Advances in the History of Rhetoric

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May 2018

  1. Trumponomics, Neoliberal Branding, and the Rhetorical Circulation of Affect
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT This article studies Trumponomics as a brand that derives its economic and political purchase from the patterns of affective circulation opened up by the contemporary political economy. Because neoliberalism enables branding to both extract surplus wealth and appropriate surplus affect directly from consumers, it changes the rhetorical terrain. In this new landscape, Trump’s incoherent economic policies fade into the background as the production of his economic brand occupies the foreground. My argument theorizes affect within the labor theory of value, analyzes the Trump brand within that framework, and explores the implications of including affective value within the rhetorical toolbox.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1474051

January 2018

  1. Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters
    Abstract

    Shannon Walters’ Rhetorical Touch stretches the consideration of embodied rhetorics to embrace the sense of touch through both classical rhetoric and contemporary disability studies. Key to Walters’ project is a rereading of Aristotle’s pisteis—logos, pathos, and ethos—through the sense of touch. To examine the productions of a variety of disabled rhetors, she draws upon rhetoricians from Empedocles to Burke, on phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and on disability-studies scholars such as Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Brueggemann. This broad, disciplinary-crossing quality of her scholarship makes sense because she situates touch as “a sense that transcends bodily boundaries; it demands an approach that also transcends boundaries” (8). Though her project is solidly within the realm of disability studies, it can and should affect how we do scholarship in rhetoric.Through an understanding of Empedocles’ sense of logos, Walters argues that touch is the broadest means of persuasion, and, furthermore, that it is the sense that ties all humans together, those who are disabled as well as those who are temporarily able-bodied. In so doing, Walters calls for a radical repositioning of all rhetorical appeals as fundamentally rooted in the sense of touch. This is the most radical and fascinating claim of the book, and it holds up for both individual rhetors as well as amorphous rhetors who are harder to identify. Walters not only uses this understanding of rhetoric to guide examination of Helen Keller, Temple Grandin, and Nancy Mairs, but also in her examination of the birth of the Disability Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s through the 1977 demonstrations for the enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. At times, her broad historical and theoretical approach weaves together unevenly, but the overarching argument’s contribution to reimagining pisteis is solid and perhaps even groundbreaking.The first chapter examines the tactile experience of Helen Keller’s rhetorical productions through a careful consideration of her texts, the context in which they were produced, and the theoretical implications of her practice. A facet of this chapter that I found particularly relevant and insightful was Walter’s examination of the doubt of authenticity and individual authorship that accompanied all of Keller’s writings. Walters reads the accusations of plagiarism against Keller as stemming directly from Keller’s relationship to communication as tactile and inherently collaborative. Though Keller is an exceptional example of these facets of rhetorical production, we all draw on sources we have absorbed unknowingly, on collaboration with present and distant others, and on a tactile experience. Walters argues we thus must reshape rhetoric to account for this dynamic. To do so, she literally redraws the traditional rhetorical triangle into a doubled triangle, forming either a diamond with an entire side “touching,” representing both traditional ethos and her reinterpretation through mêtis, or an angular and precarious hourglass, intersecting at the point of two interpretations of logos—Aristotle’s and Empedocles’.Chapter two examines the demonstrations by disability activists demanding enforcement of Section 504, simultaneously continuing Walters’ theoretical underpinnings, which rest on an understanding of rhetorical identification largely dependent on Burke, but shaped through theories of touch by Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, and Deleuze. Walters identifies a key problem with rhetorical models of identification: they “do not accommodate the identities of people with disabilities or identifications made possible by the lived experience of disability” (62). Walters’ retheorization seeks to accommodate identification: “Specifically, identification via sensation and touch possesses the potential to reform and reshape the process of identification” (64). Walters suggests Deleuze’s concept of the “fold” as a model of Burkean identification that includes division. Though I find this chapter fascinating and ambitious, I’m left wondering why we must accommodate