The sciences and humanities have long been regarded as discrete intellectual cultures, separated by a sharp epistemic divide. Recently, however, turns toward "transdisciplinarity" have intimated the growing importance of overcoming disciplinary boundaries. The Rhetoric of Inquiry and digital humanities are two transdisciplinary projects that have attempted, respectively, to bring humanistic inquiry to the sciences, and to bring scientific inquiry to the humanities. This paper attempts to trace the parallel genealogies of both projects in an attempt to theorize some common traits of theory in a transdisciplinary mode. I suggest that articulating these projects with one another enables us to suppose that building transdisciplinary theory will entail a heightened reflexivity concerned with questions about scope, methods, and epistemic values.

Timothy Barney is an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Richmond. His scholarship revolves around Cold War–era public address and visual rhetoric (particularly through the medium of cartography) as well as the political culture of post–Cold War transitions in Germany and the Czech Republic. His book, titled Mapping the Cold War, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. He is also working on a new project about the European Union and its promotional activities in the United States.András Bozóki is a professor of political science at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. He has published widely in topics of democratization, the role of intellectuals, the roundtable talks of 1989, Central/Eastern European politics, the transformation of Communist successor parties, and the ideology of anarchism. His books include Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary (1992), Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies (1994), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (1999), The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy (2002), Political Pluralism in Hungary (2003), Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006), and Virtual Republic (2012). He has taught at Columbia University, Tübingen University, Nottingham University, Bologna University, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, and, in his native Hungary, Eötvös Loránd University. He has been a research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS); the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; the Sussex European Institute in Brighton; and the Institute for Humane Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.Senkou Chou is an affirmative cultural critic. His work bridges rhetoric, media theory, French philosophy, and Chinese culture.Matthew deTar is a visiting assistant professor of rhetoric studies at Whitman College. He recently completed his doctorate in the rhetoric and public culture program at Northwestern University. His research focuses on narratives and figures of public discourse that influence national identity and political speech, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia. His research has been supported by the Institute for Turkish Studies at Georgetown University and the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University.Jason A. Edwards is an associate professor of communication studies at Bridgewater State University. He is the author of Navigating the Post–Cold War World: President Clinton’s Foreign Policy Rhetoric and coeditor of The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays. In addition, he has authored more than thirty articles and book chapters appearing in venues such as Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Communication Quarterly, Southern Journal of Communication, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and The Howard Journal of Communications.Martina Klicperová-Baker is a research fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; she is also affiliated with the Center for Behavioral Epidemiology and Community Health (C-BEACH), San Diego State University. Her research interests include the psychology of democracy, the psychology of democratic transitions, totalitarian experience, assessment of time perspective, moral behavior, and civility.Noemi Marin is a professor of communication and director of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Marin is the author of the book After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-Communist Times (2007) and contributor to several other books, including Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformation in Emerging Democracies (2007); Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diaspora, and Eastern European Voices (2005); Intercultural Communication and Creative Practices (2005); Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-Communist Nations (2000). In addition, she was the coeditor with Cezar M. Ornatowski of the Collocutio section in Advances in the History of Rhetoric in 2006 and 2008–2009. Dr. Marin is the recipient of the 2009 researcher/creative scholar of the year award, Florida Atlantic University, and the 2009 presidential leadership award, Florida Atlantic University; and was named the Fulbright summer institute expert on Eastern Europe in 2003, 2004, and 2011.Cezar M. Ornatowski is a professor of rhetoric and writing studies and is associated faculty in the master of science program in homeland security at San Diego State University. His research includes rhetoric and political transformation (especially in Central/Eastern Europe) as well as intersections between rhetoric, totalitarianism, democracy, and security. In 1999, he was a senior Fulbright research scholar at the Culture Study Unit of the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also an honorary fellow of the Center for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.Jane Robinett is a professor emerita of rhetoric and writing studies and English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. Her current research interests include rhetoric and trauma studies; rhetoric and nonviolence; and rhetoric and resistance literature. She was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Costa Rica in 1993.Philippe-Joseph Salazar was educated at Lycée Lyautey (Casablanca) and Louis-le-Grand (Paris), and is a graduate from École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne, where he studied philosophy, anthropology, and critical theory under Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes. He is a sometime director in rhetoric and democracy at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, founded by Jacques Derrida, and distinguished professor of rhetoric and humane letters at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is a 2009 Laureate recipient of the Harry Oppenheimer award, Africa’s premier research prize, in recognition of his pioneering work in rhetoric studies. His chronicles can be read on http://www.lesinfluences.fr/-Comment-raisonnent-ils-.html and http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/philippejosephsalazar.Anna Szilágyi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong. She holds a master’s degree in Hungarian language and literature from Eötvös University and a master’s degree in political science from Central European University (both in Budapest, Hungary). She is a multilingual discourse analyst whose research concerns politics, political discourses, media, and journalism in post-Communist Central/Eastern Europe and Russia, especially the rhetorics of nationalism, populism, and far-right radicalism. Her recent publications include “Variations on a Theme: The Jewish ‘Other’ in Old and New Anti-Semitic Media Discourses in Hungary in the 1940s and 2011” (coauthored with András Kovács) in editors Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson’s collection Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (New York: Routledge, 2013).David Cratis Williams is a professor of communication studies at Florida Atlantic University. His research broadly concerns rhetorical theory and criticism, public argument, and the synergistic connections between rhetoric and democracy. He focuses both on the study of political argument in Russia and on the life and works of Kenneth Burke. Williams is the executive director of both the Eurasian Communication Association of North America and the International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation.Marilyn J. Young is the Wayne C. Minnick professor of communication emerita at Florida State University. Her research has focused on political argument with an emphasis on the development of political rhetoric and argument in the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia. She remains an active scholar in retirement.

