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

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

The Loeb Classical Library was founded in 1911 by James Loeb, a retired banker devoted to the study of ancient Greece and Rome. The preface included in the first editions to be published explains Loeb’s vision for the library. Lamenting that “young people of our generation” lacked the facility to read Latin and Greek texts in the original thanks to the pressure universities were facing to provide a “more practical” education, Loeb sought to provide the “average reader” with “translations that are in themselves works of literature” and “side by side with these translations the best critical texts of the original works” (Lake 1912, ii–iii). Though naysayers occasionally mock the bilingual volumes as glorified trots, the series has been a serious work of scholarship since its inception and has gotten even better over the past twenty-five years thanks to the inclusion of more authors and the revision of outdated editions. Students of rhetoric have been major beneficiaries. Russell’s Quintilian (2002), Mirhady’s Rhetoric to Alexander (2011), and Laks and Most’s Sophists (2016) are just a few of the fundamental texts recently published. The Loeb Classical Library now exceeds five hundred volumes, red for Latin and green for Greek. This entire collection is available to subscribers online, fully searchable in English and the original languages and by both page and section numbers. Now Gisela Striker has revised J. H. Freese’s edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, taking account of improvements to the Greek text since it was published in 1926. The updated edition remains primarily the work of Freese; only his name appears on the spine. I refer to it as Freese/Striker and to the original edition as Freese. Line number references in this review are all to Freese/Striker. Professor Striker taught me more than twenty years ago in a course on Cicero’s Republic.In assessing Freese/Striker, it is important first to recognize what a Loeb volume is and what it isn’t. The Loebs are Greek and Latin texts, but they are not, with rare exceptions, critical editions with lists of variant readings or discussions of manuscript families. The Loebs are translations, but they are not accompanied by comprehensive introductions, detailed notes, or overviews of scholarly debates. Their value lies in the way the facing texts complement one another, and their core audience is readers with enough Greek or Latin to benefit from having the original language in front of them. A work such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, however, is exceptionally hard to appreciate without ancillary material. Although Freese/Striker includes a rich introduction and valuable footnotes, these are limited by the scale of the book; the Greek text and translation alone come to 469 pages. Readers who are looking for editorial guidance on a larger scale and in English can and should supplement Freese/Striker with the annotated translations of Kennedy (2nd ed. 2007), Reeve (2018), Waterfield/Yunis (2018), and Bartlett (2019), according to their interests or expertise. Kennedy’s translation is likely to be most useful to students new to the Rhetoric. Formatted as a textbook, it divides the text into sections, prefacing each section with a title and summary. The translations of Waterfield/Yunis, Reeve, and Bartlett are continuous texts without subheadings or summaries. The editors all discuss philosophical, political, and rhetorical issues. Of the three, Waterfield/Yunis’s introduction and notes are most concerned with the Rhetoric as a work of rhetorical theory and are the most accessible and comprehensive option for rhetoricians or nonspecialist readers. Reeve’s Rhetoric belongs to the New Hackett Aristotle Series and is intended for philosophers like the other volumes in that series. Reeve’s introduction and notes emphasize the Rhetoric’s relation to central issues in Aristotle’s thought. Bartlett offers an “interpretive essay” at the end of the volume rather than an introduction; this is a clear overview and summary of the text with particular focus on the Rhetoric’s concern for the role of rhetoric in politics and communal life.For those working with the original Greek, what Freese/Striker has to offer is invaluable. Indeed, since no commentary on the complete Greek text of the Rhetoric has been published in English since Cope’s in 1877, Freese/Striker replaces Freese as the primary resource for English-speaking readers with questions about how to construe the Greek. Reading Aristotle’s Greek is difficult, mostly because he expresses complex ideas in dry, technical, and above all concise language. For those working backward from the English to the Greek, however, these challenges can be virtues. The grammar is straightforward, and the vocabulary is relatively limited. This means that an individual with two years or so of Greek could, with patience and care, use Freese/Striker to work with Aristotle in the original. The search functions in the online version make this easier; one can quickly find relevant Greek passages by searching the English translation (or vice versa). Freese/Striker, therefore, fulfills Loeb’s ambitious goal of making Aristotle in the original available to people with enough Greek to understand it with a facing translation. This is even more valuable today than it was when Freese was published. The growth of rhetoric as an academic field means that rhetoricians without the time to reach advanced proficiency in Classical Greek are engaging with Aristotle’s text on a regular basis and can benefit from the updated text and translation that Freese/Striker provides.Freese/Striker prints and translates a Greek text that is superior to Freese’s. Establishing the Greek text of the Rhetoric is daunting. Aristotle’s laconic and elliptical style led scribal variants and downright errors to creep into the medieval manuscripts, some out of a well-intentioned attempt to make the Greek clearer. In addition, Aristotle seems to have revised and rethought his ideas over the thirty or so years that he worked on the Rhetoric, meaning that some apparent problems in the Greek may not be scribal errors but evidence of Aristotle’s work in progress. Freese based his text and translation on the best editions available in 1926, those of Bekker (1837) and Roemer (1898). In 1976, Kassel published an edition that placed the Greek text on the soundest footing it has been on in probably two thousand years. Freese/Striker is based on this edition, joining other modern English translations of the Rhetoric. Roberts/Barnes (1984), Kennedy, Waterfield/Yunis, and Bartlett are all based on Kassel’s edition. Reeve is based on Ross’s Oxford text (1959) but takes account of Kassel’s proposals.Most of the textual changes from Freese are subtle but important, and they begin as early as the first page, where Freese/Striker has Aristotle say in 1.1.3 1354a14 that previous writers of rhetorical handbooks “have worked out only a small portion of this art,” and Freese that they “have provided us with only a small portion of this art.” The oldest medieval manuscripts have the verb pepoiēkasin, “they have made,” but “they have made only a small portion of this art” makes little sense and seems to be a mistake. At some point, a corrector seeking to fix the problem changed the verb to peporikasin (“have provided”), which Freese adopts. Kassel (1971, 118), following a suggestion of Spengel, realized that Aristotle probably wrote peponēkasin (“have worked out”), which differs from the transmitted pepoiēkasin in just one letter, and which is used similarly with the word for “portion” in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. Improvements to the text of the Rhetoric on this scale occur throughout Freese/Striker. A more considerable shift in sense from Freese to Freese/Striker is illustrated by the following sentence from the section in book 2 on mildness (2.3.14 1380b15-17):The difference depends on Kassel’s preference for the reading helōsin (“they have convicted”) over eleōsin (“they pity”). The oldest manuscript has eleousin (“they pity”) in the indicative mood where the subjunctive is required. One option is simply to correct this to the subjunctive. This is the solution Freese adopts with eleōsin, although he adds a footnote acknowledging that helōsin is a possibility. Helōsin is attested in some manuscripts, including in a correction to the manuscript that has eleousin. Since “they have convicted” (helōsin) and “they pity” (eleōsin) are both possible, the choice between them depends on the degree of logical connection one sees between the two clauses. In following Kassel, Freese/Striker makes conviction the organizing principle: People (i.e., judges) have mild sentiments toward the people they convict, especially if they feel that an offender has already suffered more than enough for a punishment. Freese’s interpretation, on the other hand, removes the passage from the context of passing a sentence: People have mild sentiments when they feel pity toward an offender, especially if they feel that the offender has already suffered more than enough for a punishment (cf. Grimaldi 1988, 60-61).Textual editing is as much art as science, and the two proposals of Kassel that I have just discussed have not been universally embraced. Like Freese/Striker, Waterfield/Yunis translates Kassel’s text. Kennedy translates Kassel’s text for the first example but retains “they pity” for the second one, acknowledging in a footnote that “they have convicted” is an option. Reeve translates a different text from both Freese and Kassel for the first example and the same text as Freese in the second, also