It is common for those who live in democratic societies to talk about the importance of speaking to others. But what about the desirability of speaking to others? At first glance, the question appears false, since the answer seems obvious: Of course speaking to others is desirable! Engaging with others who disagree with us is part and parcel of the democratic way of life. And yet, we need not look too far to find the public sphere mired in intense polarization, divisiveness, and a general breakdown of civil discourse. In practice, we appear to set aside what we say we believe and proceed as though we know that dialogue is pointless.What should we make of this gap between, on the one hand, our accedence to the idea that speaking across difference is good and, on the other, our demonstrable lack of attunement to that good in practice?We differentiate two ways of conceiving the gap. One might understand the gap as between a belief in the importance of open dialogue and the willingness to engage in it. Here, the discrepancy between our commitment to the principle and acting on it is easily cleared up by pointing to things that make dialogue ineffective today. We could say that, while we do firmly believe in the principle of dialogue, reality makes it impossible. In this case, the retreat from dialogue is inevitable. We propose an alternative understanding of the gap as one between believing that dialogue is desirable and desiring dialogue. We make the case that while the first framework can excuse the evident tendency to avoid disagreement as a realistic, prudent, or practical choice, it also makes embracing pluralism indefensible. The second approach, we argue, has the potential not only to remind us that the desirability of dialogue is coextensive with the desirability of capacious thought and judgment, but to reattune us to pluralism as an ideal for realizing those desires.Increasingly, citizens, scholars, and civic institutions lament that it has become impossible to disagree with each other. This notion—that democratic dialogue has become an impossibility—comes in different forms. For some, the impossibility is due to contextual developments. We live in a new world in which the conditions that once made speaking to others potentially productive are gone. So, even if we make the effort to speak across difference, our deliberations in the current digital and transnational public sphere cannot consolidate public opinion as they used to. Such explanations, which attribute the impossibility to contextual developments, might be called externalist to distinguish them from ones that attribute the putative impossibility of open dialogue to inherent causes.From an internalist view, developments like the rise of social media, globalization, and the growing role of “big money” in politics have not exactly made the democratic process impossible; they have merely magnified the fact that it was always too flawed to be viable. If it once seemed that democracy—as a pluralist way of life, based on free and shared self-governance—was possible, now we can see more clearly that speaking to others is ineffective in consolidating, or ensuring the legitimacy of, public opinion. Similarly, if it once seemed that the challenge was how to make life in pluralism better, it has become clear that human beings, insofar as we are essentially tribalistic, may prefer not to have to negotiate between different values and worldviews.Whatever form it takes, the idea that democratic dialogue might have been good if it were not impossible—as an explanation of the gap between what we remain committed to in principle, on the one hand, and our readiness to act on it, on the other—has circumscribed our response to the crisis of democratic dialogue by making the importance of democratic dialogue effectively moot.Reflection about the democratic crisis has devolved into a deterministic problematization of free speech itself. In politics, free speech has become a partisan issue, and in academic scholarship, the validity of committing to the protection of free speech has become a matter to interrogate. For example, which views are acceptable to “platform” on college campuses? Does Justice Brandeis’s slogan that the “truth will out” or Mill’s idea of the “marketplace of ideas” have any actual empirical validity? Does free speech in the age of the internet make its abuse too rampant to justify its protection? And so on. However, this concern with the defensibility and parameters of free speech is confused about the stakes of the protection of free speech. It neglects the fact that the commitment to protect freedom of expression is based not on the principle that speech ought to be free, but rather on a commitment to pluralism that, in turn, demands that speech be protected. That is to say, the actual stakes of any argument in support of or against free speech go to the ideal of living with others with whom we are likely to disagree. Concern with the defensibility of free speech fails to recognize, in short, that it is the pluralism itself that needs to be defended.Accordingly, our aim is to shift the conversation about the dysfunction in public dialogue by framing the desirability of speaking to others as an aporia that can be ignored only on pain of rendering pluralism indefensible.To present the desirability of dialogue as a problematic seems odd, especially because the commonplace idea that talking across difference is important seems to already entail its desirability. And yet, if pressed to explain why anyone would want to talk to others, we find ourselves describing instrumental goods. Which is to say, we find ourselves listing things that talking to others is good for: be this cultivating civility and respect, refining our individual beliefs, or arriving at better solutions to collective problems. Indeed, it is easy to recognize the potential benefits, be they civic, social, epistemic, or moral. At that point, the distinction between believing that something is desirable and desiring it for itself becomes clear. In the first case, being in dialogue need not be a desirable prospect so long as the outcome of the process is desirable. In the second case, it is the prospect of dialogue itself that is desirable, notwithstanding its challenges. This distinction is important because the instrumental benefits of dialogue for stability, civility, and cooperation are recognizable in any kind of society or political system. Democratic societies, however, uphold pluralism as an ideal: Disagreement is not merely an instrument to resolve differences; living in difference is an opportunity to disagree. As the timing of this special section suggests, we live in a moment that calls on us to contend with the implication of this distinction for pluralism.The desirability of talking to others is a problematic that emerges specifically from a mismatch between a theory and its practice. Consider the monist-pluralist debate in Anglo-European literary theory from the 1960s up to the 1990s. The debate, which was framed as a contest between critical pluralists (represented by Wayne Booth) and monists (represented by E. D. Hirsch), opened up a discussion about the parameters within which interpretation would realize its aims and optimize its results, about how the aims are to be defined and what the ideal result might be. For Booth, the project of pluralism is one invested in “the public testing of values” through conversation, whereas for Hirsch validity in interpretation required imposing order on “the chaotic democracy of readings” (1979, 4–5). Of course, the debate was not limited to a quarrel between pluralists and monists; it expanded to include critics from numerous emerging “fields” that have since become institutional mainstays (like feminist studies, postcolonial studies, African American studies, queer studies, and comparative literature) who criticized it for various alleged ideological blind spots.What is noteworthy is that, in the exchanges between critics representing presumably irreconcilable views of how best to conduct the critical enterprise, everyone could count on others to be invested in contesting other views. When a monist like Hirsch insisted that critical inclusivity stands to compromise interpretive validity, Booth could, despite warning of monist exclusiveness as a form of “critical killing,” point to how the monist position gains clarity and force when it stands within a plurality of critical views (1979, 259). And Ellen Rooney, who criticized Booth for modeling his vision of interpretive pluralism on liberal paradigms of public reason as persuasion, wrote an entire book to persuade readers otherwise—a critique that was possible and necessary in a historical moment when a rationalist-liberal pluralism could be plausibly posited as hegemonic, whereas a public sphere paralyzed by irrationality and post-factualism calls for a foundationalist, or at least positive, theoretical intervention.Put differently, today a pluralist rhetorical theory like Booth’s would not be in a position to model itself after the openness of public discourse without first explaining why one would want to model critical discourse on a paradigm in dysfunction. Likewise, Rooney could not argue that the same ideological baggage attached to the “colloquial meaning of the term ‘pluralist’ shadows all our theories of interpretation” (1989, 17), not at a time when pluralism is no longer part of our political vernacular. She would have to find positive grounds on which to present an alternative vision of critical discourse. And Hirsch might not want to call for untethering the principles of persuasion in public discourse from the grounds of validity in scholarly criticism, not when translating the value of what literary critics do has become a paramount concern for literary studies as a discipline. In short, at the time of the monist-pluralist debate, the most exclusivist monist could afford to be so because it was possible to take fellow critics’ practical commitment to argue and disagree for granted. Booth, the avatar of critical pluralism, dedicated himself, in Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, to differentiating all the different varieties of monism and pluralism, delineating the advantages and liabilities of each of these critical “attitudes,” and to arguing the faultlessness of critical disagreements, as he did when he proposed Andrew Paul Ushenko’s thought experiment, which imagined “a fixed cone placed among observers who are not allowed to change their angle of vision” (1979, 31), as an apt analogy for “the challenge of pluralism,” all without having to consider what motivates critics to share their opinions. Meanwhile the past two decades have seen literary criticism and theory not just defending the value of interpretive knowledge (literary studies’ perennial institutional challenge) but calling into question the very point of producing interpretations (Lehman 2017).It takes a particular historical moment to push a question like the desirability of speaking to others to the forefront. Hannah Arendt raised the question in the middle of the twentieth century when she believed that the defense of pluralism was at risk, and her search led her to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy.When we invited our contributors to help us articulate the desirability of speaking to others as a problematic, we presented them the foregoing conceptual framework and offered, as orienting figures, Immanuel Kant, who articulates one of modernity’s most influential philosophical accounts of why disagreeing is good for people irrespective of the result, and Hannah Arendt, who critically revived Kant’s philosophical framework after the rise of fascism.In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant puts forward the maxim to “think in the position of everybody else” (1790/2000, 5:294). Appearing in the context of his aesthetic theory, the normative requirement to “reflect on [one’s] own judgment from a universal standpoint” is taken to be constitutive of the judgment of taste (5:295). In other words, to declare something to be beautiful presupposes “putting [one]self into the standpoint of others” (5:295). Moreover, our declaring something to be beautiful is to demand that you think so too (5:237). And yet the force of the aesthetic “ought” does not consist in the fact that you will come to agree with us. Rather, the demand makes clear that taste is an inherently social affair, and our judgments on such matters necessarily consider what our interlocutors would say when confronted with the objects that we might designate as beautiful.It is this capacity for perspective taking, exemplified in the aesthetic sphere, that Arendt famously gravitates toward as forming a basis for the political. “[T]he capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant” precisely because it is the faculty of the mind by which we take into account the perspectives of others (Arendt 1968/2006, 221). In her well-known Kant Lectures (delivered in the Fall of 1970 at the New School for Social Research), Arendt draws out the implications of Kant’s claim that to “restrain our understanding by the understanding of others” is, in fact, a “subjectively necessary touchstone of the correctness of our judgments generally” (Kant 1798/2006, 7:219).Building on this idea, Arendt puts forward the related notions of “representative thinking” and “enlarged mentality,” which involve the ideas not only that it is good to think from the standpoint of others and take their thoughts into account, but that “thinking . . . depends on others to be possible at all” (1982, 40). Whatever her differences with Kant, Arendt is to be credited for highlighting the radical force of Kant’s “belie[f] that the very faculty of thinking depends on its public use,” because it was “not made ‘to isolate itself but to get into community with others’” (40). Kant further warns in his Anthropology (1798) about the dangers of “isolating ourselves with our own understanding and judging publicly with our private representations” (1798/2006, 7:219).Here, the value of dialogue, disagreement, or modes of engagement that involve “thinking from the standpoint of others” does not lie in making our lives with others who are not like-minded manageable, nor even in the prospect of improving our thoughts and opinions by sharpening them against others, but rather because our ability to think and make judgments is most capacious when we are in conversation with others, especially those who might differ. The essays collected in this special section reflect on today’s democratic crisis by returning to the work of Kant and Arendt or proposing alternative sources and frameworks of conceptualization. They approach the problematic we set out from different fields in the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, political science, cultural studies, history, literature, and education, offering a range of historical and theoretical accounts of dialogue and disagreement enriched by interdisciplinarity. Together, they point about the of is, about what or how speech ought to be the question of the desirability of talking with others in the first That this question is is by no taken for granted. As would likely speaking with others may be but it is might to but something that only after have made up mind about after have an opinion about how things in the or about how the world should to others can if is to be by the other. Does it make in that case, to just to In of Democratic takes as her point of the of especially in the context of However, that the of speaking with others is not to but to For Arendt, speaking to others is not only important but for political is the of having a shared public world at In view, we have a world in common only to the that we it from different that for persuasion to our sense of a shared or common it also be world just to you but to In other words, it how the world appears to sense of what is by how it. from the prospect of persuasion the that might see things account, from persuasion as a rhetorical at to it as a kind of and to see the of judgment as a common world that people who have very different opinions to the with others is if we cannot agree on what objects or we are talking In his for in the of Hannah that a better, if not for democratic in a society could be in on and institutions in as opinion a set of that us in conversation with each other in the first of thinking has been used to a form of political in which we reflect on of common concern by the of as others as and alternative frameworks that how we of the of interlocutors within such In with to account of and understanding of and others as that are by a particular of speaking with each other. In with a long to which we understand each other best by with each from our own us the to see how that understanding people a of that is and or between us of this way of speaking with each other because of the free yet of the human which makes an model of this and the the of how we of the other from perspective we are to For example, do we take up the standpoint of an other, the should we to engage with particular others? For what matters is that we others in their rather their This across the more distinction between and In other words, what is is not the other or but we them in all of their that the of perspective depends on how we the our willingness to them in their and the of interlocutors to In the in draws on the work of Arendt, as as her with to argue that thinking has a particular in In such it may not be possible for people to take views into account in how they judge political as Arendt because to the of who people take to be. But what thinking can do in such is others into as of This through understanding why are for and, in so that others from a different from the that political can be by the or of the other Such can support the to include those others in democratic the to those with whom we Hannah Arendt on and draws to claim that free speech is only when others to what have to this is that speech is not just a but a that makes engagement with others desirable and However, free speech it to a the conditions which speech may become in the first on of the term at once to as as conditions which a lack of what Arendt calls the of the social of a the of in politics, and a social from and the idea that our speech be not as exchanges but as within social and institutional conditions that dialogue. As their the with judgment conditions our normative with the and of democratic and differentiate between and to speak to others. be we should not want to to persuade on a that two of can come into when we engage with others who different views. the one hand, for us to present them with of our own the other hand, for practical us to our so as not to demand too of their and In how we speak with others, we them as interlocutors who our practical as as our for their It to to to the of the debate on the retreat from dialogue in Anglo-European arguing that the solutions they to the dysfunction of public discourse are The is in of an to the of disagreement, or a to the to change their dialogue possible once potential interlocutors to get through conversation or them to good to engage if persuasion is taken out of solutions she because the is not one of but one of to to others with whom we disagree. will not be to talk to others since they can or because they do not being want to talk across differences they be to the of for returning to the literary of the public sphere, about and to political and cultural first made the of Together, and us to think about what motivates and the to speak across it might be reason that us to out dialogue, our willingness to remain in it may on our ability to and aesthetic is that democracy is not so a reality as an ideal to to. This special section is presented with the idea that this may societies that are committed to pluralism as a way of life to the conversation about the to across

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.

