The Rhetorics of Context: an Ethics of Belonging

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The Rhetorics of Context: An Ethics of Belonging

Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation

Authors Dewinter, Jennifer Fredale

Publisher The University of Arizona.

Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195654

THE RHETORICS OF CONTEXT:

AN ETHICS OF BELONGING

Jennifer Fredale deWinter

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial fulfillment of the Requirements For The Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, AND THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2008

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Jennifer Fredale deWinter entitled The Rhetorics of Context: An Ethics of

Belonging and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

______Date: November 19, 2008 Ken S McAllister

______Date: November 19, 2008 Theresa Enos

______Date: November 19, 2008 Edward M. White

______Date: November 19, 2008 Judd E. Ruggill

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

______Date: November 19, 2008 Dissertation Director: Ken S. McAllister

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgement of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED: ______Jennifer deWinter

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have been fortunate from the moment that I started my graduate studies in that I joined the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), a group of interested and interesting people to work with. So this acknowledgement needs to thank those with whom I have spent the last five years thinking, working, and collaborating: Ken McAllister for liking all of my ideas and then warning me about them; Judd Ruggill for painful yet insightful questions; Daniel

Griffin and Jason Thompson for sitting at my dining room table and talking theory late into the night; my mother Carol Johnson for using all her cell phone minutes when I got stuck writing a section and just needed to talk it out; and my long-suffering husband

Aaron McGaffey, whom I am sure wishes that I would pay attention to his technical advice concerning my computer with the same care that he has paid attention to my intellectual brainstormings. And while they are too young to have helped (indeed, they’re babies right now, so in actuality, they made writing the dissertation fairly difficult), I do want to recognize Freya deWinter and Rowan McGaffey for smiling sweetly at me when

I was so incredibly stressed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES...... 6 ABSTRACT...... 7 CHAPTER ONE: THE INVISIBLE RHETORICS OF CONTEXT...... 9 Context as God Term...... 14 The Paradoxes of an Ambivalent Context ...... 19 Chapter Overview...... 29 CHAPTER TWO: THE SPATIAL METAPHORS OF CONTEXT ...... 36 The Cartographies of Context...... 38 Framing Contexts...... 44 The Landscapes of Context...... 48 An Ethics of Metaphorical Contexts ...... 54 CHAPTER THREE: TEXTUAL CONTEXTS ...... 58 Words as Contexts for Words: Bounded and Unbounded Texts...... 61 The Myth of Decontextualization and Recontextualization ...... 66 Expanding Contexts: Adaptation as Means to Move through Space and Time ...... 80 An Ethics of Textual Context ...... 83 CHAPTER FOUR: RHETORICAL CONTEXTS ...... 88 The Marriage of Classical Theory and Modern Anthropology ...... 93 Classical Contexts: Weaving Together Fabrics of Meaning ...... 93 Rhetorical Situations: The Study of Rhetoric Through the Study of Man...... 97 Orality and Origin...... 103 “And Every Word, When Once It Is Written, Is Bandied About” ...... 112 CHAPTER FIVE: CONSUMMABLE CONTEXTS ...... 120 Purposeful Recontextualization: How to Make Global Texts Feel Local...... 123 Context as a Means to Invest Mass-Produced Texts with Authenticity...... 129 Context as Pure Commodity ...... 142 An Ethics of Consumable Context ...... 145 CHAPTER SIX: IN DEFENSE OF AN ETHICS OF CONTEXT...... 149 Context as Dialectic...... 152 Context as Rhetoric ...... 154 Context Tropes as Narratives ...... 155 Context Tropes as Places ...... 158 Context Tropes as Commodities ...... 160 Conclusion...... 161 WORKS CITED ...... 164

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1: Contextualization/Recontextualization Continuum ...... 68 Figure 5.1: Inaugural Issue of The Rose ...... 133 Figure 5.2: Covers of Japanese Newtype and Newtype USA ...... 138

ABSTRACT I examine the role of context as a rhetorical trope. As a rhetorical trope, context tends to fix complex practices in single places, which allows for the celebration of the authentic or original. Further, it privileges production while masking complex practices of circulation and consumption while simultaneously constraining seemingly infinite possibilities into finite frames that then become static and naturalized. These practices need to be examined in order to understand how power is being enacted via the trope of context for the purposes of control and limitation. I argue throughout that these power dynamics need to be addressed—that the ethics of context need to consider who or what is empowered, who or what is disempowered, and decide whether such a situational power dynamic is acceptable or should be changed.

I move through the dissertation by first presenting the metaphors of context— maps, frames, and landscapes—discussing the ways in which each of these metaphors control and limit context and therefore control and limit the text. I then analyze the textual and rhetorical context traditions to illuminate the ways in which these two prevalent traditions assume a static and constant original context to which a text belongs.

The constant appeal to an origin, I argue, invests a text or artifact with historical aura, which is often used to obscure and limit other critical engagements with a text thus controlling a text’s or artifact’s possible meanings and transformative power. Following this exploration, I turn my attention to contexts as consumable commodities. I argue that contexts as rhetorical tropes are divorced from the dialectical process of meaning making from a text and can therefore exist as its own entity. As such, contexts can be marketed to and consumed by people. An ethics of context, I conclude, would challenge the god term

8 that context has become in order to expose the power and ideological control that is exerted via a deployment of rhetorical contexts. Such an ethics would address, again, the dialectical formation of texts and contexts—texts define contexts; contexts define texts; they are inseparable.

CHAPTER ONE: THE INVISIBLE RHETORICS OF CONTEXT

Otaku [fans of Japanese anime and manga] must continue to strive for

legitimacy as well as appreciation and recognition of Anime in its original,

Japanese context.

Chris Bourke

“End of Anime: English Dubs”

We need perspectives that can reveal the place of each artistic object

within its cultural landscape; we need concepts that can enable us to

discover medieval expectations and intentions while acknowledging our

own.

Nancy Freeman Regalado

From the “Introduction” of Contexts:

Style and Values in Medieval Art and

Literature

Context is paramount; there is no rhetoric without context.

Roy Sellers

“Rhetoric”

In 1998, after spending a year studying in Tokyo Japan, I was invited to sit on a panel with two other panelists to answer questions about living in Japan. To my left sat

Antonia Levi, a Japanese historian who specialized in MacArthur-era Japan and who had

10 just published Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation. To my right sat a young man who had spent time in Osaka. The scene was Tacoma,

Washington’s anime convention Baka-Con (now Sakura-Con), and our conference room was packed. The moderator, who was also a conference organizer, stood proudly in front of the room and welcomed the audience. He explained that this panel was unique. While the other panels presented on art forms, subtitling techniques, and industry trends, this panel was designed to get to the questions that so many anime fans had. He announced that a person could not understand anime without understanding Japan, so the panel members would take questions for two hours about anything “Japanese.” And following this, a flood of questions washed over us, from self-warming toilet seats with a hundred buttons to the correct way to eat rice. Eventually, we ran overtime.

This is not a unique experience; there prevails among anime fans a belief that one must understand Japan if one is to understand anime. As such, magazines such as

Animerica and the English version of Newtype: The Moving Pictures Magazine publish articles that reports about food, anime culture, and special events. 1 Context, then, is consumed as much as or even more than the text itself. This phenomenon is not limited to an obscure anime fan-base: US Harry Potter fans pay extra for the British version of the book series, Hong Kong movies such as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Hero are

1 Newtype is a good example of the complex way that “Japanese” texts circulate in Western society. Originally a Japanese magazine that addressed all forms of moving pictures, Newtype eventually developed a reputation for its anime content, even while included content about the live-action movie and computer game industries. When ADV bought the rights to publish Newtype in the US, that company limited the content to anime, manga, and computer games exclusively. The English version of Newtype ended its run in March of 2008.

11 playing in megaplexes with English subtitles, and even food tourist industries are enjoying greater popularity with consumers going to France, for example, in order to learn about the histories and practices of French cuisine. The text can no longer be consumed on its own; it needs to be consumed with context, and that context is celebrated.

Invoked contexts are always rhetorical, and the ways in which rhetorical power acts via contexts can best be seen by returning to the three quotations from the beginning of this chapter. The first quotation concerns a debate in anime fandom concerning

English subtitles or English dubbed voiceovers. In this quotation the author is using context in multiple ways. First, he uses context to legitimize anime as a Japanese cultural art form; second, he speaks to a general celebration of an original context to defend the supremacy of English subtitles for original Japanese dialogue instead of English voiceovers; and third, he limits context by appealing to an original context. The second quotation concerning medieval scholarship starts from a position that is already legitimized in the academy, so the author’s use of context is different. Regalado proposes a study of context to unfold the complications of texts and artifacts in its medieval setting while also acknowledging the effect of a modern context in reading and analyzing historical contexts. The context, in this understanding, becomes yet another text placed into a new context—a text within a context within a context. The final quotation by

Sellers, which speaks to the tautology of text and context, quite plainly states that context is the vessel in which all rhetorical action occurs; it is an external, determining force that makes thought and action possible.

This dissertation is concerned with the rhetorics of context. “Context,” as is evident, is a complex term with many different meanings and purposes. The familiarity coupled with the malleability of this term allows people to use it for different rhetorical ends. It has the ring of authenticity because it is often represented as an external place to which texts and artifacts belong. Further, common rhetorical usage of the term tends to construct the externalized context as the origin of the text. And that authenticity is powerful, often working at what Brummett terms quotidian and conditional levels of persuasion. Brummett creates a rhetorical continuum that includes exigent, quotidian, and conditional rhetoric. Exigent rhetoric works at a conscious level, that is, it is rhetorical discourse that both the rhetor and audience understand has suasory intent. In the middle of the continuum, quotidian rhetoric functions at the daily professional and personal decision-making rhetorics in which people all engage. If pressed, people can recognize quotidian rhetoric as having suasory intent, but it is not obvious in its daily use. Finally, on the other end of the continuum is conditional rhetoric, a rhetoric that has become so naturalized that it is invisible. It works at the level of ideology, grammatical functions, cultural values and ethics, and so on. Appeals to authenticity and original contexts are generally not done with overt suasory intentions in mind.2 Rather, the underlying assumptions of an invoked context have become naturalized and thus, for the most part, invisible, working at quotidian and conditional levels in rhetorical discourse.

2 There are obvious exceptions to this, such as the buying and selling of artwork and unique objects. At these times, the direct appeal to history and authenticity works to add aura to the piece as well as increase its monetary value.

The tension between context as an unquestioned, conditional assumption and context as celebrated origin drew me to this topic. In the course of my research in the global circulation of texts, I constantly came across the claim that all understandings that did not celebrate a text’s original context were faulty. At a national conference, for example, a woman presented a paper on black face in Japanese popular culture, and an audience member who was an expert on Japan quickly told her that the interpretation that she presented was wrong, that any understanding of ganguro (literally “black face”), young Japanese men and women who constantly tan in order to look African, was simply wrong without considering Amuro Namie, an Okinawan pop star who was part black.

Missing in this attack was a recognition that the presenter was speaking on the popularity of Japanese mass culture in the United States and the perceptions of Black Face in a US context. Never once in this or most any other discussion is the appeal to context questioned when it is used to challenge work in the circulation of mass culture. Rather, scholars challenge understandings based on an assumed, original context.

This dissertation is in response to this and many other similar positions in scholarship and popular opinion. Contexts are generally described as a dialectical process with texts wherein texts and contexts define one another. However, as I argue throughout this dissertation, what people say about context and how they invoke and actually use context is significantly different. That is, when people invoke the term context, they are often relying on context as a rhetorical trope, a way to present a limited and limiting reading of a text or artifact in order to persuade a reader to adopt a certain understanding of the world. Because contexts are powerful controlling tropes, scholars need to

14 interrogate how power is created and enacted through this trope of context in order to develop a more informed and ethical method of scholarship that engages in principled rhetorical and scholarly production. To begin this interrogation into the ethics of context,

I discuss Weaver’s definition of “god term” and the ethical complications caused by the way in which context has fallen into this category. Following this, I present some of context’s paradoxes, which expose some of the basic dangers of leaving context unexamined. Because context remains a god term, I argue that context acts to fix complex practices in space and time, which acts to privilege an origin and thus empowers only those people who understand the original context. Finally, I offer a chapter breakdown that will provide a guide to the complex rhetorics of context.

Context as God Term

Words often do things; they are not neutral tools that carry intended meaning. As

J. L. Austen succinctly puts it, “[w]e were to consider, you will remember, some cases and senses (only some, Heaven help us!) in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something” (12). Words such as “context” carry both intended and unintended force depending on the historical meaning of the word and its intended contemporary meaning (100). With terms like

“context,” the meaning and therefore the force of the word are oftentimes ambiguous because of the multiple meanings intended, assumed, and historically invested into the term.

Contexto in Latin means “to weave together” (con means “together” and texto “to weave”). From its Latin beginnings, context tends to rest on the foundation of text for meaning, which can prove problematical as text remains a contentious term that seems to encompass anything that falls under the analytical eye of the scholar. In Image—Music—

Text, Barthes attempts to systematically define what a text is (and is not) in seven hypotheses: (1) texts are activities of production, (2) texts cannot be classified into a hierarchy of importance, (3) texts are radically symbolic, (4) texts exist within the intertextual with no identifiable source or end, (5) texts exist within networks that are not dependent on the idea of an author per se, (6) texts and readers collaborate to make meaning, and (7) texts are a pleasure to read/consume (155-64).

Like text, context is equally difficult to define. Further, like culture, context is an abstraction that refers to a variety of different concepts. One category that encapsulates the ways in which scholars define context is environmental—cultural, social, historical, eventual, and circumstantial—in which a text exists or acts. Another metacategory for context is theoretical—feminist, modernist, postmodernist, postcolonialist, new criticism, and so on—which provides scholars a lens through which they can analyze a text to illuminate meaning. More than either of these categories, though, context situates exactly how rhetoric works on exigent, quotidian, and conditional levels. Media anthropologists

Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin assert that ethnographic studies in local contexts

“help us see not only how media are embedded in people’s quotidian lives but also how consumers and producers are themselves imbricated in discursive universes, political situations, economic circumstances, national settings, historical moments, and

16 transnational flows, to name only a few relevant contexts” (2). This definition, which weaves together understandings of context through ethnographic readings, is useful because of its emphasis on the plurality of contexts. The idea that texts exist in many contexts simultaneously is not new; academics have long discussed contextual multiplicity from playing the British game cricket in India (Appadurai 1996) to the reception of Japanese anime in both Japan and the US (Kelts 2006).

The ways in which contemporary scholars employ “context” directly responds to the New Criticism of the 1950s and 1960s. New Criticism’s focus on language and structure acted to divorce a text from a reality in which it was produced, circulated, and consumed, which allowed critics to ignore the murkiness created when a text is in dialectical engagement with the world around it. Scholars eventually responded to this practice by introducing contexts, recognizing that a text could never be divorced from the situations in which it existed, and that these many situations inscribed the text with certain ideological understandings of the world. Feminist scholarship attempted to uncover textual meanings in a patriarchal system. Border-studies scholarship thought through the connections between a physical and social context made by intersecting spaces. Critical discourse scholars adapted anthropological and psychological theories that examined the interplay between place and meaning to make sense of communication.

Scholars who specialized in historical materialism brought the ways that material contexts affected the meanings of texts. Context also answered many of the ethical quandaries raised by texts: Texts are never apolitically consumed; rather, texts affect lived realities by changing thought, adding to ideas, and reifying ideological structures.

Already, academia challenges simplistic understandings of ambiguous constructs.

Academics have set their deconstructive sights on culture, nationalism, authenticism, nostalgia, community, and loaded terms in order to expose the assumptions and power at play via the invocation of the term. Context has long enjoyed the position of a Gricean conversational implicature—an unstated understanding that allows people to talk about a text with an external understanding attached. And such a starting point is important, for it allows work to be done without getting bogged down in defining every term that a scholar may use to do historical recovery, for example, or area studies into Japan. By appealing to context, a scholar can assume enough of a shared understanding about the term that she would not need to outline the contexts in which texts and artifacts work; instead, she can turn her attention to studying how texts and artifacts work.

Unfortunately, “context” now reigns as a singular noun, declaring its omnipotence over a text and, indeed, over those who read texts. The quotations from the beginning of this chapter speak to this problem: a Japanese context that acts to collapse the heterogeneity of diverse cultures and histories, a singular cultural landscape in which medieval texts can be placed, and, of course, the all-encompassing acontextual context of rhetoric. “Context,” in essence, has become a god term, which Weaver defines as “an expression about which all other expressions are ranked as subordinate” (212). And while

Weaver explores the god terms of social science, the fact remains that context is the unexamined assumption under which all other categories are ranked and subordinate; that is, texts and readings of those texts that are taken out of their original context and placed

18 in new contexts are seen as inferior, subordinate to the original context. Rhetorical god terms disguise power relationships that need to be interrogated. Indeed, as the title of this dissertation suggests, an analysis of context necessarily becomes an analysis of the ethics of placement in order to constantly engage with situational power relationships in an attempt to re-envision relationships for greater equity.

Coupled with the use of context as a rhetorical god term is the practice of using context when what a person means is culture, history, groups defined by geopolitical borders, and so on. These terms, which have undergone serious critique in the last twenty years, have gone into hiding behind context because context seems to be the absolute external needed for all meaning-making. Ethnographers and area studies scholars (East

Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and so on) have long theorized contextualization, the argument stating that a text is intimately connected to the cultural and temporal environment from which it emerged. Thus the work of many scholars has focused on textual origin: the original author and authorial intention, a text’s circulation among an intended audience, and the intended effect (or purpose) within that specific culture and moment. Poststructuralists, however, have questioned many of these assumptions. For example, Foucault challenges the idea of an original author, arguing that it is not useful to focus on the intention of the author; rather, we would be better served analyzing how the text dialectically informs and works within other structures of power. To this, Stuart Hall would add that the text not only acts to reinforce structures of power but is itself structured in dominance. However, as I argue throughout this dissertation, a text’s dialectical engagement with context does not occur just at a text’s or artifact’s inception

19 but constantly throughout the text’s or artifact’s trajectory through time and space. The practice of linking texts and artifacts to their origins stops the dialectical creation of knowledge in favor of a fixed meaning that needs to be conveyed through rhetorical persuasion.

The Paradoxes of an Ambivalent Context

Leaving “context” unexamined has led usage of the term from the realm of ethical specificity to ambivalence. This ambivalence can be seen in the following tensions:

. Contexts are constructed, but they are often seen as external and authentic. The

drive to assume contexts invests contexts with an aura that is fixed in a singular

historical moment.

. Contexts necessarily limit the described reality, but those limitations are rarely if

ever addressed.

. While multiple contexts exist simultaneously, privilege tends to be granted to an

assumed original context, which is defined by place of production or place of

consumption by intended audience, to which all other contexts are subordinated.

. Contexts appear to exist outside of texts—an external spatial reality or situation—

when in fact texts interact dialectically with spatial and temporal contexts to

define each other.

. Defining context as a fixed place (that is, defined in space and time) acts to mask

circulation while providing a stable positionality.

In this dissertation, then, I explore the complications of an unexamined “context.”

I argue that the unexamined use of context; (1) fixes complex practices in a single space, which enables the celebration of an original or authentic context; (2) enables the privileging of production and consumption while masking powerful and global practices of circulation by spatially fixing texts, artifacts, and practices; and (3) constrains infinite possibilities into a frame that defines histories, uses, and intersections that eventually becomes static and naturalized.

Throughout this dissertation I examine who produces contexts, for what purposes, why context enjoys such a privileged place in both popular discourses as well as academic ones, and what, ultimately, are the results of context. This dissertation is not, however, about why context is “bad.” Indeed, context is ambiguous and only experiences stability when analysts set out to define it. I am aware that approaching context with this assumption raises certain challenges. For example, the risk of confusing the political dynamics around the co-construction of agents and contexts means that the danger of making tautological arguments is fairly high. There is also risk of undermining the utility of the term "context" without offering an alternate term that is less problematical. And also, the use of the term “context” is not without danger, for it is difficult to use a term while simultaneously critiquing it. While theorists have used such substitutions as

“situation,” “scene,” and descriptions of place, I find that substituting a different word for “context” only partially represents the intended meanings. Throughout the dissertation I will remain sensitive to these challenges and work to overcome them both for myself and my readers. Context remains vitally important, for scholars use it in an

21 attempt to make explicit the assumed narratives in which texts exist. The purpose of this project is to show that in spite of this important work, “context” is routinely used not to unveil hidden meanings but rather to create them by artificially fixing events, behaviors, and artifacts in "authentic" times and places.

Given these mechanisms of restraint and definition, it should be clear that

“context” is political, and it is rhetorically employed for specific purposes at particular times in the service of power. Therefore, the processes that act to fix complex practices in an authentic place have very real consequences on both intellectual inquiry and the material world. For example, scholars tend to use “context” as an expansive concept; that is, academics attempt to provide students and peers with an understanding of spatial and material concerns, such as historical contexts, cultural contexts, and such. So, as Nancy

Freeman Regalado, the medieval scholar in the opening quotation, argues, scholars need to “reveal the place of each artistic object within its cultural landscape.” And her book

Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, like so many other books that attempt to situate artifacts within historical and cultural context, carefully introduces some of the recorded facts, speculated theses, and remaining artifacts from the medieval period in Europe. This practice is intended to open a conversation, adding new complexities and ways of understanding regarding certain artifacts. What simultaneously happens, however, is a two-fold process: first, such description privileges an authentic origin (the medieval) because it was the space of initial production and consumption.

Second, defining context in this way creates boundaries, making context, not an expansion of the infinite, but of a finite understanding. This is the paradox of context:

The process of broadening understanding acts to limit it. Yet the constant exploration into multiple finite representations of context acts to broaden understanding.

This finite understanding of context constrains knowledge, allowing those who know a context to make claims concerning other people’s lack of knowledge. Context, then, becomes the weapon of the specialist: I have lived in Japan, so I have an understanding of that context, which qualifies me to sit on a panel and answer questions concerning the daily life of an entire nation-state to fans of Japanese anime and manga.

This authentic, originating experience acts to subordinate most other experiences with anime and manga—that is, fans’ experiences with anime and manga in the US is incomplete because they are not informed by any experiential—which is to say,

“original” and “authentic”—Japanese context. As such, the lived life of material objects and intellectual ideas is caught, defined, and placed into the museum that is context. The material conditions of context are limited to those material conditions that were intended; its effect on intellectualism is defined by accepted exchanges in the history of intellectual ideas.

The university provides another case study in the limiting effects of context.

Universities are themselves contexts within contexts: the university, as opposed to the surrounding community, is a spatial divide that is grounded in a physical campus; colleges within the university claim their own contexts and own intellectual histories; departments within colleges pursue different interests; indeed, even programs in departments exemplify the ways in which defining contexts acts to segregate actors. Such projects as interdisciplinarity, community service, and faculty/administration

23 collaboration tend to resist the hybridization of practices, knowledges, and histories because, at the end of the day, people still return to their home departments and work within departmental guidelines and engage in departmental politics. One reason for this is that context, in defining place, defines borders and boundaries, and those borders and boundaries become naturalized in such a way that projects such as interdisciplinarity can and do become a process of appropriation wherein scholars attempt to fit different knowledges into a predefined context. For example, current research into disability studies in the field of rhetoric and composition tends to ignore medical research that explicitly outlines the very real limitations of people with disabilities in favor of a postmodern, social-based understanding of disability as a negative construction (Linton

1998; Davis 1995). While this research tends to be classified as medical rhetoric, some academics working in this area appropriate the subject matter without responsibly attending to the research available in medical disciplines.

This appears to be more easily done with theory, which attempts to form metacategories for understanding the world. For example, people in rhetoric and composition borrow the knowledge of scientific sociological theory, such as Thomas

Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution and Donna Haraway’s Simian, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, and explain how these theories fit their specific research needs. In these cases, it appears that the context created by consumption overrides the context created by production. Rhetoric and composition scholars also turn their academic eyes to other disciplines’ objects of study, such as new media or pictorial art, but generally with the lens of their field, contextualized within their field. While

24 importing texts, artifacts, and theories into disciplinary contexts acts to transform the disciplines, the paradox remains that these disciplinary borders remain. The contextual limitations of interdisciplinarity allow only certain types of cross-disciplinary work while simultaneously protecting departmental turf.

