ABSTRACT Ever since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, philosophical “pluralism,” a concept barely a hundred years old, has emerged across all the academic disciplines in many different forms as a possible response to variants of skepticism, relativism, and dogmatism. What makes Richard McKeon’s meta-philosophical pluralism distinct from all others is both his focus on philosophical first principles and his rhetorical method of coordinating their possibilities for theoretical development and practical application. Yet McKeon’s lifelong intellectual project remains largely unknown even among philosophers and rhetoricians, a situation the present essay modestly hopes to ameliorate.

ABSTRACT For Richard McKeon (1975), the relationships between Greek dialectics and dialogue and rhetoric involve the “fruitful interplay of controversy and agreement,” and he judges this interplay to be the contribution that Greek dialectic makes to Western history and thought. Thus, he promises to enrich ongoing challenges of diversity, involving his own ideas on pluralism. This article reflects on and furthers that thinking, connecting early Greek insights on the concepts here identified with the post-McKeon debate on deep disagreement in argumentation.

ABSTRACT This article concerns itself with the displacement and silencing of style in McKeon’s collegiate editions of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It is divided into two parts: The first proposes unactual elements on style; the second deals with McKeon’s promotion of taxis over style in his editions of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The article concludes with a brief proposal on the uses and abuses of Pericles’s Funeral Oration.

ABSTRACT On closely reading the Aristotelian-Ciceronian-Kantian-inflected essay “The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts,” Richard McKeon’s 1970 Wingspread Conference address presciently sketches a new rhetoric that is no longer about the approval of an already formed opinion, the steering of public beliefs, or political influence, but rather about dealing with new problems. Showing the “art of discovery, invention and creativity” in action, his inimitable combination of ethos (trust), pathos (emotion), and logos (structure) opens the way to the perception of new facts and previously unnoticed structures and processes, particularly when read in conjunction with the vicissitudes of the relation between words and numbers, the verbal and the numeral across a historically changing trajectory that culminated in the constituted and constitutive force of all pervasive AI digitality. Considering its “inhuman” expansion, the article’s focus on the logos of techne opens a path toward a historical assessment of humankind’s digitally framed existence.

It is a mere fifty-five years since the bulk of the New Rhetoric Project (NRP) was presented to English-speaking (and -reading) audiences in the John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver 1969 translation. Not long in the grand scheme of things, but long enough for certain orthodoxies to become established in the literature. We know, for example, that this was a return to Aristotle to recover ideas that had long been lost and that would undergird the logic of value.1 And we know that the “Universal Audience” is a problematic and confused idea. But such received ideas are what this collection of essays challenges.If there has been a rhetorical turn in argumentation theory (Bolduc 2020, 9), then that turn has safely been traced to the 1958 publication of Le Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique (henceforth, the Traité), and the coincidental appearance of Stephen Toulmin’s Uses of Argument in the same year. Subsequent to the Traité’s publication, its authors, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, expended considerable efforts in publicizing its main themes and ideas through a series of short papers in different languages, and Perelman’s single-authored précis of the larger tome, L’empire (1977), found an immediate readership among audiences—often students, for whom the larger work was deemed too unwieldy.That dissemination aside, the need for such a collection as the one now under review arises in part because of the “errors” that have found their way into the literature, but also because the Wilkinson and Weaver English translation lacks the scholarly apparatus that would provide commentary on ideas and explain the cultural background to the concerns that arise. For example, the Traité makes continuous reference to European writers of the day with which later, non-European, audiences will be unfamiliar. And beyond this, there is a growing interest in the history of the NRP: the ideas and influences that led Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca to develop one of the most important projects in the history of rhetorical theory. Their rhetorical turn in argumentation, identifying the centrality of audience adherence to theses through the development of a range of argumentation schemes and rhetorical strategies, has fascinating antecedents in Perelman’s early philosophical thinking. To this end, Michelle Bolduc and David Frank’s expressed goal is to translate the most significant texts that remain in French and to correct current mistranslations. This collection contributes to that goal.The book comprises seven essays, along with introductions and commentaries from Bolduc and Frank. Five of the essays are by Perelman alone, and the other two were written in collaboration with Olbrechts-Tyteca, including the centerpiece, “Logique et rhétorique” (1950).One of the fascinating aspects of this volume is the insights it provides into Perelman’s own development as a thinker, especially a rhetorical thinker, independent of his work with Olbrechts-Tyteca. The five essays with his sole authorship range over twenty years, from the early thirties to the early fifties, and include one of his first publications, “De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance” (On the Arbitrary in Knowledge, 1933), published when he was only twenty-one years old. Here we have a young philosopher establishing his ideas against the dominance of logical positivism, insisting that values do not lie outside of reason. Value judgments, he argues, belong to the realm of the arbitrary, or nonnecessary, and are opposed to necessary truth judgments. This inaugurates an important, positive pluralism, as it is to the underlying realm of the arbitrary that we need to turn for human knowledge.In this essay, Perelman addresses the difficulty of imagining the other. It is not enough to put ourselves in the place of another person; “we must imagine ourselves living in another time, in another context, educated differently, with a different background. This is much more difficult” (44). We might detect here an emerging appreciation of the importance of audience as well as the roots of his conception of the Universal Audience. This is also the paper, as Bolduc and Frank point out, in which we see the first discussion of the technique of dissociation that will play so central a role in the argumentative strategies of the NRP that reconfigure the way reality appears to us (31). It is through this technique, we might recall, that concepts are modified and revalued after an incompatibility in their use develops in society.Two essays on the Jewish question, “Réflexions sur l’assimilation” (1935) and “La Question juive” (1946), occupy the focus of chapter 2. Beyond providing a sense of the cultural background against which Perelman’s ideas were developing, it tells us something about his political and cultural affiliations. Perelman was a “political Zionist” who lived through the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, and his allegiance to Belgium kept him rooted in Europe, although throughout his life he worked in a number of capacities on behalf of Belgium Jews. The essay also shows that he saw his theoretical ideas having importance for the world that was developing around him. And in the remarks on antisemitism, we begin to see Perelman’s recognition of the significance of groups and how they operate in opposition to each other.A fourth essay, “Philosophies premières et philosophie régressive” (1949), receives an updated commentary and translation from the version Bolduc and Frank published in 2003 in Philosophy & Rhetoric and is here given its place in the emerging NRP story. The importance of this essay in Perelman’s development has been noted before. It introduces his conception of regressive philosophy in its opposition to a tradition of first philosophies, including Aristotle’s. In this essay, we also see more clearly the move to rhetoric as the importance of a rhetorical logic (the logic of regressive philosophy) is stressed. Unlike the dogmatism of first philosophy, with its goals of absolute and necessary knowledge, regressive philosophy champions what earlier was seen in the domain of the arbitrary. It returns thought to its human roots in human contexts. Thus, rhetorical logic, in the words of the commentary, “requires commitment and responsibility because it provides the guide for human action” (97).The last of Perelman’s essays, “Raison éternelle, raison historique” (1952), provides further details of his expanded sense of reason. He sees in Aristotle the license to develop a model of nonformal reason, but one that has Perelman’s own distinct features. His rhetorical definition of reason is rooted in human experience (time), action, and judgment. This is a conception of reason that will start to appear familiar to readers of The New Rhetoric.This is also one of the essays that clarifies details surrounding what has become one of the more difficult concepts associated with the NRP, that of the Universal Audience. As readers may appreciate, the literature is filled with readings (and perhaps misreadings) of this central idea as scholars struggle to understand it. The problem was such that Perelman himself was still trying to clarify matters late in his career (Perelman 1984). Bolduc and Frank put the confusions partly down to the Wilkinson and Weaver translation (12). Whatever the cause, there is material here to set readers down the right path. Reacting to the rather feckless audiences imagined by Aristotle in his Rhetoric, Perelman promotes audiences that are “no longer constituted by a crowd of ignorant people, but by the subject himself when it is a matter of inner deliberation or, during a discussion, by an individual interlocutor, or by what we could call the Universal Audience, formed by all reasonable humans, during the presentation of a thesis whose validity should be universally recognized” (170). Accepting that we understand “validity” here in the nonformal sense in which it is employed in the NRP, then we have a clear statement of the three audiences that will become important for Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca.The Universal Audience is not a “blank slate,” but accepts facts, values, and argumentative techniques. This audience represents “incarnate reason,” but is not provided by experience alone because it always begins with an extrapolation from “the actual adherence of certain individuals.” Thus, Perelman concludes, “We posit that the theses attributed to this audience can vary in time, that they are not impersonal but rather dependent on the person who declares them, and on the milieu and the culture which shaped him” (170–71). Thus, we see changes in the understanding of what is reasonable influencing the way people argue at different times and in different places about, say, the value to be accorded to the physically disadvantaged or about those to whom the category of “person” should be extended. This is indeed the Universal Audience that can be extracted from The New Rhetoric, but its nature is expressed far clearer in Bolduc and Frank’s new translation.The remaining two essays are authored by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca together. “De la temporalité comme caractère de l’argumentation,” from 1958, develops some of the insights in Perelman’s earlier essay on historical reason. Because time plays no role in demonstration, its importance is pronounced when we turn to argumentation. The nature and logic of argument cannot escape its history, the demands of the present, and future consequences. Here is another way in which reason informs the human condition, grounding thought in the experience of self and others and our relation to the world.It is, however, the other coauthored paper (identified as their first collaboration), “Logique et rhétorique,” from 1950, that is the most valuable essay in the collection, in terms of its anticipation of the NRP and illumination of ideas found there. It constitutes chapter 4 of the book, aptly titled “The Debut of the New Rhetoric Project.”We gain a better sense here, for example, of how Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca consider the relationship between persuasion and conviction, which can be another point of confusion in The New Rhetoric. For many scholars, and for figures such as Kant, conviction is the stronger mental state. But the authors of the NRP allow that the relationship can be reversed, a position rarely seen since Richard Whately (1963, 175). They write,True to the focus on values and action, persuasion is the conversion of conviction into action; a position or claim that is judged as correct, to which there is adherence, is personalized as it informs the behavior of the audience.Also, in accordance with its title, this article announces the importance of rhetoric for the authors and clarifies their understanding of this concept in relation to their predecessors’ views. Rhetoric differs from logic in its concern with adherence. Hence the important, but revised sense, of persuasion. As Bolduc and Frank observe, both Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca were surprised by their discovery of rhetoric (131n18), and they explain the central importance of epideictic rhetoric (often marginalized at the expense of the deliberative and judicial types) in a way not made clear in the Traité or any work prior to L’empire: “The battle that the epideictic orator wages is a battle against future objections; it is an effort to maintain the ranking of certain value judgments in the hierarchy or, potentially, to confer on them a superior status” (134). It is the association between the epideictic and value judgments that elevates epideictic in their eyes. As Perelman will later write, “In my view the epideictic genre is central to discourse because its role is to intensify adherence to values, adherence without which discourses that aim at proving action cannot find the lever to move or to inspire their listeners” (1982, 19).Further ideas, like the Universal Audience, are again rehearsed in “Logique et rhétorique.” But this is also a paper that best clarifies the distance between Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Aristotle, and this is something that deserves some discussion.One of the assumptions generally made about the NRP is that it is Aristotelian in nature and its authors neo-Aristotelians. There are, of course, grounds to support this assumption. Perelman himself speaks of the new rhetoric as a project that “amplifies as well as extends Aristotle’s work” (1982, 4). Michel Meyer, Perelman’s student, seems to confirm as much when he writes, “Perelman’s view of rhetoric has often been qualified as neo-Aristotelian because it is reasonable, if not rational, to provide arguments which are convincing due to the type of logos used” (2017, 54). And even one of the current authors in question has described Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s project as “their contemporary revision of Aristotelian rhetoric” (Frank 2023, 251). So, clearly, there are careful distinctions to be made here.Throughout the papers, the debt to Aristotle is evident and frequently acknowledged. The Aristotelian syllogism plays an important role in several discussions, and the young Perelman saw value in Aristotle’s tandem of potentiality and actuality, terms that play an important role in the Metaphysics (and, one might suggest, in the Rhetoric).2 And as we have seen, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca acknowledge Aristotle as paving the way to seeing a model of nonformal reasoning and a viable conception of rhetoric.At the same time, the logic of Aristotle’s rhetoric is not one that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca endorse. It fits smoothly into the tradition of first philosophies that the whole NRP opposes. And the vision of reason is ultimately very different, as Perelman insisted in a response to Stanley Rosen (Perelman 1959). This is made clear in “Logique et rhétorique.” Aristotle’s relevant logic, the one developed in his Rhetoric, is a logic of the plausible. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s logic, as dictated by their conception of rhetoric with its emphasis on values, is a logic of the preferable (137). Nothing could set the two systems more firmly apart. And on this distinction, if for no other, we can see why ultimately Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca would not consider themselves neo-Aristotelians.Michelle Bolduc and David Frank have provided an enormous service to present and future readers of The New Rhetoric. Elsewhere, Bolduc (2020, 288) warns against limiting the corpus of the NRP to the Traité of 1958. This volume supports that warning, bringing to light a sampling of what might be missed by such a restrictive vision. The authors have also done readers throughout the world an immeasurable service in negotiating an open-access contract with Brill. This removes all financial impediments to studying an important set of essays, and I suspect it reflects Bolduc and Frank’s belief in the value of the ideas they are presenting here, and which in further volumes they will continue to present. These are two collaborators who have thought seriously about the nature of scholarly collaboration (Frank and Bolduc 2010), deriving insights that inform their approach to their subjects here. One suspects it is a collaboration as rewarding for those involved as it is for those who benefit from its results.

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 with the deepest sorrow that I write with the news that Erik Doxtader, Philosophy & Rhetoric’s editor, passed away on June 22, 2025, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.Erik was a singular intellectual, teacher, mentor, colleague, and editor. Under his stewardship, Philosophy & Rhetoric did more than maintain its legacy as a unique forum of philosophical and rhetorical invention. He also stretched—indeed reconfigured—our philosophical and rhetorical imaginations in profound and indelible ways. Among many accomplishments, Erik made the journal hospitable to planetary thought; encouraged thoughtful encounters between ancient and cutting-edge theory; deepened the journal’s longstanding commitment to rigorous argumentation as the marrow of academic dialogue; and invited exploratory and experimental essays to the journal’s forums.It is a powerful testament to Erik’s legacy that he leaves behind a robustly healthy journal under the trusteeship of a dedicated editorial team, board, and community of peer reviewers. I am immensely proud to be following in Erik’s footsteps as editor of the journal, working alongside Dr. Freya Thimsen (Essay and Forum Editor) and Dr. Kelly Happe (Book Forum Editor). We are humbled and honored by your continued commitment to the journal. —Omedi Ochieng

ABSTRACT This article identifies a tension between two forms of respect: respect for others’ agency and respect for their rationality. This tension emerges, the article argues, when one person presents another with a nuanced argument on an important topic, thereby complimenting their rationality, but draining their agential resources by demanding their attention. Giving someone an argument can therefore generate a structurally similar double bind to giving them a puppy as a present: Refusing is normatively uncomfortable, but accepting requires a significant sacrifice. The article concludes by considering how certain factors can weaken the double bid, including rhetoric.

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. In with a long to which we understand each other best by with each from our own us the to see how that understanding people a of that is and or between us of this way of speaking with each other because of the free yet of the human which makes an model of this and the the of how we of the other from perspective we are to For example, do we take up the standpoint of an other, the should we to engage with particular others? For what matters is that we others in their rather their This across the more distinction between and In other words, what is is not the other or but we them in all of their that the of perspective depends on how we the our willingness to them in their and the of interlocutors to In the in draws on the work of Arendt, as as her with to argue that thinking has a particular in In such it may not be possible for people to take views into account in how they judge political as Arendt because to the of who people take to be. But what thinking can do in such is others into as of This through understanding why are for and, in so that others from a different from the that political can be by the or of the other Such can support the to include those others in democratic the to those with whom we Hannah Arendt on and draws to claim that free speech is only when others to what have to this is that speech is not just a but a that makes engagement with others desirable and However, free speech it to a the conditions which speech may become in the first on of the term at once to as as conditions which a lack of what Arendt calls the of the social of a the of in politics, and a social from and the idea that our speech be not as exchanges but as within social and institutional conditions that dialogue. As their the with judgment conditions our normative with the and of democratic and differentiate between and to speak to others. be we should not want to to persuade on a that two of can come into when we engage with others who different views. the one hand, for us to present them with of our own the other hand, for practical us to our so as not to demand too of their and In how we speak with others, we them as interlocutors who our practical as as our for their It to to to the of the debate on the retreat from dialogue in Anglo-European arguing that the solutions they to the dysfunction of public discourse are The is in of an to the of disagreement, or a to the to change their dialogue possible once potential interlocutors to get through conversation or them to good to engage if persuasion is taken out of solutions she because the is not one of but one of to to others with whom we disagree. will not be to talk to others since they can or because they do not being want to talk across differences they be to the of for returning to the literary of the public sphere, about and to political and cultural first made the of Together, and us to think about what motivates and the to speak across it might be reason that us to out dialogue, our willingness to remain in it may on our ability to and aesthetic is that democracy is not so a reality as an ideal to to. This special section is presented with the idea that this may societies that are committed to pluralism as a way of life to the conversation about the to across

ABSTRACT A recent surge among scholars of rhetoric seeking to refine and redefine approaches to the study of demagoguery and its rhetorical contours supplies an opportunity to raise a related yet more fundamental question: What is rhetoric’s relationship to democracy, demagoguery’s presupposed injured? Inspired by Jacques Rancière and a rereading of ancient Greek sources, this article seeks to complicate the relationship between rhetoric and democracy by narrowing in on the activity of the dēmos, a political entity undersigning both democracy and demagoguery. In so doing, this article argues that demagoguery appears not as a violation of democratic activity but as a rhetorical phenomenon associated with democratic fulfillment. This article showcases the implications of rethinking demagoguery as a sign of an active and energetic dēmos by revisiting the rhetorical work of the farm workers movement. Rhetoric and democracy, the article concludes, support demagoguery and demagoguery uplifts democracy and rhetoric.

