Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsChris Miles Chris Miles is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communicaiton & Media Studies at Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazi Magusa, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, via Mersin 10, Turkey.

Abstract The 1930s in America abounded with debates about language and communication. Interest in the effects of propaganda and the problems of miscommunication prompted the development of organizations like the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937) and Count Alfred Korzybski's Institute of General Semantics (1938). Albeit in different ways, each of these groups aimed to increase the public's awareness of the effects of language and to improve its ability to communicate. But the assumptions about language and communication held by these organizations would ultimately render them short-lived in terms of public and scholarly attention. This article examines the work of these organizations in relation to that of Kenneth Burke, and demonstrates how Burke developed his rhetorically oriented theories of communication against and in response to this rich background. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jack Selzer for his encouragement and advice on earlier drafts of this article (as well as for inspiration, as in its original version this was written for his Kenneth Burke graduate seminar at Penn State). Thanks also to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Notes 1For more thorough elaborations and further discussions, see, for example, Crowley; Sproule; George and Selzer. 2See, for instance, “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The Journal of Philosophy 31 (February 1, 1934): 80–81; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” International Journal of Ethics 44 (April 1934): 377–384; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The New Republic 79 (August 1, 1934): 327; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” Supplement to Nature (October 20, 1934): 617. 3Korzybski has a curious predilection for not capitalizing names of systems (the aristotelian, newtonian, and euclidian being the most commonly used). Because most adherents to General Semantics use the same convention, I will follow it as well in this article. 4Of course, “orientation” is also a key word for Burke, especially in Permanence and Change. Burke's idea of “orientation” appears to have come directly from Korzybski: “Orientation can go wrong. Consider, for instance, what conquest over the environment we have attained through our powers of abstraction, of generalization; and then consider the stupid national or racial wars which have been fought precisely because these abstractions were mistaken for realities” (6). Burke's term, via Veblen, for problematic orientations is “trained incapacities,” or, as he defines it more completely, “a faulty selection of means due to a faulty theory of causal relationships” (9), as, for example, chickens who have been trained to eat when a bell rings will still come running when the bell signals punishment instead of food. 5In an unpublished manuscript (recently discovered, edited, and published by James Zappen), Burke notes that Korzybski's structural differential “is valuable for calling attention to an important abstractive process of language, but cannot of itself replace a mature linguistic analysis.” 6Also, while the IPA definitely experienced failure as an organization (although certainly, as I pointed out earlier, communication departments and composition programs still find value in the seven propaganda devices), it should be noted here that contrary to Condit's assertion that “I fear that general semantics has all but died out without surviving heir” (“Post-Burke” 350), in fact the Institute of General Semantics is still quite active, and has been varyingly influential in the fields of cognitive psychology, popular psychology, linguistics, and education. Inarguably, though, it has lost most of its credibility (and even name recognition) with scholars in the fields of rhetoric and composition and communication. 7In the same letter, Burke explains to Josephson that he was going to attend one of Korzybski's General Semantics seminars in Chicago upon the offer of the “Semanticists” to pay his expenses, but decided against it because it would have consumed nearly two weeks. He writes, “Hated to pass it up—for these are the days when one yearns for his band of the like-minded—and Hayakawa writes me: ‘Both the students of General Semantics of my acquaintance and the students of linguistics are enthusiastic about your work.' Hayakawa teaches at a school in Chicago that recently offered me a job, though alas! at no such handsome salary as I could easily imagine” (Burke to Josephson 17 Dec. Citation1941). In a letter of several years earlier, Burke had complained to Richard McKeon about Stuart Chase's Tyranny of Words (which he was then writing the review for); he quips, “how he does tyrannize with words!” Burke goes on to write, “Rule of thumb: Anyone who takes Korzybski's ‘Science and Sanity’ for anything more than half a book on the subject of semantics is a public calamity. Taken as half a book, it is excellent. Taken as a whole book, it is far worse than no book at all, far inferior to naïve words uttered at random” (Burke to McKeon 13 Dec. 1937). Perhaps reviewing Chase's book (which presented a fairly skewed view of Korzybski's ideas) helped to highlight for Burke the problems with General Semantics. Both of these statements taken together, though, indicate fairly clearly that Burke saw himself not so much rejecting General Semantics, perhaps, as negotiating with it. 8Although he focuses explicitly on the “semanticists” here, Burke is also implicitly responding to the New Critics, a fact suggested by the initial appearance of the essay in The Southern Review, a journal colonized at the time by New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate. Burke's double purpose can be ascertained in small jabs elsewhere in The Philosophy of Literary Form; for instance, he remarks, “It is ‘poetic’ to develop method; it is ‘scientific’ to develop methodology. (From this standpoint, the ideal of literary criticism is a ‘scientific’ ideal.)” (130). As Ann George and Jack Selzer point out, “That distinction between scientific and poetic language, based on the Agrarian distrust of science and on the positivist assumption that science and poetry lead to two different and complementary approaches to knowledge and derived at least in part from I.A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), was fast becoming a central tenet of the nascent New Criticism, as the movement would officially be dubbed by Ransom in his 1941 book of that name” (Kenneth Burke 193). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJodie Nicotra Jodie Nicotra is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Idaho, P.O. Box 441102, Moscow, ID 83844-1102, USA.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgment The authors thank Chris Lehrich for his reflections and advice. Notes 1There are quibbles, however, as there are ample passages in Agrippa's work to suggest that words let us "hack" reality, as it were, when we understand they are symbolic articulations of the virtues/essences of things. For example, see Agrippa 208–213. For a more nuanced, book-length reading of Agrippa's understanding of language, see Lehrich. 2See Leff and Sachs. 3It is instructive to underscore how Vickers opens the essay that Miles argues outlines the "assumptions" Burke, Covino, and Gunn apparently also share: "It is my contention that the occult and the experimental scientific traditions can be differentiated in several ways: in terms of goals, methods, and assumptions. I do not maintain that they were exclusive opposites or that a Renaissance scientist's allegiance can be settled on an either/or, or yes/no, basis. Rather, in many instances, especially the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a spectrum of beliefs and attitudes can be distinguished, a continuum from, say, absolutely magical to absolutely mechanistic poles, along which thinkers place themselves at various points…" (Vickers 95). Such remarks are hardly an index of a vulgar, "binary opposition" that Miles argues is common to all the authors he critiques. Owing to the fact that each author critiques different eras of the occult tradition toward very different ends, it also seems to us rather uncharitable to assert Vickers's "assumptions" are channeling Burke, Covino, and Gunn (Miles, "Occult Retraction" 449). 4The critique, of course, is Derrida's. See especially pages 1–73. 5This is a common reading of Derrida's view. See, for example, Howells (128). Derrida says "as much"—or if you prefer, "as little" (18–26). Covino and Gunn's books begin and conclude with similar observations, respectively. See Covino (9) and Gunn (229). 6Miles has argued similarly elsewhere. In Modern Occult Rhetoric, Gunn argues that the rhetorical dynamics of occultism changed dramatically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a consequence of mass media technologies. In a book review, however, Miles indicts Gunn for failing to examine Agrippa's philosophy—a system developed three centuries before Gunn's period of study. See Miles, "Rev. of." 7Miles's conclusion, for example, first appears in Lehrich's study in the context of a discussion of Derrida's philosophy: "…it is not intrinsically odd that the sixteenth century philosophical movement which was almost entirely destroyed by modern philosophy and science—I refer of course to magic—still haunts the margins of philosophical memory…. It is worth considering the periodic surfacing of magical thought in philosophy after Descartes…, which might provoke us to wonder whether magic has always played the role of modernism's ghostly other" (Lehrich 222). 8For example, Miles argues that Agrippa's rhetoric is better characterized as employing "instructional paradox" rather than Gunn's discussion of a "generative paradox" (which do not seem mutually exclusive), and he concludes drawing on Burke's discussion of paradox. 9See Stark. 10As Burke clearly was. See Burke, Rhetoric of Religion. 11For a recent, exemplary work investigating the occult stranger within, see Lehrich, Citation2009. The authors would like to thank Chris Lehrich for his reflections and advice. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Morgan Reitmeyer Morgan Reitmeyer is a Ph.D. student at Purdue University David Blakesley David Blakesley is a Professor of English at Purdue University William A. Covino William A. Covino is the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the California State University, Stanislaus.

