Rice - The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More - On Archival Magnitude

The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude
Author(s): Jenny Rice

Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2017), pp. 26-49
Published by: Penn State University Press
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The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More:
On Archival Magnitude
Jenny Rice
a b s t r ac t
The Aristotelian concept of magnitude (megethos) can expand our understanding

of how abundant information accumulates in ways that expand beyond epistemic
registers, creating a sense of coherence. This sense of coherence, in turn, is more of
an aesthetic effect than the result of epistemic validity drawn from that evidentiary
abundance. In this article, I explore two different examples of archival magnitude:
one is the fine-grained enormity of conspiracy discourse and the second is the
large-scale quantities that power big data. These examples of archival magnitude
are simply two narratives through which to explore the aesthetic and rhetorical
operation of megethos. By redefining discourses that call on magnitude—the power
of more—as aesthetic discourse, we may also find that the most fitting response is
likewise an aesthetic one.
Keywords: magntitude, archives, conspiracy, aesthetics, data
Lizard people, chemtrails, Illuminati, toxic fluoride in the water, radio-

controlled chip implants, Jewish cabals, secret NASA technology, poisoned
vaccinations, the shooting down of Pan Am Flight 103, government-sponsored
brain washing, one-world government, JFK killed by the CIA, JFK killed by
the mafia, staged moon landings, alien bodies hidden in military bunkers,
Paul is dead, Tupac is alive. Conspiracy theories are e ndless. Not only are
there many of them, but each theory is awash in details that connect innu-
merable dots. In thinking about how to combat the more insidious kinds of
conspiracy theories, legal scholars Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule make
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2017

Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
the rhetorical aesthetics of more
the case that conspiracists simply need to be presented with more credible
information that will eventually reveal the flaws in the conspiracies. Sunstein
and Vermeule’s essay “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures” argues that
conspiracy theories are difficult to correct due to their “self-sealing” quality.
When contrary evidence is offered to conspiracy theorists that may disprove
the theory, that evidence is often discarded as a lie or is absorbed into the
larger structure of the overall theory. For Sunstein and Vermeule, conspiracy
thinking is the result of a “degenerating research program”: “Our primary
claim is that those who hold conspiracy theories of this distinctive sort typi-
cally do so not as a result of a mental illness of any kind, or of simple irra-
tionality, but as a result of a ‘crippled epistemology,’ in the form of a sharply
limited number of (relevant) informational sources” (2009, 204). The remedy,
therefore, is to increase available information sources to people who may find
themselves encountering conspiracy discourse. So, for example, Sunstein and
Vermeule recommend infiltrating the online networks where conspiracy dis-
course is exchanged. By sharing multiple sources and information networks
with participants, we may help to correct the degenerating research program.
The logic shared both by conspiracy discourse and by Sunstein and
Vermeule’s argument points to something we might call rhetoric’s “archival
magnitude”: more information, more sources, more research. Archival mag-
nitude sees the rhetor adding ever more evidence to archives from which
he or she can draw to bolster claims. By “archives,” I mean those public
artifacts, stories, pieces of information, and data that we amass in personal,
cultural, and rhetorical storehouses.1 In this context, the term “archives”
does not so much refer to the traditional spaces of archival records but to
texts, images, encounters, and narratives that, as Lauren Berlant explains,
describe “important things, like what constitutes intimate relations, politi-
cal personhood, and national life” (1997, 12). This sense of the term also
draws from Barbara Biesecker’s observation that archives are best “under-
stood as the scene of a doubled invention rather than as the site of a singular
discovery” (2006, 124). In short, archives are generative and are continually
re-created through inventive action. At first glance, this sense may seem
overly broad, yet I use it for the purpose of describing the generative acts of
archiving that are performed in a number of formal and informal ways. In
this article, I am interested in how publics both build archives and deploy
archival materials to use as evidence for particular claims. Sunstein and
Vermeule pose archival magnitude as an antidote to the “sharply limited
number of (relevant) informational sources” that conspiracy theorists draw
from. In making this suggestion, they are relying on a larger assumption
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we frequently find at work in the rather commonsense notion that more

