Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/78/1/collegeenglish27434-1.gif

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/67/1/collegecompositionandcommunication27440-1.gif

On August 27, 2015, Multimedia Editor Alexandra Hidalgo and Guest Editor Donnie Johnson Sackey discussed special issue 5.2 on race, rhetoric, and the state on Twitter. The Q&A has been curated with Storify below in hopes of continuing conversation on states’ questionable treatment of people of color until the issue’s release in late fall. See: […]

We ended the previous volume year in deep contemplation about the final word of this journal's title: English. We asked, Why English? Why English only? Why not Research in the Teaching of English(es)? We begin this new volume year-RTE's 50th anniversary-thinking about the first word in the journal's title: research. We come to this first word having thought a great deal over the past several months about story. Perhaps it has been on our minds as we have brainstormed ways of marking this 50th volume year-a year that in any person or institution's life traditionally invites commemoration through stories. Story has crept into our conversations about manuscripts as we have pored over them, sometimes hearing the words of a former colleague, who-in his research methods courses-would often say of a research report: I believe the author, but the story's all wrong. We know for certain that story became a centerpiece of the discussions that unfolded at our weekly editorial team meetings after we read the five papers that comprise this issue. Many of the authors in this issue push on or play at the edges of the conventional research article published in the social sciences, inviting a conceptual turn from research report to story. As editors, we feel this conceptual turn, and the articles and essays that inspire this turn, foreground a set of social and ethical responsibilities that researchers in the teaching of English(es) carry into their inquiry and writing.Todd DeStigter opens this issue with argument about argument. Using ethnographic anecdotes drawn from his years of research in AP Composition courses in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side, DeStigter surfaces and questions the assumptions undergirding argument's esteemed status in the ELA curriculum. Like authors previously published in RTE (e.g., Newell, VanDerHeide, & Wynhoff Olsen, 2014), DeStigter takes up the epistemological underpinnings of argument, but rather than asking how students might be taught to write better argumentative essays, he explores why and how argumentative writing has assumed its place of privilege in U.S. curricula in the first place. In addition to questioning argumentation's utility in fostering democracy and students' socio-economic prospects, DeStigter makes visible a set of Cartesian and Kantian philosophies that pose questions not just for language and literacy educators, but also for researchers. To challenge argument's position of privilege is, among other things, to call into question the Cartesian and Kantian claims to an objective, made accessible through a combination of rigorous observation and abstract reasoning (p. 17). After perusing DeStigter's article, readers may wonder in relation to their own scholarly pursuits: What does it mean to know, and how varied or multiple might be our ways of knowing? Is there really such a thing as extra-human reality? Might the reality we report in the written accounts of our research be constructed by a human narrator, who, in showing her humanity, makes her reliability-or unreliability, for that matter-more visible? As researchers, we might even walk away from DeStigter's article asking ourselves whether knowing, convincing, and/or proving is, or ought to be, the function of research in the first place. Might research, like stories, serve to imagine, to evoke, to inspire? In the spirit of DeStigter's quest to legitimize other, nondominant modes of contemplation and expression as well as actions that grow from them (p. 30), this question seems well worth our consideration as teachers, as researchers, as persons.Like DeStigter, Rebecca Woodard contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about writing instruction, while also raising questions for the researcherwriters who comprise the readership of RTE. Her investigation into the links between two teachers' writing instruction and their out-of-school writing practices honors the rich histories and experiences of teachers beyond the confines of the professional. …

Our initial research questions are concerned with the ways in which youth slam performance in this space contains the potential for not only response to, but urgent and active movements against, regressive contexts, such as the legislative moves in Arizona that have limited young people’s comprehensive access to narratives of sexuality, health, and rights.

