Papers by Justin Eckstein
The Rhetoric of Food, 2012
Argumentation and Advocacy
Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics, 2014
Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2018
This article asks if soundscapes are reasonable by inquiring if they can be designed to enhance t... more This article asks if soundscapes are reasonable by inquiring if they can be designed to enhance the capacity for reasoned judgment. Using a normative pragmatic approach to argumentation theory, I demonstrate that soundscapes can be strategically designed to amplify or attenuate obligations, increase or weaken conviction, and create or mask argumentative context. I use the paradigm case of the 2012 casserole protests in Quebec to identify how arguers can use soundscapes to compel a response, increase the desire for advocacy, and create a public context. This expands the multimodal argumentation literature to incorporate sound. This article also intervenes into sound studies by supplying critical norms of reasonableness to assess soundscapes.
Informal Logic, 2018
This essay notes the tendency to reduce sound to a cause of something else. Such a position const... more This essay notes the tendency to reduce sound to a cause of something else. Such a position constrains theory construction to only cause and effect schemes. I argue that we should expand our understanding of sound to include what I term sound figures, which acknowledge that sounds can represent the world. I conclude by offering an understanding of sound fig-ures tied to their resonance.
Argumentation and Advocacy, 2017
ABSTRACT Sound can be an argument. To make this claim, this essay eschews traditional formalist d... more ABSTRACT Sound can be an argument. To make this claim, this essay eschews traditional formalist definitions of argument in favor of Wayne Brockriede's perspectivism. I focus on how sound satisfies the three conditions of argumentation: inference, choice, and common value framework. Then, I outline three unique features of sound argument: it is embodied, immediate, and immersive. These unique features beget a style of reasoning that provokes visceral memories, conveys urgency, and attunes arguers. I also theorize three new criteria for evaluating sound reasonableness: force, velocity, and masking. Sound arguments may exert too much or too little force, occur at too quick or slow of a velocity, or may mask another's position. If a sound argument violates any or all three of these conditions, then it is no longer considered an argument.
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2017
Argumentation, 2016
How might argumentation scholars approach sound? Using the analytics afforded by strategic maneuv... more How might argumentation scholars approach sound? Using the analytics afforded by strategic maneuvering, this essay identifies three unique features of sonic presentational devices: they are immersive, immediate and embodied. Although these features offer arguers presentational resource, they also pose new problems to the reasonable resolution of disagreement: immersion hazards overlap (mask), immediacy risks rate of delivery beyond reflection (velocity), and materiality can coerce listeners (force). To theorize strategic use of sound, I reconstruct and analyze a popular Radiolab segment “The Unconscious Toscanini of the Brain.” I find Radiolab uses three different sonic figures: (1) synchronicity, or the translation of data into sound to foreground temporal relations; (2) musical stings, an auditory invocation of embodied memory and (3) the wave, a sonic strategy to arouse and narrow attention. I conclude that Radiolab’s use of sound is reasonable because it extends the critical discussion.
