ABSTRACT
What could be less material than communication? Signs and symbols, messages and meanings … the rhetorical strategies of logos, pathos, and ethos … the ethereal transmission of signals and the glow of vacuum tubes … the ephemeral quality of thought itself … the superstructural insubstantiality of ideology and culture. These conceptualizations of communication suggest a realm of intangible phenomena that mediate our embodied human experiences of the concrete world. In many ways, the immateriality of communication is the ontological assumption for mainstream theory in the fields of communication, rhetoric, and media studies. Within this familiar ontology, communication is always inadequate, an imperfect, or even manipulative attempt to represent the real or connect with others through various mechanisms of signification. Critical theory, too, has been predicated on textualist, narrative, semiotic, or ideological paradigms, and the epistemological quandary that this ontological assumption creates has led numerous scholars over the past two decades to identify a poststructuralist impasse that needs to be escaped. Such discontent has often led to a turning away from “mere communication,” toward materiality as a corrective.
