The World within Worlds (of Smoke and Mirrors) of Visual-Material Rhetoric

To support “an approach to visual rhetoric attuned not only to the persuasive components of visual artifacts but also to the ways in which considerations of space, bodies, and materiality specifically influence the rhetorical analysis of the visual,” Propen seeks to expand the scale and frame of rhetorical situations, or texts, before they are written on, so to speak, by a rhetoric’s argument. This argument, according to Prospen’s proposition, would be more sympathetic to the possible effects of the discourse it introduces, respecting, or at least recognizing, the alterity to which it sets itself against. The trouble seems that the violence of this new and improved rhetoric being ‘more just’ than the rhetoric it seeks to correct or expand upon, isn’t enough, in spite of its altruistic narrative of justification. Propen never argues, for instance, toward a Derridian ordeal of the undecidable when concerning the basis and purpose for the discourse they wish to introduce. Without a challenge to the nation-state, or the binaries that it upholds through the essence that their denotative fictions connote, the appearance, as in a truer rhetorical situation, cannot be known. As such, any new text that incorporates spatial practices where its orientation isn’t changed markedly (through sacrifice of credibility or reliability or authority —in short, the power of a particular stance and position), simply re-inscribes the dominant rhetoric’s genealogical ‘force of law’, albeit more expansively, onto the existing (and previously reproduced) text.