Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgment The authors thank Chris Lehrich for his reflections and advice. Notes 1There are quibbles, however, as there are ample passages in Agrippa's work to suggest that words let us "hack" reality, as it were, when we understand they are symbolic articulations of the virtues/essences of things. For example, see Agrippa 208–213. For a more nuanced, book-length reading of Agrippa's understanding of language, see Lehrich. 2See Leff and Sachs. 3It is instructive to underscore how Vickers opens the essay that Miles argues outlines the "assumptions" Burke, Covino, and Gunn apparently also share: "It is my contention that the occult and the experimental scientific traditions can be differentiated in several ways: in terms of goals, methods, and assumptions. I do not maintain that they were exclusive opposites or that a Renaissance scientist's allegiance can be settled on an either/or, or yes/no, basis. Rather, in many instances, especially the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a spectrum of beliefs and attitudes can be distinguished, a continuum from, say, absolutely magical to absolutely mechanistic poles, along which thinkers place themselves at various points…" (Vickers 95). Such remarks are hardly an index of a vulgar, "binary opposition" that Miles argues is common to all the authors he critiques. Owing to the fact that each author critiques different eras of the occult tradition toward very different ends, it also seems to us rather uncharitable to assert Vickers's "assumptions" are channeling Burke, Covino, and Gunn (Miles, "Occult Retraction" 449). 4The critique, of course, is Derrida's. See especially pages 1–73. 5This is a common reading of Derrida's view. See, for example, Howells (128). Derrida says "as much"—or if you prefer, "as little" (18–26). Covino and Gunn's books begin and conclude with similar observations, respectively. See Covino (9) and Gunn (229). 6Miles has argued similarly elsewhere. In Modern Occult Rhetoric, Gunn argues that the rhetorical dynamics of occultism changed dramatically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a consequence of mass media technologies. In a book review, however, Miles indicts Gunn for failing to examine Agrippa's philosophy—a system developed three centuries before Gunn's period of study. See Miles, "Rev. of." 7Miles's conclusion, for example, first appears in Lehrich's study in the context of a discussion of Derrida's philosophy: "…it is not intrinsically odd that the sixteenth century philosophical movement which was almost entirely destroyed by modern philosophy and science—I refer of course to magic—still haunts the margins of philosophical memory…. It is worth considering the periodic surfacing of magical thought in philosophy after Descartes…, which might provoke us to wonder whether magic has always played the role of modernism's ghostly other" (Lehrich 222). 8For example, Miles argues that Agrippa's rhetoric is better characterized as employing "instructional paradox" rather than Gunn's discussion of a "generative paradox" (which do not seem mutually exclusive), and he concludes drawing on Burke's discussion of paradox. 9See Stark. 10As Burke clearly was. See Burke, Rhetoric of Religion. 11For a recent, exemplary work investigating the occult stranger within, see Lehrich, Citation2009. The authors would like to thank Chris Lehrich for his reflections and advice. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Morgan Reitmeyer Morgan Reitmeyer is a Ph.D. student at Purdue University David Blakesley David Blakesley is a Professor of English at Purdue University William A. Covino William A. Covino is the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the California State University, Stanislaus.

Yod, we're all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. I read time by a corneal implant. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure, and half her teeth are regrown. Her eyes have been rebuilt twice. Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney.... I couldn't begin to survive without my personal [computer] base: I wouldn't know who I was.... We're all cyborgs, Yod. You're just a purer form of what we're all tending toward. -Marge Piercy, He, She and It (150)

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The has become an increasingly popular mode of testing, a staple of more and more placement and proficiency tests. I The following scenario is common: A student receives a topic and the specifications for a piece of writing to be completed in twenty or thirty or forty minutes. The student writes furiously (I mean this in at least two senses). The completed essay is bundled with dozens or hundreds of others and delivered to a roomful of teachers, all cranky with anticipation of their task but glad to pick up some extra money for their pains, who spend about a minute on each essay, reducing it to a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 while they watch the clock and wait for the lunch break, and occasionally chuckle together over a particularly dumb and funny student sentence. Sometime later, the student receives notification of whether she is competent, or proficient, or literate, or whatever label this enterprise is supposed to impose. The absurdity of all this is apparent.2 Good writing comes from a writer with something important to say to an interested reader. But committed writers and interested readers are nowhere in this scenario. It would appear that testing writing means asking students who would rather not write to produce something for readers who would rather not read. Without commitment and interest, all concerned must settle for efficiency: writers try to finish off a topic in minutes, and readers try to finish off each essay in seconds. While complaining about the perversion of writing and reading into a disinterested rush, I must also admit that producing an acceptable writing sample does require, however scarcely, those skills exploited more fully in most academic writing tasks. The writer being tested must invent content, focus and form it into sentences and paragraphs (keeping audience and purpose in mind), revise, and edit. Because writing samples mimic the production of an academic essay, we can conclude that the writing sample test, with all its shortcomings, does test skills relevant to academic writing.3 This conclusion introduces the central problem I wish to consider. When tests equate proficiency, competency, and literacy with writing academic essays, they maintain a severely understated and mistaken

(1981). Blair, byron, and the psychology of reading. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 236-242.