Rhetorical Hegemony: Transactional Ontologies and the

Reinvention of Material Infrastructures

Catherine Chaput, Joshua S. Hanan

Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 52, Number 4, 2019, pp. 339-365 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/742473

[ Access provided at 8 Jul 2021 05:35 GMT from CNRS BiblioSHS ]

 Rhetorical Hegemony: Transactional
Ontologies and the Reinvention
of Material Infrastructures

Catherine Chaput and Joshua S. Hanan

a b s t r ac t

This article proposes rhetorical hegemony as a new materialist intervention into

the production of alternative political economic futures. It problematizes contem-
porary theories of hegemony that assert affect as beyond rhetorical engagement,
suggesting that these accounts fail to produce viable political economic alternatives
because they use, but do not reinvent, the prevailing affective relations. Turning
to and extending Foucault’s middle and late work to forge a different model, the
article discusses rhetorical hegemony as the entangled relationships between mate-
riality and power. In conversation with other contemporary theories, it argues for
a practice of rhetorical hegemony that materially recapacitates energetic potential
and, consequently, the milieu. The article ends by outlining the rhetorical, political,
and intellectual implications of this shift.

keywords: hegemony, post-hegemony, new materialism, Foucault, geontology

Politics [is] identical with the reinvention of infrastructures for

managing the unevenness, ambivalence, violence, and ordinary con-
tingency of contemporary existence.
—Lauren Berlant, “The Commons”

The political does not reproduce or resist but creates itself anew through
movements, connections, and discourses that repattern the dominant
rhythms of a world in perpetual unrest. Consequently, meaningful political
change hinges less on collectivities that engage or resist political economic

doi: 10.5325/philrhet.52.4.0339
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 52, No. 4, 2019
Copyright © 2019 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
 catherine chaput and joshua s. hanan

structures and more on the invention of new modes of existence that, in turn,
redirect material flows or what Lauren Berlant (2016) dubs infrastructures. As
the invisible circuitry that organizes “the dynamics of attraction and aver-
sion,” infrastructure names the orienting processes by which potential moves
throughout a milieu, contours the material within it, and synchronizes its
possibilities within a prevailing order (399). Like the interstate highway sys-
tem, infrastructure directs traffic, funnels movement along particular routes,
restricts access to those routes, and determines convergence points as well
as opportunities for divergence. Moreover, it requires ongoing maintenance
and renovation. Admittedly, this is an imperfect metaphor as infrastructures
discard rigid diagrams of power (the base/superstructure, the global/local, or
the network society) in favor of constantly metabolizing, and so more elu-
sive, power formations that presume what Karen Barad (2007) calls intra-
active materiality. Forged through energetic associations among emergent
and entangled materiality, the infrastructures that gently nudge life along
predictable pathways are in constant motion and thus remain open to stra-
tegic change. Given the power of such dynamics, we argue that a rhetorical
approach to infrastructure—one that insinuates itself into the orienting forces
produced through the flux of conscious and nonconscious behaviors—injects
new possibilities into hegemonic theory and its struggle to invent alternatives
to capitalism’s influence on humans and the ecosystems with which they are
always entangled.
Inasmuch as they already view politics as beholden to a host of uncon-
scious factors, scholars of hegemony who explore the influence of affect on
political, economic, and cultural practices do not need to be convinced of the
importance of something like infrastructures. Ernesto Laclau, for instance,
offers a populist theory wherein political change develops through concrete,
though unpredictable, antagonisms that precipitate opposition, produce
new political identities, and cohere under an historically contingent signi-
fier. Underwriting this process is an account of symbolic identification that
derives its movement from the affective pull toward an alluring, but always
unreachable, partial object of desire. Theorists of hegemony, however, do
not agree on how affect functions in relationship to political economic and
rhetorical processes, and so Laclau’s framework has invited various criti-
cisms. Perhaps most notable, Slavoj Žižek (2014) stresses that capitalism
acts as a “mathem” (33), or algorithm, that manages the process of political
formation found in Laclau’s theory of hegemony. Capitalism’s algorithmic
code incorporates and adjusts to new affective resonances and their politi-
cal manifestations as it conserves itself against contradictions, antagonisms,