The tension between a dynamic exchange of ideas and the static nature of contextualized disciplines has some unforeseen consequences. It allows many academics to be conservative in their discipline, which allows them to focus their research on a very minute area of study while ignoring certain connections to related topics. For example, literature instructors can focus their careers on the literary analysis of texts and ignore movie and television adaptations, politics of translation, modes of production and marketing, and other disciplinary intersections around the text. Another consequence pertains to the rhetorics surrounding ownership, that is, to what discipline a text or artifact belongs. Part of this rhetoric depends on the rhetoric of appropriation, or the idea that others have taken ownership of a text for study that doesn’t “belong” to them. This form of academic tribalism can be seen in disciplinary journals, in faculty who claim a certain type of text as their own, and even in descriptions of what counts as acceptable scholarship for promotion and tenure.3 Finally, those few members of the academy who manage to break contextual borders and write in constantly newly forming academic contexts tend to find that they lack a comfortable home in any department or program, at least until a sufficiently transdisciplinary institution emerges that matches their scholarly inclinations. Women’s Studies programs, for example, often meet this need, and become

3 Anecdotal cases abound of faculty advising graduate students to limit their research within disciplinary boundaries until they receive tenure.

25 a mixture of affiliated faculty from English, sociology, psychology, science, media arts, and many other departments. A more recent example includes scholars who are interested in computer game research. While new media programs and labs are beginning to emerge, game scholars are still housed in departments as diverse as media arts, rhetoric and composition, communication, sociology, computer science, cognitive science, and so forth.

In response to all these factors—a desire for stable placement, a need to create boundaries, a tendency toward academic tribalism, the celebration of an original—that tend to limit both popular and academic understandings of “context,” “context” becomes naturalized as a stable, place-based construct. Underlying appeals to context as a rhetorical strategy is a general unease caused by a perceived lack of stability in which people can position themselves and subsequently a position of power from which they can speak. As a result of this unease, people construct stable contexts that enable the creation of binary structures that define a natural context (that is, the original context) in opposition to an opposite context that is marked as inferior. In a dialectical process, contexts are often material, from the materials that provide a spatial understanding of the world to the artifacts that provide a limited but important container to meaning (such as the bound book and an Internet archive acting as a different contexts to the written word).

This materiality tends to disappear when contexts are constructed and imposed as a rhetorical trope.

The marking of certain contexts as other happens when texts and contexts are invested with aura, or the idea of an original and therefore mystical presence in history.

As Walter Benjamin writes, “[t]he uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable” (223). For Benjamin, art belongs to history, and it achieves uniqueness from its historical trajectory: “An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura” (5). This aura, according to Benjamin, is erased by mechanical reproduction. The loss of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, according to Benjamin, has possible benefits, most notably of which is the ability to engage consumers with the politicization of art. That is, if consumers are no longer subjugated by the religious and historical aura of art, then they should be able to use art for political purposes and enact social change. However, the role of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction can also be used for fascist purposes by aestheticizing politics for social control. Benjamin specifically discusses the ways in which aura is invented and invested in objects for the purposes of control, using the artistic creation that war is sublime as his primary example.

The movement to place texts and artifacts into an original context is an attempt to reinvent and reinvest texts and artifacts with aura; it is often, in other words, the aetheticization of politics that Benjamin was concerned about. This movement is often created and controlled by a small group of people who are using the concept of aura for politically charged purposes from limiting control over knowledge to making claims to

27 cultural property. John Henry Merryman notes in “The Public Interest in Cultural

Property:”

[e]very cultural object is to some extent a part of a larger context from

which it draws, and to which it adds, meaning. Separated from its context,

“decontextualized,” the object and the context both lose significance. At

the extreme the object becomes anonymous, an orphan without reliable

indication of its origin, its significance, its place and function as a part of

something else. (356)

The preservation of a text with a context can become so exaggerated as to be useless—a

“sentimental notion that the object belongs somewhere because that is where it was made, or where it was first discovered, or where the cultural descendants of its makers now live” (357-58). Merryman turns his attention to the Elgin Marbles, the statuary moved from the Parthenon in the early nineteenth century to its current home in the British

Museum in London. The Greek citizenry argue that the British Museum should return the statuary to Greece—that it belongs in the context of the modern Greek nation-state.

However, as Merryman observes, the Elgin marbles would not be reunited/ recontextualized with the Parthenon; they would be moved from one museum to another.

Nevertheless, public debate still rages, and popular opinion in Brittan supports returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece where they belong, that is, in their original context (Stewart).

In the case of the Elgin Marbles, the context as a rhetorical appeal is grounded in a high-stakes political debate where cultural authority and aura are tied up in a political economy: The Elgin Marbles make money and could be making money for Greek

28 institutions. However, the rhetorics that invest texts and artifacts with aura via context are often more subtle and unquestioned. For example, such books as Jane Austen in Context and Adam Smith in Context: A Critical Reassessment of Some Central Components of His

Thought attempt to invest mass-produced books and ideas with aura, with uniqueness. In cases such as this, “in context” is referring to an original context, and placing texts and artifacts in this way acts to situate texts into historical places, to invest it with aura.

Benjamin’s prediction that aura disappears with mechanical reproduction is being fought with the idea of a stable and historical context.

Missing in the aura-creating context is a movement through history. Benjamin argues that objects become invested with aura because they do move through both history and space. The older an object is known to be, the greater its aura. In the case of literary texts mentioned above, the invested aura owes its existence to the original even though the versions that consumers have available to them are almost always copies. The ideas and words contained in these texts move throughout history, reproduced multiple times, yet it appears that people still feel uneasy with mass production and reproduction as a means to move through history. Texts and artifacts still move through the spaces of history in different forms and difference languages, and these movements are as important to the aura of any text or artifact as the original. Texts and artifacts, then, do move through different contexts unfettered by the limitations of an original context in which it needs to be placed; attempts to fetter texts and link them to an original context seems, at best, a futile effort that must be invented and reinvented multiple times to counter unstoppable movement.

To contextualize any experience with an artifact (intellectual or material) is to always to contextualize that experience in a present tense that is always already built on a history of prior and connected contextualizations, whether those contexts are known or not; that is, to contextualize is to always understand that experiences with artifacts have existed in many situations, many material conditions, and have transformed people’s lives in different ways. Multiple contextualizations tend to strip the historical aura of a text, which can allow people to critically engage with a text or artifact not as ritual but as political pieces that act and interact with the world. To continue to tout the idea of an artifact’s context is to merely perpetuate the idea of a singular context—that of the original—which replaces all other experiences with texts and artifacts in different contexts. The result of this practice allows people to dismiss the multiplicity of contexts as subordinate and not as important for appreciation and study, and hidden under the god term of context is a political agenda used to control the formation and circulation of ideas and meanings.

Chapter Overview

In chapter two, “The Metaphors of Context,” I examine three common metaphors that people use in conjunction with context: maps, frames, and landscapes. I start with an examination of the metaphors of context because metaphors provide a way to organize and make sense of abstract concepts, such as context. These three metaphors rely on a spatial and visual representation of the world, which act to limit the expansiveness of context. Texts can be placed in maps, frames, and landscapes, compelling people to

30 imagine a space or place in which a text might belong. This implicitly guides people to imagine a place where texts and artifacts belong, perpetuating the drive to find an original context for a text. Further, as I argue in this chapter, these metaphors present a context as a stable container, implying that only the text or artifact is dynamic and worthy of study.

This ignores the ways that texts and contexts dialectically form one another through each engagement. Instead, contexts as they are represented through these metaphors are rhetorical; they provide a lens through which to make sense of texts and artifacts by presenting a limited reading and understanding. I include multiple examples of these three metaphors in action, from literary studies to business advice, from travel literature to computer game scholarship. I have chosen this rather broad data set to show how the metaphors of context are ubiquitous and naturalized across multiple discourse communities. The purpose of this chapter is to make visible these naturalized metaphors in order to understand how they work to organize and limit contexts for rhetorical purposes. Such an inquiry would ideally disrupt the naïve reproduction of power imbedded in maps, frames, and landscapes, making space either for conscious use and critique of these metaphors or for new metaphors to emerge.

Historically, theories regarding context grew up in literary, anthropological, and rhetorical studies, so in chapters three and four, I explore how definitions and understandings of context develop in the scholarship. In chapter three, “Textual

Contexts,” I discuss common definitions of textual context that were developed in New

Criticism and theories of intertextuality. I argue that textual contexts act as a powerful rhetorical trope that creates an idea of an origin or an authentic placement via contextual

31 boundaries. In this chapter, I argue that original contexts are rhetorically invoked in response to the destabilizing effects of textual circulation, an approach that privileges authorial intention and audience reception within intended contexts. Scholars tend to trace texts back to their intended context to limit the domain of knowledge creation, which, according to Foucault, gives a text status. Further, by linking a text to an original context is to inscribe that text with what Benjamin calls an historically-based aura, which invests the text with the power of unquestionable authenticity. The idea of an original context is first created in the theories of textual context and then presupposed in subsequent theories of decontextualization and recontextualization. That is, the idea of an original context is embedded in the linguistic structure of the re- and de-. This devalues other textual readings from other contexts, limiting an analysis of how texts and contexts dialectically call each other into existence through complex relationships. As an example of this, I examine the ways in which the US Southwest is presented, read, and represented in different contexts, shaping those contexts and being shaped in return. I conclude this chapter with a consideration of the ethics of textual contexts—one that allows for and accounts for the spatial and temporal circulation of texts. Texts are always already in multiple contexts. Instead of searching for an original context, an ethics of textual context will attend to a multiplicity of contexts. It would recognize that any analysis of a text in a context has the phantoms of previous contexts haunting it and while anticipating the influence that text and context will have on future contexts as well.

In chapter four, “Rhetorical Contexts,” I examine the ways in which the idea of origin and authenticity is constructed in rhetorical theory. Theories for rhetorical context,

I argue, evolved from two different intellectual histories: (1) classical rhetoric, which taught people how to become orators who spoke well, and (2) anthropological ethnographies, which argued how oral utterances could only be understood at a specific place and time. Both of these histories are based on an oral tradition, which necessarily depends on a specific speaker speaking to a definable and intended audience at a particular place. In such cases, once the moment and utterance passes, so too does the surrounding context. However, as I argue in “Rhetorical Contexts,” reproductions of a rhetorical moment, whether the reproductive medium is text, film, new media or so on, allow the text to interact in multiple contexts for different rhetorical purposes. A presidential speech has different rhetorical purposes when it is delivered in front of a crowd, read in a political science college class, or played on The History Channel. The focus on rhetorical situation, I argue in this chapter, ignores how globalization affects rhetorical acts, both challenging and reinforcing the ideologies embedded into rhetoric. Rhetorical contexts, I assert in this chapter, need to be read as constantly emerging in the process of reproduction and re-consumption—there are multiple authors, audience, and situations for any rhetorical text, and as such, there are always multiple purposes for which any text can be employed. A focus on an intentional rhetorical context obscures or devalues all instances of rhetoricity surrounding a text or artifact in favor of a theoretical situation that depends on an oral tradition.

In chapter five, “Consumable Contexts,” I move from the ways in which contexts are rhetorically employed to create knowledge to how contexts are rhetorically employed as part of smart business practices. Businesses invoke contexts to localize texts and artifacts. This process of localization can be simple, such as buying rights and

“publishing” a text in a new context. Translating texts is also another common way to change texts to fit a new context, making linguistic meaning available to a new audience.

Also, producers who buy texts and purposefully recontextualize those texts often change and rearrange meaning and materials to fit a new context. There are innumerable examples of this type of recontextualization. The Pokemon (Oriental Light & Magic 1998) anime craze, which originated in Japan, provides one such example: US producers chose not to air several episodes of the animated series, and the episodes that were aired often had numerous scenes recut and rearranged throughout the season. This allowed the US distributor, 4Kids Entertainment, to change the information and meaning of the original text, for example when the company felt it needed to substitute (not just translate) dialogue that it thought would be offensive to US audiences (Katsuno and Maret).

Contrary to this, it is also fairly common for marketing strategies to emerge that attempt to create and preserve an original context (in this case, Japanese). Even more remarkable is that the version that is purposefully recontextualized for US audiences is subsequently exported to other countries. Further, when consumers know that a text has been decontextualized, they will rebel and put a tremendous amount of energy into understanding an authentic context for the artifact. For example, many Harry Potter fans

34 order the British version of a text in order to read the “authentic” novel (complete with terms like “petrol,” “trousers,” and the like). This is, I argue, a fairly innocuous construction of context. Consumers creating context is highly political, often affecting not only the formation of the text but also the formation of identity. For example, fans of anime and manga, two popular culture texts imported from Japan, have formed clubs and organized conventions; further, publishing houses have started to produce magazines specifically for anime and manga fans. The materials presented in these forums address more than just the texts of manga and anime; Japanese culture, Japanese landscapes, and even Japanese shopping districts and practices are popular topics. In fact, the opening phrase “In Japan, . . .” is commonplace in conversations at anime conventions and litters the pages of magazines and websites dedicated to Japanese popular texts. This practice goes even further, with magazines on manga, anime, and video games discussing merchandise that is not intended for release in the US, acting to further promote the context of Japan as the originator of in-demand-yet-scarce texts. In this chapter I trace multiple instances of this practice to explore the ways that context is not merely a way of understanding the production and consumption of texts but is also part of a political economy, based on circulation, that brands and sells context as an integral part of any text.

In my final chapter, I propose an ethics of context. I aim to address the power that is embedded in the rhetorical trope “context” in order to make explicit how and why contexts are constructed in particular ways. I echo my previous chapters, arguing for a

35 need to articulate a theory of context that allows for contextual multiplicity. Instead, I call on people to articulate their understanding of context in a self-reflexive manner that takes into account the politics of narration. Currently, when people invoke context for rhetorical purposes, they rely on tried and true stereotypes. For example, cultural contexts rely on stereotypes of nationalism, race, and representation. But more than a self-reflexive use of context as rhetorical trope, I argue for a dialectical method that sees texts and contexts creating one another. In such a method, contexts do not merely illuminate texts and texts do not belong to particular contexts; rather, scholars will inquire into the meaning of contexts and what texts can tell us about those contexts with the same rigor that they examine texts. Texts are always bound by context. I wholly support this statement while simultaneously supporting the flip side of this construction: contexts are always bound by texts. Further, the dialectical engagement between texts and contexts are always temporary, coming into existence and dispersing into history as texts and contexts move. As such, context require the same level of inquiry, the same care and attention that texts receive in order to make visible the conditional and quotidian rhetorics that are at work within the term, practice, and actuality of context.

CHAPTER TWO: THE SPATIAL METAPHORS OF CONTEXT

As enframing devices, metaphors are ideological and what we gain from

them can only be partial knowledge. (296)

Bill Gale

“Staging the Practices of Heritage”

The use of metaphor implies a way of thinking and a way of seeing that

pervade how we understand our world generally. (4)

Gareth Morgan

Images of Organization

Understanding the rhetorics underlying “context” requires an examination of some of the assumptions concerning context—assumptions that are ideologically present in the metaphors for context. Metaphors are simple enough to identify; they are, as Burke succinctly writes, “a device for seeing something in terms of something else” (Grammar

503). However, this definition does not speak to the relationship between metaphor and complex thought nor to the power of metaphors. In Washing the Brain: Metaphor and

Hidden Ideology, Andrew Goatly contends that “we are especially reliant on [metaphor] when discoursing on abstract targets. The strong claim of conceptual metaphor theory would be that abstract thought is only possible through the use of metaphor” (14).

Conceptual metaphor theory provides people with patterns, or conceptual metaphor themes, through which people can understand their world (15). And because people understand their world through these patterned metaphors, metaphors are inherently

37 ideological; embedded in metaphors is a series of conditional assumptions that shape people’s ideas and their relationships with their world.

The metaphors for context often rely on visual or spatial patterns, such as maps, frames, and landscapes. However, each of those metaphorical objects has undergone intense critical examination. Postcolonial theorists have argued, for example, that maps act ideologically to exert power and control by defining a set space. Once on a map, space rarely changes—it remains a certain place until the next cartographer presents a different representation. Contextual mapping is, unsurprisingly, imbricated in similar power structures and thus needs to be examined in order to question, engage with, and sometimes even resist those power structures. Frames, too, only present partial information based on vision (c.f. Barthes 1977). Because what is in the frame appears to be an accurate representation of the world, it makes invisible all material reality that is not included in the frame. As I discuss later in this chapter, frames provide limited snapshots, showing only what the person who constructed the framed material chooses to include. Landscapes, as the third metaphor, might be the strongest of the context metaphors. Like maps, landscapes refer to places; however, scholars discuss landscapes as more changeable and organic than the previous two metaphors, focusing on the layering of time and experience and the continual growth of objects within the landscape.

Yet landscape metaphors do not escape political ideologies as landscapes are often managed, arranged, and even “mapped” through the written word.

In this chapter, I discuss these three recurring metaphors of context: maps, frames, and landscapes. These three spatial metaphors appear in much of the discourse

38 concerning context. Therefore, before discussing the ways in which context is deployed as a rhetorical trope, it is important to first attend to the context’s metaphors, for as

Lakoff and Johnson succinctly state in Metaphors We Live By, “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (3). Thus in this chapter, I will analyze the conceptual system underlying context and how the ideologies embedded in these metaphors affect the usage of the very concept of context. I will be drawing on multiple sources from unrelated fields of study to show how the metaphors of context are common across completely unrelated knowledge domains. The purpose of doing so is to understand how, linguistically, scholars and consumers alike are compelled to link texts with original contexts. These metaphors, as I will demonstrate, deny theorizing a definition of context that accounts for global circulation and multiple interactions with a text.

The Cartographies of Context

Mapping context is mapping that which matters. [. . .] The range of

dimensions that are relevant depends very much on what it is that one is

trying to achieve (purpose), and what one’s existing situation is (position).

Robert Nash, Alan Hudson,

and Cecilia Luttrell

Mapping Political Context

‘Context mapping’ is a proprietary process where we try to understand the

environment in which the behavior under study takes place. We collect

relevant artifacts and map out the spaces where ‘what's going on’ happens.

“Context Mapping”

Ethnographic Research, Inc

In describing a context, scholars freeze a moment in time and begin to “map” out the meanings and ideologies, the texts and intertexts, and the cultures and practices, providing a thick description of the space. However, it seems that no matter how careful a scholar is, the frozen context becomes mimetically representational, constantly being reproduced, circulated, and consumed. For example, Ruth Benedict wrote The

Chrysanthemum and the Sword in 1944 for the Office of War Information in an effort to better understand Japanese culture. She wrote this influential book without ever having gone to Japan, and while scholars have harshly criticized this book for its representations of the Japanese people, it is still often cited as contextual evidence when reading a

Japanese text or artifact. Part of the reason for this may have to do with the permanence of writing: Once published as a print-based text, a described context does not change; it becomes naturalized by its endless consumability. But more insidious than the tyranny of the text, I would argue, are the cartographies of context.

Contexts are always representations of specific events, cultures, intertexts, and so forth. According to Stuart Hall, representations give meaning to those things that are depicted (Jhally), and that suggests that these representations are discourses that create maps of meaning or frameworks of intelligibility. Further, contexts map the interconnections among texts, among lived experiences, among histories and spaces, and in many cases, among certain geographies. Maps, as postcolonial theory has emphasized,

40 are not apolitical. They are often part of vast and largely larger and predominantly invisible processes that collect and codify data and are thus invested and invest institutions with power. As J. B. Harley notes,

Both in the selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles of

representation, maps are a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring

the human world which is biased toward, promoted by, and exerts

influence upon particular sets of social relations. By accepting such

premises it becomes easier to see how appropriate they are to

manipulation by the powerful in society. (278)

Maps act upon and constitute knowledge and ways of knowing, and in this way, they are inherently political. They are, according to Raymond Craib, “often an expression of desire rather than a summation of reality” (29). Contexts, too, are maps that are incomplete representations bound in space and time into which a text or artifact is placed.

This metaphor suggests that contexts preexist texts and artifacts instead of dialectically constituting text and context together. And what is excluded is as important as what is included, as it exerts influence onto how a text is read or understood.

Consider here what Benedict Anderson has to say about the intersection of the map and census in creating nationality: “The final logical outcome was the logo—of

‘Pagan’ or ‘The Phillippines,’ it made little difference—which by its emptiness, contextlessness, visual memorableness, and infinite reproducibility in every direction brought census and map, warp and woof, into an inerasable embrace” (185, emphasis added). The map, according to Anderson, became divorced from the material referent,

41 allowing for a rhetorical move of representation for the purposes of control. The colonialist enterprise perfected the use of maps as referential contexts, visual artifacts that are then reproduced indefinitely, seemingly outside of ideology because they appear to represent Truth with a capital T, a mere two-dimensional mirror of the world. They create and maintain the idea of the nation in the imaginary (this role of maps is maybe why, so often, context is conflated with nation-states, such as “the Japanese context” or “the

British context”). The processes of normalization, even naturalization, that move maps from representation to pure signifier follows a predictable trajectory, as each piece, according to Anderson, “could be wholly detached from its geographic context,” becoming instantaneously recognizable as logo. This process has become largely invisible, which allows it to be used with little question in a number of mundane instances.

Indeed, the very politics of inclusion and exclusion allow the cartographer to knowingly or unknowingly lie with maps. Mark Monmonier, for one, carefully examines the politics of map-making, from symbols on maps to temporal inconsistency. He states, quite clearly, “All maps distort reality.” Further, “All mapmakers use generalization and symbolization to highlight critical information and to suppress detail of lower priority.

All cartography seeks to portray the complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or on a television or video screen. In short, the author warns, all maps must tell white lies” (xi). These white lies are important to convey a useful picture of the world; however, Monmonier observes, these white lies make audiences tolerate and even leave unexamined more serious lies (1). The white lies that we accept pertain to scale, symbols,

42 and land distortions. More serious, though, are the lies that stem from either blundering or intentional misrepresentation.

Unsurprisingly, Monmonier notes that larger maps, which are able to contain more data, are more accurate whereas derivative maps—maps constructed by compiling information from other maps—have many more errors. While Monmonier is writing specifically about geospatial maps, he discusses throughout his book the ways in which maps are conceptual. Thus, his observations about derivative maps can be applied to a critique of contexts as conceptual word maps, for context construction often depends on compiling what others have said about context. For example, most non-Japanese fans of anime and manga have not been to Japan, but based on the supplementary contextual material (discussed in chapter five), they create a contextual map of a Japanese context.

And this supplementary material is marketed to them as context—context becomes a commodity that consumers can buy. The blunders inherent in derivative maps can be intentional, such as maps created for propaganda. Like all other forms of propaganda, the map’s message is created by “[. . .] emphasizing supporting features, suppressing contradictory information, and choosing provocative, dramatic symbols” (87). People trust these maps because they are willing to be persuaded by the authority already invested in something that looks so objective because they are taught that it is objective.

Goatly goes so far as to suggest that the map, with its apparent objectivism, fails as a metaphor. He writes:

It may be that, in many cases, metaphorical mapping is more like the maps

of Middl-earth [sic] provided in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings in which the

map constitutes or invents a reality rather than describing it. The metaphor

of mapping perhaps tends to push the experimental hypothesis too far in

the direction of objectivism. As Chilton remarks,

[I]t presupposes that the two domains are already structurally

similar. Yet there are no arguments for this similarity, except the

metaphorical move, the . . . analogy itself. Metaphor works by

projecting one relatively well-understood set of ideas onto a

domain that is problematic, rather than by simply expressing a pre-

existing and objective similarity. (1996: 106); (17)

The problem that Goatly identifies is that what a person might be trying to describe, in this case, context, is fairly unstructured. By imposing the metaphor of a map to context, one is imposing an objectivist structure and order, thus denying the inchoate and dynamic nature of the context (16).

Finally, contexts, as maps of meaning, seem to accurately represent certain spatial configurations. The problem is that texts expand those maps via circulation indefinitely.

As I will state again and again, texts and contexts are in constant dialectical engagement; they are not limited to places of original production nor to places of consumption because circulation ensures that texts quickly leave this origin. Further, even a fixed point in time and space is still a dynamic one, for it is simultaneously coming into being, being transformed into something else, and being extinguished. In the circulation of texts, meaning is not solely made by those who produce it (writers) nor by those who consume it (audiences), but by an interplay between the two wherein producers, distributers, world

44 markets, ideologies, societies, representations, and so forth are negotiated and transformed. Nevertheless, the search for an authentic or original context persists, and the effect of this persistence has progressed to the point that context is a reproducible commodity in global capitalist practices.

Framing Contexts

Behavior is interpreted contextually but that doesn’t mean that behavior is

interpreted arbitrarily. There are layers upon layers of contextual

frameworks that people use to interpret the meanings of given behaviors,

objects and concepts. (138)

Joseph Shaules

Deep Culture

In horror-based games, and some science fiction and fantasy, the

contextual framework tends to be more black-and-white, the player-

character established as a protagonist working in the interests of good

against evil forces. (58)

Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska

Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders

Placing a frame around an image is necessarily defining boundaries—what is inside the frame is considered; what is outside of the frame doesn’t matter. Interestingly, whatever is in the frame is considered important down to the smallest minutiae while whatever is excluded, regardless of its connections or proximity to what is inside the

45 frame, is invisible. There are exceptions to this, of course. A character in a frame will be looking at something off of the frame, indicating that an object or person is there, or in the case of cinema, sound can originate off frame and affect the characters and events happening in frame. Nevertheless, such instances only serve to underline the fact that the framing metaphor for context presupposes a partial picture that is contained and often static. And the static nature of framed contexts enables researchers to conduct research in a more orderly way. For example, Thomas Kindermann, a developmental psychologist, observes that developmental research on children tended to be limited to institutional contexts because they are stable contexts. “Stable contexts,” contends Kindermann, “are frames that can easily be targeted: Context actors are readily identified, and models, empirical designs, and time windows for capturing their influences can be comparably easily specified” (205).

Framing devices primarily act to limit the visual and temporal events that constitute a context. These limitations are steeped in ethical quandary, for because the author (the creator of context) decides what is included and excluded, and this has real consequences, affecting the knowledge and people represented in the frames. For example, In “A Study in Multiple Forms of Bias,” Thomas Beauchamp and Stephen

Klaidman recount the criticisms levied against George Crile’s documentary The

Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception (CBS 1982)—a documentary film that resulted in a lawsuit against CBS for libel. Beauchamp and Klaidman’s assessment does not intended to conclude that Crile was dishonest; rather, they are interested in analyzing how the documentary film medium could not ethically meet the demands of the topic. They

46 observe that Crile was following the format and rules of documentary filmmaking, which required him to “condense an extremely complicated story into a relatively tight time frame, and instance of a structural constraint” (166, emphasis added). The practice of condensing time into a limited frame—a necessity for almost all media—necessarily excludes pertinent information. Thus, Crile was unable to include all of the information that he had gathered from his eighty interviews for a documentary that could only air for one hour. The frame gave only a partial picture, and that partial picture imposed by the format led to Crile being a captive and even a victim of “structural distortion” (167).

Visually, too, frames cause structural distortion. Ernst Gombrich states that frames create an organization that makes everything within that frame seem to be in some way related. “So strong is this feeling of organizational pull,” he argues, “that we take it for granted that the elements of the pattern are all oriented toward their common centre”

(157). While Gombrich’s remarks concern order and the psychology of decorative art, his observations can be equally applied to contextual organization. In framing context, we act to organize it within a specific field so that the text or artifact that we study seems to naturally occupy the center. Articulating Gombrich’s theories together with Derrida’s theory of différance, Jennifer Green-Lewis observes that because of frames, “each image is set off from the other by a space [. . .] accentuated by a line bordering the image, and all within, is; without, is not.” She concludes, “[a] unifier, the frame is thus also an agent of fragmentation, for it breaks off the likeness of image to world, defining the image as much in terms of what it is not as what it is” (123). Such is the very politics—the very real power relationships—that the act of framing creates. The problem, of course, is that

47 what appears to be in the frame seems to be the whole picture precisely because of the organizational pull; attention is drawn to the center so the excluded peripheries do not even seem to exist. Indeed, in discussing the artistic frame, Christopher Wood asserts that the stability provided by the frame affects context as well: “Nor are ‘contextual’ readings exempt. For the very notion of context depends on a clear understanding of where the text ends. There can be no thought of transgression without a boundary to cross” (60).

In simultaneously highlighting and excluding information, frames in many ways act like terministic screens. In Executive Intelligence, Justin Menkes outlines the traits of successful managers. Of frames, he writes:

Frames bring with them the illusion of completeness, and it is this illusion,

rather than the existence of frames per se, that is the real problem. Because

frames exclude information, the world one sees through a frame is never

complete; each frame highlights or hides different aspects of a situation.

But frames, like stereotypes, are so powerful that they can seem more real

than reality itself. They are lenses through which the mind looks at the

world, reasons about it, and predicts what will happen next. The cost of

seeing clearly through a lens, however, is that some aspects of reality are

magnified and others made virtually invisible. This has been referred to as

“Frame Blindness.” (124)

The idea that a frame’s reality supercedes a lived reality repeats my criticisms of maps above. The frame begins to take on a life of its own, becoming through circulation and consumption a simulacrum of the reality that it attempts to represent. Contextual frame

48 blindness occurs when a contextual frame excludes information—pertinent or not—so that the reader simply cannot see the invisible contextual materials.

Contextual frames often rely on articulation rather than a full description of what is in the framing device. By this, I mean that scholars often coarticulate context with other laden terms—historical context, cultural context, social context, literary context, rhetorical context, material context, visual context, national context, and so on. This articulation accomplishes two contextual shortcuts: first, it relies on stereotypes and common knowledge for definition; a Japanese context does not need to be fully explained because it relies on the framework of stereotypical Japanese national identity. Second, articulating context automatically creates the frame of the articulated word; that is, an explicit rhetorical context limits the context to rhetoric. Because the frame makes invisible other contextual cues, a reader might not note the lack or importance of a material context in a rhetorical reading of a text. The framing device of articulation is so naturalized in academic literacy that the metaphorical term “frame” does not need to be invoked. The frame itself has become invisible, making it all the more difficult to identify that it is being included and excluded in any contextual description.

The Landscapes of Context

[Interim steps] are called opportunities for integration, and serve to frame

initial observations about the case prior to, during, and immediately after

data collection has occurred, and then again throughout the data-analysis

process. This helps focus the researchers in a more efficient manner on the

developing contextual landscape and emerging themes. (371)

O’Connor et al.

“Managing Interdisciplinary,

Longitudinal Research Teams”

Though it is too soon to fully appreciate the overall contextual landscape

of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the years 2000 to 2005 have

provided some insight into the complexities, challenges, and opportunities

for emerging entrepreneurs, managers, and leaders. (360)

Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria

In Their Time: The Greatest

Business Leaders of the Twentieth

Century

Landscapes, the last metaphor that I discuss in this chapter, appears different from the previous metaphors for context. While maps and frames are all two-dimensional in nature and have definite boundaries, landscapes are inherently three-dimensional with no definite boundaries, just horizons that change as positionality changes. Appeals to metaphorical landscapes emphasize the dynamism of its lived space. However, like maps and frames, the metaphors of landscape often describe controlled landscapes, managed spaces, and bounded places, thus falling into the same ideological trap as contextual metaphor.

One reason that the landscape-as-context metaphor appears different from map and frame metaphors is the emphasis on lived experience. In “A Man Made of Words,”

N. Scott Momaday attempts to articulate language, experience, and landscape. He writes:

I am interested in the way that a man looks at a given landscape and takes

possession of it in his blood and brain. For this happens, I am certain, in

the ordinary motion of life. None of us lives apart from the land entirely;

such an isolation is unimaginable. We have sooner or later to come to

terms with the world around us—and I mean especially the physical

world, not only as it is revealed to us immediately through our senses, but

also as it is perceived more truly in the long turn of seasons and of years.

(35-36)

For Momaday, the landscape is a vast organic context, influencing lived life through both the physical space that it provides as well as the temporal cycles through which it passes.

Landscapes cannot be framed to focus on one point, for the relationships inherent in landscapes are vitally important. Momaday offers his experience in the landscape of the

Wichita Mountains to illustrate this point: “[The mountains] are not so high and mighty as the mountains of the Far West, and they bear a different relationship to the land around them. One does not imagine that they are distinctive in themselves, or indeed that they exist apart from the plain in any sense.” And within this landscape, position intimately affects what is perceived: “To behold these mountains from the plain is one thing; to see the plain from the mountains is something else” (35).

Momaday is not discussing a metaphorical landscape; he is interested in the connection between the physical landscape and human experience. He regrets that the technological revolution has divorced Americans from the land, a “psychic dislocation of ourselves in time and space,” he calls it (36). His understanding of landscape, however, provides a deep structure to the metaphorical landscapes of context. Contexts are dynamic, with melding pieces that create a whole, inseparable image, which in turn is beholden to the natural order of time and space. As such, contexts are messy because they have a “lived in” quality that is difficult to quantify.

Momaday’s landscape is a little unwieldy for metaphorical purposes because it requires a rich dynamic that is dialectical in its engagement with experience and language. However, the dialectic of landscape is difficult to describe, which leads scholars to think through landscapes with certain limiting factors. For example, according to Anne Spirn, landscapes have a language and grammar to themselves, which act to bind them in a similar way as maps and frames. In her book The Language of Landscape, she frames her inquiry this way:

Landscape has all the features of language. It contains the equivalent of

words and parts of speech—patterns of shape, structure, material,

formation, and function. [. . .] Rules of grammar govern and guide how

landscapes are formed, some are specific to places and their local dialects,

others universal. Landscape is pragmatic, poetic, rhetorical, polemical.

Landscape is scene of life, cultivated construction, carrier of meaning. It is

language. (15)

Throughout the book, Spirn is interested in the narratives and meanings embodied in a material landscape. In this, she echoes de Certeau’s argument that place is space that is narrativised, yet Spirn takes this a step further and sees the landscape as embodied narrative.

Spirn regards landscapes as providing a location—a narrativised place—for the layering of contexts. For this she appeals to a classical definition of context that “weaves together” relevant information:

A place is particular, a tapestry of woven contexts: enduring and

ephemeral, local and global, related and unrelated, now and then, past and

future. Landscape context is a fabric whose strands are narratives of

landscape elements and features, both the persistent and the fleeting. Many

stories have been shaped over tens of thousands of years, others over

several human lifetimes, still others are just now emerging. There are deep

stories, dialogues and that have become interwoven, embedded, in place

over time. (160, emphasis added).

While she claims that the contexts provided by landscapes are places “where processes happen, a setting of dynamic relationships, not a collection of static features,” (133) the metaphors that she uses to define this context provide fairly stable material places. Thus, there is a tension between the defined shapes of contextual landscapes and her observations about layering the enduring and ephemeral.

The task of defining a contextual landscape as Momaday might define it is daunting, which might explain why contextual landscape metaphors are often combined

53 with more the more static metaphors of weaving or frames. For example, Donald

Freeman combines the contextual metaphors to limit the expansiveness of landscape:

“The fourth theme examines how context—in a social and physical sense—shapes teachers’ learning and their thinking. While other analyses might map out the research landscape differently, these four themes suggest a local way to organize this burgeoning literature” (3). Here, Freeman unconsciously acknowledges one of the inherent problems of the landscape metaphor for context: landscapes seem to deny organization and are not, therefore, always useful heuristics.

Landscapes do not necessarily deny organization—they just seem to deny. In addition to reading a grammar of landscape, all landscapes can be ordered according to a vision of how the landscape “should be.” And this is another danger to the idea of landscapes as an organic metaphor for context. Landscapes can be cleaned up, rearranged, hidden, highlighted, and anything else that the landscape architect can dream.

Further, landscapes can be limited through ecosystem boundaries—boundaries that are either physically constructed or defined for the sake of convenience (Pickett and

Cadenasso 4). Once a border, a frame is placed around an organized landscape, the landscape metaphor falls prey to the same problems plaguing the framing metaphor:

Contextual landscapes become small and static snapshots with an implied center and dominant organizing theme. To again illustrate this organizing principle, I like to think of

Japanese gardens, which are often touted as an organic harmony between man and nature when, in fact, these gardens are managed to the very length of the needles on the pine trees. The landscape looks organic though it is constructed and organized to fulfill a

54 vision. A contextual landscape can seem like an organic representation of lived life, but it is actually an organized instantiation of a person’s imagination of how context should be.

An Ethics of Metaphorical Contexts

In the same way that contexts are always in the process of becoming naturalized, so too are the metaphors of context. We no longer necessarily think of the metaphor; thus we do not necessarily engage with the metaphor, thinking through what it is highlighting and privileging and what the metaphor is hiding. What is interesting to note here is when the power of these objects and object-as-metaphors arose. Maps, as stated above, were a strong political tool of the colonialist enterprise because they organized and contained spatialized data under the heading of objectivism. Aestheticism, art, and theories of frame are also beholden to Europe’s colonialist period. In A Critique of Judgement, Kant discusses frames as a severing device. Photography and the framing of nature, too, owes much of its practice to colonialist ideology. Photographers not only collect data and organize the world, but they do so, according to Donna Haraway, by going on safari,

“shooting” and framing the natural world. Landscape, too, becomes a cultural force with the rise of country estates, landscape architects such as Capability Brown, and even the

Naturalist movements in literature and art.4 The metaphors of context still embody many of the ideological assumptions from the colonial era that were invested in them at their conception. Further, because of the constant repetition, these contextual representations

4 Landscape has a long history as an object of art and appreciation. Albrecht Altdorfer, painting during the German Enlightenment, was a successful landscape artist from the sixteenth century, building from a painting tradition that preceded him by about one hundred and fifty years.

55 begin to replace the dynamic formations of context—the representation, the metaphor of the map, frame, and landscape become the referent.

So often, the contextual metaphors attempt to provide order to a fairly messy conglomeration of relevant data. However, the data itself attempts to deny the metaphors of order and space as texts travel through multiple contexts simultaneously. It could be that the metaphors of space further act to privilege the origin, the authentic—all one must do is trace back the spatial contexts to a starting line and bind the text to the landscape that originally shaped it. Further, because place is created by narrativizing space and time together, defining and narrativizing a spatial context acts to freeze place (Tuan, 1977; de

Certeau, 1984; Augé, 1995). The university, for example, is spatially bound by context, mapping its barriers between communities, disciplines, and programs. The culture of the university coupled with the university context fixes the university into place, and the timeless traditions of the university culture act to rebuff criticism, deny change, and maintain the myth of the ivory tower, no matter how many times and ways that the myth is challenged in practice. Thus, reifying place compounds the reifying of context.

Another consequence of spatial metaphors allows both scholarship and popular discourse to refer to comfortably defined places, such as nation-states, cities, and geographical topographies that are mimetically defined, such as “the American

Southwest” or “Africa, the dark continent.” Places allow for conversations and criticisms that appear emic in nature, that is, the observations and analysis recorded can only account for one particular and finite instance and cannot be generalized into a theory that crosses borders. Places seem to create these finite borders; the observations made about

56 places are recorded and repeated, and what is repeated makes invisible that which is never said. As a result, heterogeneous peoples and practices become, through repetition, homogeneous.

Attempts to offer up new metaphors to discuss complex processes, such as

Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory—a metaphor that provides an organic and growing connectedness while denying origin—have not seemed to penetrate the metaphors of context. This might be because the spatial metaphors of context are more orderly and, therefore, easier to navigate and appeal to when attempting to, quite literally, place a text into a context. The practice of ordering contexts and being able to control the placements of texts into contexts provides a person with a tremendous amount of power; power that she may not want to relinquish.

The spatial metaphors also forcefully connect texts to particular places. Texts circulate endlessly in time and space through physical movement (a traveling museum exhibit) and reproduction (The Barnes and Noble reprint of Dante’s The Inferno). By metaphorically defining a contextual place, texts and artifacts are hard pressed to move and circulate. This allows scholars to analyze a text in a single location, either physical or intellectual. For example, to place The Inferno in its social context implies a single social context belonging to the text. The fact that students reading Dante are situated in a different social context than a fourteenth-century Italian audience, reading translated reprints in a classroom, is invisible because of the boundaries created by our metaphorical understanding of context. Even landscape metaphors, which imply a layering of time, do not account for the extreme distances that a text or artifact can circulate.

The continued use of container metaphors implies that contexts are stable while the text or artifact appears as a dynamic object worthy of inquiry. These metaphors ignore the ways in which texts and contexts are in dialectical engagement—defining and being defined by one another. Thus, contexts need to receive the same care and attention that texts receive to develop a complex understanding of dynamic processes—processes that are cut off when the metaphors used to describe them appear to be limited. Thus far, people generally appeal to contexts as a means to quickly provide a setting in order to get to the intellectual work in which they want to engage: reading a text or artifact. Contexts,

I would argue, demand equal disciplinary inquiry into their constructions and complex interweavings—a mode of inquiry that it currently cut off by the current metaphors of context. Maps, frames, and landscapes each serve to encapsulate narrow visions of context oriented toward convenient consumption. Recognizing the cost of this convenience will create opportunities for alternative metaphors and explorations of context to emerge.

CHAPTER THREE: TEXTUAL CONTEXTS

[T]his literature can ‘articulate’ a ‘chaos’ precisely and only because it

remains authentically contextual, a construct of elaborately laid-out

relationships (which it is the duty of the critic to point up) which finally

comprises a completed form. (590)

Donald Kartiganer

“The Criticism of Murray Krieger:

The Expansions of Contextualism”

“In fact, the way that these texts belong in particular contexts helps us

understand the logic of the classic claim that these texts are ‘the body of

Christ’, shaped by the Pentecostal Spirit.” (198)

James Buckley

Beyond the Hermeneutical Deadlock

Texts and contexts have a longstanding relationship with one another, rooted, as they are, in the same word. Texts and contexts dialectically constitute one another: a text is an expression of contextual forces and a context is temporarily defined when a text is active in it. At the most basic level, one cannot exist without the other. Contexts are not rhetorically called into existence unless an interlocutor of a text needs it. Texts emerge from and create complex contextual forces, and this interplay does not happen only once

59 at a text’s birth but a countless number of times: Whenever a text acts or is acted upon, a context forms for that action and whenever a context needs to be explored, texts are invoked. However, the assumption that a context provides an authentic origin for a text stabilizes that context as something external and definitive, when in fact, texts have innumerable relevant contexts. According to Donald Kartiganer’s quotation above, text always has an authentic context that in turn helps to stabilize the text. Further, according to John Webster and George P. Schner, texts belong to contexts, which again assumes that at its most basic level, context is stable and external—one is a container for the other that is always there to contain the text instead of a complex articulation of multiple texts that become meaningful through their interactions with a text. Indeed, every time that the phrase “in context” is uttered, the context is a place that has an immortal and changeless life outside of a text.

In this chapter I examine textual contexts. It is thus important to define what type of text that I mean. Throughout this dissertation I employ Barthes’ expansive definition of text as defined in the first chapter. For this chapter, however, I will be referring to collections of the written word as text unless otherwise noted. When studying the written word, scholars often invoke textual contexts, often meaning different ideas: the written word surrounding a certain set of words, the web of meaning created by intertextuality, the sociohistorical moment that “produced” a text, and a nation-based concept of place that “produced” a text. In most instances textual contexts are invoked for the purposes of analyzing a text, which according to Foucault, presents some real dangers: analysis is

60 based on the belief that “beyond any apparent beginning, there is always a secret origin— so secret and so fundamental that it can never be quite grasped in itself. Thus one is led inevitably, through the naivety of chronologies, towards an ever-receding point that is never itself present in any history” (Archeology 25). And so context steps in, providing a stable point, a place to stop before spinning into the void of history. Contexts provide a place to begin. However, once texts enter circulation, the contexts of those texts expand exponentially; a seemingly infinite number of contexts are ready to be called into being via the text-context dialectic.

In this chapter I will consider the ways in which textual contexts are constructed as a powerful rhetorical device. As a rhetorical trope, contexts create the idea of an original and authentic via the boundaries created by contextualism. Further, the prefixes for decontextualization and recontextualization presuppose an original context—the very ideas of “authentic” and “origin” are embedded in the linguistic structure. I discuss the ways in which textual contexts are often purposefully invoked as a response to the destabilizing effects of textual circulation—contexts only come into existence at the stages of production or consumption. And even in this case, consumption is fairly unstable because texts can be consumed multiple times and at multiple places with different exchange values. Nonetheless, textual scholars in general tend to take a fairly rhetorical stance on consumption, speaking of intended audiences for the text to limit the context of textual consumption. Finally, I explore the ways in which adaptation theory adopts a more dialectical approach to texts and contexts by attempting to embrace the destabilization of circulating texts to argue that multiple sites of production and

61 consumption means multiplicities of meaning. However, as I discuss, even adaptation theory still relies on the rhetorically constructed idea of authenticity.

Words as Contexts for Words: Bounded and Unbounded Texts

The literary New Critics of the twentieth century were interested in developing a critical theory in response to traditional criticism that overtly depended on historical context. While the term “new criticism” existed prior to the twentieth century, it wasn’t until American critic and poet John Crowe Ransom published his 1941 book The New

Criticism, that the term entered academic usage. In this book Ransom appeals to theories developed by T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, William Empson, and Yvor Winters to conclude that a critic’s objective should be studying the intrinsic qualities of a text rather than historical and biographical context. Textual context to the New Critics was completely bound up in a story, poem, play, or any other written work. For example, Murray Krieger, in both The New Apologists for Poetry and Theory of Criticism, argues that poems are always a closed context. Poems, and literary artifacts in general, are aesthetic objects that do not need to reference anything else—a literary “art for art’s sake” if you will.

Contextualism, for New Critics, is part of an aesthetic experience within a self- contained artifact. According to Krieger, who responds to Walter Sutton’s critics in

“Contextualism Was Ambitious,” “What induces ‘a state of rapt contemplation’ is for these critics not the mild escapism of a pleasurable object but the all-containing, mutually opposing energies of a tension-filled object that block our escape from its context and

62 thus from its world, which is an intensified, endlessly organized simulacrum of our own”

(82). Context binds the text—text and context must circulate together or not at all.

The charges against the New Critics are predictable. René Wellek identifies four common objections: (1) New Criticism is ‘esoteric aestheticism’ and is based on a formalist system; (2) New Criticism is ahistorical because it “isolates the work of art from its past and its context”; (3) New Criticism aims at making criticism scientific; and finally, (4) New Criticism is merely a pedagogical tool used to teach university students how to read and write (611). She takes exception to all of these charges, noting that the group of scholars who constitute the New Critics are diverse and contradictory.

Nevertheless, the call for close reading and the closed textual context provided by a finished piece of work continues to receive a fair amount of criticism. Terry Eagleton, for one, recognizes the purposes of New Criticism—how it was born out of the “ramblings” of traditional criticism—while noting that textual contexts led to a reification of literary works:

To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due

attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather

than to something else: to the “words on the page” rather than to the

contexts which produced and surrounded them. It implies a limiting as

well as a focusing of concern—a limiting badly needed by literary talk

which would ramble comfortably from the texture of Tennyson’s language

to the length of his beard. But in dispelling such anecdotal irrelevancies,

“close reading” also held at bay a good deal else: it encouraged the

illusion that any piece of language, “literary” or not, can be adequately

studied or even understood in isolation. It was the beginnings of a

“reification” of literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself. (38)

In his critique of New Criticism, Eagleton argues that the reading of the text should not just be the words on a page but include an analysis of a whole system that attends to production and consumption. The weakness of New Criticism, argues Eagleton, is that it does not attend to the material conditions. Understanding of a text can only occur when a person reads the bounded word and has a complex understanding of the material conditions from which the text emerged. Physical contexts return as an important piece of information, yet with more care than earlier traditional practices.

New Criticism’s heyday lasted from the 1920s to the 1960s, during which time the majority of research and publication in favor of the theory was published. The 1960s saw not only the rise of criticism against New Criticism but also Julia Kristeva’s coinage of the term “intertextuality” in 1966. Intertextuality, the theory that texts are always placed in relationships with surrounding texts and culture and cannot be removed from those relationships, is another type of text-based context. Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist theory argues that society is a formulation of repeating structures. Like Saussure, Lévi-

Strauss examined the underlying systems of language, likening linguistic exchange to cultural practices such as kinship, alliance theories, and commodity exchange. For Lévi-

Strauss, meaning in language has multiple levels, from the textbook definition of white to the deep meanings implied by “white” (that is, “pure,” “clean,” “Caucasian,” as opposed to the marked category of “black”). These deep meanings are collected as the word-as-

64 artifact moves through history and interacts with different words and historical, cultural, and social moments. Words carry with them ideological references to other uses and understandings, and these references are always culturally specific.

The importance of intertextual contexts affects more than just the deep meaning of minute words; it also accounts for the ways that texts and artifacts interact with other texts and artifacts in a similar manner. Kristeva expands semiotic theory to think through literature and texts. She claims that all texts are productivities, and as part of a productivity, all texts are a “permutation of texts, an intertextuality [intertextualité]: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another” (36). Kristeva spatializes the text as a means to navigate her critical explorations. Take, for example, Shakespeare’s King Lear. Published at the beginning of the seventeenth century, intertextually, King Lear appears to draw on The

Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Holinshed and A Mirror for

Magistrates by John Higgins. It also intertextually references The Faerie Queen by

Spenser, Legh’s Accedens of Armory, and Sidney’s Arcadia (Muir 196-208). Thus, those familiar with these texts would be able to develop an intertextual context, a weaving together of the texts in which King Lear resides. In addition to the source text references, the play references its contemporary environment through its subject matter, its treatment of royalty, and even its acceptance of revenge.

Like Kristeva, Barthes examines the ways in which cultural patterns are evident in texts, claiming that “any text is an intertext; other texts are in it, at varying levels, in more or less recognizable forms: the texts of the previous and surrounding culture” (“Theory of

65 the Text” 39). Audiences responding to these texts are themselves textual creatures, articulating themselves as writers into the intertextuality of history (44). For both Barthes and Kristeva, intertextuality is bound up in the texts, cultures, and social practices that surround it at the time of its production. The projection of history stops when the text is created, and the text can only intertextually relate to either texts that preceded it or contemporary texts. The practice of intertextual readings, further, is a type of source criticism in which the scholar identifies specific texts that the author is referencing.

