BRIDGING CULTURE AND AFFECT: RHETORICAL PRACTICES WITH(IN) A DIGITIZED
ARCHIVE
By
Phillip Bratta

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Rhetoric and Writing – Doctor of Philosophy
2018

ABSTRACT
BRIDGING CULTURE AND AFFECT: RHETORICAL PRACTICES WITH(IN) A DIGITIZED
ARCHIVE
By
Phillip Bratta
Bridging Culture and Affect: Rhetorical Practices with(in) a Digitized Archive offers a
theoretical framework to understanding culture and affect in both digital and non-digital
engagement. Many scholars typically take a semiotic approach to understand and interpret
cultural texts and events. They, however, often neglect the importance of affect in cultural
production, consumption, and meaning. In affect theory, many theorists argue that affect is an
ineffable, non-representational, and acultural phenomenon. Yet these theorists fail to account
for the role of cultural meanings that produce affect. As such, I argue that rhetorical thinking and
practice can activate what I call cultural affect—a rhetorical event in which one’s lived,
embodied experiences emerge through intensities that orient a set of relations and meanings.
As a practice, then, cultural affect involves not merely reading and then writing about people,
texts, objects, and things, but attending to one’s cultural background and affective experience
during research and analyses.
To show cultural affect in action, I use a mixed-methods approach—story, interviews,
and multi-sensuous rhetorical analyses—to explore a set of labor union political posters in the
Joseph A. Labadie Special Collections archive at the University of Michigan. After discussing
the digitized versions of the posters, I examine three posters created by the labor union
Industrial Workers of the World. My findings show the relationships between embodiment, texts,
and language. More specifically, they bring to the surface the labor of writing and the practice of
connecting reflections and cultural histories. The findings push us to make tighter connections
between embodiment and language, emphasize the value in multimodality and diverse writing
styles, initiate ethical practices, and identify the affordances and limitations of digitizing texts.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As others before have said, one never writes alone, and I would add that one never
thinks or researches alone. The words and conversations in and surrounding this document are
the echoes of past and present people—people who are too many to list, and even those listed,
I can’t thank enough. Although my “References” accurately reflects the main text of the
dissertation, it (which really, as Trixie Smith has said, should be called “Works Consulted”) is
still partial and, in fact, is really an illusion of who contributed to and informed me during the
writing and research of this project. But academic conventions remain. To those who I couldn’t
add to this “References,” know that I acknowledge and appreciate your time, thoughts, bodies,
and energy.
I must thank some obvious folks. First, my dissertation chair: Danielle DeVoss. She has
shown me the courage, vision, patience, and energy to complete a project that took many turns.
Thanks for putting up with and supporting my wonderings and wanderings. You showed me how
to mentor and see more complexities in research. Trixie Smith, ever since my exams, pushed
me to tell my story, to identify where I am in the writing. She also offered ways to be a better
listener, a practice so easy to see her do. Bill Hart-Davidson showed me how to shift my angles,
unraveling more layers of complexity that enriches my research and growth. Equally important,
these shifts informed me how to present my research to myriad audiences, indeed a valuable
skill. And Malea Powell has demonstrated how not to simply disrupt, but also build in the
discipline of rhetoric and writing toward more inclusion and in the academy writ large. In addition
to generating a genuine sense of belonging in academia, she has also shown me how to grow,
to be a “both-and,” and to resist in intricate and nuanced ways that oftentimes don’t get
recognized as activist work. And I’m going to follow suit with what she often says with her work:
“What I do well is to their credit; what I do badly belongs only to me.” Thank you, committee.

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I am also indebted to thank two dear friends who have been extraordinary for years:
Ames Hawkins and Jake Riley. Both of these humans have always been supportive of me and
my ideas, oftentimes opening and sharing space to engage with intellectual ideas in premature
and mature states. Most of my development as a scholar, teacher, student, and in general
thinker and writer stems from the times I have shared with them. Ames always has the ability to
layer and reveal more pertinent questions, ways of thinking, and connections between
seemingly disparate ideas and people, typically leading to a practice of honesty, ethics,
responsibilities, and kindness. And Jake, who is always willing and interested in reading and
providing feedback on my writing, listens carefully, articulates and syntheses, and offers
philosophical and theoretical connections that never fail to push me and enrich the ideas. You
two saw my potential, built my confidence, and showed me ways to live and treat ideas, writing,
and other people. Thank you.
Many other folks need to be thanked as well. Some of these folks directly and indirectly
contributed to this dissertation and others supported me in other ways: Laurie Gries, Stuart
Blythe, Sam Hamilton, Kyle Bohunicky, Scott Sundvall, Melissa Bianchi, John Gagnon, Doug
Schraufnagle, Ezekiel Choffel, Sarah Johnson, Matt Gomes, Mirabeth Braude, Jaquetta Shade,
Kate Firestone, Elise Dixon, Lauren Brentnell, Jessica Jacobs, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Justin
Stanisic, Dave Dixon, Les Hutchinson, Bree Gannon, Cat Jennings, Stephanie Mahnke,
Shewonda Leger, Daisy Levy, Michael Wojcik, Alex Hidalgo, Donnie Sackey, John Monberg,
Terese Monberg, Christina Cedillo, John Tinnell, Cindy Tekobbe, Sid Dobrin, Raúl Sánchez,
Greg Ulmer, McKinley Green, Heather Turner, Santos Ramos, Beth Keller, Minh-Tam Nguyen,
Jack Hennes, Allegra Smith, Gareth Hadyk-Delodder, Liza Potts, Dave Sheridan, Jeff Grabill,
Bump Halbritter, Julie Lindquist, Naomi Natale, Sarah Prielipp, Emily Glosser, Shoniqua Roach,
Wonderful Faison, Melissa Arthurton, Diana Shank, Regina Boone, Rhonda Hibbitt, Marsha
Swanson Edington, and Angela Hunt. These people know what it means to be supportive and
kind.
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I am also beholden to three kind and welcoming librarians who helped with this
dissertation: Julie Herrada, Cathy Baker, and Kate Hutchens. I greatly appreciate the time you
took to sit down with me, respond to inquiries via email, and share your knowledge. Thank you
dearly. And thanks to Mike Broughton, who was immensely helpful and caring in my visit to
Kensington Metropark.
Last, but not least, thank you to past and current family: my niece (Evelina), brother
(Jimmy), aunts (Joni, Marie, Karen, Patty), uncles (John, Tim, Bob, Phil, Andy), cousins (Taylor,
Bailey, Kendall, Christina, Christopher, Ted, Joey, Danny, Jeff, Nicole, Lucy), grandparents
(Edna, Dotty, Filippo, Rocco), stepbrothers (Chris, Jordan), and stepparents (Chris, Jan, Cathy,
Joe). And thank you to: my mom, who taught me to take care of my body despite my many
continuing failed attempts; and my dad, who taught me my work ethic, for good or ill. While they
may not know what I actually do or how I think, they have tried their best to support me in the
ways they can and know.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ……………………………………………………………………………..……. viii
CHAPTER ONE. MIDDLE OF THE MILIEUX ............................................................................ 1
INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 1
AFFECT IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION .......................................................................... 4
RHETORIC ................................................................................................................................ 7
DISSERTATION GOALS ..........................................................................................................10
OVERVIEW OF THE DISSERTATION .....................................................................................12
CHAPTER TWO. KEYWORDS ................................................................................................17
CULTURAL AFFECT ................................................................................................................17
AFFECT ....................................................................................................................................19
SIGNIFICATION .......................................................................................................................24
ECOLOGY ................................................................................................................................28
EMBODIMENT..........................................................................................................................33
SCHEMA ..................................................................................................................................37
CHAPTER THREE. METHODS IN MOTION ............................................................................39
STORY .....................................................................................................................................42
Self-reflexivity and Lived Experiences ...................................................................................49
Embodied hauntologies .........................................................................................................52
INTERVIEWS............................................................................................................................52
MULTI-SENSUOUS RHETORICAL ANALYSIS ........................................................................55
Visual Rhetoric ......................................................................................................................57
Tactile Rhetoric .....................................................................................................................59
Olfactory Rhetoric ..................................................................................................................61
CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................................63
CHAPTER FOUR. ARCHIVAL ARRIVAL AND SOME CONTEXT ...........................................65
ARCHIVES AND RHETORIC....................................................................................................70
EARLY BEGINNINGS OF THE JOSEPH A. LABADIE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS ....................74
POLITICAL POSTERS..............................................................................................................79
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD: ONE BIG UNION ................................................80
CHAPTER FIVE. DIGITIZING THE POSTERS .........................................................................87
LABOR OF DIGITIZATION .......................................................................................................89
ENGAGING WITH THE DIGITAL ARTIFACTS .........................................................................92
CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................................97
CHAPTER SIX. THEORETICAL PRACTICE: LABOR, WORK, AND FAMILIAL EVOCATIONS
.................................................................................................................................................99
PREAMBLE OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD .........................................101
Cultural Affect Experience ...................................................................................................104
PROTECT YOURSELF...........................................................................................................111
Cultural Affect Experience ...................................................................................................114
WHAT IS WHAT IN THE WORLD OF LABOR? ......................................................................121
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Cultural Affect Experience ...................................................................................................126
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................137
CHAPTER SEVEN. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................139
RECAP: CULTURAL AFFECT AND RHETORIC ....................................................................140
LEARNING AND BUILDING FROM OTHERS ........................................................................142
IMPLICATIONS.......................................................................................................................143
FUTURE RESEARCH.............................................................................................................146
APPENDICES.........................................................................................................................149
APPENDIX A: DATA VISUALIZATIONS .................................................................................150
APPENDIX B: CONSENT FORM FOR RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS ....................................152
APPENDIX C: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS ...............................................................................154
REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................156

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Roland Barthes schema for myth in 1957. ..................................................................26
Figure 2. Necessary factors for the rhetorical emergence of cultural affect ...............................37
Figure 3. “What is What in the World of Labor?” by Industrial Workers of the World (n.d.) ........65
Figure 4. Rusted, red gardening wheelbarrow with white metal handles and black plastic grips
.................................................................................................................................................67
Figure 5. Screenshot of Labadie Special Collections Digital Posters interface ..........................93
Figure 6. “Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World” by Industrial Workers of the World
(n.d.) .......................................................................................................................................101
Figure 7. Two images of Rocco “Chico” Mavigliano’s Des Plaines, Illinois trailer.....................108
Figure 8. “Protect yourself, the Ku-Klux-Klan is anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-catholic, anti-foreigner
and anti-labor” by Industrial Workers of the World (n.d.) .........................................................112
Figure 9. “What is What in the World of Labor?” by Industrial Workers of the World (n.d.) ......121
Figure 10. Julia Porter Park in Lincoln park neighborhood in Chicago, IL.. ..............................128
Figure 11. Back of Carbit Paint Co. building ............................................................................130
Figure 12. X axis is the years ranging from 1840-2020 and in ten-year increments; Y axis is the
number of records from 0-55 and in increments of five............................................................150
Figure 13. Subject headings presented by size with relation to number of records..................150
Figure 14. Origin countries of posters .....................................................................................151
Figure 15. Top 45 words in poster titles...................................................................................151

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CHAPTER ONE. MIDDLE OF THE MILIEUX
INTRODUCTION
When I began writing this dissertation in January 2016, I noticed my body was becoming
quite exhausted. I imagine every ABD graduate student experiences fatigue as they begin
reading, researching, and writing for the dissertation. For me, the emotional and mental work
would strain my body’s muscles and bones. My belief was that the more I would write, the closer
I would get to my argument and discover something in my research and writing and thinking that
would propel me into an alignment with my project. At least for the first month and a half, I kept
digging. The more I dug, the more I, unsurprisingly, felt exhausted and lost. I recall waking up
one Friday morning with aching legs, the type of soreness that I would feel the day or two after I
had played basketball for three hours or worked on cars for nine hours fifteen years ago. My
thighs and biceps were tight. My knees and knuckles banged up—the way my dad’s looked
after he worked in the yard. Tired and wobbly. My shoulders hung heavy—the way I remember
my grandpa Filippo would naturally walk, swaying side to side like with his bowed legs as stalk
to hoist up his stocky build, whether on the construction site or around the apartment building
which he built and where my folks, my brother, and I lived for several years. My back felt like an
aged tree trunk needing to be stretched and the bark pulled off. My eyelids would shut and open
only halfway, leaving heavy folds upon my zonked eyes. The body writes, but writing works the
body.
The body and labor of reading, thinking, researching, and writing is persistently present,
but seldom seen. Rarely do we find the embodied labor of writing in scholarship. Those who
have personally experienced writing a dissertation or know the labor of thinking, writing, and
researching might be able to acknowledge, more or less, the labor involved and the toll taken
upon the body. But those who haven’t, I think, do not know about the labor needed and fatigued
experienced. I do know for sure that no one in my family understands the work it took, the toll it
had, or the challenges it presented to complete such a task. Most of them don’t think reading
1

and writing is actual work. For instance, in the summer of 2016, I had a research assistantship;
and one of those summer nights in July, my dad called to ask if I wanted to head out to his
house by the Mississippi River in Illinois for half the week: “Since you don’t really have a job and
are just bumming around, why don’t you come for a visit?” This was after I had just spent seven
consecutive days writing, reading, and researching.
Writing is an ongoing risk: a risk that a writer will fail to interest readers; a risk that a
writer will never actualize the potential of the ideas; a risk that a writer exposes their vulnerability
only to be vilified. To get the words right, or rather precise; to simply articulate the argument, let
alone interestingly or compellingly, wreaks havoc upon the nerves, causing an exhaustion of the
body’s ecosystem. But there’s a capacity there in the risk. A capacity for writing an unforeseen
future; there’s an intensity that waits and emerges to bind fingertips and computer keys, eyes
and computer screen, perception and the cultural texts in and of this dissertation, my past and
this moment, my body to this event. There is a there there—biding, but also moving in the inbetween. It touches me lightly as I touch it lightly—to the point at which the anxiety can no
longer hold, when the words impressed upon my body will empty off the skin and fill/create
space on the page. This “there there” is affective.
In no way is delineating some of the affects of writing this dissertation a call for pity or
sympathy; rather, it is to bring to the forefront two ideas, one that Elspeth Probyn opined in
which she says, “writing affects bodies. Writing takes its toll on the body that writes and the
bodies that read or listen” (2010, p. 76) and another that I think appropriately fits within this
current study: writing and reading alphabetically, visually, haptically, aurally, etc. involves more
invisible labor, bodies, and affects than the visible writing presents. In this dissertation, with
these two considerations in mind and body, I show how a researcher might see/read/touch/feel
invisible and visible labor and bodies, shedding light on the emergence of what I call cultural
affect.
∞

2

Before I continue, I want to note two rhetorical choices of mine that readers will see
throughout this dissertation: the writing style and the stylistic glyph ∞. My writing style is an
attempt to represent to you the reader the experience of cultural affect more clearly than simply
academic writing. Because academic writing often facilitates a gendered, racialized, classed,
and abled style and tone suited for the academy, it closely resembles what David Bartholomae
wrote in 1986 as “academic discourse,” which, like all discourse communities, has a set of
stylistic conventions, content expectations, and (lack of) privilege and power. At times,
academic writing and discourse is necessary. But that is not always the case. While I do present
plenty of traditional academic writing, I also set out to subvert this type of writing and
demonstrate ways to write cultural affect experiences as a way to expand our understanding of
what counts as academic. This writing style is most apparent in chapter six, my analysis
chapter.
Throughout this dissertation, readers will also frequently see the glyph ∞—a symbol of
infinity. First, I rhetorically chose this glyph to signal to readers a beginning or ending of a
reflective moment or story despite the idea of infinity as having no beginning and no ending.
Although I use traditional academic headings and subheadings, I also use ∞ as a kind of
supplementary heading or subheading. This glyph informs readers that a shift in prose and
content has begun/ended. Second, I chose ∞ because of its visual presentation and
connotation: anytime we travel a path, we oftentimes find ourselves in a present moment that
similarly reflects a past moment, but we are positioned and oriented differently. We retrace our
past, but we can never return to the same place again with a previous orientation. After having
traveled a path and retracing our past, we can find, discover, and reveal a potentiality to be
(re)oriented and able to move in the present (and future). This idea, as should become evident
by the end of this dissertation, connects to my proposed concept: cultural affect.
∞

3

From September 2015 to January 2016, I oscillated with what the focus of this
dissertation should be. I had many, too many in fact as my committee pointed out at our
meeting in November 2015, directions in which the dissertation could go. But one thing readily
struck me: the desire to make theory. In the first several months of 2016, I also began to identify
other desires; or maybe attunements would be more appropriate: materiality, affect, and event.
With a distinct pull toward such desires/attunements/concepts, I decided to think about them in
relation to the University of Michigan’s Joseph A. Labadie Special Collections archive, which I
had come across in July 2015. University of Michigan (UM) librarians had recently finished
digitizing the archive’s Poster Collection, and it was my first encounter with this digital collection
that “hit me,” “pulled me” into an inquisitive investment. It was an affective experience with some
of the content and medium of the posters that facilitated my interest for a dissertation project.
But it wasn’t merely the involvement of affect—me being affected; it was also cultural—my
cultural subjectivity, identity, and agency, which led me to affect the posters’ meanings in
relation to my orientation, analysis, and practice.
In this chapter, I briefly discuss the recent turn to affect studies in the discipline of
rhetoric and composition. Then, I delineate two distinct qualities of rhetoric—emergence and
relationality—that foreground and operationalize cultural affect (for a clear definition and
elaboration of this proposed term, see chapter two). I conclude this first chapter with the
dissertation goals and overview.
AFFECT IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
Over the last twenty years or so, rhetoric and composition scholarship has taken up
affect and affect studies. Rhetoric and composition scholars have used and studied affect theory
in order to compellingly and productively explore the classroom (Lindquist, 2004), composition
studies (Eds. Jacobs and Micciche, 2003), publics (Rice, 2012), circulation (Gries, 2015),
mediation (Brouwer and Licona, 2016), and delivery (Morey, 2016), to name just a few.
Undoubtedly, affect studies have offered the discipline of rhetoric and composition much in

4

terms of thinking about rhetorical production and writing. The discipline has also contributed to
affect studies, broadening the relationship between affect and writing. The discipline, however,
has much more to offer in terms of showing the affective capacities of writing and even the
intricate links between these two. As Laura Micciche remarked: “Affect is not merely the
experience around writing; it is part of the very condition that makes writing possible, that
generates motive and purpose, terms that tend to represent logos-centered activities in
composition textbooks” (2006, p. 268). The conditions of writing differ from the discipline’s
emphasis on one of Aristotle’s key appeals: pathos. Albeit pathos is a fruitful concept for
understanding the role of emotion in a given rhetorical situation, it falls short on the more
complex social dynamics in which rhetoric and writing happens. In other words, pathos has
either been simplified or become elusive and even inconsistent, as James Jasinski noted about
Aristotle’s engagement with the term and mode of proof (2001, p. 421).
As I show in this dissertation, rhetoric and writing is not simply about creating appeals for
an audience; rather, rhetoric and writing is about understanding, engaging with, and creating
affective significations. This gets at signification and affect as not exclusive to each other, but
informative of each other. Jennifer Edbauer remarked:
Insofar as we are bodies always entering into compositions with other bodies, we
do not only (de)construct writing but also experience its intensity. When we
encounter writing, it not only signifies something to us, but it also combines with
us in a degree of affectivity. Writing, in other words, involves a mutuality between
sensual and signifying effects. The two dimensions exist in proximity to one
another: meaning and feeling always shadow the other in rhetoric without
reducing to the other. (original emphasis, 2005a, p. 151)
Edbauer concluded with a call for rhetoricians and compositionists to address the tension
between representation (and cultural meanings) and non-representational practices. Following
Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes and Lynn Worsham, Edbauer called for scholars to examine

5

culture beyond simply signification. Likewise, Daniel Chandler (2007) commented on the lack of
analyses among semioticians with affect: “structuralist semiotic analysis downplays the affective
domain. Connotation was a primary concern of Barthes, but even he did not undertake research
into the diversity of connotative meanings” (original emphasis, p. 216). Similarly, Britta Timm
Knudsen and Carsten Stage (2015) also expressed a similar notion about the tendency to value
meaning: “Many of the established cultural research practices are too focused on content and
structures of signification, with too little attention paid to reflecting inventively on where and how
affect may be traced, approached and understood” (p. 2).
I take up these scholars’ calls, offering some ways to engage with culture and affect. To
show the rhetorical operations of culture and affect, I turn to political posters created by
twentieth-century labor activists. Many of these posters express cultural representations in order
to resist dominant narratives, particularly ones that veil the exploitative practices of capitalists,
and represent affect that calls for inclusion, unity, and action. While I could build a theory from
analyzing the posters’ creators and representations, I try to move beyond simply hermeneutics
and deconstruction. As Devika Chawla (2007) contended, “Dialogic theory suggests that there
must be an interplay between the author and the represented/character/participant. All these
stances tend to deprivilege the reader’s role in the dialogue” (p. 23). I strive to bring the
reader/visual observer into the dialogue between creator and text—a move that cannot neglect
the lived, cultural embodiment of the reader/visual observer, their memories, and their
orientations. Such an approach and way of reading/engaging with materials presents what I call
cultural affect, which is a rhetorical event in which one’s lived, embodied experiences
(re)emerge through intensities that (re)orient a set of relations and meanings. To understand the
role of rhetoric in this proposed concept requires establishing two qualities of rhetoric beyond
merely persuasion: emergence and relationality.

6

RHETORIC
Rhetorical studies in the West have offered important, yet slightly exhausted definitions
and approaches to rhetoric. Most scholarship has defined rhetoric with two basic
understandings: either the use of language for persuasion and/or the communication of
meaning. The former and the most popular definition, particularly in Western scholarship, may
be Aristotle’s: “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the
available means of persuasion” (book I, part 2). Even non-Western scholars have often
perpetuated similar ways of understanding rhetoric, underscoring its persuasiveness upon an
audience. For example, Chinese scholar George Q. Xu (2004) defined rhetoric as “the practice
and theory of the use of discourse to accomplish a didactic, aesthetic, or persuasive objective”
(p. 116). Although rhetoric as discourse, for Xu, has teachable as well as beautiful objectives, it
continues the idea of persuasion. Arabella Lyon (2004) corroborated: Definitions of rhetoric “all
involve a metalinguistic awareness of language, awareness of language as a system or
complex to be manipulated in the service of identity, communication, persuasion, or artifice” (p.
132). This emphasis on persuasion works well in understanding communicative dynamics,
(un)convincing messages, and calls for action, and the discipline has offered a number of
productive models (rhetorical triangle: speaker, subject/topic, and audience; rhetorical situation:
writer/rhetor, writing, audience, exigencies, constraints, context; etc.). Perhaps the greatest
takeaway has been the ability for rhetors to make meaning and persuade others of that
meaning.
As rhetorician and communication scholar Barry Brummett (1991) contended, rhetoric is
“the social function that influences and manages meanings” (p. xiv). Other scholars have
identified such considerations in their delineations, commonly noting this “function” within social
conditions. For instance, James Berlin (1994) called for a revisionist historian approach to
rhetoric. This approach, according to Berlin, “must acknowledge that locating . . . differences is
only possible through situating rhetorics within their unique economic, social, political, and

7

cultural conditions” (1994, p. 116). For Berlin, the larger social context determines how rhetoric
forms. He continued: “Rhetorics never answer only to themselves: they reflect and, of equal
importance, refract the conditions of their creation and functioning. Rhetorics provide a set of
rules about the dispositions of discourse at a particular moment” (1994, p. 116). In other words,
rhetorics are not universal or transcendental; rather, rhetorics are constituted by historical
conditions. Rhetorics, according to The Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab, are also situated within
specific cultural communities, which aligns closely with one of the aims of cultural rhetorics: “to
emphasize rhetorics as always-already cultural and cultures as persistently rhetorical. In
practice, cultural rhetorics scholars investigate and understand meaning-making as it is situated
in specific cultural communities” (2014, 1.1).
These ideas about rhetoric, culture, and context are fruitful, but I want to supplement
these ideas with two other qualities: emergence and relations. These qualities provide a greater
and more astute understanding of rhetoric as a mechanism for connecting signification (re:
cultural meaning) and affect. First, rhetoric emerges. This quality follows Berlin in that rhetoric is
never still, static, eternal, or transcendental. Kevin Michael DeLuca and Joe Wilferth (2009) also
wrote that “rhetoric is dependent on emergent forms and . . . dependent on emerging
technologies, those of production, of mediation, and of delivery. . . . the most interesting aspect
of rhetoric is its emergent character, its contingent quality” (original emphasis, n.p.). Rhetoric is
imbued with an on-going process of meaning-making, but it is also an event and ongoing
process that cannot always be foreseen. Such an idea resonates with Kristie Fleckenstein as
she examined rhetoric: “Emergence is the process by which a perception, articulation, or shared
vision evolves” (2007, p. 8). For Fleckenstein, the emergence of an image allows an image to
be another kind of event, not from a vacuum, but as historically and culturally constituted,
“carrying with it traces of its own making” (2007, p. 8). Rhetoric is an on-going event of
meaning-making. And we find ourselves always-already in its eventfulness.

8

Rhetoric is also about relations—one of the four key “points of practice” in doing cultural
rhetorics work (Bratta and Powell, 2016, n.p.). More specifically, rhetoric emerges through
meaningful events that create and are created by material relations between humans, nonhuman animals, things, ideas, institutions, and other entities. Such a quality of rhetoric follows
what many Indigenous peoples and cultures have already known and have been practicing. In
Research Is Ceremony, Indigenous Studies scholar Shawn Wilson (2008) remarked: “Identity
for Indigenous peoples is grounded in their relationships with the land, with their ancestors who
have returned to the land and with future generations who will come into being on the land” (p.
80). For many Indigenous peoples, the sense of identity and connection to land emanates from
a foundation for Indigenous ontology, epistemology, methodology, and axiology. Wilson
suggested that the importance of relationships, or relationality, is founded on the collective, the
community. I do not intend to usurp Indigenous ways of thinking and doing for my own purposes
in this dissertation—a glaringly clear colonization; rather, I want to point out that I am not
arguing for anything new, especially since many non-Western cultures have articulated and
practiced relations for epistemological, ontological, technological, and social rhetorical
productions. The feature of rhetoric’s ability to facilitate, hinder, erase, build, connect, and
sustain relations also fosters the binding of signification (re: cultural meaning) and affect.
Through its emergence, rhetoric generates a set of relations between rhetor, text,
audience, and a host of various contexts (social, immediate, remote, and so forth). These
relations motivate, subject, establish, position, and orient individuals within worlds. When an
individual produces, consumes, or engages rhetoric—whether through writing, image, sound,
materials, and mere presence and/or absence—they participate in creating, destroying,
sustaining, and/or perpetuating social (re: cultural, political, and economic) relations. Through
such activity, individuals drive and are driven by cultures and affects.
As emergent, relational, and engaged by individuals, rhetoric operationalizes cultures
and affects. I follow Bryan J. McCann (2016) and his remark: “Affect is nimble, functioning as a

9

reservoir of felt intensities that create the condition of possibility for meaning. . . . In order for
affect to speak, it requires the work of rhetoric” (p. 134). Likewise, in order for culture to speak, it
requires the work of rhetoric. Rhetoric puts not just affect, but culture in motion, i.e. cultural
affect in motion. And while Kenneth Burke argued that rhetoric is more complicated than
persuasion and hence functions on identification, he did not delve deep enough into specific
meaning-making formations and affective flows. For Burke, identification is about
division/separateness and unity, which are based on social class and position (1969, pp. 19-23).
As such, identification closely reflects cultural affect, but the latter differs in two ways: (1) unlike
identification, cultural affect is a rhetorical emergence—an unforeseen happening; and (2)
cultural affect calls for attention to the in-betweens and relations of body to other bodies, body to
texts, body to lived experiences, and body to memories. Emergences and the in-betweens and
relations of those emergences are rhetorically formed and facilitate cultural affects.
DISSERTATION GOALS
Semiotics and somatics, in one way or another, have been ongoing threads throughout
my education, work life, and everyday practices, even when I did not have the language to
identify certain moments or experiences as such. More specifically, I have tended to be
interested in cultural meanings, multi-sensory perception, embodied practices, and that liminal
space that I feel I find myself in so many times: a neither/nor or a both/and. Amidst affect. Living
affect. Persistently in motion. While entertaining these interests, this dissertation is really about
ways of reading, writing, and sensing, which all include multi-sensuous engagement and not just
one sense (e.g., seeing, hearing, touching, and so forth). This dissertation is also less about
chasing cultural affect, tracking it, or pinning it down, but more about noticing it and writing it
without exhausting or killing it.
With this approach in mind and body, I have three goals in this dissertation. The first is to
show the ways in which both affect and signification inform each other and emerge with and in
texts. Rhetoric functions as a linkage, a glue, and a binding between affect and signification—

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enacting affect as culturally meaningful and signification as affectively charged. As such, what
follows in this dissertation is a digital-cultural-rhetorical theory that shows signification and affect
found in, projected on, communicated through, circulated, and experienced with visual-material
artifacts in both analog and digital spaces.
The second goal of this dissertation is to underscore that researchers are agents who
have complex, particular, and crucial cultural and affective experiences with their research,
which do not always get recognized, but can guide them in their orientations, interpretations,
directions, questions, and relations. When researchers carry out and then write about, with, and
through their research in a cultural affective way, they have the opportunity to reveal new or
hidden insights about themselves, texts, communities, and cultural beliefs and paradigms. In
doing so, researchers not only learn about, present, contribute, and circulate information and
knowledge, but are also better able to understand their experiences, orientations, alliances, and
ethics.
The third goal of this dissertation is to begin conversations on ways for scholars to not
ignore cultural affects in/with/of the research. Affect, or any of the other terms that are typically
used to describe a similar concept or experience (emotion, felt, feeling, attitude, mood,
sentiment, instinct, and so forth), is too often taken as insubstantial, unquantifiable, purely
theoretical, or simply subjective relativism. Similar to so much of Western thought and
paradigms based on binaries, affect gets lumped with the “Other”—body, feminine, non-White,
queer, non-middle and upper class, disabled, and so forth. For scholars across the disciplines,
the concept of cultural affect offers a robust departure from which they can engage in more
compelling research while attending to and crediting their cultural affects. To show the value of
such attention and accreditation, I not only state my claims, but also claim my states—an ever
constant set of changes that changes the effects and affects of the artifacts, the archive, and
me. In doing so, I hope to challenge assumptions about scholarship and the writing of research
as well as broaden opportunities for scholarly writing and ethical practices. In experiencing and

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writing about cultural affect, scholars can begin to develop a set of ethics that honor other
bodies, labor practices, and their own familial and cultural history.
To show the concept of cultural affect in practice, I examine three of the political posters
in the archive of The Joseph A. Labadie Collection at UM. Dating back to the early twentieth
century, the collection includes materials on anarchism, civil liberties, colonialism, communism,
socialism, labor, youth protest, etc., with “15,000 serials, 60,000 monographs, and 40,000
pamphlets, in addition to 2,100 posters, 1,200 photographs, 9,000 subject vertical
files, scrapbooks, audio recordings, [and] political buttons” (http://www.lib.umich.edu/labadiecollection/labadie-collection-history). As of July 2016, the “Poster Collection” has 2,108 posters,
which come from various countries and date as far back as 1848, and the collection continues
to grow, including recent 2014 additions (e.g., “Hands up, #blacklivesmatter calendar). From
2010 to 2015, Labadie Curator Julie Herrada completed the project of digitizing these posters so
that they could be publicly available from remote locations. The three posters I engage with are
catalogued under “Labor,” and I analyze both the digitized and analog versions as a way to
show the experience of cultural affects with different texts and ecologies.
OVERVIEW OF THE DISSERTATION
In chapter two, I introduce a number of keywords and concepts: cultural affect, affect,
signification, ecology, and embodiment. With cultural affect, I describe what it is, how one might
engage with it, and why it matters, particularly in relation to rhetoric and writing. The latter four
are components of cultural affect, and I review the scholarly literature and provide ways in which
I use the terms in this dissertation. Rhetoric, with its emergent and relational qualities, factors
into these four keywords and concepts, forming a particular presence of cultural affect.
Chapter three details the methodology and methods used in this dissertation. I use three
qualitative methods—story, interviews, and multi-sensuous rhetorical analysis—to demonstrate
one approach to studying, undertaking, and writing cultural affect with archived materials or
texts in general. With each method, I note some of the associated literature, as well as distinct

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features for how I use the method in the current study. I already began using story in this
chapter and will continue to implement it throughout the dissertation; chapters four, five, and six
provide insights from the interviews; and chapters five and six demonstrate a multi-sensuous
rhetorical analysis (visual, tactile, and olfactory) in action. Chapter three concludes by
underscoring that this dissertation provides not only a methodologically informed, but a
methodologically generative approach to cultural affect.
In chapter four, I introduce the case study: the political posters. I discuss how I came to
the Labadie archive—first its digital collection of political posters and then its posters catalogued
under “Labor.” Next, I provide a brief history of the Labadie archive as I segue into information
about the political posters. Finally, I discuss the background of the creators of the three posters
in this study: Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Knowing some of the background and
context of IWW initiates an orientation to the posters and the archive.
Chapter five presents an analysis of the digitized versions of the posters. I first discuss
the digitization project of the 2,108 posters, noting the digitizing process, the necessary labor,
and the rationale for digitization. Then, I undertake and analyze the digital interface of the
Poster Collection. Although digitizing the posters affords people access to the posters, it also
limits certain experiences with the posters. This chapter shows that while people will experience
cultural affects with digital artifacts and in digital spaces, they will also develop a different set of
cultural affect experiences through site visitations and analog artifact apprehension. This leads
me to the focus in the next chapter.
In chapter six, I present more astutely the theory of cultural affect in practice with the
analog artifacts of three IWW political posters catalogued under “Labor”. With each poster, I do
a brief rhetorical analysis, and then segue into what attention to cultural affect experiences also
provides. Cultural affect experiences do not replace traditional rhetorical analyses; rather, they
supplement such analyses to provide a richer, more personal set of ethics.