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and crises. The desire for a better political object, he concludes, is no more
exterior to capitalism than are its other productive  mechanisms, making
identification an unreliable space from which to forge political economic
change. Because infrastructure locates productive political practice at the
intersection of unconscious persuasion, embodied movement, and worldly
engagement, it has the potential to reanimate concerns about how to politi-
cally mobilize affect that have stalled in this standoff between Laclau and
Žižek.1
In fact, infrastructures offer political traction for both theories of hege-
mony and post-hegemony. Jon Beasley-Murray (2003), a key proponent
of post-hegemony, characterizes it as the “shift from a rhetoric of per-
suasion to a regime in which what counts are the effects produced and
orchestrated by affective investments” (120). Whether called refusal (Tronti
1980/2007), exodus (Hardt and Negri 2004), escape (Virno 2004), or sepa-
ration (Beasley-Murray 2010), post-hegemony privileges the nonsignifying
politics of affect that circulate separately from capitalism’s appropriation.
Engaging affective potential before it becomes moored to hegemonic struc-
tures, post-hegemonic scholars endorse political action beyond traditional
spaces of public deliberation and view affective power as capable of averting
capitalism’s intensive reach as long as it emerges from such nonprivileged
locations. Although this approach closely approximates an infrastructural
orientation, it tethers political hope to preexisting infrastructures and
lacks application within the myriad hegemonic territories of contempo-
rary capitalism. Presuming that the multitudinous affective investments of
marginalized collectivities possess acceptable infrastructures for orienting
agentive capacities, such theorists have little to say about how to reinvent
infrastructures.
New materialist rhetoricians, who have extended and diversified
the scope of rhetoric, similarly situate political possibilities within the
affordances already built into the intra-relational spaces of materiality.
Rhetoricians of ecology gravitate toward a flat ontology wherein rhetori-
cal practices take cues from complex environments swarming with diverse
agentive potentialities. That process rests on the assumption that all matter
within an ecology likewise teems with possibilities, and so others view rhet-
oric as the affective potential moving through materiality to compel specific
orientations. Diane Davis, for example, defines such rhetoricity as radical
affectability, positions it prior to symbolicity, and extends it to a range of
human and nonhuman actants. As she (2017a) sees it, “This primary rhe-
torical imperative is not a choice you get to make but your inescapable

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condition for being and for surviving, a predicament you share with every
other being who gives and responds to signals” (276). Whether viewed from
the diverse ecological perspectives of Jenny Rice, Nathan Stormer, and
Bridie McGreavy, from the deep phenomenology approach that character-
izes Thomas Rickert’s ambient rhetoric, or from the deconstructive angle
pursued by Diane Davis, rhetoric’s new materialist turn encourages dif-
ferent forms of engagement with existing infrastructures. Yet, in step with
their post-hegemonic counterparts, they do so without sufficient discussion
of how rhetoric might develop alternative relational pathways of material
intra-activity. Rhetoricians interested in political change must account for
the ability of nonhuman and nonliving materiality to constrain, influence,
and respond to the political economic and ecological reality of contempo-
rary existence, but they must also provide possibilities for reinventing these
relationships. Such an approach includes attunement to, reflection on, and
intervention into how human bodies function as part of a larger mate-
rial complex—a political practice Alexander Weheliye (2014) names habeas
viscus or “the reinvention of the human at the juncture of the cultural and
biological feedback loop” (25). Critically minded theorists, that is, have an
obligation to engage fleshly bodies as well as material ecologies in the rhe-
torical production of infrastructures.
To this end, we offer rhetorical hegemony as a politics that foregrounds
the mobilization of affect’s always uneven environmental, social, and men-
tal materializations toward the creation of new infrastructural patterns.
Aiming rhetorical practices at the production of infrastructures allows new
materialist insights to bear on the imperatives of contemporary life without
depriving embodied subjects of the ability to reflectively engage hegemonic
power, if only indirectly and indeterminately. This practice recasts human
subjects as “nonsovereign relationality” (Berlant 2016, 394). As physical
bodies synched to the rhythms of other materiality, subjects neither pre-
cede material relations nor emerge from those relations; they are neither
autonomous beings nor mere conduits for affective power. Instead, they are
relationally capacitated to reinvent the prevailing infrastructures—moving
and using their bodily materiality to channel energetic flows toward unex-
pected and unfamiliar patterns. With an eye on this uncertain agentive
potential, rhetorical hegemony, as we define it, forges, changes, and secures
infrastructures through repeated engagement with the always in process
entanglement of humans and their material worlds.2 This conception of
rhetorical hegemony adds a productive element to otherwise rich modes
of hegemonic analyses and retains the self-reflective fleshly subject as one

