Fourteen years after the special issue on neuroscience and rhetoric in this journal (Neurorhetorics, vol. 40, no. 5), we turn back and look forward. We assess what has been accomplished in neurorhetorics in that time frame, examine what has changed in rhetorical studies and in the neurosciences, and offer suggestions for future research. Eight contributors detail the importance of neurorhetorics for their work and engage a range of topics. Those include neurodiversity, neuropolicy, neurogastronomy, and interdisciplinary collaborations, among others. Ultimately, the forum points toward the need for more critical cultural approaches in neurorhetorics, more policy discussions, new methodologies, and new philosophies that can stretch beyond the “neuro-” prefix and enroll insights from New Materialisms and Global Rhetorics.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the lives of two pianists with significant impairments of their right arms: Paul Wittgenstein, a classical pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, and Horace Parlan, a jazz pianist who lost full use of his right hand due to childhood polio. Drawing on theories of mêtis and passing developed by queer theory and disability studies scholars, we theorize aural passing to examine how Parlan and Wittgenstein differently navigated the rhetorical constraints of their respective musical genres. Engaging a rhetorical biography of each performer’s unique mêtis, we compare how disabled forms of passing are not equivalent across all instances and conclude by meditating on the entrenched ableism of musical pedagogy and performance.KEYWORDS: Aural passingclassical musicdisabilityjazzmêtis AcknowledgmentsWe thank Michael Lechuga, Emma McDonnell, Mark Pedelty, Kate Rich, and Aubrey Weber who all provided feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Normate is a term developed by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to mean “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). Throughout this essay, we draw on this term to reference the link between the social construction of normative ablism and embodied standards of self-expression (Dolmage, “Back Matter” 351–52).2 Deleuze and Guattari admit that “becoming-imperceptible means many things” and, in a close parallel to the animal (fox, octopus) metaphors for cunning intelligence invoked by the term mêtis, reference “the camouflage fish” to describe the act of blending in through an overlay of patterns. They also describe “becoming-imperceptible” as “to be like everybody else,” “to go unnoticed,” and as having a “essential relation” to “movement,” which is often “below and above the threshold of perception” (279–81).3 One colleague and pianist of mine responded with the singular word “VERBOTEN!” when asked if he had ever heard of the piece played by a performer using two hands.

Historically, the commons is conceptually rooted in concerns over shared expertise derived from material resources. Contemporary understandings increasingly examine varied commons rooted in the general intellect—an affective and ideational production across people. Too often, this focus reduces technology to either a tool for, or impediment to, building and accessing robust commons, and overlooks the colonial inheritance of contemporary theory. As a corrective, we follow efforts to rehabilitate the Luddites as not antitechnology, but as technology ethicists, and theorize technology as a coproducer of the general intellect. Situating Sophie Zhang’s and others’ activism as exemplary of a productive neo-Luddism, we argue that technology constitutively remediates the general intellect and as such is central to the ethics of the commons. From this, we advance the argument that rhetorical sabotage is key to promoting a general intellect against the corporate interests and technical-colonialism too often coded into commons.

This essay applies rhetorical framing analysis to vernacular student-created discourse promoting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and Palestinian rights. The results of this study suggest that pro-BDS student activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel accountable for an ongoing system of oppression, discrimination, settler colonialism, and apartheid against Palestinians. This framing relies on the values of justice, freedom, equality, and joint struggle—values that strongly overlap with social and racial justice discourses focusing on intersectionality and justice for marginalized and oppressed peoples. In response to the rhetorical ecology for pro-BDS discourse, including counterframing by Israel advocates and the doxa that BDS is antisemitic, pro-BDS activist-rhetors regularly denounce antisemitism, emphasize Jewish support for the BDS movement, and draw comparisons to other struggles for justice and liberation.

ABSTRACTDuring a 2018 sentencing hearing of former Olympics and Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar, 156 survivors offered Victim Impact Statements, and Judge Rosemarie Aquilina made national headlines for her impassioned responses to each survivor. This essay shows how Aquilina’s responses use epideictic rhetoric to make audible a judicial practice of feminist witnessing of assault testimony. In so doing, Aquilina challenges the way blame “sticks” to survivors and casts a scrutinizing gaze on a culture that silences survivors; praises the individual act of testimony and constitutes a collective of “sister survivors,” thereby fostering connection and potential for coalition building; and reframes sexual assault testimony as a public act with socially transformative effects.KEYWORDS: Epideictic rhetoricfeminist judicial theoryfeminist witnessingsexual assault Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 I rely on the VIS reproduced on the website In Our Own Words, a resource created by Heartland Independent Film Forum and sponsored by the Michigan Daily Newspaper, MSU’s student paper. Because the statements were published with survivors’ permission on inourwords.org as an educational resource, I have used the survivor’s name if it was released. In cases where it was not, I use the number or symbols that appear on inourwords.org.2 The VIS followed Nassar’s guilty plea to seven counts of sexual misconduct. Although the plea deal meant there would be no public criminal trial during which survivors could testify, Aquilina invited any survivor impacted by Nassar’s abuse, including parents, to offer a statement.3 Aquilina’s vengeance-focused comments also received criticism from feminists, even as they often acknowledged them as an understandable response to Nassar’s abhorrent acts (Gruber; Press). Her comments, in this moment, demonstrate the limitations of what Elizabeth Bernstein calls carceral feminism, wherein criminal prosecution is viewed as a solution to gender violence, without attention to the ways criminal law is entrenched in “masculinism, racism and cruelty” (Gruber).

Given the influx in people of African descent immigrating to the United States from diverse national, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds, the demographics of the US Black community has shifted significantly over the last several decades. As a result of these changes, it is imperative that approaches to rhetorical studies, especially African-centered cultural rhetorics, remain inclusive and representative of diverse Black experiences in the United States and abroad. Toward this end, the authors propose a new disciplinary subfield called Global Black Rhetorics (GBR). GBR emphasizes engaging similarities and differences across Black experiences, positions of power, and privilege, which includes acknowledging, studying, and prioritizing the histories, languages, rhetorical traditions, and practices of continental Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Latinx, Afro-Europeans, and other people of African descent across the African Diaspora. The authors introduce a four-themed framework for GBR that includes: assessing methods of education about global Black experiences, studying and teaching Black language diversity, teaching and citing contemporary rhetors and texts from Africa and African Diasporic contexts, and prioritizing healing as a communal goal for all Black people. The essay concludes with an introduction to the contributors of this special issue whose research advances the authors’ call for a globalized approach to Black Rhetorics.

This essay conceptualizes and applies a theory of rhetorical debility to new materialist rhetorical studies. Drawing from critical disability studies, rhetorical debility frames the ways that hierarchical human and nonhuman relations can inhibit certain rhetoricities while enabling others under neoliberalism. This theory extends the concept of “rhetorical capacities,” located within a genealogy of new materialist and posthuman thought in rhetorical studies, in response to intersectional critique of new materialism from Indigenous scholars and disability studies. The essay demonstrates rhetorical debility’s applicability to transnational sites of oppression along axes of disability, colonialism, and neoliberalism through a case study analysis of Palestinian protest rhetoric.