Abstract Drawing upon published and unpublished texts from Kenneth Burke, this article argues that A Rhetoric of Motives represents the first, “Upward” half of his project on rhetoric. Emphasizing this unexpected connection between Burke and Plato, the article offers a dialectical rereading of the text, one that locates the ultimate rhetorical motive not in identification, but pure in persuasion. Interpreting the latter as a “‘mythic image,”’ it emerges as a non-empirical, imagistic portrayal of the formal conditions underlying persuasion, the origin of rhetoric. Rhetoric, dialectically redefined in terms of pure persuasion, produces the divisions that we humans would (paradoxically) discursively bridge. Notes 1This is from a letter contained in the Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The author expresses gratitude to Phoebe Pettingell Hyman for her permission to quote from these unpublished manuscripts. Letters from this collection will be parenthetically indicated “SH.” 2This manuscript is drawn from a folder in the Kenneth Burke Papers labeled: “R of M Drafts. Including final draft.” Apart from “The Rhetorical Radiance of the ‘Divine'” (and some scattered deletions in pencil), the manuscript indicated as the text's “final draft” is identical to the published version of the Rhetoric—and its 430 typed pages even include a table of contents. Thus it is quite clear that this was, until quite late in the process, the complete text of the Rhetoric. This material is taken from the archives of The Kenneth Burke Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA. The author is grateful to Sandra Stelts, Jeannette Sabre, the Penn State Libraries, and the Burke Literary Trust for their help and for permission to quote from these unpublished manuscripts. 3Another appears during discussion of “timely topics” and the press: “We pass over it hastily here, as we plan to consider the two major aspects of it in later sections of this project (when we shall consider the new level of ‘reality’ which journalistic timeliness establishes, and shall study the relation between transient and permanent factors of appeal by taking the cartoons in The New Yorker as a test case)” (Rhetoric 63). 4Authorial intentions provide notoriously controversial evidence for reinterpretation. However, as the above-quoted header makes clear, Burke altered his initial plan late in the publication process. Although other Burkean texts were altered during composition (for example, the pentad was a later addition to the Grammar), the Rhetoric project is different; the material with which Burke began was postponed, not supplemented, as in the case of the Grammar. Most significantly, Burke's papers reveal an organizational framework linking the excised material to that which remained; thus, examination of Burke's original vision for the project as a whole sheds new light on the version of the Rhetoric that was published. 5This quote is from a letter from Burke to Cowley dated 26 January 1947, housed in the Burke Papers. Letters from this collection will be parenthetically indicated “KB.” 6Judging from this description, it seems that some of this material was published in Burke's essay, “Rhetoric: Old and New” (see especially the discussion of blandness [69–75]). 7Additionally, such interpretations of Burke's text often produce an artificial separation between Burke's rhetoric and dialectic. Having sharpened this difference into a distinction, effort is required to explain their connection (e.g., Crusius, “A Case,” “Orality”; Ercolini). 8Here one might object, also citing Burke's essay on the “new” rhetoric, whose “key term” is identification (“Rhetoric” 62–63). However, in both texts, identification is introduced in the first section (or “stage”), but is transcended by other sections/stages. Further, in the Rhetoric, Burke describes persuasion and identification as his “two interrelated themes” (x), and discusses his “generating principles,” “persuasion and/or identification” (169; emphasis added)—a point he later reaffirmed in letters to Cowley (e.g., Williams 12). Identification is undeniably important in Burke's rhetorical theory, but I contend it must be contextualized within Burke's foundational claim about the nature of rhetoric. 9See also “Rhetoric: Old and New,” which contains a dialogue patterned after the Platonic dialectic—including the character “Socraticus” and references to the “Upward” and “Downward Way” (63–66). 10Although I have not altered any quotations, contemporary scholarship recognizes that the masculine is not a universal, and so my own usage reflects this philosophical commitment. 11Although there is extensive debate regarding Platonic dialectic (e.g., Kahn; Benson), Gonzalez is cited here to demonstrate two things: that appropriation of Plato is not necessarily the adoption of Platonist metaphysics and that Burke's definition is neither idiosyncratic nor outdated. Gonzalez's recent study does not cite Burke, but is distinctly Burkean in its rejection of Platonist metaphysics, and its refusal to divorce Plato's dialectic from the dramatic form of the dialogues. Further, Gonzalez emphasizes the role played by ideas and images in Plato's dialectic (e.g., 129), echoing the book cited within the Rhetoric's discussion of Plato: Stewart's The Myths of Plato. 12These unpublished notes are drawn from a folder labeled “Myth,” housed in the Kenneth Burke Papers. 14Here I draw on this essay because Burke identifies it as the foundation for this portion of the Rhetoric (e.g., Burke to Hyman, January 26, 1948, SH). 13Moreover, he argues that Mannheim's perspective gains much of its appeal—including “the feel of an ultimate order”—from its furtive resemblance to the Platonic dialectic, and (in its ambiguous concept of “Utopia”) an implicit foundation in chiliastic myth (A Rhetoric 200; cf. Burke, “Ideology” 306). 15These unpublished notes are drawn from a folder labeled “Myth” in the Burke Papers. 16These notes are also from the “Myth” folder (but: cf. A Rhetoric 203; “Ideology” 306–307). 17Said another way, by retaining our myth's connection to the Platonic dialectic, we will recognize the narrative order of myth as an imagistic portrayal of a logical order—and not as an accurate, objective account of origins (cf. Grammar 430–440). 18Which is not to say that Burke rejects Kafka; Burke's account is designed to place Kafka's (and Kierkegaard's) vocabulary within a broader whole, not dismiss it. Although I cannot here respond to a recent essay by Ercolini, disputing Burke's interpretation of Fear and Trembling, I feel Ercolini misses the point of Burke's reading of Kierkegaard. Here Burke is moving toward dialectical transcendence, and thus his critique of Kierkegaard focuses on the difference between empirical and mythic images of courtship. 19For this reason, I would argue that the definitions of pure persuasion in the scholarly literature—designed for critical use—fail to see its ultimate, mythic significance (e.g., Hagen; Lee; Olson & Olson; Sweeney). 20This is again why, for Burke, Mannheim's approach falls short; Burke argues that unlike his own approach, Mannheim's sociology cannot provide an “ultimate ground of motivation” (Rhetoric 201). 21Of course, Biesecker is not the only scholar to draw on such statements to equate identification and pure persuasion. Robert Wess likewise does not recognize pure persuasion as a mythic image, and thus his formulation of it as the “identification of identifications” subordinates it to the latter concept (e.g., 214). Similarly, although Zappen's introduction to Burke's “On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical Symmetry” insists on the importance of the third section of the Rhetoric, he ultimately does not connect dialectic, “pure persuasion,” and “ultimate identification” (e.g., 334). 22For this reason, I would argue (pace Wess and Biesecker) that identification cannot be equated with pure persuasion; identification presumes a preexisting distance between persons, unlike pure persuasion, which symbolically introduces and maintains distance. This is, I would argue, a more rounded interpretation of Burke's famous statement—early in the Rhetoric, I would add, prior to arriving at his mythic image—that “to begin with ‘identification’ is, by the same token, to confront the implications of division” (Rhetoric 22; Burke's emphasis). Thus, Burke's oft-cited discussion of the interrelation of identification and division in rhetoric follows from pure persuasion's more primary, ontological shattering of unity. This is also, I believe, why Burke later describes the most profound variant of identification as the partisan carving up of a situation through terminological means (see Burke, “The Rhetorical” 271). 23As per the “paradox of purity,” these would be identical (e.g., Grammar 35–36). 24For others beginning with symbols as introduction of division rather than unity, see Anton, Thayer, and Wilden. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBryan Crable Bryan Crable is Associate Professor

