ABSTRACT The retreat from dialogue by citizens of Anglo-European democracies is a topic of interdisciplinary debate. This article argues that the problem cannot be solved so long as it is conceived as a matter of inability to handle the discomfort of disagreement. For knowing how to get through a difficult conversation does not make people want to dialogue, nor does making conversations less difficult. The problem is one of disinclination to turn to others with whom we disagree. The desire to argue with others cannot be incentivized by ease. To want to talk across differences, interlocutors must be reattuned sensually to the good of arguing. The author argues for returning to the literary origins of the public sphere, namely, conversations about literature and art, which, according to political theorists and cultural historians, first made the sociality of disagreements felt.

The Loeb Classical Library was founded in 1911 by James Loeb, a retired banker devoted to the study of ancient Greece and Rome. The preface included in the first editions to be published explains Loeb’s vision for the library. Lamenting that “young people of our generation” lacked the facility to read Latin and Greek texts in the original thanks to the pressure universities were facing to provide a “more practical” education, Loeb sought to provide the “average reader” with “translations that are in themselves works of literature” and “side by side with these translations the best critical texts of the original works” (Lake 1912, ii–iii). Though naysayers occasionally mock the bilingual volumes as glorified trots, the series has been a serious work of scholarship since its inception and has gotten even better over the past twenty-five years thanks to the inclusion of more authors and the revision of outdated editions. Students of rhetoric have been major beneficiaries. Russell’s Quintilian (2002), Mirhady’s Rhetoric to Alexander (2011), and Laks and Most’s Sophists (2016) are just a few of the fundamental texts recently published. The Loeb Classical Library now exceeds five hundred volumes, red for Latin and green for Greek. This entire collection is available to subscribers online, fully searchable in English and the original languages and by both page and section numbers. Now Gisela Striker has revised J. H. Freese’s edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, taking account of improvements to the Greek text since it was published in 1926. The updated edition remains primarily the work of Freese; only his name appears on the spine. I refer to it as Freese/Striker and to the original edition as Freese. Line number references in this review are all to Freese/Striker. Professor Striker taught me more than twenty years ago in a course on Cicero’s Republic.In assessing Freese/Striker, it is important first to recognize what a Loeb volume is and what it isn’t. The Loebs are Greek and Latin texts, but they are not, with rare exceptions, critical editions with lists of variant readings or discussions of manuscript families. The Loebs are translations, but they are not accompanied by comprehensive introductions, detailed notes, or overviews of scholarly debates. Their value lies in the way the facing texts complement one another, and their core audience is readers with enough Greek or Latin to benefit from having the original language in front of them. A work such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, however, is exceptionally hard to appreciate without ancillary material. Although Freese/Striker includes a rich introduction and valuable footnotes, these are limited by the scale of the book; the Greek text and translation alone come to 469 pages. Readers who are looking for editorial guidance on a larger scale and in English can and should supplement Freese/Striker with the annotated translations of Kennedy (2nd ed. 2007), Reeve (2018), Waterfield/Yunis (2018), and Bartlett (2019), according to their interests or expertise. Kennedy’s translation is likely to be most useful to students new to the Rhetoric. Formatted as a textbook, it divides the text into sections, prefacing each section with a title and summary. The translations of Waterfield/Yunis, Reeve, and Bartlett are continuous texts without subheadings or summaries. The editors all discuss philosophical, political, and rhetorical issues. Of the three, Waterfield/Yunis’s introduction and notes are most concerned with the Rhetoric as a work of rhetorical theory and are the most accessible and comprehensive option for rhetoricians or nonspecialist readers. Reeve’s Rhetoric belongs to the New Hackett Aristotle Series and is intended for philosophers like the other volumes in that series. Reeve’s introduction and notes emphasize the Rhetoric’s relation to central issues in Aristotle’s thought. Bartlett offers an “interpretive essay” at the end of the volume rather than an introduction; this is a clear overview and summary of the text with particular focus on the Rhetoric’s concern for the role of rhetoric in politics and communal life.For those working with the original Greek, what Freese/Striker has to offer is invaluable. Indeed, since no commentary on the complete Greek text of the Rhetoric has been published in English since Cope’s in 1877, Freese/Striker replaces Freese as the primary resource for English-speaking readers with questions about how to construe the Greek. Reading Aristotle’s Greek is difficult, mostly because he expresses complex ideas in dry, technical, and above all concise language. For those working backward from the English to the Greek, however, these challenges can be virtues. The grammar is straightforward, and the vocabulary is relatively limited. This means that an individual with two years or so of Greek could, with patience and care, use Freese/Striker to work with Aristotle in the original. The search functions in the online version make this easier; one can quickly find relevant Greek passages by searching the English translation (or vice versa). Freese/Striker, therefore, fulfills Loeb’s ambitious goal of making Aristotle in the original available to people with enough Greek to understand it with a facing translation. This is even more valuable today than it was when Freese was published. The growth of rhetoric as an academic field means that rhetoricians without the time to reach advanced proficiency in Classical Greek are engaging with Aristotle’s text on a regular basis and can benefit from the updated text and translation that Freese/Striker provides.Freese/Striker prints and translates a Greek text that is superior to Freese’s. Establishing the Greek text of the Rhetoric is daunting. Aristotle’s laconic and elliptical style led scribal variants and downright errors to creep into the medieval manuscripts, some out of a well-intentioned attempt to make the Greek clearer. In addition, Aristotle seems to have revised and rethought his ideas over the thirty or so years that he worked on the Rhetoric, meaning that some apparent problems in the Greek may not be scribal errors but evidence of Aristotle’s work in progress. Freese based his text and translation on the best editions available in 1926, those of Bekker (1837) and Roemer (1898). In 1976, Kassel published an edition that placed the Greek text on the soundest footing it has been on in probably two thousand years. Freese/Striker is based on this edition, joining other modern English translations of the Rhetoric. Roberts/Barnes (1984), Kennedy, Waterfield/Yunis, and Bartlett are all based on Kassel’s edition. Reeve is based on Ross’s Oxford text (1959) but takes account of Kassel’s proposals.Most of the textual changes from Freese are subtle but important, and they begin as early as the first page, where Freese/Striker has Aristotle say in 1.1.3 1354a14 that previous writers of rhetorical handbooks “have worked out only a small portion of this art,” and Freese that they “have provided us with only a small portion of this art.” The oldest medieval manuscripts have the verb pepoiēkasin, “they have made,” but “they have made only a small portion of this art” makes little sense and seems to be a mistake. At some point, a corrector seeking to fix the problem changed the verb to peporikasin (“have provided”), which Freese adopts. Kassel (1971, 118), following a suggestion of Spengel, realized that Aristotle probably wrote peponēkasin (“have worked out”), which differs from the transmitted pepoiēkasin in just one letter, and which is used similarly with the word for “portion” in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. Improvements to the text of the Rhetoric on this scale occur throughout Freese/Striker. A more considerable shift in sense from Freese to Freese/Striker is illustrated by the following sentence from the section in book 2 on mildness (2.3.14 1380b15-17):The difference depends on Kassel’s preference for the reading helōsin (“they have convicted”) over eleōsin (“they pity”). The oldest manuscript has eleousin (“they pity”) in the indicative mood where the subjunctive is required. One option is simply to correct this to the subjunctive. This is the solution Freese adopts with eleōsin, although he adds a footnote acknowledging that helōsin is a possibility. Helōsin is attested in some manuscripts, including in a correction to the manuscript that has eleousin. Since “they have convicted” (helōsin) and “they pity” (eleōsin) are both possible, the choice between them depends on the degree of logical connection one sees between the two clauses. In following Kassel, Freese/Striker makes conviction the organizing principle: People (i.e., judges) have mild sentiments toward the people they convict, especially if they feel that an offender has already suffered more than enough for a punishment. Freese’s interpretation, on the other hand, removes the passage from the context of passing a sentence: People have mild sentiments when they feel pity toward an offender, especially if they feel that the offender has already suffered more than enough for a punishment (cf. Grimaldi 1988, 60-61).Textual editing is as much art as science, and the two proposals of Kassel that I have just discussed have not been universally embraced. Like Freese/Striker, Waterfield/Yunis translates Kassel’s text. Kennedy translates Kassel’s text for the first example but retains “they pity” for the second one, acknowledging in a footnote that “they have convicted” is an option. Reeve translates a different text from both Freese and Kassel for the first example and the same text as Freese in the second, also including the alternate possibilities in his endnotes. Bartlett translates the same text as Freese for the second example; for the first, he seems to accept the manuscript reading “made,” rendering it as “written of.” In both cases he notes the alternate possibilities in his notes. Finally, Roberts/Barnes translates Kassel’s text for the second example, but, like Bartlett, seems to accept “made” for the first, rendering it as “constructed”; Roberts/Barnes has no note in either case (although the translation consistently follows Kassel and notes Kassel’s readings at many points). I have surveyed these translations to show that Freese’s text and translation are not to be condemned out of hand and in some cases may be defensible. The age of the volume, however, means that readers will not systematically encounter an alternate version in a note, as they do in these instances in Kennedy, Reeve, and Bartlett. Readers who continue to use Freese from convenience (it is in the public domain and freely available through Google Books) risk being led astray. In following Kassel, Freese/Striker reflects the modern consensus and brings us closer to what Aristotle is likely to have written, fulfilling Loeb’s promise to give readers the best critical text currently available.Freese/Striker does reject some of Kassel’s bolder proposals. The discussion about the three types of speeches offers an example. In 1.3.2 1358b6-7, Kassel brackets the enigmatic clause that spectators are judges of “the ability of the speaker,” as a signal to readers that it should not be considered part of the original text even though it appears in all the medieval manuscripts. Kassel’s objection (1971, 124–25), that the clause seems to interrupt the sense of Aristotle’s argument by contradicting the distinction he has just drawn between spectators and judges, is reasonable. By using brackets, Kassel alerts the reader that he rejects the clause but does not go so far as to remove it entirely from the text. Brackets for dubious passages are a convention familiar to readers of Latin and Greek, but they clutter up translations and risk confusing readers unfamiliar with the convention. Freese/Striker uses them sparingly. Roberts/Barnes includes this clause about the speaker’s ability in brackets, with a note explaining that Kassel excised it, while Waterfield/Yunis omits it entirely. Freese/Striker (as had Freese) retains the clause without brackets (as do Kennedy, Reeve, and Bartlett), mentions Kassel’s opinion in a footnote, and points the reader to a passage in book 2 where Aristotle once again states that a spectator of an epideictic speech is a kind of judge (although the cross-reference should read 1391b16-17 rather than 1391a16-17). Since the Loebs do not allow for the kind of caution that brackets and textual apparatus provide in critical editions of Greek texts, Freese/Striker’s decision to prefer the reading of the manuscripts in cases such as this serves readers best. In all the places where Freese/Striker does print a different Greek text from Kassel, the change is acknowledged in a footnote.Besides the alterations based on Kassel’s text, Freese/Striker keeps closely to the translation in Freese, updating it to accord with modern English style: “that” instead of “which” more consistently in restrictive clauses, “on this account” instead of “wherefore,” and similar minor changes in wording. More consequential changes include more transparent renderings of the Greek. Among the most significant is this sentence from book 1 about the two different types of pisteis (1.2.2 1355b36):By broadening the scope of pisteis and eliminating the unavoidable connotation of real and fake in “inartificial” and “artificial,” Freese/Striker offers a much clearer sense of what Aristotle means. There is a trade-off. Rendering pisteis as “means of persuasion” obscures the fact that Aristotle seems deliberately to be appropriating the terminology of professional speechmakers for his own novel purposes. Pistis (the singular of pisteis) is a word used in judicial oratory for “proof” in contexts where “means of persuasion” would make little sense. Seeking to make the best of a tricky situation, Freese/Striker uses “means of persuasion” throughout the translation, except where pisteis unambiguously means “proofs.” Freese/Striker is not alone in favoring “means of persuasion.” Reeve uses it, and Roberts/Barnes and Bartlett offer “modes of persuasion.” Waterfield/Yunis stands out by keeping the time-tested “proofs.” Kennedy avoids the issue by printing pisteis without a translation. Another significant improvement over Freese is Freese/Striker’s rendering of ēthos and its cognates in most cases with the vocabulary of character rather than morality or ethics. Freese/Striker’s “considerations of character” (1.8.6 1366a13) and “adapt our speeches to character” (2.18.2 1391b28) are more accurate than Freese’s “ethical argument” and “make our speeches ethical,” as well as free of the moral judgment that Freese’s English imposes on the Greek. Finally, Freese/Striker’s use of “unfamiliar,” while perhaps not quite catching the nuance of the Greek xenos and xenikos in Aristotle’s discussion of style, avoids the negative connotations that Freese’s “foreign” often has in contemporary English.Freese features a twenty-one-page introduction that includes mini-biographies of rhetoricians before Aristotle, a comparison of the Rhetoric to the Gorgias and Phaedrus, an aside on the Rhetoric to Alexander, and accounts of the most important manuscript and of William of Moerbeke’s thirteenth-century translation into Latin. This remains useful, and some may miss it, but the information is all readily available elsewhere. The new introduction in Freese/Striker is more selective and more directly about the Rhetoric. In ten pages, it introduces the reader to Aristotle’s project, the contents of the Rhetoric, and ancient rhetoricians’ lack of interest in it after Aristotle’s death. A highlight, reflecting Striker’s expertise in Aristotle’s logic, is the concise explanation of how the theory of argument in the Rhetoric is an adaptation of the one in the Topics. There is also a new chapter index in the form of an outline that is easier to use than the paragraph-length summaries in the seventeen-page “Analysis” of the text in Freese. Freese/Striker retains from Freese the “Select Glossary of Technical and Other Terms.” This is not, nor is it meant to be, a comprehensive handlist of rhetorical concepts. As the name implies, it is a convenient place for readers of the Greek to look up technical terms or familiar words that Aristotle uses in unique ways. Most of the definitions are taken directly from Freese or lightly revised. Freese/Striker’s entries for dialektikē and sēmeion, however, are clear and concise introductions to these difficult topics, a marked improvement on Freese’s. Where Freese discusses dialektikē without specific references to how Aristotle uses it in other works, Freese/Striker summarizes the explanation in the Topics of how dialektikē is a technique of developing or refuting a thesis through questions and answers and then shows how rhetoric does more than dialectic by also seeking to persuade an audience. And where Freese’s explanation of sēmeion is abstract, Freese/Striker gives us a concrete definition (“a proposition stating a fact that points to a related other fact, so that the existence of the second fact may be inferred from the first”) followed by an example of how this works in practice (fever points to illness). The same general principle of retaining but updating governs Freese/Striker’s policy toward Freese’s rich explanatory footnotes. Many of these have been kept with no changes, some have been revised (often silently correcting oversights), and some new ones have been added. In the interests of brevity, some notes have also been excluded, and, as with the introduction, readers may miss these. Taken as a whole, however, the slightly more concise notes remain useful, especially for readers who will use Freese/Striker as a primary resource, rather than one of the more extensively annotated translations I mentioned earlier in the review.Freese/Striker ends with an index of proper names and a general index. These items too are taken from Freese, with deletions (for example, “hair (worn long in Sparta)” and “pancratiast”) and additions or corrections (for example, “licentiousness” for akolasia and “weakness of will” for akrasia rather than “incontinence” for both). With search engines, indexes are less important than they once were. This one demonstrates how helpful they can still be. The entry for “article, the, use of” refers us to 3.6.5, a section on how to use the definite article in Greek where the translation in Freese/Striker does not use the word “article.” A lexical search for “article” would turn up nothing in 3.6.5, and one for “the” would be next to useless.De Gruyter is selling Kassel’s edition of the Rhetoric for $430. It is not available as an electronic text online. Since many research do not include it in their the way that even most can it is through For the of of Freese/Striker Kassel’s text with Striker’s editorial At the same readers should that no edition, including Freese/Striker, is a version of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. serious scholarly work would be well by it, Kassel’s edition, and an of other translations and English and other their This is the case for all Loeb volumes, Freese/Striker it does Readers a and text accompanied by an lightly translation. As a first of for work on Aristotle in Greek, it should be on the real or of English-speaking of Greek rhetoric and, in the of James Loeb, of academic or in working through Aristotle’s ideas with an toward his own language.

It is common for those who live in democratic societies to talk about the importance of speaking to others. But what about the desirability of speaking to others? At first glance, the question appears false, since the answer seems obvious: Of course speaking to others is desirable! Engaging with others who disagree with us is part and parcel of the democratic way of life. And yet, we need not look too far to find the public sphere mired in intense polarization, divisiveness, and a general breakdown of civil discourse. In practice, we appear to set aside what we say we believe and proceed as though we know that dialogue is pointless.What should we make of this gap between, on the one hand, our accedence to the idea that speaking across difference is good and, on the other, our demonstrable lack of attunement to that good in practice?We differentiate two ways of conceiving the gap. One might understand the gap as between a belief in the importance of open dialogue and the willingness to engage in it. Here, the discrepancy between our commitment to the principle and acting on it is easily cleared up by pointing to things that make dialogue ineffective today. We could say that, while we do firmly believe in the principle of dialogue, reality makes it impossible. In this case, the retreat from dialogue is inevitable. We propose an alternative understanding of the gap as one between believing that dialogue is desirable and desiring dialogue. We make the case that while the first framework can excuse the evident tendency to avoid disagreement as a realistic, prudent, or practical choice, it also makes embracing pluralism indefensible. The second approach, we argue, has the potential not only to remind us that the desirability of dialogue is coextensive with the desirability of capacious thought and judgment, but to reattune us to pluralism as an ideal for realizing those desires.Increasingly, citizens, scholars, and civic institutions lament that it has become impossible to disagree with each other. This notion—that democratic dialogue has become an impossibility—comes in different forms. For some, the impossibility is due to contextual developments. We live in a new world in which the conditions that once made speaking to others potentially productive are gone. So, even if we make the effort to speak across difference, our deliberations in the current digital and transnational public sphere cannot consolidate public opinion as they used to. Such explanations, which attribute the impossibility to contextual developments, might be called externalist to distinguish them from ones that attribute the putative impossibility of open dialogue to inherent causes.From an internalist view, developments like the rise of social media, globalization, and the growing role of “big money” in politics have not exactly made the democratic process impossible; they have merely magnified the fact that it was always too flawed to be viable. If it once seemed that democracy—as a pluralist way of life, based on free and shared self-governance—was possible, now we can see more clearly that speaking to others is ineffective in consolidating, or ensuring the legitimacy of, public opinion. Similarly, if it once seemed that the challenge was how to make life in pluralism better, it has become clear that human beings, insofar as we are essentially tribalistic, may prefer not to have to negotiate between different values and worldviews.Whatever form it takes, the idea that democratic dialogue might have been good if it were not impossible—as an explanation of the gap between what we remain committed to in principle, on the one hand, and our readiness to act on it, on the other—has circumscribed our response to the crisis of democratic dialogue by making the importance of democratic dialogue effectively moot.Reflection about the democratic crisis has devolved into a deterministic problematization of free speech itself. In politics, free speech has become a partisan issue, and in academic scholarship, the validity of committing to the protection of free speech has become a matter to interrogate. For example, which views are acceptable to “platform” on college campuses? Does Justice Brandeis’s slogan that the “truth will out” or Mill’s idea of the “marketplace of ideas” have any actual empirical validity? Does free speech in the age of the internet make its abuse too rampant to justify its protection? And so on. However, this concern with the defensibility and parameters of free speech is confused about the stakes of the protection of free speech. It neglects the fact that the commitment to protect freedom of expression is based not on the principle that speech ought to be free, but rather on a commitment to pluralism that, in turn, demands that speech be protected. That is to say, the actual stakes of any argument in support of or against free speech go to the ideal of living with others with whom we are likely to disagree. Concern with the defensibility of free speech fails to recognize, in short, that it is the pluralism itself that needs to be defended.Accordingly, our aim is to shift the conversation about the dysfunction in public dialogue by framing the desirability of speaking to others as an aporia that can be ignored only on pain of rendering pluralism indefensible.To present the desirability of dialogue as a problematic seems odd, especially because the commonplace idea that talking across difference is important seems to already entail its desirability. And yet, if pressed to explain why anyone would want to talk to others, we find ourselves describing instrumental goods. Which is to say, we find ourselves listing things that talking to others is good for: be this cultivating civility and respect, refining our individual beliefs, or arriving at better solutions to collective problems. Indeed, it is easy to recognize the potential benefits, be they civic, social, epistemic, or moral. At that point, the distinction between believing that something is desirable and desiring it for itself becomes clear. In the first case, being in dialogue need not be a desirable prospect so long as the outcome of the process is desirable. In the second case, it is the prospect of dialogue itself that is desirable, notwithstanding its challenges. This distinction is important because the instrumental benefits of dialogue for stability, civility, and cooperation are recognizable in any kind of society or political system. Democratic societies, however, uphold pluralism as an ideal: Disagreement is not merely an instrument to resolve differences; living in difference is an opportunity to disagree. As the timing of this special section suggests, we live in a moment that calls on us to contend with the implication of this distinction for pluralism.The desirability of talking to others is a problematic that emerges specifically from a mismatch between a theory and its practice. Consider the monist-pluralist debate in Anglo-European literary theory from the 1960s up to the 1990s. The debate, which was framed as a contest between critical pluralists (represented by Wayne Booth) and monists (represented by E. D. Hirsch), opened up a discussion about the parameters within which interpretation would realize its aims and optimize its results, about how the aims are to be defined and what the ideal result might be. For Booth, the project of pluralism is one invested in “the public testing of values” through conversation, whereas for Hirsch validity in interpretation required imposing order on “the chaotic democracy of readings” (1979, 4–5). Of course, the debate was not limited to a quarrel between pluralists and monists; it expanded to include critics from numerous emerging “fields” that have since become institutional mainstays (like feminist studies, postcolonial studies, African American studies, queer studies, and comparative literature) who criticized it for various alleged ideological blind spots.What is noteworthy is that, in the exchanges between critics representing presumably irreconcilable views of how best to conduct the critical enterprise, everyone could count on others to be invested in contesting other views. When a monist like Hirsch insisted that critical inclusivity stands to compromise interpretive validity, Booth could, despite warning of monist exclusiveness as a form of “critical killing,” point to how the monist position gains clarity and force when it stands within a plurality of critical views (1979, 259). And Ellen Rooney, who criticized Booth for modeling his vision of interpretive pluralism on liberal paradigms of public reason as persuasion, wrote an entire book to persuade readers otherwise—a critique that was possible and necessary in a historical moment when a rationalist-liberal pluralism could be plausibly posited as hegemonic, whereas a public sphere paralyzed by irrationality and post-factualism calls for a foundationalist, or at least positive, theoretical intervention.Put differently, today a pluralist rhetorical theory like Booth’s would not be in a position to model itself after the openness of public discourse without first explaining why one would want to model critical discourse on a paradigm in dysfunction. Likewise, Rooney could not argue that the same ideological baggage attached to the “colloquial meaning of the term ‘pluralist’ shadows all our theories of interpretation” (1989, 17), not at a time when pluralism is no longer part of our political vernacular. She would have to find positive grounds on which to present an alternative vision of critical discourse. And Hirsch might not want to call for untethering the principles of persuasion in public discourse from the grounds of validity in scholarly criticism, not when translating the value of what literary critics do has become a paramount concern for literary studies as a discipline. In short, at the time of the monist-pluralist debate, the most exclusivist monist could afford to be so because it was possible to take fellow critics’ practical commitment to argue and disagree for granted. Booth, the avatar of critical pluralism, dedicated himself, in Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, to differentiating all the different varieties of monism and pluralism, delineating the advantages and liabilities of each of these critical “attitudes,” and to arguing the faultlessness of critical disagreements, as he did when he proposed Andrew Paul Ushenko’s thought experiment, which imagined “a fixed cone placed among observers who are not allowed to change their angle of vision” (1979, 31), as an apt analogy for “the challenge of pluralism,” all without having to consider what motivates critics to share their opinions. Meanwhile the past two decades have seen literary criticism and theory not just defending the value of interpretive knowledge (literary studies’ perennial institutional challenge) but calling into question the very point of producing interpretations (Lehman 2017).It takes a particular historical moment to push a question like the desirability of speaking to others to the forefront. Hannah Arendt raised the question in the middle of the twentieth century when she believed that the defense of pluralism was at risk, and her search led her to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy.When we invited our contributors to help us articulate the desirability of speaking to others as a problematic, we presented them the foregoing conceptual framework and offered, as orienting figures, Immanuel Kant, who articulates one of modernity’s most influential philosophical accounts of why disagreeing is good for people irrespective of the result, and Hannah Arendt, who critically revived Kant’s philosophical framework after the rise of fascism.In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant puts forward the maxim to “think in the position of everybody else” (1790/2000, 5:294). Appearing in the context of his aesthetic theory, the normative requirement to “reflect on [one’s] own judgment from a universal standpoint” is taken to be constitutive of the judgment of taste (5:295). In other words, to declare something to be beautiful presupposes “putting [one]self into the standpoint of others” (5:295). Moreover, our declaring something to be beautiful is to demand that you think so too (5:237). And yet the force of the aesthetic “ought” does not consist in the fact that you will come to agree with us. Rather, the demand makes clear that taste is an inherently social affair, and our judgments on such matters necessarily consider what our interlocutors would say when confronted with the objects that we might designate as beautiful.It is this capacity for perspective taking, exemplified in the aesthetic sphere, that Arendt famously gravitates toward as forming a basis for the political. “[T]he capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant” precisely because it is the faculty of the mind by which we take into account the perspectives of others (Arendt 1968/2006, 221). In her well-known Kant Lectures (delivered in the Fall of 1970 at the New School for Social Research), Arendt draws out the implications of Kant’s claim that to “restrain our understanding by the understanding of others” is, in fact, a “subjectively necessary touchstone of the correctness of our judgments generally” (Kant 1798/2006, 7:219).Building on this idea, Arendt puts forward the related notions of “representative thinking” and “enlarged mentality,” which involve the ideas not only that it is good to think from the standpoint of others and take their thoughts into account, but that “thinking . . . depends on others to be possible at all” (1982, 40). Whatever her differences with Kant, Arendt is to be credited for highlighting the radical force of Kant’s “belie[f] that the very faculty of thinking depends on its public use,” because it was “not made ‘to isolate itself but to get into community with others’” (40). Kant further warns in his Anthropology (1798) about the dangers of “isolating ourselves with our own understanding and judging publicly with our private representations” (1798/2006, 7:219).Here, the value of dialogue, disagreement, or modes of engagement that involve “thinking from the standpoint of others” does not lie in making our lives with others who are not like-minded manageable, nor even in the prospect of improving our thoughts and opinions by sharpening them against others, but rather because our ability to think and make judgments is most capacious when we are in conversation with others, especially those who might differ. The essays collected in this special section reflect on today’s democratic crisis by returning to the work of Kant and Arendt or proposing alternative sources and frameworks of conceptualization. They approach the problematic we set out from different fields in the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, political science, cultural studies, history, literature, and education, offering a range of historical and theoretical accounts of dialogue and disagreement enriched by interdisciplinarity. Together, they point about the of is, about what or how speech ought to be the question of the desirability of talking with others in the first That this question is is by no taken for granted. As would likely speaking with others may be but it is might to but something that only after have made up mind about after have an opinion about how things in the or about how the world should to others can if is to be by the other. Does it make in that case, to just to In of Democratic takes as her point of the of especially in the context of However, that the of speaking with others is not to but to For Arendt, speaking to others is not only important but for political is the of having a shared public world at In view, we have a world in common only to the that we it from different that for persuasion to our sense of a shared or common it also be world just to you but to In other words, it how the world appears to sense of what is by how it. from the prospect of persuasion the that might see things account, from persuasion as a rhetorical at to it as a kind of and to see the of judgment as a common world that people who have very different opinions to the with others is if we cannot agree on what objects or we are talking In his for in the of Hannah that a better, if not for democratic in a society could be in on and institutions in as opinion a set of that us in conversation with each other in the first of thinking has been used to a form of political in which we reflect on of common concern by the of as others as and alternative frameworks that how we of the of interlocutors within such In with to account of and understanding of and others as that are by a particular of speaking with each other. 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The proliferation of materialist perspectives in rhetorical studies has generated feelings of disciplinary crisis and fragmentation. Early materialist formulations of rhetoric, such as those put forward by Michael Calvin McGee and Raymie McKerrow, conceptualized materiality discursively and, thus, maintained continuity with more traditional accounts of rhetoric as a practice of “symbolic action.” However, beginning with texts such as Ronald Walter Greene’s “Another Materialist Rhetoric” and Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley’s edited collection Rhetorical Bodies, scholars began emphasizing the ontological and embodied rhetoricity of physical contexts and environments over discursive and ideological conceptions of materiality. This turn toward the ontological and embodied has rapidly expanded over the past twenty years, with numerous scholars now offering new materialist, postcritical, ecological, computational, and digital perspectives on rhetoric that privilege concepts such as affect, circulation, and assemblage over more traditional rhetorical terminology.It is in response to this tension between standard rhetorical perspectives and materialist rhetorical approaches that we can appreciate the interventions of S. Scott Graham’s recent book, Where’s the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. Rejecting the view that the materialist turns in rhetorical studies (particularly rhetorical new materialisms [hereafter referred to as RNM] and computational rhetoric) have left the discipline more fragmented and less capable of defending a unified perspective on rhetoric, Graham believes it is possible to generate a new unified theory that can affirm the lines of scholarly influence that have given rise to RNM (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “right branch”) as well as the more traditional lines of scholarly influence that have led to a formulation of rhetoric as “symbolic action” (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “left branch”). To accomplish this task, Graham argues that we should avoid the tendency to view RNM as “other” to traditional narratives about rhetoric and, instead, consider how these latter perspectives are compatible with the former. Much like unified field theories in physics that seek to bridge older perspectives on general relativity with newer perspectives on quantum mechanics (e.g., string theory and quantum loop gravity), Graham believes it is possible to achieve similar results in rhetorical studies by approaching standard rhetorical perspectives from the ontological viewpoints enabled by RNM.What makes Graham’s angle on this claim particularly unique is his premise that a proto-new materialist perspective has underpinned some of the most influential left branch approaches to rhetoric all along. While most rhetoricians start from the present when introducing concepts associated with RNM, Graham, following historically informed thinkers such as Scot Barnett, Debra Hawhee, and Thomas Rickert, demonstrates that there is a line of thinking about “symbolic action” as “situated action” that goes back to the relational approach to metaphysics put forward by philosopher Henri Bergson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, as Graham argues, if we begin with Bergson’s relational ontology, rather than the postmodernist and social constructivist philosophies that (explicitly and implicitly) shaped interpretations of rhetoric’s left branch during the second half of the twentieth century, we do not “need to re-engineer rhetoric” to fit the latest trends of RNM (41). From Graham’s perspective, many standard rhetorical perspectives have been hospitable toward new materialism from the outset. To appreciate this fact, we simply need to recuperate the Bergsonian legacy that informs this tradition.To make a case for this Bergsonian approach to rhetoric, the first main chapter of Graham’s book (chapter 2) engages in detail with the work of Kenneth Burke. As a crucial founder of the symbolic action paradigm, Graham believes that if he can show the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thought, he can, in turn, demonstrate how scholarship informed by Burke is also influenced by Bergson. To trace the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thinking, Graham focuses on Burke’s early work, especially Permanence and Change. In contrast to Burke’s later writings (e.g., A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and Language as Symbolic Action), which have been crucial to interpreting him as a theorist of symbolic action, Graham argues that Permanence and Change is directly indebted to a Bergsonian process philosophy that emphasizes the rhetoricity of situations. For the Burke of Permanence and Change (which Graham calls Original Bergsonian Burke [OBB]), there is no ontological or epistemological gap between symbolic action and material situations. Instead, symbolic practices and the situations that underpin such practices (e.g., environmental ecologies, social ecologies, digital ecologies, etc.) can all be conceived immanently, as nested complex dynamic systems that reveal motives toward reality. Hence, according to Graham, available in the writings of OBB is a Bergsonian ontology that emphasizes relational processes all the way down and rejects any Cartesian dualism (or Kantian correlationism) between nature and culture and things and words. For OBB, which is also the Burke Debra Hawhee focuses on most extensively in her book Moving Bodies, symbolic action is the effect rather than the cause of material processes of becoming, and rhetoric is the act of responding to these material processes in a satisfying way that is always itself creative and inventive.After offering a novel way to think about Burke and his materialist contributions to rhetoric, chapter 3 of Graham’s text turns to Carolyn Miller’s highly influential essay “Genre as Social Action” (originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1984). As her piece is deeply influenced by Permanence and Change, as well as the writings of Austrian philosopher Alfred Schutz, Graham believes that rhetoricians can also read Miller’s formulation of genre as presupposing a Bergsonian ontology. While Miller does not mention Bergson in her essay, Graham argues that by appreciating the influence of Bergson on Burke and Schutz, it is possible to see that Bergson has indirectly influenced Miller’s account of genre. Graham argues that rhetoricians can also appreciate the link to Bergson in terms of how Miller’s project explicitly rejects “modernist materialism and the postmodern fetishization of discourse” (90). For Miller, the situations that produce genres—as repeated patterns of discourse—are not mechanistic and mechanical but active and dynamic processes that sediment through time (what Bergson calls duration). For Graham, then, the resources for interpreting Miller as “in some ways, the [discipline’s] original rhetorical new materialist” are already at play within her text (90). If we simply expand Miller’s understanding of situation so that, like OBB, it accounts for patterning and structuration not only at the social level but also at the flattened ontological level of movement and becoming, then Miller’s Genre as Social Action (GASA) framework can be reconceptualized in terms of a new materialist method that Graham calls Genre as Process (GAP). Whereas GASA conceives of genres as abstract nouns that emerge out of stable social patterns, GAP emphasizes genre-ing, “[t]he processes of structuring activity that occurs in situational hierarchies and guides situated action” (73). A GAP approach also helps realize Miller’s recent call for deeper engagement with new media technologies. As dynamic structures that are always entangled with their larger contexts and environments, new media technologies, such as Twitter, are best approached through a GAP framework that can appreciate the way these technologies repattern the norms of genre (e.g., letter to the editor genre on Twitter vs. traditional letter to the editor genre). Approaching GASA as GAP, then, allows rhetoricians to conceptualize genre in terms of dynamic patterns of circulation that are continually predisposed toward change and entropy. While effective genre deployment, like Burke’s rhetoric, requires kairotic responsiveness (or what Graham, borrowing from Whitehead, calls satisfaction), this situated responsiveness (especially in digital contexts) is itself inventive and, thus, continuous with the patterns of circulation that makes genre itself possible.Chapter 4 of Graham’s book concludes the conceptual portion of his project. In this chapter, Graham argues that a GAP framework can enrich not only traditional rhetorical (left branch) perspectives but also RNM. While Graham identifies as a new materialist rhetorician who favors the ontological turn in rhetorical studies, he believes that part of what makes the GAP framework valuable is its tendency to move RNM back toward a study of “the recurring experiences of practicing rhetors” (122). Too often, Graham argues, advocates of RNM adopt a “zoom-out” (distributed agency) perspective that makes it challenging to locate rhetorical agents’ strategic, situated practices. A GAP approach, by contrast, returns to the situated rhetor without rendering their agency discrete, atomistic, or self-contained. By conceptualizing rhetorical agency as the accomplishment of “structuring structures” that produce performatively enacted boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, GAP enables both a “zoom-out” and “zoom-in” approach that can account for the rhetorical strategies that satisfy particular human situations and exigencies. Graham’s framework, thus, not only improves traditional rhetorical perspectives by making them more process-oriented but also enriches RNM approaches by making them more suited to analyze rhetorical practices and discourses.The remainder of Graham’s book is a sampling of case studies that apply the GAP framework to cultural artifacts. In chapter 5, Graham discusses the qualitative research he produced studying the work of Brandon, a graphic designer who consults with various companies to create novel digital products. Graham argues that the novel digital products that Brandon produces for these companies can be understood through a GAP framework. Across his consulting work, Brandon must demonstrate an ongoing sensitivity to the genre constraints of various situations (that are ecological, social, and digital) to effectively satisfy his clients and consumers—a practice Graham calls “fit foraging.” Graham argues that a clear example of this approach to “fit foraging” is the holiday e-card video game that Brandon produced for the Ryzex Corporation (a UPC scanner manufacturer). After being asked by Ryzex to create a novel holiday e-card that could satisfy the company’s various clients, “Brandon designed a shooting-gallery Flash game that used Ryzex UPC scanners as ranged weapons and barcode-marked boxes as appropriate targets” (126). According to Graham, this shooting gallery game was an excellent example of fit foraging because it combined the genres of the holiday e-card, shooting gallery games, and Ryzex’s unique brand identity to produce a novel outcome.In chapter 6, Graham turns his attention to scholarship on computational rhetoric. Focusing largely on his own work deploying content-analytic methods, Graham argues that these approaches work through an ongoing dialectic between intuition, which he defines as “an experiential approach to metaphysical inquiry” (139), and abstraction. This Bergsonian framing is valuable, Graham argues, because it locates practices of quantification in a GAP framework that understands data as “aggregations of intuitions rendered symbolically so that the patterns, abstracted for the local sites of situated action, become more clearly visible” (149). Hence, for Graham, computational rhetoric should be approached not as “other” to more traditional rhetorical perspectives but as a distinct genre of rhetorical inquiry that is compatible with his larger GAP framework. Graham’s insights in this chapter also have important implications for scholarship centered on the rhetoric of science. Like content analytic methods, scientific inquiry can be understood generally as a process of abstracting the intuitive and forging a fit with material reality through embodied experimentation. Graham’s Bergsonian approach to the rhetoric of science is, thus, compatible with scholars, such as Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, without needing to draw extensively on their distinct science and technology studies vocabulary. If we simply start with a Bergsonian relational ontology, Graham argues, all rhetorical practices emerge out of the nexus between intuition, the patterns of stabilization (or duration) that result from intuition, and the processes of symbolic abstraction that attempt to provisionally capture intuition and duration in a satisfying way.In chapter 7, Graham returns to a more specific case study that deals with the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Arguing that the Trump moment poses a crisis to traditional studies of presidential genre, Graham claims that a GASA framework can help make sense of Trump’s success as a rhetor. Graham’s method for analyzing Trump’s rhetoric works at two registers. First, Graham shares the results of a quantitative study he conducted to test the widely held conviction that “the 2016 presidential primary [featuring Donald Trump was] . . . more negative . . . [than] prior campaign cycles” (165). Contrary to popular perception, Graham shows that his study reveals that a similar level of negativity characterized previous primary debates and that there is no stark difference. Graham then zooms in on the specific rhetorical strategies enacted by Trump during the primary debates, focusing in particular on his infamous exchange with Marco Rubio about hand (penis) size. Graham’s main argument here is that Trump’s communication during this exchange (and others) can be appreciated in terms of a Laconic rhetoric genre that “leverages the powerful organizing structures of reality TV and Twitter flame wars to supplant the traditional genre-ing processes of political oratory” (176). Graham argues, furthermore, that this same Laconic genre did not work when Rubio deployed it because his situated responsiveness did not align with “the media apparatuses that supported . . . [Trump’s] rhetoric” (176). Graham’s case study in this chapter, thus, shows how a GAP approach to presidential genre, especially when paired with computational rhetoric, can reveal illuminating insights about rhetors. While a historical perspective on negativity in presidential primary debates cannot capture, on its own, the qualities that made the Trump presidency unique, Graham’s GAP framework is able to locate the specific “structuring structures” that made Trump such a powerful contemporary rhetor.Chapter 8 concludes Graham’s text by recapping key theses and offering a glossary that defines key terms. My summary sense of the key takeaway is that Graham offers scholars a new materialist perspective on genre (GAP) that can account for the diverse material structures that pattern symbolic meaning in historically specific contexts. Effective responsiveness to this new materialist conception of genre works in terms of Whiteheadian satisfaction, or fit foraging, which I would describe as an ontologically situated enactment of kairos (similar to the account offered by Debra Hawhee in Bodily Arts). In addition to providing a recap of his project and clearly defining key terms in the book, the concluding chapter of Graham’s text notes some of the book’s limitations. Some of the critical limitations raised here include a need for more careful engagement with cultural rhetorics (i.e., rhetorics that study the performance of identity and embodied subjectivity), applying GAP to old media in addition to new media, and considering GAP more directly in relation to sound studies.While Graham does a good job acknowledging the limits of his project, I’d like to conclude this review by discussing what I perceive as a few more limitations. First, in addition to engaging more directly with cultural rhetorics, Graham’s text could benefit from a more robust theorization of power and its effect on the patterning of genre. For example, while I agree that new materialism should explore the processes that produce the situated boundary of the human, I believe, following the interventions of scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Armond Towns, that what constitutes a “fitting” response within this domain is overdetermined by structures of racialization (as well as patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.). Graham’s work does not discuss the boundary of the human in this way, and his case studies seem to overlook the problem of positionality in relation to genre. It would be interesting, as part of Graham’s ontological account of genre formation, if he considered how genres emerge out of historically specific patterns of exclusion and bordering.Second, while I find Graham’s advocacy of “zoom-in” approaches to RNM compelling, I feel that his book could engage more with the nonhuman. Most of Graham’s case studies foreground the materiality of new media, but they say little about concrete extrahuman processes of mattering. I’d like to hear more from Graham about the role of physical ecosystems and nonhuman entities (like plants, animals, and even inorganic matter) in the dynamic materialization of genres. It seems that from an RNM perspective, something as banal as the energy used to power new media technologies would play a constitutive role in genre formation.Finally, there is the question of whether turning to Bergson can resolve rhetoric’s crisis of disciplinary identity. Bergson, after all, is first and foremost a philosopher, and Graham’s project could have benefitted from more argumentative scaffolding to support the case that Bergson was doing philosophy from a rhetorical vantage. Perhaps if Graham returned to some of the earlier disciplinary debates over rhetoric and philosophy that occurred between the late 1960s and early 1980s, he could locate more commonplaces for exploring these tensions and justifying why Bergson’s relational metaphysics should be conceived as an ontological approach to rhetoric.Limitations notwithstanding, Graham should be praised for this important contribution to the discipline. Graham demonstrates a masterful understanding of RNM, computational rhetoric, and thinkers associated with the left branch of rhetoric. And his ability to synthesize all this work into a unified theory is very impressive.I look forward to reading new scholarship in genre studies that builds on this text, and I look forward to following the theoretical debates it prompts with respect to the compatibility between RNM and traditional rhetorical perspectives. I also look forward to future scholarship that situates Graham’s process-oriented account of rhetoric in relation to a larger historical context and disciplinary genealogy. As scholars such as Debra Hawhee, Thomas Rickert, Scot Barnet, and Mari Lee Mifsud have all shown (at least indirectly), perspectives that resonate with the process philosophy of Bergson can be found in Greek antiquity as well as the Homeric period that predates Greek antiquity. More work should be done to connect these historical threads so that rhetoric’s ontological relationship to process, change, movement, and indeterminacy can be fully appreciated.