Guest editorial

Advances in the History of RhetoricAnnual Publication of the American Society for the History of RhetoricEditorEkaterina HaskinsCommunication and Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteEditorial BoardDon Abbott, English, University of California, DavisJanet Atwill, English, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleBeth S. Bennett, Communication Studies, University of AlabamaRobert W. Cape, Jr., Classical and Modern Languages, Austin CollegeAmitava Chakraborty, Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, University of DelhiClive E. Chandler, Classics, University of Cape TownChristopher P. Craig, Classics, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleJeanne D. Fahnestock, English, University of MarylandLinda Ferreira-Buckley, English, University of Texas, AustinDavid Frank, Clark Honors College, University of OregonCheryl Glenn, English, Pennsylvania State UniversityRichard Graff, Writing Studies, University of MinnesotaS. Michael Halloran, Communication and Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteDavid Hoffman, Public Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New YorkBernard E. Jacob, Law, Hofstra UniversityNan Johnson, English, Ohio State UniversitySahar Mohamed Khamis, Communication, University of MarylandJanice Lauer, English, Purdue UniversityAndrea Lunsford, English, Stanford UniversityNoemi Marin, Communications, Florida Atlantic UniversityGlen McClish, Rhetoric and Writing Studies, San Diego State UniversityMarina McCoy, Philosophy, Boston CollegeRaymie E. McKerrow, Interpersonal Communication, Ohio UniversityThomas Miller, English, University of ArizonaJean Dietz Moss, English, Catholic University of AmericaJames J. Murphy, English, University of California, DavisSean Patrick O’Rourke, Communication Studies, Furman UniversityAngela G. Ray, Communication, Northwestern UniversityAndreea Deciu Ritivoi, English, Carnegie Mellon UniversityPatricia Roberts-Miller, Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at AustinJohn Scenters-Zapico, English, University of Texas, El PasoJohn D. Schaeffer, English, Northern Illinois UniversityRobert Sullivan, Speech Communication, Ithaca CollegeJane Sutton, Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, YorkDave Tell, Communication Studies, University of KansasArthur E. Walzer, Communication Studies, University of Minnesota—Twin CitiesBarbara Warnick, Communication, University of WashingtonKathleen Welch, English, University of OklahomaMarjorie Curry Woods, English, University of Texas

