Thinking in terms of “ecologies” is, to me, one of the most important strategies for examining almost any subject—nothing exists in isolation, and recognizing this always results in a huge leap forward in human understanding. Perhaps there is something about our minds that leads us to engage in practices of atomism, focusing on individual elements and then attempting to draw connecting lines through the void between them rather than considering subjects holistically. I remember how strongly I was impacted by reading Thoreau’s “The Succession of Forest Trees” as an undergrad; lacking any sort of background in ecology or life sciences I still recognized the significance of the simple observations this work describes. Thoreau read this essay to the Middlesex Agricultural Society, a group which doubtlessly possessed a certain expertise on the subject of plants, and opened with the following anecdote:
- In my capacity as surveyor, I have often talked with some of you, my employers, at your dinner-tables… I have often been asked, as many of you have been, if I could tell how it happened, that when a pine wood was cut down an oak one commonly sprang up, and vice versa…When, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a forest springs up naturally where none of its kind grew before, I do not hesitate to say, though in some quarters still may sound paradoxical, that it came from a seed. Of the various ways by which trees are known to be propagated—by transplanting, cuttings, and the like, -- this is the only supposable one under these circumstances… It remains, then, only to show how the seed is transported from where it grows, to where it is planted.
Here Thoreau emphasizes movement, a concept which Jenny Edbauer asserts is necessary for an effective application of Bitzer’s “rhetorical situation.” Thoreau goes on to explain how he observed squirrels burying oak seeds beneath pine trees because they preferred to live in such evergreens during the winter, giving them easy access to their store of food. People had been so focused on studying the nature of the trees themselves to answer their question that they neglected to observe the ecosystem of which the trees are only a facet. Likewise, Edbauer argues against rhetorical models like “speaker-audience-message, ethos-pathos-logos, or rhetor-audience-constraints-exigence” because these lead us to view rhetoric in terms of individual, discrete elements rather than a holistic flux. The following example illustrates her point perfectly: “The contact between two people on a busy city street is never simply a matter of those two bodies; rather, the two bodies carry with them the traces of effects from whole fields of culture and social histories.”
In attempting to outline a new model that will help us explore how rhetoric operates in a “practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity,” Edbauer suggests a new understanding of the term “city” as a verb rather than a noun. The notion of “citying” connotes movement, a process that is ongoing and self-sustaining, not unlike Thoreau’s pine forest ecosystem. When thinking about “city” in this way I imagine scenes from the film Koyaanisquatsi, which juxtaposes images of nature against images of human society—the latter shots are often edited in such a way that plays with the phenomena of movement in a city, from time-lapsed footage of people moving through long bank lines or night-time footage of a busy freeway.
This sort of whirling, cyclical city-structure is an endless chain of interactions between moving elements, and by thinking of things in this way I am able to more easily visualize how rhetoric operates according to a sort of “viral economy”, spreading like the flu as more and more people are exposed and carry the disease with them.
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