Thomas Nail, a Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution, Being and Motion, and Matter and Motion, discusses his research on the philosophy of movement from antiquity to the present. Here, we take the topics of “matter and motion” and “being and motion” as orienting points but also cut across Nail’s work in ways that intersect with thinking about writing and the teaching of writing.

Michelle M. Wright, Emory College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, discusses her research on literary, cultural, philosophical, and political discourses on Blackness and Black identity in the Anglophone, Francophone, and Germanophone African Diaspora, from the 18th to 21st centuries. She published her first book, Becoming Black: Creating an Identity in the African Diaspora, with Duke UP in 2004, and her second book, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, with UMN Press in 2015. Her current project, Feeling Europe: Black and African Diasporas in the Heart of Empire, looks at how space, place, and affect destabilize yet expand notions of home and racial belonging. She is also co-editor of several books. Here, we discuss “freedom, agency, and refuge” across a broad swath of her past and current work.

Ellen Wayland-Smith, Professor (Teaching) of Writing at USC, author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (Picador, 2016) and The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (University of Chicago Press, 2020), discusses her latest book, The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self (Milkweed Editions, 2024). Here, she discusses two chapters, “Object Permanence” and “Quartz Contentment,” followed by a substantive discussion that ranges across topics of the book and to issues related to writing and rhetoric. These issues touch on personal loss and grief, the experience of time and scale, the use of scientific concepts in humanities work, and turtles.

Our Writing Program colleagues discuss AI, ChatGPT, and emerging Large Language Models, including their potentials and pitfalls for the doing and teaching writing and rhetoric, as well as the relation to writing program administration. This episode, like Episode 8 last year with Jonathan Alexander, is part of the 4th annual “The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival,” hosted by Charles Wood. This year’s theme is “AI: Applications and Trajectories.” Here, we hope to illuminate through an extensive discussion the uncertain future in regard to powerful technologies that will likely reshape writing practice for writers, teachers, and students alike.

Margherita Long, Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches courses on Japanese feminism, the modern novel, war narratives and peace activism, and eco-semiotics, discusses the introduction to her manuscript Care, Kin, Crackup: Fukushima and the Intrusion of Gaia. In 2018 she won a five-year grant from the Japan Foundation for a faculty line and a series of international symposia on Japanese Environmental Humanities at UCI. Her interest in the ethics of material indebtedness dates from her first book on psychoanalysis and the maternal-feminine in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (Stanford University Press, 2009). Here, she discusses the tension between a politics of resistance and a literature of affirmation in the post-Fukushima work of feminist writer Tsushima Yuko (1947-2016).

Nathan Stormer, Professor of Rhetoric in the Communication and Journalism Department at the University of Maine, discusses with us his article “Rhetoric by Accident,” published in Volume 53.4 of the journal Philosophy & Rhetoric. Here, he articulates a view of accidents that shape rhetorical work, but which themselves are not purposive, motive-driven, directed, or ethical. As extra-moral events and material and/or discursive happenings, accidents are indifferent to purpose. Staying with accidents and our material openness and vulnerability to them, Stormer sustains a space in which to think about accidents, and the accidental, apart from their agential and ethical usefulness, thereby disentangling the accidental from core rhetorical formulations that orbit intentionality on the human stage. In doing so, Stormer illuminates the power of accidents beyond our responses to and appropriations of them.

Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, director of the Humanities Core Program, and author, co-author, or co-editor of 22 books, discusses his new book, Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). In this episode we discuss both the introduction to his book and the broader project. As part of the 3rd annual “The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival,” this episode speaks to the Carnival theme, “Rhetoric: Places and Spaces In and Beyond the Academy.” Challenging both modes of writing and desire, Alexander conceives of writing itself as desire in the form of an ongoing opening out onto possibilities. In this way, writing, especially as figured in rhetoric and composition pedagogy, transcends narrower argumentative and persuasive modes. Furthermore, desire is not conceived of as a lack to be fulfilled, or as an essentialized need to be unleashed, but rather as a fundamental openness, inclusive of critical reflection that makes different conditions and futures possible. Exploring the histories and modalities of writing and desire, we discuss both as unending processes of thinking and being otherwise in and beyond the classroom.

Susan Jarratt, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, shares her rich experience as a writer and scholar, and also as an editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, the official journal of the "Rhetoric Society of America," which will be of great value to those of us working in rhetoric, composition, and related fields, whether in returning to unfinished projects or in taking up new ones. Here, she discusses several of her major projects, including Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991) and Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019), which inform what she imparts to scholars tackling difficult projects that often involve expansive scholarly terrains and traditions. Her practical advice will help writers navigate the limits of time and space, but also some of the psychological struggles, including the urge toward perfectionism, that can have the effect of stopping writing before it begins, or else before it is finished, thereby giving scholars tools to work through the trouble spots of their craft.

