A lot has happened in Indian Country recently: water protectors and the NoDAPL movement brought international attention to Native sovereignty and ongoing resistance to settler forms of violence against Indigenous ways of being; a settler public became aware of the MMIW movement and the ongoing assault on the lives of Indigenous women; an apology was given by executive order for a genocide that occurred in California and a Truth and Healing Council was created to investigate the historical relations between California Indians and the state of California; and Native identity is “complex” and certain people seek to profit from that complexity by duplicitously or erroneously claiming Native identity, to name a few. To be sure, these are all issues long addressed by Native people (Indigenous movements, in particular, always have a long arc), but it sure feels like these are events that happened within a recent timeframe.The feeling that these are events and not manifestations of continuing struggles that go back hundreds of years is related to the well-documented fact that settler discourses on Native peoples often still represent us as existing in the past. A settler public, almost ritualistically, gets reminded of the existence of Native people and is seemingly perpetually surprised. This condition for Rifkin, while representing a significant problem on its own, also represents a double bind for Indigenous people. The long-standing and common response to these discourses of Native pastness has been to assert Native contemporaneity and/or modernity, but, for Rifkin, such a response participates in the very terms set forth by the discourses by contesting them within a linear, developmental, and rationalistic temporal framework. Rifkin rather seeks to dispel the idea that such a response adequately contests continuing settler domination and to show that it appeals to and bolsters a deeper settler framework.The double bind is a familiar ruse first theorized by Gregory Bateson in communication theory as patterns of confusion, a general condition for him for PTSD and schizophrenia, and popularized by Michel Foucault’s analysis of two opposing forms of power that together enmesh unsuspecting and well-meaning subjects further into power’s snares. In brief, Foucault argues that repressive power, the blunt, straightforward, top-down, and usually explicit kind, elicits an antagonistic response from the subjugated that surreptitiously turns them to directly face the repression or exclusion, speak up and against it, and, in order to be intelligible, and this is the twist, assert themselves within the terms of a growing if dispersed productive power that works through them. Rifkin links the double bind to claims that modernity is a collaborative construction between the West and the rest. In this case, for Rifkin, a generative knowledge production on Native contributions to modernity both depends on and bolsters what he refers to as the “background” of a shared temporal framework, asserting a common container in which events take place, which contests narratives of Native disappearance and vulgar forms of archaism and yet contributes to national and global narratives of historical progress, wedding Native assertions of contemporaneity to state interests.Rifkin’s answer to this dilemma is Beyond Settler Time, a long, theoretically expansive, wide-ranging, and erudite book on what he calls “temporal sovereignty,” which he contrasts to “temporal recognition,” the institutional and assimilative mode through which Indigenous peoples get brought/bring themselves into the present. Temporal sovereignty, on the other hand, engages “the texture of Indigenous temporalities” (Rifkin 2017, 7–8) and Native collective experiences of becoming. Echoing Glen Coulthard’s distinction between a politics of recognition (mediated by the settler state and its epistemic frames) and grounded normativities, “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time” (cited in Rifkin 2017, 207–8), Rifkin’s argument likewise emphasizes a form of self-determination that refuses external legitimation, flowing directly from Indigenous experiences, forms of governance, and social relations, but in temporal terms.Rifkin’s turn to time isn’t an obvious one for Native studies considering the intense and persistent focus the field has on “the land question.” Though, from at least the publication of Vine Deloria Jr.’s God Is Red, in which he asserts that Indigenous epistemologies have a spatial orientation in contrast to Western, Christian orientations to historical, linear, and teleological/eschatological time (which Deloria claims undergirds an inherent colonial imperative uprooting a lived sense of place) to the recent publication of Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes’s analysis of the longue durée of Native resistance up to Standing Rock, scholarship in Native studies has had an abiding interest in theorizing time. This includes the heavily populated list of Native scholars that Rifkin draws on to make his argument, including those whom he critically locates as being Native theorists of modernity (Philip Deloria, Scott Lyons, Jean O’Brien). But Vine Deloria’s lesson, drawing on years of Indigenous struggle, has been influential, with the most recent and visible manifestation being the LandBack movement. In this sense, Mishuana Goeman’s Mark My Words is another important touchstone for Rifkin, linking as it does Indigenous modes of storying to practices of grounded normativity, distinguishing between Indigenous place making and settler-colonial space making, or, as Robert Nichols calls it, the (violent) production of land as property. Goeman writes, “Stories teach us how to care for and respect one another and the land. Responsibility, respect, and places created through tribal stories have endured longer than the Western fences that outline settler territories and individual properties that continue to change hands” (cited in Rifkin 2017, 59–61). To Goeman’s abiding sense of storied Indigenous place, Rifkin offers a storied, collective, and experiential Indigenous sense of duration.The structure of Rifkin’s book is a familiar one, beginning with a brief preface; followed by a long first chapter that details the primary argument and the theoretical and methodological investments of the book, and then three chapters that develop the argument through close readings of texts, heavily weighted by novels (where the rubber hits the road, so to speak); ending, finally, with a coda that critically reflects on the relation between the book’s argument and U.S. Indian policy as it affects Native American sovereignty. Because this is such a theoretically rich text, and because Rifkin takes great pains to develop a powerful if complex argument on Native conceptions of time, in this review I primarily focus on the first chapter. For those interested in Native American literature and other forms of Native writing, Rifkin is a consummate literary scholar, and it is certainly worth reading his continuing engagement with the work of Native authors in the last three chapters, where he offers fresh takes based on his theorizing of temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty of largely canonical Native literary texts and authors. Each of these chapters engages a different aspect of temporal recognition as the means through which more radical temporal formations in the form of sovereignty are managed or silenced.In brief, chapter 2, “The Silence of Ely S. Parker,” addresses U.S. historical narratives of developmental progress through the rhetoric of a perfecting union. Beginning with a meditation on the silent, onscreen presence of Haudenosaunee politician, Ely S. Parker, in the Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner film Lincoln, Rifkin addresses the imposed temporal formation of the expanding and perfecting rule of law and its relation to violence by juxtaposing two concurrent wars caused by uprisings, the Civil War, and the lesser-known Dakota War. Attending to the writing of Parker as well as Dakota scholar Charles Eastman, Rifkin analyzes the temporal formations of the treaty and reservation systems as outcroppings of the rule of settler law. Chapter 3, “The Duration of the Land,” focuses on John Joseph Mathews’s novel Sundown, set in an Osage community during the allotment era. Analyzing the temporality of U.S. Indian policy and its focus on resource development (allotment and the petro-economy here), Rifkin notes how Mathews’s novel represents and disrupts a maturational and heteronormative conception of social reproduction. To do so, he juxtaposes reproductive futurity to the queerness of the main character, Chal, whose Indianness acts as an opening onto a sense of place-based duration. The final chapter, “Ghost Dancing at Century’s End,” addresses the almost excessively researched social, political, and spiritual response to settler invasion, the Ghost Dance. Removing it from the sociological interpretations it has been subjected to and restoring its affective and everyday aspects, Rifkin discusses two novels in which the ceremony features prominently, Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes. Referencing the version of the ceremony envisioned by the Paiute Doctor, Wovoka (there have been others), the ceremony, as made clear by Rifkin’s readings of the two novels, is both a hopeful vision for a future restored to Indigenous peoples, with the dead returning to live with the living in many interpretations, and a messianic manifestation of Indigenous rage through the prophesied disappearance of all white people. This affective ambivalence is summed up by Rifkin through the emotions of anger and longing, which, he argues, open up cross-time proximities based in prophetic temporality and its everyday manifestations.Rifkin lays out the book’s theoretical and methodological infrastructure in chapter 1, “Indigenous Orientations,” where much of his aforementioned argument and the basis for his notion of Indigenous duration reside. Ambitious and just a bit irreverent, the chapter ranges across a bewildering set of philosophies, concepts, and theories: Native and Latinx philosopher V. F. Cordova’s vitalist philosophy; Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenology (from which Rifkin draws the term “orientation”); Native theorist, memoirist, and poet Deborah Miranda’s archival meditations on the afterlife of annihilation in the wake of the California missions; theories of Native modernity; decolonial theories of coloniality (which get lumped in with the previous group); postcolonial critiques of the enlightenment; Native studies critiques of recognition politics; queer theories of time; Einsteinian relativity; Henri Bergson’s philosophical concept of duration; Native theorist Dian Million’s felt theory (along with non-Native queer theorists of affect); and Native conceptions of storying. It’s honestly a bit overwhelming; however, Rifkin’s erudition together with a conceptually tight argument hold it all together.After establishing the broad parameters of temporal recognition, described above, Rifkin explores a variety of theoretical conceptions of temporal plurality, what he calls being-in-time, as alternatives to dominant settler time. As a subjective form, being-in-time is a phenomenological orientation drawn from past experiences that frame possible future experience, turning one toward the future through interest and momentum in the form of a trajectory. The phenomenological experience of time organizes much of the chapter, though it takes different faces with Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, Bergson’s theory of duration, and Merleau-Ponty’s more canonical philosophy. What this step does is specify the experience of time away from abstract, common time. Threaded through this argument is the question of collective (as opposed to common) and therefore Indigenous experiences (which are not just subjective or intersubjective). To begin to answer the question, Rifkin turns to Native scholars: Cordova’s notion of communal frames of reference and Miranda’s and Dian Million’s respective theories of collective storying. Rifkin ends the chapter by staging a conversation between Indigenous storying as collective and affective frames of reference and queer theorizations of temporality. This last section is the only one in the book where non-Native theories are directly questioned through a Native critical lens and is, for that reason, one of the more robust moments of theorizing in the book. It is also very much in Rifkin’s wheelhouse, hearkening back to his earlier work on intersections of queer and Indigenous studies.The hinge between temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty in the chapter, perhaps surprisingly, is physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and his idea of frames of reference. In Einsteinian relativity, Rifkin finds a conception of time that breaks with natural time, the common temporal experience of the present as an “unfolding, universal line of development” (Rifkin 2017, 34–35). Frames of reference, on the other hand, are based on one’s relative position and make the idea of a universal time impossible. Turning to theoretical physics in order to understand temporal sovereignty, though, carries a number of risks, which Rifkin acknowledges by noting the limits of Einstein’s theory for discussing Indigenous experiences. While, according to the theory, there is no possible universal time, what makes a frame of reference intelligible is having a common measure to compare frames, in this case mathematics itself (it also helps to have a common perspective, the absolute speed of light). One can understand differences between frames by comparing them according to this measure, each having internally consistent relations to time that onto each The of is that this for different experiences, a problem that philosopher Henri out to with his theory of duration. To and notion of time, offers a and notion of duration. It is, the and subjective of relativity, a philosophical to Einstein’s physics if the that had with was of the for to the between the two conceptions of time is to Rifkin’s distinction between temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty. Bergson’s of and experiential duration from time much of the critical of Rifkin’s a that the book. than time as an abstract, measure of universal movement a can of it as as temporality than temporalities” The term is as Bergson’s notion of duration is up with the question of in two against theories that human is of asserting a of human of Bergson’s and and, perhaps as a response to the by of that is an if one takes the that space is This of space and time to assert a of experiential duration, and from abstract, had significant on American such as as well as American and It’s a critical that has had and has as a form of critical common sense, as by this by V. F. is an from the fact that there is and change in the (cited in Rifkin 2017, in this distinction Rifkin’s as It like this settler time, as a of and is a that a temporal experience for temporal such as Indigenous that this are through temporal recognition, through a conception of shared modernity and the however, time is and the of settler time is a a of experiential time. The step that Rifkin takes is to this to show that Indigenous peoples within that are at also with the individual of Western Indigenous forms of temporal sovereignty, as within the settler framework. Attending to these for Rifkin, is a to time and open space for “Indigenous forms of collective and modes of One to do this is to the texture of temporal formations in Rifkin turns to physics and a philosopher of to Native temporal sovereignty, because to made but in to Indigenous and also as a of earlier discourses of social development and a time that between peoples according to a though the make is often as a spatial one, as opposed to to Rifkin’s very rich concept of temporal sovereignty into what has as I the Western Rifkin draws on for an conception of time, do not are more than the while certainly directly with Indigenous formations of and experience, of whom theorized in ways that themselves to Rifkin’s obvious answer is that and are interested primarily in time within a Western framework, to the critically turn makes to an of the West such a still makes and then of out into and and so This is of what Rifkin refers to on as his to Western formations of in order to make open and make visible the texture of Indigenous of an critical within a dominant framework. The other obvious answer is the of by Native that it a notion of that in if not Indigenous people into of a different notion of This version of pastness is largely for the idea of a against which Native people are to the common that is a Indigenous people not just in time or but also in does the question of in relation to time discussing for in as an time (Rifkin 2017, the aspect of into Rifkin how is a concept that temporal recognition through the lens of and its and relative to Indigenous time against the of settler time. But there a between Rifkin’s notion of temporal and relativity that I I it has to do with the complex between the of the and as and by Tony the concept and the of on its and more by as of an that and and through the of subjects the in the different of between and the links this and to the of the term which the question of how and, in Rifkin’s conceptions of temporal recognition and temporal sovereignty. how do these conceptions on or and for a book review if are to it back in a the and Rifkin’s book that it Rifkin’s on a double bind of its only was a philosopher if there was one, but Rifkin’s on phenomenology a form of human of the Western a number of Native in order to this sense of time as Rifkin gets there by first the problem of settler time and then it within the of Western the and its out time as a in order to the double bind of historical and assertions of Native modernity another one in relation to the of the human as a of an as is, does Rifkin the Native people are of modernity all with Native people are also complex To begin to answer this the colonial and of and its in the of to peoples, as described by and how that undergirds a sense of the This is a question that on the of from to and a that to how in social, and and interest in epistemologies and is at as made clear by the of of Indigenous What if Indigenous epistemologies and are not in the Western What and make possible another of In his engagement with the work of Deborah Rifkin offers a possible on the of the of Rifkin notes that Miranda’s work in the of the of people in the face of such a notion of turning away from a in which Indigenous people up of for an and within a Miranda’s rather the very and of through storying as of our was to the I to that the of was but other Indians California Indians been a the a lot power to or (cited in Rifkin 2017, What is is the of the term with Miranda’s the and of as well as its an or in seemingly form, perhaps through and This isn’t against the such as the but it also have the It’s at this Rifkin’s of Indigenous takes and of Indigenous as the of land or modes of governance, Rifkin finds in Miranda’s conception of a to the of Indigenous and In the of and recognition, acts as a that the itself of an Indigenous through an sense of different and ways of living that into are an affective of experience, what Dian calls felt and in often and The one is the to which, according to like water flowing the of our (cited in Rifkin 2017, in the form of and temporal experiences. For Rifkin, this sense of storying a of a lived that back against the of imposed settler forms of recognition and that from Indigenous governance, to relations to to social and and the of the time of in Rifkin 2017, is at his this sense of into conversation with queer theories of time, his earlier work on imposed forms of settler through Indian the of of Native and and with settler in other of settler as a and the of in of recognition settler and Rifkin this question to on the possible of queer to and the of time to the and through for this of queer temporal conceptions for on of and investments in the of the settler these theories against the terms of addressed by and the for collective to in the face of and Rifkin both takes the from queer temporality and also asserts that Native temporal formations are not to non-Native (which includes non-Native queer It’s a of living with the and in an of Rifkin does with queer theory what he do with Western his notion of on this powerful of storying in and through Rifkin, through us toward another of and making making in other do take up this

ABSTRACTCritiques leveled at epistemic decolonization call for a reorientation in theories of colonialism. The colonial imagination, a rhetorical tool that normalizes a sensible order of dispossession and appropriation, can be a reoriented site of contestation. By imagining an identity whose only means of relating is through opposition, the colonial imagination renders identities that inhabit a state of solitude. Two letters from Hernán Cortés to King Carlos V of Spain show how this colonial imagining aims to normalize dispossession and appropriation of the relations Originary peoples have with lands, waters, airs, and other-than-human relatives. Considering this argument, rhetorical studies needs to readjust its analytical timeframe beyond the times of settler-colonial nation-states and colonization.