In September 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration held a public hearing inviting comments on the regulation of human cells, tissues, and cellular and tissue-based products. This essay uses Nikolas Rose’s concept of molecularization to show the rhetorical conflicts that emerged between lay public arguments and biomedical experts’ claims about the limits of personal autonomy, ownership, and the definition of cells and tissues as products. By analyzing how public actors negotiate the regulation of human tissues, I argue that a rhetorical account of molecularization shows how and for whom bodies are commodified and physically distributed. Through this rhetorical account of molecularization, I move between the molecular level of the body (the micro) and the situatedness of human bodies (the macro) to rethink the ways bodies are defined, even at the level of the cell.

This essay details a history of environmental violence in Wisconsin, showing the ways that the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) responded during the walleye wars of the 1980s and early 1990s. I show that resentment-laden settler colonialism was engaged by an Ojibwe rhetoric of collaboration, a response that pedagogically emphasizes mutual respect and responsibility. In ongoing relationships with Wisconsin publics, they practice a rhetoric that works counter to the logics of settler colonialism. This essay ultimately shows how GLIFWC’s public outreach during the walleye wars unsettles a settler colonial violence grounded in ignorance and resentment. Such an approach to collaborative relationships enacts a pedagogy grounded in treaty rights between the US and Ojibwe tribes, all the while asserting sovereignty.

Coalitional politics have largely been examined across social and cultural differences that serve shared political commitments, and the rhetorical force of situated and material locations remains an open question. To provide a theoretical analytic for these excesses, I offer pluriversal and rhetorical understandings of divergence and diplomacy for coalitional politics. I demonstrate these concepts through a rhetorical analysis of a community organization from San Antonio, Texas, and their coalitional politics, which partially emerge as a response to extreme weather events and urban development. The upshot reveals that rhetorical approaches to divergence and diplomacy can help capture the material obligations and constraints across heterogeneous yet interdependent worlds. Such theoretical tools will be increasingly important for coalitional rhetorics and politics responding to climate breakdown.

Despite varying understandings of who or what a demagogue is or what a demagogue does, it is little surprise that demagoguery has long occupied rhetoricians, who are of course also interested in persuasion, argument, politics, public speech, affect, emotion, ethics, deliberative discourse, and essentially all the other realms of rhetorical action touched by the demagogue. Still, after more than two and a half millennia of deliberation on the matter, rhetoricians are still grappling with demagoguery—how to define it, how to identify who engages in it, how to explain its rhetorical character and effects, how to resist it, and how to reverse it, or if it’s even possible to do so. The essays in this issue advance that effort in a time when demagoguery is once again on the rise.

This essay features a study of the #NotOkay Twitter thread, which arose as a response to the Access Hollywood Trump tape and comprises thousands of tweets by women who describe their first experience of sexual assault. I analyze this hashtag as an act of what Elspeth Probyn calls “writing shame.” I first trace the cultural habitus of emotion around sexual assault and harassment, which teaches survivors to internalize shame and normalizes assault. I then examine how #NotOkay contributors—both before and after the election—participate in writing shame, a practice that does the following rhetorical work: serves as an invitational space for women to rewrite assault-related shame; revises the locus of shame from the individual to the culture that shames; and generates calls to transform this emotional and rhetorical sphere.

This essay assesses W.E.B. Du Bois’s response to Booker T. Washington based on the economic principles structuring public-intellectual intervention in social crisis. Arguing that public-intellectual work relies on ethos-driven rhetorical engagement that conflates the public intellectual and his conceptual intervention as a single product to be marketed, I recontextualize the debate between the two thinkers in order to account for the intersection of their discursive activities in terms of competing public-intellectual models. While Washington relied on a closed-market model that situated him as the spokesperson for an otherwise silent black community, Du Bois worked to create opportunity for deliberation among a number of black publics, and Du Bois’s more democratically minded rhetorical modeling offers a version of public-intellectual work that resonates with the needs of the current moment.

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...

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.

