Nathan Stormer | University of Maine (original) (raw)

Books by Nathan Stormer

Michigan State University Press, 2023

Our reading group collectively wrote this volume, written as a multigraph, so we are a group auth... more Our reading group collectively wrote this volume, written as a multigraph, so we are a group author of sorts although Chris Ingraham was the lead instigator and organizer and he and Candice Rai did mighty work bringing it through production. Thanks to all for our time together, the great conversations, and the work.

The site does not accurately portray the authorship - there are six of us listed in this order: Chris Ingraham, John Ackerman, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, Bridie McGreavy, Candice Rai, Nathan Stormer - Chris first because of his lead role, but then alphabetical.

The blurb from the book:

What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument. Understanding the atmospheric and ambient energies of rhetoric underscores the challenges and promises of trying to heal a harmed world from within it. A cowritten “multigraph,” which began in 2018 as a reading group, this book enacts an intimate, mutualistic spirit of shared critical inquiry and play—an exciting new way of doing, thinking, and feeling rhetorical studies by six prominent scholars in rhetoric from communication and English departments alike.

https://msupress.org/9781611864793/rhetorical-climatology/

Sign of Pathology demonstrates that from the nineteenth century forward abortion became a sign of... more Sign of Pathology demonstrates that from the nineteenth century forward abortion became a sign of social pathology within U.S. medicine, indicating to physicians that the culture was ill, attacking itself during and through pregnancy in a wrong-headed attempt to cope with reproduction. To know the extent and character of abortion was to place the United States in history; accordingly, medical discourse required a collective memory of the state of abortion not only to affect a remedy, but also to estimate the nation’s future and to take its measure across time.

“In Sign of Pathology, Nathan Stormer provides an original genealogical reading of the U.S. medical profession’s public discourses about abortion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anyone who appreciates Foucauldian perspectives should find admirable Stormer’s precisely developed argument that these medical discourses ‘made the chaotic material conditions of abortion’s morbidity rhetorically capacious for biopolitics.’”
—Celeste M. Condit, University of Georgia

“Nathan Stormer has written a stunning book, beautifully illustrating how rhetorical struggles over and through abortion have long been about situating ourselves—and pregnant women—in time and place. Civilization is recursive to the maternal body, with abortion positioned as a sign of collective disorder. It is precisely because abortion is a medicalized national metric that the issue is so intractable. Defined through biopolitics, abortion is perceived as a collective, irreparable wound, and ongoing political struggles reliant on familiar frameworks only deepen this intractability. Stormer’s elegant genealogy, both diagnostic and gently prognostic, has the capacity to shift how we see human reproduction and our place in it.” --Monica J. Casper, University of Arizona

Articulating Life's Memory offers a unique view of the history of abortion in early America. Nath... more Articulating Life's Memory offers a unique view of the history of abortion in early America. Nathan Stormer's work moves beyond general histories of medicine, science, and women; it provides specific insight into how the earliest medical writings on abortion served to create cultural memory. Nineteenth-century medical texts presented the act of abortion as a threat to the carefully circumscribed concepts of nation and race. Stormer analyzes a wealth of literature (and illustrations) from the period to explore the rhetorical techniques that led early Americans to presume that abortion put the integrity of all of American culture at risk. The book's first part provides a layered context for understanding medical practices within the rhetoric of memory formation and sets early antiabortion efforts within the wider framework of nineteenth-century biopolitics and racism. In Part II of the study, Stormer examines the substance of the memory constituted by these early medical practices. Making a major contribution to the study of rhetoric, Articulating Life's Memory will be invaluable to scholars researching reproductive rights and feminist and cultural histories of medicine.

Reviews:

Articulating Life's Memory is a timely and provocative book that restores a now-forgotten history to contemporary rhetoric and debates about abortion. Not only does this book give us new insight into the historical development of antiabortion rhetoric, it also illustrates how physicians and medical practices contributed to an understanding of abortion as a central threat to the national, racial, and sexual 'integrity' of the United States. (Carol Stabile, University of Pittsburgh )

This book contains a number of fascinating themes, particularly with respect to the evolving relationship of male physicians to their female patients, as they read the body using new instruments and techniques. (Journal of American History )

This book is a fascinating read and makes a major contribution to the history of the abortion debate and to application of rhetorical theory. (Rhetoric & Public Affairs )

This book does an admirable job of synthesizing significant works written on the wider topics of gender, women's bodies, and women's health. (Deborah Kuhn McGregor, University of Illinois, Springfield )

The book is rich with historical evidence, complex arguments, and critical insights. (Women and Language )

This book is a very important contribution to the ongoing work in the cultural dynamics performed by biomedical discourses of the nineteenth century. It is also an important case study into the value of post-humanist rhetorical methodologies for generating new knowledges about the constraints placed on traditional forms of public argumentation. (Ron Greene, University of Minnesota )
(from Amazon.com)

Articles by Nathan Stormer

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2024

The "end of the world" trope can be rote in popular culture, but its critical deployment is not s... more The "end of the world" trope can be rote in popular culture, but its critical deployment is not so and exposes something about rhetoric's relationship to humanness and to humanism, which is that the capacity for rhetoric acts as a limit of humanness. Such tropes are often used to recast "world" as "worlds" to envision humanness anew. Multiplication of the worlds of humans presents a convoluted problem because of rhetoric's investment in humanism, but more so because of the way that rhetoric sits at the limit of variation for humans and their worlds. The essay addresses humanism as an organizing concern whose belief set is disputed and changeable and discusses how rhetoricity brackets the diversification of the human as multiple. The essay argues that a capacity for rhetoric, undefinable even as speech, permeates the (dis) continuum of humanness, such that the conserving and splintering of humanness becomes rhetoric's troubled place.

