Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour Episode #3: The Strong Defense

With this episode, I continue with my provocations, attempting to assemble rhetorical theory and Bruno Latour in mutually beneficial ways. In this episode, I discuss what Bruno Latour adds to Richard Lanham's Strong Defense of rhetoric. I conclude that in addition to offering a strong defense of rhetoric, Latour offers an equally strange one as well.

Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour Episode #2: Attitude

With episode two ("Attitude"), I continue to assemble rhetorical theory and Bruno Latour in mutually beneficial ways. In this episode, I discuss what rhetoric has to offer Bruno Latour: specifically, I employ Kenneth Burke's notion of attitude to highlight the importance of "how" or of "mode" in the work of collectives.

Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour Episode #1: Show Your Work

With this first numbered episode, I continue with my provocations, attempting to assemble rhetorical theory and Bruno Latour in mutually beneficial ways. In this episode, I discuss what I am calling Latour's insistence to "show your work": that is, to not assume as already existing that which we are always working to create. Additionally, this call to "show your work" highlights all those humans and nonhumans who take part in such work.

Rhetorical Theory/Bruno Latour

A very short video outlining why I think the work of Bruno Latour is important and necessary for rhetoric and composition. I'm going to try multiple versions of this. I'd like to have several possible "elevator pitches" for Bruno Latour.

Outwitting Squirrels

Mostly, this makes me laugh, but I do like the idea of this as a textbook akin to How To Argue and Win Every Time. It presents squirrels as equal partners in a rhetorical enterprise.

Transitional Objects

I've been thinking more about carpentry and my son. Yesterday I blogged about the book When Air Moves and a few days ago about his "collection" of twigs, leaves, chunks of brick and stone, and pines cones. This line of thought is motivated, of course, by fatherly affection, but also by the argument, which emerges from the work of Jane Bennett and Ian Bogost, about the importance of a certain kind of naivete and wonder when it comes to approaching objects as objects. And then Ze Frank told me about transitional objects (or "comfort objects"). In this brief post, I want to make a case for transitional objects as a form of carpentry and so amenable to OOO. I also want to briefly use transitional objects to attend to the affective elements of carpentry and OOO.

To Wikipedia (big deal, wanna fight about it):

In human childhood development, the term transitional object is normally used. It is something, usually a physical object, which takes the place of the mother-child bond. Common examples include dolls, teddy bears or blankets.

Donald Woods Winnicott introduced the concepts of transitional objects and transitional experience in reference to a particular developmental sequence. With "transition" Winnicott means an intermediate developmental phase between the psychic and external reality. In this "transitional space" we can find the "transitional object."

Will's transitional object: Reindeer, his tiny stuffed reindeer. By my rhetorical carpentry-infused reading of Winnicott's transitional object theory, Reindeer is a specific object that attunes Will to the withdrawal of objects in general.

At first glance, this approach to objects looks correlationist. Objects are what they stand-in for, mean or represent for humans. One immediately thinks of evocative objects, the main feature of which is the argument that "objects carry both [human] ideas and passions" (although Graham Harman has argued that we can read evocative objects as amenable to OOO as well). OOO, in contrast, is interested in objects in and of themselves, distinct from what they might mean for us. Certainly, we can easily read transitional objects this way. But I think, for the moment, we might benefit from seeing them as more than this, and we can do that through the idea of carpentry. Again, I go to JB:

Rhetorical carpentry would construct objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us. ("The Decorum of Objects")

It's in light of carpentry that "transitional objects" does real work for OOO. More from Wikipedia (listen, I just thought of this):

When the young child begins to separate the "me" from the "not-me" and evolves from complete dependence to a stage of relative independence, it uses transitional objects. Infants see themselves and the mother as a whole. In this phase the mother "brings the world" to the infant without delay which gives it a "moment of illusion," a belief that its own wish creates the object of its desire which brings with it a sense of satisfaction. Winnicott calls this subjective omnipotence.

Now, bear with me for a moment: could we not see "subjective omnipotence" as correlationism—the idea that the world is only ever what I am always able to make of it—in its most extreme form? What a transitional object does, then, is help the child break out of this subjective omnipotence, which is a powerful, painful, and necessary experience.