ABSTRACTAssuming that withdrawal is ontological, no method of inquiry will breach the “essence” of an object. As such, this article raises a question of onto-epistemological access to complicate the development of recent rhetorical theories and rhetorical method/ologies informed by object-oriented ontologies and new materialisms. This article wonders about the drive to know and to feel forwarded in these rhetorical method/ologies without discussing how things hide from other things and from themselves, how things elude critics, and how scholars access others through ethnographic and embodied methodologies. Explicating epistemist and anti-epistemist approaches to the question of onto-epistemological access, this article makes a modest proposal for rhetoric scholars to conjure rhetorics of unavailable diversities to remake the gap between knowledge and reality again and again.

ABSTRACTSpeakers may argue in ways that facilitate cooperation, without really establishing unity. If emphasis is put on the word “composite” in composite audience, then the complementary act of addressing such an audience can be understood as an orchestration of different people, who may cooperate toward a conclusion. This brings attention to the multidimensionality of issues in pluralistic communities and the range of consequences proposals may have. Following Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric, I discuss how the compositeness of such argumentation can be fruitfully approached pluralistically. I argue that proposals on practical issues imply concomitant situations, wherein audiences are assigned different roles to play toward the ends of argumentation. This means that rhetorical argumentation performs implicit diplomacy, with implications for different audiences and the relationships between them. I conclude this article by discussing what this pluralistic and interactional account means for the analysis and evaluation of arguments and their rhetoric.

Modern thinkers long have been troubled by everyday talk. For example, one nineteenth-century Tory critic observes, “General small-talk” is any exchange “in mixed society, where men and women, young and old, wise and foolish, are all mingled together.” However available the occasion or obvious the topics, chatting is easy for the talented but awkward for the ungifted. On the other hand, “special, or professional small talk” is an exchange of words between persons of “the same mode of life, as between two apothecaries, two dissenters, two lawyers, two beggars, two reviewers, two butlers, two statements, two thieves, &c.&c.&c.; in short all conversations which are tinctured with the art, craft, mystery, occupation, or habits of the interlocutors” (Campbell et al. 1823). For those who can mingle, chat blossoms. For others, social occasions are always awkward, even dreaded. The traditional, elevated, polite arts of conversation were passing in the entrepreneurial, vernacular, and expert exchanges of urban living in the industrial, nationalizing nineteenth century. Newspapers headlined events, published speeches, and churned the talk of the town. Samuel McCormick’s excellent work beckons us to consider such things anew and attend: “The range of modernity’s chattering mind” (298).The Chattering Mind visits distinctions made between wasteful chatter and three sophisticated excurses. With care, he recounts “Kierkegaard’s existentialist critique of chatter, Heidegger’s phenomenological account of idle talk, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic treatment of empty speech” (297–98). These careful interpretations percolate the book’s informed call to reconsider the standing of subjectivities in an “algorithmic era, where small talk now doubles as a resource for bit data, and big data as the lynchpin of our digital selves” (295). Thus, McCormick constructs “a study of how the modern world became anxious” because “many of the cultural anxieties that piqued their interest continue to inform individual and collective life in the digital age” (299). Chatter, idle talk, and empty speech are concepts embedded, respectively, in Kierkegaard’s subjective objecting, Heidegger’s ontological rhetoric, and Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic discourses of analysis.“Every day talk” is set within the history leading from nineteenth-century modernity to twentieth-century mass society. The “everyday” initially appears “in person and in print, among ordinary citizens and educated elites, with varying degrees of deliberateness and unawareness” (2–3). The industrial revolution paralleled development of the “ordinary, habitual, and frequently recursive kind of communicating that occurs in private and public setting alike” (4). Unsettled by varieties of uninformed talk of their day, McCormick’s philosophers, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan, are nervous about the circulations of the masses and so distressed about the “gossip, babble, mumbling, and nonsense” that appear “especially pervasive” (4). These writers, McCormick observes, found a “motivational ingredient that has since become endemic to life in the digital age” (5). Yet, in the end “chatter, idle talk, and empty speech were neither means-turned-ends like phatic communion nor means-to-ends like political talk but, instead means without end like nothing they had seen before” (5). Ongoing, talk for talk’s sake manifested the worthy value of keeping flows of subjectivity streaming.The Chattering Mind builds a position in three parts with the conclusion following on. Each reads a philosopher in the contexts of the production of his discourse. Philosophical arguments are attuned to the reader’s understanding of “a conceptual history” that works with philological inquiry, the exposition of analytical positions, and the questioning of alternative views of public and crowd. McCormick unspools the dramas expressed by each philosopher who was irritated yet inspired by the contretemps-with a barber, rivals, officials, and town folk.Part I on Kierkegaard presents a grating event in which the Either/Or thinker observed, critiqued, and rebutted snak (“chatter”). Kierkegaard’s subjective-turn was initially occasioned by a dispute in the Copenhagen Post, where the naming of his own article as “amusement” unsettled him enough to differentiate his considered claims from “noise, wind, babbling” and the like. McCormick moves adroitly to analyze a source mentioned in Kierkegaard’s repost: The Talkative Barber. The chatterbox yaks and clips; so, repetition, intimacy, and banality fuse. The comedy discloses absent subjectivity through its and-another-thing, partner-less conversing. Ludvig Holberg’s one-act comedy was written in the early 1720s about excessive, thoughtless running talk that turns against the speaker himself. Like the Barber’s wagging tongue and moving jaw, chatting goes on without (a means to an) end.Part II unites Heidegger’s early lectures on rhetoric to his later publications and position in Being and Time. Aletheia and pseudos are illustrated in a model where deception, dissimulation, and distraction are equated with Sophists (Gorgias) and social figures of the Braggart, Stooge, and Babbler. Truth or aletheia reaches into pure perception, disclosive knowledge, the thinking through of the Theorist, Philosopher, and Dialectician. Speech and counterspeech is the domain of the orator, a higher form of bios politikos.Part III initiates an intricate, detailed response to Lacan’s reading of “the dream of Irma’s injection,” an initial episode that constituted a launch platform for Freud’s groundbreaking The Interpretation of Dreams. McCormick carefully explicates Lacan’s criticism of Freud and the latter’s reinterpretation of psychoanalysis. McCormick points to facts and associations unpursued by Lacan and advances the observation that “the resistive, egocentric practice of empty speech is, in fact, an opportunity structure for its opposite, a transformative mode of discourse he fittingly calls ‘full speech’ (parole pleine)” (8).The collapse of distinctions between (elite reading) publics and (peopled) crowds comprises a central decentering argument. Chattering complicates. Lacan works through Freud’s interpretations of Irma’s dream together with his own search for colleague confirmations of his analysis of her lingering illness. Otto’s dirty syringe appears, too. Lacan shows these episodes to be a split-collapse of Freud’s unified (narcissist) ego. Likewise, McCormick takes us to Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 5:1–30) where a moving hand burns writing onto the wall. With no decipherable meaning to the king or guests, the writing becomes interpreted by Daniel the prophet, who is mocked and ridiculed; yet, the message comes to completion overnight, with finality. Divine irony appears at hand. Thus, the composing ego is decomposed either at a health episode or at a banquet. In each case existence is at once “numbered, weighed and divided” (231). The costs of the ever-coding, perplexing self are expensive. “Freud’s acephalic, unconscious self interrupts the rambling dialogue of his peers to deliver a cryptic text addressed to us” (237). Yet in his turn to colleague confirmation, he joins the crowd (two colleagues combined with “nemo” as polycephalic being). Thus begins the pivot toward individual as crowd and public. Lacan’s master interpretative formulation of “being towards death” is not received as unalloyed wisdom by McCormick. “Like Daniel—conveyor of godly visions, interpreter of kingly dreams, master of all conjurers, diviners, astrologers and wise men—Lacan presents himself as the exclusive interpreter of this cryptic text” (237). Indeed, Lacan’s paraphrastic play wakes us from the sleeping to daylight’s assortments of te deums.Together sections 1 through 3 provide a powerful conceptualization of thinking and talking that recalls how the grounds are set for the contemporary “individual” of self and other. Everyday talk is turned from a marginal concept to a central puzzle. “As [Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan] saw it, ordinary language use was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity” (8). Everyday talk “poses the challenge of attunement itself” (9).The “First and Final Words” (section 3) moves the discussion of chatter beyond Lacan and into challenges of communication to actors in what has been named network society. Le Bon, Tarde, and LaTour are assembled, and McCormick objects to twentieth-century thinkers’ distinctions between the crowd and the public, for each fuses (through talk) with the other, and it is in conversation (however apparently unproductive) that the important work of communication and subjectivity reprise. Thus, he observes that “the network revolution of late-modernity, which has increasingly transformed small talk into big data” is “uniquely poised to embrace, advance, and even radicalize” techniques of communicative practices, understood as “techniques of self-cultivation” (11, 293). Networked individuals do revolutionize, even though waves of message-generating techniques promote, if not induce and trigger, messages that troll, swat, sh*tpost, frape, out, grief, and catfish classmates, friends, and strangers (Leader in Me 2019). Well-intentioned internet off-ramps are available to those who have mastered caveat emptor. McCormick’s recollection of modern thinkers, their contexts, concerns, and analytical argument show how reflective appreciation and criticism of everyday talk uncovers “individuating potential” for network society. He invests hope in youth resistance, even as young people show disturbing rates of anxiety and loneliness. Particularly with COVID-19, renewing virtual ties has become necessary to, rather than a supplement for, the accomplishment of the everyday.The Chattering Mind animates a “conceptual history” of human science that brings forth a “usable” and contingent present. In the conclusion, McCormick’s “mind” artfully nudges communication onto more complex, circumspect, and ambivalent nests of inquiry. To communicate is to share, he shows, but it is also to contaminate (285). “We see a transhistorical assemblage of communicative practices and cross-hatched identities that are at once individual and collective, rational and irrational, normative and pathological—and thus just as likely to thrive in reading publics comprised of educated elites as they are to flourish in revolutionary crowds made up of lay citizens. Such is the range of modernity’s chattering mind,” he writes (298).To be sure, the Anglo-American communication field is no stranger to the everyday. But, across the twentieth century, it preferred pragmatic theories, robust engineering, and means-ends accounting. Group discussion and vernacular address, interpersonal and organizational success furnish objects of inquiry for democratized, industrial, electronics society. The goal of increasing skills for success furnishes a mission for communication studies. Critical rhetorical theories, too, contribute by exposing inefficient prejudices and hardened traditions. Communication in this vein is a resource to be mined incessantly by centers confederating social sciences and humanities methods. Alternatively, the modern human sciences emphasize interdisciplinary work among many fields such as cognition, philosophy, history, and anthropology as well as biology, biochemistry, and folklore. Mass communication and mass society furnished objects of concern for European researchers brokering individual, national, and mass relations. McCormick’s idea of a “a new form of networked individualism” (294) asks that the field reimagine communication in forms wider than expressions with phatic meaning or strategic vectors of political power.In beautifully written and deeply thoughtful reconstructions, McCormick orchestrates the philosophy of communication into resonances with the conceptual play of the human sciences. He speaks to hearing with attention and “seeing the world around us—a way of seeing well-attuned to what Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan all understood as the challenge of attunement itself” (9). And the resonance is important. As these thinkers “were all careful to insist, everyday talk is also the condition of possibility for alternate, more resolved ways of speaking, thinking, and being with others” (8). The modes of resistance and acts of transformation that McCormick discovers are powerful. But, coded “snake oil” and the spread of soothing “technobabble” conceal genuinely disturbing algorithmic carving, rendering and distribution of “fully traceable” communications. The networked “individual” seeks to “have” (a profile) rather than to “be” (a self), McCormick suggests (296). Whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent releases of Meta (a.k.a Facebook) internal memos shows that communication scientists who work for a Black Box platform are entangled by “Flat-Earth” modeling that energizes a metrics-driven, message-commodity information society (Allyn 2021). Trace and transparency fail to link. Haugen points out that dissimilar entities are linked by profit-maximizing processes at the micro (anorexia promotion), meso (antidemocracy controls removed), and macro (genocide in Myanmar and Ethiopia) levels. The twenty-first-century “chattering mind” has its work cut out, AI notwithstanding. Sam McCormick’s inquiry on communication and its resonance with the human sciences offers an auspicious launch for inquiries into the entanglements of communication, subjectivity, and the Möbius geometries of data-fueled chat forms. We need to keep in mind that “everyday talk was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity” (292–293).

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

Other| June 01 2022 BOOKS OF INTEREST Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2022) 55 (2): 215–221. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.2.0215 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy; BOOKS OF INTEREST. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 June 2022; 55 (2): 215–221. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.2.0215 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2022 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2022The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT How does one hear a story that isn’t tellable, or advocate on behalf of someone who is illegible? We propose to develop the concept of atopos as an unspeakable, but nonetheless productive site of social energy.

ABSTRACT The tension between freedom of speech and academic freedom results from the contradiction between democracy and expertise, resulting in a rhetorical “gray zone” that stymies faculty appeals to due process and constitutional protection. It’s not so much that certain “uncivil” words and utterances cannot be said in this gray zone; it’s that such words, when said, require one’s ejection from the (academic) demos. In an examination of the case of Steven Salaita, I’ll show how the tyranny of the demos, in the guise of “civility,” “community standards,” or “institutional values,” trumps academic freedom, and how the commonplace of democracy—understood as public opinion—can and does compel faculty silence.

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

ABSTRACT A brief reflection on the possibility of contingency in the midst of what cannot be said.

ABSTRACT In the West’s Will to Know and its attendant rhetorical forms, speech has been related to silence in primarily three ways. In rhetoric and dialectic, speech pursues speech; in rhetorical education, silence pursues speech; and in sacred, ascetic rhetoric, silence pursues silence. These three relations of speech to silence as a form of knowledge in the Western rhetorical tradition leave a fourth untraversed. Yet to be explored is speech in pursuit of silence. This essay turns to the Buddhist tradition of rhetoric and dialectic to identify a form of knowledge where speech—negation—pursues silence. I then trace the same model of negatory speech in pursuit of silence in the long-repressed practice of sophistic antilogos.

ABSTRACT Philosophy joined with rhetoric is a means to speak fully about the human condition. Socrates’s statement concerning the “unexamined life” and Joyce’s manner of “two thinks at a time” are examples of how to approach the human condition. They show us ways we can speak of our humanity and ways that we cannot.