The Force of Truth is the author’s own significantly revised and expanded translation of La Force du vrai, which was published in French in 2017. The French text bears the subtitle, De Foucault à Austin (from Foucault to Austin), reflecting the book’s engagement with performative speech act theory. The American subtitle—Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault—gestures instead to new material, including most substantively a final summative chapter, “Critique and Possibilizing Genealogy” (chap. 5), as well as a brief conclusion, “Rethinking Critique.” It is worth emphasizing that six years had elapsed from the publication of La Force du vrai to The Force of Truth. I would note as well that the French text appeared in the early days of Donald Trump’s first presidency in the United States. Since this time, we have witnessed a staggering relativization of truth, including post-truth, “alternative” facts regarding pandemic policy, insurrection and repeated claims of electoral fraud, judicial manipulation in the Supreme Court, and Truth Social. Globally, we have also witnessed the rise to power of right-wing populists in other nominally liberal democracies. Lorenzini’s English translation has been framed with these urgent social and political exigencies in mind. And, with these stakes as its subtext, the book advances “a new reading of Foucault’s project of a history of truth”—most saliently as a genealogy of our own “contemporary regimes of truth,” from which Lorenzini seeks to derive “an ethics and politics of truth-telling” (9).Lorenzini is a meticulous reader of Foucault, and the ease with which he navigates and marshals Foucault’s enormous corpus is humbling. He resists the widespread reductionist—or indeed, reactionary—“(mis)reading” of Foucault on the history of “truth.” This (mis)reading tends, in broad strokes, to paint Foucault as a postmodern relativist who is hostile to objective facts and whose ideas have come to inform the contemporary phenomenon of post-truth. In the opening pages, Lorenzini offers a short list of prominent political theorists and philosophers who have, variously, criticized Foucault in this vein: Nancy Fraser, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, Daniel Dennett, and Jacques Bouveresse. These critics base their interpretations on early works in Foucault’s oeuvre, falsely claiming that Foucault more or less believed that truth is an illusion. Foucault never made such a claim, as Lorenzini makes clear: “What is an illusion, in Foucault’s view, is rather ‘the Truth’ understood in a Platonic fashion as a timeless and suprahistorical Idea” (3). As a historical—and, as I suggest below, guardedly rhetorical—corrective, The Force of Truth focuses on Foucault’s “later lectures and writings,” which “significantly developed, clarified, and in part transformed his way of conceiving of a history of truth” (3). And Lorenzini is one of the few scholars to appreciate Foucault’s “dialogue with early analytic philosophy of language, and in particular with ordinary language philosophers” (8), including Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin (see also 46–49, 63–64; Foucault 2023). He convincingly demonstrates, moreover, that Foucault’s “turn” to ethics in the 1980s is a coherent development true to his earlier interest in politics and power/knowledge, and that these are joined across his oeuvre in his abiding critical methodological commitment to archaeology and genealogy.There is plenty here to engage rhetorical scholars, even if rhetoricians are not quite guilty of the reductionist (mis)readings of Foucault that Lorenzini criticizes in these pages. Following Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970), many of us will understand “the Truth” as a rhetorical accomplishment at the intersecting axes of labor, life, and language. Moreover, rhetoricians are sensitive to the discursive conditions under which something might appear to be true and can take on a truth-function in a particular historical and rhetorical situation (or “game of truth,” as Foucault would say). After all, a history of truth and truth-telling implies far more than logical or epistemological conceptions of truth, although we might argue what this looks like or how it might be mobilized in a “defense” of Foucault’s ethico-political relevance today. But this is not to say that Lorenzini’s opening gambit should be lost on rhetorical scholars. Indeed, we should be mindful of the philosophical and political traditions that are invested in a misreading of Foucault, and why. These include some philosophers in the Anglo-American (or “analytic”) camp, as well as political theorists (or “scientists”) committed to an unreconstructed notion of liberal-humanist subjectivity, which is of course critiqued by Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers. Rhetoricians might also be familiar with the homophobic ad hominems directed at Foucault and his work (a perennial pastime, it would seem), and more recently the (to my mind) outlandish accusations that Foucault was a closet neoliberal, or somehow even responsible for neoliberalism itself (you can easily Google this; I refuse to add citations to these authors’ indexes). Most of all, perhaps, rhetoricians will be concerned with the history of our present, and the fate of truth and truth-telling in recent years, given the troubling rise of political populism, white nationalism, violent rhetorics, neofascism, and demagoguery. The book also has clear rhetorical implications for what Foucault called “ontologies of veridiction” (2010, 309–10), even as Lorenzini remains somewhat skeptical of rhetoric and studiously avoids the term “ontology” (see Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2020)—but more on this below.In his early work, Foucault had concerned himself with the subject’s relation to particular “games of truth”: “truth games that take the form of a science or refer to a scientific model,” on the one hand, and truth games that one finds “in institutions or practices of control” (1996, 432), on the other. Across the nineteenth century, for example, medicalization, psychiatrization, and criminalization represent sociodiscursive practices that were effectively coercive and “disciplinary” in their truth-functions. In Foucault’s later work, however, we note a decisive shift away from coercion and toward the practice of a subject’s self-formation, “an exercise of the self on the self, by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, and to attain a certain mode of being” (433). Self-formation is an ascetic practice (askesis) in which the emphasis is no longer on what one does, one’s behaviors, but on who one is, which today is fashioned (most problematically) as the “truth” of one’s identity. This later work of Foucault’s has proven remarkably prescient, anticipating today’s identity politics and cancel culture, our obsession with the inner truth—presumably irrefutable—of personal feelings and experiences, the basis of what Lauren Berlant once called “feeling politics” (1999). The apparent “truth” of who one is belongs, as Foucault might say, to the “confessional sciences,” a secular form of “salvation.” And so, it might be said that ours is a moment of free speech on steroids, yet stripped to its barest form, where I am free to “speak my truth,” and you yours, passionately foreclosing in advance any serious critique of what this might mean for a politics or ethics of truth, let alone an ontology of veridiction.Lorenzini identifies in Foucault three principal regimes of truth: the scientific, the confessional, and the critical. The first two are among “the most pervasive contemporary regimes of truth” (103), whereas the latter has been neglected, Lorenzini contends, and emerges from Foucault’s analysis of ancient parrhesia. As Foucault writes, “In analyzing . . . parrhēsia, I would like also to outline the genealogy of what we could call the critical attitude in our society” (2019, 63). This “critical attitude,” intimate with parrhesiastic practice, is what Lorenzini characterizes as the “possibilizing” dimension of Foucauldian genealogy, namely, the productive, world-making capacities of critique to disrupt reigning regimes of truth. In Lorenzini’s words, to write a history of truth entails “tracing a genealogy of these regimes of truth in order to open up the conceptual and political space that allows us to ask after their effects and value” (6). And, of course, the value of any truth, its effective force, is not “unconditional”; it is historically contingent, and “can never be explained solely on the basis of its reference to or correspondence with reality” (6). Rhetorically, truth is always tied to truth-telling, to veridiction (even when this is nonverbal). It matters who “can and actually does” speak or act, “in what circumstances, and at what cost” (7). For Lorenzini, then, the critical thrust of genealogy will be the counter-conduct it “possibilizes” in and as veridical speech/acts: “Even though genealogy does not legislate the specific content of these counter-conducts, it does define their form, since each aims to criticize and destabilize a given power/knowledge apparatus, a given regime of truth” (105; his emphases). Rhetoricians will be quick to pick up on Lorenzini’s italicized distinction between “content” and “form,” and may understand by “form” something akin to what we might call rhetoricity. For Christian Lundberg, rhetoricity is defined as “the functions of discourse that operate without, and in advance of, any given context”—in other words, “a kind of negative constraint, hindering the presumption that any definition of rhetoric can capture the functions of discourse without remainder” (2013, 250). Critique is possible because regimes of truth are not closed systems of power/knowledge. It is possible to prise them open productively and put them to work politically and ethically.The political and ethical dimensions of truth-telling become clear, Lorenzini argues, when Foucault’s exploration of ancient parrhesia is theorized through Austin’s understanding of speech acts, and in particular, the perlocution. Herein lies one of the book’s significant original contributions to Foucault scholarship, rhetoric, and philosophy. The book asks, “Under what conditions is ‘telling the truth’ an effective critical activity?” (9). The short answer is: none at all, if by “truth” we mean “facts,” such as statistics. Indeed, facts may be veridical, and they may be truths that correspond with reality, but they do not necessarily carry what Lorenzini calls the “force of truth.” In rhetorical parlance, and borrowing from Austin, we might say that the truth-telling of facts is a constative utterance, rather than performative speech—a descriptive claim, rather than a normative one. And as we know only too well, saying something all too often does nothing; an “is” is a far cry from an “ought.” Taking the ongoing European migrant crisis as a brief example (see also Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2020), Lorenzini points out that we can and must repeat the facts—e.g., the reported number of dead and missing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea—but he notes that this alone has done little to stem the tide of xenophobia and racism or to “disrupt” European Union policy. “Unfortunately, truth and facts alone are not enough to sustain an effective critical practice—and they are not enough because they have no force in and of themselves” (10; his emphases). A critical and generative practice requires the force of truth, Lorenzini argues, and truth’s force—the force of Foucauldian parrhesia—carries truth as one of its perlocutionary effects. It is that force by which we not only “accept certain truth claims, but . . . submit to them and give them the power to govern our conduct” (120; his emphases).While Foucault rarely engaged directly with Austin’s work (the few published instances are carefully cited, e.g., Foucault 2023), for Lorenzini the perlocution is a useful tool to understand the rhetorical force of parrhesia.1 Most readers will be familiar with Austin through performative illocutions, which are summed up by the formula “in saying x I do y.” One of Austin’s simple examples is “I bet you sixpence”: in the act of saying this phrase I’ve done (performed) what I’ve said and said what I’ve done, namely, with my illocution I’ve engaged you in a wager. But, according to Austin, perlocutions are performative in a different manner. Perlocutionary speech, true to its prefix per-, is summed up as “by saying x I do y.” Austin writes, “Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the or of the or of other and it may be done with the or of the perlocution we are in the of possible and effects. And the rhetorical on the power of by may produce effects that are not necessarily or The force of the perlocution from and it is a It is the to say something that or the and that speech and its effects. the examples of and as two of perlocutionary Austin’s with of Austin, Lorenzini that the perlocution the power to transform the disrupt power and the ethical and he characterizes the parrhesiastic as a critical perlocutionary speech act that and to be clear, we should not to a rhetorical Lorenzini, Austin and some of Foucault’s to rhetoric as the to And if we the of liberal perlocutionary effects and will refer us to the rather than to the rhetorical For rhetorical scholars, of course, speech or or necessarily in But even for a we a reading of Foucault in which is to the to to understand parrhesia we must be defined as an the of (2010, Indeed, Foucault that is no form of rhetoric specific to In parrhesia is necessarily a of These are carefully that parrhesiastic are closed they are not or or to be to particular in the rhetorical For many of this to a philosophical It a rhetoric without a discourse without Moreover, it would the of language like the can be in its would that rhetorical is concerned with the and dimensions of It is not always with truth, as is or on the and it is to and in that often and or the And I take is the kind of rhetorical and that Lorenzini seeks in the critical of counter-conduct that he A rhetorical would to advance his indeed, I would add that for Foucault philosophy is not the to is also a “game of and rhetoric, Foucault are or two of . . . two of of discourse which to the truth and which to the truth in the form of in the of (2010, Indeed, Foucault that “a discourse which claims to the truth should not be by it a history of which would us to or not it the truth” is for a genealogy of philosophical or rhetorical is an or of the discourse of truth” offers a of Foucault’s understanding of rhetoric and philosophy in relation to parrhesia. He notes that Foucault all of the perlocutionary to Foucault’s of where Foucault that does not any between the and what is rather rhetoric is as a relation of power and And by a and between the and what he that the at for it that their their And, if I have understood Lorenzini this may also a between and through the It is a relation of and of but not the may be by the not only by what is but also by of the where the is in with what is where speech and are of some form is for the of the that is to the principal Lorenzini advances in and the power relation between may be in a through the “force of truth” that their and and and As Lorenzini argues, “the between the and is not only a of parrhesiastic utterance, more a of is, a perlocutionary and an ethics of the relation to is we might say, and the is joined in a when that and that are is not always but parrhesia Lorenzini’s final chapter, “Critique and Possibilizing when he that Foucauldian genealogy normative it does not us what we should genealogy a for ethico-political us to certain of the and regimes of truth it us to of This is the most and yet the most It is where Lorenzini the three broad of his and the of a parrhesia and this are as genealogy is so, for it “possibilizes” the “critical that an ethico-political the who and and regimes in the Foucault’s genealogy, Lorenzini argues, in his a of ethico-political commitment toward the or the of the commitment to on their in the present, in a different This is the must be it is also as a of or and It is, moreover, “the of a of and that and contemporary with of different historical and to practices of but this is because Lorenzini Foucault would quite their Lorenzini normative force from its to a for (a genealogy itself to answer the by a of ethico-political commitment in its his here with the and the in Lorenzini’s does critical for a in the of the whose to words, to or at to the of As Lorenzini writes, between the and is not only a of parrhesiastic utterance, more a of . . . and to the in a speak of any however, I we must also take the of which the and the perlocutionary effects may produce in Lorenzini that this does not a rhetorical “the of parrhesia is not or but the violent of the truth” But parrhesia all of And rhetoric, at Lorenzini to Foucault’s often understanding of rhetoric as an of that on the and institutions of speech acts, rather than perlocutionary that may well and Indeed, some rhetoricians will that an rhetoric is possible e.g., if the is not to may perlocutionary of speech can always be to or to and As Lorenzini does to the and of but to do by a of power between speech and the to it is emphasis of such or Lorenzini here to the that the or moreover, by of a power that is always in a of power which is a in the first is always a between Indeed, it to that it is this power that is mobilized in and by the truth, and yet is not quite to is not quite free to do And it is the power that is in the of truth. The act of is itself a critique in this no the content of that it the of that would As Foucault in “What critique is “the of that of must not that the is also a a of In order for to be a we must be to the we must the critical we must the will to truth and in some way to it and to and speak in such a is itself an of the in and by which the This that parrhesia is, at in a of rhetoric and an the am I who to this to this of at this in time, at this of which is to the power of truth in and truths in In Foucault that parrhesia is “a way of which akin to a phrase he had in when he the critical is something in critique that is akin to Critique is “the of not quite emphasis I am of Foucault’s lectures from the 1980s the of the self as the relation to which is a relation of and or the I of of my of my words, my and my or even of my In The of the Foucault that in order to have to the truth, to it and to one must first transform through ascetic This with the practice of from to (from true discourse to what will be the of of course with The self is never or with critique is always a certain of And, if we for the of a the must true for the who to and the is, as who and who and the between the and The have to of Foucault “by the truth” In other words, the will and will a certain if he is to the and its force of be by to and to it as we are always free to the “force of truth,” and because our regime of truth is of the will to and one for the of Lorenzini’s but no less is not should I but should I Lorenzini’s book is as we from the to a mindful of our contemporary regime of truth, which its own I am also speak truth” as to be in and by this but no more and and by feelings that a that claims them and claims the of true facts no “force of truth,” we must not that the the repeat they carry the force of truth. who Lorenzini’s us to on in the many of this In as in language, a force is and only by its effects. The force, for was and in as in language, in order for to be a force we something like a with all its and with all its In other words, in order for to be force to be and for it to have and in must have As Foucault only in relation to something other than But the of any critical is for Lorenzini, “a or is it “in to a For Lorenzini, if I have understood at for although we out an on a force and are not in an the force of and of and Lorenzini his on a force that the of if only to our as something other than it

ABSTRACT This interdisciplinary article brings continental philosophy and rhetorical theory to an exploration of crucial scenes between Iphigenia and her mother Clytemnestra in Lady Jane Lumley’s sixteenth-century manuscript translation of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. In Lumley’s translation, mother and daughter model—through listening to each other, through repetition, and through their ineffective and yet constitutive arguments as Iphigenia approaches death—how the living may allow the dying to become dead, each opening toward the other without closure even as they separate. The article argues that attending to Lumley’s important translation (in light of the work of philosophers and rhetoricians such as Michel Serres, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jim Corder, and Jessica Restaino) reveals repetition as instructive, constitutive, and caring.

If we but listen, we can hear a voice from the grave—Jacques Derrida’s mournful lamentation: “There is no longer, there has never been a scholar capable of speaking of anything and everything while addressing himself to everyone and anyone, and especially to ghosts. There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts” (2006, 12), a scholar who “does not believe in the sharp distinction between . . . the living and the non-living” (12). But, then, as if in response, we witness the apparition of just such a scholar: Stuart J. Murray, the author of The Living from the Dead, who very much is dedicated to the ethical project of attending to those dead who continue to haunt the living. Indeed, the book’s cover features a spectral image, entitled “Ghost,” as it were, conjured by artist Si Lewen. As well, the very title of his work renders the “sharp distinction” between “The Living” and “The Dead” porous, quixotically indistinct, as signified by the unattached and unhinged preposition “from.” That is, the title does not announce that Murray intends to distinguish the living from the dead, nor separate the living from the dead, nor identify the living from the dead—in some categorical, decisive demarcation. Rather, Murray’s use of the preposition “from” might conjure—instead, a Derridean sense of a “borderline”—a relation marked by différance between the living and the dead. Etymologically derived from an Old English preposition, “denoting the distance, absence, or remoteness of a person or thing in fixed position” (OED)—in time or space, from evokes Derrida’s neologism. “Différance as temporization [time/deferral], différance as spacing [space/difference]. How are they [time/space],” Derrida queries, “to be joined?” (1991, 61). Murray’s syntactically incomplete phrase suggests that the living and the dead are conjoined in a relation of interminable deferral and indeterminable difference, entangled in a fluxed, symbiotic—parasitic, even—relation.Much more could be said on this t(r)opic of deferred presence (and much more, indeed, of parasitic consumption and carnophallogocentrism), but to our immediate point, as Murray’s work entreats us to consider, there is much to learn in conversation with the dead; and indeed, it is our ethical responsibility—burden, even, as he remarks—to “hearken” to their voices. Murray’s The Living from the Dead undertakes this burden, listening to “the dead, the dying, the dispossessed” (1), endeavoring to articulate “[u]nder what conditions might we hearken those dead who summon us, and exhort us, perhaps to reckon with our unspeakable complicity in their deaths” (1), while offering the following caveat: “These pages, which arise in care of such summons, exhortations, and calls to reckoning neither speak for nor as the dead, the dying, or lives lost” (1), for as he will reveal in his refrain, speaking for or as amounts to an unethical co-option, a resentencing to death of the dead and dying.Murray describes his work’s writing “something akin to thanatography” (1), which is through and through a rhetorical enterprise, necessitating an attunement to and with biopolitics’ “speech/acts and its tropological constitution of subjects, political identities, and lives lived” (10). That is, as Steven Mailloux has argued elsewhere, tropes are rotated in order to “rotate the troops” (1993, 299). Tropes, troops; life, death. Much is at stake.The subtitle of the book, Disaffirming Biopolitics, foregrounds Murray’s argument: that attending to these voices, to the dead, requires a certain disaffirmation of biopolitics, a disaffirmation of “a politics ostensibly devoted to life (bios)” (1), to the production of “life,” which is “governed by increasingly autonomous efficiencies and economies of scale, through techno-administrative mechanisms that include systems of surveillance, segregation, health and welfare regimes” (2), as well as “through education, . . . law, biomedicine, and popular culture, too” (2). The production of “life” instantiates itself by way of a “sacrificial economy” (5) that necessitates letting die (1), even “acceler[ating] or mand[ating]” (2) death. In short, “[b]iopolitics kills, albeit indirectly and in the passive voice. It lets die in the name of life. This book begins here in the care of deaths disavowed—rather than from life’s sacred vows and avowals” (1).Murray undertakes his thanatographical critique of biopolitics with an introduction, four chapters, and a concluding “refrain.” Through the use of case studies, examining sacrificial economies that mobilize tropes/troops, Murray listens to those—dead and dying—who are “let to die,” according to the rhetorics and logics of bioethics, as employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, by suicide terrorism, during the hunger strikes of California prisoners, during legal cases of “untimely” deaths of young children, and surrounding the technologically distributed, videotaped death of a disabled Black man. Each case study is situated within a rhetorical framework, and—as ever—critically foregrounds Murray’s own burden of “using,” for analysis, for his evidentiary purposes, these very “precious perilous bodies in sickness and suicide; in hunger, subjects of medico-legal power, of time and race and technology” (161). “My ‘uses’ are abuses,” he admits, “notwithstanding my intent” (161). This confession, which seeks no absolution, confirms, yet again, our/his irredeemable and “unspeakable complicity” in the violence of letting die (1).The stakes are grave, indeed, in Murray’s thanatographical critique—politically, ethically, and rhetorically, which remain, in refrain, indistinguishable, one from the other. In the face of “unconscionable state violence,” “the revivification of nativist nationalisms and racisms,” “merciless neoliberal governments and burgeoning authoritarianisms; and most recently, a deadly global pandemic”: “We live and die today on a knife’s edge of disaster” (1–2). Yet, the most devasting cut of his critique comes, on refrain, as an interrogation into his, my, our, individual and collective complicity in all. Once more, there is no option of good conscience, nor of absolution, although there remains “the future-to-come” (148). This should give us pause, to “wait abidingly” (148)—and should inspire a certain, disaffirming vigilance. At the gravest point, The Living from the Dead is a powerful, ethical invocation; a lyrical, performative provocation—and a promising, futural conjuration.Murray begins his rhetorical investigation citing Foucault’s halting attempt to “define” “biopolitics,” as worked through during a lecture at the College de France in 1976, where Foucault postulates that “one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right—to take life or let live—was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. . . . This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (qtd. in Murray 3).Murray astutely notes that Foucault’s description of this “epochal transformation” of power can be articulated only in the passive voice, and Murray argues that this is Foucault’s only grammatical recourse precisely because this new right somehow manifests “seemingly by no one, or nothing, and yet in the name of an incipient ‘life itself’” (3). However, Murray continues, although this new right is, in contrast to sovereignty’s supreme agency, “decentralized and reticulate” (4), the grammar of liberal humanism has “become a great biopolitical ruse” (4), propagating the continuing illusion “that I freely choose and choose the very conditions of my own choosing—a grammatical ‘I’ propped up in its delusional sense of rationality, autonomy, and enlightened agency. An entitled ‘I’ through which ‘life itself’ would speak” (4).This grammatical habit—like Nietzsche’s worn coin in “On Truth and Lying” (1989, 250)—remains, circulating in this sacrificial economy as zombie currency: the illusion of individual sovereignty. This “lie”—supported and reproduced by “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms” (250)—further belies that “the object of that [new] power, its site of application, is not a singular body to be disciplined or punished. Biopolitics makes live and lets die en masse. No longer concerned with given individuals, it is applied systemically on—and constitutes—particular ‘populations’” (Murray 2022, 4). Further, still, Murray maintains, not only is the grammatical “I” a rhetorical invention, but “life itself” is, also. That is, biopolitics mobilizes “a tropological regime that fabricates a vital ‘truth’ from which all else seems to follow” (3). This “truth” belies a so-called “concrete biological body,” which incarnates a trope of a “most disincarnate, sacred, or transcendental notion,” which is “neither given nor natural” (3). The Living from the Dead “surfaces” these mobilizations of metaphors—the tropes of “life itself” (14).Disaffirming biopolitics’ tropological moves is in response to scholars who advocate an “affirmative” or “democratic” biopolitics, who proffer a “kinder, gentler” biopolitics (12). Yet, as Murray convincingly argues, “to affirm is the performative speech/act of a (neo)liberal political subject and iteratively both relies on and shores up a problematic underlying ontology” (12). In this way, citing Nancy Fraser’s criticism, such affirmative attempts, therefore, do not “disturb,” but rather reify “the underlying social structures that generat[ed]” the very injustices, which we are interrogating and asking to be held accountable (12).Disaffirming, in contrast, is a thanatographical endeavor—a rhetorical one: “To critique is not to judge the truths or lies of biopolitics (it proclaims both), or whether it is good or evil (it can be both); rather, critique would pursue rhetorical questions concerning the conditions in and by which such statements could be voiced, circulate, and recruit desiring subjects as agents of the biopolitical apparatus” (13). In this way, “[t]o disaffirm is a devastating undertaking. It is not self-righteously censorious, neither a disapprobation nor a condemnation issued from a posture of moral superiority or a secure sense-of-self. . . . Instead, it would turn its gaze inward to reckon with my collusion and complicity in systems that let die in the name of my own livingness” (18). And, would amount to—if not a burial of the liberal, humanistic subject, certainly “a mortification of this subject, ‘I,’ who writes—here” (19).And then, what remains of The Living from the Dead is its refrain. After careful exegesis of the case studies, themes repeat. What remains, like a refrain, which repeats, remains. A refrain, etymologically, also carries the signifying saturation of the sense of “burden,” which Murray carries with him in his thanatographical study. As chorus or burden, Murray’s refrain through the book is to amplify, in its repetition, like a death dirge, the incalculable, immeasurable ethical burden that “we,” that “I,” that “he,” the author, carries as the ethical obligation in the face of the recognition of our own complicity in the letting die, in the knowledge that our, my, his, very living is at the purchase of the disavowal of so many deaths, the disavowal of all whom “we”/“I” have let die in this sacrificial economy (see also 171).Yet we must lend our ear. The responsibility to “hearken” to, address, and dialogue with “the dead, the dying, the dispossessed” (1) (“however fictively” [144]), however rhetorically, however lyrically, Murray argues, necessitates the use of apostrophe as a non-co-optive, non-cannibalizing trope. Through a careful explication of the distinction between the tropes of apostrophe and prosopopoeia, Murray makes clear that the latter, prosopopoeia, speaks for and as the dead—a making present, as a projection of the addressor, and, as such, is “the master trope of biopolitics,” “whether expressly in the service of making live or letting die. It is a voice that impatiently projects the response it wishes to hear. It refuses to wait; inattentive, it willfully mistakes the echo for origin” (145).In contradistinction, apostrophe attends to a nonpresent absence (144), and eternally awaits a response—an impossible response, because the “impossible possibility of the reply ontologically precedes the call, and calls-forth that call, hearkening in advance: the apostrophe is summoned (by the absent addressee), the apostrophe in turn summons, and we tarry in this space. The address is always in the eternal return of this refrain” (145).And the address, “if we seek possibilities for a critical response that might disaffirm biopolitics,” requires a different “rhetorical register” (145). Hence the apostrophic address, the address summoned by the absent addressee, requires the “mortification” of the liberal human subject, perhaps summoning a sort of sacrifice of “letting die.” In this impossible space, unmoored from “our liberal subjecthood” and the illusion of agentic sovereignty, Murray takes up the (un)timely question: How then? What now? How might “we” proceed ethically (19)? In this concluding chapter, Murray faces the impossible, ethical injunction: How, then, to “deal” with these ghosts—with all these dead and dying with whom I have some complicity—by my very “livingness”? He turns/tropes his thanatographical eye from other systems to himself—to the very act of writing about the dead, about those lives that have been allowed (accelerated or mandated) to “let die.” The repetition is palpable. The lament has a corporeal texture. One feels the weight of corpses; the burden is heavy. This grave acknowledgment, however, is not cause for despair—but rather hope; here for a future-to-come, for a new way of being—for a new relation between the living and the dead.Murray suggests that there is a rhetorical, ethical responsibility to hearken to, to address—in a mode of call-and-response. How, then? Murray, thus, queries: might “we” (as tentatively as he inscribes such a collective), alternately, “gather around the impossible possibility of death, rather than life itself—a thanatopolitics rather than a biopolitics” (170)? Murray explains (and I realize I am quoting him heavily, but his prose is so gorgeously citation-worthy): “We must not think that by saying yes to ‘life,’ one says no to power and to death; on the contrary (to continue borrowing on Foucault’s phraseology), one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of biopolitics. And yet, in the sanctimonious affirmation of my ‘life,’ biopolitics demands that I say No to death, that I possess my life by locating death elsewhere, producing it there clandestinely, outsourcing it, as the condition of my living-on” (171).Speaking yes to life or yes to death, indeed, presumes that one can address such, and—to our purposes—presumes that one can, in present circumstances, “own” one’s own death, where nothing could be further from the “truth.” To speak the “truth” would acknowledge that “we ourselves are stuck in the universal contexts of death and cooperate with the death industry” (Sloterdijk 1987, 203). And this is where Murray resurrects the ancient Cynics, who acknowledged “the death-warranting of our established order. They refuse[d] to uphold the broken liberal contract, its ‘free speech,’ its false equalities” (175). Rather, they called for a “life which is radically other” and which “itself responds to—perhaps it has hearkened—death’s address” (175).By way of explication, he conjures Foucault’s late work on Cynic philosophy, as “a sort of parallel history to Western philosophy” (165). That is, Foucault contrasts the philosophical impulses as advocated by Plato’s with that of Plato’s In the the to is with a much relation to the as articulated in the Murray explains the of the the on the of an ethical relation to as a the manifests itself a and of in to the body the that we Western philosophy, and liberal In the in contrast, “the relation to itself . . . not on the care of the . . . but on the care of life (bios)” within Cynic contrast to the and of life within biopolitics rhetorical the or by which I my life and to it rather as by of as by a reply to that It does not speak it lives it. . . . a new to the of to say the (Sloterdijk 1987, It responds to the with “a dialogue of and An disaffirming mode of a mode of of of that one’s life and one’s one is or has one is to live or let to or of the has been a by scholars in our as in a to on Foucault and the of the to speak to speak and to speak The has a and history within the rhetorical (see and but of is the to to as is on the and rhetorics have their to critical This is a by who Foucault’s of power, and who argues that that we will or those that do not sense within the of or is, then, not in the according to much as it is an a The mode of thus, this critical as that up the possibilities for or of the of the to that have in that him his life, but he articulated a of that could one’s mode of one’s mode of death. the of the no such are or even even if we this Murray, in refrain, Cynic philosophy, the no no of an no but it us to still, on refrain, are the remains, the of remains, and the “burden,” or ethical to to Derrida has the work of attending to remains, to remains that do not remain, as the the impossible nonpresent absence that renders all thus, the for what I the (qtd. in 1987, in order to acknowledge that which the How to the of How to the work of our complicity in the systems of How to to the remains, to our complicity with injustices, in order to into the of the to address—in Derrida’s a and of a responsibility for This is what Murray is a scholar who deals with who to address, who for a of “life” that in one’s relation with the living and the ethical relation that would disaffirm our biopolitical regime and would not just an other life, it is an other in which an other death will one be (175). This is his this is what remains.

