The bouleutêrion (the council house or assembly hall) was the meeting place of the council of citizens in ancient Greece under democracy. The architecture of bouleutêria has been less studied than has the architecture of theaters and religious monuments. The standard study remains William McDonald’s The Political Meeting Places of the Greeks (Johns Hopkins University Press), published in 1943. The study by Christopher Lyle Johnstone and Richard J. Graff that follows here builds on McDonald’s work but analyzes bouleutêria from a distinctly rhetorical perspective: in “Situating Deliberative Rhetoric in Ancient Greece: The Bouleutêrion as a Venue for Oratorical Performance,” they study bouleutêria from the perspective of places of oratorical performance. Theirs is the first study of oratorical sites in ancient Greece that includes both computer-generated reconstructions of the sites, enabling scholars to evaluate sightlines, and technical acoustical analysis, permitting judgments of what was likely heard from particular locations in a particular bouleutêrion. The increased interest in the material conditions of oratorical performances among rhetoric scholars and the uniqueness of Johnstone and Graff’s approach led to the decision to devote virtually this entire issue to their study. The responses to Johnstone and Graff by two scholars, Peter O’Connell, Classics, University of Georgia and author of The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory (University of Texas Press, 2017), and James Fredel, English, Ohio State University and author of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Performance from Solon to Demosthenes (Southern Illinois, 2006) complement Johnstone and Graff’s study.

In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets himself to a difficult task. He surveys over a half-century of political thought, political discourse, and political imagery in order to examine and evaluate the relationship between visual and political cultures. It is to O’Gorman’s credit as a thinker and as a writer that he does not sacrifice depth for breadth. Indeed, his book is an exemplary work of rhetorical criticism, for it advances not only our understanding of neoliberalism as a rhetorical production, but also, and perhaps more significantly, it advances our understanding of how to do visual rhetoric.As a rhetorical history, the book offers a unique perspective on neoliberalism. Tracing the ideology’s origins to postwar efforts to reimagine the role of the nation-state, O’Gorman establishes that neoliberalism is best understood in the context of broader efforts to redefine what constitutes the legitimate exercise of state power. This history adds nuance to previous accounts of neoliberalism, particularly in its account of neoliberalism’s attitude toward images, an attitude that O’Gorman astutely identifies as iconoclastic. As manifested in images of national catastrophe—the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster, and the 9-11 attacks, among others—the iconoclastic attitude regards as impossible the existence of any image adequate to representing America’s political processes more generally. For his part, O’Gorman demonstrates the error of this attitude by using these same images to represent a particular political process and to make his case for iconic representation as “the means by which we grasp our political existence” (16). This insight into the relationship between political and visual representation frames a series of case studies in which O’Gorman unpacks the ideological valence of images without reproducing neoliberalism’s hostility to visual representation. When understood in the context of rhetorical studies, this is a significant accomplishment. As with any discipline influenced by the linguistic turn, we too often regard images as vectors of oppression and false consciousness and seek to reveal them as such. Bruno Latour characterizes this attitude as a subtle and pernicious form of iconoclasm that reduces the critical operation to the trick of uncovering the trick; by exposing the manipulator behind the image, big ideology, big media, big whatever or whoever, we undermine the truth value of an image (“Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 239–42). However, the ease of the operation precludes deeper insights into images. Specifically, iconoclastic criticism cannot account for the processes by which we come to view certain representations as legitimate. This shortcoming, in turn, makes it difficult to comprehend the role played by images in various fields of human endeavor including, but not limited to, the political.It will come as no surprise to the reader that Kenneth Burke touched on the limits of the iconoclastic attitude, though he didn’t discuss images, at least not explicitly. Rather, he concerned himself with how to confront human error without undermining the belief in human progress necessary to positive social action. He voiced this concern in Attitudes Toward History, where he enjoined critics to strive for a “maximum of forensic complexity” that strikes a balance between “hagiography and iconoclasm” (226, 107). If we extend this call to the task of visual rhetoric, then our goal, to appropriate a phrase from James Elkins, is to make rhetorical criticism “more