Review of Communication

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Figures of entanglement: special issue

introduction

Christopher N. Gamble & Joshua S. Hanan

To cite this article: Christopher N. Gamble & Joshua S. Hanan (2016) Figures of
entanglement: special issue introduction, Review of Communication, 16:4, 265-280, DOI:
10.1080/15358593.2016.1221992

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REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION, 2016
VOL. 16, NO. 4, 265–280
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2016.1221992

GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Figures of entanglement: special issue introduction

Christopher N. Gamblea and Joshua S. Hananb
a
Department of Communication, University of Washington, Seattle, U.S.A.; bDepartment of Communication
Studies, University of Denver, Denver, U.S.A.

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate

entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual
affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and
as part of their entangled intra-relating.
—Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of “new materialisms” scholarship both within
and beyond the discipline of communication and rhetorical studies.1 While generally
sharing poststructuralist affinities, this turn aims to refigure meaning in less anthropo-
centric and more ecological terms. If poststructuralist critiques of subjectivity have high-
lighted the contingency and malleability of human discursive formations, thereby enabling
previously foreclosed theoretical advances and political progress for many social groups,
new materialisms argue that these important achievements have nevertheless all too
often unwittingly bolstered an anthropocentric understanding of matter and meaning
that undercuts the potential reach of those gains, imperils them by reinforcing our obliv-
iousness to an emerging ecological crisis, and continues to foreclose similar gains for the
large majority of nonhumans. In response, new materialisms call for an appreciation not
only of the contingent dynamism and agency of the discourses, institutions and technol-
ogies that constitute an ostensibly discrete human domain but also of matter itself. In
doing so, new materialisms insist that humans and human discourses are always ontologi-
cally enmeshed with more-than-human configurations and also often seek to better under-
stand how other-than-human creatures, critters, things, actants, objects and powers
behave as meaningful agencies in their own right. As such, new materialisms invite us
to revisit longstanding and foundational questions about the nature and scope of language,
meaning, subjectivity, and how these relate to questions of ontology, ethics, and political
intervention.
While these questions are too complex and wide-ranging for any single paper or collec-
tion of papers in a special issue to do them justice, our hope for this special issue on
“Figures of Entanglement” is to promote a rich and fruitful conversation on them in rheto-
ric and communication studies. We do so by organizing that conversation around what we
view as the profoundly compelling and provocative notion of “entanglement” as presented
by Karen Barad in her 2007 tour de force book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. In the broadest terms, and as ele-
gantly expressed in the epigraph, Barad’s notion of entanglement refers to a thoroughly
relational account of ontology in which entities never preexist as discrete, atomic

CONTACT Christopher N. Gamble cng120@uw.edu

© 2016 National Communication Association
266 C. N. GAMBLE AND J. S. HANAN

individuals with determinate boundaries that then combine or interact with other preex-
isting individuals. Rather, as the quantum experiments that prompt this account demon-
strate, not even atoms are “atomic” entities prior to their measurement or observation, but
emerge as either particles or waves only intra-actively, that is, as part of mutually exclusive
techno-scientific practices and discourses. Likewise, those practices and discourses do not
fully precede their entanglement with atomic (or subatomic) agencies. From this posthu-
manist perspective, then, there is no outside of matter just as there is no outside of
meaning, and thus ontology consists of “a multitude of entangled performances of the
world’s worlding itself.”2
Barad’s work has been highly cited across an impressive array of academic disciplines
outside of rhetoric or communication studies. We find it unfortunate, however, that to
date her work has received scant attention in our field. In fact, sparked by Chris’s
initial exposure to Barad’s work, we have ourselves been engaged in a spirited conversation
over the past several years in which we have both become increasingly struck by the far-
reaching and vital contributions that her notion of intra-active entanglement could make
to our discipline. In particular, we are drawn to this notion for its potential to bridge what
currently exist as disparate accounts of materialism in rhetorical studies. That is, while to
our knowledge there has been no effort to consider possible affinities between “standard”
Marxist- and poststructuralist-influenced materialist rhetoric scholarship and the “new
materialist” work presently emerging, we believe entanglement enables precisely such
an illumination, as well as, at once, productively reconfiguring their points of divergence.
Ultimately, our hope is that such an illumination will facilitate future efforts to explore the
intra-active entanglements of other areas of scholarship as well, particularly those that
continue to take for granted a radical division between domains of human meaning
and identity and of other-than-humans and broader ecologies. Thus, when Josh was pre-
sented with the opportunity by Review of Communication editor Pat Gehrke to edit a
special issue somehow addressing rhetorical materialism, we jumped at the chance to
put Barad’s work more prominently into conversation with our field, in the belief that
doing so would mutually and, in a key term of Barad’s that we discuss below, diffractively
benefit both.
The remainder of the introduction proceeds in three main sections. In the first section,
we recount rhetoric’s—always entangled—relationship with its past in order to highlight
its origins in a metaphysics that divides meaning from matter according to a logic of sup-
plementarity. We then turn to a brief discussion of contemporary scholarship that
attempts to overcome that logic by identifying “third terms” that move us in the direction
of an entangled understanding of rhetoric. In the second section, we build on this work in
an explicitly materialist direction. Specifically, we offer a reading of how standard and new
rhetorical materialisms identify “figures of entanglement” that illuminate increasing
aspects of the generativity and dynamism of matter and rhetoric. In doing so, we also con-
sider the points of overlap and divergence between these materialist areas of scholarship.
Given the space limitations of this introduction, our discussion of this work is highly selec-
tive and partial (in both senses) and is intended as only one of several possible means of
considering Barad’s intervention into rhetoric and communication studies. In the third
section, we explore in greater detail the rhetorical implications of Barad’s intra-active
account of materialism. In doing so, we provide a brief distillation of how we understand
key aspects of the quantum physics basis for Barad’s theory of diffraction that, we argue,
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 267

enables a rethinking of rhetoric, ontology and politics in irreducibly material terms. We

conclude the introduction with a discussion of the papers in this issue and by acknowled-
ging key entanglements that made this special issue possible.