Pragmatically, for most of us, “history” consists perhaps primarily of chronotopes, accumulations of symbols and shorthand associations that invest temporality with meaning: 1776, 1848, the 1960s, 1968, 1989. The chronotope 1968, for instance, consists, for many Americans, of symbols of the hippie movement, images of the Chicago Democratic Convention, the escalation of the Vietnam War. For the French, 1968 means primarily the month of May and the student revolt. For Poles, 1968 signifies March: student demonstrations in Warsaw followed by a paroxysm of official anti-Semitism that forced thousands out of their jobs and even out of the country. For Romanians, 1968 represents the political turn away from Moscow, as Nicolae Ceausescu aligned the country with the West in protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.1 Each society, regime, generation, perhaps even each locality, group, or family, has its own “time capsules” that to a large extent constitute the shared sense of history.2This special issue attempts to unpack and interrogate, from a variety of rhetorical perspectives, the chronotope of 1989—one of the more significant chronotopes that continues to haunt contemporary history and public discourse. It is also intended to serve as one possible time capsule of reflections on the year 1989.According to the American historian John Lukacs, the year 1989 marks the de facto end of the twentieth century. Lukacs argues that history does not observe neat divisions. The twentieth century did not actually start on January 1, 1901, because nothing happened on that date to make people think they were suddenly living in a different century. It was World War I that ushered in a different era: massive casualties, mass propaganda, the beginnings of “mass society,” the crisis of traditional values, mechanization of death and life, nagging doubts about the “civilizing” value of education and “civilization” itself, and the concomitant beginnings of new intellectual and political trends. Empires and monarchies (Austria-Hungary, Imperial Germany, Czarist Russia) that had defined the political order in Europe fell, while a new regime arose in Russia. Both Soviet Communism and German Nazism have their roots in World War I. Between 1914 and 1918, the Western world changed profoundly, only to change again in 1945, and then again in 1989 to 1991.The twentieth century, Lukacs claims, was a “short” century, one characterized by utopian experiments and totalitarian nightmares, punctuated by two of the bloodiest wars and greatest genocides in history, including both the Nazi and Communist genocides. As a direct or indirect result of the former, about 60 million people lost their lives (Romane 2006); as a result of the latter, about 100 million worldwide, including 20 million in the Soviet Union and 1 million in Central/Eastern Europe (Courtois et al. 1999). The century ended with the fall of the Communist regimes in Central/Eastern Europe in 1989–1990. Anyone who left for Mars in 1983, following the premiere of the film The Day After about the putative nuclear holocaust between the United States and the Soviet Union, would hardly recognize the world a mere decade later. Poland was a fully sovereign country once again, and the European Union was heading toward another extension. Tismaneanu (1992) has called the breakdown of Communist regimes in Central/Eastern Europe “one of the most important events in this [the twentieth] century” (ix).British anthropologist Anthony Cohen has argued that human communities cohere around symbols. Symbols, however, Cohen (1985) argues, “do not so much express meaning” as “give us the capacity to make meaning” (15; emphasis added). They are capacious containers, so to speak, that people invest with a diversity of meanings and interpretations. Human collectivities, Cohen (1985) suggests, share symbols, but they do not necessarily share their meanings. While most Americans, for example, profess the belief in freedom, few could probably agree as to its exact meaning. (Michael McGee [1980] refers to such specifically ideological symbols as ideographs). Cohen (1985) argues that “the reality of ‘community’ in people’s experience inheres in their attachment or commitment to a common body of symbols”; yet “the sharing of symbol is not necessarily the same as the sharing of meaning” (16).Indeed, 1989 has become such a symbol, one whose multiple meanings continue to both unite and divide. While in the West, especially in the United States, 1989 is associated mainly with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, in countries ranging from Russia, Poland, and Romania to China and Tibet its meanings are much more local and diverse, and its symbolic currency and potency in the political field are far from diminished by the passage of more than two decades—in fact, just the opposite. In many of these countries (for instance, in Poland or Romania) attitudes toward 1989 have become a major determinant of political orientation, a key element of public memory, and a clue to the interpretation of the contemporary political scene.In his contribution to this special issue, Philippe-Joseph Salazar captures the dual articulation of such symbolic dates: On the one hand, to date something is to recognize a “moment” as a movement, the passage of a force … [and] on the other hand, a date fixes a “moment” as a static pause, an interval in time. A date carries therefore the force of history, as something hits something else, the dynamic of politics, and the sense we have that, for a date to be imprinted in our experience of the world, some motion has to pass from one to another, through, literally, an act of force and, plainly, violence.The aim of the present issue is thus to interrogate 1989 as both, on the one hand, a fixed moment “imprinted in our experience of the world” and in the memories of its different “stakeholders,” and, on the other hand, as a “movement”—not only a “passage” from one state to another but as a movement, a transformative symbol, that continues to haunt the rhetorical imagination and to animate the political debates in much of Europe and beyond.As a historical moment, 1989 represents not only a revolutionary time—if by revolution one understands “a fundamental, deep change in the social order and organization of the state”—but also as a historical and rhetorical context for a variety of historical experiments, which “did not necessarily have to succeed” (Baczynski 2009, 8).As a metaphor (thus a “figure of perspective,” according to Burke [1966]), 1989 represents a past in perpetual return as a lens for the present, a creative rhetorical space (not unlike anniversaries, which are rhetorical occasions during which narratives and symbols of the past are used to nourish and shape the present, as well as the future).3 As one Polish member of parliament put it almost a year after the transition: “In every national yesterday there is a national today.”4 Indeed, for many Central/Eastern European countries, 1989 remains very much a part of the national today.However, 1989 also constitutes a potent symbol and creative rhetorical space to be exploited in strategic, geopolitical contexts. On June 4, 2014, Poland celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the June 4, 1989, semidemocratic elections that effectively ended Communist domination. The celebrations coincided with the political crisis in Ukraine: the Russian occupation of Crimea and struggle with Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Both U.S. president Barack Obama and Ukrainian president-elect Petr Poroshenko attended, and many Ukrainian flags dotted the crowd in Warsaw’s Castle Square during the main celebration. “There is no freedom without solidarity,” Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said in his speech in reference to Ukraine, opening the ubiquitous Polish slogan from the 1980s to a new interpretative twist: solidarity with Ukrainian struggle against Russian aggression. While President-Elect Poroshenko emphasized the analogy between Poland’s Solidarity and the Ukrainian Majdan (a reference to the recent bloody demonstrations on Kiev’s Majdan Square against pro-Russian president Janukovitch), Barack Obama suggested that “the story of this nation [Poland] reminds us that freedom is not guaranteed” and that “the blessings of liberty must be earned and renewed by every generation—including our own. This is the work to which we rededicate ourselves today”; Obama’s words were reminiscent of the Gettysburg Address. “The Ukrainians today are the heirs of Solidarity,” Obama declared, cementing the analogy between the struggles of 1989 and the situation in Ukraine. “There is no freedom without solidarity,” he ended, echoing Komorowski, but now from the geopolitical perspective of an outsider to the region and a world leader.Many of the articles in this issue (Matthew deTar, Senkou Chou) address this symbolic and metaphoric quality of 1989. Others, especially Anna Szilágyi and András Bozóki, note the persistence of the “force of history” contained in the 1989 moment in the post-1989 rhetoric of Viktor Orbán—a “revolutionary” force that, as Bozóki and Szilágyi note, had “once been used to initiate a transition to democracy” and is “now [being] used to complete a constitutional coup d’état against an established democracy.”Dialogue around the events of 1989 often assumes a static Cold War space and then, conversely, some sort of definable post–Cold War space. Yet if we see transition as a process by which political communities and their leaders forge new rhetorical spaces and articulate new visions, as well as create ways to marshal and integrate complex histories into these visions, we gain a richer sense of how profound changes in collective identities and imaginaries are negotiated. This process is, as Cezar M. Ornatowski points out in his contribution, dialectical and rife with multiple ironies. (It is worth remembering here that Kenneth Burke [1969] considered irony to be the master trope of history—an insight borne out by the complex events of the transitions and the complexities of the posttransitional period). Noemi Marin’s contribution proposes rhetorical space as central to the examination of the Romanian 1989 scene, where totalitarian rhetoric enforced by Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime clashes with democratic opposition to redefine Romanian identity. Jason A. Edwards’s contribution investigates how the rhetoric of Slobodan Milosevic modified the national myths of Kosovo as a redemptive argument for the Serb pre-1989 national identity. David Cratis Williams and Marilyn J. Young’s article emphasizes the challenges Soviet/Russian leaders such as Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev faced in finding a suitable lexicon of politics to invent, and articulate, the novel shapes of freedom and democratic life. Their article highlights another rhetorical dimension of the transitions of 1989: the challenge of “shaping freedom.” That challenge, according to Poland’s first non-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, proved to be even more difficult than the winning of freedom. “For years,” Mazowiecki (2009) remembers, “it seemed that winning freedom is so dreadfully difficult. Then it turned out that the shaping of freedom is not much easier” (13). Speaking from, and about, another place altogether, Jane Robinett analyzes the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize speech by the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, looking at how the discourse on freedom continues to remain in tension with political histories and cultural narratives that conflate national and nationalistic platforms of public action.The Cold War and the post–Cold War, however we define these terms, do not exist without culturally bound, ideologically explosive, discursive contestations that bring them to life. The transition between these two periods becomes a tense site of ideological struggle between competing articulations of national history, as both Timothy Barney and Martina Klicperová-Baker demonstrate in their articles on Czech pre- and post-1989 political rhetoric. However, as Barney emphasizes in a comment that applies to all the articles in this special issue, and perhaps also to all attempts to come to terms once and for all with as complex a phenomenon as 1989, The historical arguments in the case of a changing (and ultimately disintegrating) Czechoslovakia … [are], of course, only one small piece of an entire spatial and temporal reimagining of Central and Eastern Europe, one that is still in process. Yet, by examining the implications of the rhetorical tensions in democratizing nations during the crumbling of the Cold War, we can perhaps reach a bolder cartography of transition that gets us further out of the binaries that both Cold War and even post–Cold War constructs create.Ultimately, 1989 represents what historians Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney (2004) refer to as a “transnational moment of change,” alongside 1848 or 1968. Such moments foreground the “question of commonality” and, one may add, difference, which, for Horn and Kenney, become “central, a window into the processes of history” (ix).5 In terms of the complex relationships between rhetoric and history, which belong to the central problematic of rhetorical studies, such moments are thus momentous from a rhetorical, not just historical, standpoint.Rhetorically, explorations of such windows provide an opportunity for comparative studies—not, however, in the vein of comparative rhetoric (which has a specific meaning in rhetorical studies) but in the vein of what one may perhaps conceive of as comparative rhetorical histories, somewhat loosely analogous to what Horn and Kenney (2004) advocate as “comparative history.” In terms of such histories, the transnational moment of 1989 appears to consist largely, and paradoxically, of returns to, or perhaps reinventions of, national histories. Horn and Kenney (2004) note, “[I]t is in the modern era that one begins to observe moments in which social, political, and cultural movements, and even entire societies, even as they are bound within a narrative of the nation-state, consciously or unconsciously embrace similar experiences or express similar aspirations across distinctly national frontiers” (x).In the cases of all such modern transnational/national moments, as Horn and Kenney (2004) point out, the underlying processes of change predated the particular date associated with the change and continued after it—sometimes long after it. In fact, in the cases of most of the Central/Eastern European transformations associated with the year 1989, the processes continue to shape internal politics and to reverberate through the cultures, signaling perhaps not the Fukuyamasque (1992) “end of history” but rather its continuation “by other means.” For the denizens of such countries as Poland, the year 1989 marked not the “end of history” but the end of the utopia of an ideal state based on enforced monocentric unity that could transform human relations and human nature itself—a utopia that began, in Western political imagination, with Plato’s Republic. Ornatowski’s article examines the dialectics of the dissolution of such a utopian vision in the case of Poland. This dissolution, Ornatowski suggests, marked in effect a revolutionary return from utopia back to history in an ironic reversal of the dialectical process followed by Plato in his Republic.The articles in this issue, beginning with Salazar’s whimsical musings on the tradition and meanings of dating itself, thus in various ways and from various perspectives interrogate the received narratives of 1989 from the distance of the twenty-five years that separate us from these historic events. While many of the authors note the centrality of the ubiquitous theme of return in 1989 and post-1989 discourses (return to Europe, return of/to politics, return of the people, and so on), they note that such returns also mark new beginnings that present alternatives and/or transformative possibilities in different historical contexts, such as former Yugoslavia, Soviet/Post-Soviet nations, or the “new Europe.”Twenty-five years later, 1989 continues to remain a thriving locus of rhetorical inquiry, as debates over “post-Communism” (the situation after Communism) and/or “postcommunism” (the sociopolitical situation characterized by the persistent presence of the past) continue to define transitional dimensions of political life and remain an open field of political persuasion. Attempting to reconstruct the relationship between history and rhetoric during and after 1989 as a referential anchor for transitional studies, this issue addresses both past and present, the historical moment of 1989, and the broader pre- and post-1989 historical contexts as a temporal framework within which political and rhetorical dynamics of transition can be examined. How these dynamics continue to play out on the local and global scenes still remains to be seen and depends very much on the evolving and contested perceptions and interpretations of the meanings of 1989.

