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PRACTICE AND THEORY: A NEW APROACH TO

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RHETORICAL DELIVERY

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James Ridolfo

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PRACTICE AND THEORY: A NEW APPROACH TO RHETORICAL
DELIVERY

By

James Ridolfo

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Rhetoric and Writing
2009

ABSTRACT

PRACTICE AND THEORY: A NEW APPROACH TO RHETORICAL DELIVERY
By
James Ridolfo
This project works to build a new understanding of rhetorical delivery from the
experiences, stories, and documents of activists from Ingham County, Michigan. With
little money or resources, activist stories of delivery show how rhetorical theory can grow
out of a desire or necessity to change more with less. The broad range of experiences
discussed by participants represent a wide range of organizations, such as MSU Students
for Economic Justice, Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano De Aztlan, MSU Students for
Peace & Justice, Lansing Direct Action!, and Amnesty International. Findings show that
there are many new ways to expand the theoretical scope and utility of the fifth canon of
delivery. Due to arcane Graduate School imaging and formatting standards, the author

has chosen to remove all images fi'om the library version of his dissertation.

Copyright by
JAMES RIDOLFO
_ 2009

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my partner Janice, my late father, and my mother.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very thankful for the support of many amazing people. My wonderful
committee, Julie Lindquist, Bill Hart-Davidson, Ellen Cushman, and Danielle
DeVoss, my graduate cohort: Qwo-Li, Stacey Pigg, Angela, Donnie, Kendall,
Robyn. Collin, Martine, my family: my mother, late father, and my amazingly
supportive partner Janice. I am also extremely grateful for my participants and
friends: Maggie 0., Maggie R., Triana, Stu, and Todd. Their work helped make
this possible. Thanks also to Sayrah for additional research materials and
support, as well as Malea Powell, Mike McLeod, and Jeff Grabill for being

fantastic colleagues and friends.

PRACTICE AND THEORY: A NEW APPROACH TO RHETORICAL DELIVERY
TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ........................................................................................................... ix

CHAPTER 1
RHETORICAL DELIVERY IN THE LATE AGE OF PRINT .................................... 1

CHAPTER 2
THE RHETORICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF JUDAH MESSER LEON ............ 21

CHAPTER 3
TOWARD A NEW METHODOLOGY FOR THE STUDY OF RHETORICAL
DELIVERY ......................................................................................................... 43

CHAPTER 4
“MY EXPERIENCE IN DISTRIBUTING FLYERS HAS TAUGHT ME SOMETHING
DIFFERENT...:" LEARNING A NEW RHETORIC OF DELIVERY FROM

PRACTICE ......................................................................................................... 69
CHAPTER 5

“EVERYONE TOOK TURNS SPRAYING AND DRYINGI” STORIES OF
DELIVERY AND COLLABORATION: ................................................................. 92
CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 106
REFERENCES ................................................................................... 118

vi

INTRODUCTION

What does the little homing pigeon have to do with rhetorical delivery? In short,
pigeons have always had very little to do with rhetorical theory, but why? Despite their
widespread use as a central communications by the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans,
pigeons remain absent from classical Greek and Roman theories of rhetoricl (Comhill
Magazine, 285). For thousands of years while orators spoke to crowds of citizens, the
pigeons diligently delivered important communications high above cities, trees, and
surrounding armies. A magazine article from 1887 mentions how pigeon
“correspondence... was conveyed in and out of Paris, during the siege of 1871 and for
a time the departure of pigeons-post for Tours (where the letters were enlarged by
photography and sent on to Paris) was regularly advertised by the British Post Office”
(285). Pigeons helped transmit the news into by means of photographs long before the
creation of television or the Internet.

As one of the oldest domesticated animals in the world, pigeons were used to
communicate important events and information. In the time of the Greek rhetoricians,
they were released to communicate the start of the Olympic games to cities. Perhaps
more importantly, the established armies of the world used the pigeon was an important
communications tool, with armies investing large sums of money into their military
pigeons. Indeed one French pigeon flew twelve combat missions in the First World War,

receiving one of the highest of French military honors. According to an article in the

 

' By heritage canon I mean the Greek, Roman, European, and American rhetoric texts

which often have been framed as “The History of Rhetoric.”

1887 edition of the National Review, military pigeons relied on a complex system of
training, transmission monitoring, message verification, and distribution:
The [military pigeon] communication was written on a thin slip of paper and enclosed
in a very small gold box, almost as thin as the paper itself, suspended to the neck of the
bird. The time of arrival and departure was marked at each successive tower, and, for
greater security, a duplicate message was always dispatched a couple of hours after the

first (National Review, 57-5 8)

The military pigeon can be considered one of the most prominent and oldest examples of
complex systems of delivery as a strategy. As recently as 2002 India maintained a pigeon
service for its military. As one of the last governments to maintain a military pigeon
service, India opted to replace the signaling technology of the pigeon for newer
technologies. However as digital technologies continue to replace mainstream
governmental use of a military pigeon service, insurgents engaged in asymmetrical
conflict continue to find a strategic use for pigeons (“Indian”). This insurgent pigeon
delivery strategy was illustrated in the recent USA-Iraq war, where in 2006 Time
Magazine reported that insurgents were using pigeons to signal a mortar attack:
Lately, troops say insurgents have been using a technique called pigeon flipping: while
on patrol, the Marines have noticed flocks of pigeons circling above them, leading them
to conclude that supporters of the insurgents have somehow trained the birds to signal
when troops are in the area. “If it’s a game of cat and mouse,” says Corporal Richard
Bass, “then who’s the mouse?” (Time)
How might the insurgents’ use of the pigeon be understood as rhetorical, and why have

scholars never treated the technology of the pigeon, and other non-oral forms of delivery,

as a strategic use of rhetoric, as a strategic understanding of rhetorical delivery? In this
chapter I argue that contemporary scholars should look more toward the pigeon when
theorizing a rhetoric of delivery. I suggest that the pigeon is not simply a technology of
transmission absent from rhetorical theory: it has a rhetorical potential too, a strategic

advantage for a rhetoric of delivery.

GREEK AND ROMAN RHETORIC

From the texts of the Roman orator Cicero scholars of rhetoric receive fragments
of an argument for rhetorical delivery by the Greek rhetorician Demosthenes. According
to Cicero, when Demosthenes was asked his opinion of what constituted the most
important element of [a] rhetoric, he three times repeated, “delivery, delivery, delivery”
(Duncan, 84), but Demosthenes’ supporting argument has been lost to history. Aristotle’s
argument for delivery remains most prominent, and relegates delivery to a much lower
status.

According to Aristotle, “No systematic treatise upon the rules of delivery has yet
been composed; indeed, even the study of language made no progress till late in the day.
Besides, delivery is—very properly—not regarded as an elevated subject of inquiry”
(120). For Aristotle delivery is worthy of study, but is still not regarded as an elevated
subject of inquiry. In this respect Aristotle regards delivery as important, but certainly not
as important as the philosophical arts. For individuals concerned with the study of
rhetorical delivery, Aristotle says, “It is those who do bear them [the concerns of
delivery] in mind who usually win prizes in the dramatic contests; and just as in drama

the actors now count for more than the poets, so it is in the contests of public life, owing

to the defects of our political institutions” (119-120). In other words delivery is also
pejoratively important in the sense that it owes to the “defects of our political
institutions,” but it has still not been worthy of a “systematic treatise on delivery.” While
composing nothing close to a full treatise on delivery, Aristotle does note three factors
which may limit the success of an oral delivery. According to Aristotle, there are three
things that greatly affect the success of a speech:
It is plain that delivery has just as much to do with oratory as with poetry. It is,
essentially, a matter of the right management of the voice to express the various
emotions—of speaking loudly, softly, or between the two; of high, low, or intermediate
pitch; of the various rhythms that suit various subjects. These are the three things—
volume of sound, modulation of pitch, and rhythm—that a speaker bears in mind. (119)
While Aristotle focuses on the voice, Cicero and Quintilian expand delivery to include
corporeality and gesture. According to Quintilian this concern for movement is based on
the study of physical eloquence:
Delivery is often styled action. But the first name is derived from the voice, the second
from the gesture. For Cicero in one passage speaks of action as being a form of speech,
and in another as being a kind of physical eloquence. None the less, he divides action
into two elements, which are the same as the elements of delivery, namely voice and
movement. Therefore, it matters not which term we employ. (Butler, 243)
Drawing on Quintilian a millennium later the Italian rhetorician Giarnbattista Vico also
includes the elegance of the corporeal as a key component of delivery. In his work the Art
of Rhetoric, Vico states that “one’s stance, which is a certain eloquence of the body... even

though adding happily to delivery, so much that Demosthenes placed it first, is acquired

more by nature and imitation than by any precepts” (Skinner-Linnenberg 207). Vico then
becomes one of the foundational texts for the elocutionist movement of the 18th and 19th
century. At that point in history the elocutionists emerged in Europe, and they equated the
exercise of rhetorical delivery with a form of style.

The meaning of elocution stems from the Latin root elocutio, which is equivalent
to “the word for style, but it literally means ‘speaking out,’ and its English derivative,
‘elocution,’ was adapted as a term for [oral] delivery or reading aloud” (Kennedy, 278).
According to Kennedy the 18th century “interest in elocution flourished most in the
British Isles, where its leading proponent was the Irishman Thomas Sheridan” (Kennedy,
278). Similar to twentieth century etiquette manuals, eighteenth century elocution books
offered a wide variety of advice regarding the conduct of the body:

textbooks listed tropes and schemes for omamenting speeches and provided models,
often in the form of letters, for addressing various audiences in an elegant, genteel style.
Prose and verse passages often were included so that students could practice reading
material aloud. (Skinner-Linnenberg, 49)
Sheridan came to elocutio through the theatre and acting, the course of study Aristotle
says has the most to do with delivery. Kennedy says that in the 18th century the study and
promotion of elocution “began to revive with the effort to achieve high standards of
delivery in preaching and in theater” (Kennedy 278). Another rhetorician of the same
eighteenth and nineteenth century era is Gilbert Austin. According to delivery scholar
Virginia Skinner-Linnenberg, Austin focused on the “creation of a marketing method to
show proper facial expressions, eye contact, hand or bodily action, and stance” for the

purpose of the dramatic. Skinner-Linnenberg explains that Austin wanted to create a

manual for actors and orators, one that could capture the facial expressions and gestures
of classical actors in the time of Shakespeare or Milton (194). The study of elocution then
in the eighteenth century was widely connected with social class, with speaking and
acting to the standard of the ruling bourgeois. According to Nan Johnson, pamphlets such
as those penned by Sheridan and Austin circulated widely among the nineteenth century
English, American, and Canadian bourgeois:
Several elocution treatises achieved wide circulation in Canada and the United States
between 1800 and the early decades of the twentieth century and were recognized by
the academy and the literate public alike as authoritative works on the proper delivery
of speeches and public readings and the rules of pronunciation and conversation. Works
such as Ebenezer Porter’s Analysis of the Principles of Rhetorical Delivery as Applied
to Reading and Speaking (1827), William Russell's American Elocutionist (1844), and
Alexander Melville Bell Principles of Elocution (1878) provided a course in the
rudiments of delivery for the scholar and the "private Ieamer." 20 Influential homiletic
treatises such as Daniel P. Kidder Treatise on Homiletics (l 864) and Austin Phelps's
The Theory of Preaching (1882) offered general principles of delivery as well as
particular hints for pulpit elocution. (Johnson 149)
After the elocutionist movement of the nineteenth century little else was written about the
canon of delivery until the 19603 and 19703.2 After 2400 years, the heritage canon had

not moved far beyond the Greek and Roman configuration of rhetorical delivery as

 

2 I would argue that the genre of the elocution or code of conduct manual continued in the

twentieth century as the etiquette book, and later as books of manners.

equivalent to oral delivery.3 For the heritage canon the major innovation since the time of
Aristotle has been the explicit Roman inclusion of the corporeal, while Aristotle’s
discussion of rhetorical delivery focuses almost exclusively on orality. Neither the Greek
nor Roman traditions leave much room for theorizing delivery in terms of other
technologies, such as the carrier pigeon or the epistle-carrying messenger. For Greek and
Roman rhetoric the assumption that the location of aural reception would be the same as
the location of oral delivery was simply a fact of oral delivery. The conceivable scope of
the rhetorical situation as they conceived it is thus synonymous with audience, time, and
place. One Greek concept durable enough to survive classical oral delivery’s bounded
place-time concerns is the concept of kairos:
an ancient Greek word that means "the right moment'" or "the opportune." The two
meanings of the word apparently come from two different sources. In archery, it refers
to an opening, or "opporttmity" or, more precisely, a long ttmnel-like aperture through
which the archer' s arrow has to pass. Successful passage of a kairos requires, therefore,
that the archer's arrow be fired not only accurately but with enough power for it to
penetrate. (White, 13)
Kairos as a concept for rhetorical delivery necessitates that a rhetorician compose ideas
based on a precise understanding of the materiality, time, and place of a future rhetorical

situation A concern for kairos posits an inventive approach toward issues of delivery. The

 

3 For a far more comprehensive history of rhetorical delivery and the heritage canon, see
the first two chapters in Virginia Skinner-Linnenberg’s book, Dramatizing Writing:

Reincorporating Delivery in the Classroom.

rhetorician must mentally compose the future rhetorical situation as a complex
hypothetical scenario laden with many different inductive potentialities, twists, and turns.
White explains that kairos was also analogous to material practice:
The second meaning of kairos traces to the art of weaving. There it is "the critical time"
when the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp
of the cloth being woven. Putting the two meanings together, one might understand
kairos to refer to a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven
through with force if success is to be achieved. (White, 13)
White argues that for the Greeks Kairos was closely linked with a particular material
practice. This work in turn can perhaps tell scholars something about the knowledge of
rhetorical practice. As a craft, weaving is complex, and one must anticipate future moves.
Each new design poses a unique challenge, and the practice of creation is in turn a form
0f knowledge. John Trimbur notes that delivery today is generally thought about by
Compositionists as “a technical issue about physical presentation whether in oral, print, or
ele<2tronic forms” (Trimbur, Composition, 190). Even for contemporary oral delivery,
hOWever, it is no longer a given that the time, place, delivery medium, and reception will

necessarily be the same for the speaker and the speaker’s audience.

RECENT THEORIES OF DELIVERY IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
In the past twenty years there has been a flurry of new scholarship that re-
e"a.luates delivery in light of changes to the available means of persuasion. The massive
intrcduction of electronic delivery has led not only to new forms of digital delivery, but
11 SO complex strategic combinations with pre-existing forms of analog delivery. For the

fie 1d of rhetoric and composition studies this shift in the available means of persuasion

has prompted the re-examination of the Greek and Roman canons. Consequently, in the
last fifteen years the majority of field scholarship on rhetorical delivery has articulated
the need for new digital conceptualizations of rhetorical delivery. Scholars advocating
this digital reconceptualization have also connected their work to broader political,
ethical, and legal concerns. One of the first was Sheri Helsley in 1993. She argues that
rhetorical delivery has emerged from the confines of classical rhetoric with a new degree
of rhetorical importance in the digital era:
When we interpret delivery as presentation or secondary orality, we do important things
for ourselves and our students. We restore the recursiveness and synthesis originally
envisioned in the interaction of the five rhetorical canons. We move into important
discussions of inevitable technologies and new structures of consciousness in the
electronic age. We expose our students to the power of presentation in both encoding
and decoding -- an issue that has been largely ignored in contemporary education.
(Helsley, 158)
H e l sley draws on Walter Ong’s terminology of a “secondary orality,” and discusses the
the (irization of digital delivery as a form of canon restoration.4 The notion of restoring the
Canon of delivery is common not only to Helsley. Kathleen Welch also has a political
motivation for retheorizing the canon of delivery in the era of the digital. In her 1999
onk Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy, Welch argues

that there are political consequences for the absence of rhetorical delivery from writing

1:‘E-‘J'C‘lflmoks:

4\
Walter Ong’s theories of culture have been widely critiqued by cultural scholars.

In the functions of memory and delivery reside many issues of culture, ideology,
society, and the construction of public and private lives, the last of which is routinely
and tacitly regarded not as a construction at all but palpably, “obviously” as two
separate entities. The elimination of memory and delivery in the majority of student
writing textbooks constitutes the removal of student-written language from the larger

public arena” (Welch, Electric, 145).

Similar to the way the study of delivery as elocution in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century was largely the province of bourgeois education, Welch argues that the absence
of delivery from composition textbooks has real political consequences.
Only a year after Kathleen Welch’s book came out, John Trimbur published his
2000 College Composition and Communication (CCC) article “Composition and the
Circulation of Writing.” Similar to Welch, Trimbur argues for the political significance of
delivery in the age of the digital. Trimbur argues that we need to amplify “the students’
sense of what constitutes the production of writing by tracing its circulation in order to
raise questions about how professional expertise is articulated to the social formation,
how it undergoes rhetorical transformations (or ‘passages of forrn’)” (Trimbur,
Cowposition, 214). In his Marxist-materialist analysis of delivery, Trimbur argues that
the boundaries of delivery should be more broadly considered in relationship to the
means of economic production and distribution:
delivery can no longer be thought of simply as a technical aspect of public discourse. It
II'llrst be seen also as ethical and political—a democratic aspiration to devise delivery

83’ stems that circulate ideas, information, opinions and knowledge and thereby expand

lO

the public forums in which people deliberate on the issues of the day. (Trimbur,

Composition, 190)
He advances that discussions of rhetorical delivery have the potential to explain complex
economic formations relating to the means of production and distribution. Trimbur says
that the “isolation of writing from the material conditions of production and delivery”
should be a critical material concern for compositionists (Trimbur, Composition, 189).
Trimbur advances a Marxist-materialist notion of delivery; one where the study of
delivery can also be synonymous with the study of economics. Trimbur wants the field to
think of the economic activity of delivery, and Kathleen Welch wants the field to think
about the political significance of delivery in the digital age. Across the recent work of
Skinner-Linnenberg, Kathleen Welch, and Trimbur, there is a consistent thread of
technological changes alongside a re-examination of delivery in the wake of its
movement into the realm of the electronic.

A more recent piece of scholarship by Danielle Nicole DeVoss and James Porter
acutely addresses issues of ethics, file sharing, and delivery. In “Why Napster Matters to
Writing” the authors contend that emergent forms of digital delivery have implications

for ethics of composing. DeVoss and Porter argue, “the new digital ethic is characterized
by drastic changes in delivery, and reminds us of the power of delivery” (36). They posit
that changes in the infrastructure and systems of cultural delivery and distribution have a
maj or impact on students’ attitudes toward the composition and delivery of writing.
I-)e\’oss and Porter supplement their discussion of electronic delivery with a heuristic of
what might constitute a rubric for considering digital delivery and distribution. They

make use of the Napster controversy as an example to argue for an “expanded notion of

11

delivery, one that embraces the politics and economics of publishing: the politics of
technology development as they impact production and distribution; the politics of
information” in an ever-unfolding and ever-present digital landscape (25). In addition,
their article provides a highly useful list of criteria to help composition scholars think
about digital delivery and contemporary theories of delivery:
The choice of tools for production and the choice of medium for distribution—aka,
publishing practices—that is, the technical and human methods of production,
reproduction, and distribution of digital “information” (broadly understood to include

audio and video, as well as graphic and textual data);

Knowledge of the systems which govern, constrain, and promote publishing practices—
including public policy, copyright laws and other legislation, technology design and

development, publishing conventions and economic models (both micro and macro);

Awareness of the ethical and political issues that impact publishing practices—that is,
who decides? What policies best serve the interests of society? What constitutes “digital
fair use”? How should content producers be credited for their work? (DeVoss and

Porter, 26)

With a call for economic analysis complimentary to Trimbur’s discussion of delivery,

“le Napster Matters” expands on Trimbur’s discussion of economics and adds a
Specific focus on the ethical dimensions of digital composing and delivery. Similar to
Porter and DeVoss, Doug Eyman argues that new digital research methods and

methodologies are needed to supplement our existing print methodologies.

