Aristotle's Politics: Living Well and Living Together, Eugene Garver's third book on key texts of the Aristotelian corpus, charts the relationship between politics and philosophy through careful detailing of Aristotle's text. In other words, Garver reads the Politics for us. This is an achievement in itself given the gravity of both Garver's and Aristotle's thinking. Garver's reading elaborates the arguments of the Politics in order to establish a claim for what he calls “political philosophy.” His reading offers a methodological defense for a form of thinking that is itself not necessarily either “practical” or “political,” at least as scholars of rhetoric would tend to understand these terms. But Garver gives us a clue to his understanding of political philosophy when he describes Aristotle's “most impressive achievement” in the following way: The Politics “shows how to construct a constitution and a way of life ethically superior to the citizens who comprise the state” (3). Garver thus reads the paradoxes of politics and philosophy as generative rather than aporetic, seeking in the Politics something more than the mere realization of the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle argues that the regime (politeia) is the container in which the bare life of the individual is transformed into the life of a citizen.Garver situates political philosophy through a logic of praxis that implicates statesman and citizen in starkly different registers. Politics is not just about the one but also the many. While this statement may be a truism of the Rhetoric, Garver takes up the Politics in order to articulate the question of the many in a way distinct from a certain rhetorical conception of politics and political practice. Garver brings to bear a political philosophical vocabulary that is guided by the statesman (politikos) rather than the citizen (politeis) or judge (kriteis). The statesman will utilize rhetoric as a practice, as Garver notes, but it is far from clear that the statesman is meant to approach political philosophy from a rhetorical perspective. Garver marshals a series of distinctions highlighting Aristotle's unique conceptualization of the polis, a structure straddling the disjunct between artificial and natural forms of being. This conceptualization figures the polis as both artificial and natural but will come to be understood by Aristotle, according to Garver, through the terms of political philosophy. Chapter 1 deals with the “natural” relationship between master and slave memorably defined in the first book of the Politics. Taking up this “most notorious feature” of the Politics, Garver argues that the concept of natural slavery is not so much a prescription but a description: it is a way to delineate the features of politics and to distinguish them from other forms of relation, such as the family (oikos). In contrast to those modern commentators who focus on Aristotle's references to “natural” slaves, Garver argues that Aristotle's primary concern is actually with the master (despotes), who is unique in that his capacity (dynamis) extends into two tasks rather than being confined to one: first, the administration of inferiors (slave ownership) and second, participation with equals (politics): “The same person is both master and citizen,” Garver notes, and “the principal problems of politics… come from that fact” (26). For Aristotle, Greeks are both uniquely suited for political life and uniquely susceptible to the desire for domination and tyranny (27–28; 33). The drive toward mastery characteristic of the despotes also characterizes the Greek citizen more generally.If the Greeks, whom Aristotle celebrates as the only ethnos capable of meaningful citizenship, are also the only ‘natural despots,’ then politics calls for a structural response to this excess (pleonexia): “Slaves have the wrong nature…. Despots have the right nature, and yet still degenerate without… proper political circumstances” (33). This claim's double-sidedness positions politics not just as a possibility but also as a deep and persistent problem that political philosophy is enlisted to solve. Both sophistical rhetoric (Rhetoric 1354a10–30) as well as the individual and social forms of the polis, then, have a capacity for misrecognizing the sources of political legitimacy. Political philosophy, rather than rhetoric as an “art of character,” as Garver's previous book on the Rhetoric describes it, becomes the response to this problem of politics.Aristotle's Politics relies on the interplay between the search for proper political circumstances and a certain conception of the human. Thus the Politics appeals to a variety of characteristics of the human being, including philia (friendship) and thumos (spiritedness). But these human characteristics become a call for a mode of cognizing and organizing the forms of life that exist within the polis (34–37). The polis, it seems, does not constitute but rather only expresses the relationship of spirit, knowledge, desire, and virtue. Aristotle describes, taxonomizes, and interweaves these concepts. For example, as Garver notes, “You need both thumos and intelligence to be guided to virtue. The conclusion, but nothing leading up to it, talks about virtue. They are connected through citizenship. Without thumos and intelligence, one cannot be political. Without being a political animal, one cannot be guided to virtue. And conversely, only people who can be guided to virtue are fully political animals” (36).These distinctions are crucial to Garver's emphasis on the relation between Aristotelian politics and the logic of political philosophy, which calls for a politics structurally irreducible to economic contract, instrumental rationality, or individual liberty (37–41). Making political societies coincide with the nature of its individuals is not Aristotle's task, as it was for Plato. Such a task is incoherent for Aristotle's polis—a community made up of different elements linked only by constitution and citizenship. Garver notes Aristotle's recognition of the community's inherent diversity, both in its definition (i.e., that a polis is made up of different parts rather than single essences) and its composition (the a polis contains good and bad, strong and weak, few and many).Garver takes up the Politics' discussions of property and education to distinguish Aristotelian politics from its Platonic and modern variants. The moderns and Plato take opposing sides on property: for moderns, private property is the sine qua non of the well-ordered community; for Plato, it signals its absolute disunity. Aristotle takes up the space between the two, arguing that each side commits a political category error. Aristotle, Garver reminds us, “sees no right to private property”; its virtue lies in its use, not its possession (50). Against Plato, Aristotle sees public use of private property as a method for bringing people of different kinds together under the name of the political community, which imbues them with common purpose (49–50). This