Still Life with Rhetoric - Laurie Gries

"Trump Hate" as a remix of the very rhetorically consequential "Obama Hope" image

Gries, Laurie E. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach to Visual Rhetorics. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 2015.

Gries traces the "Obama Hope" image to outline a new materialist research methodology she calls "iconographic tracking" that can account for the complexity of object symmetry, or the symmetrical agency/consequentiality of objects on human subjects, not just the agency of humans on objects.

New Materialist Thought Style/Habitus, or Methodology’s Guiding Assumptions (Following Latour):
Principle of Becoming: reality change, things dynamic
Principle of Transformation: unpredictable & divergent
Principle of Consequentiality: futurity & relationships
Principle of Vitality: material force, move assemblage
Principle of Agency: actancy, distributed, exterior
Principle of Virality: spread quick/wide, affect

Iconographic Tracking: following, tracing, embracing uncertainty, and describing (Gries 86-88)

Iconographic Tracking in Action:
Phase 1: collect data set (by way of dérive & peregrination according to  psychogeographical effects)
Phase 2: assembling/sorting by patterns, trends, and relationships; provisionally bound a case study; generate key terms or tags (form, media, location, genre, etc.)
Phase 3: Use new search terms across diverse search engines for narrowed focus and recursion (and to avoid filter bubbles)
Phase 4: investigate intra-action that produces collective space via seven processes; seven processes: composition, production, transformation, distribution, circulation, collectivity, consequentiality (Gries 111-113)

Key terms & conversations:

Gries talks about images as single/multiple, and her attention to authenticity, remix, appropriation, commodification, and transnational issues ties into Alastair Pennycook's reconceptualization of “authenticity” being traditionally tied to an "original" piece as inherently better than a "repetition" in his book English as a Local Language.  When she discusses the new media literacy of appropriation and remix culture as participatory culture, she also points out that capitalist mass production devalues the "original," and these ideas of commodification speak to the work of Monica Heller as she writes about the post-national global state (although I think transnational is actually a more useful conceptualization to use with Gries's work than post-national). 

Gries demonstrates that an existing meta-culture can propel uptake of an image (which could relate to the rhetorical idea of kairos) and lists some characteristics of visual ideographs as ordinary images aimed to influence, high-order abstractions, the use of power, and culturally bound.  I am providing some examples of the "cross & crescent" ideograph I photographed in Egypt during June of 2013 post-revolution in January of that year:

 the ideograph as a tattoo on a book cover at a shop in Cairo

the ideograph painted on a wall in the city of Luxor

 the ideograph spray painted on a pillar in Cairo

 the ideograph on a shop sign in Cairo that also features the southern city of Aswan











In conversation with genre theory in the Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) tradition, she highlights the importance of “cybergenres” and makes a distinction between extant genres as previously existing genres that migrate to a new medium and novel genres as developed within a medium.  This is also related to Cynthia Selfe & Gail Hawisher’s idea of “born digital texts” and Miller & Shepard’s writing on the "blogosphere."

#genre #multimodal #transnational #rhetoric #commodification #semiotics #agency #research_methodology #new_materialism