In a later stage of the development the child no longer needs the transitional object. It is able to make a distinction between "me" and "not-me," and keeping inside and outside apart and yet interrelated. This development leads to the use of illusion, symbols and objects later on in life.

So while transitional objects could easily be read as correlationist (and perhaps work will need to be done to make this less likely), what I see these objects as are objects that attune us to the strange withdrawal of all objects, including mom and dad, doggie, rocks, trees, and even Reindeer. What OOO/OOR needs and wants is for people to hold onto these transitional objects well after childhood, which some adults do. We always need transitional objects. What carpentry suggests is that we make transitional objects in the philosophical work of dismantling more sophisticated, adult, and dangerous forms of "subjective omnipotence."

Finally, and in a round about way, I also find transitional object theory compelling because it attends to the affective dimension of carpentry. Correlationism isn't just an abstract, disembodied idea that some (or many) people have; it is a whole way of being in the world. Carpentry, then, must surely provide not just ways of engaging the strangeness and withdrawal of objects but also ways of coping with the transition to an object-oriented ontology itself. Carpentry's objects must also be security blankets and stuffed reindeer.

Note: Eileen Joy, co-editor of O-Zone, has a short essay at In the Midde that dicusses transitional objects: "Willingly Playing the Role of Thing: The Hope of Persons as Transitional Objects"

Rhetorical Carpentry: An Experiment

Having recently finished Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing , and having recently been asked to give a workshop on new media production for a poetry course taught by a colleague, I have produced my first attempt at what Bogost calls carpentry. Jim Brown, adding in an explicitly rhetorical dimension (which the title of this post nods appreciatively toward), best describes the goals of this production when he writes

"Rhetorical carpentry would construct objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us" ("The Decorum of Objects").

This attempt at rhetorical carpentry also works out of the methods I am currently developing for my Fall 2012 Problems in Rhetoric: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral course, which will explore nonhuman and nonsymbolic rhetorics. As I write on the course site, "we are not simply interested in what objects mean or represent; to this end, we must have ways of 'writing' objects that likewise resist this tendency. Such is the hope of this collection of methods."

The main goal of this experiment is to reveal nonhuman/nonhuman relationships as they take place alongside human/human and human/nonhuman relationships. Furthermore, I want to reveal that all such relations are always with aliens, so to speak. Each thing (what Bogost calls a unit and what others call an object) is more than the sum total of its relations. Objects remain withdrawn from all relations.

Here is my thinking behind the elements of this production (feel free to come back to this discussion after you have watched the video):

• Each image "captures" nonhuman relationships (there is more than just the vent in each picture)
• The Instagram filter (I took the pictures on my iPhone) blurs the edges allowing for focus on the vent and its relations
• Sound is of vents but it is disconnected/foregrounded as a sound effect separate from its normal status as background noise (think of Brown's "alien conversations")
• The text, one line from Devin Johnston's Creaturely and Other Essays is about a relationship with a house. Additionally, the relationship described is about more than control (i.e., reducing the house to its inhabitants) but is instead something reciprocal or on the same ontological level.
• Timing of the slides:
• compels viewer to attend to the whole scene.
• focuses on the words themselves, which certainly exist in relationship with other words but also remain disconnected and alienated from the sentence of which they are apart (this separation is made manifest, I hope, by the time delay between each word).
• allows for otherwise connected or related objects to become disconnected and thus become independent and alien objects

So, here you have it. Be gentle. I have spent my adult life being analytical, but I have recently discovered that this mode alone will not do. As Tim Morton argues in "Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology":

Longinian ekphrasis is not about the reaction of the (human) subject, but about rhetorical modes as affective-contemplative techniques for summoning the alien. (171)

"Alien Relationship" combines text from Devin Johnston's Creaturely and Other Essays, images taken using the Instagram App on my iPhone, and a sound effect ("white noise in the house" from klankbeeld at freesound.org).

Kenneth Burke and Object-Oriented Rhetoric

Continuing to chew on an object-oriented rhetoric, I had this lovely run-in with Kenneth Burke this morning (from A Rhetoric of Motives):

Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is "substantially one" with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another.

