Figures of Entanglement

Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism

Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan, Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000426342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

Recent and ongoing "new materialisms" scholarship seeks to fundamentally reshape the humanities and their relationship with the sciences. While this work comprises multiple and varied currents, one of the most important, yet whose distinctive merits are arguably often underappreciated, is that influenced by the theoretical physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad.

The first volume devoted to bringing Barad's work into conversation with the disciplines of rhetoric and communication studies, this collection organizes that conversation primarily around her notion of "entanglement", which encourages an understanding of meaning as inherently performative, material, and ecological. In doing so, the essays in this collection variously approach rhetoric as a "figure of entanglement" in ways that contribute to and enrich both rhetoric and Barad's theorizing. Topics range from politics to breast cancer, genealogy, the trope of academic "turns, " Marx's notion of exchange, and the "prehistoric" emergence of human consciousness.

With a new foreword by the editors and afterword by Laurie E. Gries, this collection is otherwise reprinted from the 2016 "Figures of Entanglement" special issue of the journal Review of Communication.

Breast cancer’s rhetoricity: bodily border crisis and bridge to corporeal solidarity

Annie Hill

ABSTRACT

Responding to Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking text Illness as Metaphor, this article analyzes breast cancer as a figure of entanglement, drawing on Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism. Communication scholars have fruitfully explored discursive constructions of breast cancer, but a material–discursive analysis of the disease, and the significant site it inhabits, provides a more robust account of the constraints and opportunities configuring bodies and social movements. To make the case, I show that agential realism is equipped to grasp breast cancer’s rhetoricity as it destabilizes binary codes of being, including language/matter, subject/object, and human/nonhuman. I then offer the concept of transmaterial intra-actionality to track entanglements of disease and target the political stakes of accounting for human and nonhuman life. I conclude with a call for corporeal solidarity: a posthuman politics that acknowledges connections across and through bodies.

The following passage appears on the cover of a collection of Susan Sontag’s two essays, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors:

In 1978, while recovering from cancer, Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, the celebrated essay on the invented and often punitive uses of illness in our culture. It has become a classic that Newsweek recently called “One of the most liberating books of its time.” Her aim was to strip cancer of its symbolic stigma and show that it is only a disease. She argued that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is to resist such metaphoric thinking.¹

To free people from malignant meanings, Sontag calls for an end to illness as metaphor, which will keep cancer in its proper place within medical discourse. Writing after experiencing cancer and its treatment, Sontag argues for the abandonment of illness metaphors because equating the disease with evil and appalling events hurts persons with cancer by making them bear additional stigma. Conceptually, connecting cancer to bad behavior, undesirable bodies, and corrupt politics does damage by linking those with the disease to other dreaded things. Cancer becomes doubly destructive because it harms as a disease, plotting a damaging course though the body, and as a word, traveling through negative conceptual circuits. Sontag’s polemic against illness metaphors—against interpretation—aims to replace harmful rhetoric with medical reality.

The demystification Sontag demands would stick to the fact that cancer is only a disease. If how we speak of cancer remains resolutely on the material—cancer as matter, not as metaphor—then human and cell bodies will be saved from unhealthy symbolism and people will seek treatment for a disease “without ‘meaning’.”² Comparing cancer and tuberculosis, Sontag claims the route to excising illness metaphors from society is to find the cause and cure of disease:

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era where medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured . … Now it is cancer’s turn to be the disease that doesn’t knock before it enters, cancer that fills the role of an illness experienced as a ruthless, secret invasion—a role it will keep until one day its etiology becomes as clear, and its treatment as effective, as those of TB have become.³

Sontag’s claim is extraordinary given that neither the discovery of tubercle bacilli nor effective treatment stopped TB stigma and metaphors. Its transformation from “consumption,” which was thought to be heritable, to contagious “TB,” resulted in a proliferation of public health campaigns and infectious stigma. The disease, no longer spread genealogically or borne by the brilliant and artistic, became known as bacteria penetrating bodies through the coughing, singing, laughing, and talking of others. That speech can spread TB animates ideas of contagious discourse and the materializing force of language as it identifies matter’s agency and material–discursive intra-actions producing illness. Ingested through the lungs and able to attack any body part, TB showed the same symptoms as consumption—weight loss, bloody coughs, painful aspirations—with the causal shift changing the disease’s stigmatic identity, not eradicating it. TB emerged as an object of dread and medical defense apparatuses, including sanatorium, surgery, vaccine, and a “magic bullet” cure called streptomycin.⁴

Doubting medicine’s ability to provide relief from metaphoric thinking, Paula A. Treichler observes, “after sociological explanations for AIDS gave way to biomedical ones involving a transmissible virus … images of AIDS as a ‘gay disease’ proved too alluring to abandon.”⁵ The linking of AIDS with homosexual men helps to explain why the United States left it to flourish in certain bodies and populations and how when it jumped the binary between “those at risk” and the “general population,” it became a disease of a different kind.⁶ Shifting from “gay-related” to “human” immunodeficiency informed, rather than immunized, the entanglement of matter and meaning producing HIV/AIDS.

