Thinkings-Out-Loud: An Introductory Manifest

While it may be highfalutin to describe an editor’s introduction as a “manifesto,” it seems quite apt to call it a “manifest.” Like a ship’s manifest, an introduction contains a list of the contents being carried on board. More recently, manifest has become a verb that’s often surrounded by a bit of woo. Bestselling books teach us how to manifest our hopes and desires. A quick spin through the etymological history of manifest suggests yet another meaning, as the Latin manifestus connotes proof made by hand. I take all three of these meanings as inspiration for what I hope this editorial introduction can do.

As incoming editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ), I’ve been thinking a lot about the journal’s history. One reason why I’ve been ruminating on this history is because I feel extremely honored to serve in a position held by many figures who have shaped my own disciplinary identity over the years: Ed Corbett, Carolyn Miller, Jeffrey Walker, Susan Jarrett, Jim Jasinski, Greg Clark. But, in a broader sense, I’ve also come to see that RSQ’s history tells a story about us. Not only us in a disciplinary capacity, but us as collaborative inquirers. In tracing the evolution of RSQ, we find certain habits and practices reflected back. What now may seem like well-worn grooves of disciplinary norms look different when juxtaposed with forgotten trajectories that once animated our work.

One stark juxtaposition is what RSQ (then called Newsletter of the Rhetoric Society of America) looked like 50 years ago, when Ed Corbett announced that there were enough funds in the Rhetoric Society of America coffers (“even with the reduced membership fee to $2.00”) that the organization could publish quarterly issues. For the first several years, issues of the Newsletter were never more than twenty pages in total, with only two or three essays at most. The essays themselves were also quite short, often no more than three or four pages. Rather than making calls for lengthy articles, Corbett initially called for readers to send “queries (like Donald Bryant’s) or thinkings-out-loud (like Ross Winterowd’s)” (2). Meanwhile, the regular section titled “Notes and Queries” might best be described as brief musings, such as George Yoos’s thoughts on the phrase “mere rhetoric.”

The contributions to these earliest issues don’t resemble what we might expect from RSQ today. For example, Winterowd begins his November 1972 piece, “The Process of Composition,” like this: “The following outline (actually the skeleton of a series of talks that I am about to give) might well serve as a set of ‘topics’ to generate discussion concerning the process of composition. Each element of the outline is reformulable as a question, and each item is most useful in its interrogative form” (9). He then follows it with a list of questions and subject headings, written as one might expect of a basic essay outline.

Such “thinkings-out-loud,” as Corbett calls it, seem shockingly out of place when reading through the lens of contemporary journal norms. Perhaps this is because we expect thinking-out-loud to happen behind the scenes of a finished essay. What’s more, the idea of a three- or four-page essay seems radically incompatible with how we’ve come to imagine a scholarly argument fit for publication. And, indeed, as RSQ evolved over the decades following these early volumes, the essays grew in length (as did the pages of the journal issues) and “Notes and Queries” eventually fell away altogether.

Today, most essays submitted to RSQ tend to average between 9,000 and 10,000 words. Even then, many authors still feel that so much has been left unsaid or underexplored. (I’ve certainly been in this position many times as a writer.) Standards for tenure and promotion, or even the job market, add pressure to an author’s desire to produce what looks like what we imagine “professional scholarship” to look like. There’s no place on a curriculum vitae to list one’s thinkings-out-loud.

However, while the evolution of scholarly publication expectations is not something to bemoan, I would also like to make a case for manifesting differently. Winterowd’s skeleton outline potentially seems strange because of what it is not. It is not an essay, nor is it an argument. Instead, it is doing something different/ly. He is sharing his thoughts on a topic, offering up questions that readers may find generative for themselves in some way.

These artifactual oddities reflect how different capacities for collaborative inquiry are manifested through different forms of writing. While the 10,000-word scholarly essay makes certain kinds of inquiry possible, other modes of writing open space for different thought trajectories. While re-reading early issues of RSQ, for example, I found myself reflecting on the short essay as a rhetorical genre. Rather than thinking about the short essay as a truncated version of a long essay, short essays possess much different capacity. Casey Boyle’s short essay, “The Unbearable Obliqueness of Rhetoric,” which appears in this issue, is an example of what a short essay can do. Boyle uses this genre in order to cut across an “assumed division between the practical and the playful,” seeking to provoke lines of thought (albeit through oblique rhetoric). At their best, short essays emphasize open-ended dialogue over the task of defending lines of argument.

Different lines of collaborative inquiry are also made possible through symposia and forums. In his 1996 introductory comments as the new RSQ editor, Jeffrey Walker expressed his desire to feature more symposia during his tenure. Walker imagined these as a collection of short “article-sets” that address a single question or topic from multiple perspectives, resulting in what is roughly “comparable to a conference panel” (6). As an example, he pointed to the Autumn 1992 RSQ symposium on “Bakhtin and Rhetorical Criticism,” which featured short pieces from Kay Halasek, Don Bialostosky, Michael Bernard-Donals, and James Zebroski. The short contributions read as a dialogue among the authors, offering questions and engagements across the pieces, as well as extending lines of thought that emerge in those exchanges. In a postscript to her contribution, Halasek reflects on the symposium genre as an “opportunity to engage one another in a manner and forum not often available to us” (8). But, even more significantly, Halasek emphasizes the value of such a format in its ability to reveal “not only the product of four writers’ scholarship, but part of the process, as well” (8). Indeed, the best version of such writing captures the spirit of what a symposium (or a really good conference panel) actually does: presenting voices that speak to, alongside, against, with, and in relation to each other.