I shall begin by speaking of our ancestors … [who] by their courage and their virtues, have handed … on to us a free country.—“Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” Thucydides, History of thePeloponnesian War, 2.36Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only insofar as he is free.—Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of MotivesCome, taste freedom with us.—Pussy Riot, “Death to the Jails, Freedom to the Protests”Freedom is a big, broad word—a capacious concept. It seems open and welcoming, frank and approachable. Such a natural pairing: rhetoric and freedom. There is an invitational gesture of sorts in each of the three passages that begin this piece: the speakers/writers offer to give over a polis, a choice, a collective experience to savor.For Pericles the gift of freedom is consolation and justification for the losses of war; for Burke (1950), freedom is the precondition of choice and will, essential to his sense of the human; Pussy Riot, on a more celebratory note, extends an invitation to freedom’s banquet but tacitly acknowledges that that invitation needs to be accepted. The sixty and more rhetoricians who gathered to mull over this pairing of rhetoric and freedom in San Antonio in May 2014 at the biennial symposium of the American Society of the History of Rhetoric brought with them that open spirit—a utopian urge to pursue freedom as a ground, a practice, and a potential outcome of rhetorical action. They also brought their deep rhetorical knowledge of the complexities of this subject: their awareness that this long-standing relationship between rhetoric and freedom is paradoxical, fraught with deception, and at times a spur to violence.The distortions of the term in political/popular discourse since 9/11 suggest that the time is right for a scholarly return to “freedom.” Casting himself as “author” of and “worker” for freedom, George W. Bush (2003) has now branded his own presidency and its legacy as a “Freedom Agenda.” Can freedom be authored, or forced, by one state onto another? Does “working for” freedom through military invasion not constitute the most basic violation of freedom? Although it is unlikely that such questions will be posed within the Bush Institute, a think tank “separately managed” by the Bush Foundation over the objections of trustees at Southern Methodist University adjacent to which it is housed (Traub 2009), we rhetoricians have the space, time, and conditions for contemplating and working through questions that the creation and naming of the Bush Institute raises. What is the relationship between freedom and the state, especially states that purport to be democratic? What are the personal conditions that enable rhetorical acts? Who are rhetorical persons and to what extent can we grasp their “freedom,” or lack thereof? And what will we rhetorical beings, or at least some of us, risk to win the pleasures and rewards of collective freedom?The articles brought together here, expanded versions of talks delivered at the symposium, explore these questions through an impressively diverse range of rhetorical approaches. To get a grasp on rhetoric and freedom, as these scholars demonstrate so compellingly, requires making fine distinctions, paying close, critical attention to stance and voice in historical texts and material culture, especially with regard to the state (Pernot; Lamp); it requires attending to questions about rhetorical personhood in relationship to governance as presented in Early Modern and Enlightenment political philosophy (O’Gorman; Stroud; Allen); and it demands that we direct our analysis beyond the page to the significance of space and body in the performance of protest under conditions of unfreedom (Trasciatti; Haskins). In what follows I introduce the articles offered here by reflecting on the topoi of freedom and rhetoric emerging from them—as a report on what I have learned from them and in hopes of framing and enhancing your reading experience.Freedom enters into rhetorical history and theory early on through a founding statement and performance of Athenian democracy: the funeral oration Thucydides (1954) attributes to Pericles, Athenian general and statesman, delivered early in the course of the war against Sparta, 431 BCE. Honoring the first to fall in the traditional state funeral, Pericles offers an encomium of the polis that celebrates several different kinds of freedom. As soon as he designates Athens as a free country (in the epigraph above), Pericles notes with praise that the fathers added to the city an empire; thus, the freedom of the first democracy was from the beginning contaminated by conquest and slavery. It is appropriate then that our issue begins with studies of the constraints on free speech and expression under empire. Laurent Pernot unveils the intricate processes through which Greek rhetors under the Roman empire were able to weave critical perspectives into their orations: a practice of using “figured discourse.” Kathleen S. Lamp approaches the question of freedom and captivity from the Roman side, reading state art in the Roman empire—representations of captives and conquest in sculpture, painting, and architecture—not merely to comment on the images but to ask: What happens when Roman citizens view this art? As citizenship becomes more and more available to subjects across many categories of difference, does the experience of viewing produce anything like freedom? Or does it rather foster imperial relations?The word for “free” in the passage from Pericles previously quoted is the superlative form of autarkês, meaning self-supporting or independent, as a sovereign. The same roots serve to designate imperial sovereignty (autokratoria) and the emperor (autokratês). It therefore is not surprising and is symptomatic of the state of rhetoric studies at present that the Athenian democracy praised by Pericles is, for the some of the authors in this special issue (e.g., O’Gorman; Allen; Trasciatti), a point of reference, sometimes an inspiration for the historical figures they study, but not a sanctified origin. And it is also fitting that this special issue closes as it opens, with essays that focus on the ways repressive states—the United States during World War I (Trasciatti) and Russia in the contemporary era (Haskins)—limit and punish free expression especially through the control of space and bodies. In each case, the analysis draws out the power of collective action and the rhetorical impact of bodies “prepared for freedom” (Trasciatti).As the ancient funeral oration proceeds, Pericles declares that “in my opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person” (Thucydides 1954, 2.41). Here it seems (eidê) that each man appears to be self-sufficient with reference to his body (to sôma). The general, like so many leaders since, must obscure the cruel paradox of destroying persons in the service of the freedom of the state. The “seeming” to be free and the reference to the body intrude as an unconscious into Pericles’s glorification of the solider who is “owner of his own person.”Burke’s (1950) sense of the person (in the second epigraph) is like and unlike that presented in the ancient Greek oration. Couching his project within the extreme limits of war, killing, and enslavement to dictatorship, Burke acknowledges the ultimate boundaries of freedom as life or survival—“good to remember, in these days of dictatorship” (50). The self imagined here might be that self-sufficient or sovereign: the solitary and defended self who can arm himself or herself against persuasion as aggression. And yet as Burke begins the section on “traditional principles of rhetoric,” he introduces the notion of persuasion “to attitude,” “attitude being an incipient act, a leaning or inclination” (50), qualities of a different sort of rhetorical actor. Several articles offered here in a similar fashion explore and expand the concept of rhetorical freedom as a practice, an activity, and a capacity of the person. Ned O’Gorman, for example, reads Milton against Hobbes to find in the former the concept of rhetorical freedom as a quality rather than a state. Scott R. Stroud discovers in Kant a rhetoric wherein autonomy is enacted across multiple agents toward an educative end. And Ira J. Allen presents rhetorical personhood as the characteristic of citizens who are capable of crafting collectively new forms of democratic governance.In all the articles we gain a sense of freedom as an incomplete process, a struggle requiring risk and effort but one with rewards worth savoring (as in the third epigraph). Freedom is an enticement: something sweet to taste and something to be shared. In praising Athens, Pericles remarks not only on the polis and its warriors but on daily life: “just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other” (2.37). Here the word for “freedom” is eleutherôs, coming from a verb that means to loose or let go. This freedom is available to all and reminds us of the creativity and open expression that draws rhetorical thinkers of all eras to the ancient polis despite its limits. We might find a modern parallel in Burke’s (1950) ideas about the sublime: “by the paradox of substance, one can imaginatively identify oneself with the mountain’s massive assertiveness while at the same time thinking of one’s own comparative futility. The identification thus gives a sense of freedom, since it transcends our limitations (though the effect is made possible only by our awareness of these limitations)” (325). The courageous activists presented in Mary Anne Trasciatti’s work on antiwar protestors who defied the Espionage Act during World War I and in Ekaterina V. Haskins’s study of Pussy Riot’s daring performances aimed at Putin’s authoritarian regime and the Church patriarchy supporting it give us a sense of the dangerous lengths to which rhetors will go, in the face of limitations and futility, to seek a common freedom.Through this fine work, we readers are offered more than a taste but rather strong draughts of rhetorical scholarship on freedom. I invite you to imbibe, to slake a thirst, but at the same time to whet your appetite for evermore rhetoric and freedom.