Rhetorical Climatology: By A Reading Group, 2023

This chapter is part of a multi-graph. I am lead author on it but we collectively composed the b... more This chapter is part of a multi-graph. I am lead author on it but we collectively composed the book. I suggest the following author attribution for this chapter: Nathan Stormer, Chris Ingraham, John Ackerman, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, Bridie McGreavy, and Candice Rai. The usual practice would be to treat the group as the book's editors, but you will see we each comment within the chapters (the initials on footnotes indicate the co-author making that comment). There really isn't a convention that applies for a book like this so do as you think is best, but I would prefer having my co-authors on any citation for this chapter, i.e. Stormer et al.

Something like an abstract for this chapter:

Writing this, I am motivated by the exigent need to account for Whiteness, which scholars of color and allies have repeatedly demonstrated is constitutive of the study of rhetoric and by the simultaneous need to account for anti-Blackness, which Black scholars, writers, and artists have repeatedly demonstrated is constitutive of Whiteness. At first glance, this seems dyadic, recentering Whiteness against Blackness, rather than thinking triadically perhaps (“European-Negro-Indian”) as Sylvia Wynter advocates, or figuratively as Anne Anlin Cheng does regarding “Asian/Asian American women in American culture," or intersectionally as Kimberlé Crenshaw and many others have argued for. However, I am intent on accounting for anti-Blackness as decentralized within a Whitened environment, not dyadically, such that it variably affects power configurations. I ask, how to think about Whiteness in its anti-Blackness and in terms of rhetoricity if antagonisms are racialized and highly configurable? How to talk about race, rhetoric, and anti-Blackness without making White identity formation against otherness primary, or blurring dispossessive, territorializing projects and their violence into one another, or perhaps worse, establishing hierarchical “taxonomies of violence”?

Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2020

Discussion of this article on Live Theory podcast (thanks to Ryan Leack, Ellen Wayland-Smith, and... more Discussion of this article on Live Theory podcast (thanks to Ryan Leack, Ellen Wayland-Smith, and Vorris Nunley): https://www.livetheory.org/podcast/episode/314032bd/ep9-nathan-stormer-rhetoric-by-accident

This essay presents a concept of rhetoric by accident, which understands accidents in regard to the materiality of affection (i.e., the condition of being affected) and in regard to the unconditioned rhetoricity of affectability. The concept of accidental rhetoric put forth depends on the ontological condition of openness, so first affect is stipulated in relation to the porousness of material life to explain the inevitability of affection and provide the basis for understanding rhetoric by accident. Then the accident is defined in alignment with material openness. Rather than consider accidents in terms of human control over contingencies, accidents are defined by the contingency of purposiveness to affection. That affect occurs without purpose means that beings experience rhetoric without a plan (i.e., by accident). The essay then considers how rhetoric by accident is part of any particular rhetoric's existence, namely as a horizon of evolution and diversification for rhetoric.

Communication and the Public, 2020

This essay argues that pathology as an analytical form functions as the ethical critique of mutua... more This essay argues that pathology as an analytical form functions as the ethical critique of mutual vulnerability. In the broad sense of assessing what is life-giving and life-taking, a sustained critical engagement with pathological forms circulating through public life positions the study of rhetoric as a kind of immunotherapy for democracy. In that sense, embracing pathology as a critical analytic accepts biopower (expansively construed) as the operative framework for politics, which would seem like a kind of surrender to life-under-assault as the landscape of power. However, if wounds and their pathologies are understood as ethically ambiguous, it is possible to envision the critical potential of pathologia not only as immunotherapeutic but also as constitutive of new configurations of being together. Contrasted with a conception of pathology that presupposes a fixed difference between vital and morbid conditions, it is suggested that pathology be more precisely considered as the ethically ambiguous project of defining vitality and life that is “more than normal.”

Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, eds. Bridie McGreavy, Justine Wells, George F. McHendry, Jr., and Samantha Senda-Cook (New York: Palgrave), 2018

"Even within the circle of the special science we may find diversities of functioning not to be e... more "Even within the circle of the special science we may find diversities of functioning not to be explained in terms of that science. But these diversities can be explained when we consider the variety of wider relationships of the pattern in question."
-Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought

Not everything within the circle of ecology is ecological and, similarly, not everything within the circle of rhetoric is rhetorical. As discussion of ecology within rhetoric blossoms, this volume demonstrates that each functions within the other so we ought to "consider the variety of wider relationships of the pattern in question," as Whitehead advises. One can and should view this collection as a series of steps in a rapidly moving dance between two fields, but I prefer to consider the way this volume epitomizes a distinctively fluid, transitional space that brings together scholars who would not normally collaborate. Doing so, I discuss the commingling of rhetoric and ecology as a fluctuating margin that forms its own environment.

[Afterword to Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life - https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319657103]

Lisa Meloncon and J. Blake Scott (Eds.), Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (New York: Routledge)

Susan Wells and Nathan Stormer: This paper discusses the state of histories and historiography wi... more Susan Wells and Nathan Stormer: This paper discusses the state of histories and historiography within research on the discourses of health and medicine. Regarding histories, we trace the relative decline of research on previous eras in our field and consider the reasons for it. We consider what our field might learn from study of medicine before and during the professionalization of the field in the mid-nineteenth century. The abandonment of historical work, we argue, could cut our field off from critical conceptual resources. We describe how some obstacles to historical work are being removed and suggest some ways of incorporating historical work into the ongoing conversation of medical rhetoric and health communication. Regarding historiography, we consider the value of situating discourses of health and medicine in time and place, which includes what is typically understood as history as well as the employment of historiographic methods to situate the present as a historical moment. We demonstrate not only that rhetorical histories are important works for research on the discourses of health and medicine, but also that the connection between histories and historiography should not be overlooked. It is unwise to borrow historiographic practices without deepening our understanding of the past.