September 29, 2008. Radiohead front man Thom Yorke sits frustrated at his piano. Live on stage. He is trying to start a song, but something is tripping him up. The song is “Videotape,” and he cannot start playing it. “Temporary loss of information,” he mumbles to an expectant crowd.The song “Videotape” is syncopated, meaning there is a “placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur” (Wikipedia 2021). Practically, it means that Yorke is joining a song already in progress: there is a beat before the beat that “starts” the song. Yorke, then, is starting the song not on the down beat but after the down beat—after the song has already started. He needs to hear something before he can play anything. He needs to hear the beat before he can sing. “Give me the fuckin’ hi-hats only,” he asks.Yorke is moved by the drum and a beat not his alone. It is a beat preceding him to which he must become subject. He needs to listen, but it is a particular kind of listening: a passive listening that makes him, as it were, “subject to the instruction of others” (Gross 137).Like Yorke on stage in 2008, I struggled to start and write this review. Not for any fault in the book, which is clear and concise, complex and compelling, but because I wanted to write a review that practiced the art of listening Gross cultivates: Active listening [“auditor-as-judge”], as it is understood by theoreticians and practitioners of persuasion from classical antiquity through today, only takes off at dusk like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, leaving behind obscurities of our daily lives including our susceptibility to advertising, our political apathy, our immersion in commonsense, our lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change. We have much work ahead when it comes to the theoretical and practical nuances of listening in its passive dimensions. (137)This review practices listening to this call in this way. The worry remains that the genre of the book review tends toward what Gross identifies as active listening: the judge, the critic. I should probably be the “active listener-as-judge” (83). Surely, a good reviewer should protect future readers from a “bad teacher” (131). But how should a book review practicing passive listening read? Does it aim for learning? Surely. Credulity? Why not. Subjection? Hmm. . . . It is, after all, subjection that lies at the heart of Gross’s book. Subjection is the beat before the beat that is rhetoric, an art forever syncopated.There are many aspects of Gross’s argument, which I will hear out below, but key for me, and crucial for Gross’s argument, is his emphasis on passive dispositions (e.g., apathy, adherence, suggestibility, attentiveness, etc.) crucial to political formations and so vital to rhetoric. Being moved, toward which rhetoric (sacred rhetoric especially) bends, must admit not only to the prowess and power of the rhetor but also, necessarily, to the “basic vulnerability that lies at the heart of political agency itself” (1). Indeed, “Rhetoric as a life science depends upon those lives affected” (8). Because of this dependence (and dependencies saturate the arts of listening), “rhetoric offers much more detail because it is the traditional domain where subjection is both theorized and practiced” (3).To articulate this offer, Gross works through what he describes as the “orphaned materials of modernity [that] often turn out to be vital strains of a different geology altogether” (12). Gross is here describing his own historiographic methodology. There are other things to hear in and about rhetoric. The core of his argument isn’t simply that listening is a practice important to rhetoric, with listening understood as a kind of critical facility—what Gross calls “active listener-as-judge” (83–84). Listening, for Gross, through his approach to Heidegger, bears upon being and becoming; it is in this way that rhetoric, for Gross, becomes a life science—what he at various places in the book describes as “meta-practice”: “It is in this scholarly context where rhetoric is rediscovered by Heidegger: beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).The theme of passive listening organizes the book’s emphases on sacred rhetoric, inartistic proofs, and the (non)teaching of passive voice that are all teased out through engagements with key thinkers who have come to inform contemporary rhetoric: Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud. Across the chapters, Gross articulates sacred rhetoric, which for him is a lasting source of rhetorical theory and practice: “Rhetoric moves souls” (14). Joining the writing of these thinkers is the teaching of writing itself, from which we also have much to learn about the arts of listening. Both the introduction and the final chapter have pedagogical foci. At the start and finish of his book, Gross aims to confound “in practice the expectation that classrooms benefit unilaterally from scholarship” (19). In rhetoric and composition, it is often assumed that theory trickles down into writing classrooms. Gross explores the dynamic as bilateral and mutual. The teaching of writing at the level of voice exists alongside the readings of Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud: all are practices of listening that do rhetorical theory. Gross has turned the neat trick of engaging teaching beyond the pedagogical imperative. That is, there is no concluding move to a pedagogical practice informed by (rhetorical) theory. For Gross, a theory of listening is what composition pedagogy practices.Chapter 1 starts with a provocative bang: “A debilitating commonplace has the history and theory of rhetoric honoring a communicative agent, namely the speaker, at the expense of the listener” (18). The argument here, which echoes throughout the book, is that “we reinvigorate the history and theory of rhetoric insofar as we normalize Heidegger’s care for listening” (31). “Listening,” Gross writes, “is a phenomenon shared across regions of being; hence, it must be approached carefully as such” (32). This is so because being-moved, linked to passive listening, echoes (perhaps sinisterly) notions of “obedience” and “subjection”—concepts that have contemporary purchase in our scene of emerging demagoguery. Being moved by the passions and beyond the critical faculties of active listening is a hard thing to face up to. Pathos has always been a thorn in rhetoric’s side—now more than ever. Composition textbooks, (un)ironically built around Aristotelian rhetoric, foreground pathos largely in terms of logical fallacies. A trick of the trade used by (active) speakers to move (passive) audiences. Pathos is, by and large, a bug in the rhetorical tradition demanding a sturdy, critical (logical) firewall.Gross has us hear pathos otherwise and across being moved and moving. With Heidegger, Gross emphasizes rhetoric as “δύναμις (dunamus, ‘capacity’) primarily and then secondarily a τέκνη (technē, ‘art’ or ‘technology’)” (34). δύναμις suggests a more fulsome engagement with pathos. “The pathos of a stone,” Gross argues, “allows it to become part of a wall; the pathos of a plant to grow; the pathos of an animal to perceive imminent danger and to shriek a warning to others” (44). Pathos becomes less an appeal and more a mode of being—a “being-with-one-another” (34). This mode is no less ethically fraught, however. Indeed, one could hear in Gross that stakes of pathetic appeals are far greater than our textbook approach often intones: less the proper shape of our arguments than the ethical, moral, and political consequences of how we live our lives within the fraught dynamics of our abilities to wound and be wounded. In the hands of Heidegger, rhetoric’s ontological stakes are renewed. Aristotle’s pathos becomes Heidegger’s being-moved (Sein-in-Bewegung).It is important to not drown out the disciplinary argument that Gross is making here. That is, Gross is not simply rehearsing Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle but rehearing it as also an argument about what contemporary rhetorical theory and practice ought to tune into. In our focus on the ethics of the speaker and judgments of the audience (as active listeners), we “can lose our ability to grasp adequately a wide range of unavoidable rhetorical activities, including things like passive listening, obeying, following, feeling, and so on” (50). Gross sees much of rhetorical theory moving to “systematically detach rhetorical terms like these for the sake of a political ideal” (50–51): the virtues of deliberative democracy. Gross’s interest lies in grasping “rhetoric as it forms particular ways of life” (51). Such a “trick” “compels us to ask” a series of important, situated questions: “Obedience to what end, to whom, for instance; listen to what and to whom; feel what and for whom?” (51). In our desire for straightforward ethical articulations of speaking and listening, we would be remiss to throw such particular ways of life out with the bathwater. “Listening-as-obedience” (50) certainly sounds as sinister now as it did in say 1927, but there is much to our being-moved beyond the false choice between “impossible enlightenment or demagoguery” (11). Rhetoric, Gross is arguing, ought to more thoroughly explore (rather than, say, guard) this liminal space. For Gross, this liminal is the realm of rhetoric: the arts of persuasion necessarily span the agent and patient, the “potent rhetor” and the “susceptible audience”—incorporating both as objects of study, rhetoric necessarily complicates them.As chapter 1 works through an engagement with early Heidegger (and fully cognizant of his “disastrous political philosophy”), chapter 2 works to retune rhetoric’s disciplinary relationship with Foucault. The chapter is notable for several crucial insights not least of which is Gross’s disentangling of movere from Foucault’s emphasis on organizing. This chapter is finely calibrated to parse distinctions between rhetorical approaches and the work of Foucault, who remains a central figure in/for rhetorical studies. Gross persuasively argues that as helpful as Foucault has been, he tunes rhetoric in to a particular historiographic register. Not surprisingly, then, disciplinarity continues to be at stake in this chapter.The core of Gross’s argument in chapter 2 “is that movere fits poorly into the biopolitical framework built by Foucault” (62). The sacred again emerges here for Gross: moving souls, which he sees as prototypical rhetorical activity irreducible to the arrangement or organization of bodies. Gross argues that Foucault’s emphasis upon the order of things “overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: most consequentially pedagogy, politics and psychology” (57). In place of such persuasion, we find biopower, to which something like subjection, as an exemplar of passive listening, cannot be reduced. “The art of listening is difficult to grasp,” Gross argues, “because its practicalities are now less obvious than speaking, and because we have lost touch with our relevant ways of knowing” (57). Distancing ourselves a bit from Foucault allows us to come to grips with (passive) listening as more than “the road to passive indoctrination” (83)—that being taught, commanded, or “subject to the instruction of others” is vital to movere and to being-moved. “Nor is the reverse adequate,” he continues; “the active listener-as-judge tells only part of the story, which means that many of our more recent efforts to recuperate the agency of the auditor [Gross draws primarily from Krista Radcliffe] miss the point” (83–84). For Gross, there is more to listening than an investment in agency, often in terms of critical or ethical listening, can account for.This neither/nor brings Gross back to the sacred: God’s invocation—and this is the correct word insofar as it does something—materializes that domain between a speaking agent’s absolute control and a patient serving simply as a vessel for God’s Word. (88)It is this invocation that makes possible the work of the auditor. What’s needed, then, are “communicative modalities for this middle domain where we still spend most of our time” (88)—time spent neither at the pulpit nor in the pew, but moving through the world active and yet vulnerable. Such modalities, Gross argues, are latent within rhetorical theory and practice, and, in fact, exist as dispositions in a range of disciplines. “What if,” he asks, “psychology, pedagogy, and politics are first considered meta-practical arts, like rhetoric, instead of the soft natural sciences that exercise biopower?” (65). Not arts that are “described, identified, taxonomized, administered” (65), but arts that tune us into the “dynamics of passive susceptibility: how we listen, learn, and change” (68)—a rhetorical tradition wherein we are “beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).Having opened up rhetoric to what Foucault’s biopower potentially closed off, Gross turns to rhetoric beyond the art of the rhetor. And so chapter 3 listens to the Freudian slips that sound out if not always the sacred or the supernatural then surely through those things beyond the art or the technē of the rhetor: the veranstaltungen (95): “persuasive adjuncts, contrivances, or events that cannot be reduced to mere thought however expressed” (105).In working through Freud, Gross pursues a rhetoric that is reducible to neither argument nor artistic proofs (atechnoi pisteis and entechnoi pisteis). As with earlier chapters, Gross’s move here bears upon, in large part, disciplinarity: how is rhetorical theory arranged—around what is it collected? Doing rhetorical theory is itself a practice, which is constituted by the choice of terms and of domains. What currently goes unheard? And not simply unheard but unaddressed? Rhetoric, if it could listen, would have much more to say. For instance, “We have trouble grasping sacred rhetoric because our dominant ways of knowing in the academy make it difficult to pick out sacred things in the first place” (103). The sacred, being beyond invention, is often absent from analyses because rhetorical analyses focus on the human: either the choices made by the rhetor or the cultural and political structures (in a Foucauldian register) that shape such choices. Such emphases leave no room for something (precisely) like the inartistic proofs—rendered by Quintilian as “supernatural, based on oracles, prophecies and omens” (108). Such proofs become available means of persuasion through the passive listening of a would-be rhetor: to be rendered subject to that which is beyond the rhetor. This is not the same as saying that such proofs are beyond rhetoric. “My point here is contrary,” Gross writes: “when facts speak for themselves they speak rhetorically” (107). Gross takes up the questions of facts to again engage the inartistic proofs: that which exceeds invention. He continues: “Typically, we do not learn about the rhetorical force of what is given” (107), in part because, disciplinarily, the given isn’t traceable to a speaking, inventing subject, which still often remains our base unit of both theory and practice.As an example, Gross describes the pedagogical treatment of religious texts in communication and composition courses. “In making a classroom argument about euthanasia,” Gross writes, “a sacred text like the Bible can appear to document community norms and their history; it can’t appear as ultimate authority” (109). Beyond the secular drive to excise religious texts, such sacred, inartistic proofs are excluded so that students might invent their own, artistic proofs. Gross writes, “Supernatural evidence carries a rhetorical force that resides beyond the rhetorician’s hand”—“to hear it takes some effort” (110). Gross links inartistic proofs to the domain of the sacred: the gods and everything else that might be in the room while two people are conversing. What the rhetorician—what rhetorical theory and practice—provides is the capacity to study “the precise historical relation that gives this point of intersection force” (118) among the people, words, and things—sacred and mundane—that populate rhetorical activity. “Let’s just say,” Gross writes, “there is no such thing as a persuasive word” without what’s “known to the classical rhetorician as inartistic means of persuasion” (117), which Gross treats broadly as “a certain disposition of time and place” (118) and the ambiguities of things such as “statues/relics, birds/auspices, walks/pilgrimages, pills/cures, words and spectacles human or divine” (119). The job of the rhetorician, then, is to make sense of how the “miracle” of persuasion gets done, “contrivances and all” (120).Chapter 4 (re)turns toward the composition classroom to give passive voice (back) to rhetoricity. Gross unpacks how passive voice is pedagogically and what this does for the art of listening and what it about the rhetorical theory and practice we to rhetorical and political are of passive voice that or (e.g., and “the something in Gross’s argument about passive voice and how it to the arts of listening and rhetoric. The sacred here as the core of our being is a to but that voice is not our It is not our for nor is it our for the of we speak what emerges is not reducible to either what we to say or what will to instance, Gross explores the between the and Gross asks, a more and of and a is that in rhetoric’s to foreground that active rhetorical agent, we the Such a focus would foreground we namely the we as the other who is The voice at the core of us that isn’t The The up an of to and people speaking for only active critical listening as a And such in fact, There is no Gross the book by all the that passive listening The of Gross’s book from the that this that with susceptibility to and political turns toward lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change” Such in the passive voice that gives voice to passive that is the very mode of our Yorke gets to the hi-hats does the It allows Yorke to the song, which is also to start the song. 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Who knew that the twenty-first century might turn on a battle over the legitimacy of democracy? As norms of deliberation and legislative compromise erode, and as a global struggle between democratic and autocratic rule is waged both between and within nations, a strange form of political theater emerges: all sides claim to represent the will of the people, which is expressed in images of populist demonstrations that are seen by their opponents as dangerous embodiments of irrationality. It should be no surprise that violence is waiting in the wings.Despite the historical specificity of the present conflict, it is not new. Although focused on the French Revolution, Jason Frank’s carefully argued study of the aesthetics of popular assembly resonates with contemporary concerns regarding political spectacles, populist movements, and whether or how democracy might prevail. Frank’s objective is not to restore anything but to challenge left and right critiques of “the people” in order to recover a “lost radicalism of democracy” (xii). By reexamining one of modern democracy’s origin stories, Frank zeros in on popular assembly as “a distinctive—and distinctively powerful—mode of democratic representation” (xiv). One result can be more clarity about why populism—and its mix of democratic self-assertion and delegitimation—has such a hold on democratic regimes today. Another, and Frank’s hope, is that paying more attention to the aesthetic contours of “the people” can lead to a rebooting of the political imagination—a rebooting, I would add, that is desperately needed if democracy is to become more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable.Frank begins with the assumption that democracy depends on more than “enlightenment and education”: beyond rational-critical speech, it also requires distinctive illusions of collective belonging (see also, e.g., Allen 2004, chap. 2). “At the heart of modern democracy’s fantasy space,” he argues, “lies its enigmatic constituent subject: the people” (3). But where are the people? What do they look like? Democracy’s constituent subject has an image problem: the people can’t be seen as a whole. Thus, the problem of envisioning the people “haunts the history and theory of modern democracy” (5).Frank becomes something of a ghost hunter, working carefully through theory and history to see what has been lurking around the corners and in the attic, more felt than observed. Through careful parsing of Judith Butler, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière, Carl Schmitt, and others, he constructs a theoretical framework for identifying a process of democratic belonging that is persistent, contested, and aesthetic. This dynamic field of political representation then is explored through his historical example.The French Revolution is taken up through its exponents, interpreters, and one of its visual figures. Rousseau is up first, as he comprehends both the historical transformation and its constitutive problem. Rousseau sees popular demonstrations as ritual performances essential to the transition to democracy and to the expression of democratic legitimacy. Instead of being props for the king or mobs of rebellion, the crowd becomes the people as the people become a self-aware actor in history. But there is a crucial deficiency that other actors don’t have: as a sovereign subject, the people are silent. The general will, beyond representation, is a spontaneous, authentic, and unmediated self-assertion that can be expressed only in part and must be enjoyed as sensate experience. This “mute eloquence” (64) of the assembly and a corresponding “collective self-absorption” (61) has obvious benefits for those who would usurp power, but it also opens a space for a more productive concept: the aesthetic resources that Frank labels the “democratic sublime.”The next chapter captures this aesthetic in the “living image of the people” as it involved “a dramatic transformation in the iconography of political power and rule” (69). The people came to be understood not as an incarnation of the general will but as “a surplus of democratic immanence, the physical manifestation of a fissure within prevailing forms of political representation” (71). Because democratic self-assertion was both embodied and beyond representation, it entered the aesthetic category of the sublime, which is sensed even as it exceeds a limit and can be evoked in multiple media and genres. A succession of images demonstrates how this transformation played out in visual culture, and most notably how “revolutionary iconoclasm was always entangled in, if not entirely superseded by, revolutionary iconophilia” (87). Thus, Jacques-Louis David redefined the mythical Hercules from a symbol of royal sovereignty to one of revolutionary power, and contempt for allegorical displays of kingship gave way to “spectacles of democratic self-witnessing” (91). Drawing on Benedict Anderson, Frank also widens a theoretical opening for reading political styles as modes of collective experience: “A particular style of imagining peoplehood is an unavoidable part of democratic theory, but one democratic theorists rarely explicitly engage. Confronting these questions helps us understand not only how the people is historically represented . . . but also how individuals come to experience and feel themselves as a part of this mobilized and empowered collectivity in the first place” (94–95).Like the revolution, however, the sublime also is a figure of terror. Frank takes up the challenge by turning to Edmund Burke, at once the foremost theorist of political aesthetics and the most passionate critic of the revolution. Frank’s careful tracing of Burke, his critics, and changes in political culture leads to a split decision. On the one hand, democracy’s aesthetic needs were for neither transcendence nor terror, but instead for more immanent sensations of collective belonging that could reside within ordinary social practices. Burke saw clearly that the people is not a “pre-political collective entity” (110) waiting to be mobilized, but rather something that has to be created as “first and foremost a community of sense” (112). On the other hand, democracy’s advocates resisted this awareness while its critics emphasized the dangers of transgression. Instead of bringing together the “molecular” relations of everyday life into a “unifying image” of collective authority (111, 112), political aesthetics was misrecognized in terms of either instrumental reason or conservative anxieties of disorder. Democratic engagement and the agency of the people would remain problems exceeding the available repertoires of political thought.Frank then explores two quite different paths to thicken understanding of the democratic sublime. The one of most interest to rhetorical scholars will be the “poetics of the barricade,” which documents “the most widespread and condensed symbol of popular collective action” (123) during the nineteenth century. As its tactical efficacy declined, its symbolic power as a “resonant historical manifestation of the democratic sublime” (126) increased, and for good reason, as Frank argues that it provided provisional solutions to deep problems of popular representation. The barricade emerges not out of a prior, unitary will, but through the act of resistance itself, an act synonymous with the people’s excessiveness: its surplus of bodies, desires, energies, and skills, and not least its ability to crowd and disrupt the space of political representation and create images of itself.For another approach to developing the sublime, Frank completes his integration of history and theory with a rereading of Alexis de Tocqueville. As with Burke, Frank explores an ambiguous relationship between a stinging critique of democracy (with Tocqueville, because of the danger it poses to freedom) and an appreciation of political aesthetics that challenges both liberal and illiberal critics of democracy. Tocqueville is read as a brilliant while transitional figure, and that might be the best way to think of Frank’s argument that Tocqueville’s call for “grandeur” in politics was not a look backward to civic republican “glory” or forward to fascist demagoguery, but something like a placeholder for a more aspirational and expansive conception of the democratic imagination.Although the book avoids analogies with the present, its relevance is both obvious and nuanced. A concluding afterword on “democratic appearance” takes up one line of application by discussing key elements of Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics, along with artworks by Glenn Ligon that articulate Black radical critique through depictions of the 1995 Million Man March. The basic movement of the chapter is not so much from past to present examples of democratic assembly but rather to highlight democracy’s radical promise. That promise exceeds the categories of contemporary progressive politics, and it depends on visual culture for both immanent critique and imaginative extension. Frank emphasizes how political aesthetics might work beneath or even against the grandest expressions of the democratic sublime to more effectively articulate “political capacities for collective refiguration” that “emerge from within the simple fabric of our everyday lives” (204).This observation should appeal to scholars in rhetoric, many of whom already are more interested in popular demonstrations, social movements, and political subjectivity than the inside baseball of governmental institutions. The more extensive relevance is that full realization of Frank’s argument would require bringing rhetorical perspectives and methods into political theory. (“Aesthetics” often is a convenient way for scholars in other disciplines to take up rhetoric without having to admit to it.) These corrections to what Frank calls a “blind spot” in political theory could include focusing more on actual political discourse (texts, images, performances); analyzing how collective attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and values are crafted; attending to the granularity of political interactions and the contingent relationships of ideology, political style, and locale in political subjectivity; and identifying moments of emergence or potential for distinctively or radically democratic schemes of representation and communicative action.At the same time, The Democratic Sublime demonstrates how political theory can be used to improve rhetorical scholarship. Frank’s thoughtful engagements, which never recur to the idea of prudential balancing, suggest how much is needed to understand the complexity of democratic politics and any unrealized potential for change. The level of reciprocal engagement and sophisticated argument among political theorists is exceptionally high, and Frank is an exemplary scholar in that regard. He adds to this a combination of theoretical and historical study that can correct for conventional limitations on either side of that typical division of labor. The attention to constitutive problems and enduring tensions in democracy is important and might both restrain a tendency in public sphere scholarship to overvalue normative conceptions of liberal democracy and question assumptions in more radical critique regarding the functions of mediation and the process of historical change. In any case, more theoretical and critical attention could be given to a broader array of images of the people—visual and verbal, documentary and fictional—as they can articulate a just and beloved democratic community.I have only two criticisms of this fine book. One is that more could have been done with aesthetics, both as a framing device and in practical criticism. Popular assembly involves more than the sublime, and additional discernment can come, for example, from more extensive use of artistic terms and emotional responses, or by taking up additional arts and artistic modes of advocacy, or by shifting from representation to performance. This emphasis can work in tandem with a more explicitly rhetorical orientation, and Frank’s chapter on the barricades provides an excellent point of departure.Finally, I wish that Frank had taken a bolder approach to concluding the book. He certainly has earned the right to do so, and more risk taking is likely to be needed: first, to challenge the illiberal populisms that currently are serious threats to democracy in the United States and elsewhere; and second, to take up the daunting task of creating the political imagination needed to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. That said, by staying in his lane Frank provides a sound integration of history and theory for extension by others. Whatever else it is, scholarship, like democratic politics, should be collaborative.

ABSTRACT The welcome expansion of kairos beyond its traditional locus in public debate to a broad range of discourse forms and persuasive actions has not been matched by a reevaluation of the temporal logic of kairos, which is still seen as located in teleologic time. This article suggests that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time could refigure kairos as a nonteleological relationship among past, present, and future. Benjamin provides a theoretical rationale for kairotic action that is distributed in time and space and accounts for kairos of objects, places, technologies, and works of art. These temporal affordances, usually developed separately in contemporary theory, are deeply connected in Benjamin’s writing; his understanding of time therefore integrates currently unconnected lines of research and supports a fluid but coherent understanding of kairotic agency.

Catherine Chaput’s Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates places an affective and rhetorical emphasis on the vexatious question that she argues plagues the academic Left: Why is the capitalist mode of production so much more successful than its alternatives? Capital’s hegemony, the book argues, stems from its foundational theorists’ capacity to adroitly articulate the public’s bodily affects toward its regime of private property and wage labor. By contrast, its critics, be they revolutionary or reformist, are caught in a series of rhetorical traps or oversights that neglect the affective dimensions of capital, and hence are incapable of mobilizing effective (and affective) countermovements. She writes, “The market is an affective force that influences rhetorical action by linking bodily receptivities to economic persuasion. The market feels real because it is the nominalization we give to the very real affective energies circulating throughout our lived experiences” (2). To prove this claim, Chaput carefully pairs four sets of historical thinkers, in which a proponent of the capitalist mode of production is pitted against a critic thereof. With few exceptions, the thinker allied with the capitalist mode of production emerges victorious, for they are more adept at linking these unsymbolized/unarticulated bodily affects to the mode of production’s acceptable means of expression.Prior to the main event, Chaput first reviews how affect has been underthought or misconceived in the materialist tradition and traces a critical genealogy of affect from within the rhetorical tradition as a corrective. Via readings of Ancient and Renaissance thinkers, for whom “the passions [are] coextensive with the rational and understanding both as simultaneously embodied and transembodied” (23), Chaput advocates an affective materialism that aims to suture the noncognitive, the bodily, and the social to the realms of rhetoric, symbolic influence, and ideology. Chaput accomplishes this methodologically by proposing a schema for assessing the “materiality of affect and its rhetorical significance” (36) with rhetorical inputs and material outputs. For instance, rhetorical frequency and repetition lead to “push or pull identification,” which “shapes ideological context,” while “volume/intensity” raises or lowers affective energy, which then “motivates action or inaction” (37). Chaput returns to this framework occasionally in later chapters to demonstrate what makes certain authors more effective than others at channeling resonances between bodies and private property.Chapters 2 through 5 constitute the bulk of the book, in which Adam Smith / Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes / Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich Hayek / Theodor Adorno, and Milton Friedman / John Kenneth Galbraith are read both on their own terms and through the lens of affect, and I commend Chaput for providing a perspicacious reading of each thinker. Chapter 2, wherein Smith and Marx are pitted against one another, is the heart of the argument, from which every other chapter’s assessment flows. In Chaput’s reading, because Smith’s concept of sympathy, generated from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is “a richer, perhaps intuitive, understanding of the physiological work of affect” (42), arguments in favor of the capitalist mode of production are more likely to be successful than criticisms thereof. Echoing the schema described above, Chaput writes, “The Wealth of Nations illuminates an affective structure that motivates capitalism such that market freedom opens one’s receptivity to capitalism, while participation pulls toward particular identifications within the system and the supply and demand of exchange mobilizes the fluctuating energies of specific actions” (53).In contrast, Marx’s diagnoses of the capitalist mode of production bend the opposite direction: “For Marx, capitalism closes people off, making them less and less receptive to social potentialities; it repels or pushes away identities other than capitalist and worker; it depletes life energy of both identities, making them caricatures of capital” (57). Chaput reads Marx’s early writings on alienation as also implicitly theorizing affect, but because Marx was committed to a critique of political economy (rather than an affirmative case for it), his account is hopelessly impoverished when put alongside the thinker writing several decades prior. She writes, “Smith’s affect theory, which leaves its ultimate origins to the mythical invisible hand, trumps Marx’s affective account, which requires not natural instincts but arduous propositional thinking and scientific reason, forcing a reconsideration of critical political economic theory” (60). From this point on, the die is cast. Smith’s rhetoric of sympathy, freedom, natural instinct, and the invisible hand renders bodies conducive to wage labor; his expansive, positive affects triumph over Marx’s decision to emphasize capital’s dehumanizing and divisive qualities.Chapter 3, on Keynes and Veblen, poses two reformists against one another and is the only matchup that could be scored a draw. Because both thinkers “suffer from an inflated valuation of rationality” (85), Chaput concludes that their persuasive power is weakened, “and thus the receptivity of these thinkers” (86). Despite the fact that Keynes draws the public’s attention to the “animal spirits” that systematically throw off financial markets, and the fact that investors make decisions off of second-order rationality and not on the value of assets themselves, resulting in “mass affective practices untethered to concrete material realities” (80), his endorsement of deliberation, regulation, and probabilistic thinking as a palliative dooms his work. Yet it seems to me that Keynes’s fatal flaw for Chaput is his skepticism of neoclassical economics’ concept of equilibrium, or the supposedly natural functions that balance out supply and demand: “Emphasizing that equilibrium cannot be taken for granted, Keynes offers an inefficient version of affective identification as he relies too much on persuasion and not enough on the human capacity to synergistically combine around similar experiences” (79). Arguments that presume that exchange is “natural, inevitable, and perfect” are the more efficient case for readers, and thus, once again, the capitalist mode of production triumphs discursively.If the Smith/Marx dyad is the pediment upon which the book’s argument rests, the Hayek/Adorno dyad, in chapter 4, acts as its symbolic button-tie. (Historical events occur twice, as Hegel, via Marx, reminds us.) Here, Chaput generously reads Hayek’s work as emblematizing a sophisticated concept of affect that joins together arguments in favor of the capitalist mode of production to the bodies that experience it. For Chaput, Hayek’s invocation of cognitive psychology counts as scientific proof of Smith’s intuitions surrounding sympathy and the invisible hand: “Adding cognitive psychology to Smith’s theory of moral connectivity, Hayek replaces sympathy with disposition and refines morality as political and economic liberalism” (94). Tracing the complexities of Hayek’s thought through his notions of language, of social order, and of human cognition, Chaput affirms that it is his capacity to blend the cognitive and the noncognitive in a story that renders economic liberalism more conducive to bodies than alternatives. In contrast, Adorno’s relentless negative dialectics, a ruthless criticism of everything existing, and the claim that his “body of work appears to attack people as unthinking” condemns his life’s work to a distant second place in this rhetorical matchup (112). In Chaput’s account, by asserting the moral value of economic liberalism and championing (rather than castigating) human ignorance in the face of enormous social and economic complexity, Hayek’s work completes a flawless victory over Adorno’s. Chaput concludes that this rhetorical triumph “set the path for the practical economic work of the late twentieth century and, ultimately, for the triumph of neoliberalism” (112).Chapter 5, in which Chaput sets two public figures of “the economic” against one another, Milton Friedman emerges victorious over John Kenneth Galbraith, but for a surprising set of reasons. Chaput’s overarching thesis is stretched to its limit in this chapter, for Chaput locates in Friedman’s relentless privileging of human beings’ capacity for rational economic behavior (and equally importantly, insisting that economists must interpret human behavior as if it were rational), a sublation, rather than a repudiation, of Hayek’s affect theory (117). Meanwhile, despite Galbraith, a bleeding-heart reformist and critic of unrestrained capital accumulation, arguing that corporations move individuals and the socius at the level of affect, his account is paltry in comparison because he cannot affirmatively endorse the positive affects that the capitalist mode of production generates in the production process. She writes that he “offers no energetic replacement for these negative affective situations” (120) and, later, that “Galbraith cannot theorize this identification [with corporations] as the embodied energy circulating among and thereby animating these employees and their projects” (121). And once again, much like Keynes, because Galbraith’s solution to corporate capture of the American political system is to encourage deliberative democracy, he is doomed to failure for naïvely adhering to a logic of representation that capitalist affects can overcome, divert, or recode.Those who have read thus far may be in a state of despair: not only is capital dominant, but it is persuasive, and not simply at the cognitive level. By describing procapitalist theorists’ ability to better articulate “the physiological energies inhabiting the world” (4), the capitalist mode of production is a resounding success—discursively, affectively, bodily. Every key thinker from Adam Smith onward better articulates affect, the “physical power that moves seemingly uncontrollably through human beings and other things to produce preconscious readiness” (33), toward capital’s contemporary dominance. But for those predisposed to a Foucauldian perspective, Chaput’s conclusion promises succor. Here, Chaput reads Foucault’s lectures, which focus on ethopoetic behavior and parrhesiastic speech, as a potential site of anticapitalist agency through “the cultivation of a critical subjectivity with the capacity for reflexive truth-telling” (150). From Foucault’s consent “to Smith’s explanation of the market as an ordering mechanism that exceeds full human understanding” and because he accepts “the invisible hand as a real power” (144), only the free individual, the parrhesiastic rhetor, can constitute a meaningful counter-power to the capitalist mode of production.For Foucault, “mental exercises designed to create free individuals—ones capable of assessing, mobilizing, and reorienting the fleshy impulses of their experience in the world” (151)—are vital to producing good parrhesia (rather than bad parrhesia, which acts on unearned certainty). Here, Chaput conveys Foucault’s suggestion that subjects sleep on a pallet, wear coarse clothes, eat little, drink only water, and play affectionately with one’s child while reciting the truth that this beloved individual will die (151–52). Only through cultivating this form of the self can the parrhesiastic rhetor speak disruptive truths such that the genuinely new can emerge.The turn to late-period Foucault may be unsatisfying to a reader who seeks nonindividualized remedies to the cascading inequalities and catastrophes that capitalism unleashes. Chaput frequently sets up binary oppositions (reason/passion, science/sympathy, cognitive/noncognitive) in which the procapitalist position carries the day, but a collective/individual binary is left unremarked upon. Because Chaput locates affective harmonics within discrete bodies (and crucially for her argument, bodies capable of coming to reasonable conclusions about the merits of the capitalist mode of production), individual bodies are prioritized over their being-in-concert. Take the assessment of Galbraith’s work: “Not surprisingly, Galbraith theorizes how corporations—and other large organizations—use identification to compel individuals but does not offer a productive counter-power for individual agents” (120). Despite noting that even for Foucault the invisible hand is “a manufactured ontology” designed to coordinate bodies in spaces as if they were rational economic agents, it is only sympathetically driven actors of “civil society” that can become an effective counter-power to capital’s hegemony (149).Ironically, Foucault’s insight, that what we call spontaneous order or natural inclination is manufactured, rather than discovered, ought to draw our attention to the rhetorical dimensions of each reconsidered thinker. Here, I wonder whether Chaput need have committed to a single through line, from Smith onward, as a process of discovering the unseen affective forces that sympathetically bond bodies, and not a story with rhetorical hinge points on how affect is theorized. Hayek’s role as a master-signifier would then work in two directions: First, his rhetorical interventions retroactively alter our perceptions of Smith’s own work, such that we cannot but help see him as incipiently Hayekian. Second, once a Hayekian vision of the social bond is secured, procapital rhetors need not agree on the importance of affect, sympathy, spontaneous order, and so on, to be rhetorically effective. This would help better ground the Friedman chapter, for as written, his rational choice theory, and dismissal of affect, is narrated as confirmation and not a rejection of Hayek’s position (118). By making Hayek’s monumentality central to the overall argument, it opens space for how scholars must navigate the politics of reading itself, how certain signifiers become ineluctable. This would also explain more precisely how one master-signifier, the assemblage we call “Keynes” or “Keynesianism,” functioned as the dominant mode of capitalist expression for nearly four decades, and precisely how it was thoroughly superseded by another signifying regime.Finally, Chaput devotes space in both the introduction and conclusion to the work of Dana Cloud, whose materialist commitment to ideological demystification and consciousness raising is (along with other Marxists, like James Arnt Aune) characterized as “futile” (18), and whose failure to “acknowledge affect as a semiautonomous ontology motivating our bodily instincts” renders her approach insufficient to the task of rewriting capitalist affects (159). Yet Cloud’s own 2018 work, Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture, acts as a counterpart to Chaput’s. Cloud agrees that liberal approaches to capital-T Truth are feeble in the face of capital’s stranglehold on the enthymemes that organize our embodied common sense; she similarly agrees that “affect” and “embodiment” are necessary—as is struggle (51). I encourage readers to put these works in conversation with one another, for they locate similar lacunae in our thought, but conceive of the source and solutions thereto differently.Market Affect exemplifies the kind of intervention that a rhetorically attuned scholar can bring to pressing political-economic debates; I commend the work for both letting the chosen thinkers speak on their own terms and considering the status of affect in each. The book’s thesis is admittedly provocative: it upends much materialist social history by foregrounding the affective dimensions of procapitalist writing as that which explains the mode of production’s enormous success. Future critical work that resides in the intersections of rhetoric, affect, materialism, and economics must engage with the implications of this move, and rigorously inquire exactly when, where, and, crucially, for whom this case can be proven as true. Chaput also contributes methodologically to the field of affect theory by enjoining scholars to focus not just on the “physiological energies” that circulate among bodies, but through their representations in consequential writings; Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek are welcomed into the ranks of affect theory scholars via this avenue. Scholars interested in this reconsideration now have a treasure trove of thoughtful interpretations of the most consequential thinkers in modern history (the readings of Marx, Hayek, and Adorno do deserve special mention). And as mentioned, rhetorical scholars eager for a Foucauldian political intervention will find the conclusion especially edifying, for she reads Foucault’s late work as fundamentally concerned with a rhetorical problem space. Finally, scholars ought to test Chaput’s models of affective circulation and rhetorical interpretation in future scholarship, in particular her claim that repetition, timbre, and “volume and intensity” have definable and predictable affective outcomes that influence action (37). It is a reminder to rhetoricians that we must listen as carefully as we read. As affect appears to increasingly dominate our understandings of how capital functions, this is an exciting time for inquiry on economics and the economy, and this is a powerful contribution from a notable scholar.

ABSTRACT In contemporary U.S. public discourse, calls for achieving equity abound. Many metrics now measure equity being achieved. I inquire into whether equity can be said to be achieved and still be equity. Inquiring as such leads me to excavating the menacing and actual cultural violence of developing such achievement. Simultaneously, this excavation shows the rhetoric of equity qua equity as a means of abolishing the conditions for that violence to take hold. I put forward that equity cannot be said to be achieved without the conditions of possibility equity offers being colonized. If a commitment to antiviolence speaks, it cannot say, “Equity achieved.”

When we pick up a big book like this with big names including Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, and Warburg, we want to learn something significant we don't already know by way of reading and reputation. And if we are in rhetoric per se, we are especially eager to see how these people are attached substantially to a field that none of them claimed. Following from these initial expectations, we are then owed a plausible methodology that tends neither toward the wish fulfillment of big rhetoric, nor toward one of the more conventional methods—for example biographic, or dictated by the more familiar scripts of philosophy, politics, and art history—that would render these surprises unlikely because the field would have been smoothed already; to break new ground one usually needs a new approach. Finally, we would want to know what's the point of this new approach beyond novelty per se—what can we think and do differently along these new lines? Marshall's book delivers richly on all these efforts. In what follows, I explain how, while keeping in play a pressing question about what intellectual history has to do with a larger and seemingly distant field of rhetorical studies, which is more often concerned not with big names, but with no names like “students” and the authorial commonplaces found in schoolrooms and textbooks.First a note on structure. As a book reviewer and longtime book review editor myself, I have always discouraged chapter-by-chapter reviews because that sequential structure tends to prioritize description over argumentation. In the case of Marshall's book, however, any careful argument about what the book does (or doesn't) do depends upon a sequential and experiential “here's what we know—here's what we don't know” structure of the book itself. One interesting quality of Marshall's argument, in other words, is his persistent challenge to the reader who is asked to review their own intellectual habits and presuppositions, while looking for worthwhile opportunities at Marshall's suggestion. Marshall's argument has an experiential quality part and parcel of his method explained below, which has to be evaluated in terms of its qualities: How might those scripts and presuppositions be mine after all? As a reader, what possibilities do I now see? Such qualities would not show up in the first place if I structured this review around the main claim found in the title, for instance. The primary point of the book would go missing if one were to argue whether rhetorical inquiry indeed has Weimar origins, and if so, to what extent. Missing, precisely, would be the book-length and sequential argument about the sayability of the title itself. What habits of language and thought produce the possibility of this title? The first part of Marshall's book addresses this first question. Then: What can we do with that title once it becomes a real possibility? The latter part of Marshall's book addresses that second question.Forgoing the catchy hook recommended by rhetoric, this ultimately thrilling book experience starts instead with the intentionally familiar. Chapter 1, “The Weimar We Know and the Weimar We Do Not Know,” begins by running “a standard received version of the Weimar origins of political theory” in order to set the scene for a more generative set of rhetorical presuppositions (31). That means in this case telling the story of Max Weber's political bureaucracy as it was taken up by Schmitt, Strauss, Baron, and Adorno, before introducing a nascent “rhetorical” thread in Weber's famous analysis of charisma. Methodologically, chapter 1 also introduces the philosophical work of Robert Brandom. Like Brandom's common law, concludes Marshall (312), “piecemeal” explication of concepts is both unavoidable in the everyday, and foundational for meaning itself. Concepts—including philosophical, rhetorical, theoretical, legal, and so on—don't unilaterally dictate their own meaning, nor are they delivered from on high or from authorities verbatim with meanings and extensions self-evident thereafter. Our job as interlocutors in particular fields and in everyday speech, then, is to take advantage of this cobbling dynamic with whatever skill we can muster—and indeed this will be the untapped potential of Marshall's book I will return to at the end.Chapter 2, like chapter 1, purports to offer the familiar but deceivingly so, because the pre-Weimar “Idioms of Rhetorical Inquiry” Marshall assembles won't be familiar to any but the specialized scholars of modern German rhetoric, and even for those few, familiar names like Gottsched, Sulzer, Novalis, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Baumgarten, Kleist, Nietzsche, and most importantly for what is to come Adam Müller, will appear fresh as their rhetorical idioms point in unanticipated directions, that is toward “topical sensitization” (326) that multiplies the contours of a perception field we can productively discern and then navigate at any given moment. To that end, chapter 2 subheadings organize points of ongoing interest: topical surveying, specifications of context, the shift of trope (that bends or reconfigures a perception field), orientation to belief. Finally, Müller, as it turns out, emerges as an unlikely star of the story because his much-maligned liberal indecisionism turns out to be, for Marshall and his later critics including Benjamin, the surprising name for rhetorical virtue in parademocratic times: a name that is better known conceptually as “freedom” (e.g., 210). How does Marshall get there with his surprising start in Heidegger, who grounds the core chapters?Chapter 3, “Heideggerian Foundations,” sets the daunting task of locating foundations for this kind of political freedom in one of its avowed archenemies. The trick, as it turns out, is to make the Brandom-inspired case for Heideggerian foundations that offered multiple ways forward, some of which he took himself toward Nazism first, and then finally toward a wayward critique of modernity and its “total mobilization” (118). At the same time other ways forward—that Heidegger might have marked out himself smartly but inadvertently and without any intention of following himself—could point in different and even contrary directions still indebted, nevertheless, to their Heideggerian origins. Methodologically, this is one of Marshall's important points: it is a task of the intellectual historian to identify in retrospect, and to take seriously, possibilities that could be articulated only after the fact. But it would be wrong to think that this scholarly task is to read against the grain. Or to read symptomatically. Or to in any way read at a distance from the manifest material we have on hand. Instead, ideally this type of intellectual history reads thoroughly across the entire oeuvre (which in the case of Heidegger now runs to over one hundred volumes in the Gesamtausgabe), in the original languages, and in the rich local contexts that produce the work in its manifest not just its latent qualities. Real possibilities must be legible in the origins themselves. Through this process Marshall is particularly attentive to early Heidegger, and especially his Summer Semester 1924 course on Aristotle's Rhetoric Book II focusing on the emotions. For it is in these lectures that Marshall can most readily identify the “intimate connection between rhetoric and core elements in the Heideggerian philosophical project,” most importantly the foundational role emotions play in the space and time of appearance. “For Heidegger,” Marshall summarizes, “neither time nor space were prior to motion. In fact, time and space were produced by motions, the differentials among motions, and by the articulation of those differentials. This contention established ‘situatedness’ (Befindlichkeit) as the first—rhetorical—task of all presencing” (117). However, as Marshall tells the story, Heidegger himself then follows motion-as-dunamis toward a totalizing critique of modernity without realizing a possibility that would become manifest only later in one of his star students from those Marburg years, Hannah Arendt.In chapter 4, “Hannah Arendt and the Rhetorical Constitution of Space,” Marshall himself pursues this possibility but unavoidably from a point beyond Arendt herself: “The historian of thought qua thinker has something like a duty to continue the line of inquiry that could have been but was not” (130). In this case, that means on the one hand highlighting how Arendt took plausible but unexpected turns: Heidegger on emotion became Arendt on love (131). Heidegger's analysis of Augustinian caritas—or mutual care across all creatures fallen from God—turned toward an equidistance Heidegger would never have seen favorably because it would have smacked of a proto-mathematical that later makes human beings susceptible to the cynical calculations of modernity. But contrarily within the Augustinian concept of caritas as it was developed in Arendt's dissertation, “there was an equidistance from all creatures that articulated the beginning of a political theory of equality” (135). And similarly for Arendt “solidarity” (dilectio proximi) was a “rhetorical capacity to attend to possible [e]motions without immediately succumbing to them” (138). Next Rahel Varnhagen's public spheres, according to Arendt's rhetorical twist, are not legislated but performed (142). But as Marshall points out from his methodological standpoint, “rhetoric” in this case has some interesting documentary evidence in Arendt's oeuvre—for example her 1953 notes on Aristotle's Rhetoric (267)—while at the same time remaining essentially latent in Arendt's manifest work, where it awaits revision. And here, concludes Marshall, “we have a provisional answer to the conundrum of how Arendt could have overlooked rhetoric: she saw that the ‘everydayness of being-with-one-another’ was a proto-science of politics, but she did not see that rhetoric was the analytic of everydayness” (129). Indeed, seeing at the edges of the visible shows up with increasing prominence for Marshall, especially as he moves into his final two core chapters on Benjamin and Warburg.Chapter 5, “Walter Benjamin and the Rhetorical Construal of Indecision,” approaches oeuvre like previous chapters, tarrying first with Benjamin's early Trauerspiel book and its artistic means. For Benjamin in this work on Baroque aesthetics, highly conventional forms along with their minute variations didn't signal stasis but rather the opposite. Originating Benjamin's analytic frame in the Trauerspiel book, “rhetoric made available ‘artistic means’ that were themselves critical frames” (175). Again pointing ahead toward Warburg, Marshall sees in Benjamin a “veritable gymnasium of perspicacity” (180) and gesture (182), with Iago serving as the dubious example of this art perfected. But along with the eye and its uncertain exercises, Marshall also ties Benjamin back to the aforementioned Adam Müller, and his much-maligned art of rhetorical listening that ends in regrettable indecision, according to Schmitt. Here Benjamin's rhetorical trick, according to Marshall, is to see potential, especially in societies that do not possess the classical oratorical institutions (204). “Where Schmitt emphasized emergency, Benjamin was emphasizing emergence” (200). In Benjamin's purview, indecision is not so bad after all because it is precisely where freedom of thought appears. Finally, in chapter 6, “Warburgian Image Practices,” Marshall names “freedom” outright (210) and implicates Warburg plausibly in an argument broadly designed to set rhetoric-as-restitutio eloquentiae against the captivating strategies of an emerging antidemocratic figure like Mussolini (240). “On December 22, 1927, Warburg asked himself the following question: what aspects of the classical rhetorical tradition were implicit in the phrase restitutio eloquentiae? Style, pathos, ethos, and magnanimity, he responded” (241). But as Marshall makes sense of a classicizing gesture that has largely stumped previous critics in art history, this “restitution of eloquence” is precisely not the imposition of rule but it's opposite: “Warburgian magnanimity becomes something like a plasticity and thus potential adroitness of body-imaginative response” (208). Ornamentation becomes “a mode of and a fillip for freedom because it could be seen through, rerouted, and changed” (210).Finally after these core chapters and key figures, Marshall completes his project appropriately with chapter 7, “New Points of Departure in the Weimar Afterlife,” and chapter 8, “The Possibilities of Now.” And this is where we get the best sense for how Marshall understands his approach with respect to the field of rhetorical studies writ large; it is as well, appropriately, the place where one is obligated to find unrealized possibilities in Marshall's work itself. Why, ultimately, all these larger-than-life figures at the heart of Marshall's project? And what would keep “intellectual history” from detaching from a less glamorous everyday, where most of us spend most of our time? In a move that boldly defies everyday meaning, Marshall asks the reader to take up with him and his parade of critics a connoisseurship that should be, in principle, available to everyone. Given the context of this book, the admirable goal is to refine different types of awareness and action possibilities typically buried in the totalitarian, as it is broadly conceived by Arendt in her book of that name. Moreover, these types of everyday awarenesses need not be elite. “I am arguing,” concludes Marshall, “that the critical capacity announced by ‘distinguishing’ qua krinein and collected in the mode of everydayness may be specified by ‘connoisseurial’ but not with the narrow, elite, or conservative connotations usually accompanying that term” (283).A generous gesture. But without belaboring this concrete everydayness as it tends toward the mundane, we don't wind up knowing what nonelite connoisseurship looks like. Finally, I would like to suggest that this is precisely where Marshall's truly groundbreaking work in rhetoric and intellectual history inadvertently makes new room for the archival and ecological expansion, cultural histories, and pedagogical projects that have animated rhetorical studies in the past few decades. Perhaps, for instance, even students who barely register in the public sphere are themselves collecting in the mode of everydayness just as Marshall suggests, but does not pursue himself. As teachers and scholars, we could then be more attuned to how these practically anonymous modes of collection invent-toward-freedom, every day.

Michele Kennerly's ambitious book sends a gust of fresh air through the field of ancient rhetoric. But that figure doesn't really suit her metaphorics—such a central aspect of the project. To hone in on these (a better figure, as we'll see), we need to come down to earth—to the material substance of wax tablets and papyrus book rolls, and the bodies of text produced on them. Editorial Bodies is a study of the ways ancient Greek and Roman poets and orators engaged in working on and over texts in a process of “recursive composing” (3) with consequences exceeding any narrow considerations of grammatical niceties. As Kennerly explains at the outset through a careful etymological introduction, our English word “editing,” understood as a late-stage form of “textual tidying” (1), often done by someone other than the author, cannot capture the kinds of work with texts performed and extensively discussed by these ancient wordsmiths. Honing, smithing, polishing, filing—these are a few of the gritty figures for textual work Kennerly excavates, and their object of attention, the text, is very often presented as a body. And here we arrive at the idea of “corpus care” (15), Kennerly's richly polyvalent figure for the processes and vocabularies referring to work on a text, itself a material body, for the bodies of the writers, and for those who received their work: a complex and multidimensional concept.Kennerly tracks the analogy of the body with the written text through an impressive number of authors in the Greek and Roman traditions. She argues for a consistency of reference across many sources, demonstrating that writing about writing in terms of the body pervades these ancients' extensive and careful attention to the crafting of rhetorical texts. An adjunct to this claim is the observation that insufficient attention has been paid to the relation between writing and oratory in the ancient periods. Editorial tendencies and terminologies, writes Kennerly, become absorbed into habits of writing, which, for orators, could “come to be absorbed into habits of extemporaneous speaking” (3). But Kennerly admits that delivery—the body of the orator on display—is not her concern here (172–73). Actual bodies appear from time to time. Aristotle warns that the bodily evidence of labor on a text should be hidden (9). Cicero in his dialogue Brutus relates his early experience of strain on voice and body, but after working with Molo in Rhodes, “both his body and speech [are] better defined for the unrelenting demands of public speaking” (90–91). We learn that Horace had a habit of debating with himself through shut lips (112) and that Ovid's body wasted away in exile (138–51). But Kennerly is far more interested in what bodies mean in Greek and Roman rhetorical culture, and in the textual analogy. Those signifying systems coalesce in the domain of gender, performing the normative work of “policing appropriate style and delivery” to secure “masculinity's approved cultural boundaries” (98).After an introduction setting up her terminology and claims, Kennerly begins with Athenian rhetoric in the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE), surveying a daunting array of figures: Herodotus, Agathon, Alcidamas, dramatists Cratinus and Aristophanes, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Aristotle, and Anaximenes. Accumulating evidence of the “somatic-graphic analogy” (23), Kennerly performs some quite targeted readings here. Plato scholars will look in vain for the philosophical investments of the Phaedrus and his layering of voices in the Menexenus. These are set aside in favor of a reading of “rhetorical management,” attributed to Socrates rather than Plato (38–39). But this book is cast clearly as a material, rather than intellectual, history, and the method becomes more successful when we move to comedians and their “play and polemic” about rhetorical training. The Alcidamas text, On Those Who Write, offers much pertinent commentary on editing, but it is with Isocrates that Kennerly finds the richest exponent so far of “corpus care.” In his late and highly self-reflective Panathenaicus, Isocrates offers a “harrowing composition narrative” including “a view of how extensive and collaborative an editorial process can be” (45). The “insult-dense” oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines provides Kennerly with colorful evidence of commentary on modes of composition, and of moving from written to oral performance, invested by these archenemies with “considerable invective energy” (46).The next chapter, on the Hellenistic period, is a welcome addition, given that there is less attention to these centuries than to others in the existing scholarship in rhetoric. Kennerly offers a counterpoint to the familiar narrative of rhetoric's decline, making the case here that polis life continued to rely on democratic practices and the rhetorics that they demand even after the triumphs of Philip of Macedon and Alexander at the end of the fourth century. I appreciate the way she works at the seam between Greece and Rome in this chapter, pairing two Greek writers, Demetrius of Phalerum and Callimachus, with two early Roman ones, orator Cato and poet Lucilius, who lived during the same period (roughly). Because we have no surviving work by Demetrius, Kennerly interprets his style through Cicero's extensive reception of his work in Brutus, a survey of Roman orators, and Orator, on style. Trained in the Peripatetic school of Theophrastus, Demetrius led Athens for ten years under the thumb of the Macedonians and in this role made deliberative speeches (59–65). According to Cicero, his philosophical learning “softened” his speech (64) without feminizing it. Her treatment of Cato gives us a more nuanced view of a rhetor in process than the familiar shorthand version of a gruff and taciturn moralist. Close etymological work with the treatment of figurae—understood broadly as forms or styles—in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium provides Kennerly with abundant material for body-based rhetorical advice. The picture of Hellenistic rhetoric emerging from this chapter supports the assertion that the period is more accretive than derivative (76) and offers historians of rhetoric ways of rethinking the Roman relation to Greek rhetoric as more collaborative and less strictly oppositional. Where Kennerly does address the notion of a Roman inferiority complex—an anxiety of influence where letters were concerned—she attaches it to the imperial project: “editorial polish [is seen] as a solution to the general failure of Roman writing to spread and stick” (7).In chapter 3, Kennerly takes up one of her favorite figures, Cicero, highlighting his participation in a mid-first-century BCE large-scale cultural contest over style in its broadest sense (79). The struggle had to do with Atticism versus Asianism—inherited from the Greeks—and in keeping with the theme of the book, Kennerly shows how the struggle is carried out through (gendered) corporeal language. She makes the case indisputably for Cicero's interest in the use of writing before and after the delivery of the speech. There is in his process, Kennerly shows, a mix of “memory and monument,” the latter being Cicero's term for the finished text. After his exile in the mid-fifties BCE, Cicero stepped back from the vigor and intensity of his public oratory and applied his brilliance to philosophical and stylistic works on eloquence itself. In line with the purposes of her project, Kennerly does not delve into Cicero's philosophical contributions but notes that, for this consummate stylist, philosophy provides “silva (raw material; literally a forest)” (104). Later, she notes that Cicero, in his philosophical treatise De Officiis, praised the collaborative editorial practices of poets as a model for virtuous action: one should submit plans “to the scrutiny of trusted friends so that all mistakes can be caught and corrected” (151). We are treated to a more thorough analysis of Brutus and Orator, along with the less completely realized De Optimo Genere Oratorum (On the Very Best Kind of Orator). Far from simple formulae or a rejection of the new Atticism, Cicero advises a more expansive and flexible sense of style, Kennerly observes, matching each of three genres or duties of an orator—to move, to convince, and to delight—with three styles: “the weighty moves, the thin proves, and the moderate delights” (95). As with the Greeks, for Cicero the stakes are high where stylistic expertise is concerned. When an orator fails, it is not only his art or himself that he fails: it is “a client, friend, or the Commonwealth” (100). Kennerly addresses this entanglement of text, culture, and community persuasively.The chapter on Horace is refreshing, given that we have few rhetorical treatments of this poet. Kennerly highlights his compromised position in relationship to the first emperor, Octavian/Augustus, and reviews the implications for his poetic stance. Some of the most charming language in this chapter comes from Horace's Ars Poetica, where he pays a good deal of attention to style. He proposes a “compositional ethics of the slow,” advising restraint, scraping and scrubbing with the metaphorical file (127). His care in editing, Kennerly notes, is compatible with his “philosophic bent”: writing correctly arises from wisdom (130). In chapter 5 on Ovid's writings in exile, we read of his many pleas for attention, for collaboration, for editing in its most comprehensive sense. Ovid, Kennerly writes, shows an “acute rhetorical sensitivity to a situation”: his sad legal status as exile and harsh location influence his talk about writing (141). The penultimate body chapter on Quintilian is a significant one, and in it Kennerly brings to light the diligence with which Quintilian treats care of the text. She writes that he “made the managerial magisterial” (161), encouraging time, labor, and care in mastering the rhetorical art. Another important aspect of this analysis is Kennerly's attention to the gendered critical language running throughout Quintilian. A good style is always a masculine style marked by “an attractive fertility.” Tacitus and Pliny receive unusual and welcome attention at the end as well. Pliny's letters offer an accessible and revealing view of the sociality involved in composing, editing, and performing written and spoken texts in first-century CE Rome. The final chapter brings to light Cicero's famous and beloved amanuensis, Tiro: one known provider of the often unrecognized and coerced labor that went into ancient eloquence produced by elites. Kennerly ends with a reminder of the “ancient belief in the cross-indexical quality of the way one writes and the way one lives” (205).This is a beautifully prepared book; it's original and useful. The chronological movement—tracing the consistency of corporeal language across several centuries—enables the reader to follow the complex interrelations among writers and orators across the two cultures over six centuries. The attention to the original languages across the volume is meticulous. Kennerly's bibliography is very current, spanning the fields of classics, rhetoric, and poetics. She is evenhanded in her work with sources. As with all of her publications, Kennerly is a master stylist, showing how she has “love-labored” (a term from Isocrates) over this work. Her wordplay often delights. An example comes in her discussion of Isocrates, whom she characterizes as “figure-loving”: “political discourse without polish is all bluster whereas polished discourse without political import is all luster” (39). For some readers, the relentless word play may become distracting, and at times the clever tips over into the merely flip. But overall the style leavens a project entered into a field that may feel dusty and distant to students and nonspecialists. Scholars in composition / writing studies will be especially interested in the focus on writing process. At many points, we can see possibilities for contemporary comparisons and applications.Significantly, Kennerly is not pursuing stylistic manners for their own sake. She attends to contestation over what sorts of words best sustain communal life. Where I find the text really gaining purchase are the places where Kennerly points out the stakes of editorial work, and often they concern the status of the state. For example, she points out that Horace's enthusiasm for the editorial file (lima) was not only a poetic stance but also a civic one (19). We are urged to understand that editing, in the specialized sense elaborated here, is about not only the quality of the work and the status of the author but also political health and personal ethics.I will end where Kennerly ends, with comments on the canon. She claims to have shifted the canon by placing traditional names in untraditional scenes (211), and I agree that this is a contribution of the book. She also helpfully quotes and endorses Robert Gaines's proposal for an expansive reconsideration of “canon” so as to include “‘all known texts, artifacts, and discourse venues’” in a wide range of genres in “‘the ancient European discourse community’” (Gaines 2005, 65, qtd. on 210). This is an appealing invitation, one that led me to imagine how Kennerly's interest in the materials of writing and discourses of textual body care might be applied to an even wider swath of rhetorical activity in antiquity. For papyrus book rolls and wax tablets, as Kennerly knows well, were not invented in fifth-century Athens. She specifies at the outset that she will leave aside earliest examples—those with “a small chain of reception”—and concentrate on works “that have been heard and read by many” (1). This a reasonable criterion of selection. I did wish, though, that Sappho (and with her all the archaic lyric poets?) had not been dismissed so summarily (23), given the importance of the (woman's) body in her work and a substantial literature of reception. But a book can be about only so many things, and this book is about quite a few.Looking further afield, both temporally and geographically, we find many writers and speakers grappling with the materials of textual production—clay tablets in Sumeria, bone and tortoise shell in China, string knots in the Americas. And, in fact, some texts from those preclassical sites have been saved from the papyrus garbage heap. Just to take one example from the very rich repertoire of writing (on papyrus) in ancient Egypt, consider the anonymous tale “The Eloquent Peasant,” composed around 1850 BCE (Lichtheim 1973). This didactic tale features embedded speeches in the forensic mode that a peasant was required to deliver to a king/judge and then convert to writing (with the aid of a scribe) in order to get justice for a wrong. Embodied negotiations by multiple actors in the production of written and spoken texts, the quality of bodies—fine textual and debased working bodies: these are elements Kennerly has drawn on in her study of “corpus care.” The point of applying her method to such a text would be not only to expand the canon or corpus of rhetoric but also to grant the possibility of meta-consciousness about textual production not only to well-known elites of Greece and Rome but also to figures from distant times and places for whom we have only incomplete records. I'm grateful to Kennerly for her fine study and for the potential it opens up for further work in this vein.