The proliferation of materialist perspectives in rhetorical studies has generated feelings of disciplinary crisis and fragmentation. Early materialist formulations of rhetoric, such as those put forward by Michael Calvin McGee and Raymie McKerrow, conceptualized materiality discursively and, thus, maintained continuity with more traditional accounts of rhetoric as a practice of “symbolic action.” However, beginning with texts such as Ronald Walter Greene’s “Another Materialist Rhetoric” and Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley’s edited collection Rhetorical Bodies, scholars began emphasizing the ontological and embodied rhetoricity of physical contexts and environments over discursive and ideological conceptions of materiality. This turn toward the ontological and embodied has rapidly expanded over the past twenty years, with numerous scholars now offering new materialist, postcritical, ecological, computational, and digital perspectives on rhetoric that privilege concepts such as affect, circulation, and assemblage over more traditional rhetorical terminology.It is in response to this tension between standard rhetorical perspectives and materialist rhetorical approaches that we can appreciate the interventions of S. Scott Graham’s recent book, Where’s the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. Rejecting the view that the materialist turns in rhetorical studies (particularly rhetorical new materialisms [hereafter referred to as RNM] and computational rhetoric) have left the discipline more fragmented and less capable of defending a unified perspective on rhetoric, Graham believes it is possible to generate a new unified theory that can affirm the lines of scholarly influence that have given rise to RNM (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “right branch”) as well as the more traditional lines of scholarly influence that have led to a formulation of rhetoric as “symbolic action” (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “left branch”). To accomplish this task, Graham argues that we should avoid the tendency to view RNM as “other” to traditional narratives about rhetoric and, instead, consider how these latter perspectives are compatible with the former. Much like unified field theories in physics that seek to bridge older perspectives on general relativity with newer perspectives on quantum mechanics (e.g., string theory and quantum loop gravity), Graham believes it is possible to achieve similar results in rhetorical studies by approaching standard rhetorical perspectives from the ontological viewpoints enabled by RNM.What makes Graham’s angle on this claim particularly unique is his premise that a proto-new materialist perspective has underpinned some of the most influential left branch approaches to rhetoric all along. While most rhetoricians start from the present when introducing concepts associated with RNM, Graham, following historically informed thinkers such as Scot Barnett, Debra Hawhee, and Thomas Rickert, demonstrates that there is a line of thinking about “symbolic action” as “situated action” that goes back to the relational approach to metaphysics put forward by philosopher Henri Bergson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, as Graham argues, if we begin with Bergson’s relational ontology, rather than the postmodernist and social constructivist philosophies that (explicitly and implicitly) shaped interpretations of rhetoric’s left branch during the second half of the twentieth century, we do not “need to re-engineer rhetoric” to fit the latest trends of RNM (41). From Graham’s perspective, many standard rhetorical perspectives have been hospitable toward new materialism from the outset. To appreciate this fact, we simply need to recuperate the Bergsonian legacy that informs this tradition.To make a case for this Bergsonian approach to rhetoric, the first main chapter of Graham’s book (chapter 2) engages in detail with the work of Kenneth Burke. As a crucial founder of the symbolic action paradigm, Graham believes that if he can show the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thought, he can, in turn, demonstrate how scholarship informed by Burke is also influenced by Bergson. To trace the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thinking, Graham focuses on Burke’s early work, especially Permanence and Change. In contrast to Burke’s later writings (e.g., A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and Language as Symbolic Action), which have been crucial to interpreting him as a theorist of symbolic action, Graham argues that Permanence and Change is directly indebted to a Bergsonian process philosophy that emphasizes the rhetoricity of situations. For the Burke of Permanence and Change (which Graham calls Original Bergsonian Burke [OBB]), there is no ontological or epistemological gap between symbolic action and material situations. Instead, symbolic practices and the situations that underpin such practices (e.g., environmental ecologies, social ecologies, digital ecologies, etc.) can all be conceived immanently, as nested complex dynamic systems that reveal motives toward reality. Hence, according to Graham, available in the writings of OBB is a Bergsonian ontology that emphasizes relational processes all the way down and rejects any Cartesian dualism (or Kantian correlationism) between nature and culture and things and words. For OBB, which is also the Burke Debra Hawhee focuses on most extensively in her book Moving Bodies, symbolic action is the effect rather than the cause of material processes of becoming, and rhetoric is the act of responding to these material processes in a satisfying way that is always itself creative and inventive.After offering a novel way to think about Burke and his materialist contributions to rhetoric, chapter 3 of Graham’s text turns to Carolyn Miller’s highly influential essay “Genre as Social Action” (originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1984). As her piece is deeply influenced by Permanence and Change, as well as the writings of Austrian philosopher Alfred Schutz, Graham believes that rhetoricians can also read Miller’s formulation of genre as presupposing a Bergsonian ontology. While Miller does not mention Bergson in her essay, Graham argues that by appreciating the influence of Bergson on Burke and Schutz, it is possible to see that Bergson has indirectly influenced Miller’s account of genre. Graham argues that rhetoricians can also appreciate the link to Bergson in terms of how Miller’s project explicitly rejects “modernist materialism and the postmodern fetishization of discourse” (90). For Miller, the situations that produce genres—as repeated patterns of discourse—are not mechanistic and mechanical but active and dynamic processes that sediment through time (what Bergson calls duration). For Graham, then, the resources for interpreting Miller as “in some ways, the [discipline’s] original rhetorical new materialist” are already at play within her text (90). If we simply expand Miller’s understanding of situation so that, like OBB, it accounts for patterning and structuration not only at the social level but also at the flattened ontological level of movement and becoming, then Miller’s Genre as Social Action (GASA) framework can be reconceptualized in terms of a new materialist method that Graham calls Genre as Process (GAP). Whereas GASA conceives of genres as abstract nouns that emerge out of stable social patterns, GAP emphasizes genre-ing, “[t]he processes of structuring activity that occurs in situational hierarchies and guides situated action” (73). A GAP approach also helps realize Miller’s recent call for deeper engagement with new media technologies. As dynamic structures that are always entangled with their larger contexts and environments, new media technologies, such as Twitter, are best approached through a GAP framework that can appreciate the way these technologies repattern the norms of genre (e.g., letter to the editor genre on Twitter vs. traditional letter to the editor genre). Approaching GASA as GAP, then, allows rhetoricians to conceptualize genre in terms of dynamic patterns of circulation that are continually predisposed toward change and entropy. While effective genre deployment, like Burke’s rhetoric, requires kairotic responsiveness (or what Graham, borrowing from Whitehead, calls satisfaction), this situated responsiveness (especially in digital contexts) is itself inventive and, thus, continuous with the patterns of circulation that makes genre itself possible.Chapter 4 of Graham’s book concludes the conceptual portion of his project. In this chapter, Graham argues that a GAP framework can enrich not only traditional rhetorical (left branch) perspectives but also RNM. While Graham identifies as a new materialist rhetorician who favors the ontological turn in rhetorical studies, he believes that part of what makes the GAP framework valuable is its tendency to move RNM back toward a study of “the recurring experiences of practicing rhetors” (122). Too often, Graham argues, advocates of RNM adopt a “zoom-out” (distributed agency) perspective that makes it challenging to locate rhetorical agents’ strategic, situated practices. A GAP approach, by contrast, returns to the situated rhetor without rendering their agency discrete, atomistic, or self-contained. By conceptualizing rhetorical agency as the accomplishment of “structuring structures” that produce performatively enacted boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, GAP enables both a “zoom-out” and “zoom-in” approach that can account for the rhetorical strategies that satisfy particular human situations and exigencies. Graham’s framework, thus, not only improves traditional rhetorical perspectives by making them more process-oriented but also enriches RNM approaches by making them more suited to analyze rhetorical practices and discourses.The remainder of Graham’s book is a sampling of case studies that apply the GAP framework to cultural artifacts. In chapter 5, Graham discusses the qualitative research he produced studying the work of Brandon, a graphic designer who consults with various companies to create novel digital products. Graham argues that the novel digital products that Brandon produces for these companies can be understood through a GAP framework. Across his consulting work, Brandon must demonstrate an ongoing sensitivity to the genre constraints of various situations (that are ecological, social, and digital) to effectively satisfy his clients and consumers—a practice Graham calls “fit foraging.” Graham argues that a clear example of this approach to “fit foraging” is the holiday e-card video game that Brandon produced for the Ryzex Corporation (a UPC scanner manufacturer). After being asked by Ryzex to create a novel holiday e-card that could satisfy the company’s various clients, “Brandon designed a shooting-gallery Flash game that used Ryzex UPC scanners as ranged weapons and barcode-marked boxes as appropriate targets” (126). According to Graham, this shooting gallery game was an excellent example of fit foraging because it combined the genres of the holiday e-card, shooting gallery games, and Ryzex’s unique brand identity to produce a novel outcome.In chapter 6, Graham turns his attention to scholarship on computational rhetoric. Focusing largely on his own work deploying content-analytic methods, Graham argues that these approaches work through an ongoing dialectic between intuition, which he defines as “an experiential approach to metaphysical inquiry” (139), and abstraction. This Bergsonian framing is valuable, Graham argues, because it locates practices of quantification in a GAP framework that understands data as “aggregations of intuitions rendered symbolically so that the patterns, abstracted for the local sites of situated action, become more clearly visible” (149). Hence, for Graham, computational rhetoric should be approached not as “other” to more traditional rhetorical perspectives but as a distinct genre of rhetorical inquiry that is compatible with his larger GAP framework. Graham’s insights in this chapter also have important implications for scholarship centered on the rhetoric of science. Like content analytic methods, scientific inquiry can be understood generally as a process of abstracting the intuitive and forging a fit with material reality through embodied experimentation. Graham’s Bergsonian approach to the rhetoric of science is, thus, compatible with scholars, such as Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, without needing to draw extensively on their distinct science and technology studies vocabulary. If we simply start with a Bergsonian relational ontology, Graham argues, all rhetorical practices emerge out of the nexus between intuition, the patterns of stabilization (or duration) that result from intuition, and the processes of symbolic abstraction that attempt to provisionally capture intuition and duration in a satisfying way.In chapter 7, Graham returns to a more specific case study that deals with the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Arguing that the Trump moment poses a crisis to traditional studies of presidential genre, Graham claims that a GASA framework can help make sense of Trump’s success as a rhetor. Graham’s method for analyzing Trump’s rhetoric works at two registers. First, Graham shares the results of a quantitative study he conducted to test the widely held conviction that “the 2016 presidential primary [featuring Donald Trump was] . . . more negative . . . [than] prior campaign cycles” (165). Contrary to popular perception, Graham shows that his study reveals that a similar level of negativity characterized previous primary debates and that there is no stark difference. Graham then zooms in on the specific rhetorical strategies enacted by Trump during the primary debates, focusing in particular on his infamous exchange with Marco Rubio about hand (penis) size. Graham’s main argument here is that Trump’s communication during this exchange (and others) can be appreciated in terms of a Laconic rhetoric genre that “leverages the powerful organizing structures of reality TV and Twitter flame wars to supplant the traditional genre-ing processes of political oratory” (176). Graham argues, furthermore, that this same Laconic genre did not work when Rubio deployed it because his situated responsiveness did not align with “the media apparatuses that supported . . . [Trump’s] rhetoric” (176). Graham’s case study in this chapter, thus, shows how a GAP approach to presidential genre, especially when paired with computational rhetoric, can reveal illuminating insights about rhetors. While a historical perspective on negativity in presidential primary debates cannot capture, on its own, the qualities that made the Trump presidency unique, Graham’s GAP framework is able to locate the specific “structuring structures” that made Trump such a powerful contemporary rhetor.Chapter 8 concludes Graham’s text by recapping key theses and offering a glossary that defines key terms. My summary sense of the key takeaway is that Graham offers scholars a new materialist perspective on genre (GAP) that can account for the diverse material structures that pattern symbolic meaning in historically specific contexts. Effective responsiveness to this new materialist conception of genre works in terms of Whiteheadian satisfaction, or fit foraging, which I would describe as an ontologically situated enactment of kairos (similar to the account offered by Debra Hawhee in Bodily Arts). In addition to providing a recap of his project and clearly defining key terms in the book, the concluding chapter of Graham’s text notes some of the book’s limitations. Some of the critical limitations raised here include a need for more careful engagement with cultural rhetorics (i.e., rhetorics that study the performance of identity and embodied subjectivity), applying GAP to old media in addition to new media, and considering GAP more directly in relation to sound studies.While Graham does a good job acknowledging the limits of his project, I’d like to conclude this review by discussing what I perceive as a few more limitations. First, in addition to engaging more directly with cultural rhetorics, Graham’s text could benefit from a more robust theorization of power and its effect on the patterning of genre. For example, while I agree that new materialism should explore the processes that produce the situated boundary of the human, I believe, following the interventions of scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Armond Towns, that what constitutes a “fitting” response within this domain is overdetermined by structures of racialization (as well as patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.). Graham’s work does not discuss the boundary of the human in this way, and his case studies seem to overlook the problem of positionality in relation to genre. It would be interesting, as part of Graham’s ontological account of genre formation, if he considered how genres emerge out of historically specific patterns of exclusion and bordering.Second, while I find Graham’s advocacy of “zoom-in” approaches to RNM compelling, I feel that his book could engage more with the nonhuman. Most of Graham’s case studies foreground the materiality of new media, but they say little about concrete extrahuman processes of mattering. I’d like to hear more from Graham about the role of physical ecosystems and nonhuman entities (like plants, animals, and even inorganic matter) in the dynamic materialization of genres. It seems that from an RNM perspective, something as banal as the energy used to power new media technologies would play a constitutive role in genre formation.Finally, there is the question of whether turning to Bergson can resolve rhetoric’s crisis of disciplinary identity. Bergson, after all, is first and foremost a philosopher, and Graham’s project could have benefitted from more argumentative scaffolding to support the case that Bergson was doing philosophy from a rhetorical vantage. Perhaps if Graham returned to some of the earlier disciplinary debates over rhetoric and philosophy that occurred between the late 1960s and early 1980s, he could locate more commonplaces for exploring these tensions and justifying why Bergson’s relational metaphysics should be conceived as an ontological approach to rhetoric.Limitations notwithstanding, Graham should be praised for this important contribution to the discipline. Graham demonstrates a masterful understanding of RNM, computational rhetoric, and thinkers associated with the left branch of rhetoric. And his ability to synthesize all this work into a unified theory is very impressive.I look forward to reading new scholarship in genre studies that builds on this text, and I look forward to following the theoretical debates it prompts with respect to the compatibility between RNM and traditional rhetorical perspectives. I also look forward to future scholarship that situates Graham’s process-oriented account of rhetoric in relation to a larger historical context and disciplinary genealogy. As scholars such as Debra Hawhee, Thomas Rickert, Scot Barnet, and Mari Lee Mifsud have all shown (at least indirectly), perspectives that resonate with the process philosophy of Bergson can be found in Greek antiquity as well as the Homeric period that predates Greek antiquity. More work should be done to connect these historical threads so that rhetoric’s ontological relationship to process, change, movement, and indeterminacy can be fully appreciated.

