University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

WRITING, PLACE, NETWORK: SCALE AND DIGITAL RHETORIC

MADISON P. JONES

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2020

To Jane, my network

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my advisor, Sid Dobrin for his constant encouragement, enduring patience, thoughtful feedback, and mentoring. His advice to graduate students at orientation was to get out and explore the areas around Gainesville, and following that advice brought me to this project. Raúl Sánchez always asked the toughest questions and challenged me to dig deeper into the theory. Anastasia Ulanowicz helped me to clarify my project and refine my prose. I am also grateful to Robert Walker, who led me to Howard T. Odum’s work and encouraged my interdisciplinary interests in ecology and geography and to Cynthia Barnett who taught me much about Florida’s important role in the history of environmentalism and showed me how great teachers can take learning beyond the traditional borders of the classroom. I am so fortunate to have undertaken this research alongside my colleagues in the TRACE Innovation Lab, especially

Jacob Greene, Aaron Beveridge, and Shannon Butts, who have read more than their share of my drafts, who helped me make my way through many meandering paths of thought, and who guided me through the rocky parts of this study. Thank you to Sean Morey and to John Tinnell, who blazed the trail and offered support and advice along the way. Thank you to Lee Rozelle, who has supported me since I was a budding ecocritic. I am so grateful to my father who taught me everything I know about trees and hard work and my mother who taught me to proofread and showed me what it means to be a teacher. Most of all, I would like to thank Jane, who challenges, encourages, and supports me always.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 7

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 9

(Re)Placing Scale: A Networked Methodology ...... 12 Chapter Summaries ...... 22 Elsewhere ...... 26

2 WRITING CONDITIONS: THE PREMISES OF ECOCOMPOSITION ...... 28

Placing Ecocomposition ...... 29 The Premises of Writing ...... 35 Chora, Kairos, and Regionalist Rhetoric ...... 41 Choric Environments ...... 48 Solonist Ecocomposition ...... 51 Rhetorical Wayfaring ...... 55 Prescribed Burn ...... 61

3 PALIMPSEST NETWORKS: GHOST BIKES AND DIGITAL-MATERIAL WRITING ...... 63

Publics and the Ecologies of Place ...... 65 Pedestrian Rhetorics ...... 67 MEmorials ...... 68 Chora and Place ...... 71 Vélorutionaries and Petroculture ...... 74 Petro-Armor ...... 77 Visual Rhetorics of Place ...... 79 Intersections of Petroculture ...... 82 Racial Rhetorics of Space ...... 86 Disembodied Rhetorics ...... 90 Augmented Publics ...... 92 Anthropocene ...... 93

4 SPRINGS OF INSPIRATION: THE RHETORICAL ENERGY OF PLACE ...... 95

Rhetorical Energy ...... 100 Ecosystems Ecology and Ecocomposition ...... 101 Florida Out of Place ...... 107 Rhetorical Naturecultures ...... 113

Monumental Publics ...... 118 Constellating Place ...... 121 Florida Terroir ...... 124 Silver Springs...... 126

5 SYLVAN RHETORICS: ROOTS AND BRANCHES OF MORE-THAN-HUMAN NETWORKS ...... 127

Dead Wood: New Material for Rhetorical Theory ...... 129 Strange Encounters with Rhetorics ...... 133 More-Than-Human Publics ...... 137 Sylvan Rhetorics ...... 141 The Forest of Rhetoric ...... 144 High Rise ...... 148

6 CONCLUSION: PLACING POSTDIGITAL WRITING ...... 150

Writing in the Shade ...... 151 The Postdigital Writing Classroom ...... 156 Pastoral ...... 160

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 161

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 176

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

WRITING, PLACE, NETWORK: SCALE AND DIGITAL RHETORIC

Madison P. Jones

May 2020

Chair: Sidney I. Dobrin Major: English

While writing takes place in networks which are always evolving, rhetoric and writing studies has traditionally engaged with place through the static and fixed models of Aristotelian commonplace topoi. In the face of large-scale environmental problems and with the rise of mobile writing technologies such as smartphones, this project argues that further attention should be paid by writing studies scholars to place as a network. Networked writing undercuts scalar definitions of place and it underwrites distinctions between local and global. Alongside a growing number of scholars who are reshaping the relationship between place and networked writing technologies, this project turns to the role of scale in shaping how place is imagined topologically. This project argues that topological structures for place are not sufficient, and argues for a choric and networked model for defining the relationship between place and writing.

Against scalar models for theorizing and studying the ecologies of writing, this dissertation traces the networked premises of writing through four place-based case studies to elaborate on how networks reshape the rhetorical role of place. Through emerging technologies and ecological methodologies, this dissertation demonstrates how place emerges out of chaotic networks of writing which expand the rhetorical borders of considerations and destabilizes the privileged position of humans as the central matter of concern. Through four place-based case

studies, this dissertation defines a networks approach to place and demonstrates how ecologies of place function in networked writing practices. Ultimately, this project demonstrates that networks allow writers to understand place in a world shaped by massive-scale environmental change and emerging locative technologies.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

29°39'39.6"N 82°20'09.1"W

Gainesville, Florida

As a child, the poet Adrienne Rich would write letters back and forth to a friend with the following address:

Adrienne Rich

14, Edgevale Road

Baltimore, Maryland

The United States of America

The Continent of North America The

Western Hemisphere

The Earth

The Solar System

The Universe (8).

She explains the game in a keynote where she recounts the feeling she had as a little girl of being at “the center of it all” (8). She describes how “It is this question of feeling at the center that gnaws at me now — at the center of what?” (9). In her talk, she attempts to locate herself “not with a country or a house, but with the geography closest-in” (8-9). This question—“at the center of what?”—gnaws similarly at this project, which concerns itself with how the problems of scale and topological thinking position writers: as individuals, as members of a nation, as human, as bodies, as on-the-ground, as moments in history, as distinct, remote, separate.

As networked writing technologies increasingly become central to our sense of place, location opens to new ways of encountering and imagining the relationships between writing and environment. In many ways, the disruptions that emerging technologies present to how we map

the relations between writing and place is nothing new. When images of the earth from space began to circulate in the late 1960s, notions of the earth as a large-scale ecosystem arose in both scientific and public thinking. As ecosystems ecologists like Howard T. Odum began trophic mapping and modeling at the level of atmosphere and in local environments, an American environmental movement took root. Visualization technologies became increasingly important for representing the large-scale environmental problems that were becoming public concern.

From communicating the scalar concerns of ecosystems to modeling the ozone hole, visualization technologies played a major role in how publics placed themselves within ecologies and environments.

As they represent the systems of relations between individuals and collectives, these technologies often rely on scale as a central metaphor for place. Traditions of place as a topology go back at least to Aristotelian models of place-based argumentation. As networks come to the fore of how place-based writing is theorized, following the rise of mobile and locative technologies, topological models of place are insufficient. Locative media interact with place in ways that are emergent, embodied, and distributed, and because of this, they preceed and exceed topologies of place. For this reason, the philosopher Martin Heidegger feared that images of the earth from space would disrupt our sense of the local and uproot humans from their homes, transforming human’s relationship with the world into a technological one (Being and Time 84).

Thomas Rickert points out Heidegger’s fear of the images of the earth from space in his book Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (214). Heidegger’s fear of technology “uprooting” humans (Heidegger Reader 325, qtd. in Rickert n306) stems from a topological engagement with place that has troubling connections to his concept of “blood and soil” which are part of place-based racist attitudes towards those who are rooted in place and

those who are not. While Sonia Sikka demonstrates how Heidegger rejects racism built on reductive biologism (161), his theories about place enabled a Nazi anti-Semitism which associated “Jews with a lack of rootedness” (168). While Rickert bases much of his theories of ambience on Heidegger, this project turns away from these topologies, seeking other means of engaging place beyond the genealogical and arborescent notions of rootedness. Instead, this project seeks to disrupt topological thinking by looking to the ways that large-scale environmental problems, networked theories, and emerging technologies are transforming place.

In their groundbreaking collection, Being Together in Place: Indigenous Coexistence in a

More Than Human World, Soren C. Larsen and Jay T. Johnson draw from Western phenomenology and Indigenous knowledges to understand place as an agental force. While the authors do much to bridge the connections between Western place-based theories, they argue that

“What frustrated us in the end with phenomenology, though, was that place remains an abstraction within this philosophy, still the subject of the self-referential academic voice” (16).

Building from Indigenous knowledges allowed them to address the lack of engagement both with specific places and with “an active agency of place” (17). This agency binds humans and nonhumans in “a way of being and knowing” (3). Building from Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel

Wildcat, they argue that “To be Indigenous means ‘to be of a place’” (Larsen and Johnson 3,

Deloria and Wildcat, 31). This sense of being isn’t necessarily the same as Heidegger’s

“rootedness,” which depends upon generations of being in one place.

One of the most striking elements of the Earthrise photograph is its sublime presentation of scale. As one looks at Earthrise, they can imagine zooming up from the very room through the ceiling, the atmosphere, to the furthest reaches of the imagination. In this way, scale does uproot us, but what zooms up also zooms down, connecting us to place. As scalar technologies

increasingly augment the way we locate ourselves in the world, the problems scale presents to place-based thinking likewise come to the fore, but they also reveal the deeper problems that topological definitions of place, like those that Heidegger had in mind, produce for location- based communication practices. In an era defined by massive-scale environmental issues, this project turns to emerging technologies and ecological methodologies to move beyond topologies and to understand the relational and emergent elements of place as a network.

(Re)Placing Scale: A Networked Methodology

Though you may not think about it, you encounter scale every day. Whether referring to the scale in your bathroom, balancing the scales of justice, scaling a staircase, or the great chain of being (scala naturae), scale plays a part in our sense of equilibrium and how we locate ourselves in the world. Scale (from the Latin scala for ladder or sequence) is also the cartographic measure through which to produce ratios on maps. Technologically and metaphorically we zoom out and in through scale. Scalar metaphors are central to the ways that we locate ourselves using digital media, but they have also been part of how we defined place since at least Aristotle. Even before smartphones and digital mapping technologies became essential to how we navigate, scale played a major role in how we defined place. As new technologies began to disturb our sense of the local, human geographers like Yi-Fu Tuan began to explore how vital an attachment to place is across cultures and periods. Topocentric scale has long shaped how writers construct a sense of place. Scalability is deeply embedded in traditional theories of place.

Heidegger’s concern with images of earth from space extends from these topological definitions of place, and place as a topology is a powerful influence shaping how we locate ourselves and relate to our environments (Malpas 2006 and 2012). Like the Earthrise photograph, place was connected to a sense of zoomable scale, moving from local to global.

Tuan, who frequently wrote of his dwelling, comments that “at one extreme a favorite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth” (Tuan 1977). Scale is fundamental to how we locate ourselves in relation to the places we call home. And yet, Earthrise uproots us only as much as spherical models did to a flat earth. Instead of resisting this change, this project interrogates the role of scalar topologies in place-based approaches to communication. The major problem that the following chapters are concerned with is that scale presents the illusion of zoom, creating a rift between local and global as well as stratifying environmental inequality. As

Larsen and Johnson argue, “state sovereignty is a hegemonic, hierarchical, and oppressive scale that Indigenous activism struggles to resist” (4).

Scale has become the focus of many interdisciplinary conversations across the humanities. For instance, in Hyperobjects (2013) and Dark Ecology (2016), ecocritic Timothy

Morton describes the problem of scale as a fundamental concern for ecological thinking. In Dark

Ecology, Morton describes the Anthropocene in terms of scale, where individuals cannot see their impacts except collectively as a species. Individual decisions, such as cranking up a car, are

“statistically meaningless” on the micro level yet geologically impactful when scaled up to the level of species. The resulting problem for human agency is twofold: 1) our individual actions feel trivial and 2) global environmental problems seem insurmountable. Scale ruptures the individual subject from the ecologies that make up the polis of place. This rift is what ecocritic

Timothy Clark refers to as scalar derangement. Clark argues that:

Scale effects in relation to climate change are confusing because they take the easy, daily equations of moral and political accounting and drop into them both a zero and an infinity: the greater the number of people engaged in modern forms of consumption then the less the relative influence or responsibility of each but the worse the cumulative impact of their insignificance (72).

In other words, my daily decisions as a consumer (what I eat, wear, or what mode of transportation I take) become both trivial on one scale and of geological consequence on the other.

Scalable topoi allow us to imagine place as distinct, isolated, and separate. It supports the bifurcated models which center humans and separate nonhumans. In Natural Discourse Sidney

Dobrin and Christian Weisser trace how the positioning of “nature as an object separate from human culture and life” originates in Bacon’s natura vexata, where science separates the human from the natural and Descartes “precise and careful measurement” (10). However, as new materialists like Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, and Anna Tsing have demonstrated, place is far messier than zoomable scale leads us to believe. Digital humanities scholars like Matthew

Jockers and Julia Flanders (2013) have discussed micro and macro oriented approaches as

“interconnected and interdependent” (4).

Rather than rely on topos-driven, zoomable scale, I theorize place through choric invention as part of writing networks. The Platonic concept of chora suggests the ways writing takes place within what Anna Tsing terms “nonscalability,” a concept which resists the urge “to expand—and expand, and expand—without rethinking basic elements” (505). This project engages with what Dobrin (2011) calls the “edge of chaos” which is the “possibility [...] in the moment prior to space becoming place, the moment before arrangement and meaning” (40). That is, this project seeks to define the locative aspects of writing outside of static topologies through practices which encourage writers to access what Zach Horton terms “thick ecology,” engaging with sites of large-scale disaster beyond the rigid boundaries of scale. This approach “asks us to think with the scales of the planet in all of their interconnected complexity” (21). Rather than relying on Cartesian topologies, these practices engage place as a trans-scalar network. As

technology unsettles Heideggerian notions of “world” based on scalar topologies, it also opens up new thresholds for considering how individuals relate to place in the boundary event of the

Anthropocene.

While scale is important for holistic ecological modeling, as I will discuss in chapter four, these topoi do not fully account for the complexity of ecologies of place. Rather, scalable models present an abstracted version of places in order to make them scalable (as Tsing demonstrates).

This abstraction leads to what N. Katherine Hayles terms “the Platonic backhand and forehand”:

The Platonic backhand works by inferring from the world's noisy multiplicity a simplified abstraction. So far so good: this is what theorizing should do. The problem comes when the move circles around to constitute the abstraction as the originary form from which the world's multiplicity derives. Then complexity appears as a "fuzzing up" of an essential reality rather than as a manifestation of the world's holistic nature. Whereas the platonic backhand has a history dating back to the Greeks, the Platonic forehand is more recent (12).

As abstract models are imagined as premises, they separate subject and object into precise,

Cartesian categories, effectively erasing their place in the complexity of networks. This is not to reductively say that scalable models are bad. Large-scale theories and holistic studies of writing are vital to ecocomposition. The problem comes from treating these fixed, commonplace models as premises, which Barad claims, deny “the entanglement of matter and meaning” which positions us “at some remove, to reflect on the nature of scientific practice as a spectator, not a participant” (247). In the next chapter, I will draw on Plato’s concept of chora to define premises of writing as networked and relational.

This project is deeply indebted to Nedra Reynolds’ Geographies of Writing, a landmark study of the relationships between locative technologies, human geography, and the formation of publics, nations, and boundaries. Reynolds reimagines writing as an emplaced activity, and uses visual rhetoric and GIS mapping (and other mobile technology) to describe how the borders between bodies, communities, and nations are established and traversed through writing.

Building from Reynolds’ focus on how mapping technologies are changing relations with public spaces, the following chapters demonstrate a networks approach to place. This project describes how emerging technologies, posthumanist theories, and ecological methodologies can extend the work that Reynolds initiates in Geographies of Writing and contribute to place-based advocacy rhetoric. Specifically, Writing, Place, Network concerns itself with the issue of scale in place- based approaches to digital rhetoric and writing.

Bruno Latour’s concept of actor-network theory provides useful strategies for defining place beyond the abstract scalar relations of zoom. The problem, as Latour puts it in his most recent book, Down to Earth, is that “there is no Earth corresponding to the infinite horizon of the

Global, but at the same time the Local is much too narrow, too shrunken, to accommodate the multiplicity of beings belonging to the terrestrial world.” Rather than zooming from a commonplace model to explain a specific site of rhetoric, networks emerge from the relations of actants. This project builds from writing studies scholars’ recent interest in Latour (Lynch and

Rivers) to develop a networked approach to place. Networks, Latour (1996) contends, allow “us to dissolve the micro- macro- distinction that has plagued social theory from its inception” (5).

Instead of smaller or larger scales, networks are either longer or denser. Networks offer a means to theorize place without the problems of partitioning humans and nonhumans. Place is constituted through “the type, number and topography of connections [and] is left to the actors themselves” (1996, 5). Premises of writing as networks challenge the precise and carefully demarcated orders of magnitude from which the categories of nature/culture and human/nonhuman are bifurcated.

Andrew Pilsch refers to scalar derangement as “the rhetorical problem a nonhuman rhetoric must solve” (350). Pilsch critiques Brown and Rivers’ “nonhuman rhetoric” which only

translates the world into human terms. In light of this, Pilsch theorizes the “inhuman” as a model for rhetorical practice, which removes human scales and hands over agency to inhuman beings.

As I discuss further in chapters four and five, I prefer David Abram’s concept of the more-than- human to the inhuman. Namely, this is because I believe that in a period in which human activity is capable of geological impact, human scales are still an important aspect of what Lawrence

Buell called “the environmental imagination” in his 1995 book that helped catalyze ecocriticism.

In undertaking this study, I hope to further invite connections between ecocriticism and decolonial posthumanism. Following Larsen and Johnson’s expansive concept of peoplehood in

Being Together in Place, calls us to “embrace the more-than-human communities whose autonomies are entangled in place” which allows us to “focus our attention on the embodied scales of coexistence where humans and nonhumans are engaged in different kinds of dialogue, struggle, and relationship” (5). Such scales of coexistence are severely limited within humanist timeframes and topologies. Yet, removing humans from rhetorical theory reinforces the very bifurcated logic that Pilsch critiques. This conflict characterizes the difference between

Continental posthumanism and decolonial posthumanism, which I discuss in the next chapter.

While I agree with Pilsch’s larger argument, I believe that it is a matter of emphasis. The networked methodology outlined here seeks a choric, more-than-human approach in order to decenter, but not remove, human agency and culture from rhetorical production in place.

By acknowledging the communicative capabilities of nonhumans, this study runs the risk of anthropomorphism, a fondational critique posed by early ecocriticsm. Yet, as I develop further in chapter five, to recognize that nonhumans are capable of activities previously relegated to the human and to humanism (such as communication) is not to anthropomorphize. The tendency to remove agency from the nonhuman world is part of a humanist tradition that decolonial

posthumanism directly undermines. In fact, as Larsen and Johnson demonstrate, “place has agency” and “place is guiding Indigenous peoples, settler-descended peoples, and nonhumans into a new dialogue” (1). Furthermore, in the age of the Anthopocene, human agency and the nonhuman world become deeply entangled, as do the past, present, and future. While the

Anthropocene has no agreed-upon start date (nor do other geological epochs), and remains a contested scientific term, it is proposed to refer to “The Epoh of Man,” the period in which humans became a “force of nature,” altering the climate and making marks in the geological record.

While the term has not been officially recognized as a geologic epoch by the International

Comission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the Anthopocene Working Group of the ICS is proposing the

‘golden spike’ (or start date) of 16 July 1945, with the Trinity test (and the beginning of the great acceleration). Other dates range from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the

Agricultural Revolution. One such moment of human impact relevant to this project would certainly include the genocide scientists therm the “Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the

Americas,” which recent studies suggest “resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth

System in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution” (Koch et al, 13). The extreme regrowth of plants “that is thought to have occurred following the arrival of epidemics in the

Americas” which resulted in “carbon carbon uptake [...] may have reduced atmospheric CO2 levels and led to a decline in radiative forcing that may then have contributed to the coldest part of the Little Ice Age” (14). Such a change presents deep connections between colonialism and the Anthropocene, and support the argument that Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017) have made for dating the epoch from the time of colonialization.

As such, (re)placing humanist scale involves disrupting Eurocentric time (as chronos).1

In support of their argument that “the Anthropocene is not a new event, but is rather the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, that have been at work for the last five hundred years” (761), my treatment of the “epoch of man” resists humanistic chronology. Likewise, because geological epochs don’t typically have precise or widely agreed-upon start dates (the Holocene, for instance, began between 12,000 and 11,500 years ago), the human-centered notion of a singular “beginning moment” is less than useful for this study. These beginning points often ignore the racist and imperialist histories which shaped and continue to enfore systematic inequalities (Whyte 2016).

Instead of positing a chronos of Antropocene, this project turns to chora in order to understand the ongoing kairos of Anthropocene, locating supreme moments of anthropocentric imperialism and resistance in both Ancient Greece and in the period of American colonization.

It is though this process that I endeavor to answer Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s (2019) call for

“projects that engage differing temporalities (the gifts of past to present, present to future), or terrible inheritances, such as those left in the wake of the Anthropocene.” Drawing from Kyle

Powys Whyte (2017), she argues that:

We might situate such terrible gifts as those that purposefully re-attune our attention to objects of study like “deforestation, forced removal and relocation” of peoples, containment of peoples and loss of mobility, dispossession, destruction, and pollution of land, climate destabilization, commodity agriculture, and food security (Whyte, 208-211). These are all decolonial projects because they are actions that have been predicated on the genocide of Indigenous people. They invite a new kind of attention, suggest we must get to know the givers of terrible

1 Anibal Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” argues that “Europeans generated a new temporal perspective of history and relocated the colonized population, along with their respective histories and cultures, in the past of a historical trajectory whose culmination was Europe” (Quijano 541, qtd. in Clary-Lemon 2019).

gifts. In order to attune ourselves toward giving such a new kind of attention, it is perhaps useful to surround ourselves with different ancestors.”

In writing studies, theorists like Latour (and especially Timothy Morton) have received criticism from Indigenous scholarship for ignoring (while mirroring) a/anit-modernism (Latour 1993).

Following Clary-Lemon’s “work to be the givers of less terrible gifts, ourselves,” this project builds its choric methodology from decolonial posthumanism in conversation with Latour’s ANT and AIME in order to undermine humanist timescales, to confront the rhetorical issues presented by the kairos of the Anthropocene, and to historicize the racist and colonial networks which shape our sense of place as well as contemporary concepts like rhetorical ecologies and ecocomposition.

Rather than adopt what Derek Muller terms the “planeury” perspective, a practice he sets in opposition to Michel de Certeau’s flaneur concept, choric models understand the complex ecologies among zoomed-in and zoomed-out perspectives. Instead of reinforcing the subject/object relationship, chora assembles with/in place as a network. Muller relies on human engagement with middle altitude, a middle ground informed by binaries, but his theory falls into the problems of scalability that Pilsch critiques in Rivers and Brown. Instead of oscillating between higher and lower scales which center the human perspective, defining place as a more- than-human coproduction allows the conditions of writing to come to the fore and reveals the complex networks which exist beyond Cartesian scales. Building from Pilsch, while still acknowledging the importance of human perspectives and reference points, writing studies can grapple with place as a natureculture.

Digital technologies like geovisualization have become an important part of how experts and specialists communicate large-scale problems like climate change with non-expert publics.

In everything from medical rhetoric to urban planning and design, technologies help us deal with

scale in communication. Dan Richards’ work with sea-level rise visualizers (2015 and 2018) is an important example of how important geovisualization can be for communicating environmental issues. Sea-level visualizers take complex scientific projections based on decades of climate data and allows users to explore the effects of rising seas on local communities through a digital map. The science and organization Climate Central partnered with the real estate company Zillow to create maps visualizing the potential financial losses homeowners face from rising seas. Richards conducted a user experience test with local residents in South Florida using a Climate Central sea-level map. His UX test demonstrates how maps can convey technical knowledge to local communities. This test reveals how useful mapping technologies can be, but these technologies also present new difficulties for communicating climate change.

When technology is used to disseminate knowledge in a ubiquitous way, it often takes the form of top-down communication models, where experts disseminate knowledge to publics without regard for the specific needs of a community. Using these topological models for communicating place-based issues like climate change produces several major problems, namely scalar derangement which detaches local action from the collective by creating a commonplace out of environmental issues. These top-down approaches stratify environmental inequalities through what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence.” This phenomenon poses a major problem for communicators because climate change does not have a clear causal relationship between consumer behavior and environmental impact. Topologies separate places and reinforce borders.

It is rhetorically difficult to connect the dots between an individual's daily actions and climate change because impacts are so dispersed. According to the CDP’s recent report, for instance, just

100 companies are responsible for over 70% of the world’s carbon emissions.

Mapping technologies respond to scalar derangement by giving us rhetorical sense of control through zoom. In fact, Joanna Zylinska argues that scalar derangement equips us with the fantasy that we can control and regulate scalable objects (44). In biblical discourse, scales refers to things which cause moral myopia. Scales are the things that make us unable to imagine or understand a problem. Taken this way, scale causes us to miss the networks that make up place.

The rhetorics of scale through which we discuss climate change produce a rift between local action and global impact as well as between individuals and collective publics. For problems like sea-level rise, a networks approach to place might begin with specific sites of change and study the relationality between these places at individual and global scales. Rather than zooming neatly from the concept of “sea-level rise” to that of a local community, networks allow us to better address the drastically different impacts that climate change has on communities.

Chapter Summaries

Toward a networks approach to place, each chapter engages a specific place as what

Nixon (drawing from Mary Louise Pratt) calls a contact zone. These zones of contact are places with deep histories of colonial, racial, and geographical (regionalist) violence. To practice a choric methodology, this work engages the emergent elements of place to trace the networks which shape and are shaped by writing. Writing always means engaging with place (see Dobrin

2001), but this project specifically responds to the exigence of large-scale environmental problems and the locative affordances of emerging locative media. Through a choric approach, writing studies scholars can engage the complex ecologies through which we produce publics and places. To demonstrate how these theories reshape rhetorical inquiry and elaborate on how networks transform places and publics in response to issues raised by recent theories of postcomposition, the post-topological, posthumanism, and the postdigital, I offer four place- based case studies:

In the first chapter, I elaborate on a choric and networked approach to place-based composition, demonstrating how theories of ecocomposition and digital rhetoric associated with the Florida School of writing studies can be read through the Florida landscape. This chapter theorizes place as an emergent network of rhetorical invention, both shaping and shaped by the act of writing, through a case study of The Devil’s Millhopper, a sinkhole in Gainesville, Florida which has played a significant role in early theories of digital rhetoric through the work of

Gregory L. Ulmer. Building from Ulmer’s choric methodology, I characterize a rhetorical shift from place as topos to place as an ecological network. I explore the relationship between specific place and commonplace in Aristotle’s rhetorical model and then turn to Ulmer’s choric invention to build a methodology for studying the ecologies of place as networks for writing.

In the second chapter, I explore digital and material approaches to rhetorical placemaking as part of public advocacy in decentralized networks. This chapter offers a case study of ghost bicycles as material and digital rhetorics used by cycling advocates in Jacksonville, Florida.

Ghost bikes are repurposed bicycles put in places where cyclists have been fatally injured. Ghost bikes function as MEmorials, or a public acknowledgement of the unspoken costs of petrocultural values. Through ghost bikes, advocates engage place as a network, sharing information across decentralized and relational communication structures. Rather than taking a top-down approach, ghost bikes communicate across decentralized city networks. However, ghost bikes are temporary monuments: they are often stolen or taken down by authorities within just a few days or weeks of installation. This chapter describes a mobile augmented reality experience “Death Drive(r)s: Ghost Bike (Monu)mentality” which digitally visualizes

MEmorials of ghost bikes in the places where they have been removed. This Augmented Reality

Criticism (or ARC) project engages the public through digital ghost bikes as a form of public

rhetoric and social activism. This project maps ghost bicycles in ways that run counter to scalar approaches, commemorating the fallen riders and amplifying the activist’s message.

In the third chapter, I explore the energy of place. Rather than imagine place as a static topology, energy might provide a better way of imagining the networked relations that make place. Building from the previous chapter’s discussion of fossil fuel dependence, this chapter examines the emplaced notions of energy through examples of environmental activism and ecosystems ecology that are connected to Florida’s iconic first magnitude springs. The energy of place is an important part of how we engage local publics. The springs are a wellspring of values for Florida communities and they generate affective energy that can be channeled by activists.

As a visual trope, Florida’s springs present notions of circulation and vividness which offer ways to tap into a wellspring of community values. They are also part of Howard T. Odum’s landmark studies in ecosystems ecology, which would help move the field toward the complex theories that would influence ecocriticism and ecocomposition. In his famous Silver Springs study, which produced this model, he creates a trophic map of energy moving through an entire ecosystem system from sunlight hitting the water to algae to fish, all the way higher-order predators. The energy of place allows us to read the circulatory function of the Florida springs as a locus for community stewardship and scientific literacy.

In the fourth chapter, I build from the previous chapters to explore how publics are formed and sustained through processes which are more-than-human. Through a place-based study of the Toomer’s Oaks in Auburn, Alabama, I explore how trees are part of the rhetorical act of placemaking. I connect sylvan rhetorics to ancient theories of rhetoric as well as contemporary cultural and posthumanist approaches to rhetorical theory. While trees have typically stood in for top-down, linear, hierarchical, topological, and genealogical structures,

recent ecological studies demonstrate that trees are far more networked, social, and rhizomatic than previously thought. Building from the exigence of recent ecological studies of mycorrhizal networks, this chapter defines sylvan rhetorics through a study of trees in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, examining roots and branches of new materialist and more-than-human rhetorical theory.

In the conclusion, I discuss how networked writing and choric approaches to place reshape writing instruction and transform the traditional writing classroom using locative media.

Building from recent postdigital and actionable approaches to locative media, writing teachers can move writing beyond the classroom. To illustrate how mobile technologies like augmented reality offer ways for students to think about public writing, user experience design, and usability testing, this chapter offers a study of a student project which served as a platform for students to practice postdigital writing. As part of the project, students created content and conducted usability testing, read about localization, and tested the ways that their projects connected to community users and interfaced with geographical features of the park as they produced their installations.

As this project discusses the relationship between writing and place as a network, it also seeks to practice writing in deep engagement with place. To work within this place-based methodology, each chapter takes place in a different location. Rather than serving as a backdrop or example for the theories developed in each chapter, these locations are the places from which

I proceeded as I wrote. Rather than these places functioning as a topos, these locations are where the various parts of the network surfaced (to borrow a metaphor from Nichole Starosielski). As part of this networked and choric approach, each chapter ends with a poem relating to the places

and theories engaged in that chapter. In this way, this project seeks to disrupt topological approaches to place-based composition and connect to place as a networked and emergent entity.

Changing climates are reshaping place. The Cartesian lines we have drawn with scale are breaking down. Through this project, I hope to bring these local impacts to the fore of how we discuss large-scale issues. Climate change presents rhetorical problems for how we imagine and engage the concept of place. Rather than defining place topologically through scale and zoom, which stratifies environmental inequality and depreciates environmental citizenship, this project works through networked theories and emerging locative media to engage place beyond scalar derangement. By engaging local communities as decentralized networks, we can ground large- scale environmental issues and connect local community impacts to global environmental change.

Elsewhere

The sound of thunder plays on speakers hidden above where misters kick on. We push our carts through the blue, translucent hum of refrigerated shelves. The warm afternoon blows in through open roller doors from where the parking lot refracts wet shimmers, and cars idle like a backdrop to the man picking avocados from a brown bin, pressing his fingers into the alligator flesh with the gentle pragmatism of the Michoacán woman who picked it. How many cents on the dollar go to the Caballeros Templarios and how many to the farmers? Hectares of pine forests vanish beneath that touch. The carbon sink, the record droughts, the distance between two points is not

always straight. Outside, the world goes on reckoning, the cities drowning by degrees, the species vanishing against the shore of million year old plankton with a single flick, one in twenty billion immolations, the suffering of great grandchildren. What will they think of us, picking out green grapes wet with what we can believe is dew? How far along are we in the story of mankind? He chooses one, imagines running a knife through its pulpy flesh.

Across the store, a cashier sets tomatoes on the scale which beeps and tallies the weights of distant elsewheres.

CHAPTER 2 WRITING CONDITIONS: THE PREMISES OF ECOCOMPOSITION

Writing does not begin in the self; rather writers begin writing by situating themselves, by putting themselves in a place, by locating with in a space. Writing begins with topoi, quite literally with place —Sidney Dobrin Ecocomposition (2001, 18)

The assignment is to position ourselves at the crossing [...] between the material environment of Gainesville, Alachua County, Florida, and the mood, the emotional frame that tells me how I am situated, where things are ‘at’ for me, my attunement to the world […] to explore this tuning collectively in our place specifically (chora) —Gregory Ulmer “Walden Choragraphy” (2009, 82) 29°42'24.8"N 82°23'39.5"W

Devil’s Millhopper, Gainesville, Florida

This chapter explores the role of place in ecocomposition scholarship by considering how specific locations participate as premises of writing. Ecocomposition is a post-process theory of writing that attempts to delineate the places, environments, and ecologies of writing. Although composition scholars have traditionally conceived of place in terms of commonplace, examining specific locations underlying commonplaces deepens our understanding of how place participates in the act of writing. In a conditional sentence, protasis is the premise proceeding the main clause, while apodosis expresses consequences or implications. From this perspective, the conditions of writing emerge from the material environment and the individual who becomes attuned to place through writing. Viewing specific places as premises for ecocomposition brings focus to the ecologies of writing. Focusing further on place as actant in writing networks, I build on scholarship theorizing writing as both participating in global ecologies and as taking place in autochthonous conditions. If this essay’s central claim were to be expressed as a conditional sentence, then, it might look something like this: if writing begins with place, then theorizing place as premises deepens our understanding of the conditions of writing.

In what follows, I develop an ecocompositional understanding of premise as a method and then apply it to an analysis of media theorist Gregory L. Ulmer’s description of the concept of chora circulating through the Devil’s Millhopper, a sinkhole in Gainesville, Florida. This location has appeared across many of Ulmer’s works, from Teletheory (1989) to Electronic

Monuments (2005). Though north-central Florida has played an influential role in the works of hundreds of writers and scientists, I focus here on Ulmer because of his influence on ecocomposition and place-based writing studies scholars (such as Jeff Rice and Thomas Rickert).

Through Ulmer, I examine premise in the tradition of choric invention, presenting north-central

Florida as a rhetorical crossroads “where nature and culture meet”—to quote Alachua County’s motto (“Visit Gainesville”). By tracing the ways that places act as protasis for Ulmer, I hope to make apparent the ecological relationships between writing, place, and media. Beginning with specific place as chora rather than departing from commonplace topoi, ecocomposition can further account for the role of place in composition not as a fixed entity but as fluid, complex, and emergent. Through this study, I develop solonist ecocomposition as a practice for defining the emergent relationship between self and place in writing. Solonist ecocomposition treats place as a premise of writing to trouble the distinctions between (human) writer and (nonhuman) world.1 Through solonism, writing becomes a practice of rhetorical wayfaring, where writers navigate a choric world by embracing a state of internal and external change through writing.

Placing Ecocomposition

For over thirty years, a growing body of compositionists have discussed the study of ecology, environment, and writing. Though early scholars exploring this terrain do not use the

1 James Brown and Nathaniel Rivers (2013) draw upon Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of correlationism to underscore the problematic distinctions of subject and environment “to understand rhetoric beyond human access, to consider how nonhumans might persuade, communicate, and identify both with us and with one another” (28).

term ecocomposition, they are clearly working in this direction (Coe). Early strains of ecocomposition brought the science of ecology into conversation with composition studies for various, and sometimes contradictory, purposes. While some ecocompositionists focused on the first-year writing classroom as place (Moe), others challenged the locations where “writing takes place” (Dobrin, “Writing Takes Place” 24) to include places beyond the groves of academe

(Participatory Critical Rhetoric). Around the same time, scholars began to reconceive rhetoric itself, moving away from the “rhetorical situation” (Bitzer) toward “variation and collaboration”

(Phelps 60) and then “rhetorical ecologies” (Edbauer). As composition acknowledged the importance of specific locations in the writing process, they turned attention to place as located in more than only pastoral, pristine, or picturesque environments (Hothem). Each of these scholars conceived of place as distributed and dispersed, more a wellspring for invention than a backdrop for individual writers.

When ecology was translated into the writing classroom, it was fractured into various foci. As compositionists discussed locations of writing, they also considered the relationship between environments, media, and writing. Marilyn Cooper’s 1986 article “The Ecology of

Writing” used ecology to argue for a paradigm shift for teaching beyond the cognitive process model (364). Cooper built from the science of ecology to offer a model of “dynamic interlocking systems which structure the social activity of writing” (368). Ecology provided a metaphor for understanding the limitations of process-driven models. David Grant traces these divergent approaches to Tim Taylor’s A Historical Understanding of Ecocomposition: The Greening of

University Rhetoric, which identifies “two approaches within ecocomposition: environment as subject (EAS) and environment as metaphor (EAM)” (206). While some studies sought the ecological aspects of writing, others explored environments as course topics (Owens).

From here, the field of ecocomposition began to take shape with Sidney I. Dobrin and

Christian R. Weisser’s three-part initiative, beginning with Ecocomposition: Theoretical and

Pedagogical Approaches (2001) and followed by Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition

(2002) and their article “Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition” (2002), which offered a detailed history of ecocomposition and its connections to ecocriticism and other ecologically influenced disciplines. Dobrin and Weisser’s own definition of ecocomposition in Natural Discourse begins with/in the premises of north-central Florida. They describe diving at Crystal River in Florida where a sign is posted deep underwater. By conceiving of ecocomposition out of specific place, their study begins in a location that “reminds us of how enmeshed the world of words, of text, and the natural world are” (1). Specific places, for Dobrin and Weisser, make apparent the discursive construction of place, but they also reveal how environments precede and exceed the topoi that emerge from this construction. Beginning in a specific place, rather than a commonplace topic such as sea-level rise, ecocomposition situates its use of ecology in the premises of place rather than an abstract concept.

Recently, scholars have conducted studies of specific places to further locate writing.

Casey Boyle and Jenny Rice’s collection Inventing Place: Writing Lone Star Rhetorics, for instance, explores locations throughout Texas as part of “the poiesis of a body-place assemblage”

(2). In other words, the collection treats place as co-produced between writers and their particular locations. Similarly, Jeff Rice’s collection Florida theorizes the state as a network by reading various contested spaces and monuments that comprise place. Among the place-oriented readings offered in Rice’s collection is Dobrin’s “An American Beach.” By situating ecocomposition in a specific place, Dobrin not only offers a method for “reading beaches” rhetorically, but also reveals the ways in which beaches trouble clear distinctions between nature

and culture. These recent works focusing on writing studies and specific places extend earlier projects. Thomas Rickert’s chapter in Keller and Weisser’s The Locations of Composition examines rhetorical “Invention in the Wild” through the classical concept of kairos as “a highly nuanced set of relations among language, environment, and people” (82). Such autochthonous nuances emerge from the specific locales where writing takes place.

And yet, as Dobrin (2007) points out, place is also about occupation and power (17). As described in the introductiory chapter, how we theorize place (and who we theorize place with) is shaped by power relations. Defining places reproduces those relations through occupation, valuation, and control. Such relations are evident in place-names like Alachua, which was likely taken from “Chua,” a Timucua word for sinkhole, and morphed into “La Chua” during the period of Spanish colonization of the region, starting in the 1530s. These transformations of language bear the marks of the violent colonial history of the place. The forced removal brought the extinction of the Timucua people and their language in 1767, with the death of the last known member of the tribe (Zettler). While I discuss some of the colonial history of the region in greater detail in chapter 4, it is important here to introduce the important role that Indigenous knowledges play in thinking through a place-based methodology. While there has been a separation in rhetoric and writing studies between decolonial and new materialist practices, I endeavor later in this chapter to demonstrate how Plato’s spatial theories demonstrate non/anti- imperial (bioregional) rhetorics, and then develop the connections between Indigenous knowledges and solonist pracices.

Responding to the recent turns—spatial, ecological, posthuman, and material—which characterize the new humanities, Simone Bignall and Daryle Rigney argue that “Continental posthumanism appears to ignore the prior existence of Indigenous knowledge of this kind” (159).

In their article, Bignall and Rigney work draw from their respective traditions as Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to “bring an Indigenous conceptualization of ‘more-than-human’ being into alliance with notions of ‘posthumanity’” (160). Building from the work of these and other scholars braiding traditions, I work to further bridge non-imperial thinking with place-based writing theory.

As a scholar who has settled on indigenous lands, my aim is not to further colonize

Indigenous knowledges, nor to offer what Jennifer Clary-Lemon (2019) calls a “shallow and bumbling pre-apology of white folks as they appropriate Indigenous work” but instead to follow her example and “unseat the colonial attitude that to invoke Indigenous ways of knowing is to place Indigenous people within the realm of the past, the shamanistic, the mystical instead of the present, the political, the rhetorical, the material.” In studying place as premise for writing (as I develop in the next section), I demonstrate the topological approach which threatens to overwrite the colonial history of the places with which people interact. The premises of place include not only what is apparent, but also what has been erased. Through a trans-scalar and deep time approach, a choric methodology reveals the connections between racism (as discussed further in chapter 3), colonialism (as discussed further in chapter 4), and humanism (as discussed further in chapter 5). Likewise, the interactions between humans and nonhumans has been critiqued by early waves of ecocriticism as anthropocentrism, but in chapter 5, I address the difference between the anthropocentric critique of early ecocriticsm and the value shift brought by a decolonial posthumanist approach.

Through the methodology I develop in what follows, I further unearth the connections between colonial practices and the kairos of the Athropocene. As Daniel R. Wildcat writes in the

Foreward to Larsen and Johnson’s Being Together in Place “setting aside the anthropocentric

worldview that has given us the crises of the Anthropocene and embracing the agency of place, humankind stands to gain much” (xi). As such, Larsen and Johnson offer a decolonial approach in which “Place calls us to the challenge of living together” (1). This challenge invites a shared

“being-together,” by engaging us “in the life-supportive responsibilities of this more-than-human coexistence” (2). Though the following studies demonstrate how the relations that make up the more-than-human world often find agonism and conflict, place offers “not just a site of forced engagement,” (1) but also “a summons to encounter, dialogue, and relationship among the humans and nonhumans who share the landscape” (2).

Altogether, these studies suggest the important political and elemental role place plays in composition, and in turn, composition in place. By bringing work in digital rhetoric, ecocomposition, and environmental communication together in conversation with decolonial posthumanism, my aim is to demonstrate how the kairos of the Anthropocene is part of the palimpsest networks of place. Building from these studies, this chapter posits place as premise.

Whereas the concept of place edges toward colonial territorialization, studying locations rhetorically uncovers the networked, material, colonial, and ecological premises of writing.2 In the following sections, I specifically look to the karst topography of north-central Florida as a premise, especially how this topography functions in the work of Gregory L. Ulmer as situated in the “Florida School” of rhetoric and composition.

2 In Digital Detroit, Rice takes a networks approach to place which reveals the connections of human and nonhuman actants without relying on ecology as a metaphor. Rice uses “personal experience of one space” to emphasize the importance of specific locations interacting with the individual in his theory of networks (54). While ecology is often conflated with terms such as network or circulation, and the use of the term overlaps with these concepts, it also implies a deep connection to the science of ecology and the specific locations of writing.

In their introduction to the Florida School in New Media/New Methods, Jeff Rice and

Marcel O’Gorman describe how Ulmer drew inspiration from both the material environment and the rich literary history of Alachua County to inform his approach to new media writing. From the karst landscape of north-central Florida, Ulmer imagined the underground flow of water as evoking the winnowing process of chora. In his work with the Devil’s Millhopper, Ulmer produces a theory of writing based on Plato’s concept of chora rather than Aristotle’s topoi.

While topoi-driven methods position writers to engage place as a topic—something to write about—chora destabilizes this positioning, revealing methods for writing with/in place.

The Premises of Writing

In modern parlance, premises refer both to the underlying propositions upon which a discourse builds and to the boundaries of a property. The word premise appeared at the top of title deeds in the seventeenth century, referring to the property described in the document. Over time the word became synonymous with property. In the colonization of Florida, as Bignall and

Rigney argue,

settler-colonial polities established new self-governing societies and made themselves a far-flung home on Indigenous peoples’ land, which they seized for possession either by treating the land erroneously as ‘terra nullis’ (as vacant, unowned, and nonsovereign), or by imposing dispossessing terms of Treaty in conditions of conflict, ambiguous concent, and forced surrender (168).

Thus, the act of colonization was a fundamental denial on the part of settlers to acknowledge the place-making premises of Indegenous peoples. Premises are places specified and occupied through writing as well as beliefs, theories, or values from which a writer proceeds when constructing an argument. Premises are the convictions, exigencies, and logic that come before a conclusion. Premises are preliminary. Like premise, place precedes the act of writing. With a limited view of scale and time, however, the relational premises that define a place can be ignored, erased, or overwritten.

Place is also, however, shaped by writing and acts in the proceedings of writing.

Claiming place as the premise of writing is not to position the material environment as subordinate to the writer or written text. Rather, place is premise to the conditions of writing; therefore, it is not separate from what Boyle and Rice (paraphrasing Heidegger and Yi-Fu Tuan) term a “bodily experience of being there, turning space into a place” (3, emphasis original).

Grant echoes this perspective by calling for further study of “emplaced ecologies of discourse, what discourse does in particular ecologies” (214). As legal scholars Lauren Benton and

Benjamin Staumann point out, even more important than terra nullis to European settlers was demonstrating “acts or rituals confirming the subordination of local inhabitants” in order “to show that a transfer of sovereignty had already taken place, making the argument from possession of a secondary character” (30). These embodied, place-making ritual acts (such as

“turf and twig” ceremonies) were used in combination with Roman legal prescident and the evidence of established political communities (namely, by erecting monuments) to demonstrate a transfer or aquisition of sovereignty (31-32). Thus, presence does not negate place as part of the processes of occupation, power, or sovereignty.

Beyond the immediate and imbodied sense of place as “being there,” place as premise allows composition theory to grapple with the scalar and deep time issues presented by the colonial history of violent genocide and its deep connections to the Anthropocene. Building from

Kyle Powys Whyte’s notion of the Anthropocene as his ancestor’s dystopia (2017) and Robin

Kimmerer’s (2014) blending of Western science and Indigenous knowledge, this notion of place as conditional premise responds to Clary-Lemon’s call for “projects that engage differing temporalities (the gifts of past to present, present to future), or terrible inheritances, such as those left in the wake of the Anthropocene.” In other words, to understand the kairotic crisis of the

Anthropocene present, or the futures it presents, we cannot lose the “gifts” offered by deep time thinking in order to maintain a stable sense of immediate “presence.”

While I further develop these connections later in this chapter and in others, it is useful first to understand the spatial history of place and its relation to occupation, before discussing its connections to imperialism and conquest. Though the modern usage of the word emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the relationship between place and premise is much older.

In his definition of topoi in the Rhetoric, for instance, Aristotle distinguishes between commonplace (enthymeme) and specific place (protasis). Although Aristotle’s topoi might generally translate to “place,” he used both common and specific topoi to define a method for generating arguments. Aristotle builds his topoi method from the method of loci, a process by which a rhetor memorizes a long speech. The method consists of assigning parts of a speech to various landmarks in a well-known place and then mentally walking through that place to recall the speech. Thus, topoi are a means of both remembering and generating arguments through places. In this process, place participates in the generative processes of memory and invention.

Aristotle lists common topoi that can be used to produce arguments in the second book of the Rhetoric (II.23–24). Specific place is associated with thesis, protasis, and premise, while commonplace is associated with the generative topoi in the second book. Generally, the first book details specific topoi, or the premises from which the later commonplaces develop. Specific topoi are ensconced in types of rhetoric, for which they are suited. Likewise, they are disciplinary. This is not always the case, and some topoi are a combination of the two. However,

Aristotle generally describes rhetorical commonplaces rooted in specific topoi. This is not to ascribe to Aristotle a contemporary understanding of place or networks, a venture that would rely on dubious anachronisms. Instead, I give this example to illustrate the historical relationship

between the specific and the common. As rhetors employ commonplaces today, the connections between the premises of commonplaces often vanish.

Before Aristotle centered his rhetorical method on topoi, Plato’s chora was a prevalent theory of the relationship between space, place, and invention. Plato describes chora in the

Timaeus as a “third kind” (49a, Complete Works, 1251). The concept is, perhaps, the linchpin of electracy. Ulmer describes chora as the interval between chaos and order, from which meaning emerges. Plato refers to chora as a hypokeimenon (material substratum) that connects the immaterial world of reason and the Forms (being), to the material, physical world (becoming).

As Thomas Rickert demonstrates in Ambient Rhetoric, chora referred to the area that fell outside the city walls but was still considered part of the polis. The concept was taken up by poststructural theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida who influenced Ulmer’s early interest (Rickert, “Toward the Chōra”). Chora has been used by rhetorical scholars such as

Ulmer (Applied Grammatology), Rickert (“Toward the Chōra”; Ambient Rhetoric), Byron Hawk,

Jeff Rice (Digital Detroit), and Caddie Alford to understand writing in a networked age. Ulmer defines chora as “to electracy what ‘topic’ is to literacy, placing discrete literate concepts into holistic field constellations” (“Electracy” 15). Whereas topos is organized through “shared essences, necessary attributes,” he explains that chora “gathers singular ephemeral sets of heterogeneous items based on accidental details” (Electric Monuments 120). Writing through choric invention is a “memory or memorial operation of sorting or ordering [ . . . ] that which remains undifferentiated” (125). Through chora, Ulmer’s holistic theory of electrate invention is deeply rooted in a sense of place in becoming.

Ulmer develops choragraphy, his method of digital invention, from Plato’s concept, defining choragraphy as “a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation

to memory” and a “method for writing and thinking electronically” (Heuretics 39, 45). Whereas topoi are fixed or demarcated places, Ulmer defines chora as ‘space’ or ‘region’ (“Electracy”

14). To Ulmer, chora is not merely an abstract or higher-scale version of topoi nor are they in binary opposition, as Hawk points out. The two are linked as network and node. In fact, as I develop further in the next section, just as chora evoked a particular relationship between the inner and outer regions of the polis for Plato, so does chora evoke the karst features of north- central Florida for Ulmer. The springs, sinks, and cavernous underground aquifer all play an important role in shaping Ulmer’s depiction of what Sarah J. Arroyo calls the “ebb and flow created by choric invention” (63). Locating writing studies with/in the Devil’s Millhopper brings ecocomposition into deep contact with choric and electrate methods.

While Casey Boyle’s recent Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice argues against chora as a useful theoretical concept for posthuman rhetorics, his dismissal of chora oversimplifies the concept in its characterization. In a rhetorical two-step, Boyle moves to dismiss chora while also building his definition of topoi from rhetorical theories which draw upon chora, emphasizing commonplace topoi over choric invention in his articulation of posthuman practice. While Boyle does acknowledge how chora and topoi are connected and related, he focuses on topoi and commonplaces to undercut the “recent resistance to topoi as being too static, too tied to print media” (24). The aims here are admirable, and Boyle makes an interesting case for how topos has been maligned with print-as-fixed-entity. However, Boyle misconstrues chora as a topos for scholars, even as he cleverly demonstrates how chora might function as a topos, something akin to a Latourian black box for rhetorical invention. In this discussion, Boyle fails to fully address the ecologies of chora and topoi. As Plato defines it, chora is the unknowable or unnamable, recognized only through a “bastard reasoning” (52b, Complete Works 1255). To name it is to

typify it, to place it in a topoi. This ironic ecology of chora and topoi is central to its appeal for

Derrida and Ulmer’s poststructural projects.

For instance, Derrida’s Chora L’ Works documents a famous experiment with New York

Five member Peter Eisenman where the pair attempts to create a garden that will serve as a bridge between deconstruction and architecture. The task is, as Rickert (2007) argues, “inventing the impossible” and ultimately fails to be realized, except in writing (266). This ironic ecology is obvious in this example, a project which is “asking about the possibility of giving place to something that seems to have no place” (264). To build a material monument, a place, representing chora would require transforming it into a topos. To put it another way, I might be nervous to ride an elevator designed by a poststructuralist.

While Boyle’s criticism of posthuman rhetorics which rely on a chora/topoi binary is apt, this critique gestures to a need for further scholarship on the ecological circulation of chora and topoi in the networked places of writing. In a sense, the problem with Boyle’s critique of chora is similar to the problem with other scholars’ critiques of topoi: as techniques and inventive concepts both share a complex and often convoluted history which cannot be taken for granted.

Thus, just as Boyle argues against Rice’s treatment of topoi as print-based, fixed, static, and

“based on expectation” (Rice 2012, qtd. in Boyle 126), so too does chora offer enduring and novel problems for thinking about the ecologies of place, invention, and the practice of writing.

Conceiving of place as choric means embracing movement and flux over fixity. Though premise denotes the certainty of property defined by the letter of law, it originally referred to

“the aforementioned” place on a title deed. This includes the environment, buildings, and animals inhabiting the place, and even the safety of conditions for visitors (in the case of premises liability). Likewise, ownership of premises is defined through writing but is also

subject to change through writing (Dobrin, “The Occupation of Composition”). Thus, although premise might suggest place as fixed, it is better described through the relationship between chora and topoi or specific and commonplace. As Alford asserts, chora provides a “recursive, layered sense of a beginning, hinging as it does on space and discursive play.” Place begins only where it ends. It shapes and is shaped by writing. As Dobrin points out, writers “write themselves into the order of a system, and they help define that system” (Ecocomposition 19).

Writing is more than what a human composes about a place. The environment is inseparable from the writer. It provides the very conditions of writing.

Although the material environment participates in the cultivation of place as a premise, its preceding helps place to fade from view. David M. Grant, unlike Boyle and Rice, does not offer a study of place. Grant’s call for “literacy in and with the environment” rather than “literacy about the environment” is undercut by his treating the environment as an abstract topos rather than focusing his study on a specific place. Grant turns away from commonplace to locate emplaced discourse within the field of ecocomposition, but his essay does not examine an actual place (215). Though Grant rightly identifies the problem of the series of transformations between words and world, the article discusses place abstractly, breaking from place as premise. Thus, the abstraction of world into word becomes the origin point from which theory departs and arrives.

Still, Grant does push for ecocompositionists to move beyond rigid models toward complexity, and he includes the need for place-oriented scholarship as part of that move (214). By extending

Grant’s argument to read the karst landscape of north-central Florida in Ulmer’s work, the connections between chora, kairos, place, and writing-as-network begin to surface.

Chora, Kairos, and Regionalist Rhetoric

In the Critias and Timaeus dialogues, Plato develops what we might compare to contemporary theories of anti-imperialism and bioregionalism. He draws upon images from the

material landscapes of Athens to produce his allegorical critique of Athenian imperialism which demanded the enslavement of nations to extract natural resources. Specifically, the silver mines at Larium which lay approximately 40 miles south of Athens near the coast. Plato’s myth of

Atlantis offers a subtle warning of coming destruction for Athens, a purge ordered by Zeus for the state’s pleonexia (“reaching for more”) and hubris. By reading the Timaeus and Critias side by side, it becomes evident that Critias’ argument problematizes Timaeus’ despotic worldview.

These dialogues both theorize and practice choric and kairotic approaches to place-based writing, and they offer models for critiquing both exploitative and topological ways of engaging place.

In the Critias, Plato looks to the natural world—to place—for his evidence, rendering ecological degradation as a text to interpret, and he unearths a crisis of the ontology discussed in the Timaeus, asking “How shall I establish my words, and what part of it can be truly called a remnant of the land that then was?” (110e-111a, Timaeus and Critias 113). What Plato sees in the land is what Derrida called trace, evidence of degradation and destruction. As Spivak asserts in the introduction to Of Grammatology “Derrida’s trace [ ... ] is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack of the origin that is the condition of thought and experience” (xvii). Through this absence, Plato is able to quantify the destructive practices of today we term global capitalism, and he articulates a kind of regional ecology as the appropriate restraint for Athens.

In drawing his argument from place, Plato evokes a kairotic environmental rhetoric which denounces imperialism and praises regionalism. Before turning to the role of the material environment in Plato’s spatial theories, it is useful to first place kairos within the decolonial timescale described in the introduction. In “Invention in the Wild: On Locating Kairos in Space-

Time,” Thomas Rickert works to dispel the notion that kairos is merely a “unique opportunity

arising from an audience or contxt” in order to discover “a way toward developing a richer understanding of environment and our inventive relationship toward it” (72). While an obsession with chronos has pervaded contemporary understandings of kairos, Rickert demonstrates that

“without place kairos is an empty concept” (72). Furthermore, by “[l]ooking to the earliest uses of kairos, we see that it originally had a spatial meaning,” and drawing from scholars who claim the temporal meaning came later (Onians 1973; Race 1981), suggests that place meant “shallow cut, notch, or chip in something, but which we also use to refer to a critical moment” (Rickert 73,

Onians 347). In this way, a rhetor’s sense of place is crucial to recognizing the opportune moment of opening.

Kairos is often depected as a runner who can only be seized, in the fleeting moment he is arriving, by the lock of hair which hangs in his face. Yet, there is also a discursive balance that must be struck between a rhetor seizing opportunity and a sychophant espousing pure forelock.

The subtle difference between these two might be how an audience perceives a rhetor and their discourse, but it also has to do with the sense of place that informs both an audience and a rhetorical act. What is suitable in one time and place may not be appropriate in another place or at another time. Rickert, drawing upon Debra Hawhee, writes that such middle ground

“designates not a stable realm between poles, but an always on the move, temporally unstable, and emergent moment beyond the control of a self” (76). While kairos “has heretofore remained entirely too enmeshed in an opportunistic frame, one that reinscribes kairos continually in a narrative of subjective control or advantage” Rickert demonsrates “a rich conception of kairotic force that shows how we are shaped by external circumstances/situations” (77). While Rickert then turns to Heidegger to further place kairos, here I turn away, instead seeking other relations with which to understand the concept outside of Heideggerian notions of “world” which, as

previously discussed, are rooted in racist notions of “blood and soil” which became fundamental to Nazi ideology (Sikka 168). Rather, the disruptions to European spacetime presented by the

Anthropocene open to other possibilities for thinking about kairos through a decolonial posthumanism.

In their description of place-based learning and knowing, Larsen and Johnson continually describe the Wakarusa Wetlands, the location which served as the educational focal point of their place-based learning practices. Interestingly, they repeatedly refer to the wetlands as an opportunity—for visitors (99), for community/student collaboration (108), for education (108)— and lastly “as a simultaneously sacred and biodiverse place, a complex network of related individuals each evolving and providing for each other,” a place where “perhaps we can begin to see the opportunities for humans to learn from the nonhuman” (121). Here, Larsen and Johnson refer to the kairos of opportunity not in the exploitive sense, but instead as a moment of opening to the possibilities offered by the nonhuman world. In this sense, kairos refers to the momentary opening of divisions between humans and nonhumans which can take place in locations like the

Wakarusa Wetlands.

As discussed in the introduction, this requires a methodology which disrupts Eurocentric time (as chronos) and scale (as topos). The Anthopocene requires a geological rhetoric that humanism is not equipped to understand. Rather than focusing on time, karios helps bring focus to place, its role in shaping discourse and in providing exigency. The Anthropocene concept is locked in its own kairos, with scientists and avocates measuring yearly we as a planet have left to act, focusing on the timeline of change rather than locating the opportunity. Like the “beginning point” of the Anthopocene, the notion of a “point of no return” is likewise unhelpful, contributing to a deranged sense of apathy and despair. Rather, these chronotic approaches miss

the opportunity to frame the environmental disaster within the kairos of place, connecting the ever-emerging crisis with the violent colonial history which shaped it.

If we, like the Athenians, are in conflict with a world that is changing as a result of overconsumption and the destructive impacts of globalism and colonialism, Plato offers choric and kairotic ways of engaging place-based rhetoric. The Larium mines were one of the largest veins of silver ever discovered (then or since), and they required a constant influx of workers to maintain extraction, refinement, and distribution of silver. Because workers had a life expectancy of around three years, probably due in no small part to the amount of lead being released into the air and water during refinement, the mines were peopled mostly by enslaved persons. The silver fueled Athenian imperialism, helping to fund the first navy and providing exigence for using that navy to enslave neighboring peoples. Plato’s rhetoric both resists and sustains destructive ideologies, and it allows us to read ecological destruction as a reification of dangerous worldviews.

Through his portrayal of the Athenian’s lavish wealth, specifically their use of gold and silver, Plato’s Critias critiques ideas of Athenian exceptionalism, arguing through his apocalyptic myth that decadent practices forced the Atlantians to enslave surrounding nations to fuel their overconsumption. These imperial practices led to war with Athens and Zeus’s eventual destruction of Atlantis. By extension, it is reasonable to believe that the same practices could undermine the stability of the Athenian polis. When he describes ancient Athenian housing, he asserts that “they had fashioned their [houses] with all that was proper for their mode of life in common in the way of buildings for themselves and temples, but no gold or silver; for they made no use of these metals for any purpose” (Critias 112b-c, 114). Furthermore “they aimed at the mean between splendor and meanness, dwelling in decent houses where they grew old,

themselves and their children’s children, each succeeding generation leaving them to another like itself” (Critias 112c, 115). By living within their means, the Athenian people stay connected to the material elements of place and are able to sustain themselves without relying on imperial practices.

