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

ABSTRACT“Like race” analogies have been critiqued from various perspectives, and this article enters that conversation to engage those criticisms from a rhetorical perspective. In short, this article makes a case for resisting proscriptive judgments about these analogies until they have been contextualized and afforded their complexity as rhetorical figures. A rhetorical perspective of analogies engages them not as truth statements or as part of propositional logic (a monological view of communication) but instead as invitations to explore similar sets of relationships that are qualified through continued dialogue (a dialogical view of communication). Through a case study of a highly recirculated issue of the Advocate, this essay demonstrates the productive possibilities and limitations of analogical reasoning.

ABSTRACTGerald Early's remark that black people are seminally important to the modern world because they created the blues is examined as a contribution to the politics of recognition that deviates from the liberal model that dominates in political theory. Central to this deviation is the politics of honor and Paul Corcoran's distinction between formal and aesthetic recognition. The politics of aesthetic recognition is examined here through Hans-Georg Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutics in Truth and Method as well as through Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and philosophy of Dasein (being-there), inspired by Aristotle's Rhetoric, and his writings on art. The significance of art and specifically of the blues to the politics of recognition goes beyond the representation or the relaying of others' voices, in that it calls forth modes of being-there over against difference.

ABSTRACTShot through with Schlegel's insight that “words often understand themselves better than those who use them,” Walter's Benjamin's 1916 essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” extends an invitation to reflect on those words that speak to the recognizability of language, the name of that in which language abides and discloses itself. For now, a century after it was first composed as an unsent letter, a close consideration of Benjamin's important essay sheds light on the contemporary question of recognition, the not yet rhetorical question of how the ethical-political stakes of recognition may hinge on the (dis)possession of (its) language.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the rhetorical structure of the demand for recognition in order to refigure the relationship between law and the scene of address in political and theoretical accounts of recognition. It begins by demonstrating that theorists and critics of the politics of recognition assume that law limns the scene of recognition, framing it in a way that contains its practices and marks its end. The difficulty of such a presumption, however, is that, if law is afforded the status of a frame or background, we are unable to account for the rhetorical operations of law—the way it constitutes the norms of recognizability. A reading of the U. K.'s Gender Recognition Act of 2004 provides a brief example of how a demand for recognition might expose law's rhetorical conditions and demonstrate how legal judgment presupposes a scene of recognition in which both subjects and law take (up a) place.

ABSTRACTFirst I discuss the limitations of recognition for grounding both politics and ethics, the main problem being that recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression. Next, I take up more recent attempts to link recognition to vulnerability rather than to self-consciousness. I challenge the concept of vulnerability on the grounds that it is not exclusive to, or constitutive of, humanity, on the one hand, and criticize it for ignoring differences in levels of vulnerability, on the other. I propose witnessing, grounded in response ethics, as a supplement to recognition models of political and ethical subjectivity. Witnessing takes us beyond recognition to the affective and imaginative dimensions of experience, which must be added to the politics of recognition. It requires a commitment to what Jacques Derrida calls “hyperbolic ethics,” an ethics of impossible responsibilities for what we do not and cannot recognize.

Editorial| November 23 2015 EDITOR'S NOTE Philosophy & Rhetoric (2015) 48 (4): vi. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.48.4.vi Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation EDITOR'S NOTE. Philosophy & Rhetoric 23 November 2015; 48 (4): vi. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.48.4.vi 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 During the 1970 and ’80s, there was growing agitation in the former Communist states of Eastern and Central Europe for civil society. Figures such as Václav Havel in the former Czech Socialist Republic and Adam Michnik in the People’s Republic of Poland called for the freedom to assemble and exchange ideas. They were willing to cede authority to govern to the state, but in return, they wanted the opportunity to interact, express ideas, and offer criticism that would be taken seriously as an intervention intended to improve society. Eventually the spirit of their agitation won out, as the momentous events of 1989 led to a mostly bloodless revolution in that part of the world. Many thought this was the dawning of a new age of tolerance and understanding that would lead to freer, more inclusive societies. That hope was not realized. The last quarter century has seen a proliferation of... You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that Althusser's theory of interpellation suggests, however obliquely, a way to subvert and ruin the formation of subjectivity under liberal capitalism. For Althusser, when the law calls the subject, “nine times out of ten” the person called is “really” the one that the law intended. This article asks about the one in ten who is not the one whom the law wanted but who answers the call anyway. This is what I am calling the misinterpellated subject. I argue that this subject, because she or he is unwanted and unexpected, rhetorically ruins the scene of interpellation, offering a potentially radical source of resistance to liberal capitalism. Looking at Althusser's work on interpellation along with critics like Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant, I seek to show how the occasional flaws in interpellation (the one in ten) can be expanded by developing an anarchist politics as well as anarchist forms of subjectivity.

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

ABSTRACTThis article is about recognizing the territory of a concept, in this case, that of Marxism as it appears in the Theses on Feuerbach, by summoning up Deleuze, Freud, Engels, Heidegger, and Sartre. Rhetoric analysis is applied to the foundational scripture of Marxism to show how Marx's materialist enunciation was thwarted by Engel's textual manipulation.

ABSTRACTScholars across the disciplines have turned to theories of recognition to interpret recent cases of racial profiling, police brutality, and the militarization of the police in black communities. Social activists, too, have embraced the concept, staging recognition scenes to claim political legitimacy. I examine the rhetorical contours of five recognition scenes and the sociopolitical objectives that recognition is expected to perform: 1) dialectical recognitions, which showcase how recognition works hierarchically through dyadic configurations of structural inequalities; 2) intersectional recognitions, which break down the oppressor/oppressed binary through multiaxle identifications and analyses; 3) human rights recognitions, which attempt to hold liberalism accountable to its ideals; 4) recognitions in between, which draw attention to the limits of classical liberal and neoliberal logics of recognition and create alliances that may be impossible based on the logics of recognition; and 5) postracial recognitions, which invest in the temporal fantasy that race is no longer a structuring principle in inequality and fail to account for the power in which recognition operates.