McCracken explores how material conditions encountered by sex workers-realities that "are created and disrupted by discourse and rhetoric" (xxviii)-have the potential to both deny and construct agential choice. To do this, she used an ethnographic design to embed herself within a community of sex workers as a method for asking questions and spending time "with women who exchange sex for money or drugs and the myriad people who come in contact with them" (191). Consequently, as a researcher and a self-identified advocate for sex workers, McCracken argues for more complex interpretations of the stories, ones that can lead to robust solutions to the systemic and individual traumas experienced by them. Through critical discourse analysis, she disrupts the historical and cultural interpretations of sex workers, showing how these constructed realities have led to ineffective or limited solutions because they have historically been hindered by an over-reliance on the archetypal binary of victim/ survivor. This binary obscures not only the kaleidoscopic meaning of these workers' lives, but also limits opportunities for responsible rhetorical agency, or what McCracken calls agential choice.

Reviews 215 Hanvelt, Marc, The Politics of Eloquence: David Hume's Polite Rhetoric, Toronto, University of Toronto Tress, 2012. 217pp. ISBN 978-1-44264379 -6 In this closely reasoned and commendably lucid book Marc Hanvelt acknowledges more explicitly than most historians of eloquence that his study of the rhetorical past is shaped by a preoccupation with the poli­ tics of the present. Hume's thinking about persuasion is important to him not only because it is unusually subtle, philosophically grounded, and dis­ tinctive in its own time, but also because it can tell us something about how we might better conduct our politics today. A key to Hume's thought, Hanvelt argues, is his enduring hostilitv towards a religious and political fanaticism which "has its parallels in our contemporary world" (p. 6). We need Hume's "accurate, just, and polite rhetoric" as an alternative or, as Hanvelt puts it, "antidote" (p. 75) to the "low rhetoric" of zealotry and fac­ tion which threatens to undermine the balanced opposition of interests on which modern democracies depend. As Hanvelt explains, the conclusions Hume reaches in his philosophical writings, which famously emphasize the relative weakness of reason as an influence in human nature, commits him to a conception of rhetoric in which the passions must play a lead­ ing role. But unlike the rhetoric of the zealots, Hanvelt argues, Hume's is an appeal to the passions modified bv politeness. Transferred from its eighteenth-century context, and stripped of its restrictive associations with an elitist code of manners, this "polite rhetoric" refuses to manipulate its audiences by oversimplifying or closing down choices, respects their capac­ ity for making judgements, and engages them on equal terms in sociable discourse. Other scholars have commented on what Arthur Walzer well de­ scribes as "Hume's rhetoric-friendly epistemology" and have assessed its eighteenth-century influence. Hanvelt's ambition is to proceed a step further and retrieve a coherent conception of rhetoric from Hume's own writings. Although he does not restrict himself to Hume's philosophical works, and indeed examines the later volumes of the History as an important source for Hume's thinking about rhetoric, the philosophy of mind Hume formulates in the Treatise and Enquiries is at the heart of his study. In its central chapters (2-5) Hanvelt teases out the rhetorical implications of Hume's conception of belief as a "lively idea" and elucidates Hume's view that eloquence can reproduce the "feeling" of belief that is more usually derived by means of association from custom and experience. By raising vivid and forceful ideas in the mind eloquence excites the passions and operates on the will. What, then, sets Hume's conception of rhetoric apart from the oratory of the fanatics (Hume's and, one infers, Hanvelt's antagonists) who work singlemindedly on the passions of their audiences? Hanvelt finds the answer to this question in Hume's conception of politeness, a moderating influence which equips the orator with the gentlemanly attributes of trustworthiness of character, conversational ease, and enlarged views. With the arguments of 216 RHETORICA Adam Potkay's The Fate ofEloquence in the Age ofHume (1994) in mind, he ac­ knowledges that in the eighteenth century "the polite virtues of manners and moderation . . . were generally considered to be incompatible with impas­ sioned rhetoric" (pp. 54—55). But Hume's politeness, like Hume s rhetoric, was distinctive. He associated politeness with moderation but unlike his friend Adam Smith he did not conceive of moderation as necessarily dis­ passionate. Politeness modified but did not repudiate the models of ancient eloquence, which Hume held in high regard. While Hume "distrusted impo­ lite rhetoric," Hanvelt concludes, he did not distrust rhetoric 'because it is impolite' (p. 76). The clarity with which Hanvelt disentangles complex ideas and explains how Hume differed from contemporary rhetoricians such as Campbell and Smith is one of the strengths of this book. He demonstrates beyond doubt that the idea of eloquence was unusually important to Hume, not least as an illustration and confirmation of his discoveries in the science of mind. But the approach he has taken to reading Hume's texts is not unproblematic. Acknowledging that "Hume never laid...

In Portuguese higher education, teachers from different scientific areas recognize that their students have difficulties with writing. Nevertheless, preparing students for academic writing is not a priority and any intervention depends more on the interest of particular teachers than on any institutional policy. The development of a more institutional approach to academic writing in Portugal will imply a deeper knowledge of the multifaceted reality of the students’ situation, involving identification of their own perceptions of their writing processes and of the academic writing practices they are subject to. This is the aim of our study, based on 1150 students’ answers to a questionnaire about literacy practices in Portuguese higher education.Our results show that students seem to be conscious of the procedural nature of writing and of the role and importance of planning, composing and reviewing in the course of their writing processes. As for their perceptions about institutional interventions aimed at fostering writing abilities and teacher feedback on their written work, the answers to the questionnaire allow us to conclude that such support is not frequently offered. There are, however, some differences in the way these issues are considered across the various fields of study.

Translingual approaches to composition promise to nudge the field fully away from outdated concepts of linguistic diversity, replacing judgments of correctness and assumptions—about discrete languages with analyses of local, situational negotiations and pragmatic competence. Yet in fully displacing the monolingual “native speaker” with the translingual—composer, the approach replaces one linguistic hero with another—a fully competent “user” who shuttles between languages. This article seeks to extend translingualism’s—analysis of (metaphorical) language ecologies into the material surroundings of language contact situations. Drawing on scholarship on affect, vital materialism, and material—rhetorics, it suggests an empirical reorientation that diffuses attention beyond human language-using rhetors in order to account for shared rhetorical agency.

Critics have long considered Rabelais as the “last of the French Erasmians”. However, a rereading of François Béroalde de Verville's Moyen de parvenir (1614–1617) brings to light numerous rhetorical strategies reminiscent of the discourse of morosophy, or foolish-wisdom used by the character of Folly in Erasmus' Encomium Moriae. The identification of these rhetorical devices enable us to retrace the profound and complex influence of the Rotterdam humanist's writings in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

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

Abstract This article compares science and the novel as different rhetorical strategies for representing relationships to the limits of knowledge and what seems unknown. I draw on Kenneth Burke's (1957) figure of “equipment for living” to revive the question of the value of knowledge and art for life, identifying the comparison between science and the humanities itself as a social phenomenon and focusing on the uses and rhetorical value of such disciplines and of literature for life in a period ruled by concerns for so-called applied knowledge and dreams of its transfer and dissemination. In this way, I try to escape from a notion of rhetoric limited solely to social interaction and the mutual persuasiveness of selves in order to develop, by linking rhetoric to subjectivity, a rhetorical approach to the consciousness of a subject conceived as relating to the limits of what can be known.

