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Resilient Turns: Epistrophe, Incrementum, Metonymy
Get PDFIn this essay, we demonstrate how rhetorical analyses of style can maintain their focus on linguistic patterns while simultaneously attending to material ones. Focusing on the trope of metonymy and the figures of incrementum and epistrophe, we show how these devices represent different modes of material-semiotic addressivity, resiliently turning and reconfiguring the rhetorical ecologies they capacitate. Using three case studies—a corpus of news articles about water quality amid extensive wind turbine development in Chatham-Kent, Ontario; traditional and “rogue” pain scales; and scientific literature about CRISPR—we explore the stylistic affordances of epistrophe, incrementum, and metonymy, showing how these “turnings” allow resilient material-semiotic articulations. We conclude by suggesting how our framework may be applied and extended to other topics and how this understanding of tropes and figures may align with other research trajectories in RSTM
The Resilience of Sensation in Urban Planning
Get PDFThis article examines how sensation and affect make different kinds of resilience meaningful to communities. Through a case study, we analyze public deliberation about a proposal to expand interstates in Tampa, Florida. We describe how evidence introduced by opposing sides foregrounded conflicting sensory experiences. The resulting sensoriums upheld different aspects of the city’s identity as worth maintaining. Drawing from recent scholarship defining resilience as something that can always be done otherwise, we suggest that resilience is better understood as entangled with public affect. We argue that a key point for rhetorical intervention in city planning is considering which futures and visions of resilience are being imagined for publics
We are No Longer Invisible
Get PDFSickle cell discourses are not merely descriptions of medical matters but contentious sites that invoke rhetorical arguments to support racialized medical borders, human difference, and ontological essentialism. In this essay, I examine in this essay is the way that those stricken by Sickle Cell Anemia appropriate the disease to advocate for their voice and visibility. I disclose how the construction of SCA as a black disease becomes a contested terrain which is often a “cultural centering on identity and dignity.” At odds is how the body is inscribed with a set of meanings in its association with blackness, the woeful ignorance that’s pervasive in the medical community of those who treat sickle cell patients and the indomitable will of the warrior to survive regardless. I consider the “warring ideals in one dark body,” urgings to be seen and heard. These manifest as performances of resistance, acts of resilience, and ways of asserting agency to maintain a semblance of humanity in the midst of situations that are anything but
Addressing the Social Determinants of Health: “Vulnerable” Populations and the Presentation of Healthy People 2020
Get PDFPopulation health is a concept at the core of national healthcare reform efforts. Population health focuses on the social determinants of health, or the living conditions of people at work, home, and play. To participate in population health initiatives, organizations must collect population-level data, creating a discourse of resilience-as-ability-to-cope through mapping community demographics, as though a counting of bodies and their material conditions creates a foundation for sustained, improved health outcomes. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) launched an initiative called Healthy People 2020, a set of ten-year national goals and objectives for health promotion and disease prevention. In this essay, we analyze this data project, arguing that the discourses of resiliency (through improved national, state, and local data collection efforts) and vulnerability (of the people who are reduced to data) create a constitutive rhetoric for U.S. public health officials to rally around the cause of population health yet exclude the very people upon whom such a cause should focus. Specifically, an examination of the ODPHP’s Healthy People 2020 website reveals that the reduction of bodies to quantification in data displays for health professionals, when viewed through the lens of Philip Wander’s Third Persona, objectifies groups of people already historically marginalized and obfuscates pathways to social action. We argue that instead, an ecological, relational definition of resilience must be fostered through autonomy of communities in the decisions they make about their own community members’ health and wellness
The Recalcitrance and Resilience of Scientific Function
Get PDF“Function” is a vitally important concept in the scientific community. Scientists use it to describe and address a wide variety of research problems. In publications, however, scientists within and across disciplines interpret function differently. For example, intense controversy surrounds what percentage of the human genome should be deemed "functional” rather than “junk DNA.” In this essay, we analyze the use of function in the research of de novo gene birth, a budding scientific field that studies how novel genes can emerge in non-genic sequences. Our research team, composed of a rhetorical scholar, philosopher, structural biologist and systems biologist, crafts a taxonomy of how “function” is variously constituted in de novo gene birth publications, including as expressions, capacities, interactions, physiological implications and evolutionary implications. We argue function is shaped by the diverse onto-epistemological perspectives of scientists and is both a recalcitrant and resilient concept of scientific practice. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s writings on a scientific mode of thinking, functions are time-space scales of objects under investigation that make possible references to scientific measurements
"Tree Thinking": The Rhetoric of Tree Diagrams in Biological Thought
Get PDFTree-like visualizations have played a central role in taxonomic and evolutionary biology for centuries, and the idea of a “tree of life” has been a pervasive notion not only in biology but also in religion, philosophy, and literature for much longer. The tree of life is a central figure in Darwin’s Origin of Species in both verbal and visual forms. As one of the most powerful and pervasive images in biological thought, what conceptual and communicative work has it enabled? How have the visual qualities and elements of the tree form interacted with biological thinking over time? This paper examines the pre-Darwinian history of tree images, the significance of Darwin’s use of such images, and the development of tree diagrams after Darwin. This history shows evidence of four separate traditions of visualization: cosmological, logical-philosophical, genealogical, and materialist. Visual traditions serve as rhetorical contexts that provide enthymematic backing, or what Perelman calls “objects of agreement,” for interpretation of tree diagrams. They produce polysemic warrants for arguments in different fields. The combination of the genealogical tradition with the cosmological and the logical changed the framework for thinking about the natural world and made Darwin’s theory of evolution possible; the later materialist tradition represents the “modernization” of biology as a science
Rhetoric, Dialectic, and Dogmatism: A Colloquy on Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s “Free Speech, Rhetoric, and a Free Economy”
Get PDFIn a 2019 collection, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, co-founder of POROI and Distinguished Professor Emerita at The University of Illinois at Chicago, contributed an essay entitled “Free Speech, Rhetoric, and a Free Economy.” Her claim was that rhetoric and liberty are doubly linked. For one thing, any defense of liberty will make use of rhetoric, “rhetoric” understood as “speaking with persuasive intent instead of using physical violence.” For another, the free market in ideas is a rhetorical idea at the heart of free societies. The evidence for the second proposition—that liberty is rhetorical, a matter of sweet talk, is not so persuasive as that defenses of liberty are themselves rhetorical. If true, however, the proposition that liberty is rhetorical is more important. The growth of knowledge may justify a constitution of liberty, as the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek believed, but rhetoric gives persuasive tongue to both liberty and knowledge. Free speech is more than merely parallel to free exchange. The liberal society is one that gets its rhetoric straight. The present text is a colloquium between McCloskey and eight interlocutors, and some of them with each other. It was originally conducted on a Facebook group devoted to the study of the book The Dialectics of Liberty over six days. Many participated, but eight engaged more fully.Poroi: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention is proud to present this colloquium as part of the 45th Anniversary of the founding of The Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa. The participants are Winton Bates (independent scholar, Australia), Elizabeth Bissell (music instructor, Antioch, TN), Roger E. Bissell (research associate, Molinari Institute), Troy Camplin (Ph.D. Humanities, consultant, Camplin Creative Consulting), Philippe Chamy (interpreter/translator), Roderick Tracy Long (Ph.D. Philosophy, Auburn University, Auburn, AL), Kent Rainey Biler (student of Philosophy and Economics, University of Nebraska, Omaha, NE), Jason Walker (Philosophy, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, FL), and Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (University of Illinois, emerita, Chicago, IL). The colloquium was organized by Chris Matthew Sciabarra (Ph.D., NYU, Politics, Brooklyn, NY).