Daniel M. Gross, Professor of English at UC Irvine, Campus Writing and Communication Coordinator, and Director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication, joins us to discuss his newest book, Being-Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening (University of California Press, 2020). If rhetoric is the art of speaking, who is listening? In Being-Moved, Daniel provides an answer, showing when and where the art of speaking parted ways with the art of listening—and what happens when they intersect once again. Much in the history of rhetoric must be rethought along the way. And much of this rethinking pivots around Martin Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric where his famous topic, Being, gives way to being-moved. The results, Gross goes on to show, are profound. Listening to the gods, listening to the world around us, and even listening to one another in the classroom—all of these experiences become different when rhetoric is reoriented from the voice to the ear.

In this episode Lynne Huffer, Professor of WGSS at Emory University, discusses Foucault’s Strange Eros (2020), the third book in her trilogy on Foucault. Reading Foucault as a Sapphic poet who makes “cuts” in the archive, Huffer argues that in the West “eros is to sexuality as unreason is to madness,” or, in other words, that eros forms an elusive background out of which sciences such as sexology extract objects of sexual knowledge which they can then presume to study. Eros, as that which is “other to the West although also at the origin of the West,” is thus also that which is “strange.” Responding to our invitation to consider overlaps and divergences between Foucault’s eros and Deleuzian desire, Huffer considers potential equivalences between these two concepts as well as questions the motivation for equating, and thus eliding, their differences. In this process, she also offers a response to Deleuze’s own articulation of the gap between his concept of desire and Foucault’s notion of pleasure, as he articulated them in his 1977 letter to Foucault titled “Desire and Pleasure.”

Stuart Murray, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, shares his talk with us, “In Hearkening the Dead: A Rhetorical Disaffirmation of Biopolitics,” which he describes as follows: Foucault defines biopolitics as the differential state power “to make live and let die.” The politics of life is, ironically, a sacrificial economy that produces death as its silent compact, its law. Those we let die rarely figure in our biopolitical “affirmations.” They are tendered as line items and statistics: collateral damages, opportunity costs, daily pandemic death counts. COVID-19 is an object lesson in differential dying, affirmed by the state as much as by the anti-mask and anti-lockdown protestors. How, then, might we on the Left suspend our impulse to criticism—perhaps even despite our own pain, identity, politics—in order to rethink resistance outside of biopolitical logics, and without further implicating ourselves in them or reaffirming them unwittingly? In other words, how might we critically disaffirm biopolitics, disclaim its claim over us, without quite capitulating to and recirculating its tropes?

In this episode we discuss Brian Massumi’s “Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn’t,” the introduction to his book Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2005). Among the (un)timely topics we explore are the nature of embodied movement as it affects and effects our subject positions, and how those positions can seem “gridlocked” when we retroactively pinpoint a “self” at the intersection of race, gender, and class identities. How do we acknowledge the strategic importance of such positions while not being captured by them? How can movement, affect, and sensation bring attention to the body in productive ways? How do we avoid the “cultural freeze-frame” of an identity politics that threatens to solidify certain identity constructions? Furthermore, how might field-friendly concepts from the sciences facilitate a more comprehensive and generative sense of embodied movement vis-à-vis becoming? In that effort, how do we “poach” scientific concepts without reducing them to mere metaphors? Finally, and perhaps most importantly for our podcast, how does Massumi’s experimental writing perform the very trans-disciplinary and radical empiricist philosophy that he encourages, thereby bringing movement, affect, and sensation to the writing process itself?

Vorris Nunley, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, discusses with USC and UCI faculty a talk entitled “Re-Doing Rhetoric: Incivility, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and the Limits of Persuasion (?).” Here, he discusses AOC’s response to Representative Ted Yoho referring to her as a b***h to think with and through trope, incivility, affect, and the neoliberal composition classroom. In conceiving of rhetoric beyond persuasion, he examines the ways in which tropes, in circulating preconsciously in cultures throughout various realms, use us just as much as we use them. In this way, tropes are not simple figures or metaphors individual rhetors deploy toward specific persuasive ends. Rather, that tropes permeate social fabrics as potentialities in the domains of (non)discursive rhetoric means that we “choose” tropes for a particular reason only insofar as they have already affected, shaped, and influenced us in definite ways. Vorris closes on the uses of his work in the multimodal composition classroom and on what he terms a “pedagogy of discomfort,” one which unsettles students in the pursuit of transformative education.

Abraham Weil, Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach, discusses with USC faculty his article "Trans*versal Animacies and the Mattering of Black Trans* Political Life," published in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (Volume 22, 2017), and its applications for the teaching of writing and rhetoric. Here he explores trans*versal connections between transness, blackness, and the animal through Félix Guattari's notion of "transversal" in connection with #blacklivesmatter and #blacktranslivematter movements that draw on critical animal studies to reveal ways that species hierarchies are always present in processes of racialization that allow some lives to matter more, or less, than others. How can such realizations become the work of specific approaches to writing and writing assignments? Join us for this exploration and more.