This essay extends efforts to facilitate emotional–material frameworks of rhetoric informed by strides in rhetorical and biological studies respectively. Specifically, I examine Edwin Black’s theory of exhortation in light of neurological theories of affect, emotion contagion, and embodiment. I argue Black’s theory offers a prescient precursor to emotional–material rhetoric but also demands revision in light of recent advances in neuroscience. I present two claims. First, I argue emotionally grounded rhetoric can exhort emotional–discursive connections and preference judgments absent the need to convert emotional experiences into formal beliefs. Second, I argue physiological indicators are at least as important as verbal discourse in facilitating emotional exhortation. Finally, I conclude with some theoretical implications for the emotional–material study of rhetoric.

In order to highlight the genuinely radical nature of John Dewey’s educational and democratic vision this essay articulates a vision of contemporary rhetorical education that is grounded in a pragmatic rereading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to power.” Drawing from Dewey’s treatment of the will to power in Human Nature and Conduct, I argue that rhetorical pedagogy seeks to arouse, channel, and finally compose the impulses of students through the activity of intelligence in such a way that reflects and advocates for students’ interests within a democratic ethic of advocacy, criticism, and deliberation.

As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

Local publics open a distinctively generative space for deliberation, one that can actually use difference, based on race, status, or discourse, as a resource—but only if such marginalized perspectives can gain standing and be heard. For difference to gain a voice may depend on a discourse that can delay consensus, acknowledge conflict, and provoke a difference-driven inquiry. Drawing on a study of a deliberative process triggered by issues of diversity within a university, this essay sketches a working theory of community engagement supported by the rhetorical scaffold of a Community Think Tank. The essay explores the theoretical potential of conflict in local publics while asking how rhetorical activists and educators might support a difference-driven deliberation in practice.

The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, by Deborah Brandt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 196 pages. $29.99 (paper).Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in Ameri...

This article extends research on the production of embodied space by focusing on the relations between place and memory. Beginning with a consideration of how wearable technologies enable new spatial practices within the constructed order of the city, we develop a conceptual framework to understand these spatial practices by returning to the rhetorical art of memory and the building of memory palaces. The art of memory, exemplified by memory palaces, offers a rhetorical resource for understanding how smartphones as wearable technologies may be incorporated—that is, brought into the body, as integral to the production of embodied spatial memories. We argue for the memory-palace builder as an inventive rhetorical (and mobile) figure who not only walks but also wears the city, composing and embedding hybrid memories into and onto hybrid places and, thus, providing a coherent way of being and acting in contemporary urban space.

In this essay, I develop a feminist framework for analyzing wearable technologies as embodied rhetorics, one that considers (1) how wearable technologies enable micro-performances of gender, status, and identity; (2) how wearable technologies are embedded in policy/political frameworks as well as scientific/medical ones; (3) how wearable technologies are embedded in spatiotemporal networks of actors, objects, and so on; and (4) how the design of technological objects themselves do or do not live up to the promises of wearability and mobility. Using an analysis of the breast pump as my case and drawing from interviews with women about their experiences, I show how the breast pump crystallizes a network of rhetorics that is both disruptive and productive of gendered differences. In particular, the breast pump presents rhetorical arguments for returning to work soon after childbirth while performing a professional role. At the same time, this technology makes an argument for including nursing bodies on college campuses, spaces that have not historically considered those bodies or their needs.

In both popular and scholarly discourse, wearable technologies are characterized primarily as technologies that quantify, providing wearers with new knowledge about themselves and their environments. Such limited characterizations do not fully engage technologies that are, indeed, wearable but do not simply quantify. This essay argues that wearability encompasses rhetorical work beyond that of popular, mainstream technologies like fitness trackers and sleep monitors. Using Judy Segal’s “kairology,” this essay traces five ostomy pouch narratives—focusing on narratives of empowerment and constraint and analyzing competing experiences of wearing and the divergent identifications those experiences support. The essay concludes with preliminary insights into how kairology is well-suited to help researchers tease out the dynamic processes between wearer and technology, as well as the identities that those processes make possible.

The essays in this special issue identify and analyze the rhetorics enabled and disabled, disclosed and foreclosed by wearable devices and the discourses attending to them, focusing on new rhetoric...