As we think of the place in rhetoric in object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism (Barnett's discussion of metaphor, Brown's use of decorum, Bogost's procedural rhetoric, Reid's force and relation), I'd like to also ponder identification/consubstantiality as useful terms here. Particularly, they are potentially helpful in negotiating the relation/withdrawal tension (or, as I feel it, the Latour/Harman tension). UPDATE #1: In the comments to the post linked here Reid's force and relation, the connection to Burke gets made as well. "Read the comments," I remind myself. UPDATE #2: This connection I made this morning was also made by Nathan Gale (about a year ago).

Reading the above passage, I immediately thought of Harman's Guerrilla Metaphysics and that book's chief task of describing how objects relate.

Object-oriented philosophy has a single basic tenet: the withdrawal of objects from all perceptual and causal relations. This immediately implies a single basic problem: how do relations occur?

This is rather ambiguous, and Harman's task in the book is account for relations.

It needs to be shown how relations and events are possible despite the existence of vacuum-sealed objects or tool-beings.

Burke is at work with the same ambiguity.

The thing's identity would here be its uniqueness as an entity in itself and by itself, a demarcated unit having its own particular structure.

And here:

A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so.

For Burke, identification has a pragmatic value: rhetoric is the use of language (Burke isn't not wholesale amenable to an object-oriented rhetoric) to induce cooperation. Identification, as rhetoric, is necessary and made possible by division. We are only ever able to do anything together (produce effects) by virtue of those moments we identify or become consubstantial with one another, remaining, as we are, "demarcated units." What's useful here is how, I think or hope, such a connection between Burke and Harman is mutually beneficial. Identification describes (accounts for) the activity of bringing into relation discrete, demarcated, vacuum-sealed things. The need to cooperatively produce effects or to be affected compels us toward relations. Harman's object-oriented philosophy calls our attention to identification as fundamental to all relations and not just human relations.

I am obviously in the early going here, but I thought it worth noting. What's to gained, the question we are fruitfully asked in many places on digital digs, by describing nonhuman as well as human relations in terms of identification and consubstantiality? Is rhetoric a way to think about how objects relate or could rhetoric also be the plasma in which relations are possible? As objects divide (Burke) and withdrawal (Harman) from one another do they create the possibility and the need for rhetoric?

Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification: is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity.

Mini Podcast: Object-Oriented Environmental Rhetoric

Here is a short, two-and-a-half minute podcast about my current research project, about which I have previously blogged. Here is a link to the discussion of William Cronon I mention in the podcast. I used Audioboo, a free application for the iPhone. Enjoy!

listen to ‘Object-Oriented Environmental Rhetoric’ on Audioboo

French Accountants

In my current struggle with "accounting" for the nonhuman, Latour's Aramis again proves helpful:

Of course you have to "take into account" all the elements, as people say naively, but only the not very innovative projects know in advance which accountant to believe and which accounting system to choose.

The consequences of these choices will multiply, we suppose, at the level of the city, as in the case of Urbanized.

Urbanized and Object-Oriented Rhetoric, Part Two

This isn't so much a part two, as it is a revisiting of yesterday's post on the documentary Urbanized. Not too long after I clicked "Publish Post" (lying awake in bed, in fact), I began to have some regrets. In particular, my own conclusion now gives me pause:

Bad design is design that mistakes itself as purely human. If we ignore the missing masses as "we" plan, they will come back to haunt us precisely where we live.

See the trap? I have just argued, from an object-oriented perspective, that objects, or in this case the materiality of a city cannot be reduced (see Latour) to the intentionality of the designer: there is always excess. My argument makes sense, given my use of Latour. That said, how sound or practical or ontologically possible is my advice to account for missing, nonhuman, masses?

I'll here go to Graham Harman:

Behind every apparently simple object is an infinite legion of further objects that "crush, depress, break, and enthrall one another." (Tool-Being 296)

In other words, we cannot stop them from haunting us. We cannot possibly know everything about every thing and thus include any and every thing that bears upon city life. By requiring designers to ac/count for nonhumans, do I implicitly argue that every nonhuman can be fully counted? (For more on the tension between Latour and Harman, see Harman's Prince of Networks as well as The Prince and the Wolf.)

So let's try this: the best a designer or a city planner (you know, rhetors) could do is to leave room for accidents. Make a city that will bend rather than break. Perhaps that is the way of describing the limits of, in the case of Urbanized, Modernist city planning. It's not simply that they failed to account for the nonhuman (for such an accounting is fully impossible), but that such Modernism left no wiggle room for crushing, depressing, breaking and enthralling objects.

