University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

MAPPING THE MORIBUND: THE RHETORIC OF MAPPING DEATH

ROLF K. ANDERSON

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To Hazel

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first want to thank the EcoTourists—Shannon Butts, Jason Crider, Jacob Greene, and

Madison Jones—my close friends, collaborators, and role-models. Jason in particular deserves more than thanks for his patient guidance over the last two years. I also want to thank mentors new and old. Terry Harpold rekindled a part of my imagination I’d forgotten. Phil Wegner brought warmth to every encounter. Sid Dobrin lit fires. Before them, Barry Mauer set the example for how education and critical thinking are supposed to work. And of course, without

Greg Ulmer, none of this would be possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 6

INTRODUCTION ...... 7

FOUR CORNERS ...... 10

Origins ...... 10 Emplaced Ecocomposition ...... 12 Mythos: Maps and Legends ...... 17 Make a Map ...... 21

DISNEY DEATH TOUR ...... 26

The Disney Death Myth ...... 26 Criticizing the Mouse ...... 31 From Dark Tourism to Thanatourism ...... 33 Chōra: Bodies, Minds, and (Disney) World ...... 36 Death Rhetoric ...... 39 Thinking without Knowing ...... 43

CONCLUSION ...... 46

REFERENCES ...... 48

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 51

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

MAPPING THE MORIBUND: THE RHETORIC OF MAPPING DEATH

Rolf K. Anderson

August 2018

Chair: Terry Harpold Major: English

This thesis functions as a place-based mystory, a digital writing pedagogy developed by

Gregory L. Ulmer. As an intervention in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies in general and ecocomposition in particular, I consider the role of specific places not only to develop theories of spatial writing, but to produce writings in accordance with those theories. My project consists of a formal written document and an online mapping installation. Beginning with the Four Corners

Monument at the borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, I examine a single place through various scalar lenses in relation to global climate disruption. My digital map of Four

Corners challenges the conventions of representing place at smoothly transitioning scales. From the desert southwest, my project shifts to Central Florida, using theme park tragedies at Walt

Disney World as a means of conceptualizing death rhetorically and in relation to spatial writing.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Make a map… —Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Mapping mystory: This project functions as a place-based mystory, a digital writing pedagogy developed by Gregory L. Ulmer. Ulmer posits the mystory genre as a means identifying and expressing cultural forces determining individual identity, the assumption being that the same forces responsible for individual dilemmas also generate collective aporia. To create a mystory, “Students map or document their situations or relationship to each of four institutions: Career field or major; Family; Entertainment; community History (as taught in school or otherwise commemorated in the community)” (Ulmer, 2003, p. 6). In Ulmer’s method these four institutional discourses constitute the four corners of the popcycle, which operates according to a logic of assemblage. Working through the four corners of the popcycle to assemble a mystory enables one to find his or her compass; the overall goal is to provide a sense of orientation.

“Mapping the Moribund” navigates the popcycle in search of disciplinary insight. In my case, those disciplines include rhetoric and writing studies in general and ecocomposition in particular. Spatial considerations proliferate in these fields, with recent work turning toward the role of specific places in the act and theorizing of writing. This project therefore emphasizes two places: the Four Corners Monument in the American Southwest, corresponding in my case to the popcycle’s Career discourse, and Walt Disney World in Central Florida, which, given my personal history as a Central Florida resident and a subject of The Walt Disney Company’s expansive cultural reach, corresponds to the discourses of Family, Community, and

Entertainment.

I present the written portion of this project as a trace of conceptual and practical progress from one place to another. Four Corners brings into focus some of the spatial and ecological principles on which this project is premised; like the point on a two-dimensional graph joining X and Y axes, these intersecting borders mark the origin. Moreover, Four Corners marks a site emblematic of changing climate, the global prospect of which now overdetermines every act of environmental writing. As recent geologic evidence reveals, the site hosts the highest concentration of atmospheric methane in the continental United States (Kort et al., 2014). I then move from the wildness of the West to Central Florida. My collaboration with Jason Crider on our augmented reality project, “Disney Death Tour,” maps 40 years of fatalities at Disney theme parks. Such high-profile reminders of death in a location thoroughly designed to obscure it invoke Diane Davis’s (2010) “Rhetoric of Responsibility,” an insistence upon more thoughtful community engagement when death re-enters daily considerations. At Walt Disney World, I develop a rhetorical theory of death in shared public spaces.

By combining these two locations, this project responds to crises through rhetorical invention. Juxtaposed, Four Corners and Walt Disney World risk the staging of a clichéd and ineffective nature/culture binary that I want to avoid. Instead, scale describes the complex operations that occur at individual, local, and global levels, independent from one another as perceptual frameworks, yet inherently ecological. “Mapping the Moribund” seeks to write catastrophe at the community level, as in the case of those who die at Disney, and gesture toward a practice of writing impossibly complex ecological crisis at another scale. As ecocompositionists, we might heed the words of Greg Garrard (2011), who shares the language of Diane Davis to outline a “poetics of responsibility:” “The fundamental problem of

responsibility is not what we humans are, nor how we can ‘be’ better, more natural, primal or authentic, but what we do” (p. 79).

Rhetoric includes choices, and choice entails action. Inasmuch as making is an extension of doing, this thesis and its accompanying digital maps are my response to an undeniable call to action. As my entry into the ecocompositional conversation, my message is clear: if responsible action toward our environments—a need heightened to extremity by the specter of climate change—requires communal life to hold itself “at a level equal to death” (Davis, 2010, p. 11), then what’s needed are not better representations of death, but more prominent reminders of the foundational role of death in our rhetorics of place.

CHAPTER 2 FOUR CORNERS

With climate change, however, we have a map whose scale includes the whole earth but, when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics, or specific interpretations of history, culture, literature or other areas, the map is often almost mockingly useless. —Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge

Origins

At 36° 59′ 56.31″ N latitude, 109° 2′ 42.62″ W longitude, a circular bronze plaque embedded in a slab of granite joins the unusually rectilinear borders of Arizona, Colorado, New

Mexico, and Utah at four perfect corners. Despite the plaque’s slogan, “Here meet in freedom under God four states,” any national value or referent in history deserving of a monument remains elusive. Four Corners is a monument unto itself, a monument of itself. Atop the

Colorado Plateau region in the desert of the American Southwest, the Four Corners Monument falls as well within the boundaries of the Navajo and Ute Mountain Native American reservations, and the monument site is under the administration of Navajo Nation Parks and

Recreation. With seven governments representing state, federal, and the semi-autonomous level of the reservations competing for natural resources and tourist dollars, the Four Corners are a poignant reminder of the constant contest for space. This monumental place makes keenly visible the role of writing in shaping space into place through discursive construction. Four Corners marks the origin point for this study of writing.

To consider place in the first, two ancient definitions of place indicate dynamic ways to understand specific locations. Topos, favored by Aristotle, describes places as concrete, objective points. Place as topos informs geographic approaches to cartography and GPS navigation. Before

Aristotle, Plato described place as chōra, entailing an abstract, dynamic interplay between humans and their surroundings. In the Ancient Greek, the word chōra means something like

“dance floor,” place in constant moving play. Whereas topos points to fixed locations on a map, chōra determines a sense of place, but the two meanings are not opposed. Abstract, performed space (chōra) becomes place (topos) through an act of writing. Writing inhabitants participate in the continual cultivation of a sense of place, and in turn that sense of place shapes an individual and community sense of identity. Choragraphy, in turn, names an electrate, performative method of engaging with the identity-formative aspects of place in the era of the digital field, in which practices of literacy have been supplanted by practices of electracy.

Like all borderlands, the Four Corners Monument sits at the intersection of lands and ideas. It also brings into focus unstable arrangements of space itself determined through acts of writing. Centuries of territorial and cartographic dispute, including states suing other states for territory, acutely reveal how a sense of place shifts according to legal, and therefore (at least in the era of literacy) written, distinctions. The Wikipedia history (“Four Corners,” n.d.), defined by pre-electrate models of written meaning: Spain first captured the area from American Indians in the 16th century, eventually handing over administration to an independent Mexico in 1821, before the United States seized the land in the 1848 aftermath of the Mexican-American War. At the brink of the American Civil War, the U.S. Congress ordered the formation of territorial governments to slow the spread of slavery. The new territories relied on provisional surveying, with Congress writing the distinctly straight lines of the borders into law. Some playful critics like to suggest that, owing to 19th century surveying inaccuracies, the monument is actually misplaced. The border marker, they say, is 2.5 miles off of the actual cartographic intersection of four states’ borders. In response, the National Geodetic Survey (2009) overruled such critiques, arguing that written law forms a bond with the physical markers as they were emplaced in 1875.

If the Four Corners’ arbitrary, shifting topoi indicate an uncanny relevance to writing studies, as I sense they do, then the fact that over the region hovers the highest concentration of methane in the continental United States (Kort et al., 2014) forces a sense of exigency. The greenhouse gas buildup resulting from resource extraction efforts in the region transforms Four

Corners from a monument of only itself into a relay for examining the role of specific places against a more general ecology of place and a backdrop of greenhouse gas emissions, anthropogenic global warming, and climate change. Linking the monumental impressions derived from these specific GPS coordinates to the greater ecological threat signified by its accompanying methane column—which is itself invisible within the perceptual framework of the bronze plaque—provides at least an intuition of a making-visible of the individual relation to a collective scale.

Emplaced Ecocomposition

Beginning in a specific place, rather than a commonplace topic such as sea-level rise, ecocomposition situates its use of ecology in the premises of place rather than an abstract concept. —Madison Jones, “Writing Conditions: The Premises of Ecocomposition”

By emplacing (Jones, 2017) this mystory at Four Corners, I intend to visualize how writing scales from individual persons in specific places to abstract or general theories of environments, ultimately providing a means of thinking about hyperobjective conditions

(Morton, 2013) rendered conscious by an awareness of climate change. Bruno Latour (2014) examines the “zoom effects” of shifting from local to global reference frames; legibility at one scale distorts as the scope widens or narrows. Changing the scale means altering the very properties of what is observed, requiring entirely new datasets as opposed to enlarging or shrinking some original. Similarly, Timothy Clark (2015) takes on “scale effects” in relation to climate change, climate crisis being the super-aporia that defies conventional perceptual scales,

even as local effects of its unvisualizable global reality pose measurable risks to the perceiving subject. Composition studies responds to such exigency by inventing appropriate scalar writing theories.

Closely related to the immediate challenge of scale, to even mention climate change introduces a problem of unmanageable scope. Climate change demonstrates life in the

Anthropocene, a semi-official geologic epoch marked by the traces of direct human influence. As a species, rather than as individuals or nations, we’ve all contributed to global climatic change and its consequent threats. Recent work from Timothy Clark (2015) and Timothy Morton (2013), among others, recognizes that climate change and the Anthropocene exist outside of conventional frameworks of perception, in scope and in scale. Morton’s term “hyperobjects,” or

“things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (p. 1), has seen growing use even in popular discourse for its ability to name the condition of knowledge at this time in the geological history of the planet and the biological history of one of its species.

Climate change is one example of a hyperobject. For Clark, terms like hyperobject and

Anthropocene are “symptomatic of the kinds of blurring of would-be sharp conceptual, rhetorical, material and disciplinary borders in a newly recognized planetary context” (p. 3).

I am not an ecological scientist; I am a scholar of writing. Yet my perspective on global climate is implicated by way of writing in the vast ecological totality. Often this line of thinking can serve merely to justify one’s seat at the table, from which some disciplines have been historically excluded; I’m in the English Department, but I matter too. It also establishes an implicit and counter-productive hostility from the humanities toward a notional science. To make clear my assumptions and neutralize the risk of annoying anti-scientific elements of my discourse, I take up arguments laid out by Sidney I. Dobrin and Christian Weisser (2002) in

Natural Discourse: (1) We come to understand climate and environments in the first place through acts of writing. (2) It is not that climate change demands a response from strains of ecocriticism and ecocomposition now scrambling to catch up with the scientific discussion, but in fact just the opposite. Decades of writing studies, especially those more recent strains of the discipline focused on digital writing, have long tarried with the overlap between ecology and network, between natural and built environments and the digital field. For humanists, climate change is an ecological problem that exposes writing subjectivity’s underlying connectivity through and beyond merely literate writing, reaching out to wider, electrate networks of practice and meaning. I would argue that electrate ecocomposition equips humanists for the immense conceptual task ahead as they and others wrestle with the most dramatic changes in the conditions of space that our species has faced since at least the end of the last glacial period about 10,000 years ago.

Electracy brings heightened awareness to digital writing practices, but what does it contribute to understanding the materiality of the places we inhabit? An intense subset of rhetoric and composition scholarship emphasizes the spatial dimensions of writing—not simply the places to write about, but the complex interchanges between environments and writing inhabitants. Considering scale effects guards against sweeping generalizations of complex writing ecologies. Two key insights from decades of spatial writing theories underscore the further need to develop scalar writing theories. First, models of writing based on contained writing subjects acting with individual agency fail to account for the complex role of the subject’s environment. As Sidney I. Dobrin (2001) posited, “Writing does not begin in the self; rather, writers begin by situating themselves, by putting themselves in a place, by locating with in a space” (p. 18). We’ve begun to recognize that place matters, but what would it mean to

theorize writing at a truly complex scale? Second, while ecocomposition itself is not necessarily synonymous with political environmentalism, the strains of spatial writing theory rooted in environmentalist discourse offer critical means of engaging with space toward activist ends.

However, rather than suggesting an ethical method for writing about environmental issues, this project first attempts a means of visualizing an individual relation to a collective scale grounded in place.

Ecological approaches to composition studies emerged from a recognition of the field’s failure to address its position in relation to the discipline of ecology, focusing instead on cultural and process approaches. Ecocomposition contends that place or environment precedes categories of race, class, or gender in the construction of identity. At the same time, writing studies’ claim to ecological science rests on the argument that humans encounter, shape, and interface with the natural world through discursive construction, through writing. As Dobrin and Weisser (2002) argued, there is no nature “out there,” but rather “human hands have mapped and defined

‘natural’ places and that no matter how lost in the wild one tries to get, the natural environment is a world constructed and defined by human discourse” (p. 1). In a moment of heightened awareness of climatic ecological crisis, ecocomposition figures as an urgent and necessary perspective needed by writing studies, yet it remains unclear how much influence ecocomposition as such will have within the discipline on modes of theory and environmentalism.

Madison Jones (2017) suggested that ecocomposition has lost its way. Although Dobrin

(2011) later critiqued the ecocomposition project as having “failed to produce any substantial theory regarding the ecological facets of writing or even the relationships between writing and any ecological or environmental ‘crisis’” (p. 125), Jones reassigned value to ecocomposition

under the condition that it attempt to retrace its origins in the science of ecology, in other words,

“put the ecology back in ecocomposition.” Compositionists arrive at theories of writing by generalizing the traits of individual phenomena into metaphors that describe the entire system, the opposite of a scientific approach, which tests the individual occurrence against established theories. In place of writing metaphors, Jones argued, “if writing begins with place, then ecocomposition must further consider the premises of specific places in the conditions of writing” (p. 2). To consider writing premises acknowledges the specific place’s function in the act of writing before its capture into metaphor. Writing with premises in mind encourages compositionists who are not trained as ecologists to inhabit more attendant positions in the places where writing emerges. “Mapping the Moribund” is therefore a regionalist project. Attending to the specifics of place reveals further complexity, rather than restrict it.

While Jones offered writing premises as a means of re-grounding ecocomposition in the material sciences, rhetoric and composition as a whole takes differing, but not oppositional, approaches to the question of networked writing ecologies. Prominent interventions in the field typify ends of a spectrum, with complexity on one end and ambience on another. Byron Hawk’s

(2007) A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity argued for a recognition of the actual data underpinning the networks that often serve as writing metaphors.