identification at all. This seems a retrofitting strategy and potentially less radical than an outright dismissal, or even a redefinition, as Walters does so well in her reimagining of pisteis.In the next three chapters, Walters molds the rhetorical triangle into something radically different from what our first-year composition textbooks taught us in order to be inclusive of touch and thus of disabled rhetors. Instead of Aristotle’s autonomous, rational logos, in chapter three, Walters puts forward Empedocles’ felt sense of logos, which is touch-based and enables a facilitated model of rhetoric. She finds this extralinguistic approach to logos more appropriate for rhetors with psychological disabilities and suggests that, “Empedocles’ sense of logos, felt in the heart as much as exhibited by one’s cognition, is physical, psychological, and embodied” (98). Walters then applies this reading of felt logos to online support forums for schizophrenia and depression, in which participants explicitly discuss touch and the lack of it in their lives. This reading is innovative, though perhaps limited in this online form.In the following chapter, Walters pushes her readers to reexamine how we presume an ethos that is neurotypical. She suggests, “Simply put, autistic people are seen as ethos-less when viewed through a narrowly medical or pathological lens” (113). This pathological lens casts autists as unable to identify and connect with others and therefore unable to construct ethos. In this chapter, Walters is doing her most expansive work to develop lines of thought already established in considerations of disability and of bodily knowing within our discipline, such as those developed by Debra Hawhee and Jay Dolmage, who both look to mêtis as an alternative knowledge production within rhetoric that is also based in bodily adaptation. Walters builds directly on this scholarship in order to suggest an approach to ethos that is neuro-diverse: “I redefine mêtis as a tactile relationship of embodied cognition between people and their environments that supports a method of character formation not based on traditional notions of ability and neurotypicality” (118). In this chapter, Walters makes a significant contribution to disability rhetoric as a field by showing how mêtis can accommodate those who use facilitated communication as well as those who are neuro-divergent and may use touch in nontypical ways to build trust and character.In the next chapter, Walters articulates how facility with kairos can make new forms of pathos possible: “I redefine kairos though special attention to the sense of touch, showing how kairos operates tactilely to create new emotional and physical connections among bodies in close proximity and contact” (145). Walters uses the term “redefine” in this chapter and the last in ways that may lead a reader to think she has no regard for rhetorical history. Quite to the contrary, Walters is changing perspective and illuminating a connection to touch that has always been related to the terms she is deploying. For instance, Walters notes that in the first uses of the term kairos, in Homer and Hesiod, the term is “nearly synonymous with ‘disability,’ indicating places of bodily vulnerability and impairment that are penetrable tactilely” (153). Here, Walters traces an etymology that classically may have worked to further disadvantage those who are impaired, but that in current rhetorical scholarship can call attention to the tactile and kairotic ways of employing pathos, which disabled rhetors, such as Nancy Mairs, Harriet McBryde Johnson, and John Hockenberry, have opened as rhetorical possibilities.Her final two chapters work to conclude her reexamination of rhetoric through the sense of touch. Chapter six explores the possibilities of teaching with haptic technologies. Far from an afterthought, this chapter remains deeply theoretical, engaged in historiography, and pulls together her shape-shifting pisteis within the classroom. Walters leads the reader as she leads her students through a critical investigation of haptic technologies, showing the ableist assumptions embedded within them. Not only is this investigation pertinent to disability studies, but it also models the kind of deep critical analysis we should all be guiding our students toward. Walters’ conclusion reminds us that we are all embedded in haptic technologies and the future of communication technology will only embed us further. As we critically engage technology, we need a lens through which to understand touch, which Walters has provided.Rhetorical Touch is an important contribution to the historiography of rhetoric, to rhetorical theory, to disability studies, and to composition rhetoric. I look forward to seeing how other scholars take up this reshaping of the traditional rhetorical triangle. The only disappointment I can manage to find in the book is the continued adherence to identification. However, Walters provides analytical insight and new perspectives on the tradition that are radical and inclusive of diverse bodies and minds. That is what this book offers to the world of rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1419747
  2. Facing the Challenges of Reconstructing Ancient Buildings
    Abstract

    Johnstone and Graff’s contribution to what they term the “archaeology” of Greek rhetoric is original and significant. By describing the visual and acoustic characteristics of bouleutêrion interiors, they help us to imagine the experiences of both speaker and audience in these spaces. Speeches before boulai could have been performative tours de force. Orators could have taken advantage of the settings to enhance their words’ persuasive force, to present themselves in competition as confident, powerful men, and, perhaps, to generate particular aesthetic effects. Johnstone and Graff’s approach reflects the contemporary trend of trying to situate ancient performance texts within the physical locations for which they were composed. Probably the most successful example of this is Bissera Pentcheva’s work on Hagia Sophia. Pentcheva and her colleagues have demonstrated how the acoustic properties of Hagia Sophia, particularly its reverberation time, would have affected the experiences of hearing and performing hymns, psalms, and the sung sermons known as kontakia during the Justinianic liturgy of the sixth century CE. Hagia Sophia lends itself to this kind of research, since the complete building survives, as does a large and varied corpus of texts written about it or for performance within it. Johnstone and Graff’s project faces the opposite situation. None of the dozens of known bouleutêria survives as anything approaching a complete building, and we have limited specific evidence of what went on within them. This essay considers Johnstone and Graff’s analysis in light of these two challenges.All the bouleutêria Johnstone and Graff discuss are in more-or-less ruined condition. Sufficient remains of the foundations of the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens survive for us to reconstruct the buildings’ dimensions and floor plans, but we have limited evidence about the heights and materials of the walls and roof and the materials of interior surfaces. It is not even clear whether there were wooden benches for the bouleutai to sit on. Other buildings are better preserved. For the bouleutêrion of Miletus, for instance, we know that the seats and walls were of marble and limestone, and we can reconstruct the exterior walls’ height with reasonable accuracy. Even for the best preserved bouleutêria, fundamental architectural details, including the presence of windows and the materials and pitch of the roof, are matters of speculation. The state of the buildings has important consequences for acoustic analysis, as the example of reverberation time will show.Reverberation time is a measure of how long it takes a sound to die away. Some materials, such as cloth, absorb sound and hasten its decay. Other materials, such as brick or solid wood, reflect sound and prolong its reverberation. To calculate the reverberation time of any room, therefore, we need to know the materials and surface area of every surface that sound could encounter within it, including the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture. We also need to know the volume of the room. This poses a challenge for bouleutêria. The Old Bouleuterion in Athens is a representative example. Since we do not know the height of the Old Bouleuterion, we cannot calculate with certainty its volume or the surface area of its walls and roof. Chips of yellow poros suggest that the walls were of this material, but neither the walls themselves nor traces of any of the interior furniture survive (Thompson 129–132). Accordingly, Johnstone and Graff have to make inferences about the height and the material of interior surfaces in order to calculate reverberation time. They estimate a wall height of 6 m and a roof peak height of 9.3 m. Different heights would change both the volume and surface areas, and so would result in different reverberation times. In Appendix A, Table 1, Johnstone and Graff base their calculations on “absorption coefficients that most closely resemble the building materials used.” As with the height, if we posit different materials, the reverberation times would change. Other measures, including speech intelligibility, also depend on height and materials. The presence or absence of windows can affect acoustic conditions as well. Georgios Karadedos, Vasilios Zafranas, and Panagiotis Karampatzakis, who have calculated the reverberation times of some Greek bouleutêria and ôdeia, although with very different results from Johnstone and Graff, note that open windows in their reconstruction of the Odeion of Aphrodisias would reduce reverberation time by 20 percent. When Johnstone and Graff praise the acoustics of the Old Bouleuterion, therefore, their conclusion is a possibility rather than a certainty. They are referring to their reconstruction of the building rather than the building itself. The same holds for other bouleutêria. For the bouleutêrion at Messene, for instance, Johnstone and Graff’s calculations depend on a reconstructed