ABSTRACT This article builds on the scholarship on violence at the nexus of rhetoric, philosophy, decoloniality, and human rights discourse to theorize what it calls a rhetoric of everyday violence. Moving beyond the focus on the politics of representation in slow violence, it brings a transnational feminist rhetorical analytic and a focus on the politics of recognition to illegible temporal violence, arguing that a rhetoric of everyday violence can help recalibrate human rights discourse to recognize temporal and gendered violence as human rights violations.

Rhetorical scholars have turned to various new materialist frameworks to shift the discipline’s historically anthropocentric focus and fully engage matter’s rhetoricity. While all such frameworks attempt to challenge “the anthropocentric assumption that nonhuman matter is intrinsically passive or non-agential and thus external to or separable from (human) meaning,” Figures of Entanglement enters this burgeoning conversation by centering the unique contributions of Karen Barad (xi, x). Readers may recognize this collection from a 2016 special issue of Review of Communication. Yet, with a new foreword by editors Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan and an afterword by Laurie Gries, this collection makes Barad’s distinct approach to matter’s rhetoricity even more apparent, underscoring its fruitful potential for new materialist rhetorics invested in ethical, political transformation.In the book’s foreword Gamble and Hanan differentiate Barad’s performative new materialism from “vital” as well as what they refer to as “negative” new materialisms to show the generative potential of Barad’s framework and the notion of entanglement (x). Other new materialisms tend to be “inclusionary”—add matter and stir—and fail to complicate “the human” itself and its differences (xiv, xi). First, vital and negative new materialisms maintain a distinction between being and knowing, allowing humans to emerge with a unique capacity to “objectively observe and know the existence of something essential, determinate, and unchanging about reality that precedes and remains unaffected by both its own activities and our observations of it” (xi). On the contrary, Barad’s performative approach suggests that “no aspect of reality—including human thought, meaning, and observation—is in any sense external to matter or ever remains entirely unchanged by matter’s ongoing performances” (x). Here, humans are not “outside” of observation, but all observation “human or otherwise” co-constitutes what is observed (xi). Second, failing to interrogate “the human” in an attempt to observe matter’s vitality is an ethical flaw that makes other approaches less capable of grappling with difference: they have been charged with “erasing associations between race, gender, and matter” and (re)producing a homogenizing, “Western-colonialist notion of humanness” (xiv). In contrast, Barad’s is a “thoroughly relational,” performative new materialism (1).Barad’s concept of “entanglement” draws attention to the indeterminacy of matter and meaning, but it is accompanied by an ethical imperative to examine how difference, human or otherwise, is produced and the implications of power imbalances that arise through these enactments. For Barad, the notion of entanglement does not dissolve difference; difference is what matters. Indeed, they give us a way of thinking about how performative intra-actions produce difference through material-discursive practices, or apparatuses—differences that may be expected but are not inevitable. Rhetorical scholars are therefore invited to interrogate the production of boundaries that cause harm and reconfigure them, rather than assume the discreteness of boundaries from the start. Gamble and Hanan thus make a convincing case for how Barad’s work may contribute to important scholarship in decolonial and critical rhetorics for which vital and negative new materialisms are less equipped.Gamble and Hanan utilize the introduction to show how Barad’s performative new materialism both “supports and affirms” rhetorical materialism, or rhetoric’s materiality, and enriches it (5). Ushered in by Michael Calvin McGee, “standard” rhetorical materialism worked to challenge the centuries-old debate about rhetoric’s secondary, supplementary status vis-à-vis philosophy by recognizing rhetoric as part of a “shifting and dynamic material history” (6). Building upon this view, Ronald Walter Greene utilizes Foucault’s notion of the apparatus to demonstrate how even the “material history” McGee called our attention to is itself “produced by apparatuses”—history is not “outside” of meaning (6). Instead, rhetoric’s materiality is a “publicity effect” produced through technologies of rhetoric and intersecting power relations. Gamble and Hanan suggest that Barad’s framework expands this view by demonstrating how “matter itself is, in fact, the fully tangible condition of possibility for human and more-than-human experience and rhetorical meaning.” This extends Greene’s notion of apparatuses and publicity effects to recognize that such effects produced are “not reducible to an exclusively human domain of apparatuses and technologies” (7). Gamble and Hanan demonstrate how this insight undergirds the entangled reality of humans and nonhumans and the imperative that scholars grapple with this entanglement seriously if we wish to address the power imbalances that persist from normative, taken-for-granted hierarchies. Barad’s unique approach, they argue, has the capacity to shore up power imbalances across all matter and challenge the Western tradition of human exceptionalism—a necessary stance given “the economic and ecological crises currently unfolding” (11). With Barad, then, rhetoric’s engagement with the politics of materiality is enriched.In their own ways, each contribution in this collection analyzes what the editors coin “figures of entanglement,” such as disciplinary “turns,” capitalism, breast cancer, or rhetoric itself, to challenge binary ways of being and knowing. “Figures of entanglement” offers a way to account for issues that matter for critical rhetorical scholars, such as political transformation and power differentials among humans, while also accounting for matter’s rhetoricity (x). Though there are many insights one may glean from this collection, I note three for this review: entangled genealogies that rethink rhetoric’s diversity and origin story, diffraction as a concept-metaphor driving rhetorical reading strategies, and political theorizations of matter’s rhetoricity.Thomas Rickert and Nathan Stormer offer ways to rethink rhetoric’s origin story and rhetoric’s diversity through methodological approaches that emphasize entanglement and relationality. In “Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic,” Rickert defines rhetoric as “an incremental, bottom-up achievement” that “coalesces out of multiple cultural, material, and semiotic strands that are mutually entangled and coevolving” (89). To explain rhetoric’s emergence as dependent upon both sociocultural and material conditions, Rickert takes readers to the Paleolithic caves with an approach he calls a materialist historiographic method. This method allows us to “look for strikingly different explanations of modern humanity’s emergence, and in turn, rhetoric’s development” by considering “rhetoricity in other forms of evidence, especially material traces” (94, 89). As his analysis shows, cave art does not so much “represent something” as perform it; shamans could draw upon spiritual experiences, the caves’ darkness and sounds, along with environmental materials, to perform “a theater of the sacred” (103). In effect, Rickert provides a method for rhetoricians to attune themselves to rhetoric in a way that challenges its emphasis on oral and written disciplinary history and considers its “emergent capacity,” which has always already been ambient (103).In “Rhetoric’s Diverse Materiality: Polythetic Ontology and Genealogy,” Stormer enters the conversation of rhetoric’s development from a different route by invoking polythesis as heuristic. Beginning with the point that “what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B,” Stormer seeks to offer a way of understanding “rhetoric’s verdurous materiality” as diverse—“ontologically one and many” (35, 38, 36). This complicates the “Big rhetoric” debate by showing how rhetoric is polythetic: entangled and emergent, in a processual state of “becoming-together” (40). As such, Stormer shows that what matters is not what is rhetorical so much as “how a specific potential for discursivity, realizable in many forms, inheres in dynamics afforded by a nexus” (48). This suggests that entities are entangled (a nexus) and, through their relationships, an entity may emerge as rhetorical (rhetoricity, or rhetorical capacity). For him, rhetoricity does not have an essence, nor does rhetoric have but one genealogy; genealogies themselves are already “coconstitutive acts” (43). Engaging Barad’s notion of “entangled genealogies” and Foucault’s work to offer “genealogies of rhetorics,” Stormer illuminates the sense in which rhetoric as a figure of entanglement has always been “otherwise” (41, 48). “What genealogies of rhetoric’s capacities produce,” he concludes, “is working knowledge of different strains of rhetoric as they have emerged and, perhaps, conditions for their transformation” (50). A Baradian approach to poststructuralist genealogy thus allows him to answer his central question of how we might talk of rhetoric and its genealogies as diverse (35). That is, rhetoric’s genealogies, plural, show not a linear unfolding but a series of historical appearances, never erased, never superseded.As Gamble and Hanan explain, “diffraction” is a useful term for a methodology that can read such figures of entanglement to consider how difference is produced through intra-actions. As I understand it, diffraction is a concept-metaphor that recognizes the intra-action of an apparatus—what Barad calls a measuring agency—and what it seeks to observe as a boundary-making practice that produces difference effects. Such intra-actions can be made visible by a rhetorical critic through a diffractive reading strategy when a critic puts in conversation two or more concepts to produce new insights. By constellating two concepts, for instance, one can show how both are entangled—inseparable, though made different through intra-actions with various apparatuses. A central function, then, of a diffractive reading strategy for rhetorical critics is to observe how apparatuses, as Gamble and Hanan explain, co-constitute whatever is being observed (xi).In “Entangled Exchange: Verkehr and Rhetorical Capitalism,” Matthew Bost diffracts Marx and Engels’s concept of verkehr (“intercourse”) in The German Ideology through Barad’s “notion of intra-active entanglement” to produce new insights about the relationship between historical and “new” materialisms (72). Reading verkehr diffractively through Barad’s concept of entanglement, Bost argues, “allows a refinement” of Marx/Engels’s discussion of production and intercourse insofar as both become understood as inextricably linked, though “cut apart” as they intra-act with larger apparatuses (78). Specifically, Bost suggests that it is “humanist discourses” that help sustain “power relations under contemporary capitalism” (82) insofar as such discourses inevitably and necessarily create boundaries around the very concept “human.” Therefore, he argues, “Verkehr, in conversation with Barad’s work, reframes class and class struggle as figures of ethical entanglement that work against the insulation of certain bodies from precarity at the expense of others” (83). A diffractive reading thus illuminates verkehr’s contemporary relevance and “common ground” with a posthumanist view of capitalism as entangled relations, “providing rhetorical scholars with additional tools for theorizing capitalist power outside a civic humanist frame,” which is to say, to understand how the boundaries which determine how value is produced and extracted is invariably the product of agential cuts among a confluence of materialities—cuts that are historical and for which we are ethically accountable (71, 76). Ultimately, Bost’s work challenges the dichotomy of new materialism and historical materialism: over and against, say, a comparative approach (“is new materialism better or worse than historical materialism?”) or analogical reasoning (“is it similar or different from historical materialism?”), Bost asks, instead, how a diffractive reading of Marx and Engels through Barad enables Marx and Engels to “productively speak to those aspects of contemporary global capitalism that Barad and other scholars of the nonhuman have critiqued” (73).In Diane Marie Keeling’s chapter, “Of Turning and Tropes,” she engages in a diffractive reading of disciplinary “turns” in the centennial issue of Quarterly Journal of Speech, examining how tropes of classical physics and dialectical negation collude with neoliberalism in the modern academy to produce disciplinary “turns” as different. As Keeling makes clear, a concept “cannot persist without a set of material–discursive practices—an apparatus—continually reproducing its existence” (54). She argues that neoliberalism, which “values capitalist techniques of accumulation and growth,” acts as an apparatus of academic publishing through classical physics tropes wherein “time is linear; the field is an empirical path; turns are discrete, sequentially patterned, and enable reflection” (54, 56). For instance, her analysis of one contribution shows how its emphasis on “quantification and accumulation . . . attunes us to neoliberalism” (59): This passage exemplifies many of the entangled tropes of the neoliberal constitution of the turn: a “provenance,” which is a place or source of origin; a subject “Raymie McKerrow” who is the creator of an “initial formulation”; a separate object “critical rhetoric” that set a trajectory for “others who were following”; a citation count “178” quantifying value; and credit for “an entire journal” where more research like his can be published. (58)As a corrective to this linear progression of discrete entities, she posits that “tropes of quantum physics can assist in reconditioning a performative orientation to discourse and history” so that we might consider how “turns move recursively through intra-activity, rather than sequentially through interaction” (55). Keeling thus reconfigures turns as “entangled diffractions, indistinct, unpredictable, and always reconfigurable through changes to their apparatus” (55). Reading disciplinary “turns” diffractively—“cultivating a rhetorical physics”—is what allows Keeling to challenge neoliberal progress narratives that would otherwise push us to push for the “new” without considering “turns’” relationality (63). Together, Keeling and Bost demonstrate how Barad’s concept of diffraction can offer a methodological approach to rhetorical analysis that produces insightful ways of engaging figures of entanglements to challenge neoliberalism in the academy or capitalism itself.Annie Hill’s chapter, “Breast Cancer’s Rhetoricity: Bodily Border Crisis and Bridge to Corporeal Solidarity,” offers an astute read of Barad’s agential realism to think through how the materialization of a tumor is never not inextricably linked with multiple apparatuses, particularly the discourses of racialization. This chapter is a go-to for critical scholars interested in how one might do rhetorical criticism in a posthumanist, new materialist vein while also clearing space for a radical politics of solidarity no longer constrained by rigid identity categories. As agential realism challenges the language/matter binary, among many other binaries like human/nonhuman, Hill suggests that “We can better grasp the meaning and matter of disease by tracking how it destabilizes the language/matter divide, rather than erecting this binary before analysis gets off the ground” (18–19). Not only does Hill use breast cancer as a figure of entanglement to illustrate this destabilization, but she also furthers the political implications of what she names transmaterial intra-actionality: “Incorporating the Baradian intra” to build upon feminist theories of intersectionality, writes Hill, “means forcefully underscoring the indissociability and coemergence of identity, power, and oppression while announcing that this analytic includes and exceeds the human” (25). This move underscores how “binary codes of being” are violent, our bodies are not impermeable or “closed,” and “objects” like breast cancer that we have bounded as discrete entities by language do, in fact, emerge from the conditions of rhetoricity (19). We need a new theoretical orientation that allows us to challenge these seemingly sedimented boundaries, and Hill makes a compelling case for how agential realism is one that can offer a very different starting point for transmaterial, transformative politics. Hill’s contribution centers the political implications of what she names “corporeal solidarity” so that we can better account for and “understand how we live and die with disease . . . who and what receives life support, and why” (31).Finally, Laurie E. Gries offers the collection’s afterword, which underscores the productive potential of Baradian new materialism and offers potential lines of inquiry for future scholarship. For her, Figures of Entanglement offers insight into how Barad can help rhetoricians build theory, reimagine disciplinary histories, and invent new approaches to research inquiries. Yet, there is still plenty on the horizon for continual engagement with Barad’s work. First, Gries prompts readers to consider how, “weaved together with new materialisms,” Indigenous philosophies could generate a “powerful analytic” for our field (115). Indeed, as many scholars have already noted, there are striking parallels with Barad’s onto-ethico-epistemology of agential realism and Indigenous thought, and entangling both could provide important insight and contribute to decolonial work in rhetorical studies (115). Second, scholars could build upon the research methods advanced in this collection and offer additional ones that might “productively intervene in the phenomena we aim to study” (116). For example, Gries urges scholars to take Barad’s notion of entangled intra-actions to forge more “collective engagement,” whether scholarly, pedagogically, or through local activism (116). How, she asks, can new materialist-informed research “help us work collectively to address some of our pressing cultural and rhetorical issues today?” (11)—issues that demand the kind of intellectual creativity that new materialist rhetorical work presents us with.Figures of Entanglement is ripe with potential for future rhetorical work, providing scholars with a rich array of theoretical insights and methodologies that all, in different ways, show the promise of Barad’s performative new materialism. This is a particularly compelling read for scholars who are interested in the entangled relationship between “new” and “old” materialisms and the capacity for more robust political engagement. Warranted critiques of new materialisms, broadly, ask about the consequence of fully engaging matter’s rhetoricity in a way that might obscure its social and political implications. Yet, this collection demonstrates the political potential of Barad’s framework for scholars who are committed to examining our entanglement with/in the world and how we might, as Gries writes, “productively intervene” (116). Though I have organized this review by the contributions I found most compelling, readers will no doubt find even more avenues to consider. Whatever readers may find, the that the editors about their to Barad’s work through it

