Bradford Vivian

Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative Politics on September 11, 2002.

Public memorial services held in New York City on September 11, 2002, marked the most important U.S. civic commemoration of the present era. Numerous popular and academic critics excoriated speakers on that day for commemorating the occasion with commemorative declamations instead of offering original speeches. This essay contends that assessing these unusual public eulogies according to post-Romantic conceptions of rhetorical practice overlooks the often powerful role of formulaic speech in shaping the politics of civic commemoration. The essay accordingly argues that state eulogies on the first anniversary of September 11 exemplify the emergence of neoliberal epideictic. Ritualized public praise of neoliberal ideals increasingly constitutes the normative speech of our most important civic ceremonies. The essay concludes that neoliberal epideictic defines citizens’ involvement in partisan affairs and recognition of sociopolitical difference or inequity as irreverent means of sustaining civic memory, tradition, and virtue.

The veil and the visible

The French Education Ministers attempt to ban the Muslim veil from public schools in 1994 renewed familiar tensions between Muslims and the French state‐tensions that originated in Frances colonial era. I argue that in 1994 the veil became the site of a power struggle between French‐Muslims and the French state by virtue of a complex politics of seeing and being seen. The philosophical concept of “the visible,” moreover, reveals the extent to which this politics of seeing constitutes a heretofore unexamined form of rhetoric as epistemic. Such a form of rhetoric makes different subjects known to one another and establishes differential power relations through what is seen and how it is seen. I ultimately conclude, concerning rhetorics epistemic function, that ways of knowing through seeing form a necessary complement to ways of knowing through speech.

Jefferson's other

This essay investigates how various representations of the public memory of Thomas Jefferson function rhetorically. Curiously, such representations depict a past for which no certain record exists. The portrayal of Jeffersons alleged affair with Sally Hemings in novels, films, and other discourses demonstrates that the rhetoric of public memory, which preserves the relevance and utility of the past for audiences in the present, is often sustained, not by a transparent or even plausible understanding of former persons and events, but by profound and potentially irresolvable confusions over the relationship between what is commemorated and those doing the commemorating. The essay scrutinizes how three different forms of rhetoric respond to such confusion by fashioning memories of Jefferson that reflect contemporary desires to explain the mysteries of his enigmatic past. Consequently, the essay argues that the contemporary public memory of Jefferson is defined by a discursive haunting of his official reputation in which various ghostly counterparts are said to represent what the official record can only suggest.

Forum on Arthur Walzer's “Parrēsia, Foucault, and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition”

How many different senses of parrēsia existed between the fifth century BCE and the fifth century CE? This question is no less daunting or problematic than tracing the many different senses of rhetoric over that time. The words parrēsia and rhetoric were highly mobile and have appeared across texts in Western civilization from the ancient Greeks forward. Both words carry multiple connotations over time and within a given time. Both retain their transliterated Greek form in Latin and English texts, even while also translated. Thus, to ask whether parrēsia is a type of rhetoric or rhetoric encompasses parrēsia implies two questions: ‘‘which parrēsia?’’ and ‘‘which rhetoric?’’ Working from the fifth century BCE plays of Euripedes and the speech of the Old Oligarch, as well as fourth century BCE texts by Isocrates, Aristotle, and others, Michel Foucault contrasted the civic parrēsia in those texts with the Platonic schools of the fourth century BCE and later, which advocated a more spiritual and pedagogical parrēsia. Foucault recognized that at least by the Roman era we find, ‘‘some signs of the incorporation of parrēsia within the field of rhetoric,’’ most specifically in Quintilian (Fearless 21). Foucault noted that among the Roman orators, parrēsia, as rhetorical figure, was structured as a zero-figure, a kind of figure that would appear to be without figure, but nonetheless a dimension of rhetoric artfully deployed (or feigned, if you prefer). So we know that Foucault saw parrēsia as multiple and changing over the ancient world, yet, across the four years of transcribed lectures (never intended for publication) that make up Foucault’s work-in-progress on parrēsia, he seems ambivalent on the status and qualities of rhetoric. Such ambivalence likely follows from his deliberate focus on the Platonic tradition of dividing rhetoric from parrēsia. After all, Foucault was exploring the changes in the position of philosopher as truth-teller, and in almost every place where he wrote ‘‘parrēsia is . . .’’ or ‘‘parrēsia is not . . .’’ he wrote in relation to a thinker or school of thought. His subject was not every sense and use of parrēsia in the ancient world, but a particular philosophical parrēsia that emerged in the fourth century BCE in distinction from civic parrēsia and became the model for the philosopher at least up through Hypatia. The Rhetoric Society Quarterly Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 355–381

Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education

Practices of witnessing powerfully modulate perceptions of historical temporality in contemporary liberal-democratic societies. This essay not only acknowledges that acts of witnessing suffuse the rhetoric of historical narration in our time but also examines a more fundamental temporal phenomenon: the sense of historical time peculiar to witnessing as such. Witnessing organizes a discursive window on the past through which audiences are given to understand historical chronology and potentially steer its trajectory toward the ends of symbolic, if not procedural, justice. Such collective perceptions of historical chronology are fundamentally untimely: specters of radically other historical experiences are among the most commonly invoked and uncannily felt historical touchstones of contemporary historical pedagogy, transnational justice, and moral reasoning. The essay delineates essential characteristics of the untimely time that comes to pass in the rhetorical act of witnessing and those customary historical truths and judgments that it organizes and distributes as resources of social, political, and moral influence.

Times of Violence

Time is political. Institutions, economies, and governing regimes directly and indirectly influence how entire populations live out their time on earth. For millennia, ascendant rulers instituted new calendars that communicated temporal structures unlike those of their predecessors. The Julian calendar, to cite a classic example, reformed the prior Roman calendar by order of its namesake, Julius Caesar. The advent of this new time, which occurred in 708 AUC (ab urbe condita, or from ‘‘the founding of the city’’) according to prior Roman dating, is recorded in the more familiar, post-Christian 46 BC (‘‘before Christ’’). ‘‘More than a simple adjustment,’’ David Ewing Duncan writes, ‘‘this reform was a potent symbol not only of Julius Caesar’s newfound authority but also of an empire that believed it had the power to reorder time.’’ Caesar’s commanded declaration of a new public epoch illustrates how political and religious institutions order time to convey authority over the past foundations and future destiny of an entire national or spiritual community. Doing so endows the power and authority of civic or religious rulers with such an ethos of historical inevitability and fundamental correctness that their reign appears coeval with the order of time itself. The ways that authoritative institutions invoke and order time as a means of consolidating and expressing power often engender violence. Conflicting interpretations of holy writ and spiritual obligation have incited bloody religious persecutions and armed conflicts for centuries. Slavoj Žižek contends that secular (not only religious) regimes justify radical police or military action by invoking apocalyptic senses of time: ‘‘Apocalyptic time is the time of the end of time, the time of emergency, of the state of exception when the end is nigh.’’ States of exception in liberal-democratic nations are also times of exception: executive authorities exercise unprecedented forms of violence both within and without national borders by citing as justification allegedly temporary episodes of state emergency.

Memory: Ars Memoriae, Collective Memory, and the Fortunes of Rhetoric

This essay delineates essential features of memory as a salient topos of rhetorical literature, both classical and modern. This essay also considers how both the arts of rhetoric and memory alike underwent cultural devaluation in Western modernity only to reappear in altered forms as compelling objects of analysis. In doing so, the essay contends that current enthusiasms for the study of collective memory in communication and composition studies alike signify forms of simultaneous connection and disconnection with the historical role of rhetoric in the classical art of memory.