difficult” (Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, p. 63). O’Gorman does exactly this in The Iconoclastic Imagination.Take, for example, the chapter titled “Zapruder,” in which O’Gorman traces the circulation of the eponymous film to throw light on a productive paradox of iconic iconoclasm. With each appearance—first in Life magazine, later in a television special, still later in the movie JFK—the Zapruder film occasions new efforts to resolve the tension between our collective dependence on representation and our growing distrust of images. In this account, the Zapruder film is the repeated focus of a grand critical effort to uncover the truth behind the image by dismantling it. And in every instance, we see the critics come to a similar conclusion: the film cannot allay suspicions about the official version of events, and neither can it offer a stable alternative. Instead, the film can, and does, signify the inadequacy of images to the task of representation, which in turn supports neoliberalism’s ongoing rejection of images as adequate to representing economic and political processes. The Zapruder film thus becomes an icon of iconoclasm.Ironically, the processes of signification that make the Zapruder film an icon of iconoclasm also make the Zapruder film available to O’Gorman’s decidedly iconophilic critique. As conceived by Latour, iconophilia, like iconoclasm, reveals the human hands behind the creation of images. However, where iconoclasm reveals the work of human hands to expose the image as a vector of false consciousness, iconophilia does so to gain insight into the image as an epistemological resource. And as elaborated by Finnegan and Kang, Latour’s conception of iconophilia encourages a stance on political imagery that does not look for something behind or beyond the image, but instead focuses on the flow of images to account for their function as inventional resources (“‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory, QJS, vol. 90, 2004, pp. 395–396). This is precisely the stance taken by O’Gorman, and in taking it he models what Burke might call a healthy attitude toward images—an attitude that embraces representation as salutary for democratic politics while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which the processes of representation can, and are, used to advance the neoliberal rejection of the same.All that having been said, and as O’Gorman points out in the final pages of his book, this approach has its limits. What happens when neoliberalism’s catastrophes do not yield images? What happens when, as with the 2008 financial collapse, we have no image of failure? Does neoliberalism escape critique? O’Gorman worries that the answer is yes. However, I wonder if this pessimism owes to O’Gorman’s treatment of the icon as the sine qua non of political representation. Perhaps, if we look to a different species of sign, namely the index, we will find cause for optimism.In Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, the index differs from the icon insofar as it signifies not primarily through resemblance, but instead though a causal connection to its referent (Philosophical Writings, 102–103). This is not to suggest that an index cannot resemble that to which it refers, but that it need not resemble it. For example, a fingerprint is an index, but so too is a weathercock; of these two, only the former resembles its referent. Nevertheless, in both cases the indexical reference is a representation amenable to interpretation and critique.O’Gorman suggests the representational possibilities of the index in his chapter on CNN’s coverage of the 9-11 attacks, in which he argues that CNN’s televisual coverage adopted the “style and logic” of the interface. In his analysis, CNN adopted a mode of representation that owed more to the referential logic of the computer interface than to the older, mimetic logic of photojournalism. This leads O’Gorman to posit the interface as a “new sort of icon,” one that does not represent limited or absent information, but instead organizes an abundance of incoming information into a coherent image of catastrophe (144–145). The interface as icon metaphor does important work, as it allows O’Gorman to uncover relationships between new technologies of representation and the neoliberal aesthetic. Nevertheless, it obscures the extent to which we can regard the interface as an index—a representation that reveals not through its resemblance to an event but through its referential connection to the same.With respect to the 2008 financial collapse, I propose we direct some of our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation. For although it might be true that the collapse did not yield an icon of iconoclasm, it did yield an abundance of indexes of catastrophe, signs linked to their objects by a causal connection. These indexes of catastrophe appeared in the form of “For Sale” signs, foreclosure notices, and half-finished housing developments. As critics, we can assemble these materials to create an image of catastrophe that will, in turn, serve as the basis for an iconophilic critique modeled after The Iconoclastic Imagination. It therefore seems to me that we need not worry about a lack of images, though we might need to make visual studies still more difficult. Fortunately, I think we’re up to the task.

