Philosophy & Rhetoric Sep 2024

Rhetoric Is Dead? The Fear of Stasis Behind Post-Truth Rhetoric

Eric S. Jenkins

Abstract

ABSTRACT Why does post-truth discourse feel true? This article argues that post-truth fears the death of rhetoric, rather than truth, and traces that fear to the voluminous, rapid, and intense production of stasis on social media. Social media enable and weaponize the production of stasis, and that production generates affects more aligned with death than life (stagnation, hopelessness) that explain why post-truth feels true. These fears and their concomitant hopes constitute an affective economy also present in philosophy’s predominant images of rhetoric. Some images picture rhetoric as movement, whereas others emphasize rhetoric’s capacity to secure the status quo. Social media beckon a supplementary image—a vortex—in which rhetorical movement functions to produce standstill. This image suggests the need to consider affects generated by rhetorical processes as much as from texts. Post-truth’s affective economy also drives stasis production generally, and scholars should attend to the affective economies driving various rhetorical modes.

Journal
Philosophy & Rhetoric
Published
2024-09-24
DOI
10.5325/philrhet.57.2.0166
Open Access
Closed
Topics
multimodality social media race and writing affect and writing

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Koerber et al. (2025)
    “What’s Crazy Is Look How Better I Got”: Rethinking Ethos in the Crisis of Perp…
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Cites in this index (14)

  1. Mercieca (2019)
    Dangerous Demagogues and Weaponized Communication
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  2. Kelsie (2019)
    Blackened Debate at the End of the World
    Philosophy & Rhetoric
  3. Matheson (2019)
    Stasis in the Net of Affect
    Philosophy & Rhetoric
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    It Is All There: From Reason to Reasoning-in-the-World
    Philosophy & Rhetoric
  5. Biesecker (2018)
    Guest Editor's Introduction: Toward an Archaeogenealogy of Post-truth
    Philosophy & Rhetoric
Show all 14 →
  1. Myres (2018)
    Post-truth as Symptom: The Emergence of a Masculine Hysteria
    Philosophy & Rhetoric
  2. Vivian (2018)
    On the Erosion of Democracy by Truth
    Philosophy & Rhetoric
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    “Zombies Are Real”: Fantasies, Conspiracies, and the Post-truth Wars
    Philosophy & Rhetoric
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    Money, Relativism, and the Post-Truth Political Imaginary
    Philosophy & Rhetoric
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    The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude
    Philosophy & Rhetoric
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Also cites 8 works outside this index ↓
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    Philosophy & Rhetoric  ↗
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CrossRef global citation count: 2 View in citation network →

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