Sound as Rhetorical Assemblage

Why sound + rhetoric?

In this project, I'm trying to work through my orientation towards and commitment to a set of related interests: rhetoric, materiality, bodies, and affect, all by way of sound studies. The new-materialist turn in rhetoric opens up the study of language and meaning beyond language itself (or entextualized meaning): in the (relatively recent and certainly in-process) material-discursive tradition, attention to meaning making requires attention to materiality, and how matter and meaning interact to form realities (notable schools of thought I'm thinking with here are the post-humanists, like Haraway, Hayles, Bennett, and Barad; feminisms concerned with the body, like Butler, Chávez, and Ahmed; and the rhetorical move towards praxiography, like Teston, Graham, and Mol).

So, some key quotes that have been guiding my thinking about how this project grows:

"Sound, then, is not a holistic object that holds all of the entries together

categorically but an assemblage, a multiple object, a quasi-object—part energy, part

material force, and part relational exchange—that is entangled via resonance"

(Hawk 315, from "Sound: Resonance as Rhetorical").

"Put simply, praxiography... provide[s] an important foundation for examining complex lived realities...

enacted in a range of material-discursive and embodied practices.

Praxiography provides a useful methodology not only for capturing

these diverse practices but for understanding how these practices enact [rhetorically]"

(Kessler 35, "Stigma Stories: Rhetoric, Lived Experience, and Chronic Illness")

"Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but

what they wanted to do,

what they believed they were doing,

and what they now think they did"

(Portelli 52, from "What Makes Oral History Different")