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

ABSTRACT This article examines the rhetorics of recognition in postclimate change political theory. As the future of human life—or a human way of life—is put under pressure from the heating of the planet, critical theory has increasingly leveled the ontological distinctions among biological, geological, and meteorological existents, and a posthuman critique is giving way to a postliving critique and biopower is giving way to geontopower. Building on my recent reflections on geontopower, I explore how critical theory is absorbing nonliving existents into late liberal forms of democracy, focusing more specifically on the logos-oriented model of Jacques Rancière and post-Deleuzean vitalist oriented models.

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

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

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

ABSTRACTUnder the influence of a reading style that Avital Ronell has called “narcoanalysis,” this article performs a reading of addiction and humility through David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. Exploring both addiction and humility through the vector of habit, I argue that both habits indicate the non-self-sufficiency of a subject exposed to affection from outside. But while I position addiction alongside humility, both as habits, I also argue that humility parasitizes the totalizing logic of addictive habit. Neither identical to nor simply the opposite of addiction, humility exploits addiction's structure of uncontrollable relationality. Even addiction depends on the affectability or rhetoricity of a subject always already exposed in language. Humility holds this rhetoricity open.

ABSTRACTThis article explores an alternative logic of imprudence at work in Machiavelli's The Prince, a text seemingly defined by its prudence. Arguing that crucial engagements with The Prince by Eugene Garver and Robert Hariman operate as “prudent” readings, I note that the text offers durable resources for radical political and rhetorical imagination. Such resources are recoverable, however, only in and through an alternative, imprudent, reading strategy. Following the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I read The Prince—particularly in its aesthetic and rhetorical articulation of “the people”—neither as a manual for princes or realpolitik but as both irreducible plurality and differential network, reflecting a political imagination at work in the text beyond modern calculation. Reading The Prince imprudently, I explore the necessary interconnection between rhetorical reading and political thinking—and the subsequent importance of understanding political theory as an aesthetic and textual practice.

Although I do not know Richard Doyle personally, I would say that Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere is a deeply personal book. Not only does the author offer multiple accounts of his own multicontinental explorations of intraspecies cross-pollination, but he also provides many rhetorical analyses of trip reports, biological treatises, and science fiction, all of which seem to be crucial constitutive elements of his research. That is, this is not a book that offers abstract erudition—though there is plenty of content that anyone can extract from it—but one that offers something more rare. Here, I am reminded of Goethe's famous remark, which Nietzsche chose to use as the epigraph to his Untimely Meditations: “In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity” (1982, 59). Another way of saying this is that the “personal” quality of this book indicates something quite different from one person's idiosyncratic attempt to expand their consciousness—whether through learning or smoking. Instead, it points toward a kind of impersonal singularity that is the conjunction of multiple affective/conceptual directions and speeds. It is, in short, a pedagogy in the strongest sense.So as not to be misleading, I should also say that I did know someone else named Doyle some fifteen years ago when I was a graduate student at Penn State. That other Doyle (not exactly “Richard”) was then an assistant professor who had only just published his first book exploring the “rhetorical software” that enabled the field of molecular biology and that drove the sequencing frenzy that was the Human Genome Project. I am indebted to that other Doyle for provoking in me an enthusiasm for thinking and for teaching me that if our scholarship is to be worth anything at all, it must be oriented toward learning how to live. Indeed, reading, writing, teaching, and all the practices of our industry are inextricably parts of life and therefore parts of a carbon- (and silicon-) based ecology that need to be taken seriously if we are going to claim to have been alive at all. But as Darwin's Pharmacy shows, learning how to live is often a brutal, painful, and even a literally nauseating process. Suffice to say that I did not like that Doyle then any more than I like this other one now. But I have learned from (and with) them both.This book is remarkable for several reasons. First, and most apparent, is because it manages to connect extraordinarily disparate discourses in ways that in retrospect look obvious. The chapter entitled “LSDNA” (about the multivalent links between midcentury research on DNA and the discovery of LSD, including the fact that Francis Crick was apparently under the influence of LSD when he first envisioned the double helical structure of the molecule) typifies the provocative quality of these conjunctions. But the more significant attribute that makes this book so important for rhetorical studies is that it depicts rhetoric as a deeply powerful adjunct to all the lines it follows. What this means is that rhetoric here is not merely the stylistic or persuasive adornment of a linguistic content (although it is also that) but is also a constitutive element of what we might very broadly call “experience.” Doyle is at pains to emphasize this point especially through the analysis of trip reports by those who have taken hallucinogenic drugs. It would appear from the sheer quantity of these reports that the ingestion of psychotropic drugs produces an intense desire to generate language—a language that would somehow attempt (and fail) to capture the experience of the trip. But more than that, this language also provides a crucial element of the set and setting that are key elements of all encounters with hallucinogens. “To read trip reports for what they can teach us about psychedelic experience,” Doyle argues, “we must read them as if they are less failed signs of the ineffable than symptoms of, and subsequent frames for, psychedelic states” (54). Turning from a traditional emphasis on language to a contemporary thinking of information allows Doyle to foreground the active quality of rhetoric: “Information is less a phenomenon to be understood than … a potent mutagen of human experience.”The common element shared by the various sites that Doyle investigates—from global and medical imaging, to psychedelic drug use, to the love poetry of Cyrano de Bergerac—is that they all provoke an experience of connectedness, “suggesting that in some fashion human perception is indeed “wired” for a periodic recognition of the dense imbrication of organism and environment” (9). Now of course, this message isn't new or even especially noteworthy, but what Doyle is after here is less the content of the message of interconnection and more the practices and relations through which humans come to attune themselves to this event.What interests Doyle about each of these sites is that they are all involved in pragmatic experiments that explore the distributed quality of life. One of the many things that makes Doyle's itinerary deeply compelling is that he does not follow the theoretical line about the death of the subject or the overcoming of humanism but analyzes the actual practices of people involved in pursuing these projects. Thus, for instance, hallucinogenic drug users (“psychonauts”) are pioneers, “early adopters of a transitional, transhuman identity precipitated by our intensified and amplified ecologies of information in the context of an ecosystem in distress” (230). These psychonauts are not so much attempting to “expand” consciousness (as if consciousness were merely quantitative entities) but to turn it otherwise, to explore its alternate capacities by “troping” consciousness (hence the term “psychotropic” drugs).Interestingly enough, and contra the many so-called postmodern critiques of the value of consciousness, in Doyle's account, consciousness does not disappear. Nor is it merely an epiphenomenon masking certain underlying material practices. Indeed, consciousness plays an extremely crucial role in this newly configured biosphere as “the distributed capacity to manipulate and transform living systems” (252). That is, consciousness allows us (and not only us) to pay attention to certain things in certain ways and is thus deeply motivated by what we can only call “seduction.”This emphasis on seduction connects to what I think is the most powerful argument of the book, that Darwin's evolutionary engine of natural selection has unjustly overshadowed the other evolutionary motor that he discovered: sexual selection. Focusing primarily on The Descent of Man, Doyle shows that “Darwin introduces the possibility that survival comes not to the fittest but to the sexiest, those who are adepts at attention gathering” (139). From the plumage of the peacock, to the petals of the orchid, to the thought troping of peyote, this capacity to seduce and to fascinate may well be the most fundamental, rhetorical (and evolutionary) attribute of life. And this attribute is in marked contrast to some alleged demand that the individual organism exists in robust distinction against its environment. That is, “the experience of seduction … provokes not fitness but entanglement[;] sexual selection excels at the momentary breakdown of inside/outside topologies” (249).Now it is also the case that the psychonauts that Doyle investigates are not at all casual drug users and that they are involved in a very precise and care-ful relationship to psychotropic drugs. This book is not simply advocating for the mind-altering quality of hallucinogens themselves; you will not find anything like a mindless celebration of Burning Man here. When he speaks of those who have managed to “form a commons with ayhuasca” (246), as well as the fascinated (and fascinating) artisans of marijuana cultivation, Doyle is predominantly concerned with those who are dedicated to a connoisseur-like relation to these plants (and to consciousness). This is to say that such psychonauts seem to offer a privileged and perhaps altogether rare relation to “drugs” (and to the nooshpere more generally) in that they are “more than recreational” drug users; they demonstrate “a serious intent” in their relations to the exploration of consciousness (258). And indeed, this raises the essential question (for me) as to what styles of exclusions are necessary for any pedagogy and any rhetoric. But that may be a question for a different review. For the moment, it seems to me that the stakes of ingesting this other Doyle's pedagogy are well worth the risks.

