The Ambient Spectacle

Abstract

This thesis seeks to synthesize contemporary discourses on the agency of matter and rhetoric as an ambient force alongside more traditional theories of the epideictic branch of rhetoric. This “new materialist epideictic” is then utilized to revitalize Guy Debord’s theory of the Spectacle, itself an ambient epideictic apparatus, in order to articulate a theory of the “ambient Spectacle,” a rhetorical (and critical) theory that finds hegemonic ethical evaluations to be dispersed into ambient environs as they are both experienced and inhabited. This theory of the ambient Spectacle is utilized to explore the formation of communal subjectivity, the experience of hegemonic epideictic rhetoric via encounters with matter, and the masking of effects linked to the formation of precarious futures, taking the pervasiveness of plastics and the climate-footprint of animal-byproducts as two primary examples. This thesis closes by proposing the value of “radical reattunement,” a means of ceasing to identify with the ambient Spectacle, shifting existing entanglements, and, in reattuning to the existing ambience, forming an Other-community.