And still other forms of inquiry call for scholarly writing that manifests through experimental, performative stylistics and methodologies. For many reasons, rhetorical studies has not widely embraced the kinds of narrative, fictocritical, or speculative methods that appear in disciplinary spaces like literary studies, cultural anthropology, or performance studies. Perhaps there are looming fears about appearing “unscholarly” by engaging in prose that plays. Yet scholarship by Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, bell hooks, Fred Moten, Sandra Ruiz, and Michael Taussig (to name just a few) shows how style and thought mutually shape each other. What’s more, a look back through RSQ’s history reveals striking examples of experimental, performative scholarship. Jim Corder’s 1988 piece—“When (Do I/Shall I/May I/Must I/Is It Appropriate for Me to) (Say No to/Deny/Resist/Repudiate/Attack/Alter) Any (Poem/Poet/Other/Piece of the World) for My Sake?”—is both essay and poem (and also both not essay and not poem). Corder’s piece is a personal meditation on rhetoric, criticism, poetry, and writing. He ruminates on the sometimes-indistinguishable difference between poetry and rhetoric. Much like poetry, he writes, “Rhetoric is the human action by which we constitute/reveal/declare/guess at ourselves” (63).

Corder’s words call to mind how Fred Moten describes his own approach to writing. Moten emphasizes the importance for “criticism to sound like something, to be musical and actually to figure in some iconic way the art and life that it’s talking about” (Rowell and Moten, p. 957, emphasis mine). Yet we must make space for work that embodies what Corder and Moten describe: writing that unfolds in a form that figures. In this issue, Nathan Stormer’s essay, “The World Has Ended, Long Live Worlds: Rhetoric at the Limit of Humanness,” exemplifies how certain inquiry unfolds in different formats. Stormer begins his essay by admitting a certain amount of ambivalent restlessness in his attempt to think about rhetoric’s relation to humanness. Rather than trying to avoid or cover up such restlessness, Stormer decides to write with it by “layering figures and voices” through “linked, itinerant, micro-essays.” In this way, Stormer’s essay does indeed present criticism that sounds like something.

Of course, there is much more to say about RSQ’s history beyond its genre, format, and stylistic evolutions. As a journal, RSQ has been responsive to contemporary political and social issues from the very beginning. For example, the March 1974 issue (volume 4.2) featured essays by Edward P. J. Corbett, Bruce E. Gronbeck, and Richard L. Johannesen on rhetorics of protest. These essays were followed by a five-page, single-spaced bibliography of “The Rhetoric of Social Protest and Confrontation,” listing hundreds of books and essays from authors such as Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman, and Howard Zinn (among many others). It’s vital to continue this work by encouraging essays that wrestle with the political and social complexities in current public discourse.

Two essays in this issue do this very work by addressing racialized violence, although they do so in very different ways. Chandra Maldonado and Kenneth Zagacki’s “Aporia in Barack Obama’s 2016 Dallas Police Memorial Speech” reads the 2016 speech delivered by President Barack Obama after five police officers were shot and killed during a protest in Dallas, Texas. Maldonado and Zagacki argue that in addressing this incident, one deeply intertwined with racial tensions, President Obama’s speech drew heavily on aporia in an effort to use the epideictic moment as a chance to reflect on rhetorical polarization. Meanwhile, Jennifer LeMesurier’s essay, “White Tears,” examines the rhetorical performance and display of White tears as they construct “deictic indicators” of “White victims” and “non-White addressors.” LeMesurier points to specific cases where the imagery of White tears served to legitimate historical norms of White supremacy. Together, these two essays are excellent examples of how rhetorical scholarship can intervene in the pain points we face at this moment.

More broadly, RSQ has always been a journal devoted to interdisciplinary rhetorical scholarship of all kinds. What makes RSQ unique is its capacity to embrace a range of subject matters that is as expansive as rhetoric itself. In this issue, essays by Noah Roderick, Jordynn Jack, and Emma Duvall expand familiar rhetorical terms—exigence and kairos—by recontextualizing them in difference scenes. In Jack and Duvall’s essay, “Reconsidering Weaving and Kairos: A Feminist Revolution in Tropes,” the authors advance our understandings of kairos through its ancient relationship to weaving and the loom. Meanwhile, Noah Roderick’s “Exigence at the Dawn of Recommendation Media: Dramatizing Salience in Audio Memes” expands implications for how we think about exigence within emerging technologies. These two essays are a vibrant testament not only to the vastness of rhetoric, but also to the intersections that have always made rhetorical studies unique as a discipline.

My purpose in these historical meanderings, these thinkings-out-loud, is both a manifest and manifestation. During my term as RSQ editor, I want to carry on the excellent work of previous editors. I also want to make space for rhetorical inquiry that broadens our capacities as scholars. In addition to traditional essays, therefore, I especially encourage forms of scholarship that need encouragement in this moment:

• short essays that engage in generative lines of thought;

• symposia comprising brief statements from multiple authors engaged in dialog on a single question or topic;

• essays that address rhetorical theory and practices outside of US and Eurocentric contexts;

• scholarship that experiments with genre, stylistics, and performativity as a critical method; and

• writing that pushes our discipline into strange yet generative places.

This is my manifest, or at least the manifestation I hope to manifest over the next three years. I’m grateful for the tradition that RSQ has already established, and I’m grateful to future RSQ contributors who will continue taking this work in new directions.

Disclosure Statement

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