The impetus for writing this essay is dreadful despite being ordinary (all the more dreadful because its ordinary). Today, just like yesterday or tomorrow, hundreds of millions of people will not eat or eat so little that it seems as nothing to those who always have food in easy reach. I am no moralist, this is no sermon, yet the emptiness of rhetorical theory regarding hunger has begun to gnaw at me, especially since philosophical concern for the body and for materiality in rhetoric studies has only intensified in recent years. Hunger might draw the attention of rhetorical critique when public action is taken to feed the poor or when gazing on their suffering exposes capital's cruelty. In the philosophy of rhetoric, however, hunger is something of a void, so I think it is important to note, amid omnipresent food insecurity, the unmarked satiety of the rhetor's body, which is typically assumed to be a well-fed body or at least not a starving one. It is not a simple case of oversight; hunger is separated from rhetoric as a condition of understanding both and recognizing that we might begin to reckon the significance of assuming instead that rhetoric's materiality, and hence its potential, is not detachable from food so far as human bodies are concerned.“Experience teaches us with abundant examples,” Spinoza remarks, “that nothing is less within men's power than to hold their tongues or control their appetites” (1992, 106). Speech is effectively a species of appetite for Spinoza. The “or” he inserts between tongues and appetites is bothersome, though, and it is exactly this analogic separation that I want to trouble: it is wrong to borrow from the master figure of appetite, hunger, to explain rhetoric's persistence while granting rhetoricity independence from nourishment. Rhetoric (understood as a collective noun) is permanently famished, but its human agents never seem to know the want of food. But maybe they could know that want, or maybe they have, and that is what I wish to discuss. My only point, ultimately, is that an appetite for rhetoric does not deserve autonomy from hunger, given that any rhetoric is immanent to hunger and hunger is always, everywhere imminent so long as that rhetoric is enlivened by bodies that eat. The consequence of hunger's particular immanence/imminence is that it shapes rhetoricity in ways different from that of other appetites. Hunger is a distinctive, inalterable condition for humanity—it is indiscriminate in that all people are finally subject to it, and it is like clockwork, which makes it terrifying. As a result, it is also a condition of the rhetorics that humans inhabit (not to mention a condition of creatures that humans love, fear, imprison, study, and/or rely on, such as those that become our food, but I limit myself to human want for reasons of space and concision).My concern with rhetoric's hungry body is very general, but it is important to demystify things because otherwise I risk reestablishing the analogic distance I have unfairly and opportunistically attributed to Spinoza. One in eight people currently go hungry worldwide, and although the hunger rate declined from 23.2 percent in 1990–92 to 14.9 in 2010–12, 870 million people are still undernourished (UN 2013). One in six Americans go hungry, which includes children (sixteen million of them), seniors, and working adults (Feeding America 2014b). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2012, 49.7 million Americans lived in poverty (Short 2012). And according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2012, 49 million Americans lived in food insecure environments distributed over 17.6 million households, of which 7 million had very low food security (Coleman-Jensen, Nord, and Singh 2013). The nonprofit organization Feeding America says that “food insecure children don't develop and grow as well as others. They may have more difficulty learning and may not do as well in school. They are more likely to get sick and are more likely to be hospitalized. The effects of child food insecurity are severe and they can last a lifetime” (2014a).Presumably these effects include diminished rhetorical capacities due to stunted affective potential and responsiveness to the world. However, beyond diminished capacity, the universality and proximity of starvation is also important to accounting for the ways that hunger and rhetoric entwine. Poverty and its concomitant food insecurity are everywhere, and if you live in the United States you can see just how much poverty is tucked in around you with a handy interactive map provided by the New York Times (Bloch, Ericson, and Giratikanon 2014). At this writing, Maine ranks third in food insecurity in the nation and has seen a 38% rise in SNAP participation since 2006 (Preble Street, n.d.). The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka food stamps) is the largest element of U.S. hunger alleviation programs. As I sit now in my house in Maine, I am surrounded by poverty, with rates reaching as high as 42 percent within nearby neighborhoods and communities. Undoubtedly, where I am a little peckish and looking forward to the fish tacos I will make this evening, someone (likely many someones) within walking distance has eaten little or nothing today and looks forward to little or nothing tonight.Hunger does not bargain, so one never comes to terms with it; hunger makes one incessant demand. Even when the demand is met, hunger cannot be banished to more than a few hours' distance and if one cannot give the body something to eat, the body will begin to eat itself. Perhaps the pitiless and unmoving character of hunger was on the mind of Ischomachus when he told Socrates “no man ever yet persuaded himself that he could live without the staff of life” in Xenophon's Economist (1897, 283). So rhetoric, at least in its traditional sense, is not more powerful than food. Over two millennia later, Norman Borlaug, the great advocate of the green revolution, made a similar point in his Landon Lecture at Kansas State. Referencing West African nations' collapse under the pressures of famine in the Sahel region, he set “flowery speeches” against crop yield: “Food is the first basic necessity…. When stomachs go empty, patience wears out and anger flares. If we're going to achieve world stability, it won't be done, I assure you, on empty stomachs” (1979, 3). The provision of food is irreducibly critical to the polis, but hunger's relation to rhetoric is hardly so singular, so either-or—indeed rhetoric is hardly so singular—as Borlaug makes it seem. Hunger and rhetoric are folded together in complex, dynamic layerings, such that is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins (Deleuze 1992, 108–9). Instead of a binary in which sustenance sits to one side and words (as a cipher for rhetoricity) to the other, food pleats rhetoric and hunger into each other. Through its growth, harvesting, distribution, commodification, hoarding, preparation, aestheticization, enjoyment, and waste, food wraps rhetoricity and hunger over and over the other's fabric. We can begin to make out the curves and layers of these dense, plaited relations by attending to foodways more carefully.There is something to be learned by following the oversimplification of hunger's relation to rhetoric to its breakpoint, however. Ischomachus and Borlaug, each in his own idiom, describe a brute, destructive relation where want of food blankets and suffocates civil discourse, leaving only suasion by physically violent means. In Spinozist terms, hunger is not affect but an affective multiplier that takes over the desire to persist in being (conatus). Hunger unleashes a terrible vitality that seeks only its cessation; an unmet need to eat amplifies anger, leaving violence as the only possible style of being. Hunger heightens our material vulnerability to the world, including ourselves, while making us less vulnerable to the well-heeled habits of human communication. Starvation is a potent, wordless appetite that supersedes the normalized rhetorics of national and international politics, an incredible motive force whose danger lies in the fact that it smothers other strains of rhetoric that may forestall such violence.Elaine Scarry's discussion of pain resonates with me here (1987). As a body in pain, the hungry body becomes monadic in a particular way, folding everything in on itself and out from itself relative to the process of starvation. Or, to the extent that rhetoric is understood as creative forces that mobilize affect, hunger is “the wild” at the heart of civility (Bennett 2002, 19), a gaunt power that both obliterates and compels other forms of invention. And in the face of this immanent/imminent “wild,” confronted with myriad, complex adaptations to hunger, the oversimplification of its relation to rhetoric gives way.Beyond the remorseless, desperate experience of starving, hunger at a distance enfolds rhetoricity in endlessly inventive ways. Memories of hunger, personally felt or collectively recalled, afford communities a place to build on. In other words, the quest to forget the aching hopelessness and danger of a lack of food becomes a stable, recursive foundation on which to project a future; we can recall the kind of lives that we lead or should lead. Farming has special value in locating the present between the past and future, then. Farmers have been repeatedly valorized as the bringers of civilization; cultivators come before culture. Jefferson wrote to Washington that farmers were God's chosen people, since in addition to minimizing war, “husbandry begets permanent improvement, quiet life and orderly conduct, both public and private” (1904, 151). Emerson wrote that farming “stands nearest to God, the first cause” in that all that is good in society follows from it (1904, 137). The first first of farming, before virtue and wealth, is food. Agriculture, fisheries, and husbandry yield a surplus of culture along with meat, grains, and dairy because they turn the power of hunger over. Its cessation not only allows for but nourishes an abundance of creative achievement, which includes yet is in no way limited to civility's political rhetorics. It is the broadest pleat in the materiality of consumption, the turning back of starvation, that typically uncovers a rhetor whose belly is full and a polis that inclusively excludes the unfed. Yet many smaller folds texture the relations between hunger and rhetoric because hunger is never turned back (it cannot be satisfied) and the unfed inclusively exclude the polis too (their unfulfilled appetite carries an unrealized commons within it).The multiplicity of rhetoric and the singularity of hunger are thus bound up in each other, and their entanglements produce divergent powers. Foodways, dependent on farming, actualize hunger both as a destructive and constructive force, flipping between danger and bounty in relation to rhetoric. In a physiocratic rendering of the pharmakon, François Quesnay argues in “Natural Right” that “the physical causes of physical evil are themselves the causes of physical good” (2003, 47). Hunger causes war and violence but as a craving that we need to satisfy, it gives life purpose. For the physiocrats, Jefferson, Emerson, and Borlaug, providing enough food precedes political economy and at the same time is the principal focus of governance, or rather hunger is a radical political economy of need that engenders civil society and that must always be tended to lest a society collapse. Whether that society thrives or falls, however, hunger persists and the cultivation of food enlivens a great many rhetorics, big and small.In short, the materiality of needing sustenance constantly animates rhetoricity because the demands of the stomach are relentless. It is not simply when we put words on the problem that hunger and rhetoric clasp each other. Rather, because we are never done feeding ourselves (or trying to feed ourselves) food production and consumption implacably yet creatively take up rhetoric in hunger and hunger in rhetoric.Enter again the many millions who are hungry as I write and you read, but instead of surrounding yourself with want, turn it about, encircling the malnourished in a world of plenty. The most general fold of hunger and rhetoric, wherein starvation stifles all other rhetorics, is too general and one sided to account for the many ways food deprivation vitalizes rhetoric. There are countless twisted, wrinkled knots of community in which famished bodies and sated bodies find themselves pressed together and yet separated by food, much as I (and maybe you) sit within minutes, likely meters rather kilometers, of hunger. We are incorporated in many relationships that turn on food—some urgent, some negligent, some exploitative, some noble—and these relations, never firmly constructive or destructive, contingently capacitate rhetoric in the plural.I will not pretend to imagine the complexity of all the relations that I feel are at stake, but it is not hard to recognize the complexity when it presents itself. The most recent appropriation of SNAP was through the 2014 Agricultural Act, which included massive farm subsidies but a reduction in food stamps (O'Keefe 2014). In fall of 2013, conservatives in the House, as is their wont, decried assistance as promoting laziness, which assumes that the experience of hunger or at least the very real threat of going hungry is a teacher of self-reliance and civic virtue (Nixon 2013). Thus it is responsible (and a form of responsibilization) to let hunger rule in many pockets and corners of communities, if not whole communities. Hunger, valued as a political technology, is actively incorporated into a rhetoric of governance not as an abstract enemy but as a material application of motive force. In contrast, the liberal argument is often that food assistance promotes self-sufficiency, so ending hunger yields civic virtue. And there are the strange debates over what people on food stamps choose to eat, whether it is junk food or health food that draws public attention. The inspection of food choices is more than a shaming exercise. It is an assessment of the hunger curriculum and what people should learn through food when they can get it. Food rationing is hunger rationing, so it is not simply about empty bellies versus full bellies but about the distribution of hunger relative to being. Rhetoric is implicated in every aspect, in many different material profiles. Hunger is a silent force of appetite that destroys or empowers other rhetorics as it enfolds them, and food is, therefore, a principal mediator of material ecologies for rhetoric. Agriculture, aquaculture, food manufacturing, and culinary traditions extend soil, minerals, water, plants, animals, and humans into one another in ways that impact the affective power of other appetites, including but not only an appetite for political “speech.” Foodways are key adaptations of the will to matter and, thus, rhetoric. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, not all things in rhetoric are rhetorical (2013, 39).If one grants that an appetite for rhetoric is not parallel to hunger but is shaped by it and that rhetoric is organized for hunger, to affect it, then perhaps the groundwork is laid for the philosophy of rhetoric to reconsider the materiality of food. At the most esoteric level that would mean an appreciation that survival is not always prior to creativity. Or, rather, creativity is not only in the service of survival, which is implicit in the too general fold of rhetoric and hunger described by Ischomachus and Borlaug and which sometimes grounds the political ontology of rhetoric's being (Nietzsche 1989). As Elizabeth Grosz explains in Becoming Undone, conatus is about art as well. Discussing the value of Darwin for philosophy, she argues that the world's biotic diversity is not reducible to natural selection. Creative forces unleashed by flowers to attract bees, for example, exceed reproductive utility. She argues that art is the “eruption of taste” within conatus and exceeds survival because it “enables matter to become more than it is, it enables the body to extend itself” (2011, chap. 8). Food is infinitely more than sustenance, and humans adapt and develop with plants and animals in complicated relations of taste, not just of practicality. Hence, inspecting the taste of those who rely on food stamps is not so strange after all, even if it is unpalatable. Food culture is one of the great pillars of creative, nonrational achievement, so even as we recognize hunger's necessity as a mother of invention, we must also understand that invention mothers necessity back. Being “of the world” we must eat, but to eat we must be “for the world” in order to cultivate the food that we need (Deleuze 1992, 26).At the most concrete level, appreciating hunger's material significance to rhetoric would mean exploring how foodways participate in material ecologies of rhetoric, folding and refolding want and satisfaction together to create relations between subjects and objects, taste and need. It would mean thinking about the rhetor's hungry body, not just his or her sated body, and how the distribution of hunger impacts the evolution of rhetorical capacities. To do that, we need to avoid assuming that people have enough to eat when we theorize rhetoricity; instead, we should assume that many do not, anyone may not, and begin to ask how hunger helps produce a given rhetoric's affective potential. More simply, we need to not ignore hunger in the polis when we think of rhetoric but see that it is all around us, in us.