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expression of the milieu’s multimodal capacity to bend infrastructure and

reorganize material relationships.
Our argument unfolds along three sections. The first problematizes
contemporary theories of hegemony that assert affect as the untamable
god-power in the struggle against capitalism. Surveying Laclau’s populist
hegemony and Beasley-Murray’s post-hegemony, we suggest that these
accounts fail to produce viable political economic alternatives because they
use, but do not reinvent, the prevailing relationships between rhetoricity
and the milieu. In the second section, we turn to Michel Foucault to forge a
different rhetorical model. We discuss transactional reality as the rhetorical
process of disciplining a milieu through the indeterminacy of its elements;
then, we explore biopolitics as the diffuse power that rhetorically main-
tains such an ensemble by allowing for oppositional conduct. In a third sec-
tion, we supplement our reading of Foucault with Giorgio Agamben and
Elizabeth Povinelli to discuss the rhetorical practice of materially recapaci-
tating energetic potential and, consequently, the milieu. We conclude by
indicating how this approach rethinks rhetorical agency from a materialist
perspective informed by bodily techniques, opens opportunities for rhetori-
cians to engage Foucault differently, and adds a much needed political edge
to the growing scholarship on new materialism.

Hegemony, Post-hegemony, and the Rhetorical

Limitations of Affect
The last book published during Laclau’s (2005) lifetime, On Populist
Reason, outlines a theory of democratic engagement that refines the
original theory of hegemony he developed with Chantal Mouffe (1985).
Like that earlier project, he begins with the premise that a wide vari-
ety of cultural antagonisms discursively constitute political subjectivity.
Such antagonisms join different individuals and groups through a chain
of demands that coalesce around a common, though contingent, identity.
The desire to connect with others in the process of overcoming obstacles
constructs an equivalence among the field of political demands and an
empty signifier consolidates such demands within a particular political
platform. Unlike his earlier work with Mouffe, this project emphasizes a
rhetorical theory of affective investment grounded in the work of Jacques
Lacan. Laclau conceptualizes affect as the psychological condition that
necessitates investment in a partial object—what Lacan terms the object
petit a. No matter its form, this object never satiates one’s affective desire

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because there is an unbridgeable distance between its imagined ideal and

the lived experience of the subject. The inevitable failure of the object to
match the subject’s imagination produces a continual crisis of identifica-
tion and ensures that the process of political constitution reorganizes in
perpetuity.
For Laclau, the democratic value of this constitutive political process
emerges from the failed unification between the subject and the object of
its investment. As one recognizes the mismatch between a set of policies
and one’s own imagined identity, a new chain of equivalences sets itself in
motion, producing an ever more inclusive expression of democratic pol-
itics. Laclau’s logic, in which affective investments propel individuals to
constantly seek identification within a more universal signifying shell, pre-
sumes that those underserved by a particular coalition will seek alternatives.
In other words, he rationalizes Lacanian psychology within a democratic
structure. This rationalization, however, fails to explain why individuals
remain identified with a political coalition that discursively represents their
demands, but does not produce meaningful political change.3
Christian Lundberg provides one answer to this political conundrum
by advocating for a more nuanced engagement with Lacan’s psychoanalytic
tradition. He believes Laclau moves too quickly from a structural resonance
between hegemony and jouissance to an equivalence. In Lundberg’s (2012a)
words, “If jouissance and hegemony are equivalent, one does not need
Lacan to say something that might be said more eloquently with Gramsci”
(168). Failing to distinguish the role of jouissance within his account of
hegemony, Laclau paints a rosy picture of popular democracy based on
his belief that affective desire fuels political innovation and inclusivity.
Lundberg, on the other hand, views jouissance as politically conservative. In
his reading, the subject, driven by an affective desire to be more perfectly
aligned with the object of identification, will double down in that identity
rather than seek a new identification. He exemplifies this iron grip of jouis-
sance in his readings of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and the anti-
globalization movement. Evangelical Christians, Lundberg argues, were
drawn in unprecedented numbers to Gibson’s notoriously violent depic-
tion of the crucifixion because of their affective investment as victims of
an increasingly secular state. Antiglobalization activists maintain a similar
relationship to their identity as the ethical opposition to economic oppres-
sion. In both cases, individuals become psychologically addicted to their
antagonistically constituted identifications and thus inevitably reinforce
the structures against which they assert their entrenched identities. Such