common purpose leads to a discussion of education: temperance, generosity, and “the virtue of liberality” (51–52). Education is crucially communal; it highlights “what people must share” (53). It reframes self-sufficiency, changing greed to generosity, arrogance to humility, and selfishness to sharing: “Self-sufficiency is redefined when we add liberality to temperance, transforming it from economic to ethical and political self-sufficiency” (57). This type of self-sufficiency is misrecognized; it is a basis for Aristotle's critique of Plato—“even Plato neglected education,” Garver says—and his description of the constitutions (55–56).But education is not a comprehensive good. For Aristotle, it is a quality that follows from constitutional design and the more narrow education of political philosophy. Garver's argument is predicated on a turn to the philosophical understanding of the political constitution. The shift brings us to the ground of praxis, wherein rhetorical scholarship might find itself more—for Garver, too—confident. This ground is the move from politics as techne—whose paradigm is the externalizing viewpoint of the Republic—to politics as phronesis (56; 58–63). Garver describes this shift in political understanding as “from making to doing…. The state cannot be a work of art” (45). The state's—particularly the ruler's—task is not to make the relation between ruler and ruled by “form and matter” (i.e., to posit political equality irrespective of practice) but to instill “self-replicating” virtue, whereby “we become virtuous by performing virtuous actions” (56). Here, the form of the polis–especially its constitution—tends toward a theory of right rather than toward a theory of the good. Garver insists that this recognition of right over good in politics is not due to the modern “fact of pluralism,” á la Rawls. Instead, it has to do with the aims of the polis, which are distinct from (though related to) the aspirations of a virtuous man, who aims toward individual good (57).Hostile to the modern division between the public and the private, Garver argues that for Aristotle, “civic participation never means casting aside and bracketing one's particularity. We never leave behind life in pursuit of the good life” (57). The modern argument views the good life as unencumbered, starting with Locke and Mill through to Rawls's justice as fairness. In contrast, Garver argues Aristotle offers us a different wager: it “encumbers” us with an aim toward the good life, while “unencumbering” us by refusing the “alienation” internal to distinctions of public and private (57–58). What emerges, for Garver, is a “comprehensive” view of political action affirming the relevance of “self-regarding”—private—activity.Arguing for the polis as a complex yet common conceptual form, Garver pins the “comprehensiveness” of an Aristotelian politics to a set of “incomplete” definitions that often appear circular, such as “citizen,” “constitution,” and “state.” In calling the normative basis of politics “incomplete,” Garver's intention is not so much to reconcile Aristotle's thinking with the basic problem of multiplicity as to affirm that the Politics can be seen as part of the political philosophical project of living well. For Garver the incomplete character of the polis is not a damning indictment of the relationship between ethics and the commons (koinon). Unlike in the Ethics, where a single good life is defined (and all others dismissed), in the Politics, Aristotle presupposes plural constitutional arrangements: These “disagreements and errors generate the variety of constitutions, including good constitutions…. There is no ambiguity for Aristotle in the question of… the good life,… but from book 3 on, the Politics exploits the ambiguity in how good a good constitution must be” (70).From here out, Garver's text largely oscillates between varied forms of description: political, philosophical, and even at times rhetorical. But these descriptions imagine only a certain kind of statesman as their audience—perhaps even a certain kind of esoteric thinker. In chapter 3, Garver runs into the problem of political definition—or put differently, what he calls the basic “incompleteness of the normative” in the reading of Politics 3 (66–106). It is Aristotle's unique genius that he is able to smooth the discrepancies in form and function between constitutions, highlighted in Politics 3 and 4, into a justification for political philosophy (69–70; 73–76; 92). A certain form of thinking on political deliberation follows once the analysis of constitutions is wrested from the singular focus of the good ethical life (70). “Political philosophy can occur in the rest of the Politics once Book III has freed space for deliberation by showing how constitutional form has no natural or inevitable ties” to the other causes or ends of poleis (73). Such a statement allows Garver to retroactively intervene into the debate over what constitutes good constitutions in the plural. “The three true constitutions, monarchy, aristocracy, and ‘polity,’ have the same end, the good life. Yet they are different constitutions” (74; see 73–76). But it does not allow us to intervene into the question of the good life—and it only obliquely allows us access to a discussion of the good polis. The discussion of good constitutions thus thinks “a different kind of incompleteness,” namely, “the indeterminacy within each formula” of constitutions (91; see also 83–97). For Aristotle, both good and bad constitutions share a similar principle or “formula of justice.” They do so because Aristotle separates “two independent variables, who rules and for whom, while in the Republic those two were tied together” (85; see also 79–83). In the case of political communities, then, form (of the constitution) does not immediately line up with function (the good life of citizens); they are defined by cross-reference, not through a single or ultimate reference (77, 93). Crucially, it is both possible and necessary that the polis achieve a dignity that is separate from and that ranks above the dignity of its citizens.There is some slippage occurring here between polis, citizen, and constitution, and Garver highlights this slippage to guide us toward political philosophy (92–97). These slippages begin with the comparison of political and despotic natures and continue in the movement from the citizen to the constitution. The effect of such slippages is perennial problems for understanding the relation of rhetoric to politics. For Garver, political philosophy appears a preferable substitute to trying to sort out this relationship, satisfying the need for judgment (phronesis) while providing a way to think about the practical distinctions between good and bad constitutions in conditions where we live with “the impossibility of directly enacting the good” (97). What Garver calls the “politicization” of politics in book 3 turns out to be the study not of citizens and their virtues (or vices) but of poleis and their limited principles