Rhetoric: from deficient supplement to figure of entanglement

Insofar as it is traced to classical Greek metaphysics as conventionally understood, rhetoric
originates in decidedly nonentangled terms. Rather than emerging as an integral part of a
dynamic and mutually constitutive constellation of terms, rhetoric formally enters
“Western” discourse, in the form of an abstract noun in Plato’s Gorgias,3 as an utterly
equivocal notion structured by a “logic of supplementarity.”4 According to such a logic,
one term is cast as an intrinsically meaningless supplement that acquires its meaning
and identity only in relation to an intrinsically and absolutely meaningful, nonsupplemen-
tal term. In the Gorgias, Plato invokes precisely this logic in his characterization of rhetoric
as a deficient—and potentially dangerous—supplement to philosophy. Rhetoric is
deficient, he says, because it is a mere “knack” acquired experientially and therefore con-
fined to the illusory domain of bodily senses and opinion, whereas philosophy is able to
access and facilitate knowledge of the preexisting, timeless, and immaterial truths of the
prelapsarian soul. Thus lacking epistemic grounding of its own, rhetoric is dangerous,
according to Plato, because it is a “species of flattery” whose practitioners masquerade
as genuinely knowledgeable philosophers seeking to edify while instead beguiling their lis-
teners’ souls with mellifluous half-truths or falsehoods in pursuit of personal or political
gain. Moreover, this relationship of supplementarity also underlies the dialogue’s descrip-
tion of the identities of those who practice rhetoric and philosophy. That is, against the
temperate, balanced souls of philosophers that are content and self-contained given
their propinquity to absolute truth, the souls of rhetoricians are depicted as intemperate,
perpetually unsatisfied and “leaky” given that they are driven instead by fleeting earthly
passions and hedonistic desires.5
Aristotle, as is well known, subsequently assigned rhetoric to its own proper and right-
ful domain of practical knowledge by defining it as the ability to discover the means of
persuasion in the civic arena. While often seen as attenuating much of rhetoric’s danger
in Plato’s conception of it as an epistemic nomad, Aristotle’s conception nonetheless pre-
serves its supplemental status. In particular, and in sharp contrast to the philosophical
domain of absolute, universal and transcendent truths and to the perfect reasoning
ability of philosophers, Aristotle characterizes the civic arena as inescapably imbued
with probability and contingency given that many of the people and topics addressed in
it are simply not amenable to reason. As a result, rhetoric cannot produce real knowledge
and remains a deficient version of philosophy, constituting the best possible means of per-
suading a reason-deficient public in the realm of mere opinion. Thus, although Aristotle
characterizes rhetoric as a counterpart to dialectic, as both begin from provisional pre-
mises, the latter, he says, pursues those premises with perfect reasoning in pursuit of
genuine knowledge, while rhetoric’s reasoning remains conditional, fallible and therefore
inferior. In vividly highlighting that inferiority, Jasper Neel states, in his book chapter “The
Degradation of Rhetoric,” that rhetoric for Aristotle becomes justifiable only “because the
disabled, incapable, weakminded, slow-witted, coarse, vulgar, burdensome, uneducated,
boorish, and diseased mob cannot rise to the demands of dialectic.”6 In short, much
268 C. N. GAMBLE AND J. S. HANAN

like in Plato’s conception, Aristotle’s rhetoric can at best act merely as a supplement to
help make preexisting philosophical truths more clear or palatable to the deficient hoi
polloi.
In the writings of both Plato and Aristotle, then, rhetoric is conceptualized in terms of a
logic of supplementarity. As such, in both accounts rhetoric becomes the name for that
which must be identified, reduced to a mere supplement, and negated, in order to consti-
tute the ostensibly sovereign domain of philosophy.7 Rhetoric thus functions as what
Derrida aptly calls a “constitutive erasure” that, through its simultaneous presence and
absence, marks those aspects of knowledge that are marred by the material domain of
deficient imitations (sensible Becoming) in order to establish the intelligible, philosophical
knowledge of the unmarked, immaterial domain of generative meaning (Being or the ideal
Forms).8 In so doing, rhetoric for both Plato and Aristotle acts not only to elevate the
knowledge of philosophers above the knowledge of rhetoricians but also, implicitly, to
position the characteristics of the Greek, male philosopher as the unmarked ideal of
human identity itself, thereby acting to “metaphorically condense” all other sensible,
material bodies as themselves deficient supplements against that immaterial ideal as
well.9 Given its function as an overdetermined supplement, it should be no surprise
that rhetoric assimilates unto itself and has since been variously associated with the
characteristics of all of the other supplemental terms, including embodiment and
disability,10 femininity and seduction,11 “blackness,”12 transsexuality,13 and animality.14
Nor should it be surprising, then, either, that, the subordination of rhetoric to philosophy,
has played an integral part in the larger economy of power and signification underlying the
history of colonialism and violence committed against bodies that deviate from dominant
Western standards and ideals of race, class, sexuality, ability, and humanness.15
Rhetoric’s relationship to a logic of supplementarity, however, always exceeds the per-
formative relations in which it is emplaced. Consistent with its function as a kind of meta-
supplement whose negation is necessary for constituting not only the opposition between
itself and philosophy but indeed all of the other implicated oppositions as well, rhetoric
has a contemporary history of being read in relation to a number of shifting and poly-
morphic “third terms.” In this poststructuralist approach, one locates a particular
“figure” or “trope” that cannot be reduced to either side of a particular dialectical opposi-
tion, but whose erasure was necessary for establishing that opposition. In doing so, oppo-
sitional terms that had been permanently locked into a logic of supplementarity and
normativity are now revealed to be mutually constitutive. As a result, a dimension of
meaning that had been rendered timeless and immutable is recast as fluid and dynamic,
and to that extent, rhetoric and philosophy emerge as generative of one another as well.
In her book, Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure, Michelle
Ballif illustrates this entangled logic by reading the figure of Helen in Gorgias’ famous
encomium to her as a third term that is not reducible to either a subject or object of
desire. In doing so, she argues that “Gorgias makes a proto-postmodern move to displace
common assumptions of active/passive, subject/object, being/not being by recasting Helen
as a woman with a seductive figure, which eludes capture and mastery.”16 Furthermore, in
embracing a reading of Gorgias’ encomium as aligning Helen with rhetoric itself, Ballif
argues that just as Helen and rhetoric had previously colluded in order to position both
woman and rhetoric as deficient supplements, in Gorgias’ figuring of Helen as a third
term, they now collude to recast both woman and rhetoric as seductive figures that
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 269

