Abstract

Reviews 325 Following Baudrillard, Gogan asserts throughout the book that "percep­ tion itself is rhetorical (8). He means that "language use brings about percep­ tion (8). Here is where I think many a materialist, but also many a more traditional scholar, will have a hard time following. For if the claim were sim­ ply that tropes and the use of language shapes human perception, there could be no argument. What you perceive as the just, the normal, or even—more concretely the sexual is inevitably affected by the categories and images through which you process your perceptions. Moreover, even the object world itself is created as a set of distinct identifiable objects through the existence, elaboration, and circulation of linguistic categories. There was a world in which oxygen did not exist, grav ity was not a concept, and in which the atoms of Lucretius were v ery different from those of Einstein or Niels Bohr. In the end, howev er, these observations do not establish the claim that "language use brings about perception." The prelinguistic infant has percep­ tion. My dog, whose language use is minimal, perceives. And this elementary recognition is important. While there may be no human perception worthy of entering into symbolic exchange not shaped by language use (i.e., rhetoric), that is v ery different from saying "perception is rhetorical." The latter asserts there is no necessarv referent of perception. It asserts that all perceptions are merely simulacra and in no sense representations. Phantasia, on this level, is triumphant, and meaning has disappeared. Nonetheless, Aristotle's position, which Gogan quotes approvingly, is very different. For Aristotle, phantasia ("appearance") is what mediates between perception and judgment (144). Thus, while there may be no judg­ ment without rhetoric, aisthësis ("perception") exists and so differential judge­ ments can be made. Indeed, the appearance on which judgment is predicated must be rigorously separated from perception itself. In a world of "alternative facts" and of "fake news," a world in which climate science is a matter of opin­ ion, the imperative not to reduce experience to the exchange of interchangeable simulacra, all equally unmoored from perception, has never been more urgent. Baudrillard was masterful in predicting and analyzing the rhetoric of our post­ truth society, but we will need something more to survive it. Paul Allen Miller University of South Carolina Michele Kenrterly and Damien Smith Pfister, eds., Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780817359041 When Edward Corbett first published his didactic volume Classical Rhetoric for the Modem Student, the context was mid-century television cul­ ture, and many of Corbett's examples, which were intended to demonstrate the continuing applicability of traditional tropes from ancient Athens, relied on familiarity with mass media. Since that time - when Corbett marveled at the introduction of the data-rich medium of microfilm - much in information 326 RHETORICA technology has changed dramatically, including the advent of personal com­ puting, the rise of social media platforms, and the ubiquity of access to dis­ tributed networks. Of course, there were significant works published on classical rheto­ ric and digital communication during the nineties, including Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word and Kathleen Welch's Electric Rhetoric dur­ ing the Web 1.0 era. Although Lanham and Welch are not contributors to Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, this new volume is a notable achievement in representing a very broad range of perspectives from classi­ cal rhetoric - including concepts from Aristotle, Plato, Protagoras, Isocrates, and Gorgias - and applying them to seemingly ephemeral online phenom­ ena expressed in networked publics. The introduction to Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks outlines the case for understanding the ancients through contemporary digital practices and vice versa; at the same time, it resists simplistic or arbitrary "cutting and pasting" (2) of heterogeneous sources without sufficient justification. It observes that the texts in the collection represent a range of possible linka­ ges between present and past: historical antecedents, analogues for practi­ ces, heuristics for theoretical framing, and cues to conventions such as social customs and moral orientations, as well as relations of renewal. Many of the essays outline broad theories to explain internet infra­ structures...