12

Eyman’s work is important to the field because it is the first scholarly treatment of
rhetorical delivery that asks how researchers can develop “methodologies for research in
digital rhetoric” (10). He argues that there is a critical need for humanities scholars to
know more about the circulation of digital writing:

In a knowledge economy, understanding the interactions of texts and contexts can yield
a more comprehensive picture of interaction than the traditional approach of rhetorical
invention, composition, and delivery; it can also provide a map of the relationships
between work and activity that are often hidden because we simply don't have the
means to uncover them. (8—9)

Eyman provides a wealth of methodological approaches for scholars interested in
studying the overall circulation of a composition, from conference proposals, seminar
papers, web texts, e-mail, SMS texts, and more. He proposes what he terms “circulation
analysis” as a research tool that can “help trace the movement and use of digital texts” in
humanities scholarship (10). Eyman’s dissertation work provides methods for studying
digital ecologies of circulation is a direct alternative to Trimbur’s Marxist-materialist

framework for analyzing the production and distribution of texts. While Helsley,
Kathleen Welch, Trimbur, DeVoss and Porter, and Eyman have focused on digital
delivery, two scholars have also focused on important aspects of contemporary oral
del ivery, Virginia Skinner-Linnenberg and Beverly Sauer.

Skinner-Linnenberg’s 1999 book Dramatizing Writing is the first book in

composition studies to focus solely on delivery. She argues that in “dramath writing,

Students employ both their physicality and their noetic processes, whether they are the

13

writers or the audience” (109). Consequently her focus is on making the composition
classroom a more oral, physical environment of study and learning:
Delivery in the classroom through dramatizing writing aids students to use their bodies
and minds in their writing. With delivery, students can, with the help of others, study
themselves, hear themselves, and see themselves as users of language. (111)
She holds that the dramatic elements of delivery have been lost in the contemporary
composition classroom. She argues that a return of oratory to the composition classroom
is important because such a focus brings into consideration important considerations of
gender in the classroom. Similar to Kathleen Welch and Trimbur, Skinner-Linnenberg
argues that rhetorical delivery involves important questions of ethos (110). She points out
that delivery and gender have been largely absent from classical rhetoric:
Some questions that might be asked here are: were there any women rhetoricians who
espoused a theory of delivery or who even adhered to Cicero's canon? In what ways did
the rhetoric classroom before the separation of speaking and writing differ for women
as compared to men?” (110)
Perhaps the first scholar to begin to answer some of these questions of gender, delivery,
and the classroom is Nancy Welch. In her 2005 College Composition and
Communication essay “Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Post-Publicity Era,”
N ancy Welch discusses the context of a rhetoric seminar she taught during the beginning
of the US-Iraq war in the spring of 2003. Her article focuses specifically on issues of
audience, circulation, and delivery, relating these to what she calls “living room,” or the
r adical decrease in the available room for discussion in public space, coupled with a

Si.grlificant increase in the privatization of everyday space. She says that her work in this

14

area will “add to the growing body of work that has the potential to reorient us from
regarding rhetoric as a specialized techne — the property of a small economic and political
elite — to understanding and teaching rhetoric as a [sic] mass, popular art” (Welch,
“Living Room,” 474). As an example of “teaching rhetoric as a mass popular art” the
article provides a teacher’s account of one politically active undergraduate student named
Katie.

Welch explains how Katie wrote an anti-war poem as part of an assignment. Katie
didn’t simply want to write poems for Welch’s seminar, she wanted to deliver her poetry
to the world beyond the classroom:

I want these poems to be out there, not just in a chapbook where my friends will read
them and say, “Oh, Katie wrote a poem. Isn’t that nice.” (472)

Welch describes her reaction as an instructor when Katie winds up in a police
cruiser with an infraction for tacking her flyer up on a metal utility box. She connects this
legal issue of delivery with a discussion on the shrinking public sphere. Welch argues
that the form of delivery Katie engaged in was legitimate, but “our parks, plazas,
shopping malls, and downtown sidewalks have been locked down against the homeless,
drug dealers, peddlers, and a student like Katie” (473-476). After her initial detainment
by the police Katie decides that in the immediate future she needs to hand-deliver the
poem to people. She decides that anonymously taping up copies on city utility boxes is

not the most effective form of delivery for her poem (486). Welch’s Katie example shows
how a rhetorician can learn from past instances of rhetorical delivery. Welch also
Challenges educators to think about the teaching of rhetorical delivery. In the Katie

example she foregrounds a variety of important legal concerns for certain forms of

15

corporeal delivery, challenging the field to consider a new range of pedagogical
responsibilities surrounding delivery and the body.

Beverly Sauer’s recent work The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in
Hazardous Environments also connects the episteme of the rhetorician with the potential
uncertainty of the argument’s transmission, providing a compelling example for how
situated knowledge relates to delivery. Sauer’s examines about how miners convey
abstract yet highly critical safety information to other miners through gestures. The
delivery of the miners sharply contrasts with how the managers of the mine
communicate:

When miners describe how to insert a roof bolt, they articulate an ordered sequence of
steps: Drill a hole, insert the steel, insert the glue, insert the bolt, and spin the bolt to set
the glue. But their gestures depict different aspects of the process: They can depict
abstract scientific forces like compression or they can demonstrate how to insert a 15 —
or 20-foot cable. They can spread their arms like a wing to show how roof bolts open
inside the strata, or they can imitate the rock itself as it falls. (Sauer, Risk, 256)
Sauer’s focus on the delivery and gesture of miners is a strong example of rhetoric of
practice that connects complex conversations of risk and uncertainty with situated acts of
rhetorical delivery. Her work provides an important way to think about the form of
delivery as a series of situated choices in medium and genre.
The recent conversation on delivery in rhetoric and composition studies includes
an early call for a rethinking of delivery for political reasons (Helsley, Kathleen Welch,
and Trimbur), a call for the study of specific aspects of digital delivery and research

(DeVoss and Porter, Eyman), and also includes a renewed discussion on the body and

16

delivery (Skinner-Linnenberg, Nancy Welch, Sauer), as well as the legal aspects of
delivery (DeVoss and Porter, Nancy Welch). Sauer, Nancy Welch, and Eyman also
provide a glimpse into the situated study of rhetorical delivery. Similar to Beverly Sauer
and Nancy Welch, the project of this dissertation is to develop a practice-driven approach

to the study of rhetorical delivery.

WHY DELIVERY, WHY NOW?

Why begin to rethink delivery at this particular historical moment? According to
media theorist Peter Grusin there is a “double logic according to which media
(particularly but not exclusively digital media) refashion prior media forms... Video and
computer games... remediate film by styling themselves as ‘interactive movies,’
incorporating standard Hollywood cinematic techniques” (Grusin, 1). Similar to how
scholars of rhetorical delivery today are in a unique place to appreciate the range of
choice for delivery, Bolter and Grusin argue that scholars can also appreciate trends in
remediation “because of the rapid development of new digital media and the nearly as
rapid response by traditional media” (Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 6). Bolter and
Grusin also argue that the tension between mediums is found in both Greek and Roman
culture:

The Greeks and Romans conceived of their technology of alphabetic writing on papyrus
roll in a dialectic tension with the oral tradition that writing only partly replaced.
Ancient prose, even philosophy and history, was often highly rhetorical, as if the

Writing were still trying to imitate and improve on oral presentation. The shift from

17

codex to papyrus roll was less problematic, with the result that the codex remediated the
roll almost out of existence in a few centuries (Bolter and Grusin, Writing Space, 23—4).
When applied to existing notions of rhetorical delivery Bolter and Grusin’s ideas help to
explain why a theory of delivery for the Greeks remained firmly rooted in oral rhetorics.
In Bolter and Grusin’s second book Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the
Remediation of Print, they continue to expand on the specific relationship between
remediation and technologies for writing:
Remediation is not limited to technologies of writing. . .. [They] have examined the
ways in which new visual media, such as computer graphics, virtual reality, and the
World Wide Web, define themselves by borrowing from, paying homage to, critiquing,
and refashioning their predecessors, principally television, film, photography, and
painting (23-24).
The relevance of Bolter and Grusin’s main point on this dialectic between mediums is
significant, and its importance will become clear for rhetorical delivery in the next
section on contemporary theories of delivery.

The work of Bolter and Grusin also challenge scholars of rhetoric to think about
historical moments where the gears of remediation didn’t immediately translate into a
breakthrough in rhetorical theory. Remediation happened before, but why hasn’t
technological remediation been accompanied by significant changes to how rhetorical
theory approaches the topic of delivery? As part of my contribution to the project of
rethinking rhetorical theories of delivery for the 21” century, in chapter two I will look at
a missed opportunity for rhetorical theory, a historical moment where there was

significant potential to rethink rhetorical delivery.

18

In the next chapter I look at a missed opportunity for a more inclusive theory of
rhetorical delivery, a little known 15th century Italian rhetorician and rabbi who wrote the
first ever Hebraic treatise on rhetoric, The Book of Honeycombs F low. Judah Messer
Leon was the first scholar of rhetoric to synthesize Greek, Roman, and Islamic rhetorics
into a Hebraic context. His book of rhetoric was also one of the first three books to ever
be published on the Hebrew printing press (Lesley; Bonfil; Rabinowitz).

I use the example of Messer Leon to revisit an important piece of rhetorical
scholarship at the time of the early printing press, and ask specific questions about
rhetoric, delivery, and changes in technology. Based on the technological milieu of the
Leon’s time, I theorize that Messer Leon stood a better chance than most for re-theorizing
rhetorical delivery. Why didn’t Judah Messer Leon respond to the technological
innovations of his time in the same excited manner that scholars of rhetoric today are
reinterpreting rhetorical theory? How might a 15th century missed opportunity to re-
theorize rhetorical delivery benefit rhetoric scholars today? These questions in turn help
to inform my study design in chapter three, where I look at what contemporary activist
practice can teach scholars of rhetoric about delivery.

As John Trimbur notes “in the modern era... this focus solely on oral rhetoric,
absent of other technologies, is not sustainable as a theory of rhetoric. Public forums are
diffuse, fragmented, and geographically separated. Speech is both literally and
metaphorically broadcast through expanded means of communication” (Trimbur,
Composition, 190). I argue that what is needed in the age of digital and analog delivery is

a new, flexible canon of delivery based on stories of practice, one not limited to the

19

narrow confines of the heritage canon or disparate treatises and “who responded to
whom” in any sense, but stories of delivery situated in moments of rhetorical practice.
My rationale for theorizing delivery from practice is influenced by previous
scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition, particularly the ways that Malea
Powell approaches rhetorical theory by theorizing from instances of practice. Drawing
upon her work, I show that it is also productive to theorize rhetorical delivery from
instances of practice, rather than attempting to navigate inside the narrow theoretical
confines of a particular -- all too often Greek and Roman -- rhetorical tradition. In
chapters four and five I am able to theory build several new concepts: rhetorical velocity,
rhetorical mystification and reconstruction, and rhetorical valuation. In chapter six I
expand on these concepts, and describe a new, comprehensive heuristic for understanding

rhetorical delivery as part of a complex, interconnected series of strategies and activities.

20

CHAPTER TWO: THE RHETORICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF JUDAH

MESSER LEON

In 1475 in Mantua, Italy there were two unique moments for the history of
rhetoric. Abraham the Dyer, proprietor of the earliest-known Hebrew printing press,
published the first Hebraic treatment of rhetoric, the Sefer Nofet Zuphim or The Book of
Honeycombs Flow. The Nofet Zuphim was not only the first book of Hebrew to be
published during the life of its author, Judah Messer Leon, but it was also one of the first
three books ever to be published on the Hebrew printing press. Given the alignment of
these unique historical firsts one would assume that Messer Leon’s work would have had
a more significant impact on the history of rhetoric — and certainly rhetorical delivery ---
but this was not the case. Messer Leon’s work remains obscure, and the story of the
printing of his book exists only in a few Jewish Studies texts or a paragraph’s mention in
a handful of rhetorical texts.l

I examine the significance of a new cultural treatment of rhetoric emerging, for
the first time, on a radical new medium of distribution. My purpose is not simply to
expand the historical catalogue of accounts on rhetorical delivery, but rather to help
inform my own study of delivery in chapters three through five. I show that the story of
Messer Leon and his book of rhetoric has generative importance for contemporary

rhetorical studies, particularly in terms of how scholars might study rhetorical delivery.

 

' Both the story of Messer Leon and the study of rhetorical delivery have existed in only a
small number of texts. Perhaps the former would have had more prominence if

conversations on rhetorical delivery had proceeded differently.

21

His example is significant because it hints at the unknown, at unanswerable questions
about his relationship to rhetorical delivery, and is thus perfect for helping scholars

formulate a rich list of questions for future studies of delivery.
MESSER LEON AND FIFTEENTH CENTURY ITALY

Who was Judah Messer Leon? Mauro Zonta’s Hebrew Scholasticism in the
Fifteenth Century: a History and Source Book provides a lengthy, comprehensive
summary of the rabbi, doctor, and teacher:2

Judah ben Yehiel Messer Leon (c. 1425-1498) worked in some of the main cultural
centres of fifteenth century Italy as a physician, philosopher and teacher of philosophy.
He wrote various works on Hebrew grammar, rhetoric and Biblical exegesis. Possibly
born in Montecchio Maggiore (now in the Italian province of Vicenza), tradition has it
that he was given the title ‘messer’ by the Emperor Fredrich III in 1450, as a reward for
his work as a physician. In the years around 1450, he directed a Jewish academy
(yeshivah) in Ancona. In this academy, which was to follow him in his various places of
residence, he lectured on Jewish traditional texts as well as on non-Jevvish texts. He

taught various subjects — especially Aristotelian logic and physics.3 (209)

 

2 I cannot provide a better summary of these biographical facts, so I provide more lengthy
quotations when needed.
3 Zonta also says that Messer Leon moved around several times:
Between 1456 and 1472 he lived in Padua and Bologna, where it is possible that he
attended courses in medicine and philosophy at the local Universities. He is said to

have received the title of doctor from the Emperor in Padua in 1469. After a short

22

Fifteenth century Italy was a time period that featured great academic and cultural
change, and these changes are apparent in the life and work of Messer Leon. The second
half of the fifteenth century ushered in an Italian intellectual resurgence of Maimonides
and Aristotle. In addition, there was large diversity amongst different Jewish immigrant
groups. Arthur Lesley describes the decentralized authority of fifteenth-century, Jewish
Italy:
At this time, small, new and unorganized Jewish communities were appearing in many
places north of Rome. These communities were created by the granting of short-term
contracts by towns or princes to small Jewish loan-bankers and their households. The
Jews were heterogeneous, immigrants from France, Provence, Germany, Spain, the
Levant, and southern Italy. Each group had its distinctive daily language, communal
practices, school traditions, religious and legal authorities, and the competition between
claimants for communal and intellectual authority called into the question the
legitimacy of all leadership. (“Review,” 105-106)
Fifteenth century Italy also faced an influx of new philosophical texts from the
scholastics. While texts such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric had been studied and preserved by
the Islamic scholars al-Farabi and Averroes in the tenth and twelfth century, Aristotle’s

works were not translated into Latin until the fifteenth century (Tirosh-Samuelson,

 

stay in Venice, he was in Mantua from 1473 to 1475, where Abraham F arissol
(perhaps one of his students) worked for him as a scribe. Messer Leon was surely in
Naples after 1480 and, according to a conjecture by Israel Rabinowitz, after 1495 he

fled to Monastir (now Bitula, in Macedonia), where he died. (209-210)

23

“Jewish Philosophy,” 514). Messer Leon is part of the first generation of Italian scholars
to study and engage with the works of Aristotle and the Islamic commentator Averroes.
Scholar of Italian-Jewish history Hava Tirosh-Samuelson says that Messer Leon
was the “the person most responsible for the revival of Aristotelianism among Italian
Jews,” and that Messer Leon wanted Italian Jews to study Aristotelian logic (“Jewish
Philosophy,” 514). In addition, this mixing of culture in Italy wasn’t limited to rhetorical
and philosophical texts. The mid-fifteenth century was also a time of greater freedom for
Italian Jews. According to Jewish Studies scholars Margolis and Marx, “despite papal
bulls and canonical discrimination, Jews in Italy freely associated with Christians” (481).
Historian Van Bekkum also argues that the spirit of the Renaissance afforded greater
opportunity to Italian Jews:
In the main cities of Italy we discern a general social rapprochement between Jews and
Christians which brought about a gradual loosening of religious observance on the one
hand; on the other, however, this rapprochement removed many factors that historically
had led Jews to conversion. It was possible for Jews to have social contacts with Italian
society at large without abandoning their Jewish tradition and faith totally—a true form
of acculturation. Renaissance Italy was therefore a remarkable exception in Jewish
existence. (240)
But Historian Gianfranco Miletto explains that this “free association” required significant

rhetorical work:

Rhetoric became a means for advancing the authority of the Rabbis inside the [Italian
Jewish] community, and at the same time it facilitated a kind of cultural equality,

putting the Rabbis on the same level as Christian scholars.4 (133)

Messer Leon provides an example of this newfound acculturation and the integration it
facilitated. He was the first Italian Jew to receive the honor of being able to confer
doctoral status, and was also the first Jew to wear the red hood, the mainstream Italian
Medieval dress for medical practitioners, in public. This intercultural engagement was
not without its share of personal difiiculty, and Messer Leon was accused of assimilation
for donning the red hood:
Many Jews at the time were quick to accuse their Jewish adversaries of behaving like
Christians, of having become assimilated, of not being sufficiently orthodox in their
behavior, in their cultural interests and so on and so forth. Thus it was that Leonde di
Vitale (1420 c. 1495), the medical doctor and learned rabbi usually known as Messer
Leon, was accused of assimilation because he adopted the custom of wearing the red

“hood,” the distinctive dress of medical practitioners. (Bonfil, “Jewish Life,” 103)

 

4 Miletto also says that this is why Messer Leon wrote the Nofet Zuphim:

In the introduction to Nofet [sic] sufim, Messer Leon claims that he was urged to
compose his work at the insistence of Jewish medical students who had requested a
rhetorical handbook. The great merit of Messer Leon lies in having recognized the
cultural-social function of rhetoric for both intracommunal relations and the external

relations with the Christians. (133)

25

While mid-fifteenth to sixteenth century Mantua was more tolerant of Jews than most
places in Europe, it should also be noted that less than twenty years after the publication
of the Nofet Zuphim the Spanish expelled, forcibly converted, or killed all the Jews from
neighboring Sicily and Sardinia.
MESSER LEON AND HIS EDUCATIONAL REFORMS
While Messer Leon engaged with the dominant Catholic culture, a considerable
amount of his scholarly effort went into educational reforms, which he focused on Jewish
institutions. Jewish and Rhetoric Studies scholar Arthur Lesley explains that Messer
Leon’s books of logic, rhetoric, and grammar were written for “yeshiva students in the
14505” (“Sefer,” 314). Lesley speculates that the Nofet Zuphim was also written to serve
this purpose: “My own opinion, as sketched earlier, is that the rhetoric was written for
yeshiva students in the 14503, along with the logic and grammar” (314). Messer Leon’s
reforms changed the nature of the yeshiva, which in the past had been a place of
Talmudic learning:
Messer Leon did not explain the principles of his teaching system in his theoretical
works, but it is evident from his writings that he conceived the tripartite structure of his
teaching method in accordance with the medieval trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and
logic)... Ideally, whoever was educated at his school distinguished himself by his
encyclopedic knowledge, his skills in oratory, and the stylistic elegance of his writings.
(Miletto, 133)
Similar to the trivium of Peter Ramus and his French educational reforms of the early

sixteenth century, Messer Leon also sought to achieve major curricular reforms. The

26

purpose of Messer Leon’s educational reforms was to prepare his yeshiva students to

engage with both Jewish and Christian society.

MESSER LEON AND POLITICAL CONTROVERSIES
Messer Leon’s life was not without significant controversy, and in his lifetime he
had extensive political ambitions in the Italian Jewish world. According to Robert Bonfil
“some fierce and agitated polemics have survived in which Messer Leon tried to impose
his rabbinic authority on his fellow Jews in sensitive areas of every-day custom as well as
intellectual activity” (“Nofet Suphim” VI). Historian Moses Shulvass also explains some
of Messer Leon’s most famous controversies, particularly Messer Leon’s ambition to
become the chief rabbinical authority of Italy:
The absence of a general organization, coupled with a pressing need for organized
religious guidance, especially in view of the heightened Jewish immigration from
Germany and France, may have induced Messer Leon to make his single handed
attempt at achieving unity. . .. He failed because of the bitter opposition by a number of
prominent Italian rabbis who recoiled from the very idea of rabbinic domination that
would limit the authority of local rabbis.5 (98-99)
Messer Leon tried to achieve this dominance by “promulgating a number of
ordinances with a demand that every Italian community obey them under threat of

excommunication” (98). Arthur Lesley explains how there were considerable

 

5 Messer Leon wanted to create a more rigid rabbinic hierarchy for Italy

27

philosophical and religious disagreements between the various Jewish communities in
fifteenth century Italy:
Jews from Spain, Provence, and Italy would recognize Maimonidean legal code,
Maimonidean or Averroistic scholasticism, and Kabbalah. Jews from Germany and
France had a different authoritative legal code and a different pietistic and mystical
tradition. Experts on a particular body of texts would not be recognized as authorities by
those who came from competing traditions. (“Review,” 106)
Messer Leon needed to reach a culturally and geographically diverse audience. This
circulation of decrees and ordinances was similar to the rhetorical activities of the F orli
Congress, ”a fully representative organization that would try to regulate the inner life of
Italian Jewry and its relationships with external forces that affected its destiny of the early
14th century,” which also “promulgated” its authority by decrees (96). Messer Leon used
this strategy of circulation to advocate a new religious legalism in Italy. This new
legalism came from the rising religious influence of the Ashkenazim6 in the north of
Italy, where Messer Leon looked for his understanding of religious matters and halakha7:
Messer Leon appears to be strongly influenced by Ashkenazi ways of learning and of
deciding normative matters, and eager to diffuse these among Italian Jews. Similarly he
seems interested in protecting the Ashkenazi Jews then settling in Italy from the
pernicious influences of philosophical ideas already common in Italy but hardly known

among German Jews. (Bonfil, Nofet Zuphim,” VII)

 

6 Jews descended from traditions traced back to Germanic communities

7 Jewish religious law

28

According to Tirosh-Samuelson Messer Leon wanted “to ensure that Jewish philosophers
would devote their energies to logic” (“Jewish Philosophy,” 515). In the Ashkenazi
tradition there was a prohibition against “reading Gersonides’ commentary on the
Pentateuch,” and Messer Leon attempted to extend this prohibition to Italian Jews
through a ban on Gersonides’ commentary (Bonfil, VII). Messer Leon attacked
Gersonides “denial of God’s knowledge of particulars,” a highly controversial religious
argument even today (Tirosh-Samuelson, “Messer Leon,” 347) Messer Leon’s ban
included potentially censoring the very same press that published the Nofet Zuphim:
Of the six books known to have been produced by his press from 1476 to 1480, with
care and skill and grace, lads us into the heart of the man, to whom law travel history
and exegesis, astronomy and rhetoric were equally dear: [Conat’s press published] The
legal code ‘Path of Life’ the traveler’s tales of Eldad the Danite, the popular version of
Josephus, Rabi Levi ben Gerson’s commentary on the Pentateuch, an astronomical table
by Mordecai F inzi and “The Droppings of the Honeycomb,” by Rabbi Judah ben
Yehiel, the first Hebrew book published in the lifetime of its author. (Amram, 31)

At his yeshiva Messer Leon fired a teacher who dared to teach the banned texts of
the twelfth century theologian Gersonides, and he also used his extensive rabbinical
influence to threaten excommunication to anyone who published or read the book
(Tirosh-Samuelson, “Jewish Philosophy,” 515; Bonfil, “Jewish Life,” 255). Robert Bonfil
argues that this censorship shows that Messer Leon was conscious of the power of the
printing press:

The prohibition directed principally towards the Ashkenazi communities, on reading

Gersonides’ commentary on the Pentateuch. In these struggles Messer Leon appears at

29

COI

lies

I135

Proi

first sight to be strongly rooted in medieval trends of thought, but at the same time,

conscious of the possibilities that printing offered of spreading new ideas and

influencing people. (“Nofet Zuphim,” VII)
Messer Leon’s attempt to influence the philosophic and religious makeup of Jews in Italy
was also not a firll success. Tirosh-Samuelson posits that the influx of Spanish and
Provencal immigrants may have also hampered his efforts (Tirosh-Sarnuelson, 515).

Arthur Lesley argues that Gersonides’ commentary found support among many
Italian Jews (“Sefer,” 314). Messer Leon tried to promote a number of texts in place of
Gersonides, including “the publication of Jacob ben Asher’s T urim, which Ashkenazi
Jews accepted as authoritative” (314). In addition he also wrote a number of
commentaries on Yediach Bedersi’s Bechinat 01am (The Examination of the Universe)
and on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed” (Tirosh-Samuelson, “Jewish Philosophy,”
451). Messer Leon has the distinct honor of not only being the first living author to
publish on the Hebrew printing press, but also the first to censor the printing press. He
appears not to have been successful in censoring the book on the press of Avraham Conat
the Dyer (Amram, 31).
Messer Leon would not be the last to restrict the Hebrew printing of books in

Italy. Less than half a century after the death of Messer Leon, the Ferrara Congress of
Italy also sought to impose restrictions on the publication of certain Hebrew books:

A problem of special concern... became central at the last [F errara] congress... the

question of publication of Hebrew books. The decision of the Ferrara congress of

1554... required rabbinic and communal endorsement of every new book prior to

publication. (Shulvass, 98)

30

Did the F errara Congress learn from the political example of Messer Leon? If so, what
did they learn, and what might rhetoric scholars of today learn? I argue that this example
of censorship should be taken into consideration when evaluating Messer Leon’s
understanding of rhetorical delivery. While this instance would not fall under the purview
of Greek or Roman rhetorics, it is arguably a powerful example for contemporary
theories of rhetoric because it hints at a strategic understanding of how a rhetorician in a

campaign context understands the persuasive potential of a new form of delivery.

THE NOFE T Z UPHIM: THE BOOK OF HONEYCOMBS’ FLOW

Several scholars (Bonfil; Rabinowitz; Tirosh-Samuelson; Popkin) discuss how the

Nofet Zuphim is a composite of Greek, Roman, and Islamic rhetorics. Robert Bonfil also
speculates that the newness of the medium itself held particular rhetorical importance.
Bonfil theorizes that “even if one only considers its physical appearance, one can easily
imagine the delighted excitement of contemporaries presented with what seemed to be a
codex written simultaneously by ‘many calami [quills] and not at all miraculously’, as the
printer enthusiastically boasted in the colophon” (Bonfil, “Nofet Zuphim,” V). In
addition, Popkin describes the book as “a Hebrew translation of Averroes' Middle
Commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric, together with the Latin writings of Cicero,
Quintilian, and others” (109). Robert Bonfil describes the order of the Nofet Zufim as a
four-part treatise on the subject of rhetoric:

In the first part Messer Leon deals with the definition of rhetoric, its purpose,

importance, the different kinds of speech as regards the different kinds of public, and

the characteristics of the ideal orator. In the second part he discusses the different types

31

of speeches as regards their content. In the third part the author presents the emotional
traits of the orator as these are expressed in the different kinds of speeches, while the

past part deals with the rhetorical figures (devices). (“Nofet Zuphim,” IX)

In each section Messer Leon largely presents these texts as they are in the classical
versions, but he significantly re-contextualizes them through biblical exegesis and
pastiche. James Murphy argues that because of this pastiche the book symbolizes “a new
combination of secular classical learning and scriptural exegesis for the education of
Jewish professionals in Italy” (Murphy, 161). In his use of pastiche Messer Leon is the
first known Hebraist to “compose a Hebrew treatise on rhetoric based upon the Bible
rather than on Greek and Latin sources” (Frank, 229). In addition, Zinberg discusses how
Messer Leon drew from the Hebrew Bible because Messer Leon wanted to “show that in
the reahn of style and oratory the prophets and Biblical historians must be acknowledged
as the supreme masters“ (40). The Nofet Zuphim is a complex Biblical argument for the
study of Greek, Roman, and Islamic rhetorics, Messer Leon argues that rhetorical study
has a foundation in the Hebrew bible.
Tirosh-Samuelson explains how these biblical excerpts were remixed with

classical rhetoric texts:

[Quotations] are either cited verbatim or else paraphrased, and their concepts,

arguments, and rhetorical vocabulary are rendered in Hebrew for the sake of providing

that classical rhetoric, along with the rest of human wisdom, already existed in the

divinely revealed Hebrew Bible. (“The Book of the Honeycomb’s,” 235)

32

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While this remixing and pastiche may not be original to Messer Leon, the Nofet Zuphim
provides another kind of example for contemporary rhetoric, a complex cultural remix of
Quintilian and Averroes. Robert Bonfil posits that the pastiche of texts from different
traditions creates a “rather indeterminate flavour, a mélange of late medievalism and of
the ingenuous, almost audacious, freshness of a new age hesitantly feeling its way” (V). I
would add to Bonfil’s reading that perhaps the greatest lasting legacy of the Nofet Zuphim
is its later circumstance of delivery on the press of Avraham Conat. The publication of
the Nofet Zuphim itself has the rhetorical potential to question the very rhetorical theory

within its pages.

RHETORICAL DELIVERY IN THE NOFE T Z UPHIM

What does Messer Leon say about delivery? In the Nofet Zuphim he devotes
chapter twelve to the study of rhetorical delivery. While largely summarizing the theories
of rhetorical delivery found in Aristotle, Cicero, Averroes, and Quintilian, his discussion
focuses predominantly on the examples of oral delivery found in the Hebrew Bible.
Messer Leon says that delivery has been awarded [by God] “the strong rod and the
beautiful staff [Jen 48:17];” (Rabinowitz, 127). Following the lead of Cicero and
Quintilian, Messer Leon concludes that there are two categories of delivery:

either of physical representations, or of sounds and tones. Of physical representations,
some are of the whole body, some are of parts of the body, such as the hands, face, and

head, these being the most often used in oratory. (Rabinowitz, 1 19)

33

As a restatement of classical rhetoric, this text is not new, however his careful use of
pastiche from biblical sources is fascinating. At the end of chapter twelve he provides the
following examples to show how the study of rhetorical delivery already existed ---- a
priori Aristotle and Cicero --- in the text of the Hebrew Bible:
There can be no doubt that the main rules of delivery are clearly expounded by the Holy
Books. As for qualities of voice, the prophet Isaiah, upon whom be peace, says: Cry
aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a horn, and declare unto my people their
transgression,” etc. [Isa. 58:1]. He here points out that the voice, when expressing
reproof, should be loud. By the same token, on the other hand, the voice of the
unfortunate and of suppliants ought to be subdued, as was said: And brought down
thou shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust; and
thy voice shall be as of a ghost out of the ground, etc. [Isa 29:4] Likewise: “It is not
the voice of them that cry for being overcome, neither is it the voice of them that
shout for mastery, but the voice of them that sing do I hear” [Exod. 32: 1 8].8
(Rabinowitz, 129)
Through his analysis of Isaiah, Messer Leon is able to coax out the rules for control of the
voice. The Isaiah example also provides an image of the countenance of the body. Messer
Leon is thus able to reason Cicero and Quintilian’s rules for oral delivery come from the

story of the prophet.

 

8 The text in bold indicates where Rabinowitz has bolded biblical quotations used by

Messer Leon.

34

On the subject of written delivery Messer Leon only addresses the issue in a
single passage, 3 small but significant clue that he did spend some time considering the
relationship of writing to rhetorical delivery:

The Philosopher also says: “And you should realize that while suggestion-of-
countenance is not needed in written rhetorical pieces, it is certainly a necessity
in discourses pronounced face-to-face,” etc. He further says: “Suggestion-of-
countenance is of greatest advantage in controversial speeches, since where
there is debate the speaker really needs the help of all the devices which yield

persuasion in order to bring off the victory. (Rabinowitz, 121)

Messer Leon’s understanding of written rhetorical pieces is that there is less need for self-
control. He under-stands that there is a difference in the written versus oral delivery of a .
polemical text. For Messer Leon the oral delivery of the polemic requires bodily control,
countenance. One wonders what sort of bodily countenance Messer Leon had when the
Duke of Mantua banished him for quarrelling with Rabbi Joseph Kolon at approximately
the same time that the Nofet Zuphim was published:
Alas, for the author of the [Nofet Zuphim] ‘Drippings of the Honeycomb.’ He attempted
to apply to Scripture the rules and terminology of classical rhetoric as found in the
writings of Cicero and Quintilian. How could such heresy be countenanced? Rabbi
Joseph Kolon, staunch pillar of traditionalism, soon took up the cudgels against the
innovator. . .Hardly was the book finished when a quarrel with Kolon compelled the
Duke of Mantua, Lodovico Gonzaga II. . .to save himself from the irnportunities of the

wrangling theologians by exiling them both. (Amram, 31)

35

Messer Leon’s banishment fiom Mantua was a significant punishment. Israel Zinberg
describes Mantua at the time as “the place where the most brilliant representatives of
Italian Renaissance culture assembled” (96). Was Messer Leon still present when his
book was published on the press of Avraham Conat the Dyer or was he already in exile?
Isaac Rabinowitz argues that he was likely still in Mantua:
Although the edito princeps of the NS [Nofet Zuphim] does not indicate the year and
place of its printing, we know from those of Conat’s imprints which do bear such
indications that the place was definitely Mantua, and that the year, which cannot be later
than early in 1476, was most probably 1475. Thus the probability is very great that JML
must still have been residing in Mantua when Conat first began to print the NS. He
undoubtedly knew that Conat had made a manuscript copy of his book, and he may
have known of Conat’s intention, through the newly available printing process, to issue
the work in multiple copies. (Rabinowitz, xxx)
Given that Messer Leon was likely in Mantua at the time when Avraham Conat published
the Nofet Zuphim, what was Messer Leon’s role in its publication? What was his
knowledge and potential involvement in the publication of the Nofet Zuphim, and what

might be the rhetorical significance of his practice for scholars today?

MESSER LEON AND THE PUBLICATION OF THE NOFE T Z UPHIM

Did Messer Leon have a role in the publication of his work? If so, how might he
have considered the role of the printing press in relationship to his own rhetorical theory?
AS I have already discussed in the previous section, Messer Leon wanted to expand the

scope of his religious authority to include a much broader region. In addition he also

36

sought the suppression of the circulation of Gersonides’ commentary on the Pentateuch,
perhaps even on the same printing press which first published the Nofet Zuphim.

Scholars of Messer Leon have disagreed on the role Messer Leon may have had
surrounding the publication of the Nofet Zuphim. Robert Bonfil argues that Messer Leon
had a role (xxi-xxi), while Isaac Rabinowitz contends that Messer Leon had no known
direct knowledge his work was being published by Avraham Conat. Rabinowitz argues
that because there were considerable errors made by Conat, Messer Leon would not have
allowed such a volume to go to press:

It is certain, nevertheless, that JML [Judah Messer Leon], for all that he was the original
author of the NS, played no part whatever in its production as a printed book: be
neither edited it nor corrected it in proof. Comparison of the text of Menahem De’
Rossi’s manuscript copy — based, it will be remembered, on the earlier copy made by
Conat — with that of the incunabulurn edition, shows clearly that Conat, in the course of
printing the volume, made many errors both of omission and of commission, errors that
JML would never have overlooked or allowed to stand had be anything to do with

seeing the work through the press. (Rabinowitz, xxx-xxxi)

Rabinowitz’s argument that because there are errors in Conat’s printed manuscript means
that Messer Leon had zero involvement in its publication role seems possible, but does
not appear powerful enough to rule out a lesser degree of involvement. Perhaps Messer
Leon did know the Nofet Zuphim was being published, but perhaps he could not see the
work through to print due in part to the political circumstances that lead to his soon after

CXplll sion from Mantua?

37

In her review of Isaac Rabinowitz’s book Hava Tirosh-Samuelson argues that it
is still possible that Messer Leon’s politics did have something to do with the publication
of the Nofet Zuphim on the printing press. While not directly addressing Rabinowitz’s
argument about manuscript errors, she does imply that Messer Leon may have had some
degree of involvement in the publication of his book:

Little attempt is made to relate Messer Leon’s political activities to his decision to
publish a manual on rhetoric. No mention is made, for example, of the tension within
the Italian Jewish community, of Messer Leon’s leaning towards the Ashkenazic legal
system, especially rabbinic ordination, or of the impact of the newly-invented printing
press on Jewish learning, all of which are relevant to his decision to publish Nophet

Suphim. (“The book of the Honeycomb’s,” 237-238)

On the other hand, Arthur Lesley agrees with Rabinowitz in that it is unlikely Messer
Leon had anything to do with the editorial process of the Nofet Zuphim, but he says the
motives for publishing must be separated from any involvement with the editing of the
text:
Suggestion would be convincing if Rabinowitz had not taken note of a manuscript of
The Book of the Honeycomb ’s Flow that is both earlier than and superior to the printed
version. He concludes that Messer Leon ‘almost certainly had no hand in the editorial
operations’ that determined the form of the printed text. As a result of this new
consideration, the date and motives for the printing of the book must be separated fi'om
the date and motives for its composition... Then, when several Latin rhetorics were first
printed in the early 14705, the printer Abraham Conat took advantage of the availability

01 the text, without authorization, to offer for sale a Hebrew counterpart, by an eminent

38

local scholar. There is, of course, need for additional evidence on the subject. (“Sefer,”

314)
While there is agreement between Bonfil, Lesley, Rabinowitz, and Tirosh-Samuelson that
Messer Leon likely knew about the publication of his text, there is no current evidence to
determine his degree of involvement beyond Rabinowitz’s and Lesley’s conclusion that
he was likely not involved in the editorial process of the first printed edition.
Furthermore, Arthur Lesley also advances that on this matter ”the scarcity of documents
indicates caution” (“Review,” 106). This then leaves scholars of history and rhetorical
delivery with a number of unanswered questions. I argue, however, that these
unanswered questions may hold the potential to help scholars of rhetoric think about the

study of delivery today.

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

While it is clear that further research is needed to determine what, if any, role
Messer Leon had in the printing of his manuscript, it is likely, based on the Gersonides
controversy, that he did indeed understand the power of the printing press as a vehicle for
distribution. Messer Leon’s censorship of Gersonides’s commentary and the circulation
of decrees show that he was thinking about textual delivery on a broad, regional level. In
addition, in the Nofet Zuphim itself he considers the Aristotelian relationship of
countenance to the delivery of writing. James Murphy argues that, based on his reading
of Rabinowitz, Messer Leon may have made strategic choices in terms of how he

circulated his various manuscripts:

39

Messer Leon completed a Hebrew work on grammar in 1454, The Pavement of
Sapphire, and a Hebrew treatise on logic, Perfection of Beauty, in 1455, so that The
Honeycomb’s Flow (completed by 1471) rounds out a treatment of the traditional
trivium. As Rabinowitz points out, Messer Leon circulated all these works publicly
while he reserved six of his other writings for private use by smaller circles. (Murphy,
161)
Murphy argues that Messer Leon strategized differently the delivery of texts for specific
audiences, but this sort of thinking is not directly reflected in the Nofet Zuphim. While
today this sort of thinking would indeed be considered rhetorical, at the time of the Nofet
Zuphim this type of thinking did not fall under the explicit purview of the Greek, Roman,
or Islamic thinkers Messer Leon synthesized. How then should historical stories such as

these be considered in light of a contemporary theory of rhetorical delivery?

THE USE OF MESSER LEON IN PRESENT DAY SCHOLARSHIP

The story of Messer Leon is ideal for helping contemporary scholars of rhetoric
study current rhetorical practice. Specifically, I argue that the very questions Messer
Leon’s example raises, are the very questions one would want to pose to current
practitioners of rhetoric, particularly for those involved in engaging with larger power
structures. Similar to the time of Messer Leon, this historical moment is also one of
significant technological changes in the means of delivery. I argue that it is precisely the

unknown aspects of Messer Leon’s story that are the most valuable for contemporary

scholars of delivery. The following unanswered questions provide the ideal base for

interviewing practitioners to learn more about rhetorical delivery:

1. What did Messer Leon learn from his own rhetorical practice?

2. How did Messer Leon understand the rhetorical significance of Conat’s printing
press?

3. How did Messer Leon understand these different rhetorical traditions (Greek,
Roman, Islamic) in relationship to his own political practice?

4. What was Messer Leon’s involvement in the printing of the Nofet Zuphim?

5. Involvement or no involvement, did he think the publication of his book by
“many calami” (many quills) was politically and/or rhetorically significant?

6. What knowledge did he learn from the circulation of decrees and the printing of
his book?

7. How did the choice of writing the Nofet Zuphim in Hebrew both restrict and

enable the delivery of the text?