Rhetoric is multiple and mutable in the sense that there is more than one kind of rhetoric and an... more Rhetoric is multiple and mutable in the sense that there is more than one kind of rhetoric and any particular rhetoric is highly adaptable to the point that what qualifies as rhetoric according to scholar A may be unrecognizable as such to scholar B. It is not safe to assume that we can account for rhetoric as a multiplicity or in its mutability. Despite an arsenal of terms to characterize rhetoric, how to talk about it as diverse?
This essay first conceptualizes material “diversity” and presents a borrowed term, polythesis, to give some character to the problem of rhetoric as ontologically one and many. Second, the essay discusses genealogy as an approach that enables the sorting of different rhetorics without producing a fixed taxonomy. Parsing rhetoric’s multiplicity requires mobile discriminations and should be paired with a methodology sensitive to ontological flux. As historical ontologies, genealogies of different rhetorics can produce meaningful distributions while emphasizing impermanence and changeability.

Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2017

Rhetoric teems with ecologically-inclined thoughts. This essay’s interest in ‘ecology’ concerns r... more Rhetoric teems with ecologically-inclined thoughts. This essay’s interest in ‘ecology’ concerns rhetoric’s multiple ontologies. The authors revise three commonplaces of theory to support discussions that follow from understanding rhetoric’s ontology as an emergent, materially diverse phenomenon: from agency to capacity, from violence to vulnerability, and from recalcitrance to resilience. The proposed commonplaces treat ecology as an orientation to patterns and relationships in the world, not as a science. The essay is organized by the three, interrelated transitions. The first transition defines capacity more fully in contrast to symbol-use as human agency. The second moves from thinking of rhetorical force as imposition, which is tied to violence, to a distributed sense of capacity derived from mutual vulnerabilities between entities. The third suggests that the persistence of rhetorical capacities stems from systemic adaptability and sustainability (resilience), rather than individuated abilities to resist (recalcitrance).

Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2015

This paper explores the material relationship of hunger to rhetoric.

Environmental Communication, 2013

Land-use changes can interrupt relationships to place, threaten community identity, and prompt i... more Land-use changes can interrupt relationships to place, threaten community identity, and prompt instability, altering the social and physical context and impacting the present and future state of the social ecological system. Approaches that map system changes are needed to understand the effects of natural resource decisions and human nature interactions. In this article, we merge theories of articulation, the event, and symbolic territory into a critical framework to analyze online newspaper article responses and blogs referencing a land-use controversy in the State of Maine, USA. Application of this framework reveals land-use controversies as place-making events that alter contexts and sense of place, and precipitate the re-articulation of identity in relation to, and through,symbolic territory.

This essay proposes the genealogical study of remembering and forgetting as recursive rhetorical ... more This essay proposes the genealogical study of remembering and forgetting as recursive rhetorical capacities that enable discourse to place itself in an ever-changing present. Mnesis is a meta-concept for the arrangements of remembering and forgetting that enable rhetoric to function. Most of the essay defines the materiality of mnesis, first noting the limitations of studying recursivity within dominant approaches remembering and forgetting in rhetorical studies, then describing mnesis as the performative necessity to fold the past into the present so as to provide “now” with a sense of place. After setting a foundation, the essay closes with a sketch of how to produce a genealogy of recursion.

This essay analyzes the collective mnemonics embedded in the statistical discourse of Planned Par... more This essay analyzes the collective mnemonics embedded in the statistical discourse of Planned Parenthood’s 1955 conference, _Abortion in the United States_. Conferees recalled a culture that was diseased, remembered both through social data on abortion pathology and epidemiology. The essay conceptualizes how to think of social data as a collective memory of secrets that is incumbent to biopower, particularly regarding statistical anonymity as a form of strategic amnesia. Although primarily a study of this conference, the essay notes the broader importance of collective memory and secrecy for the study of biopower.

This essay argues for articulation as a mediating logic for the analysis of biopower. Prenatal sp... more This essay argues for articulation as a mediating logic for the analysis of biopower. Prenatal space, particularly as it emerged around biomedicine and abortion, is used to demonstrate this idea. Prenatal space divides life within itself, forming a heterotopia “before life” where regimes of living converge in new and sometimes threatening ways around how to reproduce ethically. However, the history of abortion indicates a general strategy for controlling the political contingencies made possible through prenatal space. Relying on modernist space-time logic, nineteenth and twentieth century physicians reduced the practice of abortion to a sign of civilization, with some physicians contending abortion befitted savagery of the past, and others contending criminalized abortion was a relic of outmoded moralism. Wanted and unwanted regimes of living were reduced spatially to representations of time and segregated on a historical scale of value. From this example it is argued that mistaking the mediation of biopolitics as essentially representational diminishes the materiality of space and mutes biopolitical analysis.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Jan 1, 2008

This essay argues that popular images of the unborn by Lennart Nilsson and Alexander Tsiaras cons... more This essay argues that popular images of the unborn by Lennart Nilsson and Alexander Tsiaras constitute a rhetorical commonplace, “life.” The condition of that commonplace is a relationship of sublime wonder with the unborn that aesthetically demarcates topography for discourse on the order of life. However, that sublime relationship is enacted through an indirect mode of address that does not require the feeling of awe to function. Further, it is not an ordinary commonplace but a heterotopic one that establishes a terminal through which one can locate each life in relation to genes, galaxies, forces of creation, and any other living creature.

