I’m happy to share my newly published, open access article on the secrecy of rhetoric’s canon, just published in the Journal for the History of Rhetoric! “Recanonizing Rhetoric: The Secret in and of Discourse” takes stock of current scholarly conversations about rhetoric’s ancient Greek canon and why we should and should not make a “return” to these commonplaces. My hope is that it will be useful for folks who teach the ancient Greek canon as a problematic point of departure for rhetoric; that is, a beginning that cannot be accepted at face value, but demands relentless scrutiny.
It also offers two examples of why it is productive to imagine of this canon as a twofold secret. On the one hand, this secret may be understood as a history of acts of violence that have been deeply buried, repressed and concealed (in discourse). On the other hand, this secret is a retroactive realization (of discourse) in which concepts and terminology transform to reflect theorists’ investments in empire and conquest.
Here is the abstract from the publication:
Challenges to rhetoric’s canon often occur under the rubric of revising that canon and its foundational, shared meaning. Read through the strategies of deconstruction, the secret offers a common ground for recanonizing approaches by centering either a concealed quantity in ancient rhetoric’s granular archive (the secret in discourse) or an unfolding idea whose transformation has rendered it unrecognizable to its original version (the secret of discourse). This article draws on Jacques Derrida’s “White Mythology” (1974) and A Taste for the Secret (2001) before addressing how the secret’s registers in and of discourse animate de- and recanonizing readings of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric. Its implications address scholars distressed by the durable forms of oppression ensconced in rhetoric’s ancient canon.
As part of UMN Libraries’ “Give to the Max” campaign, Mark Engebretson, Shane Nackerud, and former students Rory King and Anna Larson (and yours truly) collaborated to produce this short video. Please check it out! Open access materials like Reading Rhetorical Theorycan save students a significant amount of money, and ensure that course materials remain accessible across a range of modalities.
“COMM Students Save Money on Textbooks Thanks to the Libraries”
If you are teaching a class where this textbook might be useful and are seeking additional course materials, please reach out to rhetoricaltheoryuntextbook@gmail.com! I’m happy to answer your questions and share additional resources.
This year at the 2022 National Communication Association Convention, I am presenting (remotely/virtually) a truncated version of the introduction to my book, This Page Left Intentionally Blank: Rhetorical Forms of the Secret. The presentation is scheduled to appear during a Thursday 11/1911:00am-12:00pm session entitled “Secrecy and Memory in Popular and Political Culture.” (Sheraton, Napoleon Ballroom C2 on the 3rd Floor) If you are interested in the topic, there is other excellent work being presented there by Christopher Wernecke and Virginia Massignan of Georgia State University, Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager of Colorado State University, and Patrick K Jones of Northeastern University. Please do attend if you have the opportunity!
If you are/were unable to attend the panel and would like to see what I am up to, I’ve included the abstract and my video presentation below.
Presentation Abstract: Secrets are part of a longstanding rhetorical situation best understood as a “spectacle” that draws public audiences in through the promise of revelation. They also comprise a longstanding topos for Rhetorical Studies as a mode of public address, a hidden meaning uncovered by a hermeneutics of suspicion, and a function of discursive totalities like the apparatus and assemblage. Here I add a fourth approach: a tropology of secrecy structured around naming, belatedness, and autoimmunity.
Finally, if you’re at NCA 2022, please consider attending these other excellent sessions I had a small part in assembling. I wish I could be there, but I wish the best to everyone down in New Orleans this week!
Session Description: Rhetoric’s objects and methods are changing amidst the spectacular rise of computational methods and big data analysis. Reflecting on rhetoric’s changing objects (e.g., tweets, memes, blogs, chatbots, cybersecurity, infrastructures, and networks) and methods (e.g., LDA, web scraping, TensorFlow, network analysis) this panel stages a conversation between rhetorical scholars who have expanded the scope of what counts as rhetoric’s objects and its methods. Our discussion takes stock of the ethical mandates and novel innovations in the new digital rhetoric by offering short position papers from a range of scholars with deep investments in the computational, followed by a moderated discussion with the audience.