To view writing as complex system entails a more sophisticated entanglement with data-driven science, in alignment with Jones. In contrast, Thomas Rickert’s (2013) Ambient Rhetoric draws from a Heideggerian poetic understanding of individual being in relation to, well, everything else. By tarrying with the philosophical complexities of being, ambience leaves rhetoric and writing scholars with a necessarily ethereal metaphor, not immediately appropriable to composition in practice. I would argue that when approaching climate change, which, again, is

the all-encompassing aporia of our time—climate change as hyperobject—it becomes clear that rhetoric and composition in general, and ecocomposition in particular must consider complexity and ambience (as I have formulated them for this specific purpose) simultaneously. Complexity suggests something closer to positivist approaches to problem-solving; ambience first entails a philosophical and perceptual attunement to the immensity of being. In fact, according to Rickert, rhetoric is “a responsive way of revealing the world for others, responding to and put forth through affective, symbolic, and material means, so as to (at least potentially) reattune or otherwise transform how others inhabit the world to an extent that calls for some action” (p.

162). If my project has anything to add to conversations about climate change and writing, it is first that little of interest emerges without the recognition of our perceptual deficiencies in relation to our roles as writing agents with environments.

Mythos: Maps and Legends

To avoid generalization, find in the specific not the metaphor to describe the system, but the allegory that makes intelligible, provisionally, the dispersed and immeasurably complex. I arrange a disciplinary spectrum from complexity to ambience not to misrepresent difference as opposition, but rather to emphasize the necessity of their contradictory unity in practice. The difference between complexity and ambience could be summarized as the difference between logos and mythos. As Timothy Gilmore (2017) explained, the Ancient Greek term for nature, physis, captured their understanding of nature as a dynamically unfolding set of relations not entirely appropriable to language (p. 399). In his reading of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon, in which Actaeon trespasses into a view of the nature goddess Artemis bathing in the nude and is punished for this by being transformed into a stag, Gilmore suggested that the key element of the myth is not the human-animal transformation but the consequent loss of Actaeon’s notional power of speech. He is unable to report the full “mystery behind the phenomenal appearances of

the world” (Gilmore, p. 399) and thus expresses an ancient understanding of nature that always- already evades capture into language. Citing Robert Harrison, Gilmore furthermore assumed a

“primordial unity of all things,” the wisdom of which cannot be directly communicated through logic (logos), but suggested through mythos (p. 400), what Tim O’Brien has famously called

“story truth” as opposed to “real truth.” So if complexity urges composition toward rigorous empiricism, and if ambience relies too heavily on the vague and ethereal to be of practical use, then perhaps Gilmore’s favored term “wildness” best accounts for the “unruly complexity of ecological systems, reveals our epistemological limitations as corporeal beings within such systems, and aids us in understanding the need for nurturing ecological consciousness in this time of ecological crisis” (p. 390).

If we can distinguish allegory from metaphor, we can better recognize the generative value of fictional narratives in the writing process without falling prey to unhelpful aspirations of a species of totalizing discourse. Furthermore, the narrative allegory helps us imagine our relation to climate crisis utilizing the full arsenal available to us as writers who are (also) humanities scholars, who practice and theorize the habits of the writing subject. Critiques of the modern realist novel, for example, as failing to imagine wildly dynamic narratives commensurate with climate change align with critiques in writing studies of modernist nature/culture bifurcation. As Amitav Ghosh (2015) argued, the modern novel operates according to a logic of probability that assimilates wild outliers into rational narratives (p. 27). With climate instability brought on by global warming, Ghosh continued, “the wild has become the norm,” and “if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed—and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis” (p. 101). Though housed in the institutional setting of

writing studies, this project is an attempt to discover and enact a personal mythos resistant to disciplinary fracture as a means of first understanding my position within our moment of climate crisis.

We tell stories (mythos) to imagine other modes of being, but humans struggle to think in planetary terms. As Gilmore (2017) suggested, climate change demonstrates that attempting even to imagine, let alone fathom, such a scale relies on planetary consciousness in relation to global catastrophe as conveyed through “the dominant logic of apocalypse narratives” (p. 398).

Moreover, through imperceptible scalar leaps, individual actions actually participate in the detrimental behaviors that contribute to the crisis. Timothy Clark (2015) succinctly captured this spirit of aporia:

Scale effects in relation to climate change are confusing because they take the easy, daily equations of moral and political accounting and drop into them both a zero and an infinity: the greater the number of people engaged in modern forms of consumption then the less the relative influence or responsibility of each but the worse the cumulative impact of their insignificance. (p. 150)

We hardly undertake decisions like driving a car or consuming the products of animal agriculture—whose climate-altering effects in fact exceed those of the transportation sector— with expanded modes of being in mind, and the climate crisis to which those decisions contribute requires of us access to perceptual scales which appear at first to be outside of individual human cognition. Although a generalized lack of planetary consciousness underlies environmental disaster, apocalyptic visualization at a local, mystorical, level has the potential to promote heretofore unattended ecological awareness. Gilmore supplied the lynchpin distinction between apocalypse as cataclysm and its original meaning, in the biblical sense, as revelation: “The apocalypse genre attempts to give shape to the invisible, and in doing so, exposes the need for the revelation of the wildness of ecological complexity and the development of ecological consciousness as the imaginative ability to understand what resists our thought” (p. 391).

As an ecological concept and form of personal revelation, the mystory offers a preliminary means of accessing expanded scalar awareness. The struggle to think my choric relation to place shapes a personal mythos. Working through the demands of my discipline constitutes the Career discourse of the popcycle. As an emblem, Four Corners functions as origin and as oracle, a point from which ideas come forth and around which knowledge arranges into focus. Four Corners therefore demonstrates a form of chōra in the original use of the term,

“winnowing” various disciplinary theories and personal narratives to establish my sense of the place. The Four Corners Monument demonstrates shifting spatial arrangements through discursive construction, and situated far out in the desert, carries the symbolic weight of the

“wilderness.” Timothy Gilmore (2017):

The trouble with the wilderness and the reason for its long cultural history as a place of terror and trauma is that it is viewed as other than society in a radical and fundamental way that places the individual and society in question; it is the place where wildness most clearly reveals itself because it is the place where the power of the wild as that aspect of physis that is beyond human penetration remains most unconcealed by the activities of humanity’s desire for order. (p. 404)

I visit and revisit the Four Corners as a sanctum in the wilderness for collecting my thoughts out of the “unruly complexity” that wildness suggests, assembling and reassembling my sense of a place and of places.

A form of cognitive prosthesis, a map of the Four Corners can in fact relay, through the various legends (mythos) a map enables, the fluidity of choric place in complement to material presence. This project, starting at Four Corners, is a map. Though perhaps I could retrace my steps and go back to Four Corners with a heightened sense of awareness, and perhaps I might remember to be more attendant to the place as premise in the conditions of writing, in creating this map I am first working through the immediate problem of orientation within the disciplinary quadrant of the popcycle.

Make a Map

The now-cliché wisdom, “a map is not the territory” (Korzybski, 1933) draws attention to the map’s status as representation, and thus serves as a reminder of the limits of this or any representation. The phrase seems to accuse maps of the same treachery as René Magritte’s famous images of smoking implements (which he insists are not pipes). Maps distort the territory, as anyone who has pondered the immensity of Greenland on a Mercator projection can attest. (The common Mercator projection renders Greenland about the same size as the entire

African continent, when in reality Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland.) If equally treacherous, maps differ from painterly images in that as a means of navigation, the map carries more practical expectations; users are hardly expected to “tarry with the limits of representation”

(Barnett, 2015) while waiting for their Uber drivers to arrive. To distinguish map from territory admits inaccuracy in the service of functionality.

However, to treat distortion as a deficiency to be overcome through better representations merely installs a limiting view of maps’ creative potential. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) took the map/territory confusion a step further, foregrounding a crucial distinction between mapping and

“tracing” (p. 12). Think of tracing in this sense like a charcoal rubbing of a leaf, or of a name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall, intended to approximate a copy of the real. Tracing offers a meaningful memento, but creates little more than a reinscription of what has already been established. Tracing might be a useful first step in recognizing place as premise, as Jones suggested we should, but to make a map, one necessarily knows not to mistake it for the territory: “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real” (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 33). If one avoids imposing a representation of space that could never account for the real, what remains is the powerful

recognition of the map as a creative extrapolation of place untethered from the pious devotion of a tracing. To map is to write place chorically.

“Mapping the Moribund” features an online mapping component. Using Leaflet, “the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps,” I designed and coded a map of Four Corners as a response to recent work in digital rhetoric and ecocriticism,

Jeff Rice’s (2012) Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network and Timothy

Clark’s (2015) Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. Rice began the project of rhetorical invention through online mapping. Clark supplied useful admonitions for ecocompositionists who would undertake the mapping project at an anthropic scale.

