Unveiling Multiplicities of Care and Community Support and its parallel with rhetorical ecologies

Odell’s How to Do Nothing gives a picture of attention economic climate that needs to be curtailed through resistance strategies anti-capitalistic approaches. In chapter four, “Exercise in Attention,” Odell indicates why exercising attention as a rhetorical tool is a necessity such that deep attention as a tool can reclaim and restore a person’s sense of personal sovereignty, enabling people to resist the pressures of attention economy’s ubiquitous pressures and develop a more thoughtful and meaningful engagement with their environment. As Odell stated, “I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community.” Odell’s view on deepening one’s attention with unwavering consistency to issues in society and institutions points out that the exigency of care and community support as attention-deepened rhetorical tools in addressing issues like ‘myths and superstitions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, climate change denial, etc) are characterized in our attention economy. In a more pragmatic way, Odell builds on the argument of care and community support in chapter 5, “Ecology of Strangers,” to provide a contextual illustration of care and community support. This discussion delves into what Odell means by care and community support as “local, flexible and rhizomatic networks” and justifies whether these networks of support are only rooted in corporeality and can be comparable to rhetorical ecologies.

In How to Do Nothing Jenny Odell introduces the concept of “local, flexible, and rhizomatic networks” (133) as a dynamic framework fostering care and community support. As an emerging rhetorician, my conception of local is that phenomenon rooted in geographical sitedness. I also resonate with the word flexible as a situated moment of resistance that is not premeditated but adaptable to different circumstances. On account of rhizomatic, its base morphemic form is rhizome. As stated by Deleuze and Guattari, in their work, A Thousand Plateau: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, rhizome is a post-structuralist concept that refers to a non-linear network that connects semiotic chains, organization of power, and circumstances relative to arts, science and social struggles. As stated by the scholars, the rhizome “connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even non sign states” (p. 1605). Deleuze and Guatttari’s conceptualization of rhizome shows that rhizomatic networks are rooted in multiple ways of providing support. For that matter, such rhizomatic networks of support are not rooted in hypertextuality such that if A, then B, or if B, then A. In a more critical lens, what Odell offers is the concept of care and community support, which are local, flexible, and rhizomatic networks that can help achieve better results. The scholar demonstrates how she offers neighborhood and community support that was helpful to a woman with a seizure.  Odell (20170 states, “This is where I would place my encounter with the woman having a seizure: I was helpful because I was nearby. Neighborhoods can be networks of support in situations both banal and extreme.” (p. 142). The writer also shows how a survivor of a Nicaragua earthquake finds neighborhood support from her neighbor.

What is missing in Odell’s argument is that care and community is not only and always rooted in corporeality. Although Han (2022) asserts that “in the course of digitalization, we have lost the awareness of materiality, (p.96), many people find community support and care via online spaces and other rhizomatic spaces like social media (facebook, Instagram, Snap chat,etc). For that matter, care, and community support is only rooted in corporeality needs to be examined from context to context. Such supports are not only rooted in where exactly we live and how long we live there, but the sense of community and neighborhood means developing a bond of care with people around us-both digital and physical spaces (multiplicities of rhizomatic spaces) who need support and accommodations.

To make these multiplicities of networks of care and support effectively function to address societal and institutional issues, deep attention (Bird watching), bioregionalism (people’s relation with the environment), and repair are some of the tools people use as active-driven initiatives to resist systemic issues we face. Odell’s anticapitalistic text talks about the importance of slowing down, resisting the constant demands of technology, and engaging more with the local environment, community, and ecology. I can also relate that to the pedagogy of deep listening that Hayles offers in her work “Deep and Hyper attention.” This deep listening connects with Odell’s deep attention and Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening. As stated by Han in “Non-things,” “listening is direct at the other. True listening exposes themselves to the other without reservation” (p.73). The conception of deep attention can be seen in Odell’s bird-watching scenario, such that the more we develop attention to the sound, the more we immerse ourselves in a profound connection with the environment, mirroring Hayles’s pedagogy of deep listening. As teacher-scholars, the pedagogy of deep/rhetorical/ listening and deep attention can be an instructional tool in teaching first-year writing. Bird-watching scenarios can be a helpful and metaphorical tool for teaching how to read a text rhetorically. Peer review can be utilized in peer review activities where students need to be receptive to the constructive ideas shared by peers. The bond of care and attention that exists in peer review activities in teaching first-year writing underscores a lodestar of attention in physical and digital spaces. Again, bioregionalism can be a place-based pedagogical tool. In the classroom, physical spaces (sitting arrangements, teaching, and learning materials, etc) and digital spaces (in-writing writing activity in digital space) matter. Resonating with this conception in another sense, people have collaboratively engaged in activist and decolonial works not only through neighborhood or nearby-boundedness but via rhizomatic forms like social media spaces and scholarships about the need to be localized and promoting bioregionalist ideologies by paying attention to the community coupled with sustainable living policies that promote the growth of the local ecosystem. This is also an anti-capitalist way of resisting the attention economy. Liboiron (2018) reminds us why land relations are crucial in promoting bioregionalism. Sometimes, people tend to disvalue things that are not human. One example lies in the fact that we tend to see leaves around as trash but they act as fertilization elements for the land through decomposition.  

I for one, these related networks of support, their activation for societal problem-solving, their corporeal foundations draw parallels with rhetorical ecologies. According to Ortoleva (2013), ecological literacy means understanding material and discursive relationships and how these shape relationships that are created, maintained, modified, solidified, and radically changed by acts of language. That acts of language have a direct impact on physical environments and can have significant consequences for life on the planet—ours as well as the multitude of other species with which we share this place—anchors my definition of ecological literacy by connecting the discursive and the material, natural world. By bridging the discursive and the material, natural worlds, language acts have a direct influence on physical environments and can have a substantial impact on life on earth, including our own species and the many others with which we coexist. Ortoleva’s conception of ecological literacy draws a parallel with rhetorical ecologies because humans, as the main factors, navigate through a multiplicity of spaces (socio-cultural, political, economic) to seek care and community support. Seeing connective structures of care and community support to be comparable to rhetorical ecologies helps to see rhetorics of network support in both material and digital spaces. 

[Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; Hayles, 2007; Han, 2022; Liboiron, 2021; Ortoleva, 2013; Odell, 2020; Ratcliffe, 2005]