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ABSTRACT
This essay reads former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s infamous radio interview given during the aftermath of Hurricane to rethink both the popular narrative about the federal response to Katrina and, more broadly, the displacement of rhetorical objects both popularly and within rhetorical scholarship. Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s early work, I advocate for a turn to a particular understanding of chōra, which positions critics in provisional relation objects of rhetorical study. Finally, I tender a reading of Nagin’s post-Katrina radio interview. The essay ultimately argues that: (1) the chōric function of Nagin’s interview simultaneously spurred political change and displaced the appearance of having done so; and (2) if rhetorical studies is to avoid remaining complicit with the politics of such displacement, scholars should attend carefully not only to what counts as rhetorical, but also to those objects that do not count but nevertheless function rhetorically. Reconsidering the object domain of rhetorical studies in this way not only opens up new objects for study but also accounts for how they might function outside of already established narratives.
Notes
1. See, for example: Sam Coats and Dan Eggen, “A City of Despair and Lawlessness,” The Washington Post, September 2, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090100533.html; Scott Benjamin, “Some N.O. Chaos Fact or Fiction?” CBS News, September 28, 2005. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/some-no-chaos-fact-or-fiction/; John Burnett, “More Stories Emerge of Rapes in Post-Katrina Chaos,” NPR Morning Edition, December 21, 2005. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5063796
2. C. Ray Nagin, interview by Garland Robinette, WWL-AM870, September 1, 2005. In my transcription of the audio recording of this interview, I indicate inflection and rhythm through graphic means, as opposed to the heavily edited, ironed-out transcripts found online. I encourage readers to listen to the interview for themselves, which can be found in various internet archives. See, for instance, https://archive.org/details/WWL_Radio_Interview_New_Orleans_Mayor_Ray_Nagin_
3. Nagin, “Interview.”
4. “Waiting for a Leader,” Editorial, The New York Times, September 1, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01thu1.html; See also, “Bush Launches Huge Relief Effort; Disease, Pollution Loom as Problems,” Buffalo News, September 1, 2005, LexisNexis.
5. George W. Bush, “President Addresses Nation, Discusses Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts,” September 3, 2005, The White House, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050903.html
6. “Bush Tours Stricken States, Says Relief Falls Short: President Signs $10.5 Billion ‘Down Payment Relief Bill,” NBC News, September 2, 2005. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9157866/ns/us_news-katrina_the_long_road_back/t/bush-tours-stricken-states-says-relief-falls-short/#.U0qqVfldV8E; Peter Baker, “An Embattled Bush Says ‘Results are Not Acceptable,’” The Washington Post, September 3, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/02/AR2005090200965.html; Elisabeth Bumiller, “Promises by Bush Amid the Tears,” The New York Times, September 3, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/nationalspecial/03bush.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
7. See, for instance, Kate Andersen Brower and Catherine Dodge, “Bush Says New Orleans Flyover After Katrina a ‘Huge Mistake,’” November 5, 2010. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-05/bush-calls-new-orleans-flyover-in-wake-of-hurricane-katrina-huge-mistake-.html
8. Throughout this essay, following Jacques Derrida I will be omitting the article “the” before chōra,. Doing so keeps evident the notion that chōra is a retroactively constituted “space” of reinvention. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 89–127.
9. See, for instance: Donald C. Bryant, “Some Problems of Scope and Method in Rhetorical Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 23, no. 2 (1937): 182–89; Stephen E. Lucas, “The Renaissance of American Public Address: Text and Context in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74, no. 2 (1988): 241–60; Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 2 (1992): 140–61; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 26, no. 2 (1993): 153–59; Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Object and Method in Rhetorical Criticism: From Wichelns to Leff and McGee,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 290–316; Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Introduction: Forum: Publics and Counterpublics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 410–12; Joshua Gunn, “Size Matters: Polytoning Rhetoric's Perverse Apocalypse,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2008): 82–108.
10. Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 36–90.