One problem with the context of intertextuality arises when one considers the global circulation of texts; texts no longer “stay put” but rather are constantly circulating in broader national and global markets. Indeed, arguably, texts have never stayed put, traveling temporarily and spatially from the moment that they are immortalized in the form of the written word. In the process of moving texts through different contexts, the texts work dialectically with other texts and other audiences in new contexts. The new audiences, whether intended or not, read from different ideological and cultural lenses, collaborating with the text to make different meaning. The new languages in which texts are published are equally important, conveying information that is sometimes the same and sometimes radically different. If, as Roland Barthes suggests, “any text is an intertext,” then what happens when that text is placed into relation with other texts without a clear reference to the intertextual tradition from which it emerged (39)? Like

Barthes, Kristeva is also interested in the semiotics of text, explaining that all texts are bound within a history of other texts—they are permeated by the signs, signifiers, references and so on of the culture in which they participated (36). But what happens if

66 there are multiple histories, multiple cultures? The anxiety that moving texts cause, I would argue, feeds into the myths of decontextualization and recontextualization.

The Myth of Decontextualization and Recontextualization

Because so many texts circulate in transnational flows, texts are no longer functioning in “culture” as a singular noun but cultures; the signs, signifiers, and references are both written and read into a text. In reading the politics of representation, we are asked to read a complex system of local and global politics that includes space, place, history, culture, ideology, intentionality, and so on. The rhetorics of semiotic representation—what and how a sign means—change depending on the different contexts in which it is placed, newly understood within different structures of dominance.

According to Stuart Hall, people create meaning by creating “maps of meaning,” which are defined by cultural ideologies and practices. Thus people are able to communicate their representation of the world because they share conceptual maps that allow them to interpret the world in similar ways. When texts and artifacts appear in different cultural contexts, the decoding process of meaning-making leads to new interpretations, as well as new understandings or misunderstandings, sometimes depending on and sometimes in spite of those shared maps of meaning. For example, when Japanese texts are imported and consumed by a US audience, the representations contained within will not carry the same subtext and shared understanding that is understood by a Japanese audience. While this does not necessarily lead to misunderstandings, it does lead to new understandings via different contexts and therefore the constant renewal of the texts.

Academic discourse often refers to the practice of placing texts in new and different contexts as either decontextualization or recontextualization. Both of these terms are fraught with ideological assumptions that privilege the idea of an original context and forces of mass culture and global circulation. Decontextualization, for example, rests on the assumption that anything ripped from its original context (i.e., the site of its initial production) and placed into a new context is orphaned. From this perspective, the only context is the original context—one devoid of circulation, either spatial or temporal. Often coupled with decontextualization is recontextualization: Texts or artifacts placed in any context other than their original are recontextualized.

Decontextualization seems to view the process in a negative light whereas recontextualization acknowledges the text acting in a different, unintended context. Such a term seems to address the problematics of circulation, recognizing the ways in which texts and artifacts appear in multiple contexts and interact dialectically with those contexts to create meaning. Again, however, this term privileges the original context in the same way that decontextualization does—the only context that is not “re-” is the first one.

It appears that the further texts and artifacts move from the moment of intended

“authentic” context, the more intellectual energy is invested in recording and preserving the idea the original context. The rhetorics of decontextualization and recontextualization can be considered on multiple continua:

Context Recontext (more) (less) ------ Historical movement away from the original context Intentionality of author Audience interpretation Revisions for varying contexts Cultural practices/references Political purposes/uses Intertextuality Language Figure 3.1: Contextualization/Recontextualization Continuum

For example, scholars attempt to contextualize Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by outlining biographical data, identifying the intertextual references that it makes to contemporary texts and issues, analyzing the language and structure, and so forth (see, for example, Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels by Deirdre Le Faye, What Jane Austen

Ate and Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool, and “The Imagination Goes Visiting:

Jane Austen, Judgment, and the Social” by Hina Nazar). However, scholarly inquiry into contemporary authors tends more toward an exploration of ideas and less of a construction of an all-important context that will be used to illuminate the hidden knowledge of the text. For example, Harry Potter scholarship such as Harry Potter and

Philosophy (Baggett et al.) and Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter (Heilman) explores representations of prison systems, theories of slavery, mythological structures such as

“good versus evil,” and other larger themes. There is some contextual research into

Rowling’s biography, but little to none on language, contemporary society, author intentionality, and so on. The fact is that most scholarship seems to assume that we are

69 still in the intended context. And because we are still in what is considered the original context, understanding seems to be assumed so little to no effort is exerted to create the context. This seems to assume that people in an original context have a thorough understanding of the complexities occurring around them—production, multiple forms of audience receptions, reproduction, marketing, social consequences, and so on—and therefore, those complexities do not need to be explained.

Ideology is constantly being negotiated on this continuum. Further, there is a great degree of intentionality to reading contexts and recontexts—it seems that the further a text is from context, the greater the concern is in constructing the context, that the

“recontexts” or new contexts are seen as inferior to an “authentic” context. What this concern ignores is that every text is always already inhabiting multiple contexts simultaneously, that every text is changing the nature of other contexts and representations for use at a particular moment while being changed by them in turn.

These multiple contexts dynamically influence one another, changing each other across time, space, and cultures. A book written in Victorian England is a very different book at the time of publication than it is in 1950s England, than it is in a contemporary US classroom, than it is translated into Chinese and read in Shanghai, and so on. These texts work in very different ways in each context, and each distinct context merits investigation—none has the final word about a text, and theoretically none should be privileged (though of course some are)—because they are dialectically working within cultural and ideological practices. This treatment, then, requires a complex understanding of context that considers texts within multiple contexts.

The challenge, of course, is how to consider the complexities of globalism, circulation, and textual context. For example, in his Introduction to The Intercultural

Preformance Reader, Patrice Pavis explicitly addresses what happens when texts, in this case theatrical performances, circulate in global markets. Each place, each culture, marks a new context that affects the text. And the texts, in turn, affect the context of both market and symbolic/creative forces. He writes,

Certain cultural transfers preserve the source culture, the point of view of

the other, while it is being absorbed by the receiving culture. Although

transformation or re-elaboration of the source material may take place,

these are in fact the marks of a truly intercultural representation. A

borrowing from another culture is neither a pure and simple citation nor an

absolute duplication. (12)

In other words, texts and contexts exist in a permanent dialectical state, each text defining and being defined by others. For example, people derive their understanding about their contexts from a series of texts—newspapers, television, fliers, communications, lived experience, and so on. Similarly, context-specific politics, ideologies, cultures, histories, material conditions, and so forth affect the production, circulation, and consumption of texts. Famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, for example, was an unapologetic fan of the Hollywood Western film, especially those of John Ford (Crogan). Such films, played in a Japanese theater, affected the artistic imagination of Kurosawa, who then directed new films that combined the Western genre and Jidaigeki (historical Japanese drama)

71 stylistics (Goodwin) as seen in such films as The Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai) and Yojimbo. Both of these movies enjoyed international success and were later adapted into US-based Western movies: The Seven Samurai was adapted into The Magnificent

Seven, and Yojimbo into A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing.

A simpler way to understand this confluence of globalism, circulation, and textual context might be a historical example: The Tale of Genji (Genji no Monogatari).

Arguably the oldest novel in the world, Genji is an outgrowth of Lady Shikibu’s experiences in the Japanese Heian court; that is, the context of the Heian court acted to shape and define the content of the text from its characters to its metaphors. Thus, much of the scholarship dealing with Genji has attempted to place this text into context by recreating the Heian period—its poetics, politics, and aesthetics—in order to add to modern understandings of the text (see The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in

Ancient Japan, Morris; The Splendor of Longing in the “Tale of Genji,” Field; Figure of

Resistance: Language Poetry, and Narrating in the Tale of Genji and Other Mid-Heian

Texts Okada). To do this, scholars must weave together multiple texts (including evidence from The Tale of Genji) that are contemporary to The Tale of Genji to create a scholarly text, invoking a definition of context as an intertextual weaving together of multiple texts. The product of this intertextual weaving is a textual simulation of the

Heian period as “place,” a construction of context as space and time-based, which is material and exists without the text.

Yet The Tale of Genji, like all reproduced texts, did not stay in the context of the

Heian period. It has been translated into different languages, adapted into different media,

72 and quoted or referenced in other texts. Once texts enter mass production, they circulate in global economies and are consumed in different geographical regions. Like Richard

Ohmann, I use “mass culture” here instead of “popular culture” because “mass culture”

signals the homogenization, the overriding of local and subcultural

distinctions, that has accompanied the expansion of media in our century,

and rightly implies the power of the culture industries to shape audiences

and groups of consumers. It wrongly implies a passivity and a static

uniformity of audiences, and connotes a snobbish disparagement of

popular tastes, or at worst of the people themselves. “Popular culture”

restores the respect withdrawn by the other term; it credits popularity as

authentic (not cynically imposed from above), and rightly implies a more

active role for audiences in choosing and interpreting entertainments. But

it erases the stark inequality inherent in late-twentieth-century cultural

production, and often implies a politically mystifying celebration of

marketplace democracy. (14)

Ohmann, while acknowledging that both terms are inadequate, prefers mass culture when exploring nineteenth-century magazines because it forefronts questions of power and production. In discussing circulating texts in mass markets, I find that I, too, prefer mass culture because it forefronts a discursive and adaptable industry populated by people who are interested in selling and reselling the same texts to a consumer audience. However, even mass culture is a difficult term to use for a study of context. For example, with mass culture, production is an identifiable context and can be traced back to its origin. Yet the

73 authentic context of a mass produced text cannot exist because once it enters circulation, the imagined contexts for circulation are, simply put, limitless. Add to this the process of reproduction, and even the idea of place-of-production-as-origin becomes somewhat problematic. Popular culture might provide the necessary complication to context; that is, pop culture practices are simultaneously invented/produced in multiple locations at once, defying any claim to an authentic context based on a place of production. The problem with using popular culture, though, is the same—popular culture as a term tends to mask the very purposeful discursive actions of the culture industry.

Still, a tremendous amount of scholarship and popular discourse is invested in tracing texts back to an origin and, in placing the text in that ur place, investing the text with a Benjaminian aura for potentially politically controlling purposes. This tracing back, of limiting a text to its place of production and consumption, acts to create a solid unity within the discourses of text and context. Michel Foucault uses psychiatric discourses as his example of controlling the domain or context of discourse: “In these fields of initial differentiation, in the distances, the discontinuities, and the thresholds that appear within it, psychiatric discourse finds a way of limiting its domain, of defining what it is talking about, of giving it the status of an object—and therefore of making it manifest, nameable, and describable” (The Archeology of Knowledge 41). For the purposes of this dissertation, it may be best to think of texts as the objects of discourse and contexts as their domain. The rhetorics of context are the rhetorics of limitation, of control, and ultimately, of discourse formation. These rhetorics create a unity of discourse that connects a limited definition of context to a text, thereby confining that

74 text in space and time. This is helpful because it allows scholars to focus on a specific discursive moment, tracing the ways a text interacts with a necessarily limited set of conditions, such as material, cultural, social, historical, and so on. Unfortunately, this same process creates a limitation that discourages if not disallows contextual readings that are not incorporated into the discursive unity. As such, the discourses of context tend to be the discourses of origin, and the limitations placed on the discourse tend to devalue texts that cannot be linked back to this origin.

However, mass-produced texts and artifacts resist the insistent contextual limitations placed upon them because they circulate so widely from the moment they enter the marketplace. They cross temporal and spatial boundaries as they move from region to region, country to country, and across time. So too do contexts, as contexts are formed by the texts that represent them. For example, the ways in which the US

Southwest, a quintessential US-based place, has been understood is through importing colonial textual representations from the Middle East and Africa, such as the Mexican

Rebecca image or the emphasis on empty spaces (see, for example, Barbara Babcock’s

“A New Mexican Rebecca”). The geography of the Southwest, thus inscribed, became the context that produced new texts, which were built on the texts and contexts that preceded them. Travelogues, cowboy movies, tourist pamphlets, and websites eventually began to circulate in global economies, only to be translated and rewritten. As these adaptative and consumptive practices develop, different ideologies, cultures, materialities, and so on are inscribed into the texts they engage. These rewritten texts and the new texts that they bring into being, located in Japan, England, Turkey, then further

75 act to create the context of the US Southwest by offering new representations and interpretations that are inscribed onto the landscapes of the Southwest, into the intertexts of the Southwest. For example, the idea that Japanese people, a group that is typically defined as traditional and hierarchical, should revere and glorify the individual cowboy seems paradoxical. So in their documentary, The Japanese Version, producers and directors Andrew Kolker and Louis Alvarez visit a Tokyo cowboy bar to interview a group of Japanese professionals who spend their free time dressing in cowboy attire and living the life of a Southwestern cowboy as based on movies and television shows imported in the 1960s. They wondered whether the Japanese people captured the look and missed the essence of the cowboy myth. In response to this question, Rowdy, one of the patrons at the bar, explained that the cowboy myth made complete sense to the

Japanese people:

We all grew up watching those old TV shows like Rawhide and Laramie.

What we saw was everyone getting together around a campfire. You guys

have it all wrong. It’s not about being an individual; it’s about working

together. Whenever those guys had a problem, they’d get together and

figure out how to solve it. That’s why those shows were so popular in

Japan. They’d use teamwork.

Not only is a Japanese reading of the cowboy drawing on different referents and intertexts (in most cases, analogies and comparisons to samurai movies), but also this understanding of the cowboy is then inscribed into new cowboy productions. Many successful anime such as Cowboy Bebop and Trigun are Westerns set in a Sonoran

76 landscape, and these Westerns emphasize teamwork and a Japanese romantic ideology.5

And more importantly, these anime and others like them enjoy great success in US markets as well, redefining the texts and contexts of the Southwest by providing interesting layers of intertexts. Contexts are always mediated, and global media ensures that global influences are always felt either directly or indirectly on any text and context.

Indeed, the construction of contexts is always a re-presentation of textual, spatial, and temporal landscapes that are all caught up in specific cultures, ideologies, practices, and so on.

In presenting a context, scholars must create a representation, deciding what to include and subsequently what to exclude. This process is, unsurprisingly, a very political practice that is fraught with visible and invisible power relationships. Ethnographers have long acknowledged the politics of representation, that ethnography can only ever offer a partial picture of complex practices in a dynamic world (Kirsch, 1999; Davies, 1999;

Robben and Sluka 2007). Indeed, Howard Morphy reminds readers that “[t]he representations of any subject, be it a single artifact, a religion, or a culture, involved decisions about which way to represent it, whose perspective to adopt, what audience to aim for” (“Reflections on Representations” 24). These representations, Morphy continues, are powerful, affecting people’s lived lives. And it is important to remember that representations do not end after their moment of use has come to a close—

5 Izawa argues that central to the Japanese imagination is the idea of roman, an abbreviated form of the English word “romance.” The definition of roman, according to the author, “symbolizes the emotional, the grand, the epic, the taste of heroism, fantastic adventure, and the melancholy; passionate love, personal struggle, and eternal longing”(138). The lessons learned from roman narratives stress struggle, interdependence, and teamwork (150).

77 representations are mimetic and can be reproduced indefinitely.

It is important to note here that mimetic reproductions are not simple representations—they do not merely reprint the same picture with the same meaning, for example. In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig develops a theory of mimesis, of copies and representations, that combines both the object world and the copies: “Sliding between photographic fidelity and fantasy, between iconicity and arbitrariness, wholeness and fragmentation, we thus begin to sense how weird and complex the notion of copy becomes” (17). The binary structures that Taussig identifies as the underlying tension of mimesis and representation are the same binary structures that Stuart Hall references in his discussion on stereotypes. People negotiating stereotypes of themselves, argues Hall, are often split between opposites; they are “obliged to shuttle endlessly between them, sometimes being represented as both of them at the same time” (263). Similarly, invoked contexts are representations of particular moments in space/time that are lodged in a complex of power structures: contexts are copies, re-presentations of a place, cultures, a grouping of texts. Contexts are also part of the material world, places to be experienced in lived life.

Contexts and texts are constantly being dialectically formed and reformed. Within this dialectic contexts become places that are defined by their placement in space and time, they become collections of texts that create a text-based context in which a text exists, and they stand in for cultures, the practices of lived lives, habitus, and histories.

Simultaneously, contexts establish boundaries, identify origins, and define specialized knowledges in the face of global circulation and the collapse of space and time via new

78 media. Context remains a powerful rhetorical trope that presents a unified and usually local strategy for isolating and stabilizing a text’s authenticity and range of meanings.

However, like all discourses, context is built on a history of contradictions—a tension of context as a singular noun that can be used in an infinite number of places. According to

Foucault, analysis acts to suppress the contradictions of discourse under the classical system of the law of noncontradiction (The Archeology of Knowledge 150). Thus, analysis acts to limit context, which results in a limitation of knowledges, places, intertextualities, ideologies, histories, and the like. Texts nevertheless continue to exist in multiple contexts, and each context is a contradiction of a previous reading. This may account for scholars’ fascination with original contexts—a place wherein these contradictions are more simple, based on fixed sites of production and consumption— instead of the multiple contexts that simultaneously come into being with mass culture and circulation of texts.

Leo Tak-Hung Chan in his “The Poetics of Recontextualization: Intertextuality in a Chinese Adaptive Translation of The Picture of Dorian Gray” attempts to broaden textual analysis in global markets by analyzing the ways that texts are added to when translated into new linguistic and cultural contexts. He writes,

Terms like ‘localization’ and ‘reframing’ are often invoked in conjunction

with recontextualization. ‘Localization’ is contrasted with

‘recontextualization’ in that it implies a narrowing rather than a widening

of interpretive possibilities. ‘Recontextualization’ in translation is a

complex process in which there is gain as well as loss, unlike

‘localization,’ which limits interpretive (confining its reference to a local

context) and implies more loss than gain. (476)

He analyzes a 1977 Taiwanese translation of Dorian Gray, arguing that Wang Dahong, the translator, did not merely change the language, but effectively adapted the text by inserting Taiwanese cultural references. Chan argues, “Since the new ‘context’ is the key to approaching an adaptive translation, recontextualization becomes inseparable from interpretation” (465). Further, because of the adaptive nature of this recontextualization, the intertextual references proliferate because readers are aware that there is a source culture (the place and language in which the text was produced) in addition to the translated cultural references (477, 479).

Chan’s theory is careful of the source culture while arguing that new cultural interpretations and adaptations invest texts with new and worthwhile information.

Nevertheless, this emphasis on the original acts to emphasize intention; that is,, an author creates a text with a context and audience in mind to achieve an intended effect. All contexts after this original one disrupt such intention, and the power of context in the dialectic of meaning becomes increasingly evident because context starts to exert control over meaning-making by changing culturally and ideologically based understandings of the world. Chan attempts to disrupt this predisposition toward the importance of authorial intention, ascribing to neither fidelity (being as faithful to the words on the page as possible) or transparency (being as faithful to the author’s intended meaning as possible); however, his attempt to do so is fairly anomalous, and previous theories and practices that are similar to Chan’s work are often subsumed under adaptation theory, not translation

80 theory. In contrast, many more examples exist wherein the scholar attempts to trace a text back to authorial intention. However, Michel Foucault, in his essay “The Idea of an

Author” challenges the very idea of authorial intention in an original context. He traces the way that the author-function, created by the audience of the text, is different in each case since texts are not physically connected to an author but circulate in both space and time. Foucault suggests a different set of questions that move away from a “real author” and the ideas of “authenticity” and “originality”: “What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it? What placements are determined for possible subjects? Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?” (193). Such questions move away from the constant reconstruction of an original context and toward an understanding of the author, text, and presumed purpose in a more complicated system that accounts for production, circulation, and consumption in multiple contexts. Theories of adaptation attempt to answer this call as theorists trace texts moving and changing through multiple contexts.

Expanding Contexts: Adaptation as Means to Move through Space and Time

Theories of adaptation attempt to make sense of complex practices and consequences that occur when texts “context shift.” Common to these theories is the ways that ideologies contained in a text change based on contextual placement in different spaces and times (Sanders 2006; Hutcheon 2006; Elsaesser et al. 1994).

Historically, theorists have seen adaptation as a fairly conservative practice: Translating a successful narrative from one medium or historical time period into another carries little

81 risk; producers can depend partially on previous success to ensure some degree of future success. Media theorist Linda Hutcheon emphasizes the connection between context and adaptation. In discussing Malcolm Bradbury’s reflection on the process of adapting The

History Man into a television series, Hutcheon writes, “[E]ven without any temporal updating or any alterations to national or cultural setting, it can take very little time for context to change how a story is received” (142). For Hutcheon, adaptation needs to consider the contexts of not only production but also consumption or reception in different times and places in order to attend to the process of adaptation and not just the product. To illustrate this I return to the King Lear example from the previous section.

Since its conception, this play has had multiple printings, stage performances, and adaptations in film and literature. And while scholars of Shakespeare can reasonably identify many of King Lear’s source texts, not everyone has read these source texts, nor are all readers acquainted with the contemporary references and criticisms that also make up the intertextual fabric. Instead, King Lear has moved through the centuries into historically and culturally diverse landscapes. I am careful here not to write “displaced,” for such a term would presuppose the place of production as the authentic context.

Rather, King Lear is always contextual in multiple spaces, both physical and textual.

Before tracing King Lear through multiple examples, I must first address what I am not talking about: Reader-Response theory. Reader-Response theory is founded on the principle that readers come to a text with different affective filters, and that their readings, not authorial intention, give the text meaning. Even Stanley Fish’s “interpretive communities” belongs more to reader-response theory than to a theory of context. Fish

82 proposes that readers create subjective understandings of a text based on the communities to which they belong. While this practice is definitely a practice of context even in as far as different interpretive communities would create intertextual ties to other texts, it differs from the contexts of adaptation and adaptation’s use of intertextuality because of the subjective nature of the placement.

Theories of adaptation and intertextuality study the ways in which a text interacts with a variety of other texts, and those other texts are not just source texts: in the process of production, circulation, marketing, and consumption, intertextuality, the contexts of a text expand exponentially. Marketing tells readers what King Lear is about, for example, and it tells them what texts it might remind them of while tracing which texts were possibly influenced. Consumers, too, situate the play among differing intertextualities, perhaps invoking other Shakespeare plays or other pieces of literature with similar themes. So while there is always a certain amount of subjectivity in the reading of any piece of literature, there is also an external world of intertextual contexts that constantly expand to account for new generations, new texts, new cultures, and even new media.

King Lear exemplifies Hutcheon’s argument. It has been played on stages and on screen and television multiple times; it has been adapted into a Western movie (King of Texas,

Uli Edel, 2002) and an Edo-period drama that replaces three sons with three daughters

(Akira Kurosawa, Ran, 1985).

The strength of adaptation theory and its use of context is that adaptation accounts for circulation in multiple markets. As a result, adaptation allows for a complex layering of multiple contexts that are all relevant for study. Its weakness, however, is its

83 dependency on an unexamined context: adaptation necessarily is based on the idea of an original, something from which one adapts. Considered on its own, this is relatively unproblematical: there is indeed a play (King Lear) that eventually gave rise to an actual twentieth-century Japanese film (Ran); part of the movie’s dramatic context is indisputably the seventeenth-century English play that preceded it. But more than this original material artifact, adaptation is based on the idea of an original context, a place in which a text or artifact initially existed. Such an assumption affects how adaptation theorists discuss contexts and readings as recontextualized and reinterpreted. And this is not limited to theorists. According to Chan, the knowledge of the source text is important to consumers of translated texts. Consumers rely on this knowledge to imagine the text as a unified piece of writing that otherwise may not have been easily transferred from one cultural context to another (479). Consumers of texts, then, imagine, create, and even consume supplementary contexts, a practice that I discuss more in chapter five.

An Ethics of Textual Context

Textual contexts are rhetorical. Scholars invoke them for particular purposes, limiting texts in certain ways that illuminate one set of meanings to the exclusion of others. Contexts are also rhetorical tropes, providing scholars a tool to use in their search and discovery of “truth.” According to Burke, the master trope of metonymy acts to reduce complex processes: “[A]ny attempt to deal with human relationships after the analogy of naturalistic correlations becomes necessarily a reduction of some higher or more complex realm of being to the terms of a lower or less complex realm of being”

(506). Thus, in addition to the metaphors that act to limit context, the term context itself is inherently rhetorical, reducing very intricate and dialectical processes into a simplified referent that can be called into being and invoked whenever scholars study a text. And as a rhetorical device, contexts stabilize texts, which at the very least implies that texts belong to certain contexts.