The essays in this volume were selected from the 2016 Symposium of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric: “Rhetoric In situ” held in Atlanta, Georgia. The archaeological term in situ describes an artifact found in its original resting place. Artifacts not in situ are generally considered to lack context and possess less value to the archaeologist. This theme was, in part, inspired by Richard Leo Enos’s call for “rhetorical archeology,” including the discovery of new texts and recognition of nontraditional artifacts, as well as new approaches with greater attention to context (40). Similarly, Patricia Bizzell and Susan Jarratt have argued that one way to enhance our study of rhetoric’s traditions might be to “examine the rhetorical activity of a particular historical period in depth, with traditional, non-traditional, and new texts providing contexts for each other, and all embedded in much ‘thicker’ historical and cultural contextual descriptions than scholarship has provided heretofore” (23). Such a synchronic approach might demand new or borrowed methods, for example, those of cultural geography, archaeology, or art history. The essays included here reflect concerns about the scope of the rhetorical tradition, methods of rhetorical historiography, the recovery of nontraditional rhetorical artifacts, and ways of addressing rhetorical context, all of which lie within the expansive bounds of rhetoric in situ.The essays in the issue are organized somewhat thematically, grouped around Dave Tell and Diane Favro’s keynote addresses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the essays are deeply rooted in place—the Mississippi Delta (Tell), Atlanta (Adamczyk), northern Georgia (Eatman), Jordan and Syria (Hayes), Rome (Favro), Athens (Kennerly), and Ancient Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi (Geraths). The attention to methods used by the authors in this collection stand out. The first two essays by Tell and Adamczyk offer the kind of “thick” contextual work referenced by Bizzell and Jarratt but offer a diachronic approach to examine how memory and place change over time in relation and response to complex historic, social, and economic factors. The next two essays (by Eatman and Hayes) use a “participatory approach to rhetorical criticism … to analyze embodied and emplaced rhetoric” referred to as “in situ rhetorical fieldwork” (Middleton et al., 1). Favro’s approach bridges the essays that use participatory methodology and the classically focused essays that follow through the use of experiential technology. This technology allows the contemporary scholar to experience ancient places. The last two essays (by Kennerly and Geraths) turn to place as a lens to investigate (the reception of) canonical figures/texts informed and reformed by archaeological discoveries.Dave Tell’s keynote “Remembering Emmett Till: Reflections on Geography, Race, and Memory” opens the symposium issue by articulating the importance of the “politics of being on site” and the interrelationships of money, topography, affective power, and race in remembering Till. While Tell argues that “memory is established by place,” he concludes that the inverse is true as well: “the sites of [Till’s] murder have been transformed by its commemoration.” Similarly, Christopher Lee Adamczyk, in “Confederate Memory in Post-Confederate Atlanta—a Prolegomena,” argues for considering the changing physical and social contexts of memory sites over time. In this case, Adamczyk examines how monuments in Oakland Cemetery (an obelisk and the Lion of Atlanta) representing the “lost cause” narrative were located outside (spatially and ideologically) Atlanta, which was considered a progressive model of the “New South”; however, in the early 20th century a complex set of circumstances including the expansion of the industrialized city into the area once used as Civil War battlefields ultimately changed the relationship between the city and the “lost cause” narrative.Also focused on the geographic South, Megan Eatman’s essay, “Loss and Lived Memory at the Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment,” uses rhetorical fieldwork—participant observation at lynching reenactments—to access embodied memory. She marks this approach as in tension with the archive, which tends to present lynching photography from the perspective of white supremacists who took the photos and inadequately accounts for loss. Here Eatman advocates for participatory methods as an opportunity to access the “repeated embodied transfer of cultural memory” and to decenter racist narratives of lynching. Though focused on a very different moment in time and place—2014 Jordan—Heather Ashley Hayes’s “Doing Rhetorical Studies In Situ: The Nomad Citizen in Jordan” is closely related to the previous essay, particularly in its critique of power, though the emphasis shifts from a focus on emplaced rhetoric to a focus on embodied rhetorics about place. Hayes argues explicitly for participator rhetorical fieldwork not just for the sake of documenting “the moment of rhetorical invention,” but as a means for the rhetorical critic to “co-create imagined rhetorical possibility,” “destabilize colonial power,” and “to suggest that a literal transportation of the rhetorician into a space where discourse is being produced can, and should, be considered one way the arc of materialist rhetoric can intersect with struggles for decolonizing our field.”The final set of essays in this volume shifts to the classical period where the in situ methodologies discussed in the first set of essays becomes more challenging, if not impossible, given that access to place is limited. The classical essays begin with another keynote address from the symposium by Diane Favro, architectural historian and the founder and director of UCLA’s Experiential Technology Lab. In “Reading Augustan Rome: Materiality as Rhetoric In Situ,” she takes a research question: Did the changes to the city of Rome by the emperor Augustus effect the way an average viewer experienced the city? Using digital humanities technology, Favro is able show how a contemporary researcher can still experience the ancient landscape to answer such questions. Kennerly, while also focused on the classical period, departs from the participatory and experiential, instead using situatedness as a lens to examine Socrates. She argues that simultaneously we know more of the “hyperlocalized” Socrates through archeology and the decontextualizes Socrates through his reception. Socrates was, Kennerly argues, an outsider in Athens and as such is often a resource for others in liminal spaces—here Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin. Cory Geraths “Early Christian Rhetoric(s) In Situ” closes the volume by answering Enos’s call for a rhetorical archeology—both recounting the discovery of gnostic texts in the 19th and 20th centuries and suggesting the implications of those texts for the field, including a better understanding of women’s participation in early Christian rhetoric.The scholarship from the 2016 symposium envisions the future of the history of rhetoric as richly embodied and emplaced, intertextual, dynamic in methodology, and importantly, engaged with discourses of power in an effort to recover diverse voices, memories, and experiences.