Scale Theory embodies its title in every possible way. It offers both a deep dive into and a 10,000-foot view of scale, scalar thinking, and the role of scale in scientific inquiry. The subtitle, A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, is no less apt. Author Joshua DiCaglio blends insights from rhetoric, philosophy, literary studies, and mysticism to create a novel account of scalar thinking. In so doing, he weaves together detailed thought experiments, the work of Gregory Bateson, and Philip K. Dick’s account of an extraterrestrial communication he received while under the influence of anesthesia. Provocatively, Scale Theory treats these diverse intellectual resources as coequal contributors to an emerging theory of scale and scalar thinking. Within this nondisciplinary framework, the book is devoted to advancing two primary theses: (1) Notions of scale are undertheorized in science studies and related strands of new materialisms; and (2) Proper attention to questions of scale within these theoretical traditions should prompt a more thoughtful reconsideration of the merits of mystic holism. Ultimately, Scale Theory makes a compelling case for the first thesis and advances inquiry usefully in this area. With respect to the second thesis, DiCaglio refers to a certain academic “allergy” to holism (99), and I must confess I share this allergy. That said, I assume readers already predisposed favorably toward mystic holism are likely to find Scale Theory’s attention to the second thesis thoughtful and engaging.Scale Theory is organized into three distinct parts. Part 1, “Algorithms for a Theory of Scale,” presents three interrelated thought experiments that call upon readers to imagine themselves at various distances and vantage points with respect to several objects of interest. Part 1 is stylistically Wittgensteinian. Like the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2013) or Latour’s “Irreductions,” (1993), the thought experiments unfold as a series of numbered and nested propositions, each postulating or interrogating an emerging concept in DiCaglio’s theory of scale. Part 2, “Configurations for a Theory of Scale,” returns the reader to more familiar styles of prose, providing a sort of review of the relevant literature and its relationship to the insights of the thought experiments. Finally, part 3, “Rhetorical Technologies for a Theory of Scale,” reflects on the twin marginalizations of rhetoric and mysticism in mainstream Western academia and argues for a new embrace of disembodied inquiry.The aforementioned thought experiments of part 1 outline DiCaglio’s theories of scale, scalar thinking, and scalar analysis. The discussion makes extensive use of visual and cinematic metaphors to aid the reader’s consideration of scalar questions. Ultimately, DiCaglio posits that scale is a function of the relationship between the “‘being’ of phenomena” and “the one who is measuring” (8). He argues, therefore, that “scale functions at a level above ontology and epistemology: scale is a means of orienting yourself both to experience and the being of things” (8). In making this argument, Scale Theory reflects on a range of scientific practices that require gradients of scale. Microscopy, telescopy, and simulations all provide scientists with tools to escape the mundane scales of embodied human experience. DiCaglio argues that “science must always find itself grouping things together, speaking of species, types, systems, and so on which exist on a different logical type than the individual encounters that make up these groups” (41). The taxonomic activities of scientific practice require shifts in scale to account for kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera, species, and all manner of nonbiological analogs.Within this framework, scale functions as a sort of meta-ontology that allows objects to be provisionally identified and delineated. Echoing Bateson, DiCaglio argues that In order for any thing to be said to exist whatsoever, a differential must exist out of which a difference can be discerned. Every differential occurs on some scale at which a fluctuation or movement is able to make a difference. If one goes to a smaller scale, any given differential is no longer able to be used to register a difference. (51)Thus, any given object only exists at certain scales where differences can be said to make a difference, and any given object also ceases to be an object at higher or lower orders where the differences no longer make differences. DiCaglio leverages the notion of “stability” or “stabilization” to refer to an object’s coming into being at any given scale. The metaphor of photographic or cinematographic “resolution” underwrites DiCaglio’s thinking in this area. Objects stabilize when they resolve relative to an observer’s perspective. While I find this account of stability thoughtful and compelling, it is somewhat unfortunate that it is so beholden to visual metaphors. Humans engage the world through many different senses, and not all humans engage the world with all senses.With his foundational ontology of scale established, DiCaglio proceeds to introduce “scalar analysis,” an approach to reckoning with objects, stability, and systems. The exploration of scalar analysis centers on a series of nested thought experiences and most prominently on a root cause analysis of a disease. Through oscillating our perspective between the whole human body and DNA mutations, DiCaglio shows how the dialectic of “zoom level” and “resolution” can further the analysis of complex systems. This analysis is engaging in many ways but suffers somewhat when addressing temporality. Scale analysis wants to “freeze time” (75) as an initial step, but then finds time “unwittingly introduced” (79) a few pages later. Ultimately, an analysis of causality in complex systems will probably require intentionally attending to the temporal dimensions. In fairness, at one point DiCaglio intentionally maps time to space (68) in an effort to maintain the visual metaphors of zoom and resolution. Indexing time to space is a common move, of course, and will likely only alienate a few passing Bergsonians.While the thought experiments in part 1 offer a number of interesting insights about scalar thinking, it is a bit troublesome that they exist almost exclusively in a vacuum. Aside from the occasional supportive reference to Bateson, part 1 is largely citation free. However, the insights provided seem linked in many important ways to prior efforts to understand complex systems and questions of scale. This includes both the work cited in part 2 and striking (albeit unexplored) parallels between scalar stability and accounts of stabilizing processes in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. The Whitehead parallel is, perhaps, not surprising given Bateson’s engagement with Whitehead and subsequent influence on Scale Theory. Nevertheless, this seems like an important connection and a missed opportunity. I would have very much enjoyed reading a discussion of this connection and/or an exploration of the potential synergies and disagreements between Scale Theory and Marilyn Cooper’s (2019) adaptation of Whitehead and Bateson for rhetorical new materialisms.That said, part 2 engages substantively with much of the related literature on new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics to explore previous attempts to grapple with many of the same issues of scale and complex systems. In so doing, Scale Theory argues that prior efforts to address these issues are hindered by undue focus on embodiment and embodied epistemology (in the case of feminist new materialisms), an inappropriate ontological flattening of scale (in actor-network theory), and lack of attention to holism (in cybernetics). With respect to feminist new materialisms, Scale Theory is particularly critical of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. While I agree with DiCaglio that too much reliance on epistemology is a problem for some areas of new materialism, I am not sure epistemology is as prevalent in Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad 2007) as DiCaglio suggests. Furthermore, I ultimately agree with Annmarie Mol who compellingly argues that the primarily problems of (post)modern epistemology come from the ways it is rooted in perspectivalism (2003). Thus, given the inherent perspectivism of scale theory, the approach may well replicate some of the issues new materialists most wish to avoid when avoiding epistemology in the first place.DiCaglio’s critique of embodied situated knowledges is ultimately anchored in his penchant for holism. He argues that bodies are properties of individuals, and that they situate perspective in that individual, atomistic perspective. In so doing, he critiques Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge for its overreliance on bodies that only exist at certain scales. As he writes, In scalar views there is something like a transcendent view that moves away from the body itself (2.10–12)1, zeros out the perspective as “mine” (2.9), and dislocates any single perspectival configuration. Thus, when Haraway declares that “feminists don’t need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence” (579), we ought to hesitate. (134)Thus, to understand the universe, as DiCaglio hopes you will, is to shed your corporeal form and embrace some transcendental perspective. Again, my response to this is something like “yes and no.” I am on record agreeing that it is possible for a theory to be too embodied, although I don’t think this applies to Haraway. I have previously criticized some strains of affect theory for their excessive embrace of embodied experience (Graham 2016). Specifically, I argue that affect theory duplicates the problems of epistemology by positing a more authentic infralevel of embodied engagement that replicates the problematic perspectivalism on which (post)modern epistemology is built. The subject-object binary is replaced by a more privileged body-world binary. If this critique is correct (and I think it is), Scale Theory makes a similar error. Specifically, it inverts affect theory’s normative orientation, privileging instead a putatively “higher” level of unembodied binary engagement, a mind-universe binary, if you will.Scale Theory’s rejections of actor-network theory and cybernetics are similar in both tone and content to its rejections of situated knowledges. ANT and related strands of sociology and geography do not account for scale in quite the same way as Scale Theory’s opening thought experiments. Thus “this inability to handle scale confuses the terms at the outset” (162). Similarly, while cybernetics and systems theory have much to offer scale theory, they are ultimately treated as lacking since they don’t provide appropriate tools for appreciating the aggregation to unity. Channeling Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, DiCaglio argues that while systems theory is useful for understanding bodies as ecologies, additional scalar (and perhaps mystical) elements are needed to pivot from bodies as ecologies to an apparently necessary identification of our equal oneness with bacteria and Gaia (173). Ultimately, part 2’s criticisms of prior efforts to address questions of scale proceed as though part 1 has successfully persuaded the reader on the merits of mystic holism. Part 2 takes the insights of the opening thought experiments as true, and recounts how feminist new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics fail to live up to the putative promises of scalar thinking. This is a risky rhetorical move, because for readers who are not entirely persuaded by the work of part 1, part 2 will come across as an exercise in somewhat uncharitable reading practices.Stepping away from the mysticism and my admitted allergies, Scale Theory also provides some thoughtful considerations on implications for rhetoric of science and science studies more broadly. As DiCaglio notes, “Because scale occurs outside of human experience, it must be re-presented at [human] scale. Inevitably, its representations will be partial and distorted” (183). Recognizing this fact points toward real challenges for scientific inquiry and scientific rhetoric which strives to account for notions of scale that cannot be contained at the scale of human representation. DiCaglio interrogates these challenges through an analysis of different modes of “specification” (193). When discussing specification, scholars of science studies most often consider what he dubs “ontological specifications”—that is, descriptions of objects, processes, and observed reality. We also (somewhat less regularly) attend to “epistemological specifications”—descriptions of knowing practices, sometimes methodology. But, since within scalar thinking, objects only exist at certain specific scales, neither ontological nor epistemological specification are sufficient to describe scientific activity. “Scalar specification” then becomes an essential additional rhetoric for both science and science studies. But scalar specifications are not without challenges.Here, DiCaglio draws our attention to “scale tricks” (228). Since scale must be re-presented, scalar thinking and scalar specifications may mislead readers through rendering scale invisible, presuming it infinite, or blending scales without acknowledging that they have been blended. For DiCaglio, transcending scale tricks is a question of accountability (231). Authors of re-presentations of experience have a duty to be consistent and precise in their scalar specifications. Precise specifications disrupt the potential confusions of scale tricks by making the scale intelligible, reminding readers or auditors that there is a scale, and preventing distortion through blending of scales. In some ways, DiCaglio’s theory of scalar specifications is a more encompassing version of the ethics of information design. Properly labeled x and y axes are critical to effective and ethical communication of charted data. Scale Theory reminds us that data need not be displayed graphically to be subject to scale and to require scalar specifications for interpretation.Part 3 of Scale Theory is devoted to the cosmos seeing itself. That is, it ruminates on possibilities for transcending corporality so as to achieve a perspective that all but transcends scale itself. DiCaglio does not precisely recommend specific techniques to achieve this transcendence, but he does point toward accounts of others that prominently feature hallucinogens, meditative practices, and methodical introspection. I will admit I find myself somewhat mystified by the mysticism that closes Scale Theory. Ultimately, I am pragmatic about theory. For me the utility of a theory lies in what work it does for inquiry, and that work needs to be indexed to a particular task at hand. Scale Theory might, perhaps, be considered pragmatic in this way, but the overriding task at hand is to understand the oneness of the universe. My scholarly aims are rather more modest. I put theory to work in an effort to address much more local tasks. As such, what I can take from Scale Theory for my own work may be more limited than what other readers can take. If you lack my allergy to holism and see the intersection of rhetoric, philosophy, and drug-assisted disembodied consciousness as a potential pathway to universal understanding, then this may well be the book for you. Even so, if your aims are somewhat more modest (like mine), then there is still much of interest in the pages of Scale Theory. DiCaglio adds important new dimensions of analysis to new materialisms and related science studies. Readers might take these dimensions as intended, but I would argue that they are also flexible enough to be read more synergistically alongside Cooper and Whitehead or Barad, Mol, and Haraway. And even if you reject new materialisms entirely, Scale Theory compellingly argues that rhetoricians of science would do well to attend, in more detail, to scalar specifications and the problem of scale tricks.

