Metaphors of water and flow, nature's processes of bringing materials back together, run through all parts of this work. If we could only separate ourselves from time, we would understand that we have emerged from and will return to a state of harmonious difference. Yet, we cling to time, especially to the past-present—controlling time's flow, diverting it, holding it in place with concrete dams.
A Note on this Form
This work incorporates a horizontal-scrolling, mobile-first user interface designed to produce a panorama, one long juxtaposition of images, 360-degree video, and text. During the time of the Clemsons, the namesakes of Clemson University, panoramic painting known as cycloramas were all the rage in the United States and Europe. The observer would enter into a rotunda, and move around it to better view its 360-degree painted interior, often following the spatiotemporal progression of the spectacle painted on its singular wall. Similarly, I designed this user interface to replicate the physical nature of an audience member moving through a cyclorama, but also adding 360-degree video to scale the experience of embededness.
Introduction
In that a rhetorical ecological framework reminds us that our greater design informs our present, be it a present-past or a present-future, this project originally intended to test the affordances of digital tools to write the network of interconnected people, things, spaces, and places, local and global, past and present, those included and excluded, that contributed to my experience of being at Clemson University while studying, researching, and writing my dissertation.
But in the process of filming and editing, I realized the 360-degree camera could be used to map or "fix(...)-into-being” (p. 44) what Guattari (2005) characterizes as the “movement and intensity of evolutive processes." I began thinking of these "evolutive processes" as inherently rhetorical, and working from Holling and Gunderson (2002), as functions working at different scales within the registers of a larger system. By all accounts, Clemson University, like all ecosystems, has evolved over time. But in Clemson's case, it has largely stayed true to its original purpose and larger ends. Clemson University has thus proven to be a highly resilient ecosystem, its many sub-systems acting and reacting at different registers to protect and maintain the master design.
The mobile-ready design of this project places constrains on my use of language. This constraint seems fitting given my many constraints as a thinker and writer. for example, this project can not begin to investigate the "deep rhetorical ecology" that Lou Maraj (2020) uncovers in Black or Right: Anti/Rascist Campus Rhetorics, nor can it successfully develop an epideictic argument to challenge my audience with the magnanimity of Ersula Ore's Lynching: violence, rhetoric, and American identity (2019). It couldn't. I couldn't. As a white male, I am ill-positioned and ill-capacitated to conduct such research. Perhaps more importantly, Black scholars at Clemson University have already been doing this research, as I will soon relay. Instead, I intend to use this multimodal form to better explore how a highly-territorialized ecosystem like Clemson University can be so resilient to change?
In this research, the scholarship of A.D. Carson inspired me to think more deeply about my place of learning and teaching. With his "See the Stripes" (2014) video poem, Carson initiated a movement at Clemson University that unsettled the old white patriarchy. In consequence, our Clemson Provost had him arrested. Carson's work organizing the Black Lives Matter protests and his dissertation "Owning My Masters" (2017) both garnered national attention, and yet, the university did little in response, remaining silent on a number of key issues identified by Carson, the Black Student Union, and the Faculty Senate. The university's ability to thrive amid so much controversy made me want to look more closely at how this system maintained power and control.
I was also influenced by Clemson professor Chenjerai Kumanyika, now a professor at Rutgers, who challenged PhD students like myself to identify and dismantle racist policies at our university. This directly influenced my thinking about "middling variables" and their role in protecting and buffering the larger system from change. Similarly, Rhondda Thomas's work at the university provided an example of how I might facilitate a learning space that elides inquiry and activism. Thomas's efforts to work with students in the archives, and her own archival work (2019) inspired me and many of my classmates to direct our own writing and teaching towards a more just and equitable Clemson, a space that might someday be deserving of its epithet, "a high seminary of learning."
Stagnant Ecosystems
When we discuss how rhetoric moves within a networked ecosystem, we often borrow analogies that derive from the field of aquatic ecology. We discuss “circulation,” which Laurie Gries (2015) believes are important in that they “(a) draw attention to rhetoric’s dynamic movement and fluidity; (b) reconfigure theories of rhetoric and publics to account for discourse’s dynamic, distributed, and emergent aspects; (c) rethink composing strategies for the digital age; and (d) revamp pedagogy to account for writing’s full production cycle” (p. xix).
