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 Politics counts on secrets and prediction: it depends on a visio imaginativa whereby doxa unravels itself into beliefs and holds fast onto the illusion of secrets that in reality do not exist, and fabricates the objects of its parlêtre by casting illusions of Time in order to formulate predictions and “ways forward.” The sorry state of democracy partly arises from the illusion that free citizens are made to believe in politics as a discourse of predictions and secrets.

In this article, I reexamine quality and rhetoric in Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance through Julia Kristeva's semiotic chora. To that end, I review three analyses of Pirsig's novel, reinscribe quality as a prediscursive experience of undifferentiated wholeness, argue that regression back into Kristeva's chora is one way to recover this prediscursive experience, and hypothesize that the rhetoric of Zen is an unstable discourse in which prediscursive energies from the chora disrupt and realign the meanings of signifiers. I conclude by generalizing my work beyond Pirsig's novel to three concepts in rhetorical scholarship.

This article explores the epideictic nature of online discourse, or what might be considered a digital version of social knowledge. In particular, it draws from Vilém Flusser's concept of the technical image, the image projected as singular but that is, in fact, layered with many other meanings. Working from two primary examples—the resignation of University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe and the reporting of Israeli flooding of a Gazan valley—the article theorizes how a consensus is constructed as a technical image and thus problematizes the nature of consensus in specific rhetorical moments.

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.

Civic Jazz asks us to expand our understanding of what it means to say that jazz is an American art form. While Clark is clearly a fan, with an intimate knowledge of jazz, its culture, and community, this book offers more than anecdote and description, which is so common in jazz studies. Rather, this well-crafted book extends and offers a theoretical basis to the idea, put forward by Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and most recently Barak Obama when speaking at the 2016 International Jazz Day Concert, that jazz expresses the American spirit. Clark finds his theoretical armature in Kenneth Burke's blurring of the boundary between rhetoric and poetic. As Clark argues, Burke's works articulate a rhetorical theory of aesthetics that is centered on the dispositional effects of form. Furthermore, and precisely because form is not restricted to the language arts, Burke's rhetorical aesthetics are singularly appropriate to a study of the civic role of jazz.Clark models his book on a jazz performance. The book offers neither a linear argument nor a dialectical movement from antitheses to synthesis. Rather, Clark weaves an account where theory, the rhetoric of jazz advocacy, and jazz performances themselves resonate harmoniously. Jazz becomes a representative anecdote for unpacking the details of Burke's political aesthetics, even while this developing theory provides a means to understand jazz's aesthetic workings and civic significance.In “Setting Up,” his first and introductory chapter, Clark advances the thesis/theme that jazz calls forth an identity and a form of living that manifest e pluribus unum. He introduces Burke's work, its cultural critique of America, and its call for a redemptive art of living. Aligning Burke with critics ranging from Walt Whitman to British literary theorist Terry Eagleton, Clark explains how Burke looked at America and how when he saw division, turned to rhetoric and its capacity to overcome it by fostering identification through form. Clark then takes up the difficult task of extending rhetorical theory and criticism to jazz as a historically situated and significant art form and looks to jazz writers and musicians who describe such rhetorical processes in their music. Clark establishes his bona fides by citing broadly: he revisits Aristotle's and Suzanne Langer's reflections on music, gestures toward Ingrid Monson's recent jazz musicology, and takes up the African American reflections on jazz of Ralph Ellison and Wynton Marsalis. These provide the means for him to develop the idea that jazz is constitutional and that its workings can be explained in terms of the rhetoric of form.Each chapter returns to, explores, and augments this initial theme, much as each chorus of a well-crafted jazz solo extends and develops those musical ideas that have preceded it and just as Burke notoriously returned, revised, and augmented own his prior efforts. In his second chapter, “A Rhetorical Aesthetic of Jazz,” Clark doubles down on Burke. While Burke never wrote on jazz, Clark finds in his work the means to capture jazz's civic function. Burke's Rhetoric of Motives describes the aesthetic experience of identification as “swinging along with the form” (58). In Clark's account, this link to jazz is more than fortuitous. Jazz was known as “swing” during its commercial heyday as America's main popular dance music, a reference to its pulsing, danceable rhythm and its contagious attitude, intensity, and energy. Furthermore, Burke was a young man during the “jazz age,” and was aware of African American musical styles, having favorably reviewed both a 1928 concert by the African American Jubilee Hall Singers and the 1933 African American Broadway musical Run, Little Chillun! Burke also corresponded regularly with African American intellectuals, notably Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man and Albert Murray, Ellison's friend and author of both Stompin' the Blues and The Omni-Americans, canonical texts on jazz and race in America.Clark considers “swinging along” to be an apt term to describe the activity of both musicians and audiences, who are guided by a faith that the musical work in progress will continue to cohere as it unfolds. Burke presented swinging along as a needed corrective to the American civic sphere, where cooperation is difficult. For Clark, jazz offers a model for such cooperation. This is because “jazz is an act of hopeful defiance of the alienation and fear that makes us hold ourselves back to avoid judgment or rejection” (26). Throughout the book, Clark describes singularly eloquent jazz performances, including an impromptu restaurant performance of “Route 66” by his thirteen-year-old daughter with noted jazz pianist Marcus Roberts, to illustrate the process and form of life that jazz offers. He selects Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley's rendition of “Autumn Leaves” to illustrate swinging cooperation and hopeful defiance. The reader can easily find the track online and follow Clark's commentary, which offers a sensitive analysis of how Miles and Cannonball swing along: in their improvisation, they depart from this standard's original form to explore, extend, and deepen its melancholy, using it as a resource for moving beyond, for crafting an aesthetic pathē of upward transcendence.Paradoxically Clark's third chapter, “What Jazz Is,” does not begin with a discussion of jazz, but with Burke's preoccupation with identity and his turn from literary self-expression to rhetoric. Clark retells the story of Burke's response to the turmoil and conflicts of the twentieth century. Originally a writer of poetry and fiction, Burke became a theorist and critic who, seeing America as in need of some type of transcendence, spent a career exploring how understanding, common feeling, identification, and consummation might be fostered through form. The problem in America, and indeed in any democracy, is that individual will and aspiration are in many ways antagonistic to identification and the consummatory experience of community. America's founding sides with the existential truth that our pains, our goals, and our lives are ultimately our own. In all cultures, ritual and civic arts mediate the tension between individual and community. In America, such arts are faced with a particular challenge. They cannot demand the full subordination of individual voices to an idealized unity, as does a church choir. Clark counterpoises a performance of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JALCO) to the unity of his church choir to illustrate how jazz negotiates this tension successfully. His choir follows a fixed arrangement and is guided by a choir master. In contrast, JALCO coordinates a complex of individual voices. JALCO is like a complex organism, where the written musical arrangements provide a basis for skilled jazz artists to make their own music, even as each artist and part coordinate with the whole.JALCO is for Clark exemplary of the art that Burke sought. Clark explains the jazz aesthetic by turning to jazz pedagogy, which encourages students to develop their own musical style, approaches, and voice, even though jazz is based in collective improvised performances. For Clark, jazz is singularly American in the way that it integrates the one in the many and also is forward looking, directed toward redemption. Clark turns to the blues to illustrate this American trait. Blues lyrics paint a bleak picture of pain and loss, even while the music's form and propulsive energy offer emotional coherence and hope. Robert Johnson may be standing at the crossroads and sinking down, but the music carries him and those who listen forward. As Albert Murray observed, borrowing from Burke, the blues are equipment for living, transforming desperation into defiance and joy.America's singular character is the theme of Clark's fourth chapter, “Where Jazz Comes From.” Clark focuses neither on New Orleans nor New York, neither on Chicago nor Kansas City, but on the conflict that Tocqueville saw at the center of the American spirit, where radical individualism leaves each person uprooted and solitary. This insight, first stated in his introduction, is Clark's original contribution to jazz studies. Jazz's origin is far more psychic than geographical or musicological. Jazz does not emerge from the mere musical encounter of African and European forms as much as from a reaction to American alienation, as expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Renaissance, Walt Whitman, Louis L'Amour's cowboy pulp function, and Burke's search for a redemptive civic art. Curiously, race is not central to Clark's account. He acknowledges the racial fact of jazz but does not reflect pointedly on slavery's legacy or on the link between American alienation and its original sin. His account, consistent with Wynton Marsalis's narrative, presents jazz as pointing to a world without racial division. Clark insists that jazz is concerned with transcendence and gives new meaning to jazz pianist Bill Evans's observation that “‘jazz is not a what, it is a how’” (14). Clark presents jazz as a form of collective problem solving. Jazz transcends difference by casting new modes of experience and forms of being, by relying on improvised augmentation and complexification rather than the imposition of static melodies and harmonies. Paraphrasing Whitman, we could say that Clark tells us that jazz is large and contains multitudes.While Clark offers a redemptive vision of jazz, he also reminds us that none of this is painless. He recounts the troubled 1963 recording session of Money Jungle by jazz greats Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. Musical styles, professional egos, and creative visions clashed. Neither the session nor resultant tracks were marked by harmonious identifications. Nevertheless, the conflict was productive. Clark refers to the music as “eloquent” as it strains to keep it together. Just as the purpose of the session was to produce an album, so the art of democracy is directed toward enabling a life in common, not a common life. Putting a happy face on an at times agonistic and tortured process, Clark describes jazz as another occasion for ad bellum purificandum, “a war waged with an attitude of goodwill … in the bright hope that something better for everyone will follow” (75).A great deal of jazz writing is descriptive and anecdotal, with stories of great bands and singular recordings sessions, battles with drug addiction, brilliant creators, and visionary promoters. Critical and theoretical work in jazz is relatively recent, having emerged in the last two or three decades, but as in rhetorical studies, description and historical anecdote play a crucial role and remain necessary. One of the pleasures of this book is Clark's strategic use of anecdotes as he returns to and elaborates on its main theme. One might find Clark redundant, but only if one fails to grasp his strategy of augmentation and his rhetorical celebration of jazz. Each chapter continues the process of explaining the formal theory of rhetorical aesthetics that underpins Burke's oeuvre even as they clarify the demands and workings of jazz as a civic art. Thus, in his fifth chapter “What Jazz Does,” Clark returns to Tocqueville's pessimism regarding America, to which he counterpoises jazz's possibilities and potential: jazz offers an image of what America would look like if America's three “taboo” divisive issues—race, freedom, and religion—were faced openly and worked through collectively (90). Clark turns to Billy Holiday's signature performance of “Strange Fruit,” Louis Armstrong's rendition of “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” and Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige suite as eloquent expressions of the African American experience. Clark devotes particular attention to Ellington's explicit attempt to reflect on “his people” as within the American people.Clark's account is compelling, although he does not fully resolve the underlying tension within rhetoric between identification and division. At one moment he praises jazz for offering a common aesthetic experience that offers, if only briefly, the upward transcendence that America requires to fulfill its democratic promise. Subsequently, however, he emphasizes the role of jazz in racial politics, in its lyrics of protest and in the musical expression of the pain of racism in the dissonance and wailing of free jazz. Clark attempts to resolve this tension by equating jazz with freedom, since each jazz performance raises the question of where to go next. Each soloist in part answers this question in tandem with the ensemble, and for Clark the American answer – and the jazz musician answer – is “to freedom, of course” (97). To many, jazz sounds free, which accounts for its appeal to dissidents in the USSR and Nazi Germany and for the American government's use of jazz in the Cold War. Clark notes the irony that black musicians were displayed as representatives of American freedom even while they suffered Jim Crow at home and offers free jazz and its challenge to conventional forms of expression as their rhetorical response.Of singular importance in Clark's fifth chapter is the idea that jazz is political and ethical not only because of its democratic performative pragmatics but because of its content, in both its musical forms and particular compositions. Jazz can be spiritual, in religious or secular terms, even as it is rhetorical, as in John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Clark highlights the significance of the avant-garde and its embrace of self-expression as the best way to communicate. While spiritual experience is personal, familiarity with jazz, its traditions, and its musical figures makes shared experience possible. This is for Clark what John Dewey sought when he called on Americans collectively to search for the truth. Jazz can prompt reverence, civic humility, and awe. Jazz requires intense individualism and intense cooperation. Optimistically, Clark does not address the deeply competitive spirit at the heart of jazz and its “cutting contests,” jam sessions where each soloist seeks to best and at times show up the other. For Clark, the jazz situation is much like the rhetorical situation, but less agonistic, because each performance is a collective endeavor that ultimately requires cooperation. For Clark, jazz favors congregation over segregation. In America, the latter dominates and requires the corrective jazz offers.This book is about jazz, of course, but it is also concerned with extending Burke's rhetorical sensibility beyond the verbal arts. In his penultimate chapter, “How Jazz Works,” Clark turns to Burke's 1930s novel Towards a Better Life in order to work out the trajectory of his thought. In that early effort, a walk in the New England countryside summoned Burke's alienated protagonist to find happiness through living beyond himself. Burke revisited this path to happiness in his later critical and theoretical writings, working out the nature of being summoned or called. The summons has two related moments: One is summoned to summon others. For Clark, this is how music works. Clark follows Burke's constitutive turn in the Grammar of Motives. Clark incorporates Stanley Crouch's analogy of jazz to the Constitution as an “exercise of the ‘freedom to constantly reinterpret the meanings’” (20) that it provides, offering a way to perfect the American form of life. Resolutely American in his analysis, Clark cites Dewey, who argued that art provides immediate feeling through its structure and coherence. Clark suggests that for Burke, art's aim is not experience in itself but the organization of experience through form to create common sentiments and sensibilities. Art provides resources for better encountering and living with others. In other words, art offers the possibility of civic transcendence.Jazz is constitutive of democracy, as each in turn improvises over a given form, all the while responding to others and expanding the range of what is possible. Jazz musicians share a stock of knowledge and set of skills that enable them, without sheet music or a prior plan, to meet as strangers and play something new. The pragmatics or aesthetic constitution of jazz lets musicians call the tune in a way unheard of in the classical repertoire, just as the Constitution lets citizens call the tune.This insight is not new to Clark. Wynton Marsalis has said much the same thing, What Clark brings to the mix is a more sophisticated account of how jazz both is structured democratically and manifests a democratic aesthetic sensibility. To this end, Clark offers an innovative and well-developed account of Burke's project that links aesthetic form to attitude and identity. Indeed, Clark cites Burke's observation that music far more than speech adheres to the psychology of form. The power of music and other nonrepresentational arts arises not from cognitions but from the experience of form in the moment. Furthermore, jazz as an improvised music is always performed against the possibility of failure: its movement does not always produce the consummation that it seeks. Music opens onto changing the ways that people think. To illustrate, Clark turns to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane's rendition of “In a Sentimental Mood,” which offers a remarkable, and yet for jazz, everyday call to transcendence.Even though jazz is no longer a popular musical form, Clark insists that it offers precisely the form of interaction that Burke called for. He works this out again in his concluding chapter, entitled “So What,” after one of the most memorable tracks on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. With no rehearsals and no sheet music, that session produced brilliant and innovative music because each in his ensemble was supremely conscious of the others. In this, Clark's insight and optimism shine through. Clark is driven by an appreciation of possibility. At the same time, however, he does not consider the difficulty of the art. Jazz is less democratic than it is aristocratic and republican. As with all arts, it is practiced by the bold, whose eloquence make their work look easy. Its “citizenry” is not enfranchised by birth but earns a place on the stand through displays of which requires of and Jazz is American and and indeed can offer transcendence and new but like rhetoric requires a life to the art.