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Chapter seven concludes the dissertation by discussing the implications of cultural
affect, the pedagogical possibilities, and future research. I propose three implications of the
theory: (1) cultural affect connects our embodiment more tightly and powerfully to language and
its practices, including the labor of writing, the work in reading, the skill of interpreting, and the
practice of connecting reflections; (2) cultural affect can encourage more varied writing styles
and multimodalities, offering opportunities for writers to experiment with artistic processes and
practices; (3) cultural affect evokes embodied subjects to develop a set of ethics on class,
gender, sexuality, and race relations and allyship and open space to think about ethical
practices. For pedagogy, cultural affect creates opportunities for students and teachers to
consider, develop assignments on, facilitate conversations about, and practice reflective and
reflexive learning moments. Finally, I briefly call attention to the limitations of this study and what
future research should focus on when studying and writing cultural affect.
Before moving forward, I want to comment on the overall research and writing of this
dissertation. Seeing that it involves archival research as well as focuses on culture, affect, and
rhetoric, it would only be fit to express the speed/pace at which the research has unfolded: slow.
Although possibly more stressful and frustrating, slowness in research and analysis, particularly
in working with an archive, engenders the potential for more compelling and deeper insights.
Slowness facilitates more dynamic dwellings for researchers with their affective and cultural
analyses, experiences, and reflections. In Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart (2007) argued for
a slowing down of analysis, notably in examining representations. Her “book tries to slow the
quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique long enough to find ways of
approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate because they literally hit us or
exert a pull on us” (p. 4). Similarly, Kristin Arola (forthcoming) discusses the value of “slow
composition” in multimodal writing pedagogy, but does so with a lens of Indigenous making and
gathering practices and epistemologies. For Arola, a slow composition “models the mindful pace
of gathering as seen in Ojibwe harvesting practices. A slow composition offers a counter to the

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fast rhetorical approaches and provides a model for teaching multimodal composition” (n.p.).
Slow composition is a way for teachers to open space in classrooms that shifts away from “fast
rhetorics,” which “focus[es] less on the process and more on the product, less on the relations
between objects in the world and more on the agency and authority of the
rhetor/speaker/designer to produce an effective text” (n.p.). Finally, Julie Lindquist (2012)
argued for the value of slowness in research, stating that “there is knowledge to be gained from
research that is not only locally situated but extended, delivering meaning and insights only after
periods of time that extend beyond the usual cycles of production dictated by the imperatives of
disciplinary production and advancement” (p. 656).
I note the slow speed of this dissertation to elucidate that experiencing, identifying, and
writing cultural affect takes time. Although many affect theorists argue that affective experiences
happen in a kind of split-second moment, which encompasses a felt experience and embodied
knowing before conscious registering, I advocate that affects also operate at a much slower and
longer process and can be consciously registered. Likewise, cultural meaning can operate at
lightening speeds, as for instance in the effective use of advertisements. Our unconscious is
easily and immediately moved by cultural images, sounds, and words. But meaning can also
form through a much longer process and conscious registering. Indeed, rhetorical acts are
culturally learned, enacted, practiced, and processed. That said, cultural affect is not a product,
but a process of research, reading, writing, and experiences.
The slow process of researching and writing this dissertation demonstrates a way that
bodies engage with ideas and experiences. The process of researching with and writing cultural
affect relates to what Malea Powell argued in her work with an archive and Indigenous rhetorical
histories: “My point is what it feels like to be in an archive, not because I think you care how I
feel but to illustrate the ways in which meaning is sometimes held captive by the body and how
we have to then walk through story to make sense of our experiences as writers, as scholars,
and as humans” (original emphasis, 2008, p. 117). I too am less interested in caring about how

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readers think I feel and more interested in the way stories, meanings, and affects both come
through and tack onto the body through research, reading, and writing. Writing that brings to the
forefront such stories illuminates cultural affects.

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CHAPTER TWO. KEYWORDS
CULTURAL AFFECT
Cultural affect is a rhetorical event in which one’s lived, embodied experiences
(re)emerge through intensities that (re)orient a set of relations and meanings. Cultural affect
reconciles divisions between somatics and semiotics and shows the deep connections between
bodies, language, culture, and memory. Cultural affect is not a point of contention between
affect and signification (cultural meaning), but a point of convergence—a “yes and,” if you will.
Cultural affect works at the level of recursivity between affect and culture, showing that culture
(and its signifying practices, meaning-making productions and consumptions, and the shared
beliefs, paradigms, and values among its subjects) is saturated with affect and affect (and its
“biological, hard-wired” potentials, its intensities and forces that emerge between the interaction
of bodies, and its “universality” across human populations) is cultural.
To be clear, cultural affect is not reading and then writing about texts, objects, things,
and so forth, but attending to and undertaking encounters with them in order to initiate and
practice a set of ethics. Cultural affect is similar to what Kathleen Stewart discusses about
ordinary affects: “not the kind of analytic object that can be laid out on a single, static plane of
analysis, and they don’t lend themselves to a perfect, three-tiered parallelism between analytic
subject, concept, and world” (2007, pp. 3-4). Stewart attributes ordinary affects to something
“more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and
unpredictable than symbolic meanings” (2007, p. 3). Cultural affect, instead, binds
ideology/myth and affective intensities as it moves along circuits and relations of bodies,
memories, cultures, ideologies, and ethics. It is neither solely critique nor description; it is
neither solely evaluation nor willful acceptance. Cultural affect, rather, involves both affective
attendance and ideological evaluative critique. At a fundamental level, cultural affect is neither
bad nor good, negative nor positive, oppressive nor liberating; but it also is not “neutral” with
apolitical or aethical qualities. Indeed, cultural affect has political, social, and ethical
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connotations and implications as it works in tandem with, undergirds, and catalyzes power. And
like power, it is always-already present and pervasive, distributed and accumulated, constitutive
and enacted.
Cultural affect comes through as a happening, whether grand or quotidian or somewhere
in-between. As a happening, cultural affect is an event with forces and intensities that push, pull,
shift, and maintain bodies (human, non-human, body-part, things, and so forth) into personal
and cultural memories and orient them in/to/between/with a world(s). It is a pause in a particular
moment and place with a body or bodies. That pause calls attention to a body and its relations.
Although the conditions, more or less, could be set for a pause to emerge, a pause cannot be
foreseen. This happens many times in research and writing where new insights, generative
discoveries, and more compelling questions arise as bodies carry out research and writing
tasks. In research, cultural affect involves both an orientation to and representation of the
researcher’s journey through a research project. If/When writing cultural affect within a context
of research, researchers can represent some parts of the research process as those parts relate
to their personal experiences, familial background and relations, cultural orientations, and/or
beliefs and paradigms.
Since cultural affect is a concept, it requires a set of components, rules, parameters,
body of knowledge, goals, and/or standards. Not every concept needs to have all these aspects.
In fact, every concept is contingent upon the discipline and field, which is always comprised of
its cultural, political, and historical expectations. For this dissertation, the concept of cultural
affect follows Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s claim: “Every concept has components and is
defined by them. . . . It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity is conceptual. There is no
concept with only one component” (1991/1994, p. 15). Cultural affect has four distinct, but
interrelated components that work together: affect, signification, ecology, and embodiment.
Rhetoric functions as the connective tissue between these components, making rhetoric the
undergirding mechanism for cultural affect. In the rest of this chapter, I discuss these four

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components, reviewing some of the scholarship associated with them and how I conceptualize
and use them hereafter.
AFFECT
In this dissertation, I cannot do justice to the scope of the scholarship on affect.1
Theories are numerous; approaches are multifarious. Many of these studies explore a widerange of interests and topics in or associated with affect—e.g., ontologies, epistemologies,
agency, subjectivity, matter—typically offering new frameworks and concepts: robust materiality
(Hansen, 2003), agential realism (Barad, 2007), nonrepresentationalism (Thrift, 2007), new
materialism (Coole and Frost, 2010; Gries, 2015), vital materialism (Bennett, 2010) and
speculative realism (Bryant et al., 2011). Affect scholarship proposes a number of different
definitions to affect, but is “hardly unified in its rhetorical scope, methodology, or even a shared
bibliography” (Edbauer Rice, 2008, p. 202). Even a “single, generalizable theory of affect” does
not exist; at least “not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be” since affect very much is about
the “not yets” (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, p. 3).
Despite the heterogeneity of the term and concept, most Western affect theorists have
drawn from or been influenced by Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Writing in the
seventeenth century, Spinoza articulated in Ethics that bodies are social because they affect
and are affected by other bodies (1677/2002). Bodies (human, non-human, things, and so forth)
are “neither subject nor object but a ‘mode’ of what Spinoza calls ‘Deus sive Natura’ (God or
Nature)” (Bennett, 2010, p. 22). Of course, Spinoza wrote at a time when philosophy and
theology were particularly intertwined. Yet, Spinoza’s ideas carried centuries later into affect

1

In various disciplines and fields, scholars have examined, theorized, approached, and argued for affect
and practices of affect. This scholarship pulls from a variety of disciplines, fields, and schools of thought,
ranging from new physics, biology, and the natural sciences to cybernetics to neuroscience to
anthropology to cultural studies to geography to queer studies to philosophy. While this scholarship is
expansive, compelling, and informative, it cannot be wholly delineated here in this dissertation. For further
understanding of the various trajectories of theories of affect, check out pages 6-9 in Melissa Gregg and
Gregory J. Seigworth’s introduction in The Affect Theory Reader.

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theory. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth offered a more detailed understanding of bodies
and affect:
Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be
acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes
more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of the
passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that
pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those
resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and
worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and
resonances themselves. (original emphasis, 2010, p. 1)
For Gregg and Seigworth, affect is the intensities and forces between bodies (human,
nonhuman, and so forth). Affect is also, according to Sara Ahmed, what “sticks, or what sustains
or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (2010, p. 29). Bodies, as Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari contented, are “nothing but affects and local movements, differential
speeds”; they “consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or
particles, capacities to affect and be affected” (1980/1987, pp. 260-261). Other scholars have
argued that affect is less in the spaces and transmissions between bodies and more of a holistic
sensuous bodily experience. It is “felt,” not just internally, but upon the body and body
sensations (Grossberg, 1992). Whether understood as between bodies or a holistic experience,
affect gives life to lived/ing bodies through capacities and intensities.
Some scholars (Massumi, 2002; Brennan, 2004) have argued that these intensities are
emotionally felt in the body before cognition. Neuroscience has also taken up similar
frameworks, particularly with the “half-second delay” between affect and cognition (Blackman,
2015). That is, a body is affected by an experience, feeling the intensities as parts of the brain
are stimulated before being conscious of the experience. Other cognitive approaches connect

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visuality with affect, most notably in identifying physiological placements and pathways within
the brain during visual experiences (Gibson, 1986; Barry, 2005).
While this area of research is fruitful, these studies typically conflate affect with emotion.
But the two concepts differ in subtle, yet important ways. Emotions, arguably, tend to simply rest
with the subjective and internally in the body. They are considered internalized states of the
individual, often understood as stemming from an irrationality in the mind. Brian Massumi
remarked, “an emotion is a very partial expression of affect. It only draws on a limited selection
of memories and only activates certain reflexes or tendencies. . . . No one emotional state can
encompass all the depth and breadth of our experiencing of experiencing” (2015, p. 5). In other
words, our experiences do not simply involve an isolated feeling, which we often attribute to an
emotion. Such an understanding is reductive. For instance, when we feel sad, we often reduce
that feeling to one cause. If we feel sad because our partner broke up with us, we understand
that emotion as stemming from the breakup. That emotion—the feeling of sadness—may even
be decontextualized: our partner broke up with us because they are moving to another city miles
away and do not want to continue in a long-distance relationship. When we only focus on the
breakup and not the context and our partner’s wishes, we often feel and express an emotion. In
short, emotions are feelings that we try to reduce to a single cause or that we perceive as
unaffected by the context.
Affect, on the other hand, is a force in experience to create and move individual
emotions. It forces one to feel their emotions, but also a social and ontological existence.
Intensities and forces both unite and divorce bodies as those bodies are situated on courses.
Affect is not personal feelings, but the energy for bodies to act in relation to other bodies,
institutions, objects, texts, and contexts. As such, individuals are not simply molded into
concrete subjects; rather, individuals are agents with capacities—of course, capacities largely
determined by the social domain—to act and be acted upon, making affect “irreducible to the
individual, the personal, or the psychological” (Clough, 2007, p. 3). Affect works with a

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combination of mind and body—a mindful body, if you will. As Brian Massumi (2015) remarked,
“Although affect is all about intensities of feeling, the feeling process cannot be characterized as
exclusively subjective or objective: the encounters through which it passes strike the body as
immediately as they stir the mind” (p. x). Affect also accounts more astutely for the social,
situating individuals among a network of interactions and experiences. Within this network,
affect arises due to the network’s structures shaping the agents in relation to each other. But
this is not simply ideology projected by institutions onto individuals to form subjectivities, as
Louis Althusser (1970/1971) argued. In fact, many affect theorists and theories attempt to move
beyond ideological interpellation, as claimed by Massumi who challenged cultural studies’
assumptions about positionality on an ideological grid. For Massumi, such a framework
positions bodies without movement, sensation, and affect. Bodies are simply “local embodiment
of ideology” (2002, p. 3). Massumi’s gesture of affect as an acultural phenomenon resonates
with what other scholars have expressed: affect as “separate from processes of signification or
discursive construction, indeed, as something that fundamentally disturbs or challenges the
stability of such structures of meaning” (Kølvraa, 2015, p. 183). Although affect is social, it
operates outside signification (re: cultural meaning).
Affect operates, according to many scholars, with a different logic than common
understandings of reason and rationality, particularly related to language. As Massumi noted,
affect functions with “nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback that momentarily suspend
the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future” and “follows different logics and
pertains to different orders (2002, pp. 26-27). For Massumi, the structure and uses of
language—what Ferdinand de Saussure would refer to as langue and parole—lag in conscious
register and only capture the symbolic, however the symbolic is conceived: “linguistically,
logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combination” (2002, p. 27). In contrast,
affect works as a “primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified
and intensive” concept and experience (Shaviro, 2009, p. 3); and the place of affect in this

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schema emerges in “the expression event,” which falls to the wayside “in favor of structure” for
cultural theorists invested in symbolicity (Massumi, 2002, p. 27).
Several non-White, non-male, non-heterosexual scholars, however, have shown how
affect connects to culture. For example, Frantz Fanon proposed the idea of “affective erethism,”
an internalized colonial process in which Black women (but also Black men) feel inferior and
aspire “to gain admittance to the white world” (1952/2008, p. 41). This pathological
hypersensitivity brings the cultural to the affective. Fanon continued: “any neurosis, any
abnormal behavior or affective erethism in an Antillean is the result of his cultural situation. In
other words, a host of information and a series of propositions slowly and stealthily work their
way into an individual through books, newspapers, school texts, advertisements, movies, and
radio” (1953/2008, pp. 130-131). Claudia Garcia-Rojas (2017) has also shown how “White affect
studies, [which] draws from Western-European theories to establish a sociopolitical structure of
affects, . . . positions White affects as universal, concrete, and true” (pp. 254-255). Garcia-Rojas
offers productive insights into understanding how “lesbian and queer women of color” use “a
language of self [that] emerges from the embodied and experiential self and operates as a lens
through which women of color feminists examine and expose systems of power and oppression,
hegemonic knowledge structures, and dominant economies of affect” (2017, p. 255). GarciaRojas’ vital point about White affect scholarship as pushing for universalism, concreteness, and
truth must be considered and challenged in any scholarly endeavor with affect studies. I follow
her point with my notion of affect in cultural affect, arguing that cultural affects can only happen
and reflect one’s lived, embodied orientation, subjectivity, and identity.
For this dissertation, affect is the capacity and intensity for bodies to affect and be
affected. In other words, affect is a feeling and potential that is in relational movement, which is
a much different idea than emotions or one’s emotional state. In response to Massumi and
others’ notion that affect operates in a different logic than language, in a non-linear manner, and
in a non-conscious, presubjective event, I take the position that there are affects that also

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develop in tandem with specific language use and specific cultures and cultural ecologies. That
is, many affects inform and form through subjectivity, identity, and culture, as Franz Fanon,
Claudia Garcia-Rojas, and many others have inferred (e.g., Jackie Rhodes, Sara Ahmed, Gloria
Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, and Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch, to name a few).
Additionally, many affects inform and form through lived, embodied experiences and memories.
This understanding of affect provides a basis for affect as a component to the concept of
cultural affect.
SIGNIFICATION
A sign is primarily comprised of signifier, signified, and referent. The relationship
between signifier and signified is signification. This relationship is arbitrary and used for
conventional purposes. Signification is where, when, how, and why meaning emerges.
Semiotics, the study of signs, “confronts head on the question of how images [and language]
make meanings” (Rose, 2007, p. 74). Others corroborate: Art historian and film theorist Kaja
Silverman (1983) defined semiotics as “involv[ing] the study of signification, but signification
cannot be isolated from the human subject who uses it and is defined by means of it, or from the
cultural system which generates it” (p. 3); and Chris Barker (2012) contended that semiotics
“explores how the meanings generated by texts have been achieved through a particular
arrangement of signs and cultural codes” (p. 35).
Many semioticians connect meaning to ideology as a way to illuminate power dynamics
and oppression. Ideology, as Althusser (1970/1971) argued, “hails or interpellates concrete
individuals as concrete subjects” (p. 173). It disseminates via institutions, such as schools and
mass media, notably through discourses. Institutional discourses are formed, Michel Foucault
(1972) noted, by discursive formations—”a number of statements . . . objects, types of
statement, concepts, or thematic choices . . . [that has] a regularity (an order, correlations,
positions and functionings, transformations)” (p. 38). Discourses disperse knowledge, power,
and oppression to form the bodies of subjects (Foucault, 1975/1995; Foucault, 1976/1990;

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Alcoff, 2006). In short, discourses inscribe and “speak” about bodies as well as direct them to
perform. Ideology creates subjects through discourses, and discourses interpellate meaning
onto bodies.
Ideology is another way to explain what Roland Barthes terms “myth.” Barthes,
according to Silverman, “identifies connotation with the operation of ideology (also called
‘myth’). For Barthes ideology or myth consists of the deployment of signifiers for the purpose of
expressing and surreptitiously justifying the dominant values of a given historical period” (1983,
p. 27). In Mythologies, Barthes (1957/1972) argued that “myth is a system of communication,
that it is a message. . . . Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in
which it utters this message” (p. 109). And it is “a second-order semiological system. That which
is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a
mere signifier in the second” (1957/1972, p. 114). In the first system, a sign communicates a
relatively clear signifier and signified. In the second system, the sign becomes a signifier that
contributes to the formation of signification (see figure 1). For Barthes, “signification is the myth
itself”; it “hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear” (1957/1972, p. 121) and
“a type of speech defined by its intention . . . much more than by its literal sense . . . and that in
spite of this, its intention is somehow frozen, purified, eternalized” (1957/1972, p. 124). In other
words, myths present “naturalness” to the order of things and relations. Myth “makes us forget
that things were and are made” and “inserts itself as a non-historical truth” (Rose, 2007, p. 97).

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Figure 1. Roland Barthes schema for myth in 1957

The communication of a message is neither confined to speech nor written discourse.
Myth, Barthes asserted, is also found in “photography, cinema, reporting, sport, shows,
publicity” (1957/1972, p. 110). Barthes’ most famous example was with the image of a young
black soldier on the cover of Paris Match. Dressed in his military uniform, the soldier looks
upward and salutes, presumably at the French flag located off the frame. The magazine Paris
Match is the referent; the image is the signifier; dedication to France is the signified. Together,
they form the sign: faithful black soldier. This is the first level of the sign. For Barthes, a second
level emerges: signification/myth. At this second level, the sign—faithful black soldier—becomes
a SIGNIFIER, and a different SIGNIFIED forms: “French imperiality” (1957/1972, p. 128). The
SIGNIFIER and SIGNIFIED create the signification/myth: France is a great empire and all its
people, regardless of race, are loyal; colonialism and imperialism have made lives better for
those it supposedly exploits and oppresses. This signification presents a narrative to the reader,
and “the reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal,” creating and sustaining
hegemony in various social capacities—economic, political, and cultural—through the
production, distribution, and consumption of communicative signs (1957/1972, p. 128).

26

In this dissertation, Barthes’ notion of myth is important because it presents cultural
meaning through representations (i.e., the Paris Match image, the soldier, the soldier’s race, the
saluting, and so forth are all representations). Myths communicate cultural concepts through
language. According to Chris Barker, “language gives meaning to material objects and social
practices that are brought into view by language and made intelligible to us in terms that
language delimits. These processes of meaning production are signifying practices” (2012, p.
7). Signification presents cultural meanings, which are expressed and formed through
representations in texts, objects, practices, and relations. Cultures communicate messages
through their productions and consumptions. And representations are formed by and circulate
ideology, “reflect[ing] the interests of power. In particular, ideology works to legitimate social
inequalities, and it works at the level of subjectivity” (Rose, 2007, p. 75).
The discipline of rhetoric and composition, arguably and particularly in the last thirty
years, has garnered most of its theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches from a
poststructuralism that situates language as a producer of meaning and construct of reality. The
discipline often approaches texts with an interpretative lens to unveil and analyze meaning in
connection to ideology/myth. This is pervasive in visual rhetoric scholarship, where Marita
Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (2001) remarked that “practices of looking are intimately tied to
ideology. The image culture in which we live is an arena of diverse and often conflicting
ideologies” (p. 21). Such conflicts illuminate the dynamics of power, representation, viewers,
and subjectivities. But ideological interpellation and power are not vertical or unilateral; rather,
ideology/myth and power function horizontally, rhizomatically. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1980)
noted three primary ways readers read: (1) dominant-hegemonic reading; (2) negotiated
reading; and (3) oppositional or counter-hegemonic (pp. 125-127). These ways of reading call
attention to agency and agents. In other words, readers, who are commonly understood as
passive consumers, have agency to create, whether meaning via consumption or production. A

27

cultural affect orientation and/or experience involves signification as cultural meaning, revealing
hegemony, subjectivity, identity, and agency.
ECOLOGY
For this dissertation, I use the term “ecology” as a metaphor to give a sense of a more
holistic, macroview of the cultural affects in a given event of a text. In general, metaphors
provide us with a way to conceptualize and comprehend complex concepts and ideas (Kress,
2010, p. 30), to structure everyday life and realities (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003, p. 4), and are
inescapable (Derrida, 1998, pp. 103-104; Dobrin, 2011, pp. 35-36). I have tried to choose my
metaphors carefully in order to illuminate in the clearest way how cultural affects emerge.
Ecology is one metaphor. Although the term is nearly always connected to environmentalism or
environmental studies, I do not, for this dissertation, use it as a model or metaphor to
understand it as such; rather, I turn toward it because of its emphasis on attention to various
organisms/entities, their relation to a surrounding environment, and the dynamism of them in a
context. This emphasis brings into focus complex understandings of place and space as well as
the main and peripheral materialities within a place.
In the last thirty years, rhetoric and composition and writing studies scholarship has
focused on ecocomposition, ecocriticism, and ecorhetoric (Gries, 2012, p. 67). In “The Ecology
of Writing,” Marilyn Cooper (1986) worked against both cognitive and solitary models of writing
as a way to show that “what goes on in . . . classes signals a growing awareness that language
and texts are not simply the means by which individuals discover and communicate information,
but are essentially social activities, dependent on social structures and processes not only in
their interpretative but also in their constructive phases” (p. 366). As a result, Cooper proposed
an ecological model that situates writing as “an activity through which a person is continually
engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems” (p. 367). Cooper’s ideas also generated
the term “ecocomposition,” which Sidney Dobrin and Christian R. Weisser (2002) noted is “the
study of the relationships between environments (and by that we mean natural, constructed,

28

and even imagined places) and discourse (speaking, writing, and thinking). . . . [and] attempts to
provide a more holistic, encompassing framework for studies of the relationships between
discourse and environment.” (p. 572). However, Dobrin (2012) later suggested the failure of
ecocomposition as an intellectual project, remarking that it “evolved into little more than
opportunities to bring examinations of nature writing and other environmentalist topics into
composition classrooms as topics of discussion or subjects about which to write.
Ecocomposition, that is, has never really been about ecology per se” (p. 2). For this dissertation,
an ecological model sheds light on the fluctuating and open systems that allow cultural affects to
emerge. Ecology provides a way of seeing, investigating, and accounting for both the parts and
the whole “without elevating the individual parts to a status that renders the system of
secondary value” (Dobrin, 2012, p. 8).
Ecology differs from context, Cooper argued and which I follow suit, in that context
disconnects a social writing situation from other situations. When the social writing situation is
perceived as disconnected, it appears fixed and static/undynamic. This is not to disregard
cultural, political, and economic structures as influential. Such structures and the context they
create very much inform and influence a writing situation, writers, and readers. Ecologies, on
the contrary, serve a fundamental point about situations as “inherently dynamic; though their
structures and contents can be specified at a given moment, in real time they are constantly
changing, limited only by parameters that are themselves subject to change over longer spans
of time” (p. 368). The idea of context communicates a situation as contained and static. Ecology
broadens this understanding by situating a context as one part of an ecology’s whole. This is
important for historical work since one can never recover the ecology of the past; researchers
can never return to historical ecologies other than through representations. Of course, this does
not mean that historical ecologies are disparate entities from contemporary ecologies because

29

ecologies are always built through time.2 An ecology gains velocity from historical ecologies
(and contexts) and accumulates to build on and toward contemporary ecologies. By thinking
ecologically, I attempt to call attention to the fluidity and flux of points/nodes/species in
contemporary ecologies as I work with historical materials.
Ecology also brings into focus complex understandings of place and space with cultural
affect experiences. Lloyd Bitzer defined rhetorical situation “as a complex of persons, events,
objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or
partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or
action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence” (1968, p. 6). Richard Vatz
responded to Bitzer’s theory and definition, proposing that “[n]o situation can have a nature
independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he
chooses to characterize it” (1973, p. 154). Both Bitzer’s argument for objective realism and Vatz’
argument for subjective perspective fall short of the complexity of a situation because, as
Edbauer has also suggested, they simplify the situation and decontextualize its historical
precedence. Edbauer proposed a “revised strategy for theorizing public rhetorics . . . as a
circulating ecology of effects, enactments, and events by shifting the lines of focus from
rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. . . . [in order to] add the dimensions of history and
movement (back) into our visions/versions of rhetoric's public situations” (original emphasis,
2005b, p. 9). Ecology demystifies the notion that situations are static, timeless, and a
conglomeration of discrete entities. Whenever we are located in place(s) and engaging with
space(s), we are ecologically situated amongst a number of people, institutions, beliefs,
paradigms, things, technologies, and so forth, both immediate and remote, historical and
contemporary. This ecology situation is in constant flux. The point is not to try to capture all the
fluctuations and their movements; but to attend to as many as possible in order to have a

2

Many of the ideas in the last two paragraphs stem from a conversation with my dear friend Jake Riley on
April 22, 2017.

30

clearer picture and/or to better understand the influence of an ecology’s organisms/entities on
each other.
With the Labadie Collection, ecology and ecological thinking attends to both the
individual parts (re: the posters I analyze) and the whole system: the archive, the physical
buildings and people that house the archive, the digital technologies necessary for the archive
to exist, the University of Michigan, and so forth. Ecology also calls attention to the different
ecologies in which the analog posters and digital artifacts exist. For instance, the analog posters
are stored in storage units, transferred to the UM reading room for requested visitations, and
handled by UM staff and patrons. They also rest among a variety of other analog and print
archives in the larger Labadie archive. In contrast, the digital artifacts are in a digital ecology
that includes five other digital collections—Anarchist Pamplets, Digital Photo Collection, Pinback Button Image Collection (Political Buttons), Poster Collection, and Selma Inter-religious
Project Newsletter—which are all housed in the Joseph A. Labadie Digital Collections. The two
ecologies also share and differ in particular city places where I engaged with the posters:
Lansing, MI, Los Angeles, CA, Michigan State University, my apartment, my partner’s
apartment, and my campus office with the digital artifacts; Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan,
Hatcher Graduate Library, and the UM reading room with the analog posters.
A location will produce certain cultural affects that differ from other locations and their
cultural affects. For instance, in working with the analog posters, I could easily note the attrition
of the materials, leading to inquiries about conservation and preservation. In one archival visit, I
asked Kate Hutchins, the University of Michigan Reader and Reference Services Librarian in
the Special Collections Library, about some of the attrition with a poster. Consequently,
Hutchins connected me with Cathy Baker, the University of Michigan Conservation Librarian
and Exhibit Conservator. In an interview with Baker, she and I talked for over an hour with five
posters in front of us on the table. She clarified the reason for encapsulations and why some
corners are missing: “I just cut the corner off . . . so that I could lift the top piece of Mylar up and

31

write on it. That’s all that is. It’s nothing more. It doesn’t have anything to do with conservation or
preservation. It’s just rather than taking this out of this envelope and then having to redo it or put
it into another envelope … We just didn’t have enough time to do that. That was my answer”
(Baker, personal interview, March 16, 2106). While it is interesting to consider the difference
between someone thinking about the survival of the object versus the task of archiving without
as much conscious laboring about doing it, this interview and our shared space with several of
the posters illuminates a very different ecology than when I sit at a computer and browse the
digital artifacts. The relations between artifact and user/observer3 also differ: more physical
movement is set in motion with an analog artifact, its medium, and its materiality; while less
physical movement arises with a digital artifact, the digital space does present a set of
information that culturally impacts users and allows users to tack meaning onto the posters.
And yet, the analog posters and digital artifacts both share an ecology of persons,
places, and things: the institution of University of Michigan, the Special Collections archive, the
librarians and technical specialists who have preserved the artifacts, faculty, staff, and students,
state and federal laws, an array of physical materials, such as desks, chairs, walls, computers,
paper, and pens, and so on. Each ecology evoked similar, but also different sensory
experiences and cultural affects. With the digital artifacts, I was in a variety of environments as I
accessed the archive online: at my office on Michigan State University’s campus, on my couch
in my apartment, among others. With the analog artifacts, I was positioned in the UM reading
room. These points/nodes/species come to the forefront in different ways depending on the
ecological perception a researcher or visitor has with the posters. What becomes crucial is the
embodiment of the researcher or visitor as ecologically situated. Embodiment is the final
component in understanding the makeup of cultural affects.
3

Plenty of scholarship, which includes a variety of intellectual movements, such as posthumanism, nonhumanism, actor network theory, etc., has already shown the problems of an anthropocentric paradigm
and approach. Unfortunately, this scholarship is beyond the scope of this project. Indeed, this dissertation
arguably falls victim to anthropocentrism. For sake of argument, we can think of observers as any
materiality that can affect and be affected by other materialities.

