The politics of life itself Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century

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Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health

The way of language

Since the 1960s, invention theory has reinvented itself. This essay aims to map and advance that process. It provides a window into the recent intellectual history of rhetorical studies and advocates continued development of sociologically informed rhetorical theories open to culture, materiality, and post-humanist understandings. I argue that invention theory has productively organized itself around two sets of dialectical tensions but remains constrained by two longstanding prejudices. The productive tensions revolve around (a) breaking with and affirming inherited rhetorical traditions and (b) conceiving invention as emplaced or dispersed. The prejudices consist of a continued logophilia and normative privileging of creativity and newness. I map the dialectics and prejudices across modern, premodern, and postmodern orientations. I then provide a revised definition and heuristic framework revolving around a concept, inventional media, which aims to capture invention’s simultaneous emplacement and disper...

Reinventing Invention, Again

Corporations are Not People: Dissensual Democracy and the Movement Against Corporate Rights

‘‘charisma’’ need not be viewed as outside the purview of the study of public argument. For example, a rhetorical account of how charisma works at all ought not be composed of statements that strategies generate charisma. Rather, such an account may comprise the practical reasoning that explains why such strategies may be expected to work. In short, scholars need not and ought not dismiss reasoning in all its guises in studies of the history of rhetoric.

The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change, by John Muckelbauer

Since the late 1990s, the use of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) to treat unilateral breast cancer has been on the rise. Over the past two decades, dozens of studies have been conducted in order to understand this trend, which has puzzled and frustrated physicians who find it at odds with efforts to curb the surgical overtreatment of breast cancer, as well as with evidence-based medicine, which has established that the procedure has little oncologic benefit for most patients. Based on the work of Annemarie Mol and John Law, this paper argues that these efforts to understand increased CPM use are limited by the “epistemology problem” in medicine, or, in other words, the tendency to view healthcare controversies and decision making exclusively through the lenses of objective and subjective forms of knowledge. Drawing on public discourse about rationales for choosing CPM, we argue that this surgical trend cannot adequately be understood in terms of what doctors and patients know about breast cancer risk and how CPM affects that risk. In addition, it must be recognized as the outcome of how specific practices of screening, detection, and treatment do or enact the bodies of patients, producing tensions in their lives that cannot be remedied with better or better communicated information. Recognizing the embodied realities of these enactments and their effects on patient decision making, we maintain, is essential for physicians who want to avoid the paternalism that haunts breast cancer treatment in the US.

How Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy Does the Body, or Why Epistemology Alone Cannot Explain this Controversial Breast Cancer Treatment.

Responding to critiques of instrumental approaches to rhetoric and writing, this article explains why such approaches do not necessarily suppress the materiality of language or inhibit the writer's ability to experience that materiality. Relying on Samuel Weber's re-translation of Heidegger's term, Ge-stell, as “emplacement” and Maurice Blanchot's understanding of the contradictory function of negation in language, the article demonstrates how rhetoric both secures language in place with a particular meaning for the sake of an external goal and unsecures language from that meaning. Without endorsing all instrumental approaches to rhetoric and writing (or the concept of instrumentality in general), the article then argues that there is no reliable way to distinguish inherently valuable writing from instrumentally valuable writing.

Negation and the Contradictory Technics of Rhetoric

Scholars have challenged the totalizing nature of the “geneticization thesis,” arguing that its brushstrokes are too broad to capture the complicated nature of the new genetics. One such challenge ...

Kelly Pender

Papers

The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change, by John Muckelbauer

How Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy Does the Body, or Why Epistemology Alone Cannot Explain this Controversial Breast Cancer Treatment.

Negation and the Contradictory Technics of Rhetoric

Somatic individuality in context, a comparative case study: