As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

As compositionists have constructed a critical discourse on whiteness, they have tacitly theorized how students’ bodies can stifle efforts to both reflect on unfamiliar beliefs and critique their own beliefs. While Composition’s latent theories of “embodied censorship” challenge the notion that rationality or empathy can enable one to transcend one’s own body and thereby fully engage Others’ beliefs, they also divorce the body-belief dialectic from everyday social-material practices and conditions of production. Embodied censorship is represented not as a local process but as an abstracted product, with different forms of censorship tied to corresponding types of reified bodies. Pierre Bourdieu’s and Jennifer Seibel Trainor’s work, when synthesized, present an alternative theory. Bourdieu and Trainor illuminate how bodies, beliefs, and embodied censorship are dialectically, processually produced in everyday social-material practices, such as academic writing rituals. Their materialist social theory can help compositionists design pedagogies that approach academic writing rituals as a site for reworking embodied censorship and enabling students to understand unfamiliar beliefs.

Abstract Rhetoric-composition's turn toward posthumanism and complexity theory promises to help the field grasp contemporary writing. However, the turn's promise is undermined by its disregard for history, overvaluation of complexity, and unwillingness to engage the field's common sense. Giambattista Vico's theories of rhetoric and human development not only challenge the turn's representation of Enlightenment humanism but also point to the turn's inability to help writers participate in today's complex institutions. Vichian ingenium can serve as a touchstone for critical humanist scholarship and pedagogies that seek to chart a course between a bourgeois humanism and a barbaric posthumanism. Notes 1For the helpful comments and criticisms, many thanks go out to the two RR peer reviewers, Louise Phelps and Jeremy Engels, and Timothy Brennan.