Featured Roundtable Speakers: Andre E. Johnson, Emma Bedor Hiland, Daniel Faltesek, Heather Woods, Alex McVey, Jennifer Buchan, Jules Wight, Michael Lechuga, Misti Yang, Scott Graham, Sergio Fernando Juarez, Zoltan Majdik
Session Description: Rhetorical and Communication Studies scholars respond to two new books: Emma Bedor Hiland’s Therapy Tech: The Digital Transformation of Mental Healthcare, from the University of Minnesota Press, and What it Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture, from Pennsylvania State University Press. Expert panelists are scholars in Rhetorical Studies with practical/theoretical expertise in rhetorics of mental health, feminism, and gender.
Featured Speakers: Emma Bedor Hiland (author/respondent), Stephanie Larson (author/respondent), Jenell Johnson (presenter), Bryan J. McCann (presenter), Natalie N. Fixmer-Oraiz (presenter), Erin Nicole Gangstad (presenter), Nou-Chee Chang (chair)
Abstract: Our contribution to this forum concerns the June 24th, 2022 leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson draft decision penned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The leak exemplifies how the transgressive and fluid movement of information across sealed institutional boundaries was channeled into a different bodily register, one that sought to police the gender fluidity imputed by the phrase “pregnant people” amidst the emergence of a new abortion coalition. As an alternative to the imperative to seal institutional leaks and limit gender fluidity, we highlight the importance of the Reproductive Justice framework to constitute more capacious coalitions with wider, more intersectional platforms than was once enshrined by Roe v. Wade.
On alternating years, the Rhetoric Society of America hosts seminars and workshops for faculty and graduate students. This upcoming year, Dr. Michael Lechuga of the University of New Mexico and I will be leading a two-day workshop from May 25-27. The sessions will be held at Pennsylvania State University in College Park, with limited remote access. I’m writing now because the deadline to apply for this (and all other) sessions is approaching on October 15, 2022. Please follow this link to apply! As that site notes, applicants will be notified of your acceptance into a particular session (or multiple sessions) by November 15, 2022.
Below, you’ll find a description of our session on “Secrecy, Surveillance, and Settler Colonialism,” (also available via the hyperlink). I hope you’ll check it out!
Best wishes,
Atilla
Secrecy, Surveillance, and Settler Colonialism
Our topical focus is the rhetoric of settler colonialism with emphasis on erasure, disinformation, and conspiratorial reasoning, as exemplified by the dehumanization of migrants at the Mexico/US border, the “Stop the Steal” January 6, 2021, white supremacist insurrection, and the infiltration of colonialist themes in popular science fiction narratives. We invite participants to think through the connections between events like the January 6 insurrection, gun violence, and pandemic politics as explained through the lens of settler colonialism. Our workshop focuses on how the critical frameworks of psychoanalysis and assemblage theory are instrumental for rhetoricians’ understanding of the lasting legacy of settler colonialism in the United States. Together, we (Lechuga and Hallsby) represent expertise in both rhetorical criticism, assemblage/affect theory (Lechuga), and psychoanalysis (Hallsby). We offer attendees an affect-driven framework for emerging rhetorical scholars, designed with the specific goal of attending to Settler Colonialism’s ideological, material, and unconscious formations.
Participants should expect to complete some assigned readings ahead of time and to submit a (2pp) statement about what they are already researching. During the session, we aim to discuss how the frameworks introduced during the workshop might be enlisted to revise or approach these topics. Position papers should also include a statement of participants’ goals for the workshop (e.g., creating a syllabus, conference paper, journal submission/revision, white papers/public facing, advocacy). The workshop will be divided between lecture and break-out groups/discussions. During break-out discussions, participants will also have the option to work individually or in a group (i.e., they may choose to be either self-directed or collaborate with others working on similar projects.)
