Ronald W Greene

Another Materialist Rhetoric

This paper argues for a new materialism. Rhetorical studies can achieve a new materialism by emphasizing how rhetoric traverses a governing apparatus as a technology of deliberation. As such, rhetoric makes possible the ability to judge and plan reality in order to police a population. To achieve this new materialism, I argue that rhetorical studies will need to abandon a logic of representation for a logic of articulation to better account for how rhetorical practices distribute different elements into a functioning network of power.

Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor

ed and captured to perform gendered, nationalized, and raced work—forms of work and labor that can create class structures and class forms, and can distribute bodies along the international division of labor. In other words, by focusing on communicative labor we can understand how communication makes possible the invention of class. As a form of constituent power, however, labor can never be reduced to its capture, command, and control by capital. For Hardt and Negri the cooperative potential of affirmative labor, or more specifically, the qualitative significance of communicative and affective labor, generates a productive excess impossible to calculate and control. The social force of labor “appears simply as the power to act. . . . Anything that blocks this power to act is merely an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle that is eventually outflanked, weakened, and smashed by the critical powers of labor and the everyday passional wisdom of the affects” (2000, 358). Living labor’s power to act demonstrates an ability to challenge and create new values. Therefore, rhetorical agency comes first; it realizes the value necessary for the current regime of capital and the values necessary to challenge the current regime of governance. What does this mean for the political dimensions of rhetorical agency? It means that politics cannot be disconnected from the sphere of bio-political production. To do so would be to provide a place where the revolutionary energy of communicative labor becomes harnessed to the 203 RHETORICAL AGENCY AS COMMUNICATIVE LABOR social division of labor. To take the example of free speech, when free speech becomes a political right disconnected from the constitutive power of labor, it becomes possible to balance the right of free speech against societal protection. In this way, the domain of the political-legal becomes a space for coercive restrictions on the constitutive power of labor. Being political, as Engin Isen highlights, is to disagree with the dominant regime of citizenship. Recall that the political dimension of communicative labor is built into bio-political production’s attempt to harness and capture the constitutive power of communication. As living labor, communication acts; there is no anxiety here about the status of rhetorical agency, because its action generates the value of living labor. Rhetorical agency is everywhere. To fully flesh out the politics of living labor requires a future study on how communicative labor provides new technologies and strategies for a temporal and spatial disagreement with the command logics of bio-po-

Lost convictions : Debating both sides and the ethical self-fashioning of liberal citizens

This paper takes as its point of departure the ethical problematization of debating both sides – having students argue both affirmative and negative on a debate resolution – in order to highlight the role of communication as a cultural technology of liberalism. It argues that debating both sides contributed to the cultural governance of cold war liberalism by separating speech from conviction to cultivate the value of debate as a method of democratic decision-making. The valorization of free and full expression as a pre-requisite for ‘decision by debate’ prepared the ground for dis-articulating debate from cold war liberalism and re-articulating it as a game of freedom that contributes to the moral education of liberal citizens. In so doing, debate becomes a global technology of liberalism creating exceptional subjects by circulating the communicative norms of deliberative democracy.

Y Movies: Film and the Modernization of Pastoral Power

The institutional creation of the Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits, a division of the Industrial Department of the International Committee of the YMCA, is examined to assess why the YMCA turned to film as a mode of public address in its social welfare programs. The archival history supports the claim that the “attraction effect” of film transformed it into a cultural technology for shaping the conduct of industrial workers. The essay concludes by arguing how film contributed to liberalisms modernization of pastoral power by coupling immigrant workers with the pedagogical voice of the YMCA secretary.

“From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow”: Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power

This essay performs a rhetorical cartography of “regional accents” to draw a map of how they articulate regions into, and out of, maps of power. First, the essay isolates the accent of neoliberalism in the constitution of regions through the use of regional trade agreements. Second, the essay tracks a socialist accent for regional power in Samir Amins call for the Global South to execute a political strategy of “delinking.” Third, the essay argues that the rhetorical movement between places in protest, expressed by the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, invents a horizontal regional accent. For places of protest, a horizontal regional accent invents and folds regions of protest into one another to fuel the production of new places of protest. As a political subjectivity, the protester emerges in the crease of a regional fold of protest places as these places make and unmake maps of power.

Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-liberal Governance

In discussing the shift from classical rhetoric to modern rhetoricality, a condition that embeds a ‘‘generalized rhetoric [into] the deepest levels of human existence,’’ John Bender and David Wellbery note the role of advertising: ‘‘Like other forms of mass communication, advertising rehabilitates*indeed renders virtually universal* rhetoricality at once akin to and utterly divorced from classical persuasion.’’ Advertising is like classical rhetoric because advertising retains the instrumental emphasis on persuasion, but uncouples itself from the classical tradition by permeating every sphere of human interaction. What Bender and Wellbery describe as a break between the ancients and the moderns, contemporary US rhetorical studies transformed into its central problematic: How to balance an idea of rhetoric as an art bound by a situated time and place while accounting for the rhetorical character of nearly anything? However, if advertising ‘‘renders virtually universal’’ rhetoricality, then contemporary rhetorical theory ‘‘is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.’’ A political economy of rhetoric, therefore, requires our attention. Typically, though it can be hard to find, rhetorical studies approaches political economy in five ways. First, one can explore the rhetoric of economics as a specialized discourse; second, scholars study public debates that directly or indirectly address the economy; third, rhetorical studies focuses on anti-corporate, anticapitalist, pro-union rhetorical activism; fourth, one can study corporate communication; finally, one can explore the links between rhetorical pedagogy and class. All five perspectives are important and open possibilities for imagining a ‘‘postcapitalist politics.’’ However, our critical practice should do more than rediscover corporate

John Dewey's Eloquent Citizen: Communication, Judgment, and Postmodern Capitalism

Dewey offers rhetorical studies a philosophical modernization of the eloquent citizen. In so doing, an aesthetic-moral theory of communication emerges at the core of human subjectivity. Two consequences are highlighted: First, rhetorical studies is able to re-define itself as a liberal arm of the ethical state normalizing the communicative behaviors of citizens and second, communication is transformed into a moral imperative evacuating the history of communication as a technology of self To better account for the role of communication in postmodern capitalism, rhetorical studies needs an aesthetic-economic theory of communication.

Constitutive complexity: Military entrepreneurs and the synthetic character of communication flows

Chapter 1 Introduction: Communication Constitutes OrganizationLinda L. Putnam, Anne M. Nicotera, and Robert D. McPheeChapter 2 The Communicative Constitution of Organizations: A Framework for ExplanationRobert D. McPhee and Pamela ZaugChapter 3 Agents Of Constitution In Communicad: Constitutive Processes of Communication In OrganizationsRobert D. McPhee and Joel IversonChapter 4 Constitutive complexity: Military entrepreneurs and the synthetic character of communication flowsLarry D. Browning, Ronald Walter Greene, S. B. Sitkin, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David ObstfeldChapter 5 Dislocation and Stabilization: How to Scale Up from Interactions to OrganizationFrancois Cooren and Gail T. FairhurstChapter 6 Organizing from the bottom up?: Reflections on the constitution of organization in communicationJames R. TaylorChapter 7 Theory Building: Comparisons of CCO OrientationsLinda L. Putnam and Robert D. McPhee

Affirming Rhetorical Materialism: Enfolding the Virtual and the Actual

To cite this article: Matthew Bost Matthew Bost is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota. & Ronald Walter Greene Ronald Walter Greene is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota. (2011): Affirming Rhetorical Materialism: Enfolding the Virtual and the Actual, Western Journal of Communication, 75:4, 440-444

Spatial Materialism: Labor, Location, and Transnational Literacy

Responding to the essays submitted to this special issue on space, the author advocates a spatial materialism for the study of communicative practices by positing the critical importance of transnational literacy, media location, and labor.