Scott Barnett has published a review of Harman’s Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics over at Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, arguing for the relevance of object-oriented philosophy to rhetoric. I eagerly look forward to seeing where this all leads. I’d be particularly interested in seeing someone giving a detailed treatment of what Latour has in mind when he speaks of nonhuman objects speaking.
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July 28, 2010 at 9:18 pm
Fascinating Levi. Such a rhetoric would have to prove that it could escape the correlationist circle whereby one can never exit language qua reference to the human. We could start WITHIN human language itself (why not?) and show that nonhuman words were already there. Off the top of my head and superficially, how about onomatopoeia? I know French guns go pan and English guns go bang but neither goes fizz…
July 29, 2010 at 8:02 am
It’s a nice development. In the past, when you heard “rhetoric” in a philosophical context, it always had a strongly *anti-realist* sound. Even for Aristotle, with his great treatment of enthymemes, it’s primarily a matter of dealing with audience mood, and Heidegger pursues that line of thought by treating rhetoric as a matter of Dasein’s everydayness. I think it’s really McLuhan who opens up realist rhetoric by making it a matter of the environmental backdrop rather than just the emotional one.
July 29, 2010 at 8:15 am
[…] 29, 2010 LEVI LINKED to Scot Barnett’s REVIEW of Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics. I commented briefly there […]
July 30, 2010 at 3:05 pm
[…] the semiotic in a realist rhetoric, it just wouldn’t be the whole story. Here I believe the recent work of rhetorician Scott Barnett of Clemson is exemplary. Barnett wishes to develop an object-oriented […]
August 1, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Thanks for reading and thinking about the review. Tim, I think you’re absolutely right that if there’s ever to be anything like an “object-oriented rhetoric,” then it would have to first wrangle with the correlationist circle. This, in my view, is the greatest challenge facing object-oriented rhetoricians, one that would compel us to question many of the assumptions rhetoricians hold (and hold dear) about their subject. But it is also, I think, what stands to make the most significant contribution to rhetorical studies in the 21st century: imagining rhetoric and rhetorical action beyond what Burke would describe as (human) symbolic action and Aristotle as uncovering the available means of persuasion. As Levi points out, Latour can be really helpful in this regard, expanding how we in rhetorical studies think about “speaking” and “acting” in rhetorical situations.