of justice. This is because it is the relationship between rule and principle that defines a polis rather than the relative virtue or vice of citizens (77–80). Indeed, citizenship is not, in the final examination, a question of virtue: “The purpose of citizenship surprisingly has nothing to do with the purpose of man and of the state, to live well. The function of citizens is to preserve the constitution” (80). Garver thus ties political theory to political philosophy by highlighting politics' artificial rather than natural means: it is “primarily aporetic and formal. It clears space for deliberation and makes politics autonomous” (105).To wit: “Politics III is political philosophy, carefully keeping to what political philosophy can achieve, and leaving to statesmen what is appropriate for statesmen” (103). The autonomy of politics seems prestructured by Garver's conception of political philosophy as “deliberation over the forms and functions of government” (70). Political philosophy also prefigures the rhetorical praxis of the statesmen, which Garver sees as the practical usage of reflections leading statesmen to both formulate actions and engage in persuasion. “The Politics presents dialectical arguments; in particular circumstances they become rhetorical arguments that require political, not philosophical, judgment” (104). This judgment will call for repackaging the framework of rhetorical persuasion. Garver's framing highlights for readers the obvious difficulty of reconciling philosophical with political being in many the aim of Aristotle's Politics. Garver's reading a between three forms of first, second, persuasion. in these is how Garver the relationship between political philosophy understood as a only the of the statesman and rhetoric understood as a not just the but also the judgment of the practical becomes the method by which the of phronesis in the with the inherent in the nature of politics. Politics the of or but of these those are the proper toward which the statesman and in that they are of constitutions see also Garver reads Aristotle as those constitutions that elements of and this allows the statesman to the basic of the political made by and becomes good not because of the of its which are constitutions, but because of the practical of the the Here, the of political constitutions becomes the of the statesman in political philosophy rather than the of the citizen or judge discussion of Politics the from the to the There is a between the practical of the and the practical of the Garver thus argues that political philosophy, and not rhetoric nothing of or the modern critique of Garver this framing of phronesis as it still citizens to be rather than This framing the need for a of the citizen in the phronesis is a justification for only to has nothing to to the no about they as a nothing to about the under which they to the constitution” see also Politics The that politics takes in the between and from the Politics' of Garver's discussions only this the on and the of the constitutional form and of the statesman rather than the of the of this be given Garver's description of the aims of the Politics. Yet a framing of the polis focus on the natures of those who live in its name is to as rhetorical. But Garver's emphasis on political than a from philosophy to á la the for the of by political philosophy, the statesman in the project of the constitution in a way to the of from which the Platonic critique of the ground Here, Garver the Rhetoric and argues for a relation of between the statesman and But the statesman is as he has a of the behind constitutions that Garver argues the does is for the of rhetoric is only the for a of The that his but cannot more he cannot do to the between the of the means of and seems to have by political philosophy rather than of political life. Garver notes that in book of the Rhetoric, here the statesman to understand constitutional occur and they do to Garver, has no in the but see is a way to imagine through Garver's reading a between the actions of the statesman guided by political philosophy and those of a guided by rhetorical while the is and the seems even This is made by But in 3 through political philosophy is by in such a way as to make it that to it political tied to internal Political philosophy seems a then, for the ruler to become as as But it is as distinct from rhetorical become when fully their nature as political animals” is not to that Garver the nature of the ruled But the political and ethical nature of the citizens is in to be of the of a statesman guided by political philosophy. Indeed, the of the polis to be a relative for the This is in by the to the political virtue for Garver makes this claim the of the must master the of statesman must make it appear the he in the constitution is a of and rather than In chapter Garver notes the of the statesman of the of and These are in the definition of political virtue, which over and above constitutional form of its and that is a political virtue and that the of the of particular constitution” becomes the a education in political philosophy to the to preserve and the political For Garver, political virtue for the state rather than Such an turns on the of the statesman to his citizens that politics is to and not to the of or final chapter that what constitutes the regime will be the of the question political philosophy, in be This is in the Politics as the life of and not the life of the or the life of this the philosophical life, of its of see becomes the of through the common life Yet it must be that is of rhetorical Political philosophy virtuous with that political philosophy, can at their common the virtue of those virtues are the common life appears in a different than the of the rhetorical by the discussion of forms of Here, phronesis becomes from it is a form of in which Aristotle bare the structure of political as it the absolute reading from and constitutional form in order to at a of what as the These discussions will be into ethical arguments by the statesman and made through rhetorical forms of Such forms will be by nature, both in their appeals to constitutional and in their definition of political virtue. The Politics the of on the who has in and through political philosophy. Garver thus reads a impressive theory of political structure an satisfying theory of political desire or political In what then, do political philosophy and rhetoric in Garver's reading of The and is that they to not they exist here in a seems to become and and Garver's reading Political philosophy thus not just as a concept but a internal to Garver's it possible rhetorical by which politics may be within the framework of This seems to have something to do with the Politics' for the statesman over the citizen, for the over the and the over the Garver's discussion of and expresses the different conceptual aims of political philosophy and The of in Garver's analysis of the Politics thus appears as a by the of political philosophy that Garver's impressive reading

