Dystopoi of Memory and Invention: the Rhetorical “Places” of Postmodern Dystopian Film Ben Wetherbee, University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma
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116 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics Dystopoi of Memory and Invention: The Rhetorical “Places” of Postmodern Dystopian Film Ben Wetherbee, University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma In her introduction to The Left Hand of material into a persuasive whole— Darkness, the renowned American science significantly resembles what rhetoricians fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin (2010) since Aristotle have termed invention. rallies a series of provocations around one Generally regarded as the primary and central refrain: “Science fiction is not conceptually richest of the five canons of predictive; it is descriptive” (p. xiv). rhetoric (the others are arrangement, Through its futuristic confabulations, sci-fi style, delivery, and—finally, an oft- deliberately “lies” in order to get at some neglected category I take up here— “truth” about the present; its concerns, memory), invention describes the artful though typically projected into an composition of cultural knowledge and imagined future, stem from “what the rhetorical appeals to suit a specific weather is now, today, this moment, the argument before a specific audience.1 rain, the sunlight, look!” (pp. xiv, xv). Le Aristotle (1997), for example, devotes Guin’s imploring directive, look!, voices two of the three books of his Rhetoric to no transcendent, romantic imperative of the processes of invention, which he the genre. It doesn’t ask readers to lift the describes through various devices and veil of mystification or to finally see the strategies: appeals to ethos, pathos, and capital-T truth for the first time. Rather, logos; deductive enthymemes; inductive sci-fi as Le Guin understands it asks examples; and rhetorical topoi (literally readers to perceive how fabrications, the “places”; topics; loci), which can be genre’s “lies,” refract the light of quotidian classified as discipline-specific “special” life into new shapes with new contours of premises (idia) or “common” procedures significance. Sci-fi matters, in other (koinoi topoi) used to generate arguments words, not for its ability to create an across diverse circumstances. Here, I entirely novel alternate universe, but for single out this final concept, the topos, as its ability to reassemble our own present in particularly useful in investigating not just an illuminating way. This art—the invention, but the multimodal nexus of purposeful assembly of available cultural memory and invention. 1 This definition is my own approximation of an bibliographic synthesis of rhetorical invention, see amorphous and contested term. For a useful Simonson (2014). Fall 2018 (2:2) 117 In this essay I configure the rhetorical that recur in these films: first, what I call topos as useful tool in the study of narrative the technological swamp, or the expansive fiction film—and particularly dystopian bricolage of high-tech detail, excess, and sci-fi film—in order to analyze how film waste that implies decay and neglect; and rhetoric draws credibility and connotative second, the clinic, or the overlit rhetorical power from its construction of surveillance site that implies oppressive, place. Below, I examine the rhetoric of panoptic oversight. Below, I detail how dystopian space, whose “places” constitute each genre of dystopian place—or both memetic representations of our dystopos—powerfully imbues its narratives world gone wrong and rhetorical “places” with ideological, rhetorical energy, (topoi) rich in persuasive power. These capable of implying and enhancing social two senses of place, one traditionally arguments. I argue, finally, that the poetical and the other traditionally rhetorical coexistence of these dystopoi rhetorical, irrevocably overlap, especially exemplifies the heterogenous complexity through the medium of film, the rich of postmodern spatial argument, which visual texture of which powerfully orients one can rarely boil down to a single text audiences both within poetical, memetic posing a single argument. space and within the persuasive, This essay also notably contributes to ideological structures of meaning-making an area of study, the rhetoric of film, more traditionally assigned to rhetoric. historically characterized by intermittent Here, I take up this dualistic sense of interest but general scholarly neglect. rhetorical topoi to examine the persuasive While a few rhetoricians, like David dimensions of three dystopian sci-fi films Blakesley (in English studies) and Thomas from what film scholar Vivian Sobchack W. Benson (in communication), have (2005) has called the second “Golden Age” repeatedly returned to this topic, film of American sci-fi film (p. 267)—Alien rhetoric has failed to