32

EMBODIMENT
Cultural affect is a particularly embodied experience. Embodiment is the blood that
pumps life into signification, affect, and ecology. I should clarify the distinction between “the
body” and “embodiment,” which I understand as different conceptual terms. I draw on N.
Katherine Hayles’ delineanation of embodiment: “In contrast to the body, embodiment is
contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together
compose enactment. . . . Whereas the body is an idealized form that gestures toward a Platonic
reality, embodiment is the specific instantiation generated from the noise of difference” (1999, p.
196). The body, according to Hayles, is abstract and normalized; embodiment, in contrast, is an
instantiated materiality, a corporeality that cannot be separated from its medium and context, or
rather, I would argue, ecology. Simply said, the body is general and embodiment is particular.
Likewise, Anne Frances Wysocki (2012) asserted that embodiment “calls us to attend to what
we just simply do, day to day, moving about, communicating with others, using objects that we
simply use in order to make things happen” (p. 3). Of course, embodiment and the body are
always woven together in lived experiences, social contexts, and ecologies. The key for Hayles
and Wysocki, and I concur, is not to create a binary relationship between the two or privilege
one over the other; rather, the two need to be conceptualized together as they are inextricably
intertwined.
In relation to rhetorical studies, the “official” scholarly history and literature of embodied
rhetorics is quite extensive and discrete. Several rhetoric and writing and communication
scholars have considered in various ways and degrees embodied rhetorics in relation to visual
rhetoric (Eds. Selzer & Crowley, 1999; Eds. Olson et al., 2008), multimodality (Murray, 2009;
Eds. Arola and Wysocki, 2012), composition (Lindquist, 2004), and delivery (Morey, 2016)—
many of them connecting their studies to affect as I noted in chapter one. My intent is not to
demonstrate that embodiment or the body ought to be privileged over language experience (or
reinforce the inversion); I bring embodiment theory not to bear upon theories of language, but

33

rather coalesce the two to demonstrate a symbiotic relationship that makes space for rhetoric to
function and, consequentially, activate cultural affect.
For this dissertation, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s ideas in two texts of hers to understand
embodiment: The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Queer Phenomenology. In the former, Ahmed
(2004) explored a number of texts that evoke emotions within the public sphere. For Ahmed,
emotions are cultural phenomena that inform and form cultural narratives for individuals in their
community building and alliance. These narratives, in turn, produce “others” by inclusion and
exclusion of certain populations based on their social embodiment. For instance, Ahmed begins
the book with the language of a British poster: “swarms of illegal immigrants and bogus asylum
seekers invade Britain by any means available to them. . . . They are only seeking the easy
comforts and free benefits in Soft Touch Britain. All funded by YOU” (p. 1). The poster invokes a
(White) audience to envision themselves as the “taken advantage” Brit and to understand the
imminent threat: the other. This forms, according to Ahmed, a narrative. Ahmed remarked: “The
narrative invites the reader to adopt the ‘you’ through working on emotions” (2004, p. 1). Such a
narrative, and in fact emotion in general for Ahmed, is an exercise of power over the collective
and cultural body. Emotions “operate to ‘make’ and ‘shape’ bodies as forms of action, which
also involve orientations towards others” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 4). Circulating discourses drive
emotions, which are intentional and directed toward objects. This, however, is where I depart
from her argument: emotions/affects can be unintentional and often find themselves directed
and indirected toward objects as well as places, people, and memories. As such, for this
dissertation, embodiment includes intentional and unintentional affects that explicitly and
implicitly direct subjects toward objects, texts, places, people, beliefs, and memories.
Whether explicit or implicit, the directions an embodied agent receives, takes, and
practices highlight embodiment as an orientation. And it is in Ahmed’s other work—Queer
Phenomenology—that she more deeply and compellingly argued for orientations as
foundational to culturally-situated subjects. In it, Ahmed (2006) focused more acutely on what it

34

means to be oriented and how orientations inform and affect the ways in which one’s ontology
functions within the world. As she contended, “If we know where we are when we turn this way
or that way, then we are oriented. We have our bearings. We know what to do to get to this
place or that place. To be oriented is also to be turned toward certain objects” (2006, p. 1).
Ahmed’s study was particularly focused on sexual orientation as well as gender and race, and
while this focus is indeed vastly important, her work also informs readers how bodies in general
are oriented in time and space. Queer Phenomenology shows how other social registers, such
as class, age, and (dis)ability, factor into bodies and space as dependent upon each other for
orientation. For Ahmed, sexuality is not quite about the object of choice that a sexual subject
has, but about the sexual subject’s relation and orientation to the world. This resonates with the
value of embodiment in understanding cultural affect, which is about a subject’s relation and
orientation to objects, other bodies, and the world writ large.
Emotions—and I would argue affects—are one drive for bodies to be oriented. For
Ahmed, they are crucial to the relations between a subject and an object. But orientations
involve not only present relations, but past relations and histories. They also include attention to
the degrees of those relations and histories. Ahmed (2006) remarked:
when we feel fear, we feel fear of something. . . . we are affected by “what” we
come into contact with. In other words, emotions are directed to what we come
into contact with: they move us “toward” and “away” from such objects. So, we
might fear an object that approaches us. The approach is not simply about the
arrival of an object: it is also how we turn toward that object. . . . The timing of
this apprehension matters. For an object to make this impression is dependent
on past histories, which surface as impressions on the skin. At the same time,
emotions shape what bodies do in the present, or how they are moved by the
objects they approach. . . . Emotions involve such affective forms of
(re)orientation. It is not just that bodies are moved by the orientations they have;

35

rather, the orientations we have toward others shape the contours of space by
affecting relations of proximity and distance between bodies. (original emphasis,
pp. 2-3)
Two points in this passage contribute to understanding orientation as a key tenet of
embodiment, and embodiment as one of the components of cultural affect. First, Ahmed noted
that objects impress upon bodies because of past histories. That is, an object’s history projects
onto perceiving embodied subjects to leave an impression upon subjects’ body and
embodiment. Simultaneously, perceiving embodied subjects project upon the object their own
histories of lived experiences. In the Labadie archive, my embodiment as a perceiving subject—
my Whiteness, masculinity, working-class, experiences and memories of labor, beliefs and
assumptions about what constitutes work—orients me and invokes me to project affects and
meaning on the Labadie archive and posters. At the same time, the archive and posters have a
history of working-class and activism intentions and purposes. My encounter with the archive
and posters impressed upon my body in overt and subtle ways.
Second, Ahmed called for attention to proximity and distance in relation of an embodied
subject to others, whether object or person. This means embodiment as a key conceptual area
to cultural affect brings to the forefront the proximity and distance of a subject to immediate
objects and persons as well as remote objects and persons. This proximity and distance opens
up and/or closes off understandings about objects and persons, some of which are attainable
and others that are unrecoverable. Furthermore, I add the places, beliefs, memories, stories,
and lived experiences into the consideration of proximity and distance. In doing so, I can show a
number of different cultural affects that emerge in my interaction with the analyzed posters.
These proximities and distances give a clearer understanding of where I have been, how I was
oriented, how I am reoriented, why I was oriented, and why I am reoriented. More specifically, in
this dissertation, I connect embodiment and orientation to “the laboring body,” which, as Jennifer
Keohane (2016) noted, “has garnered surprisingly little rhetorical scrutiny. . . . the laboring body

36

often struggles to be seen. The body at work, however, is a rich rhetorical resource that allows
workers to make meaning out of their tasks, perform acts of solidarity or resistance, and
demonstrate their significance to a society” (p. 68). It is here with the connection between
embodied rhetorics, orientation, and labor that illuminates particular cultural affects for this
dissertation.
SCHEMA
Figure 2 illustrates, in a rudimentary way, my point that cultural affects emerge through
four distinct, yet related and inseparable conceptual areas: affect, signification, ecology and
embodiment. If all these areas are identified, then there is a greater possibility of acknowledging

Ecology

Signification

Cultural Affect

Affect

Embodiment

Figure 2. Necessary factors for the rhetorical emergence of cultural
affect. Diagram created by author

and engaging with cultural affects; if they are not identified, cultural affects do not necessarily
dissipate, but they have the potential of being dismissed and devalued. The latter condition is
unfortunate since our worlds are laden with cultural affect. Cultural affect forms our worlds and
bodies simultaneously as worlds and bodies form cultural affect.

37

Cultural affect: embodied agents affect and are affected and oriented by/to/with ideology
and cultural meaning within an ecological situation. Rhetoric, with its emergent and relational
qualities, lingers, charges, and connects these four areas. In my case study, I engage with
these areas: affect forms and flows between the posters and my embodiment. The affect of the
posters produces a feeling that runs along my body and continues to move in-between the
spaces of the posters, me, and my past. That feeling is not acultural, but carries signification,
which is expressed through the content, medium, and materiality of the posters. That feeling
connects to the cultural history of my embodiment. Ecology situates cultural affect amidst
contemporary places and spaces, drawing attention to the people and materialities so often
relegated to the background. Ecology also positions rhetorical texts and events in relation to
institutions and discourses. Embodiment, if you will, brings ecology into a more focused
instantiation. Embodiment directs my attention to rhetorical, material, and personal historical
elements of the posters. It also hones in on the particular flesh and orientation of a specific
cultural embodiment and its affective capacities and potentialities. In this dissertation,
embodiment allows me to give attention to the positionality of my own body in relation to the
posters and archives and my past and present lived, cultural experiences, memories, and
orientations.

38

CHAPTER THREE. METHODS IN MOTION
∞
On May 9, 2016, I attended the first day of Digital Media and Composition Institute at
The Ohio State University. After a full day of introductions, discussions on sound, recording
soundscapes, and composing sixty second soundscapes with the digital-audio software
Audacity, I joined many of the other participants for dinner at Mad Mex on High Street, just
south of OSU’s campus. I sat next to Melody, an Assistant Professor and Writing Center
Director at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Following the basic introductory chit-chat,
she smiled and asked, “so, here’s the dreadful question: what’s your dissertation about?” “That’s
a hot mess,” I replied, but knew that I was going to try to explain what I was doing. She retorted
with, “well, tell me what your chapters are and how they are organized.”
I begin: “Chapter one is the introduction. Chapter two is my theory chapter in which I
want to build a theory of affect. Chapter three is my methodologies and methods chapter. And
chapter four is my analysis.” I also explained my three methods: multi-sensuous rhetorical
analysis, interviews, and story. “So, you’re using autoethnography way to analyze these posters
to build a theory of affect?” she asked.
“Yeah, more or less,” I responded, not sure if she wanted to dig into the nuances of
autoethnography and story and analysis.
“But how do you know that others wouldn’t experience the posters in the same way?
Shouldn’t you be doing a survey? And why isn’t your methods chapter second, followed by your
results and findings?” she asked. I was kind of quiet at this point, working through a way to
respond to all these questions despite my own confusion with what the hell was even going on
with my dissertation at that moment. She continued: “I’m just one who values more empirical
approaches and setups. Let me ask you: is your research inductive or deductive?” I paused
some more, with a countenance that communicated clearly that the wheels were turning in my
head. Trying to make sense of what kind of research process reasoning the project is at this
39

point, I said, “I’d say deductive, but it’s also part inductive. I began with analysis of the posters
and then decided to begin to build a theory from the analysis. But I plan to go back to
analyses—all the while refining my methodologies and methods. I look at it as a recursive
approach.”
Melody and I continued to chat through most of dinner about research methods and the
labor of completing a dissertation. “It’s a marathon,” she advised with a long stare, seeing if I
registered what exactly that means. “Yeah, I know,” I responded, knowing my challenge is that
my predisposition is the forty-yard dash. But I reminded myself of the slow research approach. I
reminded myself that I needed to wallow in the complexity of the research; to dwell in both the
research and my cultural past while also rooting myself in the present; and to feel both striking
and lingering affects with(in) the research.
Over the next couple of months, I thought about Melody’s points with empirical methods
and my evidence. First, Melody brought up a point about the value of empiricism: knowledge
created from evidence of sensory experiences. Yet, what happens when our senses experience
phenomena, but we cannot entirely turn it into evidence? How do we account for sensory
stimulation without a kind of scientific, quantitative explanation? For example, when we walk, we
don’t need to watch or touch or even give much attention to our legs as we project our bodies
forward4; or, when we go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet, we rarely think about the height of
the toilet seat and its effectiveness. It is when something disrupts our habitual or repetitive
movement of our legs, as in, say, an injury to the knee, or when the toilet seat is too high or too
low than consistent bathroom outings that we draw attention and conclusions from evidence
labeled as scientific. While these examples most strongly illuminate proprioception, a sense that
allows an individual to mobilize body parts without giving attention to the body parts, they also
manifest how our multi-sensory orientation and being is constantly engaged in the world—able
4

I understand this is quite an ablest example, and indeed disability, epistemology, and evidence needs a
more thorough investigation. My point, however, is to call attention to the limitations of scientific
empiricism and quantitative research.

40

to produce scientific, quantitative data, but more often than not to generate qualitative,
unempirical explanations. In this dissertation, I grapple with this issue since culture and affect
have the propensity to slip from empirical accountability.
My conversation with Melody also made me think about the type of reasoning in this
dissertation research. I lean more toward inductive than deductive reasoning since I take a
small slice of the larger Poster Collection—I only analyze three posters—and identify patterns
with the artifacts and my analyses. But inductive reasoning also doesn’t seem right; I’m not
gathering quantitative data to assert a dual operation of signification and affect (although future
research should do this). Rather, abductive reasoning feels better suited because ideology and
affect are both elusive, shifting phenomena. Abduction—inference to the best explanation—is
commonly used in everyday practices and scientific research. It differs from induction, as Igor
Douven (2011) noted, in that although “both are ampliative, meaning that the conclusion goes
beyond what is (logically) contained in the premises (which is why they are non-necessary
inferences) . . . in abduction there is an implicit or explicit appeal to explanatory considerations,
whereas in induction there is not; in induction, there is only an appeal to observed frequencies
or statistics” (original emphasis, n.p.). I work from explanations of the experience of cultural
affect through the writing, showing that writing cultural affect rests upon appealing to readers
through abductive reasoning.
∞
Approaching a study of the glue, the binding, the linkage of signification and affect is
undoubtedly challenging since affect is already considered immaterial, yet embodied. It is
continually in-between, yet ephemeral and fleeting. Signification, of course, works similarly in
that cultural meanings fluctuate by/through culture, interpretation, time, space and place, and
context. Signification slips, and a chain of signifiers easily leads one into a rabbit hole. But
signification as cultural meaning, at least, works through representation. How can scholars
account qualitatively for affective experiences without reducing articulations and analyses to

41

solely subjective interpretation or representations of affect? And if signification requires
interpretation and affect requires a “felt experience,” how can signification be “felt” and affect be
interpreted or put into language?
Certain methods and methodologies are better suited to address these questions.
Methods and methodologies for affect studies can be wide-ranging and diverse, which is both a
strength because of the flexibility for researchers to adapt an appropriate research design, but
also a challenge. In fact, most affect scholarship lacks solid, reliable methods. Although this
dissertation does not propose a new methodology—providing a “set of principles and ideas that
inform the design of a research study” (Birks and Mills, 2011, p. 4)—for studying affect, I
respond more or less to the challenges by implementing three methods: story, interviews, and
multi-sensuous rhetorical analysis. These methods illuminate the operationalization of
signification and affect through self-reflexivity, ethnographic engagement,5 and critical analyses.
They are by no means the only methods for understanding the theory and experience of cultural
affect; rather, they offer in this dissertation entry points to demonstrating the theory in practice.
By exemplifying one way to see, hear, feel, and experience the rhetoricity of cultural affect in
practice, I offer a project that is methodologically generative and not simply methodologically
informed.
STORY
In this dissertation, story as a research method is a central practice for writing about the
experience of cultural affect. Story, which I define below, as a method can take many forms,
expressions, mediums, and so forth. Story can include a variety of approaches and practices
during the crafting of it with research and writing. I should be clear: Story is not literary nonfiction. It is also not “me-search.” Instead, story can allow and drive researchers to affectively

5

I am not necessarily just doing ethnography in the traditional sense. While I do interview individuals, a
common ethnographic method, I also work with a more ethnographic inclination, as for example in also
doing site visitations and observations. That is, I write culture (re: ethnography) with methods that have a
more ethnographic orientation.

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and analytically consider the relationships researchers have with their “object of study,” other
persons involved with the study, and/or communities. For this dissertation, story also includes a
way to gather data, in fact embodied data. As Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage noted,
“embodied data can be either emic - produced by the affected body itself or etic - produced by
an outside observer” (original emphasis, 2015, p. 8). Story works to collect emic embodied data,
where I gather “firsthand data that is indexically linked to the body in affect (e.g., texts or images
produced by the affected person), which can be produced either in the heat of the moment (e.g.,
commenting on YouTube), in situ . . . or remembered (e.g., in a letter about the affect
experienced)” (p. 8). For the most part, I story—through alphabetic writing and pictures—how
my body affected and was affected during the research. In collecting this data, I contend that
three key practices are needed that make story a research method: self-reflexivity, lived
experience, and embodied hauntologies.
But I first want to distinguish the difference between story and narrative. They closely
resemble each other—and in fact many scholars may simply (continue to) conflate them and
use them synonymously—but some key differences exist. I approach narrative as a term that
differs from its use in literary theory. Of course, I continue the lines of narrative as having tropes,
sequences, structure, plot, character, theme, and so forth. These ideas are also taken up in the
field of communication. Larry Browning (2009) noted that it is the “study and theory of
narratives, or complex stories—what they are made of, how they are structured, and what we
gain from using them as a vehicle for communication” (p. 673). Robin M. Boylorn and Mark P.
Orbe also suggested that “narrative represents an umbrella term for forms of communication
that have: (a) a sequence of events (beginning, middle, and end), (b) some form of causal
development between sequences that produces a conclusion; and (c) memorable descriptions
of events” (2014, p. 27). The interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, which has influenced and
been influenced by composition and literary studies, uses narrative as a structure to story. Chris
Barker (2012) asserted that “[a] narrative is an ordered sequential account that makes claims to

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be a record of events. Narratives are the structured form in which stories advance explanations
for the ways of the world” (p. 35). Finally, the discipline of rhetoric and composition also has a
long history with the notion of narrative, oftentimes conflating it with story. As Debra Journet
(2012) remarked, “[a]s a discipline, we generally use narrative as both a mode of student writing
(e.g., literacy narrative or personal narrative) in which students construct stories of events or
actions that are important to them” (p. 13). Journet also posited that the discipline uses narrative
as “a research genre (e.g., case study or ethnography) in which the researcher represents her
findings by telling a story” (p. 13). But composition researchers, according to Journet, have
continually conflated narrative and personal experience. For Journet, researchers need to
understand that “there are narratives that are not based on personal experience. And there are
ways other than personal narrative to render the specific details of unique people or events” (p.
16).
I also want to argue, however, that narrative is an abstraction or generalization of
perceived, coherent, and sequenced real or imagined events that inform and are created by a
collection of individuals (re: a social body) about its place in the world at a specific time (but
simultaneously appearing timeless). As others (Ricoeur, 1981; Carr, 1986; Crites, 1986) have
noted in narrative theory, narrative is bound up with time. “Temporality [is] . . . considered to be
the nucleus of narrative theory” (Chawla, 2007, p. 25). Narrative also functions rhetorically in
that it influences and produces cultural orientations for those embedded in a culture and their
relation to other cultures. Narrative cannot be separated from culture. As Hayden White (1980)
simply remarked, “To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the
very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself” (p. 5). In some ways,
narrative operates as an ideology or myth. Narrative is a conglomeration of ideologies that
frames the ways cultures are defined by and related to other cultures. Narrative cannot form by
the subjectivity of one person because narrative is structured by culture (i.e., not one person
can make or change culture). Narrative presents what Benedict Anderson called “imagined

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community,” a concept that extends not only to nations, but also other social identities—race,
gender, sex, class, ability—in which a group of people perceive themselves as part of that group
without ever having met every person of the group (1983/2006, p. 6). There’s a perceived
connectivity, coherence, certainty, and completeness. Narrative, arguably, has “conservativism”
to it in that it continues the status quo with little modifications or critique.
Story, in contrast, is better understood as stemming from specific embodied (human,
non-human, and so forth) experiences that can contribute, or not, to modifications of a narrative.
Although individuals are formed into concrete subjects by cultural narratives, concrete subjects
become agents by telling their stories—whether verbal, written, visual, performative, or other
textual productions. Story offers the space for agents to speak back to narratives. As many
scholars of color in the discipline of rhetoric and composition have shown (Villanueva, 1993;
Royster, 1996), story is a research method that typically speaks back to hegemony. That is,
stories are counter-hegemonic practices that allow agents to assert their lived experiences and
knowledge. But stories also work alongside narratives, creating parallel and multiple notions of
life. This is not a new argument, and in fact non-Whites/Europeans have argued and practiced
such storytelling for eons. Lee Maracle (1990) remarked: “There is a story in every line of
theory. The difference between us and European scholars is that we admit this, and present
theory through story” (p. 7). All of these practices of storymaking and storytelling open up
spaces to (re)engage with places, typically modifying the places in which they happen. Agents
perform, create, and share stories in places. As Michel de Certeau contended: “Stories . . . carry
out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. They also
organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces” (1984, p. 118).
Archives are a kind of space of story, assembling particular qualities of story: discontinuities,
slight incoherence, uncertainty, and partiality. But story also has the potential to open up new
experiences, meaning, affects, and systems. Stories can be created, formed, and modified by
agents, texts, and/or events, but it takes a number of interlocking, overlapping stories to make,

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sustain, or change a narrative. As Malea Powell (2008) wrote, “all stories [come from] a much
larger, more complicated accumulation of stories” (p. 115). Story has the power to break
narrative’s conservatism—or not.
Stories illuminate how agents can or cannot experience power, mainly through centering
on or factoring in their specific embodied experiences. Stories make and resist power. When an
agent decides on what story to tell, how to tell the story, and when and where to tell a story, the
agent can gain (some) power; or, the agent can be silenced depending upon a number of
factors: the agent’s subject position, the story’s content, form, exigency, time, place, medium,
audience, circulation, and so forth. If an agent decides to enact a story that aligns and fits within
the dominant narrative, the agent can easily fall into being compliant. The stories we tell
ourselves orient us (back) to cultural narratives, relations, and realities (re: beliefs, ideas,
knowledge, matter, decisions, actions). Stories are us. As Indigenous writer Thomas King
(2005) remarked, “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (p. 62).
Two concerns may arise with this discussion of narrative and story. First, I imagine many
scholars may question my presentation of a perceived dichotomy with narrative and story:
truth/lie, fact/fiction, objectivity/subjectivity, and so forth. But such questions are of no interest to
me and, in fact, seem to invariably appear based on a Western paradigm of binary oppositions.
To be clear: narratives are not objective accounts of reality, but neither are they fictions in the
sense of being fake or absolutely imagined. Stories, similarly, are neither solely subjective
accounts of reality nor are they simply factual accounts. Although Debra Journet (2012) used
the term “personal narrative,” which more closely aligns with how I have discussed story, she
makes a key assertion that I also follow with story: “Personal narratives in composition research
are not inherently more authentic than other research modes” (p. 17). Of course, this definitely
does not position empirical, quantitative research as more legit, authentic, or “real.” Journet
wanted to point out that we must be more attentive and analytical toward how stories are used
in our research and teaching. In this dissertation, while I work with ideas about both narrative

46

and story, I practice the latter as a method in order to constellate my cultural affective relations
with the research, the posters/texts, the librarians, the theory, the writing, and the overall
dissertation.
My use of story follows some ideas expressed in cultural rhetorics theory and work. In
“Our Story Begins Here: Constellating Cultural Rhetorics Practices,” the Cultural Rhetorics
Theory Lab (2014) posited that “the practice of story is integral to doing cultural rhetorics. . . .
[although telling stories] may not be the kinds of stories you’re used to hearing, or the kinds of
things you’re used to recognizing as story” (1.1). Likewise, the stories I tell in this dissertation
work with experimenting with content, form, and delivery. They also involve my embodied
orientation, a notion that Malea Powell and I (2016) have said elsewhere: “cultural rhetorics is a
practice, and more specifically an embodied practice” and “the core of cultural rhetorics
practices is an orientation and embodied storying of the maker in relation to what is being made”
(original emphasis, n.p.). While I do not claim this dissertation is a cultural rhetorics dissertation,
I cannot neglect the fact that I have a cultural rhetorics orientation to the research and this
dissertation. And this works well because having a cultural rhetorics orientation to meaningmaking and affect encourages researchers to acknowledge contributions and power dynamics
in research, research sites, with research objects, other researchers, and the people involved in
the research.
Cultural rhetorics scholars also emphasize story as not only constellating knowledge and
community, but also emanating relations—not just relations of person to person, but also
relations between form and content, text to medium, researcher to interfaces, bodies to
subjectivities, identities, cultures, and memories, and so forth. Stories are rhetorical and
rhetorics are storified. This is what cultural rhetorics scholarship brings to our discipline:
“rhetorics as always-already cultural and cultures as persistently rhetorical” (Cultural Rhetorics
Theory Lab, 2014, 1.1). Cultures tell stories and stories form cultures. Through story, cultures
create relations. And cultural rhetorics brings to the forefront that all relations matter. Although I

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have a cultural rhetorics orientation, I do not write specifically about all the relations in this
dissertation. They are here though, and I greatly appreciate and honor them the best I can. But
my cultural rhetorics orientation involves practicing what the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab
asserted: “Cultural rhetorics as a scholarly orientation, necessitates our attention to how
relationality exists in different ways and at every step of a scholarly project's process.
The practice of relationality changes throughout that process, and is made visible in multiple
ways” (2014, 3.1).
To make that practice visible, I write some stories. Writing, in general, as a research
method underscores Anna Gibbs’ claim: “[Writing as] method . . . refers not only to the process
of research but also to the process of making sense of that research in and through a writing
that does not come afterward as a ‘writing up’ of what has previously been discovered, but is
actually continuous with it, and, in large part, produces it” (2015, p. 222). Gibbs also connected
writing as a method to affect, remarking that “Writing itself is an affect-laden process: driven by
interest and desire, subject to frustration and misery as well as productive of joy and
excitement” (2015, p. 223). I write stories that are cultural and affective and were written before,
during, and after the dissertation research. Doing so illuminates my undertaking of my
encounters—with the archive, the posters, and this dissertation—rather than simply writing
about (or “writing up”) the “data.”
This first concern segues into the second concern about narrative and story:
assumptions that narrative and story are discrete and easy identifiable. Indeed, to suggest
discreteness is problematic, and partitioning narrative and story might be trivial. And it also may
appear as if I opine that story functions outside culture—an unadulterated practice performed by
a transcendental individual. But one of the main points is that narratives tell us, until we can tell
our story. Our story and its contribution to a collection of similar stories opens the possibility for
reshaping hegemonic cultural narratives. In this dissertation, I tell stories as a way to work

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through and express cultural affect, both in its presence in my engagement with the posters and
in writing this dissertation.
Self-reflexivity and Lived Experiences
I use story with a key practice in the field cultural studies: ethnography with a selfreflexive lens. In some cultural studies work, researchers account for their own subjectivity while
conducting research and analysis. Such vigilance allows researchers to be aware of their own
ideological assumptions and biases. Such an ethnographic approach to cultural phenomena
may also be considered critical ethnography. Gary L. Anderson remarked,
critical ethnographers aim to generate insights, to explain events, and to seek
understanding. They also share with interpretivist ethnographers the view that
the cultural informant's perceptions of social reality are themselves theoretical
constructs. That is, although the informant’s constructs are, to use Geertz's
(1973) expression, more “experience-near” than the researcher’s, they are,
themselves, reconstructions of social reality. (1989, p. 253)
Critical ethnography requires researchers reflectively and reflexively to consider their positions
in order to discover their own paradigms and assumptions derived from their political, economic
and cultural subjectivity. On the one hand, taking these paradigms and assumptions into
account during research means researchers have to be aware of how they may alter the study.
On the other hand, it provides a basis for researchers to draw on their own experiences and
knowledge to understand texts and events. This self-reflexivity provides researchers with a
critical lens in the spatial-historical context where cultural texts and practices arise while
simultaneously inverting the lens back onto the researcher. Annette Markham (2009) confirmed:
the “reflexive processes” in research “look recursively and critically at the self in relation to the
object, context, and process of inquiry” (p. 135). It is a way to turn the research back onto the
researcher and then back onto the research, hopefully evoking fresh ways of seeing, knowing,
and feeling.

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Without doubt, working with an archive requires self-reflexivity. I would also argue that to
make this self-reflexivity apparent in archival research, story functions as an efficacious method.
In the “Foreword” to the anthology Beyond the Archives, Lucille M. Schultz (2008) noted that the
collection provides first-person narratives—although I would contend they are also first-person
stories—which account for how “the writers name the subjectivities with which they intentionally
and unavoidably approach the print materials, the ephemera, and the physical sites they
interrogate” (p. vii). In this dissertation, I do the same by writing my story with self-reflexivity,
hoping to elucidate my subject position—White, heterosexual working-class man—as it relates,
more or less, to my relationship with the posters.
I also think the Beyond the Archives writers illuminate an utmost important feature of
story as/in research and story as/in theory: lived process. The writers “present their work to
readers not as a fait accompli but rather as a lived process” (Schultz, 2008, p. ix). This is similar
to autobiography, which rhetoric and composition scholars have implemented. With their digital
book Techne, Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander remarked:
Scholars in our field have used autobiography in their own work, interweaving
personal narrative with theoretical conversations, often theorizing from lived
experience. For example, Victor Villanueva's Bootstraps, Keith Gilyard's Voices
of the Self, and Morris Young's Minor Re/Visions take seriously the feminist call
to think the personal as the political. We see Techne as part of that lineage, with
a twist. We not only theorize from the body but also deeply understand and feel
our engagements with multimedia technologies as recursively embodied. (2015,
n.p.)
I follow suit with the Beyond the Archive writers and Rhodes and Alexander’s interest in
theorizing embodiment and its recursive experiences with technologies. One of the best ways to
articulate such theory and experience with research as a lived process is to connect it to story,

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making story a self-reflexive, lived embodied process that makes, unmakes, and remakes
constellations of ideas, things, labor, affects, meanings, and relations.
Story as such builds on the valuable work of Jacqueline Royster and Gesa Kirsch’s
Feminist Rhetorical Practices. In it, Royster and Kirsch (2012) created a “polylogical analytical
model, an inquiry framework, for understanding, interpreting, and assessing feminist practices”
(p. 14). They are particularly interested in taking a self-reflexive approach, but as situated with
lived experiences: researchers need to “pay attention to how lived experiences shape [their]
perspectives as researchers and those of [their] research subjects. We call for greater attention
to lived, embodied experience because we consider it to be a powerful yet often-neglected
source of insight, inspiration, and passion” (2012, p. 22). Such paying attention emerges in one
of four of the model’s terms of engagement: strategic contemplation. Royster and Kirsch
remarked, “[a]lthough much has been written about identity politics, how we read and are read
by others—through various markers of language, class, gender, race, and culture—reflections
on how our embodied, lived experience bears on our scholarship and teaching are much less
readily available. . . . strategic contemplation can serve as a tool for addressing this gap” (2012,
p. 94). Strategic contemplation pushes identity politics beyond abstraction and generality and
closer to lived experiences. Many other scholars (see Fanon, 1952/2008; Anzaldúa, 1987;
Stenberg, 2002; Powell, 2008; Weber, 2010) have underscored this notion as well, but I want to
more tightly tie it to story and writing cultural affect. That is, when rhetoric and writing
researchers methodologically use story with the principles of self-reflexivity, lived experiences,
and strategic contemplation, they open the possibility for forging the linkage and
operationalization for signification and affect in rhetorical texts. When I bring to the forefront my
affectivity in relation to this research and the labor activist posters through story, I am able to
note how I see, feel, and experience the operationalization of affect and signification through
linguistic and visual language and design and the posters’ materiality. In chapter five and six, I
manifest this methodology in action.

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Embodied hauntologies
The second feature of story as a method involves what some affective methodology
theorists have proposed as hauntology. “Hauntologies,” according to Lisa Blackman, “might
start with a feeling that there is something more to say, and with a feeling of being unsettled or
wanting to unsettle” (2015, p. 27). For Blackman, hauntologies require researchers to attend to
their embodiment and attunements as they enter and dwell in the research. She offered the
method of “embodied hauntologies,” which “work with the traces, fragments, fleeting moments,
gaps, absences, submerged narratives, and displaced actors and agencies that register
affectively” (2015, p. 26). In other words, embodied hauntologies tend to the discontinuities a
researcher may find in “not just texts, statements, or practices (in the Foucauldian sense), but
specters, displacements, disjointed times, submerged events, and multiple temporalities” (2015,
p. 28). They are a way for a researcher to focus on “a particular archive of connected
statements, practices, objects, subjects, and processes that give form to and transform one's
embodied responses” (2015, p. 28).
For me, orienting myself with(in) the research means being attuned affectively to the
places, spaces, persons, and texts of the study. It means paying attention to my body—both my
embodied cultural subjectivity and the felt intensities and relations during research and
reflection. It means working with Elena Trivelli’s idea of affective attuning: “Dynamics of
‘affective attuning’ can then be framed as potential forms of recognition, and powerful windows
into manifestation of social haunting” (2015, p. 134). Such an orientation generates a more
potent embodied hauntology—one in which I not only can come to better understand how some
labor activists may have worked with cultural meaning and affect, but experience cultural affect
through the language, the medium, and the materiality.
INTERVIEWS
The method of interviewing people not only provides research data and expertise
insights, but provides two crucial qualities to understanding cultural affect in archival research.

