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Poroi
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical
Analysis and Invention
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Rhetoric, Communication, and Information
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From Architectonics to
Polytechtonics:
Rhetoric,
Communication, and
Information
G. Thomas Goodnighti
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California
Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
Keywords: Alberti, architecture,
architectonics, nomadism polytechtonics,
McKeon, rhetoric, Vitruvius, McKeon, control society
Speaking and Building
From time to time, rhetoric becomes informed by the conceit of
architecture both in its theory and its practice. Built objects and
constructed words pulse through these conjoined traditions,
extending from the classical world through the Renaissance to
modernity. The powerful figure--engaging the architectural is
engaging the rhetorical—appeared for millennia to the well-trained
eye as common sense. Designed construction was an ancient art
learned by adaptation of materials to locality through proper
conventions that served the purposes of building shelters fit for
dwelling, making conduits for travel, or constructing monuments
for the display of memory. So, too, classical rhetoric is often
understood as an art of discovering durable proofs, arranged and
deployed in support, to recall the memories and inform the
sensibilities of an audience brought to together for common
purpose. Aristotle’s teleological system of rhetoric held that the
natural world offers processes of development that could be
imitated for the sake of productive public outcomes. This is true
whether one works in speech or stone. The logics of such proper
constructions became fitted out widely as technai or liberal arts.
The influence of these ways of making renders each techné a
possible conceit to account for making poems, histories, speeches as
ways of making or doing with words. The reverse is true as well.
Architecture appears not infrequently as a master conceit.
Across time, its practices rhetorically gesture toward topics of
location, design, arrangement, convention, memory, ecological
niche, and materiality. Conceits, however, do move in and out of
influence. Transience as well as variety characterize the history of
rhetoric because conceits change. After all, a conceit is a figure of
unlikely, but generative, comparison. They work at symbolic
junctures where fiction and reality, mimesis and wit, and
convention and innovation meet. Such figures park communication
on a flexible border where figure and ground dance together.
Generative comparisons appear at performance spaces where
actuality and ideals flux back and forth between possibility and
necessity. This paper opens and intensifies inquiry into the
contingent, hybrid, contested and dispersed embodiments of
contemporary rhetorics--produced in the guises of architectonic
and polytechtonic communication.
Initially, this paper unfolds three moments at which rhetoric
and architecture have conjoined: two where architecture as practice
is secured by rhetorical theory, and a third where architecture itself
becomes a defining metaphor for rhetoric as communication. In
the last, modern moment, Richard McKeon finds rhetoric to be
assembled into the communication arts (McKeon 1987). These arts
inform social conventions and change through reflective practices
that bring together new collaborative possibilities across otherwise
distinctive special and public audiences. In its modern incarnation,
rhetoric as communication performs as an architectonic conceit
insofar as it underscores meaningful interactions that contextualize
globally situated, state-of-the-art practices that are taught,
criticized, and improved across pluralistic societies.
I push the architectural conceit into and against a new historical
moment, our moment. Of course, the accelerating digital
revolutions of the 21st century, too, promote the centrality of
communication—but the conceit shifts from interaction to
messaging. Communication appears to become regarded most
fundamentally as structures or processes of information, and only
incidentally as a feature of human interaction. Thus,
communicative practices become shifted from the horizon of
achievements of personal, professional and public life to the
inescapable assemblies of technical, state, and private message
drivers that promote ever-accelerating information simulation and
leveraged network circulation. Presently, then, in the worlds of
human interaction and platformed message exchange, the modern
G. Thomas Goodnight 2 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
communication arts and information technology initiatives struggle
as they feed, substitute, and oppose one another. I contend that
rhetoric as architectonics and as polytechtonics frame, contest, and
blend the necessities and possibilities of contemporary
communication.
Architectonics identifies rhetoric with a techné, a way of making
in which lessons learned in making discourse can be extended
productively to building human spaces. The conceit has a long
history. Vitruvius, a contemporary of Cicero, articulated. a techné in
his De Architectura Libri Decem (Ten Books on Architecture)
(Vitruvius 1914). This work defined the practical art up to the
Renaissance. Vitruvius, in turn, influenced Alberti, an Italian
polymath who introduced principles of design into the coloration of
urban landscapes (Alberti 1988). Richard McKeon elevated
architecture to architectonics by re-writing the conceit into a major
key for the modern reach of globalization (McKeon 1987). As
Donald Cushman and Philip Tompkins note, McKeon argues that
the present rhetorical moment must be understood broadly in
terms of the communication arts (Cushman and Tomkins, 1980).