In one of his many defenses of rhetoric, Aristotle states that “even if we were to have the most exact knowledge, it would not be very easy for us in speaking to use it to persuade [some audiences] … it is necessary for pisteis and speeches [as a whole] to be formed on the basis of common [beliefs]” (2007, 35). Dana Cloud's Reality Bites advances a similar position, suggesting that the political left needs to reclaim rhetorical appeals as a form of argumentation if it is to defeat the conservative forces that have taken control of the public sphere. Focusing on what she calls the “big five” (narrative, myth, affect, embodiment, spectacle), Cloud argues that the American left is losing political ground to the right due to its inability to craft effective stories convincing the general public that commonly held beliefs support a left political doctrine. Because people are embodied and emotional beings, fact-checking and appeals to pure rationality and logic are ineffective at convincing large swaths of people to change their actions and beliefs. And yet, the left continues to cling to the bare, factual truth, hoping to awaken the masses to their oppression at the hands of a proto-fascist Trumpian regime. As an alternative, Cloud proposes that we embrace what she calls rhetorical realism, a communication strategy built on the notion that “communicators can bring knowledge from particular perspectives and experiences into the domain of common sense, and that we can evaluate truth claims in public culture on the basis of whether they exhibit fidelity to the experience and interests of the people they claim to describe and represent” (15). Rhetorical realism walks the line between relativism and realism, suggesting that “there is a reality—but none of us can know it except through frames of mediation” (2). Truths may objectively exist, but they can be accessed only through rhetorical interventions that structure meaning making.Rhetorical realism has three interrelated tenets. First, rather than appeals to objective or universal truths, rhetorical realism relies upon experiential knowledge and rhetorical appeals. Two of Cloud's case studies—Neil deGrasse Tyson's 2014 reboot of Cosmos and #BlackLivesMatter—reflect this approach. Second, rhetorical realism traffics in doxastic, or common knowledge, rather than epistemic, or formal truths. Because knowledge is accessible only through mediation, rhetorical realism suggests that doxastic questions represent the most worthwhile explorations. Third, grounded in standpoint epistemology, rhetorical realism believes truth claims should be cognizant of power relations and align with the interests of the oppressed and exploited, as those at the lower rungs of society have a clearer, more holistic understanding of how society operates.These three tenets point toward what is arguably rhetorical realism's most radical implication: scholars ought to stop entirely asking formal questions of ontology and epistemology. Drawing from the lessons of rhetoric of science scholarship, Cloud's position is not that “there are no facts outside of rhetoric's intervention,” but rather that “the implementation of their use varies in ways that are strategic and invested with power” (25). Questions about the fundamental nature of our being or what truth is ought to be sidestepped in favor of “adopting the strategy of crafting frames of moral commitment and belief that can carry our truths out of the glades and into glorious, plain view” (4). Cloud does not negate the existence of an ahistorical metaphysics, but instead argues that the search for it is simply not worth pursuing. As she says, “Even if there were ever an original ‘state of nature’ in which humans encountered the world afresh, from that day forward, human symbolic framing and interpretation would have been ever present” (6). Humans instead engage in “dialectically evolving systems of ideas” that reflect localized, perspectival realities and the lived experiences of individuals and groups of people (7). Cloud says that only a realist perspective can explain both how the masses are convinced to embrace problematic ideologies and how to convince them to think otherwise: “The most powerful political discourses emerge when epistemic knowledge is mediated by explanatory and justificatory political frames” (7). By rejecting the formal, philosophical search for truth and knowledge, rhetorical realism is grounded in a social and political reality aligning with the lived experiences of various groups.A question arises from rhetorical realism's rejection of epistemological and ontological investigations: how does it not devolve into moral relativism, a position that Cloud very clearly lays out as ethically irresponsible (15–16)? Cloud addresses this concern by arguing that scholars should embrace a doxastic version of ethics grounded in the lived realities of the oppressed, defending “a perspective from which to perform criticism in the service of demystifying power and enabling the formation of public consciousness faithful to the insurgent knowledges of the oppressed and exploited” (5). Rhetorical realism thus develops ethics by locating doxastic truths from the position of the most subjugated. From this subjugated ethics, normative statements about the world can be made. For example, “Why critique rape culture unless we can say surely that women are oppressed, that consent should be a precondition for sexual engagement, or that violence against women is wrong?” (5). This normative statement about sexism and rape culture arises from the doxastic truth that women are subjugated in modern society. Rather than devolve into moral relativism, rhetorical realism's adherence to standpoint epistemology provides a valuable tool for ethically interacting with the world.Cloud develops rhetorical realism throughout six chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The introduction to Reality Bites lays out the purpose of the text: to “chart a middle way” between the rationalist and relativist practices through a defense of rhetorical realism (2). Chapter 1 introduces rhetorical realism, arguing that it is irresponsible to “concede ground to post-truth forces” via a “hunker[ing] down in the trenches of massive numbers of facts” or “giv[ing] up entirely and embrac[ing] relativism” (14). In this chapter, Cloud turns toward Marxism as a foundational tool for her theory. In particular, she utilizes Gramscian hegemony to explain how people consent to interests that negatively affect their lives yet can overcome their own oppression through learning and collective struggle, and Marxist feminist Nancy Hartsock for an understanding of standpoint epistemology. If, as Cloud suggests, it is true that class and labor mediate the realities of workers in a capitalist economy, then the critic's role is to “engage subjective experience” as a way of both raising class consciousness and regaining control of dominant societal narratives (31). Rhetorical realism, then, aligns with this Marxist tradition and call to critique.Chapter 2 unpacks the “big five”—narrative, myth, affect, embodiment, and spectacle. Once again, Cloud rejects “objective” positions taken by various leftist theorists, arguing that control over the cultural imaginary is integral to the success of these positions. Each of the “big five” can be useful tools for the left's reclamation of the cultural imaginary. Spectacles, for instance, are “powerful and interested,” motivating individuals to believe, act, and change in productive ways (47). Thus, “we need affect, embodiment, myth, narrative, and … spectacular struggle” (51).Chapter 3 introduces the concept of frame-checking, a substitute for fact-checking. Cloud describes frame-checking as an “alternative method of capturing how contending truth claims may be taken on at various staseis from conjecture through policy, with especial emphasis on quality or value” (73). Facts alone, Cloud argues, have failed us, as they ignore how “economic hardship and anxiety generate popular desire for narratives explaining social crisis at the levels of values and action, refusing to generate compelling narratives in response” (55). In an era of “post-truth,” fact-checking is ineffective at telling people what is real; rather, as Cloud tells us, a particular focus on the fidelity of stories as well as power relations is important for conveying information to the general population. Scholars should attend to the ways that “discourses selectively direct attention, involve audiences intimately with the matter at hand, and construct coherent and noncontradictory schemes of making sense of the world” (62). We should not be aiming to check facts and inquire about truths. Instead, we should attend to the frames that mediate reality.To prove the value of her theory, Cloud details several case studies. In the same chapter in which she introduces frame-checking, Cloud analyzes the controversy surrounding the 2015 Human Capital video series released by the Center for Medical Progress that purported to prove Planned Parenthood harvested aborted fetal tissue for profit. Even though these videos were ultimately discredited as false by fact-checkers, “the footage is compelling in a way that exceeds the capacity of fact-checking to disarm it” (53). Rather than simply fact-checking the video, then, Cloud suggests that it would have been more productive to address the frames by which the videos persuaded audiences that Planned Parenthood is evil. “Imagine pro-choice organizations responding immediately with another video, set in a provocative scandal frame that exposes Daleiden and his outfit, but also … counters the antiabortion videos … by interviewing women who have undergone the procedure and their reasons for doing so” (71). Rather than just denying the videos as false, Cloud suggests that a more apt response would have developed pathetic appeals in order to equal the proverbial playing field.Chapter 4 discusses the frames surrounding Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning's government leaks. Cloud indicates that discourse surrounding these two figures framed Snowden as an all-American hero, drawing upon “the mythic narrative of the masculine agent” (76). In contrast, discourse about Manning revolved around her queerness and transgender identity, which were consistently used to discredit her as mentally unstable and untrustworthy. From this comparison, Cloud concludes that queerness “reveals the limits of mediation in a homophobic and transphobic society” (103) because the media could not deal with the complexity of Manning's character. By all “objective” fact-checking standards, Snowden and Manning—as whistleblowers merely leaking documents—should have been treated equally by the media. However, Manning's queerness meant that she was discredited as a villain rather than lauded as a hero. Cloud does not draw conclusions about the purpose, meaning, or value of queerness from this example, but rather suggests that it further reveals the limitations of supposedly objective truth-based discourses in the public sphere.Chapter 5 provides an example of leftist discourse that draws from the “big five” to inform the public. Cosmos, the 1980 television show incarnated by Carl Sagan and revived in 2014 by Neil deGrasse Tyson, draws from all five of the major strategies Cloud thinks the left ought to adopt. Simultaneously however, Cloud suggests that the show functionally winks at its audience, reminding them that it is a rhetorical construction. For example, the show reminds viewers that we have yet to unlock the secrets of the universe, yet positions Tyson as an almost Godlike figure who reveals those secrets to an audience hungry for truth. Thus, Cosmos can tell its viewers that no one knows what happens in a black hole, while Tyson simultaneously flies into one in his spaceship. Cloud embraces this contradiction, arguing that it is exactly how the left can ethically engage in rhetorical realism—by reminding the public that we too are constructing stories for them to believe. By reminding members of the public that we—and ultimately, everybody—are framing the facts that they are told, people can begin to better recognize the rhetorically mediated nature of all discourse, including scientific discourse.Finally, chapter 6 compares Thomas Paine's Common Sense to the Black Lives Matter social movement, suggesting that both represent “timed, crafted, strategic set[s] of actions” (155). Cloud reads Common Sense in a unique light, arguing that Paine's pamphlet both “established what it means to critique dominant ideology” by denouncing England and demonstrates standpoint epistemology in its demand for the oppressed to resist those in power (141). Cloud also draws from Paine to argue that “the push for truly radical change happens from below” (162) where public intellectuals coalesce with revolutionary activists to fight for freedom and justice. Black Lives Matter also employs the big five by relying upon “public intellectuals who have created and sustained new publics through the use of emerging media and who understand and communicate about injustice in new, compelling, and condensed language” (149). Cloud thus thinks that theorists and activists alike can and should learn from these two very different, yet similar, American moments.Further research could more thoroughly investigate two positions that Cloud advances. First, Cloud alludes to the importance of kairos in a few different places but does not greatly detail its applicability for rhetorical realism. This is particularly stark in terms of the chapter on Black Lives Matter and Thomas Paine, where the author indicates that attending to kairos “will do far better service to social change” than relying upon preconceived beliefs about an audience (148). Kairos is clearly important for Cloud; however, its relationship to rhetorical realism deserves more attention. Given that summer 2020 marks massive, global demonstrations against police brutality in the name of Black Lives Matter, further consideration of the kairotic nature of this and other protest groups could be an incredibly fruitful area for future research.Second, in the conclusion, Cloud suggests that each of her case studies points toward the overarching power of calls for the natural within public discourse. In other words, appeals toward what is “natural” is consistently persuasive for public audiences because the natural is doxastically understood as true. This idea is interesting and could tie into a deeper understanding of Cloud's repeated suggestion that rhetorical realism is necessary for persuading “ordinary” people. Do we need to rely on what is “natural” to persuade “ordinary” people? Can rhetorical realism help scholars redefine what is “natural” or “ordinary”? I hope that future scholarship takes up these questions and provides more insight and direction.Overall, Cloud delivers a well-written, well-defended, and easy-to-read call to remember the “big five,” adopt a rhetorical realist perspective, and engage in frame-checking rather than fact-checking. Any theorist or activist interested in public argumentation and social movements would be helped by reading this book. Additionally, the provocative suggestion that scholars give up epistemological and ontological investigations and instead take up the question of ethics within a rhetorical realist perspective is an important discussion that people should take seriously, particularly as philosophers and rhetoricians debate these questions in the future.

Discussions of demagoguery are, unfortunately, back in vogue in popular political discourse. Within the contemporary political landscape, the question of whether various world leaders should be considered demagogues abounds. In the American context, many perceive strong demagogic tendencies in President Donald Trump, and others see it in candidates like Bernie Sanders. This assessment, while perhaps not always stated in such specific terms, is prevalent throughout much of the rhetoric in public debate and deliberation, with Democrats and Republicans demonizing each other with more frequency. While this discussion seems particularly relevant to the contemporary political climate, demagoguery as a term dates all the way back to some of the earliest political philosophers of the Western tradition. The term's origin was decidedly neutral, as can be seen in the likes of Aristophanes and Thucydides. Donald Trump is, in the most neutral sense of the term, a demagogue. That is to say that Trump is a leader of a group of people, a fact that his 2016 election victory affirms. Trump may also be a demagogue in the more charged sense of the word. This more charged definition finds its roots in Plato and Aristotle, who began to complicate the term before Plutarch defined the term with a negative valence that has stuck. A critical aspect of defining demagoguery in the contemporary lexicon is a focus on how an individual's rhetorical moves, with unique personal motivations, drive a public toward us versus them binaries. Much of the scholarship on the Nazis and Adolf Hitler is an exemplar of this obsession with individualistic demagoguery, as it often elucidates personal motives for Hitler's demagogic rhetoric toward the Jews. Since Hitler is considered by many to be the demagogue par excellence and some of this understanding can be traced to Kenneth Burke, this conception of demagoguery as something enacted by a particular speaker has remained dominant in rhetorical study and political philosophy.Against such a backdrop, Patricia Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely intervention into how we define and think about demagoguery. In order to accomplish such a task, Roberts-Miller traces the way demagoguery is currently envisioned, explains the deficits of that conceptualization, provides a new working definition grounded in argumentation theory, and then uses a series of examples to support her argument. Roberts-Miller takes issue with defining demagoguery as the intentional use of scapegoating by a liberal autonomous subject. For many scholars, it is easier to explain rampant discrimination, fascism, and violence as something spurred by an individual speaker rather than addressing what allowed that message to take root.Roberts-Miller therefore criticizes this approach and provides a redefinition of demagoguery as “a polarizing discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the out-group should be punished and scapegoated for the current problems of the in-group” (16). Further, she contends that public policy debate in a demagogic society tends to focus on only three things: group identity, need, and severity of punishment against the out-group. To elucidate the features that flow from this definition, Roberts-Miller draws on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's concept of philosophical paired terms. This terminology, which she rephrases as binary paired terms, shows how societal demagoguery relies on binaries, which usually circle back to in-group versus out-group driven decision making. This allows rhetors to skip deliberation and sound argumentation and simply assert their position. Roberts-Miller further theorizes how these dynamics mean that political debate focuses on nonfalsifiable motivism rather than specific policy proposals. Roberts-Miller accomplishes much of this method and theory building in the introductory and concluding chapters, advancing specific case studies in the body chapters that help elucidate and nuance her redefinition.The first example Roberts-Miller turns to is the invasion of Iraq, explored in depth in chapter 1. Roberts-Miller explains that what made her write this book was the almost entirely absent policy debate prior to the invasion of Iraq. Roberts-Miller argues that policy debate must address both need and a plan. To be clear, there was plenty of ideological pseudo-debate about need in the lead-up to the invasion, but Roberts-Miller points out there was hardly any concrete policy discussion about what plans might be considered. Beginning with the necessary background information on the lead-up to this war, Roberts-Miller then pivots to an explanation of how identity was substituted for policy. President George W. Bush and his administration did all they could to avoid discussion of a particular plan for Iraq. Such deliberation, in their view, would have delayed and bogged down support for the war effort. Rather, they simply called out anyone who did not support going to war as unpatriotic, showing how identity trumped deliberation and the patriotic/unpatriotic binary flourished. The Bush administration also enacted a binary between the “Christian West” and “Muslim Middle East” as a way to further stake the war on identities rather than sound, policy debate. With these binaries, Roberts-Miller shows how the conditions for the disastrous Iraq War were achieved through demagogic rhetoric. Many in Congress and the public positioned debate itself as being anti-American, instead opting for naïve, patriotic support of the war. Without a strong policy debate, the American war strategy relied purely on best-case scenarios that did not happen. According to Roberts-Miller, relying on public debate, rather than demagoguery, may have prevented the invasion of Iraq or “at worst, have led to a better-planned war” with contingencies being considered (47).Chapter 2 builds on the binary paired terms of punishment and reward, using a number of case studies to exemplify how these terms are used in demagogic rhetoric. The first explored is Cleon from Ancient Athens. Cleon sets up the binary of everyone being either a friend or enemy and every act being either reward or punishment. Roberts-Miller works this pairing into a unique ratio of punish/enemy and reward/friend, which characterize demagoguery writ large. Cleon's “rational” assessment here shows the risks of defining demagoguery as primarily invested in leveraging emotional appeals. As Roberts-Miller pointedly observes, definitions of demagoguery as speech driven by mere strong affects is misguided since a speaker could provide good argumentation grounded in emotion, and, conversely, a speaker might be able to perform “emotionless” rationality without solid evidence. Instead, as Roberts-Miller explains through examples ranging from segregationists in the south to the Supreme Court decision in Hirabayashi v. United States, to illustrate how those claiming calm rationality, often through an invented middle ground, can actually perpetrate demagogic binaries and policies. In Hirabayashi, this worked its way back into a punishment/reward binary where Japanese Americans were falsely blamed (scapegoated) for sabotage during the attack on Pearl Harbor and were in need of punishment (internment).In chapter 3, Roberts-Miller elaborates further upon the features of her definition of demagoguery: scapegoating and rationality. Looking deeper into Japanese internment in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Roberts-Miller expands beyond the Hirabayashi ruling to examine the Roberts Commission and California attorney general Earl Warren's supposedly emotionless arguments for imprisonment. A critical component of this appeal was Warren's surface-level reasonability and a supposed willingness to let the facts guide the debate surrounding internment. However, once one digs beneath the surface, it becomes clear that this rationality is merely a façade. Roberts-Miller points to a lack of evidence that there was any Japanese American involvement in Pearl Harbor and the difference in treatment between Japanese Americans and German and Italian Americans as proof of prejudice rather than deliberation guiding decision making. This is used to prove that rationality markers are often deployed to conflate the difference between a logical argument and an argument that is made by appealing to logic. Ultimately, the Japanese were interned not because of logic in and of itself but because demagoguery cast them as an entity Americans should fear through misleading appeals to a nonexistent logic.Chapter 4 moves from a discussion of demagoguery that appeals to logic that, while flawed, is easy to understand to demagoguery that relies on argumentation that claims rationality but intentionally obfuscates logic. The case study here is Madison Grant's racist book Passing of the Great Race, which is considered a historically significant white supremacist text because of its prevalence in America and its appreciation by Hitler himself. Roberts-Miller deftly dissects Grant's demagogic argument for the superiority of the white/Nordic race through the inconsistencies in logic. Some specific problems include Grant's lack of definition for his central term “race,” an evolutionary narrative that undercuts his claims to Nordic purity, and his practically nonexistent use of citations or appeals to authority. Roberts-Miller highlights how even those contemporary reviewers who assessed the book positively cited its poor quality of argument as a negative element. Thus, with his claims not clearly grounded in proper citations, Grant's authority comes from himself. Roberts-Miller's takedown of Grant works well to boost her claim that demagoguery can guise itself with pseudo-logic, while actually being logic's antithesis.Roberts-Miller's next move is to show how demagogic rhetoric can appeal to expert opinion and be seemingly intellectual, when it is actually anti-intellectual. Chapter 5 focuses on three case studies of nonscientists—E. S. Cox, Theodore Bilbo, and William Tam—who claimed appeals to authority and that science supported their positions (with Cox and Bilbo espousing white supremacy and Tam arguing homophobic viewpoints against gay marriage). Cox relies heavily on authorities whom he believes are right because they are good people (i.e., white). Bilbo's arguments often contradict his sources, and his sources often contradict each other. Further, the Bilbo case study works to show how demagoguery is not always a calculated maneuver, as Bilbo's political career would have been better served with a less overtly racist message. Finally, Tam shows how poor, demagogic citation practices can flourish in the digital age. Tam deflected numerous questions about his sources and the facticity of his homophobic claims as being found on the Internet, which he implicitly claimed must make them true. Here, Roberts-Miller advances more theoretical insights on the anti-intellectualism of demagoguery, bolstered most compellingly by her selection of cases that all relied on so-called expert appeals to science and, with Tam, the Internet as a whole.Roberts-Miller's conclusion again reiterates her redefinition of demagoguery and why this book has provided an important move to understanding the culture of demagoguery. Roberts-Miller then lists some topics that she could not explore in depth due to length restrictions, including gender, religion, charismatic leadership, reification, demagoguery's universality, and if demagoguery harms only in cases of an essentialized out-group identity. Indeed, I was surprised that Roberts-Miller's book largely declined to give issues of gender and other power differentials greater attention in order to present a more capacious account of demagoguery. One area in particular this book could have improved on is either providing significant cases of demagoguery on the left or explaining why this omission is necessary given her theoretical redefinition. Every major example in the body chapters of this book comes from right-leaning politicians and sympathizers. While these provide stark and compelling case examples, Roberts-Miller opens by saying, “Any project that is entirely about how badly they argue is going to be a self-congratulating exercise in saying the out-group is the out-group. Trying to identify the characteristics that help people climb up the latter [sic -ladder] of extermination shouldn't be in service of purifying our communities of demagogues—we are demagogues—but in service of reflecting on what is persuading us. That's the goal of this book” (8). As such, a case study of leftist demagoguery would have done well to illustrate her point across ideological and party lines. Or if leftist demagoguery does not exist, an explanation of why that is the case would be very insightful for future research. Nevertheless, Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely and essential intervention into our conception of demagoguery in the present day. Readers of Philosophy & Rhetoric as well as those interested in political philosophy will find much practical and scholarly utility in this book.

ABSTRACT Notwithstanding recent controversies involving echo chambers and social media, “post-truth” has always been central to philosophical investigations of what is knowable and good. The internal tension of the term offers a choice: to gasp in feigned astonishment at the hell-in-a-handbasket state of public discourse, or to reflect critically on what is beyond, after, or other than the truth. In this essay, we approach post-truth via elements of narrative, biography, and myth, portraying Friedrich Nietzsche's polytropic figure, Zarathustra, as he might have spoken to the contemporary moment. We demonstrate how Zarathustra affords access to the idea that truth (in all its deceptiveness) and life (or possibly, aliveness) are inextricable in the human condition. To temper this tension, we depict a character whose disposition toward post-truth spans from certainty and doubt to exuberance and despair. Our hope is to indicate how, for the humans of Motley Cow, post-truth is ubiquitous, institutional, and infrastructural.

Celeste Michelle Condit's Angry Public Rhetorics: Global Relations and Emotion in the Wake of 9/11 is a complex and challenging contribution to the understudied area of public emotion that charts the course for an arduous but rewarding journey toward a greater synthesis between the study of human biological and material existence and the study of our symbolic world. Condit maintains that “shared public anger co-orients peoples and tends to direct their actions and resources along particular paths … shaped by numerous forces—including cultural traditions, ideologies, histories, and sedimented patterns of resource distributions—they are also substantively shaped by the distinctive set of characteristics that are constitutive of ‘being angry together’ as a pervasive social phenomenon” and that the “sharing of that anger” is a communicative process requiring that one “attend closely to the dynamics of the public discourses that constitute and circulate such shared emotion” (1–2). Condit develops a “script” for public anger: “(1) they (an absolutely antagonistic agent, identified as a long-standing enemy), (2) acted to cause serious harm (serious in terms of the normative claim being made), (3) to us (the model protagonist), (4) in violation of crucial social norms (or morals), (5) so we must attack!” (5–6). Her analysis of the discourses of bin Laden, Bush, and Sontag reveals that “the most resonant versions of this script … promote essentialism, binarism, rote thinking, excessive optimism, stereotyping, and attack orientations” (6).While it is often the case that one of the important tests of rhetorical theory is its ability to elucidate texts, what is perhaps most compelling about Condit's book is not its critical engagement with the texts, but rather its ambitious epistemological framework. Indeed what makes the book compelling (and occasionally results in somewhat infelicitous moments) is its unabashed ambition to adopt an epistemological framework that incorporates dispositions and findings from all three of the major research methodologies—natural science, social science, and humanities.Such a pan-methodological approach is necessary insofar as Condit's goal is not modest, as it is to “build a theory of emotion that integrates symbolic and physiological elements on firm academic ground” (150), requiring “reworking the onto-epistemological foundations from which most … operate” (15). Along these lines Condit relies upon an “onto-epistemological stance” (developed with Bruce Railback) termed “‘transilience’ (rather than E. O. Wilson's ‘consilience’) for recognizing the leaps that both signify gaps and simultaneously connect the movement across those gaps, among physical, biological, and symbolic modes of being” (17). Transilience takes seriously the biological and symbolic dimensions of human experience and hence requires that scholars show a willingness to move across the gaps separating academic disciplines and research methodologies.Condit's understanding of the “symbolic” elements is informed by her humanistic training in rhetorical studies, while her attempt to grasp “physiological” elements is informed by her more recent explorations and work in the natural sciences. Insofar as “biological beings seem to have a tendency to develop communication capacities” (26), she aims at a theory of emotions that is materially grounded in both biology and symbol systems. This biosymbolic approach aims to reconcile biological sciences and the humanities, but Condit is also interested in what has always been a central concern of social scientists in communication: the empirical effects of communicative messages: “The ultimate goal is to understand how the biological and the symbolic can produce a kind of human affect-range called public emotion that is susceptible to theoretically guided empirical observation and influence, albeit under different parameters of investigation than the model developed by classical physics” (20). Alongside the book's transilient fusion of humanistic and natural science into a biosymbolic perspective, it also employs social scientific methodologies in the form of frequent reviews of empirical research in order to assess the effects of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag. In the end her “view of humans as biosymbolic beings … has been undergirded by describing a transilient onto-epistemology that posits what we call the physical, the biological, and the symbolic as different but linked modes of being that result from the relatively distinctive forms in which matter has come to be arranged” (41).While Condit is centrally concerned with “public anger,” that is, how emotion circulates among collectivities in communities, the foundation of her approach is the millennia of philosophical reflections regarding the character of emotions as experienced by individuals: “Stretching back to Aristotle, many theorists have identified four components of emotion … (1) appraisal cues, (2) neurophysiology (sometimes divided into neural versus other physiological elements such as hormones or muscular activations to make a total of five), (3) subjective experience, and (4) action tendencies. Appraisal cues and action tendencies are most readily identifiable in collective emotion, and they should form the central pillars of analyses of the pathos of public rhetorics, but the other two components are involved … as well” (49). Beginning from this well-established philosophical typology, Condit overlays a wide range of insights drawn from the biological study of emotions, enabling resolution of many of the tensions between biological and neurological approaches to emotions that see them as universal species traits, and cultural and symbolic approaches that view emotions as emerging from particular cultural milieus.But since “collective emotion is not simply the aggregation of the emotion of individuals” (70), putting the “public” in public anger requires that the author explore territory that is much less well studied and understood. Public anger is complex, and “occurs when many people share the multidimensional complex featuring the action tendencies of cognitive narrowing, optimistic bias, an antagonistic approach, and four appraisals: (1) negative events have occurred that (2) result from the blameworthy actions of others, and (3) one has a reasonably high likelihood of controlling the others behavior, and (4) a relatively high certainty about events and their causes” (72). Public anger involves not only collective perceptions and understandings, but collective action. Based on the study of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag, Condit concludes that “to be angry together is to be predisposed to collective activity, specifically to attack, which may include intense, even violent, action. Circulation of these three sets of angry rhetorics activated their publics toward attack, but not in precisely the same ways” (216). While this particular set of cases seems to line up with “most humanistic engagements of social emotions” that “have described them as undesirable” (224), Condit also observes that public anger can have positive functions: “Studies by historians have pointed to a similar or overlapping range of functions for anger in larger human collectivities … the historians' accounts noted the way in which scripts for anger have served to regulate the contributions and accumulations of members of leadership hierarchies, both charging them to risk life and resources to protect their peoples and lands from other nobles and also limiting their own depredations upon their people” (73).The author is focused on biology and neurology, but communication and rhetoric remain at the center of shared public emotions: “With regard to specific elements of this method of analysis of public emotion, the focal evidence is the specific symbols circulated (in this case, almost exclusively words, though pictures, vocal sounds, and other nonverbal elements could be included)” (94). Indeed, it is through symbol systems that emotions are shared and made public: “It is empirically the case that symbol systems provide the imaginative and cooperative resources to create novel kinds of objects and life patterns, even as those objects and life patterns become instantiated in individual bodies by both the experience of those life patterns and by the symbols that are physiologically and fantastically part and parcel of those experiences” (32). Accordingly, the channels of discourse function as a sort of circulatory system within which public emotions move: “Public discourse that circulates emotion in order to co-orient individuals toward collective action tends to remake those individuals as members of that collectivity in ways that are shaped and constrained by the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Not only are symbols of primary focus for analysis, her framework assumes that “the sharing of public emotions constitutes a key nexus of collective action,” and she uses “the example of anger to illustrate how particular qualities of an emotion shape public discourses surrounding a global event, additional to the ideological preferences or positionality of a public leader and his or her supporters” (209).In the end Condit calls for the programmatic study of other public emotions: “The treatment of anger in this analysis should also provide a model for further academic analyses of emotion and political relations. One can easily imagine analyses of the role of hope, compassion or sorrow employing the method here pursued. The detailed assessment of the proclivities of such emotions at the discursive and biological levels would produce a template to describe the tendencies encouraged by specific complexes. An examination of diverse and key public rhetorics that shared the specific emotion would then allow an understanding of the range and possibilities of the operation of that emotion in particular contexts and for particular purposes” (236). Condit reiterates “that good theory requires familiarity with both rapidly expanding understandings of human biological proclivities and the foundational structures of language” (236).What is particularly new and challenging in this book is that Condit is aiming to genuinely bring together the sciences and the humanities. For decades humanities scholars in several disciplines have earnestly sought to bridge the gap between sciences and humanities, but usually on their own humanistic grounds. Philosophers of science have long bridged the gap by examining the philosophical assumptions animating science and the scientific method, usually within philosophical frames centered on epistemology. So too historians of science have brought science and history together by making science an object of historical study. Finally, scholarship on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, in which humanities scholars explore the central role of rhetoric and communication in the discovery and development of scientific knowledge, undoubtedly effects a sort of union of science and rhetoric, but does so solidly under the sign of rhetoric.What makes Condit's work unique is that it is not merely appropriating science as an object of study under the sign of the humanities. Condit's scholarship, informed by her graduate level experiences in genetics courses and lab work, aspires to something that could be described as a genuinely synthetic view of the biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. This work aims at a perspective that is pan- or meta-methodological. Critics might express concern that it is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for a scholar to move beyond and transcend a methodological and disciplinary paradigm that has been instilled through decades of study, credentialing, and training within a particular kind of academic community. Indeed Condit recognizes these very barriers, and in other works on transilience has advocated the need for greater collaboration among scholars from different disciplines despite the institutional disciplinary and methodological barriers that divide them.It can be hoped that this book itself can be a place that scholars from many disciplines not only can find theories and concepts that can contribute to their own work, but also can begin to imagine themselves as potential participants in larger and profoundly more enlightening networks of knowledge discovery and creation. But such potential adventurers are to be warned that this journey is not without its infelicitous moments. This reviewer's experiences and stocks of disciplinary knowledge (informed by an undergraduate degree in biology and a PhD in communication and rhetorical studies) were an effective preparation for a positive and engaged response to the overall bio-symbolic approach. However, having only recently completely overcome my epistemological insecurity that a humanist scholar's particular interpretation of a text or message's meaning is meaningless unless empirically verified by a scientific experiment, my inward embattled humanist rhetorical scholar cringed at Condit's repeated concern to back up what would seem to be perfectly reasonable interpretive claims with empirical verification (see for instance 100, 135, 174–78). Such moments of discomfort, born of disciplinary and methodological biases, may be inevitable to most readers at different points in this book. These moments of discomfort or skepticism, one should recognize, are inevitable when one is reading a book that quite deliberately takes the readers out of their academically proscribed comfort zones. Moments of discomfort, however, are a small price to pay for a project of epistemological and disciplinary integration. Such an integration is undoubtedly necessary for the study of emotion—a phenomenon that has long been recognized to have neurological and cultural components. In terms of the much more recent explorations of “shared” and “public” emotion, the complexity of interactions between the emotions of particular organisms, the discourses by which they circulate, and the various political, cultural, and economic contexts within which these discourses circulate will undoubtedly require the insights of many disciplines and all the major research methodologies.One area that remains underdeveloped in Angry Public Rhetorics is a more systematic model of the “public” in public emotion. Thinking about the emotions as a phenomenon of public collectivities as opposed to just individuals requires more effective ways to theorize about how emotions are shared in publics and other communities. One natural way to think about this transition is to imagine communities as being like individual organisms. For instance, it is well established that one of the biological and evolutionary functions of fear is to allow individual organisms to better detect and respond to danger. So too it has been suggested that fear can serve a similar function for societies and polities—alerting us to threats that should engage our collective attention and deliberative political efforts. Condit seems to take this view, at least in the organic metaphors frequently used to describe publics and communities, speaking as she does of “the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Such organismic imagery is promising in many respects, for it suggests that the assemblages of human beings comprising polities, communities, and societies are akin to the complexes of cells, organs, and symbiots that work together within the body of an organism. If we take the organic metaphor seriously, discourse, communication, and rhetoric will remain central concepts that help us to understand how the “body” of a community is constituted and maintained in the face of the forces of entropy that threaten both bodies and human communities. However, such organic imagery might also distract from alternative conceptions of society, community, and polity that more completely capture the complexity and uniqueness of human communal life.Notwithstanding epistemological complexities or occasionally ambiguous organismic imagery, Condit's “biosymbolic” approach is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to rhetorical studies and the humanities generally because it is another reminder of the continued relevance of biological materiality. Humanistic scholars that treat categories like “the body” and “embodiment” as completely open signifiers that can be construed in any way by the power of culture and convention will be disappointed to bump up against a central material fact of human existence—we have bodies (real bodies, not just cultural representations thereof). Scholars that are already sensitive to the importance of materialist philosophies like Marxism will undoubtedly welcome another reminder that our cultural world is connected in fundamental ways to our material existence within human bodies and societies. In the end the study of language, rhetoric, and culture will be enriched, not eclipsed, by works like Condit's that take the realities of our biological existence seriously.

The Great Recession of 2008 underscored the precarity of housing for many people living in the United States, as well as the unequal conditions that structure housing policy and practices. Victimized by predatory lending practices, many families lost their homes as a speculative housing bubble burst. Facing tremendous uncertainty, these families joined tens of thousands of others across the country who struggle with housing for a variety of reasons—leaving an abusive partner, struggling with medical and other unforeseen expenses, coping with addiction and/or mental illness, and more. Indeed, as Melanie Loehwing explains in her important new book, “housed” and “unhoused” represent not fixed categories or stable life trajectories but moments and dynamics that reveal the struggles of negotiating an unequal, exclusive, and often uncaring society that views the deprivation of some as justifying the privilege of many and, moreover, as a harsh reminder to compete in the marketplace lest the term “unhoused” characterize one's own social and material standing.Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home is a book about public policy and democratic theory. Offering this overview, I do not wish to suggest that Loehwing has written a book about two different topics. To the contrary, Loehwing argues compellingly that public policy (particularly policies geared toward eliminating homelessness) and democratic theory are two parts of a mutually informative relationship. Housed citizens tolerate homelessness because the sight of someone ostensibly living on the street comports with their idea of the polity, in which individuals' social standing and resources reflect their ability and effort to provide for themselves. Working together through the state, citizens do not demand more ambitious efforts to redress homelessness because of these ascriptions of deservingness and undeservingness to others. Reciprocally, popularly held perspectives of democracy justify inequality and deprivation by imagining ideals of the competent citizen whose lead should be followed by all. While homelessness illuminates material disadvantage and suffering, it also outlines the limits of a collective imagining of how people should act as citizens. Far from separating the public sphere from the private sphere, homelessness expresses their interrelationship for housed and unhoused citizens alike. On this basis, Loehwing critiques narrow, instrumental approaches that view homelessness strictly as a lack of housing. Instead, Loehwing argues that we should “understand announcements of an end to homelessness as a rhetorical act, one that contributes to the constitution of the civic body by strategically defining homelessness as a marker of flawed disposition that disqualifies individuals from inclusion in the political community” (4). To end homelessness, citizens and officials must do more than provide housing to people who lack it at a particular moment. Rather, redressing homelessness requires reimagining democracy and building a more inclusive civic home.Employing a democratic lens, Loehwing contrasts conventional and unconventional modes of advocacy to address homelessness. Conducted by organizations like the National Coalition for Homelessness and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, conventional advocacy engages in important policy-related efforts directed toward institutional actors to increase the saliency of and generate resources for programs to eliminate homelessness. While these and other organizations dedicate considerable energy to a comparatively undervalued issue, Loehwing explains that their advocacy seeks attention and influence at the cost of reinforcing some potentially disabling conventions about people experiencing homelessness. First, these organizations draw on a trope of visibility that assumes that housed citizens and policy makers are insufficiently informed about people experiencing homelessness and that bringing homelessness into clearer view will engender positive change. Second, mainstream organizations engaged in conventional advocacy often present themselves as tending to the broken bodies of people experiencing homelessness. By foregrounding physiological and psychological suffering, conventional advocacy reinforces the image of homelessness as a brutish existence that degrades the human body. Third, conventional advocacy aligns homelessness with a present-centered outlook that seeks the satisfaction of immediate needs at the expense of past memories and future plans. According to this convention, those experiencing homelessness can afford to think only in the moment, without any consideration of what they experienced previously or may experience in the future.Reflecting the connection between policy and visions of democracy, these three conventions not only characterize the people experiencing homelessness that mainstream organizations wish to help but also disqualify the homeless as citizens. Conventional advocacy may induce pity (or fear) of people without permanent shelter, but this advocacy does not treat people experiencing homelessness as potentially engaging housed publics on equal ground. Instead, relations of marginalization and subordination prevail. Together, the three conventions that Loehwing highlights—visuality, corporeality, and temporality—“illuminate the implicit models of ideal democratic citizenship that underwrite the exclusion of the homeless from contemporary society” (64). People experiencing homelessness, then, are not only people without homes; they are noncitizens, perhaps anti-citizens, and remain so until they obtain housing and simultaneously refashion themselves. Moreover, the persistence of homelessness, even if individuals, families, and groups may move among homeless and housed, reinforces the ideal notions of democratic citizenship.In chapters 2 through 4 of Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home, Loehwing explores in each chapter a detailed case of unconventional advocacy that challenges the conventions of visibility, corporeality, and temporality. Chapter 2 considers the practices of meal-sharing initiatives, particularly the work of the Food Not Bombs group of Orlando, Florida, to share meals with people experiencing homelessness in their city. In chapter 3, Loehwing considers efforts of activists across a transnational network to organize a Homeless World Cup—an international soccer tournament composed of players experiencing homelessness in their “home” nations. Turning to the convention of time, chapter 4 explores the practice in cities across the United States of Homeless Persons' Memorial Days, in which participants remember homeless people in their communities who died in the past year.As Loehwing argues, meal sharing reconfigures the visibility politics of homelessness and citizenship. In their imagining of the ideal, theories of citizenship retain a skepticism toward the visual as potentially weakening critical judgment in the presence of spectacle. A citizen must exhibit reason, while spectacle threatens to overwhelm reason. Conventional advocacy abides by this visibility politics insofar as it maintains the spectacle of homelessness as distinct from a housed public that may be affected by visibility. Sharing meals in Orlando's city center, the Food Not Bombs group works with people on equal terms, creating a community of homeless and housed members. As Loehwing observes, “FNB creates the sights of community anew, countering invisibility with constitutive visions of what the community could look like if different values and norms of civic relationships were enacted through the form of radically inclusive shared meals” (88–89).If ideal citizens should act rationally, they also must control their bodies. Stereotypical images of people experiencing homelessness, such as images of people performing actions that housed publics perform in private, serve as sharp reminders of the connections between policy and democratic theory—anyone who engages in “debasing” actions before others cannot be trusted as a citizen. Reversing conventional hierarchies of bodily control, the Homeless World Cup provides a venue for homeless people from across the globe to demonstrate acute physical prowess. Started by British homeless advocate Mel Young, the Homeless World Cup began as a way to bring together people experiencing homelessness from different nations. As a well-attended event, the Homeless World Cup reconfigures the bodies of participants and spectators. In addition to illuminating the unique abilities of the players, Loehwing explains, the tournament “positions a housed public as an interested and supportive spectator … [and] the HWC re-presents the individuals experiencing homelessness as representatives of the nation, rather than those rejected from the civic body” (112).From antiquity forward, ideal citizens have needed to negotiate different temporal horizons. Indeed, Aristotle's three species of rhetoric (judicial, epideictic, deliberative) each asked audiences to make a distinct time-oriented (past, present, future) judgment. Living in the now does not permit judgments of past events or future planning, which democracy asks of every citizen. As the name suggests, Homeless Persons' Memorial Days explicitly challenge the association of present centeredness and homelessness. Loehwing explains that “these events reconstruct lost lives, enact moments of identification between homeless and housed, and deliberate about the shared future of a community constituted around mourning the loss of homeless neighbors” (130). Like the other instances of unconventional advocacy that Loehwing analyzes, Homeless Persons' Memorial Days bring together, rather than separate, homeless and housed publics. These events regard people experiencing homelessness not as anonymous elements of a dystopic contemporary scene but as people with names, lives, histories, aspirations. They too made contributions to the communities in which members of housed and homeless publics lived; their lives held value.Loehwing is clear to explain that the differences between conventional and unconventional advocacy do not compel readers to choose between these modes. Indeed, Loehwing holds that the two modes “go a long way toward reconciling each other's limitations and drawbacks” (162). Focused more on institutions, conventional advocacy may garner more “recognition, resources, and social services” for people (162). Unconventional advocacy promises “a different kind of remedy—one that extends civic recognition as its core contribution, because it acknowledges that working for more resources within the existing system may not do enough to challenge the conditions that led to homeless marginalization in the first place” (163). Systemic change requires that we focus on the constitutive connection of theories and practices of policy and democracy.Loehwing envisions the convergence of policy and democracy in the concept of the “civic home.” As a home, a civic home recalls the material inequities of persistent homelessness, which compels some publics to move among housed and homeless standing as they negotiate the ups and downs of an unequal society while others go about their daily lives largely insulated from these traumatic experiences. Yet, as a civic home, Loehwing's concept underscores that resources, while irreplaceable, may not be enough if privileged publics imagine the polity in ways that perpetually exclude others. Without systemic change, housed publics will continue to tolerate homelessness as an unfortunate (or, perhaps, best unseen) byproduct of a wider society that produces benefits for those who subscribe to the vision of ideal citizenship.A civic home underscores the ameliorative role of unconventional advocacy in potentially “realign[ing] the assumptions, prejudices, and exclusions found in competing rhetorics of homelessness” (163). Loehwing locates the materials for the construction of a civic home in “rhetorical circulation.” If the civic home is a “symbolic space,” then its building requires the reshaping of political culture so that publics may appreciate connections to one another. For Loehwing, the civic home would serve as a “place of mutual recognition and inclusion” (166). Our present approach to homelessness divides publics, drawing civic ideals by denying material and discursive resources to others, and reifies the terms “housed” and “homeless,” obscuring the complicated lives and struggles of many citizens. A rebuilt civic home would disavow this zero-sum game, recognizing and appreciating the diverse contributions of intersecting and overlapping publics. In the construction process, unconventional advocacy performs both “circulatory” and “consummatory” functions. In circulation, this advocacy invites wider publics to reconsider the meanings of homeless and housed and people's relationships to one another. Yet this advocacy also consummates the agency and identity of the homeless/housed advocates, affirming their place in the civic home. While advocacy—both conventional and unconventional—constitutes one type of building material, Loehwing also includes deliberation and protest in a full civic rhetoric.Addressing issues of visibility, corporeality, and temporality, and articulating a civic rhetoric of advocacy, deliberation, and protest, Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home offers lessons for scholars and students considering a range of topics. Assumptions about who belongs within a political community and on what terms—who may gain entry to our civic home as currently constructed—pervade politics and policy. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine social policy without assumptions about diverse publics. Melanie Loehwing importantly invites readers to consider these issues explicitly. Loehwing encourages us to understand how these assumptions operate and to evaluate them, reconstructing our notions of community as necessary. In doing so, we may build a new civic home on a firmer foundation of justice, equality, and mutual respect.

