Recent Rhetorics of Purity in the Visual Arts. Infection,Dissemination, Genealogy

The rhetoric of purity has been foundational in the visual arts of this century, particularly in the advent of abstract art. Is it still a potent discourse? There can be no question that contemporary artists address this issue. As examples, I analyze the relationships between Kazimir Malevich's art, especially his notion of the “supplemental element,” and new work by Taras Polataiko, who is “infected” by the earlier artist. I extend this analysis of medical discourses of infection, purity, and impurity to the group General Idea's recent manipulations of the images and ideas of the quintessential Modernists Piet Mondrian and Ad Reinhardt. My readings suggest that purity as a concept in the visual arts remains powerful — both in the genealogy of artists and in individual works — but in a mutated form.     

Uncivil Speech: Invective and the Rhetorics of Democracy in the Early Republic

Robert Owen's “Declaration of Mental Independence,” declaimed on the Fourth of July, 1826, was one of the most ill-received speeches in the early Republic. The attendant controversy provides an opportunity to theorize invective's role in democratic culture. Invective was useful in the early Republic, and continues to be useful today, because it is both constitutive of national identity and a curative rhetoric for managing cultural anxiety. However, there are limits to what invective can achieve, and invective's place in democracy is consequently ambivalent. Rather than curing democratic anxiety, invective tends to perpetuate it, disrupting democracy's emphasis on controlled conflict and pushing it ever closer to violence.     

“We're Not Going to Do That Because It's Not Right”: Using Pedagogical Responsibility to Reframe the Doublespeak of Fidelity

In this essay, Doris Santoro examines the discourse of “fidelity of instruction” to show how it is doublespeak for teacher compliance that is incompatible with democracy and education. Analyzing the distorted use of the term “fidelity” by market‐based reformers, Santoro illustrates how it can be used as a weapon against teacher intelligence and moral response. She argues that John Dewey's philosophy provides conceptual resources to reframe some teacher infidelity as intelligent response, the moral agency required for pedagogical responsibility.     

Patterns and purposes in the uses and misuses of the term ‘critical thinking’ in the social sciences

This article analyses the uses and representations of the term “critical thinking” in the social science literature, based on a qualitative content analysis of titles, abstracts and keywords retrieved from the SCOPUS database for Germany, France and Russia over the last two decades. Our analysis focuses on how the use of the term “critical thinking” has increased over time, in which contexts the term is used and in which part of article texts it is used. Our findings are counterintuitive on several levels. First, the term “critical thinking” is seldom used in a pluri-disciplinary context. More commonly, it is used within specific discourses—notably education. Second, we found that it is mainly used instrumentally, rather than analytically. Third, most of the articles that use the term do not engage in actual critical analysis. There are also important geographic variation in the use of the term. In articles from Germany and Russia the term is used in similar ways—and differently in France. These nuances are difficult to analyse however, due to the different topics addressed, as well as author preferences. The use of the term “critical thinking” is diverse; indeed, at times weak and paradoxical. Finally, we discuss how editorial policy in academic journals possibly influences the discourse on critical thinking.     

Introduction to Section III: Deweyan Growth in Practice

At present, the structures, practice, and discourse of schooling are anchored to a “commercial spirit” that understands students, educators, and parents as economic operators trading competitively in human capital and to a discourse of failure that is disabling those who seek to understand and enact John Dewey's notion of education as democratic practice. Here Barbara Stengel illustrates both the commercial spirit in public schools and the discourse of school failure across two geopolitical settings: Shanghai, China, and urban U.S. schools. She argues that framing the educational enterprise in terms of economic success and failure makes it difficult for educators to address Dewey's vision of democracy and education substantively. Stengel concludes with an acknowledgment that, regardless of putative political commitments, these two public school systems are schooling — though not often educating — the same neoliberal subject, but that Dewey's vision of democracy and education nonetheless remains critical and compelling.     