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individuals, he explains, are more rooted in practices of identity formation

than in the pragmatics of democratic politics.
Contra Laclau’s idealization of affectively driven and discursively con-
stituted democratic identities, Lundberg draws attention to enjoyment as
a complicating factor that funnels affective investment through an infinite
loop of identification.4 Conscious of the trap of political identification,
Lundberg (2012b) declares that the political demand functions as “a kind of
surrender” (309) to the status quo, and so he privileges analysis over politi-
cal production: “do not take discourse at face value but interrogate what is
obscured, condensed, or displaced” (2012a, 109). Without a positive mecha-
nism for moving subjects away from the kind of recalcitrant identifications
that impede political change, this option maintains its own capitulation
to the hegemonic order. Because Lacanian affect offers a choice between
repeated identity performance and the cul-de-sac of perpetual analysis—
both of which foreclose possibilities for political invention—theorists
interested in radical change often turn to Gilles Deleuze for a different ori-
entation to affect.
Deleuzian affect appears to enable greater political fecundity in its
effort to move beyond both subjectivity and interpretation. For scholars like
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, affect circulates throughout the material world
in unpredictable rhythms that cannot be captured by, or defined against, a
subject-centered discursive structure. Containing immeasurable possibili-
ties in its raw potential state, affect travels, they (1987) say, along “an alter-
nate current that disrupts signifying projects as well as subjective feelings”
(233). This version of affect moves through humans and nonhumans, the
sentient and nonsentient, as well as the organic and the inorganic to per-
meate an entire ecology. Individuals do not become subjects through itera-
tive performances of a chosen identity as much as they become lightning
rods of possibility by folding themselves into the entanglements of a given
milieu. As Deleuze (1995) asserts, affect is “a specific or collective individu-
alization relating to an event (a time of day, a river, a wind, a life . . . ). It’s
a mode of intensity, not a personal subject” (98–99). Affective intensities
circulate in and through environments, animate their diverse elements, and
configure a particular reality from the myriad anticipatory points within the
world’s decentered material complex. So conceived, affect does not inter-
sect with the rights-based subject that demands its freedom, but functions
nonanthropocentrically through what Laura Collins (2014) calls an
ungrounded “freedom in inventing the world anew” (738). Adamant that
affect fuels and orients material encounters and not political identities,