From these questions I locate the driving question and rhetorical precedent for my
qualitative study: what does a rhetorician learn from her or his rhetorical delivery? I call
the rhetorical research involved in answering this question rhetorical reconstruction.
Rhetorical reconstruction is an attempt to understand another rhetorician’s strategy of
delivery, to discover what another rhetorician has been strategizing. Unlike much of the
heritage canon, the story of Messer Leon provides the field of rhetoric and composition
studies the precedent to ask important questions about how the intent, the strategy of the

rhetorician impacts our understanding of rhetorical delivery. The question of intent also

41

allows us to ask additional questions about what a rhetorician may have learned about a
past instance of rhetorical delivery. The Messer Leon mystery provides a precedent to
build a study that focuses on investigating questions of intent and knowledge. As I
discussed in the first chapter there is little scholarship in rhetorical studies on delivery,
and even less that discusses the everyday strategic practice of delivery. Messer Leon and
the Nofet Zuphim is an ideal place for me to start generating research questions because
the book exists at the intersection of cultures, technologies of delivery, and also happens

to involve a formidable rhetorician.

42

CHAPTER THREE: TOWARD A METHODOLOGY FOR THE STUDY OF
RHETORICAL DELIVERY

In the first chapter I looked at the historical and current field conversations on
rhetorical delivery. In the second chapter I examined the story of a Jewish rhetorician,
Judah Messer Leon, a story that yields useful for studying contemporary rhetorical
delivery. Judah Messer Leon’s historical narrative calls attention to the importance of the
relationship between a rhetor’s intent for and delivery of a particular text. The dearth of
historical evidence seemingly begs contemporary scholars to wonder what he might have
reflexively learned from his rhetorical practice. This historical episode has in turn
provided me with the exigence to design my qualitative study, a study where I further
investigate the ways rhetoricians’ intentions relate to their understanding of rhetorical
delivery. From the example of Messer Leon, it is clear to me that this can only be
accomplished through primary means--by talking with rhetoricians about their intentions
and reflections on instances of rhetorical delivery. What I have gathered from these.
interviews are, at the very least, accounts of how five activists talk about the delivery of
their work. Of those six interviews, five turned out to be viable for this study. These are
individuals who regularly attend protests, hand out flyers, and do other types of direct
action around issues of economic, racial and justice. From them, I have collected four
hours of oral history as well as hundreds of pages of documents.

As I have discussed in chapter one, there is a need to build rhetorical theories of
delivery from stories of practice. This new project is essential for not only theory
building with different rhetorics, but also for teaching these different rhetorics. There is a

desperate field need for situated examples of rhetorical delivery and practice. In chapter

43

two I discussed a missed opportunity in historiography to look at and theory-build from
the actual rhetorical situation of Judah Messer Leon, not simply a published work of
rhetoric. In this chapter I move forward, introducing one possible solution, oral history, to
begin theory building rhetorics of delivery from the ground up, introducing new concepts
from stories of practice.

It is my intent with this work to address key field questions surrounding rhetorical
delivery. Following in the footsteps of Nancy Welch (2005; 2008), I am interested in
theory building rhetoric from the experiences of activist practice. In this work I hope to
then contribute to the major field conversation of Skinner-Linnenberg 1999; Trimbur
2000; DeVoss & Porter 2005; Welch 2005; 2008; Eyman 2007, not simply by
introducing new theoretical concepts, but also presenting examples of activist practice. In
turn, I see this work as beneficial to the activists whom I am working with, because it
provides a written account of their smart discussions. Therefore, the materials I produce
might also be used in future training materials for communities such as these.

For the purpose of this study, however, I have focused on one cluster of
individuals/groups, and I chose this group because I had an established peer relationship
with them. I found them through shared activist work, and they met me as an activist long
before they knew me as a researcher. In this sense they see my research and myself as
working toward a common objective, the production of materials that can assist in
training other activists. I am not in a position then to judge, and my research is not about

criticizing, but rather I attempt to investigate firrther what I deem to be some of the most

interesting discussion on rhetorical delivery available to me, and fi'om that investigation I
hope to produce scholarship that helps them/us in our future work.1

In thinking about howl see my dual roles as someone involved with a
community, and as someone who later researches a community, I have been very much
influenced by the field conversations around Ellen Cushman’s 1996 College Composition
and Communication article The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change. In her initial
article and later book, The Struggle and the Tools, Cushman foregrounds concerns of
access to communities, affordances (to both community members and researchers), and
the role of the activist-researcher. She discusses the reasons and motivations of the
researcher, and argues that there are “other ways in which we [rhetoric and composition
teachers and scholars] can affect social change, something more along the lines of civic
participation” (“Rhetorician,” 7). In Cushman’s work I see an imperative to consider a
broad range of ethical concerns regarding how academics engage with communities
outside their discipline.

In terms of specific groups, my study population includes past and present active

members from Michigan State University (MSU) Students for Economic Justice, Lansing

 

I Largely campaign and issue driven, these groups generally work to challenge systemic
problems through local issues, such as working on university anti-sweatshop campaigns
to raise local awareness and promote specific institutional form of larger, ofien seemingly
“abstract” systemic problems (depending on folks positionality). This cluster of groups
and people is often focused on issues found under the very broad umbrella of “alternate
globalization” activism, and I explain howl became involved with this group of

colleagues in the next section.

45

Direct Action!, MSU Students for Peace and Justice, Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano De
Aztlan and Amnesty International. In this study I requested to interview a community of
participants about various activist actions, campaigns, and their corresponding written
documents in order to learn more about how this particular community of activists
discusses and strategizes the delivery of activist material. After several years of working
with this community, I solicited participants through Facebook, e-mail, and face-to—face
interactions. This solicitation grew out of dozens of conversations fiom the last several
years where the individuals and I involved with this type of activism explicitly discussed
the real need for better materials for media training, strategizing, and study. I consider
this research then to be well negotiated with interested members of the community in
terms of its future use for facilitating the type of workshops my participants think
necessary to provide these types of activist communities. I received a positive response
back fiom the twelve potential interviewees. I sent interested participants a list of
interview questions and request for documents in advance, and later, at a time and setting
of their choosing, sat down with each of them individually. There was no set duration for
the interview, and the documented conversations ranged from eighteen minutes to an
hour and fifteen minutes long. What follows is a description of who I am in relationship
to this community as both an activist and researcher, how I wound up doing this kind of

work, what the field rationale is for this sort of study, and an overview of my procedures.

SCHOLAR-ACTIVISM
During most of time as a graduate student at Michigan State University in 2003-
2007, I spent most of what would have been my free time working on various campaigns

related to the alternate globalization movement. This activist work was a continuation of

my undergraduate work at the University of Rhode Island, where I became deeply
involved in the emerging anti-sweatshop campaigns of United Students Against
Sweatshops (U SAS) and movements in opposition to the sharp escalation of the USA
military abroad from 2001-2003. This type of activist work, often characterized as
“grassroots activism,” primarily involved organizing with different student and
community groups around the problems of the USA and militarism, which in those years
moved quickly year by year from issues of Plan Colombia, sweatshop labor and
economic inequality, to Afghanistan and the buildup and subsequent execution of the
“second” Iraq war. I became involved in these alternate globalization movements largely
for personal and psychological reasons. I do think some of this political activity could be
considered doing what I thought was right or correct at the time, but in my later twenties
I’ve come to also think that much of what I did was also a way for me to “work through
my own shit.” In this sense I do think it is extremely important to say a few things about
where my personal motivations for this work have come from, and why exactly I am
working with the participant group I have chosen. As will become clear in the interview
transcripts I supply in the Appendix, my relationship with my participants as fellow
activists is deeply woven into the text of the interviews themselves, where in each
interview the six interviewees mention (often hesitantly because of the research context)
my role as an activist in particular campaigns, actions, skill sharing workshops, and
conferences. I highlighting this interconnectedness because it is important, and its
importance will be apparent in chapters three and four as 1 reference these instances in
my transcripts. For now in the pages to come I will explain howl became involved in

activism as a participant and later as a researcher.

47

MY OWN EXPERIENCE

I grew up in a white, rniddlc-class home of an ever-increasing upper middle class
suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, the only child of one father and mother. I am privileged
in these very facts. In my younger years, around five or six, I started to notice some of the
ways in which my family was different. As early as I can remember my father was
always sick, and I remember that my mother was, equal to his sickness, always in
considerable strain as she too dealt with the day-to-day realities of illnesses. This sickness
had a longer history in our family story. My grandfather, my fathers’ father, had spent
over twenty years of his life after the Second World War in a Veterans Affairs mental
hospital. During his childhood my father had grown up in the Frog Hollow housing
projects of Hartford. Economic mobility was, he claimed to me, a large part of his
decision to join the military and fight in Vietnam. His military service ended in mid-1968
when he was very severely wounded in a large munitions explosion at a base near Cu-
Chi, 25 miles south of Saigon. He spent the next year and a half of his life in what he
described later as a poorly maintained Veterans Affairs hospital outside Boston, MA as
be dealt with and survived the onset of gangrene, skin grafts, sixteen operations, and a
body full of shrapnel.

In my own childhood I grew up aware, but normalized, to the psychological
effects of these injuries and experiences. He never slept a full night’s sleep, and often
paced around the hallway or sat alone in the bathroom most nights of the week. When he
died in my early adolescence, the VA then classified his death as related to his war
injuries. This had a profound impact on my political development. His subsequent

absence from my life had an important effect on my political development, one necessary

to account for as part of my methodology, This development later explains part of my
motivations and how I’ve explained my motivations to the activist commtmities I’ve
worked with, particularly the participants in my study from the Michigan community.
This work of tracing my motivations serves as a record for me as a researcher and helps
me map out how I wound up where I am now. It’s also a rhetoric that is exchanged
between participants. This rhetoric binds us to a cause, to a side, and is also a form of
ethos construction, pathos, and catharsis.

When I wrote a few paragraphs ago that activism helped me to “work through my
shit,” I meant that in engaging with politics opposed to militarism, I found a cause into
which I could channel my frustrations and energy. This purpose expanded for me into
explanations for large global issues, such as militarism. I found explanations for how
things could be different in popular antiwar political slogans from February 15, 2003
such as “Another World is Possible,” I thought (and still do think) about what life might
have been like if I had had brothers and sisters, if my father had never gone to war, and
had had a better chance at reaching old age.

My relationship to this type of speculative questioning seems to be settling down
as I approach thirty, but I do know that in the years that followed his death I became
i1'1cl‘easingly focused on the politics of militarism because of these sorts of questions, and
my attention began to shift to present USA conflicts. By 1999, between the stream of
rerrlinders from VA paperwork and the television images of USA warplanes dropping
l)(hnbs over the former Yugoslavia, my political convictions drove me to do something
1110re proactive and prompted me to seek out organizations to work with on these types of

lsSues. Although my work in these areas continued for eight years, my involvement in the

49

alternate globalization movement began at Central Connecticut State University with the
hogressive Student Alliance in _(year?) and I grew even more involved during the
millennium at the University of Rhode Island with URI Students for Social Change

(URISSC). This involvement included activism around fair trade clothing campaigns,

anti -—militarism organizing and protests around the Iraq and Afghanistan war, corporate
responsibility campaigns, and work with local unions and various left-of-center
organizations and causes. This activity transitioned smoothly into my graduate study
Where for the next four years I became actively involved at Michigan State with MSU
Students for Economic Justice, and MSU Students for Peace and Justice. When I began
my graduate work at MSU in the fall of 2003, the Iraq war was already entering its sixth
month, and I found myself immediately picking up the activism I had been doing in
Rhode Island around the war and economic activism. It was between the years 2002 and
2004 that the initial ideas for this dissertation project began to emerge from my activist
inVOIVement. In 2002, I recognized that I could be useful for activists in a professional
caPaCity by developing better materials to help train activists with media, but I did not
make the connections that this idea could be transformed into a research project in
rhetorical theory until my first year of graduate school at Michigan State.

Early on, I became fascinated in how my fiiends and cohort in alternate
globalization activism (some of whom now do media work for large nonprofits) thought
about and strategized campaigns along side strategies for the delivery and distribution of
c0Il‘rpositions. There always seemed to be constant conversations in alternate

globalization circles at the University of Rhode Island and at Michigan State University

arOUnd questions of how, from campaign to campaign and event-to-event, different

50

groups strategize the delivery, distribution and reception of messages. As an
undergraduate, I volunteered often to make different media and document materials for
1ocal actions and campaigns. During those years there were a lot of actions and
campaigns around militarism for me become involved in (Plan Colombia, School of the

Americas, the Afghanistan and second Iraq war), and I got involved. This in turn drew

me to rhetorical study.

Between 2000-2002, I became interested in rhetorical studies and took classes
with Dr. Libby Miles and Dr. Robert Schwegler. In their courses on rhetorical studies and
composition, I was challenged to think about the ways these well-articulated approaches
to language and texts could help inform my thinking outside the classroom and seminar
room. I looked for ways to help think about my practices as an activist more rhetorically,
and in turn I began to look for ways in which the practice of this type of activism might
help itlform my work as a student of rhetoric. F rom those two concurrent roles, as a
rhetoric seminar attendee and as someone (among many) trying to do his best to advocate
against the Iraq war buildup, I began to see in my practice and studies both gaps and
intersections between contemporary acts of protests and the rhetorical texts of the Bizzel
& Hertzberg Rhetorical Tradition. I became interested in how the complex discussions I
heard in late night organizing meetings about everything from design and delivery of
flyers, leaflets, manifestos, stencils, press advisories, releases, video, as well as the design
811d delivery of visually intensive protest-events.

My first long-terrn academic project of developing rhetorical theory from case
e)‘amples of alternate globalization experience began in my Masters thesis, Rhetoric,

Economy, and the Technologies of A ctivist Delivery, and it is one I continue now in this

51

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dissertation project. What motivated me in part is what I perceived as a growing need to
document what the activists I came to know (myself included) were learning (often
through trial and error) from their instances of practice. I began to think that rhetorical
theory could benefit from these new examples of practice, and activists groups in turn
could benefit from informed media theory texts, particularly texts grounded in activist
case examples. This in turn became a major motivation for my current project, where I
wanted to record oral history accounts of various activist experiences with document
design and campaign strategy.

The types of activist conversations that have educated, fascinated, innovated, and
prompted me to do oral history work as a form of theory building have addressed
everything from “how to” questions such as “how do we strategize the delivery of our
message,” or “how do we learn as a group to write press advisories,” to strategic activist
dialogues where folks collectively think through, brainstorm, invent, and plan; the design,
arrangement, and delivery; of flyers, leaflets, manifestos, chapbooks, short digital films. I
think contemporary rhetorical theory can learn some things about delivery from
grassroots activism, and many future grassroots activists could benefit fi'om discussions
of activist case examples, particularly conversations that include core component issues

of strategy and rhetorical theory.

ASSUMPTIONS
Prior to beginning this study I had originally conceived of what I had assumed
would be two distinct participant groups. I imagined two different sets of interviews:

people who were primary actors in the strategy and delivery of compositions, and folks

52

with only an ancillary involvement in or partial witness to an extrinsic or 3rd party
process and/or strategy of rhetorical delivery. In reflecting on why I thought these two
participant groups would be ideal, I imagined that the difference of perspective would be
important to document. In other words, I did not set out with the goal of categorizing any
participants as only having a certain type of experience based on these interviews, nor
have I have ever intended this to be a comprehensive study of how a specific individual
thinks or strategizes over a wide set of case examples. What I set out to do is document
snapshots of how these activists (and my participants all identify as activists) from this
specific Midwestern area talk through and discuss issues of delivery and distribution in
this particular time and place. I conceived of this study as a first step, an initial study to
begin experimenting with ways to learn about how different types of practitioners talk
about the rhetorical delivery of texts.

In the case of the first participant group, I went forward eliciting my request for
participants to different areas of the progressive activist commtmity in Ingham County. In
addition to posting my request for participants on my Facebook profile as a "Note,"
(meaning that only people I was already fiiends with would be most likely to see my
request), from June, 2007 to November, 20071 also spoke to people individually in
person and at different activist meetings over the course of a four month period. I knew
that I wanted to document a type of discussion around particular genres of composing and
rhetorical situations. What I didn't realize was that I would be composing an oral history
of a community of activists. Before interviews began I conceived of each interview and
participant as telling a story between the document and interviewee. I did not anticipate

the interconnectedness of each interview, and this began to complicate how I thought of

53

these interviews. I tried to think about a first group involved in the invention and delivery
of texts, and a second group speaking about their understanding of other folk’s strategies
of delivery. When I began to do interviews, however, I soon realized that this distinction
did not make a whole lot of practical sense. I realized that the interviews and textual
artifacts I collected were interwoven with each other to such a degree that such a rigid
distinction between "groups" no longer made sense for this study. In fact, what I wound
up with was an interwoven set of oral history accounts, which comprise the partial

historical account of a community in a particular moment in time.

GATHERING THE DOCUMENTS AND INTERVIEWS

I interviewed a total of six local activists in the Lansing/East Lansing area of
Ingham County, MI about their experiences with the design, composition, and
strategization of compositions for the purpose of delivery. As I have already discussed, I
had a deep familiarity with each person I interviewed after having done campaigns with
each of them for the last several years. When I decided to do this study I solicited
requests by Facebook and e-mail, and received a positive response back fi'om many
individuals. I received a favorable response from my participant request, I think, in part
due to my explanation for how I think this research will be useful not only for academics
in my particular field of study, but also for other activists because it will help to create
(what I hope will be) genuinely useful educational materials for the newly involved. I
along with my participants imagined that these documented stories would become
extremely useful for aiding the future training of activists. There simply isn’t enough

material specifically designed to help cultivate and facilitate activist discussions of

54

campaign strategy. When I began procedurally speaking to do interviews I consulted the

American Historical Society guide for doing oral history, which has an important list of

seven major points of adherence:

1.

Interviews should be recorded on tape but only after the person to be
interviewed has been informed of the mutual rights and responsibilities
involved in oral history, such as editing, confidentiality, disposition, and
dissemination of all forms of the record. Interviewers should obtain legal

releases and document any agreements with interviewees.

The interviewer should strive to prompt informative dialogue through
challenging and perceptive inquiry, should be grounded in the background
and experiences of the person being interviewed, and, if possible, should
review the sources relating to the interviewee before conducting the

interview.

To the extent practicable, interviewers should extend the inquiry beyond
their immediate needs to make each interview as complete as possible for the

benefit of others.

The interviewer should guard against possible social injury to or exploitation

of interviewees and should conduct interviews with respect for human

dignity.

55

5. Interviewers should be responsible for proper citation of oral history sources

in creative works, including permanent location.

6. Interviewers should arrange to deposit their interviews in an archival
repository that is capable of both preserving the interviews and making them
available for general research. Additionally, the interviewer should work

with the repository in determining the necessary legal arrangements.

7. As teachers, historians are obligated to inform students of their
responsibilities in regard to interviewing and to encourage adherence to the

guidelines set forth here. (Ritchie 111-112)

For varying reasons including scheduling, time, fit with the study, I wound up
interviewing six participants from the local community. Each interview was scheduled a
week in advance. I spoke to each participant and prior to the interview, I told them my
intentionsifor the study, both as a contribution to my field and as a useful document for
the activist community. I then asked each individual that agreed to be interviewed for to
prepare for the interview by thinking about an instance of composing where they thought
about the delivery of their work in significant ways. After explaining this request, I
provided an example of the type of story I was interested in hearing more about (the stock
example I used was about how I composed press advisories, thinking about the various

media outlets and how they might use them). Each participant in my study was familiar

56

 

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with this example of activist composing, and I think this example helped my participant
group to consider and select their example.

Each time I received a positive response back for a possible interview, I e-mailed
the consent form and interview questions. I sent the interview questions because I wanted
potential participants to have a chance to see the sort of questions I was interested in. In
at least two cases this process self-excluded several participants from the study who felt
that this study just wasn't of interest to them.

Interviews ranged from eighteen minutes to an hour and fifteen minutes in length,
were tape-recorded, and later transcribed. During the interviews I did not address each
question point blank to the interviewee, but instead asked each participant to tell the story
around a particular instance of composing and delivery they had chosen to discuss with
me. I chose to do this because I wanted to understand the decision making processes of
my participants better, and I also thought that the story would be more useful for others to
read as case examples. After collecting interviews, I transcribed the contents and sent the
transcripts to my participants for their approval and/or edit suggestions In sum, I was able
to complete six successful interviews around participants’ experiences in/around the

delivery of compositions. Of these six, five were viable for my study.