evidence makes for a stronger argument. (After all, nobody ever asks for less
evidence when weighing claims.) Or to put it another way, archival mag-
nitude appears to generate a sense of coherence with regard to claims, no
matter if the claims support conspiracy or work against it.
Of course, archival magnitude is not only relevant in the case of fringe
issues. Indeed, in the era of big data, we find the concepts of magnitude (vast
amounts of information gathered) and scale (the ability of that vast accu-
mulation of information to “scale up” a claim) at work in fields as disparate
as geography, public health, library science, and digital humanities. Many
U.S. universities, for example, have begun to invest significant resources into
big data analytics in order to raise student retention numbers, decrease time
to graduation, and streamline the advising process. While privacy experts
are wary of these large-scale personal data-mining operations, universities
justify them on the grounds that claims about what classes an individual
student should take, for example, are better supported with more informa-
tion (Stirton 2012). More is not only more; more is better. While it is not
too difficult to identify the faulty logic of this notion, big data continues to
persuade not only institutions, but also individuals, in ways that sometimes
transcend the limits of rationality. Indeed, the assumption that magnitude
yields a greater accuracy to our claims has led to some rather substantial big
data failures.
But what exactly is a fitting response (to borrow Lloyd Bitzer’s termi-
nology) to claims—especially to troubling claims—that draw on a magni-
tude of evidence? What is a fitting response to unjustifiable arguments that
marshal a large amount of “evidence” as backing, as, for example, in the case
of many conspiracy theories? One possibility is to engage with the accuracy
(or inaccuracy) and the logic of evidence used to support such claims. We
might question, debate, critique, demonstrate, and counterdemonstrate the
unjustifiability of the evidence itself. Yet, in some cases, this strategy fails
in significant ways. Consider Kenneth Burke’s analysis in “The Rhetoric of
Hitler’s Battle,” which offers a look at the magnitude of Hitler’s perverse
archive: “If you point out the enormous amount of evidence to show that
the Jewish worker is at odds with the ‘international Jew stock exchange
capitalist,’ Hitler replies with one hundred per cent regularity: That is
one more indication of the cunning with which the ‘Jewish plot’ is being
engineered” (1974, 194–95). Any counterevidence is simply absorbed into
an ever-growing archive of anti-Semitism. Hitler’s perverse magnitude of
evidence scaled up to what he saw as the truth of the “International Jew.”
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One observation that follows from Burke’s analysis turns Sunstein and
Vermeule’s argument on its side: perhaps unjustifiable claims are faulty not
due to a lack of evidence but instead gain fuel from evidentiary abundance.
A similar problem of counterargument is identified in Kevin
J. Ayotte’s “A Vocabulary of Dis-Ease: Argumentation, Hot Zones, and
the Intertextuality of Bioterrorism,” which examines public fears of bioter-
rorism that have little scientific or rational basis. As Ayotte writes, “The
positivist epistemological framework of public health officials—framing
knowledge as either present or lacking, accurate or inaccurate—misunder-
stands the problem” (2011, 2). Previous emotional and nonrational sources of
meaning contribute to a kind of “enthymematic argumentation” that skips
a more formal epistemic reasoning process. Although risk communication
scholars often conceptualize risk as “magnitude x probability,” the magni-
tude of fears about contagions such as Ebola, SARS, or anthrax poisoning
can overwhelm the associated probability of actual epidemics (2011, 13). For
this reason, continues Ayotte, it is true that “the presentation of counter-
evidence to contradict inflated claims is unquestionably a necessary part
of any strategy designed to prepare appropriately for biodefense, but sole
reliance upon scientifically accurate information . . . cannot comprise the
entirety of the response” (2011, 18). Instead, Ayotte argues that we must also
account for the ways in which the beliefs of bioterrorism are underwritten
by feeling, emotion, and sensations like revulsion and fear.
Here I arrive at a provisional hypothesis that I would like to explore
in this article: archival magnitude is not only a function of (or a catalyst
for) the persuasive moment but is also a discrete act in itself. That is, the
act of constructing and maintaining archives may also be read separately
from any particular claims those archives are used to support. The exigen-
cies for my exploration emerge from our ongoing need to consider what
Debra Hawhee describes as “rhetoric’s sensorium,” or the ways in which we
communicate via sensations that are not necessarily “encased in language”
and yet can still be known (2015, 13). We may of course describe informa-
tional abundance epistemically, which is generally how we have approached
the persuasive moment. Yet there is also much to be learned from asking
what archival magnitude generates beyond the epistemic. In short, I want
to understand the power of more. Beyond contents of evidentiary archives,
what else does more transmit? In an attempt to explore these questions,
I turn to the aesthetic dimension of magnitude, which is articulated in
Aristotle’s version of megethos. By revisiting the aesthetic dimension of
megethos, we may better understand the rhetorical power of archive building
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and, relatedly, we may be able to cultivate a fitting response to rhetoric that

operates via magnitude.
In this article, I explore two different examples of archival magnitude:
one is the fine-grained enormity of conspiracy discourse and the second
is the large-scale quantities that power big data. These examples of archi-
val magnitude are simply two narratives through which to explore the
aesthetic and rhetorical operation of megethos. Although they are quite dif-
ferent examples, I am interested in the ways both call on magnitude—the
power of more—to create claims that might be better described in terms
of aesthetics.
megethos
As it turns out, Aristotle has a lot to say about magnitude. “Aristotle wasn’t
much noted as a tropologist. But in the Rhetoric, the single most frequently
recurring commonplace is that of quantity, degree, largess, magnitude,”
notes Thomas Farrell, who has done some of the best work on this subject.
“It’s as broad as it’s long. What looks large from a distance, close up is never
that big. It is interesting, by contrast, to reflect upon the poetic understand-
ing of magnitude. The Greek word is the same: megethos. But now we find
a quite different inflection placed upon meaning and function” (1998, 6).
Farrell shows how megethos wends and winds throughout both the Rhetoric
and Poetics.
Megethos has a poetic impact that is not necessarily in proportion to the
size or extent of an object. As Aristotle explains in the Poetics:
Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any

whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrange-
ment of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty
depends on magnitude and order. Hence a very small animal
organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the
object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor,
again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take
it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the
spectator; as for instance if there were one a thousand miles long.
As, therefore, in the case of animate bodies and organisms a cer-
tain magnitude is necessary, and a magnitude which may be easily
embraced in one view. (1898, 31–32)
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Aristotle tells us that a very tiny or a very giant thing cannot be beautiful
because we find it impossible to take in. For this reason, as Farrell points
out, we should understand Aristotle’s magnitude as having an aesthetic
component. Farrell’s example is the “friendly conversation” where you ask,
“Hey, what’s going on?” Too much detail is unwanted. Too little detail is
rude. The good response to the friendly conversation is a beautiful aesthetic
of just right: “Things are going well. I’m hanging in there.” Not too much
to take in, but not so little as to provide nothing at all.
Farrell indicates the complex nature of magnitude and its importance
to rhetoric: “Magnitude—in its myriad of manifestations—seems essential
to the most important concerns of traditional rhetoric: namely, whether an
audience may care about any topic sufficiently to attend to it, to engage it,
and to act upon it; what consequences will weigh most heavily upon their
prospective deliberation; what priorities will finally tip the balance in their
judgment; and what appetitive attachments will need to be overcome for
rational reflection to be feasible” (2008, 471). At the same time, Farrell also
points out how what counts as big, weighty, or significant is contingent.
This contingency is evident in those cases when one group becomes furious
by another group’s refusal to accede the same weight to something that the
first group judges to be enormously important. “In the bigger scheme of
things, this concern is pretty small,” I have heard myself say on occasion to
someone who wants me to understand the importance of something I dub
insignificant.
Conspiracy discourse underscores strange and uneven connections
between magnitude and weight. I was reminded of magnitude’s weight and
weightlessness when I received an overstuffed envelope in my campus mail-
box from a conspiracist who said that he wanted to send me some impor-
tant information about secret government plots. He copied and stapled
each item, because (as he told me in his letter) the documents were deeply
significant. When I read through the mountain of documents, however, I
had a hard time understanding the significance of anything. There were
declassified memos, newspaper clippings, and other information acquired
through the Freedom of Information Act. To me, it was nothing more than
random pages of bureaucratic ephemera. The weight was very light to me,
and yet there was so much of it. To him, however, the large amount of this
material was damming and deeply important. It had weight. Heaviness.
Part of what makes conspiracy theorists so strange to many of us is the
disproportionate weight they grant to their evidence. The magnitude they
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ascribe to it is not aesthetically “right.” Aesthetically, the size does not seem
quite embraceable, at least as Aristotle imagines. Perhaps it is too vast for
to take in. Or perhaps it is too tiny to perceive, its weight too insignificant
to register at all. Moreover, the amount of evidence that is loaded up in
various conspiracy discourses does not have the effect of securing any kind
of satisfactory epistemic sense of completeness. Reading ever more details
intended to bolster the claim that the September 11 attacks were an inside
job do not persuade me of this claim. If anything, the mountain of sprawl-
ing materials marshaled in support of the claim makes it appear even more
ridiculous. The more dots that are connected as evidence, the less likely I
am to buy any part of the claim. Of course, for the conspiracist who sent
me his personal archive, the mass of papers and details worked the other
way: their accretion formed a body of suasive concreteness. Although our
reactions were quite different, the impact of this magnitude transcended
the contents found in them. This strange relay among aesthetic magni-
tude, epistemic magnitude, and weight points to an epistemic aesthetic.
As Farrell points out, Aristotle’s sense of megethos pushes us to “set aside
totalizing disjunctions: ‘the’ aesthetic vs. ‘the’ epistemic” (1998, 7). In short,
magnitude itself, and its aesthetic impact in particular, may be part of an
argument’s epistemic claims.
In Aristotle’s description, the aesthetics surrounding magnitude mark
a kind of coherence, or a feeling of “taking in” what is sometimes translated
as a “sense of the whole.” This particular translation renders Aristotelian
beauty less an epistemic concept of unity and more a sense impression of
wholeness. According to Aristotle, a tiny insect cannot be beautiful, even
though we are able to easily see the bug in its entirety, because we are not
able to acquire a fine-grained sense impression of its miniscule details with
our human eyes. We do not have a sense of the whole, despite the fact that
we see the whole bug easily in one glance. The implications for rhetoric of
thinking as aesthetics as a way of knowing that differs from epistemic is out-
lined quite vividly in Steve Whitson and John Poulakos’s essay “Nietzsche
and the Aesthetics of Rhetoric” in which they draw on the Nietzschean
view that “consciousness itself is predicated on and structured by concepts
whose origin is to be traced to the senses” (1993, 137), that sense and sen-
sation undergird epistemology: “Aesthetic rhetoric,” they argue, “focuses
on the human body as an excitable entity, an entity aroused by language”
(1993, 141). Megethos may thus be understood as an aesthetic inflection of a
quantitative mass that gives a sense of weightiness, a sense that sustains the
epistemic without relying on epistemology to structure it. To borrow from
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Whitson and Poulakos, megethos operates through the human body as an

excitable entity, an entity aroused by the sensation of more.2
In order to see how this sense of magnitude, or megethos, is deployed
in various ways, I now turn to a consideration of how a rhetoric of more
leads to various types of claims in the case of conspiracy theories and big
data. Both yield claims that run from the preposterous to the tenable, yet
I want to focus particularly on the ways that the “archives” used to make
these claims are primarily aesthetic in character. More importantly, I want
to emphasize that aesthetic coherence is actualized in the process of con-
structing archives. By understanding the archives—or what we might more
generically call “evidence”—as aesthetic, I hope to discover a more fitting
response to discourses that draw heavily on megethos.
conspiracy and the weight of more