This is contrasted with the ancient population of Atlantis, who adorned the “whole circuit of the outermost wall [with] a coat, a ceruse, as one might say, of copper, the inner with melted tin, and the wall for the actual acropolis with orichalc which gleamed like fire” (Critias 116b,

120). Furthermore, the “whole exterior [of the temple] was coated with silver, except the figures on the pediments; these were covered with gold” (Critias 116d, 120). The use of precious metals signaled more than just the rise of decadence in a culture that had lost touch with its place. Their modern mining practices provided them with wealth and power, but the result is a divergence from the sacred. The temples of gold immediately point to the mines, the slaves, the imperial conquest that are all required in its production. The gold suggests waste, both in excess and in by-products of mining and refining gold and silver. This excess suggests a loss of connection to place and a hubris that provokes punishment from Zeus. Using Atlantis as an example, the

Critias dialogue offers a warning for the rise in Athenian imperialist practices and industrial mining processes, using traces to reveal how tenuous the state’s domain really was in the face of environmental degradation.

In these dialogs, Plato’s kairotic appeals suggest ethical dimensions of how human publics related to the nonhuman elements of place in the Ancient Greek concept of polis. As

Rickert demonstrates in Ambient Rhetoric, polis refers to both the body of the citizenry and the body of land which together formed a place (48). Rickert compares the process of polis-making to a dance floor, where “the dance ‘weaves’” like “the weaving of the city” which “emerges

directly from the situated activity of its inhabitants” (48-49). The Ancient Greek notion of polis and psyche (or city and soul) connected individuals holistically to the larger political body. Polis designates publics as formed through the agonism of its constituents, from the virtual and individual to the material and collective. In the wake of anthropogenic environmental change,

Latour (2013, p. 483) imagines a more expansive version of the agora which acknowledges a wider scope of representatives beyond the merely human.

Melissa Lane offers a compelling description of the relationship between polis and psyche in Ecorepublic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us About Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable

Living. Ecorepublic looks to Plato in hopes of exposing and confronting unsustainable means of thinking and being in the world. From this relationship, she argues for new ways of thinking with

Platonic theory to reimagine concepts of ethos, polis, and pleonexia. Building from her interpretations of Plato alongside her larger argument that our contemporary environmental crisis as a result of a flawed political imagination, this project demonstrates how chora offers ways to engage the place-based ethics of networks. By looking to Plato, Lane is able to interpret some of the problems with denialist, even Orwellian3 approaches, to issues like sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and global warming. Lane argues that these large-scale disruptions are evidence of smaller imbalances between polis and psyche. In the following chapter, I will build on this analysis to demonstrate how digital and material networks are harnessing the locative affordances of networked rhetorics to advocate for lower-impact place-based city design.

3 In 2015, Kristina Trotta (and numerous other officials) of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state predicted by scientists to be most drastically affected by climate change, claims that there was an order in place from the top of the DEP not “to use the terms ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ or even ‘sea-level rise,’” which was instead “to be referred to as ‘nuisance flooding’” (Quoted in Korten). This censorship from the very government department devoted to environmental protection serves as one of the most salient examples of Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” and “Newspeak” I have encountered in recent news.

Attention to the nonhuman, ecological, and digital elements of place disrupts topological thinking, but it also opens to ascalar modes of engaging place.

Choric Environments

Places are emergent participants in the act of writing. The Devil’s Millhopper, a sinkhole in Gainesville, Florida, is a premise for Ulmer’s theory of electracy. Through the location, Ulmer articulates the fluid relationship between choric writing methods and electrate practices. Ulmer uses the karst composition of north-central Florida to illustrate chora in many of his works but most markedly in Heuretics and Electronic Monuments. However, in his earlier work, the relationship between place and chora is more implicit. In later projects like “Miami Virtue:

Choragraphy of the Virtual City,” electrate practice is deeply rooted in places defined by the aqueous flow of chora. Ulmer later establishes deeper connections between chora and electracy, as Rowan Wilken claims, but the concept is more than a minor element in even earlier works

(51). In many ways, the relationship between chora and specific places is the premise of even

Teletheory, starting with the image of the sieve on the cover.

In the final section of Teletheory, Ulmer offers an example of his mystory writing technique in an essay fragment titled “Derrida at the Little Bighorn.” In the essay, Ulmer establishes the connections he finds between the Devil’s Millhopper and Walt Ulmer’s Sand and

Gravel plant. The sieve, which literally bookends Teletheory (appearing on the cover and the penultimate page), brings together the Derridean conception of chora, the apparatus used in his father’s plant, and Ulmer’s own experiences to put his inventive technique into practice. The sieve represents the sorting or winnowing process of chora, which Ulmer understands through choric association.

Ulmer recalls how “one of [his] first jobs when [he] worked at the plant was to clean the grids of the screens used to grade the gravel into sizes” (237). Through this memory, Ulmer is

able to understand chora in the manner of Plato’s “bastard reasoning” (Plato, 52b, Complete

Works 1255). Ulmer compares this in the next section of the essay to Plato’s description of chora in the Timaeus as winnowing through “crible, sieve or sift” (Ulmer 240, emphasis original). In this image Ulmer uses a reciprocal technique, examining chora through choric writing. It is clear from this example that the entangled nature of chora and place serves as the premise for

Teletheory as well as for Ulmer’s later formation of the theory of electracy.

The karst topography of north-central Florida, with its springs and sinkholes, is an important premise to Ulmer’s later theory of electracy. Craig Saper’s essay “The Florida

School’s Legacy, or the Devil’s Millhopper Joke Revisited” examines the influence that the

Devil’s Millhopper sinkhole had on Ulmer’s work. Saper explains how the sinkhole served as an inventive location through which he interpreted Hamlet in a TV series parodying

“psychobiographies, common in PBS documentaries on authors” that focus “on places [ . . . ] to explain the meaning of poems” (69). He builds this parody from the connections established in the final chapter of Teletheory where he connects the Millhopper to “Hamlet’s Mill” through his father’s sand and gravel plant. The parody is meant to illustrate how place functions in networks of writing—not as part of literate interpretation, but as chora. Ulmer sought through parody “to pull the (Mill’s) stopper and let writing out of the logocentric book-logic” (70). The Millhopper, then, is a touchstone through which Ulmer employs choric methods for digital writing.

The sinkhole is a premise for many of Ulmer’s works. In Electronic Monuments, Ulmer proposes the Florida Rushmore, a psychogeographical monument in the Devil’s Millhopper.

Using digital technologies, the monument would illustrate the relationship between individual and collective identities. The sinkhole is a premise that suggests “one possible alternative to national identity” (24). Ulmer uses psychogeographical techniques that he connects to Freud’s

model of the psyche and Deleuze and Guittari’s notion of faciality to unearth the Millhopper as an allegory for the circulation of power, claiming that “what the face is to the body, the landscape is to the environment (a system of surfaces and holes organized into significance, expressing systems of power)” (24). These expressions, those at surface level or the deeper expressions of the sinkhole, are the premises from which Ulmer focuses electrate practice on choric approaches to writing.

At the root of Ulmer’s project is the relationship between specific topoi and commonplace topoi. For instance, Ulmer highlights the connection between north-central Florida and Coleridge’s poem “Xanadu,” inspired in part by naturalist William Bartram’s descriptions of

Salt Springs (“The Chora Collaborations”). In “The Ulmer Tapes,” an interview with John Craig

Freeman, Ulmer explains how Florida served as one of the four exotic locations from which

Coleridge drew inspiration. He describes the image of Xanadu evoked out of the landscape as

“an ecological image, an image of the way in which everything is interrelated” (Ulmer qtd. in

Freeman). The tracing of Alachua from Bartram to Coleridge revealed a network of the

Romantic imagination for Ulmer, who felt that his connection to the place bore “a certain responsibility, [ . . . ] almost a duty to participate” (Ulmer qtd. in Freeman). The springs and sinks are a complex premise for Ulmer, which he connects to Bartram’s ecological understanding of the world and how this sense of place became a commonplace for Coleridge in the formation of Romantic sensibility (which I elaborate on in chapter four).

What interested Ulmer about “Xanadu” was the image of winnowing that Coleridge created out of Bartram’s description of spring sinks disappearing into the ground and boiling up elsewhere from the depths of the Floridan aquifer (Freeman). To Ulmer, the image of winnowing evokes Plato’s discussion of chora in the Timaeus. Ulmer argues that this act of winnowing, as

Coleridge describes it, moves and sorts just as the sieve does in the earlier example. Chora stands between being (the forms) and becoming (the material world) as a “midwife” (52e) sensed only through a “bastard reasoning” (52b). Chora is the location “where chaos passes into order,” which Ulmer compares to “a winnowing basket shaking around” (Ulmer qtd. in Freeman).

Through the choric flow of water, things are combined, sorted, and connected in new ways. The

Devil’s Millhopper and Salt Springs participate in the complex network of writing ecologies that circulate through time and place.

Thus, north-central Florida is an important premise for Ulmer’s use of choric invention and for electrate practice. Ulmer understands chora through the karst features of the landscape, and in turn, his sense of place is altered by this choric mode. Place and writer are positioned as part of an ever-evolving rhetorical inhabitance. As Ulmer and other writers interact with the

Millhopper, they shape and are shaped by the place. Rather than thinking of place as a fixed commonplace, Ulmer’s psychogeographical practices like the popcycle and mystory push writing beyond the subjective relations of Aristotle’s topoi towards methods of choric invention that consider place as part of the conditions of writing.

Solonist Ecocomposition

While Ulmer’s choric invention models how the ecology of a place can function as premises, the conditions of writing, Ulmer’s work also models how we might enact solonist ecocomposition. Ulmer distinguishes solonism from conventional tourism. Whereas a tourist might be defined as a subject who visits places to observe or understand the distinct features of that place, the solonist travels to understand their “self” in relation to place, to observe how place and self are mutually constituted. Ulmer defines solonism in the tradition of the theoria, a practice that provides an excellent model to theorize choric ecocomposition. Rather than defining place as a fixed or commonplace topos, a definition that participates in the separation of subject

and environment, theorizing writing as choric better accounts for the complexity of place as an integral part of the conditions of writing.

In “The Ulmer Tapes,” Ulmer explains the connections between electracy, tourism, and the ancient practice of the theoria (θεωρία). A theoria was a group sent from a city on a journey to spectate, observe, discuss, and participate in a religious rite or a duty. These groups sojourned to learn and discover but also to build community identity through monumentality. Similarly,

Ulmer and the Florida Research Ensemble (FRE) sought to foster monumentality through tourism. In the electronic essay “Metaphoric Rocks: A Psychogeography of Tourism and

Monumentality,” Ulmer compares the tradition of the theoria to contemporary tourism while discussing the Devil’s Millhopper. Here, Ulmer develops a practice for theorizing through travel, not as a tourist in the conventional sense, but more in light with pilgrimages and other cultural rites of passage that involve traveling to a sacred site, not just to learn about the place, but to learn about the self through the act of traveling.

He terms this “solonism,” named for Solon who, in Plato’s Timaeus, returned from Egypt with a history of Athens (Atlantis) forgotten in the wake of apocalypse.4 As discussed earlier,

Plato uses Solon’s story to critique Athenian imperialism and promote place-based thinking. For

Ulmer a solonist is “a tourist functioning as ‘witness’” (“Metaphoric Rocks”). In this tradition,

Ulmer connects the mission of the FRE (and the Florida School) to contemporary Florida tourism. By touring specific regions, the theoria sought to discover information not only about

4 Dobrin explains that theoria is closely related to speculum, both to speculate and the specula, the mirror, to reflect, and to see (Constructing Knowledges 7). The word refers to both contemplation and theorizing. For a reading of Plato’s apocalyptic rhetoric and the Atlantis myth, see Madison Jones’s article “Plato’s Apocalyptic Rhetoric: Interpreting Bioregionalism in the Critias-Timaeus Dialogs.” Ulmer suggests that one possible fate for Atlantis was being swallowed by a giant sinkhole (Freeman 2012).

the world around them but also about themselves and the places from which they came. Through this practice, the theoria discovers the connections between self and place, what Ulmer (drawing from Barthes) calls “the middle voice” with voice (διάθεσις) referring also to condition in

Ancient Greek (Electronic Monuments 72).

Florida’s tourism industry originated in north-central Florida with glass-bottom boat tours at Silver Springs, as Wendy Adams King explains in “Through the Looking Glass of Silver

Springs: Tourism and the Politics of Vision.” King demonstrates how the boat’s transparent hull provided a medium through which tourists could experience the park while maintaining the subjective distance that characterizes “Kant’s 1870 (about the same time the glass bottom boat appears) distinctions between the aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque” (King). The

Romantic conception of nature was a powerful influence on the development of Florida tourism.

Ulmer demonstrates that ‘nature’ itself is a literate concept based on the dialectical separation of writer and environment (“Walden Choragraphy”). In this model, the writer writes about, rather than with/in, a material place.

Such a methodology aligns well with the aims of Larsen and Johnson’s decolonial place- based work, framing place “as it emerged in collaboration with the people, places, and communities we have engaged” (13). Rather than a static object, place is deeply part of this process of winessing, becoming “a project of coexistence, the record of an agonistic encounter informed by discussions and interactions [...] and how place has transformed [...] what it means to coexist” (13). Today, the tourist exemplifies the colonial separation of subject and environment. Tourists travel to attractions with the same “Romantic and transcendentalist desire to escape from civilization into the rejuvenating arms of sublime nature” that King describes.

Ulmer’s solonist (“Metaphoric Rocks”), however, travels to discover the inseparable premise of

place in the formation of self, what Ulmer calls “attunement” (“Walden Choragraphy”). In doing so, Ulmer models how solonism as a practice can move writing beyond the bifurcation of subject and environment that has troubled ecocomposition since its origins, toward networked, emplaced, and ecological models of writing.

Grant and Hawk offer overlapping critiques of Dobrin and Weisser’s early definition of ecocomposition, which attempted to create an ecological model by focusing on discourse instead of literate practices (Grant 204; Hawk 223-224). Hawk argues that “emphasis on discourse and dialectics is a blinder to ecological complexity, which is post dialectical” (223). Dobrin agrees with Hawk’s critique and responds by moving “to disrupt ecocomposition from its social- epistemic and, often, expressivist groundings in order to push ecological methodologies into the potential spaces that Hawk suggests” through what he terms “ecocomposition postcomposition”

(Postcomposition 128). Similarly, Grant points to Ulmerian approaches for ways to theorize complexity of writing ecologies beyond discursive metaphor. Solonist ecocomposition is an especially useful practice for unearthing the deep mesh between writer and environment.

However, before describing what a solonist ecocomposition might bring to place-based research, it is important to note that, while Ulmer’s essay gestures to decolonial thinking, he does not cite scholars interested in postcolonial or indigenous thinking. Claims such as “There was a time before nations, and there may come a time after and without nations” and framing solonism as a practice which might discover “an alternative to the opposition between unity and separatism” are well attuned to these aims. However, as Bignall and Rigney claim”this apparently ‘new’ intellectual frontier in fact traces an ancient philosophical terrain already occupied by Indigenous epistemologies and associated modes of human experience” (160). In framing a solonist ecocomposition, then, it is important to follow Jenifer Clary-Lemon’s call

“that new materialists—especially those interested in rhetoric—examine the question of who we cite and why, examine the move to disassociate from cultural rhetorics and Indigenous knowledges, and move towards work that itself does better in the future.” Just as Ulmer’s essay features an image of Columbus approaching a Native American figure with the caption

“Columbus discovers the hammock,” so too does posthumanism threaten to “discover” (and erase) Indigenous knowledges.

Rhetorical Wayfaring

Solonists find their way by recognizing the role of place in the act of writing. As the conditions of writing, place is like a wayfinding point for writing. When travelers look to a specific place, such as when navigating by the stars, their perspective changes depending on where they are in relation to that point.5 Similarly, places and writers are constantly changed through the act of writing. As a solonist finds their way through writing, they engage in what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls wayfaring, “the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth” (12). Drawing from Ingold (but also Indigenous scholars like Deloria and

Wildcat) Larsen and Johnson argue that the “hodological” (the study of paths) offers “not just an embodied way of participating in and knowing these relationships by actually moving across the land” but also “a grounded metaphor for the kind of decolonizing ‘place thinking’ Indigenous and settler-descended people are using to work with each other” (27). These forms of wayfaring, they argue, have been lost in the Western tradition “as Enlightenment discourse generated a powerful cartesian system of disembodied, spatialized knowleges (27).

5Interestingly, Malea Powell and her co-authors suggest constellations as a model for writing. As emerging between human storytellers and the outer world, a constellation “allows for multiply- situated subjects to connect to multiple discourses at the same time, as well as for those relationships [ . . . ] to shift and change without holding a subject captive” (Powell et al.)

As the solonist engages with place, they inhabit autochthonous conditions in writing.

Ingold, drawing from Whitehead, claims that “the world we inhabit is never complete but continually surpassing itself” (Ingold 12, Whitehead 410). By thinking of our place in the world in terms of the emergent qualities of chora, rather than commonplace topoi, solonists recognize wayfaring as an ongoing process among humans and the nonhuman world. Following Plato’s famous quoting of Heraclitus, “Everything flows and nothing stays” (Cratylus, 402a), solonists embrace the flow of chora to find their way through the world. In doing so, solonists write to inhabit, not to control or dominate the places with which they write.

Building from Ingold, Nathanial Rivers asserts, “Wayfaring is about ‘place-making,’ and it is a way of understanding place outside the nature/culture and human/nonhuman distinction”

(184, emphasis original). To visit a place as a tourist is more akin to reading than writing.

Tourists consume a sense of place that emerges from prior encounters between various actants

(human or nonhuman). Place in this sense is fixed, commonplace, and bifurcated. Places like the

Devil’s Millhopper or Silver Springs are the locative equivalent of canonical literature. They are well-known, and their identities are highly stabilized. They are topics of interest, places where outsiders come to consume, participants in the totalizing force of commonplace. These places resist interaction between park visitors by design. Anyone who has visited a state or national park is familiar with the “leave no trace” policy. The tourist fails to recognize, as Rivers affirms,

“trails are made of our footprints, which, rather than leaving marks upon some static substrate, make up the threads weaving that very surface” (185). Until we recognize our impacts as part of our inhabitance, we cannot find our way in the world.

The solonist, on the other hand, participates in the rhetorical act of inhabitance by interacting with place as a writer (as reductively opposed to reader). By writing with/in place in

the tradition of the theoria, the solonist learns their own place and discovers their own way. For example, Ulmer’s Florida Rushmore project would radically alter the sense of place commonly associated with the Devil’s Millhopper. Were the electronic projection to be installed in the park, the location would be transformed from a place defined by the tired tropes of the so-called natural world to a mashup of nature and culture. The mixed reality experience described by

Ulmer would blend the virtual and actual, word and world. Here, the solonist could visit not to passively consume place but to contribute both to the identity of the place and to their own identity through a kind of rhetorical wayfaring. John Tinnell has termed the emerging movement of place-based writers following Ulmerian methods the “kairotic intellectual” who “creates work in the capacity of actionable media such that their humanistic inquiries not only address a general audience but also interface with local action amid highly public settings” (182). The work of the kairotic intellectual disrupts locations as fixed commonplace, and out of the disruption, a more fluid sense of place emerges. Were Ulmer’s Florida Rushmore project to be installed, the Devil’s

Millhopper would become a location for visitors to practice wayfaring with/in the premises of place as solonists.

While tourism is geared solely toward attraction, solonists seek sites of attraction and repulsion. Thus, a solonist ecocomposition endeavors to better acknowledge how places are both abjected and idealized through writing. By revealing the abject elements of place, the solonist discovers not only how self and place are intrinsically bound, but also the connections of specific place to commonplace topoi. To this end, Ulmer’s MEmorial method visualizes the connection of the individual (what Ulmer terms an “egent”) to large-scale, abstract commonplace topoi through specific places. Through electrate practices like the MEmorial, writers move beyond subjective models to account for specific place as the premise of both self and commonplace.

That is, the solonist recognizes place as more than just a link between self and commonplace.

Place emerges as a location to witness choric circulation, troubling our sense of subject/environment, outer/inner and higher/lower-scale.

There are several recent examples of ecological approaches to writing studies using

Ulmerian methods that might serve as models for solonist ecocomposition. For instance, Sean

Morey’s webtext describes his project, the “Roadkill Tollbooth,” a “MEmorial” for animals killed in the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill of 2010 (“Deepwater Horizon MEmorial”). In this project, Morey uses a digital map of the Florida turnpike to theorize electrate ecocomposition and to bring abject elements of place into view through “a distributed monumentality that can raise [ . . . ] abject sacrifices to the surface.” In similar fashion, Jacob Greene and I created an augmented reality project to document cyclist deaths in Jacksonville, Florida as part of the

University of Florida’s TRACE innovation initiative (Jones and Greene). The TRACE initiative supports a range of digital humanities projects, including Augmented Reality Criticism (or

ARCs) that “use AR to modify and transform dominant narratives about objects, subjects, sites, and historical moments” (Trace ARCs). In place of the physical monuments known as “ghost bikes,” which are often taken down or stolen, the smartphone application displays augmented- reality visualizations of ghost bikes in the locations where cyclists were killed. In both projects, digital media are used to make connections between specific and commonplace topoi visible through writing.

These projects address environments as choric premises to visualize abject elements of place in relation to concepts of digital and material, individual and collective, as well as self and environment. For Morey, this is his own complicity in the BP Oil Spill and his personal connection to Key West. For Jacob and I, this is recognizing how attitudes such as racism and

fossil-fuel dependence are naturalized into spaces like the sprawled city of Jacksonville, resulting in the unsafe driving conditions that lead to high instances of pedalcyclist death. In a sense, these two examples achieve opposite goals. Morey identifies the individual’s place in a collective disaster while Jacob and I examine how the intersections of histories of violence and dependence on fossil fuels have shaped a specific built environment. Yet, both projects work to show how subjective models for writing based entirely on commonplace topoi prevent scholars from making these connections.

By creating a MEmorial, writers learn their own place, the connection between the individual writer and the larger issues of a society. In this way, solonists reinvent their sense of self and the places with which they interact. In his article “From Augmentation to Articulation:

(Hyper)linking the Locations of Public Writing,” Jacob Greene describes making an ARC at the

SeaWorld-Orlando amusement park as a “process requires a keen rhetorical eye for how a confluence of human and nonhuman elements (e.g., the animals in the park, the software used to design the app, park visitors, Florida’s tourist economy, etc.) co-produce the application alongside its human ‘creators’” (Greene). By creating a digital overlay, human writing does more than simply stack atop the natural world; it interacts with it in a rhetorical coproduction.

In future practice, a solonist ecocomposition might begin by considering place as a premise which troubles distinctions between (human) writer and (nonhuman) environment.

Rather than conceiving of the environment (as well as the nonhuman) as either “lacking voice” or being “spoken for” in writing, a solonist ecocomposition bears witness to the choric premises of place as the very conditions of writing itself. Rather than treating writing as the crossing point between a pre-existing agent and the material environment, solonist ecocomposition would implement Ulmerian models such as MEmorial, mystory, and the popcycle into studies of the

ecological premises of writing. Such studies would aim to understand how self and place are mutually constituted, not to establish places as origin points, but as nascent landmarks through which to discover our own paths to rhetorical inhabitance.

As demonstrated in this chapter, writing emerges out of the reciprocal interaction of writers and places in complex rhetorical ecologies. Place is more than content for writing; it constitutes the conditions of writing itself. Examining specific places allows ecocomposition to delineate and locate ecologies of writing. As Dobrin explains, “we may be able to achieve a more ecologically based view of writing by examining the spaces of strange loops as dynamic spaces in which systems establish internal order and as locations in which interrelations take hold”

(Postcomposition 166). Places resonate with rhetorical feedback. By triangulating the rhetorical reverberations that constitute place, scholars can navigate the complex ecologies that characterize our relationship with/in places. My analysis illustrates a generalized role of specific place (protasis) in ecocomposition by considering one location, but in doing so, I hope to encourage future writing studies scholarship on premises of writing.

A choric approach to specific places engages the emergent properties of wayfinding that mark the premises of writing. Solonists recognize that navigating writing requires a multitude of wayfinding points. By orienting ourselves to a wider variety of places, writers can negotiate the flows of choric writing. Rather than considering place in the fixed terms of commonplace topoi, this chapter traces how the karst features of north-central Florida allowed Ulmer to illustrate, comprehend, and deploy choric invention. While the Devil’s Millhopper served as an important premise for Ulmer to negotiate the bifurcation of subject and environment, further consideration of a wider range of places and writers practicing as solonists will yield a still greater set of wayfinding points. Likewise, because solonists recognize writing as a relay occurring with/in

place, future studies will bring a wider range of perspectives to the places of writing, such as in the inventive networks of the Alachua springs and writers like Bartram, Coleridge, and Ulmer.6

The goal of this chapter is to encourage writing studies to further engage with place in a world characterized by tumultuous change. Human activity has left its mark on even the most remote places, from the atmosphere to the abyssal depths of the oceans. Change is chaotic and often destructive, but it is also a fundamental component of navigation. As our positions change, so do our perceptions, and those perceptions shape our rhetorical locations. A solonist ecocomposition gets beyond thinking of place as fixed commonplace or as bifurcated. Through this study, I propose an ecocomposition that views specific places as important wayfinding points for the practice of theorizing and connecting with/in the places of writing. As solonists, we can now attend to writing’s choric premises.

Prescribed Burn

Below the trail, we see the white fuel tanks through the cloud of smoke that makes the flames they cast seem dull. The ranger, in her white fire suit, looks martian-esque against this strange landscape of green and char behind where she walks, waves of flame spread and smolder the leaf litter like breakers on a shoreline. A tame blaze born out of the steady flow of gasoline and a spark, disciplined by firebreaks plowed into the darkening earth, the ranger walks her sacred labyrinth in reverse,

6 For a rhetorical perspective on Bartram’s ecological consciousness, see Matthew Sivils’ (2004) article, “William Bartram's Travels and the Rhetoric of Ecological Communities.” His article examines the “move from analyses of Bartram’s influence on the works of writers such as Coleridge” to understand it as “a botanical, zoological, anthropological, ethological, agricultural, theological, sociological, and literary work of great importance” (59). While he demonstrates Bartram’s influence on the American nature writing tradition, from Thoreau to Leopold, Abbey, and others, he also highlights Bartram’s macroscopic, ecological perspective which “tells the story of the entire wilderness, not of only a few species” (59).

a god birthing Phlegethon behind her as she moves outward toward the perimeter of tilled dirt, the tattoo of scorched ground and handline spelling boundaries to veil the illusion of management and control, a remedy born out of its own poison, her careful retreat from its advancing line leaving the landscape charred and impotent, fighting wildfire with restrained flame, scorching the fuel, the saw palm becomes an offering against the day when feral flames might sweep wild as mad dogs through protected taproot and loam.

CHAPTER 3 PALIMPSEST NETWORKS: GHOST BIKES AND DIGITAL-MATERIAL WRITING

In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness. — Robert M. Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (4)

30°19'55.6"N 81°39'20.4"W

Jacksonville, Florida

Anyone who has seen a ghost bicycle on a city street has wondered what it was, what it meant, who placed it there, and why. This confusion stems, in part, from the many meanings that ghost bikes carry. Ghost bicycles are monuments made from repurposed bicycles that designate a place where a cyclist was seriously or (most often) fatally injured. Spray painted white with dry- rotted tires, chained to a roadside fixture, these bicycles seem strangely out of place. They are ex- situ , ghastly, and otherworldly objects. At once, ghost bikes suggest the freedom of motion epitomized by the bicycle, and yet they are motionless, broken monuments. When a ghost bicycle is adorned with plastic flowers, it might resemble a gravesite. When it bears a sign saying, “cyclist struck here,” it takes on public elements of activist discourse.

Ghost bikes are usually either sourced from frames and parts which no longer work, or they are purposefully broken before being installed, to reduce the likelihood of their being stolen.

Like the lost lives they represent, these repurposed objects would otherwise be discarded and forgotten by society. Of course, like the bicycle from which they are deconstructed, ghost bikes serve a host of purposes and are sourced with whatever materials are available at the time. If the rider’s bicycle survives, it is sometimes reused for the ghost bike, but often they are too mangled

to resemble a bicycle. Some ghost bike materials are purchased new and thus require the resources of producing a bike for the sole purpose of creating the monument. These memorials first appeared in the early 2000s, emerging out of San Francisco from the work of artist Jo Slota, who installed white-painted bicycle frames around the city. The first recorded ghost bike memorial appeared in St. Louis, Missouri, when Patrick Van der Tuin—a frustrated cyclist turned activist—placed mangled bicycles where he knew cyclists had been killed by motorists, according to Peter Walker and Vicky Lane's (2011) article in The Guardian. The ghost bike as the public, rhetorical object we know today emerged from New York City soon after, popularized by activist organizations like GhostBikes.org.

These markers serve an array of rhetorical roles. Primarily, they are a memento mori for the public and a memento vitam for the family and community. They are monuments celebrating and commemorating those who have been injured. They remind both cyclists and motorists of the importance of remaining vigilant on the road. In cases where negligent motorists collide with cyclists, the cyclist is by far the most likely to incur severe injury. Likewise, the many unsolved hit-and-run bicycle deaths each year underscore that motorists are not held liable for negligent actions, reinforcing petrocentric attitudes. Beyond the private spheres of mourning and memorialization, ghost bikes play a variety of roles in public discourse and place-making. These memorials unite cycling communities around the topoi of an individual’s death. They participate in the complex social roles that bicycles have played since the 19th century. Ghost bikes emerged out of the radical cycling countercultures of the 1970s and 1990s in the United States, and they extend a long tradition of the bicycle as a mode of travel for marginalized social groups.

Through the more-than-human assemblage of ghost bike memorials, citizens advocate for a wider range of inhabiting publics through what David Crow calls unofficial language.

In this chapter, I offer a study of ghost bikes in Jacksonville, Florida as an example of the palimpsest networks through which notions of place as part of more-than-human publics are formed. I explore the cultural history of ghost bikes and their connection to vélorutionism, a movement which transformed a bourgeois toy into a revolutionary object. Through Ulmer’s

MEmorial methodology, I engage the topic of place and the formation of publics as more-than- human assemblages (which I elaborate in chapter five). As a material form of networked writing, ghost bikes make visible the logic of petroculture and the racist ideologies and infrastructures it sustains. By engaging with petroculture, this chapter introduces the rhetorical notion of energy as part of place-making (which I elaborate on in chapter four). Through this study, I elaborate on the choric and networked methodology introduced in chapter two (choragraphy), and I describe the augmented reality criticism (ARC) project Jacob Greene and I designed to emplace digital ghost bicycles in the places across Jacksonville where they have been removed.