Other| May 01 2014 Addresses of Contributors to This Issue Rhetorica (2014) 32 (2): 210–211. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.210 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Addresses of Contributors to This Issue. Rhetorica 1 May 2014; 32 (2): 210–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.210 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. © 2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Dianne Fallon responds to Blaauw-Hara’s article in this issue.

In this issue, a group of emerging scholars take up diverse and timely questions about language ideologies, literate embodiments, and the ethically consequential relationships that come to be constructed, reflected, and contested at the scenes of written communication.

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&#8220;the book advocates for experience architects to participate in the systems they build and to invite other participants to comment on the design of those systems, thus encouraging a greater fit between a design and implementation.&#8221;

&#8220;We remember Linda’s legacy at Present Tense as we continue publishing scholarship that advocates the kind of positive change through pedagogy, community engagement, and research that Linda worked toward her whole life. Thank you, Linda, for enriching our lives.&#8221;

We understand "community literacy" as the domain for literacy work that exists outside of mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, lifelong learning, workplace literacy, or work with marginalized populations, but it can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference

Previous scholarship in literacy and composition has noted the importance and function of ancestors in the literacy and rhetorical practices of descendants. However, such research has not explored how ancestorship functions for people at the marginalized intersection of racialized otherness and queer sexualities and genders. This article offers one response to this gap by reporting on the role of literacy in the life stories of sixty Black queer people residing in various regions across the United States who named historical erasure as a particularly detrimental form of oppression enacted by, though subverted through, literacy. An analysis of participants' uses of literacy to navigate historical erasure reveals that as participants encounter historical erasure, they disrupt its negative impact through four patterns of ancestorship: (1) literacy is used to create, discover, and affirm relationships to ancestors; (2) ancestors model the multiplicity of identities as a category of rhetorical analysis; (3) descendants’ identity formation/affirmation is affected by an ancestors’ writing and lives; and (4) descendants receive cross-generational mandates to become ancestors through literacy. Further, while African American literacies and LGBTQ literacies have each emerged as potent areas of scholarship in literacy and composition studies, the absence of a sustained and substantive discussion at the intersection of both areas contributes to a larger critical vacuum in rhetoric and composition in which we have overlooked the literacy and composition practices shaped at the intersection of race and queerness. This article begins to address this oversight through an in-depth exploration of a specific literacy and rhetorical practice among Black LGBTQ people.

202 RHETORICA mainstream composition studies, especially in the model of conversation for pedagogy" (p. 127). Examples of an exception as well as this merging are explored in texts by women such as Mary Augusta Jordan and Gertrude Buck, respectively. As noted, the conclusion argues that the tradition s de­ cline is linked to women starting to write rhetoric and composition textbooks for mixed-gender audiences. I would have liked to see more discussion of this claim, particularly related to the discussion of Buck. For instance, Buck's texts emerged directly from the all-women classes she taught at Vassar Col­ lege, and many examples in her books are targeted specifically at women. Although Buck's case may have been atypical, perhaps these differences could have been explored. In addressing new questions related to women's theorizing of rhetoric, Conversational Rhetoric is to be commended for enacting the new directions that historians and feminist scholars in the field have urged (Royster and Kirsch 2012; Gold 2012). In so doing, it illuminates a significant tradition of women theorizing conversation and introduces us to women with whom we may be unfamiliar. The book also suggests the need to investigate other examples of how women have theorized conversation and other potential ways that women have conceptualized communication. In spanning three hundred years and investigating such a wide array of texts, the book also is exemplary in terms of the breadth and depth that Donawerth brings to such an analysis. Suzanne Bordelon San Diego State University Stephen Pender and Nancy Struever eds, Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, ix, 299 pp., ISBN: 9781 -4094-3022-6 Rhetoric and Medicine have been compared since antiquity. Both are eminently practical arts, requiring their practitioners to work with the vari­ ability of human experience, on the basis of a growing but still contestable body of theory. Both are intimately concerned with persuasion and with the emotions. Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe is a collection of ten essays, introduction and afterword, based on panels from the 2003 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. This is a thought-provoking collection, including some excellent essays, which explores the relations be­ tween medicine and rhetoric from many different points of view and in relation to a range of different types of subject-matter. Stephen Pender in­ troduces the collection with an analysis of the physician's different needs for persuasion (rational and emotional). His own essay "Between Medicine and Rhetoric (revised from his 2005 article in Early Science and MLedicine} surveys the relations between rhetoric and the art of medicine in Plato's Phaedrus and Reviews 203 Gorgias, Aristotle s Rhetoric and the early modern English physician John Cotta's A Short Discoverie of the Unobserved Dangers ofSeverall Sorts ofIgnorant and Unconsiderate Practisers of Physicke in England (1612). Focusing on the uncertainty of medical diagnosis and treatment enables Cotta to align the physician's pragmatic flexibility with the prudence of the orator: "a practical, prudential interpretation of probable signs directed toward intervention.. .is at the heart of medical practice" (p. 59). Jean Dietz Moss analyses five local physician's descriptions of the health­ giving properties of the waters of Bath, which aimed to promote the attrac­ tions of the spa, written between 1572 and 1697. She analyses the rhetori­ cal techniques employed by these publicists, discussing their deployment of narratives, authorities and evidence in order to extol the divinely pro­ vided health-giving properties of the spa. Richard Sugg analyses the use of the metaphor of anatomy in a range of sixteenth and seventtenth-century titles. Andrea Carlino resituates Andreas Vesalius within the humanist mi­ lieu of 1540s Padua and particularly within the Accademia degli Infiammati. He argues that the title of Vesalius's famous work De humani corporis fab­ rica libri septeni (1543) alludes through the word fabrica both to Cicero's De natnra deorum and to architectural works such as Sebastiano Serlio's Sette libri d'Architettnra. He documents Vesalius's connections with members of the Accademia degli infiammati, including a letter to Benedetto Varchi in which he mentions the recent publication of Daniele Barbaro's commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric. He...

