Rhetoric and philosophy have long attended to the conditions, dynamics, and relative benefits of debate. Antiquity's deep concern for the relationship between debate and city-serving pedagogy remains an open question. In part through a shared commitment to argumentation theory, rhetoric and philosophy have agreed on and sparred over debate's constitutive and performative role in truth seeking, critical understanding, and collective action. With different and shared idioms, they have touted debate as a fundament of public life, investigated how debate may productively trouble norms of publicity, and reflected on whether the “problem” with the public lies with its reductive affection for debate as antagonism or its self-serving aversion to debate as the risk of confronting the limits of one's own worldview.The ongoing debate about debate is timely and perhaps pressing. Inside and outside academe, there is an audible lament over the collapse if not death of debate—gone is a force for critical inquiry and progressive engagement. And yet, if the eulogy is not premature, there are many who find no cause to mourn—gone is a modernist relic, a promise of rational deliberation that has so often delivered neither reason nor meaningful engagement. So too, the idea that debate can inform collective judgment let alone engender ethics-making consensus is now often seen as proof of its hegemony and evidence of its colonizing designs. As its “enlightened” terms, rules, and conditions are found demeaning, marginalizing, and hostile, debate increasingly stands without apparent standing.If debate takes shape and proceeds within arguments, the constellation of a claim, evidence, and warrant feels increasingly distant if not simply anachronistic, all the more so in the onslaught of reductive, trending, and hermetically sealed assertions of belief, many of which are justified by narrative appeals to experience that refuse question. To the extent that it requires a shared referent and proceeds only as participants are willing in principle to change their minds, the very premise of debate strikes many—on the right and the left—as not only naïve to the exigence of so-called deep division but also an unjustifiable intrusion. In academic and public life, appeals to consider “both sides” of issues are heard as morally suspect and frequently written off as so much neoliberalism at the same time that calls to promote the “free expression” of debate are condemned for their ulterior motives if not outright hypocrisy. Calls to find common ground in the name of undertaking productive disagreement are deemed heretical by all sides. And yet, if these criticisms of debate are themselves open to criticism, if they are not hysterical, the attending dilemma is how to assess their merits without undertaking precisely that which they have ruled out of order. Absent an answer, a solution that has so far proved elusive, the idea of debate is increasingly reduced to strife and conflict (one of the “original” definitions of the term) in which only difference abides. And, with the art of rebuttal deemed bullying and the dynamics of clash held out as violence, what may appear is a kind of vacuum, itself a form of stasis, into which pours endless dialogues and quickly forgotten conversations.This P&R Forum is addressed to the contemporary (im)possibility of debate. Has debate become impossible? What are the conditions of its possibility? What are the costs? Is the impossibility of debate an advance or a setback? Is it time to defend, abandon, or reinvent debate? What is at stake in debate's (im)possibility? Written by a distinguished group, one that includes several individuals who have long-standing and deep ties to academic debate, the essays that compose the forum offer intersecting, overlapping, and often conflicting replies to these questions—including the suggestion that they are perhaps the wrong questions. Within and across the pages that follow, there is provocative agreement, curious divergence, and instructive disagreement. The question of debate is an opening in which to discern and grapple with experiences of expression, the potential of speech, habits of engagement, the complexity of lived and conceptual stasis, the cost of sovereign self-certainty, and the contested truths of ethical life.

ABSTRACT Invoking the work of Maurice Blanchot, this text is situated in the (im)possibility of contemporary debate and the impossible, but necessary, question of (un)avowable community. Arguing that identity politics today forecloses debate in the syntactical closures of the named name, we follow Blanchot to open onto a paratactical politics of community. The parataxis (polysyndeton) is here the key trope of community and communication: the side-by-side arrangement of fragments that puts into play the seeming self-evidence of contemporary conjunctions, relations of subordination, and temporal sequence. The parataxis configures relations of alterity, radicalized in death, where the (non)being-in-common of self-other and self-self are exposed. Taking as instance the disaster of Donald Trump's presidency and the digital conveyances of identity, we explore this joke, its common currents, and the possibility for a paratactical politics of community when the joke is on us.

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

ABSTRACTAt the End of the World there is blackness doing the (im)possible. This essay considers the (im)possibility of debate in our contemporary crisis through an examination of the domestication of potentiality in rhetorical dialectic. Debate, in its presupposition of stasis, parallels sovereignty's ontologizing operations of antiblack racial terror that suspend contingency. Meanwhile, blackness was already getting it done. The U.S. Civil War serves as a privileged example for thinking through blackness as the groundless constitutive outside to the possible that yet gestures toward other generative moments found in refusal of the disappointing options that pass for politics offered to us today.

ABSTRACT The emergence of narratives concerning post-truth, alternative facts, fake news, and the like underpins a felt sense of crisis about the possibility of debate, insofar as argument depends on truth norms. This essay argues that the post-truth narrative is regressive. It depends on Enlightenment-derived standards of truth that were from the beginning impoverished. I argue that rather than appeal nostalgically to the past, we should look to arguments interior to rhetorical history that point to truth norms that include worldly experience, or thereness. Using examples from Protagoras, Johann Georg Hamann, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I briefly expand on different ways of conceiving how to marry worldly involvements to our conceptions of knowledge. The world, inclusive of radical technological change, doesn't just shape but takes part in who we are and what we know, say, and do. In this sense, argument and debate are ambient phenomena.

ABSTRACT Debate is a civic skill necessary for democracy. Participation in debate is important not only because it teaches habits of advocacy that enable a person to win an argument, but because debate, at its best, teaches us how to lose and, in losing, understand why others act the way they do.

ABSTRACTPhilosophy consists primarily in or of texts. The implications of this very basic fact for the subject—both as a writer and as a reader—and philosophy's conception of itself as a privileged form of argumentation and for establishing the truth have, however, been largely neglected. In order to address these issues, the article reconsiders Foucault's “double reading” of Descartes's Meditations as “demonstration” and “exercise” that both affects and transforms the meditating subject. I argue that such a double reading is not only proper to the Meditations but constitutive of all philosophical texts. This leads to a revised notion of truth that derives its argumentative consistency precisely from the entanglement of demonstration and exercise.

ABSTRACT Stasis is a precondition for debate that can be understood as a proposition determining controversy in advance or a retroactively determined basis for judgment. This essay examines the affective conditions of possibility for stasis, arguing that the propositional model risks concealing a broader economy of desire that might help to explain why unexpected audiences cathect to certain positions. The example of support for Donald Trump from QAnon conspiracy theorists illustrates these affective connections and the importance of reexamining affect as a condition of possibility for debate.

ABSTRACT The notion of debate suggests an orderly controversy and so contains an implicit ideal of orderliness. This orderliness has a fluid reality but is structured by a regard for procedural equality. This ideal becomes possible in practice only to the degree that participants in debate are guided by habits and capabilities described here as dialectical virtues.

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

ABSTRACT This article examines the kairotic beginnings of the #MeToo movement in order to understand what we are to make of this moment. It shows that commentaries about #MeToo unfold as a debate over the desire for law and the law of desire, ceding the contingent kairotic moment in which we might remake our contemporary political landscapes. As such, I argue that movements dedicated to ending sexual violence must reimagine the scene of address in which demands for justice might be spoken and their speech recognized as the truth. This project is complicated, however, by a post-truth era in which telling the truth matters little because truth itself has been devalued. Through this lens, we can see that the cost of telling the truth in the terms of the established debate is the creation of a form of identity politics that reinforces post-truth logics rather than intervening in them.

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

ABSTRACT This article asks if soundscapes are reasonable by inquiring if they can be designed to enhance the capacity for reasoned judgment. Using a normative pragmatic approach to argumentation theory, I demonstrate that soundscapes can be strategically designed to amplify or attenuate obligations, increase or weaken conviction, and create or mask argumentative context. I use the paradigm case of the 2012 casserole protests in Quebec to identify how arguers can use soundscapes to compel a response, increase the desire for advocacy, and create a public context. This expands the multimodal argumentation literature to incorporate sound. This article also intervenes into sound studies by supplying critical norms of reasonableness to assess soundscapes.

ABSTRACTBy way of generative critique, this article considers the premises, potential, and consequences of object-oriented ontology (OOO) and object-oriented rhetoric (OOR). To do this, it moves through four progressive and accumulative sections: first, the primacy and necessity of meaning-formation (signification) in any meaningful ontology, and thus the rhetorical exigency of any ontology in the first place; second, the potential and pitfalls of any specifically object-oriented rhetoric; third, the function of doxa (and episteme / logos) as means to recalibrate OOO and bridge it to a proper OOR; and fourth, extending from such a doxical approach, the ethical and political consequences of OOO/OOR, which we mark as a “dark politics” for two reasons—(1) the appropriately withdrawn, but nonetheless actual, politics of OOO/OOR, and (2) how such an ontological politics, whether intended or not, has “dark” (destructive) potential for bodies and lives.

ABSTRACT To address challenges to the primacy of the subject in speculative realism, we put Levi R. Bryant's object-oriented ontology in conversation with Jacques Lacan's register theory. In so doing, we recuperate an autonomous materiality for itself, providing a reading of the debate between Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau over the Lacanian Real and simultaneously providing a rich map of the being of subjectivity and modes of the rhetorical. We systematize Žižek's claim that each element of the register resonates with the others to produce an ontical cartography: a map of the different intersections of the materially autonomous Real with the Symbolic and Imaginary elements of the Lacanian subject. By delimiting the characteristics of these intersections, we can better understand the different valences in which rhetoric operates without foreclosing the agency of objects and the objectivity of subjects.

For Hannah Arendt, the promise serves as currency in a world where predictability of outcome in the realm of human action is impossible, where courage is required in order to submit oneself in word and deed in the public realm, and where forgiveness serves as recourse when things go differently than hoped. Each of these points in Arendt's political philosophy is indebted to Immanuel Kant, a thinker who is often characterized as rejecting rhetoric on aesthetic and moral grounds alike. In Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric, Scott Stroud takes up the apparently straightforward but ultimately complicated question of Immanuel Kant's treatment of, and disposition toward, rhetoric.While Kant is typically characterized as both dismissive and antipathetical toward rhetoric (in contrast with philosophy), Stroud's thoughtful, well-informed, and nuanced examination of the communicative and rhetorical underpinnings of Kantian thought focuses on identifying a nonmanipulative, educative rhetoric underscoring Kant's ethical, aesthetic, pedagogical, religious, and critical writings. This is not Kant's promise, at least wittingly—Stroud does the work in outlining the promise of rhetoric in Kant, at least insofar as his philosophy implicitly relies on a repertoire of communicative, discursive, embodied, and even performative practices. If, as Jaspers noted, Kant is the philosopher of the Western tradition, then interrogating the relation between rhetoric and philosophy requires a sustained and thoughtful intervention into the question of Kant's attitudes toward rhetoric—not merely a passing consideration of esoteric or occasional interest but a fundamental and essential intervention. Stroud's work offers the first book-length direct examination of this question.Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric presents a compelling counterreading to a prevailing and predominant narrative from both philosophy and rhetoric, namely, that Kant dismissed rhetoric wholesale in favor of philosophy. While much attention is paid to the monuments of Western thought known as Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment, the critical philosophy only represents part of the Kantian enterprise. In accordance with the recent turn to Kant's so-called occasional works and his anthropological writings (see Robert Louden, Kant's Impure Ethics [2000]), Stroud's investigation incorporates lesser-discussed works from Kant such as Religion Beyond the Bounds of Mere Reason, Metaphysics of Morals, and lectures on both anthropology and pedagogy and does so in order to suggest that Kant's attitudes toward rhetoric are far more complicated and nuanced than has been recognized in his critical philosophy.The central question of this project is “can we reclaim rhetoric as a part of Kant's project of moral improvement, of molding an individual into a caring and consistent community member?” (8). Stroud grounds his examination in the aesthetic and ethical works (and, importantly, the relation between them) in order to situate and trace the communicative and discursive dimensions that disclose different facets of Kant's educative rhetoric—not only in how Kant prioritized lively examples in teaching but in the function and practices of narrative, symbol, and ritual in constituting the ethical community of religion, as well as in how secular argumentation serves as a critical rhetoric for both rhetor and audience. Stroud identifies rhetorical experience as the core of Kantian educative rhetoric, defined as “the use of experience of a message receiver in the persuasion of that receiver” (8). He carries this perspective throughout the study in showing how rhetorical experience forms an understated, even assumed, yet central function in Kant's ethical project.The first chapter, “Tracing the Sources of Kant's Apparent Animosity to Rhetoric,” both provides an overview of the standard take that Kant dismissed rhetoric and embarks on some contextual sleuthing to determine the basis of that negative characterization. His attacks on rhetoric are aimed at particular and situated targets—the popular Ciceronian philosopher Christian Garve—while the criticism focuses on both methodological and ethical considerations—a particular instrumental and ends-oriented view of persuasion. This chapter distinguishes Garve's Ciceronian-inflected popular style that was designed to appeal to a general audience and emphasized the virtues of happiness and instrumental motives from Kant's investment in philosophical rigor, properly oriented by morality, intended for a more technical audience. We thus have two different paradigms of public enlightenment and two different attendant rhetorics.To open up the question of Kant's attitudes toward rhetoric before building a Kantian approach to rhetoric and communication, we also need to think in broader terms about what practices Kant recommends and condemns, to think beyond the restricted scope of what he inconstantly termed “rhetoric.” The second chapter, “Kant on Beauty, Art, and Rhetoric,” begins to identify myriad ways in which skilled speaking and language use can positively and significantly influence others while also respecting their autonomy. If one can use vivacity and liveliness to help instantiate and render the moral accessible and present, then cannot that very operation demonstrate a nonmanipulative concept of persuasion that encourages a particular path without evacuating and nullifying the audience's capacity for judgment? Since the distinction between poetry and rhetoric for Kant relates to the use of poetic images in the service of entertainment or serious business respectively, then contrast between rhetoric and poetics becomes less sharp once rhetoric also includes nonmanipulative positive moral influence.Stroud distinguishes manipulative persuasion (where the speaker holds an advantage over the audience and enacts a hidden agenda, which exerts a causal force on listeners, hence subverting their agency) from a nonmanipulative rhetoric (which amounts to an edifying influence realized through lively presentation of examples, euphony, and propriety and characterized by transparency, where public ends are known to all members of the audience, who assist the auditor in using their own faculty of judgment). The third chapter, “Freedom, Coercion, and the Search for the Ideal Community,” works from Kantian moral philosophy to establish a form of persuasion that reflects proper maxims for action, for “if moral philosophy amounts to anything of enduring value, it must be in positing an endpoint for our endeavors to become better individuals and better group members through freedom” (59). This process of moral cultivation and improvement of the individual and collective alike assumes a certain form of permissible influence that serves not as an external force but more as a catalyst stimulating an inner process of judgment.The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters lay out three different contexts and forms of educative rhetoric in Kant: the pedagogical function of the example, the use of symbol, narrative, and ritual in his religious writings to foster the constitution of community, and a critical rhetoric involving principles for both engaged speakers and auditors. These chapters together outline a range of different yet isomorphic practices that serve to cultivate and foster moral improvement without evacuating the auditor's autonomy and judgment. Accordingly, the fourth chapter “Pedagogical Educative Rhetoric: Education, Rhetoric, and the Use of the Example,” provides the broader warrant underlying the three forms of educative rhetoric—that for Kant, education serves as the paradigm for ethical influence that guides cultivation and self-discipline, while recognizing the capacities common to all and also preserving and respecting autonomy. Educative rhetoric is defined as “the use of speech and symbolic means to create or instantiate the sort of change desired in the pupil” (110). Examples, pedagogical tools favored by Kant, provide the proper orientation by creating moral dispositions that help promote the recognition of moral bases for action.Chapter 5, “Religious Educative Rhetoric: Religion and Ritual as Rhetorical Means of Moral Cultivation,” shows how religious symbol and narrative serve as a moral catechism, how myths operate as enargeia in making the moral present, and how practices like public prayer (not personal petitioning) performatively enact a self-persuasion that fosters the living church of ethical community by reorienting purpose away from self-love. With this, the final chapter circles back to the question of politics—although how we treat one another, how we orient ourselves, and how we constitute moral communities, I would submit, reflect a political commitment all the while. In this final chapter, Stroud draws his examination of Kant's educative rhetoric toward the implication that far from decrying rhetoric and abnegating the human realm of interaction, Kant not only provides fairly extensive guidelines for how to properly orient oneself to others, how to communicate in ways that preserve autonomy and freedom, and how to fashion a critical rhetoric that recommends ways of promoting ethical messages and interaction, but also for the development of an everyday critical capacity to receive and engage such messages from others.Although detailing a range of practices that constitute Kant's rhetorically inflected observations, Stroud repeatedly returns to the idiom of persuasion. Perhaps something broader like “influence” (just as one example) might better highlight some of the variety within the domain of educative rhetorical practices in Kant. A minor point, for sure—but one that invariably undersells the laborious work here in showing attitudinal, orientational, and (at points, even) affective dispositionality in a thinker like Kant, underserved by consistent recourse to the vocabulary of persuasion. While the promise is stated rather humbly, the payoff seems considerably larger than outlined in this book—particularly if educative rhetoric is more explicitly connected to Kant's notion of enlightenment. This connection is directly addressed in a few, brief places, but our understanding of Kant's thought shifts radically when we acknowledge that enlightenment (toward which his critical and noncritical writings alike build) is predicated on, occurs through, and leads toward communicative practices that serve to cultivate the capacities of humanity. This might require a different engagement with the Ciceronian Christian Garve and possibly call for reconsideration of whether Kant was primarily interested in targeting a technical philosophical audience or a more popular audience. Stroud's project changes the way in which we view Kant and the relation between rhetoric and philosophy, as well as the deeply rhetorical underpinnings of enlightenment.Stroud's book is an important, ground-breaking study on Kant's apparently confusing take on rhetoric. Although Kant's place in the pantheon of Western philosophy is secured by the difficult and laborious first Critique, Kant was, throughout his life, first and foremost an educator. He began lecturing before he secured his position at Königsberg and continued until he reached the point in his advanced age where he could teach no more. Stroud's project, in using experiential, educative rhetoric as the major thematic through which to reread Kant on the question of rhetoric, highlights and pays tribute to this often underacknowledged pedagogical orientation and dedication throughout Kant's writings. These strong, carefully documented chapters show a range of recommended practices for cultivating sufficient means of influence that do not carry persuasion so far (in grounds, style, method, and aim) as to overrun the auditor's free exercise of their faculties. Stroud's examination of the range within Kant's pedagogical, religious, and critical educative rhetoric greatly adds to our understanding of another side of Kant, the author of the first Critique—a pedagogically oriented theorist of communication.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes Heidegger's rhetoric in his most famous political address, the Rektoratsrede, which he delivered at the University of Freiburg on 27 May 1933. After I set out the political and philosophical kairos of the Rektoratsrede by drawing on Heidegger's contemporary lectures, letters, and Ponderings, in part 2 I use classical rhetorical resources and Heidegger's philosophy of temporality in Sein und Zeit (1927) to analyze the arrangement of his speech. In part 3, I examine two key National Socialist terms in the speech's climax. In part 4, I consider Heidegger's elocutio—his artful use of charged figures of speech and thought in the Rektoratsrede—in more detail. Concluding remarks reflect on the value and limits of the analysis in the context of debates about Heidegger's politics and its imbrication with his thought.

