Joshua Reeves

License to Kill Trayvon Martin and the Logic of Exception

This essay presents two complementary culprits in the death of Trayvon Martin. First, Zimmerman’s acquittal under Florida’s self-defense codes demonstrates how simple communicative rites allow citizens to undergo a subjective transformation by which they are empowered to act “above the law.” Second, this transformation illustrates a darker side of our cultural dichotomization of speech and violence. Although this dichotomy generally functions to enforce the state’s exclusive privilege of violence, it also has the effect of constructing an escalatory logic between speech and violent acts. Fostered by vague self-defense codes, this escalatory logic of exception—by which the supposed failure of speech effortlessly escalates into its exceptional other—contributes to a cultural climate in which interpersonal conflicts easily escalate into lethal violence.

Police Media: The Governance of Territory, Speed, and Communication

The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communication. In conclusion, we consider the possibilities for resistance in a time when digital police media have given rise to alarming strategies for surveilling populations, stifling dissent, and exerting control over public and private space.

The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy

As a rejoinder to Robert Terrill’s recent analysis of Barack Obama’s 2009 Nobel lecture, this essay more closely examines that address vis-à-vis the historical foundations of just war philosophy. We argue that Obama’s lecture rechannels traditional just war thought by diffusing the potential spatiotemporal reach of American military jurisdiction, praising the supposedly post-political decisions of elite individuals and institutions, and offering ever more inclusive definitions of originary hostile acts that demand the “retribution” of just war. We conclude by addressing the irony that, instead of harnessing that historic occasion for the cause of a renewed global peace, President Obama’s lecture actually lays the moral foundation for future conflicts.

Automatic for the people: the automation of communicative labor

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence is rapidly giving rise to new automated technologies. Among the most important of these innovations is the development of artificially intelligent machines that produce increasingly sophisticated forms of oral and written discourse. As more of our communicative encounters are with artificial agents, our notions of communicative labor, surveillance, and digital rhetoric will have to contend with these extensive shifts. As a step in this direction, the present article evaluates several trends in the automation of oral and written discourse, examining their social and economic impact.

New media, new panics

ABSTRACT When Stuart Hall and his Birmingham School colleagues argued that media technologies were essential to the production of moral panics, they focused on the relationship between mass media and the state. Because new technologies have altered our cultures of ostracism and punishment, we offer a revised analysis of this relationship that examines the role of online shaming in current moral panics. Not only do we analyze the new technological affordances of digital media, we argue that our current shaming culture is symptomatic of a deep-seated political disenfranchisement that leaves subjects grasping to “do something.” Contributing to a social media-driven panic culture that punishes and ostracizes deviants thus stands in for meaningful political participation. Ultimately, we argue that the evolving orientation to public life fostered by these new technologies has created a culture of shaming whereby citizens often prosecute their own discrete moral panics amid the more sustained sense of political crisis that characterizes contemporary life.

Temptation and Its Discontents: Digital Rhetoric, Flow, and the Possible

This essay explores the role of rhetoric in everyday online activities, arguing that scholarship in digital rhetoric can be informed by Raymond Williamss theory of media flow. Turning to Martin Heidegger and John Poulakos, I argue that the Webs rhetoric of the possible encourages a momentum of text consumption by which users are tempted to further immerse themselves in a “flowing” media experience. As digital technologies provide new opportunities for the surveillance and personalization of our Web practices, this article concludes by encouraging scholars to be critical of the tempting possibilities—and possible selves—crafted by this rhetoric.

Of Social Networks and Suicide Nets: Biopolitics and the Suicide Screen:

This article analyzes how the Silicon Valley ethos has influenced the development of screening technologies designed to enforce survival. Although various technologies have been used to ensure the survival of clumsy, sick, depressed, or unpredictable subjects, this article focuses on recent developments in suicide screens—that is, those screening technologies that detect suicidal subjects and aim to prevent acts of suicide. Digital versions of these screens have also emerged: the U.S. military, in particular, has begun developing software designed to analyze returning veterans’ social media posts for hints of suicidal tendencies. Meanwhile, Foxconn, the Asian super-manufacturer that assembles products for Silicon Valley giants like Apple and HP, notoriously developed a network of “suicide nets” designed to prevent its miserable workers from jumping to their deaths. In Foucaultian parlance, while the state and its allies routinely “let die,” suicide threatens the state’s sovereignty over life by introducing a rupture of political intelligibility whereby a community can come to realize its basic biopolitical autonomy.

Taking People Out: Drones, Media/Weapons, and the Coming Humanectomy

The future may or may not bear out my pres ent convictions, but I can not refrain from saying that it is difficult for me to see at pres ent how, with such a princi ple brought to great perfection, as it undoubtedly will be in the course of time, guns can maintain themselves as weapons. We shall be able, by availing ourselves of this advance, to send a projectile at much greater distance, it will not be limited in any way by weight or amount of explosive charge, we shall be able to submerge it at command, to arrest it in its flight, and call it back, and send it out again and explode it at will, and, more than this, it will never make a miss, since all chance in this regard, if hitting the object of attack were at all required, is eliminated. But the chief feature of such a weapon is still to be told; namely, it may be made to respond only to a certain note or tune, it may be endowed with selective power. Directly such an arm is produced, it becomes almost impossible to meet it with a corresponding development. It is this feature, perhaps more than in its power of destruction, that its tendency to arrest the development of arms and to stop warfare will reside.

The State of Babel After the Fall: Philo Judaeus and the Possibility of Rhetoric

This article contextualizes Philo Judaeus’s treatise De Confusione Linguarum in rhetorical and intellectual history. While most interpretations of the Tower of Babel legend have found that its primary function is to explain the dispersion of the world’s diverse nations and languages, Philo argues that the “confusion of tongues” signifies a more basic existential condition. For Philo, this confusion disrupted humankind’s capacity for perfect communication, helping us value rhetorical action as an essential element of the confused, ongoing process of struggle that characterizes our everyday sociality. The confusion of tongues, therefore, simultaneously gave rise to rhetoric and the masses, as it imposed a principle of difference in language and discordant heterogeneity in the social order.