These arts offer productive principles for working practices of
meaningful exchange, agreement, and diversity across pluralistic
societies in a global world. In its modern garb, rhetoric offers
special arts that cultivate communication practices that achieve
prudential action thereby sustaining deep pluralism. Such
informed practices cannot be secured by formal meta-disciplines
such as mathematics or philosophy, but, like rhetoric,
communication requires continual attention to the cultivation of
expression, probability, and judgment before specialized and
general audiences.
Polytechtonics refers to communication that appears in the
relation between performance and the control structures of an
information society. Information instruments and networks
promote individual access and simulated sociality while at the same
time they feed large gathering and data extraction systems of
message surveillance and security. Whereas architectonics
embraces communication primarily as meaningful interaction and
exchange within and across personal, professional, and public life,
polytechtonics simulates such embrace at a distance and seizes
communication as a congeries of evolving information tools that
secure adaptive, scalable, expandable, mobile, mediated, networks
of message-making. A polytechtonic rhetoric converts language
action to multiple signals, codes, and calculating mechanisms that
promote ambiguous discursive, perceptual and symbolic
equivalencies through substitution, conversion, transversal
G. Thomas Goodnight 3 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
equation, shadow replacements, resemblance and simulation.
Rhetoric achieves influence in such dress (1) by schematically
arranging the illusions of expanded access, easy connection, social
engagement, and the joys of DIY (do-it-yourself) local control, on
the one hand, while on the other hand (2) topically feeding private,
state, and global information-security and surveillance systems that
underwrite a control society (Beniger 1986). Inquiry into each
conceit should enable appreciation and critique of the mixed
articulations of contemporary rhetorics as communication and as
information.
The Ancient Dwelling
Vitruvius (80? to 15 BCE) draws a clear relationship between
speaker and architect. He was “indebted to Cicero for his demand
for a knowledge of practice,” and rhetoric supplied him with his
model. “The orator, like the architect, requires knowledge both
theoretical practical, as well as natural talent, an ‘inborn capacity’
for the task” cultivated by a liberal education (Frith, 2004, 41).
Upon inspection, the relationship goes much deeper to underscore
the nature of dwelling itself. Vitruvius explains, using a narrative
about the origins of social life whose main topics, however varied,
go back to Protagoras:
[T]he men of old were born like the wild beasts, in
woods, caves, and groves, and lived on savage fare. As
time went on, the thickly crowded trees in a certain
place, tossed by storms and winds, and rubbing their
branches against one another, caught fire, and so the
inhabitants of the place were put to flight, being terrified
by the furious flame.
In time, he goes on, fear recedes and mutual address arises at a
sight of domesticated warmth.
After it subsided, they drew near, and observing that
they were very comfortable standing before the warm
fire, they put on logs and, while thus keeping it alive,
brought up other people to it, showing them by signs
how much comfort they got from it. In that gathering
of men, at a time when utterance of sound was purely
individual, from daily habits they fixed upon articulate
words just as these had happened to come; then, from
indicating by name things in common use, the result was
that in this chance way they began to talk, and thus
originated conversation with one another (Vitruvius
1914, 38).
G. Thomas Goodnight 4 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
Unlike in classical Greece, fire is not figured here as a Promethean
gift, but as a collective moment prompting a common language. As
sociality warmed, gatherings “gave rise to the coming together of
men, to the deliberative assembly, and to social intercourse. They
began in that first assembly to construct shelters,” Vitruvius says.
Some made them of green boughs; others dug caves on
mountainsides, and some, in imitation of the nests of
swallows and the way they built, made places of refuge
out of mud and twigs. Next, by observing the shelters of
others and adding new details to their own inceptions,
they constructed better and better kinds of huts as time
went on (Vitruvius 1914, 38-39).
From these dwellings, customs evolved, and the entwined practical
arts of architecture and rhetoric emerged.
Attention to the art was self-developing. Rhetoric subtends the
borders between the human world and terra incognita. The conceit
propels rhetoric to become a social and material cultural force. Just
as the orator must study the range of available knowledge, so the
architect must establish range so that materials may be designed to
purposes that adapt properly structures to environment, custom,
and convention. Thus, it was not so much fire per se, but the
discovery of a practical art, informed by conventionalized practices
adapted to local materials, environments, and ecologies, that got
progress going on its way:
Then, taking courage and looking forward from the
standpoint of higher ideas born of the multiplication of
the arts, they gave up huts and began to build houses
with foundations, having brick or stone walls, and roofs
of timber and tiles; next, observation and application led
them from fluctuating and indefinite conceptions to
definite rules of symmetry. Perceiving that nature had
been lavish in the bestowal of timber and bountiful in
stores of building material, they treated this like careful
nurses, and thus developing the refinements of life,
embellished them with luxuries (Vitruvius 1914, 40-41).