Everyday spaces and places are increasingly experienced as hybrid---as a confluence of material and informatic possibility---thanks to the ubiquity of always connected mobile devices and robust sociotechnical networks. For example, the interiors of many contemporary vehicles are personal area networks that move with drivers through daily commutes, connecting them to their phone's text messages and social networks in and through the material space of their car. In such cases, communication flows strongly mediate people's experiences in, movements through, and perceptions toward spaces of work, learning, and leisure. This article explores such hybrid spaces from the perspective of communication design, offering a heuristic approach to user experience in a world where spaces are often crosshatched and multiple. This exploration focuses on the kinds of tools and practices common to knowledge work and its recent extensions into forms of knowledge play, where the means of knowledge work are coordinated and transformed for non-work pursuits. This article, then, presents a practical, persona driven perspective on the relationships between communication flows and hybrid spaces, challenging design of communication researchers and user experience professionals to rethink the everyday combinations of symbolic action, knowledge work tools and networks, and mundane locations and movements.

ABSTRACT Through examining Jarena Lee’s employment of hymns in her spiritual autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, I demonstrate how hymnody, a largely understudied literary genre in rhetorical studies, proved a critical instrument in authenticating her spiritual conversion and validating her qualifications to serve as a ministerial leader. Using Chaim Perelman’s concept of “presence” and recent research in neuroscience (on the brain and music) I show how Lee’s excerpts of the nineteenth century’s most popular hymns create an aural ambience reminiscent of a worship service that engages her Christian readers’ pathos and sense of piety in order to disengage their prejudice against her race and gender.

AbstractThis essay examines kairos and rhetorical situation theory in relation to scientific inquiry, particularly the quantitative and interpretive components of Samuel G. Morton’s Crania Americana. Morton’s text is a flashpoint of debate on the ability of the sciences to detach themselves from their social contexts. This essay seeks to elucidate the significant political and social influences on scientific practice by examining the impact of kairos on Morton’s data analysis, and thereby to demonstrate kairos as a model for analyzing the interplay of the subjective and objective elements in processes of scientific inquiry. Notes1 I thank RR reviewers Daniel Schowalter and James Zappen for their insightful and useful guidance. I am also grateful for the tremendous helpfulness of Theresa Enos and her staff.2 See http://plum.museum.upenn.edu/˜orsa/Welcome.html.3 See studies by Lyne and Howe and by Barahona and Cachon on the rhetorical dynamics of Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibria.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDaniel ColeDaniel Cole is an assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies and Composition at Hofstra University. His research explores Native American rhetoric and resistance writing, especially during the era of Indian Removal. He also researches theory and practice in writing instruction.

AbstractAtom Egoyan's film Ararat advances a rhetoric of mediated mourning that counters Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. His characters' mourning is mediated in two senses: First, it expresses itself through the production or analy‐sis of visual texts; second, those texts interpose themselves between grieving subjects and the community with whom they identify. while Ararat attempts to visualize the unquenchable urge toward consubstantiality with an ancestral collective, the movie deliberately resists absorption by discourses that render Armenian post-exiles answerable to skeptics and to privileged audiences who appropriate narratives of atrocity for personal catharsis. Notes1. 1I dedicate this essay to my father, Phillip Dwayne Carter (1952–2014). I would also like to thank RR reviewers David Blakesley and Nathaniel Rivers for their trenchant commentary, and Theresa Jarnagin Enos for her guidance and support.2. 2See Siraganian (134) and Parker (1047). What Parker sees as Egoyan's insistence on "intergenerational embrace" also enters into Saroyan's film, which dramatizes young people struggling to support suffering parents as well as parents reaching helplessly toward lost children.3. 3Davis features the quoted passage from Burke's Language as Symbolic Action in her own Inessential Solidarity (33).4. 4See Romney (171) and Torchin (9) for discussions of Spielberg's translation of Holocaust testimony into epic spectacle.5. 5Theriault describes the circumstances of Gorky's emigration in Rethinking Arshile Gorky (15). She also observes that Gorky's ensuing work tended toward abstract experimentalism, as he experienced what Georgiana Banita describes as "an ambivalent relationship to figurative painting" (93). His simultaneous practice and suspicion of figurative representation make him an especially apt ally for Egoyan, who expresses a similar attitude toward mimetic film.6. 6See Inessential Solidarity 21. Although Davis elegantly describes Burke's grounding of identity in multiple, sometimes clashing affinities, she challenges his idea of a biological individual that precedes discourse and that engages in persuasion so as to overcome its originary division from other subjects (23–25). She posits intersubjective union as a constitutive condition rather than a frustrated aspiration.7. 7The Blanchot quotation appears in The Historiographic Perversion (10). In an intriguing turn in the same work, Nichanian also refuses to describe events in Armenia as genocide. He does so, however, from a position deeply opposed to the one adopted by Ali. Nichanian details how historians have demanded copious archival testimony to support the claim of genocide, yet argues that such testimony could never encompass the horror of what took place in Van during and after 1915. Insofar as the idea of genocide makes an intellectual commodity of unrepresentable violence, he finds it inadequate to a Catastrophe that has not ended but continues in the form of concerted denial by the government whose predecessors brought it about.Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher CarterChristopher Carter is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, where he serves as Composition Director. He is author of Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy (Hampton Press, 2008) and previous editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. His essays have appeared in Works and Days, JAC, and College English, and he has written chapters for Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers as well as Narrative Acts: Rhetoric, Race and Identity, Knowledge. His second book, Rhetorical Exposures: Confrontation and Contradiction in U. S. Social Documentary Photography, will be published by the University of Alabama Press in 2015.

Critics have long considered Rabelais as the “last of the French Erasmians”. However, a rereading of François Béroalde de Verville’s Moyen de parvenir (1614–1617) brings to light numerous rhetorical strategies reminiscent of the discourse of morosophy, or foolish-wisdom used by the character of Folly in Erasmus’ Encomium Moriae. The identification of these rhetorical devices enable us to retrace the profound and complex influence of the Rotterdam humanist’s writings in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) offers treatment to sex offenders civilly confined after they complete their prison sentences. In this article, we enhance the notion of kairos in rhetorical situations with the perceptions of risk and the sociological concept of moral panic by tracing three kairotic moments involving MSOP: the 1992 Dennis Linehan civil commitment case; the 2003 murder of college student Dru Sjodin; and the 2012 provisional discharge of Clarence Opheim. We examine the political, public, and media response to these events and provide the results of 21 interviews with stakeholders. In doing so, we hope to illustrate how moral panic and risk perception can so influence what seems the right choice at the right time that stakeholders may get caught in what we call kairotic cycles, where solutions to a problem are stymied by competing perceptions and by entrenched positions that reoccur over time and without resolution.

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.

This essay urges scholars and teachers interested in the rhetorical agency of economically disenfranchised groups to expand their field of vision beyond the organized labor movement. The author discusses the Moonlight Schools, founded in Kentucky in 1911 by Cora Wilson Stewart, as a site for investigating alternative forms of solidarity. More particularly, she argues that Appalachian women used the literacy skills they developed under Stewart’s tutelage to support their own long-standing practices of neighborliness. By thus looking beyond strikes, walkouts, and other dramatic rhetorical moments from the labor movement, this essay hopes to begin building a more nuanced understanding of how people with limited economic resources gain purchase in the world through words.

This article explores how rhetorical myth can be used as a tool for persuading employees to accept change and to maintain consensus during the process. It defines rhetorical myth using three concepts: chronographia (a rhetorical interpretation of history), epideictic prediction (defining a present action by assigning praise and blame to both past and future), and communal markers (using Burkean identification and rhetorically defined boundary objects to define a community). The article reports on a 3-year ethnographic study that documents the development of a rhetorical myth at Iowa State University’s Printing Services department as it underwent changes to its central software system.

Abstract In this essay, we examine public responses to Jared Lee Loughner’s attempted assassination of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, focusing in particular on the rhetorical strategies employed by political conservatives. We argue that the most prominent conservative reactions either undermined the potential for reasoned debate and a cohesive narrative regarding the causes of the attack or, by emphasizing Loughner’s agency as an individual, deranged actor, painted the event in a way that failed to provide transformative redemption, foreclosed even the possibility of a rhetorically satisfying sense of justice, and preempted what could otherwise have been a rich, deliberative deployment of civility. We utilize Kenneth Burke’s dramatism in speculating about possible alternative interpretations of the situation, hopeful that such an analysis might offer both the public and the government more effective rhetorical resources for dealing with and even preventing such increasingly common tragedies. In particular, we advocate the use of a hybrid, tragicomic frame—a sort of Burkean Serenity Prayer in which we accept the things we cannot change while still finding the inspiration, strength, and wisdom to respond productively—alongside a multifaceted set of pentadic ratios to address the complex demands created by mental illness.