ORAL HISTORY

I chose to do oral history and not interviews. I understand that my participants are
engaging in historically significant activist work. In thirty years I think that there will be
a real need to understand how activists at this specific moment in history have theorized

the delivery of their work. For this reason 1 follow the definition of oral history found in

57

Dennis Ritchie’s (2003) Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide, where he defines the

work of oral history as collecting:

...memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded
interviews. An oral history interview generally consists of a well-prepared interviewer
questioning an interviewee and recording their exchange in audio or video format.

- Recordings of the interview are transcribed, summarized, or indexed and then placed in
a library or archives. These interviews may be used for research or excerpted in a
publication, radio or video documentary, museum exhibition, dramatization or other
form of public presentation. Recordings, transcripts, catalogs, photographs and related
documentary materials can also be posted on the Internet. Oral history does not include
random taping, such as President Richard Nixon's surreptitious recording of his White
House conversations, nor does it refer to recorded speeches, wiretapping, personal
diaries on tape, or other sound recordings that lack the dialogue between interviewer

and interviewee (20).

According to Ritchie an interview becomes an oral history when it has been “recorded,
processed in some way, made available in an archive, library, or other repository, or
reproduced in relatively verbatim form for publication” (25). I understand my oral history
work as providing foremost interview transcripts within a context of documents and
stories. And my end result is to provide my interview transcripts as an attached appendix
to this project, so that future activists and scholars may study the interviews in as
complete form as I am able to provide. In the chapters, I do extensive work to provide
interpretations for the interview texts I have gathered in order to provide my interview

transcripts within a context of supporting documents (25 ). As Grele explains in

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Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History, it is important to combine oral history with
any available supporting documents:
Where written sources are available, they should be used as background as well as
corroboration. Oral data does not exonerate the historian from searching for and using
written documents exhaustively. Critical questions about reliability, validity and the
representative nature of the data are as essential for oral sources as they are for written
material. (Grele et al. 5)

It is not my attempt or aspiration to combine my interview data with supporting
evidence in order to do an analysis of my participants’ discourse. I am instead interested
in learning more about how activists conceived of their strategies of delivery. As I will
discuss in the procedures section, I also made efforts to make sure that my participants
were able to check over the transcripts and make sure that the transcripts were suitable to
them after the interview had been completed. At the request of several participants 1 also
removed instances of “Uhm,” “Like,” and other types of pauses. In this sense my work
does not share any methodological connection with the deep structure oral history studies
of McMahan:

McMahan is interested in three aspects of hermeneutic theory and how they apply to the
interview: the performance of the interview within the universe of linguistic
possibilities that mark the historicity of the human experience, the fact that the
interpretation of historical phenomena is always guided by the biases that an interpreter
has at a specific moment of time [ideology], and the contention that the act of
interpretation must always be concerned not with the intended meaning, but what the

intended meaning is about [deep structure]. (McMahan and Rogers 3)

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This means that I am not doing discourse analysis, but I am instead collecting a series of
rhetorically situated stories. I am interested not in the specific language moves my

participants have chosen to make, but rather a narrative of activist practice.
MY DATA IS RHETORIC, TOO

My approach then to these interviews is that I see these texts as rhetorical. I am not
interested in analyzing sentence-level discussions, but the interview text is a co-produced,
rhetorically situated document. Each of my participants have read, checked, and agreed
to share their transcript for academic use and this study. I have also honored all requests
to edit the transcripts as my participants saw fit. The interview text then is not an accurate
representation of each interview, but rather something that has been molded by
participants to reflect a specific representation. I too have also been a part of this
rhetorical construction: as an interviewer I over-determined the topic of the conversation
in advance, sending to them my interview questions for their consideration, and during
the interview I provided them guiding questions. While I approach the text as rhetorical, a
complex series of performances by individuals that have known each other for many
years, I also approach the stories of practice that emerge from these texts are valuable.

The information conveyed in such a scene should not simply be considered a capitol-
“t” Truth, but should instead be treated as a series of lowercase-t truths, truth in need of
rhetorical qualification and some additional explication. In this study on rhetoric, it is
unique then that I am not so much interested in how people say what they say, or the

rhetoric of how they say these things, but instead want to know something about how

they strategize the delivery of their rhetoric, but as a scholar of rhetoric I cannot ignore
how the interview itself functions as a complex rhetorical situation.

Directly informing my thinking on this subject is Julie Lindquist’s chapter in A Place
To Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a W orking-Class Bar, where she utilizes
ethnography to study the rhetorical landscape of a working-class bar in Chicago called
The Smokehouse. In her chapter titled “A Place to Tell It,” she includes conversations
with her study participants, noting that “the following sections show what Walter, Hoe,
Arlen, Maggie, and Perry wanted me to know they knew about themes of class, race and
ethnicity, education, language and literacy, and politics” (74). Regarding quotations from
her participants, Lindquist notes that her framing is an “attempt to show Smokehousers
“’in their own words,”’ but the reader should keep in mind that all narratives are
mediated, that conclusions about the “meaning” of the following data are inevitably
directed by my position as one who participates in, but, in many ways stands apart from,
Smokehouse culture” (74). Similar to Lindquist, I also have been a part of the activities I
am now interviewing my participants about. I also share a dual position as one who
directs the research project and one who also a part of the rhetorical situation, both as a
researcher and an activist. Methodologically speaking, I am able to account for my own
understanding of how people talk about their work and what people want me to know
about their thinking. In this chapter what I am able to frame are three unique examples of
how individuals discuss strategies and processes of delivery. For each case example I
examine, based on the rubric, how activists are discussing issues of rhetorical delivery. In

the next two chapters, I will utilize the following analytic to interpret the data. I present

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the story of the particular situation of rhetorical delivery, and then work to understand the

issues raised in terms of intentions and objectives.

The focus of the study is on the understanding of the rhetorician in regards to intention:
intention toward delivery, strategy, materials, and objectives. The analytic I have created
will serve to produce new knowledge about how a distinct group of rhetoricians
understand their practices of delivery. I treat the interviews as rhetorical: these are all
rhetorical discussions between myself and another activist-researcher. As such, it is
difficult to situate the interview materials outside of their rhetorical situation. This is OK.
The stories that emerge from these interviews can be examined by the analytic above, and
as such they are of considerable use in building a rhetorical theory from practice. In the
last chapter, I will interpret the data once more, theory building from the findings to draw
conclusions about what a new practice-driven rhetoric of delivery looks like.

While answers to these questions do not emerge from his historical example, the
questions his example raises are ideal for informing the study of contemporary instances
of practice. While rhetoricians today are limited in their range of study in regards to
historical examples of practice and rhetorical delivery, there is more possibility when
looking at contemporary instances of practice. As I will discuss in greater depth later, in
practice it is extremely difficult to know how someone else theorizes, understands, or
reflects a process of rhetorical delivery or distribution. Unlike the historical example of
Messer Leon, in contemporary instances of practice I am able to interview activists about
their take on rhetorical delivery. But what Messer Leon does provide is a basis for how I

should interpret my data. From his case example, I have developed an analytic to

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highlight a missing area of research into rhetorical delivery, intentions, actions, and

reflections. To this end, the analytic I have developed for chapter four and five explores

intentions, actions, and reflections on delivery, strategy, materials, and rhetorical

objectives.

1. Intentions and Actions. What are the intentions and actions of the rhetorician?

Specifically concerning:

a. Delivery: How is the rhetorician talking about delivery, distribution, and

circulation?

b.

Strategy: Is there an identifiable strategy in their discussion?

. Materials: How are they talking about materials? What are these?

Goal: How do they discuss the rhetorical goal? What are these?
Reflections. How does the rhetorician discuss their reflections?
What do they say that they learned?

How do they reflect on what they learned?

What do they not consider learning, but could be considered as such?

To be more specific, the analytic presents how someone discusses his or her process

of rhetorical delivery. It does not however attempt to uncover or interrogate their

presentation of ideas more deeply. What I mean by this clause is to say that the situation

of the interview itself is a complex rhetorical situation, one that necessarily includes its

own particular motivations, intentions, and rhetorical objectives.

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INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1 include here the interview questions for both participant groups, even though these

collapsed into non-distinct groups when I began data collection. These questions were

sent to participants prior to each oral interview:

1)
2)

3)

4)

5)
6)

7)

8)

9)

Could you provide a brief introduction to you and your work?

Could you speak generally about the sort of media activism work you do/have
done?

How long would you say you have been doing this kind of media activist work?
What sorts of activist writing do you do/have you done? Who do you generally
think of as the audience for your work?

What campaigns or causes are you currently working on?

Could you talk a bit about the writing/composition you have selected?

Were there any other authors of this writing/composition? What role did they
play?

What was the campaign(s) or action(s) you wrote this document for?

Who is/are the audiences for this writing/composition?

10) What was the activist goal for the writing/composition at that particular moment?

11) What was the long-term activist goal?

12) Were these goals realized? Why? Why not?

13) Could you talk about the need for making this? What situation prompted the need

to compose this writing/composition?

14) How did you/others distribute the writing/composition?

15) Could you talk a bit more about this? What sort of physical work/labor did you

have to do to deliver the writing/composition (printing, carrying, etc)

16) What mediums (print, intemet, broadcast) did you consider using when you were
still brainstorming the writing/composition? What made you finally decide?

17) How did you think about concerns of delivery early on?

18) How did the delivery meet your expectations? How did it not?

19) Was the writing you did re-used, re-appropriated, re-written by someone else in
the future?

20) What would you have done differently?

21) Was the piece of writing/composition re-used, or re-purposed after you delivered
it?

22) What will you do in the future when facing a similar task of delivery?

Questions for Participant Group Two:

1) Could you provide a brief introduction to you and your work?

2) Could you speak generally about the sort of media activism work you do/have
done?

3) How long would you say you have been doing this kind of media activist work?

4) What sorts of activist writing do you do/have you done? Who do you generally
think of as the audience for your work?

5) Could you talk about this particular event/campaign/piece of
writing/composition?

6) What sort of delivery/distribution was involved in the campaign?

7) What roles did other folks play in the delivery/distribution?

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8) How would you describe this event/campaign/piece of writing/composition?

9) What sort of strategy/strategizing went into this particular event/act of
delivery/distribution?

10) What exactly was the purpose of this event/campaign/piece of
writing/composition?

11) How did you/others distribute the writing/composition?

12) Could you talk a bit more about this? What sort of physical work/labor did you
have to do to deliver the writing/composition (printing, carrying, etc)

13) What mediums (print, intemet, broadcast) did you consider using when you were
still brainstorming the writing/composition? What made you finally decide?

14) Who were the authors of this event/campaign/piece of writing/composition?

15) What was/were the short-term activist goal/s for this event/campaign/piece of
writing/composition?

16) What was/were the long-term activist goals for this event/campaign/piece of
writing/composition?

17) Were these activist goals realized? Why? Why not?

18) Was the event/piece of writing/composition re-used, re-purposed, re-composed in
some other way after the initial act of delivery?

19) Was this a positive or a negative? Could you talk a bit more about this?

20) What would you do differently in the future, if faced with a comparable instance
of delivery?

THE ACTIVISTS

I include below short biographies for each of the five activists in my study:

Maggie Ryan — I met Maggie Ryan in 2005 through MSU Students for Economic
Justice. She had worked on the MSU Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) campaign and
was involved in Women’s Council and other campus activism. She regularly helped to
draft fliers, organize actions, petitions, and large-scale protests on a variety of social,
economic, and political issues as well as organize the group's internal organization.
She’s been continuing her activist work as a member of the National Lawyers Guild and

as a legal observer.

Maggie Corser — I first met Maggie Corser in 2003, where we worked on planning an
anti-Militarism conference with MSU Students for Peace and Justice. She was
beginning her first year of university and was (and still remains) someone looking for
ways to engage and improve things. Since graduating MSU in 2008, she has begun her
graduate work at the New School, where she is working on policy around preventing

the sex trafficking of women.

Stuart (Stu) Niles-Kraft — Stuart and I worked together in MSU Students for
Economic Justice during 2006. He regularly creates flyers, leaflets, and designs for
actions. He is currently working at a local organic farm and is interested in

environmental activism.

Triana Sirdenis — I met Triana in 2006 working with MSU Students for Economic
Justice. She has worked on numerous campaigns with SEJ, including the Killer Coke
campaign, ethical contracting, and Freedom of Information Act "stuff. Triana is still

active in community activism and regularly works on different actions.

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Ernesto Todd Mireles — Todd is a highly experienced Lansing and Detroit Xicano
activist with over a dozen years of active campaign history. We met in 2004, working
on the WRC campaign with Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano de Aztlan and SE]. He has
extensive expertise organizing campaigns from scratch, from community racial justice
to union campaigns. He recently completed his M.S.W and is currently working on his
doctorate in American Studies at Michigan State University.

WHY ACTIVISTS?

I chose to interview activists because I hypothesize that activists have interesting
stories to tell about delivery. I think that the stories these activists tell about delivery are
different from other groups of people, such as professional artist communities. In a future
study I plan to focus on the stories of graphic artists, programmers, and lobbyists. I think
that each community of practice will have new, interesting stories of strategy and

delivery.

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CHAPTER FOUR: “MY EXPERIENCE IN DISTRIBUTING FLYERS HAS
TAUGHT ME SOMETHING DIFFERENT...”: LEARNING A NEW RHETORIC

OF DELIVERY FROM PRACTICE

In the first three chapters I have argued that the field of rhetoric and composition
studies needs a new approach to studying rhetorical delivery. In this chapter, I provide
three activist case examples along with interview data and field documents. In the first
example, Maggie Corser talks about her experiences strategizing, delivering, and then
observing the distribution and circulation of her manifesto concerning women’s role in
local activist meetings. Her example provides a rich account for how one can scaffold a
strategy of rhetorical delivery, and it also shows how delivery can fimction both as a type
of learning and a form of knowledge making. In the second example, Maggie Ryan talks
about a 2005 protest she helped to organize. It was designed to help push Michigan State
University into joining the Workers Rights Consortium. While she considers the
rhetorical objectives of the protest successful, an image of her at the event was later
appropriated by the university and then used for a wide range of university advertising
purposes. This appropriation has continued for over four years, with her image appearing
on the main MSU web page, on departmental pages, in a photo database, and on
university mailings. Her case example provides key insights into how issues of remix and
appropriation relate to considerations of rhetorical delivery. In the third and last example
of this chapter, Ernesto Todd Mireles talks about a situation in the spring of 2006 where a
white supremacist organization, the MSU Young Americans for Freedom (YAF),
organized a mock lynching event on the Michigan State University campus. Drawing on

his vast experience composing and delivering flyers, Todd talks about moments of

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delivery as experiences from which he can learn. In the case example he discusses, Todd
talks about students’ and local community activists’ organizational strategies for
countering this hateful event. Specifically, he focuses on the ways that activists
strategized the acquisition of press materials from the Spanish and English media. At the
end of the chapter, I theorize how these three case examples are useful for a new rhetoric
of delivery. These case examples provide examples for how activist practitioners theorize
rhetorical delivery as a form of strategy. I advance rhetorical delivery can be understood
as a form of strategy, and theory build new rhetorical concepts from each case example.
Case Example: Maggie C. and the Manifesto
In 2006, Maggie Corser, a seasoned activist in the Lansing area, wrote an anti-
oppression manifesto after participating in an activist meeting that frustrated her (see
figure 4.], removed by Graduate School). In October 2007 I interviewed her about the
delivery of her manifesto:
Last year, which was 2006 I wrote an anti-oppression piece that I had written after a
really frustrating meeting where the dynamics of the meeting had a lot of problems and
it was just sort of a last straw kind of a thing... I wrote it in about two hours and then sat
on it - went back to it two weeks later and revised it and then brought it to a women’s
group and got feedback from everyone there... and then after that I circulated it to
individuals within the activist community... So I brought it to them. I emailed it out first
to our private listserv and then I printed it out and brought it to them in case they hadn't
read it on our listserv.
A few weeks later, she e-mailed the piece to a friend of hers at the University of

Michigan. Her fi'iend liked the piece so much that she printed out copies and brought it to

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an activist meeting in Ann Arbor. Then with Maggie’s consent, the editor of a zine in
Minneapolis later remixed the piece. Fellow activists began to print off Maggie’s work
and bring these documents to meetings; they also sent her writing out over various
listservs. After distributing her manifesto to friends, a few weeks later her work was
republished in a Student Housing Cooperative newspaper in East Lansing:
One of them [her activist friends] said... thanks for printing it out for me. And I said
well, I'm glad you like that. What I'm planning on doing — sorry - So actually somebody
asked how are you going to get this out to different people in the activist community
that you think need to read this. And I said well, I'd already thought of that a while ago
and I want, I told her, I want to print them out, give them to people and then have
discussions with that person. In other words, ask them to read it and then call them in a
couple days and try to talk about it... And then I emailed it to some fi'iends... A woman
from the University of Michigan brought it to her group. There was, I have a friend who
is a, she's like a co-editor or something for a queer zine that's in Minneapolis and they
took it and used some of my bulleted points in my piece in their zine.... Most of those
were either people printing them off and taking them to groups or emailing them out to
their group's listservs.
From Maggie’s description, it’s easy to see that her choice of medium changed depending
on the immediate rhetorical situation. When presented with the opportunity to meet with
those she identified as likely allies, Maggie concludes that sending the document over a
listserv is rhetorically safe, and to augment this initial electronic delivery she brings
printed out copies of her manifesto to the women’s meeting. When she considers the

potential risks and consequences of what she perceives as “higher stakes instances of

7]

delivery” — where her audience is deemed to be less amenable to accepting or
understanding the manifesto’s content, she talks about the importance of scheduling one-
on-one meetings with individuals, as well as hand delivering each document. When she
discusses the way she used the analog, printed flyer, Maggie explains that she is able to
exert considerably more control over delivery and the rhetorical situation, particularly in
comparison to listservs:
If somebody sends out an e-mail and says um, could somebody, could somebody write,
you know, or send this to whatever. Nine times out of ten nobody does it because it’s
sent out to 300 people and just doesn't seem like it’s your responsibility. I think in the
same way that if something is sent out that says look there's a problem and we need to
talk about it, a lot of times the people that really do need to talk about it um, sort of
relinquish all responsibility.
In theorizing the limitations of e-mail, Maggie identifies how e-mail can be used as an
excuse to avoid dialogue. In identifying one mode of delivery as less conducive for a
particular audience, she only e-mails the manifesto to those she identifies as potential
allies. This strategy of delivery is informed by Maggie’s study of past examples of what
she learned from studying other activists’ practice, or what I call the third party study of
rhetorical delivery. In other words, Maggie reflects both on the way that she and others
have used listserv communication in order to help inform her future practice:
Something that I took from like my four or five years here was that listservs can be
really useful tools to get information out, but certain information will not be heard over
a listserv or like digested by people. Just in terms of anti-oppression work I don't think

that it can be done over email. If you're talking about interpersonal power dynamics or

72

broader societal trends, 1 don't think that can be conveyed, or a dialogue can be started
on a listserv that has 500 people that already has really high traffic. Because I don't
think that the activists on the listserv can put in the time or really see it as an important
dialogue space.
In the above example, Maggie’s broad reflections on third person instances of rhetorical
delivery reflect a particular kind of knowledge-production, and highlight how the study
of a third party’s strategy of rhetorical delivery can be epistemic.

When I study the delivery of Maggie C’s manifesto, I notice the way she
distinguishes among rhetorical delivery, distribution, and circulation. She understands
rhetorical delivery as action, and circulation as third party distribution. The image below
depicts the recursive way in which these processes interact with and influence one
another. Although Maggie highlights the concept of circulation in her discussion, it is not
easily discemable from the image above. Maggie explains her understanding of
circulation as a complex rhetorical process whose outcome is not entirely predictable but
one that she attempts to control and influence in limited ways nonetheless:

I expected it [the manifesto] to be circulated, to be honest, within the activist
community by some really supportive people and by some um kinda outraged people
that were... I don't know... felt attacked by it or whatever and wanted to sort of
discredit it. I expected either like a really positive or negative discussion about it with
different circles.
If you return to viewing the diagram above it is difficult to pinpoint the “exact” moment
or moments of circulation. In actions two, three, and four, Maggie engages in discrete

acts of rhetorical delivery. In actions five, six, and seven, Maggie has less agency, but

73

through her initial acts of delivery she has been able to determine the timefi'ame, medium
of reception, and content to a limited degree. I argue that any future delivery originating
from instances five, six, and seven should be considered what I term “circulation.” In this
sense, I argue that from her initial acts of rhetorical delivery, Maggie can and does exert
important influence over subsequent instances of distribution and circulation. This
example demonstrates that Maggie’ s ability to strategize around the potential for future
moments of distribution, recomposition, and apprOpriation is a critical conceptual
component of a 21St century rhetoric of delivery.