Michigan State University Press, 2023

The blurb from the book:

https://msupress.org/9781611864793/rhetorical-climatology/

Reviews:

This book is a fascinating read and makes a major contribution to the history of the abortion debate and to application of rhetorical theory. (Rhetoric & Public Affairs )

The book is rich with historical evidence, complex arguments, and critical insights. (Women and Language )

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2024

Rhetorical Climatology: By A Reading Group, 2023

Something like an abstract for this chapter:

Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2020

Communication and the Public, 2020

Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, eds. Bridie McGreavy, Justine Wells, George F. McHendry, Jr., and Samantha Senda-Cook (New York: Palgrave), 2018

[Afterword to Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life - https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319657103]

Lisa Meloncon and J. Blake Scott (Eds.), Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (New York: Routledge)

Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2017

Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2015

This paper explores the material relationship of hunger to rhetoric.

Environmental Communication, 2013

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Jan 1, 2008

B. Dow and J. Wood (Eds.), SAGE Handbook on Gender and Communication, (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE) , Jan 1, 2006

This essay suggests a way to historicize different rhetorical practices--in effect, alternative w... more This essay suggests a way to historicize different rhetorical practices--in effect, alternative ways to write genealogies of diverse rhetorics. A certain distinction between culture and nature is a fundamental organizing concept in humanistic rhetoric that has circumscribed scholars' ability to appreciate rhetoric that does not emanate from the subject as conceptualized in Greco-Roman theory and the theory derived from it. Accordingly, scholarship is preoccupied with the ways that the motivated discourse of subjects leaps the gap between discourse and things to affect the material world. Rather than treating it as natural, the formation of a gap between discourse and things is defined in this essay as a performance articulated through everyday practices, which shifts the focus from human agents to practices. Articulation is a performative concept about the ordering of matter and meaning. To articulate is to produce bodies, language, and the space of their relative disposition through shared acts. Ultimately, practices establish different orders of discourse and things and, thus, condition the relationships that enable diverse modes of rhetoric to function. Historicizing the order articulated by practices becomes a way to trace genealogies of diverse rhetorics.

Mass representations of the sublime use apostrophe as a mode of address that normalizes a moment ... more Mass representations of the sublime use apostrophe as a mode of address that normalizes a moment of expected failure of discourse. Regardless of whether a viewer experiences "sublimity," mass representations of what is supposedly beyond discourse embody the expected limits of communication, aestheticizing conditions of impossibility for discourse, and thereby constituting a space wherein the humanist subject may become a recognizable self in a public sense. Constituting a relationship between the spectator as human and the sublime objects as greater than human, a mass reproduced sublime thus helps establish discursive spaces of humanism. Although the aesthetics of the sublime can be exceptionally varied, the essay applies these ideas to popular Ansel Adams photographs, which illustrate the problems of attempting to represent the unrepresentable and the invocation of a particular kind of subjectivity as a commonplace.

Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2023

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2020

In The Art of Gratitude, Jeremy Engels proposes that a revised understanding of gratitude can sup... more In The Art of Gratitude, Jeremy Engels proposes that a revised understanding of gratitude can support "a new politics that is not based on malicious rhetorical strategies" but rather on "the possibility for a democratic politics oriented toward the common good" (9). This, his third book, continues his analysis of U.S. democratic culture through the public life of emotions within political rhetoric; however, unlike his previous works that considered ugly emotions (fear-mongering as "enemyship" and resentment, respectively), this book looks toward a hopeful emotion. Engels's fervent desire to heal a political culture poisoned by toxic emotions that enervate democracy gives the book a buoyant energy.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2020

If you are like me, the most immediate reaction to Casey Boyle’s Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice... more If you are like me, the most immediate reaction to Casey Boyle’s Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice will be admiration for the depth of the scholarship. Boyle is impressively conversant in posthuman and new materialist theory and equally so in theories of rhetoric that engage with those literatures. As the title portends, he presents practice as a key idea for thinking about and performing rhetoric, but his contribution is to reimagine practice through an ecological ontology. The work is indebted to many philosophers, such as Deleuze and Guattari, but much more so to Gilbert Simondon and his concepts of “transduction” and “transindividualism.” In fact, to my knowledge, Boyle’s book is the first philosophy of rhetoric to ground itself in Simondon’s thought, so for that reason alone scholars familiar with discussions of rhetoric and posthumanism will be rewarded by learning more about Simondon and what one might make of his work. It is a challenging, ambitious book that asks readers to view rhetoric as a thoroughly material, affective practice.

