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The District of Complexity: On Ecological Fieldwork “The archive is what actornetwork tracers and the flaneur have in common. And the archive that they share is special in that it has no end in sight.” Jenny Rice Distant Publics 174
Calls for new research methods flow thickly and pool in the basin of rhetoric
and writing studies. They sluice from a wide variety of tributaries: network and
complexity theories; the study of environments, organic and synthetic; digital,
multimodal, and public rhetorics; and posthuman studies. These calls tend to echo each
other: new methods must respond to “the challenges of investigating chaotic
phenomena” (Cooper 16). They must themselves be “complex, diffuse, and messy”
(Fleckenstein et al. 389). They must enact “inquiry for action” (Dobrin, “Writing Takes
Place” 14) and heed the “ecological imperative for composition studies” (Dobrin,
“Introduction” 3). Moreover:
Future research would need to make network maps, identify how and where
various spheres form on it, and discuss the intensity and sustainability of their
ongoing development into spheres. These collective points of contact and density
create the ambient environments or spheres and provide connections between
places and commonplaces for publics to emerge . . . it would take long term
studies to really track the variations of movements and circulations. (Hawk,
“Curating Ecologies” 176)
General agreement, perhaps, has emerged that new methods must be more ecological
shaped and scaled for our (relatively) new ecological accounts of rhetoric. And yet,
Laura Micciche has recently remarked that ecological approaches “have not gained
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much traction” (494). Sidney Dobrin notes that while writing studies has “embraced the
metaphors of space and place,” it has also “been limited in its adoption of ecological
methodologies” (“Writing Takes Place” 12). This collection, with its focus on the local,
offers an opportunity to advance methodological work, while also addressing rhetorics
of the local. In Ambient Rhetoric, Thomas Rickert describes terroir as a “closeknit
relation among grapevines, the earth, and cultivation techniques that imparts a unique
quality to a wine,” offering in shorthand that terroir is the “taste of a place” (271). In
order to get at the taste of any place, its local flavor, I argue that the subject and the
approach coconstitute each other; the study of the local needs ecological methods, that
is, and ecological methods need the local.
In April 2014, the Urban Institute published “Our Changing City,” to “tell
[Washington, D.C. residents] what’s obvious in their neighborhoods: the city is changing
dramatically.” Their statistical analysis provides context to what Washingtonians already
see and feel, the rapidly shifting demographic and material realities of life in the nation’s
capital. This report highlights three major recent changes to life in Washington:
1. Historically one of the U.S.’s few majorityblack cities, the Chocolate City has
seen the reversal of its decades long trend of population decline, as a result of a
huge influx of affluent white millennials to the point that Washington no longer
boasts an AfricanAmerican majority.
2. To accommodate this new population, developers have enthusiastically
reshaped the city.
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3. High cost rentals account for a larger and larger share of available housing,
resulting in one of the most expensive housing stocks in the country.
These changes are occurring in a city that for decades has experienced an ongoing
influx of transplanted residents because of the enormous federal presence, which
persistently maintains the complex divisions between those born and raised in
Washington and more recent (and often temporary) arrivals. It’s the job, I will argue, of
rhetorical researchers to coordinate with accounts such as the Urban Institute’s to
address the subtle ways that cities express themselves“to capture . . . the lay
knowledge that lies outside of the typical documentation” (from the CFP).
DC/Adapters, my study of a local rhetorical network, makes strides in this
direction. For two years, I’ve photographed and archived material and digital
adaptations of Washington’s city flag. Emerging in diverse forms and diverse places,
adapted flags hang in shop windows, dressup brick alleyways, and bounce all over the
web. A wide variety of agents produce these artifacts, including street artists, local
entrepreneurs, and activists organizations, among others. This embodied and
embedded form of research, which I call ecological fieldwork, traces one topos, local
flag adaptations, and uncovers an entire rhetorical network. DC/Adapters demonstrates
how ecological fieldwork can coordinate with studies like the Urban Institute’s and offer
access to the unique pathos of a city in the midst of convulsive change.