Publics and the Ecologies of Place

In Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner modifies Habermas’ concept of the public sphere to argue for a plurality of publics existing within what was traditionally defined as a singular entity. Warner demonstrates that, rather than a single speaker and audience, publics are made from the “ongoing space of encounter for discourse,” formed from interactions or links formed between encounters (62). These publics are often in conversation, and just as often at odds, with one another. Ghost bikes, and bicycle counterculture in general, can be understood as what Warner terms a counterpublic, publics which are at “tension with a larger public” (56).

Though they are often at odds, counterpublics are part of the larger public, and their agonism is part of the very encounters that sustain publics. Ghost bicycles are rhetorical vehicles for this agonism, and their presence produces the tensions which allow cyclists to advocate for polycultural means of transportation and inhabitance that run counter to petrocentric discourse.

Building from Warner, Jenny Rice (then Edbauer) adopts the term “rhetorical ecologies” to describe the complex circulation of affective rhetorical energies which produce the links between publics and counterpublics. As discussed in chapter two, the premises of place function similarly to those of publics and counterpublics. Places consist of various networks of human and nonhuman actants. The agonisms between humans and nonhumans compose place as a more-than-human public (which I discuss in chapter five). By focusing on ghost bikes as rhetorical links between publics and counterpublics, this chapter demonstrates how objects participate in traditional human-centered publics. As a form of energy rhetoric (which I discuss alongside rhetorical energy in the next chapter), ghost bikes call attention to human dependence on nonhuman resources, and they likewise draw focus to the natural world as rhetorically constructed as well as shaped by human and posthuman acts and interests.

While Rice rejects place as part of the fixed topographies of situs and the rhetorical situation, place is an important means of thinking through inhabitance because it more immediately suggests more-than-human interests than publics do. Further, Rice demonstrates that the “notion of place has [...] recently become much more complicated in the theoretical frameworks of both cultural geographers and rhetoricians.” Building from Rice’s work with publics, but focusing instead on place as a choric network, allows a greater range of actants which are more-than-human, to emerge into our rhetorical considerations. In fact, Rice’s reliance on human-centered publics somewhat undercuts her move toward rhetorical models built on affective networks because it topologically excludes nonhumans from consideration. Rather, I will demonstrate how ghost bikes participate in embodied notions of place as an affective encounter precisely through their disembodiment which rhetorically links the absent body of a cyclist to the displacements of petrocentrism.

Pedestrian Rhetorics

[T]o walk faster, or run faster, one works harder. Similarly, to drive faster on a bicycle, one works harder. But when I learned to drive a car, I suddenly found myself confronting a quite different realm of motives —Kenneth Burke “The Rhetorical Situation” (269)

Advocates who install ghost bikes are often calling for greater protections for pedestrians, including those walking or using non-motorized transportation and wheelchairs (such as in the definition of pedestrian made by New York State Vehicle and Traffic Law, Section 130). In this sense, auto-mobility is the right to travel safely through public spaces across a multitude of transportation apparati. Ghost bicycles call into question the ways that spaces are designed for cars. The resulting spaces are often pedestrian in the sense that they are ubiquitous and commonplace, such as in strip malls along the interstate. Pedestrian spaces naturalize car- centered design, and they exclude other forms of motion. In this sense, the resulting deaths of non-motorists (and perhaps motorists, too) become pedestrian. As they pose a counter-narrative to these places, ghost bikes critique petrocentrism and petroculture and advocate for polycultural communities.

In the webtext “Augmented Vélorutionaries: Digital Rhetoric, Memorials, and Public

Discourse,” Jacob Greene and I explore how fossil fuel infrastructure in the United States has led to urban design which reinforces petrocentric ways of inhabiting a place:

Petrocentrism is a monocultural dependence on fossil fuels [...]. Petrocentrism can be contrasted with pluralist polyculture, which advocates for multiple perspectives, and, in the case of travel, denotes a host of alternative means of transportation that stand outside of, even in opposition to, the single-passenger, commuter automobile. [T]hrough the act of commuter cycling, [riders] advocate for polycultural values and the displacement of petrocentric values. Likewise, public transit options might be included as part of a polycultural system, even though they often rely on fossil fuels, since they provide energy-efficient ways of moving through and inhabiting spaces, as do motorized bikes which allow users to move swiftly but with a lower carbon footprint. Ghost bicycles advocate for non-petrocentric attitudes by revealing the true cost of vehicular transportation.

Petrocentric urban design often erases the real costs of fossil fuel dependence by naturalizing designs which are geared entirely toward monocultural automobility. Costs such as pedestrian deaths due to petrocentric design, as Ulmer claims, are sacrifices made on behalf of public values. Ulmer (2005) writes that, in America, the automobile invokes a public subject that demands the right “to drive wherever I want, whenever I want, for whatever purpose, in whatever manner I choose, so help me God” (p. 49). As Greene and Jones argue, ghost bikes are part of petrocentric systems, but they also imagine other possible ways of inhabiting place:

Even the commuter cyclist is implicated in the massive fossil fuel infrastructure through the styrene and butadiene in their tires, brakes, and other components. Bicycles as well as their riders are unquestionably dependent on fossil fuels. Yet, through the act of commuter cycling, they also advocate for polycultural values and the displacement of petrocentric values.

Ghost bikes make petrocentric values and their requisite sacrifices visible and apparent in the material environments. They provide a counter-narrative to the naturalized petrocentrism of

Jacksonville’s sprawl.

Though ghost bicycles appear internationally, they are very much an emplaced, American phenomenon. When the German bicycle manufacturer Ghost brought its brand to the US through

REI, many cycling advocates were outraged. The controversy is rooted in REI’s decision to bring the brand over without considering the meaning “ghost” already carried in American bicycling lexicon. A similar situation occurred when DKNY placed orange-painted bicycles across New

York City as part of a guerilla marketing campaign. Advocates thought this dishonored the ghost bike memorials throughout the city (Furness, 2010, p. 160).

MEmorials

As monuments which serve many rhetorical roles and negotiate the spaces between the public and private, ghost bicycles are an example of Ulmer’s concept of the MEmorial. In

Electronic Monuments, Ulmer discusses the MEmorial and differentiates it from traditional

memorials. MEmorials differ as a writing practice from traditional memorials in several ways.

They are digital artifacts, meant to connect citizen writers to “the internet as a public sphere”

(xvii). The subjects of MEmorials are tragedies which fall beyond the pale of traditional national monuments, such as car accidents, victims of gun violence, or those of domestic abuse. While traditional monuments memorialize the sacrifices made on behalf of public values (such as the deaths of soldiers in war for values associated with freedom), MEmorials deal with abject deaths, those which are not thought of as sacrifices. Ulmer explains that a “MEmorial witnesses

(monitors) a disaster in progress” (xxvii). MEmorials negotiate the derangements of scale by connecting individual deaths to collective tragedies. In the case of automobile crashes, they are often considered tragic accidents at the local level, but scale up to the national level and they are more obviously the result of design. Furthermore, MEmorials connect the individual writer/rider to the disaster; thus the ME in MEmorial. Through a choragrapic methodology, MEmorials emphasize the individual’s own personal debt to those who have died on behalf of public values, and they further complicate the networked relationality of categories such as private and public as well as national and local.

Often chained to fixed structures, ghost bikes designate tightly confined topoi. They point indexically to the death of one person, the loss of an individual. Yet, ghost bikes likewise connect the individual to larger collective ecologies and topoi: passengers, members of regional communities, cyclists, and even activists. They take on further intersectionality as they literally represent the collision of ideologies with public and private lives. They designate spaces where those lives were forced to stop moving in any direction. The bicycles are themselves broken, purposefully unusable fixtures, remnants of destructive, useless loss. These monuments, however, make these abject losses visible and thus repurpose them. They communicate and

memorialize private losses in a space available to the public imagination. They are vivid because they affectively represent an individual’s death, not just an impersonal statistic in a spreadsheet.

However, ghost bikes only connect to those who know what they mean. Though many people are brought to ghost bike literacy through a fascination with these mysterious objects, they are often confusing to the uninitiated. Annette Vie suggests that literacies possess a

“heritage of moral goodness” and that “calling something a literacy raises the stakes for acquiring that knowledge” (2). Ghost bike activism builds on this sense of literacy, connecting a moral dimension with knowledge about ghost bikes. Those who know what they mean are rhetorically positioned as insiders, connected to the cycling community through ghost bike literacy. For those who don’t know what they are, they function as a curiosity, and for those who do know, they affirm the onlooker’s position in the community.

Rather than build from a topocentric logic, ghost bikes operate through affective, visual, emergent, and choric rhetorical properties. Building from apparatus theory and urbanist writers like Paul Virilio, Ulmer proposes MEmorials as a method for using networked writing to build civic spheres through the Internet as “an inhabitable monument” which provides “a mode of active collective reasoning” (xiii). The purpose of Ulmer’s MEmorial is to expose the sacrifices necessary to support value systems. This exposure forces us to question if the value is worth the sacrifice. If the value is not worth the cost, we must change our values. In a similar fashion,

Melissa Lane’s (2012) Ecorepublic turns to Plato to ask if in “clinging to the comforts and familiarities of our current way of life and its fossil-fuel infrastructure, despite a mounting consensus of scientific studies documenting the damage which this is doing, are we trapping ourselves in Plato’s Cave?” (4). Like the prisoners of Plato’s allegory of the cave, automobiles lock us into particular ways of seeing the world. Ecorepublic explores methods with which to

“model a sustainable relation between what we may call” in the terms of the ancient Greeks, polis and psyche, “the city and soul” (p. 26). But like the prisoners of Plato’s cave, we must come to understand how the objects held before us, and those which contain us, help to rhetorically produce the world we see as natural, authentic, and true. With this approach in mind, we can read these crashes as the tragic expression of the tension between petroculture—which uses as its vehicle the single-passenger automobile—and expressions of polyculture such as bicycling and walking.

Chora and Place

While petrocentrism shapes the physical layout of Jacksonville, the influence of fossil fuel design disappears under topocentric theories of place. Cars are a means to move from point

A to point B with little thought for what dwells betwixt and between. Topoi encourage us to see spaces as tightly demarcated GPS coordinates. They reinforce a sense of place which is human- centered and, in this case, petrocentric. Choric approaches, on the other hand, recognize how place is constantly in flux. Chora reveals not only the derangements scale but also of time. Places are palimpsests. They are sites of history and erasure. In geography, palimpsest landscapes are those which reveal traces of previous impacts, both of natural and cultural forces. This is often the case in landscapes rich with ore and other mineral resources, where distinct geographical features are further altered by mining. The remains of the massive forests of the Carboniferous period, for instance, survive as much of the world’s coal (they fossilized because the bacterial and fungal relations I discuss in chapter four had not yet emerged). In the Timaeus dialogue,

Plato discusses chora in relation to the material environment (with a particular interest in caves and mining). As such, chora works behind the rhetorical scenes of perceptible topoi. A modern example might be the idea of a city’s uptown, downtown, and midtown, which emerge not from

tightly demarcated lines but from psychogeographical networks connecting the various ecologies of topoi which make up a place.

Ghost bicycles are nodes of the networks of values which constitute the various places of passage that we call Jacksonville. The collective attitudes that lead to cyclist deaths are part of the system which ghost bikes help to make visible. As Ulmer (2005) denotes in Electronic

Monuments, “chora mediates individual/collective identities” (p. 26). Earlier, Ulmer (1994) sketches choragraphy as both “a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (p. 39) and a “method for writing and thinking electronically” (p. 45). While topos-centered methods encourage us to see these crashes as isolated, individual incidents, choric methods insist that we step back and see the larger connections that emerge out of place. Thus, the topoi of the ghost bicycles refer back to the larger, collective issues we face as a society dependent on fossil fuels, point toward more just climate futures, and index the loss of an individual life. In this way, ghost bikes elevate the life of a person in order to draw attention to the ecologies of scalar issues.

Along similar lines, Thomas Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric demonstrates how “much rhetorical theory still relies on a separatist mind/body/environment paradigm” (p. 43) and explains how the concept of chora reveals that “minds are at once embodied, and hence grounded in emotion and sensation, and dispersed into the environment itself” (p. 43). As ghost bikes stand in for absent riders, they call attention to their sacrifices as abjected by the polis. As I discuss further at the end of this chapter, ghost bikes participate in reinhabiting place by calling attention to absence. Building from Kristeva’s notion of the abject, Ulmer uses a choric methodology to locate sites of both attraction and repulsion to bear affective witness to collective attitudes which produce disasters. As automobile culture reinforces the distinctions of mind, body, and

environment, ghost bicycles signal the networks that weave together these supposedly distinct entities.

As rhetorical objects, ghost bike memorials do not offer drivers statistics, facts, or abstract propositions; their evidence is affective, material, and anecdotal. Like Roland Barthes'

“third meaning,” chora troubles simple distinctions of signifier and signified and even meaning and signification. Ghost bikes are ambient, bringing together “an ensemble of variables, forces, and elements that shape things in ways difficult to quantify or specify” (Rickert, 2013, p. 7).

Additionally, Julia Kristeva argues that “although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitively posited: as a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it axiomatic form” (1984, p. 26). She connects the concept of chora to the embodied and emplaced conditions from which meaning emerges while troubling the inscriptions of masculinity and authorship in meaning-making. When motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists pass a ghost bike, its rhetorical tactic is one of ambient, embodied influence, working to reconfigure the pedestrian space of the busy intersection from a mundane element of city life into a site of tragedy and intersectional activism. We still inhabit these petrocentric spaces, but ghost bikes allow a public to be attuned to them differently.

Our personal values, what Lane (2012) connects to psyche, abject these deaths which are required to support the polis, our national values. Ulmer (2005) argues that “public discussion

[remains] fixed on the events, rarely reflecting on the frame of the events, never raising the structural questions that might help grasp the cause and function of private and public death”

(35). If we take Ulmer’s point to heart, we can see why topocentric solutions to these problems will never be enough: “How to stop making mistakes? How to reduce error and eliminate accidents? These are the goals of a certain scientific method incapable of thinking wreckage as

sacrificial ceremony” (p. 35). Because our roadways are dangerous by design for vulnerable road users, no amount of reciprocal change will ameliorate these tragic deaths. In light of this, we must acknowledge that public tragedy is part of private freedom, and we must ask if the deaths of these cyclists are worth the values that come with petrocentrism. As one Economist blogger D.

K. (2014) frames it:

In 2012 some 120 cyclists were killed in traffic accidents across Florida. That is as many as were killed in Britain in the same year—a country with three times as many people as Florida and a lot more cyclists. … Such deaths are not inevitable: over the past few decades, traffic deaths in general have declined spectacularly– from almost 55,000 in 1972 to 33,000 in 2012. Much of these gains however have come from better-designed cars.

Because many large American cities, such as Jacksonville, sprawled out with the rise of the automobile, they have become unusable by non-motorists, unsustainable and dangerous by design. As of this writing, Jacksonville is the 12th largest US city by population, but it is the largest city in the contiguous US by area. These unsustainable places are formed through histories of what Rob Nixon calls slow violence, building from histories of racist attitudes which are reinforced by fossil fuel infrastructures. By facing these dangerous spaces, and by memorializing fallen fellows, cyclists advocate for more inclusive and usable spaces.

Vélorutionaries and Petroculture

Zack Furness’s (2010) One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility explores cycling as a radical form of political expression and an increasingly “more attractive mode of urban transportation due in part to longer traffic delays, wildly fluctuating oil and gas prices, and the increasing costs of owning and operating a car” (p. 3). However, he claims, it remains “not only a fringe mode of transportation in a country with more vehicles than licensed drivers; it is a form of mobility rendered virtually obsolete by the material infrastructure and dominant cultural norms in the United States” (p. 4). Furness describes how the bicycle became “the centerpiece of

an emerging critique of the automobile and car culture” throughout the 1960s and 70s (p. 47).

Known as “vélorutionaries,” (“velo” is French for “bicycle”), cycling activists began to leverage the rhetorical dissonance of the bicycle to challenge the “ideological, spatial, and environmental tensions of car culture” (p. 47). As a cultural icon increasingly associated with values such as environmentalism and conscientious urban planning, the bicycle served as a natural foil for the insidious, carbon-based impacts of an auto-obsessed culture. Ghost bikes emerge out of what

Furness (2010) calls an “intense frustration with a car culture in which the rhetoric of the freedom of the road often replaces the actual right to freely use the road” (p. 9).

The constitutional “right to travel” is not actually part of the protections that allow for the use of public space for recreation, exercise, walking, or socializing. Historically, this constitutional protection only applies to the right to travel between states through the Interstate

Highway System. Because interstate travel is a protected method of state-to-state travel, where non-motorized vehicles are prohibited, this provision does not protect cycling as a basic right. In

1975, a federal judge examined the use of public space for non-motorized purposes, determining that use of space for these reasons were a “basic value” which was protected insofar as the use

“does not interfere with other persons’ rights” (Justia US Law, 2017a). The right to travel locally was actually decided to be part of freedom of speech, protected in the First Amendment in 1990.

This means that, like other forms of speech, it can be regulated in limited degrees, according to the time, place, and manner of use (Justia US Law, 2017b). Thus, commuter cyclists exercise their freedom of speech every time they get on their bikes to ride to work. Ghost bicycles arguably extend this freedom, but no case has yet been heard (to my knowledge).

Chaining ghost bikes to a fixed public structure reflects their MEmorial status, as bicycle deaths are inescapably attached to a culture that does not take non-motorized transportation into

account in its spatial design. As Ulmer (2005) describes, such a MEmorial does “not advocate or condemn the social commitment to the automobile, but only makes it recognizable as a specific kind of value, belief, commitment, with the purpose of helping the public understand itself in its collective identity” (50). Cycling deaths are what Ulmer refers to as abject sacrifice: those deaths that we do not recognize as sacrifices made for our freedoms (p. 134). The values of a petroculture, such as the freedom to move at extremely high speeds in enormous metal objects, are supported by these deaths. Unlike F. T. Marinetti, father of 20th-century Futurism, who drew inspiration from the speed of the bicycle, ghost bikes inspire through their motionlessness. Spray painting the bicycle memorials white originated as a theft deterrent, but it also suggests that these monuments are in a sense devalued—repurposed waste of an abject remnant—which paradoxically allows them to remain visible by keeping them from being stolen, but it also causes them to be seen by some communities as an eyesore. These haunting objects that result from this process speak to motorists who might not otherwise share a discourse space with cyclists. They are a memento mori in a literal sense, calling out to travelers, “remember you will die.” They disrupt petro-logics through their pathos.

Reading ghost bicycles as a critical response to petroculture, it becomes clear that these discarded objects, this repurposed waste, comes to signify resistance and counter-narratives.

While automobiles tell us we can go anywhere and be anyone while hidden in their anonymous hulls, these narratives of loss insist on the personal. The grief they mark is that of the community. The people who die are remembered and celebrated in the object. In Heuretics,

Ulmer (1994) argues that if “in commodity or consumer culture human relationships have been displaced into things, then these same things, taken up into the details of a diegesis, become places of passage” (p. 127). These object-signified locations act as public discourse, speaking on

behalf of cyclists to the community at large. These memorials help us as a community to honor their memories, but they also serve as a reminder that we must travel with vigilant awareness and care. They speak not just to motorists—reminding them that operating a vehicle means taking lives into one’s hands—but also to other riders—fostering solidarity, resisting the grand narrative of automobile culture. They remind us that roads are public spaces providing many points of contact, many avenues for interaction and intersection.

Petro-Armor

Jacques Derrida’s (1993) concept of armor, which he develops in Specters of Marx, helps to explain how automobiles work to conceal the social, cultural, and material impact they have on the urban landscape. Derrida explains that armor “covers the body from head to foot, the armor of which it is a part and to which it is attached. This is what distinguishes a visor from the mask with which, nevertheless, it shares this incomparable power, perhaps the supreme insignia of power: the power to see without being seen” (8). As motorists move through the streets, their vehicles function in this way, protecting them, isolating them, and endowing them with this power. It is difficult to hear the counter-narrative of a silent ghost bike through the roar of an engine; it is harder still to see from high in the cab how petroculture locks us in unsustainable spaces by design. Automobiles themselves can be seen as an iteration of topocentric rhetoric.

They are closed off from the outside, isolated and protected by a clearly demarcated space.

Anyone who has ever commuted by bicycle on a hot or rainy day will know the feeling of envy that accompanies looking into a vehicle’s cab to a passenger who is cool and dry. Automobiles are deeply intertwined with American ideology. They work to protect, and, ultimately, alienate us from the immediate material impacts of our actions. In his interview video in the Jones and

Greene article, Ulmer explains that:

Some commentators date the Anthropocene from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As we start to burn coal, that’s when we start to act at a planetary level and change our own environment. After the Industrial Revolution, we invented a transformative scale of technology and machinery. This machinery requires human beings to change their behaviors. This goes by Taylorism, Fordism, ultimately, the assembly line. Our philosophers call the effect of this on people ‘alienation.’ As people are alienated, the world is reified and objectified and we lose our sense of agency. Individuals working in factories having their behavior correlated to fit with the machine no longer recognize the consequences of their own actions. This is a kind of psychosis. At a civilizational level, people can’t see the results of their own behavior. This is called fetishism in commodity culture (Jones and Greene).

As Ulmer demonstrates, apparatus theory explains why victim blaming often occurs in the wake of a bicycle death. The machinery becomes a mask for abject values. Petroculture encourages us to think of road biking as taking our lives into our own hands. This kind of thinking insists that cyclists don’t die because of a system that does not support multiple kinds of transportation, but instead because they placed themselves in a perilous situation without proper protection—the petro-armor of the automobile. Cyclists might, however, rightfully respond that bicycling shouldn’t be punishable by death. In Daniel Duane’s (2013) article “Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?” he argues that:

cycling isn’t skydiving. It’s not just thrill-seeking, or self-indulgence. It’s a sensible response to a changing transportation environment, with a clear social upside in terms of better public health, less traffic and lower emissions. The world is going this way regardless, toward ever denser cities and resulting changes in law and infrastructure. But the most important changes, with the potential to save the most lives, are the ones we can make in our attitudes.

Ghost bikes call to us to make these attitude changes. To those that hold the literacy, ghost bikes reveal the true costs of petroculture’s reliance on the automobile grand narrative. Ghost bikes invite outsiders into the discourse community through their mysterious presence. Cyclists and ghost bikes are on the front lines, closer than advertisements, articles, or protests. They remind us that negligence on the road can, and does, mean death. In 2013, Michael Dumas conducted an

AL.com poll in response to three pedalcyclist fatalities in the same area of Mobile, Alabama, in a

single week. In response to the question “are ghost bikes a fitting tribute or pointless vandalism?” one user, RobnDobbie (2013) responds:

Maybe when the streets of Mobile are lined with white memorial bicycles the MPO [Metropolitan Planning Organization] will start to consider the bicycle and pedestrians in the design and rehabilitation of Mobile’s streets. Take for example the busy intersection on the Hank Aaron loop at Beauregard Street and Water Street. There is not a single pedestrian cross walk. This is 2013. Transportation Planners know better.

As this frustrated writer noted in the comments, these monuments serve as a location for public advocacy. The material bicycles occupy petrocentric space, revealing the disconnect between public, legal forms of transportation and the dangers posed by using them. The bicycle visually speaks on behalf of groups who are often not taken into consideration by community planning committees, and who cannot be heard by motorists traveling at high speeds in large, enclosed vehicles.

Visual Rhetorics of Place

Although motorists cannot hear cyclists, they can see them. Ghost bikes act on drivers from their very presence, as defined by rhetoric scholars Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-

Tyteca (1971) in The New Rhetoric (pp. 115–120). “Presence” refers to how an image moves to the foreground of the observer’s consciousness. In his chapter “The Psychology of Rhetorical

Images,” Charles A. Hill (2004) refers to the psychological relationship between images and

“developing or revising one’s beliefs based on [these mental] images” as vividness (p. 31).

Vividness, according to Hill, is a major quality that contributes to the object’s power of presence.

He offers a continuum to define the concept of vividness, ranging from most vivid information—

“actual experience, moving images with sound, static photograph”—to less vivid information—

“line drawing, narrative, descriptive account; abstract, impersonal analysis; statistics” (p. 31).

While motorists are isolated from sound by the automobile itself, these bicycles operate

somewhere between static photograph and actual experience, since they are in a sense experienced, and encountered as the driver moves through physical space. In this way, ghost bikes operate as a kind of camera lucida, an early optical aid used by 19th-century painters to create more realistic artworks. Like the ghost bike, the camera lucida transforms the mundane features of the physical world (landscapes, broken bikes) into a work of art.

In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes (1984) writes of the phenomenological experience of viewing a photograph, “I wanted to explore it not as a question

(a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think” (p. 21). For Barthes, the photographic medium elicited a range of reactions that move from the affective and immediate to the rational and contemplative. These images occupy our imaginations with a vivid presence, forcing us to confront the cost of petrocentric values at the level of affect. In this way, the ghost bike operates as a visual “punctum,” a term popularized by Roland Barthes to refer to the small, seemingly irrelevant details of an image that nonetheless produce a strong emotional resonance within the viewer (p. 43). Barthes' use of punctum, which means any kind of sharp edge or tip, emphasized the ways that images hold the potential to “‘prick’” at the armor of entrenched ideologies, such as the values of a petroculture (p. 47). As Derrida refers to the difference between the “visor and mask,” these roadside images pierce through petro-armor— through the one open space, the windshield—with their emotionally vivid presence (Derrida,

1993, p. 8).

Barthes’ Camera Lucida was literally bookended by death: Barthes wrote it in the wake of his mother’s passing, and two weeks after publishing it, Barthes himself died in a car crash while walking across the street. On the day Barthes died, Ulmer was in Paris, having traveled there to meet him. He recalls that the “hoped-for encounter with Roland Barthes did not go so

well. On February 25, 1980, crossing the street in front of the Collège de France, Barthes was struck by what I heard was a laundry truck. I got the news from a concierge whom I asked for help in finding Barthes's office. I was told that Barthes was in the hospital, where he died on

March 26, 1980” (Figueiredo 61). Although traffic deaths are traditionally positioned as accidents, this rhetoric suggests an absence of blame such that organizations like Transportation

Alternatives (https://www.crashnotaccident.com/) are working to change these ways of thinking about vehicular death. Barthes’ death could instead be understood as a sacrifice to a particular cultural value that was surging within France at the time (Schwartz, 1980). Indeed, France’s post-war car obsession fueled its high traffic fatality rate throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As

Robert Zaretsky (2011) wrote, “when novelists, musicians and film directors were not busy using the car and road as metonyms or signifiers, they were instead busy dying, or being maimed, in real cars on real roads” (para. 8).

In this choric analysis, I build from Ulmer’s connections to Barthes’ own tragic death by automobile and his interest in the mythologies of the bicycle. In “The Tour de France As Epic,”

Barthes (2012) discusses cycling as myth-making. In “Necessity and Limits of Mythology,”

Barthes (1972) writes that “[t]o decipher the Tour de France [...] is to cut oneself off from those who are entertained or warmed up by [it]. The mythologist is condemned to live in a theoretical sociality; for him, to be in society is, at best, to be truthful: his utmost sociality dwells in his utmost morality. His connection with the world is of the order of sarcasm” (158). Sarcasm runs counter to the pervasive logic of a grand narrative through affective and subversive means. In this way, ghost bicycles challenge the rhetoric of automobile culture by making visible the cost of privileging automobiles and accepting them as the natural means of individual conveyance.

Covered with plastic flowers, personal messages, and faded photographs, they seek to “develop

or revise” public discourse through the “vivid,” affective logic of visual rhetoric (Hill, 2008, p.

31). They occupy our streets to make that sense of loss apparent to the public.

Rickert (2007) argues in the article, “Towards the Chōra: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on Emplaced Invention,” that “we should begin to consider media not simply the medium by which we interact and communicate with others, but in a quite literal sense a place” (p. 251, original emphasis). These ghost bicycles point to the individual place, the person and the sacrifice, and toward the ubiquitous public value for which that sacrifice was made. Each object is unique in type and size; it is covered with remnants and private memories that make the visual personal. As Furness (2010) puts it:

The bicycle, like the automobile, is an object that becomes meaningful through its relationship to an entire field of cultural practices, discourses, and social forces. These linkages, or what cultural theorists call articulations, are not naturally occurring, nor are they due to the essence of the bicycle itself. Rather, they are made: people construct, define, and modify these connections by writing about bicycles, displaying them in museums, documenting them in films, representing them on T-shirts and posters, singing about them, fixing them, and, of course, riding them (pp. 9–10).

Ghost bicycles haunt the spaces they occupy, revealing glimpses of past losses and offering counter-narratives to the grand narrative of petroculture.

Intersections of Petroculture

The relationship between bicycling, freedom, and authenticity (as expressed in the Pirsig quote at the beginning of the chapter) has a long history in the United States. In the 20th century, cycling went from a leisure activity to an essential means of conveyance for the working class.

Bicycles likewise played an important role in women’s suffrage in the 19th century. They provided women with mobility, independence, and agency. In Claiming the Bicycle: Women,

Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America, Sarah Hallenbeck explores the role of the bicycle in women’s movements in the 19th century. Hallenbeck refers to its role in suffrage

and its connection to women’s mobility. This new technology opened radical possibilities for numerous groups of people. Ghost bikes inherit and continue this tradition, making countercultural rhetoric visible to numerous passenger groups.

Like the petrocentric spaces of Jacksonville, the bicycle itself has been shaped by the attitudes and values of its users and designers. The components of the bicycle, from which the ghost bicycle is produced, consist of individual parts which retain their identity and are yet assembled into the very identity of the bicycle. Claiming the Bicycle demonstrates the ways that, in the late nineteenth century, “Wheel Women” “collectively [...] contributed to the changed material environment [...] in which women bicyclists enacted a broad array of other changes in their lives” (p. 67). As they began to popularize the bicycle, they invented clothing and other tools to make commuting possible for women. Hallenbeck has taken an intersectional approach to reading the bicycle, explicating the material rhetorics at play in the technology to understand

“rhetorics of time, space, objects and other conditions of materiality” and the ways in which these “function both to naturalize and to transform gender relations” (p. xv). Similarly, by reading the sprawled built environments which collectively compose Jacksonville, we can begin to uncover the ways in which road users navigate and even rewrite ideological and historical intersections that have been naturalized into the material rhetorics of space.

Like many other U.S. cities, the busy intersections and roadways of Jacksonville are designed as passage points, not sites to interact with other members of the community. A report from Smart Growth America (2002) linked suburban sprawl to four key environmental characteristics known to be detrimental to the development of a livable, traversable city space: 1) dispersed communities, 2) clear delineations between home, work, and shopping areas, 3) large, inaccessible roads, and 4) weak or nonexistent community centers (as cited in Ewing, Pendall, &

Chen, 3). Such conditions, the researchers argue, exacerbate a number of public health concerns, including increased risk of traffic fatality, lower rates of walking or cycling, and higher levels of air pollution.