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

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.

Creative writing is divided between instructors upholding New Critical emphasis on texts and those challenging the goals of the discipline. While innovators propose reform, reconceptions put instructors at odds with one another and with students. In compromise, I propose praxes that incorporate lore-based methodology with innovations from critical and rhetorical theory.

Much has been written about how to evaluate static graphics from the perspective of clarity, ethics, efficiency, and power relations. However, when considering interactive graphics, agency must enter the conversation. This article develops a typology to understand the balance of agency between the designers and users of interactive graphics. The authors use this typology to interrogate 2 contemporary theories of rhetorical agency advanced by Miller and by Herndl and Licona.

Reviews Peter White. Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Repub­ lic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 256 pp. Hardcover: $60. Paperback: $29.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-538851-0. Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010. Cicero in Letters is a major landmark in the study of Ciceronian letters, and a book that belongs in the personal libraries of all scholars interested in the fields of Cicero and ancient letters. Building on and extending the seminal work of D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Peter White meticulously analyzes the massive corpus of extant Ciceronian letters, focusing on how the letters function as a form of social media, as it were, constructing and maintaining Cicero's personal networks. Although White engages to a certain degree with sociolinguistic method, the general approach of the book is philological, concerned primarily with close reading of individual letters, analysis of the editorial process that gave form to the extant collect, prosopography, and historical reconstruction of letters' functions as part of the reciprocity systems embedded in elite Roman networks of amicitia. Cicero in Letters, available in hardcover, softcover and electronic ver­ sions, consists of a preface, six chapters, an afterword, two appendices, notes, bibliography and indices. The main body of the book is divided into two major parts. "Part I: Reading the Letters from the Outside In" (83 pages) con­ sists of three chapters focusing on the form and context of Cicero's letters, "1. Constraints and Biases in Roman Letter Writing," "2. The Editing of the Collection," and "3. Frames of the Letter." Next is "Part II: Epistolary Preoc­ cupations" (76 pages), comprised of three chapters emphasizing the content of the letters, "4. The Letters and Literature," "5. Giving and Getting Advice by Letter," and "6. Letter Writing and Leadership." The organization of the book is thematic rather than strictly analytical, and the approach, despite meticulous scholarship, more exploratory and essayistic than scientific or argumentative. All Ciceronian passages are quoted both in Latin and in the author's own translations. The translations are generally accurate and read­ able, and the writing style of both White's text and translations is accessible to the non-specialist. The first chapter, "Reading the Letters from the Outside In," sets letter writing within its social and generic context. It exemplifies ways in which Rhetorica, Vol. XXXII, Issue 4, pp. 0-430, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2014.32.4.0. Reviews 413 the study of Latin letters differs radically from that of Greek. Biblical schol­ ars, especially, and a smaller group of rhetorical scholars, have produced exhaustive studies of the form and context of Greek letters, including the lo­ gistics of letter production and delivery and the relationships among letters, letter-theory and rhetorical theory, but as much ancient epistolary scholar­ ship is concerned with the Pauline epistles, less work has been devoted to Latin letters than Greek, and what work does exist is more focused on seeing letters as a lens through which to examine literature, history or politics rather than studying epistolographv for its own sake. White's work, following this general trend, displays particular strengths in analyzing how Cicero's letters responded to the problem of maintaining political influence and networks at a distance. While White's first chapter does a workmanlike job of dis­ cussing issues of letter transmission and production, and such issues as the importance of the presence formula, the discussion is presented somewhat in a vacuum, approaching, for example, the philophronetic nature of an­ cient epistolographv as a point to be proven rather than as position that has been widely accepted in the study in ancient letters since Deissman (1910, 1911) and Koskenniemi (1956). White's treatment of how Cicero in­ flects these common practices is detailed and meticulous, albeit scholars of ancient letter-writing may find frustrating the lack of comparative material or responsiveness to existing scholarship on ancient letters (e...

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

This essay takes up a discussion concerning the 1929 debate between the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger by reading it as an instatiation of an ongoing dilemma within the field of rhetoric. I argue that the Davos meeting may be productively read through the lens of rhetorical theory and that such a reading can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this event. The essay concludes by making a case for Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms as a normative ground for a rhetorical theory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured, cosmopolitan, critical humanism.

