We may not be able to make you love reading, but archaeology of knowledge will lead you to love reading starting from now. Book is the window to open the new world. The world that you want is in the better stage and level. World will always guide you to even the prestige stage of the life. You know, this is some of how reading will give you the kindness. In this case, more books you read more knowledge you know, but it can mean also the bore is full.

The archaeology of knowledge

Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy

The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric.

Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy to its Fate?

In this essay, I propose that agency (1) is communal and participatory, hence, both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic; (2) is "invented" by authors who are points of articulation; (3) emerges in artistry or craft; (4) is effected through form; and (5) is perverse, that is, inherently protean, ambiguous, open to reversal. Those claims are illustrated and confounded through an analysis of the text, created by a white woman twelve years after the event, of the speech allegedly delivered by Sojourner Truth at the 1851 woman's rights convention in Akron, Ohio.

Agency: Promiscuous and Protean

We live in a revolutionary age of communicative abundance in which many media innovations - from satellite broadcasting to smart glasses and electronic books - spawn great fascination mixed with excitement. In the field of politics, hopeful talk of digital democracy, cybercitizens and e-government has been flourishing. This book admits the many thrilling ways that communicative abundance is fundamentally altering the contours of our lives and of our politics, often for the better. But it asks whether too little attention has been paid to the troubling counter-trends, the decadent media developments that encourage public silence and concentrations of unlimited power, so weakening the spirit and substance of democracy. Exploring examples of clever government surveillance, market censorship, spin tactics and back-channel public relations, John Keane seeks to understand and explain these trends, and how best to deal with them. Tackling some tough but big and fateful questions, Keane argues that 'media decadence' is deeply harmful for public life.

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Democracy and Media Decadence

This article answers critical and theoretical calls for the study of ordinary talk by analyzing a transcribed speech in which Alvertis Simmons, a member of the Denver, Colorado, African American community, engaged a panel of school board officials on the topic of racial stereotypes in an elementary school science experiment. Simmons's discourse can be shown symbolically to reorganize features of integrationist and nationalist ways of speaking-two dominant strands of mid- to late-twentieth century African American public address. Building a theory of "oratorical influence" from these intertextual relationships, this essay concludes that the force of public discourse may reside less in a speaker's ability to persuade an audience than in an audience's willingness to recycle and revise figural aspects of a speaker's discourse in their everyday talk. An interpretive stance such as this can encourage rhetorical critics to expand their objects of critique, to include more ordinary ways of speaking that follow af...

Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse

Efforts to mutually adjust wise thinking and elegant speaking have contributed to the development of at least two programs for rhetorical scholarship: (1) the treatment of philosophical writing as a species of civic discourse, or philosophy as rhetoric, and (2) more recent efforts to derive ultimate terminologies from the figurai plane of political texts and performance, or rhetoric as philosophy. Although the later mode of inquiry continues to receive attention from rhetoricians,1 the critical project of reading philosophy as a mode of politics is in need of further development. Considerations of philosophy as rhetoric tend to limit themselves to the task of revealing the persuasive motives and features of philosophical treatises, displacing efforts to coordinate rhetoric and philosophy with the more anxious project of confirming the "presence" of rhetorical motives in philosophical discourse. "Philosophical finesse," "philosophical style," "philosophical rhetoric," "metaphysical releve of metaphor" all are thought to await exposure in the work of would-be thinkers.2 Revelations of this sort do not come cheap. Philosophers may be unmasked as rhetoricians only insofar as they produce texts bearing the recognizable marks of "philosophy." That certain works can be shown to privilege an identity of meaning within arguments aimed at a timeless readership over and against efforts to coach situated audiences into bodies of identification has become a precondition for the rhetorical study of philosophy as a genre of civic discourse. This brand of ideology critique is premised on the abstraction or, better still, the reification of "philosophy" as an exposable method apart from the more operative methods of its exposure. Critique becomes surgery, as Peter Sloterdijk well notes:

The Artistry of Obedience: From Kant to Kingship

The presidency was once a carefully scripted and carefully controlled site of speech production Today's media environment has not lessened efforts at control, but it has rendered these efforts increasingly difficult Previously disruptive and disfluent ways of speaking now serve a useful role in presidential address, allowing mass-mediated audiences to apprehend the presidency in ways that appear to be more intimate and more authentic than careful scripting allows In response to this new and fast-evolving rhetorical landscape, this essay develops an analytically, historically, and conceptually wide-ranging argument, inviting rhetorical scholars to supplement their abiding interest in traditional forms of presidential eloquence with a commitment to the study of presidential disfluency Awkward pauses, verbal hiccups, botched colloquialisms, confessionals, and overly personalized speech—all transgress the norms and expectations of presidential eloquence, allowing scholars to reflect on the longstanding, r

Presidential Disfluency: Literacy, Legibility, and Vocal Political Aesthetics in the Rhetorical Presidency

Although much has been written about ancient rhetorical theories of example, few scholars have examined the subtypes of example contained in these ancient rhetorical theories. As a corrective to this scholarly blind spot, this article explores the lesser-known conceptual history of “comparison,” which Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all theorize as a subtype of example. Taken together, their rhetorical theories suggest that arguments by comparison are hypothetical, contentious, indirect, interrogative, and frequently deceptive. Moreover, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all theorize comparison by calling attention to the persuasive artistry of Socrates, notably his use of arguments by comparison to provoke interlocutors without challenging them directly. Understanding and explaining these rhetorical theories of comparison is the primary task of this article.

Argument by Comparison

This essay analyzes a local civic debate in which the purposive, referential, and deliberative structures of an argument by comparison are rendered inoperative. In so doing, it advances our understanding of the rhetoric of exemplarity, widens our conception of democratic political contention, and directs scholarly attention to local forums of civic life, where rhetorical motive often gives way to pure persuasion, reasoned debate commonly slips into everyday talk, democratic deliberation frequently verges on radical dissensus, and emotional investments routinely culminate in affective events.

Samuel McCormick

Papers

Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse

The Artistry of Obedience: From Kant to Kingship

Presidential Disfluency: Literacy, Legibility, and Vocal Political Aesthetics in the Rhetorical Presidency

Argument by Comparison

Arguments from Analogy and Beyond: The Persuasive Artistry of Local American Civic Life