AbstractWhat emerged out of Kenneth Burke’s engagements with T. S. Eliot—particularly his engagements with Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral? An examination of Burke’s comments on Eliot in Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, and A Rhetoric of Motives, as well as in his unpublished correspondence reveals examples of the emerging and developing concepts surrounding Burkean identification. Taken in the context of Burke’s own conflicting commitments to aestheticist and social perspectives on art, such a portrait supports the thesis that identification is not a one-time state to be achieved, but instead is an ongoing rhetorical–dialectical process that must be constantly maintained through negotiation. Ultimately, for Burke, Eliot and Murder reflected the rhetorical concerns he dedicated his career to exploring: How do our perspectives limit us, how do they divide us, and how do we transcend those divisions? Notes1 Collected in the Kenneth Burke Papers housed in the Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University. Quotations from the Kenneth Burke Papers are reproduced with permission from the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust. The Malcolm Cowley quotation on page nine (which does not appear in Jay) is also taken from a letter in the Kenneth Burke Papers and reproduced with permission of Robert Cowley.2 Dana Anderson defines identification as “the process of perceiving the self in relation to the various social scenes it occupies” (26) while Gregory Clark likewise discusses identification (and more largely, rhetoric) as a process of interaction between self (individual) and collective identity (3).3 For example, Clark discusses “identifications” that occur in “moments of identification” (3), suggesting an underlying focus on identification as discrete, countable—a moment(or moments) at the end of a process. Anderson notes the process of identification as it relates to the construction and (strategic) deployment of identity, though this analysis of identification necessarily focuses on moments of fluctuating stability where identities are perceived in relation to social scenes (26).4 For more on the expansion of the modernist canon, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz.5 I should note here that I have found no evidence that Burke and Eliot ever actually spoke or corresponded. In an April 27, 1947 letter to James Sibley Watson, Burke mentions his plans to attend one of Eliot’s lectures on Milton the following Saturday; however, I have found no further mention of the lecture in Burke’s correspondence. Burke nevertheless analyzes Eliot’s literary and critical publications throughout his career, although I have no evidence that Eliot ever took note of Burke.6 For a detailed argument on Permanence and Change as a cultural history, see chapter 3 of George and Selzer.7 This passage, along with several others, was subsequently deleted in the 1954 revised edition of P&C. Here I have provided the 1935 edition page numbers for the excised content; however, other references to P&C in this manuscript, unless otherwise noted, refer to the reprinted 1984 University of California Press edition. For more on the printing history and “Lost Passages” of P&C, see Edward Schiappa and Mary Keehner.8 In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke accounts for heterogeneity in consubstantiality by explaining that a “thing’s identity would … be its uniqueness as an entity in itself and by itself, a demarcated unit having its own particular structure. However, ‘substance’ is an abstruse philosophic term, beset by a long history of quandaries and puzzlements … an acting-together; and in the acting-together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (21). In other words, consubstantiality does not preclude heterogeneity because it is an act, not a state of being, and people can share in an act.9 I use transcendence here and throughout this essay in the Burkean sense—that is, the expansion of a particular perspective to encompass opposing perspectives.10 Murder in the Cathedral is Eliot’s retelling of the death of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered by knights of King Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral. Burke’s focus is primarily on the actual death scene in the play, where Becket is killed and the four murderers turn and address the audience in prose to justify their act.11 Burke provides a succinct summary of this reading in a letter to Malcolm Cowley: “Issue: the approach to God through elegance. How you leave the old locale behind, because it isn’t elegant enough. How you build up elegance by antithesis. And then search for its reality-here-and-now abroad. But eventually discover that only God is elegant enough” (Burke to Cowley, April 13, 1936).12 It is worth noting that Burke eventually says the character of Saint Thomas “specifically use[s] the dramatist grammar” by meditating on human motives “in terms of ‘action’ and ‘passion’” (GM 263). This is, however, not a novel reading of the play—many critics have also noted the action-passion motif in Murder. In the book T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice, Carol H. Smith points out that a large part of the action-suffering motif “rests in the realization that to ‘act’ in the illusion of freedom from God’s laws is the strongest kind of bondage to the world of the senses, while to exercise the freedom of the will by ‘suffering’ God’s will is to be freed from the torture-wheel of life” (80–81).Burke further considers freedom and action-passion duality in the ending dialogue of The Rhetoric of Religion. Here, Satan explains that because acts are by definition free, human beings must also be free, since they are capable of action (281). The Lord goes on to point out that “action (along with its grammatical partner passion)” are the basis of drama, which is particularly important because “of the large part that the arts of comedy and tragedy will play in [humans’] outlook, extending even to their ideas of ultimate salvation” (281).13 Randy Malamud likewise describes this scene as a “shocking contrast to the play’s passionate crescendo” where the murderers “step forward and address the audience in prose rhetoric evocative of a sloppy after-dinner speech” (69).14 Burke will later point out in A Grammar of Motives that “Eliot specifically considers the action-motion relation” here (263).15 Of course, Burke makes a similar argument in his now oft-commented on address to the First American Writer’s Congress, titled “Revolutinoary Symbolism in America,” where he claims “The complete propagandist, it seems to me, would take an interest in as many imaginative, aesthetic, and speculative as he can handle—and into this breadth of his concerns weave a general attitude of sympathy for the oppressed and antipathy towards our oppressive institutions” (Simmons and Melia 268).16 I infer this from the various ways Burke discusses Eliot in other sources. In the Rhetoric, Burke contrasts Eliot’s subdued, “smart” lamentations with the “full-throated outpourings of Biblical lamentations” (318). In the following letter, Mr. A is likewise unable to “make his bellyache full-throated,” so he couches it with cleverness and romantic irony.17 Eliot’s obvious discontent with modern life has become an interpretive staple for reading his work. See Carol Smith vii; Mary Karr ix–xxvii; Burton Raffel 8–10; and Peter Ackroyd.18 Tate’s article, to which Burke refers, is “A Poetry of Ideas,” published in the June 1926 issue of the New Republic. In the particular scene Tate examines, the speaker of the poem takes a critical (or Burke says, superior) tone toward a house agent’s clerk who is seducing a young woman.19 In between these October 4 and October 8 letters from Tate to Burke is Burke’s missing response in which he critiques Tate’s stance on Eliot. Although I searched, I could not find the text of Burke’s missing letter (written sometime between Oct 4 and 8, 1941), which I infer elucidates his misgivings toward Tate’s improvised psychology for Eliot. Neither the Kenneth Burke Papers at Pennsylvania State University nor the Allen Tate Papers at Princeton University had a copy, and as a result, I can only assemble Burke’s criticisms in light of Tate’s responses, which, while helpful in piecing together the quarrel, nonetheless leave some of the details of Burke’s thought to be discovered.20 For more sites of inquiry into Burke’s evolving notion of identification, under various guises, see “Boring from Within” (1931), “Auscultation, Creation, Revision” (1932), and “Twelve Propositions” (1938).21 For a brief overview of scholarship on Burke’s guilt-purification-redemption cycle, particularly as it focuses on victimage/mortification, see David Bobbit (9–10) and William Rueckert.22 See, for example, Jeanne Fisher’s Burkean analysis of murder/suicide as a symbolic act or Brian Ott and Eric Aoki’s analysis of Matthew Sheppard’s murder and the subsequent public/media response. For Fischer, mass murderer Joseph White’s act of killing, stood in for, or symbolized the internal attitude that festered inside him toward his victims (188). Furthermore, Ott and Aoki complicate this process by adding a social dimension to Fischer’s arguments. If, as Fischer might argue, the killing of Matthew Sheppard symbolized the attitude of homophobia present in larger American society, then Ott and Aoki argue that the media coverage of the Matthew Sheppard case emphasized Burke’s scapegoat process, functioning rhetorically “to alleviate the public’s guilt concerning anti-gay hate crimes and to excuse the public of any social culpability” (1). However, despite being intimately thematically connected to Burke’s ideas of slaying and symbolism—and despite being thorough, complex, and ground-breaking articles—neither Fisher nor Ott and Aoki engages explicitly with the slaying discussion from those first few pages of A Rhetoric of Motives.23 I need to explain the difference between my senses of “transformation” and “transcendence.” Transformation in the generic sense is any type of change (terminological, perspectival, etc.), while transcendence, as it has been used so far in the more specific Burkean sense, involves achieving a stance which encompasses opposing terms or perspectives. Therefore, for my purposes here, the transcendence Burke speaks of is a type of more generic transformation, although the terms are not interchangeable.24 This is in line with Ross Wolin’s claim that “Collaboration is the key to style as the engine of identification” (189).25 This is not a new claim, but an old claim with new dimensions. Timothy Crusius likewise argues that “When language is used to overcome … differences, to foster cooperation and establish community, we are in the realm of rhetoric” (24). However, the implication one can draw from Eliot’s wheel is that establishing community is not a one-time act—it requires constant negotiation and readjustment to preserve the consubstantiality achieved.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn BelkJohn Belk is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Pennsylvania State University, 134 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16803, USA. jmb851@psu.edu

