Blockchain Papers

Nathaniel A. Rivers

September 29, 2008. Radiohead front man Thom Yorke sits frustrated at his piano. Live on stage. He is trying to start a song, but something is tripping him up. The song is “Videotape,” and he cannot start playing it. “Temporary loss of information,” he mumbles to an expectant crowd.The song “Videotape” is syncopated, meaning there is a “placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur” (Wikipedia 2021). Practically, it means that Yorke is joining a song already in progress: there is a beat before the beat that “starts” the song. Yorke, then, is starting the song not on the down beat but after the down beat—after the song has already started. He needs to hear something before he can play anything. He needs to hear the beat before he can sing. “Give me the fuckin’ hi-hats only,” he asks.Yorke is moved by the drum and a beat not his alone. It is a beat preceding him to which he must become subject. He needs to listen, but it is a particular kind of listening: a passive listening that makes him, as it were, “subject to the instruction of others” (Gross 137).Like Yorke on stage in 2008, I struggled to start and write this review. Not for any fault in the book, which is clear and concise, complex and compelling, but because I wanted to write a review that practiced the art of listening Gross cultivates: Active listening [“auditor-as-judge”], as it is understood by theoreticians and practitioners of persuasion from classical antiquity through today, only takes off at dusk like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, leaving behind obscurities of our daily lives including our susceptibility to advertising, our political apathy, our immersion in commonsense, our lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change. We have much work ahead when it comes to the theoretical and practical nuances of listening in its passive dimensions. (137)This review practices listening to this call in this way. The worry remains that the genre of the book review tends toward what Gross identifies as active listening: the judge, the critic. I should probably be the “active listener-as-judge” (83). Surely, a good reviewer should protect future readers from a “bad teacher” (131). But how should a book review practicing passive listening read? Does it aim for learning? Surely. Credulity? Why not. Subjection? Hmm. . . . It is, after all, subjection that lies at the heart of Gross’s book. Subjection is the beat before the beat that is rhetoric, an art forever syncopated.There are many aspects of Gross’s argument, which I will hear out below, but key for me, and crucial for Gross’s argument, is his emphasis on passive dispositions (e.g., apathy, adherence, suggestibility, attentiveness, etc.) crucial to political formations and so vital to rhetoric. Being moved, toward which rhetoric (sacred rhetoric especially) bends, must admit not only to the prowess and power of the rhetor but also, necessarily, to the “basic vulnerability that lies at the heart of political agency itself” (1). Indeed, “Rhetoric as a life science depends upon those lives affected” (8). Because of this dependence (and dependencies saturate the arts of listening), “rhetoric offers much more detail because it is the traditional domain where subjection is both theorized and practiced” (3).To articulate this offer, Gross works through what he describes as the “orphaned materials of modernity [that] often turn out to be vital strains of a different geology altogether” (12). Gross is here describing his own historiographic methodology. There are other things to hear in and about rhetoric. The core of his argument isn’t simply that listening is a practice important to rhetoric, with listening understood as a kind of critical facility—what Gross calls “active listener-as-judge” (83–84). Listening, for Gross, through his approach to Heidegger, bears upon being and becoming; it is in this way that rhetoric, for Gross, becomes a life science—what he at various places in the book describes as “meta-practice”: “It is in this scholarly context where rhetoric is rediscovered by Heidegger: beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).The theme of passive listening organizes the book’s emphases on sacred rhetoric, inartistic proofs, and the (non)teaching of passive voice that are all teased out through engagements with key thinkers who have come to inform contemporary rhetoric: Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud. Across the chapters, Gross articulates sacred rhetoric, which for him is a lasting source of rhetorical theory and practice: “Rhetoric moves souls” (14). Joining the writing of these thinkers is the teaching of writing itself, from which we also have much to learn about the arts of listening. Both the introduction and the final chapter have pedagogical foci. At the start and finish of his book, Gross aims to confound “in practice the expectation that classrooms benefit unilaterally from scholarship” (19). In rhetoric and composition, it is often assumed that theory trickles down into writing classrooms. Gross explores the dynamic as bilateral and mutual. The teaching of writing at the level of voice exists alongside the readings of Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud: all are practices of listening that do rhetorical theory. Gross has turned the neat trick of engaging teaching beyond the pedagogical imperative. That is, there is no concluding move to a pedagogical practice informed by (rhetorical) theory. For Gross, a theory of listening is what composition pedagogy practices.Chapter 1 starts with a provocative bang: “A debilitating commonplace has the history and theory of rhetoric honoring a communicative agent, namely the speaker, at the expense of the listener” (18). The argument here, which echoes throughout the book, is that “we reinvigorate the history and theory of rhetoric insofar as we normalize Heidegger’s care for listening” (31). “Listening,” Gross writes, “is a phenomenon shared across regions of being; hence, it must be approached carefully as such” (32). This is so because being-moved, linked to passive listening, echoes (perhaps sinisterly) notions of “obedience” and “subjection”—concepts that have contemporary purchase in our scene of emerging demagoguery. Being moved by the passions and beyond the critical faculties of active listening is a hard thing to face up to. Pathos has always been a thorn in rhetoric’s side—now more than ever. Composition textbooks, (un)ironically built around Aristotelian rhetoric, foreground pathos largely in terms of logical fallacies. A trick of the trade used by (active) speakers to move (passive) audiences. Pathos is, by and large, a bug in the rhetorical tradition demanding a sturdy, critical (logical) firewall.Gross has us hear pathos otherwise and across being moved and moving. With Heidegger, Gross emphasizes rhetoric as “δύναμις (dunamus, ‘capacity’) primarily and then secondarily a τέκνη (technē, ‘art’ or ‘technology’)” (34). δύναμις suggests a more fulsome engagement with pathos. “The pathos of a stone,” Gross argues, “allows it to become part of a wall; the pathos of a plant to grow; the pathos of an animal to perceive imminent danger and to shriek a warning to others” (44). Pathos becomes less an appeal and more a mode of being—a “being-with-one-another” (34). This mode is no less ethically fraught, however. Indeed, one could hear in Gross that stakes of pathetic appeals are far greater than our textbook approach often intones: less the proper shape of our arguments than the ethical, moral, and political consequences of how we live our lives within the fraught dynamics of our abilities to wound and be wounded. In the hands of Heidegger, rhetoric’s ontological stakes are renewed. Aristotle’s