Thinking with Tides and Édouard Glissant (original) (raw)

2022, National Communication Association Convention, "Rhetoric as Nature" pre-conference, New Orleans, Nov. 16,

John Drabinski describes tidal presence within Édouard Glissant’s writing as "shoreline thinking . . . sited, cited, and caught sight between the Middle Passage and the composition of composite cultural forms. The Middle Passage renders the beginning abyssal. Glissant’s poetics makes philosophy of this beginning. It is witness to water, sand, sun, death and life." We use shoreline thinking to address the "rhetoric of nature," asking not only how rhetoric is (part) "of" nature, but what is nature in Glissant? Ontologies that begin with or that rhizomatically connect with slavery, colonization, and gendered racial violence require fundamentally rethinking “common sense” categories like nature and culture, which Glissant persistently deploys and confuses. Through "errantry" (wandering) within his poetics of Relation, Glissant treats culture as nature - not Nature as Culture's scene but as a totality-in-movement wherein being adaptively enculturates itself via Relation. Nature becomes "ontic passion" we argue, meaning an active-passive state of errantry. This supplants errantry as ambulatory wandering with place as wandering; space is a grid one sojourns across no more, but a panoply of dispersions and folds brought into contact, and time is not an arrow but an indivisible experience of unfolding. Shoreline thinking uniquely models the rhythmic errantry of place, wherein difference is lived in opacity as incommensurate, dependent, and adaptive being. The errantry of place refigures racial, sexual, and colonial logics of "nature" and, doing so, opens the possibility that rhetoric is not "of" nature per se, but common to places instead.