Queries about Rhetorical Velocity and its Connection to Genre

As we advance into thinking about what it means to create original text, Ridolfo and Rife's case study of Maggie from Michigan State University complicates the notion that one owns a text, not in the sense of dual authorship, but in the sense of inherent rights to one's "own thing." Here, they demonstrate the "distance" that a rhetorical velocity can travel between two points, by showing how Maggie's highly scheduled, planned rhetoric in the snow was appropriated and recomposed for a new delivery and a new rhetorical outcome than predicted with Maggie and her peers' initial rhetorical velocity.



"Rhetorical velocity also means anticipating strategic remixing—that is, theorizing how the media (e.g., a video) might be remixed by others in ways ultimately advantageous to the rhetor’s goals and objectives. Rhetorical velocity also means theorizing how to release a image (e.g., with a watermark) to curtail the future appropriation of the image" (242, Ridolfo and Rife). Ridolfo and Rife seem to find an overarching theme in Maggie's case: Was appropriating the image of her in the snow to a seemingly mindless day of fun rather than the actual context only wrong because it was not an anticipated and planned outcome of Maggie's own rhetoric? Is it legally wrong to take an image out of context that would have been intended for public use in a different sort of way? This, herein defines appropriation - the use of Maggie's image out of context for the sake of the university's own personal gain and use, and ultimately ties into rhetorical velocity as an outcome of a branch of unintended rhetorical velocity. Here, I would like to pose a question to Ridolfo and Rife based on this realization. I would like to know more about how much rhetorical velocity truly covers; does it cover unintended anticipations? Does it include the unknown anticipations of others onto your piece of rhetoric? How all-encompassing, vague, or precise of a tool is rhetorical velocity?

Re-composition, simply put, is a component of rhetorical velocity pre-envisioned; the way a text can take on new platforms, new medias, while utilizing the same text. Delivery is therein how this re-composition or appropriate (unintentional or intentional) is broadcasted. In Maggie's case, Ridolfo and Rife delve into both privacy (ethical) and fair use (legal) issues of a third party picking up an "orphan" rhetorical discourse and making it into something entirely new.

The concept of appropriating a body is complex, as Maggie herself did not create the image appropriated and re-distributed under an entirely new discourse. Ridolfo and Rife say that a university and students' contracts are not all written and not all explicit, but a series of implicit agreements to be a representative of a school in which the school takes on a parent role in your life. This parent role gives the university a concrete set of rights over public, unowned images, and in Maggie's case, her action, completed on university property and intended for public use, falls under the university's rights to do with as they please. Again, I follow up with another series of queries as I wrestled through this text with hope of an inspired epiphany: At what point do we draw the line for the university's role as a parent? Had it been a poster they had taken out of context, and not a picture of Maggie's body, would it have fallen under their right to appropriate it? A body's image's right to privacy can be put into play with these questions, a concept that Ridolfo and Rife do wrestle with as well. Maggie's right to privacy, according to them, conflicts with her rhetorical intent: "When Maggie engaged in a protest in a public space—a physical commons, open to public view at a public institution—the argument is very strong that she had little right to privacy. Because Maggie was aware of the photographer’s presence and continued with her activities nonetheless, the argument that she had any reasonable expectation of privacy would be weak." (231, Ridolfo and Rife) Additionally, Maggie wanted her image to be appropriated, but in a way that was projected with her own rhetorical velocity, not in an unanticipated way. Again, I pose another question: how heavily can we weigh intention on what is appropriate for use of a rhetorical discourse? In regards to genre, does what we expect of a genre and what we expect of its use create the existence of that genre, or do we deal with genre on a more situational basis? These queries have brought me closer to a realization about the link between genre and intention, text and intention, and authorship and intention.