Animal-machine

Growing interest in the more-than-human world has sparked debate in communication and rhetorical studies about how to best approach a range of non-human entities: animals, plants, objects, machines and more. In Animal-machine, I argue that these categories do not emerge as pre-formed and discrete objects but are co-constituted with each other and human social orders. Rather than choose between a materialism before language or a radical linguisticism that reduces the world to a narrow understanding of human meaning, I outline a general rhetoricity which sees human discourse as just one subset of an open-ended economy of language, from animals to rocks to photons and more. This move complicates the representational logics that underly the stable forms of “animal,” “machine,” “object” as well as their distinction from human social imaginaries, revealing those formerly secure sites of identification as textual interplay between human and non-human markings. In this way, animal-machine points to the inability (and undesirability) of the move to place a non-human, material, pre-linguistic world outside or prior to human social orders of difference (race, gender, ability, etc.). I also argue against the tendency to separate models of non-human rhetoricity through turns—the animal turn, the new materialist turn, the object turn, the AI turn—which misses how entities such as, for example, “AI” and “animal” and their most distinguishing attributes emerge from a common and overlapping intellectual and rhetorical history.

Author dc:creator

• Rooney, David Aaron

Contributors dc:contributor

• Hartelius, E. Johanna, 1979-
• Joshua Gunn
• Diane Davis
• Stacey Sowards

• Animal
• Materiality
• Race
• Machine
• Language
• Rhetoric

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/61171

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:tdl-ir.tdl.org:2152/133843