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First, interviews facilitate the opportunity to develop relationships with persons involved with
archival, rhetorical, and institutional materials. As Elizabeth Yakel remarked: “Communicating
with an archivist to understand the nature and comprehensiveness of digital collections is
essential” (2010, p. 113). And, particularly with archival research, it is of utmost importance to
recognize the archivist(s) as agent(s)—persons who are deeply invested, dedicate much
invisible labor, and hold various sorts of information and knowledge about and beyond the given
archive. Cheryl Glenn and Jessica Enoch (2010) noted that “archivists as vital agents in the
archive . . . are the ones who see the archive collections purposefully, as a whole, while we, too
often, limit our vision to the small part of the archive we intend to use” (p. 20). Archivists and
those involved in digitizing an archive, even those who may not have a holistic lens of and
involvement with the archive, can provide various insights into the systems, operations, and
processes of the archive, whether analog or digital.
With the Labadie Collection, archival labor is ever present despite the seemingly
inconspicuous bodies that labored to garner the collection and digitize the posters. That labor,
one could surmise, is part of the labor activist movement—a way to keep alive and to circulate
the cultural blood of radical activism. It connects to the way Julie Herrada, the Curator of the
Collection, represents rhetorically many of the social issues in the posters. This labor also
extends beyond Herrada’s. For example, Cathy Baker—another librarian I interviewed—
provided fascinating insights into the materiality of some of the posters as well as the
preservation of them. My interview with her and the space we shared added another layering of
culture and affect with the posters. That is, our conversation not only provided a transmission of
knowledge, but a transmission of culture and affect through our relations of each other with
discourse, the posters, and signification.
Second, interviewing people showcases the human and material ecologies we live in.
My interviews with the librarians illuminated the rhetorical ecology of agents (the activists,
artists, and librarians), knowledge (radical activism and its history, preservation practices),

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objects (posters), technologies (computers, scanners, polyester folders, and storage units),
institutions (activist organizations, labor unions, University of Michigan, the Internet). In my
analysis and engagement with the archive and its posters, these points/nodes/species factored
into my experiences. By interviewing UM librarians, I could better understand the influence and
value of these points/nodes/species in relation to the current status of the analog and digital
posters. My goal was to also bring this knowledge into the analysis as it relates to experiences
of cultural affect. Not every interview mattered explicitly to each of the three posters I analyze.
But every interview did lead me further along in the research. And some of the interviews did
inform me about how to understand certain qualities of the posters.
I interviewed three librarians—Julie Herrada, Cathy Baker, and Kate Hutchens—who
were/are all involved with the preservation, curation, and/or digitization of the political posters in
the Joseph A. Labadie Special Collections. While the interviews were always scheduled weeks
in advance, I communicated with each participant, either via email or in-person during my
University of Michigan reading room visits, to explain my IRB approval, my intentions for the
interview, and how I might be able to contribute to the Poster Collection or archive in general
after the dissertation. Additionally, I sent interviewees a set of questions, ranging from six to ten,
before the interview as a way to offer the interviewees a chance to reflect on possible answers.
Interviewees also received a consent form prior to the interview. (see appendix B and C for
consent form for research participants and interview questions, respectively)
The interviews ranged from forty minutes to an hour and ten minutes in length. All were
audio-recorded and transcribed afterward. With all the interviews, only about 20% of the
questions were actually asked; rather, each interview was more of a casual conversation, with
ideas discussed easily addressing all the interview questions. These interviews, in their own
unique ways, provided insights into the archive and the curation of it, specifically showing how
the metadata was created and its importance, the process of digitizing the posters, and the
printed materiality of the posters.

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I want to give some background on the three interviewees: Julie Herrada is the Curator
of the Joseph A. Labadie Collection in the University of Michigan Special Collections Library.
From 1994-2000, she served as Assistant Curator of the Labadie Collection. In 2000, she was
appointed Curator. She handles collection development and management, addresses research
inquiries, interprets the collection’s holdings, works with donors, installs original exhibits,
manages digitization projects, and manages the collection website.
Cathy Baker is the University of Michigan Conservation Librarian and Exhibit
Conservator—focusing on rare library and archival collections throughout the UM Library
system—and Adjunct Lecturer in Information, School of Information. She has also been
conservator of unbound and bound paper-based material in the Special Collections at University
of Michigan. With forty-five years experiences, she has published numerous articles and several
books, focusing on conservation, preservation, paper, and print technologies in both scholarly,
layperson, and technical language.
Kate Hutchens is the Reader and Reference Services Librarian in the Special
Collections Library. Having been in the Special Collections Library since 2009, she coordinates
activities in the reading room, assists reading room visitors, provides reference assistance to
onsite and remote researchers, and conducts instruction sessions.
MULTI-SENSUOUS RHETORICAL ANALYSIS
Empirical evidence is arguably the most common research method for the goal of
research: to access or produce knowledge. Within the humanities and social sciences, a
number of sensory methods are continually used, oftentimes linked to ethnography. Sarah Pink
(2015) remarked, “Sensory ethnography is used across scholarly, practice-based and applied
disciplines” (p. xi).6 In addition, sensory research has gained interdisciplinary attention,
generating what David Howes has called “a sensual revolution” that has turned “the tables and
6

In Doing Sensory Ethnography, Sarah Pink gives an excellent historical and cultural overview of the
importance of the senses, both in ethnographic research and across various disciplines in the humanities
and social sciences. For more sources and details, check pages 3-24.

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recover(ed) a full-bodied understanding of culture and experience” (qtd. in Pink, 2015, p. 23).
For this dissertation, I implement what I call a multi-sensuous rhetorical analysis. This includes
paying attention to and using three of the five primary senses: visual, tactile, and olfactory.
Although I use these three, a multi-sensuous methodology and method can undoubtedly adopt
other human senses, such as proprioception, vestibular, mechanoreception, and others, or a
different combination. For me, these three senses provided abduction and the best intuitiveempirical experience with the political posters. And although all three of these senses are not
discussed with each poster, they factored in various ways to my engagement with cultural affect
experiences.
To consider visual, tactile, and olfaction rhetorically means attending to various elements
of the posters. For instance, my visual rhetorical analysis focuses on the symbols and signs
labor activists used in their posters and the materiality of the posters (type of paper, condition of
paper, ink used, overall size, and so forth). The tactile rhetorical analysis involves a thick
description of the haptic materiality of the posters and the technologies surrounding the posters,
both in terms of the analog artifacts and the digitized artifacts (e.g., tables, chairs, computer,
mouse, screen, and so forth). And the olfactory rhetorical analysis addresses the aromas
emitting from the posters, when applicable since the digital versions lack the ability to engage
olfaction, in a way that connects possible cultural and affective associations through the
materiality.
Of course, my multi-sensuous rhetorical analysis takes on close-readings of the posters’
content, materiality, and medium. This means I must situate the posters in their historical
moment despite being far removed from that context (explored in chapter four). To understand
or recover cultural meanings from the posters runs the risk of me providing distorted claims and
support since, as one might guess, my/our own historical and cultural context has informed
my/our perceptions. But such is the nature of doing archival/historical work. Nevertheless, I

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strive to stay faithful to possible meanings in the posters’ historical context with my deep
rhetorical analyses.
Visual Rhetoric
In the West, ocularcentrism and its connection to epistemology dates back to the
Greeks, as postcolonial theorist Bill Ashcroft (2001) noted, with Plato’s writing of the allegory of
the cave: “For Plato, and for Western society ever since, vision, knowledge and reason were
inextricably tied to each other by means of this imagery of the truth ‘shining resplendent’” (p.
126). Ashcroft continued: “it [ocularcentrism] has remained a key paradigm in both epistemology
and ontology, a dominant trope of knowledge and being which has tended to promote specular
cognition as the natural goal of any serious activity. The identification of ‘I see’ with ‘I know’ is so
deep in European consciousness that it goes completely unremarked” (2001, pp. 126-127).
Johanna Drucker (2014) corroborated: “What could be seen could be known, and knowledge
and sight had a reliable connection even if visual means of representing that knowledge were
taken for granted rather than studied in their own right” (p. 21). Ancient Greek paradigms
continued into modernity as the Renaissance developed with its return to classical Greek and
Roman philosophy and art. Such a rebirth (i.e., renaissance) initiated the seeds that would
sprout into European colonialism in modernity. In part of the study, Ashcroft, then, detailed the
operational effects of ocularcentrism in colonialization—particularly in European cartography,
map making, and space—and literature. In European Enlightenment, capitalism gained
momentum and legitimacy through its connection to scientific endeavors, empirical knowledge,
objective universe, and the “natural” world. By the twentieth century, ocularcentrism continued
to function as the primary mode of epistemological and ontological production (Howes, ed.,
1991; Stoller, 1989).
In the last thirty years, many disciplines in the humanities have taken up what has been
termed “the visual turn” or, as media theorist W.J.T. Mitchell suggested, “the pictorial turn”
(1994, p. 11). Following Richard Rorty’s 1967 claim of “the linguistic turn” in philosophy, Mitchell

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posited that “the pictorial turn” navigated its way into various disciplines—linguistics, philosophy,
rhetoric, art history, and others—and delineated how pictures or images can provide a new
theorizing that philosophers had neglected. What Mitchell embarked upon in Picture Theory was
a new lens through which to understand theory and representations, a kind of “postlinguistic,
postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus,
institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” (1994, p. 16). This kind of interplay partly informs
my visual analysis of the posters, particularly in terms of how apparatuses, institutions,
discourse, and bodies of the posters work alongside and together to communicate meanings
and transfer affect. In addition, this interplay functions in my cultural affect experiences—
orienting me in particular ways to see the posters, see my past, and see my embodiment.
Since the 1970s, rhetoric and composition scholars, as Sonja Foss (2005) claimed, also
studied and taught imagery, which expanded the definition of rhetoric (p. 141). But it was not
until the 1990s that the two terms—”visual” and “rhetoric”—were compounded. Even with the
new term, Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (2004) noted that “there seemed to be very
little agreement on the basic nature of [each of the] two terms” (p. ix). In Defining Visual
Rhetoric, Hill and Helmers presented a number of essays that clarify how scholars have used
the terms, developed methodologies and methods, and analyzed a broad range of visual texts
(e.g., images, texts, film, documents, clothes, advertisements, et al.). Moreover, Hill and
Helmers presented work that discussed the assumptions made in doing visual rhetoric
analyses. Many visual studies, they contended, typically offer analyses of representational
images, or “the study of visual rhetoric . . . [as] necessarily involv[ing] a study of the process of
looking, of ‘the gaze,’ with all of the psychological and cultural implications that have become
wrapped within that term” (2004, p. x). In the same vein, Lester Olson, Cara Finnegan, and
Diane Hope (2008) also provided similar foundations for visual rhetoric: “Visual implies the
cultural practices of seeing and looking, as well as the artifacts produced in diverse
communicative forms and media. . . . rhetoric as practice and theory concerns persuasive

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symbolic actions primarily” (original emphasis, p. 3). While this focus on representations is
fruitful, and indeed I work with representations in the posters, I also work with the
representations in relation to my own lived, cultural experiences, particularly as they evoke
affective moments.
Tactile Rhetoric
Most visual rhetoric scholarship does not account for how the sensory experience of
touch factors into visual culture. Tactile rhetoric would also illuminate more acutely culture and
affect and their traces in textual analysis. Tactile rhetoric can facilitate a better understanding of
affect since affect is felt—not just in a commonplace understanding, for instance my fingers
touch the keys on the keyboard as I type, but that another layer of felt works around and in the
body through the skin’s presence in a place and in relation to other objects. Clearly, the tactile
experience with handling the analog posters changes with browsing through the digital posters.
To understand this change, I offer a two-prong approach to practicing a tactile rhetorical
analysis: (1) description and analysis of the touching of the text’s material; and (2) description
and analysis of the materiality environing the text.
With the first prong, I describe and analyze the analog posters’ materialities by touching
physically and visually. The former is informed in many ways by my interview with Cathy Baker.
The description and analysis with the digital posters slightly differ. I spend less time in
describing the materiality of the digital screen and more time in bestowing what Laura Marks
terms as haptic visuality. In Touch, Marks (2002) embarked upon a road of understanding how
visuality is haptic—how “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch” (p. 2). “Haptic
visuality, a term contrasted to optical visuality,” Marks noted, “draws from other forms of sense
experience, primarily touch and kinesthetic” (2002, p. 2). Haptic visuality “emphasizes the
viewer’s inclination to perceive haptically . . . [and] encourage[s] a bodily relationship between
the viewer and the image” (2002, p. 3). For me, the haptic supplements the vision (and vice
versa), offering possibilities of knowing and being (and becoming). It does not supplant vision in

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order to make up for something hidden or lost in an image; rather, it participates with vision to
underscore the limits of sensory knowledge and being and the body as central to our
phenomenological orientation. Marks opined, “haptics work at the level of the subject as entire
body. The engagement of the haptic viewer occurs not simply in psychic registers but in the
sensorium” (2002, p. 18).
By working my tactile analysis with Marks’ idea of the haptic—“Touching, not mastering.
The term haptic emerges in Deleuze and Guattari’s description of ‘smooth space,’ a space that
must be moved through by constant reference to the immediate environment, as when
navigating an expanse of snow or sand” (2002, p. xii)—I call attention to the ways that the
posters, both analog and digital, do two things. First, the posters create not just a visual
experience, but an experience that shows how visuals touch a viewer and a viewer touches a
visual. To touch means noticing what can easily be written as trivial, mundane, or irrelevant. “If
every object and event is irreducible in its materiality,” Marks argued, “then part of learning to
touch it is to come to love its particularity, its strangeness, its precious and inimitable place in
the world” (2002, p. xii). This is in no way to get at some “essence” of an object or event; rather,
it is to allow its materiality to inform perception. Second, a haptic visuality allowed me to take a
tactile rhetorical approach that acknowledges the immediate environment, which should be
understood as an ecology, that touches and contributes to cultural affect. In other words, my
tactile rhetorical analysis continues what Marks noted as haptic criticism, which can “maintain a
robust flow between sensuous closeness and symbolic distance” (p. xiii).
The second prong in my tactile approach follows what Jesse Stommel termed
“interactive criticism,” which also works from Laura Marks’ ideas about haptic criticism.
Interactive criticism includes four principles: “(1) recognizes that media is haptic and that we
engage even seemingly intangible media in a visceral way; (2) is an encounter with a text in
which we do something to the text and the text does something to us; (3) acknowledges that
looking away and theorizing that looking away is a critical gesture; (4) is always unfinished, the

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start to a conversation not a reservoir” (2016, n.p.). The four principles played a major part in my
cultural affect experiences: both analog and digital versions created an embodied experience;
my undertaking of the encounters gave meaning to the posters and the archive while also
facilitated particular encounters with my past and present; a number of moments turned my
attention to other experiences than the immediate experience with the posters, a looking away if
you will; and researching, analyzing, and reflecting in this dissertation is incomplete and simply
began inquiries into what happens when a researcher considers culture and affect through
rhetorical thinking.
Olfactory Rhetoric
Humanities scholarship on olfactory research is not extensive. Some scholars have
noted its neglect and called for more research, particularly when working with images. As W.J.T.
Mitchell (2010) remarked:
The default meaning of image is ‘visual image,’ though that very phrase suggests
that images can be apprehended by, and addressed to, other, nonvisual senses.
Acoustic, tactile, gustatory, and even olfactory images are unavoidable notions,
and they satisfy the same basic definition of imagery: they are signs or symbols
by way of sensuous resemblance, bundles of analog information carried by
different sensory vehicles, received by distinct perceptual channels. (p. 42)
Part of the issue is that olfactory experiences have an ephemeral quality, whereas visual
experiences with images offer a seeming timelessness. In her discussion of approaching
research interviews with a sensory paradigm, Sarah Pink (2015) noted: “In contrast to sound
and images, of which one can make permanent recordings, smell is much more elusive in that
its temporality has different limits and cannot be controlled to the same extent” (p. 92).
Olfactory experiences are undoubtedly both affective and cultural, although not all
scholarship recognizes this. If smelling an aroma creates an affective moment, then it follows
what affect theorists have argued in terms of neurology: “the eye is histologically and

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anatomically an extrusion of the brain, and the nasal smell receptors ‘recognize’ specific
chemical isomers emotionally before the brain can express to the mind what they are” (Jones,
2010, p. 91). Likewise, Nigel Thrift (2007) noted the unconscious registering with smell,
particularly just pheromones in the environmental air, when he stated,
very often no direct contact is needed for their transmission: pheromones are in
the air. Though often associated only with sexuality and reproduction,
pheromones have a wider compass, often acting as means of unconscious
communication. Pheromones are a powerful means of transmitting affect through
smell and taste, along with sight (understood as grip), sound and rhythm, with its
insistent beats. (p. 228)
Needless to say, smells engage affect. In addition, smell is also cultural, as pointed out by
several scholars (Classen, Howes, & Synnott, 1994; Drobnick, ed., 2006; Herz, 2007). Nigel
Thrift asserted: “it is now recognized that different cultures have different olfactory palettes”
(2007, p. 228). Ethnographers have also begun to pay more attention to the ways in which smell
factors into cultural practices, identity formations, and research practices. Pink remarked:
“Scents alone could not contribute to scholarly debates or make theoretical arguments.
However, their introduction into ethnographic representations could produce forms of intimacy
and senses of place that draw audiences into new relationships to ethnographers and research
participants” (2015, p. 180).
Within the discipline of rhetoric and composition, research on and about smell is limited.
In general, there is a “lack of literature in rhetoric and composition that documents how sensory
categories of smell, taste, and touch impact our rhetorical understanding of communication,
people, and material embodiment. . . . [And] there is . . . almost nothing regarding smell and
olfactory rhetoric” (Phillips, 2015, p. 37). Yet, while most scholars focus on visual and auditory,
smells are rhetorical. They persuade us to accept or reject ideas; they have a grammar; they
communicate meaning; they are relational; they are emergent; and they orient our bodies to the

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world as our bodies simultaneously take in and release various smells. Lisa L. Phillips (2015)
remarked, “Olfactory rhetoric . . . is concerned with how we write, think, talk about, and
experience smell and scent in different environments, cultural contexts, and disciplinary
domains” (p. 36). By understanding olfaction as rhetorical and attending to our olfactory
experiences rhetorically, we may be able to bring to the forefront certain embodied ways of
knowing and orienting—ways that have primarily been disregarded or simply neglected. Certain
olfactory experiences, as I show in chapter six, work rhetorically on bodies to generate cultural
affects, oftentimes pulling personal and cultural memories and associations to the surface that
inform and orient those bodies (in)to social, cultural, economic, and political spheres.
In this dissertation, I use a multi-sensuous rhetorical analysis to think about the interplay
of visual, tactile, and olfactory engagement with the posters. Each sense informs and
sometimes undermines the other, creating at times a more complex understanding of the
communication of the experience of cultural affect. By having this multi-sensuous approach, I
shed light on how the cultural productions of art activists can deliver powerful rhetorical
messages, but also intentionally and unintentionally produce cultural affect experiences.
CONCLUSION
The methods in this dissertation show researchers how to approach archives from a
rhetorical position and with rhetorical thinking that can acknowledge and experience cultural
affects. The methods are not necessarily productive for simply garnering data, but also because
they correspond nicely to components of semiotics and affect theory. Interviews with those who
worked with the artifacts under study provided insights into the collection’s history, its digitization
process, and the artifacts themselves. The stories are built, affect-loaded, and culturally active—
orienting me in positions to my object of study: the archive, the archivists, the posters, the
dissertation, and so forth. The method of story leans more toward affect than signification; but
not wholly. Story allows me to acknowledge the fact that I am a researching body that is
involved with and reacts to the objects of study, limiting but also contributing to an

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understanding of the affective materials and milieus of the study. Since I attend to my affective
experience in this study, it would be fruitful to note the contribution of affect to the empirical, as
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth offered: “Affect’s contribution to the empirical unfolds
as an aesthetic or art of dosages: experiment and experience. Feel the angles and rhythms at
the interface of bodies and worlds” (2010, p. 16). The multi-sensuous rhetorical analysis works
with signs and the symbolic; but it certainly does not dismiss the affective dimensions,
productions, and circulations. Indeed, a multi-sensuous rhetorical approach brings front and
center embodiment and the body/bodies and its/their extension and connection to other bodies,
places and spaces, and artifacts. It also manifests how signification and affect are linked
through rhetorical content, mediums, and materiality. By implementing story and multi-sensuous
analysis, I bring to the forefront cultural meaning and affect in its dual operation. By attending to
meaning-making and affect more heavily in self-reflective and self-reflexive archival research—
not just reflecting on our methods and our positions, but our affective orientations and
dispositions at all points in research processes—we researchers and teachers can learn to
better acknowledge our bodies and make sense of our sensuous experiences.
I also intentionally selected and enacted these methods because of their flexibility for
research. Archival research is already a challenge methodologically. “Archival research,” Alexis
E. Ramsey et al. noted, “even when the researcher is prepared with a methods toolbox, is never
a rigid process, nor should it be” (2010, p. 5). Although such a claim may excite some
researchers since it would allow flexibility in their research design, it actually leaves the
research approach much more open to a vast landscape, complete with winding paths, tarried
trenches, dense forests, and dead-end roads. As I show in the following chapters, I move in
such landscape.

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CHAPTER FOUR. ARCHIVAL ARRIVAL AND SOME CONTEXT
∞
In May 2015, I went to San Francisco to participate in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s and
Sarah Shelton Mann’s two-day radical dance workshop. There, I met some fascinating people
and engaged in various cultural performances that will contribute to my pedagogy and future
research, but I didn’t make the kind of connections I had hoped for—at least nothing that I felt
could springboard me into some dissertation research. I felt that I failed.
Two months later after the workshop, I was out in Los Angeles where I was visiting my
partner at the time. One afternoon, after I took a break from writing my Ph.D. concentration
exam essay, I went on Twitter to browse for news. Open Culture, a website that posts culturallyrelevant digital materials, tweeted about a recently digitized poster collection based out of the
Joseph A. Labadie Special Collections. The political areas of the collection were vast—
anarchism, communism, socialism, ecology, women’s rights, feminism, labor, civil rights, and

Figure 3. “What is What in the World
of Labor?” by Industrial Workers of
the World (n.d.)

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youth protest. As I browsed the poster collection, I was fascinated by the way the posters
ranged in content, their variety of design and materials, and their craft of beautiful and clever
written discourse and imagery. Take, for instance, figure 3, which was created by Industrial
Workers of the World, and notice the way symbols, linguistics, and design are used cleverly to
allude to the body, labor, and human relations: the capitalist’s heart and its desire, the club used
as a weapon, workers exploited by the capitalist to don cultural accessories (diamond), workers
getting “played” in the card game, labor unions potentially gaining the “winning” card, and so
forth. Not all the posters worked with rhetoric in such a way, but I was intrigued by how they
were all digitally available cultural artifacts that accumulated within an archival unit. But why an
archive? Why think about materiality and affect with an archive? I had never done “archival
research” in the common sense, so why begin now with a dissertation project?
It wasn’t until June 29, 2016—nearly a year after I had originally encountered the
Labadie archive—that I felt that I could answer these questions. As I drove down to University of
Michigan from Lansing, Michigan the morning of the 29th, I took a different route than the one I
had been taking, which primarily consists of state highways. Instead, I took the long stretches of
rural roads, which means I went through smaller Michigan towns and two-lane country roads. As
I drove, I noticed the farms and old buildings dispersed throughout the countryside, but also in
the towns. I was compelled by some of the dilapidated structures, eroded paint colors, unkempt
lawns, and rusted machinery and metals. And it made me think about why I was drawn to this
archive of posters, particularly the ones that date back a hundred years. I’ve persistently been
interested in old things since I was young because I always thought of things as having a story
and mattering to bodies. They have stories of relationships with people, giving meaning to
people as well as having purposes, both intended and unintended; they provide a subjectivity
and identity, both in terms of content and materiality. At a smaller scale, I have consistently
been drawn to collections, accumulations of objects, and hoarding and hoarders. I, in fact, grew

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up with a certain kind of hoarding as both my dad and mom hoarded and collected material
things.
To this day, my dad never seems to throw anything away. Even scrap pieces of wood,
pieces that can’t even be used as a doorstopper, are saved and stored and believed to be
useful at some point by someone for something. Almost everything has/will have a use. Old
Folgers coffee cans store loose bolts and moldering metals as well as be appropriated as great
pots for plants; a three-generation old extra shovel could go to my grandma’s for gardening
activities; the spare tire from the recently broken down Ford Escort might be used for the trailer;
the “gardening” wheelbarrow with spots of concrete build up and dried paint will always be
useful as a medium for carrying logs, mixing cement and water, or any odd jobs, even as rust
eats away at the metal handles and undercarriage (figure 4). An overwhelming collection of
scraps of lumber, random screws and bolts, washers and nuts, rusted tools, buckets and pails,
water hoses, tie-down straps, chairs and stools, tables and shelves; an inexhaustible list of
items yet-unknown uses.

Figure 4. Rusted, red gardening
wheelbarrow with white metal
handles and black plastic grips.
Photograph by author

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My mom doesn’t hoard in the traditional sense of the word, but she has particular
practices when it comes to collecting. In her own way, she collects by cutting out coupons every
day after getting the newspaper or borrowing the coupon section from the neighbor’s. She
hoards coupons. My mom wants to spend as little money as possible to buy products that would
move her up the social ladder. She believes that she will become middle-class. But I also think
that she likes having envelopes filled with coupons in the kitchen drawers and in her purse. She
also hoards photographs. She understands the world and memories through visuals and visual
representations: dozens of photo albums.
For Jane Bennett, things have thing-powers and are actants with lives of their own
independent from humans. And hoarders are “not . . . bearers of mental illness but . . .
differently-abled bodies that might have special sensory access to the call of things” (2012, p.
244). Perhaps my parents (and other family members too; for example, recently, my brother has
begun attending auctions and buying mass amounts of everyday objects—shower curtains,
tiles, bed sheets, comforters, coffee makers, chemistry beakers and flasks—in order to sell
them on ebay and “make some fast cash”) have such sensory access; and perhaps it is in my
family tree.
The familiarity of being around objects in kind collected is an easy rationale for part of
my attraction to archives. I grew up around it, even if my parents’ collecting practices were
simply for functional use, frugality, and efficiency. But my interest in collecting and hoarding also
partially stems from understanding why such practices happen. I see those practices as creating
and sustaining identity, in this case a Midwestern, working-class identity. Indeed, my family
members are all blue-collar workers (my brother’s emphasis on “making some fast cash”
through nickel and diming his way to day-to-day living and eventually a million dollars is indeed
a kind of hustle that resonates with working-class folks)—another component that may have
charged me to investigate the Labadie archive, which has many materials focused on labor and
unions. But objects also fascinate me because they have stories; they are stories; they mean(t)

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something to someone at some point; they have a history—a history of relationships and
usages and purposes and audiences; and they have cultural meanings in the contexts in which
they exist. They are texts, but also rhetorical events that create an experience of cultural
relationships.
∞
I tell this opening story about my arrival to the Joseph A. Labadie archive and its Poster
Collection and my familial background to show the indirect ways the initial beginnings of cultural
affect experiences happen later with the posters. Cultural affect is not merely one moment, but a
journey and an accumulation of memories, sentiments, ideologies, and experiences. This
opening story also demonstrates how researchers might come to archives: through serendipity,
but also not so serendipitously if we understand culture and affect as consistently circulating
around and within us. I “stumbled” across the digitized poster collection, but I also gave
attention to the poster collection because of my cultural and affective dispositions and
orientations.
In the rest of this chapter, I do several things. First, I discuss the relationship between
archives and rhetoric. I also provide a couple of stories that express two of my encounters with
the archive. Second, I provide some historical information about the Labadie Curators and the
archive’s life and discuss some of the background of the creators of the posters I analyze:
Industrial Workers of the World. With the historical background of the archive’s life, I bring to the
forefront the archive’s progression, intentions, and the necessary invisible labor. I do this as a
way to not only pay homage to the people and labor involved, but to show some of the ethics of
writing about cultural affect experiences. Writing cultural affect within a large project such as a
dissertation requires acknowledging the labor and efforts needed to provide the more immediate
experience of cultural affect. A similar gesture follows when I discuss the early beginnings of the
Industrial Workers of the World. With this labor union, I show some of its philosophy and
mission, which connects with many of the posters in the collection, and its formation through a

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series of events and collective, inclusive efforts that built the foundation through which the
posters could create cultural affect experiences.
ARCHIVES AND RHETORIC
I am not an archivist. But I know that the archivist is always present in constructing the
archive and that archives are never neutral. And I know that the history of archives is rooted in
state power and colonialism—a way for power to be exerted, violence to be exercised,
knowledge to be controlled, and history to be carefully constructed. In short, archives are social
and political, as many others have shown (Foucault, 1972; Derrida 1996; Schwartz & Cook,
2002; Kirsch & Rohan, 2008), and they are cultural. Archives are also rhetorical, an argument
previously made by plenty of others (Biesecker, 2006; Finnegan, 2006; Morris, 2006). I do not
intend to reiterate such arguments. I do, however, want to note that although many rhetoric and
composition scholars have studied and even created archives, they have often received little to
no formal training—whether in graduate school or in professionalization
seminars/workshops/etc. As Lynée Lewis Gaillet (2010) remarked: “We don’t have many
treatises addressing the how-to of archival research, and, as a result, many of us visit archives
initially equipped with little training in procedures for investigating primary works and few tools
for analyzing what we might find in those repositories” (p. 29). Gaillet’s statement about the
ignorance of procedures, as I show shortly, rings loudly in this dissertation.
In the anthologies Working in the Archives (2010) and Beyond the Archives (2008), a
number of rhetoric and composition/writing scholars propose various ways to approach and
participate with an archive. Due to brevity, I do not intend to rehash these ideas here; rather, I
want to underscore that my initial and continual engagement with the Labadie archive resides in
the ways in which many of the scholars in these anthologies engage with an archive: candid,
personal discussions that bring an archive to life. In various ways, these scholars enact what
Kristie S. Fleckenstein (2014) coins as “ambient visual media ecology,” which is “a historically
specific array of mutually constitutive connections among visual technologies, artifacts,

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collections, and users that constitute the surrounding ‘vision-scape’ of a culture. Such a
perspective animates—brings to life—archive, artifact, and researcher” (p. 14). Fleckenstein’s
ambient visual media ecology provides a generative entry to perceive a collection of materials,
an archive, and/or an artifact. Following Fleckenstein, I build in this chapter a general “visionscape” of the Labadie collection. This vision-scape could be seen as some of the building blocks
for the rhetorical operationalization of cultural affect. In other words, and while I cannot go into
all the details, this vision-scape factored into every instance in which I analyzed and dwelled
with the three posters I discuss in chapter six.
∞
On the morning of Monday, February 15, 2016, I drove from Lansing to Ann Arbor to visit
the UM reading room. I had requested to see five of the “Labor” posters, ones I had already
begun analyzing online about two months ago. Once I arrived on UM’s campus, I headed to the
elevator in the Hatcher Graduate Library building and ascended to the eighth floor for the
Special Collections reading room. The hallway on the eighth floor leads to the reading room
desk, passing a glass wall that partitions the hallway from the tables in the room. Visitors check
in at the desk and receive a locker key to stow away backpacks, food and drinks, pens, and so
forth. Visitors are only allowed to bring in laptops, paper, pencils, phones, and cameras. During
visiting hours, there are always two reading room librarians who assist, monitor, and manage
visitors and requested materials. After checking in, the librarians bring requested materials to
visitors.
At the reading room front desk, I handed a student worker my ID. She informed me that
my requested items had not been retrieved and that I would receive an email when they were
available. I considered this a failure on my part, and I did not ask if they could be retrieved at the
time because I didn’t want to be a pest. My drive to Ann Arbor felt pointless, and I felt that I
wasted most of my day.