The move from scarcity to luxury suggests a surplus above meeting
basic necessity has been developed, thus signaling security as a
benefit of the arts. As words enter to guide the social development
of the practical projects, so rhetoric as techné becomes integral to
the productive arts and the rise of productive arts contribute to
rhetoric.
G. Thomas Goodnight 5 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
Quattrocento Italy and Civic Pride
Among the most influential thinkers of architecture and related
arts is Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472 CE). Known chiefly as an
architect, he is remembered as a polymath author, artist, poet,
priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer. Classical rhetoric
influenced his cultural turn. In Rome, Alberti investigated and
brought into contemporary relations through design the ancient
sites, ruins, and objects of art. His observations on architecture
were published in his 1452 book De Re Aedificatoria (On the Art of
Building). Alberti took his predecessor Vitruvius’s text as both a
model and a challenge, dividing his own into ten books. His “very
title was a deliberate challenge to the ancient author across a
millennium and a half” (Rykwert 1988, xi). His work adapted
Vitruvius to comport with his own experiences with materials,
knowledge of locality, geometry of construction, and urban
environment.
Like Vitruvius, too, Alberti recounts the origins of architecture,
though the two accounts differ starkly. For Alberti, the first people
started from a position of safety. As a result, “not wishing to have
all their household and private affairs conducted in the same
place…men began to consider how to build” (Alberti, 1452/1988, 8).
The great architect like the great orator is rare because it takes
talent and learning to bring together imagination and craft for the
public. The orator and architect make an aesthetic contribution as
well. Alberti also structured modern treatises on painting and
sculpture, bringing “an exacting analysis of the pictorial image from
the point of view of the spectator, discriminating between what was
represented and how much as an orator had to distinguish what to
say from how to say it” (McHam 2008, 526). His rendition of the
art “applies a generally Ciceronian attitude,” Carl Goldstein finds,
“urging the painter, as Cicero and Quintilian had urged the orator,
to master the liberal arts, even while, in good rhetorical fashion,
himself disclaiming eloquence” (1991, 642). Most generally, he
“used the categories and processes from rhetoric to frame his
discussion of architecture, formulate a coherent aesthetic, and
delineate the appropriate place and importance of architecture in
Renaissance society” (Morin 2002, viii).
When Alberti holds that good work serves good ends he is
extending a classical Roman view (Bertazzo, 2008). Just as the
language of the orator spans specialized systems of knowledge, so
the practical art of architecture requires experience with a variety of
learning. Conceptually, rhetorical principles of address are useful
in the directed release of talent into shaping materials, building
G. Thomas Goodnight 6 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
design, coloring city spaces while recalling and improving ancient
models. Such activities constitute human agency fit for the times.
Thus, an orator or an architect alike rise above the vicissitudes of
subsistence struggles and grow “in charge of his own destiny, able
to resist adversity with the aid of the humanities” (Bertazzo 2008,
164). Further, just as language can extend from classical to
vernacular structures and use, so color and shape move from the
formal, classical style to its contemporary vernacular splendors
(Grayson, 1998). Rhetoric enabled Alberti to supervise “a broad
programme of building, urban redevelopment and restoration of
ancient buildings ” (Bertazzo 2008, 164-165).
Alberti introduced architecture into what would become its
early modern variations and experiments. His views remain
influential. In fact, those presently practicing architecture and
coloration return to Alberti for fresh inspiration (Jones & Livne-
Tarandach, 2008; Parker & Hildebrandt, 1993). Rather than follow
out how rhetoric informs architecture, however, I now make a turn
to show how the conceit veers from one practice and becomes
reconfigured to serve as a metaphor for rhetoric in its changing
manifestation as a practical art.
Architectonic Rhetoric
During the Cold War, Richard McKeon identified his own
contemporary transformation of rhetoric as techné, following the
“Ciceronian tradition [in which] arts are sciences; things known are
things made; and processes of knowing are processes of making and
doing” (McKeon 1975, 730). Rhetoric was conceptualized as
communication, a theory of building state-of-the art practices of
meaningful, reciprocal exchange among professionals and citizens
on a global basis. The art of rhetoric is used “to secure agreement
in the reformulation and revolution of statements of questions and
of principles, and in the establishment of communications and of
communities” (McKeon 1978, 208-209). McKeon was involved in
framing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this
context, rhetoric as an architectonic art is uniquely valuable. Unlike
theoretical knowledge or empirical measurement, rhetoric directly
addresses the arts of making the case with particular goals in view.
