Material Intimacy: Bearing Witness, Listening, and Wandering The Ruins

Abstract

In this dissertation, I consider the rhetorical ecology of architectural ruins, specifically those of natural disaster, as actors in a system of human and nonhuman intra-action that has rhetorical potential for material intimacy. I argue that ruins address the human in ways that elicit a response. The human response enacts a paratactic praxis, which I explore in my first chapter as a practice that creates series or lists that call on the reader or the listener to fill the gaps between entities and make meaning out of the resulting juxtaposition of words, phrases, or collections. In the second, third, and fourth chapters, I locate paratactic praxis in accounts of ruins following natural disasters by drawing on a new materialist rhetorical methodology via three specific moves toward material intimacy: witnessing, listening, and wandering. I have chosen ruins as a focus of study precisely because of the need in our digital age to become more intimate with the spaces that we create, protect, and destroy as a means of understanding humanity’s place in the world.The language we use to describe ruins and the effects they have on us contain keys to uncovering the hidden rhetoricity of ruins. I use a combination of new materialist developments in rhetorical theory based on a phenomenological foundation to explore the human experience of ruin and ruins as material bodies engaged in that experience.