Whereas Rhetorical Studies conventionally emphasizes the rhetorical situation/ecology as a general contextual framework for persuasion, representation, and power, we would advance arguments for understanding rhetoric’s persisting habitus as a Settler Situation, a set of recurring/repeating historical contexts appealing to topoi of jingoistic conquest, extraction economies, and racial purity. We offer the following framing questions: (1) How do we read and measure settler-colonial narratives/events? What is the archive of settler colonialism? If the archive is secret, what tools or techniques do rhetoricians have available to read it? (2) How does the Settler Situation redefine the conventional boundaries of the rhetorical text? What aspects of rhetoric’s conventional focus on public address and representation are retained by this framework and which are transformed by it? (3) How do (psychoanalytic/assemblage-based) theories of affect account for the combined psychological and material injury created by contemporary nationalist discourses? (4) How do present-but-unarticulated or unacknowledged affects produce recurring patterns of historical trauma? What can rhetorical studies contribute to the understanding of these historical patterns?
I’m posting this awards call for the Public Address Division (PAD) of the National Communication Association (NCA) to ensure that it has a semi-permanent web-presence that folks might be able to redirect to beyond list-servs and social media. As a member of the Benson-Campbell committee, I’d like to ensure that folks see the call for nominations below! Share as widely or as frequently as you’d like! The due date for this award is Friday, September 16, 2022. Please send a packet with your materials to bensoncampbellaward@gmail.com. Advisor letters may be sent separately as needed.
Call for Nominations: Benson/Campbell Dissertation Award
The Public Address Division of the National Communication Association welcomes nominations for the 2022 Benson-Campbell Dissertation Research Award, which honors the scholarly contributions of Thomas Benson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell by recognizing outstanding promise in doctoral research in rhetoric and public address.
We recognize that the study of public address has often privileged the study of hegemonic figures, groups, methods, and rhetorics. Therefore, we encourage scholars whose position and/or scholarship expands beyond these historical limitations to submit their work for consideration. With these values in mind, we will assess proposals based on the following criteria:
The originality of the proposal
Significance of the potential findings
Contribution to (and beyond) the theory, history, or criticism of public address;
Appropriateness and/or innovation of the research design and method.
A $500 award will be presented at the business meeting of the Public Address Division at the 2022 NCA convention. Competition for the Benson-Campbell Award is open to graduate student members of the Public Address Division who have successfully defended a Ph.D. dissertation prospectus. A completed nomination packet consists of:
A 7-10 page summary of the dissertation prospectus
A statement by the nominee about the progress of the dissertation to date
A letter of support from the nominee’s dissertation advisor that certifies that the nominee has completed their dissertation prospectus meeting and/or has successfully defended the prospectus. The dissertation advisor’s letter should also provide a rationale for why the nominee should receive the award.
Andre E. Johnson (Committee Chair, University of Memphis), Atilla Hallsby (University of Minnesota TC) and Matthew Houdek (Rochester Institute of Technology) comprise the 2022 selection committee for this award.
Complete nomination packets must be submitted electronically to Andre Johnson at bensoncampbellaward@gmail.com by no later than Friday, September 16, 2022, in order for the nominee to be considered for the award. Please direct questions to Andre E. Johnson at (bensoncampbellaward@gmail.com).
Since August 8th — but really, a lot over the last six-odd years — I have repeatedly felt compelled to write about secrecy-related events as they were being reported. The Mueller Reporthas already taken its place alongside the Pentagon Papersand any number of WikiLeaks disclosures as an allegedly impotent revelation, that is, ineffectual because it allegedly said nothing more than what folks already knew. Allegedly, no one read the Papers. The same has been said of the WikiLeaks disclosures. After all, what do you know about Joshua Schulte or Vault 7? Another example: the Trump phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinkskyy, like the Trump Tapes, played at the final session of the January 6 Committee, are clear media analogs to the ever-damning Nixon Tapes. As Lisa Corrigan has pointed out, none of these now-historical records were ever intended to be a damaging disclosure — these were legacy projects. So in some ways, to me, the story that began on August 8, 2022 — or even earlier on February 6, 2022,when we learned about the “burn bags” in the White House (to say nothing of flushing documents down the toilet) — feels less like the breaking of some dark and damaging secret and more like a very familiar bedtime story. To quote one of those earlier headlines, some of the documents Trump tried to hide at Mar-a-Lago were actually pretty important.
