Ambling with infraordinary elemental rhythms, or practicing phenology

Rhetoric scholars interested in the ecological thought, object-oriented ontologies, and new materialisms have turned their attention from what rhetoric is to how rhetoric is – as both ambient and infrastructural. These theoretical moves prompt methodological questions: How do rhetoric scholars notice that which goes un(der)noticed? How do we tune our attunements from foreground to background? This article attempts an aesthetic and ambulant methodology that re/tunes and re/turns conceptual-corporeal-empirical methods to play with the background relations in which beings always already find themselves. More specifically, by practicing phenology, this article engages with infraordinary elemental rhythms – in/visible seasonal dis/appearances. The methodological trick may be thinking-feeling rhythmically, ma(r)king other temporalities – moving among chronos, kairos, pheno, and aion – to invent newly available paths of (infra)being.