The most important thing to say here is thank you: thanks to Heather Hayes, Rosa Eberly, Tim Barney, and Nate Atkinson for so thoroughly and graciously engaging with my work. Thanks to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, which more than any other disciplinary organization with which I have been associated has been the source of so many of my “ah ha!” moments. And thanks to rhetorical studies in the United States more broadly, which affords me and many others intellectual and critical space to move. The Iconoclastic Imagination, as my commentators note here, ranges widely. In its scope, and not just its methods, it is a product of a paideia in the house of many rooms that is United States rhetorical studies. I am grateful.I must confess that, as I read responses and reviews, I am still learning about The Iconoclastic Imagination. It is a book, as Professor Eberly knows, that was long in developing. While clear in its basic arguments, it is also a book that you have to deliberately work your way through. As a reviewer in American Quarterly recently wrote: O’Gorman stresses at the outset that The Iconoclastic Imagination is not a “history” of neoliberalism in a conventional sense. There is therefore no overarching narrative to his exploration of different moments of catastrophe in the twentieth century. Instead, he offers a series of essays that, together, argue that the neoliberal imaginary “entails a discourse of transcendence that appeals to invisible, unrepresentable orders as the overarching means of organizing and safeguarding [American] society” (xi). It is an intellectual history, but also a history of state policy during the Cold War. It is a history of media, but also of political economy. It dabbles in the minutiae of film analysis, and it meanders from Byzantine iconography and Protestant iconoclasm through Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime. It dizzies readers so that they might orient themselves in a free-floating neoliberal imaginary. It demands complete attention. If O’Gorman’s narrative approach seems at times bewildering, if it seems to dwell too often in the weeds or the clouds, the book is functioning as intended. (157-158)When I first read these words, I laughed out loud. It was a laugh of uncanny recognition, of surprise that another recognized in this project that I had been living with for so long my own artistic as well as intellectual aims. In fact, I did treat The Iconoclastic Imagination as a work of art, of rhetorical art. Its “bewildering” quality was in fact intentional—an effort at rhetorical iconicity in the way that Michael Leff and Andrew Sachs wrote about it back in 1990 (“Words Most Like Things: Iconicity in the Rhetorical Text,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, 1990). But this “intentionality” is probably less a product of my rhetorical intentions than a reflection of my own attempts to come to terms with the bewildering quality of “neoliberalism” as both a critical term and as a political, economic, and cultural formation. The Iconoclastic Imagination is a book of essays precisely because it is an exploration, maybe even an investigation. As a friend of mine who is a Special Agent with the F.B.I. says, bewilderment can be a means of understanding what the hell is going on.Speaking of the F.B.I. and bewilderment, I want to focus the rest of this response on guns, a topic Professor Eberly raised in thinking about The Iconoclastic Imagination. Professor Barney wonders about the role of “the more quotidian rhetorical events of the Cold War play in the perpetuation of a neoliberal imaginary,” noting that The Iconoclastic Imagination does not address the “gaps” between the extraordinary or epochal events it investigates. He is definitely right about the gaps in my book. And if I were to try to fill them in, I would need to take on the quotidian interregnums between the “where-were-you-when?” events I examine. Guns, in fact, are a good place start. Guns are not only pervasive in American culture, they negotiate, on a day-to-day basis, many of the political issues I explore in my book: legitimacy, nationhood, nationalism, national politics, political representation, nature/artifice, and order.Professor Eberly points to the way in which guns circulate in American political culture as a counter-democratic, perhaps even counter-revolutionary, force. Much of The Iconoclastic Imagination is concerned with the sublime, an aesthetic that in the eighteenth-century was a means of rhetorically negotiating revolution and counter-revolution. The sublime, as I suggest in the book, is not just a rhetoric and aesthetic of transcendence, but marks limits and thresholds—that is, it is a rhetoric of limits. In the longer arc of American history, it seems to me that guns have stood as icons of the threshold of political legitimacy. As a revolutionary nation, the United States has long been a nation wherein political legitimacy hangs, like a loose chad, from the ballot. The bullet, in turn, is kept on reserve for a revolutionary function when the sovereign, the state, or the system is deemed illegitimate. Of course, this ballot-and-bullet logic stands at another threshold integral to The Iconoclastic Imagination, that between the American social