This essay proposes that the rise of sentient cities inaugurates an era of pervasive citizenship wherein individual citizens function as wearable devices for a collective body. To understand what rhetorical practices are available in this problematic, the essay proceeds in three parts. First, it surveys how information systems help determine rhetoric through and as a kind of systems theory. Second, the essay traces how technologies and techniques that form individual bodies are now emerging at larger scales and shape collective bodies. Through several examples, the essay shows how these multipartner ventures to install data collection sensors in cities are informing a new problematic that we term #SenseCommons. Third, the project offers extradisciplinary resources for rhetorically navigating today’s increasingly pervasive information spaces. Ultimately, this essay proposes that the emergence of sentient cities introduces a system of continuous rhetoric whose primary function is not to persuade but to inform.

Wearable technologies in general and mHealth data in particular are championed frequently for ways they afford individual agency and empowerment and promote what the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) calls a “culture of health.” This article complicates such epideictic rhetorics based on results from a situational analysis of the RWJF’s Data for Health listening events, which incorporated panelists from the RWJF, JawBone, Inc., the Quantified Self, and other mHealth technology organizations as well as audience participants who work in community health. Given panelists’ and audiences’ diverging claims about how mHealth data either succeed or fail in creating a culture of health, I mobilize precarity as an analytic construct for critiquing the coexistence of technoscientific progress alongside the persistence of health disparities among vulnerable populations.

This essay extends efforts to complicate traditional understandings of ethos by considering it as expressed through and by means of the body. This analysis also examines ethos in relation to Vicki Tolar Burton’s concept of rhetorical accretion or the practice of overlaying new texts on the primary core text. To reveal the significance of analyzing ethos in this manner, this study explores the work of Genevieve Stebbins, a late nineteenth-century proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. The essay examines her use of textual accretion as a form of critique but also as a means of acceptance and overlay. More significantly, it reveals the ways that Stebbins’s deployment of rhetorical accretion represents a striking reversal of Burton’s concept. Instead of men overlaying a woman’s text we see the opposite practice in Stebbins’s case.

In 1970, black autoworker James Johnson, Jr., fatally shot three people at Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue Gear and Axel Plant in Detroit. The shooting occurred three years after a devastating urban uprising and in the context of black militant labor organizing in local automotive plants. After a legal defense arguing racism and labor exploitation provoked his actions, Johnson was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. In this essay, I attend to the defense strategy that attempted to retain the political critique implicit in Johnson’s “black rage” while working within the constraints of jurisprudential and clinical notions of “insanity.” The Johnson case suggests that the mobilization of black affect is an always-ambivalent endeavor that can enable radical critique and political practice, while also subordinating black rhetorical agency.

This essay argues that the mechanical voice of Stephen Hawking requires theorizing the public as a voice object. I contend that Hawking’s mechanical voice threatened his audience with what Jacques Lacan called the object voice, a voice in excess of bodies and languages that functions as an elusive object-cause of desire. Upon showing how the psychoanalytic account of voice and rhetorical scholarship on publics may mutually inform one another, I argue that, due to the role of publics as an objet petit a, the strange qualities of Hawking’s synthesizer were rhetorically surmounted. In sum, this essay considers whether Hawking’s mechanical voice was really all that different from our own.

When Susan Jarratt asked me to write an essay that would invite RSQ readers to engage with all four articles in this issue, she described the task using the musical metaphor of “Counterpoint”—the t...

In this essay, I analyze anti-Chinese rhetoric produced by the Knights of Labor to explore how labor functions as a performance of citizenship. I argue that Knights deployed citizenship as a embodiable topos, using the physicality of labor as a channel to claim inclusion in the national polity despite their marginalized class status.

This essay engages the understudied Indian reformer, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), in order to explicate pragmatism’s influence in non-Western rhetorical situations. By charting the influence of John Dewey on Ambedkar as a student at Columbia University, this study explores Ambedkar’s translation of pragmatism into an Indian context filled with religiously underwritten injustice. His form of pragmatist rhetoric focuses on conversion as a solution to the problems of untouchables in India, and represents a version of pragmatist rhetoric that is revolutionary in form and effect. Expanding our knowledge of how persuasion relates to religious conversion, I argue that Ambedkar constructs and employs a pragmatist rhetoric of reorientation. Honed by Ambedkar in the pluralistic context of India, this process is composed of three distinct steps: evaluation of existing religious commitments, renunciation of harmful worldviews, and conversion to beneficial alternative religious orientations.