wall height of 17 m and a roof peak height of 20.3 m. All of Johnstone and Graff’s assumptions are reasonable, but results based on information that we do not know must always be used with caution.Even though Johnstone and Graff’s results may be uncertain in particulars, they point to conclusions that are generally correct. Greek bouleutêria, especially those whose shapes resemble the Old or New Bouleuterion in Athens, were effective performance spaces for both visual and acoustic reasons. The Greeks themselves seem to have appreciated the functionality of the Old and New Bouleuteria, since, of all the monumental civic and religious buildings of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, their architecture was the most consistently imitated. This contrasts with another Athenian building that hosted oratorical performances, the Odeion of Pericles. Modeled after Xerxes’ tent, it did not become the model for later ôdeia (Camp 347), perhaps because its many columns and sloping, peaked roof impeded visibility and resulted in poor acoustics, especially compared to the simple box-like shapes of the Old and New Bouleuteria.Research on bouleutêria faces a second central challenge besides the scanty archaeological remains. While we know these buildings housed councils of various sorts throughout the Greek world from the archaic through late antique periods, we have little idea of how these councils actually conducted their business. This is particularly true of Hellenistic cities, but it is also true of Classical Athens. We know much about the Athenian boulê’s responsibilities and procedures, but we do not know what the bouleutai did in the buildings we call the Old and New Bouleuteria and what they did elsewhere. The boulê met almost every day. Its published agendas always included the location of the meeting (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 43.3), and that location may have changed often. As Johnstone and Graff note, inscriptions and literary references attest to the Athenian boulê meeting in various places. Similarly, according to Xenophon’s Hellenica 5.2.29, the Theban boulê would meet in a stoa when its usual meeting place on the hill known as the Cadmea was being used for another purpose, and Christopher P. Dickenson (115) infers from two accounts of the same event in Plutarch’s Life of Aratus 40.2–3 and Life of Cleomenes 19.1 that the Corinthian boulê could meet in the Temple of Apollo, even though there was a bouleutêrion in Corinth (Diodorus Siculus 16.65.6).We need to be cautious about references to bouleutêria in ancient sources, since bouleutêrion is both a general and specific term. In Athens, it can refer to the particular buildings that we call the Old and New Bouleuteria, but any other place that any boulê meets is also a bouleutêrion. Hence, there was a bouleutêrion on the Areopagus for the boulê of the Areopagus (Lalonde). Any building where a boulê was meeting could probably be designated a temporary bouleutêrion, just as a stoa could become a dikastêrion while it was being used for trials. Along the same lines, at least some of the buildings designated as bouleutêria would have hosted events besides meetings of the boulê, since, as a general rule, Greek buildings were designed for multiple purposes. As Johnstone and Graff point out, the Old Bouleuterion may have simultaneously housed both the boulê and Athens’ archives. This affects how we think of bouleutêria as venues for oratorical performances. While there can be no question that they did host oratory, we cannot be sure of what else they were used for or how often speeches took place within them, as opposed to alternative meeting places of boulai.By emphasizing oratorical performances in bouleutêria, Johnstone and Graff’s analysis leaves questions about boulê procedure and the buildings’ other purposes unanswered. How often would speakers who were capable of the kind of performances that Johnstone and Graff envision have had the opportunity to speak in bouleutêria? How would the architectural characteristics that made bouleutêria excellent spaces for oratory have affected the other activities that occurred within them, such as subcommittee meetings or debates like the one in Lysias 22, Against the Graindealers, that Johnstone and Graff mention? What was more central to bouleutêria’s roles, their acoustics or the unimpeded sight lines from almost anywhere inside them? In the rest of this essay, I consider Johnstone and Graff’s analysis from the broad perspective of these questions. I will not offer answers, which is probably impossible based on our evidence, but I will show that reconstructions of bouleutêria need to account for other activities just as prominently as for deliberative oratory. Even though Johnstone and Graff do not specifically address other activities, their study points to how bouleutêria would have been more than simply venues for speechmaking. I will focus particularly on Athens, since