perpetually eschew these dualisms.17 Consequently, a dimension of rhetoric and identity

that had been disparaged as merely and immutably supplemental is now recast as genera-
tive and dynamic, while the sovereignty of philosophy is therefore undermined.
Generally rooted in postmodern sensibilities, however, existing scholarship that reads
rhetoric in relation to third terms tends to uncritically confine its project to a preexisting
domain of human culture or symbols.18 As a consequence, this reading strategy implicitly
reproduces an opposition between an exclusively human realm of meaning and a mean-
ingless realm of passive matter. As we discussed, however, rhetoric’s supplemental status
in relation to philosophy is thoroughly implicated in the association of rhetoric with the
deceptive, shifting domain of sensible materiality. Moreover, it is precisely their materiality
that all of the nonnormative bodies associated with rhetoric’s disparagement share in
common and that therefore underlies that disparagement as its condition of possibility.19
Hence, while third terms promote a reading of rhetoric in partially entangled rather than
supplementary terms, in our view the assumption of human discursive exceptionalism that
has tended to guide such an approach cannot but end up reinstalling a meaning/matter
dualism that greatly curtails our ability to appreciate the dynamism of the more-than-
human world or of our entanglement with it.20
In more thoroughly transforming rhetoric’s enduring relationship to a logic of supple-
mentarity, then, we argue that we must grapple with the role of matter in making possible
the opposition between symbolic meaning and meaningless materiality that structures
rhetoric’s supplemental status. In the remainder of the introduction, we seek to do so
through a reading of standard and new materialist rhetoric scholarship that demonstrates
how they variously locate “figures of entanglement” that enable the recasting of particular
dimensions of matter and rhetoric from meaningless supplements into generative and
dynamic terms. In place of third terms, we propose “figures of entanglement” for its
stronger emphasis on the deferred material dimensions of symbolic meaning, given its
derivation from the work of Barad. Our aim in the reading that follows, in short, is to
illuminate the extent to which these projects promote an entangled account of rhetoric
themselves and with one another. We then turn, in the subsequent section, to Barad’s
reading of quantum physics to show how we think it supports and affirms rhetorical
materialism by promoting diffraction as a figure of entanglement.

Tracing figures of entanglement in standard and new materialist rhetorics

The first attempt to formulate rhetoric as a problem of rhetorical materialism is generally
attributed to Michael Calvin McGee in his 1982 essay, “A Materialist’s Conception of
Rhetoric.”21 Beginning from the Marxist axiom that praxis precedes consciousness,
McGee critiques Plato not simply for denying rhetoric epistemic status but also for the
idealism underlying that denial that positions human nature, along with the principles
of human persuasion, in a timeless domain of meaning that is both unaffected by the
movement of material history and, however ironically, inaccessible to rhetoricians. In
our reading of it, then, McGee’s critique is not only or primarily that Plato reduces rhetoric
to a mere supplement in relation to philosophy but that he permanently suspends that
supplementary relationship fully beyond material, historical change. On this basis,
McGee admonishes many of his rhetorical predecessors for their preoccupation with
attempting to disprove Plato by either demonstrating that rhetoric always has, in fact,
270 C. N. GAMBLE AND J. S. HANAN

had the idealist epistemic standing that Plato denies it, or by establishing that standing
themselves.22 In either case, argues McGee, such efforts take for granted Plato’s misguided
view that a genuine rhetoric ought to function, like philosophy, according to a “product-
model” guided by timeless, ahistorical principles grounded in knowledge of the equally
timeless and ahistorical human condition. Against these efforts, McGee advances a
“process-model” of rhetoric instead, which seeks to demonstrate inductively that
human discursive meaning always emerges as an integral part of a shifting and
dynamic material history. In doing so, McGee effectively treats “historical human experi-
ence” as a figure of entanglement whose erasure was necessary for establishing the opposi-
tion between timeless, immaterial meaning and meaningless material change in the first
place. As a result, a dimension of Plato’s meaningless matter now emerges as partly gen-
erative of meaning, while, conversely, Plato’s immaterial and immutable meaning emerges
as at least partly material and mutable.
Rather than fully disrupting a logic of supplementarity, however, McGee’s project ends
up unwittingly reinstalling part of this logic in a new location. In figuring rhetoric’s mate-
rialization as a “species of coercion” that symbolically “sublimates” physically coercive
expressions of power, Ronald Walter Greene argues, in his touchstone essay, “Another
Materialist Rhetoric,” that McGee implicates a logic of “expressive causality” that positions
the category of historical experience as itself outside of production.23 As an alternative to
this dialectical logic, Greene reconceptualizes rhetoric’s materiality through the Foucaul-
dian language of an apparatus. Defined as a “technique that makes meaning possible,”
apparatuses function as Greene’s figure of entanglement by emphasizing rhetoric’s role
in the materialization of elementary units of ontological meaning.24 In contrast to
McGee, then, who casts history as an entanglement figure that nonetheless remains
outside of its own material and discursive production, Greene shows how the category
of history itself is produced by apparatuses. Thus, by advancing an overdetermined
logic of production that Matthew S. May has recently labeled “immanent causality,”25
Greene’s project successfully obviates the possibility that any dimension of human discur-
sive meaning could exist outside of its relational and iterative production by material
apparatuses. Put differently, by refiguring rhetoric’s materiality as a “publicity effect,” or
retroactive materialization of power, Greene’s aim is to demonstrate how meaning itself
is always entangled with its own interactive, performative, and mutually constitutive
logics of production that are never reducible to representational frameworks.
This “standard” materialist account of meaning, as developed by McGee and Greene,
has exerted a powerful influence over rhetorical studies. In addition to spurring a larger
materialist conversation in the discipline that centers on what Barbara A. Biesecker and
John Louis Lucaites have termed “rhetoric’s materiality,”26 this line of scholarship has con-
verged with an “interactional” political agenda that emphasizes the racialized, classed, and
sexualized dimensions of publics.27 In part, these streams of inquiry have advanced such a
view by drawing out the role of what Judith Butler calls the “constitutive outside” in the
materialization of public identities.28 In such an account, the publicity effect made possible
by apparatuses not only performatively sutures and articulates the gaps between different
elementary units of ontological meaning, as in Greene’s initial formulation, but also results
in the economization of a “surplus” by overdetermining how particular bodies materialize
in praxis.29 Given that this “surplus” invariably comprises the nonnormative, “supplemen-
tal” identities that must be violently erased in order to produce and sustain normativity,
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 271