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

ABSTRACTMost Plato scholarship characterizes Socrates's dialectic as cooperative, reciprocal, and open ended. This orthodoxy echoes Socrates's characterizations of it, but the dialectic's dramatizations rarely confirm it. Commentators recognizing this seek to protect the dialectic's image by maligning Socrates's interlocutors. Francisco Gonzalez's description of the Protagoras's “central crisis” exemplifies this approach. When a dispute over how to conduct the discussion threatens its dissolution, Gonzalez blames Protagoras, claiming that relativism forecloses conversation and community. I argue that Gonzalez elides alternative forms of community supported by other discursive practices and that Socrates's refusal to answer legitimate concerns about his methodological demands turns the dialectic into the “external, nondialogical, absolute standard” Gonzalez says it lacks.

We often confuse commercial representation with political intervention. For instance, a recent Cheerios advertisement featuring a biracial family provided many people the evidence of a welcomed cultural shift, recognition of a growing acceptance of what might have been taboo and even illegal in the United States a handful of decades ago. We stumble upon another example as we realize that washing down a Chick-fil-A fried chicken sandwich with a 7–11 BigGulp has somehow become not one but two political acts of cultural defiance. While companies aligning themselves explicitly or implicitly for or against cultural politics might seem odd, the frequency of such events demonstrates a noticeable—and increasing—overlap between economic production and political intervention. At the risk of sounding clichéd, these cases remind us that we are what we eat. That said, what “we are” and “what we eat” are both at stake in contemporary culture because technological and media innovation have made that culture more malleable. Jeff Pruchnic's Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age: The Transhuman Condition does not delve directly into these particular events, but the problems the book engages help us better understand and respond to modes of cultural production that we must come to see as increasingly heterogeneous. What is the role of rhetoric in an economy of “just-in-time” accommodation?Tacking widely across cultural, economic, and biological registers, Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age seeks to theorize rhetorical possibility after cybernetics, a field in which every thing seems open to redesign and reinvention. Toward these ends, the book traffics in micro-studies: embryotic stem cell manipulation, a Burkebot, video game effects, stock market algorithms, political redistricting, a collection of shoes, among many more. What links these various items is the extent to which biological, cultural, social phenomena once considered autonomous are now susceptible to direct intervention through and as technological innovation. Pruchnic's central claim in response to this development is simple, albeit counterintuitive: contemporary technologies and media are evidence of an increased humanization of social and technological processes and are not inhuman forces of calculation and computation. This is to say that the proliferation of and increased reliance on information media and technological processes allow contemporary cultural practices to more effectively mimic the complexity and vitality of biological processes. While such a claim might be simply stated, its implications for understanding ethical engagement with technics may be quite profound for humanities study in general and for rhetorical scholarship in particular. Put differently, the implications concern the extent to which epistemological categories have always been shaped by supposedly inhuman forces of techne, which then refigure a host of available responses to changing technological conditions. The position allows us to explore and respond to cultural institutions that have markedly become less concerned with establishing mass markets than with identifying and intensifying market subsets that are fueled, in part, by more efficient methods of demographic research and more effective deployment of marketing techniques.Pruchnic's response to this moment is two-pronged. First—in a task occupying the book's first two chapters—he broadly traces how epistemological and technical domains are becoming conflated in contemporary culture. Second—in a series of case studies through the book's final three chapters—he articulates a version of rhetorical ethics robust enough to respond to such a conflation by engaging in specific analyses of contemporary culture. Taken as a whole, the book offers a theory of rhetorical practice and cultural analysis that moves away from logics of exclusion (classification, division, and separation) and instead emphasizes inclusionary logics that seek to establish and maintain ongoing processes of interaction.In the initial chapters, Pruchnic offers analyses of the conditions of contemporary culture, especially with regard to the ways in which cultural life is steeped in technological advancement. Key to this work is a genealogy that Pruchnic constructs and that he uses to trace how, through technics and media, “forms of knowledge/representation are not based on quantification or calculation but on dynamics processes for maintaining relationships” (13). Pruchnic arrives at this claim by arguing that we are witnessing an increasing overlap between the two previously distinct domains of logos and techne, the former largely encompassing reason and communication—traditional human activities—and the latter the material technologies and what has long thought to be nonhuman mechanics. These chapters propose that the traditional separation between these two domains allowed entire systems of ethical and political practice to be founded and sustained. We need not look too far to witness that these divisions play out explicitly in the university, where liberal arts, social sciences, and hard science are well instituted as distinct lines of inquiry. That these two domains now find themselves to be overlapping and have become less distinct is the cause of a great many of our contemporary “problems,” which include the fracturing of democratic processes and anthropocentric effects such as global climate change and armed unrest. Far from claiming that today is unlike any other, Pruchnic instead maintains that the logic undergirding much of these activities is different in kind only because of the speed and complexity with which these operations are undertaken. In response, he proposes that contemporary culture should be understood and characterized as a “technologic,” that is, as “forms of interaction and engagement that not only find their most explicit manifestation in contemporary technologies but signal the imbrication, or recombination, of techne (formalistic and goal-directed strategies) with logos (both in its sense of human ‘higher reason’ and of the general structuring of human life) that Plato attempted to so carefully separate and the division of which became a touchstone for Western thought” (9).As it combines two terms, the “technologic” helps refigure the many debates and problems we find ourselves a part of. Pruchnic finds a basis for this refiguring through a careful reading of Martin Heidegger's work concerning technology, especially as it pertains to the ontological. Toward this reading, Pruchnic goes on to argue that Heidegger's critique of technology's increasing centrality in human affairs has less force now because it regards contemporary technology as only calculation, reductionism, or standardization. Pruchnic instead revisits Heidegger's ontological approach to historical analysis and proposes that we might consider the developments that Heidegger casts as epochs of self-understanding as a “history of techniques” (71). The turn toward techniques is buoyed, as Pruchnic contends, contra many of the criticisms of Heidegger's conflation of material technologies and conceptual frameworks, by the fact that such a conflation may actually be a strength in reorganizing our capacities for responding to technological innovation. Recasting Heidegger's historical analysis as one that traces techniques eliminates issues of authenticity and emphasizes instead “elements of rhetorical thought and praxis that were largely crowded out by Platonic thought” (64). Rhetoric, considered thusly, then is better understood to be “a vector of forces or practices … premised somewhere between the application of physical force and the immaterial realm of pure reason or judgment” (17). This analysis expands Pruchnic's initial proposal, suggesting that many of our humanistic programs and modes of cultural critique—for which Heidegger serves as the most productive example—that privileged the rational, political actor may now be compelled to contend with affective or “subrational” forces as a necessary part of cultural work.Taking affective force seriously has several consequences. In particular, affective approaches focus on processes over individuals as well as asignification alongside signification. The first among these had follows from and led to a revaluation of the importance of ecological relations. Pruchnic locates our interest in ecology, as it regards our understanding of technologic, in the Macy conferences, a series of interdisciplinary discussions regarding the future of science that took place from 1941 to 1960. While the organizers hoped that they would unify disparate branches of science and theory, the conferences are remembered mostly for their work on cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Pruchnic finds in the Macy conferences two primary imports for rhetorical theory. First is the shift toward considering the ecological interaction between actor and environment. This shift gave rise to accounts of homeostatic processes that treated human and technological interactions as a circulation of agency and not the result of a central human actor controlling a nonhuman environment. Second, the conference revised notions of teleological aims often at the core of instrumental orientations to technology, a switch that especially impacts how telos may be related to technologies whose own “purpose” shares functions with many of our own in that they have changed over time. Together, these two findings have much significance for rhetorical theory and practice, as they undercut the reductive communication models that rhetoric is often charged as facilitating.In addition to outlining the conceptual work done by the conferences, much of which the humanities are only now coming around to appreciate, Pruchnic shows how early cybernetic thinkers drew heavily on rhetorical