we know more about the Athenian boulê than the boulai of other cities.Plato’s Gorgias, who surely has Athens in mind, defines rhêtorikê as “the ability to persuade with words dikastai in a dikastêrion, bouleutai in a bouleutêrion, and ekklêsiastai in an ekklêsia, as well as in any other type of political meeting” (452e, my trans.). The Athenian boulê acted as a kind of gatekeeper for the ekklêsia, setting the agenda of topics for each meeting. An item placed on the ekklêsia’s agenda was called a “preliminary resolution,” or probouleuma. Speakers could influence Athenian policy by successfully persuading the bouleutai to pass probouleumata recommending their pet causes. Since the ekklêsia appears to have approved the boulê’s recommendations without changes about half the time (Rhodes 79), a politician who was skilled at manipulating the boulê could wield considerable influence over the policies of Athens. Debates over probouleumata probably attracted the kinds of trained orators that Johnstone and Graff envision taking advantage of the acoustic conditions of the Old and New Bouleuteria. In the Sausage Seller’s description of a chaotic meeting of the boulê in Aristophanes’ Knights, we hear that Paphlagon was “booming with words that struck like thunderbolts” and “hurling mountain crags” at the bouleutai (626–629, my trans.). Although exaggerated for comic effect, this gives us a taste of the kind of oratory that politicians such as Cleon would have practiced before the boulê in the 420s BCE.There were other opportunities for oratorical performance before the boulê besides debates over probouleumata. The boulê had the power to conduct certain types of judicial hearings, most importantly dokimasiai, or “examinations,” of magistrates who were about to take office, as well as of invalids seeking public support. Dokimasiai took the form of trials. The people objecting to the appointment spoke first, and then the prospective officials defended themselves. Of the five surviving speeches that were delivered before the Athenian boulê, four come from dokimasiai (Lys. 16, 24, 26, 31) and one from another type of judicial hearing (Dem. 51). Dokimasiai would have been ideal occasions for what Johnstone and Graff term the “performance of masculine virtue and virtuosity in a competitive culture that prized honor and reputation.” Prospective magistrates and bouleutai had to justify not only their qualifications but also their lifestyles and habits. For instance, in Lysias 16, For Mantitheus, Mantitheus defends his appearance and reputation as an orator and responds to the charge that he served in the cavalry under the Thirty Tyrants.We should not exaggerate the importance of oratory in dokimasiai. Most of the hundreds of hearings the boulê had to conduct each year must have been resolved with rapid approvals or rejections and minimal speechmaking. Furthermore, whenever the boulê acted as a court, we do not know whether it even met in the Old or New Bouleuterion. Pollux 8.86 says that the dokimasiai of archons took place in the Stoa Basileos (Rhodes 36), and the manuscripts of Lysias 31.1 refer to a dikastêrion rather than a bouleutêrion. While the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens, therefore, seem to have served as venues for oratorical performances during discussions of probouleumata, the boulê seems to have been convened in other places on at least some occasions that may have featured competitive oratory.Even during political debates, prominent politicians could not address the boulê whenever they wished, since only the bouleutai themselves had an absolute right to speak (Rhodes 42–43). As a result, politicians sometimes pursued policy goals through behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Demosthenes (23.9,14), Aeschines (3.125), and the pseudo-Aristotelian Athênainôn Politeia (29.1–3) all describe politicians advancing policies through personal relationships (Rhodes 57). As Josiah Ober has argued, the boulê of the fifth and fourth centuries functioned through a series of interlocking social networks that recognized and relied on individuals’ connections and expertise (142–155). Ober calls this process “knowledge aggregation.” The aggregated knowledge of the boulê and its constituent social networks would have served as a check on the power of rhetoric. When bouleutai voted, their decisions were informed both by the speeches they had heard and by the informed opinions of their expert colleagues. Both the Old and New Bouleuteria, as Johnstone and Graff have reconstructed them, would have facilitated this kind of informed voting. By sitting, or perhaps standing, in what Ober (199–205) calls “inward facing circles,” the bouleutai could have observed each other as they listened to speeches and so reached judgments informed by the reactions of their colleagues. The open space that facilitated oratory would also have encouraged visual communication among listeners and so prevented orators from