Despite this, the overall goals of the “Florida Pedestrian and Bicycle Strategic Safety

Plan” (State of Florida Department of Transportation, 2013) were to 1) educate motorists and non-motorists on “sharing the road,” 2) pursue “educational efforts to improve the safety of pedestrians and bicycles through design, construction, operation, and maintenance,” and 3) work to ensure that “all areas of Florida’s transportation system provide safe and accessible travel options for pedestrians and bicycles” (20–24). Such a strategy seems to suggest that pedestrian and bike fatalities are so high, in part, because bicycling is rapidly becoming a popular mode of transportation and of cultural expression, and it hasn’t finished establishing its voice in the grand narrative of petroculture. This plan has identified some of the risks that cyclists and pedestrians face: “Florida represented six percent of the U.S. population in 2011, but accounted for 11 percent of all U.S. pedestrian fatalities and 17.4 percent of all U.S. bicycle fatalities” (2). Our system is petrocentric, designed by and for petroculture. Users who step outside this system are subject to the risk of terrible injury and even death.

Through tracing the intersectional convergences which constitute petroculture, we are able to unearth the ideological and material strata connecting the various topoi of Jacksonville, ranging from the individual locations marked by ghost bicycles, to the municipalities of the city, and to national values supporting the infrastructures of petrocentrism. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the freedom to travel by bicycle is legally protected as a speech act. Attempting to exercise the First Amendment right by navigating the dangerous or unusable Jacksonville roadways brings the multidimensional and interconnected issues of racism, sexism, classism, and

ableism into view. In this way, navigating by non-automotive means connects road users to other types of speech acts in places which mitigate similar hazards. Because the bicycle has a cosmopolitan history of use by numerous groups of people, the ghost bicycles in Jacksonville,

Florida, reflect this diverse range of ways in which bicycles are used. Different areas of the city tend to be navigated for different purposes, and the road conditions pedalcyclists face vary on historical and contemporary ideologies, designs, and attitudes which shape the material environment.

Jacksonville Florida is one of the most dangerous places in America to ride a bicycle. It stands in stark contrast to the city of Gainesville, home to the University of Florida where

Gregory Ulmer built his career, and one of the safest places in the country to ride. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s National Center for Statistics and

Analysis 2013 Data Report, Florida writ large has the second most pedalcyclist fatalities of any state (National Highway, 2015). Led closely by California, the two have more than double the pedalcyclist fatalities of any other state in the US. In 2013, there were 141 pedalcyclist deaths in

California and 133 in Florida, making up 4.7% and 5.5% of the total traffic fatalities in the states, respectively, with Florida having nearly double the pedalcyclist fatalities per million of even

California. Texas, third on the list, had a mere 48 pedalcyclist deaths, though its total number of traffic fatalities was the highest.

However, the 2013 Florida Pedestrian and Bicycle Strategic Safety Plan (hereafter the

“Florida Safety Plan”) suggests that “the magnitude of the problem extends beyond what police reported crashes show” (p. 2). In order to encourage automobile operators to travel with greater care, the plan identifies pedalcyclists and pedestrians as “vulnerable road users” (State of Florida

Department of Transportation, 2016, 1–2, 23). The study further notes that pedalcyclists and

pedestrians are most likely to incur severe injury in crashes “because of the lack of protection in case of a crash” (2). Thus, the study frames cause of death as an absence of petroarmor, not of exposure to dangerous and unusable transportation environments for non-motorists. Defining cyclists as vulnerable is, as Derrida (1993) observes, “the armor of which it is a part and to which it is attached” (8). While these definitions of users are intended to help bring charges against negligent drivers who refuse to share the road, they also make evident the ways we naturalize petroculture. Ulmer (2005) remarks that “individuals may not want to wreck their cars, but nations do” (5). Though we blame individual drivers for causing the death of a cyclist, ghost bicycles force us to step back and see the larger system that requires these abject sacrifices to maintain its values.

The cycling advocacy group “ghostbikes.org” has mapped locations of ghost bicycles and records fatal bicycle accidents on its website. These maps represent and preserve the locations in which a bicycle death has occurred. They make a public record of these fatalities. When possible, they have also taken pictures of the ghost bicycles themselves, preserving a trace of them after they are removed. Many ghost bike fatalities occur near Jacksonville’s busiest roads: Interstate-

10 and Interstate-95. Like the tightly interlocked roads of Jacksonville’s downtown corridor, these bicycle deaths cluster around the city center and then disperse out into the surrounding areas. However, it is difficult to grasp the rhetorical significance of these markers until you understand the material history of the spaces in which these fatal collisions occurred.

Racial Rhetorics of Space

Downtown Jacksonville sits about 12 miles west of the Atlantic Ocean along the St.

Johns River. As it grew in population in the years immediately following WWII, Jacksonville residents moved east and south away from the urban core (Crooks, 2004, p. 36). In 1968,

Jacksonville became the largest city in the contiguous United States when it voted to consolidate

with the various municipalities of nearby Duval County. The depreciation of downtown

Jacksonville continued into the late 20th century as wealthier, white residents moved to gated communities and beachfront properties outside of the urban core, leaving a stretch of busy intersections, strip malls, and unwalkable streets in their wake (Crooks, 2004, p. 217).

Jacksonville has sought urban revitalization efforts since at least the 1990s; however, many of these efforts are more focused on transforming downtown Jacksonville into an economically viable sports and entertainment district than a traversable community space (Amiker & Piggot,

2015)

Florida is home to eight of the ten most dangerous cities to be a pedestrian in the United

States, with Jacksonville coming in behind Fort Myers and Orlando at number three (“Dangerous by Design,” 2016). According to a recent report from Smart Growth America (2016),

Jacksonville has a PDI (Pedestrian Danger Index) of 228.7 (p. ii). PDI numbers are calculated based on the number of pedestrian deaths in relation to the number of pedestrians on an average day. This helps correct for cities that have higher rates of pedestrian death but are not necessarily more dangerous. The report described how minorities and lower income households are overrepresented in pedestrian death statistics, with people of color making up 46.1 percent of pedestrian deaths despite only making up 34.9 percent of the population (p. iv). Unfortunately, because many of the metro areas cited in the report continue to rely on car-centered road design, such deaths are likely to continue.

Due to a rising pedestrian death rate, Jacksonville was designated a “focus city” by the

Federal Highway Administration in 2015, which qualified the city for special programs aided by the federal government (U.S. Department of Transportation, 2016). As a result, Jacksonville has begun to take steps to address the issue of high pedestrian and cyclist deaths. Although the city

of Jacksonville is committed to a multi-faceted approach to addressing this issue, including road redesigns, part of their pedestrian and bicycle master plan has called for “policies and programs that educate and encourage safe pedestrian and bicycle activities” (Ingles, 2017). Although such a goal is certainly admirable and potentially effective at mitigating pedestrian and biking fatalities, in practice it can sometimes result in counterproductive pedestrian shaming.

In May 2016, Jacksonville launched a pilot program to install pedestrian safety warning signs at busy intersections (Johnson, 2016). The text on the sign reads “No Regrets When You

Cross With Care.” This sign, and by extension the city of Jacksonville, has shifted blame onto the pedestrian, implying that more attention or care on the part of the pedestrian is sufficient to prevent further deaths. The harsh, concrete background on the sign has created an ominous backdrop for the small, vulnerable pedestrian figure in the image’s foreground. Overall, the roadside instructions seem to say to the pedestrian, “You don’t belong here.” As public schools were desegregated in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education, a vast number of white residents left city centers for suburban school systems, and moved their children into private schools. In the case of Jacksonville, the white community’s response to desegregation led to a new, spatially naturalized form of segregation through distance and automobility. Thus, as Morton (2012) noted in his exploration of racism and Anthropocentrism, these attitudes converge and intersect in the environments through which cyclists and others attempt to navigate.

Pedestrian warning signs are located primarily within the inner part of Jacksonville’s I-

295 beltway, which serves as the de facto boundary for the city’s urban core. The majority of

Jacksonville’s black population resides west of the St. Johns River in the city’s downtown area

(Statistical Atlas, 2015). Jacksonville’s large geographic size turns acceleration and speed into a commodity. As a result, communities in these areas become defined as points of passage for

vehicles, locations where pedestrians and cyclists are not welcome. Thus, these signs are not only markers that perpetuate pedestrian shaming: it is an intersectional marker of race and class, a way of surveilling those who do not treat this space as a mere passage point from A to B are taking their lives into their own hands.

Over the past year, ProPublica and the Florida Times Union have been reporting on the high number of pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville in a series titled “Walking While Black.” This series examines how black residents receive a disproportionate number of tickets in the city. The report demonstrates that “blacks received 55 percent of all pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville, while only accounting for 29 percent of the population. Blacks account for a higher percentage of tickets in Duval County than any other large county in Florida” (Conarck, et al.). While white flight and the automobile helped to create the geographical sprawl, these laws further the racial inequalities that define the downtown area.

Petrocentric spaces enable the surveillance of the inner city. Simone Browne’s (2015)

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness has considered "blackness, as metaphor and as lived materiality, and applies it to an understanding of surveillance” (p. 7). Indeed, Browne worked “across multiple spaces,” from airports to slave ships, as a way of “[thinking] through the multiplicities of blackness” (p. 7). As Browne mentioned in the introduction, “blackness is often absented from what is theorized” about surveillance despite the fact that black motorists comprise “a disproportionate number of traffic stops” and “stop-and-frisk policing practices” (p.

13). For Browne, being black is to have already been forced into spaces and systems of surveillance. Browne’s approach has offered us new ways of understanding the relationship between petrocentric spaces like Jacksonville, Florida, and the spatial designs that result in dangerous, racialized conditions for bikers and pedestrians. As these pedestrian warning signs

attest, Jacksonville’s urban core is not only a space where petrocentricism and other modes of mobility intersect (and often clash), it is also a space “where blackness meets surveillance” as those who live and work in this space continue to be subjected to the most damaging effects of petrocentric values (p. 13).

Disembodied Rhetorics

In a recent issue of the KB Journal, Janice Chernekoff uses the example of randonneuring, “a form of endurance bicycling,” to explore Burke’s “concept of a mind-body dialectic with studies of embodied rhetorics to explore connections between bodily vocations and the writing linked to them.” Her analysis of randonneur ride reports extends the embodied rhetorical theories of Burke and Hawhee. While cycling sports, as Hawhee argues, “foregrounds the body as a vital, connective, mobile and transformational force” (Moving Bodies 7), ghost bicycles suggest the antipode. They are disembodied objects, traces of the w/rider left in their absence. Their stasis suggests a lack of vital rhetorical energy, and yet this absence is what creates the punctum and vivid, rhetorical force of the object. Through disembodiment, ghost bicycles call attention to place as a choric palimpsest, made of partially erased and written over layers. Like randonneurs, ghost bicycles push motorists “out of their physical comfort zone”

(Chernekoff).

As disembodied objects, ghost bicycles participate in place-making networks. Their mobility comes from reference, not physical movement. As they recall the body of the absent rider, they connect the political body of Jacksonville to the bodies of its citizens and the body of land. Through disembodiment, ghost bicycles undercut a topological sense of place based on zoomable scale. As they sit on a street corner, they visualize a network of past events, from large-scale events like white flight and petrocentrism to the individual event of a crash. In this capacity, ghost bikes harness what Pilsch refers to as inhuman rhetoric (as discussed in the

previous chapter). Through the relationship between absent body and present bike, they negotiate global and local spatial rhetorics through their networked occupation of place. Ghost bikes connect these networks to the potential futures of polycultural change and climate justice.

The automobile enables people to move rapidly through space, and similarly, telepresence technologies like smartphones allow us to bend space and time. As these technologies disrupt and reframe ontologies, they also produce new forms of disembodiment. As these technologies rapidly transport us from point A to point B, they remove our rhetorical attention from the spaces between destinations. Yet, between places are often sites of change.

Ghost bicycles call attention to these liminal spaces, interrupting the continuity of automobility.

In this way, ghost bicycles call attention to petrocentric design through what Bernard Stiegler terms “tertiary memory,” revealing the tragic loss of life which sustains petrocultural values.

This is not to say that the rhetorical properties of ghost bicycles are in binary opposition to automobile culture, or its disembodiments. Rather, they call attention to disembodiment as part of the conditions of petrocultural embodiment. As Mark Hansen (building from Stiegler) argues in Bodies in Code, “disembodiment is not so much opposed to embodiment as it is to its strict complement; bluntly put, disembodiment is the condition of possibility for embodied human life to sustain its (life-sustaining) contact with the preindividual (92). In this way, ghost bicycles embody disembodiment by visualizing the abject premises of petrocentric urban sprawl.

As MEmorials, they connect the micro scale to the macro, the public to the private.

Though their presence is powerful and jarring, ghost bicycles are ephemeral. They pass through time motionless, occupying space on the sidewalk, in the way of pedestrians. Their paint chips as they whispers reminders to us on the street corner in the pouring rain. Ghost bikes, like the riders to which they refer, are here and then gone. Because they can obstruct pedestrian right-

of-way, violate encroachment ordinances, and are considered by some communities to be an eyesore, ghost bicycles are often taken down within weeks or months of their installation, as is the case in Jacksonville, Florida, where not a single ghost bike remains.

Augmented Publics

[I]f I am in a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can at will focus on the scenery or on the window-pane. At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparence of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once present and empty to me, and the landscape unreal and full. —Roland Barthes “Myth Today” (1972, 122)

Like the automobile, mobile handheld and wearable technologies promise to once more revolutionize mobility. Ubiquitous geovisualization technologies like digital mapping and augmented reality (or AR) applications in mobile devices function much like the car windshield

Barthes describes, except in this case, the screen is populated with the rich presence of digital content, integrating virtual and material worlds. While common criticism of technology holds that it is increasingly taking us out of the “real” world, these technologies demonstrate how virtual and actual might someday seamlessly cohabitate and collaborate. Already, organizations like Ghostbikes.org are utilizing mapping technologies to record places where ghost bicycles have been placed, creating a digital repository which continues to haunt the space after their removal. As they become digital objects, ghost bikes are a form of digital-material writing, traces of the complex ecologies through which publics are formed, reformed, and sustained.

Building from these efforts, Jacob Greene and I designed the TRACE ARC project

“Death Drive(r)s: Ghost Bike (Monu)mentality” to (re)place digital ghost bikes in the locations where they had been removed. Mobile AR makes it possible to overlay digital objects within physical environments, allowing writers to replace these haunting MEmorials in the spaces

where they have been removed. This ARC project overlaps the interests of the Florida Safety

Plan, with its objective of developing and implementing “a comprehensive communications plan that will improve public awareness of pedestrian and bicycle crash problems and programs directed at preventing them” (p. 28). This program of action, like the ARC project, can remediate and reduce deaths by raising awareness. Yet, as Ulmer illuminates, these deaths will never completely cease, so long as we hold certain values in our culture. As such, those who have given their lives to support those values should be memorialized. Through the process of memorializing these people, a counterpublic signals to the dominant petropublic, producing an agonism which calls values into question.

By replacing the ghost bikes with digital overlays, making non-petrocentric voices heard, we call into question the values of polis and psyche, of the relationship between the values of a city or nation and the sacrifices of the individual citizen. However, this ARC project, and others like it are not aimed at “reproducing” the experience of ghost bikes. It is unlikely that augmented reality will become a popular protest technology in the near future, preciecely because it requires viewers to seek out and access the digital information. This ARC project functions more like a place-based form of metadata for the embodied event of ghost bike rhetoric. Like the Internet

Archive’s “Wayback Machine,” the project preserves some of the rhetorical attributes of the physical object, but it cannot stand in for the object itself. Thus, the ARC project, like the ghost bicycles themselves, demonstrates how place functions as premise, be it ephemieral and palimpsest.

Anthropocene

We won’t disappear like the bees, who forget us with open mouths honeyed like drunks.

The bees who forget, pressing their dusty bodies honeyed like drunks into the dry valleys.

Pressing their dusty bodies into the sky, a darkening dream echoing in the dry valleys with answers we ignored.

Into the sky, a dream darkening those places we were before. With answers we ignored, darkness surrounds us.

Those places we were before became something new as darkness surrounds us, forgetting ourselves like a river.

We became something new, opening our mouths, forgetting ourselves like a river. We won’t disappear.

CHAPTER 4 SPRINGS OF INSPIRATION: THE RHETORICAL ENERGY OF PLACE

29°12'54.8"N 82°03'06.4"W

Silver Springs State Park, Alachua County, Florida

What constitutes the objects of rhetorical inquiry is a perennial concern for rhetorical theory. While some scholars argue that rhetoric resides squarely in situations involving human communicators (Bitzer 1968), a growing body of new materialist rhetorical scholarship argues for a wider definition of rhetoric to include rhetors beyond the human. For rhetorical theorists interested in these definitions of rhetoric, George Kennedy’s (1992) article “A Hoot in the Dark:

The Evolution of General Rhetoric” has been a landmark. Scholars such as Bradford Vivian

(2004), Carolyn Miller (2007), John Muckelbauer (2008), Diane Davis (2010), Thomas Rickert

(2013), Debra Hawhee (2018), and others point to his work as one point of departure for scholarship redrawing the boundaries of rhetoric. In the article, Kennedy argues for a definition of a general rhetoric built on the concept of energy, suggesting that it is “perhaps a special case of the energy of all physics” (13), and even going so far as to suggest the “rheme” as a “unit of rhetorical energy” (2). Since Kennedy, more recent scholarship has leveraged rhetorical energy to question the borders between human and nonhuman worlds.

Drawing upon Aristotle’s concepts of energia and enargia, and building from the previous chapters’ discussions of the connections between mining practices and Plato’s spatial theories and of petrocentrism in Jacksonville’s built environment, this chapter develops energy as a framework for examining the circulation of rhetorical ecologies of place through a study of the Florida Springs in north-central Florida. Though energy as a rhetorical concept has a somewhat convoluted history, this chapter attempts to clarify one method for its use by applying the concept to several examples of “vigor, vividness, and energy in expression” (Lanham 65)

which have been inspired by the spring. I draw upon methodologies from visual rhetoric and ecocomposition to argue that energy provides a means to rhetorically account for the ecologies of nature and culture. Energy illuminates how the hydrographic visual tropes of water clarity circulate from technical science to popular culture and public discourse. Through this study, I demonstrate how place might be theorized as a conduit for writing.

In undertaking a study of the energy of place, I seek to put rhetorical ecologies and ecocomposition into closer conversation with decolonial posthumanism by connecting both the concepts of energy and ecology to Indigenous knowledge and by locating the colonial history of ecology as it solidified into a master discipline, a lens through which we see the world. The primacy of place in Indigenous cosmologies, as Larsen and Johnson demonstrate, serves the role as a creator “personalizing the energy of Creation into the many forms of life that exist in genealogical relationship with one another, and whose coexistence is indelibly entangled” (200).

While this appears to the arrière-garde of environmental theory to violate the anthropomorphism critique, decolonial posthumanism actually turns that debate inside out, revealing that by only by first separating nature and culture and establishing the primacy of humans (rather than place) is

Romanic anthropomorphism possible. These enganglements are better understood through a decolonial posthumanism than they are through a Continental posthumanism, because they are able to account for a posthuman ethics of place.

Many ecocritics, scientists, and environmentalists are understandably resistant to the posthumanist breakdown of the nature/culture binary for precisely the question of ethics.

Without the divide between sacred nature and profane culture, the ethics of environmental protection and valuation become murky. Without humanism, how might we value, and thereby protect, the natural world? Changing our understanding of agency might be interpreted as a

means of letting go of responsibility. For instance, the politics of Object-Oriented Ontology (or

OOO), which reduce all things to a flat ontological playing field, leave us ill equipped to grapple with human’s accelerated impact on the planet. In his debate with Grahm Harman, Bruno Latour distinguishes ANT from OOO, with its reliance on Heidegger’s “stark opposition between being and nothing” (Latour, Harman, and Erdeyi 9), by claiming that the “whole notion of the network is something that passes; not because it is in time but because it has descendants and ascendants”

(103). Elsewhere, Latour has framed this notion “that time doesn’t flow, that time is something else [...] an event, where something happens that breaks the passage of regular clock time” in terms of kairos (Walsh, et al 410).

This is an important distinction for two important reasons: 1) because it locates networks within Aristotle’s dynamics of energia (or “actual”) and dunamis or “potential” and its disruptive potentials for humanist timescales, and 2) because it frames networks as relations in ways which clearly echo the Indigenous knowledges described by Larsen and Johnson. Like Odum’s notion of “emergy,” (which I discuss at greater length later in this chapter), Indigenous perspectives are key to undermining “deeply held, a priori assumptions in [the] Western worldview about the ontological categories of nature and culture” (110). While Odum’s emergy is often criticized for instrumentalizing nature, it follows the same Indigenous understandings that treat “all components of the landscape, animate and inanimate,” as “inhabited by the same energy” (110).

Latour’s (1993) non/amodern conceptualization of natureculture follows these same paths of thought which allow us to collapse binaries without losing our sense of the world as sacred.

The “energy of place” brings together ANT’s kairotic rejection of dunamis as separate category (Latour, Harman, and Erdelyi 121), requiring instead an understanding of change through translation, while also demonstrating how such moves allow us to imagine place beyond

the scalar derangements of zoom and time called for by decolonial posthumanism. In doing so, I hope to further map the historical connections between Indigenous knowledge, colonialism, and ecology. Defining rhetoric through energy likewise offers opportunities to explore the divisions between humans and nonhumans, nature and culture, and science and public discourse. In his contribution to Rhetoric Society of America’s recent special issue, Chris Ingram (2018) traces the convoluted historical and contemporary meanings of energy in order to “situate energy as a keyword of rhetorical studies, past and future” (260). Ingram connects Kennedy’s rhetorical energy to four concepts he sees as tied to future applications: affect theory, the Anthropocene, new materialism, and the more-than-human. Ingram establishes how Kennedy paved a means for rhetorical energy to encounter the influences of posthuman theorists like Cary Wolf (2009) who has been influential for rhetorical theorists that examine affect in relation to nonhuman rhetorics.1 Rather than situating rhetoric within the confines of logos, argument, or reason, rhetorical energy comes into contact with concepts like ecologies (Rice 2005 and Dobrin 2011) circulation (Chaput 2010 and Gries 2015) and practice (Boyle 2018). These and many other rhetorical studies bring about more expansive and inclusive approaches to theories of rhetoric.

In light of these shifts, this chapter takes up Aristotle’s overlapping concepts of energia and enargia in conjunction with Kennedy’s notion of rhetorical energy to explore the rhetorical potential of energy moving through place to examine writing-as-system through the complex circulation of scientific, public, and popular discourses. Using ecocompositional methods, this chapter presents a case study of the springs in north-central Florida as a locus for the

1 Among the many recent studies of animal rhetorics, Debra Hawhee’s (2016) Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw is notable for this study because (as Ingram points out) she offers important insights into the role of nonhumans in ancient rhetorical training, especially in the relationship between sensation, logos/alogos, and affect.

construction and expression of scientific, political, and cultural knowledge. This study illustrates how place participates as an actant in how humans and nonhumans construct publics through rhetorical discourse. By extending the work of Kennedy, Ingram, and others, I propose that the concept of energy can be used to trace how places participate as conduits of writing, both by influencing the way we theorize and understand rhetoric, and in providing the exigence and conditions of writing itself. Through Silver Springs, I trace a confluence of rhetorical methodologies through which to theorize place as actant in writing, from the relationship between energia and visual rhetoric to circulation studies and new materialism.

With over 900 springs bubbling out of its underwater caves, more first-magnitude springs than any other state or nation in the world, numerous karst windows and spring-sink combinations, and nineteen state parks named for its springs, Florida sits atop a vast network of water. Though the state is undeniably defined by its numerous iconic beaches (Dobrin 2015), the springs were the first tourist destinations in the state. Silver Springs was a popular destination before the Civil War, and its popularity increased with the glass-bottom boat tour starting in the late 1870s. The closed dimensions of the location allowed for Howard T. Odum’s groundbreaking study in ecosystems ecology as well as serving as a location for films like

Creature From the Black Lagoon and Tarzan the Ape Man. Yet, the hydrological connection between the springs and the vast Floridan Aquifer also connect the site to distant areas in Florida, such as Jacksonville, whose municipal water withdrawals contribute to reduced discharge and spring flow. Silver Springs is a topos not only for scientific discovery, but also for local and national productions of publics and cultural rhetorics. Beyond a topos, the springs are also a choric premises which conduct the energies of writing.

Rhetorical Energy

While energy is an appealing concept for rhetorical theory, it also presents a convoluted set of intersecting historical and contemporary connections which Ingraham compares to “laces of a wicked knot” where each attempt to tease out its meaning “makes the knot still tighter”

(260). This is partly because of energy’s roots in overlapping rhetorical concepts developed by

Aristotle. Namely, Ingraham demonstrates energy’s entanglement with energia, which refers to the principle of actuality. It is part of Aristotle’s characterization of change or movement, when a thing sheds its stored potential to become real. Energia is paired with dunamis, or “potential,” and together they are part of Aristotle’s characterization of the relationship between matter and form, possibility and reality, or being and becoming.

Also entangled with energia is the term enargia, which describes vivid or vigorous writing, especially visual description (such as in expository writing). Enargia is the ability to render a description vivid or visible. Richard Lanham attempts to simplify the relationship between these terms by suggesting “enargia as the basic umbrella term for the various special terms for vigorous ocular demonstration, and energia as a more general term for vigor and verve”

(65). In its connection to these concepts energy suggests rhetorics’ power to produce change and also clarity and vividness. Energy is thus implicated in the concept of life and vitality, which culminated, as Byron Hawk argues in A Counter-History of Composition, “in Heidegger’s attempt to combine being and time into a more ecological and complex view of life, which sets the stage for understanding the emerging technological era” (6).

Energy’s inheritance of these ancient concepts connects its contemporary rhetorical use to both change and vivid visual tropes. The result is a concept which is as pervasive as it is elusive. The philosopher Michael Marder demonstrates that “relative and absolute ambiguities of energy” further complicate the “historical predicament of energy today” (Marder 2). In the

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following sections, I attempt to clarify the connections between energy, change, and vividness by tracing various aspects of a single location which has played an energetic role in shaping contemporary understandings of environment, ecology, and nature. The clarity of the water at

Silver Springs has long presented scientists, writers, filmmakers, artists, and activists with a visual trope for a wide variety of representations of the natural world. Through this ecocompositional study, I present the place as a conduit for energetic writing and rhetoric. In the following three sections, I explore how Silver Springs participates in scientific, public, and cultural rhetorics in connection with the energetic properties of ecology, activism, and “the natural.”

Ecosystems Ecology and Ecocomposition

The energy of place has been an important concern in both ecosystems ecology and ecocomposition as the fields moved toward complex models. Sidney Dobrin and Christian

Weisser’s Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition opens at Crystal River in north-central

Florida, where a sign sits below the surface of the water. Dobrin and Weisser use the sign’s appearance “in a place where words might seem a foreign thing, an intrusive thing” as a way to illustrate how ecocomposition (following Haraway and Latour) rejects the demarcation of culture and nature and instead traces the circulation of “how enmeshed the world of words, of text, and the natural world are” (1). Through the window of clear waters, divers experience the words as a vivid circulating call for ecological consciousness which emerges out of the discursive relationship of word and world, nature and culture, human and nonhuman. As such, ecocomposition studies the complex relationships, interactions, and impacts that compose the ecologies of writing. Ecocomposition shares an etymological connection to the scientific discipline of ecology, as Dobrin and Weisser demonstrate, but the discipline also shares

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geographical, institutional, and methodological connections with the pioneering work of ecosystems ecologist Howard T. Odum.

About an hour’s drive from Crystal River, Odum conducted his famous ecological study mapping the trophic structure and productivity of Silver Springs, which presented the first holistic analysis of energy moving through an “eco-system” (1957). Odum borrowed from economics and cybernetics to understand environments as scaled objects, through which energy flows could be mapped. Odum was a pioneer in the burgeoning field of ecosystems ecology. He employed what he would later refer to as a macroscopic perspective (1971, 2-3),2 describing a holistic “whole system view” (16). This tool for looking at an environment allowed a researcher to scale above the individual parts of an ecosystem through a process he referred to as the “detail eliminator” (1971, 10). Odum’s eco-system metaphor, and his analysis, helped bring ecology from a simplistic soft science to the hard science that solidified into the master discipline it has become today.

This system combines social and natural processes to determine large-scale functions in a closed ecosystem. The size and magnitude is determined by scale, not by the individuation of parts. As Odum asserts, “[i]n the quest for knowledge and in the practicality of earth management, all scales are of importance, each in its place” (2007, xiii). Specific place played an important role in Odum’s work, working as small-scale topoi from which his larger models emerged. Odum’s dissertation work in meteorology (Odum 1950) analyzed global circulation of strontium and “anticipated in the late 1940s the view of the earth as one great ecosystem.”

2 Macroscopic thinking has been applied to digital writing studies scholarship as a method for data driven research about media ecologies. These scholars argue that, while numerous theories of writing have employed microscopic-level approaches, “a complimentary macroscopic approach is needed to further investigate how attention functions for network culture” (Van Horn, et. al. 2016).

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(Crafoord 1987). The models developed out of his studies might be comparable to the commonplace topoi Aristotle produced from individual topic locales. Yet, the holistic viewpoint also relies on a networked ecology, where larger-scale events (such as strontium circulation) interact with (and have observable effects on) in smaller-scale places. Silver Springs was an important premise for Odum’s energy mapping. The clarity, stable temperature, and steady flow of Silver Springs made it an ideal location to conduct his study.

Ecology as a scientific discipline emerged during the 1930s out of what Reed and Lister refer to as “classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty and order.” In the decades that followed, ecosystems ecology progressed toward “more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience, and flexibility.” Odum’s holistic mapping played a role in this shift, working towards models of complexity which better account for the movement of energy in an ecosystem. Odum (2007) introduces the concept of ecological systems in Environment, Power and Society using Silver Springs as his example, explaining that in “large springs where waters flow out of the ground with constant properties, the union of sunlight with clear water containing optimal quantities of nutrients produces fertile beds of waving green bottom plants, covered with diatoms and supporting a food chain of many animals and microorganisms” (132).While Odum’s macroscopic approach helped lead to large-scale models for ecosystems ecology, it did so by relying on specific, small-scale locations as the premises for those models. Silver Springs serves as a premise for Odum’s energy diagramming of complex ecological systems.

Following a similar path as Odum’s eco-system, Dobrin’s (2011) Postcomposition— which directly compares the development of “ecocomposition postcomposition” to the E. P.