“When you find yourself neck deep in shit, start making bricks,” or so I was advised by Luanne T. Frank, a faculty member during my graduate days, who was deftly “translating” Heidegger for us during one class session. And now, decades later, I look around and think, “I'd better get busy, really busy.”With that prelude, and apologies to those weak of stomach or imagination—but this is not the time to be queasy—I approach Barbara Cassin's Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism. Indeed, the paperback cover image is of a man knee deep in water, at the least, and he looks down reflectively, somberly, as if to ask: “Really? What to do?”When I first read Cassin's volume—a collection of (mostly) previously published essays on the sophists, on philosophy's systematic repression of their thought, and on the pragmatic and political value of sophistic “relativism,” I was struck by the volume's lack of engagement with similar scholarship that has been undertaken in the United States. Except for two references, one to the work of John Poulakos and the other to that of Ed Schiappa, the collection of essays does not otherwise engage with rhetoric studies that “we,” and I use this collective pronoun with increasing discomfort as I write this, have published in English. My first impulse, thus, after reading, was to react: but why recuperate the sophists now? Didn't “we” vociferously and variously praise, resurrect, refigure, and bury them several decades ago?My subsequent impulse was to acknowledge the very antisophistic drive at work in my own reception of a foreign scholarship (Oh, how easy it is to feel “at home” in one's disciplinary comfort zone, to circle the wagons around a constitutive “we”). I recognized, clearly, that now, right now is precisely the right time to readdress the sophists. Irrepressible, the sophists haunt us, no matter how hard we try to bury them (see the work of Victor J. Vitanza and Jane Sutton, for example), and in times of rampant bigotry, xenophobia, and fundamentalism, the sophists return to remind us that now will always already be the right time to rethink, revisit, and retheorize the sophists. As scholars in rhetoric and as Cassin, here, argue, the sophists represent the power to challenge totalizing beliefs and their oppressive effects.I acknowledge the argument that it is a totalizing move itself to group all the various rhetors and philosophers under one homogenizing category of “the sophists” (see the work of Schiappa, for example). By doing so, we risk dehistoricizing them, anachronistically reviving them, and compelling them to speak from their ancient graves according to a contemporary script. Yet as John Poulakos, Victor J. Vitanza, and others have previously argued—and as Cassin does here—“the sophist” serves as a productive, as Vitanza would say, representative anecdote/antidote, a way both to explore “neglected and repressed traditions, of alternative paths” (1) and to counteract the philosophical demand for homology. Cassin writes: “Sophistic texts are the paradigm of what was not only left to one side but transformed and made unintelligible by their enemies” (2). These neglected, repressed, and alternative texts—these “others,” she further argues, “have in common another way of speaking, even another conception of logos” (2).Contrary to the ontologists, the philosophers, who worship at the altar of the law of noncontradiction, of homogenization and the “one,” the sophists, as “logologists,” inhabit the unholy space of the many, “outside of the regime of meaning as univocity” (4). The philosophical tradition has embraced this law, Aristotle's “principle of all principles,” and its attendant communicational presumption and demand and thus, by structural necessity (just as structurally necessary as the prohibition of incest, she notes), excluded sophists and their language games (4-5). Cassin's methodological interest—and the interest for our future methodological muscle, then—is to query how and why the philosopher demands such prohibitions and, further, needs or feels the “right to say that people need punishment” for violations of the “one” and is thus compelled to violence (4).In a world forged across simultaneous intimacy (where the proverbial “seven degrees of separation” appears mistaken: it is always One degree of separation) and strangeness (where the One appears forever separated from the one), Cassin invites us to see the sophist as the figure who acknowledges us—all of us; every one of us—as a stranger, fundamentally, essentially, even when we feel most “at home.” Cassin's essays thus press us to welcome the stranger, the foreign other, to theorize a political system and a way of being that recognizes the complexity of our world, in its strangeness, to encounter the powerful strangeness that characterizes language, and to attend to the untranslatable quality that is world, that is being, that is being in the world.This is the theoretical impulse of the book—the recognition of the sophist as the “stranger,” inhabiting the unreadable if not inhabitable characteristics of the other—which comprises seventeen chapters, again mostly of previously published work, sectioned in five emphases: “Unusual Presocratics”; “Sophistics, Rhetorics, Politics”; “Sophistical Trends in Political Philosophy”; “Performance and Performative”; and “Enough of the Truth For….” The volume's emphasis is, thus, on the political implications for sophistical theories of language, as performative, of not describing a preexistent reality but of bringing worlds into being. Cassin's engagement with political philosophy leads her to propose what she calls a “consistent” relativism as a certain response to criticisms of “contingent” relativism as advanced by Richard Rorty, for example, as perpetuating opinions as the wind favors.I'll leave Cassin to argue with Rorty and others, as she does in a variety of chapters on the value(s) of political relativism (and I'll leave Steven Mailloux to meditate on sophistic pragmatism); I want to direct my brief comments here to the complicated relation between the impossibility of possibly living with others (consistently or contingently) possibly or impossibly.I want to focus on chapter 13, which is titled: “Philosophizing in Tongues,” which could be retitled as “How to Live Hospitably in an Inhospitable World When There is No One Language” (a mouthful of tongues to be sure), or more simply “Living Rhetorically in/with Tongues.” Obviously, the author nor the editors sought my opinion before selecting the chapter's title. But my point: we're “translating” Cassin's philosophical disciplinary focus/home into a more rhetorical one and hopefully a more unhomely one. She writes: “It is from the basis of the deeply nonviolent premise of this sentence—‘a language is not something that belongs’—that I would like to lay out what we attempted to achieve with the Dictionary of Untranslatables” (247). What I want to suggest is that the work of Cassin presses us—as a discipline—to think of the rhetorical as outside the simplistic hail of the “triangle,” of the presumption that a rhetorical agent “knows what he knows and knows what he speaks” and that audiences and messages are uncomplicated and dissociable entities. I further want to suggest that the work of Cassin presses rhetorical studies to think of communication as an “untranslatable” event.In service of this provocation is Cassin's edited, masterful Dictionary of Untranslatables, published by Princeton University Press in 2014. This hefty volume of approximately thirteen hundred pages celebrates the “cartography of language” (vii), of the various journeys of the word—and the singularity of each journey. The dictionary is a rich resource, reminding me of an expansive version of Michel Foucault's description of Borges's “certain Chinese encyclopedia” that instantiated The Order of Things. Do yourself the favor: buy this dictionary.In a world that trades in “untranslatable” values from continent to continent and in “untranslatable” words, such as “covfefe,” and when consequences, politically and ethically and mortally, are so dear, the field of rhetoric studies needs to take very seriously the “play of signification,” to refigure its theorization and praxis of attending to the “untranslatable.” Cassin invokes this refiguration, this revisitation of sophistry, not “as a destinal challenge to Babel but as an obviously deceptive and ironic commitment. The Dictionary of Untranslatables does not pretend to offer ‘the’ perfect translation to any untranslatable; rather, it clarifies the contradictions and places them face to face and in reflection; it is a pluralist and comparative work in its nonenclosing gesture” (247, emphasis mine). What a beautiful way to describe a sophistic enterprise: to work without destination and with some shot of irony in the face of the impossible, to reflect on contradictions face to face, in a “nonenclosing gesture.”Cassin historicizes this early acknowledgment of the plurality of languages and the impossibility of rendering the same—between the divide of “hellenizein” (“to speak Greek”; “to speak correctly”; “to think and act as a civilized man” [248]) and “barbarizein” (“which violently conflates the stranger, the unintelligible, and the inhuman” [248]). Not much has changed, it appears, from the first sophistic to our current rhetorical landscape, as Cassin acknowledges that this tension between what can be said “correctly” by the “civilized” and what can be said “otherwise” by the Other is indicative of the performative characteristic of language. Rhetoric is not governed by an “onto-logy” or a “phenomeno-logy,” “which must tell us what is and how it is” (249): the world is created by words (and by the relations that such words solidify, politically) that have no trans-signification guarantor. Cassin's deep scrutiny of the political and ethical ramifications of an impossible rhetoric hails what she calls a sophistic understanding of rhetoric studies as an impossible yet absolutely ethical endeavor that acknowledges that “different languages produce different worlds” (249) and that further acknowledges that any attempt to make “these worlds communicate” is a rhetorical process that “enabl[es] languages to trouble each other in such a way that the reader's language reaches out to the writer's language.” For “our common world is at most a regulating principle, an aim, and not a starting point” (249).That is, we cannot begin to realize justice or peace, for example, with any expectation of a “common” or translatable language. Yet it is this precise recognition (of the impossibility) that allows for the possibility of justice or peace. Citing Walter Benjamin—who describes the unsettling in every language due to the aftershocks of the “tremor of other languages”—Cassin writes: “This ‘wavering equivocity of the world,’ linked to the plurality of languages inasmuch as it is possible for us to learn them, seems to me to be the least violent of human conditions. A plurality of languages of culture that astound each other, this is what I wish for Europe. To be uncertain of the essence of things, uncertain of the essence of Europe, would be the best outcome for Europe and for us all” (258).Uncertainty is, granted, not a comforting political or ethical state of being. Yet we are here; we are always already here, neck deep in the “wavering equivocity of the world”—and word. The sophists (with all the scholarly caveats acknowledged) invite us to work with the impossibility presented by the plurality of languages—to embrace uncertainty and to view it precisely as our way forward. I acknowledge that this provides no satisfactory answer to uncertain times, but certainty is surely (I say with irony) the problem. It is time, the kairotic time, to start making bricks to build a less violent future.

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

With this issue, Philosophy & Rhetoric begins its fifty-first year. It is an honor to play a role in this turn and a privilege to serve the journal as editor.Looking back for a moment, I remember my first encounter with P&R as a young graduate student at Northwestern—Tom Farrell gave me the galleys of a forthcoming article, a gift that led me into the journal's archive and left me to hope that my first piece of scholarship would appear in its pages (almost, but not quite). Since then, P&R has been a constant source of inspiration, provocation, and understanding. In 2005, I was quick to accept Gerard Hauser's invitation to serve as the journal's book review editor, all the more so as it offered a chance to work closely with a scholar that I had long admired. The opportunity exceeded every expectation. Over the course of a twelve-year collaboration, I benefited so very much from Hauser's sharp insight, intellectual generosity, and friendship. Jerry is a cherished colleague and a good friend.This is a moment to underscore the importance of the inquiry that has defined and distinguished Philosophy & Rhetoric from its very first issue—with respect to this remarkable history, I strongly recommend reading Hauser's introduction to the fiftieth anniversary issue (50.4). Whether one looks inside or outside the academy, there is an evident if not urgent need for original scholarship that addresses the intersection of philosophy and rhetoric. This is a moment to extend and deepen P&R's longstanding mission, not least in light of emerging lines of inquiry, shifting disciplinary constellations, new forms of writing and reading, and popular skepticism about the value of the humanities.The work ahead is a joint effort. From the beginning, I want to express my thanks to each member of the journal's editorial board, including several individuals who agreed to serve after the print deadline for this issue. In the same breath, it is my pleasure to announce Daniel M. Gross as the journal's new essay and forum editor and Kelly Happe as the P&R book review editor. I am grateful for their willingness to serve the journal. All editors should be so lucky as to have the chance to work with such talented and thoughtful colleagues.Perhaps transition is the norm, not least for philosophical-rhetorical and rhetorical-philosophical inquiry. But transition is neither uninterrupted continuity nor unhinged change. With its fifty-first volume, the journal publishes articles that exemplify its best traditions. They are an original and important mix, a set of jointly-edited inquiries that ask after our most important questions, afford theoretical and practice insight, and open space for debate. With them appear select book reviews and a variety of forums and critical essays, along with a new “books of interest” list. The volume's fourth issue will be a guest-edited special issue.There will be time to speak more about what's to come. Here, in this moment, there is a more pressing call, a need to pause and reflect on a truly remarkable record of intellectual leadership and scholarly service.Gerard Hauser edited Philosophy & Rhetoric for fourteen years, assuming the position in 2003. Fourteen years! Before that, between 1976 and 2002, he served variously as the journal's coeditor, associate editor, and consulting editor. And before that, from 1970 to 1976, he held the post of book review editor. One of Hauser's many articles appeared in the journal's second issue.This record is not simply commendable, though it is that. It is astounding, a truly extraordinary accomplishment, one that testifies to Hauser's sustained intellectual vision, tireless leadership, and steadfast commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry, all of which have served the interests of multiple fields, supported groundbreaking scholarship, and promoted crucial intellectual exchange. For the vast majority of the last fifty years, Hauser has served if not led Philosophy & Rhetoric. He has broadened the journal's audience and deepened its reach. His patient and visionary work has distinguished the journal—nationally and internationally. Hauser's contribution to Philosophy & Rhetoric is not simply self-evident—it is indelible, properly so.In this light, and on behalf of the journal and the Pennsylvania State University Press, it is my utmost pleasure to name Gerard Hauser as Philosophy & Rhetoric's editor emeritus. I do so with abiding gratitude and in the hope that there will be moments in the future when I have the good fortune to work closely with Jerry.Last but by no means least, I want to express my deepest thanks to Jean Hauser, who has served as P&R's managing editor for the last ten years. This extraordinary service demands the fullest possible recognition. As so many well know, Jean's work has made a crucial difference—to the journal's editorial group, its contributing authors, and its readers. I have personally relied very much on her skill, insight, dedication, and wit. On more than a few occasions, she has kept me out of the tall grass. In the last months, she has taken the time to introduce me to some of the more hidden ways and means of the journal—I am very grateful for this help.In the coming weeks, I hope that Philosophy & Rhetoric's readers will take a moment to reach out and express their appreciation to both Gerard Hauser and Jean Hauser. Individually and together, they have served—and indeed built—Philosophy & Rhetoric with grace and with the greatest distinction.