The People Against Corporate Personhood: Doxa and Dissensual Democracy

This essay theorizes dissensual democracy as an event that requires both demonstration and critique of doxai. Jacques Rancière joins many theorists in rhetorical studies by arguing that democratic doxa is necessary for transformative collective politics. But Rancière famously dismisses the possibility that post-ideological approaches such as “critical rhetoric“ might contribute to democracy. Critique, however, has an important role to play in dissensual democracy. The political rhetoric of the anti-corporate Move to Amend shows how both demonstrations and critiques of doxai are required to produce the appearance of a democratic subject of enunciation, which, I argue, is a type of Deleuzean sense-event.     

An Archetypal Phenomenology of Skholé

In this essay David Kennedy argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult–child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. Following Herbert Marcuse's invocation of a “new sensibility,” Kennedy argues that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny — the long formative period of human childhood and the paedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle — makes of the adult–child collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. After exploring child–adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what John Dewey called “impulse” and “habit,” Kennedy identifies three key dimensions of dialogic schooling, all of which are grounded in a fourth: the form of dialogical group discourse called community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), which is based on the problematization and reconstruction of concepts through critical argumentation. As a discourse model, CPI grounds practice in all of the dialogic school's emergent curricular spaces, whether science or mathematics, whether literature, art, or philosophy. Second, CPI opens a functional space for shared decision making and collaborative governance, making of school an exemplary model of direct democracy. Finally, CPI as a site for the critical interrogation of concepts encountered in the curriculum (such as “alive,” “justice,” “system,” and “biosphere”) and as a site for democratic governance leads naturally to expression in activist projects that model an emergent “new reality principle” through concrete solutions to practical problems on local and global levels.     

(Re)Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric,Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha

Though the drive to limit US citizenship often takes shape through the symbolic and material exclusion of “aliens,” immigrants also engage in rhetorical struggles over the limits of the US civic imaginary. This essay examines one such challenge to the bordering logics of US citizenship—La Gran Marcha, one of the largest immigration protests of 2006. Rather than see the protest as wholly “alien,” as it was conceived of by anti-immigrant forces, or as purely “American,” as an attempt for mere recognition, La Gran Marcha can best be understood as performing a hybrid US citizenship. This hybrid rhetoric problematizes contemporary understandings of citizenship and elucidates immigrants' agency within US democracy.     

Coming to Terms with Perfection: The Case of Terri Schiavo

Our project is intended to supplement and extend research that emphasizes how the rhetoric informing the euthanasia debate admits a call of conscience and how this call would have us act heroically as we acknowledge what is arguably some particular truth that is at work in the debate (e.g., only God has the right to take a life). The relationship between conscience, acknowledgment, heroism, truth and rhetoric, we submit, presupposes the workings of our metaphysical desire for perfection—a desire that is definitely on hand when debating issues of the “good life” and the “good death.” The relationship constitutes a rhetoric of perfection that plays an essential role in the euthanasia debate as a whole. Such a rhetoric lies at the heart of the recent and much publicized case of Terri Schiavo—a young woman who lived in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years before she was allowed to die the “dignified” death that she supposedly wanted all along.     

Metastasis and retroactive causality in incentive rhetoric

Our contemporary moment is characterized by the pervasiveness of economics in social life, and the extension of “incentives” into new areas represents this movement’s keystone. Originally a fairly narrow term from neoclassical economic theory, politicians, journalists, and cultural ?gures deploy “incentives” to explain all manner of activity: judicial rulings, gendered wage gaps, and even whether soccer players score penalty kicks. To address this, I elucidate the trope of metastasis – the rhetorical mechanism by which social life is “economized.” Metastasis entails a ?gurative displacement, wherein cause shifts from one place to another. More than simply a spread of narrow economic ideas into culture, incentive rhetoric metastasizes. It displaces alternative explanations onto neoclassical market axioms. Since its proponents insist that incentives are causal mechanisms, I introduce Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of Aristotle’s discourse on causality. Lacan rereads Aristotle’s “?nal cause” from a rhetorical perspective, and forwards the retroactive causality of the symbolic order. Incentive rhetoric exempli?es this concept, in which all outcomes are explained as having been caused by a prior, unseen market force. Incentive rhetorics promise a universal code that unlocks the mysteries of human behavior that reduces all context to discrete individual choices, thereby providing a discursive alibi for economic inequality.     