Abstract Anxiety about the deliberative abilities of ordinary citizens, feared to be too easily influenced by the powers of rhetoric, has accompanied democracy since its birth. This anxiety is reflected in critiques of the American jury system. This article examines efforts in the middle of the twentieth century to rationalize jury decision making through the use of mathematical probability. These efforts—one a trial in which a prosecutor used dubious statistics to help convict a couple of a robbery and the other a call for juries to use formulas for assessing the likelihood of guilt—reflect a desire to simultaneously harness and contain the dangerousness of rhetoric. More significantly, proposals to mathematize jury decision making individualize deliberation and privilege expert over everyday knowledge, signaling a threat not only to this important feature of American democracy but also to the ability of citizens to deliberate collectively in debates increasingly dominated by statistical reasoning. Acknowledgments Many thanks to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers of this article, as well as to Greg Goodale, Bonnie Jefferson, David Kellogg, Chuck Morris, Elizabeth Shea, and Patricia Sullivan for helpfully commenting on drafts of this article at various stages. Thanks to Alyson Wilson and Greg Wilson for conversations about subjective probability; any remaining misconceptions in this article are entirely my own. I am grateful to Hugh Baxter, Ellen Cushman, Cassandra Jackson, and John Schaeffer for conceptual help, and to Greg Clark, Kathleen Kelly, Marina Leslie, Bernadette Longo, John Monberg, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, Jeff Strobel, and Christine Wolff for encouragement. Notes 1Interestingly, although Tribe was a Harvard law professor at the time he challenged Finkelstein and Fairley's proposal, he had been a law clerk on the California Supreme Court when People v. Collins was heard. An undergraduate math major, Tribe had drafted much of the opinion but had left the court months before it was issued. He did not disclose his role in the Collins opinion until 2004. See Fisher. 2As of this writing, Tribe's article has been cited in 84 state and federal cases. See, for example, United States v. Massey, 594 F.2d 676 (1979), which quotes extensively from Tribe in support of reversing the conviction of a man convicted of robbery based on probability data about hair samples. A more recent case, United States v. Veysey, 334 F.3d 600 (2003), contains an extensive discussion of legal commentary, including Tribe's 1971 article, but rules in favor of admitting statistical evidence. 3In the federal court system, jury verdicts must be unanimous in civil trials unless otherwise agreed to by the litigating parties and must always be unanimous in criminal trials. See the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. In all state courts, jury verdicts must be unanimous in criminal trials. The number required in civil trials varies by state. See United States Department of Justice 233.