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Deleuze and Guattari (1996) declare that it has “nothing to do with rhetoric”
(177). Affect sets the terms for participation in vibrant ecologies that must
be taken up without relying on intentional discourse geared toward specific
ends.
This appreciation of affect as a nonsignifying politics informs the post-
hegemonic hypothesis pioneered by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
(2000, 2004, 2009) and explored in more detail by scholars such as Beasley-
Murray (2003, 2010), Nicholas Thoburn (2007), and Scott Lash (2007).
Beasley-Murray, for instance, illustrates the post-hegemonic project in
his studies of Latin American political struggle. Deconstructing the well-
rehearsed narratives of public deliberation, he locates politics on the terrain
of affective investments and replaces the discursively constituted political
subject with what—building on the work of Hardt and Negri—he calls
the multitude. The multitude functions as potentiality unencumbered by
the limitations and prohibitions of hegemonic structures. Sharing neither a
party platform nor a coherent value system, the multitude’s agenda is bound
up with the life-affirming affordances of a given ecology. Its politics take
shape as the multitude withdraws from the operative logics of a dominant
milieu and begins to organize itself along a different affective frequency.
Beasley-Murray’s embrace of Deleuzian affect usefully escapes the
infinite loop of subject making even as it engages in active political struggle.
However, instead of grappling with “the temporal and spatial disjunctures
and conjunctures provided by different articulations” (Greene 2009, 55) of
potentiality, his post-hegemonic model tends to approach affect from “the
jurisdiction of ethnographic locality” (Weheliye 2014, 14). In such a view,
affect functions as a uniform trait within a given community. Consider
Beasley-Murray’s treatment of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation
Front (FMNL) of El Salvador. The movement’s promise, he repeatedly
asserts, lies in its positive affective pull: testimonios from FMNL members
underscore “a happiness that evades representational logic” (2010, 146).
This deep joy stems from innocuous activities like singing and drinking
tea, but also from violent activities like killing. Although these experiences
appear materially and affectively quite different, their relationship to the
community’s positive intensity cannot be assessed as all normative crite-
ria, Beasley-Murray contends, conform to the “necroeconomics” (Montag
2005) of neoliberalism, symbolicity, and quantification. Framed through a
rigid binary between neoliberalism as the symbolic colonization of exis-
tence and resistance as an escape into the pre-representational affective
realm, such post-hegemony endorses nontraditional lines of flight without

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taking critical account of their bearings on larger environmental, social, and

mental ecologies.5 In other words, exodus becomes the sole litmus test that
affirms a group’s revolutionary status, exempts it from further interrogation,
and establishes its democratic value.
Without a place for reflective engagement, Beasley-Murray’s post-
hegemonic project converts affect into a mechanical, preordained process.
This is especially evident in how Beasley-Murray appropriates Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus to understand the unconscious movement of affect.
Habitus, he explains, “provides us with our bearings in time and space,
so that we comprehend the world as if by instinct” (2010, 198). On closer
examination, however, this sense of habitus appears less dynamically tuned
to immanent potential and more statically sutured to existing patterns of
behavior. Resistance emerges according to a clear cause and effect rela-
tionship: opposition erupts because “the old habits no longer fit the new
circumstances” (177). For instance, when the Venezuelan government raised
public transportation costs, individuals in Caracas, habituated to a differ-
ent economic structure, refused to pay the new prices. Their refusal stimu-
lated further protests, culminating in massive looting of the city’s resources.
After the dust settled, individuals adjusted to, rather than transformed, the
new habitus. In Beasley-Murray’s schema the multitude folds into mate-
rial resonances, but it does not act on those resonances in order to produce
new affective relations. We believe this limitation stems from the fact that
post-hegemonic theory borrows Deleuze and Guattari’s model of affect
that, as we said earlier, claims no intersection with rhetorical practices. To
avoid indiscriminately endorsing all uprisings, the affective potentiality at
the heart of post-hegemony must be capacitated with a greater intra-active
range, including rhetorical practices designed to coax affect toward dif-
ferent infrastructural pathways rather than simply acclimate bodies to the
affordances of prevailing patterns.
To be clear, political struggle cannot be forged from a positionality
that quarantines affect from rhetoric. Affect’s infrastructural politics oper-
ate along a different plane than the symbolic field; but, as new materialists
have demonstrated, rhetoric exceeds the symbolic. It includes both the vast
ecological terrain of existence and the animating forces surging through
such existence. As part of that material complex, bodies and their atten-
dant modes of being are ontologically implicated in governing structures
that guide, modulate, and limit rhetorical possibilities. While scholars like
Laclau and Beasley-Murray make compelling cases for theorizing affect
as part of political struggle, neither provides a productive way to mobilize