ABSTRACT Why does post-truth discourse feel true? This article argues that post-truth fears the death of rhetoric, rather than truth, and traces that fear to the voluminous, rapid, and intense production of stasis on social media. Social media enable and weaponize the production of stasis, and that production generates affects more aligned with death than life (stagnation, hopelessness) that explain why post-truth feels true. These fears and their concomitant hopes constitute an affective economy also present in philosophy’s predominant images of rhetoric. Some images picture rhetoric as movement, whereas others emphasize rhetoric’s capacity to secure the status quo. Social media beckon a supplementary image—a vortex—in which rhetorical movement functions to produce standstill. This image suggests the need to consider affects generated by rhetorical processes as much as from texts. Post-truth’s affective economy also drives stasis production generally, and scholars should attend to the affective economies driving various rhetorical modes.

Style is a perennial concern within rhetorical studies. As one of Aristotle’s five canons, style has inspired a great deal of rhetorical theory over the past two millennia and counting. Hence, it would be reasonable to presume that there is not much, if anything, else original to contribute to the well-trodden domain of the stylistic. However, Taylor Black’s Style: A Queer Cosmology challenges this assumption by offering a fresh take on its titular concept. The book’s grounding in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies allows its author to speak to multiple audiences at once, including those invested in queer theory, race and ethnicity, popular culture, new materialism, and literary criticism. To this inventory, I would add anyone interested in the art of rhetoric, particularly those committed to incorporating new, diverse perspectives into the field’s existing analytical tool chest. Tonally whimsical but nonetheless boldly argued, Style dramatically reframes a timeworn concept in the rhetorical lexicon that many of us have likely—and mistakenly—come to take for granted.Readers of this journal will be immediately seduced by Black’s provocative rethinking of style as elemental. Here, the term “elemental” directs attention toward style as “the rudimentary source of difference that distinguishes one thing from another, something perhaps, more closely aligned with myth than fact: an immaterial force or energy, perhaps supernatural in essence, that imbues everything under the sun” (5). As Black infers throughout the book’s introduction, style is the expression of difference available to all human and nonhuman beings. More than aesthetic ornamentation, or the mere ability to make oneself appear outwardly beautiful, style is a mysterious yet universal condition of possibility underlying the cultivation of a personality. Style names the intertwined processes of self-fashioning and self-discovery that produce individuation as its outcome. And though everyone “has” a style, Black asserts, “not everyone is a stylist” (15). Black posits the figure of the stylist to denote a minoritarian subject who transmutes the experience of oppression into a purposeful performance of self. Upon realizing their exclusion from a majoritarian social order organized by deeply embedded attachments to a hierarchy of difference that discriminates on bases of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other intersecting codes of identification, stylists turn their failure to conform into an opportunity for opening possibilities for alternative futures.In other words, from the limitations that accompany experiences of structural oppression, style authorizes potential. Referencing Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Black suggests stylists tend to dwell in cosmology, a form of storytelling or narrative fabulation about the universe’s origins and one’s place in its ongoing unfolding. “Stylists,” Black poetically avers, are “naturally drawn to understanding the universe better by virtue of developing a more and more acute consciousness of who and what they are and how they came to be” (20). Black highlights style’s fundamental elementality as emerging from cosmic renderings of marginalized experience and the pursuit of a future otherwise. To further illustrate this elemental notion of the stylistic, Black assembles an eclectic corpus of texts by those he calls “subterranean American stylists” (5), namely Quentin Crisp, Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, whose lives and work he examines over seven chapters divided into three main parts. Each chapter supplies unique insights on the elementals of style, as well as its subject matter, thus allowing Black to support the thesis constructed in the introduction without ever seeming overly redundant.The first part of Style, “The Mystery of Personality: Queerness as Style,” consists of a preface and two chapters oriented around the specific ways stylizations of queer selfhood may function as a survival strategy and, relatedly, a means for exploring elemental mysteries of personality and being. In the initial chapter, Black analyzes texts authored by openly gay memoirist and cultural commentor Quentin Crisp, who became famous for his humorous and often brash approach to publicly discussing social issues during the last half of the twentieth century. In Crisp’s work, Black locates the inextricable relationship between style and repetition. As someone perceived by the public as an “effeminate homosexual” living during an era prior to many of the legal protections hard won by the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, Crisp deployed style ritualistically as a “path to self-preservation” (35). Crisp did so by consistently rejecting status quo standards of masculinity and defiantly repeating a style of self-presentation that blurred lines of intelligibility between available gender categories. “What Crisp has to offer us,” Black contends, is an embodied, temporal theory of style; that is, a “way of transforming being in time into an endless process of becoming: a transvaluation of life into a self-sustaining set of habits that attempt to align one’s body and spirit with the sometimes unrecognizable and not immediately knowable elements of the world” (38). From a close reading of texts like Crisp’s autobiography, readers can grasp the inherent riskiness of stylistic repetition in a social environment that constantly threatens difference with violence. Importantly, Crisp shows how, by doubling down on one’s own commitment to style as a habitualized mode of self-realization, consistent stylistic repetition builds and sustains a “queer utopia” premised in the infectious celebration, rather than the eradication, of stylized difference (40).As the second chapter begins, Black acquaints readers with Style’s topical promiscuity, a certainly queer stylistic choice that runs throughout the book. Black examines writings and other artistic productions by Flannery O’Connor, a twentieth-century writer from Georgia who acquired notoriety for short stories that stylized the U.S. South as a region of unbridled grotesquerie, and who—like Crisp—gained a queer sensibility by finding herself “in the wrong place at the wrong time” (62). Black charts how O’Connor, always well aware that her reading public was composed mostly of cosmopolitan northern audiences that imagined themselves as superior to the freakish southern characters she depicted, used style rhetorically to expose ironic similarities between the elitist gaze of northern readers and the myopic visions of those featured in her fiction. O’Connor’s application of style to draw out the fact that “everyone in the world is a freak” is an insight only the cleverest stylist could both ascertain and deploy artistically as social critique (90). For Black, this facet of O’Connor’s work is evidence of style’s elemental capacity to reveal foundational dynamics that shape the experience of existence (90).The next part of Style, “The Arrow of Time: Style and the Problems of Originality and History,” contains another preface and a pair of chapters centered around style’s temporality and its relationship to cosmology. In the third chapter, Black extends his focus on American literature by closely reading the works of Edgar Allan Poe, a stylist known for authoring works that explore connections between the macabre and the eschatological. Focusing on not only Poe’s signature style across his oeuvre but also the “whole network or infrastructure of the greater assemblage that we know now as ‘Poe,’” Black credits Poe’s enduring relevance as a figure in literary history to his ingenuity as a stylist, one that effectively alchemized his mysterious personality with that of the off-kilter content of his work to fabricate a legacy (98). Black challenges the doctrines of New Criticism, as well as postmodern declarations of “the death of the author,” by insisting that the meaning of Poe’s work and its ability to continually attract new generations of audiences depends on the imbrication of the author’s biography and the polysemy of the text itself (121). Like O’Connor, Poe creates highly stylized encounters between text and reader that permit the stylist to posthumously exert a presence on the world despite their body’s disappearance from it. And therein one can conceive of style’s indefinite effectivity as evidence of a lasting temporal futurity that is cosmic in the way it routes, shapes, and determines the direction of existence.Black nuances this perspective in the fourth chapter, which explores the folksongs of Bob Dylan. Black suggests that Dylan’s music reaches not toward a utopian future but “backward, into the graveyard of the national imagination” (128). Framing Dylan’s body as a vessel for the “ghosts” conjured by folk music, Black provides a description of the artist’s style as dynamically entangled with memories of the past, which he uses to convey his creativity and public-facing persona (132). As Dylan repetitively consults the past, he undergoes embodied, quasi-ritualistic processes of conversion that are “neither flat nor unidirectional (like the arrow of time); they are circular, recursive and prophetic” (143). Consequently, Dylan taps into the cosmological power of style, specifically its capability for transforming the direction of an in-progress history using the materials of seemingly bygone times.The last part of Style, “The Critic as Stylist: Toward a Theory of Attunement,” comprises a final preface and the book’s last three main chapters, all of which advocate for an understanding of style as an attunement to one’s most authentic version of self as it exists in relation to a broader, ever-changing universe of stylized beings. In the fifth chapter, Black insists on a notion of critical reading as an attunement to the sensate musicality of a textual artifact. “Criticism, in this sense, should seek to re-create the sensation of reading-feeling,” Black argues (162, emphasis original). Black points to Toni Morrison’s scholarship, specifically the author’s 2017 essay “Romancing Slavery,” as an exemplary study in how to self-consciously transform the act of critique into a stylistic endeavor, specifically one that is attuned to the vibratory resonance of the past’s impression on the present. Similarly, in Beloved, Morrison achieves a “sound” in the novel that is “sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious” and, in effect, infuses “the text with a musical emphasis that words can do sometimes even better than music can” (175).Black carries his focus on style as an orientation toward criticism into the sixth chapter. He contends that reading and interpretation are active “practices of style” or ways of “attuning our instincts with knowledge” (179). In an impressive survey of numerous schools of thought, including pragmatism, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology, Black makes a case for the humanistic critic as fundamentally a stylist concerned with thinking about and expressing “things that are in their very nature unmeasurable” (179). While some scholars of humanities working in contemporary academic institutions may feel pressures to adopt methodologies of the social or hard sciences to prove their field’s validity and/or relevance, Black mounts a defense of close textual criticism as a method that is not replicable precisely because it entails critics who employ style to better understand their places in the universe while also attuning to cosmic questions and concerns that resist capture by positivist logics and protocols of measurement.In the seventh chapter, Black finalizes this idea by turning toward academic disciplines as sites of latent stylistic creativity. Throughout, Black laments how modern disciplinary contexts are delimited and contained by rigid conventions of professionalization, such as departmental silos in universities and conference presentations at scholarly meetings. A collective embrace of style, Black promises, is the surest path for deterritorializing established fields and nurturing their revitalization as they become something new in the future.Rather than a proper conclusion, Black ends Style with a short but substantive coda. In it, Black compares style to a religious practice: “[style] is a desire to know the universe and the mysteries of the universe . . . a way of searching out mystery and forging a path against the arrow of time” (249). “Style is,” Black continues, “like God, never totally achievable but always somehow still available” (249). With this statement, Black once again makes clear his understanding of style as a way of life through which the humanist can pursue big picture questions with no clear or easy answers. Style is a resource for becoming more like oneself and, in the process, broaching topics that elementally bind everyone together as a collective body in a shared universe.While there is much to appreciate about Style, the book is not without shortcomings. Two come to mind immediately. First, on multiple occasions, Black fails to fully acknowledge the complex existing power dynamics and structures of oppression that restrict and even make impossible certain enactments of style, particularly for people belonging to marginalized communities. For instance, Black spends a great deal of time studying Quentin Crisp as a stylist whose life work facilitated extraordinary examples of queer worldmaking. But Black does not mention Crisp’s late-in-life confession that he perhaps identified more as a trans woman than as a queer man. Crisp admitted that the lack of a widespread vocabulary for describing trans phenomena during his lifetime likely prevented him from ever seeing himself in terms of any other gender identity than the one assigned to him at birth. How would Black’s book have changed if the author had contextualized Crisp as a trans stylist whose style was temporally ahead of the available terminology for describing it? I doubt that posing such a question would have diminished Black’s analysis but would have provided only more nuance for complexifying some of its inferences and implications.Second, as a rhetorician, I do wish Black had acknowledged and taken seriously at least some of the many scholarly treatments of style that have emanated specifically from the field of rhetorical studies. Unfortunately, Black dedicates no space in Style to ancient or contemporary rhetoricians who have written at length on style’s innately rhetorical dimensions. So, we will never know how a rhetorical viewpoint could have enriched Black’s insights. Fortunately, this rather large omission leaves room for future rhetoricians to fill the gaps created by the release of the book.Despite the book’s weaknesses, rhetoricians can glean from Style a version of rhetorical analysis that never quite names itself as such, but nevertheless still inspires inquiries that are indelibly rhetorical. Style is a reminder of our tradition’s possession of theoretical tools that open existential inquiries about what it means to be a human living and seeking meaning in a world that often feels all too precarious. As I finished reading Black’s book for the second time, I began to understand it as a guide for how to alchemize one’s personality and creativity in the exertion of a stylized rhetorical agency ethically collaborated toward the building of a common future. Indeed, Style is a profound performance of intellectual labor that forgoes appeals to canonicality and, in doing so, opens new scholarly routes from which rhetoricians can draw inspiration for reimagining how they approach their own work. Personally, I was inspired to return to the field’s seemingly basic analytical touchstones and begin to reimagine how I convey their meaning in my scholarship and teaching. I believe other rhetoricians will come away from Style with similar impressions, and for this reason, I highly recommend it.

ABSTRACT The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) pose important questions for rhetorical theory and pedagogy. This article offers an overview of how LLMs like GPT work and a consideration of whether they should be considered rhetorical agents. To answer this question, the article considers structural and argumentative similarities in classical theorizations of rhetoric and the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. GPT’s particular method of encoding statistical patterns in language gives it some rudimentary semantics and reliably generates acceptable natural language output, so it should be considered to have a degree of rhetorical agency. But it is also badly limited by its restriction to written text, and an analysis of its interface shows that much of its rhetorical savvy is caused by the highly restricted rhetorical situation created by the ChatGPT interface.

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.

ABSTRACT Despite seemingly broad acceptance within rhetorical theory, the category of the unconscious has remained understudied and misunderstood ever since Kenneth Burke first appropriated the concept from psychoanalysis, and his unquestioned commitment to conventional anthropocentric binaries continues to obscure the role and function of the unconscious within communication into this century. Offering a corrective reanalysis of the Freudian apparatus for contemporary rhetoricians, this article shows where Burke went wrong in his early encounter with psychoanalysis and suggests a vital alternative approach in the cybernetic recasting of Jacques Lacan, which suggests the possibility of an unconscious without Dramatism’s traditional humanist assumptions. In a lateral turn bringing this imagined dialogue between Burke and Lacan into our era, the article demonstrates how a Lacan-inflected posthumanist revision of rhetoric’s unconscious is better suited to address contemporary issues of mediated communication, such as the pedagogical import of AI and ChatGPT.

ABSTRACT Taking the example of the French Résistance and by summoning up the twin rhetorical concepts of kinesis and energeia, this article establishes the long reach of a national liberation trajectory, of which the Résistance was a key moment in its attempt to free the country and to move ahead with the project and promise of an ideal republic.

ABSTRACT Effective communication relies on the use of rhetorical devices and strategies to make ideas present in the minds of an audience. By employing the concept of cognitive environments, we can use the visual analogy of making an idea “present” to its fullest effect, empowering our rhetorical skills and helping influence audience reception. In this article, the author argues that while cognitive environments do indeed provide a significant and important conceptual tool for understanding and anticipating an audience’s experiences, beliefs, and knowledge, a more robust sense of agreement is necessary. The article proposes the concept of a topos that serves as a shared meeting place within cognitive environments within which both author and audience contribute their background assumptions to find common ground and commonalities in interpretations. It is in figuring the topos effectively that cognitive environments can be more accurately and effectively mapped onto each other, and breaches between such environments can be productively bridged.

ABSTRACT Despite Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s well-known influence on argumentation studies, it is striking that their theory of argumentation no longer stands out as a living project in the field. On the one hand, critics argue that their theory is inherently relativistic and therefore incapable of aiding argument evaluation. On the other hand, critics argue that, even as a descriptive theory, it fails to sufficiently justify its own systematic ambitions. This article addresses these dual concerns by returning to one of the most neglected yet most innovative aspects of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argumentation—its rhetorical methodology. Reconstructing two key aspects of this methodology in phenomenological terms, the author discusses that the theory of argumentation found in The New Rhetoric is a philosophically neutral framework for describing the already norm-laden practice of argumentation.