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Designed by Charles Dunn to evoke the red stars and bars on a white shield portion of George Washington’s family coat of arms, the flag was formally adopted by the District of Columbia in 1938. At 14th St NW’s the Red Derby; photograph by Matthew Pavesich.
A simple adaptation into a red sticker, with chevrons instead of bars and differently sized stars. Found on the black painted door of Columbia Station on 18th St NW; photograph by Matthew Pavesich
In order to illustrate this approach, I’ve organized this chapter into three sections,
all of which include methods, materials, and findings from this longitudinal ecological
fieldwork project. Because of the format of this text, I’ve elected not to include images.
Hundreds of adapted flags are viewable, however, at dcadapters.org. The first section
outlines how the project began and its general methods. The second section notes
emergent complexities of the work and how they have necessarily reshaped the project
itself but also my disposition as a researcher. The third section addresses the ethics of
ecological fieldwork and the rhetorical production it demands. The latter becomes
especially important in that it illuminates the insufficiency of description as the goal of
localfacing research. The challenge of the local’s essential indescribability, as I’ve
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learned from my ecological fieldwork, is not that such work offers better description of
local conditions but that it orients me toward interaction among and coordination with
human and nonhuman agents that shape D.C.’s local flavor.
Shape and Scale
DC/Adapters jolted to life, just as Jenny Rice suggests all tracings do, from an
initial spark (Distant Publics 174). For me, this event occurred at Washington, D.C.’s
Union Market in February of 2013. Within forty feet of each other, I observed three
different food stands, all of which adapted the District of Columbia’s flag in their
commercial signage.
DC Sharp at Union Market. Photograph by Matthew Pavesich
Within a second or so, I thought all of the following things, in some unrecoverable
order:
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1. The D.C. flag operates like a topos of graphic design a way to proclaim
one’s position in and allegiance to the local.
2. All three use the same visual means of persuasion, which suggests none
think the others’ use diminishes their own.
3. This reminds me a bit of Jenny Rice’s short tracing of the topos “Keep
Austin Weird” in her widely cited article “Unframing Models of Public
Distribution.” (1420).
4. I’ve seen these in other places around the city. I remember them now that
I see these here at Union Market, even though I didn’t really take notice of
them before.
5. I’ve lived here for two years, but am only now recognizing this uniquely
local rhetoric, which suggests something about the time required for
attunement to a new local.
6. Maybe I should begin to trace these and see if this is a thing to try to
find out what this phenomenon responds to and what it does.
And so I set out to trace the variations of one topos in a dense urban network.
I hoped to devise a new way of seeing and moving through the city that
would highlight alreadyexisting material rhetorics. Ethnography makes sense as an
approach to the layers of public, civic activity in material urban environments, and of
course many contemporary rhetoricians utilize its methods, including Ralph Cintron,
Ellen Cushman, Julie Lindquist, and others. Orienting fieldwork ecologically, as I aim to,
is to look at a rhetorical thing, but to consider it primarily (or at least consistently) in its
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relation to other things. Ecological fieldwork, that is, combines a rhetorically and
materiallyfocused version of ethnography with ecologyscale attention. It swaps the
microscope of traditional rhetorical research and analysis for a camera with a
wideangle lens set to a high shutter speed. As Byron Hawk puts it above, this sort of
work examines the relationships between places and commonplaces, which
ethnography already does, in such a way that highlights the intensity and sustainability
of sphere formation in networks. This work would include examination of what Jim
Ridolfo calls rhetorical velocity, originally articulated in a 2009 Kairos article with
Danielle Nicole DeVoss, which he later elaborated on in The Available Means of
Persuasion with David Sheridan and Anthony J. Michel: “the potential recomposition
and redistribution of a text,” including speed and direction, as well as something like
uptake or viral potential (79). From the sparkmoment at Union Market, I devised four
original guidelines to ecological fieldwork.
Original Guideline 1: Photograph each artifact and note its location. I began by
using my iPhone to gather images of all adapted flags I found around the city. As I
began to stumble across adapted flags on the web, screenshots joined my amateur
photographs. I noted each object’s location because I was and am interested in where I
find adaptations, the joining of places and commonplaces. Which neighborhoods and
webspaces witness the greatest number of adapted flags? What is it about these
places? How do the adapted flags’ locations shape my and others’ experiences in D.C.?
Original Guideline 2: Everyday encounters only. I decided early on to collect only
those adaptations I encountered in the movements of my daily life. I didn’t want to
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approach this project in such a way that it might seem to overwrite the idiosyncrasies of
complexity. This project cannot claim to retrieve all adapted flags in the city, nor can I
make unassailable observations about where this rhetorical activity occurs and where it
does not because, for starters, many of these objects are ephemeral, winking into
existence for a day or two or even less sometimes due to weather, human actions, web
rot, and so on. More broadly, all fieldwork is ecological, embedded and embodied, yes,
but also in the sense that it acknowledges its own partiality; good ethnography cannot
claim to present knowledge that transcends its humanness. At the 2015 Conference on
College Composition and Communication, Marc C. Santos aptly described Jeff Rice’s
Digital Detroit as an exercise in imagining a counterhistory of Detroit through his own
personal access. Similarly, I interact with Washington, creating a spatial counterpresent
through my personal access (I’m tempted to say “counterpresence,” rather than
“personal access.”).
Original Guideline 3: Adaptations, not appropriations. I’ve focused on graphic
alterations to the flag’s red starsandbars, rather than simple iterations like the
straightup appropriation of a red and white tshirt. It’s rhetors’ fluid interactions with
objects, color, shapes, genres, and velocity that energize this project; the exciting
rhetorical work occurs in agility, manipulation, craft, etc. Timothy Richardson, in 2014’s
“The Authenticity of What’s Next,” nicely captures my thinking here by considering
“hacking” from a rhetorical perspective. “Hacking,” he notes, “seems about reuse and
more importantly repurposing” (1). “The hack,” he continues, “is all about new
functionality . . . And a hack would be an argument, I suppose” (4).
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Rule 4: Be public. I could not know when I began if this project would catch on as
it has, whether or not D.C. would continue to generate this specific link between place
and commonplace, and how many adapted flags I would find. It seemed important to be
as public as the objects I’m tracking, in the sense of James J. Brown, Jr., who
encourages conducting rhetorical experiments in public (2). At first, I housed the archive
on Tumblr, moving to WordPress as my vision of DC/Adapters grew and changed. The
site houses the materials for future analysis and production, even as the archive itself
functions as a form of production and public circulation.
DC/Adapters could easily have died on the vine, but it has not it emerges from
sustained rhetorical energy in Washington, which the project itself continually gathers
and makes visible. The archive now collects and stores nearly four hundred unique flag
hacks (and counting). We know that emergence is the engine of rhetoric, as described
by Hawk’s exploration of vitalism in A Counterhistory of Composition, but I still feel
surprised with every addition to the archive. I wonder how long the phenomenon will
continue, when the topos will exhaust itself, while marveling at its renewable energies.
My four original guidelines, I see now, allow for the project’s acknowledgement of and
coemergence with these energies. The mundane surprise of each new object helps me
to see, more than I did two years ago with my original guidelines, how one might shape
ecological fieldwork projects by designing for such openness. But what I’m only now
beginning to understand are the ways that this intellectual work, and the research of the
local itself, demands dispositional change, too.
Emergence and Disposition
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Partiality confronts the ecological fieldworker: what I don’t know, or can’t access,
constantly thrusts itself in front of me. This section grapples with emergence as a
powerful force in ecological fieldwork and the disposition it requires of researchers. I
offer here an account of what it means to coordinate with a project, rather than to
conduct it, the traditional model wherein the researcher understands himself to be the
active agent and the project the necessarily passive creation of that agency. I’m trying
to be both open and systematic in tracking down relations between artifacts and places,
as well as coding them for analysis. This balance, between openness and systematicity,
indicates the limitations of the latter; systematic, in ecological fieldwork, amounts to
something like “oriented to the system,” rather than perfectly pinned down and
annotated. I would argue that the need to adapt one’s analytical framework for new
findings and to allow for a new disposition as a researcher is always in play no matter
what sort of work is pursued, but they are amplified with ecological fieldwork.