The Roman thinker and politician Cicero may seem worlds away from us and our twenty-first-century problems. As long as he lived, Cicero's practical aims were to strengthen the power of the senatorial class and his own personal influence over others. He did not view the republic as a means toward collective betterment, and never questioned his rich and aristocratic peers' militaristic values and commitment to an empire secured by violence and economic exploitation. Despite these and other issues, renewed scholarly interest in Cicero arose in the last years of the twentieth century and has continued to grow. It has been fueled by the reemergence of interest in republicanism and the Roman tradition, in particular in Cambridge School intellectual history and political theory that began with the publication of important work in the 1970s and 1980s by (among others) J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner.Having myself repeatedly made the argument that Cicero is a useful thinker for us today, particularly in his complex, ambitious treatment of rhetoric as the core art of politics—and precisely because he is both a pragmatist accustomed to balancing competing interests and a politician sensitive to the role of fantasy and desire in politics—I should say at the outset that I approach Gary Remer's book with sympathetic interest. Remer ably guides us through key elements in and arising from Cicero's conviction that the act of speaking is the field not only of legitimate politics but of moral decision making and moral action.What Remer calls Cicero's “political morality” is intimately bound up with Cicero's views on the instrumental and aesthetic elements of speech. Remer's most significant advance in this now fairly well-articulated field of study is his overview of the rich legacy of Cicero's thought, from the first-century CE rhetorician Quintilian to Lipsius, Edmund Burke, the Federalists, and John Stuart Mill. If some readers find that Remer defines this “Ciceronian” tradition too broadly, they will find his consideration of these thinkers from a Ciceronian perspective worth reading nonetheless.It is a truth universally acknowledged that politicians have tough decisions to make. Where Machiavelli advises princes to do what is practically useful rather than what is honorable, Cicero declares that it is possible to pursue both the utile and the honestum at the same time. The orator is the person best placed to do this, and (not incidentally) to live the life of deliberated action that Cicero praises in his On the Republic as the life most worth living. On what grounds? In Cicero's view, morality is inherent in the orator's professional activity: the nature of persuasive speech, the act of one human being speaking to others with a view to moving or changing them, tends to constrain the speaker from behaving viciously. By contrast with Aristotle, who treats ethics as the external constraint on oratorical practice, Cicero suggests that the rules of persuasive communication internal to the relation between speaker and audience provide built-in constraints to thought and action.Here is the scene Cicero has in mind, simplified for the sake of brevity, which he dissects in greatest detail in his three-book dialogue On the Orator. The orator seeks to move, teach, or please others: movere, docere, delectare. In the first act of speaking (which might be a gesture or an expression), a multivalent exchange is instantly constructed, and through the whole course of it the speaker must obey various important constraints. To be understood, the orator must obey rules of comprehensibility. To be believed, the orator must obey rules of plausibility and common sensibility (echoes of Habermas are relevant and appropriate here). To move the listeners, to ensure that they learn, to create pleasure—to effect change, in short, an altogether more complex and nuanced process—the orator must obey rules of decorum. As Adam Smith (professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh before he took a chair in moral philosophy at Glasgow) comments in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, “When the original passions of the person principally concerned are in perfect concord with the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they necessarily appear to this last just and proper, and suitable to their objects; and, on the contrary, when, upon bringing the case home to himself, he find that they do not coincide with what he feels, they necessarily appear to him unjust and improper” (1.3). The orator faces a steep uphill climb when he seeks to persuade those whose aesthetic and moral sensibilities he offends.In chapter 1's comparison between Aristotle and Cicero, Remer rightly identifies the other-directedness of Cicero's speaker as a distinctive element in his moral thinking. Keenly attuned to the perspective, range of experience, and interests of his listeners, Cicero's orator keeps within their ambit and moderates his speech accordingly. The decorum he embodies and performs amplifies his audience's sense of what is suitable as it articulates the orator's prudential view of how and what the audience should believe and do. Further, in the argument Remer develops in chapters 2 through 4, which places Cicero in dialogue with Machiavelli and Lipsius, the orator qua politician is well placed to assess which types of moral obligations he will obey. These obligations are role-specific and flexible, according to need and circumstance. For example, when Brutus committed murder in the course of founding the Roman republic, he obeyed the “role morality” of a person devoted to the good of the collective rather than to other individual human beings, including his son (70). Since the politician obtains his status through the iterative legitimating acknowledgments of the political community, the legitimacy of his role-specific actions is always under review according to communal values and standards. This engine keeps the orator in check. It effectively encompasses moral law as well as the ever-changing circumstances that guide moral decision making.To Cicero, speech is the civic glue of the republic. His ideal orator, that is, the ideal republican citizen, is one who cultivates a heterogeneous, passionate style of speech and manner that reflects the variety of his experiences in real life and in his imagination. “It is necessary for the orator to have seen and heard many things, and to have gone over many subjects in reflection and reading,” Cicero says in On the Orator. “He must not take possession of these things as his own property, but rather take sips of them as things belonging to others…. He must explore the very veins of every type, age, and class; he must taste of the minds and senses of those before whom he speaks” (1.218, 223). As Remer accurately notes, the orator must not simply act out these feelings like an actor; he must perform the emotional labor and feel the feelings he expresses to his audience.These assertions place Cicero and his ideal orator into what Remer arrestingly calls in another context “an uneasy state of equipoise.” Remer is right to say that Cicero's orator cannot look to perfect universal law as his everyday guide; he must cope with the plural community. Plurality means that we cannot reliably know what each of us believes or why, what we will think or do next. We should keep in mind that the Roman republic, like our own, is an unchosen assembly—unlike the democracy of the Athenians, who carefully reviewed each applicant to their citizen body and in the course of the fifth century, decided to winnow out men without two Athenian parents. A republic is not a kin group, so we do not resemble one another. In our plurality of perspectives, goals, hopes, and dreams, we probably do not like one another very much. (The realities of pluralism have always made me skeptical about Aristotelian accounts of citizenship that model themselves on friendship.) As Cicero says rather plaintively in On Moral Duties book 1, it's not always easy to care about other human beings. A genuinely plural politics cannot emerge from agreements with preselected partners who already know how to play the game. We must instead expose ourselves to people and views that we don't have a say over, even as we seek to influence others; we must feel what they feel. Visible emotion is the raw edge of exposure; it builds the connection.Particularly now, in the age of Trump, master of the passionate in-group appeal, this may give us pause. What, we may ask, controls or constrains this passionate orator? As we have seen, Remer replies that the Ciceronian orator must cultivate propriety or decorum—the capacity of self-government guided by the orator's sense of communal mores. We can go slightly further to define decorum as the awareness of the watchful gaze of the community, whose approval the orator needs to work his persuasive powers and exert his fullest authority. To speak persuasively is to forcefully articulate one's views and try to impose them on others. But to speak with decorum is to own a self-critical sensibility, a flexible command of vocabulary and cultural values, a capacity to conform with social rules and moral norms, and to risk vulnerability in the face of uncertainty. After all, we never know exactly what someone will say in reply to us, and Cicero discourses at some length in On the Orator about the stage fright that rightly afflicts good orators, who are keenly attuned to the audience's unpredictable nature.Central to Remer's reclamation of Cicero for modern political morality is the Roman rhetorician's pragmatic treatment of the necessity of emotion in political speech. Remer is correct to underscore this important aspect of Cicero's thought, but he remains somewhat squeamish about its implications, and in my view this leads him to overemphasize the value Cicero placed on self-restraint and reason. I do not agree with Remer that the vision of rational argument that Cicero articulates in his dialogue On the Laws is a “better” form of speech than the emotion-laden oratory he describes in On the Orator and other rhetorical treatises—and which he famously practiced himself. Cicero has far too much to say about the importance of emotion in creating bonds among citizens of the republic for this to be a plausible view. When his friend Atticus asks Cicero whether his proposed law to keep oratory moderate and free from passion is feasible, Cicero replies that it refers not to men of today, but to “men of the future who may wish to obey these laws.” While this statement suits the spirit of On the Laws, an experiment in Platonic philosophizing, it strikes me as at best a tepid endorsement of moderate oratory. Against this experiment I place Cicero's warning in his history of Roman oratory, the Brutus, to his friend (and the future assassin of Caesar), that restrained, dry, “Attic” oratory will always fall short. This strong opinion captures Cicero's deep conviction that emotion is not only necessary for political speech; it is a key driver of building republican political community. The orator's capacity to channel and convey emotion is at the heart of the intersubjective relation between the orator and his audience that Remer describes so compellingly in chapters 1 and 2.Remer leaps too quickly from this intersubjective relationship between orator and audience partly sustained by shared emotion—and the craving of the audience for emotional oratory that carries them away, that bathes them in delight (52)—to the “better” decorum Cicero describes in On the Laws. Having established the necessity of the performance of emotion for the purposes of sustaining intersubjective community, rather than jump with him to the normative ideal, I would have liked him to delve further into the controls Cicero places on the expression of emotion, and the larger implication for Cicero's view of the republic.Cicero had one excellent reason to advocate for decorum in day-to-day political speech: fear. As he knows from years of factional strife and civil war, fear kills politics and kills freedom. Decorum means restraining the overreaching behaviors elites are prone to that create fear and increase public mistrust. Only after learning to moderate behaviors that arouse fear among his fellow citizens can the orator explore the “very veins of every type, age, and class” that allow him to speak to and for the whole community. The elite class to which Cicero belonged cultivated moderation as a virtue: this was part of their stranglehold on power, but it also restrained them.But Cicero also sees a fundamental tension between decorum and the capacity to struggle against injustice or outright threats to the republic. His insight into this tension is why, in the Verrine orations—passionate speeches against corruption, extortion, and elite overreach in the province of Sicily—Cicero warns against elite institutions like lawcourt juries sitting too comfortably in their univocal exercise of power. This is why his history of the Roman republic in On the Republic book 2 is a history of cyclical conflict and violence, and why in On the Laws he reminds his interlocutor that tribunes, who voice the people's concerns, are necessary for the good of the republic. Cicero repeatedly clears space for dissensus, for conflict, because he sees, and worries, that the comfortable stability of the homogeneous elite always threatens to tilt into arrogance and violence against the people.So his ideal orator is one who feels, who is necessarily and constantly alive to the beliefs and feelings and fears of others, with the proven capacity to imagine and identify with the experience of others. Emotion is not instrumental in value; its expression is intrinsic to acknowledging and navigating the tense antagonisms that constitute the republic.But this does not answer my question about what prevents the orator from emoting his way into tyranny or the incitement of murder, as Cicero did when he advocated the extralegal executions of Catiline's fellow conspirators. My thinking here is informed by David Velleman's and Herlinde Pauer-Studer's work on the distortion of moral norms in their analysis of diaries and letters written by those who personally carried out acts of murder during the Holocaust. The reason why Nazi perpetrators were not deterred by morality, in their view, is that their moral principles “were filtered through socially conditioned interpretations and perceptions that gave events a distorted normative significance.” Recall Remer's treatment of the exchange between orator and audience. As he rightly describes the scene, orator and audience cultivate norms together. When the orator voices emotional arguments against injustice, does he take time, as Cicero sometimes though not always does, to acknowledge other points of view? Or does he use emotion to set one group against another? If the latter, does the community endorse that use? We can learn from the fact that Cicero expresses his greatest rage and contempt when he speaks out against elite rivals. He does not deploy it in a sustained way against entire groups in the republic, particularly disempowered ones, such as the poor, immigrants, or slaves. A norm emerges here, one informed by Cicero's warnings about elite overreach and the people's vulnerability and fear.Classical scholarship emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in response to an urgent necessity: the need for a secular discourse of collective politics, a discourse that offered alternatives to the rule of king or church. As a classicist, I want my field to reclaim its historical role in giving people language with which we can articulate our roles in collective life—which means diving deep into the tempests of public discourse in the classroom or in our research. I am glad to join Gary Remer in arguing that Ciceronian rhetoric can, as it did in the early modern period, help us think a new style of political thought and action. I hope his book leads to further work along these lines.Black Lives Matter, the descendants of Occupy and related political movements, rightly insist that we must together invent a politics that gives a part to those who have no part, as Jacques Rancière memorably put it. To do this, those in conditions of power and comfort must not simply speak for the silent many who live in conditions of precarity. The challenge is how to create a dialogic style of talk and action that allows for the politically destitute to enter the space of politics in conditions of nondomination. If we seek fresh thinking toward a new politics, we do well to focus on oratory, the art that (as Cicero says) brings together word and action, mind and body, reason and passion.

For those of us who went to graduate school during the 1970s and 1980s, our understanding of early-modern rhetoric was shaped in large part by a preoccupation with clarifying the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. The curriculum at that time usually included a heavy dose of secondary literature by scholars in the tradition of Wilbur Samuel Howell, Karl Wallace, Douglas Ehninger, Vincent Bevilacqua, and Lloyd Bitzer. A common theme in those readings was an investment in mapping the primary texts of modern rhetorical theory against the background of metaphysics and epistemology. Occasionally, we read an essay like Walter Ong's “Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind,” which suggested a different approach to the subject. However, our interest in documenting the influence of Francis Bacon's scientific method on Joseph Priestley's theory of rhetorical invention or of explaining how George Campbell responded to David Hume's skepticism left us with little time to explore the influence of commercial culture on modern rhetorical theory—even in cases that probably should have been obvious like Adam Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres or Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric.Today, many of us who were originally trained as historians of rhetoric find ourselves surrounded by colleagues who dismiss the history of rhetoric courses as hopelessly passé. In fact, if we're honest, even for those of us who embrace the history of rhetoric as an essential component of liberal arts education, our files of lectures about the intricacies of Enlightenment rhetorical theory can seem increasingly remote and tired. As Christopher Hill once explained, every generation is faced with the task of rewriting history in its own way: “although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors” (1972, 15). The challenge facing historians of rhetoric, in other words, is this: how do we reframe Enlightenment rhetoric to reveal its relevance in our lives today?In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker suggests a “way in” to modern rhetorical theory that is likely to resonate with many twenty-first-century readers. Instead of approaching Enlightenment rhetoric as a reaction to modern theories of metaphysics and epistemology, Longaker reconfigures the subject around compelling problems of economics and ethics. For example, in an age of free-market capitalism and consumer culture, what is the moral grounding for our obligation to transparency and honesty in our rhetorical transactions? When attempting to flourish in an economic system that gives its highest rewards to self-interested instrumentalism and greed, is it still possible to cultivate a sense of altruism, honor, or loyalty toward others? And, furthermore, as we find ourselves inhabiting an increasingly privatized, competitive, and commercialized “marketplace of ideas,” how do we reconcile the values of free speech with the values of rhetorical decorum and politeness? For anyone who worries about the practical fallout of these sorts of questions, Longaker provides a compelling reminder that “our age is not exceptional. From its seventeenth-century financial beginning through its nineteenth-century industrial episode to its twenty-first century digital projection, capitalism has been thoroughly rhetorical” (11). In expanding upon this claim, Longaker proceeds recursively in relation to four case studies: John Locke on clarity, Adam Smith on probity, Hugh Blair on moderation, and Herbert Spencer on economy.Chapter 1 examines John Locke's obsession with discursive clarity and its role in commercial contracts. Traditional readings of book 3 of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (the treatment of the “abuses of words” and the remedies for those abuses) tend to place a heavy emphasis on Locke's relationship to British empirical sciences as inspired by his involvement with the Royal Society of London for the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge. While this focus on epistemology and scientific inquiry did obviously play an important role in Locke's analysis of the subject, Longaker advises historians of rhetoric that there is more to the story. His close reading of the Essay makes clear that Locke's attacks on sophistry and rhetoric are unusually vitriolic and inconsistent with other statements Locke made about the significance of verbal imprecision in the sciences. If we pay attention to the evolution of early drafts of Locke's Essay and if we read the Essay against the background of Locke's other writings on issues having to do with economics and business finance, we begin to realize that his frequent allusions to the relationship between argument and commerce and his analogies between sophistry and financial dishonesty are not just stylistic embellishments. Longaker explains that Locke's rule about linguistic propriety “is not just a stylistic guideline, nor is it principally a political suggestion. Locke believed that propriety in currency and language preserves commercial stability, since propriety depends on consent, and consent to a common medium permits financial and conversational exchange” (22). Longaker examines Locke's conception of an ethical obligation to propriety in commercial interactions. He then explains how Locke's requirement for clarity and his rule against disputation were implicated not only in his theory of natural law and social contract theory, but also in his analysis of misrepresentation in financial contracts. Longaker concludes the chapter with a survey of Locke's writings on education. He demonstrates how Locke's writings emphasized a “rhetorical pedagogy of clarity” (37) as an essential component in the education of the new merchant classes.In chapter 2, Longaker turns to Adam Smith's analysis of sincerity and probity. He begins by reviewing the common assumption that Smith's version of free-market capitalism transforms all goods and services into commodities, such that the value of bourgeois virtue is defined as a transactional calculation of prudence. As Smith said in The Wealth of Nations (1776), “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, or the brewer that we expect [their probity]… but from their regard to their own interest” (Smith quoted by Longaker 44). That is to say, any claims about moral obligation within a capitalist system appear to be grounded in a claim to expedience—protecting one's reputation in the marketplace (in the short term, and also in the long term). However, as Longaker explains, this common interpretation of Smith is faulty. The interpretation persists because key passages have been read out of context. A more robust reading of Smith would strive to examine these passages against the background of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762), and Smith's lectures on jurisprudence (c. 1754–1764). Longaker succinctly summarizes his survey of this literature by asserting that Smith did not, in fact, define probity as merely a “ruthless calculation of interest”: “Honesty may be prudent, and the prudent man may be honest, but he is not honest because he is prudent. Probity comes from a felt sense of right, which leads to an honest rhetorical style” (44). Longaker devotes most of chapter 2 to unpacking these claims—and, more generally, to explaining the recurring problem in Enlightenment ethics regarding the relationships between instrumental reason, moral feeling, habit, and ethical character. Longaker explains how Smith posited the psychological mechanism of fellow feeling or sympathy as the basis for capitalism's “two legal pillars,” property and contract (56–57). The capacity for sympathy can only be cultivated through the exercise of imagination—not through reason. With Smith, we see the beginnings of a decline in classical invention and the rise of aesthetics and belletristic criticism as dominating forces in rhetorical pedagogy. Longaker concludes the chapter with an examination of Smith's efforts “at promoting rhetorical criticism of imaginative literature to illustrate how he wanted students to study, discern, and produce honest discourse in the free arenas of civil society: the literary salon, the commodities exchange, and the rhetoric classroom” (44).Longaker presents Locke and Smith as having been generally optimistic about capitalism as a force for social improvement. Capitalism promotes rhetorical virtue in the sense that clarity is a necessary condition for meeting the obligations of financial contracts. Further, a felt sense of sympathy and of sincerity is an essential condition for becoming an effective participant in the marketplace. Later writers, however, became increasingly cynical about the relationship between virtue and commerce. Virtue and commerce “seemed sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory forces.” This ambivalence prompted the question, “Did capitalism make people good, or did good people make commerce possible?” (74). In chapter 3, Longaker takes this question as the starting point for his analysis of Hugh Blair. Conceding that Blair was not a systematic or consistent thinker, Longaker brings a sense of order to his analysis by focusing on Blair's participation in a debate among eighteenth-century intellectuals regarding the vice of licentiousness and the corrupting influence of material luxuries. Reviewing statements by writers such as Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Daniel Defoe, Longaker asserts that Blair's most important contribution to the “luxury debates” was the “bourgeois virtue of moderation” which would provide “a ballast to right a commercial ship listing toward overconsumption” (79). Specifically, “Christian morals and republican virtue teach good habits of moderate consumption and personal savings, habits that support commerce by ensuring reinvestment and by preventing overconsumption” (74). In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Blair gave his students a guide to rhetorical moderation by crafting a synthesis between Locke's demand for verbal clarity and Smith's celebration of sentimental figures (88).In chapter 4, Longaker turns to Herbert Spencer as “the proper inheritor of the British Enlightenment's integration of ethics, economics, and style” but who, in the end, tracked the “decline and fall of rhetorical style and bourgeois virtue” (101). Spencer's essay “The Philosophy of Style” (1852) is usually remembered for its treatment of language as a source of “friction” which hinders the “machinery” of the human intellect: “the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived” (Spencer quoted by Longaker 102). This famous description of the “economics of style” grew out of Spencer's work in industrial engineering and his analysis of the need for efficient communication within large corporations. But Longaker claims that this is actually the least interesting feature of Spencer's analysis of style: “More interesting and more important is Spencer's adherence to the British Enlightenment faith that rhetorical style can facilitate sympathy; will ameliorate humanity, and must advance commerce” (103). This optimism that permeated Spencer's rhetorical economics was a product of his belief in the Enlightenment's theory of historical progress. He believed in the power of capitalism—not so much as an artificial creation of human beings but as a divinely ordained necessity in human evolution. Over time, however, Spencer learned to distinguish biological evolution from social evolution. In the process, according to Longaker, he became increasingly skeptical about the role and significance of individual agency. Ultimately, Spencer's fascination with the mechanisms of a deterministic evolution led him to turn away from rhetorical education and from the imaginative arts all together. As Longaker explains, Spencer “lost faith in the individual's ability to purposefully cultivate bourgeois virtue” (123).The narrative arc of Longaker's survey is clear and perspicacious. Although he examines a limited number of canonical texts in Enlightenment rhetorical theory, by shifting the frame of analysis from epistemology to economics, he succeeds in uncovering in those familiar texts many original and compelling insights. If there is any criticism one might offer, it is that, at times, the narrative is too neat and too economical. Longaker focuses so scrupulously on a progression of ideas that he sometimes neglects complicating issues that—on closer examination—may also turn out to be relevant. For example, he devotes little attention to the influence of the classical traditions of invention and argument on Enlightenment rhetoric. However, one can't help but be curious about how classical notions of scientific discovery and rhetorical advocacy were reconciled with Adam Smith's theory of economic growth in commercial society—which depends on the division of labor and specialization in the labor force (including both physical and intellectual labor). Although it may have distracted from Longaker's central interest by drawing us back to the more familiar grounds of rhetoric and epistemology, the tendency toward intellectual fragmentation—which undermines modern usage of the classical topoi—does seem to be important to any discussion of rhetorical pedagogy and bourgeois ethics. So, for instance, by ending his narrative with Spencer, Longaker overlooks other writers (John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Alexander Bain, and John Ruskin, for example) who were preoccupied with responding to Smith's division of labor because of its dangerously dehumanizing implications. The project of reframing public discourse—and specifically, of reframing public argument—in a way that would secure social justice as a constraining value to commercial culture became pervasive to nineteenth-century ethics and economics.Longaker's “rebranding” of Hugh Blair as a “moderate man” who “taught bourgeois virtue to offset the vice of luxury and to prevent the corruption of commerce” (98) is an intriguing claim. But for those of us who are accustomed to reading Blair's lectures against the backdrop of neo-classical rhetoric and eighteenth-century classical education, the argument is not entirely convincing. For example, dating at least to Charles Rollin's The Ancient History (1729), Greek history had been a stage for attacking the commercial decadence of Athenian “popular culture” and for defending an elite “high culture.” Blair's disdain for disputation and for popular oratory and his endorsement of polite belles lettres reenacted a standard trope in eighteenth-century debates about class and economic stratification. Longaker's interpretation of Blair might be more convincing had he acknowledged this historical context—or at least provided greater attention to the way Blair's notion of belles lettres would be mobilized as a class marker.Finally, it is surprising that Longaker grants Richard Whately only a brief reference in his text. Whately was, after all, a major force in nineteenth-century British interpretation of rhetoric and of political economy. A prolific writer, he offered commentary on diverse subjects that seem directly relevant to the question of bourgeois virtue: tolerance and partisanship, charity and covetousness, luxury, argumentative clarity and consistency, humility and moral judgment, and the relationship between reason and passion in persuasive discourse. Granted, any careful examination of Whately on rhetoric, economics, and ethics, would easily fill a book by itself. Still, one suspects that by adding someone like Whately to this discussion the project might have gained an extra level of depth and nuance.Despite these minor disappointments, the bottom line is that Longaker's work stands as essential reading for anyone who is interested in the relationship between rhetoric and economics. In fact, for all of us who face the prospect of spending the remainder of our careers responding to the consequences of a collective investment in Trumpean economics—and at a time in which the Supreme Court has declared that “money is speech”—Longaker's analysis gives us ample motivation to rethink our assumptions about the relevance of Enlightenment rhetorical theory to our twenty-first-century predicament. John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer each grappled with moral problems that are surprisingly similar to problems we face today. Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue may not provide a comprehensive study of the subject, but it is an impressive point of entry that is likely to inspire compelling research for the future.

In Words Are Weapons, Philippe-Joseph Salazar confronts ISIS's discourse and its persuasive effects, arguing the group reset the world order such that “youth run to them,” “cultures are annihilated,” and “energetic propaganda … has taken over our mental horizon and parasitized our language and our discourse.” This essay confronts Salazar's work, prompting consideration of his treatment, and mistreatment, of historical, colonial, and geopolitical dynamics of the terror wars. It draws specific attention to his work on the term “caliphate,” his discussion of terrorism and language, and his inattention to colonial histories affecting people throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It concludes by advocating for understanding Salazar's work in context of omittances of analysis around ongoing coalition building, movements, and protest within majority-Muslim communities around the world. Specifically, it points to ways those movements are building sustainable progress toward the aims Salazar identifies, including peace and antiauthoritarian leadership, while also working toward anticolonial frameworks.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the formal dimensions of “post-truth” as a discourse. Specifically, I read post-truth as symptom, not as an “era” or “world.” The emergence of this symptom, the post-truth signifier, directs our attention to an anxiety regarding the desire for truth, rather than its presence or absence in public discourse. Based on Jacques Lacan's theory of discourse in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, I argue that the emergence of the term “post-truth” in the popular vernacular epitomizes a masculinized discourse of hysteria. To outline the formal features of post-truth discourse, I draw upon an early use of the term “post-truth” in a 1992 article of the Nation written by screenwriter and playwright Steve Tesich. The article concludes by consulting the critical psychoanalytic writings of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray to better specify the uniquely masculine form of post-truth hysteria and its implications for public discourse.

The theme of this special issue is Post-truth. No doubt it was my exasperation with the terminological state of our collective situation that incited me in the spring of 2017 to settle upon it. What, exactly, does the hyphenated couplet mean or to what does it refer? What is its significance or sense? How is it being used, by whom, for what purpose, and with what consequences—for whom? And if, as was being asserted on nearly every side, we currently find ourselves in post-truth, how might we ever get out, presuming we may one day want as much? The original contributions by Sarah Burgess, James Crosswhite, Jason David Myres, Bradford Vivian, and Eric King Watts published herein go a long way toward answering these questions. In the pages that follow, readers will encounter five different takes on what post-truth is: a dangerously normative scene of address, a contemporary communicative environment and a series of historical philosophical movements, the discourse of the masculine hysteric, an insidious mode of governance, racism's latest word. Readers also will happen upon five different estimations of post-truth's (ab)uses and effects: the depoliticization of #MeToo, babble and echo chamber, the impotence of truth, the rationalization of authoritarian impulses and the death of democracy, and zombie relations and tribal war. As for an exodus, over the course of these pages readers will be gifted words that trace an open: kairos, apophasis, desire, pluralistic deliberation, and ideological critique.For all their significant differences—both substantive and stylistic—there is, however, at least one point on which all of the issue's contributions converge: today we do not suffer a shortfall of truth. Quite to the contrary, we are witness to its excess(es), enabled by a circuitous slippage between facts or alt-facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth. Indeed, few to none today openly profess a brazen and callous disregard of truth; instead, truth tellers all! In view of that fact, I will use the remaining pages of this introduction to briefly develop a thesis and deliver a wager. Thesis: post-truth is a distinct regime of truth singularly suited to late neoliberal governance. Wager: Derrida's deconstruction of the philosopheme truth offers invaluable instruction in the possible undoing of the post-truth regime.“Each society,” Michel Foucault famously noticed, “has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth” (1994, 131). I submit that post-truth is the name for a distinct mutation in the “‘political economy’ of truth” in the United States that has been in the making at least since the 1980s, a crucial decade during which neoliberalism began to function as a normative order of reason in public, private, and personal life. Now with other modern regimes of truth, it seems to me, post-truth shares four of five “important traits” to which Foucault attributes their truth effects: “Truth” is subject to constant economic and political incitement (the demand for [it], as much for economic production as for political power); it is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption (circulating through apparatuses of education and information whose extent is relatively broad in the social body, notwithstanding certain strict limitations); it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media); finally, it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation (“ideological” struggles). (1984, 131) To wit, post-truth as cash cow for print and electronic media and fodder for year-around political campaigning and fund-raising; English Dictionary 2016 Word of the Year; interminable open- and closed-door House and Senate hearings on Russian interference in U.S. elections; the internet, Ken Ham's Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, Breitbart, and the presidential bully pulpit; the birther movement, deep state conspiracy theory, global warming and New Creationism debates, and free speech controversies on university campuses across the country.But there is, according to Foucault, a fifth feature of all modern truth regimes that is conspicuously missing from post-truth. Whereas in all the others “‘[t]ruth’ is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions that produce it” (1984, 130), in the post-truth regime, the form of scientific discourse is displaced by a discourse very different in form and in kind. Of course, what sets scientific discourse or truth claims formally apart from other modes of address is, above all else, the disappearance of the enunciative subject as well as the universalization of its audience. In other words, there is a clear correlation between the value of any scientific claim to truth and the erasure of any and all traces of the “I,” on both ends of the exchange. Not incidentally, that is not the case in the post-truth regime wherein truth value pivots on the degree to which any claim or utterance comports or resonates with individuals' affectively imbued investments, attachments, and identifications. Per the Cambridge English Dictionary, post-truth is “an adjective relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” According to the Economist, post-truths are “assertions that ‘feel true’ but have no basis in fact” (2016). The point is amplified by C. G. Prado in the introduction to his edited collection of essays titled America's Post-truth Phenomenon: When Feelings and Opinions Trump Facts and Evidence: Post-truth is the final step in the misguided move away from objective truth to relativization of truth. If truth is objective, assertions or propositions are true depending on how things are. If truth is relative, assertions or propositions are true depending on how people take things to be. Post-truth is an extreme form of relative truth because in being subjective, it makes assertions or propositions true depending only on how individuals take things to be. (2018, 2) For the time being I wish to defer the complicated issue of the “relativization of truth” in the declared interest of not being distracted from two others. That truth has been individualized or that individuals have become, to borrow a turn of phrase from Foucault, the primary and principal points of the production, application, and adjudication of truth is one important point. That emotion and personal belief are able now to outflank even objective facts and scientific knowledge is another (the claim that literature, for example, has truths to tell has long fallen on deaf ears). Their articulation is decisive: with the regime's inflection, even inflation, of the indefinitely pluralized and individualized enunciative I who, by virtue of strong feeling, is able at any moment not only to recognize or know but, also, to tell or speak the truth, truth is privatized and immanitized, its universal and transcendental dimensions nullified altogether. Hence, what is true for any one person need not be true for everyone or anyone else; what is true for anyone now need not necessarily be true later.This thinking about post-truth as a distinct and consequential mutation in the political economy of truth in the United States prepares one to appreciate an occurrence that easily could be dismissed as insignificant, not worthy of studied reflection. In June 2017 the Fox News network dropped its wildly successful marketing tagline “Fair and Balanced.” Now how is this anything more than a trivial change in—or, for consumers who never bought it, a long overdue giving up on—appearances? “A functional change in a sign-system is,” Gayatri Spivak explained some years ago, “a violent event. Even when it is perceived as ‘gradual,’ or ‘failed,’ or yet ‘reversing itself,’ the change itself can only be operated by the force of a crisis” (1987, 197). It is from this angle that the Fox News network's erasure of “Fair and Balanced” is grasped as indicative of a crisis that may be summarily described as the epistemic drift to post-truth. Telling, too, is the network's new motto, “Most Watched. Most Trusted.” The sequence of the two syntagms is curious in the least, as conventional wisdom would have them reversed for reason of causality: because Fox delivers trustworthy news, it is the most watched network. But that is not the case here: instead the motto reads, because Fox delivers the most watched news, it is (to be) trusted. Even more, conventional wisdom would suggest that when it comes to reporting the news, “most trusted [by its viewers]” (a verb) would be rephrased as “most trust-worthy [for any viewer]” (an adjective modifying the noun or the news content delivered). The movement from one marketing tagline, “Fair and Balanced” (even if only for the purpose of keeping up the appearance of disinterestedness), to the next, “Most Watched. Most Trusted,” intimates the usefulness of the post-truth regime to late neoliberal governance. It is to this relation that I now turn.Elsewhere and on more than one occasion I have written at relative length about late neoliberalism, aspiring to lend specificity to this overused and, all too often, undefined term that typically is asked to carry the considerable weight of an overdetermined context functioning as source, origin, or ground for some phenomenon in question. In the brief compass that is the special issue editor's introduction, a short and schematic summary of it will have to do.One, I follow Foucault's lead by using the term “neoliberalism” as the name for a distinct rationality and corresponding mode of governance that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century. At its most basic, I understand any rationality to be something like a mind-set or habit of thought in accordance to which persons of every sort make sense out of and conduct their daily lives, and I understand governance as the “conduct of [that] conduct,” “at a distance” and carried out by more than juridical means (Gordon 1991, 2). Despite its actually being a complex construction, neoliberalism feels natural or given by nature to those groomed in it. Like other modes of governance, neoliberalism's (soft) power to shape human activity is secured by a whole host of institutions, apparatuses, and knowledges.Now as Foucault explains in his 1979 lectures published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, twentieth-century American neoliberalism as a rationality materializes as the effort “to use the market economy and the typical analyses of the market economy to decipher non-market relationships and phenomena which are not strictly and specifically economic but what we call social phenomena” (2008, 240). Even more specifically, then, neoliberalism is to be understood as a rationality inaugurated by a migration of economic sense making (for example, the calculus of profit and loss and the principle of laissez-faire) from the private or corporate sphere to the public sphere, from consumer relations in the strict sense to social relations in the general sense. Foucault delivers an illustrative example: In their analysis of human capital … the neo-liberals tried to explain, for example, how the mother-child relationship, concretely characterized by the time spent by the mother with the child, the quality of the care she gives, the affection she shows, the vigilance with which she follows its development, its education, and not only its scholastic but also its physical progress, the way in which she not only gives it food but also imparts a particular style to eating patterns, and the relationship she has with its eating, all constitute for the neo-liberals an investment which can be measured in time. And what will this investment constitute? It will constitute a human capital, the child's human capital, which will produce an income. What will this income be? It will be the child's salary when he or she becomes an adult. And what will the income be for the mother who made the investment? Well, the neo-liberals say, it will be a psychical income. (2008, 243–44) Summarily put, neoliberalism is a rationality that lends market sense even to so-called interpersonal relations and the micro-practices of everyday life.It is crucial to notice, however, that with neoliberalism also comes a determined and determining critique of the state. That is to say, whereas in nineteenth-century classical liberalism laissez-faire functioned as “a principle of government's self-limitation,” in post–World War II America “it is a principle turned against it” (2008, 247). Foucault elaborates: Faced with excessive governmental action, and in opposition to it, the nineteenth century sought to establish a sort of administrative jurisdiction that would enable the action of public authorities to be assessed in terms of right, whereas here we have a sort of economic that claims to action in strictly economic and market (2008, The of market analysis to is the the and, to this demand that the social be and and the of to the of from the to the and or altogether. It also is the rationality by which the of the and primary care is able to make sense. In the of the neoliberal of the state at out the with which it the and, of course, of human and individuals and private as the United she education for public education, personal and interminable for social for public of all for public and knowledge, for use for public is neoliberal of a certain of subject that is my second point. I follow Foucault in to be neoliberal primary the of the during the century and the I also take a is to say, as the primary point of of neoliberal governance. The name Foucault gives to that point of of power is of and the (2008, with to neoliberal governance, Foucault The subject is only as which does not mean that the whole subject is as In other words, the subject as does not an of any with economic It means that economic is the of one will on the of a new It also means that the becomes that power a on to the and only to the that he is That is to say, the of between the and the power on and the principle of the of power over the will be only this of of is the of and the But this does not mean that every every subject is an economic (2008, As Foucault explains in the series of is a subject of interest for the state only to the extent that its conduct is in market and Foucault points out that conduct takes in what he terms “an of on the one in the form of to a series of and, on the in the form of production, to the of or which his to the production of the of (2008, on the one to over which neoliberal have no and on the other “to the of will in their activity a an That is to say, in the market of and to upon laissez-faire makes itself as the by which individuals their and, in the Indeed, what Foucault as of the relationships of the social to the that is, the of neoliberalism is the historical of for also to function to in the care for The of course, is that as is by a in a situation Foucault with to the which happen to and with to the he for (2008, it is not to the neoliberal as but to the that virtue one of the of the neoliberal of the I use the term to a relatively but in I certain that in other and for example, in of in I will be to call late neoliberal and have their to here I to late twentieth-century neoliberalism's to and of in and the this of neoliberal governance, has the his of me that of has a general in how human and conduct in the century. As he it, very of who we of the we are and the of we have this I mean that the of the a of the of our point is to that but human has to as a the sense of the in the political but human now as a new of of in the political what is and in with this but human has been a in neoliberal political the and its terms of analysis have been to the of the has emerged the of the that is grasped at the but … in terms of its are understood less in terms of their of carried on a more in terms of a global economy of and the is a and with yet from a to the body, to be and this gives a in what of the for has the of the is and the is less about of the than it is about Hence, by I mean to point to a rationality that the or or by which or are made to and to others and those and, no by the of any social order or historical the social is for this point I the post-truth regime's with and usefulness to late neoliberal and governance is to the regime of truth whose is on the and of the enunciative I and whose is the and of truth a mode of governance whose primary is but whose primary point of of (soft) power is Indeed, at this point I might it this post-truth is the of has been asserted by more than one and on that it is to the of Foucault and or the and that we find ourselves in this we call post-truth. I one example, have the form of truth most today have no time for or and are to claims about relative other than to its form of truth is of and is in the of Michel Foucault and their from of truth, like Foucault and objective truth and truth to of truth was the in the in historical from modern to I it could be from the In fact, I will my introduction to this special issue to a with a that as a deconstruction will have something important to about how to post-truth well in of its Indeed, the been there from the in the thinking on the trace and the of the the universal of truth is also these the is to on is the It is the of the which is to say, the the not as a an and an as as the of would have it” but, instead, as by the trace of another which never as then, that is not to be grasped in the sense as on a but in the general sense as a of and made the case for in the general sense in and I the of to the the one the the the that is would not as the or opposition which gives them is the most significance of the to as the of the and functioning of an not by any would be the a in the of a trace the other as other in the no would do its and no would as the force of Derrida's is not against and for as Prado and others would have a of the of that classical will not the effort is to at the of both and be it with to or truth. and there is no of or truth the of or truth, even if all of the of or of truth are will also have been the point of Derrida's with a on the of to has this to about the of the and the the transcendental and the is not only the and to a truth whose would with all The or of being in a is no and in with it is the of As long as is or can not be in the … is not The and in this not the of possible in as that is the also is subject to even As The whole point of Derrida's analysis is the being determined and universal in an sense and are and not because are not but because the very of the universal sphere can only be in through like of this the to itself the possible to turn its the and the of the universal to relation that between truth and its also to the relation of and the and the given state of our In this particular historical the at is to against the to to the occasion of the of the in the of (the then, are five very different on the state of our post-truth as a the call to that any in our post-truth our thinking about it both and I want to all of the for their contributions to this issue and my deep to for his and of the

Anyone who does not simply refuse to perceive decline will hasten to claim a special justification for his own personal existence, his activity and involvement in this chaos. There are as many exceptions for one's own sphere of action, place of residence, and moment of time as there are insights into the general failure. A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence—rather than, through impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion—is triumphing almost everywhere. That is why the air is so thick with life theories and world views, and why in this country they cut so presumptuous a figure, for almost always they finally serve to sanction some utterly trivial private situation. For just the same reason the air is teeming with phantoms, mirages of glorious cultural figures breaking upon us overnight in spite of it all, for everyone is committed to the optical illusions of his isolated standpoint.—Walter Benjamin, “Imperial Panorama, VIII,” One-Way Street It is difficult to see the question of truth. In the imperial panorama that so concerned Benjamin, the question of truth was disappeared by a war's seemingly endless violence. In this moment, now, it appears to disappear into the midst (though not the fog, not by the long shot—of our own inattention) of endless war, a violence that drones over Hannah Arendt's worry that it is “in the nature of the political realm to be at war with truth in all of its forms” (1993, 239) and drowns out Alexandre Koyré's pressing warning that the assertion and experience of “essential enmity” renders the lie not simply a virtue but a “primary and fundamental rule of behavior” ([1943] 2017, 146).Without question, there is now (again) deep and ongoing concern for the deficient or excessive state (inside and outside the nation-state) of truth and what is to be said and done in the apparent aftermath of veracity. Post-truth has provoked—no doubt, but perhaps not always well. From the left, right, and center, it has so often led into the cul-de-sac of what Foucault called “commentary,” a proliferating reiteration that has relied on a prominent but question-begging pronouncement about the definitive meaning of a “word of the year” to foreclose if not deter inquiry into the question of truth. More than a bit of this common cause is articulated and enacted in works such as Michiko Kakutani's The Death of Truth (2018). Though nearly unreadable for the pretension that covers its conceptual confusion (including an astonishing indifference to the implications of the mythology that is explicitly claimed—perhaps incorrectly—to abide in its title), this book takes care to tick all of the “proper” boxes: consistent and unrelenting terminological conflation (for example, and with no apparent need to consider their order, post-truth = fake news = alt-facts = lying = propaganda = opinion = subjectivity = extreme relativism = denialism, etc., etc.)—check; a call to cling with unwavering faith to the banister of a monolithic “science” (the call's simplicity recalls the sole and quaint “Science Building” that adorns the campus of Bob Jones University)—check; a pronounced aversion to any inquiry that would reflect on forms of truth and how such variety may underpin and trouble the expression of truth (i.e., there is no time for either dawdling philosophy or indulgent rhetoric)—check; an incoherent and cherry-picking tirade against something named “postmodernism,” an attack that consistently conflates (and refuses to actually read) inter alia structuralism, poststructuralism, constructivism, deconstruction, and genealogy, all in order to foment (or just foam) against the specter of a deeply confused notion of “subjectivity” and then rally for a return to proper and unified reason, one that appears unable to hear anything of Arendt's claim in “Lying in Politics,” that “moral outrage” will not facilitate an interest in truth and that the nonaccidental arrival of lying into politics is indicative of the fact that much “deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts” (6; emphasis in original; it is telling that Kakutani excludes this idea from her own quotation of Arendt, see 12–13)—check, check, and check; the expressed wish to recover a pure and proper language for public life (and, on the down low, the unquestionable virtue of pragmatic prose, aka journalism), one that will somehow (remember—there can be no rhetoric and likely no speech-action) undo America's “deep division,” a divide that is itself never queried in terms of whether it amounts to stasis or a rather self-confirming (and defeating) conceit on the part of those who prefer not to hear anything but what they want to hear—check; shoot-from-the-hip warnings about the violent and totalitarian tendencies of a post-truth world, as if truth lacks any manner of coercion and as if there is not standing disagreement (not least among victims) as to what regimes make of truth claims and the various ways in which they do and do not make claims on truth—check.If the question of truth is too often hidden and overwritten by so much chatter, including the incoherent pronouncements of those who seem to believe that having character is the same thing as expression limited to 280 characters, the question reappears in the timely and challenging contributions that compose this special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric. Indeed, the articles that follow shed different and crucial light on the emergence, dynamics, and stakes of life in the midst of post-truth—they also forge interesting connections with other recent work in the journal, including several of the contributions published in P&R's fiftieth anniversary issue (50:4, 2017). I want to express my sincere and full gratitude to Barbara Biesecker, who correctly insisted on the need for a special issue on post-truth, imagined its form and convened a distinguished group of contributors, and then tirelessly served as the issue's editor. It is an honor and a pleasure to work with Professor Biesecker, a genuine scholar and an ever so thoughtful colleague.

ABSTRACTJacques Rancière's account of the political demonstration of equality makes an important contribution to long-standing conceptualizations of democracy as occurring apart from state institutions. Rancière's performative account of democracy, however, recognizes the impurity of political language used within state institutions as well as in democratic events. Rancière's polemics against “metapolitical” theories of social existence and the state take issue with how such forms of philosophy assume the primacy of their own capacity to explain political language. Community rights ordinances (CROs) demonstrate how conceptualizing shared political language as doxa reveals the possibility that a metapolitical rhetorical style can occur within Rancière's method of equality. CROs also demonstrate how the method of equality can operate in the context of democratic philosophizing.

The Enlightenment can be described as an attempt to make reason more worldly in order to make the world more reasonable, and the Enlightenment project is characterized by an unflagging confidence in reason's ability to ensure humanity's progress toward a more peaceful, civilized, and moral social and political order. However, the luminaries of the Enlightenment did not succumb to the naive belief that disembodied reason was capable of exercising an immediate influence on human history. To the contrary, these thinkers recognized that humanity always already mediates between reason and history and that reason only ever becomes efficacious in the world by being at work in and on human beings. Accordingly, they recognized that their attempt to promote human progress could succeed only in and through a program of universal education. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment not only thought deeply about the nature and purpose of education; they also saw their own intellectual efforts as contributions to the education of the human race. Indeed, the great Enlightenment thinkers were driven to serious reflection on their own practice of writing as the vehicle for their overarching attempt to engage, teach, and shape their readers. Though it is now common to describe the Enlightenment as a transition away from humanism's concern with speech, rhetoric, and community toward a one-sided emphasis on mathematics, method, and subjectivity, this characterization is a drastic oversimplification that fails to attend to the necessary and abiding connection between Enlightenment, education, and communication.Immanuel Kant is exemplary, in this context. For though he did not write an independent treatise on rhetoric, he emphasizes the vital role that rational discourse and effective communication play in promoting freedom and morality. Thus, Kant characterizes the Enlightenment itself as an attempt to educate the human race by cultivating in each individual the capacity and courage to employ their own understanding to make rational judgments without relying on the guidance of authoritative opinion or received custom, and he argues that this pedagogical project requires, as its necessary condition, the public use of reason, in which individuals communicate their own considered views to their community. Kant thereby indicates that the Enlightenment is inseparable from the modes of communication that make Enlightenment possible and a fortiori from an account of what modes of communication are conducive to the Enlightenment project.G. L. Ercolini's Kant's Philosophy of Communication takes Kant's account of the connection between Enlightenment and the public use of reason as its starting point. Noting that the public use of reason is nothing if not a way of speaking to and with others, Ercolini's principal thesis is that Kant not only offers “a complex philosophy of communication, but, as it turns out, rhetoric, debate, and exchange emerge as central to his enlightenment philosophy” (2). Ercolini begins by noting that historians of rhetoric have tended to overlook Kant completely or to emphasize his noteworthy criticisms of rhetoric (9). However, Ercolini avers that “a little digging” allows us “to get past Kant's curt dismissals” of rhetoric and reveals that there is, in fact, “much in his work that relies on an important role for speech, rhetoric, communication, and public discourse” (6). Accordingly, Ercolini undertakes the daunting but important task of drawing out the theory of communication underlying Kant's various “discussions of rhetoric, ethics, aesthetics, and style” (2).Ercolini begins her analysis of Kant's philosophy of communication by reviewing Kant's several explicit discussions of rhetoric (chapter 1). She rightly observes that Kant is often quite critical of the art of rhetoric, and she notes that “Kant's objection to rhetoric … is twofold: first, to its deceptive purpose and, second, to its violation of the audience's goodwill and autonomy” (33). That said, Ercolini emphasizes that Kant's criticisms of rhetoric do not prevent him from acknowledging the need to speak well, with practiced eloquence and measured style (40). Indeed, Kant appends an important footnote to his most famous and trenchant critique of rhetoric in which he praises the figure of the Ciceronian orator, who speaks “without art and full of vigor” (40). In the final analysis, then, Kant's explicit discussions of rhetoric are ambivalent. Kant is critical of rhetoric, to be sure, but he also points beyond rhetoric to a mode of speaking that is both praiseworthy and salutary. Thus, Ercolini concludes, “Kant's treatment of rhetoric, albeit confounding and requiring much patience, ends up opening possibilities for distinguishing good from bad rhetoric” (41). The remainder of Ercolini's book is devoted to exploring these possibilities in an attempt to develop “a Kantian account of what could be considered as a positive role for rhetoric” (34).Schematically, Ercolini's analysis of Kant's philosophy of communication seems to fall into three parts: one that deals with the practical significance of Kantian rhetoric (chapters 2–3), one that deals with the aesthetic characteristics of Kantian rhetoric (chapters 4–5), and one that begins to develop an account of what Ercolini calls “rhetorical judgment” (conclusion). In the realm of the practical, Ercolini first examines Kant's interest in and analysis of popularity (chapter 2) and then turns to a more direct examination of the moral significance of rhetoric (chapter 3). Ercolini's treatment of Kant's account of popularity is one of the strongest and most important sections of the book. Noting Kant's well-known criticism of popularity in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (77–79), Ercolini illuminates this criticism's place within Kant's broader critique of Popularphilosophie, on one hand (81–87), and his own attempt to clarify, popularize, and promote the Critique of Pure Reason by publishing the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, on the other (60–77). Ercolini's central claim is that Kant is critical of the pursuit of popularity for its own sake but that he also recognizes the need to popularize his own thought. Of course, Kant is well aware that it is difficult to navigate between the demand for rigor and well-groundedness and the demand for clarity and accessibility, but Ercolini concludes that he sees the attempt to meet both demands as one of the central tasks of philosophical communication.Chapter 3 turns from an examination of popularity to an investigation of the normative principles that ought to govern the quest for popularity. In taking up the relationship between Kant's moral philosophy and his philosophy of communication, however, Ercolini turns away from what she describes as the “strict and morally rigorous Kant,” who “is interested in determining the a priori principle of moral action divested of any particularities, experience, or other intervening factors”, to what she describes as “another ethics in Kant”—“an other-ethics,” “an ethics of the empirical,” “an improper ethics” (92, 106, 104). Ercolini's claim is that Kant's anthropological writings reveal an approach to ethics that is “anchored in the realm of the contingent, the situational, and the momentary” (93). On Ercolini's reading, this “improper ethics” corrects for “the radical interiority of the categorical imperative” by offering an account of the human as necessarily directed toward and obligated by the community in which he or she abides (110). And precisely because it orients one toward community, the “other side” of Kant's ethics both demands and describes forms of communication fitting for moral community, as Ercolini demonstrates through a fascinating analysis of Kant's concrete discussions of communal dining (115–20).After completing her examination of the “practical” side of Kant's philosophy of communication, Ercolini turns to the “aesthetic” side in order to consider the role of Kant's aesthetic theory (chapter 4) and his account of style and tone (chapter 5). Chapter 4's overarching goal is to explain why Kant ranks poetry above rhetoric in the hierarchy of the fine arts. Ercolini argues that a careful analysis of Kant's argument reveals that both poetry and rhetoric can provoke a lawless and disordered relation between the cognitive capacities but that both can also provoke a lawful and harmonious free play of the faculties (154–64). Accordingly, Ercolini once again concludes that Kant's aesthetic theory points toward a positive account of rhetoric, his explicit criticisms of rhetoric notwithstanding.Chapter 5 offers an important analysis of Kant's account of style and tone. Regarding style, Ercolini stresses Kant's recognition of the need to balance logical and aesthetic perfection in order to achieve a “perspicaciousness” that is conducive to true popularity (167–75), while avoiding a fashionable, enthusiastic, and affected style that undermines rational autonomy (175–81). Whereas style can and should engage the understanding, Ercolini argues that Kant thinks that tone necessarily engages the affects (186). Thus, Kant's account of tone is primarily negative in orientation—he emphasizes the need to avoid a “superior” tone that smacks of “elitism, where the philosopher is one of the few who uncovers the secret of philosophy and, as such, holds a superior position over the many who have no such direct access” (193). And yet this negative posture points beyond itself to Kant's commitment to a way of speaking that “facilitates understanding and encourages engagement and exchange” (197).In her conclusion, Ercolini seeks to draw the insights from the preceding chapters together in order to offer an account of Kant's Enlightenment legacy. She pays particular attention to Kant's popular essays. Drawing out their historical context, she characterizes these essays as “argumentative moments in dynamic and lively debates” that describe, theorize, and establish “the communicative space of a vision of politics focusing on public modes of engagement” (202, 200). Ercolini concludes that Kant's popular essays reveal an implicit theory of what she calls “rhetorical judgment,” that is, the “practices of submitting one's thought to the public realm, achieving balance between rigorous examination … and aesthetic perfection” in order to attain true popularity (215).Having offered an overview of Ercolini's argument, I conclude this review by developing three critical suggestions in hopes of inspiring further reflection on the nature, meaning, and significance of Kant's philosophy of communication. The first critical suggestion concerns Ercolini's treatment of Kant's ethical theory. As noted above, Ercolini's treatment of Kant's moral philosophy turns on her distinction between Kant's account of a pure and abstract ethical theory grounded in the categorical imperative and the “impure” and therefore “improper” ethics that Kant presents in his anthropological writings. Though Ercolini is right to claim that scholars have tended to emphasize the former at the expense of the latter, she goes too far in her own attempt to correct for the scholarship's one-sidedness. For Ercolini goes so far as to claim that it is possible to read Kant as grounding morality in anthropology (106). However, the mature Kant consistently maintains that the categorical imperative is and must be the foundational principle of human morality. This observation is not intended to discredit Ercolini's claim that Kant's anthropological writings shed important light on his understanding of communication—they surely do—but it does call Ercolini's way of drawing a sharp distinction between two different “sides” of Kant's ethics into question. It would be productive to further develop Ercolini's careful examination of Kant's anthropological writings by exploring the important and vital connection between Kant's philosophy of communication and his account of the nature and significance of the fundamental principle of morality, that is, the categorical imperative.A second critical suggestion has to do with Ercolini's way of abstracting from Kant's account of reason as spontaneous, free, teleological, and moral. For Kant, the categorical imperative is grounded in reason. The moral law is always reason's moral law, and reason always already demands that morality be efficacious in the world of lived experience. This demand is root and fruit of Kant's account of the highest good, and it ultimately takes the form of an obligation to establish what Kant describes, variously, as a moral world, a kingdom of ends, and an ethical community. Attending to Kant's account of reason suggests that the categorical imperative, as reason's moral law, is always already bound up with concerns with and interests in the well-being of the community. Indeed, Kant emphasizes the importance of speech, communication, and the public use of reason at least in part because these activities are conducive to the realization of the highest good in the world. Accordingly, we do not need to turn away from Kant's “proper” ethics in order to explore the connection between morality, community, and communication. Ercolini's account of the role of communication in humanity's social and political life might benefit from further reflection on the central role that the highest good plays in Kant's moral theory.A final critical suggestion concerns Ercolini's treatment of the Critique of Judgment. For, though Ercolini offers a general summary of Kant's project in this work and a careful analysis of Kant's account of the relationship between poetry and rhetoric, she overlooks several other important and explicit discussions of communication that Kant offers in the third Critique. In particular, an account of Kant's philosophy of communication would benefit from a discussion of Kant's claim that judgments of taste are characterized by their universal communicability, of Kant's account of genius as an artist who is characterized by a special talent for a unique mode of communication, and especially of Kant's suggestion in CPJ §60 that beautiful art is capable of contributing to social and cultural progress by facilitating communication and sympathy between different social classes. Ercolini's discussion of the third Critique is helpful so far as it goes, but this work contains more resources for developing a complete account of Kant's philosophy of communication than Ercolini suggests.In the final analysis, Ercolini's treatment of Kant's philosophy of communication is clear, original, and provocative, and it pursues a number of important questions that are typically overlooked in the Kant scholarship. Kant's Philosophy of Communication makes an original and timely contribution to the scholarship. It will be of interest to scholars working on Kant's social and political theory, and it will be required reading for anyone interested in Kant's understanding of speech, rhetoric, and communication.