this scholarship demonstrates that “supplemental” identities and norms are always
mutually constituted and entangled. In doing so, it also highlights the political need to
“queer” the meaning of nonnormative identities and bodies in order to transform and
rearticulate the larger normative logic into terms more capable of affirming and valuing
otherness.30 Nodding to a recent special issue of Review of Communication, we could
characterize this overdetermined logic of social change as contributing to what the
editors of that issue call “rhetorical multitudes.”31
Independent of these “standard,” interactional materialist approaches, more recent
scholarship has emerged that identifies itself with a “new materialist” project. While com-
prising heterogeneous streams, new materialisms are generally distinguished by their com-
mitment to understanding meaning and identity in nonanthropocentric terms through an
emphasis on the agency and vitality of matter itself. Thus, if standard materialisms have
brought attention to the role of apparatuses and publics in fabricating human history
and meaning, new materialists show how the oppositions between human and nonhuman
or nature and culture are likewise produced by a “publicity effect,” which is therefore not
reducible to an exclusively human domain of apparatuses and technologies.32 In the most
fully developed new materialist account of rhetoric to date, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attune-
ments of Rhetorical Being, Thomas Rickert greatly advances such a project by demonstrat-
ing how the fabrication of publics is not only never reducible to humans but also always
premised on a necessary and generative role of “withdrawal.” Similar to Butler’s “consti-
tutive outside,” withdrawal becomes a figure of entanglement that emphasizes how
coming-to-matter always involves the production of a particular dynamic reserve of inde-
terminacy that can always partially manifest itself again and thereby constitute the world
anew, through a novel withdrawal. In extending such a notion in a posthumanist direction,
however, Rickert demonstrates how that dynamic reserve is not limited to human identi-
ties or bodies that discourse fails to fully capture; rather, it encompasses the larger
ambient, material ecology whose ongoing withdrawals constitute us and condition our dis-
courses. In doing so, Rickert’s project exemplifies how new materialist work can greatly
expand and transform the purview of materiality in rhetorical studies. Thus, if McGee for-
mally inaugurated the rhetorical materialism conversation by arguing that “rhetoric is
‘material’ by measure of human experiencing of it, not by virtue of our ability to continue
touching it after it is gone,”33 then new materialisms bring this account full circle by
demonstrating how matter itself is, in fact, the fully tangible condition of possibility for
human and more-than-human experience and rhetorical meaning.
However, while new materialist scholarship calls our attention to the entanglements of
human meaning and other-than-human materialities, to date there has been no effort
within rhetorical scholarship to place this work into conversation with existing standard
materialist accounts of entanglements among humans.34 This compartmentalization is
unfortunate given the myriad entanglements linking nature, gender, race, class, sexuality,
and ableism.35 As Mel Chen argues,
vivid links, whether live or long-standing, continue to be drawn between immigrants, people
of color, laborers and working-class subjects, colonial subjects, women, queer subjects,
disabled people, and animals, meaning, not the class of creatures that includes humans
but quite the converse, the class against which the (often rational) human with inviolate
and full subjectivity is defined.36
272 C. N. GAMBLE AND J. S. HANAN

It is precisely with the aim of illuminating such links, as well as their implication of matter
itself, that we wish to consider Barad’s contribution to the rhetorical materialism conver-
sation. More specifically, through a broad and incisive cross-disciplinary approach, Barad
extends both a Foucauldian notion of an apparatus and Butler’s account of the constitutive
exclusion in a new materialist direction. In this way, as she puts it, she “circumvents the
problem of [inherently] different materialities”37 and helps us develop an onto-historical
account of rhetorical materialism that demonstrates how any unit or dimension of
meaning (whether human or otherwise) is, in fact, always actually entangled with that
which it attempts to exclude from meaning. Below we outline how Barad helps us
develop such an account through her diffractive reading of matter in quantum physics.
We then conclude by summarizing how each of the contributors to this special issue
pursues Barad’s intra-active ontology in their own respective directions.