In the contemporary United States, concerns about the rise and continued influence of Christian Fundamentalism are likely to be more political than religious in nature. Based on widely held assumpt...

There is little rhetorical inquiry that does not grapple, in one way or another, with tensions between the need for healthy, beneficial encounters with authority and concern for the monolithic and ...

This essay reads John Bulwer’s seventeenth-century gesture manuals Chironomia and Chirologia. Bulwer advances a theory of invention as an inherently gestural form. The frequent consignment of gesture to delivery is rooted in a persistent tendency to treat motions as ornaments that may be taken or left. Bulwer’s gesture theory refuses the separation of action and invention from which this tendency derives. From this refusal, I argue for a model of animate eloquence that can be used to collapse distinctions among mind and body and reason and emotion in the production, transmission, and reception of persuasive claims.

Increasingly, rhetoricians have taken up the task of understanding how rhetoric is applicable to material conditions, yet have found difficulty in approaching the rhetoric that exists between nonhumans. While the debate over the size of rhetoric, big or small, has often dominated discussions, the concern over size is less important than the relationship between rhetoric and materiality. Both “rhetorical materialism” and “rhetoric’s materiality” approaches see nonhuman objects as subsumed in symbolic representations and human-centric worldviews. This essay suggests a micro-rhetorical stance, which avoids discussions over size and builds upon existing formulations of exploratory, nonhuman rhetorics. A micro-rhetoric allows for concepts not previously thought of as rhetorical, such as hyle, which can be used to identify persuasive elements within nonhuman relations. To show how hyle can be used in a micro-rhetorical investigation, this essay offers a brief analysis of the material persuasions involved in the design of a microbrewery malting system.

Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown argue that the complexity of environmental rhetoric is such that its concerns are embedded in both our lived experiences and across many intellectual endeavors. To think through environmentalism, they suggest, is to think through rhetoric, and both entail crossing boundaries. Environmentalism and its concomitant rhetorics, however, frequently draw a bold line between humans and nonhuman nature, and so long as rhetoric remains wedded to the human and the human alone, environmental rhetoric will continue to miss the mark. A strange environmental rhetoric, which blurs the line between humans and nonhumans, calls for more relations and not less—not a removal of humans from the environment, but another way of comporting ourselves with environments.

Applying a constitutive rhetorical framework to public speeches and letters circulated transnationally from 1859–1866 by the leadership of the revolutionary Irish nationalist Fenian movement, this essay argues that constitutive rhetorical theory's assumed ideological effects must be modified to account for the transnational rhetorical practices of movements like the Fenians. The essay first traces how Fenian identification practices seek to fix the entire diaspora as the "Irish people" and Ireland as the true homeland. It then examines how the movement transcodes its constitutive rhetoric to better fit the separate national constraints operating in the United States and Ireland, and how these strategies hamper the organization's ability to sustain the unity required for success. While the constituted Irish Revolutionary remained in each national context, their strategies for fulfilling the constitutive narrative had splintered, helping to doom the cause. The Fenian case demonstrates the need to render constitutive rhetorical theory in more dialogic terms, especially for transnational audiences.

Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement, by Eric King Watts. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. x + 246 pp. $39.95 (cloth).The Insistent Call: Rhe...

As postcolonial studies and decolonial thinking continue to intersect with the field of rhetorical studies, two primary aims are articulated. The first aim speaks to how language, knowledge, and rh...

This essay performs a comparative analysis of the rhetorical dimensions of versions of the socialist anthem the “Internationale” in divergent historical contexts. Based on literature on the rhetoric of music in social movements and theories of affect and emotion, our study of two historical iterations of the “Internationale” demonstrates the differences between class-conscious and nationalist-populist mobilization of feeling. In versions faithful to working class experience, the anthem names a basic class antagonism, unites an audience in affective musical practice resonant with working class experience and aspirations, and explicitly demonstrates how reason and revolt, in the words and sounds of the song, may thunder together.

