My scholarship attends to ghosts. By this I don’t mean looking for literal specters (can the ontologically unconfirmed even be considered “literal”—and if not, what does that mean for the unseen?), but taking stock of the ways our bodies, discourses, histories, and narratives are haunted by other(ed) ways of knowing, being, and doing that have been rendered silent and unseen by our collectively individuated attention. Rivers’ argument that “rhetoric is attentional” (62), and as such, deeply anchored the relational interchange of context-driven consent adds further exigence to the act of “attending to ghosts.”
First, to attend to our hauntedness means to consent to seeing absent presences. It means building a capacity to see the other anew, “becoming something else . . . someone altered and primed to attend otherwise” (59). Second, attending to our hauntedness means inventing rhetorical models that rewor(l)d our dwellings—our bodies, discourses, histories, and narratives—to make space for “other possible ways of becoming together” (62). In other words, attending to ghosts means a collective will to see, imagine, and become such that new ways of relating literally manifest. (182)
[Rivers, 2020]