Abstract Scholars of rhetoric have veered away from non-traditional rhetorical artifacts in the classical period. In this article I examine the Ara Pacis Augustae, Altar of Augustan Peace, as one such overlooked rhetorical artifact. I argue the altar, although constructed as a war monument, shapes public memory to persuade the people of Rome to accept the dynastic succession of Augustus's heir. In addition, I show a variety of rhetorical theories operate on the altar in visual form including amplification, imitation, and enthymeme. Ultimately I contend that by focusing on non-traditional rhetorical artifacts, we can deepen our understanding of the rhetorical tradition in a period in which rhetoric is generally believed to have faded away. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKathleen LampKathleen Lamp is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 702 S. Wright St., 244 Lincoln Hall, MC-456, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: lamp@uiuc.edu

Abstract Recent work on the relationship between rhetoric and magic has tended to pivot around the issue of magic's perceived identification of signifier and signified and what that might mean for its relationship to larger theological, empirical, and rhetorical approaches to language. This article seeks to problematize the assumptions underlying this issue through an examination of the work of Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), the author of what is commonly regarded as the European Renaissance's most influential magical text, De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533). In investigating the rhetorical strategies contained in Agrippa's famously ambiguous retraction of his occult works we may uncover an equally polysemic stance toward the ability of language to deal with both the everyday world and the realm of the sacred, a stance that uses textual instantiations of paradoxes of self-reference to forcefully undermine the apparently paradigmatic magical identification of signifier and signified. Acknowledgment I thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions on this article. Notes 1See Lehrich (Language of Demons and Angels) for a comprehensive analysis of the three books. 2See Zika for an overview of Reuchlin's influence on Agrippa. 3"…, lapides loquitor, caveant ne cerebrum illis excutiat." J.F.'s use of the alliterated "b"s in his English translation is perhaps more effective in its Anglo-Saxon brutality. 4Note that the quotation marks are not in the original Latin but added by J.F. for the English translation of 1651. 5Again, the quotation marks are an addition of J.F.'s English translation and are not in the Latin original. 6See Kneale and Kneale (228–231) for a discussion of the Liar's context in medieval logic. 7See Sainsbury (114–132), Simmons (2–7), and Hofstadter for accessible re-formulations from the nineteenth century onward. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChris Miles Chris Miles is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazi Magusa, Mersin 10, Turkey. E-mail: chris.miles@emu.edu.tr

Kenneth Burke claimed in 1952 that he viewed his rhetorical theory and critical method as a "Bennington Project," a sign that he attributed a measure of his intellectual success to teaching at pragmatist-inspired Bennington College. Studying Burke's teaching at Bennington can help scholars to better understand his theory and method because Burke taught undergraduates his own critical reading practices, ones that he believed heightened students' awareness of terministic screens and deepened their appreciation for the consequences of human symbol-use. Burke's teaching practices and his comments on student essays reveal that he taught indexing and charting to his undergraduates because he believed everyone can and should use them throughout their lives to examine—and, when necessary, revise—the often unexpressed assumptions that propel so much human activity toward competition and, ultimately, physical and social destruction.