Reading Barad and materialist rhetoric diffractively

While not addressing “rhetorical materialism” directly, Barad’s intervention into materi-
alism broadly is particularly compelling given that she approaches the conversation as
both a theoretical physicist and a feminist philosopher. Whereas most scholars engaged
in this conversation are steeped in poststructuralist concepts such as Butler’s constitutive
outside or Foucault’s notion of the apparatus, Barad is also able to read these insights
through quantum physics.38 The result is a full-blown posthumanist or new materialist
account of ontology and politics that establishes a new “figure of entanglement” for under-
standing rhetoric’s materiality: diffraction. In what follows, we discuss key aspects of the
quantum physics basis for this extension in order to show how the resulting logic of dif-
fraction extends the entanglement reading of standard materialism and new materialism
that we presented in the previous section.
As Barad discusses in detail, quantum physics emerged out of debates in the early 20th
century over seemingly contradictory evidence regarding the nature of light. At that time,
classical physics maintained that all objects in the world objectively preexist their measure-
ment or observation as either a wave (an extension in space) or a particle (localized in
space). While defined in mutually exclusive terms, studies increasingly yielded evidence
suggesting that light exhibited the characteristics of both waves and particles. Against
explanations seeking to preserve the basic classical assumption of absolute independence
between a preexisting object and its observation, however, a quantum account proposed
that the object and agencies of observation are somehow, in fact, inextricably tethered.
Accordingly, the conflicting findings could be reconciled by allowing that light simply
exhibits mutually exclusive characteristics when observed using mutually exclusive exper-
imental arrangements or apparatuses. Over time, this quantum account has prevailed as
sufficient experimental replications have empirically confirmed its accuracy. Moreover,
while originating in debates over the wave–particle duality of light specifically, the
quantum physics account has since also been extended to findings demonstrating the
same basic duality in matter (e.g., atoms, electrons, neutrons) as well.
Yet while a quantum account of matter has since become the consensus view among
physicists, to date there is no consensus as to which of the numerous competing interpret-
ations may most accurately explain just how the act of observation affects the observed
object. Crucially, based on an extremely rigorous reading of the relevant literature,
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 273

Barad argues foremost for the ontological interpretation proposed by Niels Bohr. In con-
trast to other quantum accounts, including those proposed by Heisenberg and Schrödin-
ger, Bohr maintains that the act of observation does not simply alter or obscure our
knowledge of the object; instead, observation invariably plays an integral role in coconsti-
tuting the object. Thus, it is not simply that matter exhibits the characteristics of waves or
particles under respective experimental conditions but that matter really is either a wave or
a particle under those conditions. This allows Barad to argue that apart from the agencies
of observation, or apparatuses, which make possible the very opposition between knower
and known, matter is not determinately wave or particle; it is, rather, ontologically inde-
terminate. This indeterminacy gets resolved only through the particular ontological “cuts”
of specific apparatuses, albeit only ever contingently, as each new cut also excludes some-
thing else as indeterminate. In short, and parallel with Butler’s rendering of the discursive
production of human bodies, that which is excluded constitutes a dynamic reserve of inde-
terminacy that can always play a role in determining or rearticulating matter and meaning
anew.
Based on this understanding of matter itself as intrinsically and dynamically indetermi-
nate, Barad develops her new materialist extension, at once, of the theories of both
quantum physics and poststructuralism. Whereas quantum physics has demonstrated
its greater precision and accuracy than classical physics at not only the microscale but
also the macroscale, physicists have been reluctant to fully pursue that logic, which
Barad attributes to a residual element of humanism. Thus even Bohr, who recognized
that human discourses and concepts emerge from and are entangled with the “specific
material arrangements” of particular apparatuses,39 nevertheless circumscribed that
material–discursive entanglement within an exclusively human space of the scientific lab-
oratory radically separate from the rest of nature. In doing so, Bohr ends up positioning
humans, against the implications of his own argument, as objective observers of a rela-
tional, entangled quantum reality.
Yet, as Barad teases out in her writings, Bohr’s own account suggests something signifi-
cantly more posthuman than he was perhaps willing to accept. Specifically, because there
is no absolute or radical outside of the universe as a whole, there is “no way to describe the
entire system.”40 “Description,” thus, “always occurs from within: only part of the world
can be made intelligible to itself at a time, because the other part of the world has to be
the part that it makes a difference to.”41 And as part of the fully intra-active “exuberant
creativity”42 of the universe ourselves, this perspective entails that humans cannot
simply observe quantum entanglements through our apparatuses but are also and at
once produced by them. Barad’s engagement with quantum physics thus helps us appreci-
ate the ontological role of apparatuses not only in fabricating meaning in the human realm,
as Greene has argued, but also in making possible the dynamic and performative pro-
duction of boundaries between humans and nonhumans as well.
It is out of this particular reading of apparatuses that Barad is able to move the political
and ethical implications of poststructuralism in fully posthumanist, new materialist direc-
tions. That is, by demonstrating how apparatuses are always entangled with that which
they attempt to exclude from meaning, Barad shows how the regulatory production
of human bodies cannot be extricated from the materialization of nonhuman bodies.
In doing so, she highlights how human bodies and human meaning are always produced
as part of the physical material world. Barad’s account of power therefore complements
274 C. N. GAMBLE AND J. S. HANAN