Rhetoric Review, 2018

Jason Kalin, Diane Keeling, and Nathan Stormer, reviewers: In the introduction to Kenneth Burke +... more Jason Kalin, Diane Keeling, and Nathan Stormer, reviewers: In the introduction to Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman, Chris Mays, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins acknowledge that Kenneth Burke and posthumanism may be an odd cou- pling. So we wonder: Why turn to Burke to respond to contemporary epistemological, ontological, and technological entanglements? Burke—ostensibly a modernist and humanist—grounds his project in the human subject with his “Definition of Man” as “bodies that learn language,” thus establishing a privileged ontological position for the human (85). In contrast, posthumanist thinking tends to emphasize a less hierarchical ontology, diffusing the human subject by placing her within symbolic and material systems or ecologies always already in the process of becoming otherwise. The editors carefully note that they are not claiming Burke as a posthumanist, though some of the contributors come close to doing so; rather, they propose that many of Burke’s ideas and attitudes are compatible with posthumanism. These compatibilities offer a way of reading “the contradictions among Burke’s body of work and posthumanism as generative, as opportunities for invention, revision, and, importantly, transdisciplinary knowledge-making” (6). This collection “Burkes Burke,” returning to him a certain “moltenness” that makes his thinking a resource for ambiguity and transformation regarding posthuman rhetoric(s) ([16]; Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945/1969: xix). As Robert Wess notes in his chapter, Burke develops the term “counter-nature” in relation to the Latin “contra,” which, according to Burke, “can mean ‘against’ both in the sense of ‘opposed to’ and in the sense of ‘in close contact with’” (86). Reading Burke counter to posthumanism attempts to establish, however tentatively, new boundaries of and futures for the human, for rhetoric, and, as many of the contributors argue, for ethical living in a world wrought with ecological crises and technological anxieties.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2018

As I read Helene Shugart's new book, Heavy: The Obesity Crisis in Cultural Context, I became awar... more As I read Helene Shugart's new book, Heavy: The Obesity Crisis in Cultural Context, I became aware of just how much public attention is paid to obesity. I don't live in a bubble; I already knew the attention was extensive, but it was eye opening to be presented with the full range of discourses about obesity, and the extent to which the public marinates in them. As each chapter unfolded and Shugart followed the different threads, from official stories of calorie packing to personal stories of disgrace, it was all very familiar. As I said, I don't live in a bubble, but I also don't make a point of seeking out rhetoric about obesity either, so the fact that I was aware without having been aware of different shows, individuals, public and private campaigns, and so on was in itself valuable. I, we, everyone living in a US dominated media environment dwells in over-saturated discourse on obesity, and it is more subtle and complicated than the disarmingly simple, official story of calorie imbalance would let on. Skillfully , in readable, well-paced prose, Shugart answers her central questions: " What are the various stories about obesity that are being told today? Why? And what are their impli-cations? " (1).

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2018

Diane Keeling, Nathan Stormer, and Jason Kalin reviewers: In Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Hawhee e... more Diane Keeling, Nathan Stormer, and Jason Kalin reviewers: In Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Hawhee extends and synthesizes many of her signature concerns into a novel reading of rhetorical history from Aristotle to Erasmus. She models her pan-historiographic method, which she has previously elaborated on (Hawhee & Olsen), to study how sensation organizes rhetoric not only as a bodily art, but also as a theory of feeling with much to say about nonrational forms of interaction. Delicately, with inspiring ease, she traces the way in which animals, indeed animality, subtend rhetorical theories of perception and affect from Aristotle forward.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2017

Laurie E. Gries has written an accessible, clear model of how to employ new materialist philosoph... more Laurie E. Gries has written an accessible, clear model of how to employ new materialist philosophy for the rhetorical analysis of what she terms " visual things. " For scholars and students who are looking for a grounded introduction to new materialism and rhetoric, I recommend Still Life with Rhetoric. For those who are more familiar with the literature but looking for direction on what this body of thought can do for them analytically, I recommend the book highly. Gries introduces an approach and provides a nuanced example of its application that will appeal to many. One may or may not embrace all of what Gries suggests, but regardless she provides a valuable set of principles and practices that may help others focus their own projects. The last several years have witnessed an eruption of scholarship within rhetoric informed by the overlapping literatures of actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, and speculative realism, among other names. " New materialism " has been adopted as the uncomfortable, contested term of art among rhetoricians for this complicated nest of ideas (others outside the field use it similarly but it is hardly agreed on as a catch-all term, nor should it be). One of the refreshing things about Gries's book is that she does not attempt to parse the various schools of thought too closely or join the turf battles that often mark the literature. Although such discussions are important and can be productive, they are readily available elsewhere. Instead, she accepts the general moniker but clarifies her thinking by focusing on specific concepts in relation to an extended case study filled with images of the red, white, and blue Obama Hope image that Shepard Fairey produced for the 2008 presidential cycle and that has since become a staple in our visual field. Gries joins a growing number of rhetoric scholars influenced by some vein of new materialist thinking to focus on methodology, which is understandable and welcome. Given that new materialism problematizes basic premises of humanism and agency, it is unsurprising that scholars would want to re-format the methods of analysis to align with new premises. What sets Still Life with Rhetoric apart is the precision with which Gries defines and enacts these revised premises as guidelines for rhetorical analysis.

Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2017

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Jan 1, 2015

The healthcare system is in crisis. We have been told this repeatedly as we have also been told t... more The healthcare system is in crisis. We have been told this repeatedly as we have also been told that failure to act will produce a system collapse. Robert B. Hackey explores the history of this characteriza- tion in Cries of Crisis: Rethinking the Healthcare Debate. The rethinking he offers revolves around the fact that since Richard Nixon declared in 1969 that the United States faced a “massive crisis,” healthcare reform has been framed through a remarkably steady narrative of emergency. Hackey argues that a crisis mentality has not produced reform and that if a public debate is to begin yielding results, we must reframe our discussions of healthcare. In the end, Hackey’s thesis is that healthcare rhetoric is broken and unable to produce functional deliberation. Using the language of medicine to orga- nize his project, Hackey argues that the problems facing healthcare are chronic, not acute, and so if we are to make improvement, public discourse should talk about these problems as long-term conditions. It is not unlike the rhetorical diffıculties in treating poverty as a war, although the parallels of medical rhetoric to war rhetoric are not part of Hackey’s analysis.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, Feb 4, 2015