11. Wiegman, Object Lessons, 83.
12. See, for instance, Edward Schiappa, “Second Thoughts on the Critiques of Big Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001): 260–74.
13. Gunn, “Size Matters,” 90.
14. Gunn, “Size Matters,” 96.
15. Wiegman, Object Lessons, 45, 49, 53–69.
16. Plato, Timaeus, 49a. See Plato, Complete in Twelve Volumes, Vol. IX, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952).
17. Plato, Timaeus, 50d.
18. Plato, Timaeus, 51a.
19. Emanuela Bianchi, “Receptacle/Chōra: Figuring the Errant Feminine in Plato's Timaeus,” Hypatia 21, no. 4 (2006): 124.
20. Derrida, On the Name, 90. That chōra is outside of Plato's constitutive ontology is also indicative of a slight distance between this essay and Diane Davis's important work on rhetoric and the other, especially Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Whereas, for Davis, “rhetoricity” is part of a social ontology, for me, chōra similarly functions outside of meaning, but is produced by processes of subjectivation.
21. Rhetorical scholars have recently adopted chōra as a concept that assists in theorizing the materiality of rhetoric. Pulling chōra out of its metaphysical pretenses, new materialism and affect studies have appropriated it as a theoretical and necessarily heuristic concept for explaining rhetoric outside of systems of meaning. The attempt to specify nonlinguistic rhetorical effect by reference to chōra has entailed a turn away from meaningful discourse and towards bodies and places. Of particular note are Thomas Rickert's synthesis of the term's Platonic philosophical origins in Timaeus and its contemporary interpretations and modifications, and Brian Ott and Diane Marie Keeling's appropriation of Kristeva's work on poetic language and political thought. Taken together, these scholars have made crucial attempts to theorize what rhetoric is and can do today—an age, they contend, which is distinguished by fragmentation and the technological saturation of sense experience—through recourse to the rhetoricity of the body and/in its techno-aesthetic environment. The posthumanist tradition out of which this and similarly committed scholarship emerges is thus said to upheave the distinction between the body and discourse entirely by finding rhetorical effect in both realms (as if, the contention goes, they were distinct). See, for instance: Thomas Rickert, “Toward the Chōra: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on Emplaced Invention,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 3 (2007): 251–73; Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Rhetoric and Philosophy 43, no. 1 (2010): 1–25; Brian L. Ott and Diane Marie Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 363–86; Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). See also, for a performative take on rhetoric and materiality: Nathan Stormer, “Recursivity: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Mnesis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 1 (2013): 27–50.
22. See, for instance: Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation”; Ott and Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection”; Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric.
23. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious, trans. Cormac Gallagher, unpublished seminar from May 2, 1958, 202. See also, Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 75–81.
24. For an extended rhetorical treatment of failed and feigned unicity, see Christian O. Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2012).
25. Manque in French is a dynamic word: It has noun and verb forms and conveys lack, absence, something missing or lost (for a subject: Tu me manques, you are missing for me, I miss you).
26. Take, for instance, his critique of Melanie Klein's work in Seminar I. Klein's case study of a child who not only did not possess an intelligible system of language but also, moreover, did not want one, led her to place the child's experience wholly outside systems of language. Lacan's retort: “But the child already has his own system of language, quite sufficient. The proof is that he plays with it. He even makes use of it to play a game of opposition against the adults’ attempts to intrude.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 83.
27. To extend the force of this point, in Pouvoirs de l’horreur, Kristeva speaks at length of the corps propre, an ambiguous rendering that could be understood as the “clean body” or as one's “own body,” the proper body or the body proper. Abjective wrenching is a rejection of that which has been made unclean that begins establishing what will at some point be the identifiable self. See Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
28. Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 21–5.
29. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 41.
30. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
31. See, for instance, Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 63.
32. Lacan, Écrits, 434; Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 129.
33. Kristeva, Revolution, 48. She notes in fn53 that manque à être could also be translated “want-of-being” or “constitutive lack,” given that both Kristeva and Lacan do not, for instance, use the French verb vouloir, which conveys the more common sense of “to want” something, but instead use the noun manque, which can also connote “missing” in all that word's ambiguity. This point gains importance given Kristeva's subsequent work on maternal loss and mourning.
34. Kristeva, Revolution, 48.
35. Miglena Nikolchina, Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf (New York: Other Press, 2004).
36. Sara Beardsworth, “From Revolution to Revolt Culture,” in Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis, eds. Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), 44.
37. Beardsworth, “From Revolution,” 47.
38. See, for instance: Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, eds. Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009).
39. Nikolchina, Matricide, 21.
40. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the American Red Cross,” October 30, 2012, The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/10/30/remarks-president-american-red-cross
41. Paul Krugman, “Sandy versus Katrina,” The New York Times, November 4, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/opinion/krugman-sandy-versus-katrina.html; see also, Brian Naylor, “Lessons From Katrina Boost FEMA's Sandy Response,” NPR, November 3, 2012. http://www.npr.org/2012/11/03/164224394/lessons-from-katrina-boost-femas-sandy-response
42. See, for instance, Thomas A Birkland, “Disasters, Catastrophes, and Policy Failure in the Homeland Security Era,” Review of Policy Research 26, no. 4 (2009): 423–38; Greg Elmer and Andy Opel, “Surviving the Inevitable Future: Preemption in the Age of Faulty Intelligence,” Cultural Studies 20, no. 4–5 (2006): 477–92; Amanda Lee Hollis, “A Tale of Two Federal Emergency Management Agencies,” The Forum: The Berkeley Electronic Press 3, no. 3 (2005).
43. See, for instance, Mark Andrejevic, “Interactive (in)Security: The Participatory Promise of Ready.gov,” Cultural Studies 20, nos. 4–5 (2006): 441–58; Mark Andrejevic, “'Securitainment’ in the Post-9/11 Era,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (2011): 165–75; James Hay, “Designing Homes to Be the First Line of Defense: Safe Households, Mobilization, and the New Mobile Privatization,” Cultural Studies 20, nos. 4-5 (2006): 349–77; James Hay, “The Many Responsibilities of the New Citizen-Soldier,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2007): 216–20; James Hay and Mark Andrejevic, “Introduction: Toward an Analytic of Governmental Experiments in These Times: Homeland Security as the New Social Security,” Cultural Studies 20, nos. 4–5 (2006): 331–48; for an extensive review of this approach, see Bryan C. Taylor, “‘A Hedge against the Future’: The Post-Cold War Rhetoric of Nuclear Weapons Modernization,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 1 (2010): 1–24.
44. Matt Smith, “Ex-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin Guilty after Courtroom ‘Belly-Flop,’” CNN, February 14, 2014. http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/justice/louisiana-nagin-convicted; David A. Fahrenthold, “Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin Convicted on Bribery, Other Charges,” The Washington Post, February 12, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-new-orleans-mayor-nagin-convicted-on-bribery-other-charges/2014/02/12/d26c9a8a-9418-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html; Bill Chappell, “Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin Found Guilty of Corruption,” February 12, 2014. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/10/274925929/former-new-orleans-mayor-ray-nagin-found-guilty-of-corruption
45. Lorne Gunter, “Ray Nagin Isn’t Blame-Free,” National Post (Canada), September 6, 2005, A16.
46. Tamer El-Ghobashy, “Fear Toll in the Thousands: Feds Rush to City Besieged by Looting,” Daily News, September 1, 2005; Sheldon Alberts, “Total Despair: New Orleans Death Toll ‘Likely Thousands,’” The Calgary Herald, September 1, 2005; Emily Smith, “Looting, Shooting, Sharks … And Still the Water is Rising,” The Sun, September 1, 2005.