For Megha Sharma SehdevNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. —W. B. Yeats, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”Violence is a limit formation. It is neither reducible to a brute fact nor is it ineffably ethereal. To write about violence, then, is to confront—if only as disavowed remainder—critical limits, no less of the writer than of the writing itself. Fewer subjects have proven as confounding for philosophy and rhetoric, this journal’s primary charge. In both its general particulars and its specific manifolds, violence nonpluses philosophical commonplaces, upends rhetorical tropologies.Philosophy imagines itself mediator to reality’s arche, the bedrock of being. Ancient Greek philosophy sought to distinguish necessity from contingency, essence from accident, dialectic from rhetoric, logic from fallacy. Those who took up this intellectual tradition came to conceptualize violence as first and foremost a question of “nature”—more specifically, those marked out by nature to rule (propertied male citizens) and those marked out by nature for subjection (the enslaved, women, nonhuman animals). In the early modern context of European philosophy, still, despite its pretensions, deeply indebted to this Mediterranean legacy, the canonical lexicon of sensemaking centered on legitimacy and its conceptual appurtenances of sovereignty, will, and rights.Strikingly, it is in the opposed registers of analytic and continental philosophy that violence’s cataphilosophic figuration appears most salient. Consider, for example, one such famous symposium convened in the analytic journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, as narrated by political philosopher Michael Walzer: In an earlier issue of Philosophy & Public Affairs there appeared a symposium on the rules of war which was actually (or at least more importantly) a symposium on another topic. The actual topic was whether or not a man can ever face, or ever has to face, a moral dilemma, a situation where he must choose between two courses of action both of which it would be wrong for him to undertake. Thomas Nagel worriedly suggested that this could happen and that it did happen whenever someone was forced to choose between upholding an important moral principle and avoiding some looming disaster. R. B. Brandt argued that it could not possibly happen, for there were guidelines we might follow and calculations we might go through which would necessarily yield the conclusion that one or the other course of action was the right one to undertake in the circumstances (or that it did not matter which we undertook). R. M. Hare explained how it was that someone might wrongly suppose that he was faced with a moral dilemma: sometimes, he suggested, the precepts and principles of an ordinary man, the products of his moral education, come into conflict with injunctions developed at a higher level of moral discourse. But this conflict is, or ought to be, resolved at the higher level; there is no real dilemma. (1973, 160–61)Analytic political philosophy’s resolute disavowals could not be here better splayed. Morality is construed as all-encompassing. The political is not so much effaced as it is rendered derivative to a foundational drama of will, obligation, choice. Analytic philosophy’s oft-preened claim to clear, transparent, terse style proves constitutive of its desire to contain, if it cannot altogether moralize away violence.Where analytic philosophy conceives of violence as an object, its limits defined by morality’s handmaiden, the “well-ordered society” (Rawls 2001, 8), continental philosophy conjures a sublime violence that shatters and transfigures normative violence. Walter Benjamin posits a binary opposition between mythical and divine violence: “If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates, if the former threatens, the latter strikes, if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood” (1978, 297). The mysterium tremendum of Benjaminian divine violence looms transcendent, fathomless, sublime when posed against analytic philosophy’s persnickety morality. But a violence imagined as expiatory, redemptive, and cleansing is still a morality aestheticized. Benjamin’s prose can be surrealistic, by turns slashing and propulsive, slanted and opaque. In its heady movement from repulsion to fascination and back again to repulsion, he is exemplar as few before or after him of the very limits of sustained thought on violence.Rhetorical criticism, for its part, has perfected elaborate apotropaic and piacular rites to govern its discourse on violence. The Aristotelian account of the rhetorical domain as that which is concerned with persuasion, contingency, and audience, “the discourse of the many”—as distinct from dialectic, necessity, and philosophy, “the discourse of the few”—gained axiomatic assent in modern institutional rhetoric. In his influential, field-defining article, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Lloyd F. Bitzer holds that rhetoric is mainly concerned with persuasive utterances. For Bitzer, the realm of necessity is nonrhetorical: “An exigence which cannot be modified is not rhetorical; thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed—death, winter, and some natural disasters, for instance—are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical” (1968, 6).One discerns the shape of rhetorical studies’ recoil from any serious reckoning with violence in Bitzer’s staking of the field to suasory discourse. In such an account, violence is nonrhetorical, nay, antirhetorical. Other rhetoricians have departed from Bitzer’s conclusions, though still beholden to many of his premises. In a recent special issue of the journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Jay Childers argues that inasmuch as “rhetoric is human inducement,” (2022, 4) then it follows that rhetorical violence is that which functions as a form of human inducement.Childers anticipates the objection that his definition fails to account for rhetorical inducements from nonhuman phenomena. Acknowledging that these exist, he nevertheless insists that “human inducement is worthy of its own area of study” (2022, 5). His response, however, begs the question in a manner characteristic of disciplinary justifications for research. For what is under contestation cannot be whether human inducement is worth study, but rather if a critic’s presuppositions foreclose insightful etiological routes of understanding; if their definitions naturalize the historical formations from which concepts are emergent; if their rhetorical style deadens imaginative and utopian leaps. Institutional rhetorical inquiry brings violence within its purview by defining violence as acts intended to transmit a message. But in doing so, it mystifies and naturalizes infrafigurations of violence entirely irreducible to communication—epochal ecological devastation; suppurating lesions wrought by imperial, colonial, and insurgent infrastructure; and, for that matter, gratuitous, irruptive, evental coups de force.Roiling beneath rhetorical studies’ monochrome prose—fewer disciplines are as given to the fetish of “effectiveness”—is a desire for a violence that is tractable. Necessity, however, cannot be wished away through compulsive recitations of contingency. This has always been true, perhaps, but it particularly cuts deeply in the epoch of the racial capitalocene. Here, it is foolhardy to be in denial. Racial capitalism necessarily leads to planetary destruction—its circuits of accumulation necessarily drive extinction; its circuits of reproduction necessarily engineer irreversible metabolic rifts; its circuits of exchange necessarily manufacture ruses of adaptation; its circuits of consumption necessarily stimulate toxic cascades. The upshot is just as ineluctable: any serious account of violence must, of necessity, imagine an insurgent abolition against racial capitalism.Analytic philosophy’s banal moralism, continental philosophy’s ecstatic messianism, rhetorical studies’ strategic instrumentalism—these are the nodal points from which a philosophy and rhetoric of violence bump up against its limits. “Violence is never the answer,” so goes the old liberal saw. “But it is a question” has been the inevitable response to liberal sanctimony. This forum suggests it may be neither. Rather, violence contours the very limits of enunciation.The articles gathered in this forum, each in its inimitable dialogic idiom, seek to trouble the limits of violence, such troubling understood in at least three senses. The first concerns the limits that violence exerts on faculties of human sensemaking and worldmaking, how, for example, the concepts and institutions for rendering violence intelligible are revealed to be inadequate or even violent in themselves. The second sense refers to forms of violence that stretch the outer limits of extremity, owing to their cruelty, intensity, and gratuitousness. The third concerns the limits of violence when taken up as a mechanism of world making and unmaking, for instance, practices and concepts that seek forms of living that are non- or anti-violent.Catherine Besteman examines the carceral sublime, the United States’s vast and elaborate punishment system. The kinds of violence that proliferate in the prison industrial complex are as quotidian as they are spectacular. Besteman focuses attention on a particularly insidious kind—the capricious cutting off of the imprisoned from anybody with whom they have made some relational connection. When I initially invited Besteman to write an essay for this forum, she planned to coauthor her essay with Leo Hylton, a long-time intellectual collaborator incarcerated in the Maine Department of Corrections Facilities. That plan in the end did not materialize due to a characteristically cruel and arbitrary decision by the prison authorities to break off all forms of communication between the two writers. Besteman’s essay, then, draws our attention to carceral violence as a structural atrocity not only vile in its scope, intensity, and mercuriality, but also for the manner in which it recursively curls back and strikes at those who would seek to understand its reach and texture.José G. Izaguirre III examines the vexatious solidus rhetoric/violence through the lens of coloniality. Such a lens shatters an oft-assumed narrowing of violence to individual acts. An ineliminably sociopolitical view of rhetoric/violence reveals that the term “nonviolence” is a misnomer. It misleads by characterizing antiviolence as an absence. As against this view, the refusal of violence, robustly understood as antiviolence, demonstrates it as a subversive, indeed revolutionary, form of worldmaking.Alison Yeh Cheung delves into how Asian American vocal performance—and thus, Asian American identity—is rendered impossible. Cheung seeks a nuanced engagement with Asian American subjectivities that can simultaneously register their subsumption in atmospheres of anti-Blackness while ruthlessly critiquing ruses of self-reflexivity that function to foreclose invention and reinvention. Ultimately, Cheung’s call is for a mode of attention that radically destabilizes a representational politics given to the racialization of sound.Kelly Happe and Allegro Wang seek to think with the French polymath Catherine Malabou. Malabou’s concept of plasticity has been extraordinarily generative across the humanities owing in part to its bringing into relief the imbrication of the biological and the symbolic, the neuronal and the mental, the brain and the self. Happe and Wang, however, take issue with Malabou’s eupeptic conceptualization of resilience. In basing it on the deflagration emergent from disaster, such a view occludes the weather and weathering of anti-Black violence. For this reason, Happe and Wang turn to the work of the thinker and writer Christina Sharpe. Her analytic of wake work proffers searing symbolic practices that disrupt and rupture the relentless ongoingness of slavery.Belinda Walzer pushes beyond a representational critique of violence in excavating the illegibility of everyday violence in discourses of human rights. Walzer starts with a critique of Rob Nixon’s influential notion of “slow violence.” Nixon calls for innovative representational techniques for drawing attention to the delayed effects of climate injustices. However, such a stance is unresponsive to the objection that the very mechanisms of recognition exceptionalize, anachronize, and efface everyday violence. Walzer argues that transnational feminism can speak to the multiscalar and multitemporal formations of violence in a way that does better justice to gendered and racialized violence.In our final essay, Michael Bernard-Donals turns to the topic of academic freedom. The last few years have witnessed relentless attacks on universities by right-wing movements. Bernard-Donals calls attention to these forms of institutional violence even as he advances the counterintuitive idea that academic freedom is in and of itself violent. His argument rests on the notion that the very faculty that academic freedom aims to secure—the capacity for critical deliberation—works precisely by unraveling the commonplaces around which the university coheres. His essay, then, invites us to tarry in the aporia of deliberation, which at once reveals our vulnerability and our relationality.You see the great indifference of the godsto these things that have happened,who begat us and are called our fathers,and look on such sufferings.What is to come no one can see,but what is here now is pitiable for usand shameful for them,but of all men hardest for himon whom this disaster has fallen.Maiden, do not stay in this house:you have seen death and many agonies,fresh and strangeand there is nothing here that is not Zeus. —Sophocles, Trachiniae 1266–781I initially met Megha Sharma Sehdev on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Our intellectual interests overlapped across an astonishing range of themes, including philosophical anthropology, the rhetoric of philosophy, postcolonial intellectual histories, Global South feminisms, law, and aesthetics.Megha wrote with devastating clarity on the texture of quotidian violence in India. When I proposed this forum on violence, she was the first person I immediately thought to invite. As we neared the deadline for the submission of essays, she wrote to tell me the essay she’d been writing for the forum had plunged her back to a traumatic past. Her memories, she added, had “thrown off” her relationship to academic analysis. I asked her if she wanted to Zoom. She said she wanted to finish the essay first. She’d call after she was done. Two weeks later, I received the news that Megha had passed away by suicide on August 17, 2023.In the theoretical dominant, violence carves an arc toward either redemption or abjection. Against this imaginary, Megha invites us to tarry in violence’s irresolutions, deferrals, interregnums. In her brilliant ethnography of women’s encounters with the judicial system in New Delhi, Megha writes that women who filed cases against their abusive partners found themselves suspended in an indeterminate temporality of endlessly deferred hearings. The law is not so much “a technology for decision-making,” as it is “coterminous with its ‘other,’ or everyday life” (Sehdev 2017, 8). But for Megha, the interminable duration of Indian law is not simply an absence, an inert zone in which nothing happens as complainants await justice. Rather, it is productive of various forms of intimacy—both familial and public—and generative of a bewildering array of artifacts, documents, and, wondrously, a stunningly beautiful unfoldment of material culture and artistry (Sehdev 2020).Megha had a luminous mind, a resplendent imagination, a heart for the crushed of the earth. “You have seen death and many agonies/fresh and strange/and there is nothing here that is not Zeus,” resounds a threnody in Sophocles’s Trachiniae, a keening as haunting for its uncontainable grief as for its uncanny sublimity. If the abiding hubris of imperial power is the desire for violence made pure instrumentality, that of the crushed of the earth make known an infraconstitutive invention. Here there is no theodicy, no stoicism, not even the ennoblements of tragedy. If this is a violence, it is invention split open, a wail for irreplaceable particularity, a remainder of endless solidarity.2