A Response to Lindsey Harding’s “Writing beyond the Page: Reflective Essay as Box Composition” Rachel Ihara A Response to Rachel Ihara’s “Student Perspectives on Self-Assessment: Insights and Implications” Lindsey Harding

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A man sets himself on fire in Tunisia. His self-immolation sparks a wildfire that transforms the Middle East and the world. What just happened? How are we to think and talk about these days of rage and hope, these potentially epoch-defining events? News cycles, with their commitment to reducing the most important events to little more than banal commodities, provide little help in the matter. Academics too often fail us, offering theoretical and methodological devotion at the expense of a commitment to the realities of emergent resistance. French philosopher Alain Badiou proves an exception, bringing equal parts rage and insight to his thinking of the events transforming our world.In The Rebirth of History, Badiou provides a provocative and illuminating engagement with the events of the Arab Spring while also offering an accessible and relatively concise introduction to his larger political and philosophical project. In it, Badiou steps away from his more commonly used anecdotes—particularly that of May 1968. Paying particular attention to the 2011 Egyptian protest in Tahrir Square that would ultimately lead to the resignation of the country's president, Badiou contends that these movements represent “a time of riots wherein a rebirth of History, as opposed to the pure and simple repetition of the worst, is signaled and takes shape” (5). In his typically provocative, polemical, and often humorous style, Badiou seizes his opportunity to dress his theoretical commitments in new clothes and in the process, unwittingly, highlights various links to the field of rhetoric and the material implications of his most abstract theorizations.Among Badiou's crucial theoretical concepts articulated here is the event. Events are foundational breaks with the repetition and order of the world. They affirm profound political change and the unfolding of a new potential course of action. The event is something that appears but immediately disappears, supplementing the world with a new way of thinking and acting. The early twenty-first century is a time of great potential in this regard. The increase in riots around the world, both ones that are highly visible and ones that are relatively invisible, constitutes a phenomenon that does not properly have a name in the existing order of the world. This phenomenon lacks a name because the current configuration of epistemology fails to recognize its potential. This potential implicates the riot's relationship to events.While many of Badiou's contemporaries have discussed the event or analogous concepts, none of them have fully developed a formalized theory of the event in quite the same way Badiou has. In most cases, Badiou discusses events in abstract theoretical terms (2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2009; 2000), depending heavily on his mathematical take regarding ontology. At other times the event is applied specifically to a given truth process or field of possible evental emergence (2012; 2004) or case study as in the Rebirth of History and Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Herein lies the value of The Rebirth of History: its ability to link the event to action and meaning in more tangible and digestible ways by using contemporary objects of analysis.In The Rebirth of History, Badiou posits the event in relationship to three types of riot: immanent, latent, and, most importantly to this text, historical. Each type of riot is discussed in terms of its potential to produce new political order and lasting material change. By articulating the event in relationship to riots that have immediate resonance, Badiou demonstrates how actions, resistance, and social unrest can produce the conditions of an event, extrapolating the relationship between communicative or rhetorical practice and his brand of thinking about change.1Early in the text, Badiou simultaneously establishes two key constructs, communism and capitalism. His undeniable Marxism is pronounced, but he distances himself from some of his Marxist contemporaries, such as Antonio Negri. For Badiou, Marxism is “the organized knowledge of the political means required to undo existing society and fully realize an egalitarian rational figure of collective organization for which the name is ‘communism’” (8). In other words, communism is the organized, proper name of the disruption of the structures, assumptions, and dynamics that create the world as it is (see Badiou 2010). Furthermore, capitalism is, in short, the name for the world as it is. It is the condition of our world, what dominates ideas and practices. Various mutations of capitalism have emerged that have led some to identify a postmodern capitalism. Postmodern capitalism, for Badiou, can be summed up as the contention that capitalism is ever changing, ever progressing, and potentially changing and progressing in ways that create spaces for new ways of living and distributing power. However, Badiou rejects this notion: “Contemporary capitalism possesses all the features of classical capitalism. It is strictly in keeping with what is to be expected of it when its logic is not counteracted by resolute, locally victorious class action” (11). In other words, our time is marked by the same principles of governance and action that Marx foretold. What some herald as the emergence of a postmodern capitalism is, for Badiou, no more than the “unfolding of the irrational and, in truth, monstrous potentialities of capitalism” (12). Only the disruptive force of an idea that achieves organized, continued enaction can interrupt capitalism; such was and is Badiou's hope for communism.The Rebirth of History demonstrates how riots, given the right circumstances, can constitute a break in the system and lead to the subsequent organization of alternative ways of being. Chapters 2 and 3 outline immanent riots and latent riots, respectively. Badiou first details how riots are positioned by the state according to the narratives that are designed to maintain state and global capitalist concerns, narratives that criminalize riots and undermine their potential to account for the majority of the world's population. This allows the state to reinforce police authority and its own criminal justice system. Badiou implicitly contends that the state's response to riots both materially and discursively positions collective resistance as a crime by creating double standards with regards to visibility and agency. To use an example from the text, “zero-tolerance” policies are applied differently to poor communities