“Architectonic arts treat ends which order the ends of subordinate
arts” (McKeon 1987, 3). Similar to the architecture conceit, an
architectonics puts together theory and practice, the laws of
composition, proportion, and design together with the conventions,
habits, skills and materials of practice. Thus arise “architectons, or
G. Thomas Goodnight 7 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
master craftsmen, [who] direct the work of craftsmen, and
architectonic arts [which] order and relate…arts, sciences, and
actions” (McKeon 1981, 431).
What were the exigencies that led McKeon to take this line? In
the 19th century, rhetoric associated with oratory had led a vibrant
life, but in the 20th century the equation of principles and practices
fell on hard times. A well-disciplined academy left rhetorical studies
all but fugitive, even while disciplines such as social psychology
ransacked its theories and traditions for material. Similarly, the
mass media devoured rhetoric and turned the art into cycles of
mass war-time propaganda and peace-time consumer advertising.
McKeon trumped the relationships among empiricism, logical-
positivism, and disciplinary hierarchies to reimagine a renewed,
pragmatic (communicative problem solving) role for rhetoric. His
idea was to re-identify rhetoric as communication. David Depew
points out that McKeon in reading Aristotle was responding to a
conversation of his times about rhetoric as a practice and a way of
making (Depew 2010). He saw a similarity between his time and
certain earlier ones. Just as the Roman Republic and the
Renaissance had prompted new rhetorics, he contended, so modern
pluralistic urban living appeared to invite a new rhetoric. In
modernity, rhetoric appears in the garb of communication. Indeed,
if one examines the terms eloquence and communication over
Google n-gram one sees that eloquence falls from general use over
time while communication rises until their relative position in
textual citations is reversed. Eloquence disappears from the high
modern lexicon. Communication ascends to occupy its formerly
held heights.
In architectonics, rhetoric achieves the form and function of
communication. This discipline imports cultural moments from
ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy, yet at the same time pursues
its own global possibilities in a modern world--whose existence and
spread depends essentially upon communication. The patterns,
conventions, materials, and theories of rhetoric as a productive art
are rendered into practices that take form as communication of
groups, nations, institutions, and cosmopolitan collectivities come
into spaces that require for cooperative and contested action means
of communication by which interactions can be compared,
appreciated, understood, and advanced (McKeon 1968). Modern
rhetoric thus appears to build in the architectural as a master
conceit at a very basic level. As communication, rhetorics build
processes of exchange, development, and legitimation. The
continuities and revolutions of the 20th century are global, McKeon
writes:
G. Thomas Goodnight 8 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
The growth of science and communication, the increase
of knowledge and the formation of world community,
have begun to lay out the field of systematic organization
both as a system of operation and an ongoing
development and inquiry technology. It is a field which
provides grounding for the intersubjectivity of
communications of person and groups and for the
objectivity of conclusions of inquiry and action. (McKeon
1987, 23, my italic.)
Rhetoric as communication under McKeon’s definition links to
processes of personal, institutional, and public development and
change (McKeon 1952). Interestingly, so complete is rhetoric’s
transformation that its traditional discourses become little noticed,
if not nearly forgotten, among a wide swath of the humanities and
social sciences, while communication is a term that continues to
rise in ascendency (McKeon 1957). Gerard Hauser and Donald
Cushman synthesize and extend McKeon’s views, persuasively in
my judgment, into a promise in which communication becomes a
route of inquiry in and into a globalizing, pluralistic world (Hauser
and Cushman 1973). Robert Craig maps communication as its own
modern field of inquiry (Craig 1999).
Polytechtonics and Rhetoric
The question I wish to raise is what becomes of communication and
architectonics in an age characterized by digital material exchange,
networks of assembly, and global circulations? Polytechtonics is a
rhetorical conceit extended from the idea that in natural language
words substitute for one another as equivalencies. In this context,
information (1,0) becomes the mechanism of automating
equivalencies par excellence; such substitutions appear ready-
detachable from sites of production and locations of performance.
Words mediated digitally produce a novel techné of equivalence as
analog gestures become converted to platformed messaging and
information processing. Crucially, polytechtonics depends upon
systematic trajectories intertwining individual and networked
inducements to participate, protect, use, habitualize, and enjoy the
informationalizing of communication.
As in traditional rhetoric, the art remains hidden.