Argumentation and Advocacy, Jun 22, 2011
The Climate Change Controversy: A Technical Debate in the Public Sphere. By William Mosley-Jensen... more The Climate Change Controversy: A Technical Debate in the Public Sphere. By William Mosley-Jensen. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr Muller GmbH & Co. KG, 2011. pp. 100. The Climate Change Controversy is an insightful investigation into the politics surrounding climate change policy. Mosley-Jensen locates the climate change controversy between "two heterogeneous camps that have organized in support or opposition to the principle document on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report": assenters who agree with the report and dissenters who oppose the IPCC's findings (p. 8). Despite this divide, Mosley-Jensen provides ample evidence suggesting a scientific consensus for anthropogenic causes of climate change (p. 43). Mosley-Jensen's inquiry seeks to elucidate how a consensus in the technical sphere becomes a public controversy. "What is interesting about the case of climate change," Mosley-Jensen writes, "is that the controversy has promulgated in exactly the opposite direction, agreement has been reached in science but the dissenters have taken their case before the public post hoc" (p. 15). Mosley-Jensen explores a number of the dissenter's tactics, but finds that their common goal is to produce enough uncertainty to perpetuate deliberation and extend the controversy, thwarting any sort of policy action. The dissenters frustrate calls for policy reform by carefully cultivating a scientific ethos. Shedding insight into the nature of controversy and the relationship between science and the public sphere, The Climate Change Controversy represents a useful addition to argumentation theory because it indexes the various rhetorical and argumentative strategies invoked to perpetuate controversy. Further, Mosley-Jensen extends the scholarly conversation surrounding controversy by theorizing the way that controversy can be used strategically to achieve certain political ends. Following his first chapter's reflection on previous scholarship (including the work of G. Thomas Goodnight, Edward Panetta, and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca) about argumentation and controversy, Mosley-Jensen's second chapter seeks to contextualize and explicate how climate change functions as a controversy. Mosley-Jensen contends that George W. Bush's administration deliberately attempted to muddle and problematize climate change science. Citing the passage of the Data Quality Act (p. 28), appointment of questionable scientists (p. 28), and silencing of James Hansen (head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies) (pp. 28-29), Mosley-Jensen argues that the Bush administration sought "to express a greater level of uncertainty than was supported by the scientists preparing the documents" (p. 28). As a result of the Bush administration's climate policies, A Gore decided to spread his message, initially through lecture and then through his film An Inconvenient Truth. Attending to the specifics of Gore's argumentative style, Mosley-Jensen directs the reader's attention to Gore's use of film and narrative to adduce his position. He comments that Gore's use of film represents a novel form of environmental argumentation that helped push the controversy into the public sphere. This chapter also examines Glenn Beck's response, Exposed." A Climate of Fear, as an exemplar of the dissenters' response. In this section, Mosley-Jensen begins to outline the macro argument of his project: dissenters are able to enact a parasitic argumentative strategy that adorns their position with the "trappings of science so that they may gain access to the historical legitimacy that is accorded to the scientific community" (p. 9). As Mosely-Jensen will develop throughout his book, the dissenters' attempt to appear scientific does more than grant their arguments equal credibility, it functions to confuse the public and prolong the controversy. These observations are further augmented in the next chapter, where Mosley-Jensen explicates the public's perception of science as monolithic. …
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2015
In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic spac... more In her excellent book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly theorizes the classroom as a protopublic space, a space in which students may “engage in the praxis of rhetoric, an art whose telos is krisis, or judgment.” In other words, the purpose of rhetoric is to critique and to judge, and a protopublic space creates a dynamic laboratory in which students engage in this sort of meaning-making. We argue in this essay that the same can be said of the meal—it offers a space where “private people can come together in public” to “manifest a public-oriented subjectivity, that is, a self that is more or less able to turn private reactions” about a dish, a cultural tradition, a dinner party, the source of the food on the table and so on, into “discourses that address some shared concerns.” As Alice Waters articulates, “eating is a political act, but in the way the ancient Greeks used the word “political”—not just having to do with voting in an election, but to mean “of, or pertaining to, all our interactions with other people.” Seeing eating as political and the meal/table as a protopublic space invites reflection on the epistemic contours of food culture—how do we come to “know” food culture, how are our politics shaped by the meal, and how can experts like chef intellectuals guide our understanding toward a more productive politics of food and food culture? Cooking is a “technique of relation,” or a bringing together, that transduces disparate ingredients, methods, instruments, customs, and people together into an ephemeral event, the meal. From this perspective, the meal is less a noun than a verb, an active becoming, an occasion, circumscribed to a specific time and place. There is nothing intrinsic about pork shoulder, liquid, heat, knives, and spices that create a meal. It is only once these things enter relation—as cooking—that it becomes something bigger than the sum total of its parts. This event not only involves the transformation of raw food into a cooked dish but also brings people together at a