Abstract Drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, this article argues that the fixation of some scholars on the status, size, and identity of rhetorical studies is symptomatic of an apocalyptic perversion. An attention to the apocalyptic tone of recent discussions about "Big Rhetoric" in conference papers and journal articles bespeaks a characteristically phallogocentric ideology of discrimination between insiders and outsiders. An examination of the ubiquity and character of this tone, I suggest, forever precludes a united rhetorical studies for two reasons: (1) we enjoy our apocalyptic too much; and (2) apocalyptic is central to the identity of rhetorical studies because it is central to disciplinarity as such. Insofar as the urgency of the apocalyptic tone is sometimes a pragmatic and political necessity, an argument is made in favor of a more playful, polytonal apocalypticism that can help us better reckon with—and sometimes avoid—rhetoric that excludes. Acknowledgments The author thanks Carole Blair, Diane Davis, Debbie Hawhee, and the blind reviewers for their helpful suggestions and wise counsel. Notes 1Arguably, the first love object is not the mother's breast, but the mother's voice; the implications of this article of faith will be detailed in my later remarks on the apocalyptic (see Silverman; and Schwarz). 2I mean to suggest that the exodus was sanctioned in both senses: there are consequences for the enjoyment rhetoric's supplementarity, a point Gaonkar earlier developed in terms of the uncanny (also see Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double" 341–366). 3That is, he is both celebrated and cursed for establishing order in the idiom of the negative. I should indicate that by "Big Rhetoric" I refer not only to the globalization of rhetoric (or what is sometimes termed the rhetoric of inquiry), but all the related issues that are collected under that name via anxiety about disciplinary identity, including: (1) how ought we define "rhetoric"? (2) how should we define rhetorical studies as a field? by object or recourse to method, or by pedagogical mission? (3) who "owns" rhetoric or where is rhetoric better situated, in departments of English or Communication Studies? (4) is there such a thing as a "rhetorical tradition?" if so, what constitutes that tradition? (5) who does or does not have the authority to define rhetoric and rhetorical studies? (6) is rhetoric inclusive or mutually exclusive of cultural studies? and so on. These many questions all speak to the fundamental anxiety about what rhetoric is and who we are as rhetoricians, and I am focused on the whole of this anxiety vis-à-vis discipline, not any one question in particular. 4The primal horde refers to a mythic scenario developed by Darwin and elaborated by Freud to explain the emergence of the social contract and incest taboo: the idealized and primal father seizes all the women for himself, driving the sons away when they reach maturity. The sons, resentful of the father's despotism but desiring his love, agree to band together, kill the father, and eat him. They do so, however, only at the price of indigestion, for they find that their ideal leader is dead and are haunted by him; consequently, they agree to live as equals and to dispossess "the women" and practice exogamy (See Freud, Totem 201–204). 5This article is the most accessible and, in my view, most accurate description of the debate surrounding rhetoric and discipliniarity. I will nevertheless take issue later with what I think is a misreading of Dilip Gaonkar's positions. 6Of course, "criticism in crisis" is a tired hat, about which more shortly, but for the moment, we can trace it to Paul de Man's "Criticism and Crisis" (in Blindness 3–19). 7For the different ways in which a more interdisciplinary yet coherent, text- or practice-centered and historically mindful rhetorical studies has been called for, see Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies" 69–76; Fuller, "Globalization"; Keith, "Identity, Rhetoric, and Myth" 106; Leff, "Rhetorical Disciplines" 83–93; Mailloux, "Disciplinary Identities" 5–29 (also see his Disciplinary Histories for a revised version); Mailloux, "Practices, Theories, and Traditions" 129–138; and Mailloux, "Places in Time" 53–68. For arguments in favor of "Big Rhetoric" or globalization, see Simons, "Rhetorical Hermeneutics" 86–109; and Simons, "Globalization" 260–274. For a diversity of views on the issue of disciplinarity, see Herbert W. Simons' edited collection, The Rhetorical Turn, as well as the edited collection by Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith, Rhetorical Hermeneutics. Finally, one consequence of this decade-long discussion was the formation of the Alliance of Rhetorical Societies—initiated by Fred Antczak, Gerard Hauser, Robert Gaines, Michael Leff, and many others associated with the Rhetoric Society of America—which brought together a diverse group of rhetoricians for three days in Evanston, Illinois in the fall of 2003. Descriptions of the discussions at the conference are printed in the third issue of volume 24 of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2004). 8For a rumination on the "death" of rhetoric, see Bender and Wellberry, The Ends of Rhetoric, especially the introductory essay by the editors, which argues that in modernity "rhetoric" has given way to the delightfully more-syllabic "rhetoricality." 9My argument, however, is deliberately elliptical, as it attempts to underscore the performative dynamics of the debate over "Big Rhetoric" performatively. By "performative" I mean to suggest that the frequent masturbatory, petulant tone and prose of the present essay is both "fun and games" as well as argumentative, a point that will become clearer as the essay progresses toward the analysis of "tone" as a rhetorical device. From time to time I use the word "playful" to denote this approach. As an aside, an important if sadly over-critiqued element of both deconstruction and psychoanalysis is their playful tone and wildly associative writing techniques, which are deliberately employed to accompany the more traditional, syllogistic argument (and sometimes in Derrida's case, against the syllogistic argument). Slavoj Žižek's work is perhaps the most accessible example of performative writing in this sense, but for a full-throttle example of this "style" of performance, see Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume One: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002). "All you consumer fascist types, you know who you are," opens Rickels on the topic of his style of writing, "cannot be stopped from policing the middlebrow beat to which intellectual discourse was condemned a long time ago" (xv). Although Rickels insists that his "obscurity" is less a "style of writing or argument" than the juxtapositional demand of the objects of his analysis, his rhetoric is unquestionably strategic. 