and advances the aims and objectives of standard materialists such as Greene, Butler, and
Foucault. Unlike these latter theorists, however, Barad carefully illuminates how power
cannot be limited or restricted to a human only social domain. As a consequence,
Barad enables an intra- rather than an inter-actional politics in which power is always pro-
duced through the dynamic movement of the material cosmos itself.43 That movement,
moreover, may or may not involve humans, as apparatuses are certainly no less intelligible
or meaningful in our absence.44
In casting apparatuses as irreducible problems of material–discursive entanglement,
Barad provides us with a new figure of entanglement for understanding the materiality
of rhetoric: diffraction. In classical physics, diffraction refers to the resulting pattern
when two or more preexisting waves intersect and become one, novel entity with larger
peaks and smaller troughs. Once this occurs, it is no longer possible to disentangle or sep-
arate out the individual waves as they existed prior to their intra-action. Quantum physics
demonstrates, however, that not only waves but particles, too, constitute intra-active
entanglements that cannot be individually distinguished as preexisting objects. Moreover,
because there is no absolute boundary or outside to the scientific laboratory, Barad
demonstrates how quantum diffraction applies to all entities, whether human or other-
wise. Thus, while diffraction overlaps with what May has recently described as “immanent
causality” insofar as both agree that any apparatus or system and their parts are mutually
constituted through particular cuts or exclusions, Barad’s diffraction can never be limited
to a preexisting, self-contained or sovereign domain of human meaning-making.45 In
Barad’s posthumanist elaboration, that is, the ostensibly human domain is also always
diffractively entangled with what is more than human.
In advancing diffraction as a “figure of entanglement” for conceptualizing the material
production of meaning, we believe that the contributions of Barad to rhetorical material-
ism could not be more profound or important. If rhetoric’s supplementary status emerged
in classical Greece in relation not only to a hierarchy of human bodies but also and at once
to anthropocentrism premised on a division of matter and meaning, then a Baradian
materialist approach brings our discussion of rhetoric in the previous sections to fruition.
Through an empirical demonstration of the entangled fate of humans and nonhumans,
Barad shows that so long as we continue to figure matter or rhetoric as intrinsically mean-
ingless supplements that must be erased in order to establish the meaningful domain of
human discourse, bodies will invariably continue to be locked into normative hierarchies
accordingly. Human bodies, that is, will continue to be defined as more or less deficient
based on their alleged proximity to or resemblance of matter and nonhuman bodies
will continue to be banished to a domain of utter meaninglessness. Conversely, insofar
as we affirm and embrace the dynamic generativity of matter, we foster an understanding
of otherness as internal and constitutive, and thus, of bodily differences as, likewise, gen-
erative rather than deficient. Human identity categories such as race, class, sexuality, and
ability, then, can no longer be understood as structured against norms that ostensibly
transcend matter; instead, all bodies, whether human, animal, plant, or toxin, emerge as
meaningful and mutually generative material differences.46 In such an account, rhetoric
emerges as the irreducibly material name for the performative patterns and formations
of the cosmos intelligibly diffracting itself. Ultimately, we are left with a robust ecological
understanding of meaning and identity in which what is excluded becomes as important
and integral a part of our ethical and political concerns as that which is included. Such an
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 275

account, moreover, could not be more timely or relevant for responding to the economic
and ecological crises currently unfolding.

Exploring the special issue’s essays

The five essays in this special issue all very impressively demonstrate and develop, in their
own directions, the contributions that Barad’s intra-active entanglement account can
make to rhetoric and communication studies.
In her essay, “Breast Cancer’s Rhetoricity: Bodily Border Crisis and Bridge to Corporeal
Solidarity,” Annie Hill deftly performs a novel, intra-active rhetorical criticism of breast
cancer with farreaching implications. Hill begins by challenging an account of breast
cancer that seeks to divest it of its social stigma by defining it in purely material, non-meta-
phorical terms as an intrinsically meaningless disease that fully precedes its social, politi-
cal, and cultural production. In developing an alternative account, Hill demonstrates how
breast cancer in fact always materializes in and through a multiplicity of material–discur-
sive apparatuses that are structured by gendered, racialized, classed, and (dis)abilty norms.
Consequently, Hill illuminates how breast cancer’s extrahuman identity as a foreign and
invasive agent cannot be disentangled from the political and economic cuts and exclusions
that constitute and sustain the idealization and devaluation of particular female bodies
(which includes, as she shows, even the respective breast cancer rates of and medical
care received by those bodies.). In doing so, Hill not only makes important contributions
to rhetorics of science and technology but also articulates a posthumanist political vision
of “transmaterial solidarity” that refigures and affirms bodies and their differences through
an appreciation of their generative materiality.
In his essay, “Rhetoric’s Diverse Materiality: Polythetic Ontology and Genealogy,”
Nathan Stormer argues for an account of rhetoric that is always intra-actively multiple,
mutable, and emergent. Stormer undertakes this project by arguing that, at the level of
ontology, rhetoricians should resist approaching rhetoric as a unified identity that can
be broken into discrete categories that all share the same essential and defining character-
istic or trait. He argues that this is how rhetoric was rendered during the globalization
debates when all objects of criticism were described as having the same “rhetorical”
quality. As an alternative, Stormer suggests conceptualizing rhetoric’s ontology as an
“adaptive multiplicity” and thus as always in a state of becoming something other than
itself. Stormer supports this account, at the methodological level, by drawing on Michel
Foucault’s and Karen Barad’s respective notions of genealogy in order to develop his
own rich and robust account of “entangled genealogies.” As a fluid yet coherent means
of tracing and understanding the relative historical permanence and flux of particular rhe-
torical ecologies, entangled genealogies offer a way of approaching rhetoric in its fully
intra-active material diversity.
In her essay, “Of Turning and Tropes,” Diane Marie Keeling develops an intra-active
account of the ubiquitous yet, to date, surprisingly underexamined ritual of invoking aca-
demic “turns” by exploring their entanglement with larger political economies. Taking the
centennial issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech as her text for developing this contri-
bution, Keeling demonstrates, first, that even otherwise poststructuralist-friendly scholar-
ship often figures academic turns according to a prevailing neoliberal apparatus. Second,
she argues that this neoliberal apparatus is entangled with a classical ontology that
276 C. N. GAMBLE AND J. S. HANAN

imagines disciplinary interventions as singular, unique, completed events moving along a