imaginary and the actual operations of the American state. Guns, as Professor Eberly suggests, form a copia of cultural imaginaries that go well beyond Mayberry, and even the NRA: freedom fighters, survivalists, mafia bosses, kingpins, gangbangers, weekend outdoorsmen, James Bond, cops, and so on. Guns also, especially when amplified into bombs and missiles, have been a primary means of American global power since the middle of the twentieth century. Arms are, in this sense, “icons” of America, images that point beyond themselves without annihilating their own representational integrity. But this means that guns are not really sublime, but mundane.Yet, part of the pacifying quality of neoliberal discourse, and part of its ideological function, is to tell us that what I have just articulated is all wrong: arms aren’t really integral to American power or political culture, but rather part of the nation’s necessary emergency reserve. The essence of America is found instead in its economic productivity, or “freedom.” In this sense, neoliberalism entails an elite discourse positioned against “populist” elements that continue to insist on the primary Hobbesian natural right of self-preservation vis-à-vis guns. Neoliberalism would transform these gun-wielding citizens into participants in the “labor market” as part of a national project in pacification under the conditions of globalization. To which, in a kind of reversal of the ballot-and-bullet logic, these gun-wielding citizens approach the ballot as a kind of emergency reserve by which to protect their natural right to the bullet: and so, we have the NRA, Donald Trump, and now, perhaps, Neil Gorsuch.I think Professor Atkinson is quite right to draw our attention to indexes so as to better orient collective action in bewildering times. Guns, to be sure, are indexes of shifts in American political and economic culture. Gun ownership is rapidly becoming what Hobbes would call a natural right. Guns are, as Professor Atkinson suggests, “signs linked to their objects by causal connection.” My point in The Iconoclastic Imagination was not to cast doubt on the political potential of indexes so much as to argue that within the parameters of the neoliberal imaginary indexicality cannot be taken for granted—that it, like normative versions of rhetoric, depends on certain cultural and political conditions in order to survive, let alone to thrive. So, I would join Professor Atkinson in his call to citizen-critics (a phrase I first learned from Professor Eberly) to “direct our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation.” Guns and arms are an important place to look. I would only insist that we recognize just how difficult such looking is under neoliberal conditions. It can be downright bewildering.

When Hawthorne traveled north to Niagara Falls, he was on a journey of self-discovery as much as he was on a writer’s journey to see America and sketch its beauty. In June, 2016, I journeyed 740+ miles roundtrip to see Niagara Falls for one brief day. My journey was both similar to, and monumentally different from, Hawthorne’s.As many have said, the Horseshoe Falls of Canada—undoubtedly more splendid than the American Falls, which are stunning in themselves—are nearly indescribable. When Hawthorne went to Niagara in search of the sublime and the grand in America, he dramatically restrained himself from immediately viewing the falls, worried they would not meet the expectations set by numerous authors’ tour books he had read or that his experience would be tainted by that of others who had not yet seen the falls for themselves. He first listened to their roar. Then, when he allowed himself to see the falls, he spent days and nights trying to apprehend them for himself. His final view of the falls was from the famed Table Rock on the Canadian side. While Hawthorne struggled with tasteful tourism and criticized tourists who viewed the falls through others’ eyes (ah, he would have had a few problems with me thinking about him and his trip), or who consider manmade feats more admirable, he seemed to most want to just be with the falls—sitting alone, contemplating, and communing with them. By the end of his visit, Hawthorne was able to meditate deeply on the falls despite the presence of other people. He simply “got it,” as we might say.The Niagara Falls that both Hawthorne and I saw are majestic and amazing. What words really can describe them? I spent hours simply looking: snapping some photos (while Hawthorne could only sketch with words), sitting and staring, or closing my eyes to muse by its roar. For nearly two hours, I watched the late afternoon sun-bow shift with my position and perspective, coloring the scene through the mist.Nonetheless, the Niagara Falls that I viewed are vastly different from those Hawthorne experienced. For example, only in the eighteenth century had Table Rock, on which he and other nineteenth century tourists sat, emerged from the water itself—part of the erosive power natural to waterfalls. In 1818, 1828, and 1829, parts of Table Rock broke off in minor rock falls. Hawthorne sat upon their remnant. In 1850, nearly a third of Table Rock collapsed, thundering into the gorge (“Table Rock, Niagara Falls”). Today, after other rock falls and a