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ABSTRACT
In this essay, I redefine a conception of text as a nowing. Resisting the linear argumentative form of the scholarly journal article, I opt for an internal dialogue as a form of argumentation. The circularity of this method performs the argument of time in rhetoric while elevating endnotes to the importance of the text at the top. I then identify three paradoxes in Aristotle’s argument of time in his Physics: presence as absence, identity as difference, and whole as parts. In analyzing these paradoxes, rhetoricians can gain new heuristic vocabularies to speak and write about time in time. Finally, I apply this understanding of time to a text that has been developing in the last three decades in México: La Caída del Sistema.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Stephen Browne, Kirt H. Wilson, Debra Hawhee and her group of advisees Lauren Beard, Curry Kennedy, Megan Poole, Ashley Rea, and Michael Young, the editorial team of QJS, editor Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Lee, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback at different stages of this project.
Notes
1 Emmanuel Lévinas, De Otro Modo Que Ser o Más Allá de la Esencia (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1995), 164.
2 A spoken and visual version of this essay was first delivered November 14, 2019 during NCA 105th Annual Convention: Communication for Survival at Baltimore, MD.
3 In the pages of this journal, a forum has been published under the heading #RhetoricSoWhite. This essay knocks on the doors of Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Stacey K. Sowards, Vincent N. Pham, Godfried Agyeman Asante, and Tiara R. Na’puti’s essay “Rhetoric’s ‘Distinguished’ Pitfalls: A Plática,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 502–7, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669901. One aim of this essay, then, is to continue not only a conversation, but a plática following the events of the summer of 2019. The author of this piece agrees with the characterization of the “current moment” offered in Wanzer-Serrano, Sowards, Pham, Asante, and Na’puti’s essay:
In June 2019, the National Communication Association (NCA) erupted in controversy when Martin J. Medhurst emailed the editorial board for, and others associated with, Rhetoric & Public Affairs (for which he served as founding editor), with a draft editorial lambasting the national organization for privileging “diversity … a god term of our age” over “merit as the chief criterion for selecting Distinguished Scholars, choosing journal editors and evaluating research.” Immediately, NCA released a host of documents and internal communications related to the policy changes designed to remedy systematic bias in the selection of Distinguished Scholars. Multiple scholars came forward to distance or align themselves with Medhurst’s claims and/or the broader commitments to “merit” and a particular kind of selection “process.” Many Rhetoric & Public Affairs board members resigned and, in September 2019, Medhurst’s retirement as journal editor (effective at the end of the year) was publicly announced by Michigan State University Press, which publishes the journal, after a prolonged coordinated campaign demanding his ouster. Within NCA, many divisions, all caucuses, and many Distinguished Scholars had advanced strong statements in support of racial justice and reconciliation; some, however, have remained silent, defended their stance against the NCA policy revisions, or lambasted those advocating change, 502.
4 The current moment lived in Rhetorical Studies must engage in deep reflection before any considerations for “moving forward.” Since the inception of this journal in 1915, marginalized voices for the most part have been pushed outside the pages of this journal. See: Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, Charlton McIlwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2, (2018): 254–66, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003. In order to continue the process of delinking Rhetorical Studies from #RhetoricSoWhite, this essay follows the “ethical and emotional dimensions” of Eric King Watts's “voice” in his essay “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 2 (2001): 192, https://doi.org/:10.1080/00335630109384328. This voice resonates through the mattering in “life matters” of Kirt Wilson’s 2016 NCA Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture “Dreams of Union, Days of Conflict: Communicating Social Justice and Civil Rights Memory in the Age of Barack Obama,” January 27, 2017, YouTube video, 58:37, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtEBKqcdzOw. But as Wilson recognizes, if life matters, then “so its death.” Attempting to take issues of voice and voicelessness and life and death seriously and sincerely, the voice behind this essay agrees and hopes that “instead of defending strict boundaries of history and belonging, we can prepare ourselves to listen to ghosts, to be unsettled, and get lost so we can find other ways of being” as articulated by Catherine R. Squires in her 2018 NCA Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture “Tubman & Jackson on the Twenty Dollar Bill; Or, Ghosts, Gossip, Mediums and Debts,” January 11, 2018, YouTube video, 44:27–44:39, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbpcCP-NWoU. The voice behind this essay recognizes that the particularities from the previous voices differ from the author writing this essay. In trying to build coalitions and understand the particularities of racialized silences as “a matter of ontology” as articulated by Lisa Flores in her 2019 NCA Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture “Mobility, Containment, and the Racialized Spatio-Temporalities of Survival,” December 12, 2019, YouTube video, 57:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgHwM1YmkzI, an intention of the author’s voice is to make present what has been mostly absent in the pages of this journal: speaking from the positionality of a non-U.S. citizen. As a tree sprouting from another tree, I hope for a coalition of a theoretical inosculation of time in rhetoric beyond the spatio-temporalities of the U.S. and the permeating whiteness within it.
