Chapter 4: New Materialist Research Strategies

Chapter 4: New Materialist Research Strategies

1. Cultivating new materialist habits for visual rhetorics

   • Breaking down destructive binaries that position humans over non human matter
     • Visual rhetoric
       • "how visual things circulate and acquire power to co-constitute collective life" (86)

2. Principles of new materialist rhetorical approach (86-87)

   • Principle of Becoming
     • open process of mattering and assemblage
   • Principle of Transformation
     • Rhetorical transformation of things as they materialize in different spatiotemporal configurations
   • Principle of Consequentiality
     • consequences that emerge once matter is initially produced
   • Principle of Vitality
     • Ability of things to exert material forces and trigger changes via various assemblages
   • Principle of Agency
     • actancy/dynamic dance enacted by diverse entities intra-acting within and across assemblages
   • Principle of Virality
     • tendency of things to spread quickly and widely

3. Importance: Enables a visualization of how to employ materialist rhetorical approaches to research

4. Research Actions

   • Following
     • Tracing
       • Embracing Uncertainty
         • De-scribing
           • "is a composing act (de-scribing) that entails replying visual actants as networks of mediation in such rich detail that little theoretical explanation is needed to account for how their actions are distributed across" (101)
         • "investigate how a wildly consequential a visual thing is, we cannot help but confront materiality's radical opens and flux no matter how much uncertainty such research creates" (97).
       • "exterior relations so they can disclose the process whereby an image circulates, materializes in different versions, intra-acts with other concrete and abstract entities, and triggers changes" (94).
     • Discovering why technological systems or inventions fail to material
     • "how it plays a significant role in generating, sustaining, and influencing the continual assemblage and reassemble of collective existence" (89).
   • Accounts for an image's diachronic movement, complex relationally, and distributed materialization and impact.

5. Corina Lerma and Sidouane Patcha Lum

6. Latour

   • "actants themselves can make everything, including their own frames, their own theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics...even their own ontologies" (103).
     • "If no trace is produced...they offer no information to the observer and will have no visible effect on other agents" (94).

7. Rhetorical Transformation

   • Iconographic Tracking