including the alternate possibilities in his endnotes. Bartlett translates the same text as Freese for the second example; for the first, he seems to accept the manuscript reading “made,” rendering it as “written of.” In both cases he notes the alternate possibilities in his notes. Finally, Roberts/Barnes translates Kassel’s text for the second example, but, like Bartlett, seems to accept “made” for the first, rendering it as “constructed”; Roberts/Barnes has no note in either case (although the translation consistently follows Kassel and notes Kassel’s readings at many points). I have surveyed these translations to show that Freese’s text and translation are not to be condemned out of hand and in some cases may be defensible. The age of the volume, however, means that readers will not systematically encounter an alternate version in a note, as they do in these instances in Kennedy, Reeve, and Bartlett. Readers who continue to use Freese from convenience (it is in the public domain and freely available through Google Books) risk being led astray. In following Kassel, Freese/Striker reflects the modern consensus and brings us closer to what Aristotle is likely to have written, fulfilling Loeb’s promise to give readers the best critical text currently available.Freese/Striker does reject some of Kassel’s bolder proposals. The discussion about the three types of speeches offers an example. In 1.3.2 1358b6-7, Kassel brackets the enigmatic clause that spectators are judges of “the ability of the speaker,” as a signal to readers that it should not be considered part of the original text even though it appears in all the medieval manuscripts. Kassel’s objection (1971, 124–25), that the clause seems to interrupt the sense of Aristotle’s argument by contradicting the distinction he has just drawn between spectators and judges, is reasonable. By using brackets, Kassel alerts the reader that he rejects the clause but does not go so far as to remove it entirely from the text. Brackets for dubious passages are a convention familiar to readers of Latin and Greek, but they clutter up translations and risk confusing readers unfamiliar with the convention. Freese/Striker uses them sparingly. Roberts/Barnes includes this clause about the speaker’s ability in brackets, with a note explaining that Kassel excised it, while Waterfield/Yunis omits it entirely. Freese/Striker (as had Freese) retains the clause without brackets (as do Kennedy, Reeve, and Bartlett), mentions Kassel’s opinion in a footnote, and points the reader to a passage in book 2 where Aristotle once again states that a spectator of an epideictic speech is a kind of judge (although the cross-reference should read 1391b16-17 rather than 1391a16-17). Since the Loebs do not allow for the kind of caution that brackets and textual apparatus provide in critical editions of Greek texts, Freese/Striker’s decision to prefer the reading of the manuscripts in cases such as this serves readers best. In all the places where Freese/Striker does print a different Greek text from Kassel, the change is acknowledged in a footnote.Besides the alterations based on Kassel’s text, Freese/Striker keeps closely to the translation in Freese, updating it to accord with modern English style: “that” instead of “which” more consistently in restrictive clauses, “on this account” instead of “wherefore,” and similar minor changes in wording. More consequential changes include more transparent renderings of the Greek. Among the most significant is this sentence from book 1 about the two different types of pisteis (1.2.2 1355b36):By broadening the scope of pisteis and eliminating the unavoidable connotation of real and fake in “inartificial” and “artificial,” Freese/Striker offers a much clearer sense of what Aristotle means. There is a trade-off. Rendering pisteis as “means of persuasion” obscures the fact that Aristotle seems deliberately to be appropriating the terminology of professional speechmakers for his own novel purposes. Pistis (the singular of pisteis) is a word used in judicial oratory for “proof” in contexts where “means of persuasion” would make little sense. Seeking to make the best of a tricky situation, Freese/Striker uses “means of persuasion” throughout the translation, except where pisteis unambiguously means “proofs.” Freese/Striker is not alone in favoring “means of persuasion.” Reeve uses it, and Roberts/Barnes and Bartlett offer “modes of persuasion.” Waterfield/Yunis stands out by keeping the time-tested “proofs.” Kennedy avoids the issue by printing pisteis without a translation. Another significant improvement over Freese is Freese/Striker’s rendering of ēthos and its cognates in most cases with the vocabulary of character rather than morality or ethics. Freese/Striker’s “considerations of character” (1.8.6 1366a13) and “adapt our speeches to character” (2.18.2 1391b28) are more accurate than Freese’s “ethical argument” and “make our speeches ethical,” as well as free of the moral judgment that Freese’s English imposes on the Greek. Finally, Freese/Striker’s use of “unfamiliar,” while perhaps not quite catching the nuance of the Greek xenos and xenikos in Aristotle’s discussion of style, avoids the negative connotations that Freese’s “foreign” often has in contemporary English.Freese features a twenty-one-page introduction that includes mini-biographies of rhetoricians before Aristotle, a comparison of the Rhetoric to the Gorgias and Phaedrus, an aside on the Rhetoric to Alexander, and accounts of the most important manuscript and of William of Moerbeke’s thirteenth-century translation into Latin. This remains useful, and some may miss it, but the information is all readily available elsewhere. The new introduction in Freese/Striker is more selective and more directly about the Rhetoric. In ten pages, it introduces the reader to Aristotle’s project, the contents of the Rhetoric, and ancient rhetoricians’ lack of interest in it after Aristotle’s death. A highlight, reflecting Striker’s expertise in Aristotle’s logic, is the concise explanation of how the theory of argument in the Rhetoric is an adaptation of the one in the Topics. There is also a new chapter index in the form of an outline that is easier to use than the paragraph-length summaries in the seventeen-page “Analysis” of the text in Freese. Freese/Striker retains from Freese the “Select Glossary of Technical and Other Terms.” This is not, nor is it meant to be, a comprehensive handlist of rhetorical concepts. As the name implies, it is a convenient place for readers of the Greek to look up technical terms or familiar words that Aristotle uses in unique ways. Most of the definitions are taken directly from Freese or lightly revised. Freese/Striker’s entries for dialektikē and sēmeion, however, are clear and concise introductions to these difficult topics, a marked improvement on Freese’s. Where Freese discusses dialektikē without specific references to how Aristotle uses it in other works, Freese/Striker summarizes the explanation in the Topics of how dialektikē is a technique of developing or refuting a thesis through questions and answers and then shows how rhetoric does more than dialectic by also seeking to persuade an audience. And where Freese’s explanation of sēmeion is abstract, Freese/Striker gives us a concrete definition (“a proposition stating a fact that points to a related other fact, so that the existence of the second fact may be inferred from the first”) followed by an example of how this works in practice (fever points to illness). The same general principle of retaining but updating governs Freese/Striker’s policy toward Freese’s rich explanatory footnotes. Many of these have been kept with no changes, some have been revised (often silently correcting oversights), and some new ones have been added. In the interests of brevity, some notes have also been excluded, and, as with the introduction, readers may miss these. Taken as a whole, however, the slightly more concise notes remain useful, especially for readers who will use Freese/Striker as a primary resource, rather than one of the more extensively annotated translations I mentioned earlier in the review.Freese/Striker ends with an index of proper names and a general index. These items too are taken from Freese, with deletions (for example, “hair (worn long in Sparta)” and “pancratiast”) and additions or corrections (for example, “licentiousness” for akolasia and “weakness of will” for akrasia rather than “incontinence” for both). With search engines, indexes are less important than they once were. This one demonstrates how helpful they can still be. The entry for “article, the, use of” refers us to 3.6.5, a section on how to use the definite article in Greek where the translation in Freese/Striker does not use the word “article.” A lexical search for “article” would turn up nothing in 3.6.5, and one for “the” would be next to useless.De Gruyter is selling Kassel’s edition of the Rhetoric for $430. It is not available as an electronic text online. Since many research do not include it in their the way that even most can it is through For the of of Freese/Striker Kassel’s text with Striker’s editorial At the same readers should that no edition, including Freese/Striker, is a version of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. serious scholarly work would be well by it, Kassel’s edition, and an of other translations and English and other their This is the case for all Loeb volumes, Freese/Striker it does Readers a and text accompanied by an lightly translation. As a first of for work on Aristotle in Greek, it should be on the real or of English-speaking of Greek rhetoric and, in the of James Loeb, of academic or in working through Aristotle’s ideas with an toward his own language.

