Revamping Rhet/Comp’s Rhythms and Intensities: A Review of Circulation, Writing, & Rhetoric, edited by Laurie E. Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke

Circulation, Writing, & Rhetoric. Eds. Laurie E. Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke. Logan, Utah State University Press, 2018. 338 pp.

John J Silvestro, Slippery Rock University

(Published June 21, 2018)

Over the past 20 years, Rhet/Comp and Writing Studies (RC/WS) scholars have increasingly drawn upon circulation, which Laurie E. Gries in her introduction to Circulation, Writing & Rhetoric defines as both, "a cultural process…[and] a rhetorical process in that people, ideas, images, and discourse become persuasive as they move through the world and enter into various associations" (12) in an effort to extend various methods and theories. Scholars have drawn upon circulation to update classical rhetoric concepts, like Delivery, for Web 2.0 practices (Brooke; Porter; Ridolfo and DeVoss), to create theories of public rhetoric that align with the structures of 21^st Century publics (Hawk; Mathieu, Parks, and Rousculp; Trimbur), and to enlarge our research methods to capture previously-obscure sites and data, particularly in feminist and/or archival work (Carr; Dingo; Kirsch and Royster). Circulation, Writing & Rhetoric entangles itself in this conversation, endeavoring to fold it back onto RC/WS in an effort to transform the entire discipline.

Laurie E. Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke, the co-editors of Circulation, Writing & Rhetoric, situate the collection as an effort to establish circulation as a threshold concept for RC/WS. Circulation, they argue, affords a conceptual gateway through which engenders a substantially different view of the discipline, both in particulars – research methods, theories, pedagogies – and in the general - our dominant theories of how writing and rhetoric effects individuals, communities, and cultures (5-6). Put in circulation studies terminology, circulation enables new rhythms and intensities in RC/WS. However, the co-editors leave the substantially different views, and the new rhythms and intensities, un-defined: is circulation an under-acknowledged current in rhetoric's history that is now emerging, as Gries and Rickert suggest, or is circulation a means through which RC/WS can free itself from our received traditions of writing pedagogy and classical rhetoric, as Dobrin argues in his response essay, or is circulation merely a framework through which scholars can advance key RC/WS sub-areas?

It is into this exigency—circulation as an un-defined threshold concept for RC/WS—that Gries and Brooke forward the collection's 14 chapters and five response essays. Yet by establishing the exigency and then leaving it to others to respond to it through their own projects, the collection (unintentionally) offers a narrow response to the exigency. Given that this is an edited collection, Circulation, Writing & Rhetoric includes work from scholars working in RC/WS sub-areas that have already engaged with circulation, specifically digital, feminist, and public rhetorics, all sub-disciplines with decades of scholarship connecting circulation to the sub-areas methods, practices, and pedagogies. In fact, all but one of the chapters situates itself as working in one those three sub-areas. Thus, the collection offers much for RC/WS scholars working in digital, feminist, and/or public rhetorics. Yet in doing so, it fails to present the "substantially different views" of RC/WS as a whole, or even of other sub-areas in RC/WS, such as composition pedagogy, cultural rhetorics, or sonic/visual/multimodal rhetorics.

For example, some of the collection's most compelling work comes from the chapters engaging with feminist research methods. These chapters demonstrate that circulation affords new ways to perform feminist criticism: that by tracing the spatio-temporal flows of discourse feminist critics can disentangle and expose the histories of arguments, that have seemingly become "given" and uncontestable (Clark) or unravel how discourses of female empowerment ultimately perpetuate neoliberal economic and political forces (Dingo). While others demonstrate how attention to the circulation of discourse across space and time enables archivists new possibilities for uncovering practices and/or communities otherwise marginalized in the records and/or provide new ways for studying documents (Enoch; Graban and Sullivan; Royster and Kirsch). While invaluable, only one of these chapters presents notions of circulation's possibilities beyond the specific feminist research methods being employed - Rebecca Dingo's articulation of a feminist-and-circulation focused writing pedagogy.

Similarly, the chapters on public rhetorics all present a vision of publics generated and sustained through the punctuality of circulating public discourses, and by extension a vision of public rhetoric not as discourse to-be-distributed to particular spaces and audiences but as actants circulating within and across publics. Such a perspective enables the scholars to trace the public impacts of everything from the remains of an activist art project to the currents of nostalgia on Facebook to locative media apps. As Boyle and River summarize in "Augmented Publics," "Each public...is the result of the activation of a certain kind of circulation" (84). Yet these visions of publics elaborate upon existing theories of publics and public rhetoric that public rhetoric scholars have been working with for a while, see Hawk and Trimbur for oft-cited examples.

Similarly, the chapters engaging digital rhetoric predominately further one of the dominant and ongoing projects of digital rhetoric scholarship – articulating the distinct affordances and possibilities of social media platforms, networks, and digital infrastructures. For example, in "Entanglements that Matter," Edwards and Lang trace the circulation of the #YesAllWomen hashtag beyond Twitter out into other social media platforms, protests, clothing, and other material objects. Knitting together circulation studies and new materialism, they forward a new vision of activist hashtags. The co-authors argue that hashtags can develop a distinct thing-power as they circulate and subsequently become entangled with other objects, narratives, and bodies. Through this circulation, hashtags become topoi or at the very least a thing from which individuals can discuss ideas and issues (122-124). The other chapters on digital rhetorics explore similar terrain. They articulate how, when considered through the lens of circulation, our perspectives on either digital infrastructures or objects change.

