Rhetoricity at the End of History: Defining Rhetorical Debility under Neoliberal Colonialism

ABSTRACT

This essay conceptualizes and applies a theory of rhetorical debility to new materialist rhetorical studies. Drawing from critical disability studies, rhetorical debility frames the ways that hierarchical human and nonhuman relations can inhibit certain rhetoricities while enabling others under neoliberalism. This theory extends the concept of “rhetorical capacities,” located within a genealogy of new materialist and posthuman thought in rhetorical studies, in response to intersectional critique of new materialism from Indigenous scholars and disability studies. The essay demonstrates rhetorical debility’s applicability to transnational sites of oppression along axes of disability, colonialism, and neoliberalism through a case study analysis of Palestinian protest rhetoric.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• disability studies
• neoliberalism
• new materialism

At the end of the Cold War, political scientist Frances Fukuyama famously announced that the fall of the Soviet Union heralded “the end of history,” declaring Western liberalism, transnational capitalism, and its scaffolded neoliberal¹ biopolitics as the victorious, and thereby stable, social order (Fukuyama 211). Undergirding the end of history, then, is the assumption that society’s institutions, and their capacity for change amid any uncertainty are rational or just, and the processes and outcomes of exploitation that afford such capacities are warranted—the natural state at the end of the dialectic march of history. Within this telos, betraying an implied stability, are the attributes contained in human beings and their constantly shifting relations. Adaptability, survivability, resilience, vulnerability—these are just a few ontological categories dialectically imbued in some at the expense and exploitation of others—human and nonhuman alike. Rhetoric is not just about ways of knowing, but ways of being, mediated by neoliberal institutions that make humans and nonhumans politically “matter” to varying degrees.

Those consigned to death by neoliberalism and market-driven verdicts about which lives and discourses matter call into question the extent to which new materialist rhetorics are equipped to engage with human/nonhuman agency under neoliberal biopolitics. Despite Fukuyama insisting his thesis holds as recently as 2020,² the stability he admires is inadequate for those subjugated by colonial political relations—those exploited and disabled to maintain prosperity in the Global North. In rhetorical studies, scholars apply and adapt posthuman and new materialist theories to make interventions amid these entwined political and social contexts. Where neoliberalism is taken as a prosperous, stable political economy for some at the expense and exploitation of others, what constitutes rhetoricity at such an end of history? Theorizations of how rhetoric is itself material and ontological must attend to the capacities our scholarship privileges and the ones it does not. If posthumanism produces, as Braidotti writes, “new fields of transdisciplinary knowledge” (1), to what extent does that newness afford methods of rhetorical analysis with the dynamism needed to engage with neoliberal hegemony?³ What possibilities and limitations are carried over from new materialism when applied in rhetorical studies, and what discourses, objects of study, and sites of practice are privileged by new materialist rhetorical studies? In general, new materialism calls for a recognition of entwined human and nonhuman agencies. In rhetorical studies, this recognition informs and reframes scholarly engagements with common sites, methods, and subjects, such as visual rhetorics (Gries) and notions of rhetorical agency (Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice). While discussing the full breadth of new materialist interventions in rhetoric is beyond the scope of this essay, one key construct, Nathan Stormer’s rhetorical capacity, is most applicable to a consideration of oppressive political relations because it historicizes the limits of human and nonhuman rhetoricities. This essay seeks to take up and add to the new materialist construct of rhetorical capacity by defining a theory of rhetorical debility to contend with the social and economic contexts of neoliberal colonialism—the modern organization of colonialization under neoliberalism.

After a survey of the critiques of new materialism from Indigenous scholarship and critical disability studies, I will describe an intersectional approach to new materialism that cuts across disability, race, and coloniality.⁴ I then connect this approach to Stormer’s theorization of rhetorical capacities before attuning said theorization to disability studies and broader critical theories by Jasbir Puar. I will speak to the significance of Puar’s construct of debility as a coconstructive term to capacities and subsequently operationalize rhetorical debility as a contribution to new materialist rhetorical studies. I theorize this term as necessary to understand the hierarchical and historical conditioning of political relations under neoliberal colonialism. Our field can mobilize the rhetorical continuum of capacity and debility to understand how vulnerability, resilience, and rhetoricity are meted out in particular political contexts—marshaled among populations through modes of capacitation that new materialist rhetorical studies can address. Last, I will discuss an application of rhetorical debility and capacity where forms of rhetorical circulation are enabled (capacitated) or inhibited (debilitated) by neoliberal colonialism.