At the most fundamental level, hacks of the D.C. flag emerge as a regional
rhetoric. I use the term “regional rhetoric” in Jenny Rice’s sense. Rice writes, “Regional
rhetorics provide alternative ways of framing our relationships and modes of belonging,”
elaborating on them as, “particular (re)makings of patterns within specific material sites.
. . regional rhetorics are more specific and strategic instances of how topoi help to
create space” (“From Architectonic” 203). Hacked flag designs rewrite the urban
landscape not in the metaphorical sense, but in both a material way the objects
populate the space and in the sense I named earlier as local flavor, a felt sense of
bodies in that space. Specific places in D.C., in other words, coemerge with this
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regional rhetoric. When I talk with people about the project, local residents see what this
is about right away. Even when such individuals haven’t in highly conscious ways noted
the presence of the Washington flag, our conversation typically calls to mind the
nonconscious impression these objects have made. We all, in other words, acquire a
felt sense of these place/commonplace zones. Some stretches of city street feel like
popup gallery spaces for flag design hacks, including U Street NW, the Black
Broadway of historical Washington, and 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan, a
nightliferich strip.
Band sticker on U Street NW. Photograph by Matthew Pavesich
Outlining the features of regional rhetorics, Rice notes that they help people, “to
assess, critique, and respond to the global flows that cut through . . . specific local
spaces” (“From Architectonic” 204). Global flows coursing through D.C. include the
seismic shifts I mentioned earlier, substantial population overturn, exploding housing
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cost, and proliferation of highend dining and shopping. Locallyowned boutique
Redeem, for example, responds to the global flow of big box shopping with a
chalkboard sidewalk sign that reads “Redeem: Defend the District” and features a
handdrawn flag. Signs like these operate as a consumer call to arms. In seemingly
direct response to the changing racial proportions of Washington, one Magic Marker tag
in a bar bathroom adapts a flag by adding the text, “You’re in D.C. now, Wonderbread!”
This hack suggests another kind of defense the District might require. Advocates of
D.C. statehood, an issue rife with collisions between the local, national, and global, hack
flags by adding text such as “No Taxation without Representation.”
Though not exactly surprising, D.C. flag hacks are wildly diverse. As Hawk put it,
I’ve been discovering “collective points of contact and density” and the “connections
between places and commonplaces.” So far, I’ve identified five subsystems of flag hack
Shop Local, Street Art/Graffiti, Activist, Electoral, and Municipalish. These categories
have emerged unevenly and shaped the project over time. The local has determined the
project rather than the other way around, by which I mean that these categories form
through differences among the hacked flags. My tracing began with what I would come
to call Shop Local at Union Market, and now includes Glen’s Garden Market (with
tshirts featuring a store logo that replacing the flag’s stars with chickens), Whole Foods
(with totes on which cherry blossoms replace the stars), and Off Road bike shop (with a
window sign in which gear cogs replace the stars). Street Art/Graffiti includes crude
graffiti like a sidewalk etching with three letters “x” replacing the stars and the words
“Peter’s Meth Lab” arranged around it, and threestory high, commissioned murals like
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Antarah Crawley’s piece “Greetings from Dystopia City.” Ads for local electoral
candidates flared into view during the campaign cycles, featuring multiple genres, of
course, but predominantly the placard/lawn sign sometimes planted in a small yard but
mostly stapled or taped onto streetlights. Mayoral candidates and those for other
citywide offices distributed their signs all over the city, but those for advisory
neighborhood councils were more geographically specific of course. The subsystem I
call Cultural Consumption emerged most recently, splitting off from Shop Local. As I
found more and more local bands who hack flags on their promotional flyers and
stickers, it became harder to categorize their activity in the same category as a
newlyopened highend restaurant. Thus, Cultural Consumption, rather squishy I admit,
includes local bands and D.J.s, and other aspects of the local cultural like museum
exhibits. This is hardly a tidy distinction: restaurants and local bands both desire my
money, but they still feel different to me, which indicates the frequently felt collision
between my method and these constantly emerging categories. Lastly, while I have little
interest in municipal uses, which I don’t see as hacks, I’ve dubbed a category
Municipalish in order to tag hacked flags from, for example, initiative partnerships
between a city agency and a local nonprofit.
