AbstractWriting assessment and social justice rely largely on success-trajectory narratives, which sideline productive failure as a means of resisting normative futurity-based modes of education and policy. This essay offers an alternative perspective on failure in writing assessment and social justice by illustrating how relying on rhetoric as a hope and means for positive change can undermine aims of social justice and a critical education. By examining the queer (non)possibilities for assessment and acceptance without dependence on constant improvement and success, instructors may find more inclusive ways of thinking about the value of rhetoric's role in a generative acceptance of difference.

Mass-Observation’s archives and methodology offer insight for expanding the concept of network to assemblage through deterritorializing and reterritorializing rhetorical aspects of historiography and normative historical narratives. Reading M-O’s archives as “worlds expressing” rather than individual, subjective expressions of a world helps theorize rhetorical networks as less straightforward and accountable, provoking recognition of multiple rhetorical agents that coproduce ambient and reiterative rhythms of materiality.

Charles Abrams and Robert Moses engaged in a decades-long rhetorical skirmish regarding urban housing and planning in New York City. Despite Abrams's stylistic efforts to alter the physical permanent plans of Moses, his efforts for the most part failed to overcome institutionalized power and its ability to cement the public terms of debate, especially slum. Yet Abrams's sensitivity to multiple factors of urban use illustrates his valuation of collective discourse for perceived social problems and provides a reminder of the importance of approaching complex issues with an orthos logos perspective.