ABSTRACTThe Aristotelian concept of magnitude (megethos) can expand our understanding of how abundant information accumulates in ways that expand beyond epistemic registers, creating a sense of coherence. This sense of coherence, in turn, is more of an aesthetic effect than the result of epistemic validity drawn from that evidentiary abundance. In this article, I explore two different examples of archival magnitude: one is the fine-grained enormity of conspiracy discourse and the second is the large-scale quantities that power big data. These examples of archival magnitude are simply two narratives through which to explore the aesthetic and rhetorical operation of megethos. By redefining discourses that call on magnitude—the power of more—as aesthetic discourse, we may also find that the most fitting response is likewise an aesthetic one.

Abstract In this article I critically consider the usefulness of Jacques Rancière's “politics of literarity,” as explicated by Samuel Chambers, for understanding feminist politics. Emphasizing the historical and grammatical dimensions of the speech acts central to a politics of literarity, I show that women's assertions of gender injustice remain tightly tethered to a police order whose disruption remains crucial to establishing the political bona fides of any such claim to equality. While Chambers embraces this paradoxical aspect of a politics of literarity—that it both disrupts police and remains embedded within it—I suggest that the paradoxes confronted by those who articulate the “wrongs” of the gender order perforce raise questions about the adequacy of literarity as a linchpin of democratic politics. I elaborate this claim by reconsidering the historical example of Olympe de Gouges, first as her feminist speech is parsed by Joan Scott and second as it is parsed by Rancière.

Abstract This article explores the rhetorical underpinning of the pedagogics of unlearning by way of a consideration of three figures: first, “the ignorant schoolmaster” as constructed by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster; second, “the intimate schoolmaster,” as fantasized and feared by a diverse range of theories and theorists (but attention will specifically go to this figure as he features in a key moment of poststructuralism, namely Derrida's Dissemination); and third, “the ignorant sifu,” as a figure that exemplifies a strong impulse in many modern movements in approaches to martial arts, self-defense, and combat training. I represent these three figures by way Joseph Jacotot, Plato/Socrates, and Bruce Lee, using them as a way to explore an undecidability at the heart of the binary ignorance/knowledge. Ignorance, I maintain, has always been a key (even if unacknowledged) premise of the dominant textual and discourse approaches of poststructuralism, and there are good reasons why we might try to unlearn some of our dominant understandings of or assumptions about the political and cultural importance of pedagogy.

AbstractThis article examines how rhetoric bears on Hegel's presentation of comedy. Although comedy succeeds tragedy in his catalogue of “romantic” arts, Hegel says little about it, a paradox mirrored in the secondary literature. Moreover, while Hegel's dialectic attests to his education in rhetoric in its staging of the multivalent image and its tracking of ironic, chiastic reversal of significance, the Aesthetics downplays any such performative element. I note Hegel's praise of Aristophanes, at odds with the dominant line of New Comedy: following the romantics, Hegel foregrounds human subjectivity in both action represented and audience reception. I summarize his position and then contrast its thematic bias with the Phenomenology's attention to form and pragmatics. Comedic discovery of self in “Art-religion” (chapter 7) prefigures self-presentation in the philosophical Idea, and confirms Hayden White's filing of Hegelian historiography under comedy. Anticipating Bergson, Hegel locates comedy on the margin between art and life, as philosophical regard merges with its object.

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.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the figures of life and death as rhetorical and material conditions for self-consciousness and mutual recognition, notoriously described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It turns to Hegel's treatment of life and death, concepts that—according to Hegel's mature system—anticipate and prefigure the struggle for recognition and its master-slave dialectic. Part 1 analyzes the Philosophy of Nature, with attention to how the sex relation, species-life, and the diseased body “pathologically” figure the life and death of the nonhuman (animal) organism. Part 2 takes up Hegel's “Anthropology,” which opens his Philosophy of Mind, exploring the problematic relationship between (reproductive) sex and love as an incipient politics of woman, family, civil society, and state. Part 3 brings Hegel's world-historical system into dialogue with contemporary biopolitics, arguing that recognition today is driven by a world-historical discourse on bios and that Hegel's “pathological” figures might occasion a productive critique of affirmative biopolitics.

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.

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

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

ABSTRACT Between the publication of Montaigne's Essais (1588–1595) and Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) rhetors became increasingly anxious about arguing in utramque partem. Paradiastolic discourse, fundamental to Montaigne's early essays, is anxiously though expertly deployed in Leviathan. Paradiastole fuses the ability to see and speak about an issue from antithetical perspectives with the ambivalence such power arouses in. Beyond their skepticism, Montaigne and Hobbes share a concern for how phenomena can be interpreted and represented through language. Despite Hobbes's desire for a method that would ensure constant and determinate linguistic acts that would render rhetoric supererogatory, Leviathan demonstrates his unremarkable affinities with mainline Renaissance humanists alongside his uneasy affinities with the Sophists. Both the humanist and the Sophist used the trope to probe and to persuade, though both were anxious about the reversibility of such rhetorical redescriptions. Paradiastolic discourses, we argue, integrate the cognitive procedures of philosophy with the judicative procedures of rhetoric. The trope operates through exploiting the reciprocity between similar qualities, as exemplified by the influential paradiastolic pairing of ferox and fortis.

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.

AbstractThis article explores the rhetoric of regret as a way to rethink the aesthetic dimension of two hitherto artificially separated late ancient corpora of thought—rabbinic and “pagan.” Moving away from the thinking in terms of historicist “influences” I arrive at a point of mutual illumination of the corpora, thereby advancing a new model of philosophical and rhetorical analysis that both justifies the importance of the modern discussion of relationships between philosophy, rhetoric, and aesthetics for understanding the Talmud as a late ancient body of text and thought and shows how the Talmud, thus understood, complicates and raises the stakes in that discussion. I first draw on the framework of this bidirectional analysis for probing the rhetoric of the rabbis and of the “pagan” philosophers. I consequently work against the grain of a modern interpretation of late ancient aesthetics to arrive to a comparative study of the aesthetics of rabbinic discourse.

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

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

Abstract Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism provide an implicit critique of the contemporary theoretical emphasis on antirepresentational, immanent theories of discourse, subjectivity, and power. From this standpoint, such immanentism can be understood as a distinct effect of a neoliberal governmental practice directed at the suppression of the idea of totality. To address Foucault's critique, this article argues for a reinterpretation of Lloyd Bitzer's concept of “situation” to recover a working notion of totality that would be useful for critical and material rhetorical inquiry. Historicizing the immanent turn in the critical humanities can open the way for a critical social theory of communication.