“A Capital and Novel Argument”: Charles Darwin's Notebooks and the Productivity of Rhetorical Consciousness

With the rise of poststructuralist critiques of the autonomous subject, attention has shifted from the nature of “intentional persuasion” to the constitutive nature of discourse. Although this turn has led to valuable new insights into the nature of rhetoric, it also threatens to discount one of the most vital contributions of the rhetorical tradition—the nature of rhetorical invention. This essay seeks to recover the notion of invention by drawing from John Dewey's naturalistic interpretation of experience. In Dewey's framework, “consciousness” is neither the private contents of thought nor a point of articulation for social discourse, but a practice of manipulating public meanings as a means of responding to problematic situations. I then use Dewey's notion to advance the concept of a “rhetorical consciousness,” which I define in terms of the sophistical principles of imitatio and dissoi logoi. To demonstrate the pragmatic significance of this concept, I then show, through an analysis of Charles Darwin's notebooks, how Darwin employed his own rhetorical consciousness within his struggle to invent the revolutionary arguments that led up to his publication of On the Origin of Species. My hope is that this naturalistic interpretation of rhetorical invention will contribute to the ongoing project of cultivating a more intelligent, critical, and creative citizenry through the application of classical rhetorical principles to contemporary democratic forms of education in both the arts and sciences.     

“Other” White Storytellers: Emancipating Albinism Identity through Personal Narratives

Through the rhetoric of whiteness, the term “albino” distinguishes an albinic body from the “normal” white skin color of a White person. However, “albino” bodies may reposition themselves closer towards perceived normalcy via emancipatory rhetoric. This study analyzes the emancipatory rhetoric within TEDx talks presented by albinic, Black fashion models, Diandra Forrest and Shaun Ross.It is argued that the two utilize personal narratives to un-otherize(emancipate) from the stereotypical “albino” identity and highlight the complexity of race and difference-making in our culture.     

试论“体育教育”的话语困境

一个多世纪以来,“体育教育”这个富有争议的词语,为什么能够经常出现在日常话语、期刊杂志甚至各类政策文件之中？究其根源,在于缺乏术语规范意识和学术批判精神。文章在对“体育教育”一词使用状况及其受质疑状况进行考评的基础上,从传播学、语言学、术语学和教育学四个维度进行了重新解读和辨析,最后得出结论:“体育教育”之说确实具有明显的不合理性,不符合学术思想表达的一般规范,必须特别谨慎地使用,并自觉区分它在政策话语、实践话语和理论话语中的实际内涵。     

Race and Genetics from a Modal Materialist Perspective

Prevailing idealist and materialist theories of rhetoric fail to account for the continual circulation and recirculation of “racism” as a scientific discourse. An alternative theory of modal materialism addresses this problem by suggesting that the properties of all being are constituted through three distinguishable forms of matter that include the “physical,” the “biological,” and the “symbolic.” A sufficiently lush and nimble conceptualization of human action requires consideration of the interaction of all three modes in theory and in practice. The theory of modal materialism is illustrated through a consideration of the discourse of race and genetics as it was recirculated and modified in 2005 and 2006 by publications in the journal Science, and which were amplified for a larger reading public through circulation in the New York Times.     

Trashing the System: Social Movement,Intersectional Rhetoric,and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization's Garbage Offensive

Examining the nascent rhetoric of the Young Lords Organization's (YLO) 1969 “garbage offensive,” this essay argues that the long-standing constraints on agency to which they were responding demanded an inventive rhetoric that was decolonizing both in its aim and in its form. Blending diverse forms of discourse produced an intersectional rhetoric that was qualitatively different from other movements at the time. As such, the YLO constructed a collective agency challenging the status quo and, in some ways, foreshadowed more contemporary movement discourses that similarly function intersectionally. Examining the YLO's garbage offensive, then, presents rhetorical scholars with an opportunity to revise our understanding of how marginalized groups craft power through rhetoric.     