In the latest Oxford World Classic edition of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2015), a painting of the beautiful adorns the cover. The slope of the neck, the curve of the back, it focuses on the form of the beautiful in performance. Seven years earlier, in 2008, the same book, in the same series, imaged the sublime on its cover. Snow falls on pines, the rocks of mountaintops loom in the background; it is meant to evoke the power of the dynamic sublime. Nathan Crick’s challenging new book, Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece, completes a similar transition in classical scholarship by moving aesthetic theories of historiography from the rupture of the sublime, like the history of Victor Vitanza, to the forms of the beautiful, like those that support the history of John Poulakos. Crick does aesthetic through a series of close readings of archaic and classical Greek literary, philosophic, and traditionally rhetorical texts ranging from works by Homer to Aristotle. In these readings, he looks not to philology but rather constructs a history of how these texts key to contemporary definitions of power, rhetoric, and politics. It is thus a conceptual history that, in the end, seeks to persuade us that “the faith of rhetoric is that through the power of speech we can recognize our interdependence in a contingent world and seek, together, to constitute a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226).As with most modernist conceptions of the beautiful, like those in Schiller, Crick’s is one that founds itself on the essentialism of both the text and the properties of humanity. Rhetoric and Power begins its first chapter with a reading of Homer that demonstrates how an oral culture creates a virtue that is always bound with divinity. The wandering minstrel has power; he alone gets to stand before the people and remind them how heroes act. In chapter two, Crick considers how the rise of a literate culture influences history. He focuses especially on Heraclitus’s we “can’t stop in the same river twice,” which he reads as containing within it, because of the form of the aphorism, the power to “wake up” individuals to the wisdom of a contingent, as distinguished from a divine, world. Tragedy in Aeschylus, because of the nature of hubris, converges the oral virtue of the Homeric world with the aphoristic insistence that reason cannot rest on divinity. It is in this convergence that rhetoric is first manifest “as a medium by which power is challenged, destroyed, created, and transformed” (60). Protagoras, in chapter four, snatches the scales of justice and the right of retribution from the gods and delivers them to humans, for Protagoras’s words were able to “articulate a political framework … that gave rational justification for putting … multiple perspectives into meaningful communication with each other in order to collectively measure the affairs of the polis” (65). Gorgias’s logical structure takes up chapter five, where his demonstration of all possible causes contains within itself the possibility to break and create anew different orders in symbolic chains of meaning. The history of Thucydides shows justice as “a consequence of power relationships” (155, emphasis in the original), which requires us to contemplate the good action of the present as part of the drama of history. In chapter seven, Aristophanes’s Old Comedy essentializes humans as fallible; Crick concludes, “We are comic creatures precisely because we are always striving to be something greater than what we are” (140); in so doing, Aristophanes allows humans to forgive the error of leaders who incorrectly judge the drama of history. Plato’s dialectic performs “tragicomedy” within his Protagoras, in Crick’s chapter eight, which introduced a “new relationship between rhetoric and power” (168), as the form that allows individuals to turn to the masses and question whether their actions truly conform to “the beautiful state” (162). In chapter nine, Crick credits Isocrates and writing with embedding rhetoric through the human world. Aristotle, then, in the last close reading of the book, contains within his canon the “means by which the competing ends of power and of truth are reconciled through the progressive constitution of the good life” (214).Because it is a history that emphasizes the beautiful, Crick’s history predictably excises violence from power and therefore from rhetoric. This pacification of right communication begins in the introduction, where Crick uses Prometheus Bound to justify an Arendtian separation of violence and power. Violence is an instrument for manipulating material toward an end; power is the capacity for humans to act in concert and “witness a beginning” (91). Rhetoric, then, is the “facilitator” and “medium” of this beneficent power. Rhetoric is, on Crick’s reading, “the artistry of power” and can either be a force for social collectivity or the means for division and conflict. Crick supports this claim with a quotation from the “Chorus to