pathos becomes Heidegger’s being-moved (Sein-in-Bewegung).It is important to not drown out the disciplinary argument that Gross is making here. That is, Gross is not simply rehearsing Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle but rehearing it as also an argument about what contemporary rhetorical theory and practice ought to tune into. In our focus on the ethics of the speaker and judgments of the audience (as active listeners), we “can lose our ability to grasp adequately a wide range of unavoidable rhetorical activities, including things like passive listening, obeying, following, feeling, and so on” (50). Gross sees much of rhetorical theory moving to “systematically detach rhetorical terms like these for the sake of a political ideal” (50–51): the virtues of deliberative democracy. Gross’s interest lies in grasping “rhetoric as it forms particular ways of life” (51). Such a “trick” “compels us to ask” a series of important, situated questions: “Obedience to what end, to whom, for instance; listen to what and to whom; feel what and for whom?” (51). In our desire for straightforward ethical articulations of speaking and listening, we would be remiss to throw such particular ways of life out with the bathwater. “Listening-as-obedience” (50) certainly sounds as sinister now as it did in say 1927, but there is much to our being-moved beyond the false choice between “impossible enlightenment or demagoguery” (11). Rhetoric, Gross is arguing, ought to more thoroughly explore (rather than, say, guard) this liminal space. For Gross, this liminal is the realm of rhetoric: the arts of persuasion necessarily span the agent and patient, the “potent rhetor” and the “susceptible audience”—incorporating both as objects of study, rhetoric necessarily complicates them.As chapter 1 works through an engagement with early Heidegger (and fully cognizant of his “disastrous political philosophy”), chapter 2 works to retune rhetoric’s disciplinary relationship with Foucault. The chapter is notable for several crucial insights not least of which is Gross’s disentangling of movere from Foucault’s emphasis on organizing. This chapter is finely calibrated to parse distinctions between rhetorical approaches and the work of Foucault, who remains a central figure in/for rhetorical studies. Gross persuasively argues that as helpful as Foucault has been, he tunes rhetoric in to a particular historiographic register. Not surprisingly, then, disciplinarity continues to be at stake in this chapter.The core of Gross’s argument in chapter 2 “is that movere fits poorly into the biopolitical framework built by Foucault” (62). The sacred again emerges here for Gross: moving souls, which he sees as prototypical rhetorical activity irreducible to the arrangement or organization of bodies. Gross argues that Foucault’s emphasis upon the order of things “overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: most consequentially pedagogy, politics and psychology” (57). In place of such persuasion, we find biopower, to which something like subjection, as an exemplar of passive listening, cannot be reduced. “The art of listening is difficult to grasp,” Gross argues, “because its practicalities are now less obvious than speaking, and because we have lost touch with our relevant ways of knowing” (57). Distancing ourselves a bit from Foucault allows us to come to grips with (passive) listening as more than “the road to passive indoctrination” (83)—that being taught, commanded, or “subject to the instruction of others” is vital to movere and to being-moved. “Nor is the reverse adequate,” he continues; “the active listener-as-judge tells only part of the story, which means that many of our more recent efforts to recuperate the agency of the auditor [Gross draws primarily from Krista Radcliffe] miss the point” (83–84). For Gross, there is more to listening than an investment in agency, often in terms of critical or ethical listening, can account for.This neither/nor brings Gross back to the sacred: God’s invocation—and this is the correct word insofar as it does something—materializes that domain between a speaking agent’s absolute control and a patient serving simply as a vessel for God’s Word. (88)It is this invocation that makes possible the work of the auditor. What’s needed, then, are “communicative modalities for this middle domain where we still spend most of our time” (88)—time spent neither at the pulpit nor in the pew, but moving through the world active and yet vulnerable. Such modalities, Gross argues, are latent within rhetorical theory and practice, and, in fact, exist as dispositions in a range of disciplines. “What if,” he asks, “psychology, pedagogy, and politics are first considered meta-practical arts, like rhetoric, instead of the soft natural sciences that exercise biopower?” (65). Not arts that are “described, identified, taxonomized, administered” (65), but arts that tune us into the “dynamics of passive susceptibility: how we listen, learn, and change” (68)—a rhetorical tradition wherein we are “beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).Having opened up rhetoric to what Foucault’s biopower potentially closed off, Gross turns to rhetoric beyond the art of the rhetor. And so chapter 3 listens to the Freudian slips that sound out if not always the sacred or the supernatural then surely through those things beyond the art or the technē of the rhetor: the veranstaltungen (95): “persuasive adjuncts, contrivances, or events that cannot be reduced to mere thought however expressed” (105).In working through Freud, Gross pursues a rhetoric that is reducible to neither argument nor artistic proofs (atechnoi pisteis and entechnoi pisteis). As with earlier chapters, Gross’s move here bears upon, in large part, disciplinarity: how is rhetorical theory arranged—around what is it collected? Doing rhetorical theory is itself a practice, which is constituted by the choice of terms and of domains. What currently goes unheard? And not simply unheard but unaddressed? Rhetoric, if it could listen, would have much more to say. For instance, “We have trouble grasping sacred rhetoric because our dominant ways of knowing in the academy make it difficult to pick out sacred things in the first place” (103). The sacred, being beyond invention, is often absent from analyses because rhetorical analyses focus on the human: either the choices made by the rhetor or the cultural and political structures (in a Foucauldian register) that shape such choices. Such emphases leave no room for something (precisely) like the inartistic proofs—rendered by Quintilian as “supernatural, based on oracles, prophecies and omens” (108). Such proofs become available means of persuasion through the passive listening of a would-be rhetor: to be rendered subject to that which is beyond the rhetor. This is not the same as saying that such proofs are beyond rhetoric. “My point here is contrary,” Gross writes: “when facts speak for themselves they speak rhetorically” (107). Gross takes up the questions of facts to again engage the inartistic proofs: that which exceeds invention. He continues: “Typically, we do not learn about the rhetorical force of what is given” (107), in part because, disciplinarily, the given isn’t traceable to a speaking, inventing subject, which still often remains our base unit of both theory and practice.As an example, Gross describes the pedagogical treatment of religious texts in communication and composition courses. “In making a classroom argument about euthanasia,” Gross writes, “a sacred text like the Bible can appear to document community norms and their history; it can’t appear as ultimate authority” (109). Beyond the secular drive to excise religious texts, such sacred, inartistic proofs are excluded so that