technique to conceptualize cybernetic theory. Both cybernetics and rhetorical practice invent, develop, and encourage robust and flexible techniques for organizing processes of interaction. Pruchnic focuses on how “techniques” may enable theory to be applied through rhetorical and humanities practice, defining the term as a set of “flexibly responsive practices that are directed toward motivating the performance of a generic action and/or the maintenance of a general equilibrium” (16). “Techniques” as a term and concept allows for the development of a technologic that recognizes, Pruchnic notes, that “the very same advances in, and increasing importance of, technologies and communicational media so apparent in other areas under review in this essay are crucial considerations for any attempt to rethink the contemporary status of economics, let alone labor, in the present moment” (31). Pruchnic's approach both widens the scope of his project, allowing him to include a wide array of interdisciplinary discussions, and it also does the important work of refiguring some of the practices we experience as central to rhetorical work.Pruchnic's understanding of techniques and his alignment with the complexity that subtends cybernetics leads him to outline an ethical response that affirms its imbrication within those same modes of technological production that it seeks to change rather than to adopt a critical practice that seeks its intervention from a position outside. Why this is a crucial pairing is evident in how Pruchnic understands rhetoric's role in contemporary culture: “The fundamental challenge of the present is not so much to discover some radical alternative to contemporary conditions … but to figure out how these same techniques already immensely immanent in contemporary capitalism can be made to produce different outcomes” (38). Such a task is even more pressing when we consider that scientific authority to produce and maintain what counts as fact vies with the demand to prioritize “direct application and intervention as the core goals of scientific research and knowledge production” (25). While Pruchnic often cites the work that science does, by no means is the cybernetic moment restricted to lab coats and electrical circuitry. What is true in science is also true in other realms. For example, the granular redistricting of voting districts preselects the voters charged with voting for certain politicians, and manufacturing is able to produce more specific goods for more specific subsets of markets. Basic business notions of supply and demand have become as complex and intertwined as communication's outdated sender-receiver model.These realizations lead Pruchnic to enter an ongoing conversation regarding the role of humanism in rhetoric and cultural analysis. Pruchnic carefully traces the development of posthumanism (an analysis that I cannot do justice to here), noting a tension in most posthuman thought insofar as it “ends up reinforcing [humanism's] superiority or autonomy, the position of the human as the one who ‘decides’” (50). This tension leads him to posit that “we might have to reconsider humanism as something of a rhetorical strategy rather than a philosophical doctrine” (54) and to propose the “transhuman condition” as a key organizing principle to explain contemporary culture. Working from Julian Huxley's short essay “Transhumanism,” Pruchnic posits that the increase in and proliferation of technological intervention helps displace categories of natural and artificial in favor of the idea of flexible but robust processes. “Transhuman” as a term allows Pruchnic to articulate four connected processes of interaction that characterize our contemporary technologic: transition, which details the ways that the continuing process of defining what is and can be human has accelerated in recent decades; transference, which denotes the ways that functional operations can be shared and joined between previously separated domains (human, nonhuman animals, and technologies); transactional, which refers to common processes and procedures for establishing equilibrium rather than a discrete object to be passed along; and transversal, which describes the unusual connections between separated domains of activity such as nature and culture, logos and techne. These terms are threaded throughout the book as a way to organize the intense intermingling of previously separate domains. Although these operations are distinct enough to warrant separate terms, they become confused, as each relies on the others to articulate its own operation. This, however, may be a strength as well, since the confusion performs something of the complexity that the book seeks to trace.Pruchnic's move to the transhuman as a controlling concept in place of others more commonly used today (e.g., posthumanism, antihumanism) opens an avenue of inquiry in which human activity is marked less by periodization than by processes. This avenue then positions cybernetics not as a distinct break but as an intensification of a technologic that extends far beyond our contemporary moment. Pruchnic closes the general framing of the transhuman condition with the aforementioned “history of techniques.” Our “parametric present” is a condition heralded by the standardization of time through clocks and the development of now fundamental physics, a perspective that challenges that idea that we have only recently broken away from more humanism. What characterizes the “parametric present” has been hinted at throughout this review. The conflation of techne and logos provides a greater capacity for miming biological processes in connection with markets, science, media, and democratic governance by its admission of previously nonhuman technology into our approach to epistemological structures. Such a conflation resists a reduction of technologics to mere quantification or calculation and instead gestures toward contemporary culture as concerned with algorithmically managing associations with granular detail.So, where does rhetoric fit in again?While the initial chapters sketch the broad terms of the conditions of contemporary culture in the cybernetic age, the three final chapters isolate important threads for rhetorical ethics. To start, chapter 3, “Rhetoric and the Age of Intelligent Machines,” offers a specific site in which rhetoric and cybernetic theory converse, revisiting Kenneth Burke's response to cybernetics and information technology to show how rhetoric might be revised with respects to technological innovation and social power. While Burke's anxieties about technology are well documented, Pruchnic finds that offers ways of responding to our technological moment. This response a of technology and instead demonstrates the for an technologic in the book's early a process of and Pruchnic on Burke's early to show that Burke's with cybernetics for responses that are not simply critical of technology as something and to human but that as of for social In particular, Pruchnic in on Burke's of the concept of and how that through as a that to the cybernetics moment. subtends a it allows Pruchnic to out of the idea that the of the but from the of their Pruchnic this concept provides with a to a that the that Pruchnic also seeks to work of arguing against phenomena such as and us to in these processes themselves rather than their What this means for rhetoric is that instead of to inhuman forces of technological we can instead ways to that force through the of the Pruchnic how such as and that have circulation in rhetoric over the now into the present that by logics of rather than For this Pruchnic engages the concept of as it through the of and chapter with a recognition of the rhetorical of and this chapter up by that affective is no a means of because it has become a force by those many of Pruchnic's affective is as to and as it is to political is the for when uses already and by Pruchnic focuses on how a tension in of concept of might be by rhetorical In understands as a whose are as productive as the it Pruchnic to to out for within Pruchnic his for a case study on marketing techniques to show how might a flexible of to that can and forces offers a of that would seek to through those forces in of a or into play not only because as Pruchnic time as a for a marketing but also because is central to the of contemporary Pruchnic shows how offers a series of in which to does not look an to a but instead an of that to out other ways it might be The chapter by a handful of for rhetorical practice in a critique as a to a and an engagement with the final chapter on the four by ethics in an of global media, and While the chapter with a of the possibility of to or from of and it first through a crucial for ethical engagement in a time of technical This through an engagement with market logics and in particular While and biological intervention is one of a toward so too is the more common material in contemporary cultural from a for material and a in the analysis through the of ethics and economics, a with the early This analysis how since leads to ontological of and heavily on the extent to which and an ethical Pruchnic by ethics over and against the common and material of the contemporary social would be our most or most efficient to ethics Pruchnic these by out a series of to the to transhuman instead of human careful analyses of of and even a of the his own shoes, Pruchnic provides an kind of with shows how with ethics such as and with the logic of What this final is the extent to which the transhuman condition functions as a kind of shared that even the most of as a productive should not a on the of the While the book a of different registers, it as it is out of its reason this might be the case is that the of any is a kind of work done through the This is not a against the book in terms of critical but is a on the of the book's That is, the book's and seem in many to mimic the of complexity that the are themselves with and that we might with cybernetics and complexity theory. are often broken into a for the that emphasizes a claim in one moment even as that very claim in the While the is not to a it provides the a of ethical of contemporary Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age offers a to a of areas in rhetorical the primary be to of rhetorical theory and practice in and through This much from Pruchnic's instead of on this or that particular technology and then rhetorical analyses that and the provides much historical work in the and logics that the kind of media effects we witness that the should also interest rhetorical who might not with of contemporary media technology, as it provides and historical of the development of logics that any of in which rhetorical study especially economics, cultural studies most of ethical