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I decided to head to the second floor where study desks are. I figured I might as well get
some writing done as a way not to waste more of the day driving. Setting up my computer at
one of the rectangular desks with dimly lit lamps with green shades, I began to do a freewrite.
And I wrote with anger and frustration on my failure and embarrassment—a stream of
consciousness:
Why did I assume that just because I put my request date in that that date would
ensure the items would be available? I’m so unfamiliar with how libraries work.
I’m so unfamiliar with how higher education works. I’m not sure why I think I
belong here—in grad school, in academia. Both faculty and grad students seem
to have a kind of knowledge I lack and haven’t been able to gain. They also
seem to have a kind of patience that I lack. What the fuck am I doing? If I leave
academia—which I have considered many times—what the hell would I do? Go
back to working on cars? I get bored with so many jobs. In academia, I’m not
bored, but always confused, always feel like I’m struggling more than others.
Where do I belong? I’m stuck in an in-between. I live in a certain kind of affect: a
neither cause nor effect, a neither here nor there. Simply in process, in motion. In
the midst of something. In the midst of becoming.
Retroactively, perhaps my frustration was not that unique. Perhaps all scholars who work with
archives encounter such obstacles. And the fact is that I did gain access to these posters, at
least digitally, and knew how to easily contact Julie Herrada. Perhaps I am not any different than
other fledgling researchers. Perhaps I am not in-between, but continuing to pin myself to one of
two sides: academic and mechanic. This same kind of approach and paradigm lingers, follows
me, creating a tension and persistent evaluation of my position and identity.
After finishing my stream of consciousness writing, I decided to go to Julie’s office on the
seventh floor. I explained the situation to Julie, and she responded with a smile, “Oh, the
posters are there and you won’t get an email.” I’m confused and yet relieved. Perhaps I was not

72

a pest and I just did not know the process (yet). Julie and I walked up to the eight floor reading
room where Kate Hutchens had gotten back from lunch. Kate checked me in and handed me
the key to a locker located outside the reading room, where I locked up my coat and backpack
and took my laptop, pencil, notepad, and computer mouse into the reading room.
∞
Ten days after this February visit, I made another trip to UM to check out five other
posters in the collection. Three of these five posters were enclosed with a clear polyester
plastic—a condition I hadn’t expected because the Labadie website had not presented such
information about the analog posters. This plastic, obviously, was added to many of the posters
based on attrition and visual inspections of their conditions. This protectant preserves the
posters. But the posters were not fully encapsulated with these polyester plastics; in the lowerleft corner, there was a small diagonal opening. After about an hour of taking notes and dwelling
with these five posters, I decided to ask Kate Hutchens, who was working the reading room
desk, about the polyester enclosures and this small opening in the corners.
Kate noted that the corner openings, most likely, function for several reasons. First,
paper can release acidic gasses that will deteriorate the molecular bonding of the fibers. As the
Library of Congress’ website on collections care and preservation states about “essential facts”:
“Paper is made of cellulose -- a repeating chain of glucose molecules -- derived from plant cell
walls. One measure of paper quality is how long the cellulose chains, and subsequently the
paper fibers, are: long-fibered paper is stronger and more flexible and durable than short-fibered
paper” (n.p.). In the nineteenth century, paper was oftentimes made from wood and a pulping
process, replacing cotton and linen rags previously used. Such a shift to wood and pulping
created shorter-fibered paper. But the external environment also changed and affected the lifespan and material conditions of paper. The Library of Congress’ website continues: “acids from
the environment (e.g., air pollution, poor-quality enclosures), or from within the paper (e.g., from
the raw materials, manufacturing process, deterioration products), repeatedly cut the glucose

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chains into shorter lengths. This acid hydrolysis reaction produces more acids, feeding further,
continued degradation” (n.p.). Kate told me some other possibilities for the corner openings—
prevention of molding and the possibility of removing the enclosing in the future in case it’s
discovered that the plastic is damaging the poster—but ultimately she provided me the contact
of the Poster Collection’s paper conservator librarian: Cathy Baker.
∞
Kate’s assistance contributed to research leads (an interview with Cathy Baker, inquiries
into preservation and conservation of archival materials) and future visits that facilitate cultural
affects with the analog posters. Cultural affects emerge not simply through what one knows, but
through an ongoing and undertaking of learning, communication, and relational process. By
telling this story, as well as the other stories, I stress that cultural affects are not isolated
phenomena that a researcher has with a text or with one person. Rather, they are distributed
and densely layered. This creates richness, but also shows that researchers must make
rhetorical decisions about what stories to include, what stories are valuable, and how cultural
affects may have emerged.
In these stories, Kate (as well as Julie, Cathy, and other UM workers) is a
point/node/species in the ecology of the posters; University of Michigan is another; Hatcher
Graduate Library building and the elevator mark others; the desks, tables, and chairs; the
recorder I used during the interview with Julie; my computer, car, and clothes on my back; and,
of course, the analog posters. And my embodiment was oriented in relations with all these
points/nodes/species.
EARLY BEGINNINGS OF THE JOSEPH A. LABADIE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Before its actual inception at University of Michigan, the Joseph A. Labadie Special
Collections archive begins with Joseph A. Labadie, a Detroit labor organizer, anarchist,
publisher, writer, and activist known as the “Gentle Anarchist” for his nonviolent strategy and
tactics. Born in 1850 in Paw Paw, Michigan, Labadie came to be a well-known and influential

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figure within Michigan labor movements and unions. He was a descendant of seventeenthcentury French immigrants and grew up near native Pottawatami tribes where he saw his father
do translations between Christian missionaries and the Pottawatami. At twenty-eight years old,
Labadie joined the Michigan Branch Knights of Labor, a labor organization with members from
various industries (e.g., railroad, steel, agriculture) that actively pursued the eight-hour workday,
organized strikes and boycotts, and strove to end child labor. By 1883, Labadie adopted
individualist anarchism, which based its philosophy and actions on non-violent action.
Individualist anarchists believed that social and economic upheavals and issues stemmed from
the State protecting corporations and big business. Their philosophy espoused the individual as
the highest importance for market forces rather than collectivism or State political body. After
thirty-five years of labor union activism, Labadie “retired” (he, however, continued to make
pamphlets, write poetry, and publish materials on labor, anarchism, and social relations) in
Wixom, MI in 1912 and on some forty acres of the land enclosed in today’s Kensington
Metropark.
In 1911, a year before Labadie retired and more frequently lived in Bubbling Waters, he
donated personal papers and part of his extensive library to University of Michigan. This
donation, which none of the librarians at the time recorded its size, had a “first shipment [that]
arrived in about 20 boxes. In addition to materials created on Labadie’s printing press and his
vast correspondence, there were also books, pamphlets, by-laws, newspapers, newsletters,
announcements, membership cards, photographs, posters, and badges” (Herrada, 2007, p.
135). These materials, which comprised the whole collection, were “placed in a corner, and
when inquiring researchers asked to use it, they would be given a key and sent, on their own,
into a locked cage area filled with boxes of unaccessioned, unprocessed, and uncataloged
material. Undoubtedly, many items disappeared from the collection during that time” (Herrada,
2007, p. 135). But, over the next fifty years, these materials would initiate the collection as a
prominent center for anarchist and labor activist materials. Labadie’s decision, according to Julie

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Herrada, to donate to the library was two-fold: to store the collection “geographically close to his
home” and to provide some “needed . . . ideological balance in [University of Michigan’s library]
collections” since the institution was “conservative” (Herrada, 2007, p. 135). According to
Edward Weber (1990), Labadie also wanted the materials to be readily available to students (p.
157). With these two original categories—”Anarchism” and “Labor”—of social protest artifacts,
the physical collection continued to amass activist materials over the next hundred years,
developing additional categories, such as civil liberties, colonialism, communism, ecology,
pacifism, sexual freedom, socialism, women, and youth/student protest. Herrada noted that the
collection “contains more than 35,000 books and 8,000 periodicals . . . but is also famous for its
vast amounts of ephemeral materials: brochures, leaflets, clippings, and reprints, posters
illustrating various aspects of protest, and numerous photographs, including ones of people
prominent in the anarchist movement” (2007, p. 133). These ephemeral materials have been
collected over the years by University of Michigan’s Curators and other archivists as well as
donated by activists and radicals.
Labadie was a prolific writer. His copious writings began in the early 1870s when he
moved to Detroit and purchased “a printing press and used it to create little pamphlets
containing his essays as well as poetry he wrote, along with contributions from his friends and
other writers. Having almost no money, he printed on used scraps of paper and wallpaper, and
bound the booklets with bits of leather” (Herrada, 2007, p. 134). Labadie also wrote extensively,
both for his own papers—The Three Stars, Labor Review, the Advance and Labor Leaf—and for
others, such as Liberty, Ego, and The Mutualist (http://fair-use.org/jo-labadie/, n.p.). He also
penned “tender love poems” and garnered a “treasure trove of letters, periodicals, clippings,
manuscripts, booklets, photos, and circulars . . . [which he] stored in his attic” (Anderson, 1998,
pp. 12-13). Not only an activist and writer, Labadie, in his own right, was also an archivist. But it
was his wife, Sophie, who “bundled flyers, tracts, pamphlets, circulars, handbills, union
constitutions and initiation ceremonies, badges, copies of resolutions, programs, poems,

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newspaper clippings, even menus, and toted them upstairs. . . . Preserving them was the only
active role Sophie played in Jo’s reform efforts, but it was a major one” (Anderson, 1998, p.
227). Sophie’s invisible labor is the reason why UM has the archive. It is the reason why I am
able to engage with the archive and the posters.
Labadie continued to write and print anarchist materials (pamphlets and books) after his
retirement, including making more contributions to The Special Collections at UM. But the
collection received little attention in the beginning; in fact, the UM library had failed to live up to
Labadie’s pledge for the collection to be readily available to students. As Edward Weber (1990)
remarked, “As is unfortunately the case in many institutions the planning for immediate
necessities year after year postponed the implementation of this pledge” (p. 157). It wasn’t until
1924 when Detroit activist Agnes Inglis began working with the collection and finding more
materials on labor activism to add that the archive gained robust attention and more
organization.
Inglis was a friend and fellow anarchist to Labadie, involved in various social
movements, and had connections to other anarchists and labor activists. In 1924, she initially
began “‘sort[ing] out’ the materials and attempt[ing] to bring some order to the chaos” (Herrada,
2007, p. 135). She continued to correspond with Labadie, as well as work with “Mr. Goodrich,
who arranged for preserving much of the material in the Labadie Collection” and William Warner
Bishop, who “was the head Librarian . . . [and] dedicated to the preservation and access of the
materials. It was Bishop who had special plates made for the books, pamphlets, and
scrapbooks in the Labadie Collection” (Herrada, 2007, p. 136). Inglis’s work and contribution to
the collection cannot be emphasized enough. From the mid-1920s to her death in 1952 at age
eighty-one, Inglis “concocted an idiosyncratic card cataloging system, without cross references
or call numbers,” which unfortunately though “only she understood” (Anderson, 1998, p. 233).
She also “entic[ed] radicals and scholars from all over the world to send materials. . . . [and]
increased the holdings of the Labadie Collection perhaps twenty-fold. Many items she donated

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herself” (Anderson, 1998, pp. 233-234). But she “corresponded extensively with her network of
friends, soliciting their memoirs and documentation of significant events and persons” (Weber,
1987, p. 10); she also “coaxed rare and valuable items from the ‘trunks and attics’ of her former
comrades and a wide circle of radicals, rebels, and revolutionaries of her acquaintance”
(Anderson, 1998, pp. 233-234). In his last years, Labadie took note to the work, even
“suggest[ing] that the Collection be renamed the Inglis-Labadie Collection, but Inglis declined,
part of her virtue being that she did not want much recognition” (Herrada, 2007, p. 136). Like
Sophie Labadie, Inglis’ invisible labor is the reason why the archive exists. It is the reason why I
am able to engage with the archive and the posters.
Such work, effort, and dedication to the collection by Inglis and Sophie sheds light on the
kind of invisible labor involved with archiving. Most patrons to the Labadie archive will never see
this invisibility. And, in many ways, I too cannot actually pinpoint easily Inglis’ labor, which
created a “flood of acquisitions” in the 1930s, the work in contacting activists, working with (and
oftentimes against) the UM library, cataloging and organizing the materials, and so forth. Both
Inglis’ and Sophie’s labor are essential to the forming of the archive; these women’s labor,
decisions, and practices are all rhetorical and conducive to contributing to the cultural affects the
archive can produce in the twenty-first century.
After Inglis’ death in 1952, Edward C. Weber, the Curator of the Labadie Collection from
1960 to 2000, “began corresponding with individuals, groups, and organizations active in
publishing or disseminating radical literature. This gained the collection substantial holdings in
the areas of civil rights, the student protest and anti-war movements, modern anarchist and
socialist literature, gay liberation, radical feminism, pacifism, environmental concerns, and antinuclear movements” (Weber, 1998, p. 257). Like Inglis and Sophie’s labor, I am disconnected
from Weber’s efforts and work. My arrival to the archive in 2015 lacks a kind of understanding of
the labor practiced and needed to form the archive. All I can claim is that knowing part of the
immeasurable and inaccessible amount of labor required for the archive informs me that my

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experiences—my cultural affect experiences with the archive—include others’ bodies,
dedication, and work. They are part of the ecology of the archive and every engagement with
the archive by patrons.
POLITICAL POSTERS
One of the most fascinating collections in the Labadie Special Collections is the set of
political posters, which number 2,108 and provide commentary on and resistance in a variety of
social issues: exploitation, racism, sexism, oppression, injustices, and corruption. The subject
heading with the largest number of posters (469) is anarchism, but several other categories
follow close behind: Colonialism & Imperialism (323), Civil Liberties (265), Pacifism (217), Labor
(198), and Youth & Student Protest (166). (see figure 13 in appendix A for data visualization of
all subject headings). ome of these posters date back to 1848, although most come from 1968
to the present day. Of course, many of the posters had no information on the year of their
creation, but unsurprisingly 1968 is the most popular year and includes seven different subject
headings: Pacifism (1); Labor (2); Civil Liberties (2); Ecology (3); Women (4); Anarchism (6);
and Colonialism & Imperialism (35). (see figure 12 in appendix A for data visualization of years).
1968 indeed marks a significant moment in activist history: major protests in France, civil rights
and anti-war movements in the United States, resistance by Northern Ireland against the British,
and the continued fight for independence and decolonialization by a number of African countries
(Mauritius, Kingdom of Swaziland, Republic of Equatorial Guinea, People's Republic of
Mozambique, Republic of Cape Verde, Union of the Comoros, Democratic Republic of São
Tomé and Príncipe, and People's Republic of Angola). Many of the posters address and/or point
toward such 1968 activist moments and movements.
The Poster Collection includes artifacts from various nation-states. Although 422 of the
2,108 posters are not labeled, the majority of them (1,140) come from the United States. Yet,
the collection extends well beyond the United States—France, Mexico, the United Kingdom,
China, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Chile, Venezuela, South Africa, and others,

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which comprise 546 posters suggests an extensive global reach from five other continents. (see
figure 14 in appendix A for data visualization map of comprehensive itemization of countries).
Print culture, whether newspapers, pamphlets, or posters, was and continues to be a primary,
subversive act for advancing social justice and resistance.
The rhetorical diction for the titles of the 2,108 posters also shows a set of values and
ethics these activists hold as well as the archive as a whole. The most frequent words used in
the titles are “you” (78); “no” (71); “day” (70); “people” (69); “we” (64); “international” (54); “all”
(53); “our”(53); “solidarity” (53); “war” (53); and “free” (52).7 (see figure 15 in appendix A for
comprehensive itemization of top 45 words and frequencies). Although not all the posters were
acquired with a title already attached to them—the archive’s curators typically then gave them a
title based on the content of the posters—the use of “you” shows the motivation for public
circulation and presentation to an audience. This isn’t such an unusual occurrence. As Sonja
Foss (2005) asserted, three elements must constitute an image for the image to rhetorically
function as a visual: symbolic action, human intervention, and presentation to an audience for
communicative purposes (p. 144). Many of the posters functioned through rhetorical diction:
calling for unity and social cohesion by using “people,” “we,” “all,” “our,” and of course
“solidarity.” Aside from linguistic expressions, most of the posters offer signs, symbols, and
some form of imagery to expose oppression and exploitation and change social conditions.
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD: ONE BIG UNION
In general, the Labadie Collection has much work from Industrial Workers of the World
(hereafter IWW), a labor union that began in the first decade of the twentieth century. Prior to
the union’s inception, the 1870s and 1880s in the United States were rife with strikes, police
brutalities, and poor working conditions. In response, many workers organized and several
unions formed. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), “founded in 1883 . . . [and] sought to
7

In total, there are 14,029 words and 4,523 unique word forms. The corpus for the data visualization
excludes articles, most auxiliary verbs, demonstrate adjectives, verbs “to be,” conjunction, and
propositions in English, Spanish, and French.

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organize skilled workers (almost entirely white and male) only,” (Miner, 2005, p. 9) had created
a loose network of labor unions that were oftentimes compliant with the employing class and
highly resistant to socialistic tendencies and philosophies. The AFL was primarily interested in
“self-protection and advancement” (Miner, 2005, p. 9) and developed a craft unionism, which
based its organization on “negotiations [that] were entirely separate for each type of job, and
workers in one part of a business had no reason to strike with workers in another part of the
business” (Miner, 2005, p. 11). By the turn of the century, the AFL became outdated “(organized
for an earlier period of industrial labor) . . . ineffective, exclusionary and unfair to the masses of
industrial workers” (Miner, 2005, p. 12). Consequently, many other unions (e.g., The United
Metal Workers, The Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and The Western Federation of
Miners) disassociated and/or were removed—either by themselves or the AFL—from the AFL.
For several decades, arguments and disputed contracts by and between labor unions and labor
workers proliferated.8
But it is within this context of tensions between the AFL and workers, labor unions, and
labor workers that IWW emerged. At a November 1904 meeting, labor organizers Clarence
Smith, Thomas Haggerty, George Estes, W.L. Hall, Isaac Cowan, and William E. Trautmann
wanted “to consider whether there was any chance of building a labor movement in which
unions would support each other and not, in the name of sacred contracts, scab on each other”
(Thompson and Bekken, 2006, p. 7). These six decided to hold a “secret conference” two
months later on January 2, 1905 in Chicago for thirty-six labor activists. The conference would
address the “larger ‘labor question,’” hoping to find common ground on socialist programs or
“cooperative commonwealth” (Thompson and Bekken, 2006, p. 8). In short, the six organizers
8

For more details of IWW history, check Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman’s Wobblies!: A graphic history
of the industrial workers of the world, Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken’s The Industrial Workers of the
World: Its First 100 Years, Stewart Bird, Dan Georgakas, and Deborah Shaffer’s Solidarity Forever: An
Oral History of the IWW, Len De Caux’s The Living Spirit of the Wobblies, Donald E. Winters, Jr.’s The
Soul of the Wobblies: The I.W.W., Religion and American Culture in the Progressive Era, 1905-1917,
John Clendenin Townsend’s Running the Gauntlet: Cultural Sources of Violence Against the I.W.W., and
Joyce L. Kornbluh’s Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology.

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aspired to reassess and “correct revolutionary principles” for benefits of workers (Thompson and
Bekken, 2006, p. 8). Twenty five showed and crafted a
Manifesto calling for an Industrial Union Congress in Chicago on June 27. . . .
This Manifesto called for “the economic organization of the working class without
affiliation with any political party”; industrial organization, with “industrial
autonomy internationally”; transfers between local or national or international
unions to be universal; a central defense or strike fund to which all members
were to contribute equally; its general administration to be conducted “in
harmony with the recognition of the irrepressible conflict between the capitalist
class and the working class.” (Thompson and Bekken, 2006, p. 9)
This manifesto9 circulated widely in the U.S. prior to the convention on June 27, 1905 in
Chicago’s Brand Hall. At the convention, William D. Haywood—“Big Bill,” a miner since he was
nine years old and who was blind in one eye from a mining accident—declared to over twohundred delegates and spectators: “Fellow workers, this is the Continental Congress of the
Working Class.” Big Bill, according to historian Foster Rhea Dulles, was “a powerful and
aggressive embodiment of the frontier spirit” (qtd. in Kornbluh, 1988, p. 2) and organizer for the
Western Federation of Miners and the Socialist Party. As Joyce L. Kornbluh (1988) stated,
“From the start of the convention Haywood expressed his interest in organizing the forgotten
unskilled workers, those without votes and without unions” (p. 2).
Big Bill may have been a force to be reckoned with, but it is crucial to note that the
crafting of the IWW philosophy, the speakers’ platform at this convention, and in various other
ways included women and persons of color. African-American/Mexican-Indian10 revolutionary
Lucy Parsons, courageous, witty, and “the greatest woman agitator” 75-year old Mother Mary
Jones, and Daniel de Leon, to name a few, were all highly involved in the forming of the IWW
9

See pages 7-10 in Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Ed. Kornbluh) for full Manifesto.
Different sources label her subjectivity differently: some identify her as African-American; others as
Mexican-Indian. One thing all sources do agree upon is that she was a woman of color.
10

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and its philosophy. “At the 1905 founding convention in Chicago,” Dylan Miner (2007) explained,
“Lucy E. González Parsons (the wife of assassinated anarchist Albert Parsons) and
latinoamericano Daniel de Leon along with countless other people of color, women, and foreignborn workers, would play an instrumental role in creating IWW philosophy” (pp. 57-58). IWW’s
newspaper, Industrial Worker, and the numerous other cultural productions (oral histories,
songs, posters, and others) also involved a heterogeneous racial and gendered collection of
artists, laborers, and activists. Miner continued: “In traditional Wobbly folklore, many of the oral
histories, stories, and songs revolve around heroic women and people of color, so often
excluded from mainstream labor discourse” (Miner, 2007, p. 58). With what we would consider a
multimodal activist approach—using images, sound, and alphabetic writing and speech—IWW
actively sought nationally and internationally solidarity and representation across racialized and
gendered bodies.
Many critics of the Manifesto believed that writers of the text had underlying political
motives because the Manifesto did not explicitly delineate much on socialist philosophy except
for the statement: “it is blind to the possibility of establishing an industrial democracy, wherein
there shall be no wage slavery, but where the workers will own the tools which they operate,
and the product which they alone will enjoy” (Thompson and Bekken, 2006, pp. 9-10). Despite
the ambiguity, the Manifesto served as a foundation for IWW members, known as Wobblies.
Indeed, many Wobblies were socialists and anarchists. But Wobblies also considered registers
beyond economics, such as cultural differences (primarily nationality, race, and gender). This
orientation and approach was a way to engage in radical labor organizing across cultural bodies
and industries. The Manifesto emerged from IWW’s development due to “too little solidarity, too
little straight labor education, and consequently too little vision of what could be won, and too
little will to win it” (Thompson and Bekken, 2006, p. 1). To create unity and solidarity among the
working class and exploited working bodies, Wobblies couched this idea within a cultural
narrative: workers and laborers pitted against and exploited by employers and capitalists. This

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narrative, which typically borderlines on a modernist approach to inverting the binary, comes
through in a variety of Wobbly cultural productions.
∞
I was raised in an environment of work. Pro-union or anti-union, all my family members
believed in that one thing: work. On both sides of my family, work was valuable, never to be
forsaken. On my grandma’s eighty-sixth birthday in the summer of 2016, she and I sat on a
backyard bench at my dad’s house in Savanna, Illinois, a small northwestern town of 3,000
people that borders the Mississippi River. Cigarettes between our fingers (American Spirit in
mine, Pall Mall in hers), smoke and humidity in our lungs, and sun on our heads, we caught up
on family, talked politics, and listened to the dark, basil green oak trees and tall grasslands that
back up to the yard. I asked my grandma Edna, who continues to regularly mow the lawn, plant
trees, and knit, what would be one piece of advice after all these years. She took a drag from
her nimble cigarette and said, “never stop working. Keep your body moving. Otherwise, you’ll
die.” To live is to work. Movement, labor, and the body. The smell of burnt tobacco and exhaled
smoke lingered in the air, and we made eye contact, basked in our silence and the noise of the
landscape, and continued to perch on the bench.
My social class identity has persistently been a challenge for me. In various ways, I am
working class. My social milieu growing up, however, involved a variety of social places and
spaces, ranging from poor and working-class to middle-class to upper-class and urban to
suburb to rural. In a matter of ten years—from when I was six years old to sixteen years old, I
had already moved six times in Chicago and around the Chicagoland area. The familial space,
however, always stayed the same in terms of the language practices, beliefs, customs, and
expectations, which built toward an expectation of class, not simply in terms of occupational
aspirations, but in tastes, orientations, and identity. Yet, the non-familial spaces also carried
similar cultural connotations, which set me up to be streamlined into particular trajectories. I was
never a precocious child intellectually, but I was also never unintelligent. If anything, I was more

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aloof, reclusive, and ardently rebellious to conventions and authorities. Such qualities, I surmise,
also position me nicely into a working-class life trajectory.
During my high school freshman year, my guidance counselor at Waubonsie Valley high
school in Aurora, Illinois signed me up for all of those masculine, working-class courses: small
engine repair, wood fabrication, and power mechanics. I remember hearing about some other
freshmen taking courses on civics or English or mathematics. And during my senior year at Coal
City high school in Coal City, Illinois, I was told by my dad and guidance counselor to choose a
trade for my vocational training in another city during the school days: welding, heating and
refrigeration, building/construction, and automotive (I chose automotive because I had already
been doing mechanical and body work on a 1967 Acapulco blue mustang coupe). A narrative
for me and many others, in more than just these two school moments and places, had been
planned by political, economic, and cultural forces. Brattas work in blue-collar jobs—ones that
require some skills beyond simply flipping burgers as an adult.
This narrative also played out in my family tree. Going back several generations, my
nuclear and extensive family has persistently been in blue-collar jobs: plumbers, carpenters,
concrete finishers, landscapers, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, and elementary
school secretaries; both skilled and unskilled laborers. Half of these family members were/are
pro-union; the other half anti-union. I remember when I was fourteen years old playing darts and
drinking rum with my dad and my uncles in my uncle Bob’s garage at family gatherings. These
types of gatherings often facilitated many conversations about unions, and I remember heated
arguments about both the need for unions and the uselessness of unions. My dad and uncle
John always saw unions as hindrances to “getting a job done”; my uncle Tim and Bob saw the
justice unions gave to capitalism. Holiday banter with serious beliefs about work; raised voices
jabbered, loaded with staunch, slightly ineffable passion and boiling blood; all the while with
beers and rum and sharp needles with feather tails in hand. In my family, unity and solidarity
didn’t really exist.

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I bring this history, subjectivity, and identity to the archive and IWW’s historical effects
and cultural productions. It all affects me as I affect the posters and their meanings despite any
concentrated effort to dispel such assumptions and biases. It will influence the way I see,
interpret, and engage with the posters, whether in their digital or analog form. But, the contexts
of IWW, the Labadie Collection, and my familial situations and people led me to the
contemporary cultural affect experiences with the posters.
∞

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CHAPTER FIVE. DIGITIZING THE POSTERS
Seeing the political posters does not require a visitation to Hatcher Graduate Library at
University of Michigan. From 2010 to 2015, UM librarians digitized nearly all (2,071 of 2,108) of
the posters. This digitization project required a number of people within the library and across
the university, an immense amount of human labor, conversations on legality, both digital and
non-digital technologies, and technical resources and skills. In short, the digital posters are
embedded and accessible because of a complex and dynamic ecology. To understand some of
the emergence of this ecology, I first give some background into the digitization project, noting
some of the reasons for such a project. Next, I discuss in more detail the necessary people and
labor for the creation of the digital archive and some of the limitations visitors encounter with the
digital posters. Finally, I show the digital interface and engagement with the digital posters as a
way to illuminate some of the affordances and limitations of digitizing the posters. Similar to my
discussion of my familial background, this background about the digital process and engaging
with the digital posters brings to the forefront the ecological system, including the people,
technologies, and labor, in which cultural affects emerge, which I discuss in the next chapter.
While the digitization project began in 2010, Curator Julie Herrada states that the first
digitizing of the posters began before 2010. In 2004, two UM students at the School of
Information took a sample of fifty posters and scanned them for a class project. After using an
old scanner and equipment to digitize them, the students simply kept the files and provided
Herrada a final report. Herrada noted that the project was “basically a scanning project with no
goal except to learn how to do scanning at that time. They had to scan things in this little room,
break the photos up into pieces. Then, they had all these images for one item and you had to
knit them together on the software program” (Herrada, personal interview, January 20, 2016). In
addition, another student in 2004 scanned about 1200 posters with a digital camera,
photographing at 300 DPI. The student edited the photos, created metadata for an Excel
spreadsheet, and then merged them into FileMaker Pro. These digital files and spreadsheet
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were strictly for in-house use, as Herrada remarked, “for my needs as a curator to be able to
see all the posters that we had without going physically through them” (Herrada, personal
interview, January 20, 2016).
Reasons for digitizing the posters vary greatly, but one of the most obvious focuses on
conversation and preservation. With every physical handling by UM archivists, librarians, and
visitors, the posters experience some attrition. As Herrada remarked: “Posters are a difficult
format because they are fragile and can only withstand so much physical handling, so providing
access to these materials while keeping them safe is a complicated process, or it was, until the
technology and resources became more readily available to us” (qtd. in Meier, 2015, n.p.).
Indeed, Herrada (2015) noted that sharing the posters onsite at University of Michigan—even
just a short distance from storage to the reading room—caused quite a bit of wear and tear
(n.p.).
Better preservation and conservation could also be enacted with better storage units. By
2009, Herrada believed the posters were solid candidates for a cataloguing project because the
storage of them in the archive was particularly disorganized. Some were laid on book shelves,
oftentimes hanging off the edge because of the posters’ sizes, and Herrada and other librarians
also faced the challenge of diverse poster sizes. Additionally, the collection had acquired so
many posters that storage space on the book shelves withered. Storage units could solve these
issues by consolidating the posters more neatly within a contained unit.
The disorganization also created poor records for the special collections archive.
Herrada noted that “part of the reason that I did this digitization project is because there were no
good records. . . . They were just stored in a cabinet and all of the information about them was
in the head of the [previous] curator. There was no written information or electronic information
about them” (personal interview, January 20, 2016). In 2009 and 2010, Herrada and others
surveyed about 1,600 posters to better understand conditions and develop more metadata. This
survey led to the library obtaining polyester folders and acid free enclosures as well as

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organizing the posters in a three-tier storage unit, roughly five foot by six foot (2015, n.p.). By
2009, the UM library had already implemented a digitization program, which had digitized
photographs, pamphlets, buttons, and several other collections of material. The library had also
acquired better technology—large scanners—that allowed better quality of images (Herrada,
2015, n.p.). In this ecology of digital initiatives and technologies, the poster digitization project
was ideal.
Another important reason for digitization stems from wider accessibility and circulation
for the general public. As Herrada remarked: “There was no good access point to get to these at
all for the public” (personal interview, January 20, 2016). In fact, Herrada illuminated that “it’s
not enough for us to preserve the artifact if people cannot see it.” This exigency inspired
Herrada to take action for better public accessibility; it also aligned with the Council on Library
and Information Resources (CLIR) grant program, which centered on exposing hidden and rare
library collections, a mission that University of Michigan’s special collections also took up.
Although Herrada and the UM library did not pursue grant funding, Herrada noted that given the
nature of the Labadie collection, exposing the collection to a wider audience also aligned with
the idea of greater awareness of social protest (2015, n.p.). In their archivist work, UM librarians
become activists—a way to continue the efforts and dedication Joseph Labadie, Sophie
Labadie, Agnes Inglis, the poster creators, and many others have given to activism and social
justice.
LABOR OF DIGITIZATION
The digitization process involved labor in a variety of ways, a fact that could easily go
unnoticed in any interaction or research with the collection. I want to briefly discuss some of this
labor because it not only needs to be visible, but it also connects in an interesting way to this
dissertation: the effects of laboring bodies although those bodies are not present in a
conventional sense. That is, when I or any visitor to the digital posters works with the digital
artifacts, we may not “see” the librarians involved with/in the digitized posters, but we feel their

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material effects. The same could be said with readers of this dissertation: readers may not “see”
my labor involved with/in researching, reading, and writing if I don’t bring this to the forefront.
Nevertheless, I bring this issue in as a way to underscore the importance of attending to the
production of both the analog and digital archive (and any archive, at that) as a way to
acknowledge the bodies and invariably present despite any visual erasure.
As noted above, the digitization process involved a number of librarians, UM staff, and
students and their labor. Several students, as Herrada noted, worked on various iterations of the
project (2015, n.p.). Students Barbara Perles and Yu-Ling Fan conducted a pilot study in the
mid-1990s with fifty posters using an HP ScanJet llc at 150 dpi.11 This pilot project received no
support, and in fact no one had considered copyright issues. It wasn’t until 2004 when another
student, Shahana Alam, digitized many more posters: 1200, to be exact. This digitization
involved Alam using a digital camera as she stood on a chair in the UM reading room as the
posters lay on the table. Alam also created an Excel spreadsheet with the metadata. Herrada
(2015) noted that “most of the time the poster is all that exists—no indication of who designed it,
who produced it, no date, no location. So records can be very simple” (n.p.). This Excel
spreadsheet was merged into a FileMaker Pro database, which easily preserved digitized
versions; however, as Herrada remarked, “this database could not be shared. We were even
limited to how many staff computers had FileMaker installed. I located the database recently
and was able to open it, but there were no images, just records. The images still exist on the
library server” (2015, n.p.). Creating this metadata, according to Herrada, took lots of labor and
time because, as noted above, the collection was disorganized in storage. In 2009 and 2010,
Herrada and other librarians surveyed about 1,600 posters to better understand their conditions
and information. This survey provided some methodologies for coding the posters, which
viewers now see with the digital posters: unique object identifier (for recording purposes), title,
author/creator, city, province/state, country, (subject) heading, and size. During these two years,
11

Herrada does not have these images or any metadata from this project; only the final report.

