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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...

In this chapter, as a means to assess the ongoing, complex, and intertwined histories of communication and security, I examine securitizing speech acts concerning weapons. I argue that speech acts that grant, restrict, and prohibit the possession of weapons enact a type of transformative access that alters reality for particular populations by determining who may legally and knowledgeably possess guns, and thereby creates both security and insecurity, or in/security, for particular populations. A historical series of reinterpretations of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment by the U.S. Supreme Court and state gun-control laws exemplify how granting legal access to guns has helped to create in/security, for instance for the political struggles of African Americans and the contemporary culture of mass shootings.

This paper examines the dynamite at the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing trial and in the courtroom address of accused bomb conspirator August Spies. The analysis focuses on the crucial object of the Haymarket events—the dynamite bomb—as much as it focuses on Spies's words. I argue that the material presence of dynamite interacted with polysemy and paradox when Spies preached dynamite. Spies delved into the polysemy of the term dynamite by drawing attention to the word's multiple meanings, and he constructed turnaround arguments warranted by dynamite to reverse the accusation of conspiring to commit violence back onto the state.

Courses: Rhetoric Studies, Discourse Studies, Persuasive Writing, Argumentation, Rhetoric of Social MovementsObjectives: (1) This semester-long project requires each student to write one entry that will be compiled with their classmates' entries into an argumentative dictionary and published as an eBook. By “argumentative dictionary,” I mean a book that defines terms, and argues about how they rhetorically function. (2) By writing argumentative dictionary entries that include definitions, historical contextualization, and mini rhetorical analyses, students will learn the fundamentals of rhetorical studies, including the rhetoric of definitions, persuasive writing, argumentation, rhetorical criticism, and discourse analysis, as well as ePublishing. (3) Learning how to write for a public, open-access audience is emphasized.

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.