OpenAI's ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that excels at generating text and public controversy. Upon its release, many marveled at its ability to author intelligible and generically responsible texts (Herman). Writing about his students' experiences using artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants, S. Scott Graham remarks that the results were "consistently mediocre—and usually quite obvious in their fabrication." Why might this be true? How can an LLM succeed in some respects and fail in others? We argue that the discrepant reactions to human and AI rhetoric are a question of genre, specifically that AI rhetoric is only generic; AI rhetoric represents a new enactment of "writing degree zero" (Barthes) that is disengaged from immediate rhetorical situations and knowledge bases. AI text generators (currently) have a more difficult time simulating the positioned perspectives that human writers bring to situations and communicate to audiences through their genre usage. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, we treat this problem as a question of generic form and audience addressivity. We describe the interplay of form and addressivity as genre signaling and offer it as a construct for the analysis of AI rhetoric and genre as a cultural form (Miller). Genre signaling (Hart-Davidson and Omizo) describes a feature of communicative behavior as it occurs over time that can help both humans and machines evaluate written discourse as it exhibits certain stabilized formal features. When texts contain specific genre signals at expected frequencies and intensities, it may be recognized as being generally accurate, reliable, trustworthy. Without these signals, a text with a similar topical focus might fail to be taken as credible or useful. In this essay we propose to quantify genre signaling based on three measures: (1) stability, (2) frequency, and (3) periodicity.

ABSTRACTThis short essay explores oblique approaches to rhetorical theory and practice and, in doing so, accidently arrives at a renewed appreciation of Aesthetics.KEYWORDS: Aestheticsobliquesense AcknowledgmentsI thank Crystal Colombini for reading versions of this essay and offering editorial guidance that made the essay much better. I also thank the anonymous reviewer whose questions and suggestions undoubtedly strengthened the work.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 One such encounter with the oblique can be found in Debra Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency (177n13).2 Thanks to Eunsong Kim for pointing me toward Glissant’s discussion of the opaque.

This article performs a psycho-rhetorical reading of the generalized theorization and specific application of simile in classical and early modern rhetorical treatises and in Shakespeare’s similaically entitled play, As You Like It (1600), respectively. Shakespeare’s play articulates multiple forms of gender and sexuality that are situated beyond the phallic norm inscribed into the privileged category of metaphor and trope; that is, cisgender heterosexuality. These forms include nonprocreative pleasure, lesbianism, homosexuality, incest, adultery, polyamory, pansexuality, drag and masquerade, and nonbinary gender, all of which are associated with the figure of simile. The similaically erotic, polymorphic language of Shakespeare’s illustrative comedy transgresses the Law of the phallus, and fabricates alternative gradations of gender, sexuality, love, li(n)king, and desire. Consequently, repressive and reductive operations of ancient and early modern rhetorical guides constitutively fail in Shakespeare’s play, and reaffirm the nonnormative forms of gender and sexuality that they aspire to censure and censor.

Persuasive effect will always be an essential part of rhetoric studies, but it should not be either its ready shorthand, identifying trait, or lodestar. The decades-long momentum to move beyond the identification of rhetoric with the production and management of effects should be pointedly encouraged, with many new rhetorical imaginaries (invitational, dialogic, agonistic, ecologic, etc.) providing ample resources for doing so. This paper will describe the self-limiting nature of an effects frame, show that there have always been alternatives within rhetoric’s traditions to move beyond it, outline the persistence of a first-order identification with persuasive effect in contemporary disciplinary history, and point to specific ways to put this habit in the rear-view mirror. The rhetorical appropriation of Foucault’s interpretation of parrhesia is explored as an example of a rhetorical practice that moves beyond the reductive straight-jacket of effects.