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two to three library staff also had to work with UM technicians to transport the posters to the
scanner. In short, large amounts of human labor, equipment, time, and expertise were needed
throughout the five-year digitizing process.
During the reorganizing and digitizing phases in 2009 and 2010, Herrada also worked
with Conservation Librarian Cathy Baker. Baker, who specializes in nineteenth-century paper
conservation, has a wide-range of both technical and nontechnical knowledge about
preservation, conservation, and restoration. For forty years, she has engaged in an array of
book archiving. Baker’s expertise and dedicated labor to the project ensured the posters could
be searchable and identifiable for patrons. For Baker, one of the key elements of organizing and
digitizing the posters was to create unique object identifiers (UOI) for every poster. Prior to
2010, Baker suspected that the Labadie Collection didn’t have a plethora of curators, but only
one, which meant that information on the posters was stored in one curator’s memory. While
this system is beneficial in that “They [the curator] know their collection really well, which can be
great for them,” it does not work well for “anybody else who actually wants to use the collection
when they’re not around” (Baker, personal interview, March 16, 2106). With the emergence of
more digital systems, most materials are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI). These
identifiers are not new to libraries; nearly all library books have them, creating a much easier
way to find materials. Baker noted that finding copies of materials always depends on whether
the library uses the Library of Congress call number system or the Dewey Decimal. Books don’t
have both; rather, usually one or the other within a collection. For the Labadie Collection, a DOI
was “really essential for this kind of collection” (Baker, personal interview, March 16, 2016).
This accumulation of people, their work, and collaboration created a project that is
currently accessible to a wider public. Those with internet access can visit the posters and see
the cultural productions of historical struggles from activists. In addition to seeing the images of
these posters, they can obtain information about who created the posters, when and where they
were created, and what kinds of social issues they address. The most important effect of this

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accumulation is the distribution of knowledge about historical social issues and struggles—some
of which are still present in the twenty-first century.
ENGAGING WITH THE DIGITAL ARTIFACTS
After my prospectus defense in November 2015, I visited University of Michigan over the
next five months five times for interviews with Julie Herrada, Kate Hutchens, and Cathy Baker,
who were all involved with digitizing the posters. From February to August, I also made ten
separate trips to spend time with about twelve analog version “labor” posters that interested me.
With each visit, I spent a minimum of an hour and usually closer to an average of about four
hours. Over these months, I slowly came to realize another layer of my interests with this
archive: the materiality and affect of the posters within analog and digital spaces.
The ecology of the interface in the digital collection does not simply present the posters
to viewers. Because the Hatcher Library has so many collections, certain processes and
knowledge is required to reach the digital artifacts. For instance, when I first browsed the digital
collection through the University of Michigan’s library, I reached the posters via the “2153
images/descriptions” link on the university’s library collections website. That link took me to 108
web pages of the posters. In the upper-right corner is a page navigator, and each page presents
twenty thumbnail images with their unique IDs and poster titles in three rows. As I clicked on
thumbnails, each click took me to another page: the individual poster’s page. The individual
digitized poster pages have a uniform architecture for users. At the top is the title of the poster,
and below the title are three buttons. The left button is a drop-down menu for “Download,” which
lists size options for file downloads. Some posters have three or four size options, ranging from
112 x 149 to 7208 x 9568; but most have only one option for a high-resolution image download,
a smaller file, such as 149 x 255. Next to the “Download” drop-down menu is a “Share/Cite”
drop-down menu, which has three options: “Link to this page,” “Citation,” and “Image view.” The
third button is “problems/comments?”, which provides a new window for leaving a comment for
UM librarians.

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Below these buttons is the digitized artifact/text. It is presented in a fixed navigation
window, which has a zooming feature and four-way navigation. Users can also use their pointer

Figure 5. Screenshot of Labadie Special Collections Digital Posters interface. Screenshot by
author.

to drag the artifact around the fixed window. Because of the high-resolution scanning of the
images, I could zoom in closely and see detailed markings and conditions of the posters. When
I downloaded the file onto my computer, which is usually a smaller file size, and opened it with
photo viewer, I could also zoom in on the digital poster; yet, the quality of most of these scanned
artifacts in their smaller sizes is poor, due to legality issues in digitizing the posters. If I wanted
to see the details, I had to view them in the fixed window, which becomes a kind of supplement
to the digital artifacts/texts. The fixed window becomes integral to engaging with the digital
artifact.
With the digital artifacts, I must move the posters by clicking and dragging in the fixed
window as I read the text. With the digital artifacts, I stare at the computer screen, scanning my
eyes around the poster and keeping my head and body still. While I do use my hands and body,
it’s minimal and it does not compare sufficiently to the labor-intensive operating of a printing
press. The digital artifact also hinders me from haptic encounters with a certain texture of the

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inked markings, the traces of a careful attention to the strokes (although the shaping of the lead
blocks may be more fitting) of each letter.
The digital artifacts are not only representations of the posters, but texts framed with
navigation affordances and constraints. The posters create a layering effect. “Layers,” Daniel
Anderson and Jentery Sayers (2015) argued, “add verticality to our sense of composing,” a
notion that allows them to understand that “[e]ach reading performs and even generates new
versions of a text over time, but accumulated representations of those readings can be
gathered, simultaneous, viewed through one another” (p. 80). For the Labadie collection, the
digital artifacts are viewed through the materiality of the digital screen at one layer; but the
posters are also viewed at another layer: the reduced poster size in the zoom window. These
(digital) layers include analog experiences, particularly in relation to bodies: “clicking, touching,
sliding, and scrolling, enacting the embodied materiality of the digital” (Anderson and Sayers,
2015, p. 82). In other words, layering debunks the myth that the digital is disembodied. The
zoom window of each poster invites embodied action, creating an interactive visual-embodied
experience. Viewers can see greater detail of the posters—texture, faint pen marks, and paper
folds/creases—by zooming in at a close distance.
It’s not that the digital artifact lacks cultural affect. One way to think about the digital
cultural affect is in considering the materialities needed and involved. This might mean
understanding materials and bodies as extensions of each other. Specifically, hands are vital to
engaging with tactility of digital cultural affect. With the poster “Preamble,” the cursor on my
laptop hovered over the zoom-in feature, and my index finger pressed upon the mouse button to
zoom in. The poster includes six paragraphs about IWW’s principles, goals, and a call to action
(which I discuss further in the next chapter), which I could read more clearly. My body stayed
still in my black leather desk chair in my apartment. I inhaled and exhaled as my eyes scanned
the paragraphs in the fixed window. My hand rest on the wireless mouse with index finger

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hovering over the button. But my visual attention overpowered this body position. I could not see
all six paragraphs at one moment, thus I dragged the digital artifact around in the window.
For me, the labor required to access the digital archive is more intellectual and less
manual. It was a labor that required a literacy of how to navigate the architecture of UM library’s
website. After nine years of education in college in the last twelve years, I have learned a
literacy. Yet, even all these years of using the Internet and databases for research do not yield
expertise. This calls attention to the heterogeneity of the Internet and databases knowledge,
with archives being a prime example. “Archival materials,” Elizabeth Yakel wrote, “are often
considered to be part of the ‘deep Web,’ that portion of the Internet not easily indexed by search
engines and therefore difficult to retrieve. . . . The ‘deep Web’ offers a great deal of archival
information, but navigating Web sites or online databases that yield different levels of detail can
be very confusing” (2010, pp. 102-103). While the Labadie Special Collections is hardly part of
the deep Web, it does require a specialized literacy, particularly when visitors to its website (the
UM library’s website) must navigate various pages and rules.
Visitors who do find their way to the digital artifacts gain more than just visual
apprehension of the posters. Visitors receive additional information about the posters that are
not, for the most part, readily available in seeing the posters. Herrada and others worked to
provide extra-textual information for each poster. This information is the paratext, which Gérard
Genette remarked is “a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author's
name, a title, a preface, illustrations” that accompany a text (1987/1997, p. 1). Genette
continued: “although we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as
belonging to the text, in any case they surround it and extend it, precisely in order to present it,
in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the
text's presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of
a book” (original emphasis, p. 1). Genette emphasized that the paratext enables the book to be
a book, and albeit Genette’s study was on a traditional notion of print books, the concept of

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paratext and an extension of it works well with these posters. The paratexts of the Labadie
archive digital artifacts can be understood as a layering of the rhetorical and compositional
decisions, makings, and interpretations. For instance, next to the digital artifact situated in its
fixed window was/is metadata organized with categories, such as poster’s unique ID, title,
author/creator, city, province/state, country, heading 1, heading 2, and size (cm), and hyperlinks
to other digital artifacts/texts.
Without doubt, providing digital access to the posters enhances the collection. Herrada
indeed accomplishes her activist goal of providing wider public access. Sitting at my computer in
my apartment, navigating the website pages, and interacting with the digital artifacts, I am still
able to touch the artifacts through mediation: clicks, scrolls, navigations, and zooms. This
mediation, however, erases some of the tactile and olfactory qualities of the posters. Perhaps
some cultural affects are lost when engaging with the digital versions. As Alexis E. Ramsey
noted, “one can argue that all texts, when digitized, lose something when confined to a screen”
(2010, p. 84). Indeed, I lose a certain kind of tactile and olfactory experience as the artifacts are
flattened upon the computer screen. I am reminded of my work life that is spent with many
hours on the computer—receiving, sending, and responding to emails, reading books and
articles, researching for this dissertation and other projects, developing an online journal,
designing and maintaining a number of websites, teaching courses, and creating documents
and deliverables. This cultural affect experience reorients my body to a present and future I
have carved out for myself: a shift in blue-collar work and the manual labor needed to whitecollar work and intellectual labor.
Herrada is fully aware of the limitations of the digitizing the posters, particularly in
regards to sensory experience. In an interview with her, she asserted,
with any kind of markings or anything that would be on that original, you wouldn’t
necessarily be able to see them online. If there was a tape, you could tell that it
was posted somewhere then you’d have a deeper sense of how it might have

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been used. Then the field, the paper, the type of paper that they used, the
printing process which you can’t always tell from a digital image. . . . Texture of
the paper. Some of these are glossies. Some of them are silk screen, some of
them are newsprint. Some of them are hand painted. Some of them are
handmade paper or different kinds of paper. There’s a lot that gets lost when
you’re looking only at the digital, although it’s better than nothing. You have a
graphic image but if we digitize everything and throw away all the paper, I feel
we’d be lost in the desert. (personal interview, January 20, 2016)
Herrada’s remarks call attention to the fact that researchers still should/need to travel to
sites where artifacts are. And, perhaps, digitized artifacts may not be the end goal.
Alexis E. Ramsey contended: “And the goal of digitizing is often to entice the researcher
into the archive to see, touch, and smell the real thing. Being able to touch and smell
documents are important aspects of archival work because a researcher should be able
to take account of the collection for him- or herself and not only through digital
renderings” (2010, p. 84). Researchers need to engage with artifacts beyond simply the
computer screen, dwelling with them, other persons, and their contemporary ecologies.
CONCLUSION
This chapter provided an understanding of the “behind the scenes”—the technologies
used, the storage, the labor, archiving practices, and rhetorical decisions on an archive. They
form the digital ecology as the posters are situated digitally. Librarians, students, UM staff, and I
are situated in this ecology and moved by the discourses and actions of other bodies when
working with the posters. My positionality and orientation to the digital archives raises the idea
about literacy within digital spaces. With the digital archive and artifacts, I often had a cultural
affect experience of literacy that evoked a sense of where I came from, what I know and don’t
know, and what kind of work I do now. During those moments, I also felt that I was missing

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something from merely engaging with the digital artifacts on my computer. That feeling is a
cultural affect one that also evoked to visit the analog versions of the posters.
Despite the benefits and affordances of digital technologies for analog artifacts,
researchers still need to visit sites. Particularly in archival research, site visitations bring a
different kind of experience, a cultural affect one that can evoke different understandings about
the analog materials and a researcher’s embodiment and research practices. Indeed, Gesa
E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan (2008) posited that researchers ought to implement an “important, if
undertheorized, research method”: site visitation “where a historical subject lived and worked”
(p. 5). Kirsch and Rohan assert that “Exploring a place and re-seeing a place as an archive
teach the hands-on nature of research. . . . [It] is intricately linked with living, being present both
mindfully and physically” (p. 5). In the next, I discuss engagements with some posters during
non-digital archival visits and continuing to show the emergence of cultural affects within a
different ecology.

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CHAPTER SIX. THEORETICAL PRACTICE: LABOR, WORK, AND FAMILIAL
EVOCATIONS
∞
The first time I visited the Labadie archives in Ann Arbor to check out some analog
posters was in mid-February 2016. A couple of weeks prior, I had requested five posters to
view: Industrial Workers of the World’s “What is What in the World of Labor?”, “Protect yourself,
the Ku-Klux-Klan is anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-catholic, anti-foreigner and anti-labor”,
“Greetings”, Carlos Cortez/Industrial Workers of the World’s “There’s so few of him and so many
of us!”, and B. Warrior’s “Strike! While the iron is hot! Wages for housework.” Visitors to the
Labadie archive in Ann Arbor must view their requested materials in the Hatcher Graduate
Library reading room, which is located nearly at the center of UM’s campus on the eighth floor of
the Hatcher Graduate Library building. After exiting the elevators, I walked down to the main
hallway and through a set of doors. The reading room has two glass walls and a U-shaped
desk. Two librarians always work the desk. Visitors must hand one of the workers an ID. Then,
the UM worker passes along a key for visitors to lock up materials in the individual lockers down
the hall. After receiving the key on my visit, I was told that I could bring my computer and phone,
but no pens, liquids, food, or bags into the reading room.
∞
In this chapter, I use story, interviews, and a multi-sensuous analysis to show some
cultural affects. Cultural affect is a rhetorical event in which one’s lived, embodied experiences
(re)emerge through intensities that (re)orient a set of relations and meanings. Cultural affect
binds somatics and semiotics and builds connections between bodies, language, culture, and
personal and social history in order to initiate a set of ethics in research, writing, and the world in
general. Cultural affect is an experience in which readers/observers/audiences affect a text’s
meaning simultaneously as the text affects readers/observers/audiences and the meaning of

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their past, subjectivity, identity, and embodiment. To be clear, cultural affect is not writing about
people, texts, and objects, but attending to and undertaking encounters with people, texts, and
objects. I use the three methods discussed in chapter three as I demonstrate some cultural
affects that emerged in this dissertation’s specific autoethnographic archival research, reflecting
not just on methods and research positions, but also affective orientation and disposition at a
number of points in the process. I have already practiced parts of these methods in the first four
chapters, primarily story in chapters one, four, and five and interview data in chapter five. This
chapter focuses on cultural affects as they are situated with(in) the archive through story and
multi-sensuous rhetorical analysis; that is, my lived, embodied sensuous experiences of
engaging with three of the posters in the archive.
With each of the three “Labor” posters, I first briefly give rhetorical analyses, drawing on
semiotic and affective orientations. While such analyses with these orientations are productive, I
supplement them with articulations of cultural affect experiences as a way to show what
attention to our cultural affects might reveal about relationships to labor and academic research,
the practice of a working-class intellectual identity, and the beginnings of ethical engagement in
the world. With this in mind, delineating cultural affect experiences offers a readjusting of
cultural lenses and unveils, in this study, another layer of understanding labor that can include
the body of the archivists, union laborers, and myself as a researcher. As I wrote in chapter one,
I am less interested in chasing cultural affect, tracking it, or pinning it down, but more invested in
noticing it and writing it (despite the conundrum that cultural affect cannot be written about, but
experienced). As I mentioned in chapter one about the writing style in this dissertation, I present
some personal stories, experimental prose, and images that shift from traditional academic
prose as a way to expand our understanding of what counts as academic writing.
While the Labadie Collection has in total over two thousand posters and the “Labor”
collection has over two hundred, I chose the three “Labor” posters for two reasons. First, they
were the most interesting to me in terms of how they expressed ideas about the body and

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embodiment through alphabetic text, content, design, and creativity; second, these three
continued to reoccur throughout my research process, suggesting to me they had a cultural and
affective impact on me (and possibly others).
PREAMBLE OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD
At the June 1905 convention that formed Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Father
Thomas J. Hagerty, “a Catholic priest from New Mexico who had converted to Marxism even
before his ordination in 1892,” announced what would end up being the infamous opening IWW
preamble line: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common” (Kornbluh,

Figure 6. “Preamble of the Industrial
Workers of the World” by Industrial
Workers of the World (n.d.)

1988, p. 2). This remark situated an economic and social relation and introduced IWW and its
philosophy and mission to its members and the general public. The political poster in the

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Labadie Collection, “Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World” (figure 6)12, is sized at 36
x 26.5 centimeters (about 14” x 10”) and presents six paragraphs that establish the
organizations principles, goals, and call to action.
A rhetorical analysis of the text and design would show that a narrative forms: two
distinct classes are at odds—working class and employing class. This narrative stemmed from
an exigency that motivated Father Hagerty’s notion of “nothing in common” and facilitated a
cultural meaning between the two social bodies and their relation. The narrative includes the
explicit origin of this struggle—the wage system—but with each iteration, the writer(s) called for
specific actions: (1) “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until workers of the world
organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish
the wage system”;13 and (2) “we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword,
‘Abolition of the wage system.’” IWW’s answer to the exploitative cultural narrative (re: wage
system) and nature of its relations was organization, (taking back) ownership, and abolition.
IWW’s narrative was a counter-narrative that involved organizing around unity and solidarity as
well as taking ownership—both of the earth, a particularly Western paradigm in which humans
reign over the natural world, and the machinery—as a way to call into question the means of
production, similar to another U.S. economic and political mode: slavery.
In 1905, “abolition” and “to abolish” might have been associated with Black slavery in the
United States—a racialized economic and political system that theoretically ended forty years
12

Although the Labadie Collection does not provide a year of creation for the poster, I discovered that
these six paragraphs are mostly unchanged as the IWW’s official website provides the preamble:
www.iww.org/culture/official/preamble.shtml. Important to note is that this poster in the Labadie archive is
not the original preamble; at the end of IWW website’s preamble page is an image of what appears to be
the original preamble document, a very different visual presentation of the preamble. Although their visual
textures differ drastically and a compare and contrast reading would be interesting, I focus on the Labadie
archive poster due to brevity.
13
This preamble is a revised version, appearing after a 1908 IWW Convention in the IWW Industrial
Union Bulletin on November 7, 1908 (Kornbluh, 1988, p. 12). In the 1905 preamble, the second
paragraph read: “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on
the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor,
through an economic organization of the working class without affiliation with any political party.” This
amending attempted to form greater unity and emphasize economic rather than political action for an
“industrial democracy in a worker-controlled, cooperative commonwealth” (Kornbluh, 1988, p. 6).

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earlier. By recalling a not-too-distant past in which an economic and political system operated to
oppress a segment of the population based on racial hierarchy, IWW’s diction connected the
current struggle to a historical struggle, possibly as a way to establish its set of principles, but
also to work with historical language that connected some of the issues it faced to other political
issues. Such language also called for greater unity and solidarity across racial lines, which
again fit with IWW’s general approach to the exploitative system.
The counter-narrative was also sustained through other rhetorical moves in the overall
image, specifically in the design. Images rarely, if ever, communicate only a single message. As
Roland Barthes (1977) asserted, “all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their
signifiers, a 'floating chain' of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others” (pp.
38-39). Design is an effective complement to what we identify as classic Western rhetoric:
speech and written alphabetic text. As an unencapsulated and, in fact, “polyesterless” artifact in
the archive, the poster presented a much more pronounced and salient border that contains the
text. The border framed both literally and figuratively the six paragraphs with interwoven
relations, stability, unity, and strength. The cranberry red border established a vibrant, yet
modest, bold, yet inviting design that created negative space with curved lines that accumulate
into a woven braid or rope. This design evoked an interweave of people and possibly classes:
the working class must stay tightly bound as it moves in unison; the employing class and
capitalist depend upon the working class and laborer, their ontologies defined by each other;
and the sharp juxtaposition with the two classes having “nothing in common.” One might even
associate the left and right side of the border with Greco-Roman columns, communicating
strength, stability, and elegance. These bold columns communicated “officialness,” building
credibility, but doing so through a cultural intertextuality. Before readers began to consume the
six enclosed paragraphs of the analog poster, the design initiated an orientation of the
viewer/reader to a set of relations between the organization, its identity, and its authority.

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This rethinking of the narrative and class-based relation—both classes interlaced and
dependent upon each other—worked effectively with the alphabetic text too. In fact, such a
reading of the poster not only worked culturally, but affectively in relation to material conditions.
The preamble states, “These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class
upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all of its members in any one industry,
or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department
thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.” The rhetorical choice to bring the
vulnerable and potentially injured individual body to the collective body asserted the
consequences of not changing the conditions and called for workers to move in unison. IWW’s
language did not resonate with the idea of small, increment actions to cause change; nor did it
evoke ideas of the power of ripples within the system. Its language was affective by presenting
individual bodies and potential harms done to them, but also harms done to the larger, unified
body. This same tactic appeared with evoking a feeling of hunger for the body/ies—both the
individual bodies and the collective body of the audience: “there can be no peace so long as
hunger and want are found among millions.”
Cultural Affect Experience
I have shown in these last few pages a kind of brief traditional rhetorical analysis with
some semiotic and affective considerations. A cultural affect orientation and experience of the
poster would not replace such an analysis, but supplements it in a Derridean: “the concept of
the supplement . . . harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange as it
is necessary. The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude,
the fullest measure of presence” (Derrida, 1967/1976, p. 144). Cultural affect supplements
layers of meanings and affects, one way being through with the poster’s materiality. For
example, the stylizing of the alphabetic text has a humanistic typeface with visual marks
reflecting the laboring of human hands in pressing the ink onto the paper. The font is a serif font,
with little to no kerning and light weight strokes. As expected, the poster was made on an old

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printing press with most likely reversed, relief printing blocks, transmitting traces of the tools and
laboring body on the machine. That cranberry red woven border has imperfections and
blemishes from when the ink bled or did not press securely onto the paper.
Such attention to the materiality could easily be semiotic or affective through critical
analysis. But this materiality resonated with me, evoking a sense of work with the hands, arms,
and torso. A cultural affect experience emerged: I could envision the printmaker arranging the
blocks, setting the type, handling the inks, inserting the blank Irish cream beige 14 ¼” x 10 ½”
poster into the machine, and rolling the press. But there was something else about the ink too,
notably in the alphabetic writing. As I honed in on the inked letters, I felt a slowness of markings.
There’s some human quality—a human body laboring with the texture of the poster and of the
inked lettering. Johanna Drucker remarked: “Repressing the blank face of letters on the page
will never obliterate the record from the trace, nor wipe clean the persevering palimpsest of
memory” (1998, p. 56). She also asserted: “As a form of individual expression writing is a
somatically inflected sign, a production of the bodily self which seeks identity in an image of its
own making” (1998, p. 59). With the digital artifact on the computer screen, I did not see or
experience the same evocations, which may suggest a modification and/or even loss with the
digitizing of the artifact.
Perhaps it was because, with the analog artifact, I had more possibilities with adjusting
my body for visual-tactile apprehension. I could adjust my head to slightly different angles.
Zooming in. Cocking my head to the left. I engaged angles with each movement, each head
position. The visual texture changed accordingly. My perception shifted. I laid my fingertips on
the poster, identifying that the ink of the font was not raised; it was, as I perceived with my
naked eye, flush with the paper material. Yet, I felt the ink. I could touch the blemishes of some
of the lettering without removing the ink. I touched them as they touched me. This space
between us culturally and affectively moved my flesh: the investment of labor into making this
activist artifact, this rhetorical deliverable. The labor and humans were both ever present and

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absent; and the type of labor and humans were understood by own background in labor.
Although I never worked at a printing press, I have worked similar machines requiring the value
of hands and body: lathes, table saws, jigsaws, and planers.
The poster was smaller than I anticipated, and I imagined it could have been easily
moved and stored, both by Wobblies, as well as the Labadie Collection librarians and staff. The
overall size is slightly larger than a regular 8 ½” x 11” sheet of notebook paper, and I also
measured with a translucent ruler borrowed from the UM reading room desk the title at the top—
¼” height font, about an 18 pt. font. I did a general visual scan of the poster again, noting its
pristine condition with no creases or folds or bends, which was impressive given it was probably
or close to one-hundred years old. The material was sturdy, close to cardboard packaging
material, but not as thick, and also flexible and wobbly. Of course, I had no information on when
this poster was exactly created, where it was presented, and the places in which it traveled.
Even on the back, no information provided its historical context(s); only in the bottom-right
corner was penciled “S3-13” and “SCLP0506 LA,” which were notes by UM librarians. As the
case with so many instances in this dissertation research, the text was decontextualized and
recontextualized. But I extracted these details because of semiotic opportunity. In other words,
my ability to visually and haptically work with the poster opens the opportunity for more semiotic
analysis. I used a tool to measure, I flipped the poster to check for any clues, and I pulled back
and closed in at different angles on material features. Semiotics, however, can only take a
researcher so far.
Cultural affect, on the other hand, can emanate other understandings and experiences.
With “Preamble,” I put my large, aquiline-shaped nose to the poster, inhaling the resembling
scent of old paper; not dusty, but vanilla-like and fruity almond-like with a tint of musty and
woodsy odor. I lifted my head back, and then moved forward again to smell it. It was a
redolent of paper and ink, and each time my nose inched toward the poster, some feeling ran
along my skin and incited a vague memory. It was a moment I could not specifically recall; only

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the smell, that smell of old paper. Laura Marks (2002) opined, “When we smell, we are able to
re-create this sense of past in our own bodies—lucky for us, because these are memories that
often can’t be apprehended any other way; unlucky, because the memories smell brings us can
be overwhelming” (p. 114). The memory associated with the smell of the poster had
nonspecificity. At the same time, there was a particularity to it, understandable since “[s]mell
asks to be sensed in its particularity, in an engagement between two bodies, chemical and
human” (Marks, 2002, p. 114). Despite the nonspecificity, the smell had meaning—both
personal and cultural.14 A number of questions emerged: Where had I smelled aged paper
before and derived pleasure or been attracted to it? Was it in my dad’s basement and shed—a
place where tools and work benches and newspapers and other hoarded materials resided—
when I was growing up? In my dad’s other work areas, where he laid newspaper down as a way
to absorb oil and other automotive fluid drips and spills? Or, perhaps it was my grandpa Rocco’s
trailer (see figure 7)?
∞
My grandpa Rocco, who is my mom’s dad, went to Lewis University in Romeoville,
Illinois because of a football scholarship. Although he only stood five foot five inches, he was
stocky with a square frame. My family has told me stories about “Chico”—a nickname he picked
up when he was young and stayed with him until his passing in 2015—and his ambition and
drive on the football field. As a running back, he was especially small for the game, but he
somehow set numerous Lewis University football records that continue to hold to this day. He
was a workhorse in football.

14

Much research has shown that human olfactory systems do work beyond the cultural, especially with
odorless chemicals. Laura Marks noted that “they speak directly to the most primitive part of the brain, the
hypothalamus or ‘reptilian brain,’ without ever making contact with consciousness” (2002, p. 115). But
such acultural sensory experiences are not of interest to me, and in fact, I think most of our olfactory
experiences are culturally-related.

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Figure 7. Two images of Rocco “Chico” Mavigliano’s Des Plaines,
Illinois trailer. Photographs by author.

After college, Chico did get drafted by the Green Bay Packers, but injured his knee and
had surgery before the start of the 1952 season. He never fully recovered from this surgery, and
his football days were short-lived. My family has also told me stories about how even if he
hadn’t gotten injured, he would have been too small to have a NFL career. But we keep the
story of his injury and surgery as the cause for the end of his football days. Shortly after the
surgery, Chico returned to Chicago, accepted the end of a potential football career, and worked
for Royal Pipe & Supply of Melrose Park as a clerk and bookkeeper.
I’m unsure when Chico exactly moved to Des Plaines, IL—a northwest suburb less than
twenty miles from downtown Chicago and three miles from O’Hare airport—and into the doublewide trailer for the last forty years of his life. In my preteen years, my mom, brother, and I would
go visit him in that trailer. At those visits, I remember seeing stacks of newspaper clippings from
his football days. The stacks always sat on his kitchen table, producing that aroma of old
newspaper: vanilla-like and fruity almond-like with a tint of musty and woodsy odor. During the
visits, he would recall fond memories of those days as joy filled his round face. Included in those
tellings were moments of disappointment and failure. “I could have been rich and famous and
living in a fancy house,” he would say tongue-in-cheek as we crowded around his tight living
room with the sounds of airplanes arriving and departing from one of the busiest airports only
three miles south of us. Sports and his athletic body were the means to “make it.” His body was

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crucial to class mobility in terms of economics. In general, class mobility needs the body,
particularly an abled body. But when the body fails or is oftentimes marked in particular ways—
racialized, gendered, sexualized, and abled—that mobility creates immobility. Economics as the
means for class movement is key, but not essential. Race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and
the cultural practices—such as language, lifestyle, hobbies, values, and beliefs—that work
within these social identities also factor into (im)possibilities for class mobility.
∞
The smell of paper with the “Preamble” poster set off a whole host of associations that
connect to my own set of values as a working-class person and the desires of the workingclass: Rely on your body, not your intellect to make it through the world. My past was everpresent. And the smell was distinct, one in which science has shown that the chemical
compound breakdown in paper produces such an aroma, but not all of my familial places
housed old paper (let alone 1905 paper). I cannot provide irrefutable explanations for this
connection between the effects of chemical breakdown and places in which old paper did not
exist. But, what comes to mind was my projection onto this artifact—a projection that included
my months of engagement already with the archive and the “Labor” posters, my working-class
subjectivity, and my experience with labor as a child and adolescent in these familial places.
The story about Rocco may not appear to help me analyze the poster better. However, it
revealed to me the emphasis that working-class subjects—whether activist or not—have on
their bodies for everyday work practices and job futurities. I can identify, and might I say
“understand,” the labor Wobblies dedicate every day, the body they depend upon to carry out
such labor, and the justice these IWW activists fight for. Affect cannot be separated from the
culture in which it emerges and finds itself (and likewise, culture is saturated with affect). In all,
the materiality of the poster touched me visually and olfactorily as I touched visually and
olfactorily the poster, connecting my cultural orientation to the Labadie archive’s cultural affect
and the IWW activists’ affective culture. In doing so, I came to learn about the need to value

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both mind and body. While the mind and body is continually separated conceptually, particularly
within Western paradigms and for academics in the academy, they are interrelated and must be
acknowledged and valued within academic work. Reading, writing, researching, thinking, and
engaging with others requires a labor upon the body that oftentimes is unacknowledged and
undervalued. Attention to cultural affect offers a possibility for acknowledging and valuing the
body—and mind—within given historical and political situations.
Multi-sensory attention and engagement opens greater possibilities for cultural affect
experiences. With “Preamble,” my olfactory experience evoked nostalgia, an initial semiunclear, but, upon reflection, vivid memory. As Marks explained, “Smell follows a path to
symbolization. Interestingly, discriminating among smells activates the right hemisphere, the
language center. . . . find discriminations about smells start to merge with the processing of
language and images” (2002, pp. 121-122). My visual and tactile engagement with the poster
raised a sense of labor to produce, to mark, to make the poster. These sensory experiences
with the material artifact affected me as I simultaneously affected this poster’s meaning by the
traces of my culture projected upon it: my working-class background emerged to feel connected
to both the content and the material. This differs from Roland Barthes notion of the punctum,
which closely resembles cultural affect. For Barthes, the punctum was allegedly beyond
representation as it “break[s] (or punctuate[s]) the studium,” which is a culturally created and
motivated part of a text. The punctum “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and
pierces” (1982, p. 26). Barthes suggested that the punctum was a “sting, speck, cut, little holeand also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also
bruises me, is poignant to me)” (1982, p. 27). But Barthes’ notion of punctum is related to visual
apprehension; cultural affect is multi-sensuous. The punctum suggests a kind of a negative,
harmful effect; cultural affect does not necessarily harm (although of course it can) or wound
bodies, but undertakes, orients, and reveals bodies and their values. With “Preamble,” my body
breathed, skin touches-ed without recess. Cultural affect engaged movement, in movement; it

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shifted, reoriented me toward my cultural background and attentiveness to my subjectivity: a
working-class man. Intensity built in my blood, rushing along the veins and outward to my skin
as it directed me to this subjectivity. Barthes partitioned punctum and stadium. Cultural affect
coalesces them.
PROTECT YOURSELF
In the 1920s, there was a striking rise in KKK membership in the United States. Howard
Zinn (2005) explained, “The Ku Klux Klan was revived in the 1920s, and it spread into the North.
By 1924 it had 4½ million members” (p. 382). Part of this resurgence of White Supremacy was
due to the immigration influx. In addition to the cultural resurgence, the U.S. government also
implemented policies that aligned with White Anglo-Saxon Supremacy:
Congress, in the twenties, put an end to the dangerous, turbulent flood of
immigrants (14 million between 1900 and 1920) by passing laws setting
immigration quotas: the quotas favored Anglo-Saxons, kept out black and yellow
people, limited severely the coming of Latins, Slavs, Jews. No African country
could send more than 100 people; 100 was the limit for China, for Bulgaria, for
Palestine; 34,007 could come from England or Northern Ireland, but only 3,845
from Italy; 51,227 from Germany, but only 124 from Lithuania; 28,567 from the
Irish Free State, but only 2,248 from Russia. (Zinn, 2005, p. 382)
These statistics and the context of the early twentieth century show a number of ways that the
U.S. government exercised White Supremacy institutionally, which also reflected a cultural and
racial paradigm among the KKK. Whiteness, clearly, had a much different meaning than it does
today, and it is not just non-White skin tone the Klan feared and attacked, but also practices with
those non-White people: non-Christian and non-Protestant religions (Judaism, Buddhism,
Catholicism, Islam) and low-wage labor.
During the 1920s, Ralph Chaplin, an illustrator, writer, and labor activist from Chicago,
either gifted to the Labadie Collection or created the later-donated poster “Protect Yourself, the

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Ku-Klux-Klan is anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-catholic, anti-foreigner and anti-labor” for IWW (figure
8). Cathy Baker noted that the poster was likely produced in this decade because of a written
note in the upper-left-hand corner: “Labadie Collection gr[?]: Ralph Chaplin 1932 July 7,” which
was probably the date in which the poster was donated to the Labadie archive (personal

Figure 8. “Protect yourself, the
Ku-Klux-Klan is anti-Jew, antiNegro, anti-catholic, antiforeigner and anti-labor” by
Industrial Workers of the World
(n.d.)

interview, March 16, 2016). Created in Chicago, “Protect Yourself” measured 91 x 61.5
centimeters (about 35” x 24”). Out of the three posters in this dissertation, it was by far the
largest, which allowed its message, design, and medium to function rhetorically with much more
impact. With its light elm brown background and solid sans serif black font, the top of the poster
read in bold capitalized words “PROTECT YOURSELF.” Below these words was a black square
with a Ku Klux Klan member dressed in a white hood and holding a double-barrel shotgun. To
the right of the KKK member was alphabetic text beginning with: “The Ku-Klux-Klan is.” The
next lines list what the Klan opposed, hated, and discriminated against by expressing the

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preposition “anti”: anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner, and anti-labor. Under this
main message was a closing: “Organize Industrially LINE UP! Join the I.W.W.”
The primary focus of “Protect Yourself” was on hatred and discrimination. Implicitly, the
KKK became associated with the capitalist, hence suggesting the idea of the capitalist as
unethical, racist, xenophobic, and religious discriminator. Historically, anti-Catholicism dates
back to the early days of the British colonies in North America where Protestants hindered
Catholics from settlement in the colonies. Such anti-Catholic sentiment lingered into the
nineteenth century when the 1840s experienced the immigration of many Irish and German
Catholics into the U.S. Furthermore, the U.S. experienced another wave of immigration from
Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Particularly with this last wave, WASPs (White
Anglo-Saxon Protestants) moved toward more assimilation strategies and tactics: invention of
annual Flag Day, which was first celebrated in 1877 and took off as a holiday in 1890; the desire
in 1889 to establish flag poles and displays at all public schools along with the recitation of the
Pledge of Allegiance; campaigns to have civilians regularly salute the flag, which citizens
seldom did previously; among others. Although assimilation was forced culturally, this was a
pseudo gesture because many White Anglo-Saxon Americans still believed in racial separation
and hierarchy. In the beginning of the twentieth century, when White Anglo-Saxon America(ns)
did not identify Irish and Italian Catholics as racially White, Irish-Americans and ItalianAmericans became labeled as Other, the inferior opposite of the Occident within orientalist,
colonial paradigms. Orientalism positioned the White European (re: White Anglo-Saxon
Protestants) as superior, God-chosen, and destined (and justified) to dominant the Other—nonWhite, non-masculine peoples—and the Other’s lands, resources, and bodies (Said, 1978).
Justification for such domination often resonated with rhetoric of the Other as backwards,
different, passive, and open for domination. “Protect Yourself” attempted to work across racial,
ethnic, and national differences by situating labor as a cultural Other.