having too much power.The boulê oversaw many Athenian officials, especially those concerned with finances and the navy. One of the boulê’s most important roles was to supervise monetary transactions. For instance, in the fifth century the boulê observed the presentation of tribute from the allies (Meiggs and Lewis 46), and in the fourth century they watched in the bouleutêrion as the debts of individuals who had paid the money they owed to the state were formally erased from the written record (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 48.1). Duties such as these required seeing as much as hearing, which again indicates that visibility would have been as important as audibility to the design of Athenian bouleutêria. The open space of the Old and New Bouleuteria probably encouraged small meetings of subcommittees as well as mass viewing, especially if there were movable wooden benches. By the fourth century, the boulê conducted much of its supervisory business through subcommittees (Rhodes 143).The Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens were multipurpose buildings whose design facilitated a range of activities besides oratory. We know much less about the business conducted in bouleutêria outside Athens, but they also seem to have hosted both political oratory and other events, some of which had nothing to do with speaking or governing.Inscriptions and literary references make clear that boulai throughout the Greek-speaking world played an active role in political decisions, sometimes through listening to speeches. Polybius, for instance, describes a debate that took place in 226 or 225 BCE in the koinon, here “shared” or “federal,” bouleutêrion of the Achaean League, which was probably in Aegium, on the Gulf of Corinth. At this meeting, envoys of the Megalopolitans read a letter from the Macedonian king Antigonus Doson and urged the representatives of the league to make an alliance with him, but the general Aratus responded “at length,” urging them to continue acting on their own for the time being. The “crowd applauded” Aratus’ speech and accepted his recommendation (2.50.10–51.1). Polybius also paraphrases a speech of the general Philopoemen given in what was probably the same bouleutêrion in 208 or 207 BCE (11.9.1–9), which criticizes the soldiers of the Achaean League for neglecting their armor and weaponry in favor of fancy dress.By the imperial period, bouleutêria hosted performances besides political oratory, including epideictic oratory and musical concerts. Libanius describes the enthusiastic reception that greeted him when he spoke in the bouleutêrion in his hometown of Antioch in 353 CE (Autobiography 87–89), and Dio of Prusa (19.2–3) describes the performance of a lyre player in the bouleutêrion in Cyzicus sometime between 85 and 95 CE. While Libanius and other epideictic speakers probably benefited from the same architectural conditions that Johnstone and Graff show favored deliberative speakers, a focus on oratory alone does not address whether bouleuêtria would also have been effective performance spaces for singers and instrumentalists. Did the buildings host concerts because their acoustics were good for music as well as speech or simply because they were available?Some bouleutêria accommodated events unrelated to government or to individual performances. To take one example, Josephus tells us that the same building in Tiberias was used both for formal political meetings of the Tiberian boulê, complete with oratory and debates, and as a proseukhê, “prayer-house” or “synagogue” (Life 276–298, Rocca 296–300). Other synagogues of the late Second Temple period seem to have been modeled after Hellenistic bouleutêria such as the ones at Priene and Miletus that Johnstone and Graff discuss (Ma‘oz 41, Rocca 305–310). This suggests that the architectural characteristics that Johnstone and Graff associate primarily with oratory would also have been appropriate for the non-oratorical activities in synagogues, the of the the of the and outside and, especially after public while Johnstone and Graff’s specific results need to be used with their analysis of the performance conditions of bouleutêria how skilled orators could have used these buildings to their in the that a At the same time, Johnstone and Graff’s focus on oratory the of their every speech before a boulê would have been delivered in a bouleutêrion, bouleutai had many responsibilities that did not call for and bouleutêria were used for besides boulê The physical characteristics of bouleutêria in Athens and throughout the Greek-speaking world that Johnstone and Graff would have accommodated a range of besides oratorical including visual small musical performances, and religious based on Johnstone and Graff’s may us how the architecture of bouleutêria would have facilitated or these at the of well late because they were multipurpose buildings to many of civic to and whose an of this essay, and to who my to ancient

