Fascism is currently resurgent in national governments and enhanced popular acceptance of fascist ideas. But preconditions of fascism may also lie in ordinary language or speech. I draw from twentieth-century structuralism to support this claim. An account of how modern institutions exercise control over entire populations by inciting individuals to speak versions of truth about themselves to presiding authorities forms the centerpiece of my analysis. I define this rhetorical and political phenomenon as the incitement. My analysis emphasizes Michel Foucault’s works while identifying complementary arguments from other thinkers in the structuralist context (like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) as well as contemporary figures (such as Giorgio Agamben, Michelle Alexander, Judith Butler, and Ibram X. Kendi). I conclude by highlighting avenues for future research on the incitement and latent fascism.

ABSTRACT This article proposes a counterintuitive approach to the timely phenomenon of so-called post-truth politics. The article argues that the premise of a post-truth politics misdiagnoses the particular crisis of truth that now threatens to undermine democratic norms and institutions. Social and political appeals cited as prime examples of an allegedly proliferating “post-truth” mentality do not abandon truth; those appeals rationalize available forms of truth conducive to the legitimation of authoritarian power. They do so, the article maintains, by simultaneously undermining opportunities for pluralistic deliberation over conditions of truth itself and promoting extra-deliberative versions of truth (based on biological supremacy, historical destiny, or cultural heritage). In supporting these claims, the analysis shows how the spread of particular forms of truth (not the simple loss of it) can erode democracies from within and, concomitantly, how authoritarian regimes may be invested in a regime of truth as much as any other sociopolitical system.

This essay delineates essential features of memory as a salient topos of rhetorical literature, both classical and modern. This essay also considers how both the arts of rhetoric and memory alike underwent cultural devaluation in Western modernity only to reappear in altered forms as compelling objects of analysis. In doing so, the essay contends that current enthusiasms for the study of collective memory in communication and composition studies alike signify forms of simultaneous connection and disconnection with the historical role of rhetoric in the classical art of memory.

AbstractPractices of witnessing powerfully modulate perceptions of historical temporality in contemporary liberal-democratic societies. This essay not only acknowledges that acts of witnessing suffuse the rhetoric of historical narration in our time but also examines a more fundamental temporal phenomenon: the sense of historical time peculiar to witnessing as such. Witnessing organizes a discursive window on the past through which audiences are given to understand historical chronology and potentially steer its trajectory toward the ends of symbolic, if not procedural, justice. Such collective perceptions of historical chronology are fundamentally untimely: specters of radically other historical experiences are among the most commonly invoked and uncannily felt historical touchstones of contemporary historical pedagogy, transnational justice, and moral reasoning. The essay delineates essential characteristics of the untimely time that comes to pass in the rhetorical act of witnessing and those customary historical truths and judgments that it organizes and distributes as resources of social, political, and moral influence. Notes1. 1Relevant works on this topic include Jacqueline Bacon; Elazar Barkan; Barkan and Alexander Kahn; Roy Brooks; Erik Doxtader; Dexter Gordon and Carrie Crenshaw; John Hatch; Jennifer Lind; Mark McPhail; Melissa Nobles; Charles Villa-Vicencio and Doxtader.2. 2On the subjunctive, see Barbie Zelizer, About 14–17.

Rhetorics of Display marshals diverse subject matter and methodological orientations in order to demonstrate the omnipresent significance of display as a contemporary persuasive phenomenon. “[M]uch...

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