In his first book, Christian Lundberg takes on the formidable challenge of rescuing Lacan for rhetorical studies. As he demonstrates in his first chapter, scholars in other disciplines have mostly neglected Lacan's profound reliance on the rhetorical idiom, while rhetoricians have deployed his theory for critical purposes without fully appreciating the thoroughgoing transformation of rhetoric it effects. Lundberg's intervention is the first sustained effort to treat Lacan's expansive, dense, and often opaque oeuvre as a fully formed theory of rhetoric. In fact, the book persuasively advances the provocative claim that Lacan pushes rhetoric in far more promising directions than the academic disciplines of rhetorical and composition studies have managed to date.A pervasive concern linking assorted Lacanianisms is the subject's knotty relationship to the social world. Even the leading exponent of Lacanian political critique, Slavoj Žižek, returns incessantly to subjectivity as the privileged locus of ideological fantasy on which political orders rely. Among the considerable virtues of Lundberg's book is that it facilitates a much-needed departure from the problematic of subjectivity by shifting the focus to what he calls the “economy of trope.” Yet this departure is also a return: Lundberg contends that Lacan's theory is deeply faithful to rhetoric's rich tradition, painstakingly recovering within its letter and spirit a cogent, systematic account of the tropological processes on which both subjectivity and social ontology depend. As a result, the book skillfully and forcefully opens productive avenues for future scholarship in rhetoric.Lundberg's argument hinges on the claim that Lacan's theory—indeed, science—of rhetoric presumes that communication, understood as the achievement of shared meaning, inevitably fails. In this, Lacan diverges sharply from both various structuralisms on the one hand and Foucauldian discourse theory on the other, since for Lacan the inherent failure of communication is not an obstacle or limit but both a prerequisite for and an effect of the psychic, social, and political efficiency of discourse. In a series of close encounters with prevailing currents in rhetorical studies, Lundberg argues convincingly that the appropriations of so-called poststructuralist, discursive and neomaterialist theories by rhetoricians err in continuing to stake themselves on the communication model.Each of these approaches in its own way presumes that the production of shared meaning is the aim of communicative practices; the differences among them lie in the way this presumption is deployed to explain rhetoric's role. In Lundberg's view, such work misses the way the impossibility of shared meaning is the generative matrix of rhetorical action. Rhetoric is essential not to achieve the fact or semblance of shared meaning but to organize an economy in which the circulation of signs conscripts subjects through affective investment whose condition of possibility is precisely the absence of shared meaning. Thus, “rhetoric is both signifying in a condition of failed unicity and a way of feigning unicity in the context of failed unicity…. Rhetorical artifice—tropes, modes of address, imaginary commitments, and the labor of investment—underwrites these practices, feigning unicity in the context of its failure” (3).Chapter 2 takes up the long-standing difficulty of defining rhetoric as a symptom of the chronic misapprehension of rhetoric as a practice of communication. Against the persistent indecision concerning rhetoric's scope and object domain, Lundberg proposes a Lacanian reformulation of the problem that sees rhetoric as neither the confluence of strategic, ornamental, and constitutive capacities of language (and other modes of signification), nor the disciplinary production of knowledge about a genus of objects defined as “rhetorical,” but as the “transcontextual logic of discourse, situated in an economy of tropes and affects that underwrites both the sign and the concrete modes of its employment” (23). This in turn means that, while the American tradition of rhetorical studies has privileged the Imaginary register, focus must shift to the Lacanian Symbolic “because … the sign is the result of artificial … of tropological connection—and … as a result, the sign is a site of affective investment” (28). Whereas “the Imaginary … houses the specific contents … that fill in symbolic forms” (30), the formal, autonomous operation of “trope is logically prior to all the operations that stem from the Imaginary” (39).Consequently, in chapter 3, Lundberg urges rhetorical critics to forego their investment in the Imaginary as the site of “the agential capacities of the orator, the audience and … the critic” (41) and focus on a conception of “speech” orthogonal to the fantasy of communication. To delineate this conception, Lundberg painstakingly works through Lacan's “schema L,” which formalizes the radically extrasubjective production of the unconscious, or “the whole field of tropological connections that is the condition of possibility for a sign to have an intelligible meaning” (52). Rather than a manageable process and medium for the production and circulation of meaning, here “speech is the site where language moves through a subject, and where the economy of signs takes up a specific material position, mode of address, and social context” (56). So understood, speech both relies on and disrupts the Imaginary register, replacing “a bilateral … reciprocally constitutive direct relation between subjects with a tripartite, asymmetrical relation of indirection,” marked by gaps within subjects as well as between them and the Imaginary objects and Symbolic processes on which they rely (62).If communication succeeds, it is not in establishing an intersubjective domain of meaning but in generating a volatile yet systematic array of meaning-effects. In view of this, Lundberg argues that Lacan rehabilitates rhetoric as a “symbolic science of forms” (71) committed to accounting for the operation of the “symbolic machine” in social life (72). What makes this machine both unpredictable and orderly is what, in chapter 4, Lundberg calls the “economy of the trope” comprising it. The figure of economy serves to differentiate the Lacanian theory of trope from those prevailing in American communication studies. For Lacan, metaphor and metonymy denote infrastructural logics of signification as such, rendering the latter fundamentally fortuitous and depriving it of the unicity it ostensibly promises. In short, the operation of trope both forecloses continuity and intentionality in signification and operationalizes this foreclosure itself as rhetorical agency “distributed across the whole economy of discourse … the subject's affective investments [and] the movement of tropes themselves” (87). Hence “An economically figured practice for reading trope can … account [for] the force of individual texts … by attending to the intertextual tropological exchanges that animate and exceed them” (87).Extending the figure of rhetorical economy, chapter 5 responds to “materialist” concerns that the expansion of rhetoric entails a reduction of reality to an effect of discourse. Lundberg points out that Lacan stipulates the existence of a world outside signification and stresses the materiality of signification itself. Among the senses of the Lacanian Real is a physical objectivity to which humans have only indirect access and which constitutes a limit on meaningful experience. Moreover, insofar as Lacanian reality is the field of experience produced by the embodiment of the signifier, it is the domain of metaxy, or the mediating function of desire that sustains the relation of nonrelation misperceived by the distinction between the material and the discursive. Understood “as studied (im)mediation, as a site of enjoyment that flows from the gap between discourse and the world,” metaxy engenders this distinction itself (105).A recursive structure of affective investment and circuitry of somatic enjoyment is thus both a cause and an effect of the gap within signification and between sign and world. Hence the general economy of trope is resolutely material, accounting for “the conditions of possibility for a specific emotion to be manifest given the specific economy of tropes that organizes [its] experience” (109). Indeed, for Lacan “affect … is itself organized for the subject by the function of the signifier,” which is in turn repressed as the former's “absent cause” (110). The body is a body insofar as its affects are captured within the signifying network, which requires affective investment to function, so that enjoyment is less about signs and their meanings than “the ways that the object or practice serves the subject in negotiating a relationship to the general economy of exchange” (114). This is a material form of labor “that underwrites signification by ‘sliding’ the signified under the signifier” (115). The science of rhetoric, then, is concerned not with the exchange, coproduction or contestation of meanings in designated contexts but with the demands imposed by the material operations of language itself. The challenge for rhetoricians is to forego the premise of the rhetorical relationship and to develop methods of analysis adequate to the task of explicating these operations and their effects in public life.With this in mind, chapter 6 shifts attention to the public as both the name of practical spaces of discursive performance and the implicit horizon of the rhetorical processes at stake in the book. For Lundberg, Lacan radicalizes the ontic experience of publicness into an ontological condition “where the subject is articulated … in relation to the whole economy of discourse” (130). Accordingly, the Lacanian gaze instantiates the subject's irreducibly “ambivalent relationship to the speech of the Other” (131), since “the signifier is both a site for the articulation of the individual subject and its passions and a kind of ‘public property’” (132). The public character of speech thus involves subjects in a tropological relation of prosopopoeia that organizes an economy of address suspended between the subject's imaginary relation to others and its relation to the abstract, autonomous logics of discourse in general. Against the premise of a complementarity between logos and pathos, Lacan draws attention to stasis, or the circuitous relation between sociopolitical commitments and affective investments that maintain social links by violating, circumventing, or eroticizing these commitments. The critical question now concerns the productive capacities inherent in the discontinuities among pragmatic, rational, affective, ethical, and formal dimensions of public discourse. To illustrate the practical consequences of reconfiguring rhetorical criticism in this way, chapter 7 undertakes two paradigmatic readings: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ illustrates the way attention to the tropological economy of identitarian public-making reconciles the apparent contradictions of evangelical discourse practices; while antiglobalization protest movements illustrate the limits of demand-driven politics that fail to register in critical accounts organized around the strategic politics of democratic resistance.Among other difficulties, The Passion raises the question of how a film that submits its audience to a sustained experience of visceral revulsion can mobilize identification, since its symbolic construction would seem undercut by its affective impact. In Lundberg's view, focusing on the film's narrative construction in the context of evangelical ideology renders its central metaphor of scourging enigmatic, not least because evangelicalism rests on a paradoxical image of a community of unconditional love secured by vehement exclusion. The solution to this interpretive conundrum lies in tracking the function of enjoyment through the economy of tropological exchange established between the film's aesthetic strategy and evangelical publicness. Accordingly, Lundberg's reading shows how “the experience of revulsion both conceals and makes acceptable the evangelical community's cathectic investment in the grotesque violence” by routing enjoyment through “a reading of secular powers as agents of evil who conspire against … the body of Christ as a whole” (163).If prevailing critical protocols underestimate this dimension of Christian evangelicalism, they overestimate the democratic potential of radical resistance movements for precisely the same reason. Focusing on the discursive logic of demands lodged against powerful elites occludes the cathectic investments in existing relations of power that such demands enact. Put simply, in their symbolic guise as address to the Other, such demands actually desire their own failure as the mechanism for cementing their position of enunciation within the symbolic order. In effect, radical antiglobalization movements evince a tropological economy designed to preserve the status quo in a way that continues to produce enjoyment for the protestors. Aiming at their own failure, they succeed at generating surplus enjoyment, buttressing the conditions they ostensibly target.Both readings succeed admirably in demonstrating both Lundberg's critical acumen and the productivity of the rhetorical vocabulary he extracts from Lacan. What remains less certain is whether this vocabulary is exceptionally suited to the interpretive challenges the objects of analysis pose, or indeed whether an interpretation that succeeds so well in reconciling their internal contradictions is fully faithful to the principle of failed unicity on which it relies. To be sure, the latter is hardly a shortcoming of the book but a question for Lacanian theory writ large; still, it remains a question rhetorical theory should entertain before staking itself on the Lacanian science of rhetoric.The postscript that concludes the book returns to the continuity between Lacanian theory and the rhetorical tradition, figuring the former as the latter's faithful heir. In particular, Lundberg considers the unexpected convergence between Lacan and Ernesto Grassi around the ontological priority of trope, as well Lacan's affinity with Aristotle's Protrepticus, which enlists enjoyment as the mechanism that makes intellection possible. The result is a “protreptic rhetoric,” figured as a science “rooted in the enjoyment of signs [that] requires rejecting both an arid structuralism and the banal reduction of rhetoric to its imaginary coordinates” (192).Lundberg's argument that Lacan offers a potentially transformative theory of rhetoric is thoroughly convincing, as is his adroit reconstruction of this theory. No doubt reframing rhetorical inquiry along the lines proposed by the book promises to yield vital new insights and to spur rewarding new interpretive strategies and research trajectories. Certainly the stress Lacan lays on the consequences of failed unicity and the irreducibility of miscommunication augurs a wholesale renovation of rhetorical scholarship. Such a project will entail confronting a crucial question: how far can the implications of Lacanian rhetoric bear to be pressed? If there is no unicity to be had, is the only alternative the feigned unicity generated through tropological exchange? Are all modes of sociality predicated on the forms of misrecognition this economy entails? Must the failure of unicity be recuperated, or can social life proceed without feigning it—and if so, how must rhetoric be rethought to account for this possibility? More radically, does the failure of unicity precede—logically or temporally—the supplements that compensate for it, or does this failure appear as a problem in need of a solution retrospectively, as a consequence of supplementary processes themselves? While such questions exceed the book's scope, it brings them helpfully into focus and will surely prove invaluable for future efforts to address them.

Abstract Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism provide an implicit critique of the contemporary theoretical emphasis on antirepresentational, immanent theories of discourse, subjectivity, and power. From this standpoint, such immanentism can be understood as a distinct effect of a neoliberal governmental practice directed at the suppression of the idea of totality. To address Foucault's critique, this article argues for a reinterpretation of Lloyd Bitzer's concept of “situation” to recover a working notion of totality that would be useful for critical and material rhetorical inquiry. Historicizing the immanent turn in the critical humanities can open the way for a critical social theory of communication.

In sixteenth-century male writers’ descriptions of the English grammar school program, mothers were imagined as impediments to boys’ learning. Yet these same writers paradoxically turned to a “mother” figure, prosopopoeia, as the rhetorical device through which they imagined and brought into being a humanist-inspired education. By embedding maternal narratives, bodies, and language in their explanations of grammar school and its “mat(t)er,” the writers of rhetorical manuals, grammar school textbooks, and pedagogical handbooks position the mother at the center of early modern thought, which has implications and consequences for actual mothers and their participation in early modern rhetorical education.

This article considers why users of popular software packages choose to find answers to their task problems on user forums rather than in official documentation. The author concludes that traditional documentation is developed around an antiquated notion of “task,” which leads to restrictive ways of thinking about problems that users encounter and the solutions that might be appropriate. The author argues, instead, that tasks and problems arise from networked rhetorical situations and networked contexts for rhetorical action. The influence of networks requires a redefinition of rhetorical situation and context, from which we derive a networked picture of tasks and problems as emergent and uncertain phenomenon, best addressed in the uncertain and sometimes-chaotic setting of user forums. Forum threads are studied using discourse analytic techniques to determine what they can reveal about qualities making tasks and problems uncertain.

“Sinners Welcome” explores the relationship between current community partnership models and the political rhetoric that often surrounds them. Taking up the frequent invocation of Cornel West’s “prophetic pragmatism” in such partnerships, this article investigates what it might mean to understand this term as a call to work for actual systemic justice for those most oppressed by the current political moment. To make this concrete, the article discusses a community partnership project that resulted in an activist organization being created by local residents in response to a large-scale redevelopment effort in the neighborhood. Once created, this organization became the site of a concerted countereffort to defund and discredit such partnership work. It is this tension between community partnerships and activism, between prophetic pragmatism’s theoretical goals and its actual practice, that represents a fundamental choice within English studies. Ultimately, the article poses the question of how far our field is willing to go in the name of a “transformative politics.”

