Joshua Hanan

The essays in this book broaden and enrich the scope, at
once, of both rhetoric and Barad’s theorizing through
entangled reworkings of topics ranging from politics to
breast cancer, genealogy, the trope of academic "turns,"
Marx’s notion of exchange, and the "prehistoric" emergence
of human consciousness.
With a new foreword by the editors and afterword by Laurie
E. Gries, this collection is otherwise reprinted from the 2016
‘Figures of Entanglement’ special issue of the journal Review
of Communication

This collection brings together established and emerging scholars in communication studies to examine the relationship between communication and the economy in contemporary society.
Providing context for ongoing debates in the field as well as opening new areas of research, the collection brings a sense of continuity and coherency to an area of study that, until recently, has received little commentary at the level of disciplinary objectives and commitments.
Through concrete case studies and theoretically informed essays, the chapters explore a range of important disciplinary topics – from the rhetoric of economics to the role of language in mediating financial crises.
Written with an eye towards engaging a wide audience, this collection is a welcome addition to any course that focuses on the relationship between culture, the economy and communication including the rhetoric of economics, political economy and communication and cultural studies of the economy."

Although critical rhetoric scholarship foregrounds voices of oppressed communities and challenges systemic power imbalances, its doxastic and performative potential to affect social justice has lagged behind its conceptual (and, more recently, methodological and empirical) development. One reason is because that scholarship has privileged rhetoricians performing criticism as the end goal rather than using their criticism to conduct activism scholarship by engaging in and studying critically social justice interventions. This essay articulates a social justice activism approach to critical rhetoric scholarship that involves rhetoricians intervening collaboratively with oppressed communities and activist groups to make unjust discourses more just, and studying and reporting those endeavors.

This article proposes rhetorical hegemony as a new materialist intervention into the production of alternative political economic futures. It problematizes contemporary theories of hegemony that assert affect as beyond rhetorical engagement, suggesting that these accounts fail to produce viable political economic alternatives because they use, but do not reinvent, the prevailing affective relations. Turning to and extending Foucault’s middle and late work to forge a different model, the article discusses rhetorical hegemony as the entangled relationships between materiality and power. In conversation with other contemporary theories, it argues for a practice of rhetorical hegemony that materially recapacitates energetic potential and, consequently, the milieu. The article ends by outlining the rhetorical, political, and intellectual implications of this shift.

This essay (re)presents my own experiences living with attention deficit disorder (ADD) as a child and adult to provide a radically historical, contextual, and critical autoethnographic conceptualization of this “learning disability.” Specifically, by building upon Ragan Fox’s “auto-archeological” method, a critical perspective that “unite[s] autoethnography and Foucault’s
theories of discourse,” I draw upon institutional artifacts, psychiatric diagnoses, and interviews with close family members to show that ADD is a “technology of the self” that economizes the body in accordance with a distinctly neoliberal temporality. This temporalizing process, I show, is reinforced by a range of other neoliberal technologies of selfhood and ultimately cultivates the very “deficit framework” that ADD diagnoses are aimed at healing. The conclusion questions the legitimacy of ADD outside of the various technological interfaces that make the disability visible as a public problem and considers the intimate connections between neoliberalism, ableism, and the contemporary university.

Depending on how you approach it, economic justice is either an extremely old intellectual tradition or a relatively new one. From the first perspective, economic justice is part and parcel of classical political philosophy—Plato’s The Republic and Aristotle’s The Politics, for instance, both discuss property distribution in an ideal society, emphasizing the philosophy of justice over economic precepts. From the second perspective, the one we embrace, economic justice is a uniquely modern inquiry that emerged with the writings of Karl Marx and his revolutionary critique of the capitalist political economy. For Marx, economic justice can be understood as a critical enterprise that attempts to locate contradictions between universal and particular conceptions of human freedom and intervene politically into these contradictions with the aim of creating a more just, equitable, and egalitarian society. So conceived, economic justice liberates the collective potential of humanity from its exploitation and degradation by
capitalism as well as the various legal institutions it develops to control human behavior for the purpose of extracting of surplus-value. It is this Marxist perspective and the various historical reformulations that it has authorized that influence the way rhetoricians and scholars of cultural studies conceptualize economic justice in the discipline of communication. While not all of these scholars endorse an explicitly Marxist line of thought, they all attempt to conceptualize economic justice as a normative political category that influences various models of rhetorical agency and social change.