Odum’s develompent of system ecology (143)—argues for writing studies to move beyond

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ecocomposition’s preoccupation with subject-oriented and small-scale definitions of writing

(125) towards dynamic models of writing-as-system which are better equipped to map the complexity of writing networks (186). Responding to Byron Hawk’s critique of ecocomposition,

Dobrin seeks “to disrupt ecocomposition from its social-epistemic and, often, expressivist groundings in order to push ecological methodologies into the potential spaces that Hawk suggests” (128). Building from Dobrin’s ecocomposition postcomposition, I will trace the rhetorical energy of the springs to locate some of the complex relationships between writing and ecology.

As energy moves through a closed system, it is transformed through various biological processes. Odum referred to this process of transformation as ratios of emergy, a portmanteau of

“embodied” and “energy.” Emergy, for Odum, is the energy needed by an ecosystem. He used this concept to calculate the energy flow and budget in Silver Springs (1957), the Enewetak atoll atomic test site in the Marshall Islands (Odum, et al, 1955), El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico

(Odum, et al, 1970), and elsewhere. Through these studies, Odum demonstrated how energy moved through various sources and at various levels of scale and complexity, ranging “from dilute sunlight up to plant matter, to coal, from coal to oil, to electricity and up to the high quality efforts of computer and human information processing” (1973, 224). While Odum’s macroscopic approach helped lead to large-scale models for ecosystems ecology, it did so by relying on specific, small-scale locations as the premises for those models.

Peter Taylor argues that “ecological and social concepts are strongly connected in [...]

Odum's thinking,” what Taylor characterizes as “technocratic optimism” (214). Technocrats,

Taylor explains, sought to replace a monetary value system with a system based on units of energy (213). The child of the sociologist Howard W. Odum, Howard T. Odum was encouraged

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from a young age to “go into science and to develop new techniques to contribute to social progress. Howard learned his early scientific lessons about birds from his brother, about fish and the philosophy of biology while working after school for the marine zoologist Robert Coker, and about electrical circuits from The Boy Electrician by Alfred Powell Morgan.” (Taylor 223).

Taylor explains that Odum transformed the metaphor of ecological complexity to represent “the scientist's interventions within nature - interventions which society facilitates in actuality, as possibilities, or as powerful fantasies” (215).

Over the past decade, ecology has proven a useful metaphor for understanding the sea change brought about by networked technologies which have transformed how we imagine and study communication. Jenny Edbauer’s landmark essay “Unframing Models of Public

Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies” suggests that ecologies are a metaphor better suited to theorize rhetoric’s fluidity than Lloyd Bitzer’s famous model, the

“rhetorical situation.” Building from Michael Warner’s notion of “counterpublics,” Rice demonstrates that Bitzer’s model is too simplistic to account for the ways that rhetoric changes as it moves within a communication system. As writing studies scholars have taken up rhetorical ecologies, it has become an influential concept for understanding how writing circulates as well as the place-based elements of writing. Rhetoric’s “ecological turn” offers important opportunities to understand the relationship between environmental science, digital communication, and place-based practices.

However, by borrowing from ecological science, rhetoricians interested in understanding ecologies of writing also import the disciplinary history and ideological structures undergirding ecosystems ecology. Today, ecology has become a master discipline, a lens through which we see our world, but as with many scientific disciplines, it has undergone profound changes since

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the 1940’s, becoming a hard science by borrowing methodologies from other disciplines. In

“Proving Grounds: Ecological Fieldwork in the Pacific and the Materialization of Ecosystems,”

Laura. J. Martin agues “that the history of ecosystem science cannot be separated from the history of nuclear colonialism and environmental devastation in the Pacific Proving Grounds”

(1). By looking at the role of the energy of place in ecosystems ecology, this project addresses the gap in scholarship connecting decolonial posthumanism to rhetorical ecologies.

In a trajectory similar to the one Edbauer traces with rhetoric, ecosystems ecology emerged out of simplistic models which relied largely on Aristotelian models, toward increasingly more complex ways of mapping relations. The work of ecologists like Howard T.

Odum, who borrowed metaphors from cybernetics and economics to understand environments as relational “eco-systems,” helped lay the groundwork for contemporary ecological science.

Odum’s trophic mapping produced some of the first models of ecosystems. While these models were often simplistic, akin to Bitzer’s sender-receiver model of the rhetorical situation, ecologists built from these studies in the decades that followed, using increasingly advanced data collection and visualization tools, to produce more complex models. These advances were predicated on Odum’s work, which was connected to nuclear weapons interests through

Department of Defense funding for place-based ecosystems fieldwork in the Enewetak Atoll and in El Junque rainforest in Puerto Rico (Martin 9). These connections help to establish ecology’s historical connections to colonial and ecocidal practices which shaped the formation of ecosystems theory.

Bringing conversations in STS about Odum and ecosystems ecology into conversation with rhetoric’s ecological turn brings greater attention to a geneology of rhetorical ecology.

Through closer attention to the situational and historical elements which influenced the evolution

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of ecosystems ecology, this study seeks to deepen the field’s connections between rhetoric and ecology in order to understand the ideological frameworks which inform rhetorical ecologies.

Likewise, by connecting these conversations, this article hopes to present some of the affordances of rhetorical ecologies for environmental communication. Specifically, I argue that the problems presented by large-scale environmental problems for communicators (Pilsch) can be solved by an approach to environmental rhetoric informed by what Zach Horton terms a

“trans-scalar” approach to environmental thinking. In order to solve the rhetoric problems presented by a changing world, then, this by looking to ecology’s past.

In the next section, I will demonstrate how this concept of what Michael Marder calls

“energy dreams” has a historic connection to the ethereal waters of Florida’s springs. The energetic ecologies of place which emerge from Silver Springs circulate through science, activism, and popular culture. In the following sections, I extend Odum’s analysis of trophic structure and productivity to the poiesis of place, examining the visual role of the springs as inspiration for an emerging ecological consciousness and a commonplace for activism. As the springs flow, they disrupt the bifurcations of nature/culture, human/nonhuman, space/place, science/humanities, and chora/topoi, among others. Because they are a site of such disruption, they are an important place to study the ecologies of writing.

Florida Out of Place

When the naturalist William Bartram came to Salt Springs in 1774, he remarked extensively on the clarity of the water. Bartram’s Travels provides a remarkable account of his journeys through the American South. At the springs, Bartram observed an Edenic natural world, recounting that “though real” the scene “appears at first but as a piece of excellent painting; there seems no medium” (167). The crystal waters Bartram traverses in his cypress dugout canoe offer him a two-way mirror where he could reflect on and interact with the natural world. His trip and

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his descriptions have inspired numerous writers, and they were part of what drew tourists to the springs of north-central Florida in the mid-19th Century. Bartram’s writings, which used elements of both literary and scientific writing, drew from the energy of the place. However, when Bartram’s writings were taken up by the Romantics, Florida was transformed into a colonial commonplace, transported, and made to stand in for other exotic locales.

Bartram’s influence has even led some scholars to suggest him as a viable candidate for the first ecologist (Sayre 67). Yet, building from previous discussions of Indigenous knowledges,

Bartram’s might be better thought of as the first settler ecologist, as numerous scholars suggest these ways of thinking long predate colonialism in indigenous American cultures (Kimmerer).

Purportedly, Bartram did not set out to write Travels, but rather the book emerged from his notes and sketches recorded in the process of his field work. His storytelling practice of deep mapping, was developed out of this interactions with numerous indigenous tribes, as detailed in Travels.

As Travels circulated, it carried Indegenous place-based storytelling techniques while removing them from the context, effectively colonizing Indegenous knowledge as scientific method.

Bartram’s work was funded by, and part of, the colonial project (Iannini, 150). For instance, he both witnesses and, perhaps unwittingly, provokes colonial violence while conducting field work in Travels. As he describes and illustrates the environment, Bartram also disrupts the ecologies to which he bears witness. For example, in one early scene in his account of his journeys, he describes the grief of a bear cub whose mother was shot by his expedition guide. In the passage, Bartram considers the emotional capacities of nonhuman life and expresses guilt over the animal’s death:

we gained gradually on our prey by this artifice, without their noticing us, finding ourselves near enough, the hunter fired, and laid the largest dead on the spot, where she stood, when presently the other, not seeming the least moved, at the report of our

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piece, approached the dead body, smelled, and pawed it, and appearing in agony, fell to weeping and looking upwards, then towards us, and cried out like a child. whilst our boat approached very near, the hunter was loading his rifle in order to shoot the survivor, which was a young cub, and the slain supposed to be the dam; the continual cries of this afflicted child, bereft of its parent, affected me very sensibly, I was moved with compassion, and charging myself as if accessary to what now appeared to be a cruel murder, and endeavoured to prevail on the hunter to save its life, but to no effect! for by habit he had become insensible to compassion towards the brute creation, being now within a few yards of the harmless devoted victim, he fired, and laid it dead, upon the body of the dam (xxvi-xxvii).

This scene is but one of many accounts of Bartram pleading, to no avail, for an animal’s life.

What makes this passage especially compelling is Bartram’s vivid description of animal grief and his own complicity in the killing. For his abiding interest in the natural world, Ahaya the

Cowkeeper nicknamed Bartram “Puc Puggy,” meaning “the flower hunter” when he came to

Alachua. This points to Bartram’s tender-hearted and abiding love for the natural world, and the name suggests his interests left him out-of-place (as I develop later in the article). Throughout

Travels, Bartram’s encounters with the natural world both witness and contribute to the ecological violence of colonialism, and it is from these experiences and in situ writing and illustration practices that Bartram’s environmental ethic emerges.

Passages like these suggest that Bartram was at least aware of the harm which was being done by his field work. It would be easy to discount Travels altogether, given that his work was funded by colonial interests, and yet to do so would be to ignore one of the most important historical connections between contemporary environmental thinking and colonial trauma.

Bartram’s work offers places to confront this history and to acknowledge the relationship between colonial trauma and contemporary environmental thinking. This is not to say that

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colonialism and its horrific effects are justifiable given their contributions to environmentalism.

Rather, by thinking through the complexity of this history through traumics scholarship, I seek to situate Bartram’s environmental ethics as a productive response to the trauma of colonial violence. Today, these illustrations and writings provide a window through which to see the traumatic losses, to visualize the devastation wrought by colonialism, and the echoing effects these practices have on our own contemporary environmental crisis.

Bartram’s writings were an influence on British Romantic writers like William

Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bartram’s work also played an important role in the formation of the American nature writing tradition (Adams 1994) and in establishing an

American scientific community (Magee 2007). Coleridge called Bartram’s energetic writings

“not a Book of Travels, properly speaking; but a series of poems, chiefly descriptive” (qtd. in

Higgins 58). John Livingston Lowes documented the influence Bartram had on Coleridge in his

(1927) Road to Xanadu. Through his careful analysis of Coleridge, Lowes presents the “charged and electrical atmospheric background of a poet’s mind” (29), how “at any moment a page which

Coleridge was reading might become electrical, and set free the currents of creative energy” (33).

Coleridge drew such electrical inspiration from many sources, including Bartram’s descriptions of Salt Springs which provided inspiration for the “caverns measureless to man” in the poem

“Kubla Khan.”3

As Travels influenced the British Romantic movement, Bartram’s depictions participate in colonial narratives of abundance and plentitude (Higgins 2016), but his writing also informed the early roots of ecological thinking (Sivils 2004) in what Adams terms “‘heterogeneous’ and

3 The full title, “Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment," suggests how the poem evokes the psychic energy of Michael Marder’s “energy dreams.”

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‘conglomerated’—i.e., ironic—relations”. The tensions of performing and recognizing colonialism in Bartram’s writings reflect the collision of colonial and Native American cultures

(Hallock 2001 and Bellin 1995). As Mark Sturges demonstrates, “Bartram drafted [Travels] not only in the wake of the American Revolution, but also on the eve of a momentous scientific revolution that transformed the study of both natural and cultural history” (45). Bartram’s writings are a site where early strains of the bifurcation of nature and culture—what Latour

(1999) claims is the foundational binary for the “modernist settlement”—can be observed (14).

The natural world presented in Bartram’s Travels, as Adams demonstrates, “forces the observer to recognize the irony of his effort to make nature’s immense energy stand still for his absolutizing categories” (69). As many Bartram scholars have observed, Travels presents the connections between colonialism and science (Regis 1992), but it also offers a site of what

Christopher Irmscher terms “dynamic stasis” (39), where Bartram’s use of narrative undercuts the visual elements which abstracts the environment into a commonplace.

It is not novelty that inspires Coleridge to set “Kubla Khan” in an imaginary place.

Coleridge's Xanadu stems from the long tradition of presenting the crystal springs to ex situ, positioned in imagined and Orientalized locations, such as in the myth of Ponce de Leon and the

Fountain of Youth. The myth of the rejuvenating waters likely originated in Asia (Olschki 1941) and was probably not the real exigence which lead to the “discovery” of Florida. It is far more likely that freshwater springs were sought only to support colonization efforts by supplying potable water for ships. The act of transporting the springs through poetic representation further removes and colonizes the location. Coleridge’s combination of topographia (description of a place) and toposthesia (description of an imagined place) combined Bartram’s scientific accounts with the various myths that transformed north-central Florida into Xanadu.

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The electrical connections of Coleridge to the Florida landscape become important for rhetoric and writing studies when they are taken up by Gregory L. Ulmer in his formation of the

Florida School and his theory of electracy. As I discuss in Chapter two, Ulmer understands the choric inventive method for electracy through Coleridge’s image of water winnowing through the Floridan aquifer (Ulmer 2008, 22). Ulmer connect the electrate practices of the Florida

School to Alachua County through Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, the first hypertext project

(begun in 1960). Ulmer’s work with the Florida School sought to (re)place Florida in Xanadu using digital technology to intervene in place. Ulmer’s Miami Virtue project uses digital technology to produce a choragraphic map which visualizes the destructive, intersecting processes occurring in the Miami River zone:

The FRE premise, however, is that “problems” are emergent phenomena in a quantum world picture, such that they must be addressed holistically: to analyze the river into its “elements” is to make “problem” disappear, its qualities being not “parts” (the “properties” of a conceptual description) but a localized manifestation of a global condition. [...] The river itself, as it flowed around the hull of a barge pushing upstream, provided an image of what was needed to grasp the zone as a whole (a strange attractor) (2008, 24-25).

Like Odum’s macroscopic methods which mapped the trophic structure and productivity of the springs, Ulmer’s choragraphy employs holistic perspectives to connect specific place topoi

(such as a 5-mile stretch of the Miami River) to national or global ecological threats.

While Ulmer traces the currents moving from Bartram through Coleridge as exigence for the Florida School, an ecocompositional approach might be best served by working from

Bartram’s influence on the American science and nature writing traditions as part of the premises from which ecocriticism and ecocomposition develop. Bartram’s writings combine science with poetic and rhetorical techniques (such as ekphrasis and copia) in ways which will influence writers like Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey. As a conduit for the

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energetic currents of both colonial and ecological ways of thinking, Silver Springs presents a location to trace the emergence of nature-culture in the age of the Anthropocene.

Rhetorical Naturecultures

If Silver Springs is a construction site for the modernist settlement of bifurcated nature and culture, it is also a location for tracing the currents flowing between nature and culture.

Ecocomposition challenges these bifurcations as harmful instrumentalizations of nature. As

Dobrin and Weisser put it, “ecocomposition contends that identifying nature as an object separate from human culture and life aligns it as an object that humans may act upon rather than within” (10). Silver Springs is an important location for demonstrating how nature is bifurcated and how currents of energy flowing through the place short-circuit these separations. To trace the flows of energy across nature and culture, I build from ecocritics like Stacy Alaimo, who proposes a trans-corporeality through “a posthuman environmental ethics in which the flows, interchanges, and interrelations between human corporeality and the more-than-human world resist the ideological forces of disconnection” (142), Bruno Latour, who demonstrates that the modernist settlement of nature and culture leads to the proliferation of “hybrids, monsters—what

Donna Haraway calls “cyborgs’ and ‘tricksters’” (Latour 1991, 47, Haraway 1991), and Karen

Barad, who argues that “matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency” (151; emphasis removed). Silver Springs overflows with the circulation of nature and culture. At such a location, it is possible to draw upon the

(dis)connections to reimagine the role of place in writing.

When nature and culture meet, the results are often seen as monstrous. Silver Springs and other Florida springs provided a setting for the iconic film The Creature from the Black Lagoon

(1954). In the tradition of Coleridge and other Romantic writers, the springs are displaced as a representation of an exotic Amazonian locale. The material environment is transformed on

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screen into a stand-in for another place. This move geographically distances the scene from the film, following the traditions of earlier films set there such as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932).

Similarly, the separation of humans and nonhumans takes on a monstrous form with the Gill- man, an amphibious, humanoid antagonist. The Gill-man represents a monstrous hybridity that crosses the lines between many modernist separations, but most importantly between land- dwelling humans and aquatic nonhumans. At the end of the film, the Gill-man captures Kay

Lawrence and brings her to his lair. The sexual desire of a nonhuman is a site of horror in the film. Guillermo del Toro reimagines the relationship between the pair in his (2017) The Shape of

Water. Rather than a place of horror, the film depicts some humans as monstrous and the Gill- man of as a transhuman god, radiating with a miraculous Bioluminescent power. Just as

Bartram’s writings enacted both colonial and ecological impulses toward the landscape, so does the influence of springs circulate between the divisions of human and nonhuman in the enduring influence of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Recently, Andrew Pilsch forwards the concept of the “inhuman” in his critique of James

J. Brown Jr. and Nathaniel Rivers’ concept of “rhetorical carpentry” (built from Ian Bogost’s

“carpentry”). Pilsch draws issue with the ways that critical making as defined through rhetorical carpentry focuses on the human through human scales and a fixation with human control.

Through the inhuman, Pilsch suggests “strategies for not exploring nonhuman rhetoric in a way that makes the world for us” (340). Central to this method is avoiding the “scalar derangements”

(drawn from Juliana Zylinska 2014, 27) that occur when everything is placed on human scales

(341). While I agree with Pilsh’s invocation of scalar derangement, which I address further in the final chapter, I prefer the term more-than-human over his inhuman in my definition of rhetorical naturecultures.

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The inhuman suggests some of the problems of the transhumanist futurism in which technological transformations of the human will save humans from impending ecological collapse. Pilsch (drawing from Steven B. Katz) argues that in order to move “rhetoric beyond the embodied human” we must “imagine a rhetoric that is not indebted to the human body as a reference” (343). Rather than remove the human body from interfacing with the world, a move which ecocritics like William Cronon (1995) have long connected to frontier colonialism, I undermine the framing of the body as a stable topoi, either the individual human body or the body of the collective polis. Rather than remove humans from rhetorical production, I argue that from the more-than-human perspective of natureculture, humans are a decentered quasi-object

(following Serres and Latour) made of a multiplicity of symbiotic organisms clinging precariously to a world which they are actively destroying by situating themselves squarely in the rhetorical center of the universe.

The more-than-human suggests the troubling ways that humans have been separated under cartesian models. In Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton establishes the philosophical connections between speciesism, racism, and anthropocentric thinking. Morton writes:

There is such a thing as the human. But human need not be something that is ontically given: we can’t see it or touch it or designate it as present in some way (as whiteness or not-blackness et cetera). There is no obvious, constantly positive content to the human. So Anthropocene isn’t racist. Racism exists when one fills in the gap between what one can see [...] and what this human thing is: the human considered as a species, [...] a massively distributed physical entity (15).

Decentering the human through the more-than-human means acknowledging the bifurcations not only of human/nonhuman and living/nonliving but also of (white) human and the racial other. It is important to recognize the ways that posthumanism engagements with concepts like the

Anthropocene can be totalizing and erase the experiences of marginalized people. For instance,

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one cannot theorize place in the South without engaging the role that race has played in shaping place.

Silver Springs has been a location which bifurcated human worlds as well as that of nonhumans. Silver Springs Park was segregated, leading to the creation of Paradise Park in 1949, which split the area around the spring until 1967. The invisible lines drawn around the springs racially demarcated and excluded. Lu Vickers and Cynthia Wilson-Graham’s Remembering

Paradise Park: Tourism and Segregation at Silver Springs connects the iconic location to the work of novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and other important African American writers. Their book traces the rhetorical lives of the springs, from the segregated park to the water that circulated independently of these boundaries. Hurston draws on the underground flow of water in her novel Seraph on the Sewanee which articulates the experience of “Florida crackers” in a time of segregation. In the novel, her character Jim claims that “Some folks are surface water and are easily seen and known about. Others get caught underground, and have to cut and gnaw their way out if they ever get seen by human eyes” (294-95). Silver Springs was a site where the separation of humans based on the cultural categories of economic status and of race, which held many African Americans down in the unseen depths.

In the Silver Springs passage, Hurston connects Florida folk traditions to a choric mode of articulating the experience of segregation. John Lowe describes how, in the above passage,

Hurston draws upon the traditions of springs as entrances to underground wombs (329). Such womb imagery evokes the connections between water and choric flows that inspired Coleridge and interested Ulmer. While these words describe economic separations, Vickers and Wilson-

Graham explain that “the words could well be used to describe what has happened to the history of Paradise Park” (1). They demonstrate how “the history of Silver Springs glided along the

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surface of the Silver River for all to see, while the story of her darker sister remained underground” (1). Hurston repeats this image of unconscious energy dreams, repressed and swirling like groundwater, in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road:

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes (87).

This breathtaking passage connects material flows of energy (decomposition) mental energy

(unconscious psychic flows) and the physical labor of bodies, both before and after the abolition of slavery and the following history of slavery in the American South (themes she addresses further Their Eyes Were Watching God, her most popular novel). Through this image, Hurston articulates her own actualization as a writer and thinker. In similar fashions, many writers, scientists, and theorists have turned to Silver Springs to understand the connections of the energy of place that flows through nature and culture. Rather than lose the flows of energy circulating between human and nonhuman, the perspective of natureculture allows us to trace the currents that reveal connections between humans and the more-than-human world.

While my own definition of rhetorical naturecultures builds from Pilsch’s ultimate goal— to “move the human out of the way as a reference for rhetorical production and thus route around the scalar derangement that so perniciously pops up in attempts to build rhetorics that engage with more than just the concerns of humans” (emphasis added)—I believe that inhumanism is too suggestive of posthumanism’s transhuman inheritance. Rather, the more-than-human suggests the humility which meets with thinking about rhetorical production outside the limits of the human. Like the earlier example of The Shape of Water as a revisioning of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a more-than-human perspective acknowledges that encounters between humans and nonhumans is not only not monstrous but fundamental to the conditions of human

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life. The production of rhetoric requires the flows of energy which move freely between all forms of life and beyond humanist bifurcations and the derangements of scale.

Monumental Publics

If Odum were seeking a place to conduct his study today, Silver Springs might no longer be an ideal location. The Florida springs are experiencing degradations in both clarity and flow as a result of a range of anthropogenic impacts on the landscape. While these impacts are extremely destructive, they are also increasingly producing sites where such impacts become visible not just to scientists but to activists and to publics. Because the spring water has always participated as an affective visual image for pristine nature, the water clouding or slowing its flow has become an important tool for Floridians to understand and rethink their relationship to the environment. As nitrate runoff fuels excessive algal bloom, the springs take on new rhetorical energy, transforming from a crystal-clear viewing pane to a clouded mirror reflecting human impact.

The multimedia project Springs Eternal: Florida’s Fragile Fountains of Youth is an evolving series created by Florida nature photographer John Moran with Lesley Gamble and

Rick Kilby to document the degradation of the springs and advocate for their protection. Moran celebrates the springs using his camera without reducing them to a mere aesthetic object because his project documents their beautiful and tragic connections to human culture. The project harnesses the visual and heliotropic rhetorical potentials of the springs to advocate for their protection. Moran uses photography to give voice to the springs, revealing their cultural importance and the reality of the ecological threats they face. The project website asserts that the first step toward revitalizing the springs “is to listen to the springs themselves, to their many intricate languages: visual, biological, hydrological, geological” (“Springs”). As energy flows from human into nature, the visible impacts become a place for the formation of more-than-

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human publics through what Ulmer terms monumentality. The degradation of place becomes an emerging monument which forces us to acknowledge our impact on topoi which are constructed as remote, separate, and protected from the human.

Sites of damage are often locations from which publics emerge. In Distant Publics, Jenny

Rice demonstrates how environmental and anti-development rhetorics in Austin, Texas formed through various more-than-human exigencies. In her work, Rice theorizes the “exceptional public subject” who “occup[y] a precarious position between publicness and a withdrawal from publicness” (5). These subjects imagine themselves as part of a publics by feeling or emotion rather than action. Though Rice argues that “it is in publics, not place, that rhetoricians can make the strongest intervention into imperiled places,” I argue that places and publics are inseparably enmeshed (14). As Dobrin and Weisser demonstrate in Natural Discourse, words and world are in constant circulation, and this means that places play a constant role in discursive publics formation. Florida’s freshwater springs were likely not sought by Ponce de León for some magical youth-restoring properties, but instead to support the material needs of colonization.

Publics are formed and supported through material conditions, and (as I develop further in chapter three) nonhumans participate in the production of these publics.

While Rice focuses exclusively on humans in Distant Publics, her analysis opens new paths to thinking with nonhumans as part of the complex formation of publics. In “Unframing

Models of Public Distribution,” Edbauer demonstrates the complex and fluid circulations that form in a “wide ecology of rhetorics” (20). I extend her claim that “‘messages, as they accrete over time, determine the shape of public rhetorics” to include the buildup of nitrates which fuel algal growth and the siphoning off of water for distant municipalities like Jacksonville (20).One of the locations she discusses in Distant Publics as a site for the production of anti-development

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rhetorics in Austin is Barton Springs, a beloved place for swimming which was threatened by the

Circle C Ranch plans which sought to develop “an all-inclusive community” including “not only

[...] neighborhoods but also its own schools, country clubs, and shopping areas” (70). Rice carefully documents and unpacks the emergence of injury claims as “well-worn patterns of response from both pro- and anti-development forces” (72). Rice demonstrates how the springs became a topos, a locus for a diverse range of discourse, from those who swam at the springs to those who saw the springs as sacred to those who believed the springs could be put to use for the betterment of the community.

Similar debates abound about the fate of Florida’s springs. Two particular environmental threats are familiar topoi in these debates: cloudy water (from excess nutrients) and low flow

(from overpumping of the aquifer). These are not the only threats to the springs, and all threats are intersectional. The Florida springs function as what Jenny Rice terms a “site of injury,” a location where subjects are cultivated and publics are produced. This is especially true for the iconic Silver Springs, a site familiar and important to Floridian identity. Yet, rather than being solely a topos, as Jenny Rice explores with Barton Springs, Silver Springs is a choric site for rhetorical invention. The threats facing the springs connect the impact of individuals both near

(such as overdevelopment and fertilizer runoff) and far to global ecological issues (like sea-level rise and population growth).

As human activity destructively transforms the springs, they become a locus for environmental advocacy in the public sphere through what Gregory Ulmer (2005) refers to as

“monumentality.” Places of disaster and destruction are locations where individual and collective identities can be traced and constructed. As springs dry up and cloud with algae, they become visible, affective topoi for environmental rhetoric. Sites like White Springs bathhouse have

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become a trope in local environmental discourse. Once a popular tourist destination, White

Springs ceased flowing in the 1980s and serves as an example of what might happen to Silver

Springs if water management policies are not changed. Such a site is monumental both as a pristine object (of bifurcated nature and culture) and as a wound in the landscape (as natureculture). Ulmer writes that, “monumentality is a kind of writing whose school is tourism.

The matrix of geology, technology, and culture existing in the [Florida] landscape make it an ideal location for bringing this symbolic practice (written mourning) into visibility” (Ulmer).

Through the practice of mourning the springs’ degradation, humans’ relationship to the land might be changed.

These places are important sites for MEmorialization because they signal the environmental health of the aquifer in relation to even deep and distant topoi. Likewise, these sites are highly subject to change. Their conditions could improve or worsen from how humans react. Places like White Springs could be transformed to MEmorial sites where solonists could visit and bear witness to the disastrous effects of Florida’s water management policies. Ulmer asks, “Is it unimaginable that the sore spots of an environment could be magnets attracting tourists?” (Ulmer). Such a place would also be a site for visualizing the labor of healing the environment. As Ulmer puts it, “[w]hen tourists add theoria (witnessing) to their itinerary, they expose a problematic dimension of the environment to a new kind of attention whose function would not be ‘spectacle’ but ‘healing.’” (Ulmer). If White Springs’ flow were returned to something resembling that of the 1930’s, it would be a reference point for the importance of ecological activism in bringing positive change to collective environmental problems.

Constellating Place

As emergent, choric premises, the springs serve as an example of what Malea Powell and her coauthors term “constellatory cultural rhetorics.” Constellations allow for “multiply-situated

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subjects to connect to multiple discourses at the same time, as well as for those relationships

(among subjects, among discourses, among kinds of connections) to shift and change without holding a subject captive.” Constellations participate in the formation of publics through the circulatory flow of material and cultural energy transformations. Powell, et. al argue that “the practice of story is integral to doing cultural rhetorics.” They establish stories as a means for acknowledging relations while also allowing for differences in those relations. From science to activism to popular culture, the Florida springs participate in the storying that produces publics.

Plato’s chora was the interval between the heavenly and earthly planes. Similarly, the Florida springs are a place to trace the choric flows of natureculture. Like the heavenly sunlight transforming into monstrous algal mats, the springs are a place where more-than-human perspectives are formed.

The Floridan Aquifer participates in a different type of flow uniting spring and constellation, one that comes not from the ground but from the tap. First Magnitude Brewing

Company in Gainesville, Florida gets its name from the designation of both the brightest stars in the night sky and the most powerful springs. First Magnitude Brewing stories with the springs to articulate a naturecultural networked public which consumes and produces with the springs.

Their mission is to “make excellent beer, build awareness and appreciation of Florida’s springs, have a great space for people to come and enjoy a pint, be an exceptional place to work, and be a big part of our local community” (“First Magnitude”). The mermaid refers to the mermaid tradition at Weeki Wachee springs, a tourist attraction featuring performers wearing fish tails which began in the late 1940s. The telescope points to the stellar, constellatory nature of the brewery as part of the local community.