The state of movement is a question—of movement, in theory.What is movement, a movement, perhaps not least as the condition of arrival, an “original” beginning? Where does it come from? How does it work, in better and worse ways? To what does it lead—and why? If these standing questions remain open, there is also a chance that they are not questions at all, that they remain in some basic way beyond inquiry, precisely as they beg the question, as Giorgio Agamben has contended, of how “movement” remains “our unthought,” of the way in which “movement” presents us with the puzzle of an unconceived concept, the tension of a word whose work demands forgetting the “defeats and failures” of its use in the name and at the edges of democracy, and getting around the aporia of its necessary power without end (2005, 1). Perhaps we can only boggle—and perhaps we should. To inquire into the “state of movement” may be less a struggle for answers than the condition of question-ability itself, a movement of movement that appears in theory.Inspiring gesture. Endless stasis. Myriad advances. Countless retreats. Emerging hopes. Multiplying panics. Forced dislocation. Involuntary relocation. Indefinite incarceration. Sovereign and disciplinary borders crossed, closed, and blurred. Speech acts—in action. Moving words—gone sideways. Gathering judgments. Calling out and compounding injustice. Cancelling the show. Incursions, attacks, invasions. History’s (always) incoming storm. Recalling, extending, and setting aside law’s precedent. Blown away, in a gust and a measure of time. Rising sea levels, receding forests, spiraling temperatures. Rustling aspen trees at altitude. Getting back on the bike. Staying put for the planet. Finding, instilling, and following desire. Unbounded discovery. Undue appropriation. Undoing what’s been done. Bodies at work, play, and ecstasy—and in decay, duress, and internment. Swept off the streets—and the quad. Vectors of transmission and expression. Breaking quarantine—and cliché. Soft landings and winding supply chains. Streaming words. Tropes turning into (intelligent) algorithms—and back again. Bullets flying . . . in homes, hospitals, classrooms. Struck by the light of a nebula and a sky full of kinetic kill vehicles. Populist uprising—progressive overreach. Equal and opposite reactions. Runway culture. Throwaway sociality. Publicity’s collapse. Privatization’s disclosure. Hopes for stillness and repose. Travel bans . . . for life. Packing the U-Haul for a better life. Generations letting go—and digging in. Rounds of chants. Days of marches. Cycles of emergency. Revolutionary aspirations in the avenues. Circling the leader, demanding commands. Running resistance. Caught out. Making way—and away.Asking after the state of movement may be less about the pause of cataloguing than the open that appears with being still, making a way of moving without movement, for a moment—to reflect on our understanding of the modes, manners, grammars, and vocabularies of movement and to speculate on the experience and so, in some basic sense, the assumption of movement, the line between those movements that remain in the background, out of view and taken for granted, often in the name of being able to simply get on with things, and those that provoke, invite, and disturb inquiry. If, for instance, the sort of movement named a “journey” is a long-standing and basic feature of the human condition (one can think variously, of better and much worse instantiations, from the Odyssey to the bloody quests for “salvation” that might have but mostly didn’t hinge on the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow to the Trail of Tears and Middle Passage to the moon shots), what’s happening in an American culture currently besotted with the idea of “being on a journey”—of discovery, fitness, creativity, acceptance, recovery, parenthood, leadership, home ownership, and so on and so forth. One wonders—or boggles—if such journeys, if they are journeys, whether as events, metaphors, or, speech acts, amount to prefigured objects or open-ended activities (Folit-Weinberg 2022). If not nostalgic, many seem self-indulgent if not self-confounding, at least those that have no apparent way of beginning or ending and so amount to passing time. Some smack of a home-baked lockdown hangover cure, while others present as a way to resist political stasis, though it’s not always easy to differentiate this latter impulse from the desire to run away, whether from oneself or from everyone else. More than a few are looking to find a more or less lost plot, one that’s been perhaps derailed by too much scrolling. It’s difficult to say, as the trope (topos, more likely) rarely distances itself from its own cliché. And so, this too shall pass—and quickly. Madison Avenue (itself now displaced into the influencer ether) will soon enough turn its eye to another notion. The journey will come to a close, whether successfully or as a function of getting lost or just running out of steam. One movement will enable, cover, and confound another. And so on. Entropy and revolution will touch, a coincidence that bears wholly on the fate of the romanticized “social movement,” the pure light of a heralded beginning giving way to the shadowy work of institutionalization and the latter’s paralyzing “corruption.”As Aristotle had it: “Now if a thing is moved, it can be otherwise than it is,” except for that unnamed and unnamable “something—X—which moves while being itself unmoved, existing actually” (XII, vii, 1072b). Timely, at least for its hint that inquiry into the state of movement confronts and expresses an exception, an aporia, and a paradox. First, the exception, as the state of movement is . . . movement. It’s all (in) motion, all the time, in the background, round and round. At quantum, atomic, cellular, and bodily levels, there is no pause—in gravity, form, life, or death. And for the most part, as we go about the movements of the day, all of this remains in the background, the ground of the lifeworld. The sun rises. One breath follows another. The coffee drips into the cup. Ideas appear, not least with the words that arrive, and the words that are expressed, more or less where they are supposed to go. Paths are forged, though mostly followed. Places along the way are ignored, encountered, and forgotten. Mis-steps happen. Mis-takes are made. All in all, bedrock is a vast and mostly unseen and unappreciated complex of movement, which means that there is nowhere to actually stand, no place that affords certain standing. The irony of the human lifeworld (in antiquity: the ground of tragedy) in which zoē gives way to bios, in which life exceeds the necessities of simply staying alive, is that living being cannot be what it is—in constant motion, in infinite flux, in complete contingency. If all movement all the time is stasis, everyday life, at least, begins in exception to its movement, a way of being inside and outside what it is, moving inside and outside its movement, in the name of a beginning, a power to pause and move anew.Second, the aporia, the statement that expresses the state of movement only by altering its speed and blocking its trajectory, often forcing it to turn—around, one way or another, if not on itself. As an impulse to inquire into the existence, nature, or qualities of movement, the statement aims toward and proffers what movement is, an account that puts movement in its place, even as movement qua movement has long been a condition of the epistemic interest that underwrites the work of definition—the movement of reason (Kotef 2013, 5). If understanding the world entails leaving the cave and getting out into the world, such movement may be thwarted by the words that are addressed to moving, the words that move themselves but which can’t keep up with (their own) experience, that arrive to movement only by displacing, slowing, rerouting, and perhaps stopping it in its tracks. In kinēsis (and semiotics): movement-disturbing-movement is not simply tautology. And in so many words, in language, an account of movement amounts to its reification, its interruption, an aporia that turns more complicated precisely as the word that is always behind, always dragging movement toward a halt is itself moving, the moving words of the speech act, trope, rhetorical-argument, poetic, and translation, the words that move within and beyond what they state, that hold a power to move that vibrates, resonates, and shimmers with potential, a power that remains in-between, that may or may not come to be.1Third, the paradox, the movement that puts us in a state, a condition fundamental and anathema to politics, that recalls Oedipus’s recollection of the dangers held in kinēsis, the movement that disturbs the given design and profanes the sanctified order, the constitutive mysteries that inaugurate the movements that they then strive to control (1527). Hence the difficulty of locating let alone critically accounting for movement, a concept that appears in the midst, at the very center of the political-ethical life that cannot fully bear its disorder, insecurity, and ambiguity. As Agamben observes, “Movement is the impossibility, indefiniteness, and imperfection of every politics” (2005, 3). It is, in Hagar Kotef’s useful account, the “manifestation (and precondition) of a free social order” at the same time that such “freedom is only politically valuable if it relies on some mechanisms that would regulate the movement that manifests it” (2013, 8). The capacity for movement, whether intellectual, physical, economic, sociocultural, or political, sets the promise of the democratic and autonomous (liberal) subject, a promise that is then selectively narrowed and policed in the name of constituting a state that establishes and extends the right of movement to citizens, the subjects deemed capable of moving reasonably, that is, with the movement of rationality that marks “civilization” and which is then taken to warrant imperial-colonial movement, the confinement, relocation, domestication, and redistribution of those, the “savages” and the “dissidents,” held to roam without purpose, meaning, or propriety and who turn to resist these movements with another (6, 8). Taking leave of “normal” politics and so resisting definition, this movement, for Agamben, is nevertheless decisive: “Movement becomes the decisive political concept when the democratic concept of the people as a political body, is in demise” (2005, 2). Movement is paradoxical precisely as it is always in transition, for a transition that defies full account.The remarkable essays that follow shed significant light on the exceptional beginnings, aporetic potentials, and paradoxical transitions that arrive with and follow inquiry into the state of movement. And they do quite a bit more. In a variety of idioms, approaches, and speeds, the essays ask after a number of intersecting, diverging, and sometimes parallel ways of moving and do so through a variety of movements. Recalling another and often overlooked sense of kineō, the collection asks after and indeed disturbs the assumptions on which the concept of movement tends to rest. Momentum is altered—and sometimes broken. What can we yet say about the given modes, manners, and forms of movement? On what does movement depend, and what does it yield, as energy, force, or power—in time, across space, and through words? On what conditions does it disperse, dissipate, and still? How is it experienced, understood, and perhaps assessed as so much the better or worse? And with these inquiries, one finds a dedicated concern for the movement of inquiry itself, the arrival, appearance, and disturbance of a question, with its turns, arcs, circulations, and deviations, including the disorderly and disordering economies of interdisciplinary wonder. In short, these essays move. And, not least as essays, they are on the move. To their credit, individually and together, they are not quite here, not necessarily, where they are supposed to be, as they take their leave, often very subtly, to ask after the state of movement, holding out and expressing the possibility of being elsewhere and otherwise, at least for a moment, with and without the promise of return.In and along their way, finding and making way, these essays move with movement. They do so in a way that recalls and recollects an old and perhaps still important idea, one that is not always easy to see and for which there is not always a place. Here, there is a disclosure of theory, of theoria—as movement, in its movement, the paths beyond the walls that are found, followed, and sometimes forged by the theoros, those who undertook a passage if not a pilgrimage in the name of setting eyes on a spectacle before returning home (nostos) and setting forth their vision in so many (pre)measured words (epideictic).Theory moves—or, at least it used to. In theoria, it may have begun with a call to take leave, a decision if not a demand to set out and see the sights, take it all in, and report back. In the sixth and fifth centuries (BCE), as Andrea Wilson Nightingale reads the record, theoria was “generally defined as a journey or pilgrimage to a destination away from one’s own city for the purposes of seeing as an eye-witness certain events or spectacles” (2001, 29).2 In a civic capacity, the theoros was “an official envoy” charged to consult an oracle, undertake various rituals, and return with an account of what they had done and witnessed. Such work, if it was work, could also involve travel to religious festivals, events that blurred the line between secular and sacred space, precisely as it afforded the chance for the theoros to “assert the voice of one’s own polis” and gather those words that arrive from beyond (Rutherford 1995, 276). In all of this, including the excursions of private citizens interested to see the world and experience other cultures, Nightingale contends that “the practice of theoria encompassed the entire journey including the detachment from home, the spectating, and the final reentry” even as she stresses that “at its center was the act of seeing, generally focused on a sacred object or spectacle” (2004, 3–4). In theoria, the theoros “entered into a ‘ritualized visuality’ in which secular modes of viewing were screened out by religious rites and practice” (4). Thus, prefiguring the familiar concept of theory as first and foremost rooted in the ocular (theoria from thea, rather than theo or theos), the stress here is on each “end” of the movement undertaken by the theoros, the spectacle taken in upon arrival and the epideictic words offered upon return (Cassin 2004, 1037).What then of theory’s passage, the grounds, appearance, experience, and value of the movement on which a basic sense of theoria is held to rest, in which it unfolds, and through which it promises insight? Inquiry into the state of movement offers one way (there are a variety of others) to dislodge and (re)open this question, perhaps all the more so in light of the city-state’s charge to the theoros and its contested rules (evident, for instance, in Plato’s Laws XII, 953) regarding who can pass through the gates, hear the oracle, speak for the polis, and judge what is best said upon return. It’s a question that may unravel itself, as it involves un-assuming theory and setting it (back) into motion, perhaps by wandering off method’s oft-trod telic path (hodos) and displacing the theoros turned itinerary-laden tourist unable or unwilling to wonder after the “excluded” middle of the trip.3 As they stand, as neither of these typical excursions show much interest to actually leave the city, there is then little chance of their being without the banister of recognition, of being unrecognized, if only for a moment, without the laws of analysis, interpretation, and communication. So too, on this trip without movement, there is never a doubt that the homologeō rides for free, with no charge for its baggage. Never then at a loss for words. No need even for a moment of silence. No need to hear let alone listen. In short, no experience of language as such, as a question not to be asked in so many words but as questionability itself. Benjamin’s aside is crucial: “(A questioner is someone who never in his entire life has given a thought to language, but now wants to do right by it. A questioner is affable towards gods.)”; that is, the appearance of potentiality in which the beautiful soul turns on its addiction to (its own) “becoming” and confronts the bad infinity of (its own) promise turned into endless waiting.4 In the name of politics, at least, the movement of transition abides in a difficult middle, in the collision of the power of beginning and the aporia set down by the causality of fate.The state of movement is a question—of theoria, as movement.

ABSTRACT Catherine Malabou builds on neuroscience to offer a theory of the plasticity of the brain, arguing that trauma holds transformative potential. This article argues, however, that her theory prioritizes resilience in the face of episodic moments of violence and trauma, which undertheorizes the trauma of chronic conditions experienced by racialized, particularly Black, subjects. Instead, this article turns to Christina Sharpe’s theory of wake work and, more specifically, Black annotation and Black redaction, to demonstrate how, in the wake of transatlantic slavery, there is space for the collective disruption of symbolic structures to generate openings for imagining and circulating alternative possibilities to the hegemonic institutions of the past and present. Contrasting Malabou’s focus on the transformation of the brain during episodic violence and trauma, this article contends that Sharpe may demonstrate the possibility of plasticity in form and the symbolic in quotidian experiences and practices.

ABSTRACT This article builds on the scholarship on violence at the nexus of rhetoric, philosophy, decoloniality, and human rights discourse to theorize what it calls a rhetoric of everyday violence. Moving beyond the focus on the politics of representation in slow violence, it brings a transnational feminist rhetorical analytic and a focus on the politics of recognition to illegible temporal violence, arguing that a rhetoric of everyday violence can help recalibrate human rights discourse to recognize temporal and gendered violence as human rights violations.

This issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric, a somewhat rare double-issue, features significant and inspiring work that moves in a variety of directions and proceeds in a number of idioms, while also responding directly and indirectly to a complex exigence, though perhaps in a less familiar sense of the term, as what Giorgio Agamben calls a “messianic modality” that “coincides with the possibility of philosophy itself”—exigency as the expression of what remains unforgettable in the midst of all that is no longer remembered for the sake of history’s progress. Appearing between contingency and necessity, exigency is not then a problem to be re-solved but the opening of a question; or more precisely, the epideictic expression of question-ability, the beginning of inquiry into what calls forth and perhaps even demands its possibility, for now.On what grounds do old questions stand? Through what power and by what happenstance are new questions found and formed? And when—in what kinds of moments do questions appear? With what force do they arrive? At what cost? What questions inflict violence? What violence thwarts a question? What do we (not) ask? How does the (un)questionable give way? Can multiple disciplines ever pose let alone inquire into the same question? What are the (de)constitutive elements of a good question? What does a good question do? Has pious genealogy corrupted the question? Does the discovery of a question remain one of the last “secrets,” the unhinged authentic insight about which little can or should be said?A century ago, announcing the launch of Angelus Novus, Benjamin reflected on the moment and contended that the “vocation of a journal is to proclaim the spirit of its age.” Such a task, in his view, demanded a strict “relevance to the present” even over “unity or clarity” and required exposing the “talented fakes” and resisting “the sterile pageant of new and fashionable events” that obscure how “impossible it is in our age to give a voice to any communality [Gemeinsamkeit].” It is a tall and certainly debatable order, one that Benjamin himself was unable to realize—Angelus never got off the ground. But perhaps the underlying insight remains, the basic importance of holding space for work that discerns and expresses the potential of question-ability.This potential may well be the spirit-breath of an age. And, for now, here and now, it may well be a pressing question—on the shore of Ontario’s Crawford Lake, waiting for official word that the Holocene has ended; in a largely unacknowledged transition, seemingly out of the pandemic’s worst, ramping back up to speed, and yet deeply uncertain about the next normal; in the midst of the two “wars” (a term to which all participating parties will not agree) that make the front page (or the top of the feed) and the many that do not, the grotesque surfeit of increasingly automatic-droning violence unfolding on the grounds of sanctified rage that makes it difficult to ask let alone grasp what violence is; at the gates of the university, where so much inquiry is supplanted with so many strategic plans, and academic freedom is slowly juridified to the advantage of legislatures eager to rewrite the mission; and, in the midst of the noisy quietude that thwarts so many of the small inquiries into well-being that weave the fabric of public life.It’s been a pleasure to work with all of those who have contributed to this issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric. Indeed, the pages that follow radiate with curiosity and insight. Together, they are an expression of inquiry in which question-ability remains unforgettable and there remains a moment to ask—after the question.

ABSTRACT This article describes the conceptualizations of the term kairos, generally taken to mean “the opportune moment,” by Isocrates. Though Isocrates was instrumental in developing kairos as a “quasi-technical” concept within the rhetorical art, his use of the word was highly nuanced and could be applied in one of three poles of meaning: (1) “circumstances”; (2) notions of the “appropriate”; and (3) “opportunity,” an orientation of elements within a particular moment that either supplies or shuts off a path toward a strategic outcome. Furthermore, over half of Isocrates’s eighty-five uses of the term and its variants have little to do with rhetorical theory per se but are simply incidental modifiers of matters under discussion. Accordingly, though kairos is an important term of art for Isocrates, only nuanced reading of the context can reveal his meaning for any given use of the word.

