The Rise and Fall of a Mechanical Rhetoric, or, What Grain Elevators Teach us About Postmodernism

I use the one-hundred-year, transatlantic circulation of Le Corbusier's grain elevator photographs to tell the story of the short but vibrant life of a mechanized rhetoric. From 1913 to 1969, these photographs were understood in the context of a mechanized rhetoric, and they starred in the icon...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Quarterly journal of speech Vol. 100; no. 2; pp. 163 - 185
Main Author Tell, Dave
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Philadelphia Routledge 03.04.2014
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Conveyors
Le Corbusier
Mechanics
Modern Architecture
Opportunity costs
Postmodernism
Rhetoric
Symbolism
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Summary:I use the one-hundred-year, transatlantic circulation of Le Corbusier's grain elevator photographs to tell the story of the short but vibrant life of a mechanized rhetoric. From 1913 to 1969, these photographs were understood in the context of a mechanized rhetoric, and they starred in the iconography of modernity. From 1971 to 2010, the same photographs were contextualized by a symbolic vision of rhetoric. So contextualized, the photographs lost their prestige and became conduits through which postmodernism was introduced into architectural theory-and from there into the American academy. As a case study of rhetoric's becoming-symbolic, then, this essay foregrounds the opportunity costs of symbolic definitions of rhetoric. It suggests that the twinned introduction of symbolism and postmodernism involved a misreading of rhetorical history.
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ISSN:0033-5630
1479-5779
DOI:10.1080/00335630.2014.939992