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In Craft Obsession, Jeff Rice (2016) builds from Walter Benjamin’s (1968) connections of storytelling and craft to tell the story of “craft beer” but also “rhetoric and, in particular, the rhetoric of social media” (x). “These stories” Rice demonstrates “affect taste, consumption, behavior, political affiliation, and other activities for the ways that they frame overall interests”

(2). Attractions like the Weeki Wachee mermaids might function as sites for traditional tourism or for solonism, depending on what kinds of stories take place. Weeki Wachee Springs State

Park describes itself in terms of pristine ‘Nature’ (“an enchanted spring where you can see live mermaids”), but as part of the springs system, is also a location where nitrate runoff catalyzes runaway algal growth. As these energies actualize in the biological community at the intersections (or better, constellations) of human and natural worlds, they thread the mesh that constitutes natureculture. The springs are one location where we can meaningfully trace rhetorical energy flowing through the supposed bifurcations of constellatory and aqueous, natural and cultural, human and nonhuman.

While some ecocompositionists (such as Grant 2009) argue that human words cannot be said to matter to the natural world, the stories that humans tell have a drastic impact in shaping attitudes toward the ‘nonhuman world.’ First Magnitude is a prime example of craft storytelling which includes the more-than-human. For example, their Miami Blue Bock beer was one of the first augmented reality beer labels. The Miami Blue Bock was created to raise awareness of the endangered Miami blue butterfly and support conservation efforts by the Florida Museum of

Natural History. The FMNH created the free AR application, which, when scanned by a smartphone, reveals a 3-D animation of the butterfly, to help make the endangered species visible to the public. Of the numerous beers First Magnitude has since brewed in collaboration with the FMNH, their recent Bartram Blonde (released April 2018) draws upon Bartram’s

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writings to story with the Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak butterfly. The application draws upon the sense of Florida as a network in the sense of assemblage, trace, and network, but it also visualizes these connections through digital networking akin to Ulmer’s Millhopper project. In chapters five and six, I explore the use of digital mapping and augmented reality in relation to visualizing place networks. For the purposes of this chapter, this AR project is but one example of many means of more-than-human storytelling which often, and perhaps most effectively (but not necessarily), deploy digital technologies.

These stories don’t matter to the natural world in the (human) sense of subject and object.

The world cannot be said to understand or respond to a beer label. Instead, First Magnitude is an example of storytelling that draws upon the energy of place beyond the distinctions of nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object. First Magnitude follows Bartram’s traditions of combining science, art, and popular culture as they foster a public naturecultural sensibility of the more-than-human world. By acknowledging the more-than-human through storytelling, constellatory rhetorics have the potential to produce publics in which humans are not the center and words are not bifurcated from world.

Florida Terroir

Jeff Rice refers his own relationship to craft beer as a “networked terroir” (xiii) and

(drawing upon Jenny Edbauer) “an ecology of place” which includes Gainesville (before the it experienced the craft beer renaissance currently underway) as part of his aggregate lived experience with crafting place (77). Like yeast metabolizing sugars into energy which produces carbonation and alcohol in beer as a byproduct, place cannot be reduced to bifurcations of living/nonliving, human/nonhuman, nature/culture. Instead, defining Florida as network allows me to draw upon the energy of place as what Jenny Rice refers to as “a space of contacts, which are always changing and never discrete” (10). Building from these definitions of place, scholars

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of rhetorics can expand their focus on humans to more fully account for the role of “nonhuman” relations in the formation of place-based public subjectivities.

Florida’s springs are places of dreams, of fantasies, of paradisal imagery, of pristine nature. Yet, they are also sites of destruction, colonization, the intrusion of the human into the nonhuman. Just as Bartram enacts colonialism as he discovers ecological ways of inhabiting and interacting with the world, so do solonists occupy this shifting landscape of rhetorical inhabitance. Bartram reveals a more-than-human perspective through a rhetorical engagement with Deep Time (Adams) even as he depicts a plentiful Edenic landscape. Each of the examples

I have discussed in this chapter deploys the energia of Silver Springs in different ways. These writers and scientists draw upon the energy of place to inform and articulate their understanding of ecology. Like Odum’s trophic mapping of Silver Springs, the energy of place actualizes through natureculture.

As in the example of algal blooms clouding the pristine waters at Silver Springs, the constellations which reveal the deep mesh of nature and culture are often seen as monstrous hybrids. However, as I develop in the next chapter, it is these sites of strange relations that produce more-than-human publics. In particular, I address the lack of attention that posthuman rhetorical theory has paid to the vegetal world. Michael Marder wonders if “our stubborn denigration of all things vegetal was in collusion with the desire to burn everything and everyone, instead of receiving the beautiful energy of the solar blaze in the manner of vegetation” (x). Rather than viewing the proliferation of algae as horrifying, solonists approach such sites of repulsion as premises with which to theorize. The terroir of north-central Florida may incite terror, but facing this fear brings us to terms with some of writing studies’ deep seated subjective models for writing.

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Silver Springs

We glide through the crystal water in a rented canoe, drifting like Disney park goers who took the wrong turn down some overgrown channel to a place where we can almost forget the plastic elephants on the Jungle Cruise, faces frozen in human grimace, staring out at the convergence of the Amazon, Nile, and Mekong rivers.

These protected waters where fish as long as my forearm trail the boat, blue bodies cutting the currents and darting into the tall reeds that line the soft white bottom, their stalks grown mad with fertilizer and topsoil runoff, cut from the neighboring developments.

The zoo cages still visible from the banks, bars rusted and bending with the weight of disuse. We imagine Rhesus Monkeys staring through the branches, though they refuse to appear. They’ve been disobeying us since Colonel Tooley brought them here, not knowing they could swim. This place is theirs now. The remnants of the reptile farm, the collapsed palisades of Kings Fort retreat into the background like some collapsing icon, ochre spears now point in all directions, thatch from the roofs of derelict buildings now packed into nests in dark spaces, the sunken prop boat now a warm spot for yellow-belly sliders and a young alligator, sunning themselves in the gathering noon.

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CHAPTER 5 SYLVAN RHETORICS: ROOTS AND BRANCHES OF MORE-THAN-HUMAN NETWORKS

If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning. —Richard Powers, The Overstory (4)

32°36'23.1"N 85°28'55.0"W

Toomer’s Corner, Auburn, Alabama

When Jochen Wiest set fire to one of the Toomer’s Oaks in Auburn, Alabama on

September 24th, 2016, he torched the second pair of trees to have been killed there. Wiest was charged with felony criminal mischief, public intoxication, and desecration of a venerable object, the same charge used to prosecute flag burners and those who destroy religious objects. His iconoclastic act destroyed the replacement planted after Alabama football fan Harvey Updyke Jr. poisoned the original oaks in 2011 with the powerful industrial herbicide Spike 80DF. Each time the trees were killed, the Auburn community rallied around them. The iconic Toomer’s Oaks are, in many ways, the centerpiece of Auburn, Alabama. As a landmark, the trees serve many roles.

They mark the entryway from city to campus and serve as a commonplace where citizens gather together during events, festivals, and protests. They participate in conflicting attitudes toward place, ranging from pastoral nostalgia for the Old South to regionalism, agrarianism, and stewardship for the land.

The Toomer’s Oaks are not alone in presenting conflicting attitudes toward nonhumans and rhetoric. Trees and other plants have long participated in a range of roles in the history of rhetoric and philosophy.4 Trees have instructed students of writing and rhetoric since long before

4 Michael Marder (2012) explores the historic relationship between plants and philosophy in The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium.

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Aristotle evoked them to illustrate hyle and telos. In recent times, Bruno Latour’s case study of the Amazon forest helped influence rhetoric’s new materialist turn. Trees are also remarkable exemplars of nonhuman communication networks. From the exigence of recent ecological studies of mycorrhizal networks, this chapter defines sylvan rhetorics through a study of trees in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, examining roots and branches of new materialist and more-than-human rhetorical theory.

In this chapter, I consider how trees might offer rhetoricians new ways to consider nonhumans as part of the formation of publics. Through a new materialist approach, I demonstrate how trees participate in rhetorics of the more-than-human world. Trees contribute to how we imagine and theorize writing and have long had the capacity to instruct writers and rhetoricians. They have represented forces of good and evil across cultures and time, from

Krishna’s Banyan tree to the Zhuhai to the Bodhi tree to the Yggdrasil to the Tree of Knowledge.

They have sheltered a place for education since at least the groves of Plato’s academy and offered a shaded commonplace for the exchange of public dialogue. Like any other sacred object or public monument, trees are sites of activism and iconoclasm, protection and subversion. They help to illustrate the ethereal and the material alike. In a digital age, they offer models for understanding publics at the limits of communication, language, and logos.

Sylvan rhetorics are capacious. By grafting to the competitive, adaptive, and collaborative processes that trees deploy to form forests, rhetoricians might understand publics as composed of a wider range of agents beyond the human. Though I take a new materialist approach to define sylvan rhetorics, I also demonstrate that trees and other nonhumans have

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always been part of human literacies. 5 While nonhuman animals have recently gained attention from scholars, trees and other plants have not been widely considered by rhetorical theory. Trees are part of both the dominative and destructive processes of what Donna Haraway terms the

“Plantationocene” (2015) and part of other means of rhetorically inhabiting what Rosa Eberly terms “bioregions of discourse” (6). Trees participate in the formation of publics (or what Eberly terms a protopublic) through their conflicting rhetorical roles, fostering both pastoral and ecological values in the rhetorical construction of place. By putting down roots across bifurcated zones—virtual and actual, natural and cultural, human and nonhuman—trees offer compelling ways to encounter the strange complexity of rhetoric in more-than-human publics.

In making this argument, I first set out to place sylvan rhetorics in relation to new materialist theory. Then, I will develop the term as part of the growing body of rhetoric and writing studies scholarship influenced by new materialism and posthumanism. Building from these conversations, I offer a sylvan rhetorical analysis of the Toomer’s Oaks as an example of publics formed through a more-than-human assemblage. While plants make for strange rhetorical relations, I will demonstrate how this strangeness is important for the formation of participatory publics in more-than-human networks.

Dead Wood: New Material for Rhetorical Theory

Are we near or far from the forest? —Bruno Latour Pandora’s Hope (26)

5 In “Reading Tree in Nature’s Nation: Toward a Field Guide to Sylvan Literacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Deegan Miller demonstrates that in “the nineteenth-century U.S., a tree was rarely just a tree” (1115) but also part of “a specific lexicon of sylvan symbols” (1118) that were “in a constant process of renegotiation” (1120).

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Sylvan rhetorics are the study of trees as relations for, and in relation to, rhetoric. That is, sylvan rhetorics trace the strange rhetorical assemblages formed by publics which are more-than- human. Sylvan rhetorics are but one method of inquiry for acknowledging how human writing networks rely on a diverse assemblage of nonhumans. Over the past few decades, scholars like

Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett (to name but a few), have been influential in the production of an expansive overstory of posthumanist and new materialist scholarship considering rhetorical theory. In defining sylvan rhetorics, I build upon recent scholars in rhetoric who draw from new materialism and posthumanism to reconceive the boundaries of rhetorical study. Each of these thinkers helped redefine what constitutes agency in a more-than-human world. While trees have played an important role in the work of these new materialist scholars, few rhetoricians have taken up trees and other plants in relation to rhetorical theory. In this section, I highlight a few examples of trees in new materialism and then consider how these examples might be brought into contact with sylvan rhetorics.

Rhetoric has always been arboreal. While posthumanism has begun questioning the boundaries of humans and nonhumans, the connection between trees and concepts of things, objects, and material is much older. For instance, Aristotle adapted the concept of hyle from the

Greek word for wood or timber. Aristotle modifies the definition of hyle in terms of relational properties instead of mere use or potential, and from this evolved the conception of hyle as meaning, matter, or stuff.6 Contemporary conceptions of objects are also shaped by the rhetorical properties of trees, and trees contribute to how new materialist rhetoricians consider objects and other nonhumans. As in ancient theories, new materialism relies on trees to understand relations

6 Hyle referred to wood or timber that had a particular (human) purpose in the works of Homer, Thucydides, and Xenophon (Pflugfelder, 2015, p. 453). Hyle was wood with a specific purpose, such as cut logs or a forest which would be cut.

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beyond the bifurcations of humans and nature. While trees play central roles in the theories of many new materialists, they have not received the attention from rhetorical scholarship had by other nonhumans. Before defining trees as part of rhetorical theory specifically, it is useful to outline a few examples of trees as they operate in the work of key figures in new materialism.

In Pandora’s Hope, Bruno Latour follows a group of scientists in the Amazon who are attempting to determine if the forest is expanding or shrinking its boundaries. They study various aspects of the forest through their unique disciplines (pedology, botany, and geomorphology) to answer this larger question about the forest. By chronicling their work, Latour theorizes what he terms “circulating reference” by thinking about the networks which exist between actants like scientists, disciplines, plants, texts, and soil. Here, Latour examines how the areas mapped out by the scientists are transformed from forest to laboratory (32). He compares the plant cuttings brought back by the botanist to the references in a scholarly work, evidence upon which future arguments will be built (34). Through the leaves, Latour traces the steps from word to world and back again. Like Latour’s concept of circulating reference, sylvan rhetorics trace the connections between word and world by examining trees as actants in writing and rhetorical theory.

Jane Bennett draws upon this example from Latour in Vibrant Matter to ask “What, if anything, does the claim that worms and trees and aluminum are participants in an ecosystem say about political participation?” (100). Through this example, Bennett theorizes these actants as vibrant matter, participants in a larger ecology beyond human agency. None of these individuals—the trees or the worms—Bennett argues, can be said to be the central operator (98).

Similarly, in Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad draws upon trees to illuminate her definition of intra-action, a key component of her theory of agential realism. Barad argues that objects emerge through intra-action, rather than as assemblages of humans and nonhumans (as

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Latour contends). She compares “the rings of trees [which] mark the sedimented history of their intra-actions within and as part of the world” to “the sedimented historialities of the practices through which [matter] is produced as part of its ongoing becoming [...] ingrained and enriched in its becoming” (180). Trees, as Barad demonstrates, do not exist at any moment as singular entities, but their intra-action leaves traces from which rhetors can observe and learn.

Taken together, these examples place sylvan rhetorics as part of more-than-human theories broadly termed posthumanism and new materialism which undermine the separation of human and natural worlds. Latour and Donna Haraway refer to these connections as natureculture (Latour 1993, p. 7 and Haraway 2003). As human action becomes visible on a global scale in the boundary event of the Anthropocene, or what Haraway terms the plantationocene, the bifurcation of nature and culture becomes increasingly impossible (Latour

2008, p. 14). Trees are meaningful sites to locate these events, be they icons of place (such as the

Toomer’s Oaks), or witnesses to the past.7 As their roots entangle the separation of nature and culture, sylvan rhetorics reveal trees as intersectional (Crenshaw 1991), constellatory (Powell, et al), and undercutting the colonial logic of the “modernist settlement” (Latour 1999). From the perspective which emerges from rhetorical encounters with trees, sylvan rhetorics expand our sense of rhetoric beyond human boundaries. Sylvan rhetorics build from the kairos of ecological decay, collapse, and catastrophe in the plantationocene to locate publics from a more-than- human perspective.

7 In Witness Tree, Lynda V. Mapes spends a year in the Harvard Forest recording her experience with a single century-old oak tree. She describes the messages, recorded in the heartwood of old trees, that scientists are reading to understand climate change. Similarly, witness trees have been used to determine possible historic conditions of century-old forests for restoration ecology (Thomas-Van Gundy and Strager 2012).

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Strange Encounters with Rhetorics

Our encounter with other beings becomes profound. They are strange, even intrinsically strange. Getting to know them makes them stranger. When we talk about life forms, we’re talking about strange strangers. The ecological thought imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers. —Timothy Morton The Ecological Thought (15)

Posthumanism is a collective term for the growing body of work calling for the reconfiguration of traditional humanism to move beyond the limits drawn by human-centered inquiry. From diverging places and approaches, posthumanism generally looks to subjects outside traditional human foci, such as nonhumans (animals, plants, fungi, etc.), cyborgs, networks, and objects, in order to challenge distinctions underlying key humanist concepts, such as nature/culture, mind/body, body/environment, matter/meaning, word/world, and human/nonhuman. The posthuman wave of rhetoric and writing swells from many streams of thought, each reflecting a tide turning from what Casey Boyle terms “the traditional conception of rhetoric as a critical reflection about an object” to redefine rhetoric as “an ongoing series of mediated encounters” (534). As part of posthumanism’s interest in moving beyond a human focus, sylvan rhetorics turn specifically to the relations that emerge from rhetorical encounters with trees.

While recent scholarship in posthuman rhetorics offer a wide array of terms and prefixes designating worldviews beyond the human, I deploy David Abram’s (1996) concept of the

“more-than-human” (following scholars like Chris Ingraham) because it decenters humans as only one part of the strange encounters of rhetoric. Abrams argues that perceiving nonhuman agency requires attunement to frequencies beyond the human. These signals appear distinctly strange in a human-centered world. Rather than attempt to bifurcate humans and nonhumans or seek a rhetoric that excludes humans or leaves them behind, sylvan rhetorics reveal persuasion as

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part of an entangled world of many rhetorical relations. Sylvan rhetorics attune to the encounters of trees in the formation of more-than-human publics. As I have demonstrated, trees have played a formative role in shaping both rhetoric and new materialism. Yet, tree taxonomizes a culture- specific set of visual criteria (such as in the distinction between tree and shrub). Trees shape and are shaped by the relations that emerge between humans and nonhumans. Trees entwine human and natural worlds. Acknowledging the rhetorical potential of nonhumans means relinquishing some agency as rhetors, but in the exchange, humans also gain a depth of understanding about rhetoric beyond the human.

Plants are strange companions for students of rhetoric. Following George Kennedy’s

(1992) “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” numerous rhetorical scholars have studied animal rhetoric, including Debra Hawhee (2011 and 2017), Muckelbauer (2011). and Alex Parish (2014). A recent special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, themed “A

Rhetorical Bestiary,” expanded the work of scholars who, over the last decade, have explored possibilities for animal rhetoric. As they have defined nonhuman rhetoric, rhetoricians have primarily considered the capabilities of animals.8 Trees and other plants have yet to receive their

“day in the sun”, as John Muckelbauer (2016) claims because they are so different from humans.

Their strangeness is likely why rhetoricians have long sought kinship in animals rather than plants, as Hawhee (2017) demonstrates. It is this alien difference that makes them an important consideration for rhetorical theory. The comparative similarity of animals to humans, especially

8 Parish describes rhetoric in strictly animal terms: “the intentional communicative act of an animal whose purpose is to inform, or to manipulate the behavior of, one or more members of a real or imagined category of hearers called ‘audience’” (48). While a number of rhetoricians have discussed a wider array of actants, such as yeast, hops, and malt as rhetorical aspects of craft beer networks (Rice 2016 and Pflugfelder 2015), the majority of rhetoricians interested in nonanimals still tend to privilege those which interact with humans as hyle (in terms of raw material), such as plants which humans can eat or feed to livestock (Frye and Bruner 2012).

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mammals, makes for simple rhetorical relations. As Muckelbauer puts it, “there is nothing whatsoever human about a plant turning toward the sun” (39). Compared to animals, trees and other plants are distinctly ahuman, strange, and even alien to the human imagination. Their ahuman qualities are part of what makes trees and other plants alluring for rhetorical theory interested in the more-than-human world.

Because of their strangeness, trees and other plants offer rhetoricians a place to encounter and engage the nonhuman. Trees have much to teach us as rhetors, providing an example of what

Nathaniel Rivers, working from Morton,9 calls a “strange environmental rhetoric, which blurs the lines between humans and nonhumans” and “calls for more relations and not less” (420). The strange company of plants offers new ways to imagine the relationality of rhetorics in a more- than-human world. There are many examples of similar new materialist projects. As sociologist

Stefan Helmreich demonstrates in Alien Ocean, environmental phenomena that are far from the human offer important ways to think about how the biological “materializes as a networked phenomenon linking the microscopic to the macroscopic, bacteria to the biosphere, genes to globe” (ix). Helmreich identifies how the concept of the alien, that which is distant, foreign, unfamiliar, “is a channel for exchange between the oceanic and the human” (xi).

Plants have rhetorical lives of their own. The communicative abilities of plants are discussed in the recent collection, The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature

(Gagliano, et al. 2017). The essays explore the communicative potential of plants from scientific and humanistic perspectives. Surprisingly, apart from two mentions (177 and 281), plants are not

9 Building from ecocriticism and object-oriented philosophy, Rivers argues for reconceiving of nonhumans as capable of rhetorical agency. Rivers terms these nonhumans “wild objects,” which we perceive as what Timothy Morton calls the “strange stranger,” referring to the sense of irreducible complexity that ecological thinking produces when thinking about nonhuman agency.

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explicitly explored in the collection as rhetors or in the context of a rhetorical framework.

However, the chapters which focus on the communicative abilities of plants from a scientific perspective do gesture toward productive possibilities for sylvan rhetoric. While Timothy

Morton establishes rhetoric’s ties to the botanical—“[a] trope is a flower of rhetoric (anthos, anthology)” (212)—others explore the evolutionary fitness of plants in Aristotelian terms of discovery, “the sophisticated ways in which plants sense and respond to environmental cues”

(38).

As budding scholarship begins to consider plants, a hammock of writers have brought trees into conversation with nonhuman rhetoric. Most notably, Jennifer Clary-Lemon focuses on the rhetorical agency of tree planting in Planting the Anthropocene: Rhetorics of Natureculture

(2019). Clary-Lemon builds a methodology from Haraway (2015) and Anna Tsing (2012) to explore silviculture as part of plantationocene logic. She demonstrates that, in the plantationocene, humans have amplified power to destroy but are also incredibly dependent upon

(and vulnerable to) the destruction of diverse bioregions.10 Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think, a posthuman anthropological study of the Ecuadorian Amazon, is also an important influence on sylvan rhetorics. Kohn brings a wide assemblage of nonhumans into conversation with actor- network theory (ANT), but he also works to subvert the bifurcated models that separate human and natural worlds. Kohn works through anthropology’s emphasis on human language by focusing on a wider range of signification beyond the symbolic.

10 Clary-Lemon examines the planting of “a monocultureed tree in a forest ecology” in order to “consider the discursive and rhetorical realm of silviculture, [which] remains unremarked in favor of social, environmental, the economic, and geographical realms” (2). Clary-Lemon uses silviculture to connect ecological and new materialist methodologies, bringing the “rhetorical and the human in tandem with their interaction with other inanimate and nonhuman bodies” (4).

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Building from these theorists, sylvan rhetorics aligns with John Muckelbauer’s (2016) call for a paradigm shift toward heliotropic rhetoric. Muckelbauer claims that “plants turning toward the sun and audiences accepting an argument might well involve the same kind of action/motion. As a result, as rhetoric scholars, we would have a lot to learn from plants (and from the botanists who study them) about persuasion itself” (40, emphasis original). Through the strange encounters with the more than human world, sylvan rhetorics reconfigure persuasive elements beyond human-centered models toward one which better accounts for a wider range of rhetorical actants.

More-Than-Human Publics

A tree does not obtain its character-as-tree from the soil, but rhetorical discourse, I shall argue, does obtain its character-as-rhetorical from the situation which generates it. — Lloyd Bitzer “The Rhetorical Situation” (3)

Despite Bitzer’s claim, trees (like rhetorical discourse) are shaped by the emergent properties of the soil in which they grow. Without proper nutrients, for instance, an acorn will never actualize into an oak. In her brilliant refutation of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation model, Jenny

Rice (then Edbauer) argues that rhetoric cannot be constrained to such a reductive account.

Building from Michael Warner, Rice demonstrates that the sender-receiver model oversimplifies how rhetorics constitute publics. Rather than publics being formed through a conglomeration of rhetorical elements (think audience, exigence, constraints, etc.), Rice posits “rhetorical ecologies” to describe how publics are formed through distributed, fluid, and complex processes.

She calls for a reorientation of rhetorical theory “to theorize how publics are also created through affective channels” (21). Following Rice’s charge, sylvan rhetorics take a heliotropic perspective to further reveal the complex rhetorical ecologies which form more-than-human publics.

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Located in the central downtown corner of Magnolia Avenue and College Street, the

Toomer’s Oaks are an axis mundi for the Auburn community. They mark the entryway from city to campus, a Southern take on the groves of academe. Valued as part of Auburn’s football culture, the trees are part of the traditions of agrarian regionalism. Fans celebrate victory by rolling the tree with toilet paper. The apocryphal story behind this tradition holds that State

Senator Sheldon “Shell” Toomer, who owned the now-historic Toomer’s Corner, would throw ticker tape into the trees to signal a victory. As the owner of the first telegraph in town, the ticker tape in the branches of a live oak might suggest encroaching modernity in the pastoral South.

Today, fans inscribe themselves into the Auburn scene by rolling Toomer’s Corner. The spurious origin story likely makes the tradition, like the original trees, older than it really is. Likely, the tradition of rolling the trees began much more recently.11

Each time the oaks were destroyed, they functioned not only as commonplace topoi when taken up by the Auburn community, but also as nonhuman actants capable of reforming publics.

When Harvey Updike Jr. poisoned the soil surrounding the trees, he attacked Auburn’s community at the root. His destructive act revealed the trees as participants in the creation of a more-than-human public. As sacred objects, the Toomer’s oaks participate in the rhetorical circulation of civil structures, discourses, and histories that define the collective polis of Auburn.

They are also complicit in the endless signifying construction of “Auburn” as a place, what

Baudrillard terms the “precession of simulacra” (166). Sylvan rhetorics sprout from the

11 The ages of the original Toomer’s Oaks were inflated as high as 130 years old, but when the dead oaks were cut down, they were dated at around 80 years old. David Housel, Auburn’s Athletics Director Emeritus, has attributed the tradition of rolling the trees to a scatological joke involving longtime rival Alabama in the game known as “Punt Bama Punt.” An Auburn player’s threat to “beat the No. 2 out of them” (Bama’s ranking at the time) came to fruition, and the victory was celebrated with toilet paper streamers.

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crossroads of nature and culture and thus often play conflicting roles in the construction of publics.

As icons of place, the Toomer’s Oaks simulate the deep south. They represent an ex situ

(or out-of-place) sense of place because, as southern live oaks (Quercus virginiana), they are native to the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plains, including only the southernmost landscapes of

Alabama. Hailing from some of the South’s most iconic locations, the live oak represents nostalgia for the Old South. In this way, the Toomer’s Oaks support the monocultural practices of the plantationocene, serving as abstract symbols rather than inhabitants. This point is reinforced by the fact that “The Toomer’s Oaks” refers, not to a single pair of trees, but any pair of designated trees planted in the place.

In Distant Publics, Jenny Rice demonstrates the conflicting roles that trees play, describing how antidevelopment rhetorics emerged out of several instances of tree removal and poisoning (11). Rice argues that, in Austin, the Treaty Oak poisoning and the Waller Creek removal had different rhetorical impact than the removal of monuments because they reinforced

“familiar binaries between (good) nature and (bad) culture” (11). Thus, trees have the potential to transform publics, but they can also reinforce the divisions between nature and culture. Publics formed though place, Rice demonstrates, act as “both symptoms and catalysts of public subjectivities” which can help us “imagine how we can improve discourse in order to repair damaged places and promote long term sustainable futures” (14).

Similarly, the Toomer’s Oaks also function as part of community connections to in situ

(or emplaced) publics formation. In the wake of their recurrent destruction, citizens rally around them as a locus for stewardship and community beyond the wellbeing of a particular species. In this way, the Toomer’s Oaks function as an environmental icon—what Sean Morey (2009) calls

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an “econ”—promoting ecological values as part of larger communities. They offer citizens a commonplace location to steward and protect. The oaks participate in how the community values nonhumans beyond the human foci of residential and economic growth.

When the trees were set on fire in September of 2016, images of the oaks burning began to circulate online. From a preliminary search on Twitter,12 I was able to visualize some of the ways that the event circulated virtually. My aim in this initial survey is not to form claims about it as a representative data set, a goal well beyond the scope of this chapter, but instead to simply demonstrate that the Toomer’s Oaks took on new topoi as a rhetorical commonplace for the

Auburn community in the wake of the iconoclastic event. In digital space, citizens participated as fans, community members, and advocates, virtually assembling in what Laurie Gries (2015) and

Alexander Reid (2007) refer to (following Deleuze and Guattari) as the “virtual-actual event” of rhetoric. As the trees burned and their images circulated online, their role in coproducing

Auburn’s sense of place came to the fore. The destruction of the trees were seen as an attack on the community, and in the wake of their destruction, the community rallied together in their honor. Like ticker tape thrown in the branches, Twitter users responded to the iconoclastic event as a public. As symbols of the Old South, the trees reinforce a pastoral sense of place, but as they are destroyed and mourned, they have the potential to cultivate ecologies which form publics capable of disrupting monocultural, plantationocene logic.

The Toomer’s Oaks are a rich example of sylvan rhetorics because they exist at the crossroads of so many conflicting ways of constructing place. They are icons of regionalism, but

12 Using the open-source software project MassMine (Van Horn and Beveridge 2016), I pulled data from Twitter to collect a limited sample of the virtual-actual event of the Toomer’s Oaks fire. Drawn from the keywords “auburn-lsu fire,” “toomer fire” and “auburn oak,” in order to produce visualizations of the Twitter data for seven days following the fire.

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they are also out-of-place biota. The trees are celebrated as part of the community, but this also marks them as sites of iconoclasm. Trees both nurture publics by providing material conditions for humans to form collectives and are then governed as part of those publics. As Pliny the Elder observes in Natural History, “the trees and forests were supposed to be the supreme gift bestowed by [the earth] on man. These first provided him with food, their foliage carpeted his cave and their bark served him for aliment; there are still races which practice this mode of life”

(12.1—3). While trees have always been one of the most important resources supporting human publics, the carelessness with which they are destroyed has often produced disastrous results for civilizations. Sylvan rhetorics, then, attempt to learn how publics are formed with trees as relations.

Sylvan Rhetorics

Writing moves (in) the world. As writing moves, it bumps into things, generating effects. Writing shapes and becomes a part of the environment. Writing composes connections: its agonism produces publics. —Nathaniel A. Rivers “Geocomposition …” (576)

As rooted between nature and culture, sylvan rhetorics understand trees as places of conflicting rhetorical articulations. In the above quote, Rivers defines writing publics through the agonism of rhetorical intersections and frictions. In the conflicting rhetorical roles trees play, publics are formed as part of the more-than-human world. To African American communities, for instance, people gathering around trees might refer not only to lynching and other forms of racial violence13 but also to the ways that “tree talk” and other place-based literacies helped enslaved people escape from plantation bondage. Cedars were often used as grave markers when

13 In its study documenting racial terror lynchings in Southern states during the period between reconstruction and World War II (1877 to 1950), the Equal Justice Initiative lists 4 victims of lynching in Lee County, where Auburn is located.

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headstones were too expensive, commonly used for slaves and poor whites in the South. As a socially constructed concept, the concept of tree functions like the concept of race, which problematically conflates biological traits with visual and cultural stereotypes.14 As part of the intersections between nature and culture, trees participate in the agonism of the production of publics, and as I demonstrate in the next section, these conflicts may, over time, help produce sustainable bioregions of discourse.

