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Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 2013. 334 pp.
If the intent is to "attune" its readers to the necessity of retheorizing or rethinking aspects of rhetorical theory, then Thomas Rickert's Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunement of Rhetorical Being is profoundly successful. If, however, Rickert intended his book to transcend the boundaries of a space in which theory simply takes place to a place which allows for an examination of what those theories might look like in action, then, as the author admits, much work remains to be done. For it seems that Rickert's call to action is ultimately this very (re)attunement itself: rhetorical theory's grounding in humanism, its support of the subject/object paradigm, prevents exploration of the human/world relationship as reciprocal, and as the world in which rhetorical theory exists continues to change, becoming a progressively complex ecological web of networked-weddedness, "we need conceptions of rhetoric that keep pace with these transformations" (33). In other words, his reworking of what rhetoric is requires "some action" because "rhetoric from an ambient perspective can no longer be situated solely in human subjective performance" (29). However, Rickert's action seems to imply more than just intellectual engagement with or epistemological restructuring of traditional notions of rhetoric, as he questions the ways in which an attunement to ambience would change the ways we write and compose, the concerns or interests we have as teachers, writers, and rhetoricians, while foregoing a discussion of what those changes might look like in practice. The negation of an answer to these and other questions essentially categorizes the book as a highly insightful and minutely detailed block on which to build: "Ambient rhetoric . . . is less an answer in itself than an invitation to disclose anew, to build further, and so begin to dwell" (37). Dwelling, in the sense that Martin Heidegger uses that term, is a crucial component of Rickert's thoroughly researched scholarly work that presents rhetoric as a concept with an ontological, a priori weddedness to the material world. The author seeks to convince us of our inherent enmeshment with our surroundings, claiming that who we are, how we invent-and pointedly-how we engage each other rhetorically can no longer be considered a product...