path of linear progress. Drawing on Barad, Keeling argues instead for understanding aca-
demic turns in quantum terms as moving recursively, having multiple beginnings that are
always open to being rearticulated, and that cannot be understood according to an absol-
ute or predetermined notion of progress. In doing so, Keeling brings much needed critical
attention and consideration to how what is often reflexively treated as a neutral, taken-for-
granted concept actually implicates farreaching material and political consequences. She
concludes her essay by discussing the resulting ethical implications of a quantum refigur-
ing of academic turns.
In his essay, “Entangled Exchange: Verkehr and Rhetorical Capitalism,” Matthew
W. Bost provides an intra-active reading of Marx and Engels’ materialist theory of
exchange. Focusing in particular on Marx and Engels’ discussion of exchange in the
“German Ideology,” Bost provocatively argues that this narrative can be read not only
as a critique of capital’s attempt to universalize a particular classed account of the
human, but also as harboring intra-active, posthumanist implications. Bost further elab-
orates on this reading by placing Marx and Engels in conversation with Kojin Karatani
and Karen Barad. In diffractively reading their insights through one another, Bost helps
to clarify the stakes of a fully intra-active politics by articulating important connections
between race, gender, sexuality, anthropocentricism, and a capitalist drive toward immor-
tality. In doing so, Bost makes an important contribution to the aim of this special issue to
bridge standard and new materialist perspectives.
Finally, in the closing essay, “Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic,” Thomas
Rickert incisively and rigorously develops an intra-active understanding of rhetoric that
directly challenges the rhetorical tradition’s tendency to draw a dividing line between a
“formal” history beginning in classical Greece and a “prehistory” prior to that beginning.
Building in part on Jeffery Walker’s argument that classical rhetoric derives from and is
thus entangled with an epideictic tradition of oral poetry reaching back at least to
Homer, Rickert ventures back significantly further in human history in order to argue
that even Paleolithhic humans can and should also be understood as having developed
and enacted elaborate rhetorical practices of their own. In further developing his previous
arguments about the ambient entanglement of rhetoric, Rickert draws on and introduces
to the field recent scholarship about Paleolithic cave art in order to demonstrate how, even
there, rhetoric and materiality are constitutively entangled with humans and their per-
formances. In doing so, Rickert greatly extends and contributes to transforming prevailing
accounts of rhetoric and its larger ecological entanglement.
As editors of this special issue, we could not be more excited about the collected essays,
all of which perform their own creative and impressive diffractions of Barad’s work in
novel and productive directions. In doing so, each paper also makes very significant con-
tributions to an emerging new materialist understanding of rhetoric by illuminating and
transforming entanglements in areas that have long been presumed to be divided and sep-
arate by strict and unquestioned boundaries. We are extremely grateful for the opportu-
nity to be part of such an important and exciting project that has resulted in a collection of
papers that have far surpassed our highest hopes, and we eagerly look forward to the future
diffractions and entanglements this work will undoubtedly spark.
In closing, we would first like to acknowledge the ground-altering work of Karen Barad
for inspiring the probing conversations that eventually led to this special issue. We would
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 277

also like to express our sincere gratitude to those colleagues who were kind enough to
provide their time and expertise to reviewing essays for this special issue: Catherine
Chaput, Diane Davis, Thomas R. Dunn, S. Scott Graham, Attila Hallsby, Kate Lockwood
Harris, Debra Hawhee, Byron Hawk, Claire Sisco King, Jamie Merchant, John Muckel-
bauer, Damien Smith Pfister, Davi Johnson Thornton, and Jeffery Walker. Every one of
them provided invaluable feedback from which this special issue greatly benefited.
Finally, we would like to thank Pat Gehrke for inviting us to edit this special issue. Pat
gave us the freedom to develop our own vision for this project while at the same time
providing extensive insight and support during the various stages of bringing the
special issue to light.

Notes
1. Within communication studies, see, e.g., Diane Davis and Michelle Ballif, “Guest Editors’
Introduction: Pushing the Limits of the Anthropos,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 47, no. 4
(2014): 346–53; Laurie Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for
Visual Rhetorics (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015); Thomas Rickert, Ambient
Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2013). More broadly, see, e.g., Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Stacy Alaimo, and Susan Hekman, eds.
Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Diana Coole and
Samantha Frost, ed. New Materialisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2010);
Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012); Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Introduction: Has the
Queer Ever Been Human?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–3
(2015): 183–207; Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecocriticism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). For a more comprehensive list of sources
advancing a “nonhuman turn,” see Luciano and Chen, Queer Human, 203–5n30.
2. Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 121–58, 133.
3. See Edward Schiappa, “Did Plato Coin Rhetorikē?,” American Journal of Philology 111, no. 4
(1990): 457–70.
4. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University, 1976); “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1981), 63–171. See also Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Rhetoric and its
Double: Reflections on the Rhetorical Turn in the Human Sciences,” in The Rhetorical Turn:
Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1990), 341–66. However, whereas Gaonkar describes efforts to
“escape from” or “revolt against” rhetoric’s supplementary status, we seek to embrace that
status as a constitutive exclusion, in order to illuminate how rhetoric and philosophy,
along with all other disciplines, are mutually and intra-actively constituted.
5. See Plato, Gorgias, 492e–494a.
6. Jasper Neel, “The Degradation of Rhetoric; Or, Dressing Like a Gentleman, Speaking Like a
Scholar,” in Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism, ed. Steven Mailloux (Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge University Press), 73.
7. See, for example, Victor J. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997).
8. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 109.
9. See, for example, Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Atwill seeks to counter this normative move by
linking Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric as contingent to a pre-Platonic notion of productive
knowledge. On “metaphorical condensation,” see Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public:
278 C. N. GAMBLE AND J. S. HANAN

Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012),
78–82.
10. See, for example, James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, “Disability, Rhetoric, and
the Body,” in Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, eds. James C. Wilson
and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 1–24;
Brenda Jo Brueggeman and James A. Fredal, “Studying Disability Rhetorically,” in Disability
Discourse, eds. Mairian Corker and Sally French (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999):
129–35; Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014).
11. See Michelle Ballif, Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure (Carbon-
dale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001).
12. See Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Complicity: The Theory of Negative Difference,” The Howard
Journal of Communications 3, no. 1 (1991): 1–13, 3; The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited:
Reparations or Separation? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002),
esp. chapter 2.
13. Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 71–82.
14. Shannon Walters, “Animal Athena: The Interspecies Mētis of Women Writers with Autism,”
JAC 30, no. 3–4 (2010): 683–711.
15. See, for example, McPhail, Rhetoric of Racism. Critiquing this economy and the role of phi-
losophy’s subordination of rhetoric in producing it, McPhail seeks to “reconceptualize
[rhetoric] in a manner that allows for the affirmation and acceptance of difference”, which
he calls “rhetoric as coherence,” 97. However, due in part to the influence of Plato and Aris-
totle, rhetoric has often played a role in enabling colonialism by embracing many of the
norms and ideals of philosophy and imposing them on nonnormative bodies as well. For
work critiquing rhetoric for playing this role and that proposes various strategies for trans-
forming its norms and ideals, see, for example, Raka Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions in
the Rhetorical Canon: An ‘Other’ View,” Communication Theory 6, no. 1 (1996): 40–59;
Darrel Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis
through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 647–57; Karma
R. Chávez, “Beyond inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72.
16. Ballif, Seduction, 66.
17. Ibid., 66–67.
18. See, for example, ibid. where Ballif embraces a view of “materiality (and subjectivity and sexu-
ality) as a metaphor,” or as “symbolic inscription.” 25.
19. See Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, esp. chapters 1 and 2. Dolmage discusses the mutual dis-
paragement of the materiality of nonnormative human bodies and of rhetoric and develops
an “embodied rhetoric” based precisely on an appreciation of the generativity of those bodies.
20. See Chen, Animacies, for a noteworthy recent exception, however, which treats “animal
figures” as a third term in the development of a new materialist project, 102.
21. Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” in Explorations in Rhetoric:
Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, ed. Raymie McKerrow (Glenview, IL: Scott-Foresman,
1982), 23–48.
22. Ibid., 28.
23. Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Sutdies in Media Communi-
cation 15, no. 1 (1998): 15–16. See also Matthew S. May, “The Imaginative-Power of ‘Another
Materialist Rhetoric,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): 399–
403. In this article, published in a recent forum devoted to Ronald Walter Greene’s
“Another Materialist Rhetoric” essay, May offers a helpful breakdown of the different
logics of influence in rhetorical studies. He distinguishes between transitive causality, expres-
sive causality, and immanent causality. In the case of expressive causality, which is the frame-
work McGee’s materialist project falls into, elementary units of meaning are conceptualized
as microcosms of an ordered system or totality. This view is residually essentialist because it
posits an underlying principle of unity (e.g., a Hegelian spirit) such that all of the parts cohere
within a larger whole. May contrasts this view with an Althusserian logic of “immanent
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 279

causality,” which conceptualizes the parts and whole as mutually constituted against that
which remains deferred and absent.
24. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” 30.
25. See May, “Imaginative-Power.”
26. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites, eds. “Introduction,” in Rhetoric, Materiality,
and Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 4.
27. On the notion of “radical interactionality,” see Karma Chávez, Queer Migration Politics:
Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013),
esp. chapter 2. Chávez critiques intersectionality for figuring identity categories as fixed, as
preexisting individual experiences, and thus as separable from one another. In contrast,
her notion of radical interactionality advances an entangled account of human identities
given that, as she states, it “highlights the complicated and dynamic way in which identities,
power, and systems of oppression intermesh, interlock, intersect, and thus interact,” 58. See
also Lauren Gail Berlant, The Queen of American goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert
Asen, eds. Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life (Tusca-
loosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).
28. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Taylor &
Francis, 2011). See John M. Sloop, Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in
Contemporary US Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), for an
application of Butler's approach in communication studies.
29. On the relationship between apparatuses and the production of surplus, see Ronald Walter
Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy
and Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 188–206; “Orator Communist,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39,
no. 1 (2006): 85–95; “More Materialist Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural
Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): 414–17; Kristin A. Swenson, “Being in Common: In Celebration
of Ronald W. Greene’s Woolbert Award,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
12, no. 4 (2015): 404–9. For an application of the notion of overdetermination in rhetoric
studies, see Matthew S. May and Daniel Synk, “Contradiction and Overdetermination in
Occupy Wall Street,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 74–84.
30. See, for example, Isaac West, Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the
Law (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Erin J. Rand, Reclaiming Queer: Activist
and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014);
Chávez, Queer Migration Politics.
31. Jeffrey A. Bennett and Charles E. Morris III, “Rhetorical Criticism’s Multitudes,” Review of
Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 1–3.
32. See Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009),
which conceptualizes nonhuman agencies and actants in the language of publics. See also
Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers, ed. Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Compo-
sition (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 2015).
33. McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception,” 23.
34. See Luciano and Chen, Queer Human; Chen, Animacies, for two examples of such work
outside of rhetorical studies.
35. Ibid.
36. Chen, Animacies, 95.
37. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 211.
38. See, ibid., e.g., 25 on this “diffractive reading strategy.”
39. Ibid., 196, 329.
40. Ibid., 351.
41. Ibid., 351 (italics in the original).
42. Ibid., 235.
43. See, ibid., esp. chapters 5 and 6, for examples of this intra-actional analysis.
280 C. N. GAMBLE AND J. S. HANAN

44. Ibid., see, e.g., discussion of brittle stars, 369–84. For a consonant argument in rhetorical
studies as it pertains to all living beings, see Diane Davis, “Autozoography: Notes Toward
a Rhetoricity of the Living,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014): 533–53.
45. See May, “Imaginative-Power.”
46. See Chen, Animacies, for a recent development of such an argument outside of rhetorical
studies through an incisive critical engagement with dominant “animacy hierarchies” utiliz-
ing numerous contemporary examples. See Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, for such an argu-
ment within rhetorical studies pertaining to (nonnormative) human bodies.