The impact of new materialism on the study of rhetoric is indefinite, but one cannot deny the fac... more The impact of new materialism on the study of rhetoric is indefinite, but one cannot deny the fact that it is having an impact. Simple but important questions, such as how new materialism differs from either rhetorical materialism or material rhetoric, have not been addressed rigorously, even as new materialism scrambles familiar questions such as whether rhetoric is a byproduct of humans or humans are a byproduct of rhetoric. More fundamentally, new materialism reignites smoldering questions of what rhetoric is and whether studying it is valuable because new materialism abandons a bifurcated ontology in favor of a flat one, shifting “from a world of nature versus culture to a heterogeneous monism of vibrant bodies” (121). I believe that new materialism challenges us to reconsider the relationships between rhetoric and power and, indeed, the powers of rhetoric. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things is an important text for scholars of rhetoric who would take up such questions.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2013

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is sui generis. A casual observer might sense this, but a reader of the f... more The AIDS Memorial Quilt is sui generis. A casual observer might sense this, but a reader of the fine anthology Remembering the AIDS Quilt, edited by Charles E. Morris III, will be overwhelmed by the unparalleled qualities and conundrums of the Quilt. One of the most potent conundrums is remembering a traveling, crowd-sourced, parse-able memorial (that was never ‘‘just’’ a memorial and grows still). Morris rightly puts the irony front and center with the volume’s title. I write as someone who has not experienced the Quilt but through overhead images. After reading 12 wide-ranging, often affecting, essays, I am struck by how much the Quilt is unlike other memorials. I am struck by the many personal, political, conceptual, and methodological issues staked by the short, freighted history of the Quilt. Like any anthology there are ups and downs, but this one is well worth reading, whether you are interested in the history of HIV/AIDS, gay activism, public memory, or critical methods.

Presented at the NCA Convention, National Harbor, MD, 11-17-2023 This essay forwards a concept o... more Presented at the NCA Convention, National Harbor, MD, 11-17-2023

This essay forwards a concept of ontic passion — the indeterminate active/passive condition of material vulnerability — and argues that ontic passion interrupts the use of humanist ontology to explain freedom. To do that, the essay turns to Denise Ferreira da Silva, who argues that Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conceptions of self-determination are both conditioned and threatened by affectability, meaning subjugation to external forces (Global). Further, she contends that necessity "provides the metaphysical grounds for modern thought" (Unpayable 48) by instituting a particular division between natural and moral being and separating existents into those who are determined and those free (enough) to leverage necessity to produce themselves and the world around them. In that, the antagonism of freedom and necessity relative to affectability exposes the raciality at the core of accounts of Human affective capacity. Building from Silva, this paper argues that: a) affectability, as material vulnerability, is both unresisting and irresistible - an ontic passion that acts as it is acted upon (active/passive); b) that setting the active against the passive supports the Human as that which is distinctly capable of shaping its conditions and itself; and c) that explanations of rhetoricity that extend a humanized capacity to affect conditions extends necessity as the metaphysical ground of freedom. To paraphrase Harney and Moten, to humanize freedom is to racialize freedom (15). Regarding affectability, substituting ontic passion for an active/passive antagonism provides a path to thinking rhetoricity without humanizing it through a racial analytic of necessity and freedom.

National Communication Association Convention, "Rhetoric as Nature" pre-conference, New Orleans, Nov. 16,, 2022

John Drabinski describes tidal presence within Édouard Glissant’s writing as "shoreline thinking ... more John Drabinski describes tidal presence within Édouard Glissant’s writing as "shoreline thinking . . . sited, cited, and caught sight between the Middle Passage and the composition of composite cultural forms. The Middle Passage renders the beginning abyssal. Glissant’s poetics makes philosophy of this beginning. It is witness to water, sand, sun, death and life." We use shoreline thinking to address the "rhetoric of nature," asking not only how rhetoric is (part) "of" nature, but what is nature in Glissant? Ontologies that begin with or that rhizomatically connect with slavery, colonization, and gendered racial violence require fundamentally rethinking “common sense” categories like nature and culture, which Glissant persistently deploys and confuses. Through "errantry" (wandering) within his poetics of Relation, Glissant treats culture as nature - not Nature as Culture's scene but as a totality-in-movement wherein being adaptively enculturates itself via Relation. Nature becomes "ontic passion" we argue, meaning an active-passive state of errantry. This supplants errantry as ambulatory wandering with place as wandering; space is a grid one sojourns across no more, but a panoply of dispersions and folds brought into contact, and time is not an arrow but an indivisible experience of unfolding. Shoreline thinking uniquely models the rhythmic errantry of place, wherein difference is lived in opacity as incommensurate, dependent, and adaptive being. The errantry of place refigures racial, sexual, and colonial logics of "nature" and, doing so, opens the possibility that rhetoric is not "of" nature per se, but common to places instead.