Digital Detroit functions in part as a digital mapping project that draws on Google Maps as an extensive online database. Mapping services like Google Maps, Rice (2012) affirmed, are databases that produce “an emerging rhetoric regarding how to map space as well as how to move through places” (p. 28). “That rhetoric,” he continued, “is enacted by both a given system

(one like Google Maps) and the rhetor who engages with the system (the user)” (p. 28). Rice noted the interaction of Google’s pre-existing databases, themselves an immeasurably complex information assembly, with user-generated content, including photos, reviews, suggestions, and comments, all centered around the cultural and historical materiality of Detroit as topos. Rice’s work is a brilliant recognition of complex digital and material entanglements in place that initiates further invention by breaking away from online hegemons like Google. In Digital

Detroit, users invent within the frameworks Google allows, the technical undergirding of which

Google keeps black-boxed. The open source Leaflet, on the other hand, enables user-creators to tinker with every aspect of the online mapping experience. The question for my purposes, driven

by Timothy Clark’s work, is how to use these inventive tools to further the project of ecocomposition.

Ecocriticism on the Edge urged for considerations of scale that do not assume a smooth transitioning from one level to another. Clark (2015) demarcated complex technological relations into three levels. Level I could be summarized as simple and visible interactions with tools to produce predictable outcomes, like turning over an ignition to start a car, while Level II captures the circulations of tools within “a complex socio-technological system” (p. 7). “Events at Level

III,” however, “broadly correspond to Morton’s notion of the hyperobject, entities whose physical and temporal scale and complexity overwhelm both traditional conceptions of what a thing is and what ‘understanding’ it could mean” (p. 7). Scalar relations to technology extend to decision-making. Individual moral calculations operate at one scale, global ecological systems at another, and it does not make sense to think one in terms of the other. Representations often fall into the trap of assuming that localized tropes generalize to different scales.

And yet I propose to make a map, another representation. Here at last is an opportunity to directly confront problems of scale effects by using the functionalities of a digital map against the user’s expectation that the map and territory should be visually and conceptually coterminous, confounding his or her attempts to transition smoothly between scales. Popular navigation and location-based phone applications like Google Maps or Uber feature “zoom controls.” The “+” symbol indicates a zoomed-in, smaller scale, while the “−” symbol zooms out the image to reveal a larger scale. When pressed, zoom controls animate the transition between scales as a smooth, uninterrupted shrinking or enlarging, ostensibly of a single image. Bruno

Latour (2014) argued that cartography misleadingly applies “zoom effects” that follow a

photographic logic, a telescopic effect created by optical zoom; “Optics has distorted cartography entirely” (p. 121). To quote Latour at length,

It is incorrect, moreover, to think that maps, for instance, prove the reality of the zoom effect: when one shifts from a map on a scale of 1 cm. to 1 km. to one on 1 cm. to 10 km., the latter does not contain the same information as the former: it contains other information that might (or might not) coincide with what appears in the former. (p. 121)

In answer to Clark—“Can the Leviathan of humanity en masse, as a geological force, be represented?” (p. 73)—this project stymies attempts to do so through what Latour called

“common sense” optical logic.

Zoom control animations normalize a scalar perception that renders the transition between scales as a convenient act of pressing a button. Google Maps and similar applications provide common, daily interactions between the average user and cartography. Their basic functionalities are not intended to confront the implications of scale in a critical way, yet this normalized understanding of scale is still deeply misleading. Therefore, rather than relying on functionalities that have been pre-programmed by Google, “Mapping the Moribund” uses the trappings of commercial apps toward critical ends. An assortment of free, open-access frameworks, such as Leaflet, enable digital writing scholars to interrupt and reroute industry standards.

The online map portion of this project is designed to resemble popular navigation apps. It features the familiar zoom controls in the lower right corner of the screen, referred to in Leaflet by the JavaScript variable zoomControl. Leaflet enables zoom control animations by default, which users can easily disable by changing the option in code from “true” to “false.” Resonant with Ecocriticism on the Edge, users can also distinguish at which zoom level to disable animations through the fittingly labeled zoomAnimationThreshold. My Four Corners map toys further with the conventions of zoom controls. When a user visits the page, the map centers on

the official GPS coordinates of Four Corners Monument at the one of the smallest possible scales. On clicking the “−” symbol to zoom out, the user expects a smooth scaling upward to include a view of each surrounding state, the entire Colorado Plateau, the United States, and eventually the whole Earth. However, this map does not zoom out to a larger view, but instead takes the user to an entirely different page. Gone are the slick animations that render scaling invisible. In place is an intentionally clunkier and resistant, interruptive experience in which changing the scale means calling upon a different set of underlying information. To frustrate zoom controls gestures against the photographic logic of zoom and toward representations of scale that acknowledge the imperceptible thresholds between them.

CHAPTER 3 DISNEY DEATH TOUR

Individual and collective traumas are part of nearly every inhabited place’s invisible landscape. —Mark Sample, “Location Is Not Compelling (Until It Is Haunted)”

[T]he process of MEmorializing begins with a sting (punctum) received from a news item, a story from the daily dose of information circulated by journalism. —Gregory L. Ulmer, Electronic Monuments

A Walt Disney World custodian plunged 40 feet to his death Sunday morning after clinging to the outside of a rising cable car that had swept him from a platform. —Orlando Sentinel, February 14, 1999

The Disney Death Myth

Did you know? “It’s company policy... [N]o one dies at Disney” (Inside the Mouse, 1995, p. 115). According to one of the most popular urban legends associated with Walt Disney World, when a tourist with a heart condition goes lifeless on a roller coaster, medical professionals by decree must wait to make the death pronouncement off-property. Such a claim suggests corporate mediation so intrusive as to censor death itself. Whether we can verify the policy through documentary evidence remains to be seen, this “Disney death myth” characterizes power relations toward the Walt Disney Company and contributes to the mysterious ethos of the park.

Called a “Vatican with mouse ears” (as cited in Clément, 2012, p. 6), Disney wields tremendous influence in Florida, where it employs upwards of 56,000, more people than any other company in the state. Local government policy often reflects Disney “flexing its bicep,” as one state senator put it (Garcia & Damron, 2012). In 1967, Florida’s House granted unrivaled autonomy to the company in the form of a private charter, which allows Disney to operate its parks independent of “state and county regulation of buildings, land use, airport and nuclear power plant construction, and even the distribution and sale of alcoholic beverages” (Foglesong,

as cited in Clément, p. 6). With its propensity for shaping elections and securing favorable legal conditions, it might not be so absurd to imagine Disney flexing its muscles to outlaw death too.

Of course, people do die at Walt Disney World. While most deaths result from preexisting conditions, others result from accidents on rides or negligence by park officials. Some result from a horrifying collision of natural and built worlds, as in 2016, when two year-old Lane

Graves was killed by an alligator at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa. All Florida theme parks are required to report injuries and deaths to the state Department of Agriculture, and

Disney has had to pay regular fines issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration

(OSHA) for safety violations. However, Disney, like any corporation, has no obligation to publicize these deaths. In fact, as Graves’ story indicates, these deaths have the potential to become national news anyway. And despite the Orlando park itself serving in part as a memorial to Walt’s death, Disney has constructed no such accompanying monuments within the park to memorialize the numerous deaths of workers and visitors that occur there. But with the use of mobile computing technologies, our “Disney Death Tour” offers a means of reintroducing these marginalized narratives back into this restricted write-space, creating the opportunity for users to rewrite their sensory experience of the park to include collective mourning.

