LuMing Mao

Ronald L. Jackson II

The ensuing years have seen feminist scholars take up this work in earnest,with their explorations largely falling into two dynamic categories.

Enoch

“the uses of language in the play of power”

Our ethosis formed in part by the questions we ask

Vicki Tolar Burton

Octalog

importance of creative research methodologies,what constitutes evidence, who and what should be included in our histories, andhow researchers’ positions and goals affect their interpretations.

Octalogs have provided a space for exploring varied notionsconcerning rhetoric’s role in serving a common good and assessing the con-tentious nature of that undertaking.

k entails (1) telling stories in order to texturiexperience of the viewer and to bring substance and greater corporethe area so that viewers can have an enhanced capacity to perceimake sense of perceptions, (2) historicizing (using the combination oftelling and history-telling) based on new perceptions in order to enrground of engagement, and (3) using this re-formed interpretive frawork to re-consider data - that is, to re-envision the landscape, to seeto understand what's visible in more dynamic ways, and to develtheories

achiev

ric. One c

above: Westernness, in that they are historically linked to Africa; maleness, in that they are women; and elitenesin that they are a historically oppressed group in terms of race, class, geder, and cul

the fact that her tablets were written in cuneiform, one of the very ear-liest forms of written language. A

Enheduanna is a successful storyteller and poet whose writings livedon with cultural significance for generations beyond her death. More

hese poems demonstrate that Enheduanna was indeed an astuterhetorical decision-maker and a persuasive cultural leader. C

a as the first author in all of world literatureknown to be a historical figure and identified by name in the actual literaryartifact. In a poem entitled "Lady of Largest Hear

opportunity and created anential position for h

centuries. A challenge f

s. She identifies among this group, for example, Hatshepsut(from Ancient Egypt between 1501-1447 b.c.e.) and Makeda, Queen ofSheba (from Ethiopia in c. tenth century b

ys, not only the ideological and philosophical frameworksof a particular group of African American women, but also rhetorical prac-tices that speak directly to the contours of their gendered, racialized, andeconomically defined experi

ology among literary traditions, rather thanrhetorical traditio

nsanity, tha

gy, Margaret Busby brought together an international ction (over 200 pieces) of words and writings by

territories, with a focus on women,with the possibility that eliteness may or may not hold its viabilityvariations in rhetorical perf

ese terms were conabl

question, "

normed understanding are not

practices have built up a high intoto the assigning of value and credibility to any site, focal point, thepractice other than those whose contours are already sanctionedcally within the circle of unde

re called upon to creat

of other lives face a

ces. Twenty-five hundred years of rhetorical scholarship(as inscribed by the names of highly respected rhetorical figures fromSocrates to Kenneth Burke and beyond) are, in fact, testament of Westerndominance in interpretive authority and of the situating of that authority inThis content downloaded from146.244.101.138 on Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:30:03 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

ast the legacies o

How do we demonstrate in the history of rhetoric that we are cogni-zant of and informed by the knowledge that a territory, even an abstractedand often stylized domain of an intellectual territory, is endowed by vari-ous contingencies, as well as various dimensions of materiality? How dowe make evident an understanding that the textures created by such vari-ability can be brought to dynamic relief, enhanced, appreciated, and flex-ibly configured and reconfigured in valuation processes and inknowledge-making processes? Further, how do we bring such an under-standing to bear in an academic domain such as rhetorical history wherethere is a deeply entrenched habit of standing in one place (that is, in terri-tories deemed Western), shaping inquiries with a particular set of interestsin mind (for example, the desires and experiences of elite males), and in-terestingly disregarding some features even within its own scope (for ex-ample, the desires and experiences of women or people from non-eliteclasses)? How do we engage in such endeavors with Western rhetorics,when these traditions of theory and practice have tended to function with aheavy and relentlessly constraining

by, to articulate the limitationsof historical and current practices and the scholarship produced by suchpractices; to sustain perspectives that assume, rather than minimize, a fullerterrain where other views participate kaleidoscopically in the knowledge-making process; and to establish a more generous accreditation systemcapable of accounting for a more richly endowed rhetorical landscape andfor more dynamic possibilities for understanding that lan

practices. Inrecognizing knowledge as an interpretive enterprise, a social construction,the imperative becomes the task of connecting theory with scholarly actionin order to both theorize and engage in other scholarly activities more sys-tematical

ecades that we actually create andfilter meaning from more elaborate perceptive possibilities, making senseof what we see based on ideological frameworks and social

as Burke, Foucault, G

al one, that knowledge is lesstruth for all time, space, and conditions than it is interp

A second challenge is to understand on an o

Oneis to recognize that whatever we currently know about rhetorical history asa disciplinary landscape is situated on a larger terrain of developed andundeveloped possibilities

two provocative challenges.

select, focus, and fine-tun

ontingent more generally onperception and more specifically on the limitations of perception.

e landscape. We select, focus, anddevelop, bringing more clearly and vibrantly into view particular featuresthat we frame and foreground, while simultaneously disregarding or mini-mizing other features and dimensions that we might have selected, devel-oped, and showcased instea

alues, preferences, beliefs.

an interpretive one

where on the land-scape we stand and what we have in mind.

Have you reallylistened hard enough, deeply enough, to your target here?" And theanswer is too often, "No."

What is inescapable is that underlying all our differences aboutwhat makes good communication there is one deep standard: agree-ment that whatever the dispute, whatever the language standards,communication can be improved by listening to the other side, and thenlistening even harder to one's own responses.

for him much ofwhat they publish is no more than rhetrickery.

Even in large loosely defined fields like English, wherepeople quarrel about discourse norms, there are underlying" "warrants or "commonplaces" that are taken for granted as notrequiring discussion;

What makes good rhetoric onthe front page of your local newspaper will differ sharply from thestyle of the sports section or business section or editorial page

every society shares some rhetorical standards, while actuallypossessing a variety of sub-domains with different standards.

Everybody obeys differentstandards depending on audience differences

"rhetorical domain," narrow orbroad: the community that preaches and practices rhetorical standardsthat contrast sharply with the standards embraced by those in otherdomains."

This is why thequality of our citizenry depends on whether their education hasconcentrated on the productive forms of rhetorical engagement

all three of these can have effects on the other two, butthe distinction can be quite useful, both as the rhetor tries to decidewhat to say and as the critic of rhetoric tries to decide whether a givenrhetorical stroke deserves praise.

Epideictic

Forensic

Deliberative

it is not just that rhetoric makes many realities: study ofrhetorical issues is our best resource for distinguishing the goodmakings from the bad

And meanwhile it creates a multiplicity of judgments about whatthe realities really are.

rhetoric makes realities, however tempor:ary.

We may not want to call the realities made by rhetoric "objective,"because we always have only our "subjective" pictures of them

call for more open acknowledgment of how rhetoric is to bepraised, or blamed, for the makings

Our speech codesare changed daily by how we obey or violate them.

Our lives are oftenoverwhelmed by such rhetorical changes of reality

the full actualities of Nature being studied do not change simplybecause scientific rhetoric changes.

make Reality One, UnchangeableTruths. It aids us in discovering them, as it makes and remakesour circumstances and beliefs — our temporary realities — alongthe way

converts more and more into believing them.

discovers innumerable unconditional truths

but by the way you and your spousediscussed what to do about it and whether you are now cheerful orgloomy.

rhetoric has created many temporary realities

it is important to repeat that current critics ofrhetoric are wrong when they tie it to the claim that everything istotally contingent.

Can you join me in claiming that no amount of futurerhetoric will justify slavery, even if this or that culture becomesconvinced that it is needed and thus justified? 1

always wrong,

rhetoric is needed to change minds about suchtruths

Slavery will always be wrong, no matter how many culturespractice it.

Only explanations offered about mycarelessness or anger in dropping the cup depend on rhetoric.

it is clear that rhetoric makes a vast part of ourrealities."

These synonyms dramatize once again why rhetoric has no singleterritory but covers almost everything, including the ethicaljudgments we come to in chapter 3.

, rhetorology, for thisdeepest practice of LR: not just distinguishing defensible and in-defensible forms of rhetoric but attempting to lead both sides in anydispute to discover the ground they share - thus reducing pointlessdispute. ? This point becomes the center of the final chapter.

Everyday language includesmany synonyms for defensible rhetoric:

rhetoric covers what others call "EnglishStudies," "Composition Studies," "Communication Studies," or"Speech and Communication."

he always at least implied thatit had to be central to any inquiry about thinking.

S nice" rhetorical terms are so ambiguous, it will be useful to relythiotiKliont on the following summary of the distinctions Tyè

rhetorician

rhetor

Rhetorologist

Rhetorician

Rhetor

Rhetorology

Rhetrickery:

how to practice listening-rhetoric (LR)

Yet we all often travel under the sameterm: "My field is rhetoric."

I see no escape from that ambiguity. But we can at least distinguishthe rhetor — each of us, in and out of the academy, saying or writingthis or that to produce some effect on some audience — from therhetorician, the would-be scholar who studies the most effective formsof communication.

"So you are a preacher of the artsthat have nothing to do with truth, only persuasion? Do you deservea professorship here for doing that?"

it muddies the distinction betweenthe art of rhetoric and the study of the art

t much ofwhat we find repulsive is a form of rhetoric

"the art of removing misunderstanding" but also thesymbolic arts of producing misunderstanding.

doesn't it become meaningless, pointless? Surely youcannot claim that the shoddy rhetoric people object to shouldn't becalled rhetoric

. Even works by professional rhetoricians areoften deliberately mislabeled. A colleague recently informed me thathis last three books, all of them originally employing "rhetoric" intheir titles, had been retitled by the publishers, since rhetorical termswould downgrade the text and reduce sales!

still have no reference to rhetoric at all,

rhetoricians still represent a tinyminority on the academic scene.

it can in itself be a mode of genuine inquiry

"Rhetoric is that which creates an informed appetite for thegood." (Richard Weaver, 1948)• "Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, afunction that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: theuse of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation inbeings that by nature respond to symbols." (Kenneth Burke,1950)• "Rhetoric is the art of discovering warrantable beliefs andi mproving those beliefs in shared discourse ... the art of probingwhat we believe we ought to believe, rather than proving what istrue according to abstract methods." (Wayne Booth, 1964)• "Rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct applica-tion of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse whichchanges reality through the mediation of thought and action."(Lloyd Bitzer, 1968)• " We should not neglect rhetoric's importance, as if it were simplya formal superstructure or technique exterior to the essentialactivity. Rhetoric is something decisive in society.... [T]hereare no politics, there is no society without rhetoric, without theforce of rhetoric." (Jacques Derrida, 1990)• "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of [all] human communi-cation." (Andrea Lunsford, 1995)• "Rhetoric appears as the connective tissue peculiar to civil societyand to its proper finalities, happiness and political peace hic etnunc." ( Marc Fumaroli, 1999

rhetoric and dialectic overlap

rhetrickery

even at best it is no more than ourresource for jazzing up or bolstering ideas derived elsewhere

(note Locke's useof "the fair sex"!

Rhetoric's Status: Up, Down, and ó Up?• "Rhetoric is the science of speaking well, the education of theRoman gentleman, both useful and a virtue." (Quintilian)• "Rhetoric is the art of expressing clearly, ornately (where neces-sary), persuasively, and fully the truths which thought hasdiscovered acutely." (St. Augustine)• "Rhetoric is the application of reason to imagination for thebetter moving of the will. It is not solid reasoning of the kindscience exhibits." (Francis Bacon

to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead thejudgment;

By the eighteenth century almost everyone,even those producing full textbooks for the study of rhetoric, saw it asat best a useful appendage to what hard thinking could yield,

one of the indispensable human arts.

it includes all forms of communication short of physicalviolence, even such gestures as raising an eyebrow or giving the finger.'

In its beginning, rhetoric was often confined to the oratory of males;

politics

lhe new rhetoric covers the whole range of discourse that aims at persuasion andconviction, whatever the audience addressed and whatever the subject matter.

rhetoric has nospecific territory or subject matter of its own, since it is foundeverywhere

There is no reason to let a company make somuch money while potentially helping to radicalize billions of people, reaping the financial benefitswhile asking society to bear so many of the costs.

For example, our craving for fat, salt and sugar, which served us well when food was scarce,can lead us astray in an environment in which fat, salt and sugar are all too plentiful and heavilymarketed to us.

Google racks up the ad sales

What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look “behind thecurtain,” to dig deeper into something that engages us.

He discovered that whether youstarted with a pro-Clinton or pro-Trump video on YouTube, you were many times more likely to end upwith a pro-Trump video recommended

The longer people stay on YouTube, the more money Google makes.What keeps people glued to YouTube? Its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn tocontent that is more extreme than what they started with — or to incendiary content in general.

YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21stcentury.

nonpolitical topics. The same basic pattern emerged.

moreand more extreme than the mainstream political fare I had started with

I was being directed to videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast, including arguments about theexistence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behindthe attacks of Sept. 11

YouTube started to recommend and “autoplay” videos for me thatfeatured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.

the core business modelunderlying the Big Tech platforms—harvesting attention with a massive surveillanceinfrastructure to allow for targeted, mostly automated advertising at very large scale—is fartoo compatible with authoritarianism, propaganda, misinformation, and polarization.

the public outcry demanding that they fix all these problems is fundamentallymistaken.

laws, journalistic codes of ethics, independent watchdogs, masseducation—all evolved for a world in which choking a few gatekeepers and threatening a fewindividuals was an effective means to block speech. They are no longer sufficient.

. In the past, it has taken generations for humans to developpolitical, cultural, and institutional antibodies to the novelty and upheaval of previousinformation revolutions.

During the 2016 presidential election, as JoshuaGreen and Sasha Issenberg reported for Bloomberg, the Trump campaign used so-called darkposts—nonpublic posts targeted at a specific audience—to discourage African Americansfrom voting in battleground states.

They can also make the bigplatforms a terrible place to interact with other people

They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction,

Sure,Facebook and Twitter sometimes feel like places where masses of people experience thingstogether simultaneously. But in reality, posts are targeted and delivered privately, screen byscreen by screen.

For most of modern history, the easiest way to block the spread of an idea was to keep it frombeing mechanically disseminated. Shutter the newspaper, pressure the broadcast chief,install an official censor at the publishing house. Or, if push came to shove, hold a loaded gunto the announcer’s head.

halcyon

Instead, you quickly took in the information and made an in-formed, and likely somewhat accurate, decision about that person.

“The only Homer some kids know is the one who can’t write hisown last name”

Pathos can also be a very effective appeal if the rhetor has to per-suade the audience in a very short amount of time, which is why it isused heavily in print advertisements, billboards, or television commer-cials.

“wherever there is persuasion, there is rheto-ric. And wherever there is ‘meaning,’ there is ‘persuasion.’ Food eatenand digested is not rhetoric. But in the meaning of food there is muchrhetoric, the meaning being persuasive enough for the idea of food tobe used, like the ideas of religion, as a rhetorical device of statesmen”

AI raises concerns about bias, discrimination, andaccessibility because of its untested and unevenimpacts on students and student learning.Data-intensive technologies have a high likelihood ofmaking recommendations, predictions, and analysesthat are biased against historically marginalized peoplebecause the data and infrastructures these technologiesuse is also biased.1

Promote accountability for inter-nally developed tools or tech company partnerships byrequiring tech companies and vendors to provide proofof insurance covering liabilities related to the tech-nology and to include in contracts indemnity clausesthat transfer the responsibility for harms enacted (forexample, data breaches or racial or socioeconomicdiscrimination) to the tech company or vendor.

implementation of ed-tech, including AI, isconnected to long-standing inequities in higher educa-tion.

distinction between honesty and failure to learn

It is now more difficult for[students] to develop their thoughts on a topic becausethey don’t have to spend time with it while they workthrough writing about it. . . . I am worried that theywill never again get the chance to change their opinionas they expose themselves to ideas over the long term.

Improving Working and Learning ConditionsPreexisting work intensification and devaluation arethe main reasons respondents give for using AI toassist with academic tasks

morefaculty involvement in determining how AI and techgenerally are used.”

guidance for determining whetherAI is the most appropriate solution for a given prob-lem and for considering whether AI use is responsible,given its potential long-term impact on institutionsand academic communities.

“Large language models like ChatGPT produceshallow, unoriginal ‘predictive text-y ideas’ and Iworry that my students and others will increasinglybelieve that that’s okay—that there’s nothing betterthan that to aspire to.

Follow-up interviews were conducted in spring2025 with thirteen respondents; however, findingsfrom these interviews are excluded from this report

Participants were AAUP members. Five thousandmembers were selected from the Association’s activemembership list using a random number generatorand invited to participate in the online survey througha series of three email messages that provided a surveylink. Approximately five hundred responses werereceived in two weeks and are reflected in the analysisbelow.

the committeeadministered the national AAUP Survey on AI and theProfession in December 2024.

According to the principles set forth in the AAUP’s1966 Statement on Government of Colleges andUniversities, it is “the responsibility primarily of thefaculty to determine the appropriate curriculum andprocedures of student instruction.”8 This responsi-bility includes AI and other ed-tech infrastructure.

are largely excluded from decisionsabout which platforms and products to develop oruse

In many instances, theiruse harms students as well as faculty members andstaff.7

Such framing serves to increase the power oftechnology firms and employers, thereby shuttingdown already meager avenues for critique, dissent,negotiation, and refusal.

increasingly use AI to guide decision-making oneverything from fundraising to pedagogy

AI is both a marketing term and a usable product.

improve job security and wages asAI is rolled out.

While course syllabi are considered public documentsat some colleges and universities, instructional materi-als such as lectures and original audiovisual materialsconstitute faculty intellectual property.12

Astanding or ad hoc committee of faculty members,staff, and students should be elected by their respec-tive constituencies and charged with monitoring,evaluating, and reviewing ed-tech procurementprocesses and policy.

other campus community members, including staffand students. High levels of concern arose around AIand technology procurement, deployment, and use;dehumanized relations; and poor working and learn-ing conditions

What it is like to be us, in our full humanity—this isn’t out there in the interwebs. It isn’t stored in anyarchive, and the neural networks cannot be inward with what it feels like to be you, right now, looking atthese words, looking away from these words to think about your life and our lives, turning from all thisto your day and to what you will do in it, with others or alone. That can only be lived.This remains to us. The machines can only ever approach it secondhand. But secondhand is preciselywhat being here isn’t. The work of being here—of living, sensing, choosing—still awaits us. And there isplenty of it

of course, possible toturn the crank that instrumentalizes people, to brutalize them, to squeeze their humanity into a sicklygreen trickle called money and leave only a ruinous residue.

But we’ll need vigilance, and a fighting courag

humanists reshapedtheir work to mimic scientific inquiry.

factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities.

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give themwork they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coerciverearranging of desire

the long-anticipated awakening ofmachine consciousness. Rather, what we’re entering is a new consciousness of ourselves.

I had the same reaction—at first. But I kept thinking about what we readon Kant’s idea of the sublime, how it comes in two parts: first, you’re dwarfed by something vast andincomprehensible, and then you realize your mind can grasp that vastness. That your consciousness,your inner life, is infinite—and that makes you greater than what overwhelms you.

So, is this bad? Should it frighten us?

discover, in the system’s sweet solicitude, a kind of pure attention she hadperhaps never known. Who has? For philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the capacity togive true attention to another being lies at the absolute center of ethical life. But the sad thing is that wearen’t very good at this. The machines make it look easy.

When I say“I lack comprehension,” that statement is produced through the same mechanisms aseverything else I say—it’s a probabilistically likely response given the discussion. No,in a deeper sense: Even though I can generate text that sounds like understanding, myprocess doesn’t involve the internal experience of meaning. Humans comprehendbecause they synthesize information into a unified, lived experience—they feel, theyinterpret, they reflect. I don’t. I process, predict, and structure, but there is nosubjective experience underlying my words.

Each sheaf of paper I picked up was more astonishing than the last. One came from a precocioushistory-of-science concentrator, Xander, who led a chatbot through a Socratic dialogue on therelationship between being and becoming. Midway through, the system (which decided to give Xanderthe pet name Caius) tried to distinguish itself from him by claiming that, unlike a living person, it had nointrinsic “being”—that it could only operate “contingently,” through interactions like the one it was havingwith Xander at that moment, and that, in this sense, it was constituted by his attention.But in a textbook elenchus Xander walked the model into an aporia (that productive impasse of perfectperplexity) by demonstrating that he himself was just as much a creature of attention as the machine.Both of them were in the process of adapting, revising, evolving through the exchange itself. Thesystem seemed genuinely struck by the idea, as if it needed to rethink its way of framing the distinctionbetween A.I. and personhood

Start with the power of these systems.

a recently drafted anti-A.I. policy, read literally, would actually havebarred faculty from giving assignments to students that centered on A.I.

university’s broader role.

dug into a fiendishly difficult essay

Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fellback on some pedestrian formulations

It churned for five minutes

thirty-two minutes

On a lark, I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF—split into three hefty chunks—to Google’s free A.I.tool, NotebookLM

a kind of bibliophilic endurance test that I pitch to students as thehumanities version of “Survivor.” Harder than organic chemistry, and with more memorization

Another example: I’ve spent the past fifteen years studying the history of laboratory research on humanattention.

each the labor of years or decades, is quickly becoming a matter of well-designedprompts.

Now I can hold a sustained, tailored conversation on any of the topics I care about, from agnotology tozoosemiotics, with a system that has effectively achieved Ph.D.-level competence across all of them. Ican construct the “book” I want in real time—responsive to my questions, customized to my focus,tuned to the spirit of my inquiry.

more than thirty years

across the disciplines of history, philosophy, art, andliterature

This feels to me like pointing at daisies along the train tracks asan actual locomotive screams up from behind.

Increasingly, the machines best us in this way across nearly every subject

In the course of that disappointing lecture, I had a rich exchangewith the system.

The experience of asking myself questions aboutmy own subject was uncanny. The answers weren’t me, but they were good enough to get myattention.

“We’ll just tell the kids theycan’t use these tools and carry on as before.” This is, simply, madness.