This essay performs a rhetorical criticism of neo-classical economics, with particular attention to its methodological influence on a number of faulty mathematical models that lay at the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis. Going beyond Goodnight and Green’s mimetic conception of economic rhetoric, which positions rhetoric as a site of mediation between symbolic and material spirals, we argue that the rhetoric of neoclassicism is best understood as an “apparatus” that attempts to suture two ontologically incommensurable conceptions of time that we term intensive and extensive. We further argue that the hinge of this rhetorical apparatus centers on a kairotic tactic of arbitrage, which theoretically posits, at the same time that it negates, ontological market failure. We end by exploring rhetorical alternatives to neo-classical economics that take the internally contradictory structure of arbitrage to its emergent conclusions.

This essay expands the rhetoric of economics conversation started by economist Deirdre McCloskey. Through a close engagement with Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1979, concerning the dual problematics of liberalism and biopolitics, we argue for theorizing economic rhetoric as a governmental problem of order, or taxis, which arranges value among divergent subjects beyond the dichotomies of material/cultural and global/local. This approach toward rhetoric, we further contend, takes as its strategic form what Foucault and Agamben have called a dispositif. We demonstrate this premise through a case study of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s notion of freakonomics, suggesting that it can be understood as a rhetorical dispositif working within the broader political rationality of neoliberal governmentality. We end by gesturing toward a rhetoric of the common as an alternative to the dispositif of freakonomics.

This essay explores the changing nature of home ownership in America over the past 70 years in an attempt to explain how shifting cultural attitudes about this social and economic structure played a large role in America’s recent housing bubble. By using Foucault’s concept of “disciplinary societies” and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “societies of control” as a framework for explaining this differentiation in attitudes, the essay argues that in neoliberal capitalism the home no longer functions as a space of social and economic reproduction but instead as a site of social and economic production.

.Rhetorics Change/Rhetoric’s Change features selected essays, multimedia texts,
and audio pieces from the 2016 Rhetoric Society of America biennial conference,
which spotlighted the theme “Rhetoric and Change.” The pieces are broadly
focused around eight different lines of thought: Mediated Rhetorics; Rhetoric and Science; Bodies, Embodiment; Digital Rhetorics; Languages and Politics; Apologia, Revolution, Reflection; and Intersectionality, Interdisciplinarity, and the Future of Feminist Rhetoric. Simultaneously familiar yet new, the value of this collection can be found in the range of its modes and voices.

This essay builds upon the work of George Bataille to develop an account of rhetoric's general economy that operates in terms of the relational and always entangled affective-rhetorical "turning" of all matter in the cosmos. This orientation to rhetoric's general economy affords five takeaways for rhetorical studies, especially for scholars interested in new materialist vantage points: 1) a conceptualization of rhetoric's materiality that operates in terms of an ongoing process that I call entangled entropic movement; 2) a perspective on discursive overdetermination that does not assume in advance an immaterial and unchanging extrarhetorical context that dialectically (re)produces transcendent metaphysical oppositions; 3) a view on "troping" that applies to all material bodies (organic and inorganic); 4) an agenda for rhetorical new materialisms that centers vocabularies derived from physics rather than vocabularies derived primarily from the life sciences and cognitive sciences; 5) new materialist reading strategies that are capable of critiquing the human discourses and tropes that often function in the interest of capitalism and colonialism to the detriment of local ecologies and communities.

The essay is part of the RSQ forum on Rhetorical New Materialisms.