Rhetorical scholars have turned to various new materialist frameworks to shift the discipline’s historically anthropocentric focus and fully engage matter’s rhetoricity. While all such frameworks attempt to challenge “the anthropocentric assumption that nonhuman matter is intrinsically passive or non-agential and thus external to or separable from (human) meaning,” Figures of Entanglement enters this burgeoning conversation by centering the unique contributions of Karen Barad (xi, x). Readers may recognize this collection from a 2016 special issue of Review of Communication. Yet, with a new foreword by editors Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan and an afterword by Laurie Gries, this collection makes Barad’s distinct approach to matter’s rhetoricity even more apparent, underscoring its fruitful potential for new materialist rhetorics invested in ethical, political transformation.In the book’s foreword Gamble and Hanan differentiate Barad’s performative new materialism from “vital” as well as what they refer to as “negative” new materialisms to show the generative potential of Barad’s framework and the notion of entanglement (x). Other new materialisms tend to be “inclusionary”—add matter and stir—and fail to complicate “the human” itself and its differences (xiv, xi). First, vital and negative new materialisms maintain a distinction between being and knowing, allowing humans to emerge with a unique capacity to “objectively observe and know the existence of something essential, determinate, and unchanging about reality that precedes and remains unaffected by both its own activities and our observations of it” (xi). On the contrary, Barad’s performative approach suggests that “no aspect of reality—including human thought, meaning, and observation—is in any sense external to matter or ever remains entirely unchanged by matter’s ongoing performances” (x). Here, humans are not “outside” of observation, but all observation “human or otherwise” co-constitutes what is observed (xi). Second, failing to interrogate “the human” in an attempt to observe matter’s vitality is an ethical flaw that makes other approaches less capable of grappling with difference: they have been charged with “erasing associations between race, gender, and matter” and (re)producing a homogenizing, “Western-colonialist notion of humanness” (xiv). In contrast, Barad’s is a “thoroughly relational,” performative new materialism (1).Barad’s concept of “entanglement” draws attention to the indeterminacy of matter and meaning, but it is accompanied by an ethical imperative to examine how difference, human or otherwise, is produced and the implications of power imbalances that arise through these enactments. For Barad, the notion of entanglement does not dissolve difference; difference is what matters. Indeed, they give us a way of thinking about how performative intra-actions produce difference through material-discursive practices, or apparatuses—differences that may be expected but are not inevitable. Rhetorical scholars are therefore invited to interrogate the production of boundaries that cause harm and reconfigure them, rather than assume the discreteness of boundaries from the start. Gamble and Hanan thus make a convincing case for how Barad’s work may contribute to important scholarship in decolonial and critical rhetorics for which vital and negative new materialisms are less equipped.Gamble and Hanan utilize the introduction to show how Barad’s performative new materialism both “supports and affirms” rhetorical materialism, or rhetoric’s materiality, and enriches it (5). Ushered in by Michael Calvin McGee, “standard” rhetorical materialism worked to challenge the centuries-old debate about rhetoric’s secondary, supplementary status vis-à-vis philosophy by recognizing rhetoric as part of a “shifting and dynamic material history” (6). Building upon this view, Ronald Walter Greene utilizes Foucault’s notion of the apparatus to demonstrate how even the “material history” McGee called our attention to is itself “produced by apparatuses”—history is not “outside” of meaning (6). Instead, rhetoric’s materiality is a “publicity effect” produced through technologies of rhetoric and intersecting power relations. Gamble and Hanan suggest that Barad’s framework expands this view by demonstrating how “matter itself is, in fact, the fully tangible condition of possibility for human and more-than-human experience and rhetorical meaning.” This extends Greene’s notion of apparatuses and publicity effects to recognize that such effects produced are “not reducible to an exclusively human domain of apparatuses and technologies” (7). Gamble and Hanan demonstrate how this insight undergirds the entangled reality of humans and nonhumans and the imperative that scholars grapple with this entanglement seriously if we wish to address the power imbalances that persist from normative, taken-for-granted hierarchies. Barad’s unique approach, they argue, has the capacity to shore up power imbalances across all matter and challenge the Western tradition of human exceptionalism—a necessary stance given “the economic and ecological crises currently unfolding” (11). With Barad, then, rhetoric’s engagement with the politics of materiality is enriched.In their own ways, each contribution in this collection analyzes what the editors coin “figures of entanglement,” such as disciplinary “turns,” capitalism, breast cancer, or rhetoric itself, to challenge binary ways of being and knowing. “Figures of entanglement” offers a way to account for issues that matter for critical rhetorical scholars, such as political transformation and power differentials among humans, while also accounting for matter’s rhetoricity (x). Though there are many insights one may glean from this collection, I note three for this review: entangled genealogies that rethink rhetoric’s diversity and origin story, diffraction as a concept-metaphor driving rhetorical reading strategies, and political theorizations of matter’s rhetoricity.Thomas Rickert and Nathan Stormer offer ways to rethink rhetoric’s origin story and rhetoric’s diversity through methodological approaches that emphasize entanglement and relationality. In “Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic,” Rickert defines rhetoric as “an incremental, bottom-up achievement” that “coalesces out of multiple cultural, material, and semiotic strands that are mutually entangled and coevolving” (89). To explain rhetoric’s emergence as dependent upon both sociocultural and material conditions, Rickert takes readers to the Paleolithic caves with an approach he calls a materialist historiographic method. This method allows us to “look for strikingly different explanations of modern humanity’s emergence, and in turn, rhetoric’s development” by considering “rhetoricity in other forms of evidence, especially material traces” (94, 89). As his analysis shows, cave art does not so much “represent something” as perform it; shamans could draw upon spiritual experiences, the caves’ darkness and sounds, along with environmental materials, to perform “a theater of the sacred” (103). In effect, Rickert provides a method for rhetoricians to attune themselves to rhetoric in a way that challenges its emphasis on oral and written disciplinary history and considers its “emergent capacity,” which has always already been ambient (103).In “Rhetoric’s Diverse Materiality: Polythetic Ontology and Genealogy,” Stormer enters the conversation of rhetoric’s development from a different route by invoking polythesis as heuristic. Beginning with the point that “what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B,” Stormer seeks to offer a way of understanding “rhetoric’s verdurous materiality” as diverse—“ontologically one and many” (35, 38, 36). This complicates the “Big rhetoric” debate by showing how rhetoric is polythetic: entangled and emergent, in a processual state of “becoming-together” (40). As such, Stormer shows that what matters is not what is rhetorical so much as “how a specific potential for discursivity, realizable in many forms, inheres in dynamics afforded by a nexus” (48). This suggests that entities are entangled (a nexus) and, through their relationships, an entity may emerge as rhetorical (rhetoricity, or rhetorical capacity). For him, rhetoricity does not have an essence, nor does rhetoric have but one genealogy; genealogies themselves are already “coconstitutive acts” (43). Engaging Barad’s notion of “entangled genealogies” and Foucault’s work to offer “genealogies of rhetorics,” Stormer illuminates the sense in which rhetoric as a figure of entanglement has always been “otherwise” (41, 48). “What genealogies of rhetoric’s capacities produce,” he concludes, “is working knowledge of different strains of rhetoric as they have emerged and, perhaps, conditions for their transformation” (50). A Baradian approach to poststructuralist genealogy thus allows him to answer his central question of how we might talk of rhetoric and its genealogies as diverse (35). That is, rhetoric’s genealogies, plural, show not a linear unfolding but a series of historical appearances, never erased, never superseded.As Gamble and Hanan explain, “diffraction” is a useful term for a methodology that can read such figures of entanglement to consider how difference is produced through intra-actions. As I understand it, diffraction is a concept-metaphor that recognizes the intra-action of an apparatus—what Barad calls a measuring agency—and what it seeks to observe as a boundary-making practice that produces difference effects. Such intra-actions can be made visible by a rhetorical critic through a diffractive reading strategy when a critic puts in conversation two or more concepts to produce new insights. By constellating two concepts, for instance, one can show how both are entangled—inseparable, though made different through intra-actions with various apparatuses. A central function, then, of a diffractive reading strategy for rhetorical critics is to observe how apparatuses, as Gamble and Hanan explain, co-constitute whatever is being observed (xi).In “Entangled Exchange: Verkehr and Rhetorical Capitalism,” Matthew Bost diffracts Marx and Engels’s concept of verkehr (“intercourse”) in The German Ideology through Barad’s “notion of intra-active entanglement” to produce new insights about the relationship between historical and “new” materialisms (72). Reading verkehr diffractively through Barad’s concept of entanglement, Bost argues, “allows a refinement” of Marx/Engels’s discussion of production and intercourse insofar as both become understood as inextricably linked, though “cut apart” as they intra-act with larger apparatuses (78). Specifically, Bost suggests that it is “humanist discourses” that help sustain “power relations under contemporary capitalism” (82) insofar as such discourses inevitably and necessarily create boundaries around the very concept “human.” Therefore, he argues, “Verkehr, in conversation with Barad’s work, reframes class and class struggle as figures of ethical entanglement that work against the insulation of certain bodies from precarity at the expense of others” (83). A diffractive reading thus illuminates verkehr’s contemporary relevance and “common ground” with a posthumanist view of capitalism as entangled relations, “providing rhetorical scholars with additional tools for theorizing capitalist power outside a civic humanist frame,” which is to say, to understand how the boundaries which determine how value is produced and extracted is invariably the product of agential cuts among a confluence of materialities—cuts that are historical and for which we are ethically accountable (71, 76). Ultimately, Bost’s work challenges the dichotomy of new materialism and historical materialism: over and against, say, a comparative approach (“is new materialism better or worse than historical materialism?”) or analogical reasoning (“is it similar or different from historical materialism?”), Bost asks, instead, how a diffractive reading of Marx and Engels through Barad enables Marx and Engels to “productively speak to those aspects of contemporary global capitalism that Barad and other scholars of the nonhuman have critiqued” (73).In Diane Marie Keeling’s chapter, “Of Turning and Tropes,” she engages in a diffractive reading of disciplinary “turns” in the centennial issue of Quarterly Journal of Speech, examining how tropes of classical physics and dialectical negation collude with neoliberalism in the modern academy to produce disciplinary “turns” as different. As Keeling makes clear, a concept “cannot persist without a set of material–discursive practices—an apparatus—continually reproducing its existence” (54). She argues that neoliberalism, which “values capitalist techniques of accumulation and growth,” acts as an apparatus of academic publishing through classical physics tropes wherein “time is linear; the field is an empirical path; turns are discrete, sequentially patterned, and enable reflection” (54, 56). For instance, her analysis of one contribution shows how its emphasis on “quantification and accumulation . . . attunes us to neoliberalism” (59): This passage exemplifies many of the entangled tropes of the neoliberal constitution of the turn: a “provenance,” which is a place or source of origin; a subject “Raymie McKerrow” who is the creator of an “initial formulation”; a separate object “critical rhetoric” that set a trajectory for “others who were following”; a citation count “178” quantifying value; and credit for “an entire journal” where more research like his can be published. (58)As a corrective to this linear progression of discrete entities, she posits that “tropes of quantum physics can assist in reconditioning a performative orientation to discourse and history” so that we might consider how “turns move recursively through intra-activity, rather than sequentially through interaction” (55). Keeling thus reconfigures turns as “entangled diffractions, indistinct, unpredictable, and always reconfigurable through changes to their apparatus” (55). Reading disciplinary “turns” diffractively—“cultivating a rhetorical physics”—is what allows Keeling to challenge neoliberal progress narratives that would otherwise push us to push for the “new” without considering “turns’” relationality (63). Together, Keeling and Bost demonstrate how Barad’s concept of diffraction can offer a methodological approach to rhetorical analysis that produces insightful ways of engaging figures of entanglements to challenge neoliberalism in the academy or capitalism itself.Annie Hill’s chapter, “Breast Cancer’s Rhetoricity: Bodily Border Crisis and Bridge to Corporeal Solidarity,” offers an astute read of Barad’s agential realism to think through how the materialization of a tumor is never not inextricably linked with multiple apparatuses, particularly the discourses of racialization. This chapter is a go-to for critical scholars interested in how one might do rhetorical criticism in a posthumanist, new materialist vein while also clearing space for a radical politics of solidarity no longer constrained by rigid identity categories. As agential realism challenges the language/matter binary, among many other binaries like human/nonhuman, Hill suggests that “We can better grasp the meaning and matter of disease by tracking how it destabilizes the language/matter divide, rather than erecting this binary before analysis gets off the ground” (18–19). Not only does Hill use breast cancer as a figure of entanglement to illustrate this destabilization, but she also furthers the political implications of what she names transmaterial intra-actionality: “Incorporating the Baradian intra” to build upon feminist theories of intersectionality, writes Hill, “means forcefully underscoring the indissociability and coemergence of identity, power, and oppression while announcing that this analytic includes and exceeds the human” (25). This move underscores how “binary codes of being” are violent, our bodies are not impermeable or “closed,” and “objects” like breast cancer that we have bounded as discrete entities by language do, in fact, emerge from the conditions of rhetoricity (19). We need a new theoretical orientation that allows us to challenge these seemingly sedimented boundaries, and Hill makes a compelling case for how agential realism is one that can offer a very different starting point for transmaterial, transformative politics. Hill’s contribution centers the political implications of what she names “corporeal solidarity” so that we can better account for and “understand how we live and die with disease . . . who and what receives life support, and why” (31).Finally, Laurie E. Gries offers the collection’s afterword, which underscores the productive potential of Baradian new materialism and offers potential lines of inquiry for future scholarship. For her, Figures of Entanglement offers insight into how Barad can help rhetoricians build theory, reimagine disciplinary histories, and invent new approaches to research inquiries. Yet, there is still plenty on the horizon for continual engagement with Barad’s work. First, Gries prompts readers to consider how, “weaved together with new materialisms,” Indigenous philosophies could generate a “powerful analytic” for our field (115). Indeed, as many scholars have already noted, there are striking parallels with Barad’s onto-ethico-epistemology of agential realism and Indigenous thought, and entangling both could provide important insight and contribute to decolonial work in rhetorical studies (115). Second, scholars could build upon the research methods advanced in this collection and offer additional ones that might “productively intervene in the phenomena we aim to study” (116). For example, Gries urges scholars to take Barad’s notion of entangled intra-actions to forge more “collective engagement,” whether scholarly, pedagogically, or through local activism (116). How, she asks, can new materialist-informed research “help us work collectively to address some of our pressing cultural and rhetorical issues today?” (11)—issues that demand the kind of intellectual creativity that new materialist rhetorical work presents us with.Figures of Entanglement is ripe with potential for future rhetorical work, providing scholars with a rich array of theoretical insights and methodologies that all, in different ways, show the promise of Barad’s performative new materialism. This is a particularly compelling read for scholars who are interested in the entangled relationship between “new” and “old” materialisms and the capacity for more robust political engagement. Warranted critiques of new materialisms, broadly, ask about the consequence of fully engaging matter’s rhetoricity in a way that might obscure its social and political implications. Yet, this collection demonstrates the political potential of Barad’s framework for scholars who are committed to examining our entanglement with/in the world and how we might, as Gries writes, “productively intervene” (116). Though I have organized this review by the contributions I found most compelling, readers will no doubt find even more avenues to consider. Whatever readers may find, the that the editors about their to Barad’s work through it

Scale Theory embodies its title in every possible way. It offers both a deep dive into and a 10,000-foot view of scale, scalar thinking, and the role of scale in scientific inquiry. The subtitle, A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, is no less apt. Author Joshua DiCaglio blends insights from rhetoric, philosophy, literary studies, and mysticism to create a novel account of scalar thinking. In so doing, he weaves together detailed thought experiments, the work of Gregory Bateson, and Philip K. Dick’s account of an extraterrestrial communication he received while under the influence of anesthesia. Provocatively, Scale Theory treats these diverse intellectual resources as coequal contributors to an emerging theory of scale and scalar thinking. Within this nondisciplinary framework, the book is devoted to advancing two primary theses: (1) Notions of scale are undertheorized in science studies and related strands of new materialisms; and (2) Proper attention to questions of scale within these theoretical traditions should prompt a more thoughtful reconsideration of the merits of mystic holism. Ultimately, Scale Theory makes a compelling case for the first thesis and advances inquiry usefully in this area. With respect to the second thesis, DiCaglio refers to a certain academic “allergy” to holism (99), and I must confess I share this allergy. That said, I assume readers already predisposed favorably toward mystic holism are likely to find Scale Theory’s attention to the second thesis thoughtful and engaging.Scale Theory is organized into three distinct parts. Part 1, “Algorithms for a Theory of Scale,” presents three interrelated thought experiments that call upon readers to imagine themselves at various distances and vantage points with respect to several objects of interest. Part 1 is stylistically Wittgensteinian. Like the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2013) or Latour’s “Irreductions,” (1993), the thought experiments unfold as a series of numbered and nested propositions, each postulating or interrogating an emerging concept in DiCaglio’s theory of scale. Part 2, “Configurations for a Theory of Scale,” returns the reader to more familiar styles of prose, providing a sort of review of the relevant literature and its relationship to the insights of the thought experiments. Finally, part 3, “Rhetorical Technologies for a Theory of Scale,” reflects on the twin marginalizations of rhetoric and mysticism in mainstream Western academia and argues for a new embrace of disembodied inquiry.The aforementioned thought experiments of part 1 outline DiCaglio’s theories of scale, scalar thinking, and scalar analysis. The discussion makes extensive use of visual and cinematic metaphors to aid the reader’s consideration of scalar questions. Ultimately, DiCaglio posits that scale is a function of the relationship between the “‘being’ of phenomena” and “the one who is measuring” (8). He argues, therefore, that “scale functions at a level above ontology and epistemology: scale is a means of orienting yourself both to experience and the being of things” (8). In making this argument, Scale Theory reflects on a range of scientific practices that require gradients of scale. Microscopy, telescopy, and simulations all provide scientists with tools to escape the mundane scales of embodied human experience. DiCaglio argues that “science must always find itself grouping things together, speaking of species, types, systems, and so on which exist on a different logical type than the individual encounters that make up these groups” (41). The taxonomic activities of scientific practice require shifts in scale to account for kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera, species, and all manner of nonbiological analogs.Within this framework, scale functions as a sort of meta-ontology that allows objects to be provisionally identified and delineated. Echoing Bateson, DiCaglio argues that In order for any thing to be said to exist whatsoever, a differential must exist out of which a difference can be discerned. Every differential occurs on some scale at which a fluctuation or movement is able to make a difference. If one goes to a smaller scale, any given differential is no longer able to be used to register a difference. (51)Thus, any given object only exists at certain scales where differences can be said to make a difference, and any given object also ceases to be an object at higher or lower orders where the differences no longer make differences. DiCaglio leverages the notion of “stability” or “stabilization” to refer to an object’s coming into being at any given scale. The metaphor of photographic or cinematographic “resolution” underwrites DiCaglio’s thinking in this area. Objects stabilize when they resolve relative to an observer’s perspective. While I find this account of stability thoughtful and compelling, it is somewhat unfortunate that it is so beholden to visual metaphors. Humans engage the world through many different senses, and not all humans engage the world with all senses.With his foundational ontology of scale established, DiCaglio proceeds to introduce “scalar analysis,” an approach to reckoning with objects, stability, and systems. The exploration of scalar analysis centers on a series of nested thought experiences and most prominently on a root cause analysis of a disease. Through oscillating our perspective between the whole human body and DNA mutations, DiCaglio shows how the dialectic of “zoom level” and “resolution” can further the analysis of complex systems. This analysis is engaging in many ways but suffers somewhat when addressing temporality. Scale analysis wants to “freeze time” (75) as an initial step, but then finds time “unwittingly introduced” (79) a few pages later. Ultimately, an analysis of causality in complex systems will probably require intentionally attending to the temporal dimensions. In fairness, at one point DiCaglio intentionally maps time to space (68) in an effort to maintain the visual metaphors of zoom and resolution. Indexing time to space is a common move, of course, and will likely only alienate a few passing Bergsonians.While the thought experiments in part 1 offer a number of interesting insights about scalar thinking, it is a bit troublesome that they exist almost exclusively in a vacuum. Aside from the occasional supportive reference to Bateson, part 1 is largely citation free. However, the insights provided seem linked in many important ways to prior efforts to understand complex systems and questions of scale. This includes both the work cited in part 2 and striking (albeit unexplored) parallels between scalar stability and accounts of stabilizing processes in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. The Whitehead parallel is, perhaps, not surprising given Bateson’s engagement with Whitehead and subsequent influence on Scale Theory. Nevertheless, this seems like an important connection and a missed opportunity. I would have very much enjoyed reading a discussion of this connection and/or an exploration of the potential synergies and disagreements between Scale Theory and Marilyn Cooper’s (2019) adaptation of Whitehead and Bateson for rhetorical new materialisms.That said, part 2 engages substantively with much of the related literature on new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics to explore previous attempts to grapple with many of the same issues of scale and complex systems. In so doing, Scale Theory argues that prior efforts to address these issues are hindered by undue focus on embodiment and embodied epistemology (in the case of feminist new materialisms), an inappropriate ontological flattening of scale (in actor-network theory), and lack of attention to holism (in cybernetics). With respect to feminist new materialisms, Scale Theory is particularly critical of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. While I agree with DiCaglio that too much reliance on epistemology is a problem for some areas of new materialism, I am not sure epistemology is as prevalent in Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad 2007) as DiCaglio suggests. Furthermore, I ultimately agree with Annmarie Mol who compellingly argues that the primarily problems of (post)modern epistemology come from the ways it is rooted in perspectivalism (2003). Thus, given the inherent perspectivism of scale theory, the approach may well replicate some of the issues new materialists most wish to avoid when avoiding epistemology in the first place.DiCaglio’s critique of embodied situated knowledges is ultimately anchored in his penchant for holism. He argues that bodies are properties of individuals, and that they situate perspective in that individual, atomistic perspective. In so doing, he critiques Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge for its overreliance on bodies that only exist at certain scales. As he writes, In scalar views there is something like a transcendent view that moves away from the body itself (2.10–12)1, zeros out the perspective as “mine” (2.9), and dislocates any single perspectival configuration. Thus, when Haraway declares that “feminists don’t need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence” (579), we ought to hesitate. (134)Thus, to understand the universe, as DiCaglio hopes you will, is to shed your corporeal form and embrace some transcendental perspective. Again, my response to this is something like “yes and no.” I am on record agreeing that it is possible for a theory to be too embodied, although I don’t think this applies to Haraway. I have previously criticized some strains of affect theory for their excessive embrace of embodied experience (Graham 2016). Specifically, I argue that affect theory duplicates the problems of epistemology by positing a more authentic infralevel of embodied engagement that replicates the problematic perspectivalism on which (post)modern epistemology is built. The subject-object binary is replaced by a more privileged body-world binary. If this critique is correct (and I think it is), Scale Theory makes a similar error. Specifically, it inverts affect theory’s normative orientation, privileging instead a putatively “higher” level of unembodied binary engagement, a mind-universe binary, if you will.Scale Theory’s rejections of actor-network theory and cybernetics are similar in both tone and content to its rejections of situated knowledges. ANT and related strands of sociology and geography do not account for scale in quite the same way as Scale Theory’s opening thought experiments. Thus “this inability to handle scale confuses the terms at the outset” (162). Similarly, while cybernetics and systems theory have much to offer scale theory, they are ultimately treated as lacking since they don’t provide appropriate tools for appreciating the aggregation to unity. Channeling Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, DiCaglio argues that while systems theory is useful for understanding bodies as ecologies, additional scalar (and perhaps mystical) elements are needed to pivot from bodies as ecologies to an apparently necessary identification of our equal oneness with bacteria and Gaia (173). Ultimately, part 2’s criticisms of prior efforts to address questions of scale proceed as though part 1 has successfully persuaded the reader on the merits of mystic holism. Part 2 takes the insights of the opening thought experiments as true, and recounts how feminist new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics fail to live up to the putative promises of scalar thinking. This is a risky rhetorical move, because for readers who are not entirely persuaded by the work of part 1, part 2 will come across as an exercise in somewhat uncharitable reading practices.Stepping away from the mysticism and my admitted allergies, Scale Theory also provides some thoughtful considerations on implications for rhetoric of science and science studies more broadly. As DiCaglio notes, “Because scale occurs outside of human experience, it must be re-presented at [human] scale. Inevitably, its representations will be partial and distorted” (183). Recognizing this fact points toward real challenges for scientific inquiry and scientific rhetoric which strives to account for notions of scale that cannot be contained at the scale of human representation. DiCaglio interrogates these challenges through an analysis of different modes of “specification” (193). When discussing specification, scholars of science studies most often consider what he dubs “ontological specifications”—that is, descriptions of objects, processes, and observed reality. We also (somewhat less regularly) attend to “epistemological specifications”—descriptions of knowing practices, sometimes methodology. But, since within scalar thinking, objects only exist at certain specific scales, neither ontological nor epistemological specification are sufficient to describe scientific activity. “Scalar specification” then becomes an essential additional rhetoric for both science and science studies. But scalar specifications are not without challenges.Here, DiCaglio draws our attention to “scale tricks” (228). Since scale must be re-presented, scalar thinking and scalar specifications may mislead readers through rendering scale invisible, presuming it infinite, or blending scales without acknowledging that they have been blended. For DiCaglio, transcending scale tricks is a question of accountability (231). Authors of re-presentations of experience have a duty to be consistent and precise in their scalar specifications. Precise specifications disrupt the potential confusions of scale tricks by making the scale intelligible, reminding readers or auditors that there is a scale, and preventing distortion through blending of scales. In some ways, DiCaglio’s theory of scalar specifications is a more encompassing version of the ethics of information design. Properly labeled x and y axes are critical to effective and ethical communication of charted data. Scale Theory reminds us that data need not be displayed graphically to be subject to scale and to require scalar specifications for interpretation.Part 3 of Scale Theory is devoted to the cosmos seeing itself. That is, it ruminates on possibilities for transcending corporality so as to achieve a perspective that all but transcends scale itself. DiCaglio does not precisely recommend specific techniques to achieve this transcendence, but he does point toward accounts of others that prominently feature hallucinogens, meditative practices, and methodical introspection. I will admit I find myself somewhat mystified by the mysticism that closes Scale Theory. Ultimately, I am pragmatic about theory. For me the utility of a theory lies in what work it does for inquiry, and that work needs to be indexed to a particular task at hand. Scale Theory might, perhaps, be considered pragmatic in this way, but the overriding task at hand is to understand the oneness of the universe. My scholarly aims are rather more modest. I put theory to work in an effort to address much more local tasks. As such, what I can take from Scale Theory for my own work may be more limited than what other readers can take. If you lack my allergy to holism and see the intersection of rhetoric, philosophy, and drug-assisted disembodied consciousness as a potential pathway to universal understanding, then this may well be the book for you. Even so, if your aims are somewhat more modest (like mine), then there is still much of interest in the pages of Scale Theory. DiCaglio adds important new dimensions of analysis to new materialisms and related science studies. Readers might take these dimensions as intended, but I would argue that they are also flexible enough to be read more synergistically alongside Cooper and Whitehead or Barad, Mol, and Haraway. And even if you reject new materialisms entirely, Scale Theory compellingly argues that rhetoricians of science would do well to attend, in more detail, to scalar specifications and the problem of scale tricks.

How does one describe a crucial moment, a moment that calls for action? What kinds of time are opened, disclosed, or foreclosed in such moments? This section explores a concept that has a long history in rhetoric and philosophy, but which is urgently called for now, in a time that many think of as critical, catastrophic, or even apocalyptic. Changes in the economy, climate, and the state of our democracies demand urgent attention, and while people disagree on the course to be taken, there is a sense that—this is it!—now is the time. The concept of kairos (from ancient Greek καιρός) comprises both a critical time and a perfect opportunity; it is the right moment to act, even though the word could also be interpreted in a more general sense as referring to the issue of right timing. Considered as “one of the most untranslatable of Greek words,” kairos is perhaps related to the verb kurō, “to meet” or “meet accidentally,” as when an arrow meets a target, suggesting that there is a spatial component in the temporal kairos.1 The spatial dimension shines through in the earliest uses of the term discussed in both SeungJung Kim’s article on ancient Greek visual arts and Robert Sullivan’s article on Isocrates (436–338 BCE). According to Sullivan’s survey, Isocrates most often employs the word to refer to a specific situation, occasion, state of affairs, or set of circumstances.How do you recognize, let alone seize, this kind of moment, though? The best-known depiction of this difficulty is a portrait of Kairos personified that dates back to Lysippos in the fourth century BCE, reconstructed visually in three dimensions in Kim’s essay. In Greek mythology Kairos is the god of golden opportunities, which (as we all know!) tend to pass by too quickly. The portrait shows a winged figure with a flowing forelock that ideally gives you something to hold on to. I like to imagine that if you manage to arrest this passing instant, time itself comes to an abrupt halt, which throws Kairos’s hair out in front of his face.Of course, people do not necessarily see it as positive when someone appears to have captured the moment. At the kairos symposium hosted by art historian Barbara Baert in Brussels in October 2018, W. J. T. Mitchell held up a picture of President Donald Trump’s sculpted forelock to illustrate that it all depends on the perspective. Turning the familiar Greek portrait into an image of the opportunist, Mitchell reminded all of us that had gathered to celebrate the legacy of kairos in iconographic, philosophical, theological, semantic, historical, and anthropological studies, of the ethical issues arising in such moments. The question of moral accountability is bound to come up, whether one takes kairos to refer to the act of seizing the moment, involving some form of decision, or to the moment itself, the kairos, which some might claim just seized upon them and carried them away.As Debra Hawhee and Erik Charles White before her have argued, kairos does not seem to be confined by the subjective reason operating in a “rhetorical situation,” but it depends on “the forces pushing on the encounter,” in addition to instinct and intuition, and possibly on habitual impulses springing from experience (Hawhee 2002, 24–25; White 1987; reconsidered by Brod 2021). Audiences may also have a significant role to play, as Kermit Campbell underscores in his discussion of the symbiosis of call and response in African American churches and his reflection on how Martin Luther King’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington replied to a call: “Tell them about the dream, Martin.”The moment of kairos may appear spontaneous and deliberate, both at the same time. The classical rhetoricians in fact insisted on the value of preparing for the unexpected, as we try to do in our current crisis management plans. In his essay, Sullivan documents the incredibly nuanced instructions Isocrates gave on how to exploit a prospective opening in all sorts of civic settings. From a rhetorical viewpoint, kairos can appear both as a strategic point of intervention and as an empowering outlook and toolbox.This is very far from how the word came to be used in the Greek versions of the Bible, where, as Phillip Sipiora has pointed out, kairos occurs hundreds of times describing the divine disruption and absolute command of worldly time (Sipiora 2002a, 3). According to the ecclesiastical saying discussed in Felix Ó Murchadha’s essay, there is “a season, and a time [kairos]” for everything here on this earth (cf. Smith 2002). And then, when Christ opens his mouth to speak as the anointed messiah, his first words are “The time [kairos] is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15; Sipiora 2002b, 114).It is worth observing that when the classical-rhetorical concept was rediscovered in the Christian Renaissance, the pagan god of opportunity was restored to prominence (Baumlin 2002). In a widespread emblem by Andrea Alciato titled In occasionem, a powerful female goddess named Occasio is holding up a spear-like razor, saying, “I am the moment of seized opportunity that governs all” (Alciato 1531).Skills at recognizing such cutting instants were effective instruments of power for those who had received a classical education and who mastered the rules of decorum and every aspect of society and its institutions. Right timing and attunement to the occasion were important not only in politics, the theatre, and book publication, but even in matters of religious persuasion (Paul 2014; Lewis 2020; Johanson 2023; Skouen 2018, 2023). The moment of conversion coincides with the kairos, an obvious—but strangely unrecognized—case in point being the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which even features an arrow; a classical image of kairos.2Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept has enjoyed a second renaissance. In the 1920s, classicists and philosophers in different European countries started probing the pre-Socratic and theological origins of kairos. The two Italian articles (cited in Kim’s article) by Augusto Rostagni and, respectively, Doro Levi are considered the most important philological studies. In the wake of World War I, several German thinkers were interrogating the idea of the critical moment, not least the theologian Paul Tillich and his circle of religious socialists styling themselves as the “Kairos-Kreis” (Weidner 2020). This crucial development, also involving Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, is the topic of Ó Murchadha’s article. In the classical tradition kairos is contrasted with chronos, representing the common conception of historical and chronological time, although in times of crisis the urgent experience of both these senses of time “intensify each other” (Hawhee 2023, 58). According to Ó Murchadha, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Tillich engaged with kairos in different ways to critique—not just chronos, but historicism, presenting their own respective ideas of a messianic, destinial, and prophetic temporality.With regard to the Christian understandings of kairos, Heidegger appears to have taken an interest in this as early as 1917 when, as a student, he was reading Friedrich Schleiermacher’s writings on religion (Kisiel 1993, 492). According to Theodore Kisiel, Heidegger’s “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” (1920–21) marks his “discovery of the kairological character of lived time,” connecting the parousia and the kairos, which Heidegger translates both here and elsewhere as der Augenblick (152, 185–86; McNeill 1999, 44–45, 124–25).Ó Murchadha shows how Heidegger, Benjamin, and Tillich worked to broaden the conceptual scope of kairos, responding to their own time of crisis and finding kairos to represent something other than krisis. In the process, kairos took on new existential and ontological meanings. As Daniel Weidner has argued, the way in which Tillich and others reconceptualized kairos in light of their modern, historical context also bespeaks the great flexibility of the concept itself. On the one hand, kairos requires one to adapt to shifting circumstances. On the other, the concept itself has readjusted to different contexts of understanding, at times connoting idealism, at other times realism, involving subjective and objective dimensions, and fulfilling spiritual and material needs (Weidner 2020, 86). As Kim points out in her article, the ancient Greek term was already very complex, involving both spatial and temporal dimensions, and having different implications in different domains, such as visual art and aesthetics, ethics, athletics, rhetoric, or medicine.Further proof of this extraordinary adaptability can be found in Antonio Negri’s essential chapter on kairos first published in Italian in 2000 and appearing in English in Time for Revolution (2003). Starting with “the classical image of the act of releasing the arrow,” Negri introduces kairos, “here in postmodernity,” as “an extremely singular force of production of temporality, the reverse of the very sad and naked Heideggerian figures of powerlessness” (2003, 142). To Negri, kairos is not just “the quality of the time of the instant, the moment of rupture and opening of temporality,” but it is also “a fundamental ontology of time” (142, 152). Indeed, it is our very power to experience, grasp, and express temporality, and through it, time is “broken and rendered creative” (152, 159). Expanding earlier notions of kairos, Negri describes how “being opens itself, attracted by the void at the limit of time” and deciding, as it were, “to fill that void” (152). For the Marxist philosopher, it is crucial to ask how “a revolutionary subjectivity” could potentially “form itself within a multitude of producers,” and the concept of kairos inspires hope that many singular kairoi might open up to each other in common acts of naming the void (144, 155).This understanding of kairos emphasizing its ontological aspects contrasts sharply with the current everyday uses of the word. Online, there are many competing companies and services by that name, such as business advisors and career coaches wanting to teach people how to become more proactive. Life in digitized societies offers an unprecedented stream of opportunities and kairos does seem the right word at the right time, even though Isocrates characterized the concept in much the same way about 2,500 years before the digital era began. Yet, the familiar legends of “opportunity” warrant criticism as they emerge from and are associated with a white, Western hegemony. In his essay, Campbell stakes out new directions in kairos theory by comparing earlier notions of kairic time to modes of Black discourse and soul power, and by claiming that Kairos might be the ideal mythical figure representing African American rhetoric.What kind of response does the right moment require? The cluster of essays presented here fills an obvious gap—or what rhetoricians of science such as Carolyn R. Miller (1992) would call “the kairos” demanding new research, for even though there has been an increasing amount of work done in the last decades, no comparable interdisciplinary set of essays yet exists. This special section seeks to reclaim the Greek word from its current limited, instrumental, everyday senses, providing new sources of reference on what kind of moment the kairos really is. The four essays also employ kairos as a conceptual tool for thinking about urgent points in time, which is the kind of time we live in now.

ABSTRACT Despite the common understanding of kairos as a temporal concept, it also harbors a spatial notion that holds particular significance in relation to Greek visual arts. The inquiry into its primary role in the formation of aesthetic beauty requires a phenomenological reading of the Lysippan personification of the concept, as it resonates with its counterparts in the fields of philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. Using Andrew Stewart’s suggestion as a starting point—that the Lysippan Kairos may serve as the artist’s manifesto, consciously constructed in response to the earlier Polykleitan Canon—the evidence for kairos as the sire of beauty is shown to reside not only in its principal role in characterizing the perfect proportion and harmony, but also in its relationship to somatic intuition and sensory understanding, implicating the viewer as a key participant in the process.

Other| December 31 2023 Books of Interest Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2023) 56 (3-4): 403–409. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.56.3-4.0403 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Kennedy; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 31 December 2023; 56 (3-4): 403–409. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.56.3-4.0403 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2024 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2024The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between rhetoric and violence by running this pairing through a corresponding couplet: rhetoric and race. Arguing for a common substrate between these two pairs of terms—coloniality—this article proposes that rhetorics of “nonviolence” are better understood as rhetorics of anti-violence.

For Megha Sharma SehdevNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. —W. B. Yeats, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”Violence is a limit formation. It is neither reducible to a brute fact nor is it ineffably ethereal. To write about violence, then, is to confront—if only as disavowed remainder—critical limits, no less of the writer than of the writing itself. Fewer subjects have proven as confounding for philosophy and rhetoric, this journal’s primary charge. In both its general particulars and its specific manifolds, violence nonpluses philosophical commonplaces, upends rhetorical tropologies.Philosophy imagines itself mediator to reality’s arche, the bedrock of being. Ancient Greek philosophy sought to distinguish necessity from contingency, essence from accident, dialectic from rhetoric, logic from fallacy. Those who took up this intellectual tradition came to conceptualize violence as first and foremost a question of “nature”—more specifically, those marked out by nature to rule (propertied male citizens) and those marked out by nature for subjection (the enslaved, women, nonhuman animals). In the early modern context of European philosophy, still, despite its pretensions, deeply indebted to this Mediterranean legacy, the canonical lexicon of sensemaking centered on legitimacy and its conceptual appurtenances of sovereignty, will, and rights.Strikingly, it is in the opposed registers of analytic and continental philosophy that violence’s cataphilosophic figuration appears most salient. Consider, for example, one such famous symposium convened in the analytic journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, as narrated by political philosopher Michael Walzer: In an earlier issue of Philosophy & Public Affairs there appeared a symposium on the rules of war which was actually (or at least more importantly) a symposium on another topic. The actual topic was whether or not a man can ever face, or ever has to face, a moral dilemma, a situation where he must choose between two courses of action both of which it would be wrong for him to undertake. Thomas Nagel worriedly suggested that this could happen and that it did happen whenever someone was forced to choose between upholding an important moral principle and avoiding some looming disaster. R. B. Brandt argued that it could not possibly happen, for there were guidelines we might follow and calculations we might go through which would necessarily yield the conclusion that one or the other course of action was the right one to undertake in the circumstances (or that it did not matter which we undertook). R. M. Hare explained how it was that someone might wrongly suppose that he was faced with a moral dilemma: sometimes, he suggested, the precepts and principles of an ordinary man, the products of his moral education, come into conflict with injunctions developed at a higher level of moral discourse. But this conflict is, or ought to be, resolved at the higher level; there is no real dilemma. (1973, 160–61)Analytic political philosophy’s resolute disavowals could not be here better splayed. Morality is construed as all-encompassing. The political is not so much effaced as it is rendered derivative to a foundational drama of will, obligation, choice. Analytic philosophy’s oft-preened claim to clear, transparent, terse style proves constitutive of its desire to contain, if it cannot altogether moralize away violence.Where analytic philosophy conceives of violence as an object, its limits defined by morality’s handmaiden, the “well-ordered society” (Rawls 2001, 8), continental philosophy conjures a sublime violence that shatters and transfigures normative violence. Walter Benjamin posits a binary opposition between mythical and divine violence: “If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates, if the former threatens, the latter strikes, if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood” (1978, 297). The mysterium tremendum of Benjaminian divine violence looms transcendent, fathomless, sublime when posed against analytic philosophy’s persnickety morality. But a violence imagined as expiatory, redemptive, and cleansing is still a morality aestheticized. Benjamin’s prose can be surrealistic, by turns slashing and propulsive, slanted and opaque. In its heady movement from repulsion to fascination and back again to repulsion, he is exemplar as few before or after him of the very limits of sustained thought on violence.Rhetorical criticism, for its part, has perfected elaborate apotropaic and piacular rites to govern its discourse on violence. The Aristotelian account of the rhetorical domain as that which is concerned with persuasion, contingency, and audience, “the discourse of the many”—as distinct from dialectic, necessity, and philosophy, “the discourse of the few”—gained axiomatic assent in modern institutional rhetoric. In his influential, field-defining article, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Lloyd F. Bitzer holds that rhetoric is mainly concerned with persuasive utterances. For Bitzer, the realm of necessity is nonrhetorical: “An exigence which cannot be modified is not rhetorical; thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed—death, winter, and some natural disasters, for instance—are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical” (1968, 6).One discerns the shape of rhetorical studies’ recoil from any serious reckoning with violence in Bitzer’s staking of the field to suasory discourse. In such an account, violence is nonrhetorical, nay, antirhetorical. Other rhetoricians have departed from Bitzer’s conclusions, though still beholden to many of his premises. In a recent special issue of the journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Jay Childers argues that inasmuch as “rhetoric is human inducement,” (2022, 4) then it follows that rhetorical violence is that which functions as a form of human inducement.Childers anticipates the objection that his definition fails to account for rhetorical inducements from nonhuman phenomena. Acknowledging that these exist, he nevertheless insists that “human inducement is worthy of its own area of study” (2022, 5). His response, however, begs the question in a manner characteristic of disciplinary justifications for research. For what is under contestation cannot be whether human inducement is worth study, but rather if a critic’s presuppositions foreclose insightful etiological routes of understanding; if their definitions naturalize the historical formations from which concepts are emergent; if their rhetorical style deadens imaginative and utopian leaps. Institutional rhetorical inquiry brings violence within its purview by defining violence as acts intended to transmit a message. But in doing so, it mystifies and naturalizes infrafigurations of violence entirely irreducible to communication—epochal ecological devastation; suppurating lesions wrought by imperial, colonial, and insurgent infrastructure; and, for that matter, gratuitous, irruptive, evental coups de force.Roiling beneath rhetorical studies’ monochrome prose—fewer disciplines are as given to the fetish of “effectiveness”—is a desire for a violence that is tractable. Necessity, however, cannot be wished away through compulsive recitations of contingency. This has always been true, perhaps, but it particularly cuts deeply in the epoch of the racial capitalocene. Here, it is foolhardy to be in denial. Racial capitalism necessarily leads to planetary destruction—its circuits of accumulation necessarily drive extinction; its circuits of reproduction necessarily engineer irreversible metabolic rifts; its circuits of exchange necessarily manufacture ruses of adaptation; its circuits of consumption necessarily stimulate toxic cascades. The upshot is just as ineluctable: any serious account of violence must, of necessity, imagine an insurgent abolition against racial capitalism.Analytic philosophy’s banal moralism, continental philosophy’s ecstatic messianism, rhetorical studies’ strategic instrumentalism—these are the nodal points from which a philosophy and rhetoric of violence bump up against its limits. “Violence is never the answer,” so goes the old liberal saw. “But it is a question” has been the inevitable response to liberal sanctimony. This forum suggests it may be neither. Rather, violence contours the very limits of enunciation.The articles gathered in this forum, each in its inimitable dialogic idiom, seek to trouble the limits of violence, such troubling understood in at least three senses. The first concerns the limits that violence exerts on faculties of human sensemaking and worldmaking, how, for example, the concepts and institutions for rendering violence intelligible are revealed to be inadequate or even violent in themselves. The second sense refers to forms of violence that stretch the outer limits of extremity, owing to their cruelty, intensity, and gratuitousness. The third concerns the limits of violence when taken up as a mechanism of world making and unmaking, for instance, practices and concepts that seek forms of living that are non- or anti-violent.Catherine Besteman examines the carceral sublime, the United States’s vast and elaborate punishment system. The kinds of violence that proliferate in the prison industrial complex are as quotidian as they are spectacular. Besteman focuses attention on a particularly insidious kind—the capricious cutting off of the imprisoned from anybody with whom they have made some relational connection. When I initially invited Besteman to write an essay for this forum, she planned to coauthor her essay with Leo Hylton, a long-time intellectual collaborator incarcerated in the Maine Department of Corrections Facilities. That plan in the end did not materialize due to a characteristically cruel and arbitrary decision by the prison authorities to break off all forms of communication between the two writers. Besteman’s essay, then, draws our attention to carceral violence as a structural atrocity not only vile in its scope, intensity, and mercuriality, but also for the manner in which it recursively curls back and strikes at those who would seek to understand its reach and texture.José G. Izaguirre III examines the vexatious solidus rhetoric/violence through the lens of coloniality. Such a lens shatters an oft-assumed narrowing of violence to individual acts. An ineliminably sociopolitical view of rhetoric/violence reveals that the term “nonviolence” is a misnomer. It misleads by characterizing antiviolence as an absence. As against this view, the refusal of violence, robustly understood as antiviolence, demonstrates it as a subversive, indeed revolutionary, form of worldmaking.Alison Yeh Cheung delves into how Asian American vocal performance—and thus, Asian American identity—is rendered impossible. Cheung seeks a nuanced engagement with Asian American subjectivities that can simultaneously register their subsumption in atmospheres of anti-Blackness while ruthlessly critiquing ruses of self-reflexivity that function to foreclose invention and reinvention. Ultimately, Cheung’s call is for a mode of attention that radically destabilizes a representational politics given to the racialization of sound.Kelly Happe and Allegro Wang seek to think with the French polymath Catherine Malabou. Malabou’s concept of plasticity has been extraordinarily generative across the humanities owing in part to its bringing into relief the imbrication of the biological and the symbolic, the neuronal and the mental, the brain and the self. Happe and Wang, however, take issue with Malabou’s eupeptic conceptualization of resilience. In basing it on the deflagration emergent from disaster, such a view occludes the weather and weathering of anti-Black violence. For this reason, Happe and Wang turn to the work of the thinker and writer Christina Sharpe. Her analytic of wake work proffers searing symbolic practices that disrupt and rupture the relentless ongoingness of slavery.Belinda Walzer pushes beyond a representational critique of violence in excavating the illegibility of everyday violence in discourses of human rights. Walzer starts with a critique of Rob Nixon’s influential notion of “slow violence.” Nixon calls for innovative representational techniques for drawing attention to the delayed effects of climate injustices. However, such a stance is unresponsive to the objection that the very mechanisms of recognition exceptionalize, anachronize, and efface everyday violence. Walzer argues that transnational feminism can speak to the multiscalar and multitemporal formations of violence in a way that does better justice to gendered and racialized violence.In our final essay, Michael Bernard-Donals turns to the topic of academic freedom. The last few years have witnessed relentless attacks on universities by right-wing movements. Bernard-Donals calls attention to these forms of institutional violence even as he advances the counterintuitive idea that academic freedom is in and of itself violent. His argument rests on the notion that the very faculty that academic freedom aims to secure—the capacity for critical deliberation—works precisely by unraveling the commonplaces around which the university coheres. His essay, then, invites us to tarry in the aporia of deliberation, which at once reveals our vulnerability and our relationality.You see the great indifference of the godsto these things that have happened,who begat us and are called our fathers,and look on such sufferings.What is to come no one can see,but what is here now is pitiable for usand shameful for them,but of all men hardest for himon whom this disaster has fallen.Maiden, do not stay in this house:you have seen death and many agonies,fresh and strangeand there is nothing here that is not Zeus. —Sophocles, Trachiniae 1266–781I initially met Megha Sharma Sehdev on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Our intellectual interests overlapped across an astonishing range of themes, including philosophical anthropology, the rhetoric of philosophy, postcolonial intellectual histories, Global South feminisms, law, and aesthetics.Megha wrote with devastating clarity on the texture of quotidian violence in India. When I proposed this forum on violence, she was the first person I immediately thought to invite. As we neared the deadline for the submission of essays, she wrote to tell me the essay she’d been writing for the forum had plunged her back to a traumatic past. Her memories, she added, had “thrown off” her relationship to academic analysis. I asked her if she wanted to Zoom. She said she wanted to finish the essay first. She’d call after she was done. Two weeks later, I received the news that Megha had passed away by suicide on August 17, 2023.In the theoretical dominant, violence carves an arc toward either redemption or abjection. Against this imaginary, Megha invites us to tarry in violence’s irresolutions, deferrals, interregnums. In her brilliant ethnography of women’s encounters with the judicial system in New Delhi, Megha writes that women who filed cases against their abusive partners found themselves suspended in an indeterminate temporality of endlessly deferred hearings. The law is not so much “a technology for decision-making,” as it is “coterminous with its ‘other,’ or everyday life” (Sehdev 2017, 8). But for Megha, the interminable duration of Indian law is not simply an absence, an inert zone in which nothing happens as complainants await justice. Rather, it is productive of various forms of intimacy—both familial and public—and generative of a bewildering array of artifacts, documents, and, wondrously, a stunningly beautiful unfoldment of material culture and artistry (Sehdev 2020).Megha had a luminous mind, a resplendent imagination, a heart for the crushed of the earth. “You have seen death and many agonies/fresh and strange/and there is nothing here that is not Zeus,” resounds a threnody in Sophocles’s Trachiniae, a keening as haunting for its uncontainable grief as for its uncanny sublimity. If the abiding hubris of imperial power is the desire for violence made pure instrumentality, that of the crushed of the earth make known an infraconstitutive invention. Here there is no theodicy, no stoicism, not even the ennoblements of tragedy. If this is a violence, it is invention split open, a wail for irreplaceable particularity, a remainder of endless solidarity.2

ABSTRACT The phrase “Enlightenment rhetoric” typically denotes discourses bent on rejecting classical oratorical styles in favor of purportedly scientific ones. Likewise, scholars often associate Enlightenment rhetorical styles with the scientific epistemologies that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article reconsiders Enlightenment rhetoric by analyzing David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of Eloquence.” More specifically, the article argues that the Scottish Enlightenment context necessitated a rhetoric that compensated for the discursive limitations of new scientific worldviews. In so doing, the article argues that Hume verbalizes the transcendent dimension of classical eloquence in ways commensurate with the emphasis on perspicuity emerging in English culture, a rhetorical maneuver that the author calls discursive transcendence. Hume’s “Of Eloquence” thus serves as a case study demonstrating how an Enlightenment writer advanced a rhetoric that both rejects and pulls from prior rhetorical traditions, constituting a new understanding of Enlightenment rhetoric.

ABSTRACT This article makes a case for the contemporary relevance of Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of rhetoric and its further fulfillment through biosemiotics and pragmatist-inflected physiological feminisms. It situates itself in an era when rhetoric is undergoing conceptual change, with the social constructivism that guided much thinking since the 1970s supplanted in part by a family of postconstructivisms. In conversation with new materialist, affective, and biological strands of rhetorical theory, the article maps questions and risks involved in developing newer conceptions of rhetoric not limited to discourse, symbolic action, and exclusively human capacities. It argues that Peircean thinking provides resources for nonreductive understandings of how rhetoric emerges from life itself and is pluralistically mediated through the forming conditions and multimodal consequences that materially give it meaning. Contemporary biosemiotics and physiologically oriented feminisms like Teresa de Lauretis’s then move the promise of Peircean rhetoric closer to reality.

ABSTRACT Post-truth, understood as a turn from collective sense and judgment to nonpublic forms of epistemic justification, is a distinctly rhetorical problem. This article offers, in response, a theorization of knowledge making as the means by which affective and material impingements upon bodies become publicly legible and rhetorically available. For this, the author turns, perhaps unexpectedly, to John Locke. Locke’s works offer the foundations of an empirical theory of rhetoric that embraces the sensible realm not as a conduit to reality but as a space where social connection becomes possible. Locke engages this realm through natural historical inquiry. Tracing this inquiry to his commonplacing practices, the author presents the rhetorical-dialectical topics as a basis for the shared sense and judgment that he pursued and that post-truth demands. The topics, this article argues, guide and enlarge the senses, forming objects of knowledge with which to sustain public life—objects about which plural truths are possible.

ABSTRACT This article examines Foucault as a rhetorician rather than as a historian of parrhesia and rhetoric. It explores what we can learn about his philosophy by examining it through the lens of his rhetorical practices. Focusing on his famous 1961 preface to History and Madness, it suggests that Foucault’s model of philosophy entails a rhetoric of conversion or transformation.

E. Cram’s Violent Inheritance is an exceptional work that presents a distinctive synthesis of queer, decolonial, and mixed-method scholarship. The goal of the book, Cram states, is to both “reimagine the place of racialized sexualities in contemporary conversations about environment, energy, and systems of violence” and “anchor these questions in contested memories of the North American West” (5). The book does just that, drawing from many contemporary streams of thought in rhetoric as well as the environmental and energy humanities to fashion a new and subtle analytic of infrastructures of feeling, which is supported by a range of conceptual innovations. For readers of this journal, Cram’s choice to ground theory quite literally in the land will be, I suspect, highly rewarding for those with interests crossing a wide range of topics: queer studies, violence, affect, Indigenous thought, sexuality and modernity, memory studies, rhetoric and materialism, ecological thought, ambience, regionalism. The breadth of scholarly dialogues that Cram harmonizes is simply impressive, reflecting the many years and the care they have devoted to this project.The book is composed of five chapters including a conceptual first chapter followed by four separate yet reinforcing studies. These are framed by a tidy introduction that prepares the reader admirably for the synergistic work to follow and a conclusion that stresses the bonds between the chapters without compromising the particularity of each study. In that regard, Violent Inheritance is both a single work guided by several cross-cutting ideas and questions and an anthology of sorts that prompts a series of discrete, rich conversations. The careful writing is evident in every paragraph, often presenting the reader with elegant, thought-provoking formulations of deep onto-epistemological problems that never feel weighted down by the complexity of dwelling on “onto-epistemic” matters.The introduction sets out the question of the book in engaging fashion. Cram asks, in the first sentence, “What does it mean to route ‘sexuality’ through modernity’s relationship to energy?” They use nineteenth-century eugenic physician John Harvey Kellogg’s Rocky Mountain climatic therapeutics to exemplify how “climate and the environment” became crucial to “the production of theories of sexuality” (3). Cram proposes energy to be “perhaps the dominant relationship between humans and the environment” and points to the ways that “racial and sexual value” have been assigned to a broad range of practices of “revitalization and exhaustion,” such that “racial and sexual vitality converge in extractivism” (3, 5, 4). In this way, the “bodily vitality” of the “normative sexual subject” demands privileged access to land and the energy that can be taken from it, be it affective or petrochemical. The emergence of sexual modernity, Cram thus contends, is inextricably tied to the regime of energy extraction. Through selected cases, Cram follows “nonlinear traces of this regime’s enduring materiality and sedimentation: the ecological, energetic, and affective inheritance that I call ‘land lines’” (6). The term “land lines” refers to how “political and economic actions tether, or forge connections, between domains of sexuality and land use,” and “names the aggregation of layers of cultural sediment or the violent inheritance of any given place. . . . As method, to trace land lines asks in earnest how places of memory and memorialization mediate these relationships” (6,7, emphasis original). The choice of the North American West follows from Cram having grown up there and the particular land lines that bind them to its violent inheritance, as well as the West’s stature as a colonial reservoir of myth and abundant energy.The separate chapters are saturated with meticulous detail, studied reflection, and constant insight that reward slow reading, making a synoptic view misleading. Nevertheless, chapter 1 travels through the 1893 journal of author Owen Wister (who helped create the myth of the West) to map a rhetoric of reinvigorated, masculinized settler sexuality by way of access to the West and the healing energy of nature. Following the route Wister presents in his journal, Cram details the social ecologies of sexual modernity as they emerge in Chicago as the racialized White City, the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the train ride to Wyoming, and Theodore Roosevelt’s much touted rehabilitation from enervated neurasthenia through the “West cure.” The violent inheritance, the land lines, traced in this chapter link together the racial-sexual dynamics of heredity, rail’s connectivity, the logic of climatic therapeutics, the relations of electricity to sexuality, and the articulation of energetic friction between urbanity and nature. In these lines, Cram finds a capacitive network that cultivated settler sexuality as energy regulation for the purposes of reinvention.Chapter 2 queers settler sexuality and its relation to the land by considering the life of Grace Raymond Hebard, “a historian, suffrage activist, and progressive” who was crucial to developing pioneer mythology, particularly the White mythos surrounding Sacajawea, and who also shared a home and a life with historian Agnes Wergeland (62). Cram studies how archival practices at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming establish “relationships between memory and imagination” that mediate Hebard’s life and love and, in turn, shape the violent inheritance of sexual modernity. Cram queers the affective possibilities of archival mediation by reading how Hebard’s and Wergeland’s lives are connected through Hebard’s sentimental “love for land and woman” within archived materials and against a “narrow vision of settler feminism” that inscribed “extractive world making into her labor” (65). Cram’s intention is to undercut recuperation (here of the New Western feminist woman) and instead foster what they term regeneration. First, they examine Hebard’s racial biopolitics of pioneering, including her sentimental incorporation of Sacajawea into a settler imagination of racial vitalization through extractive, colonial relations to Western land and climate. Then Cram performs queer detective work to disrupt the landline of pioneer womanhood by inspecting Hebard’s efforts to preserve Wergeland’s papers, Hebard and Wergeland’s side-by-side burial plots, Wergeland’s love poetry, a handwritten endearment on the back of a photograph, and embossed lettering on Hebard’s briefcase that suggests Hebard had Wergeland’s name placed opposite hers after Wergeland’s death. Cram’s sensitivity to working against the materials’ normative mediation of Hebard’s memory is admirable for modeling an attunement to traces of queer life in an archive that proceeds as if their love for each other were unthinkable or irrelevant.Chapter 3 shifts again, taking the reader to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, where Cram stresses “the importance of engaging in situ encounters with settler aesthetics of violence as an entry point to witnessing violent inheritance” (92). The organizing interest for the chapter is controversy over the CMHR’s muted account of Canada’s residential school system, which was “explicitly designed to rupture the kinship ties and languages of Indigenous children stolen from their families” (91). Attending to administrative discourse, they contextualize the systemic educational violence of the residential school system within colonial biopolitics, namely the forcible sexualization of Indigeneity through the figure of childhood. Doing so, Cram situates children as resources within the extractive logic of sexual modernity, noting the abusive, paternal absorption of childlike “Natives” to revitalize the settler nation. Then they elaborate the controversy surrounding the CMHR’s handling of residential schools, centering on the museum’s justification that it was protecting (settler) children from “difficult memories” regarding the schools (92). They read two of the museum’s exhibits, the permanent Childhood Denied exhibit and a temporary one, Witness Blanket, to demonstrate the infrastructural violence of incorporating Indigenous sovereignty through Witness Blanket while also erasing it as a special instance within a persistent aesthetic, narrative architecture of settler inheritance. Cram offers a subtle, delicately written, experiential analysis of the two exhibits to contrast a settler vision of reconciliation in the permanent exhibit with that of the temporary exhibit, designed by Carey Newman (Kwagiulth and Coast Salish), which “reconfigures the metaphysics of witness” (126). This counter-installation offers a remapping of Indigeneity through “regenerative aesthetics . . . that do not presume the integrity of nor Indigenous incorporation into the settler state” (127, emphasis original). Cram closes by noting that as of 2019 the CMHR entered a nonpossessive, collaborative stewardship arrangement for Witness Blanket, thus opening future regenerative possibilities. The entire chapter is richly detailed and, against the brutality of the schools, draws transformative inspiration from the power of alternative aesthetic practices.Chapter 4 reflects again on the contested memory of the land, this time through the Minidoka National Historical Site in northern Wyoming, which memorializes the Japanese internment camp that was sited there. It is perhaps the most complex and unexpected chapter in a complex and often unexpected book. Using detailed participation of a pilgrimage to the site, interviews, and historical methods, Cram resituates the politics of internment without disrupting the memory work of its survivors and descendants; in fact, they provide nuance that leaves one humbled. Specifically, they analyze the state’s 2012 allowance of Big Sky Farms to place an eight-thousand-animal concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) just over a mile from Minidoka. Cram uses the legal logic of affected persons, determined by property and residence status (which thus denied survivors and descendants standing to object), to “narrate the overlapping and conflicted relationships it encompasses” (132). Affected persons trace the land lines of this chapter, allowing one to follow the “inherited consequence [cumulative impacts] of earlier appropriations of land from its earlier uses prior to contact, land grabs, and later appropriations” (133). Cram maps how the War Relocation Authority articulated Japanese detention within “histories and spatialities of Indianness” (134) by situating detention sites in federal lands of dispossessed Indigenous people and within imaginaries of future land development, in particular how Japanese forced labor was used to cultivate seized land to be “later transferred to private homesteaders” (134). The chapter outlines a complicated memoryscape by detailing the experience of the pilgrimage (filtered through voices of pilgrims), the history of locating Minidoka on public (dispossessed) land, the camp’s physical layout, pilgrims’ witnessing practices, the intimate environmental dimensions of the memorial, and the smell and pollution of the CAFO. Cram traces these through the way sexuality weaves through capital’s racialized, extractive biopolitics, where land seizure, cultivation by forced labor, and large private bovine agriculture operations make affected persons a window onto the violent inheritance of Western land’s relation to national, whitened vitality.Chapter 5 shifts from sites to mobilities, specifically to Interstate 80 as “a landmark of national and bicoastal queer mobility, a mid-twentieth century route for small-town queer dreams of moving to the Big Gay Bay or Big Apple” (164). To “speak of queer automobilities means thinking through processes of dwelling and constraints on movement” and also taking “seriously the vast energy infrastructures that make such social space possible” (164, 165). Cram makes a strong case for queer scholarship to attend to petroculture because “petroleum and carbon byproducts literally scatter throughout queer migration stories” (166). The chapter follows the connection between urban and rural spaces along I-80, notably through interviews conducted in Laramie and Boulder, to demonstrate the “regional affect” of queer and trans life inhabiting “settler colonial structures” of “‘living oil’” (169, 166). Because the chapter is based in interviews, the regional affect Cram is trying to show us is encountered through “intimate atmospheres” of “queer regional stories” (169). In Laramie, which is defined by petroculture, Cram listens to the suffocating, slow, ambient violence that “petromasculinity” prosecutes and how it creates isolation, vulnerability, and a deep sense of misattunement for queer and trans people. In Boulder, suffocating misattunement becomes a kind of misfitting amid pervasive emphasis on fitness and outdoor life that is ableist, white, and heteronormative. The overpowering desire to just get out created by such toxic, intimate atmospheres pushes people toward the affordances of automobility—“the promise of white selfhood connected to unfettered movement”—in which such mobility depends on consumptive, violent inheritances (183).Cram closes chapter 5, almost like a coda, by taking us to Queer Nature in Colorado in search of an alternative, regenerative form of atmospheric intimacy. As a kind of sanctuary, Cram situates Queer Nature within the longer history of intentional communities of the “lesbian land” movement of the 1970s and 1980s (187). Queer Nature’s mission “overlaps and departs from these models” with the goal of “tending to nature connection as responsive to the violence of settler colonialism” (188). The philosophy of Queer Nature focuses on ecological awareness and grief, which Cram argues is a form of “transing of the erotic,” drawing from Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic as “energy for change” (196, 194).To say this book is an accomplishment is understatement. Methodologically it is brilliant, demonstrating the significant potential of painstaking regional, case-based scholarship. Conceptually it is discerning, unbound by rigid expectations to hew to schools of thought and consistently profound as a result. As a “read,” it is engrossing. And, most important, as a perspective, exploring violent land relations as an inheritance of energy extraction, settler coloniality, racialized biopolitics, and queer life and insight, it is inspiring. Cram models a kind of environmentally minded scholarship that defies simple categorization but adds to every conversation they enter.Further, because the book is built around case studies brocaded with detail, Cram also generates further lines of inquiry that can build on their work. For example, while the case studies focus on extractive and violent relations, Cram continuously remarks on the ironies of responding to such violence from within its inheritances. How to transform violence into a differently regenerative ethics in opposition to the consumptive regeneration that marks a Whitened settler world is a critical question—one of the broad questions today. Across a range of critical literatures, scholars have considered how to foment new possibilities amid deep structures of violence, and such possibilities come not from establishing a pristine, alternative space or by seeking refuge from vulnerabilities that are necessary to life, but by understanding how one is integrally bound up in, as Cram describes, the inheritances that layer even the simplest actions, like driving to escape your intolerant, hate-filled hometown. Cram helps readers understand that such desires are a form of queer decoloniality, or “dwelling in a decolonial ancestral imagination that abides in the political imagination of eroticism” in the transed sense of Lorde’s erotic (199). The book does not provide answers but rather, from a different vantage point, returns to an important, long-standing question about the necessity and limits of resistance. What is regeneration if it is tied to the land and tangled in lines connecting violence, energy extraction, and modern sexuality? What does regeneration look like if (against individual, whitened bodily vitalization) it is pursued environmentally and attuned to violent infrastructures of feeling?As is evident, I greatly admire Cram and their book. Violent Inheritance does not forge a scalpel to do specific analytical work. As a model for others, Cram writes into the contexts presented, being more evocative than precisely conceptual, sometimes to the point of being elliptical, but gradually you come to feel what they mean in a very concrete way. In that, the book enacts what Cram has previously called queer orientational scholarship in order to advocate for “queer collaborative stewardship.” Such stewardship “models a different kind of queer politics routed not through liberal imagination but though an ecological imagination” that “resists a scarcity framework of settler modernity in favor of abundance” (204, 206). To make this stewardship imaginable, Cram produces concepts that are not instruments so much as they are doorways for readers to enter a different, regenerative inhabitation of their world, by which I mean their bodies, their thoughts, and their feelings in relation to all that makes up “place.” You must sit with this book to understand it; you cannot extract from it easily. And that, I suspect, is part of what Cram means by queer orientational scholarship—to study and connect in affirmative ways that resist the extractive sexualities of modernity, including the modes of scholarship to which all of us are inured.

Other| July 31 2023 BOOKS OF INTEREST Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2023) 56 (2): 206–212. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.56.2.0206 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Kennedy; BOOKS OF INTEREST. Philosophy & Rhetoric 31 July 2023; 56 (2): 206–212. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.56.2.0206 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2023The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT Reverse eikos (plausibility) arguments are notorious for reversing a reason that supports an accusation into a reason that denies this accusation. This article offers new insights on their analysis and evaluation, by reconstructing a reverse eikos argument’s line of reasoning as an argumentative pattern. The pattern reveals that this type of argument centers not only on the arguer’s claim that by doing the act of which they have been accused, they would risk becoming the likely suspect, but also on the connected reasoning that they would not want to risk this since that would be stupid and they are not stupid. The proposed analysis, which is illustrated with classic and modern examples of reverse eikos arguments, shows that the evaluation of these arguments boils down to estimating the arguer’s calculation of the costs and benefits of taking the risk, while taking into account the arguer’s character, intellect, and circumstances.

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. The beat already moving itself but the which isn’t the Yorke becomes of playing through an of subjection and of He is being But is now the time to call for passive no to demanding and As I Gross’s book, a forms the that and on the A in The to the very The of are being from the they in by those who from their in the of and And the from only part of the But what I here are not simply things to which we might but those facts of the already moving us to to of and for a more just and feel such a to be so moved, not only a clear and voice but an and a heart being rendered to what the world might be teaching it to sing.

ABSTRACT This article invites critical inquiry into the rhetorical form of Sylvia Wynter’s thought. The author identifies the key to Wynter’s thought as charting a cartography that is intransigently committed to a vision of the intellectual imagination at its most ambitious while staying true to the grain and detail of the liminal, the lumpen, and the particular. The upshot is that Wynter wants to open up a space for the imagination and labor of Black thought, one that comes after and beyond philosophy and theory.

ABSTRACT Africana scholars often address their texts to a reader who is implicitly white. This tendency, which this article characterizes as the “discursive orientation toward whiteness,” has the pernicious effect of limiting the range and rigor of scholars’ research questions and proposal. This analysis examines the other discursive “face,” following J. Saunders Redding’s observation from almost eighty years ago, which remains unnervingly insightful: “Negro [sic] writers have been obliged to have two faces . . . to satisfy two different (and opposed when not entirely opposite) audiences, the [B]lack and the white.” Scholars have described this second face in the text in a number of ways—variously as a temperament, a rhythm, or an “aesthetic.” Through an analysis of a few exemplary texts, the current study will describe a few of the most salient characteristics, ultimately in the service of equipping the “Black” scholar with a few effective, liberatory rhetorical strategies.