Background

Rhetoricians at the new materialist turn⁵ in the field concern themselves with the complexity of relations between human and nonhuman agents, deploying models of rhetorical analysis meant to interface with ontological complexity. This attribute of some of the field’s scholarship appears in terms like ecologies, ambience, vitality, and rhetorical capacities (Edbauer Rice; Ingraham; Rickert; Stormer, “Rhetoric’s Diverse Materiality”). Each of these constructs are mobilized to unearth Latour’s proverbial “missing masses”—the nonhuman entities whose relations are not historically imbued with rhetoricity: the quality or characteristic of being rhetorical. The expansion of rhetoric into nonhuman ontologies is neither new nor without existing critique branching from larger analyses of new materialism’s limitations (Sara Ahmed; Hinton and Liu; Irni; Sullivan; Tompkins). Zoe Todd in particular has critiqued Latour’s position as the origin point of many inquiries into nonhuman ontologies as it forecloses the work of Indigenous scholars and their attention to relational ontology and agency.⁶ Where new materialist traditions “retrace dominant and embedded histories, narratives, and authors” (Na’puti 496), they rarely cite Indigenous epistemologies or examine processes of colonization that frame hierarchies of violence and subjugation. As it stands, much of new materialist rhetorical studies extends a genealogy Tiara Na’puti and other Indigenous scholars like Malea Powell have identified as “deeply mired in the muck of the logic of coloniality” (393). Further framing this issue in rhetorical studies is Remi Yergeau’s book, Authoring Autism. Yergeau discusses rhetoricity in the context of both neoliberalism and ableism undergirded in rhetorical studies. Yergeau suggests that tendencies toward certain objects of study in the dominant genealogy of rhetorical studies hold political ramifications for autistic people’s denied rhetoricity: “[R]hetoricians have written about the ways in which nonhuman animals are rhetorical, or even the ways in which objects are rhetorical. Furniture may bear rhetoricity, but autistic people lack the Socratic gusto of futons” (11).

Even where new materialist scholarship in rhetorical studies attends to more diverse traditions of knowledge-making, the aforementioned logics of coloniality can still remain intact, revealing broader theoretical issues in the way that new materialism is applied to rhetorical studies. For example, Justine Wells’s discussion of rhetorical ecologies acknowledges the need to include Indigenous epistemologies in rhetorical studies while arguing for a similar scholarly attention to Black ecological traditions she locates within W.E.B. Du Bois’s legacy (343). However, in doing so, there is no mention of Du Bois’s politics—his work with and extension of Marxist, historical-materialist analysis of the political economies of slavery, colonialism, and racism. As scholars like Victor Villanueva have shown, DuBois’s analyses of anti-Black rhetorics in liberal economics and industrialization were all tied to economic critique, even up to the end of his life (60). So-called old-materialism and historical-materialist analysis are clear parts of Du Bois’s wider⁷ materialist, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist analyses Wells describes, yet aren’t visible or even mentioned as part of his rhetorical ecology.

In extending Indigenous critique of new materialism’s colonial logic to also account for the ways that Black thinkers are framed, I find that critique of new materialism must be intersectional,⁸ constellating Indigenous, disabled, and minoritized perspectives. As Alison Ravenscroft argues, the tension between new materialist and Indigenous ontologies is also one between colonizer and colonized, bearing on whose theories matter, or are rendered epistemologically and methodologically legible. New materialism risks “re-enlivening” the same human-centered relations it has the potential to destabilize (370). Engaging with the tensions between different theories of materialism is worthwhile in that such an approach can redress the erasure of knowledge under oppressive relations and establish more ethical frameworks of rhetorical theory and practice. Kristen Arola makes this point when questioning the ethical obligation of posthuman and new materialist scholars to cite Indigenous relationality, concluding that “we all would benefit from reading outside of our often narrowly defined research areas” (Sackey et al. 389). Other rhetorical studies scholars have found that different traditions’ attention to relationality can “interface” with new materialism and posthumanism, as Donnie Sackey puts it (Sackey et al. 391). In her piece, “Gifts, Ancestors, and Relations: Notes Toward an Indigenous New Materialism” Clary-Lemon puts forward a framework of Indigenous and new materialist knowledge-making to complicate and further develop rhetorical theory. Hegemonic relations operate at every level of political interaction—from scholarly discourse around epistemological ethics, to sites of neoliberal colonial violence and oppression. For this reason, this essay puts forward an intersectional analysis to show how the lack of scholarly engagement with Indigenous, Black, and disabled experiences are undergirded by new materialist tendencies to obscure hierarchies found in colonial relations.

Transnational capitalism and its attendant/dependent forces of neoliberalism, colonialism, and ableism are deeply hierarchical, yet in much of new materialist scholarship, “relations are not understood to exist in a context of hierarchies of power” (Cudworth and Hobden 138). Ecological metaphors of the rhizome, often connected to rhetorical studies (Jones; Mays et al.; Nautiyal; Rhodes and Alexander; Wang; Wells) can foreground horizontal relations as an analytical alternative to “arboreal” relations. These applications make impactful interventions into the field, broadening the scope of what is and is not rhetorical; in critical disability studies, however, the figure and framework of the rhizome have been subject to critique for the ways they risk foreclosing certain sites, topics, and relations from analysis.

As Nirmala Erevelles points out, the original theorization of the rhizome by Deleuze and Guattari directs readers to “set aside a historical-materialist critique, because ‘arborescence promotes grand narratives which function as strata, where everyday intensities (thoughts, feeling and actions) are grasped and individuals’ lives are territorialized by these narratives’” (qtd. in Erevelles, Disability and Difference 47). To examine the “arbitrary/indeterminate horizontal flows of intensities (rhizome)” is to, by Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization, necessarily forego analysis of “the deliberate intercorporeal violence produced out of hierarchical social and economic formations (arboreal structures)” (Erevelles, Disability and Difference 47). Relations of coloniality and disability both condition and demand bodily capacities within and among certain populations through hierarchical oppression. We must attend to these hierarchies and traditions in rhetorical studies. Without them, some analyses of new materialist rhetoric can fail to honor the histories and political actions the field seeks to understand today in terms of posthuman and new materialist rhetoricity. That said, if including marginalized perspectives or traditions of knowledge-making doesn’t ensure those perspectives and traditions will be honored, we must take additional steps for our theoretical work in rhetorical studies to engage with both the horizontal and vertical relations found in ecological networks, as made clear by Erevelles’s analysis of transnational capitalism’s domination of disabled bodies, Du Bois’s application and expansion of historical-materialism, and Indigenous scholarship’s attention to colonization.