To cite this article: Laurie Gries, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Nathaniel Rivers, Jodie Nicotra, John M. Ackerman, David M. Grant, Gabriela R. Ríos, Byron Hawk, Joshua S. Hanan, Kristin L. Arola, Thomas J. Rickert, Qwo-Li Driskill & Donnie Johnson Sackey (2022) Rhetorical New Materialisms (RNM), Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 52:2, 137-202.

Rory Randall interviewed rhetoric professor Joshua Hanan about his paper 'Subjects of technology: An auto-archaeology of attention deficit disorder in neoliberal time(s)'. They discuss the effects of an attention deficit disorder diagnosis, the performance of disability, activism as a way out, and the use of theory in making sense of lived experience.

This course approaches rhetoric from a materialist perspective by considering how historical conceptualizations of public life shape instrumental understandings of rhetorical practice and how historical conceptions of public life are constitutively rhetorical. In order to consider these two interrelated themes, the course will attempt to specify the importance of public life to both ancient and contemporary configurations of material reality in the Euro-Western tradition-with particular attention to the space it creates for rhetoric as a mode of political and social action. Two books, in particular, will allow us to accomplish this task: Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. As two of the most important studies of public life written in the past century, Arendt's text will provide us with a firm account of public life as it developed historically in the Euro-Western tradition and Habermas will help us think through the modern concept of the public sphere, which derives from particular reconfigurations of material reality that occurred over the past several centuries.

In addition to spending time each week exploring the concept of public life (and its influence on rhetoric) from a historical perspective, we will also spend time each week considering current social and ecological processes that produce certain unconscious conceptions of public life in the present in fundamentally rhetorical ways. Some of the processes we will explore include neoliberalism, digital media, technoliberalism (the confluence of neoliberalism and digital technologies), and race, gender, ability, and sexuality. Toward the end of the quarter, we will also challenge contemporary frameworks that formulate public life primarily in terms of human social process by paying attention to how ecological and extra-human processes rhetorically constitute public experience.

This course offers an advanced introduction to the exciting world of cultural studies. As a body of scholarship that draws upon larger theoretical and methodological currents in the humanities, cultural studies offers an approach to communication that is deeply contextual and always grounded in material practices and processes. By bringing attention to topics—such as the role of colonialism in shaping our identities and perceptions, the role of capitalism in structuring our sense of selfhood, and the importance of heteronormativity in regulating our behavior and social conduct—cultural studies challenges the ideological view that communication involves the free exchange of meaning and information.

This course explores a political rationality first identified by Michel Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics as neoliberalism. It explores the evolution of the term “neoliberalism” over the last four decades and how it has become a powerful force in shaping political economy, social interaction, morality and religion, and communications. As Foucault first proposed, neoliberalism is not so much an economic system as a mode of “governmentality” that incorporates all aspects of human life and culture.  The course will explore how Foucault’s theories and those of his contemporaries have influenced a whole new generation of critical theorists.

This course explores Michel Foucault's contributions to the study of governance in liberal democratic societies. While Foucault does not describe governance in terms that are explicitly rhetorical, this course will argue that Foucault's formulation of the subject matter—which he termed governmentality—offers an important way to conceptualize rhetoric in the modern world. The course will begin by exploring some of the key principles of Foucault's method, particularly as it establishes a framework for analyzing the role of discourses, institutions, technologies, and rationalities of government in producing normative pathways for human communication. The course will then turn its attention to an influential book in govermentality studies with the aim of applying Foucault's method to a number of shifting and changing historical "problematics." Most weeks will also hone in on a particular case study in governmentality studies (e.g., liberty, risk, policing) that will be presented to the class by groups in our seminar. The material read in this course will be challenging and critical of the modern institutions and governing rationalities that organize the present world we live in.