Prometheus” in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound: “So why lavish all your gifts on humans when you can’t take prudent care of yourself? Once you’ve shucked off these bonds I think you’ll be no less powerful than overweening Zeus” (5). As Prometheus is chained to the Caucuses at this time, Crick notes that the only power the chorus could speak of at this moment is the power of speech. This interpretation ignores the fact that Prometheus would first need to “shuck off” the chains. In his discussion of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, Crick rejects readings that see Gorgias as criticizing those who would take Helen by force; on Crick’s reading, Gorgias’s targets are “Homeric poets” and their “barbaric violence” (83). In Aristophanes’s Birds, the violence of Pisthetairos’ consuming the “jailbirds” is not power or rhetoric, but force, as the eating is an instrument to preserve continued rule. In fact, for Crick, the scene demonstrates the impossibility of rhetoric to act as a preservation of rule in an oral culture.Crick’s interpretive devotion to the split between power and violence leads to a rather odd moment in his discussion of Isocrates. Because Nicocles was penned rather than spoken, it can perform the function of “power maintenance”; the oral rule of Pisthetairos could not because it can institute a “social contract.” Unlike under Hobbes’s contract, the ruled receive not a freedom from violence, but rather the identification of their place in the hierarchy of virtue. In contradistinction to democracy, which allows the “best to pass unnoticed,” monarchy raises to higher levels those “whose habits and accomplishments can act as exemplars for the rest of the people” (189) because it allows the hegemon to keep detailed written records of all of the ruled. In this way, the ruler is able to prevent revolutions and arrange the people based on their adherence to codified law. In Evagoras, “the goal remains the establishment of a system of perfect surveillance” (188). This surveillance, though, is not violent, as it is in Hobbes. Instead, it “becomes a means of collective regulation in order to form a stable society in harmony with the hegemonic Logos” (190). This contract, however, is not without the threat of violence. Even Crick notes, “Nicocles would have inherited the proto-police system of which the people would have been all too familiar, making [Isocrates’s] suggestion that his thoughts (and eyes) would be present in their deliberations quite literal” (180). How this is not violent is lost on the reader, particularly when Crick quotes again from Nicocles a passage that is a statement of at least symbolic violence, “[d]o not keep silent if you see any who are disloyal to my rule, but expose them; and believe that those who aid in concealing crime deserve the same punishment as those who commit it” (190). Yet, Crick still maintains that there is a split between violence and power here. It is because of this split that Crick is able, in an offhand comment, to dismiss the claim of Victor Vitanza that Isocrates’s system of rhetoric, power, and politics is inherently fascist.Because Isocrates’s system is not violence perpetrated by the state, but instead merely a ranking of citizens from most to least virtuous, the surveillance system of Isocrates can be used by both the ruled and the ruler. We see this again in the conclusion, when Crick, echoing the call from Kalbfleisch’s 2013 article in Advances, claims that historians of rhetoric need to “fully comprehend how the development of print, radio, photography, the telegraph, the press, the telephone, the movie, the computer, and the revolution in communication technologies” (224) changes how the “universal” forms of rhetoric manifest. This is requisite for Crick because without it we will not be able to adequately conceptualize the ways new contingent articulations of people acting in concert can articulate themselves closer to the Platonic three: the true, the good, and the beautiful. Trying to look for a rhetoric that is not one of the “universal” is, according to Crick, exchanging history for propaganda. Some might object to this claim, valuable as it is in its appropriate context, given that often in the Arendtian conception of power, “people acting in concert” includes only those whom the state would qualify as people. It was certainly a political reality at the time, as Crick notes in his introduction, that not everyone counted as human and there was nothing they could do to gain more worth in the hierarchy of the state.Despite my reservations, as an aesthetic reading of rhetoric’s history and the role rhetoric played in human emancipation from the divine, Rhetoric and Power is imaginative and original. If I were to adopt it for teaching, I would put this work with Poulakos and Haskins, juxtaposed against Grimaldi, Gross, Schiappa and Graff. Certainly the work contributes well to the ongoing debate in the field about the nature of history, historiography, and the tradition.

