Notes
Notes Introduction 1. In communication studies, research contributes both to scholarly conversations and to local community concerns. Richard Cherwitz’s Intellectual Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Texas at Austin (est. 1996), for instance, encourages local faculty to become “citizen-scholars.” The Annenberg Public Policy Center (est. 1994) at the University of Pennsylvania brings communication studies scholarship to bear on pragmatic civic concerns such as the use of media in modern politics. While communication studies scholars research civically relevant topics, faculty in English departments theorize democratic education. Drawing from a number of intellectual, pedagogical, and political traditions, many encourage students to become civically active, politically charged, motivated public citizens. For a survey of these efforts, see Christian Weisser’s Moving Beyond Academic Discourse (2002). For a careful description of one laudable effort at civic pedagogy engaging a contemporary public sphere in a service-learning composition course, see David Coogan’s “Counterpublics in Public Housing” (2005). 2. For examples of this Edenic narrative about the history of rhetoric, see Gregory Clark’s Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation (1990), particularly ch. 5; S. Michael Halloran ’s “From Rhetoric to Composition” (1990);the introduction to Oratorical Cultures in Nineteenth-Century America (1993) by both Clark and Halloran; Thomas Miller’s The Formation of College English (1997),particularly the conclusion;and Janet Carey Eldred’s and Peter Mortensen’s Imagining Rhetoric (2002),particularly the introduction and ch.1.Historians tracking the formation of English departments have grown fond of claiming that aesthetics did not preoccupy rhetoric teachers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury American or British higher education. The aesthetic ¤xation in English studies begins to look like an aberration from rhetoric’s more time-honored civic course. For an example,see Linda Ferreira-Buckley’s article “‘Scotch Knowledge’and the Formation of Rhetorical Studies in Nineteenth-Century England”(1998).Even historians of classical rhetoric get into this game. Their Edenic narrative depicts rhetoric’s intellectual and pedagogical tradition as a four-thousand-year consistent hymn to audience, immediately relevant politics, and democratic citizenship, a song interrupted by atavistic, staccato bursts of literary,apolitical,noise.For an example of a classical historian telling an Edenic history of rhetoric’s past, see George Kennedy’s Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (1980), particularly chs. 6 and 11. Takis Polulakis even goes so far as to argue that English faculty interested in the civic potential of cultural studies and critical pedagogy should turn to classical rhetoric, particularly to Isocrates,where they will ¤nd a program of rhetorical education suitable to the civic turn in twenty-¤rst-century writing instruction. See his book Speaking for the Polis (1997), particularly the introduction. 3. It was common practice for students in the late nineteenth century to write descriptive essays about pictures included in textbooks, about natural scenes that they witnessed, or about their own personal feelings. These essays located authority in the students’ empirical observations or in their own sincerity, not in communally held knowledge or shared principles (Schultz 108–09). 4. To my knowledge, Michael Ryan was the ¤rst to use the term articulation in the manner that I do here. Ryan tried to articulate Marxian political practice to deconstructive philosophy in the interest of promoting radical democratic politics in the early 1980s. Ryan conceded that Marxian politics and Derridean deconstructive philosophy were wholly separate institutions, but he believed that forging a connection between them would allow historical agents in postmodern America to actuate a radically inclusive political agenda suf¤cient to their own peculiar circumstances. (See Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction, especially the introduction.) 5. A review of several articles illustrates that articulation theory among rhetoricians continues the emphasis on discourse as begun by Laclau, Mouffe, Hall, and Grossberg. Kevin DeLuca, for instance, de¤nes articulation strictly as a rhetorical practice, though he does concede that there are “real” objects and institutions at stake. DeLuca says that the factory may be a real structure, but the realm of political action must be con¤ned to the “competing discourses” of “Marxism and capitalism” which de¤ne this structure and its uses in very different ways (336). Raymie McKerrow likewise turns away from economic factors when discussing power and hegemony, strictly focusing, like DeLuca, on discourse. For McKerrow as for DeLuca,articulatory practice and social agency are rhetorically constructed: “Discourse is the tactical dimension of the operation of power in its manifold relations at all levels of society, within and between its institutions...
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