47. Baker, “An Embattled.”
48. Bumiller, “Promises.”
49. “Fury at Feds Mounts; Bush Pledges More Help: ‘Results Not Acceptable,’” The Capital Times, September 2, 2005; Helen Kennedy, “‘Results Are Not Acceptable’: Orleans Mayor Rips Feds for Doing Little,” Daily News, September 3, 2005; “Mayor Rails Against Slow Pace of Relief Effort,” Ottawa Citizen, September 3, 2005; Susan Saulny, “Newcomer is Struggling to Lead a City in Ruins,” The New York Times, September 3, 2005; Andy Geller, “‘Get Off Your Asses!’: N.O. Mayor Rips Slow Relief Effort,” The New York Post, September 3, 2005; Jennifer Wells, “Leadership: President Bush's Tour of the Disaster Area was Too Little, Too Late,” The Toronto Star, September 3, 2005.
50. Nagin, “Interview.”
51. See, for instance: Shawn J. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945–1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); James Hay, “The Many Responsibilities of the New Citizen-Soldier,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2007); Jenna M. Loyd, “Peace Is Our Only Shelter’: Questioning Domesticities of Militarization and White Privilege,” Antipode 43, no. 3 (2010): 845–73.
52. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
53. Hollis, “A Tale of Two.”
54. Scholars have also argued that the response to Hurricane Katrina also brought to the national consciousness the systemic link between race and class, particularly given the racial makeup of the temporary residents of the Superdome post-Katrina. It may well be the case that many saw “cut-tape” disaster response logic as a corrective for—or political cover for—the uneven local and state-level disaster response capabilities and their alignment along racial lines. It is an argument that would require a more thorough treatment than I can provide here. Existing literature includes: Henry A. Giroux, “Violence, Katrina, and the Biopolitics of Disposibility,” Theory, Culture, & Society 24 (2007): 305–9; Daniel A. Grano and Kenneth S. Zagacki, “Cleansing the Superdome: The Paradox of Purity and Post-Katrina Guilt,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 2 (2011): 201–23; Kate Lockwood Harris, “‘Compassion’ and Katrina: Reasserting Violent White Masculinity after the Storm,” Women & Language 34, no. 1 (2011): 11–27; Lynnell L. Thomas, “‘People Want to See What Happened’: Treme, Televisual Tourism, and the Racial Remapping of Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Television & New Media 13, no. 3 (2012): 213–24.
55. See Kristeva's discussion of Freudian Zeitlos (timelessness/lost time). Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, esp. 29–30.
56. Gunn, “Size Matters,” 83–86.
57. Julia Kristeva, Sens et Non-Sens de la Révolte (Paris: Fayard, 1996).
58. Barbara Biesecker, following Joan Copjec's Lacanian take, locates political agency precisely at this site of drive activity. See Barbara A. Biesecker, “Whither Ideology? Toward a Different Take on Enjoyment as a Political Factor,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 445–50.
59. Plato, Timaeus, 52b
60. Nagin, “Interview.”
61. Nagin, “Interview.”
62. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3, emphasis in original.
63. Nagin, “Interview.”
64. Cf. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 45. See also, Lacan, Écrits, 82–101.
65. Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 38.
66. It would be too divergent from the purposes of this essay to detail greatly the partiality of the drives as Lacan describes them. Instead, I want to stress that the drive does not properly exist for Lacan and his readers, including Kristeva:
Every drive being, by its essence as drive, a partial drive, no drive represents … the totality of the Sexualstrebung, of the sexual tendency, as it might be conceived as making present in the psyche the function of Fortpflanzung, of reproduction, if this function entered the psyche at all,
67. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 23, ellipsis in original.
68. “Vocalization” takes on variant forms, one of which Joshua Gunn has described as “public release.” While our projects align in significant ways, “vocalization” here marks only the speech-symptom of chōric inscription, which can otherwise irrupt into the realm of the visual, the performative, and so on. Joshua Gunn, “On Speech and Public Release,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (2010): 1–41. Gunn has also proposed the “abject voice” that is the “something more” in speech than speech itself, the Lacanian objet a. In my view, this filtering of Kristeva through Lacan limits the potential force of Gunn's intervention. Joshua Gunn, “Gimme Some Tongue (On Recovering Speech),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 3 (2007): 362.