AbstractThis essay draws on Jacques Derrida’s theories of performativity to explore how a performance by Lenny Bruce dramatizes the positive productive potentials of language’s breaking force. Because this performance dramatizes how Bruce’s comedy act gets reinscribed and reinvented in multiple contexts that produce a wide array of effects, it provides a way to look at how language, in this case, humorous appeals in the form of jokes, is always already interrupted by its future instantiations and can never fully be contained in a given context, not even the context of the intentions of the human consciousness. This performance shows us that persuasive appeals do not emerge from a fully realized self-present subject and, therefore, gives us reason to question who or what is at the center of the rhetorical situation if it is no longer a stable human subject. Notes1 The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”2 Derrida’s intervention intends to demonstrate that, in fact, the same risks that have been long associated with writing also apply to speech/gesture and all other forms of communication. Derrida’s claim is that all language—speech, gesture, writing—along with all experience, including the experience of being itself, is structured like writing. Writing is not a subservient tool to speech/gesture that carries “a continuous and homogenous reparation and modification of presence in the representation,” but is rather a “break in presence” (“Signature” 5). This breaking force occurs at the moment of inscription of any form of communication, suggesting that all language forms are structurally susceptible to the same risks Plato wanted to only apply to writing.3 Similarly, contemporary rhetoricians Diane Davis and Bradford J. Vivian have written on various aspects of language’s asignifying force. Davis calls attention to the importance of the often overlooked “non-hermeneutical dimension” of rhetoric, a dimension “that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up signification to comprehension” (“Addressing Alterity” 192). For Davis, this dimension deals not in the aspect of language that “opens itself up to interpretation,” a position she equates with J.L. Austin’s constative speech act and Levinas’s concept of the “said,” but rather in the “saying,” the dimension of language that “necessarily unsettles what is congealed in the already-said” and, in Austin’s terms, “indicates a performative” (192–193). Vivian likewise moves away essentialist notions of the human subject in asking whether it would be possible to conceive of rhetoric without first appealing to an essential subject. Vivian does not intend to replace one ontology of the subject with another, as a mere inversion of the system would again do nothing to disrupt the organizing principles of the system itself. He intends to move towards a conception of the subject in such a way that it no longer governs the entire scene and system of the rhetorical process, but rather becomes a “rhetoric beyond representation—one no longer organized, that is, by the representation of moral truth or transcendental reason nor representative of an ideal conception of human being, however explicit or implicit it may be” (13–14).4 Even as Austin undertakes rigorous efforts to define a clear distinction between serious and non-serious contexts, his text itself works against the limitations he wishes to define. For example, when he uses slang expressions like “cock a snook” (119) and self-deprecating humor like, “Of course, this is bound to be a little boring and dry to listen to and digest; not nearly so much so as to think and write” (164) to make his points about the need to sequester jokes, poetry, and plays from serious communication, he is in effect using performative utterances to make constative claims. Considering How To Do Things With Words was originally delivered as a series of lectures, Austin’s text ultimately performs its very purpose; it becomes about what it does and not necessarily about what it says (119). Ultimately, Austin’s openness toward his own methodology leads him to accept that there is a little bit of the constative and a little bit of the performative in any utterance: “we found sufficient indications that unhappiness nevertheless seems to characterize both kinds of utterance, not merely the performative; and that the requirement of conforming or bearing some relation to the facts … seems to characterize performatives” (91).5 Bruce appears to take particular offense to this part of the transcript, because such accusations, if true, would harm his standing in the eyes of his more sophisticated female audience members: “I would never make gestures of masturbation, cause, I like … I, I’m concerned with my, image, in that, I, I know it offends chicks. And I, you know, it frightens them, it’s ugly to them, and, Dorothy Killgallen is not going to see some crotch grabbing hooligan. I would just never do anything like that. It’s offensive.”6 Before Bruce exits the club to the street outside in the final seconds of The Lenny Bruce Performance Film—the second to last performance he would make before his death—his last words spoken on camera were vintage Lenny Bruce—irreverent, odd, sincere, funny: “I really dug working with you, and good night, and as Will Rogers said, I never met a dyke I didn’t like, and, good night.”7 Lenny Bruce died on August 3, 1966, a victim of an accidental overdose of morphine. His efforts to perform his act before the courts were never realized. Bruce was found guilty of obscenity in the New York case he defends in this film, and the Supreme Court rejected his appeal for review. However, on December 23, 2003, Governor George Pataki posthumously pardoned him, the first such pardon in the history of the state (Kifner). The last lines of journalist Dick Schaap’s eulogy to Lenny Bruce in Playboy magazine were as follows: “One last four-letter word for Lenny. Dead. At 40. That’s obscene” (qtd. in Collins and Skover 370).Additional informationNotes on contributorsKevin CasperKevin Casper is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at the University of West Georgia, 1601 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118, USA. kcasper@westga.edu

In this essay I explore the paradoxical operation of the rhetoric of individualism. While individualism suggests the demarcation of liberal subjects and even opposition to communities, groups, and collectives, its rhetorical deployment can call people together in powerful ways, offering them a common identity and a shared perspective. In short, the rhetoric of individualism can be used to create community. To illustrate the paradoxical operation of the rhetoric of individualism, I analyze William James's popular lecture “The Will to Believe,” which deployed individualism as a response to various social, political, and intellectual shifts at the end of the nineteenth century. In particular, James's individualist rhetoric helped foster a community of religious believers ready to oppose the evidentiary demands of modern science. Although “The Will to Believe” represents only one instance of the rhetoric of individualism, it suggests that community building may be a natural function of individualism's rhetorical deployment.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments This essay is an outcome of a workshop on the topic of "Sound Studies and Rhetoric" at the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, created at the behest of Ph.D. candidate and workshop participant Jon Stone, held in Lawrence, Kansas, last June. The authors thank Jon for his advice and keen insights, as well as workshop "sounders": Katie Fargo Ahern, Gina L. Ercolini, Lisa Foster, Andrew Hansen, Jamie Landau, Martin Law, Amy Patterson, and Anne Shea. This essay is better read as a "report" collaboratively authored by the workshoppers.

Abstract This essay presents a method for reconsidering identities linked to place and the rhetoric used to construct them. Drawing from Jane Bachnik's "uchi/soto dynamic" and Kaori Chino's study of Tang-dynasty Chinese art's place in early Japanese regional identity, it introduces a theory of inside-outside positionalities for engaging the meaning-making potential within tropes of inside-outside, foreign-local, and traditional-modern. This theory building is followed by a reading of the "invented tradition" (Hobsbawm) of the Japanese Christmas cake, one of many symbols constituting post-war Japanese identity. The Christmas cake gains its significance simultaneously through overt reference to a supposed foreign origin and from less overt citation of older Japanese traditions—while marked as coming from "outside" local culture, the Christmas cake has strong local meanings specific to Japan, meanings unfamiliar in the cake's supposed place of origin. While this essay focuses on meaning-making in Japan, inside-outside positionalities functions broadly as a comparative methodology for rhetorical study. Notes 1For examples of such work, see Damián Baca's Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations and the Territories of Writing and LuMing Mao's Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie. 2In this sense, inside-outside positionalities parallels the workings of "common sense" ideology as explained by Norman Fairclough (77–108). Additional informationNotes on contributorsDominic Ashby Dominic Ashby is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and is Coordinator of BUS102: Writing for Business Decision-Making in the Farmer School of Business at Miami University, 356 Bachelor Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.

This essay argues that Dorothy Day's 1930s Catholic Worker columns prudently translated Catholic social teachings in order to articulate a vision for radical Catholic social reform. Day's columns interpreted dogmatic Church texts in response to public outcries for social change during a period of economic and social collapse, specifically the doctrinal principles of human dignity, hospitality to laborers, and Catholic action. As a translator, Day balanced arguments for the relevance of traditional religious values with circumstances requiring innovative solutions. She used prudence in order to carve out a “middle way” between the two extremes of dogmatic fidelity to the views of established Church leaders and pandering to revolutionary sentiments that urged the working class to eschew traditional religion. Day's case illustrates an important relationship between translation and prudence—how prudent translation enables rhetors to craft innovations from within traditional belief systems in order to rework cultural norms and advance social change.