10Most breaks with Freud among psychoanalysts were a consequence of disagreements about drive theory. Some thinkers believed that the drives were not sexual but something else; for example, Jung believed the drives were spiritual in nature, whereas Adler eventually argued humans are driven by self-esteem. Others advocated a complete abandonment of the drive model in favor of more "relational" model, which generally goes under the name of "object relations theory." For the classical textbook on the latter, see Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations. 11The better explanation here, however, is that he does not seem to give a shit, when he understands his obstinacy and petulance to be precisely what the Other wants! He very much gives a shit (by hoarding his stuff, as it were) and wants to be disciplined! See Karl Abraham, "Contributions" 370–392. 12Initially Freud believed that the drives always aimed toward pleasure and the avoidance of pain in accord with "the pleasure principle." Eventually, however, Freud changed his mind to suggest there is a "death drive," or a pursuit of something beyond pleasure and life (see Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Freud's thinking in this respect would lead Jacques Lacan to suggest that, in the end, all drives are death drives. I will discuss this later in terms of "jouissance" or "enjoyment." 13The late James P. McDaniel's recent article, "Speaking Like a State," identifies "political enjoyment" as the problematic jouissance of our time. He argues that only by owning up to satisfactions of sadism, cruelty, and pain that all of us harbor through the processes of self-knowledge and "ironic self-suspension" can we start to counter and avoid the terrible political events (and the destructive, local responses to those events) in these "times of terror" (346). In a certain sense, the critique I advance here shows how the same "psychosocial economy of enjoyment" is in play in our discussions of disciplinarity as well. 14I acknowledge that such a shift from the psychoanalytic theory of the individual psyche to the "group behavior" of rhetoricians is controversial to some readers. In his understudied monograph Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud links the two levels via the function of the "object" (understood as another person) in the individual psyche: "In the individual's life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology…is at the same time social psychology as well" (3). My approach is similarly informed (that is, that groups behave in an analogous manner to individuals; e.g., class behavior often reflects Oedipal arrangements). For a more thoroughgoing discussion of this important theoretical tangle, see Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic" 338–395. 15I would be remiss not to point out that this some who enjoy tend to be gendered male, a point well made by Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter at the same disciplinary moment that Big Rhetoric became a concern. I will return to their essay later (see Blair, Brown, and Baxter, 383–409). 16For more on this evangelical riff, see Lundberg and Gunn, "'Ouija.'" 17The most recent are Steven Mailloux ("Places in Time") and James Arnt Aune's ("The Politics of Rhetorical Studies") essays in the February 2006 Quarterly Journal of Speech, which are revised versions of papers each delivered at the inaugural Alliance of Rhetorical Societies meeting in Evanston, Illinois in 2003. As the present essay attests, the theme of the 2006 meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America guarantees there are yet more and more to come. 18The keynote address by Steven Mailloux, "One Size Doesn't Fit All: The Contingent Universality of Rhetoric," revisits the Big Rhetoric debate, as did a number of papers on the 2006 RSA Convention Program. 19For the bottom feeders such as me, the suggestion here is that tone marks an intersection of psychoanalysis and rhetoric; tone is unquestionably a rhetorical quality, but it is not a word. Tone also registers the sound of desire and enjoyment. 20 For a Lacanian riff on a similar point ("mode"), see Dolar, "The Object Voice" 19–20. 21"Voice" is a mediating, sister concept to tone, and has received closer scrutiny in rhetorical studies (see Vivian, Being Made Strange; and Watts, "'Voice'" 179–796). 22If "mourning" is "a feeling-tone perhaps unique in the modern university," as James Arnt Aune has suggested ("Politics" 71), then apocalypticism is what the discourse of the modern university shares with the current administration of George W. Bush. The difference between the academic and federal apocalyptic, suggests Ellen Messer-Davidow, is that conservatism truly mourns and moves on, whereas the academic Left seems stuck in its nostalgic weeping. Space limits expanding the argument I offer later beyond the local, however, I would suggest inability of rhetorical studies to "get over itself" or "its death" is the same problem of the academic humanities as well; we simply cannot reckon with our dehabilitating and discriminatory perversity (see Messer-Davidow 1–35). 23For context, the complete comment from the blind reviewer was as follows: "Blair et al., despite the circulation their essay has gotten, struck me as simply whining, and generalizing on the basis of a highly limited sample." 24For a more modest reengagement with the project of defining both rhetoric and rhetorical studies as a field, see Graff, Walzer, and Atwill's The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition. 25James Darsey has suggested that erring too much on the side of deliberation emasculates protest politics and reformist rhetorics of social change (see Darsey 199–210). 26Once we recognize from the start that forging a contract or agreement among very different kinds of parties only threatens the hidden premise of exclusion, then we are led to a renewed responsibility to re-read our written work and be ever wary of tone. Just like a drug addict, the pervert must own her perversion to stop hurting the self and others. Owning up to one's role in the continuance of oppressive ideological norms is difficult, but as many of those who critique ideology have argued, the systemic character of ideology requires a degree of reflexivity. 27That the latter is the founding motto of any academic department was an argument often told by Robert Lee Scott to his students during many of his rhetoric seminars. My thanks to Dr. Scott for this humorous truism. 28In other words, my argument is that a recourse to a traditional apocalyptic tone—one that tempts the logic of the Same at the expense of the other—may be justifiable as a political strategy to save lives. It seems to me less justifiable as a tone in academic discussion. This would imply not taking a side with either "little rhetoric" or "Big Rhetoric," but rather, taking up the question of definition and disciplinarity solely in the institutional or political context (e.g., how to keep the program getting axed by the dean, and so on). 29Stylistically, Nietzsche famously yoked the feminine to tonal hollows (wombs), water, and the oceanic (see Derrida, Spurs; and Irigaray, Marine Lover). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