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

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

ABSTRACT That movement is associated with things both human and divine is as old as human experience. How does movement come to be formed as an idea, as an object of thought? For the answer we may turn to Aristotle’s De caelo, to Nicolas Oresme’s first graphic representation of movement in On Intensities, to Descartes’s essay on analytic geometry appended to his Discours de la méthode, and to Leibniz’s Monadologie as well as to Vico’s Scienza nuova and Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes. “Movement” is a central term in the transformation of Greco-Roman to Medieval scholastic to modern thought.

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

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

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

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

September 29, 2008. Radiohead front man Thom Yorke sits frustrated at his piano. Live on stage. He is trying to start a song, but something is tripping him up. The song is “Videotape,” and he cannot start playing it. “Temporary loss of information,” he mumbles to an expectant crowd.The song “Videotape” is syncopated, meaning there is a “placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur” (Wikipedia 2021). Practically, it means that Yorke is joining a song already in progress: there is a beat before the beat that “starts” the song. Yorke, then, is starting the song not on the down beat but after the down beat—after the song has already started. He needs to hear something before he can play anything. He needs to hear the beat before he can sing. “Give me the fuckin’ hi-hats only,” he asks.Yorke is moved by the drum and a beat not his alone. It is a beat preceding him to which he must become subject. He needs to listen, but it is a particular kind of listening: a passive listening that makes him, as it were, “subject to the instruction of others” (Gross 137).Like Yorke on stage in 2008, I struggled to start and write this review. Not for any fault in the book, which is clear and concise, complex and compelling, but because I wanted to write a review that practiced the art of listening Gross cultivates: Active listening [“auditor-as-judge”], as it is understood by theoreticians and practitioners of persuasion from classical antiquity through today, only takes off at dusk like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, leaving behind obscurities of our daily lives including our susceptibility to advertising, our political apathy, our immersion in commonsense, our lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change. We have much work ahead when it comes to the theoretical and practical nuances of listening in its passive dimensions. (137)This review practices listening to this call in this way. The worry remains that the genre of the book review tends toward what Gross identifies as active listening: the judge, the critic. I should probably be the “active listener-as-judge” (83). Surely, a good reviewer should protect future readers from a “bad teacher” (131). But how should a book review practicing passive listening read? Does it aim for learning? Surely. Credulity? Why not. Subjection? Hmm. . . . It is, after all, subjection that lies at the heart of Gross’s book. Subjection is the beat before the beat that is rhetoric, an art forever syncopated.There are many aspects of Gross’s argument, which I will hear out below, but key for me, and crucial for Gross’s argument, is his emphasis on passive dispositions (e.g., apathy, adherence, suggestibility, attentiveness, etc.) crucial to political formations and so vital to rhetoric. Being moved, toward which rhetoric (sacred rhetoric especially) bends, must admit not only to the prowess and power of the rhetor but also, necessarily, to the “basic vulnerability that lies at the heart of political agency itself” (1). Indeed, “Rhetoric as a life science depends upon those lives affected” (8). Because of this dependence (and dependencies saturate the arts of listening), “rhetoric offers much more detail because it is the traditional domain where subjection is both theorized and practiced” (3).To articulate this offer, Gross works through what he describes as the “orphaned materials of modernity [that] often turn out to be vital strains of a different geology altogether” (12). Gross is here describing his own historiographic methodology. There are other things to hear in and about rhetoric. The core of his argument isn’t simply that listening is a practice important to rhetoric, with listening understood as a kind of critical facility—what Gross calls “active listener-as-judge” (83–84). Listening, for Gross, through his approach to Heidegger, bears upon being and becoming; it is in this way that rhetoric, for Gross, becomes a life science—what he at various places in the book describes as “meta-practice”: “It is in this scholarly context where rhetoric is rediscovered by Heidegger: beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).The theme of passive listening organizes the book’s emphases on sacred rhetoric, inartistic proofs, and the (non)teaching of passive voice that are all teased out through engagements with key thinkers who have come to inform contemporary rhetoric: Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud. Across the chapters, Gross articulates sacred rhetoric, which for him is a lasting source of rhetorical theory and practice: “Rhetoric moves souls” (14). Joining the writing of these thinkers is the teaching of writing itself, from which we also have much to learn about the arts of listening. Both the introduction and the final chapter have pedagogical foci. At the start and finish of his book, Gross aims to confound “in practice the expectation that classrooms benefit unilaterally from scholarship” (19). In rhetoric and composition, it is often assumed that theory trickles down into writing classrooms. Gross explores the dynamic as bilateral and mutual. The teaching of writing at the level of voice exists alongside the readings of Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud: all are practices of listening that do rhetorical theory. Gross has turned the neat trick of engaging teaching beyond the pedagogical imperative. That is, there is no concluding move to a pedagogical practice informed by (rhetorical) theory. For Gross, a theory of listening is what composition pedagogy practices.Chapter 1 starts with a provocative bang: “A debilitating commonplace has the history and theory of rhetoric honoring a communicative agent, namely the speaker, at the expense of the listener” (18). The argument here, which echoes throughout the book, is that “we reinvigorate the history and theory of rhetoric insofar as we normalize Heidegger’s care for listening” (31). “Listening,” Gross writes, “is a phenomenon shared across regions of being; hence, it must be approached carefully as such” (32). This is so because being-moved, linked to passive listening, echoes (perhaps sinisterly) notions of “obedience” and “subjection”—concepts that have contemporary purchase in our scene of emerging demagoguery. Being moved by the passions and beyond the critical faculties of active listening is a hard thing to face up to. Pathos has always been a thorn in rhetoric’s side—now more than ever. Composition textbooks, (un)ironically built around Aristotelian rhetoric, foreground pathos largely in terms of logical fallacies. A trick of the trade used by (active) speakers to move (passive) audiences. Pathos is, by and large, a bug in the rhetorical tradition demanding a sturdy, critical (logical) firewall.Gross has us hear pathos otherwise and across being moved and moving. With Heidegger, Gross emphasizes rhetoric as “δύναμις (dunamus, ‘capacity’) primarily and then secondarily a τέκνη (technē, ‘art’ or ‘technology’)” (34). δύναμις suggests a more fulsome engagement with pathos. “The pathos of a stone,” Gross argues, “allows it to become part of a wall; the pathos of a plant to grow; the pathos of an animal to perceive imminent danger and to shriek a warning to others” (44). Pathos becomes less an appeal and more a mode of being—a “being-with-one-another” (34). This mode is no less ethically fraught, however. Indeed, one could hear in Gross that stakes of pathetic appeals are far greater than our textbook approach often intones: less the proper shape of our arguments than the ethical, moral, and political consequences of how we live our lives within the fraught dynamics of our abilities to wound and be wounded. In the hands of Heidegger, rhetoric’s ontological stakes are renewed. Aristotle’s pathos becomes Heidegger’s being-moved (Sein-in-Bewegung).It is important to not drown out the disciplinary argument that Gross is making here. That is, Gross is not simply rehearsing Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle but rehearing it as also an argument about what contemporary rhetorical theory and practice ought to tune into. In our focus on the ethics of the speaker and judgments of the audience (as active listeners), we “can lose our ability to grasp adequately a wide range of unavoidable rhetorical activities, including things like passive listening, obeying, following, feeling, and so on” (50). Gross sees much of rhetorical theory moving to “systematically detach rhetorical terms like these for the sake of a political ideal” (50–51): the virtues of deliberative democracy. Gross’s interest lies in grasping “rhetoric as it forms particular ways of life” (51). Such a “trick” “compels us to ask” a series of important, situated questions: “Obedience to what end, to whom, for instance; listen to what and to whom; feel what and for whom?” (51). In our desire for