than they are to wealthy bankers or politicians, demonstrating a double standard with regard to criminality. In The Rebirth of History, Badiou is concerned with the double standards of justice and leniency that manifest themselves in response to riots as criminal acts and that simultaneously perpetuate a particular configuration of power. Badiou's term for the lack of agency that such a configuration of power imposes on certain populations is “inexistence.” Inexistent populations are those populations that lack the ability to determine the course of politics in the world or to determine their own material or political subjectivity. Immediate riots are a response to inexistence and to the exercise of state authority against inexistent populations “An immediate riot is unrest among a section of population, nearly always in the wake of a violent episode of state coercion” (22). This type of riot, which can give birth to a historical riot, has three important qualities: they are spearheaded by the youth of a given population, take place in the territory inhabited and controlled by those who are rioting, and do not distinguish the subject types they invite to rebel, because rebellion is the sole defining characteristic of the subject type involved.2Latent riots are the product of unrest emerging within a configuration of power that effectively disciplines outbursts. The flexibility of “democratic” systems of governance lends itself to peaceful coexistence and has suppressed such rebellious vigor in many cases. This creates latency in unrest that runs parallel across various contexts, creating the conditions under which immediate riots can be disseminated without the local character of such acts having to be sacrificed. Latent riots are those acts of peaceful unrest that signal a novel form of unity among marginalized groups, traversing conventional borders and seemingly distinct populations. In other words, latent riots are the quiet conditions of possibility that have not yet overtly manifested as unrest, linking disparate groups.The primary characteristic of a historical riot is the transition from the undirected nihilism of the immediate riot to what Badiou calls prepolitical conditions that create the grounds for new ways of being or acting as a subject to emerge. Riots no longer rely on reactionary localization but control an enduring, secure site of protest and reappropriate that site and its significant symbols. The “Arab Spring” protests are an example of a historical riot. These protests did not spread from a central location but derived, by imitation, from latent discontent across a number of significant cities and sites, demonstrating an analogous dissatisfaction with the world in its current state.For Badiou, this constitutes the rebirth of history because historical riots introduce a new sequence of possibility into an otherwise redundant cycle of political and social conditions. Thus, Badiou dubs the historical riot as an intervallic period, that period during which an alternative and revolutionary political character has been defined but has yet to take a formalized structure. This character is “explicitly presented as an alternative to the dominant world, and on this basis has secured massive, disciplined support” (39). What is still lacking is the powerful synthesizing hypothesis that move riots from the idea and its immanent manifestation of new political subjects to organized politics, that is, novel, creative, organized, and structured ways of distributing power.It is important to realize that the achievement of a historical riot does not guarantee that political action or political organization will follow. To put it in terms more common to Badiou's work, the opening of an event or of new potential configurations for action does not predetermine fidelity to the event itself. The leap to such a different, alternative form of political thought is difficult. Most riots are considered failures in their aftermath because it is easy to return to the already established, former structures and thus to the very relationships the riots resisted. Western countries and media outlets use the dogmatic categories of good and bad riots as a way of judging resistance under standards against which the resistance is opposed, thus encouraging a falling in line of rioters and observers. Good riots happen at a distance, away from the Western world. They are framed as eruptions of desire for a Western lifestyle rather than an act of dissent against its influence. This power to name “the Good is nothing but the modernized name for imperial interventionism” (49), because it perpetuates an adherence to the old way of thinking, being, speaking, and acting in the world by framing the riot as a manifestation of desire for Western systems. Bad riots are deemed irrational and are suppressed quickly because they rise up within overt Western configurations of power and thus violate the sensibilities that normalize and valorize that system. The value of the riot is its ability to manifest the ability to overcome such obstacles.Events and what they produce are not mere abstract desires to change; they are primarily material phenomena. Events create an opening for the emergence of what Badiou calls truth, that which is manifest in the immediate and productive being of the people. That is, Badiou presents truth as the process by which the idea (the kernels of aforementioned organizing principles) emerges and provides a new configuration of contingency. This configuration is derived from the universal imperative that is always present in localized resistance. The assumption here is that universals exist at the core of all ideological, political, or social programs. This new material manifestation of existence replaces inexistence. If inexistent populations “count for nothing” (55), to change the world is to make the inexistent exist. Such was the case in Tahrir Square when Egyptians demanded political existence and seized control of Egyptian political identity on their own terms. As the inexistent comes to exist, the arrangement of power and possibility, at least temporarily, is altered and any program that emerges from it may manifest this new arrangement. To deny a program its core imperative is to declaw it in the material and ideological struggle it must take part in. Badiou's call for the universal and for truth, as a form of justice, is a call for the core principles of material resistance to be maintained and not reappropriated and pacified by neoliberal commitments. This is imperative if a riot is to enact long-term, meaningful change rather than taking part in the repetition of world as it is.The emergence of existence from inexistence depends on two important, observable phenomena, both of which could be considered rhetorical. First, protestors