5 This essay asks of its reader to engage in movement between the text at the top and the endnotes at the bottom for the following reasons. First, the performative act of reading this essay emphasizes the importance of footnotes and endnotes. Relegating footnotes and endnotes to a second order of importance to the text at the top perpetuates a logic of merit of the argument over the people co-creating these arguments. In having the reader move between the text at the top and the endnotes at the bottom, the hope is not to relegate parts of the argument to an endnote but to elevate footnotes and endnotes to the importance of the argument at the top. Second, the argument that the author proposes in this essay favors a circular logic rather than a linear logic. The paradoxes inherent in time discussed in this essay are highlighted when the argument performs what it is trying to argue. Finally, by elevating the importance of footnotes and endnotes while favoring a circular logic, this method offers a different form of argumentation that does not rely on the merit of reasonable claims presented linearly but on the transformational power of taking endnotes and footnotes seriously and sincerely. To facilitate the reading of this essay, I recommend reading the online version of the article in the QJS website. The reader can click on a note and it will be displayed in a comment box to the right of the main text.
6 The methodology of this essay performs its function in its style of argumentation. As such, ‘single quotation marks’ are reserved for terms where the signification of the term reaches a different meaning when the same term is marked by italics.
7 This essay has taken inspiration in its usage of footnotes from Brianne Waychoff’s performative essay “Leftovers: Performing Gleaning,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 8, no. 1 (2012), http://liminalities.net/8-1/index.html. Waychoff’s essay has taught me the importance of footnotes in every essay and their political implications. As performative, the voice behind this essay is in the process of “learning how to perform” (Author emphasis) everyday life performance in order to connect “oral interpretation” with “the past and future of the field” as articulated by Danielle Dick McGeough in her essay “Literacy in Performance Studies: Connecting Oral Interpretation, Critical Media Literacy, and Digital Performance,” American Communication Journal 17, no. 1 (2015): 2. Rather than defining a disciplinary field, however, I frame disciplinary field as a mode of Jacques Derrida’s sense of “dissemination” in Dissemination, ed. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 296–300. Roughly speaking, field here signifies a self-organizing connector between past and future scholarship amongst those who have method for scholarship itself.
8 Aristotle, Physics, Rev. ed. (Loeb Classical Library, 1957). https://doi.org/:10.4159/DLCL.aristotle-physics.1957.
9 In Aristotle’s Physics (Loeb Classical Library, 1957), motion is the translation I prefer for kínēsis.
10 Aristotle in his Physics (Loeb Classical Library, 1957) reaches the conclusion that “time is regarded as the rotation of the sphere,” 425. In a lecture on the Aristotelian conception of time, a German phenomenologist from the 1920s, whom the author does not wish to cite, also reaches the conclusion that time is in a certain sense a circle.
11 Rhetoricians have long looked at different understandings of time centering around kairos and chronos. This essay relates to kairos insofar as William C. Trapani and Chandra A. Maldonado, “Kairos: On the Limits to Our (Rhetorical) Situation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2018): 278–86, https://doi.org/:10.1080/02773945.2018.1454211 argue, “the structural capacity for rupture of fields is a kairotic precondition for meaningful invention within fields,” 282 (emphasis in the original). For a reconceptualization of kairos foregrounding Black women’s positionality see Tamika L. Carey, “Necessary Adjustments: Black Women’s Rhetorical Impatience,” Rhetoric Review 39, no. 3 (2020): 269–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2020.1764745. The usage of the English word “time” in this essay is related closer to chronos than kairos. In Nicole T. Allen, “A Reconsidering Chronos: Chronistic Criticism and the First ‘Iraqi National Calendar,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 4 (2018): 361–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2018.1519256, they argue that works about time have been “occasionally scattered approaches [which] confront a lack of systematic reflection concerning the incorporation of time-temporality in rhetorical criticism,” 363. In systematizing these three traditions about time (time independent of humanistic intervention, time as an inter-subjective human process, and time as an organizer of objective relationships amongst events), Allen calls for chronistic criticism. Similarly, this essay is aided by and is an intervention in the Aristotelian understanding of time. Borrowing some of the vocabulary used by Aristotle to understand time, I depart in his understanding of time as a number, a tradition that has been followed by Newton and influenced German phenomenologists’ understanding of time. In rearticulating Aristotle’s argument about time as a way to study texts, this essay departs from mathematical conceptions of time and joins Allen in developing a chronistic criticism capable of humanistic intervention in the now.