Amid critiques from disability studies scholars and Indigenous scholars, I write this piece from the belief that new materialism can develop to engage with the nonhuman rhetoricities they make visible and the human rhetoricities historically inhibited by hierarchies of oppression that are often left out of new materialist work. New materialism has a broad coverage of different ideologies addressing violence and inequity. Rather than reject new materialism as a whole, I see potential in putting forward an approach from new materialism (rhetorical capacities) and applying a specific political and historical attention to the power and structures of violence undergirding neoliberalism and its histories of colonialism and ableism. To approach these aspects of marginalization is to both call for the inclusion of oft-excluded thinkers and sites of study and build on theories that can intervene in key networks of rhetorical action amid the arboreal and rhizomatic relations found under neoliberal colonialism.

Rhetorical Capacity

Many scholars engaged in the study of posthuman and new materialist rhetoric have taken up Stormer’s construct of rhetorical capacities in support of ecological and relational frameworks of rhetorical activity (e.g., Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice; Chaput; Chaput and Hanan; Chirindo; Conley and Eckstein; Davis; Kalin and Gruber; McGreavy). Theirs is a shift away from the humanist notions of bodily ability, instead emphasizing the ecological and affective relations between humans and nonhumans. Such a framing of rhetoric undeniably holds space for broader notions of what rhetoric is—its “polythetic ontology,” as Stormer puts it (“Rhetoric’s Diverse Materiality”, 303). Central to this ontology is Stormer’s concept of rhetorical capacities—“trans-ontological modes of doing that arise within and between modes of being” that ask, “What can and cannot be done, how did such limits arise, and can they be otherwise?” in terms of historical ontologies (309). Because a rhetorical capacity is “a specific kind of power that affords to discourses some prospect of mattering” (Stormer 310), there clearly is an applicability toward hierarchical historical relations and implied discourses that don’t matter as a result. Stormer’s own analysis of abortion rhetoric engages with such relations, because capacities “make apparent what must change in the broader milieu so that a certain rhetoric might fade and more desirable ones might flourish” (313). Rhetorical capacities can be further applied to analyze hierarchies of power under neoliberalism in line with Erevelles’s call to complicate rhizomatic analysis and Cudworth and Hobden’s critique of new materialist theories that ignore hierarchies of power. The broader milieu that Stormer references must be focused into specific histories of oppression—Stormer himself anticipates this need, arguing that “it is not necessary to historicize all the canons; the value is not from being exhaustive. It is fromthe pragmatics of producing greater degrees of freedom” (313). New materialist rhetorical studies must historicize the sites where certain rhetorics don’t just fade, but are directly inhibited for others to remain dominant under hierarchical political relations.

Although neoliberalism and colonialism aren’t subject areas for Stormer, extending his theoretical foundation means expanding who/what can engage in rhetorical practices without obscuring or flattening the hierarchical ways those rhetorics circulate and are produced. Where bodies are commodified under neoliberalism, marshaled for rehabilitation, or marked for slow death,⁹ hierarchies that situate some ontologies as rhetorical and exclude others must be a part of rhetorical studies’ turn toward new materialism in general, and our usage of constructs like rhetorical capacities in particular. We must account for not just capacitation—the give of rhetorical practice—but debilitation as well—the take of the interactions between populations and nonhumans set into exploitative relations under neoliberalism.

Rhetorical Debility

To create a more generative framework for rhetorical capacities, its application, and its utility in rhetorical studies, this essay suggests more pointed attention to the hierarchical relations found under neoliberal colonialism. The foundation of Stormer’s theoretical work resonates with applications of capacity that describe relational, hierarchical agency. One such application is that of Jasbir Puar and her work with capacity, debility, and disability. Puar authors a critical transnational insight into hierarchical relations of disablement that mark bodily capacitation as always politically mediated and exploited—a theoretical counterpart to Stormer that I believe can inform new materialist rhetorical analyses that attend to the hierarchical relations of colonialism and disability.

Puar’s The Right to Maim, and her study of biopolitics and disability therein, deploys capacity as itself a relational, posthuman, material construct; however, she does so by attending to the neoliberal politics that mark some bodies as valuable for rehabilitation and others for slow death. Puar defines debility as a process:

the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled. While the latter concept creates and hinges on a narrative of before and after for individuals who will eventually be identified as disabled, the former comprehends those bodies that are sustained in a perpetual state of debilitation precisely through foreclosing the social, cultural, and political translation to disability. (xiii)

In part, Puar’s project “open[s] up capacity as a source of generative affective politics rather than only a closure around neoliberal demands” (The Right to Maim, 27). She writes that her “deployment of the term ‘capacity’ is an amendment to affect studies, which posits affect as the endless capacitation of the individuated body, even as it might always see that body as relational” (Puar20). Similarly, in his 2006 piece “Articulation,” Stormer specifically moves away from the framing of rhetoric as a kind of individuated capacity that is innate or acquired. Rhetorical capacities enact this intention, and just as Puar’s use of capacity/debility expands her analytical network beyond disability subjectivities, Stormer’s “key precept is that a rhetoric’s ontology is translocal, materially distributed, and so distinct from the subjectivities produced along with it” (306–07). According to Puar, in contexts of colonialism and their surrounding political economies, bodily capacity is predetermined along lines of exploitation, disability, and death that are not solely embodied within individual subjectivities, but in whole populations. To this point, under Puar’s framework, rhetoric can be separated from subjectivity, aligning with Stormer’s project while also extending into more specific decolonial and anti-ableist applications.

I link these authors to find common theoretical ground between them and stage an intervention into new materialist rhetorical studies. Puar finds utility in theorizing debility separately from capacity, and so I locate a similar utility in extending Stormer’s theoretical foundation. Rhetorical debility is meant to account for and include an explicit attention to the processes that inhibit rhetorical practices for groups marginalized along the intersections of disability, race, and class. I define rhetorical debility as a process of exploitation wherein political relations render populations as arhetorical through institutional subjugation that further sets the terms of acceptable or legible rhetorical practice—making available, or capacitating, certain rhetoricities for some populations at the expense of others.

To put forward an example of this definition, consider the common description of American climate crises as resembling “Third World slums” during Hurricane Katrina (Giroux 186) and more recently during Texas’s deep freeze in 2021 where formal Shell Oil President John Hofmeister described Texans as “living in a third-world situation” (Kaplan). In the case of Hurricane Katrina, comparisons were even more specific, as with Anderson Cooper’s report from New Orleans stating, “Walking through the rubble, it feels like Sri Lanka, Sarajevo, somewhere else, not here, not home, not America” (Brinkley 204). Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson in 2014 and Portland in 2020 evoked similar comparisons. Representative Emanuel Cleaver insisted that “Ferguson resembles Fallujah more than it does Ferguson” (Topaz)and when asked about the state of Portland, a Deputy US Marshal stated it “looks like downtown Baghdad” in comparison to where the “world’s normal” and “the city is clean and functioning” (Balsamo and Flaccus). Rhetorical comparisons to Baghdad and Fallujah are only made possible by Western imperialism abroad and the systematic debilitation of populations kept in poverty by US military occupation and colonial extraction. The positioning of Iraq as a natural site of disorder is disconnected from any notion of Iraqi culture, history, or agency before and during US military occupation. Systemic debilitation obscures political and cultural nuance to position Iraq as a global, political, rhetorical other. In both economic and rhetorical terms, other countries are impoverished so the Global North can be empowered. In the United States, treating the state of countries ravaged by war abroad as “natural” (Erevelles, Disability and Difference 125) makes available political arguments that are given utility by the same forces that subjugated those countries in the first place. This relation also curtails critique of the state’s role in domestic inequality, marking primarily Black and disabled people as invisible victims and acceptable losses in the case of Hurricane Katrina (126) and locating Black protesters as insurgents, necessitating militarized police response. To make the point that poverty and destruction are atypical for the United States, they must be the norm elsewhere, and there is rhetorical value from this exploitative relation in the same way there is economic value, as both are coconstructive of a broader political economy capacitating some rhetoricities at the expense of others. Rhetorical debility describes this relation, and gives language to redress it.

Puar’s notions of capacity and debility are entwined with critical disability studies scholarship via Erevelles, Rachel Gorman, and Yergeau. There are key differences in the methodological approaches of each author, especially as they engage with disability from different, sometimes conflicting, vantage points from within and outside of disability studies. What I feel they share is a significant intersectional attention to ableism under neoliberalism and, in the case of Erevelles and Gorman, attention to colonialism and capitalism. From this scholarly context, citing Puar, Kelly Fritsch writes, “Debility and capacity are not absolute categories pertaining to individual bodies, but rather draw attention to what bodies do, their capacity to act, including their affective processes. Bodies are neither solely capacitated nor debilitated: there are gradations of debility and capacity” (14). This framing includes a key point of resonance; not chafing in its contact with Stormer’s notion of rhetorical capacities, both articulations speak to a shared disavowal of any essentialization of bodily relations to capacity. Puar specifies the kind of capacities she seeks to disrupt via debility. She writes, “This deployment of the term ‘capacity’ is an amendment to … the endless capacitation of the individuated body, even as it might always see that body as relational” (The Right to Maim 19–20). Puar’s “effort to open up capacity … rather than only a closure around neoliberal demands” (27), articulated here as resisting endless capacitation as a model, speaks to Stormer’s rhetorical capacities, although the theories develop from separate fields. This connection can be made most clear in considering the capacitation of identities as economically productive. If we accept this notion by Puar as a starting point, rhetorical studies must then ask: what ways of being—what rhetoricities—are inhibited by relations formed within neoliberal political economies found under transnational capitalism? What histories inform colonial relations within these economies, and what intersectional oppressions operate along lines of race, class, Indigeneity, and disability therein? With a coconstructive articulation of where relations capacitate and debilitate certain rhetoricities, rhetorical debility extends rhetorical capacities to critically engage with hierarchies encountered under neoliberal colonialism; to “apprehend the scenes of power” as Puar puts it (The Right to Maim, 22).