A number of recent essays and books have asked how pragmatism, since its inception, informs questions that are central to the theory and practice of rhetoric and communication. Paul Stob's book makes a significant contribution to that conversation, not least through a demonstration of the depth of William James's work as a public lecturer and the ways in which James's conception of public lecturing shaped his larger intellectual perspectives and commitments. John Dewey often gets most of the attention of rhetorical scholars, largely because of several cryptic passages that Dewey penned on the importance of communication. Stob's work offers an important corrective to those that overemphasize Dewey's role in founding pragmatism and its relevance to rhetorical studies. His book also offers perhaps the most thorough and detailed articulation of how rhetorical considerations were constitutive features in the development of pragmatism.Stob begins the book by citing a letter that James wrote to F. C. S. Schiller in 1903. In that letter, James states that he believes “popular statement to be the highest form of art” (xi). William James and the Art of Popular Statement is devoted to demonstrating the importance of this claim (and how it has often been overlooked in scholarship on James) and explicating how James developed his art of popular statement. The former argument is probably of most interest to philosophers and historians of pragmatism, while the latter argument ought to be of interest to rhetorical scholars. This book is a fully articulated argument for why and how popular public lecturing made James a unique and important philosopher. Put more broadly, this is an argument that rhetorical practice was a constitutive feature of William James's intellectual contributions to philosophy and a range of other subjects. As such, Stob shows how rhetorical practices, and not abstract philosophical principles, oriented all of James's intellectual endeavors, and that James's work on the public lecture circuit is not distinguishable from his roles as philosopher and scientist. This is not an argument traditionally found in scholarship on William James, and, therefore, Stob makes an original and important contribution to our understanding of James.To advance this claim, Stob positions James at the intersection of two historical trends. On the one hand, James was “reared in the culture of eloquence.” On the other, he was “trained in a culture of professionalism.” The culture of eloquence taught James about the importance of the “cultivation of the moral character of oneself and one's community” (36). At the same time, the culture of professionalism drove the development of his work in psychology and recommended attention to specific puzzles and problems only comprehensible to a trained expert. The tension between these two traditions provided the rhetorical resources for James to invent novel ways of relating to audiences and a novel philosophy that “centered on the experiences, perceptions, and predicaments of the man and woman ‘of the street’” (37). James constantly pushed back against the expectations of the culture of professionalism, even though he gained fame as a certified professional expert, through the intellectual commitments of the culture of eloquence. Furthermore, the culture of eloquence provided James with the intellectual support necessary for orienting his more expert insights into philosophy and psychology. Throughout the book, Stob argues that James purposefully engaged popular audiences and critiqued experts with the intention of empowering those audiences and bringing people into a participatory intellectual community.James's massively popular lecture series, “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals,” is an excellent illustration of how James worked within these two traditions. A critical investigation of these lectures makes up the third chapter of Stob's book, and his insights here offer a serious contribution to one of the most often overlooked works of James's career. James delivered these lectures hundreds of times to audiences all over the United States. “Talks to Teachers” dealt with the themes and ideas of James's Principles of Psychology, but not in a way that simply tried to translate those ideas into simpler terms: “James tried to empower his teacher audiences, giving them a stake in the modern intellectual culture and helping them see their value in democratic society” (108). As such, Stob shows that these lectures enacted James's deep investment in “creating a new kind of intellectual community” (109). That intellectual community did not champion scientific knowledge at the expense of other forms of knowledge. Instead, James claimed that expert psychological knowledge was not more important than the artistry of the classroom teacher.This is where Stob is at his best—using the resources of intellectual history combined with rhetorical criticism of James's performance to advance a sophisticated argument about both the meaning of James's work and its larger significance for our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. To develop this further, Stob points to James's “oral style” as productive of “moments of interaction.” For James, “concepts were important, of course, but his prose aimed above all at fostering relationships in the unfolding of ideas” (97). “Talks to Teachers” highlights the ways in which style is constitutive of meaning and how James's style produced “participatory discourses” (97). Such an understanding of style clearly resonates with the philosophy of pragmatism, and part of the argument here is that James would not have gotten to his version of pragmatism without working through this particular style and without attempting to master the art of public statement.In chapters on psychical research and religious experience, Stob further elaborates these arguments about popular statement. He shows convincingly that all of James's intellectual contributions are shot through with a kind of oral style derived from his conception of public lecturing and his desire to create intellectual communities. In his work on psychical research, James deployed his own standing as a scientific expert while at the same time critiquing scientific research for being “impersonal, monolithic, confining, illiberal” and for advancing an epistemology that James thought inadequate (148). What is essential here is that James's epistemology, which would become a central feature of pragmatism, was born in and through popular statements about psychical research, theology, and psychology. The Varieties of Religious Experience was delivered as a set of Gifford lectures in Edinburgh (a prestigious lecture series associated with the universities in Scotland). Part of James's project was to address the prescribed topic of natural theology, which many at the time considered essential for true knowledge. Not surprisingly, James rejected the kind of theology oriented toward such true knowledge and instead focused the lectures on the religious experiences of individual, common people. To do this, James critiqued “the deficiencies of religious inquiry according to the standards of academic professionalism” (165). This allowed him to connect with the popular audience at the lectures. Also, by making “experience” the beginning and ending point of his inquiry, James argued that “everyone could contribute to the general storehouse of religious knowledge” (165). James's lectures were quite well received and he proved himself capable of connecting to a popular audience and contributing to the development of a populist intellectual culture.The final chapter of Stob's book deals with pragmatism more squarely. Focused on James's lecture “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” Stob is concerned with unpacking the oratorical beginnings of pragmatism. Just like the earlier lectures, this lecture was “at bottom a collaborative text because it made James's immediate audience leaders in the world of thought” by the ways in which James rejected professional philosophy and advanced a populist epistemology instead (202). Essentially, the lectures on pragmatism demonstrated the larger claim that “the character of the audience was a determining factor in the character of the discourse” (228). I can't imagine an insight more consonant with the rhetorical tradition. Rhetorical considerations, for James, came before the articulation of philosophical principles. James's rhetorical considerations included a deep attention to the kinds of experiences that his audience of non-experts had. In addition, James's lectures were oriented toward intellectual participation on the part of non-experts and personal empowerment. James wanted to “flatten hierarchies and break chains of authority” and to show that “the best kind of knowledge emerged from a pluralistic, accessible, egalitarian intellectual culture” (237). The result of this outlook was a “new level of engagement based upon horizontal vision,” and this level of engagement was also a product of James's consistent argument that individuals (despite the testimony of some experts) “were, in fact, responsible for determining the character of their world” (238). What James's pragmatism made clear was that personal empowerment entailed opposition to the stifling aspects of academic professionalism.Given the breadth of historical detail and the depth of both contextual and textual readings of a significant range of James's work, Stob's book should prove to be a major and enduring argument about the relationship between rhetoric and American pragmatism. At times, theoretical insight into rhetoric's role in constituting philosophical or epistemological claims is sacrificed in favor of historical and contextual detail. In other words, Stob does not make a full-blown argument about the function and necessity of rhetoric for pragmatism or for American democracy. And he does not advance any sophisticated argument about what a pragmatist rhetoric might look like. But this might be asking too much from a book that offers such a solid and well-reasoned argument about one particular figure in the history of pragmatism. For a vision of how best to defend and advance a pluralist, pragmatist epistemology, one should simply read Stob's interpretation of William James. There, in full detail, one finds a commitment to rhetorical practice as a thorough underpinning for a massive intellectual project that still stands as one of America's great contributions to the history of ideas.

AbstractHow we interact with others is a vital part of the rhetorical practices of the sort of democracy the pragmatists hoped to create. This article examines growing evidence of the threat posed by partisanship to our attempts to critically analyze the claims of others, represented by “partisan perfect reasoning”—the habit of analyzing the claims of others in a fashion that preserves the presupposed reasonableness of our original positions. One path for dealing with the risk of such truncated habits of reasoning is the path of skepticism, represented by the “ironism” of Richard Rorty. This article constructs another possible path, the path of affirming all claims as a starting point for respectful dialogue and argument. Using the concepts of anekāntavāda and syādvāda from the Jaina tradition, this article argues that we can mitigate partisan perfect reasoning and foster respect for our conversational others through a novel orientation to rhetorical activity.

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

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

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

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

ABSTRACTIn her 2006 article “The Task of the Bow” Carol Poster shows through an analysis of the fragment “For the bow, its name is life but its task is death” that for Heraclitus the instability of the material world also infects language and that investigating the unstable logos—its hidden, double, oblique meanings—discloses this extralinguistic world instability. This article conducts similar analysis of the wordplay in Heraclitus's opening lines, challenging the long-standing debate over the meaning of logos in the first fragment. Through reconsidering the context of Aristotle's references to Heraclitus's paradoxes, this article develops a set of hermeneutic criteria that may be applied to contemporary interpretations of the first fragment. Understood as a paradox, the hidden meaning of this logos must be sought through its primary meaning (speech or discourse), and its fuller interpretation requires an expansion (not contraction) of its possible signification. By such an interpretation, the logos as speech of the first fragment is concomitant with the volatile flux of the material world itself.