I begin with an anecdote. While a senior at a small liberal arts college, I participated in a year-long senior seminar on evolution. The central questions were how we come to be human and, more basically, what it means to be human. Units were taught from the perspectives of biology, various traditions of philosophy, theology, education, history, and world literature. Faculty were drawn from across the curriculum, each taking units and assigning readings from their discipline that addressed our central questions from an evolutionary perspective. Importantly, the faculty leading seminar discussions also attended each session, so that every meeting possessed the possibility of full-scale intellectual battle not only with and among the students but (oh joy!) among the esteemed faculty. The first unit was led by two biologists who assigned Charles Darwin's On the Origins of Species (1845) and Theodosius Dobzhansky's Evolution, Genetics, and Man (1955). Ours being a Jesuit institution, we were required to enroll in eighteen credits of philosophy, twelve of which had to center on Thomism or related topics, along with sixteen hours of theology. We students were curious as to how the priests, especially, would respond to an evolutionary perspective that did not begin with a creator and had humans crawling out of the genetic swamp's primordial ooze, so to speak.We were not disappointed. In fact, when we detected that norms of civility and decorum were keeping pointed disputation in check, we asked sniggling questions, having learned from our Jesuitical training how to be provocateurs. Although there is nothing remarkable to recount from their disagreements, because we had been educated by Jesuits we understood perspective meant everything, and the seminar's jousts were nothing if not contests waged from divergent starting points. What does linger is a question born of the way the biologists were appropriating Darwin and Dobzhansky, pushing them beyond scientific inquiry to address existential considerations. The dissonance between what we assumed motivated a scientist's disciplinary curiosity and the way these scientists were thinking prompted a humanist in our class to query one of our professors as to why he studied biology. His answer was that he thought it gave him his best shot at understanding what it means to be a human being. We had not anticipated that. Pursuing science to answer ontological and metaphysical questions about being seemed at odds with our curriculum's foundational appropriation of the ratio studorum to achieve a specific (moral) perspective on the world and on human existence most particularly through theology, philosophy, and literary subjects. Our professor's answer accepted the humanistic values of a Jesuit education while affirming there were many roads to Rome. To oversimplify, it reinforced the search for productive perspectives, such that when considering multiple paths to understanding (more on this later), the question was not which road you took, but a) whether the road led to your destination, and b) what you discovered along the way.Ever since Greek antiquity, rhetoric has been understood as an art of influencing audiences through arguments, emotions, and character; through persuasion (movere), instruction (docere), or delight (delectare). Moreover, that art has been understood as both a regime of instruction (docens) and use (utens). Without passing into the sociology of knowledge, it is worth spending a moment to remind ourselves of rhetoric's complex history. I focus on rhetoric because, as the journal's founding statement suggests, Philosophy and Rhetoric is concerned with rhetoric as a philosophical category. We are led to ask, therefore, what it means to be a “philosophical category.” In its most basic sense, it is a domain of speculation about philosophy's first principles, about its relationship to how we come to understand our world (epistemology) and experience (ethics), and possibly it is related to our being in the world (ontology). But it also can mean to be under the rule of a superordinate system of thought, of philosophy itself—whatever that might be, whatever that might mean.In 1949, P. Albert Duhamel published his important essay “The Function of Rhetoric as Effective Expression.” Duhamel followed the intellectual fashion of the day, which emphasized interpreting historical texts in terms of their antecedent influences. He argued that a milieu of metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological assumptions gives each theory of rhetoric its unique character and distinguishes it from relatives distant and near. No single idea of rhetoric embraces all others; they share only a concern for effective expression. Although written nearly 70 years ago, Duhamel's position remains an important interpretive stance. His theses that individual rhetorics must be read in terms of their presuppositions and that all rhetorics share an abiding concern for effective expression are particularly relevant to the challenge that was first undertaken by this journal fifty years ago to explore the intersections of philosophy and rhetoric and that it continues to emphasize today.There is much to admire in Duhamel's argument, especially its resistance to a certain type of reductionism in his reasoned defense of plural rhetorics and the methodological rigor his analysis advances for distinguishing among rhetorics. Still, Duhamel's argument carries problematic implications. Reading a theory in terms of its metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological presuppositions implies that we can read a text “correctly.” Whether there can be a single, “correct” interpretation of a rich rhetorical treatise is doubtful, given the inherent polysemy of such texts and the gap between original and historically distant interpretations of context that distorts our efforts to recover what lies beneath time's erasure. In addition, Duhamel's suggested approach to rhetorical treatises strongly implies that rhetorics are derived from antecedent philosophical positions. This begs a still hotly contested question that dates from rhetoric's original theoretical formulations by the elder Sophists. Finally, even though Duhamel's argument construes rhetorical theory as deriving from philosophy, it implies deep philosophical ambivalence toward rhetoric because the practices it theorizes are not entirely trustworthy. Rhetorical discourse aims at effectiveness, not eternal truth. Consequently, most philosophical stances have difficulty accommodating a theoretical treatise on rhetoric without reference to their own philosophic positions, which valorize the eternally true, or at least an orientation toward truth, and its discursive prerequisite of trustworthy speech.The historical benchmark for these problems is found in the quarrel between Gorgias and Plato. Gorgias celebrated the psychagogic powers of language, while Plato lamented the consequences of an abandoned quest for truth. Plato regarded philosophy to be a quest for eternal truth through reasoned arguments, while Sophists and rhetors sought mere probabilities through sensory engagement structured by phantasia and mimesis (Plato, Gorgias 464a–466a). Consequently, Plato regarded the only acceptable rhetoric to be one brought to heel by submitting first to dialectic in order to secure its claims (Plato, Phaedrus 262c, 266b, 269c–274b, 277b–c).The Gorgias-Plato quarrel highlights lingering issues for establishing an intellectual stance between philosophy and rhetoric: How are we to understand the power of words? 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ABSTRACT This fiftieth anniversary reflection begins by recalling a debate on its pages about the origins of rhetoric, which queried the relationship between Plato and the Sophists. I argue that contrary to the shared assumption of the scholars in this debate, Plato and the Sophists differed less over what counts as good philosophical/rhetorical practice than over whether its access should be free or restricted. An implication of this proposed shift in interpretation is that Plato and the Sophists are both reasonably seen as “post-truth” thinkers, concerned more with the mix of chance and skill in the construction of truth than with the truth as such. Focusing on Plato's hostility to playwrights, I argue that at stake is control over “modal power,” which is ultimately about defining the sphere of what is possible in society. I end with a brief discussion of the problematic of public relations as an ongoing contemporary version of much the same story.

ABSTRACTSome arguments that are delivered in a dialectical exchange are never again recalled. Others are repeated again and again across argumentative situations and settle in a community's shared cognitive environment, thus demonstrating a memetic quality along lines that have become popular with several cultural theorists as a way of describing the evolution of culture. Moreover, some arguments may themselves act as memes. If memes “are replicators and tend to increase in number whenever they have the chance” (Blackmore 1999, 37), then they should be of interest to rhetoricians and argumentation theorists. I explore the relationship between arguments and memes, considering the nature of the meme and its argumentative potential. While controversial, meme theory promises to shed new light on how persuasion works in our mutual cognitive environments, and the attention it gives to how reasons move from mind to mind encourages the effort of the exploration.

In this article, I analyze the debate between Raimond Gaita and Christopher Hamilton on the rhetorical practices appropriate to achieving lucidity (full attention to moral reality). I concentrate on the deployment of untimely terms (taking “soul” as my central example) as a means by which both Gaita and Hamilton attempt to provoke lucidity in the reader. In the final sections of the article, I use this case study of the moral term “soul” to set out a theoretical model for the process of becoming lucid in order to (partially) defend Gaita's philosophical style against Hamilton's criticisms. At stake is the possibility of other forms of rigor, other forms of clarity, and other forms of cogency than analytic philosophizing typically presumes.

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

In chapters on the Gorgias and the Meno in his 1997From Plato to Postmodernism, James Kasterly argues that an important point made in the Gorgias is that Socrates fails to persuade Callicles. Its lesson is that philosophers will never succeed in persuading nonphilosophers if they rely on dialectic, with its premises grounded in epistemology (32, 34), and in the Meno, he finds a type of dialectic that functions rhetorically (67). In this new book, The Rhetoric of Plato's “Republic”: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, Kastely builds on his earlier work. He reads the Republic as Plato's effort to address the implicit challenge posed by Socrates' defeat in the Gorgias. Plato's purpose in the Republic, he claims, is to set forth and enact an alternative to dialectic, an alternative that he identifies as a philosophical rhetoric (that is, a rhetoric for philosophers), that would enable philosophers to persuade nonphilosophers to value justice and morality above all else. The Republic, on his reading, not only (if obliquely) argues for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic but also practices it and thus attempts to constitute interlocutors and engaged readers as the moral, justice-loving subjects of a new republic.The crucial passage that generates Kastely's reading occurs at the beginning of book 2, when Glaucon enters the conversation after Socrates' exchange with Thrasymachus in book 1 has stalled. Thrasymachus, exhausted and frustrated by Socrates' dialectic interrogation and by Socrates' refusal to allow him to state his opinion directly (350e), has withdrawn from genuine engagement; instead, he placidly agrees with whatever Socrates proposes (351c). Glaucon challenges Socrates: does he want really to persuade them or just give the appearance of having persuaded them (357a–b)? Kastely argues that here Glaucon is referring to the kind of “persuasion” that Socrates has practiced on Thrasymachus—a nit-picking (from Thrasymachus's point of view) dialectic that wins on technical points but that changes few people's minds and hearts. Yet there is a potential problem with Kastely's interpretation, namely, that Glaucon does not state that the distinction he intends is between two types of persuasion (artificial and real); rather he states that the distinction is between two types of arguments on behalf of justice—arguments that propose behaving justly as prudent for the benefits that treating others well confers and arguments for living justly for its own sake, without reference to benefits. However, Glaucon may indeed mean both, as Kastely maintains. And in support of Kastely's interpretation, there are other references in the Republic to dialectic as a problematic way of convincing nonphilosophers: most noteworthy (among several) is Adeimantus's insistence that although philosophers can as a result of their training often defeat nonphilosophers in dialectical argument, this “victory” does not mean they have really persuaded their opponent or anyone (487b–d).For Kastely, the development and enactment of a rhetoric for philosophers is at the heart of the Republic: “Is it possible, then, for a philosopher to discover a rhetoric that would permit philosophy to have some sort of purchase on public opinion and persuade an audience of the truths philosophy has discovered? The Republic is aware of the importance of this question and has chosen to foreground it dramatically. It understands that, as a dialogue, it must provide an answer to that question, if philosophy is to be anything other than a deeply limited and esoteric activity. … For this dialogue simply not to self-destruct, Socrates has to make the case for a viable philosophical rhetoric” (122).The title of chapter 4, “Confronting Obstacles to Persuasion,” captures the major theme in much of the rest of Kastely's argument. The most formidable obstacle that the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers confronts is ideology, though Kastely does not use this term, perhaps regarding its usage in this context as ahistorical. In Kastely's words, it is the problem of our failure to recognize that “the desires of the soul have been shaped by a culture and are never encountered in innocent form” (66) or that “the work of political culture is masked, and it is mistakenly read as if current values and desires are the product of nature” (206). With regard to justice, in the view of most people we are just out of fear of punishment or of retaliation if we are unjust; if we could practice injustice to our advantage with impunity (the myth of Gyges's ring), we would, and, moreover, it would be natural for us to do so. Thus, the first challenge to the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers that it is in our interest to be just even if it means losing an advantage is to bring them to understand that all knowledge is “rhetorically mediated” (66). Rhetoric is not the problem but the means of cure: its duty is to make citizens aware of the rhetorical character of what they experience as natural.In chapters 5, 6 and 7, Kastely explores the particular obstacles Socrates faces if his aim is to persuade Athenians of what they may regard as ideologically counterintuitive and unnatural, namely, that a life grounded in justice is the best life. For instance, Socrates' advocacy of women serving as guardians (452a) is, on Kastely's reading, motivated not only by Socrates' belief that there is inherent value in women serving as guardians but also and primarily by his desire to illustrate how a reigning ideology blinds his interlocutors to alternative possibilities (101). While Socrates' interlocutors regard the proposal as unnatural, Socrates argues that thinking of women as guardians is only unconventional but nevertheless thoroughly reasonable.The greatest challenge Socrates faces in the Republic is persuading his listeners that philosophers should be kings. On hearing the proposal, Glaucon warns Socrates that were he to issue the proposal publicly he would be greeted with not only disbelief but also violent resistance (473e). Kastely observes that “Socrates is fully aware of the general population's low estimation of philosophy [and philosophers],” and his discussion of philosophy is a “self conscious rhetorical act designed to mollify an angry audience and to transform that anger into calmness” (109–10). If the response to the proposal were to be as extreme as Glaucon envisions, it is surely unlikely that the crowd would be prepared to engage in dialectic. The foremost rhetorical means Socrates uses to overcome these ideological prejudices are the famous images and analogies of books 6 and 7: the sun, the divided line, and the parable of the cave. Kastely reads these tropes as rhetorical versions of Platonic philosophy that can persuade nonphilosophers, treating them as evidence for his thesis that the Republic argues for and practices a rhetorical presentation of philosophy that is superior to dialectic, at least when it comes to discussing philosophy with nonphilosophers.But there is at least one problem with this interpretation of books 6 and 7 of the Republic. The argument that underpins Kastely's reading—that the Republic is about a search for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic—seems to me to rest on the assumption that Socrates could have presented a more technical and accurate description of these truths but instead took into consideration the limitations of his audience. He chose images because they were more effective than dialectic's definitions and divisions. But Socrates claims that the nature of the subject requires use of images. In a subsequent chapter, Kastely concedes that “even Socrates himself cannot claim with certainty that he has achieved a full philosophical vision” of goodness (157). At least through the period of the Republic, Socrates notoriously relies on analogies and images to describe the good. Socrates resorts to images because he has no choice, not because rhetorically images are the preferred means for a particular audience. In Kastely's defense, it is true that these images have an affective dimension that makes them appealing, and the fact that there are no alternative ways to express this vision does not make the images less rhetorical. They function rhetorically, neither dialectically as argument nor as the simplification of teaching.That a specific philosophical rhetoric is not thematized as such in the Republic leads Kastely almost necessarily to argue that Plato and Socrates enact their program through mimesis rather than overtly arguing for it. Socrates in effect says do as I do here rather than do what I say, since I don't say much about rhetoric. For Kastely, Socrates' criticism of the mimesis of epic poetry and drama is tacit admission of its effectiveness (210), and he would in fact employ it to a good end to advance his own program: “While the Republic ostensibly argues for a certain kind of rhetorical constitution through a specifically prescribed curriculum, what it offers its readers is in fact a different kind of education embodied in the mimetic presentation of an extended act of persuasion. Presumably, Plato intends this kind of education or rhetorical constitution for the actual readers of the dialogue—the readers who have already been subjected to the cultural influences that Socrates would undo or minimize” (79). At the heart of this mimetic theory is “an act of constitution or identification” (217). On Kastely's reading, the rhetoric Socrates enacts in the Republic is obviously not the rhetoric that Socrates criticizes in the Gorgias. The rhetoric that Kastely sees in the Republic is to be “understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220). This Burkean description is not one that Plato would associate with rhetoric, though it is not impossible (given the way he envisions dialectic functioning) that Plato could imagine a type of dialectic that is similarly transformative. There are many varieties of dialectic in Plato, including less rule-driven varieties that resemble the semidisciplined conversation of the Republic. Kastely has appropriated for rhetoric what others (including Plato) might see as a version of dialectic. But perhaps this objection reduces to a quibble about names.Socrates' famous admission in book 9 that only divine intervention could bring about the rule of philosopher-kings would seem to announce the failure of the philosophical rhetoric that Socrates (on Kastely's reading) had hoped would mimetically persuade interlocutors and readers. Kastely's response to the challenge that book 9 presents is twofold. With most other commentators, he argues that Plato never intended to present an ideal polis in the Republic: the description of the guardians, the philosopher king, and so forth was never to be taken literally. The Republic is not about the formation of an ideal state; the description of the kallipolis that dominates is in fact a trope to show the formation of the properly ordered soul. If this is the case, then Socrates' admission does not thwart his purpose. Secondly, Kastely argues that Socrates' withdrawal from politics can be read as a rejection of the imposition of the philosophical life by a philosopher, who is, after all, a king, in favor of the transformation of individual citizens through the rhetorical means that he sees Socrates' enacting (181).Kastely's is a bold thesis. It asks us to accept not only that Plato came to accept a socially responsible role for rhetoric in the polis but also that in the Republic Plato acknowledges epistemologically that there is no escape from culture, that all “knowledge” is rhetorically mediated. It is also an honest book, as Kastely raises and addresses objections to his reading. Because it is an honest, rigorous book, I benefited immensely from the encounter with it, though I was ultimately not persuaded by its thesis.

ABSTRACT This article gives an account of the nature and purpose of Kant's poetic rhetoric in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. I argue that Kant employs a poetic mode of rhetoric in order to provoke a passionate, enthusiastic response in his audience. I go on to show that Kant became increasingly skeptical of poetic rhetoric's pathetic power after publishing Dreams. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Kant's confrontation with the Sturm und Drang led him to formulate a moral critique of poetic rhetoric and its tendency to undermine its audience's rational autonomy. I conclude by highlighting the significance of this critique in and for the development of Kant's mature rhetorical theory.

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

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

AbstractThis article examines Rancière's account of politics from a performative perspective. It brings insight about linguistic performativity to bear on key examples of political subjectification in order to illuminate the value and limits of a Rancièrean account of politics. It argues that Rancière's account of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political activism helps shed light on how language produces the political subjects of dissensual politics and illuminates the important role citationality plays in that production. Nonetheless, a performative analysis reveals that Rancière's account, with its emphasis on the momentary character of politics and its briefly detailed and decontextualized examples, glosses over the necessity of citational repetition to the intelligibility and disruptiveness of an act of resistance. Without an account of politics more attuned to these iterative dimensions we may be unable to cultivate the ethos required by the conditions of our age or the terms of Rancière's own account.

Deep Rhetoric is addressed to philosophy and rhetoric. And, like the journal, its questions emerge from the problem of a long-standing and uncomfortable conjunction, the “and” that divides and joins in one stroke. Over the course of eight chapters or a “series of closely related essays” (8), Crosswhite argues for a redefinition of rhetoric's place within our society's ethical imagination (giving it new “rights” to reason, justice, and wisdom, rights usually given to philosophy) and thereby returns rhetoric firmly to its original arena, the human condition. Such a recovery of rhetoric, if not its empowerment, grounds Crosswhite's concern for questions that philosophy shares with rhetoric only in a kind of grudging détente. It also says a great deal about his claim that rhetoric may be (or perhaps was all along) philosophy's best critic, offering us other ways way of loving wisdom, seeking justice, and contending with violence.A note on “deep:” Crosswhite's “deep” is both a move against philosophy and a gesture toward going “beyond” rhetoric as an academic discipline. Rhetoric began—like philosophy—amid the conditions of humanity: our questions of virtue, community, and communication of both. Rhetoric's migration into a university setting says less about its essences (one being its connection to teaching) and more about how education has shifted away from a concern with those conditions (3). Moreover, as Crosswhite notes, rhetoric has not been treated well in American higher education; it has been especially damaged by “destructive elitist” attitudes that simplify the complex “communication capabilities” needed for social life (3). Yet if rhetoric can go or become “deep” enough, Crosswhite argues, if it can do what it has always done all those times institutions have tried to kill it off—respond to controversies “for a specific time and in a specific place,” ‘hosting’ them as honest and useful (6)—then it will thrive. In the end, Crosswhite is after this fully “critical, creative, and truthful” rhetoric (177).Crosswhite solidifies rhetoric's “rapprochement” with philosophy (177) in chapters 5 and 6, an extensive and productive reading of Heidegger. The work of that German philosopher/rhetorician is one of many shared substances between the two schools of thought that Crosswhite gives attention to throughout the book. A typical review would summarize those substances and their attendant chapters, moving toward an analytical climax. Yet a fair reviewer knows such a limited space cannot do justice to Crosswhite's dense arguments, especially about Heidegger. And also Crosswhite covers some old ground. I will not rehearse his expansion on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1969 work (chapter 7). Readers of this journal know that Crosswhite organized and oversaw a special issue in 2010 about the legacy of The New Rhetoric.Crosswhite's individual chapters are not as important as his work on concepts that bring rhetoric into its “deeper” self. Crosswhite argues for a retrieval of four concepts “from millennia of philosophical and theological reifications” (79).1 It is these concepts—transcendence, psychagōgia, logos, and humanism—that deserve a reviewer's (and reader's) attention. Their development throughout the essays shows in a more direct way how this book situates itself within rhetorical theory and the history of rhetoric and in relation to the progress that has been made in both of those arenas in the second half of the twentieth century. These concepts are not new to philosophy or rhetoric, but taken as a whole they define the “deepest” rhetoric.Crosswhite's rhetorical attention to these concepts highlights a significant difference between philosophy and rhetoric: he insists that rhetoric resist the urge for an epistemological telos, prominent in philosophy. Thus a “deep” rhetoric pursues a direction but acknowledges that such a pursuit consistently destabilizes any actual arriving. In that frame, Crosswhite expends the first one hundred pages or so (chapters 1 and 2) trying to name but not terminally define “deep rhetoric” through these concepts; the rescued concepts become mines in which Crosswhite repeatedly enters, not because he is looking for “gold” but because he wants to describe rhetoric as the work of mining. And so he claims rhetoric as a “way of being.” This claim is not new to rhetorical theory, but what makes Crosswhite's attempt so persuasive is the ambitiousness of the book as evidenced in the depth of the mining, which extends past the first two chapters, the concepts aiding his analysis of justice, violence, and wisdom. Along with this depth, the book's breadth also argues forcefully that one does not “study” rhetoric so much as live it, because its influence is felt across the human condition. That is what makes rhetoric philosophical or, better, what makes philosophy rhetorical. And the living is an entangled, material existence. Mixing humor and serious scholarship, for example, Crosswhite couples his close reading of Heidegger with an explanation of how silence and logos inhabit the manner in which he and his wife share a bed.Living amid others requires the practice of transcendence, the first of the key concepts. Crosswhite writes that rhetoric as transcendence is “a way we open ourselves to the influence of what is beyond ourselves and become receptive, a way we participate in a larger world and become open to the lives of others, a way we learn and change” (17). This participation is a meeting with each other “in language of some kind” (61), equal to “our being-in-logos” (56). In the eternal battle between rhetoric and philosophy, rhetoric's practice in the mundane (as opposed to philosophy's attachment to the ideal seen in Plato's heavenly visions) has been seen as a weakness. In Crosswhite's estimation this lack of heavenly transcendence is not a negative when seen through a different frame. Crosswhite argues that rhetoric is “something we are, not something we have” (61). This implies a different relationship to philosophy, one hidden by “knowledge” as a having. In addition, rhetorical transcendence has an “ethical force” because ethics is “constitutive of rhetoric” (107). That force certainly has something to do with “the good,” but it does not entail imposing that “good” on others through violence, physical or rhetorical. For Crosswhite the difference between an ethical transcendence and what he calls a “warrior theory of transcendence” is the latter's lack of restraint (117). This lack is best seen in Plato's description of Gorgias: he is a man who seeks “conquest and domination” along with wealth for himself (117), but ironically his rhetoric is not rhetorical enough. “Socrates' real charge against Gorgias's rhetoric is that it does not go deep enough” (124, emphasis his). In other words, rhetoric may have been a skill or “discipline” for the Sophist but not a manner of life and so less than ethical. That ethical manner of life is a constant communicative examination, a questioning of what we claim to know and put “under” our power. This opens us to something or someone else.This communicative examination is part of the second concept, psychagōgia. Translated as “leading the soul,” this Platonic notion is a “special power” of logos (different than its usual association with sophistic magic or spellbinding) that Crosswhite draws out from the gospel of John, known for its description of Logos as the Word of God. “Pros ton theon” (“toward the god”) becomes the lack of “possession or knowledge of an ultimate being” or “definite, certain, foreseeable, outcomes” (31) or a “not-having, a way of comporting oneself toward but not a way of actually knowing or grasping or achieving the goal” (30). This restraint is what makes this concept a rhetorical one rather than a philosophical one. Psychagōgia as a practice of “deep rhetoric” is “a life of pursuing and loving that stretches out toward wisdom but never arrives at it” (253). This “limited” power is a power “to which one must yield and not simply a power that one attempts to master and use for oneself” (133). Such a limitation makes rhetoric more ethical than its more end-orientated sister, philosophy. And a “deep rhetoric” internalizes this limitation on a primal level. One might suggest that what keeps philosophy grounded—that is, what prevents its heavenly transcendence—is its rhetorical “leading.”Psychagōgia is something “which we can never completely objectify” (131). This is because of its relation to logos, the third concept. Logos “moves in and against the semiotic languages of human beings; it makes them possible, but it works strongly against their certainties and ideologies” (79). Yet this “it” is not “a thing but a direction” (79). In terms of the gospel of John it is “the dynamic movement toward and into G-d,” and it must continue moving toward that which “will always exceed the forms of comprehension that lead toward it” (34). In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, rhetoric's “essence [as logos] is its onwardness” (79) or its experiencing of psychagōgia. This particular formation has implications for rhetoric as it continues its ethical turn. Rhetorical scholars have struggled indirectly with the content of rhetoric and so also with the content of its ethic. But if it is toward a good, if it is a leading toward, then rhetoric is not suspicious but in line with the w/Word as a calling toward. Such a leading toward enhances the power of language, a win for rhetoric.Or in Heidegger's thinking, rhetoric “is an awareness of” a logos, an awareness “deeper” that extends beyond the discipline, a “more original” logos of “communication, controversy, deliberation, and being-with-one-another—the essential sociality of Dasein” (195). This “ungrounded” logos (197) appears as Crosswhite pushes past what he sees as Heidegger's self-centered “authenticity” toward “a richer conception of logos and a more complex vision of sociality” (198). Conceptualizing “sociality” as that which is human, Crosswhite argues that human “beings” are not “simple entities, enclosed in themselves, but are movements toward and away from each other,” the world, themselves, and “whatever else their transcendence reveals” (174). These movements are both inherently rhetorical and ethical, movements toward a good.It is the movement of logos—the quintessence of rhetoric in a way—that violence puts to an end. And yet, in Crosswhite's opinion, rhetorical violence is often the response to physical violence. Here he contends with Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” suggesting that as much as it offers productive paths, it also is “intellectually traumatized” by the wars of the twentieth century and so is “an extreme example” of this tendency toward violence in response to violence (Benjamin argues for a divine violence that would overwhelm a mythic violence) (168–69). Crosswhite refuses any solution to violence (ontotheological or otherwise) and argues for a “suffering” rhetoric, one that experiences and endures violence (166). The best response to violence is a “deep rhetoric” that both prevents “overarching” theories and that is “carefully attuned” to a form of the human as sociality amid transcendence. Yet Crosswhite stumbles a bit here. At times his own analysis is as abstract as Benjamin's. More profoundly, although Crosswhite suggests that Benjamin needs a type of violence, many readers of Benjamin might disagree. Even if one accepts that Benjamin does indeed have such a need, the argument between the two is a larger one concerning rhetoric and religion. One cannot easily dismiss Benjamin's theological adherence to some form of messianic glory, Jewish or otherwise, merely because of the effects of war. And perhaps our lack of intellectual traumatization due to the wars of the twenty-first century says more than we let on. In the end, many religions answer violence with a “suffering” savior. Ironically, Crosswhite describes his response to violence as a more human, “less ultimate” work of justice and peace, a kenosis ironically not unlike that of the primary character in the gospel of John.On the other hand, Crosswhite's argument against violence certainly has value and legitimacy, and it grounds his central claim on a related subject: humans need to do more work (rhetorical and otherwise) to effect justice. However, when Crosswhite dabbles in religious rhetoric (along with the gospel on John, he draws on Augustine, Buddhist meditation, and the Hebraic tradition to develop his idea of rhetorical wisdom in the last chapter), he does not go deep enough. He draws from these rhetorical depths, but he seems to stop at moments when they could offer more. Ironically, as Crosswhite shows in his interaction with wisdom in the last chapter, it is religion in part that makes possible his most substantial critique of Heidegger, namely, that Heidegger does not go deep enough into human sociality. In fairness Crosswhite notes that he has worked to show the “formal similarities” of explicit religious rhetoric to his own “deep rhetoric” (366) but also admits he could only give a “preliminary account” of this relationship (367). In a less than generous reading, the whole book itself is only a “preliminary account” of a deep rhetoric, leaving readers wanting more. In a generous reading, this is exactly what a philosophical rhetoric is supposed to do: keep the conversation moving. In other words, as with most of our best scholarship, its strength is also its weakness.The last of Crosswhite's four concepts—humanism—certainly poses the questions that religion does but does not define the human exclusively in religious terms. Like a rhetorical justice, the “human” and its attendant wisdom is “for a time” (54). For Crosswhite, humanism is not about “realizing a specifically human essence,” such as rationality, but about “struggling for human dignity,” dignity here being understood as a freedom to develop (46). Deep rhetoric thus must “prevent its own humanism from congealing into something reified and dogmatic” (56). Humanism is not just dynamic but also ethical, limiting itself, and thereby making itself accountable to others. This is the human condition to which a deep rhetoric “aspires” (222), a condition achievable, yet always achieved kairotically, within time, space, and logos. Many rhetorical scholars could enthusiastically embrace this definition, mainly because it emphasizes both a looking back and a future orientation.In the end Deep Rhetoric is certainly a virtuous keystone (perhaps not yet a capstone) to the long process of “mining” within Crosswhite's thinking that began with his own dissertation on Heidegger nearly thirty years ago. It is also a broad survey of the ways in which rhetoric can and should become a different kind of philosophy, its own kind. The book is both deep and wide, and its movement steers us toward something that can be called good. If indeed this is a sustained direction for rhetorical theory in the future (and I hope it is), Crosswhite's book will be read for a long time.

John Dewey is a philosopher who seems perpetually on the verge of rhetoric. He displays a continual interest in the necessity of communication for democracy, and yet he often remains vague (maddeningly so) as to what shape such communication should take. While this would seem to limit his usefulness for rhetoricians, the opposite has proven true. As scholars of rhetoric, we now find ourselves in the midst of a renaissance in studies of Dewey. Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice seeks to both consolidate the gains made by such scholarship and further encourage rhetoricians' interest in Dewey's work. Namely, the various authors in this volume concern themselves with treating Dewey's writings as contributions to a broader “democratic culture” (2) of which rhetoric is a vital, animating component. In doing so, they offer a collective argument as to why Dewey is, and should remain, a rich resource for rhetorical inquiries into democracy, treated here as both a practice and a way of life.Trained Capacities is divided into three sections, each dealing with an aspect of Dewey's scholarly work and his career as a public intellectual. The essays in the first section, “Dewey and Democratic Practice,” look to Dewey's engagement with the perpetually important yet problematic subjects of science, philosophy, and religion—“the architectonic assumptions of democratic practice” (20). William Keith and Robert Danisch lead off this section with “Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric.” They begin by arguing that “Dewey does not offer a rhetorical pedagogy, a way of practicing rhetoric,” which is no surprise to rhetoricians familiar with Dewey's work (28). Rather, they argue, Dewey's unification of scientific thinking and democratic deliberation provides a “sociology of rhetoric,” or “a systematic account of the theoretical and normative ways in which social structures, institutions, and forms of individual agency are both guided by and constituted by communicative practices” (28). For Keith and Danisch, Dewey supplies a way of discussing the structures through which rhetorical action is made possible in the first place. Publics who are facing problems must attend to the ways in which their specific structural contingencies delimit the available means for developing democratic practices and arriving at sound judgment. Keith and Danish's essay is rich with ideas, and sure to provoke further discussion amongst pragmatist philosophers and rhetoricians alike.Philosophy and Rhetoric readers will want to pay special attention to Scott Stroud's contribution to Trained Capacities, “John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and the Role of Orientation in Rhetoric.” We found it to be one of the high notes of this edited volume in that it goes beyond “the account of rhetoric that Dewey held (or failed to hold)” in order to craft a “Deweyan pragmatist rhetoric” (48). This is a worthwhile project that has been under way for some time, but Stroud does something too few have done by bringing Kenneth Burke into the mix. The result is enjoyable and provocative. Deweyan rhetoric scholars will likely have intuited the linkages between Burke's notion of orientation and Dewey's understanding of habituation on their own, and it is this intuition that Stroud fleshes out for the book's readers. Stroud argues that Deweyan morality is situational and that Burke helps us understand how these situations are constructed linguistically via grammars of motivations and purpose. Individuals' responses to these situations are habitual, as they have already been oriented to them by the language of their respective communities. However, that does not guarantee that the individual's habituated responses are helpful—sometimes they are trained incapacities.Stroud suggests that our various trained incapacities call out for reorientations. He reaches beyond Dewey's preference for respect and civility and embraces Burke's notion of impiety. Drawing on Richard Rorty's understanding of the strong poet, Stroud suggests that the poet and the ironist are the artful critics most suited to addressing public moral dilemmas. Importantly, such artistic provocations are not undertaken for their own sake but rather (in keeping with a Deweyan pragmatist rhetoric) to answer actual problematic situations. Finally, in true Deweyan form, Stroud insists that these artful incongruities should take place experimentally if the project of moral reorientation is to result in moral development.Scholars have long been fascinated with Dewey's conflicting views on religious faith, and they go to great pains to demonstrate that his democratic faith was closely tied to his religious beliefs. Paul Stob's contribution, “Minister of Democracy: John Dewey, Religious Rhetoric, and the Great Community” extends this project. He begins with Dewey's response to William Jennings Bryan's discourse during the Scopes trial, noting Dewey's frustration with Bryan's “divisive, antagonistic, intolerant religious rhetoric” (66). Is there any room for such “fire spitting” in Dewey's Great Community? For Dewey, religious rhetoric should tend toward inclusivity, and its uses should be governed by the kind of society it is likely to produce. Stob argues that rather than dismiss religious rhetoric outright, Dewey appreciated the power of religious symbols as evinced by his own use of religious rhetoric. Stob contends that in using religious rhetoric himself, Dewey did not simply co-opt religious symbols but also infused “public culture with a new religious purpose” (68) and direction. Stob argues that Dewey's own rhetorical project—one characterized by religious dissociation and democratic faith—cemented his reputation as a minister of democracy. In the end, “Dewey's gospel, like Bryan's gospel, relied on judgments of sin and evil, of hope and deliverance, of community and communion” (80). The key for Dewey was to dissociate religiously infused language from the kinds of dogmatism that breed division and instead turn it to the work of creating the Great Community.Part 2, “Dewey and His Interlocutors,” is of particular interest to rhetoricians since it shows Dewey practicing the sort of democratic culture that the book as a whole works to theorize. Essays by Jean Goodwin, Louise W. Knight, Keith Gilyard, and Walton Muyumba treat Dewey's public interactions with the familiar figures of Lippmann, Addams, Du Bois, and James Baldwin, respectively. While these authors tread familiar ground, they nonetheless shed new light upon the close connection between Dewey's interactions with his various interlocutors and his subsequent public pronouncements. Across these essays the message is clear: “indispensable opposition” (as Goodwin figures Lippmann) is of vital importance to a democratic culture animated by rhetorical practice. Such opposition is no small matter, and these essays demonstrate the mutual influence necessary to sustain a democratic public. However, for those who pick up Trained Capacities with the hope of learning more about either rhetoric or Dewey's philosophy, it is worth noting that the essays in this section tend to focus more on the respective interlocutor than Dewey himself. Rhetorical theory and philosophy take a backseat to history—albeit history that is fascinating and very well written.One exception to this section's overt focus on history is Jeremy Engels's “Dewey on Jefferson: Reiterating Democratic Faith in Times of War.” Engels investigates Dewey's rhetorical uses of Thomas Jefferson for the purpose of affirming the necessity of democratic faith. It was through his invocation of the historical Jefferson, Engels argues, that Dewey attempted to build “an ontological, prepolitical foundation that would keep Americans from straying too far from the democratic cause and that would keep democracy itself from transforming into something else entirely” (94). Engels supports this claim by supplying a fascinating, though necessarily brief, genealogy of Jeffersonian tropes in American democratic theory (which surfaced in a variety of forms throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Engels's primary purpose in doing so is to demonstrate the importance of history, and its rhetorical translation into new situations, when responding to antidemocratic challenges. In Engels's telling, Dewey's democratic faith was beset by a “crisis of war and exception” (103) not unlike our own. He responded by turning to Jefferson's writings, seeing in them a moral foundation for a lasting democratic faith. The challenge for rhetorical theorists today is to understand “how best to render democratic faith to the jaded ears of a postmodern generation” (103), a particularly salient problem for citizens struggling with the prospects of a seemingly endless war on terror. No easy answers are given, but the lesson is clear: attending to Dewey's rhetoric of democratic faith better equips us, immersed as we are in our in our own conflict-laden politics, to confront the challenges of crisis and war that necessarily and tragically lurk at the margins of democratic culture.The essays in section 2 serve as a powerful reminder that Dewey's contributions to both democratic theory and rhetoric were at their most robust when they reflected his engagements with equally committed interlocutors. As Knight states, summarizing the outcome of Dewey and Jane Addams's disagreements over the First World War, “Addams had learned from Dewey and experience, and Dewey had learned from Addams and experience. Their debate over World War I illustrates how they applied their ideas of pragmatism to their own lives as well as a point made often in this book: that when, over time, debate turns into shared inquiry, there is mutual learning on both sides” (121).Though Dewey did not directly engage in rhetorical theorizing, his work nonetheless affirms the social necessity of rhetoric for the vitality of a democratic society. This point is particularly evident when we turn to Dewey's work on education, which is taken up in the third section of the book. Evincing concern for the ways in which Dewey's philosophy can be applied to rhetorical pedagogy, the essays in this section demonstrate that practice is the central link between Dewey's pragmatism and “experimental” methods of rhetorical instruction designed to inculcate democratic values. As Nathan Crick observes in “Rhetoric and Dewey's Experimental Pedagogy,” such an “experimental attitude … is not merely one facet of democracy; its cultivation within a public is the culmination of democratic social life itself” (186). In short, as students are given lease to test ideas through rhetorical interaction, their capacity for healthy skepticism, self-reliant inquiry, and other critical tools necessary for sustained democratic practices increase exponentially. As Donald Jones is quick to point out, encouraging this type of rhetorical engagement is no easy task for the teacher. Nonetheless, such an experimental attitude is necessary for the building and maintenance of a truly democratic culture.To be clear, Trained Capacities is not concerned with crafting a clear narrative in which Dewey's work is transformed into rhetorical theory, nor one in which Dewey is treated as a rhetorician. Rather, Trained Capacities moves beyond such strict binaries—“Dewey and Rhetoric,” or “Dewey as Rhetorician”—and instead treats his pragmatism, public engagement, and commitment to education as equally valuable components of an overarching faith in democratic culture. Central to, and constitutive of, such a democratic culture is the practice and teaching of rhetoric. It goes without saying that such a broad, sweeping project is bound to miss some things, to focus too much on others, and to appeal to a variety of readers from all over the intellectual spectrum. Even so, Philosophy and Rhetorics's readers will want to read Trained Capacities, which is a welcome contribution to studies of pragmatism and rhetorical theory. The individual chapters, each with their various strengths and weaknesses, work in concert to create the beginnings of a Great Community of Dewey scholarship.

Abstract“Morality is relative to culture” is a descriptive claim, but in practice its normative entailment is rarely embraced. It is often claimed that this poses a problem of consistency for relativism as a morally normative theory: either relativists do not act in accordance with their beliefs or they hold different beliefs from what they espouse. This article evaluates a debate between Paul Boghossian and Stanley Fish over relativism, analyzing their arguments on the relationship between theory and practice in ethics and the tenability of moral relativism. I defend two claims: that the truth or falsity of moral relativism has significant bearing on action and that morality is based on a conjunctivity of doxastic and practical discursive commitments. Establishing the conjunctive commitment argument, I make the case that the doxastic and the practical lie at the heart of normative reasoning in general and ethics in particular and discuss the implications of such a view for rhetorical theory and community.

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

ABSTRACTIn “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam,” Bruno Latour wonders whether academia, particularly the humanities, can rethink its dedication to critique and cultivate an ethos that cares. I question whether Latour's commitment to enlightenment without modernity, particularly his allergy to transcendence, inhibits his ability to transform critique into care. For Latour, transcendence makes impossible the due process of his proposed collective and the corresponding practice of real world politics precisely because it dangles a truth beyond compromise. While Latour regards notions of a transcendence in terms of a beyond as a precursor to terror, Levinas finds terror in the practice of philosophy without the disequilibrium transcendence can bring. Thus, I argue that Levinas offers Latour a way to uncross God that posits the beyond as something other than ineffectually and debilitatingly distant, as something that can inspire us to care.

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the ongoing debate between pluralistic and monistic approaches to dealing with critical disagreement. I return to the theory of world hypotheses advanced by Stephen C. Pepper, an understudied figure in aesthetics and pragmatism, to enunciate a version of pluralism that centers on the nature of critical evidence and its functioning in social settings of argument. I argue that Pepper's expansive philosophy holds interesting implications for what can be called the metaphysics of criticism, a point missed by partisans of standard views of pluralism and monism. Building on his analysis of equally autonomous (but noncommensurable) world hypotheses, this study enunciates an explicit notion of rhetorical pluralism that goes beyond simple relativism. This account can be labeled “evidentiary pluralism,” since it internalizes standards for evaluation to specific worldviews and recognizes their changeable nature in the context of critical disagreement.

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) has emerged as an academic field primarily devoted to opening inquiry into the relationship between human and nonhuman objects. By treating human and nonhuman things as ontologically coequal, this emerging philosophical school has rejected the correlationist and anthropocentric tendencies of most ethical systems. However, as objects expand and multiply, some become so big that they can't be seen, understood, or described in the ordinary spatiotemporal sense. Precisely because they are here but cannot be consistently experienced, these unique objects have severely complicated our lifeworld. For example, global warming can be remedially understood as a sum of many small objects (particulate matter, sunlight, thermometer readings, hurricanes, raindrops, etc.), but it is also an object itself—one so massive that we can't point to it or wrap our (scientific) heads around it. Similarly, plutonium-239 can be thought of as a simple object (an isotope or fuel for a nuclear reactor), but with deadly radiation and a half-life of 24,100 years, its real scale is not comprehensible. Oil fields, capitalism, cities, and endocrine disruptors share a similar set of properties.These objects, coined “hyperobjects” by Timothy Morton, are very real; yet, they exist beyond, and independently of, the reality of humans (15). Part 1 of the book is dedicated to defining hyperobjects, while part 2 addresses the social issues raised by OOO. Part 2 also offers unique solutions and some poignant criticism of the rhetoric of environmentalists. In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Morton seeks to answer two questions: what are hyperobjects, and how can we develop ethical, political, and social systems that account for the unique characteristics of hyperobjects? In answering the first, Morton details five shared properties of hyperobjects: viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity.Hyperobjects are viscous because they are stuck to us and we are stuck to them (28). The feeling of heat on the back of our necks is emitted by global warming and becomes stuck to us in the form of rashes, burns, and cancer. The bisphenol A (a controversial industrial chemical used in plastics), radiation, and mercury flowing through our bodies may not be visible, but they are quite real: “They are what they are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there they are, impossible to shake off” (35). Global warming can't be wished away by denialists, and plutonium-239 doesn't lose its radioactive force simply because humans have decided it would be better off stored in Yucca Mountain. In short, the property of viscosity certifies the presence of hyperobjects.Hyperobjects are nonlocal because they are not here, despite the fact that human objects feel their presence. For example, most of the worst effects of global warming will be geographically limited to the people least responsible for the phenomenon. Decisions made in developed countries to produce and consume billions of tons of carbon will primarily impact the periphery at a dramatic scale. Shorelines in Pacific island countries will recede and indigenous nations in the Arctic will lose vital components of their local culture. However, drowning islands and melting ice are just local manifestations of “some vast entity that” we are “unable directly to see” (47–48). Importantly, these local manifestations do not function synecdochically—we do not come closer to the hyperobject of global warming simply because we see that it has “distributed pieces,” nor do we understand the hyperobject of radiation by surveying Chernobyl (49).The property of nonlocality diminishes the ability of science to prove the evolution or effect of hyperobjects. Scientific devices are intrinsically local, which leaves ample room for skepticism with regard to strict causality. For example, traditional scientific measurements can't guarantee that carbon emissions strengthened Hurricane Sandy or that the Daiichi nuclear disaster definitively caused radiation exposure in Berkeley. This geographical distance feeds the denialist meme that cold weather in one locality denies the existence of anthropogenic global warming writ large. Morton regards this “right-wing talking head” strategy as a “desperate attempt” to avert the ontological disaster posed by global warming (48).Hyperobjects are temporally undulated because they are “time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind” (58). Hyperobjects are here now, but their dramatic timescales confuse and irritate cognitive maps. Although humans can likely comprehend the number 24,100 (the half-life of plutonium-239), it is extremely difficult for humans to understand, or scientific instruments to measure, the effect of radiation throughout that period of time. The natural reaction to this temporal stretching out is to withdraw from or displace hyperobjects: send the nuclear material to Yucca or inject captured carbon into oil reservoirs. However, these quick fix solutions ignore, or repress, the environmental costs that will be shifted onto future generations. Morton finds that temporal undulation provides fodder for global warming denialists because any future projection based on scientific measurements is inherently uncertain, and scientific certainty has been rhetorically constructed as the primary justification for proof of anthropogenic global warming. Modern belief systems tend to prioritize the present and do not sufficiently account for future objects.Hyperobjects are phased because they occupy a high-dimensional space that makes them “impossible to see as a whole on a regular three-dimensional human-scale” (70). Surely humans experience tsunamis and feel radiation sickness, but those are simply “snapshots” of the hyperobject that occupies a more complex space (70). Selecting one “thin slice” of the hyperobject to analyze is just as likely to weaken our understanding of the hyperobject as it is to improve it (70). Morton uses the study of an iceberg (pictured on the front cover of the text) to illuminate phasing. Given adequate light and distance, humans can see the tip of an iceberg. However, 90 percent of the iceberg is under water. The scientific reaction to this dilemma is to move the camera underwater, but this choice distorts the part of the iceberg that sits above water, rendering a complete picture impossible. The scientist faces other choices as well. Should she move in close to the iceberg, or is there some perfect critical distance? If she gets close she may miss important context, but if she moves too far away, she misses the undulations and imperfections of the surface. Should she drill or melt part of the iceberg? If she did, she might end up knowing more about the iceberg she intended to observe, but she would have fundamentally altered the object of study in the process. Should she map the movement of the iceberg? This may tell her something about the pedigree of the object, but she can't trace back forever, and she won't ever perfectly know the future itinerary of the iceberg. None of these dilemmas deny the reality of the iceberg; rather, Morton sees them as emblematic of the failure of the modern scientific tradition. The more that modernity develops indexical signs to mark hyperobjects, the larger the “not-all set” becomes as well (78).Hyperobjects are interobjective because they constitute the mesh that floats in and around other objects (83). Hyperobjects are causal webs that leave footprints on other objects. In other words, many hyperobjects are “crisscrossing” force fields (93). Global warming leaves a footprint on the back of our neck, and endocrine disruptors leave footprints on our breasts and thyroids. As in any interconnected system, manipulation of one object has cascading effects on other parts, either changing the form of other objects or creating “gaps and absences” in the mesh (83). Humanity seeks benign substitutes (e.g., margarine for butter, or Splenda for sugar), but each of these has unpredictable effects that extend beyond itself. Importantly, the appearance of these markers only tells us about the “past of a hyperobject,” which seemingly distorts the metaphysics of presence (90). Although some scientists and philosophers chase the tail of hyperobjects, Morton argues that they are “never present” and that this end of the present lifeworld is precisely the “reaction shot” necessary to spark the radical transformation of ethics proposed in part 2 of his text (93, 95).The second part of Hyperobjects transitions from the definitional to the normative, outlining ethical, political, and social systems that account for “the time of hyperobjects” (97). The precipitous pace of environmental degradation has placed human and nonhuman objects in grave danger, a peril that is not accidental and not solely relegated to future generations. Hyperobjects shatter the contemporary lifeworld: the natural world can no longer be considered a national park that humans can observe from “behind the windshield of an SUV” or a conservation area to be preserved for future generations (127). The future is here, and it is the job of philosophers to show that this lifeworld has come to an end—there is no longer (if there ever was) a difference between substance and accident, nor a difference between the human and the natural (101). Facing fatal substances that will outlast anything resembling a close relative of themselves, humans must develop an “ethics of the other, an ethics based on the proximity of the stranger” and learn to democratically coexist with nonhuman objects (124, 121).Morton launches three poignant criticisms at modern environmental philosophy. First, he argues that environmentalism, by merely greening the existing social order, is doomed to continuously reproduce fatal substances (116). Modern environmentalism finds salvation in technologies that reproduce, or at least don't address, the fundamental dangers of hyperobjects. Although Morton does not use these examples, his criticism underscores the irony of “environmentally friendly” hybrid Hummers, corn-based biofuels, and natural-gas fracking (at least it isn't coal, right?). Sustainable capitalism, to Morton an oxymoron, merely attempts to preserve a lifeworld that is no longer with us.Second, he argues that environmentalism is too anthropocentric: it is focused on preserving human objects, often at the expense of nonhuman objects. Utilitarianism, to Morton a profoundly self-interested philosophy, attempts to protect “humanness,” which is a “fictional idea” that “ecological awareness actually refutes” (131).Finally, Morton contends that environmentalism is too focused on developing persuasive strategies (public relations) that don't radically alter the existing ontological order. Citing the inevitable failure of PR as a motivating force, Morton notes that “we need to get out the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business” (181). Humans are in denial about “their role in the Anthropocene,” so reasons (rhetoric) will not reverse their apathy. Morton implies that rational discourse has failed and that the affective domain must be awakened through the magic of art. Controversially, Morton notes that “no further proof is required” and more “reasons” actually “inhibit our responsible action, or seriously delay it” (183).Morton is deeply concerned about the apathetic right as well as the failures of the environmental left. He seeks to shatter the existing ethical framework and to pick up the pieces with a fundamental ontological transformation, in the form of object-oriented art: art that “sticks to us and flows over us,” not to make us think, but to “walk [us] through an inner space that is hard to traverse” (189, 184). As examples, he cites the sound art of Francisco Lopez and Jarrod Fowler and Robert Ashley's She Was a Visitor. These pieces “resist classification” as music yet still stimulate a contemplation (rest) that attunes humans to the nonhuman hyperobject (187). It is impossible to describe these truly postmodern works, but that is likely the point. For Morton, it is this dizzying contemplation that will help humans wake up to hyperobjects that have been, are already, and most definitely will continue beyond human existence. Postmodern art is part of the magic that Morton believes will alter the environmental behaviors that persuasive strategies have failed to change.Scholars of rhetoric and philosophy will find Hyperobjects engaging in a variety of ways. Morton is intensely concerned with denialist strategies that hyperbolize uncertainty to justify apathy toward the hyperobject of global warming. Yet, he is equally troubled by the cynicism of the left that “maps perfectly both onto the U.S. Republican do-nothing-ism and Gaian defeatism” (157). For him, the job of philosophers is to awaken humans to the fact that their lifeworld has come to an end and attune them to their nonhuman coequals (101). This conundrum requires a diminution of academic distance: academics must engage to forge an ethical system that doesn't “reduce or dissolve” nonhuman objects (157).Hyperobjects also seeks to broaden the objects of study for philosophers and rhetoricians. Instead of seeking to persuade or writing persuasion onto art, scholars are beckoned to appreciate atonal music, which allows nonhuman objects to confront us. Interestingly, Morton focuses primarily on sight and touch as the basis for his phenomenological encounters, often heavily focused on the reality of the object at the expense of understanding language as experience. However, hyperobjects don't simply deliver affect; language certainly shapes and mediates human understanding of nonhuman objects—a point Morton himself models by his intentional use of the phrase “global warming” instead of “climate change” (8). Thus, this text provides a starting point for rhetoricians and philosophers to explore the way language, undoubtedly a hyperobject itself, interacts with the interconnected mesh of objects.Morton's methodology sways “somewhat sickeningly between phenomenological narrative and scientific reason,” which is both necessary and discomforting (6). His text is focused on actually existing objects that he says have a “reality [that] is verified beyond question” (7). And his faith in the ability of science to determine some facts (the existence of global warming, the power of black holes, the influence of radiation on the body, etc.) is firm. He even draws on this faith to deny the truth of other's phenomenological experience, by criticizing the skeptics who deny global warming based on their own local experience (being situated in colder weather). However, Morton also claims that he is stuck, “unable to go beyond” first-person “situatedness” (5). Although I do not intend to deny the value of phenomenological criticism (or the scientific facts supporting the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis), there is certainly a tension between his method and results that merits further exploration.Hyperobjects also presents useful insights for scholars interested in humanist and posthumanist ethics. Morton's criticisms of environmental apathy, leftist cynicism, and global warming denialism are persuasive. Humans have spurned nonhuman objects that will be “responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking” (201). And, our relationship to those objects continues to wreak devastation on the human and nonhuman world. For Morton, this dilemma requires a shattering of the human-nonhuman hierarchy, a democratic coexistence, and recognition that the being of a “paper cup” is as profound as humanness (17).If this sufficiently shatters human-centered ontology, it is not entirely clear how we should pick up the pieces. Morton proposes atonal music and object-oriented art to stimulate an object-oriented ontology, but unfortunately he provides little evidence that these strategies will change environmental attitudes. Even if such strategies generate respect for the nonhuman world, some further ethical centering will be needed. Human objects face choices daily, decisions that once made will result in the destruction of some nonhuman objects (e.g., to eat local meat or globalized vegetable produce, to drive or ride the bus to work, to breastfeed or feed with formula), and by flattening hierarchies of objects, OOO provides no template for ethical environmental action. In the face of this ethical impasse, human objects anthropomorphize nonhuman objects by writing human language onto them. We find mountains thinking, stones speaking, hammers wanting, and cigarettes demanding, and we act as if we can understand the desires of inanimate objects. Unfortunately, for those invested in OOO, this act of attributing human traits to nonhumans seems to strengthen the primacy of humanness and weaken the democratic coexistence that Morton theorizes. For rhetoricians and philosophers interested in environmental ethics, the challenge now is to develop viable ethical systems that preserve human and nonhuman life in the age of hyperobjects.

We often confuse commercial representation with political intervention. For instance, a recent Cheerios advertisement featuring a biracial family provided many people the evidence of a welcomed cultural shift, recognition of a growing acceptance of what might have been taboo and even illegal in the United States a handful of decades ago. We stumble upon another example as we realize that washing down a Chick-fil-A fried chicken sandwich with a 7–11 BigGulp has somehow become not one but two political acts of cultural defiance. While companies aligning themselves explicitly or implicitly for or against cultural politics might seem odd, the frequency of such events demonstrates a noticeable—and increasing—overlap between economic production and political intervention. At the risk of sounding clichéd, these cases remind us that we are what we eat. That said, what “we are” and “what we eat” are both at stake in contemporary culture because technological and media innovation have made that culture more malleable. Jeff Pruchnic's Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age: The Transhuman Condition does not delve directly into these particular events, but the problems the book engages help us better understand and respond to modes of cultural production that we must come to see as increasingly heterogeneous. What is the role of rhetoric in an economy of “just-in-time” accommodation?Tacking widely across cultural, economic, and biological registers, Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age seeks to theorize rhetorical possibility after cybernetics, a field in which every thing seems open to redesign and reinvention. Toward these ends, the book traffics in micro-studies: embryotic stem cell manipulation, a Burkebot, video game effects, stock market algorithms, political redistricting, a collection of shoes, among many more. What links these various items is the extent to which biological, cultural, social phenomena once considered autonomous are now susceptible to direct intervention through and as technological innovation. Pruchnic's central claim in response to this development is simple, albeit counterintuitive: contemporary technologies and media are evidence of an increased humanization of social and technological processes and are not inhuman forces of calculation and computation. This is to say that the proliferation of and increased reliance on information media and technological processes allow contemporary cultural practices to more effectively mimic the complexity and vitality of biological processes. While such a claim might be simply stated, its implications for understanding ethical engagement with technics may be quite profound for humanities study in general and for rhetorical scholarship in particular. Put differently, the implications concern the extent to which epistemological categories have always been shaped by supposedly inhuman forces of techne, which then refigure a host of available responses to changing technological conditions. The position allows us to explore and respond to cultural institutions that have markedly become less concerned with establishing mass markets than with identifying and intensifying market subsets that are fueled, in part, by more efficient methods of demographic research and more effective deployment of marketing techniques.Pruchnic's response to this moment is two-pronged. First—in a task occupying the book's first two chapters—he broadly traces how epistemological and technical domains are becoming conflated in contemporary culture. Second—in a series of case studies through the book's final three chapters—he articulates a version of rhetorical ethics robust enough to respond to such a conflation by engaging in specific analyses of contemporary culture. Taken as a whole, the book offers a theory of rhetorical practice and cultural analysis that moves away from logics of exclusion (classification, division, and separation) and instead emphasizes inclusionary logics that seek to establish and maintain ongoing processes of interaction.In the initial chapters, Pruchnic offers analyses of the conditions of contemporary culture, especially with regard to the ways in which cultural life is steeped in technological advancement. Key to this work is a genealogy that Pruchnic constructs and that he uses to trace how, through technics and media, “forms of knowledge/representation are not based on quantification or calculation but on dynamics processes for maintaining relationships” (13). Pruchnic arrives at this claim by arguing that we are witnessing an increasing overlap between the two previously distinct domains of logos and techne, the former largely encompassing reason and communication—traditional human activities—and the latter the material technologies and what has long thought to be nonhuman mechanics. These chapters propose that the traditional separation between these two domains allowed entire systems of ethical and political practice to be founded and sustained. We need not look too far to witness that these divisions play out explicitly in the university, where liberal arts, social sciences, and hard science are well instituted as distinct lines of inquiry. That these two domains now find themselves to be overlapping and have become less distinct is the cause of a great many of our contemporary “problems,” which include the fracturing of democratic processes and anthropocentric effects such as global climate change and armed unrest. Far from claiming that today is unlike any other, Pruchnic instead maintains that the logic undergirding much of these activities is different in kind only because of the speed and complexity with which these operations are undertaken. In response, he proposes that contemporary culture should be understood and characterized as a “technologic,” that is, as “forms of interaction and engagement that not only find their most explicit manifestation in contemporary technologies but signal the imbrication, or recombination, of techne (formalistic and goal-directed strategies) with logos (both in its sense of human ‘higher reason’ and of the general structuring of human life) that Plato attempted to so carefully separate and the division of which became a touchstone for Western thought” (9).As it combines two terms, the “technologic” helps refigure the many debates and problems we find ourselves a part of. Pruchnic finds a basis for this refiguring through a careful reading of Martin Heidegger's work concerning technology, especially as it pertains to the ontological. Toward this reading, Pruchnic goes on to argue that Heidegger's critique of technology's increasing centrality in human affairs has less force now because it regards contemporary technology as only calculation, reductionism, or standardization. Pruchnic instead revisits Heidegger's ontological approach to historical analysis and proposes that we might consider the developments that Heidegger casts as epochs of self-understanding as a “history of techniques” (71). The turn toward techniques is buoyed, as Pruchnic contends, contra many of the criticisms of Heidegger's conflation of material technologies and conceptual frameworks, by the fact that such a conflation may actually be a strength in reorganizing our capacities for responding to technological innovation. Recasting Heidegger's historical analysis as one that traces techniques eliminates issues of authenticity and emphasizes instead “elements of rhetorical thought and praxis that were largely crowded out by Platonic thought” (64). Rhetoric, considered thusly, then is better understood to be “a vector of forces or practices … premised somewhere between the application of physical force and the immaterial realm of pure reason or judgment” (17). This analysis expands Pruchnic's initial proposal, suggesting that many of our humanistic programs and modes of cultural critique—for which Heidegger serves as the most productive example—that privileged the rational, political actor may now be compelled to contend with affective or “subrational” forces as a necessary part of cultural work.Taking affective force seriously has several consequences. In particular, affective approaches focus on processes over individuals as well as asignification alongside signification. The first among these had follows from and led to a revaluation of the importance of ecological relations. Pruchnic locates our interest in ecology, as it regards our understanding of technologic, in the Macy conferences, a series of interdisciplinary discussions regarding the future of science that took place from 1941 to 1960. While the organizers hoped that they would unify disparate branches of science and theory, the conferences are remembered mostly for their work on cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Pruchnic finds in the Macy conferences two primary imports for rhetorical theory. First is the shift toward considering the ecological interaction between actor and environment. This shift gave rise to accounts of homeostatic processes that treated human and technological interactions as a circulation of agency and not the result of a central human actor controlling a nonhuman environment. Second, the conference revised notions of teleological aims often at the core of instrumental orientations to technology, a switch that especially impacts how telos may be related to technologies whose own “purpose” shares functions with many of our own in that they have changed over time. Together, these two findings have much significance for rhetorical theory and practice, as they undercut the reductive communication models that rhetoric is often charged as facilitating.In addition to outlining the conceptual work done by the conferences, much of which the humanities are only now coming around to appreciate, Pruchnic shows how early cybernetic thinkers drew heavily on rhetorical technique to conceptualize cybernetic theory. Both cybernetics and rhetorical practice invent, develop, and encourage robust and flexible techniques for organizing processes of interaction. Pruchnic focuses on how “techniques” may enable theory to be applied through rhetorical and humanities practice, defining the term as a set of “flexibly responsive practices that are directed toward motivating the performance of a generic action and/or the maintenance of a general equilibrium” (16). “Techniques” as a term and concept allows for the development of a technologic that recognizes, Pruchnic notes, that “the very same advances in, and increasing importance of, technologies and communicational media so apparent in other areas under review in this essay are crucial considerations for any attempt to rethink the contemporary status of economics, let alone labor, in the present moment” (31). Pruchnic's approach both widens the scope of his project, allowing him to include a wide array of interdisciplinary discussions, and it also does the important work of refiguring some of the practices we experience as central to rhetorical work.Pruchnic's understanding of techniques and his alignment with the complexity that subtends cybernetics leads him to outline an ethical response that affirms its imbrication within those same modes of technological production that it seeks to change rather than to adopt a critical practice that seeks its intervention from a position outside. Why this is a crucial pairing is evident in how Pruchnic understands rhetoric's role in contemporary culture: “The fundamental challenge of the present is not so much to discover some radical alternative to contemporary conditions … but to figure out how these same techniques already immensely immanent in contemporary capitalism can be made to produce different outcomes” (38). Such a task is even more pressing when we consider that scientific authority to produce and maintain what counts as fact vies with the demand to prioritize “direct application and intervention as the core goals of scientific research and knowledge production” (25). While Pruchnic often cites the work that science does, by no means is the cybernetic moment restricted to lab coats and electrical circuitry. What is true in science is also true in other realms. For example, the granular redistricting of voting districts preselects the voters charged with voting for certain politicians, and manufacturing is able to produce more specific goods for more specific subsets of markets. Basic business notions of supply and demand have become as complex and intertwined as communication's outdated sender-receiver model.These realizations lead Pruchnic to enter an ongoing conversation regarding the role of humanism in rhetoric and cultural analysis. Pruchnic carefully traces the development of posthumanism (an analysis that I cannot do justice to here), noting a tension in most posthuman thought insofar as it “ends up reinforcing [humanism's] superiority or autonomy, the position of the human as the one who ‘decides’” (50). This tension leads him to posit that “we might have to reconsider humanism as something of a rhetorical strategy rather than a philosophical doctrine” (54) and to propose the “transhuman condition” as a key organizing principle to explain contemporary culture. Working from Julian Huxley's short essay “Transhumanism,” Pruchnic posits that the increase in and proliferation of technological intervention helps displace categories of natural and artificial in favor of the idea of flexible but robust processes. “Transhuman” as a term allows Pruchnic to articulate four connected processes of interaction that characterize our contemporary technologic: transition, which details the ways that the continuing process of defining what is and can be human has accelerated in recent decades; transference, which denotes the ways that functional operations can be shared and joined between previously separated domains (human, nonhuman animals, and technologies); transactional, which refers to common processes and procedures for establishing equilibrium rather than a discrete object to be passed along; and transversal, which describes the unusual connections between separated domains of activity such as nature and culture, logos and techne. These terms are threaded throughout the book as a way to organize the intense intermingling of previously separate domains. Although these operations are distinct enough to warrant separate terms, they become confused, as each relies on the others to articulate its own operation. This, however, may be a strength as well, since the confusion performs something of the complexity that the book seeks to trace.Pruchnic's move to the transhuman as a controlling concept in place of others more commonly used today (e.g., posthumanism, antihumanism) opens an avenue of inquiry in which human activity is marked less by periodization than by processes. This avenue then positions cybernetics not as a distinct break but as an intensification of a technologic that extends far beyond our contemporary moment. Pruchnic closes the general framing of the transhuman condition with the aforementioned “history of techniques.” Our “parametric present” is a condition heralded by the standardization of time through clocks and the development of now fundamental physics, a perspective that challenges that idea that we have only recently broken away from more humanism. What characterizes the “parametric present” has been hinted at throughout this review. The conflation of techne and logos provides a greater capacity for miming biological processes in connection with markets, science, media, and democratic governance by its admission of previously nonhuman technology into our approach to epistemological structures. Such a conflation resists a reduction of technologics to mere quantification or calculation and instead gestures toward contemporary culture as concerned with algorithmically managing associations with granular detail.So, where does rhetoric fit in again?While the initial chapters sketch the broad terms of the conditions of contemporary culture in the cybernetic age, the three final chapters isolate important threads for rhetorical ethics. To start, chapter 3, “Rhetoric and the Age of Intelligent Machines,” offers a specific site in which rhetoric and cybernetic theory converse, revisiting Kenneth Burke's response to cybernetics and information technology to show how rhetoric might be revised with respects to technological innovation and social power. While Burke's anxieties about technology are well documented, Pruchnic finds that offers ways of responding to our technological moment. 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A recent trend in communication studies has seen increased attention to delineating the rhetorical dimensions of publics, public spheres, and public opinions, a project largely inaugurated by Gerard Hauser's (1999)Vernacular Voices. This intervention has shifted the focus from elite discourses of public officials in institutional spaces to everyday acts of discursive engagement in more quotidian and diverse public fora. Meanwhile, theories of “deliberative democracy” have come to be a dominant strand of democratic theory among political scientists and political philosophers. Proponents of the deliberative turn consider deliberation, plurality, and public participation essential to a healthy democratic polity and argue that “consensus based on reason-giving” should be the goal (Dryzek 2010, 322). As such, and continuing a long line of criticism that runs from Plato to Kant, Rawls, Habermas and others, rhetoric is often treated in deliberative democratic theory as the opposite of rational deliberation and as a tool to be used merely to persuade rather than to prove (Dryzek 2010, 322–23).More recently, however, there has been an upsurge of deliberative democratic theory that employs a rhetorical lens or rhetorical concepts and that seeks to emancipate rhetoric from its Platonic and Kantian shackles, such as Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) and Robert Ivie's “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now” (2002). Seeing see deliberation as necessarily rhetorical, these theorists shed light on the essentially controversial and agonistic nature of political debate, dialogue, and decision making. They view rhetoric not as merely monodirectional or a form of deceit but instead recognize that rhetoric occurs across multiple public settings and circulates throughout various publics.Continuing to push this dialogue further, Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation, a collection of essays edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen, adopts a rhetorical lens to consider public deliberation, political discourse, and democratic society. In a well-crafted introduction, the editors advance the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a unifying perspective for developing a cross-disciplinary “understanding of citizenship as a discursive phenomenon.” In this connection, they argue that “discourse is not prefatory to real action but in many ways is constitutive of civic engagement” (1). Through eighteen chapters divided into three sections, the contributing authors use rhetorical citizenship as an umbrella term to engage a number of discursive sites, citizen actors, and various publics and public controversies in both theoretical musings and practical, international case studies on deliberative democracy. Overall, the essays marshal “a diversity of actual deliberative practices” in considering “how everyday people participate in and practice citizenship, and how everyday practices might be enhanced” (8).The authors proffer citizenship as a mode of political activity and as a discursive and deliberative process that requires public reflection and entails a rhetorical orientation to the arguments and debates that take place in democratic society. Enacting rhetorical citizenship is thus not merely constituted by “deliberative exchange among representatives and citizens across multiple sites” (4). It also requires “internal deliberation” by citizen actors with regard to the public arguments put forth by their political representatives and other public officials. Rhetorical citizenship is a process that requires both citizens' rhetorical output and their discursive, critical engagement with political discourses. To these ends, the individual authors consider “actual civic discourse” that occurs across multiple sites and through a multiplicity of actors at the same time that they interrogate notions of rhetorical agency and issues of “voice, power, and rights” (7). Further, although proponents of deliberative democracy take consensus and the elimination of conflict as their end goal in public debates and controversies, this collection affords a space for considering the productive and emancipatory nature of conflict, contention, and agon in the public sphere and within public spheres—while also looking ahead to rethink consensus and deliberative norms in general.Throughout the collection, the authors draw heavily on rhetoricians and political philosophers, including Gerard Hauser, Robert Asen, Robert Hariman, Kenneth Burke, Jürgen Habermas, and John Dryzek, among others. While the overall themes of the book are centered on deliberation and rhetoric, scholars from communication studies, discourse analysis, and political philosophy, along with fields outside the humanities such as political science and sociology, all contribute to the dialogue. Developed initially for the 2008 “Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation” conference in Copenhagen, the individual chapters in this collection represent this disciplinary diversity while bringing together academic voices from throughout the international community as well. Each chapter is prefaced by a brief introduction written by the editors, effectively organizing and clarifying the objectives that tie the essays together. As a brief review does not afford space to consider each of the eighteen individual chapters in this collection, my aim here is to reflect on several essays from each section, all of which serve to illuminate the book's broader themes and contributions.The book's first section provides the historical precedents for deliberative democracy, rhetorical citizenship, and the idea of the public forum. Kasper Møller Hansen, a political scientist, traces the origins of deliberative democracy through political thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey. While contemporary theories of deliberative democracy are often regarded as constituting a new scholarly trend, such dialogues have their roots with these historical political thinkers and with earlier conceptions of the republican tradition. While Hansen provides a historical background for deliberative democratic theory, Manfred Kraus traces the origins of rhetorical citizenship to ancient Greece. Kraus persuasively argues that the Sophists' “analysis of operational truth with respect to the contingencies of human life,” along with their belief in the “constant negotiation between contradictory points of view as observed in the Athenian practice of political assemblies and law courts, laid the ground for the concept of citizenship” (40). Kraus argues that there was never a Sophist philosophy of rhetoric per se, but when brought together the individuals who identified with sophistry constituted an intellectual movement that presaged Aristotle's later inauguration of rhetorical theory. Finally, tracking and comparing the development and ultimate failure of forums, town halls, and public meetings in France and the United States, William Keith and Paula Cossart tease out some of the fundamental tensions that complicate the ability of citizens to enact their rhetorical citizenship in various discursive contexts. Together, the essays in this section productively set the stage for the remainder of the collection, offering a historical grounding for the main themes of the book as a whole: deliberative democracy and its republican roots; citizenship as a fundamentally rhetorical, discursive, and agonistic practice; and the need to identify alternative discursive sites where citizens can and do participate in political discussions and perform strategies that mitigate the problems and pitfalls of the formal political sphere.Broken up into three parts, the twelve essays in section 2 break some new ground in terms of theory building and for considering non-discursive norms for engaging in political action and public deliberation. Part 1 of section 2 is perhaps best represented by Marie Lund Klujeff's essay and case study on what she calls provocative style. Political debate can be messy. It does not often live up to the ideals or follow the conventions espoused by political theorists and academics. In the political arena, participants may meet discursive challenges that limit or diminish their ability to effectively contribute to debate and thus must adopt unconventional rhetorical strategies that afford an agentive capacity. Klujeff argues that employing a provocative style in public debate can serve as a “deliberate violation of the norms of official communication and communicative action,” instantiating a “stylistic parody [that] functions as refutation by mockery” (105–7). In the internet debate that Klujeff tracks in her case study, the use of such a non-normative stylistic tactic indeed resulted in “offense and irritation.” However, it simultaneously gave “rhetorical salience to the conflict” for a much wider audience that would have otherwise not been engaged. It also allowed for the citizen provocateur to participate and contribute to the deliberative process. Similarly, in “Virtual Deliberations” Ildiko Kaposi also looks to an online forum to argue that “the criteria for judging deliberative talk need to be treated and interpreted flexibly, and modified according to the circumstances in which deliberation and discussion occur” (119). In all, the four essays in part 1 of section 2 argue that breaking the rules of decorum in public deliberations can serve important rhetorical functions. Such non-normative, provocative strategies do not necessarily seek consensus but instead aim to further community building, help circulate political discourse, and foster moral respect between both debaters and broader publics.The four essays in part 2 examine elite discourse in order to “study how notions of citizenship are portrayed and realized by agents in positions of power and influence” (63). The authors look across multiple public settings and interrogate political subject matter from the literary public sphere to gendered war rhetoric and from political statements concerning a terrorist attack against the Danish embassy to a case study of constitutional law and political philosophy. Challenging the discursive and deliberative norms of the formal political sphere, the elite citizens (including Barbara Bush and Tony Blair) discussed in part 2 are seen to undertake disruptive discursive acts in the midst of formal political settings. The authors demonstrate that while one is able to exercise one's rhetorical agency through such destabilizing acts, the norms in such institutionalized settings are not so easily challenged or subverted. As Lisa Villadsen writes in her exemplary essay “Speaking of Terror: Norms of Rhetorical Citizenship in Danish Public Debate Culture,” in such an “a-rhetorical debate culture” as the formal political sphere, the rules of deliberative conduct determine the standards of “proper” rhetorical citizenship (179). Any deviation from these norms is considered a breach of one's citizenship status. Given this, Villadsen calls for the need to “continue questioning the norms—spoken or unspoken—that underlie notions of rhetorical citizenship in a given national or cultural setting” (179). Using a rhetorical lens to examine why modes of communicative action may succeed or fail allows for greater opportunities to understand citizenship across multiple settings. Part 3 of section 2 continues the collection's broader goals of examining rhetorical citizenship, deliberative practices, and rhetorical agency across a variety of public contexts. From public hearings held in Quebec, Canada, to grassroots groups in New York and Washington, DC, online debates over Danish real estate economic issues, and public engagement with a song from a popular Danish revue, the four essays extend and add to the diversity of sites in which public deliberation occurs and to what effect.The final section offers a set of future-oriented proposals for how rhetorical citizenship and deliberation can be productive for democratic society in ways that are not agonistic or confrontational. Effectively bookending the collection, the three chapters advance strategies and conceptualizations for reducing contentious debate and transforming competing political arguments in such as way as to encourage a more dynamic and constructive public sphere. As an exemplar, Christian Kock's, “A Tool for Rhetorical Citizenship: Generalizing the Status System” reappropriates and reformulates status theories with the aim of identifying how “present-day debaters” and “observers of debate” may find new grounds for building consensus or mutual understanding between otherwise opposing viewpoints (279). In deliberative contexts where “partisanship and polarization rule,” Kock provides a tool for fostering “normative metaconsensus” through narrowing down party-line disagreements to “more specific points—in which either side might have a better chance of persuading people unsympathetic to their positions” (294). This is not only a tool for debaters and the elite, Kock argues, but also a means of building awareness of the nuances of political disagreements among both citizens who consume these discourses as well as the media that represents them.On the whole, the notion of rhetorical citizenship is a timely intervention that aims to rethink the standards and practices of public deliberation and thereby contribute to a healthier pluralistic democratic polity. Perhaps especially in the context of U.S. politics, where the vitriolic bifurcation of present-day partisan lines leaves little to no room for rhetoric and deliberation in the formal political sphere, such a discussion is not only warranted but necessary, providing a way to think through this antagonistic gridlock. Rhetorical citizenship affords a critical space in which to theorize new practices of public engagement and deliberation and to move beyond deliberative democratic theory's insistence on rigid discursive norms and consensus building. We should attend to and take seriously agon, agitation, destabilization, and other nonnormative dissentious acts in order to better understand alternative sites of democratic instantiation. The nature of conflict, contention, and competition is not always derisive and dividing. Instead, as many of the essays in this collection argue, agonistic enactments can be productive and provocative, building communities, circulating discourse to multiple publics, and affording an agentive modality for civic engagement and citizenship. At other times, as the essays in the concluding section argue, there is an evident need to rethink the meaning of consensus in itself and consider rhetorical strategies for orienting oneself to oppositional positions. Across multiple sites, from online fora, grassroots enclaves, and more formal institutional settings, the international case studies taken up in Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation speak to the broad applicability of rhetorical citizenship as a concept.This variety in case studies is indeed one of the strengths of the collection, especially when paired with the disciplinary diversity represented by the individual authors. A concept like rhetorical citizenship, as demonstrated by this diverse collection, produces an opening for various other academic traditions to look to the tools and theories cultivated within rhetorical theory and apply them to cases across cultural and political settings. While the concept of rhetorical citizenship in itself requires the reader to extrapolate in order to see how it might be defined across these ostensibly disparate applications, the editors' introductory chapter and prefatory remarks at the start of each section strategically orient the essays to this larger theme. Moreover, as this disciplinary promiscuity speaks to the broad appeal of rhetorical citizenship, Kock and Villadsen do not provide a justification for why these various fields are represented and what this contributes to the overall dialogue. Interdisciplinarity should not be taken as an end in itself, although that is not necessarily to say that is the case with this collection. The diversity of the authors is likely symptomatic of this being a conference proceedings rather than the editors' attempt at diversity for diversity's sake. Given that the topic of the collection is deliberation and democratic society, however, it seems fitting that a range of disciplinary voices would be represented in this dialogue, especially when humanistic disciplines, while sharing much in common, often are insular and speak in their own respective vacuums.Finally, the collection attends to a wide spectrum of public and political sites where deliberation actually takes place. As the editors state in the introduction, “Focusing on how citizens deliberate allows us to consider both macro and micro politics, but always with an eye to the significance for the individuals involved” (6). In this regard, the editors advance a set of research questions that speak to the larger themes of the book, such as “What forms of participation does a particular discursive phenomenon encourage—and by whom? How are speaking positions allotted and organized? … What possibilities are there for ‘ordinary’ citizens to engage in public discourse?” (6–7). Despite the repeated insistence on the collection's commitment to “vernacular rhetoric,” the public settings and political fora addressed in the individual case studies are not quite as representative of a pluralistic democracy as one would hope. The issue of gender is only explicitly taken up in one essay, while questions of how and where racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ minorities are able to perform their rhetorical citizenship are not addressed.The four essays that engage online deliberation are perhaps the closest the volume comes to exploring vernacular discursive contexts, and indeed these critical engagements are valuable. Participation in such online dialogues, on the other hand, still requires an availability that allows for free time to deliberate as well as the economic security that affords ready access to the internet. The editors assert that “a rhetorical focus has a special regard for individual actors in the public arena, not just the eloquent politician or NGO representative but also the person watching an election debate on TV, chiming in with a point of view through a blog on civic issues, collecting signatures from passerby on a windy street to stop municipal budget cuts, or deciding to join a local interest group” (6). And while each of these sites and settings are addressed, the rhetoric and deliberation that is endemic to the streets, down on the corner, in the market, and even in the local pub are left out of this discussion. The reader is left to wonder who we should and should not consider a citizen, what publics the concept of rhetorical citizenship includes and excludes, who has the capacity to enact their rhetorical agency, and more pointedly, whether access to the public arena and the deliberative process necessarily entails a relative position of privilege. As such, while the disciplinary diversity may be one of the strong points of this collection, this openness is contained by a mostly straight, white, male representation of deliberative democratic society.Despite these omissions, however, Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen's Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation offers an excellent portfolio of case studies and theoretical insights that will surely contribute to future discussions across a range of disciplinary sites. The bridging of rhetorical studies and deliberative democratic theory is an important intervention that is promising for future cross-disciplinary scholarship and for extending the scope of the discourses and deliberative practices that actually do outside more formal political settings. As such, this collection would be well for that focus on rhetorical theory, civic and the public sphere, or as for scholarship that aims to on discursive theories of citizenship across multiple public and international contexts. It also well for scholarship that aims to the between political science and rhetorical studies, a that offers many opportunities for theories of contemporary democratic society.