National Communication Association Convention, New Orleans, Nov. 19, 2022

Rhetoric’s Western tradition has been described as fundamental to humanism many times; Ernesto Gr... more Rhetoric’s Western tradition has been described as fundamental to humanism many times; Ernesto Grassi’s work on Italian thought is a prime example. But it is also right to say that humanism is fundamental to conceptualizing rhetoric on Western terms. That is, European humanism (a matrix of ideas that is neither stable or consistent) forms a place where rhetoric resides as it varies and changes, being constrained but also splintered by humanism in crucial ways. In this presentation I will discuss humanism as rhetoric’s place, but I understand place in terms of inheritance, not topos. Humanism requires one to inhabit its problems and trajectories such that the presumptive unity that humanism provides to rhetoric, its legacy, is “only in the injunction to reaffirm in choosing . . . one must filter, sift, criticize . . . If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it” (Derrida). I will explore how the injunction to recur to humanism emplaces rhetoric in a perpetually Western “present” from which rhetoric’s fractured past is sifted and criticized and its many futures are projected forward. I close by synthesizing Chela Sandoval’s concept of “differential movement” with Édouard Glissant’s concept of “errantry” to imagine a way of inhabiting rhetoric’s humanist inheritance in the hope of separating its futures from that very injunction.

Rhetoric Society of America Conference, 2022

The “end of the World” trope can be crushingly rote in apocalyptic discourses, but its critical d... more The “end of the World” trope can be crushingly rote in apocalyptic discourses, but its critical deployment is not, and it goes to the heart of rhetoric’s self-concept. My starting point is obvious and well-marked: world is not severable from Man, so the end of the world is about the end of Man. Etymologically, the term “world” derives from Germanic languages and refers to the life of mankind, being a compound term of “man” and “age” with the literal meaning of “age of man.” Unsurprisingly, the “end of the world” invoked by many feminist, post-structural, and posthuman theorists, as well as by Black, decolonial, and science studies scholars is often a comment on the death of Man’s entitlement as the organizing matrix for life on earth. I’ll pull at three threads of “end of the world” troping, all of which revolve around diffracted conceptions of world and, concomitantly, humanity. Then I pose two questions raised by multi-world ontologies for the potential of humanism in rhetoric: First, how do diffracted ‘worlds’ impact rhetoric’s know-ability? Second, can co-extensive being function as an orienting heart of ‘worlds’ without contradicting a logic of diffraction?

As this most miserable year stumbles along, great energy pours into mobilizing against antiblackn... more As this most miserable year stumbles along, great energy pours into mobilizing against antiblackness after George Floyd’s lynching. Black Lives Matter is vibrant in new ways because people (particularly like me) are allying with the movement at least as a cause if not as a matter of life and death. Questions hover around the how and why of a shamefully delinquent alliance against antiblackness (and it’s real depth). However so, reflecting on my place and the disciplinary conversation on Whiteness, I want to think about antiblackness as part of rhetoric, to “enunciate its characteristics.” To that end, I feel Christina Sharpe’s antiblackness as climate can extend Nakayama and Krizek’s foundational work on “Whiteness as a Strategic Rhetoric.” In brief, you can expect an antiblack climate from Whiteness; violence, injustice, and erasure are its characteristic weather. Antiblackness as climate looks past White identity to the resistant force of Black life – despite and because of the vulnerabilities of everyday ontological terror.

Consider that the chora of whiteness is antiblack, meaning blackness being-sent, shipped, exiled... more Consider that the chora of whiteness is antiblack, meaning blackness being-sent, shipped, exiled creates the ontological ambience of whiteness, in Thomas Rickert’s terms. As a friendly amendment to Nakayama and Krizek’s pivotal diagnosis of whiteness as strategic rhetoric, what if an antiblack chora forms another nothingness, an ‘other’ nothingness, a something that does not matter, that is not-in-between being and nothingness? Given incessant, multi-focal, antiblack violence, Eric Watts says to ignore the radical claim of black noncommunicability is to commit more violence. We’re in a period, the long foul breath of the Middle Passage and its “still unfolding aftermaths.” So what if the unavoidable punctus were a dissevering figure of ‘world,’ when world is punctuated by unending “disavowal and damnation of blackness,” quoting Watts again?

One thing you don’t find much discussion of in rhetoric is the accidental. Without trying too ha... more One thing you don’t find much discussion of in rhetoric is the accidental. Without trying too hard you’ll find talk of bollocksed opportunities, logical error, calamitous missteps, and failure generally – maybe a sidebar about luck or somesuch, but nothing like a concept of ‘accidental rhetoric.’ I’d chalk this up to the peculiar history of the accident, which usually is treated as the other to essence, probability, or as just a synonym for misfortune. I’d also credit the peculiar history of rhetoric, which is intently focused on strategy and tactics, not flukes, which Burke famously summed up in the Rhetoric of Motives: “Did you ever do a friend injury by accident, in all poetic simplicity? Then conceive of this same injury done by sly design, and you are forthwith within the orbit of Rhetoric.” For me, contemporary questions about rhetoric’s ontological conditions warrant recasting the accident as one of those conditions.

Vulnerability acts as a kind or moral lodestar in literatures on resilience, whether ecological o... more Vulnerability acts as a kind or moral lodestar in literatures on resilience, whether ecological or social, and I think that misunderstands the condition of being open. I’ll touch briefly on key facets of a contemporary, moralized vulnerability by way of arguing instead that it’s the pharmakon of materiality, meaning a condition of existence that may behave like a therapy and a disease yet is neither. Vulnerability is moralized today in many ways but two streams of thought are especially important. In one, the literature on coupled human-natural systems, it stands in contrast to resilience. There’s a sense of resistance to this understanding, such that resilient forms of being are resistant to the disharmonies that plague connected life. Vulnerabilities are inelastic conditions that threaten a system’s responsiveness to disruption; they’re to be managed and reduced within a power-resistance framework. In the other, vulnerability is the condition of power and resistance both and not a problem that confounds resilience. Vulnerability is, thus, a negative condition to be minimized or it’s a negative condition to be converted to positive ends.