Despite equating curing disease with curing metaphor, Sontag’s argument provides two cues for this article because of her belief in a medical discourse, cleansed of metaphoric contaminants, spreading through society to heal how we communicate disease. Firstly, Sontag depicts language as something that obscures and inscribes matter. Her exposition of illness metaphors is excellent, but it relies on an inscription model of language that divides meaning from materiality. Secondly, Sontag’s treatment of language and matter invites a radical rethinking of their relationship critical to studies of communication. We can better grasp the meaning and matter of disease by tracking how it destabilizes the language/matter divide, rather than erecting this binary before analysis gets off the ground. Or, to put it another way, using the binary as a prophylactic against the contamination of language by matter and matter by language. Responding to Sontag, this article analyzes breast cancer as a figure of entanglement, drawing on Karen Barad’s materialist theory of agential realism. In so doing, I show how breast cancer provides a location, or localized resolution in phenomena (i.e., a “thing” we attempt to grasp), which destabilizes binary codes of being, including language/matter, subject/object, and human/nonhuman. I then offer the concept of transmaterial intra-actionality to track entanglements of disease and target the political stakes of accounting for human and nonhuman life. I conclude with a call for corporeal solidarity: a posthuman politics creating connections and commitments across and through bodies. This agential realist account amplifies the alternate starting points and conclusions of disease analyses that refuse to use inscription models that render matter passive or, worse, meaningless.

Language/matter

Communication scholars have argued for the recognition of language as a materializing force, rather than as mere reflection of material reality or immaterial ideal. But a funny thing happened on the way to recasting language’s relation to reality. According to Celeste Condit, “These attacks on the view of language as reference, well taken as they are, have not successfully fused the distinction between language and reality, the idea and the thing”; instead “in most cases, theorists have succeeded merely in reversing the hierarchy—in elevating the sign over the referent, the ideal over the material (often effacing the material).”⁷ Condit wonders if the privileging of language seduced rhetoricians because it is an “attractive reversal that puts language ‘on top,’ even if the relationship is still a binary, hierarchical one.”⁸ For Nathan Stormer,

The dualism of language (emblematic of culture) and reality (emblematic of nature) is one outcome of conceptualizing rhetoric’s ability to produce material change by way of individuals’ speech. Correspondingly, in rhetorical studies the unit of theory and analysis has usually remained the humanist subject working to make an impression on the material world through speech-like activity.⁹

Whether we aim to suppress illness metaphors following Sontag or deconstruct them through rhetorical analysis, our focus remains trained on language without giving matter its due.¹⁰

Feminist theorist and theoretical physicist Karen Barad elaborates a materialist theory that rejects the discursive privilege informing inscription models and linguistic turns:

Agential realism’s reconceptualization of the nature of matter and discursive practices provides a means for taking account of the productive nature of natural as well as cultural forces in the differential materialization of nonhuman as well as human bodies. It thereby avoids the privileging of discursive over material concerns and the reinscription of the nature–culture dualism.¹¹

Reality, on this account, is a dynamic process constituted through material–discursive practices. Agential realism regards matter as active in the world’s becoming, not as passive stuff needing human signification to have meaning. Barad avers that matter produces meaning and meaning affects what materializes or ceases to be: “Meaning is not an ideality; meaning is material. And matter isn’t what exists separately from meaning. Mattering is a matter of what comes to matter and what doesn’t.”¹² We cannot then gaze innocently upon human or cell bodies, pace Sontag, and stripping meaning from matter is neither doable nor desirable. Barad contributes to the study of communication by retiring questions about whether language reflects or creates reality and using quantum physics to argue matter and meaning are entangled down to the tiniest, most ostensibly “atomic” elements of reality.¹³ She theorizes a causal relationship between “specific material configurations of the world (i.e., discursive practices/(con)figurations rather than ‘words’) and specific material phenomena (i.e., relations rather than ‘things’). This causal relationship between apparatuses of bodily production and the phenomenon produced is one of ‘agential intra-action.’”¹⁴ Agential intra-action corrects constructivist accounts granting language too much power and objectivist accounts positioning nature as prediscursive facticity.

An agential realist approach, therefore, reorients analyses of phenomena constituted as subjects and objects (e.g., cancer patient, breast cancer), which we habitually grasp as separate things in order to make sense of the situation. Indeed the desire to put things in order is at the heart of this habit. Agential realism acknowledges cancer patients and breast cancer as entangled intra-active phenomena, not discrete, independent entities that interact. Phenomena, including and exceeding the human, are processes enacting boundaries, attributing properties, and making agential cuts that become sedimented into embodied concepts and solidified components (e.g., “She has breast cancer”; “It is breast cancer”).¹⁵ These concepts and components include the material–discursive subject, “she,” and material–discursive object, “breast cancer,” not only the latter, due to the co-constitutive emergence of gendered disease and diseased gender.¹⁶

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Figures of Entanglement
• 1 Breast cancer’s rhetoricity: bodily border crisis and bridge to corporeal solidarity
• 2 Rhetoric’s diverse materiality: polythetic ontology and genealogy
• 3 Of turning and tropes
• 4 Entangled exchange: verkehr and rhetorical capitalism
• 5 Rhetorical prehistory and the Paleolithic
• 6 Afterword
• Index