I explore the role of categories as rhetorical barriers in organizations responding to crisis (Veil, 2011 Veil, S. R. (2011). Mindful learning in crisis management. Journal of Business Communication, 48(2), 116–147. doi:10.1177/0021943610382294[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). I analyze some problematic categories of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the categories’ impact on the organizations’ response to Hurricane Katrina. My analysis shows that unintended and perverse consequences (Giddens, 1984 Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. [Google Scholar], 1987 Giddens, A. (1987). Social theory and modern sociology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar]) reversed the power of a key legitimated category (Orlikowski, 1995 Orlikowski, W. J. (1995). Categories: Concept, content, and context. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 3, 73–78.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Giddens, 1984 Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]) and exposed a set of reified categories (Giddens, 1984 Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]).

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

A Comment on “Reimagining the Social Turn”Donald Lazere, Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander A Comment on “One Train Can Hide Another”Paul Lynch and Nathaniel A. Rivers, Tony Scott and Nancy Welch

Preview this article: From the Editors, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/6/collegeenglish27371-1.gif

Research problem: The study attempts to study how an empowered Chinese public coped with and interpreted the environmental crisis of the ConocoPhillips oil spill and how ConocoPhillips reacted to the growing influence of social media. Research questions: In what ways did the Chinese public exercise its new power through social media in addressing the ConocoPhillips Oil Spill Incident? How did a multinational company like ConocoPhillips act during the crisis and react to the voices of the public through new media? Literature review: Social media has caused a power shift in China by allowing the ordinary Chinese public who used to be the silent majority to expose scandals and express their opinions about crises with greater freedom. At the same time, pressure is growing on corporations to exercise social responsibility, through responding to economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectations that society has. Stakeholder theory indicates that only by meeting the needs and expectations of the individuals and groups who can affect or are affected by the firm's objectives can a firm survive and succeed. In developing countries, corporate social responsibility is characterized by a lack of systematic and institutionalized approach, with stakeholders, such as the public and community, being neglected for a long time. Methodology: Researchers conducted a thematic analysis of 932 microblog and blog entries about the ConocoPhillips Oil Spill Incident in China that were published on leading Chinese social media websites between June 2011 to February 2013. Results and discussion: The study found that the oil spill sparked an uproar of anger and criticism in the Chinese online community. Most posts on microblogs and blogs engaged in finding the causes and laying the blame for the oil spill. The overwhelming majority of the Chinese public attributed the crisis to the faulty laws and inaction on the part of the Chinese government regulators, to ConocoPhillips, and the Chinese joint venture partner China National Offshore Oil Corporation's failure to undertake due responsibilities. In response to mounting online criticisms, ConocoPhillips exhibited little interest in engaging with the Chinese public and showed poor communication in terms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The study's theoretical contribution lies in combining CSR and Stakeholder theory with Discourse Power theory. Practical implications to multinational corporations seeking long-term business development in the developing country contexts, such as China, are that managers need to engage in responsive listening, actively participate in online conversations, and constantly scan the social media environment to manage its relations with the general public. Particularly, firms experiencing crises can gain the public's emotional support by communicating emotion-laden messages through social media.

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/66/4/collegecompositionandcommunication27361-1.gif

Responses from Mary P. Sheridan, Scott Wible, Asao B. Inoue, Madelyn Flammia, Natasha N. Jones, Yvonne CLeary, and Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Anne Wysocki.

This special issue of KB Journal is the second of two issues that offer a compilation of papers presented at the conference Rhetoric as Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke, Culture and Education, which was held in May 2013 at Ghent University, Belgium. In part II of the special issue we will continue with a more theoretical examination of Burke's international legacy, by giving a stage to scholars who confront Burke's ideas with the work of European thinkers such as François Lyotard, Chaim Perelman and Augustine but also non-western thinkers such as the Ehtiopean scholar Maimire Mennsasemay. Other contributions in this issue confront the work of Burke with more contemporary theoretical perspectives.

This essay presents an initial response to the challenge that scholars begin to flesh-out the possibilities for a Dramatistic ethics. In turn we consider the status of ethics after the poststructural and linguistic turns and explore the potential in Burke's work as a response to the impasse that these turns have created for ethics. Next, we argue that a Dramatistic ethics begin as a mode of inquiry and advance pentadic analysis as a holistic framework for continuing ethical scholarship. Last, we provide a synoptic pentadic analysis of five ethical theories as suggestive points of critical entry.

