(Re)Arranging Regional Rhetorics

Abstract

This chapter builds from an orientation to emergent rhetorical moments through the concepts of arrangement and region. After tracing arrangement through classical and contemporary rhetorical theory, and noting the way the canon becomes affiliated with invention in theories of rhetoric and materiality, the chapter turns to one example of rhetoric as a regional arrangement: a prairie foraging demonstration on the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie. In addition to mapping the materials invented by the foraging demonstration’s arrangements, the chapter remains critical of efforts to develop a sense of spatial authenticity: if all rhetorics are regional, then their constitutive materials inherently come from, and are on their way to, elsewhere. The chapter concludes by examining the relationship between rhetorical events as regional arrangements and processes of rhetorical production.

And that precisely would be…one of the truly productive characteristics of material spatiality—its potential for the happenstance juxtaposition of previously unrelated trajectories, that business of walking round a corner and bumping into alterity, of having (somehow, and well or badly) to get on with neighbors who have got “here” (this block of flats, this neighborhood, this country—this meeting-up) by different routes than you; your being here together is, in that sense, quite uncoordinated. This is an aspect of the productiveness of spatiality which may enable “something new” to happen.

Doreen Massey, For Space

We live in a world populated by structures—a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of ways with the other historical constructions that surround us, and in these interactions we generate novel combinations, some of which possess emergent properties. In turn, these synergistic combinations, whether of human origin or not, become the raw material for further mixtures. This is how the population of structures inhabiting our planet has acquired its rich variety, as the entry of novel materials into the mix triggers wild proliferations of new forms.

Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History