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2015
How we eat—the origin and handling of ingredients; the modes of production and distribution invol... more How we eat—the origin and handling of ingredients; the modes of production and distribution involved; the social contexts of consumption; and the invention and processing applied to the end product—is rhetorical. From discourses of nutrition to celebrity chefs and DIY cooking, from cultural rituals and identity expressions to ongoing debates over terms like “local” and “organic” and “natural,” food mediates and structures our cultural habitudes, social-economic conditions, and political landscapes. Foodways is where history and culture meet through networks of production, distribution, and consumption. Foodways stresses the interconnected nature of what it means to dine, cook, share a table, pop in at a grocery store, patronize a local farmers’ market, go vegan, boycott a mega-conglomerate, reside in a food desert, read labels, vote this way versus that, and so on. Rhetoric occupies a salient, albeit largely implicit, place in the scholarly discourse on food. Food is vernacular, residing in the common choices that make up everyday life. Food is enticing, inventing culinary tourism, celebratory gatherings, and formal meetings. Food communicates values, history, politics, demography, regionality, and culture. The insightful first skit in the hit show Portlandia, for example, which shows two Portland hipsters’ four-year-quest to ensure that one single free-range, organic chicken on a local menu was raised humanely, may seem over the top, but it demarcates important rhetorical ground: the cultural space where ordinary consumption merges with citizenship’s moral valence. The skit lampoons the extent to which eating specifically and consumption more generally increasingly become the terrain of political engagement. Now, more than ever, the issue of “choice” is fraught with historical consequence and thus ethical reflexivity. Now, more than ever, our choices surrounding what and how/much we eat are vexed by an overwhelming contradiction: on the one hand, our habits of consumption come with the promise of
Oral History Review, 2012
Western Journal of Communication, 2016
In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre President Barack Obama and Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice ... more In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre President Barack Obama and Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, engaged in a critical discussion on the future of gun reform. Obama started by assuming that guns are the cause of violence, thus advocating for more gun control. LaPierre argued for more guns to stop violence, assuming that guns are passive instruments without agency. Yet, despite the public outcry for action, the gun debate continues unabated. Using strategic maneuvering as an analytic framework, we assess both parties’ “reasonableness” in the public discussion and uncover the moves that preclude resolution. Neither Obama nor LaPierre was reasonable because they ignored the other’s starting point. We propose cross arguing, or arguing from an interlocutor’s starting point, as a method to move this and other intractable debates forward.
Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, 2015
British Parliamentary (BP) debate or Worlds is a competitive debate format whose roots have a lon... more British Parliamentary (BP) debate or Worlds is a competitive debate format whose roots have a long fascinating history. A. Craig Baird (1923) was the first to report on the format to the nascent American professional debating community in the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking, most notably pointing out that British debate had no judges and no decision. For Baird, BP was a novel form of public debateless interested in finding a winner or loser and more interested in the demonstration of argumentative skill. BP's current iteration is now a more familiar competitive activity: teams of two prepare a case for or against a motion in 15 minutes. Once preparation time expires, four teams divided between a government and opposing benches (opening government (OG), closing government (CG), opening opposition (OO), and closing opposition(CO)) take turns giving 7-minute speeches advocating or opposing the motion. Then a panel of judges ranks the teams 1 st through 4 th , giving the best team the 1. In contrast to other formats, where each judge's vote counts independently, BP favors consensus-the judges must agree on the ranking. The international championship tournament for this event is called the World Universities Debating Championship (WUDC). The WUDC and contemporary BP are so closely wed together that they are often used
Networking Argument, 2019
Communication and the Public, 2020
Wounds materialize in the wake of the event, when rhetoric inadequately indexes what is present i... more Wounds materialize in the wake of the event, when rhetoric inadequately indexes what is present in a situation. Such a position bypasses ethics from the transcendental ought or the purely descriptive is to an ethics grounded in an immanent occurrence. To give an example of this kind of rhetorical ethics, I turn to an example of a recent wound, the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the pathology of gun violence has created a wound that shattered our rhetorical sensorium. In the immediate aftermath, Emma Gonzales, a student and survivor of the Parkland shooting, seized upon this perspective on the wound to forge a new figure, the Parkland Kid, and with it new lines of argument. I argue her capacity to turn a wounding into a new subject illustrates a new rhetorical ethics that is inclusive; she became a subject of the shooting, the new Parkland Kid, that anyone is welcome to join. My contribution departs from the wound as a damaged attachment for its understanding...
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Papers by Justin Eckstein