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1419745

September 2017

  1. Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation
    Abstract

    In the field of rhetorical studies, and more often than not in broader traditions of the humanities, nonhuman animals (NHAs) are remanded to epistemological margins in terms of both theory and case. Scholars of rhetoric tend to invoke animalism only when focusing on a human agent’s use of animal metaphors and parasitic tropes as a linguistic act or discursive tactic, or in movement studies, when constituting NHAs as objects of other-directed human activism. Sometimes, NHAs appear as negative foils, as in the illustration of Kenneth Burke’s distinction between human action and animalistic motion, or in the numerous examples of how logos punctuates humans’ rhetorical supremacy and singularity. Philosophically, scholars typically cipher NHAs as “cases in point” to discuss more expansive ethical dimensions of sentience in the service of arguing for the human condition. Technologically, in studies of media culture, NHAs perform as memes or serve as darling accoutrement in YouTube videos designed for human consumptive pleasure. In the end, what we find in the lion’s share (no pun) of humanities scholarship is the de-agentized NHA as a voiceless, silent, inactive, dispassionate, non-communicative, and ancillary object of humans’ rhetorical discourse and material action. (There are exceptions to this treatment in the field of communication studies [see Almiron, Cole, and Freeman, Critical Animal and Media Studies Communication; and the collected essays in Goodale and Black, Arguments about Animal Ethics].)Debra Hawhee’s book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, responsibly cuts against the tradition of metonymically reducing NHAs to footnotes. Therein, she reanimates the positionality of NHAs as instructive actors in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. Engaging in pan-historiographical methods, Hawhee brings a new perspective to the NHA-human relationship by centering the ways NHAs have circulated within and among ancient and modern texts not just as complements, but rather as charged inventional resources unto themselves. She explores rhetorical treatises ranging from those by Aristotle and Demetrius to Longinus, Erasmus, and new translations by Lucian and Psellos (among others) to locate how NHAs appear active as zoostylistic teachers.Hawhee does not make the argument that NHAs do rhetoric; instead, her larger claim is that NHAs’ influences outstrip verbal language and compel us to contemplate extra-lingual dimensions of rhetorical energy. In sum, she grounds sensation as a common point between humans and NHAs. The rhetorical history Hawhee traces does not presume, “as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as both reason and speech” (11). Rather, her study “stresses energy, bodies, sensation, feeling, and imagination” (11).NHAs have been a part of human existence, and particularly human narratology, since time immemorial. Indeed, as Hawhee deftly points out, in the context of rhetorical theory and rhetorical education, many of us have likely encountered the ways that Aristotle’s dog in the Rhetoric (2.3.138oa.24–26) emblemizes how humans and NHAs assess each other’s dispositions and modulate their responses and how Herodotus’ and Libanius’ encomia on NHAs (crocodile in Histories; peacock in Progymnasmata, respectively) represent models for human epideictic genres. Perhaps we have wondered about the theriomorphic fashion in which Demetrius’s nightingale charms and delights, just as rhetorical handbooks suggest a rhetor ought to when considering the sensory touchstones of one’s discursive choices (On Style). Moreover, many of us may have contemplated Aesop’s fables and why animals stand as sentries over cautionary tales that become analogs for our public lives in the civis. Even Rhetorica from Giarda’s 1628 Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae holds at her left side a leashed, three-headed beast and in her right hand a snake-wound scepter. What does the presence of such NHAs mean for the study of rhetorical theory and the instructional ways it is actuated in the handbook tradition?Hawhee’s high water mark treatment of NHAs in some of Western culture’s most treasured rhetorical treatises adds to our field the importance of sensation. In fact, she argues that sensation “matters the most” and provides a vocabulary of logos and alogos to emphasize how the latter remains key to progymnasmata, or the system of exercises used to prepare one for rhetorical study. What began for Hawhee as a book about animals and rhetorical theory blossomed into a project that values and locates sensation and imagination in well-worn artifacts that have heretofore seemed locked into unidimensional interpretation. At a time in the humanities when affect is discussed and debated more and more, and when we are witnessing the return of pathos as a sine qua non rhetorical proof, Hawhee’s book gets us closer to the roots of aesthesis and pathe. Concomitantly, the project celebrates alogos, or those rhetorical movements not associated with traditional rationality. In the offing, the sensory emerges not as passive or attendant, but as central to rhetorical education. As Hawhee writes, “Sensation, feeling, and emotion, then, have emerged as the positive counterparts to rationality and reason—positive, that is, in comparison with the term nonrational” (7).Hawhee contends that NHAs keep sensation alive in rhetorical theory, whether by modeling sound, countenance, and efficiency in post-Aristotelian theory (chapter two) and providing deliberative rhetorical grounds through fables (chapter three), or by inculcating encomia and visual inquiry (chapter four), teaching memory in medieval rhetorical theory (chapter five), or considering accumulatio in Erasmus’s De Copia (chapter six). Every chapter, with its multiple case studies, enlivens this new interpretation of rhetorical history, scaffolding how NHAs intersect with our senses of sensation over time. Written convincingly and argued expertly, Hawhee’s book is a gem among new genealogical studies that help us reconsider the superstructures of rhetoric as art and craft.The audiences for Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw are plural, to say the least. Certainly, scholars interested in ancient and modern rhetorical theory will gain fresh insight into the way emotion and sensation unfolded in the rhetorical tradition vis-à-vis NHAs. Classicists and philosophers would also benefit from a study that centers alogos as both fundamental to the human communicative condition and endemically primeval to animal (human and NHA) sentience and ontology overall. One of the genuinely admirable qualities of Hawhee’s work is the way she merges rhetorical studies with animal studies. Animal studies largely claims roots in philosophy and animal sciences, mostly through the study of the ethical treatment of animals by way of human intervention into NHA lives and ethos (i.e., using animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment). Since the publication of Peter Singer’s watershed Animal Liberation (1975), animal studies has grown into its own discipline in many ways (made emblematic by programs such as Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, and book series found at the University of Chicago Press [Animal Lives series] and Routledge [Human-Animal series]). Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw connects rhetorical studies (from classical approaches to critical-cultural spaces) to animal studies, what Richard Ryder calls the study of “the changing relationships between human and nonhuman animals over time” (Animal Revolution). Clearly, animal-studies scholars would be intensely attuned to Hawhee’s arguments about the sensory overlap present in NHA-human rhetorical connections.In the end, Hawhee is to be applauded for envisioning and presenting a volume that reenergizes the study of extra-lingual features in rhetorical theory (principally, sensation) and that advances the vivification of NHAs as voice-full, resonant, active, passionate, communicative, and primary subjects in their own right.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1385263