This course explores the “epochal” idea that we live today in an information society. Defined by Manuel Castells as a “period of time where information is the key ingredient of our social organization and where flows of messages and images between networks constitute the basic thread of our social structure,” the information society is rapidly transforming the way people communicate and understand their identity in the modern world. Students will leave the course with a greater sensitivity to how the information society is distinct from previous eras of history (such as the industrial society) and the way human communication is fundamentally intertwined with technology and cultural change. As a 3000 level course, the workload is largely reading and discussion based. We will also watch ample documentaries in the course that help contextualize the information society in the spheres of self-identity, shifting workplace environments, and politics.  An open mind toward critical thinking and a respect for divergent points of view is a necessary prerequisite for this course.

The Rhetoric of Economics is a course that illustrates the important relationship between persuasion and modern science. Examining the discipline of economics as its particular object of analysis, the course will argue that this field of thought must be understood as an attempt to rhetorically secure belief in an innate market logic that undergirds all human behaviors and social practices. Both critical and historical in its engagement with a wide variety of economic texts, the rhetoric of economics will provide students with a vocabulary to grapple with many of the most pressing problems of the 21st century. These topics include, but are not limited to, financial crises, globalization, living wages, and climate change. An open mind and willingness to question taken for granted assumptions about society and culture are important prerequisites for the course.

This course teaches students how to practice rhetorical criticism, particularly from a critical cultural perspective that is in conversation with many larger theoretical trends in the humanities. Each week students will explore rhetorical criticism from a different angle—starting with ideological and critical approaches and ending with post-ideological and post-critical approaches that privilege frameworks such as posthumanism and decolonization. The course will also engage with a number of emergent disciplinary conversations in rhetorical criticism, including visual rhetoric, public memory, and affective rhetoric.

This course utilizes the concept of materialism as a framework for thinking through the interdisciplinary relationship between rhetorical theory and critical theory. In its contemporary configuration—influenced by poststructuralist interventions into Marxism, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology—materialism has resulted in an approach to rhetorical theory and critical theory that conceptualizes all appeals to truth, identity, and universality in terms of differentially constituted boundary-making practices that are always partial, perspectival, and value-laden. As a consequence, materialism rejects all ontologies rooted in idealist accounts of metaphysics and science and, instead, aligns with a rhetorical ontology that concerns the unconscious role of persuasion (defined largely in affective terms) in the historical production and articulation of all normative social ideals (e.g., religion, science, art, politics, ethics, free speech, civilization, “human progress,” etc.).

As a pathway for engaging with the materialist conversation in rhetorical theory and critical theory, this course will focus on six different theoretical camps that all implicitly and/or explicitly gravitate toward materialist orientations: Lacanian materialism, Foucauldian materialism, Deleuzian (immanent) materialism, Derridean (deconstructive) materialism, new materialism(s), and decolonial materialism(s). While each of these perspectives approaches the production and reproduction of reality in terms of boundary-making practices, they vary in terms of the emphasis they place on discourse, social forces, and the empirical world in the facilitation of such processes. Thus, not only will each of the theoretical camps help us think through the problematic of materialism in rhetorical theory and critical theory, but they will also help us think through the strengths and weaknesses of each conceptual approach as well as the question of whether these divergent materialist perspectives can be viewed as commensurable or incommensurable with one another.

This course explores the intersections between rhetoric, politics, and affect theory. Since Aristotle’s first systematic account of rhetoric in ancient Greece, rhetoric has been viewed as a political art that operates largely through pathos, or what we now call affect. Historically, rhetoric’s connection to affect was viewed as a liability and as a regrettable, but necessary, supplement to reasoned, rational discourse (i.e., dialectic). Starting with the modern period, however, affect came to take on a more positive light. Due to overlapping historical developments--such as Darwinism, Protestantism, utilitarianism, liberalism, and capitalism—affect came to be seen as a foundation of human society and as central to the practice of democratic government. In recent years, in fact, affect has become one of the preeminent frameworks for understanding the complex dynamics of human behavior while simultaneously calling into question any easy opposition between humans and non-humans. From developments in cognitive psychology that emphasize the role of mirror neurons in human skill acquisition, to developments in economics that emphasize the role of evolved emotions in human consumptive behavior, affect has come to be viewed as a transdisciplinary concept with great explanatory power.