In the last twenty-five years, researchers from diverse fields of inquiry, including rhetoric and communication studies, have sought to “mine contemporary discourse and dominant logics that often b...

This essay argues that public debating societies that emerged in Britain in the later eighteenth century functioned as sites of invention where citizens could develop dispositions associated with a more inclusive form of democracy. I locate the generative aspects of these forums in the principle of decorum. I argue that this principle functioned as a means for participants to negotiate traditional codes of conduct and standards of speech that constrained interactions among various constituents of the body politic. To illustrate this claim, I focus on the clash of codes exemplified in an encounter between a Quaker woman and a member of Parliament in a public debating forum. By highlighting these discursive interactions, this essay extends current conversations in public sphere theory that call for a focus on the processes and forms of rhetorical engagement among diverse publics.

This article uses a short reflection on the life and work of Father António Vieira (born Portugal, 1608, died Brazil, 1697) to draw our attention to the need to account not just for the dynamic interplay between colony and metropolis, but also the colony’s impact on the teaching, theory, and practice of rhetoric since 1492. Specifically, my reflection focuses on Vieira’s Le Lacrime d’Eraclito, a text that suggests that for rhetorical theory and practice the colonial encounter had ramifications on the European continent as profound as those on the American. We cannot speak of an American or Western rhetorical tradition and history without considering this interplay in which the American colonies were active participants, not passive subjects.

Because evanescent oral phenomena present hermeneutical and representational dilemmas, orality remains an elusive and underestimated force in histories of rhetoric. This essay raises the profile of orality by attending to its cultural value and political resonance in historical and modern Latin America. In the encounter period, both the indigenous and the Europeans express preferences for the oral in legal, religious, and political contexts. In the modern period, a progressive political class adopts the oral as medium of choice for strengthening and diversifying civil society. Following theorists Diane Davis, Steven Mailloux, and Walter Ong, this essay treats orality as a relational phenomenon potentially instructive in a twenty-first century climate where recognizing the “presence” of Latin America is a political and ethical priority.

This essay uses the specter of Mexican presidential rhetoric (specifically, Plutarco Elías Calles’ 1928 informe) to remark on the nationalistic limitations of U.S. presidential rhetoric scholarship as a whole. Such limitations can lead to possible mis- and under-readings that can hinder the applicability of U.S. scholarship to other “American” places. These observations are then followed by a reading of Calles’ informe that argues for a wider hemispheric approach to our understanding of “American” presidential rhetoric. Such an approach aims to push our collective gaze beyond the territory of the United States to the point where the rhetorical histories of Latin America rub uncomfortably but productively against our own U.S.-centrism.

This article examines Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo, the only extant Spanish-language narrative written by a slave, to illuminate Manzano’s reception of rhetoric, or rather his rejection of it. This reception is briefly situated in the context of contemporary receptions of belletristic rhetoric within the Cuban literary circle that solicited Manzano’s life story. Additionally, the article brings rhetorical terminology to what critics have observed as Manzano’s developing agency through the process of writing his narrative and selecting its content. Providing a view of rhetoric from the margins, Manzano’s narrative offers a critique of the complex relationship between oral and written discourse and the slave’s ability to be seen as truthful.

This essay uses data from a field-based study to describe the everyday rhetorical performances through which ethos is established when the orator’s credibility has been compromised by stigma born of chronic mental illness. These strategies, called “recuperative ethos,” include displays of astuteness, references to strong human connections, and appeals to religious topoi. Further, the essay describes innovative rhetorical performances, called “agile epistemologies,” which include logical contradiction, metonymic parallels, enthymemes, and expansive views on human agency. Taken together, these terms use the voices and experiences of mentally ill participants to add important insight into the rhetoric of mental healthcare and the rhetoric of medicine, health, and wellness.

Rhetoricians have paid increasing attention to the influence of materiality and context on rhetorical action. However, such attention has yet to infiltrate discussions of constitutive rhetoric. This essay examines Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a case study for developing audience cultivation as a metaphor for analyzing audience development. This metaphor allows scholars to better account for the historical and material contexts that shape rhetorical efforts. Through analyses of Child’s and other contemporary cookbooks, as well as rigorous attention to the political, economic, social, and cultural forces at play in midcentury American life, I argue that Child’s success is not solely the product of her rhetorical prowess or charisma, but also the product of a constellation of extra-discursive elements that both enabled and constrained her rhetorical efforts.

From the early to mid 2000s, economists, pundits, and other commentators engaged in heated debate about the possibility of a bubble in the U.S. housing market. Prognosticating in a variety of public forums, debaters divided along largely ideological lines, with adherents of mainstream neoclassical economics producing a forceful narrative accord that a bubble was unlikely or impossible. Approaching this debate as a case of the powerful discourses that strive to keep markets intervention-free, this essay explores market bubbles as sites of discursive tension and professional stigma, seeking to understand how the allegation of a bubble imbricates expectations of decorum and provokes a constraining rhetorical response. With particular attention to the phenomenon of “bubble denial,” I highlight how rhetorical strategies of definition, insult, and risk dismissal functioned to sustain market confidence, discredit bubble predictors, and habituate decision makers to evolving market risk.

African Diaspora rhetorics and vernaculars are neither shadowy thugs perpetrating drive-bys on Western Civ, nor viruses that corrupt and destroy the purity of superior forms. African Diaspora rheto...

Historical and heritage tourism is a booming industry across the United States, and southern states in particular offer tourists the chance to walk the streets where some of the United States’ most dramatic racial conflicts unfolded. In these contexts, publics are invited to remember slavery in strategic ways. This essay enriches rhetorical studies’ understanding of the relationship between place and public memory by offering a robust consideration of tourism as a constitutive component of memory environments. We do so through a closer look at the memories of urban slavery and rebellion that circulate in Charleston, South Carolina’s historical tourism industry.

Inquiry’s place in rhetorical studies has long been contentious. Critics argue that academic professionalism and the rise of criticism and theory have diminished rhetoric as a pragmatic art. The recent trend in higher education toward greater restrictions on academic inquiry poses new problems for rhetorical studies, particularly where those restrictions exacerbate existing educational inequities. In the effort to address those inequities, a distinction needs to be made between old concerns with inquiry and the new issues any reorganization of inquiry will present. The generic support for inquiry that universities provide benefits rhetorical studies by lending structure to inquiry processes fraught with uncertainty and marked by impermanency. That support allows for the kind of careful engagement with possibility that rhetorical invention requires. The 2009 documentary film Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist illustrates the value to inquiry of professional conventions and other forms of generic support. Those same conventions serve rhetorical studies in similar ways.

Recent scholarship has called for the study of mixed metaphors wherein two or more phrases (i.e., vehicles) are enlisted to describe a single underlying idea (i.e., tenor). In this essay, I delineate the rhetorical predecessors of (in)fertility, a term that constitutes both a metaphor in and of itself and a tenor that has been explained in terms of mixed metaphorical discourses of the past. Through an initial analysis of the evolution of reproductive metaphors in texts spanning the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and then a follow-up analysis of those metaphors as they mixed together in early twentieth-century discourses, I illustrate how the interaction of a mixed metaphor’s distinct vehicles is dependent on those metaphors’ historical uses. My findings are considered in terms of their implications for positioning individual women—both in the past and more recently—as more or less at-fault for their lack of children.

Revisionist historiographies in rhetorical studies often recuperate marginalized figures to advance scholarship on rhetorical education. I illustrate the heuristic value of recuperating mainstream figures by drawing on unexamined materials of John Bascom, whose contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory have been determined exclusively by his textbook, Philosophy of Rhetoric. I challenge such interpretations by using autobiography and institutional history to illustrate Bascom’s disdain for rhetoric and preference for philosophy. I synthesize Bascom’s publications, teaching, and administrative work while president of the University of Wisconsin to recuperate a civic philosophy of public education that integrated civic humanism with progressivism to promote collective identity and shared governance. I use Bascom’s philosophy to support rhetorical education that integrates participation and deliberation as strategies for civic engagement. This essay contributes to rhetorical historiography by demonstrating how a wider range of materials can produce more complex, compelling accounts of an individual’s contributions to theory or pedagogy.