cohere as a consistent (Scott, 1979), Outland (Hyams, 1981), subdiscipline of multimodal rhetorical and Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)—each of study.2 I suspect, though, that mounting which exemplifies the complex and interest in multimodal rhetorics as such difficult patchwork of postmodern spatial (without de facto subservience to new composition, and all of which share visual media studies or digital rhetorics in textures that could imply a common particular) could rejuvenate rhetoricians’ narrative universe across the three films. I interest in film, which—in the era of focus on two particular genres of “place” Netflix and IMAX—remains a potent, 2 This is not to say that work on the rhetoric of andmodern rhetorical theory to film and television film is altogether lacking. It is beyond the scope of include Hendrix & Wood (1973); Behrens (1979); this essay to supply a thoroughgoing bibliography Chatman (1990); Booth (2002); Blakesley (2004); on the rhetoric of film, but interested scholars Benson & Snee (2008). See Wetherbee (2015) for might begin with Blakesley’s (2003) wide-ranging another application of the term topos to film edited collection The Terministic Screen. Other analysis and Gunn (2005) for a more general particularly notable applications of classical examination of visual topoi. 118 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics influential medium of cultural production. emotionally package key social issues I hope this essay contributes to such a (19.1456b). While, as Aristotle explains, resurgence. poetics dramatizes social events and Below, before turning to a specific rhetoric comments on those events examination of Alien, Outland, and Blade through direct speech (19.1456b), both Runner, I find it necessary to reflect on arts require an intimate familiarity with how the rhetorical study of dystopian cultural doxa and the emotional space reflects both (1) the intersection predispositions of one’s audience toward between rhetorical (persuasive) and certain ideas and events (cf. Burke, 1966, poetical (literary, mimetic) discourses and p. 296). But, as Kenneth Burke stresses, (2) that between invention and the long- this distinction between overt neglected canon of memory. I then turn argumentation and dramatization rarely these critical pairings toward the topic of yields neat boundaries: the distinction is cinematic dystopian space seen in “forever on the move” (1966, p. 307). dystopian film. Anecdotes and didactic narratives, one might point out, often dramatize events in Rhetoric, Poetics, and Epideixis service of overt argument, while literary As many historians of rhetoric have genres like the novel integrate numerous noted, the schism between poetics and rhetorical forms into their discursive rhetoric—which mirrors both the fiber.3 disciplinary split between English and Put another way, ancient purveyors of communication studies and, within liberal education might have perceived the English, the intradisciplinary split between ostensibly hard-and-fast present-day literature and rhetoric/composition—is a distinction between rhetorical genres (the fairly new phenomenon. In the words of political speech, essay, advertisement, George A. Kennedy (1999), “poetics can etc.) and poetical genres (the novel, be regarded as parallel to and overlapping poem, film, etc.) as artificially rigid.4 with rhetoric” in antiquity; both concern Here, the ancient category of epideictic style, generic convention, and appeals to rhetoric merits especial attention. In the character and emotion (pp. 135-136). In Rhetoric, Aristotle (2007) offers a tripartite the Poetics, Aristotle (2009) prescribes taxonomy of rhetorical orations: that, in the composition and performance deliberative, political speech concerning of drama, rhetorical knowledge should future of the polis; judicial, courtroom dictate how playwrights represent and speech demonstrating a forensic under- 3 Numerous critical discussions of the rhetoric of dynamics of textual authority between authors poetics now exist, but Bakhtin (2004) and Booth and readers. I believe the rheto-poetical study of (1983) provide two paradigmatic and particularly space I advocate here could supplement both useful examples. Bakhtin focuses on the novel as perspectives. the artistic arrangement of rhetorical forms like 4 For latter-day speculation about reintegrating the letter, speech, and so forth, while Booth (and rhetoric and poetics, see, for example, Crowley Chatman [1990], by extension) discusses the (1985-1986); Berlin (2003); Bialostosky (2016). Fall 2018 (2:2) 119 standing of the past; and epideictic, or rehash the example above, nothing in ceremonial speech concerned largely with, present American culture valorizes the but not properly limited to, the praise and rogue masculine hero more effectively blame of individuals and values in order to than the epideictic rhetoric of video firm up a sense of