I’m not concerned with whether Trump has already admitted guilt or made some significant misstep. The point isn’t to conjecture about whether the documents might *actually* belong to a former sitting President, which seems utterly absurd. I think dwelling on or seeking to expose some “unknown unknown,” is similarly wasted effort. I think Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it best:
Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enmeshed in the penal system? In the United States and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hyper-visible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 140
Even if we avoid a totally paranoid mentality about this incident, the story is … not great. Those documents could absolutely have effects both immediately and for years to come. Unlike some experts, my concern doesn’t arise because I have specialized legal knowledge but because of what I know about the rhetoric of these events. Although rhetoricians often have much to say about the injustice of the law, rhetoric is also, famously, not about knowing or discovering “the truth.” Tweaking the famous Col. Nathan R. Jessup line, we cannot handle the truth because it’s been redacted and, therefore, taken out of the public’s hands. Rhetoric is what reshapes the truth we don’t have access to. It runs on uncertainty. It communicates knowledge about something we don’t know.
So, here are some notes about why rhetoric, often a bad word for people speaking disingenuously, offers some perspective on events like this one. If you’re reading, thank you. Selfishly, I hope these notes will help me track some of what I’ve noticed as I finally wrap up my book project on the rhetoric of secrecy this fall, titled This Page Left Intentionally Blank.
What does rhetoric have to do with these documents at all?
For one thing, the documents are clearly being hailed as weaponized speech. Weaponized speech describes a whole collection of metaphors that makes information into something capable of doing harm in the public mind’s eye. “Information Bombs.” “Cyberwarfare.” “Digital Terrorist.” The language we use about information curates our relationship to — and our expectations about — the consequences of “deploying” them (which, in Trump’s case, amounts to selling them or having them stolen). Sometimes, it heightens a threat that isn’t all that threatening, except to encourage “warlike” attitudes. Other times, they signal a risk calculation and a heightened state of anxiety. Trump’s documents aren’t just dangerous for what they contain; they’re dangerous for what they could do — if read, spoken, and spread. This, again, is a way of alerting us to weaponized speech, which has consequences much in the same way that releasing a computer virus has consequences.
When tuning in, I frequently ask whether the national security talking heads are anxious and whether their purpose is to produce or quell anxiety. These and other experts have already agreed on the significance of invoking the 1917 Espionage Act and what comes next. Regardless of whether their purpose is to produce or quell anxiety, the situation is, again, not great. I have noticed a proliferation of “cut through the fog” editorials (this post might even be an example) that continuously beg the complicated question of the American public’s fetishistic relationship to its national security institutions. I often think that it is not just a little strange that the public always seems to crave ever-more James Bond, Jason Borne, and Avengers content — as more-and-less secret wars become ever more unpopular. The fetishistic mode is especially active on occasions when Natsec officials actually wish to communicate something to the public at large. In this case, we, the attention-paying public, are meant to be in the know that something has happened. And the way that this something has been communicated is through metaphor.
What do you mean, metaphor?
Metaphors place one thing in terms of another. When the focal “thing” we are trying to describe is prohibited from being described, then metaphor is essential because it allows us to say something indirectly, without giving away the goods. If I say, “you’ve been on a real dinner biscuit lately,” I’m coding my praise (you’re on a roll) in a way that sounds strange to anyone but the person who feels the need to decipher it.
So what is the indirect language we’ve gotten about this particular leak? The secrets are classified, secret, and top secret. They have been suspected of containing national defense information, FISA materials, and nuclear, human, and signals intelligence.” They have been called “crown jewels” by the likes of former FBI official Chuck Rosenberg and Lawfare Contributor/George Mason Professor David Priess. And parts of the warrant and the affidavit are redacted, making a spectacle out of the fact that there is something out there that cannot be read. All of these are ways of representing something that can’t be represented, making a metaphor out of something severely secret and which must therefore be stepped around to be articulated.
What about the seriousness of the potentially leaked documents?
When secrets themselves concern “nuclear” information or “signals” intelligence, my understanding is that representatives of the national security state do not just put the lost value into dollars (e.g., “it’s a five billion dollar catastrophe!”). They also translate it into terms of risk and potential harm. Here, Trump-a-Lago-gate sounds like what Peter Galison calls an “objective” secret, a secret which, once released, cannot be unreleased. An “objective” secret is “diffuse” (expressed in many words), “technical” (unavailable to people without the appropriate expertise), “determinable” (i.e., they could be independently found out or deduced), and “eternal” (living in long-lasting memory). Unlike its “subjective” counterpart, an “objective” secret cannot be changed at a moment’s notice or forgotten in a few days.