AbstractThe representation and classification of the structure of natural arguments has been one of the most important aspects of Aristotelian and medieval dialectical and rhetorical theories. This traditional approach is represented nowadays in models of argumentation schemes. The purpose of this article is to show how arguments are characterized by a complex combination of two levels of abstraction, namely, semantic relations and types of reasoning, and to provide an effective and comprehensive classification system for this matrix of semantic and quasilogical connections. To this purpose, we propose a dichotomous criterion of classification, transcending both levels of abstraction and representing not what an argument is but how it is understood and interpreted. The schemes are grouped according to an end-means criterion, which is strictly bound to the ontological structure of the conclusion and the premises. On this view, a scheme can be selected according to the intended or reconstructed purpose of an argument and the possible strategies that can be used to achieve it.

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

AbstractThe Presocratic thinker Parmenides is portrayed in philosophy and rhetoric as a philosopher of static monism anticipating reason's triumph over myth. Such a portrayal is narrow and ill fits the evidence. Parmenides was associated with a cult of priest-healers (iatromantis) of Apollo who practiced incubation, usually in caves, in order to receive wisdom and truth. Parmenides's famous poem “On Being” (“Peri Phuseōs”) reflects these practices. The poem directly invokes altered states of consciousness, revelations from the gods, and an underworld descent (katabasis). Further, the poem is of strong rhetorical interest because it directly discusses rhetorical themes of persuasion, truth, and knowledge. Additionally, the poem suggests that rationality alone cannot suffice to liberate human beings from worldly illusions; rather, reason must be accompanied by a combination of divine inspiration and mêtis (cunning wisdom).