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Sticker for a local activist hacker space. Photograph by Matthew Pavesich
As I hope is clear, these subsystems contain wildly disparate action in and
among them; they are deeply heterogeneous. And while I can’t categorize a substantial
number of the adapted flags I’ve archived so far, I can report this early subsystem
distribution: Shop Local 35%; Cultural Consumption 17%; Street Art/Graffiti 11%;
Activist 10%; Electoral 9% (and remember, the latter flared for only a short time around
the campaigns). These figures leave fully 18% uncategorized (though Municipalish is
not yet accounted for) which indicates all the action that continues to push on my
categories, that challenges them and forges new ones. We’ll see if elements of this 18%
eventually coalesce into distinct new subsystems. Each subsystem emerged in this way
as well: I first found Shop Local hacks that day at Union Market, but then I found tags in
alleys and stickers on signs, and Street Art/Graffiti emerged. A next stage of analysis
will include investigation into the spatial distribution of these subsystems. In other
words, does Shop Local tend to be concentrated in a certain neighborhood or
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neighborhoods? Where do we see the densest Street Art/Graffiti occur? Emergence,
though, hasn’t only functioned in the formation of these subsystems.
Other sorts of emergence have also shaped my evolving analysis. For example,
I’ve begun to chart a taxonomy of graphic moves. So far, I’ve noted seven types of
graphic design hack (not to mention yet all the different genres, materials, and
methods of circulation). These include adding text; replacing the stars with other
images; replacing the bars with other images; replacing both; spatially reconfiguring the
three stars and two bars design, like flipping them upside down or smooshing them into
a pyramid; incorporating these elements into another image, a fairly common example
of which is to turn the stars and bars into a crown on someone’s head; and, lastly,
various combinations of any of these moves. Eventually, I will also look at patterns
across these categories what sorts of influences shape the hacking within
subsystems? Is there a more common type of topos adaptation in X subsystem? Also,
is there greater incidence of genre and forms of circulation with certain types of hack, or
in certain neighborhoods?
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Political advertisement in which the flag becomes the letter “E.” Photograph by
Matthew Pavesich.
Even my method has evolved as the project has proceeded. Though I designed
the project ecologically, which as a body of thought deemphasizes the sovereign
rational subject and distributes cognition and writing, I alone collected these initial
images and managed the archive at first. As time passed, I naturally discussed this
work with friends, colleagues, and students, and a kind of organic crowdsourcing
emerged. I began to receive submissions from others, which I was only too happy to
archive. These led to a contact with a reporter at the Washington Post, who wrote an
article on the project, which in turn spurred more submissions from others, this time
from outside of my personal network. I’ve even seen colleagues, like Steph Ceraso at
the University of Maryland Baltimore County, assign their students hacks of iconic city
images, using DC/Adapters as an archive of possible models, which in turn generates
more hacks to archive. This shift, however, from flag hacks as found objects to flag
hacks as resulting from my project itself in some way, raises questions about my place
in terms of this rhetorical production. The project, then, has experienced its own kind of
ecological expansion. In this matter, I turn to Kristie Fleckenstein et al. when they write,
“even as feedback helps the researcher determine the scope of research, it
simultaneously highlights the permeability of any circle a researcher draws to define the
organisminitsenvironment. . . . Project perimeters are not just flexible [but] also
porous” (398). The ecological fieldworker, I’ve found, must remain, “sensitive to the
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porosity of the perimeter” (399). Note they don’t say that the researcher must maintain
this perimeter.
Porosity of this kind suggests something like what Collin Brooke and Thomas
Rickert, in a chapter of Beyond Postprocess, indicate in their prompt for the field to,
“shift our research idiom from retrieval to interaction (175, original emphasis). They
describe the researcher’s interaction with “sentient ecologies,” of a piece with their
posthumanist bent, and while they address Web 2.0 environments and I address an
urban ecology, I’d suggest they share a kind of sentience. A shift from
researchasretrieval to researchasinteraction amounts to a foundational
methodological shift, especially when we’re dealing with objects still construed in regular
life and academe as semiotic objects, objects to be interpreted. A central part of this
shift, then, includes sliding towards a view in which hacked flag designs function as
rhetors themselves, objectagents in the world rather than the texts of distant human
rhetors. Without coming to understand research as interaction, the researcher dooms
herself to ignore, as Brooke and Rickert put it, “the rich, material interanimation between
people and things of the world” (166).