Disney Death Tour commemorates those who have died at Walt Disney World. It puts commercial tourism in conversation with “critical spatial theory,” Scot Barnett’s (2012) term for viewing space as “less a fixed, neutral, or transhistorical idea and more a dynamic, ongoing process of relations involving people, discourses, objects, ideologies, histories, and the built and natural environments that together help establish the conditions of lived experience in the world”

(“Psychogeographies of Writing”). As multimodal composition practices put writing studies into new negotiations with space, Disney theme parks and other hypermediated corporate spaces

become sites where writing technologies bring new civic potentials into focus. Structured as a guided tour, the Death Tour redirects the flow of foot traffic and installs an alternative writing of theme park space that mirrors Jeff Rice’s (2012) use of digital logics to renegotiate traditionally- conceived physical spaces in Digital Detroit. At the same time, it challenges above all else the supremacy of spatial narratives; it functions as a writing, as opposed to another reading, and offers an emplaced critique as a means of creating civic opportunities for rewriting corporate space. Ultimately , this project offers a potential for a continual structuring and restructuring of space determined by its participants as made possible through ubiquitous mobile computing technologies.

Ulmer’s (2005) concept of the “MEmorial” offers a means of recognizing and writing communal attitudes towards tragedy. Whereas traditional monuments enshrine only official values, the MEmorial operates as an Internet monument that facilitates civic practices for rewriting public space to reflect unofficial values. MEmorials bridge the psychic distance between catastrophe and complacency by constructing a visceral reminder of abject social sacrifices, in this case within the tourist industry. At Disney World, via the Death Tour, you walk among the dead.

Spatially, the tour can be experienced in any order, but in terms of our MEmorial, it begins with a single tragedy:

Raymond Barlow, 65, was on a platform for the Skyway in Fantasyland when the cable- car ride was switched on for the park's opening, sending one of the gondolas toward the part-time worker. The startled Clermont resident grabbed the four-person gondola and struggled to pull himself inside, park employees told investigators. On the way up, he apparently was looking for a place to land and let go over a flower bed, snapping some tree branches on the way down, the workers said. (Connolly, 1999)

Although the Skyway was torn down six months later, and Disney was fined $4,500 for “a

‘serious’ violation of safety standards,” the Sentinel reported that “The ride’s closing is not a

result of any concerns about its safety” (Hinman, 1999). As one commenter suggested, “Disney figured it could make better use of the space” (“Sun Sets on Skyway,” 1999). At the time of this writing, the Magic Kingdom features no marker or plaque memorializing Barlow’s fall, even though his sacrifice helps maintain Disney World and, at a different scale, the tourist industry in general. Disney Death Tour makes use of the space to better recognize similar abject losses.

Barlow’s fall, and Disney’s subsequent response, encapsulate some of the key spatial principles that the Death Tour explores. Power mediates space both physically, as in tearing down a ride, as well as through discursive construction. Conversely, as Sidney I. Dobrin (2011) wrote, “though one body orders a space to a particular end, that order is not necessarily recognized or obeyed by all who enter that space” (p. 40). When entering a Disney park, space is ordered, but not necessarily obeyed, and the Death Tour provides an alternative option for occupying the park. Corporations have images to maintain, which for Disney means preserving its parks’ status as the happiest, most magical places on earth. Space is carefully arranged to suppress or containerize contradictory narratives, in this case the deaths of parkgoers and workers. Like a designated smoking section, Disney confines death to the Haunted Mansion, where the afterlife follows a safe, playful script. In Barlow’s case, the official story dismisses any link between safety concerns and the decision to close the Skyway, but the claims of those constructing the narrative cannot assuage the death myth’s subversive appeal. To die at Disney is to go off script, and flies in the face of the wholesome image of perpetual adolescence that the company cultivates. Without taking this myth’s appeal as factual truth, our Death Tour magnifies its same subversive logic. As such, we use locative computing technologies, like the augmented reality (AR) used in this tour’s phone app, to permit unsanctioned narratives into these hypermediated corporate spaces.

Disney scrutinizes what enters and leaves its property such that truth seems only to circulate in the off-record whispers of its employees:

We had a guy last summer who went to EPCOT, stood under the golf ball, took a gun, and blew his head off. But he didn’t die. He stood right there in front of all those tourists and went “cluck” and brains blew everywhere. But he didn’t die there. The medic told me that they are not allowed to let them die there. Keep them alive by artificial means until they’re off Disney property, like there’s an imaginary line in the road and they go, “He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s dead.” (as cited in Inside the Mouse, 1995, p. 115)

The Death Tour is premised on an urban legend. If veracity were the only metric for a narrative’s value, this one hardly satisfies. Online fact-checker Snopes examined the claim, “Disney can legitmately [sic] claim that no one has ever died at one of their theme parks, because they always ensure that accident victims are removed from park property before being declared dead”

(Mikkelson, 2017). Though it rendered a “false” verdict, Snopes acknowledged “This legend is a tricky subject to tackle, because it’s based upon the fine (and often confusing) distinction between actual death and declared death” (Mikkelson, 2017). Actual death becomes declared death through an act of writing. Literate practices structure life and death through writing: a birth certificate declares “this person is,” and a grave marker “this person was.” The death myth suggests the believable (to the extent that any legend is believable) potential of Disney to interrupt death through writing. To clarify, the Death Tour does not literally (or literately) accept the death myth as law of the land. It instead explores how Disney deaths circulate in a network of lore, industry, politics, and place-making. Actual death becomes tour through an act of electrate writing.

Despite all efforts to control a corporate image, whether sinister or practical, no imagineer can stop people from dying at Disney. In addition to Barlow’s, the Death Tour maps over 55 deaths at Disney theme parks since 1977, although an exact figure is difficult to cobble together. Many were the result of preexisting conditions or natural causes. Some were freak

accidents. In many cases, families pursued legal action and reached financial settlements with the

Disney Company.

That being said, while the Disney Company downplays death within their parks, they do engage with it elsewhere. Under less litigious circumstances, Disney World works with the Give

Kids the World charity, offering some source of comfort for terminally ill children and their families. And in a gesture toward what Death Tour aims to further articulate, Disney erected a lighthouse statue in memory of Lane Graves near the site of his death. Make no mistake, this is a complicated and tragic matter. Unlike paranoid conspiracy theories and academic critiques aimed at Disney’s aesthetic formations, we are operating to acknowledge these disasters in a serious and respectful way.

Criticizing the Mouse

Imagine promoting a universe in which raw Nature doesn’t fit because it doesn’t measure up; isn’t safe enough, accessible enough, predictable enough, even beautiful enough for company standards. —Carl Hiassen, Team Rodent

Critical approaches to Disney theme parks are nothing new. In 1981’s Simulacra and

Simulation, Jean Baudrillard famously identified Disneyland as the perfect example of

“hyperreality.” And in 1995, the cultural studies ensemble The Project on Disney published

Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, which conducts an examination of and in

Disney theme parks. In part the book is a model—it weighs the cognitive dissonance of critics- turned-tourists (“The Problem with Pleasure”), suggests playfully subversive negotiations of park space (“The Alternative Ride”), and of course can’t resist a degree of anti-authority snark

(“Working at the Rat”). It also helps circulate the “no one dies at Disney” myth as a counter- narrative that manages to escape the hypermediated corporate space of Disney’s parks. The

Project on Disney serves as a precedent, a source for the myth, and ultimately a point of

departure for the Disney Death Tour. Whereas these critical approaches to Disney offer analytic readings, hermeneutics for the park’s arrangement and the company’s actions, our approach enacts a writing.

Thibaut Clément’s (2012) excellent “‘Locus of Control’: A Selective Review of Disney

Theme Parks” traced this intellectual suspicion toward mass entertainment. Efforts to identify the

“locus of control”—the where of meaning-making—in Disney’s parks traversed the high- brow/low-brow debates of the last century. Critical hostility emerged as early as 1958, when screenwriter Julian Halevy remarked, “[Disney parks] exist for the relief of tension and boredom, as tranquilizers for social anxiety” (as cited in Clément, p. 1). Other voices saw in Disneyland a restoration of the public sphere, of performance and participation. Recent work finds the productive rather than pessimistic possibilities in commercial tourist spaces. As opposed to an early postmodern view of Disney parks as “sets of signs and representations arranged into a discourse and intended to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy,” Clément argued:

In assigning various degrees of agency to the parks’ participants, critics have gradually displaced the locus of control for the parks’ meaning, design, and operations from the Disney corporation to the individual user and the company’s socio-economic context, paying increasing attention to the audience’s interpretive activity and the parks’ competitive environment. (p. 8)

He concluded, “Visitors are not ‘cultural dopes’ but rather actively reconstruct available meanings to elaborate strategies and pursue motives of their own” (p. 8). Seeking the locus of control shifts from identifying the presence of agency to the more nuanced assessment of “how much credit the parks’ various participants must be given in shaping and assigning meaning to the parks’ environment” (p. 9). Disney Death Tour extends “interpretive activity” by reinscribing the space through digital writing implements. Assigning “credit,” however, means thinking of writing and writing subjects participating in complex, networked ecologies. As this project goes

on to explore, and as MEmorials help visualize, a locus of control cannot be neatly accounted for because writing theory confounds the locus of subjectivity itself.

