Abstract

The themes in this dissertation arise from three sources: phenomenological research exploring the phenomena of place and implacement, the placial philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the recent explosion of placial metaphors in research devoted to rhetorical theory and criticism. My goal is to mine the discoveries of each of these sources in order to better understand how each are interrelated. In essence, I develop a "trialogue" among these rich research programs. The overlapping commonalities of my discoveries come from treating place, movement, and rhetoric as phenomena in their own rights---phenomena that help articulate each other in terms of active, affective, fluid, and dynamic forces that pervade our experience of the world. To an extent, this work is prolegomenous to my future research agenda as I am only able to begin to mine resources that are, indeed, theoretically and phenomenologically fecund. ;The trajectory of these investigations is as follows. I begin with a general overview of the phenomenology of place and then survey the deployment of placial themes in contemporary rhetorical studies. The second chapter is a detailed examination of the historicity of "the place of rhetoric," especially in terms of the resituating, respecifying, and reorienting movements in which rhetoric has been rethought. The final three chapters, then, begin the journey of articulating a placial theory of rhetoric by considering, phenomenologically, how rhetoric is in place, how rhetoric is of place, and how rhetoric is through place. In each chapter, the trialogue between rhetorical scholarship, phenomenological insights, and the works of Deleuze and Guattari unfolds to show a dynamic and liberating structure common to rhetoric, place, and movement.