The discipline of rhetoric has not been immune to the transdisciplinary emphasis on affect in the humanities and social sciences and, in recent years, the concept has been central to explaining rhetorical practices. As a concept that attenuates the discipline’s longstanding emphasis on representation, discourse, and language as a framework for making sense of rhetorical practices, affect theory breathes new life into rhetorical studies and offers a way to make sense of rhetoric in its more materialist, energetic, and embodied modalities. Affect theory also offers a pathway into many other conversations in rhetoric and the critical humanities, including queer theory, critical race theory, biopolitics, and new materialism. Hence, while this course primarily explores affect theory at the interdisciplinary level of the critical humanities, I will illustrate, throughout the quarter, how the latest trends in rhetorical studies (and related sub-disciplines such as performance studies) are deeply indebted to affect theory. To further emphasize this point, I have assigned, throughout the quarter, a sampling of scholarship in rhetorical studies that applies affect theory to the discipline. I will ask that students model a similar approach in their final papers by choosing a topic that can be analyzed through the triple-lens of rhetoric, political theory, and affect theory.

This course explores the theoretical and methodological connections between critical theory and contemporary rhetorical theory. While critical theory first grew out of humanistic disciplines such as philosophy, English, sociology, and anthropology, rather than out of rhetorical studies, the course will illustrate how critical theory provides an important foundation for conceptualizing rhetorical theory in the 21st century. To accomplish this task, our course will pay particular attention to a materialist strain of critical theory that has its mid-19th century roots in the writings of Karl Marx and mid-20th century roots in the writings of Louis Althusser. As a perspective that attends to the contradictory physical, biological, economic, technological, and semiotic practices that constitute reality, materialist critical theory challenges the Western tendency to conceptualize nature and human reason in idealist (timeless, abstract, mathematical, quantifiable) terms. Materialist critical theory, thus, understands critique as a vehicle for transformative change and conceptualizes ontology, epistemology, and axiology in ways that are radically contingent, performative, and irreducibly rhetorical.

To appreciate how materialist critical theory has been applied toward the end of the 20th and early 21st centuries, the course will hone in on five key themes that correspond with particular contemporary trends in materialist critical theory: hegemony, biopolitics, performativity, new materialism, and decolonization. Each of these themes takes a critical attitude toward the neutralization and naturalization of normative ideals (e.g., religion, science, art, politics, ethics, free speech, civilization, " human progress, " etc.) and seeks to give voice to non-normative perspectives (e.g., rhetoric, nature, animality, femininity, disability, indigeneity, etc.) that, historically, have been violently attacked and disciplined in order to materially reproduce the normative ideals. Each theme we explore can be thought of as being in conversation with the earlier themes while also seeking to radicalize and transform how the relationship between normative and non-normative categories are conceptualized and analyzed.

While this course primarily explores critical theory at the interdisciplinary level of the humanities, I will illustrate, throughout the quarter, how the latest trends in rhetorical studies (and related sub-disciplines such as performance studies) are deeply indebted to critical theory. To further emphasize this point, I have assigned, throughout the quarter, a sampling of scholarship in rhetorical studies that applies critical theory to the discipline. I will ask that students model a similar approach in their final papers by choosing a topic that can be analyzed through the dual lens of rhetoric and critical theory. It should also be noted that, as with all of the other graduate seminars that I teach, professional development and the cultivation of critical thinking skills will be emphasized throughout the quarter. Finally, I would like to emphasize the importance of respecting methodological plurality and differing political commitments in this seminar. While this course is undoubtedly critical of the status quo (and its institutionalized expressions of racism, sexism, classism, heteronormativity, ableism, and human exceptionalism), it is also critical of the effort to monopolize or universalize any one critical perspective toward power.