E. Cram’s Violent Inheritance is an exceptional work that presents a distinctive synthesis of queer, decolonial, and mixed-method scholarship. The goal of the book, Cram states, is to both “reimagine the place of racialized sexualities in contemporary conversations about environment, energy, and systems of violence” and “anchor these questions in contested memories of the North American West” (5). The book does just that, drawing from many contemporary streams of thought in rhetoric as well as the environmental and energy humanities to fashion a new and subtle analytic of infrastructures of feeling, which is supported by a range of conceptual innovations. For readers of this journal, Cram’s choice to ground theory quite literally in the land will be, I suspect, highly rewarding for those with interests crossing a wide range of topics: queer studies, violence, affect, Indigenous thought, sexuality and modernity, memory studies, rhetoric and materialism, ecological thought, ambience, regionalism. The breadth of scholarly dialogues that Cram harmonizes is simply impressive, reflecting the many years and the care they have devoted to this project.The book is composed of five chapters including a conceptual first chapter followed by four separate yet reinforcing studies. These are framed by a tidy introduction that prepares the reader admirably for the synergistic work to follow and a conclusion that stresses the bonds between the chapters without compromising the particularity of each study. In that regard, Violent Inheritance is both a single work guided by several cross-cutting ideas and questions and an anthology of sorts that prompts a series of discrete, rich conversations. The careful writing is evident in every paragraph, often presenting the reader with elegant, thought-provoking formulations of deep onto-epistemological problems that never feel weighted down by the complexity of dwelling on “onto-epistemic” matters.The introduction sets out the question of the book in engaging fashion. Cram asks, in the first sentence, “What does it mean to route ‘sexuality’ through modernity’s relationship to energy?” They use nineteenth-century eugenic physician John Harvey Kellogg’s Rocky Mountain climatic therapeutics to exemplify how “climate and the environment” became crucial to “the production of theories of sexuality” (3). Cram proposes energy to be “perhaps the dominant relationship between humans and the environment” and points to the ways that “racial and sexual value” have been assigned to a broad range of practices of “revitalization and exhaustion,” such that “racial and sexual vitality converge in extractivism” (3, 5, 4). In this way, the “bodily vitality” of the “normative sexual subject” demands privileged access to land and the energy that can be taken from it, be it affective or petrochemical. The emergence of sexual modernity, Cram thus contends, is inextricably tied to the regime of energy extraction. Through selected cases, Cram follows “nonlinear traces of this regime’s enduring materiality and sedimentation: the ecological, energetic, and affective inheritance that I call ‘land lines’” (6). The term “land lines” refers to how “political and economic actions tether, or forge connections, between domains of sexuality and land use,” and “names the aggregation of layers of cultural sediment or the violent inheritance of any given place. . . . As method, to trace land lines asks in earnest how places of memory and memorialization mediate these relationships” (6,7, emphasis original). The choice of the North American West follows from Cram having grown up there and the particular land lines that bind them to its violent inheritance, as well as the West’s stature as a colonial reservoir of myth and abundant energy.The separate chapters are saturated with meticulous detail, studied reflection, and constant insight that reward slow reading, making a synoptic view misleading. Nevertheless, chapter 1 travels through the 1893 journal of author Owen Wister (who helped create the myth of the West) to map a rhetoric of reinvigorated, masculinized settler sexuality by way of access to the West and the healing energy of nature. Following the route Wister presents in his journal, Cram details the social ecologies of sexual modernity as they emerge in Chicago as the racialized White City, the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the train ride to Wyoming, and Theodore Roosevelt’s much touted rehabilitation from enervated neurasthenia through the “West cure.” The violent inheritance, the land lines, traced in this chapter link together the racial-sexual dynamics of heredity, rail’s connectivity, the logic of climatic therapeutics, the relations of electricity to sexuality, and the articulation of energetic friction between urbanity and nature. In these lines, Cram finds a capacitive network that cultivated settler sexuality as energy regulation for the purposes of reinvention.Chapter 2 queers settler sexuality and its relation to the land by considering the life of Grace Raymond Hebard, “a historian, suffrage activist, and progressive” who was crucial to developing pioneer mythology, particularly the White mythos surrounding Sacajawea, and who also shared a home and a life with historian Agnes Wergeland (62). Cram studies how archival practices at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming establish “relationships between memory and imagination” that mediate Hebard’s life and love and, in turn, shape the violent inheritance of sexual modernity. Cram queers the affective possibilities of archival mediation by reading how Hebard’s and Wergeland’s lives are connected through Hebard’s sentimental “love for land and woman” within archived materials and against a “narrow vision of settler feminism” that inscribed “extractive world making into her labor” (65). Cram’s intention is to undercut recuperation (here of the New Western feminist woman) and instead foster what they term regeneration. First, they examine Hebard’s racial biopolitics of pioneering, including her sentimental incorporation of Sacajawea into a settler imagination of racial vitalization through extractive, colonial relations to Western land and climate. Then Cram performs queer detective work to disrupt the landline of pioneer womanhood by inspecting Hebard’s efforts to preserve Wergeland’s papers, Hebard and Wergeland’s side-by-side burial plots, Wergeland’s love poetry, a handwritten endearment on the back of a photograph, and embossed lettering on Hebard’s briefcase that suggests Hebard had Wergeland’s name placed opposite hers after Wergeland’s death. Cram’s sensitivity to working against the materials’ normative mediation of Hebard’s memory is admirable for modeling an attunement to traces of queer life in an archive that proceeds as if their love for each other were unthinkable or irrelevant.Chapter 3 shifts again, taking the reader to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, where Cram stresses “the importance of engaging in situ encounters with settler aesthetics of violence as an entry point to witnessing violent inheritance” (92). The organizing interest for the chapter is controversy over the CMHR’s muted account of Canada’s residential school system, which was “explicitly designed to rupture the kinship ties and languages of Indigenous children stolen from their families” (91). Attending to administrative discourse, they contextualize the systemic educational violence of the residential school system within colonial biopolitics, namely the forcible sexualization of Indigeneity through the figure of childhood. Doing so, Cram situates children as resources within the extractive logic of sexual modernity, noting the abusive, paternal absorption of childlike “Natives” to revitalize the settler nation. Then they elaborate the controversy surrounding the CMHR’s handling of residential schools, centering on the museum’s justification that it was protecting (settler) children from “difficult memories” regarding the schools (92). They read two of the museum’s exhibits, the permanent Childhood Denied exhibit and a temporary one, Witness Blanket, to demonstrate the infrastructural violence of incorporating Indigenous sovereignty through Witness Blanket while also erasing it as a special instance within a persistent aesthetic, narrative architecture of settler inheritance. Cram offers a subtle, delicately written, experiential analysis of the two exhibits to contrast a settler vision of reconciliation in the permanent exhibit with that of the temporary exhibit, designed by Carey Newman (Kwagiulth and Coast Salish), which “reconfigures the metaphysics of witness” (126). This counter-installation offers a remapping of Indigeneity through “regenerative aesthetics . . . that do not presume the integrity of nor Indigenous incorporation into the settler state” (127, emphasis original). Cram closes by noting that as of 2019 the CMHR entered a nonpossessive, collaborative stewardship arrangement for Witness Blanket, thus opening future regenerative possibilities. The entire chapter is richly detailed and, against the brutality of the schools, draws transformative inspiration from the power of alternative aesthetic practices.Chapter 4 reflects again on the contested memory of the land, this time through the Minidoka National Historical Site in northern Wyoming, which memorializes the Japanese internment camp that was sited there. It is perhaps the most complex and unexpected chapter in a complex and often unexpected book. Using detailed participation of a pilgrimage to the site, interviews, and historical methods, Cram resituates the politics of internment without disrupting the memory work of its survivors and descendants; in fact, they provide nuance that leaves one humbled. Specifically, they analyze the state’s 2012 allowance of Big Sky Farms to place an eight-thousand-animal concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) just over a mile from Minidoka. Cram uses the legal logic of affected persons, determined by property and residence status (which thus denied survivors and descendants standing to object), to “narrate the overlapping and conflicted relationships it encompasses” (132). Affected persons trace the land lines of this chapter, allowing one to follow the “inherited consequence [cumulative impacts] of earlier appropriations of land from its earlier uses prior to contact, land grabs, and later appropriations” (133). Cram maps how the War Relocation Authority articulated Japanese detention within “histories and spatialities of Indianness” (134) by situating detention sites in federal lands of dispossessed Indigenous people and within imaginaries of future land development, in particular how Japanese forced labor was used to cultivate seized land to be “later transferred to private homesteaders” (134). The chapter outlines a complicated memoryscape by detailing the experience of the pilgrimage (filtered through voices of pilgrims), the history of locating Minidoka on public (dispossessed) land, the camp’s physical layout, pilgrims’ witnessing practices, the intimate environmental dimensions of the memorial, and the smell and pollution of the CAFO. Cram traces these through the way sexuality weaves through capital’s racialized, extractive biopolitics, where land seizure, cultivation by forced labor, and large private bovine agriculture operations make affected persons a window onto the violent inheritance of Western land’s relation to national, whitened vitality.Chapter 5 shifts from sites to mobilities, specifically to Interstate 80 as “a landmark of national and bicoastal queer mobility, a mid-twentieth century route for small-town queer dreams of moving to the Big Gay Bay or Big Apple” (164). To “speak of queer automobilities means thinking through processes of dwelling and constraints on movement” and also taking “seriously the vast energy infrastructures that make such social space possible” (164, 165). Cram makes a strong case for queer scholarship to attend to petroculture because “petroleum and carbon byproducts literally scatter throughout queer migration stories” (166). The chapter follows the connection between urban and rural spaces along I-80, notably through interviews conducted in Laramie and Boulder, to demonstrate the “regional affect” of queer and trans life inhabiting “settler colonial structures” of “‘living oil’” (169, 166). Because the chapter is based in interviews, the regional affect Cram is trying to show us is encountered through “intimate atmospheres” of “queer regional stories” (169). In Laramie, which is defined by petroculture, Cram listens to the suffocating, slow, ambient violence that “petromasculinity” prosecutes and how it creates isolation, vulnerability, and a deep sense of misattunement for queer and trans people. In Boulder, suffocating misattunement becomes a kind of misfitting amid pervasive emphasis on fitness and outdoor life that is ableist, white, and heteronormative. The overpowering desire to just get out created by such toxic, intimate atmospheres pushes people toward the affordances of automobility—“the promise of white selfhood connected to unfettered movement”—in which such mobility depends on consumptive, violent inheritances (183).Cram closes chapter 5, almost like a coda, by taking us to Queer Nature in Colorado in search of an alternative, regenerative form of atmospheric intimacy. As a kind of sanctuary, Cram situates Queer Nature within the longer history of intentional communities of the “lesbian land” movement of the 1970s and 1980s (187). Queer Nature’s mission “overlaps and departs from these models” with the goal of “tending to nature connection as responsive to the violence of settler colonialism” (188). The philosophy of Queer Nature focuses on ecological awareness and grief, which Cram argues is a form of “transing of the erotic,” drawing from Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic as “energy for change” (196, 194).To say this book is an accomplishment is understatement. Methodologically it is brilliant, demonstrating the significant potential of painstaking regional, case-based scholarship. Conceptually it is discerning, unbound by rigid expectations to hew to schools of thought and consistently profound as a result. As a “read,” it is engrossing. And, most important, as a perspective, exploring violent land relations as an inheritance of energy extraction, settler coloniality, racialized biopolitics, and queer life and insight, it is inspiring. Cram models a kind of environmentally minded scholarship that defies simple categorization but adds to every conversation they enter.Further, because the book is built around case studies brocaded with detail, Cram also generates further lines of inquiry that can build on their work. For example, while the case studies focus on extractive and violent relations, Cram continuously remarks on the ironies of responding to such violence from within its inheritances. How to transform violence into a differently regenerative ethics in opposition to the consumptive regeneration that marks a Whitened settler world is a critical question—one of the broad questions today. Across a range of critical literatures, scholars have considered how to foment new possibilities amid deep structures of violence, and such possibilities come not from establishing a pristine, alternative space or by seeking refuge from vulnerabilities that are necessary to life, but by understanding how one is integrally bound up in, as Cram describes, the inheritances that layer even the simplest actions, like driving to escape your intolerant, hate-filled hometown. Cram helps readers understand that such desires are a form of queer decoloniality, or “dwelling in a decolonial ancestral imagination that abides in the political imagination of eroticism” in the transed sense of Lorde’s erotic (199). The book does not provide answers but rather, from a different vantage point, returns to an important, long-standing question about the necessity and limits of resistance. What is regeneration if it is tied to the land and tangled in lines connecting violence, energy extraction, and modern sexuality? What does regeneration look like if (against individual, whitened bodily vitalization) it is pursued environmentally and attuned to violent infrastructures of feeling?As is evident, I greatly admire Cram and their book. Violent Inheritance does not forge a scalpel to do specific analytical work. As a model for others, Cram writes into the contexts presented, being more evocative than precisely conceptual, sometimes to the point of being elliptical, but gradually you come to feel what they mean in a very concrete way. In that, the book enacts what Cram has previously called queer orientational scholarship in order to advocate for “queer collaborative stewardship.” Such stewardship “models a different kind of queer politics routed not through liberal imagination but though an ecological imagination” that “resists a scarcity framework of settler modernity in favor of abundance” (204, 206). To make this stewardship imaginable, Cram produces concepts that are not instruments so much as they are doorways for readers to enter a different, regenerative inhabitation of their world, by which I mean their bodies, their thoughts, and their feelings in relation to all that makes up “place.” You must sit with this book to understand it; you cannot extract from it easily. And that, I suspect, is part of what Cram means by queer orientational scholarship—to study and connect in affirmative ways that resist the extractive sexualities of modernity, including the modes of scholarship to which all of us are inured.

