Books and Special Issues by Ira Allen
Rhetoric Review, 2020
The essays of this symposium draw on the concept of rhetorical witnessing to examine sites of his... more The essays of this symposium draw on the concept of rhetorical witnessing to examine sites of historical trauma from a range of angles.
Special Section: Surveilling Bodies/Screening Surveillance
Screen Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Perception, Experience, and Display, 2019
Surveillance now is ubiquitous—each of us is decomposed along multiple axes into discrete data po... more Surveillance now is ubiquitous—each of us is decomposed along multiple axes into discrete data points, and then recomposed on screens and in combinatory algorithms that organize our life chances. Such surveillance is directly screened in popular culture, however, quite rarely. It is hard to see ubiquitous surveillance, and the harder something powerful is to see, the more powerful it tends to be. The essays of this Screen Shot offer perspective on various concrete instances of contemporary surveillance, both ubiquitous and granular, and in so doing offer tools for negotiating its suffusive presence in and organization of our lives.
*The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory* tells a story about the "spirit" of rhetorical theory,... more *The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory* tells a story about the "spirit" of rhetorical theory, from the Greeks to the present (and beyond and before). Along the way, it explains concepts of "troubled freedom" and "fantastical truth" that are each, in some way, central to the practices of rhetorical theory--and both sorely needed today, both in and outside of the discipline. The story proceeds through a range of classical and modern sources, from Isocrates and Cicero to Hannah Arendt and William James and Kenneth Burke, and not only argues for a baseline for thinking about rhetorical theory but also shares broadly useful concepts for readers outside the field.
Journal Articles by Ira Allen
Degrowth Journal, 2024
Chastened humanism offers philosophical grounding for an alternative hedonism that might make deg... more Chastened humanism offers philosophical grounding for an alternative hedonism that might make degrowth palatable to consumer societies. Though not identical to degrowth, alternative hedonism is attitudinally adjacent to its deflationary impulse, its “soft landing” approach to global political-economic restructuring. For degrowth to become ideologically attractive, wealthier humans need to enjoy “less” more. Chastened humanism suggests one philosophical foundation for such enjoyment or retraining of desire. Under conditions of scarcity and risk, but prior to the intensely diminished resource access to come, chastened humanism redevelops classical humanist thought toward a vision of enjoyable transcendence-toward-less, offering a strategy for collective meaning-making that can ground alternative hedonism and degrowth alike. Chastened humanism comprises (1) humility on the basis of species-membership and (2) commitment to transcendence-toward-less. This offers a way of negotiating hard cultural and planetary constraints with an eye to transcending an apparent ecological law of niche construction. If humans, like other species, construct our ecological niche to maximize resource metabolization until interrupted by other biota, and if capitalism and carbon technologies intensify our capacities for niche construction unto death, what will allow us to interrupt ourselves ? What habits of mind can help us to desire, and so strive effectively for, the transcendence of “ecological law” that would be collective self-limitation of resource consumption at a mass scale ? Chastened humanism draws out from Italian humanist Giambattista Vico’s orations On Humanistic Education a way of thinking about such desirable self-limitation as transcendence.
The Writing Center Journal, 2021
Composition studies in general, and writing center studies in particular, have developed an incre... more Composition studies in general, and writing center studies in particular, have developed an increasingly fulsome conversation about archives. Excellent recent work on the theory and practice of creating archives establishes best practices and rationales. Building especially on Stacy Nall (2014), we introduce "flash archiving" as a term and practice for what we call "good-enough archiving," an entry-point approach to archiving for harried writing center administrators and staff. Flash archiving mirrors the knowledge-making that is the de facto outcome of writing center practice: attuned to ephemera in the midst of solving real-world writing dilemmas. The notion of flash archiving arises from our work as writing center administrators in Lebanon and Egypt and offers a less-than-perfect but nonetheless quite viable way of getting a snapshot of writing centers' relational work. Because community engagement is central to the meaning-making practices of writing centers, we trace out the logic for and practical uses of flash archiving as a way of capturing the relational "nonevents" that typify such engagement. The result is a form of knowledge-making and collective self-fashioning attuned to the constitutive vagaries of writing center work. TheWritingCenterjournal38.3 j 2021 117 :ii'
Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 2021
Profound social tensions and structuralized racial violence in the U.S. can be understood in term... more Profound social tensions and structuralized racial violence in the U.S. can be understood in terms of unconcluded war. This is not unique. Especially following civil wars that threaten the integrity of nation-states and that remain in important senses unconcluded, bearing witness offers possibilities for becoming-together in loss. This article examines a testimonial response to the Lebanese civil war's ongoing shaping of society as instructive for the U.S. context, which is also shaped by unconcluded war. Reading U.S. and Lebanese contexts together through the lens of rhetorical witnessing , I discover historical hope in an apparent testimonial failure. A Lebanese testimonial assemblage-graffiti by artist Jad El-Khoury on the war-wounded Beirut Holiday Inn, cross-sectarian public outrage at the graffiti, and subsequent effacing of it by the Lebanese military-serves as an instance where rhetorical witnessing creates social space for becoming-together-in-loss. Such becoming offers possibilities for symbolic unification in contexts of unconcluded war.
