Unintended Trajectory; Ridolfo & Rife's terminology

Rhetorical velocity is a concept that evolved out of a social and legal need to define and anticipate the trajectory of a text. The world we live in is becoming increasingly remediated as the media trends toward multimodal communication. Appropriation refers to the way a text is formed to fit into different social contexts and the way it is often reformed and re-contextualized. Recomposition is something of a result of appropriation; recomposition could be seen as a texts possible alternate trajectory. Original intent has increasingly little credence in terms of a texts spreadability and applicability. As Ridolfo and Rife state, it is impossible to anticipate the way a text will be interpreted and reimagined once it is created, “Rhetorical velocity is a strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetor theorizes the possibilities for the recomposition of a text (e.g., a media release) based on how s/he anticipates how the text might later be used” (Ridolfo & Rife 229). The moment a text is created it takes on a life of its own, maintaining some vague semblance of parenthood but scant concrete sense of ownership.

            Everything is subject to recomposition because of its rhetorical velocity; every reproduction is a recomposition of some sort. Weather a text is being intentionally reappropriated it is altered in some way when it is produced on a new media platform. Looking at this through slightly more theoretical lens certain parallels to Carolyn R. Miller’s Genre as Social Action. Miller writes “I will examine the connection between genre and recurrent situation and the way in which genre can be said to represent typified rhetorical action” (Miller 151). These recurrent situations that Miller refers to are the way “collections of discourses may be sorted into classes”, this idea is intrinsically tied to the terms aforementioned (Miller 152). Genres only exist in relation and juxtaposition of other genres, in this sense genres are not a simple means of categorization, rather they are a framework for deviation. It is only clear that something new has been configured based on that which has already been established. Miller quotes Campbell and Jamieson saying, “A genre does not consist merely of a series of acts in which certain rhetorical forms recur…Instead, a genre is composed of a constellation of recognizable forms bound together by an internal dynamic” (Campbell & Jamieson 21 qtd. Miller 152).

            Rhetorical velocity can be seen as the unpredictable deviation from presently available genres to new versions of these genres. In Rodolfo and Rife’s “Maggie” case study the issues of ownership, appropriation, and parenthood come into question. There are innumerable questions as to who owns Maggie's image, the legality of its recomposition, its method of delivery and the deviation from its originally intended message.  Rodolfo and Rife use Maggie's story as a means for demonstrating the lack of control individuals have over their texts once they have been released into the world. Everything is constantly remixed and re used in different ways, getting further and further from its original intentionality. Millers ideal definition of genre calls for genre to “be limited to a particular type of discourse classification, a classification based on rhetorical practice and consequently open rather than closed and organized around situated actions” (Miller 155). This definition offers some context for understanding genre in terms of rhetoric practice and helps contextualize Rodolfo and Rife's terms. Their terms help create an appropriate mental lexicon for understanding genre as Millers classifies it. Looking at the Maggie case in terms of Millers interpretation of genre and using Rodolfo and Rifes terms allows for a truer understanding of genre “The classification I am advocating is, in effect, ethnomethodological: it seeks to explicate the knowledge that practice creates. This approach insists that the “de fact” genres, the types we have names for in everyday language tell us something theoretically important about discourse” (Miller 155).

             In terms of Maggie’s case this discourse was completely altered by the appropriation of her image, the political context of what she and the other student protesters were doing was totally undermined by the universities recomposition of her image. “Maggie lost control in a very real way. And, do, the agency-the power that she engaged in her political-was undermined, inverted, and her image took on a life of its own” (Rodolfo & Rife 233). In this sense, context or more appropriately for this topic, genre is far more than a means of classification, it is the result of rhetorical velocity, appropriation, delivery and recomposition. All of the social constraints that surround a text constitute its genre and thus its rhetorical power.

~Mikaela McShane