12 Catherine Helen Palczweski, “What is ‘Good Criticism?’ A Conversation in Progress,” Communication Studies 54, no. 3 (2003): 385–91, https://doi.org/:10.1080/10510970309363296.
13 Aristotle, Physics (Loeb Classical Library, 1957), 373. He inquires whether some consideration “might make one suspect either that there is really no such thing as time,” 373.
14 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, ed. Albert C. Outler (Philadelphia: Library of Christian Classics, 1955), 162.
15 Aristotle, Physics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991), 68.
16 Aristotle, Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991), 68.
17 Aristotle, Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991), 68.
18 Aristotle argues in his Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991): “Now the change or movement of each thing is only in the thing which changes or where the thing itself which moves or change may chance to be,” 69 (emphasis in the original).
19 In performing the argument, here I have advanced the argument by calling back to the beginning of this paragraph. First, there is a distinction between ‘is’ and ‘howness of is.’ Second, the ‘howness of is’ is reciprocated by ‘ising.’ Finally, the ‘ising’ is contrasted with the ‘is’ to be put in motion and keep advancing the argument in the form of a rhetorical question.
20 I prefer the translation of kínēsis as motion rather than movement because in his discussion, Aristotle (Loeb Classical Library, 1957), says “that time is not identical with movement [kínēsis]; nor, in this connexion, need we distinguish between movement [kínēsis] and other kinds of change [metabállō],” 379. From this line, we can infer that time is not only movement, but rather a more general kind of change.
21 Aristotle, Physics (Loeb Classical Library, 1957), 199. Simply put: motion as the actuality of a potentiality. Rather than entering an Aristotelian debate amongst philosophers who interpret this definition, I prefer to offer an illustration for this generalized term.
22 The distinction of the ‘ising’ and ‘is’ is parallel to Lévinas’ “diciendo” and “dicho” (dit and det in French); ‘saying’ and ‘said’ in Paul Ricour and Matthew Escobar, “Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence,’” Yale French Studies 104, (2004): 82–99, https://doi.org/:10.2307/3182506. Having said that, I prefer the Spanish version because “dicho” has the denotation of “said” but also the connotation of “saying” as understood as a noun and not a verb. Many “dichos” in México are aphoristic, easy to remember, memetic in their circulation. In this way, dicho signifies, as a noun, something said and an aphoristic saying. Diciendo signifies an ‘ising’ of a dicho which functions as a verb rather than a noun. As a methodological note, once the verb becomes a noun in its italics, it functions both as a previous verb and a current noun. It functions as a “saying” both in its connotation from the verb ‘to say’ but also as the noun ‘saying’ known to everyday English usage.
23 Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). Edith Stein was crucial in putting these lectures together though she was not recognized as an editor, which in many ways, she should have been instead of Heidegger. For more, see Roman Ingarden, “Edith Stein on Her Activity as an Assistant of Edmund Husserl,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 23, no. 2 (December, 1962): 155–75, https://doi.org/:10.2307/2104910.
24 In a basic structure of Husserl’s internal-time consciousness, the past is retained in retentions and memories, while the now has an “original impression,” while the future is expected in protentions.
25 Aristotle, Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991), 70. The now is a cut because it leaves the past as a no-longer and the future as a not-yet. A no-longer and a not-yet, however, are different from a before and an after. The no-longer and not-yet presupposes a presence in the middle of two absences which can be cut. For example, we needed of a note in the middle to be able to say that the note in the middle is not-yet when we played the first note and a no-longer when we played the third note. The before and after does not need of a presence in the middle to be sensical, just as an eight does not need of a presence before the nine to be connected. Rather, the before and after gives the now a character of a ‘connector’ rather than a ‘cut’ between and outside the no-longer and not-yet. For example, we could say that after an eight there is a nine and before a nine there is an eight. But in this example, it would not make sense to say that when a nine follows an eight, the eight is ‘no-longer,’ or when an eight is before a nine, the nine is ‘not-yet.’ In both cases they are connected regardless of change. In this way, the now acquires its character of the cut from the ‘not-yet’ and the ‘no-longer’ and the connector from the ‘before’ and ‘after.’
26 Aristotle, Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991), 70.
27 Kent A. Ono’s “contextual fields” gets to a similar dynamic by drawing from the synchronic and diachronic distinction of time. My articulation of text as a nowing, however, bypasses this distinction in order to avoid a conceptualization of time which necessitates of linearity in the diachronic counterpart. See more, Kent A. Ono, “Contextual Fields of Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 84, no. 3 (2020): 264–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2019.1681497.