students might invent their own, artistic proofs. Gross writes, “Supernatural evidence carries a rhetorical force that resides beyond the rhetorician’s hand”—“to hear it takes some effort” (110). Gross links inartistic proofs to the domain of the sacred: the gods and everything else that might be in the room while two people are conversing. What the rhetorician—what rhetorical theory and practice—provides is the capacity to study “the precise historical relation that gives this point of intersection force” (118) among the people, words, and things—sacred and mundane—that populate rhetorical activity. “Let’s just say,” Gross writes, “there is no such thing as a persuasive word” without what’s “known to the classical rhetorician as inartistic means of persuasion” (117), which Gross treats broadly as “a certain disposition of time and place” (118) and the ambiguities of things such as “statues/relics, birds/auspices, walks/pilgrimages, pills/cures, words and spectacles human or divine” (119). The job of the rhetorician, then, is to make sense of how the “miracle” of persuasion gets done, “contrivances and all” (120).Chapter 4 (re)turns toward the composition classroom to give passive voice (back) to rhetoricity. Gross unpacks how passive voice is pedagogically and what this does for the art of listening and what it about the rhetorical theory and practice we to rhetorical and political are of passive voice that or (e.g., and “the something in Gross’s argument about passive voice and how it to the arts of listening and rhetoric. The sacred here as the core of our being is a to but that voice is not our It is not our for nor is it our for the of we speak what emerges is not reducible to either what we to say or what will to instance, Gross explores the between the and Gross asks, a more and of and a is that in rhetoric’s to foreground that active rhetorical agent, we the Such a focus would foreground we namely the we as the other who is The voice at the core of us that isn’t The The up an of to and people speaking for only active critical listening as a And such in fact, There is no Gross the book by all the that passive listening The of Gross’s book from the that this that with susceptibility to and political turns toward lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change” Such in the passive voice that gives voice to passive that is the very mode of our Yorke gets to the hi-hats does the It allows Yorke to the song, which is also to start the song. The beat already moving itself but the which isn’t the Yorke becomes of playing through an of subjection and of He is being But is now the time to call for passive no to demanding and As I Gross’s book, a forms the that and on the A in The to the very The of are being from the they in by those who from their in the of and And the from only part of the But what I here are not simply things to which we might but those facts of the already moving us to to of and for a more just and feel such a to be so moved, not only a clear and voice but an and a heart being rendered to what the world might be teaching it to sing.

Christopher W. Tindale

Part of the RSA series in transdisciplinary rhetoric, this volume brings together the insights of a diverse group of rhetorical scholars exploring the rhetorical dimensions of mathematics. There is no single perspective or approach on display as the reader is presented with studies of the rhetoric of mathematics as well as the use of rhetoric in mathematics and the rhetorical nature of mathematical language. These three prongs structure Edward Schiappa's foundational paper that explicitly informs the work of several contributors to the volume. In addition to these essentially theoretical explorations, the volume is rounded out by prescient applications that reinforce the topicality and importance of the subject matter. But any full review of the collection must begin with Schiappa's analyses.To the casual reader, no subjects could be more disconnected than rhetoric and mathematics. The language of demonstration and proofs measures an attitude of mind that values the apodictic and axiomatic while marginalizing, if not ignoring, the efforts of rhetoric. Chaim Perelman drew attention to this divide in his critique of the Cartesian ideal that detached the self-evident from the human sphere, wherein questions arise that mathematicians would consider foreign to their discipline.1 To consider numbers themselves as a source of evidence is part of what is at stake when mathematics is exposed as a human activity. Schiappa takes what Perelman abandoned and claims it as rhetorical territory. “In What Ways Shall We Describe Mathematics as Rhetorical?” answers the question in fertile ways (as subsequent papers show). The rhetorical turn of recent decades involves the rhetorical nature of mathematics on different fronts: “(1) the rhetoric of mathematics, understood as the persuasive argumentative use of mathematics; (2) rhetoric in mathematics, understood as the argumentative modes of persuasion found in written proofs and arguments throughout the history of mathematics; and (3) mathematical language as rhetorical, a sociolinguistic approach to the language of mathematics,” an approach supported by recent writings of Thomas Kuhn (33). In the first case, mathematics serves as evidence in an argument, increasing the persuasiveness of a claim. The second case refers to the argumentative and stylistic modes of persuasion found in proofs, a feature of the history of mathematics. The final case finds its motivation in the work of rhetoricians like Richard Weaver and Kenneth Burke,2 for whom all symbol use is rhetorical including that of mathematics. Mathematics is a language like others and with its own reasoning patterns operating in the discourse community of mathematicians. Schiappa illustrates each of these rhetorical aspects of mathematics with examples and bolsters their importance with argument, including a detailed discussion of the work of Kuhn. This, before taking a particularly interesting turn into ethnomathematics and the differences in how mathematics is conceived and used across cultures.Four of the papers in the collection make explicit reference to Schiappa's account and draw part of their stimulus from his distinctions; and the other analyses can be read through the lens of one or more of his distinctions, whether the papers are historical in nature or deal with contemporary questions. In the opening paper, and beyond their Introduction, the book's editors, James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes, open some of the relevant discussions by exploring relationships between rhetoric and mathematics. They reinforce their belief that the volume offers a timely and coordinated effort to explore the intersections of these two fields. In Schiappa's distinctions they find the appropriate routes into the subject matter. They trace the historical division between the fields, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, whose system of argument offered little overlap between rhetoric and mathematics, through to the uneven attention directed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (not so much, although the authors’ reading of quasi-logical arguments suggests something) and Burke (quite a bit, with the explicit inclusion of mathematics as a symbolic means of communication). This reinforces the importance of rhetoric in mathematics, and much of Wynn and Reyes’ closing analyses confirm this.Two papers pursue the themes of the volume into the field of economics. Catherine Chaput and Crystal Broch Colombini explore the persuasive role of mathematics at work in the metaphor of the invisible hand. And G. Mitchell Reyes provides a detailed investigation of the 2008 financial crisis through