ABSTRACT When enmity seizes language, speech needs be silenced to give meaningful communication a chance. But current Manichean structures making life a moral battleground have to first be undone to make shared problem solving possible. It is suggested that a rhetoric of the essay is better suited to this task than the rhetoric of speech.

ABSTRACT Motivated by a seeming disregard of the problem of speech proper in some rhetorical theorizing, I attempt to show the heuristic value of a semiological approach to what can(not) be said to rhetorical inquiry. I argue that attending to the specifics of speech, of its conditions of (im)possibility, is one way to arrive at rhetoric’s multiple compositions. To illustrate these points, I consider the case of what cannot be said from the perspective of speakers of Shona through an integrational philosophy of communication.

What cannot be said? The question presses, as there are no words, or no fitting words, or no words that make sense let alone do justice, all perhaps in the face of demands (not) to speak. And, as voice collapses in the midst of the violence that confounds reference, degrades language, imposes silence, and enforces repression—what cannot be said may turn on privation, the grounds, incentives, and intentions of expression that are banished, disappeared, and colonized, often in the name of deterring and containing the “dangerous” word, the word assumed to be violent, perhaps intrinsically and perhaps as it’s held to contravene the homologeō with so much “barbarism.” In this way, what cannot be said may also be a function of what’s given or taken for granted, whether as capacity, presumption, affirmation, commonplace, law, or spirit, just as it may stem from surplus, the economies of nonstop expression that cannot bear quiet reflection on their own presumptions, not least the possibility that there is such a thing as too much all at once.What cannot be said? Speaking is fraught, in the midst of a breath-taking pandemic and the suffocating smoke—so much smoke—of the next war and an earth on fire. It is an altogether tense time, place, and manner to speak, at a moment when the idea, doctrine, and “marketplace” of “free expression” divides generations and fuels contemporary kulturkampf, a proto-stasis in which fewer and fewer want or care to hear from those who are not already in the “proper” (progressive, reactionary, tolerant, conservative, fundamentalist, etc., etc.) crowd, singing the proper tune in the right chords, the truths about all the big lies. The infinitely recallable words afloat in social media’s gloomy cloud set the fear of being called out—ever later—into the calling to speak. The demand to burn books echoes from school board meeting to meeting, as trending tirades about the difference between cancelation and censorship flame, smolder, and flame back. More fire—throwing light on the fact that the problem at hand is a very old one. The hemlock has taken many forms, with varying levels of toxicity. The promise underwriting audi alteram partem has long provoked (better and worse) opposition and more than a few bans for violating standing “terms of service.”What cannot be said? It’s fashionable to deem language incapable of revealing what “matters” and so best indicted as mere “linguisticism.” If the charge risks a certain hypocrisy, it is never self-evident what grounds good speech or embodies its power, whether to cross the line turned smudge between speaking and writing, and how best to conceive the work of interpretation, representation, and critique that continues to attend and confound expression. Though so many words yet strive to figure a rational-deliberative-public persona that may have long left the building, this aspiration with dwindling audience may be no less chilling than a fragmenting articulation of belief that demands recognition of an “I” that appears naïve to the speech-action on which its emergence hinges. One wonders then if much has changed, if we remain in a moment, as Foucault put it, that “never attached much importance to the fact that, after all, speech exists”—a denial that has well-served those who take the word as their own in the name of refusing any advice about the merits of learning more about how to talk about talk.What cannot be said? The question abides, multiplies, and compounds, not least within and between rhetoric and philosophy. What goes and what can perhaps only go without saying, for better and worse—that is, for the lifeworld? What is said in what’s left unsaid, perhaps as the unsayable is the ground and demand to speak? What’s not being said in the name of being and at the cost of becoming otherwise? What remains unsaid and unsayable, in silence and in the midst of the damage done, not least the damage done to language itself? What cannot be said in time and what saying has no place? What cannot be said for history? How does what cannot be said appear—as inability, choice, prohibition, transgression, virtue, imperative? What potential abides in the unsaid and unsayable, for truth, freedom, authority, judgment?What cannot be said? Quick and tidy replies will not do, except perhaps as evasion. This is partly to say that it is likely important not to introduce this special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric, an extended and challenging consideration of the question—What cannot be said? It is not so much that the essays here speak for themselves, although in many ways they do, at the same time that they ask after and frequently trouble such certainty. It is not that they demand silence, even as they provoke quiet reflection. And it is not that they require an interpretive map, as they are best approached from multiple angles and taken up in various orders—the essays here sit in some tension, and also abide with and work for one another, in ways that invite discovery. Indeed, anything resembling a “proper” introduction may be less a distraction than evidence of a deep misunderstanding, a failure to grasp that the question of what cannot be said—as a question—may resist obligatory first words, the definitions, topoi, speech acts, and language games that are deemed prior and held so very tight, perhaps at the cost of language itself. The essays here, not least as they manifest the possibility that Adorno discerned in the essay’s form, resist this conformity. In their own way, each “says what is at issue and stops where it feels itself complete—not where nothing is left to say” (1984, 152). Neither first nor last word, but a compound opening, an idea whose very form may amount to heresy.

Other| December 01 2021 BOOKS OF INTEREST Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2021) 54 (4): 434–439. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.4.0434 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Kennedy; BOOKS OF INTEREST. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 December 2021; 54 (4): 434–439. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.4.0434 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 You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT In order to explore the possibilities of affirmative ethics and algorithmic judgment, this article puts machinic rhetoric in conversation with classical imitation pedagogy. Taking a machine-learning chatbot as my example, I examine how imitation and repetition in a restrictive economy of rhetorical models produces a limited affirmative ethics through dialectical relations. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's concept of representative thinking to theorize a procedure for algorithmic judgment, I argue that rhetorical training requires the affirmation of a plurality of models if it is to generate not only versatility but also ethical repetitions.

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

ABSTRACT This article develops a theory of rhetorical impression through a critical genealogy of the term phantasia. The genealogy demonstrates cause for understanding phantasia as impression, not image. I trace phantasia as impression through the work of Plato and Aristotle but ultimately argue that the stoics offer the most productive leads for thinking through impressions, materiality, and sensations together. Specifically, I demonstrate how the stoics' concept of lekton can productively mediate the relationship between rhetoric, materiality, imagination, and idealism. In the closing section, I suggest how a theory of rhetorical impression can address lacunae in existing new materialist approaches.

ABSTRACT For Victoria Kahn, Hobbes' argument that fear of violent death is “the passion to be reckoned upon” in explaining what inclines men to peace must be interpreted as a mimetic argument. However, Kahn then notes a paradox that makes Hobbes' thinking problematic: whereas love and the desires are appetites that produce an imitative effect, fear is different. Though also a passion, fear lacks that capacity to produce a mimetic effect or, therefore, to generate a contract. My hypothesis is that resolving the dilemma presented in Kahn's interpretation of Hobbes requires a shift in attention from mimesis to rhetoric and, more specifically, to biological rhetoric as defined by Nancy Struever. This approach to Hobbes makes it possible to understand the rhetorical role of fear in generating and maintaining the social contract, and how the problem that Kahn signals—the impotence of fear in relation to mimesis—can be resolved.

ABSTRACT Many rhetorical theories of ethos mark their relationship with time by focusing on two temporal poles: the timely ethos and the timeless ethos. But between these two temporal poles, ethos is also durative; it lingers, shifts, accumulates, and dissipates over time. Although scholarship often foregrounds the kairotic and static senses of ethos popularized in Aristotle's Rhetoric, this article highlights how the chronic elements of ethos are no less important to rhetoric. By examining Xenophon's and Plato's representations of the trial of Socrates, this article contends that these competing views about the temporalities of ethos have a storied history that predates Aristotle's writings. This analysis also expands received understandings of Plato's contributions to rhetoric by illuminating how his view of ethos is deeply intertwined with ongoing philosophical practice. The article concludes by arguing that rhetorical studies has much to gain by more closely attending to the cumulative aspects of ethos.

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

ABSTRACTThe Gorgias presents us with a mystery and an enigma: Who was Callicles? And, what was Plato trying to accomplish in this dialogue? While searching for the identity of Callicles, we gain a better understanding of Plato's purpose for this dialogue, which is to use justice as a means for staking out the boundaries of four types of rhetoric. This article argues that Plato uses the Gorgias to reveal the deficiencies of sophistic nomos-centered rhetorics and an unjust sophistic phusis-centered rhetoric, opening the door for a “true” rhetoric that he articulates in the Phaedrus and a universal justice based on virtue that he describes in the Republic.

