Fourteen years after the special issue on neuroscience and rhetoric in this journal (Neurorhetorics, vol. 40, no. 5), we turn back and look forward. We assess what has been accomplished in neurorhetorics in that time frame, examine what has changed in rhetorical studies and in the neurosciences, and offer suggestions for future research. Eight contributors detail the importance of neurorhetorics for their work and engage a range of topics. Those include neurodiversity, neuropolicy, neurogastronomy, and interdisciplinary collaborations, among others. Ultimately, the forum points toward the need for more critical cultural approaches in neurorhetorics, more policy discussions, new methodologies, and new philosophies that can stretch beyond the “neuro-” prefix and enroll insights from New Materialisms and Global Rhetorics.

Despite calls to give greater attention to bodies and infrastructures, and despite the development of facial recognition software and face replacement apps, not to mention medical face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic and a long history of political faces in the news, rhetoric has not directly nor adequately dealt with the face. I offer a new materialist rhetorical theory of the face, drawing on the concepts of hyle and iwi to argue that the face is a bio-social conglomeration both human and nonhuman. I look specifically to biometric data collection and to artist Zach Blas’s algorithmically designed masks from his project, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” to illuminate how the face is rhetorical and how faces might resist facial recognition suppression. The study urges rhetoricians to think carefully and ecologically about the face.

ABSTRACTAssuming that withdrawal is ontological, no method of inquiry will breach the “essence” of an object. As such, this article raises a question of onto-epistemological access to complicate the development of recent rhetorical theories and rhetorical method/ologies informed by object-oriented ontologies and new materialisms. This article wonders about the drive to know and to feel forwarded in these rhetorical method/ologies without discussing how things hide from other things and from themselves, how things elude critics, and how scholars access others through ethnographic and embodied methodologies. Explicating epistemist and anti-epistemist approaches to the question of onto-epistemological access, this article makes a modest proposal for rhetoric scholars to conjure rhetorics of unavailable diversities to remake the gap between knowledge and reality again and again.

When considering the material ecologies of the human body, we must consider the bodies within—at least five hundred known species of microbes. We propose the term gut rhetorics to highlight how our guts have become an environment to which we are exposed: a biologically active actant contributing to the physiology and psychology—the rhetorical capacities—of the human body. Gut rhetorics incorporate—bring into the body and, importantly, into the body of rhetoric—the hungry horde within human bodies. First, we trace one probiotic formulation across three scientific studies to show how bodies, affects, and microbes are being “calibrated” at the level of experiment. Second, we stress skilled probiotic experimentation and encourage scholars to play amid environments, give attention to embodiment, and pursue phenomenological inquiry (Gruber, 2018; Melonçon, 2018). Gut rhetorics consider bodies, affects, and microbiota as entangled metabolic intra-actions that affect how the world appears to the body and the body to the world.

Neuro-realism is a widely cited concept describing a textual phenomenon in popular science news wherein brain research uncritically validates or invalidates the “realness” of particular beliefs or practices. Currently, no research on neuro-realism examines the variable rhetorical roles of such statements, that is, how they support specialized arguments or enhance social functions across genres of public communication. This article details the nuances of neuro-realism, arguing that neuro-realism is much more than a singular textual phenomenon but a flexible rhetorical vehicle manifesting in at least three forms: commonsense, judicial, and rational. Each form serves a larger argumentative purpose, and each can be consistently linked to a popular news subgenre, illuminating how neuro-realism’s stunning lack of criticality proves permissible and reproducible in popular science publications.

Neuroscience findings employed in professional and academic fields can construct new avenues of inquiry, provide evidence for existing theories, or bolster less-recognized fields of study with exciting research from the brain sciences. However, the strategic, rhetorical alignments or disjunctions that enable those fields to incorporate or reject interpretations of neuroscience data have not yet undergone much discussion. This paper examines how phenomenologists construct the means to contest interpretations of mirror neurons coming from the cognitive neurosciences. The analysis ultimately expands neurorhetorics, demonstrating that rhetorical scholars need not privilege neuroscientific conceptions but can continually “re-invent” the brain, foregrounding multiple ontologies, pursuing alternative rhetorical alignments and performances.

This article examines how mirror neuron research from the neurosciences is incorporated by the field of group analysis and made to fit within the history and practices of the field. The approach taken is from science and technology studies’ discussion of “translation” across actor-networks. The article ends with the suggestion that a translation analysis indicates good reason for rhetoric and writing scholars to consider “multiple ontologies” and to understand neurodisciplinary work as invention.

During a series of protests in Hong Kong about a leadership transition widely perceived to give Mainland China greater political influence, the Hong Kong Museum of History held a Special Exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors of Xian, China. Sponsored by “The Leisure and Cultural Service Department,” the exhibit featured the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ushered in “an epoch-making era in Chinese history that witnessed the unification of China” (Museum Exhibition). This essay explores the multi-media aspects of the exhibit, arguing that encounters with dramatic music and fully immersive digital experiences are examples of an embodied, affective form of constitutive rhetoric. Put differently, the museum’s multi-media elements demonstrate how Maurice Charland’s theory of a constitutive rhetoric can be informed by recent work on affect and can provide one point from which to engage affect theory and the “affective dimension of politics.”