ABSTRACTABSTRACTIn this essay, age is considered a relevant and significant subject position in which ecological advocates put forth ideologies and cultural constructions of youth to communicate about and for the environment. Young activists employ 'ephebic appeals' to raise awareness of certain issues, display public critical thinking, advocate for society-wide solutions, and empower audiences. The author analyzes the ephebic appeals Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and Mari Copeny to better understand how age operates rhetorically to justify youth's entrance and involvement in civic and political deliberations, render public judgments, and enable similar reflections and critiques in others. Overall, the essay considers how ephebic appeals expand disciplinary boundaries as they relate to rhetorical agency, protest and social change, and citizenship.KEYWORDS: Agencyenvironmental communicationsocial movementsyouth activism AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks Melanie Loehwig, Matthew Houdek, Alex McVey, Emma Frances Bloomfield, and the peer reviewers for their insightful feedback on this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

In this essay, I examine the 17 November 1991 “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves” advertisement in the New York Times. The advertisement is a reflection of 1,600 Black women coming to the defense of Anita Hill after the Hill-Thomas Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings. By analyzing how the advertisement’s authors came to the defense of Anita Hill while inverting Lewis Gordon’s idea of bad faith, building with Sylvia Wynter’s conception of Being as Praxis, attuning to Hortense Spillers’s description of Black women as Being for the Captor, and critiquing Kenneth Burke’s “Definition of Man,” I illuminate a logic of care, Being in Good Faith, that broadens rhetorical scholars’ understandings of the boundaries of what humans can care about and how humans can care.

Judges and jurists frequently read police-recorded video as arhetorical. It is not. Footage recorded from the perspective of an officer favors police. Drawing on both Burke’s theory of identification and film studies, I consider how footage filmed from an officer’s perspective functions as a nonverbal constitutive rhetoric. In an analysis of Harris v. Scott (2007), I demonstrate how police-recorded video encourages viewers to dissolve the space between themselves and the police, inviting audiences to characterize both police and themselves as passive, impartial, and objective viewers of an recorded event. When successful as constitutive rhetoric, footage from police-recorded video makes jurors and judges more suspectable to arguments that characterize police as passive observers in an event.

This essay uses the figure of pollice verso, the “turned thumb” gesture synonymous with Roman gladiatorial contests, as a speculative tool to account for Donald Trump’s use of ambiguity in his rhetoric. Specifically, the essay argues that translating Trump’s demonstrative rhetoric into a deliberative frame can lead to misunderstanding one of his chief resources as a rhetor: the ambiguity of his “thumbful” rhetoric. Through a discussion of Third Sophistic rhetorical theory, affect, and the comedian Sarah Cooper’s parodies of Trump, the essay argues why countergesture should be considered just as indispensable as counterargument for rhetoricians who teach about affordances of digital media.

This essay develops a rhetorical theory of the commons that accounts for both its ontological and political dimensions and contributes to conversations between new materialist rhetorical scholarship and critical rhetorical theories of human power relations. We develop such a theory by considering how the dimension of ontological entanglement that Ralph Cintron describes as the “deep commons” materializes through systemic organizations of affect that foster some relational capacities at the expense of others. This framing allows us to study capitalism and commoning as affective-rhetorical systems that capacitate the deep commons through distinct practices of boundary-making. Whereas capitalism produces boundaries that treat the deep commons as a source of tendentially limitless growth and enact a split between nonhuman nature and human society, commoning practices draw boundaries aimed at plural and interdependent relation between commons systems and their constitutive outsides, enabling more robust expressions of the deep commons to emerge.

The Spanish flu’s efficacy of spreading across El Paso was in part due to neoliberal governments and racially prejudiced free-market economies exploiting a natural ecosystem to marginalize a Latinx community. This study identifies the tragic consequences these actions brought about for an entire city of both marginalized and privileged. This work argues for a new paradigm of rhetorical agency that accounts for interactions between rhetorical ecologies happening over time. This work demonstrates this paradigm through government policies, newspaper articles, press releases, and ecological surveys of El Paso, Texas, beginning with the early nineteenth century through the first years of the Spanish flu (1918–20). Through the lens of rhetorical methods concerning agency distribution and radical interactionality, we see how one neighborhood played a vital role in the epidemic’s spread throughout the city.