While A Rhetoric of Motives remains one of the most well-known works on rhetoric, few realize that it was at one point intended to comprise two volumes. In a curious footnote on page 294, Burke states briefly that the sentences concluding the section on “Pure Persuasion”—one of his knottier concepts—were meant as a transition to a “section on The War of Words. But that must await publication in a separate volume” (Burke 1950/1969, 294). This never before published “separate volume” is now available. In it Burke names, describes, and analyzes transhistorical rhetorical devices that he discovers in journalism, bureaucratism, the news, and other media to emphasize how symbol users can, under the guise of peace, subtly incite readers to hold attitudes of acquiescence to states of war.After publishing Attitudes toward History, Burke began conceiving of a third book to conclude what he at first hoped would be a trilogy that began with Permanence and Change, but that third volume, first called “On Human Relations,” developed into yet another trilogy: the motivorum project that began with A Grammar of Motives and was also to include A Rhetoric of Motives and A Symbolic of Motives. In a 1946 letter to James Sibley Watson, the “W. C. Blum” on the dedication page of and in the introduction to A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke states that the “War of Words” would “deal with all the variants of malice and the lie, the thumbs-down side of rhetoric,” and would also include “our specialty, analysis of rhetorical devices (operated about the ambiguities of competition and cooperation),” plus “analysis of news, literary polemic, etc.” (qtd. in Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 17). The title, The War of Words, certainly alludes to the motto and epigraph of A Grammar of Motives: ad bellum purificandum, toward the “purification” of war, an epigraph that hopes for war to be acted out symbolically rather than actually, and an epigraph that helps to explain the “thumbs-down side of rhetoric” that one sees in The War of Words. The War of Words includes an editors' introduction, four chapters (two complete, two incomplete), three appendices, explanatory notes, and an index.Because Burke's plan for “The War of Words” kept changing, the editors focus on its composition history in their indispensable introduction, which I discuss below. The first and by far the longest chapter, “The Devices,” lists, analyzes, and describes formal patterns instantiated in journalism and the news. In Burke's own words, the chapter discusses “characteristic rhetorical forms employed in the struggle for advantage that is essential to the Human Comedy” (2018, 43). While Burke worries that his political examples might stir up either strong passions in readers or assumptions that particular devices are fleeting, the purpose is not to do either; rather, it is to “isolate the universal ingredient,” one that can be applied to multiple situations, contexts, and time periods (45). In other words, while “yesterday's sneeze” might be “gone forever,” Burke states, “the ‘principles’ of that sneeze are eternal” (46). These transhistorical patterns reflect personality states and states of motivation. Therefore, they “are primarily matters of style” (135). These devices include the Bland Strategy, Shrewd Simplicity, Undo by Overdoing, Yielding Aggressively, Deflection, Spokesman, Reversal, Say the Opposite, Spiritualization (the Nostrum), Making the Connection, and Say Anything, each of which Burke discusses. The transdisciplinarity and transhistoricality of the devices enable them to be discovered and analyzed in contemporary logomachies so that readers and listeners can see the subtle attempts that are made to invite them to hold attitudes of war under the guises of peace.One device, Deflection, has “so general an end that nearly all of the Logomachy could be included under it,” even as the discussion of that device also looks toward the later-developed concept of terministic screens. Burke gives an example of Franklin Roosevelt enacting deflection when responding to a question about some (unfavorable) election results by saying that he was only paying attention to the (favorable) results from the battlefront (73). Yet, while “The Devices” catalogues and classifies many of these patterns, Burke did not intend “The Devices” to be a method for symbolic weapons distribution, nor as “a rhetorical manual for instructing students in their use” (159). The principles discussed in The War of Words are useful, “not as a device for throwing at an enemy, but for purposes of solace and placement, and for the cultivation of mental states that make one less likely to be hurt by enemies” (159). Rather, Burke is more interested in “an ethical approach … a method of meditation or contemplation that should be part of a ‘way of life’” (159). The devices can also be understood as Aristotelian topoi; and just as Aristotle defines rhetoric as a capacity for seeing the available means of persuasion in any situation, so a contemplation of the devices enables a person, not just to see or even to use them, but also to be able to listen cautiously, carefully, and critically so as to recognize their use. There is deception only when readers think they are “reading ‘facts’ as distinct from rhetorical manipulation” (191), Burke goes on to say in the next chapter.Chapter 2, “Scientific Rhetoric,” assumes a broad interpretation of science (broader than most would define it today) as it focuses on “the typical rhetorical resources available to journalism and other mediums that deal in the distributing of information” (43). The first section, “‘Facts’ Are Interpretations,” anticipates the scientific turn in rhetorical studies by mentioning how reports are “implicitly rhetorical” (169). Burke's emphasis in the chapter, however, is on reporting in news and journalism. Since “facts” are interpretations, they are also selections that assume standards of judgment. Therefore, the act of reporting assumes an underlying philosophy. In other words, rather than being antithetical to philosophy, a news or media source “is itself the uncritical and unsystematic, or implicit, philosophy” (172). In the relevant words of the prospectus for A Rhetoric of Motives, helpfully reprinted in the editors' introduction, Burke states that he wanted to show “why Rhetoric is not just a matter for specialists, but goes to the roots of psychology and ethics, including man's relation to his political and economic background” (qtd. in Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 14). Statements in The War of Words about people as philosophers add to Burke's arguments elsewhere about human beings as poets, symbol-using animals, and bodies that learn language. However they are defined, human beings demand drama, a demand that media and news sources attempt to satisfy but necessarily do so selectively, reductively, and tonally using what Burke calls Headline Thinking. Burke's discussion makes The War of Words essential reading for students and scholars interested in analyzing contemporary rhetoric found in clickbait and on social media.While chapters 1 and 2 are more polished, the editors have added the words “[Notes toward]” to the titles of both chapters 3 and 4 to signify that these inclusions are preliminary drafts of other documents that Burke at one point planned to include in “The War of Words.” Nevertheless, these incomplete chapters still provide much insight into rhetoric and the relationship between war and words. While chapters 1 and 2 emphasize the verbal aspects of rhetoric, chapter 3, “[Notes toward] The Rhetoric of Bureaucracy” discusses nonverbal rhetoric in “instances where administrative or organizational factors are exceptionally prominent” (43). The chapter adds to previous notions about pentadic agency, including an insightful analysis of an Agency-Purpose ratio in its descriptions of how corporate identification and corporate boasting lead to corporate thinking. Highly reminiscent of the Grammar, Burke shows how bureaucratic Agencies not only deem actions appropriate and inappropriate but also provide people with attitudes, attributes, and goods that enable them to obtain a Purpose that is understood and achieved only in relation to those Agencies.Continuing the trajectory of the discussion that began verbally and then expanded to the nonverbal, chapter 4, “[Notes toward] The Rhetorical Situation,” discusses the extraverbal that “concerns what we consider to be the ground of the Logomachy today” (43). Largely reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes's (and others') bellum omnium contra omnes, this chapter describes “the essential rhetorical situation” as a constant “invitation to war” (242). Here, Burke wrestles with some “essentials of present conditions implied in the characteristic rhetoric of social relations, the press, and administrative persuasion” (43). For example, Burke shows how a thing's identity can be understood as being twofold: the “universal nature in which it is grounded” and the “part distinct from other parts”—a “part distinct” that is also in some sense “an exclusion” (242). As soon as one recognizes that war is “everywhere,” one can also recognize that peace is “everywhere,” given the ambiguities between war and peace, cooperation and competition. Burke warns against the dangerous self-aggrandizement tragically inherent in American culture as he critiques the atrocious treatment of Native Americans by white settlers who exploited natural resources to the point that, symbolically, “exploitation” became synonymous with “progress,” while culturally it became the “American way” (255). Here, Burke obviously foreshadows his later work on hypertechnologism and ecological rhetoric. Burke's critique also shows how this rhetoric projects an ethical standard that influences Americans to assume that their material purchases are what provide them with evidence of their freedom and propriety. In order for this kind of materialistic “progress” to continue, people are led to passionately desire things that they do not need and cannot use (255–56). Here, the war of words also hints at a war of desires; logomachy quietly shades into eromachy.The editors of The War of Words also include three appendices. Appendix 1, “Facsimile of the Outline of ‘The Rhetorical Situation,’” shows Burke's plan for what appears as chapter 4. Appendix 2 is a transcription of “Foreword (to end on),” a document that was intended to conclude a future published version of The War of Words, while appendix 3 is a facsimile of the “Foreword (to end on).” These last two appendices reveal Burke's struggle to decide where “The Devices” should be placed in relation to the Grammar and the Rhetoric. While stating that he wrote “most of this material” before the Grammar and Rhetoric as a foundation for those books, he wishes here that the books had been “published exactly in the order in which they were written, with the Devices as preparation for what followed” (265, 270). The Devices, a “poor man's Machiavelli,” began as Burke compiled the “signs of plotting, deviousness, and duplicity” that he saw in the news, but as he continued to write, however, he “sometimes felt downright mean” (266). Since the Devices can be used for “ulterior purposes,” they find themselves in the realm of rhetoric; but since they also can become “implicit self-portraits, in representing the character of the user,” they also impinge on the realm of ethics (266). However, insofar as they relate to self-expression and identity, they find themselves in the realm of poetics, which was to be discussed in the Symbolic of Motives. In other words, The War of Words includes material that spans rhetoric, ethics, and aesthetics.After praising A Rhetoric of Motives, discussing the cryptic footnote on page 294, and summarizing The War of Words, the editors in their informative introduction discuss Burke's social and professional circles in a post–World War II context of 1945–50. This context provides a background for the main focus of the introduction: a composition history of The War of Words. After publishing the Grammar, Burke turned his attention to the Rhetoric. The word-for-word transcription of his 1946 prospectus to Prentice Hall for the Rhetoric shows a vastly different book than the one that was later published in 1950, with “Part One (on the War of Words, the ‘Logomachy’)” being “designed to show just how deeply the militaristic ingredient in our vocabulary goes” (qtd. in Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 14). But as Burke wrote the Rhetoric, he kept moving and expanding his work on the Logomachy until it became a separate volume. The editors include a helpful facsimile of part of Burke's 1946 letter to Watson, which shows Burke saying that the Rhetoric, as it was then being drafted with “The War of Words” as a central part, “was becoming too negativistic” because of Burke's depression brought on by the contemporary press's corruption “which is doing almost as much as is humanly possible to prepare us for a cult of devastation and desolation that will leave practically noone in a position to attain even rudimentary amenities” (qtd. in Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 17). The editors also chronicle Burke's thinking in five episodes during Burke's writing of 1946 and 1948: his research and studies of myth, his search for commonalities between rhetoric and poetic, his orienting the Rhetoric around the concept of identification, his wrestling with the “Landmarks of Rhetoric” (Aristotle's Rhetoric, Cicero's De Oratore, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Augustine's De Doctrina Cristiana, and Longinus's On the Sublime), and the placement of the concept of identification within the dialectical framework of the “Upward Way” in the final section of A Rhetoric of Motives, “Order” (Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 20–24). After the “Upward Way,” Burke then worked furiously on “The Downward Way” consisting of “The Devices” and “Scientific Rhetoric,” grateful that he could treat the material less polemically than he had during his earlier drafting process (27). At this point, however, Burke realized that A Rhetoric of Motives had grown into two volumes instead of one, so he added the footnote on page 294 and sent the first volume to Prentice Hall without even telling them that the second existed (30–31). This close connection between “The War of Words” and A Rhetoric of Motives, leads the editors to state that people often misunderstand A Rhetoric of Motives because it is missing what was once its central part. In other words, because parts of “The War of Words” were at one point intended to be the “first half” of the book that became A Rhetoric of Motives, and because “The War of Words” was later intended to be published as a separate volume, A Rhetoric of Motives “remains incomplete” (Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 30). Hence the import of The War of Words to contemporary rhetorical theory.Such an intriguing emphasis on the composition history of The War of Words naturally invites readers to ask several questions about it. While the introduction emphasizes the relationship between “The War of Words” and A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke states in the “Foreword (to end on)” that he finished “most of this material” before he wrote the Grammar and Rhetoric, which were intended to be “preparatory grounding” for it (270). What should be made of these and other statements that suggest that parts of The War of Words may have been drafted before the Grammar as Burke worked on what he thought was to be the final volume in the trilogy that began with Permanence and Change? In addition, if A Rhetoric of Motives remains incomplete without The War of Words, as the editors argue, then, given the incompleteness of both chapters 3 and 4 of The War of Words, does this then mean that A Rhetoric of Motives itself remains perpetually incomplete? If so, why did Burke tell Watson that it was “finished”? And finally, readers who underscore Burke's statement that “‘Facts’ are Interpretations” (169) would appreciate a clarification of the editors' assertion that they explain the composition history and evolution of The War of Words “without our advancing interpretation of the work” (4). In sum, scholars of Burke would greatly benefit from a longer, additional work about The War of Words and its relationship to A Rhetoric of Motives comparable to what Ann George has done for Permanence and Change (see George 2018).In sum, it certainly sounds alluring to say that the original unpublished second volume—if not the very core—of “the most intriguing, original, and stimulating contribution to rhetorical theory since Aristotle” (Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 1) has recently been discovered and published. Yet even for those who hesitate when they notice an attempt at allurement, it is nevertheless clear that Burke's study of contemporary rhetorical devices, still in use by journalists, bureaucrats, and other media writers, could not be more timely. It is hard to overstate the value of The War of Words in an age of seemingly endless logomachies that include much misinformation and disinformation, heated attacks, drama, “Tithing by Tonality,” and the like. The War of Words is a remarkable work, multifaceted, admirably edited, worthy of attention, and one that will be essential to the study of philosophy and rhetoric in the years, and in the logomachies, to come.

ABSTRACT This essay explores the concept of hegemony as it is differently elaborated by Perry Anderson and Peter Thomas. I first provide an orientation to Gramsci's theory of hegemony and how it has been taken up in cultural and rhetorical studies. Then I explore Anderson's interventions into hegemony theory in the earlier Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci before a substantial review of The H-Word. I then discuss Peter Thomas's critique of Anderson's orientation to the hegemonic constructs of the ruling classes of nation-states and conclude with a discussion about how the concept of hegemony elaborated by these authors might productively extend the work we do as scholars of rhetoric.

ABSTRACT Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that leading judges into passions is like warping a rule or kanon before using it. Rather than seeing this as an exclusion of emotion from rhetoric, I argue that the ability for the pathe to bend judgment has its appropriate use in achieving equity. The pathe are themselves a kanon, resembling the soft, leaden rule used by Lesbian masons, referred to in his discussion of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics. In problematic cases, the rigidity of law requires the correction of a judge's pathetic capacity. I then read Lysias's Against Simon, a speech given under strict relevancy requirements, to show how the pathe are used in the narration of the accused party in seeking an equitable judgment. I conclude with how such a view may inform contemporary rhetorical inquiry on the emotions.

As theorists and critics, we should welcome books that call us to question the ideas and ideals that motivate our scholarship and, more specifically, the way we employ foundational concepts in the study of rhetoric and philosophy. Ralph Cintron's Democracy as Fetish is one such book. Cintron takes on one of the field's most important grounding concepts—democracy—and asks that we think it anew. The goal is not to abandon or abolish democracy but rather to consider its premises and rethink the assumption that we (and everyone else) know what it means.Cintron is an ideal docent for this rethinking, and in his care readers are guided through a consideration of what democracy means and how it might mean otherwise. Cintron asks readers to sit with questions, consider multiple perspectives, and question the stakes of righteousness that the idea of democracy so often elicits. The moment when you feel yourself full of passionate, tenacious conviction of knowing something or being right might be exactly the moment of deception that necessitates consideration of what else, and who your rightness has othered or abandoned. As Cintron explains to readers, the work that this book suggests is to “continue to do what you are doing…. But cultivate that tragic awareness that you are deceiving yourselves. Unravel your own final claims, including the fantasies about the Other that you use to buttress your own claims. Dare to feel a certain emptying out of conviction” (34). As I read this during autumn 2020, with so much self-righteous indignation circulating around about doing things right and being on the right side of things, I couldn't help but feel a pull toward the questioning and “radical egalitarianism between friend and enemy” that Cintron suggests (34). But I am getting ahead of myself in my task of synthesizing and assessing this book; I am offering the what without considering the why. I will end back at this starting place of what Cintron's ideas offer readers, but before I get there I want to lay out what I see as the main reasons that rhetoric scholars and practitioners should take time to read this monograph and dialogue with Cintron. I focus on Cintron's eclectic approach to method and what the monograph argues about democracy as a god concept before concluding with a consideration of how this monograph instructs living and being in this world.As Cintron is known in rhetorical studies for his early contributions to conversations about rhetoric and ethnography in Angel's Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday, it should come as no surprise that Democracy as Fetish also spotlights ethnographic insights. This monograph, however, is not bound or beholden to the field. Cintron intermingles field observations from Chicago and Kosovo with theory and moments of “self-parody” (33). Cintron treats all of these elements as equal “texts” that are “species of poetics insofar as all texts are hypotheses about the world attempting to overcome the hypothetical” (33). This rowdy approach to method is what Cintron himself calls a form of poetics. As he suggests, “Poetics is simply a term describing how words miss their marks and slide toward metaphor only to rise up and try again. So, for me at least, the deployment of multiple textual strategies produces a ‘thickened poetics.’ One strategy succeeds and fails, only to be compensated by the next one” (33). This method of putting field observations, theoretical elaborations, and personal reflections together and in conversation is, at times, unruly. It assumes the reader has done a particular kind (and amount) of background reading so that the reader is ready to jump in where Cintron starts. The discussion twists and turns at will. Cintron provides context for why he moves where he moves, and even so readers might find themselves at moments lost or unprepared for the conversation. That, I believe, is part of the point of the poetics-as-methodology framework. It allows the reader to come in and out, to read literally in one paragraph and metaphorically in the next. As Cintron admits, this approach might simultaneously succeed and fail, and if it does, that is also the point. We must do more to allow multiplicities to exist together, even opposites such as success and failure. This method is not one I would recommend my graduate students first starting out to emulate. In fact, I am not sure if most rhetorical scholars I know could pull something like this off. But Cintron does so with humility, grace, and humor, and in his doing, he offers readers a vital and timely opportunity to think otherwise about a concept and idea that has taken on almost naturalized status in our field.It is no small task to rethink liberal democracy, much less so in a sociopolitical moment when there is so much talk about the health of democracies around the world. I read Democracy as Fetish twice in two different, yet connected, democratic contexts. The first was in spring 2018 in Mexico City, Mexico, in a political context considered by many a young and forming democracy. The second was in Madison, Wisconsin, in fall 2020 while the world awaited news of the latest U.S. presidential elections. And though the United States is discussed as a long-established democracy, I witnessed many of the same struggles to territorialize democracy, or put democracy into practice, during that period as I did while I considered Mexico's democratic project. During both reads, I couldn't help but consider what was happening around me, and how the ideal of democracy circulated and was lifted up as the aspirational answer to all the real, messy problems on the ground when democracy was put into practice. In some ways, both places became additional fieldwork sites informing how I made sense of and interacted with Cintron's problematizing. Reflecting back, I think this is one of the major methodological contributions of framing this project as a poetic. This approach is less about telling readers how something is and more about creating space for readers inside the text, inviting readers to contribute their own field observations, theoretical meanderings, reflections, and contrary considerations so that the text is dialogic and polyvocal. Democracy as Fetish gives readers hospitality, positioning them as guests who are invited to create meaning alongside the author. While different from his last methodological contribution to the field, Cintron's current innovation to the practice of rhetorical inquiry should also be seriously engaged and applauded.The purpose of this text is to consider—by way of invitation—what democracy is supposed to mean and do as a rhetoric. Part of the challenge in this task is engaging the “god like” status democracy has achieved as a term. One the one hand, it is “a kind of emotional promise” for many people. On the other hand, democracy is “territorialized,” or put into practice in real-life settings as a political structure that seeks to actualize or manifest that emotional promise. The tension between the promise and the territorialization is what Cintron's work calls us to question—namely that the implementation of the promise on the ground always already forecloses the possibility that the promise can ever be achieved since democracy is fetishized (the emotional promise) in territorialized democratic systems. This fetishization is not something we can necessarily get outside of, but rather is a product of the system of instituting democracy. As Cintron writes, “The fetish and fetishization are productive of who we are, and we cannot remove their threads, for they belong to the fabric of our most precious actions and truths. Without them, we do not know ourselves” (8). Distinguishing the idea and ideals of democracy from its instantiation in practice is the first significant contribution that Cintron's thinking makes to rhetorical studies of democracy. The distinction calls critics and theorists of democracy to take care in explicating what iteration they are employing as they go about their work. It calls us to modify the noun “democracy,” by specifying whether we are talking about the idea of democracy or its territorialized manifestation in time and place. Such a shift would move us out of talk of democracy as something assumed to exist and into a discussion of the institutedness of democracy's presence.I believe this is what Cintron is getting at when he discusses the managerial nature of instituting liberal democracies, which he suggests is true of all sorts of democracies, and “socialisms, communisms, and even fascisms and anarchisms” as well (179). In order to make liberal democracies appear as naturalized fact it takes the “exquisite management” and institution of their “potentiality,” not only once, but as a constant, recurring process (175). The fact of its management makes it hard to see liberal democracies as anything but already evident and there. The difference between the fetishized idea of democracy as a “container containing millions of desires” and its territorialized, always-less-than-perfect instantiation disappears from view in the performative institution of it. As Cintron writes, “If it is true that democracy is a kind of container containing millions of desires, then democracy will remain forever a potentiality generating excessive hopes and excessive frustration. Ultimately, my position is rather blunt: fetishization signals a longing to live inside what we do not have. That is, democracy seems to be split between its deterritorialized versions—which exist as abstract, fetishized ideologies—and its territorialized versions, which are the only ones that can be experienced” (9). Instead of getting caught up in the fetishized promise of democracy as the thing that exists on the ground, we must do a better job of separating the ideals of deterritorialized democracy (all of the hopes and wishes that we put on democracy) from what democracy looks like when it is territorialized on the ground. Making this distinction helps scholars pay attention to the Others and exclusions upon which our democratic homes are premised. For example, to say that democracy is about belonging and equal political participation of those who belong in a bounded nation-state territory raises the question of where the lines of belonging and participation are drawn when this ideal is put into practice (chapter 3). Furthermore, to suggest that political participation should be available to all in a democracy raises the question of whose voices are privileged and prioritized when democracy is put into practice (chapter 4). As Cintron illustrates, no matter what side of the political spectrum one's beliefs fall on, othering and exclusion practices happen to delimit the possibility that all those ideals we put on and into democracy can ever be achieved.Cintron explains that we can see these othering and exclusionary practices of territorialized democracy when we pay attention to what he describes as the ratios that prop up democracy's performative presence. Ratios, or ways of measuring how much of one thing there is in relation to another thing, signal relationality between elements or units. Cintron suggests that “liberal democracy is in ratio or proportional relation to oligarchy” (24). Drawing on Aristotle, he suggests that ceding the power of representation into the hands of elected officials demonstrates the “mixed” nature of democratic political systems. It may be called democracy, but the inability to fully represent ourselves in territorialized versions of liberal democracies necessitates that we cede our representation to others. The very act of electing a representative is oligarchic in that elections are mechanisms of “filtering out who can and cannot be elected to office” (52). Of course, the people represented do not always follow the whims of the oligarchic leaders, but what we can say is that we understand territorialized democracies better when we pay attention to the oligarchy that exists in relation to democratic impulses. And not as a matter of some exceptional error, some failure, but as part and parcel to what democracy looks like on the ground.Toward illustrating the importance of recognizing the ratios inherent in political ideals and structures, Cintron narrows in on the ratio between vertical accumulation and horizontal distribution that is ever present in territorialized democratic structures. As he explains, this ratio summarizes the bind that many in-practice democracies face. He illustrates this overarching ratio in the tension between the citizen and noncitizen (chapter 3) and the fusion of humans with things such that political subjectivity is unitized through property ownership (chapter 4) in democratic societies. In these chapters we learn about the messiness of managing territorialized democracies. Struggles for justice produce attending injustices. Wins in bids on the freedom front necessarily arrive with certain constraints or limits on other fronts. “Inclusivity has never been inclusive; it has always also been exclusive” (100). There is no master route out of the mess; no ultimate, ethical position (or political structure for that matter) that will get us out of the bind.This reminder, I believe, is a major contribution of Democracy as Fetish. It can guide contemporary thinking about how democracies territorialize. Rather than turning toward polarization and opposition, or landing on the side of what democracy is and should do, this book asks us to consider the ideals that we are fetishizing, to what and to whom those fetishizations are related, and what would happen to those others were our ideals to actualize. The book calls readers to recognize that “politics cannot bring salvation into being but instead territorializes it into something less” and hence “the tragedy only deepens” (184). In recognizing the “comic absurdity” of all of our trying to get it right, Cintron invites readers to question what it is we think we know about right and better political living in this world. And once we have identified those fetishized ideals, he asks us to think again. As he suggests to readers at the outset, the point is not to stop doing what we are doing in order to bring about our ideas of a more just world; if this book accomplishes its goal, we readers will feel called to sit longer and slower in the uncomfortable space between our visions and those of others. We will consider what and whom our fetishized ideals make other. Once we can see this othering, we will hopefully meet these others and their ideas with more generous, compassionate consideration. This is the work of recognizing democracy's fetish.