In this discussion of circulation, we must also think in terms of “flows and blockages,” analogies for which Chris Mays (2015) argues serve a useful purpose in examining what he considers our "diachronic" rhetorical and non-rhetorical systems (3). In his research, Mays examines unproductive arguments, especially the stubbornness of an interlocutor in doxa driven argument, which he deems a form of rhetorical blockage. His work considers why it might be beneficial to use a system’s approach to address those who refuse to be affected by rhetoric. In advancing this discussion of rhetorical circulation in systems, we would do well to take a closer look at how rhetoric forms, circulates, or is constrained within hegemonic systems.
In my own use the aquatic ecology metaphor as a means of understanding rhetorical theory, I borrow and apply the terms “stagnant” and “stagnation,” which ecologists often use to describe lentic ecosystems. Freshwater ecosystems are characterized as either lotic (flowing) or lentic (stagnant). These latter systems can be the result of lakes and ponds forming naturally, or by way of human construction. While we often refer to lentic ecosystems as "stagnant," stagnation does not preclude movement or circulation of packages and bodies within these stagnant spaces and places. Nor can we classify stagnant ecosystems as any less dynamic or healthy than "non-stagnant" ones.
On the other hand, these relatively closed systems can also be easily contaminated by a range of human factors whose impacts can be long lasting. In the context of previous theories of rhetorical circulation, the metaphor of stagnation, as occurring in a lentic ecosystem is perhaps the most apt for examining how hegemonic systems function rhetorically, and how their practices can come to dominate particular spaces and places through human design. In my research, I employ the term rhetorical stagnation to explain highly territorialized spaces (cf. Ecofeminism, Warren 1990), where rhetoric can be easily controlled and manipulated, often with great implications for all that lies above and below.
More than any other invention, the dam symbolizes how humans use technology to overpower and dominate their natural environment, not just rewriting landscapes, but controlling them. In examining the problems that plague these lentic systems, from fertilizer runoff to more sinister industrial contaminations, and in thinking about how these different bodies interconnect through various material, political, and social assemblages, we might also begin to explore the effects of our own individual thinking, policies, and actions.
Clemson University rests on just such a body, Lake Hartwell, built by damming up the Savannah River. This reservoir serves as a source for recreation, hydroelectric power, drinking water, and as a flood control measure for the Savannah River Nuclear Site some 100 miles below on the Savannah River. But underneath Hartwell's mass of water, around which million-dollar homes have been constructed, across which boaters skim, lies the remains of the Cherokee Town of Seneca. The Cherokee were defeated, marched away from this land so that the victors could build wealth through slavery. And that which remains of Seneca and the remains of the people who lived there, have been concealed by these waters, and forgotten.
Background
The university is named for Thomas Clemson, son-in-law of John C. Calhoun, the fiery South Carolina politician and defender of slavery whose "A disquisition on government" (1851) provided the legal argument for the South's secession. Clemson inherited Calhoun's Fort Hill plantation, later bequeathing it to the state for the purposes of establishing a "high seminary of learning." While the university characterizes Clemson as a gentleman scholar/farmer, venerable "founder," his actual story is less dignified. As Bartley (2009) contends, Clemson struggled socially and financially throughout his life, benefiting more from familial connections than his own skill or intellect.
The actual designer of Clemson University was the white supremacist, Benjamin Ryan Tillman. In his term as Governor of South Carolina, Tillman worked to institute policies to disenfranchise black voters and dismantle reconstruction. Tillman made a name for himself during the 1876 election campaign, when he led a gang of "Red Shirts," riflemen on horseback riding through black communities terrorizing black voters. In the largest of these events, the Hamburg Massacre and Ellenton Riots, over one-hundred African Americans were thought to have been murdered. Tillman openly bragged about his role in these crimes, including the execution of Simon Coker, a black state senator who had come to Ellenton to investigate the events.
In a 1909 account to the state legislature, Tillman explained how he used Clemson University to solidify white supremacy through technical and agricultural education of young white men. Tillman took full credit for the university's founding, describing Clemson as a recluse whose “ideas on the university were not clear or well defined” (p.5). To protect the university from interference from the state legislature, who in 1880's had been a majority black, Tillman instituted a scheme written into Clemson's will that would appoint himself and his cronies as trustees, with the power to select the majority of board members, thus creating a system that was, as he put it, “self-perpetuating."