Of course, not every “biggest ever” secret is significant. The rhetorical presentation of great volume is megethos, which, as Jenny Rice explains, gives the viewer an impression of size, significance, and magnitude. Sometimes this is “mere” rhetoric: after the Iraq and Afghan War Logs, the greater-and-greater volume of WikiLeaks successive releases turned out not to have the grandiose consequences Julian Assange had promised. When Trump released his health plan after the emergence of COVID-19, it materialized as a predictably “huge,” “enormous” book — which turned out to be full of blank pages. It is also true that public audiences have difficulty discerning magnitude, and “biggest ever” doesn’t consistently deliver the emotional impact it promises. The scale of the difference between 1, 10, and 100 million — or any of these and 1 billion — is difficult to perceive because these magnitudes are so far outside the scope of what many of us are accustomed to.
Again, perhaps nothing. Most pessimistically, these events could go the way of the Mueller Report, creating a mega-lithic story that occupies a months-long (if not years-long) media cycle on the incalculable damage wrought by a Trump presidency that is disconnected from a realistic assessment of the non-existent legal consequences that leaking has for former presidents and the ultra-wealthy. That isn’t to say that the document scandal doesn’t have effects. One immediate effect might be heightened paranoia and stochastic violence against people suspected of being “spies” and “infiltrators.” Another is to intensify “deep-state” style conspiracy theories about the DOJ and the FBI while heroizing these institutions, reinforcing partisan support for policing at every level. As one member of the Twitterati stated on August 9, 2022: “the fbi is not GOOD. it cannot do GOOD THINGS. it can however do FUNNY THINGS. this is an important distinction.”
Depending on how damaging the documents are, we might not have a good sense of the effects the documents have already had — or what might be coming down the road. What sticks out to me now is the month-long effort to communicate national security harms and damages. This seems like a challenging rhetorical task because the need to amplify the sensitivity of the documents is almost certainly balanced against the more frequent imperative to say nothing at all. I am reminded, for instance, of Chuck Schumer’s appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show on August 8th, 2022, where he repeatedly refused to comment on the then-only-hours-old FBI seizure of documents. Instead, he insisted upon celebrating also-recent policy “wins” related to job creation, climate change, debt reduction, inflation relief, corporate taxation, and drug costs. The subtext was that “Democrats are persisting and things will happen” — which, when placed against the other dramatic events of the day, had the ring of a double-entendre. According to Schumer, “things happening” meant legislative victories. However, as a way of metaphorically talking about something that he didn’t want to talk about, Schumer’s emphasis on the fact that “things are happening” also made Doc-a-Lago sound like it was part and parcel of the “results” that democrats were delivering.
At least for now, it all adds up to this: For there to be a shared sense of gravity, stories like this one are built up as rhetorical secrets; to borrow a famous turn of phrase, what makes these secrets stick is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.” Even though Trump perpetrated crimes out in the open and in plain sight, what draws us to them is the way that they are constructed to make something appear as if it is hidden, keeping us on the hook for what might come next.
From the textbook page: This textbook offers a undergraduate-appropriate survey of rhetorical theory centered on techniques of speaking, cultural modes of representation, and entrenched hierarchies of power. It covers rhetoric’s problematic “origins” in ancient Greece, rhetoric as a feature of 20th-century sign- and symbol-systems, rhetoric’s role in crafting shared ideologies and belief systems, narrative-, argument-, and visual-based approaches to rhetoric, and a variety of different “situations” (rhetorical, settler colonial, secrecy/surveillance, and digital) where rhetoric continues to be found and felt in contemporary U.S. culture. This book also includes audio or video recordings for each chapter, recommended written assignments, and study guides for quizzes/exams. Developed in the wake of the 2020 global pandemic, this resource is designed for a range of modalities (online synchronous, online asynchronous, in-person, and hybrid). Additional materials (PowerPoint slides, quiz/exam questions) are also available to confirmed instructors upon request.