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affect’s dynamic affordances. Another possibility, one we call rhetorical

hegemony, retains the subject, as conscious and unconscious matter, in
order to wrangle with affect’s always uneven environmental, social, and
mental materializations. This model locates rhetoric’s ability to reinvent
infrastructures in the bodily practices of subjects and their entangled mate-
rial milieus. Rhetorical hegemony facilitates dynamic play between the
constitutive and the constituted as well as the ontological and the episte-
mological in an effort to adjust the material energies circulating through
the milieu and thus redraw the privileged pathways that forge its reliable
configurations. This new materialist angle on hegemony extends rhetorical
invention into the as yet untheorized space of infrastructural productions.
Foucault, whose late work explored the invention and maintenance of
capitalism as a purportedly natural political economic structure, provides an
unlikely springboard into such productive rhetorical practices. Foucault was
not interested in theorizing hegemony as the discursive work of ideological
state apparatuses, in the way Louis Althusser, his mentor, made famous, nor
was he much interested in rhetoric, a practice he approached with the same
reluctance as Deleuze and Guattari. Nevertheless, his study of how capital-
ism disperses political economic power throughout the multiple entangled
layers of materiality models a productive approach that inches us toward a
theory of rhetorical hegemony. Offering a potential corrective to the notion
of affect as an impenetrable and independent force, the next section turns to
Foucault’s work on the dynamic formation of transactional realities and the
ecological management of their myriad relationships as one way to retain
a place for rhetorical interventions within the affective theories currently
driving hegemony debates. The section rereads Foucault’s well-known the-
orization of power as a hegemonic process: disciplinary power transforms
materiality into dynamically oriented things and biopower transforms the
relationships among those things into a self-regulating ecology. Through
this differently focused lens, we demonstrate how Foucault’s genealogical
period lays the ground work for a rhetorical politics of affect intended to
produce new infrastructures and alternative modes of habituation.

Hegemony as the Management of Capitalism’s

Transactional Realities
Foucault famously distinguishes modern capitalist power from sovereign
power through his concept of governmentality. The richness of this frame-
work, which first reached the American public via a single chapter pulled

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from his 1977–78 lectures at the Collège de France, cannot be captured

sufficiently in the often-repeated shorthand: “the conduct of conduct”
(Gordon 1991, 2). As Foucault explains more fully in his annual lectures,
governmentality relies on two intersecting and cooperating forces. First,
disciplinary power infiltrates materiality through micro-orientations and,
second, biopolitical power manages the relations among that materiality to
produce the capitalist milieu. In this twofold process, one Foucault (2012)
refers to as a “mesh,” power moves below the surface, constituting relatively
discrete forms out of an always indeterminate material fabric, and through-
out the milieu, connecting, separating, and weaving the unconscious path-
ways of material existence. Engaging materiality across the milieu, this
double power evolves according to the complex metabolism of exchanges
that develop in tandem with capitalism’s fluctuating political economic cal-
culus. From our perspective, Foucault’s governmentality offers an implicit
theory of hegemony as it both solicits consent and allows for a margin of
dissent. Moreover, as we will show, his theory sets the stage for an infra-
structural account of political intervention by tethering the indeterminacy
of human and nonhuman potential to a multipronged conception of power
that literally (rather than merely discursively) circulates through materiality.
Foucault theorized disciplinary power as the worldly friction that
converts potentiality into actuality, emphasizing its productive functions
alongside its restrictive ones. Disciplinary power, he (2008) says, uses
the inherently porous boundaries between the material and the cultural
to produce “transactional realities” or phenomena that emerge “from the
interplay of relations of power” (297) but feel like they burst forth directly
from nature. Targeting individuals whose lived practices are structured pre-
emptively, disciplinarity harnesses nature in motion—nature naturing, as
Spinoza (2004) terms it, or the infrastructural, as Berlant (2016) defines
it—to ensure probable realities. It works at the micro-level to transform
the body into the subject. In Foucault’s (2006) assessment, this form of
power grafts agency onto “somatic singularity” (55). It embeds itself within
bodies, “taking actions, behaviors, habits, and words into account” (40) and
leaves its imprint as a trace that “intervene(s) beforehand, before the act
itself is possible” (51). Foucault’s theorization of disciplinary power reflects
a sensitivity to the noncognitive forces that inform a body’s capabilities. In
addition to flowing through and influencing the body in the radical pres-
ent, these forces leave a residue that adheres to and lingers in the body,
constituting subjectivity through the materiality of the flesh. Consequently,
the spontaneous behaviors of a subject disciplined into the structures of a