Tillman established Clemson University on the former slave plantation of the most revered of all white supremacists, John C. Calhoun, not for the purposes of establishing an institution of higher learning, but as a means of achieving white supremacy in South Carolina. As such, he designated it a military college and hired a faculty largely consisting of former Confederate soldiers (Thomas 2018). Even up until 1955, cadets clothed in confederate grey uniforms served an important spectacle of function, marching in well-formed lines on the parade ground below the university's main educational building, later named "Tillman Hall" in response to the civil rights movement.
Field of Till
Stagnant ecosystems are highly susceptible to contamination. In ponds and lakes, fertilizer run-off feeds giant algae blooms stifling other forms of life within. In territorialized spaces like Clemson, spectacle produces similar outcomes. While the sight of marching cadets once served this function, over time, this symbol was replaced by a better one, football. The intensity of Clemson game day is difficult to explain to the uninitiated, but its rituals serve an important function in this stagnant ecosystem. I often wonder what a visiting space alien might make of this stadium, yet another kind of reservoir, filled with screaming orange bodies, thick like a bloom of algae in our stagnant waters, distracting us, stunting our growth and development.
Tillman's many schemes to reestablish white supremacy succeeded. Through terror campaigns and gerrymandering, Tillman's Democrats were able to displace the black majority in state government. Then in a coup de grâce, Tillman, now a U.S. Senator, organized the State Constitutional Convention of 1895, leading the effort to amend voting requirements to include a poll tax, reading and writing proficiency, and a constitutional knowledge test. Tillman's plan succeeded: at the close of the Civil War, some 60% of South Carolina’s population was black, while today that population stands at less than 30%. (US Census, 1880, 2017).
For the whole of its existence, Clemson University has done its part to reinforce systematic racism by primarily educating white men, their sons, and their sons, Strom Thurmond chief among them. At present, black students make up only 6% of the Clemson student body (2018 Fact Book). Bridge programs, which other universities typically install to provide a pathway to higher ed for minority and low-income students, are instead filled with white alumni whose children don't meet Clemson's admissions requirements (Barkley Interview 2017). On the employment side, black faculty hiring and retention are similarly lacking (Simon 2019).
Resilience Theory
So how has Clemson University been able to avoid significant change? When ecologists discuss the strength of an ecosystem, they often refer to the system’s resilience. Gunderson and Holling's (2002) work on resilience theory considers nested adaptive resilience models theorizing large, intermediate, and small feedback loops, known as panarchies, named for the Greek God of nature, Pan. Rather than representing a system in a single register, panarchies express the complexity of a given system functioning at different scales. When a system experiences change, small fast variables revolt, causing the middle loop to absorb the shock, reorganize, allowing the large, slow variables to adapt and learn should the system experience further disturbance.
Gunderson and Hollings (2002) in Folke (2006).
Fast Variables
The small, fast variables provide spaces of experimentation and discovery.
Clemson’s fast variables incorporate the doings of the classroom space, teachers and students engaged in learning, workers laboring, people moving in relation to one another. Let us be clear: These are white spaces. White spaces reproducing white space.
Intermediate Variables
Intermediate feedback loops serve as buffers between small and large variables.
At Clemson, the intermediate variables consist of the makings of departments, faculty and student senate, campus and student organizations, labor practices, forms and procedures, communications, especially propaganda.
The next film includes Clemson University President, James Clement's 2017 welcome back speech, made in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rather than take the opportunity to possibly move our own campus and community in a more ethical and just direction, the administration reverted to old propaganda, reminding us that we are happy, united in "solid orange," and that we should do nothing if not smile. I silenced Clements in this message so that you may see the video for what it is: seeds to be sewn. The film also includes found footage, uncut university reenactment footage portraying a contemplative Thomas Clemson, our purported founder, wandering the fencerows of his inherited slave plantation.
Slow Variables
Large feedback loops are representative of slow variables that add to the robust nature of a system. Clemson possesses large, slow variables responsible for our university knowings. These include our architectural design, archives, alumni board, and administration. Slow to change, revered, protected from fast variables by intermediate ones, they can be seen marching along with great pomp, maintaining the traditions and designs of Benjamin Tillman, adding to the work of others who have maintained this system.