This May, I will be presenting research at the Association for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) Symposium, “Rhetoric in Motu,” and at the Rhetoric Society of America convention. Brief abstracts and hyperlinks to the presentations are available below!
Abstract: This presentation offers the secret as common ground between different scholarly criticisms that reject and/or revise rhetorical theory’s foundation in ancient Greece. Although secrets most often refer to hidden or concealed information, I argue that this term may instead be understood as a productive force (rather than as ‘mere’ negation). On the one hand, scholars who wish to revise the ancient rhetorical contexts by pointing out what is ignored or under-noticed within them are attentive to secrets in discourse: the suppressed originators of the persuasive arts, who include women sophists, foreign-born non-citizens, and the enslaved peoples of ancient Syracuse. On the other hand, scholars who either abandon or reinvent the history of rhetoric are attentive to the secret of discourse, in which rhetoric’s ‘core’ meaning is troped and transformed. Here, I examine how metaphor evolves from the Greek to the Roman context to support the interests of imperial conquest. I conclude by describing these registers as indicative of how rhetoric has and might still become unrecognizable to its former self through progressive revision and retroactive signification.
Abstract: This presentation considers the problem of rhetorical temporality staged by the Department of Energy’s (DoE) Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the world’s 3rd deep geological repository licensed to store radioactive waste. Because the WIPP houses materials that will remain hazardous for 10,000 years, the DoE instituted a marker project to communicate a linear message of warning to future populations. Secrecy remains a key rhetorical mode of political time management for the project: site data would remain part-concealed, part-open to prolong institutional and public memories of mortal danger.Building upon the idea of rhetoric as time management, we argue that the “future societies analysis” conducted by projects familiar colonialist practices indefinitely into the future. Kairos, as an obsessive fixation upon the present, also authorizes the appropriation of indigenous temporalities, a continuing commitment to extractive forms of capitalism, and the reproduction of familiar stereotypes about Latin America and the inner city as “third worlds.” We conclude with observations about kairos as a metaphysics and examine how a deconstructed understanding of kairos/chronos shifts commonplace understandings of rhetorical temporality.
Abstract: On November 9, 1912, publishers Sam H. Clark and C.H. Crockard were indicted by a federal grand jury in Fargo, ND for distributing “obscene and immoral reading matter” throughout the Midwest via interstate mail. Using the pseudonym “Jim Jam Junior” the two published a tabloid they titled Jim Jam Jems,which featured (among other topics) stories about criminalized abortion, the American Medical Association’s vaccine requirements, and regressive social standards of feminine purity. As we argue, one critical rhetorical feature of the Jim Jam Jems tabloid is its figuration of an inflammatory anti-abortion stance through space-based metaphors — the mill and the factory — unique to the imaginary of the historical moment of this publication. Whereas today the locative phrase “the back alley” signifies a particular historical memory of abortion prior to the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, for Clark and Crockard it did not. In this presentation, we situate our work alongside other rhetorical scholarship concerned with the historical memory of abortion. We then locate Jim Jam Jems within a governing legal and social context. We then offer a thick description of a focal series of entries from the tabloid concerning Dr. Charles H. Hunter, which begins with the sensationalized 1912 story titled “Three Weeks in the Magic City.” Finally, we conclude with reflections about the relevance of the Jim Jam Jems case for contemporary analyses of abortion rhetoric.
This open-access resource for college-level rhetorical theory classes includes chapters on the ancient history of rhetoric, the twentieth-century invention of the symbol and the sign, an overview of ideology, narrative, argumentation, visual rhetoric and the rhetorical situation, and coverage of topics like settler colonialism, secrecy/surveillance, and digital rhetoric. The resource includes an agenda for synchronous online teaching and 3 recommended “short paper” written assignments.
The UnTextbook has new course pages forthcoming, including a course page for “The Rhetoric of Secrecy and Surveillance” (to be completed by May 2022) and my “Graduate Survey of Rhetorical Theory” (to be completed by December 2022). Additionally, the main chapters of the Rhetorical Theory UnTextbook will be re-released as an open-access Pressbook with the University of Minnesota Libraries in Spring 2022.
Atilla Hallsby 