The influences of Stoicism on the historical development of rhetorical theory are deeply interwoven into the history of rhetoric, from Cicero to the Enlightenment.1 In recent years, interest in the Stoics has enjoyed a revival in conjunction with discussions of cosmopolitanism, most notably the lively debate surrounding Martha Nussbaum's (2002) proposal for a cosmopolitan education, and some of the articles presented in this issue remind us of the connection between the Stoics and certain conceptions of cosmopolitanism. My interest in the convergence of these conversations stems from my own work on the possibilities and necessity of a cosmopolitan rhetoric for our time, a time characterized by massive displacements: the movement of people through geographical and social space, the homogenization of space, and the technological abolition of space (Darsey 2003).Nussbaum's inquiry into cosmopolitanism is occasioned by an urgent sense of movement across boundaries. Our time has been described as one in which “rootlessness, movement, homelessness and nomadism are the motifs of the day” (Skribs, Kendall, and Woodward 2004, 115). bell hooks begins her recent book, Belonging: A Culture of Place, with this poignant observation: “As I travel around I am stunned by how many citizens in our nation feel lost, feel bereft of a sense of direction, feel as though they cannot see where our journeys lead, that they cannot know where they are going. Many folks feel no sense of place” (2009, 1). As Pico Iyer puts it: For more and more people … the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings—Gastarbeiters and boat people and marielitos—as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafés; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the furthest point is just a click away. (2001, 10–11)So Nussbaum, drawing from Stoic sources, feels the imperative to move beyond the borders of the nation state (2002, 3).In the world described by hooks, Iyer, and Nussbaum, the question for rhetoric is this: What is the proper rhetorical response to an increasingly globalized and cosmopolitan world? In a world in which place is rapidly disappearing, from where do arguments come? How can an audience be addressed? About this aspect of radical displacement, Iyer writes: “The Global Soul may see so many sides of every question that he never settles on a firm conviction.” The answer to the question “Where do you stand?” is, for Iyer, “treacherous” (2001, 25). Place has historically been inextricably connected to meaning-making and has, at least prior to very recent time, been the most convenient site of “culture.” As evidence of this relationship, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson point to world maps on which the world is represented as a collection of countries, “inherently fragmented space, divided by different colors into diverse national societies, each ‘rooted’ in its proper place… . It is so taken for granted that each country embodies its own distinctive culture and society that the terms ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are routinely appended to the names of nation-states” (1997, 34). The mapping described by Gupta and Ferguson suggests two things: (1) a deep desire for definition, the dual and simultaneous operation of inclusion and exclusion; and (2) the conceit that the borders marked by the colored patches are as stable and constant as the mountains, rivers, and other geographical features that populate the map.The fiction of stability presented by the cartography exposed, where, then, do we find grounds for argument in a world in which stable ground has disappeared? What are the bases for argument? Where are the places we search for arguments in a world of flux? Are there any more commonplaces? One temptation, evidenced in the summer 2010 “Restore America” rally in Washington, DC, is to retreat into provincialism. Any cursory survey of recent news stories provides a disheartening number of examples of attempts to reconcile conflicting ethical claims too often retreating to a reassertion of the local. At the time of this writing, those stories include the passing of legislation in the Slovak Republic making that country the only European country to require that its national anthem be played daily in schools, at each town council meeting, and on all public radio and television programs. This, along with the requirement that all state business be conducted in the Slovak language has created concern among the Hungarian minority that these laws are part of a movement to ostracize ethnic Hungarians. In March 2010, a group of Latin American nations joined in a new bloc that excludes the United States and Canada, and in April, investigators found evidence of the revival of human sacrifice among Kali worshippers in Bolpur, India. Throughout the spring of 2010, the revival of Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq threatened the U.S. hope of establishing a stable government there, and a conflict between Google and the government of the People's Republic of China over access to information assumed the dimensions of an international crisis.In the United States in the spring of 2010, Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration became the focus of a nationwide debate, revealing a concern with the movement of people across boundaries. At the same time, a new battle in the ongoing war over sex education revealed concern with the movement of ideas across boundaries. Ross Douthat, in the New York Times, described the latest battle as “at heart … a battle over community standards. Berkeley liberals don't want their kids taught that premarital sex is wrong. Alabama churchgoers don't want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation” (2010, 16). Finally, in a case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court in April, 2010 the justices were asked to consider whether a Christian organization of law students at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco could be allowed to discriminate against students unable or unwilling to affirm the group's statement of faith, which includes the promise to refrain from sexual conduct outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. That is, the court asked to what degree should those sharing a public space and resources be required to adhere to the same values?The examples of retreats into parochial sureties can be multiplied almost indefinitely: burkas in schools in France; the continuing controversy over how to handle Eritrean families living in the United States who insist on subjecting their daughters to what, for them, is a religious ritual, but which we call female genital mutilation; states such as Oklahoma and Wyoming drawing up bans on Sharia law. And so on.On October 16, 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made international news when, in a speech to young members of the Christian Democratic Union, she declared multiculturalism to be an utter failure in Germany (Weaver 2010). The following week, William Falk, in his editorial in The Week, wrote: The boundaries between cultures are eroding, due to widespread immigration, economic interdependence, and the Internet, forcing modern societies into an uncomfortable paradox. We believe that every cultural group, religion, and nation has the right to self-determination. But we also hold as a bedrock principle that every human being is born with inalienable rights—including the 50 percent of us who are women. Is it our business to free Muslim women from their shrouds and subservience, to bring a halt to female genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East? Do we have the right to object to China's insistence that democracy and human rights do not apply there? Genteel tolerance alone will not resolve these questions. The collision of values has begun. How that conflict plays out will determine the shape of the next half-century. (2010, 7)As Falk's editorial suggests, each of the conflicts referred to here is the symptom of a contested boundary: in some cases a boundary that has been transgressed, in other cases a rampart being built against the barbarians who are perceived to be at the gate. These fragile walls and fences have failed to maintain what Gupta and Ferguson call the “play of differences” necessary to meaning-making. “The structures of feeling that enable meaningful relationships with particular locales, constituted and experienced in a particular manner, necessarily include the marking of ‘self’ and ‘other’ through identification with larger collectivities,” they write. “To be a part of a community is to be positioned as a particular kind of subject, similar to others within the community and different from those who are excluded from it” (1997, 19). Rhetorically, these examples represent instances in which enthymemes have failed to cross borders, geographical propinquity without community; those with no shared grounds for agreement find themselves having to share the same social space.The alternative to provincialism as a response to an increasingly complex and integrated world is cosmopolitanism. In 1998, Ulrich Beck published in The New Statesman a “Cosmopolitan Manifesto,” declaring that, just as 150 years prior the moment had been ripe for The Communist Manifesto, the moment was ripe, at the dawn of a new millennium, for a cosmopolitan manifesto: The Cosmopolitan Manifesto is about transnational-national conflict and dialogue which has to be opened up and organised. What is this global dialogue to be about? About the goals, values and structures of a cosmopolitan society. About whether democracy will be possible in a global age… . The key idea for a Cosmopolitan Manifesto is that there is a new dialectic of global and local questions which do not fit into national politics… .These questions are already part of the political agenda—in the localities and regions, in governments and public spheres both national and international. But only in a transnational framework can they be properly posed, debated and resolved. For this there has to be a reinvention of politics, a founding and grounding of the new political subject: that is—cosmopolitan parties. These represent transnational interests transnationally, but also work within the arenas of national politics. (1998, 28)Beck's call repeatedly draws our attention to place and to the necessity of transcending place. Beck is concerned with the issues of a world in which our fates are bound together but our focus too often remains stubbornly local. Consider the recent climate talks in Copenhagen and the ongoing debates over global warming, what to do about it, and who ought to do it.But Beck's manifesto is notable more for its representativeness than for its originality. Seventy-one years before Beck published his manifesto, Hugh Harris, writing in the wake of “the great war” and two years after the First International Conference on Child Welfare, surveyed the calls for cosmopolitanism among his contemporaries. Harris noted that, while the events of the early years of the twentieth century had done much to give the ideal of cosmopolitanism its “present intellectual currency,” the ideal itself “is not merely ephemeral doctrine, but one that has been transmitted to us through the ages” (1927, 1). Harris notes the “prevalent opinion” that cosmopolitanism in the Western world begins with the Stoics (2). Though Harris sets out to correct what he identified as the “prevalent opinion … that prior to the Alexandrian age and to the foundation of the Stoic school, Greek thought had not advanced beyond the conceptions of a narrow city-state patriotism and of an irreconcilable barrier between Hellenes and barbarians” (2). Harris locates the Greek origins of the cosmopolitan ideal much more broadly—in poetry, science, philosophy, and religion.The prevalent opinion, fueled by the proclamation of Diogenes of Sinope that he was a “citizen of the world,” is tenacious, and it was given a major infusion of new energy when Martha Nussbaum published her article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” in 1994 in the Boston Review. There were 29 responses to Nussbaum's article published along with the article itself, and two years later the article was republished in book form along with eleven of the original responses and five new ones (Nussbaum 2002, 