The cover art for Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World is startling and alluring.1 A Black female human-animal defiantly meets one’s gaze. With bull-like horns and ears jutting out of both sides of the head, thick, matted hair (fur?) migrating from the crown of the head to the brow, this portrait of a hybrid species challenges the senses and the imaginary. Leaning into the spectator’s eyeline with shoulders angled and breasts partly obscured by the enveloping shadows out of which she emerges and seems to crouch into, this Black female human-animal provokes questions: What sort of being is this? What kind of being is the Black woman? Becoming Human is a complex, and at times dense, meditation on these and related queries into anti-Blackness, new materialism, and the roles that Black women’s bodies have played historically and contemporaneously in philosophical and biological discourses on the human. Recent studies interrogating the “genre” of “Man” range across literary studies, aesthetics, geography, Black studies, and animal studies. Jackson’s work thinks alongside and rebuts claims developed in these fields by centering “gender, sexuality, and maternity in the animalization of blackness” (4).Becoming Human is expansive and involves eclectic case studies: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” the mercurial artistry of Wangechi Mutu, and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. What links these diverse aesthetic “objects” and artistic practices are their interventions into how we come to see, feel, and know the (non)being of Blackness and the ongoing reproduction of Blackened bodies. There is much to commend in Becoming Human—its explorations and critiques of the supposed binarism involved in positing human/culture divides, its explications of some foundational philosophies assembling the tenets of anti-Blackness, and its recognition of the significance of signification; that is, its mobilization of a mode of rhetorical thinking. Moreover, Jackson delivers some truly engaging and unique discussions of discursive forms, paying particular attention to “blackness’s abject generativity” (69), a phenomenon she also calls Blackness’s “natal function” (70). This ambitious project unfolds along three interdependent, yet distinct registers: (1) a philosophical questioning of the underpinnings of anti-Blackness, (2) a robust critique of aesthetic formations and their potentiality for altering the terms of (non)humanity, (3) an encounter with materiality’s discursivity—or, discourse’s materiality. This review delineates each register, keeping in mind that each register is deeply imbricated in the others.It has become relatively normative in thinking about anti-Blackness and racism to assert or proffer the notion that Blackness is barred from the ontological status of human (Hartman 1997; Wynter 2003; Weheliye 2014). That is, to premise one’s intervention into racialization of diverse kinds on how technologies of slavery and colonialism (and their afterlives) deny Blackness ontological ground as a human being, indeed, to repudiate (Black) being as such. There is, of course, strong evidence of such an absolute exile operating as the condition of possibility for what counts as human life and the fungibility of Blackened bodies. But since Jackson seeks to trouble binarism itself, she asserts the “concept of plasticity, which maintains that black(ened) people are not so much as dehumanized as nonhumans or cast as liminal humans nor are black(ened) people framed as animal-like or machine-like but are cast as sub, supra, and human simultaneously . . . being everything and nothing for an order . . . constructs black(ened) humanity as privation and exorbitance of form” (35). In this formulation, the essential question is no longer whether or not Blackness is animalistic, it’s what specific labors are accomplished through discursive practices of animalization? Jackson posits that there is a “selective recognition” of Black humanity alongside violent exclusion. And so, what logics govern the selection? In short, these logics go by the name anti-Blackness and generate historically contingent abjection, debility, and disposability. Jackson interrogates foundational Western philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger to show how treatises like the latter’s Introduction to Metaphysics worked to separate what counts as philosophy from “Hottentots” and primitivism writ large. Jackson asserts that Hegel’s perceptions of Africa and Africans as possessing no history or development, representing the antithesis of the fullness of Dasein as human essence, haunts Heidegger’s thinking. Thus, the philosophical capacity for human being to build worlds (utilizing the natural resources of earth) gets counterposed in Heidegger to those Black bodies that lack this human capacity—those bodies and populations that are locked permanently within the animal-earth relation, the Black (98–99). Becoming Human, then, seeks to disturb these foundations by reiterating “that blackness, and the abject fleshy figures that bear the weight of the world, is a being (something rather than nothing, perhaps even everything), and I aim to reveal and unsettle the machinations that suggest blackness is nothingness” (83).The more difficult challenge facing readers of this work is embedded within the relations among the various figurations of the Black female body as a sexuating, reproducing organism. Here the conceptualization relies on how the Black female body is treated in discourses of biology as capable of bringing new (male and female) bodies into the world and not capable of being truly feminine, a caesura that begets and preserves white femininity. Jackson relies on queer science fiction to illuminate and cast doubt upon these anti-Black operations. Chapter 2 features an analysis of the “postcolonial science fiction” (88) of Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, and chapter 3 forwards the “insect poetics” (121) of Butler’s “Bloodchild.” Although each work offers very different versions of Black woman futurity, they allow for Jackson to think about Blackened female bodies and the biopolitical imperatives of reproduction. How might, Jackson asks, Blackened female bodies resist or transform the ongoing commands issued by biopolitics to make more bodies even as this reproduction diminishes the self? In the case of “Bloodchild,” Jackson contemplates how discourses of species are racialized to provide warrants for the domination of not only animals—like Blackened female bodies—but also “insects and microorganisms, such as parasites, viruses, protoctists, fungi, and bacteria” (132). Jackson is, in short, attempting to illustrate how anti-Blackness invents multiple forms of organisms as the “‘enemy of man’” (136), thus proposing that (inter)planetary alliances among Blackened bodies (even microscopic ones) are possible and necessary for liberation.To offer plasticity as the mode of anti-Blackness is to conceive of racism as an exceptionally potent assemblage of aesthetic practices organized by and housed within biopolitical aesthetic regimes like the slave plantation. From this perspective, Becoming Human contemplates the shaping, constituting, and mutating forces acting on individual and social bodies and things. Importantly, among these “things” are Black female bodies and the artistic practices of those very bodies. Hence, Jackson understands anti-Blackness as a biopolitical and economic generative force through which one can witness how “the coordinates of the human body are forcefully altered into a different shape or form—bizarre and fantastic: human personality is made ‘wild’ under the weight of blackness’s production as seemingly pure potentiality” (70–71). In the case of chattel slavery, the slave body was made to become whatever it must become to serve the fickle and gratuitous interests of the slaver’s fears and desires—to bear the lash, to bear children, to bear unimaginable grief. The Black female human-animal is an object of an aesthetics that cannot be dissociated (in reality or in phantasy) from the conceits of the aesthetic values attributed to whiteness. Becoming Human, therefore, engages a variety of aesthetic forms as it maps the terrain of anti-Blackness. For the purposes of this review, there are two notable examples in addition to the Black female human-animal worth elaborating upon: the slave narrative and the novel’s unique status as a literary form.Prior to taking up Morrison’s Beloved as a neo–slave narrative, Jackson comments on the genre of slave narration and Frederick Douglass’s rhetorical performances. A genre is not simply an arrangement of elements that constrain artistic practices—although it is that—it constitutes and mobilizes affective logics governing systems of social relations. As such, the slave narrative depends on “sentimentality,” a “privileged rhetorical mode” that establishes “empathic identification” among speakers and audiences (56). Although this rhetorical mode may build “bonds of kindness” important to abolitionism, it also reifies racial hierarchies and social laws pertinent to anti-Blackness’s continuation and revision. Douglass’s “‘formal mastery’ of genres of masculine, republican elocution” (56) cannot disable the racist aesthetics of animalization. Nor can it transfer his conditional humanity onto other Black bodies. In this respect, the genre of the slave narrative has less to do with Black freedom; it solicits Black artistic practices as a “pretext for racial hierarchy in the form of a pedagogy in white ideality and the pathologization and criminalization of blackness” (58).Jackson’s critique of the racializing affects of Western aesthetics continues with a consideration of the historical context of the emergence of the novel as honored literary form. The prestige of the novel as a literary form is involved in the elevation of rational man and its forms of speech. Taken to be a reflection of immanent subjectivity and the transcendence of nature, the novel operates as a metaphor; it signifies the attainment of high culture and the vulgar existence of Black flesh that lacks the powers of self-reflection. The novel is also popularized through market economies constitutive of global colonialism and chattel slavery. Importantly, the novel participates in and furthers a “certain nationalist myth of language” engendering a reverence for its literary form as white-nation speech. This is the historical-aesthetical formulation into which Beloved and Brown Girl intervene—as counterstatements to this racist aesthetics and as ways to imagine worldly relations differently (90–99) (see also Bakhtin 1986).By centering the concept of plasticity in its analysis, Becoming Human produces an aperture through which one can appreciate the rhetorical character of anti-Blackness and the aesthetics of racism. Throughout the work Jackson reveals a sensitivity to discursivity. When discussing the genre of the slave narrative, she refers to the “rhetorical inheritance” passed down from the “literary cultural industry” regulating the form slave narratives can take (52). Genre, therefore, offers up and excludes from consideration specific topoi for rhetorical invention. But as Jackson works her way through this register involving the entanglement of genre, trope, and the Black female body, the “natal function” of Blackness ushers into view the idea that “the slave is the discursive-material site that must contend with the demand for seemingly infinite malleability, a demand whose limits are set merely by the tyrannies of will and imagination” (72). Plasticity is an effect of this discursive-material relation as it violently seizes and molds bodies, in part, by continuously enlisting various forms of biopolitical administration. The implications and limitations of this relation get teased out in the work’s final chapter, “Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde” (159–98). Rather than explore Jackson’s examination of Mutu and Lorde, the final stage of this review tries to clarify the stakes for rhetorical theory expressed by Jackson’s staging of her critique.Beginning with the traditional biocentric view that human beings are determined by biological processes, and that culture is subsidiary, Jackson utilizes the work of Sylvia Wynter to engage “sociogeny” as a refutation of biocentricity that has gained traction over the past two decades. Instead of privileging biology (forgetting that biology is itself discursive like metaphysics), Becoming Human questions the “and” posited in “discursivity and materiality” (160). Indeed, “antiblackness itself is sexuating, whereby so-called biological sex is modulated by ‘culture’ . . . at the registers of both sign and matter, antiblackness produces differential biocultural effects of gender and sex” (159). In this sense, patterns and forms of discourse are biotropological—they are assemblages of biotropes (Daut 2015; Watts 2021). Such discourses habituate bodily (and subjective) responses, neurochemical processes that have values and feelings inscribed through them; they have the capacity to trigger ideas, preferences, ways of knowing, modes of visuality operating “as if it was instinctual.” This “as if” is paramount, for it elides the fact that the human subject is “semiotically defined” (162). Matter itself can be understood as an effect, at least in part, of the mechanics of discourse. Becoming Human understands this “as if” as a racist rhetorical strategy: it sponsors “mutations” in human-animal, calls them nature’s “monsters,” and “reasons” that they need to be studied, dissected, policed, and incarcerated or killed. To be sure, Jackson does not label the work as an investment in rhetorical theory one might suspect because her assessments and critiques of philosophy and metaphysics tend to treat rhetoric as a set of devices that “biological discourses” mobilize. From this reviewer’s point of view, this tendency is another effect of “as if”—as if biological discourses, especially when manufacturing the Black female human-animal, are not rhetorical through and through. Despite this quibble, Becoming Human offers provocative analyses of anti-Blackness and the multifaceted worlds it repetitively and distressingly (rhetorically) invents.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ABSTRACT This essay thinks through the relationship between dystopia and utopia, in particular, how the constellation of past and present in radical demands amid state and economic violence (what Weinbaum calls black feminism's philosophy of history) is that which creates “crisis”—an estrangement from the present, a reclaiming of past insurgency, and the possibilities for other worlds.

ABSTRACTThis essay throws genealogical light upon contemporary theoretical practice by charting the relatively short history of rhetorical theory as a consequential sign in Anglophone discourse. It advances a historical sociology of knowledge inflected by feminist and postcolonial studies to trace the invention, institutionalization, and changing meanings of rhetorical theory from the late nineteenth century to the present. In the process, it illuminates three structuring patterns: (1) the valorization of European civilization that accompanied U.S. settler colonialism and its manifestation in universities where rhetorical theory materially grounded itself; (2) the gendered production of knowledge within academic institutions, particularly through the masculinization of the postwar university and its shaping of communities of inquiry invested in rhetorical theory; and (3) the power of relevance as a metonym for intellectual, political, and educational initiatives that, beginning in the late 1960s, enlarged rhetorical theory's community of inquiry and range of meanings.

ABSTRACTContemporary debates over the future of critique, feminist or otherwise, tend to neglect if not perpetuate a reliance on the philosophical tradition, with its disdain for the contingent and indifference to local audiences. If critique is to be realistic, as distinguished from realist or antirealist as the philosophical tradition has defined those terms, it must begin by clarifying the nature and extent of this reliance and begin to develop alternatives. Such an idea of critique would begin by questioning received notions of the relationship between theory and practice, which I argue are unduly inflected by philosophical prejudices. Theory should not be understood as a primarily epistemological or methodological enterprise whose task is to justify the basis of critique. Instead, theory should be conceived, with the rhetorical tradition, as a world-creating, first-order practice that gives meaning and significance to the human commons.

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

AbstractThis article contests Jacques Rancière's disinclination to theorize the gendered, sexual, racial, colonial, and other fields of power that dramatically shape contemporary possibilities for democratic disruptions. Drawing on Samuel Chamber's book The Lessons of Rancière (2013), I sketch out Rancière's account of democratic politics as dissensus, conflict, and rupture by particularly emphasizing his compelling notion of democratic quarreling and use it to illuminate disruptive practices within the U.S. civil and welfare rights movements. As valuable and productive as Rancière's ideas are, I nonetheless argue that his reluctance to heed the lessons offered by critical race scholars, postcolonial critics, feminists, and others about how histories of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and colonialism influence who remains uncounted or miscounted perpetuates the all-too-common tendency of Western theorizing from an unacknowledged center. I conclude with reflections on the politics of polemicizing and Rancière's recent elevation within the worlds of political philosophy and political theory.

