (Would an argument from ethos work here? An enthymeme?) and more like a set of arcane project-management skills. Rhetorical agency, in turn, needs to be reconfigured, understood in relation to a web of contingencies that are largely beyond the control of the rhetor.
A different set of problems pertains to the distinctive way semiosis happens when words, images, and sounds interact. In multimodal compositions, the whole exceeds the sum of the parts, resulting in both challenges and new possibilities. Some of these challenges concern a set of ethical considerations that emerge from multimodal semiosis. Some of the potentials concern the reality that culture itself is multimodal, as are the cultural products of identity and consciousness.
In the remainder of this chapter, we briefly illustrate each of these problems by examining three examples or cases. Indeed, this book relies heavily on our interpretation of case examples as a means to convey ideas about rhetoric, pedagogy, publics, and new media. This kind of evidence has its own limitations and affordances, as James E. Porter has noted. Drawing on Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, Porter observes that any “principles derived in such a way [i.e., through case analysis] do not hold ‘universal or invariable’ status, but they do have heuristic power” (Rhetorical 20). This book aims to develop heuristic strategies for teachers, scholars, and practitioners by examining multiple cases of multimodal public rhetoric.
Case #1: 3D Printers (Or, What Forms of Composing Are NOT Relevant to Writing Courses?)
There’s a new kind of printer on the market, a rapid-prototyping technology that prints fully-formed three-dimensional objects. Inkjet and laser printers, like typewriters before them, place a layer of ink on the surface of paper. 3D printers spray a very thin layer of plastic and then continue to add layer upon layer until the composition is rendered complete with height, width, and depth. Some commentators have claimed that this turn to desktop manufacturing will be just as “revolutionary” as desktop publishing has been (see Gershenfeld 42; Morris).6
Should composition and rhetoric participate in this revolution? We routinely ask students to print papers. Should we ask them to print 3D compositions as well? We suspect that many readers will be skeptical about the relevance of 3D printers for the composition classroom or the field of composition studies. Indeed, skepticism toward new rhetorical forms is historically typical. Plato was skeptical about writing. More recently, those who have explored the importance of visual, aural, and multimodal rhetorics have found it necessary to address various forms of skepticism. Writing eight years after the New London Group drew attention to the importance of visual, aural, and multimodal literacies, Bruce McComiskey begins a discussion of visual rhetoric by recounting conversations with colleagues who claim that visuality is irrelevant to writing (“Visual” 188).
Intellectual skepticism is healthy when it engenders critical reflection. It is counterproductive, however, when it forecloses emergent rhetorical forms that students might usefully deploy in the publics and counterpublics with which they identify. So how do we, as a field, tell the difference between new rhetorical forms that we can safely ignore and forms that force us to reconfigure our pedagogies? The question is an important one. Those of us who help facilitate rhetorical education are assigned the sobering task of deciding which rhetorical practices, forms, and tools are valued in the classroom and which ones are not. The set of values we install in classroom contexts, to some degree, shapes the broader culture outside the classroom. So how do we decide what to value? Maybe it’s okay for rhetorical education to ignore 3D printers. How would we know?
While we find 3D printers interesting, our goal here is not to advocate their use in the writing classroom, but instead to raise an important intellectual problem that rhetors, rhetorical theorists, and rhetorical educators need to face. Given that we are continually confronted with new rhetorical modes, practices, and technologies, how do we decide what to teach and use? As we map a theory and pedagogy of multimodal public rhetoric, we find it essential to address this question.
Case #2: Not a Box (Or, The Distribution of the Message Is the Message)
Dutch designer David Graas is known for innovative designs that exemplify sustainable practices. One of his designs is the Not a Box—a lamp made from a cardboard box (figure 1). In a gesture of postmodern humor, the sides of the box contain cutouts in the shape of a traditional lamp. When the bulb inside the Not a Box is turned on, the cutouts light up. To understand the rhetoricity of the Not a Box, we need to see that the package for the product (the cardboard box) is the product. The Not a Box is an example of no-waste packaging; as such, it functions to raise awareness of sustainable practices. The rhetorical message embodied and performed by the Not a Box might be paraphrased as we need to (and can!) find creative ways to avoid waste.
Figure 1. David Graas’s Not a Box. Photograph by Tim Stet. © 2010 David Graas. Used by permission.
Traditional models of rhetorical theory and pedagogy are of limited use in helping to facilitate a critical reading of the Not a Box. The rhetorical success of the Not a Box cannot be accounted for based on compositional considerations alone. It’s a simple cardboard lamp, a novelty item. Imagine that the Not a Box was submitted by a student in response to the assignment, Produce a composition that helps raise awareness about sustainable practices. Teachers who sought out the message of the Not a Box through the usual methods—by examining the composition—would be forced to conclude that there was no message. The Not a Box would certainly receive a failing grade.
It is only when one takes into account how the lamp was distributed—that the lamp was its own package, and therefore generated zero waste—that the Not a Box communicates a socially relevant message. This case points to the relationship between composition and distribution—between the message and how that message travels through material-cultural contexts. In this case, composition anticipates circulation. Graas didn’t design a lamp and then inquire into how it could be shipped. He first inquired how it could be shipped and then created a design that exploited that process. Considerations of composition follow considerations of distribution.
As we map a theory and pedagogy of multimodal public rhetoric, we find that it is essential to revise models of rhetorical invention