In “For Public Distribution,” Dale M. Smith and James Brown Jr take up digital infrastructures and their effects on publics and in doing so offer the collection's most compelling argument as to how and why circulation fundamentally alters RC/WS. They argue that the Internet and network technologies have become the dominant forms of circulation. Search engines, social media, and digital archives have generated new forms of punctuality – texts circulate during events, rippling almost immediately across the horizontal nodes in those networks. However, Smith and Brown Jr note that networks are not delivery systems for free-for-all circulation, as they are publicly perceived to be. In fact, corporate and government control measures, see protocols, regulate what circulates and when it circulates, and these protocols have been deliberately obscured by the corporations under the cover of the free-for-all visions of networks (212-217).

Thus, Smith and Brown Jr argue public perceptions of circulation, and by extension public rhetoric, have become flawed.  Publics expect the rapid circulation of information during crucial, public events yet they largely do not have the knowledge to understand the ways the information and discourse have been constrained and regulated (211). Circulation not only structures our publics through new forms of punctuality, but our public knowledge of that punctuality has become dramatically more limited than it was before. In some ways we are more aware of circulation and its influence on publics than ever before – the potential for viral discourse and leaked information to shape the public has become a common public refrain – yet, as Brown Jr and Smith point out other elements have become increasing black-boxed from public awareness – particularly what information is being generated about internet users and stored in achieves and even what texts are being prevented from public circulation without public awareness.

The new awareness of circulation, which seemingly occludes the public's lack of understanding about other forms of circulation, necessitates a profound change in the ways we publicly define writing, communication, rhetoric, and even knowledge. While we have an increased awareness of and ability to participate in the circulation of the texts and information that shape our publics, we are also regulated and constrained by networks collecting and hiding information from our publics in archives we often don't know exist.  It is this change in public perception of circulation that most necessitates a change in how we study and perform writing, rhetoric, and composition. We must rethink how we define publics and how they are constituted by circulation and in turn alter our rhetorical theories to fit those publics. Based on these observations, Smith and Brown Jr argue that we must re-position the rhetor. She is no longer the producer of texts but the discerning auditor of the information and objects circulating to and beyond her (221). Yet, much like the other chapters in the collection, Smith and Brown Jr's argument is most applicable the three aforementioned sub-areas, in this case digital and public rhetoric.

However, the collection does contain one chapter that demonstrates how circulation could expand other RC/WS sub-areas. In "Open's Access(ibility)?" Jay Dolmage draws upon circulation to re-define rhetoric in such a way that it addresses the different ways rhetoric reaches bodies, "rhetoric [is] the circulation of rhetoric through the body" (263). A definition through which he exposes how the recent wave of "access-able," online academic journals, which attempt to make academic work available to the general public and which he praises, have unfortunately not made texts actually accessible for all. He notes that many "access"-able, online journals have failed to make their texts accessible for individuals who can't easily access print or visual texts. As Dolmage writes, "We need accessible texts that also democratize, reinvigorate the public sphere, and accrue value as they are shared, commented upon, and redeployed" (274).  Dolmage's chapter demonstrates how circulation can lead to re-conceptualizations of both general RC/WS theories, such as definitions of rhetoric, and specific areas, disability studies, public rhetorics, and digital publishing.

Additionally, Dolmage's definition hints at a range of issues that circulation could be used to elaborate in RC/WS, such as how does rhetoric move and assemble with different bodies and identities? How can we study cultures and communities that might experience circulation differently or that might resist circulation? What about the ways circulation suggest changes in our RC/WS classrooms? For the collection also lacks considerations of circulation's potential for extending writing pedagogies. Only two chapters address pedagogy, and only Rebecca Dingo outlines a specific circulation pedagogy. The lack is all the more significant given, as Dolmage points out, 70% of the work done by RC/WS scholars is performed by untenured adjuncts, VAPs, and graduate students who are overwhelmingly tasked with teaching and spreading RC/WS in undergraduate composition courses (265). If circulation is to become a threshold concept for RC/WS then it must help us fundamentally re-see the dominant RC/WS work, writing pedagogy, and sites, composition classrooms, something this collection fails to do.

Cumulatively, the collection reads less as a case for circulation's position as a RC/WS threshold concept and more of an effort to deepen the groves that existing RC/WS work on circulation has already worn. The collection articulates one aspect of threshold concepts that Gries noted in her introduction, "This collection can be understood as representing what the discipline of RC/WS knows for now about circulation" (5), and in work and theories of the sub-areas of digital, feminist, and public rhetoric circulation has accumulated a central role. Thus, for scholars working in those sub-areas, the collection provides multiple methods, concepts, and potential research sites to draw upon. The five response essays at the end of the collection outline numerous, productive questions for future scholars in digital, feminist, and/or public rhetorics to examine. Using the framework from Edwards and Lang's chapter, the collection situates circulation as a "thing" from which to think differently about those sub-areas.

Ultimately, the work of re-seeing RC/WS through circulation remains beyond the collection itself. More work is needed in areas that have yet to engage circulation. Gries herself acknowledges as much in her "Afterword," concluding the collection by asking, "How might circulation, as an emergent threshold concept, open up studies of rhetoric and writing in ways that we have yet to even imagine?" (329). The collection does offer a solid starting point for scholars in other sub-areas of RC/WS looking to engage with circulation. The chapters from the collection can be assembled with some of the earlier foundational work on circulation, such as Edbauer; Ridolfo and DeVoss; Trimbur, and then merged with methods from other sub-fields, generating alternative rhythms and intensities for RC/WS work.