Day One: Rhetorical Analysis of...

I'll be honest. I tend to blow conferences up in my head. Not in an angsty 'I hated your paper and wish I had a revolver' way (which is the gist of one comment in the very first session Danielle and I attended), but in a deific 'I'll finally see Scholar X and it will be fantastic' way. Sometimes that holds up. Sometimes it's just a little bit of a let-down because everyone reads their paper*. Sometimes you want to pull out your laptop and work on slides for your own presentation. And sometimes--hopefully only very rarely--you feel like getting up to leave because you can tell five minutes in that the first speaker (and maybe the other two) is going to seriously waste your time.

One thing that struck me about most of the panels I visited on the first day (one on object-oriented-rhetoric, one on material rhetoric, one on social (media) delivery, and one on identity and composition-rhetoric) was how theory-laden most of the work was. I wasn't especially surprised by this, but especially when considered from the context of our own backdrop of Texas Tech tech comm and rhetoric, I couldn't help but notice that many of the presentations I saw were largely absent of a text or a corpus under inspection. Lots of theory, lots of Latour, and little specificity. This isn't a *bad* thing, and I know there were plenty of sessions that did work out from specific examinations of objects, texts, and contexts (I heard about an investigation of Roman coin rhetoric that I was sad to have missed), but Kim, Danielle, and I had a series of moments where we'd look at or text one another and wonder if our panel--with its very specific rhetorical analyses of very specific artifacts--was somehow out of place.

Of course this is an overgeneralization. The second session I attended, "Rhetorical Remains: Affect, Enactment, and the Living Dead," chaired by Anne Wysocki, was an engaging and, well, affective exploration and representation of invention, voice, memory, and ordinary language and objects and how we might pass them through the inventios of different people, or how we embalm voices or disregard 'facts' or resist page logics at the same time as we engage academic nonvisual logics. Another paper in a different panel, presented by Jeff Rice about sentiment and engagement through social media delivery, took up craft brewing and an event called 'Dark Lord Days' to offer thoughtful perspectives on network tracing and the mythic and communal characteristics of social media. I enjoyed the first session very much, too; Alex Ried's discussion of mobile objects and glitching as a source of agency and thought was especially good, even if Latour and the New Aesthetic are a lot to take at 9:30 in the morning.

A high point was the keynote. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karly Kohrs Campbell presented a riveting discussion of American Exceptionalism and the phrase "a city on a hill" in presidential rhetoric. Starting with Puritan (not Pilgrim; sorry, Reagan) John Winthrop's sermon, their analysis pointed out the iterations of this phrase as used by Ronald Reagan and JFK, and then discussed the debate point of American Exceptionalism in Mitt Romney's attacks on Barack Obama. I won't say their address "saved the day" because it honestly didn't need to be saved. But after an exhilarating but exhausting morning of theory, their embrace of texts provided an important reminder of--as Danielle has discussed in a previous post--our audience here at RSA, and the diverse manifestations of that thing called "rhetorical scholarship."

Also. I could eat all of Philadelphia. Even the chocolate-dipped onions.

*Something that, as graduate students, we are often encouraged to avoid like the plague. Anathema? More like just another theme.