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

We often confuse commercial representation with political intervention. For instance, a recent Cheerios advertisement featuring a biracial family provided many people the evidence of a welcomed cultural shift, recognition of a growing acceptance of what might have been taboo and even illegal in the United States a handful of decades ago. We stumble upon another example as we realize that washing down a Chick-fil-A fried chicken sandwich with a 7–11 BigGulp has somehow become not one but two political acts of cultural defiance. While companies aligning themselves explicitly or implicitly for or against cultural politics might seem odd, the frequency of such events demonstrates a noticeable—and increasing—overlap between economic production and political intervention. At the risk of sounding clichéd, these cases remind us that we are what we eat. That said, what “we are” and “what we eat” are both at stake in contemporary culture because technological and media innovation have made that culture more malleable. Jeff Pruchnic's Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age: The Transhuman Condition does not delve directly into these particular events, but the problems the book engages help us better understand and respond to modes of cultural production that we must come to see as increasingly heterogeneous. What is the role of rhetoric in an economy of “just-in-time” accommodation?Tacking widely across cultural, economic, and biological registers, Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age seeks to theorize rhetorical possibility after cybernetics, a field in which every thing seems open to redesign and reinvention. Toward these ends, the book traffics in micro-studies: embryotic stem cell manipulation, a Burkebot, video game effects, stock market algorithms, political redistricting, a collection of shoes, among many more. What links these various items is the extent to which biological, cultural, social phenomena once considered autonomous are now susceptible to direct intervention through and as technological innovation. Pruchnic's central claim in response to this development is simple, albeit counterintuitive: contemporary technologies and media are evidence of an increased humanization of social and technological processes and are not inhuman forces of calculation and computation. This is to say that the proliferation of and increased reliance on information media and technological processes allow contemporary cultural practices to more effectively mimic the complexity and vitality of biological processes. While such a claim might be simply stated, its implications for understanding ethical engagement with technics may be quite profound for humanities study in general and for rhetorical scholarship in particular. Put differently, the implications concern the extent to which epistemological categories have always been shaped by supposedly inhuman forces of techne, which then refigure a host of available responses to changing technological conditions. The position allows us to explore and respond to cultural institutions that have markedly become less concerned with establishing mass markets than with identifying and intensifying market subsets that are fueled, in part, by more efficient methods of demographic research and more effective deployment of marketing techniques.Pruchnic's response to this moment is two-pronged. First—in a task occupying the book's first two chapters—he broadly traces how epistemological and technical domains are becoming conflated in contemporary culture. Second—in a series of case studies through the book's final three chapters—he articulates a version of rhetorical ethics robust enough to respond to such a conflation by engaging in specific analyses of contemporary culture. Taken as a whole, the book offers a theory of rhetorical practice and cultural analysis that moves away from logics of exclusion (classification, division, and separation) and instead emphasizes inclusionary logics that seek to establish and maintain ongoing processes of interaction.In the initial chapters, Pruchnic offers analyses of the conditions of contemporary culture, especially with regard to the ways in which cultural life is steeped in technological advancement. Key to this work is a genealogy that Pruchnic constructs and that he uses to trace how, through technics and media, “forms of knowledge/representation are not based on quantification or calculation but on dynamics processes for maintaining relationships” (13). Pruchnic arrives at this claim by arguing that we are witnessing an increasing overlap between the two previously distinct domains of logos and techne, the former largely encompassing reason and communication—traditional human activities—and the latter the material technologies and what has long thought to be nonhuman mechanics. These chapters propose that the traditional separation between these two domains allowed entire systems of ethical and political practice to be founded and sustained. We need not look too far to witness that these divisions play out explicitly in the university, where liberal arts, social sciences, and hard science are well instituted as distinct lines of inquiry. That these two domains now find themselves to be overlapping and have become less distinct is the cause of a great many of our contemporary “problems,” which include the fracturing of democratic processes and anthropocentric effects such as global climate change and armed unrest. Far from claiming that today is unlike any other, Pruchnic instead maintains that the logic undergirding much of these activities is different in kind only because of the speed and complexity with which these operations are undertaken. In response, he proposes that contemporary culture should be understood and characterized as a “technologic,” that is, as “forms of interaction and engagement that not only find their most explicit manifestation in contemporary technologies but signal the imbrication, or recombination, of techne (formalistic and goal-directed strategies) with logos (both in its sense of human ‘higher reason’ and of the general structuring of human life) that Plato attempted to so carefully separate and the division of which became a touchstone for Western thought” (9).As it combines two terms, the “technologic” helps refigure the many debates and problems we find ourselves a part of. Pruchnic finds a basis for this refiguring through a careful reading of Martin Heidegger's work concerning technology, especially as it pertains to the ontological. Toward this reading, Pruchnic goes on to argue that Heidegger's critique of technology's increasing centrality in human affairs has less force now because it regards contemporary technology as only calculation, reductionism, or standardization. Pruchnic instead revisits Heidegger's ontological approach to historical