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Although “Protect Yourself” emphasized the wide-ranging of hatred and discriminatory
ideas of the KKK, it also called for unity and activist organizing across social identity platforms.
In contrast to the “Preamble” and the articulation of a narrative about class conflict, “Protect
Yourself” showed the exigency in which IWW activists worked to build unity and solidarity
through inclusion and fight a number of oppressive systems: capitalism, White supremacy, and
nationalism. This intersectional justice and inclusivity paradigm was a continual practice for
IWW. As Dylan Miner (2007) noted, “the IWW was much more than an industrial union. In fact,
the IWW was (and continues to be) an anarchist-affiliated cultural and social organization. . . .
Unlike the racist and sexist histories of North American craft unionism, Wobbly industrial
unionism has always welcomed racialized, foreign-born and female members” (p. 57). In
“Protect Yourself,” this inclusiveness and unity began to work toward a unified identity that
recognizes differences and fight together against oppressive powers.
Cultural Affect Experience
With the “Protect Yourself” analog artifact, I had a multi-sensuous engagement: haptic,
olfactory, and aural senses kicked in as I sat in the Hatcher Graduate Library reading room. My
hands flipped the poster over and back, listening to the noise of a slow swish as I carefully
turned it over—an action that most likely would not have happened with this poster that hung on
a wall in the early twentieth century. This, of course, was a different way of engaging with the
artifact in contrast to the digital version. As Susan Howe (2014) remarked, “The nature of
archival research is in flux; we need to see and touch objects and documents; now we often
merely view the same material on a computer screen—digitally, virtually, etc.” (p. 9). Indeed, we
read differently with digital texts in comparison to analog texts, as for example with the eye
navigating the digital interface (re: screen) differently than the analog interface (re: paper). The
eye does not simply gaze; rather there is a visually tactile experience.
The sheer size of “Protect Yourself” can capture a viewer’s attention intensely. Indeed,
during several UM reading room visits, I was surprised; taken aback at the size of it. Measuring

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at 91 x 61.5 centimeters (35” x 24”), data I knew from the digital poster’s paratext information
online, the poster, unlike “Preamble,” was much larger than I had imagined when I simply
encountered and analyzed it digitally. Seeing the whole poster and its actual size with me a foot
away positioned me differently than the digital version. Its materiality aligns with what Margaret
Timmers (1998) argued about the power of posters in general: “By its nature, the poster has the
ability to seize the immediate attention of the viewer . . . During that span of attention, it can
provoke and motivate its audience—it can make the viewer gasp, laugh, reflect, question,
assent, protest, recoil, or otherwise react.” (p. 8). Timmers’ list of reactionary verbs primarily
evokes a pathos appeal as well as, arguably, affects. But, similar to affect theorists, the cultural
influences and embodiments of these reactions are neglected.
Unfortunately, my olfactory experience with “Protect Yourself” was nulled because the
poster was in an enclosed casing. This casing was, as UM conservation librarian Cathy Baker
remarked, an older method that uses double-sided tape to secure a polyester film. Baker
asserted that the “Protect Yourself” poster was the “absolute worst case scenario for an
encapsulation. In the first place, it’s not encapsulated. Encapsulation means basically, at least in
preservation terms, sealing this completely from the air, any exposure to the air” (personal
interview, March 16, 2016). Part of the issue was that “Protect Yourself” is not made with strong,
good quality paper; it was equivalent to newsprint in which “it’s just ground pulp—very unpurified
wood fiber which has a lot of lignin in it, and lignin is death on paper. It’s what causes this
yellowing to occur” (personal interview, March 16, 2016). Lignin, “an organic substance binding
the cells, fibres and vessels which constitute wood and the lignified elements of plants,” causes
newspapers to discolor to yellow when exposed to sunlight (International Lignin Institute, n.p.).
Using Royster and Kirsch’s method of critical imagination, I thought about what this
might suggest about how long Chaplin or the creator(s) of this poster expected the poster to
last. Possibly, this poster in particular spoke to a certain time and place, whereas the IWW
“Preamble” poster attempted to be more universal, timeless, binding. If “Protect Yourself” was

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created and circulated in the 1920s, it would make sense given the aging of the background
color and its message (i.e., the Klan figure in the poster recalls Klan members in Birth of a
Nation, which appeared in 1915, because of the skinny, extended KKK hood at the top). Or,
does the paper choice perhaps indicate a bricolage situation? Chaplin or the creator(s) may
have lacked resources, hence the use of cheap paper, but felt the exigency of the situation for
various ethnicities and working-class laborers to unite. But this would be purely speculation. I
was detached from the people, context, and situation, and rather I sat within the contemporary
ecology.
This ecology included a variety of other material sources, some of which are at my
disposal, such as tools. On one of my visits to the UM reading room, I asked Kate at the reading
room desk for a ruler to measure various parts of the poster. She handed me an 18” translucent
ruler, and I began measuring different elements of the poster. As I took notes of quantifiable
data from my measurements, I thought about my time working on cars—identifying the right size
socket for the head of a bolt—and working construction—using my tape measure to measure
out cuts and spaces. My cultural background of manual labor and of the body as central to
living, making a living, and being in the world peaked through my research. Persistently present,
but seldom seen. It oriented me to this poster and how I conducted my research. Did it matter
that I measured discolored stripes, perhaps water marks, that ran across the top and bottom—
roughly 1 3/8” wide? Or that the “Protect Yourself” lettering was 6” tall font? Or that four strips of
tape were on the back of the poster—an observation I could not have made with only seeing the
digital version—with two of them running the length of the top and bottom (about 1 ¼” wide
brown tape) and two in the lower half and covering one vertical fold and one horizontal fold in
which the poster composition broke? Maybe not. But I was collecting data, unsure if/why this
data might be useful to my project. And while I could decide not to include such data, I feel that
the process of collecting it illuminates a cultural affect. The same way we cannot escape culture

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and our cultural makeup, I/we are never affectless; I/we are always affectful.15 The measuring
and observations—the parallels for me that emerge—call attention to a cultural affectfulness.
Despite the polyester enclosure of the analog poster, “Protect Yourself” subtly called
attention to my hands and digits. Measuring the poster with my hands and the ruler evoked my
non-academic past, and I reflected briefly on my relationship to academia and being an
academic. But another cultural affect lingered more powerfully. It had less to do with my tactile
experience of the poster’s materiality and more to do with my visual apprehension of the
alphabetic text.
Two explicit words (anti-foreigner and anti-labor) and one cultural belief (racism derived
from the Ku Klux Klan) evoked a cultural affect experience. These words and belief created a
singular event that relays to familial bodies and blood: my two grandpas Filippo Bratta and
Rocco Mavigliano. In the first half of the twentieth century, both emigrated to the United States:
Filippo from Bari, Italy, a port city on the southwest coast of the country; and Rocco from the
Calabria region in southern Italy. In Italy, northern Italians had a history of discriminating against
southern Italians due to their assumed ancestry to African and Arabic origins. From 1880 to
1921, “some 4.5 million Italians came to America” with about “80 perfect of them [coming] from
the poor, backward southern portion of Italy” (Cosco, 2003, p. 4). Their arrival came with
continued discrimination from White America as they were not deemed White as they are now in
the twenty-first century. John Higham noted that “Italians [who emigrated to the U.S.] were often
thought to be the most degraded of the European newcomers. They were swarthy, more than
half of them were illiterate, and almost all were victims of a standard living lower than that of any
other the other prominent nationalities” (qtd. in Cosco, 2003, p. 3). Racism against Italians
pushed these immigrants to hide their Italianicity. And after World War II, Italian-Americans

15

This idea of “affectless” and “affectful” comes from a conversation with my dear friend Jake Riley on
August 1, 2016. Again, this conversation illuminates a kind of ecology that I/we are embedded in—one in
which affects and ideas always circulate, embodiment is always discursively-oriented, and orientation is
always culturally-situated.

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continued to hide their ethnicity, hoping to blend in and/or assimilate to White America. As Kym
Ragusa (2003) stated:
For my family, as for many Italian Americans, white flight was the culmination of
an escape from the desperate poverty of southern Italy. It was the last leg in a
series of migrations—from Italy to America, from immigrant slum to ethnic
neighborhood—and these migrations themselves were inextricably linked to
provisional class ascension and the ascension of whiteness. The move from the
ethnic neighborhood to the outlying suburbs was the completion of these
migrations. It held the promise of assimilation into the dominant white culture, in
exchange for a final displacement of the “Old Country” as both home and ideal.
The suburbs became a place of forgetting, of leaving history behind. (p. 218-219)
It is, however, also well-documented by many sources about the racism ItalianAmericans perpetuated in the United States, especially toward Black people. Despite ItalianAmericans suffering from racism from White America, they also enacted colonialist paradigms—
creating, sustaining, and disseminating a (meta)narrative based on hierarchical binaries:
self/other, progressive/backwards, culture/nature, civilized/primitive, man/woman, and so forth.
They adapted racist paradigms in order to assimilate to Whiteness, a move that clearly worked
considering Italians are raced as White nowadays.
This cultural history connects to the cultural affect that emerged with “Protect Yourself.”
It was a cultural affect that had less to do with my labor background and more with my Italian
roots, the racism in my family, and the assimilation to White America. It also produced a
pensive, yet ruminative mood—one in which I became oriented to the ugly stories that live in my
memory and blood. An intensity augmented just above my stomach, but below my breast plate.
It began to ripple to the outer surface of my body—my skin. I did not try to suppress, push,
dispel, quell, or fight the intensity. I let it build, gain momentum. The ugliness sharpened, and I
decided that I needed to dwell in the ugly stories, careful not feel guilt or anger; but to learn.

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“Even the ugliest stories,” Tim Dougherty wrote, “are instructive for us in this moment as we
constellate them with other histories” (2016, n.p.). This cultural affect brought to the forefront my
Whiteness, even if that Whiteness would not have been categorized as such in the early
twentieth century.
My uncles tell me stories about grandpa Filippo working construction in the 1950s, 60s,
and 70s. “Niggers, kikes, and spics,” they would tell me he would say, “are lazy and thieves.
And they take our jobs and do shitty ass work.” My dad never talked about this. And when I was
an early teenager, I asked him once about it and all he could say was “grandpa has some
beliefs.” Confused and unsure how to respond to his comment, I simply said “oh” and remained
silent. A few years later, I could recall pretty much the only time my dad actually discussed race.
He told me how when he was in high school, he could not understand how his White and Black
peers hated each other so much when they lived across the street from each other. He could
not understand how people from the same neighborhood despised one another based on their
skin tones.
∞
Human skin holds the body together, playing a major part in keeping the muscles and
organs in place and veins in tack for blood to circulate. It holds together the ecology of the
body—set on the outside, yet integral to the functioning of the body. It can get punctured, yet
heal; burned, yet mostly regenerates; sheds daily, yet simultaneously regrows. Skin cells are
our selves. Skin is the outer surface of the body, a massive organ of the integumentary system
with cultural connotations. Skin is a biological entity, but it is also a cultural phenomenon. My
slightly olive-shade skin communicates Whiteness.
Skin touches our flesh, keeping in tack muscles and fat and giving a visible form to the
body. But flesh is also what Maurice Merleau-Ponty identified as Being: “Flesh is not matter, in
the sense of collections of corpuscles, and it is not ‘some “psychic” material.’ Generally
speaking, it is not a material or spiritual fact or collection of facts. Nor is it a mental

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representation” (Cataldi and Hamrick, 2007, pp. 3-4); rather, flesh is an element of Being, as
Carol Bigwood (2007) noted: “Flesh is neither matter nor psychic, but a kind of ‘element’ like
earth, air, fire or water which all of us share. . . . It is the condition of their [i.e., everything
animate and inanimate] interaction and intermingling” (p. 102). Flesh is the seer seeing the
object or other simultaneously as the seer is being seen by object or other; the hand touching
the object or other simultaneously as the hand is being touched by object or other. Flesh is the
both-and, the in-between, the liminality. It is a sensible sentient woven with the world in which it
finds itself. Flesh is the living body in lived experiences. My flesh sees the skin color of itself and
the other, an orientation generated by my cultural affect experience with “Protect Yourself.”
∞
The rhetoric of “Protect Yourself” operationalized cultural affects that brought to the
surface part of my non-academic past, family heritage and racism, and my Whiteness. As I
reflected on these cultural affects, I concluded a number of insights and ethics. First, I was
reminded of my liminality in the academy: a non-traditional student with vocational skills and
experiences. As a scholar and teacher, I also thought about how many college students are
similar, having come to the academy from different cultural backgrounds and for different
reasons and goals. Second, “Protect Yourself” subtly reminds us that Whiteness has been a
fluid social construct, despite the myth of stability and eternalness of it as a racial category.
Knowing some of my family history as Italian and how Italians were understood and treated in
the early twentieth century allowed me to approach the artifact differently than a simplified racial
binary of White/Black. This segues into a third takeaway from the cultural affect experience: my
racist family history, my present racialized body, and some of the necessary ethics in telling
stories. People who I identify ethnically with were discriminated against because of their race
and ethnicity, but many of them assimilated to Whiteness and continued the same type of
discrimination they had faced. Rather than taking a more conservative, decontextualizing
position, such as “Italians weren’t always White and look how they overcame those obstacles,”

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which is an argument I have heard many times from Italian-Americans, I remind myself again of
the choice I made years ago: to address the system of Whiteness and White supremacy and its
discriminatory and inhumane treatment of people.
WHAT IS WHAT IN THE WORLD OF LABOR?
The last poster for this dissertation is the one that initially grabbed my attention with the
archive: “What is What in the World of Labor?” (figure 9). Through artistic and activist creativity,
the IWW poster rhetorically presented a narrative about two classes in battle in an exploitative
system and called for unity and solidarity. Based on the attrition of the poster, it was likely
created and appeared in Chicago in the first-half of the twentieth century. Although no date was

Figure 9. “What is What in the World of
Labor?” by Industrial Workers of the
World (n.d.)

available, Julie Herrada claimed a possible 1918 publication date. After some research on
IWW’s history, I learned that the poster must have been created between April 1933 and

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February 197016 because of the address at the bottom. The poster was slightly weathered with
a cream beige background, midnight black serif typefaces, and two crimson red and two solid
midnight black symbols. The overall size of the poster was 37.5 x 24 centimeters (about 15” x
10”), but the main focus was on a bordered section resembling the ratio of the height and width
of a playing card (roughly 20 x 15 centimeters/8” x 6”). With the playing card situated within the
poster, the poster aesthetically resembled a Modernist design in which artists in various artistic
practices challenged Realism, industrialism, leisure, and bourgeois society. The oversized
playing card, which appears directly below the title of the poster, presented a combination of
alphabetic marks and well-known symbols from a deck of playing cards: heart, club, diamond,
and spade.
A deep rhetorical analysis of “What is What” would unveil the same social narrative in
“Preamble,” but with more specificity on the body and embodiment. These two bodies created a
cultural narrative with affective connotations that (1) illuminated the workers’ bodies and (2)
exposed the exploited labor. Initiating the narrative in the playing card with “The Capitalist’s” on
the top line, the poster quickly offered an enjambment with one of the capitalist’s body parts: a
crimson red heart symbol. Below this symbol was the line, “Is in his pocketbook.”
Understandably so, the possessive pronoun “his” gendered the capitalist—and capitalism—
since primary capitalist endeavors were done by men and more often than not framed by
(hyper)masculinity. By using the possessive pronoun, the IWW activist(s) generated, or rather
perpetuated, the idea that capitalists were men and not women, which was/is not necessarily
untrue; it simply called attention to power and gender: patriarchy.
With this opening for the poster, viewers could/should deduce that capitalists did have a
heart and feelings. The poster, however, presented the capitalist’s feelings as “in his
pocketbook”—concealed; they could be pulled from the pocketbook—as any item in one’s

16

1933-1970 is when IWW had its longest location for its Chicago general headquarters
(http://www.iww.org/headquarters/oldghq.shtml)

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pocketbook can be presented in visible space—but they remained hidden. More importantly,
and what really set the scene for the overall message, was that the imagery called attention to
the capitalist who made moves based on desire for acquiring money for the wallet in his pocket.
Valuing money, the capitalist dehumanized labor through intention: profitability. The poster
presented an abstraction with the nuanced tone of dehumanization; profit over humans.
After the IWW activist(s) set this scene, they made rhetorical moves to evoke affect,
explaining how money and profit were acquired for the pocketbook—more specifically,
physically acquired in the relation of capitalist to worker. The creators wrote, “And he uses the”
as they transitioned to a second playing card symbol: black club. The next line continued the
thought/sentence with “Over you so he can wear” and finished the thought/sentence with a red
diamond. Again, any literal representation of the body was absent, but the rhetorical imagery
implied bodies as well as evoked the affective relations of bodies within labor actions. Workers
were affected by the hierarchy; their bodies used and alienated for the production of material
goods (soon-to-be commodities). Viewers could/can infer that workers were being beaten—
whether literally or symbolically—to produce commodities that would enter the market for profit
acquisition. The heart and club functioned to create not only a pathos appeal, but also an
affective appeal: bodies were affected by and affected the hierarchical relation between
capitalist and laborer. This affective signification connected to both the abstractions of the
bodies and unnamed embodied subjects.
The IWW activist(s) shed light on the violent background of the politics of economic
production: “he [the capitalist] uses the [club] over you.” Viewers of “What is What” might have
understood a narrative about the affective context of bodies and objects—one based on
exploitation and injustice. This poster’s expression of this rhetorical narrative was/is indicative of
the exploitative practices in late industrial capitalism. IWW activists created a narrative about
labor relations and also a story that represented intensities of workers’ lived, embodied
experiences. Workers’ bodies felt/feel the intensities of the capitalist’s club—a narrative laden

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with affect. As workers extracted resources or physically made commodities, the capitalist
brought the commodity (in)to the public. In doing so, the capitalist and the market created and
circulated an affective commodity; consumers experienced the affects and affected the objects
through their exchange; and consumers also purchased commodities based on their cultural
tastes. In the end, capitalists profited from this affect and signification: they used the profits to
don diamond jewelry.
Both the diction of “wear” and the symbol of a diamond alluded to the presence of a
body: bodies wear jewelry. And the bodies that could afford jewelry are typically of the middle
and upper classes. The IWW activist(s) may have been working with irony and satire in
delivering their message because many of the union workers in the IWW were miners,
extracting resources from the western United States. In fact, IWW was established in 1905 in
Chicago by fighting against Colorado mining operations. William D. Haywood, Eugene V. Debs,
Daniel De Leon, and Mary Harris “Mother” Jones were the co-founders and some of the initial
leaders of the organization, representing farmers, factory workers, and loggers. However, during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, miners, led by Mother Jones, organized strikes
to protest the dangerous working conditions with little pay and long hours. This poster, arguably,
called particular attention to these miners through an affective appeal. And in doing so, the idea
that the capitalist abused workers to don diamonds—a resource obtained through mining—was
connected even more tightly to the labor and bodies of workers.
The “What is What” IWW activist(s) completed their message by working with an
inversion with the last suit: “By organizing right we can give him a,” and then a black spade was
presented. The combination of the alphabetic text and the spade was a peculiar choice. Of
course, the IWW activist(s) needed to use the fourth playing card symbol in order to have
symbol coherency; and of course, they needed to end their message with a call to organizing
and becoming a union member. But why give the capitalist a spade? The answer may lie with
the final line. Below the spade, the words “With which to earn an honest living” appeared. The

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poster did not necessarily represent the idea that the capitalist and worker ought to change
places, a basic inversion that would continue a capitalist class hierarchy system; rather, the idea
might have been that the capitalist’s embodiment, first, needed to experience the labor of the
work and be affected by the working-class tools. If done, the capitalist would gain a better
understanding of the physical investment and exertion, changing working conditions, and
employee-employer and labor-capital relationships. Second, the idea underscored the fact that
the capitalist lived and worked a dishonest life—one based on greed and exploitation. Affect
marked laboring practices: manual labor was honest work whereas the labor of the capitalist
was not. The poster gave viewers who are part of the working class a clear depiction of the
structure of their labor life and necessary actions to develop a different set of (ethical) relations.
Those actions were presented in IWW’s use of affect to recruit workers. Below the
framed playing card, IWW expressed the overall philosophy of the organization: “The right way
to organize is the way we work – all on the job together – all in an industry together – and
everyone together in One Big Union. That’s the IWW way!” Following this ethical message, IWW
wrapped up the poster with the following statements:
Read the INDUSTRIAL WORKER each week, and get the facts. There labor
news is reported, undistorted by workers themselves—and these workers have
the intelligence and backbone to boost the program of One Big Union of All
Labor.
Read the ONE BIG UNION MONTHLY, the illustrated labor magazine, full of
labor stories, timely articles and features of concern to labor, issued by the
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD.
These closing remarks, obviously, functioned as a call for viewers to subscribe to the Industrial
Worker. But the poster also provided some striking language as a way to hone in on
representations of working-class and capitalist bodies, cultivating in its targeted audience—
laborers—a cultural narrative. These IWW activists rhetorically used alphabetic text, symbols,

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and design to create an interaction between poster and audience that required viewers to reflect
upon the narrative, which does three things: (1) unveiled the capitalists’ affect: to profit by
affecting exploitatively other bodies and labor; (2) emphasized the relations of bodies within
labor actions: workers exchanged their bodies for wages and sustain the economic system
while also being affected by the hierarchical class structure; and (3) affectively called for unity to
change the system and current relations between laborers and capitalists.
Cultural Affect Experience
My cultural affect experience with this poster was not immediate; and in fact, it was only
after I attempted, and failed at, a certain research strategy that I felt a lingering cultural affect.
That strategy was Jacqueline Royster and Gesa Kirsch’s “critical imagination,” which is “an
inquiry tool, a mechanism for seeing the noticed and the unnoticed, rethinking what is there and
not there, and speculating about what could be there instead” (2012, p. 20). During research,
scholars can use critical imagination to “engage, as it were, in hypothesizing, in what might be
called ‘educated guessing,’ as a means for searching methodically, not so much for immutable
truth but instead for what is likely or possible, given the facts in hand” (Royster and Gesa, 2012,
p. 71). With “What is What,” I began to envision where this analog poster might have appeared.
With no staple holes present, I imagined it being on a ledge or shelf standing erect in the
hallway that leads to a large gathering space. As a poster, it most likely appeared in political
gatherings and rallies. According to Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Posters provide a literal, material
bridge between the new public sphere constituted by mass communications and the public
spaces that become the sites of modern politics as street theater” (2005, p. 20). Books also can
be easily thought of as that same bridge: public knowledge materialized; but books can be
“closed tightly to preserve [their] power” (Drucker, 1998, p. 172). Posters, on the other hand,
resist such closure. Their intent is to be open, exposed, and readily available for the public,
serving as swift texts that grab viewers’ attention without much effort.

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My critical imagination involved a bereft feeling; something was missing. An embodied
haunting lingered between me and the poster. As I discussed in chapter three, embodied
hauntologies “work with the traces, fragments, fleeting moments, gaps, absences, submerged
narratives, and displaced actors and agencies that register affectively - in a profound sense that
there is something more to say” (Blackman, 2015, p. 26). For me, this embodied haunting was
not a search for serendipity—some breakthrough in the dissertation research. Archival work, in
contrast to common assumptions, needn’t be serendipitous to be important, provocative, or
meaningful. Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohan (2008) remarked, “serendipity is [not] necessary for
identifying a good research topic; in fact, coincidence, chance, or luck may not come into play at
all” (pp. 4-5); rather, “genuine curiosity, a willingness to follow all possible leads, an openness to
what one may encounter, and flexibility in revising research questions and the scope of a project
[are] key factors for conducting successful historical work” (Kirsch and Rohan, 2008, p. 5). This
haunting suggested to me that I needed to move beyond the UM reading room and the digital
space that houses the digitized versions. These places felt detached—removed from their
historical time and their historical place (both geographically and culturally). I needed a journey
beyond where the current analog and digital artifacts were located and accessible. I felt that I
needed a site visitation.
∞
At the bottom of “What is What” was the address “2422 Halsted Street, Chicago IL,”
which I visited twice (June 30, 2016 and August 4, 2016). On my first visit, I parked about four
blocks south of the address. It was a sunny, warm, and nearly cloudless day, and I was excited
to see one of the old buildings of the IWW general headquarters. I did not know what to expect.
I knew IWW general headquarters had relocated, but I was curious to find out if the original
building could say something more about IWW. I did not try to fool myself; I knew the building
would probably not be exactly tied to this particular poster other than the address provided. But I

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followed my embodied haunting and tried again to practice critical imagination—open for the
possibilities of discovery—as I walked toward the address.
2422 Halstead is located near DePaul University in Lincoln Park, a mostly White, affluent
Chicago neighborhood. As I walked the four blocks north, I noticed copious new construction
architecture: flat, light brown, almost orangish brick with powder sand beige concrete frames.
Such buildings were not here for nearly all of the twentieth century. As I approached 2422, I
passed a small park at the six-way intersection of Halstead, Fullerton Ave., and Lincoln Ave. I
kept walking, passing a parking lot and coming upon a five-story newly constructed building: the
Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute. And the address read 2430. IWW’s building at
2422 no longer existed.
Disappointed, I walked back south to the small corner park, turning my attention to a
two-tone blue sign that read “Julia Porter Park” and, about forty feet away, a dark bronze, even
copper-looking sculpture of seven children (see figure 10). I decided to sit at one of the five

Figure 10. Julia Porter Park in Lincoln park neighborhood
in Chicago, IL. Photograph by author.

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benches circling the sculpture, facing west, hoping to take in this transformed place. The sixway intersection to my left and south of me was busy on this Thursday afternoon; two White
homeless men sat at another bench with their shopping carts of clothes, empty cans and
bottles, and other found or retrieved items; and several pigeons paced around near the
sculpture. While the sidewalks were bustling with mostly college-aged adults, mostly White, I
imagined what kinds of people and activities would have happened in this area in the 1930s.
Since the nineteenth century, Lincoln Park has been a mix of social classes. Affluent
families lived near the park and lake while “industrial plants such as furniture factories and the
Deering Harvester Works [were] concentrated along the North Branch of the river . . . [with]
Italians, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, and Slovaks work[ing] in these factories and
establish[ing] the working-class character of west Lincoln Park” (Seligman, 2005, n.p.). The
mansions and middle-class housing populated on the east side of the neighborhood would have
provided a stark contrast to the laborers only a mile or two away. This is unsurprising given
Chicago’s history of unofficial segregation, whether by class and/or race, neighborhoods and
streets.
About a month later, I visited this neighborhood again and decided to check out some
sites along the North Branch Chicago River, about a mile from Julia Porter Park. As I walked on

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Figure 11. Back of Carbit Paint Co. building. Photograph by
author

Kingsbury Street, passing a recently built Whole Foods, another building caught my attention,
particularly its imperfect brick layering as well as structure for factory work. A round chimney
also allured me because it towered over the two main buildings (figure 11). I walked behind the
buildings, discovering that the company is Carbit Paint Co., “a local, third generation family
owned and operated coating manufacturer” (“Home page”, 2014, n.p.).
What was interesting was the juxtaposition with the twenty-eight stories of luxury glass
condos in the background, as shown in figure 11. Much of Lincoln Park has become gentrified,
which began with the “General Neighborhood Renewal Plan” in 1962 and into the 1970s. Today,
the neighborhood has acquired a particular class stature—an affective culture that impresses
and circulates upon city dwellers and visitors through the architecture and the types of
establishments (e.g., DePaul University, Whole Foods, Old Navy, and an indoor skydiving
facility). This affective culture is White and middle-upper class, which contrasts with workingclass and poor peoples’ affects. Despite the gentrification, the remnants of a working-class
affect, however, still exist. Carbit’s building is one among several—another being the recycling

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centers posted next to the river, three blocks north of North Avenue—that date back to the midtwentieth century. As I stood in the Carbit’s parking lot, I felt more comfortable next to these
buildings than I did in walking past Whole Foods or seeing the high-rise luxury condos. The
Carbit building recalled for me the apartment building my grandpa Filippo Bratta built in Des
Plaines, Illinois—the same suburb where my other grandpa (Rocco) lived his last forty years—
because of the same style brick laying and foundation. Filippo, my grandma Edna, my dad, and
uncles and aunts lived in that building on and off for years throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Vague memories of visiting my grandma and aunt Marie in that building in the 1980s percolate
in my legs and arms—body parts that were elementary to playing in the street and small yard
with my brother and cousins.
But these site visitations were relatively a dead-end for my research, as oftentimes
research is. How many paths to nowhere do researchers travel? How many obstructions—
historical, political, economic, and cultural—impede the research from saying something
worthwhile, from unveiling the novel point that contributes to the scholarly literature? Yet, this
type of research orientation is part of what cultural affect is. Cultural affect involves an
orientation that represents the process of research and the researcher’s journey. Bringing this
process and journey to the forefront shows how researchers use their cultural and affective
experiences to discover or not discover new knowledge and insights.
∞
Back in the UM reading room, the materiality of “What is What” also drew me into
another kind of cultural affect. Similar to “Preamble,” the construction board material, slightly
weathered color, and careful strokes of ink pressed onto the poster implicitly conveyed ideas
about labor. My perception of this materiality moved me into a cultural affect—one that worked
its way onto my arms and legs. It tightened up my muscles, eliciting a movement that was not
visible to the reading room librarians and other patrons, but felt by me. And it crept up from my
legs and inward from my arms to the center of my torso: this poster evoked a cultural affect that

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brings to the surface how seemingly invisible labor and bodies were present. It made me turn a
gaze back upon myself and the labor I do nowadays. As Johanna Drucker (1998) remarked,
“Labor, after all, does not disappear in a so-called post-industrial society, but it is rendered
invisible, made to seem a natural function of the appearance of a product, rather than being a
thing in itself” (p. 190). Although Drucker’s remark focuses on offset printing and the production
of art in an electronic age, it connects to a variety of post-industrial industries, including
academia. In fact, dissertations are valued—a marker of a final product; the research and labor
of the dissertation (archival research, site visitations, editing and revising, and so forth) seem to
be secondary to the product. Attention to cultural affect experiences pushes us to rethink that
binary and find the value in both the process and product.
That cultural affect experience with this poster also evoked a strange curiosity about
what it meant for me to labor with the poster here in the UM reading room. To my right was the
reading room desk, where Kate and a student worker helped out visitors; to the left, a set of
windows overlooking University of Michigan. I put my body in action: I swiveled around in my
chair, moving my body around the table more than moving the poster. As I moved around and
measured elements of the poster, two UM custodians arrived to repair a leaking radiator pipe
under the windows of the room. The custodians came around 1:45pm, and as I worked with this
poster, their walkie-talkies were aurally present with static and voices creeping in every now and
then for the next few hours. During this time, I began to think about how I was nowhere close to
being in the past context of this poster or even close to what I and many others deem as
working-class labor. Yet, here in front of me was the presence of two different types of labor: my
intellectual laboring and the custodians’ manual laboring. The archive relies upon an ecology of
labor: not just the labor of the librarians like Kate, but the manual labor of the custodians to
maintain Hatcher Graduate Library. I labored with the posters; the custodians labored with the
radiator. The posters and I were situated in an ecology that called my attention to my past in this
present moment.

