My own conclusion
I wanted this part of the chora to be all about Heidegger, but in Rickert’s ambient style--Heidegger, ambience, the Lascaux caves—all of them—are intertwined, co-dependent, and feeding back and forth into each other. Suffice it to say that Rickert builds off of much of Heidegger's work on dwelling and re-thinking subject/object dichotomies. It is through a kind of recovery of Heidegger that Rickert is able to develop attunement and dwelling into inhabitable concepts now.
My chora, here, is not meant to make the images/ideas/creators/concepts separate, but rather always in relation to the other actively emerging things in the chora. Each piece represented in the chora, here, is constantly interacting with another piece in the chora. If you listen and watch carefully, they inter-animate each other. I conclude with a few remarks about this remarkable work.
I have, purposefully, created a review with my voice and my experience of the text. This renders my voice, if you choose to listen to any part of it, as material, integral to the experience and the environment, of both the text and your interaction with the text and this review. Yet my voice also exceeds me, as a material, outgrowing my intent as rhetorician or persuasive agent, processed through many other persuasive agents. Part of me is afraid to see how and where it exceeds me, but part of me offers this as a dwelling space and enactment of
Ambient Rhetoric. This review only emerges across multiple “distributed forms of mutual conditioning across many actants” and which all condition.
Finally while
Ambient Rhetoric offers many things to the field of rhetoric and composition, what I think I find most important is its careful recreation and composition of pathways and concepts--chora, ambience, dwelling, and attunement--from which to build future work on rhetorical ambience, digital space, sustainable dwellings and other emerging research in the field. This work is so emergent that we do not yet have ample bedrock of concepts from which to build, yet Rickert creates a very robust environ for future invention. Speaking as a graduate student trying to find language, media, and legibility within my own scholarship,
Ambient Rhetoric offers a much needed repository for more ways to practice and think through
inhabitable rhetoric(s),
sustainable rhetoric(s).