Another reformulation of rhetoric as a wedge

Henry Johnstone\u27s idea of The Rhetorical Wedge began with a remark in his The Problem of the Self where the word Bridge is also used. While The Wedge has been appropriated as a useful metaphor for understanding rhetorical processes, The Bridge has not, despite rhetoric\u27s ability to unify as well as distinguish perspectives. Since The Bridge metaphor has been left unexplored, and since The Wedge although necessary in rhetorical processes is not sufficient to their completion, this p resentation reformulates The Rhetorical Wedge to carry forward the idea of The Rhetorical Bridge in rhetorical processes

On Being a Simple Judge: Exploring Rhetorical Citizenship in Aristotelian and Homeric Rhetorics

If we want to make the argument that rhetoric matters to citizenship and that the two - rhetoric and citizenship - are mutually benefitted by their exchanges, then we need to deal with this charge of citizens as simpletons that rings through the rhetorical tradition. We need to go to these other places. In juxtaposition with an approach relegating classical conceptions of agency and audience as outdated and over, I wish in this essay to avoid such a negative approach, or perhaps I should say such a negating choice. I wish to take being simple as a citizen judge creatively. Rather than negating citizen judges as simpletons, might we create something new? In this essay, I wish to try

To the Humanities: What Does Communication Studies Give?

This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as 1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; 2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, performative, and ethical implications of our communicative being, our being constituted by symbolic action and mediated exchange in ever-present yet always variant material and affective environments, spaces, and places; 3) a discipline emerging from rhetoric, one of the original liberal arts, yet developing in transdisciplinary ways, transforming the binary of humanities and sciences; 4) a tool for decolonizing knowledge(s); 5) a tool for exploring, critiquing, engaging, and creating with the new media of our digital lives together; 6) a long-standing yet ever inventive method and mode for public humanities; and 7) a praxis of resistance. These essays bring to light what studying communication offers the humanities: a plural, public, reflexive, and ever inventive enterprise for examining being human together on this planet

Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication

Rhetoric and the Gift, taking as its starting point the Homeric idea of the gift and Aristotle’s related rhetorical theory, explores rhetoric not only at the level of the artful response but at the level of the call and response. Mari Lee Mifsud takes up a number of questions crucial to thinking about contemporary communication: What does it mean that communication is a system of exchange with others? How are we to deal with questions of ethics in an economic system of power and authority? Can exchange ever be truly generous, and can communication, then, ever be free? Is there a more ethical way of relating and communicating, and might there be a different self-other relationship more conducive to a free people? As a historian of ancient Greek rhetorical theory, Mifsud examines these questions of contemporary significance by turning first to Aristotle’s many citations of and references to Homer in order to discern the emergence of a system of exchange thought to be appropriate for a democratic polis. As she elucidates, the Homeric system of exchange — gift-giving — was used by Aristotle as a metaphor for rhetoric’s function, as he distinguished the gift as a system of exchange within the functioning of the polis, operating between individuals and society to bind people to people and cultures to cultures. These ancient ideas are shown to relate directly to our modern arguments concerning exception and exceptionalism as they play out in politics, law, and culture. Such questions of exchange, thus, are shown to reverberate and continue to circulate through conversations in philosophy and communication, ranging across a great deal of recent study. Mifsud’s discussion of a variety of contemporary thinkers, together with her historical and theoretical approach, offers rich possibilities for new trajectories of relating the self and other, providing the critical, hermeneutical, and theoretical resources for thinking otherwise about rhetorical conceptions of relational ethics in communication, on both a personal and political level.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1206/thumbnail.jp

Revision and Immortality in Philosophical Argumentation: Reconsidering the Rhetorical Wedge

This essay explores Johnstone\u27s idea that rhetoric is a wedge. In particular, it explores the place of this idea in Johnstone\u27s philosophy of argument, the need to confront this idea with argument, and ways of confronting it with ad rem and ad hominem arguments

Storytelling as Soul-Tuning: The Ancient Rhetoric of Valmiki\u27s Ramayana

In this essay, I illuminate rhetorical dimensions of storytelling as soul-tuning in Valmiki\u27s Ramayana. I explore how the story\u27s historical, reflexive, and paratactic rhetoric invites experiencing it not just as Rama\u27s story, but as the telling of Rama\u27s story. The telling is the tuner of the soul, as it creates an indelible impression on human memory of divine revelation

On Network

From Homeric to Hellenistic cultures, we are given a robust vocabulary of networking. We have terms for nets;\u27 for work;\u27 and for network:\u27 Each term gives rise to yet another nuance of the role network plays in being human. In this section on lexical network, I present these terms in a catalog form as an homage to archaic Homeric rhetoric. Homer\u27s catalogs are plentiful in the epics, his catalog of ships being particularly well known. Homeric catalogs call attention to their items. Catalogs circulate well and are an aid to remembering the past, as ever-present. The catalog of network I offer takes the form of a list, a sparse accounting of items, in this case related words for net;\u27 work;\u27 and network. Lists are, as Benjamin Sammons describes them, inelaborate catalogues (i.e., easily worked up into the fuller form through the addition of elaboration). From this list, we will begin to see distinctive lexical dimensions of network; elaboration of the list will issue from mythical and tropical dimensions of network

On Rhetoric as Gift/Giving

In this essay, I explore the possibilities of rhetoric as gift. I begin with the Homeric gift economy and the rhetorical resources of this economy. My use of economy here is not reducible to a monetary exchange system, but rather a more general system of practices orchestrating cultural identity and relations. As Georges Bataille suggests, studying a general economy may hold the key to all the problems posed by every discipline (1991, 10). For Bataille everything from geophysics to political economy, by way of sociology, history and biology, to psychology, philosophy, art, literature, and poetry has an essential connection with economy. So, too, rhetoric. Henry Johnstone once defined rhetoric as the art of getting attention (1990, 334). We cannot attend to everything at once, so something must call our attention, invite our focus, and this something is rhetoric. Rhetoric\u27s desire to dispose its audience to invest in the object of attention connects rhetoric to economy. Rhetoric can be said to enact a disposition to invest, or a cathexis, a certain kind of savings. As such it is subject to economic movements and displacements, a dimension seen as well through Lyotard\u27s figure of the dispositif (1993, x.)

To the Humanities: What does Communication Studies Give?

This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as (1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; (2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, performative, and ethical implications of our communicative being, our being constituted by symbolic action and mediated exchange in ever-present yet always variant material and affective environments, spaces, and places; (3) a discipline emerging from rhetoric, one of the original liberal arts, yet developing in transdisciplinary ways, transforming the binary of humanities and sciences; (4) a tool for decolonizing knowledge(s); (5) a tool for exploring, critiquing, engaging, and creating with the new media of our digital lives together; (6) a long-standing yet ever inventive method and mode for public humanities; and (7) a praxis of resistance. These essays bring to light what studying communication offers the humanities: a plural, public, reflexive, and ever inventive enterprise for examining being human together on this planet