John, Emily, and Renae's Notes from Rickert's Introduction
Throughout the introduction Rickert weaves the cave paintings found in Lascaux, France as an example of ambient rhetoric. However, his specific task with the introduction is to “lay out the basic meanings of ambience, address some central terms, such as attunement, and then work through the thought of some of the key theorists, researches, and practitioners who underpin the rest of the book.” He also “examine[s] Thomas Cole’s self-admittedly conservative definition of rhetoric, using a brief but specific example to demonstrate its differences from a definition of rhetoric as ambient” (5).
Rickert first traces the concept of ambience through several centuries of scholarship (5-10). The word itself is Latin, and “largely it refers to what is lying around, surrounding, encircling, encompassing, or environing” (5). The French “added an aesthetic dimension,” allowing ambience to describe effects linked to “work, practice, or place” (6). Rickert backs up to describe ambience as akin to a Greek concept, “one that suggests that the subject/object dichotomy characteristic of modern thought has not always held such sway” (7). The Greek term to periechon has “active, embracing connotations” that have been taken up in contemporary scholarship (7). Ambience today is linked to perception (7), attunement (8), and scientific research (10). Therefore, “ambient rhetoric opens us onto these insights and thus is less an answer in itself than an invitation to disclose anew, to build further, and so begin to dwell” (37).
Rickert adds to the existing scholarship on ambience by looking at it through four different lenses: contemporary cognitive science, hermeneutic phenomenology (Heidegger), twentieth-century ambient music, and emerging stances on materiality (speculative materialism, “thing theory”, etc.) (11).
Through Heidegger, Rickert reexamines the subject-object relationship. He questions the position that subjects do things to objects and that objects do not impart any change on subjects (11, 13, 16). He later brings Heidegger’s work into conversation with cognitive and computer science to show how these sciences have worked to blend the line between subject and object (see computer mouse example on 18).
Rickert goes on to show, through Latour’s “political ecology” and Heidegger’s “dwelling”, that the subject-object/object-subject relationship is inseparable (26-7).
Next, Rickert discusses ambient music as a way of illustrating his concept of ambient rhetoric. “Ambient music, I am arguing, brings together at a practical level many of the thematic strands I have been discussing, including ambience’s connection to rhetoricity” (29). Music “facilitates listening at various levels of attention”; it also “generates a sense of potentially nonexistent place” (28). Rickert then turns to technology, describing it as acting on us with a rhetorical force that goes unnoticed--until said technology breaks (31). He goes on to argue “ambient intelligence radically changes who we are in our environs; it situates us differently in the world, evoking other ways of being. It… reveals rhetoric to us differently than it has appeared heretofore” (33).
Perhaps the overarching purpose of this text is outlined at the very end of the introduction where Rickert works to break down a common assumption of rhetorical theory. He says “Rhetorical theory tends to assume that intent equals result… the causality of rhetorical intent actualized through rhetorical work is often assumed as an unquestionable given” (35). Yet, “[b]ehind the conventional notion of intention lies a model of human being as an autonomous, self-knowing, subjective agent. Everything I have here described works to undo and disperse this model as a reduced view of human being” (36). Rickert describes the problematic emphasis on intent and self-consciousness (35-36). “...at any given moment, we are only partially conscious of what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what will result from it. When we tether intent to self-consciousness, we cut off large swaths of human activity from rhetorical practice in our rhetorical theory” (36). Instead of limiting rhetoric to human actors Rickert wants us to expand our understanding of what can act rhetorically.
“It is not an impartial medium but an ensemble of variables, forces, and elements that shape things in ways difficult to quantify or specify. These elements are simultaneously present and withdrawn, active and reactive, and complexly interactive among themselves as much as with human beings” (7).
Rickert describes “the necessity for an ecological conception of the perceptual environment in which various levels of attention and attunement are in play” (7).
“Attunement is not additive [to an environment]. Rather, there is a fundamental entanglement, with the individuation of particular facets being an achieved disclosure. Thus, wakefulness to ambience is… an attunement” (8).
“Mood is not reducible to psychological or conscious cognitive states, to ‘interior’ phenomena, since it is constitutively entangled within and emerges from the environment in which we are situated and therefore also is a prerequisite for intelligibility as such” (Ratcliffe quoted in Rickert 14)
“‘not a theory about the cultural significance of objects’ (110). Rather, it is about the power of objects themselves…. Thing theory wants to give back a sense of voice, of ‘objectness,’ to the thing, so that it is not understood exclusively within human meanings. The thing has a material thrust that coexists with and emerges within the surrounding ambient culture but is not exactly equivalent to it” (22).
From Latour. “Rhetoric is implicated in and gathered across things… things cannot be separated from the forms of scientific production that make them show up for us” (26). Latour argues for an “object-oriented rhetoric” (27).
“Dwelling is an attunement that can generate various kinds of knowledge, in particular a knowledge of how the world gives back, as it were, or how the world transcendent of human thought and power is integral to how life takes shape” (27).
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