Ecological fieldwork also requires of researchers a dispositional shift. Sheridan,
Ridolfo, and Michel note that photographs and videos and archives, too, I would add
often assert themselves as arhetorical. Ecological fieldworkers must actively work
against the appearance of such arhetoricality. For Sheridan et al., the real ethical action
of rhetoric resides in the effort to reveal what’s beneath, to forego the voice of god
narration and foreground uncertainty (131). As I note in Original Guideline 2, I’m
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extremely limited in terms of what I can say about where hacked flags do and don’t
circulate in D.C.; I can only say where I’ve found them in the parts of the city through
which I move. More importantly, I need to create analyses and digital artifacts that
balance my findings with acknowledgement of the partiality of the work. The project, that
is, must foreground that the patterns I identify in these networks crisscross my network
pathways, not the city as a whole. This difference doubles down on the attractiveness of
the increasingly opensourced method that has emerged in DC/Adapters, but even then,
even as the reach of the project expands, I will still need to foreground its limitations. I
think here of Ralph Cintron’s linking the limitations of ethnography with its value: “What I
like about ethnography is the possibility of mobilizing a complex formula that utilizes
empirical data, reveals sociopolitical constraints, delivers a tentative analysis of social
structure, recognizes the limits of research, and is attuned to love (or at least to
empathy and companionship), and purposefully awakens these inside the ethnographer
and the readers” (10). For Cintron, then, the openendedness of such work intersects
with the researcher’s ethos; the form of ecological fieldwork, or so I would extend his
argument, coordinates the motions but also the feelings of researchers with their
environments.
People ask me if I plan to interview the humans involved in flag hacking and
I’m torn. A preecological approach would demand interviews in order to access
authorial intention. I am wary of my ability to balance human rhetors with each object’s
rhetorical power. I’d hate to do anything that would undermine the flat ontology of
humans and objects observed in DC/Adapters and the productive speculation prompted
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by the objects themselves. I don’t want to obscure the point that this is about the flaneur
in a city and how this network of material objects shapes that walker’s (now, walkers’)
experiences of the environment. I want to highlight objects’ opacity and the limits of
access, not tip the project toward the hermeneutic. The things themselves are no more
or less transparent to ecological fieldwork than in other methods, nor can we risk
pretending so. Ecological fieldwork doesn’t seek answers, or at least those on the
model of transparency; ecological fieldwork seeks attunement the result of sustained
interaction with the objects themselves, but also within the larger system. Rickert, in
Ambient Rhetoric, suggests the notsohumble aspirations of projects like mine and a
method like ecological fieldwork: “we take as provisional starting points the dissolution
of the subjectobject relation, the abandonment of representationalist theories of
language, an appreciation of nonlinear dynamics and the process of emergence, and
the incorporation of the material world as integral to human action and interaction,
including the rhetorical arts.” (xii). As ethical rhetoricians oriented toward the local, we
can ask of our work neither for more than this nor settle for less.
Mapping and Other Making
Fleckenstein et al. write, “Neither entirely material nor entirely semiotic,
ecologically oriented research is always poised on the edge of difference . . . To
paraphrase Bateson, [it] is undertaken so that new knowledge can be a difference that
makes a difference” (406, emphasis in original). Rhetoricians have always been poised
on this edge, in a way. In the introduction to George Kennedy’s definitive translation of
Aristotle’s On Rhetoric (2nd ed.), he notes how Aristotle vacillates between rhetoric as
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identifying the available means and putting those means to public use (16). Similarly,
Richardson highlights Aristotle’s use of the term dunamis, or the faculty or capacity to
act, another way of highlighting how we are at all times poised between observing the
available means and putting them into action. Ecological fieldwork, because of its up
close and personal engagement with the local, cannot maintain the appearance of mere
retrieval or observation, unlike other forms of research. It will never be enough in
ecological fieldwork, that is, to identify the available means of persuasion. Because
ecological research needs the local, as I suggested earlier, the ecological researcher
finds herself drawn to observe available means as they emerge, collide, and intertwine
in complex systems. Simultaneously, the experience of ecological fieldwork quietly
expresses the demands of the local, nudging the researcher into new and strange forms
of action to respond to making with making.