In new materialist scholarship in rhetorical studies, there hasn’t yet been attention paid to the political economy of disability under global neoliberalism, even where neoliberalism is explicitly challenged by scholars deploying rhetorical capacities within their analyses (Chaput; Chaput and Hanan). Rhetorical debility affords analysis of hierarchichized rhetoricities that function, or are capacitated, through obfuscation and oppression of other disabled, colonized, or otherwise inhibited rhetoricities. As a point of illustration within rhetorical studies, take, for example, Elizabeth Wilhoit’s article “Affordances as Material Communication: How the Spatial Environment Communicates to Organize Cyclists in Copenhagen, Denmark” and her posthuman analysis of Copenhagen’s bicycle signs and the ways they capacitate cyclists to navigate physical barriers (44). I’d like to connect this analysis to my homeland. In Palestine, Israeli turnstiles work to constrict and manipulate bodies at checkpoints, based in an assumption of illiteracy—the rhetorical capacity of physical barriers are made necessary and complicit in the rhetorical debility of Palestinians whose schools are bombed and whose educators are targeted for deportation. As Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir show quite literally in their article, “Between Imaginary Lines,” wheelchairs are not accessible to checkpoints. Disabled Palestinians are not simply “encountering” nonhuman capacities, but are debilitated by necessity of the bodily control they are subjected to under occupation. Puar’s inquiry into the occupation of Palestine marks a similar attention to the technologies and methods of carceral power and the bodies that are privileged in public movement amid the intersectional oppressions of colonized, disabled Palestinians. These are explicitly rhetorical relations, demarcating the capacity of some bodies over the debility of others to move and communicate in a settler-colonial context.

My point is not that Wilhoit’s piece is not itself a powerful analysis of posthuman rhetoric (it very much is), but that it and others’ rhetorical region-making around posthumanism, new materialism, and rhetorical capacities often do not include populations for whom hierarchical relations are central concerns. We might consider here Edbauer Rice’s concept of folds—that rhetorical regions are helpful in forming assemblages unbound by spatial or disciplinary boundaries. The West Bank border wall and the US-Mexico border wall form a region of debility in the way both are materially connected. Israeli technology and subcontracting informs and resonates with the US-Mexico border wall, illustrating what Siegfried calls the “agentic materialism” of settler colonialism (13). Extending this point, US capital and technology invest in and arm Israeli border control and Israeli policing tactics inform US police brutality and white supremacy (Nasim Ahmed). These are material relations that affix or “fold” imperialism and debility within hierarchies of oppression that operate in global regions of colonialism and disablement. Where “folds draw together regions that were once distant or even opposed to one another” (Rice 209), we need to consider the related capacities and debilities within regions that are subject to hierarchical relations along lines of occupation, colonization, and disablement. Debility, like Stormer’s notion of capacity, is not a static category. Both are forms of becoming (rhetorical) that enable and disable populations and rhetorics in a spectrum, rather than a binary. Recalling Fritsch’s distinction, “there are graduations of debility and capacity” (14). One group’s rhetoricity might be capacitated by the debility of others’—the distinction is meaningful in how it traces injustice within relations that rhetorical studies might seek to reveal and redress. Debility focuses attention to the way some forms of rhetorical empowerment require and depend on the inequitable distribution and production of rhetoricity.

The applicability of debility to Stormer’s new materialist intervention in the field is vital. In Puar’s work, then, how does capacity and debility function in terms of neoliberalism, and what possibilities for an application in rhetorical studies emerge from her framing? Her formulation of the terms and subsequent research questions are key here:

Those “folded” into life are seen as more capacious or on the side of capacity, while those targeted for premature or slow death are figured as on the side of debility. Such an analysis reposes the question: Which bodies are made to pay for “progress”? Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for neoliberalism, available and valuable enough for rehabilitation, and which cannot be? (13)

Puar extends disability theory by conceptualizing debility as part of an assemblage of affective and biopolitical relations. Neoliberalism individualizes and makes productive disabled bodies, not through horizontal encounters, but through violent stacking of some as more-than others. Brought to bear on rhetorical capacities, the notion of debility points us toward the sites where bodies may not be capacitated for ways of doing rhetoric or being rhetorical. To operationalize this spectrum of rhetorical capacity and debility, I will demonstrate an application of rhetorical capacity and debility in the following section.

Application: Disability, Protest, and Settler Colonialism

Emphasizing a transnational application, this case study extends Puar and Gorman’s respective engagement with the Israeli occupation of Palestine in critical disability studies by considering the murder of Ibrahim Abu Thurayeh, a disabled Palestinian protester. In 2017, engaged in protests of then-president Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s state capital, Abu Thurayeh was killed by Israeli Defense Force (IDF) sniper fire (The Guardian). A double amputee due to the Israeli bombing of Gaza in 2008, Abu Thurayeh protested while in his wheelchair, visibly disabled, as lamented by Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights at the time. In condemnation of the murder, Al-Hussein said, “Given his severe disability, which must have been clearly visible to those who shot him, his killing is incomprehensible—a truly shocking and wanton act” (The Guardian). In viewing this scene of rhetorical address through the lens of rhetorical capacity/debility, we must attend to the relations being leveraged both in the colonial violence committed (the assassination of a protester) and the representation of said violence in international media (the UN statement). Although rhetorical debility, like capacity, seeks to extricate and analyze rhetoric from the confines of individual subjectivity, focusing a case study on an individual, Abu Thurayeh, can provide insight into the broader political economy that debilitates Palestinian rhetoricity and capacitates certain material and rhetorical relations of settler colonialism.