dynamite blast in 1939, there remains only a bronze tablet marking the mid-point of Table Rock, pointing visitors to its remains—and Hawthorne’s seat—below (see Photo 1). Photo 1.The author at Table Rock.The falls themselves also changed. In the early nineteenth century, both the American and the Horseshoe Falls were much closer to Table Rock, which their water flow had shaped over tens of thousands of years. For example, according to “Online Niagara,” the Horseshoe Falls eroded approximately 3.8 feet annually from 1842 (the first year of official study) to 1905. The erosion changed to 2.3 feet annually until 1927, after which the diversion of water through hydroelectric power stations diminished the erosion to approximately 1 foot annually. (By contrast, the American Falls now are eroding at a mere 3–4 inches annually, although their erosion rate was once much higher.) Today, one must walk over one hundred yards further in approaching the threshold of the falls. When Hawthorne watched the falls from Table Rock, unencumbered by the railings and fences that marked my journey, he sat at the edge of the falls themselves. Did his feet kick stones to the mist below?Water treaties between America and Canada were instituted in 1909 and 1950 (“A River Diversion”). They continue to regulate boundaries and the sharing of water for power; sanitary and domestic means; water navigation; and, of course, to preserve the natural wonder of the falls. Hence, the waterfalls continue to thunder, but their intensity has been diminished—not that we would see or feel that diminishment, never having experienced them differently—as hydroelectric power companies on both the American and Canadian sides divert some of the water that used to rush over the falls. At nighttime, the flow over the Horseshoe Falls is cut by half. The daytime flow of approximately 600,000 gallons per second is left higher for tourists, yet it is still not equal to the brute power Hawthorne witnessed in 1832 (“Facts about Niagara Falls”). Indeed, the powerful water with which Hawthorne communed was likely more than twice that which I experienced in 2016.Today, people can view the combined Niagara Falls from the air by a touring helicopter or from the water by one of four boats—two from each side—that leave from their docks every quarter hour in a carefully orchestrated dance. On the American side, one can either take an elevator up to an observation tower to look over the falls, or take an elevator down to experience the “Cave of the Winds,” in the process becoming soaked with splashing water and experiencing some of the falls’ true power. On the Canadian side, although one can no longer climb down to the base behind the Horseshoe Falls, the “Journey Behind the Falls” uses an elevator set deep in the rock to deposit tourists to a different viewpoint at the base of the falls. Thus, by air, river, elevator, and stairs, the falls are accessible in ways Hawthorne could not have dreamed. He had never seen an airplane, let alone a helicopter. Hawthorne cautiously climbed up and down rocks to his views. I imagined him using the curled maple staff with carved fish and snake images, the craft of a Tuscarora Native American, to steady his feet on the slippery rocks (Hawthorne 56–57). What boats in his time would risk the trip into the mist of the thundering water, and, indeed, why would they? He had never imagined the ubiquitous tourists, taking selfies at every view of the falls; yet, with Hawthorne’s devotion to experiencing the falls for himself turning over in my mind, I could picture him shaking his head, penning critiques of their shortsighted, sightseeing eyes—eyes that failed to perceive what he had spent days attempting to apprehend.Despite all the wonders I have experienced that Hawthorne had not—from traveling by jet to scuba diving to gazing at the Hubble’s views of the cosmos—the falls held me: beautiful, amazing, awesome. I was mute. Almost two centuries ago, Hawthorne used words to describe the same-yet-different falls that I viewed. I have only a few words to add. Not one drop of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that falls per second will pass through the falls again in the same exact form. Every drop of water that falls is in exactly the right place at the right time of its existence. As was Hawthorne. As was I.

ABSTRACT This article situates the extraordinary events of 1989 within the symbolic and politicoeconomic context of Reform-era China. It sees 1989 as a threshold moment for the political culture and a turning point for the collective ethos. The article argues that the vitalistic 1980s made for an ethical existence for the demos, culminating in the “poetics” of 1989, while the post-1989 era witnessed a homogenization of the Chinese ethical imaginary. The latter is the very exigency that drives this study. Drawing on the ethical understandings of Deleuze and Burke, the article calls for the return and fusion of the ethical and the political, and points to a reason for pietas toward the world and the demos. The article is informed by a genealogical understanding of history and a ritualistic-dramatistic understanding of political life. Its central concern is the retransformation of the soul of the Chinese people in the here and now.