4. Conclusion: Grammatization beyond Stiegler
Although Stiegler identified this grammatological shift from flows of programs to stocks of footage, he did not consider the rhetoricity of the latter. This is where digital rhetoricians might take up the question of grammatization beyond Stiegler. While it may be sufficient for media theoriststo broadly describe the historical and culturalsignificance of emerging media technologies, rhetoricians must push the issue toward production. What does it mean to compose with this new unit, this new gramme? Contrary to flows of programs, stocks of footage operate more like alphabetic characters and words, in that they, too, possess what Derrida called the nuclear traits of (arche-)writing: iterability, citationality, structural absences, etc. In this respect, describing YouTube as a process of grammatization entails the remediation of alphabetic writing qua the logic of supplementarity (not to be confused with Bolter and Grusin’s emphasis on hypermediacy and immediacy). But the alphabetic analogy also clues us in on an important difference: audiovisual stocks are infinite. From ideograms to phonetic letters, early writing marched toward abstraction and economy, progressively chiseling away at the imagistic correspondence between the written signifier and the visual context of its signified. Eliminating the trace of these visual correspondences, and reconfiguring letters around sonic rhythms, was the key to creating a finite alphabet that was small enough to carry a gentle learning curve and flexible enough to support a multitude of exigencies. Networks of audiovisual stocks, by contrast, are expansive and singular; they preserve the very semiotic indexes that finite alphabets efface and, more than film or photography, position each audiovisual stock for general interlocution. Granted, audiovisual media production relies on well-worn conventions recycled from other composition practices;still, recognizing the gramme of thistechne asstocks of footage lends added perspective to our rhetorical activity. Through YouTube, one works with and combines ready-made, discrete elements to create definite rhetorical or aesthetic sequences—but the set of audiovisual characters remains open, concrete, and unlimited. To upload a video is both to create a finite sequence for viewing and to add new characters to the available means of audiovisualstock for writing. Thissame double value carried by stocks of footage in YouTube can be observed in a multitude of other digital video, audio, and image networks.