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a vision of rhetoric as metaphysical enactment. This position contrasts with traditionally accepted views of rhetoric as phenomenological practice, evidenced prominently in contemporary rhetorical theory. I advance a framework that employs metaphorical accommodation and indicates a way that rhetoric can be situated as a perpetually productive force. The analytic tradition affords a method and vocabulary that when placed in conversation with rhetorical studies offers an alternative for viewing rhetoric as metaphysical enactment. I determine that rhetorical theory should engage with rhetoric as a measure of action, activity, and vitality that raises our awareness and connects us.

ABSTRACTThe essay explores Alva Noë's theory of choreography as a practice that recapitulates (and heightens our awareness of) quotidian forms of perception—perception understood as a set of organized behaviors aiming for “the right critical stance.” Noë argues (pace Heidegger) that the moment when we become aware of the organized, constructed nature of our behaviors is not a “breakdown” but rather a choreographic “display” of perception as a form of research. I begin by examining how his theory of dance and dance spectatorship developed through collaborations first with Lisa Nelson, then with William Forsythe. Next, while still approaching choreography as the “display” of perceptual practices, I move toward a conclusion that Noë allows but does not pursue. Studying a scene from Pina Bausch's Café Müller, I propose that choreography displays not our mastery of reality but our lack thereof. Perceptual habits give us a world, but one in which we are never quite “at home.” For me, the conceptual payoff of the aestheticization of movement (or choreography as display) is not simply that we become aware that perception is organized and rhetorically framed, but also that perceptual practices are impeded by the “critical stance” or rhetorical frame that orients them.

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

ABSTRACTThis essay responds to Alva Noë's arguments that popular musics (rock, country, etc.) organize listeners through style and personality, while other musics, such as classical and jazz, organize listeners on the music itself. Noë's arguments suggest that music is an existential phenomenon, and thus that music is ontological. There is much to like here, including the idea that musics can be existentially different. However, the work of pop musics cannot be confined solely to stylistics and personality; pop also has musical interest, which I explicate as the exploration of sound (3D)—timbre, groove, beat, tonality, texture, and so on. Classical, jazz, and other kinds of music may seek to emphasize the music itself (2D), but they are also caught up in style. Music, I conclude, is rhetorical in how it organizes or “moves” us, and we must attend to all its dimensions, musical and stylistic, in order to understand how so.

ABSTRACTThis essay questions the reading of Plato's Phaedrus according to which writing is understood as a mechanism of objectivity and critical distance. Plato's denomination of writing as a “pharmakon” (a poison/cure) indicates a deep ambiguity in his definition of writing—an ambiguity embodied in Phaedrus's written speech. The speech triggers both critical analysis and a simultaneous “rhetorical passivity,” whereby upon hearing the speech Socrates is consumed by a manic power. Although Socrates explicitly decries the detrimental consequences of writing in the Myth of Theuth (that it destroys living speech), he nevertheless is overcome by the power of the written speech and driven to a state of logomania. The Phaedrus demonstrates the potential for the written word to release one into a type of passivity, where the subject is no longer an autonomous master but a passive receiver.

In Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, Casey Boyle—or rather, the habitual practice referred to as Casey Boyle—participates in rhetorical studies' recurring concern with relations between humanism and posthumanism. Boyle's posthumanist project crafts another space within the field to think about what rhetoric is, what it does, and what it may become. Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice recalls the purpose of rhetorical education in the Isocrates and Quintilian traditions—“to become a certain kind of person” (Fleming 1998, 179), but with a posthuman return: Whereas classical rhetorical education aimed at ethically stable character formation—the humanist subject—Boyle's posthuman practice enacts character as in-formation, a process of individuation whereby individual bodies achieve stability, but only for so long—a metastability, which is not an essence, but a series of sense-abilities. Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice expands the many ways (euporia) of doing rhetoric, including the many ways things become different without becoming something separate as well as the many ways of being human without becoming something other than human.The book is organized into three parts: “Preface to Practice,” “Theorizing Rhetorical Practice,” and “Practicing Rhetorical Theory.” In part 1's “Questions Concerning the Practice of Rhetoric,” Boyle introduces readers to the work of Gilbert Simondon. Specifically, Boyle brings Simondon's philosophy of information and media-techno-aesthetics into rhetorical studies and demonstrates how his philosophical concepts, such as individuation, transindividuation, transduction, and metastability, may be incorporated into the body of rhetoric. For example, Boyle argues that information—as material processes—informs bodies so that bodies are always already in-formation, or rather, resolving and dissolving individuations. This incorporation activates new rhetorical capacities by which rhetorical exercises, such as the enthymeme, dissoi logoi, topoi, and copia, may be practiced differently, which, in turn, activates new rhetorical bodies, which, in turn, may exercise and be exercised differently.Part 2 begins with “Rhetorical Ecologies of Posthuman Practice.” Three seemingly disparate analogies open up the practice of practice: learning to use the telegraph, the literary style of Deleuze and Guattari, and the development of technical objects. What each practice shares is its self-erasure. Practice for Boyle is not self-preservation or self-improvement because the repetition of practice enacts changing conditions of its existence. Repetition with difference is what Boyle means by posthuman practice: “ongoing, serial encounters within ecologies” (34). Boyle compares practice to Karen Barad's quantum diffraction, accenting the continual entanglement of matter. Posthuman practice does not reflect the same thing over and over again. Instead, it diffracts, creating “new versions of what might otherwise be seen as the same” (34). For example, reflecting on how one wrote an essay does not reflect the writing of that essay; rather, the reflection essay diffracts the writing of that essay. The writer does not reflect; reflection in-forms the writer. According to Boyle, the reflection on writing does not grant privileged access to interiority, decision making, and rationality. Instead, it is another exercise that may be no more or less insightful than any other exercise. Reflective practices, however, have been a dominant pedagogical tool in the field of composition studies. Thus, the chapter offers a concise history of how this reflective practice emerged in skill development literature on metacognition, demonstrating the shortcomings of this humanist orientation. It then surveys posthuman theories both broadly and within the field of rhetoric to emphasize practice as something other than conscious, intentional activity—what he calls serial: “A series is composed of items that are continuous with but also distinct from one another without being separate” (53). Throughout, Boyle amplifies this point: all practices, including writing and reflection in-formation, create novel possibilities in bodies and environments, and for him, this is a posthuman ethic.Chapter 2, “Posthuman Practice and/as Information,” refines the seriality of posthuman practice as a process of information. Boyle incorporates Simondon's “transductive version of information” to show how information is converted across multiple media in a process that in-forms bodies rather than transmitted between preexisting individual subjects (63). Put differently, information is a dynamic structuring process in which bodies “take form” and by which bodies only ever achieve “metastability” (78). Thus, rhetoric as a posthuman practice undertakes “how to initiate structuring movements across the material and semiotic, digital and analog, theoretical and practical, human and nonhuman” (81) as well as “mind and body, rational and sensuous” (88). In this account, rhetoric is an ethic of becoming a particular kind of body in relation, which Boyle illustrates by reorienting the enthymeme. Rather than defining an enthymeme by what it lacks in comparison to the syllogism, the “missing premise,” he argues, circulates among a collective body within an ecology of practice—an ethic of commonplaces. An enthymeme is a structuring process that “activates the already present connective tissues of a community in ways that the purely rational premises of the syllogism does not/cannot” (84). In this way, the enthymeme exercises the euporia (multiple ways) of rhetoric in which the potential for further invention resides.In part 3, “Practicing Rhetorical Theory,” Boyle develops rhetoric and/as posthuman practice through diffractive elaborations of identity, place, and amplification. In chapter 3, “Informing Metastable Orientations,” Boyle reincorporates the rhetorical practice of dissoi logoi and Richard Lanham's “bi-stable oscillation.” Rather than understanding dissoi logoi as limited to “two-fold arguments” and bi-stable oscillation as limited to two subject positions of a singular identity, Boyle argues for a “metastable orientation” that understands identity as the production of “differing stabilities” (23). In this reorientation, dissoi logoi is a way in which individuals become rhetorical to generate a manifold of arguments, not simply two-fold arguments. Similarly, Lanham's bi-stable oscillation expands to metastable orientations that multiply the many subject positions and sense-abilities of bodies. Together, dissoi logoi and metastable orientations exercise bodies as temporary resolutions of disparate tensions. Rather than a Burkean persuasion attempting to achieve identification, a posthuman rhetorical practice follows the transduction of information “to increase, intensify, and inform what [bodies] can do” (121).Where chapter 3 is concerned with the metastability of identity, chapter 4, “Orienting to Topological Engagement,” hunts for the metastability of places. Rather than static places holding preconceived arguments based on fixed repetition, topoi, in Boyle's telling, are “rhythm machines” (126) producing “transversal mediations” (127) and “unique sensibilities” (23). He performs a “strange archaeology” (130) of topoi, digging into the rhetorical history of topoi to argue that a “topos is always a practice of becoming informed and further informing a place” (146). To demonstrate this sense of topos, Boyle uses topology, which is the mathematical study of “how an object remembers its place while undergoing change” (142). Topoi, experienced topologically, are “immanent mediations between an exterior and interior”—foldings and stretchings of place to produce new rhythms (144). Boyle offers the practice of urban exploration to illustrate topoi as topological, noting how the urban explorer appears as both theorist and practitioner, inside and outside the city. Urban explorers enact and are enacted by places as “varying rhythms of difference and repetition” (155). Put differently, topos is both centripetal—a place that gathers—and centrifugal—a place that disperses, or “runs in all directions” (155).The topological tension between gathering and dispersal is complicated further in chapter 5, “Engaging Nomadic Activity,” in which Boyle asks how we might respond to the seemingly always-on, always-there demands of infrastructural connectivity. As with topoi, we are never simply inside or outside; we are never simply online or offline. Rather, we are always mediated by infrastructural networks; we are bodies in-formation as transindividuals. Bringing together Cynthia Haynes's and Vilém Flusser's versions of homelessness, Rosi Braidotti's nomadism, and Adrian McKenzie's wirelessness, Boyle suggests that a feeling of rootlessness, induced by the connectivity of infrastructural networks, is a “pervasive condition of contemporary life” (169). Nevertheless, he advances the possibility of finding rootedness amid rootlessness by amplifying copia as a posthuman practice: both as “an affirmative practice that exercises one's capacity to resolve a singular problem in multiple ways” and as “an ongoing transindividual practice” that exercises one's capacity to resolve the singular problem of contemporary life—a feeling of homelessness—in multiple ways (24). Copia as transindividual practice cultivates capacities for variability: the transindividual is able to work with apparent scarcity to generate abundance, to multiply connections “while also retaining some sense of prior relations” (184), thus generating euporia by proposing this one and this one and this one—each a possible path to follow.The coda, titled “Activating Sense and Sense-abilities,” picks up the question of “this one” by asking “which one?” Boyle argues that rhetoric as a posthuman practice is informed by an ethic of “which one?” rather than “what is?” Whereas the latter grasps after essence, the former proposes possibilities: the transductive euporia of enthymemes, the manifoldness of metastabilities, the rhythmic repetition and difference of topoi, and the itinerant rootedness of transindividuality. Rather than conscious and reflective disputation, rhetoric and/as posthuman practice in-forms bodily dispositions.Throughout, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice continuously exercises rhetoric's body, showing how it may become different while remaining familiar—and how rhetorical scholars might bring a posthumanist sensibility to rhetoric's traditional emphasis on the humanist subject as the body of rhetoric. With his posthuman reorientation, Boyle demonstrates that there is no unmediated exercise of, or access to, our mediated bodies—nor to the body of rhetoric. Importantly, Boyle practices his posthuman sensibility by writing in a style that enacts his argument: layering in examples, making analogical movements, and repeating with variation what he has already written. The reader begins to sense what he is arguing. The style, as posthuman practice, exercises the reader's capacities for following a line of argument among serial encounters.Some argumentative movements, however, may be too linear. For example, Boyle's history of the emergence of reflection within composition studies is written as a reflection of the field, in a linear structure. No winks. No recursion. He moves easily from traditional rhetoric to current-traditional rhetoric to current-critical rhetoric, “outlining the humanist frame … sketching the discipline's turn to reflective practice” (34). However, in presenting the history as a reflection of the discipline's past, Boyle is able to capture more rhetorical force for his argument, that “the practice of practicing reflection creates and sustains an untenable humanist orientation” (48). The reader must then build a relationship between what appears to be a reflective history and Boyle's point about seriality: serial practice “is a part of, but also apart from, any definite linear logic” (53). A similar issue of perspective may arise when considering the different histories of scholars in composition studies and those in communication studies.Boyle's history of “current-critical rhetoric” in composition studies may give pause to communication scholars because it presents a different disciplinary understanding of “critical rhetoric” and the practice of reflection. Critical rhetoric of communication studies in the 1980s and 1990s offered formative expressions of a posthumanist orientation to rhetoric, including post-Marxist-materialist and historical-archival approaches. Critical rhetoric folded into, with, and away from posthumanist orientations of scholarship that decentered human consciousness and amplified complexity in dynamic ways.Although Boyle's discussion of current-critical rhetoric in composition studies does not discuss critical theory, comparing a critical theory understanding of practice alongside his posthuman conception could offer interesting discussions for a graduate course. Raymie McKerrow's critical practice, for example, could spark interesting conversations regarding what each concept of practice affords rhetorical scholars and to what extent a critical posthuman notion of practice, from the critical theory tradition, could be developed (1989). Indeed, a critical practice—praxis and politics—may be required to ensure that rhetoric scholars have skin in the game. For example, Boyle includes the practice of urban exploration without exploring the privileges of urban explorers' bodies, who “discover” the “hidden” and “ruined” infrastructures of cities and who often “conquer” these places through a photographic style that evokes the humanist subject. Similarly, the explication of homelessness as the condition of contemporary life feels unsatisfying when juxtaposed with the exposures of bodies experiencing homelessness in the streets. What ought we do about the actually existing homelessness that prompts the copious transindividuality of chapter 5? If we are to ask “which one?,” we ought to ask “which bodies” are made to endure and which are allowed to perish, again and again. This observation is less a criticism and more a prompt for further reflection, or rather asking again what rhetoric scholars can do.That said, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice is not a work of critical theory or critical rhetoric or a critique of the posthuman condition. Instead, it is an affirmative project, following the philosophical style of Simondon, and, as such, it is interested in challenging us to transform what a rhetorical education can and should do, including the many ways bodies may live together by transforming relationships to build a more generous world.