Where disability is marked as visible, the UN statement demarcates that the body of the disabled Palestinian protester should be spared from death—implying that, in disability’s absence, no such fate is spared. More specifically, the statement legitimizes imperial notions that unarmed, nondisabled, colonized protesters are a constant physical threat to armed occupiers. Colonial murder, in this context, is reframed into a failure of visibility and of identification with disability. The rhetorical capacity of disability in the context of protests is such that it provides certain protections from harm, regardless of individual subjectivity. This capacity is only made possible where disability is separated from protest rhetoric—where disability is seen as a visible marker of disempowerment and vulnerability. The rhetorical debility of Palestinian protesters makes this disempowerment available and rhetorically effective. Making disability a universally vulnerable condition means removing disability from its context as a condition that is produced by colonization. In this case, Abu Thurayeh’s disability was produced by an Israeli missile strike, as are many Palestinians’ physical disabilities (Puar, The Right to Maim 108). We can directly map rhetorical capacity and debility into the ecology described above. Certain identity-based precarities are made rhetorically legible (capacitated), which condition the broader context of rhetorical acts, like protest, as illegible (debilitated). Abu Thurayeh’s disability is the sole rhetorical agent identified by the UN response. Not the history of oppression that produced his disability in the first place, not the message of his decolonial protest—simply the legible, capacitated rhetoricity of his body and the assumed rhetorical clairvoyance of a sniper scope.

Here, per the region-making involved in rhetorical debility, we can attend to one of Abu Thurayeh’s rhetorical protest actions. Prior to being shot, Abu Thurayeh was photographed abandoning his wheelchair (Roberts). Region-making emerges from the resonance of that action with protests by disabled Americans abandoning their wheelchairs to crawl up the steps of the US Capitol building in 1989 to advocate for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA; Lewis). In both cases, visibly disabled bodies are capacitated as vulnerable and are meant to be exempt from state violence usually enacted on protestors. By rejecting a visible marker of disability—the wheelchair—the vulnerability typically coded to disabled bodies is disrupted. In some protest contexts, this rejection of “the normal response of pity,” as Victoria Ann Lewis puts it, can in turn capacitate disabled protest, as it did for advocacy for the ADA. In Palestine, the rejection precedes death. Beyond the individual, rhetorical debility speaks to the unique ways that whole populations’ rhetoricity is debilitated. Where, in other contexts, the rejection of pity is a legible rhetorical protest action, Palestinian protest is always enwrapped in perceptions of bodily threat and transgressions against the safety of the occupier. This overt characterization subsumes almost all other rhetorical capacities, enabling the Israeli state to reinforce its own occupation and the violence it enacts on colonized subjects. So, when Abu Thurayeh enacts his “rejection of pity,” not only is his a rhetorical action of protest, but one that emerges from multiple aspects of the rhetorical ecology that contextualizes the act.

On the Gazan border, Palestinians protest on unpaved ground littered with fencing, barbed wire, tear gas, and gunfire. All of these contextualizing aspects mark protest as violent and threatening, even though they are implemented by the occupying force as measures of population control. These nonhuman rhetorical objects enable and disable human agency as part of a hierarchy of colonial violence that subsumes and debilitates anti-imperial protest as a transgression against safety. Within that context, visible disability—obscuring the message of protest to capacitate vulnerability to state violence—can be rejected in an attempt to reclaim the message of anti-imperial protest. This dynamic is clear in the way that Israeli military response to Abu Thurayeh’s murder makes no mention of disability, claiming that “live rounds fired under supervision were aimed ‘towards main instigators’” (The Guardian). With this rejection, the state reassumes its authority over protesting subjects. Rhetorical debility is totalizing and any navigation of the rhetorical ecology of disabled, anti-imperial protest is overcome by colonizing discourse that frames all protesters as violent threats subject to death and debility.

The relationality between colonization and disability is made clear in this case study through an analysis of rhetorical debility. Furthermore, it allows us to be critical of rhetorical region-making, and understand the different ways disability is produced and received in different contexts. When American disability activist Stephanie Thomas looked back at the Capitol crawl, she reflected, “We took a lot of flak for it—but I’ve thought a lot about crawling. First—people like me in most of the world—if they’re not dead—they have to crawl to get around. There’s no wheelchairs, no access. Do I think I’m better than them?” (Lewis).Unlike Thomas’s presumption of disability in the Global South, Abu Thurayeh did have a wheelchair—received from a rhetorical region of anti-imperial solidarity between Palestinians and the group “Irish Friends of Palestine” (Roberts). When speaking to the group, Abu Thurayeh said, “Please never look at my disabled body, look at the great job I am doing. I never get despaired. It’s not the end of the world and life should go on” (Roberts).While this statement could be perceived as a narrative of overcoming disability, such an analysis would do a disservice to Abu Thurayeh’s navigation of disability and Palestinian subjectivity under debilitating conditions. As I’ve sought to articulate, the visibility of his disability is part of a broader continuum of rhetorical capacity and debility under settler colonialism. Abu Thurayeh pushed against the constant inhibiting of his disabled, Palestinian rhetoricity by temporarily abandoning his wheelchair as the visible marker of arhetorical vulnerability during protests—not just in the case described here, but also in protests throughout the years where he would climb electric poles to wave the Palestinian flag (Roberts). Abu Thurayeh’s response to receiving his wheelchair and in temporarily abandoning that wheelchair during protests speaks to the way that Palestinian activism resists a totalizing debility of Palestinian rhetoricity.