analysis and proposes that we might consider the developments that Heidegger casts as epochs of self-understanding as a “history of techniques” (71). The turn toward techniques is buoyed, as Pruchnic contends, contra many of the criticisms of Heidegger's conflation of material technologies and conceptual frameworks, by the fact that such a conflation may actually be a strength in reorganizing our capacities for responding to technological innovation. Recasting Heidegger's historical analysis as one that traces techniques eliminates issues of authenticity and emphasizes instead “elements of rhetorical thought and praxis that were largely crowded out by Platonic thought” (64). Rhetoric, considered thusly, then is better understood to be “a vector of forces or practices … premised somewhere between the application of physical force and the immaterial realm of pure reason or judgment” (17). This analysis expands Pruchnic's initial proposal, suggesting that many of our humanistic programs and modes of cultural critique—for which Heidegger serves as the most productive example—that privileged the rational, political actor may now be compelled to contend with affective or “subrational” forces as a necessary part of cultural work.Taking affective force seriously has several consequences. In particular, affective approaches focus on processes over individuals as well as asignification alongside signification. The first among these had follows from and led to a revaluation of the importance of ecological relations. Pruchnic locates our interest in ecology, as it regards our understanding of technologic, in the Macy conferences, a series of interdisciplinary discussions regarding the future of science that took place from 1941 to 1960. While the organizers hoped that they would unify disparate branches of science and theory, the conferences are remembered mostly for their work on cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Pruchnic finds in the Macy conferences two primary imports for rhetorical theory. First is the shift toward considering the ecological interaction between actor and environment. This shift gave rise to accounts of homeostatic processes that treated human and technological interactions as a circulation of agency and not the result of a central human actor controlling a nonhuman environment. Second, the conference revised notions of teleological aims often at the core of instrumental orientations to technology, a switch that especially impacts how telos may be related to technologies whose own “purpose” shares functions with many of our own in that they have changed over time. Together, these two findings have much significance for rhetorical theory and practice, as they undercut the reductive communication models that rhetoric is often charged as facilitating.In addition to outlining the conceptual work done by the conferences, much of which the humanities are only now coming around to appreciate, Pruchnic shows how early cybernetic thinkers drew heavily on rhetorical technique to conceptualize cybernetic theory. Both cybernetics and rhetorical practice invent, develop, and encourage robust and flexible techniques for organizing processes of interaction. Pruchnic focuses on how “techniques” may enable theory to be applied through rhetorical and humanities practice, defining the term as a set of “flexibly responsive practices that are directed toward motivating the performance of a generic action and/or the maintenance of a general equilibrium” (16). “Techniques” as a term and concept allows for the development of a technologic that recognizes, Pruchnic notes, that “the very same advances in, and increasing importance of, technologies and communicational media so apparent in other areas under review in this essay are crucial considerations for any attempt to rethink the contemporary status of economics, let alone labor, in the present moment” (31). Pruchnic's approach both widens the scope of his project, allowing him to include a wide array of interdisciplinary discussions, and it also does the important work of refiguring some of the practices we experience as central to rhetorical work.Pruchnic's understanding of techniques and his alignment with the complexity that subtends cybernetics leads him to outline an ethical response that affirms its imbrication within those same modes of technological production that it seeks to change rather than to adopt a critical practice that seeks its intervention from a position outside. Why this is a crucial pairing is evident in how Pruchnic understands rhetoric's role in contemporary culture: “The fundamental challenge of the present is not so much to discover some radical alternative to contemporary conditions … but to figure out how these same techniques already immensely immanent in contemporary capitalism can be made to produce different outcomes” (38). Such a task is even more pressing when we consider that scientific authority to produce and maintain what counts as fact vies with the demand to prioritize “direct application and intervention as the core goals of scientific research and knowledge production” (25). While Pruchnic often cites the work that science does, by no means is the cybernetic moment restricted to lab coats and electrical circuitry. What is true in science is also true in other realms. For example, the granular redistricting of voting districts preselects the voters charged with voting for certain politicians, and manufacturing is able to produce more specific goods for more specific subsets of markets. Basic business notions of supply and demand have become as complex and intertwined as communication's outdated sender-receiver model.These realizations lead Pruchnic to enter an ongoing conversation regarding the role of humanism in rhetoric and cultural analysis. Pruchnic carefully traces the development of posthumanism (an analysis that I cannot do justice to here), noting a tension in most posthuman thought insofar as it “ends up reinforcing [humanism's] superiority or autonomy, the position of the human as the one who ‘decides’” (50). This tension leads him to posit that “we might have to reconsider humanism as something of a rhetorical strategy rather than a philosophical doctrine” (54) and to propose the “transhuman condition” as a key organizing principle to explain contemporary culture. Working from Julian Huxley's short essay “Transhumanism,” Pruchnic posits that the increase in and proliferation of technological intervention helps displace categories of natural and artificial in favor of the idea of flexible but robust processes. “Transhuman” as a term allows Pruchnic to articulate four connected processes of interaction that characterize our contemporary technologic: transition, which details the ways that the continuing process of defining what is and can be human has accelerated in recent decades; transference, which denotes the ways that