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As I sat there with “What is What,” I compared my labor life in 2016 as a thirty-four-year
old to 2001 as a nineteen-year old, reflecting upon the drastic changes in my labor life. Fifteen
years ago, I was oriented differently to labor. I traded in a literal blue-collar Dickies shirt and
turning wrenches on cars in a swamp cooler garage in Phoenix, Arizona for white-collar button
downs and underlining, writing, marking, and connecting ideas with a black pilot G-2 gel pen in
notebooks and books. I no longer had callouses on my hands and dirt and grease under my
fingernails. I entered the information economy that involves a very different affective labor. This
entry undoubtedly required adjustments in my orientation. My body takes in information,
frequently overwhelmingly, with every iteration of data. Orientations matter, as Sara Ahmed
claimed, particularly in regards to ideas of the strange and familiar. Extending Immanuel Kant’s
ideas about the “conditions of possibility for orientation” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 6) and Martin
Heidegger’s ideas about orientations and familiarity of the world, Ahmed gave the example of
being blindfolded in a familiar room versus a strange room:
In a familiar room we have already extended ourselves. We can reach out, and in
feeling what we feel—say, the corner of a table—we find out which way we are
facing. Orientation involves aligning body and space: we only know which way to
turn once we know which way we are facing. If we are in a strange room, one
whose contours are not part of our memory map, then the situation is not so
easy. We can reach out, but what we feel does not necessarily allow us to know
which way we are facing; a lack of knowledge that involves an uncertainty about
which way to turn. (original emphasis, 2006, p. 7)
Reaching out always allows us to navigate our way, whether in a familiar or strange place.
Reaching out, however, also involves expectations from one’s past experiences. We never
arrive as a blank slate, but we arrive with structured assumptions about how to respond to our
positionality in an ecology and all its proximate and distant entities.

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Ever since I entered college in my mid-twenties, I had a disposition and set of
assumptions about labor and what my body was supposed to do. My embodiment in the
academy experiences the institutional spaces and people, systems, processes, and time of the
academy differently than many of those who have gone straight through from high school into
college. Of course, in many ways my body is welcomed in academia, seeing that my subjectivity
and identity is White, male, and heterosexual. But nearly every time I visited the UM reading
room, Kensington Metropark, and Lincoln Park sites, as well as interviewed/spoke with UM
librarians, I felt that I was in a strange, unfamiliar room, twisting and turning perpetually to figure
out where and how I am oriented. Nearly with every twist and turn, I felt unsure at the moment. I
continually felt (and continue to feel) that I do not belong in academia.
That feeling of uncertainty was a particular cultural affect of labor. It stemmed from the
assumption for me to choose a side: intellectual or laborer. Working-class people often have a
cultural belief that these two sides are separate. Throughout my life, I have been pushed in
various ways to choose a side, and throughout this dissertation, I have struggled to pin myself
as one or the other. Every time I do pin myself, I do not fit neatly, but end up leaning toward the
other side. As I sat with “What is What” in the UM reading room, I found myself oriented to the
custodians and their labor, perhaps reflecting too long on their bodies and the work they must
do. And, little did I know at the time, I would end up finding myself situated in Lincoln Park
amidst two laboring classes and two types of architecture; remnants of White Eastern European
working-class and developments of White Anglo-Saxon middle- to upper-class. As I walked the
streets in Lincoln Park during my site visit, I walked between and in two cultures, two affects,
two laboring practices. Perhaps I live in a liminal space; perhaps it reflects how academia
works. “In academia,” David Gold remarked, “one is in a perpetual liminal space. As soon as
you answer a research question, you ask another, your growing body of expertise simply
marking the expanding edge of your ignorance” (2008, 15). But the liminal space I occupy
differs. It is a perceived dichotomy between intellectual and manual labor. In my intellectual

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labor, a manual labor does emerge: my fingers grip the pen, type on the keyboard, click the
mouse, travel to geographic sites, and so forth. Likewise, manual labor involves a kind of
intellectual capacity, as for example in my time working as a mechanic: diagnosing an
automotive mechanical problem, tracing the issue through the appropriate system, thinking
about the larger vehicle’s system, and so forth.
My position in the academy—a graduate student, a teacher, a fledgling researcher, an
emerging writer—requires types of labor that I have not been accustomed to. Even after getting
a bachelor’s and master’s and completing three years of Ph.D. work—a total of eight years of
schooling spanning over twelve to thirteen years because of various breaks and returns—I
continue to not feel that I have actually adjusted to concepts of academic labor and manual
labor. With a B.A. and M.A., I cannot actually claim working class. Class, as many others have
written, is more than specific income level; rather, class involves education, occupation,
language, taste, beliefs, and so forth. Of course, these other elements of class rely upon
income, but they also show the complexity and nuanced practices of enacting class identity and
sensibilities. And that is where I claim working class: I absorb and produce working-class affects
through the orientation and expectations of my embodiment and felt experiences.
∞
The body of the working-class intellectual: my body.
The phrase “working-class intellectual” is loaded with “a peculiar ring to it, paradoxical
and even bordering on the oxymoronic, like ‘calculated error’ or ‘conspicuous absence’” (Busk
and Goehring, 2014, n.p.). The term “working-class intellectual” is a conundrum because the
academy is a middle- and upper-class institution, despite the G.I. bill in the mid-twentieth
century and influx of students in the 1970s creating the opportunity for non-traditional students
to get a college education. The term challenges the assumption of college as a place for only
educating young adult minds. What the working-class intellectual brings is an engagement of
both mind and body—embodied mind or intelligent body—in whatever work they do. They

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cannot relegate their embodiment to the side and absorb disembodied, objective information.
The body is always-already present in relationships to labor.
I constantly feel positioned in an in-between state—neither here nor there as well as a
both-and of here and there. I oscillate my body and discourse, hoping to gain some tracking;
and yet I loathe and resist being pinned into a neatly organized identity. I am neither simply
mechanic nor simply academic, neither simply laborer nor simply intellectual. I am affectively
and culturally situated within an ecology that intensifies with each turn of a wrench, each stroke
of a pen, each lifting of a shovel, each interpretation of a text, each cultural moment; hence, why
affect draws me as I draw it through my body, noticing the dynamics of the ecology. Perhaps,
my predilection with labor, both in general and in nuances, is what has actually drawn me to the
Labadie Collection. Unsurprisingly, this is how most research happens: researchers choose an
area of focus and research questions, then a site or object or community or idea to study, and
finally carry out the study with conscious and unconscious percepts and affects that evoke ideas
and draw conclusions. Biases run amok.
But, in fact, I arguably do not live in an in-between state. I am not only educated now,
but I am a White, heterosexual man. People of color, women, disabled, and queer people live
much more clearly in that in-between space. What does it mean for me to say I am in the inbetween? What does it mean for me to feel in the in-between? These questions, arguably, can
begin to be addressed by paying attention to cultural affect experiences. One of the cultural
affect experiences with this “What is What” poster is a feeling of not belonging—neither as a
mechanic in the autoshop or as a gopher on the construction site or as a teacher, researcher,
and student in the academy. To take on that feeling of not belonging, I write stories about my
background, experiences, and life.
By confronting and reclaiming stories, whether they are beautiful, heart-breaking,
inspiring, or ugly, cultural affect reflects what some scholars have called storied practice, where
scholars practice writing stories that articulate theory and decolonize colonial systems and their

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effects. Cultural affect, however, differs in that the focus on decolonialism is not always a
necessity. Decolonialism is of great concern for society and social relations, and indeed storied
practice provides powerful impacts that work to resolve many of the historical and contemporary
effects from European colonialism. Storied practice offers a way for subjects who have been
colonized to speak back to hegemony and articulate their own sovereignty, or do what some
scholars call survivance (survival + resistance). These stories and practices are needed in
academia. Cultural affect offers another way for stories and practices to happen that are not
necessarily directly tied to colonialism. Cultural affect might even be a first step toward storied
practice, particularly for those whose bodies represent the colonizer, but who have to do work
on their own compliance with systems of domination.
∞
CONCLUSION
Semiotic readings and affective readings allow us to see interesting ways IWW activists
resisted capitalism, exposed exploitative practices, and called for unity and solidarity of workers.
They provide valuable insights into how activists can work with materials, content, and design to
build rhetorical force and present powerful messages. In considering cultural affect, another
understanding of labor emerges. Cultural affect complicates notions of labor, bodies, culture,
and affect—pointing out conspicuous and inconspicuous labor and bodies in textual production
as well as the traces left by texts that enable us to identify, or not, labor and affect. As Jennifer
Keohane (2016) noted, “the laboring body often struggles to be seen. The body at work,
however, is a rich rhetorical resource that allows workers to make meaning out of their tasks,
perform acts of solidarity or resistance, and demonstrate their significance to a society” (p. 68).
As a rhetorical practice, cultural affect allows us to draw on our memories, experiences, and
embodiment when engaging with reading and writing. Those moments offer opportunities to
think about our own ethics and why they matter.

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In many ways, this chapter was about me unraveling my own positionality and reading of
the texts, bringing to the forefront the ways I was (re)oriented to the posters and the archive.
Included in this (re)orienting were traces of my lived experiences, self-reflexivity, memories, and
embodied practices in coming to understand my position in the academy and research. While
the labor of cultural affect emerged from various traces on texts—as for instance, the tape or
staple holes on a poster or the ink markings—and indicated a laboring to circulate materials and
messages and motivate people to action, it also emerged through dwelling with a text and one’s
past as well as reflecting and paying attention to the connections and disconnections. That also
was a labor—both an intellectual and manual one. Cultural affect is always-already affectively
oriented by its particular pasts through embodiment. The cultural affect experiences of a
researcher and writer are also presently oriented in the moment and in the researcher and
writer’s futurities. What cultural affect does is collapse the past into the present. We are alwaysalready affectively and culturally oriented in/toward/within ecology.
As this chapter showed, experiencing and writing cultural affect was no easy task. At
several moments, I was led down a path of “unproductive” research, as in the site visitation to
Lincoln Park. Yet, even these dead-end ventures contributed peripherally to the cultural affect
experiences of the posters. These stories were part of the ecologies and my embodiment,
enriching the constellating of the other stories throughout the dissertation. In the end, this
dissertation became an archive of stories and cultural affect experiences.

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CHAPTER SEVEN. CONCLUSION
Cultural affect is both an experience and representation of my research process. I
rhetorically chose to focus on some of the cultural affects of labor; simultaneously, some cultural
affects of labor rhetorically chose me. As Camilla M. Reestorff (2015) notes, “affects are shaped
by the past. Thus, some users experience and express affects primed both by the visible cue
and by their lived past” (p. 214). Extending Reestorff’s claim, I would say the same with culture,
cultural productions, and cultural consumptions: our cultural orientations, discourses, and
practices are shaped by our past. Cultural affect collapses the past and present as a way to
reveal something that one has known all along, but that is also new about oneself. For me, this
folding of the past and present opened up an understanding of my own techniques (and
challenges) in doing academic research, my sense of unbelonging in the academy, and my
value system about intellectual and manual labor writing and research. In the experience of
cultural affect, we are reoriented in the world—to texts, to artifacts, to places, to others, and to
ourselves. Through my cultural affect experiences in this research project, I became reoriented
to textual analysis, but reoriented with a cultural embodiment of what a working-class intellectual
is and how a working-class intellectual might conduct research.
In the rest of this chapter, I briefly review the scholarly ideas about signification and
affect as I segue into a recap of my proposed theory and its four components, with rhetoric as a
kind of driving force for the operation and emergence of cultural affect. I also point out that the
theory is not necessarily new, but has value in how it builds from other scholars’ work,
particularly women of color and queer scholars, which illuminates the presence of power and
social history in reading, writing, and research. Next, I discuss four implications we can glean
from cultural affect: tighter connections between embodiment and language, greater value in
multimodality and diverse writing styles, possibilities for ethical practices, and affordances and
limitations of digitizing texts. Finally, I consider future research that focuses on pedagogy,
collective activism, and methodology and methods in the discipline of rhetoric and writing.
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RECAP: CULTURAL AFFECT AND RHETORIC
This dissertation joins the scholarly conversation about signification and affect. To
review, signification is the relationship between a signifier and signified. In that relationship is
meaning that is culturally situated. Affect deals with the capacity for bodies to affect and be
affected. While some writing and rhetoric scholars have addressed the relationship between
signification and affect, they have not focused enough on more of the cultural specificities with
rhetoric and rhetorical acts. As such, I proposed the concept of cultural affect to bring more
attention to social meanings and affect in the research process, writing about the research
process, experiences with texts and technologies, and cultural subjectivities and identities. This
attention offers the possibility for researchers (but also teachers, students, and writers) to initiate
or solidify a set of ethics in research, writing, and even teaching. Some of those ethics are
honoring others’ bodies, the necessary labor of textual and archival production, and familial and
cultural histories, particularly as individuals bring those histories into the academy. For instance,
I worked to shed light on IWW activists’ labor practices in creating the posters with a printing
press, as well as the UM librarians’ process of making the posters more publicly available
through digitization. But it is because of my cultural background and lived experiences that I
could bring such labor practices to the forefront. In other words, my cultural affect experiences
directed me to see what many might have overlooked in approaching the archive and its
materials.
As I detailed in chapter two, cultural affect has four components: affect, signification,
ecology, and embodiment. Affect is not personal, internalized emotions, but the energy
inbetween/for bodies to act in relation to other bodies (human, non-human, institutions, and so
forth). Affect is the intensity in cultural affect experiences that strike and linger for an individual,
leading an individual to reflect upon lived experiences and memories. Signification
communicates through representations, and representations convey ideologies that give cultural
meanings. Signification informs an individual of subjectivity, identity, and positionality,

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particularly in relation to dominant myths. Ecology is the environment of the fluidity and flux of
points/nodes/species, both historical and contemporary. Ecology draws attention to the parts
and the larger system and gives a place and space through which cultural affects reside and
emerge. Embodiment brings to the forefront specific instantiations and orientations of the body.
It orients cultural affect, and with that orientation is proximity and distance between a body and
other (re: other body, text, object, institution, etc.).
These parts—affect, signification, ecology, and embodiment—are set in motion through
rhetoric, which is a relational and emergent phenomenon. Rhetoric then exposes cultural affect,
making cultural affect a practice and event in which one’s lived, embodied experiences
(re)emerge through intensities that (re)orient a set of relations and meanings. To be clear
though, rhetoric must be engaged by agents. When agents use rhetoric, they open up the
opportunity to experience cultural affect. In such moments of using rhetoric, agents do not
merely read and then write about people, texts, and objects, but attend to and undertake
encounters with them. Such attention and undertakings can offer different ways to look, touch,
smell, story, and engage with texts. As agents use rhetoric and do rhetorical practices, they
incite rhetoric to spawn cultural affect experiences.
My use of reading and writing rhetorically, as well as the Labadie archive’s materials (the
digital system and interface, digitized artifacts, the analog posters, the UM librarians, the
Hatcher Graduate Library, the UM custodians, and so forth), enabled me to experience cultural
affect. As I wrote about those experiences—a necessary move for me to make because of the
requirement to write a dissertation, despite the experience of cultural affect as slightly
ineffable—I developed a dissertation that is an archive in its own right and that I can return to in
the future. A dissertation project, including the writing of it, is an accumulation of field notes, site
visits, data, analyses, reflections, and relationships. And, perhaps, a dissertation project is
comprised of a set of experiences that show (or hide) a necessary labor of building an archive.
My project here became a meta-project: laboring in an archive as I built my own archive. This

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laboring, both in the Labadie archive and the dissertation, is one way to go about approaching
an archive, being an archive, and building an archive.
LEARNING AND BUILDING FROM OTHERS
The concept and practices of cultural affect have, to a certain degree, been suggested
by a number of other scholars, such as Jackie Rhodes, Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie
Moraga, Malea Powell, and Jacqueline Royster and Gesa Kirsch, to name a few. These women,
many of who are queer and/or persons of color, bring to the forefront their embodied cultural
identities in their writing and research. They offer instances of culture and affect from the
position of marginalized persons. Their work greatly benefits our understanding of culture,
affect, power, exploitation, and injustices. I obviously cannot speak from these subjectivities and
positions because of my White, working-class, heterosexual cis male American subjectivity; for
the most part, my body functions as a representation of the dominant social body. But this does
not mean that my embodiment carries out all the hegemonic practices. Cultural affect calls
attention to hegemony and encourages one to pause in an encounter with a text, person, and
event. In that pause and subsequent rumination, I (and others) have the opportunity to better
understand social histories, cultural meanings, and alliances. While cultural affect is not
necessarily a novel concept, it is a term that can give us language for describing, analyzing, and
reflecting phenomenologically our encounters in the world, without reducing those encounters to
intentionality.
Ultimately, there is no writing or research that does not involve cultural affect. Embedded
within culture and affect, writers and researchers are influenced with their orientation, writing,
reading, and interpreting decisions. Such a situation, however, does not mean that writers and
researchers tap into cultural affect. As active agents, writers and researchers must
activate/engage cultural affect through their rhetoric and rhetorical practices. When writers and
researchers neglect the presence and potential of cultural affect, they can easily research and
write from a disembodied position, presenting a kind of objective analysis, perhaps merely

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ideological evaluation. But when writers and researchers turn their attention to and tap into
cultural affects in a given situation, they open the potential to not simply reveal histories and
positionalities about themselves, but understand their roles in social issues and make rhetorical
impact. In other words, cultural affect affords writers and researchers to take a stand, know why
they have that stance, and begin some practices that distribute the effects of that stance. This
practice means they can have a better handling on writing and researching cultural affects to
create their own growth and becoming as well as social changes based on ethics.
IMPLICATIONS
The value of thinking about, engaging with, and writing cultural affect matters in four
ways. First, cultural affect links our embodiment more tightly and powerfully to language and its
practices. Since the mid-twentieth century with the formation and influence of poststructuralism
across the social sciences and humanities, language became a primary focus of study. This
created a situation in the last few decades where “words mattered more than matter” (Selzer,
1999, p. 4). “Language,” according to Karen Barad (2006), “has been granted too much power.
The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at
every turn lately every ‘thing’—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some
other form of cultural representation” (p. 11). Barad provides a valuable push to (re)turn to
materiality (re: new materialism), but the fact is that we cannot escape culture, representation,
and language. We are embedded. Cultural affect offers a way to bring language and materiality,
specifically embodiment and the body, in conversation that broadens our understandings about
their symbiotic relationship. In chapter six, I showed a few ways in which such a conversation
can happen: my embodiment and personal experiences with the social bodies of my past and
the language of the text and discourse and materiality of the posters. Language has rhetorical
power, but it only has such power in relation to the embodiments that engage (with) it. With
cultural affect, the connection between embodiment and language raises a valuable point about
various rhetorical and writing practices, such as the labor of writing, the work in reading, the skill

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of interpreting, and the practice of connecting reflections. While rhetoric and writing scholars,
more or less, have studied, taught, and written about these practices, cultural affect focuses on
these practices as a way to show how our worlds and orientations are formed, particularly with
each instantiation of reading, writing, researching, and learning.
A second implication is that cultural affect calls for more varied writing styles and
modalities. Since cultural affect is multilayered, distributed, and elusive, it cannot be captured,
discussed, understood, or represented through one mode of writing (e.g. academic, creative,
fictional, poetic, documentary, and others) or one medium (alphabetic text, image, sound,
dance, environ, and others). Relying on one mode or medium restricts the complexity and
expansiveness of cultural affect experiences and the writing of them. This means cultural affect
experiences require writing cultural affect through multigenre and multimodal approaches and
processes, which I attempted to do at several points in this dissertation. In several chapters, I
shifted from academic analytical prose into a style of storytelling, vignettes, and stanzas. I also
included images. For example, in my discussion of “Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the
World,” I showed an image of my grandpa Rocco’s trailer and told a story about Rocco’s life in
relation to assumptions about working-class bodies. Additionally, in my discussion of “What is
What,” I presented two images as I storied a site visitation to the Lincoln Park neighborhood in
Chicago, illuminating the stark juxtaposition of buildings and social classes. With such
approaches and processes, writers have greater opportunities to demonstrate the complexity of
compelling embodied experiences, seemingly disparate connections, and new ways to convey
information and create knowledge. As such, cultural affect also expands our understanding of
what counts as academic, scholarly, and/or professional writing and practices. Writing cultural
affect works under the umbrella of what Ames Hawkins calls “creative-critical scholarship,” or
what could be understood as a transgenre desire and writing of stories that challenge standard
academic form and prose (2016, n.p.). As one iteration of creative-critical scholarship, writing

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cultural affect is inclusive and expansive to the diversity of human bodies and experiences,
ways of thinking, knowledge production, and ethics.
Third, the concept of cultural affect initiates a possible set of ethical practices of
engagement with texts, history, and people. These practices begin with cultural affect bringing
to the forefront better and more layered understandings of political subjectivities and identities
that do not neatly fall within clear, definitive categories and binaries (White/Black,
masculine/feminine, intellectual/laborer, and so forth). Cultural affect, then, evokes embodied
subjects to reflect upon their personal experiences, cultural histories, and social context in
relation to texts. At times, these reflections reveal something about texts that is not readily
apparent. Other times, reflections can teach embodied subjects about their place in the world,
including their privileges and marginalizations. For example, with each political poster in chapter
six, I discussed in various ways understandings of my subjectivity, identity, familial background
and expectations, and current position within the academy. All of these kinds of reflections can
move embodied subjects to develop a set of ethics on class, gender, sexuality, and race
relations and allyship, as for example in my experience with “Protect Yourself” when I was
reminded of Whiteness as a fluid social construct and the social value of telling an ugly story.
Or, such reflections can illuminate invisible labor within the production and consumption of texts,
as for example with “Preamble” when I connected the laboring body using the printing press to
produce the poster.
Finally, cultural affect shows some of the affordances and limitations of digitizing texts
and researching digitized artifacts. In general, digitizing texts can create greater accessibility
and wider circulation across various digital platforms. Such accessibility and circulation can
augment larger social cultural affects. That is, while digitization strengthens awareness and
knowledge within a population, it also distributes ideologies and affects that can charge larger
scale social movements, for good or ill. Simultaneously, digitization also subdues other qualities
of analog/printed artifacts—qualities that indeed can have great rhetorical impact. For example,

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in my case study, the size and materiality of the posters invoked different cultural affect
experiences. This raises the importance of continuing to visit sites and engage with analog
artifacts, particularly for researchers and students. In doing so, researchers and students can
come to better understand the changes and impacts of digital and analog artifacts in different
cultural places and spaces. While digitizing artifacts is valuable and at times necessary for
preservation and conservation, it also erases or hinders other factors necessary to understand
and experience artifacts. For example, many of my tactile and olfactory experiences with the
posters could not have happened with the digital versions. It also offers possibilities for scholars
to build other theories on archives, digital rhetorics, visual rhetorics, embodiment, and activism.
FUTURE RESEARCH
In my future research, I would like to explore several areas. First, I plan to examine how
cultural affect as an overall concept can tie to pedagogy and teaching practices. Since I applied
cultural affect in relation to labor and work, I would like my research to examine how teachers
might discuss the labor of writing and embodied experiences of writing, both in and outside the
classroom. Although rhetoric and writing teachers know that writing takes extensive time and
labor, many students may not understand the necessary time and labor, as well as the
embodied effects from and in writing. In future research, I am curious how we as teachers might
facilitate discussions and develop lessons that illuminate that necessity, as well as the value of
putting forth the time and labor. I suspect that we would need to emphasize how the labor and
time dedicated to writing transfers across contexts and situations. As such, a future research
study would explore how cultural assumptions about intellectual and manual labor factor into
students’ attitudes about writing and how teachers might develop strategies to address such
attitudes.
Another future research project of mine connected to pedagogy is a study on how
cultural affect may allow non-traditional students to (dis)connect, learn, and participate in writing
classes. For many non-traditional students—working-class, people of color, queer, women—the

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academy is a foreign and unwelcoming institution. I would like to see if some of the principles of
cultural affect—specifically attention to embodiment and ecological thinking—can invite such
students to share their experiences, particularly in relation to reading and writing assignments.
By inviting students to share their lived, embodied experiences in relation to texts and ideas,
teachers might be able to facilitate discussions that connect familial backgrounds to cultural and
social histories.
In my future research, I would also like to more acutely turn to and work from queer
women and women of color. While I already built part of the concept by working from several
scholars of color (e.g., Ahmed, Royster, Maracle, King, and Wilson), I may have narrowed too
much on specific agents. Thus, I am curious about the ways in which cultural affect operates at
a larger, collective level. In drawing on queer and women of color scholars, I would like my
research to examine the strategies and tactics contemporary activists use as collective to
culturally and affectively create impact within public spheres. How do contemporary activists
work from and produce cultural affects for rhetorical impacts, particularly with their use of digital
technologies and networks? How does cultural affect function within different kinds of activist
arguments, both within non-digital and digital spaces?
Finally, I would like to do more research on methodologies and methods in rhetoric and
writing. In the discipline, scholars have neglected to investigate a number of sensory
experiences, such as olfactory and tactile stimuli, as I noted in chapter three. Studying these
senses, as well as others, and how they function rhetorically requires asking difficult questions:
How might we document various sensory experiences in relation to culture, particularly when
digital technologies and texts are involved? That is, how can various, often overlooked, sensory
experiences with digital texts be presented? What would other multi-sensory experiences—
different from the ones I presented in this dissertation—tell us about artifacts and texts,
particularly in the context of digitizing them? Multi-sensuous rhetorical analyses open space for
interdisciplinary considerations that can enrich the field of rhetoric and writing as well as

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contribute to a number of humanities, social sciences, and even STEM disciplines. I would also
like to explore more of the complexities of using story as a method in studying cultural affect.
Many qualities of story are not universal, such as the genre, form, organization, modes,
voice(s), and others. What other ways and qualities different from the way I told stories can
present cultural affect experiences? What other digital technologies and practices afford agents
to experience cultural affect and communicate those experiences? In exploring these questions,
I hope to extend research from this dissertation and offer more robust methods for studying
rhetoric and writing.

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APPENDICES

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APPENDIX A: DATA VISUALIZATIONS

Figure 12. X axis is the years ranging from 1840-2020 and in ten-year increments; Y axis is
the number of records from 0-55 and in increments of five. Visualization created by author
using Tableau.

Figure 13. Subject headings presented by size with relation to number of records. Data
visualization created by author using Tableau.

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Figure 14. Origin countries of posters. Data visualization created by author using
Tableau.

Figure 15. Top 45 words in poster titles. In total, there are 14,029 words and 4,523
unique word forms. The corpus for the data visualization excludes articles, most auxiliary
verbs, demonstrate adjectives, verbs “to be,” conjunction, and propositions in English,
Spanish, and French. Text visualization created by author using Voyant Tools.

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APPENDIX B: CONSENT FORM FOR RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS
Consent Form
Title of Project: Digital-Rhetorical Affect Theory
Researcher: Phil Bratta
Introduction
You are being asked to participate in an interview being conducted by Phil Bratta for the
Michigan State University. This research is designed for the researcher to better understand the
theories and methods of archiving analog and digital posters in the Joseph A. Labadie
Collection. This research may contribute to the researcher’s dissertation.
Procedures
The interview will take approximately thirty (30) minutes to one (1) hour. The interview will be
audiotaped and transcribed. During the interview, you will be asked questions about a number
of topics: your curation of the political posters in the Joseph A. Labadie Special Collections, the
process of digitizing the posters, participation in the cataloguing of the posters.
Risks & Benefits
The researcher does not foresee any risks for you by participating in this research. There are no
direct benefits to you from participation, but your willingness to share your knowledge and
experiences will contribute to the researcher’s further interest and research, which will hopefully
be beneficial for other teachers and researchers.
Confidentiality
Unless you check below to request anonymity, your name will be referenced in the researcher’s
field notes, which will be closed to the public and for public use. If you request anonymity, the
researcher will give you a pseudonym in the field notes and any future publications.
Voluntary Participation
Your participation in this research is voluntary. Even if you decide to participate, you may
withdraw from your participation or request confidentiality at any point during the research. You

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may also choose not to answer specific questions or discuss certain subjects with the
researcher.
Contacts and Questions
If you have any questions about this research project or interview, feel free to contact Phil Bratta
at philbratta@gmail.com or 630-768-4677.
Statement of Consent
I agree to participate in this research, and to the use of this research as described above. My
preference regarding the use of my name is as follows:

_____ I agree to be identified by name in any transcript or reference to the information
contained in this interview.

_____ I wish to remain anonymous in any transcript or reference to the information contained in
this interview.
____________________________________________
Participant’s signature

____________________
Date

____________________________________________
Researcher’s signature

____________________
Date

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APPENDIX C: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Interviewer: Phil Bratta
Interviewee: Julie Herrada
Date: January 20, 2016
1. Did you use MARC records (Machine Readable Cataloging record) or DACS records
(Describing Archival Content Standards) to archive (any of) the Labadie Collection
political posters? If so, what are your thoughts on it/them?
2. When cataloging the collection’s political posters, do you have set criteria? If so, can you
talk a bit about those criteria?
3. What were the criteria for categorizing political posters in the collection under “labor?”
4. Why did you want to digitize part of the Labadie Collection?
5. Did any other influences contribute to your decision to digitally catalog and organize the
Labadie Collection political poster materials? If so, what were they?
6. Please describe your process for digitizing materials in the Labadie Collection.
7. What challenges arose as you digitized part of the Collection?
8. Did you have specific criteria for choosing materials for digitization? If so, what were
they?
9. Finally, how have visitors, as far as you know, engaged with the Collection after the most
recent digitization?
10. Any final comments you’d like to say?
Interviewer: Phil Bratta
Interviewee: Cathleen Baker
Date: March 16, 2016
11. What must a paper conservator consider when working with artifacts?
12. Are there certain kinds of approaches to conserving artifacts that work best for you? If
so, could you talk about those?

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13. Can you tell me a little bit about your involvement with the political posters in the Joséph
Labadie Collection?
14. What were some things you needed to consider with the posters to preserve them?
15. What challenges arose for you in preserving the posters?
16. What was your involvement with the digitization of the posters?
17. With these five posters, what can you tell me about their attrition? Any thoughts on how
they were stored and preserved before the most recent changes in preservation?
18. Any final comments you’d like to say?
Interviewer: Phil Bratta
Interviewee: Kate Hutchens
Date: April 13, 2016
1. In general, what are some of the most common Special Collections requests?
2. What was/has been your involvement with the political posters in the Labadie
Collection?
3. Were you involved with the digitization process? And if so, could you talk a little bit about
that process?
4. Before the posters were digitized, did many people request to visit them in the reading
room? If so, can you recall certain posters that were frequently requested?
5. When visitors come to the reading room for political poster requests, are there certain
practices you find they do? Or, have you talked with them and found anything particular
with their experience with the posters?
6. How have visitors, as far as you know, engaged with the Collection after the most recent
digitization?
7. Any final comments you’d like to say about the UM Special Collections or Labadie
Collection political posters?

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