Archives of conspiracies grow to unfathomable scales. Consider the emer-
gence of “truthers,” those who believe that popular social narratives are
designed to perpetuate a dark lie, which they have been able to uncover.
There are 9/11 truthers, Boston Marathon truthers, Sandy Hook truthers,
and birthers, those who claim Barack Obama’s U.S. birth certificate is fake,
just to name a few. The members of these various communities collect
evidence, carefully archiving pictures, news stories, maps, interviews, and
other texts that seem to offer perspective on the “truth” that is hidden from
plain sight. For the past few years, I have conducted research and field-
work with these self-described “truther” groups. As I began to interview
these groups and join online discussions, I quickly found myself drowning
in details, information, archival images, and texts that circulate across the
various groups. As Jonathan Kay remarks in his book Among the Truthers,
“Increasingly, members of the Truth movements began presenting them-
selves as scientists as much as activists” (2011, 104). I would add to Kay’s
statement that they also are remarkable archivists, as well.
The archive in conspiracy discourse is both a giant and a microscopic
one, often comprised of time-lapsed images and still frames that can give
second-by-second analysis. Such fine-grained attention to detail was seen,
for example, in the truther community that sprung up (literally overnight)
after the Boston Marathon bombing. As soon as gory images began to
appear online of badly injured victims—some missing limbs and covered in
blood—the conspiracy community began citing them as evidence of a “false
flag” at work. Many of the postings in online sites like Reddit and Facebook
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reflected intensive archival work, the mining of old websites and images
in order to connect some fairly dark dots. Consider this posting from a
conspiracy website, written only a few hours after the events in Boston:
“Family Guy episode (Turban Cowboy) which was aired on March 17, 2013
on Fox, You will see a Boston marathon with people being killed, a library,
terrorists and you will hear two explosions, bombs detonated via cell phone
and see one explosion of a bridge from a bomb detonated via cell phone.
Look into it.”3
The conspiracy floated was that the bombing was a “false flag” perpe-
trated by the federal government in order to clamp down on civil liber-
ties. Evidence of this plot was unearthed in such minutia like old cartoon
episodes and even references to offhand comments made weeks earlier by
local police officials. Images of the bombing aftermath quickly formed the
bulk of this archival material. One of the most frequently cited images in
Boston bombing truther communities was of a now legless victim named
Jeff Bauman. The horrific picture of Bauman being carried away directly
after the blast began to appear alongside an image of a legless veteran
named Nick Vogt, who resembled Bauman. Certain Boston truthers had
dug deeply into local news stories about Vogt and searched his Facebook
page in order to compare minute details like facial structure and even
amputation features. Boston truthers were adamant that Bauman and Vogt
were the same man and that instead of being a victim, Bauman/Vogt was a
“crisis actor” who played along with the fake bombing. Countless versions
of this argument, always featuring juxtaposed images of Bauman and Vogt,
circulated rapidly in sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. The argument
that Bauman and Vogt were the same person gained traction across social
media sites when additional archival work seemed to “uncover” damming
pieces of evidence, such as the detail that a Facebook page set up to elicit
support for Vogt had been shut down weeks earlier.
Allegations that crisis actors were hired were repeated in the aftermath
of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings and the Aurora theater
shooting. In the months following the Sandy Hook shootings, Sandy Hook
truthers created numerous online memes that compared images of Sandy
Hook victims and images of living children who truthers argued were the
actors who “played” victims for purposes of conspiratorial cover-up. Gene
Rosen, who was a hero in the midst of the tragedy, became a special target
of conspiracy theorists. One classroom of Sandy Hook elementary school
children escaped Adam Lanza’s deadly attacks by running to Rosen’s neigh-
boring house for help. After telling him that their teacher had been shot
34
Figure 1: An example of the Bauman/ Figure 2: An example of the Sandy Hook
Vogt conspiracies that circulated through “crisis actor” conspiracy.
social media.
dead, he took them inside and called police. Rosen describes being barraged
almost immediately by taunting emails and phone calls by Sandy Hook
“truthers” who accused him of being an actor in a staged hoax. “I’m getting
emails with . . . accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much
am I being paid?’ . . . The quantity of the material is overwhelming,” Rosen
told one reporter (Seitz-Wald 2013).
For rhetoricians who wish to make sense of conspiracy discourse, one
obvious place to begin critical analysis is with the contents of such discourse,
whether in terms of its evidence or in the ways that those arguments engage
with defined social phenomenon. Taking a broad perspective on the rhetor-
ical elements of conspiracy talk, for example, Thomas Goodnight and John
Poulakos explore the ways that conspiracy theories often make it possible
for users to engage (albeit roughly) in a quasi-critical inquiry about rhetori-
cal epistemology. They define conspiracy rhetoric as “a struggle to define the
grounding of discourse” (1981, 301). Goodnight and Poulakos also examine
how conspiracy discourse evaluates and critiques what rhetorical theorists
call evidence. According to Goodnight and Poulakos, conspiracy theorists
struggle to define social reality through their engagement with epistemic
value of proof. Alternatively, Shane Miller argues that conspiracy discourse
is a form of critique and an attempt to speak to power. Miller writes, “By
focusing on issues at the heart of the exercise of power (authority, legitimacy,
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credibility, grounding, etc.) conspiracy theories themselves serve as a way

for non-expert citizens to critique the placement and administration of
power” (2002, 53). Likewise, Marouf Hasian Jr. explores the relationships
between particular conspiracies and larger social contexts. In his analysis
of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hasian argues that “as critics, the chal-
lenge involves trying to balance the search for epistemic knowledge while
pointing out the material conditions . . . within cultures that give rise to
conspiratorial rhetorics” (1997, 209). Hasian then calls for rhetorical critics
to examine “the ideological complexities of artifacts like The Protocols” in
order to counteract their ongoing circulatory power (1997, 210).
Although these kinds of analyses offer important insights into con-
spiracy discourse by examining its internal logic and the cultural contexts
in which it is embedded, we might also look to the rhetorical impact this
discourse has outside of its contents. It may be that explaining ideological
complexities of any given conspiracy discourse is not the only—or even the
best—means of critique or counterresponse. This is not to say that the con-
tents of any given text or archive play no role in persuasion. The mass of evi-
dence alone does not persuade regardless of what that evidence contains. At
the same time, we must recognize that the quantity of material amassed has
rhetorical impacts that are not coterminous with those contents. Borrowing
from Hawhee, then, we might ask what explains magnitudinous discourse
as it operates in rhetoric’s sensorium. Does conspiracy rhetoric, for exam-
ple, move in ways that are not encased in language yet remain rhetori-
cally salient? In widening our critical gaze, we see yet another dimension of
their discourses: how they move and why they manage to persuade in spite
of their faulty logics. Reading these discourses across a theory of megethos
reveals that it is not simply the case that archives build claims but also that
archives are beautiful.
(more) big data