On one hand, life and death refuse tidy classification. On the other, life and death invoke abso... more On one hand, life and death refuse tidy classification. On the other, life and death invoke absolute boundaries. I’ve become increasingly attuned to this contradictory refusal and demand to be bounded and view it as a motivating problem in rhetorics that assign value to life and death. Life and death are so overdetermined and conflicted yet so necessary to guide what is judged desirable and undesirable, that I started looking for anything simple and consistent that might explain how this contradiction is not a conundrum but rhetorically productive and that’s what I want to sketch in brief today. For that purpose, liminal states of being are the most revealing in that like water on wood, they bring out the grain, revealing rich veins and patterns that are barely visible otherwise. And few states are as revealing as persistent vegetative state (or PVS) where individuals may linger for years, exhibiting mild affective responses but no discernable inner life. Most are familiar with Terri Schiavo and others like her, Karen Ann Quinlan most likely. Their stories may seem exhausted and no longer disclosive, only contentious, but I want to engage with PVS because stories like these have been worked so hard. An estimated 10 to 35 thousand in the United States alone exist in PVS and the fraught nature of addressing this condition exposes what I consider to be nearly unbreakable features of rhetorics that work the contradiction, relying on life and death to defy our understanding while also insisting on being understood.

This paper responds to the prompt to consider "around" as a mode of turning within rhetoric. The... more This paper responds to the prompt to consider "around" as a mode of turning within rhetoric. The argument explores the conjuncture of finitude, life, and rhetoric through the relationality of "around," contending that the fact that "life happens around you is a figure for captivity within change and is a scene of ontic passion."

Moving " beyond representation " is a calling card of contemporary orientations to rhetoric broad... more Moving " beyond representation " is a calling card of contemporary orientations to rhetoric broadly informed by the crisis of meaning. Although imprecise, the phrase has clear uses, one of which is to reject explanations of rhetorical action that turn on the conjuncture of mind, symbol, and meaning, often to substitute another conception of action like performativity or affect. I become uneasy when “beyond” slides toward “rejection" because that move sequesters representation with a nettlesome epistemology held responsible for obstructing our reckoning with materiality. In reconsidering the relation of mind and matter, scholars risk re-installing the very relation of epistemology and ontology that is uncomfortable, a bifurcated thought and being. Representationalism is found inadequate on grounds that it doesn't represent very well; ironic. If our going beyond swaps one ontological default for another, we won't have moved beyond. Were representation ontologically ubiquitous, it couldn't be a master figure or cast aside.

This paper responds to a prompt to consider mobility as an "other" to rhetorical theory. Instead... more This paper responds to a prompt to consider mobility as an "other" to rhetorical theory. Instead I argue that mobility is an immanent potential for self-othering requisite to becoming otherwise.

This paper argues that resilience theory is a culmination of, not an answer to, modernity's reali... more This paper argues that resilience theory is a culmination of, not an answer to, modernity's realization that human bodies are embedded in the world, and thus resilience is an objectless motive of biopower.

This paper takes up Lisa Keränen's concept of biocriticism by arguing that disease is a mode of c... more This paper takes up Lisa Keränen's concept of biocriticism by arguing that disease is a mode of critique in biopolitical regimes, which makes pathology the critical rhetoric of biopower.

The search for “rhetoric beyond representation,” as some people describe this moment, is groping ... more The search for “rhetoric beyond representation,” as some people describe this moment, is groping its way toward a one-substance cosmology, where thought, matter, and mediate action, are immanent to one another. They arise from the same flickering substance as different attributes. It’s a materialist ontology for rhetoric, but not like one we’ve had before.

Paper presented at the National Communication Association Convention, Orlando, November 17, 2012

This paper discusses the materiality of the ideograph. In the current moment, it is argued that ... more This paper discusses the materiality of the ideograph. In the current moment, it is argued that the value of the ideograph lies less in its explanatory potential for political rhetoric than in the assumptions that have made it explanatory.

Paper presented at the National Communication Association Convention, San Francisco, November 16,... more Paper presented at the National Communication Association Convention, San Francisco, November 16, 2010.

Women S Studies in Communication, Mar 22, 2001

In 1867, an anonymous woman published a letter in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (later ... more In 1867, an anonymous woman published a letter in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (later to become the New England Journal of Medicine) that refuted Horatio Storer, leader of the anti-abortion movement. In this essay I argue that this letter highlights issues ...

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Women S Studies in Communication, 2001

Quarterly Journal of Speech, Aug 6, 2006

Critical Studies in Media Communication, Sep 1, 2004

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 10510970309363307, May 22, 2009

Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 2015

Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2015

This paper explores the material relationship of hunger to rhetoric.

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 00335630 2013 775703, May 1, 2013

The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Aug 1, 2002

Quarterly Journal of Speech

... the heyday of scientific racists such as Francis Galton, who &amp;quot;coined the ter... more ... the heyday of scientific racists such as Francis Galton, who &amp;quot;coined the term &amp;#x27;eugenics&amp;#x27;&amp;quot; (Gould 1981, 75), and popular figures such as Jacob Riis, whose famous photographic sur-veillance of &amp;quot;the other half&amp;quot; posed the danger of the growing urban un-derclass (Twigg 1992), the ...

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2013

Leonardo, 2009

This paper argues for redefining evaluation criteria for faculty working in new media research an... more This paper argues for redefining evaluation criteria for faculty working in new media research and makes specific recommendations for promotion and tenure committees in U.S. universities.