Scholarship
A selection rather than a record, reflecting a trajectory of interest: the rhetoric of incommensurability.
Insurgent Rhetorics and Historical Materialism
American military doctrine treats rhetoric as information moving through a continuous present: Field Manual 3-24’s attempt to historicize counterinsurgency got stripped of citations prior to publication. Insurgent propaganda publications like Inspire do the opposite, grounding claims to legitimacy in histories of oppression, and Western media respond by casting the region of southwest Asia as fundamentally pre-modern. In material-historical terms, rhetorical labor aggregates into circulating rhetorical capital, and the distinction between the open hand of persuasion and the closed fist of violence collapses: special operations kill the people who constitute networks of rhetorical delivery, and Inspire’s enacted persuasion delivers violent effects.
Unpacking the Universal Library: Digital Reading and the Recirculation of Economic Value
Recent arguments against digital reading practices rely on contradictory implicit claims: that digital technologies harm the way we read, and that reading is a set of monolithic and unchanging practices. Both claims are mistaken. Digital reading practices illuminate the diverse forms of value in the labor and capital associated with textual work.
Economies of Writing, Without the Economics
Composition’s increasing engagement with economic concerns has not been matched by any comparable attention to economic scholarship. The result is an attenuated disciplinary rhetoric that represents economy as either beyond intervention or as a metaphor for non-economic phenomena. A more rigorous grounding in economic scholarship offers composition studies a rhetoric that opens possibilities for economic agency.