Including this selection of previous scholarship clarifies Disney Death Tour’s intentions—what it is, and what it is not. Not an exposé revealing corporate secrets, nor a critically aloof reading of Disney parks. Nor does it state the obvious: of course visitors cultivate personal meanings in even the most mediated of public spaces. Whereas this previous critical work formulates Disney parks in terms of either the passive reception of signs or the active construction of individual interpretations, of dominant ideologies or subversive subjectivities, the

Death Tour introduces new writings into the space itself. At the same time, it is an exploratory spatial writing theory. Death Tour employs as much its methods–MEmorality, psychogeography, augmented reality, critical tourism–as an inquiry into the limits of those methods.

From Dark Tourism to Thanatourism

The challenge of the EmerAgency is to show that tourism is capable of influencing public policy through bearing witness to base sacrifice. —Gregory L. Ulmer, Electronic Monuments

What occupies space, then, are bodies: specific bodies that mark and identify segments of the space they occupy. —Sidney I. Dobrin, Postcomposition

Disney Death Tour uses tourism to enact a methodology of locative composition. It performs critical tourism—embodied participation in public writing spaces through commercial travel. In Postcomposition, Dobrin (2011) opened a space for putting writing studies in conversation with this definition of travel and tourism. Composition studies, Dobrin argued, should detach itself from pedagogic practices that serve to secure territory as a discipline, should move outside the classroom “to occupy new places” (p. 54). As the military metaphor suggests, occupation often entails violence, to which a tour organized around death can attest. Occupation moreover implies embodiment. Bodies occupy space, establish place, and achieve orientation.

Body and space codetermine place in a phenomenon we might call interlocation, bodies as interlocators. The Death Tour wonders if composition studies might occupy new places not through violence, but embodiment as critical tourists.

While modern theme parks and tourist attractions are thought of in terms of their entertainment value, according to Ulmer (2005), travel also facilities a mode of thinking about place, and Ulmer reminds us that the first theorists were also the first tourists. Theoria, the ancient Greek practice of investigation through tourism, “implied a complex but organic mode of active observation—a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing” (E. V. Walter, as cited in Ulmer, 2005, p.

5). These early theorists sought out facts obscured by rumor and myth. Like theoria, the Death

Tour depends on physical travel and perceptual attunement. Yet this is not a strictly fact-finding mission. Rather, Walt Disney World provides a high-profile site for demonstrating the tourist’s place-making potential.

The Death Tour argues that death always-already haunts tourist practices. In his extended travelogue “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” David Foster Wallace (1998) modeled a hermeneutic approach to a stereotypical view of commercial tourism. Although that this tour works against mere interpretation, . Still, “A Supposedly Fun Thing” highlighted the intermingling of death, pleasure, and hypermediation at tourism’s core. Aboard the MV Zenith

(which, just as “mouse” becomes “rat,” he rechristens Nadir), Wallace catalogued the “nearly insanity-inducing pampering” of an all-inclusive luxury cruise vacation, as well as his own complicity in the arrangement. system. He attributed the willingness to cede experiential control—to join the “bovine” (p. 310) herd of tourists—to an underlying desire to escape death.

“A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness,” Wallace noted, arguing that because of death’s

supreme unpleasantness, passengers on the Nadir “are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay” (p. 264). As a tourist, observed

Wallace, “I pay for the privilege of handing over to trained professionals responsibility not just for my experience but for my interpretation of that experience—i.e. my pleasure” (p. 268).While not bitterly dismissive of the enterprise, Wallace forecloses travel’s critically-interruptive capacity, canonizing the tacky flip-flops/suntan lotion/camera-on-gut version of tourism. A more critically aware tourism not only disrupts similar stereotypes, it encourages invention of counter- narratives that emerge emerging from embodied experience; the brochure says go this way, but the critical tourist has no obligation to obey. To avoid reproducing a containerized worldview, the Death Tour shifts from analysis to invention.

Drawing from the Ancient Greek thanatos, meaning death, thanatourism (Seaton, 1996) describes the allure of death through travel. Though often used interchangeably with “dark tourism,” thanatourism connotes a more benign, even beneficial, commingling of death and travel. It might seem grotesque, but the purpose here is not rubbernecking, or “milking the macabre” (Dann, 1994). Instead, by functioning as a MEmorial, the Death Tour serves as a means of recognizing and reflecting upon community values enshrined in collective sacrifices, making Walt Disney World theme parks sites of civic pilgrimage. Or, put another way, the tour operates as a form of memento mori for a networked civic sphere.

Thanatourism includes visits to battlefields, concentration camps, famous gravesites, etc.—any attraction to sites of mass death or trauma. A modernist practice, thanatourism coincides with mass media and culture. As J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley (2000) argued in

Dark Tourism, for a tourist destination to be dark, “global communication technologies play a major part in creating the initial interest” (p. 11). According to Lennon and Foley, the era of

thanatourism begins with two global-scale catastrophes: The First World War, an unprecedented industrial clash of modern liberal democracies, and the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, a death cruise given spectacular media coverage. Mirroring Ulmer’s insights in Electronic Monuments,

Dark Tourism posits dark destinations as a means of reconciling individual experience and mass trauma through personal encounter. Collective wounds also provoke reflection on the fatal consequences of mass culture. As Lennon and Foley suggested, “the objects of dark tourism themselves appear to introduce anxiety and doubt about the project of modernity” (p. 11).

Disney, on the other hand, uses its global media engine to opposite ends, where the “happiest” or

“most magical” places on earth promote what Wallace called “fantasies of triumph” over death and decay.

Dark Tourism demystifies the fascination with death and tourism. Tourism, as Lennon and Foley read it, grants a means of individual reconciliation with mass cultural trauma.

However, to restrict dark tourism to battlefields and gravesites presents a limited scope of pre- digested coordinates on the map. Interpreting particular tourist sites as distinctly “dark” discounts the role—and the potential—of writing death into spaces designed to obscure it.

Taking into account recent efforts to develop more complex maps of writing, ecology, space, and subjectivity, thanatourism describes a process of theorizing, experiencing, and writing death alongside broadly defined public writing spaces.

Chōra: Bodies, Minds, and (Disney) World

The study of rhetoric and composition has entered its space age. An intense subset of the field seeks the where of writing, what Clément might call the “locus of control”—how writing and writers shape and are shaped by place. Previous models of intentional, localized writing subjects fail to account for complex interactions of writers, technologies, and environs.

Discussed by, among others, Dobrin, Hawk, Ulmer, and Thomas Rickert, chōra helps complicate

and expand both static maps of writing as well as fixed notions of place. As Rickert (2013) explained, “Plato’s chōra is an ancient attempt to think the relation between matter and activity, work and space, background and meaning” (p. 42). Applied to writing, chōra indicates the impossibly complex relational networks which surround and bind the writing subject. To

“theorize subjectivity ambiently,” as Rickert suggested, abandons the search for fixed loci of control and leaves writing studies with a necessarily ethereal metaphor.

Ambience furthermore informs this project’s critical approach to tourism. To contrast with prior hermeneutic readings of Disney World, the Death Tour should be viewed “in terms of embedded and embodied immersion rather than connection, dispersed and interactive flow rather than node, conditions of possibility rather than static presence” (Rickert, 2013, p. 92). In relation to the tourist subject, chōric place cannot be pinpointed on the map, but rather witnessed as an

“affective, circulating, and evolving series of encounters” (Rickert, 2013, p. 44). Disney’s Magic

Kingdom sits at 28° 25′ 4.19″ N latitude, 81° 34′ 31.19″ W longitude, but its sense of place is determined by how people “come together in the continual making of a place; at the same time, that place is interwoven into the way they have come to be as they are” (Rickert, 2013, p. xiii).