This essay investigates the role of ephemeral co-location within practices of regionalization as a potential response to the increasingly commodified, mediated, and militarized experience of public space. An “epilogue” to the articles gathered for this special issue, this essay outlines five characteristics of regionalization: active resistance, selective deployment, shared aesthetics, common identity, and augmented reality.

Abstract Royster and Cochran use the words of African American women writers to enrich our view of intersections between American civil rights discourses and the discourses of human rights as a global concept. They focus on both individual and collective activities of the women and contextualize this activism within the larger framework of the rise of individual human rights language in twentieth century international relations. Notes 1Sam Occom (1723–1792), a progenitor of Native-American literature, was a Mohegan minister and political leader who worked to protect the cultures, traditions, and practices of indigenous peoples. He was an advocate for their political autonomy, spiritual well-being, and their education, as evidenced by his associations with Dartmouth College. 2A simplistic measure of this positioning is a keyword search of a top-ranked research university's library (The Ohio State University). "African Americans Civil Rights" yielded 1,346 entries. "African Americans Human Rights" yielded 194 entries. 3For a complementary argument about connections between civil rights and human rights, see Kirt Wilson's Keynote Address at the 2010 Public Address Conference on Human Rights, "More than Civil Rights: The Fight for Black Freedom as a Human Rights Struggle." Also, as noted below we are distinguishing between human rights as a set of values, policies, and practices exercised by individuals and groups and human rights values, policies, and practices that function universally in international relations and thereby beyond the boundaries of nation-states. 4In presenting this analytical framework, we note the persistent ways in which the master narrative of self-determination, peace, and justice for all gave rise to special allowances among the Western powers, creating various illogicalities for those not in power, a situation that, as we explain with more detail below, has pushed persistently the double-edged sword of hope and rage/despair. 5The analytical framework for this essay is drawn from Royster's larger manuscript project, currently entitled A Nation Within: Utopian Desire, Radical Action, and the Voices of African American Women. 6In addition to its linkages with Christian discourses, Wheatley's quotation also suggests the impact of Enlightenment values on human rights discourses and a more inclusive approach to human dignity and human rights. Further, a case can be made that Wheatley positions herself as a witness to this "absurdity," the discontinuity between the words and actions that prevailed so dramatically during her era. 7For a book-length treatment of affective mapping, see Flately. 8This use of "museum piece" mirrors the use of this term by Spitzack and Carter (407). 9Insightful and compelling as a discursive framework, the quest for "civil rights" as a response to the disempowering conditions and effects of slavery, rather than the quest for "human rights" as a global concept, has been the norm in scholarly analyses of racial oppression in the United States. Examples of civil rights scholarship include leading scholars, such as: Stampp; Woodward; Gutman; Franklin; Sundquist; and others. More attention to the connection of struggles in the United States for civil rights to struggles globally for human rights include: Eric Foner; Anderson; Henry J. Richardson, III; Shuler; Soohoo, Albisa, and Davis; and others. 10Space limitations do not permit a full explanation of how transnational feminist scholarship (e.g., Alexander and Mohanty) has enriched contemporary human rights discourses or how women of African descent, including African-American women writers, continue to be pacesetters in making insightful connections, analyses, and interpretations. 11This explanation is based on Eleanor Hinton Hoytt. 12Note that elite African-American women broadened their horizons in the twentieth century through foreign travel, with increasing numbers participating in both individual and organized trips. By the mid-twentieth century, foreign travel had become a booming business among this group, as evidenced by the highly successful Henderson Travel Agency, founded in 1955 by African-American woman entrepreneur Freddye Henderson in Atlanta, Georgia. Furthermore, the push to be philanthropic was very much in motion, as verified by Gill's discussion of the community activism of beauticians in Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (2009). 13For example, prominent writer H. G. Wells drafted an international bill of rights in his New World Order. 14The drafting subcommittee was composed of eight individuals from the United States, Lebanon, Great Britain, France, China, Australia, Chile, and the U.S.S.R., which appointed a "working group" of the first four state representatives listed. Rene Cassin, the lead author in drafting the UDHR, states all 58 nations contributed to the final shape of the UDHR. The UDHR was adopted unanimously, albeit with eight abstentions from the Eastern bloc, on 10 December 1948. 15Dorothy Jones discusses why the positioning of the term dignity in the Preamble and Article 1 is significant as a statement of intent for the whole document. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJacqueline Jones Royster Jacqueline Jones Royster is Ivan Allen Jr. Chair and Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, 781 Marietta Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0525, USA. Molly Cochran Molly Cochran is Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology, 781 Marietta Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0610, USA.

Through her reading of the editors' introduction and ensuing four essays, Hesford approaches human rights as a discourse of public persuasion that envisions certain scenes of sociopolitical recognition, normative notions of subject formation, and paradoxical particularities. She joins contributors in their interrogation of the normative scenes of sociopolitical recognition on which the human rights paradox of exclusive universalism rests. Yet, she also maintains that in our efforts to construe a more inclusive human rights history that we are mindful of distinctions between the rhetorical tactics of individuals and social movements and differences of geopolitical scale and scope.