As sylvan rhetors, attenuating to the strange encounters of more-than-human publics means accepting often conflicting relations. In order to do so, sylvan rhetorics stem not only from posthumanism and new materialism strains of thought, but also cultural rhetorics. In her response to Linda Walsh’s interview with Bruno Latour, Laurie Gries demonstrates how attunement to the more-than-human world is nothing new (Walsh, et al.). Gries highlights the work of American Indian scholars to underscore the fact that trees and other plants have always played “roles in how indigenous peoples communicate, celebrate, medicate, create, domesticate, nourish, and sustain” (2017, p. 4-5). As posthumanism intervenes in humanist inquiry, cultural rhetoricians like Malea Powell (2011) and Kristin Arola (2017) demonstrate that these theories are uncovering what indigenous scholars have long held true: rhetorics are “relational and constellated” (Powell, et al). That is, rhetorical practices are “built, shaped, and dismantled based on encounters” (Powell, et al). Trees are a fruitful place to explore the encounters of cultural and posthuman rhetorics.

Sylvan rhetorics rely on these methodologies to understand trees as naturecultural. For instance, marker trees, also known as trail or prayer trees, exemplify the deep mesh between the

14 Timothy Morton (2016) discusses the conflation of biological terms in concepts of race and species as part of the formation of the category of “human” as distinct from the environment, closing the Kantian gap “between what a thing is and how it appears” (16).

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formation of publics and nonhuman actants. As a form of boundary marking, trail signage, and communication across the pre-Columbian Americas, culturally modified hardwoods cannot be understood in purely natural or cultural terms. Trail trees are an example of how sylvan rhetorics branch from the work of scholars like Powell (2011), which Gries draws upon in her new materialist methodology. Powell demonstrates that the relational webs of ecology were part of ancient discourses of many cultures, where “all living things matter, all are important, all must be treated as relatives” (Powell). Marker trees are one example of how sylvan rhetorics are best understood as part of a more-than-human world.

The Toomer’s Oaks, like marker trees, are shaped by human culture. As relations of the

Auburn community, the trees are more than signifiers for that culture. The trees have their own biological conditions, and as relations they bring these strange properties into conversation with the community. These strange encounters are often full of agonism, but this friction is evidence of trees as rhetorical sites of negotiation and, perhaps, even transformation. Sylvan rhetorics have the potential to lift rhetoric from the strictures of a human focus, to reveal how publics are rooted in larger relational ecologies. Such a shift might align with the changing ways biologists, ecologists, foresters, and other students of trees are coming to understand forest networks. As biologist George David Haskell demonstrates in The Songs of Trees, trees are social beings which form communication networks deep in the earth, beneath where humans might think to look. As Haskell reveals, understanding forest networks brings contemporary science into contact with long-held indigenous perspectives (in his case, the beliefs of the Waorani in

Ecuador, who do not think of individual species as separate from their habitat). As part of these changing perspectives, sylvan rhetorics study publics as forests composed of the agonism of many strange relations.

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The Forest of Rhetoric

Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. —Deleuze & Guattari A Thousand Plateaus (36)

Forests present an ideal entity with which to theorize more-than-human publics, but theorists tend to ignore the forest of assemblages for the tree of hierarchy.15 For example,

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) malign trees with Aristotelian and Cartesian systems and contrast arborescent knowledge with their concept of the rhizome. However, the discovery of mycorrhizal networks by ecologists such as Suzanne Simard, have shown forests collaborate in far greater capacities than previously thought. Botanically speaking, rhizomes are single organisms which propagate by splitting and forming separate clones. Rhizomes, with their tangled webs of roots and nodes, offered Deleuze and Guattari a means to theorize a holistic perspective beyond the individual, binary, and hierarchical, what they call a “Body without Organs.” On the other hand, trees communicate across a forest by assembling a host of various species, with each actant maintaining its own identity in the exchange. Forests are, potentially, a better example of rhizomatic assemblage than rhizomes.

Mycorrhizal networks (from Greek mykós, "fungus", and rhiza, "root") are interspecies hybrid networks of plants and fungi through which trees communicate in mutualistic collaboration. It is already well-established that plants communicate through biochemical

15 Trees have long helped humans define writing and lent their arboreal qualities to many postmodern thinkers, such as Saussure, who first defined his concept of sign, signifier, and signified using tree and arbor as his example (67). Beyond these uses of trees, which Dobrin and Weisser critique—as topics, signs in human language, or as part of hierarchical knowledge— theorists like Kohn have explored writing with nonhumans and argued for the impossibility of bifurcating humans from nonhumans or nature from culture. Building from the work of Dobrin and Weisser as well as Kohn, sylvan rhetorics understand publics as constructed through a strange assemblage of many relations.

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signaling, but the mycorrhizal networks trees form are striking because they assemble such a diversity of phyla and kingdoms and cover such large territories. Known as “Wood Wide Webs,” mycorrhizal networks are nonhuman social networks which operate across an entire forest ecosystem. Rather than cloning (like a rhizome) to proliferate, these networks help to produce stable bioregions through the diversity of their assemblages. While rhizomatic vegetation is often invasive and extremely destructive, forest networks achieve stable bioregions through both competition and symbiosis. Through these networks, trees forage, share excess resources, dispose of waste, and communicate about threats even over vast distances. Likewise, a rhizome is a singular entity, while mycorrhizal networks are more obviously an assemblage.

In her discussion of mushrooms as a companion species and protagonist for ecological thinking, Anna Tsing demonstrates how monocrop farming is susceptible to fungal attack (such as heart rot) because it relies on monocultural methods like cloning rather than supporting biodiversity (147-48). Monoculture, what Haraway associates with the logic of the plantationocene, while incredibly destructive, is also unsustainable because a lack of biodiversity leaves networks vulnerable to a host of invisible, microbial actants. Through competitive, adaptive, and collaborative processes, forests achieve stable bioregions through agonism.

Though most trees engage in interspecific competition, they are also examples of incredible interspecies cooperation. 16 By assembling with other species like mushrooms in mycorrhizal

16 In dense forests, tall tree species reduce sunlight, but other species adapt to grow faster or to benefit from lower light conditions. Over time, this competition produces the stability of old growth forests. Trees demonstrate a remarkable ability to coexist, participating in numerous adaptive behaviors such as crown shyness, where leaves of some trees avoid touching leaves of other trees. The gaps that form between them in the canopy are likely a convergent evolutionary feature which may benefit forest ecology by reducing the spread of insects or preventing over- competition for light. Older trees, known as hub trees, provide nutrients to younger trees in the understory.

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networks, trees work to build sustainable ecosystems. Forests of rhetoric, then, establish stable bioregions of discourse through both individual competition and large-scale processes of adaptation and collaboration which lead to gradual stability. As with digital remixes, each entity maintains its own identity while also participating in larger-scale ecologies.17 These symbiotic exchanges can be mutualistic, commensalistic, or parasitic at the individual level, but they achieve stability through collaboration.

As Tsing demonstrates, not all fungi are benign, and neither are the rhetorical properties of trees. Black walnuts, for example, produce toxic chemicals which oxidize into juglone to kill or inhibit the growth of nearby plants and even fungi. Pliny the Elder observes that the shade produced by walnuts are “heavy, and even causes headache in man and injury to anything planted in the vicinity” (Book XVII: 89). While black walnuts hinder the growth of some species, they also reduce competition and threats for their companion species. As part of both destructive ideologies like the monocrop logic of the plantationocene and ecological means of rhetorical inhabitance, sylvan rhetorics follow Powell’s claim that, “[e]ven harmful, frightening or negative relatives are important and must be understood and honored if we are to survive together in the same spaces” (Powell). Pliny’s description of shade reflects Powell’s claims about contested spaces. They are a matter of perspective and framing.

By assembling with ecological protagonists like mushrooms, forests might be thought of as an interspecies hivemind (Byrd and Owens 1999) or Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without

17 As Tsing points out, the fungi which is detrimental to wooden houses is also essential for breaking down dead wood into the hummus which feeds future forests (143). Alex Reid uses mushrooms to explain remix and digital writing, building from Gregory Ulmer’s use of the saprophyte in his essay “The Object of Post-Criticism.” Reid compares remix to “trees and mushrooms [which] share points of connection that allow one to flow into the other. Similarly, electronic files share formatting information, which allows entry into their data, the mixing of data, and the composition of new media” (133).

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Organs, producing ecological stability through fluidity and agonism. Though trees appear to humans as individuals in direct competition, they collaborate beneath the visible surface of the forest floor, where networks of minerals, fungi and roots are the real foundations of the forest.

Stemming from this notion, sylvan rhetorics trace the rhetorical event of rhetorics across divisions of human and nonhuman, nature and culture, virtual and actual. Just as trees rely upon a diverse range of other actants to communicate through chemical exchanges, sylvan rhetorics acknowledge the holistic flow of naturecultural networks across virtual and actual planes to demonstrate plants as capable practitioners and teachers of rhetoric.

The rhetorical forest, then, helps rhetors to better account for the more-than-human publics which form our polis. Sylvan rhetorics extend these notions of publics to nonhuman agents to consider how trees might help compose naturecultural publics in the more-than human world. In the Toomer’s Oaks example, trees participate in networks which constitute Auburn as a place, a community of humans and nonhumans, and this includes rhetorical processes which are benign and hostile, symbiotic and parasitic, virtual and material. As the Toomer’s Oaks were poisoned, replanted, and burned, they complicated bifurcated notions of human and nonhuman, nature and culture, virtual and actual. Their roots exchange chemicals with nonhumans and humans alike, crossing the boundaries of nature and culture. In the forest of rhetoric, there are many participants, and their relations are distinctly strange. In the human and nonhuman exchange between the Toomer’s Oaks, a public identity emerges capable of both countering and reinforcing plantationocene logic. By acknowledging trees as part of the rhetorical assemblages that constitute more-than-human publics, sylvan rhetorics account for the forests of rhetoric which work to establish stable bioregions of discourse.

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Sylvanus, the roman deity of forests and fields, protected boundaries. At the edge of a property, stacks of rocks indicated the end of one place and the beginning of another. Today, trees have much to teach us about the boundaries of rhetoric. In undertaking this initial study of sylvan rhetorics, I hope to suggest some potential uses, roots, and grafting points between trees and rhetoric. This study is by no means an exhaustive one, and it is my hope that scholars will take up the concept of sylvan rhetorics in relation to both humans and nonhumans. Sylvan rhetorics have the capacities to radically realign human and natural worlds, but they also have the potential to reify bifurcated models. It is therefore important that scholars take up studies of sylvan rhetorics to harness their ecological potentials.

Future works might explore sylvan ethnographies (such as in case studies of witness trees or marker trees), historiographies of trees in rhetoric and writing studies, sylvan readings of the rhetorical canon, an exploration of sylvan aspects of data visualization, and the use of sylvan writing techniques in scholarship or the classroom. Like the different disciplinary researchers working together to determine if the forest or the savanna is expanding, I hope that rhetoric and writing studies will begin to take up these and other questions raised by sylvan rhetorics in relation to the vast conceptual fields of objects, things, networks, ecologies, science, and publics.

Like Latour and his fellow researchers, we turn to trees to ask: Is the field of rhetoric advancing or receding in acknowledging a wider range of actants in its inquiries? It is my hope that this article, and many like it, are evidence of those expanding borders.

High Rise

Walking downtown, past twenty stories about what used to be a pasture, without the shadow of a single tree, I am wondering how I could leave the casements of my life wide open, screens hanging from their frames by a screw, how to let the morning

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come dragging in whenever it damn well pleases, without a question for it on my lips, how to break down those years I have stacked around myself like mud bricks, to find the humid afternoon we rode our bicycles down the long path. The air was full of lavender and ash.

Leave the walls unfinished, so the scent of wild onion drifts like autumn leaves when the neighbor mows, so the outside might find a way into the tiny rooms I inhabit, amber sunlight like a river, swallowing everything in its flow, sweeping motes of dust collecting on my shelves, littered by those who come and go, their rubber soles scarcely marking the floorboards. Strip the insulation, handful by powdery handful, crumble the insulae of my loneliness, its ceiling blocks my silver glimpse, the skyline contours of the other world.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION: PLACING POSTDIGITAL WRITING

Forgive me, my friend. I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only the people in the city can do that. —Socrates Plato, Complete Works (230a, 510).

29°38'42.0"N 82°20'48.2"W

University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida

In this chapter, I conclude by following Cicero’s example at the opening of De Oratore, where a cast of characters similar to those of Plato’s Phaedrus decide to follow Socrates’ example and sit beneath a plane tree, remarking at how “its broad boughs [...] shade this place exactly like that other plane tree whose shade Socrates sought” (Cicero 63–64, qtd. in Pederson

1). In this case, the chapter opens beneath the shade of a relative of Plato’s Platanus orientalis, the Platanus occidentalis or American sycamore. This particular tree is known as a “moon tree” because it traveled to the moon and back in 1971 on the Apollo 14 before it was given to the

University of Florida as a gift. Like the Earthrise example from the introduction, the appeal of this otherwise ordinary sycamore comes from our scalar fascination with space as part of the highest topologies of place. This tree has scaled higher than most humans have or ever will.

The University of Florida’s moon tree is also an example of how ineffectual topologies are in defining place. Every day, people pass this tree with no idea that it has been to the moon.

To them, it is an ordinary sycamore, or for those who cannot recognize it as a sycamore, a tree.

The location of the tree has been kept somewhat of a secret by the university to prevent the kind of attention that brought harm to the Toomer’s Oaks. The scalar place-making features of trees leads to a destructive attraction to them, and the identities of moon trees are often kept secret for this reason. Sadly, keeping their identity secret may have been why the other moon trees on

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campus (a pair of pines) were accidentally cut down. In this chapter, I explore how decolonial posthumanism discussed in the previous chapters might change how we think of the classroom as a place. Through a reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, this conclusion illustrates how the dialogue might help scholars move beyond a Euro-Western focus in theorizing place. Then, this chapter considers how the emerging technologies offer ways to teach writing that emphasize place as a network and utilize the locative affordances of digital media. While postdigital locative media transform place-based thinking in ways which conflict with Heideggerian notions of topologies, they also present a kairos, opening to the choric possibilities of the energy of place.

Writing in the Shade

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates and his student Phaedrus wait out the heat of the day beneath a large plane tree. Here, in the outskirts of the polis, the pair hold a meandering conversation which will reverberate for millenia through theories of writing. As a growing number of scholars in rhetoric and composition turn to posthumanism and new materialism to reconceive of some of the foundations and traditions of the discipline, it is no surprise, then, that the Phaedrus has seen a renewed interest from rhetoricians. This dialogue was an important influence on Derrida’s theories of writing as a pharmakon (“Plato’s Pharmacy”). It has been important to the work of posthumanist rhetoricians like Alex Reid, and in how Nedra Reynolds frames her arguments about location’s central role in writing. Recently, the work has received attention from rhetorical theorists interested in new materialism and place (Pedersen) as well as readings of Socrates as out-of-place (atopos) (Kennerly). With such excellent company, it might be safe to claim that there is little else important to say about the Phaedrus.

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This might be true, were it not for the tree. The tree where Socrates and Phaedrus rest and converse shares its roots with Plato’s name (Platano).18 In a clever trick, Plato uses a pun to turn himself into a tree in the dialogue in order to throw shade at some of his contemporaries, and in doing so, he sets up some of the central questions about writing which this project addresses. The plane tree pun references Plato’s role as author of the dialogue. Plato frequently considers the meaning of names in his dialogues.19 To a Hellenic audience, as Michael Marder claims, this would have referred to “the irony [that] Plato has literally overshadowed Socrates and Phaedrus”

(18). Trees in the Phaedrus point back to the dialogue as virtual, a written text. While Reynolds describes the important role of place in the dialogue, focusing more on the plane tree underscores her points about writing and location and provides an excellent example of what the dialogue can teach us about writing as a digital and ecological event. Though Plato’s Socrates dismisses writing, the very trees which shelter his discourse call attention to writing and contradict his argument. Getting beyond the shade Plato’s plane tree, that some roots of decolonial posthuman rhetorics might surface beyond the groves of academe.

Today, the digital, as associated with the global, threatens our sense of the local in ways which are comparable to the threats Socrates feared from writing. At the time, writing was an emerging technology and was disrupting the scales of how information was composed, remembered, and shared. The Phaedrus concerns itself with anxieties about writing as a technology through its meta-awareness of the ways the dialogue represents virtual and actual.

While the dialogue takes place in a clearly defined setting and is deeply concerned with the

18 The plane tree (platanos), named for its broad leaves, shares its derivation from the Greek platys with Plato’s name. 19 The Cratylus is an example of the author’s propensity for the etymology of names.

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material elements of place-making (Pedersen),20 Socrates ultimately dismisses writing for displacing the acts of invention, memory, circulation, and delivery.

Yet, the dialogue also demonstrates the topological power of writing as a technology.

While Socrates denounces writing, the Phaedrus demonstrates writing as a location for dialectic through irony and metaphor. In Plato, Derrida, and Writing, Jasper Neel argues that, in the

Phaedrus, Plato uses sophistic rhetoric and writing to condemn both practices. Through these rhetorical moves, what Neel refers to as a “brilliant rhetorical ploy” Plato uses “a medium against itself so as to debase it and impede its use by all followers” (28). Through Derrida, Neel underscores the central irony, that Plato “could stand under the plane tree beside the Ilissus and shout as loudly as he liked; the only way we ‘hear’ him today is in writing” (3). Though the dialogue purports to recreate an actual exchange between two real people, Socrates and

Phaedrus, Neel reads this as an expression of the power of sophistic rhetoric. To Neel, Plato uses writing to condemn writing, and thus he makes himself the only virtuous writer. According to

Neel’s reading, Plato wants to eat his cake and have it too.21

20 Set among Plato’s other Socratic dialogues, Phaedrus is an outlier. It takes place outside the city walls, which Phaedrus remarks, finds Socrates “totally out of place” (230c-d, Complete Works 510), with Socrates wandering outside his usual stomping grounds led by Phaedrus to hear him retell Lysias’ speech. This place, however, figures into the dialogue as both exigence and even as a character when the pair of travelers stop to talk in the shade of a plane tree. As Socrates and Phaedrus wait out the heat of the day beneath the plane tree and the chaste tree (230b, 510), the ironies between written and real proliferate in dizzying proportions. 21 A longstanding debate held in rhetoric and composition considered whether the Phaedrus denounces rhetoric (McAdon 2004 and Neel 1988) or whether it positively advances a philosophical or dialectical rhetoric (Bizzell and Herzberg 1990). While McAdon convincingly argues against the possibility that the Phaedrus could be read as simply affirming rhetoric’s positive value, the environmental images foreground the scene as a written text. Through the Plato plane tree and other puns, the environment signifies the discourse as both a scene and a piece of writing. Among the numerous references to the environment as writing, he mentions a lover “not trained in full sunlight but in dappled shade” (239c, Complete Works 518). Plato refers to Phaedrus, who Socrates is instructing in the shade, and the fact that these are characters in a

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Sy Taffel traces the history of the concept of the postdigital to demonstrate that, through the concept is often associated with the rhetorics of progress and novelty that accompany

Continental posthumanism, the concept has a long history in the evolution of various disciplines concerned with technocultures and technology studies. He maps the often conflicting definitions of the term and analyzes the ways that the postdigital underscore some of the rhetorics associated with the digital. The postdigital, especially as read by Taffel through Stiegler, demonstrates how the issues we face with emerging technologies are not new, nor are they novel. Just as Socrates sees writing as a disruptive force to the ethics of oral dialog, the rhetorics of the digital and postdigital challenge the distinction of mind, body, technology, and world. Rather than attempt to identify a correct definition of postdigital, building from Taffel’s approach opens to posthuman approaches to writing studies. Just as John Tinnell identifies a move from screen to world through his exploration of ubiquitous computing, postdigital approaches to writing studies identify a moment where location’s central role in writing becomes obvious.

To return to the Phaedrus example, location is a central feature of how Plato demonstrates writing’s topological power as a communication technology, as Reynolds discusses at length. Plato harnesses the plane tree pun as a vehicle through which to explore writing’s ability to shelter discourse. Plato criticizes and satirizes Isocrates in the Phaedrus (McAdon 24), but the fact that he does so in writing undermines the sleight of hand in his argument. While

Plato delivers the final blow to Isocrates by turning himself into a tree, his act of writing is what carries his words to us today. By placing himself in the scene as a large plane tree, Plato is able to subtly throw shade. He also draws attention to the irony of his critique through writing, which

written text. Thus, Plato draws attention to the dialogue-as-text through references to the environment where their conversation takes place.

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demonstrates writing as a powerful tool for dialectic.22 Through the plane tree, Plato emphasizes the dialogue as taking place in writing. Through the chaste tree, he reveals how writing can quell bodily passions. The leaves of parchment provide the coolest shade for Plato to consider and revise Socrates’ first inquiry, which was driven off-course by the eros of heated conversation.

Plato draws on the shade of the plane tree and the chaste tree to demonstrate how writing provides a place for more careful reflection, removing the writer from the passions of direct dialogue.23 Socrates rejects writing and orators, like Lysias, who take their speeches so seriously

(257a, Complete Works 533) that they forget how to practice dialectic, replacing knowledge with the “appearance of wisdom” (275a-b, 551-2). Yet, Socrates goes on to explain that “priests of the temple of Zeus at Dodona say that the first prophecies were the words of an oak” (275b, 552).

Thus, Socrates draws on a sylvan image to make his point about writing. This image indexically points back to the punning on Plato and the plane tree and to the fact that Plato is the author of the dialogue, not Socrates. The profound irony comes into full view as Socrates says the ancients

“found it rewarding enough in their simplicity to listen to an oak or even a stone, so long as it was telling the truth” (275b-c, 552).

Plato is able to discover a kariotic opening in writing as a technology, building a grove of academe which views place through the static and fixed forms of a topology. Similarly, emerging technologies open to choric ways of mapping place’s energy, suggesting possible paths out of the

22 This is not to say, however, that Plato is endorsing a dialectical rhetoric, which McAdon (2004) demonstrates would be a dubious anachronism (23). 23 While Michael Marder presents a similar reading of Plato insinuating himself into the conversation through the plane tree (2014, 22), he argues that, from the moment the pair lie down in the grass together, the power of discourse comes to the foreground. To Marder, this is evidence of Plato emphasizing the power of dialogic philosophy and orality. However, it is not discourse that Plato emphasizes through the shadow he casts over the pair of speakers but writing.

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walled groves of academe, out of the shadow of Plato’s literate plane tree. If Plato’s tree is one possible place for tracing other relations for decolonial posthumanism and postdigital rhetoric, it sprouts from the roots and branches of the dialogue as both as scripted (written, virtual) and as event (dialogic, actual). Postdigital rhetoric, then, participates in what writing scholars

(following Deleuze and Guattari) like Gries (2015) and Reid (2007) refer to as the “virtual-actual event” of writing networks. Rather than disembody the act of communication, as Socrates fears, emerging technologies increasingly challenge topological notions of the body as a stable entity, producing important fault lines in humanist models for the study of writing. Locative media productively disrupt places where writing is practiced and shared.

The Postdigital Writing Classroom

I created the EcoTour project (available at ecotourapp.com) alongside several collaborators in the TRACE Innovation Lab at the University of Florida to put the decolonial posthuman theories of rhetoric and writing discussed throughout this project into practice through an assignment combining emerging technologies, public advocacy, and place-based composition. EcoTour is an augmented reality walking tour in Paynes Prairie State Park in

Gainesville, Florida. Using the locative affordances of mobile smartphone technology, we created EcoTour as a platform for students to write not only about place but with it. The tour unearths the colonial history, ecological diversity, and environmental threats the park currently faces, but it also foregrounds the ways that postdigital writing interfaces with the material environment. In a reversal of Plato’s move in the Phaedrus, where he uses the landscape to emphasize the text as virtual, EcoTour uses augmented reality to bring the material environment into greater contact with digital writing.

In Being Together in Place, Larsen and Johnson discuss a similar classroom project in the

Wakarusa Wetlands in northeastern Kansas. Like Paynes Prairie, these wetlands are a site of

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important indigenous history and contemporary environmental activism. In their discussion, they ask how place-based thinking might be tied to activism. They write, “the call of place [...] often entails a certain vulnerability” (86). Like the ghost bikes in Jacksonville, FL, these place are often a wound, for the more-than-human community. By designing a digital writing project around a site of colonial history, community value, and environmental exigency, I hoped to cultivate a learning experience which fostered an environmental thinking which was transmedial, post-digital, transcalar, and which engated deep time.

At the beginning of the semester, students in my Digital Rhetoric course read about the concept of digital rhetoric and mapped the diverging histories of the term as situated within media studies and rhetorical theory. Then, we turned to the concept of the postdigital and explored how the term has been in use almost as long as digital rhetoric. Through this discussion, we were able to interrogate the notion that “new” technologies present wholly new problems for rhetoric. Then we turn to writers like Nichole Starosielski, whose book The Undersea Network reveals how insufficient the placeless metaphors for ‘the cloud’ are for understanding the materiality of digital networks. From here, we frame how issues of digital materiality and the complex ecologies of virtual and actual play a major role in postdigital approaches to writing and rhetoric.

Building from Starosielski’s decolonial approach to framing networks (which she expands on in her digital project (surfacing.in), she maps a transcalar and deep time approach to understanding digital cable networks as they cross the lines of digital information and material environments. She destabilizes bifurcated distinctions of “nature” and “culture,” showing how entangled the two are in our world-wide network of cables. These cables traverse built and natural spaces, and Starosielski traces them through deep ocean and remote backcountry as well

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as the many cities and towns where they pass through the lives and nations of people, land, and animals. Likewise, she pushes us away from talking about place in terms of the rhetorical moves made by telecommunications companies, who portrayed places like New Zealand as remote and isolated. Such moves position “cable technology as bringing a new and complete connection, despite the fact that it was used by an elite” (169). Here her signal paths depart from that of the traditional travel narrative, revealing the ways in which these locations had already been connected, such as in the case of New Zealand which was linked “via ships, migrations, news circulation, and the postal service” long before the telegraph wires emerged out of the sea (173).

Cables are shaped by the places through which they pass, and the places are in turn transformed by their connections.

“Surfacing.in” further complicates our view of digital and material environments, blending visualized objects of cables, environments, and cultures with digital images of networks to render these narrative elements spatially. The project has users move through the digital network, first coming ashore through a cable in a disorienting manner. As you surface and dive, seafaring through the network, “narratives about the history of the cable network, the companies that construct it, and the ecologies that it runs through will orient you in your journey”

(Starosielski et al.). Part of this re-orienting involves facing some of the horrors of colonial practice, such as how “the infrastructures of colonial empires could not have been built without the labor of slaves and indentured servants” and that “the expenses saved through this practice made transoceanic networks both possible and profitable” (Starosielski et al.). Through different levels of view, “map,” “place,” “theme,” and “image,” we can zoom in on the intersecting locations, issues, images, information, and history and see how they converge and cross in an

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inseparable mesh. The digital project makes visible the new and old ways in which cables connected these Pacific Islands.

From these and other readings and discussions, I introduced EcoTour as a way to practice decolonial postdigital writing. Students researched the deep history of Paynes Prairie, proposed video augmentations about topics related to the park, and conducted usability testing and workshops for their digital installations. Their projects ranged from the history of the Timucuan and the colonial violence of Native American removal to the contemporary environmental threats the park faced. Students designed their videos for specific audiences (park-goers), and they tailored their content to connect with these audiences. In their tests, students thought about localization, with community users and geographical features of the park in mind as they designed their installations. In this way, students recognized and practiced postdigital approaches to writing as part of the complex ecologies of places which cross networks of communities, technologies, and the more-than-human world.

Early in the morning of September 11th, 2017, Hurricane Irma reached North-Central

Florida, dumping massive quantities of water on Gainesville and the surrounding area.

Overnight, the area was transformed from a droughted savannah to what was historically known as Alachua Lake. Paynes Prairie Basin experiences ongoing cycles of flooding and draining.

Flooding has happened many times before, such as in the late 1800s, when the flooding reached a point in which river boats were able to enter Alachua Lake. Paynes Prairie drains into the

Alachua Sink, connecting the park to the vast Floridan Aquifer. The water drains into sinkholes and returns to the aquifer, but if the sinkholes are overwhelmed with drainage or stopped up with debris, the basin fills and does not drain. In the 1920s and 30s, canal systems cut through the

Alachua Savannah and rerouted water coming into the Prairie Basin and the Alachua Sink.

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Construction of US Route 441 and later I-75 divided sections of the land and further altered the ecological balance. These anthropogenic impacts have left their mark on the ecosystem. Through this walking tour, we make different marks on Paynes Prairie. Through emerging technologies users are able to interact in new ways with the complex historical and ecological systems, which overlap and converge in the landscape. Against the scalar topologies which reinforce separations between local and global, postdigital writing engages place as a network and reconnects communities to places of change.

Pastoral

I knew a field named Eurydice, which every field resembles after dark, where we would walk in dawning days, another way of saying youth. That arrow we let fly without a thought, towards blurred significance, had missed the mark. Not to say that our years have a point but are more akin to a bullet hole. The first one I ever saw was in a coyote my grandfather shot. Point of entry, of exit, of no return. A little blood flecked on the fieldgrass. The marks we see are all that’s left behind as evening takes everything, another way of saying night. When I turned to look, she was dust. The field, that is. The field that was. A salt-lick dropped in the dirt behind the little truck. The truck my father got after they took his old man’s keys. He would drive those distant miles to the farm to feed his father’s cows and give them water, the springtime ruins of Alabama filling the cab, bringing the poverty he felt for that field into view. They sold the cows before my grandfather bought the farm, another way of saying died. The grass grew long as the hayrick filled with wasps and then collapsed from rot and gravity, another way for entropy to show its heft, but only with what we leave behind and glance back at as frost stiffens and crumbles beneath the thick-hooved weight of time.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Madison Jones was born in Auburn, Alabama. He received his B.A. in English in 2010 from the University of Montevallo and his M.A. in English in 2014 from Auburn University.

Prior to receiving his Ph.D. in 2020, he published articles in Rhetoric Review, Enculturation,

Kairos, Computers & Composition Online, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and

Environment and coedited the collection Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century

American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature. His article “Sylvan

Rhetorics: Roots and Branches of More-Than-Human Publics” was awarded CCCC/NCTE’s

Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication for 2020. His poetry appears in North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The

Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. His poetry collection, Losing the Dog, is forthcoming from

Salmon Poetry in 2022 and his previous collection, Reflections on the Dark Water, was released by Solomon & George in 2016. In Fall 2020, he will join the faculty at the University of Rhode

Island as an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric/Writing and Natural Resources Science.

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