a case study of the mathematical formula known as the Li Gaussian copula. As Reyes writes: “Unraveling this copula reveals the constitutive rhetorical force of mathematical discourse—its capacity to invent, accelerate, and concentrate economic networks” (83). The story is long and far too complex to be detailed here. But the study rewards the reader with an understanding of just how traditional rhetorical modalities (like analogy and argument) connect to the rhetorical modalities of numeracy (like abstraction and commensurability) to generate something new (114).Likewise, Chaput and Colombini draw from the traditions of rhetoric in exploring the metaphor of the invisible hand. Their concept of particular focus is energeia, the power or force that activates potential. One of the theses of the analysis is that “the metaphor of the invisible hand regulates the energetic force of economic arguments” (62), and they track the metaphor accordingly, from the work of Adam Smith to that of John Maynard Keynes, where mathematics gains a more central place in economic discussion, and on to Milton Friedman's “positivist mathematical economics” (66). Through these and further analyses, the paper successfully supports the argument that capitalism's force (energeia) emerges in part from the historical developments of the mathematization of the invisible hand.The last paper of Part 2, by Andrew C. Jones and Nathan Crick, weaves together the mathematical reasoning of Charles Sanders Peirce and the detective fiction of Edgar Allen Poe, specifically the Dupin trilogy that includes “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The discussion identifies similarities between Poe's forensic analyst and Peirce's mathematician, offering a further case of rhetoric in mathematics. Like Burke in the earlier paper, Peirce is a thinker who understands rhetoric as the effective communication of signs—although I would not want to be taken as suggesting similarities between Burke and Peirce beyond this—and this would apply to all signs, including the mathematical. Poe's detective Dupin further illustrates Peirce's method of abduction, and Jones and Crick take us through the steps involved, from hypothesis to confirmation (while also using the wrong turn of the real case behind “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” to show how abductive reasoning can fail).Part 3, on mathematical argument and rhetorical invention, begins with Joseph Little's adoption of Schiappa's taxonomy for his study of the Saturnian account of atomic spectra, the most technical paper in the collection. That said, the historical case study of Hantaro Nagaoka underlying the discussion is quite accessible. The investigation of atomic spectra begins with a puzzle involving different appearances under different conditions. Little addresses responses to this by looking at rhetoric in Nagaok's mathematics, specifically his use of an analogy between the behaviour of material in Saturn's rings and that of atoms in what is known as the Zeeman effect. Little then analyzes the rhetoric of Nagaoka's mathematics, showing that “a mathematical equation can function indexically, symbolically, and qualitatively in a given case without taking on a computational role (164). Finally, he completes the Schiappian analysis with an account of Nagaoka's mathematical language as rhetorical in the debate that ensued between Nagaoka and the mathematical physicist G.A. Schott.Jeanne Fahnestock's paper, “The New Mathematical Arts of Argument: Naturalists Images and Geometric Diagrams,” completes Part 3. The study takes its place among Fahnestock's meticulously wrought accounts of rhetorical thinking in the history of science.3 She plunges the reader immediately into a discussion of the depiction of scallops in Martin Lister's publications of 1695. Illustrated with original drawings from the account, the rhetorical importance of image reproduction combined with geometrical ways of seeing diagrammatically is shown to underlie arguing in sixteenth century natural philosophy to an extent “that is difficult to appreciate from a twenty-first century perspective that separates the mathematical and the verbal” (174). Fahnestock believes these features underlie arguing because, unlike today, grounding all disciplines (including mathematics) was dialectic in the form of a general art of argumentation. The dialectic in question is Philip Melanchthon's Erotemata dialectics, a work which Fahnestock has just translated into English (Fahnestock 2021). This is a dialectic in which mathematics plays a detailed role, and the paper proceeds to provide a history of this work that blends naturally into a deeper history of the argumentative use of diagrams. Her conclusions point to how, through geometrically controlled images. mathematical ways of viewing the natural world issued in today's “mathematically constructed world” (204).The final two essays comprise Part 4, and both deal with the role of mathematics in education. James Wynn's “Accommodating Young Women” explores some of the gender biases in the way mathematics is taught but more specifically provides a lengthy case study of the rhetorical devices used by TV star and math scholar Danica McKellar to turn middle school girls to the study of mathematics through her book Math Doesn't Suck. This involves an interesting application of epideictic rhetoric to a contemporary subject of concern, and the strategies used are both traditional and innovative. Essentially, McKellar strives to modify the image of mathematics, and Wynn's study of her attempts is both fascinating and instructive.The final paper in the collection, Michael Dreher's “Turning Principles of Action into Practice,” studies the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ (NCTM) rhetoric in reforming mathematics education. Two of Schiappa's categories come into play here: rhetoric of mathematics and in mathematics. Built on a historical account of philosophies of mathematics education, and incorporating several pertinent anecdotes, Dreher reveals the successes and failures of the NCTM's persuasive attempts to counter the idea that mathematical ability is inherent in only few and instead promote wide success in students’ mathematical achievement. It is a challenge that continues, and Dreher makes clear the difficulties still to be faced.This is, in sum, an eclectic set of papers gathered around a few common agreements and unified by a deep conviction of the importance of challenging any vestiges of the traditional belief that rhetoric and mathematics occupy different, even competing, spheres. The stand-out paper, testified to by the importance accorded it by many of the other studies in the book, is Schiappa's. One could say that it is worth the price of the book, but that would be unfair to the many other fine pieces of scholarship collected here.The observant reader will also have noted that much of the forgoing discussion refers to rhetoric and mathematics, while the title of the volume speaks of arguing. In fact, the attention to argumentation is pervasive, and this book takes its place among a recent appreciation of the role of mathematics in argumentation,4 while answering the kinds of dismissive critiques we once witnessed from skeptics like Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont,5 who attempted to maintain the rhetoric/mathematics gap by suggesting that those who crossed it (at least from one direction) were unknowledgeable interlopers. It was one of Schiappa's opening insights that “If we replace the word “rhetoric” with “argument” . . . we find considerable recent interest in “mathematical argumentation” as a social and pedagogical practice” (43). And, as I have noted, this is repeatedly corroborated in this highly recommended book.

Fielding Montgomery

Discussions of demagoguery are, unfortunately, back in vogue in popular political discourse. Within the contemporary political landscape, the question of whether various world leaders should be considered demagogues abounds. In the American context, many perceive strong demagogic tendencies in President Donald Trump, and others see it in candidates like Bernie Sanders. This assessment, while perhaps not always stated in such specific terms, is prevalent throughout much of the rhetoric in public debate and deliberation, with Democrats and Republicans demonizing each other with more frequency. While this discussion seems particularly relevant to the contemporary political climate, demagoguery as a term dates all the way back to some of the earliest political philosophers of the Western tradition. The term's origin was decidedly neutral, as can be seen in the likes of Aristophanes and Thucydides. Donald Trump is, in the most neutral sense of the term, a demagogue. That is to say that Trump is a leader of a group of people, a fact that his 2016 election victory affirms. Trump may also be a demagogue in the more charged sense of the word. This more charged definition finds its roots in Plato and Aristotle, who began to complicate the term before Plutarch defined the term with a negative valence that has stuck. A critical aspect of defining demagoguery in the contemporary lexicon is a focus on how an individual's rhetorical moves, with unique personal motivations, drive a public toward us versus them binaries. Much of the scholarship on the Nazis and Adolf Hitler is an exemplar of this obsession with individualistic demagoguery, as it often elucidates personal motives for Hitler's demagogic rhetoric toward the Jews. Since Hitler is considered by many to be the demagogue par excellence and some of this understanding can be traced to Kenneth Burke, this conception of demagoguery as something enacted by a particular speaker has remained dominant in rhetorical study and political philosophy.Against such a backdrop, Patricia Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely intervention into how we define and think about demagoguery. In order to accomplish such a task, Roberts-Miller traces the way demagoguery is currently envisioned, explains the deficits of that conceptualization, provides a new working definition grounded in argumentation theory, and then uses a series of examples to support her argument. Roberts-Miller takes issue with defining demagoguery as the intentional use of scapegoating by a liberal autonomous subject. For many scholars, it is easier to explain rampant discrimination, fascism, and violence as something spurred by an individual speaker rather than addressing what allowed that message to take root.Roberts-Miller therefore criticizes this approach and provides a redefinition of demagoguery as “a polarizing discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the out-group should be punished and scapegoated for the current problems of the in-group” (16). Further, she contends that public policy debate in a demagogic society tends to focus on only three things: group identity, need, and severity of punishment against the out-group. To elucidate the features that flow from this definition, Roberts-Miller draws on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's concept of philosophical paired terms. This terminology, which she rephrases as binary paired terms, shows how societal demagoguery relies on binaries, which usually circle back to in-group versus out-group driven decision making. This allows rhetors to skip deliberation and sound argumentation and simply assert their position. Roberts-Miller further theorizes how these dynamics mean that political debate focuses on nonfalsifiable motivism rather than specific policy proposals. Roberts-Miller accomplishes much of this method and theory building in the introductory and concluding chapters, advancing specific case studies in the body chapters that help elucidate and nuance her redefinition.The first example Roberts-Miller turns to is the invasion of Iraq, explored in depth in chapter 1. Roberts-Miller explains that what made her write this book was the almost entirely absent policy debate prior to the invasion of Iraq. Roberts-Miller argues that policy debate must address both need and a plan. To be clear, there was plenty of ideological pseudo-debate about need in the lead-up to the invasion, but Roberts-Miller points out there was hardly any concrete policy discussion about what plans might be considered. Beginning with the necessary background information on the lead-up to this war, Roberts-Miller then pivots to an explanation of how identity was substituted for policy. President George W. Bush and his administration did all they could to avoid discussion of a particular plan for Iraq. Such deliberation, in their view, would have delayed and bogged down support for the war effort. Rather, they simply called out anyone who did not support going to war as unpatriotic, showing how identity trumped deliberation and the patriotic/unpatriotic binary flourished. The Bush administration also enacted a binary between the “Christian West” and “Muslim Middle East” as a way to further stake the war on identities rather than sound, policy debate. With these binaries, Roberts-Miller shows how the conditions for the disastrous Iraq War were achieved through demagogic rhetoric. Many in Congress and the public positioned debate itself as being anti-American, instead opting for naïve, patriotic support of the war. Without a strong policy debate, the American war strategy relied purely on best-case scenarios that did not happen. According to Roberts-Miller, relying on public debate, rather than demagoguery, may have prevented the invasion of Iraq or “at worst, have led to a better-planned war” with contingencies being considered (47).Chapter 2 builds on the binary paired terms of punishment and reward, using a number of case studies to exemplify how these terms are used in demagogic rhetoric. The first explored is Cleon from Ancient Athens. Cleon sets up the binary of everyone being either a friend or enemy and every act being either reward or punishment. Roberts-Miller works this pairing into a unique ratio of punish/enemy and reward/friend, which characterize demagoguery writ large. Cleon's “rational” assessment here shows the risks of defining demagoguery as primarily invested in leveraging emotional appeals. As Roberts-Miller pointedly observes, definitions of demagoguery as speech driven by mere strong affects is misguided since a speaker could provide good argumentation grounded in emotion, and, conversely, a speaker might be able to perform “emotionless” rationality without solid evidence. Instead, as Roberts-Miller explains through examples ranging from segregationists in the south to the Supreme Court decision in Hirabayashi v. United States, to illustrate how those claiming calm rationality, often through an invented middle ground, can actually perpetrate demagogic binaries and policies. In Hirabayashi, this worked its way back into a punishment/reward binary where Japanese Americans were falsely blamed (scapegoated) for sabotage during the attack on Pearl Harbor and were in need of punishment (internment).In chapter 3, Roberts-Miller elaborates further upon the features of her definition of demagoguery: scapegoating and rationality. Looking deeper into Japanese internment in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Roberts-Miller expands beyond the Hirabayashi ruling to examine the Roberts Commission and California attorney general Earl Warren's supposedly emotionless arguments for imprisonment. A critical component of this appeal was Warren's surface-level reasonability and a supposed willingness to let the facts guide the debate surrounding internment. However, once one digs beneath the surface, it becomes clear that this rationality is merely a façade. Roberts-Miller points to a lack of evidence that there was any Japanese American involvement in Pearl Harbor and the difference in treatment between Japanese Americans and German and Italian Americans as proof of prejudice rather than deliberation guiding decision making. This is used to prove that rationality markers are often deployed to conflate the difference between a logical argument and an argument that is made by appealing to logic. Ultimately, the Japanese were interned not because of logic in and of itself but because demagoguery cast them as an entity Americans should fear through misleading appeals to a nonexistent logic.Chapter 4 moves from a discussion of demagoguery that appeals to logic that, while flawed, is easy to understand to demagoguery that relies on argumentation that claims rationality but intentionally obfuscates logic. The case study here is Madison Grant's racist book Passing of the Great Race, which is considered a historically significant white supremacist text because of its prevalence in America and its appreciation by Hitler himself. Roberts-Miller deftly dissects Grant's demagogic argument for the superiority of the white/Nordic race through the inconsistencies in logic. Some specific problems include Grant's lack of definition for his central term “race,” an evolutionary narrative that undercuts his claims to Nordic purity, and his practically nonexistent use of citations or appeals to authority. Roberts-Miller highlights how even those contemporary reviewers who assessed the book positively cited its poor quality of argument as a negative element. Thus, with his claims not clearly grounded in proper citations, Grant's authority comes from himself. Roberts-Miller's takedown of Grant works well to boost her claim that demagoguery can guise itself with pseudo-logic, while actually being logic's antithesis.Roberts-Miller's next move is to show how demagogic rhetoric can appeal to expert opinion and be seemingly intellectual, when it is actually anti-intellectual. Chapter 5 focuses on three case studies of nonscientists—E. S. Cox, Theodore Bilbo, and William Tam—who claimed appeals to authority and that science supported their positions (with Cox and Bilbo espousing white supremacy and Tam arguing homophobic viewpoints against gay marriage). Cox relies heavily on authorities whom he believes are right because they are good people (i.e., white). Bilbo's arguments often contradict his sources, and his sources often contradict each other. Further, the Bilbo case study works to show how demagoguery is not always a calculated maneuver, as Bilbo's political career would have been better served with a less overtly racist message. Finally, Tam shows how poor, demagogic citation practices can flourish in the digital age. Tam deflected numerous questions about his sources and the facticity of his homophobic claims as being found on the Internet, which he implicitly claimed must make them true. Here, Roberts-Miller advances more theoretical insights on the anti-intellectualism of demagoguery, bolstered most compellingly by her selection of cases that all relied on so-called expert appeals to science and, with Tam, the Internet as a whole.Roberts-Miller's conclusion again reiterates her redefinition of demagoguery and why this book has provided an important move to understanding the culture of demagoguery. Roberts-Miller then lists some topics that she could not explore in depth due to length restrictions, including gender, religion, charismatic leadership, reification, demagoguery's universality, and if demagoguery harms only in cases of an essentialized out-group identity. Indeed, I was surprised that Roberts-Miller's book largely declined to give issues of gender and other power differentials greater attention in order to present a more capacious account of demagoguery. One area in particular this book could have improved on is either providing significant cases of demagoguery on the left or explaining why this omission is necessary given her theoretical redefinition. Every major example in the body chapters of this book comes from right-leaning politicians and sympathizers. While these provide stark and compelling case examples, Roberts-Miller opens by saying, “Any project that is entirely about how badly they argue is going to be a self-congratulating exercise in saying the out-group is the out-group. Trying to identify the characteristics that help people climb up the latter [sic -ladder] of extermination shouldn't be in service of purifying our communities of demagogues—we are demagogues—but in service of reflecting on what is persuading us. That's the goal of this book” (8). As such, a case study of leftist demagoguery would have done well to illustrate her point across ideological and party lines. Or if leftist demagoguery does not exist, an explanation of why that is the case would be very insightful for future research. Nevertheless, Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely and essential intervention into our conception of demagoguery in the present day. Readers of Philosophy & Rhetoric as well as those interested in political philosophy will find much practical and scholarly utility in this book.

Steven S. Kapica

Readers—collections comprised mainly of previously published scholarship—are by design a mixed bag. They stake out fields or topics established enough to merit targeted collections of foundational texts and attempt to be representative but not comprehensive. Their appeal is to accessibility—grounding the initiate and appeasing the seasoned scholar. To that end, most of us automatically assume that “readers” are for students. We look to them as a way to anchor an undergraduate survey course. Maybe we suggest one to a graduate student who needs a quick primer or refresher. For scholars, however, readers rarely provide more than casual strolls along well-worn paths. This is not the case, however, with Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz's Comedy Studies Reader, an expertly conceived collection that proves both familiar and new.Comedy studies is a patchwork field, composed of scholars from a range of disciplines, including (but certainly not limited to) literature, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, media studies, communications, rhetoric, and anthropology. It's a field born of nagging questions. Why do we laugh? Why do we laugh at things we probably shouldn't? A “comedy studies reader,” then, might prove more valuable than a generic reader. A comedy studies reader might provide a useful snapshot of a multifarious field. It might serve as a mission statement or a foundational testament. It might even serve ontological necessity. Marx and Sienkiewicz's collection doesn't lay claim to any of these, exactly. Instead, it “serves as a call to expand both the scope of comedic media that scholars and students consider and the tools they use to do so” (13). The collection “offers an opportunity to consider comedy as both a theoretical concept and a commercial product, while illustrating the ways in which these things are inevitably intertwined” (6). These statements of purpose reveal the editors' disciplinary homes (media studies and communication) and evince the book's preoccupation with film and television comedy (each chapter begins with an epigraph formatted as a film or television script). Although the text does, as its editors claim, probe “the history of Western thought about comedy, joking, and humor, in order to encourage its reexamination in the classroom,” the focus on comedy's commercial aspects tips the collection's hat more toward media studies than any of the other disciplines under the comedy studies umbrella (14). That said, it would be a mistake for us to consign the collection to media studies.The Comedy Studies Reader is expertly ordered. It consists of a clearly articulated (and accessibly written) introduction followed by eight chapters centered on key concepts. Each chapter has its own short introduction from the editors, excerpts from seminal authors, and essays that exemplify how “contemporary scholars have applied comedy theory to media texts” (15). Finally, each chapter includes a new essay that builds on the preceding materials. It is in these new essays that The Comedy Studies Reader achieves its most salient purpose. Students can take note of the scaffolding, how arguments are introduced, synthesized, and built; they can use the theoretical excerpts as foundations for further exploration, the representative and new essays serving as models. Scholars familiar with the theoretical frames, however, can find inspiration in the new essays. We can revisit old concepts in search of nuance and discover unexplored angles worth pursuing.Marx and Sienkiewicz begin chapter 1 with an excerpt by Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Carnivalesque,” which seems to suggest that the Russian philosopher and literary critic serves as an appropriate starting point for comedy studies theory. A contestable point, maybe. However, the Bakhtin excerpt is followed by Umberto Eco's “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom,’” which both complicates (dismantles) and extends Bakhtin's position. “From antiquity to Freud or Bergson,” Eco writes, “every attempt to define comic seems to be jeopardized by the fact that this is an umbrella term … that gathers together a disturbing ensemble of diverse and not completely homogeneous phenomena, such as humor, comedy, grotesque, parody, satire, wit, and so on” (25). Reading this—after Bakhtin—alerts us to the constraints and affordances of comedy studies as a field. It puts us in a position to critically consider and thoughtfully engage all that is gathered under the umbrella of The Comedy Studies Reader. What we are in for, then, is not a chronological walkthrough of the tenets of comedy studies; rather, we are invited to consider how the diverse ensemble of not-so-homogeneous phenomena might usefully connect and overlap. The new essay, by Philp Scepanski, concludes the chapter by invoking Bakhtin. Scepanski's essay takes as its object of study the “notoriously base, self-consciously offensive, and largely critically reviled” animated sitcom Family Guy and mines the controversial text for answers to how irreverent comedy can provide us with “a better sense of how American comedy and culture respond to collective trauma in our time” (34). The essay serves as proof positive of the kind of scholarship Marx and Sienkiewicz invite us to engage with and produce.After Eco's citation of Freud and Bergson, it should come as no surprise that the central figures of the next two chapters are Henri Bergson (chapter 2, “Comedy Mechanics and Absurdity”) and Sigmund Freud (chapter 3, “Psychoanalyzing Comedy”). Chapter 2 pairs Bergson with an excerpt from Jerry Palmer's The Logic of the Absurd (1987) and Donald Crafton's 1995 piece on slapstick, “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle, and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy.” These three foundational pieces lead to a truly fascinating essay by Evan Elkins on the shocking, antitalk show The Eric André Show. Elkins builds on Bergson and Palmer, as well as Bakhtin, exploring how the narrow-casting logic of postnetwork American television is drawing us into “darker, more absurd, aggressive, and avant-garde forms of comedy” (59). Chapter 3 begins with excerpts from Freud before presenting us with Paul Flaig's 2011 essay “Lacan's Harpo,” which proves a thorny though revelatory exploration of how Harpo Marx's absurdist comedy dissolves the arbitrary boundary between the symbolic and the real. Flaig's heady piece is followed by an essay from Andrew J. Owens who considers a much less controversial text than either Scepanski and Elkins do, opting to explore through a psychoanalytic approach CBS's extremely popular, though decidedly middle-brow, Big Bang Theory.For the most part, the remaining chapters cover expected but necessary bases: irony (chapter 4), genre (chapter 5), race and ethnicity (chapter 6), gender and sexuality (chapter 7), and nation and globalization (chapter 8). Like the first three chapters, each of the remaining chapters includes excellent texts that serve as foundations for the essays that follow. This review risks minimizing the value of these later chapters by not fully explicating them—something I am loathe to do, as the works collected here are just as strong as those in earlier chapters. What becomes clear as one navigates through The Comedy Studies Reader is that the dynamics of the field (comedy studies) make for wildly diverse, infinitely generative scholarship that has clear and useful connections across its myriad interests and domains. I'll confess that early on, I expected to skip through the chapters, reading only those essays whose titles piqued my interest. Yet with each chapter I found myself deeply invested in how all the pieces fit together—and before I knew it, I'd read the entire collection cover to cover, marking many of the selections with notes for work I hope to pursue in the near future.The Comedy Studies Reader meets its claim to be a wide-ranging introduction to comedy studies aimed at both scholars and students. While a majority of the primer is housed in media studies, this is not a bad thing. Marx and Sienkiewicz's selections and organization invite cross- disciplinary dialogue across issues that concern scholars of all fields. For instance, in chapter 5, we find ourselves reading about the features of the television sitcom. In the included excerpt from Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik's Popular Film and Television Comedy, amid discussion of shows like M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we are met with a reference to Freud. In itself, this is not surprising, as recourse to Freud is part of comedy studies' DNA, but for the reader of the collection it triggers recall of earlier excerpts; it invites backward glances to how the themes and goals of earlier chapters, though occasionally embroiled in generic, disciplinary features, easily build on and influence each other. Owens's essay on The Big Bang Theory, included in the psychoanalysis chapter (3), can be pulled forward and considered in terms of genre (chapter 5). Ji Hoon Park, Nadine G. Gabbadon, and Ariel R. Chernin's essay on Rush Hour 2 (chapter 6, “Race and Ethnicity”) hearkens back to chapter 4 (“Irony”) and the excerpt from Linda Hutcheon. Alfred L. Martin Jr.'s essay (“Generic Closets: Sitcoms, Audiences, and Black Male Gayness”) from chapter 7 (“Gender and Sexuality”) connects to chapters 4 and 6, and the excerpt from Andy Medhurst's A National Joke, included in the book's final chapter, brings us full circle, recalling Bakhtin and Eco. So while there are those of us who might have liked a more wide-ranging selection of comedic texts (Medhurst's piece is the only one to really address stand-up comedy, for instance), The Comedy Studies Reader expertly follows through on its promise for scholars—providing a clear invitation to play, to revisit old streets and explore new territories under the sheltering sky of comedy studies.

Daniel M. Gross

Reviews 209 Jamie Dow, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric (Oxford University Press) Oxford & New York, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN9780198716266 Aristotle s Rhetoric has long posed problems of fit, which makes its uptake particularly revealing of the preoccupations that define a historical moment. Where should the Rhetoric be situated in the Corpus Aristotelicuml Is it primarily a practical work in the handbook tradition, or is it supposed to offer a full-blown theory of rhetoric? Should it be approached as a kind of philosophy, or something else entirely, especially since it devotes so much attention to style and passion? Is it even a coherent text to begin with? In his ambitious book, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Jamie Dow begins with these basic questions in mind, and he defends a set of interlocking answers that point to the Rhetoric as a serious, philosophical work along the following lines. Aristotle's Rhetoric is primarily a work on argumentation as understood by medieval Arab commentators along with some of our contemporaries including Bumyeat and Allen; it offers a full­ blown theory of rhetoric opposed to the handbook tradition of Gorgias and Thrasymachus; it is coherent in general and in detail, and it legitimates on philosophical grounds the use of passion in rhetoric. Thus, Dow's project also speaks to our historical moment—broadly postwar—when passions in political life became suspect for good reasons. Few will agree with all of the key claims as laid out by Dow or with each of the demonstrations offered. But it is an outstanding virtue of the book that Dow defends each claim with such care that even objections can be sharpened productively. In what follows, I outline the main arguments and what appears to be at stake. The first page offers the basic argument and a sense of the imperatives that make Dow's book bracing. "The principal claim defended in this book is that, for Aristotle in the Rhetoric, arousing the passions of others can amount to giving them proper grounds for conviction, and hence a skill in doing so is properly part of an expertise in rhetoric. This claim rests on two principal foundations. First, it involves defending the attribution to Aristotle of a norma­ tive view of rhetoric, centered around its role in the state, in which rhetoric is a skill producing proper grounds for conviction. If the arousal of the passions is part of rhetoric, thus understood, Aristotle must hold, second, a particular view of the passions: he must think they are representational states, in which the subject takes things to be the way they are represented" (p. 1). First Foundation I: this normative view, according to Dow, contrasts sharply with the merely practical understanding of rhetoric held by his pre­ decessors in the handbook tradition, and it diverges from the Platonic expectation that the orator needs to know the truth about the subject matter. Instead, according to Dow, Aristotle's orator should skillfully grasp plausi­ ble starting points for the listener's deliberations in the form of reputable opinions" (endoxa) related to the subject at hand (pp- 34—5). So how exactly is the rhetor obligated, and why isn't this obligation arbitrary? Here Dow is careful not to invoke some higher ethical principle. The obligation of the 210 RHETORICA rhetor remains immanent to the skill itself, as it becomes manifest in the context of the state organized along participatory lines. That is to say, rhetoric is by virtue of the world in which it appears as such—originally in the lawcourts and in the political assembly (p. 9). Understood at the most basic level, a rhetor should exercise skill precisely where the subject at hand speaks to the commonplaces and reputable opinions anchored in the state thus consti­ tuted. This is an important point that Dow wishes to extend beyond Aristotle per se: rhetorical skill has wide value and it must be measured as such (p. 76). Hence Dow gives us an ethos-proof like this: "they believe the things Pericles has said, because they believe Pericles—he himself is what is pistos" (p. 98). And then more formally this example of a pathos-proof: "1.1 register evidence...

Michael Rothberg

3 Song of Solomon picks up where Mumbo Jumbo leaves off. That is, in repeating with a difference certain details and motifs of Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Toni Morrison signifies upon what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has called one of grand works of critical Signification (238). (1) While the writing of Mumbo Jumbo concludes, we read, at P.M. on Jan. 31st, 1971, Morrison's famous North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent sets off from the roof of Mercy Hospital for other side of Lake Superior ... [a]t 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February 1931 (Reed 218; Morrison, Song 3). If Morrison sets her watch by Reed's earlier novel, she also rewinds the time back to the early years of the Depression. Yet even in that return to the past, Song of Solomon continues Mumbo Jumbo, a novel that, except for its epilogue, is set in a fantastic pastiche of the 1920s. With this opening example, I would like to suggest how an exploration of Song of Solomon and its many intertexts evoke questions of narrative logic, historical time, and cultural memory. Because it is so densely allusive on so many different levels and in so many different modes, Morrison's novel deserves to be read not only through its numerous intertexts, but also as a commentary on the significance of intertextuality as a literary, historical, and social process. As her careful but parodic dating suggests, Morrison, like Reed, uses intertextuality to provide an alternative to dominant accounts of history, and, like Reed again, she does so by engaging both with texts of the black Atlantic and with Euro-American currents in Western literary culture. In particular, for my interests, both Song of Solomon and Mumbo Jumbo rewrite Thomas Pynchon's paranoid postmodern quest classic The Crying of Lot 49. (2) On the surface, Morrison's novel seems far from Pynchon's and Reed's work, but in fact they constitute a complex constellation that can lead to a rethinking both of intertextual relations and of intersections among literature, history, and memory. Each novel involves a protagonist's quest for a hidden truth that destabilizes his or her everyday world and turns out to involve coming to terms with some significant, but previously obscure, aspect of the past and its still operative influence on the present. Pynchon's Oedipa sets out to execute a will and finds herself searching for proof of an elaborate postal conspiracy that recedes hundreds of years into the past. Reed's PaPa LaBas attempts to understand the wax and wane of the Jew Grew infection and ends up seeking the sacred Text of black culture and uncovering an epic battle that stretches back to ancient Egypt. Finally, Morrison's Milkman initially sets out after his Aunt Pilate's inheritance, only to discover that it is not gold that is at stake, but an oral cultural document of familial and communal history. Despite broad narrative and thematic similarities--and a host of smaller-scale convergences--Morrison's work diverges significantly from the two other texts I have identified. While Reed in Mumbo Jumbo pushes Pynchon's paranoid and conspiratorial logic to the extreme, at once universalizing and shattering it, Morrison takes a different tack. She backgrounds conspiracy in order to explore a related, but significantly different, narrative logic, that of traumatic memory. While critics have in particular read Morrison's Beloved as a literary enactment of trauma, Song of Solomon also offers an opportunity to engage with contemporary legacies of traumatic memory. (3) Exploring the intersections among these texts takes on particular significance because narratives of conspiracy and trauma have emerged in recent decades as two of the most powerful logics through which the subjects of postmodern U.S. culture register and reflect on history. The two narrative logics are often linked, both in real life and in popular culture. In two well-known examples, the trauma of Kennedy's assassination has given birth to rampant paranoid speculation, and Mulder's conspiratorial thinking on The X Files has supposedly been spurred by the traumatic abduction of his sister. …

B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan · 5 authors

The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979–1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles “created to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).”1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the film—directed by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Women’s Film Project collective and described as “the first Latin American feminist documentary”—examines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the film’s production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Day’s institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as development’s “regimes of visuality.”5 Especially relevant to The Double Day’s production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, WID emphasized women’s participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970s—as best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of “underdevelopment” that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered “development media”—exemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such media’s production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how “gender impacts [these works’] shape, content, and trajectories.”9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as “development media” is to overlook the film’s place within Solberg’s directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational women’s filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth century—sometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase women’s contributions but also presumes a “weak” or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about “development media” as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this film’s radical Marxist approach to women’s labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the film’s protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its making—from the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated it—revealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the film’s Latin American context—reflected in Solberg’s formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico City—requires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the film’s history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalism’s political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed “the practice of informed speculation.”18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to “press at the limits” of the archive to “inoculate our scholarship against our evidence’s afflictions.”19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive “in a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.”20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and “intimate familiarity with the archive” that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projects—and their preservation—over time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of women’s movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of development—each historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these films’ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issue’s own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordances—such as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platforms—we have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge production—and this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a “powerful but fragile semantic constellation,” as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while “an area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.”22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond “modernity” as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and media’s entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to development’s epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also women’s in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how development’s has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about women’s urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of women’s and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This “gender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the women’s development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of women’s presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a