Conclusion: Clemson as a Resilient System
Clemson University, over the course of its history, has proven an uncommonly resilient ecosystem. This is not to say that it hasn’t faced dangers from outside. Ecologists use the term dual-phase evolution to explain how ecosystems adapt through “local” and “global phases,” or fail to do so, which results in a threshold, a state of sudden change. Over its long history, Clemson has encountered “global phases” such as its admittance of women, desegregation, the sexual revolution, but has been able to learn from enaction and reorganize its intermediate variables to either deter or minimize thresholds.
At the moment, Clemson is facing a number challenges in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. In response the trustees have dropped the name of Calhoun from the honor's college. Additionally, at the urging of the faculty senate, they have requested that Tillman's name be removed from the school of education, a decision that actually rests with the State Legislature. But these are small changes at a school responsible for much of the inequity in the state of South Carolina. We can change the names, but we won't change the design.
This film was shot over the course of two years. Filming began using a FLY 360 camera with the intended audience accessing the content in Google Cardboard. The Fly 360 uses a single wide-angle lens producing unusual distortions of images, bending lines and light through space with ghostly effect. As the project evolved and garnered additional funding, a Garmin Virb 360 replaced the ultra-wide angle. Images from a Canon T6i were used to create a cyclorama effect. Select 360-degree films may also be accessed using the YouTube APP in dedicated VR Headsets like Oculus. Visit the Clemson Ghost Tour Channel.
References
Barkley, Robert (2017, January 19) [Interview] Clemson University Director of Admissions.
Bartley, Abel. (2009). Race, reconstruction, and post-bellum education. In Alma Bennett, Thomas Green Clemson’s Life and World (pp. 159-186). Clemson, South Carolina: Clemson University Digital Press.
Retrieved from https://cup.sites.clemson.edu/pubs/tclemson/tclemson-08-bartley.pdf
Calhoun, John C. (1851). A disquisition on government (Vol. 1). Charleston, South Carolina: Steam Power Press of Walker and James.
Carson, A. D. (2017). Owning my masters: The rhetorics of rhymes & revolutions [Dissertation]. Clemson, South Carolina: Tiger Prints.
Clemson, Thomas (1883). Will and Testament. Retrieved April 14, 2016, from https://www. clemson.edu/TGC200/the-will.htm.
Clemson University 2019 Fact Sheet (2019). Retrieved July, 5 2020 from https://www.clemson.edu/institutional-effectiveness/documents/2019/factsheet19.pdf
Cixous, Hélène. (1998). Stigmata. London and New York: Routlage.
Democritus (1962). Fragments in G. Kirk, J. Raven & M. Schofield, The presocratic philosophers: A critical history with a selection of texts. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Folke, Carl. (2006). Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analyses. Global Environmental Change, 16(3), 253-267.
Guattari, Felix. (2005). The three ecologies. (I. Pindar & P. Sutton, Trans.). Somerset: New Jersey: Bloomsbury Publishing. (Original work published 1989)
Gunderson, Lance and C.S. Holling. (2002). Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Washington D.C.: Island Press.
Gries, Laurie. (2015). Still life with rhetoric: A new materialist approach for visual rhetorics. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.
Lucretius. (1984) De rerum natura. In M. Puchner, The Norton anthology of Western Literature. New York, New York: W. W. Norton.
Maraj, Lou (2020). Black or Right: Anti/Rascist Campus Rhetorics. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Mays, Chris (2015). From ‘Flows’ to ‘excess’: on stability, stubbornness, and blockage in rhetorical ecologies. Enculturation, 19.
Ore, Ersula J (2019).Lynching: violence, rhetoric, and American identityJackson: The University Press of Mississippi.
Simon, Mollie R. (2019, January 21) As Clemson works to increase faculty diversity, progress is slow but steady. Anderson Independent Mail.
Thomas, Rhondda Robinson. (2018). Reconstruction, public memory, and the making of Clemson University on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation. American Literary History, 30(3), 584-607.
Thomas, Rhondda Robinson. (2019). Call my name: Using biographical storytelling to reconceptualize the history of African Americans at Clemson University." Biography, 42(3), 624-652 .
Tillman, Benjamin. (1909, July 20). The Origin of Clemson University. Box 2, Folder 39. J.C. Littlejohn Papers. Clemson Special Collections and Archives, Strom Thurmond Institute, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina. Retrieved May 1, 2018.