Colonialism and ableism form arboreal hierarchies as the dominant new materialist relations in this case. There is no horizontal encounter in this scene of rhetorical address—addressor and addressee, colonizer and colonized, shooter and victim, couldn’t be further apart at the moment of death. The logic of settler colonialism at play here debilitates Palestinian rhetoricity. The rhetoricity that is produced and capacitated can be understood in the transnational circulation of discourse, American political support of Israeli occupation that sparked the protest, but also material relations found in the economic support of Palestinian debility by the United States.

The 271 Palestinian fatalities and 29,187 injuries in the year following Abu Thurayeh’s murder exemplify the way in which Palestinian protesters are debilitated and killed by transnational military capitalism. The wounds observed by doctors in Gaza during the protests were regarded as “consistent with those caused by high-velocity Israeli-manufactured Tavor rifles using 5.56 mm military ammunition” while yet “[o]ther wounds bear the hallmarks of US-manufactured M24 Remington sniper rifles shooting 7.62 mm hunting ammunition, which expand and mushroom inside the body” (Amnesty International).Here rhetorical debility bears out in the material/discursive relations that sustain Israel’s occupational violence, but also, more significantly, the hierarchies of those relations as they debilitate. Limiting Palestinian protests for human rights and decolonization to the visibility and thus legibility of a body’s identity as disabled obscures the way that disability was produced by the structural and institutional forces of settler colonialism under the guise of state security. The capacity of the IDF sniper rifle, developed from US-Israeli industrial hegemonic partnerships, to engage with the Palestinian protester—the scope to see a colonized body and mark it for death or debility—emerges in relation to the invisibility or misrepresentation of protest of the occupation of Palestine. This relation helps illustrate the political economy at play in this rhetorical ecology. The capacities made available and rhetorically legible under settler colonialism are only made possible by the debilitation of Palestinian rhetoricity entwined with embodied disability.

Conclusion

When Diane Davis titled “Rhetoricity at the End of the World,” hers was a reference to the “undeconstructable and anahuman rhetoricity” of the “world stripped down to its quasi-originary condition”—the end of the world is the pre-and-post discursive condition that is still imbued with rhetoricity (435). By contrast, the end of history marks the precedence and assumed stability of neoliberalism in the present, and the rhetoricity produced and circulated therein that privileges some humans and nonhumans over others; some material/discursive relations over others; some rhetoricities over others. Inextricable from colonialism, ableism, and the myriad other hegemonic forces that tie critiques of new materialism to institutions of power, the dominant genealogies of our field’s ways of knowing must be accountable to sites, bodies, and relations debilitated by neoliberalism. In this regard, I’ve contributed rhetorical debility as an addition to rhetorical capacity to be deployed in studies of new materialist and posthuman rhetorics and draw out the hierarchies of relations conditioned by hegemonic power—hierarchies that privilege some rhetoricities over others in our scholarship and in broader scenes of political action.

Writing now, in 2021, amid a renewed and intensified colonial attack on Palestinians living under apartheid, rhetorical debility names a sustained political relationality that scholarship cannot redress alone. Rhetorical debility, like debility in general, with its emphasis on massification and the wearing down of populations over time (Puar, The Right to Maim), defines relations that have been concretized for generations. Breaking those relations down requires a naming of relational hierarchies as hierarchical. Where Palestinians continue to be displaced from their lands, assaulted by settlers, and have their homes, schools, hospitals, as well as cultural and humanitarian spaces destroyed by a colonial, occupying force, I know that rhetorical studies can only help us understand colonization, not resist or dismantle it. Decolonization is not a metaphor, after all (Tuck and Yang). It is a material, political process of restorative justice in all aspects of society. Decolonization can, however, operate in network with rhetorical studies scholarship.

Colonization and neoliberalism operate together with a politically mediated spectrum of rhetorical capacity/debility, marking some lives as worth living, and some rhetorics as worth engaging. Thus, both debilitated rhetoricities and legible rhetorical capacities invite critical attention to the hierarchies that grant or disallow them recognition. However, recognizing debilitated rhetoricities is only as meaningful as our commitments to decolonization and the dismantling of neoliberal structures that debilitate and capacitate rhetoric and life itself. That recognition must extend beyond identifying objects of colonial violence or subjects whose rhetoric is only legible where it fits imperialist terms of acceptable resistance. Decolonization in any form other than the abstract is unacceptable to colonial projects, so new materialist theories of rhetoric must not obscure oppressive relations, much less reinforce them.