This essay argues for embodied dialog among scholars from different global situations as an academic practice crucial to anticolonial transformation. The essay illustrates this practice by recounting the critical interpretations of two differently situated anticolonial persons and the changes in interpretations wrought by our dialog. We draw on postcolonial and dialogic orientations and recent materialist theories that envision rhetorical scholarship as "making" in order to encourage expansion of the range of depictions of Muslims in literature. The analysis employs a persona theory revised through Burkean dramatism and the anticolonial perspective. The transformative potential of the approach is illustrated by a dialogically executed analysis of the Pakistan-focused novel, The Spinner's Tale, by Omar Shahid Hamid.

This essay explores the figure of “liberal tears” as a manifestation of contemporary sadistic conservative discourse in the United States. Sadistic rhetoric betrays an underlying structure of affect where hate and desire coincide. Its primary work is to enforce separation between sadistic subjects and fantasy objects that appeal to them in ways that must be disavowed for their identities to remain coherent. The liberal other is a figure both promising and threatening overwhelming enjoyment. Because of the ways in which it relies on separation and identification to generate enjoyment for its subjects, strategies like satire and empathy are insufficient to respond to sadistic conservative discourses, but rhetoric’s capacity to destabilize identities and undermine certainty remain promising contributions to engaged scholarship.

This essay utilizes the newly translated seminar by Jacques Derrida, Life Death, to formulate a theory of rhetoric linking genetic modifications and larger issues of social and environmental justice. The essay aims to demonstrate one avenue for integrating Life Death within the greater landscape of new materialist rhetorical theory as well as within the rhetoric of science. To do so, it examines the genetic impacts of lead poisoning in marginalized communities to posit how rhetoric links together research in the life sciences and humanities to explain the relationship between genetic alterations and structural discrimination.

What does it mean to be literate in contemporary rhetorics of nostalgia? How can such knowledge lead to a better-designed world? From scrutinizing digital technologies of longing like Facebook’s On This Day to pursuing Afrofuturistic traditions toward neostalgic tomorrows, this essay surveys the human need to bathe in lost pasts, how such longing is coded into our lives, and how it can be activated by rhetoric students to design equitable futures. In doing so, I propose five tenets of nostalgic design, a making-centric approach to the rhetoric of memory that (1) interrogates technologies of nostalgia, (2) learns from user longings, (3) urges solidarity across a design’s lifespan, (4) fragments isolated traditions, and (5) surveys the past for lost futures. Within each movement, I both introduce defining features of the rhetoric of nostalgia and assignments that aid students in remaking the memory systems around them.

This essay draws on theories of rhetorical ability to analyze public discourse on sexual consent. By emphasizing the rhetoricity of disability, these theories underscore the environmental conditions of communication. Through an analysis of the discourse surrounding a controversial legal case, the author develops a rhetorical theory of consent that calls attention to the way that arrangements of power enable and constrain the communicative conditions that facilitate the possibility of consent.

In this essay, I argue that the ecological turn in rhetorical studies has produced spatiotemporal problems and that these problems are directly tied to the material disciplinary history of ecosystems ecology and its connections to the Anthropocene violence of nuclear colonialism. These spatiotemporal concerns result from rhetoric’s “ecological moment”—a kairotic framework that emphasizes flux but elides material histories. Building from rhetorical scholarship in decolonial historiography and place-based methods, I offer a counterhistory of ecology to demonstrate how our field can better engage with the dynamic narrative pasts that shape contemporary rhetorical ecological inquiry. Through this counterhistory, I provide a method for combating rhetoric’s spatiotemporal concerns, a framework I refer to as field histories, which aims to situate disciplinary practices in place and time by combining historiography and fieldwork.

This essay shows how Plato uses methods of fourth-century rhetorical theory to build a theory of language-as-signification, which he constructed to overcome the problem of lies and “false speech” in sophistic culture. By deconstructing Plato’s theorization of signification, I question the historical process by which the “sovereignty of the signifier” (in Michel Foucault’s terms) came to be established, and I reposition Plato as a theorist in the rhetorical tradition who, by redefining the key terms of onoma, rhêma, and logos, created a theory of language that made lies all the more potent by reducing them to “mere signification.” It is this understanding of language as merely signifying and referencing the world that, I argue, lies at the root of the post-truth problem in 21st-century politics. While Plato’s truth problem is characterized by “silence without disproof,” our own post-truth problem is characterized as “disproof without silence.”