straightforward ethical articulations of speaking and listening, we would be remiss to throw such particular ways of life out with the bathwater. “Listening-as-obedience” (50) certainly sounds as sinister now as it did in say 1927, but there is much to our being-moved beyond the false choice between “impossible enlightenment or demagoguery” (11). Rhetoric, Gross is arguing, ought to more thoroughly explore (rather than, say, guard) this liminal space. For Gross, this liminal is the realm of rhetoric: the arts of persuasion necessarily span the agent and patient, the “potent rhetor” and the “susceptible audience”—incorporating both as objects of study, rhetoric necessarily complicates them.As chapter 1 works through an engagement with early Heidegger (and fully cognizant of his “disastrous political philosophy”), chapter 2 works to retune rhetoric’s disciplinary relationship with Foucault. The chapter is notable for several crucial insights not least of which is Gross’s disentangling of movere from Foucault’s emphasis on organizing. This chapter is finely calibrated to parse distinctions between rhetorical approaches and the work of Foucault, who remains a central figure in/for rhetorical studies. Gross persuasively argues that as helpful as Foucault has been, he tunes rhetoric in to a particular historiographic register. Not surprisingly, then, disciplinarity continues to be at stake in this chapter.The core of Gross’s argument in chapter 2 “is that movere fits poorly into the biopolitical framework built by Foucault” (62). The sacred again emerges here for Gross: moving souls, which he sees as prototypical rhetorical activity irreducible to the arrangement or organization of bodies. Gross argues that Foucault’s emphasis upon the order of things “overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: most consequentially pedagogy, politics and psychology” (57). In place of such persuasion, we find biopower, to which something like subjection, as an exemplar of passive listening, cannot be reduced. “The art of listening is difficult to grasp,” Gross argues, “because its practicalities are now less obvious than speaking, and because we have lost touch with our relevant ways of knowing” (57). Distancing ourselves a bit from Foucault allows us to come to grips with (passive) listening as more than “the road to passive indoctrination” (83)—that being taught, commanded, or “subject to the instruction of others” is vital to movere and to being-moved. “Nor is the reverse adequate,” he continues; “the active listener-as-judge tells only part of the story, which means that many of our more recent efforts to recuperate the agency of the auditor [Gross draws primarily from Krista Radcliffe] miss the point” (83–84). For Gross, there is more to listening than an investment in agency, often in terms of critical or ethical listening, can account for.This neither/nor brings Gross back to the sacred: God’s invocation—and this is the correct word insofar as it does something—materializes that domain between a speaking agent’s absolute control and a patient serving simply as a vessel for God’s Word. (88)It is this invocation that makes possible the work of the auditor. What’s needed, then, are “communicative modalities for this middle domain where we still spend most of our time” (88)—time spent neither at the pulpit nor in the pew, but moving through the world active and yet vulnerable. Such modalities, Gross argues, are latent within rhetorical theory and practice, and, in fact, exist as dispositions in a range of disciplines. “What if,” he asks, “psychology, pedagogy, and politics are first considered meta-practical arts, like rhetoric, instead of the soft natural sciences that exercise biopower?” (65). Not arts that are “described, identified, taxonomized, administered” (65), but arts that tune us into the “dynamics of passive susceptibility: how we listen, learn, and change” (68)—a rhetorical tradition wherein we are “beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).Having opened up rhetoric to what Foucault’s biopower potentially closed off, Gross turns to rhetoric beyond the art of the rhetor. And so chapter 3 listens to the Freudian slips that sound out if not always the sacred or the supernatural then surely through those things beyond the art or the technē of the rhetor: the veranstaltungen (95): “persuasive adjuncts, contrivances, or events that cannot be reduced to mere thought however expressed” (105).In working through Freud, Gross pursues a rhetoric that is reducible to neither argument nor artistic proofs (atechnoi pisteis and entechnoi pisteis). As with earlier chapters, Gross’s move here bears upon, in large part, disciplinarity: how is rhetorical theory arranged—around what is it collected? Doing rhetorical theory is itself a practice, which is constituted by the choice of terms and of domains. What currently goes unheard? And not simply unheard but unaddressed? Rhetoric, if it could listen, would have much more to say. For instance, “We have trouble grasping sacred rhetoric because our dominant ways of knowing in the academy make it difficult to pick out sacred things in the first place” (103). The sacred, being beyond invention, is often absent from analyses because rhetorical analyses focus on the human: either the choices made by the rhetor or the cultural and political structures (in a Foucauldian register) that shape such choices. Such emphases leave no room for something (precisely) like the inartistic proofs—rendered by Quintilian as “supernatural, based on oracles, prophecies and omens” (108). Such proofs become available means of persuasion through the passive listening of a would-be rhetor: to be rendered subject to that which is beyond the rhetor. This is not the same as saying that such proofs are beyond rhetoric. “My point here is contrary,” Gross writes: “when facts speak for themselves they speak rhetorically” (107). Gross takes up the questions of facts to again engage the inartistic proofs: that which exceeds invention. He continues: “Typically, we do not learn about the rhetorical force of what is given” (107), in part because, disciplinarily, the given isn’t traceable to a speaking, inventing subject, which still often remains our base unit of both theory and practice.As an example, Gross describes the pedagogical treatment of religious texts in communication and composition courses. “In making a classroom argument about euthanasia,” Gross writes, “a sacred text like the Bible can appear to document community norms and their history; it can’t appear as ultimate authority” (109). Beyond the secular drive to excise religious texts, such sacred, inartistic proofs are excluded so that students might invent their own, artistic proofs. Gross writes, “Supernatural evidence carries a rhetorical force that resides beyond the rhetorician’s hand”—“to hear it takes some effort” (110). Gross links inartistic proofs to the domain of the sacred: the gods and everything else that might be in the room while two people are conversing. What the rhetorician—what rhetorical theory and practice—provides is the capacity to study “the precise historical relation that gives this point of intersection force” (118) among the people, words, and things—sacred and mundane—that populate rhetorical activity. “Let’s just say,” Gross writes, “there is no such thing as a persuasive word” without what’s “known to the classical rhetorician as inartistic means of persuasion” (117), which Gross treats broadly as “a certain disposition of time and place” (118) and the ambiguities of things such as “statues/relics, birds/auspices, walks/pilgrimages, pills/cures, words and spectacles human or divine” (119). The job of the rhetorician, then, is to make sense of how the “miracle” of persuasion gets done, “contrivances and all” (120).Chapter 4 (re)turns toward the composition classroom to give passive voice (back) to rhetoricity. Gross unpacks how passive voice is pedagogically and what this does for the art of listening and what it about the rhetorical theory and practice we to rhetorical and political are of passive voice that or (e.g., and “the something in Gross’s argument about passive voice and how it to the arts of listening and rhetoric. The sacred here as the core of our being is a to but that voice is not our It is not our for nor is it our for the of we speak what emerges is not reducible to either what we to say or what will to instance, Gross explores the between the and Gross asks, a more and of and a is that in rhetoric’s to foreground that active rhetorical agent, we the Such a focus would foreground we namely the we as the other who is The voice at the core of us that isn’t The The up an of to and people speaking for only active critical listening as a And such in fact, There is no Gross the book by all the that passive listening The of Gross’s book from the that this that with susceptibility to and political turns toward lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change” Such in the passive voice that gives voice to passive that is the very mode of our Yorke gets to the hi-hats does the It allows Yorke to the song, which is also to start the song. The beat already moving itself but the which isn’t the Yorke becomes of playing through an of subjection and of He is being But is now the time to call for passive no to demanding and As I Gross’s book, a forms the that and on the A in The to the very The of are being from the they in by those who from their in the of and And the from only part of the But what I here are not simply things to which we might but those facts of the already moving us to to of and for a more just and feel such a to be so moved, not only a clear and voice but an and a heart being rendered to what the world might be teaching it to sing.