Warren, Karen J. (1990). The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism. Environmental Ethics, 12(2), 125-146
Video
Carson, A. D. (2017). See the Stripes [Video file]. YouTube. Retrieved 1 September, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl1cSgbnZTo
Clemson Media. (2017, August 18). A Special Message for the Clemson Community [Video file]. Clemson Newsstand. Retrieved 20 September, 2017, from https://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/welcome-to-the-start-of-a-new-academic-year/
Clemson Media. (N.d.). Stock footage of Thomas Clemson. [Video file]. Clemson Media Archive. Retrieved June, 24 2017.
Clemson University Web Cameras. (2018, April 24). [Live video capture]. Clemson.edu. Retrieved April 24, 2018, from https://www.clemson.edu/webcams/
Images
Brady, Mathew. (1849, March). John C. Calhoun [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved April 18, 2018, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_C_Calhoun_by_Mathew_Brady,_March_1849-crop.jpg
N.p. (N.d.). "board.jpg" [Photograph]. Clemson.edu. Retrieved 18 April 2018, from https://www.clemson.edu/administration/bot/board.html
N.p. (2016, October 20) Jim Clements.jpg. [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved April 18, 2018, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:James_P._Clements#/media/File:Jim_Clements.jpg
N.p. (N.d.). Robert Jones Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost [Photograph]. Clemson.edu. Retrieved 18 April 2018, from https://www.clemson.edu/provost/leadership
N.p. (N.d.). Strom Thurmond [Photograph]. Preaprez.wordpress.com. Retrieved 17 April 2018, from https://preaprez.wordpress.com/2007/06/29/supreme-court-adopts-southern-manifesto/
N.p. (N.d.). Thomas Green Clemson portrait from 1899 Clemson College catalog [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved 17 April 2018, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Green_Clemson_portrait.png
N.p. (2016, October 20) Jim Clements.jpg. [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved April 18, 2018, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:James_P._Clements#/media/File:Jim_Clements.jpg
N.p. (N.d.). Robert Jones Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost [Photograph]. Clemson.edu. Retrieved 18 April 2018, from https://www.clemson.edu/provost/leadership
N.p. (N.d.). Strom Thurmond [Photograph]. Preaprez.wordpress.com. Retrieved 17 April 2018, from https://preaprez.wordpress.com/2007/06/29/supreme-court-adopts-southern-manifesto/
N.p. (N.d.). Thomas Green Clemson portrait from 1899 Clemson College catalog [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved 17 April 2018, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Green_Clemson_portrait.png
Music
BBC. (2014, Sept 5). John Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine – BBC Proms 2014 [Audio from video file]. YouTube. Retrieved April 16, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LoUm_r7It8&feature=youtu.be
Clemson Marching Band. (N.d.). Tiger Rag – The Song That Shakes the Southland [Audio file]. Clemson.World. Retrieved April 25, 2015, from https://clemson.world/tiger-rag-the-song-that-shakes-the-southland/
Michael Tilson Thomas - Topic. (2014, September 25). Bolero, M81. Greatest Hits Of Ravel. Maurice Ravel. London Symphony Orchestra [Audio from video file]. YouTube. Retrieved April 18, 2018, from https://youtu.be/VYvVxRNyX4A
Phillip Glass - Topic. (Nov 7, 2014). Morning Passages [Audio from video file]. YouTube. Retrieved on 23 April 2018, from YouTube Audio Library.
Silent Partner. (2015, May 3). Under Water [Audio file]. YouTube. Retrieved May 22, 2018, from YouTube Audio Library.
Special Thanks
The Clemson Ghost Tour and this project received gracious funding and support from the Clemson Humanities Hub and the Clemson Graduate School. It also received support from Clemson CCIT and the Clemson Center of Excellence.
This work would not have been possible had it not been for the encouragement of my fellow wanderer, dweller, and wife, Cassie and our two sons who have all shared in the work of plowing.
My neighbors and friends in South Carolina have been generous with their knowledge, time, and tools. In South Carolina I found many inspiring, like-minded people who value community, seek equality, and are working for a more just and equitable future for all of South Carolinians. Thanks also to Cynthia Haynes, Victor Vitanza, Stephen Moysey, Dan Harding, Jan Holmevik, David Blakesley, Todd May, April O'Brien, Eric Stephens, Brian Gaines for supporting this project. Special thanks to Michael Farris who provided technical knowledge regarding this user interface, and to the University of Pittsburgh's support of my digital scholarship and growth.