Writing studies has become increasingly interested in “making.” James J. Brown,
Jr. and Nathaniel Rivers envision rhetorical carpentry and the composers’ workshop.
Kristin Prins works from the term “craft,” noting that it, “calls to mind a maker, the tools
that maker uses, and the materials that maker shapes into an object. And as the
tradition of craft guilds illustrates, craft also implies a complex of relationships between
a maker’s identity, her interactions with others, and the things she makes” (145).
Alternately, David Sheridan prefers the term “fabrication” in his exploration of 3D
printing and composition. Jeff Grabill argues that rhetoric makes political things: we
must interest ourselves with the “assembl[y] of a we and then caring for that assembly”
(256). Fleckenstein et al. even frame archival work, curation, as a step to networked
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activism (406), a claim echoed by Ben McCorkle and Jason Palmeri in their coedited
issue of Harlot. Together, these examples illuminate the unprecedented moment of
productive creation in rhetoric and writing studies.
More specifically, mapping has emerged as one prominent mode of scholarly
making. We’ve seen collections like Else/where, an interdisciplinary exploration of digital
mapping techniques in 2006. Scot Barnett explodes past metaphors of space and place
with his elaboration of the “psychogeographical,” the way individuals “reexperience
familiar spaces at the level of the felt (and unfelt) bodily sensation,” and consideration
of Christopher Nold’s Bio Mapping project. Similarly, Jason Farman seems perfectly
justified in examining the intersection between informational and anthropological
cartography. Rhetoric and writing studies has also become increasingly interested in
mapping its own contours. For example, Benjamin Miller maps methods of study in the
field over time. Jeremy Tirrell, with his project Mapping Digital Technology in Rhetoric
and Composition History, “provides access to maps and data that document the history
of digital technology in the field of Rhetoric and Composition.” At rhetmap.org, Jim
Ridolfo charts rhetoric and composition PhD programs and jobs (rhetmap.org). The turn
to mapping in our field reflects a larger cultural shift; data visualization and other digital
visual capabilities seem to have brought about the mapping zeitgeist. You Are Here
(youarehere.cc), a part of the Social Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab, creates
maps that, “will be an aggregation of thousands of microstories, tracing the narratives of
our collective experience. We will make maps of the little things that make up life from
the trees we hug, to the places where we crashed our bikes, to the benches where we
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fell in love.” CourtVision Analytics “evaluates basketball performance via spatial and
visual modalities” (courtvisionanalytics.com). This American Life seems to have been
ahead of the curve with its episode on mapping in 1998. Fundamentally, the turn to
mapping indicates a growing sensitivity to ecological phenomena, in that they tether us
to the embodied and embedded local and maintain our attention at the level of the
system.
I’ve already begun the making aspect of DC/Adapters with the archive itself, but
the local pushes for more. As with Aristotelian dunamis, this archive gathers materials,
and it also verges into a making, a putting to public use. Mapping, however, is the next
stage. The site already features a heat map, demonstrating the overall spatial
distribution of all hacked flags I’ve found. The heat map highlights the areas with the
densest concentration of artifacts (from my encounters, not a god’s eye view,
remember). Next, I intend to partner with others in order to create a fully interactive map
that includes all identified hacked D.C. flags. The purpose of such an artifact is to offer
to others a digital experience that chronologically and spatially condenses my findings.