ABSTRACT Tense is the clue to the discovery of the meaning of time. Speaking hints at thinking, and language suggests a way to conceive of philosophical concepts. Here, the universality of temporality is that out of which the grammar of tense and the concept of time first come. Temporality, however, is not simply present in tense or time. On the contrary, temporality’s way of being—like being’s—is implication: tense is implied by how the verbality of verbs can be spoken; time, by how temporal beings come to presence—just as being is implied in Greek, and many other languages. But then, the habits of modern Western language and philosophy must be radically reformed in order to learn how to imply again, and to think and speak about time and being as implications.

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

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

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

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

ABSTRACT This essay reflects on how the pandemic has intensified long-standing discussions regarding race, Blackness, white privilege and supremacy, settler colonialism, social justice, and more. I draw from forty years of ethnographic fieldwork or being part of the departmental leadership of Latin American and Latino Studies at my university. (Backdrop: growing up Puerto Rican in South Texas with Mexican and Mexican American families, I have dealt with these themes and tropes my entire life. I prefer class analysis over identity and culture, and, like a sophist or anarchist, I do not easily accept the thoughts of anyone.) This essay uses propositional logic to establish a poetics of radical compassion as prior to radical politics, followed by the “scenic” as evidence to “prove” that paradox is our living condition. In contrast, today’s totalization and capitalization of fear and the hypostatization of truth claims—insofar as they obscure the emptiness of truth—are the methods of war.

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

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

ABSTRACT In this short text, I analyze various senses of being in time. My claim is that time forms a weird interiority through an embrace of whatever is “in” it. I, then, flesh out this claim through a close reading of Book IV in Aristotle's Physics, while grafting each “measure of movement,” through which the Greek philosopher defines time, onto the movements of plants. The result is a twisting and turning, ramified, wayward temporality that holds every sense of being in time in a vegetal embrace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABSTRACT This article approaches the problem of post-truth and the opposition between philosophical dialectics and sophistic rhetoric. The antagonism is addressed through a reading of Žižek's depiction of the ongoing discussion between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, the “new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and the sophists,” as stained by sexual difference, and the dialectics between Parmenides and Gorgias. The article argues that only through acknowledging the inescapable failure of these sides to ever establish a complete totality are we capable of overcoming the antagonism that resides at their core, thus making a dialectical sophistics, on the basis of Žižek's thought, possible. Thus, only by taking the path through post-truth can we attempt to reach the disavowed core of truth that haunts every failed system.

Celeste Michelle Condit's Angry Public Rhetorics: Global Relations and Emotion in the Wake of 9/11 is a complex and challenging contribution to the understudied area of public emotion that charts the course for an arduous but rewarding journey toward a greater synthesis between the study of human biological and material existence and the study of our symbolic world. Condit maintains that “shared public anger co-orients peoples and tends to direct their actions and resources along particular paths … shaped by numerous forces—including cultural traditions, ideologies, histories, and sedimented patterns of resource distributions—they are also substantively shaped by the distinctive set of characteristics that are constitutive of ‘being angry together’ as a pervasive social phenomenon” and that the “sharing of that anger” is a communicative process requiring that one “attend closely to the dynamics of the public discourses that constitute and circulate such shared emotion” (1–2). Condit develops a “script” for public anger: “(1) they (an absolutely antagonistic agent, identified as a long-standing enemy), (2) acted to cause serious harm (serious in terms of the normative claim being made), (3) to us (the model protagonist), (4) in violation of crucial social norms (or morals), (5) so we must attack!” (5–6). Her analysis of the discourses of bin Laden, Bush, and Sontag reveals that “the most resonant versions of this script … promote essentialism, binarism, rote thinking, excessive optimism, stereotyping, and attack orientations” (6).While it is often the case that one of the important tests of rhetorical theory is its ability to elucidate texts, what is perhaps most compelling about Condit's book is not its critical engagement with the texts, but rather its ambitious epistemological framework. Indeed what makes the book compelling (and occasionally results in somewhat infelicitous moments) is its unabashed ambition to adopt an epistemological framework that incorporates dispositions and findings from all three of the major research methodologies—natural science, social science, and humanities.Such a pan-methodological approach is necessary insofar as Condit's goal is not modest, as it is to “build a theory of emotion that integrates symbolic and physiological elements on firm academic ground” (150), requiring “reworking the onto-epistemological foundations from which most … operate” (15). Along these lines Condit relies upon an “onto-epistemological stance” (developed with Bruce Railback) termed “‘transilience’ (rather than E. O. Wilson's ‘consilience’) for recognizing the leaps that both signify gaps and simultaneously connect the movement across those gaps, among physical, biological, and symbolic modes of being” (17). Transilience takes seriously the biological and symbolic dimensions of human experience and hence requires that scholars show a willingness to move across the gaps separating academic disciplines and research methodologies.Condit's understanding of the “symbolic” elements is informed by her humanistic training in rhetorical studies, while her attempt to grasp “physiological” elements is informed by her more recent explorations and work in the natural sciences. Insofar as “biological beings seem to have a tendency to develop communication capacities” (26), she aims at a theory of emotions that is materially grounded in both biology and symbol systems. This biosymbolic approach aims to reconcile biological sciences and the humanities, but Condit is also interested in what has always been a central concern of social scientists in communication: the empirical effects of communicative messages: “The ultimate goal is to understand how the biological and the symbolic can produce a kind of human affect-range called public emotion that is susceptible to theoretically guided empirical observation and influence, albeit under different parameters of investigation than the model developed by classical physics” (20). Alongside the book's transilient fusion of humanistic and natural science into a biosymbolic perspective, it also employs social scientific methodologies in the form of frequent reviews of empirical research in order to assess the effects of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag. In the end her “view of humans as biosymbolic beings … has been undergirded by describing a transilient onto-epistemology that posits what we call the physical, the biological, and the symbolic as different but linked modes of being that result from the relatively distinctive forms in which matter has come to be arranged” (41).While Condit is centrally concerned with “public anger,” that is, how emotion circulates among collectivities in communities, the foundation of her approach is the millennia of philosophical reflections regarding the character of emotions as experienced by individuals: “Stretching back to Aristotle, many theorists have identified four components of emotion … (1) appraisal cues, (2) neurophysiology (sometimes divided into neural versus other physiological elements such as hormones or muscular activations to make a total of five), (3) subjective experience, and (4) action tendencies. Appraisal cues and action tendencies are most readily identifiable in collective emotion, and they should form the central pillars of analyses of the pathos of public rhetorics, but the other two components are involved … as well” (49). Beginning from this well-established philosophical typology, Condit overlays a wide range of insights drawn from the biological study of emotions, enabling resolution of many of the tensions between biological and neurological approaches to emotions that see them as universal species traits, and cultural and symbolic approaches that view emotions as emerging from particular cultural milieus.But since “collective emotion is not simply the aggregation of the emotion of individuals” (70), putting the “public” in public anger requires that the author explore territory that is much less well studied and understood. Public anger is complex, and “occurs when many people share the multidimensional complex featuring the action tendencies of cognitive narrowing, optimistic bias, an antagonistic approach, and four appraisals: (1) negative events have occurred that (2) result from the blameworthy actions of others, and (3) one has a reasonably high likelihood of controlling the others behavior, and (4) a relatively high certainty about events and their causes” (72). Public anger involves not only collective perceptions and understandings, but collective action. Based on the study of the angry rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag, Condit concludes that “to be angry together is to be predisposed to collective activity, specifically to attack, which may include intense, even violent, action. Circulation of these three sets of angry rhetorics activated their publics toward attack, but not in precisely the same ways” (216). While this particular set of cases seems to line up with “most humanistic engagements of social emotions” that “have described them as undesirable” (224), Condit also observes that public anger can have positive functions: “Studies by historians have pointed to a similar or overlapping range of functions for anger in larger human collectivities … the historians' accounts noted the way in which scripts for anger have served to regulate the contributions and accumulations of members of leadership hierarchies, both charging them to risk life and resources to protect their peoples and lands from other nobles and also limiting their own depredations upon their people” (73).The author is focused on biology and neurology, but communication and rhetoric remain at the center of shared public emotions: “With regard to specific elements of this method of analysis of public emotion, the focal evidence is the specific symbols circulated (in this case, almost exclusively words, though pictures, vocal sounds, and other nonverbal elements could be included)” (94). Indeed, it is through symbol systems that emotions are shared and made public: “It is empirically the case that symbol systems provide the imaginative and cooperative resources to create novel kinds of objects and life patterns, even as those objects and life patterns become instantiated in individual bodies by both the experience of those life patterns and by the symbols that are physiologically and fantastically part and parcel of those experiences” (32). Accordingly, the channels of discourse function as a sort of circulatory system within which public emotions move: “Public discourse that circulates emotion in order to co-orient individuals toward collective action tends to remake those individuals as members of that collectivity in ways that are shaped and constrained by the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Not only are symbols of primary focus for analysis, her framework assumes that “the sharing of public emotions constitutes a key nexus of collective action,” and she uses “the example of anger to illustrate how particular qualities of an emotion shape public discourses surrounding a global event, additional to the ideological preferences or positionality of a public leader and his or her supporters” (209).In the end Condit calls for the programmatic study of other public emotions: “The treatment of anger in this analysis should also provide a model for further academic analyses of emotion and political relations. One can easily imagine analyses of the role of hope, compassion or sorrow employing the method here pursued. The detailed assessment of the proclivities of such emotions at the discursive and biological levels would produce a template to describe the tendencies encouraged by specific complexes. An examination of diverse and key public rhetorics that shared the specific emotion would then allow an understanding of the range and possibilities of the operation of that emotion in particular contexts and for particular purposes” (236). Condit reiterates “that good theory requires familiarity with both rapidly expanding understandings of human biological proclivities and the foundational structures of language” (236).What is particularly new and challenging in this book is that Condit is aiming to genuinely bring together the sciences and the humanities. For decades humanities scholars in several disciplines have earnestly sought to bridge the gap between sciences and humanities, but usually on their own humanistic grounds. Philosophers of science have long bridged the gap by examining the philosophical assumptions animating science and the scientific method, usually within philosophical frames centered on epistemology. So too historians of science have brought science and history together by making science an object of historical study. Finally, scholarship on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, in which humanities scholars explore the central role of rhetoric and communication in the discovery and development of scientific knowledge, undoubtedly effects a sort of union of science and rhetoric, but does so solidly under the sign of rhetoric.What makes Condit's work unique is that it is not merely appropriating science as an object of study under the sign of the humanities. Condit's scholarship, informed by her graduate level experiences in genetics courses and lab work, aspires to something that could be described as a genuinely synthetic view of the biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. This work aims at a perspective that is pan- or meta-methodological. Critics might express concern that it is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for a scholar to move beyond and transcend a methodological and disciplinary paradigm that has been instilled through decades of study, credentialing, and training within a particular kind of academic community. Indeed Condit recognizes these very barriers, and in other works on transilience has advocated the need for greater collaboration among scholars from different disciplines despite the institutional disciplinary and methodological barriers that divide them.It can be hoped that this book itself can be a place that scholars from many disciplines not only can find theories and concepts that can contribute to their own work, but also can begin to imagine themselves as potential participants in larger and profoundly more enlightening networks of knowledge discovery and creation. But such potential adventurers are to be warned that this journey is not without its infelicitous moments. This reviewer's experiences and stocks of disciplinary knowledge (informed by an undergraduate degree in biology and a PhD in communication and rhetorical studies) were an effective preparation for a positive and engaged response to the overall bio-symbolic approach. However, having only recently completely overcome my epistemological insecurity that a humanist scholar's particular interpretation of a text or message's meaning is meaningless unless empirically verified by a scientific experiment, my inward embattled humanist rhetorical scholar cringed at Condit's repeated concern to back up what would seem to be perfectly reasonable interpretive claims with empirical verification (see for instance 100, 135, 174–78). Such moments of discomfort, born of disciplinary and methodological biases, may be inevitable to most readers at different points in this book. These moments of discomfort or skepticism, one should recognize, are inevitable when one is reading a book that quite deliberately takes the readers out of their academically proscribed comfort zones. Moments of discomfort, however, are a small price to pay for a project of epistemological and disciplinary integration. Such an integration is undoubtedly necessary for the study of emotion—a phenomenon that has long been recognized to have neurological and cultural components. In terms of the much more recent explorations of “shared” and “public” emotion, the complexity of interactions between the emotions of particular organisms, the discourses by which they circulate, and the various political, cultural, and economic contexts within which these discourses circulate will undoubtedly require the insights of many disciplines and all the major research methodologies.One area that remains underdeveloped in Angry Public Rhetorics is a more systematic model of the “public” in public emotion. Thinking about the emotions as a phenomenon of public collectivities as opposed to just individuals requires more effective ways to theorize about how emotions are shared in publics and other communities. One natural way to think about this transition is to imagine communities as being like individual organisms. For instance, it is well established that one of the biological and evolutionary functions of fear is to allow individual organisms to better detect and respond to danger. So too it has been suggested that fear can serve a similar function for societies and polities—alerting us to threats that should engage our collective attention and deliberative political efforts. Condit seems to take this view, at least in the organic metaphors frequently used to describe publics and communities, speaking as she does of “the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune” (70). Such organismic imagery is promising in many respects, for it suggests that the assemblages of human beings comprising polities, communities, and societies are akin to the complexes of cells, organs, and symbiots that work together within the body of an organism. If we take the organic metaphor seriously, discourse, communication, and rhetoric will remain central concepts that help us to understand how the “body” of a community is constituted and maintained in the face of the forces of entropy that threaten both bodies and human communities. However, such organic imagery might also distract from alternative conceptions of society, community, and polity that more completely capture the complexity and uniqueness of human communal life.Notwithstanding epistemological complexities or occasionally ambiguous organismic imagery, Condit's “biosymbolic” approach is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to rhetorical studies and the humanities generally because it is another reminder of the continued relevance of biological materiality. Humanistic scholars that treat categories like “the body” and “embodiment” as completely open signifiers that can be construed in any way by the power of culture and convention will be disappointed to bump up against a central material fact of human existence—we have bodies (real bodies, not just cultural representations thereof). Scholars that are already sensitive to the importance of materialist philosophies like Marxism will undoubtedly welcome another reminder that our cultural world is connected in fundamental ways to our material existence within human bodies and societies. In the end the study of language, rhetoric, and culture will be enriched, not eclipsed, by works like Condit's that take the realities of our biological existence seriously.

Tushar Irani's Plato on the Value of Philosophy seeks to put our understanding of Plato's critique of rhetoric on a new footing by turning our attention to what we might call the social dimension of that critique. Irani reads the Gorgias and Phaedrus as complementary dialogues connected not only by their focus on rhetoric but also by their treatment of love (erōs) and friendship (philia) as integral to Plato's incipient model of a philosophical art of argument. Irani's most important contribution is to emphasize the centrality of “the different interpersonal attitudes that Plato believes distinguish the rhetorical ethos from the philosophical ethos: whereas the former seeks to dominate or otherwise win over an audience, the latter seeks to benefit others. A philosophical attitude towards argument thus fundamentally requires a form of care [for others] according to Plato” (6).Irani's introduction provides helpful context (8–18), including a brief treatment of the most important fifth- and fourth-century views of rhetoric, including those of Gorgias of Leontini, Thucydides, and Aristophanes. Isocrates's model of rhetoric receives a more detailed analysis (13–18), which locates Isocrates squarely in the camp of Gorgias and other “conventional” rhetoricians, whose views Irani will contrast with Plato's model of the “philosophical attitude towards argument.”The body of the study is divided into two parts: part 1 (chapters 1–4) treats the Gorgias, and part 2 (chapters 5–8) turns to the Phaedrus. In part 1, Irani argues that Plato's critique of Gorgianic rhetoric consists of two main interconnected arguments. First, Gorgias and his students Polus and Callicles share an “attitude towards argument” grounded in an instrumental “attitude towards others” that seeks to dominate them in the rhetorician's own interest. And second, this Gorgianic attitude fails to develop an account of the soul, the object both the rhetorician and the philosopher aim to affect through their different approaches to the art of argument. Part 2 turns to the Phaedrus in order to examine the Platonic model of the soul, upon which, Irani argues, a properly philosophical “attitude towards argument” and its concomitant “attitude towards others” is founded. For Irani, the Phaedrus provides a necessary supplement to the Gorgias by offering the detailed account of the soul to which the Gorgias gestures without elaborating. Moreover, by focusing on the Phaedrus's analysis of the soul and the soul's relationship to the forms, Irani seeks to connect Plato's critique of rhetoric to his metaphysics in an innovative way.Chapter 1 explores Socrates's contrast between two ways of life dedicated to “the practice of argument” in the Gorgias, that of the rhetorician and that of the philosopher. Irani's key claim here is that “for both the rhetorician and the philosopher, the practice of argument brings with it a distinctive political outlook and disposition towards others” (31). While the rhetorician is motivated by the goal of “securing [his] personal interests or desires,” the philosopher engages in “a use of argument aimed at mutual understanding” (33).Chapter 2 develops this contrast by focusing on Socrates's claim that he is the only practitioner of the true political art (Gorgias 521d), which he characterizes as therapeia, a “form of care for the soul” (46). Irani argues that all three interlocutors in the Gorgias confirm that “while a conventional rhetorician will calibrate his efforts at persuasion to the desires of those with whom he engages, his attitude towards argument is marked … by self-interested concerns, particularly a desire for dominance over others” (53). Hence the rhetorician sees his audience as a means to his own ends, unlike the philosopher, who seeks to benefit his interlocutors because he sees them as ends in themselves.In chapter 3, Irani begins with the well-known passage from the Gorgias in which Socrates claims to share with Callicles the unusual situation of having two beloved objects: Socrates loves philosophy and Alcibiades just as Callicles loves the people (dēmos) of Athens and a young man named Demos (481c–d). The approach the two lovers take to their twin beloveds exemplifies their contrasting “ways of approaching the human soul,” which is central to their “two different ways of approaching politics” (69).An analysis of Callicles's “great speech” follows (70–75), in which Irani shows that Callicles's account of rhetoric contains a fundamental contradiction or “disharmony” (76). While the purpose of rhetoric, according to Callicles, is to satisfy the rhetorician's desires, the practice of rhetoric subjects the rhetorician to his audience's desires, which he must satisfy through pandering and flattery (77). The philosophical life, Irani emphasizes, suffers no such disharmony, since by practicing philosophy “Socrates sees himself fulfilling not only his own good but the good of others as well” (87).Chapter 4 concludes Irani's analysis of the Gorgias by connecting Callicles's immoralism and hedonism by showing how both emerge from his commitment to the rhetorical way of life and, in particular, the role of rhetoric in a model of politics in which the ultimate goal is to dominate others in a zero-sum game. Socrates's examination of Callicles, according to Irani, exposes an underlying “unreflectiveness” about what the good for humans actually is. This unreflectiveness is, in turn, connected to the absence of an adequate account of the soul and human motivation in the Gorgianic model of rhetoric. For Plato's alternative account of the soul, the reader must turn to the Phaedrus.Picking up on the discussion in chapter 4, Irani begins his reading of the Phaedrus in chapter 5 with an analysis of two models of love (erōs) presented in the three speeches in the first half of the dialogue. Lysias's speech and Socrates's first speech present love as a “purely pleasure-seeking drive,” while Socrates's second speech (his palinode) offers “an account of love grounded in the appreciation of matters of real value” (113). Irani's analysis of the three speeches emerges organically from his reading of the Gorgias and its contrast between two different views of human motivation that characterize the “rhetorical ethos” and the “philosophical ethos.” “The main import of Socrates' account of interpersonal love in the palinode,” according to Irani, is that the “genuine lover” described in the myth of the charioteer regards “his partner as a fellow companion in learning … rather than as a mere provider of pleasure” (129).Irani further argues that this view of the beloved object as a partner depends on Plato's model of psychology and, in particular, its account of human desire and motivation. Irani emphasizes Plato's analysis of the soul's complex form, in which “reason functions as an independent source of motivation in pursuing matters of value” (129, emphasis original). The chapter ends by suggesting that Plato's characterization of the forms as “the proper objects of desire for the rational part of the soul” is key to understanding how reason can constitute such an independent source of motivation (130).Accordingly, chapter 6 elaborates the psychological model of motivation sketched out in the previous chapter by adducing evidence from elsewhere in the Platonic corpus, including the Republic and Symposium. Irani argues that, for Plato, the forms are objects of desire independent of any satisfaction the philosopher derives from them: “The value or goodness of the forms … cannot consist in us desiring them, but must be self-contained” (134). Thus the philosopher's love of the forms provides a model for his love of other people, since both kinds of beloved objects are viewed as ends with intrinsic value rather than merely as means of the lover's satisfaction.Moreover, the forms exercise what Irani calls an “internal compulsion” on the philosopher, since the soul, by its nature, desires the forms. Hence Irani attributes to Plato the view “that those who are compelled in philosophical argument are in an important sense compelled by themselves” (139, emphasis original). The philosopher's deployment of argument to arouse such “internal compulsion” in the interlocutor therefore differs sharply from the manipulative or coercive force of the rhetorician's argument. “In contrast to the power of a merely rhetorical argument that moves us as if by external force,” concludes Irani, “the power of a philosophical argument is found in its ability to provoke independent thought, such that the dialectician can be said to engage in a cultivation rather than an indoctrination of his interlocutor” (143).Chapter 7 focuses on Socrates's well-known chariot allegory (Phaedrus 246a and following) as a model for the philosophical practice of “soul leading” (psuchagōgia) that recognizes and attends to the rational nature of the interlocutor. Irani departs from other readers of the Phaedrus, who tend to see Socrates's second speech (the palinode) as a more or less complete rejection of his first speech. Instead, Irani reads Socrates's two speeches together as “an example of rational compulsion” (152) through which Socrates attempts to direct Phaedrus toward the love of wisdom and the practice of philosophy. By depicting Socrates attending to Phaedrus's rational nature—an expression of his love for him—the Phaedrus stages an example of the care for others (therapeia) that, according to Irani, is central to a properly philosophical art of argument.Chapter 8 concludes Irani's analysis of the Phaedrus with a focus on Plato's understanding of the soul as defined by the principle of self-motion. Irani connects this idea of self-motion especially with the rational part of the soul as the essence of human nature, suggesting that the philosophical orientation toward others recognizes and attends to them as “self-movers.” Thus Irani understands the appeal to Phaedrus in both of Socrates's speeches as displaying “concern for Phaedrus as a self-mover” directed at his “capacity for independent movement” through his rational nature (178).A brief conclusion considers the implications of Irani's arguments for some broader questions in Platonic scholarship. Two elements stand out here. First, if the essential feature that distinguishes philosophical argument from rhetoric is its orientation toward others as rational “self-movers,” we need not assess its success or failure based on whether or not it results in persuasion or conviction (185–88). The ultimate aim of philosophical argument, as a form of care, is to advance the interlocutor's own capacity to pursue wisdom, the ultimate human good. Second, Irani's emphasis on the mutually beneficial nature of the dialectic encounter allows him to put forward a nuanced version of Socratic eudaimonism that avoids both an anachronistic characterization of Socrates as a “pure altruist” and an overly egoistic reading of Socratic ethics (188–90). Unlike Gorgianic rhetoric, in which the orator's domination of his audience is a zero-sum affair, the dialectic model of philosophical argument allows for both partners to interrogate their beliefs and desires and to benefit from the exercise of the rational element of the soul in pursuit of wisdom.While Irani's exploration of the connections between the ethical and metaphysical elements of Plato's critique of rhetoric represents an important contribution, some readers will not find all the details of this argument equally persuasive. For example, taking the principle of self-motion as the basis for Socrates's view of his interlocutors as independent thinkers, as Irani does when he claims that Socrates's two speeches in the Phaedrus show “concern for Phaedrus as a self-mover” (178), seems somewhat forced. Socrates adduces the argument about self-motion as proof of the soul's immortality (Phaedrus 245c–246a), but an individual's capacity for independent thought seems not to depend on this view of the soul as a “self-mover” but rather arises from the interaction of the soul's constituent parts and its experiences with the forms when disembodied and traveling in the company of the gods. Others may take issue with his unusually optimistic assessment of Socrates's achievements in the Gorgias: does Socrates really succeed in moving Polus and Callicles “just a little closer to understanding” by “thwarting their desire to win in argument” or in leading Callicles, in particular, “to reconsider his account of natural justice” (187)? The text provides scant evidence for such reconsideration, since the Gorgias ends not with continued argument but with Socrates's mythic account of the soul's experience after death. This mythic narrative, like the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, relies upon fear of punishment—as opposed to rational argument—as a motivation for ethical behavior in life. Socrates's interlocutors in the Gorgias do not respond to the myth, but Socrates himself suggests Callicles's most likely reaction: “Perhaps you consider this account like a story told by an old lady and despise it” (527a).Such reservations, however, do not detract from the overall value of Irani's nuanced treatment of these two central works in the history of rhetoric. Throughout the book, Irani lays out his argument in clear, relatively jargon-free prose that readers will find easy to follow, regardless of their background. Those who are interested in the social and ethical dimensions of Plato's critique of rhetoric will find many insights in Irani's detailed readings of the Gorgias and Phaedrus. In addition, Irani's attention to Plato's theory of the forms and the nature of the soul will provide much food for thought and further debate about the relationship between Plato's metaphysics and his model of philosophical argument.