We learn something from the mistakes we make with a book. In this case I read the word “quarkism” where I should have read the word “Quakerism.” As in the sentence on page 102 of Lisbeth Lipari's quirky book: “This kind of listening is perhaps what is called in Quakerism [or was it “quarkism”] the ‘gathered meeting,’ where the assembled silent worshipers cease being individual selves and instead join together in ‘gathered harkening.’” You can guess “worshipers” alerted me to this mistake, but the first part seemed perfectly plausible, as the discussion in the first chapter of holism versus atomism runs through quantum mechanics and brings up subatomic particles like quarks and the space in between.I venture there is no other book on earth that would have produced this mistake. And that is high praise: we are rightfully pleased when academic commonplaces are foiled for a good cause. More on that later.First, in Lipari's book we do also, thankfully, encounter some of the expectations that her title creates. We run into the philosophers of hearing and listening—Murray Schafer, Walter Ong, Don Ihde, David Michael Levin, and especially Gemma Corradi Fiumara—who theorize what happens when “the listening interlocutor actually becomes a participant in the nascent thought of the person who is listening” (199). Hence one contribution: Lipari draws together such philosophy and communication psychology to make a case for what she calls “constitutive listening” (133–35), which frames some interesting laboratory research on the ways in which attentive listeners make us remember things and talk more (sometimes a dubious gift!).As expected, we also encounter Martin Heidegger on being, especially the late Heidegger working around Heraclitus toward noninstrumental language, as it calls, “Being's poem, just begun, is man” (101). And Lipari is right: Heidegger sees language neither as an ideally transparent means of communication between minds nor as an arbitrary system of differences, à la Saussure. Instead, language is understood discursively; now stretching Lipari in a pragmatic direction I would say rooted in shared moods, human institutions and the nonchronological history these institutions compose. Here I emphasize an important relationship between Heidegger's early work on language—its use and abuse, its emergence and silence—and his later work on this topic in Unterwegs zur Sprache. In his earlier 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger describes rhetoric as the art of listening, not as the art of speaking. It is the rhetor who has “genuine power over being-there” (“ῥητορική πειθοῦς δημιουργός”) (2009, 74, referencing Plato, Republic 453a), which for Heidegger doesn't mean the ability to manipulate others by way of the voice. Instead he gives us a being who, insofar as that being can hear, is constituted as someone among others, Mitsein, someone in a particular situation who demands action or who goes conspicuously unheard (2009, 72). In other words I think the ethical attunement Lipari finds beyond Heidegger in a figure like Levinas actually does appear in its nascent form circa 1924, only to be abandoned by Heidegger soon thereafter. But that's another story.We also encounter, as we might expect, Nel Noddings (181) on feminist care ethics, and as I just mentioned, Levinas, along with his proximate reader Michael Hyde on response as responsibility (178). This is to say an “ethics of attunement,” as we read it in the title of Lipari's book, figures the ear centrally as a genuinely engaged response (178) that can hear what she calls the otherness of the other.But as you start to see by way of my introductory confusion, Lipari's book is not just this recap of listening philosophy in its largely Continental, twentieth-century incarnation. Quantum physics gives way to music smoothly enough, where metaphors of vibration and resonance and also dissonance become concrete. It is a virtue of Lipari's book that she works through material registers like the physicality of music without losing track of the phenomenology typically missing from sound studies and from the sciences of audiology (as Heidegger insisted, we don't hear a sound but a motorcycle, for example). Then, also importantly, Indian music with its twenty microtones (38), Indian cosmology, including holistic theories of sound in language (27), then in some depth ancient Eastern language philosophy (fifth/sixth-century Sanskrit grammarians and then others) as it developed through competing schools that can now provide some rich resources for listening projects designed, like Lipari's, to foreground holistic, not atomistic, perspective on language (78).So emergent patterns, including particles and plants, musical resonance, ancient Eastern and Western language philosophies, being/becoming—all mobilized against atomism as an apparatus of capture (not her term) — my liberties there at the end should remind you of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, which is similarly designed to upset the linear expectations of academics. And like A Thousand Plateaus, which, incidentally, Lipari doesn't cite, this listening book is hugely ambitious but in a different way, as it gestures toward world peace: “By changing our thinking about listening, we may be freed to dismantle the linguistic prison house that confine us to misconceptions of our own making about who we are, what we do, and how we might live peacefully together with others on this planet” (3). Indeed phrases regularly appear like those I fondly remember from Grateful Dead shows during the 1980s: “Space infuses all things” (17), and we are guided into the “elusive mysteries of listening” (101). When everything is connected, Lipari's project becomes ambitious to the point of courageous impossibility: “So what would a holistic paradigm of listening include?,” Lipari asks. “In short, everything” she answers (99).At that point I do get overwhelmed, and I retreat to critical pragmatism. It is not untrue that everything is connected, but at the same time footholds suggest themselves strongly, or, to shift the modality, we are subject to earworms not of our choosing, as Lipari explains well enough. Perhaps our difference as listening theorists ultimately lies in the ethics I see emerging out of these impositions—how we are hailed, who is rigorously unheard—whereas Lipari looks for a listening ethics that precedes or exceeds such worldly imposition. I can only hope she is right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life can be frustrating. For others, not for me. I am thinking of “others” faced with me, the rhetor(ician). Let me explain this: so far I have lived my rhetor(ician)'s life by observing others getting caught in a state of “admiration.” Whenever I reply to the unthinking question “And what do you do?” with “I am a professor of rhetoric,” I wait for the reaction, I smile inwardly, sometimes pour myself a drink, and watch “admiration” enfold. Descartes: “Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul that makes it focus its attention on objects that seem rare and out of the ordinary” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxx, my translation). When, adding insult to injury, my interlocutor tries to get things back on an ordinary track and persists, asking “I see [do you?], you mean [no, I don't] like [bad start for a definition] ‘communication’ [here, substitute a string of annoying approximations, as you please]?,” I don't loosen the snare but rather tighten the noose: “No, rhetoric, just as the word says.” And I see how frustrating life can be for those who think and believe they know what rhetoric is—including that peculiar brand of unconfessed pedants: English teachers. I am at my worst, of course, when I am asked, “In French?” (they assume I teach elocution at a charm school).Indeed for Descartes “admiration” is one of the six architectonic passions. So, I make it my philosophical duty not to let my interlocutors off the hook on which they have snagged themselves. I should let go, I know, but I won't. I want to exploit the kairos. The energy of “admiration” literally lies in “surprise” (and materially in Cartesian physiology); that is how the soul is “caught” unawares, forcing it to reset itself and its atoms, if it can. That energy (see how relentless Descartes is) is made of two components: novelty and forcefulness (“insofar as the impulse it triggers is powerful right from the start”). In sum: admiration has a knock-out effect, like a tennis backhand coming from nowhere and applied with full power right on contact, never mind the follow-through and all those courtly frills. So, after a while I let the victims go, yet not without providing them, for the road, with one striking example of “rhetoric” applied to current news, so that no doubt be left in their mind that they are not dealing with something they can reduce to what they think they know but with something actually “admirable,” in sum “novel” and “powerful.” Life need not be frustrating.For some time now I have been testing publicly the impact of this uncompromising proselytizing, and I have learned a great deal about perceptions of rhetoric among an educated public, which in France we call the “honest public” (the assumption being that uneducated folks are dishonest by mistake, while educated ones should know better). I write a regular column for a leading French online, public intellectual magazine, Les influences (www.lesinfluences.fr). My blog is called Le rhéteur cosmopolite (The Cosmopolitan Rhetor). During the recent French elections, Le nouvel observateur plus asked for my collaboration—which caused some stupor among readers but created somewhat of a fleeting sensation. I call a spade a spade. I am a rhetor and I am cosmopolitan. I refuse to take a leaf from Stanley Fish's acribic blog in the New York Times, The Opinionator: I do rhetoric, not opinion. I am still hoping the Onion will run a spoof of Fish and call it “The Onionator.” Professor Fish is very smart indeed at peeling off onion layers of opinions, until what is usually left are the bitter tears of his contrite liberalism defeated by illiberal public arguments. In my own blog I never let my political opinions color my analysis: I also peel onions, but I do not expect anything in return (except fans, like a mysterious “Corinne,” who followed me from my previous blog on Mediapart, Les oies du Capitol [The Capitoline Geese], to Les influences when I got contracted). My own opinions are private; they are long-standing prejudices that have hardly changed since I reached the age of reason, and they are unlikely ever to alter. Like ancient, imperious Gods they command me when I cast my ballot or get involved in politics. Otherwise I keep them in check. It makes for uneasiness, but that is the destiny of those who keep Sextus Empiricus on their bedroom pedestal. A commentator, on another site, chastised me on account of my “pessimism.”Be that as it may, “Le rhéteur cosmopolite” led to a book (Paroles de Leaders, [2011]) and then to another (De l'art de séduire l'électeur indécis [2012]), as I watched the word “rhétorique” pass through phases of public “admiration” and become implanted, as it were, in current parlance. I say “current” because here again Descartes is right on the money when he describes who is more likely to be struck by admiration: “In any event, although the intellectually challenged are not by nature inclined toward admiration, it does not follow that clever people are always prone to it, unlike those who in general have enough common sense but not a very high opinion of their own capacities” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxxvii, my translation).Descartes, having lived in Holland where weighing gold was akin to weighing thoughts to the smallest ounce, offers a fine observation of life and of public life. The last part of his definition is, in my view, a rather neat description of commentators on social networks and, to be frank, the rank and file of journalists. So, I have been observing how professional media persons or social media interjectors “admire” rhetoric, how they awake out of the opiate slumber of “information” and confess “admiration.”It all began early in 2010 when Sciences humaines, a respected monthly mainly read by the teacherly professions, ran a two-page-long eulogy of my Hyperpolitique (2009) titled “Un grand discours vaut mieux qu'une petite phrase”; it carried a catchy center-page insert that read “Rhetoric was a Jesuits' diabolical invention of persuasion.” An advance copy of the article (richly illustrated by orators at full throttle in the old Third Republic chambers) triggered commentary on prime-time radio (France-Inter [“Revue de presse,” 26 Jan. 2010]) by an anchor who dedicated his program to “political talk.” He addressed three ideas that he claimed came out of my book: that in Britain public speaking is a like a tennis match, that in the United States it is “soft and hypocritical” (!), and that in France it is a “theaterocracy.” My telephone started to ring. Everyone listens to that program: it gives the chattering classes something to sound smart about, for a day. I hardly recognized the arguments of the first chapter of Hyperpolitique but was keen to see how the journalist (who attended a top school and is a philosophy major) managed to summarize it against the grain of public opinion: Gallic stereotypes are that British are underhanded, Americans pugnacious, and the French clear thinking. Clearly, my argument about rhetorical cultures, however bent by him to create controversy, had led him to revise his opinions about universals of public speaking in democratic cultures (oddly, he left out what I wrote about the German rhetorical world).Then something unexpected happened, as the press awoke from its information-induced opiate sleep—management journals and financial magazines began taking an interest in my book. Le nouvel économiste (25 Mar. 2010), a leading, salmon-pulped, financial weekly, interviewed me and ran an article titled “Le goût de l'éloquence” misspelling “rhétorique” as “réthorique” (as did the French C-Span, LCP, in a ticker during a broadcast in which I was invited to comment on the Socialist Party's primaries). It gained momentum. “Rhetoric” was being adopted by business people who, had they read analyses in Hyperpolitique about the “delirium” of “labor talk” and the rhetoric of trust or contract management, may have realized I was on their case and not on their side. It was my turn to be struck with “admiration.”What made the surprise all the more novel and forceful was the fact Le nouvel économiste article, uniformly laudatory and actually well written (except for the displaced “h,” but copy editors are no longer what they used to be), appeared in its “Leadership and Management” section and placed the emphasis on “eloquence” in its title. It highlighted three key points or catchphrases set in inserts that, read in sequence, produced the following syllogism: rhetoric teaches that social life is a transaction of arguments, transaction is good, and thus rhetoric should be taught at school. I was stunned by the boldness of the enthymeme. Soon after, a professional newsletter for senior staff at state agencies, hailed “rhetoric” as a new tool for labor relations (“Rhétorique à la rescousse,” Lettre du cadre territorial, 1 June 2010). Rhetoric had reentered public awareness where I did not expect it, in that very audience who, we are so often told, controls and understands “the real world”: the world of finance, of demand and supply, of accumulation of capital and return on investment. Yet, not under the guise of rhetoric as such but still draped in the quaint nobility of “eloquence.” Striking such a pose is rather typical, I often find, of the conservative dowdiness of financiers who entertain obsolescent images of high culture, even when they collect cows dipped in formaldehyde solution—to them “eloquence” spoke of artful elevation and of cultural capital.The grafting of “rhetoric” onto public idiom was taking and, to size up the change over the years, I simply needed to look back at what Les Échos, France's main daily financial paper, read by stock-exchange people, had written back in 2006 (in its supplement “Les enjeux,” Apr. 2006). A columnist had asked a rhetorical question, “How does a HR manager tell workers they are being laid off?” Her answer was a laundry-list of self-help tips in public address, appended with a substantial list of secondary reading—a motley of manuals, ancient and modern, among them my Art de parler (2003). However, my book is not a manual of persuasive writing. It is nothing like the unrivaled Hodges' Harbrace Handbook (2009). It is not even a primer for public address—both are the sort of books French elite professionals, trained in grandes écoles, dislike and distrust and despise and abandon to the college-educated crowd. L'art de parler is a historical anthology of rare and, to the noninitiate, complex manuals of rhetoric. “Eloquence” does fit in Les Échos' readers' idea of high culture and social codes of distinction, but it is actually an unpractical notion if the purpose is sweet-talking workers unions. As Les Échos declared Art de parler “illuminating,” I wondered, “Of what?” Not of “rhetoric” for the word “rhetoric,” let alone the concept, was absent in that self-help article. I got an answer after the publication, that same year, of my Mahomet (a history of narrative topoi about the founder of Islam): two leading Arab philosophers, Malek Chebel and Abdelwahab Meddeb (author of The Malady of Islam), reviewed it who acknowledged its belletristic and cultural value but stopped hesitatingly at the doors of the ivory tower, as it were—Meddeb just hinted at the possible, hermeneutic value of “rhetoric” in public affairs (in this case, the debate about Islam in France). Later on he and I had a lively public exchange. Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, it became clear to me that it all evinced a desire and a lack, that is, a lack of knowledge as to what the lack actually is or was.By the time in mid-2011 that my blog had become a regular feature, its essays were being taken up by other online magazines (often lifted without even my knowing, always a good sign), and invitations to contribute elsewhere had become routine. Paroles de Leaders was out. Mentions in the press acknowledged “admiration,” spoke now of “rhetoric” in curious, somewhat inquisitive tones—gone was pejoration. They responded to the novelty and force of the surprise in two ways.On the one hand, notably feminist or women writers wrote of “manipulation,” describing me as “cantankerous” and as “filling [my] fountain pen with Pastis” (Le Monde, 18 Aug. 2011) or (in an otherwise level-headed and well-intentioned interview) as a master at explaining “wondrous jugglery” (Terrafemina, 14 Oct. 2011): they played out stereotypes commonplace in some feminist circles that men exert persuasive power through hectoring or dazzling display or self-inebriation of speaking, while women's rhetoric is irenic and conversational and coactive (see my Gender Rhetoric [2009] for contrasting views on the subject). On the other hand, leading magazines mostly read by the financial professions spoke of “rhetoric” as a novel, surprising, forceful, and desirable management tool (which, I guess, would reinforce the just-mentioned stereotype). Here is a florilegium: for Les Échos (7 Oct. 2011) Paroles de Leaders is “ruffling and lifts the veil on the mystery of leadership”; in L'express (16 Nov. 2011) the star column “Tendançologie” (“Trendology”) hailed this new approach on “how to become a leader.” The September 2011 L'expansion Management Review, a quarterly of reference only sold by subscription, judged the book “indispensable.” The lesson easily drawn, with hindsight, from these punchy reviews is clear: the medias and their audiences no longer shunned the word and the idea of rhetoric and gave rhetoric, properly spelled, a prime spot. I asked the marketing department at one of my publishers (Bourin) if they had a hand in it. “No, the financial press just likes what you write; it is new, and they see its usefulness.” Descartes was possibly correct in judging who is more prone to “admiration.” I have taken part in a number of national television and radio broadcasts in which the word “rhétorique” was cast about generously, like aspersions at mass, yet not without an ever-so-slight hesitation, the sort one has when tasting a new dish, and I even discerned a twinkle of daring in the eye of the show host. It amuses me always to see the word rising on the horizon and popping up, not in derision or pejoration but as an intellectual evidence, a lack-filler.If I have retraced this short history, a surrogate confession of information opium eaters and their discovery of rhetoric as a management and public affairs (ephemeral) panacea, the reason is not vanity. Rather, it has to do with identifying our place in the lack, with how, as rhetor(ician)s, we interact with public affairs, how we are placed.The bracketed “-ician” is an indication of our unstable place, of an instability that should be, for us, a matter to ponder. Say “rhetor” and one risks confusion with “orator”—the risk is that popular perceptions will infer from the denomination itself our purported ability to persuade, as if specialists of rhetoric ought to be better shod than when it to our public And the same perceptions will also in of being and smart to be if it that, we are persuasive in of public say and it in a that is, as professional as the French it The will but we will be at to explain what we actually Here is an it has to me over and over again when a to a that I have to tell the at that I am not a professor at the and rhetoric is not a I get a as if I were to something about my On another getting a at my I had this in is as it on my and what I had never a what rhetoric, think came a smile of followed by this from the I and I was not as I had just a on the rhetoric of on at and was my thoughts on rhetoric as the de The “-ician” because it to a and in a as in de a has two main to create a of and to is what the and the were me, me. I am a be that as it rhetoric is not a it is a and a that the as it is the lesson at the very of the lesson of the and the rhetoric is but in need of and (a is to in a by in the of under the “Rhetoric or a and Rhetoric Rhetoric is also a to the world as because it is the of the fact that is as I to call it. may explain management is so in for all its on that are and in to if not the is usually to explain this which one have possibly are indeed they were would be and and would not to those who to that are or as they are of it, in the of is to In my I to rhetorical idiom to in public affairs, a I also to show that on the of rhetorical can be I do so without any for the of I where the lack is at the word and the of to that which one has without its idea by in his as a key notion for is no I in or our idiom to to that is to what be of to The public out of “admiration,” some of our idiom and some of it. The of course, is to see our idiom to what in an culture like the French this is than in a culture where self-help is over The risk however is to be in public as who may become to and commentators on I believe that, to being eaters of our own we ought to size up the value of the to the and to attention to the of life.

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