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Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics. Edited by Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites. New York: Peter Lang, 2009; pp xi + 358. $99.95 cloth.
In the twentieth century, the object domain of rhetoric has shift ed from that of the humanist orator of the ancient Greek polis to symbolic structures more generally. Within such a framework, rhetoric has come to be seen not only as an instrumental art that leads to behavioral change but also a material process that constitutes reality. Although this shift in conceptual models has warranted the rhetorical analysis of texts located outside the traditional purview of rhetorical criticism, as noted by Ronald Walter Greene in his groundbreaking essay "Another Materialist Rhetoric" (1998), it has led to something of a theoretical impasse when it comes to explaining the eff ectivity of rhetorical practices. By describing rhetoric as the dialectical interplay between a text and its context (to borrow from Michael Leff ), scholars of rhetoric have come to produce a static model that tends to oversimplify the radically contingent nature of rhetorical events. Th at is, either rhetoric is reduced to an ideological force that hides and distorts a more primordial material reality, or rhetoric is described as a constitutive process that produces such realities by virtue of its symbolic utterance.
Intervening in this conversation, Barbara Biesecker and John Lucaites's edited volume Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics is an attempt to solve this conundrum. Using Michael Calvin McGee's 1982 essay "A Materialist Conception of Rhetoric" as the springboard, the 12 subsequent original essays in this volume all attempt to off er new ways to conceptualize the ontological relationship between rhetoric and the material world. Whether articulating rhetoric to economic, institutional, technological, psychological, or linguistic structures, the scholars in this book all question the charge that rhetoric simply produces or represents the material world.
Accepting McGee's premise that rhetorical theory has...