28 Aristotle, Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991), 71.
29 Kenneth Burke distinguishes “action” with “sheer motion” in “The Nature of Human Action” in On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph R. Gusfield (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 53. Though I disagree with many aspects of Burke’s definition of “action,” I find the distinction useful insofar as it implies a sense of intentionality. Action, different from motion, necessitates of the identity and difference of motion and action which can then reflect upon itself and others; whereas motion only necessitates of the identity and difference of motion, so it can only reflect upon itself.
30 Now, we can add another distinction that is ‘parallel’ to the one of ‘is’ and ‘ising;’ ‘dicho’ y ‘diciendo,’ ‘said’ and ‘saying:’ Derrida’s différance. Différance can only be understood if it is spoken. In its writing, the “a” is visible, but when it is spoken it becomes invisible because it sounds just as différence. The spoken word allows for this kind of playfulness with language that the written page limits.
31 Aristotle in his Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991) argues that “the ‘now’ on the other hand since the body carried is moving, is always different,” 71. In other words, the ‘now’ gains its identity as a ‘now’ because on the one hand it is ‘not-yet’ and on the other is ‘no-longer.’ This is another way of saying that the now is as long as it has been and it can be.
32 This conclusion is parallel to Aristotle’s claim that “The ‘now’ in one sense is the same, in another it is not the same,” Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991), 71.
33 Darrel Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 647–57, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41940627.
34 Here, Aristotle argues that as a number, the ‘now’ as a number is the one in two and the two in one, Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991), 71–2.
35 In this last paragraph, my argument has significantly bifurcated away from Aristotle’s argument. He advanced the argument by differentiating between the count and counted:
Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted. But if nothing but soul, or in soul reason, is qualified to count, there would not be time unless there were soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if movement can exist without soul, and the before and after are attributes of movement, and time is these qua numerable, Physics (Oxford: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, 1991), 68.
This leads Aristotle to epistemological, metaphysical, and mathematical conceptions and questions of time rather than ontological, interpretative, and rhetorical conceptions and questions of time. Thus, for him it is about how time can be counted in its counting, later measured in its measuring, 73. Rather than seeing how time can be interpreted in its interpreting, later rhetorized in its rhetorizing.
36 In continuing the discussion of différance from endnote 30, rhetorical positionalities act “only to the extent that we are able to differ, as in spatial distinction or relation to an other, and to defer, as in temporalizing or delay, are we able to produce anything” as argued by Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rhethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Différance,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 110–30, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40237580. In this temporalizing space, rhetorical positionalities intersect with an infinitude of potential and actual identities. Due to the impossibility to recap every potential and actual identity in this essay, here I would like to draw from Lisa A. Flores’s liminal view of a Chicana feminist positionality. In “Creating Discursive Space Through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 142–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639609384147, Flores argues that Chicanas have constructed discursive spaces through a rhetoric of difference, established space, and turned a space into a home while creating bridges in autonomy, alliances, and hermanas. Though the “I” behind this essay has existed in time from a different positionality from Flores’s articulation, my voice hopes to build those alliances in creating temporalized spaces in order to be able to have pláticas and conversations in the pages of the discipline’s journals.
37 Following the events of the summer of 2019, scholars around the field of Communication Studies gathered at the NCA 105th Annual Convention: Communication for Survival. In a panel titled “Inventing Rhetorical Modes of Survival,” José Ángel Maldonado theorized that if rhetoricians were to translate survival for its Spanish counterpart, sobrevivir, there arises an understanding of survival as to live “above” but also “beyond” current configurations. However, he complicates this notion in the face of “incomunicación,” signifying exile, solitary confinement, exilio from within. The “in” in “incomunicación” signifies marginalized positionalities who are not only excluded when they live “outside” current configurations of power but also when they are incommunicated from within the disciplinary field even when speaking.
38 Though not representative of the whole discipline around NCA, the following statistics illustrate this kind of exclusion at the level of social and cultural capital:
Between 1992 and 2007, 64 scholars became Distinguished Scholars: 84% male (54), 16% female (10), no person of color.
Between 2008 and 2015, 28 scholars became Distinguished Scholars: 71% male (20), 25% female (7), one person of color (3%).
Current Distinguished Scholar Composition as of May 2019:
104 Distinguished Scholars: 81 male (78%), 23 female (22%), one male person of color (.96%).
In 2020, 6 scholars became Distinguished Scholars: 3 (50%) (white) women, 2 (33.33%) (white) male, and 1 (16.33%) (Black) male. See more: https://www.natcom.org/awards/distinguished-scholar-award
39 In an act of connecting amplification: Susan Romano, “‘Grand Convergence’ in the Mexican Colonial Mundane: The Matter of Introductories,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2010): 71–93, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773940903413407. René Agustín De los Santos, “La Ola Latina: Recent Scholarship in Latina/o and Latin American Rhetorics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 3 (2012): 320–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2012.692166. Marouf A. Hasian Jr., José Ángel Maldonado, and Kent Ono, “Thanatourism, Caminata Nocturna, and the Complex Geopolitics of Mexico's Parque EcoAlberto,” Southern Communication Journal 80, no. 4 (2015): 311–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2015.1043138. Christa J. Olson, “‘But in Regard to These (the American) Continents:’ U.S. National Rhetorics and the Figure of Latin America,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2015): 264–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2015.1032857. Christa J. Olson & René Agustín De los Santos, “Expanding the Idea of América,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2015): 193–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2015.1032848. Roberto Avant-Mier and Michael Lechuga, Cine-Mexicans: An Introduction to Chicano Cinema (Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2018). Romeo García and José M. Cortez, “The Trace of a Mark That Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 2 (2020): 93–108, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2020.1714703. José Ángel Maldonado, “Manifestx: Toward a Rhetoric Loaded with Future,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 104–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1723799.
40 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669068.
41 C. Kyle Rudick, Fernando Ismael Quiñones Valdivia, Lexi Hudachek, Jackson Specker, and Alan K. Goodboy, “A Communication and Instruction Approach to Embodied Cultural and Social Capital at a Public, 4-year University,” Communication Education 68, no. 4 (2019): 438–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2019.1642501.
42 Drawing from the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Rudick et al., “A Communication and Instruction Approach,” argue that “fields of experience (or ‘field’) refers to the institutional context of a given set of cultural and normative practices,” 441 (emphasis in the original). This understanding of “field” can be understood as one subset of the more generalized sense of field articulated earlier in this essay. Given that each “institutional system is also hierarchical” and that “institutions have a limited amount of symbolic and material resources” hierarchical fields of experience reproduce the same cultural and social practices as self-selecting rewards that operate within each given field, 441. Thus, I have dubbed the practice of hierarchizing scholars within a field of experience by self-reproducing cultural capital in the form of awards as electioneering.
43 The practice of hierarchizing scholars through awards only highlighted a broader problem in this field of experience. Prior to this controversy, Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter turned a critical eye towards the discipline in “Disciplining the Feminine,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 4 (1994): 383–409, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639409384084. A quarter of a century later, this same journal turns its critical eye against itself under the hashtag #RhetoricSoWhite interrogating problems of multlingualism as noted by Stacey K. Sowards, “#RhetoricSoEnglishOnly: Decolonizing Rhetorical Studies through Multilingualism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 477–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669891; U.S.-centrism as noted by Godfried Agyeman Asante, “#RhetoricSoWhite and US Centered: Reflections on Challenges and Opportunities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 484–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669892; resistance against a path towards #RhetoricNotSoWhite as recounted by Vincent N. Pham, “The Threat of #RhetoricNotSoWhite,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 489–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669894; and erasure of Indigeneity and anti-Blackness as argued by Tiara R. Na’puti, “Speaking of Indigeneity: Navigating Genealogies against Erasure and #RhetoricSoWhite,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 495–501, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669895; and, of course, these problems are not exhaustive either to the field or the problems in Rhetorical Studies.
44 It is not only that a text ‘is’ ising but also that text(s) ‘are’ aring with other text(s) in time.
45 It is not only that a point in time goes from infinite potentialities towards one actuality. But also that for a point in time to become an actuality, it needs to coincide with all the infinite potentialities and infinite actualities of all other point(s) in time. In drawing an analogy, it could be argued: for a text(s) to move from a potentiality towards an actuality, it needs to coincide with all the infinite potentialities of itself and other text(s) and the infinite actualities of itself and other text(s) in time.
46 Roderic A. Camp, Politics in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
47 Cárdenas said, “Soy hijo de militar, salido del pueblo y entregado sin reservas a la Revolución” in “Discurso Previo al Registro de la Candidatura Presidencial en la Plaza de la Ciudadela. Ciudad de México, 12 de marzo de 1988,” in Selección de Discursos del Ing. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, ed. Revistas UNAM (Cd. de México: UNAM, 1988), http://www.revistas.unam.mx/index.php/rep/article/download/60002/52937 (accessed January, 24, 2020). See more: Randal Sheppard, A Persistent Revolution: History, Nationalism, and Politics in Mexico since 1968 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016). I have translated the Spanish to English for all these text(s).
