Abstract

ABSTRACTMobility is the engine that makes rhetoric work. It's integral to rhetoric itself and yet is also potentially destabilizing of both human subjectivity and of the institutions—including higher education—in which we reside. This essay defines rhetoric's mobility by considering Burke's action-motion pair, Giorgio Agamben's stasis, and Deleuze and Guattari's nomadism, taking account of how rhetoric moves us, and how we move, rhetorically, in and amid institutions. Rhetorical movement has less to do with movement from here to there and more to do with flux, disturbance, and—potentially—vulnerability and violence. This essay takes up this premise about rhetoric's mobility—as disturbance, potential, “more”—in order to understand what it would mean to deploy rhetoric in discussions about the future of higher education.