Inducements appear as discovery. “Surfing” is a conceit for
participatory play on and across digital platforms—
hypertextualizing an endless summer. Thus, rhetoric shifts from
an architectonics producing communicative dwellings to rhizomic
wanderings. Place evaporates into mobility, itself a lure into matrix
envelopment. DIY explorations of the Internet yield fresh riots of
G. Thomas Goodnight 9 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
experience—all captured, stored, and flattened into an information
desert, subject to detachment, recoding, and measurement by
nomad. Nomad is a perspective that has been held by critics to be a
complement of rhizome. It is that, but it is also much more. The
nomad perspective does transform the world into a flat, desert
information milieu-space (Cresswell 1997; Deleuze & Guattari
1986). Characterized by its “variability, the polyvocality of
directions,” smooth nomad spaces are appropriated, however, “as a
means of communication in the service of striated space,” which is
“defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of
orientation, invariance of distance through an interchange of
inertial points of reference, interlinkage by immersion into an
ambient milieu, and constitution of a central perspective” (Deleuze
& Guattari 1987, 382, 385, 494). Surfing is one thing; mechanisms
of communication control quite another. Nomad becomes the
state, market, and global institutions that share data and produce
multiple, surveillance oriented, detached apparatuses that reduce
globally the variety of ‘privacy-assured’ communications to clouds.
I contend that rhizone and nomad are complementary but opposite
sides of our present polytechtonic rhetoric and rhetorical situation.
Although McKeon wanted architectonics to be a means of
interpretation as well as of discovery, his vision of the latter was
always more strongly marked than his grasp of the former.
Polytechtonics recovers rhetoric as the means of discovery or, as
Cicero called it, invention, where more or less self-serving
inventional rules convert the massed hunter-gatherer message
behaviors of internet communities into the vast businesses of data
platforms, analytics, and spam. The price of admission is startling.
No longer do the horizons of communication reside within
contended goals of forming genuine community or reaching
understanding among members of a pluralistic society. However
varied, communication activities might appear as rhizomatic but
communication as nomadic is strictly reduced to an information
plane; there is no communication that is not information. Network
fragments or kaleidescapes appear open and safe to us, if a few
rules are selected and put into place. The platforms and aps are not
as they appear, however. The polytecs of private and state security
apparatuses go beyond the boundaries of consumer and citizen to
reduce communication to information subject to infinite
acquisition, storage, remix, and surveillance.
A polytechtonics of communicative equivalence opens the
prospects for unstable, trust-absent, authority-disguised dual-faced
circulatory rhetorics. The controllers and the controlled both are
induced to participate, but each remains closed to the other; there is
G. Thomas Goodnight 10 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
little to no recourse to an accessible architectonics. P olytechtonics
is self-styled as a disruptive techné. The dual relationship between
networked users and controllers is defined more by its oppositional
dynamic than by coherent interaction. The urban landscape
appears to be flourishing with rhizomes of message making such as
mobile apparatuses, app-studded tablets, blipped feelings—all these
offering DIY networks of pleasure, connection, and consumption
with security assured by fictions of presence. Consumption itself
becomes a politics of the supplement (Strait & Goodnight 2012).
The internet surfer—re-incarnated presently into a hip mobile
phone user--discovers personal transient release across this
rhizomic landscape that invites nomadic “types” of self, identity and
sociality (D’Andrea 2006, 95).
So influential is this relationship that readers of Deleuze and
Guattari draw equivalences between nomadic activity and “rhizomic
multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 371). They do not
recognize the critical difference. “Today we all want to be nomads,”
John Noyes explains. “We travel like nomads, we shop and surf the
Internet like nomads, our technologies of communication release us
from locality, and, when we use them, we defy the physical worlds
that tie us to territory” (Noyes 2004, 159). The pleasure is
harrowing: “Mobility casts subjectivity between the ideal freedom of
the disembodied wanderer and the refugee” (Noyes 2004, 160). For
some, nomadic life promises a return to more primitive pleasures.
“The lack of boundaries both in hunting and gathering and in
electronic societies leads to many striking parallels” (Meyrowitz
1985, 315). Nomad societies are the most egalitarian, it is alleged,
with no loyalty to territory, little sense of place, activities, and
behaviors because they “are not tightly fixed to specific physical
settings.” “Our advanced technological stage allows us to hunt and
gather information rather than food” (Meyrowitz 1985, 317).
Indeed, diaspora and community change place in such
cosmopolitan worlds of post-hegemony and post-sovereign drift.