The cover art for Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World is startling and alluring.1 A Black female human-animal defiantly meets one’s gaze. With bull-like horns and ears jutting out of both sides of the head, thick, matted hair (fur?) migrating from the crown of the head to the brow, this portrait of a hybrid species challenges the senses and the imaginary. Leaning into the spectator’s eyeline with shoulders angled and breasts partly obscured by the enveloping shadows out of which she emerges and seems to crouch into, this Black female human-animal provokes questions: What sort of being is this? What kind of being is the Black woman? Becoming Human is a complex, and at times dense, meditation on these and related queries into anti-Blackness, new materialism, and the roles that Black women’s bodies have played historically and contemporaneously in philosophical and biological discourses on the human. Recent studies interrogating the “genre” of “Man” range across literary studies, aesthetics, geography, Black studies, and animal studies. Jackson’s work thinks alongside and rebuts claims developed in these fields by centering “gender, sexuality, and maternity in the animalization of blackness” (4).Becoming Human is expansive and involves eclectic case studies: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” the mercurial artistry of Wangechi Mutu, and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. What links these diverse aesthetic “objects” and artistic practices are their interventions into how we come to see, feel, and know the (non)being of Blackness and the ongoing reproduction of Blackened bodies. There is much to commend in Becoming Human—its explorations and critiques of the supposed binarism involved in positing human/culture divides, its explications of some foundational philosophies assembling the tenets of anti-Blackness, and its recognition of the significance of signification; that is, its mobilization of a mode of rhetorical thinking. Moreover, Jackson delivers some truly engaging and unique discussions of discursive forms, paying particular attention to “blackness’s abject generativity” (69), a phenomenon she also calls Blackness’s “natal function” (70). This ambitious project unfolds along three interdependent, yet distinct registers: (1) a philosophical questioning of the underpinnings of anti-Blackness, (2) a robust critique of aesthetic formations and their potentiality for altering the terms of (non)humanity, (3) an encounter with materiality’s discursivity—or, discourse’s materiality. This review delineates each register, keeping in mind that each register is deeply imbricated in the others.It has become relatively normative in thinking about anti-Blackness and racism to assert or proffer the notion that Blackness is barred from the ontological status of human (Hartman 1997; Wynter 2003; Weheliye 2014). That is, to premise one’s intervention into racialization of diverse kinds on how technologies of slavery and colonialism (and their afterlives) deny Blackness ontological ground as a human being, indeed, to repudiate (Black) being as such. There is, of course, strong evidence of such an absolute exile operating as the condition of possibility for what counts as human life and the fungibility of Blackened bodies. But since Jackson seeks to trouble binarism itself, she asserts the “concept of plasticity, which maintains that black(ened) people are not so much as dehumanized as nonhumans or cast as liminal humans nor are black(ened) people framed as animal-like or machine-like but are cast as sub, supra, and human simultaneously . . . being everything and nothing for an order . . . constructs black(ened) humanity as privation and exorbitance of form” (35). In this formulation, the essential question is no longer whether or not Blackness is animalistic, it’s what specific labors are accomplished through discursive practices of animalization? Jackson posits that there is a “selective recognition” of Black humanity alongside violent exclusion. And so, what logics govern the selection? In short, these logics go by the name anti-Blackness and generate historically contingent abjection, debility, and disposability. Jackson interrogates foundational Western philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger to show how treatises like the latter’s Introduction to Metaphysics worked to separate what counts as philosophy from “Hottentots” and primitivism writ large. Jackson asserts that Hegel’s perceptions of Africa and Africans as possessing no history or development, representing the antithesis of the fullness of Dasein as human essence, haunts Heidegger’s thinking. Thus, the philosophical capacity for human being to build worlds (utilizing the natural resources of earth) gets counterposed in Heidegger to those Black bodies that lack this human capacity—those bodies and populations that are locked permanently within the animal-earth relation, the Black (98–99). Becoming Human, then, seeks to disturb these foundations by reiterating “that blackness, and the abject fleshy figures that bear the weight of the world, is a being (something rather than nothing, perhaps even everything), and I aim to reveal and unsettle the machinations that suggest blackness is nothingness” (83).The more difficult challenge facing readers of this work is embedded within the relations among the various figurations of the Black female body as a sexuating, reproducing organism. Here the conceptualization relies on how the Black female body is treated in discourses of biology as capable of bringing new (male and female) bodies into the world and not capable of being truly feminine, a caesura that begets and preserves white femininity. Jackson relies on queer science fiction to illuminate and cast doubt upon these anti-Black operations. Chapter 2 features an analysis of the “postcolonial science fiction” (88) of Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, and chapter 3 forwards the “insect poetics” (121) of Butler’s “Bloodchild.” Although each work offers very different versions of Black woman futurity, they allow for Jackson to think about Blackened female bodies and the biopolitical imperatives of reproduction. How might, Jackson asks, Blackened female bodies resist or transform the ongoing commands issued by biopolitics to make more bodies even as this reproduction diminishes the self? In the case of “Bloodchild,” Jackson contemplates how discourses of species are racialized to provide warrants for the domination of not only animals—like Blackened female bodies—but also “insects and microorganisms, such as parasites, viruses, protoctists, fungi, and bacteria” (132). Jackson is, in short, attempting to illustrate how anti-Blackness invents multiple forms of organisms as the “‘enemy of man’” (136), thus proposing that (inter)planetary alliances among Blackened bodies (even microscopic ones) are possible and necessary for liberation.To offer plasticity as the mode of anti-Blackness is to conceive of racism as an exceptionally potent assemblage of aesthetic practices organized by and housed within biopolitical aesthetic regimes like the slave plantation. From this perspective, Becoming Human contemplates the shaping, constituting, and mutating forces acting on individual and social bodies and things. Importantly, among these “things” are Black female bodies and the artistic practices of those very bodies. Hence, Jackson understands anti-Blackness as a biopolitical and economic generative force through which one can witness how “the coordinates of the human body are forcefully altered into a different shape or form—bizarre and fantastic: human personality is made ‘wild’ under the weight of blackness’s production as seemingly pure potentiality” (70–71). In the case of chattel slavery, the slave body was made to become whatever it must become to serve the fickle and gratuitous interests of the slaver’s fears and desires—to bear the lash, to bear children, to bear unimaginable grief. The Black female human-animal is an object of an aesthetics that cannot be dissociated (in reality or in phantasy) from the conceits of the aesthetic values attributed to whiteness. Becoming Human, therefore, engages a variety of aesthetic forms as it maps the terrain of anti-Blackness. For the purposes of this review, there are two notable examples in addition to the Black female human-animal worth elaborating upon: the slave narrative and the novel’s unique status as a literary form.Prior to taking up Morrison’s Beloved as a neo–slave narrative, Jackson comments on the genre of slave narration and Frederick Douglass’s rhetorical performances. A genre is not simply an arrangement of elements that constrain artistic practices—although it is that—it constitutes and mobilizes affective logics governing systems of social relations. As such, the slave narrative depends on “sentimentality,” a “privileged rhetorical mode” that establishes “empathic identification” among speakers and audiences (56). Although this rhetorical mode may build “bonds of kindness” important to abolitionism, it also reifies racial hierarchies and social laws pertinent to anti-Blackness’s continuation and revision. Douglass’s “‘formal mastery’ of genres of masculine, republican elocution” (56) cannot disable the racist aesthetics of animalization. Nor can it transfer his conditional humanity onto other Black bodies. In this respect, the genre of the slave narrative has less to do with Black freedom; it solicits Black artistic practices as a “pretext for racial hierarchy in the form of a pedagogy in white ideality and the pathologization and criminalization of blackness” (58).Jackson’s critique of the racializing affects of Western aesthetics continues with a consideration of the historical context of the emergence of the novel as honored literary form. The prestige of the novel as a literary form is involved in the elevation of rational man and its forms of speech. Taken to be a reflection of immanent subjectivity and the transcendence of nature, the novel operates as a metaphor; it signifies the attainment of high culture and the vulgar existence of Black flesh that lacks the powers of self-reflection. The novel is also popularized through market economies constitutive of global colonialism and chattel slavery. Importantly, the novel participates in and furthers a “certain nationalist myth of language” engendering a reverence for its literary form as white-nation speech. This is the historical-aesthetical formulation into which Beloved and Brown Girl intervene—as counterstatements to this racist aesthetics and as ways to imagine worldly relations differently (90–99) (see also Bakhtin 1986).By centering the concept of plasticity in its analysis, Becoming Human produces an aperture through which one can appreciate the rhetorical character of anti-Blackness and the aesthetics of racism. Throughout the work Jackson reveals a sensitivity to discursivity. When discussing the genre of the slave narrative, she refers to the “rhetorical inheritance” passed down from the “literary cultural industry” regulating the form slave narratives can take (52). Genre, therefore, offers up and excludes from consideration specific topoi for rhetorical invention. But as Jackson works her way through this register involving the entanglement of genre, trope, and the Black female body, the “natal function” of Blackness ushers into view the idea that “the slave is the discursive-material site that must contend with the demand for seemingly infinite malleability, a demand whose limits are set merely by the tyrannies of will and imagination” (72). Plasticity is an effect of this discursive-material relation as it violently seizes and molds bodies, in part, by continuously enlisting various forms of biopolitical administration. The implications and limitations of this relation get teased out in the work’s final chapter, “Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde” (159–98). Rather than explore Jackson’s examination of Mutu and Lorde, the final stage of this review tries to clarify the stakes for rhetorical theory expressed by Jackson’s staging of her critique.Beginning with the traditional biocentric view that human beings are determined by biological processes, and that culture is subsidiary, Jackson utilizes the work of Sylvia Wynter to engage “sociogeny” as a refutation of biocentricity that has gained traction over the past two decades. Instead of privileging biology (forgetting that biology is itself discursive like metaphysics), Becoming Human questions the “and” posited in “discursivity and materiality” (160). Indeed, “antiblackness itself is sexuating, whereby so-called biological sex is modulated by ‘culture’ . . . at the registers of both sign and matter, antiblackness produces differential biocultural effects of gender and sex” (159). In this sense, patterns and forms of discourse are biotropological—they are assemblages of biotropes (Daut 2015; Watts 2021). Such discourses habituate bodily (and subjective) responses, neurochemical processes that have values and feelings inscribed through them; they have the capacity to trigger ideas, preferences, ways of knowing, modes of visuality operating “as if it was instinctual.” This “as if” is paramount, for it elides the fact that the human subject is “semiotically defined” (162). Matter itself can be understood as an effect, at least in part, of the mechanics of discourse. Becoming Human understands this “as if” as a racist rhetorical strategy: it sponsors “mutations” in human-animal, calls them nature’s “monsters,” and “reasons” that they need to be studied, dissected, policed, and incarcerated or killed. To be sure, Jackson does not label the work as an investment in rhetorical theory one might suspect because her assessments and critiques of philosophy and metaphysics tend to treat rhetoric as a set of devices that “biological discourses” mobilize. From this reviewer’s point of view, this tendency is another effect of “as if”—as if biological discourses, especially when manufacturing the Black female human-animal, are not rhetorical through and through. Despite this quibble, Becoming Human offers provocative analyses of anti-Blackness and the multifaceted worlds it repetitively and distressingly (rhetorically) invents.

Other| December 30 2022 BOOKS OF INTEREST Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2022) 55 (4): 424–430. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.4.0424 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy; BOOKS OF INTEREST. Philosophy & Rhetoric 30 December 2022; 55 (4): 424–430. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.4.0424 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2023The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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.

ABSTRACT The logic of humor has been acknowledged as an essential dimension of every joke. However, what is the logic of jokes, exactly? The modern theories of humor maintain that jokes are characterized by their own logic, dubbed “pseudo,” “playful,” or “local,” which has been the object of frequent criticisms. This article intends to address the limitations of the current perspectives on the logic of jokes by proposing a rhetorical approach to humorous texts. Building on the traditional development of Aristotle’s almost neglected view of jokes as surprising enthymemes, the former are analyzed as rhetorical arguments. Like enthymemes, jokes are characterized by natural inferences that can be represented as topics, and quasi-formalized in argumentation theory as argumentation schemes. Like rhetorical arguments, jokes express a reason in support of different types of conclusions and proceed from distinct kinds of reasoning and semantic relations.

The role of public memory in a digital information age beckons us to explore how information is stored, managed, and circulated throughout various networks. Engaging with questions of public memory allows us to meditate on how we and future generations have developed processes and methods of information management that shape how knowledge emerges today. In order to understand how public memory interacts with networks of information, we must look at the systems and technologies that store, manage, and make publicly accessible this information. Nathan R. Johnson’s Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age serves as an important contribution to this task by historicizing the formation of these information infrastructures. Johnson contends that the convergence between the labor of memory infrastructure and the development of mnemonic technê directly drives circulation of knowledge—and the history of this convergence undergirds the way networked archives take shape in our digital present.Architects of Memory carefully stitches together the history of memory with a detailed account of information science’s development in building infrastructures of memory in library schools and military intelligence agencies. In doing so, Johnson uses two key frameworks—memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê—to forge connections between memory as a commonplace in rhetorical history and in a digital age. By definition, memory infrastructure, per Johnson, refers to “the backgrounds that expose particular modes of memory” and elucidates a society’s typical patterns for exchanging and remembering information (6). Mnemonic technê denotes the technological resources used to collect, organize, and archive information that became crucial to the development of information science in the mid-twentieth century. While chapters 1 to 6 trace how memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê interanimated one another throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, Johnson’s “intermezzo” chapters provide specific examples that narrow in on the development of mnemonic technê. For example, the emergence of the Dewey Decimal Classification, punch-card coding systems, and library book trucks represent how mnemonic technê formed to systematize the processes of accessing information, which ultimately created networked memory infrastructures that produce patterns of memory management. Johnson shows that these technologies are issues of public memory because the systems that store information are the means by which future generations will come to access this information, meaning that these technologies mediate the information that publics will engage with and remember in the future.Chapter 1 of Architects of Memory is devoted to exploring the utility of an infrastructural model for understanding the rhetorical nature of memory. Johnson stresses that memory infrastructures both bridge the gap between what is remembered and what is forgotten and intervene in the process of remembering and forgetting (15). Johnson’s lengthy explanation of these phenomena is important in demonstrating how this infrastructural model stands far apart from how memory has been typically thought of in the field of rhetoric; without this long and at times repetitive explanation, the reader may struggle to understand that mnemonic technê and memory infrastructures bear a symbiotic relationship and collaborate in managing modes of public memory. Johnson discusses how artificial mnemonic devices give our future selves tools to remember the past, which, for Johnson, exemplifies how memory acts as a mode of exchange—an exchange of information regulated by the practices we use to store and access this information. Juno Moneta’s symbol on the Roman coin, as a marker of citizenship and economic participation, provides a metaphor for memory in that the networked exchange of coins crystalized the image of Juno Moneta as an important figurehead in Roman culture. Johnson’s detour into the figures of Simonides and Juno Moneta distracts from his theoretical hedging in this initial chapter because the book largely covers the twentieth-century development of information science, and yet this sets the foundation for the rest of the book by offering a helpful illustration of memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê that aids in navigating the following chapters.One of Johnson’s main contributions in this book is his thesis that the symbiotic relationship between memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê would not exist without the human labor forces that built these connections. Johnson dedicates chapter 2 to describing how the post–World War II panic over information security galvanized Western militaries to develop more sophisticated systems for scientific research and communication. The geopolitical impetus for protecting government information in the Cold War era intensified the development of more memory systems for the purposes of distributing and evaluating scientific research. Ushered in by the second industrial revolution (1870–1930), this new age of memory innovation gave rise to developments such as Paul Otlet’s Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). Further, the rise of “operations research,” championed by scientists like John Desmond Bernal, gave way to a new type of documentation that gathered data for the purposes of mathematical analysis (37). As an example, Bernal’s National Distributing Authorities (NDA) created a centralized system whereby those who work in science fields could be granted direct access to scientific research apart from the genre of academic journals. Johnson notes that while Bernal’s NDA forwarded a centralized system that ultimately failed, Bernal’s efforts mark an important milestone in the systemization of information distribution. The concept of centralized memory technologies—such as punch-card systems and microfilm—that were accessible for workers across a variety of fields took traction, which, as Johnson argues, speaks to the power of mnemonic technê to construct fields of public memory.Johnson explains in the first intermezzo chapter why information science and librarianship historically held a distant relationship. Librarianship, as a field characterized as “service-oriented” and mostly employing women, was largely disrespected, and the advent of information science could be characterized as a move to “exorcise the library spirit” (47). Thus, Johnson details in chapter 3 how information science upturned the structure of the library from the inside out. Because scientists often depended on libraries for accessing information, the postwar exigence for enhancing scientific communication and research trickled into the library sphere, ultimately reshaping library education to center around networks of information exchange. Johnson oscillates between exploring the Cold War panic over defending science research and the flourishing of professional librarian schools—a move that solidifies the causal relationship between postwar operations research and the revolutionizing of memory technologies in everyday libraries. Specifically, government grants given to Georgia Tech libraries allowed for Dorothy Crosland, the lead librarian at Georgia Tech from 1953 to 1971, to train librarians to be specialists in science and technical information—which led to the creation of a graduate program in information science. This institutional reform put a scientific sheen on the process of locating, storing, and accessing information, which created professional distinctions between the “information scientist” and the more bookish “librarian.” Information science, moreover, developed new systems for the retrieval of source information—such as Calvin Mooers’s Zatocoding system, the subject of Architects of Memory’s second intermezzo chapter. Johnson encourages the reader to see that the advent of information science, in part, stands to masculinize the field of librarianship in a way that glosses over the feminine history of library work. But instead of teasing out the ramifications of this conflict, Johnson turns at the end of chapter 3 to criticize the field of rhetoric’s indifference to memory during the mid-twentieth century. Denouncing Edward Corbett’s claim that memory is “a dead canon,” Johnson shows how the development of information science and new librarian graduate programs at Georgia Tech reveal that memory was far from a dead canon at the time. This switch to discussing rhetorical studies’ thoughts on memory at the time distracts from Johnson’s larger project of tracing the relationship between librarianship and information science, but at the same time it underlines Johnson’s work in restoring what memory can offer—and has offered—rhetorical studies.Chapter 4 clarifies that while government funding allowed for information science to blossom under the postwar frenzy for securing scientific communication, the practice of organizing and processing information in an accessible way was—and had always been—the librarian’s game. Specifically, Robert S. Taylor’s The Making of a Library (1972) outlined the transition from book-centered library services to making the library an “information institution” (91). Johnson upholds Taylor’s book as a key signifier of how this transition reflected both Cold War anxieties and a pivotal turning point in information access. Taylor was quite nervous about the possibilities bestowed by the library’s reformation as an “information institution,” and yet it was written to guide librarians and information scientists into the future of the profession. Even though Taylor remained loyal to his librarian roots, his career at the School of Library Science at Syracuse unearthed the tradition of “librarianship” and redirected library training to center around the new technologies and newer demands for accessing information. Whereas “the older course taught bibliography and literature and included sessions detailing particular academic subjects, . . . the newer informational course taught students the structure, channels, and systems of a universal scientific community” (103). This shift shows that the methods for cataloging and organizing data depend on structures of communication built both by librarians and by users over time, which indicates that library labor is less about organizing information and more about facilitating the process users undergo to locate information—effectively propping up what Johnson terms a “library economy” (105). Johnson calls us to see that teaching memory requires one to focus on how people use, access, and store modes of memory—not just the existence of memory practices themselves. Much like Crosland’s book trucks that haul books about the library for circulation (the subject of the third intermezzo chapter), the technologies one uses to access information do not lose relevance—these technologies might be picked up, dusted off, and restored for a new set of users with new demands.Johnson’s work in tracing the midcentury transformation of memory practices illustrates the symbiotic relationship between mnemonic technê and memory infrastructure. The ways people use both the mnemonic technê and memory infrastructures reveal how each take shape. In chapter 5, Johnson explains that the user’s motivations for accessing and storing data directly influence how memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê take shape. Chapter 5 pivots from the arc of the book’s predominant twentieth-century focus, as Johnson aims to rethink the tradition of memory in rhetoric’s history. He argues that memory operates as a coin, in that practices of memory center on the values and patterns of exchange that are characteristic of a community. This economic metaphor draws attention to how memory, much like currency, passes along from person to person in an established network that regulates its movement. To construct this metaphor, Johnson retells the myth of Simonides of Ceos and zeroes in on Simonides’s motivation for creating his memory palaces. By drawing on evidence from both Quintilian and Cicero’s telling of Simonides’s story, Johnson makes a compelling case that Simonides was motivated by economic reasons to remember where each person sat at Scopas’s table. In Johnson’s retelling, Simonides felt bitter about Scopas’s critique of his poem but still wanted to be paid, so when the temple fell on Scopas and his guests, Simonides sought to remember where each of them sat so that he could collect money from their families for writing their eulogies. In the same way that Simonides’s motivation for creating his memory palaces centered on money, so too can the importance of Juno Moneta to the Roman people be explained by the demands of economic exchange. While this comparison between Simonides and Juno Moneta is a bit anachronistic and far-fetched (as Johnson himself admits), this analogy suggests that memory practices can be better understood by locating users’ motivations for remembering. As the concluding chapter asserts, Johnson’s framework of memory-as-coinage illustrates that remembering and forgetting oscillate on the values and intentions of those who engage with memory practices. Chapter 6 briefly touches on the implications of Johnson’s infrastructural perspective for search engines. While he does not fully extrapolate on search engines and the algorithmic indexing that generates targeted information for users, he does imply that these memory infrastructures will play a significant role in the construction of public memory in the future. Johnson is careful to note that the construction of memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê will always be dependent on the human labor that works to make public memory possible. Just as Dorothy Crosland’s book trucks and Robert S. Taylor’s pedagogical reform changed the way library and information science work was done, so too does the future of memory technology depend on innovative labor.Johnson’s book contributes to rhetorical theory not only by calling our attention to the various technologies and systems developed over the years to accessibly store information, but also in calling attention to the rhetorical work these technologies do in shaping our interactions with information. In other words, memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê rhetorically guide our encounters with information across time and space. Though Architects of Memory applies a more historical focus and does not fully consider how memory practices will take shape in the twenty-first century, we as readers can deduce that the everyday encounters we have with search engine algorithms and targeted advertisements work on their own networked infrastructure, emerging from the tradition of data collection in information science that Architects of Memory describes. As Architects of Memory concludes, “The work of twenty-first-century mnemonists is to identify and locate memory’s commonplace so they can be reassessed continually” (155). Johnson words this as a call for rhetoricians to apply their nuanced insight into the commonplaces of networked memory infrastructures and their impact on public memory—but moreover, it is a call to the public as well to be mindful of how our commonplaces of memory will impact future generations. For rhetoricians and the public alike, Architects of Memory encourages us not just to draw on rhetorical theories of memory into our everyday encounters with information, but to take an intentional approach to exploring how the infrastructural networks of memory undergird our everyday moments of digital information access. Memory, in this sense, takes a direct role in the creation and circulation of rhetorical practices that we explore in the past, present, and future.

Other| October 01 2022 BOOKS OF INTEREST Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2022) 55 (3): 331–336. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.3.0331 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy; BOOKS OF INTEREST. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 October 2022; 55 (3): 331–336. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.3.0331 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2022 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2022The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.