48 Elías Chávez, “‘Se Cayó el Sistema’ Afloran las Dudas,” Proceso, July 11, 1988, https://www.proceso.com.mx/150955/se-cayo-el-sistema-afloran-las-dudas (accessed December 8, 2018).
49 Chávez,“‘Se Cayó el Sistema’ Afloran las Dudas.”
50 Ginger Thompson, “Ex-President in Mexico Casts New Light on Rigged 1988 Election,” New York Times, March 9, 2004, https://nytimes.com/2004/03/09/world/ex-president-in-mexico-casts-new-light-on-rigged-1988-election.html.
51 As a counterpart to de la Madrid’s action, he had also acted in ‘motion’ previously when he appointed Salinas as his successor for the party’s nomination. Known as the “dedazo” (big finger), current PRI presidents have the custom, or norm, to appoint the new presidential candidate without a primary election. At the time of the election, there was a debate whether Salinas would reform PRI’s internal nomination practices for the presidency, which he never did.
52 Thompson, “Ex-President in Mexico.”
53 Thompson, “Ex-President in Mexico.”
54 Translation: “We were informed in the Technical Committee of Vigilance for the Electoral National Registry, that the computer fell, fortunately not from the verb to fall but from the verb to silence […] it is not working, it is silenced, it has crashed” in Soledad Loaeza, “A 20 años de Distancia,” La Jornada, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2008/07/10/index.php?section=politica&article=020a2pol (accessed December 8, 2018).
55 In Loaeza, “A 20 Años de Distancia,” this popular Mexican newspaper interpreted this statement twenty years after the election as follows: “[de Cevallos] no era muy ducho [was not very clever/complicit/grounded but flashy] en asuntos de cómputo [with computers] y quiso hacer un chiste [and wanted to make a joke], evocando la posibilidad de que un mueble inmenso—la computadora—cayera encima de quienes recibían la información electoral [evoking the possibility that an immense mobile—the computer—may fall over those receiving the electoral information].”
56 To expand beyond endnote 30’s distinction between ‘is’ as ‘ising,’ ‘dicho’ as ‘diciendo,’ ‘are’ as ‘aring,’ I develop it through Derrida’s trace. It is not only that there are ‘things’ in ‘time,’ but also that there are ‘things’ passing through ‘time.’ Some ‘things’ are ‘text(s)’ in ‘nowings.’ ‘Text(s)’ as ‘Nowings’ coincide with other ‘Text(s) as Nowings.’ ‘Text(s) as Nowings,’ then, not only are, but are also ‘aring.’ In an interview with Julia Kristeva, “Semiology and Grammatology,” in Positions, ed. Alan Bass (The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 27, Derrida says that “Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the ‘full’ terms would not signify, would not function.”
57 As Lévinas notes, De Otro Modo Que Ser, 170, possessive adjectives function to interweave in themselves a sense of propriety to that which is not mine. Nonetheless, I keep the possessive adjective ‘his’ to accentuate the “proximity” in which this actioning is “más acá” [here] rather than “más allá” [there] in its ‘nowing’ as ‘aring.’
58 Thompson, “Ex-President in Mexico.”
59 Translation: “There are not official results but the PRI says that they won.” “No hay Resultados Oficiales pero el PRI Dice que Ganó,” El Siglo de Torreón, http://h.elsiglodetorreon.com.mx/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Search&Key=EDT/1988/07/07/1/Ar00115.xml&CollName=EDT_1980_1989&DOCID=1496162&PageLabelPrint=1&skin=ElSiglo&AppName=2&sPublication=EDT&sLanguage=English&Content=ALL&selLanguage=&sQuery=sistema&x=0&y=0&rEntityType=&sScopeID=DR&sDateFrom=07%252F06%252F1988&sDateTo=07%252F07%252F1988&sSorting=Score%252Cdesc&ViewMode=GIF (accessed December 8, 2018).
60 Translation: “The System Fell: Doubts Grow/Bloom.” The ‘connecting tissue’ of this text(s) is also articulated in the ‘body’ of this headline. It provides a recount of the night in detail. Elías Chávez, “‘Se Cayó el Sistema’ Afloran las Dudas,” Proceso, July 9, 1988.
61 Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, “1988 Declaración de Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas al Pueblo de México,” La Jornada, July 10, 1988, http://www.memoriapoliticademexico.org/Textos/7CRumbo/1988-CC.html.
62 In here, I just mean to say that for every action that ‘is,’ there is a ‘howness’ of such action. The howness of what an action is has a character.