3). For all of the various responses the article has provoked, it is notable that almost no one takes issue with Nussbaum's claim that the intellectual lineage of cosmopolitanism in the West runs from Diogenes the Cynic through the Stoics to the Immanuel Kant of Perpetual Peace. I want to suggest that, as students of rhetoric, perhaps we should.From a rhetorical perspective, Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitan education presents at least four problems. First, Nussbaum celebrates the Stoics as champions of a universalizing and antiprovincial rationality, but the emphasis on rationality, necessarily if paradoxically, is exclusionary. As Peter Euben has noted in his cross-examination of Nussbaum's proposal, Stoicism sponsored “a new exclusiveness based on differential commitment to and practice of rationality… . Very few exceptional humans could be full members in the community of reason,” Euben goes on to argue (2001, 266, 268–270). Rhetoric has long been identified with democracy and inclusiveness, and contemporary work—beginning with Stephen Toulmin and extending through Walter Fisher's work on narrative and Michael Billig's work on argument—has made great strides toward maintaining and even extending that tradition through the articulation and legitimation of mundane forms of argument that are not necessarily logical. Work by Sally Planalp and others has extended our understanding of the role of the emotions in persuasion.Second, Nussbaum's proposal neglects the praxis of real political contention. As Fred Dallmayr has put it: “[I]t is insufficient—on moral and practical grounds—to throw a mantle of universal rules over humankind without paying simultaneous attention to public debate and the role of political will formation” (2003, 434). Dallmayr goes on to remind us that Diogenes the Cynic, whose example was followed by most of the Roman Stoics (Cicero being the exception), “was described as an ‘exile’ from his city who paid little heed to ‘political thought’ and adopted a ‘strikingly apolitical stance’” (435). Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that Nussbaum “quotes the Stoics at some length as proponents of the idea of a universal ‘moral community’ and ‘world citizenship.’ But she quotes Aristotle not at all. Yet Aristotle's dictum, ‘Man is by nature a political animal,’ has proved to be far more prescient than the Stoic doctrine” (2002, 74). While the question of nature in the human political character has been contested ground at least since Hobbes, we have, whether by nature or by necessity, historically found our existence as part of a polis, and there can be little contesting of Aristotle's asseveration that “politics is the master art,” and rhetoric its ethical branch. A rhetorical theory that neglects politics be no rhetorical theory at and a cosmopolitan that neglects politics be of many of the issues our world within itself a toward the very that the call for a cosmopolitan to to the one the to all human as of their shared for against based on or the other of is by extending to only in the in which they are with (2003, and Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitanism based on universal reason is to our in the degree that it is itself in it is the of our that the grounds of reason itself have been reason has no from which to if we to the claims of against the of the the universal As puts it, of and the cultural of the universal work against its claim to a (2002, as Gertrude Himmelfarb of the universal values and of are not only in practice by a part of they are not in all of in perhaps even Western (2002, response to the of the universal is to it as an of of and … an alternative to Nussbaum's I am to a as the for a theory of rhetoric, a theory of rhetoric that can the world of and and among The of were early in a they were citizens of the and though they were notably by for their as they the of and it was their from that allowed them to put moral questions at the of public Harris includes the in his survey of the of cosmopolitanism in them with the and the and in particular to the of While most of the the of among them only a few of those an between the of the and their Harris Yet it is that is in a of and their to the Western intellectual tradition may be a rhetorical practice with this cosmopolitan following the of that the while they may be and are for a cosmopolitan rhetoric their multiculturalism into or a kind of that the were of the point of or that their were based on is not by the and contemporary find evidence of ethical in the of the the of concern with in interest in the social of proper the in which the to rhetoric bring about for the and us that there is evidence for all of the that they were in politics, often at very necessarily then, making ethical and that or four of the as a of the political they represented beyond the the evidence even more if we include who for the of over war and for a who to his what in to as of It is not that the any idea of but that they it as “the of of in to the Stoics who to and that the case can be a cosmopolitan rhetoric based on the have these over Nussbaum's First, it be a deeply or not the were of rhetoric, they were inextricably with the rhetorical and political of their The were of a rhetoric, being in displacement, ought to the of a world with the of The were and as as as the were also as and is not to the movement of but as Kendall, and Woodward is about of and just as much as it is about of is not only but also and As a rhetoric in displacement, a rhetoric should the of a rhetoric, not bound by a universal ought to be to forms of argument and the possibilities for argument and in that a Stoic rhetoric is not and as and others have us out of the of a alternative for in the between the two world and in that to our own moment in Hugh Harris the poignant for a cosmopolitan understanding that he found in the intellectual of There is, on the one a to see our historical as in of there is, on the other a to historical for our as that we have this before and that our will see us through In a rhetoric represent a with the of but one that has never enjoyed widespread this is its perhaps this time we can it