This essay places rhetorical theories of publicity and the common in conversation around the concept of intimacy. Defined as a felt sense of proximity or closeness, intimacy is a form of affective relation that underlies both private and public worldmaking practices, and that produces investments in certain forms of life and community. Considering the relationship between publicity and the common in terms of intimacy makes clear that dominant forms of contemporary publicity are predicated on racialized and gendered enclosures of intimacy that have dispossessed noncapitalist relationships to land and community and instead fostered intimacies conducive to capital accumulation. Our argument suggests that critical scholars who are concerned with contemporary capitalism’s subjection of life to the market have a common interest in attending to the ways these histories of enclosure shape the horizons of modern publicity. Our argument also suggests further attention be directed to forms of counterintimacy aimed at producing anticapitalist coalition.

This essay develops a rhetorical theory of the commons that accounts for both its ontological and political dimensions and contributes to conversations between new materialist rhetorical scholarship and critical rhetorical theories of human power relations. We develop such a theory by considering how the dimension of ontological entanglement that Ralph Cintron describes as the “deep commons” materializes through systemic organizations of affect that foster some relational capacities at the expense of others. This framing allows us to study capitalism and commoning as affective-rhetorical systems that capacitate the deep commons through distinct practices of boundary-making. Whereas capitalism produces boundaries that treat the deep commons as a source of tendentially limitless growth and enact a split between nonhuman nature and human society, commoning practices draw boundaries aimed at plural and interdependent relation between commons systems and their constitutive outsides, enabling more robust expressions of the deep commons to emerge.

ABSTRACTThis article proposes rhetorical hegemony as a new materialist intervention into the production of alternative political economic futures. It problematizes contemporary theories of hegemony that assert affect as beyond rhetorical engagement, suggesting that these accounts fail to produce viable political economic alternatives because they use, but do not reinvent, the prevailing affective relations. Turning to and extending Foucault's middle and late work to forge a different model, the article discusses rhetorical hegemony as the entangled relationships between materiality and power. In conversation with other contemporary theories, it argues for a practice of rhetorical hegemony that materially recapacitates energetic potential and, consequently, the milieu. The article ends by outlining the rhetorical, political, and intellectual implications of this shift.

Book Review| December 01 2010 Democracy’s Debt Democracy’s Debt. M. Lane Bruner. Joshua S. Hanan Joshua S. Hanan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (4): 754–757. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940519 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Joshua S. Hanan; Democracy’s Debt. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2010; 13 (4): 754–757. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940519 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.