This long overdue translation of Dan Sperber's 1975 paper, “Rudiments de rhetorique cognitive,” beyond its sheer quality of thought, is important for three specific reasons. One is simple priority....

ABSTRACT In the introduction to this special issue, Hawhee sets the stage for the scholarly performances featured at the 2005 Pittsburgh symposium on ancient rhetoric by describing the context and foregrounding the lectures/essays contained in this issue. She notes the shift to questions of performing rhetoric and considers that shift in relation to disciplinary identities which, she asserts, function performatively.

ABSTRACT Applying a theory of homology to rhetorical pedagogy, this article suggests that Plato's and Augustine's discursive methods—dialectic and hermeneutics/homiletics respectively—function as unlocking devices via their formal structures. Dialectics unlock the discourses produced in/about the sensory world to reveal a higher level of material reality; hermeneutics/homiletics unlock Biblical ambiguities to produce a truer level of insight. Unlocking discourses, thus, give access to knowledge that would otherwise lie beyond reach for the untrained. The attention to form permits a different perspective on interpretation and pedagogy than more traditional approaches because it emphasizes audience's cognitive and “erotic” response to form and style.

Abstract Whereas earlier work on rhetorical situation focuses upon, the elements of audience, exigence, and constraints, this article argues that rhetorical situations operate within a network of lived practical consciousness or structures of feeling. Placing the rhetorical “elements” within this wider context destabilizes the discrete borders of a rhetorical situation. As an example of this wider context, this article explores the public rhetoric surrounding issues of urban sprawl in Austin, Texas. While public rhetorical movements can be seen as a response to the “exigence” of overdevelopment, it is also possible to situate the exigence's evocation within a wider context of affective ecologies comprised of material experiences and public feelings.