Abstract Rhetorical analysis of John Locke's monetary arguments reveals that Locke relied on a core enthymeme that deployed several rhetorical devices (including a narrative diegesis, a dissociation and hierarchization of terms, and several metaphors) to synthesize two contradictory and common beliefs about money's value—money's value is determined by supply and demand; money's value is determined by substance. Moreover, this analysis revitalizes the conversation between economists and rhetoricians by presenting rhetorical analysis as a way to discover causal mechanisms. Finally, locating causal mechanisms allows an historical understanding of how debates have been shaped by the available means of persuasion. Acknowledgments Special thanks to James Aune, Martin Medhurst, and the editor and anonymous RSQ reviewers for their feedback at various stages in this article's production. Notes 1The stalled nature of the conversation is nowhere better captured than in Fabienne Peter's “Rhetoric Vs. Realism in Economic Methodology.” 2For another social-scientific discussion of causal mechanisms, see Sayer 105–117. 3My description of a “deep-seated” mechanism depends on the assumption that a social formation can be productively imagined as a stratification of numerous causal powers, some deeper and more pervasively effective. What we immediately witness at the top of a formation is thus “overdetermined” by the causal mechanisms layered beneath. For a fuller exploration of this concept, see Andrew Collier's “Stratified Explanation and Marx's Conception of History.” 4For a fuller explanation of how England's various parties formed into a “military-financial state,” see Dickson (chs. 1–3) and Carruthers (chs. 2–3). 5Aristotle asserts that “an ability to aim at commonly held opinions [endoxa] is a characteristic of one who also has a similar ability to regard the truth” (33). Pierre Bourdieu differentiates between orthodoxy and heterodoxy (Outline 164–171). According to Bourdieu, crises can disrupt all the rhetorical resources available to a population, both the heterodox and the orthodox, creating a space for an allodoxia, a new, potentially revolutionary, set of assumptions (Language 132–133). 6For more on the term “crisis of representation” and its relation to seventeenth-century England, see Poovey 6. 7Although they disagreed about recoinage, Locke and Nicholas Barbon believed that commodities' values are set by the intersection of supply and demand (Barbon Trade 15–19; Locke Some Considerations 66). 8James Thompson contends that Locke made an “ontological” appeal to the “ineluctable being of silver,” thus strictly emphasizing its substance value (63). Thompson, on the other hand, also notices that Locke accredited the socially constructed forces of supply and demand with value creation (61). He therefore concludes that Locke contradicted himself. 9Vaughn dubs Locke's model a “proportionality theory of money,” but given the overwhelming use of the term “quantity” in post-Lockean monetary theory, I choose this term to emphasize the model's persistence in subsequent arguments. 10James Thompson rightly notices the central importance of security in Locke's monetary theory. Locke wanted a stable monetary system that guaranteed transmission of value: “The return is always the same, for the ideal is an exchange system, or a system of debit and credit, in which one receives what he gave” (58). Karen Vaughn notes that Locke was an unusual metalist because he did not believe in money's ontological value, while he did believe that the substance (silver) was necessary to guarantee stability (35). 11For further treatment of Locke's economic writings and his theory of natural law, see Appleby; Finkelstein 165–170; and Vaughn 131. For a dissenting perspective, an argument that money had no place in Locke's imagined state of nature or in his theory of natural law, see Tully 149. 12In this paragraph, I rely on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's explanation of dissociation, hierarchy, and the topic of order (80–83, 93–94, 411–415). 13For a fuller review of the Bill, its enactment, and its effects, see Horsefield (61–70) and Feavearyear (135–149). 14Marx contended that Locke emphasized one side of money's contradictory composition, its substance (Contribution 159). Eli Heckscher similarly contended that Locke accepted the mercantilist equation of metal and value, saying that Locke confused Juno for the cloud, money for what money represented (209). Additional informationNotes on contributorsMark Garrett Longaker Mark Garrett Longaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, PAR 3, Mailcode B5500, Austin, TX, 78712, USA.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsScott R. StroudScott R. Stroud is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A1105, Austin, TX 78712-0115, USA.

Abstract This essay is a review of: Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, by Paul Woodruff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Citation2001. x + 248 pp. First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea, by Paul Woodruff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Citation2005. xv + 284 pp. The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched, by Paul Woodruff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Citation2008. x + 257 pp. Additional informationNotes on contributorsGregory Clark Gregory Clark is a Professor in the English Department at Brigham Young University, 2004 JFSB, Provo, UT 84602, USA.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I thank Xing (Lucy) Lu, Arabella Lyon, and Bo Wang for reading early drafts of this essay, and for their highly constructive comments. Notes 1For starters, see Hum and Lyon, as well as Combs, Lipson, Lyon ("Rhetorical"), Mao ("Studying"), Wang, Wu, and You. 2I assume we are not disputing the singular contributions his work has made to comparative rhetoric. 3Hum and Lyon also point out the danger of conducting comparative rhetoric through the lens of one's own tradition without reflection, and they further discuss the importance of crossing borders and acknowledging one's (partial) standpoint (155–156; 159–160). 4In fact, Hum and Lyon have explicitly discussed four different approaches—including feminist approaches to Chinese rhetoric—that scholars have developed in the past in carrying out their comparative rhetorical work. They have also called for a need to develop revisionist readings and to recover lost perspectives (157–161). 5Lu also recognizes and indeed discusses the interdependence of description and appropriation or what she refers to as historical and scriptural hermeneutics (Rhetoric 21). 6Lipson also reminds us of the difficulty of casting aside "both the theoretical lens and related values and apparatus through which Western scholars have come to view human communication" (3). In the same essay, drawing on Steven Mailloux's work Lipson also proposes using the term "cultural rhetoric" to underscore the importance of culture and to focus on the rhetorics of different cultures (22–24). Additional informationNotes on contributorsLuMing Mao LuMing Mao is a Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Asian/Asian American Studies Program at Miami University, 356F Bachelor Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJordynn JackJordynn Jack is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina, 512 Greenlaw Hall CB#3520, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA. E-mail: jjack@email.unc.edu