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

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

ABSTRACT This article considers Michel Foucault's theories of ethical speech and militant life in the context of Occupy Wall Street's encampments in Zuccotti Park. Focusing on the encampments and the production and circulation of resources to meet bodily needs, the article concludes that occupation was a self-inflicted form of precarity as well as an extension of an already existing vulnerability, a living that is at once a form of social death. I read the occupations as a mode of militant life, which is to say, that which enacts precarity while at the same time transforming it into the object of radical speech.

ABSTRACTThe problem St. Augustine confronts in the Confessions is fundamentally one of rhetoric: God should be singularly desirable, yet rhetoric seems necessary to motivate our pursuit of him. Religion participates in the relative marketplace of rhetoric, where ideals need to be authorized because they lack a self-sufficient rationale. In his early encounters with Cicero and the Platonists, Augustine struggles to renounce all such partial ideals in order to pursue philosophical truth unequivocally. Yet the refusal of rhetoric is, paradoxically, another willed ideal authorized by its own rhetoric. Augustine ultimately escapes rhetoric in the conversion scene by demonstrating his inescapable subjection to it; in doing so, he surrenders his will in such a way as to permit God's grace to operate through him. His conversion ultimately results from this inverted humiliation, which forces Augustine to abdicate his ascetic efforts and pretensions.

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

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

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

Abstract This article compares science and the novel as different rhetorical strategies for representing relationships to the limits of knowledge and what seems unknown. I draw on Kenneth Burke's (1957) figure of “equipment for living” to revive the question of the value of knowledge and art for life, identifying the comparison between science and the humanities itself as a social phenomenon and focusing on the uses and rhetorical value of such disciplines and of literature for life in a period ruled by concerns for so-called applied knowledge and dreams of its transfer and dissemination. In this way, I try to escape from a notion of rhetoric limited solely to social interaction and the mutual persuasiveness of selves in order to develop, by linking rhetoric to subjectivity, a rhetorical approach to the consciousness of a subject conceived as relating to the limits of what can be known.

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

AbstractRecent scholarship on Kant and rhetoric suggests an inclusive relation between affectivity and cognitive judgment, but that position runs counter to a traditional philosophical opposition between sensibility and rationality. A way to overcome this opposition comes into view in the overlap in three significant areas between Kantian judgment and Aristotelian rhetoric. First, each allows that communicative capacities operate within the way a perceptual object or scene appears in the first place. Secondly, each significantly broadens such communicative capacities so as to include the entire conceptual form of one's disposition or orientation to the world as a whole. Thirdly, each links those broad mental dispositions to specifically affective states of mind. Taken together, the areas of overlap between Kantian judgment and Aristotelian rhetoric adumbrate an integrated picture of the affective sensibilities and cognitive capacities largely missing from the contemporary landscape.

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

Abstract In systems of meaning that run on a regular setting, allegory is about filling in the blanks that disclose the “other story.” In the modern setting that Walter Benjamin tracked (back to the seventeenth century), allegory must turn significance out of the blank itself, working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward. The “psy-fi” genre is the hub where bona fide science fictions, documentations of psychosis (memoirs and psychiatric and psychoanalytic studies), and tracts on mass psychology or psychological warfare, meet and cross over toward the evolution of new norms. Is it possible to construe a series of references in works of the “psy-fi” genre to Zeno's paradox of a con-test involving human and animal subjects as allegory of the test situation in which blanks secure the last or new step, which ultimately is taken toward mourning, the final frontier? Yes.