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

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

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

Discourse, Figure signifies an event. I mean this in a variety of ways. There has been a recent event: the publication of an English translation of Jean-François Lyotard's first major book. Its translation is an event forty years delayed and signifies the closing of a major gap in the translation of Lyotard's work. Of course, both “signify” and “event” are important words for Lyotard. Discourse, Figure's goal is to “signify the other of signification” (2011, 13, emphasis his). The question of the representability of events that concerns Lyotard throughout his career originates in Discourse, Figure. I use these two words to guide my review. First I outline the events of the book: its context and its argument. Within its argument, I focus on its central chapter in order to signify the uniqueness of Discourse, Figure. Finally, I offer some thoughts on what this event may signify for us now.Discourse, Figure signifies an event in Lyotard's career. It is tempting to think of his oeuvre as discontinuous: the early phenomenological work breaks off in a flurry of political writings and activism; the psychoanalytic work coalesces into Libidinal Economy, a positively derivative book that makes a radical break with Marxism; language games yield incredulity toward metanarratives; and his later preoccupation with Kant becomes a critique of the third critique in both The Differend and his work on the sublime.Situated between his phenomenological work and Libidinal Economy, before the break with Marxism yet already politically ambivalent, Discourse, Figure signifies schism—from its title to its organization. Its first half deals with phenomenology and the second half with psychoanalysis. Between these is only the trompe-l'oeil of a veduta, the section on which I focus in a moment. The temptation to take a discontinuous view of Lyotard's career now runs up against the temptation to see a continuity in which Discourse, Figure looks back at his first book, Phenomenology, and forward toward his next, Libidinal Economy. To look for such a continuity might be to attempt a narrative of which Lyotard himself would be incredulous. Nevertheless, there can be continuity without mastery: “To link is necessary; how to link is contingent”(Lyotard 1988, 29).Lyotard only considered three of his books “real” books: Discourse, Figure, Libidinal Economy, and The Differend (Bennington 1988, 2). He regarded his other books as preparations for these major works. That it took forty years for the first of these “real” books to be translated is as remarkable as it is unfortunate. The translation had originally been undertaken by Mary Lydon, who published translations of two of its chapters in the early eighties. Her “Veduta on Discours, Figure,” a version of which was originally meant to serve as the introduction to her translation, opens by calling Discourse, Figure, “a notoriously difficult book” (2001, 10).1 Sadly, Lydon's untimely death later in 2001 ended her role in the work. The translation, already delayed in 2001, had to wait another ten years. Antony Hudek took on what I can only assume seemed an impossible task.The length of time Lydon spent translating Discourse, Figure, along with her awareness of its delay recalls a third event: the length of time Lyotard spent writing the book and his awareness of that time: “If I had to wait as long as I did to see my own resistance to writing it fall, it was (among other reasons) without a doubt out of fear of being seduced, distracted from this goal, mesmerized by language” (2011, 14). Seventeen years passed between Lyotard's first book, Phenomenology, and his first “real” book, Discourse, Figure. During those intervening years he drifted, the collected essays of that period appearing as Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. The drifting return to those two figures eventually became Discourse, Figure, his attempt to signify the other of signification without being mesmerized by signification.Lydon's statement that Lyotard's book is difficult serves as an understatement. Discourse, Figure could be read almost as a novel or epic poem, replete with philosophical, aesthetic, psychoanalytic, religious, and political allusions. His discourse is figurative. His opening salvo, “This book protests: the given is not a text” (2011, 3), aims not just at its immediate interlocutor, Paul Claudel, and his statement that the sensible world is legible. It also takes aim at Jacques Derrida's text-centered claim that “there is no outside-text” (1976, 158). The book's lengthy engagements with Hegel, Mallarmé, Merleau-Ponty, Frege, Klee, Cezanné, and Freud, hide sidelong references to Deleuze, Levinas, Derrida, Kandinsky, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare. All of this to say that for Lyotard, the stakes are high. He grapples with Jacques Lacan by returning ever more rigorously to Freud.2 He performs Derrida's (anti)method of deconstruction without being mesmerized by language. He follows Deleuze's anti-Hegelian critique of representational difference while subtly chiding Deleuze for his neglect of the visual and his rejection of the psychoanalytic. Lyotard is in a Burkean parlor in which he has spent seventeen years listening.The first chapter, “The Bias of the Figural,” serves as an introduction, and signifies at least two more events: the book's aim and the book's arc, each of which entails its own failure. Discourse, Figure's aim, as noted, is the signification of the other of signification. Throughout the first half, phenomenology and structuralist linguistics are relied on, or rather stretched to their limits, in an attempt to represent what Lyotard will ultimately call unrepresentable: “Phenomenology … remains a reflection on knowledge, and the purpose of such a reflection is to absorb the event, to recuperate the Other into the Same” (2011, 17, emphasis his). The failure of the aim leads us to its arc.Lyotard tells us that the arc of the book is an event in which the visual comes to play less and less of a role. While its opening pages concern themselves with the very pragmatic distinction between seeing and reading, by the end of this first chapter it is clear that there will be a shift throughout the course of the book. The shift is from phenomenology to psychoanalysis but also away from figure as visuality and toward figure as rhetoric and as unconscious. In a sense, Lyotard must become dissatisfied with the answers phenomenology offers and move on to psychoanalysis.Why include the first half then? Why not just move on? “I would answer,” Lyotard explains, “that this displacement is precisely what constitutes the event for me in this book. By virtue of what order, of what assumed function of the book, of what prestige of discourse, should one attempt to erase it?” (2011, 19). In this sense the book signifies the event of phenomenology's failure to signify the event and Lyotard's move away from it. That failure creates a clear structure, one that parallels its title. After the initial chapter, the book takes shape in two halves: “Signification and Designation,” concerned with phenomenology and linguistics, and “The Other Space,” devoted to a return to Freud. And in between, Lyotard offers a crucial chapter entitled “Veduta on a Fragment of the ‘History’ of Desire.”The text proceeds through a series of ninety-degree rotations, each of which can be traced and each of which offers a way into Lyotard's complex argument. In the first half of the book, Lyotard begins by distinguishing between the negation of the sensory and the negation of language. The negation of the sensory consists in the distance between the seer and the seen, a distance that becomes confused with the distinction between subject and object. Language's negation consists not only in the gaps between signifiers but also in the distance between signifier and signified, and, most importantly, in the “no” of psychoanalysis, the “no” that says “yes.” For Lyotard, negation provides an elementary link between the seen and the said.Lyotard's first rotation is thus a move from signification to designation. Saussurian signification consists in a chain of signifiers. Between these signifiers are invariable gaps. The distance between cat and car is no greater or smaller than between cat and epistemology, structurally speaking. Thus Lyotard sees a flatness in signification that does not parallel the variable gaps of designation, the distance between me and my hand and the moon and my office. In Saussure, there is a rotation such that designation becomes confused with signification. The moon becomes another word. Flatness asserts itself over thickness. Lyotard understands this turn as representation.The title Discourse, Figure refers us to the movement from phenomenology to psychoanalysis, another event of the book, one in which Lyotard slowly moves toward taking the side of the figural. But Discourse, Figure is a deliberate book, not a spontaneous event, and there is a bit of secondary revision occurring. Freud and Lacan lurk throughout the first half, sometimes explicitly and often implicitly. It is clear that Lyotard has this larger rotation from discourse to figure in mind throughout the early chapters, and this foreshadowing creates depth and tension.So it is unsurprising that after moving from Saussure to Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard finds Freudian negation underlying structuralist linguistics and phenomenology. Lyotard ends the first half by distinguishing between opposition and difference in a chapter that perhaps owes the most to Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze sat on the habilitation committee to which Lyotard submitted Discours, Figure, and Lyotard's concept of difference is decidedly Deleuzian). Opposition corresponds to the negative difference of representation that Deleuze critiques in Difference and Repetition. In an important section of book entitled “Nonhuman Sex,” Lyotard explains that the castration complex which inaugurates difference does not primarily hinge on the opposition between the two sexes (i.e., women are not castrated men, or rather, women are not not men) but on the difference between human and nonhuman sex. Lateral to distinctions between man/woman, pure/impure, black/white, or good/evil, we find the difference of difference: “Sex is foremost nonhuman, non-opposite, transgressive with regard to oppositions” (2011, 147). The entry into representation is built on the castration complex, which owes to the death drive. It is the “yes” of the death drive that appears alongside all of these “no”s with which we have been concerned.This lateral move allows Lyotard to move toward visual phenomena. He outlines theories of curvilinear perspective (to be opposed to linear perspective via the coming veduta) as well as of peripheral vision. Linear perspective depends on an immobile focus of the eye that duplicates the false mobility of the eye. By immobilizing the eye and paying attention to the periphery we begin to understand curvilinear perspective and the death drive lurking at the corners of our eyes. These two elements, representation and perspective, frame Lyotard's veduta.The section on the veduta constitutes an abrupt rupture that sutures the book together. He offers a short history of images in the West, focusing on medieval illuminated manuscripts and the paintings of the early Renaissance, specifically those of Masaccio. Lyotard wants to move us from the sacred to the secular, through two types of thickness and through two rotations. It is a complex move, or rather two moves, each of which is worth dwelling on.Lyotard attempts to demonstrate the imbrication of discourse and figure within medieval illuminated manuscripts. The images may be read and the letters seen just as often as the reverse. Their signification is working opposite to our own. While we might represent the designated (the “real” world), the signifier for the medieval mind always signifies divine discourse. Because there is only one signified, image and text alike are infused with figure. The thickness to which Lyotard has referred throughout occupies—during the medieval period—the space between God and man: true difference.At the beginning of the fifteenth century, we see a rotation. Masaccio's perspectival paintings reveal a new thickness, one between designation and signification. Difference is no longer vertical (God-human) but horizontal (human-vase-sheep-human); transcendence is replaced with immanence. It is this rotation that opens up the possibility of nonsacred art, that is, depictions of peasants and everyday objects. Masaccio's perspective is complex, not yet strictly linear. He employs aerial perspective as well (which offers the illusion of atmospheric depth), but the two types of perspective appear within the same painting without any kind of framing device separating them.Lyotard compares this to Leonardo's use of aerial perspective, where it is carefully restricted. Leonardo has already moved to a linear perspective that is based on a rotation from picture plane to viewer: “The distance from the ‘eye-point’ to the screen is transferred onto the latter so as to establish the oblique from which the objects' foreshortening will be determined” (2011, 197). This second rotation, geometrical foreshortening, may be directly opposed to Masaccio's perspective. In Masaccio, we see naught but plastic space, ready to be invested with figural, libidinal energy. In Leonardo, each aspect of the painting must be kept separate. In Masaccio, the viewer is immanent to the world of the painting. In Leonardo, she or he is transcendent: “This rotation of meaning is directly opposed to that which I described to convey the importance of the Masaccian revolution: rather than the exteriorization of what was scripted, it is the scripting of exteriority” (2011, 197). These two rotations—first from creator to creation, then from immanence to transcendence—occur in the first few years of the fifteenth century and separate the sacred, mythopoetic world from our current secular, scientific world.Lyotard uses the term “veduta” to refer to a particular kind of painting within a painting. A window is painted on the wall, like the one placed behind Mona Lisa. This window achieves a kind of trompe-l'oeil effect. We see “through” the painting at another level. In a sense, Lyotard's veduta offers us a chance to see “through” the history of representation. The first half of the book frames this history. The second half signifies what we might see on the other side of the veduta.In the face of the failure of signification outlined in the first half and the history of its subordination of desire outlined in the veduta, Lyotard attempts to signify the other of signification by more psychoanalytic means. Here, in the second half of the book, he performs this work through a rotation from discourse to figure, exploring the unrepresentable in the paintings of Paul Klee and in the dream work that does not think. The dream- work of course cannot think, cannot perform discourse, as it operates under the sign of desire, that is, through the unconscious. Language depends on negation, and the unconscious, Freud reminds us, knows no negation. Lyotard's argument reaches its crescendo in his tripartite model of figurality: figure-image, figure-form, and figure-matrix: The figure-image, that which I see in the hallucination or the dream and which the painting and film offer me, is an object placed at a distance, a theme. It belongs to the order of the visible, as outline. The figure-form is present in the visible, and may even be visible, but in general remains unseen. This is Lhote's regulating line, the Gestalt of a configuration, the architecture of a picture, the scenography of a performance, the framing of a photograph—in short, the schema. By definition, the figure-matrix is invisible, the object of original repression, instantly laced with discourse: “originary” phantasy. Nonetheless the figure-matrix is figure, not structure, because it is, from the outset, violation of the discursive order—violence against the transformations authorized by this order. (2011, 268, emphasis his) The unconscious is not a language at all. These three parts of figurality braid themselves throughout discourse via desire. Desire's complicity with the figural operates through three transgressions that parallel the three elements of figurality: transgression of the object, transgression of form, and transgression of space. Lyotard argues that these transgressions are manifestations of the death drive and drives his point home by returning to Freud in repeated interpretations of the case study “A Child Is Being Beaten.” These readings allow us to see that the death drive acts as a baffle that moves the spool from fort to da. It is only against this movement that repetition, repression, regression, occurs. Thanatos provides the “re-” that makes possible the return. Death drives deconstruction.While we may have expected figurality to be dangerous only to structuralists, we are surprised by the truth (and it is in its surprise that we recognize its truth): figurality is not eros but thanatos. The relationship of figure to discourse cannot be spoken or drawn, for discourse is within figure and vice versa. Rather than painting a mise-en-scène, Lyotard stages for us a mise en abyme. In the final paragraphs of the book, Lyotard signifies a final rotation: between mother and spouse. Mousetrap, the play within the play in Hamlet, provides Hamlet an opportunity to meditate on his mother as “mobbled” queen. Lyotard reads “mobbled” through an associational chain that leads to “mobilized.” The mobile mother rotates her relationship from variable gap between mother and son to the invariant gap between lovers: Hamlet's “Oedipal truth” (Lyotard 2011, 388). In this final scene we may see how Lyotard prefigures Anti-Oedipus.Discourse, Figure finds us in the shadow of a recent return to Lyotard in the work of philosophers like Alain Baidou, Ray Brassier, Jacques Rancière, and Bernard Stiegler and that of rhetoricians like Diane Davis, and Lyotard was more than most to at this of rhetoric and to not only study the but to be A rotation of the book's title reminds us of the and often between discourse and as figure in discourse, so rhetoric not from without but from of visual rhetoric of Jacques psychoanalytic theories of the or on the between image and Lyotard offers a cannot only be must be space for us to on and on our Finally, images cannot be from text as as we might and image are as as discourse and have to Discourse, Figure's to and on Deleuze for have an in Deleuze's theories of While Deleuze has to say to our he that is psychoanalytic in Lyotard. we are returning to Lyotard can offer to the the of or of this us to a final event: my own failure at Discourse, Figure. It is a book that must be read and a book that up its only after That it took this long to to us is perhaps In an with Lyotard on its was with a of on my to that a book like Discourse, was at the time because it was explicitly against … I was against this way of and I that now have this book. I was (Lyotard We

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

AbstractHyperbole is an easily misunderstood and misused trope, and it is largely unexplored in current rhetorical studies. Yet, at moments within thought and discourse, the excessiveness of hyperbole elicits a constructive, transformative ambiguity that can reveal alternative epistemological and ontological insights. Indeed, hyperbole is often the most effective way of trying to express seemingly impossible and inexpressible positions. I argue for the reexploration and critical examination of hyperbole, and I offer a theoretical framework from which to view texts and discourse from a hyperbolic perspective. I identify the metafunction of hyperbole, and I offer two specific functions of hyperbole. Hyperbole is more than simply an obvious and intentional exaggeration and thus can benefit from an exploration that considers it beyond its traditional tropological limits. It can be engaged as a mode of inquiry in order to delve into the complexities and paradoxes of theo-philosophical discourse, and it can also be appropriated as a critical position from which one might, for example, propose interpretations of various textual expressions that differ from their more normative interpretations.