functional operations can be shared and joined between previously separated domains (human, nonhuman animals, and technologies); transactional, which refers to common processes and procedures for establishing equilibrium rather than a discrete object to be passed along; and transversal, which describes the unusual connections between separated domains of activity such as nature and culture, logos and techne. These terms are threaded throughout the book as a way to organize the intense intermingling of previously separate domains. Although these operations are distinct enough to warrant separate terms, they become confused, as each relies on the others to articulate its own operation. This, however, may be a strength as well, since the confusion performs something of the complexity that the book seeks to trace.Pruchnic's move to the transhuman as a controlling concept in place of others more commonly used today (e.g., posthumanism, antihumanism) opens an avenue of inquiry in which human activity is marked less by periodization than by processes. This avenue then positions cybernetics not as a distinct break but as an intensification of a technologic that extends far beyond our contemporary moment. Pruchnic closes the general framing of the transhuman condition with the aforementioned “history of techniques.” Our “parametric present” is a condition heralded by the standardization of time through clocks and the development of now fundamental physics, a perspective that challenges that idea that we have only recently broken away from more humanism. What characterizes the “parametric present” has been hinted at throughout this review. The conflation of techne and logos provides a greater capacity for miming biological processes in connection with markets, science, media, and democratic governance by its admission of previously nonhuman technology into our approach to epistemological structures. Such a conflation resists a reduction of technologics to mere quantification or calculation and instead gestures toward contemporary culture as concerned with algorithmically managing associations with granular detail.So, where does rhetoric fit in again?While the initial chapters sketch the broad terms of the conditions of contemporary culture in the cybernetic age, the three final chapters isolate important threads for rhetorical ethics. To start, chapter 3, “Rhetoric and the Age of Intelligent Machines,” offers a specific site in which rhetoric and cybernetic theory converse, revisiting Kenneth Burke's response to cybernetics and information technology to show how rhetoric might be revised with respects to technological innovation and social power. While Burke's anxieties about technology are well documented, Pruchnic finds that offers ways of responding to our technological moment. This response a of technology and instead demonstrates the for an technologic in the book's early a process of and Pruchnic on Burke's early to show that Burke's with cybernetics for responses that are not simply critical of technology as something and to human but that as of for social In particular, Pruchnic in on Burke's of the concept of and how that through as a that to the cybernetics moment. subtends a it allows Pruchnic to out of the idea that the of the but from the of their Pruchnic this concept provides with a to a that the that Pruchnic also seeks to work of arguing against phenomena such as and us to in these processes themselves rather than their What this means for rhetoric is that instead of to inhuman forces of technological we can instead ways to that force through the of the Pruchnic how such as and that have circulation in rhetoric over the now into the present that by logics of rather than For this Pruchnic engages the concept of as it through the of and chapter with a recognition of the rhetorical of and this chapter up by that affective is no a means of because it has become a force by those many of Pruchnic's affective is as to and as it is to political is the for when uses already and by Pruchnic focuses on how a tension in of concept of might be by rhetorical In understands as a whose are as productive as the it Pruchnic to to out for within Pruchnic his for a case study on marketing techniques to show how might a flexible of to that can and forces offers a of that would seek to through those forces in of a or into play not only because as Pruchnic time as a for a marketing but also because is central to the of contemporary Pruchnic shows how offers a series of in which to does not look an to a but instead an of that to out other ways it might be The chapter by a handful of for rhetorical practice in a critique as a to a and an engagement with the final chapter on the four by ethics in an of global media, and While the chapter with a of the possibility of to or from of and it first through a crucial for ethical engagement in a time of technical This through an engagement with market logics and in particular While and biological intervention is one of a toward so too is the more common material in contemporary cultural from a for material and a in the analysis through the of ethics and economics, a with the early This analysis how since leads to ontological of and heavily on the extent to which and an ethical Pruchnic by ethics over and against the common and material of the contemporary social would be our most or most efficient to ethics Pruchnic these by out a series of to the to transhuman instead of human careful analyses of of and even a of the his own shoes, Pruchnic provides an kind of with shows how with ethics such as and with the logic of What this final is the extent to which the transhuman condition functions as a kind of shared that even the most of as a productive should not a on the of the While the book a of different registers, it as it is out of its reason this might be the case is that the of any is a kind of work done through the This is not a against the book in terms of critical but is a on the of the book's That is, the book's and seem in many to mimic the of complexity that the are themselves with and that we might with cybernetics and complexity theory. are often broken into a for the that emphasizes a claim in one moment even as that very claim in the While the is not to a it provides the a of ethical of contemporary Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age offers a to a of areas in rhetorical the primary be to of rhetorical theory and practice in and through This much from Pruchnic's instead of on this or that particular technology and then rhetorical analyses that and the provides much historical work in the and logics that the kind of media effects we witness that the should also interest rhetorical who might not with of contemporary media technology, as it provides and historical of the development of logics that any of in which rhetorical study especially economics, cultural studies most of ethical