Abstract The rivalry between Plato and Isocrates has begun to receive scholarly attention, primarily because both Plato and Isocrates used the term philosophia to describe their occupation. However, the efforts to distinguish their respective uses and definitions of the term typically ignore the performative dimension of both Plato's and Isocrates’ writings and their relationship with other discourses of Athenian public culture. This essay argues that both Plato and Isocrates constructed the domain of philosophy by performing the speech genres constitutive of Greek cultural memory. To support this claim, I offer a reading of Plato's Menexenus and Isocrates’ Panegyricus, both of which were crafted in response to the same historical event, the Peace of Antalkidas. The essay demonstrates the distinct ways in which Plato and Isocrates appropriated generic conventions of the Athenian funeral oration and panegyric in order to construct the identity of a “philosopher” vis‐à‐vis his polis and to model the relationship between students of “philosophy” and discourses of their culture.

these reflections on working group discussions held at the ARS meeting has quickly taken me back to Evanston in mid-September 2003 and to the extraordinarily productive and provocative work that got done there. I vividly remember listening as Jerzy Axer and then Jeffrey Walker sounded an emergent theme: rhetoric, they said, is a teaching tradition. I remember being surprised at this theme - in fact, I would not have predicted it, and that surprise took me even further back, to the disappointment I felt in having a proposal rejected for an ISHR meeting: awe do not accept papers on pedagogy, the letter said. The dismissal of pedagogy is not unique to ISHR, of course; MLA and NGA have also been reluctant to yield pedagogy a place at the disciplinary table. Even in the GGGG, which was founded on pedagogical concerns, a sometimes bitter conflict has sprung up between theory and practice, with those advocating for the crucial role of theory arguing that studies in composition/rhetoric will not prosper or mature unless the field gives up its attachment to practice, to pedagogy. So I was surprised at the primacy of pedagogy at the ARS conference, and I was heartened by it as well. As Mike Leff has since remarked, at ARS, all roads lead to teaching. In his essay in this issue, Jerry Hauser offers a retrospective explanation for the marginalization of pedagogy and teaching: the ancient Greek rhetorical tradition, grounded in the paedeia and on the capacitating the individual student to lead the life of an active and responsible citizen gave way to the model of the German research institution, with its emphasis on and valorization of discovering new knowledge. This is an elegant explanation, one that leads to Hauser's equally elegant peroration: capacitating students to be competent citizens is our birthright It has been ours since antiquity. Modern education has stripped us of We need to reclaim it. What became increasingly clear to me is that a second key term that animated the conference - performance - must also play a central role in any such reclamation. In retrospect, I realized that every keynote address touched not only on pedagogy but also on performance: the performance of teaching; the performance of civic duty and discourse; the performance of student speaking and writing; the performance of disciplinarity. As I listened and talked, the focus on performance and pedagogy seemed perfectly to bridge the rhetoric/composition and communication traditions to which

Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 by Nan Johnson Carbondale: SIU Press, 2002. 220 pp. Rhetoric In The Middle Ages And Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts By James J. Murphy. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. 1974. “Foreword to the Reprint”; Jody Enders. Bibliography, not credited. MRTS Reprint Series, No. 4. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. xii + 399 pp. Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts by James J. Murphy. 1971. MRTS Reprint Series, No. 5. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. xxiii + 236 pp.

Abstract Although belletristic rhetoric constitutes à response to concerns that are unique to the eighteenth century, its fundamental principles carry forward Stoic views concerning the relationships among the individual's perceptions, moral sense, and civic duty. Stoic philosophy had particular appeal for eighteenth‐century thinkers searching for stability in the midst of rapid change. Examining the philosophical links between belletristic rhetoric and Stoic thought provides a more complete understanding of the beliefs about language, virtue, and society that shape the development of belletristic rhetoric.

Abstract Balancing the critiques of scientism in communications, this response notes how belletrism has marginalized rhetorical studies on the other side of the modern opposition of the arts and sciences. Such institutional divisions need to be assessed against broader changes in literacy if our disciplinary histories are to be a resource for assessing how rhetoricians in composition and communications can work together. The marginal positions of composition and speech courses may undermine the prestige of rhetoric as an academic discipline, but the margins can be a place of power if approached pragmatically. Looking beyond the pragmatic professionalism of disciplinary insiders such as Stanley Fish, we need to develop alliances with practitioners of the arts of rhetoric outside as well as within the academy if pragmatism is to contribute to the institutional work of making universities into institutions of public learning.

Abstract In his essay “Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies,”; Steven Mailloux notes that “many compositionists in the seventies and eighties did not find it necessary to claim to be a scientific discipline “(16). I respond to this claim by focusing on the new discourse about writing that emerged in the 1970s in work by Emig, Shaughnessy, Flower & Hayes, and others. Distinguishing between the “formative “ (intellectual) contexts from which this work drew, and the “receptive”; contexts in which it came to valued, used, and resonate, I show that whereas the roots of this work were almost exclusively empirical, their effects in the receptive context, including beyond the academy, were deeply rhetorical.