And, to make OOO more explicitly into an OOR, the designers' and planners' techne needs to leave room for tuche, which is bound to happen. Thinking more about what OOR might do, what its William Jamesian cash value is, this might be a line of thought worth pursuing (having just recently read Kelly Pender's Techne and re-read Ballif's "Writing the Third-Sophistic"). That is, in terms of an object-oriented rhetorical production/invention/action, can we think in terms of both techne and tuche? Within our plans and actions there is the irreducible materiality of the nonhuman (the object, the thing--boy I need to tighten up that terminology).

Anyway, there's my part two, my revisiting, my apology. I'll sleep better tonight for sure.

Wilderness

In a previous post I introduced my new research project on object-oriented environmental rhetoric. My original way into this project was my previous (and on-going) work on the physis/nomos split. Frequently, discussions of environment or environmentalism presume a fundamental disconnect between humans and their environments: technology and culture (on the side of nomos), for instance, alienate us from nature (on the side of physis). Thus, a concept like wilderness became interesting for me. For example, the anthropologist Tim Ingold (in his awesomely brilliant The Perception of the Environment) takes the whole concept of wilderness to task.

Scientific conservation is firmly rooted in the doctrine [...] that the world of nature is separate from, and subordinate to, the world of humanity [...] As a result, we tend to think that only environments that still exist in a genuinely natural condition are those that remain beyond the bounds of human civilisation, as in the dictionary definition of wilderness: "A tract of land or a region uncultivated or inhabited by humans beings." (67)

Ingold's take on "wilderness" very much resonates with the work of environmental historian William Cronon, who argues (in "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature") that the very idea of wilderness is problematic for environmentalism:

But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living...only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living form the land.

Moving along as I was in the Cronon article (and rather fresh off of reading Ingold), I became rather content with dismissing wilderness as a defunct term with entirely too much actively pernicious philosophical baggage (for another, similar angle, see Zizek's critique of ecology). But then I reached Cronon's conclusion, where, he claims, he is "forced to confront [his] own deep ambivalence about [wilderness's] meaning for modern environmentalism." On the one hand, he argues, the notion of wilderness disconnects humans from their environment and thus often produces irresponsible behavior. That is, we let ourselves off of the hook when we take ourselves out of nature.

On the other hand, I also think it no less crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did not create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is. The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to human arrogance.

I was stuck. I had no time for Cronon's ambivalence: "Doesn't he know I am trying to crank out an article!" I was troubled, however, because I was persuaded by his ambivalence. We aren't disconnected from nature (the physis/nomos split is deeply troublesome), but the many other participants in nature aren't simply the same as or reducible to us either. There is such a thing as wilderness, but it isn't a wilderness apart from us.

And this is, of course, where object-oriented ontology (OOO) and now, lately, object-oriented rhetoric (OOR) arrives on the scene. In his review essay of Graham Harman (a key figure in OOO or, also, speculative realism), Scot Barnett tightly formulates the OOO/OOR position:

For Harman, then, the project of object-oriented philosophy involves two key moves: first, the recognition of the ontology of individual objects or tool-beings and their perpetual withdrawal from other objects in the world; and second the attunement to the reality and implications of these objects coming into relation with one another and how those relations in turn produce new objects whose depths, like any other object, can never be fully known or expressed in language.

Wilderness, then, can be re-read (and rescued) in this way: individual objects, which I read broadly here to include plants, animals, and rocks, perpetually withdraw from us--they remain wild in being never fully known to or controlled by us. And those wild objects will relate with one another in ways unknown to us (as wild objects ourselves) and produce effects we cannot codified (and might very well find threatening). This, I think, suggests something very interesting (if not fully known to me at this point) to environmentalism and environmental rhetoric. Barnett writes of the

many opportunities for future researchers to extend Harman’s thinking into the development of a broader and more nuanced rhetorical consideration of the world and our (i.e. human speakers' and writers’) being with others—human and nonhuman alike—in the world.