Abstract While traditional rhetoric missed opportunities for potent change in the New World, alternative rhetorical theory nonetheless existed. This essay argues that a play by renowned nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is a source of protofeminist, New World rhetoric, prompted by multicultural seventeenth-century New Spain. Immensely respected by the dominant powers of Church and state, Sor Juana was also attuned to issues of nondominance because she was criolla and female. Her religiously orthodox Divine Narcissus is simultaneously a rhetoric of listening that rewrites classical rhetoric's focus on speaking within a community to attend to people at odds with one another. It highlights the need for Spaniards, criollas, and Mesoamericans to go beyond talking at one another, and instead listen with care. The Divine Narcissus is an important text in rhetorical theory, concerned with dominant and nondominant rhetors and audiences in early Mexican society. Notes 1See Merrim and Kirkpatrick on the echo; Stroud's Lacanian reading; Gonzalez, Granger-Carrasco, and Kirk on theology; and Merrim on narcissism. Like me, Ackerman emphasizes the theme of utterance and hearing voices, but stresses this as a means of encouraging an "interpretive devotion to Christ" (73). 2Work on rhetoric and listening is now being explored by rhetoricians such as Royster, Krista Ratcliffe (see "Cassandra," Rhetorical Listening), Michelle Ballif, and Gemma Fiumara. Wayne Booth is one of the few scholars to posit listening as an overlooked but traditional part of rhetoric. See also Cynthia Selfe's recent argument for composition studies to reclaim "aurality," "the reception and production of aural communications" (646, note 1). 3Naming indigenous groups is a fraught endeavor. Current scholarly practice favors using an ethnic group's name for itself when feasible; the specific group Sor Juana refers to here are the Mexica. I use Nahua (of which Mexica are a prominent subgroup) to refer to a wider group of Nahuatl speakers and their religious practices, and I use Mesoamerican as a general term for indigenous peoples of central Mexico and environs. While sensitive to the history of associating native with pejoratives like primitive, I use native as a neutral term for connoting indigenous inhabitants. 4For example, Flower suggests that in composition studies we teach students how to "speak up" and "speak against" but not "how to speak with others" (2). Her rhetoric of public engagement aims for intercultural dialogue in urban settings, often through "hybrid discourse" or nontraditional delivery (32). Ratcliffe investigates rhetorical listening as "a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in cross-cultural exchanges" (Rhetorical Listening 1). Glenn examines how nondominant groups use silence, "as a rhetoric, a constellation of symbolic strategies" (xi). 5As an auto sacramental, The Divine Narcissus is a one-act play with a prefatory loa. While both are divided into scenes, the numbering of lines is consecutive throughout each respective unit, so my citations specify loa or auto and the line number only. This and subsequent citations from The Divine Narcissus (hereafter abbreviated DN in parenthetical citations) are from the first and only full English translation of the play, by Patricia Peters and Renée Domeier, now out of print. 6For poems in which Mesoamericans speak Nahuatl and Blacks speak their own dialect of Spanish and an African language, see Obras completas 2.14 (translated into English in Trueblood 125), 26, 39, 71, 94, and 138. Sor Juana's use of Nahuatl in these poems reflects a concern for native speakers that is also a rhetorical device, making parishioners feel the Church was also theirs. 7See Pratt's discussion of Guaman Poma's letter ("Arts"). 8Méndez Plancarte, one of the two twentieth-century editors of Sor Juana's collected works, argues against the possibility that this auto was used to explain doctrine or that it had a missionary goal of educating indigenous groups (Juana, OC 3.511). 9 Auto sacramental is a generic designation for a religious play that is often allegorical, and which typically during this period honored the Eucharist (Granger-Carrasco Ch. 1). 10Between 1691 and 1725, The Divine Narcissus was published in Spain several times in collections of Sor Juana's works. It was not reprinted again until 1924, in Mexico. 11Echo plays the part of "Angelic nature, fallen from grace." 12New Spain's literary scene was determined by Spain, where Narcissus was a "ubiquitous" literary presence from the fifteenth century on (Méndez Plancarte in Juana, OC 3.514). Both Méndez Plancarte and Paz aver that Sor Juana's play is not only different from but also far superior to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's play (Juana, OC 3.lxxiv; Paz 351). 14 Yo iré también, que me inclina la piedad a llegar (antes que tu furor lo embista) a convidarlos, de paz, a que mi culto reciban. I offer my own translation because Peters's and Domeier's is quite off the mark: "And I, in peace, will also go/(before your fury lays them low)/for justice must with mercy kiss;/I shall invite them to arise/from superstitious depths to faith." Sor Juana's Spanish is more generous. There is no mention of "superstitious depths"; both Nahua and Spanish religious practices are referred to as cultos (forms of worship; cf. Loa 95, 178). 13My reading contrasts with Gerard Flynn's: "All in all, her attitude towards the Conquest seems neutral. She shows no recrimination for Zeal, and yet the pagan Occident and America are not ugly…. Sor Juana assents to both that which is Spanish and that which is Indian. The Conquest happened, and she accepts it" (74). 15Octavio Paz views Sor Juana's works as crucial to the early formation of criollo identity. It is only recently, though, that Sor Juana's works have been classified as literature of Mexico, not Spain (Granger-Carrasco 15). 16A similar multiplicity of identity is what Gloria Anzaldúa capitalizes on in her twentieth-century rhetorical theory for Mexican Americans. 17The Requerimiento demands allegiance to the Church as supreme ruler, but also tells Mesoamericans that Spaniards "shall not compel you to turn Christians, unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth, should wish to be converted to our holy Catholic faith" (Washburn 308). 18It is this aspect of language that Moraña attributes to Sor Juana, claiming that her "rhetoric of silence" (the capacity for words to persuade beyond their overt reference) is affiliated with the sublime (176). 19Sor Juana seems to be conflating rituals that apply to two different Nahua gods, Huitzilopochtli (god of the seeds) and Quetzalcoatl (to whom human sacrifices were made) (Sabat de Rivers 290–291). 20The incident is quite possibly apocryphal, and at the very least, sculpted to resonate with the stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria and the young Jesus in Luke 2:46–47. 21"An attitude of complete receptivity, of openness to 'any view or hypothesis that a participant seriously wants to advance,' still puts a woman, I believe, in a dangerous stance," Susan Jarratt cautions, quoting Peter Elbow (117). 22"Why is the Devil a woman?," Merrim asks of the play, and reconciles the dilemma by finding parallels between Satan and Sor Juana, who must also dissimilate because divine authorities restrict her voice (114). 23In Spanish, the last line cited here (line 1300) reads, "Suene tu voz a mi oído": "Make your voice sound within my hearing." Sor Juana is playing upon verse 2.14 of the Song of Songs: "Let thy voice sound in my ears" (Douay-Rheims version). The English translation given by Peters and Domeier does not change the meaning, and the use of pour manages to allude to the fountain into which Narcissus gazes. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJulie A. Bokser Julie A. Bokser is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul University, 802 W. Belden, Chicago, IL 60614, USA.

Abstract We live in a world of risks that lurk everywhere, in the food and water we consume, in the viruses and bacteria we encounter, and in the global political scene that seems more and more volatile. This article pursues two lines of inquiry: first, I use the concept of risk, and specifically the work of Ulrich Beck, to show how the relationship between science, politics, and rhetoric is being transformed from earlier, politically progressive, twentieth-century conceptions of the role of science in public culture. Second, I try to explain how the concept of risk has altered political culture and requires a different form of prudence for political rhetoric. These two lines of inquiry work to demonstrate how uncertainty and contingency are now the products of techno-scientific rationality. This way of thinking about contingency changes how we understand the practices of political rhetoric and the constitution of public culture. Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert Danisch Robert Danisch is Assistant Professor in the General Studies Unit at Concordia University, 1455 De Maisonneuve West EV-6.233, Montreal, Quebec H2S 2E3, Canada.