Rhetoric Review, 2020
In a time of global pandemic, fire, and flood, how we live together depends more than ever on how... more In a time of global pandemic, fire, and flood, how we live together depends more than ever on how we symbolize trauma. Bearing witness is rhetorical action in search of a shared world. This symposium considers the hows and whys of our efforts to live together in language and other symbolic media under conditions of near-impossibility. Rhetorical witnessing is an emerging and still underdeveloped subfield of the interdisciplinary field of witnessing studies, which arose out of Holocaust studies and does the crucially important work of investigating pain, suffering, loss, trauma, resilience, testimony and, ultimately, social change and subjective reconstitution. Although traumatic pain and suffering can result from a wide variety of causes including natural disasters and other events not involving human intervention, here we are defining them as involving a victim or victims and a perpetrator or perpetrators. A witness may be either a victim or a third party who observes the traumatic event, in both cases an eyewitness, or someone who hears about it secondhand, or a thirdhand observer who sees or hears about it, often through media of some kind—television, newspapers, social media. A witness may be a passive observer but may also bear witness—that is, provide an account, willing or reluctant—for the purpose of contributing to knowledge or developing more relational forms of understanding. The testimony of rhetorical witnessing may contribute to healing in the case of the victim’s or victims’ testimony or compassion for the victim or victims in the case of other witnesses. Across all instances, to think of witnessing’s rhetorical dimension is to emphasize its situatedness as being for audiences and making worlds.
College Composition and Communication, 2020
Marilyn Cooper responds to Allen's "Composition Is the Ethical Negotiation of Fantastical Selves"... more Marilyn Cooper responds to Allen's "Composition Is the Ethical Negotiation of Fantastical Selves"; Allen responds to Cooper's "Response to Allen."
Screen Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Perception, Experience, and Displace, 2019
Surveillance now is ubiquitous-each of us is decomposed along multiple axes into discrete data po... more Surveillance now is ubiquitous-each of us is decomposed along multiple axes into discrete data points, and then recomposed on screens and in combinatory algorithms that organize our life chances. Such surveillance is directly screened in popular culture, however, quite rarely. It is hard to see ubiquitous surveillance, and the harder something powerful is to see, the more powerful it tends to be. The essays of this Screen Shot offer perspective on various concrete instances of contemporary surveillance, both ubiquitous and granular, and in so doing offer tools for negotiating its suffusive presence in and organization of our lives.
College Composition and Communication, 2018
This article addresses an impasse between rhetoric and composition practice and theory. On one ha... more This article addresses an impasse between rhetoric and composition practice and theory. On one hand, from the poststructural through the posthuman, our most vigorous theories challenge classical notions of selfhood and agency. On the other hand, from institutional assessment through writing about writing, composition's most vigorous practices entail fairly traditional ideas about selfhood and agency. This piece crosses over the impasse by suggesting that "self " and "agency" are vital fantasies for composition, and that negotiating these fantasies is an ethical process. At its heart, I argue, composition is any ethical, collective working out of these fantastical concepts that helps adaptive individuals more freely emerge.