Alva Noë, who is a major figure in establishment philosophy, has been producing work that speaks directly to rhetoric in new ways that are important. This “In Focus” project explores how so, with the help of Carrie Noland on dance, Thomas Rickert on music, and, in a previous issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric 53.1, Nancy Struever on the basics of human inquiry including pictorial, which she thinks almost nobody gets right except for R. G. Collingwood, and perhaps now Noë. In each case you will see how “rhetoric” must be stretched by way of these lateral artistic, and at the same time essential, projects in the discipline per se.“Rhetoric” in these considerations is certainly not a vague notion that the things we do have persuasive goals, or audiences, for example. Though complicated in this discussion with Noë, “rhetoric” has precise meaning it's the job of this introduction to clarify, because it goes to our basic situation and it does so in a way that's unfamiliar.In Varieties of Presence (2012),1 Noë makes the argument for a rhetoric of experience explicit. Starting with the example of traditional art like song or a painting, Noë explains how mere perceptual exposure is not yet aesthetic experience. Only “through looking, handling, describing, conversing, noticing, comparing, keeping track, [do] we achieve contact with the work/world” (125). But this kind of contact with the world is not neutral; following Kant it falls in the domain of “ought”: our response reflects our sense of how one ought to respond to a work of art for instance. Hence rhetoric as persuasion: “aesthetic experience happens only where there is the possibility of substantive disagreement, and so also the need for justification, explanation and persuasion” (126). Is such persuasive rhetoric relevant only to traditional art forms per se? No—and this is Noë's bold move: he is really working on perceptual experience “tout court,” with art recapitulating the basic fact about perceptual consciousness and serving as a model or “guide to our basic situation.” “Perception is not a matter of sensation; it is never a matter of mere feeling,” Noë summarizes. Instead perceiving is “an activity of securing access to the world by cultivating the right critical stance,” or even more directly: human experience has a “rhetorical structure” (128). How do we miss this according to Noë? “The big mistake,” explains Noë, “is the overlooking of the aesthetic, or critical, character and context of all experience. There is no such thing as how things look independently of this larger context of thought, feeling and interest [classical rhetoric would similarly list the goals of rhetoric: docere, movere, delectare]. This is plain and obvious when we think of the experience of art. It is no less true in daily life” (129).Though resonant with the work of Struever and then with her major reference point Collingwood, or with John Dewey as Noë points out himself, this is a major reorientation of philosophy and rhetoric. It puts philosophy right next to other human activities that include the arts like dance, music, and painting. And it does so not as the addendum after basic human activities have wound down. On this mistaken model, philosophy and the arts including linguistic arrive only belatedly, after the real work is finished on the ground. Instead, according to Noë, these artistic and thoughtful activities are exactly what make us human in the first place, as they are the inherent possibilities that shape human activity from the outset: no language without the probing possibilities, like irony, that bind up language in a world flexibly, no music without the capacity for musical reflection that offers up the audible world one way not another, no dancing or for that matter movement without the possibility of the arts that put on display dancing and movement, indeed giving us the very world where things including us get moved around. Movement at its most immediate, to pick up this last example, is always already choreographed though not mechanically so—as Noë explains in his reply it is precisely the choreography that at the same time “sets us free,” opening up the distance whether more habitual or more explicitly mindful that makes the activity human in the first place. Rhetoric, then, names the inflection points—of movement, of language, of philosophy and the arts—that make the human situation what it is, with the scholarly activity we call “rhetoric” offering a kind of field guide to the environments in which we are.But, finally, are these environments just ours? They can't be. They are shared fundamentally, though not in ways that Noë explores in this project, despite the fact that he is trained, we should recall, as a philosopher of biology.Gesturing thus to an opportunity beyond this project, I conclude with biologist Joan Roughgarden, who helps us see how environments are shared across species, even down to the rhetorical structures that give particular environments their shape. Instead of selecting sexually for ideal types, argues Roughgarden in her groundbreaking work Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, a species needs “a balanced portfolio” of genes to survive over the long term (2004, 5), and sex, which entails a very wide (but not indefinite; 177) range of behaviors—reproductive and otherwise—is the social activity that continually rebalances a species' overall genetic portfolio in the context of dynamic environments. Instead of offering only background noise, indeterminacy of the sign (as we might call it from the semiotic or rhetorical perspective, where X is somewhere between attractive or repellent, pro- or antisocial, praise or blameworthy, and so on) is compatible with biodiversity precisely insofar as it constitutes the social. Antisocial eugenics and cloning are Roughgarden's counterexamples; just like the computer scientist knows that focusing only on the code while ignoring the execution environment is a mistake, cloning biologists who focus on the nucleus of the cell while ignoring the cytoplasm make the same mistake insofar as they have ceased to work ecologically (311).Then back to Noë at last, it is worth thinking at some point about the ways in which his activities that “put on display” are a subset of a more general biological capacity to triangulate, in environments that are always dynamic and often threateningly so. Now with the help of Struever, Noland, Rickert, and Noë, we can at least start thinking differently about the rhetorical opportunities our current environment offers.

In The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory, Ira Allen does much more than give us a theory of rhetoric. He gives us a map of reality, of how we make the world real to ourselves, how we convince one another (and ourselves) of its realness, even as what we so deem is constantly changing. This book is a primer on how the fact of radical contingency is not in and of itself fatal to the project of human life and politics. On the contrary, for Allen, it is the source of human life and politics. In his careful and elegant way of thinking Allen shows us how out of the chaos and swirl of all that is, we manage nonetheless to continuously produce a tension (what he calls a “hung dialectic”) between what we claim the world to be and what we experience it as being. At the center of this navigation is our relationship to rhetoric itself. For Allen, rhetoric is no less aleatory and contingent than the world we try to describe through its tropes. But rather than being a drawback, this shared contingency is precisely how rhetoric is able to connect us with this world in ways that are both creative and powerful.Allen's book is divided into seven chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the nature of what constitutes “truth” in rhetorical theory. Allen shows us that something deemed true can also (must also) be both fantastical and poetic. Yet, as Allen shows, this is nonetheless a “pragmatic fantasy” (13), that is, it does something; it coheres and performs. Chapters 3 through 5 develop the idea of a “troubled freedom,” a way of negotiating the rules (and there are rules!) to rhetoric without being overly limited by them. These central chapters explore the relationship between modern and classical rhetoric, the way that rhetoric circulates among what Allen calls “focalizers” (the one, the some, the many, the all), and the relationship rhetoric has to the symbols that it employs. These various discussions contend with what could be called the granularity and sedimentation of rhetoric, the traditions and modes by which it is undertaken and how these both shape and free up the power of rhetorical theory to explain the world. Finally, in chapter 6, Allen looks at rhetorical theory in terms of what he calls a “self-consciously ethical fantasy,” bringing this consideration into direct conversation with ethical understandings of how rhetoric functions.In his examination of the possibilities and limits of rhetorical theory, Allen not only describes but models the key notion of his book, which is that of “troubled freedom.” Troubled freedom, as previously noted, references the way we seek expression and persuasion even as we navigate the problematical limits of language. We are never as free as we want to be, but we are also never as constrained as we fear (here again, the tension between those two states is the basis for what we actually can do). Allen accepts the things that he can't prove or know, and from this limited basis, he shows how much freedom we do have, as well as the kinds of truths and fantasies—which in Allen's fascinating formulation are effectively the same thing—we can come up with out of this basis.In order to give a sense of the depth and breadth of this book it is helpful to further explain a few of its central notions. One key claim is the aforementioned concept of a “hung dialectic.” This notion is central to the entire scope of this work. A hung dialectic is one that does not resolve itself, does not lead to transcendence in any sense and is, perhaps above all, not a teleological certainty. For all of this, the hung dialectic still is highly effective. Allen tells us that rhetorical theory is itself a hung dialectic, writing, “As a hung dialectic, rhetorical theory does not issue in any one outcome. It remains multiple and in its multiplicity inaccessible [as a clear and determinable thing]…. No one aspect of rhetorical theory's work can be pressed into service as its truth” (71). This is, once again, not disabling but actually enabling because it allows multiplicity to be expressed, to contend with itself, to radically change and develop whatever rhetorical theory is even as it remains bound within its limits (including its limit to not be a single, coherent, and unchanging thing). A hung dialectic, you could say, is the basis for troubled freedom; it is a key part of how we navigate an imperfect and ever changing world.A second—and related—critical concept for this book is spirit. Allen tells us that spirit is the thread that ropes together the disparate aspects of rhetorical theory, its referents, its devices, its patterns and usages. But he is careful not to say that spirit is a teleology that contains within itself all that it needs to know before it even starts. This latter idea is redolent of a reading of Hegel that Allen vigorously challenges. Spirit is for Allen more of a moving target. When we read Hegel's work without a sense of spirit as a form (or really the form) of motion, we make mistakenly limiting snapshots of his work. Allen tells us that “[spirit] is anticipatorily apprehended as synchronic totality only in its diachronic passage through and by means of opposition that function as reality-makers and that never are wholly resolved” (99–100). In other words, spirit works not despite but because it does not conform to ordinary rules about temporality (and spatiality for that matter too). It is the throughline of rhetorical shapedness, but that shape can be seen only in retrospect.To call spirit “anticipatory,” as he does, does not mean that for Allen spirit already knows that which it is anticipating. It is a process of becoming, yes, but each stage of that becoming is not known in advance (even though it is anticipated). To think of spirit as a form of motion allows rhetorical theory, in Allen's conception, to make sense to us, to be like a particle wave whose shape over time constitutes a kind of cohering that allows for “reality mak[ing].” This insight allows Allen to graphically depict rhetorical theory as a whole. He charts for example a movement from classical to modern modalities. Just like quantum physics, these separated aspects are both particles and waves. It is spirit that unites them even while they keep their separate singularity. As Allen tells us, “Spirit is both a style of motion and the fullness of being that occurs via that motion” (105).I think that this concept of spirit is, like the hung dialectic, a very useful way to think about the coherence of disparate things, the way that they can be effective even though they are multiple and sometimes at odds with one another. I often think of the human subject, not as a singular organized and hierarchical whole but rather as a vast anarchist ferment of various competing, overlapping subjectivities, some of which are wholly interior and some of which are shared or borrowed from other selves. But this doesn't mean that we are paralyzed by dissension or multiplicity. We do things: we talk, we think, we act. You could say that the thing that holds us together is this spirit. But what exactly is spirit in that case? As Allen describes it, it is not in any way a theological concept. Perhaps it merely refers to the possibility of language and thinking producing an effectively unified set of concepts despite the apparent disorganization that comes with giving up on the kinds of certainties that Allen is battling against (certainties of sense, predetermined meanings, “truth” in language, etc.). Spirit, you could say, works along the lines of “if you build it they will come”: the mere possibility (or spirit) of coherence amidst contingency makes it so.To those who worry about such a view of language leading us into a zone of total chaos and confusion, Allen explains that human beings cannot not see the world as predicated, as having meaning and truth in it. I suspect that this is not only the source but the actuality of spirit; spirit is a kind of delusion, a fantasy (but then again, for Allen, all truth is a form of fantasy until it isn't). Spirit is this predication, the ability to see oneness where there isn't any; this is also the essence of rhetoric for Allen. That form of seeing deeply matters; it involves how we decide who is whom and what is what, the way we make sense of the world. It is the basis of politics, of our troubled freedom.Allen takes maximal advantage of this human propensity to predicate. He seizes upon it as a way to be able to say something about the world, about language and rhetoric itself (in this way this book is itself a superb example of spirit). It is our mistaken reading of the world as having meaning and truth in it that gives us a modicum of meaning and truth (another version of “if you build it”). The reader or listener or viewer's mistaken belief causes us to live as if amidst what we think must exist. And so it does (as far as we are concerned). Allen several times quotes Wittgenstein's comment that “something must be taught as a foundation” (1). It doesn't seem to matter just what that foundation is (since there are no actual foundations); since we have to have a foundation, we will certainly find one.This is where the connection between truth and fantasy becomes so important in The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory. In Allen's view, all truth is initially fantasy. In some sense it remains fantasy the whole time but insofar as there has to be a foundation, and since a foundation can't be read as a fantasy, for a time at least, a fantasy becomes true, until it is displaced by another truth and so on (actually I think that Allen shows us that it is much more complicated than this; in fact many truths are coming into being and then leaving in multiple discordant fashion at different and overlapping times, but we must read all of this, Allen says, as if it were coherent and so it is, once again, so far as we are concerned).As a response to this understanding of truth, Allen offers us what he calls a “chastened humanism” (220). He is interested in the concept of posthumanism, but he has a few hesitations about embracing such a position himself. He worries that to think oneself as being posthuman suggests the possibility of transcending limitations that human beings can't transcend (otherwise we wouldn't have a troubled freedom, we'd have most likely no freedom at all insofar as those limits are critical to what makes that freedom possible in the first place). For Allen we must embrace our own self-consciousness because this is a critical part of how we navigate our position as truth-makers. In a sense, we must be in on our own fraud in order not to be completely taken over by it and succumb to the very kinds of teleologies that Allen tells us that rhetorical theory helps us to trouble. He writes, “Humanism, chastened by this acknowledgment [of the fantastic nature of truth], is no celebration; it is a straightforward way of negotiating a hard limit. Posthumanism is no more a stance that can be taken up by actual human animals than is objectivity” (104).This is one of the rare places in the book where I found myself pushing back a bit on what Allen is saying, but it might just reflect our respective understandings of the term “posthumanism.” I haven't read posthumanism (at least some versions of it) as seeking to transcend humanity so much as similarly seeking to trouble it (not unlike Allen himself). I wholeheartedly agree that it is a mistake to try to imagine ourselves as no longer being human or occupying a nonhuman perspective. That's more like what the transhumanists do: transcend death and even humanness itself. Posthumanism, as I understand it, is itself somewhat chastened, but I don't want to split hairs over what might simply be a semantic difference.Chastened humanism is perhaps a better term than posthumanism because it doesn't mean abandoning roots and imagined origins but just recognizing our own lack of domination and control over the process we are moving through and being shaped by; it means recognizing the way spirit shapes our lives and serves as our ever-changing temporal and spatial envelope of possibility. A chastened humanism could also be given as the name for Allen's methodology in this book, which I would summarize as a style of thinking and writing where nothing is abandoned but nothing is allowed to dominate either. Except for his one axiom (that humans must predicate), Allen doesn't assume anything further. He allows rhetorical theory to exist in all of its glorious complexity and incoherence (and coherence too). So for example, one set of points that he sees as integral to the body and shape of rhetorical theory is a complicated relationship to its classical past. There is both continuity and discontinuity between that tradition and modern times, and there is no getting around that relationship even if it has been discarded or disavowed. This may not seem “methodological,” but I would submit that it is. The method in this case is to simultaneously accept two seemingly contradictory modalities, the fact that language is both chaotic and meaningful at the same time. Accordingly, the way that “modern” rhetorical theory predicates itself (and predicate we must!) is by saying either that it stems from classical rhetoric or that it doesn't stem from classical rhetoric. There doesn't seem to be any way around that relationship. Rather than see this as an impossible contradiction, Allen doesn't sweat this. He allows this to simply be, part of the spirit of rhetoric.Similarly, Allen allows for a multiplicity of what he calls “focalizers,” namely the sense of the “all,” the “many” the “some” and the “one,” to coexist despite the fact that they are at times patently contradictory. For example, to distinguish between conviction and persuasion, there needs to be an elicited sense of “the all,” that is to say the true and absolute audience that serves (even though it doesn't actually exist) as a witness to a truth; that is how you get the possibility of conviction. The many or some need not be true audiences either (or not as true anyway; I think there can be gradations rather than separation between these quantities; this too can be both a set of particles and a wave). These focalizers help to give dimension and heft to the practice of rhetorical theory without needing to be either ontologically true or in harmony with other focalizers.The final element in Allen's account of what could be called the material or substantive nature of rhetorical theory is the symbol, a notion that he derives in part from the work of Kenneth Burke. The symbol is a kind of working model of troubled freedom, a predication that can't ever be true but that has an enduring power of its own. One very concrete example that Allen gives of how the symbol can affect the world without a monopoly on truth (quite the contrary) comes in his discussion of how Burke thinks about constitutions. Burke suggests that in terms of constitutional law “what is really mandatory upon the court is a new act” (227). In other words, novelty and the circulation of laws and interpretations is what gives the law its life and its motion and indeed its spirit. This is a good example of how some things very tangible (laws, constitutions) are not prevented but enabled by their own contingent nature (in this case, via the category of newness).Here, you can get a sense of how all of the disparate parts that Allen focuses on fit together despite being wholly unalike; symbolism, focalizers, the relationship between the modern and the classic tradition, it is all part of the materiality of rhetorical theory. These things don't have to be truly true (which is fortunate because they aren't). They certainly aren't eternal or constant. There is nothing of the “idea” here. Or rather there is but in a sense that is closer to Walter Benjamin than Plato. Benjamin tells us that the idea isn't found in some ideal transcendent space but rather in each and every expression of a category. So for example, if you could gather every possible rendition of a chair—including chairs that don't really seem to be chairs at all, or maybe even everything that one could use as a chair that isn't a chair—you would effectively have the “idea” of a chair before you (although you couldn't possibly have them all literally before you). The idea is itself a kind of symbol, but it's a symbol that successfully—at least in its form as an idea—seems to encompass something in all of its material presence, its way of being and changing in space and time (that's the other thing; you'd need to know what a chair was going to be like in ten thousand years, ten million years too). As such, the idea suggests a kind of transcendent status, but I would actually say that it really has descendent status, that is, it is the essence of materialism in all of its aleatory and contingent multiplicity.This connects to the last thing I want to say and appreciate about Allen's book. This is a book about the ordinary and the every day. Allen celebrates ordinary freedoms, doxa in all of its banal variety. This is a book about not heroic truths but humbler, more chastened sorts of truths. I think this books shows how we can live without transcendent heights, without the need for perfection and true unity. As such, I would say this is a radically democratic and indeed highly anarchist book. The fact that Allen shows us how we can have truth and predication, a sedimented world that we can sink our teeth into, even without the requirement for higher laws and absolute truths and facts saves us from thinking that we need recourse to the kind of transcendent laws that are the stuff of archaism. For this reason alone (but there are many other reasons too), I think Allen has done us all a great and vital service.