Surfing for news, views, and games, exchange outside the dreary
halls of our dormitories, randomly attending to the next link, wink,
tweet, or crinkle of information. There are no boundaries here.
Rosi Braidotti explains that such beliefs are powerful drivers but
participation is not underwritten with emancipatory guarantees.
The “dislocation of the subject opens up space where new modes of
data intake can be implanted, and hence new sensorial, perceptual,
conceptual and ethical insights,” he says and continues:
But there are costs to going rhizomic:
The tactic of sensorial decontextualization is not
deprived of violence. …[H]igh security enclosed space[s]
G. Thomas Goodnight 11 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
reproduce exactly the same conditions of traumatic
displacement. In the case of the contemporary digital
arts culture… the touch of cruelty is set to the task of
enlarging the range of what embodied, embedded and
technologically enhanced subjects are capable of
becoming. …Breaking open the doors of perception
through sensorial intervention leads to the desegregation
of bodily capacities by decoding sedimented knowledge
to which the subject is used. The result is as addictive as
any legally prescribed drug (Braidotti 2006, 232).
“Knowledge is no longer monumental and monolithic but
differentiated,” one critic still concludes with joy (Chambers 1986,
193). Nomad is thus rendered in partnership with rhizome. This
unreflective equivalence among critics appears to be one that is also
accepted by the public, as both alike ignore the possibility that a
nomadic perspective involves rhetoric in the discursive engineering
of a global, security machine.
Polytechtonics: Rhetoric as Nomada
Conceptualize nomad as a rhetorical conceit, not an anthropological
category. A key nomadic moment seized by Deleuze is that of a gaze
onto a flat open landscape from which in synchronic fashion space
spreads out, emptied in every direction. Rhetoric as rhizome
travels, moves, and circulates across such surfaces. But the ‘nomad’
perspective of the ‘war machine’ features rhetoric as a flattened
landscape without boundaries where words merely swirl, swell, and
stir. In contrast to rhetoric conceived as a productive architectonic
art characterized by “a vertical, hierarchical and centralized
configuration,” polytechtonic rhetoric consists of
horizontal, nonhierarchical formations with no center,
…no privileged locus of growth, …and no stable patterns
of interconnection among its elements, …a network
much like the internet, …a proliferating multiplicity of
terminals and circuits, in which any terminal may be
connected to any other terminal, and with such rapidity
that each terminal is virtually contiguous to every other
terminal, no matter how far apart the various terminals
may be in terms of actual spatial distance (Bogue 2007,
126-127).
Thus polytechtonic rhetoric doubles materiality into a dynamic
of flattening security and simulated vulnerability. From the point
of view of its users, the internet and its technologies are free, open,
and mobile. Once communication was grounded within life worlds
G. Thomas Goodnight 12 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
of actors, professionals and citizens; now these are simulated by the
internet and naively popular--as if connections were still an open
source endeavor. However, the telecom engineer-capitalists of a
control society naturalize and program our communications much,
much differently than we experience them. The security apparatus
trumps sovereign and private experiences as framed by institutions
such as the NSA. For commerce, free decentered mobility remains
a useful illusion to extract data from the masses. From the nomad
perspective, individual communications networks dissolve into
matrixes that disclose ever wider information deserts. The grains of
words swirl and swell into dunes whose patterns can be predicted,
connections mapped, and densities uncovered. Communications-
as-information can be scooped, measured, reinvented
systematically as big data. In this polytechtonic world,
communication becomes mined and processed simultaneously as
information asset and standing reserve of energy. Modern
institutions may flourish as do postmodern entertainments, but
nomad subordinates each and all to the networks of acquisition,
storage, retrieval, and recall into the interlocking “mechanisms” of
“modulation” for a global communication control society (Deleuze
1992, 3-7). Nomad as conceit bears greater resemblance to the self-
repairing, hybrid hunting deep space satellite of an early Star Trek
episode than to Genghis Khan’s mogul horde.
Rhetorical inquiry is called to investigate this age divided
against itself. The architectonics of communication remind us of
how powerful rhetoric can become as it transforms itself into
communication practices. As society moves from an industrial to
an information economy, architectonic rhetorics appear to grow
more tested, robust, inter-related, and important. New
communication media lend an energy boost to modern
communication. But the cost is high. Communication seems to be a
prize to capture by institutions with control ambitions, however.