As we so often trip about and lose our breath over speaking precisely to “what is rhetoric(al)?,” it should come to no surprise that being asked what we want of rhetoric, of language, of an other (in language) moves us to fidget, even brings us to blush. But if we pause with these questions, lips parted without yet the words to answer, we may notice a peculiar craving that churns before the naming. We want of rhetoric—but what? We are compelled toward rhetoric—whereto? We seek in rhetoric—for? If this desire, what Hannah Arendt calls an appetite for love for its own sake, refers to the will to “have and to hold,” our love in/for/through rhetoric always seems to slip from capture. So much so that after a whirl of scholarship that attempts to wed or to divorce rhetoric from a definitive purpose, from its technē, we must now let the lids of our eyes fold into a softer gaze. What do we want of rhetoric? At last, it spills over: “I want you to be.”1We are invited into this vulnerability, to voice such a confession, in Mari Lee Mifsud's Rhetoric of the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication. This book—itself a living form of rhetorical gift/giving—in some way revisits very traditional themes of the ethics and sociality of communication and does so within the canonically sanctioned context of classical antiquity. That said, it possesses a far more adventurous spirit than do missionary readings of Aristotle's Rhetoric. For Mifsud, the possibilities of gift/giving in communication spread beyond exchange and art; she explores rhetoric's gift/giving as “prior to and in excess of art, not as some rudimentary system of relating that awaits systematic and philosophical development, but as some thing, some event, some movement, other than art, other than technē, incommensurable even, meaning outside the system of exchange altogether, beyond exchangist figures, meaning other than signification, other than symbols, yet always already within and functioning” (3–4). In these first pages, Mifsud gently loosens rhetoric from the grip of its application. Should we not want it for our own desired ends, should we let it move, rhetoric in/as/through gift/giving gives back to us new ways of thinking about communication as in and outside of word exchange, both stirring inside and brimming over technē.Among the multiple gifts/givens that “rhetoric of and as gift” offers is that it frees us to openly explore the relationship between language and love, two creatures who have long been twisted together in the corner. Love in/for/through rhetoric is spoken just above a whisper by Mifsud (such secrecy may be well matched to the ethereal relationship she draws between rhetoric and the gift). “What Aristotle himself called happiness, Cixous, jouissance, Schrag, love, Spivak, care, and Johnstone, freedom” is draped by her more explicit elaboration of “giving rhetoric” as poiesis, creative and generative practice (11). In this vein, Mifsud gathers her chapters around three interlaced topics: 1) creative rather than technical critical orientation; 2) the gift's sacrifice for/by communication; and 3) gift/giving rhetoric as relationality that makes way for the polis. She takes up these topics through an examination of Homeric gift/givens in Aristotle's Rhetoric that have up to this point been a hushed dimension of the field's work. In so doing, Mifsud both explains (in excess) and performs (poetic) rhetoric of and as gift, giving way to a “creative consciousness, capable of what Cixous calls “Other-love” (148). In short, Mifsud's articulations of the “and” that dwells between “rhetoric and the gift” allows us as critics and citizens to imagine and practice love in language by letting whatever is other be.An aside dedicated to (the technē of) exorida, the (art of) beginning, and a moment for reaching shared understanding: it would both betray and misrepresent Mifsud's insights to here tidily align each chapter with creative historiography, sacrifice, and givens in the polis. As she is committed to letting the poetic emerge and exhibit, Mifsud's footing in her project is not steady, and the reader swerves behind her shifts. Therefore, this review wanders more thematically than chronologically. It slides amid subjects, and it invites further wandering. Yes, the task of “review” remains at hand, however the occasion calls, too, for embracing logos as “a gathering,” an “invitation to you to see what you might see, to be free, … to imagine all the more to be imagined” (55). Echoing what is familiar but doing so in a way that allows what is being said to nonetheless be experienced as new is, after all, the function of Homeric poiesis.2Mifsud continuously pronounces distinctions between creative and technical orientations, between Homeric and technical rhetoric, and so tempts her readers to believe that there must be some contest between rhetoric that is contained and rhetoric that is allowed to be in excess; however, she is very clear throughout her book that poiesis is not anti-technē. That is, poetic gifts/givens pulsate in carefully composed expressions and, at the same time, exceed them. Her traversing of these planes, as she all the while welcomes any surprise that comes from their movements, indicates a creative rather than technical orientation toward thought, language, and other, fully appreciating the gift rather than reflexively tucking it behind organization and argumentation. This is not to say that operating from a technical orientation erases the poetic; it simply emphasizes a means-to-an-end approach at the expense of letting the poetic come into view. As Mifsud puts it, technical thinking/writing/acting entails “an exacting efficiency to achieve the end of reason” without yielding to its excess (19).Mifsud articulates this difference in the first chapter through a focused comparison of how Homer and Aristotle have been historicized as rhetorical figures. Here she takes issue with technical historiographical interpretations of Homer, which depict him as “being a poet with a run-on style” and lacking rationality. Technical language reveals “a complex mind capable of abstract and critical thinking,” and thus Homer is seen as “primitive” (20). The technical historiographic interpretations of Homer are not just considered “technical” because of their emphasis on technē (for Homer's so-called failure to contribute a technē of rhetoric may be attributed to the mistake of counting him among rhetoricians to begin with) but because they measure Homer against Aristotle's view of rhetoric, certain defined preconditions for the rhetorical, and the particular demands of the polis. That is, evaluations of Homer on these grounds affirm the authority of Rhetoric and position Homer as the negative, the other whose form can only be traced recognized when aligned with what forms of rhetoric are presumed proper (21–22). Mifsud asks what an affirmative attitude toward Homer would offer to rhetoric: reconsidering Homeric gifts/giving and their relationship to language and being blends and blurs the borders of rhetoric solidified by technē, fixations on the logical, the figurative, and the representative (25–26). She spends the remaining chapters of the book performing a “creative historiographic” approach for the purposes of exploring how Homer contributes otherwise to our understanding of rhetoric. Put differently (here she borrows from Deleuze), Mifsud seeks to “deterritorialize” what we know of rhetoric, all the while appreciating that ultimately rhetoric will be “reterritorialized” by way of technē (28). “Such a creative orientation toward history and theory writing allows for rhetoric, in acknowledgment and performance of the gift, to offer a return to itself to and in excess of exchange” (30).Commitment to a creative orientation to the rhetorical calls for giving (in)to the excess of language and yielding to the multiple experiences a poetic rhetorical act makes possible; such an orientation immediately transforms the relationship the rhetor has with words, who is no longer bound up by purpose or utilization but allowed to roam. It also transforms the rhetor's relationship with the addressee for whom the words were uttered. Poiesis puts to bed any expectations that a message or meaning is transmitted or even merely “understood;” instead, language (and the other sharing in it) enjoys the loving liberty that comes from being let to be. Mifsud describes this “hospitable” rhetor in Deleuzian terms as no longer an author but a production studio undergoing wholly creative labor without method or rules (146). And, for hospitality's sake, the giving rhetor/rhetoric as gift must demand some sacrifice. Sacrifice “informs the gift and is an effect of the gift. To give requires sacrifice of some sort, for to give is to give away, to let go” (95). A creative relationship to rhetoric requires a radical openness to/with language, as it requires letting the other pull from our words whatever he or she sees in the expression without the rhetor burdening him or her with what it really means, and thus Homer is the personification of this giving.Specifically, Homer plays host to Aristotle. Homer is referred to and relied on throughout the Rhetoric, but he is not exactly paid homage (95, 100). Sacrifice explicitly requires the giving away of goods hard to come by and a giving away of self—Aristotle sacrifices Homer by “circulat[ing] only the thinnest slivers of Homeric doxa,” compressing vivid scenes from his epics into “sound bites” that fit the defined purpose of rhetorical technē (96), and by sacrificing the “poet” himself to “the new signification of rhetor, more in line with the norms and needs of classical technē” (100). Mifsud is very clear that Aristotle's sacrifice of Homer, Homeric givens, and poiesis “should not be considered an abuse of Homer. Homeric hospitality is unconcerned with exploitation by the one in receipt of its gift, and by virtue of poiesis, even though the poetic is reduced by Aristotle to prose more fitting for the technical, “we have no ‘true’ Homer' … to recover” (96). Homer, agnostic toward himself and his creation, makes his offerings without acknowledgment as such or obligation to reciprocate or to receive in any so-called appropriate manner (the sort of offering Aristotle names kharis in his Rhetoric). Aristotle's appropriation of Homer marks the taking place of giving rhetoric, and just as Homer's epics inhabit Aristotle's Rhetoric (however subtly), just as poiesis sighs between technē's articulations, the gift/giving gives rise to and nurtures the rhetorical.Nonetheless Mifsud remarks that our memory of rhetoric's foundations in the gift/giving has faded. Its appearance has been stamped over repeatedly by “procedural operation” and “technical knowledge,” even in the polis, the place where men supposedly show themselves for who they truly are (103). At this point, after insisting for over one hundred pages that poiesis has never really abandoned rhetoric, even if it just faintly glows in the face of technē, Mifsud mourns poiesis as if it has been lost, given away to the “service of technē.” Its dissolution in our interactions with others is tragic: “Things and people in a polis culture are related through distant, abstract mechanisms of power rather than personal relations, through technical proceduralism and utility more so than through hospitality and honor.” The forfeiting of the poetic to the technical not only restrains creativity capacity and limits our access to worlds yet known through language but also transforms communication from a medium through which we come to know and love the other into a barrier wedged between the self and other (103).With the erosion of rhetoric as gift/giving by “end-driven goals,” the other does not appear at all except as a commodity, one whom the rhetor seeks to win over, to persuade, to possess as a means to securing the rhetor's own ambitions and aims. In sum, rhetoric drained of the poetic, rhetoric made into merely “a technical apparatus to secure judgment,” is rhetoric drained of its ethical and genuinely political dimension (104). This dramatic warning against forgetting Homer raises some crucial questions about the polis in the midst of the field's ongoing romanticization of civic discourse, democracy, and justice. Mifsud grants that these matters are indeed worthy of attention but maintains that they neither can nor should dictate rhetoric's expanse (104). It would be fair to say that Mifsud does not ask that we abandon our idealistic vision of the polis but to embrace it more tightly, and forging such intimacy, she suggests, is possible only by recognizing the limits of technē and reaching into its excess, where the poetic lies in waiting.In the latter portion of her book, Mifsud is most lucid about the stakes of her appeals to recover rhetorical gift/giving. When the rhetorical is curbed by a sought-after result, when the other is not to be seen or acknowledged through rhetoric but possessed by it for the purpose of policy, allegiance, lawfulness, equality, and so forth, the ethical and political relations made possible in and through language are compromised. It is beside the point that these purposes may be valuable or good; “possession” is the operative phrase: renouncing Homeric poiesis directs our visions and capacities only toward a “particular order of things” at the expense of recognition of the other qua other and at the expense of recognizing language as such.3 It feels as though Mifsud is calling for rhetoricians to reclaim the poetic in order to remember rhetoric's origins in the gift, thereby radically rethinking what sort of inquiry rhetoric should take up and how we engage in our questions together through the written and spoken word. Do we revitalize the subject of style? Are we now obliged to open our understanding of publics in a way that intimates rhetoric gift/giving? Maybe. Whatever instruction Mifsud leaves to her reader is confused by her compulsory bow to Derrida's critique of gift giving (127, 139–43, 161). “The archaic Homeric gift economy is not our savior,” she assures (143).But if the rhetorical is concerned with the question of language and (love of) the other, why not heed Homer's example as host? Mifsud's most compelling contribution is a critique of the ways we indefinitely affix argument, persuasion, policy, and democracy to rhetoric's art; or, put differently, the ways in which we have only asked after how language can serve our self-determined appearances or preconceived designs and purposes. The gift/giving rhetoric requests at last (as it always has) to let the question of language—language as a question—surface, to let it shimmer in the expression of the other, to let it ring in the other's voice. True, this is a matter of love. Never mind that gifts may implicate language or the other in a reciprocal exchange. Should we be wary to let language in turn give voice? Through this thesis we approach a Levinasian dream, whereby the other finds himself in (the other's) expression, and the other is recognized in an intimate state, already giving of herself. This is not obligation so much as a joining, a touching and being touched. Mifsud is thus too humble in her final appeals: the spectacular transformation of our relationship to language that Rhetoric and the Gift performs—throwing back into question what we know/that we have ever actually known/whether we can ever know rhetoric's potential—is the necessary beginning of loving an other and of loving the world.

ABSTRACT Walter Benjamin's warning against unphilosophical “astonishment that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible” has new urgency in the face of real estate developer and reality-show host Donald Trump's surprise victory in the presidential election of 2016. Philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist Georg Simmel's 1900 magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money, provides valuable orientation at a moment when the expectation that public discourse must be oriented by norms of truth and accuracy is under siege—not least by those who ascended to power openly denigrating the value of expertise and the specialized knowledge long regarded as essential to modern government. Trump has an instinctive grasp of Simmel's decisive insight that “money is the strongest and most immediate symbol” of the cynical truism that “the only absolute is the relativity of things.” Situating philosophy at the limits of disciplinary ways of knowing, the Philosophy of Money develops a modernist, performative strategy of thought that turns relativity into a philosophical resource. It can help us to counter the dissolution of the ideal of veracity in an era of absolutized marketing by disentangling thought from narratives of rational progress that obscure its opposite and interrogating the limitations of the professionalized ordering of knowledge practices in which expertise continues to be produced and maintained. Simmel's strategy for embracing the fragmentation, multiplicity, and uncertainty of human experience may thereby help us address the complexity and ambiguity of a historical situation growing increasingly surreal as techno-scientific progress goes hand in hand with post-truth politics.

Aristotle's Organon provides an ingeniously systematic way to identify the discrete nature of disciplines that concern human thought and expression. While such an approach helps to understand the unique properties that warrant the recognition of disciplines as discrete, Aristotle's system of classification does not capture well the dynamics, synergy, and symbiotic relationships that appear when disciplines intersect. Perhaps, in fairness to Aristotle, his task was not to explore such relationships, but that does not mean that we should not try to better understand the nature and impact of disciplines such as rhetoric by examining their interplay within the dynamics of social interaction. It is this dynamism of disciplinary interaction that concerns Nathan Crick's Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece. Specifically, Crick's insightful work concentrates on how power (kratos) serves as the common denominator that grounds all disciplines of human thought and expression in classical Greece. Crick's perspective is shared by earlier scholars of rhetoric. For example, Jeffrey Walker's brilliant 2000 volume Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity helps us to understand that while disciplines may have discrete properties they are nonetheless inextricably bound together in the intersections of human symbolic action. That is, both mimetic and nonmimetic disciplines (e.g., poetry and rhetoric) work together in the social interplay of a culture's activities and, consequently, both their discrete (Aristotelian) properties and their relationship(s) with one another should be the object of study. The significance of Crick's Rhetoric and Power is revealed within the study of such relationships.Crick argues that rhetoric functioned as power in ancient Greece and that this phenomenon explains both the social contributions and the centrality of rhetoric in Hellenic culture. The quest, use, and abuse of power is a controlling force in classical Greece. “What is particularly notable about the Classical Greek inquiry into power,” Crick observes, “is that it always ended up placing power in relationship to speech” (3). From this perspective, the techne or “art” of rhetoric enables the manufacturing of power in human communication. Drawing on such modern thinkers as rhetoricians Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, and Chaïm Perelman, as well as philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Friedrich Nietzsche, Crick explains how this rhetorical capacity has resulting social consequences across all fields of human communication. In short, Crick's work suggests that rhetoric is the art for creating and performing social dramatism through “representative publicity” (242n26).Crick's orientation encourages us to reconceptualize rhetoric by moving away from Aristotelian notions of rhetoric as solely field-dependent casuistry and toward an idea of it as a phenomenon that encompasses all Hellenic disciplines during the classical period. To this end, Rhetoric and Power re-views such dominant aspects of ancient Greece as Homeric, Presocratic, tragic, Sophistic, Isocratean, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought. Crick's thorough and systematic treatment of each of these vectors of Greek thought is framed by the relationship between rhetoric, power, and drama. “Rhetoric,” Crick argues, “therefore stands in relationship to power as a facilitator and medium,” and “any discussion of rhetoric must be grounded in a conception of power,” since it is rhetoric that functions as a medium for power through a spectrum of symbolic forms (6, 10). All major forms of art have the capacity to serve as media to perform power; this social dimension of art helps to dramatize the crises, struggles, and issues of the time, and it is through this dramatization that we can both understand and appreciate the scope of rhetoric's influence. For example, this view of rhetoric enables us to see how the Homeric rhapsode's dramatic narrative shaped the paideia of culture through an oral epic. We can see how Presocratic philosophers, dramatists, Sophists, and Plato shifted views of power, representing it as a human capacity rather than the province of gods. Crick also shows—and I believe these are the best points of the book—that the written forms of rhetoric taken on by the historian Thucydides and the educator Isocrates demonstrated a sort of literate power that not only facilitated abstract thought but moved the mentality of Greeks from an oral, tribal perspective to a panhellenic view, transforming the provincial outlook of the civic polis into the more catholic nationalism sought by Alexander. This view of power does not carry with it any inherently negative or cynical connotation. Power, exercised through dramatized rhetoric, can be used as a force for justice; such dramatizations can praise virtue and condemn vice and can provide didactic lessons from history that offer a moral standard and normative corrective.The strength of this volume is Crick's demonstration of how the development of Greek thought and culture is best understood through power. “This effort to transform the nature of power,” Crick observes, “by drawing on rational and mythic resources remains at the core of almost any successful rhetorical endeavor” (41). Homeric discourse served as the medium for maintaining and propagating long-held traditional values, but those values would be challenged. Presocratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, for example, would introduce the notion that mythic views should yield to the newly discovered power of logos (37). The birth of tragedy in the works of dramatists such as Aeschylus would reveal theater as a new medium of power, one where rhetoric literally took the stage to make social commentary, where the “tragic choice” was a rhetorical choice of values. Comedy, as discussed here with the work of Aristophanes, in turn took on an epideictic function; in the form of ridicule and satire, power served as a corrective force exposing (and critiquing) issues for Athenian viewers. Further, as democracy emerges in Athens it becomes apparent that “power will not come from a monarch who monopolizes the tools of violence and forces his subjects to hold their tongue and prostrate themselves before authority; power will come from the free speech of citizens standing on their own feet and deliberating over how to act in concert in pursuit of possibilities” (60).Crick believes that rhetoric finds its “habitation” in situations of struggle that dominate the drama of history, as evidence of these struggles are revealed in Sophistic rhetoric and its Platonic and Isocratean challenges. Crick does an excellent job of showing how Protagoras moved from a notion of logos to a two-logoi oppositional format, advancing the position that power (not merely validity) came through securing agreement between interlocutors by deliberating a continuum of possibilities (e.g., 68). “In effect,” Crick notes, “Protagoras was the first democratic public intellectual who offered citizens a practical metaphysics of political culture which gave them not only rights and responsibilities but also self-understanding rooted in a progressive attitude toward history” (65). This distribution of power explains the popularity and sustained success of the Sophistic movement, the embodiment of which was Gorgias, who awed Athenian spectators with his ability to dramatically perform power. Even in historiography, this vector between rhetor and power becomes evident. Thucydides narrates his history of the Peloponnesian War as a dramatic power struggle, making a conscious effort to apply the sophistic power of logoi (i.e., “set speeches”) to explain human motivation and celebrate human valor (103). Only recently have historians recognized that the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides are best understood in terms of the inherent rhetorical vector of historiography and that the notion of a dispassionate reported chronicling of events fails to capture what these and other historians of their time sought to accomplish by accounting for their moments of struggle. To rhetoricians, the idea that history is rhetorical is obvious, but this is a realization that came to scholars of Greek history only recently. Crick's insights to the ideological manifestations of rhetoric and power in historiography deserves praise (109, 112).Rhetoric and Power compels us to rethink and alter our views of the most important contributors to Greek rhetoric. Crick's treatment of Plato, for example, asks us to include the Protagoras along with our standard readings of the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, if we wish to have a more complete understanding of Plato's view of the public intellectual. Crick shows that Plato comes to realize that rhetoric gives a power to philosophy, a power that provides a force of action for civic improvement. In a word, Plato's dramatization of the dialogue Protagoras makes apparent his view “that civic virtue can and must be taught” (154). What the Protagoras does is provide a plan of action that complements the inquiry into the nature and merits of (Sophistic) rhetoric in the Gorgias and the claim in the Phaedrus that rhetoric is at its best when supported by philosophy (162). I also consider this observation to be one of the best contributions of Crick's book.We can likewise appreciate the rhetoric of Isocrates through the lens of Crick's notion of power and drama. The contributions of Isocrates as a literate rhetorician are well established (179). What Crick helps us to realize is how Isocrates' concern for literacy shifted the power of rhetoric from an oral, local force to a more expansive generalized power that helped to foster and promote his campaign for panhellenism. “With the increase in the speed and ease of communication, both physically and through the written medium,” Crick observes, “Greece of the fourth century [BCE] was more and more becoming a political entity rather than a merely geographical one, and its increased scope and complexity required a medium of power, the written word, as well as a pattern of rhetorical address which could coordinate the affairs of multiple parties over a distance with detail and reliability” (183–84). Crick asks us to see the phenomenon of Isocrates (if we may call him that) as offering a form of power through a rhetoric that ushers “in the new age of representative publicity” (185). Isocrates' dream was to design a rhetoric that tribal city-states could share with a common political order and common leadership; in short, “a common Logos” (191).All that Crick does up to this point in Rhetoric and Power helps us to see rhetoric as a force in a new and important way. In this same spirit, we can now look at Aristotle's Rhetoric differently. The beginning passages of Aristotle's Rhetoric make it clear that Aristotle sees rhetoric as a source of power, even civic power. Yet Aristotle's treatment is not merely a study of an Athenian civic rhetoric of power but also an exploration of rhetoric that is intended to be generalized across city-states, a more universal accounting of rhetoric, rhetoric that is oral as well as written. As Crick observes: “In Aristotle's comprehensive vision, then, rhetoric becomes the means by which political power purifies itself through trial and error” (201). For Aristotle, Crick notes, rhetoric is a “civilizing power” that enables popular audiences to seek and attain a shared notion of aletheia (truth) that contributes to “the growth of civilization” through the deliberation of endoxa (reputable opinions) that are shared by everyone “or by the majority or by the wise” (201, 212). In short, as Crick argues, “truth, power and democracy” each serve the good of the other when rhetoric is employed in such a manner (213).It should be apparent that I consider Rhetoric and Power to be an excellent piece of scholarship, worthy of the accolades that I have given and that will doubtlessly follow from other historians of rhetoric. Are there any features that could have made this excellent work even better? There are only a few, and these are not offered as a corrective but rather as a complement to the contributions of this work. The treatment of Thucydides could have been expanded to include other historians in more detail. Herodotus, for example, is recognized as the first Greek historian because he explained how the Athenians came to defeat the Persians. More than merely chronicling events, he claimed that the Athenians had discovered the power of the collective force of democracy over the inherent flaws of Persian tyranny. I also believe that a more extended discussion of how epideictic rhetoric manifests power—especially in the treatment of Greek comedy—would have been beneficial. Finally, I believe that an extended treatment of William M. A. Grimaldi's brilliant commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric would have provided a richer understanding of Aristotle's view of rhetoric's dunamis and energia than offered in this otherwise insightful analysis of Aristotelian rhetoric.Crick concludes Rhetoric and Power by stating that “rhetoric as a conscious art of constituting, transforming, challenging, and channeling power came into being within the drama of Classical Greece during the height of the tragic age, and it is only within a dramatic retelling that we can capture its spirit” (225). Crick shows that both in classical Greece and even today rhetoric has the capacity to serve as “a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226). Rhetoricians such as Crick and myself hold onto the hope that the power of rhetoric will be used in this manner. What makes Crick's hope substantial is that his work does not buoy it up with empty platitudes but rather demonstrates through careful and insightful scholarship what happens when it is realized.

Lloyd Bitzer's passing came as deeply sad news. He was an exceptional person in all respects. I was fortunate to have been his student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and to have experienced Lloyd in my life as a mentor, a colleague in the discipline, a confidant, a friend, and a role model. The discipline of rhetoric was fortunate to have had him among its ranks as a leading theorist. He was among those most responsible for pushing rhetorical studies into new territory during the latter part of the twentieth century. Lloyd was the principle investigator on and driving force behind the National Developmental Project on Rhetoric, which involved forty scholars from philosophy, rhetoric, communication, English, and sociology at the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences at the beginning of the 1970s and which culminated in The Prospect of Rhetoric, the volume he coedited with his colleague Edwin Black. And Philosophy and Rhetoric was fortunate to have him grace its pages with his scholarship and editorial advice. His iconic essay “The Rhetorical Situation” inaugurated the journal in 1968 as the lead article. It set the stage for reconsidering rhetoric in terms of its philosophical commitments.Lloyd was not a prolific publisher, but each of his articles were gems of careful scholarship and tight reasoning, and they demonstrate an unfailing sense for ideas that matter and an understanding of the impact those ideas could have on future work. His 1959 Quarterly Journal of Speech article “Aristotle's Enthymeme Revisited” broke new ground by decoupling the form of pisteis Aristotle regarded as the heart of persuasion from its logical form. His 1960 QJS article “A Re-evaluation Campbell's Doctrine of Evidence” argued that Campbell, in following Hume, had inverted the two-millennial-old Western tradition that established reason as the capital of right action and instead located it in the passions. His subsequent editor's introduction to the edited republication of Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric and his 1969 Philosophy and Rhetoric article “Hume's Philosophy in George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric” meticulously made the case for Hume's role in introducing rhetoric into the new country wherein its study led to understanding human nature. In 1978, when consideration of the public sphere was just beginning to emerge as a scholarly topic in the literature on rhetoric, Lloyd published his award- winning essay “Rhetoric and Public Knowledge,” in which he considered the necessary conditions for distinguishing between audiences and publics. It was not a coincidence that two years earlier he broke form with the practice of association presidents in the then Speech Communication Association of offering as their presidential address reflections on the discipline when he presented a version of this paper as his presidential address. His choice was an expression of his belief that presidents of scholarly societies should lead by example of their scholarship.Lloyd's presidential address, as much as anything, captured his sense of himself as a scholar and teacher and spoke to what he considered the nobility of his and our work. Studying with him was at once exhilarating, fearsome, calming, and affirming. He was demanding of his students, excited by ideas, not given to tolerating sloppy thinking or unsupported argument, quick to affirm student insights and progress, able to express and inspire confidence in his students' work, and generous with his time and counsel, always willing to assist his students' growth and prosperity. My friend Tom Farrell, another of Lloyd's doctoral students, captured well how lasting an impact our mentor had when, in the prime of our careers, he commented “I still write for Lloyd.” So did I; so do I still.In May 2015, the Rhetoric Society of America held its biennial summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I was filled with anticipation for the event, which is unique in its format and impact on its participants, for being once more in Madison where I had done my doctoral studies, and for the opportunity to spend time with colleagues, former students, and dear friends in the discipline. At the center of my excitement was the dinner date Lloyd and I had arranged. That evening was vintage Lloyd: he and his incomparable spouse Jo Ann arriving precisely on time, dinner at a favorite restaurant, lively and wide-ranging conversation covering shop talk, politics, the university, mutual friends, our children, and grandchildren. Too soon the evening ended, but Lloyd insisted that we should drive to his home outside Madison to drop off Jo Ann and have a nightcap before he took me back to my hotel on campus. He made certain we extended the evening so our conversation might continue. His characteristic care for how our time was spent conveyed more than words the intimacy of personal regard.Lloyd was not comfortable with warm expressions (he edited my dissertation acknowledgment of him, insisting I delete comments on what he meant to me—he meant the world—as something I might find embarrassing for their warmth in later years). But he knew how to convey his warmth and how to acknowledge it in return. He brought me to believe in myself as a young scholar, he filled me with admiration and trust, he inspired delight in intellectual work, and more than anyone he awakened my sense of its essential dignity. He touched the profession and this journal as a scholar. He touched me as a person. I shall remember Lloyd always with affection and gratitude. He enriched my life and I shall miss him dearly.

Abstract Jacques Rancière defines literarity as texts' propensity to be used in unexpected ways by unforeseen readers. Unlike scholars who view literarity as having intrinsically democratic implications, I contend that Rancière offers a more ambivalent account of its significance. I illustrate my argument by analyzing the aftermath of suffragists' appeal to the U.S. Constitution in the 1870s. I show that public agitation over textual meaning can shore up the perception that a text is indeterminate and allows debate, but it can be cited as well as a symptom of incompetence and duplicity, as evidence that texts should be reserved for those with mastery. Using a text democratically, then, involves more than advocating for innovative interpretations. It also involves struggling for the propriety of treating the meaning of a text as a matter of democratic interaction, against those who treat it as not subject to public debate.

Abstract When, on 4 July 2014, the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, preached in the venerable mosque of Mosul the restoration of the caliphate, his homily ushered in far more than a new phase in jihadist warfare against Western values. His oratory launched on the world scene a new culture that instantly began to shape, solidify, and even sublimate the caliphate as the most arresting rhetorical performance of radical and militant Islam. However, despite this self-proclamation, political commentators failed to accurately size up the emerging culture of the new caliphate, and we find ourselves faced now with an alternative, global culture that draws irresistibly more and more converts and partisans into its orbit. The most perilous form of underestimating adversaries is to reduce their cultural complexity to a few, unreflective clichés, a telling sign of our own cultural illiteracy.

AbstractFoundational theories of the public sphere prioritize civic speech while distrusting forms of visuality. As a corrective to this model of the public sphere, rhetorical theorists have recently emphasized visuality as a constitutive mode of contemporary public culture, but they nevertheless tend to prioritize the civic actor over the civic spectator. A productive alternative would begin to distinguish an emerging shift from “deliberative publicity” to “photographic publicity.” The bourgeois public sphere innovated verbal communicative practices that produced a specifically deliberative publicity, enabling one resolution to the core political problems of an earlier (feudal) era. Likewise, contemporary publics utilize emerging digital technologies to produce a specifically photographic publicity, allowing them to address fundamental limitations of the bourgeois public sphere. Photographic publicity helps us rethink the problem of the public sphere in terms of theatricality and civic spectatorship.

Abstract Jürgen Habermas supports his transhistorical conception of violence as a form of instrumental reason to be rejected from the ideal polity with a historical narrative that recounts the rejection of Machiavellian and Hobbesian instrumental violence by the Enlightenment philosophes. This article provides a revised narrative, which emphasizes the persistence of a rhetorical conception of violence from Machiavelli's princely violence to a line of Anglo-American republican thinkers who shifted the locus of sovereign rhetorical violence to the people's armed militia. The narrative culminates with Madison's exegesis of the Second Amendment and sketches how this Madisonian conception harmonizes with Habermasian norms and law.

Recognition demands our attention. As a “keyword,” its significance is measured in part simply by the number of times it appears across the pages of the works that occupy our desks. Claimed by political theorists, moral philosophers, cultural anthropologists, legal scholars, activists, historians, and rhetoricians (certainly there are others), recognition has become a workhorse for theorizing the ontological, epistemological, political, and ethical conditions and practices of intersubjectivity. Political theorists in the early 1990s popularized the term as a way to grasp how liberal democratic societies might negotiate, regulate, and promote multiculturalism. Reviving Hegel's account of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) in the Phenomenology of Spirit, they argued that individuals who fail to find themselves reflected in social norms and values, those who are silenced, erased, or illegible in the places they live, may become full members of a political community through the recognition of the value and worth of their identities. As Charles Taylor compellingly argues in his seminal article on the subject, “Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves” (1994, 25). Given that its absence can cause injury, Taylor reasons that recognition therefore “is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need” (26). Articulated in this way, recognition's appeal is undeniable: “It expresses an attractive ideal, envisioning a world in which people could all find their own identities accurately and respectfully reflected in the mirror of their shared social and political life” (Markell 2003, 3).Despite recognition's promise, critiques of multiculturalism expose the untenable foundations on which recognition is built. On Taylor's account of the politics of recognition, group rights, institutionalized in law, afford the respect and dignity demanded by those in need of recognition. Taylor himself toward the end of his article wonders whether rights should serve as the binding force for what might, in the end, be a moral problem: “Perhaps we don't need to ask whether it's something that others can demand from us as a right. We might simply ask whether this is the way we ought to approach others” (1994, 72). For political theorists and philosophers, the more immediate issue is how recognition might be institutionalized in a system of rights—how rights might serve as the mark of successful recognition. They demonstrate that within a liberal democratic framework grounded in individual rights, the politics of recognition requires law to accommodate what are essentially illiberal demands based on group identities. For some, the task is to show how group demands can be met within a system of rights—how demands for recognition of group identities are not in fact inconsistent with individual rights (see Kymlicka 1995). For theorists working within the paradigm of deliberative democracy, the task is to show how legal rights do not and cannot grant recognition once and for all. In these works, imagining the politics of recognition means refiguring it as both a continuing practice of public debate and a public norm rather than as an end in itself: “Recognition in theory and practice should not be seen as a telos or end state, but as a partial, provisional, mutual, and human-all-too-human part of continuous processes of democratic activity in which citizens struggle to change their rules of mutual recognition as they change themselves” (Tully 2000, 477). As a process that relies on contestation and the productive frenzy of debate, recognition does not signal for these theorists a singular act or event but rather an ongoing process, a deliberation over (the rules regulating) the terms of recognizability (see Habermas 1994). For Nancy Fraser in particular, recognition is best understood as a “folk paradigm”—a set of “linked assumptions about the causes of and remedies for injustice” (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 11)—that provides reasons for why demands for recognition bind “all who agree to abide by fair terms of interaction under conditions of value pluralism” (31). What this reframing in critical scholarship exposes is that the multiculturalist ideal of a politics of recognition does not account for the conditions in which demands for recognition are met.Although this critique was prominent in early engagements with multiculturalism, much of the scholarship since has seized on the seemingly unbreakable bond of recognition and identity logics. Recognition, we learn, “rests on a simplified understanding of subject formation, identity and agency in the context of social hierarchy” (McNay 2008, 2). To detail the complexities lost in the presumptions of the politics of recognition, a virtual industry of scholarship has emerged. For some, the difficulty of such a politics is that it collapses individual and collective identities. K. Anthony Appiah argues, for instance, that recognition of group identities risks reproducing the violent, “tyrannical” relationship between dominant society and underrepresented groups in the relationship between an individual and the group with whom she identifies. Group identities produce “scripts”—“proper ways of being”—that suppress individual autonomy and difference in the name of earning and maintaining recognition (Appiah 1994, 162–63). For others, it is not the normative force of collective identities that renders recognition problematic but its attachment to identity in the first place. Patchen Markell shows that because identity appears as a “coherent self-description that can serve as the ground of agency, guiding or determining what we are to do” (2003, 36), the pursuit of recognition becomes synonymous with the pursuit of sovereignty. The result is that a politics of recognition invokes and fixes identity as a stable expression of who we are, misrecognizing the ways we exist in the middle of a politics that betrays the vulnerability of our autonomy and the instability of our becoming. Still others find recognition unworkable because it reinforces or bolsters existing structures of power, concealing the violence and oppression that play out in recognition's practice. Scholars locate this violence in different dimensions of recognition: in the way that it produces symbolic change rather than economic redistribution (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 12); in the way that it “diverts attention from the role of the powerful, of the misrecognizers, in these interactions, focusing on the consequences of suffering misrecognition rather than on the more fundamental question of what it means to commit it” (Markell 2003, 18); in the way it constitutes the colonial subject's consciousness (Fanon 1967); in the way that it, à la Hegel, entails a life-and-death struggle that is then somehow supposed to give way to “compassionate personal relations, ethical social relations, or democratic political relations” (Oliver 2001, 4).In the wake of these critiques, visions of a politics of recognition grounded in identity have given way to critical accounts that seek to recuperate or reimagine the foundations of our shared political or ethical life in other terms. Some scholars heuristically remove recognition from the political scene in an effort to think its possibilities and limits in different registers (see Butler 2005). Instead of being deployed as a norm intended to shape the landscape and relations of politics, the concept is employed as an analytic that might foster insight into the conditions in which subjectivity and ethical life emerge—reading for recognition's ontological and ethical implications. Other scholars, having seen what props up recognition, abandon the ideal altogether. Preferring to use concepts such as acknowledgment (Markell 2003; Hyde 2006), witnessing (Oliver 2001), or agency as embodied practice (McNay 2008), they investigate the possibility of an ethical intersubjectivity that can serve as a corrective to the violence or pathology of recognition.If the first critical body of literature attempts to determine a proper place for recognition—one we might anticipate and welcome—the second body of scholarship that seeks other normative ideals renders a judgment on recognition's significance and efficacy for understanding and intervening in the world. Given this vast body of scholarship, we begin to understand how the proliferation of work on recognition threatens to become, like a well-fed gremlin after midnight, monstrous. As Ricoeur remarks, “There must be a reason that no widely recognized philosophical work of high reputation has been published with the title Recognition” (2005, 1). Recognition appears across a variety of works as both the instrument of a more democratic and ethical life and as the ruse that allows us to believe we are free and equal—even as we become further subjected to structures of power that render us complicit with injustice. It is accorded “dual significance … as both a descriptive tool and a regulative idea” (McNay 2008, 2). It is both solution and problem. While the multiplicity of recognition's meanings, uses, and registers is itself not problematic, it does pose a problem of referentiality that threatens to make recognition into everything and nothing all at once. To study recognition, to read for its potential or its limits, is to pose the inevitable question: to what does recognition refer?This special issue does not set out to answer this question by fixing recognition's referent. Instead, it wagers that this question becomes a question for us, in part, because we have not yet fully understood how recognition entails or is imbricated with referentiality, meaning making, place making. In short, we have not yet fully understood the rhetorical conditions in which this question might be raised. The articles that follow set out to do this work. Authors were invited to critically examine recognition in its different forms and to define its rhetorical contours. Articulated in this way, the invitation asked authors to do more than offer thoughts on how rhetorical perspectives and acts of criticism might illuminate recognition—assuming that we might indeed be able to locate recognition and bring it to light. If we understand a contour as an outline—or, more precisely, as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it, as “an outline especially of a curving or irregular figure”—the task set out was to examine how the figuration of recognition (how its taking place as a commonplace) operates or is given form or shape in and through rhetoric. An investigation of the rhetorical contours of recognition encourages a consideration of how rhetoric acts to constitute, perform, represent, flesh out, and trouble forms of recognition, and so this issue suspends, if only for a short time, a judgment about the value of recognition in the context of legal, political, ethical, or theoretical controversies in order to probe its rhetorical conditions, practices, and power.Admittedly, this collection of articles might defy the expectations of its audience. For too long, the terms in and through which recognition has been addressed, theorized, and critiqued have been set in such a way that to raise the question of the rhetorical contours of recognition, to ask after the implications of its (theoretical) histories and deployments, and to question how these very terms have taken up a place in the narratives we tell about recognition means that what follows might be unfamiliar, even unrecognizable, as a “rhetoric of recognition.” Authors were invited, encouraged even, to invoke diverse definitions, traditions, and theorists of the term. As a result, the articles do not settle on or begin from a single definition of recognition, nor do they even all accept the commonplace treatment of recognition as a practice of intersubjectivity through which individuals are validated by those around them. Alongside the Fichtean and Hegelian concept of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) that drives discourses of multiculturalism and identity politics, the contributors also draw on the concept in both its Aristotelian form (anagnôrisis) and in the derivatives of its French form (reconnaître). In Aristotle's Poetics, anagnôrisis is the element of a plot structure that enables a shift from ignorance to knowledge. While lesser known than Aristotle's concept of reversal (peripeteia), anagnôrisis represents a recognition scene in which the author—somewhat artificially or shoddily, Terence Cave tells us—resolves the plot (as, for example, when Sophocles has Oedipus discover who he is). Importantly, though, the passage from ignorance to knowledge is “different from rational cognition. It operates surreptitiously, randomly, elliptically and often perversely, seizing on precisely those details that from a rational point of view seem trivial” (Cave 1990, 10). The French reconnaître, according to Ricoeur, has “three major senses”: to grasp something in thought; to accept something as true; and to “bear witness through gratitude that one is indebted to someone for” (2005, 12). Introducing these different forms of recognition into the collection unsettles the presumptions—about knowledge or recognition's scene, for example—that underwrite its well-known accounts, holding open the possibility of reflecting on the value of rhetoric for larger discourses on recognition.Read together, these articles then redefine what it means for recognition to be a “keyword.” Setting aside the question of the term's significance, they invite us to consider how recognition's word(s) permit(s) passage. That is, they allow us to explore how an understanding of the rhetorical conditions and practices of recognition move subjects, objects, scenes, and speech or transform them into something they were not already. They signal the need and desire to think about how recognition's practices are authorized in the constitution of its word(s). They imagine the various shapes recognition might take in order to open a view onto our shared life. They give us pause to ask onto what or through what recognition passes, illuminating the ways that the place of recognition has so very much to do with how recognition takes place.There is a conceptual movement, a shape, in the way these articles are organized; they themselves move and transform. One opens a set of questions that the next addresses or affirms or troubles—not in a seamless way, of course, but in a way that allows us to see how the contours of recognition appear in the (various) words about its words. Conceptually, the articles move us from a question of the language of recognition to its ethical implications for life, passing us onto its political scene and opening to a question of aesthetic experience. In the article that begins this collection, Erik Doxtader comments that “one irony of the ongoing debate over the relative merits of recognition is that it frequently turns (to) language only when it can be mustered and used as evidence for how competing positions unduly rely on the shifting and contingent—mere—nature of words.” Noting that contemporary discourses of recognition falter when they approach the question of language—even as recognition is staked out in terms of voice and speakability—he poses a question that several articles in the collection take up: “Does recognition assume language in a way that precludes the recognition of language?” For Doxtader, this question occasions a turn to Walter Benjamin's “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” which he draws on to explore in both content and form how Benjamin “grasps that the language of recognition may awaken in the recognizability of language.” Philippe-Joseph question to ask not about the recognizability of language but the recognizability of a on a of in the of the and of what it might to recognition to what shapes the of in the of to show that a into a the into a the into a the into a and is the of the concept For the of this and the of the turns on the way in which of the and are themselves articles that follow explore the ways insight into the rhetorical contours of recognition are by and the terms of life. questions whether the form of power that our attention and its of for understanding the of power in change political that the foundations of have to she the concept of as a way to think about how power operates in through the of the between life and in how more are being she argues that the for the recognition of the if it is to the of the for recognition of of the must the of rather than simply to into too with contemporary forms of the of life, to Hegel's life-and-death struggle in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that this struggle for recognition is … precisely because it the of a that can be staked and in a the of through To grasp how life in Hegel's work conditions recognition, between and we might and in Hegel's of and that for by and that appear to in the from to a life that is human and In a of life in Hegel's a form of recognition as a of knowledge that might be able to account ways that produces its own as the conditions of witnessing and to an grounded on our shared bond to our singular as a way to to of recognition that ground their ethical in the vulnerability of human life. are problematic for because they that the recognition of vulnerability to ethical relations that vulnerability a human subjectivity or Noting that is shared with she for a form of as ongoing and between and their cannot be to recognition, mutual or consideration of the of life opens onto an of the politics of recognition's scene and how it might bring about the and rhetorical implications of a concept he defines as of of in which an “an and of at with a to the work of and his details the way the to it as if were the one for whom it was able to the and social norms within the of and The value of then is that it a potential … to the and power of and as as to the that such and and examine the of the scene of in order to understand the possibilities for critique in political practices of recognition. theoretical accounts of legal recognition and outline the of that law is the or of the scene of recognition. an account of rhetorical is what is lost in political theoretical to a form of violence and injustice. that if we the relationship between law and recognition's scene, we are able to see how scene of recognition is set not by the law itself but by a demand for recognition in and through which both and law take details the rhetorical conditions of different of recognition, as to and of and to violence and point toward the that recognition is to article is to how as an politics, and in the are to recognition and how these critiques of and The possibility of this critique for in the to the dimensions of recognition in political and the between the of power within and across groups who are and liberal and of and takes on a scene of political recognition, the debate, it to the political potential of he various used to for rights in order to of as for recognition as that is as much an act of as it is of he that an understanding of the of might forms of knowledge and foster political across the article of the collection, how a language of recognition might to make of aesthetic the on and he a of aesthetic through which we to see that expresses a fundamental element of human and in so in the world to that significance of and of the to the politics of recognition the or the of in that it of over on the and aesthetic recognition point toward the need to the relationship between rhetoric and terms that a and yet If we accept that is the of the of in the world in and through and in then we are with and to the question of the of language in recognition in which the collection to all the authors who articles to this special to the in ways shape and life to the especially for the with and to by Erik Doxtader, and and for the work of who of their to offer to the like to for the to this collection and the he the

ABSTRACT In public debates there are occasions on which persons might feel obligated to show disrespect in order to preserve integrity. In some public discourses (like those between evolutionists and creationists) interlocutors often show disrespect by “writing off” one another's reasons in an attempt to defend and preserve their own particular beliefs. To make better sense of the apparent discomfiture of intuitions concerning the connections between respect and integrity in such public confrontations, an “other-words orientation” to communication is proposed. The other-words orientation requires that individuals “stand for something” but in a way that respects one's opposition as the living, breathing, reason-giving entities they are. The ancient art of double argument is central to this endeavor.