Other| May 01 2015 Addresses of Contributors to This Issue Rhetorica (2015) 33 (2): 220–221. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2015.33.2.220 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Addresses of Contributors to This Issue. Rhetorica 1 May 2015; 33 (2): 220–221. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2015.33.2.220 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2015 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This paper is a response to an invitation from the editors of the special issue to comment on the ingredients of effective writing to learn interventions as reflected in the contributions to the special issue. The six papers in the issue vary widely in approach and underlying theoretical frameworks but share the broad common theme of writing to learn. Within this, they vary along three main dimensions: (i) how learning is defined and assessed, and in particular whether they assess effects of the writing intervention on content knowledge; (ii) related to this, whether they are primarily focussed on discipline specific skills or on more general effects of writing; and (iii) whether they are designed to carry out a controlled evaluation of the writing intervention or rather are concerned with describing the design and purpose of a specific intervention. In what follows, I will first consider the general characteristics of the papers in relation to these three dimensions. I will then reflect on the findings of the individual papers, and then conclude by relating the papers to my personal understanding of writing to learn in terms of a dual-process model of writing.

Living with global terrorism, global epidemics, and new medical technologies has made risk a dominant theme in the 21st century in terms of both individual action and public policy.This condition has led us to become more occupied with debating, preventing, and managing risks.Risk Society, 1996 Any time we read or watch the news, the global, scientifically saturated nature of the world becomes apparent.Current events pertaining to medical risks in particular have become increasingly significant.Take, for example, the recent Ebola situation in which we have witnessed how infectious disease threat and communication of risk ignite and stoke public frenzy about how to act and whom to blame.Think of the news coverage on whether the "infected Dallas nurse and other innocent bystanders vulnerable to contracting Ebola.Also consider the treatment politically issuedwent for a bike ride.Perceptions of harm get encased in public talk where case scenario" storylines not only dominate and d but also lead to action.In this regard, and in response to her quarantine orders specifically, the

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/5/collegeenglish27173-1.gif

This special issue marks years of research and inquiry on the rhetoric of freedom and dissent in the pre- and post-1989 global context. Many of the ideas in this issue have been discussed and developed during conferences and seminars on Communism and post-Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, on rhetoric and freedom in South Africa and Tibet, as well as on discursive perspectives on history and the politics of domination in the final decades of the twentieth century.The editors of this special issue want to express their deep gratitude to Robert N. Gaines, the general editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric (2003[#x02013]2011), whose unconditional support and relevant comments made possible a series of publications on this topic, building up to this publication, which marks twenty-five years of political and rhetorical change throughout the world.Special thanks to Susan Jarratt, the current president of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, who in supporting this project has invited new perspectives on rhetorical research that highlight the complex relationship between history and rhetoric in transitional and transnational political contexts.Grateful acknowledgment is due to Taylor & Francis as well as to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric for its generous publication grant.The editors would also like to thank their respective families (Merrie and John) for editorial support, intellectual stimulation, and moral encouragement.

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.

AbstractPeople use software in service of complex tasks that are distributed over sprawling and idiosyncratically constructed technological and social networks. The aims and means of carrying out those tasks are not only complex but uncertain, which creates problems for providing help if the tasks, starting points, and endpoints cannot be assumed. Uncertain problems are characteristic of networks, and software forums stand out as effective public spaces in which help can be pursued in a network fashion that differs from traditional help documentation. This article describes the results of a quantitative descriptive study of such practices in four software forums.Keywords: documentationforumsinstruction setsnetworks NotesThis study received an exemption approval from North Carolina State University IRB on November 24, 2010. IRB approval #1774. A condition of approval is that all quoted material is kept anonymous to the extent possible.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJason SwartsJason Swarts is a professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching centers on mobile communication, coordinative work practices, and emerging genres of technical communication.