Abstract

The practices of architecture and rhetoric have been closely entwined since antiquity. University of Chicago philosopher Richard McKeon mobilized this conceit to identify architectonic rhetoric as giving rise to the communication arts. State of the art communication practices would construct a pluralistic, global world for the twentieth century. The contemporary digital revolution has transferred the communication arts into information control systems through polytechtonic rhetorics. This essay calls for critique where communication is at issue for a control society.