Giorgio Agamben's The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath can be read as a radical rethinking of a traditional rhetorical category: ethos. This is not the ethos you learned in school. Rather than a mode of persuasion, Agamben argues that ethos is the distinguishing characteristic of human language as such. In this regard, its essential characteristic is the movement it enables between a “speaker and his language.” It is this ethical relationship—what Agamben calls the articulation of “life and language” (69)—that distinguishes human speech from birdsong, insect signals, and the roar of lions. “The decisive element that confers on human language its peculiar virtue is not in the tool itself but in the place it leaves to the speaker, in the fact that it prepares within itself a hollowed-out form that the speaker must always assume in order to speak—that is to say, in the ethical relation established between a speaker and his language” (71).This doesn't put it quite strongly enough. Nor does it capture radicalness of Agamben's inquiry. Precisely speaking, Agamben is not concerned with the articulation of life and language—the linkage between the two established formally by ethos and enacted in the oath. Rather, to use one of his favorite phrases, Agamben is concerned with the zone of indistinction between life and language. Thus to the extent that ethos is the fundamental characteristic of human language, to the same extent humanity is constituted and set off from the animal kingdom by the fact that, alone among the animals, humans read their life in their language. Agamben writes, “Uniquely among living things, man is not limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language…. He is the living being whose language places his life in question” (69, emphasis his). This is a radical revision of ethos: by moving freely between the two poles of the ancient concept (language and life) and reading each pole within the other, Agamben has turned ethos into a zone of indistinction that explains what it binds together: the specificity of human language and the never-ending task of anthropogenesis.To better understand this zone of indistinction, Agamben turns to an archaeology of the oath. This makes good sense. In both legal and religious contexts, the oath is the genre par excellence for guaranteeing the relation of life and language. In the most conventional sense possible, to swear an oath is to verify the correlation of deeds and words, life and language. As Agamben puts it, the oath “seems” to guarantee the “truth or effectiveness” of a proposition (5). For this reason, the oath has thrived in contexts (law and religion most prominently) where questions of truth are paramount. Yet the conventional reading of the oath as a tool for articulating words and deeds is clearly not sufficient for Agamben. To render life and language indistinguishable (not simply linkable), the oath must be more than a rhetorical technique. In its capacity to bind words and deeds together, it must be understood as archetypal of language as such. For Agamben, therefore, an oath is not one genre among many; it is the essence of language, its purest manifestation and a privileged window into its ultimate conceit. Agamben thus approaches the oath not as it exists in legal/religious contexts but as something more fundamental. In fact, his entire methodology—his archaeology—is designed precisely to foreground the fundamental indistinction of language and oath.Agamben's archaeology must not be confused with Foucault's. Eschewing transcendental categories like origin or totality, Foucault's archaeologist pursues the endless accumulation of historical statements. On this model, the archaeologist does not ask where these statements began, what motivated them, or what drove them to appear when they did. She resists every temptation to look beyond the statement to something deeper, more fundamental, or more originary than the simple historical fact of its appearance. In the sharpest of contrasts, Agamben's archaeologist purses an “arche” that is beyond all historical statements. Following philologist Georges Dumézil (who was also influential for Foucault), Agamben argues that the goal of archaeology is the “furthest fringe of ultra-history” (9). His example is the so-called Indo-European language, the entirely hypothetical language from which a great variety of historical languages supposedly sprung. His conceit is that the examination of historical statements allows the archaeologist to work backward from history to ultra-history, from specific statements to a “force operating in history” (10) to the “otherwise inaccessible stages of the history of social institutions” (9). The distance between the two archaeologies might be measured by the mathematical metaphors used to describe them. Foucault's archaeology is grounded in addition; for him the fundamental archaeological task is accumulation.1 For Agamben, on the other hand, the archaeologist requires an “algorithm,” a means of arranging historical statements into a formula that produces something more than the sum of its parts (9).In the Sacrament of Language, Agamben uses his algorithm to work backward from a variety of classical meditations on the oath (Philo and Cicero are prominent) to what he calls an originary “experience of language” (53). This experience, much like the Indo-European language, “is something that is necessarily presupposed as having happened but that cannot be hypostatized into an event in a chronology” (11). What is this “pure” experience of language (53)? Here we need to follow Agamben into the details. His first clue that the historical career of the oath might bear witness to the pure experience of language is grounded in the observation that the name of God is a recurrent (even required) aspect of the oath (e.g., “I swear by God …”). To make sense of this formulaic requirement, Agamben turns to the first-century philosopher Philo Judeaus. In his analysis of a lengthy portion of the Legum allegoriae, Agamben stresses the ambiguous function of the name of God within the formula of the oath: “It is completely impossible to tell if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God” (22). This indeterminacy between the oath and name of God is important to Agamben, and he returns to this fundamental lesson from Philo at critical points throughout the book (48, 51).The indistinction between the oath and the name of God prompts Agamben to turn to Nietzsche's one-time teacher, the German philologist Hermann Usener. Now known for his concept of momentary gods, Usener argued that every name of the gods was originally the name of an action or a brief event. Thus there were gods named after harvest, tilling, plowing, and so forth. So understood, there is no distance between the name of a god and activities in the world; the name of a given god was the activity and the activity was the name of the god (46). This, we might say, is the ultimate instantiation of ethos: there is here no distance between life and language. Indeed, it is precisely the collapsing of the distance (the indistinction) between words and things that constitutes the oath as an index to an originary experience of language. “Here we have something like the foundation or originary core of that testimonial and guaranteeing function of language.” Thus, the name of God, essential to the formulaic structure of the oath, attests to the indistinction that envelops words and deeds, the oath and language as such. The name of God “is the very event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked. Every naming, every act of speech is, in this sense, an oath” (46).The simple act of nomination, then, points to an original experience of language. On this score, the essential characteristic of nomination is the fact that, in the act of naming, words and deeds are performatively related. “As in the oath, the utterance of the name immediately actualizes the correspondence between words and things” (49). At this point, Agamben's mode of argument resembles nothing so much as Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” As Nietzsche explains in this 1873 essay, originally speaking, language was neither denotative nor semantic. Rather, all words were originally interjections, names imposed on events by the creative whim of the “intuitive man” (who would soon become the “overman”). For Nietzsche (and Agamben), in the original act of naming, words and things were related only by the aesthetic preferences of the strong; it was only as the weak repeated the original interjections of the strong that words fell into the realm of semantics, representation, and meaning.2 It is for this reason, Agamben argues, that categories long central to the understanding of language (meaning, representation, and denotation) were not part of the original (performative) experience of language. He even suggests that one day the experience of language might once more escape the paradigm of representation: “The distinction between sense and denotation, which is perhaps not, as we have been accustomed to believe, an original and eternal characteristic of human language but a historical product (which, as such, has not always existed and could one day cease to exist)” (55). Thus does Agamben revise the speech act theory of performatives. Owing to their nonrepresentational semiotics, performatives point to the original experience of language. “They represent in language a remnant of a stage … in which the connection between words and things is not of a semantico-denotative type but performative, in the sense that, as in the oath, the verbal act brings being into truth” (55). At this point we can begin to see Agamben's radical revision of ethos. As he makes the category central to the experience of language, he asks us to remove it from the realm of representation in which it functions as a technique a speaker might deploy to guarantee the truth of her words. Rather, Agamben asks us to consider ethos performatively, to see it as indistinguishable from an original experience of language.Much like Nietzsche's, Agamben's tale is one of degeneration. Once the original performative experience of language was lost (and the paradigm of representation took over), possibilities of truth and falsehood emerged. In the space that now existed between words and things, the space that had been collapsed in the act of naming and in the oath, semantics took the place of performance. It was now the question of meaning that guaranteed the articulation of life and language. But meaning, complicated as it is by rhetoric, proved an untrustworthy linkage. Thus it seemed that falsehood was a possibility written into the experience of language as such. For this reason Agamben argues that it was only after the original experience of language had been lost that law and religion—the two historical guardians of the oath—sprang up to guarantee the relation between language and life. No longer an integral part of language itself, the linkage between words and deeds needed to be vouched for by human institutions and an ever-proliferating list of blessings/curses attached to the oath. Agamben returns to this point time and again, suggesting that it is deeply significant for him. Over and again, he insists on the primacy of an experience of language from which followed a number of cultural institutions: “And it is in the attempt to check this split in the experience of language that law and religion are born, both of which seek to tie speech to things and to bind, by means of curses and anathemas, speaking subjects to the veritative power of their speech” (58).Agamben cares about more than the birth of law and religion. On a more fundamental level, in the “split in the experience of language” Agamben reads the birth of anthropogenesis. That is, because humanity is the animal that reads itself in its language, the introduction of space between words and things provoked an existential crisis from which we have not recovered. “Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being” (11). This is why Agamben considers The Sacrament of Language to be a continuation of Homo Sacer. Agamben opened (and closed) Homo Sacer with a quotation from Foucault: “Modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.”3 He ends The Sacrament of Language with the same quotation, adding this comment: “So also is he the living being whose language places his life in question. These two definitions are, in fact, inseparable and constitutively dependent on each other” (69, emphasis his). In other words, if in the original volume Agamben stressed the political production of bare life, Agamben now argues that bare life and language are structurally related.4 Indeed—and this may be his strongest claim—Agamben now argues that bare life must itself be considered a product of language. From the perspective of Agamben's oeuvre, then, we must consider Homo Sacer and The Sacrament of Language as symmetrical studies: they chart the construction of bare life from political and linguistic origins respectively. From the perspective of the rhetorical tradition, the revision of ethos must now be considered complete: if Agamben can posit ethos as the fundamental category of language, it is because language itself creates the (bare) life to which it is continuously annexed.Now, truth be told, Agamben only once characterizes his inquiry in terms of ethos (on page 68). I've framed the entire inquiry in such terms to foreground the fact that, despite the difficulty of the philosophical prose, and despite the absence of what might be thought of as a rhetorical cast of mind, The Sacrament of Language is a book that will command the interest of readers of this journal. It is book that takes canonical ideas and concepts, reads them in creative ways, and produces results that are provocative by any measure. At this moment in rhetorical studies, a moment marked by a renewed concern in nonhuman rhetorics, animal rhetorics, and the space of the speaking subject vis-à-vis language, The Sacrament of Language may prove itself an invaluable tool for rethinking rhetoric's relationship to animals, humanity, and language.I'd like to register only one qualification. Briefly put, I fear Agamben may confuse articulation and indistinction. More precisely, he tends to read indistinction where a more nuanced reader might see only articulation. A few examples. In his reading of Philo, Agamben concludes that “it is completely impossible to decide if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God.” This is not true. For Philo, the fact that God's words are oaths is a “corollary” deduced from the primary fact of his “sure strength” (20). Philo is certainly articulating the oath and God, but they remain distinct: one is a corollary of another. Similar objections might be leveled against Agamben's equation of law and curse (38) and the various equations of the oath with blasphemy (39), promises (27), or perjury (7). Just because there is a mutually constitutive (even symbiotic) relationship between these concepts (and Agamben is at his best demonstrating these links) does not mean that they occupy a zone of indistinction.My concern is not limited to The Sacrament of Language. Readers of Agamben know that zones of indistinction are absolutely central to the whole of his work. I could point to the zones of indistinction he posits in Homo Sacer between man and animal, law and fact, or, ultimately, life and politics.5 Or I could point to the indistinction between anomie and order that permeates his State of Exception.6 In all cases, Agamben's work relies on the careful, meticulous, and complete erasing of boundaries. Agamben reads free movement, indeterminacy, and indistinction where others have read particular forms of correlation. At times, this indistinction is grounded in readings of obscure (Philo, Usener) or extreme (the Nazi documents that circulate in the closing section of Homo Sacer) texts that may (or may not) be sufficient to establish the indistinction he needs. Near the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben makes his commitment to zones of indistinction explicit: “It is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, the difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought.”7 Whether or not Agamben is correct that zones of indistinction must become a central category of our political thinking, I'd like to suggest that they must be central to our evaluation and uptake of Agamben himself. Above all, we must ask ourselves whether or not the zones of indistinction that punctuate his work at regular intervals are justified by the evidence he presents. My hunch is that some of them are and some of them are not. Indeed, zones of indistinction are the great genius and great liability of Agamben's thought: by moving freely between historically distinct ideas, by treating mutually constitutive concepts as if they were indistinguishable, Agamben enables us to ask profound questions that cut to the heart of our tradition. There is no denying this is important work. But, by the same measure, these questions only obtain because what might be called a consistent habit of (mis)reading indistinction for articulation. Whether one finds such work theoretically provocative (which it is) or historically slippery (which it is) is ultimately a question of faith.