Other| March 12 2021 Books of Interest Michael Kennedy Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2021) 54 (1): 101–106. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.1.0101 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Kennedy; Books of Interest. Philosophy & Rhetoric 12 March 2021; 54 (1): 101–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.1.0101 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 You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1974 chapter on dissociation in the comic furthers our understanding of the rhetorical possibilities of dissociation, revealing how the concept can dismantle old worldviews and create new ones through laughter. Thanks to issues with translation and the chapter's obscure examples, however, this text has been largely overlooked by scholars. This article grounds the chapter's theories in examples with more contemporary resonance as a necessary first step toward understanding the full scope of Olbrechts-Tyteca's contributions to the concept of dissociation. Considering Olbrechts-Tyteca's chapter in light of other texts from the New Rhetoric Project also calls attention to the ways that translation practices have shaped scholars' reception and use of the Project's concepts.

ABSTRACTThe sections devoted to dissociation in The New Rhetoric identify many verbal forms that can express this reconceptualizing line of argument. This article reviews the linguistic options offered in English for epitomizing dissociations, including tautologies and constructions that prompt diverging meanings, orthographical devices like capitalization or subscripts that produce variants of a single word, word schemes like agnominatio and polyptoton that alter core forms, and affixes or modifiers that are either available as antonyms or require forcing apart by subsequent antitheses. Paying attention to the verbal expression of dissociations highlights cases that may or may not qualify as the rich reconceptualizations Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca had in mind. Arguments that involve three distinguished terms may, for example, reach a limit where dissociations merge into arguments from division, a long recognized device in traditional rhetoric/dialectic.

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

ABSTRACTThis study explores the influence of the French Symbolist poet, novelist, and literary critic Remy de Gourmont on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's conception of dissociation. It proposes translatio—the medieval trope describing a transfer of ideas—as a lens through which to read the significance of Gourmont's thought on the New Rhetoric Project (NRP). Thus forgoing more traditional comparative approaches such as intertextuality, this study argues that translatio serves here as a particularly valuable conceptual tool: it unveils the evolution of Perelman's thought over time, and Olbrechts-Tyteca's significant contribution to it; it also provides a clearer understanding of the relationship between association (in the guise of analogy) and dissociation in the NRP than what is generally understood by scholars of the Traité. More importantly, translatio unveils the features that make their conception of dissociation one of the truly innovative aspects of the NRP.

There is arguably no region of the world that has been the object of more intellectual contempt, intellectual derision, and intellectual disregard than Africa. Scholars have long documented the dark, dreary, pernicious, and primitive “Africanism” some argue has been a (if not the) defining pillar of philosophizing, literature, criticism, and historiography in the North Atlantic for a long time. Emerging along with intentionally misconstrued yet ubiquitous constructions of blackness as other than human—negative ideas about the continent of Africa and its supposed intellectual vacuity are part of a widely circulating discourse that Kurtis Keim dubbed “mistaking Africa.” In the United States, what Toni Morrison called “American Africanism” is so routine and mundane, it is hardly notable that very few courses on African philosophy and rhetoric are offered in American colleges and universities. To witness how the epistemic disregard of African rhetorics and philosophies plays out in these familiar confines, just peruse the volumes of Philosophy & Rhetoric since its inception in 1968. Such epistemic disregard is part of the “colonizer's model of the world,” to borrow a phrase from J. M. Blaut, a model that posits Western Europe and North America as the putative center of intellectual, historic, and cultural development of humankind. The upshot of this misperception has been that for too long Africa and Africa's relation to the global emergence and circulation of ideas has been severely undertheorized, particularly in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, including in philosophy and rhetoric.At the same time, what it means to live (or try to live) the good life also remains a perennially vexing problem in a number of disciplines, including philosophy, political theory, and religious studies. Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life attends to Africa's role in the intellectual world by rhetoricizing theories about the good life. Groundwork faults philosophical abstractionism for producing theories of both the good life and intellectual life in Africa that are too brittle, too idealistic, and too far removed from practical reality. The book's unstated goal, it seems, is to recommend rhetoric's penchant for particular contexts, contingency, and historicity to social theorists. In order to do that, Ochieng recovers the contingency and historicity specific to both the good life and sociopolitics in African societies. He convincingly demonstrates that the meanings of both are negotiated on an ongoing basis, and that both are shot through with contingency and interanimation. To wit, this is not a book about the good life alone nor about Africanism per se, but one whose central arguments about intellectual practice turn on the rhetorical nature both of ideas about Africa and of some of the best regarded theories of the good life. The argument in Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life is that in order to extricate both the good life and Africa from misbegotten understandings, we must rethink intellectual work away from the orthodoxy of metaphysical thought and toward the recursivity and contingency of orthopraxy. In pressing his challenge, Ochieng is undaunted: many luminaries of both African (Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Ajume Wingo, Achille Mbembe, Jean-François Bayart) and Western (Aristotle, Plato, Foucault, Žižek, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Nussbaum) thought are subject to his reproach. But the goal is not just a vain naming and shaming of these individuals. Ochieng seeks instead to refigure any polarities between African and North Atlantic thought as indications of the incompleteness and irreducible entanglement of both thought systems in the catalog of human thought and practice. For him, the telos of the good life is figured rhetorically; it emerges from conditions in particular contexts.Towards this end, Ochieng offers a program for doing philosophy that is grounded in the contingencies of everyday life. Groundwork develops this program in four chapters. Chapter 1 argues that an empirical social ontology is the best framework for investigating “the good society,” which is the ideal location for the experience of the good life. The good society, Ochieng argues, is an “emergent normativity” (57), an intransitive that develops in and at the confluence of performative particulars that comprise the ontological makeup of the social: subjectivity, power, agency, and normativity (12–58). Specifically, the good society emerges through an analysis of the “interanimation of historiography”; the activation and expansion of political imagination via the (re)articulation of the political; political practice that foregrounds lived experiences over the deus ex machina of transcendentalist and metaphysically imbued political theory; and the enactment of restructurative justice through the constant remaking of the political, social, and cultural. Of these, restructurative justice best demonstrates the turn away from the abstract and universal and toward the concrete and particular. Restructurative justice obligates members of the good society to observe “egalitarianism; democratic practices; and relationships of solidarity” (90). Anchored in the recognition that structural and historical violence have affected people differently, restructurative justice is, in the first position, concerned with unsettling the structural and historical “entrenchment of privilege and power” (91). Calls to explore financial and other compensation for American descendants of enslaved persons advocated in House Bill 40 of the U.S. Congress and by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates illustrate this first commitment of restructurative justice. Additionally, restructurative justice upholds commitments to both democratic practices and solidarity, which Ochieng defines as a concern with enabling members of one's society who are otherwise unable to exert their political will to do so. This is how the terrain of the good life is cultivated.In chapter 2, Ochieng details his theory of the political in African societies, which borrows from and expands upon Bakhtin's concept of chronotopes. For Bakhtin, chronotope denotes the inextricable interwovenness of time and space. To apprehend the dynamic contingency of sociopolitics in Africa (and the good life), Ochieng infuses Bakhtin's chronotope with a “third dimension in the intersection of space and time: that of agency” (13). Adding agency to chronotope allows Ochieng to show “how structures are emergent from within history (time) as this is imbricated and bounded by horizons (space) of the possible (agency)” (13). Ochieng illustrates this argument in chapter 2, which works through an admittedly incomplete catalog of ten chronotopes in African politics. Through each theme, Ochieng returns to one point: politics in Africa is emergent from a diverse series of practices that are configured and constrained in history—they cannot be fully understood apart from ground contexts. He illustrates the chronotopics in African politics with examples from across the continent (Mali in the west, Kenya in the east, the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the center, and South Africa and Zimbabwe in the south). This chronotopic account of politics in Africa highlights “the diversity of political formations” and foregrounds “the irreducibly plural and multi-dimensional task of the political imagination” (181) attendant to the good life.Chapters 3 and 4 pivot away from politics to ethics. In chapter 3, Ochieng argues that only a meta-ethics that grows out of the social ontology and chronotopics as developed in the preceding chapters is appropriate for the contemplation of the good life. His meta-ethics “is less that of an immovable and irresistible arché and more of a web of thick relationships; an emergent patchwork of interpretive practices and a cluster of gripping values that have come to be appreciated in light of history” (193). Chapter 4 returns at last to the motivating problem of how to theorize the good life from the standpoint of interanimation, social ontology, and articulation. On this point, Ochieng argues forcefully that the good life, if it is to square with the lived realities of humans everywhere, cannot be imbued in transcendence. He contends instead, and convincingly, that the best revered models of the good life that have echoed loudest across the centuries—the hero, the saint, and the citizen—are hollow and brittle because the authority each commands issues not from the mundaneness of everyday life but out of the abstractions of theistic, mythic, and political thinking. Thus, the good life appears in much of philosophical and religious discourse as an “ideal normativity” premised on hypostatic principles that inflect away from the practicality of social ontology. Whether it is framed as a quest for a metaphysical telos (hero) or defined by universalizing abstractionism (citizen), or as emanating from origins (saint) as nebulous as they are mythical and mystical, the good life—as it is figured in the saint, the hero, and the citizen—offers “no articulation of the social ontology from which ethical action is intelligible and is effectuated” (229). Rather than draw our ethical projects from these facile personae, Ochieng urges an ethics conditioned on ground projects, which themselves “are emergent from particular forms of social relationships” and in which “justice is instantiated in and through” (229).While its central argument—that the quest for the good life is best explained as emergent and that philosophers and rhetoricians should so orient their projects—is compelling, this case, as it is advanced in Groundwork, will strike some as familiar. Readers familiar with Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, Comaroff and Comaroff's Theory from the South, Nathan Stormer's work on articulation and taxis, or Stuart Hall's work on articulation and race in The Fateful Triangle, for example, will hear familiar refrains in Groundwork. In addition, as strong a case as Groundwork makes for ground-based philosophy, it leaves a few questions unanswered. Take Ochieng's broadside against Western philosophy's proclivity for the transcendental and universal, for example. As he rightly observes, this “transcendalist delusion,” as Linda Martín Alcoff has labeled it, fails on two counts: for one, it often projects philosophers' perspectives as a “view from nowhere” (3), a neutral episteme, one that, by some ineluctable stroke of genius, is unsullied by the caprices of subjective and context-bound doxa. Second, perhaps as a consequence of the preference for transcendentalism in philosophy, it results in a willful inattention to the particularities of conditions on the ground, manifested in philosophy's preference for the abstract over the concrete (save for the cherry-picked anecdote proffered here and there). Thus, Ochieng intones in his introduction that “the very idea of rooting philosophical discourse in particular subjectivity and social context” constitutes “a betrayal of the transcendence and universality of philosophical questions” the field considers to be its purview. Yet following this line of reasoning leads to the twin challenges of delineating contexts (what to include and what to exclude in identifying a particular context), and of distinguishing different localities from each other (how to distinguish between interrelation and idiosyncrasy of contexts). In addition, recent contributions by African political theorists have moved beyond the weaknesses in Jean-François Bayart's “politics of the belly” documented in Groundwork and toward dynamic models constructed from multiple local contexts (e.g., the concepts of “pluri-politics and the politics of “ID-ology”), and in African historiography (here, one thinks of the challenges “patriotic” history in southern Africa raised by historians influenced by Terence Ranger). But these points need not dampen the appeal of the arguments laid out in Groundwork. They suggest instead a possible way of building on this project by exploring social philosophy through specific cases. This book invites us to vistas of possibility of philosophy and rhetoric's entanglements as we start our thinking by working from the ground up.