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

Traditionally, rhetorical theory has been defined as the study of human symbol use, which posits at the center of “the rhetorical situation” a knowing subject who understands himself (traditionally, it is a he), his audience, and what he means to communicate; indeed, this capacity to mean what he says and say what he means is, putatively, what distinguishes him as human. According to this very traditional approach, each of the elements in the rhetorical situation remain discrete—rhetor, audience, exigency, constraints, purpose, context, and message—and a successful outcome depends on the capacity of the rhetor to invent, organize, style, and deliver a message that will move this particular audience at this particular moment to some sort of action or attitude. Over the last several decades, the profoundly humanist and foundationalist (not to mention sexist) presumptions of this perspective have been challenged in various ways and to various ends by both continental philosophers and rhetorical theorists and practitioners.Decades of feminist scholarship has challenged the deeply sexist assumption that the rhetor is male, noting rhetoric's collusion with patriarchal and phallic modes, in addition to its accompanying complicity with racist and classist institutional privileges. That is, scholars have questioned the fundamental assumption that the rhetor is granted rhetorical agency precisely because of his humanity, which traditionally is associated with being a white, male property owner.1 Building on this critique, subsequent scholars have further challenged the humanist foundation of rhetoric by inviting our attention to the various ecologies that instantiate any so-called rhetorical situation, including material geologies as well as networked relations.2 Acknowledging how “the human” is indelibly networked in its relations to place, space, matter, and especially to technology and various media, many have theorized a notion of the “posthuman,” of a human that is fundamentally a technological construction or prosthesis.3This focus on the technological, on the networked, on that part of the so-called human that is arguably ahuman, has challenged us to consider in what ways human being is networked with “things,” with objects or technologies that are theorized to have their own rhetorical agency, their own ontological existence. The ensuing proliferation of “object-oriented ontologies” and rhetorics has proved a rich challenge to human-centric ontologies and rhetorics, inviting human beings once again to rethink the world and our supposed central relation to it.4Other scholars have asked us to think about the presumptive category of “the human” as the primal rhetorical being, investigating rhetorical practices of divination and prayer in relation to the dead and the divine.5 And still others have addressed the conscientious practices of forests, for example, as well as the communicative practices of the so-called nonhuman animal, including the intricate messages of chimpanzees and the mourning practices of elephants, to reveal the deeply humanistic assumptions that we hold, as rhetorical scholars, about communication and identification.6This special issue on extrahuman rhetorical relations aims to further a thinking of rhetoric beyond human symbol use. In the invitation we sent to potential contributors, we requested pieces examining how “the human” is produced through anahuman communications, but we left entirely open the range of potential approaches to our prompt; as a result, the responses published here are quite diverse. We did not, for obvious reasons, invite contributors who would simply challenge this prompt in an attempt to return to humanist notions of rhetorical exchange; therefore, you will note in each of these articles, despite their great diversity, an unapologetic push for us to move beyond traditional, humanist presumptions.We reproduce here a section from our letter of invitation (August 2012), which describes the general goals of the issue: The focus of this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is extrahuman rhetorical relations, including any aspect of the scene of responsive engagement with or among nonhuman others. It's true that traditionally rhetoric names a specifically human art or science, requiring at least one discrete human subject at the center of its operations. Even what the discipline of communication studies calls “extrapersonal communication,” which involves communication with a nonhuman other (an animal, a plant, a deity, a ghost, an object, a machine, etc.), presumes first of all a preexisting human subject who uses rhetoric to establish the connection. However, we aim to honor this weighty inheritance in the tradition of what Avital Ronell has called the noble traitor, inviting essays that take it up in order to expose its limits and presumptions.We invite, for example, essays that examine the ways in which “the human” is produced through ahuman or inhuman communications very broadly conceived; essays that attend to a generalized notion of rhetoricity—a fundamental affectability, persuadability, or responsivity—that remains irreducible to “speech” and symbolic exchange more generally; essays that interrogate the predicament of addressivity or responsivity in the face of (or among) animals, objects, deities, and the dead—but also essays that deconstruct the clean distinctions implied in such designations as “the animal,” “the object,” “the dead,” and “the divine,” that expose the ways in which these dangerous supplements are mobilized in the name of the collective noun “the human.”Our aim is to open a space for provocative reflection on extrahuman—rhetorical—relations, on what takes place at the dimly lit intersections of these three terms. We welcome a diverse range of theoretical and methodological lenses, from deconstructive, psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to more familiar philosophical, rhetorical, literary, and historical methods of inquiry.It was not our intention to produce a volume that systematically covered every angle of our theme, leaving no remainder. We were not interested, that is, in finally wrapping up the nagging question of extrahuman rhetorics but in holding it open, in probing and pushing the limits of the anthropos, in part by zooming in on the relations that constitute the conditions for the appearance of the figure of “the human” itself.In the interview that opens the issue, Avital Ronell contemplates “places where there's contamination, where there are installations of the nonhuman, the machinic, the theological trace, the stall in, or even the stated impossibility of, constituting what counts as ‘the natural,’ ‘the human.’” She ponders the “equip-mentality of the anthropos,” the fact that “we're already equipped with receptors for drugs,” that “we're already made up of all sorts of apps and calling instruments and all manner of technological ciphers and chemical command centers,” all of which “require us somehow to break out of the humanist presumption.” This paradox of the living machine, what Elissa Marder describes in her contribution as the human's “primal relation to artifice, imitation, technology, rhetoric, and death” is taken up in various ways by each of the contributors here. The very notion of a