The View from My Office. There is a garden and a tree. There are squirrels and birds and bugs in the garden and in the tree. There is an auto body shop, a play house for my son, and an alley complete with various dumpsters. I am embedded in this environment. For instance, I watch the squirrels and the birds (note the bird book). I relate to them and they, at times, to me. But the squirrels and the birds and the bugs in the garden also withdraw from me and relate to one another independent of me. I am not out of nature here, but it nevertheless is wild.

I am interested, in light of Cronon's deep ambivalence about wilderness (a term I may yet jettison) and Ingold's rather forceful (and persuasive) rejection of it, in develoing a rhetoric of, or better yet, for human and nonhuman relations (the "being with others" Barnett describes above). We can't be apart from nature, but we can never fully know and determine everything also in it.

A New Project

From my Current Projects page:
"The Shape of the World to Come: Toward an Object-Oriented Environmental Rhetoric" (In progress, 3000 words).

Abstract: This article works to develop an environmental rhetoric that gives vibrant matter its due. My argument, and it is one made by others, is that much environmentalism overemphasizes human agency. Or, in other words, in giving ourselves the responsibility to save or fix the planet, we have over-invested in our own agency, enacting the self-same hubris that results in dispositions toward the environment that environmentalists themselves might very well (and rightly) condemn. I argue that this over-investment (to the exclusion of denying and/or erasing nonhuman agency) is not the proper comportment we should have with the environment. Drawing on work in speculative realism (and related theories such as new materialism) and work in the emerging area of object-oriented rhetoric, I suggest that we can neither fully understand nor determine the environment, and that we need an environmental rhetoric concerned with inventing and shaping attitudes alive to this suggestion.

2011 CCCC Paper (Working Draft)

I am just about set for CCCC in Atlanta. Here is my working draft, which explores (in under 20 minutes) the work rhetoric does in cultivating the materiality of the human experience (cognitive, bodily, environmental).

Rivers CCCC 2011 Working Draft

Memory As Activity: Collin Brooke and Proteins

I have finally gotten around to remembering to post this.

In his Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media, Collin Brooke, to make a long story short, rewrites the rhetorical canons through the lens of new media. I was particularly interested in his treatment of memory, given my own interests in cognitive science and the extended mind. With respect to memory, Brooke argues that with new media we can move away from the traditional and Platonic model of memory as absence/presence (or memory as storage) and towards memory as pattern and randomness. Brooke writes,

Perhaps more than any of the other five canons, memory is the one canon whose status as practice is in need of rehabilitation.

That is, memory is not simply or only about absence or presence (you either have a memory that is complete or incomplete), but is also, and perhaps more importantly, about the activity of constructing and dissolving "patterns over time," or what Brooke calls persistence. In this model, memory is not about accurately representing some past event (getting it right), but about constructing memories in particular ways for particular uses (and a lot of this, my psychoanalytical colleagues will justly point out, is unconscious, driven by desire, and thus exceeds critical engagement). Memory, in short, is not something we have; it is something we do.

All of which leads me to fascinating article in Smithsonian about "Making Memories." While the article is haunted by the specter of absence/presence (i.e., speaking of inaccurate or incomplete memories), it deals with memory research and therapeutic practice that are both very much in sync with Brooke's practical take on memory. Researcher Karim Nader has advanced the hypothesis that each time we remember something that memory is literally (at the level of proteins) rebuilt in the mind. That is, we do not simply access a memory in a brain as we remember it. Each time we remember we re-make the memory. For a bit of shorthand: as the Michael Keaton movie Multiplicity demonstrates, each time we re-make something it is slightly different from the original version. The organic reproduction of memory seems to work the same way. It explains, for instance, why Nader, and 73% of the rest of us, remember

seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day.

The "very act of remembering," Nader argues, "can change our memories." We rebuild them, we reorganize them, new or related information is blended into them. It is not about storage so much as it is about stories.

The second part of this article, however, really puts this hypothesis to work (and in a way equally relevant to rhetoric and the work of moving people. I would nod her to Diane Davis' work on rhetoric and suggestion in her treatment of Kenneth Burke and Freud.). Alain Brunet, a psychologist, works with sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The hope is that caregivers might be able to weaken the hold of traumatic memories that haunt patients during the day and invade their dreams at night.