Engineering sciences now bid to master the limits of the natural
world with social engineering translating risk populations through
communication mechanisms. Polytechtonics prizes
communication, too, but its views resemble only vaguely the conceit
that McKeon imagined. The engineering of a knowledge economy
subordinates communication to information, which in turn
becomes scaled up into property. Rhetoric flourishes as topical
inventional rules that categorize information as data and puts to
purpose self-feeding mechanisms to sustain, expand, interconnect
and use such formations. Thus, security enters into the rhetorical
dynamics of defining order. Critique begins by pursuing such a
rhetoric to its perfection, following new technologies to powerful
G. Thomas Goodnight 13 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
technai of a communication control order. Consider the following
dystopic scenario as a possible development of polytechtonics.
Polytechtonic Rhetoric:
Rhizome<control>Nomad
The global knowledge economy sustains and
replicates the outcomes of the industrial
revolution in a communications revolution.
Wealth is built but economies fluctuate wildly.
Fraud becomes rampant and rationalized as
innovation. Regulatory boundaries are removed.
Government is denounced as the enemy. Income
inequality increases. So does debt. Economic
gambling becomes lauded as risk-taking
requisite to an ownership society. A global crash
ensues. Social safety nets are shredded in the
name of austerity. Subsistence needs are denied
and life support curtailed. Just as human labor
was alienated by industrial wage schemes, so the
knowledge economy appropriates life world
communication work to serve the interests of
capital. Communication is converted to
information, then horded as property. Piracy
panics are posed to misdirect suspicions. The
university turns from a center of learning into an
information factory. Newly educated become
widely unemployed. Students rise as a debtor
class. Diaspora becomes a generational norm.
Surplus value extracted from communicative
work of the masses filters into elite pockets.
Surveillance becomes ubiquitous through
massive data exchange among private and state
entities with extensions from the built
environment into mobile flows. Income
inequality is rationalized as the reward of
entrepreneurship. Information marketing and
data analytics unify to reify and expand social
stratification. Security measures are justified by
alarms over cyber warfare and identity theft.
Prison infects the lower classes. Violence erupts
but is hidden or limited to “mass” spectacle.
Heroic first responders supplement police
powers and quell public assembly. The war
machine goes domestic. C3I (communication,
command and control) becomes the dominant
paradigm for risk containment and institutional
management. Security ensembles overwrite the
G. Thomas Goodnight 14 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
war machine. “Privacy settings” and “free aps”
inducements furnish limit cases of false
consciousness. Neoliberal institutions blend,
colonize, and control fantasy and life worlds.
Filter bubbles refine control to co-opt individual
cultural play. Polysemy becomes fugitive. Top
media platforms commercialize message feasts,
even as they build, crash, or disappear
periodically. Digital technologies work feverishly
to automate remaindered communicative labor.
Global communications is celebrated. Scholars
claim that new media stimulate democracy even
while state cronyism increases and telecom
consolidates its gains. Network triumphalism
finds global spectacle. Communications
research drives out communication inquiry.
This dystopian scenario furnishes a narrative in which rhetoric
manifests itself increasingly as an information conceit. Utopian
scenarios are available as well. These emphasize the freedom of the
internet, reduction of gatekeepers, the marvel of information
accesses, the potential of online communities to assemble groups
spatially distant but vitally connected. In such scenarios, digital
divides are correctable, net neutrality can be sustained, openness of
the internet remains a cross-cultural global value. It is against
these competing horizons that the hybrid practices of contemporary
rhetoric need be subject to inquiry and the steaks appear to be
growing.
Information does seem to meet some goals of architectonics by
enhancing the speed, ease, and efficiency of communication as the
era of architectonics conceived it. But the cost is a hidden dualism
upon which the system is predicated. Information circulates and
engineers (1) an increasingly individualized rhizomic life world that
is (2) in tension with yet fed by the nomadic flattening of human
“communication” into exchange infrastructures of capital and the
state. The intake is reconstituted as “big data” that generates a
spreading information desert. Polytechtonic rhetoric fashions
conceits that would eject interlocutors from the safety structures of
dwelling and spin them among simulated dunes and drifts of signal-
monitored, gaming netizens. Here logarithm hunting and ‘big data’
gathering become the necessary vehicles of collective competition
and survival, with social relations, market regulations and
sovereign constraints quickly minimized if not entirely discarded.
G. Thomas Goodnight 15 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
Architectonics and polytechtonics bear a conjunctive
relationship in which new possibilities for civic engagement, social
movement, and community development sometimes contest and
bring to justice systems of excess. Should evidence suggest that the
dystopic scenario or something like it is becoming the defining
feature of 21st century, communication studies become problematic.
The communication discipline is likely to grow in importance, but
the cost may be that it may need become even more intensively than
it currently supposes itself to be the object of its own critique.