This course explores rhetoric from the framework of historical materialism. Following Victor Vitanza, it argues that the history of rhetoric is a history of negation and that to truly appreciate the productive potential of rhetoric we must think critically about the way rhetoric has been defined over the past 2,500 years. To explore alternative histories of rhetoric, the course emphasizes a method that Nietzsche and Foucault have termed genealogy. The goal of genealogy is to illustrate how the origins of ontological dualisms—such as the opposition between philosophy and rhetoric, mind and body, and being and becoming—are produced in and through historical, technological, economic, and bodily practices of violence and exclusion.

The aim of this course is twofold: First, students will develop their theoretical and critical skills by learning how to approach rhetoric through those voices that have been excluded from the tradition rather than those voices who have been included in the tradition. Put differently, students will learn that—given its historically overdetermined association with marginalized, non-normative, and abject bodies—expanding our definition of rhetoric is central to understanding the practice of rhetoric. Second, students will develop a methodological lens for practicing rhetorical analysis. We will learn that, in addition to analyzing rhetoric through the lens of rhetorical criticism, scholars can study rhetoric from the framework of critical theory and rhetorical historiography.

This course conceptualizes communication from within the paradigm of performativity, particularly as it has been developed in the highly influential writings of Judith Butler. Performativity attends to how the physical and sensuous world that humans inhabit is ritually enacted through discourse, psychic structures, and technologies of power. In Butler's writings, performativity has been used primarily to illustrate how the opposition between sex—conceived as an identity that is natural and biological—and gender—conceived as an identity that is artificial and socially constructed—take on meaning in ways that foreclose the capacity for non-heteronormative bodies to communicate their lived experiences. Building upon Butler's influential project, we will extend her performativity lens to other binary oppositions in modern society that attempt to naturalize what is always already contrived, manipulated, and artificial. In particular, we will focus on the opposition between ability and disability by considering how these discourses maintain normative power relationships and exclude particular bodies from expressing their desires. In their final papers, students will be asked to continue applying the paradigm of performativity to new case studies.

This course seeks to read rhetoric and new materialisms through one another. While comprising heterogeneous streams of scholarship, new materialisms are generally distinguished by their commitment to understanding meaning and identity in non-humancentric terms through an emphasis on the agency and vitality of matter itself. As such, new materialisms invite us to revisit longstanding and foundational questions about the nature and scope of language, meaning, subjectivity, and how these relate to questions of ontology, ethics, and political intervention. In channeling such a perspective, this course will explore three ways that new materialisms intervene into the practice and theory of rhetoric: first, new materialisms call into question the assumption that rhetoric is an exclusively human concern by attending to the meaningful rhetorical practices and agencies of other-than-human creatures, critters, things, actants, objects and powers; second, new materialisms enrich and complicate intersectional and queer scholarship in rhetorical studies by illuminating how the normative and hierarchical relations among human groups based on race, sexuality, class, and ability, are always intimately entangled with and structured by an anthropocentric hierarchy that also includes animals, plants, toxins, and the broader political economies/ecologies of which we are all a part; finally, new materialisms transform disciplinary interpretations of the relationship between rhetoric and technology by conceptualizing technology as something that is not specifically or exclusively human. Students in the seminar will be encouraged to pursue the implications of these new materialist interventions in their own work, and participate in the broader attempt to de-link rhetoric from its patriarchal, heteronormative, settler-colonial, ableist, and anthropocentric history.

This course attempts to rethink the agentive possibilities of rhetoric from the “biopolitical” standpoint of the oikos, or domestic household, rather than the traditional standpoint of the democratic polis. As the Greek word for economy, traditionally associated with the monarchial realm of necessity, rather than the democratic realm of freedom and contingency, the oikos points to a critical project that concerns how the distinction between the political and apolitical is rhetorically produced and governed in particular historical moments. This way of problematizing rhetoric, the course will argue, is particularly relevant to the modern world, which recognizes the radical contingency of political representation at the same time that it attempts to transcend such contingency through liberal categories of social mediation (such as territorial sovereignty, ethnic identity, citizenship, biological and technological articulations of personhood, “human” rights, property ownership, technical literacy, and the broader cultural distinction between able and disabled bodies).