Abstract It does not seem terribly unfair to say that studies of both rhetoric and dialogue have tended, by and large, to pass over listening in favor of speaking. In scholarly as well as quotidian parlance, it would appear that both rhetoric and dialogue are principally concerned with speech, banishing listening to the silent subservience of rhetoric's other. Whichever way it is glossed—as rhetoric, dialogue, language, or argumentation—the Western conception of logos emphasizes speaking at the expense of listening (Fiumara 1990). And the problem with conceiving of logos in terms of speech and speaking is not only that it ignores the importance of listening but also that it obscures how listening makes the ethical response possible. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this article examines the ethical exigency of the face and its relation to primordial discourse in order to disclose the otherwise hidden ethical significance of listening and its vocation as a form of co-constitutive communicative action that can “listen persons to speech.”

Rhetorical lore holds that epideictic address resolves itself into acts of either praise or blame. The passing of Michael C. Leff—friend to so many, colleague of a fortunate few—grants us every good reason to indulge the former, avoid the latter, and thus satisfy our need to bear witness to an extraordinary life. But we know, too, that the imperative to witness is scarcely limited to these options. This special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is conceived as a testament to the work of Leff generally but especially to a mind possessed of relentless curiosity, at once fiercely independent and disciplined, steadfast in its principles but open always to question, debate, and revision. Leff was, in a word, an explorer, and in this spirit we have asked our contributors neither to bury nor to praise him but to press on as fellow travelers into the world of ideas he so manifestly relished.That Philosophy and Rhetoric should host such an expedition seems altogether appropriate. Since the publication of its first issue in 1968, the journal has committed itself to reinventing the relationship between two ancient, enduring, and often warring traditions of thought. The genius of its founders—Henry Johnstone Jr., Carroll Arnold, Robert Oliver—lay in replacing the long-standing “versus” with an “and.” To grasp the importance of that “and” is to understand the mission of the journal, its editors, and the authors who hold its legacy in trust. It is well to be reminded of how bold that move was at the time, how uncertain its prospects. All was new, but readers quickly learned that here was a journal in full, evidence of which can be found in the roster of essays making up its first volume, among them Lloyd Bitzer's “The Rhetorical Situation, Chaïm Perelman's “Rhetoric and Philosophy,” Gerard Hauser's “The Example in Aristotle's Rhetoric,” Douglass Ehninger's “The Systems of Rhetoric,” Carroll Arnold's “Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,” George Yoos's “Being Literally False.” The journal, in short, proved instrumental in opening up new ways of thinking about the subject, and it does nothing to detract from Leff's many accomplishments to recognize paths charted before him.Much of what we may say of the journal may indeed be said of the man as well. Both remained convinced of the possibilities of inquiry once emancipated from habit, complacency, and unquestioned tradition. Leff, like Johnstone et al., strained against millennia of thinking of philosophy and rhetoric as being bound in an interminable cold war; they sought, finally, not so much a detente among the powers as a full and genuine partnership. The point was not to collapse the two modes of inquiry, nor to ignore the differences that themselves might be productive of insight. It was rather to put philosophy and rhetoric into conversation with each other.The results were not altogether even—as Henry once confided to me, there were times when he thought philosophers were trying to sound like rhetoricians and rhetoricians like philosophers. But the parties remained loyal to the pact and now, more than forty years on, the enterprise continues to expand the horizons of what we know and can know about that “and.” It has produced much, though with varying degrees of emphasis and interest: ontologies of discourse, classical exegesis, informal logic; hermeneutics, poststructuralism, feminism, public sphere analysis, and, recently, Bakhtin. The range will keep widening, but the journal will retain its signature commitment to depth, rigor, and innovation.I offer these reflections on the journal as a way of suggesting that Leff and it share certain abiding investments. It remains to the authors herein to enrich the contributions of both, and so I will limit my comments on the man to only a few broad observations. As I have noted, his thinking was marked by a steadfast commitment to the humanistic bases of the disciplines, but he did not allow himself to be artificially bound by either. This stubbornness—and he could be stubborn—as often as not placed him in the role of instigator: if he did not approve of the way things were going, he set out to create the conditions for change and renewal. It is notable in this respect how many developments in scholarship he either initiated, signed onto early, or aligned himself with to certain effect. Early in his career he was instrumental, with James J. Murphy, in reinvigorating the study of classical rhetoric at the University of California at Davis, whence was born the journal Rhetorica, for which he served as second editor. At Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he further established his reputation as a student of public address and rhetorical criticism; he led and gave forceful expression to the practice of close textual analysis, with attendant interests in linguistics and discourse pragmatics, assisted in the international study of argumentation, cofounded the Public Address Conference, and rejuvenated rhetorical studies at the University of Memphis.The list is incomplete but the point perhaps made: Leff carried with him the courage of his convictions, and he acted on them by creating the enabling conditions for new avenues of inquiry. In this regard he bore out the potential of interdisciplinarity in ways all too rare in academic work today. The term itself has become justly vulnerable: skeptics have good reason to wince at its easy optimism, the frequency with which it is bruited as an inherent good and the paucity of its actual results. Interdisciplinarity can and has given warrant to ecumenical excess, and in some guises it has promoted the view of rhetoric as being by definition a pariah discipline. In my view, at least, Leff avoided these pitfalls by remaining fixed to certain constants, chief among them a conception of rhetoric as a form of habitation, that is, a mode of being and acting in which the art and the artist collaborate in a world shaped by contingency, the unexpected, and the partially glimpsed. If one word may be said to capture this sense, it is “performance.” Leff himself did not use the term overmuch, perhaps because of the freight it carried during latter decades of the twentieth century; but as a way of explaining the ways of rhetoric it runs as a leitmotif throughout nearly fifty years of thinking and writing about the subject.The third decade of Leff's career found him at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was fortunate enough to work with him when I was completing my graduate studies. The 1980s proved a tumultuous period across the humanities, no less so in rhetoric. I had occasion, then, to observe up close how a first-rate thinker negotiated the manifold challenges posed by emerging forms of postmodernism. For many, his response revealed a certain conservative strain; this much is true, but not for the reasons usually ascribed. Leff was clearly concerned to extend and revitalize neoclassical forms of analysis, and he could be rather too quick to dismiss what seemed then like novel ways of reformulating the disciplinary grounds of rhetoric. His chief concerns, however, cut much deeper than such temperamental matters. Leff's problem was not with the beau ideals of the age—Foucault, de Man, et al.—but more generally with how they were being taken up and to what effect. In the main he found such acolytes afflicted with what he called the tendency to “think in slogans” and bristled at glib dismissals of the rhetorical tradition by those unversed in that tradition. Above all, however, he was troubled by the dangers of writing agency out of the script, as if rhetoric could be reconceived independent of its habitation in the lived realities of human symbolic action. At stake, again, was the role of performance, with its related commitments to historical context, locality, and the artistic rendering of human will. Leff's work was accordingly devoted to reclaiming the realm of concrete expression from airy abstractions, to capture again the rough ground of the discipline and develop a critical vocabulary responsible to the particulars of the speech act even as it sought cautiously for certain levels of generalization.All this may at first glance seem to speak more directly of Leff the rhetorical critic than of theorist familiar to readers of this journal. I would like to submit, however, that in fact his work gives little evidence that he viewed himself operating on one or the other register. I do not mean to suggest that Leff conflated the theoretical with the critical or refused to acknowledge their different emphases and predilections. As a theorist, he was deeply conversant in the historical and conceptual grounds of philosophy and rhetoric, and at various points he proved expert in diagnosing the state of scholarship in both. Still, it must be said that Leff's interest in the “and” leaned to the right, to the ways in which rhetoric, conceived as a form of embodied symbolic performance, could be seen as at once informed by theory and straining always to outstep its explanatory reach.Such a perspective on the art meant that Leff consistently sought to place theory and practice in a tensive, often ambiguous and ironic, but always productive relationship to each other. This much is clearly evident in virtually all of his writings on Cicero, for example, and it is with reference to the Roman orator that I conclude my comments on Leff. Tully was, of course, a preoccupation of Leff's from beginning to end. The reasons for this are many, but for the most direct explanation I refer readers to the essay reprinted in this issue. It is, in my view, the most efficient representation of Leff's abiding interests, including those just noted: the rhetorical lore, its canonical figures, the stress on performativity, the embrace of ambiguity and tension, the play of theory and practice. Short of rehearsing the argument, it may be illustrative to take his description of Ciceronian humanism as a mirror of his own: “a suspicious attitude toward abstract theory not only in respect to rhetoric but also to ethics and politics; a conviction that discourse, especially discourse that allows for argument on both sides of an issue, has a constitutive role to play in civic life; a valorization and idealization of eloquence that entails a strong connection between eloquence and virtue; and a conception of virtue that is decisively linked to political activity.” With this passage in mind, let us hint briefly at the essays to follow.The emergence of rhetorical studies in modern American higher education is in several ways a curious story. All disciplines, of course, struggle early to situate themselves within the complex and contested terrain of academic inquiry, but rhetoric, more than most, struggled to locate itself between the competing demands of research and theory on the one hand, and its applied and vocational missions on the other. It is no small part of Leff's legacy that he steadfastly refused to resolve this tension into a simple disjunction between the library and the classroom. A quick glance at his bibliography gives evidence that in fact he remained for much of his career deeply interested in the interplay of rhetorical pedagogy and theory. And the ground for this interest, as we might expect, was a long-standing investment in traditions of Latin learning generally and rhetorical education in particular.The distinguished classicist Martin Camargo takes us deep into this terrain in his exploration of Anglo-Latin rhetoric in late fourteenth-century England. As if to remind us that the status of rhetoric seems never to have been altogether settled, Camargo painstakingly assembles his case to demonstrate that the subject was not, as is frequently thought, the province of the classroom alone. His extensive recovery of archival materials, rather, leads him to conclude that, if anything, “the theory and practice of rhetoric were anything but banal, trite, and jejune; they were new, hot, even controversial—not milk for infants but solid food for adults.”Leff began his career as a classicist, and he ended it as a classicist. His attunement to the tradition, however, gradually shifted over time from largely exegetical concerns to questions over the relevance and fecundity of such thought for contemporary theorizing about the art. This interest he represented on several fronts: by reclaiming neoclassical criticism for the work of textual analysis, for instance, and by revisiting the concept of decorum as it related to contemporary theory. Among Leff's most important contributions in this vein was to have reanimated debates over the centrality of invention, argument, and hermeneutics. Here again he found himself both defending and promoting certain classical traditions of thought as unjustly stigmatized by postmodern critiques, and, more positively, as a robust resource for explaining rhetorical performance. In this enterprise he enjoyed the amicable but challenging company of Steven Mailloux, with whom he carried on a lively exchange of ideas over many years. Although Leff was rather more concerned to articulate the productive disciplinary differences that might be said to obtain between them, both held constant the role that controversy plays in funding rhetorical argument.Over and against strains of antihumanist thought—ranging from Plato to Heidegger to postmodernism—Mailloux locates an understanding of humanism that rightly embraces human agency and the inventive force of tradition. At the heart of this relationship is Leff's particular brand of “hermeneutical rhetoric,” the process through which individual actors render strategic interpretations of the past to shape collective perceptions in the present. Mailloux reminds us that in no sense does this form of humanism presuppose an absolutely free agent, nor does it ever concede a sense of tradition as inherently prescriptive or determinate. On the contrary, rhetorical humanism—and the hermeneutics it enables—celebrates the deeply human capacity for making judgments in precisely those contexts marked by contingency, plurality, and the shifting demands of human community in time.The study of argumentation is in some ways anomalous. Although it cannot be said to reside at the core of either philosophy or rhetoric as a disciplinary domain, it nevertheless abides as a persistent interest for both. Indeed, it was no small part of Henry Johnstones's mission—successful, in the event—to firmly locate the subject at the interstices of interdisciplinary inquiry and thus to ensure its career and strengthen its claim on several communities of scholars at once. Leff came argumentation through two routes: in his younger years as a collegiate debater and afterward as an academic. The former, I might suggest, is not altogether without relevance to the latter. From it he retained a sense of argument as the embodied exchange of convictions about matters of public concern. This commitment was to surface again when, in the 1980s and thereafter, Leff enthusiastically joined in the renaissance of argument studies that continues to this day.At least two themes join together much of Leff's thinking about argument, and they may be observed at work in his scholarship generally. One is an entrenched resistance to what he regarded as rigid and excessively abstract approaches to the subject, and the other, not surprisingly, perhaps, is the relevance of classical lore, especially Aristotle. Both are evidenced in J. Anthony Blair's case for revisioning conventional treatments of argument and its relationships to dialectic and logic. A prominent figure in the resurgence of argumentation studies, Blair proposes an alternative understanding of how these modes of description and action comport with each other. Rhetoric, he argues, is best understood as a theory of argument as it relates to speeches, dialectic as a theory of argument as it relates to conversations, and logic as a theory of reasoning as it relates to both.I have suggested that the principle of performativity underwrites virtually the whole of Leff's interpretive corpus. Nowhere is this preoccupation more evident than in his practice as a rhetorical critic. On a number of occasions he sought to sharpen, defend, and promote this practice, most explicitly with reference to the work of textual analysis. In the process, Leff helped to established its key theoretical underpinnings, to identify, that is, those premises which might shift such criticism away from mere impressionism toward a more stable and rigorous foundation. The task was not an easy one: a number of leading critics in their own right suspected in this project a certain New Critical fondness for contextless formalism. Again, I think this charge unfounded. We need only consider his insights regarding enactment to see why: texts, he argued, are not merely the record of symbolic action but are themselves forms of action, momentarily bounded by their textness, shaped by contextual forces, and expressions of artistic judgment. “Text,” that is, is as much a verb as a noun. And certain texts, he demonstrated, are notable for the ways in which they perform their own theory; Cicero's De oratore, for example, he took to be a “cookbook that bakes its own cake.”This conception of enactment we see at work in David Zarefsky's treatment of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. Zarefsky, preeminent among rhetorical studies in the study of the sixteenth president, shares with Leff an abiding interest in how Lincoln was able to give to his thoughts their optimal mode of expression. In the First Inaugural, Zarefsky teaches us, Lincoln exercises the generic possibilities opened to him by presenting what may be called his philosophy of republican government in its distinctly American form. He does so, however, not in the shape of a treatise but through argumentative enactment, a key example of which is found in how he seeks to slow down the deliberative judgment of the audience by slowing down the internal movement of the speech itself. Thus Zarefsky: “By coming back to the argument about secession again and again, [Lincoln] arrested the progression of the speech, halting its movement toward the final choice of peace or war. By developing separate, complete arguments, he invited consideration of the dangers of secession from multiple points of view, so that listeners would take time, not ‘hurry in hot haste’ but think ‘calmly and well’ on the subject. Lincoln's speech is an act as well as a set of propositions. The act carried out the slowing of time for which the propositions call.”Ours is not a particularly hospital time for the study of genre. A casualty of the antiformalism fashionable in much interpretive work of the 1980s and 1990s, the subject remains nevertheless a potent, if underrealized, resource for the analysis of public discourse. Leff, of course, gave to the matter considerable attention, notably in his work on Lincoln and, again, Cicero. His treatments of genre worked in large part because he understood that, contrary to the popular allegation, there was nothing inherently static or predetermined implied in its usage. Rather, he conceived of genres as a formal resource through which traditions of expression—and therefore thought—were given effect in arenas of civic action.Such a conception seems to inform Bradford Vivian's analysis of Booker T. Washington's (in)famous address at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. For Vivian, the text of that speech offers up a case study in the act of witnessing, where the dialectics of remembering and forgetting give shape and direction to the orator's vision of social rebirth. Among the key insights he offers is that this play of opposites is managed decisively by the epideictic form itself. Far from fixing that vision within the conventional options of praise or blame, Vivian illustrates how Washington subverts the genre through tactical appeals to forget one version of the past and to champion another and so to chart a course of putatively enhanced racial relations. Whatever we may conclude about the speaker's ultimate aims and effect—Vivian leaves us no doubt as to his own views—the text itself amounts, in his words, “to a meditation on time and memory as elements of public judgment.”Time now to let our authors speak for themselves.