must determine the meaning of a given site and important artifacts. For example, Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square established the meaning of the square, the Egyptian flag, and “Egyptianness,” each of which was an important symbolic transgression against the state. Second, the minority in the street must undeniably come to represent an intense manifestation of the larger population and its discontents. This creates what Badiou calls a popular dictatorship. A popular dictatorship is “an authority that is legitimized precisely because its truth derives from the fact that it legitimizes itself” (59), expressing the general will of the people. This is accomplished through the construction of a will that is manifest directly in the site and that transgresses the given order of the world. The historical riots that may arise from such transgressions create the potential for a wide and organized political movement against the existing order, but do not—obviously—guarantee it.Ultimately, the emergence of a new political order is the logical extension of a historical riot. Three conditions must be satisfied for a historical riot to create the conditions for sustained political organization: the population must be contracted into a representative form of unrest, that unrest must be intensified in the form of political action, and a specific site and its transformation must be emphasized. If political organization emerges from an event, it faces the difficult imperative of remaining a student of this material process of the event itself. Failure to do so results in the betrayal of the creative character that ignited the movement and prevents politics from maintaining its novel character. This produces the ethical imperative in Badiou's theory, to remain faithful to the event (see Badiou 2002). Truly political organizations remain loyal to the material process that breaks with the world as it is and with its order. In this way it becomes a subject in the Badiouian sense of the word. That is, it becomes “a mediation between the world and changing the world” (66). The political organization is a subject of the event insofar as it maintains this mediation through its fidelity to the material emergence of a truth.After articulating the material process of the political organization as it emerges from an event, Badiou clarifies the role of identity and existence as imperatives to disruption. One of the primary mechanisms by which the state and the various mechanisms of global capitalism determine degrees of existence is the process of naming. Naming creates ideals by normalizing bonds between names and characteristics. The less symmetry between a given subject and the ideal—be it “French,” “American,” and so forth—the greater the possibility of inexistence marking the subject's being in the world. Varying degrees of inexistence are marked by what Badiou calls “separating names.” Separating names are those that discern and socially position subjects and/or groups whose being is marked by inexistence.Justice, for Badiou, is the eradication of separating names as relevant and effective terms. By eradicating them the political burden is placed squarely on individual citizens to demonstrate their own political and social relevance and commitments. Badiou calls this process “political truth,” the organized product of an event that restricts the power of the state and its reliance on constructions of identity and replaces it with the material practices of immanent, enacted subjectivity. To put it another way, political truth takes from the state the function of determining existence and places it in the hands of subjects themselves; political organizations formalize the results over time.This function of political truth is vital in The Rebirth of History. To suggest its importance, Badiou dedicates the closing chapters of the book to explicating his definition of it: “A political truth is a series of consequences, organized on the condition of an idea, a massive popular event, in which intensification, contraction, and localization replace an identitarian object, and the separating names bound up with it, with a real presentation of generic power of the multiple” (85). In Badiou this definition and each as a way of the to our of knowledge about resistance. In the closing of the Badiou an important assumption that lies his the for the the ability to manifest existence and the of separating names and other mechanisms that create is a by most people. For Badiou, a desire for justice is a desire for a unfolding of the world. This the emergence of a universal from a universal that a new way of being and thinking in the riots, insofar as they are events that could potentially produce political must be They from the of the immediate riot to the creative politics for sustained resistance to the world as it is. of is material and demonstrates that what is visible or in a given not be at The Rebirth of History with two popular by Badiou on the subject of resistance, the first of which with and the of which the and of in the contemporary world. Each of Badiou's theory in applied and digestible Rebirth of History is a but of Badiou's larger of a for those who have the of his thought in the field of Badiou's of his theory of change here for rhetorical as he it to contemporary popular Badiou his with The Rebirth of History by the book so quickly the in and thus his own ability to the political of the riots, are at least three specific of the theoretical Badiou that rhetorical may on and and Badiou's commitments have up the relationship to Badiou's materially and materially unfolding truth may to think in new ways about what constitutes a rhetorical act and how it may to change or subjectivity. Second, Badiou's on the of the site is with rhetorical character. How does the site help the of populations into a minority of What are the by which protestors can and do the meaning of a What such so The idea of the site and localization has been and remain an important for rhetorical and these may the field in Badiou's use of existence and inexistence highlights in the world as it is and in a way that may be more digestible and for than his former is a theoretical The universal or generic not be to a but be as the proper name of that which is productive and in a given For the becomes how we can use this of the universal and the local to and our of local political theory of social and political change is often as and The Rebirth of History provides a of this theory in a contemporary and political This book will relevance with political and rhetorical in social change and and creative ways of thinking In the of the various the grounds for a new world, Badiou's that the between and control and profound to think about resistance and the of its