This essay analyzes the Heard Museum’s exhibition Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience, a site that documents student experiences at off-reservation boarding schools in the United States. The essay pursues questions of materiality and memory in the creation and disruption of public memory narratives. More specifically, this essay attends to the meaning-making of objects and analyzes their contributions to the exhibit’s documentation and identification work. I argue the successful use of objects in this site holds two key implications for the rhetoric of public memory scholarship: (1) that objects are a resource for the rhetorical invention of public memory, and (2) that additional possibilities for documentation and identification may rest in objects. In making this argument, I thus theorize the relationship among public memory, objects, and settler colonialism, and call for increased attention to objects in our rhetorical histories and theories.

Questioning modernity’s humanism, rhetorical theory has increasingly sought to describe the rhetorical force of the material. Central to this movement has been Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). While Latour’s theory is useful, his general aversion to rhetoric prevents ANT from fully explaining processes of translation or the politics of networks. This essay mobilizes Bernard Stiegler’s theorization of individuation and technics as a necessary corrective to ANT. Their hybridization facilitates a theory of rhetoric as the architechnical organizer of networks. I develop this position by analyzing Facebook’s mobilization of the slogan “time well spent” after revelations about their problematic role in the 2016 US presidential elections. This case demonstrates how rhetoric translates memory to build networks, reshaping the subjectivity and politics of involved—and excluded—actants. Such an approach overcomes the rhetorical shortcomings of ANT and Stiegler while refiguring discussions regarding systems of individuation, rhetorical subjectivity, and power in networked relation.

Energy Darwinism is a metaphor used in economic discourse that proposes markets will naturally become greener and cleaner as fossil fuel costs increase. Influenced by Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, I perform a close reading of the metaphor to analyze its presence in two Citigroup reports. Based on this reading, I argue that the Energy Darwinism metaphor anthropomorphizes markets as acting subjects whose economic autonomy should not be violated and supports the cleansing of industry’s environmental sins. These features of Energy Darwinism construct what I call neoliberal piety, which frames environmental restoration not as inherently valuable but as a by-product of economic success and technological progress. The Energy Darwinism metaphor provides an important case study for analyzing contemporary energy discourse, the rhetorical obstacles that prevent imagining sustainable futures, and the ways we might rework neoliberal assumptions in service of those sustainable futures.

This essay analyzes Decision Points, an interactive exhibit at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, and illustrates how it leverages the digital properties of videogames to make an argument for the necessity of the Bush Doctrine. Starting with how the museum’s material and spatial environment builds identification between visitors and Bush, the piece proceeds to show how the exhibit relies on the affordances of digital environments to characterize Bush’s decision-making process as complex. Focusing on the exhibit’s simulation of the War in Iraq, I argue that rhetorical studies will need to account for the persuasive capacities of videogames in memory places in order to help visitors become more aware of and responsive to the rhetorical claims they encode. This necessity opens possibility spaces for collaboration between the fields of rhetoric, museology, and game studies.

This essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for the “conservation of races” as an instance of an ecological legacy in African American thought that challenged traditional divisions between humans and nonhumans. Evoking contemporary models of rhetoric, I show that Du Bois implicitly figured blackness as an inventive rhetorical ecology that was distributed through material things and environments. Promoting the conservation of that ecology, his sociological work gestured toward a worldly, more-than-human ideal of justice. I explore how his ecological articulation of conservation resonated with Progressive Era environmental conservation in its rejection of ideals of purity but pressed beyond its economic materialism and human essentialism. Ultimately, I argue, Du Bois leaves us with a unique picture of conservation as a cooperative practice of identification in which both human and nonhuman participants come to articulate as interdependent parts of a larger ecology, a process that involves memory at a lived, material level.