69. Nagin, “Interview.”
70. Nagin, “Interview.”
71. Nagin, “Interview.”
72. Samuel McCormick and Mary Stuckey, “Presidential Disfluency: Literacy, Legibility, and Vocal Political Aesthetics in the Rhetorical Presidency,” Review of Communication 13, no. 1 (2013): 4.
73. Samuel McCormick, “Arguments from Analogy and Beyond: The Persuasive Artistry of Local American Civic Life,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 2 (2014): 205.
74. McCormick, “Arguments,” 208. This argument takes on even more force when considering that one of the discipline's early foci was the treatment of stuttering. See, for instance, Pauline B. Camp, “Correction of Speech Defects in a Public School System,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 3, no. 4 (1917): 304–9; Ernest Tompkins M.E., “Left-Handedness and Stammering,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 5, no. 1 (1919): 6–11; Walter B. Swift, “Can Stuttering be Outgrown?” Quarterly Journal of Speech 5, no. 4 (1919): 368–74. See also, Joshua Gunn, “Speech's Sanatorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 18–33.
75. McCormick, “Arguments,” 204.
76. Nikolchina, Matricide, 8. I have added quotation marks where Kristeva is referenced verbatim. See Kristeva, Black Sun, 246.
77. Nagin, “Interview.”
78. This is somewhat different than the profane, idiotic rhetoric for which Craig Mattson so convincingly argues. Whereas Mattson's interest is in reading what appears as piffle and profanity onto the plane of meaning, attention, and identification, mine is in the rhythm and glossolalia that find their effect outside of these realms. See, Craig Mattson, “From Wimsey to The Wire: Distracting Discourse and Attentional Practice,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 1 (2014): 31–52.
79. Arnold R. Hirsch, “Fade to Black: Hurricane Katrina and the Disappearance of Creole New Orleans,” The Journal of American History 94 (December 2007): 752–61.
80. Nagin, “Interview.”
81. Nagin, “Interview.” Despite any theoretical differences between McCormick and Stuckey's projects and mine, it may be wondered why I choose not to utilize an established, standardized method of transcription as they do, particularly in this section. I made this choice based on the concern that analysis grounded in such forms of transcription may too easily lead to a typologization of forms, which would obviously be at odds with the very theoretical definition of chōric rhetoric. Rather than attempting to fully capture and record its paralinguistic aspects, I instead opted to transcribe the audio recording in a more literary fashion, which comports better with the theoretical commitments of this essay (see also fn 93).
82. Nagin, “Interview.”
83. Nagin, “Interview.”
84. Kristeva, Black Sun, 101, emphasis in original.
85. Obama, “American Red Cross.”
86. Kristeva, Black Sun, 42.
87. Robert Scott, “Rhetoric and Silence,” Western Journal of Communication 36, no. 3 (1972): 146–58.
88. See: Barry Brummett, “Towards a Theory of Silence as a Political Strategy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 3 (1980): 289–303; Lester C. Olson, “On the Margins of Rhetoric: Audre Lorde Transforming Silence into Language and Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 1 (1997): 49–70; Cheryl Glenn, “Silence: A Rhetorical Art for Resisting Discipline(s),” JAC 22, no. 2 (2002): 261–91; Cynthia Ryan, “Unquiet Gestures: Thoughts on a Productive Rhetoric of Silence,” JAC 22, no. 3 (2002): 667–78; Robert E. Terrill, “Irony, Silence, and Time: Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (2003): 216–34; Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004).
89. See, for instance, Dana L. Cloud, “The Null Persona: Race and the Rhetoric of Silence in the Uprising of ’34,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1999): 177–209; Nan Johnson, “Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33, no. 3 (2000): 221–42; Charles E. Morris III, “Passing by Proxy: Collusive and Convulsive Silence in the Trial of Leopold and Loeb,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 3 (2005): 264–90; Tammie M. Kennedy, “Enthymematical, Epistemic, and Emotional Silence(s) in the Rhetoric of Whiteness,” JAC 27, no. 1/2 (2007): 253–75; Susan Zaeske, “Hearing the Silences in Lincoln's Temperance Address: Whig Masculinity as an Ethic of Rhetorical Civility,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 3 (2010): 389–419.