living machine challenges the putatively clean distinctions between life and death, human being and technology, and—given the typical alignment of “the animal” with “the machine”—human and animal. If life itself is already machinic and vice versa, a host of prized presumptions are called into question, including those that situate an indivisible line between mortal and immortal life, the human and the divine.Marder offers Pandora, “first woman and first android,” as “a prehuman figuration for a nonanthropomorphic and nonnatural concept of the human that is, perhaps, still to come.” This extrahuman character, Marder proposes, becomes a figure “for what, within the human, challenges the possibility of defining the limits of the human.” An “animated artificial entity” bestowed “with special, technological powers,” Pandora is “not modeled after life but rather is the very model for life itself.” She both simulates divine life “(through language and representation)” and remains “inextricably bound up with sexuality, temporality, technicity, and alterity,” making it “difficult to decide whether she herself is alive or … merely an imitation of life, like an android, a robot or automaton.” Either way, after her “human life can no longer be simply opposed to death or figured exclusively as human.” Michael Bernard-Donals and Steven Mailloux describe the technics of a primal relation with the divine in terms of an unavoidable call (to or from the divine) that operates as limit structure, separating what it also joins. Mailloux offers a rhetoric of prayer, defining “angels” as the “finite, contingent conditions” in which it takes place, and Bernard-Donals explicates the ways in which the call from or of the divine initiates a violence that is constitutive of the human. Thomas Rickert also contemplates a divine call, linking Parmenides's sophisticated logical techniques not to reason but to revelation by examining this historical figure's dedication to incubation, an ancient Greek practice in which one sleeps (usually in caves, sometimes with the help of pharmaceuticals) on the ground in hopes of receiving divine inspiration through dreams.Laurence Rickels demonstrates in what he calls the “psy-fi” genre an allegorical link between standards of “normal” human behavior and “the maimed animal test subject” discussed by Adorno and Horkheimer. Allegory, by identifying or filling in the blanks “that disclose the ‘other story,’” turns “significance out of the blank itself,” Rickels suggests, “working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward.” But “allegorical legibility,” he adds, “would appear to require the broken-down psychotic state for discerning what goes into the norms into which we are plugged.” Indeed, he shows that psy-fi presents test situations in which “blanks secure the last or new step, which ultimately is taken toward mourning, the final frontier.” Michelle Ballif, on the other hand, zooms in on an “originary mourning,” which she situates as the very condition for any rhetorical address. The relation between the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible (specter) constitutes, she argues, the “ethical relation between the self and the other, the otherness of the self, and the otherness of the other.” Writing is, for her as for Derrida, “the very graphic scene of mourning,” a mourning “of the self as other and the other as other” that overflows the traditional limits of “the rhetorical situation.”Cary Wolfe describes two types of finitude at the heart of the extrahuman relation: the finitude of embodiment that we share with all other living beings and the (also shared) finitude of our prosthetic subjection to language or to any semiotic system from which concepts and modes of communication are drawn, and so through which “extrahuman relations” are recognized and articulated to begin with. These relations involve a scene of address in which all the possible modes of comprehension and expression were “on the scene” well before the interlocutors showed up. In the case of relations with extrahumans, this “iterative language” or “meaning,” Wolfe notes, is required to “form a recursive loop that can braid together different life worlds in a third space reducible to neither—the very space of ‘relation.’” James Brown, Joshua Gunn, and Diane Davis also take up, in distinct ways, this shared finitude of prosthetic subjection. Brown exposes some of the “machinic roots of the rhetorical tradition,” suggesting that “rhetoric is a collection of machines (‘whatsits,’ ‘gadgets’) for generating interpretive arguments.” Tracing what he calls the “robot rhetor,” which would be any “entity that ‘machines language,’” he calls into question the clear distinction between human and robot.Gunn runs Henri Bergson's formula for laughter (“something mechanical encrusted upon the living”) through Jacques Lacan's subversion of the subject to suggest that laughter names “something lawful encrusted upon the living.” Language here aligns with the lawful or the mechanical (the “Symbolic”), and Gunn examines the way it “comes to bear on that nominal domain of human spirit that Bergson dubbed the ‘life impulse,’ and that Sigmund Freud referenced as ‘the drive.’” Davis describes this prosthetic subjection as a kind of “preoriginary rhetoricity” through which every being, to be what it is, marks itself off from the other in a gesture of self-reference, repeating itself to gather itself and therefore to relate both to itself and to the other. At least since Descartes, self-referentiality has been taken as the putatively indivisible line distinguishing “the human” from “the animal,” but Davis proposes that self-reference or autodeixis is not a specifically human power to disclose an ontological “as such” (as Heidegger wanted) but the extrahuman operations of an allegorical “as if,” which names the already relational condition for the singularity and functioning of any living being.We would like to express our deep gratitude to each of the contributors in this issue, for their willing participation, their thoughtful and envelope-pushing essays, and their patience as we pulled it all together. Thanks especially to Cary Wolfe for so swiftly accepting our invitation to write the response piece that closes the issue. We are profoundly grateful to Avital Ronell, who graciously agreed to sit down with Diane for two hours on a Saturday morning in New York City for the interview that opens the volume; as always, her insights are both provocative and far reaching. We want to thank those colleagues who generously agreed to review the contributions published here: Janet Atwill, Erik Doxtader, Daniel Gross, Debbie Hawhee, John Muckelbauer, Jenny Rice, Greg Ulmer, and Victor J. Vitanza. We are grateful to each of you for your time and for your immensely helpful feedback and suggestions. Thanks also to Sam Baroody, a graduate student in the Department of Classics at the University of Georgia, for checking Greek translations in two of the contributions published here, and to Eric Detweiler, a graduate student at the University of Texas, for transcribing the interview with Avital Ronell. And finally, we want to thank Jerry Hauser for inviting us to edit this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric—we are extremely grateful for your guidance, your trust, and your inspiration.