Conspiracy discourses are dizzyingly vast, but they are minute compared
to the monstrous size of big data. While there are several competing defi-
nitions of big data, perhaps the most insightful is technology writer Gil
Press’s quip that big data operates from the “belief that the more data you
have the more insights and answers will rise automatically from the pool
of ones and zeros” (2014). The sprawling pieces of information—images,
maps, stories, data, facts, rumors—overlay and can create patterns that
seem incontrovertible to the analysts who collect these details. In drawing
36
conclusions from this data, analysts can sometimes fall into the mistaken
belief that the magnitude of information has given us a closer or more
accurate view of actual states of affair. Much like the truther who feels as
if an abundance of shared and circulated images confirms evidence of a
conspiracy, big data analysts can sometimes connect too strongly the links
between magnitude and scale.
The most passionate defenses of big data stem from a kind of faith in
magnitude’s ability to scale up to a better representation of reality. The more
data, the stronger our claims become. Ideally, if we could collect “the big-
gest” big data, then we would be able to give a perfect account of whatever
we are examining. Our accounts would scale up to a “god’s-eye view.” In
one of the boldest statements of big data’s perfect scalability, former Wired
editor-in-chief Chris Anderson declares in an article titled “The End of
Theory” that “this is a world where massive amounts of data and applied
mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out
with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget
taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they
do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprec-
edented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”
(2008). Anderson’s faith in big data rests on the assumption that enough
data will eventually lay bare the truth of everything. The numbers speak for
themselves. And the more numbers we have, the louder they speak.
Yet, as many critics have pointed out, big data often fails to offer the
elusive god’s- eye view (see boyd and Crawford 2012 for an example of such
critiques). It risks missing the nuances and smaller narratives lodged in each
N that is aggregated into a conclusion. Belief in perfect representation risks
becoming its own kind of conspiracy theory. There are several colorful exam-
ples of big data’s archival magnitude failing to result in warranted claims.
One spectacular example is the 2009 Google Flu Trends case. A team of
Google researchers claimed they could track influenza outbreaks in almost
real time based on Google searches across the world. While the Centers for
Disease Control relied on reports from medical practitioners who reported
such cases, the Google team aggregated searches for flu symptoms and drew
conclusions that these accumulating search terms reflected actual cases of
influenza. Their results were published in the journal Nature, which was
then widely circulated and touted for its promise of “nowcasting” disease
spread (Preis and Moat 2014). Google Flu Trends retained its celebrated
status for several years, until researchers for Nature News discovered that
data from the CDC showed that Google had overestimated outbreaks by
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a rather significant factor. According to economist Tim Harford, the case

of Google Flu Trends shows the danger of drawing conclusions from big
data’s aggregation without undertaking a more subtle analysis. As Harford
writes of the Google Flu Trends failure, “A theory-free analysis of mere
correlations is inevitably fragile. If you have no idea what is behind a cor-
relation, you have no idea what might cause that correlation to break down”
(2014, 15). Another way of phrasing Harford’s conclusion is that we must be
aware of a wrongly placed faith in the self-evidence of abundance.
Rather than examining big data in terms of this ongoing debate, how-
ever, I am more interested in examining the current faith in big data as a
reflection of the rhetorical impact, the aesthetic impact, of megethos. The
proliferation of data in big data may not lead to more warranted claims,
a warning that even big data advocates often issue, yet there still remains
something different about big data’s abundance. In “View from Nowhere,”
Nathan Jurgenson hints at what that “something different” might be: “As
the name suggests, Big Data is about size. Many proponents of Big Data
claim that massive databases can reveal a whole new set of truths because
of the unprecedented quantity of information they contain. But the big in
Big Data is also used to denote a qualitative difference—that aggregating
a certain amount of information makes data pass over into . . . a different
sort of knowledge altogether” (2014). The term “knowledge” is a problem-
atic word here, but it is worth pursing the suggestion that aggregating data
can lead to a transformation. At some point, magnitude passes over from
an evidentiary function into a different function, one that might best be
described in terms of its aesthetic effects.
Indeed, a hallmark of big data is not simply the amount of data col-
lected but the way that data is made coherent. Big data is rarely presented
in a raw form, since its sheer mass is too great to “take in” with a single
look. Visualization, with a special emphasis on aesthetic design, has been
key for big data collectors and users. As Anthony McCosker and Rowan
Wilken write in “Rethinking ‘Big Data’ as Visual Knowledge: The Sublime
and the Diagrammatic in Data Visualisation,” “We see in this emphasis on
beauty a kind of aesthetic engagement with Big Data, a form of knowl-
edge encounter that turns on the complexity and aura of an unimaginable
object” (2014, 157). McCosker and Wilken describe the ways that the uses of
big data visualization and aesthetics go beyond merely presenting the data
mined in any mass collection; the visualizations themselves pass over into a
sense of something coherent, a sense that possibly transcends the individual
pieces of datum that are contained within that aesthetic whole.
38
There are numerous examples of Big Data’s aesthetic. On the most basic
end of the spectrum, we may think of the now ubiquitous “word cloud,”
which mines texts of all sizes to show intensity of particular words within
those texts. More serious examples of Big Data’s aesthetic character can be
seen in several recent projects visualizing geotagged Twitter feeds. If a user
has location enabled on her Twitter account, for example, then her hashtags
or words can be coordinated with that particular set of geographic coor-
dinates. An aggregate of all geotagged tweets using particular hashtags or
words can then be collected in order to provide a huge amount of data
about where certain conversations are happening. During the Arab Spring,
for example, many critical geographers created maps that helped readers
to visualize the huge quantity of Tweets that used the hashtag #arabspring
trending across the globe. The maps that emerged were stunning in their
capacity to help readers grasp the temporal and spatial dimensions of a
social movement involving millions of stories and lives. In the midst of the
Egyptian revolution, technology designer Kovas Boguta gathered massive
amounts of data from Tweets written by those who were talking about the
events in Egypt. Boguta’s resulting map uses color, size, and proximity to
reflect the movements of these writers’ interactions (including a sense of
how many were writing in English or in Arabic).
Visualizations such as Boguta’s arguably contain an element of
Aristotle’s sense of beauty. This kind of visual accumulation allows for a
beautiful coherence, or what Edward Tufte calls “beautiful clarity.” Tufte
Figure 3: Kovas Boguta’s visualization.
39
jenny rice
describes such beautiful clarity in terms of macro/micro readings of visual