Screen Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Experience, Perception, and Display, 2018
I could not hear weeping as the screen fell dark. But the glistening cheeks and too-bright eyes s... more I could not hear weeping as the screen fell dark. But the glistening cheeks and too-bright eyes spoke loudly enough when the lights rose. We had confronted together a loss of revolutionary possibility, and a refusal of that same loss, that touched nearly every body in the theater. To view Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Ali Atassi’s Our Terrible Country (2014) in Beirut, scarcely seventy-five miles from a Damascus whose dying and lost flowed continuously into Lebanon even as we watched for Syrian hope on the screen, was to be swept up in the civil war’s terrible pull of collective suffering and loss. Swept up, for many in the salle, perhaps all, all the more than each was already. Less than a decade earlier, Syrian military checkpoints had controlled movement throughout Lebanon entire. Lebanon had been the fractured vassal state, Syria its wise but firm tutor. In the “now” of 2014, however, there was no longer a Syria but only an increasingly dim possibility that one might come someday again to be. Syrian refugees swelled Lebanon’s population, crowded Beirut and Tripoli and the mountain towns and the verdant Bekaa Valley. And many sitting silent and wet-eyed through the film’s still-terrible credits had friends and loved ones not only from but still in the terrible, devastated spaces we had together watched passing across the screen—spaces still falling apart in 2014 as we watched, scarcely two hours away, scarcely further than the length of the film itself, falling apart before our eyes in the 2013 of the film’s shooting as they had been falling apart for two years already before that. As they are falling apart still, now in 2018, with only proper names exchanged: Ghouta, Raqqa, Homs, Aleppo, today Ghouta again. Tomorrow? Their terrible country, indeed.
enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture, 2018
"Donald Trump's Antisemitism--And Ours" is an effort to understand the puzzling situation of havi... more "Donald Trump's Antisemitism--And Ours" is an effort to understand the puzzling situation of having a U.S. president who is personally closer to Judaism than any before him and, at the same time, substantially one with the most virulent and frightening growth of antisemitism in America in recent memory. Ultimately, at stake is a deep antisemitism running through American life, which has become in recent years unashamed--in direct harmony with the rise of Trumpism, a fact that the more conservative corners of the Jewish community should note much more closely, and in keeping with a long history of disavowed American antisemitism, to which liberals and progressives should pay careful heed. The essay closes with some thoughts on democratic friendship in antidemocratic times.
Political science struggles, sometimes more than it knows, to study religion’s relationship with ... more Political science struggles, sometimes more than it knows, to study religion’s relationship with politics, democratic and otherwise. The difficulty is in part theoretical. This paper synthesizes diverse strains in recent scholarship on religion to propose a theoretically attuned definition well suited for empirical political science. Religions are defined as systems of shared activity organized around transcendental signifiers. Transcendental signifiers are readily identifiable in public discourse and are “god terms” that organize (or rest at the center of organized) systems of shared activity. This parsimonious definition admits both belief-oriented and practice-oriented phenomena and allows political scientists to study religion as it shapes political acts, interventions, and possibilities. For illustrative purposes, the paper examines a key speech delivered by Sukarno at Indonesia’s founding moment, in which naturalistically observable transcendental signifiers mark the mobilization of religion. Revising older histories that discover a contest between “secular” and “religious” actors, or that are keen to determine the sincerity of Sukarno’s own belief, we contend that Indonesia’s founding is best understood in terms of competing religious discourses that merge in the development of a new civil religion.
This symposium reaches print as the US electoral machinery—thus far, the bizarre and often troubl... more This symposium reaches print as the US electoral machinery—thus far, the bizarre and often troubling marketing campaigns of both party primaries—whirs and spins and thuds into high gear. This coming autumn, in November 2016, voters throughout the United States (and writing in from abroad) will cast ballots, offering guidance to an Electoral College that, by tradition, will adhere to that guidance in selecting a president. Next winter, in January 2017, the “Age of Obama,” called such appreciatively or derisively, will come to an end. This symposium, “Barack Obama’s Significance for Rhetoric and Composition,” aims to provoke and renew disciplinary conversations about the meaning of an age now nearly past, as well as to pose questions that resonate for presidential rhetoric generally.
"Troubled Freedom, Rhetorical Personhood, and Democracy's Ongoing Constitution" looks at one of r... more "Troubled Freedom, Rhetorical Personhood, and Democracy's Ongoing Constitution" looks at one of rhetorical theory's central insights about being a person, and at what this tells us about how to write constitutions. The insight is that "freedom" is a constitutively troubled phenomenon, a negotiation of constraint. Some political implications of this insight are traced out with reference to recent Icelandic efforts to re-write a constitution.