Meteorology and the rhetoric of nature's cultural display

On television (the primary source of weather information), meteorology, or the science of short‐term weather prediction, visually associates atmospheric information as relevant to social and economic issues. This is particularly true on The Weather Channel (TWC). This essay borrows and extends the work of Lessl and Messaris to examine the rhetoric of TV meteorology as it is displayed on TWC. I argue that TWC combines priestly (expertise) and bardic (visual eloquence) discourse to create “weathertainment” that predicates and encourages consumer practices.     

The rhetorical limits of the “plastic body”

This essay analyzes the “plastic body” as it is produced in the discourse of plastic surgery. The contemporary industry has constructed a popular image of plastic surgery as a readily available and personally empowering means to resolve body image issues, on the presumption that any body can become a “better” body. The ideology underlying the industry emerges out of analysis of the rhetoric of surgeons and patients. The rhetorical efforts of amputee “wannabes,” who seek elective amputation and who use arguments similar to those of mainstream plastic surgery applicants, reveal the paradoxes and contradictions in decision‐making about who has access to these procedures. The essay concludes that the concept of the plastic body is based less on medical technology and skill than on rhetorical power and suggests that this body of discourse has important implications for medical and technological advances that have enlarged the possibilities for body alteration practices.     

Deconstitutive rhetoric: The destruction of legal personhood in the Global War on Terrorism

This essay examines a set of memoranda, speeches, and other official discourse issued during the Global War on Terrorism that transformed the legal paradigm under which the enemy was defined and authorized new norms of conduct previously prohibited by law. It argues that these texts employ “deconstitutive rhetoric,” defined as discursive action that undermines the existing legal status of those to whom it refers and produces a disarticulate, destitute subject by denying the individual access to the civic forums in which rhetorical agency may be exercised. The essay begins with an analysis of the use of deconstitutive rhetoric in the decision to legally re-define Afghanistan as a “failed state” in order to absolve the United States of treaty obligations with that nation. It then addresses the emergence of “unlawful enemy combatant status,” a new legal category not recognized under the international laws of war. The essay concludes with a discussion the Obama administration’s detention and drone strike policies, which have continued to use deconstitutive rhetoric to undermine the legal status of those captured and killed in the Global War on Terrorism.     

Boy Trouble: Rhetorical framing of boys' underachievement

This article examines discourse in the United States used to socially construct an “underachieving boys” moral panic. Employing discourse analysis I examine the adversarial rhetoric of claims-makers and the frames they deploy to undermine alternative and conflicting accounts (of females as disadvantaged) and to forestall any challenges to the scientific authority of their own (biological essentialist) account of crisis. I illustrate how this discourse adapts the rhetorical frame of gender equity from the discourse it politically opposes, and uses it to legitimate its own goals. I find that the framing of innocent victimized boys as scientific “truth” is aligned with a broader masculinity politics that blames certain “folk devils”, and a synchronic moral panic about fearsome (black) male youth. I conclude by considering the success of this moral panic as evidenced by changes in educational policies and practices in the United States.     

商务会话中专家身份建构的指称策略研究

本研究基于身份工作模式,引入成员分类机制概念,以医药商务会话录音转写为语料,探讨专家身份建构 的指称策略使用情况。研究发现,（1）医药商务会话中咨询专家通过人称代词的使用以及他称和自称的相互投射实现 专家身份建构;（2）前者包括第一人称代词复数和单数的主格与属格,其指称用法分别表现为机构型、专家型、引用型、 互动型、病患型以及专家型、结构型、引用型和病患型;（3）后者则通过自称和他称身份标记语完成对专家身份建构的 投射。本研究认为,可以在身份工作模式下对人称代词和社交称谓的使用进行解释,它们的使用与成员分类机制一起, 构成说话人进行身份工作而采取的修辞策略,或谓之说话人实施的身份修辞行为。