January 2014

  1. Fearing the Masses: Gustave Le Bon and Some Undemocratic Roots of Modern Rhetorical Studies
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT As the popular narrative has it, the modern speech discipline in the United States was born out of a concern for democracy and reason. However, this story occludes other, decidedly undemocratic, foundational ideas that were at the heart of rhetoric and oratory during the first half of the twentieth century. Given contemporary concerns with both deliberative democracy and affect theory, rhetoricians and speech teachers would benefit today from a fuller understanding of some of the undemocratic ideas that influenced the modern rhetorical renaissance. This article helps accomplish this by focusing on the work of Gustave Le Bon, whose concern with persuasion and the masses was influential on early scholars of rhetorical oratory, including James Winans, William Brigance, and James O’Neill. Indeed, it was Gustave Le Bon who popularized the notion that the masses were like a psychological crowd devoid of reason and the ability to deliberate.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2014.886932

July 2011

  1. Looking Into Aristotle's Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT This article culls a theory of rhetorical vision from Aristotle's Rhetoric by examining the cluster of terms that bears on his theory of visual style. Rhetorical vision stands apart from but complements visual rhetoric in that it attends to the rhetorical and linguistic conjuring of visual images—what contemporary neuroscientists call visual imagery—and can even affect direct perception. The article concludes by examining rhetorical vision in Demosthenes' Epitaphios. At stake in this investigation is the visible and visual liveliness of rhetoric and its ability to alter sense perception.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2011.613288

January 2009

  1. Taking Agency, Constituting Community: The Activist Rhetoric of Richard Allen
    Abstract

    Abstract This study features the activist rhetoric of early African American clergyman Richard Allen. Through chronological analyses of four late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts, we explore how Allen establishes individual and corporate agency and furthers an African American community consciousness. Allen's rhetoric, we argue, demonstrates the ways material and rhetorical opportunities affect textual production that, in turn, enables freedom and community to emerge. Paying particular attention to the strategy of the narrative account, we demonstrate how Allen's advocacy, which both works within and challenges the limitations imposed by white society, reflects and develops his identity as a black community leader.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2009.10597378