According to Maggie, she learned to think about delivery in this way because of a
range of past activist experiences. She talks explicitly about the ways materials take on
new meanings in different contexts. In her words, texts can become “like a bastardized
form. . . misrepresented... especially among a group of friends. .. I don't know I've just
seen it [misrepresentation] happen with. . . different things over the last four or five
years.” From her experiences, she realizes how easily texts can become changed, altered,
manipulated by different audiences. This experience informs her current and future
practices.

In terms of her rhetorical goals in the manifesto instance, she worked to produce a
certain type of conversation around her manifesto. The rhetorical choices in medium and
interaction were thus contingent upon the timeframe and audience. In terms of time, the
longer her campaign went on, the more broadly she delivered her manifesto. After having
achieved specific types of face-to-face discussion around her document, she e-mailed it
out and allowed it to be reprinted and reproduced. When discussing her choice of

medium, Maggie talks about how a singular mode of delivery might not work:

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My goals were to have a real discussion with a lot of people in the activist community. I
thought that the discussion - having a discussion versus just writing and sending it to
somebody would sort of run prevent too many discussions like that to come out in terms
of just being outraged and you know needing to vent and being like this is ridiculous. I
thought that if I was upfront and just went to people and talked about it and let them
know where I was coming from that it would prevent that sort of backlash that I think is
pretty inevitable, and not really publicized by a lot of more dominant people within the
activist community.
In choosing not to simply write and send it to somebody, she emphasizes the way that her
ultimate rhetorical goals dictate her means of delivery. Specifically, she highlights the
fact that face-to-face interactions are most likely to yield the type of conversations she
wants to co-produce. In highlighting this specific approach, however, I’d also like to call
attention to the way that Maggie envisions the rhetorical delivery process as multi-tiered,
with at least two stages. These two stages in her delivery strategy correspond to two
different sets of goals, one more immediate, and the other more long term. Her choices in
delivery and her movement from the face-to-face delivery of the manifesto to the second,
digital stage emphasize how multimodal and time specific strategies of delivery can
correspond to multiple rhetorical goals:
A goal, a personal goal was just to distribute it and not sort of go along with what was
going on and be complicit with silence. I wanted these words distributed at least to sort
of let people know where I was coming from. I think in that sense my goal was

absolutely realized. The second goal of trying to raise awareness among a lot of people

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within the activist community I think was partially realized. There's still a lot of
problems that run really deep but people know where I stand on it.
I argue that this change in approach to her preferred method of delivery is time sensitive
and goal specific. In the first two sets of acts, the handing out of the printed document
corresponded with her personal goal of “letting people know where she was coming
from,” but it also had the double importance of providing her with useful responses and
feedback from a range of voices.

After reflecting on her observations concerning the relative utility of different
technologies for particular tasks of rhetorical delivery, she discusses the ways her future
rhetorical practices of activist delivery will be informed by the delivery, distribution, and
circulation of her manifesto. She reflects on what she says she learned from this strategy:

So I'd say in the future if I ever did do and write another anti-oppression piece, it would
not be put out over a listserv. And if I did have to have meetings with people I think
printing it off and talking to people was the most effective because I could have printed
it off and given it to them but there's no dialogue afterwards. It might have been read,
but I would have no way of knowing if it was really understood.
In the above quotation, Maggie Corser’s case example provides several new ways to
think about rhetorical delivery. Specifically, I understand the rhetor’s discussion as
engaged in a type of observational, trial and error learning. This iterative process is also
evident in later case examples. Her example is also useful for rethinking rhetorical
delivery in terms of strategy. In this example, she talks about understanding how the
manifesto’s opponents may recirculate or misuse the piece, and she attempts to anticipate

and diffuse this possibility in her strategies for delivery and distribution. This type of

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strategic thinking about delivery will be revisited toward the end of the chapter, where I
will discuss it in terms of “rhetorical velocity,” or a type of action where a rhetor

explicitly strategizes in a way to anticipate the recomposition of her or his work.

Case Example: Maggie Ryan and the Appropriation of the Image

As part of a national effort by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS),
Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano De Aztlan (MEXA) and Students for Economic Justice
(SEJ), a local affiliate of United Students Against Sweatshops (U SAS), made up of
student activists at Michigan State University (MSU) engaged in a campaign from Fall
2000 to Spring 2005. During this period, they tried to convince the MSU administration
to join the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), a fair labor monitoring body that
investigates and certifies college apparel as sweatshop free.

In Spring 2005 the SEJ and MEXA anti-sweatshop campaign at MSU underwent
a major shift in tactics and strategy due to a change in university leadership. Prior to
Spring 2005, the students attempted to engage with a university president who refused to
join the WRC. In that unsupportive atmosphere, the campaign tactics focused largely on
event disruption and other forms of direct action which included dressing up as waiters
who then surreptiously attended alumni events and handed out “sweatshop menus” to
hungry university donors.

Once President Peter McPherson resigned in Spring 2005, however, and a more
responsive and progressive leader, Lou Anna K. Simon, assumed the university president
position, the SEJ and MEXA student activists drastically revised their strategy to better

address the new rhetorical situation. On March 3, one of approximately half a dozen

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large, media-centered protests took place. These actions were designed to be what scholar
Kevin DeLuca describes as an “image event”— a particular action designed to achieve
media coverage through visual display (DeLuca, 1-5). In this case, the SEJ and MEXA
activists’ primary strategic objective for the March 3rd protest was to attain broadcast
coverage and continue their strategy of maintaining a consistent presence in the local
news. Consequently, they wanted to use the media to continue to exert public pressure on
the MSU administration. Maggie Ryan, one of the activists involved in planning the
March 3'd protest, recalls that the action, which took place in front of the MSU
Administration building near the John Hannah statue, moved the campaign in a new,
more creative direction. She explains:
we were, you know. trying to integrate new ideas because just having a bunch of
people gather with signs was getting a little boring and the media wasn’t really paying
very much attention when there was like fifieen students with a sign—[but] the media
started paying more attention when there was like fifteen students doing something way
different.
Maggie then explains how the March 3“” actions included a far more creative and visual
rhetorical appeal, one that moved way beyond the simple “stand with signs” protest. In
the group’s attempt to involve more activists as well as more media, they took a new
approach-writing with the tools that winter provided, snow itself: “We got dye to write
things in the snow and we wrote with our footprints very large in the snow ‘W. R. C’ so it
was visible from very high up - that’s Workers Rights Consortium -we basically put
signs up. . . .” Arguably both the broader campaign and this specific action were a

complete success, and the rhetorical goals Maggie intended to achieve were reached. Due

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to a constant and steady stream of protests, media, and publicity, the student activists’
objective was achieved on April 8, 2005, when MEXA and SEJ learned that President
Lou Anna K. Simon intended to join the WRC. By the end of the summer, President
Simon had kept her promise, and the university formally joined the WRC.

But that is not the end of the story, at least not for one participant in the WRC
Spring 2005 campaign. In November of 2006, the university used an image of Maggie
from the March 2005 protest for advertising purposes (see figures 4.3 and 4.4, removed
by Graduate School). According to Maggie, this appropriation wasn’t something she had
anticipated when the action was initially conceived. She describes how the image was

captured during the action:

I was wearing like a sweatshirt and some other people in Students for Economic Justice
were playing in a snowball fight and there was a photographer during the snow fight
who was really kind of sketchy scaling up the buildings to take pictures and it was
really weird. And then about maybe eight months later the picture appeared on maybe
the front page of the Michigan State University and the title of it was “students having
fun in the snow.”
While the protest itself was far from serious (see figure 4.3, removed by Graduate
School), there is no doubt for Maggie that the political intentions of the assembly were.
Regardless of the action’s relative level of seriousness, the appropriation of Maggie’s
image (see figures 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, removed by Graduate School) without her consent is

indeed a strange and unanticipated occurrence.

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Maggie Ryan’s image was first used as the main focal point on the MSU website
in 2006 (see figures 4.4 and 4.5, removed by Graduate School), but this would not be the
last time the university would use Maggie Ryan’s image. In figure 4.8, I show a timeline
for the appropriation of the Maggie Ryan image, (visible by the blue hat in the images
below) for different purposes. Even after I conducted my interview with Maggie Ryan in
2007, an additional example of appropriation took place in February 2008, when the
university used her image as part of a major bulk mailing effort (see figure 4.7, removed
by Graduate School).

Maggie Ryan’s case exemplifies the surprising distance that possible strategies for
delivery can travel. While the desired press coverage of the March 3rd action was
achieved (see figure 4.3, removed by Graduate School), Maggie R. had no way of
anticipating how the university would later use an image of her from the event to promote
the Department of Student Life (see figure 4.6, removed by Graduate School), and the
University through both its website, (figures 4.3 and 4.4, removed by Graduate School)
and the bulk US Post mailing (figure 4.7, removed by Graduate School). But in addition
to directly appropriating her image, the university also remixed her image. When
comparing figures 4.3 and 4.4, it’s clear that not only did the university web team take a
picture of Maggie Ryan out of context but they also repurposed it by adding the caption
”winter fun learn more” in figures 4.4 and 4.5. Additionally, in figure 4.5 they also
cropped Maggie Ryan out of the less scenic background of the MSU administration
building, and put her image on the more picturesque and iconic backdrop of the

Beaumont tower. When Maggie talked about the action after these first two acts of

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appropriation and remixing had taken place, she called attention to the way the university
used her image without any attempt to attribute it to her:
They [the university] didn’t contact me. Nobody ever got my name. Nobody ever asked
anything. The reporters I don’t think even got it but university officials definitely didn’t.
They didn’t get my name or the name of the other person in the picture. And I was like

the main person, focal point of the picture.

While Maggie Ryan never consented to or approved of the university using her image for
these large-scale advertising purposes, she talked about what she could have done
differently to curtail the appropriation of her image. She says that it might have been “a
good idea to have more prorrrinent posters or firings with you or have things with you so
people know what’s going on.” In doing so, Maggie strategizes how to resist certain
forms of appropriation. While the action itself was by her own conclusions not a very
serious protest, it did achieve the goals of garnering the requisite amount of broadcast
press for the week.

In terms of theorizing delivery, in figure 4.8 I map out the theory of the action. In
action one, the activists theorized the image event, and conceived of the sort of coverage
they could achieve for that particular week. As Maggie Ryan reflects, these strategic
discussions only extended into thinking about the appropriation of the event within the
realm of the broadcast and print press, and only within the timeframe of the next few
weeks. In these later instances of university appropriation in 2006, 2007, and 2008, the
specific misuse of the images was, according to Maggie Ryan, simply beyond the horizon
of the activist conversations in early 2005. There was simply no foreseeable or realistic

way to predict that this sort of activity would emerge from the event, and specifically that

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Maggie Ryan would be utilized in this fashion. As I will discuss toward the end of this
chapter, the case example of Maggie Ryan has additional contributions to make toward a
theory of rhetorical velocity, which is a term I use to describe how rhetoricians think

about the positive, negative, and neutral aspects of composing for recomposition.

Case Example: Todd and the Press Packet

In F all 2006, a controversial group at MSU called the Young Americans for
Freedom (YAF) began to publicize an on-campus event called “Catch an Illegal
Immigrant.” At a time when immigration was front and central in the United States media
because of widespread debate over proposed anti-illegal immigration legislation, the
YAF chapters at MSU and the University of Michigan announced that they would hold
mock lynching-style events on campus. One Michigan State University anti-racist
activist, Ernesto Todd Mireles, defined the YAF event in the following way:
[it was]. . .a game they actually played at a couple different universities across the
country, and basically what happens is some people from the group dress up as an
“illegal” immigrant, whatever that looks like, and in most cases it looks like something
like a Mexican peon type thing, and then they chase this person around campus until
they catch them and then they “deport” them... And so they announced their intention
to do this here at Michigan State... And so myself and a few other people began to try to
conceive of ways that we could combat this effectively, or if possible stop it.

In order to be able to stop or undermine this event, however, Todd and his colleagues

needed to better understand its rhetorical goals. After studying the event’s strategy, Todd

and his fellow activists concluded that the primary objective of the MSU YAF was to

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attract media attention. Given this goal, Todd and his colleagues began to strategize ways
to prevent the YAF from achieving their goal.

At the University of Michigan, the September 2006 “Catch an Illegal Immigrant”
day event generated a considerable amount of national press coverage, and Todd talks
about how the activists in Student Association of Non-Violent Resistance (SA-NVR)
made sense of the rhetorical situation:

I understood their [the YAF] goal as being media exposure. That there’s four or five
people that are in this group, they have been trained... to use the media through
sensationalism. I think the question is... how do we keep them from getting what it is
that they really want.
In studying the strategy of the proposed YAF event in a large group activist meeting, the
activists in SA-NVR created an interesting rhetorical strategy in order to counter the
YAF’s media objectives. Todd describes these discussions:
I mean they just want that notoriety. They want people to see their name and they want
people to know about their organization. And that’s what their whole goal is. . .What we
did was, we were like, how do we put these guys [YAF] back on the defensive. . ..
through a process a number of us decided that what we should do is we should give the
Young Americans for Freedom an opportunity to demonstrate just how deeply they
really believe in all of these things that they are saying.
This “opportunity to demonstrate just how deeply they really believe in all of these
things” was the key to the SA-NVR strategy. On the one hand, the whole narrative of the
event was to engage in controversial and racist dramatic re-enactments to attract media

attention. On the other hand, they seemed to want the media attention for the group as a

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whole more than they wanted to be perceived and recognized as an organization
specifically designed to foster hate and racism. In taking this into consideration, SA-NVR
activists theorized a strategy that directly drew the personal ethos of the MSU YAF
participants into the spotlight. When the MSU YAF announced that it would hold its
event, it did not specify a precise time and location for the event. SA-NVR strategically
took advantage of this ambiguity:
So we said what we’re going to do is we are going to make a flyer that invites the entire
campus community to come and watch them do their game in front of all of us. . . So we
said, I think it was on October 9th 2006 that at such and such a time “we invite the
Young Americans for Freedom to come and demonstrate their game”
In choosing the day October 9'“, 2006, the SA-NVR campaign connected the YAF
protests with the yearly convergences around Columbus Day, known to many of the
activists as Indigenous Peoples Day. By connecting these two issues together, SA-NVR
recontextualized the YAF event to be associated with a larger political issue, and in doing
so they were able to estimate the number of possible protesters who might attend the
October 9th event. Todd explains that the flyer was designed to be provocative and calls
attention to the strategic ways the YAF drew upon iconic images of racism that resonate
on a very emotional key (see figure 4.9):
[the flyer] was fairly inflammatory: at the top it had two pictures, it had a picture of the
Young Americans for Freedom and it had a picture of a lynching from the South,
probably from the fifties I’m thinking, and across the top it said, “Does this look like a
game?” And then underneath those two pictures it said, “come watch the Young

Americans for Freedom participate in their lynching game they call ‘Catch an Illegal

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Immigrant’”. And then it went on to explain some of the other things, basically equating
this group of young white kids who are at Michigan State University with this group of
young white kids who are participating in this lynching of these two black men hanging
from this picture, and the flyer was shocking. But I think rightfully so.

In making the explicit connection in the flyer between the “Catch an Illegal
Immigrant” game and a history of racially charged lynching in the USA, SA-NVR
changed the tone of the debate considerably to one of tactic. Is MSU YAF’s choice in
tactic indicative of a certain form of racism? The debate drew in the MSU President, who
condemned the MSU YAF for its tone. In addition to the flyer challenging the YAF to
demonstrate its convictions at a certain time and place, the activist group very quickly
organized a press conference and produced a range of targeted materials, including a
press release in Spanish (see Appendix A):

[They] [c]reated an entire press packet that had the statements from the students, that
had a press release concerning the press conference and the invitation to come watch the
game, it also included the flyer that I described earlier, and we mailed that out to all the
local media and we e-mailed it to all the Spanish language outlets that we could find
across the country... And then we held a press conference, and so in the context of this
press conference, we had several students that spoke and so myself and a few other

people helped these students put together their remarks.

After the SA-NVR press conference, “Students challenge YAF to hold event in public
view,” on September 25, 2006 (figures 4.10 and 4.11), SA-NVR waited for MSU YAF to
respond to their challenge. In a September 26, 2006 article in the MSU student newspaper

reporting on the SA-NVR press conference, the chairman of MSU YAF Kyle Bristow

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responded to the challenge, and said that the MSU YAF would not hold the event on
October 9th, but still planned to hold the event at some point in the future (Machak). In so
doing, Bristow and MSU YAF buckled in the face of the SA-NVR challenge. Three days
later on September 29, the MSU student paper reported that Kyle Bristow and the MSU
YAF had decided to postpone the event indefinitely (F redricka and Machak); SA-NVR
had achieved its goals of preventing the event from taking place. Reflecting on this
victory, Todd notes that in the end the MSU YAF buckled under public pressure:
[they] Cancelled the game, they didn’t do it. And they haven’t done it here to my
knowledge, and if they have done it they did it without telling anybody about it. And I
think it is important to know that this is the only university that I am aware of where we
didn’t just protest the game, we stopped it before it even happened. And I think that’s
really the key to all of this. .. In reality we’re stopping this game before it ever
happens... Because we’re diffusing the situation...
Basically we forced them into a position where they had to respond to us. Are you [the
YAF] going to come and do this game when we say, or are you going to slink away and
try to do it undercover, in the dark of night, when nobody is looking and try to pretend
like you did something brave and heroic.

Todd’s discussion of the strategic elements involved in drinking through the SA-
NVR’s campaign strategy is useful for field conversations about rhetorical delivery,
particularly because he connects strategy with delivery through phrases such as “media
exposure.” I interpret his mention of the term “media exposure” as a type of delivery
strategy where SA-NVR is theorizing about their opponents’ strategy of delivery. In

talking about the “media exposure” of YAF, I understand the SA-NVR as thinking about

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how to prevent YAF from effectively succeeding in the delivery of YAF press releases.
According to Todd, in the initial SA-NVR strategy meeting the activists discussed ways
to keep the YAF from garnering media attention. He explains:
How we could deny them what it was that they really wanted, was this media exposure.
And we came to the conclusion really quickly that there was no way to stop it one
hundred percent. That they had seized the initiative. That we were, that whatever we did
from that point forward in all of the scenarios that we were coming up with, was a
reaction to their statement and that until we were somehow able to regain the initiative
and make them react to what we were saying, that anything that we said from that point
forward would only serve to bolster their claims and to give them exactly what it is that
they wanted.
In response to YAF’s initial move, SA-NVR needed to strategize a way to seize the event
and “turn it around in some way,” or as Todd says, “flip it” on them. Todd explains that
this “flipping,” or turning their own event against them, needed to include strategic
drinking on how YAF was making use of different media:
So what we had to do was, I mean we had to reconceptualize it, you know, and really
think about it in terms of, not in terms of what do we do about this but -— I don’t know ~
it’s kind of hard to put it into words actually, now that I think about it. I don’t know if
I’ve ever actually said it out loud — It’s not about, it’s not about reacting to other people,
because when you react to them then you’re doing something that’s predictable based
on their actions. What we had to do was do our own thing, you know. . .. I think that we
were able to respond and gain the initiative all at one time. By using the exact same

mediums they were hoping to use...

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In Todd’s discussion of co-opting the YAF strategy and flipping, he said to me that he
doesn’t know if he had “ever actually said it out lou ” before. I understand this search for
words as an example of a place where there is an absence of clearly articulated rhetorical
concepts. While the knowledge from practice exists, there is still no clear vernacular to
convey a sense of what is happening as it is happening.
When I asked Todd about his past experiences thinking about delivery, he
highlighted part of the art involved with creating and delivering content by means of
circulating flyers:
Well I think that my experience in creating flyers has taught me that there are things
that work and do not work on flyers. And you know that may seem simplistic but it is
actually true... Now as far as distribution goes... We don’t make five hundred flyers,
we make five thousand flyers and we put them out all over campus. We put them up
underneath people’s doors, we put them in the bathrooms, we put them everywhere. We
inundate the campus with flyers because it’s a form of public communication, you
know, and so there’s a direct return, the amount of publicity you do will directly impact
the amount of people who know and who attend any given event... It is the fundamental
tenant of organizing: “I’m going to explain this to you, but I am going to explain this to
you really quick — read this”, and then bam, there you go. It’s where it’s at - flyering is
where it’s at.

