Keywords: A Prelude and an Appendix

Raymond Williams’s Keywords was first born in the form of an appendage to his book manuscript Culture and Society, but—although it showed no signs of rupturing or of sepsis—the publisher snipped the appendix, having “jibbed at the length” of it (MacCabe xvi). This surgical intervention, this excision, reminded me of Georges Bataille, of the wound “through which communication becomes possible” (Kendall xvii).

In Williams’s introductory remarks to Keywords, he identifies moments of wounded unease when, returning in 1945 from Army service during World War II, he found the world around him “strange,” and its inhabitants, in effect, speaking a different language, even if they were using the “same” words (xxiv). He was home, and yet he felt unhomed. Had the vocabulary, the “shared body of words and meanings” (xxvii), he queried, morphed? He answered in the affirmative, and so began his inquiry into “keywords,” and how they suture “together certain ways of seeing culture and society” and, simultaneously, “open up issues and problems” in understanding (xxvii).

In 2018, we collectively experience our own “homecoming,” the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), which presents us with the occasion to reflect on the disciplinary vocabularies that have formed and will have formed the organization’s identity, and to feel again not only a sense of renewed solidarity but also a “certain strangeness and unease,” in our “language when, in certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed” (xxiv). This issue is an attempt to celebrate just such an event.

As one of many commemorative gestures in celebration of the RSA’s fiftieth anniversary, the organization’s Board of Directors encouraged the publication of two issues: the first, a “greatest hits” compilation of essays previously published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and the second, a devoted “special issue” of the journal to celebrate the organization’s past and future.

Susan C. Jarratt, the Editor of RSQ, and I, as the Associate Editor for Special Issues, deliberated about what the focus of such a very special “special issue” might be; Susan, inspired by the Raymond Williams project, Keywords, thought it would be provocative and productive to see what the members of the RSA considered to be the essential “keywords” of our collective identity. Thus, we invited proposals that would identify a “keyword” and that would, further, historicize it, contextualize it, and imagine its future.

In retrospect, we were asking for the impossible: asking for 100-word proposals that would do all of that: historicize, contextualize, and prognosticate. And we received approximately 60 submissions, identifying various “keywords” and proposing how such terms could be explored, reflected on, problematized, retheorized. The selection process to rank and rate the proposals, the task of narrowing the vocabulary, was undertaken with the assistance of Susan and two RSQ editorial board members. After much dialogue and debate, we decided on nine keywords to be featured in this special issue: the body, the digital, energy, genre, kairos, memory, public, resistance, sound. The authors of such were asked to develop their keyword entries within a strict 4,000-word limit. Once again, an impossible request. But the authors rendered the impossible possible, as you will see.

To contextualize this commemoration, this issue opens with a brief, anecdotal history, compiled by S. Michael Halloran, that describes the growth of the organization from a small group of “autodidacts” to a thriving community of approximately 1,500 members—all, then and now, passionately curious about one “keyword”: rhetoric.

Of course, then and now, this particular “keyword” defies definitive definition, as do all “keywords,” according to Raymond Williams. Although a collection of such words with ostensibly shared meanings serves to bind a community, those very keywords are simultaneously sites of “strangeness and unease” (xxiv) with the capacity to render disciplinary homes unhomely. Williams celebrated this possibility and averred that his “vocabulary of culture and society” is “not a tradition to be learned, nor a consensus to be accepted, nor a set of meanings which, because it is ‘our language’ has a natural authority.” Rather, Williams presented a dynamic vocabulary, always already in the process of “shaping and reshaping, in real circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view” (xxxv, emphasis in the original).

In this same spirit, this collection of “keywords” presumes no consensus of understanding nor stability of tradition, acknowledging the impossibility—and undesirability—of realizing either. Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables is, likewise, no “concept mausoleum” (Apter xiii) but rather is a formidably delicious 1,300-page lexical compendium (inspired by her impossible work of translating the sophists and the pre-socratics), an homage to “the instability of meaning,” “the performative dimension of sophistic effects,” and “the vertiginous apprehension of infinitude” (and finitude, I would add) (Apter vii). It is my hope that the entries contained here inspire with dizzying possibilities for the future of rhetorical studies.

To stress the futural impulse of his project, Raymond Williams convinced his publishers to end the volume with a beginning, promised by the presence of “some blank pages, not only for the convenience of making notes, but also as a sign that the inquiry remains open” (xxxvii). Coincidentally, perhaps, Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary also concludes with a handful of blank pages. And, here, whether Taylor & Francis will append such an absence, gift us with such a presence here, remains to be remaindered. In any event, literally or figuratively, such an opening serves as an appendix to our pasts and a prelude to our futures.