In the spirit of apologia, this essay illustrates how the rhetoric of Reverend Jeremiah Wright can be better understood when set in relation to the black vernacular tradition of Signification or signifyin(g), the Racial Contract, and Whiteness. A sustained contextualization of Wright’s “controversial statements” reveals a complex performative rhetoric that is highly dependent on elements of delivery, especially tone. We argue that reporters in the mainstream media as well as Barack Obama deliberately maligned the performative dimension of Wright’s rhetoric, thereby misrepresenting it in the service of generating controversy and political expediency, respectively.

Under headings that include rhetoric of assent, critical understanding, pluralism, rhetorology, and listening-rhetoric, Wayne Booth’s scholarly work for over thirty-five years hinged on a simple question: “How can I get each side to understand the other?” Booth’s imbroglio with Kenneth Burke demonstrates that “understanding”—Booth’s key concept—is not confined, as Booth had suggested, to respecting opposing views, searching for common ground, and finding reasons that warrant shared assent. Understanding is also enabled and obstructed by a number of factors, including six I examine: form, process, emotion, differences, power, and additional rhetorical/material constraints. Analyzing Booth and Burke’s published exchange in Critical Inquiry (1974), along with their correspondence from 1972 to 1983, reveals how their disagreement evolved; how their prolonged dispute highlights limitations in Booth’s theory; and how Booth’s engagement with Burke, along with Booth’s subsequent reflections on their exchange, extends Booth’s project to offer a more rhetorically robust theory of understanding.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Chaim Perelman's work showed the Platonic roots of Modernist thought; see especially The Realm of Rhetoric. Latour's work is strong in terms of Modernism's impact on understandings of science.2 See Robert Hariman; Reyes, "The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth."3 I draw mostly on Rotman's more recent Mathematics as Sign because there one finds the clearest articulation of his approach.4 The issue of the relationship between informal and formal mathematical discourse, the discursive/argumentative strategies within each, and the rhetorical purposes of each remains an unexplored and potentially rich area for rhetorical analysis. See the "Potentialities" section that follows.5 For others who make this argument see William P. Thurston; Lakoff and Núñez; Imre Lakatos.6 This is, of course, a major issue in the mathematics education literature, where studies of student perspectives on math reveal two consistent themes: students perceive math as (1) abstract and (2) rule-driven. The point that we are building toward is that mathematics is not abstract or rule-driven by nature, but it can and often is taught as an abstract form of logical (rule-driven) reasoning. This pedagogical approach, it has been shown, does not allow the majority of students to identify with mathematics (see Boaler). Regarding computers and mathematics, an interesting phenomenon has emerged in the twenty-first century: powerful computers are analyzing enormous data sets and are producing complex mathematical formulas out of those data sets that even the best mathematicians cannot understand—they know they work to predict certain phenomena in the data set but they cannot give meaning to those predictions. The fact that computers can generate novel mathematical formulae significantly undermines the Platonic view of mathematics. See Rotman, Mathematics as Sign, 126–128.7 Lakatos's work reveals the importance of historical context and the dynamics of argumentation in mathematical innovation. See Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations.8 For insightful accounts of the emergence of Greek geometry and its debt to empirical, material features of the world see Michel Serres; Reviel Netz.9 To the skeptical reader who thinks math is only metaphorical at the basic level: Nearly half of Where Mathematics Comes From addresses more complex mathematics, offering analyses of the concept of infinity and of Euler's classic equation eπi = −1. A full treatment of these analyses is beyond the scope of this essay.10 Rhetoric of science scholars have extended Latour's argument in various ways. The number of scholars is too long to list here but one might profitably begin with John A. Lynch and Chantal Benoit-Barné.11 Analysis of rhetoric as constitutive has increased in many areas of rhetorical studies but remains a minority approach to the study of mathematical discourse. I develop this point in "The Rhetoric in Mathematics."12 These works build of course on previous scholarship on mathematics as deployed in other domains, including especially the domains of economics and statistics.13 Bernhard Riemann's concept of manifold, for example, comes to mind as a potentially beneficial way to advance our thinking about polysemy and subjectivity, for it emphasizes not only the discrete differentiations of meaning and identity but also their layered and continuous features. See Arkady Plotnitsky.