images. His own example is Constantine Anderson’s isometric map of
Manhattan. Anderson’s maps, which took over two decades to complete,
drill down to nitty gritty details such as telephone booths, bus shelters,
and sidewalk planters. “Detail cumulates into larger coherent structures,”
Tufte explains, “those thousands of tiny windows, when seen at a distance,
gray into surfaces to form a whole building” (1990, 37). From this accumu-
lation and magnitude comes the experience of taking in something both
phantastic and phantastically coherent.
In these examples, there is a resonance between the visceral experi-
ence of “taking in” and what we sometimes identify as a sense of coherence.
What is being taken in when we view Anderson’s map is not anything like
truth or representation. Nor do we take in the overwhelming microscopic
details he provides on a large scale. Rather, we take in a kind of whole that
is the accumulation of (and the exceeding of ) individual parts. It is the
experience that we have taken in something in a satisfactory way. That sat-
isfaction is akin to what Aristotle describes as the beauty of proper order.
It is coherent. From cohaerēre, “sticking together,” coherence is nothing
but accumulation—a sticking together until something feels whole. The
affective nuance of coherence is evident in what medical sociologist Aaron
Antonovsky describes as a human “sense of coherence,” which is a feeling
of “global orientation” in the world (1979, 2). Coherence is not reducible to
individual stimuli from our environments but is a sensual response to the
whole. Indeed, according to Antonovsky, our human sense of coherence
does not so much signal correctness as it does the “proper order” of senti-
ment. Accumulation hits a beautiful just right for certain bodies, at least in
an Aristotelian conception of beauty. What we might conclude, therefore,
is that the power of magnitude lies in its ability to generate a sense of
coherence that transcends the individual pieces it encompasses.
building archival beauty

Before returning to the question of fitting response, I would like to add
one final thread to this discussion of archival magnitude and its aes-
thetic dimension. In order to address what exactly we are “taking in”
when megethos is at work, I turn to Michael Wood, Karen Douglas, and
Robbie Sutton’s excellent essay “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory
Conspiracy Theories,” which shares results from a study of conspiracy
theorists who simultaneously believe in contradictory versions of events.
40
Wood and his coauthors found that contradictory beliefs do not indicate
a case of troubled dissonance. Instead, conspiracists assimilate competing
viewpoints in support of a “conspiracist worldview”: “The more that par-
ticipants believe that a person at the centre of a death-related conspiracy
theory, such as Princess Diana or Osama Bin Laden, is still alive, the more
they also tend to believe that the same person was killed, so long as the
alleged manner of death involves deception by officialdom” (2012, 2–3).
Logically, Bin Laden is either dead or alive, and a single conspiracy theory
cannot somehow account for both facts at once. It is rational to eliminate
one of these alternatives in order to remove a significant cognitive disso-
nance. Yet both theories (Bin Laden is still secretly alive; Bin Laden was
already dead when Seal Team Six arrived) bolster the idea that there is a
larger banner of secrecy within the government. The version of conspiracy
is almost beside the larger point: secrecy is at work, it is nefarious, and it
must be revealed.
In order to further explain this seeming paradox, Wood, Douglas, and
Sutton draw from Theodor Adorno’s work in The Authoritarian Personality,
which examines conflicting anti-Semitic beliefs, such as the belief that
Jews are too eager to assimilate and they are also too isolated from wider
culture. Adorno shows that these competing beliefs may contradict each
other at one level, yet they are a unified part of a larger “nuclear idea” that
is strongly mistrustful of Jews in general (2012, 5). For this reason, identify-
ing and analyzing conspiracy theories at local levels of individual claims
has only limited value. Instead, as Wood, Douglas, and Sutton suggest, we
ought to view these claims as extending a wider ideological (or, we might
say, rhetorical) gesture. The nonsensical competing claims about Bin Laden
being both dead and alive or about Jews being both too assimilated and too
isolated help to sustain a much larger coherent discourse about nefarious
machination.
The effect does not come from the contents themselves or from whether
those contents are accurately represented. Rather, Wood, Douglas, and
Sutton as well as Adorno suggest that the goal is accumulation itself, the
building up of the conspiracy archive. That is, the activity of accumulation
is the source of coherence. Even through competing narratives, paradoxical
claims, and unwarranted beliefs, conspiracists create a coherent ideology,
namely, the ongoing boosterism of conspiracy thinking. The coherence this
ongoing process yields—the way all the pieces stick together and are able to
be taken in—is itself beautiful. In short, the aesthetically pleasing aspect of
archiving magnitude is the act of building found in megethos itself.
41
jenny rice
This aesthetic sense of coherence is what makes archival magnitude so