ABSTRACTThis essay tells the story of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's “dissociation of concepts,” which they introduced in 1958 and is in use as a tool of criticism by many rhetorical critics. The story begins in England with John Locke's development of associative reasoning in 1770 and then moves to France, with Remy de Gourmont extending associative reasoning with the concept of dissociation in 1899. Gourmont's dissociation crosses the Atlantic and is then developed by Kenneth Burke in 1931. In turn, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca absorbed and expanded Locke, Gourmont, and Burke's theories of association and dissociation in 1958. They crafted a tool, the dissociation of concepts, that equips rhetorical reasoning with the capacity to navigate between the promise and perils of fission and fusion. Since 1958, many scholars have made productive use of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's innovation. The essay concludes with some possible futures for their dissociation of concepts.

ABSTRACTThis essay presents a concept of rhetoric by accident, which understands accidents in regard to the materiality of affection (i.e., the condition of being affected) and in regard to the unconditioned rhetoricity of affectability. The concept of accidental rhetoric put forth depends on the ontological condition of openness, so first affect is stipulated in relation to the porousness of material life to explain the inevitability of affection and provide the basis for understanding rhetoric by accident. Then the accident is defined in alignment with material openness. Rather than consider accidents in terms of human control over contingencies, accidents are defined by the contingency of purposiveness to affection. That affect occurs without purpose means that beings experience rhetoric without a plan (i.e., by accident). The essay then considers how rhetoric by accident is part of any particular rhetoric's existence, namely as a horizon of evolution and diversification for rhetoric.

ABSTRACT Dissociation is considered by many to be Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's most innovative and significant contribution to rhetorical theory. Currently on display in American debates over racial justice and public health, dissociation is a nuanced process of conceptual reconfiguration. After exploring how dissociation figures in these debates, the introduction summarizes how scholars over the years have extended and complicated the concept. The introduction then identifies key gaps in scholarship that are addressed by the articles included in this special section, including dissociation's philosophical genesis, its linguistic manifestations, its structural possibilities, and its role in comedic discourse.

In Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), Quentin Skinner argued, first, that Thomas Hobbes's philosophy is best understood when placed within the context of the study of rhetoric in Early Modern England and, second, that Hobbes's attitude toward rhetoric changed in the course of his career: that he passed from a period in which he embraced civic humanism, with its emphasis on rhetoric (in the 1620s and early 1630s) to one of adamantly rejecting rhetoric in the late 1630s and 1640s, only to reembrace rhetoric in his Leviathan (1651). In his Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, Timothy Raylor challenges Skinner's influential thesis, arguing for more continuity in Hobbes's attitude toward rhetoric throughout his corpus.Raylor's biographical first chapter provides evidence of the kind of scrupulous scholarship characteristic of the book as a whole. Raylor leaves no question unanswered without the most thorough effort to address it, no assumption unexamined. When Hobbes undertook the tutelage of William Cavendish, Second Earl of Devonshire, in 1608, what curriculum did he design for his charge? To find out, Raylor surveys the books purchased by the Cavendish household in the years immediately following Hobbes's hiring, records that remain at Chatsworth House, the Cavendish family estate. As a result of his painstaking review of family accounts, Raylor finds nothing terribly surprising—mostly standard collections and dictionaries were purchased—but nonetheless, now we know what works Hobbes thought essential to education: the curriculum that Hobbes, as tutor, was creating for his young charge, while not neglecting the humanities, emphasized mathematics, logic, and the modern languages (Raylor 37–38).The heart of the book is Raylor's engagement with Skinner, whose work provides the skeletal architecture for Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes. In chapters 2 and 3 on Hobbes's early work, Raylor argues, contra Skinner, that Hobbes never embraced civic humanism or the place of rhetoric in it. He finds other motives than the humanistic ones assigned by Skinner for Hobbes's translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War (1629) and for his poem De mirabilibus. That translation of a Greek or Latin work was a stage in the studia humanitatis was the basis for Skinner's claim that Hobbes was attempting to establish humanist bona fides in undertaking his translation of Thucydides (Skinner 238). Moreover, Cicero had praised history as “magistra vitae” (life's teacher) as a warrant for his translation that Hobbes sites in his prefatory “To the Reader.” Finally, Hobbes's defense of Thucydides against his critics in his introductory “Life and History of Thucydides” conforms in its organizational pattern to the prescriptions for the genus iudiciale in the Ad Herennium, with Hobbes taking the role of the defense against Thucydides's critics (Skinner 246–47). Taking issue with Skinner, Raylor emphasizes that Hobbes was likely attracted to Thucydides because his theory of history emphasized identifying the causal laws that explain events, a more scientific view of history that Bacon modeled in his History of Henry VII (Raylor 68–69). True, Hobbes may have praised history as teacher of moralisms, but that was in the preface where authors praise a subject to attract readers to its importance (Raylor 71). Hobbes's translation cannot stand as particularly humanist. In chapter 3, Raylor similarly finds in Hobbes's poem De Mirabilibus Pecci (On Marvelous Peaks) an emphasis on natural history and the influence, again, of Bacon, not an exercise in epideictic that checks off an achievement within the studia humanitatis (Raylor 105–9).Chapter 4's focus is on Hobbes's famous Briefe of Aristotle's Rhetoric (based on Theodore Goulston's Latin translation of 1619), which Hobbes published in 1637. By Skinner's reckoning the Briefe falls within Hobbes's second period, following what Leo Strauss called Hobbes's “Euclidian conversion” in a Genevan library in 1630, which resulted in his turning away from humanism and rhetoric and toward scientism (Raylor 127). Raylor notes that Hobbes scholars (J. T. Harwood and Pantelis Bassakos, as well as Skinner) “have scoured the [Briefe's] many omissions and its less frequent additions for signs of hostility to the enterprise of rhetoric, reading Hobbes's subsequent ‘rejection’ of eloquence back into it” (150). Skinner, laboring this antirhetoric thesis, maintained, for instance, that there “is nothing in Aristotle corresponding to Hobbes's contention in chapter 1 [of the Rhetoric] that judges are incapable of following scientific proofs, and that advocates are consequently obliged to take ‘the Rhetoricall, shorter way’” (Skinner 257). But Hobbes's rendering seems fair to what Aristotle writes at I.i.12.1355a: that rhetoric is useful because, while (in Freese's Loeb translation) “scientific discourse is concerned with instruction,” for the typical audience for rhetorical discourse such instruction “is impossible,” thus necessitating a rhetorical approach. Similarly, those who see in Hobbes's Briefe an antirhetoric bias point to Hobbes's translation of the first sentence in book II, chapter 1, that “‘rhetoric is that faculty, by which we understand what will serve our turn concerning any subject to win belief in the hearer.’” Skinner reads this as Hobbes's “sneering conclusion” that rhetoricians “are only interested in victory and not in truth” (257). In defense of Hobbes's neutrality, Raylor points out that in Aristotle's account of rhetoric, rhetorical discourse depends on doxa, not apodictic premises, and has persuasion, not the discovery of truth, as its end; furthermore, the claim that rhetoricians are interested only in victory is Skinner's interpolation, found in neither Aristotle nor Hobbes (Raylor 170). Raylor constantly refers to two facts about the Briefe to explain its character: it is a digest, and it was originally created as an aid for his tutoring of William Cavendish. “Streamlining” and “pedagogical value” can best explain Hobbes's rendering of Aristotle (155). If at particular points in the text Hobbes's version seems to make rhetoric more amoral than the original, it may be because Hobbes, in pursuit of economy, has combined attitudes Aristotle expressed elsewhere in summary fashion in the Rhetoric, a notoriously conflicted text.Chapter 5 is concerned with the view of rhetoric in Hobbes's Elements of Law, Natural and Positive, and in De Cive (On the Citizen), considered by Skinner as part of his middle period. Raylor maintains that Hobbes's works, early and late, reflect a basically Aristotelian view of rhetoric—rhetoric is a means to winning belief, is based on doxa (not the apodictic conclusions of demonstration), and, to be effective, must appeal to the passions of its nonexpert audience. He lines up descriptions of rhetoric and eloquence from Hobbes's Briefe of the Rhetoric, from Elements of Law, and from De Cive. On the face of it, the description in De Cive, later than the other two, seems decidedly more sophistic and lends support to Skinner's thesis that Hobbes lost respect for rhetoric in his middle period. In De Cive, the goal of rhetoric is said to be “‘to make the good and the bad … appear greater or less than they really are and to make the unjust appear just,’” that rhetoric does not begin “‘from true principles but from doxa … which are for the most part usually false’” (quoted in Raylor 178). Hobbes's description does not reflect the neutrality of Aristotle's approach. Raylor maintains that the description from De Cive is part of an argument against democratic assemblies and therefore should be taken not as a definitive for rhetoric generally but as a description of its typical deployment in this context (179). In support, he points out that later in De Cive, Hobbes identifies a second kind of eloquence that emphasizes perspicuity and elegance (182–83).Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Leviathan, addressing the question of whether here, in Hobbes's exemplary work of civil science, he makes room for rhetoric, either in theory or by his practice. Raylor points out that Skinner argued that with Leviathan Hobbes had “changed his mind about rhetoric since apparently rejecting it in the Elements of Law and De Cive, readmitting it as part of a reconstituted civil science” (246). Raylor disagrees: this conclusion depends “upon too strong a construction of what are, in context, rather more limited concessions, hedged about by restrictions” (246). On Raylor's analysis, before and in Leviathan, Hobbes is consistent: rhetoric and rhetorical thinking had no place in scientific discovery or mathematical demonstration, including a civil science that could be based on demonstration. Rhetorical invention fosters an uncritical acceptance of familiar conjectural patterns and associations and does not encourage original investigation (Raylor 220–23, 245), a criticism Bacon levied as well. Hobbes never wavered in his suspicion of rhetorical thinking. Raylor does grant that Hobbes allows a belated role for some aspects of elocutio in the presentational aspects of the genuine sciences, including civil science. While metaphor is verboten, simile, for example, is allowed not as a means of discovery or proof, but as a means for illustration (250; 262). This role for rhetoric, Raylor does concede, is more pronounced in Leviathan, but it was not, he insists, altogether absent earlier. Raylor grants too what Skinner and others also claim: a more pronounced polemical texture and tone in Leviathan, a greater presence of rhetorical figures, especially figures of abuse or ridicule, in the last two books (263–65). In these books, Hobbes acts not as the scientist but as the polemicist, denouncing what he regards as obfuscating abuses, especially of religionists.In my judgment, Raylor shows that Hobbes's take on rhetoric in the Leviathan is not, as Skinner claimed, “antithetical” (Skinner 12) to what Hobbes advanced in Elements of Law and De Cive. Hobbes's changed view is better characterized as Raylor has it—a restricted accommodation to allow rhetorical methods a limited role in the discourse of civil science. But in making political philosophers aware of the way the rhetorical culture of the early modern period shaped debates even into the seventeenth century, Skinner's was a genuine, original contribution. Perhaps we can allow innovators a degree of overstatement.The writer who noted that life in the absence of government would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan I.13) understood the way economy, climax (the figure auxesis), and wryness can make prose memorable. Hobbes clearly benefitted from a humanist education but had scarce respect for it. He had no regard for Ciceronian probabilism and would agree with Descartes that if two people hold opposing views, one or both of them is wrong. He preferred to pragmatic reasoning abstract ratiocination, a deductive method that generally “discovered” that “objective” reality was coterminous with his own thinking. Within the history of rhetoric, Hobbes is best seen as a transitional figure: the belated role he found for rhetoric anticipated what became in the Enlightenment the Campbell two-step: first convince, then persuade. For him, this formulation grudgingly allowed a role for rhetoric when dealing with imbeciles, but it hardly makes Hobbes a legitimate heir of the magnificent rhetorical culture of the early modern period.

ABSTRACTOne of the most important developments in twentieth-century rhetorical theory is Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's insight that concepts, when under strain, can be split or dissociated into two separate terms. Not a simple binary, these terms remain interconnected in a value hierarchy with one term serving as the normative frame for the other. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca theorize that either term can be dissociated further, producing a fan-type dissociation. Unlike ordinary dissociations, fan-types place three or more terms in hierarchical relationship, resulting in unique rhetorical features. Fanning a dissociation can serve three basic rhetorical functions: purging undesirable elements, preserving less undesirable elements from total devaluation, and purifying desirable elements. Building on these basic functions, rhetors can perform complex rhetorical actions, from intensifying a dissociation's values to completely undoing a dissociation. Long ignored by theorists and critics, fan-types complicate our understanding of dissociation, argumentation, and value-based reasoning, and therefore deserve more scholarly attention.

ABSTRACT Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert in the White House's coronavirus task force, is challenged to offer responsible public communication of science despite working under a habitual liar who has no tolerance for criticism or dissent. Fauci manages this rhetorical exigence by using strategic ambiguity, the topos of the honest broker, dissociation, and a narrative that constrains executive decision making.

ABSTRACT This essay walks through the ways the pandemic structures and limits our movement in cities. It suggests that our well-worn tropes for walking, in this moment, shore up the power of the state over individual bodies. To imagine the possibility of how bodily movement might resist this power, the essay turns to a rhetorical conception of scale.