Recomposing Genres: Ridolfo and Rife

Ridolfo and Rife offer up four key terms for understanding texts and the copyright issues surrounding them in the digital age: rhetorical velocity, delivery, appropriation, and recompostion. While each are specific in their own definitions, all are inescapably linked and compose, what Miller would characterize, as an entirely new genre of rhetoric hinging on the audience’s inevitable and visible involvement with the text. In the digital age, texts are generally approached with the assumption of a response, and thus these texts can embody multiple motives, or genres, at once.  

Ridolfo and Rife describe rhetorical velocity as “a strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetor theorizes the possibilities for the recomposition of a text” (229). Within this first definition, two of the other terms are already represented: delivery and recomposition. Therefore, rhetorical velocity is a type of delivery that assumes recomposition. In other words, a rhetor employs rhetorical velocity through a specific delivery method, however it is executed, with the assumption—and sometimes the hope, as in the Maggie case—that other forms of media with other motives and intentions will “mix, mash, and merge” the ‘original’ text (229).

However, these differing intentions are the root of appropriation, and perhaps misappropriation, of the text comes into play, as in the Maggie case. Here, the original text, or rather the original situation, was put into, or ‘situated’ as Miller would argue, into an entirely unexpected and unwanted genre, promoting the university instead of protesting its lack of involvement in the anti-sweat shop organization. The original rhetorical situation was in direct defiance of the new rhetorical situation; however, the material from the first, the photograph in this case, was used in an entirely new deliver, recomposed for an opposed purpose, and situated in a new genre.  

Overall, rhetorical velocity was the term that jumped out at me most, partly because I have no previous experience with the word and therefore very little, if any, preconceived notions as to what it is trying to convey before reading Ridolfo and Rife’s definition of it. Because I had never heard the concept, I spent some time trying to understand it not only as a concept but as a word. By applying my known understanding of velocity, it allowed me to conceptualize this concept as motion, moving through time and space (as Derrida theorized) and thus through different typified genres (as Miller theorized). This idea is especially alarming when thinking about the fact that the culture of recomposition has caused the original composer to consider different genres when composing, having to be aware of the existing space in-between.