Editor Ellen Cushman introduces Mya Poe as the guest editor of this special issue on diversity and international writing assessment and previews the content of the issue.

Diversity in writing assessment research means paying attention to the consequences of writing assessment for all students’ learning and writing. This special issue of Research in the Teaching of English brings together researchers from various national contexts who share such a perspective to explore the meanings and roles of writing assessment today.

Editor Kathleen Blake Yancey introduces the February issue.

ment workshop gone awry. A session on responding to student work—meant to introduce the commenting philosophies fundamental to writing studies—became derailed when faculty failed to accept the orthodoxy of deemphasizing grammar and sentence-level concerns in favor of global issues, such as content development, elaboration, and arrangement. As Cole notes, such conflicts between writing studies’ principles and the beliefs of faculty in the disciplines are common. Cole responds to the issue pragmatically, reasoning that we will ultimately have greater success in persuading disciplinary faculty of our writing across the curricu-lum / writing in the disciplines (WAC/WID) philosophies if we make some effort to address what they see as the most pressing concerns with student writing. To this end, he provides a list created by faculty on his campus of ten “things ” university students should know about writing—a list he hopes will be revised as needed, over the years, and accepted by all faculty at his institution. He ends with a call to bring “discussions of grammar pedagogy out of the margins, and reconsider how grammar instruction might be optimally reintegrated into our classrooms.”

Corporate social responsibility is a topic that is increasingly incorporated into business school curricula. This article describes a study of undergraduate business majors who wrote about an environmental topic in response to an Analytical Writing Assessment question in the Graduate Management Admission Test™. Of 187 students, only 76 mentioned natural resources in their responses. The study examines this smaller corpus for stance, framing, and argument. The results indicate that the majority of those 76 students supported sustainable practices but were less adept at presenting their perspectives, invoking a personal frame over a professional one. The authors suggest ways to help students develop stronger skills in writing about corporate social responsibility.

Abstract The authors argue that technical communication instructors are in a particularly apt position to teach social media as key to students’ lives as technical communicators and future professionals. Drawing on the concepts of reach and crowd sourcing as heuristics to rearticulate dominant cultural narratives of social media as deleterious to students’ careers, the authors offer a case study of an introductory professional and technical communication pedagogy that helped to disrupt uncritical deployments of social media. Keywords: crowd sourcingpedagogyreachsocial media ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors give many thanks to Dr. David J. Reamer and the students enrolled in his technical writing course at the University of Tampa for their feedback and comments on the student documentation published on Instructables. The authors also appreciate thoughtful and engaged reviewer comments that helped us to develop this article. Notes Students are not misguided in their concerns about social media use and its connection to employment, and perhaps even university admissions practices. As of May 13, Citation2013, the National Conferences of State Legislatures reports that social-media privacy protection laws are being introduced or are pending in 36 states. These states are seeking to stop the practice of employers and universities from requesting logins and passwords of employees or students to their social media sites. According to the conference, four states already have such protections, including Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (para 1). These same laws are under debate as both industry and regulatory finances groups argue for the veracity of having access to social media outlets in order to monitor employee discussions of sensitive financial information (Eaglesham & Rothfeld, Citation2013, para 1). In the particular semester discussed, students all used Instructables to ensure they were working with the same interface and design features and to allow for more robust user-testing. We understand that some students in professional and technical writing courses might be eager to learn about and use social media for their professional development, but we see this position as equally capable of reinforcing the binary of good/bad that is worthy of complication. Neither position affords human agency because technology is the determinant factor in either a student's success or failure. Additional informationNotes on contributorsElise Verzosa Hurley Elise Verzosa Hurley is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Her research interests include technical and professional communication pedagogy, visual rhetoric, and multimodal composition. Her work has appeared in Kairos. Amy C. Kimme Hea Amy C. Kimme Hea is Writing Program Director and Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, and author of Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers.