Continuing our Speculative Study in the Present: Critique as Provocation

When we began drafting this issue introduction, extending from a previous introduction in which we committed "to do more and better in cultivating, sponsoring, publishing, and promoting scholarship that addresses racism and interlocking systems of oppression as public health (and/or other health or medical) issues," we knew we wanted to continue to foster a space in which RHM scholars could ask new and newly exigent questions born out of the rupture of our current moment of swirling, interconnected crises, some longstanding and others novel.

To situate what we imagined as our "call" for a (self) critique of the present, we first turned to Bruno Latour's (2004) reorientation of critique from "matters of fact" to "matters of concern," as a way to understand our editorial commitments to hospitality, community-building, care, generosity, and other priorities articulated across our previous editors' introductions. In his call for reimagining the purpose of critique, Latour (2004) contrasted matters of fact, focused on attacking, criticizing, exposing, and historicizing "beliefs, powers, and illusions" and the conditions that make them possible (pp. 245, 232), with matters of concern, focused on "a multifarious inquiry … to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence" (pp. 245–246). Latour (2003) connected matters of fact to a predominant mode of critique that "lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers" (246).

"Although matters of fact are excellent for debunking," Latour (2004) warned, they themselves can become "eaten up by the same debunking impetus" (p. 232). Karen Barad (2012) elaborated how this mode of critique has not been a productive practice but a destructive one "meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or something down." To replace this version of critique, Barad explained, Latour drew on Alan Turing's concept of "critical," "where going critical refers to the notion of critical mass." Latour (2004) recast the critic, in our case the rhetorician, as "one who assembles" and "one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather" (p. 246).

We were drawn to Latour's reformulation for several reasons. First, it gave us another way to think about the journal and field as a sustainable and sustained dwelling place, or a gathering "of ideas, forces, players and arenas in which 'things' and issues, not facts, come to be and to persist, because they are supported, cared for, worried over" (Neil, 2017). And, like Latour, we value an inter- and multidisciplinary assembling, though with a strong rhetorical orientation. This value has guided the genres and forms supported by the journal. It has shaped our open and targeted calls for submissions (including in such underrepresented areas as racial inequities in healthcare), our special issues driven by the field's reported interests, dialogues assembling an array of stakeholders around issues of concern, persuasion briefs aimed at connecting rhetorical scholarship to the research and practice of others, and the ethical exposure essays featured in this issue.

We also share an emphasis on co-constructing and caring for—as opposed to deconstructing and debunking—rhetorical scholarship, through supporting new enactments of this work (e.g., methodological experimentation, theory-building) and through the care we take in our modes of assembling, such as our review and other editorial processes or our attention to practice-level methodological tensions and responses. For us, as for Latour, attending to matters of concern entails a productive responsiveness to, rather than hermeneutics of suspicion toward (Ricœur, 1970), the phenomena we engage (in), guided by a humbler and more caring attunement to our roles in such phenomena. As Thomas Rickert argued, "rhetoric cannot precede its constitutive entanglement in worldly relation and iteration; rather, it is emergent from within such entanglements, being the incipient motivation within iteration" (Walsh et al., 2017, p. 453). Our critical practices, then, must be attuned and responsive to their entanglements.

Despite the usefulness of this Latourian concept for reinforcing key values of the journal, we became increasingly discomforted by the direction of our introduction as primarily engaging...