AbstractFollowing Derrida, who follows the animal, this article seeks to proliferate the figures that mark the limits of the space between the “machine” and the “human.” Drawing on Erasmus's De copia, I argue that rhetoricians have long been interested in robot-like procedures. Given these machinic roots, we can understand a rhetorical education as procedural and computational and as particularly well suited to a cultural moment in which we write with (alongside) machines. In addition, I describe a robot that enacts Erasmus's method of continually rewriting the sentence “Your letter pleased me greatly.” The article thus demonstrates two ways of addressing the robot rhetor. First, it suggests that a rereading of the machinic tradition within rhetoric opens up new ways of understanding all rhetorical action as robotic. Second, echoing Ian Bogost, it demonstrates how works of “carpentry” can offer a window (albeit, a cloudy one) onto extrahuman rhetorical relations.

Abstract In philosophy and rhetorical studies, self-knowledge inscribes the absolutely indivisible line that separates “the human” from “the animal.” Autodeixis, the self-reflexive power of the I, is the condition both for language acquisition and for reason; it names an exceptional sort of auto–affection in which a being demonstrates the capacity to step back from itself enough to recognize itself and so to refer to itself as itself. What I propose in this article, however, is that autodeixis involves not a specifically human power to disclose an ontological as such (as Heidegger wanted) but the extrahuman operations of an allegorical as if. The presumption of self-knowledge is not an innate quality of “the human” but the already relational condition for any living being that must repeat itself to be itself. A kind of preoriginary rhetoricity, I argue, is the very condition for the singularity and functioning of any living being.

AbstractThis article explores some rhetorical paths of thinking about prayer in relation to traditional humanism and its alternatives. It seeks to develop a Heideggerian rhetorical hermeneutics in relation to a nonpersonal, extrahuman model of communication between the human and the divine. Eventually, the article pivots away from God as the addressee of prayerful rhetoric and focuses instead on angels as the name for the finite, contingent conditions in which the rhetoric of prayer takes place.

AbstractArguing that the foundational relation that constitutes the (rhetorical) address is that between the living and the dead, this article calls on rhetorical studies to reconceive rhetoric as a (non)visual relation between the “invisible” (specter) and the “visible” (living). I then complicate this relation—and the easy distinction between the two—and argue that regarding the dead, guarding them, mourning them, is the ethical relation that makes any rhetorical address possible.

Abstract This article argues that the example of (canned) laughter continues to trouble the human/machine binary that so many have troubled, from Descartes to Zupančič. Sounding various objects of “recorded” laughter through psychoanalytic tweeters, deconstructive warps, and object-oriented woofers implicates ontology as so much noise for the projection of certainty. Derivatively speaking, I argue for the primacy of a rhetorical ethics.

Abstract This interview with Avital Ronell, conducted by Diane Davis, explores a variety of extrahuman relations, demonstrating how the vegetal, the animal, the technological, the divine, and the dead play a significant role in the theory and practice of rhetorical relations.