As we examine in a later section, theories of articulation promisingly account for rhetorical co-determinacy between human and non-human agents. Whereas the ethereal metaphor of ambience might be difficult to actuate, articulation makes visible a composition practice which leaves open the possibility of alternative writings. By engaging with Disney

World—its symbols, lore, spatial arrangements, and even the absent presence of death—the tourist and the tour articulate space in Jacob W. Greene’s (2017) sense to reveal narrative pathways that are already at the location rather than imposing new ones. The Death Tour

(re)considers Disney World as a place that obscures the fatal consequences of its very existence,

but site-specific death markers only partially fulfill its intended use as “a responsive way of revealing the world for others, responding to and put forth through affective, symbolic, and material means” (Rickert, 2013, p. 162). The ambient thanatourist articulates space according to personal histories, desires, sensations, etc., and space in turn alters the tourist’s affective makeup.

Thus, a map marker merely suggests points of disclosure in the ambient sense, “itself manifold and ambient; it can be performed, practiced, and activated in many ways, only so much of which will at any given time be directly appropriable to consciousness, intention, or theorization”

(Rickert, 2013, p. 72). Each encounter with a Hidden Mortimer has the potential to alter the thanatourist by exposing her to a previously undisclosed point of articulation. That point, however, does not determine a particular vector, making it impossible to project this tour’s intentional impact. Instead, thanatourism encourages articulation of space as a “process of creating temporary, contingent connections...through which familiar ideas begin to emerge as something new” (Greene, 2017), yet never insists upon narrative supremacy.

In contrast to Wallace’s luxury cruise, critical thanatourism adopts William Bartram as a type of the Floridian proto-tourist. Discussed by Madison Jones in his 2017 Association for the

Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) presentation, Bartram paddled Florida’s Silver

Springs and wrote from his canoe’s emplaced vantage point, attuned to the unmediated materiality of the Springs. The “emplaced composition” Jones developed from Bartram’s example rescues material specificity from culturally mediated abstraction. Toward a fuller articulation of place, this mapping reintroduces specific deaths, marking sites of nature’s most inescapable collisions with culture. Disney Death Tour negotiates a rhetoricity of tourism that is always already thanatourism.

Death Rhetoric

[T]he limits of memory and representation serve to remind composition scholars of the significant roles pre-reflective sensations play in our everyday lives and the responsibilities we hold at the same time to guard against their theorization or memorialization as such in writing. —Scot Barnett, “Psychogeographies of Writing”

Hope lies in the fact that the appropriation of what is inscribed (the said) necessarily testifies to the inappropriable exposure that insists and resists. —Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity

Disney Death Tour identifies structural death at Disney theme parks, reminding tourists of mortality. The MEmorial in general, and Disney Death Tour specifically, are meant to provoke, but not to insult. As Ulmer (2005) wrote, the MEmorial is “not intended to condemn or pass judgment, but instead visualize the invisible sacrifices made on behalf of certain cultural or national values” (p. xiii). In terms of ambient tourism, the goal is not to shame, but to engage with ambience so “as to (at least potentially) reattune or otherwise transform how others inhabit the world to an extent that calls for some action” (Rickert, 2013, p. 162). As a counter-narrative to Disney’s highly-mediated spaces and muted depictions of death, the Death Tour provides a means of rumination on some of the invisible consequences of modern commercial tourism and entertainment. Within composition studies, this MEmorial explores the possibilities of electrate writing practices distinct from literate memorialization. The alternative mapping capabilities enabled through its AR counterpart further allow us to reintroduce death as a central part of the rhetorical process of spatial movement and emplacement. Other MEmorials identify various deaths supporting abject communal values, often drawing upon “haunting” as a metaphor for

MEmorial and AR’s revelatory function but leaving death’s theoretical significance underexamined. The aim is therefore not to ameliorate theme park fatalities or safeguard new park visitors—OSHA exists for that—but to enter what this project terms “Death Rhetoric” into widely-shared community considerations of space.

The Death Tour confronts a tragic and sensitive subject, with the ethical considerations informing a methodology designed to avoid appropriating the dead, insulting the living, or merely exposing the skeletons in Disney’s closet. Of course, the dead cannot speak for themselves, and neither would we presume to write for them; the tour of their deaths does not give them voice. Therefore this critical tour argues for a new ethics of mapping death, one that confronts ethical reservations through theories of writing informed by the limitations set by existence. As a writing, the Death Tour responds to appeals from Scot Barnett (2012) and Diane

Davis (2010) to conceive of rhetoric and composition in ways that resist containerized or instrumentalized representations. Though this map gives a limited depiction of those who physically died at Disney, and where those deaths occurred, indicating their hidden presence does take a step toward articulating the dead in a larger network of distributed identity, what

Ulmer (2012) identified as “avatar.”

Barnett’s (2012) “Psychogeographies of Writing” challenged compositionists to acknowledge and work creatively within the “limits of representation” in order to develop new maps of writing (and in turn write new maps). For Barnett, citing Judith Butler, writing commits violence when representations expect certainty from their subjects. Or, in other words, representation seeks essence. On this map one finds indications of physical death, those who used-to-be-in-the-world. The challenge is to avoid doubling down on “ethical violence.” Barnett argued,

an act of ethical violence occurs when we ask of the other the question ‘who are you?’ and demand in return a satisfactory response capable of presenting a clear and coherent image of the other’s self. Though often couched in the name of ethics, such acts, Butler has argued, nevertheless demand of the other something she cannot possibly provide— namely, an account of the self that is self-identical with the ‘I’ in whose name she speaks. (“Psychogeographies”)

Articulating death merely exacerbates writing’s failure to represent what not even the living other can present as a coherent self.

In one sense, this alternative mapping of Walt Disney World turns a smartphone into a can of spray-paint used by a graffiti artist, inscribing a corporate space with unsanctioned writings. Problematizing these rebellious assumptions, Barnett (2012) argued that “although attempting to unmask and demystify hidden power relations can satisfy in the short term, doing so also has the potential to leave in place the very thing we hoped to transcend—in this case the problem of yet another representation of space quietly asserting its own truth or authenticity”

(“Psychogeographies”). Yes, Disney Death Tour attempts to demystify hidden power relations at work in Disney World, but rather than insisting on one interpretation of Disney (a reading), a focus on the writing-tourist shifts attention to what Barnett described as “those irreducible aspects of embodied being-in-the-world that haunt the accounts we offer of ourselves but that may never find a comfortable place in the discourses we rely upon to represent and memorialize those accounts” (“Psychogeographies”). Critical tourism is the participation in a contest for writing spaces through travel, and involves the embodied experience of being-in-the-world. In light of Barnett’s admonishments, composition scholars must be careful not to replace one aspirationally totalizing narrative with another, and instead acknowledge the limits of critiques contingent upon the limits of representation. This project treats skeptically the notion of simply preserving and retrieving the memory of the dead through writing and mostly avoids those questions altogether. Through augmented reality and electrate mapping, the question instead becomes how do we “see without knowing,” as Barnett calls for?

Throughout the process of compiling names, dates, and accounts of deaths at Disney, this project depended on journalism. The Death Tour could not exist without the Orlando Sentinel’s

accident database (Minshew, 2016), for example, which, incomplete as it is, only demonstrates the shortage of accessible information on the topic. But to approach the Death Tour as mere exposé wades only into the deficiencies of archival records. Literate representation offers certain affordances and limitations, which opens up the need for inventing electrate writing practices, in this case MEmorial. Another prominent inquiry into death exemplifies literacy and eletracy’s divergent concerns: during 12 episodes of the long-form journalism podcast Serial, Sarah Koenig

(2014) examined the 1999 murder of high school student Hae Min Lee. Adnan Syed, the man imprisoned for the crime, insists on his innocence. Episode one begins with a memory exercise: try to recall in detail what you were doing six weeks ago. If the task proves difficult to answer with certainty—and as Koenig’s experiment reveals, accounts are often revised or conflicting— then consider that 1999 was 18 years ago at the time of this writing. Koenig weighed Syed’s claim of innocence against archival records, witness testimonies, and expert opinions, but the season finale leaves personal and legal judgments about Adnan Syed unresolved and perhaps even unresolvable. Serial demonstrates that even thorough works of investigative journalism depend on the limits of written memorialization as a part of their praxis.