The Great Recession of 2008 underscored the precarity of housing for many people living in the United States, as well as the unequal conditions that structure housing policy and practices. Victimized by predatory lending practices, many families lost their homes as a speculative housing bubble burst. Facing tremendous uncertainty, these families joined tens of thousands of others across the country who struggle with housing for a variety of reasons—leaving an abusive partner, struggling with medical and other unforeseen expenses, coping with addiction and/or mental illness, and more. Indeed, as Melanie Loehwing explains in her important new book, “housed” and “unhoused” represent not fixed categories or stable life trajectories but moments and dynamics that reveal the struggles of negotiating an unequal, exclusive, and often uncaring society that views the deprivation of some as justifying the privilege of many and, moreover, as a harsh reminder to compete in the marketplace lest the term “unhoused” characterize one's own social and material standing.Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home is a book about public policy and democratic theory. Offering this overview, I do not wish to suggest that Loehwing has written a book about two different topics. To the contrary, Loehwing argues compellingly that public policy (particularly policies geared toward eliminating homelessness) and democratic theory are two parts of a mutually informative relationship. Housed citizens tolerate homelessness because the sight of someone ostensibly living on the street comports with their idea of the polity, in which individuals' social standing and resources reflect their ability and effort to provide for themselves. Working together through the state, citizens do not demand more ambitious efforts to redress homelessness because of these ascriptions of deservingness and undeservingness to others. Reciprocally, popularly held perspectives of democracy justify inequality and deprivation by imagining ideals of the competent citizen whose lead should be followed by all. While homelessness illuminates material disadvantage and suffering, it also outlines the limits of a collective imagining of how people should act as citizens. Far from separating the public sphere from the private sphere, homelessness expresses their interrelationship for housed and unhoused citizens alike. On this basis, Loehwing critiques narrow, instrumental approaches that view homelessness strictly as a lack of housing. Instead, Loehwing argues that we should “understand announcements of an end to homelessness as a rhetorical act, one that contributes to the constitution of the civic body by strategically defining homelessness as a marker of flawed disposition that disqualifies individuals from inclusion in the political community” (4). To end homelessness, citizens and officials must do more than provide housing to people who lack it at a particular moment. Rather, redressing homelessness requires reimagining democracy and building a more inclusive civic home.Employing a democratic lens, Loehwing contrasts conventional and unconventional modes of advocacy to address homelessness. Conducted by organizations like the National Coalition for Homelessness and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, conventional advocacy engages in important policy-related efforts directed toward institutional actors to increase the saliency of and generate resources for programs to eliminate homelessness. While these and other organizations dedicate considerable energy to a comparatively undervalued issue, Loehwing explains that their advocacy seeks attention and influence at the cost of reinforcing some potentially disabling conventions about people experiencing homelessness. First, these organizations draw on a trope of visibility that assumes that housed citizens and policy makers are insufficiently informed about people experiencing homelessness and that bringing homelessness into clearer view will engender positive change. Second, mainstream organizations engaged in conventional advocacy often present themselves as tending to the broken bodies of people experiencing homelessness. By foregrounding physiological and psychological suffering, conventional advocacy reinforces the image of homelessness as a brutish existence that degrades the human body. Third, conventional advocacy aligns homelessness with a present-centered outlook that seeks the satisfaction of immediate needs at the expense of past memories and future plans. According to this convention, those experiencing homelessness can afford to think only in the moment, without any consideration of what they experienced previously or may experience in the future.Reflecting the connection between policy and visions of democracy, these three conventions not only characterize the people experiencing homelessness that mainstream organizations wish to help but also disqualify the homeless as citizens. Conventional advocacy may induce pity (or fear) of people without permanent shelter, but this advocacy does not treat people experiencing homelessness as potentially engaging housed publics on equal ground. Instead, relations of marginalization and subordination prevail. Together, the three conventions that Loehwing highlights—visuality, corporeality, and temporality—“illuminate the implicit models of ideal democratic citizenship that underwrite the exclusion of the homeless from contemporary society” (64). People experiencing homelessness, then, are not only people without homes; they are noncitizens, perhaps anti-citizens, and remain so until they obtain housing and simultaneously refashion themselves. Moreover, the persistence of homelessness, even if individuals, families, and groups may move among homeless and housed, reinforces the ideal notions of democratic citizenship.In chapters 2 through 4 of Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home, Loehwing explores in each chapter a detailed case of unconventional advocacy that challenges the conventions of visibility, corporeality, and temporality. Chapter 2 considers the practices of meal-sharing initiatives, particularly the work of the Food Not Bombs group of Orlando, Florida, to share meals with people experiencing homelessness in their city. In chapter 3, Loehwing considers efforts of activists across a transnational network to organize a Homeless World Cup—an international soccer tournament composed of players experiencing homelessness in their “home” nations. Turning to the convention of time, chapter 4 explores the practice in cities across the United States of Homeless Persons' Memorial Days, in which participants remember homeless people in their communities who died in the past year.As Loehwing argues, meal sharing reconfigures the visibility politics of homelessness and citizenship. In their imagining of the ideal, theories of citizenship retain a skepticism toward the visual as potentially weakening critical judgment in the presence of spectacle. A citizen must exhibit reason, while spectacle threatens to overwhelm reason. Conventional advocacy abides by this visibility politics insofar as it maintains the spectacle of homelessness as distinct from a housed public that may be affected by visibility. Sharing meals in Orlando's city center, the Food Not Bombs group works with people on equal terms, creating a community of homeless and housed members. As Loehwing observes, “FNB creates the sights of community anew, countering invisibility with constitutive visions of what the community could look like if different values and norms of civic relationships were enacted through the form of radically inclusive shared meals” (88–89).If ideal citizens should act rationally, they also must control their bodies. Stereotypical images of people experiencing homelessness, such as images of people performing actions that housed publics perform in private, serve as sharp reminders of the connections between policy and democratic theory—anyone who engages in “debasing” actions before others cannot be trusted as a citizen. Reversing conventional hierarchies of bodily control, the Homeless World Cup provides a venue for homeless people from across the globe to demonstrate acute physical prowess. Started by British homeless advocate Mel Young, the Homeless World Cup began as a way to bring together people experiencing homelessness from different nations. As a well-attended event, the Homeless World Cup reconfigures the bodies of participants and spectators. In addition to illuminating the unique abilities of the players, Loehwing explains, the tournament “positions a housed public as an interested and supportive spectator … [and] the HWC re-presents the individuals experiencing homelessness as representatives of the nation, rather than those rejected from the civic body” (112).From antiquity forward, ideal citizens have needed to negotiate different temporal horizons. Indeed, Aristotle's three species of rhetoric (judicial, epideictic, deliberative) each asked audiences to make a distinct time-oriented (past, present, future) judgment. Living in the now does not permit judgments of past events or future planning, which democracy asks of every citizen. As the name suggests, Homeless Persons' Memorial Days explicitly challenge the association of present centeredness and homelessness. Loehwing explains that “these events reconstruct lost lives, enact moments of identification between homeless and housed, and deliberate about the shared future of a community constituted around mourning the loss of homeless neighbors” (130). Like the other instances of unconventional advocacy that Loehwing analyzes, Homeless Persons' Memorial Days bring together, rather than separate, homeless and housed publics. These events regard people experiencing homelessness not as anonymous elements of a dystopic contemporary scene but as people with names, lives, histories, aspirations. They too made contributions to the communities in which members of housed and homeless publics lived; their lives held value.Loehwing is clear to explain that the differences between conventional and unconventional advocacy do not compel readers to choose between these modes. Indeed, Loehwing holds that the two modes “go a long way toward reconciling each other's limitations and drawbacks” (162). Focused more on institutions, conventional advocacy may garner more “recognition, resources, and social services” for people (162). Unconventional advocacy promises “a different kind of remedy—one that extends civic recognition as its core contribution, because it acknowledges that working for more resources within the existing system may not do enough to challenge the conditions that led to homeless marginalization in the first place” (163). Systemic change requires that we focus on the constitutive connection of theories and practices of policy and democracy.Loehwing envisions the convergence of policy and democracy in the concept of the “civic home.” As a home, a civic home recalls the material inequities of persistent homelessness, which compels some publics to move among housed and homeless standing as they negotiate the ups and downs of an unequal society while others go about their daily lives largely insulated from these traumatic experiences. Yet, as a civic home, Loehwing's concept underscores that resources, while irreplaceable, may not be enough if privileged publics imagine the polity in ways that perpetually exclude others. Without systemic change, housed publics will continue to tolerate homelessness as an unfortunate (or, perhaps, best unseen) byproduct of a wider society that produces benefits for those who subscribe to the vision of ideal citizenship.A civic home underscores the ameliorative role of unconventional advocacy in potentially “realign[ing] the assumptions, prejudices, and exclusions found in competing rhetorics of homelessness” (163). Loehwing locates the materials for the construction of a civic home in “rhetorical circulation.” If the civic home is a “symbolic space,” then its building requires the reshaping of political culture so that publics may appreciate connections to one another. For Loehwing, the civic home would serve as a “place of mutual recognition and inclusion” (166). Our present approach to homelessness divides publics, drawing civic ideals by denying material and discursive resources to others, and reifies the terms “housed” and “homeless,” obscuring the complicated lives and struggles of many citizens. A rebuilt civic home would disavow this zero-sum game, recognizing and appreciating the diverse contributions of intersecting and overlapping publics. In the construction process, unconventional advocacy performs both “circulatory” and “consummatory” functions. In circulation, this advocacy invites wider publics to reconsider the meanings of homeless and housed and people's relationships to one another. Yet this advocacy also consummates the agency and identity of the homeless/housed advocates, affirming their place in the civic home. While advocacy—both conventional and unconventional—constitutes one type of building material, Loehwing also includes deliberation and protest in a full civic rhetoric.Addressing issues of visibility, corporeality, and temporality, and articulating a civic rhetoric of advocacy, deliberation, and protest, Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home offers lessons for scholars and students considering a range of topics. Assumptions about who belongs within a political community and on what terms—who may gain entry to our civic home as currently constructed—pervade politics and policy. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine social policy without assumptions about diverse publics. Melanie Loehwing importantly invites readers to consider these issues explicitly. Loehwing encourages us to understand how these assumptions operate and to evaluate them, reconstructing our notions of community as necessary. In doing so, we may build a new civic home on a firmer foundation of justice, equality, and mutual respect.