difficult to address rhetorically. While we can argue with the conclusions of
a claim and even with the contents of any particular archive, we have a most
difficult time dislodging the aesthetic effect of accumulation. We can ques-
tion the accuracy of a claim, but that does not necessarily undo the effects
of magnitude. For conspiracists, building the archive—that activity itself—
is beautiful. And for that reason, it is always right. Even when it’s wrong.
This is the rhetorical power of more. It is not just the coherence that
is beautiful but the activity itself of building, of accumulating and sticking
together. Building together is how archives are lived and maintained. Here
we might see the activity of archival magnitude, or the ongoing and end-
less work of accumulating coherence, as the end of such rhetorics and not
simply a means. The power of more thus never ends because adding to the
archive is itself the goal. This explains why introducing counterevidence or a
counterarchive does not often persuade those engaged in building archival
magnitude. The archive does not reflect any truth beyond its own accumu-
lation, its own coherence.
David Hume’s useful distinction between sentiment and judgment
offers another perspective on the challenges presented by rhetorical mag-
nitude: “All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to noth-
ing beyond itself, and is always real. . . . But all determinations of the
understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something
beyond themselves, to wit, to real matters of fact; and are not always com-
fortable to that standard” (2001, 832). Addressing the judgment that arises
from the sentiment is one thing. We can do that in response to the “archi-
val magnitude” of evidence built up, say, around unjustifiable conspiracy
theories. But, as Hume points out, it is nearly impossible to argue with
the impact of sentiment, insofar as its impact is aesthetic. The aesthetic is
always true.
Unfortunately, counterstrategies to troubled archives too often fall back
on a mistaken faith in the essential relationship between magnitude and
scale. That is, we argue against the accumulated evidence of conspiracy, false
conclusions from Big Data, stereotypes, and the like by showing how the
magnitude of “evidence” does not scale up and offer a better perspective on
reality. And while this argument may be indeed warranted, the counterstrat-
egy is likely to fail because “scaling up” is not always the goal behind such
accumulation. Burke’s example of Hitler’s anti-Semitic rhetoric is a prime
example. Counterevidence failed, to borrow Hume’s words, because Hitler’s
archival magnitude had a reference to nothing beyond itself. It referenced
42
only its own sentiment; its beautiful coherence of the evil “International
Jew.” Accumulation in action thus became its own credible refuge.
sensible responses
How exactly should we respond to archival magnitude? I suggest that we
can begin a fitting response by first reading such rhetoric as aesthetic dis-
course, or what we might also describe as epideictic discourse. Indeed, the
power of more can be found in the links that Aristotle makes between
megethos and epideictic. As Ned O’Gorman writes, “Epideictic, as the
aspect of discourse especially given to the invocation of magnitude, pro-
vides for the polis through lexis as phantasia images of honor and shame
or virtue and vice, that can be ‘sized up’ and interpreted according to a
logic of scale. How great was his courage? How expansive was her generos-
ity?” (2005, 28). Epideictic in the most basic rhetorical pedagogy is about
amplification. As Aristotle instructs us on epideictic praise: “Thus, even
if there is no comparison with the famous, one should compare [the per-
son praised] with the many, since superiority [even over them] seems to
denote excellence. In general. . . amplification is most at home in those that
are epideictic; for these take up actions that are agreed upon, so that what
remains is to clothe the actions with greatness and beauty” (2006, 82–83).
Although we often make a temporal distinction among the three types
of discourse—judicial, deliberative, and epideictic—this distinction is not
very useful except for the unity it provides in bringing together past, future,
present. But, as Debra Hawhee makes clear, “the very task of epideictic
rhetoric is to rhetorically—through a host of images furnished by memory,
by vivid comparisons, and projected into the future—produce magnitude,
thereby achieving . . . density by calling up multiple images, and piling on
excessive details” (2011, 149). Epideictic is about accumulation. More.
Thus, the notion of epideictic as ornamental speech also does not
quite get at epideictic’s more powerful function. Jeffrey Walker notes that
Aristotle does not merely define epideictic speech as ornamental or cer-
emonial speech. Aristotle distinguishes deliberative and judicial discourse
audiences, who are expected to be kritai (judges), from epideictic discourse
audiences, who are expected to be theoros (those who makes observations).
“The role of the theoros, in short, is not to make rulings but to form opinions about
and in response to the discourse presented,” writes Walker (2000, 9). Thus, epi-
deictic discourse is not a third triangulated piece of discourse (as we some-
times teach) but underlies the work of deliberative and judicial rhetoric.
43
jenny rice
Epideictic, continues Walker, “shapes the fundamental grounds, the ‘deep’

commitments and presuppositions, that will underlie and ultimately deter-
mine decision and debate in particular pragmatic forms” (2000, 9). For this
reason, Walker proposes epideictic discourse as a primal element of pub-
lic discourse. Or, as O’Gorman puts it, “we can understand the epideictic
function of discourse as primary, central, and primal” (2000, 33). The epide-
ictic function gives salience to deliberative and judicial discourse.
While the sense of coherence generated by magnitude may not be (in
our estimate) defensible, as Hume points out, it is nevertheless right, since
it has no reference to anything beyond itself. Likewise, because epideictic, as
the primal foundation of deliberative and judicial discourse, is also based in
accumulation, our arguments and claims are similarly rooted in the sensa-
tional effects of accumulation. Therefore, if we read magnitude as an epide-
ictic expression of beautiful coherence, our response as interlocutors ought
to shift from that of kritai to theoros. Reading archival magnitude through
the eyes of theoros instead of kritai does not mean we should abandon the
responsibility of evidentiary evaluation. As John Poulakos points out, the
audience of epideictic is no less of a judge than the audience to deliberative
or forensic discourse. However, Poulakos writes, “In epideictic rhetoric the
listeners judge the aesthetic merits of the discourse at hand on the basis of
the delight they feel upon hearing it. . . . When the audience passes judg-
ment on the beauty of what it hears, it does so from a vague yet secure sense,
not from a strict system of explicit rules of dialectical reasoning” (2007, 347).
The “vague yet secure sense,” as Poulakos frames it, is further grounded in
ta endoxa, or commonly held beliefs that may not emerge at the level of
reflexive reasoning. The judge of epideictic discourse is operating from a
sense of sense, in other words; a sense of aesthetic judgment. By specifically
reframing discourses of megethos as epideictic, we might therefore better
position a response from sense itself.
What is perhaps the most fitting response to archival magnitude may
not begin by addressing the claims made from any particular archive of
evidence. Instead, a fittingly aesthetic response to such magnitude inter-
rogates the broader frameworks of coherence, asking whether the sense of
the whole that is being advocated seems to us (te doxa) to be coherent. This
kind of response engages with the sensations that are diffused by certain
claims rather than with the archival materials. For example, we might show
that the archive itself is not a beautiful whole. It is too big, as in conspiracy
discourse, or perhaps too tiny. Both size problems reflect a kind of gross dis-
proportionality that may interrupt a sense of the whole. In Farrell’s example
44
of the “just right” conversation, the beauty of proportionality comes from a