A recent trend in communication studies has seen increased attention to delineating the rhetorical dimensions of publics, public spheres, and public opinions, a project largely inaugurated by Gerard Hauser's (1999)Vernacular Voices. This intervention has shifted the focus from elite discourses of public officials in institutional spaces to everyday acts of discursive engagement in more quotidian and diverse public fora. Meanwhile, theories of “deliberative democracy” have come to be a dominant strand of democratic theory among political scientists and political philosophers. Proponents of the deliberative turn consider deliberation, plurality, and public participation essential to a healthy democratic polity and argue that “consensus based on reason-giving” should be the goal (Dryzek 2010, 322). As such, and continuing a long line of criticism that runs from Plato to Kant, Rawls, Habermas and others, rhetoric is often treated in deliberative democratic theory as the opposite of rational deliberation and as a tool to be used merely to persuade rather than to prove (Dryzek 2010, 322–23).More recently, however, there has been an upsurge of deliberative democratic theory that employs a rhetorical lens or rhetorical concepts and that seeks to emancipate rhetoric from its Platonic and Kantian shackles, such as Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) and Robert Ivie's “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now” (2002). Seeing see deliberation as necessarily rhetorical, these theorists shed light on the essentially controversial and agonistic nature of political debate, dialogue, and decision making. They view rhetoric not as merely monodirectional or a form of deceit but instead recognize that rhetoric occurs across multiple public settings and circulates throughout various publics.Continuing to push this dialogue further, Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation, a collection of essays edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen, adopts a rhetorical lens to consider public deliberation, political discourse, and democratic society. In a well-crafted introduction, the editors advance the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a unifying perspective for developing a cross-disciplinary “understanding of citizenship as a discursive phenomenon.” In this connection, they argue that “discourse is not prefatory to real action but in many ways is constitutive of civic engagement” (1). Through eighteen chapters divided into three sections, the contributing authors use rhetorical citizenship as an umbrella term to engage a number of discursive sites, citizen actors, and various publics and public controversies in both theoretical musings and practical, international case studies on deliberative democracy. Overall, the essays marshal “a diversity of actual deliberative practices” in considering “how everyday people participate in and practice citizenship, and how everyday practices might be enhanced” (8).The authors proffer citizenship as a mode of political activity and as a discursive and deliberative process that requires public reflection and entails a rhetorical orientation to the arguments and debates that take place in democratic society. Enacting rhetorical citizenship is thus not merely constituted by “deliberative exchange among representatives and citizens across multiple sites” (4). It also requires “internal deliberation” by citizen actors with regard to the public arguments put forth by their political representatives and other public officials. Rhetorical citizenship is a process that requires both citizens' rhetorical output and their discursive, critical engagement with political discourses. To these ends, the individual authors consider “actual civic discourse” that occurs across multiple sites and through a multiplicity of actors at the same time that they interrogate notions of rhetorical agency and issues of “voice, power, and rights” (7). Further, although proponents of deliberative democracy take consensus and the elimination of conflict as their end goal in public debates and controversies, this collection affords a space for considering the productive and emancipatory nature of conflict, contention, and agon in the public sphere and within public spheres—while also looking ahead to rethink consensus and deliberative norms in general.Throughout the collection, the authors draw heavily on rhetoricians and political philosophers, including Gerard Hauser, Robert Asen, Robert Hariman, Kenneth Burke, Jürgen Habermas, and John Dryzek, among others. While the overall themes of the book are centered on deliberation and rhetoric, scholars from communication studies, discourse analysis, and political philosophy, along with fields outside the humanities such as political science and sociology, all contribute to the dialogue. Developed initially for the 2008 “Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation” conference in Copenhagen, the individual chapters in this collection represent this disciplinary diversity while bringing together academic voices from throughout the international community as well. Each chapter is prefaced by a brief introduction written by the editors, effectively organizing and clarifying the objectives that tie the essays together. As a brief review does not afford space to consider each of the eighteen individual chapters in this collection, my aim here is to reflect on several essays from each section, all of which serve to illuminate the book's broader themes and contributions.The book's first section provides the historical precedents for deliberative democracy, rhetorical citizenship, and the idea of the public forum. Kasper Møller Hansen, a political scientist, traces the origins of deliberative democracy through political thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey. While contemporary theories of deliberative democracy are often regarded as constituting a new scholarly trend, such dialogues have their roots with these historical political thinkers and with earlier conceptions of the republican tradition. While Hansen provides a historical background for deliberative democratic theory, Manfred Kraus traces the origins of rhetorical citizenship to ancient Greece. Kraus persuasively argues that the Sophists' “analysis of operational truth with respect to the contingencies of human life,” along with their belief in the “constant negotiation between contradictory points of view as observed in the Athenian practice of political assemblies and law courts, laid the ground for the concept of citizenship” (40). Kraus argues that there was never a Sophist philosophy of rhetoric per se, but when brought together the individuals who identified with sophistry constituted an intellectual movement that presaged Aristotle's later inauguration of rhetorical theory. Finally, tracking and comparing the development and ultimate failure of forums, town halls, and public meetings in France and the United States, William Keith and Paula Cossart tease out some of the fundamental tensions that complicate the ability of citizens to enact their rhetorical citizenship in various discursive contexts. Together, the essays in this section productively set the stage for the remainder of the collection, offering a historical grounding for the main themes of the book as a whole: deliberative democracy and its republican roots; citizenship as a fundamentally rhetorical, discursive, and agonistic practice; and the need to identify alternative discursive sites where citizens can and do participate in political discussions and perform strategies that mitigate the problems and pitfalls of the formal political sphere.Broken up into three parts, the twelve essays in section 2 break some new ground in terms of theory building and for considering non-discursive norms for engaging in political action and public deliberation. Part 1 of section 2 is perhaps best represented by Marie Lund Klujeff's essay and case study on what she calls provocative style. Political debate can be messy. It does not often live up to the ideals or follow the conventions espoused by political theorists and academics. In the political arena, participants may meet discursive challenges that limit or diminish their ability to effectively contribute to debate and thus must adopt unconventional rhetorical strategies that afford an agentive capacity. Klujeff argues that employing a provocative style in public debate can serve as a “deliberate violation of the norms of official communication and communicative action,” instantiating a “stylistic parody [that] functions as refutation by mockery” (105–7). In the internet debate that Klujeff tracks in her case study, the use of such a non-normative stylistic tactic indeed resulted in “offense and irritation.” However, it simultaneously gave “rhetorical salience to the conflict” for a much wider audience that would have otherwise not been engaged. It also allowed for the citizen provocateur to participate and contribute to the deliberative process. Similarly, in “Virtual Deliberations” Ildiko Kaposi also looks to an online forum to argue that “the criteria for judging deliberative talk need to be treated and interpreted flexibly, and modified according to the circumstances in which deliberation and discussion occur” (119). In all, the four essays in part 1 of section 2 argue that breaking the rules of decorum in public deliberations can serve important rhetorical functions. Such non-normative, provocative strategies do not necessarily seek consensus but instead aim to further community building, help circulate political discourse, and foster moral respect between both debaters and broader publics.The four essays in part 2 examine elite discourse in order to “study how notions of citizenship are portrayed and realized by agents in positions of power and influence” (63). The authors look across multiple public settings and interrogate political subject matter from the literary public sphere to gendered war rhetoric and from political statements concerning a terrorist attack against the Danish embassy to a case study of constitutional law and political philosophy. Challenging the discursive and deliberative norms of the formal political sphere, the elite citizens (including Barbara Bush and Tony Blair) discussed in part 2 are seen to undertake disruptive discursive acts in the midst of formal political settings. The authors demonstrate that while one is able to exercise one's rhetorical agency through such destabilizing acts, the norms in such institutionalized settings are not so easily challenged or subverted. As Lisa Villadsen writes in her exemplary essay “Speaking of Terror: Norms of Rhetorical Citizenship in Danish Public Debate Culture,” in such an “a-rhetorical debate culture” as the formal political sphere, the rules of deliberative conduct determine the standards of “proper” rhetorical citizenship (179). Any deviation from these norms is considered a breach of one's citizenship status. Given this, Villadsen calls for the need to “continue questioning the norms—spoken or unspoken—that underlie notions of rhetorical citizenship in a given national or cultural setting” (179). Using a rhetorical lens to examine why modes of communicative action may succeed or fail allows for greater opportunities to understand citizenship across multiple settings. Part 3 of section 2 continues the collection's broader goals of examining rhetorical citizenship, deliberative practices, and rhetorical agency across a variety of public contexts. From public hearings held in Quebec, Canada, to grassroots groups in New York and Washington, DC, online debates over Danish real estate economic issues, and public engagement with a song from a popular Danish revue, the four essays extend and add to the diversity of sites in which public deliberation occurs and to what effect.The final section offers a set of future-oriented proposals for how rhetorical citizenship and deliberation can be productive for democratic society in ways that are not agonistic or confrontational. Effectively bookending the collection, the three chapters advance strategies and conceptualizations for reducing contentious debate and transforming competing political arguments in such as way as to encourage a more dynamic and constructive public sphere. As an exemplar, Christian Kock's, “A Tool for Rhetorical Citizenship: Generalizing the Status System” reappropriates and reformulates status theories with the aim of identifying how “present-day debaters” and “observers of debate” may find new grounds for building consensus or mutual understanding between otherwise opposing viewpoints (279). In deliberative contexts where “partisanship and polarization rule,” Kock provides a tool for fostering “normative metaconsensus” through narrowing down party-line disagreements to “more specific points—in which either side might have a better chance of persuading people unsympathetic to their positions” (294). This is not only a tool for debaters and the elite, Kock argues, but also a means of building awareness of the nuances of political disagreements among both citizens who consume these discourses as well as the media that represents them.On the whole, the notion of rhetorical citizenship is a timely intervention that aims to rethink the standards and practices of public deliberation and thereby contribute to a healthier pluralistic democratic polity. Perhaps especially in the context of U.S. politics, where the vitriolic bifurcation of present-day partisan lines leaves little to no room for rhetoric and deliberation in the formal political sphere, such a discussion is not only warranted but necessary, providing a way to think through this antagonistic gridlock. Rhetorical citizenship affords a critical space in which to theorize new practices of public engagement and deliberation and to move beyond deliberative democratic theory's insistence on rigid discursive norms and consensus building. We should attend to and take seriously agon, agitation, destabilization, and other nonnormative dissentious acts in order to better understand alternative sites of democratic instantiation. The nature of conflict, contention, and competition is not always derisive and dividing. Instead, as many of the essays in this collection argue, agonistic enactments can be productive and provocative, building communities, circulating discourse to multiple publics, and affording an agentive modality for civic engagement and citizenship. At other times, as the essays in the concluding section argue, there is an evident need to rethink the meaning of consensus in itself and consider rhetorical strategies for orienting oneself to oppositional positions. Across multiple sites, from online fora, grassroots enclaves, and more formal institutional settings, the international case studies taken up in Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation speak to the broad applicability of rhetorical citizenship as a concept.This variety in case studies is indeed one of the strengths of the collection, especially when paired with the disciplinary diversity represented by the individual authors. A concept like rhetorical citizenship, as demonstrated by this diverse collection, produces an opening for various other academic traditions to look to the tools and theories cultivated within rhetorical theory and apply them to cases across cultural and political settings. While the concept of rhetorical citizenship in itself requires the reader to extrapolate in order to see how it might be defined across these ostensibly disparate applications, the editors' introductory chapter and prefatory remarks at the start of each section strategically orient the essays to this larger theme. Moreover, as this disciplinary promiscuity speaks to the broad appeal of rhetorical citizenship, Kock and Villadsen do not provide a justification for why these various fields are represented and what this contributes to the overall dialogue. Interdisciplinarity should not be taken as an end in itself, although that is not necessarily to say that is the case with this collection. The diversity of the authors is likely symptomatic of this being a conference proceedings rather than the editors' attempt at diversity for diversity's sake. Given that the topic of the collection is deliberation and democratic society, however, it seems fitting that a range of disciplinary voices would be represented in this dialogue, especially when humanistic disciplines, while sharing much in common, often are insular and speak in their own respective vacuums.Finally, the collection attends to a wide spectrum of public and political sites where deliberation actually takes place. As the editors state in the introduction, “Focusing on how citizens deliberate allows us to consider both macro and micro politics, but always with an eye to the significance for the individuals involved” (6). In this regard, the editors advance a set of research questions that speak to the larger themes of the book, such as “What forms of participation does a particular discursive phenomenon encourage—and by whom? How are speaking positions allotted and organized? … What possibilities are there for ‘ordinary’ citizens to engage in public discourse?” (6–7). Despite the repeated insistence on the collection's commitment to “vernacular rhetoric,” the public settings and political fora addressed in the individual case studies are not quite as representative of a pluralistic democracy as one would hope. The issue of gender is only explicitly taken up in one essay, while questions of how and where racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ minorities are able to perform their rhetorical citizenship are not addressed.The four essays that engage online deliberation are perhaps the closest the volume comes to exploring vernacular discursive contexts, and indeed these critical engagements are valuable. Participation in such online dialogues, on the other hand, still requires an availability that allows for free time to deliberate as well as the economic security that affords ready access to the internet. The editors assert that “a rhetorical focus has a special regard for individual actors in the public arena, not just the eloquent politician or NGO representative but also the person watching an election debate on TV, chiming in with a point of view through a blog on civic issues, collecting signatures from passerby on a windy street to stop municipal budget cuts, or deciding to join a local interest group” (6). And while each of these sites and settings are addressed, the rhetoric and deliberation that is endemic to the streets, down on the corner, in the market, and even in the local pub are left out of this discussion. The reader is left to wonder who we should and should not consider a citizen, what publics the concept of rhetorical citizenship includes and excludes, who has the capacity to enact their rhetorical agency, and more pointedly, whether access to the public arena and the deliberative process necessarily entails a relative position of privilege. As such, while the disciplinary diversity may be one of the strong points of this collection, this openness is contained by a mostly straight, white, male representation of deliberative democratic society.Despite these omissions, however, Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen's Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation offers an excellent portfolio of case studies and theoretical insights that will surely contribute to future discussions across a range of disciplinary sites. The bridging of rhetorical studies and deliberative democratic theory is an important intervention that is promising for future cross-disciplinary scholarship and for extending the scope of the discourses and deliberative practices that actually do outside more formal political settings. As such, this collection would be well for that focus on rhetorical theory, civic and the public sphere, or as for scholarship that aims to on discursive theories of citizenship across multiple public and international contexts. It also well for scholarship that aims to the between political science and rhetorical studies, a that offers many opportunities for theories of contemporary democratic society.

ABSTRACTRalph Waldo Emerson's theory of rhetoric has been the subject of ongoing inquiry that has moved Emerson further and further outside a line of Platonic thinkers in order to make his discussion of rhetoric applicable to contemporary discussions about civic discourse and the public sphere. Such accounts, however, subtly undermine the complexity of Emerson's attempts to reconcile transcendentalism with democracy. Understanding Emerson as involved in a project to not only democratize language and rhetorical theory but also Plato, the representative of truth seeking and idealism, clarifies precisely how Emerson understands the power of rhetoric and philosophy to shape and enact democracy. Emerson was trying to find a place for Platonic idealism in the shaping of a young country, and in doing so, he reconfigured what might seem today to be irreconcilable dualities. For Emerson the split between the spiritual and the material world does not implicitly prioritize one domain over the other. Instead, Emerson negotiates the terrain between the worlds and suggests ultimately that language and action are means of straddling them and realizing real change in society. If ideals are in some way external in Emerson's metaphysics, they are no less accessible by every person who attends to his or her own experience in the world. Rhetoric, for Emerson, brings those poles together.

Arabella Lyon's Deliberative Acts begins with a rhetorical question: “Shall we speak of Abu Ghraib and torture; shall we educate the children of illegal immigrants; shall we guarantee health care for all or for most; shall we intervene in the governance of other nations; shall we ban the hijab (head scarf), medical marijuana, and prayer in the schools; shall we find one hundred million missing women, the lost boys of Africa, and los desaparecidos (the disappeared)?” (1) With this list of violations framed as a question, Lyon suggests that through the media, popular culture, and politics, we are constantly confronted with and compelled to deliberate on issues of rights, so much so that human rights have become the grounding for the work of democracy. Thus, Lyon's major intervention is located at this intersection of human rights discourse and the political deliberation necessary in democracies. She seeks to advance a theory of “performative deliberation” (3) that conceives of deliberation within theories of performance and performativity as an activity that refocuses on the present and the constitutive moment of recognition within the specific context of each speech act. In order to do so, Lyon turns to human rights case studies as represented in the media and life stories because they, by nature, attend to radical difference and because they “require examinations of both being and situated knowledge for the many coming to action, an action potentially transformative of being and knowledge” (4).Rhetorical studies has been surprisingly late in taking up a human rights critique. Although many have been engaged in critiquing human rights from a rhetorical perspective for years, and even more have been engaged in critiquing human rights through discourse analysis and literary analysis, the lack of conversation in rhetoric prompts Erik Doxtader to question whether rhetoric should have a role in human rights discourse in the first place.1 Despite his question, the past several years has seen a renewed interest in rhetorical approaches to human rights. In fact, a special issue of RSQ coedited by Arabella Lyon and Lester Olson in 2011 (subsequently published as a book in 2012) and Wendy Hesford's book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (2011) were among the first in this new wave of rhetorical studies to focus directly on human rights as such. Lyon's Deliberative Acts is situated within this relatively recent rhetorical turn to human rights and provides a useful and necessary theoretical grounding on rhetorical concepts and deliberation across difference as they relate to human rights case studies on which others can build. Additionally, for scholars engaged in conversations surrounding deliberative rhetorics, Lyon offers a convincing model of performative deliberation that accounts for the fluidity of poststructuralist notions of agency and subjectivity through an overdue rethinking of rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition, and performance/performativity in persuasion. However, for scholars participating in the conversation and critique directly surrounding human rights discourse, a critique that is predominantly located in the humanities and rapidly expanding out from its literary foundations, Lyon's book may be controversial, as it does not necessarily critique the discourse of rights itself, nor the amorphous “we” constructed in her first sentence. Rather, she is interested in critiquing how that “we” employs, deploys, and deliberates over human rights cases, including the claims made by Libyan woman Eman al-Obeidi's to Western journalists that she was raped and abused by Gaddafi's military, the Chinese one-child policy, Rigoberta Menchú's testimony, and women's suffrage in the United States.Lyon's introduction locates her intervention in the conversation surrounding deliberation and deliberative democracy in a global and transnational era. To begin, Lyon distinguishes deliberative democracy (a way for states to legitimize decisions) from deliberation (a rhetorical practice), a distinction that suggests that the problem with deliberative democracy is that “it finds difference disruptive rather than productively diverse” (11). This is problematic because “in responding to rights conflicts” Lyon claims, “citizens are asked to deliberate, to recognize interlocutors, to comprehend their competing claims, and weigh definitions of the issue and the consequences of their decisions on people whom they have never seen” (4). Lyon's introduction articulates three major critiques that scholars of deliberative theory might find very useful. First, she critiques its origins in procedural democracy, which engages in forensic rhetoric, rather than deliberative politics, which engages in deliberative rhetoric. Stated differently, deliberative democracy is future oriented and focuses on action and procedure rather than present context. Second, in its privileging of reason, deliberative democracy values Western notions of speech-action that delegitimize alternative and embodied strategies of persuasion. Thus, deliberative democracy ignores the contextual forces that constitute reason in the first place. Third, Lyon argues that deliberative democracy values consensus, which “creates problems for theorizing radical deliberation, because it is hard to imagine even basic norms of justice achieving practical consensus” (19).The first chapter, “Defining Deliberative Space: Rethinking Persuasion, Position, and Identification” theoretically situates the book and redefines some foundational rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition and persuasion. Lyon suggests that instead of deliberative rhetoric being a futurist discourse, it can instead be constitutive of the present, “a doing based in speech and act and not in persuasion and identification” (30). For example, identification predicated on recognition, argues Lyon, will always subsume difference and is thus inadequate for discourse across difference. Lyon critiques deliberation as a persuasive discourse on three grounds. It is inadequate for human rights and cross-cultural engagement since it is predicated upon an unequal relationship between speaker and audience (rather than an equal relationship between interlocutors); it is future rather than present oriented; and it assumes certain sets of communal knowledges that will always “seek to remove otherness” (31). In order to remedy these problems Lyon turns to “alternative rhetorics,” including feminist rhetorics and Confucian notions of remonstration, that can help scholars conceive of deliberation “as a dramatic event or a series of enactments” and as “the discursive acts responsible for altering the subjectivity of the participants, their discourses, and their beliefs” (36–37). Ultimately, Lyon proposes a conception of deliberation as a continuum of political perspectives, suggesting that if each interlocutor values the other over the outcome, then deliberation can occur. If we understand deliberation as a “regularly occurring human act” (49), she claims, then recognition does not have to occur prior to deliberation; the act of deliberation is itself an act of recognition and thus humanizing.Understanding recognition as occurring in the moment of engagement with the other seems to solve the poststructuralist problem of the fixed individual of rights, but it gets more challenging when the subject of rights is not a subject who can engage in deliberation at all, such as third generation rights of/to the environment. However, in critiquing Aristotle's notion of persuasion so as to redefine deliberation not as a discourse oriented toward the future bent on persuasion but rather as one constitutive of the present bent on recognition, Lyon opens the possibility of deliberation across difference that does not reproduce the hegemonic structures always present in discourses of persuasive deliberation.The second chapter, “Performative Deliberation and the Narratable Who,” begins with the story of Eman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman who, according to Lyon, became a symbol of defiance against Gaddafi when she entered the Rixos Hotel in 2011 (a hotel where Western journalists covering the uprising gathered) and claimed that she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi's military. During this telling of her rape, Gaddafi's military entered the hotel and again abducted al-Obeidi despite the journalists' attempts to protect her. Lyon uses the story of al-Obeidi throughout the chapter to argue for a theory of performative deliberation as a way to account for the complexities of agency, recognition, and narratability in deliberative discourse. The chapter offers a further critique of identification and recognition through a close reading of J. L. Austin's notion of the performative, Kenneth Burke's concept of performance, and Judith Butler's notions of performativity as “a continuum of form and forming” (25) that scales outward from the individual to the structural. In an attempt to locate individual agency within structural notions of subjectivity, Lyon then provides a close reading of issues pertaining to narration and agency that she traces through Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, and Adriana Cavarero. Through these theories and the story of al-Obeidi, Lyon proposes to extend speech act theory in four main ways. First, by analyzing “tensions between conforming and forming within speech act theories to reveal the agency inherent in discourse” (69), Lyon shows how al-Obeidi shifted the focus of her speech act from an individual act of rape when she was talking with the journalists in the restaurant of the Rixos Hotel to a violation within the normative and structural discourse of human rights when she was interviewed much later by Anderson Cooper on CNN. According to Lyon, this intentional slippage shifts blame “from the shame of the woman to the shame of the patriarchal state” (69). Second, because speech acts do not just conform to normative conventions but also maintain space for agency and can be inaugural sites themselves, then “the nature of the cultural change is visible in abnormal or infelicitous performances” (69). Therefore, she reads al-Obeidi's decision to burst in on the breakfast of Western journalists covering the war in Libya as an example of an infelicitous speech act that was able to redefine the norms of testimony. Third, Lyon seeks to find agency in the embodied performance of the speech act (69), and fourth, the chapter claims that agency is found in navigating existing norms by “using both felicitous and infelicitous acts to widen possibilities” (69), exemplified in al-Obeidi's navigation of the Western media. This chapter is one of the more compelling chapters because of its thorough critique of identification and recognition.The third chapter critiques U.S. media representations of what Lyon calls “the most major human rights crisis in the world today: missing women” (108) in Asia and China due to the one-child policy. The chapter, titled “Narrating Rights, Creating Agents: Missing Women in the U.S. Media” with an intended pun on “missing women,” suggests that if the media, like literature, could work to foster compassion, then it could initiate the kind of relationships necessary for performative deliberation. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of the narratable self, Lyon modifies Arendt's view of compassion as an emotion that demands action rather than the slow movement of deliberation in order to develop a theory of deliberation that employs compassion from a distance. Her theory of compassion is the rhetorical equivalent of theories of literary witness articulated by Anne Cubilié in Women Witnessing Terror (2005) and Wendy Kozol (2011) in her essay “Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco's Palestine.” All three scholars articulate a notion of witness that demands action rather than spectatorship, the latter implying passivity and consumption. Lyon argues that the media representation of China's missing women revives Cold War sentiments and the fear of China surpassing the United States as an economic and global superpower. Negating any form of cross-cultural recognition, family planning gets mapped onto the United States' own political fears and Chinese women become allegorical figures for the nation-state. The U.S. media thus misses the missing women because they are not seen as a human rights violation but rather a symptom of family planning or abject suffering, made the subject of narratives, argues Lyon, that foreclose deliberation across difference. To counteract this, Lyon calls for a kind of “global citizen” who is located in the United States but who is educated and informed and who can advocate for women's rights in other cultures. Lyon argues that literature can offer this kind of compassionate education that underwrites performative deliberations and turns to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club as an example, thus contributing to the wealth of scholarship that suggest literature does human rights work. However, Lyon ends her chapter by backing away from the work literature can do, suggesting that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” (126).Chapter 4, “The Beauty of Arendt's Lies: Menchú's Political Strategy,” analyzes the reception of Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú and U.S. scholars' attempt to explain away the inconsistencies of the controversial testimonio. In so doing, the chapter “reconceives the ethics of lies, arguing that they are examples of imaginative, performative acts in the service of (potentially new) political regimes” (27). Returning once again to Arendt, Lyon furthers Arendt's sanction of lies for diplomatic political use, particularly those told to enemies, and legitimates Menchú's inconsistencies as an expression of her political agency by which she negotiates norms. Suggesting that Menchú's lies facilitate human rights deliberation, this chapter more deeply examines issues of recognition within normative conventions of the genre of testimonio. Thus, Lyon not only provides a helpful reading of the normative conventions of the testimonio in this chapter but also critiques the ways in which narratives are frequently recognized based on their adherence to normative conventions of testimonial veracity. The chapter ends with an apologia of sorts that explains why Lyon advocates the political tactic of lying, claiming that “the state's legitimacy relies on its truthful adherence to its laws, but citizen agents must speak back to dishonest states, even with lies” (149).The final chapter of Deliberative Acts, titled “Voting like a Girl: Declarations, Paradoxes of Deliberation, and Embodied Citizens as a Difference In Kind,” moves the discussion of rights onto U.S. soil and into the past in an examination of the deliberations over women's suffrage. One of the chapter's most interesting interventions is Lyon's claim that paradoxes are generative of deliberation because they counteract consensus and because they disrupt the stability of answers. This reframing of paradox is incredibly useful for human rights because of the inherently paradoxical nature of human rights, but it should be noted that Lyon articulates a particular definition of the paradox as “indicating a set of radical claims about women that challenge traditional beliefs and doxa” rather than “an irresolvable proposition” (154). Lyon examines four particular paradoxes: the tension between old and new ideas (exemplified by competing interpretations over time of the First Amendment and free speech), the tension between the normativity of rights and the inherent (de)limitations of those norms, the chicken-or-egg dilemma regarding the political origins of rights as they relate to the formation of the citizen, and finally, the irresolvable tension between language as describing rights and constituting them as such. The chapter examines these paradoxes through a detailed reading of deliberation surrounding the First Amendment, suggesting that Susan B. Anthony's illegal performance of citizenship and the Seneca Falls Convention's rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, like al-Obeidi's testimony and Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio, are infelicitous performances that serve to negotiate and expand what was and is considered normative and thus expand the notion of “what it means to embody citizenship and rights” (172). Lyon ends her book by reiterating the performative, and nature of to the conversation surrounding rights discourse is in that she articulates how deliberation over human rights can potentially a subject of rights. In the Lyon to articulate a definition of rights, and thus a subject of rights, that is and are seen as relationships through speech acts and with the of being and situated they are as of in conversations among and out in or which them as and as through based and deliberation, and in However, seems to be a tension throughout the book on the one an of rights in their or discursive as an by a set of normative conventions and that and constantly on the an of them as political and by the critique are U.S. and the of rights are whom they have never seen” particularly in her that “performative deliberation must extend the concept of recognition from one of people visible to one of the it have understand recognition as a of being and rather than one of and or However, on recognition rather than persuasion and hegemonic discursive structures through “a agency in the present moment of seems to that all are at the and that all are as and studies has it is those who are not recognized as who rights the In other the is only human when she or is as a the Lyon this problem in chapter when she articulates the paradox of rights as the chicken-or-egg of what citizen who advocates for rights or the rights to the citizen as such. In Lyon's in chapter that al-Obeidi's to the of the violation from the individual to from the to the of the is also an analysis of the rhetoric of rights However, it could be interesting to on Lyon's by more deeply if this the norms of testimony the that the reason al-Obeidi was able to her claim and her testimony as a of rape was because she has a and had an audience the Western who both and that testimony and of it as a If the Western media had not been to the al-Obeidi's rape, and have as In other it is more through which normative cultural Libyan or al-Obeidi's speech is 4, does a account of the and problems of recognition, as in it Lyon offers a particularly reading of the norms surrounding Menchú's testimony and her of lies for political within the normative discourse of her useful critique of a an titled “The and many media in chapter Lyon out the ways in which the popular media representations of women not facilitate an space where may and initiate This chapter's critique of the popular representation across of missing women is to further Lyon's theories of performative deliberation in specific it the media for missing women and a rather view of the of U.S. Additionally, how Lyon's critique of the and other U.S. media as to a of engaged who can then in deliberation are by the on in China the one-child to to that will then to including the U.S. and the Chinese in the world of media and or what she of the recent turn to literature by human rights her that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” tension between the notion of normative rights as subject and the notion of rights as a set of that to be by a Western “we” lies at the of Lyon's but does not from her theoretical notion of performative deliberation as constitutive of human rights In fact, Lyon's reading of identification and the theoretical of deliberation, particularly in the first chapter, are very useful for scholars at the of human rights discourse and rhetorical particularly those scholars interested in of global transnational rhetorics, and deliberative democracy. If rights are and made normative by narratives, whether or Lyon's examination of deliberation provides a for the of reading across reading that is potentially subject Although the first of the book is theoretical and can across as from the of rights discourse and from the of rights claims example, what does it of of rights violations to suggest that they the possibility of a relationship with their or of Lyon's critique of the discourse of deliberation as persuasion and her of performative deliberation across difference is within more practical discourses in the second of the Lyon's critique of deliberation in human rights discourse, particularly her from identification as a in persuasion across is and should be a foundational one for those of in rights discourse because it to the very on which rights claims, particularly within like the have been In one of the more of the in chapter 4, Lyon Judith in claiming that one does not as a subject of recognition, to the and to be one must or the of that telling the is also problematic if it does not recognize as For scholars in human rights discourse to expand the notions of what is this is useful as we and critique that may or may or may not or may not be recognized as or existing normative of what human rights, rights narratives, rights claims, and of rights.

The impetus for writing this essay is dreadful despite being ordinary (all the more dreadful because its ordinary). Today, just like yesterday or tomorrow, hundreds of millions of people will not eat or eat so little that it seems as nothing to those who always have food in easy reach. I am no moralist, this is no sermon, yet the emptiness of rhetorical theory regarding hunger has begun to gnaw at me, especially since philosophical concern for the body and for materiality in rhetoric studies has only intensified in recent years. Hunger might draw the attention of rhetorical critique when public action is taken to feed the poor or when gazing on their suffering exposes capital's cruelty. In the philosophy of rhetoric, however, hunger is something of a void, so I think it is important to note, amid omnipresent food insecurity, the unmarked satiety of the rhetor's body, which is typically assumed to be a well-fed body or at least not a starving one. It is not a simple case of oversight; hunger is separated from rhetoric as a condition of understanding both and recognizing that we might begin to reckon the significance of assuming instead that rhetoric's materiality, and hence its potential, is not detachable from food so far as human bodies are concerned.“Experience teaches us with abundant examples,” Spinoza remarks, “that nothing is less within men's power than to hold their tongues or control their appetites” (1992, 106). Speech is effectively a species of appetite for Spinoza. The “or” he inserts between tongues and appetites is bothersome, though, and it is exactly this analogic separation that I want to trouble: it is wrong to borrow from the master figure of appetite, hunger, to explain rhetoric's persistence while granting rhetoricity independence from nourishment. Rhetoric (understood as a collective noun) is permanently famished, but its human agents never seem to know the want of food. But maybe they could know that want, or maybe they have, and that is what I wish to discuss. My only point, ultimately, is that an appetite for rhetoric does not deserve autonomy from hunger, given that any rhetoric is immanent to hunger and hunger is always, everywhere imminent so long as that rhetoric is enlivened by bodies that eat. The consequence of hunger's particular immanence/imminence is that it shapes rhetoricity in ways different from that of other appetites. Hunger is a distinctive, inalterable condition for humanity—it is indiscriminate in that all people are finally subject to it, and it is like clockwork, which makes it terrifying. As a result, it is also a condition of the rhetorics that humans inhabit (not to mention a condition of creatures that humans love, fear, imprison, study, and/or rely on, such as those that become our food, but I limit myself to human want for reasons of space and concision).My concern with rhetoric's hungry body is very general, but it is important to demystify things because otherwise I risk reestablishing the analogic distance I have unfairly and opportunistically attributed to Spinoza. One in eight people currently go hungry worldwide, and although the hunger rate declined from 23.2 percent in 1990–92 to 14.9 in 2010–12, 870 million people are still undernourished (UN 2013). One in six Americans go hungry, which includes children (sixteen million of them), seniors, and working adults (Feeding America 2014b). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2012, 49.7 million Americans lived in poverty (Short 2012). And according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2012, 49 million Americans lived in food insecure environments distributed over 17.6 million households, of which 7 million had very low food security (Coleman-Jensen, Nord, and Singh 2013). The nonprofit organization Feeding America says that “food insecure children don't develop and grow as well as others. They may have more difficulty learning and may not do as well in school. They are more likely to get sick and are more likely to be hospitalized. The effects of child food insecurity are severe and they can last a lifetime” (2014a).Presumably these effects include diminished rhetorical capacities due to stunted affective potential and responsiveness to the world. However, beyond diminished capacity, the universality and proximity of starvation is also important to accounting for the ways that hunger and rhetoric entwine. Poverty and its concomitant food insecurity are everywhere, and if you live in the United States you can see just how much poverty is tucked in around you with a handy interactive map provided by the New York Times (Bloch, Ericson, and Giratikanon 2014). At this writing, Maine ranks third in food insecurity in the nation and has seen a 38% rise in SNAP participation since 2006 (Preble Street, n.d.). The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka food stamps) is the largest element of U.S. hunger alleviation programs. As I sit now in my house in Maine, I am surrounded by poverty, with rates reaching as high as 42 percent within nearby neighborhoods and communities. Undoubtedly, where I am a little peckish and looking forward to the fish tacos I will make this evening, someone (likely many someones) within walking distance has eaten little or nothing today and looks forward to little or nothing tonight.Hunger does not bargain, so one never comes to terms with it; hunger makes one incessant demand. Even when the demand is met, hunger cannot be banished to more than a few hours' distance and if one cannot give the body something to eat, the body will begin to eat itself. Perhaps the pitiless and unmoving character of hunger was on the mind of Ischomachus when he told Socrates “no man ever yet persuaded himself that he could live without the staff of life” in Xenophon's Economist (1897, 283). So rhetoric, at least in its traditional sense, is not more powerful than food. Over two millennia later, Norman Borlaug, the great advocate of the green revolution, made a similar point in his Landon Lecture at Kansas State. Referencing West African nations' collapse under the pressures of famine in the Sahel region, he set “flowery speeches” against crop yield: “Food is the first basic necessity…. When stomachs go empty, patience wears out and anger flares. If we're going to achieve world stability, it won't be done, I assure you, on empty stomachs” (1979, 3). The provision of food is irreducibly critical to the polis, but hunger's relation to rhetoric is hardly so singular, so either-or—indeed rhetoric is hardly so singular—as Borlaug makes it seem. Hunger and rhetoric are folded together in complex, dynamic layerings, such that is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins (Deleuze 1992, 108–9). Instead of a binary in which sustenance sits to one side and words (as a cipher for rhetoricity) to the other, food pleats rhetoric and hunger into each other. Through its growth, harvesting, distribution, commodification, hoarding, preparation, aestheticization, enjoyment, and waste, food wraps rhetoricity and hunger over and over the other's fabric. We can begin to make out the curves and layers of these dense, plaited relations by attending to foodways more carefully.There is something to be learned by following the oversimplification of hunger's relation to rhetoric to its breakpoint, however. Ischomachus and Borlaug, each in his own idiom, describe a brute, destructive relation where want of food blankets and suffocates civil discourse, leaving only suasion by physically violent means. In Spinozist terms, hunger is not affect but an affective multiplier that takes over the desire to persist in being (conatus). Hunger unleashes a terrible vitality that seeks only its cessation; an unmet need to eat amplifies anger, leaving violence as the only possible style of being. Hunger heightens our material vulnerability to the world, including ourselves, while making us less vulnerable to the well-heeled habits of human communication. Starvation is a potent, wordless appetite that supersedes the normalized rhetorics of national and international politics, an incredible motive force whose danger lies in the fact that it smothers other strains of rhetoric that may forestall such violence.Elaine Scarry's discussion of pain resonates with me here (1987). As a body in pain, the hungry body becomes monadic in a particular way, folding everything in on itself and out from itself relative to the process of starvation. Or, to the extent that rhetoric is understood as creative forces that mobilize affect, hunger is “the wild” at the heart of civility (Bennett 2002, 19), a gaunt power that both obliterates and compels other forms of invention. And in the face of this immanent/imminent “wild,” confronted with myriad, complex adaptations to hunger, the oversimplification of its relation to rhetoric gives way.Beyond the remorseless, desperate experience of starving, hunger at a distance enfolds rhetoricity in endlessly inventive ways. Memories of hunger, personally felt or collectively recalled, afford communities a place to build on. In other words, the quest to forget the aching hopelessness and danger of a lack of food becomes a stable, recursive foundation on which to project a future; we can recall the kind of lives that we lead or should lead. Farming has special value in locating the present between the past and future, then. Farmers have been repeatedly valorized as the bringers of civilization; cultivators come before culture. Jefferson wrote to Washington that farmers were God's chosen people, since in addition to minimizing war, “husbandry begets permanent improvement, quiet life and orderly conduct, both public and private” (1904, 151). Emerson wrote that farming “stands nearest to God, the first cause” in that all that is good in society follows from it (1904, 137). The first first of farming, before virtue and wealth, is food. Agriculture, fisheries, and husbandry yield a surplus of culture along with meat, grains, and dairy because they turn the power of hunger over. Its cessation not only allows for but nourishes an abundance of creative achievement, which includes yet is in no way limited to civility's political rhetorics. It is the broadest pleat in the materiality of consumption, the turning back of starvation, that typically uncovers a rhetor whose belly is full and a polis that inclusively excludes the unfed. Yet many smaller folds texture the relations between hunger and rhetoric because hunger is never turned back (it cannot be satisfied) and the unfed inclusively exclude the polis too (their unfulfilled appetite carries an unrealized commons within it).The multiplicity of rhetoric and the singularity of hunger are thus bound up in each other, and their entanglements produce divergent powers. Foodways, dependent on farming, actualize hunger both as a destructive and constructive force, flipping between danger and bounty in relation to rhetoric. In a physiocratic rendering of the pharmakon, François Quesnay argues in “Natural Right” that “the physical causes of physical evil are themselves the causes of physical good” (2003, 47). Hunger causes war and violence but as a craving that we need to satisfy, it gives life purpose. For the physiocrats, Jefferson, Emerson, and Borlaug, providing enough food precedes political economy and at the same time is the principal focus of governance, or rather hunger is a radical political economy of need that engenders civil society and that must always be tended to lest a society collapse. Whether that society thrives or falls, however, hunger persists and the cultivation of food enlivens a great many rhetorics, big and small.In short, the materiality of needing sustenance constantly animates rhetoricity because the demands of the stomach are relentless. It is not simply when we put words on the problem that hunger and rhetoric clasp each other. Rather, because we are never done feeding ourselves (or trying to feed ourselves) food production and consumption implacably yet creatively take up rhetoric in hunger and hunger in rhetoric.Enter again the many millions who are hungry as I write and you read, but instead of surrounding yourself with want, turn it about, encircling the malnourished in a world of plenty. The most general fold of hunger and rhetoric, wherein starvation stifles all other rhetorics, is too general and one sided to account for the many ways food deprivation vitalizes rhetoric. There are countless twisted, wrinkled knots of community in which famished bodies and sated bodies find themselves pressed together and yet separated by food, much as I (and maybe you) sit within minutes, likely meters rather kilometers, of hunger. We are incorporated in many relationships that turn on food—some urgent, some negligent, some exploitative, some noble—and these relations, never firmly constructive or destructive, contingently capacitate rhetoric in the plural.I will not pretend to imagine the complexity of all the relations that I feel are at stake, but it is not hard to recognize the complexity when it presents itself. The most recent appropriation of SNAP was through the 2014 Agricultural Act, which included massive farm subsidies but a reduction in food stamps (O'Keefe 2014). In fall of 2013, conservatives in the House, as is their wont, decried assistance as promoting laziness, which assumes that the experience of hunger or at least the very real threat of going hungry is a teacher of self-reliance and civic virtue (Nixon 2013). Thus it is responsible (and a form of responsibilization) to let hunger rule in many pockets and corners of communities, if not whole communities. Hunger, valued as a political technology, is actively incorporated into a rhetoric of governance not as an abstract enemy but as a material application of motive force. In contrast, the liberal argument is often that food assistance promotes self-sufficiency, so ending hunger yields civic virtue. And there are the strange debates over what people on food stamps choose to eat, whether it is junk food or health food that draws public attention. The inspection of food choices is more than a shaming exercise. It is an assessment of the hunger curriculum and what people should learn through food when they can get it. Food rationing is hunger rationing, so it is not simply about empty bellies versus full bellies but about the distribution of hunger relative to being. Rhetoric is implicated in every aspect, in many different material profiles. Hunger is a silent force of appetite that destroys or empowers other rhetorics as it enfolds them, and food is, therefore, a principal mediator of material ecologies for rhetoric. Agriculture, aquaculture, food manufacturing, and culinary traditions extend soil, minerals, water, plants, animals, and humans into one another in ways that impact the affective power of other appetites, including but not only an appetite for political “speech.” Foodways are key adaptations of the will to matter and, thus, rhetoric. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, not all things in rhetoric are rhetorical (2013, 39).If one grants that an appetite for rhetoric is not parallel to hunger but is shaped by it and that rhetoric is organized for hunger, to affect it, then perhaps the groundwork is laid for the philosophy of rhetoric to reconsider the materiality of food. At the most esoteric level that would mean an appreciation that survival is not always prior to creativity. Or, rather, creativity is not only in the service of survival, which is implicit in the too general fold of rhetoric and hunger described by Ischomachus and Borlaug and which sometimes grounds the political ontology of rhetoric's being (Nietzsche 1989). As Elizabeth Grosz explains in Becoming Undone, conatus is about art as well. Discussing the value of Darwin for philosophy, she argues that the world's biotic diversity is not reducible to natural selection. Creative forces unleashed by flowers to attract bees, for example, exceed reproductive utility. She argues that art is the “eruption of taste” within conatus and exceeds survival because it “enables matter to become more than it is, it enables the body to extend itself” (2011, chap. 8). Food is infinitely more than sustenance, and humans adapt and develop with plants and animals in complicated relations of taste, not just of practicality. Hence, inspecting the taste of those who rely on food stamps is not so strange after all, even if it is unpalatable. Food culture is one of the great pillars of creative, nonrational achievement, so even as we recognize hunger's necessity as a mother of invention, we must also understand that invention mothers necessity back. Being “of the world” we must eat, but to eat we must be “for the world” in order to cultivate the food that we need (Deleuze 1992, 26).At the most concrete level, appreciating hunger's material significance to rhetoric would mean exploring how foodways participate in material ecologies of rhetoric, folding and refolding want and satisfaction together to create relations between subjects and objects, taste and need. It would mean thinking about the rhetor's hungry body, not just his or her sated body, and how the distribution of hunger impacts the evolution of rhetorical capacities. To do that, we need to avoid assuming that people have enough to eat when we theorize rhetoricity; instead, we should assume that many do not, anyone may not, and begin to ask how hunger helps produce a given rhetoric's affective potential. More simply, we need to not ignore hunger in the polis when we think of rhetoric but see that it is all around us, in us.

In his first book, Christian Lundberg takes on the formidable challenge of rescuing Lacan for rhetorical studies. As he demonstrates in his first chapter, scholars in other disciplines have mostly neglected Lacan's profound reliance on the rhetorical idiom, while rhetoricians have deployed his theory for critical purposes without fully appreciating the thoroughgoing transformation of rhetoric it effects. Lundberg's intervention is the first sustained effort to treat Lacan's expansive, dense, and often opaque oeuvre as a fully formed theory of rhetoric. In fact, the book persuasively advances the provocative claim that Lacan pushes rhetoric in far more promising directions than the academic disciplines of rhetorical and composition studies have managed to date.A pervasive concern linking assorted Lacanianisms is the subject's knotty relationship to the social world. Even the leading exponent of Lacanian political critique, Slavoj Žižek, returns incessantly to subjectivity as the privileged locus of ideological fantasy on which political orders rely. Among the considerable virtues of Lundberg's book is that it facilitates a much-needed departure from the problematic of subjectivity by shifting the focus to what he calls the “economy of trope.” Yet this departure is also a return: Lundberg contends that Lacan's theory is deeply faithful to rhetoric's rich tradition, painstakingly recovering within its letter and spirit a cogent, systematic account of the tropological processes on which both subjectivity and social ontology depend. As a result, the book skillfully and forcefully opens productive avenues for future scholarship in rhetoric.Lundberg's argument hinges on the claim that Lacan's theory—indeed, science—of rhetoric presumes that communication, understood as the achievement of shared meaning, inevitably fails. In this, Lacan diverges sharply from both various structuralisms on the one hand and Foucauldian discourse theory on the other, since for Lacan the inherent failure of communication is not an obstacle or limit but both a prerequisite for and an effect of the psychic, social, and political efficiency of discourse. In a series of close encounters with prevailing currents in rhetorical studies, Lundberg argues convincingly that the appropriations of so-called poststructuralist, discursive and neomaterialist theories by rhetoricians err in continuing to stake themselves on the communication model.Each of these approaches in its own way presumes that the production of shared meaning is the aim of communicative practices; the differences among them lie in the way this presumption is deployed to explain rhetoric's role. In Lundberg's view, such work misses the way the impossibility of shared meaning is the generative matrix of rhetorical action. Rhetoric is essential not to achieve the fact or semblance of shared meaning but to organize an economy in which the circulation of signs conscripts subjects through affective investment whose condition of possibility is precisely the absence of shared meaning. Thus, “rhetoric is both signifying in a condition of failed unicity and a way of feigning unicity in the context of failed unicity…. Rhetorical artifice—tropes, modes of address, imaginary commitments, and the labor of investment—underwrites these practices, feigning unicity in the context of its failure” (3).Chapter 2 takes up the long-standing difficulty of defining rhetoric as a symptom of the chronic misapprehension of rhetoric as a practice of communication. Against the persistent indecision concerning rhetoric's scope and object domain, Lundberg proposes a Lacanian reformulation of the problem that sees rhetoric as neither the confluence of strategic, ornamental, and constitutive capacities of language (and other modes of signification), nor the disciplinary production of knowledge about a genus of objects defined as “rhetorical,” but as the “transcontextual logic of discourse, situated in an economy of tropes and affects that underwrites both the sign and the concrete modes of its employment” (23). This in turn means that, while the American tradition of rhetorical studies has privileged the Imaginary register, focus must shift to the Lacanian Symbolic “because … the sign is the result of artificial … of tropological connection—and … as a result, the sign is a site of affective investment” (28). Whereas “the Imaginary … houses the specific contents … that fill in symbolic forms” (30), the formal, autonomous operation of “trope is logically prior to all the operations that stem from the Imaginary” (39).Consequently, in chapter 3, Lundberg urges rhetorical critics to forego their investment in the Imaginary as the site of “the agential capacities of the orator, the audience and … the critic” (41) and focus on a conception of “speech” orthogonal to the fantasy of communication. To delineate this conception, Lundberg painstakingly works through Lacan's “schema L,” which formalizes the radically extrasubjective production of the unconscious, or “the whole field of tropological connections that is the condition of possibility for a sign to have an intelligible meaning” (52). Rather than a manageable process and medium for the production and circulation of meaning, here “speech is the site where language moves through a subject, and where the economy of signs takes up a specific material position, mode of address, and social context” (56). So understood, speech both relies on and disrupts the Imaginary register, replacing “a bilateral … reciprocally constitutive direct relation between subjects with a tripartite, asymmetrical relation of indirection,” marked by gaps within subjects as well as between them and the Imaginary objects and Symbolic processes on which they rely (62).If communication succeeds, it is not in establishing an intersubjective domain of meaning but in generating a volatile yet systematic array of meaning-effects. In view of this, Lundberg argues that Lacan rehabilitates rhetoric as a “symbolic science of forms” (71) committed to accounting for the operation of the “symbolic machine” in social life (72). What makes this machine both unpredictable and orderly is what, in chapter 4, Lundberg calls the “economy of the trope” comprising it. The figure of economy serves to differentiate the Lacanian theory of trope from those prevailing in American communication studies. For Lacan, metaphor and metonymy denote infrastructural logics of signification as such, rendering the latter fundamentally fortuitous and depriving it of the unicity it ostensibly promises. In short, the operation of trope both forecloses continuity and intentionality in signification and operationalizes this foreclosure itself as rhetorical agency “distributed across the whole economy of discourse … the subject's affective investments [and] the movement of tropes themselves” (87). Hence “An economically figured practice for reading trope can … account [for] the force of individual texts … by attending to the intertextual tropological exchanges that animate and exceed them” (87).Extending the figure of rhetorical economy, chapter 5 responds to “materialist” concerns that the expansion of rhetoric entails a reduction of reality to an effect of discourse. Lundberg points out that Lacan stipulates the existence of a world outside signification and stresses the materiality of signification itself. Among the senses of the Lacanian Real is a physical objectivity to which humans have only indirect access and which constitutes a limit on meaningful experience. Moreover, insofar as Lacanian reality is the field of experience produced by the embodiment of the signifier, it is the domain of metaxy, or the mediating function of desire that sustains the relation of nonrelation misperceived by the distinction between the material and the discursive. Understood “as studied (im)mediation, as a site of enjoyment that flows from the gap between discourse and the world,” metaxy engenders this distinction itself (105).A recursive structure of affective investment and circuitry of somatic enjoyment is thus both a cause and an effect of the gap within signification and between sign and world. Hence the general economy of trope is resolutely material, accounting for “the conditions of possibility for a specific emotion to be manifest given the specific economy of tropes that organizes [its] experience” (109). Indeed, for Lacan “affect … is itself organized for the subject by the function of the signifier,” which is in turn repressed as the former's “absent cause” (110). The body is a body insofar as its affects are captured within the signifying network, which requires affective investment to function, so that enjoyment is less about signs and their meanings than “the ways that the object or practice serves the subject in negotiating a relationship to the general economy of exchange” (114). This is a material form of labor “that underwrites signification by ‘sliding’ the signified under the signifier” (115). The science of rhetoric, then, is concerned not with the exchange, coproduction or contestation of meanings in designated contexts but with the demands imposed by the material operations of language itself. The challenge for rhetoricians is to forego the premise of the rhetorical relationship and to develop methods of analysis adequate to the task of explicating these operations and their effects in public life.With this in mind, chapter 6 shifts attention to the public as both the name of practical spaces of discursive performance and the implicit horizon of the rhetorical processes at stake in the book. For Lundberg, Lacan radicalizes the ontic experience of publicness into an ontological condition “where the subject is articulated … in relation to the whole economy of discourse” (130). Accordingly, the Lacanian gaze instantiates the subject's irreducibly “ambivalent relationship to the speech of the Other” (131), since “the signifier is both a site for the articulation of the individual subject and its passions and a kind of ‘public property’” (132). The public character of speech thus involves subjects in a tropological relation of prosopopoeia that organizes an economy of address suspended between the subject's imaginary relation to others and its relation to the abstract, autonomous logics of discourse in general. Against the premise of a complementarity between logos and pathos, Lacan draws attention to stasis, or the circuitous relation between sociopolitical commitments and affective investments that maintain social links by violating, circumventing, or eroticizing these commitments. The critical question now concerns the productive capacities inherent in the discontinuities among pragmatic, rational, affective, ethical, and formal dimensions of public discourse. To illustrate the practical consequences of reconfiguring rhetorical criticism in this way, chapter 7 undertakes two paradigmatic readings: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ illustrates the way attention to the tropological economy of identitarian public-making reconciles the apparent contradictions of evangelical discourse practices; while antiglobalization protest movements illustrate the limits of demand-driven politics that fail to register in critical accounts organized around the strategic politics of democratic resistance.Among other difficulties, The Passion raises the question of how a film that submits its audience to a sustained experience of visceral revulsion can mobilize identification, since its symbolic construction would seem undercut by its affective impact. In Lundberg's view, focusing on the film's narrative construction in the context of evangelical ideology renders its central metaphor of scourging enigmatic, not least because evangelicalism rests on a paradoxical image of a community of unconditional love secured by vehement exclusion. The solution to this interpretive conundrum lies in tracking the function of enjoyment through the economy of tropological exchange established between the film's aesthetic strategy and evangelical publicness. Accordingly, Lundberg's reading shows how “the experience of revulsion both conceals and makes acceptable the evangelical community's cathectic investment in the grotesque violence” by routing enjoyment through “a reading of secular powers as agents of evil who conspire against … the body of Christ as a whole” (163).If prevailing critical protocols underestimate this dimension of Christian evangelicalism, they overestimate the democratic potential of radical resistance movements for precisely the same reason. Focusing on the discursive logic of demands lodged against powerful elites occludes the cathectic investments in existing relations of power that such demands enact. Put simply, in their symbolic guise as address to the Other, such demands actually desire their own failure as the mechanism for cementing their position of enunciation within the symbolic order. In effect, radical antiglobalization movements evince a tropological economy designed to preserve the status quo in a way that continues to produce enjoyment for the protestors. Aiming at their own failure, they succeed at generating surplus enjoyment, buttressing the conditions they ostensibly target.Both readings succeed admirably in demonstrating both Lundberg's critical acumen and the productivity of the rhetorical vocabulary he extracts from Lacan. What remains less certain is whether this vocabulary is exceptionally suited to the interpretive challenges the objects of analysis pose, or indeed whether an interpretation that succeeds so well in reconciling their internal contradictions is fully faithful to the principle of failed unicity on which it relies. To be sure, the latter is hardly a shortcoming of the book but a question for Lacanian theory writ large; still, it remains a question rhetorical theory should entertain before staking itself on the Lacanian science of rhetoric.The postscript that concludes the book returns to the continuity between Lacanian theory and the rhetorical tradition, figuring the former as the latter's faithful heir. In particular, Lundberg considers the unexpected convergence between Lacan and Ernesto Grassi around the ontological priority of trope, as well Lacan's affinity with Aristotle's Protrepticus, which enlists enjoyment as the mechanism that makes intellection possible. The result is a “protreptic rhetoric,” figured as a science “rooted in the enjoyment of signs [that] requires rejecting both an arid structuralism and the banal reduction of rhetoric to its imaginary coordinates” (192).Lundberg's argument that Lacan offers a potentially transformative theory of rhetoric is thoroughly convincing, as is his adroit reconstruction of this theory. No doubt reframing rhetorical inquiry along the lines proposed by the book promises to yield vital new insights and to spur rewarding new interpretive strategies and research trajectories. Certainly the stress Lacan lays on the consequences of failed unicity and the irreducibility of miscommunication augurs a wholesale renovation of rhetorical scholarship. Such a project will entail confronting a crucial question: how far can the implications of Lacanian rhetoric bear to be pressed? If there is no unicity to be had, is the only alternative the feigned unicity generated through tropological exchange? Are all modes of sociality predicated on the forms of misrecognition this economy entails? Must the failure of unicity be recuperated, or can social life proceed without feigning it—and if so, how must rhetoric be rethought to account for this possibility? More radically, does the failure of unicity precede—logically or temporally—the supplements that compensate for it, or does this failure appear as a problem in need of a solution retrospectively, as a consequence of supplementary processes themselves? While such questions exceed the book's scope, it brings them helpfully into focus and will surely prove invaluable for future efforts to address them.

Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound in twentieth-century American culture that offers examples of how sound functions argumentatively in specific historical contexts. Goodale argues that sound can be read or interpreted in a manner similar to words and images but that the field of communication has largely neglected sound and its relationship to words and images. He shows how dialect, accents, and intonations in presidential speeches; ticking clocks, rumbling locomotives, and machinic hums in literary texts; and the sound of sirens and bombs in cartoons and war propaganda all function persuasively in rhetorical ecologies that contain words, images, and technologies. The book opens with an anecdote that foreshadows Goodale's basic mode of operation. FDR's iconic phrase “The only thing to fear is fear itself” loses much of its persuasive power when encountered only as words on a page. A significant aspect of its rhetorical force was Roosevelt's use of a pause after “fear” and before “is.” The silent pause invited listeners to fill in the gap with their own imagined fears and allowed Roosevelt to break this tension with a strong emphasis on “is” that focuses the audience's attention on “fear itself” (1–2). The cadence and sound of his voice was tailored to take advantage of the persuasive affordances of radio and does not translate to the page. Rather than isolate sound as an object of study in the manner of sound studies, Goodale's examples and close readings prompt his readers to integrate sound into the mainstream of rhetorical scholarship.Along with McLuhan, Goodale argues that humanities researchers have neglected “ear culture.” Following critiques of modern and Western visual bias, he locates the origin of this tendency in Plato's allegory of the cave and its reproduction in scholarship that emphasizes texts and archives. Even though twentieth-century technologies have increasingly made it possible to archive sound, most digitization projects have centered on archiving texts and images, with some of the online sonic archives being almost “as ephemeral as speech itself” (5). Texts and images are also much easier to reproduce in print journals that are still the valued venue for scholarship. And sound has failed to transcend disciplinary boundaries. While words are still central to English departments and images are still central to art departments, they are both engaged widely across many fields in a way that sound is not—sound predominantly remains the scholarly property of music departments. Even the field of speech communication, for Goodale, gave up its previous emphasis on voice and sound after the invention of television—film, television, and the internet have long surpassed the phonograph and radio as areas of interest in communication (6). While there is a growing movement surrounding sound, from Jonathan Sterne in sound studies to Joshua Gunn in communication, Goodale maintains that a significant hurdle for sound's wider dissemination across the humanities is that it is difficult to “read” in the traditional humanities sense of the term. His book sets out to show how these difficulties can be overcome. Less a theoretical treatise on sound, than a series of close readings that practice this form of sound criticism, the book seeks to show that sound can be read closely and on par with images and words.In chapter 2, “Fitting Sounds,” Goodale develops readings of recorded presidential speeches to show that a significant shift occurred in the sound of presidential oratory in the period between 1892 and 1912. Grounding these readings in the notion of a “period ear,” he culls together evidence from the language of political cartoons to verbal cues in early phonographic recordings and literary novels to public speaking textbooks to show how the mixing of dialects and accents influences presidential rhetoric. Over this period, the increase in foreign-speaking immigrants, the rising influence of labor on politics, the dissemination of recording technologies, and changing ideas of masculinity drive a shift from a theatrical or orotund style through a transitional period to a vernacular, instructional voice. The orotund style, which Goodale examines through short, close readings of the speeches of Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, is modeled on Shakespearean actors and conveys a sense of elite class and power in its weightiness and gravitas. Every letter and every word is articulated clearly and heard distinctly. The style is marked by rolling r's and y's pronounced like a long i rather than ee (28). This kind of slow pacing and specific pronunciation was often needed to project to larger crowds in the less than ideal acoustic surroundings in which political speeches were often delivered. Goodale identifies a transitional, contextualizing moment marked by works such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, whose characters spoke in a more vernacular style, by actors such as Henry Irving, who rejected the orotund style in one of the first phonographic recordings of Richard III, and by speech teachers such as Brainard Gardner Smith, who began to advise orators to “speak as if before friends” (33). Goodale shows the turn in oratory that favored the instructional, plain style of professors through a close analysis of an early recording from Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 campaign that combined bits of his stump speech “The Right of the People to Rule” and his Progressive Party convention speech, “Confessions of Faith.” Roosevelt edited the speeches into a four-minute recording that was intended to reach broader audiences in the home and the saloon. Roosevelt fails to trill his r's, fails to pronounce every consonant and syllable, and speaks in the key of C (ascending and descending along the scale), in an attempt to mimic popular music, much of which was written in that key. The changing historical context created certain “sonic expectations” among public audiences that prompted Roosevelt to become the first president to sound like the people, providing Goodale with evidence that persuasively demonstrates the significance of sound in Roosevelt's recordings.Chapter 3, “Machine Mouth,” focuses on the quintessentially modern sounds of the clock and the locomotive to examine how sound can pierce or fragment identity and transform into a “sonic envelope” that protects and strengthens identity and community. What began as a “war of the working class against the clock” is taken up and celebrated by modern artists and composers and eventually turns into the accepted ambient sound of modernity. Pre–WWI artists, writers, and composers, embrace the deterritorializing of modern noise. Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque paint with sharp staccato lines that run through their subjects, fragmenting them into multiplicities. Goodale reads this as imitating the sharp sound of modernity and its effect on listeners. Braque's Woman with a Guitar (1913) exemplifies this technique, featuring lines cutting through the figure that connote the lines of a musical staff or the strings of a guitar. Futurists such as Carlo Carra and Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti challenge visual artists and poets to render sound and noise through movement, vibration, and color. Carra sees sounds as always “freed from their origin” (58) and uses techniques such as acute angles, oblique lines, and subjective perspectives to translate these sonic sensations into images. Umberto Boccioni observes that “an object moving at speed (a train, a car, a bicycle) appears in pure sensation in the form of an emotional ambience, which takes the form of horizontal penetrations at acute angles” (58). However, this cultural work serves to familiarize and domesticate these sounds, which produces “sound envelopes.” Goodale argues that futurist poet Marinetti's attempts to imitate the ear's ability to hear simultaneous sounds from multiple directions anticipates Hitler's orations. Marinetti's writing is intentionally disturbing, violent, and chaotic. But rather than fragmenting the self, Hitler used “the sound of his voice, his mechanized armies, and the crowd to unify a massive group into a single body politic” (61). Hitler uses the microphone, loudspeaker, and radio to envelop his listeners in sound. Vocal domination and the manipulation of applause create a comforting sonic envelope. Triumph of the Will, for example, uses microphones, martial music, cheers, church bells, and Hitler's amplified voice to “make an incredibly persuasive aural experience, one that bathed listeners in an impermeable sonorous envelope” (64). Adapting to these initially jarring modern sounds, audiences recompose them into a soundscape that creates identification rather than disrupts identity—in Hitler's case with disastrous results. Goodale examines a number of sonic artists up through bluesman Bukka White's integration of locomotive sounds into song to show how this “period ear” transforms over time—modern sound starts as jarring assault and becomes ambient soundscape. Radio plays a key role in this transformation because listeners can control the volume, turn to stations that align with preestablished identities, place the radio in familiar environments such as the home or church, and place the radio at the center of a sonic envelope rather than experiencing a sonic assault from all sides.In chapter 4, “The Race of Sound,” Goodale examines sonic persuasion even more directly, showing how tropes related to race were eventually used to upend mainstream sonic segregation. This chapter focuses on music cultures of the interwar period and the ways musicians collaborated directly and indirectly in order to navigate the record industry's racialized genre categories and eventually rearticulate them. Goodale provides close readings of a recorded oral history from ex-slave Phoebe Boyd, a radio episode of Amos and Andy, and Billie Holiday's recording of “Strange Fruit.” Because sound recordings were still dominant in this pretelevision era, determination of race often had to be made through voice, which is more rhetorically malleable than bodies, problematizing the commonplace that voice is a truer reflection of the self. The heights of audio technologies—phonograph and radio—made “sonic passing” through vocal and musical style a significant rhetorical strategy (78), and musicians regularly upended segregation by performing together in clubs and studios and imitating each other's styles. The chapter is awash in examples, but the focus on Holiday directly links sonic persuasion to the metaphor of coloring: color as skin, as tone in music or sound, and as rhetorical trope (97). Following Cicero and Seneca, Goodale sees tone as casting “light or darkness on events, facts, and personalities,” coloring listener's interpretations of an argument (97). “Color” is a verb that connotes change; it conveys the idea of influencing or distorting perception that isn't limited to the visual. In 1933, Holiday joins an integrated group put together by Benny Goodman in which she is prompted to sing “straight” or in a white style, because of the sonic expectations of the time and the need to “market race” (92). But by 1939's recording of “Strange Fruit,” her signature color/ing came front and center. Holiday took her style into the antilynching protest song in order to color the listener's perceptions just as FDR did with his speeches. Goodale writes: The south's purported goodness, for example, gets an ironic treatment when Holiday twists phrases like “sweet and fresh” while eliding “gallant” into something sonically less than a full word…. Her intonation of “sudden”… is rapid, thus turning the word into an example of itself. When she forces out the word bulging, she imitates with her voice the visual appearance of something being forced outward. The word breeze is elongated, and the letter b in blood drips from Holiday's lips like the life force of the victims she describes. When Holiday sings drop her voice briefly ascends then descends in a long glissando. At the end of the dragged out drop, Holiday's vibrato sonically mimics the tension of the long rope bouncing at first then quivering, then remaining still. Her voice has gained in intensity until this moment but then fades out, suggesting that it is at this point in the song when the lynching has occurred and life has ended. (99–100) She renders the words through a form of sonic persuasion that colors them in sounds that conflate the multiple meanings of the term—race, sound, and influence—creating a sonic envelope that colors the listener's experience.In Chapter 5, “Sounds of War,” Goodale concludes his analyses with an examination of sound in the cold war period. He analyzes sonic manipulations in cold war propaganda, specifically the ways that civil defense sirens and the sounds of dropping bombs were used to greater and lesser effects. Goodale looks at the educational film Duck and Cover's misguided use of the siren, which is intended to ease fears by teaching preparedness but ends up amplifying those fears; Hollywood's use of diving bombs in the Roadrunner cartoons, which actually succeeded in alleviating fears of bombing; and the persuasive impact of sonic manipulation in President Johnson's “Daisy” campaign ad from 1964. While the sound of the air raid sirens pierced the audience's sonic envelope, the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons turn the sounds of war into comic familiarity, enveloping the listeners in a safer aural environment. In addition to providing his typical contextualization that places creator Chuck Jones as a member of Hollywood's left, Goodale offers a close reading that centers on the Doppler effect. Christian Doppler actually identified the effect using light, noticing that as an object approaches you its light waves are compressed and shift toward the higher visual frequency, blue light, and that as it moves away it shifts into light waves that are stretched into the red end of the spectrum. Christoph Ballot first tested the theory with sound, having trumpeters play on a moving train. Moving toward the listener the sound waves are compressed into the higher frequencies, and moving away they are stretched into the lower frequencies where the sound correspondingly moves down the musical scale in pitch (118). Goodale notes how this materiality of sound operates rhetorically in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons: It is a sound from the perspective of a particular listener: the listener away from whom the bomb travels. These are the sounds produced by a culture that has, since 1812, bombed others and not been bombed itself. Listen to a war film in Germany, and you are likely to hear a very different sound; the sound of something falling toward the listener has a gradually ascending or constant high-pitched scream, not an almost musical, falling whistle. The sound of the falling bomb that Jones made famous in the 1950s is the sound perceived by people who are bombers and not the bombed. It is the sound of survival, not of death. (118–19) The listener enthymematically fills in the phenomenological sonic position of survival, which is reinforced by Wile E. Coyote's continued survival after every pratfall. This kind of enthymematic identification is central to Goodale's chapter and analyses. In his discussion of America's use of soundless bombing videos during the Gulf War, he draws on Kathleen Hall Jamieson's concept “empathematic,” which combines enthymeme and empathy, filling in the argumentative warrants and identifying with the subject positions the argument offers. But the lack of sound in the grainy, video-game-like propaganda videos left American audiences “little possibility of stepping into the shoes of the Iraqis and completing the argument about the real effects of bombs” (127). The Iraqis had been turned into caricatures that survive rather than humans being bombed and thus worthy of empathy.Since Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound, readers in philosophy will find smaller amounts of theoretical development and readers in rhetoric will find a reliance on a relatively traditional sense of rhetoric. Rhetorical concepts such as the enthymeme and identification are predominant in Goodale's examples, and he adopts a relatively traditional model of interpretation based on historical context and close reading, his goal being critical awareness. What is exciting about the sonic turn for many is the potential to develop newer rhetorical concepts and theoretical models out of engagements with sound. While Goodale hints at this potential, his interpretive practice stays within relatively well-recognized territory.1 But it is important to acknowledge what is significant about book on its own terms. Just as it became clear in the late 1990s that we could no longer talk about cultural studies without digital technologies, since culture was becoming so intimately tied to the digital, Goodale makes the case that in the twentieth century we can't talk about rhetoric without sound, since persuasion has been so intimately tied to the sonic. For a broader readership in communication or composition, the book provides a persuasive rationale for acknowledging how sound potentially impacts all acts of persuasion. Sonic Persuasion makes the case for opening the field to a wide array of engagements with sound, and while it doesn't always take us to these diverse places and methods—affect beyond meaning, engagement beyond interpretation, method beyond close reading and historical context—it does provide clear disciplinary grounds for these pursuits, making it difficult to neglect the sounds that fragment and envelop everyday acts of persuasion and the slickest media manipulations.

ABSTRACTReason, religion, and public culture have been of significant interest recently, with critics reevaluating modernity's conception of secularism and calling for a “postsecular” public discourse. Simultaneously, one sees rising religious fundamentalisms and a growing style of antirationalism in public debate. These conditions make a reconceptualization of public reason necessary. The main goals of this article are to establish agnostic public reason as the conceptual guide and normative ethic for public debate in liberal democracies by considering the secular/religious reason boundary explicitly and to argue that this ethic of public reason requires a commitment to reason giving and a particular epistemic attitude but that it does not, nor should it, take precedence over first-order judgments. An ethics of citizenship based on the process of reason giving with the appropriate epistemic stance might be one step toward rectifying the problem of an increasing separation between enclave publics, even if, by design, it cannot solve fundamental disagreement.

The contemporary American political landscape is littered with talk of apology. Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, both camps sparred over when, why, and to whom apologies should be made. The most striking clash occurred in July 2012. The Obama camp ran a series of campaign advertisements alleging that the then presumptive Republican nominee had in fact remained at Bain Capitol in a leadership role longer than he had claimed, bolstering their characterization of Romney as a businessman whose business was not good for America.1 When Romney's aide failed to quiet the critique by claiming that the candidate had “retired retroactively” (DeLong 2012), Romney himself took to the airwaves to speak to the situation. On Friday, 13 July, he appeared on five different networks to condemn these types of attacks and to call for a campaign centered on issues, sidestepping the question of his tenure at Bain. In an ABC interview, Romney emphatically stated, “He [Obama] sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). When asked, Obama and his team refused comment. The next day, however, a video advertisement posted on YouTube titled “Mitt Romney: Asking for Apologies”—attributed to the “Truth Team”—did respond in a manner that was read by pundits as a blatant refusal of Romney's demand for an apology. Interspersed with clips of Romney claiming that Obama does not understand freedom and that he should be apologizing to America rather than for it, appeared three simple blue screens that read: “Mitt Romney. He sure asks for a lot of apologies. When he's not busy launching attacks.”This exchange triggered almost predictable responses from political commentators. On the right, Obama's refusal to apologize was read as a white flag—an admission that he could say nothing without publicly acknowledging the lies he told for political gain. On the left, Romney's demand was read as an attempt to evade the questions raised by the advertisements, although some read it as even less than this, equating Romney's demand with “crying uncle” (Easley 2012). Had the back and forth of the commentary been even somewhat novel, it might have become exhausting. As it played out, however, it just lay there already dead in the water, waiting for the next wave of issues and predictable responses to wash over it.One might certainly read this scene with a sort of cynicism or even nostalgia for a time in our political life when things were otherwise—when the truth of speech mattered or apologies were read on a moral register. I think both attitudes, however, miss the larger point. The quickness with which we discount political speech, having seen for years what lies behind the curtain, and our obsession with memories of times that perhaps never were, keep us from investigating how this beastly creature, the “demand for apology,” operates. We say almost nothing about it, preferring to lament the state of political rhetoric more generally or reading it from and through established political stances. The rich body of literature produced by rhetorical theorists and critics about apology itself offers us important insights into the potential and limits of such speech acts. Yet these studies rarely include a sustained investigation of the demand for apology, and if they do, they make certain presumptions about the operations of demands that are suspect. In response, this essay highlights the need for a study of the rhetorical complexities of demands that examines the conditions through which these speech acts structure and invoke another's response, revealing how a demand for apology both constitutes and is conditioned by the scene in which this demand takes place. Implicitly then, this argument pushes us toward a renewed interrogation of rhetoric's scene of address.Demands for apology are curious in that apologies proffered in response sometimes fail to sufficiently resolve the demand. Such scenes are familiar to us. I demand an apology from you for something you have said or done, and you turn to say “sorry.” Your apology though, however uttered, does not fully satisfy me. Perhaps it is because I had to ask you to apologize in the first place, to point out that what you have said or done is wrong or injurious. Perhaps it is because, given the injury I incurred, your apology does not quite feel like enough. In any case, the anger or hurt that prompted my demand might in fact remain even after you apologize. Such emotions might be magnified in the context of apologies offered on behalf of a state to a specific group or population. It is easy to imagine how apologies might fail to “make up for” historical atrocities. “We're sorry” can hardly right involuntary internment, abuse of indigenous peoples, institutionalized racism, or genocide. But, to be fair, demands for apology rarely ask this much; that is, they do not ask for the situation to be “fixed” but rather addressed (ethically).That an apology conditions and performs an ethical address is worth noting only if we understand the complex ways in which language trips us up, causing the apology to stumble in the face of a demand. Sara Ahmed's work here is helpful. She argues that the difficulty of any apology is that its utterance cannot on its own perform the work that a demand demands. “Of course,” she explains, “the gap between saying sorry and being sorry cannot be filled, even by a ‘good performance’ of the utterance” (2004, 114). Felicitous or not, the performance of an apology—both what it says and how it is said—cannot effect, guarantee, or authenticate what Ahmed takes as the object of a demand for apology: feeling sorry. Thus into this scene of address—and Ahmed is clear that apology must be read as an interlocutionary scene—a problem of recognition appears that confounds the work of an apology. She explains: So the receiver has to judge whether the utterance is readable as an apology. So the following question becomes intelligible: Does “this” apology “apologise”? The action of the apology is curiously dependent on its reception. The apology may “do something” in the event that the other is willing to receive the utterance as an apology, a willingness, which will depend on the conditions in which the speech act was uttered. (2004, 115) The success of an apology depends then not on what is said or the emotion it conveys but on how this apology is “taken up” and read. Thus the one who demands an apology judges whether the apology meets the conditions of recognizability in the particular context.Paradoxically, however, the very terms that render an apology recognizable might effectively strip the demand for this apology of its force. In recent work, Adam Ellwanger suggests that apologies are only read as such when they perform metanoia, the subject's internal conversion or transformation. (I have apologized when I show you that I am a changed person.) Ellwanger demonstrates quite convincingly, however, that the performance of this metanoia in an apology negates or undermines the force of the demand. Understanding apologies as (speech) acts of public humiliation that ultimately bring the offender in line with public norms of civility (2012, 309), Ellwanger claims that in the apology, “the activity of confession itself becomes the punitive mechanism. This creates the illusion of self-censure, a phenomenon that is crucial to punitive apologetics” (2012, 310). The apology thus renders the demand that occasioned it at best irrelevant and at worst logically suspect. What makes it irrelevant is that the self-punishment enacted in the apology appears to be self-motivated; the confession evidences an internal transformation of a subject that, for Ellwanger, occurs “independently of his accusers' demands” (2012, 324). I see the error of my ways and find myself a changed person because of what I now know and understand. The demand is occluded because I am both the origin and the effect of this self-transformation. And what makes it logically suspect is that the demand for apology promises forgiveness in exchange for a form of punishment predicated on relationships that prohibit this forgiveness. As Ellwanger explains, “The covertly punitive goals of the call for apology ensure that the dialogue will be defined by agonism and antipathy on both sides—conditions that make forgiveness and reconciliation all but impossible” (2012, 326).That demands for apology end in paradox may lead to the conclusion that discourses of apology might have limited application in public arenas. Ellwanger himself argues that “a space that is more conducive to honest dialogue and negotiation” is possible if only we rethink the demand for apology as “the kategoria that initiates a conversation where the accused offender engages in a vocal defense of himself, while the accusers seek to prove his guilt” (2012, 326). For him, it is best not to force “a necessarily dubious metanoia” (2012, 326). Instead, we should understand apologetic speech as an antagonistic debate that allows “for the possibility that the offender does not want reconciliation” (2012, 326). In the end, Ellwanger claims that “minimizing the emphasis on forgiveness and admitting the conflict at the heart of public apologetic discourse might temper our expectations for its outcomes” (2012, 326).Although Ellwanger is right to caution against an understanding of apology as an act that brings about a total reconciliation or transformation, it is hard to imagine how the demand for apology can bring about anything but stasis. If, for instance, we read our original scene through Ellwanger, we see how Romney's demand for an apology becomes the occasion for a conversation in which both parties might state their case without seeking to reconcile their positions. Romney levels an accusation that the Obama team is telling lies for political gain rather than engaging the issues; the “Truth Team” opts for a preschooler's response of “he did it first” rather than explains why Obama will not or should not apologize for the claims made in the advertisement. In this example, the call of the demand and the response of the (non)apology become unhinged. The advertisement for Obama does not address the complaints Romney levels. Instead, it takes the occasion of the demand to address the American people, suggesting that we are in on the joke that is the demand. Romney is no worse for wear, though, given that his demand for apology never turned on Obama's response (or nonresponse, as the case may be). That Romney issued the demand allows him to stake a claim to a moral position within the political scene. The content of the demand is to some extent irrelevant because it is the act of demanding itself that is meant to accomplish his goals. These goals are revealed in what he says immediately after he issues his demand for apology. Romney comments that the president's allegations are “very disappointing” given his promises in the first campaign (Shear 2012). Romney thereby claims the high ground, a position from which he takes authority to pass judgment on Obama's speech and actions. What is so interesting in this overly familiar political strategy is that it renders any response inconsequential. This demand does not call for a response or invoke an other.2 It is instead a performance of the place (and the power) the speaker claims by virtue of the demand. All are called here to witness this spectacle but certainly not to engage it or question it. So the “conversation” begun by the demand ends with it as well, revealing a stasis that might be honest at the cost of truth.This is not, as some rhetorical scholars would have us believe, the necessary result of a political life constituted in and through agonistic debate. It gestures to a larger set of questions about the rhetorical-ethical contours of the demand for apology for which current scholarship fails to fully account. How does the demand invoke the other or bind another in an address? How does this invocation place the interlocutors in relation to each other? What are the conditions in which this relation functions ethically? The complexity of these questions confound us when we take for granted the conditions of the demand's recognizability. Considerations of the demand for apology (which may be treated as supplemental to the exploration of apology itself) often proceed from the premise that the terms of a demand merely represent or narrate some previous injury, suggesting an ontologically and temporally prior recognition of a particular history of injury or violence. When demands for apology are made, that is, we presume that they seek redress for historical acts that have already been deemed and recognized as morally wrong. Ahmed, for instance, claims that a demand for apology “exposes the history of violence to others, who are now called upon to bear witness to the injustice” (2004, 119). As an expository act, all the demand seemingly does, then, is carry forward a history that it itself does not constitute or color. Interlocutors in this scene are asked to “bear witness” to this history or respond to it through an apology, accounting for their role in this history. Because we do not account for the history itself—its constitution and the rhetorical conditions in which it is addressed to an audience—we lose a sense of the very thing that marks a demand as a demand: risk. As Alexander García Düttmann explains: One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because every demand requires uncertainty as the medium in which it is raised. One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because nothing ensures that a response will ensue, whether the one who makes the demand encounters indifference or whether there is no one to hear the demand. Finally one can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because the seriousness of a demand (for recognition) cannot be guaranteed; on each occasion one must decide anew whether another person's demand (for recognition) is feigned or whether it is meant seriously. (2000, 10–11) Risk attends the demand not only because we cannot predict or guarantee a response but also because the demand itself seeks recognition as a demand. In the case of a demand for apology, the history revealed in the demand is an uncertain history because it needs recognition for both the content of the history (is this what happened?) and the telling of the story (is this telling an act of laying bare history or is it the premise of a joke?).Theorists of demands for apology also seem to presume a kind of standing for the subject of the demand. We are, as we must be, always already on the scene when we give an account of a demand for an apology. To speak of or theorize this demand and its effect, that is, one presumes that there is an already established relationship between the one who demands and the addressee of that demand. We might argue that this relationship is inaugurated in and through the injury and therefore has been structured prior to this demand. Is it the case, however, that if our account of the demand precedes from an already inhabited scene, then it must follow that the demand had no influence on setting this scene? In other words, how might the demand change the structure of address? To answer these questions, we turn for a moment to a consideration of the scene itself. In Ellwanger's work we are met with a claim that demands for apology operate as a kategoria—an accusation made in a court of law that calls for a defense. Linking contemporary demands for apology to the kategoria of antiquity, Ellwanger argues that rethinking demands as the beginning of a conversation can help us understand the role of apology in creating productive debate. Yet what Ellwanger, like many others, ignores is that the kategoria binds the other in conversation because it invokes the authority and the conventions of the legal scene. The accusation calls on the other to respond because it speaks in the name of law. Here is where the Burkean understanding of a scene fails us. The scene is not merely a “container” for the speech act, a place or landscape in which a demand is made. The force of the demand comes from and constitutes the scene in which it operates. As Judith Butler reminds us, “In order to have that relation of responsiveness, one needs already to be in a relationship to a set of others in which one can be addressed or can be appealed to in some way. In other words, one needs to be disposed to hearing, one needs to be in the scene of interlocution, one needs first to establish such a scene in order to be responsive” (Murray 2007, 418–19). We are called then to understand the ways that demands for apology are conditioned by and structure scenes of address. To do so illustrates how the demand places the speaker at risk. One can demand recognition only if one is dislocated by it. I demand an apology not as the subject who was injured but as the subject whose standing—the right and authority to speak before the other—is in jeopardy. To make a demand places me in a tenuous position. Against a history of violence or injury that almost always revokes my authority to speak, I demand “as if” I already inhabit a place in the scene of address that authorizes my speech and obligates you to respond, aware that it might establish the very conditions under which I suffered injury.To examine a demand for apology rhetorically is thus to read for how language mediates the risk of subjects and histories as it constitutes the scene of address in which it operates. With this insight, we return to our beginning. Romney's demand for apology, when examined closely, shows itself to be simply obscene. The language of his demand carries and covers over a history that authorizes Romney's standing in the scene. “He sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). This might be the “folksy” language of George Bush or Sarah Palin to which we've become accustomed. But it also harkens back to a 1950s suburban vernacular in which Romney's standing to demand an apology would have gone unquestioned. While conjuring a scene that confirms his own authority to make the demand in the terms that he does, Romney's language mitigates the risk associated with claiming a place in the scene of address by sealing off this scene and placing it against (and the contemporary political it against the scene. Romney's demand is not issued to Obama out for a the demand invokes no one in particular even as it to witness the attacks that are the of his The risk is because the scene of the demand is with the the perhaps more with the contemporary political scene at demand is thus offered from an that can be seen but not addressed or in the As a his demand offers the a of the and place by a different As an act that the scene of though, the demand speech, the that speak within and to it. In the place of speech, we are only with a of that of truth to the very of political

The acknowledgments preceding The State of Speech illuminate much about the subtext of the book and the very real-world problems to which the author hoped to find a solution in writing it. The problem: the disjunction in post-9/11 America “between the daily practices of citizenship and the exercise of political power” (xi). Joy Connolly's solution: Cicero's ideal orator. Here Connolly's goal is not simply to provide a clearer explanation of Cicero's entwined political and rhetorical theory as read through his ideal orator but also to extract from Cicero's works a rival to current republican thought entrenched in “individual liberty” (1). For Connolly, as for Cicero, this model is based in rhetorical practices.Ultimately, accepting Connolly's argument depends first on the reader's acceptance that Ciceronian theory provides a model that values personal experience (including nonelite experience), that the orator is positioned through civility or decorum to recognize others' experiences, and finally that the orator prioritizes the common good of all (Roman) people. This requires that Connolly reconcile the Roman masses with the oratorical practices of the elite in the Roman republic and de-essentialize gender and class as the basis of full, participatory citizenship. These topics are the frequent focuses of the early chapters of the book and by far the most controversial lines of argument. Second, the reader must accept that the Ciceronian model can extend beyond the theoretical to actual political practice, presumably, in post-9/11America. While the success of Connolly's argument may hinge on the acceptance of these claims, the success of the book, a theoretically dense reading of republican rhetorical and political theory, primarily, though not exclusively, through the works of Cicero, does not. It is much of the work necessary to underpin the major arguments of the book that holds the greatest value for readers interested in oratorical performance, citizenship, gender, class, and rhetorical theory in ancient Rome.The introduction of the book begins to establish the major lines of argument and to build the claim that “Roman rhetoric makes a major contribution to the way that the western tradition thinks about politics” (262). In support of this claim, Connolly moves between Roman and early American and even contemporary rhetorical and political theory (Habermas, Marx, Mouffe, Arendt, Benhabib, Gramsci, and Žižek among others are all frequently cited). The introduction emphasizes the significance of the Roman republic in American political theory by detailing how republicanism has served to mediate between “radical and liberal approaches” to American history (7–10).The first chapter, “Founding the State of Speech,” is an exploration of two key questions in republican Rome, the relation between the orator and the masses—how the Roman populace was taken up, represented, ruled, formed, and guided by the speech act—and the basis of authority for the speaker. Connolly's examination of these issues leads to the major claim of the chapter—that for the orator of the Roman republic authority was performative and firmly rooted in the charismatic, elite body. That is, until the shift in the early first century and the influx of Greek rhetorical theory represented in the handbooks of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's own De inventione.This shift, according to Connolly, was a move to, as the title of section header makes clear, “rationalize the republic,” in that handbooks were able to “put rhetoric forward as a model of rational and rationalized public discourse,” which “constrain[ed] expressions of authority” inasmuch as the orator was no longer “relying on ancestry or wealth, but [instead] recouping elite charisma in a logical discourse of style” (67–68). For Connolly, this shift transferred authority from the bodies of Rome's elite and conflicts among them to a “learnable code” (69). The role of the people, who Connolly argues were once “moral judges,” also shifts, through the genre of judicial oratory, to deliberation about what is “just and honorable” with the jury functioning as “a microcosm of the just city” (70). According to Connolly, these shifts moved Rome from conflict to consensus by grounding conflict in law, judicial rhetoric, and deliberation and reconciled Hellenistic rhetorical theory, namely status (or stasis) theory, with the oratorical practices of the Roman republic (73–75).Chapter 2, “Naturalized Citizens” begins with a discussion of the origins of Roman civil society using myth, specifically Virgil's Aeneid, to frame the tensions between nature and culture before moving to a similar and, Connolly argues, related tension in discussions of eloquence as resulting from nature or art in the prefaces of Cicero's De oratore. This chapter establishes two major arguments. First, that Roman citizenship underwent a transformation, necessitated by expansion of the Roman empire in the first century BCE, from an Aristotelian model of “a virtuous, homogeneous citizenry intimately linked by geographic proximity and the shared experience of living together” to a more flexible Ciceronian model that sought “to represent civic bonds as rooted in nature but activated and reinforced through human acts and their memorialization in text” (88, 89).Second, and much more significant to the remainder of the book (and scholars of rhetorical history), Connolly makes the case that Cicero's concept of republican citizenship can be unearthed from the nature/art debate regarding rhetorical training in De oratore. This reading leads to the claim that the shift in “eloquence's status as an art to its identity as a product of nature” is not “a matter of wholesale transformation” as much as “a hybridization of the categories ars and natura” (103). Interestingly, Connolly argues that those who need the art are, in Roman rhetorical treatises, “demasculinized” and not “eligible for full citizenship” (104). Because experience (apprenticeships, practice in the forum) is privileged by Cicero (and his Antonius), rhetorical training is unnecessary: “Naturalization of rhetoric amounts to a claim of natural domination in terms of class and ethnicity … [by the] male, well-educated, and wealthy” Roman citizen (111). However, Connolly argues that ultimately Cicero's characters are concealing rather than naturalizing rhetorical training, an obscuration that is symptomatic of “eloquence as stability born of instability” and “Cicero's view of the res publica.” This conflict leads Connolly to clearly articulate her reading of Cicero's ideal orator: “As Cicero closes the gap between eloquence and virtue, the orator's speaking body becomes the virtuous body of the citizen and, by extension, a microcosm of the virtuous body politic: eloquence emerges as a performative ethics that embodies and enacts the common good for the instruction and pleasure of the republic” (113). Perhaps surprisingly, there is very little consideration of Cicero's own position as a new man, though there is a brief suggestion that Cicero might be guilty of a “tactical misreading” of the bounds of Roman citizenship (90).Chapter 3, “The Body Politic,” builds on a conclusion of the previous chapter, that Cicero's ideal orator is “embodied proof of republican virtue,” by developing the implications of Cicero's philosophy of rhetoric as fundamentally performative. The chapter makes two theoretical claims about republican practices based on Cicero's ideal orator. First, while the orators of De oratore are all upper-class men, Cicero's rhetorical theory manages to “encompass a more generous circle,” his “universalizing language” broadening civic identity (125). She develops this idea, returning to the relationship between the people and the orator from the first chapter, by arguing that Cicero's orator is meant to offer a “mirror of the good life” that the audience can accept (or reject) and that in doing so the orator opens himself to the judgment of the people. Connolly's second major claim of this chapter, which follows from the first, is that Cicero's focus on the body is a largely a response to Plato's arguments against rhetoric as found mainly in the Gorgias. Here, Connolly puts forward Cicero's model as a “historic ally for theoretical work” that seeks to problematize the mind/body dualism that has connected men to logic and women to the body, arguing that Cicero's model of “rhetoric opens up a view of subjectification that is usually overlooked in examinations of the Western tradition; the positive moments of subject construction, as opposed to purely negative practices of subjection” (150–51).The arguments leading to this claim center on the body of the orator. First, Plato's questioning of the epistemic function of rhetoric is answered, according to Connolly (building on Habermas), because the orator's “beliefs and practices are not fully his own.” Rather they are a combination of history and perception, and his “virtue is constructed through interactions with others” that break down public and private communication, as the orator's “self” “emerges in the context of communal belief and practice” (144, 151). “Communal observation and supervision,” then, function as a check on the potentially unchecked power of the orator (147). This positioning of the orator is rather precarious both physically and psychologically, with the “orator's body … embedded in republican networks that anchor communicative practices … serving as site of connection for elite and mass” (154). Though Connolly does not elaborate on this claim, the potential vulnerability of the body (and mind) of the orator becomes a recurring theme in the book (152–56).Chapter 4, “The Aesthetics of Virtue,” begins with a discussion of two Roman concepts: libertas, which, although similar to the contemporary concept of negative liberty, is here positioned as free as opposed to slave, and the related dignitas, that is, the freedom not only of speech but the “accrual of standing” to see one's ideas put in place (160). These two terms open a discussion of the tension between tyranny, both of the senatorial class and of the self-interested elite, and the common good of the lawful republic. “Oratorical training and performance,” then, according to Connolly, offer a means of “self-mastery” by which to balance these polarities, in part because the orator, whether in public or private performances, seeks the “label of vir bonus” (161). “Republican patriotism,” a term coined by Connolly, is defined as the process of training the self through “self-love,” repeated performance, and the display of emotion, which, for Cicero, “brings relations of power into the realm of aesthetics” (162). Connolly develops these ideas through several sections. First, she ties together the role of passion in political speech and the idea of “civic love” or “natural sociability.” She makes the case that Cicero regards decorum as the virtue that allows the orator to control his passions (165–66, 169), a virtue similar to the Greek sophrosune, which, Connolly claims, essentializes class. She goes on to address Cicero's “paradoxical solution,” which roots “aesthetic sensibility” in nature, and finally turns to Catullus, who Connolly claims balances decorum and passion (169–85).Returning to notions of libertas through the ideal of self-control and performativity, Connolly stresses that because law played a limited role in constraining domination by the elite and the will to power, “the social conventions that regulated ethics, behavior, and deportment played a correspondingly important role” (187). This section then follows up on the risks of such self-mastery, such as that it might lead to the desire to “exploit the spectacularity of the self” or a dangerous “contempt for others” that forces one to withdrawal from civic life or self-destruction (189). Continuing with the idea of the destabilizing power of the passions, Connolly turns to the role of the passions in contemporary political thought to address the issues of “widespread civic disengagement” and “fragmentation,” particularly as articulated by Iris Marion Young, who is concerned that in using “historical polities that privileged public discourse as models” we risk excluding people based on bodily difference (192–93).1 Connolly offers a slightly different model of a “deliberating republic, one that is a constant repetitive performance…. Communal acts and witnessing of character are pivotal in the constant self-reminding of identity and sentiment that citizens must perform in order to strengthen and reconstitute civic ties” (196). Connolly's “argument in this chapter is intended to suggest that the Roman rhetorical tradition provides a model. What that tradition tells us, above all, is that speech is married to the learned, learnable techniques of emotion control” (193).Chapter 5, “Republican Theater,” begins with the anxieties about the orator as an actor who can perform virtuosity without living virtuously. The first part of the chapter explores the nature of the oratorical performance in relation to stage acting and its role in Ciceronian thought. Connolly argues that while in Cicero's model the orator must be virtuous, a certain duplicity is necessary in republican life, and ultimately the orator's training, which teaches him to pass his performance off as natural, constrains him by demanding that he conceal his education both by not discussing it and not revealing it when speaking (202–6). Connolly argues, “The student of such a curriculum was in a position to learn that the authority granted by eloquence is not the manifestation of free men's natural superiority, and that its tactics are identical to those of actors and women, who exist outside the charmed circle of the political class” (206). While this anxiety over the tension between authenticity and artifice is often expressed in language reflecting gender panic, Connolly argues that the anxiety is more complex, in that, it “emerge[s] out of a recognition precisely that the republic exists in the act, the show, the display of plausible authority, the theatrical presentation of ethos” (206). Here Connolly takes exception with John Dugan, who, according to Connolly, argues that “Cicero advocates a transgressive aesthetic that undermines conventional Roman notions of masculinity” (199n4).2 Connolly's own position has evolved from her earlier article “Mastering Corruption,” which considers gender as defining the “panic” discussed here rather than one factor among many. Though in the article she is primarily interested in Quintilian and declamation, Connolly suggests citizenship in Rome gender and class to a much than is in her discussion of Cicero's in State of “The two and were in a of that then as as the and social that them men, free to the practices of women and that they in the that the speech they was a the State of as in “Mastering Corruption,” Connolly Greek and Roman discussions of in rhetorical theory that or of with the Here, she her Cicero's anxiety is not about or discourse has the it does not because is and … but because civic of to a political what we In what Connolly the between her view that … is the in and by of gender that out what are civic and and that of others who establish “the nature of civic only its in of of this chapter shift to focus on and in and which Cicero power was Connolly's argument here is but She that as the republic Cicero moved beyond to the more and of Here Connolly as Cicero on oratorical in the law in an to to and in in order to a or that the audience not to as but to … the of the In the on particularly in Cicero's was meant to to the of the and, in doing to of an that the with one's citizens that was necessary for civil life chapter of State of Speech moves from Cicero to how the republican political on the performance of the orator, was forward into Rome in the of Here, Connolly focuses on the works of and argues that the were of the up by Ciceronian rhetorical discourse and its performative ethics of republican the that there in the first the of a in In to the significance of in terms of social and as a of to the new Connolly in several from earlier chapters here In chapters and for Connolly argues that because the orator's performance is based in experience and depends on emotion, he may his by in public This idea is connected to the of who even than the republican orator to Connolly also argues that the are symptomatic of social in their to his on and of She then suggests that with his on control of the body, represented a against the and a to the discussed in chapter According to Connolly, this rhetorical education served as a training for a of people, which ultimately Cicero's public orator. In as a way to establish social and control” brief discussion of in which Connolly scholars who Cicero is Marion and are “Cicero's on decorum lead him to that the public must his audience of citizens as in an of to be because he that they are his but because the of him to the of communal and to the decorum as the virtue, one that down the of class and Connolly the claim that to control to that and among his Cicero's ideal citizen is in a position to political before she with a for an view of claims that Cicero's orator requires and is performance are and provide a for Cicero's political to contemporary The of This of the of De oratore as Connolly with to of the the nature/art debate and the While he these very from Connolly, the debate as an an Aristotelian model of rhetoric, with Cicero down firmly on the of the he Connolly, that Cicero is a model of rhetoric that is based in as opposed to theoretical and that this is necessary in order to with the audience Perhaps the one difference between them that a is that Connolly's belief that “the debate is in terms of difference and in tension with the of (103). While this focus on difference allows Connolly to Cicero's of citizenship from it also the that Cicero, as argues, has a Greek model in Cicero's to the way in which rhetoric was Rome suggests all rhetorical training it is a Connolly's focus on Cicero's connection to contemporary political theory her from reading Cicero through so on Cicero Though Connolly that the Roman republic was by she claims that “Cicero's of civility is a place to the terms of social because it the tension of and social class, it is not by of class or what is Cicero the common but how he intended that good to be is, more than Connolly of ultimately Connolly's of the people into the performance of the values were and by rhetorical handbooks and oratorical in law as in the of the elite control of in the as the orator their and the masses to be in elite oratorical While this reading is for the role of the people in relation to in Rome, Connolly's reading is limited by the on the orator's bodily performance and his (and of the people. This the people must be for in the oratorical rhetorical their role as an and rhetorical practices that might more represent the Roman people. Connolly elite control of language as a of class to for the means by which to the masses into the oratorical Though Connolly the significance of political the “Roman to see positioning rhetoric as a art that the of among its before to Cicero's she does not or of the Roman people into oratorical practice as a model for contemporary Connolly's arguments about civic to of the for are In the what Cicero ideal orator, one who through his turns conflict into of as Connolly frequently a a response to unchecked that was the republic and, all Cicero's ideal orator and the resulting republic Connolly's reading of Cicero is by the need to Cicero a way to which scholars of the history of rhetoric will be as a model solution to contemporary political a that with the common While the arguments necessary to so may not be fully they are and lead to a consideration of gender and class in ancient Rome and work on the of the particularly those as a way to bodily charisma and as a means by which to the audience to consideration of and of the vulnerability of the orator's body and those stage and withdrawal from political life and the risk of to to audience are and of a there is in Connolly's recouping of Ciceronian theory, though it is not the it is its of negative has so the common good as to such a The The State of Speech was and the it was political in and though much of the rhetoric of the has one need no than the of control to public by to find that the disjunction that first Connolly has and a recognition of are a good place to and one than to to Cicero for of