In the face of oppressive political relations whose stability is naturalized as part of a neoliberal political economy, new materialist rhetoric must attend not just to overlooked missing masses, but communities that have been intentionally rendered as arhetorical in the service of hegemonic power. Pushed further and tooled toward empirical inquiry, rhetorical debility could frame qualitative data analysis, mapping a coding schema to rhetorical capacities and debilities afforded in a particular scene of address, resistance, or oppression. Rhetorical capacities, in network with debility, have potential to engage with new materialist rhetorical relations such that systems of power might be better understood and the experiences of humans and nonhumans within them better honored. In our classrooms and our scholarship, the production of debility bears out on our understanding of rhetorical historiography, decolonial rhetoric, as well as analyses of activism and rhetorics of social movements as we work to teach and study how and why certain rhetoricities are enabled or continue to be inhibited.

Where horizontalism is critiqued by Indigenous scholars and disability studies, rhetorical debility allows for change and fluidity of human/nonhuman ways of knowing and ways of being that defy neoliberal colonialism—ways that are capacitated at some points of history are debilitated in another, and our field must always engage with shifting hierarchical logics that uphold hegemony. New materialism, as it currently exists, is far from the only framework that can be leveraged toward greater understanding of rhetoricity under hegemonic power. Rhetorical debility takes cues from Indigenous scholarship, as well as critical disability studies and critical theory, but it also operates alongside rhetorical capacity—a distinctly new materialist theory. Amid the connections between materialist theories, we must be mindful of what Alison Ravenscroft calls “a refusal to acknowledge the prior presence of and the debt to Indigenous materialisms [which] reiterates the fabricated grounds of colonization” (355). Rhetorical debility is one tool with which to work through the tensions new materialism has with Indigenous, Black, and disabled materialisms to better redress colonial relations in our scholarship and sites of study. We must continuously question and critique dominant genealogies of rhetorical theory to more critically foreground decolonial, antiracist, and anti-ableist epistemologies amid the stability of neoliberalism and its debilitative effects.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, as cited by Marcial González and Carlos Gallego, David Harvey defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices” (2). See also Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos and her framing of neoliberalism as the “economization of politics” (164).

² At the 2020 Munich Security Conference, Fukuyama stated: “I have not heard anyone posit an alternative political economic form other than liberal democracy tied to a market economy that I think will be a higher form of human civilization that will produce higher levels of prosperity and more happiness for the people that live in it” (1:54–2:14).

³ Here I use Antonio Gramsci’s definition of hegemony, paraphrased as “the ideological predominance of the cultural norms, values and ideas of the dominant class over the dominated” (Woolcock 204).

⁴ As a field, critical disability studies is defined by a contingent of disability studies scholars who operate on the shared foundation “that disabled people are undervalued and discriminated against and this cannot be changed simply through liberal or neo-liberal legislation and policy” (Meekosha & Shuttleworth 65). Critical disability studies also emphasizes intersectional methodologies of analysis attending to race, gender, and sexuality (Kim; Schalk) that frame the field by its “mode of analysis rather than its objects of study” (Minich).

⁵ New materialist projects are often constellated around what Jane Bennett calls a “greater recognition of the agential powers of natural and artifactual things, greater awareness of the dense web of their connections with each other and with human bodies, and, finally, a more cautious, intelligent approach to our interventions in that ecology” (349). For a comprehensive introduction to new materialism and its intersections with rhetorical theory, see Laurie Gries’s Still Life with Rhetoric.

⁶ Given this essay’s attention to Stormer’s work, it bears mentioning that Na’puti lists “Rhetoric’s diverse materiality” as part of the genealogy of scholarship that fails to center Indigeneity (496). In addition to Na’puti’s, a similar critique could be made regarding Stormer’s lack of attention to disability. Rather than engage in a criticism of what traditions and themes authors do or do not engage with when forming rhetorical theories, I want to extend on Stormer’s work by considering how different traditions or applications might further dimensionalize theory—namely disability and debility, in my case.

⁷ I’m less concerned here with the significance of naming a Du Boisian ecology of political analysis as marxist, and more interested in the oppressions Du Bois worked to address through an “arboreal” model of materialist analysis like historical-materialism. His derivations from historical-materialism to enable less linear analyses of economic systems of anti-Blackness (see Wagers, cited by Wells) are powerful additions to rhetorical studies of new materialism, as Wells does argue. However, the “arboreal” analysis is an important aspect of Du Bois’s legacy in particular and Black resistance to white supremacy writ large. To ignore the histories and labor of people of color who used and continue to use and modify marxist analytical modes is to engage in the same whitewashing that scholars like Kyla Wazana Tompkins locate in the “new” part of “new materialism.”

⁸ I frame critical disability studies, Black, and Indigenous scholarship as similar in their shared absence in new materialist rhetorical studies. In aligning these fields, I in no way intend to obscure the differences and tensions between them—in particular, the lack of Indigenous voices in disability studies and the latter field’s failures to deal with global imperialism, both historic and contemporary (see Gorman). I focus on a specific thread of critical disability studies and invite future inquiry into disability studies’ genealogical frictions with Indigenous and Black scholarship and their own relations of rhetoricity and epistemological practice.

⁹ See Berlant, who defines slow death as “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence” (754).