The concurrent publication of The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History—a collection of essays published over the span of three decades (1980–2005)—and Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity makes available and defines Nancy Struever's ongoing revision of the history of rhetoric and pioneering understanding of rhetoric as a mode of inquiry. In Struever's own idiom, the all-inclusive “thickness” of rhetorical inquiry—as opposed to the discriminating “thinness” of philosophy—requires some concern for a thinker's intellectual career. Indeed, taken together, the two books allow for a useful, incremental gloss of the later Struever by the earlier and vice versa. Struever authorizes this continuity in her introduction to History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, linking the last essay in her collection, on Hobbes and Vico, to the more sustained analysis of the two thinkers provided in her most recent monograph. As a whole, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity aims at illustrating “rhetoric's renewed task: the critique of philosophy's unfortunate affinities for necessity, thus determinism, that weakens, damages political thinking” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, xix). Despite this adversarial claim—and her firm awareness of the perennial quality of the quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy—Struever calls for an inside job: a rescue mission intended to liberate rhetoric by authentic rhetorical means. Among them, certainly, is a renewed intimacy between theory and practice, the “theory as practice” that Struever has called for in another work.1Struever's commitment to rhetoric as inquiry makes her wary of the academic “culture wars” that defined the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, ix). One of the most fascinating aspects of Struever's career, as it emerges from these pages, is her ability to distinguish herself or, as she would prefer, to “secede” from an intellectual world whose proclivity for language hardly translated into a historical and thus profound understanding and practice of rhetoric as an investigative mode. “It is one thing to take a ‘linguistic turn’ and proclaim language as the core of politics,” Struever claims, but “it is another to proclaim the political core of language, for this generates a list of useful investigative priorities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 91).In her quest for appropriate boundaries, Struever argues against the “dysfunctional colonization of rhetoric by literary criticism,” whose adherence to Cartesian philosophy compels us to interpret metaphor “as primarily cognitive; that is, as an introspective act of a Cartesian consciousness in an isolate realm of concepts” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 1:73).2 This approach is particularly detrimental to the field of intellectual history, where the reduction of rhetoric to poetics, or worse, to a “poetic epistemology” (Paul De Man, Hayden White, etc.), leads to a self-referential focus “on texts, on products, not the events of process” (2:67). Even a “philosopher's rhetoric” such as Ernesto Grassi's, in Struever's view, remains bogged down by external “definitions” and “judgments” that often turn rhetoric into just “a techne, with some epistemic pretensions and an easy relation to theoretical axioms” (1:70). Rhetorical pragmatism should forbid “professional interference,” appeals to “empty formal relations” or to “the essentialist premises of the logical categories.” According to Struever, rather, what we need is a “rhetorician's rhetoric” devoted to restoring the discipline to its civil domain through an “account of the rhetorical premises and procedures investing specific historical initiatives and their reception” (75).So much for the pars destruens of this venture. One could argue that Struever emerges unscathed from what she views as the “fractured status of contemporary rhetorical theory” by paying heed to Vico's educational ideal. Struever's inclusive humanistic education gives her scholarship a fine edge: an equal mastery of the tools and concerns of Renaissance scholarship, intellectual history, political theory, and ancient as well as modern philosophy. More to the point, Struever shows that actual knowledge of Renaissance thought and practices can revise our fascination for Continental philosophy and protect against the pitfalls of contemporary theory's misplaced prejudice against the beginnings of modernity. A sympathetic reader of her work is bound to view the Renaissance and early modernity with the same new eyes Heidegger's unique approach to Greek antiquity afforded his students in the study of Plato and Aristotle. However, it would barely suffice to claim that Struever allows for an uncommon experience of the postmodern moment. Rather, her work thoroughly and successfully rewrites the future agenda of intellectual history and rhetorical inquiry.Struever fondly acknowledges the intellectual debts incurred to C. S. Pierce and Heidegger, from whose works she extrapolates insights that form her notions of “inquiry” and “rhetoric.” Pierce's antinecessitarian pragmatism defines the communal and temporal “constraints” of the logic of inquiry for our epoch: thought creates communal beliefs, which in turn tend to the establishment of “habits of action,” including inquiry. These premises “resonate with rhetoric's topical concerns: its engagement with a community's belief, shared opinions (endoxa) and with rhetoric's inveterate habits of activity, persuasion, as practice and goal” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 2–3). Working at a “supraindividualist” level, Pierce restores epistemology's dependence on community, the too often forsaken “locus of investigative action.” Inquiry is pragmatic: its subtilitas applicandi prevails over the correlated subtleties in knowing and interpreting (see History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 3:217–20).As for Heidegger, rhetoricians may yet learn how much they owe him. The neglected summer semester lectures of 1924 (Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie) remain, “arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 6:127). These lectures offer an “extraordinary opportunity” for those willing to share in Heidegger's recovery of the unity of “discourse” (Miteinanderreden) and “political life” (Miteinandersein) according to the originary Hellenic initiative: the “authentic life” as “political life” (106). Among the moderns, only the early Heidegger allows rhetoric to reside squarely “inside politics.” The consequences of this recovery are momentous: Heidegger aids in bypassing the “inauthentic” Platonic definition of rhetoric as a trivial art and rescues this mode of inquiry from its own “bookish retreat” as an academic discipline divested of a “precise sense of duty to action” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 133). In hindsight, one cannot but regret that Heidegger's interest in rhetoric was short lived and gave way to poetic concerns akin to those of the literary critics (to say nothing, of course, of his nefarious political allegiance).By endorsing Heidegger's prominence in “modern revivals of rhetoric” and assimilating his interpretation, Struever takes pride of place in the now long and crowded history of his reception. Yet she sits askew with respect to many other like-minded students. Like those of, for example, Gadamer or Grassi, her reading of Heidegger resonates with Vico, rhetoric, humanism, and the Italian Renaissance and early modernity. Unlike them, however, Struever does not ground her sought-for reconciliation of Heideggerianism and Romanitas in a refutation of Heidegger's anti-Platonism. Indeed, Plato seems to hold no interest for Struever.Confident of Heidegger's restoration of rhetoric to its proper domain (in the civil operations of political life), Struever embarks on an actualization of its nature as inquiry. Despite its co-originality with philosophy (for some, like Heidegger, rhetoric even takes chronological precedence) and Struever's internalist ambitions, rhetoric's vital fear of solitude asks that this discipline be defined, at least preliminarily, in confrontation. In other words, rhetoric's quarrel with philosophy is both inescapable and generative, if only the true nature of such opposition is revealed as neither a “contest of faculties” nor as an “academic rivalry” but rather as a vivifying “confrontation of two major investigative initiatives,” each characterized by its own modal allegiance: “necessity” for philosophy and “possibility” for rhetoric. Struever promotes rhetorical inquiry's kairotic infiltration and colonization of that breathing space left open by Aristotle “between partial and complete actualization,” the space of “unrealized possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 6).Released into its element, rhetoric's “modal proclivity” and “revisionary capacities” are given full rein to create “counterfactual narratives of the past used as unrealized possibilities to illumine a still inadequately defined past, as well as to project future policy” (125). While this task may seem daunting, Struever's point is that it should not appear impossible. The rhetorical inquirer is not asked to rewrite history from scratch but rather to reveal “what might have been otherwise,” to indulge in exploring the “possible worlds” that open up by placing “actuality in a range of possibilities” (6). If we persist, past, present, and future may look different though strangely familiar: “The modal interest perhaps replicates defamiliarization as a critical gesture” (127).In conclusion to Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever poses a pertinent question: “Where do we begin our tactics of rephrasing?” As a matter of fact, once a three-dimensional view of “possibility” is conquered and inhabited, the “where” and “when”—temporal and spatial coordinates—matter less than the “how”: that is, the appropriate attitude and strategy. In this context, the formation of strong alliances becomes of paramount importance. Thus Struever's admiration for Hobbes and Vico, who, although rarely as officially and tightly allied as in her reading, team up against political theory's dependence on the universal moral truths generated in timeless solitude by Greek philosophy. As both “topics” and “practitioners” of rhetorical inquiry, Hobbes and Vico have a lesson to teach in academic disobedience that could promote the overhaul of a political philosophy that to this day remains “fraught with fashion” and “susceptible to the quick exchange of deadening theoretical conformities” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 19:80). “Politics demands novelty,” and Hobbes and Vico put their rhetorical “inventiveness” to the service of a “life science” that contests the “philosophical confections of ‘oughts’” (76). In this reading, the “early modernity” of Hobbes and Vico comes closer than some of these pages would suggest to the “Renaissance” of their best humanist predecessors: creative imitation, congenial alliances, and strategies of secession remain salient features of this subsequent alternative project.At the outset, the “case for the modernity of Early Modernity” rests on Hobbes's subtle appropriation of Aristotle, an appropriation that, in Struever's view, certainly glosses Heidegger's own. In this case, too, Struever's reading draws heavily on selected sources, including, the “generous frame for Renaissance inquiry” proffered by Wilhelm Dilthey's neglected Weltanschauung und Analyse. His merit is twofold. First, Dilthey manages to keep the “issues and tactics” proper to the history of rhetoric apart from those of the history of philosophy. Coming from Dilthey, the approach could only be sympathetic: humanists “are to be read as pyschologues and anthropologues” rather than as (failed) epistemologists and metaphysicians (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 4:2). Moreover, it is to Dilthey's credit to have emphasized the Renaissance revival of Romanitas—that is, the mutually constraining relationship of individual and sovereign will (imperium).Hobbes's “roman orientation” and concern for the res publica endows his Ciceronian reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric with a pragmatic slant (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 12). Hobbes secedes by reaching over Cartesian dualism and appropriating the “Aristotelian continuum of faculties and actions” and “definition of the soul as principle (archē) of life”: “Soul is life” (13). The interaction and continuum of faculties (sensation, perception, imagination, passion, memory, and reason) inhibit a misguided distinction between “sensitive” and “cognitive” elements and “accommodate biology” in political life. “Nature as motion, as alteration,” restlessly seeks what it lacks: “If life, then motion, if motion, then passions, if passions, then differences, if differences, then politics” (22). The goal of rhetoric as “life science” should be to guarantee movement and endlessly postpone the end products of the “rational will.” The “therapeutic” freedom of open-ended deliberation, Struever claims, has greater value than the hit-or-miss liberty of action. This is how “Hobbes follows Aristotle … in the total politicisation of rhetoric” (17). In this frame, “rhetorical pessimism”—its concern for “process” not “end”—turns into a “competence” apt to produce “not so much a list of solutions” as “an ever-expanding account of the possibilities of multiple dysfunctions.” On this point, Struever is perhaps too unflustered in admitting that “the ambitions that try to assert complete consensus” are bound to be a casualty of this new rhetorical campaign (124).Struever's sophisticated reading of Hobbes cannot be fully recounted here. It is clear, however, that the author enjoys partaking in the rowdy liberation of rhetoric her work promotes. Rhetoric's liberation in politics focuses on the motus animi that “fuels political behavior” and “drives political action” in a creatio continua insisting on “complication” (24) and “fluidity” (33). Struever's decision to read early modernity under the rubric of Dilthey's “impetuous subjectivity”—as opposed, for example, to Burckhardt's stiff “individualism”—is a productive one. But should one allow things to spin out of control? Hobbes and Vico offer a solution not by transcending the political but by extending its purview to the community and its sensus communis. A more precise sense of civil “wholeness”—not to be mistaken for philosophical “plenitude”—can be recovered in Vico's commitment to the “impersonal.” In Struever's narrative, Vico delivers what Hobbes promises: “If Hobbes is critical, Vico is hypercritical of the moralistic initiative” (49).Struever notes that Vico declares his secession at the outset of the New Science with an emphasis on “civil things” (cose civili) rather than “moral” (morali). At once, the private moral inquiry of political philosophy is forsaken together with “narratives of personal decision and heroic interventions” (42). Vico's historiography opts for an “impersonal agency”—“Achilles,” for example, “is not a proper name but a possibility of role”—that “tempers, corrects individualism as our sense of Struever's reading of and its to as a gesture” may be her in community as the place where knowledge is and Moreover, emphasis on community corrects the and of philosophy and its political At a closer if “necessity” is our only we might our will to be tightly emphasis on on the and on up to but to the of beliefs, that the range of civil actions” However, if to and it by which to that same that rhetoric or In other words, space is to the that political philosophy out of be Hobbes in Vico and still it of their for they as unrealized possibilities in Modernity” establishment and of rhetoric's true nature as inquiry the recovery of an authentic However, Struever is that her has its a author with so much of rhetoric and politics with her Struever this in her of the “academic or investigative of the most rhetorical of (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, Vico's well as those of thinkers such as and and thus interest in inquiry only its practice” In other words, comes up against as the is to own possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever may be these are not as or for yet how much should a like-minded reader from a creative of and practices of Struever would an of rhetorical initiatives as opposed to of a Struever's own she is more on this If her work is a to critical the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, a early modernity is with late modernity and the At this a of rhetorical in Hobbes and Struever on of and some affinities with Vico however, as as the of Indeed, is the only unrealized possibility in Struever's a casualty of a agenda that is a with on the of or, its of and the of rhetoric's “political the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, as a with to Struever in a fine of intended to up the emphasis on in inquiry and the nature of the philosophy a point that the of the and as and a shared a of Heidegger's is now closer at Struever her of “possibility” in contemporary inquiry with a of the best and most recent rhetorical initiatives in and much the is that a rhetoric in in our of and our solitude of and of like those of Hobbes and Vico, of their A revision is bound to an of its This is even if such a as in the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, is as a point in the of a and career. One that History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History is not more inclusive not of Struever's past As it is, it for how Struever's could be to of its as inquiry” is critical of or persuasion, and the The of an reader can be for of its with Struever's rhetoric study or in which to be are that her work will like a literary to those to the of what Struever calls a more defined concerns as a Renaissance still this of The Renaissance early she has been a in One would not to Struever's as a to that of the her work that the is to this its Yet we a are the Renaissance and early modernity or This is a in Struever's work her in of be Struever's recent for “early modernity” less to Hobbes's and Vico's historical than to her to place herself in res and historical The of early modernity certainly more unrealized than the of the In case, a less of the should be an those who, including Struever in her own are still in the of the to this point is Struever's in Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity with respect to another Yet the she calls for one can of that to which she her The continuity and of between the humanism, and Vico's early modernity to that Struever would be on a reader of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity has not read of her other many essays in History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History the “Renaissance” of and some may Struever's to up to the to rhetoric's to It is true that this approach has more often than not to a and definition of rhetoric as a rather than different of be clear, it is not the of that one but rather the that is in the a that, with Struever's and Gadamer to this vital in from which Struever is as she is from by her of of rhetoric as inquiry shows what our discipline would look like if from matter how this may its and are bound to appear just as “therapeutic” as Struever to be in to the moral from the civil rather than the other way The of by Struever to one of the most contemporary in of both its civil and Struever shows that we can the past more lesson for the