Abstract This article revisits stasis theory, the rhetorical tool that outlines the strategic options of a defendant in a moral or legal accusation. By analyzing the burden of proof of an accuser and deducing a comprehensive model for a modern theory of stasis from the resulting obligations, it develops a system of ten vital staseis (key issues), each of which is by itself sufficient for a defense in front of a reasonable audience. The resulting modern theory of stasis can be a useful heuristic tool for the rhetorical defense against moral and legal accusations as well as for the systematic analysis of judicial speeches and debates.

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

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

Aristotle's Politics: Living Well and Living Together, Eugene Garver's third book on key texts of the Aristotelian corpus, charts the relationship between politics and philosophy through careful detailing of Aristotle's text. In other words, Garver reads the Politics for us. This is an achievement in itself given the gravity of both Garver's and Aristotle's thinking. Garver's reading elaborates the arguments of the Politics in order to establish a claim for what he calls “political philosophy.” His reading offers a methodological defense for a form of thinking that is itself not necessarily either “practical” or “political,” at least as scholars of rhetoric would tend to understand these terms. But Garver gives us a clue to his understanding of political philosophy when he describes Aristotle's “most impressive achievement” in the following way: The Politics “shows how to construct a constitution and a way of life ethically superior to the citizens who comprise the state” (3). Garver thus reads the paradoxes of politics and philosophy as generative rather than aporetic, seeking in the Politics something more than the mere realization of the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle argues that the regime (politeia) is the container in which the bare life of the individual is transformed into the life of a citizen.Garver situates political philosophy through a logic of praxis that implicates statesman and citizen in starkly different registers. Politics is not just about the one but also the many. While this statement may be a truism of the Rhetoric, Garver takes up the Politics in order to articulate the question of the many in a way distinct from a certain rhetorical conception of politics and political practice. Garver brings to bear a political philosophical vocabulary that is guided by the statesman (politikos) rather than the citizen (politeis) or judge (kriteis). The statesman will utilize rhetoric as a practice, as Garver notes, but it is far from clear that the statesman is meant to approach political philosophy from a rhetorical perspective. Garver marshals a series of distinctions highlighting Aristotle's unique conceptualization of the polis, a structure straddling the disjunct between artificial and natural forms of being. This conceptualization figures the polis as both artificial and natural but will come to be understood by Aristotle, according to Garver, through the terms of political philosophy. Chapter 1 deals with the “natural” relationship between master and slave memorably defined in the first book of the Politics. Taking up this “most notorious feature” of the Politics, Garver argues that the concept of natural slavery is not so much a prescription but a description: it is a way to delineate the features of politics and to distinguish them from other forms of relation, such as the family (oikos). In contrast to those modern commentators who focus on Aristotle's references to “natural” slaves, Garver argues that Aristotle's primary concern is actually with the master (despotes), who is unique in that his capacity (dynamis) extends into two tasks rather than being confined to one: first, the administration of inferiors (slave ownership) and second, participation with equals (politics): “The same person is both master and citizen,” Garver notes, and “the principal problems of politics… come from that fact” (26). For Aristotle, Greeks are both uniquely suited for political life and uniquely susceptible to the desire for domination and tyranny (27–28; 33). The drive toward mastery characteristic of the despotes also characterizes the Greek citizen more generally.If the Greeks, whom Aristotle celebrates as the only ethnos capable of meaningful citizenship, are also the only ‘natural despots,’ then politics calls for a structural response to this excess (pleonexia): “Slaves have the wrong nature…. Despots have the right nature, and yet still degenerate without… proper political circumstances” (33). This claim's double-sidedness positions politics not just as a possibility but also as a deep and persistent problem that political philosophy is enlisted to solve. Both sophistical rhetoric (Rhetoric 1354a10–30) as well as the individual and social forms of the polis, then, have a capacity for misrecognizing the sources of political legitimacy. Political philosophy, rather than rhetoric as an “art of character,” as Garver's previous book on the Rhetoric describes it, becomes the response to this problem of politics.Aristotle's Politics relies on the interplay between the search for proper political circumstances and a certain conception of the human. Thus the Politics appeals to a variety of characteristics of the human being, including philia (friendship) and thumos (spiritedness). But these human characteristics become a call for a mode of cognizing and organizing the forms of life that exist within the polis (34–37). The polis, it seems, does not constitute but rather only expresses the relationship of spirit, knowledge, desire, and virtue. Aristotle describes, taxonomizes, and interweaves these concepts. For example, as Garver notes, “You need both thumos and intelligence to be guided to virtue. The conclusion, but nothing leading up to it, talks about virtue. They are connected through citizenship. Without thumos and intelligence, one cannot be political. Without being a political animal, one cannot be guided to virtue. And conversely, only people who can be guided to virtue are fully political animals” (36).These distinctions are crucial to Garver's emphasis on the relation between Aristotelian politics and the logic of political philosophy, which calls for a politics structurally irreducible to economic contract, instrumental rationality, or individual liberty (37–41). Making political societies coincide with the nature of its individuals is not Aristotle's task, as it was for Plato. Such a task is incoherent for Aristotle's polis—a community made up of different elements linked only by constitution and citizenship. Garver notes Aristotle's recognition of the community's inherent diversity, both in its definition (i.e., that a polis is made up of different parts rather than single essences) and its composition (the a polis contains good and bad, strong and weak, few and many).Garver takes up the Politics' discussions of property and education to distinguish Aristotelian politics from its Platonic and modern variants. The moderns and Plato take opposing sides on property: for moderns, private property is the sine qua non of the well-ordered community; for Plato, it signals its absolute disunity. Aristotle takes up the space between the two, arguing that each side commits a political category error. Aristotle, Garver reminds us, “sees no right to private property”; its virtue lies in its use, not its possession (50). Against Plato, Aristotle sees public use of private property as a method for bringing people of different kinds together under the name of the political community, which imbues them with common purpose (49–50). This common purpose leads to a discussion of education: temperance, generosity, and “the virtue of liberality” (51–52). Education is crucially communal; it highlights “what people must share” (53). It reframes self-sufficiency, changing greed to generosity, arrogance to humility, and selfishness to sharing: “Self-sufficiency is redefined when we add liberality to temperance, transforming it from economic to ethical and political self-sufficiency” (57). This type of self-sufficiency is misrecognized; it is a basis for Aristotle's critique of Plato—“even Plato neglected education,” Garver says—and his description of the constitutions (55–56).But education is not a comprehensive good. For Aristotle, it is a quality that follows from constitutional design and the more narrow education of political philosophy. Garver's argument is predicated on a turn to the philosophical understanding of the political constitution. The shift brings us to the ground of praxis, wherein rhetorical scholarship might find itself more—for Garver, too—confident. This ground is the move from politics as techne—whose paradigm is the externalizing viewpoint of the Republic—to politics as phronesis (56; 58–63). Garver describes this shift in political understanding as “from making to doing…. The state cannot be a work of art” (45). The state's—particularly the ruler's—task is not to make the relation between ruler and ruled by “form and matter” (i.e., to posit political equality irrespective of practice) but to instill “self-replicating” virtue, whereby “we become virtuous by performing virtuous actions” (56). Here, the form of the polis–especially its constitution—tends toward a theory of right rather than toward a theory of the good. Garver insists that this recognition of right over good in politics is not due to the modern “fact of pluralism,” á la Rawls. Instead, it has to do with the aims of the polis, which are distinct from (though related to) the aspirations of a virtuous man, who aims toward individual good (57).Hostile to the modern division between the public and the private, Garver argues that for Aristotle, “civic participation never means casting aside and bracketing one's particularity. We never leave behind life in pursuit of the good life” (57). The modern argument views the good life as unencumbered, starting with Locke and Mill through to Rawls's justice as fairness. In contrast, Garver argues Aristotle offers us a different wager: it “encumbers” us with an aim toward the good life, while “unencumbering” us by refusing the “alienation” internal to distinctions of public and private (57–58). What emerges, for Garver, is a “comprehensive” view of political action affirming the relevance of “self-regarding”—private—activity.Arguing for the polis as a complex yet common conceptual form, Garver pins the “comprehensiveness” of an Aristotelian politics to a set of “incomplete” definitions that often appear circular, such as “citizen,” “constitution,” and “state.” In calling the normative basis of politics “incomplete,” Garver's intention is not so much to reconcile Aristotle's thinking with the basic problem of multiplicity as to affirm that the Politics can be seen as part of the political philosophical project of living well. For Garver the incomplete character of the polis is not a damning indictment of the relationship between ethics and the commons (koinon). Unlike in the Ethics, where a single good life is defined (and all others dismissed), in the Politics, Aristotle presupposes plural constitutional arrangements: These “disagreements and errors generate the variety of constitutions, including good constitutions…. There is no ambiguity for Aristotle in the question of… the good life,… but from book 3 on, the Politics exploits the ambiguity in how good a good constitution must be” (70).From here out, Garver's text largely oscillates between varied forms of description: political, philosophical, and even at times rhetorical. But these descriptions imagine only a certain kind of statesman as their audience—perhaps even a certain kind of esoteric thinker. In chapter 3, Garver runs into the problem of political definition—or put differently, what he calls the basic “incompleteness of the normative” in the reading of Politics 3 (66–106). It is Aristotle's unique genius that he is able to smooth the discrepancies in form and function between constitutions, highlighted in Politics 3 and 4, into a justification for political philosophy (69–70; 73–76; 92). A certain form of thinking on political deliberation follows once the analysis of constitutions is wrested from the singular focus of the good ethical life (70). “Political philosophy can occur in the rest of the Politics once Book III has freed space for deliberation by showing how constitutional form has no natural or inevitable ties” to the other causes or ends of poleis (73). Such a statement allows Garver to retroactively intervene into the debate over what constitutes good constitutions in the plural. “The three true constitutions, monarchy, aristocracy, and ‘polity,’ have the same end, the good life. Yet they are different constitutions” (74; see 73–76). But it does not allow us to intervene into the question of the good life—and it only obliquely allows us access to a discussion of the good polis. The discussion of good constitutions thus thinks “a different kind of incompleteness,” namely, “the indeterminacy within each formula” of constitutions (91; see also 83–97). For Aristotle, both good and bad constitutions share a similar principle or “formula of justice.” They do so because Aristotle separates “two independent variables, who rules and for whom, while in the Republic those two were tied together” (85; see also 79–83). In the case of political communities, then, form (of the constitution) does not immediately line up with function (the good life of citizens); they are defined by cross-reference, not through a single or ultimate reference (77, 93). Crucially, it is both possible and necessary that the polis achieve a dignity that is separate from and that ranks above the dignity of its citizens.There is some slippage occurring here between polis, citizen, and constitution, and Garver highlights this slippage to guide us toward political philosophy (92–97). These slippages begin with the comparison of political and despotic natures and continue in the movement from the citizen to the constitution. The effect of such slippages is perennial problems for understanding the relation of rhetoric to politics. For Garver, political philosophy appears a preferable substitute to trying to sort out this relationship, satisfying the need for judgment (phronesis) while providing a way to think about the practical distinctions between good and bad constitutions in conditions where we live with “the impossibility of directly enacting the good” (97). What Garver calls the “politicization” of politics in book 3 turns out to be the study not of citizens and their virtues (or vices) but of poleis and their limited principles of justice. This is because it is the relationship between rule and principle that defines a polis rather than the relative virtue or vice of citizens (77–80). Indeed, citizenship is not, in the final examination, a question of virtue: “The purpose of citizenship surprisingly has nothing to do with the purpose of man and of the state, to live well. The function of citizens is to preserve the constitution” (80). Garver thus ties political theory to political philosophy by highlighting politics' artificial rather than natural means: it is “primarily aporetic and formal. It clears space for deliberation and makes politics autonomous” (105).To wit: “Politics III is political philosophy, carefully keeping to what political philosophy can achieve, and leaving to statesmen what is appropriate for statesmen” (103). The autonomy of politics seems prestructured by Garver's conception of political philosophy as “deliberation over the forms and functions of government” (70). Political philosophy also prefigures the rhetorical praxis of the statesmen, which Garver sees as the practical usage of reflections leading statesmen to both formulate actions and engage in persuasion. “The Politics presents dialectical arguments; in particular circumstances they become rhetorical arguments that require political, not philosophical, judgment” (104). This judgment will call for repackaging the framework of rhetorical persuasion. Garver's framing highlights for readers the obvious difficulty of reconciling philosophical with political being in many the aim of Aristotle's Politics. Garver's reading a between three forms of first, second, persuasion. in these is how Garver the relationship between political philosophy understood as a only the of the statesman and rhetoric understood as a not just the but also the judgment of the practical becomes the method by which the of phronesis in the with the inherent in the nature of politics. Politics the of or but of these those are the proper toward which the statesman and in that they are of constitutions see also Garver reads Aristotle as those constitutions that elements of and this allows the statesman to the basic of the political made by and becomes good not because of the of its which are constitutions, but because of the practical of the the Here, the of political constitutions becomes the of the statesman in political philosophy rather than the of the citizen or judge discussion of Politics the from the to the There is a between the practical of the and the practical of the Garver thus argues that political philosophy, and not rhetoric nothing of or the modern critique of Garver this framing of phronesis as it still citizens to be rather than This framing the need for a of the citizen in the phronesis is a justification for only to has nothing to to the no about they as a nothing to about the under which they to the constitution” see also Politics The that politics takes in the between and from the Politics' of Garver's discussions only this the on and the of the constitutional form and of the statesman rather than the of the of this be given Garver's description of the aims of the Politics. Yet a framing of the polis focus on the natures of those who live in its name is to as rhetorical. But Garver's emphasis on political than a from philosophy to á la the for the of by political philosophy, the statesman in the project of the constitution in a way to the of from which the Platonic critique of the ground Here, Garver the Rhetoric and argues for a relation of between the statesman and But the statesman is as he has a of the behind constitutions that Garver argues the does is for the of rhetoric is only the for a of The that his but cannot more he cannot do to the between the of the means of and seems to have by political philosophy rather than of political life. Garver notes that in book of the Rhetoric, here the statesman to understand constitutional occur and they do to Garver, has no in the but see is a way to imagine through Garver's reading a between the actions of the statesman guided by political philosophy and those of a guided by rhetorical while the is and the seems even This is made by But in 3 through political philosophy is by in such a way as to make it that to it political tied to internal Political philosophy seems a then, for the ruler to become as as But it is as distinct from rhetorical become when fully their nature as political animals” is not to that Garver the nature of the ruled But the political and ethical nature of the citizens is in to be of the of a statesman guided by political philosophy. Indeed, the of the polis to be a relative for the This is in by the to the political virtue for Garver makes this claim the of the must master the of statesman must make it appear the he in the constitution is a of and rather than In chapter Garver notes the of the statesman of the of and These are in the definition of political virtue, which over and above constitutional form of its and that is a political virtue and that the of the of particular constitution” becomes the a education in political philosophy to the to preserve and the political For Garver, political virtue for the state rather than Such an turns on the of the statesman to his citizens that politics is to and not to the of or final chapter that what constitutes the regime will be the of the question political philosophy, in be This is in the Politics as the life of and not the life of the or the life of this the philosophical life, of its of see becomes the of through the common life Yet it must be that is of rhetorical Political philosophy virtuous with that political philosophy, can at their common the virtue of those virtues are the common life appears in a different than the of the rhetorical by the discussion of forms of Here, phronesis becomes from it is a form of in which Aristotle bare the structure of political as it the absolute reading from and constitutional form in order to at a of what as the These discussions will be into ethical arguments by the statesman and made through rhetorical forms of Such forms will be by nature, both in their appeals to constitutional and in their definition of political virtue. The Politics the of on the who has in and through political philosophy. Garver thus reads a impressive theory of political structure an satisfying theory of political desire or political In what then, do political philosophy and rhetoric in Garver's reading of The and is that they to not they exist here in a seems to become and and Garver's reading Political philosophy thus not just as a concept but a internal to Garver's it possible rhetorical by which politics may be within the framework of This seems to have something to do with the Politics' for the statesman over the citizen, for the over the and the over the Garver's discussion of and expresses the different conceptual aims of political philosophy and The of in Garver's analysis of the Politics thus appears as a by the of political philosophy that Garver's impressive reading

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