314 RHETORICA cause Reid zzlook[s] askew at existing disciplinary histories" to reassemble the sometimes disparate people, texts, and institutions that comprised Parlia­ ment's rhetorical culture (Hawhee and Olson, "Pan-Historiography, p. 96). He recognizes multiple eighteenth-century disciplines at play in the print circulation of Parliament and enlists several contemporary disciplines to in­ terpret archives that complicate the purview of traditional scholarship about Parliament. In addition to history and rhetorical theory, Reid draws upon his background as a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, discussing, for instance, how Cowper, Samuel Johnson, and William Hazlitt criticized par­ liamentary oratory Complementing Matthew Bevis's study of nineteenthcentury literature and rhetoric, he shows "how the permeable boundaries between speech and print were related to those between politics and liter­ ature" because print media encouraged readers to imaginatively reconstruct parliamentary speech (Bevis, The Art of Eloquence, 2007, p. 23). Like Cow­ per liberating the "imprison'd wranglers," Reid gives voice to the variety of rhetorical activities surrounding the eighteenth-century Commons. With copious archival evidence and thoughtful deployment of recent historio­ graphic approaches, he sheds new light on the rhetorical practices of the eighteenth-century Parliament and its constituents. Katie S. Homar University ofPittsburgh Laurent Pernot (ed., trans., comm.), Alexandre le Grand. Les risques du pouvoir, Textes philosophiques et rhétoriques, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013, XXIII + 242 pp., ISBN: 978-2-251-33967-2. Se fu il grande teatro ateniese del V secolo a. C. a mettere per primo al centro della scena la duplice veste della figura del monarca, sempre in bilico fra regalità e tirannide, fu uno storico del IV secolo, Teopompo, a far risaltare le luci e le ombre che si riverberavano da un personaggio storico, l'ingombrante padre di Alessandro, Filippo II di Macedonia, dando cosí vita a una nuova impostazione storiografica (cfr. L. Canfora, in C. Franco, Vita di Alessandro il Macedone, Palermo 2001, pp. 11-12). Sarebbe stato pero il figlio, il grande conquistatore del mondo, a prestarsi, piú di ogni altro, a un grandioso sviluppo di questa idea della compresenza di bene e male (peraltro connaturata alia visione greca delle cose fin da Hes. Op. 179): e quegli storici che ne raccontarono vita e imprese, e che eccellevano anche come scrittori (si pensi a Curzio Rufo), fecero di lui un ritratto, di perdurante influenza, caratterizzato da potenti chiaroscuri. Alessandro divenne cosí un paradigma del potere, e del suo buono o cattivo uso, soprattutto nei lunghi secoli in cui un potere supremo vi fu, incarnato da un imperatore, di volta in volta migliore o peggiore di chi l'aveva preceduto sul trono. Reviews 315 Nell originale scelta di testi greci e latini, di età impériale, che costituiscono il corpus di questo suggestivo piccolo libro dal titolo molto signifi­ cativo (Les risques du pouvoir), Laurent Pernot (LP) raccoglie e antologizza autori (Seneca padre, Dione di Prusa, Luciano; estratti di «une foule de déclamateurs grecs et latins, célèbres ou anonymes» ) che «se situent sur un double registre, celui de la philosophie et de la rhétorique à la fois» (p. XI-XII), e che hanno scritto di Alessandro Magno senza essere né storici né biografi. Apre il volumetto una breve premessa generale (Avant-propos) sui principi che hanno informato la selezione degli autori e dei testi e sul filo conduttore che idealmente li unisce (pp. IX-XVIII); la corredano alcuni ausili pratici per il lettore (un prospetto cronológico délia storia délia Macedonia fino alla morte di Alessandro e una cartina, ridotta all'essenziale, dell'itinerario délia sua grande spedizione in Asia). A ogni testo antico riportato, in una traduzione realizzata da LP appositamente per questo volume, viene premessa una Introduction, che dà notizie sull'autore e sul testo prescelto. Seguono due appendici su terni alquanto specialistici (pp. 163-170: I. La théorie des trois "dénions"; II. La fin énigmatique du quatrième Discours sur la Royauté) e una abbastanza ricca serie di note di carattere molto vario: sono per lo più informative ed esplicative, ma registrano anche puntualmente citazioni e allusioni presentí nei testi; non mancano, in taluni casi, quelle di carattere più specificamente filológico. Chiudono Popera una...

This essay takes up a discussion concerning the 1929 debate between the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger by reading it as an instatiation of an ongoing dilemma within the field of rhetoric. I argue that the Davos meeting may be productively read through the lens of rhetorical theory and that such a reading can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this event. The essay concludes by making a case for Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms as a normative ground for a rhetorical theory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured, cosmopolitan, critical humanism.

Spontaneous writing observed in chats, instant messengers, and social media has become established as productive modes of communication and discourse genres. However, they remain understudied from the perspective of writing process research. In this paper, we present an empirical study wherein keystrokes made by chat users in a game were recorded. The distributions of the inter-key intervals were analyzed and fitted with ex-Gaussian distribution equation, and an argument for psycholinguistic interpretation of the distribution parameters is presented. This analysis leads to establishing a threshold of 500 ms for the identification of pauses in spontaneous writing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that pauses longer than 1.2 s may correspond to higher-level linguistic processing beyond a single propositional expression (functional element of the discourse).

Abstract This essay defines and describes the atheistic voice. Drawing from Thomas Lessl’s “voice” metaphor (“The Priestly Voice”), the logology of Kenneth Burke, and the literary insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, I map out the rhetorical tropes of the atheistic voice by analyzing the rhetoric of Christopher Hitchens, which exemplifies the atheistic voice as a rhetorical ideal. Hitchens demonstrates that the rhetorical strategies of burlesque and grotesque rejection are the atheistic voice’s primary means of ridiculing and tearing down the god-terms of priestly and bardic discourses. After analyzing these strategies, I point to concerns—some perennial, some contemporary—that the ebb and flow of atheistic voices in a democratic public sphere present.

To explore understandings of corruption in Colombia, we analyzed public talk on Hora 20 , a very popular Colombian radio program. Using Burke’s concept of terministic screens and his method of cluster analysis, we found that Hora 20’s radio speakers express six terministic screens regarding corruption. Each cluster triggers different programs of action with diverse linguistic and practical implications, both for addressing problems of corruption in Colombia and for complicating Burke’s cluster analysis method.

This paper puts the spotlight on the work of Dutch Poet Laureate Ramsey Nasr. In the four years of his official appointment, he wrote poems and essays articulating a critical perspective on the current political conjuncture in the Netherlands. The Poet Laureate can be considered a public intellectual in that he shows engagement in regard to concrete societal issues and ‘translates’ this into poetry. Using ideas and rhetorical tools from the work of Kenneth Burke, I will show how Nasr’s poetry prompts readers to identify with his perspective while illuminating how such identification leads to division from a perspective that frames nationalism in terms that would exclude multiethnic citizenship.

Whoever raises questions about the legibility of the city must notice that the metaphor of legibility involves the ideas of interpreting signs and symbols under different motivational accesses, which leads to the creation of different scopes of reading, understanding and acting. Thus, the legibility of the city involves the idea of a rhetoric of the city. Kevin lynch is one of the most important theorists of the legibility of the city and his ground-breaking work The Image of the City is first of all on questions concerning the influence of architectural clues and city form on the degree a city becomes legible. Therefore, he emphasizes the important role of three major terms: identity, structure and meaning. But, while his inquiry stresses identity and structure, he says almost nothing about meaning. Since Lynch has no background in theories of meaning, his work leaves a desideratum. It seems to be obvious that leaving out questions of meaning won’t lead to any kind of legibility of the city, as long as the metaphor of legibility is taken seriously. To fill this gap Lynch’s work has to be grounded on a theory of meaning which is able to explain how form influences attributions of meaning, creates scopes of understanding and, finally, affects questions of appropriate behavior. This theoretical background is given by Kenneth Burke. The thesis of this paper is that Burke describes the relation of form, situation and action by the help of what I will call the motive-circle and that this motive-circle is able to explain the above mentioned advisements. Thus, the aim of this paper is to show the rhetorical dimension of the creation of an image of the city. Since—for Lynch—our processes of orientation are based on our image of the city, the main thesis of this paper is that processes of spatial orientation have a rhetorical dimension.

In the face of what information design theorist Richard Wurman has dubbed "information anxiety," it is well documented that information visualization has become a widely accepted tool to assist with the navigation of the symbolic world. Information visualisations, or infographics, are essentially external cognitive aids such as graphs, diagrams, maps and other interactive and innovative graphic applications. It is often argued by design theorists that information visualisations are rhetorical texts in that they have the ability to persuade. Thus, it is not a leap to assert that information visualization may be understood as one expression of Kenneth Burke’s notion of the ‘terministic screen.’

To explore understandings of corruption in Colombia, we analyzed public talk on Hora 20 , a very popular Colombian radio program. Using Burke’s concept of terministic screens and his method of cluster analysis, we found that Hora 20’s radio speakers express six terministic screens regarding corruption. Each cluster triggers different programs of action with diverse linguistic and practical implications, both for addressing problems of corruption in Colombia and for complicating Burke’s cluster analysis method.

This paper puts the spotlight on the work of Dutch Poet Laureate Ramsey Nasr. In the four years of his official appointment, he wrote poems and essays articulating a critical perspective on the current political conjuncture in the Netherlands. The Poet Laureate can be considered a public intellectual in that he shows engagement in regard to concrete societal issues and ‘translates’ this into poetry. Using ideas and rhetorical tools from the work of Kenneth Burke, I will show how Nasr’s poetry prompts readers to identify with his perspective while illuminating how such identification leads to division from a perspective that frames nationalism in terms that would exclude multiethnic citizenship.