This article considers how demagoguery gives meaning to violence by providing a symbolic, expressive outlet for resentment resulting from real or felt precarity. This rhetorical process redirects frustrations away from the entities and sociopolitical structures responsible for creating precarity and toward a scapegoat. Rather than examining demagoguery as rhetoric produced by an individual rhetor or consumed by an audience of the masses, the author explores the “meso-level” of demagogic discourse: the organizations called into existence and motivated by individuals’ shared identification with a symbolic struggle against an imagined Other. This phenomenon is illustrated through a close reading of the Proud Boys, a multinational fraternal organization that uses an aesthetic of libertarianism to advance a fascist politic.

In 1939, Kenneth Burke, reviewing the first translated, unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf for The Southern Review, complained in the introduction that earlier reviews were long on condemnation and...

When two transgender teenagers posted eerily similar suicide letters to public Tumblr accounts in late 2014 and early 2015, they inspired a viral memorialization effort across the website. In this article, I argue the widespread circulation of transgender suicide rhetoric facilitates the possibility for queer rhetors to provoke collective enactments of rhetorical agency even after their deaths. I identify the suicide letters as an emergent rhetorical form, which on its dissemination and due to its intelligibility, incites a kairotic moment. The kairotic moment may be protracted by a network of bodies who feel and collectively reproduce its sensate exigence. As it becomes viral, the kairotic moment acts as the queer futurity of ecological rhetorical agency because it stretches the visceral pressure of exigence beyond its original spatiotemporal emergence, draws bodies into collaborative networks, and orients invention toward the dismantling of normative rhetorical constructs and the composition of alternative worlds.

This article examines commonplaces in the debate over using trigger warnings in college classes with special attention given to the repudiation of “sensitivity.” Arguments against sensitivity have privileged appeals to academic freedom over course and classroom accessibility, but these values may engender conflicting and even contradictory obligations. A rhetorical theory of sensitivity can equip teachers and scholars of rhetoric to make more ethical decisions in the debate over trigger warnings and can lead the field toward a more “sensitive” rhetoric.

Sound has typically been approached as an object of study that gets rhetorical theory applied to it in order to interpret its meaning. Both sound and theory remain unchanged. Understood as vibration that materially affects bodies, however, a sonic orientation toward rhetoric has the potential to further develop theoretical models of situatedness and newer rhetorical concepts such as resonance.

Often paying attention to dominant voices and events, the field of rhetoric appears to have had a fraught relationship with resistance. Contemporary rhetorical theory has moved to embrace resistance as a key term, however, particularly to underscore the embodied politics of the rituals of everyday life, as well as how collective acts assemble to negotiate power and public goods. This essay provides a brief etymology of the term and surveys three dominant articulations of it within this journal: writing, embodiment, and ecologies. Reflecting on cultural histories and contemporary cultural conjunctures, we argue resistance is better appreciated as a practical, vulnerable, and collective articulation of opposition and struggle.

The historical relationship between Judaism and Islam has been the subject of scholarly inquiry for decades. Until recently, however, this fourteen-century-old relationship has gone unremarked on by theorists and historians of rhetoric. In this article, I explore the interconnectivities between legal rhetoric in Judaism and Islam. Looking at the Nicomachaean Ethics and Chaim Perelman’s analysis of rhetoric, justice, and law, I first investigate how, like Aristotle, Jewish and Muslim jurists link virtuousness to obedience to the law. Then, I show how sharia and halakha, Islamic and Jewish law, use rhetoric and systematic argumentation to articulate the place of law in the lives of Muslims and Jews. Finally, using the medieval Mamluk Sultanate and the Geniza community as the basis of a comparatist rhetorical analysis, I demonstrate the lived interconnectedness of Judeo-Muslim legal rhetorics pertaining to marriage, divorce, and the juristic agency of medieval Mediterranean women.