Queerly Remembered: Rhetorics for Representing the GLBTQ Past, by Thomas R. Dunn

Thomas R. Dunn’s Queerly Remembered is an important contribution to scholarship on queer history, queer advocacy, and public memory. “How,” Dunn asks, “have gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) advocates of the past and present represented and contested history in endeavors to influence or persuade the judgments by dominant, apparently heterosexual citizens?” (3). The advocacy in question turns on, in Dunn’s rendering, a rhetorical prospect: commemorating, narrating, or representing GLBTQ pasts in ways that both denaturalize and displace the terms of heterosexual history and memory. With Queerly Remembered, Dunn takes a rightful place in the field of rhetoric as a leader in both queer studies and public memory research. His work simultaneously helps to advance scholarship on those topics in ways unconstrained by standard disciplinary affiliations. Dunn orients readers to the aims, methods, and significance of his book in chapter one. He expresses a preference for the heuristic of memory over history, arguing that it offers a “more compelling way to understand GLBTQ pasts today” (6). This preference entails a rebuke of traditional Western investments in history as a seemingly neutral interpretive lens for understanding the past. Dunn consults scholarship on public memory to prove how recent forms of advocacy regarding GLBTQ pasts provocatively balance historically prior deployments of “tactical and ephemeral forms of memory work” against “significant shifts” to “queer monumentality” (13). The author posits that the “queer ‘turn toward memory’ is really a queer return to memory”; “memory,” he writes, “has been a vital resource for homosexual, homophile, and GLBTQ activism for more than a century” (13, emphasis in the original). Dunn’s first chapter thus amounts to a compelling meditation on the very prospect of “queer monumentality,” which he defines as “an ongoing and evolving assortment of efforts by GLBTQ people, institutions, and communities to give their shared pasts a weightiness, timelessness, and grandeur in order to activate collective power and effect social change” (21, emphasis in the original). This development reflects recent civic, artistic, and academic enthusiasms for idioms of collective remembrance; but the turn toward a putatively queer monumentality nonetheless Rhetoric Society Quarterly Vol. 48, No. 5, pp. 537–556

A Review of: Rhetorics of Display, by Lawrence J. Prelli

exposes may have been more the effect of distinct cultural elements—elements that led inevitably to armed conflict—than the cause of the war itself. I honor Roberts-Miller’s argument because, like her, I believe that public rhetoric truly matters, as do studies that seek to understand the consequences of our words. Even so, it’s possible that in this instance, other factors may have mattered more. Fittingly, my quibbles reveal perhaps the greatest strength of Fanatical Schemes. It’s not difficult to argue with Roberts-Miller precisely because she models the very sort of rhetoric she demonstrates proslavery advocates failed to produce. Carefully considering multiple answers to important questions, fairly representing the positions she opposes, and arguing on a consistently rational plane, she invites her reader to further the debates that comprise the book. In this way, she shows us what we truly need to glean from the history of rhetoric. Fanatical Schemes is, therefore, an important work for historians of rhetoric and students of public deliberation, but it is also a useful book for teachers of writing and speech who wish to reconsider the role argumentation plays in their pedagogy.

Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (review)

Life” offer interesting assessments of the personal sacrifices that must be made when staffers sign on to work in an organization that is essentially an “artificial construct.” And longer studies of “The Office of Press Secretary” and the “Office of Communications” provide needed updates to our knowledge of how presidential staffs create and handle their own newsmaking opportunities. As Kumar demonstrates, understanding how various staff members interpreted the flow chart for the Office of Communications in the Clinton administration helps us see how various tasks such as speechwriting were assigned and how they were “cleared” through the chain of command. The persistent reader of The White House World will be rewarded by new insights and some surprises. For example, David Gergen is quoted early in the book reminding readers that campaign staffs who actually “know the guy” must be included in the permanent organizational structure. His view challenges the conventional wisdom that there should be a wall between those of the campaign and those who create policy and govern. Likewise, a Reagan staffer observes that a president’s work style should be the generative force in deciding how the White House staff should be organized: a thoughtful observation that subtly challenges old ideas about the institutional presidency. To be sure, over its nearly four hundred pages various writers sometimes repeat the same advice and occasionally cite the same quotations. This is not necessarily a study that needs to be read from cover to cover. Even so, it helps bring the challenges posed by presidential transitions into better focus. And it is a timely reminder of how much the nation and the president depend on the ambitious staffers who work at the institutional center of our national life.