However, texts travel. Words leave behind the words that surround them, ideas enter new intertextual webs, texts are translated into new languages, books are reproduced a thousand years after authors wrote them and intended audiences consumed them. And this is normal. Once a text is produced, it can and most probably will be reproduced in whole or in part. Theories concerning textual context seem to be most concerned with the consumption of these displaced texts. If a text is still in its “place,” context is rarely evoked. For example, when people study The Tale of Genji, the assumption under which they work believes that one cannot truly understand a text without understanding Japan. In fact, many translations imply as much in the introduction by providing pages of historical, biographical, and linguistic content (see, for example,

Edward G Seidensticker’s introduction to the Vintage Classics version and Royall Tyler’s introduction to the Penguin Book’s edition). However, when people read Mark Twain, for example, they do not assume that they cannot understand the text even though the text is temporally and spatially displaced. Interestingly, because the text belongs to a certain nation-state or language, context does not seem as important for the casual reader. Even for the scholar, context is invoked only when it’s different. That difference requires analysis to understand, which leads the scholar in search of an origin.

I do not mean to imply here that contexts don’t matter; they do. Without contexts, texts cannot exist as texts come into existence from the ooze of conflicting forces, histories, and cultures. However, what is needed is an approach to context that does not rhetorically limit texts but accounts for circulation. Poststructural theory has tried to answer the complications brought to context by offering deterritorialization as an alternative to decontextualization. Deterritorialization refers to the weakening of the ties that connect culture and place, or to put it differently, culture from “original” context.

Jameson explores the scary limits and consequences of deterritorialization, arguing that money, for example, has become so completely deterritorialized that it no longer belongs to context: “[deterritorialization] implies a new ontological and free-floating state, in which the content (to revert to Hegelian language) has definitely been suppressed in favor of the form” (259-60). As a consequence, Jameson argues, texts and artifacts transform

“into that element which by definition has no context or territory, and indeed no use value as such, namely, money” (260). Deleuze and Guattari provide one answer to this rather bleak view of deterritorialization. In developing their theory of the rhizome (as opposed to the origin tree), they argue that all deterritorialization is linked with reterritorialization in the circulation of an expanding process of rhizomic becomings, writing, “[t]here is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying” (10). Deleuze and Guattari’s theory challenges the very idea of an authentic context, one that can be traced back via a tree of knowledge. Instead, the interaction between texts and contexts are part of a large network of texts and contexts

86 that are constantly moving through different territories; texts float in and out of multiple contexts.

Postcolonial theory, like poststructural theory, has theorized the circulation of peoples via the metaphor of deterritorialization. According to Arjun Appadurai, diaspora caused by economic and cultural migration has both positive and negative results, from nationalist fundamentalism to cultural trade. He proposes five different landscapes to help make sense of a constantly shifting world brought on by de- and reterritorialization: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. These landscapes or contexts help scholars to move from a Benedict Anderson-view of imagined communities to a more complex sense of imagine worlds that account for the circulation of peoples, monies, and commodities (33). Appadurai concludes that mediascapes and ideoscapes provide only a fractured understanding of the world: “[T]he ideas and images produced by mass media often are only partial guides to the goods and experiences that deterritorialized populations transfer to one another” (38).

Why, with so many available theories that work to account for circulation in addition to production and consumption, does the myth of decontextualization and recontextualization remain? Part of the answer may stem from the pervasiveness of humanist philosophy, which wants to attribute intentionality and even genius to textual production. Part of the answer may have to do with the seeming stability of the sites of production and consumption. And part of the answer may just be simple expertise; it is impossible to carefully attend to a text in all of the different contexts that it appears.

An ethics of textual contexts, then, would require scholars to develop a method of

87 research that forefronts the rhetoricity of the chosen contexts. Douglass Kellner’s

“multiperspectival approach” comes to mind in that that Kellner developed a critical method of inquiry for cultural studies to account for the production and consumption of texts in addition to the more traditional close reading methods. Kellner argues for a three dimensional analysis of textual relationships: “(1) the production and political economy of culture; (2) textual analysis and critique of its artifacts; and (3) study of audience reception and the uses of media/cultural products” (50). In his call for a more critical cultural studies theory, Kellner proposes that scholars consider multiple subject positions in their audience and reception studies. Kellner’s approach forefronts production and consumption in textual analysis. To this multiperspectival approach, I would propose an examination of contexts to highlight the significance circulation. His current focus on audience reception studies would help to make clear the dynamics of textual contexts if an audience sampling comes from multiple sites of consumption that span a range of space and time. Further, sampling a text in multiple spaces and time would highlight the role of the reproduction and adaptation of a text. Such an approach would deny the search for the original context by emphasizing the formation of multiple contexts. In this way, other contexts would become just as important as the imagined original context.

Additionally, a multiperspectival, multicontextual approach would switch the focus of context-as-rhetoric wherein context is used as a trope to make meaning to context-as- dialectic wherein context and text constantly define one another.

CHAPTER FOUR: RHETORICAL CONTEXTS

[T]he work of rhetoric is fragmentary outside its environment; it functions

only in a particular world. By contrast, the work of fine art is more self-

sufficient and detached from any specific ambiance. This fact gives the

discovery of context an enhanced importance in rhetorical criticism as

opposed to criticism of the fine arts. (39)

Edwin Black

Rhetorical Criticism

To paraphrase the axiom which states: the 3 most important words in real

estate are: location, location, location; the 3 most important words in the

late 20th Century are: context, context, context.

Jeff Gates

“Information in Formation”

In the fourth century B. C. E., Plato wrote “‘Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding”

(165). Worse still, laments Plato, writing is static and therefore cannot answer questions as they arise (166). When Plato expresses his anxiety about writing robbing the human race of its memory, thus sending us deeper into an unenlightened cave, he could have equally expressed an anxiety about writing and oral rhetoric, for the written word frees rhetoric from its occasion, its situation, its kairotic moment. Written rhetoric, like

89 externalized memory, is disembodied persuasion, free to frolic across history unless put back into its contextual place.

As the quotations that open this chapter suggest, rhetorical context seems to exert an omnipotence over rhetorical studies. Thus, in an intellectual age of antifoundationalism, context remains one of the foundational concepts in rhetoric, appearing in the literature as rhetorical context, rhetorical situation, or sometimes just as the rhetorical triangle (speaker, audience, and topic).6 Textbooks in the field of rhetoric

(either rhetoric and composition or speech communication) offer definitions of context as limited to a very specific space and time. For example, The Thompson Reader:

Conversations in Context attempts to explain the connection between writing and context to first-year writing students: “[. . .] good writing is an appropriate response to a given situation. Writing is good when it fits the context. This means that good writers examine the writing situation, or what theorists call the rhetorical situation, and try to address it effectively. [. . .] It is good if it communicates something meaningful to those readers in that situation” (Yagelski and Crouse-Powers 4). The use of “that” in the final sentence of this quotation indicates a singular context for which the piece of writing seems to be intended. And this intentionality within an original context is insinuated throughout the book by the authors’ emphasis on historical and cultural context. Even A Student’s Guide to First-Year Writing, the University of Arizona’s custom publication for the first-year writing curriculum, assumes a singular context that controls the production and

6 Textbooks often interpret context as the rhetorical triangle. For example, Sonja K. Foss’ introduction of Neo-Aristotelian criticism states, “[t]o understand context, the critic investigates three major components of it—the rhetor, the occasion, and the audience” (27).

90 essentially immediate consumption of a text: “[T]he production of texts takes place within contexts—‘the circumstances surrounding and influencing the creation and reception of a text. Context is one of the elements of a rhetorical situation; the others are the intended audience and the author’s purpose’” (Smith et al. 25).

These textbooks would have initiates in rhetorical studies believing that the field generally accepts a discrete yet stable definition of context—one that belongs to a specific rhetorical moment in a specific rhetorical place. This is simply not the case.

Rhetorical theorists are careful to note the difficulties with rhetorical context. Branham and Pearce, for example, observe that “[i]n principle, contexts are ephemeral, potentially unraveling as fast as they are woven. In practice, however, contexts tend to be relatively stable, because people and societies work to construct and enforce a re-creation of shared experiences” (19). It is this re-creation, according to these authors, that creates the illusion of permanence and choice within social contexts. Instead, they argue, contexts, like texts, are interpreted by a community, and in fact, texts and contexts are in reciprocal relationship, acting as both text and context at a given time (20). The idea that contexts are also texts to be read and analyzed has influenced historiography of rhetoric and composition. In his chapter “The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in

Intellectual History,” Hayden White argues that a critic’s understanding of historical context is linguistic in nature and as such can only be puzzled together through texts. He summarizes his textual reconstruction of Henry Adam’s historical context with this statement: “The indexical, iconic, and symbolic notions of language, and therefore of texts, obscure the nature of this indirect referentiality and hold out the possibility of

(feign) direct reflected in the texts. But even if we grant this, what we see is the reflection, not the thing reflected” (209). This assertion inverts the traditional understanding that contexts influence and guide texts—texts influence and guide the reading of contexts. Stephen Lucas brings this idea to the field of rhetorical criticism, arguing that critics need to study textual context, or the process of building meaning through ideas, style, rhetorical tropes, arguments, and linguistic turns-of-phrase (249).

Regardless of these more complex theories of context, the fact is that the majority of textbooks and scholarly articles continue to treat context as an authentic place where the simultaneous production and consumption of rhetoric occurs. According to this model, rhetoric, often in the guise of “the rhetorical situation,” does not circulate for different rhetorical purposes but belongs exclusively to a specific time and space. Part of the reason for this, I argue, has to do with the two different histories for rhetorical context—one based in classical rhetoric and the other in linguistic anthropology. Both of these histories, I observe, are based on oral rhetoric: (1) classical rhetoricians were interested in creating orators who spoke well, and (2) early anthropologists’ foci on language and practiced as spearheaded by anthropologist Malinowski’s study of oral language and action among the Trobrainders of Papua New Guinea. Contexts for oral utterances, one can argue, are limited to a specific place in time. Once the moment for an oral utterance passes, so too does the surrounding context.

This chapter considers the scholarship and politics of rhetorical context. I begin with an examination of the term “context” in rhetorical theory. This term allows scholars to produce their rhetorical contexts post hoc, affecting a text or artifact’s rhetorocity by

92 limiting its scope of authority. As a result, scholars have been naturalized to the concept as a result of its slippage from discussions of oral discourse into written discourse, and this naturalized language has become the unquestioned language of a disciplinary specialist. One consequence of this assumption that all rhetoric is the act of intentional persuasion for a specific place ignores the quotidian and conditional rhetorics that are in constant circulation.7 This can be seen in both teaching and research in rhetoric:

In teaching,

. rhetorical context is taught as a static situation—static in that it can only exist in one

place and time, so students are not asked to consider how their work might act outside

of the immediate “rhetorical situation”;

. rhetorical context privileges moments of overt or exigent rhetoric in both studied

content and writing situations. This partially accounts for a general resistance to

cultural studies as classroom content in a composition course as studies of mass

culture consider circulation in addition to production and consumption, analyzing

quotidian and conditional rhetorics as well as exigent rhetorical purposes;

In research,

. rhetorical context enables the specialist to “reconstruct” an original and authentic

context in which a piece of rhetoric occurred;

7 As discussed in Chapter One: The Politics of Context, I am borrowing from Barry Brummett’s rhetorical continuum that identifies exigent rhetoric as that which intentionally persuades, quotidian rhetoric as that which functions in the day-to-day decision making processes in which we all engage, and conditional rhetoric as an invisible rhetoric that functions on the level of ideology.

. rhetorical context denies the mass production of rhetorical texts, offering instead a

stable and rational place in which a single piece of rhetoric occurs; and

. rhetorical context continues to privilege the intentionality of the “speaker” as the

authority of a message directed to a predicable and definable audience.

The challenge of rhetorical context becomes how to teach either the critique or the practice of rhetoric with a critical eye toward circulation.

The Marriage of Classical Theory and Modern Anthropology

A skim through almost any book on introductory rhetoric shows context defined as a rhetorical situation made up of writer, audience, and topic. Coupling “rhetorical situation” with the Aristotelian “rhetorical triangle” occurs so seamlessly that it appears the definition of rhetorical context stems from a seemingly stable intellectual history, when, in fact, that history is riddled with contestation and debate. As I discuss in this section, rhetorical context is articulated from two traditions—classical contexts and anthropological “situations”—and even within these two traditions, context is an unstable and contested term that has different meanings at different times.

Classical Contexts: Weaving Together Fabrics of Meaning

Many definitions of rhetoric appeal to Aristotle’s speech situation, now often referred to as the rhetorical or communication triangle: “A speech [situation] consists of three things: a speaker and a subject on which he speaks and someone addressed” (On

Rhetoric 1.3). On Rhetoric is an instruction manual that teaches a student of rhetoric how

94 to address a large audience, and while Kennedy classifies Aristotle’s rhetoric as philosophic, actual philosophic inquiry seems to belong to dialectic. Kennedy observes,

“[d]ialectic usually deals with philosophical or at least general questions, rhetoric with concrete or practical ones. Dialectic is rigorous and constructs chains of argument; rhetoric is popular and expansive” (81). In speaking to specific large groups about practical and popular or timely topics, rhetoric, by this definition, is very limited to a specific space and time.

While many definitions cited in textbooks present the rhetorical triangle as rhetorical context, the fact is that context has a much more storied and contested history.

Of the major schools of thought that have passed down through the centuries, atomists see context as immanent and material, civic rhetoricians see it as constructed, and hermeneutical rhetoricians see it as a stable historical imaginary, that in order to understand these ancient words, a rhetor must put himself in the place of the person who wrote those words. As noted in chapter one, the actual word comes into English from the

Latin contexto, a combination of con (an expression of togetherness or connection) and texto (to weave or to construct complex structures with elaborate care). Contexto, then, means ‘to weave together,’ or in the case of language, “to connect, link (words); to compose, assemble (speech, writings) by linking together” (Glare 429).8 Context is not just the verbal fabric of words, nor is it merely a socio-historical place; context is also a

8 This is much like the Greek concept of rapsoidein, to rhapsodize, which means ‘to stitch songs together.’ According to Walter Ong, the ability to stitch songs together is a marker of an oral culture: “The oral poet had an abundant repertoire of epithets diversified enough to provide an epithet for any metrical exigency that might arise as he stitched his story together” (21).

95 physical force. For example, Lucretius’ use of the term complicates context by articulating mystical relationships between the material and the spiritual:

Again, all things alike would be destroyed

By the same force and cause, were they not held fast

By matter everlasting, fastened together

More or less tightly in its framing bonds.

A touch would be enough to cause destruction,

Since there would be no eternal elements

Needing a special force to break them up.

But as it is, since the bonds which bind the elements

Are various and their matter is everlasting

They stay intact, until they meet a force

Found strong enough to break their textures down.

Therefore no single thing returns to nothing

But at its dissolution everything

Returns to matter’s primal particles. (1.237-1.250)9

9 I have put in bold the relevant words in the original Latin text: Denique res omnis eadem vis causaque volgo conficeret, nisi materies aeterna teneret, inter se nexus minus aut magis indupedita; tactus enim leti satis esset causa profecto, quippe ubi nulla forent aeterno corpore, quorum contextum vis deberet dissolvere quaeque. at nunc, inter se quia nexus principiorum dissimiles constant aeternaque materies est, incolumi remanent res corpore, dum satis acris vis obeat pro textura cuiusque reperta.

The contextum of material bodies such as rain, trees, people and so forth hold together until the fabric that holds them together is pulled apart (dissoluere) and their textura dissolves. As an atomist, Lucretius is concerned with the ways in which the material world interacts with the immaterial world. Thus, the immaterial soul, because it is connected to a material body, dissolves (3.686-3.689). For Lucretius, contexts are material constraints that affect places and actions.

Cicero does not adhere to this atomist view of context, seeing, instead, context as the weaving together of historical stories in which rhetors can place themselves, and that in weaving their lives together with the lives of their ancestors, rhetoricians can historically contextualize situations. Modern understandings of context also stem from

Quintilian’s concept of loci (homes or places) that house the topoi and memory techniques of education and rhetoric.10 Context is spatialized—a place in which information is stored. From these topoi, according to both Cicero and Quintilian, rhetoricians must thoughtfully weave together discourse (intexere).

Augustine, like Cicero, sees context as the woven fabric of discourse, but

Augustine’s interest in understanding context is a hermeneutic one. To help a person puzzle through the complexities of scripture, Augustine writes:

haud igitur redit ad nihilum res ulla, sed omnes discidio redeunt in corpora materiai.

10 Francis Yates explores the connection between memory storage and memory places in Greek, Latin, medieval, and renaissance rhetorical theory in The Art of Memory. Yates emphasizes the imaginative and constructed nature of context: “We have to think of the ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorized places the images he has placed on them” (3).

There are other things too which signify not just single ideas but, taken

individually, two or often more ideas, depending on the contexts in which

they are found. From passages where such things are expressed clearly one

should find out how they are to be understood in obscure contexts. (86)

Context here is not spatialized in the atomist view of the universe, nor is it spatialized in memory places and historical memory. Rather, context is a place for text, the landscape of the written word. The bards of the past, who wove together words and sentences, have invented a place from which words and meanings cannot escape, which is how it is mostly viewed today.

Rhetorical Situations: The Study of Rhetoric Through the Study of Man

At the beginning of the twentieth century, social sciences such as anthropology and anthropological linguistics adopted the idea of context to study specific practices at specific times, and this use of context acts as a noun that fixes a place in which action occurs. For example, Malinowski’s supplement to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’ The

Meaning of Meaning emphasizes the connection between language and a place-based context: “it needs no special stressing that in a primitive language the meaning of a single word is to a very high degree dependent on its context” (306). For Malinowski, context is only ever the active life situated in a specific space and time:

But when we pass from a modern civilized language, of which we think

mostly in terms of written records, or from a dead one which survives only

in inscription, to a primitive tongue, never used in writing, where all the

material lives only in winged words, passing from man to man—there it

should be clear at once that the conception of meaning as contained in an

utterance is false and futile. A statement, spoken in real life, is never

detached from the situation in which it has been uttered. For each verbal

statement by a human being has the aim and function of expressing some

thought or feeling actual at that moment and in that same situation, and

necessary for some reason or other to be made known to another person or

persons—in order either to serve purposes of common action, or to

establish ties of purely social communion, or else to deliver the speaker to

violent feelings or passions. Without some imperative stimulus of the

moment, there can be no spoken statement. In each case, therefore,

utterance and situation are bound up inextricably with each other and the

context of situation is indispensable for the understanding of the words.

Exactly as in the reality of spoken or written languages, a word without

linguistic context in a mere figment and stands for nothing by itself, so in

the reality of a spoken living tongue, the utterance has no meaning except

in the context of situation. (307)

In this paragraph Malinowski invests context with a series of meanings and assumptions—meanings and assumptions that appear repeatedly subsequent to this publication and in many disciplinary fields. First, context is a fixed place in time and space, an understanding of context that is taken up and repeated by anthropologists and ethnographers alike throughout the twentieth century (cf. Benedict, 1934; Mead, 1928;

Geertz, 1975). Second, the context of the situation is external to the actors, an authentic reality that, while bound up with the utterance, still exerts its force in determining meaning and action. Third, such an understanding of context acts to “other” places and peoples within a specific place in a manner similar to an unexamined understanding of culture. This is especially apparent in this early anthropological work in which a purported civilized scholar goes to study the primitive society that is locked in a specific context in ways that civilized peoples are not.

In “The Rhetorical Situation,” Lloyd Bitzer repeats Malinowski’s claims that the context of a situation controls and even determines meaning. Bitzer adapts Malinowski’s work with linguistic contexts for the purposes of rhetorical contexts to explore rhetorical exigency. “Rhetorical works,” argues Bitzer, “belong to the class of things which obtain their character from the circumstances of the historical context in which they occur” (3).

Like Malinowski, Bitzer also concludes that the context of a situation determines meaning: “Not the rhetor and not persuasive intent, but the situation is the source and ground of rhetorical activity—and, I should add, of rhetorical criticism” (6). Exigency, an urgent problem, and context, made up of audience and constraints, combine to create the rhetorical situation. And because rhetorical situations always invite a fitting response,

Bitzer invests rhetorical situations with a certain degree of agency: “If it makes sense to say that a situation invites a ‘fitting’ response, then that situation must somehow prescribe the response which fits” (10). For Bitzer, then, rhetorical contexts are both external, belonging to an assumed reality, and determining.

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In “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Richard Vatz responds to Bitzer’s claims that the rhetorical situation exists outside of human experience: “No situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it” (154). In placing responsibility on the rhetor and not the situation, Vatz argues that rhetoric and communication become events marked by “choice, interpretation, and translation.” Rhetorical choices “will be seen as purposeful acts for discernible reasons. They are decisions to make salient or not to make salient these situations” (158). In other words, the rhetor defines a rhetorical situation by highlighting power systems and inequity that may have been invisible and then subsequently addressing the highlighted problem. Previous to language, the exigence and subsequently the context did not exist.

The debate between Bitzer, who sees rhetorical contexts as external to the actor, and Vatz, who sees rhetorical context as something that the actor creates, ignores the dialectical engagement between the material context and the actors within that context.

Scott Consigny attempts to find a middle ground between Bitzer and Vatz, arguing that rhetorical situations are neither external nor created by the rhetor. He draws on Aristotle,

Cicero, and Vico to develop a theory of rhetorical topics or common places to allow the rhetor to maintain his or her autonomy while also being sensitive to the demands of particular situations. Further, Kenneth Burke, with his exploration into the scene-agent ratio of the pentad, helps to explain the interplay between contexts and actors/artifacts.

Burke’s pentad is based on his theory of dramatism—the idea that motives articulated via symbolic action can be better illuminated and even understood through the interplay

101 between act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. Like Bitzer, Burke is indebted to

Malinowski’s context of situation for his articulation of scene (The Philosophy of

Literary Form, 111; “Questions and Answers,” 333). In his exploration of the scene-act ratio, Burke defines “scene” as the container, which expresses meaning through fixed properties (Grammar 3). The scene is not a passive container, however; in a scene-agent ratio, it expresses the quality of the character in a complimentary presentation of the quality of the country (Grammar 8). Burke refers to Marxist material dialectics to explain the ways that the scene can even determine act: “[. . .] you can’t get a fully socialist act unless you have a fully socialist scene, and for the dialectical materialist such a scene requires a high stage of industrial development” (Grammar 14).

The way that Burke describes scene in A Grammar of Motives is reminiscent of

Bitzer’s rhetorical situation. It seems that scene is an external reality that determines actions. However, Burke draws on a Marxist tradition of dialectical materialism, and while he became disillusioned with the theories and promises of Marxism, the influence of Marxist thought continued to thread throughout his works. In the case of dramatism, then, Burke is arguing that context qua scene is a determining force because it grounds the material conditions in which action occurs. It is not, I must emphasize, the determining force. Actors can act on the scene to change it, and in changing it, allow different actions to be supported in the scene. Burke further adds to the complication of context, for his scene, an external reality, is an active participant in dialectical engagement, not something that is created and understood via a dialectical engagement.

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Indeed, the scene, or material context, is the foundation of Marxist philosophy. At the beginning of On Capital, Marx writes, “The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought” (2).

Furthermore, Marx contends that “[i]t is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” That is, one’s material context literally defines how one thinks; context both shapes one’s own perception of the world, and it is tool to deploy in understanding history. Rhetoric and contexts, in this formation, are the dialectic—rhetoric defines contexts and contexts define rhetoric—which change dominant classical Athenian understandings of rhetorical contexts.

Classical rhetorical contexts are connected to the concept of kairos, or good timing. According to Aristotle, rhetoric is “the faculty of observing in any given case all the available means of persuasion” (1.2.1). These given cases, or rhetorical situations, exist outside of the rhetor, and it is the rhetor’s job to understand all available means of persuasion to meet that case. Here, Bitzer appeals to an Aristotelian understanding of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation. Aristotle, however, also gives the aspiring rhetorician a series of tools to manipulate the audience, regardless of the situation, in order to turn the situation to the rhetor’s advantage—a strategy that is picked up by Vatz. This view of rhetorical contexts is perpetuated in rhetoric and composition textbooks, which present the rhetorical situation as an external reality that must be met with the correct or proper rhetoric. Additionally, this Aristotelian view limits the spaces of rhetoric to the production and immediate consumption of a rhetorical text.

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Orality and Origin

The field of rhetoric’s connection with orality continues to affect both the interpretation of rhetoric (rhetorical criticism) and the production of rhetoric in both oral and written communication. Also because of its connection with orality, rhetoric is infused with intentionality—that is, the writer or speaker has control over a rhetorical act via intentional communication with an intentional purpose. In adopting the rhetorical triangle as context from Aristotle’s work, scholars have also adopted the basic premise that rhetoric is imbued with intentionality.

In Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character, Eugene Garver states quite plainly,

“[p]ersuasion has to be intentional, and require this mutual awareness, because belief, the end of persuasion, is similarly intentional. [. . .] Evoking assent through an ambiguity that masks the fact that the speaker has nothing to say is not an intentional act, and consequently not an act of rhetorical persuasion” (153). In 1925, Wichelns translated

Aristotelian rhetoric into an interpretive model, simultaneously creating neo-Aristotelian rhetorical analysis and refocusing rhetoric as an art of interpretation. “Oratory,” argues

Wichelns, “is intimately associated with statecraft; it is bound up with the things of the moment; its occasion, its terms, its background, can often be understood only by a careful student of history” (Bryant 182). In identifying the intentional turn of rhetoric, Dilip

Parameshwar Gaonkar recognizes that rhetorical interpretation requires more than just technical vocabulary; it requires an intimate and describable understanding of ideology:

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a view of speaker as the seat of origin rather than a point of articulation, a

view of strategy as identifiable under an intentional description, a view of

discourse as constitutive of character and community, a view of audience

positioned simultaneously as “spectator” and “participant,” and finally, a

view of “ends” that binds speaker, strategy, discourse, and audience in a

web of purposive actions. (32-33)

As a result of this oral tradition that tends to privilege authorial intention, rhetorical context is often understood, even assumed, as historical context, and within that historical context, rhetoric acts as a metadiscourse to weave together this “web of purposive actions.” This tendency can be seen time and again in epistemic rhetorical criticism.

While it is not in the scope of this chapter to offer an overview of all rhetorical criticism as proof to the above claim, I believe that a well-chosen example can illustrate a general tendency to assume historical context as the specific place of intentional rhetoric.

For this purpose, I turn to Leff and Mohrmann’s 1974 article “Lincoln at Cooper Union:

A Rhetorical Analysis of the Text.” I chose this article because it is often cited as one of the most important examples of neo-Aristotelian rhetorical criticism and the emergence of generic criticism (Brock et al. 29). This article, furthermore, has been reprinted in anthologies and continues to appear on rhetorical analysis syllabi in communication and

English departments. And finally, this article starts an important discussion between one of the authors and Jasinski concerning the role of context in rhetorical analysis.

In “Lincoln at Cooper Union,” Leff and Mohrmann provide a careful analysis of

Lincoln’s pre-presidential speech at Cooper Union, a speech that has enjoyed constant

105 celebration, according to the authors, but no critical attention as a piece of rhetoric. They walk through the speech to show that Lincoln, contrary to popular belief, was purposeful in separating the Republican party from the South in order to establish himself as the best candidate for the presidential nomination—a nomination that he was, until that moment, almost assuredly not going to receive. This rhetorical analysis brings to light many of the nuances of this important speech and its ultimate role in shaping US history.

In establishing the foundation for their analysis, Leff and Mohrmann write that they must first make some “preliminary remarks about the rhetorical context” (347). As becomes quickly evident, rhetorical context here means both biographical context (they discuss Lincoln and his ambitions) interspersed with historical context (what was happening with the Republican Party at that moment in time). Also in building their framework for analysis, Leff and Mohrmann identify the genre that Lincoln uses so that between the biographical/historical context and the genre, Lincoln’s intention is made clear (348). In this instance, an explication of the rhetorical context is limited, ignoring the specific audience that Lincoln addresses, the news media, the cultural milieu, and, indeed, such material influences as the physical setting.

Not that attending to every influence of a rhetorical context is possible in an article or even in a book—contexts are simply too great in size and too ambiguous in the threads that they must weave together. Indeed, Mohrmann and Leff recognize the difficulty of contexts in their article, arguing that genre theory provides the rhetorical critic an entry into rhetorical performance. “Genre theory,” they argue, “is notoriously abstract; it rejects time and place as bases for classification and groups historical

106 situations into general categories” (460). Further, genre theory allows the abstraction of audience and rhetorical situations (459), a claim that seems to be contradicted later in the article when the authors write, “[neoclassicism] specifically anchors a discourse in the context of other discourses and the demands of the audience, and it blunts the charge that the neo-classical orientation forces the critic to overlook ‘the effects of audience, situation and other contemporary discourses on the speaker’s behavior’” (465). Genre theory, the theoretical basis of the Lincoln at Cooper Union analysis, simultaneously denies time and space for generic forms while anchoring discourse in the immediate situation of audience and purpose. The tensions concerning context within genre theory play themselves out in the reading of Lincoln’s address: The authors emphasize genre and intention but it seems that they cannot neglect the neo-Aristotelian emphasis on rhetorical situation, or original situation. While they nod their heads to rhetorical situation or context, Mohrmann and Leff do not explore the interplay of text and context. Further, the rhetorical context that they assume is a historical one and the appeal to the biographical context merely acts to further situate the piece of rhetoric in the originator of that rhetoric.

In his 2001 reflection “Lincoln at Cooper Union: Neo-Classical Criticism

Revisited,” Leff acknowledges the impact of three decades on rhetorical criticism scholarship and its impact on his own research. Specifically he addresses the text-context relationship, observing in his conclusion,

a new generation of critics has attempted to broaden the scope of textual

criticism by redefining the notion of context and it[s] relationship to text.

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On the older view—the one textual critics sought to avoid—context

consisted in objective circumstances and actual effects that rhetorical art

could not encompass or control. This perspective prevented a fluid

relationship between text and context and thus encouraged interpretive

critics to hunker down within the boundaries of text. But on the more

recent view, contexts themselves are, at least to some extent, rhetorical

and interpretive constructs and thus the text/context relationship emerges

as mobile and negotiable. (246)

Leff acknowledges two sources of criticism against his original reading of Lincoln’s speech: James Jasinski’s “Instrumentalism, Contextualism, and Interpretation in

Rhetorical Criticism” and Leah Ceccarelli’s work on reception studies. Both Jasinski and

Ceccarelli’s work, Leff notes, attempt to bring context to the forefront of rhetorical studies.

In his piece, Jasinski is building a theory of performative rhetoric and rhetorical criticism. He rebels against the notion that context is a passive container for rhetorical occasion, and he borrows Burkes term “consubstantial” to highlight the ways in which text and context are so dialectically entwined as to be inseparable: “The organic and the intertextual metaphors both figure context as permeating or saturating the text” (209).

This is most evident with linguistic contexts, and the critic must face the hermeneutic challenge of analyzing how contexts are inscribed into texts (209-10). He criticizes both

Nichols and Leff and Mohrmann’s readings of Lincoln’s speeches. Of Nichols, he observes a Wichelns-like understanding of context as an outside force that acts to

108 determine purpose. He plainly states his criticism of this view: “[C]ontext only enters the interpretive process through the agency of purpose; contextual elements not mediated by purpose are of no interest to the critic operating within the instrumentalist model” (202).

He then transfers his attention to Mohrmann and Leff’s reading of Lincoln’s speech, arguing that their instrumentalist view overemphasized the connection between purpose and context to the detriment of the analysis (202). To prove this, he offers a brief intertextual reading of the piece that identifies a ‘locus of the existent’ trope as defined by

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (203). Jasinski concludes his argument by offering performative traditions as a means to overcome the weaknesses he sees in instrumentalist theory and practice:

As an interpretive practice, rhetorical reconstruction seeks to “chart” (to

use Burke’s metaphor) the play of languages and voices, what I’ve termed

performative traditions, within the field of textual action. Reconstructing

the appropriation and diffusion of, and the play among, performative

traditions moves rhetorical criticism beyond formalist recounting of

discursive techniques. It seeks to provide a thick description of the organic

emergence of text from its performative context, recognizing the radical

multiplicity of the text’s context. (216)

Jasinski’s revision of rhetorical criticism, then, appears to be adopting techniques from anthropological ethnography (thick description) and literary contexts via the study of intertextuality. Nonetheless, performative context, it would appear, is still the context of original utterance—an authentic, if endless expansive, context.

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Leff answers Jasinski’s rather harsh criticism of instrumentalist rhetorical criticism, arguing that Jasinski’s call for an intertextual reading only acts to strengthen the original argument in “Lincoln at Cooper Union” (235). Leff admits that the text- context ratio constructed in the original reading of Lincoln’s speech was, in fact, mediated by purpose. He builds an intertextual reading to prove that the debate that raged concerning slavery provided material for intertextual referencing, and that in turn led to purposeful persuasion within that context, or what Leff refers to as “the intentional structure of the text” (238-39). Leff concludes his response to Jasinki, stating that his rereading of Cooper Union attends to the discursive civic rhetoric of nineteenth-century politics (intertextuality) coupled with an analysis of a speech within an immediate situation (purpose) (239).

Following this, Leff turns his reflection to reception theory, focusing on

Ceccarelli’s article “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism.” In

Mohrmann and Leff’s 1978 reading of Cooper Union, the lack of audience or stakeholders is conspicuous in the analysis, which acts to invest the producer of rhetoric with greater intentionality. Thus, it is the rhetorical critic’s unspoken job to interpret and make clear the intention from that moment, not the ways in which the piece of rhetoric has acted without intentionality throughout its century and a half of circulation. Such a historical reading, therefore, presupposes an authentic context—the place wherein the rhetoric was originally produced and consumed. This acts to undermine other contexts and thus other readings or uses of the rhetorical text. To address this lack, Leff reads

110 contemporary responses to the Cooper Union speech to understand the ways in which the audience understood and subsequently used the speech.

Leah Ceccarelli brings together contemporary theories of polysemy and rhetorical theory to articulate a method for reception theory for rhetorical criticism. By attending to contemporary publications, according to Ceccarelli, a rhetorical critic can reconstruct audience reception—accepting the intended message, resisting readings, and repurposing meaning via ambiguous readings. In her discussion of hermeneutic depth, Ceccarelli notes that most rhetorical critics tend to imagine what audience thought of a text instead of offering evidence. Instead, she charges rhetorical critics to analyze both the text

(speaker) and the reception of the text (audience): “By engaging a close analysis of both the primary text and the texts that are produced in response to it, the critic can recognize both polysemic potential and the actualization of that potential by audiences. In doing so,” she concludes, “we can learn a great deal about the power of audiences to subvert the rhetor’s intent, as well as the power of rhetors to manipulate conflicting groups into harmonious adjustment” (407). By applying Ceccerelli’s method, Leff notes that rhetorical critics are better able to understand the rhetorical work of the text, not just the rhetorical instance (246).

What Leff, Jasinski, and Ceccerelli’s works all overlook in their consideration of context is the fact that rhetorical texts are continuously being reproduced and circulated long after their original moments of production and are consumed by multiple audiences.

So even though Leff and Mohrmann acknowledge that the speech “continued to elicit praise throughout the intervening years” (346), it is very clear that the only moment of

111 consumption in need of examination is the original and intended moment of consumption. The speech has been reproduced countless times in books, on webpages, and as speeches given by animatronical President Lincolns. However, the rhetorical context of the Cooper Union speech, say, reprinted in a ninth-grade textbook for study in an American history class does not draw the eye of the rhetorician for rhetorical analysis.

And in each of these different contexts, the text means and acts differently than in other contexts. Thus, we can never understand an “original context” because we are always viewing the text from inside completely different and equally relevant contexts.

The fact that the Cooper Union speech continues to be a live rhetorical text, interacting with audiences, is easily seen by just a quick search online. Take, for example, this posting from Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica blog: “It’s probably also worth noting that more than a little of the politics of Battlestar Galactica can be traced back to these passages originally written by the rail-splitter from Illinois.” Whether Lincoln’s speeches influenced the creators of the newest version of Battlestar Galactica or not, the point is that the speeches still garner a modern audience and still exert rhetorical power precisely because they are still in production. As such, an understanding of rhetorical contexts based on an oral tradition does not take into account the multiplicity of rhetorical contexts within which a text will circulate.

This view of rhetorical context, one might presuppose, is a result of the fact that the scholars I have attended to thus far are in speech communication, which, unsurprisingly, focuses on speeches. Rhetoric and composition, one might argue, would have a different view of rhetorical contexts because of the discipline’s focus on the

112 written word. Such is not the case. Composition textbooks, when attending to the idea of context at all, rely on a combination of Aristotle’s triangle and Bitzer’s rhetorical situation terminology. And while rhetoricians in speech communication will often nod to the Roman contributions to context—a weaving together of materials—this appellation to the classical tradition is missing from composition. Further, in theorizing context for composition, scholars attempt to graft different views onto classical rhetorical contexts.

Take, for example, Charles Schuster’s “Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist,” an article that I have chosen because it has been anthologized in one of the only composition theory readers Crosstalk in Comp Theory. Schuster is exploring Bakhtin’s dialogic theory, concluding that “[t]hese contexts include not only the syntactic structuring of the utterance and the localized setting of the speaker or writer but also the social, historical, ideological environments in which that utterance exists and participates” (460). Again, the definition of context relies on Aristotelian topic (utterance), speaker, and audience, and Schuster grafts on a series of environments that further affect context. Still, context is informed by an oral tradition that adheres to the constraints of time and space.

“And Every Word, When Once It Is Written, Is Bandied About”

The reliance on time and space to define rhetorical contexts seems to deny the ways in which the written word, and indeed, other forms of media, escapes those boundaries. The reason for this is unclear, for writing has allowed the word to escape oral situations for a few millennia. One reason may simply be a general unease about writing, meaning, and authority, as can be seen as early as Plato’s work. Through the mouth of

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Socrates speaking to Phaedrus, Plato writes: “And every word, when once it was written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself” (166). Once the words start to get “bandied about,” the meaning has no authorial origin, no intentional persuasion—rhetoric running amok.

The theorists who define and analyze rhetorical situations as they have descended from the classical tradition, then, recognize the original moment of rhetoricity and actively ignore attempts to adapt old texts to new rhetorical situations (Schiappa; Neel) while also turning a blind eye to the ways that rhetorical texts, still in circulation, are always already in rhetorical contexts. Again, “context” is typically used to fix a text, in this case a rhetorical text, to a specific place that is defined in space and time. Schiappa calls for careful scholarship that focuses exclusively on classical texts in their classical contexts, decrying modern uses of classical rhetorical texts as unethical appropriation.

And while scholarship should attend to classical contexts and appreciate what can be learned in those contexts, it is equally true that texts have been circulating throughout history; people have used, translated, adapted, appropriated, and been influenced by

Aristotle’s work through two millennia, and each of those contexts have both shaped and been shaped by this Greek philosopher. The fact is that there have been many rhetorical situations for Aristotle’s work—many contexts in which these texts interact—the predominant focus on an original situation tends to fix these texts in history while subordinating all other non-authentic contextual understandings.

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Coupled with the desire to fix rhetorical contexts into place is an equal desire to claim everything as rhetorical, thus effectively globalizing rhetorical contexts. Dilip

Parameshwar Gaonkar, for example, takes traditionalists to task about their dependence on human agency and understandable discursive mediation (75), arguing that coarticulation (that is, political rhetoric, feminist rhetoric, historical rhetoric, and so on) makes rhetoric both a global and a situated concept. Gaonkar writes:

What the traditionalists fail to notice (being preoccupied with the

paradigmatic pole of substitutability rather than with the syntagmatic pole

of contiguity) is that the proliferating coarticulations simultaneously create

the effect of both globalization (everywhere) and situatedness (here and

now). [. . .] The sheer usage and repetition emanating out of a hermeneutic

stance is what creates the effect of globalization. Moreover, globalization

severely undermines rhetoric’s self-representation as a situated practical

art. (76)

Gaonkar is echoing Bruce Robbins’ 1990 claim, noting that the all-encompassing nature of rhetoric tends to camouflage fairly different agendas and ideologies under the same term.

Based on Gaonkar’s observations, I would like to add another dimension as it concerns context: The focus on situatedness—that is, on rhetorical context—while ignoring rhetoric’s globalizing effect acts to further perpetuate ideologies that escape situation. What I mean here is that rhetoricians often outline a context and describe the rhetoric occurring in that context—the speaker, the intention, occasionally the audience’s

115 reception. This reading then becomes the globalized reading; it can be imposed on similar rhetorical situations via careless adoption and reiteration by other scholars, thereby escaping the bounds of the original context to become a free-floating rhetorical idea.

Thus, an event that is, in theory, context-specific becomes a heuristic to understand unrelated events: a rhetorical exchange between a teacher and her student becomes an article that generalizes the event so that it can be applied to other teachers, other classrooms, and other students; an analysis of a group that protests the WTO, allows a rhetorician to make claims about all social movements; a study of one Martin Luther

King, Jr. speech becomes a means to understand the entire civil rights movement. A paradox is created when an adherence to time and space comes into contact with a broad view of rhetoric: Rhetoric is situated; rhetoric is everywhere.

In attempting to address the paradoxes of a rhetorical context brought about by the oral tradition, theorists have offered revised understandings of the elements of rhetorical situations. Walter Ong in “The Writer’s Audience Is Always Fiction” and later

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s “Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked,” for example, have complicated the audience of written work. In the oral tradition, these theorists argue, the rhetor can directly address the audience, looking to specific people at a specific place.

In writing, however, the rhetor often does not have this ability to see an audience and thus must invent the audience based on the styles and traditions of written work. The audience, in turn, enters into this invention, taking on certain identities as defined by the writer in order to be the right type of audience for a particular work.

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This idea provides the foundation for Michael McGee’s work “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture.” According to McGee, there is a substantial difference between speaking and writing, and rhetorical critics can only develop an understanding of a text by analyzing apparently finished discourse in conjunction with its sources, its culture, and its influence (280). Only by examining a text in this way, McGee argues, can rhetors break the habit of separating text and context and thereby treating text and context as different things. He writes:

My way of stating the case (using the concept “fragment” to collapse

“context” into “text”) emphasizes an important truth about discourse:

Discourse ceases to be what it is whenever parts of it are taken “out of

context.” Failing to account for “context,” or reducing “context” to one or

two of its parts, means quite simply that one is no longer dealing with

discourse as it appears in the world. (283)

McGee then offers a reading of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream speech, asserting that a scholar cannot say anything meaningful about the text without the context, that the two are, in fact, embedded in the same speech. Based on this, McGee argues that we are no longer attending to “texts” but “fragments”—snap-shots of a product that emerges from the collapse of text and context.

One result of the fragmentation of discourse, according to McGee, is the emergence of an “invisible text” that occurs as a result of the changing cultural conditions in which fragments exist. As such, the roles of speakers/writers and readers/audiences become reversed as readers/audiences recreate texts in new cultural contexts. “The only

117 way to ‘say it all’ in our fractured culture,” concludes McGee, “is to provide readers/audiences with dense, truncated fragments which cue them to produce a finished discourse in their minds. In short, text construction is now something done more by the consumers than by the producers of discourse” (288).

McGee’s argument is interesting insofar as the most provocative argument, the one quoted above, appears in the next to last paragraph of his essay. Previous to this argument, McGee outlines a theory of rhetorical criticism that is fairly familiar: rhetorical critics must look at the original context—context constructed by the interplay of sources, culture, and interplay—when interpreting a text. Further, his unproblematized proposal concerning audiences’ roles grants audiences with what appears to be conscious construction. However, as Celeste Condit observes, “it is not even clear how frequently audiences exercise their creative capacities. I am dismayed at my students’ whole-hearted attempt to live themselves unreflexively into the text of a Michelob Light commercial. I doubt that ‘text construction is now something done more by the consumers than by the producers of discourse’” (340).

I do not intend to devalue the work that McGee is doing here. He has recognized a need to have a more complex understanding of rhetorical context. Further, he seems to unconsciously recognize the weakness of Ong’s and Ede and Lunsford’s earlier analyses of a writer’s audience. That is, Ong and Ede and Lunsford base their analyses of a writer and his audience on the conception that the audience who reads a book is the intended one. As such, the audience can successfully read the cues that the writer embedded into the text and invent themselves in turn. However, with the global circulation of texts

118 coupled with the ability to reproduce countless versions of a text, completely unintended audiences can access and read a text. For example, a Canadian businesswoman can buy a copy of The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), a novel from about 800 CE Japan, that is translated into English, and read it on a plane as she travels to French-speaking Quebec, where a French version of the same book is in print. Lady Shikibu, the author of the book, could not anticipate this audience and therefore could not write in the textual clues by which audience members must create themselves. Likewise, the audience does not necessarily know how to imagine themselves in turn to be the intended audience.

McGee offers a theory of audiences interacting with fragments of con/texts, and the audiences are invested with a tremendous amount of power to create meaning from those texts. In this way, McGee revises rhetorical criticism’s focus, shifting it from production to consumption. And this shift is where the problem lies. McGee’s assumption of production appears to trace a text’s production back to its source—rhetorical intention at the time of delivery. So to return to the example from the previous section, the moment

Lincoln produced or presented his Cooper Union speech, and thus the moment of rhetorical delivery, was when Lincoln was standing in front of the people and speaking.

Since then, it has had multiple audiences, and on this point, I agree with McGee.

However, also since then, it has had multiple productions or reproductions. Different authors, translators, publishing houses, internet sites, and comic artists have all represented the text with different intentionality: to instill a sense of nationalist pride, to celebrate a great rhetor, to explain the formation of political parties, to entertain children at a theme park, to provide a reference point that scholars can access, and so on. If

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Lincoln’s purpose was to form a cohesive Republican party and gain a presidential nomination, then it is safe to assume that people reading or listening to the same speech today would not be influenced by that particular motive but other motives and ideological workings.

If rhetoric continues to appeal to a theory of context that is based on an oral tradition, then the field will continue to labor under a mode of production and consumption that is static within a definable space and time. Working under a theory of traditional rhetorical contexts, rhetoricians are not merely limited in how they read a text in rhetorical criticism but are also limiting their invention and strategy in creating rhetorical texts. Indeed, contrary to many people’s intuition, orality’s ephemeral quality provides a paradoxically stable context for analysis—stable at least in comparison to a text that can be passed around and interpreted indefinitely. Rhetorical contexts need to be understood, instead, as constantly emerging as texts are reproduced and re-consumed by multiple producers and audiences. Working in this way, rhetoricians can attend to the complexity that circulation and unlimited reproducibility brings to rhetorical contexts instead of focusing on a theory of rhetorical communication that assumes the relative stability of orality.

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CHAPTER FIVE: CONSUMMABLE CONTEXTS

Everything is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively as a commodity.

(77)

Jean-François Revel

Anti-Americanism

In my previous chapters, I have focused on the trope of context as an unquestioned rhetorical strategy that tends to privilege an authentic origin that masks circulation and constrains texts into specific places. In interrogating textual contexts, I was particularly interested in tracing the dialectical engagements between texts and contexts— how they create and recreate one another—and their relationships in global flows. My purpose in the textual contexts chapter was to disrupt static understandings of context that are generally imagined at the sites of production and consumption, showing the ways in which texts and contexts are dynamic and constantly transforming. In examining rhetorical contexts, I intended to illustrate that a focus on an oral tradition has led scholars to privilege sites of original production and consumption while ignoring the far-reaching rhetorocity of texts. Context, however, is not merely a rhetorical trope; it is also deployed by marketers as a means to profit. The culture industry that Adorno and Horkheimer identified in 1944 has commodified context and made it the tool of the connoisseur and specialist. In the same way that radio and television become vehicles for advertisement

(Adorno and Horkheimer 128), so too has context become the tool of advertisement for the product that it supports. The process of creating a consumable context takes on

121 different forms in global economies: purposeful recontextualization, often referred to as localization, of a text; new texts that celebrate an original context as a means of investing global commodities with aura; and context as a commodity within itself—something that can be bought, consumed, and sold in mass markets.

This chapter, then, concerns how context is commodified by examining the intersections among global economies, marketing, and context. It is important here to remember that there is not a division between the local and the global, between contexts and the “decontextualizing” processes of circulation. Rather, producers and consumers always imagine localized contexts at the global scale as imagined communities and specialized markets, and the idea of the global is always imagined at multiple localities in a piecemeal and contested manner (Appadurai 12). Part of this piecemeal, contested, and multilocal practice is the politics and rhetorics of context. In marketing and commerce, appeals to context appears as recontextualizing and decontextualizing, as well as in related terms like localization, specialty markets, and my personal favorite, global bazaars.11 This practice of assembling an ideology of global consumerism, however, is not just a corporate scheme to get more money; consumers are complicit in the commodification of context to invest mass produced consumer goods with artistic aura, or sometimes alternatively, to

11 Target has a home décor brand available as part of their global bazaar series, locating their products as Asian, Indian, and African. This is not unique to Target, however; Pier One Imports, Overstock.com, and a series of other large chains (and small independent stores) all offer merchandise as part of their global (read “oriental” or “exotic”) marketplace.

122 claim ideological rights and privileges for certain commodities to the exclusion of others, such as those marked by “made in the USA” slogans.

My argument in this chapter builds from my arguments in previous chapters: The idea of authenticity is embodied in the rhetorical trope of context, which can and does have very real material consequences as context moves from an epistemological idea to a marketing strategy employed in the name of global capitalism. I will move through this chapter in three parts. In part one, I address the purposeful business practices of

“recontextualizing” texts and artifacts for the purposes of global circulation. This can be something as simple as translating the text from one language to another to far more complex practices of “localizing” texts by changing or rearranging materials. In part two I explore the ways in which both businesses and consumers invest texts and artifacts with an aura or authenticity by appealing to an original context. Such an analysis explores the ways in which the original context is imagined and consumed as a supplementary text as well as consumer strategies that resist the “decontextualization” of a text. Finally, in part three I examine the ways in which spatial context has become a commodity to be bought and sold by a consuming public that desires an authentic experience; that is, consumers not only want to understand the context from which a text emerges, but they also want to experience that text within its original context. In my conclusion to this section, I will discuss the material consequences of these practices—the fact that context is now a fetishized commodity that affects the marketplace, people’s lives, and the texts themselves.

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Purposeful Recontextualization: How to Make Global Texts Feel Local

Context is a tremendously important concept when marketing products for global marketplaces, and tremendous effort and money is invested in recontextualizing texts for new locations. Recontextualization depends on the belief that there is an original context in which a text belongs. Consider, for example, the definition that Linell offers:

Recontextualization may be defined as the dynamic transfer-and-

transformation of something from one discourse/text-in-context (the

context being in reality a matrix or field of contexts) to another.

Recontextualization involves the extrication of some part or aspect from a

text or discourse, or from a genre of texts or discourses, and the fitting of

this part or aspect into another context, i.e., another text or discourse (or

discourse genre) and its use and environment. (144-45)

Recontextualization assumes a process of decontextualization, for texts are cut off from

“their original loci of occurrence and their indexicals thereby cut off from the elements they had originally indexed” (Sarangi 306). Recontextualization of commodities—of texts and artifacts—is a process that requires the text or artifact to be revised to meet audience expectations and thus ensure greater profitability.

This type of purposeful recontextualization can be as simple as buying the rights of a text and publishing it in a new context. Often, the text published in a new context is revised in some way, from new dust jackets (a fairly small revision) to new languages (a substantial revision that bears no superficial similarity to the source text).

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For example, the Harry Potter series, while originally written in English, was translated/adapted for a US audience. Editors of the US changed British words to their US equivalent, such as “mum” to “mom,” “boot” to “trunk” and “jumper” to “sweater.” (A full comparative list of these changes can be found on the website The Harry Potter

Lexicon.) Also, the title of the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone became Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The reason for this is reputedly because

Scholastic Books, the US publishers of the series, thought that US children would not buy a book if the word “philosopher” was in the title (“Help/About”). And while J. K.

Rowling now regrets the change (“Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”), she did agree to it at the time as part of a translation project to make the book more accessible to a US audience:

Arthur Levine, my American editor, and I decided that words should be

altered only where we felt they would be incomprehensible, even in

context, to an American reader . . . [.] The title change was Arthur's idea

initially, because he felt that the British title gave a misleading idea of the

subject matter. In England, we discussed several alternative titles and

Sorcerer's Stone was my idea. (Rowling, qtd. in Ask Yahoo!)

These changes were not necessarily greeted with unanimous praise in the US market. People still refuse to read the US version, ordering each book from the UK so that they can experience the Harry Potter series as it was intended. And such a view is not idiosyncratic; a search on the changes to the US version of Harry Potter reveals a number

125 of sites where fans express their displeasure about the recontextualization process.

Indeed, in the July 10, 2000 issue of The New York Times, Peter H. Gleick wrote a fairly strong polemic titled “Harry Potter, Minus a Certain Flavour,” wherein he concludes:

Are any books immune from this kind of devolution from English

to "American" English? Would we sit back and let publishers rewrite

Charles Dickens or Shakespeare? I can see it now: "A Christmas Song," "A

Story of Two Cities," "The Salesman of Venice."

By protecting our children from an occasional misunderstanding or

trip to the dictionary, we are pretending that other cultures are, or should

be, the same as ours.

By insisting that everything be Americanized, we dumb down our

own society rather than enrich it.

Gleick’s point appears to be that recontextualization is merely a tool of cultural homogenization, that texts can and should circulate without purposeful alterations that attend to localized differences. And in the case of a book written in English and disseminated to English-speaking countries, this might be possible. Nevertheless, there are multiple instances in which purposeful recontextualization, or lack thereof, has ensured the success or failure of texts circulating in global markets.

For example, following the commercial success of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

(Saban Entertainment 1993-2001 and Walt Disney Company 2002-present), DiC

Entertainment, at the time a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, purchased rights

126 to translate the Japanese anime Sailor Moon (Toei Animation 1992-1997) for US and

Canadian television. The series’ ratings failed to reach significant levels, and the show was subsequently pulled from the air in 1996, just one year after airing. The show was revised in certain ways for a US audience: it was translated and dubbed into English, certain scenes that were considered too violent or too sexually explicit were cut, and a “Sailor

Says” segment that provided a daily lesson was added to the end of each episode.

However, Anne Allison reports in Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global

Imagination that these revisions were not enough to localize the series. “But the general consensus for its failure here was that the property had been insufficiently

‘Americanized’ to work in this America-centric marketplace,” she writes. “American girls are not receptive to Japanese anime, Bandai officials told me in Tokyo. And executives in the field I spoke with, both in Japan and in the United States, said simply that marketing had not paid enough attention to localization” (152).

Recontextualization, or lack thereof, might not actually account for the failure of

Sailor Moon on US television. Cartoon Network picked up Sailor Moon in 1998 and included it in its Toonami block with Dragon Ball Z (Toei Animation 1986-1989), which proved a great success. Also, they deleted the “Sailor Says” segment and tried not to

“Americanize” the series quite so much, much to the delight of the fans. Further, Roland

Kelts proposes that Sailor Moon’s failure has a lot to do with the Toei company’s

“technical errors, poor production standards, carelessly negotiated or (in the case of

Sailor Moon) revoked rights, and other sloppiness and insensitivity” (187). Meanwhile,

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Sailor Moon the manga series, published by Mixx Magazine, which is now TokyoPop, enjoyed tremendous commercial success, and outside of translating the language into

English, very little was done to purposefully recontextualize the series. In fact,

TokyoPop pioneered the practice of publishing its manga in a Japanese book format, which is read from right to left, which means that US consumers must read the book backwards.

This does not mean that purposeful recontextualization has only been used to nonreceptive ends. In 1985, Robotech (Harmony Gold USA in association with

Tatsunoko Production) the television series successfully aired in Canada and the US. The

Robotech series is actually an amalgamation of three different Japanese anime series: The

Super Dimension Fortress Macross (Studio Nue, Tatsunoko Production, and Artland

1982-1983), Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross (Tatsunoko Production 1984), and Genesis Climber Mospeada (Artmic/Tatsunoko Production 1985). In a frequently- asked-question section on Harmony Gold’s official Robotech website, Tom Bateman explains:

Back in 1985, when Robotech was first broadcast, there was a minimum

65-episode requirement for daily strip syndication. To fill in the necessary

episode requirement, SOUTHERN CROSS (23 episodes) and

MOSPEADA (25 episodes), were combined with Macross to make up the

85-episodes of Robotech. An additional episode, #37 – "Dana’s Story"

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was created specifically for the Robotech series as a bridge between The

Macross Saga and Robotech Masters chapters.

Added to this recontextualization was the conscious choices to cut certain scenes that were considered too violent or sexual for US audiences, the renaming of characters “to appeal to the American and international markets,” and the splicing together of scenes to create whole new episodes that were only aired as part of the US Robotech franchise, not the Japanese Macross franchise (Bateman).

Important to note in this example is that the processes of recontextualizing a text for the US market is often synonymous with recontextualizing a text for international markets. In other words, Macross was not exported to international markets; the US adaptation Robotech became the international version, complete with Westernized name changes, edited scenes that reflected US sensibilities, and even the combined story arch that does not exist in Japan. All recontextualizing after the US edits only address language and market, not content. A more recent example of this purposeful recontextualization into US markets and subsequent internationalism of the US version can be seen in the

Pokemon craze (Oriental Light & Magic 1998).

Pokemon (short for Pocket Monsters) expanded from a handheld computer game for the Nintendo Gameboy to an international phenomenon, which now has Pikachu, the yellow, electrically-charged main character, gracing the side of a Nippon Air Boeing 747.

The anime series within this franchise enjoyed tremendous success on US television, but not without revision. As Katsuno and Maret trace in “Localizing the Pokémon TV Series

129 for the American Market,” US producers chose not to air several episodes of the animated series, and the episodes that were aired often had numerous scenes recut and rearranged throughout the season. This allowed the US distributor, 4Kids Entertainment, to change the information and meaning of the original text, for example when the company felt it needed to substitute (not just translate) dialogue that it thought would be offensive to US audiences as either too violent or too sexualized.

The US version of Pokemon became the version that was exported to international markets, becoming a global mass cultural phenomenon. Indeed, Koichi Iwabuchi argues

“Given the fact that these globally circulating Pokémon are the American versions rather than the Japanese originals, Nintendo of America’s marketing of Pokémon as global characters is a prime example of the Americanization of Japanization” (69-70). It seems, then, that producers of texts do not need to put a lot of effort into recontextualizing texts for local audiences if a text has already conformed or been modified to match a dominant entertainment context—in this case, the US entertainment industry. Japanese anime can only become global commodities if they first become US commodities or if there is sufficient novelty and exoticness to give it a certain chic value.

Context as a Means to Invest Mass-Produced Texts with Authenticity

Recontextualizing or localizing texts often has the added consequence of apparently diminishing or stripping a text of important contextual information from the texts’ sources. Even though the content of the text is made accessible via

130 recontextualization, the text itself loses its connection to the original, its sense of authenticity that is derived from its place in history and geography. And as many businesses have discovered, this authenticity is profitable, adding to a product’s kitsch value.12 As such, in the dialectic of producing and consuming texts, producers and consumers have started to produce and consume accompanying contexts to supplement those texts. Context, then, is not just an external consideration when revising texts for mass consumption; it becomes an addition to the text to be both co-produced and co- consumed with the text.

For example, in 1964, Hiroaki (Rocky) Aoki opened his first Benihana of Tokyo restaurant. His market research indicated that Americans enjoyed exotic surroundings but not necessarily exotic foods. With this knowledge in hand, Aoki started a teppanyaki- style restaurant in New York City that prepared food in front of its customers. What is most noteworthy of Benihana’s early success was Aoki’s insistence on authenticity:

[. . .] I insisted on historical authenticity. The walls, ceilings, beams,

artifacts, and decorative lights of a Benihana are all from Japan. The

building materials are gathered from old houses there, carefully

disassembled, and shipped in pieces to the United States where they are

12 “Kitschification” is the process wherein objects or ideas are transformed into easily marketable forms by being grouped with like objects or ideas and given names of which “country kitsch” is probably the most common. See Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism by Matei Calinescu and “The Aesthetic Endeavour Today” by Roger Scruton.

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reassembled by one of my father’s two crews of Japanese carpenters.

(Aoki, qtd. in Sasser 2)

The recreation of historical authenticity vis-à-vis the importation of material context required Aoki to pay New York City-based union carpenters to sit at the job site and do nothing while the Japanese carpenters worked. Additionally, the staff of early Benihana restaurants were all of Asian descent, adding to the feeling of exotic authenticity. And while Benihana restaurants no longer import all of their building materials and wait staff, the early success of Benihana is often attributed to the marketing of an authentic Japanese experience in terms of material contexts paired with localization in terms of its food.

Aoki’s original investment into Japanese authenticity paid off well in the long run because the material space of the restaurant now refers to and reactivates the authentic material contexts of its early restaurants. What occured in this instance is slightly different from that described in Benjamin’s argument in “The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction.” Mechanical reproduction, according to Benjamin, depreciates the quality of a work of art detaching a piece from its tradition and what suffers, as a result, is its aura. Benjamin recognizes, however, that “[t]he presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (220), and establishing the original, the authentic, allowed Aoki to eventually abandon the cost intensive recreation of material contexts in his US stores. Once the brand was established as authentic and thus aura- filled, the brand just needed enough referents in its non-authentic reproduction to simulate

132 the aura. And this aura was vitally important to Benihana’s success—the context is created to be co-consumed with the more obvious commodity of food.

This practice of commodifying context does not only include material contexts and consumable artifacts. Media texts and artifacts, too, are often supplemented and co- marketed with an authentic or original context. Indeed, the process of localization is a process of dialectical engagement between audiences and corporations. At the extreme ends of an audience continuum are self-identified fans who want only the original and consumers who enjoy the mass-produced text for a moment of distraction. And this audience continuum complicates corporate localization efforts, for the balance that producers must achieve is creating and maintaining a very invested fan base while also appealing to a broad market. But producers do not do this on their own—audiences often take on the labor of establishing a context in which a text belongs. For example, in the

1980s, the US saw an increase in anime fan clubs. These clubs were generally just a group of people who came together at someone’s house and watched anime together. Most anime was still unavailable in English, so many of these groups would watch untranslated materials or anime that had been translated and subtitled by other fans and then distributed. With the rise of anime fan clubs, anime fanzines (fan + magazine) started to appear. These were mostly short, photocopied publications that had club meeting dates, a list of anime that was available, fan-produced art, and sometimes anime reviews. The late

80s saw a number of these fanzines published, including The Super-Dimensional Space

Cavalry of Eastern Mass: A Bi-Monthly Journal Dedicated to the Creation and

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Continuation of Japanese Animation (1986), The Rose (1987), and C/FO—Atlanta

Newsletter (1987).

In 1987, Lorraine Savage started one of the first national anime clubs, Anime

Hasshin, and produced the fanzine The

Rose (see figure 5.1).13 The Rose was published for fourteen years and completed its run at sixty-four issues. All of the content for this fanzine was completely generated by fans for fans. It included reviews of new and/or popular anime titles, fan artwork, and cultural notes about Figure 5.1: Inaugural Issue of The Rose Japan. As Savage explained in the inaugural issue of The Rose, “Japanimation clubs seem to be growing as fast as the American interest in Japanimation has. It seemed only natural that little Rhode Island would have its own Japanimation club.”

The Rose became one of the premiere fan-produced anime fanzines, probably because Savage also organized an anime exchange program that made it easier for people to exchange anime tapes across the country. Members paid an annual fee of $14 for the

13 The Rose won the 1995 Osamu Tezuka Award for Best Anime/Manga Fanzine/ Newsletter at the AnimEast convention.

134 quarterly publication as well as the right to publish their original artwork and articles in the fanzine. As a whole, the articles contained in The Rose are an interesting study in the formation of context for international texts and artifacts. Writers attempt to situate the reviewed anime into its original Japanese context—either within the nation-state of Japan or as part of a director’s vision and as part of that director’s oeuvre—while also attempting to place the text into a US/Western framework for the US audience. For example, in his review of the Vampire Hunter D series, Kevin Leahy places the narrative genre of the series into a woven context of US genres, writing, “What do you get when you slam a Hammer Horror film with a Lovecraftian twist head-on into an ultra-violent spaghetti western?” Shortly following this, Leahy simultaneously places the Vampire

Hunter D series into an intertextual context that other anime fans would recognize:

“Anime fans should be familiar with such works of his as THE NAME OF THE WIND

IS AMNESIA [A Wind Called Amnesia], WICKED CITY, DEMON CITY

(SHINJUKU), and of course, VAMPIRE HUNTER D.”

As Japanese anime and manga began to enter mainstream entertainment, fanzines made way for professional publications, of which I will only mention a few notable publications here. An early attempt started with Animag in 1987, which only ran seven issues. When Animag ended its publication run, many of its production staff went to

Animerica (1991), a Viz Communications publication, which is a US subsidiary of the

Japanese companies Shueisha Inc., Shogakukan Inc., and Shogakukan Production Co., Ltd.

(ShoPro Japan). About the same time, the editors of the fanzine Anime UK Newsletter

135 started the professional magazine Anime UK in 1991. Like Anime UK, the fanzine of The

Japanese Animation Society of Hawai’i became the professional publication Animeco in

1996. While the format and content of these early magazines owe much to their fanzine origins, it is interesting to note that there is still an underlying theme of an authentic

Japanese context to which the writers and audience refers. This context—that is, the place of production and the culture that surrounds that place—is an important identifier for anime fandom as a subgroup by expanding on a specialized area of knowledge. Fans are cohesively defined as a subgroup precisely because they develop a specialized language and understanding that only they understand.

Like the fanzine articles, most references to context are referenced quickly and are assumed by the writers and audiences in order to situate the anime review. This can be seen in how anime series are introduced, such as this example from a review of Otaku no

Video:

Toren Smith says that if you want to understand what makes Gainax tick

just like a nuclear detonator, there are three things it would be best not to

forget. First, that the members of Gainax are otaku to the bone-marrow

transplant; second, as true sons of Japan’s gritty “second city” Osaka and

its surrounding Kansai district (in contrast to almost all the rest of the

anime industry, which revolves around Tokyo), they’re hot for material

success, as honestly portrayed in Otaku no Video, where Gainax’s sideline

in “garage” (limited-manufacture model) kits are wish-fulfilled into a

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Fortune 500 industrial giant; and three, that they’re more a family than a

company, who must make decisions collectively, and who can’t delegate

authority to outsiders. (“Otakings” 8)

Here, the contextualizing information assumes a level of knowledge from the audience. It does not define “otaku,” which is used in Japan in the same way that “nerd” or “geek” is used in vernacular English. It does, however, offer a quick definition of the cultures of

Osaka (the city) and Kansai (the geographical region in which Osaka stands). And, as this review states, the audience cannot understand Gainax and subsequently their semi- autobiographical anime Otaku no Video without understanding these contextual markers— a context that is now available on the newsstands via these anime magazines.

In addition to an original context being both constructed and assumed in reviews, these magazines also offered articles that acted to demystify or define Japanese cultural practices and mythologies, such as Jonathan Clements’ article “Trade Surplus: Japan and

Post-War Sci-Fi” in Anime UK or Animeco’s series “Focus on” in which each article addresses something specific to Japan, such as Japanese homes (Poitras). And, of course, the letters section of all of these magazines is a collection of questions from fans who want to know more about different levels of Japanese formality and even why people always contemplate love when looking at carp fish.

Fans do not rely completely on these mass publications for provide their supplementary contextual materials for anime and manga; there are a number of fansites

(fan websites) that have replaced the old print-based fanzine. While these sites are

137 dispersed across the world, the Anime Web Turnpike (anipike.com), created in 1995, acts as a directory for them. In addition to offering a collection of links to fan-generated sites, the Anime Web Turnpike also offers forums in which fans can post and answer questions.

One such forum is “The Culture Corner,” which includes three subcategories:

• Wok Around the Clock: Share favorite recipes, cooking tips, and

discover Asian cuisine beyond Pocky and ramen

• Why Do They Do That?: The place to ask about cultural points you

didn’t learn in school—shoes off please.

• Japanese Language Center: The place to direct questions about the

Japanese language: grammar, suffixes and translations. (No da.)

Forums such as these act to provide audiences with supplemental contexts so that their consumption of the text is augmented with an understanding of “original” meaning. A functioning context is bolstered by additional information, which works because, once one has raised the specter of context, one is also admitting that one’s knowledge is incomplete and thus flawed. This is a boon to marketers who can endlessly play up an audience’s lack and sell to that lack. This supplemental context is not, as is probably evident, desired nor consumed by all audiences of anime and manga. Again, some audiences continue to enjoy anime and manga that has been localized for their distraction and enjoyment.

However, the marketing of supplemental context has become a lucrative business, and that can best be seen in the US licensing agreement with Newtype: The Motion Pictures

Magazine.

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Kodokawa Shoten launched Newtype: The Motion Pictures Magazine in 1985.14

While this publication focuses on the anime industry, as its name suggests it also reviews many other aspects of the entertainment industry, such as television programs and movies. In addition to its anime and manga content, the Japanese publication includes live-action movies, music, and game reviews, pages of “How to Art” and model-making techniques, and spotlights on the toy industry.

Figure 5.2: Covers of Japanese Newtype (Left) and Newtype USA (right)

Newtype has a popular reputation among US anime fans as a cornerstone publication in anime and manga. In 2002, A. D. Vision licensed Newtype and started to release Newtype USA, and the series ran from 2002 until 2008. From the outset, Newtype

USA in many ways attempted to mimic the original Japanese publication. Visually, the

14 Newtype took its name from a stage of evolution defined in the Gundam anime franchise, so its connection with the anime industry is defined in name as well as content. This might be why the first issue of Newtype USA featured a large picture of Gundam Seed on its cover.

139 page layouts are similar and many of the articles are translations of the Japanese articles

(see figure 5.2 on the previous page).

What is important to note about Newtype is that from the format to the content, an original or authentic context is celebrated as supplementary material for the US anime and manga market. The US version is printed right to left instead of the traditional left to right—a publishing decision made popular by Tokyo Pop’s manga line. Also in the US version are listings of the top rated manga, anime, and music, as well as show times and weekly synopses in both US and Japanese markets. This way, notes Lissa Pattillo,

“Newtype put more focus on Japanese anime releases as opposed to a more domestic approach. It allowed the more casual anime fan to feel up to date with the newest releases straight from their source” as opposed to other North American magazines. By discussing merchandise that is not intended for release in the US, magazines such as Newtype act to further promote the context of Japan as the originator of in-demand yet scarce texts.

Newtype USA also has features that attend to Japanese language, culture, and even

Japan itself. For example, the “I Love Anime” series of articles provides a travelogue across Japan for anime fans. The “I Love Anime” series announces, “No passport needed as we take you to anime hotspots across Japan,” and the recurring feature is familiar in that it provides rich detail about local customs and local anime vendors. In his opening diary about Miyagi prefecture, Hidekazu Kato writes,

For starters I try Fairy Tale [a local maid café], a place that’s just a hop,

skip and a jump from my hotel. On the menu I notice something called

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“Laputa Bread”—your guess is as good as mine. I order one out of

curiosity, and when it comes out, I kick myself for not recognizing it

sooner. It’s a piece of toast with a fried egg on top, exactly like the ones

Pazu and Sheeta eat in the underground cave in Miyazaki’s Castle in the

Sky. (113)

In addition to detailing experiences during travel, “I Love Anime” describes locations throughout Japan that appear in anime or manga, celebrating physical origins. For example, in his Hokkaido Prefecture travelogue, Kouichi Yazawa writes:

For my third day, I visit the town of Otaru, situated just a few miles

northwest of Sapporo. Otaru provides the setting for the dramatic Saikano

anime and manga series. It’s also the home of the Otaru University of

Commerce and Otaru commercial High School, the school that was used as

the model for the one Chise and Shuji attend in the story. The romantic

Asahi Observation Point that the two of them visit together is also nearby.

(115)

In his column, Yazawa is aware that a close connection exists between anime and the selling of context via tourism. “When it comes to titles set in Sapporo,” he begins,

“the first one that comes to mind is the Kita e game and anime series. One of the Kita e games was adapted to anime as Diamond Daydreams. This series contains so many scenes of famous spots in Hokkaido that players joke that the franchise is a thinly veiled promotional vehicle for the Hokkaido tourism industry” (115). The players who Yazawa

141 references here are Japanese, so their relationship with context consumption is slightly different than that of English-speakers reading a Newtype USA column to learn more about the place-based origins of their favorite anime series.15 English-speakers are building an imaginative context of what they consider “Japan” to be based on these short travelogues.

The idea of origin is simultaneously concrete—Japan exists—and ephemeral—Japan can only be briefly understood through other people traveling through the country and writing about their experiences.

In addition to providing locational context for its readers, Newtype provides linguistic context for its English-speaking audience. The drive for English-speaking audiences to make sense of the Japanese language is interesting considering that US- distributed anime generally comes with at least two viewing options: English voice-overs or English subtitles with a Japanese language track. At all times, English-speakers have access to the meaning of the storyline. Nevertheless, in almost every anime publication, a serial column answers questions about the Japanese language. Newtype’s column, “Ask

Jack,” invites people to submit questions concerning Japanese language or culture in relation to anime and manga. In September, 2006, one Newtype reader asks, “What is the difference between ‘kanji’ and Japanese?” (160) while another reader in the June, 2007 issue asks, “What is the difference between the phrases suki da and ai shiteru? Both seem to mean ‘I love you.’ In the anime Loveless, Sobu constantly uses suki da but I’ve only

15 No parallel feature appears in the Japanese version of Newtype. Instead, the Japanese Newtype provides articles about anime and television series and popular films, which, of course, the US version of Newtype also provides.

142 heard ai shiteru before” (160). Questions concerning language appear to feed into an attempt to appropriate Japanese as part of a fan-culture’s jargon, so words like suki and ai join a list of other common words associated to anime. Thus spring such websites as

100 Most Essential Words in Anime (Soler) and Akemi’s Anime World’s “Anime

Glossary” (Marshall), as well as word polls, such as Newtype’s poll which attempted to see which Japanese words people use the most in their everyday speech.

Obviously, Newtype and publications like it can only supplement something that is already there: anime and manga. While many of the articles focus on anime summaries and industry interviews, the very fact that a mainstay of these publications is information about cultural context speaks to the fact that context has become an important commodity within itself. The contexts that are both embodied and explained in Newtype provide anime fans with a sense of “Japan as origin.” Similar articles do not run in the

Japanese Newtype because there is no need to market an origin to the Japanese audience— context is only consumable so long as it is someone else’s context.

Context as Pure Commodity

Early anthropology is credited with creating the mythology that other people have culture, and that culture, according to James Carey, is often recorded “mischievously and patronizingly” (19). In the same way, other places are contexts, frozen as a tapestry of meaning that we can go see and understand. Consider this promotional blurb from the tourist website Context: The Experience of Place:

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Context is a network of architects, historians, and art historians who

organize walking seminars for intellectually curious travelers. We are

acutely sensitive to the corrosive effects of mass tourism, so besides

designing exceptional programs for our clients, it is our hope that these

experiences improve the relationship between the city and its guests.

The owners place themselves in opposition to Disneyland and Club Med, offering up an experience of “real places” as part of sustainable tourism. The underlying assumptions of

Context: The Experience of Place presume an authentic place that tourists can visit if they leave the trappings of mass tourism. The “built environment, cultural heritage, and living fabric” that make up the context of a place are explicitly for sale. The context is not just a supplementary commodity but the commodity in its own right.

Context: The Experience of Place is merely one example in which context, with its promises of authenticity and origin, has become a commodity. Depending on what the object of interest is, a context tour probably exists for it. Currently, some of the most popular of these tours are cuisine-based: learn how to make French food in France from a

French chef. According to gastronomy scholar Michael Symons, authentic food must have

“a respect for local climate” and “be true to place” (336). Thus, when people go on food tours, the dominant commodity on sale is not food; it is the local climate, the true place.

There is a sense that food in its original context simply tastes better and, if popular food- based travelogues such as Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray, Love are to be believed, allow the consumer to return to a nostalgically simpler life with simpler tastes.

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Anime, too, has created Japan as a contextual commodity instead of a destination within itself. In addition to Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo, a tour book of Tokyo for anime fans, self-proclaimed otaku can join specially organized tour groups that explore Japan as the originator of anime and manga. The website Pop Japan

Travel, for example, offers anime tours, the Tokyo Game Show tour, the Mind Over

Manga tour, all of which include full hotel accommodations, airfare from L.A. to Tokyo, guided tours, and a customized guidebook. After all, as Pop Travel Japan announces, “If you're looking for a tour to Japan that's more than just sightseeing on a bus—if you want to experience the REAL Japan—then Pop Japan Travel is exactly what you're looking for.”

Context can only be consumed as a commodity if that context is a familiar form, such as a text, an image, or a physical place. This is because businesses know how to market certain forms, and context simply becomes the content for these forms. Thus tourism, an industry with a long history steeped in the desire for the authentic, is an excellent place for context-as-commodity to emerge. If, indeed, “context” as a concept has evolved in the popular and even the scholarly mind as synonymous with authentic or origin, then it is unsurprising that commercial rhetoric embraces context as a means to sell the same old commodities (in tourism’s case, travel and landscapes) with continually fresh appeals to authenticity. The shift that I would like to point out, however, is toward the idea that the authenticity is not the contextual site; it is what the context can invest in mass-produced products. Contextual places are places of origin: The origin provides aura

145 through implied authenticity and therefore the origin invests related commodities with its halo of authenticity. The reinvested aura acts to limit and control textual potential, limiting the potential for revolutionary change. Instead of critical engagement and change, consumers of context are now actors within their own distraction; they must buy the commodities and do the work necessary to create contextual aura, which makes it more difficult for them to see how texts, contexts, and the aura of authenticity limits their abilities to transform thoughts and ideas.

An Ethics of Consumable Context

Consumable contexts embody an ethical paradox. On one hand, contexts provide a network or web of related influences, and understanding this context gives consumers a better understanding of the power relationships that surround a text or artifact. On the other hand, the culture industry has subsumed context into its great machine. What began as an ethical idea in the academy has left the academy; the consumers of context must suppress their imagination—a tragic effect of the culture industry as identified by Adorno and Horkheimer (100)—and accept a prepackaged context for the text. If we accept

Adorno and Horkheimer’s rather bleak and prophetic exploration into the culture industry, then context-as-commodity has degenerated into reproducible sameness. The context for anime is always the idea of Japan—the same context accompanies Sailor

Moon (an anime for young girls), Samurai Champloo (an anime for teenage boys from

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Manglobe INC, 2004-2005), and Urotsukidoji (a pornographic anime from West Cape

Production/Team Mu 1987-1995).

Now that context is a commodity, it is doubtful that context can be used as a means to ethically understand how a text operates in its lived life without some degree of difficulty. The problem arises when people think of the text as the only commodifiable object. However, since texts and contexts dialectically define one another and because texts are often created are reproducible commodities, then the context, too, will be formed through this dialectical engagement as at least part commodity. The commodified context translates into a worship of the authentic, and that worship is generally uncritical of its object. The commodification of context is another successful attempt to commodify origin, thus investing mass produced texts with the aura of authenticity. The move to commodify authentic origins is not the invention of the culture industry, although the culture industry has successfully marketed context. Consumable context appears to be the commodity of the connoisseur and the specialist, and connoisseurs and specialists have adopted the language of the academy in order to situate celebrated mass commodities—

England as the context for Harry Potter, Japan as the context for anime, and Italy as the context for Italian food. The connoisseur and the specialist speak of the importance of context in order to fully appreciate a text or artifact, becoming at least passingly knowledgeable of the contexts sold to them as supplementary material while also producing representations of additional contexts. Thus, I would argue, an ethics of consumable context must consider the discourses between the academy, which has

147 discursively defined context in conjunction with authentic and origin, the connoisseur and the specialist, who either transferred their knowledge of context from their education or built an understanding of context from contextual commodities, and the culture industry, which classifies and sells contexts to consumers.

The ideologies that are embedded in context are often constructed and celebrated by specialists and connoisseurs. One place in which an ethics can be addressed, then, is with the specialists. If specialists begin to present complex representations of context, it might be possible to oppose the perpetual sameness of the culture industry’s context.

Moreover, one question that the specialist needs to ask concerns purpose: What is the purpose of understanding the context of a text or artifact? Underlying this purpose might be the answer about the worship of origin and authenticity. If academics can ideologically shift the purpose enough so that origin and authenticity are no longer the conclusions of context, then the context presented to the consumer as supplementary information might shed some light on the complexities of texts in mass circulation. However, the call for greater contextual complexity does not necessarily mean that context ceases to be a commodity. Indeed, the market definition of commodity would lead then to the idea that such an enhancement to the context would only remove it from the commodity class temporarily or even make context more valuable. Eventually, either the culture industry will either provide materials for more complex context or will limit the level of complexity tolerated in a pre-packaged contextual commodity. A conceivable hurdle that the culture industry faces is that, by making contexts too complex, the information would take too

148 much energy for a mass-market to consume. Therefore, it is safe to assume that there might be a threshold of resistance to commodification.

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CHAPTER SIX: IN DEFENSE OF AN ETHICS OF CONTEXT

Man must consider truth not as something fixed and final but as something

to be created moment by moment in the circumstances in which he finds

himself and with which he must cope. Man may plot his course by fixed

stars but he does not possess those stars; he only proceeds, more or less

effectively, on his course. Furthermore, man has learned that his stars are

fixed only in a relative sense. (318).

Robert L. Scott

“On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic”

The rhetorical skills are potent instruments which transmit much of the

motive power which decides the destiny of society. (266)

Henry Wieman and Otis M. Walter,

“Toward an Analysis of Ethics

for Rhetoric”

Contexts matter.

Contexts are often employed as rhetorical tropes by any number of stakeholders for different purposes, for example, a rhetorical scholar using contexts to establish an

“intended” rhetorical situation in need of interpretation or a marketing team who decides to publish a magazine that delivers an exploration of an authentic context to connoisseurs of a mass-marketed product. Metaphorically, contexts act as limiting devices, fixing texts

150 and artifacts in certain spaces and times. Added to the metaphors of context are the assumptions of context: context as culture/nation/origin/authentic.

Ethical inquiry is an inquiry into situational power relationships. At any moment, power is circulating and congealing in different places and times in varying degrees.

Ethical inquiry analyzes these exchange dynamics to determine if power relations are acceptable for a certain situation. If deemed necessary, ethical action would then engage these power relationships with the full knowledge that power will always be inequitably distributed. Context as both a naturalized term and a rhetorical trope has long escaped the lens of ethical inquiry. So long as context exists as a god term, these underlying assumptions continue to proliferate with each new invocation and repetition. Analytical interrogations, then, are stymied and incomplete. If the purpose of analysis is to uncover meanings and interrogate power relationships in order to affect transformative change, then the tools of analysis cannot be allowed to recover those meanings and power relationships. Further, contexts are also part of industries trying to imbue their mass- cultural artifacts with some degree of missing aura. In other words, there is money, manipulation, power, and cultural capital wrapped up in the creation and commodification of context.

Celebrating the authentic text, the birthplace of ideas, the intentions of speakers and audiences seems to me an unconscious and nostalgic commemoration of modernist ideologies. This celebration perpetuates the idea that a text’s context can be known and that the context can imbue the text with the aura of history. However, definitions of context need to allow for movement and circulation while also dealing with its traditional

151 domains of production and consumption. However, as people adapt their uses of context to address circulation, their appeals to production and consumption will necessarily acknowledge the material and political contexts of reproduction and endless consumption. In this way, “context” becomes a useful concept that helps to illuminate not only the ways that texts are shaped and defined by those spaces where they are first produced and first consumed, but also how they are endlessly reshaped and redefined with every subsequent reengagement, no matter when, where, or by whom.

As I have argued throughout this dissertation, scholars need to examine the formation and use of context for its rhetoricity. In rhetorical theory, scholars have long understood and represented context as the place where rhetoric occurs. Contexts come into existence through a dialectical process with texts—texts and contexts transform and define one another. However, when it is invoked as a lens through which to understand a text or artifact, context becomes a rhetorical trope, shaping how knowledge is constructed. And as the quotations that I use to open this chapter attest, rhetoric is powerful because it defines people’s knowledge of the world. When people use context as a rhetorical trope, they first limit representations of knowledge and then privilege certain contexts over others, thereby privileging certain ways of knowing the world.

I conclude this dissertation by discussing the different ways in which context is formed, for what purposes, and then how those purposes are made manifest. The formation of context, I argue, is both dialectical and rhetorical, and these formations, when recorded, become additional narrative texts. Once contexts are articulated or recorded, they provide a stable place of belonging, and people will trace that sense of

152 belonging to an original place, which invests texts with a sense of historical aura. Further, contexts tend to stand in for other concepts, such as culture, nation-state, history, and so forth, which allow people to sidestep many of the ethical quandaries that arise when evoking these concepts. Finally, because contexts are recorded and because they seem to provide a stable location in which to “place” a text, they can be and in fact are converted into supplementary commodities that people sell and buy.

Context as Dialectic

An ethics of context would not deny inquiry into a site of production or consumption; rather, an ethics of context would value multiple inquiries into every site of production and consumption, recognizing that texts, by their very existence will co-create contexts. This process is, as I argued in chapter three, a dialectical process wherein the material world and the world of ideas transform one another in a search for truth. Because contexts are both intellectual and material, a contextual dialectic is necessarily a combination of Hegelian dialectics (that is, the interplay between a thesis and antithesis create a new thesis or understanding of the world) with Material dialectics wherein “the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought” (Marx, “Afterward”).16 And within each instantiation of dialectical transformation are the remnants of previous ideas, thoughts, and realities.

16 In his afterward to the second edition of Capital, Marx directly opposes his theory of dialectic to Hegel’s because the use of Hegel’s dialectic “seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things.” Further, Hegelian dialectic seemed to deny imposition and material transformation within the flow of history. However, even in

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For example, any reader can understand this quotation from Aristotle’s On

Rhetoric: “[F]or what we said earlier is true, that rhetoric is a combination of analytical knowledge and knowledge of characters and that on the one hand it is like dialectic, on the other like sophistic discourses” (53). And the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the work would deepen when placed into the textual context of the surrounding words.

And that meaning would deepen further if the reader also studied sophistic philosophy and theories of dialectic. And to that, the reader can study a number of other contexts: the purpose of the book, how it was pulled together from student notes, the text in Greek, the cultural climate of the time, the uses of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, the interpretations of Aristotle in Arabic language and philosophy, the reclamation of Aristotle in the

Enlightenment, the appropriation of Aristotle in rhetorical pedagogies for composition classes, the canonization of Aristotle in multiple fields, and so on.

Dialectically formed contexts are ephemeral contexts. They come into being through interaction with the text, and then once the text continues to move through space and time, those contexts either dissipate or transform into different contexts. As I argued in chapter four, “Rhetorical Contexts,” the contexts that form around an oral event probably (and ironically) provide the most stable connection between a text and intended context because contexts end as soon as the oral event ends. There is a direct connection between one text or event and one context. When a text is recorded, on the other hand, that text moves, calling into being multiple contexts through dialectical engagement. In

critiquing Hegel, Marx still recognizes the ways in which his theory of dialectics is indebted to Hegel’s, declaring that he was “a pupil of that mighty thinker.”

154 this way, contexts transform instead of dissipate. However, this dialectical process changes once a context is described and recorded. It moves from dialectic to rhetoric.

Context as Rhetoric

Once contexts are described and recorded, they do not dissipate. Instead, those contexts become texts that represent complex relationships as knowable. The representations of those contexts are defined, recorded, and objectified, ready for reproduction. It is at this moment that contexts become rhetorical—they convey a truth, a way to understand the world. Dialectical inquiry requires contradictions in order to generate new knowledge; rhetoric, on the other hand, starts from the conclusions and then tries to convince people of those conclusions. In the case of reading a text through a context, representations of the context are generally presented as a stable lens. In order to make contexts tangible for rhetorical purposes, those contexts need to be constructed in a way that makes the articulations clear and the chosen foci significant. Those contexts become new texts, stories that provide a structure for a text to call home. These stories are always created after the end of a context in an attempt to describe something that once was, which leads to a process of representing context as something foreign, mysterious, and heretofore unknown. Further, contexts are articulated with other stabilizing terms, such a cultural context, historical context, national context, which collapses the distinction between context and culture/history/nation through constant identification.

Stabilizing contexts via narratives create places where texts belong, and that sense of belonging brings with it an ideological imperative to place the text not just in a place but

155 in its original place—the place that it truly belongs. The sense of origin and belonging created by context invests the related texts with an aura of authenticity, which provides both the text and the context with a level of commodity value that producers can then market to consumers.

Context Tropes as Narratives

As I argued in both “Textual Contexts” and “Rhetorical Contexts,” for all that contexts are considered external, they are, by their very definition, constructed after a set of material conditions have passed. Defined by its classical roots, context as a noun weaves together different strands to make a pattern, a fabricated situation. Texts act within dynamic situations; however, to speak of a context, a person speaks of a construction. Because they are created post hoc, contexts need to be discovered, constructed, and interpreted at the intersections of hermeneutics and epistemology. In

History of Hermeneutics, Maurizio Ferraris argues that hermeneutics and scientific knowledge are not necessarily opposed even though their respective histories ensure that they are not a unitary concept. He traces the parting of ways, so to speak, to Plato’s suspicion of hermeneutics. Plato expressed concern that an interpreter cannot establish whether a statement is true or false. “Thus,” notes Ferraris, “the idea of episteme as knowledge of the truth of a thing is opposed to the knowledge of the interpreter and the poet” (196). Ferraris works from Hempel’s Covering Law Model—a model of historical explanation—to bridge this historical divide with narrative: “Narrative is not some decoration subordinate to the formulation of general laws. Vice versa it is the first,

156 necessary phase of explanation, since an event can be can be inscribed within an explicative law only insofar as it has already been worked out (translated and interpreted) into a narrative” (223). From here, Ferraris cites Arthur C. Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History, emphasizing the explanatory force of narratives to make sense of unknown historical laws. Such a philosophical inquiry into hermeneutics, epistemology, and history is important to the development of an ethical theory of context because in certain respects, contexts are invoked as historical narratives.

In describing contexts, people are attempting to uncover and illuminate knowledge, and the sources that I use in the chapter “Rhetorical Contexts” are good examples of those attempts. Invocations of context begin to pull from the ether of history certain salient facts that can help people develop a more complex understanding of a text.

This is not a revolutionary idea for the study of context—contexts have been created and described in a narrative form as long as there have been texts. However, because narrativized contexts have become, for the most part, naturalized, invisible rhetorical invocations, the power and rhetorical purposes embedded in contexts are often overlooked. And every time a context is re-presented, the ideologies bury themselves deeper into the term so as to be inseparable from the described context. Thus, the assumption that context means “original context”—the place of production and intended consumption—only makes sense because it has been repeated so many times as to become natural.

It is important to note here that narratives, too, are rhetorical tools with embedded power relationships. Most narratives depend on a beginning, middle, and end, presenting

157 in their final forms what looks like a cohesive and whole idea. Postmodernism critiques what Lyotard labels the “metanarrative,” the stories that are told about beliefs, cultures, practices, and so on.17 These metanarratives serve to mask the instabilities and contradictions of context, and Lyotard offers, instead, mini-narratives that are

“provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative” (Barry 87). A text has trailing after it a long line of phantasmal contexts, some recorded, some imagined, from each interaction.

A text never stops being in a context, and each context marks and is marked by the text.

To appeal to the place of production/intended consumption as an “authentic” or

“original” context is to supply a modernist reality. Rather, to ethically engage contexts, one must consider the circulation, the unknowable and unpresentable past and, to that,

“invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented” (Lyotard 81).

The rhetorical narratives of context become even more difficult to ethically navigate because each narrative becomes a text within itself, born from a different context with different purposes. Further, once a context is interpreted via narrative and recorded in a text, the context is preserved. This might account for the recurring assumption that contexts are something external to the text, something that the text can be

“placed in.” An ethics of context, then, would consider the effects of contexts being recorded as texts, and that this process is a constant stacking of contexts—contexts recorded, referenced, re-recorded, woven together again. Such an ethics would allow people to delve into the power relationships created by contexts as rhetorical tropes by asking: what is being privileged, what is being disempowered, and is that relationship

17This is sometimes called a grand narrative or master narrative.

158 acceptable? At every stage, one must ask: Why was the context constructed? How was it constructed? Is the context being used rhetorically to impose meaning on a text? Is it being referenced as part of a dialectical engagement with the text? At what point of text/context’s historical trajectory is a text/context being invoked? What are the previous contexts? What are the following contexts? By answering these questions, people must contend with the rhetorics they are invoking when conjuring a context. They must consider a text’s trajectory through time and space instead of binding text to a particular time and space. They are compelled to think through their purposes of invoking context as either a lens through which a text can be interpreted or a dynamic process that constantly engages with a text to dialectically form and be formed by the process.

Context Tropes as Places

Contexts do not only shine light on a text, they limit the domain of the text. In chapter two, “The Metaphors of Context,” I examine three common spatial metaphors— maps, frames, and landscapes—to illustrate how people intentionally or unintentionally limit a text or context’s influence. Spatial metaphors imply that contexts are containers, that they existed before the text as something external to the dialectical process. This is seen in such phrases as “placing a text in context,” indicating that a text belongs to a particular space and time. Space is often imagined within geographical borders, such as nations and cities. As I argued in “Textual Contexts,” what is contained within these borders is something “Other,” by which I mean the result of defining the “normal” and then objectifying and distancing those subjects that do not fit within this definition.

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Spatial Othering, in this case, often occurs when a normative definition is constructed around the ideas of nations and cities, which allow all other nations or cities to be

“them”—those people with strange practices and different habits. Contextual time, too, is

Othered. When people reconstruct contexts, those contexts have almost always seemed to have happened in the past—few people talk about a completely contemporary context because it is assumed that those contexts are natural and thus invisible. Michel de

Certeau, for example, discusses the “historiographic operation” as a rhetorical device that separates the past from the present, which effectively constitutes the idea of a “past” as an object ready for analysis. Thus, as I argued in “Textual Contexts,” people will describe contexts and speak of their use in analysis more often when those contexts have already occurred, when they belong to the past. Further, according to Foucault, history, as a disciplined discourse, “transforms documents into monuments,” and such monuments can only retain meaning through the cultural valuation of that discourse (Archeology 7). The historicizing of context allows for intellectual claims to authenticity because of its appeal to history.

This process of Othering allows people to make fairly generic observations about an object—in this case, context—that can exist outside of the messiness of daily lived life. Thus, when people construct contexts as having an outside existence with finite borders that mark off its beginnings and ends, they do not need to explain much because they rely on the stereotypes of space and time. These stereotypes, furthermore, do not follow an ordered pattern; rather, space and time stereotypes are layered into a single representation. For example, anime in context is a text coupled with an invocation of a

160 nation-state. Representations of Japan as a nation-state tend to be temporally messy: images of space-aged chrome buildings with mega televisions mounted on their sides are just as common as kimono-wearing “geishas” and samurai swords hung in a traditional tea house. In this way a Japanese context assumes first and foremost a spatial divide, but layered in that contextual stereotype is a temporal collapse. This assumed messiness is what an ethics of context needs to address.

Context Tropes as Commodities

When people record contexts, those created recordings become new texts.

However, they are not treated as texts; they still have the authority granted to them as contexts—an authority that allows them to cast certain lights upon the text. One of those lights, as I have discussed in this and all previous chapters, emphasizes authenticity. As I argued in “The Metaphors of Context,” contexts create an authentic place to which a text belongs. And this authentic place—this origin—invests texts with aura. It matters little whether the text or artifact is a singular artistic creation or a mass-produced text. The articulation of an original context invests both types of text with aura because it provides both texts with a sense of history.

In the case of mass-produced texts, that aura can only be applied if people are aware of an original context. This is opposed to a text that carries within it its own sense of history, such as a painting wherein each brushstroke is visible or a piece of antique furniture wherein the craft-person’s skill is seen in chisel marks and its use value is seen in the myriad dents and scratches that it accumulated throughout time. The value of a

161 recorded context becomes all the more tangible as contexts become supplementary commodities that are used to increase a text or artifact’s worth. Commodity contexts rely on both the idea that contexts are narrativized texts and places to which a text belongs.

Producers sell the context narratives. The context narratives are often related to a physical or metaphorical place and origin. Contexts as commodities rely on a number of the rhetorical moves that I trace in previous chapters: they rely on the metaphors of context to limit and contain texts; they rely on a sense of belonging created by linking a text to a specified intertextual webbing; they rely on ideas of intentionality—an author’s intended meaning to an intended audience; and they rely on people’s desire for a stable referent.

From this, the context as commodity rhetorically persuades people to buy more by providing a seemingly endless supply of supplementary contextual materials.

Conclusion

I began the dissertation by invoking Richard Weaver’s The Ethics of Rhetoric, arguing that people use context as a god term, which tends to privilege an authentic and original place under which all other contexts are subordinated. The drive to define an authentic or original context focuses analysis on production and consumption—two sites that are constructed as fairly stable—while masking circulation and the multiplicities of contexts that simultaneously exist. Defined contexts become stable contexts, fossils in the histories of dynamic events, and the power structures embodied in them become naturalized through naming those contexts and explaining them through limiting and limited metaphors. Thus the paradoxes of context continue to work without question:

162 external and real with constructed and intangible; contained spaces with infinite possibilities; unknowable with knowable; intangible ideas with material commodities; and finally, texts and contexts define one another with texts belonging to a context.

The paradoxes can continue because underlying them is a general modernist concern about space, place, and belonging: circulation displaces texts, artifacts, and even lived experiences. People invoke context to curtail circulation and create some stable ground from which to work. People go so far as to invoke an original context as a mechanism to invest their texts with an aura, a place in history, in order to increase the value and richness of a text or artifact. In other words, context is used in a variety of ways yet always with the various stabilizing effect, stopping a text’s movement through time and space so that it belongs. And as I argued in chapter three, that sense of belonging will run its course further and further back until the text is linked again with its original, its authentic context. From here, all other contexts are inferior, acknowledging their inferiority through reference: decontextualization, recontextualization, localization, new contexts, and so on.

My hope is that the reader will walk away from reading this dissertation with a much-needed wariness when invoking this seemingly neutral term. But an ethics of context requires not just awareness and critique; it requires a strategy for interaction.

When used as a rhetorical trope, contexts exert power to discursively limit knowledge to sites of productions and consumption while simultaneously privileging a text or artifact’s origin. Instead of defining a context, I propose a system in which people consider the formation of context at the same time that they consider a text. Such a consideration can

163 present the dialectical formation of context as a means to examine the interaction between texts and contexts in circulating global economies, which would provide a much needed perspective about the lives and influences of texts and artifacts.

164

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