Violent subjects: a rhetorical cartography of bodies, spaces, and technologies in the global war on terror

Abstract

Looking to the bodies of suicide attackers, to the circulating technologies of the United States drone program, and to the space of Egypt's Tahrir Square in January of 2011, this project expands the ways rhetorical studies has conceptualized the relationship between violence and discourse. It also generates political and cultural insights about the possibilities for newly formed subjectivities and their relationship to violence within the global war on terror and beyond. The monograph argues that these insights point to a refiguration of the rhetorical situation as primarily composed of bodies, spaces/places, and technologies and attends to the ways different subjectivities arise and circulate within larger maps of contemporary global power. More specifically, the project produces three areas of insight. First, for rhetorical studies, it suggests a refiguring of the rhetorical situation to be understood as material. As such, it suggests that the rhetorical situation is composed of bodies, technologies, and spaces/places. This new transsituated circuit would replace the understanding of the rhetorical situation as primarily composed of exigencies, audiences, and constraints as previously argued in the context of rhetorical studies scholarship. Second, for interdisciplinary modes of investigation, the project further develops rhetorical cartography as a method of inquiry, drawing foundationally from both rhetorical studies and from critical cartography and geography. This method allows for mapping of modes of materiality within rhetorical situations and cultural moments. Finally, the project suggests political and cultural insights for understanding the conjuncture of the global war on terror. Here, the project posits that through rhetorical cartography, we can better understand the multitude of ways that subject positions are generated, changed, and reconstituted for people to occupy within the global war on terror.