Journalistic objectivity tends toward containerization, the demand to know for the record.

When a figure like Syed resists tidy representations, and when a journalistic account reaches its disciplinary limits, the result can be frustrating. As one commenter exclaimed in episode eight,

“Well then who the fuck did it?” In its expletive-inducing journalistic restraint, Serial reaches the very limits of literate memory practices. Koenig ended with a big “I don’t know,” not for certain anyway. Her exhaustive diligence not to reduce the complexities of lived experience to a snappy story resembles a Butlerian journalistic ethic. Working as an extension beyond the limitations of literate journalism, the MEmorial then “begins with a sting (punctum) received from a news

item, a story from the daily dose of information circulated by journalism” (Ulmer, 2005, p. 118).

Electrate writing practices do not displace but extend literate journalism. In response to Barnett,

MEmorials seek not better containers, but alternative approaches.

Thinking without Knowing

As discussed in the Thanatourism section, emplacement forwards an ethics attuned to the material specifics of place, engaged locally, in detail, rather than in abstract tropes. In this sense, emplacement resembles a journalistic project. To avoid containing the irreducible complexities of lived experience to the obituary section of the newspaper, it becomes essential to work past journalism as memorialization and into the theoretical possibilities of MEmorialization as an electrate writing practice for civic engagement. Though it may be impossible to substitute writing for the memory of lived experience, the Death Tour opens a consideration of death’s rhetoricity.

In her introduction to Inessential Solidarity, Diane Davis (2010) argued that what Butler and Barnett treat as concerns to be avoided are in reality impossible altogether: “There is no longer any way to pose [ontology’s] defining question, a question of uncontaminated essence:

‘What is X?’ There is no immanent or intrinsic being, no essence in itself that would therefore be capable of presenting itself as such” (p. 4). Davis shifts the stakes from taxonomical to rhetorical and theoretical. Drawing extensively from Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, she identified a “preoriginary rhetoricty” in the condition of distributed being. According to Nancy, being is always already contaminated by community and environs; the “singularity” of the individual “designate[s] precisely that which, each time, forms a point of exposure, traces an intersection of limits on which there is exposure. To be exposed is to be on the limit where, at the same time, there is both inside and outside, and neither inside nor outside” (as cited in Davis, p.

5). This exposure, Davis said, “[Precedes] symbolic identification … is relationality as such; it is

constitutive of being, which is always and only in the mode of exposition and not essence” (p. 7).

Barnett’s project seeks pre-reflective aspects of being-in-the-world. Davis finds in the world a being-with that is always a being-for, a “solidarity that precedes symbolicity” (p. 15).

“A Rhetoric of Responsibility” makes it clear that the role of dying at Disney extends beyond mere morbid fascination. Nancy wrote, “what community reveals to me, in presenting to me my birth and my death, is my existence outside myself” (as cited in Davis, 2010, p. 10). As

Davis put it, “Death marks the absolute limit of identification and (so) of understanding … ‘my’ finitude…can communicate itself to me only through ‘your’ mortality” (p. 10). Levinas’ use of

“face” refers to both physical, face-to-face, presence disrupting indifference, and to what Davis called “the site of ‘my’ encounter with the inassimilable alterity of the other, which provokes an interruption in identification and cognition” (p. 12). She continued, “What one encounters in the face to face is the other’s finitude, the other’s exposedness—that is to say, both his or her mortality…” (p. 12). By pinpointing Disney deaths down to latitude and longitude, the Death

Tour literalizes the processes of exposure in order to visualize sites of encounter. Disney Death

Tour puts Walt Disney World visitors face-to-face with death.

However, Death Rhetoric is not a means of reducing the complexities of rhetorical being(s) to simple map markers, but of articulating a reminder that, as Davis (2010) argued,

“Responsibility kicks in as a response to finitude’s deadly intensity” (p. 11). Barnett (2012) tasked composition with finding ways of “seeing without knowing” (“Psychogeographies”). If the impulse to know risks ethical violence, Davis’ theorization of preoriginary rhetoric offers a productive direction: “Thinking is not the same as knowing, and the challenge today, the social, ethical, and political challenge is to learn to think the sharing of community without effacing precisely this sharing by conceptualizing it, turning it into an object to be grasped and put to

work” (p. 8). Death depictions like those at the Haunted Mansion offer a scripted version of death without consequences. They are not sites of encounter with one’s own mortality, and are certainly not intended to be. In response to Disney’s glossy performances of death, the Death

Tour inscribes Walt Disney World with “Hidden Mortimers,” grave markers with mouse ears that play on the “Hidden Mickeys” scattered throughout Disney parks. Whereas headstones operate as a literate exercise in representation, perhaps these map-markers should be thought of as facestones, electrate renderings of death’s finitude. This tour challenges indifference, “the luxury of exposed existents who are not faced with the fact of their exposedness” (Davis, p. 14).

At these sites of encounter, “The face comes through each time as pure appeal, persuasion without a rhetorician” (Davis, p. 14). Ultimately, the Death Tour indicates not just death, but being’s underlying solidarity, being-for, realized when “communal life holds itself ‘at a level equal to death’” (Davis, p. 10).

CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION

Response, responsibility: Everything comes down to death, which Diane Davis foregrounded like no other scholar of rhetoric. Death is always experienced as a community; for

Davis (2010), the “singularity” of the individual constitutes a point of exposure to the inside-out

(and “neither inside nor outside”) of the group subject (p. 7). Awareness of death itself comes from an exterior revelation in the community: “Death marks the absolute limit of identification and (so) of understanding … ‘my’ finitude…can communicate itself to me only through ‘your’ mortality” (Davis, p. 12). Here, once again, the operations of modernity discussed by Gilmore,

Ghosh, and Latour serve primarily to obscure what Davis views as a fundamental, or preoriginary, state of being-with that is always already being-for. As Davis so encouragingly put it, “Responsibility kicks in as a response to finitude’s deadly intensity; it kicks in when communal life holds itself ‘at a level equal to death’ rather than sliding into tranquilized comforts and everyday absorptions, such as football or professional conferences or Oprah” (p.

11). Since global climate crisis forces a reconsideration of the daily actions of communal life, such that driving a car or eating meat takes on an aura of deadly intensity, one hopes responsibility kicks in.

The mystory genre posits a form of electrate problem-solving, entailing the recognition of disciplinary specialty as one dimension of the popcycle. My aim is to confront the all- encompassing problems climate change poses from an ecocompositional frame of reference.

How do professionals utilize their available tools when a problem seems outside of disciplinary reach? The mystory looks to behavioral models from which to appropriate creative logics. To conclude with such an example, in Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science,

Philippe Squarzoni (2014) realized he is a graphic journalist who covers environmental politics,

yet, as he says, “I don’t know what I’m talking about” (p. 31). By way of a nearly 500 page graphic novel, not only does Squarzoni arrange a narrative of his journey through the science, he opens up an imaginative space capable of forecasting climate change’s various potentialities and subsequent human responses, providing a means in the first place of simply thinking about the mess.

Climate Changed sets a precedent for responding to climate crisis though the production of creative mythos rather than despair. But what are readers to make of a narrative tackling an already morose subject when it kills off the narrator’s dog Mirabelle? Mira’s death overwhelms more immediately than remote considerations of the effects of climate change, to be sure. It conveys climate trauma on a scale recognizable to humans. In so acutely juxtaposing traumas at drastically different scales, Climate Changed also opens up a space for performing scalar leaps in reading strategies. It is telling, then, that Squarzoni responds to the death of his dog and to climate crisis in the same way, by doing his duty.

The popcycle’s Career discourse, which this thesis catalogues, directs the mystory at last toward clarity. In the face of crisis, if I cannot solve, I am at least equipped to create. If I cannot know, I can think. Inventing electrate writing practices often means the playful coining of neologisms and repurposing of old terms through puns. In this case, the rhetorical impact of death prompts a renegotiation of the term park and all of its resonances—from the theme park, to the national park, to parking the car—to remember the need for spaces of inertia, pause, and attendance.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Rolf K. Anderson grew up in Orlando, where he received his BA in English from the

University of Central Florida. He received his master’s degree in English from the University of

Florida in 2018. Now he works as a ranger for the National Park Service.