ABSTRACTThis essay argues for the value of presence as rhetorical heuristic. Beginning with the philosophical tradition, the authors establish a long-standing interest in presence or isness, understood as the thing-itself outside subjectivity. We then trace how rhetorical theorists including Aristotle, Quintilian, and Perelman have privileged isness as a baseline for true conviction, positioning rhetoric as an effort to imitate material proofs. Such views highlight the tension between presence (things of the world in their isness) and the arts of presencing (the capacity of words and symbols to shape an isness), suggesting a generative frame for analysis. To demonstrate, we examine global migration. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented migrants, we posit that these individuals' paradoxical experiences of bodily presence but legal absence reveal a fraught interplay among rhetoric, state power, and competing notions of truth. However, immigration is only a case study; presence is a much more widely applicable heuristic.

The Roman thinker and politician Cicero may seem worlds away from us and our twenty-first-century problems. As long as he lived, Cicero's practical aims were to strengthen the power of the senatorial class and his own personal influence over others. He did not view the republic as a means toward collective betterment, and never questioned his rich and aristocratic peers' militaristic values and commitment to an empire secured by violence and economic exploitation. Despite these and other issues, renewed scholarly interest in Cicero arose in the last years of the twentieth century and has continued to grow. It has been fueled by the reemergence of interest in republicanism and the Roman tradition, in particular in Cambridge School intellectual history and political theory that began with the publication of important work in the 1970s and 1980s by (among others) J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner.Having myself repeatedly made the argument that Cicero is a useful thinker for us today, particularly in his complex, ambitious treatment of rhetoric as the core art of politics—and precisely because he is both a pragmatist accustomed to balancing competing interests and a politician sensitive to the role of fantasy and desire in politics—I should say at the outset that I approach Gary Remer's book with sympathetic interest. Remer ably guides us through key elements in and arising from Cicero's conviction that the act of speaking is the field not only of legitimate politics but of moral decision making and moral action.What Remer calls Cicero's “political morality” is intimately bound up with Cicero's views on the instrumental and aesthetic elements of speech. Remer's most significant advance in this now fairly well-articulated field of study is his overview of the rich legacy of Cicero's thought, from the first-century CE rhetorician Quintilian to Lipsius, Edmund Burke, the Federalists, and John Stuart Mill. If some readers find that Remer defines this “Ciceronian” tradition too broadly, they will find his consideration of these thinkers from a Ciceronian perspective worth reading nonetheless.It is a truth universally acknowledged that politicians have tough decisions to make. Where Machiavelli advises princes to do what is practically useful rather than what is honorable, Cicero declares that it is possible to pursue both the utile and the honestum at the same time. The orator is the person best placed to do this, and (not incidentally) to live the life of deliberated action that Cicero praises in his On the Republic as the life most worth living. On what grounds? In Cicero's view, morality is inherent in the orator's professional activity: the nature of persuasive speech, the act of one human being speaking to others with a view to moving or changing them, tends to constrain the speaker from behaving viciously. By contrast with Aristotle, who treats ethics as the external constraint on oratorical practice, Cicero suggests that the rules of persuasive communication internal to the relation between speaker and audience provide built-in constraints to thought and action.Here is the scene Cicero has in mind, simplified for the sake of brevity, which he dissects in greatest detail in his three-book dialogue On the Orator. The orator seeks to move, teach, or please others: movere, docere, delectare. In the first act of speaking (which might be a gesture or an expression), a multivalent exchange is instantly constructed, and through the whole course of it the speaker must obey various important constraints. To be understood, the orator must obey rules of comprehensibility. To be believed, the orator must obey rules of plausibility and common sensibility (echoes of Habermas are relevant and appropriate here). To move the listeners, to ensure that they learn, to create pleasure—to effect change, in short, an altogether more complex and nuanced process—the orator must obey rules of decorum. As Adam Smith (professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh before he took a chair in moral philosophy at Glasgow) comments in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, “When the original passions of the person principally concerned are in perfect concord with the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they necessarily appear to this last just and proper, and suitable to their objects; and, on the contrary, when, upon bringing the case home to himself, he find that they do not coincide with what he feels, they necessarily appear to him unjust and improper” (1.3). The orator faces a steep uphill climb when he seeks to persuade those whose aesthetic and moral sensibilities he offends.In chapter 1's comparison between Aristotle and Cicero, Remer rightly identifies the other-directedness of Cicero's speaker as a distinctive element in his moral thinking. Keenly attuned to the perspective, range of experience, and interests of his listeners, Cicero's orator keeps within their ambit and moderates his speech accordingly. The decorum he embodies and performs amplifies his audience's sense of what is suitable as it articulates the orator's prudential view of how and what the audience should believe and do. Further, in the argument Remer develops in chapters 2 through 4, which places Cicero in dialogue with Machiavelli and Lipsius, the orator qua politician is well placed to assess which types of moral obligations he will obey. These obligations are role-specific and flexible, according to need and circumstance. For example, when Brutus committed murder in the course of founding the Roman republic, he obeyed the “role morality” of a person devoted to the good of the collective rather than to other individual human beings, including his son (70). Since the politician obtains his status through the iterative legitimating acknowledgments of the political community, the legitimacy of his role-specific actions is always under review according to communal values and standards. This engine keeps the orator in check. It effectively encompasses moral law as well as the ever-changing circumstances that guide moral decision making.To Cicero, speech is the civic glue of the republic. His ideal orator, that is, the ideal republican citizen, is one who cultivates a heterogeneous, passionate style of speech and manner that reflects the variety of his experiences in real life and in his imagination. “It is necessary for the orator to have seen and heard many things, and to have gone over many subjects in reflection and reading,” Cicero says in On the Orator. “He must not take possession of these things as his own property, but rather take sips of them as things belonging to others…. He must explore the very veins of every type, age, and class; he must taste of the minds and senses of those before whom he speaks” (1.218, 223). As Remer accurately notes, the orator must not simply act out these feelings like an actor; he must perform the emotional labor and feel the feelings he expresses to his audience.These assertions place Cicero and his ideal orator into what Remer arrestingly calls in another context “an uneasy state of equipoise.” Remer is right to say that Cicero's orator cannot look to perfect universal law as his everyday guide; he must cope with the plural community. Plurality means that we cannot reliably know what each of us believes or why, what we will think or do next. We should keep in mind that the Roman republic, like our own, is an unchosen assembly—unlike the democracy of the Athenians, who carefully reviewed each applicant to their citizen body and in the course of the fifth century, decided to winnow out men without two Athenian parents. A republic is not a kin group, so we do not resemble one another. In our plurality of perspectives, goals, hopes, and dreams, we probably do not like one another very much. (The realities of pluralism have always made me skeptical about Aristotelian accounts of citizenship that model themselves on friendship.) As Cicero says rather plaintively in On Moral Duties book 1, it's not always easy to care about other human beings. A genuinely plural politics cannot emerge from agreements with preselected partners who already know how to play the game. We must instead expose ourselves to people and views that we don't have a say over, even as we seek to influence others; we must feel what they feel. Visible emotion is the raw edge of exposure; it builds the connection.Particularly now, in the age of Trump, master of the passionate in-group appeal, this may give us pause. What, we may ask, controls or constrains this passionate orator? As we have seen, Remer replies that the Ciceronian orator must cultivate propriety or decorum—the capacity of self-government guided by the orator's sense of communal mores. We can go slightly further to define decorum as the awareness of the watchful gaze of the community, whose approval the orator needs to work his persuasive powers and exert his fullest authority. To speak persuasively is to forcefully articulate one's views and try to impose them on others. But to speak with decorum is to own a self-critical sensibility, a flexible command of vocabulary and cultural values, a capacity to conform with social rules and moral norms, and to risk vulnerability in the face of uncertainty. After all, we never know exactly what someone will say in reply to us, and Cicero discourses at some length in On the Orator about the stage fright that rightly afflicts good orators, who are keenly attuned to the audience's unpredictable nature.Central to Remer's reclamation of Cicero for modern political morality is the Roman rhetorician's pragmatic treatment of the necessity of emotion in political speech. Remer is correct to underscore this important aspect of Cicero's thought, but he remains somewhat squeamish about its implications, and in my view this leads him to overemphasize the value Cicero placed on self-restraint and reason. I do not agree with Remer that the vision of rational argument that Cicero articulates in his dialogue On the Laws is a “better” form of speech than the emotion-laden oratory he describes in On the Orator and other rhetorical treatises—and which he famously practiced himself. Cicero has far too much to say about the importance of emotion in creating bonds among citizens of the republic for this to be a plausible view. When his friend Atticus asks Cicero whether his proposed law to keep oratory moderate and free from passion is feasible, Cicero replies that it refers not to men of today, but to “men of the future who may wish to obey these laws.” While this statement suits the spirit of On the Laws, an experiment in Platonic philosophizing, it strikes me as at best a tepid endorsement of moderate oratory. Against this experiment I place Cicero's warning in his history of Roman oratory, the Brutus, to his friend (and the future assassin of Caesar), that restrained, dry, “Attic” oratory will always fall short. This strong opinion captures Cicero's deep conviction that emotion is not only necessary for political speech; it is a key driver of building republican political community. The orator's capacity to channel and convey emotion is at the heart of the intersubjective relation between the orator and his audience that Remer describes so compellingly in chapters 1 and 2.Remer leaps too quickly from this intersubjective relationship between orator and audience partly sustained by shared emotion—and the craving of the audience for emotional oratory that carries them away, that bathes them in delight (52)—to the “better” decorum Cicero describes in On the Laws. Having established the necessity of the performance of emotion for the purposes of sustaining intersubjective community, rather than jump with him to the normative ideal, I would have liked him to delve further into the controls Cicero places on the expression of emotion, and the larger implication for Cicero's view of the republic.Cicero had one excellent reason to advocate for decorum in day-to-day political speech: fear. As he knows from years of factional strife and civil war, fear kills politics and kills freedom. Decorum means restraining the overreaching behaviors elites are prone to that create fear and increase public mistrust. Only after learning to moderate behaviors that arouse fear among his fellow citizens can the orator explore the “very veins of every type, age, and class” that allow him to speak to and for the whole community. The elite class to which Cicero belonged cultivated moderation as a virtue: this was part of their stranglehold on power, but it also restrained them.But Cicero also sees a fundamental tension between decorum and the capacity to struggle against injustice or outright threats to the republic. His insight into this tension is why, in the Verrine orations—passionate speeches against corruption, extortion, and elite overreach in the province of Sicily—Cicero warns against elite institutions like lawcourt juries sitting too comfortably in their univocal exercise of power. This is why his history of the Roman republic in On the Republic book 2 is a history of cyclical conflict and violence, and why in On the Laws he reminds his interlocutor that tribunes, who voice the people's concerns, are necessary for the good of the republic. Cicero repeatedly clears space for dissensus, for conflict, because he sees, and worries, that the comfortable stability of the homogeneous elite always threatens to tilt into arrogance and violence against the people.So his ideal orator is one who feels, who is necessarily and constantly alive to the beliefs and feelings and fears of others, with the proven capacity to imagine and identify with the experience of others. Emotion is not instrumental in value; its expression is intrinsic to acknowledging and navigating the tense antagonisms that constitute the republic.But this does not answer my question about what prevents the orator from emoting his way into tyranny or the incitement of murder, as Cicero did when he advocated the extralegal executions of Catiline's fellow conspirators. My thinking here is informed by David Velleman's and Herlinde Pauer-Studer's work on the distortion of moral norms in their analysis of diaries and letters written by those who personally carried out acts of murder during the Holocaust. The reason why Nazi perpetrators were not deterred by morality, in their view, is that their moral principles “were filtered through socially conditioned interpretations and perceptions that gave events a distorted normative significance.” Recall Remer's treatment of the exchange between orator and audience. As he rightly describes the scene, orator and audience cultivate norms together. When the orator voices emotional arguments against injustice, does he take time, as Cicero sometimes though not always does, to acknowledge other points of view? Or does he use emotion to set one group against another? If the latter, does the community endorse that use? We can learn from the fact that Cicero expresses his greatest rage and contempt when he speaks out against elite rivals. He does not deploy it in a sustained way against entire groups in the republic, particularly disempowered ones, such as the poor, immigrants, or slaves. A norm emerges here, one informed by Cicero's warnings about elite overreach and the people's vulnerability and fear.Classical scholarship emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in response to an urgent necessity: the need for a secular discourse of collective politics, a discourse that offered alternatives to the rule of king or church. As a classicist, I want my field to reclaim its historical role in giving people language with which we can articulate our roles in collective life—which means diving deep into the tempests of public discourse in the classroom or in our research. I am glad to join Gary Remer in arguing that Ciceronian rhetoric can, as it did in the early modern period, help us think a new style of political thought and action. I hope his book leads to further work along these lines.Black Lives Matter, the descendants of Occupy and related political movements, rightly insist that we must together invent a politics that gives a part to those who have no part, as Jacques Rancière memorably put it. To do this, those in conditions of power and comfort must not simply speak for the silent many who live in conditions of precarity. The challenge is how to create a dialogic style of talk and action that allows for the politically destitute to enter the space of politics in conditions of nondomination. If we seek fresh thinking toward a new politics, we do well to focus on oratory, the art that (as Cicero says) brings together word and action, mind and body, reason and passion.

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

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

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

ABSTRACTThe enthymeme is well known in rhetorical theory as a three-part syllogism from which one premise has been elided. The enthymeme works because the listener supplies the “missing piece,” thereby participating in the very argument by which she is persuaded. This enthymeme is widely believed to derive from Aristotle, but previous scholars have shown that the “truncated syllogism” view of the enthymeme is both un-Aristotelian and impracticable. In this article, I review problems with the syllogistic enthymeme and reasons for its improbable longevity before proposing a view of the enthymeme that derives not from the syllogism but from the legal narratives produced by early Greek orators. The enthymeme is best understood not through its deductive structure, but its emplotment. This model makes sense of Aristotle's comments without relying on a discredited syllogistic frame to explain how ancient orators argued.

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

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

ABSTRACTOnly recently have we begun to realize how Martin Heidegger's 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric permanently altered the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. This article explains how it did so, outlining what exactly Heidegger reclaimed in Aristotle's Rhetoric just as he was radically reformulating the history of Western metaphysics against his contemporaries in philosophy. Key are a couple of scholarly moves. Heidegger places Aristotle's Rhetoric in the Corpus Aristotelicum next to the Physics, away from the logical works and the Poetics. And he defines rhetoric as the hermeneutic of Dasein itself only after working out what he calls the “Greco-Christian interpretation of life.” Finally, this article explains how and why Heidegger left rhetoric behind soon after 1924, as he actively took up Weimar politics and consequently lost faith in the analysis of factical life Aristotle made possible.

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

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