The way Todd talks about “bam” is another instance where a concept is needed to

describe an extremely complex situation of delivery. The “barn” is more than a successful

act of rhetorical delivery, it is an instance when a strategy of rhetorical delivery has

succeeded, where a rhetor has accurately assessed and anticipated its audiences’ needs,

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and consequently, the audience responds in the ways that the rhetors had hoped. In this
case example, there are many different elements that made this campaign a success for
Todd and SA-NVR. In showcasing the range of materials produced, and in providing
some information on how they were used, my analysis of this case illustrates that there is
more to this event than the documents themselves. There’s the “bam, ” the strategies still
in need of rhetorical description, theories of rhetoric which helped make this strategy a

success for SA-NVR. In the next section I will look at some of those theories.

FROM PRACTICE TO THEORY

What can be learned about rhetorical delivery from practice? In each of these
instances, activist practitioners talk about how they understand the past and use the
knowledge gained from past strategies to remix, redistribute, and recompose images
and texts in the future. To review the cases discussed throughout this chapter,
Maggie Corser strategically considered how individuals opposed to her writing
might in fact redistribute her work. Additionally, her case example reflects how it is
possible to study rhetorical delivery not as a single discrete act, but as a series of
scaffolding and complimentary acts. In the last example, Todd and the SA-NVR
campaign were able to effectively derail the MSU YAF from holding its “Catch an
Illegal Immigrant” event. Talking about the ways the group was able to strategize the
negation of the YAF event, Todd highlights the complex rhetorical issues
surrounding how the SA-NVR group worked to understand and undermine their
opponents’ campaign. In addition to discussing and strategizing the negation of
future texts, Todd also provides an important argument for the development of a new

vernacular to discuss strategies of rhetorical delivery, the need to describe the “barn”.

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In my previous Masters Thesis and 2009 published work with Danielle
DeVoss, I have written about a concept called “rhetorical velocity,” or the art of
composing for recomposition. In Ridolfo and DeVoss, I define rhetorical velocity as
“the strategic theorizing for how a text might be recomposed (and why it might be
recomposed) by third parties, and how this recomposing may be useful or not to the
short- or long-term rhetorical objectives of the rhetorician” (velocity.html). Each of
these three case examples involves, to varying extent, theorizing the future of texts.
In Maggie Ryan’s example, she worked with other student activists to design a
visually intensive protest in order to achieve a particular type of broadcast press
coverage. Even though the protest and activist campaign were ultimately successful,
in the years that followed, a series of Maggie Ryan’s images were used in ways
neither Maggie nor the other activists could have plausibly predicted. While the
activists succeeded in their rhetorical goal of achieving third-party media coverage
for their campaign, Maggie Ryan’s ethos was undesirably drawn into the spotlight
well after the initial events took place. In my previous formulation of rhetorical
velocity, I only considered the futures of documents in relation to the original
campaign goals, but Maggie Ryan’s case complicates this theoretical framework.
Maggie Ryan’s case example complicates my initial articulation of rhetorical
velocity. Now, I have to consider the way the initial actors’ individual ethos’ may
continue to be put in circulation (and thus also reformulated and repurposed) long
after the first event has taken place.

As a theory, rhetorical velocity is useful for articulating the positive

appropriation of a press release in terms of acquiring additional institutional ethos.

For example, when the SA-NVR campaign held their press conference in September
2006, the positive press that originated fi'om the press conference was perhaps worth
more in terms of rhetorical weight than a paid advertisement in a newspaper or a
commercial break during the evening news. The ethos of the news outlet is
potentially worth more to the activists than any sum of money they could raise. But
this type of ethos is not without its own economy of value and exchange. In the case
of Maggie Ryan, she lent her ethos to the WRC campaign, but unbeknownst to her
and without her consent ultimately her ethos was appropriated for another purpose.
In this sense, in certain instances more weight may need to be given in theories of
rhetorical velocity to the framing of the individual ethos in relationship to the action.
For example, even though an action may be effective in the short term, what are the
long-term ramifications on any identifiable individuals involved in the execution of
the action?

In the next chapter, I will be building on the issue of knowledge and delivery.
Specifically, how do activists understand a third party’s strategy of rhetorical
delivery, and how researchable is this strategy? In the case of Todd, considerable
effort went into understanding the rhetorical strategy of YAF, but how do rhetors
learn about and verify this knowledge, and what is its relationship to rhetorical
delivery? How is rhetorical delivery epistemic? In the next chapter I look at stories
from a Coca-Cola campaign at Michigan State University. From discussions with Stu
and Triana, I develop the concepts of rhetorical mystification and reconstruction,
concepts I use to describe the work rhetors do to investigate, understand, and plan

around a third party’s strategy of delivery.

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CHAPTER FIVE: “EVERYONE TOOK TURNS SPRAYING AND DRYING”:

STORIES OF DELIVERY AND COLLABORATION

In chapter four I presented three activist case examples: Maggie Corser, Maggie
Ryan, and Ernesto Todd Mireles, and I discussed how these examples might help
rhetoricians think about rhetorical delivery within a new framework. I proposed
redefining rhetorical delivery as inclusive of strategies for textual delivery, distribution,
and circulation, and I began to develop several new concepts in rhetorical delivery. The
first idea is a process I term “rhetorical velocity” which involves composing for
recomposition, and the second idea is that rhetorical delivery is knowledge producing. In
chapter five I analyze two additional activist case examples and develop two more critical
concepts: rhetorical mystification and rhetorical reconstruction. In this chapter I continue
to frame the analysis in terms of delivery, strategy, material, and goals, but unlike the
previous chapter, both of the case examples in this chapter, “Stu and the Stencil” and
“Triana and the FOIA request,” were drawn fiom different moments in the same activist
campaign. By providing two case examples from the same campaign, my intention is to
highlight the ways that different moments within a single activist campaign can

exemplify multiple, complimentary strategies for rhetorical delivery.

THE 2006 MSU KILLER COKE CAMPAIGN

Once they successfully completed the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC)
campaign in the summer of 2005, in the fall of 2005 MSU Students for Economic Justice
(SEJ) and Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano de Aztlan (MEXA) began to channel more of

their activist energy into the United Students Against Sweatshops (U SAS) “Killer Coke”

campaign. The campaign worked similar to the WRC, with individual college USAS
chapters working at the local level to cut their university beverage contracts. In 2005 the
USAS rationalized participation in the “Why Target Coca-Cola” section of the
Unthinkable! Undrinkable! USAS Killer Coke Organizing Manual in the following ways:
Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most powerful and profitable corporations. In 2004,
Coca-Cola earned $4.85 billion in profits. Yet, despite repeated pleas for help, Coca-
Cola has not found the time or resources to insure the most basic safety of the workers
who bottle its products or prevent massive environmental devastation in the
communities where it does business. Coca-Cola has responded by launching public
relations campaigns and denying responsibility- it’s time we show them that they need
to actually change things on the ground- enough is enough!
The USAS activists cite specific allegations against Coca Cola and its bottling
companies: the murder of eight Coca-Cola union organizers from 1989-2005 in addition
to environmental crimes in Kala Dera, Rajasthan, Mehdiganj, Plachimada, Kerala, and
Uttar Pradesh, India (“Unthinkablel Undrinkable!”). As part of the national USAS “Killer
Coke” strategy, local USAS chapters advocated to cut university beverage contracts with
Coca-Cola. While the loss in university sales is significant, the damage to Coca Cola’s
image is more powerful. In the January 26th edition of the 2006 The Michigan Daily an
anonymous “financial analyst who monitors the beverage industry,” commented on the
University of Michigan’s own January 2006 suspension of its beverage contract, saying
that “even with the loss of revenue from the schools, the major victim of the suspensions
will be the company's public image” (“Coca-Cola's image”). After the University of

Michigan cut its own Coca Cola contract, the rhetorical situation of the MSU campaign

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changed. In the spring of 2006, Coca Cola began to pay closer attention to the MSU
campaign. What follows are two interrelated stories from the MSU Killer Coke
campaign. In the first example Stuart “Stu” Niles-Kraft talks about the strategic
appropriation of a Coca-Cola advertisement, and in the second example Triana Sirdenis
discusses the campaign strategy of submitting Freedom of Information Act (F OIA)
requests. SEJ and Triana filed the F OIA requests in order to access private

communications between the MSU administration and Coca Cola.

STU AND THE STENCIL
By the early spring of 2006, Coca Cola began to actively counter the burgeoning
MSU Killer Coke campaign. This included communicating with the MSU administration,
as well as paying for newspaper space in the MSU Stu recalls that he had the impression
that the campaign was going well:
[I thought] that it was a really good time for them, like the Coke campaign was really
taking off, they were pretty successful and like setting up meetings with university
advisors and were getting attention in the school newspaper. Basically making a lot of
progress on that campaign and also I think they gained a lot of new membership around
that time then.
After the previous success of the WRC campaign, membership and meeting attendance
were high in 2006. This is important because one of the short-term campaign goals for
SEJ was to increase its membership. Triana Sirdenis, one of the activists involved in the
MSU SEJ Killer Coke campaign, explains the long-term goal of the Coke campaign:
the long term goal was definitely to end our contract with Coke, some schools wait until

the contract is up and for us that was four or five years until our contract was up, so it

wasn’t an option for us to wait for the contract to expire, so we’re asking for the

contract to be ended.
After the University of Michigan cut its contract in January 2006, Coca Cola feared
something similar might follow in East Lansing. The company then responded to the
student-led protests of January and February 2006 by purchasing a full-page response in
the student-run newspaper, The State News (see figure 5.1, image removed by the
Graduate School). The letter was also published in other student newspapers, and each
was signed by Ed Potter, director of Global Labor Relations for Coca-Cola (Davis).
Triana, one of the SEJ activists involved with the Killer Coke campaign, talks about some
of the ways that Coke tried to change its image at MSU:

during that year there was also a lot of advertisers in the school newspaper, like full-

page ads declaring that Coke was really a [sic] ethically conscious company. And this

was happening at other schools too. When their campaigns were really strong Coke

would buy thousand dollar page ads, like full-page ads in the newspaper.
As Triana mentions, the SEJ and MEXA activists were acutely conscious of the
economic costs of the Coca-Cola letter. On March 3rd, 2006 a SEJ member sent out a
message on Facebook to the MSU Killer Coke group, providing SEJ activists with a
specific monetary figure (see figure 5.2, image removed by the Graduate School). The
sender of the message discussed how he investigated the cost of the letter:

took the liberty of calling the state news, and found out that the advertisement cost

$1524.60. . .. we [activists] should see this as a small victory. This shows that the heat is

on, and we are starting to make an impact to the extent that Coke recognizes it (Coke

Advertisement).

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Stuart “Stu” Niles-Kraft, one of the recipients of the SEJ Facebook message and an
organizer of the 2006 MSU Killer Coke campaign, recalls the sequence of events that
followed:
[that] Coca-Cola bought full page advertisements in the school paper and the State
News and uh, we used those advertisements which were a response to our Coke
campaign fi'om the company. . . [the day after the paper came out and]... a few people
called each other and we all said we would get the paper from the news stands and so
we collected newspapers after that day, mostly straight from news stands, some from
recycling centers.
In choosing to not take the papers the day they came out, the activists learned from and
avoided the issue of a censorship accusation. In March of 2001 this very issue plagued
activists at Brown University when neoconservative David Horowitz paid for the
publication of arguments against slave reparations in the university newspaper The
Brown Daily Herald. In response to the racially charged situation that Horowitz created,
a group of student activists chose to prevent the distribution of the argument by taking all
4,000-plus issues of The Brown Daily (Rosenbaum). In the resulting controversy that
ensued “much of the campus and media turned against these students and accused them
of censorship” (Sagrans). In the end and with relatively little effort, Horowitz was able to
receive a considerable amount of national media attention, effectively launching the
public relations framework for his so-called “Academic Bill of Rights” campaign. In the
case of MSU however, after recovering the papers from recycling bins and dumpsters,

members of SEJ brought back newspapers to a local cooperative space:

 

So we got all these papers and then. .. I made sets of stencils just using... manila :
folders... like one was a Coke bottle with a scull and cross bones in it and... I found a
font on my computer that looked a lot like the Coke font, had the same kind of curly Q
design... So I tried to use Coca-Cola’s trademark font or the closest thing we could get
to it... kind of like... a jamming sort of idea using their own logo against them.
In figures 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6 (images removed by the Graduate School), I show the
activists’ production process of the stencils. Because the letter covered the full back page
of The State News, the SEJ activists only needed to perform a single Exacto knife cut to
fully detach the advertisement. In choosing to juxtapose the font and colors of Coca-Cola,
the activists accomplished a visually powerful remix made possible by the ease with
which they were able to appropriate Coca-Cola’s public relations materials.

Stu says that as a community activity “everyone took turns spraying and drying
and collecting.” In addition there “were very few costs involved... The paper was free
and. . . the paint was salvaged from somewhere.” The only investment was time. Stu
reflects that he thought the appropriation of the letter was like a work of art:

Thought it was pretty poetic in that we were using a piece of Coca-Cola’s propaganda
which they bought and paid for, we used those materials to make posters... to use
against them and that felt really cool to me. I’m not sure if everybody who saw them
realized that it was a Coca-Cola ad that these posters were printed on... But that was the
idea we went into it with.
Over the course of the next two months the newly created stencils were delivered across
the campus landscape (see figures 5.7 and 5.8, images removed by the Graduate School).

They were wheat pasted to walkways, bulletin boards, and trashcans. In the case of Coca-

Cola and the letter, Stu (the originator of the idea) had a long history of repurposing, cut-
and-paste, and placement dating back to his early experience producing zines in high
school:
I saw friends of mine make zines that way and the kids from high school who are into
kind of making their own little zines and literature it was kind of centered around punk
rock culture and that kind of stuff. So that’s just how I’d always seen little bits of self
made media like that [J irn: Yeah], with scissors and photocopiers. That’s just what I
was exposed to.
As someone coming from a youth culture of zines, pastiche, and stencils, Stu talks about
how the delivery and placement of each poster was an art. For Stu, this type of artistic
delivery is what appealed to him about the stenciled over Coke letter. He talks about how
the crafting and the delivery are related:
the idea of making something like that that’s kind of a piece of street art that’s, you
know, putting it on someone else’s - on some other piece of public property, I thought
placement was really important for like each piece. Especially like when I see stencils
where [the place] it is put is almost as important as what the image is. . . I like to see
stencils on campus where it’s cleverly placed in accordance with you know whatever
that message is... it [the stenciled Coke letter] was mostly specific I think for me

anyways that it be on some kind of MSU or university property.

While there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Coca-Cola did not initially consider
how printing their letter as the back full-page section might inadvertently produce useful
material for the activists, there is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that Coca-Cola may

have modified its strategy for future letters, specifically in the case of a letter published at

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Smith. Triana received word that in at least one other paper, The Smith Sophian, Coca-
Cola took out a letter only half a page in size (Sirdenis). In figure 5.91 compare the half
size and full size layouts (image removed by the Graduate School):
I propose that in the case of The Smith Sophian the likeliness for Coke of any activist
appropriation is considerably less plausible. Unlike the full-page letter, the half page
letter requires more activist time for less of an impact. The form of the half page letter
significantly reduces the probability of activist appropriation. In comparison to the MSU
advertisement, activists at Smith would have needed to do an additional cut to remove the
letter from the newspaper. But did Coca-Cola make the strategic choice to publish a half
page letter in The Smith Sophian based on their prior experiences at MSU? There is no
direct proof. It is possible that a half page of newspaper space was all that was available
for purchase on that particular day. I argue though that it is indeed rhetorically realistic to
consider, just for a moment, the possibility that Coca Cola could learn from its past
experiences with delivery. I argue that it is also equally important for rhetorical theory to
consider how Stu and other activists understand Coca-Cola’s strategy of delivery, as it is
also equally important to theorize the possible significance of Coke’s half page letter at
Smith. As part of this argument, I propose that this case example highlights instances for
two concepts integral to a new rhetoric of delivery: rhetorical velocity and rhetorical
mystification.
In chapter four I introduced rhetorical velocity as a strategy of composing for
recomposition. In the example of the stenciled Coca-Cola letter, the delivery of the letter
at MSU could be considered a failure for Coca-Cola. If this appropriation was not a

desired outcome by Coca-Cola’s public relations staff, then Coca-Cola’s public relations

 

staff failed to see the potentiality for a disadvantageous remix of their letter. I have called
this form of appropriation “negative appropriation” in chapter four. Specifically, negative
appropriation is when one fails to predict and take measures to stop forms of
recomposition or remixing which are disadvantageous to specific rhetorical goals. In the
case of Coca-Cola, if their rhetorical goal at MSU was to convince the student body that
the activist campaign was unfounded, then the stenciled Coca Cola letter may have been
a rhetorically damaging recomposition, negative appropriation. This is an example of
theorizing for recomposition where the rhetor (Coca-Cola) theorizes how its rhetoric may
be appropriated and used against its specific rhetorical campaign objectives. As I have
said before in the case of Maggie Ryan, negative appropriation is where someone
theorizes how their work may be used against their rhetorical objectives. In the case of
Coca Cola and the Smith Sophian, this is a real possibility.

The second important concept relevant to this example is rhetorical mystification,
or the difficulty of Stu knowing for sure what Coca Cola’s strategy of delivery is. Was
Coca Cola paying close attention to the campaign at MSU? For Stu, this is a realistic
possibility:

I’d like to think that they did [know about the Coke stencil] I’m not really aware of how
closely they pay attention to our university campus but I imagine that it is a concern.
The fact that they wanted to print the ads that were used in our papers makes me think
that they are paying attention to our Coke campaign here and I know that the University
of Michigan success in their Coke Campaign prior that year had been in the news so I

do think they pay attention and I’d like to think that they at least did notice that

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composition. Maybe that’s wishful thinking I’m not sure. I imagine they probably had

someone here observing afterwards too.
Rhetorical mystification then is a condition for the rhetorical delivery of texts. As I
discussed in chapter four, rhetorical delivery is a knowledge producing activity. For the
rhetor, engaging in the delivery of texts, any texts, produces certain types of knowledge.
As Stu discusses when he reflects on the delivery of his stencils, there is a particular craft
to the delivery and placement of stencils. In actively engaging in this form of delivery,
Stu learns his craft and its delivery. But this knowledge is difficult for someone such as
Coca Cola to dislodge from the vantage point of the practitioner. In the case of Stu and
the other activists in my study, I need to interview them in order to understand some of
what they have learned from their particular experiences with delivery. In the case of
Messer Leon, these answers are elusive and extremely difficult to uncover. An example
of rhetorical mystification then is Stu’s theorizing about what Coca Cola knows about his
activist campaign at MSU. In light of the Smith Sophian, did Coca Cola learn from their
practice at MSU? This question exemplifies a kind of rhetorical mystification --- where it
is almost impossible, yet still theorizeable, for Stu to know what Coca Cola knew about
the MSU activist campaign.

Another example of rhetorical mystification is when Coca-Cola sends out ten
campaign press releases, yet only two media outlets end up publishing a story on the
campaign. For a third party such as Stu or Triana, trying to research Coca-Cola’s strategy
and actions of delivery, the most easily researchable texts are the two published news
stories about Coca-Cola’s campaign. Any boilerplate text the reporters used from Coca

Cola’s 3 press advisory, or any of Coca Cola’s first hand knowledge about the other eight

10]

media outlets that did not pick up his story, remains largely close to the knowledge of
Coca-Cola. In order to understand more about Coca-Cola’s strategy and knowledge of
delivery, significant rhetorical reconstruction would be required. In this sense, Coca-
Cola’s acquired knowledge fi'om various acts of rhetorical delivery, as well as strategy of
delivering their documents, remains in a state of mystification to outsiders. In this sense,
rhetorical mystification is the difficulty in Stu researching what knowledge and strategy a

Coca Cola has in relationship to their strategy of rhetorical delivery.

Triana and the FOIA request
Rhetorical mystification has a counterpart, rhetorical reconstruction. In the case of
the MSU SEJ Killer Coke campaign, a striking example of rhetorical reconstruction is the
attempt to fill in the gaps of rhetorical mystification, to uncover what someone else
knows about rhetorical delivery through the use of a Freedom of Information Act Request
(FOIA). Triana explains the SEJ rational for the FOIA:
SEJ has been working on the Killer Coke campaign for over two years and I think
during the first year of the campaign we realized there was a lot of information that we
needed to find out about... We saw the vending machines in the Cafeterias, but we
didn’t know like all the ins and outs and the details. We didn’t know how much money
we were invested in and how much product we were buying a year and what we were
buying... So we needed to find out more.
Rhetorical reconstruction is the attempt by individuals or groups to actively research,
learn, and uncover someone else’s knowledge and strategy for delivery. This process can

include learning about past instances of rhetorical delivery, such as a failed press release,

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a series of hidden communications between individuals and institutions, or details about a
strategy of rhetorical delivery. Triana also remarks that the F OIA (see figure 5.10, images
removed by the Graduate School) “gave us a lot of bargaining power in meetings
knowing that we had this information and they didn’t have any control over whether we
had it or not.” Some of this information retrieved from the FOIA requests included
documents useful for bargaining with the university.
This includes an “Addendum Letter of Agreement,” where in 2002 Coca-Cola sent a
letter modifying the existing beverage contract. The letter uses September 11'" as the
primary reason to not allow labor and human rights monitors to visit factories and inspect
plant working conditions in Colombia (see figure 5.11, images removed by the Graduate
School). While perhaps in the intense American political climate of 2002 such a request
may have seemed reasonable to university administrators, by 2006 this seemed absurd.
The likeliness that Al Qaeda would have pretended to be university-sponsored plant
inspectors in order to attack Coca Cola bottling plants in Colombia seems highly
unlikely. In the eyes of MSU activists, Coca-Cola used September 11t as an excuse to
strategically amend the multi-million dollar beverage contract, and MSU officials took
Coca Cola at their word (see figure 5.12 and 5.13, images removed by the Graduate
School). But the activists received much more useful material from the two F OIA
requests, and Triana recalls that they found a wide range of documents. These materials
helped the activists understand the level of communications between the university and
Coca Cola:

We [SEJ] found personal e-mails — we found some Coke contact between some of our

administrators. And it said specifically like our groups names — SEJ. We also found a

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lot of, Coke had sent our school a lot of packets of information showing like the
positives about their company and how they’re doing strong environmental work and
how they have a good human rights record... So we know that they were listening and
that it was having a big impact on the campaign.
In the previous example I ended with Stu reflecting on the possibility of whether or not
Coke learned from the MSU activist campaign. SEJ had learned through the use of FOIA
that Coca Cola and the MSU administration were actively aware of the MSU activist
campaign. In addition to learning that they had been noticed; the activists also found
examples of the communications between Coca Cola and the administration (see
Appendix B), which included Coke’s communications strategy. Triana talks about how
the F OIA information helped the SEJ campaign:
the company didn’t seem as distant as you normally think a corporation is, like when
there is actual e-mails from actual contacts from a corporation sending people you know
e-mails and like, ah, they definitely have knowledge of our campaign, and you could
see I guess how much of an impact it [the campaign] made.
This information had a significant impact on the campaign strategy, and sparked Triana’s
interest in creating a template for other university activist groups on how to make FOIA
request. In Appendix B, I’ve included the template she created. She later distributed this
template to USAS groups at other universities.
Triana talks about how the ability to do a F OIA significantly impacted the overall activist
campaign strategy:
I think FOIAs are... with the information that you can get from them they can shed so

much more light into your campaign and strategy, because it completely changes your

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situation and depending on, with this, the university context, depending on what your
relationship is with your administrators, with your decision makers it can change the

dynamics of a meeting, it can change a whole campaign...

Stu and Triana’s case examples showcase how multiple strategies of rhetorical delivery
can scaffold within the same campaign. Their story demonstrates how a new rhetoric of
delivery, one conceived of primarily as rhetorical strategies for delivering texts, can
involve theorizing the rhetorical potential of texts as future building blocks, as well as the
research into someone else’s strategy of rhetorical delivery. In the same campaign where
Stu theorizes the appropriation of the Coca-Cola letter, Triana and Stu both wonder about
Coca-Cola’s level of interest in their activist campaign. How is Coca-Cola strategizing
the delivery of its texts in order to counter their campaign? Who is Coca Cola sending
materials to, and how are they doing so? Through the information gleaned from the FOIA
request Triana answers many of these questions. Although these initial processes of
delivery were completely obscured, she did manage to uncover some of Coke’s strategy
of delivery. The material she uncovered was then of particular value in SEJ’s
conversations with the MSU administration. Although the entire strategy of Coca-Cola
was not revealed, Triana and Stu both actively theorize about Coke’s methods and
knowledge. For Stu and Triana, certain questions remain unanswered: did Coca-Cola
learn from the appropriation of the MSU letter and then make corrective changes at
Smith? This question continues to remain unanswered, the access to the answers continue
to remain in a state of mystification for the activists. In the last chapter I continue to
develop the case for rhetorical mystification, as well as rhetorical delivery as episteme,

rhetorical velocity, and rhetorical reconstruction.

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CHAPTER SIX: THE PIGEON AND THE HONEYCOMB: CONCLUSION

In the first chapter I argued that rhetoric and composition studies needs to
turn toward practice in order to build a theory of delivery. I invoke the pigeon as a
symbolic reminder that there are other historical forms of delivery worthy of study
beyond orality. I argue that from Iraq insurgents to contemporary Brazil,

rhetoricians have much to learn from the practice of pigeons:

 

Pigeons fly cell phones into Brazilian prison
By STAN LEHMAN, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Inmates have devised an innovative way to smuggle in cell phones into a prison
farm in Brazil: carrier pigeons. Guards at the Danilio Pinheiro prison near the
southeastern city of Sorocaba noticed a pigeon resting on an electric wire with a
small cloth bag tied to one of its legs last week. "The guards nabbed the bird after
luring it down with some food and discovered components of a small cell phone
inside the bag," police investigator Celso Soramiglio said Tuesday.

One day later, another pigeon was spotted dragging a similar bag inside the prison's
exercise yard. Inside the bag was the cell phone's charger, Soramiglio said.

The birds were apparently bred and raised inside the prison, smuggled out, outfitted
with the cell phone parts and then released to fly back.

"Pigeons instinctively fly back home, always," the investigator said.

 

 

 

The example of the prison pigeon is an important example for how rhetoric
can learn from practice. The Brazilian pigeon highlights an important trend also
visible in the Iraqi pigeon example: one instance and medium of delivery
increasingly relies on other technologies for success. While used to circumvent the

US frequency scanners in Iraq, or the prison guards in Brazil, the pigeon in turn

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enables other forms of delivery: the mortar shell or the phone call from a prisoner.
However there is an important distinction to be made then between medium theory
and rhetorical theory: medium theory focuses less on the rhetorical strategy of the
group or individual, and more on the communicative potentialities of the medium
itself.1 On the other hand, rhetorical theory focuses more on the rhetorical
objectives, a specific situation, rhetors, and audiences.

There is also an important difference between a technology of delivery and a
strategy of delivery.2 When theorized outside of the rhetorical triangle, the pigeon

and the printing press cease to exist as explicitly rhetorical devices and instead exist

 

1 This includes Innis, McLuhan, and others. Danielle DeVoss also wrote an excellent

distinction in our 2009 Kairos: A journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy

article:
We attend not to the work of McLuhan or other communications scholars but
instead present a review of work anchored to composition studies, because we
think it is necessary to base our understanding of rhetorical delivery on existing
field conversations, specifically those that make use of the term. We do not focus
on conversations of medium theory, which, although extremely relevant to
rhetorical delivery, we view as historically distinct within our discipline from
conversations of classical rhetorical delivery. (rhetcomphtml)

2 I do not use De Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics. Certeau

distinguishes between strategy as an institutional structure for those in power,

verses tactics that are used to “manipulate and divert those spaces" (30). Rather, I

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as media, a technology of delivery: a pigeon, a press of wood and metal. The two
pigeon examples therefore show how old and new technologies of delivery can
combine to form new technological combinations for the delivery of texts. This
however is not the same as looking at the rhetorical strategy of a technology. In
chapters four and five my research with contemporary activists shows how both
technologies and strategies of delivery can combine, scaffold, and compliment one
another. As Maggie C shows, strategies of delivery are sometimes even more
strategic when combined with multiple technologies for delivery.

In figure 6.1 (image removed by the Graduate School) I am visually
conveying how rhetorical delivery is increasingly not simply a single action, but a
series of supporting, often coordinated actions: Strategies of Textual Placement. The
Maggie C case is an excellent example of a rhetor that considers the placement of a
text across a span of time. This diagram is thus designed to represent delivery as
strategic activity, a series of actions that take place not in one discrete moment, but
are instead spread out across a span of time.

Increasingly, delivery also involves the maintenance of a text: Strategies of
Textual Maintenance. The digital file is often uploaded to a server, and the “receiver”
must be coerced into downloading the file through other supporting text. Digital
delivery is increasingly less mono-directional in this respect, and involves an

element of coercion on the part of the uploader, and consent on the part of the

 

understand strategy as a plan for (rhetorical) action, and tactics as specific methods

or the use of certain tools to help achieve certain objectives.

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downloader. The rhetorician however must also maintain the availability of the text:
the server must continue to serve the rhetorical materials; the stencil must remain
on the wall. While coercion and consent are certainly not dominant concepts for
digital delivery, I invoke them to illustrate how the delivery of a text increasingly
involves its placement in a given analog or digital location.

The final point about 6.1 (image removed by the Graduate School) I will
make relates to time and research. I argue that complex strategies of delivery
highlight the temporal disparity between rhetoricians. Delivery becomes, more
clearly, a research problem. When faced with a complex strategy of delivery, the
rhetor-researcher is almost always researching the past. Triana’s example shows, it
is extremely difficult to research and counteract an opponent’ s strategy of delivery.
Not only is there a temporal disadvantage, but specialized, often institutionally
specific research knowledge, is required.

In chapters four and five I have introduced and discussed four concepts for a
new rhetoric of delivery. Stu and Maggie C show how activists are thinking about
composing for recomposition, or what I have termed rhetorical velocity. Maggie R,
Todd, and Triana teach how acts of rhetorical delivery can be epistemic or
knowledge producing. Stu and Triana both show how researching and uncovering
an opponent's strategy and practice of delivery is extremely difficult, but is still
possible. I call the condition of having only a partial knowledge of an opponents’
delivery strategy and practice a form of rhetorical mystification. This term rhetorical

mystification should not be confused with Kenneth Burke's term “mystify.” In A

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Rhetoric of Motives Burke explains his notion of mystify as “an omission of meaning"
that takes place because of systems of writing:
But expression of the past eras survives in fragments, and often without explicit
reference to the situations in which it arose [but of which people were wholly
conscious at the time). So the “mystifications” are in part merely a by-product of
the written record, and in this sense mystify us as they do not mystify their
contemporaries. (111]
Burke argues that hierarchies of power create terms that in turn mystify whole
societies (111-120). Power is thus maintained through mysteries of language, and
opposition to power structures has the potential to expose mysteries of language.
My definition of rhetorical mystification has no connection to the historical
slippage of meaning that Burke discusses. However both Burke and I share a
rhetorical interest in systems of writing. While Burke is primarily interested in the
significance of the longevity of written texts, I am interested in the rhetoricial
significance of strategically placing texts, or what I call Strategies of Textual
Placement (STP) (see figure 6.1 (Image Removed by the Graduate School)).
Rhetorical velocity is one example of a strategy of textual placement in which the
rhetorician theorizes the harm or benefits for the future appropriations of a text.
Another excellent example of a strategy of textual placement can be found in
Huatong Sun’s 2004 dissertation Expanding the Scope of Localization: A Cultural
Usability Perspective on Mobile Text Messaging Use in American and Chinese Context.
Sun examines the complexities of a multimodal argument between Dirk and Emma

(175]. During the argument Emma changes the means of delivery several times and

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for several different people. She utilizes AOL Instant Messenger, SMS over the web,
SMS by phone, cellular walkie-talkie, and cell phone calls:
Affordances of each technology are used here to arrange a stronger rhetoric. Cell
phone conversations allow her to argue with her boyfriend at a distance... Walkie-
talkie conversations occurred to counteract the disadvantages of cell phone
conversations. Discrete conversation flows with sentence pauses helped them to
focus on the content they wanted to convey without being extraordinarily
emotional. (183)
This strategic oscillation between different technologies of delivery was part of a
rhetorical strategy to mediate the argument. Sun's example demonstrates how the
presence of a plurality of technologies of delivery can further complicate strategies
of delivery. This oscillation between technologies of rhetorical delivery is also the
case in the Maggie Corser example, where Maggie scaffolds her strategy of delivery
over the course of several weeks, making strategic use of a broad range of different
technologies. In figure 6.1 I call this Practices of Textual Maintenance (PTM), where
the rhetorician must do specific rhetorical tasks in order to maintain a strategy of
delivery over a length of time. PTM is concerned with the tools and labor involved in

cultivating a process of delivery over a span of time.3

 

3 PTM can include a concern for infrastructure, too, but the category differs in that it
is not specific to the site of composing, but rather deals with the work required to
maintain a strategy of delivery over a stretch of time. See DeVoss, Cushman, and
Grabill’s 2005 CCC article on the emerging need for a critical understanding of the

infrastructure required for new media composing.

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Practices of textual management include a new concept called rhetorical
valuation, which is the name for a process that identifies the specific acts required to
maintain a strategy of delivery over a period of time. In Stu’s case, dozens of
individual delivery acts were required to maintain the delivery strategy over a long
period of time. Stu’s case exemplifies rhetorical valuation in action because he
accounted for all of the acts required to maintain a complex strategy of delivery,
consequently he ends up theorizing the delivery of delivery. Rhetorical valuation
can also include tertiary forms of delivery, such as flyering for an event, or sending a
link to an activist listserv out to a website.

Rhetorical valuation can be an assessment of the time and resources
required to pay the power bill for a server room. However, the rhetorical strategies
for the websites are an example of a strategy of textual placement.4 Rhetorical
valuation also applies to classical delivery. The theoretical shift to thinking about
rhetorical delivery as not one act, but as a strategy of textual placement means that
the traditional concerns of classical delivery (voice, body, gesture] still have an
important place in a new rhetoric of delivery. For example, the stump speech is

given fifty times on the campaign trail in key cities. The delivery of the speech is

 

‘ Consider, for example, the difficulty activists have had hosting indymedia.org
servers in many countries. Governments in the Americas and Europe have regularly
raided server rooms and seized machines. The task of maintaining indymedia.org
(which includes hiring attorneys, raising bail money, running the servers, and
paying the bills] is a different set of concerms than the rhetorical strategy of

indymedia's hosted content. (“lndymedia”)

112.

conceived of as an image event, a photo opportunity for the print and broadcast
press. The individual speeches are part of a PTM, while the overall rhetorical plan a
STP: the delivery of the stump speech in key locales --- with the right press present -
-- all across the geography of the electorate.

But how does someone else see all of a PTM from the moment it has taken
place? This question provides the basis for what I’ve called “rhetorical mystification"
in chapter five. I propose that rhetorical mystification then is a condition of
understanding the strategy practice of delivery as epistemic. Knowledge of delivery
becomes increasingly complex because the choices for delivery continue to
proliferate. Furthermore, this knowledge of delivery is unequally distributed
between individuals, groups, and society. Did the reporter write the news story after
receiving a press release? Who sent the press release? Who was the press release
sent to? How did different news desks react to the press release? I call this research
into the rhetorical context of strategies of textual placement and practices of textual
maintenance a form of rhetorical reconstruction.

Rhetorical reconstruction is the acknowledgement of a researchable problem
and procedures for researching it. It is an effort to demystify the strategies of textual
placement and practices of textual maintenance of a rhetorical opponent. Triana and
Todd are both provide models for rhetoricians engaging in acts of rhetorical
reconstruction. Triana utilizes the power of the Freedom of Information Act to learn
more about the rhetorical strategy and activities of Coca Cola. Todd studies the

Young Americans for Freedom to Ieam about Kyle Bristow’s strategy, and then to

formulate a plan to defeat Kyle Bristow’s strategy. In relationship to rhetorical

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reconstruction, rhetorical mystification will always exist in the past tense. The press
release is faxed to a newspaper, but it takes time and resources to uncover the
mysteries of the faxers’ strategy, practices, and knowledge.

In the Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault asks, how can researchers
understand the history of ideas and their transmission (21) in relationship to
practitioner strategy and practice? How do researchers come to definitively
understand this notion of the spirit of the times, or the “community of meanings"
that historians find in the study of past conversations (22)? Foucault is concerned
with the methodological problem of how scholars reason and re-reason our words,
the words of other people, and words from another place and time:

Aren’t you sure of what you’re saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your
position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections
are not really directed at the place from which you are speaking? Are you going to
declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with
being. (17]
Foucault’s problem poses a challenge for a new rhetoric of delivery, but one that is
not insurmountable. While the original meaning and full intention are difficult to
discern, in digital environments it is possible to research patterns of activity. These
practices can include techniques such as (rhetorical) data mining. Rhetorical data
mining may involve comparing digitally archived data, or utilizing digital search
techniques and services to compare texts. It may also include examining key phrases
from a press release to understand how the texts are recomposed into derivative

news articles (Ridolfo and DeVoss, futurehtml).

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It takes a considerable amount of time, effort, and research to uncover a
strategy and practices of someone else's strategies of textual placement and
practices of textual maintenance. It is impossible that one can ever fully research
and know the experiential knowledge of delivery that someone else has attained.
This situation however does not mean that uncovering the main points of someone
else's strategies of textual placement and practices of textual maintenance is not in
itself a significant, rhetorically valuable success. Researching into someone's
practices of textual maintenance may yield important breadcrumbs that may help
explain their strategy of textual placement. Recognizing rhetorical delivery as
epistemic may also mean that an experiential knowledge of rhetorical delivery may
in turn help individuals or groups identify other people’s rhetorical strategies for
delivery. Doug Eyman’s work also traces the circulation of texts. In his work on
ecologies of writing. Eyman proposes that a circulation analysis, “tracing and
mapping the connections between digital texts," can help explain the rhetorical
impact of texts:

although these methods are related to and sometimes derived from methods used
in informetrics... circulation analysis is not a “citation study," nor is it a
bibliometric analysis... [circulation analysis] uses qualitative, rhetorical evaluation
techniques... to discover and outline emergent ecosystems whose contours and
boundaries are revealed through the structures made by textual relationships
(additionally, circulation analysis looks at all references and links, not just those

represented through formal citation). (202)

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In this sense Eyman’s proposal for circulation analysis can compliment the

rhetorical study of practice (by rhetoricians].

The Pigeon and the Honeycomb

Based on my research I propose five implications for the future study of rhetorical

delivery:

1] Rhetorical delivery produces a special kind of social, institutional, technological,

and strategic form of knowledge;

2) Rhetorical delivery is a strategy of delivery, distribution, but is rarely a strategy
of circulation. For example, strategies of delivery are made more interesting and
complex through combinations of technologies: the analog and the digital, the

digital stencil and the physical brick wall, the pigeon and the phone;

3) Thus, the digital will never fully obsolete the analog stencil, but combined with

other technologies, the strategic reach of the stencil can be extended, through

combining technologies, as part of a complex strategy of rhetorical delivery

116

4) Rhetorical delivery is a distinct concept from distribution and circulation:
circulation is a term more suited for researchers, as delivery and distribution are

for practitioners.

5) Technologies of delivery (the medium theory of McLuhan) should be treated as
distinct from rhetorical strategies of delivery. Consider the pigeon as a technology,

verses the pigeon as a part of a strategy and a rhetorical situation.

Based on my study I propose that there are three directions for the future study of
rhetorical delivery:
1) The continued study of contemporary rhetorical practice as a platform for
theory-building;
2) The study of how technologies of delivery combine and scaffold on top of
each other: the pigeon‘and the cell phone;
3) Archival work that examines different historical practices, the technology
and rhetoric of the Honeycomb;
Through the pursuit of these three areas of study, I propose that rhetorical theories
of delivery will continue to expand well beyond the narrow confines of Greek and
Roman delivery. While older technologies of delivery may fade into history, the
pigeon serves as a reminder that they are never far away. The stories of the pigeon
and the Honeycomb remind scholars that beyond the technology and its significance
to a particular moment in history, the rhetorical strategy proper has the potential to

inform contemporary theories of rhetoric.

117

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