Minimally, rhetorical architectonics and polytechtonics need to be
distinguished in order to furnish grounds for renewed social theory
and to discover productive description and engagement.
Challenges to Critical Communication Inquiry
There are three general conclusions to this paper.
(1) Critical inquiry needs to reopen the relationships between
rhetoric and communication over time. Rhetorical inquiry without
reference to communication remains blind. At the same time
communication theory without rhetorical context remains partial.
Communication theory and practice entwines with rhetorical acts
and events to create rich legacies, complex presents, and alternative
futures.
(2) Conceits offer windows into the complexities of rhetorical
history. Architecture is a master conceit that renews itself from
time to time, marking tradition, modernity, and postmodernity.
Minor conceits are important as well. These offer alterior,
alternative, or counter-border relations among fiction and reality,
fantasy and material worlds. Independent and relational aspects of
major and minor conceits deserve attention as these define a style,
set in motion a dynamic, or become the identity of a historical event
or moment.
(3) Architectonics and polytechtonics mark the 21st century as
generating divided rhetorics. Modern institutions spread and
extend influence through communication theory and practice, while
cultural play and information structures spread and link up as
harbingers of escape and a communication control society.
But a fourth conclusion suggests itself as well.
(4). These implications (1)-(3) suggest that critical inquiry needs
to account for its own contradictions (Goodnight 1996).
G. Thomas Goodnight 16 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
Critics sometimes find the potential to celebrate polytechtonic
flows and to identify with the fiction of nomadic existence
(Grossberg 1998). In reality, critics are like publics in that each has
no separate space upon which dis-encamp from the cultural melee
in which we are all implicated. While critics can insist upon
equating rhizome and nomad, the security apparatus that fuses
economic and state interest is still busy connecting scholarship with
the ‘war machine’ to use Deleuze’s terms, which has been
transformed into the machinery of biopolitical security and
surveillance. This error is common. Critics become playful and joy
creates a surplus promoting change . With open source internet,
perhaps such utopian possibilities were possible. Polytechtonics
now produces and anticipates filter effects thereby creating seams
to anticipate and gin contagion. Our joys may neither be nor
remain entirely our own. Cultural inquiry needs to now take into
account the prospect that the mass audience has been re-
programmed by search platforms to capture and reproduce
audience participation in ever-thinning, adaptive polysemy. Many
critics have celebrated rhizomes as postmodern structures of
liberation. The romanticizing of nomadic life leads to flattened and
suspect conclusions about hunter gatherer societies, but, even if this
limit is ignored, the rhizome/nomad conceit itself is understood
positing a fringe in which escape is possible and new social
movements find hidden places to grow and expand. But nomad
operations of the biopolitical security machine gobble up and digest
such edges without much exertion, it seems. The net results are
anomic outcomes as polytechtonics join state and market
machinery and deploy architectonics as a front for routinization of
control (Tardanico 2012). Communication is information;
information flattens and levels. Desert-like formations of
communication-as-information are secured.
McKeon and Deleuze together remind us that rhetoric and the
practical arts are brought together at different junctures in
historical moments. The architectonic and polytechtonic conceits
lead to the discovery that rhetoric and communication are not
givens, but rather relationships that are realized and fraught with
limits and possibilities. Hauser and Cushman observe that the
“history of the arts of communication is a history of
transformations,” and that such change continues in ambiguous
ways (Hauser and Cushman 1973, 211). This paper began by
comparing modern architectonics to polytechtonics at a time when
rhetoric has become caught up in the trade of global
communications. Polytechtonics flaunts itself as a pre-architectural
conceit which features rhetoric basically as ingeniously invented
G. Thomas Goodnight 17 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
mobile, adaptive, survival adventure. Polytechtonics gathers and
circulates messages transposed by codes and scales for information-
deployed groupings--organisms, herds, populations or societies.
Polytechtonic qualities of natural language equivalencies persist in
generative relationship, over and against monotechtonic artificial
languages that program, capture, replicate and simulate the
products of machined communications. This paper opens a space
for appreciation and critique of contemporary globalizing rhetorics
as the fate and fortunes of master and minor conceits play out over
time.
Copyright @ 2014 G. Thomas Goodnight
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i This paper was revised from a presentation at the University of South
Carolina Rhetorical Theory Conference, Charleston, South Carolina,
October 10-12, 2013. The author would like to express his appreciation
to the conference. I would like to thank Paul Strait for his work on the
study.
G. Thomas Goodnight 21 Poroi 10,1 (January 2014)