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given historical moment generally conform to expectations even though

that subject, acting according to its internal priming system, does nothing
more than follow purportedly innate dispositions.
This process of guiding fleshly instincts, too often reduced to the notion
of a docile body, extends itself throughout a much more pervasive sense
of embodiment that encompasses all matter (both organic and inorganic)
within a given milieu.6 As the indeterminate space out of and through
which capitalist power circulates, the milieu includes innumerable things
besides disciplined subjects. Neither an environment in which humans find
themselves nor one they craft from scratch, the milieu emerges as a macro-
level reality made up of multiple, constantly fluctuating transactional real-
ities. These realities include land and water, fauna and flora, energy and
mineral extraction, climate and industry, and a host of other elements pro-
duced through the dynamic entanglements of the natural and the artificial.
Foucault (2007b) describes the milieu as he does other transactional reali-
ties: it is “an artifice [that] functions as a nature” (22). The entire panoply
of its material elements act as disciplined things that intra-relate accord-
ing to invisible patterns and not as a consequence of their inherent status
as passive objects or active subjects. Consonant with a Spinozian account
of immanent causality (May 2009, 2015), Foucault’s discussion of discipli-
narity as a transactional reality identifies a complex set of intersections,
penetrations, and entanglements among nature and culture that belies a
clear-cut distinction between the two.
Foucault supplements disciplinary power with biopolitical power that
monitors and manipulates the intra-animated relations among the transac-
tional elements comprising the capitalist milieu. As he (2007b) characterizes
it, biopolitics manages economic relations—“complex involvements with
things like wealth, resources, and means of subsistence”—as well as cultural
relations—“customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking” (97). It further
regulates the material environment—“territory with its borders, qualities,
climate, dryness, fertility”—and the social environment—“misfortunes,
famine, epidemics, and death” (97). Biopolitics does not directly intervene
into these economic, cultural, ecological, and social practices, but acts on
the milieu to encourage particular, though fluctuating, associations among
the transactional realities that freely evolve, sustain themselves, and thrive
according to the rhythms of a political economic terrain in constant motion.
Because the transactional realities produced through disciplinary power
can never be determinant, biopolitical power intersects with and supple-
ments disciplinarity to manage the ratios between consent and nonconsent.

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To summarize, the interplay between disciplinary and biopolitical powers

organizes a nearly total, anticipatory, and unobtrusive system for mobiliz-
ing consent and managing dissent within capitalism’s perpetual flux.7
As a porous governing structure, capitalism uses disciplinary and bio-
political powers to produce itself from the concrete confluence of multiple
and differently oriented materialities emerging from a terrain that is con-
stantly monitored and adjusted. The capitalist market responds to the cur-
rents of life experience, experimentation, and difference by acting on the
milieu so as to accommodate diverse material expressions within its evolv-
ing hegemonic pathways. Foucault (1982) characterizes this responsiveness
as a generalized form of agency wherein a dynamic “structure of actions are
brought to bear upon possible actions” (220). In its aggregate, the milieu
serves as a “permanent provocation” (222) that can be engaged to redi-
rect and transform governing flows. In this expansive definition, material
agency may include individuals whose barter activities produce a backlash
against the official economy, animals infected with environmental toxins
or adapting to new sources of food that pose obstacles to and thus spur
innovations in the food industries, or receding shorelines that force rezon-
ing of coastal cities. Each of these immanent processes influences the total
milieu, coercing it into ever-evolving forms that accept, and even profit
from, deviations. Thus, for Foucault, agency emerges neither from the state
and its apparatuses (Marxist hegemony), nor from self-constituting sub-
jects (post-Marxist hegemony), nor from the inherently positive movement
of affect (post-hegemony), but from the way historically emergent power
relations intra-act with the transactional realities constituting a particular
milieu. The capacity to oppose hegemonic power, in this regard, requires
different orientations toward vibrant materiality and the governmental
production of transactional realities. It involves practices that redirect the
material flows metabolized by power structures.
Rhetorical practices need to condition materiality differently so that
they might shape the infrastructural relationships encouraged by the capi-
talist milieu into other patterns. Such possibilities emerge through “envi-
ronments that capacitate and incapacitate the circuits that connect affective,
energetic and symbolic dimensions of rhetoric in such a way that the body
politic is produced” (Povinelli, 2012, 374). The full power of this emergence
is not captured within post-hegemonic models that house affect within
specific populations whose politics can be counted on to erupt according
to predictable rhythms. In fact, as Povinelli illustrates with her narrative
of hesitating with a full bladder in an empty hallway before a bathroom

