Rickert, Thomas. “The whole of the Moon: Latour, Context, and the Problem of Holism.” Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 10 July 2016.
See notebook notes. **Really I think Rickert hurts the cause of Critical Theorists by reclaiming the notion of “context.” He identifies Latour’s “plasma” as that from which context emerges.
144: “What is not said here, and what I think we need is a nonsubjective understanding of value, loosely understood, that springs from rhetoricity conceived beyond subject/object, nature/culture, and so on divides.” (***Context?)
142: Is Context a thing? A field of potentiality? 145: Furthermore the ether is objective?
142: “Perhaps, it is again a matter of pushing Latour harder on his basic premises. Context, then, like latour’s hybrid actants, would traverse the divides between nature/culture, mind/body, and body/world.” ***Rickert rejects Latour’s challenge to Modernism. He refuses to jettison the divides. “Further, context is always buoyed up by and derived from an ‘as a whole’ that has (at least) two dimensions. The first is the holistic, material ecology within which things find their roles and actions. This can include what we call ‘subjective’ experience—indeed, it requires it as at least one vector in the contextual fabric. The second, which can be harder to attune ourselves to, might be described as the ‘relation of relations’—the undergirding logos from which things and language emerge in their meaning and bearing. The mention of language is important here; it is often assigned to human being, but in the sense I am using it here, it both involves and transcends human being. Both these dimensions of the ‘as a whole,’ or the chorographic background, are involved with the assemblanges Latour presents, but they also transcend and inflect them.” ***Definitely Rickert rejects “flatness”… He is explicitly injecting “dimensionality” into the discussion again. What is gained by this? What is lost? To whom? Why?
**What when images are the ‘language’?
139: “Latour frequently defines rhetorical power as alliance, so that the strength of a position depends on the connections created.”
(there’s more… look at pink notebook)
147: “This certainly gives us a fair and richer accounting of wine, but it still stops short of rendering the how of the wine or an understanding of our judgment.” ***Rickert doesn’t want method, he wants theory!!!
I’m pretty sure I very mostly disagree with Rickert.
***Here is my year later thinking about this “disagreement.” For one, it seems rather silly to me to conceive of a “non-subjective” context because we have no means but through language to conceive of context or to think about it. Surely I must be missing something and am just very stupid. I understand the value of expanding the notion of agency to include “things.” I do not understand why this necessitates the dissolution of the subject. I think Ricker’t notion of “ambiance” does some interesting work on Latour’s terrible “plasma.”
***Later, later reflection…. So I JUST read the beginning of a review of Rickert’s Acts of Enjoyment and … aw hell… That’s my argument. Kind of. Mostly.
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