Lures, slimes, time: Viscosity and the nearness of distance

This article explores the notion of viscosity as a way of theoretically and empirically investigating ambient rhetoric. Viscosity is a particular kind of lure or proposition that may be inherent in phenomena and that is fundamentally sensory and affective—viscosity presents us with a difference, with a change in states, with rhetorical potentialities. Visual autoethnography is detailed and modeled as an empirical methodology for tracing and engaging viscosity and, thus, ambient rhetoric. In viscous encounters, time bends, distances move nearer, and human–nonhuman relations are animated and enlivened.