A Memento of Complexity: The Rhetorics of Memory, Ambience, and Emergence

Drawing from complexity theory, this dissertation develops a schema of rhetorical memory that exhibits extended characteristics. Scholars traditionally conceptualize memory, the fourth canon in classical rhetoric, as place (loci) or image (phantasm). However, memory rhetoric resists the traditional loci-phantasm framework and instead emerges from enmeshments of interiority, collectivity, and technology. Emergence considers the dynamics of fundamental parts that generate complex systems and offers a methodological lens to theorizing memory. The resulting construct informs everyday life, which includes interfacing with pervasive computing or sensing familiarity. Further, congruently with a neurological turn that contradicts simplification, this dissertation resituates rhetorical memory as generative to imagination or perception.