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This essay examines the commonplace argument that particular weapons have the power to end war forever. I argue that the basic form of the durable memetic phrasal pattern that emerges from the commonplace’s many iterations is Weapon X makes war impossible. I call this meme the perpetual peace weapons snowclone. Snowclones are formulaic communication patterns that enable users to swap out words, phrases, or images for one another without breaking the original pattern. To understand how and why the perpetual peace weapons snowclone remains cogent for weapons advocacy, I connect Erasmus’s concept of copia to the contemporary concept of snowclones. Taken together, collective copia and snowclones demonstrate how simultaneous linguistic flexibility and rigidity help memes and other rhetorical commonplaces to replicate. I then trace the perpetual peace weapons snowclone’s replication with a historical survey of the oft-repeated commonplace through the development of the atomic bomb, at which point the pe...

This article examines the rhetorical transformation of Malthus’s concept of the “redundant population” into what Marx and Engels relabeled the “surplus population” and the “industrial reserve army.” Three rhetorical functions can be observed in this transformation. First, the altered terminology served as a rhetorical marker for a place of theoretical disagreement about economic causality. “Rhetorical marker” refers to a subtle terminological modification that has manifold ramifications for meaning and understanding. Second, this reconstitution of the masses reinforced opposed assumptions about the relationship of people to technology, and third, it provided a type of embodied material proof for Marx’s and Engels’s revolutionary politics.

This paper examines “sonic torture,” which refers to using sound reproduction technologies to blast prisoners with a continuous noise at peak loudness in order to coerce cooperation. I propose two ways to understand sonic torture's deafening noise—by examining how its technological embodiment coerces prisoner behavior, and by analyzing how people re-amplify the sound's embodiment when they condemn or advocate torture in the greater “soundscape.” I first argue that the concept of “amplification,” in both its electronic and rhetorical senses, links the capacity of noise to alter moods and behaviors to how people communicate about sound. Second, I analyze victims’ testimony to show how they amplified their pain when describing the indescribable brutality of sonic torture. Third, I examine how torture advocates used amplification to justify sonic torture as a form of “torture lite,” dictating what prisoners will or will not hear.