And they do this, simply put, by having PTSD sufferer remember their trauma while they are on drugs that inhibit the brain's ability to rebuild the memory, which Nader argues we do each time to remember something. Thus, each time the traumatic memory is remembered it is rebuilt weaker (it is made, to borrow from Brooke, less persistent). It is not, however, just that the memory goes away (this is to re-inscribe the presence/absence understanding of memory). It is, Brunet puts it,

They start to care less about that memory.

The ability to rewrite memories, far from ruining them in terms of accuracy (the presence or absence of true details) reconstructs memories that are less painful and debilitating.

In other words [the article concludes], it just might be what keeps us from living in the past.

And that, I guess, is kairos too.

A Material Marcus Tullius

As part of my summer research campaign, I am reading Anthony Everitt's biography of Cicero, Cicero. Reading it, I am amazed but not surprised by Cicero's material rhetoric, by which I mean his persuasive efforts through spatial and temporal action (as opposed to oratorical efforts). I am not surprised because as a successful orator, politician, and advocate, I assume Cicero did more than give a good speech. I am surprised by the extent to which Cicero marshaled space and time in his persuasive efforts. I attribute this to the fact that much of we (in rhetoric) know of Cicero we know through his speeches or writings, which exist, to a certain extent, outside time and space. I might also attribute it to a certain privileging or understanding of rhetoric as purely or only discursive.

A few notes before I proceed. I do not mean to discount speeches or other discursive efforts. I mean only to mark the rhetoric that occurs other ways. Indeed, much of Cicero's effectiveness in the case I will shortly describe comes from his speeches and how he arranged them. I would also acknowledge here that "material rhetoric" is, as with most things, a concept currently under construction. In brief, it concerns the rhetorical force of materiality (spaces, bodies, etc) and the rhetorical constitution of things such as spaces and bodies. Finally, it is probably also true that the material and the discursive are not polar opposites or even mutually exclusive. Speaking and writing are surely also bodily (and technologically mediated) acts.

The trial of Caius Verres, former governor of Sicily, and about whom there is a Mountain Goats song, showcases Cicero's material rhetoric. Cicero, who apparently rarely acted as prosecutor, was constrained by several (material) factors. First, at this point in Roman history juries were composed entirely of senators, making bribery and peer pressure of a sort more common. Second, Verres and his allies went to great lengths to delay the trial both to allow them time to stack the jury and to draw out the trial (over Roman holidays and other conventions of the time) in order to weaken the impact of the evidence.

To combat these material rhetorical moves, Cicero enacted his own robust rhetoric, both discursive and material. Primarily, Cicero worked to speed-up the trail to force a decision before a long break. As a result of his own detective work, Cicero had an "air tight" case, but the longer the trial took the less likely it became that a conviction would be secured.

It was crucial that Cicero finish his presentation before the court went into recess with the opening of Pompey's games on August 16. In the event, he managed to set out his material expeditiously as well as comprehensively. On August 13 he rested his case. (79)

Cicero's move to speed up the trial was accomplished by augmenting the traditional order of the trail. Securing permission to do so, Cicero began with his evidence against Verres rather than his opening remarks.

Cicero's coup was devastating for the defense and had immediate consequences. (79)

By virtue of what we could call a rhetorical move that addressed the material conditions of the trial, Cicero reversed what had been a foregone conclusion: Verres acquittal. Because Cicero forced the issue, the senate had no choice but to convict Verres.

Today the eyes of the world are upon you. This man's case will establish whether a jury composed exclusively of Senators can possibly convict some who is very very guilty--and very rich [...] No such excuses can extenuate the number and scale of his offenses. (79)

Surely a great speech that played an important role in convicting Verres; however, it was Cicero's material rhetoric which forced such a scrutinous gaze upon the Roman Senate.

Cicero's success had, then, its own material consequences. His actions, including composing and distributing speeches "he might have delivered had he had the chance" (80),

made a powerful case for reform of the courts and the jury system [...] Later in the autumn the Senatorial monopoly of juries was rescinded and their share of the memebership reduced to one third. (80)

Cicero well understood that oratory takes place in space and time, and that if these are stacked against you your words have little chance of achieving any effect. Cicero, as Everitt demonstrates, understood that the rule of law and the various institutions that uphold it are vital to the law working at all.

As a figure for and of rhetoric, Cicero and his victory in the trial of Verres marks rhetoric's materiality.