response that is neither too brief nor too wordy. When I pass my friend in
the hallway, the right-sized response to my phatic question “How are you?”
is almost always something like “Pretty good. And you?” Yet if my friend
had just received news that she only had twenty-four hours to live, that
response would be disproportionate—almost cruelly so. In the aftermath,
I would almost certainly feel hurt by what seemed a darkly off-balanced
exchange.
We have recently seen this kind of response deployed with those who
oppose antivaccination discourse. Studies have shown that engaging with
antivaccination proponents at the evidentiary level has very little persuasive
effect (see Nyhan 2014), and so the broader provaccination movement has
launched public campaigns that appeal to an aesthetics of size in order to
reveal the radical insufficiency of antivaccination claims.
Provaccination proponents are increasingly turning to infographics, an
aesthetic genre of argumentation, not only to emphasize the evidentiary
data themselves but also to underscore proportionality and size. They oper-
ate on the same logic as any other rhetoric of megethos by giving a sense of
the whole. In figure 4, for example, the risk vaccination poses is compared
to other (seemingly far-reaching) things that could happen to one’s child
or that one’s child could achieve. Being struck by lightening, for example,
occupies the second largest space among all of the circles. Even making the
U.S. Olympic team is represented graphically as significantly larger than
the tiny size of vaccination risk. In a response like this one, we see a coun-
terrhetoric that deploys an equally aesthetic response that relates to size.
Rather than engaging the faulty logic used by antivaccination proponents,
Figure 4: Provaccination infographic.
45
jenny rice
this response chooses instead to emphasize the disproportionality of

antivaccination fears by pointing to the radical insufficiency of antivaccina-
tion archives: not only are they are not a beautifully coherent whole, but
they now look gross in their lack of proper size.
On the other hand, in the case of Big Data, we may better understand
the data to be coherent not because of its contents but because it has liter-
ally made sense. It has given us a sense of a whole, yet the immensity of its
size may also give us pause. The Google Flu Trends fiasco reminds us that
what appears as a coherent whole may be radically disproportionate to its
parts. The billions of data pieces within any Big Data map are fragments of
lives and events that are immensely complex; too complex to be subsumed
under the largest data set. This is precisely what McCosker and Wilken are
getting at when they suggest that we see Big Data’s visualizations less as
complete representations and more in the mode of a Deleuzian diagram:
not a representation or transmission of information but a distribution and
impact of sensation, sense, or forces (2014, 160). “The diagram does not
‘demonstrate’, but rather casts light on the creative acts through which con-
cepts, constructions and knowledge might emerge,” they write (2014, 162).
In short, Big Data’s major deployment through size (and, more specifically,
its visualizations) impacts and distributes sensation rather than transmits
information. By acknowledging this rhetorical character, therefore, we may
find ourselves in the position of theoros when confronted with its discourse.
We are called on to respond as an epideictic audience with the senses that
such epideixis excites.
Beyond considering fitting responses, however, we may also consider
how megethos drives our own rhetorics and the archives we build. As we
amass evidence in support of our most deeply held claims, is it possible
that the acts of building of these archives are actually the source of coher-
ence? Becoming a critic of one’s own rhetoric may thus involve less evalu-
ation of defensibility and more attention to proportionality surrounding
our archives. Does our discourse appear grossly large or atomistically small
to those who encounter them? What kinds of sensations and impacts are
diffused through the aesthetics of our seemingly coherent arguments?
Answering these questions will not necessarily unmake our own rhetorics,
but they will trouble any comfort we take in the sense of coherence. In rec-
ognizing that constructing and maintaining archives are acts discrete from
any particular claims drawn from those archives, we may begin to under-
stand the rhetorical power of more. Of course, this recognition also opens
up a new line of inquiry for rhetors and critics alike. Could we imagine,
46
for example, a methodology that approaches activist rhetorics through a

vocabulary of sensation? Specifically, what would it mean to respond to
accumulation, abundance, and (dis)proportionality not as epistemic inflec-
tions but as acts that create and diffuse sensations? How do our critical
frameworks shift when we view our personal, public, social archives not as
a resource of evidence but as a telos in itself ? These are only a few questions
that emerge from broader attention to archival abundance and the rhetori-
cal power of more.
University of Kentucky
Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies
notes
1. I use the term “storehouses” to indicate a kind of social indexing for topical refer-
ences. I draw on Ralph Cintron’s description of topoi as “storehouses of social energy,”
which are also a kind of social indexing (2010, 100). Archives and topoi are not unrelated,
since topoi coalesce through archival energies that are spread across publics. Here I am
interested in archival energies themselves—the ones that eventually condense into recog-
nizable topoi and social indexes that can then be drawn from.
2. Consider the familiar ritual of a childhood crush. My teenage diaries contain
pages filled with the name of that moment’s love interest written over and over again.
The act itself makes no sense. Yet, in some ways, it does nothing but make sense. This
act of accumulation and magnitude overwhelms the (already excited) senses in a kind of
heightened sensation, both through the building up of a sensational archive and through
the experience of its totality.
3. See http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/04/family-guy-warned-of-the-boston-
bombings-turban-cowboy-aired-on-march-17-2013-on-fox-video-2621858.html.
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The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude

Author(s): Jenny Rice

The Aristotelian concept of magnitude (megethos) can expand our understanding

Keywords: magntitude, archives, conspiracy, aesthetics, data

Lizard people, chemtrails, Illuminati, toxic fluoride in the water, radio-­

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2017

we frequently find at work in the rather commonsense notion that more

and, relatedly, we may be able to cultivate a fitting response to rhetoric that

Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any

Whitson and Poulakos, megethos operates through the human body as an

conspiracy and the weight of more

credibility, grounding, etc.) conspiracy t­heories ­themselves serve as a way

(more) big data

a rather significant factor. According to economist Tim Harford, the case

Figure 3: Kovas Boguta’s visualization.

describes such beautiful clarity in terms of macro/micro readings of visual

building archival beauty

This aesthetic sense of coherence is what makes archival magnitude so

Epideictic, continues Walker, “shapes the fundamental grounds, the ‘deep’

of the “just right” conversation, the beauty of proportionality comes from a

Figure 4: Provaccination infographic.

this response chooses instead to emphasize the disproportionality of

for example, a methodology that approaches activist rhetorics through a

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credibility, grounding, etc.) conspiracy theories themselves serve as a way