Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies

278 Pages·2015·2.072 MB·English

by  Morey, Sean

Rhetorical Delivery and Digital
Technologies
“Like delivery itself, Sean Morey’s book offers more than it suggests at
first glance. Beneath its insightful readings of delivery/hyprokrisis in the
classical tradition and its examinations of delivery’s many meanings and
possibilities in new media contexts, it delivers something else as well: a new
style of reading and writing—indeed, a new method for rhetorical inquiry—
specifically attuned to the medial logics of the digital age.”
—Scot Barnett, Indiana University, USA
This book theorizes digital logics and applications for the rhetorical canon
of delivery. Digital writing technologies invite a re-evaluation about what
delivery can offer to rhetorical studies and writing practices. Sean Morey
argues that what delivery provides is access to the unspeakable, unconscious
elements of rhetoric, not primarily through emotion or feeling as is usu-
ally offered by previous studies, but affect, a domain of sensation implicit
in the (overlooked) original Greek term for delivery, hypokrisis. Moreover,
the primary means for delivering affect is both the logic and technology of
a network, construed as modern, digital networks, but also networks of
associations between humans and nonhuman objects. Casting delivery in
this light offers new rhetorical trajectories that promote its incorporation
into digital networked-bodies. Given its provocative and broad reframing of
delivery, this book provides original, robust ways to understand rhetorical
delivery not only through a lens of digital writing technologies, but all his-
torical means of enacting delivery, offering implications that will ultimately
affect how scholars of rhetoric will come to view not only the other canons
of rhetoric, but rhetoric as a whole.
Sean Morey is an Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University where
he teaches writing and digital media in the department of English. He is the
author of The New Media Writer (Fountainhead Press, 2014) and co-edited
the collection Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature (SUNY Press, 2009).
Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication
1 Rhetorics, Literacies, and 9 The Rhetoric of Food
Narratives of Sustainability Discourse, Materiality, and
Edited by Peter Goggin Power
Edited by Joshua J. Frye and
2 Queer Temporalities in Gay Michael S. Bruner
Male Representation
Tragedy, Normativity, and
10 The Multimediated Rhetoric
Futurity
of the Internet
Dustin Bradley Goltz
Digital Fusion
Carolyn Handa
3 The Rhetoric of Intellectual
Property
Copyright Law and the 11 Communicating Marginalized
Regulation of Digital Culture Masculinities
Jessica Reyman Identity Politics in TV, Film,
and New Media
4 Media Representations of Edited by Ronald L. Jackson II
Gender and Torture Post-9/11 and Jamie E. Moshin
Marita Gronnvoll
5 Rhetoric, Remembrance, 12 Perspectives on Human-Animal
and Visual Form Communication
Sighting Memory Internatural Communication
Edited by Anne Teresa Demo Edited by Emily Plec
and Bradford Vivian
13 Rhetoric and Discourse in
6 Reading, Writing, and the
Supreme Court Oral
Rhetorics of Whiteness
Arguments
Wendy Ryden and Ian Marshall
Sensemaking in Judicial
Decisions
7 Radical Pedagogies of Socrates
Ryan A. Malphurs
and Freire
Ancient Rhetoric/Radical Praxis
S.G. Brown 14 Rhetoric, History, and Women’s
Oratorical Education
8 Ecology, Writing Theory, and American Women Learn to
New Media Speak
Writing Ecology Edited by David Gold and
Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin Catherine L. Hobbs
15 Cultivating Cosmopolitanism 22 Identity and Power in
for Intercultural Communication Narratives of
Communicating as Global Displacement
Citizens Katrina M. Powell
Miriam Sobré-Denton and
Nilanjana Bardhan 23 Pedagogies of Public
Memory
16 Environmental Rhetoric and Teaching Writing and
Ecologies of Place Rhetoric at Museums,
Edited by Peter N. Goggin Archives, and
Memorials
17 Rhetoric and Ethics in the Edited by Jane Greer and
Cybernetic Age Laurie Grobman
The Transhuman Condition
Jeff Pruchnic 24 Authorship Contested
Cultural Challenges to
18 Communication, Public the Authentic, Autonomous
Opinion, and Globalization in Author
Urban China Edited by Amy E. Robillard
Francis L.F. Lee, Chin-Chuan and Ron Fortune
Lee, Mike Z. Yao, Tsan-Kuo
Chang, Fen Jennifer Lin, and 25 Software Evangelism and
Chris Fei Shen the Rhetoric of Morality
Coding Justice in a Digital
19 Adaptive Rhetoric Democracy
Evolution, Culture, and the Art Jennifer Helene Maher
of Persuasion
Alex C. Parrish 26 Sexual Rhetorics
Methods, Identities,
20 Communication, Public Discourse, Publics
and Road Safety Campaigns Edited by Jonathan
Persuading People to Be Safer Alexander and Jacqueline
Nurit Guttman Rhodes
21 Mapping Christian Rhetorics 27 Rhetorical Delivery and
Connecting Conversations, Digital Technologies
Charting New Territories Networks, Affect,
Edited by Michael-John Electracy
DePalma and Jeffrey M. Ringer Sean Morey
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Rhetorical Delivery
and Digital Technologies
Networks, Affect, Electracy
Sean Morey
First published 2016
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
The right of Sean Morey to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morey, Sean, 1979- author.
Rhetorical delivery and digital technologies: networks, affect, electracy / By Sean Morey.
pages cm. — (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication; 27)
Includes bibliographical references and index. (alk. paper)
1. Rhetoric—Data processing. 2. Rhetoric—Study and teaching.
3. Literacy—Study and teaching. 4. Computers and literacy. I. Title.
P301.5.D37M67 2015
808.00285—dc23 2015030073
ISBN: 978-1-138-92544-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68374-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
This one’s for Aubrey, Sofia, and Fisher
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Contents
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: The Rebirth of Delivery 1
PART I
What is Delivery?
1 Declassifying Delivery 21
2 Reclassifying Delivery 60
PART II
Who Delivers?
3 Becoming Delivery-Machine—Emotion, Feeling, Affect 93
4 Becoming Shaman—Delivering the Invisible 136
PART III
How to Deliver?
5 Delivery-Networks 177
6 Posthuman Gestures and Electrate Attunements 214
Postscript: The Death of Delivery (and Other Transitions) 247
Index 261