Abstract This article configures Kenneth Burke as an atheistic thinker, aligning Burkean logology—the study of symbolic hierarchies—with Edward Said’s project of “secular criticism” in opposition to systems of heteronomous closure. It examines and defends Burke’s self-avowed secular orientation, illustrating how Burke employs religious terminology for metonymic, rhetorical effect rather than ontological judgment. It contrasts Burke’s and Said’s slightly divergent secular understandings of god-term with the ontological positions of Wayne Booth and Richard Weaver before stressing the cultural and disciplinary value of understanding atheism as a rhetorical response to symbolic order rather than a mere scientific debunking of the God hypothesis.
Abstract This article explores the relationship between eloquence and ambiguity as well as how the ambiguous nature of eloquence in Cicero manifests in our contemporary moment. Eloquence in Cicero remains elusive, developing ambiguous qualities as political circumstances shift, leading Cicero in Orator to conceptualize an “abstract eloquence, which we can only behold with the mind’s eye.” The relationship between ambiguity and eloquence, however, declines as the term eloquence is limited to definitions that aim toward clarity rather than abstraction. Drawing on John Muckelbauer’s concept of asignification, the article argues for renewed attention to the relationship between ambiguity and eloquence through reimagining eloquence as the deployment of strategic ambiguity. To do so, this article analyze how an asignifying approach to eloquence—one focused primarily on force—manifests in the cute winter boots trend that began circulating on the popular social media platform TikTok in early 2025. This contemporary expression draws on the ambiguous features of eloquence in order to resist algorithmic suppression through the deployment of strategic ambiguity toward definitional and algorithmic rupture.
Abstract To examine how ambiguity functions in rhetorical argumentation about justice, this article compares two prominent theoretical frameworks: Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric Project (NRP) and Frans van Eemeren and his colleagues’ Pragma-Dialectics (PD). Where the NRP embraces ambiguity as a heuristic resource for moral reasoning and dynamic justice, PD treats ambiguity as a fallacy that obstructs the resolution of disagreement, which is achieved through strict adherence to process and disambiguation. To test these contrasting approaches, this article considers the US Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down sodomy laws and established constitutional protection for same-sex intimacy. Justice Kennedy’s majority and Justice O’Connor’s concurring opinions illustrate how constitutional ambiguity, reflecting the assumptions of the NRP, can prompt the evolution of justice. Justice Scalia’s dissent demonstrates how strict commitment to the argument process and disambiguation—hallmarks of PD—can constrain legal and moral progress. The analysis reveals that rhetorical theory must account for both the productive potential of ambiguity and the clarifying function of disambiguation, though argument frameworks prioritizing procedural certainty over substantive justice may impede the development of rhetorical knowledge and moral evolution.
Abstract This introductory article argues that uncertainty is not an incidental challenge or an epistemic shortcoming of rhetoric but rather a constitutive feature of the field: rhetoric is a symbolic practice oriented toward contingency and probabilistic judgment rather than universal or demonstrative truth. By revisiting classical distinctions among epistēmē, doxa, eikos, and empeiria, the article shows how rhetorical theory has long been marked by competing visions of the plausible and the possible. It then turns to contemporary information ecosystems to suggest that large language models materialize collective doxai as probabilistic text and, in doing so, render newly visible the discipline’s ongoing preoccupation with how rhetors and audiences navigate and act amid uncertainty.
While scholars in rhetoric have long studied President Lyndon Johnson’s selling of his Vietnam policies, the intra-administration deliberative practices that led to those policies has been of little interest. Yet, among political and military historians, it is simply a given that the flawed deliberation led to the flawed decisions. This article looks at the spring 1964 internal rhetoric among the major advisers in order to argue that the notoriously flawed deliberative practices of the decision-makers were the consequence not of groupthink, cognitive biases, or excessive faith in American exceptionalism but of excessive faith in rhetoric, specifically instrumental rhetoric.
This article provides an English translation of Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “Comique du discours et connaissance” (Comic discourse and knowledge), published in 1977. The accompanying introduction discusses Olbrechts-Tyteca’s role in the New Rhetoric project and the connections between her work on the comic and the theory of argumentation she developed with Chaïm Perelman. “Comique du discours et connaissance” discusses the autonomy of the comic, comic competence, the status of the universal audience, the difference between argumentation and demonstration (and why the comic can exist only in the former), arguments of reciprocity, and the comic in notions of agreements and presuppositions.
The “shock and awe” of the 2024 election has so laid bare the vacuity of the rhetoric of American liberal democracy that it has elicited a new, coarsened public rhetoric. FAAFO (F—ed around and found out) is a trope to which even the respectable discourse of the mainstream media has resorted. FAAFO is the irrepressible rhetoric in which we now speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie, as Walter Benjamin observed of surrealism. This ruin had already come under the gaze of Black millennial counterculture that originated in the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era of the 1980s and 1990s when Blacks experienced that smashing of the ruins of American democracy. Although it was less to liberate themselves from the ruins of American liberal democracy than to give voice to an unapologetic rhetoric damning the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberalism, a new social rhetoric, namely, rap and hip-hop, spoke, not sang, in the most prosaic terms urban odes to the collapsed welfare state that revanchist political elites had been trying to overturn for more than two generations (e.g., the Clinton-era “end of welfare as we have known it”). At the center of this enterprise that lies in ruins is the rhetorical de/construction of the American Dream.
This article uses the fate of four signs to reflect on the power of irony-assisted recall. Between 2008 and 2019, the four signs were erected sequentially on the same spot: the eastern bank of the Tallahatchie River, two hundred miles south of Memphis, where the body of Emmett Till was recovered from the water. The first three signs were vandalized; the fourth is bulletproof. All of them demonstrate with striking clarity the power of irony as a resource of commemoration.