Between the summary rejection of his habilitation in 1925 and the demise of Germany's briefly lef... more Between the summary rejection of his habilitation in 1925 and the demise of Germany's briefly leftist-friendly radio stations in 1933, Walter Benjamin sustained himself in part by writing and delivering nearly a hundred radio broadcasts. Of course, his scholarly production neither depended upon nor ended with his hopes for an academic career, but he turned now to popular media production for subsistence-and, in some measure, as an intellectual-political exercise. His radio pieces included lectures, children's programs, radio-plays, didactic dramatizations, and interviews covering a wide range of topics-including pieces like "Witch Trials," "The Mississippi Flood of 1927," and "The Bootleggers" for Youth Radio-Hour programming offered by Frankfurt and Berlin radio stations. Benjamin delivered "True Stories about Dogs," presented here in translation, around the mid-point of a period of almost feverish engagement. Between August 1929 and spring 1932, he wrote and read aloud over thirty children's radio programs. 1 Shortly before broadcasting "True Stories about Dogs" in Berlin, for instance, Benjamin was in Frankfurt delivering a piece for children on "Bands of Robbers in Old Germany"; over the next month, he did four more children's shows in Berlin. And then he was back in Frankfurt, delivering a lecture for adults (now lost) on "Graphology, Old and New" and broadcasting a children's program on "Kaspar Hauser, a Famous Prisoner" for the second time. So it went.
Book Chapters by Ira Allen
Rhetoric and Guns, 2022
When I mention my shotgun, some people nod knowingly and say, “Good home defense gun.” And I expl... more When I mention my shotgun, some people nod knowingly and say, “Good home defense gun.” And I explain, “No, not exactly,” or “Really, no, not at all.” I keep it locked up, unloaded, inaccessible. If somebody wants to break into my home while I’m there, I have a baseball bat. If they only want my stuff, well, that’s not worth killing or dying for. My gun’s not a defensive gun. It’s not a gun for the present, though I do shoot clay pigeons to keep in practice and because it’s fun. My gun isn’t for shooting people, at least in these times. (For shooting people in other times? Maybe; one hopes not; maybe.) This is an end-of-one-world gun, and it is nice to think that the circumstances that would make owning such a gun rational will never arrive. (It is very white to think they are not already here, but also very white to ward them off by collecting and displaying guns like talismans.) My non-defensive gun is, in short, a response to climate change.
Representations of Political Resistance and Emancipation in Science Fiction, 2020
How can political theorists and political philosophers take up questions of origins, possibility,... more How can political theorists and political philosophers take up questions of origins, possibility, and impossibility in an age of disaster, when the surest thing we can say about the future is that it will come only after the devastation of the present? How can contemporary political theory connect questions of origin and foundation with a political future whose likeliest past will be the undoing of the present order? Or, to put the question another way, what can we do to uncover and foster what Franco Berardi terms futurability, "layer[ s] of possibility that may or may not develop into actuality" (Futurability, Verso, 2017: 3), for the future that will arrive on the heels of disaster? For Berardi, precisely because "the future is not prescribed"--even ages of catastrophe have no certain, monolithic outcome--"our task consists in distinguishing the layers of futurability that lie in the texture of the present reality and in the present consciousness" (17). If our world is swept up in catastrophe, and headed for far more, how do we understand relations between political possibility and impossibility within and after the unfoldings-to-come of our disaster? What relations, woven into the texture of the present, constitute our layers of futurability? How, indeed, are we already thinking such relations?
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Books and Special Issues by Ira Allen
Journal Articles by Ira Allen
Book Chapters by Ira Allen
Student: In suggesting that the old men and women of the future will transmit a new tradition concerning the relations between life and death, change and tradition, and history and nature, you observe that "what is obscure, but also promising, in ecology is to invent a non-religious question of death." In general, you argue forcefully for the necessity of a new non-religious thinking of death in dialectical opposition to life. This is where I think I must disagree. To begin with, I do not think that the concepts of death and life make an appropriate dialectical pairing. At the level of content, they are not sufficiently dialectical. That is, we can synthesize the data of biology, and so on, with the experience of being in order to say something about the content of life from two opposing positions; but the experience of being can tell us nothing about our own death with regard to its possibility for bringing together opposing modes of knowledge. Death is a half empty concept, allowing only an external objective description and not also an internal or phenomenological one. Our extrapolations from our own experiences of others dying can tell us nothing at all about the experience of dying as such. In short, life is a dialectical concept in itself, while death is not. Moreover, in order to think about death dialectically--that is, from within and without, both subjectively and objectively--it is necessary to speculate about the experiential content of death as a concept. Such speculation is more or less religious by definition. Indeed, I mean to say that one can not invent a non-religious question of death because the questioning of death is the fundamental mode of religiosity.