When Worlds/Senses Collide

In his “Preface” to his and Victor Villanueva’s edited collection Rhetorics of the Americas 3114 BCE to 2012 CE, Damian Baca writes, “This book is the first work to begin to fill a gap: an understanding of discourse aimed to persuade, rhetoric, within the Pre-Columbian Americas; that is, in presenting the rhetoric that coincided with but was not influenced by Greco-Roman inventions” (ix).

Thus far in class, we’ve inadvertently made a distinction between rhetorical practices of the East and West, codifying certain practices in our attempts to understand difference. Largely, we make the distinctions we make for convenience; I do not believe us to be intentionally malicious. However, when confronted with “Western” rhetoric that we cannot call traditionally Western, we are forced to rethink our facile classifications.

Perhaps distinctions have been easy to draw because we’ve been lucky enough to have studied the rhetorical traditions of cultures whose people have made full or partial transition to literacy. Thus, translation becomes our first tool of interpretive colonization. With the Moche and the Mesoamerican-Mexican rhetoric, we were confronted with cultures who produced artifacts whose “languages” we could not so easily transpose. Their written languages are lost to us, and we have no way to decipher them through connection with our own. To avoid cultural hegemony, then, Gries offers one solution: “a methodology of restraint that attempts to work within the confines of a genre that has not yet revealed to us its precise rhetorical purpose but clearly has rhetorical actions” (98).

In our approach to Exploratory 2, we considered Gries’ methodology. Unwilling--and, certainly, unable--to speak for the Moche burial site and the embodied rhetoric of its rituals and practices, we decided to, as Stephanie notes, “re-present” a Moche burial site, the San Jose de Moro Archaeological Site, through a user-directed infographic map [explanation here]. As Gries demonstrates in her chapter, we wanted to construct something that would allow our cultural artifacts to speak for themselves as “actors that, through their own devices, render the world in new ways,” actors who “ask for nothing more than for us to see the world through their eyes and acknowledge the voices of their actions” (102).

As theories of Rhetoric and Composition have evolved, more attention has been given to “unconventional” composing practices. Thus, Gries’ application of Picture Theory to the Moche burial site seems strange, but it makes a lot of sense. Everything we see is constituted through images. Letters, words, and numbers are images, images with embodied sounds and ideas of their own. So, yes, Brandenburg’s guiding question for research in her study of the Mesoamerican rhetoric of Mexico is a valid one, and I would argue that “the passage from the pictorial to the alphabetic was” not “completed centuries ago” and instead that “the two sign systems continue to compete today” (154) because they are, in fact, inseparable.

Thus, in her study of the Moche ritual practices and their associated images, Gries identifies possible constructions for how one might “read” the images, but I think her emphasis on restrained listening acts as a safeguard against reading and speaking for the Moche rituals. Reading is (de)terministic; it is an act of pure carnivorous consumption. Listening, on the other hand, is purely receptive. In “Listening,” French Historian Jacques Attali positions attention to sound as “a way of perceiving the world” (4). Life is full of noise, and the true way to study life and history is through listening, not looking or examining.

By not prescribing an order to our pictorial portrayal of the Moche archaeological site, we hoped that “readers” would resist the urge to merely kill and consume the rhetoric of the site. By allowing access to the site from many points of entry, we hoped that “readers” would enter as they pleased, much like Burke’s parlor, listening to the various conversations of the artifacts—in isolation and as a whole—and then finding places to communicate their own meanings in an ethical and restrained manner.

Thus, even though Gries’ method seems a little too restricting, Stephanie and I truly believe that following her model can lead to the making of meaning. Despite not knowing the pictorial “language” of the rituals and associated artifacts, Gries does not that “many of the funerary practices are so consistent that, even as we must refrain from concretizing interpretations of their rhetorical meaning, it is safe to say that in their orientation to both addressivity and history, the Moche mortuary practices constitute a rich rhetorical genre that uncovers its own embedded rhetorical actions” (100). Replicability is vital to any scientific theory, but I would contend that it is vital to any theory—from any field. Gries is careful to note that she makes her connection with hesitation, but she is only attempting to provide a theory for entry into the study of Moche ritual-based rhetoric. She is not attempting to construct an incontrovertible law.

As discussed in class, the safest and most ethical way to make connections, such as the ones Gries makes, is to situate rhetorical practices in more than just moments of insularity. Illuminating one practice is good in its own right, but we have to be able to find this practice in other burial sites, in other contiguous regions, over more than one generation of people. Through the construction of our map, we are hoping that users will make these connections, that they will say, “I’ve seen this before. This aligns with my conception of ‘X’ rhetoric.” We cannot simply take moments of insularity, lift them out of their context, and place them next to Western practices in order to find differences and similarities. Thus, I liked our hands-on approach that still kept the integrity of the space intact.

However, I also liked Travis’s and Andrew’s “look, but do not touch” approach. In our current age of multimodal, material composition, our hands certainly do function rhetorically. A computer mouse does not dissociate rhetoric from touch. A project that involves augmented reality, then, allows one to experience a cultural artifact (or a whole site) in a healthy way. Instead of the “reader” imposing his or her rhetoric of interpretation onto the object, the object, becoming a subject, imposes its rhetoric onto an audience of listeners. Listeners can then experience the cultural artifact as it speaks to them, through boxes of speech that appear and disappear as one spends time getting to know the artifact. All of the approaches were interesting, I just found more connection between our proposed project and Travis’s and Andrew’s.