During his long career, John Dewey produced an almost endless number of pages of dense philosophical prose, giving those interested in his work plenty to do. Even scholars of rhetoric have found a host of reasons to return to Dewey's corpus, despite the fact that Dewey himself seemed, at best, uninterested in rhetoric. Two recent works—Robert Danisch's Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric and Nathan Crick's Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming—have already fruitfully mined Dewey's writings for insights on how pragmatist philosophy intersects with the rhetorical tradition. Now comes Scott Stroud's John Dewey and the Artful Life. Like Danisch and Crick, Stroud explores the nexus of American pragmatism, human communication, and civic life. Also like Danisch and Crick, he focuses much-needed attention on how Dewey's understanding of art—or, better, the artful life—connects to his understanding of language, symbols, deliberation, and discourse. Taken together, these books provide a strong foundation for those interested in continuing the conversation about rhetoric and pragmatism.Yet it would be a mistake to suggest that Stroud's book is merely an extension of the work begun by Danisch and Crick, for Stroud approaches Dewey's thought from a distinct perspective. Whereas Danisch and Crick utilize Dewey's insights for decidedly rhetorical projects, Stroud begins from philosophical ground and builds toward communication and the artful life. Both approaches are valuable in their own ways, but it is important to note that Stroud's primary interest concerns aesthetic experience, which then leads to a consideration of communicative practices. It is also important to note that whereas Danisch and Crick foreground the rhetorical tradition, Stroud is content—and understandably so—to leave rhetoric lurking around the periphery. Scholars interested in pragmatism, aesthetics, ethics, and communication will find in John Dewey and the Artful Life a compelling treatment of the artistry of experience from a Deweyan perspective. Scholars will also find a clear, engaging, well-developed discussion of how Dewey's work informs aesthetics and moral philosophy. At the same time, however, Stroud's book raises significant questions about the place and character of rhetoric in a Deweyan view of the world.Stroud begins with the relationship between art and morality—or, in Deweyan terms, aesthetic experience and moral cultivation. In response to scholars who implicitly or explicitly erect barriers between art, morality, and life, Stroud persuasively argues that aesthetic experience can lead to moral growth. He turns to Dewey's work because Dewey locates “the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience” itself (6). Whether through an immediate encounter with an “art object” or through subsequent reflection on the encounter, the individual's experience with art can, does, and should lead to “a progressive adjustment or growth … in light of some concrete situation” (6). For both Stroud and Dewey, aesthetic experience can be morally cultivating because it involves absorbed attentiveness to particular situations as well as “the constant and ongoing adjustment of individual to environment” (8).Central to the “ongoing adjustment of individual to environment” are the pragmatist notions of habit and attitude—notions that William James and John Dewey, among others, spent considerable time explicating. In Stroud's treatment, moral cultivation hinges on the habit and attitude of “orientational meliorism,” which concerns the way individuals attend to and adjust their “deep-seated orientations toward self, others, and the value of an activity” (9). Put somewhat differently, orientational meliorism is a mental, attitudinal adjustment to the rich particulars of experience. For example, instead of viewing an activity as simply the means for attaining a long-term goal, one should, Stroud argues, pay attention to “the material of the present situation, while maintaining a flexibility to new ways of reacting to such material and to the myriad meanings resident in such a situation” (157). By attending to the rich particulars of the situation at hand, one can make one's experience aesthetically and morally meaningful. Moreover, because orientational meliorism is tied to one's attitude and habits, it can be employed in almost any situation, which means that almost any experience can become aesthetically and morally meaningful. Art, Stroud insists, does not lie in a particular object; rather, it emerges from the way we approach and tend to the qualities of experience.Stroud explores aesthetic experience, moral cultivation, and orientational meliorism across six substantive chapters in addition to an introduction and conclusion. The early chapters explore such topics as the meaning and dimensions of aesthetic experience, Dewey's thoughts on the connection between experience and value, and the ways aesthetic experience can function as moral cultivation. Among readers of Philosophy and Rhetoric, however, the later chapters will likely attract the most attention. In chapter 5, “Reflection and Moral Value in Aesthetic Experience,” Stroud explores how art works communicatively—that is, how it can be “used by an artist or by an auditor to force consideration of values, beliefs, and action strategies” (95). In this conceptualization, art exists in the relational space between speaker and audience, writer and reader, producer and consumer, rhetor and auditor. To illustrate the point, Stroud draws on three disparate but compelling examples—the film Saving Private Ryan, the sculpture Tilted Arc by Richard Serra, and the haiku poetry of Bashō. These art objects are purposively evocative of experience itself, making audiences aware of the aesthetic encounter taking place and eliciting from them reflective judgment. The result is a bond between artist and audience, a shared way of attending to the moral meanings of the situation.In chapter 6, Stroud explores the concept of orientational meliorism at length, showing the problems associated with “nonpresent goals” and how Dewey's philosophy can properly attune individuals to the depths of everyday experience. One way Stroud illustrates orientational meliorism is through common attitudes toward work, labor, and one's occupation. One could, and many do, view work as drudgery, as simply a means to a paycheck. Conversely, Stroud argues, one could view it “as something that is suffused with the value of a larger goal. One could consciously tie one's activity to the goal of the organization in which one is located” (160). Similarly, one could focus on the personal relationships associated with one's occupation (161). The key is how the individual orients himself or herself to the present situation. Orientational meliorism thus allows individuals to make meaning out of the particulars they encounter—whether those particulars be in traditional art objects or in the more mundane aspects of everyday life.Chapter 7 ties together Stroud's themes of aesthetic experience, moral cultivation, and orientation meliorism in communicative encounters. And here Stroud, as many before him have done, underscores the importance of Dewey's philosophy for the study and practice of communication. According to Stroud, the key to artful communication, whereby ordinary symbolic exchanges become aesthetic, is “the orientation of the individual communicator”; it is the “attitude the subject brings into the communicative experience that will render it aesthetic” (171). By attending to “means and ends as integrally connected” and by valuing “means and ends in a connected fashion,” one is able to see and develop the aesthetic threads of almost any form of communication. Stroud provides three specific guidelines for making communicative activities more aesthetic. “First, a communicator is well served to avoid focusing on a remote goal” (186). Seeing one's interlocutors as intrinsically valuable, for example, can keep one grounded in the exchange itself. Second, “one ought to consciously cultivate habits of attending to the demands of the present communication situation” (186). This means, on Stroud's account, not only considering one's personal needs and interests but the needs and interests of others (family, friends, coworkers, etc.). Without considering these wider interests, one can quickly cut oneself off from the possibilities at hand. Third, “one should avoid the pitfall … of focusing too much attention on the idea of a reified, separate self” (187). Stroud's caution here is important for his project and for pragmatist philosophy more generally. While Stroud, like Dewey and other pragmatists, focuses extensively on individuals and subjective dispositions, he is careful to note that selves are integrally linked to communities and wider relational networks. Individuals are inseparable from the communities through which they exist, and properly attending to the specifics of a situation can coordinate meanings across individuals.All of this suggests that John Dewey and the Artful Life is as much about ethical life as it is about aesthetic experience and moral cultivation. These concepts are integrally linked, especially in the ways we communicate. Indeed, human communication is, or can be, one of the most fully developed expressions of an aesthetic, moral, ethical life. Perhaps the best way to think about John Dewey and the Artful Life, then, is as a guidebook for infusing everyday life with new meaning. By seizing on the particulars of experience—of almost any experience—one can make the world richer and more meaningful, so long as one adopts the proper orientation. Orientational meliorism is an attitude anyone can adopt, even in the most horrific circumstances (see the example Stroud develops on 163–67), which means that aesthetic experience is close at hand. In the end, Stroud merges communication studies and philosophy into a provocative pragmatist whole—and he does so in a way that Dewey himself would likely applaud.Yet in accord with Dewey's own philosophy, John Dewey and the Artful Life centers on communicative practices writ large, leaving the art of rhetoric, more narrowly conceived, at the periphery. In fact, readers of Philosophy and Rhetoric may come away from Stroud's book asking the question long asked about Dewey's work: “Whither rhetoric?” If we follow Stroud's lead in theorizing about aesthetic experience, moral cultivation, and orientational meliorism, rhetoric's role is ambiguous at best. At worst the art of rhetoric may impede the aesthetic, moral, ethical life.To be clear, Stroud never claims that his book will address the connection between Dewey's work and the art of rhetoric. Indeed, his treatment of John Dewey and the Artful Life stands admirably on its own terms, offering a compelling study in how everyday experience can be infused with meaning and possibility. So my question about the place of rhetoric is not a criticism of Stroud's book. But it is a question with which Stroud's book leaves us—a question that follows directly from Dewey's philosophy. It is also a question that readers of Philosophy and Rhetoric ought to consider, especially given the ongoing conversation about pragmatism and rhetoric. Does the art of rhetoric become less artful when considered in the context of Dewey's conception of the artful life? Is there a place for rhetoric in Deweyan aesthetic experience? More precisely, is there a place for certain kinds of rhetorical practice in the melioristic-communicative schema Stroud explicates?Scholars of Dewey's work will well remember the idealistic, romantic quality of his thoughts on communication. When Dewey insists that communication can liberate us “from the otherwise overwhelming pressure of events,” can enable us “to live in a world of things that have meaning,” and can allow us to share “in the objects and arts precious to a community,” all of which result in a profound “sense of communion” with those around us, he links the artistry of communication to moments of cooperative, level-headed, face-to-face exchange (1988, 159). Aesthetic communicative experiences thus hinge on individuals working deliberatively together for the common good. In this view of communication Stroud seems to concur, insisting that the key to aesthetically rich discourse is the proper orientation of communicants. Artistry depends, writes Stroud, “on orientations in the artist and the audience. Of particular interest to my argument is the orientation that the audience must take. This receiver orientation is crucial, as art's reception as valuable in the public sphere depends on the precondition that the audience attends to it in such a fashion that its uniquely communicative power is available” (102).Such a characterization nicely captures the artistry of many communicative exchanges, but it simultaneously pushes certain rhetorical encounters outside the boundaries of art. Indeed, rhetoric often operates in those moments when audiences lack the proper orientation. In many rhetorical encounters, speakers and audiences are misaligned, even hostile and antagonistic. And one could argue that rhetoric is most artful when it wrenches individuals away from their initial orientations, setting them aright about the basic goods of life. In Stroud's schema, however, the proper orientation is necessary for an aesthetic experience, which means that this framework may be unable to accommodate those profound moments when rhetoric is needed to wrench people away from what they think they know.Put somewhat differently, does the artful life include those times in a democracy when individuals do not collaborate and deliberate together but yell, decry, defame, lambaste, and try to start fights with words? Several scholars have already critiqued a Deweyan view of communication for failing to account for truly democratic rhetoric—namely, moments of protest, denunciation, and vituperation (e.g., Schudson 1997 and Roberts-Miller 2005). In such moments, does rhetoric fall outside the boundaries of art? What are we to do with rhetors like William Lloyd Garrison, whose powerful, profound, prophetic, vicious denunciations of slavery basically told the American people they were going to hell? Surely Garrison's audiences were thoroughly misaligned with his words. Surely they lacked the proper orientation. Does Garrison's rhetoric thus become inartistic? I hope not, considering that Garrison's pages overflow with eloquence, with wisdom speaking artistically. William Lloyd Garrison ought to have a place in Dewey's Great Community. His unflinching invectives against slavery ought to be affirmed as part of the nation's collective aesthetic experience. Artful living ought to incorporate those who yell at others, who condemn their foes, who disregard the orientations of the status quo and denounce evil.Stroud and Dewey would likely have a reasonable response to these concerns. Stroud himself begins to offer one when he notes that aesthetic experience accommodates those moments when artists “force consideration of values, beliefs, and action strategies” (95). Forcing consideration of values is one way of characterizing Garrison's project. But insisting that “it is the attitude the subject brings into the communicative experience that will render it aesthetic” (171) seems to leave little room for forcing people into a position where they must reconsider their beliefs. Orientational meliorism may mean that many rhetorical encounters fall beyond the pale of the aesthetic.Or maybe not. Stroud never claims that his view of aesthetic experience is all-encompassing, nor does he claim that he is interested in using Dewey's philosophy to account for rhetoric. So once again, my critique is not of Stroud's book. It is rather a prompt for scholars who wish to continue to pursue pragmatism and rhetoric. John Dewey and the Artful Life gives us a detailed, clear, and insightful account of how Dewey's work intersects with art, experience, and communication. At the same time, it encourages us to think further about Dewey's place in and around the rhetorical tradition.

ἔστω δὴ ἡ ῥητορικὴ δύναμις περὶ ἕκαστον τοῦ θεωρῆσαι τὸἐνδεχόμενον πιθανόν.(Estō dē hē rhētorikē dunamis peri hekaston tou theōrēsai to endekhomenon pithanon.)Let us define rhetoric to be “A faculty of considering all the possible means of persuasion on every subject.” (Hobbes translation)Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever. (Freese translation)Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. (Rhys Roberts translation)Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion. (Kennedy translation) The question of rhetoric's potential continues to provoke. What appears in Aristotle's attempt to name rhetoric—and to name it as a dunamis? What appearances do such a name endeavor to keep? Infused with a contingency that seems to double and perhaps even double again, the opening line of the Rhetoric's second chapter seems to defy understanding, let alone explanation. Form and substance blur. Is this a definition? A proposition? An article of faith? A prayer? Questions of translation circle and then spiral. Questions of context loom and fade away, and then loom again. As Aristotle pronounced it, rhetoric's (im)potentiality seems to promise and thwart (its own) recognizability. It remains otherwise—a suspicion of thought's necessary corruption, an opening to a discovery without grounds, an aporia with protreptic power. Whatever it might become, however becoming it might be, rhetoric's art is not (yet) altogether here. This may signal a deficit. It may sound a shared calling. In the name of letting rhetoric be, Aristotle bequeaths us a question that, perhaps tragically, we cannot let alone.The subtle and thoughtful essays that compose this forum require little introduction, not least as they thematize and reflect variously on the multifaceted question of beginning that inheres in Aristotle's famous pronouncement at 1355b. Concerned that dunamis is far from a “neutral human capacity,” Ekatrina Haskins considers the impracticality of Aristotle's attempt to name rhetoric and how this founding gesture “erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy” that supports a teleology, a vision of progress in which rhetoric—as civic discourse—disciplines if not deters its performance. Starting with the insistent desire to understand the source of rhetoric, Megan Foley turns the table on Socrates—rhetoric emerges, for Aristotle, not from “some genus of ontically existing things but from the incipiently existing domain of the possible.” Existing potentially, existing as potentiality, rhetoric begins before its first (practical) move, a beginning that begins with the question of its contingent ground. In his meditation on the “rhetoricity” that may abide in Aristotle's concern to “let rhetoric be,” Christian Lundberg reflects carefully on this question of ground as a problem of context, that is, the ways in which rhetoric—as a discourse—operates “in advance of any context” and how the understandable need to define rhetoric does not relieve us of the need to think the movement between trope and persuasion, a movement in which rhetoric's potentiality begins—and perhaps ends—in a nomadic existence.These nuanced inquiries are timely. Individually and together, they show how the city—whether Aristotle's or our own—cannot contain rhetoric. Rhetoric's potential sets it in motion and moves it beyond the walls, beyond the law, beyond the law of (its) language. In this way, very quietly but very firmly, the essays here trouble and expand the tradition of rhetorical theory as such. They do so from a beginning, from Aristotle's naming of rhetoric as an (im)potentiality, that marks a tear between the apophantic and nonapophantic modes of expression. As it refuses to disavow its own antiphasis—and here, it is well worth recalling Aristotle's dedicated interest in the ways in which self-unraveling assertion participates in the work of coming to be and passing away—rhetoric's “defining” (im)potentiality testifies to an unsettling experience of (its) language, a moment of letting go, of letting a controlling interest in language give way to letting the word be. As Walter Benjamin saw it, this gesture is an ethical hinge. It is a moment to hear the lament of language in the wake of its overnaming, a human impulse that submits speech to the fate of tragedy at the cost of recognizing its power—for now. Such a gesture may also be urgent, at least in a moment when the need to advocate (for rhetoric) feels nothing less than pressing.

The term dunamis, by which Aristotle defines rhetoric in the first chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, is a “power” term, as its various meanings in Aristotle's corpus—from vernacular ones like “political influence” to strictly philosophical ones like “potentiality”—attest.1 In the Rhetoric, however, dunamis is usually translated as “ability” or “faculty,” a designation that, compared to other terms that describe persuasion in ancient Greek poetics and rhetoric (such as “bia” [“force”] or “eros” [“seduction”]), marks rhetoric as a neutral human capacity rather than the use of language entangled in the vagaries of violence and desire.2 John Kirby calls Aristotle's definition “one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of language: to redefine rhetoric, not as the use of peitho but as the study of peitho” (1990, 227). The presumption of rhetoric's ethical neutrality implied by dunamis has indeed become commonplace in interpretations of Aristotle's treatise itself and of rhetoric as a social phenomenon. As George Kennedy puts it in his authoritative translation of the Rhetoric, “Aristotle was the first person to recognize clearly that rhetoric as an art of communication was morally neutral, that it could be used either for good or ill” (1991, ix). In this article, I would like to probe another, perhaps not so reassuring, implication of dunamis as a term for rhetoric—that as “an ability to see all available means of persuasion,” it does not need to become (or emulate) practical oratory. In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle's terminology, however neutral it may appear, constitutes an intellectually and politically motivated act of naming that severs rhetorical knowledge from historically specific rhetorical practices and thereby erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy.Defined as a capacity, rhetoric occupies a peculiar position with regard to existing practices of oratory and rhetorical instruction. In Metaphysics 9, dunamis describes “potentiality” of substances and nonrational animals and “ability” of humans. Among human dunameis, some are innate (such as the senses), some come by practice (such as flute playing), some are acquired through learning (such as the capacities of the crafts, technai) (see 1047b 33–35). Art “comes into being when out of many notions from experience we form one universal belief concerning similar facts,” and while experienced persons “know the fact but not the why of it,” those who possess a techne “know the why of it or the cause” (Aristotle 1979, 13). Accordingly, master craftsmen “are considered wiser not in virtue of their ability to do something but in virtue of having the theory and knowing the causes” (Aristotle 1979, 13). We see a similar logic at work in the opening chapter of the Rhetoric. As a rational capacity, rhetoric seems to be present among the general population, since most people are able to engage in verbal self-defense or attack. But their ability is often the result of random chance or habit rather than of a systematic art (Rhetoric 1354a). While one is unlikely to gain rhetorical dunamis through sheer experience, Aristotle insinuates that studying other currently available arts of rhetoric is even less preferable, for these arts give disproportionate attention to “matters outside the subject” (“ta exō tou pragmatos”) (Aristotle 1991a, 5, 7, 11). By offering a systematic investigation of “available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991a, 13) and stressing proofs (pisteis) and arguments (logoi), Aristotle sets up his version of the art above those purveyed by writers of rhetorical handbooks and other master teachers.Admittedly, the text of the Rhetoric disavows the first chapter's attack on other technai's treatment of emotions and matters “outside the subject” as it proceeds to furnish an extensive discussion of human emotions in book 2 and addresses style and delivery in book 3.3 However, the manner in which it presents rhetorical proofs and stylistic devices is detached from practices of oratory. Whether Aristotle considers rhetorical genres or emotions, his method of exposition is characterized by “surgical detachment and description” (Dubois 1993, 125). So, for example, he investigates the causes of anger without actually examining how this passion was stirred by a particular orator. According to Kennedy, the Rhetoric is one of Aristotle's “most Athenian works,” “for only in Athens did rhetoric fully function in the way he describes” (1996, 418), but the treatise contains little evidence of its author's direct contact with rhetorical practices of Athenian democracy. As J. C. Trevett has shown, “Aristotle fails … to quote from or allude to the text of a single deliberative or forensic speech” and instead “attributes statements or arguments to a particular speaker” or draws on various poetic genres such as epic, tragedy, and lyric (1996, 371, 372, 375). At the same time, Aristotle quotes extensively from epideictic compositions, including those written by Isocrates, for whom Aristotle reserves a minor place in the context of his discussion of style. This curiously inconsistent use of citations can be explained, in part, by the relative ease of access to literary genres and the paucity of deliberative and forensic texts, on the one hand, and Aristotle's lack of firsthand experience of oral practices of Athenian democracy due to his status as a resident alien, on the other.Yet Aristotle's many disparaging remarks about pandering orators and easily excitable and ignorant audiences indicate an entrenched suspicion toward the power of performed speech, the very power his rhetoric as dunamis is designed to guard against. The Rhetoric is indeed “the most Athenian” of Aristotle's works in the sense that in it the philosopher responds to an ideology that he regards as inimical to philosophical life and civic education.4 Aristotle is unequivocal that rhetoric would be of little use in a well-ordered state, since in such a state legislation limits the role of judges to a minimum and judges, in turn, are drawn from the ranks of prudent citizens. By contrast, in a corrupt regime such as Athenian democracy, judges are assigned their roles by lot and their decision making is often obscured by passion and self-interest (Rhetoric 1354a32–1354b12). It is the fickle and corrupt disposition of the demos that calls for the use of style and delivery that Aristotle considers vulgar and superfluous to proper argumentation (Rhetoric 1404a). Eager to meet their audience's expectations, orators worry more about securing the hearers' approval than about demonstrating the truth of their position. Aristotle observes the same deplorable state of affairs both in dramatic competitions and political contests, where a skillful performance, not the integrity of a tragic plot or a logically compelling demonstration, wins applause (Rhetoric 1403b).5 Not only does the audience influence the form and content of drama and oratory—it corrupts the very character of performers. Aristotle's association of performance in drama and oratory with pandering to a corrupt set of listeners is thus consonant with the conceptualization of rhetoric as a dunamis, a rational capacity that does not require imitation or practice.The status of rhetoric as a dunamis and a techne secures its position as a form of philosophically legitimate knowledge, for it allows its students to understand the “why” of persuasion without committing them to a morally precarious life of political performance in a corrupt regime. At the same time, rhetoric does not stand on its own as a “theory of civic discourse,” as the subtitle of Kennedy's translation (1991) of the Rhetoric calls it. Although the treatise's language, preoccupation with abstract categorization, and apparent detachment from the particulars of oratory might qualify it as a “theory” in our contemporary sense, for Aristotle rhetoric is a productive art, not to be confused with theoria, the highest form of philosophical knowledge that rules over practical and productive arts.6 In Aristotle's hierarchy of knowledge, rhetoric is subordinated to politike, the “master art” in the sphere of praxis, which comprises ethics and politics (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b). As complementary parts of politike, ethics and politics investigate the principles that guide the attainment of virtue and practical wisdom and the forms of political organization most congenial to this pursuit.Aristotle would likely be surprised by our inclination to read the Rhetoric as a theory of civic discourse, since he explicitly disapproves of those who, “partly from ignorance, partly from boastfulness, and partly from other human weaknesses,” take the appearance of rhetoric as an “offshoot” of politike to mean that the two are the same art (Aristotle 1991a, 19). He points out that rhetoric, though it “slips under the garb” of politike, is but a dunamis of furnishing arguments (tou porisai logous), not an art of good life and good government (Aristotle 1991a, 19). Here he doesn't seem to be criticizing handbook writers; rather this objection is likely a reference to Isocrates, whose logon paideia was in Aristotle's sights when he lectured on rhetoric at the Academy and Lyceum. Isocrates regards discourse (logos) as an artificer of civic institutions and embraces the performative and politically constitutive character of traditional Greek education (paideia) by making character and political identity dependent on recurrent performance addressed to the polis. Despite his elitism, Isocrates accepts the norms of his rhetorical culture and tries to adapt them to a literary medium. On the contrary, Aristotle aspires to protect the practical rationality and virtue of a properly habituated student from being corrupted by these very cultural norms. It could be argued that Aristotle's effort to split the traditional link between eloquence (eu legein) and virtuous action (eu prattein) by making them subjects of different arts (rhetorike and politike, respectively) is a response to Isocrates' “boastful” incorporation of the two under the name philosophia.7By conceiving of rhetoric as a dunamis, Aristotle distances the art from practical oratory and reduces it to a faculty in the service of substantive intellectual disciplines. Why, then, are we (academic students of rhetoric) so beholden to this treatise? The text's current prestige is hardly the consequence of the way the rhetorical tradition has viewed it. As Carol Poster summarizes the history of its transmission and interpretation: Hellenistic rhetoricians didn't know it; neoplatonic commentators overlooked it; the Byzantines didn't understand it; the early Middle Ages didn't have it; the late middle ages and Renaissance scholars were puzzled by it; and not until the prejudice against Aristotle due to its association with scholasticism died away was the Rhetorica revived alongside Ciceronian rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (1998, 332)The rise of the Rhetoric to its position of dominance in the twentieth century has many possible explanations. One of them, undoubtedly, is the name of Aristotle, whose historical authority is recognized across the university and, as such, allows scholars from less prestigious and less well-funded fields (such as rhetoric and composition) to gain at least some measure of respectability by sheer association with the Philosopher.8 Another reason is the ascendance of theory among the humanities and social sciences due to the increasing stress on research over teaching in modern universities. Perhaps because the Rhetoric looks so much more like “theory” than the fragmented record of the sophists and the writings of Isocrates, it has come to be regarded as a high point of rhetoric's evolution as an intellectual discipline in the fourth century BCE and a solid point of departure for contemporary students.9 This teleological view has not gone unchallenged, of course, but the recovery and interpretation of what Aristotle's conceptualization of rhetoric has marginalized or suppressed is an ongoing project.10 I would therefore like to conclude with a plea to young scholars to keep up questioning the beginnings of our discipline, including Aristotle's not-so-innocent definition of rhetoric.

Scott Welsh is likely to elicit a sigh of relief from the many academics who struggle with what, if any, public intellectual persona they should adopt. Welsh (2012) argues against a broad swathe of mostly left-leaning rhetorical scholars that the academic's democratic duty is adequately discharged by providing suitably ambivalent rhetorical resources for others to use in their political struggles. For Welsh, following Slavoj Žižek (2008), the scholar's first obligation is to “enjoy your symptom”—that is, to demonstrate in one's discursive practice the problematic nature of trying to claim epistemic privilege in a society ostensibly of equals. The main conceptual difference between Welsh's and my own conception of academics as public intellectuals is that he understands the rhetor's imperative to deploy “all the available means of persuasion” collectively, whereas I understand it distributively.Thus, Welsh calls for a very tolerant attitude toward the exact rhetorical register in which academics engage with the public, calling on Kenneth Burke (1969) and Terry Eagleton (1990) as witnesses to the essential unpredictability and “polyvalence” of discursive uptake. In short, given sufficient time and space, anything said in any way in any context might just work, from which Welsh concludes that we should not be too judgmental of how our colleagues approach the public intellectual's role. Moreover, there may be something interesting to say—via Žižek—about the nature of the anxiety generated by the status of academics as public intellectuals. In contrast, I believe that each public intellectual is obliged to exploit the distinct communicative resources afforded by all the media. All public intellectuals should aspire to be “the compleat rhetor.” Of course, what can be conveyed in a heavily referenced tome cannot be conveyed in a three-part television series, let alone a live radio broadcast. However, the public intellectual is willing and able to play variations on her ideas across these different media. Even in our own time, despite the problems I discuss here, academics—three quite different but equally effective exemplars would be Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, and Niall Ferguson—have risen to the challenge.To be sure, the performance standards of public intellectual life may well exceed the abilities and dispositions of most academics, whose communicative comfort zone ends with their scholarly peers. I allude to what Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacities,” which are often reinforced by the constitution of the academic field. More specifically, I have in mind not the early nineteenth- century ideal Humboldtian academic who aspired to do research worth teaching. That is very much in the mold of the public intellectual, and its spirit still imbues many liberal arts colleges (Fuller 2009, chap. 1). Rather, I mean, in the first instance, a phenomenon to which Veblen himself was responding in the early twentieth-century—namely, the rise of graduate education and the fetishization of the PhD, which effectively disabled academics' impulse to communicate with the larger society by structuring career advancement in terms of an increasingly specialized community of fellow researchers. Thus, the academic shifted from broad- to narrowcaster. However, the early twenty-first century has imposed an additional layer of difficulty, as the decline in tenurable posts has exposed academics more directly to market pressures, rendering them more biddable to fashion, which in turn erodes the sense of intellectual autonomy that the specialist researcher still retained.Given this trajectory, it is perhaps not surprising that Welsh restricts his discussion of the prospects for the academic as public intellectual in terms of the likely uptake of one's message, which in his view might as well be sent in a bottle. For a paper whose title draws attention to political agency, remarkably little is said about what if any obligation the academic might have in trying to control the public reception of his message. Here I would put the stress on “trying,” since there is no guarantee that the academic will be received in a way that he finds satisfying. However, a key moment in democratic education occurs precisely during the negotiation of this sort of potential misunderstanding, a negotiation that may be likened to what happens when theory and practice are drawn closer together. In this respect, I find Welsh's appeal to the early Habermas (1973) misguided because—like his evil twin Allan Bloom (1987)—Habermas presumes that academics would be unduly authoritarian were they to try to dictate policies based on their research. The possibility of the public character of academic rhetoric becoming overbearing was perhaps a legitimate concern for Max Weber in the early twentieth century, when universities were still very elite institutions, but the accelerated expansion of university construction since the 1960s has rendered such a concern moot. The increase in access to academic channels of discourse—from student enrollments to journal publications—has effectively diluted academic authority. Indeed, the argument has been made that external funding, given its reliable scarcity, may be eclipsing publications as the main market signal of academic merit (Lamont 2009). More to the point, there would have been no need for Richard Dawkins to hold a chair in the “public understanding of science” were there a serious chance that “the scientific establishment” might soon succeed in dominating public opinion about the nature of reality.If anything, this implied fragmentation of epistemic authority—which I have dubbed “Protscience” after the Protestant Reformation (Fuller 2010)—has only increased, as the internet empowers the modestly educated layperson to find a “second opinion” on virtually any topic of academic concern. In this respect, progress in the development of smart search engines could easily put the cautious, even-handed, “value-neutral” academic out of business. More difficult to automate is a consistent style of response across a broad range of issues that marks the autonomy of the public intellectual voice. We are much more familiar with the style of, say, Voltaire or Sartre than with the substance of what they said—and this is not because they did not say substantive, often rather unexpected, things. But their style marked them as thinking through things for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others. From that point of view, academic discourse can look like bad acting, where the presence of a script is all too evident in the performance. And here I mean not the literal presence of the written text—which is bad enough—but the academic's tendency to declare her reliance on others' work too loudly like a proud ventriloquist's dummy. The proper term for this stance is “normal science” (Kuhn 1970). It makes for a poor reading and listening experience.Thus, the rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums, relatively scarce access to which is matched by a large appreciative audience. This has meant that, for quite a while now, academics have had to compete with such “media elites” as professional writers, journalists, and other “celebrities” for prime-time television exposure (Debray 1981). Chomsky, Dawkins and Ferguson have risen to the challenge, each in his own way. Against this backdrop, Welsh's apparent satisfaction with academics simply providing Habermas-style “resources” for citizen deliberation appears profoundly unambitious. At the same time, though, given the erosion of the academic's intellectual autonomy in our time, treating one's own words as bottled messages may offer prudent career advice for people unsure of who will be writing their next paycheck. But Welsh does not seem to want to argue from such a position of abject weakness. In that case, he needs to come to grips more directly with the cognitive significance of entertainment as a modus operandi in public intellectual life—not just now but perhaps always.“Entertainment” is an early seventeenth-century English coinage designed to capture an abstract sense of tenancy, as in the case of the king who keeps a poet or playwright on retainer solely for purposes of amusement but whose proximity ends up exerting influence over his political judgment. It was just this sense of the term that had led Plato to regard the performing arts as potentially subversive of good governance. Moreover, as Adriano Shaplin (2009) has recently dramatized, Hobbes shared similar suspicions about the English court's fascination with the theatricality of experimental demonstrations, the details of which form the basis of the most influential monograph in the historical sociology of science in recent times (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The fear evoked—or opportunity afforded—by entertainment is that after the final curtain is drawn, the audience might themselves continue acting in the spirit of the performance they had observed, effectively turning “real life” into an extension of the stage or, as Hobbes feared, the lab. It was precisely to decrease the likelihood of this happening that Aristotle stressed the cathartic function of the well-formed play: the most artful way to highlight drama's fictional character is to present its action as completely self-contained, which means that by the end all the plotlines have been resolved. Without such resolution, the line between fact and fiction may be easily blurred in an imaginatively inflamed audience. From that standpoint, the public intellectual clearly aims to violate Aristotle's strictures on good drama by wishing her brand of entertainment to outlast the experience of the actual performance so as to carry over as a motive force in the audience members once they have left the theater.My sense of entertainment's intellectually empowering character goes very much against the grain of Neil Postman's (1985) influential demonization of its alleged narcotic effects. To be sure, Postman was fixated on television, which he understood as Marshall McLuhan's absorbing yet noninteractive “cool” medium that, in Brave New World fashion, effectively sucked the life out of its viewers, a process that had been recently sensationalized by David Cronenberg in the film Videodrome (1983). But rather than the vampire, Postman might have considered the virus as the model of entertainment's modus operandi, whereby the host is not so much annihilated as simply contaminated by the guest organism. This then gets us back to the problem that originally concerned Plato, one which Antoine Artaud's (1958) “theatre of cruelty” converted into a virtue: it is not that the poets send the audience into a dream state but that the audience might enact those dreams in “real life.” The normative limits of “reality television” provide an interesting contemporary benchmark on this issue. Whereas television producers and audiences are enthusiastic about Dragons' Den styled programs (called Shark Tank in the United States) that cast entrepreneurship as a talent competition, similarly styled proposals to stage political elections have been met with the sort of disapproval that would have pleased Plato (see, e.g., Firth 2009).Against this backdrop, Welsh gets my critique of Dewey exactly wrong. Of course, Dewey was trying to be a public intellectual. In fact, the monumental level of his failure reflects the tremendous effort he put into the task. But in the end, his approach to the task was profoundly nonentertaining. He simply tried to apply his ideas without considering how the medium might affect the message. By nearly all accounts, Dewey's many public appearances and popular books over a very long career were watered down versions of the distractedly presented abstractions that marked his more technical performances. He was and is boring. Although Dewey saw the classroom as the gateway to a more democratic society, his real talent lay in taking advantage of the classroom's artificially well-bounded character to treat it as a laboratory for generating democratic sentiments. While hardly a trivial achievement, like many other laboratory-based experiments, it did not generalize. Perhaps Dewey's best chance in the public intellectual sweepstakes was taken by his followers behind the so-called forum movement, which in interwar America aimed to institutionalize deliberative democracy in the form of discussion groups in local churches, clubs, union halls, and community centers. William Keith (2007) has provided a sophisticated, critically sympathetic account of this phenomenon, which attracted the support of the reformist wing of the emerging speech communication scholarly community, who believed that in an era of mass democracy, the paramount concern of public discourse should focus on how to forge a purposeful consensus. In that context, they found classical debate practices inappropriately combative and elitist and therefore not suited to this purpose.However, the forum movement failed for reasons that would have been obvious to Dewey's nemesis, Walter Lippmann, journalism's answer to Plato. Dewey had imagined that the twentieth century would bring an end to the hereditary elites who had inhibited the populace from realizing their potential for self-governance. In many respects, the debate culture was an atavism of that predemocratic past in its casting of intellectual exchange as a confrontation of rhetorical virtuosos, observed admiringly by a mass audience. The big worry shared by Dewey and Lippmann as they debated in books and the pages of The New Republic in the 1920s was that the rise of broadcast media, especially radio, would facilitate the replacement of those old elites with a new, media-savvy breed of demagoguery that by the 1930s had come to be associated with fascist rhetoric (Schudson 2008). In this context, the forum movement was a collectively self-applied immunization strategy, as social peers—often neighbors—helped each other articulate their beliefs and desires, ideally in a way that enabled them to have a common voice in the face of the various claims increasingly pressed on them by competing ideologues and, for that matter, advertisers.Nevertheless, Keith (2007) concludes that the forum movement fell afoul of market-driven entertainment imperatives, as had such nineteenth-century precursors as the lyceum movement, which popularized New England transcendentalism, and the Chautauqua movement, which effectively spawned a self-improvement industry that has only grown with time. Big-name speakers were booked to draw large audiences, but then what passed for “discussion” was either respectful “Q&A” sessions or uncritical enthusiasm. In neither case was the original egalitarian and grassroots spirit of the movement truly maintained, a fatal structural deformation, considering the forum movement's aims. With hindsight we can say that the movement's boosters underestimated the extent to which people's beliefs and desires are constructed rather than discovered, especially once they enter relatively neutral zones of articulation. In other words, Dewey's followers were wrong to presume that some innate sense of collective reason came to light once external barriers were removed. Rather, it may be that the very possibility of “collective” thought and action is predicated on the open-ended character of individuals' ends. In short, people are by nature biddable.Lippmann took that prospect as a practical proposition, which is why he called for state licensing of commercial advertising even before Bernays (1928), the bible of modern public relations, had adumbrated advertising's likely long-term significance to “engineer consent.” Whatever else one might say about Lippmann, he took the normative character of the public intellectual's task seriously—albeit understood as guardian of the public interest, indeed often against the public's own instincts. While I do not share Lippmann's construal of the public intellectual's task, it is one that came to grips with the power of entertainment, an important of legacy of which was his own persona as the calming presence of the all-knowing insider. In contrast, the other successful twentieth-century U.S. public intellectual that I cite in “The Public Intellectual as Agent of Justice” (2006), Reinhold Niebuhr, played to the entertainment function more directly by extending the prophetic strain of Christian preaching into a call to arms to fight both poverty at home and communism abroad. His righteous politicized persona has been arguably—and perhaps even self-consciously—reinvented for a by chap. an of Welsh's to with the and is the of Slavoj Žižek as an intellectual for understanding the political position of the The not in the sort of light that Žižek which is simply a play of to scholars as members of society are in the of yet by they are to of which taken an to in many “all both and Welsh Žižek to the end, for and concludes that this is and in practice a of then for scholars to to with the that from a that with a position that is at once in but not of But this is no more than a of the of and, more the experience of that dubbed the of in modern from this is is is Welsh's of Žižek for these while a and clearly very well educated in and is not a in Welsh's Žižek does not hold a academic he and is a and the of academic life—not to with 2008). all of his while relatively academic in are through commercial with old New This means that his work is for its of on the basis of academic which of of and However, over time such has a as Žižek with his which in turn reflects a between and In short, Žižek the people Welsh claims to be is that were Žižek to apply his own of he would not himself in the position of the in the of but rather the public intellectual in the of Indeed, Žižek has been with I to by academics, with a in the public intellectual the problem of academics the of public intellectuals is even than that of academics trying to into the public intellectual

In my article, “Coming to Terms with the Antagonism Between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency,” I argue that academic desire is inherently frustrated by motives in tension with each other (2012). As rhetoric scholars, we are supposed to explore what we find politically interesting or important by isolating a chosen element of the political in order to perform a systematic study of that element and generate some insight about it. Yet graduate students quickly learn that moral fervor and political commitment are not the same thing as studying something that they care about. And this moment of revelation is no less true for a partisan in the throws of a political campaign than it is for an academic shut away in an archive. For example, political campaign operatives charged with polling a subset of the electorate are not, in the act of designing and performing the poll, acting as political operatives. Rather, in their role as pollsters, they must resist their own wishes or expectations or they will not actually be of any service to their campaign or party. Instead, to be of service, they must apply methods that are intended to return results that would be valuable to anyone who might have access to them. This is why campaigns hide their internal polls from both the public and competing campaigns. They do not want either the public or competing campaigns to know what they have learned precisely because such malleable knowledge could be applied by others in ways that might thwart their own campaign's strategy.Nevertheless, the difference between a political campaign's internal polling operation and an academic should be clear. Like internal pollsters, academics engage in systematic study in order to produce results that anyone could potentially use. However, unlike pollsters, academics do not keep the results of their research hidden away for partisan advantage but rather make those results public because their research is intended to serve the interests of anyone who might engage the products of their analysis. Like internal pollsters, however, academics also do not need to be understood as “value-neutral.” Of course they aren't. They will have chosen what they want to study because they suspect that an inadequate understanding of some element of reality may be the cause of problems that they hope improved understanding might somehow contribute to ameliorating. Now, if an academic fails to deliver a product that is of use to anyone because it takes a form that no one can figure out how to use, and use in a relatively sophisticated way, then the academic might be considered to have failed. She will have failed insofar as she had hoped that improved understanding might potentially aid those directly involved in addressing the problem.Might we say that academics work amid a broader competition to enact particular policies, just as internal campaign pollsters work amid those directly competing to win elections? Hence, are not both academics and internal campaign pollsters “in” the contest but not “of” the contest? Might we say that faithful service to either of the two demands it? In Slavoj Žižek's language (following Lacan), attempting to cut the corner, to directly engage in the contest, would be an example of what he calls “giving way” on one's “desire” (1989, 117–18). In the language of my prior article, it is an example of refusing the challenge that constitutes the antagonism, in this case, the antagonism between reflection and action that constitutes the academic subject position. Recall, however, that antagonism does not mean simple opposition. Rather, it points to a state of affairs in which an ideology or subject position unavoidably contains elements that are in tension. And “tension” is the right word because it can mean both pressing together and pulling apart. Antagonism, in Žižek's sense, means inseparability paired with incommensurability (to be a politically effective internal campaign pollster one must forswear politics). At his most esoteric, Žižek writes that antagonisms do not exist in what he calls “the real” (which can mean something like reality in the absence of symbols), because antagonisms are products of language (2005, 249–54). No word or set of words can say everything, and what is left unsaid in any moment will continue to torment what is said, creating the experience of antagonism—or an anxiety-producing need to say two different things at the same time (1991, 154; 1989, 21, 43, 49; 1994, 21, 26). Yet, while both things must be said, those two things, within language, always manifest as in tension with each other (in the world but not of the world, wholly God and wholly man, the mysteries of the sublime).Effacing an antagonism by reducing the saying of one thing to the saying of another—and acting as if it “resolves” the antagonism—entails giving way on one's desire. It is the construction of a cheap substitute when what is needed is not exactly the real thing itself, but the pursuit of the real thing. Hence, the pursuit of the real thing entails refusing to take a shortcut to one's desire (1989, 117–18; 1993, 60). The very idea of an “academic as public intellectual” is just such a shortcut. In it's material manifestation, it is an unstable, unsatisfying compromise that is wholly committed to neither reflection nor action. And, because it is neither one nor the other, it also cannot be both.For example, consider Fuller's account of the plight of the public intellectual. First, he explains that the “rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums.” In order to reclaim their allegedly rightful place in public discourse, Fuller argues that academics need to more carefully consider what it takes “to compete with such ‘media elites’ as professional writers, journalists, and other ‘celebrities’ for prime-time television exposure.” And what it takes, he says, is the careful cultivation of a persona that keeps some of the affectations of the academic yet is entertaining enough to attract a wide audience. Walter Lippmann, Fuller argues, is an especially good model for aspiring academics as public intellectuals because, even though he was not primarily an academic in the institutional sense of the word, he nevertheless played the part. He cultivated the public persona of “the calming presence of an all-knowing insider” as his authorizing—and entertaining—hook or gimmick, which permitted him to exercise a high degree of individual political agency. In contrast, John Dewey's problem, according to Fuller, was that he remained too singularly focused on maximizing effective citizen political participation, through various forum movements and improved public education, to the detriment of maximizing the reach of his own political voice. Thus, while Dewey may have thought of himself as something like what we call a public intellectual, he actually was not one in Fuller's sense of the word because either Dewey refused to perform a broadly entertaining persona or was simply, as a matter of temperament, not amusing or entertaining enough to effectively playact the role of the wise, trustworthy, plain-spoken professor for a mass audience.This is the same advice Stephen Hartnett gives academics who aspire to be public intellectuals. They must, as I noted in the prior article, learn to “speak clearly and look authoritative” while offering “mass-media-shaped tidbits” (2010, 81–83). The academic as public intellectual must look authoritative (play the part of an academic) while saying things that could just as well be said by a celebrity guest. The bait-and-switch quality of the academic playing the role of an academic on TV is apparent in a number of those whom Fuller identifies as public intellectual “exemplars,” particularly Noam Chomsky, Niall Ferguson, and Cornel West. Chomsky's “public intellectual” work, for example, bears only a passing resemblance to the academic research for which he is known. Hence, whatever a public audience might get from Chomsky's books about whatever the current outrage is, they should not be afforded special attention due to his renown as a professor of linguistics. Ferguson's August 2012 cover story in Newsweek arguing against the reelection of Barack Obama is a particularly egregious example of this bait-and-switch technique: he lures the audience in with the promise of rigorous academic intelligence but instead writes a deceptive account of the Affordable Care Act; no one expects the Harvard professor to be plainly dishonest (Ferguson 2012; Krugman 2012). Cornel West, the former Harvard professor who has cultivated what Fuller calls a “righteous politicized persona,” has definitely been adept at competing for the media spotlight, but it is not at all clear that his current persona promotes anything resembling what an academic is supposedly uniquely equipped to offer public discourse—namely, some sort of intellectual contribution. Together, all three become caricatures in line with the worst of what the public believes about academics—that they are unstable ideologues who pursue political agendas under the auspices of higher education.Each of them also fulfills Fuller's academic-as-public-intellectual obligation “to exploit the distinctive communicative resources afforded by all the media.” What he means by this, here and elsewhere, is that academics who want to be public intellectuals have to not only be ready with but must also promote the nickel, fifty-cent, and ten-dollar version of their “ideas” in order to maximize each idea's public reach, appeal, and effectiveness. Yet how different is the nickel version of any intellectual idea from what many other similarly minded commentators, politicians, or protestors are already saying? Is the nickel version of Chomsky much different than what is printed on T-shirts outside of World Trade Organization meetings? And, in the case of Chomsky, does his actual academic expertise intellectually ground those slogans? And how is the talk radio or morning television version of any idea ever an “intellectual” contribution to public discourse? All that is left of the intellectual is the wise or iconoclastic professor persona cultivated by the professor doing the speaking; recall the number of conservative “thinkers” on television who enact their thoughtfulness by their choice in neckwear (always a bowtie).Is Fuller not recommending something like an ironic inversion of the classic advertising line “I'm not really a doctor, but I play one on TV,” except now the professor says, “I am really a professor but, until the next commercial break, I'm just going to play one on TV”? Just as celebrities trade on their stardom to play the game of political winning and losing, academics as public intellectuals ought to trade on their scholarly persona. In other words, one plays the part of the academic intellectual but must not supply what the persona promises to deliver. And this, Fuller says, is what it means for academics as public intellectuals to adopt a style in the tradition of Voltaire and Sartre, “marked” as “thinking things through for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others”? And it therefore follows, then, in a line Fuller likes to repeat, that it is the traditional academic who is little more than “a proud ventriloquist's dummy” (2005, 100)?Yet perhaps the deeper problem is bound up with idea that the spirit of broader academic arguments or intellectual syntheses continues to live inside their stripped-down nickel versions. However, as I argued in the earlier article, every academic conclusion drawn from however rigorous or voluminous the research will necessarily (should it ever come into contact with public discourse) be reduced to a simplified metaphor or simplifying shorthand term (Welsh 2012, 17). Still, in its simplified form, it is never simply a short or a nutshell version. Rather, it is a discursive resource in its own right that becomes immediately detachable (and is detached) from its origins and takes on new and unanticipated forms, which is to say that it immediately becomes available for diverse, often opposing forms of appropriation.Consider, for example, the term “social capital” that emerged among Dewey and his followers at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly as discussed by the political scientist James Farr (2004). “Social capital,” a term that continues to be used today among certain liberals as well as conservatives, tends to be understood as a call to look for cultural, educational, institutional, and economic “investments” that might support integrated and healthy communities. At its best, it frames social life in morally rich terms of connectedness and interdependence, taking the place of morally debilitating visions of “survival of the fittest” or “winner take all.” Farr argues that that the term's continued resonance has to do with the artistic twist it gives to common words and meanings. Yet it offers more than momentary delight. It invokes a revised world with modified priorities. It is morally suggestive and a richly heuristic play on words.Hence, people can do with it something very much like what Robert Putnam (1995) suggested in his widely read article “Bowling Alone” and invest in community groups and gatherings, treating social connections as a form of capital requiring steady investment. And certain kinds of conservatives can also use the term to rationalize cohesive communities—built on the exclusion of outsiders. At the same time, opponents of social capital in either of these senses could reframe the term in order to recommend forms of community ruled by the demands of capital accumulation. Efforts at building social capital in either of the two prior senses could be cast as impeding the production of the “real” social capital, which such opponents might argue is the economic output of the members of a society. Time spent at “social clubs” and “off the job” could be presented in terms of lost economic growth or diminished hard capital, the same capital needed to pay for the social “get-togethers.” Money doesn't grow on trees, you get what you pay for, there is no such thing as a free lunch.More economically progressive uses of the term “social capital,” others could say, is just code for “socialism” (a word that has a constant presence in American political discourse, complete with images of Stalin), a tactic designed to scare citizens away from progressive reforms. All of these arguments are already in place, ready to be marshaled into service should the term “social capital” begin to seriously challenge prevailing ways of speaking in any particular way. It could even be that those most sympathetic to the diverse uses to which the term can be put should argue for setting it aside because it is simply too fraught with difficulty. Is there any other two-word combination that draws attention to the dominant political and economic tension of the twentieth century more than “social capital”? Could there be?Fuller's argument, however, is that academics can, and must try to, actively “control the public reception” of their messages. Yet once an academic's “message” is reduced to a central metaphor, control is already lost. And, in addition to it no longer being in any respect a complicating “intellectual” message or discourse, in that same moment everyone is granted the freedom to pick it up and use it quite differently than intended—all the while continuing to tout the authority of its academic provenance. Thus, once one moves from academic discourse to public discourse, the scholarly product becomes a rhetoric, and once it becomes a rhetoric it becomes just one more rhetorical pivot point susceptible to leveraging competing policies. It becomes what C. Wright Mills called a part of the sociological imagination (2000, 4–5, 48, 71).However, is this not precisely the place where rhetorical scholarship becomes most relevant to public affairs? Any rhetorical analysis or critique worthy of the name must be rooted in the recognition that private terms are more likely to become public rhetorics when diverse groups of people can imagine using them in pursuit of a wide variety of goals. Hence, there is no teacher of rhetoric that has ever claimed to have found the political message that needed to get out. Rather, as Fuller himself argues in The Intellectual, the earliest teachers of what we tend to think of as rhetoric, the Sophists (whom Fuller also refers to as the first public intellectuals), did not advance particular ideas but, instead, offered training in using ideas as rhetorical instruments in light of a student's aims (2005, 7). Fuller argues that “the sophists never understood themselves as ‘idea merchants,’ as one might characterize think-tank dwellers today or, in more elevated tones[,] … Voltaire.” “No,” Fuller clarifies, “the sophists were purveyors of certain skills and perhaps even tools” (2005, 9). Moreover, Fuller explains how “the sophists mainly wanted to help clients win lawsuits and sway public opinion, to take greater control of their fate, as befits citizens in a democracy” (2005, 9). My argument is that rhetoric scholars should see themselves in just this way—as devoted to understanding public discourse, which entails weighing the shifting and unpredictable assets and liabilities of the wide range of rhetorical resources. By seeing themselves in such a light, they provide a service to all citizens, activists, and politicians engaged in unpredictable and constantly evolving rhetorical contests for power (Welsh 2013).Perhaps the key distinction here concerns whose agency academics should be interested in promoting. Fuller says that we are doing a bad job if we are not constantly thinking about how to win support for our own particular visions of what is good or just—the academic thus needs to be a political campaign's internal pollster, strategist, and messenger all in one. Hence, Fuller is arguing that Dewey's problem was that Dewey did not see his role as either or for inherently malleable and a quality of that Dewey clearly Rather, like the Dewey remained as a and to the political agency of even if that not maximizing his Yet, the that the Dewey had on and I think we can say he also did well for he refused to the antagonism that academic desire did not way on it.

ABSTRACTThe rhetorical tradition has long been concerned with how to negotiate the discursive juncture between mass and elite audiences. Such a concern has contributed to what might be characterized as the rhetorical tradition's anxiety with regard to its own status. In this article I suggest that this anxiety parallels an ontological conception of the elite as second-order in relation to the first-order mass. I use the standoff between novelist Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey in 2001 as a running example of status tensions in the public sphere, arguing for a theory of vernacular as language that talks and of specialized language as language that talks about. Finally, I suggest that the separate claims to status of vernacular and specialized language might be resolved by thinking further about Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia.

AbstractThis article examines the critique of deliberative democracy leveled by William Connolly. Drawing on both recent findings in cognitive science as well on Gilles Deleuze's cosmological pluralism, Connolly argues that deliberative democracy, and the contemporary left more generally, is guilty of intellectualism for overlooking the embodied, visceral register of political judgment. Going back to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, this article reconstructs the working assumptions of Connolly's critique and argues that it unwittingly leads to an indefensible embrace of manipulation. Against his micropolitics of visceral manipulation, I propose an alternative route for realizing Connolly's politics of agonistic negotiation in the form of a critical theory of the public sphere.