Abstract The Stoic is often seen as the forerunner of Adam Smith's market man of morals, but others have suggested that the sophist played a role in the formation of market morality and political economy. This article traces Smith's treatment of ancient sophists and his use of the term sophistry in the Wealth of Nations. Smith praised ancient sophists for their effective didactic oratory and their ability to make money through teaching. Smith criticized arguments as sophistic when they promoted monetary advantage for a few over and above the principle of competition. This varied reception of sophists and sophistry suggests a keen understanding of the rhetorical tradition and its capacity to influence the development of the discourse of political economy. Smith's use of sophistry and reference to the sophists invites a deeper awareness of the essential vitality of effective argumentation for Smith's “system of natural liberty.”

Book Review| January 01 2010 The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy.Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. 314 pp. $60.00, cloth; $38.00, paper. Tracy, Karen; McDaniel, James P.; Gronbeck, Bruce E. Christine Harold Christine Harold Department of Communication University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2010) 43 (3): 296–300. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.43.3.0296 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Christine Harold; The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2010; 43 (3): 296–300. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.43.3.0296 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2010The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2008 The Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse Gerard A. Hauser Gerard A. Hauser Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2008) 41 (4): 440–466. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655331 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gerard A. Hauser; The Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2008; 41 (4): 440–466. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655331 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University2008The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2006 Philosophy as Self-Constituting Discourse: The Case of Dialogue Frederic Cossutta Frederic Cossutta Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (3): 181–207. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697153 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Frederic Cossutta; Philosophy as Self-Constituting Discourse: The Case of Dialogue. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (3): 181–207. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697153 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2005 Aristotle’s Phantasia in the Rhetoric: Lexis, Appearance, and the Epideictic Function of Discourse Ned O'Gorman Ned O'Gorman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2005) 38 (1): 16–40. https://doi.org/10.2307/40238199 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ned O'Gorman; Aristotle’s Phantasia in the Rhetoric: Lexis, Appearance, and the Epideictic Function of Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2005; 38 (1): 16–40. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/40238199 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania State University2004The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.