Papers by Paul Johnson
Theory & Event, 2024
This essay defines Owning the Libs (OTL), a logic of envy, characterized by a subject's need to b... more This essay defines Owning the Libs (OTL), a logic of envy, characterized by a subject's need to both deny another enjoyment and to frustrate the capacity of these political opponents to live. My case studies focus on reactions to progressive protests in the post-Ferguson environment. OTL is not downstream of some cultural war nor an exotic right-wing, illiberal phenomenon. Situating personhood in the tradition of violent dispossession, I illuminate the practice's liberal roots, before concluding OTL will be (if it is not already) US conservatism's policy agenda, and an existential threat to progressive agitation.
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Women's Studies in Communication, 2021
This essay reads the 2018 remake of the vigilante film Death Wish (directed by Eli Roth). Situati... more This essay reads the 2018 remake of the vigilante film Death Wish (directed by Eli Roth). Situating the film within the ideological context of postracialism and the proximate context of the Movement for Black Lives, #MeToo, anti-gun activism, and the Trump presidency, I suggest that the film figures Chicago as a racial threat to white, feminized, suburban life. Mostly dispensing with conventional racial markers, Roth's film paints Chicago as a space of immiseration and death to generate a racialized threat of sexual assault, conjuring an uncanny scene of sexual violence followed by a lynching. The film models postracial sovereignty, a model of authority constantly producing death to ward off the threat of Blackness and preserve the white and masculine prerogatives of political liberalism. The film illustrates how political liberalism wields the threat of death to attempt the suppression of antiracist, feminist rebellions offering understandings of life that diverge from liberalism's white masculinity.
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Reading the Presidency: Advances in Presidential Rhetoric, 2019
Utilizing work on polarization, political theory, and the presidency, essay argues that legislati... more Utilizing work on polarization, political theory, and the presidency, essay argues that legislative fights of the Obama-era relate to a reactionary defense of the traditionally white and male presidency against the racial incursion of Obama. Because other civic fabrics have been gutted by capitalism, the fight over the presidency--and legislative gridlock--was particularly intense.
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Essay articulates central appeal of Donald Trump's presidential campaign as his capacity to confu... more Essay articulates central appeal of Donald Trump's presidential campaign as his capacity to confuse a well of white, masculine resentment for a "principled" critique of the Establishment, understood as political parties, politicians, the media, and forces agitating for social "difference." Situating Trump in the history of American demagogues helps understand the nature of his appeals based on race and gender. Trump confounds the ability to speak of the victimized or precarious with objectivity, and his political success follows from this cooptation of liberal ideas of precarity.
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To cite this article: Paul Elliott Johnson (2017) Deactivating the state of exception: imagining ... more To cite this article: Paul Elliott Johnson (2017) Deactivating the state of exception: imagining a popular trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Argumentation and Advocacy, 53:1, 2-22
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This essay argues that the intense popularity of the television show Breaking Bad owes to its cap... more This essay argues that the intense popularity of the television show Breaking Bad owes to its capacity to function allegorically, as a mechanism to rehabilitate a white masculinity threatened by the 2008 financial crisis and the election of non-white Barack Obama to the American presidency.
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Critical Studies in Media …, Jan 1, 2009
Baseball has been a reservoir for nostalgic narratives of equality, fair play, and the American d... more Baseball has been a reservoir for nostalgic narratives of equality, fair play, and the American dream. However, the recent steroids scandals unearth contradictions within these narratives, highlighting anxieties concerning baseball's past and the steroid era related to our ...
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Teaching Documents by Paul Johnson
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CV
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A class focused on the rhetoric of the Cold War, organized around three theses: 1) contemporary p... more A class focused on the rhetoric of the Cold War, organized around three theses: 1) contemporary political paranoia as a constitutive form of society can be traced in part to Cold War roots, 2) the Cold War engineered a racial discombobulation by producing a consumerist citizen that could participate in the patriotic freedom struggle, and 3) today's imperial collapse reframes Cold War victory as pyrrhic
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Populism Syllabus, 2021
A graduate syllabus for a course on populism.
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Grad Seminar on Sovereignty
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Overview " Argument is a person risking enterprise " –Douglas Ehninger " There is a tendency of p... more Overview " Argument is a person risking enterprise " –Douglas Ehninger " There is a tendency of public argument, because of its very nature, to favor those values, stories, and descriptions directed at the most universal audience present. " –Celeste M. Condit Course Description/Objectives This course aims to provide a survey of the basic building blocks of argumentation, and also specific subsets of argumentative study within the field of communication and rhetoric. In addition to covering the structure of arguments themselves (the model developed by Steven Toulmin, notions like audience, persuasion, types of appeals, the relationship between argumentation and public policy, and the coherence and logic of arguments (their " truth "), this class also aims to instruct about various and sundry modes and types of argumentation (visual argument, arguments by social movements, argumentation in a democracy where both the " people " and technocrats act as judges of argumentation, and political arguments in campaigns). Students will develop expertise with the basics of argumentation, and familiarity with argumentative subfields. We will do this with attention to relevant and contemporary public controversies, including but not limited to political debates, ongoing social movements, and matters of cultural interest. Texts The only required text is Rhetoric in Civic Life by Palczewski, Ice, and Fritch. There will a number of articles posted on the courseweb portal as well. Please pay regular attention to the announcements section in case there is a news article to read before class as well. Assignment Details/Grading Breakdown Quizzes (5x)—There will be five pop quizzes over the course of the semester. These quizzes will test students on their knowledge and critical interpretation of the weekly
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Book Reviews by Paul Johnson
A Review of Michael Lee's Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words That Made an American Movement
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Papers by Paul Johnson
Teaching Documents by Paul Johnson
Book Reviews by Paul Johnson