63 Fox would become the first non-PRI President in more than seventy years in 2000.
64 Translation: The equivalent to the “State of the Union” in México.
65 “Cuando Fox no Quería,” Proceso, August 3, 2003, https://www.proceso.com.mx/189969/cuando-fox-no-lo-queria (accessed December 8, 2018).
66 “Cuando Fox no Quería.” Translation: “avoid that (Salinas) were named new emperor.”
67 Here, I am playing with the double signification of character as a noun, e.g., there is a character in the play of history, and an adjective, e.g., this play has some serious character.
68 “Cuando Fox no Quería.” Translation: “The then federal representative of Guanajuato pronounced there a speech with ‘rage and impotence’ for ‘the gigantic electoral fraud’ instrumented by ‘el Salinillas.’”
69 Presidents in México have given such a distinct character to the country that historian Enrique Krauze has written a history of modern México from the framework of each President’s character in Enrique Krauze, La Presidencia Imperial: Ascenso y Caída del Sistema Político Mexicano (Barcelona: Tusquets editores, 1997).
70 At the most basic level, this statement says: for every action that Salinas has taken and which has coincided with all other actions of other positionalities, they have gained identity in their actualities against all the potentialities that never were.
71 Krauze, La Presidencia Imperial, 453.
72 Historizing, however, does not have to connote any grand theory of history. In this usage, it means that the actions done by those who were in power gave a character to history.
73 When Lévinas was responding to the “historizing” [Geschehen] of a Nazi German philosopher, which necessitates of a conception of fate and destiny, he said “Nada se hará,” in Lévinas, De Otro Modo que Ser, 171. Nothing will be done. In the same way, this version of historizing is much more mundane and it is already created by each person’s actions as they are mediated by each person’s racialized positionality in time.
74 The phrase is commonly misattributed to Manuel Barlett, who was the Secretary of the Federal Electoral Commission during the election of 1988. Barlett became the face of corruption behind Salinas’s election. Since then, Barlett has tried to defend his character against several allegations of corruption. In one interview, he said that Salinas fired him so he could become a scapegoat. I was unaware that it was in fact de Cevallos and not Barlett who uttered the famous dicho “se calló el sistema” until I started researching this incident. In this way, the incident has achieved mythical connotations not only for its robust circulation after 1988, but also for those characters like Barlett who have characterized the event as a “myth.” “Caída del Sistema, un Mito; en 1988 Hubo un Acuerdo Salinas-Fernández de Cevallos: Bartlett,” Aristegui Noticias, August 1, 2018, https://aristeguinoticias.com/0108/mexico/caida-del-sistema-un-mito-en-1988-hubo-un-acuerdo-salinas-fernandez-de-cevallos-bartlett/
75 “Nacimineto, Auge y la Caída del PRI (III),” El Universal Querétaro, June 3, 2019, http://www.eluniversalqueretaro.mx/especiales/nacimiento-auge-y-la-caida-del-pri-iii
76 The burden should be on the critic to provide a rationale for using normative texts rather than texts from marginalized positionalities. In other words, the burden should be on justifying the not-amplifying of marginalized voices rather than continuing to make an argument for amplifying voices. This is, the burden is in amplifying voices rather than just amplify in the ‘said.’
77 It is my hope that this essay will continue with building coalitions as “a present and existing vision and practice that reflects an orientation to others and a shared commitment to change” and also as a “horizon that can reorganize our possibilities and the conditions of them” as articulated in Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 146.
78 Here, I mean sense as in Sinn in German. The English word “meaning” can be understood as “Bedeutung” and “Sinn” in German. Bedeutung may refer to the linguistic understanding of the meaning of a particular text in its linguistic whole. If the word “meaning” and “sense” in English are conflated, then we get the second signification for “meaning” in German as in “Sinn.” Sinn may refer to the generalized sensual and linguistic understanding of the meaning of a particular text in its whole. Sense, then, understood as the generalized understanding of a part in its whole in its temporal relations. Debra Hawhee, in this journal, has reviewed the last hundred years as of 2015 of scholarship on sensation: Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 2–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.995925.
79 Joshua Gunn, Greg Goodale, Mirko M. Hall, and Rosa A. Eberly, “Ausculating Again: Rhetoric and Sound Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 5 (2013): 475–489, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2013.851581.
80 Catherine Helen Palczweski, “Argument in an Off Key: Playing with the Productive Limits of Argument,” Conference Proceedings – National Communication Association/Ame 2001 Arguing Communication 1, no. 1: 1–23.
81 W.E.B. Du Bois, De Senectute, February 1948. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b159-i391 (accessed November 1, 2019).
82 To continue the conversation about time in rhetorical studies, the author recommends reading the following books and essays that concern themselves with time to different degrees. For an understanding of chronos that is conceptualized as change rather than homogenous, see Allen, “A Reconsidering Chronos.” For a relationship between chronos and controversy see Matthew P. Brigham, “Chrono-Controversy: The Makah’s Campaign to Resume the Whale Hunt,” Western Journal of Communication 81, no. 2 (2017): 243–61, https://doi.org/:10.1080/10570314.2016.1242023. For a discussion of Bakhtin’s chronotopes see Jordynn Jack, “Chronotopes: Forms of Time in Rhetorical Argument,” College English 69, no. 1 (2006): 52–73, https://doi.org/10.2307/25472188. For an understanding of chronopolis as textured by real-time communication technologies see Roger Stahl, “A Clockwork War: Rhetorics of Time in a Time of Terror,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 1 (2008): 73–99, https://doi.org/:10.1080/00335630701790826. For an understanding of chronic temporality of whiteness as serial temporality see Megan Foley, “Serializing Racial Subjects: The Stagnation and Suspense of the OJ Simpson Saga,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 1 (2010): 69–88, https://doi.org/:10.1080/00335630903512713. For an understanding of white national time constructed by the discourse of policing and lynching see Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Politics of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 1–16, https://doi.org/:10.1080/07491409.2020.1828709. For an understanding of racial temporal hegemony see Carey, “Necessary Adjustments.” For an understanding of the temporality of efficiency see Leslie A. Hahner, “Working Girls and the Temporality of Efficiency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 3 (2009): 289–310, https://doi.org/:10.1080/00335630903140648. For an understanding of time which is future oriented see Bryan C. Short, “The Temporality of Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 7, no. 2 (1989): 367–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198909388867. For understandings of time working against colonial conceptions of time see Randall A. Lake “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 2 (1991): 123–51, https://doi.org/:10.1080/00335639109383949; Kathleen Pickering, “Decolonizing Time Regimes: Lakota Conceptions of Work, Economy, and Society,” American Anthropologist 106, no. 1 (2004): 85–97, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2004.106.1.85; Mark Rifkin, “The Duration of the Land: The Queerness of Spacetime in Sundown,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 27, no. 1 (2015): 33–69, https://doi.org/10.5250/studamerindilite.27.1.0033; Mariana Valverde, “‘Time Thickens, Takes On Flesh,’” in Irus Braverman (ed.), The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press, 2014), 53–76. For a queer understanding of time see Marie Draz, “From Duration to Self-Identification? The Temporal Politics of the California Gender Recognition Act,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 4 (2019): 593–607, https://doi.org/:10.1215/23289252-7771751. For an understanding of time in relation to deixis see Allison M. Prasch, “Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Deixis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 166–93, https://doi.org/:10.1080/00335630.2016.1156145. For understandings of time in Presidential rhetoric see Brian Amsden, “Dimensions of Temporality in President Obama’s Tucson Memorial Address,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 17, no. 3 (2014): 455–76, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.3.0455 ; Michael Leff, “Dimensions of Temporality in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” Communication Reports 1, no. 1 (1988): 26–31, https://doi.org/:10.1080/08934218809367458; Catherine Helen Palczewski, “When Times Collide: Ward Churchill’s Use of an Epideictic Moment to Ground Forensic Argument,” Argumentation & Advocacy 41, no. 3 (2005): 123–38, https://doi.org/:10.1080/00028533.2005.11821624. For understandings of time as they relate to history and memory see Jordynn Jack, “Space, Time, Memory: Gendered Recollections of Wartime Los Alamos,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2007): 229–50, https://doi.org/:10.1080/02773940601039363; Victor J. Vitanza, “Imagine A Re-Thinking of Historiographies (of Rhetorics) as Atemporal, Anachronistic Post-Cinematic Practices,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2014): 271–86, https://doi.org/:10.1080/02773945.2014.911564; Bradford Vivian, “Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2014): 204–19, https://doi.org/:10.1080/02773945.2014.911558. For essays on the “temporal turn” during and after COVID-19 see the special issue including Kundai Chirindo, Robert Gutierrez-Perez, Matthew Houdek, Louis M. Maraj, Ersula J. Ore, Kendall R. Phillips, Lee M. Pierce, and G. Mitchell Reyes, “Coda: A Rupture in Time,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 1–12, https://doi.org/:10.1080/07491409.2020.1828718. For all the understandings of time, there are pluriversal possibilities for the theorization of this concept. The “an” in the title of this essay gives this possibility both in its presence from an absence, its identity from its difference, and its part from a much larger whole.