Kinematic Rhetoric

“Kinematic Rhetoric” seeks to formulate a theory of rhetoric in the age of dynamic texts—texts that employ movement, sound and duration as part of their expression. As a fully interactive ePub, Joddy Murray articulates these ideas using embedded video, animation and sound in order to demonstrate his theory. Murray’s theory of rhetoric adds the elements of movement, sound, image, affect and duration to traditional accounts of digital, visual and multimodal rhetorics. His concept of “time-affect” images provides a complex and nuanced theory for composing that builds upon his earlier concept of “nondiscursive texts.” By turning to Deleuze’s work on cinema, Murray presents the “time-affect image,” which “generates and amplifies affectivity through duration and motion, and is the key concept in this rhetorical theory. Motion, he argues, creates meaning that is independent of the content and, like all images, carries with it the potential for persuasion through the affective domain. Any rhetorical theory centered on kinematic texts must account for the way images function to carry meaning and emotions, but also how motion and duration carry meaning and emotions. Motion is itself a mode, a kind of symbol affordance, that allows for extra meaning-making through space and time. “Kinematic Rhetoric” expands on Murray’s earlier work “Non-discursive Rhetoric” by creating a special class of images in kinematic texts: non-discursive, time-affect images that move.