90. See Shelby P. Bell, “What Does Silence Signify?: Investigating the Rhetoric of Silence in Berghuis v. Thompkins,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 2 (2014): 175–93.
91. See also: Rod Jenks, “The Sounds of Silence: Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Refutation of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 2 (2007): 201–15;
92. See, for instance: Trent Eades, “Plato, Rhetoric, and Silence,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 29, no. 3 (1996): 244–58; Cheryl Glenn,
93. New materialism has effectively suppressed the urge to give such primacy to meaning as well, but at the same time has seemed to drop “silence” as a conceptual category of discourse. It is possible that a flat ontology, replete with the rhizomatic movement of bodies and discourse, has the effect of obliterating any distinction between speaking and silence, thus making all silences equally positive, even if not at the epistemological level.
94. Robert Scott, “Between Silence and Certainty: A Codicil to ‘Dialectical Tensions of Speaking and Silence,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, no. 1 (2000): 108–10.
95. Edwin Black, “Gettysburg and Silence,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 1 (1994): 21–36.
96. See also, for a more directly metaphysical, theological, and mystical interpretation of such silence, Dorothee Soelle, Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2001).
97. For a Lacanian rhetorical take on the future anterior tense of the “will have been,” see Barbara A. Biesecker, “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 1 (2007): 147–69.
98. Nagin, “Interview.” An unanswered email inquiry to Garland Robinette failed to reveal who this third person was. It is clear that he is on Robinette's side of the connection, but he had until that moment not spoken.
99. Chōric silence cannot thus be reduced to sonorous encounter. For this approach, see Greg Goodale, “The Sonorous Envelope and Political Deliberation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013): 218–24.
100. University of Notre Dame Latin Dictionary, s.v. “sileo,” accessed May 28, 2014. http://latin.campus.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=sileo&ending=sileo
101. Nagin, “Interview.”
102. In a sampling of the Hurricane Sandy-generated press alone, see: Peter Foster, “Republican Attacked for Plan to Cut Relief Agency,” The Daily Telegraph, October 31, 2012; Lara Marlowe, “At Least 32 Killed as Sandy Sweeps US Northeast,” The Irish Times, October 31, 2012; Kenneth T. Walsh, “A Tale of two Storms: Comparing Bush and Obama's Hurricane Response,” U.S. News, October 31, 2012. http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/ken-walshs-washington/2012/10/31/a-tale-of-two-storms-comparing-bush-and-obamas-hurricane-response; Stacey Plaisance, “Hurricane Katrina Memories Stirred by Sandy's Wrath,” The Huffington Post, November 11, 2012; John Aravosis, “A Tale of Two Hurricanes: Obama Comforted Victims, Bush Ate Cake,” America Blog, http://americablog.com/2012/11/bush-obama-hurricane-katrina-sandy.html; Hayes Brown, “Bush's FEMA Director During Katrina Criticizes Obama for Responding to Sandy too Quickly,” Nation of Change, October 31, 2012. https://thinkprogress.org/bushs-fema-director-during-katrina-criticizes-obama-for-responding-to-sandy-too-quickly-7412ec7c71d0#.vz8bfqk82
103. Walsh, “A Tale.”
104. Nikolchina, Matricide, 2. Bradford Vivian has called psychoanalysis a project set against forgetting and, while the thrust of his critique aims elsewhere, he is fortunately not wrong. Nevertheless, like Kristeva, he sees promise in the Arendtian conception of natality, or rebirth. See Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting.
105. Nikolchina, Matricide, 8.
106. Thorough elaboration of the concept can be found in Kristeva, Revolution.
107. S. K. Keltner, “Introduction,” in Oliver and Kelter, Psychoanalysis, 3.