While new strides in speculative realism are making thinkers in the humanities more aware of the material world, rhetorical studies have been taking on the task of understanding how a discipline focused on meaning-making makes sense of materiality. This dissertation joins this conversation and provides rhetoricians and new materialist thinkers with a heuristic by which the material world’s meaning-making capacities can be understood. The object of analysis for this project comes from a visit I made to the Allure of Matter exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This dissertation has five chapters, firstly I describe the exhibit and provide context for the project. Secondly, the focus is on new materialist theory in order to establish a theoretical framework for the project. Thirdly, I describe the ways in which materiality has been discussed in the field of rhetorical studies while establishing my heuristic. The heuristic is then applied in the fourth chapter onto Yin Xiuzhen’s installation titled Transformation (1997). I conclude by exploring the potential future research this dissertation has to offer for rhetorical theory, new materialism, art, and composition studies.My new materialist framework relies on Karen Barad’s agential realist philosophy and Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of incorporeality. This framework takes into consideration the importance of object performativity as a means by which objects exhibit their agency and produce meaning. Material-discursivity becomes an important concept in order to understand these meaning-making methods even further. Material-discursivity posits that discourse and matter work hand-in-hand with one another in order for meaning to be produced. This simultaneous emergence is what Barad refers to as intra-action, objects/subjects encountering one another to produce new phenomena in ways where the agencies of both subjects affect the outcome of an occurrence equally. Material-discursivity becomes important for the context of this project when taken into consideration with Grosz’s concept of lekta (sayables). Grosz’s incorporeal concepts purport that there are some immaterial phenomena that produce material things in ways which should not be ignored. In this argument. Language becomes an immaterial force which has the ability to transform material realities. My heuristic, which is developed in the third chapter, is composed by four inquiries; an object’s composition, an object’s performativity, the discourse that revolves around this object, and lastly the events that took place in order to establish this object as a cultural phenomenon. This section of the dissertation establishes this heuristic after surveying the literature in rhetorical theory on material rhetoric. My intention is to produce a heuristic which offers scholars the ability to discuss objects in their non-discursivity, i.e focusing on their role in the world outside of their symbolicity. This heuristic is then applied to the aforementioned artwork by Yin Xiuzhen in order to show that material art has the ability to teach us many lessons about how materials make meaning. The fourth chapter shows that materials teach us about human values and how those values transform our human relations. This chapter also shows how one of the materials in this artwork (concrete) plays a role as an active agent in our world building. My objective was to show how even the most basic materials in our lives are making meaning in ways that only become apparent if we choose to listen to them in new ways.
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