Native to ancient dialogues, medieval allegories, and early modern iconologies, Rhetorica has come to represent rhetoric as an area of academic inquiry. In this essay, we consider how contemporary rhetorical scholars and organizations have used Rhetorica and explore the potential of other personifications of rhetoric and persuasion, drawing on rhetoric’s histories to supply new inventive resources for rhetorical inquiry. First, we introduce lesser-known depictions of Rhetorica. Her range gives historical grounding to a scholarly imaginary that has moved beyond yet still uses Mantegna’s Rhetorica. We do not urge rhetoricians to select a new face for the discipline but instead to recognize Rhetorica’s own diversity and history as an on-going aid and asset to rhetorical thinking and theorizing. Second, we advocate a shift from an exclusive focus on Rhetorica to a shared focus on her less disciplinarily profuse predecessor, Peithō (persuasion).

Readers of A Rhetoric of Motives often acknowledge Burke’s anti-feminist blind spots, but argue that these blind spots need not negate his larger contributions to rhetorical theory. While true, this claim is also dangerous because it assumes that identifying an argumentative blind spot is tantamount to having worked through all its complexities. This article attempts to work through these complexities via a method of mythic historiography grounded in Burke’s concept of the almost universal. This article demonstrates that Burke organizes his philosophy of modern rhetoric and his concept of identification around a deceitful Woman trope in ways that claim a universality that is actually gendered male. By reimagining the relation of identification and myth in A Rhetoric of Motives this article refigures the deceitful Woman trope in terms of its unassimilability within Burke’s modern philosophy of rhetoric and discusses implications for rhetorical studies.

Friedrich Schiller may not be a household name among contemporary rhetoricians, yet since the 1960s Schiller’s critics have begun to take an interest in the rhetorical dimension of his aesthetic writings, particularly with respect to his Aesthetic Letters. These efforts, however, tend to focus on Schiller’s method of presentation rather than the possible rhetorical implications of the Letters’ key ideas and concepts. This essay proposes treating the Letters as an instance of implicit rhetorical theory, one that suggests an innovative model of rhetorical effectivity, according to which rhetoric enables people to experience the normative ideal of beauty as freedom.

Scholars in rhetoric have been slow to recognize children as capable of exercising rhetorical agency. This oversight inadvertently recapitulates the divestment of agency experienced by children who speak publicly about civic concerns. This essay examines the argumentative and organizational strategies of a group of children from New Mexico who worked in the early 1990s to publicize, design, and fund the Children’s Peace Statue and who repeatedly petitioned the Los Alamos County Council to accept the statue as a gift to the city of Los Alamos. Analyzing the children’s rhetorical strategies alongside responses of adult opponents, I show how opponents rejected the statue in part by resisting engaging with children as rhetorical agents. This research underscores the stakes of recognizing children’s agency as complexly meaningful.

This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood.

In light of the genuine disagreement between the seemingly non-rhetorical political philosophy of John Rawls and the philosophical rhetoric of the new rhetoric project I propose a re-reading of Rawls that will help move that project in a needed direction. This re-reading will make the case that (1) Rawls’s conception of justice implies a commitment to the reasonable that is very like the new rhetoric projects, that (2) their differences regarding distance—in particular the distancing strategies of impartiality and objectivity—can be reconciled, that (3) the major difference between them—that is, the role of the rational—comes down to Rawls’s willingness to try universalizing the good, and that (4) such universalizing is a resource of rhetorical particularity that adds value to the construction of the universal audience.

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.

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...

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.

Last October I bought a ticket to hear the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. I went because I wanted to hear what democracy sounded like. Or, more accurately, I went to hear wh...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Digital media offer innovative ways of resolving crises of trust. This essay discusses a campaign that aimed to rebuild public trust in banks during the financial crisis. The campaign reflected a strategy (well-known in conflict resolution) that is best described as an online exercise in active listening. The essay discusses the potential of such a campaign and argues that in a crisis where rhetorical agency is impaired due to declining trust, corporations that engage in public listening may communicate acknowledgment and openness to change. However, in order to realize this potential, the public must be entrusted with a meaningful role as contributor to the campaign in the discursive and technical design of the medium of interaction. In the case studied, the campaign texts explicitly invited participation, but implicitly restrained the rhetorical agency of the public. This undermined the initiative's ability to renew the cognitive and emotional grounds for trust.