Such a map would include my photos of hacked D.C. flags pinned on the location I
found them, featuring filters to highlight items by subsystem category, material, and
method of circulation. Once the interactive map is completed, I intend to move into a
series of static maps with flags by neighborhood overlaid on a variety of data slices. I’ll
identify various proxies for gentrification, and create comparative maps that explore the
correlation between the shape of the hacked flag network and where gentrification is
most intense. These proxies will include the spatial distribution and density of building
23
permits, as well as change in relative wealth over specific time periods and change in
racial populations. Lastly, though I don’t have an even tentative answer yet for this
question, this project has forced me to consider how to map digital and material
circulation pathways onto each other. In a way, the sheer number of maps I intend to
create are more important than any single map. By making a whole series, I hope to
trigger the ethical function mentioned earlier, eschewing the voice of god narration and
foregrounding uncertainty. By piling maps on top of maps, the whole prevents any
single map from seeming to assert a single narrative or transcendent view of action in
this ecology. But there’s no reason to stop with mapping when it comes to the making
aspirations of the project.
After the mapmaking stage of DC/Adapters, I intend to act on the suggestion of a
friend that I first shrugged off, thinking it was too far outside my work as a teacher and
scholar in rhetoric and composition. He suggested putting together a gallery show, and
I’ve warmed to the idea over the last year, especially because I’ve come to believe that
such an ongoing event could, as Grabill put it, “assemble a we and maintain that
assembly.” As of now, I imagine a map of the District covering a gallery’s floor, maybe
coming up the walls, too. I hope to devise a way of displaying every hacked flag on this
map through a combination of material fabrication and projection. Visitors as they move
through the show will shoulder their way through adaptive rhetorics in the dense
clusters in which I found them. This immersed perspective, though, is just the first view;
I hope to devise a means of offering multiple positions from which to view the whole that
allow visitors to see the flag hacks sliced in different ways: by location, sure, but also by
24
subsystem, graphic move, and so on. Perhaps a catwalk view from above will allow a
view of neighborhood distribution. Partially elevated viewing portals from the side might
allow for the artifacts arranged at different elevations to show viewers subsystem
differentiation (so, shop local artifacts are at height X, while street art artifacts are at
height Y, and so viewable as slices). I’m also currently imagining how I might use an
augmented reality app like Tagwhat to virtually annotate each flag for viewers. And
while my imagination is running wild with possibilities, I may as well note that I’d like to
move the show around D.C. and thereby trace new layers to these networks.
Mapping and such other making constitute, “a ‘publics approach,’ [which]
understands publics and their discourse as the best site for making interventions into
material spaces” (Rice, Distant Publics 7). Rice invokes that word “difference” again: “In
other words, rhetorical theory and rhetorical pedagogy can make a difference to the
current development crisis not by interrogating ‘place’ but by helping to shape different
kinds of subjects who can undertake different kinds of work” (Distant Publics 7). The
combination of a publicly available archive, a sizable collection of digital maps, and a
roving gallery show, if successful, might energize a “publics approach” to this particular
local, especially if viewers at differently located galleries were offered materials to hack
the flags themselves for their own purposes.
As Fleckenstein et al. put it “Rather than beginning with a research question or
artifacts, which are the conventional starting points for research, a rhetorical researcher
enacts the systemic nature of ecological thinking through kairos, a move that shifts
research from a process of problem identification and problem solving to a response to
25
the urgency of a particular situation within which the researcher is immersed” (407,
emphasis in original). The local, all locals, always crackle with urgency. D.C.’s current
urgencies include intense development in the context of unique local politics like the
racial proportions of the city and its substatehood status. Locallyattuned rhetorical
research, as I have framed ecological fieldwork, coupled with the urge to make, cannot
“stop” gentrification (whatever that would mean) any more than can conventional means
of activism or even wellintentioned policy initiatives. Ecological fieldwork can, however,
activate in oneself and others a kind of sensitivity to and interaction with local environs.
Efforts to interface with the local, like that offered by this volume, must embrace
and extend ecological methods. If rhetorical ecologies haven’t gained traction as much
as some writing studies scholars would prefer, that can only change through
engagement with the local with precisely these methods. The future of rhetorical
research, as it now takes shape on the horizon, eschews retrieval and description and
the placid certainty that such methods historically reinforce. Instead, this future
embraces the essential indescribability of the local. Indeed, you always “have to be
there.” Ecological fieldwork plunges into the messy local, and crosses a threshold where
it becomes ethically impossible not to respond with your own hacking and making. This
is where the lines blur for rhetorical researchers, where we should force ourselves
always, to be with local publics.
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