Abstract During the late nineteenth century, language authorities in the United States were distressed by what they saw as a pervasive misuse of words. A particular type of language authority, the verbal critic, attempted to mitigate misuse by establishing and insisting upon "correct" meanings of words, and the writing of these verbal critics were remarkably popular at the time. Verbal critics' goals are not always clear-cut: they often lament the ignorance of those who "abuse" words, and at other times, they express their purpose as offering instruction in how to speak properly. Indeed, verbal criticism is full of contradictions, which this article explains in terms of a widespread crisis in representation, a crisis that seemed to threaten speakers' ability to communicate, affected late-nineteenth-century social structure, and mirrored political and economic debates over monetary policy, as well. Acknowledgment I thank the editor and anonymous readers for RSQ for their helpful comments and suggestions, which enriched this article, as well as my thinking about verbal criticism. A number of references cited or discussed in footnotes were brought to my attention by the readers. Notes 1Edward Finegan discusses Mathews's professorship (71), and Kenneth Cmiel tabulates the publication history of this and other such works (263–266). The number of copies in print comes from the title page to the 1896 edition. 2See Finegan, passim and Baron, 188–225 for more on this distinction between doctrines of correctness and usage. Plato's Cratylus offers the classical articulation of this distinction, with Cratylus arguing for correctness or "naturalism," described by Hermogenes as words with "a truth or correctness in them, which is the same for Hellenes as for barbarians" (383b), and Hermogenes arguing for usage or "conventionalism." 3As Assistant Keeper of the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum from 1838–50, Garnett composed a number of essays on philology that were later collected by his son (also Richard Garnett) as The Philological Essays of the Late Rev. Richard Garnett (Citation1859). The younger Garnett prefaced the collection with a "Memoir" explaining that Garnett aspired to join the clergy, in preparation for which he was required to "obtain a thorough acquaintance with Latin, of which he knew little, and with Greek, of which he knew nothing" (ii). Although, his son notes, Garnett's learning about Latin and Greek was "especially Scriptural," he nevertheless, in 1829, "entered upon an entirely new sphere of social intercourse and literary activity": writing about philology. As his son observes, Garnett "entered upon his new career at the most auspicious period imaginable, when Rask and Grimm and W. Humboldt" had begun writing about linguistics (x). However, Garnett's contributions to the discipline have gone largely unnoted by contemporary linguists, revealing perhaps that Garnett's "acuteness" derives more from his service to Mathews than it does from his service to more general studies of language. 4See p. 313. Cmiel studies eight newspapers: "the four refined papers were the Boston Daily Advertiser, The New York Times, the New York Evening Post, and the Chicago Tribune. The four popular papers were the Boston Herald, the New York Tribune, the New York Sun, and the Chicago Times." 5This way of approaching the debate between critics and scholars (the scholars were as elitist as the critics) turns out to be a way of missing another important similarity that I will consider later: the critics too had a democratic impulse. After all, given verbal criticism's immense popularity, what should we infer? Did readers consume books that merely made them feel inferior? Or did they find in these texts instruction for speaking in more refined or cultured ways? Cmiel has shown that Ayres and White, after publishing for refined newspapers in the 1860s and '70s, had their columns picked up by populist newspapers in the 1880s, and verbal criticism became "a part of popular adult education" (146). Adams Sherman Hill's Our English, for example, originated as a series of Chautauqua lectures. 6Plato's distinction between belief in beautiful things and beauty itself (Republic 476c) usefully distinguishes nominalists from realists (as well as particulars from universals). 7This is not to say that no one compared words to money prior to the nineteenth century. At least as early as John Locke, philosophers were noting the imprecision of words' representation of ideas and money's representation of value. (For Locke on language, see Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, particularly chapters II, "On the Signification of Words" and IX, "Of the Imperfection of Words"; on money, see Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money.) However, discussing language as money (as opposed to language and money or language and/as a precious metal) does seem to have been rare until the nineteenth century. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen's New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (Citation1999) collects a number of works attempting "to rediscover the contact points among literature, culture, and economics" (9). Although the essays in the collection are primarily concerned with how critics informed by economics can approach the study of literature, the editors' introduction, particularly pp. 10–17, provides a helpful review of what they call economic criticism, recent attempts by theorists to link literature and language to money and economics. 8Although this evolution of the trope suggests it "had shifted from its earlier appreciation of beautiful coins," presumably to appreciation of a medium of exchange, the important point for Carr is that the trope's repetition demonstrates that "the history of nineteenth-century readers is marked by borrowing and adaptation, and by the persistence of traditional associations and definitions that nevertheless adapt to changing times and values" (145). But finding the same kind of value in language that one finds in money, I am arguing, has a particular significance in the late nineteenth century. 9Mathews cites Farrar on this point, coincidentally on his own page 261. 10The point for Painter is that inflationary policy hurt workers and farmers, giving rise to Populist resentment. Milton Friedman ultimately agrees, albeit from a much different orientation, that deflation was devastating. More concerned with economic growth than with the effect on the working classes, Friedman concludes that "Whether or not a verdict of guilty would have been appropriate in a court of law for 'the crime of 1873,' that verdict is appropriate in the court of history" because a "bimetallic standard … would have produced a considerably steadier price level than did the gold standard that was adopted" (78, 76). 11The other significant plank of the Populists' platform was an endorsement of direct election of U.S. senators. For more on Populism as a response to monetary policy, see Trachtenberg 175. 12Ritter's conservative and antimonopolist positions map neatly onto the deflationist and inflationist positions I have been discussing. An excellent history of the "financial question" during the period 1865–96, Goldbugs and Greenbacks argues that existing scholarship has managed to recognize "the significance of the farmer-labor tradition" without accounting for the "prominence the antimonopolists gave to the financial question." Even "common citizens" were invested in debates about money, Ritter argues, because these debates concerned "the belief that the preservation of economic opportunity was essential for meaningful democracy" (ix–x). 13This question over the role of persuasion in Marxism, of course, has everything to do with rhetoric. James Aune's Rhetoric and Marxism is concerned with just this issue, in only a slightly different register. For instance, Aune asks how rhetoricians might bridge the theoretical gap between structure and struggle—that is, the difference between rhetoric being a tool for interesting, but finally defeatist, analysis and being a tool for producing discourse that might effect real change (13). 14Even earlier political economists (Smith and Ricardo) recognized the existence of surplus-value—the unpaid portion of production—but what "they had regarded as a solution" Marx "considered but a problem" (149–151). 15Production must itself be understood as more complex than the mere set of steps individual workers take to generate a product if we are to understand how it effects class positions that come to be occupied by workers. Production comprises the labor process and relations of production, the former of which is a material condition of production (which, Althusser argues, means "a denial of every 'humanist' conception of human labour as pure creativity"). The relations of production entail foremost "relations between men and things, such that the relations between men and men are defined by the precise relations existing between men and the material elements of the production process" (171–175). Moreover, insofar as these relations include "agents of production," we must distinguish between "direct agents," whose labor power directly and materially infuses the product with use-value, and non-direct agents—the owners of the means of production—whose "labour power is not used in the production process." The arrangement of these agents and their instruments of production designates "a certain political configuration." And it is this political configuration that has a structural effect on other elements (e.g., the economic and the cultural) in the social totality: "the nature of the relations of production … establishes the degree of effectivity delegated to a certain level of the social totality." In other words, what we have here is not a pre-existing arrangement of levels in the social totality. Rather, the mode of production is the name we give to the "site" and "extension" of each structural element (176–177). 16In this sense, Kenneth Cmiel misses the point when he writes, "The very success of verbal criticism was undermining the original goals" (139), since the goals of verbal criticism included giving readers the verbal tools for upward mobility. 17The tragedy has, nevertheless, been feared and even predicted on numerous occasions. Locke's theory of language allowed not only for the "Imperfection of Words" (Book III, Chapter IX of Essay Concerning Human Understanding), but also—as a result—for the "Abuse of Words" (Chapter X), proposing "Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfection and Abuses" (Chapter XI). As recently as 2004, Samuel Huntington warned that the "persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages." Such linguistic anxieties, and there have been plenty in the intervening years, tend to correspond to other cultural changes. Huntington was responding to increased immigration, Locke the coinage crisis of the 1690s. Locke's case is similar to the late nineteenth century's insofar as he too was concerned with theories of representation for both language and money. In a fascinating reading that brings together these theories, Carol Pech shows that Locke identifies the value of money through metonymy and also (elsewhere) describes the problems of language as beginning with metaphor and synecdoche. "That Locke goes on to examine the problems posed by synecdoche through the example of a precious metal (i.e., gold) is significant to understanding his writings on money" (283). These writings reveal, Pech ultimately argues, that Locke fetishizes precious metals in order to "disavow the ways in which symbolic modes of signification have begun to sever the connections between currency and natural substances" (286). Additional informationNotes on contributorsWilliam Rodney Herring William Rodney Herring is a Lecturer in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver, 2150 E. Evans Ave., Penrose Library Room 202, Denver, CO 80208-5203.