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designated for men, there are moments when bodily experience conflicts
with the environment and nevertheless affective ruptures are nowhere to
be found. Rather than sparking inevitable opposition, the misalignment
between her bodily cues and those of the milieu provides a rhetorical oppor-
tunity to capacitate circuits or infrastructural flows. Making a conscious
decision to transgress normative protocols by entering this bathroom, des-
ignated for others, enacts an infrastructural reorientation that simultane-
ously alters a body’s ability to act and a bathroom’s power to determine
acceptable users. The palpable pause wherein one refuses the automatic
becomes a moment in the process of reinvention. Such refusals participate
in the transformation of materiality inasmuch as they redirect invisible ori-
enting flows that do not remain static but are always on the move, invent-
ing and reinventing everything in their wake. No single identity—inside or
outside capitalism—can be the storehouse of this oppositional force as it
must be conscientiously worked and reworked into the rhetorical muscles
of bodies and the signaling forces of materiality.8
To this end, the next section examines the rhetorical possibilities of
producing such counterhegemonic practices by way of material engage-
ment within a milieu. We extend Foucault through Giorgio Agamben’s
discussion of life’s political force as an open-ended ontology and Elizabeth
Povinelli’s theorization of nonlife’s political force as a transfiguring geon-
tology. Collectively, this scholarship offers a way to conceptualize rhetorical
invention in posthumanist terms as orienting, bending, or turning toward
something different (Muckelbauer 2008, 2016). Moreover, as theories of
rhetorical production, they help dislodge hegemony from the political ruse
that affect and consciousness reside on two perfectly parallel planes that
never intersect.

Reinventing Infrastructure as Counterhegemonic

Possibility
In the previous section, we suggested that Foucault’s disciplinary power
works on matter at the micro-level to produce predictable, autonomous
responses within things across a milieu while his biopolitical power works
at the macro-level to regulate productive associations among disparate
materialities. Together, these entwined powers secure the hegemonic oper-
ations of an invisible process, one that masquerades as a totality (the global
marketplace) but remains incomplete, porous, and adaptable. This section
explores possibilities for redirecting these cooperating powers by extending

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our discussion of rhetorical hegemony into a series of lectures Foucault

delivered at the Collège de France between 1981 and 1984. Whereas his
genealogical period focused on the double powers that maintain a dynamic
hegemonic order, his late work explored the process of confronting such
powers in an effort to fracture hegemonic structures. By dwelling in the
rich material processes that forge a transactional relationship between con-
scious action and unconscious motivations, Foucault and his contemporary
interlocutors suggest a mode of rhetorical hegemony capable of addressing
power differentials without becoming wedded to any particular counterhe-
gemonic platform. In doing so, they resurrect subjectivity as the relational
practice of reinventing instinctual patterns.
Such subjectivity purposefully fashions bodily impulses so that one’s
transactional nature refracts against the prevailing order. The person who
takes up this practice consciously designs and submits to rigorous physi-
cal and mental exercises intended to assess, mobilize, and orient bodily
impulses. A lifelong vocation, this “self-subjectivation” (Foucault 2005, 214)
includes exercises in concentration, restraint, and physical endurance, all of
which seek to recompose the body’s instinctual nature. The individual prac-
tices turning away from expected, desired, automated responses until the
ability to act contrary becomes perpetually “available and can be resorted
to whenever the opportunity arises” (Foucault 2011, 231). As a relationship
between bodily orientations and the material world, these exercises—what
Foucault characterizes as askēsis—do not function in service to a particular
truth or against a specific regime. They aim only at capacitating one’s body
with the ability to act differently in the world. These embodied exercises
rewrite old instinctual patterns and equip the flesh with a new readiness:
“an open and an oriented preparation of the individual for the events of life”
(2005, 320). As a means for cultivating a different relationship to the pre-
vailing milieu, such practices alter the hegemonic structure by destabilizing
normative movements, patterns, and directives. Cultivating a new set of
dispositions through the systematic refusal of old bodily patterns, individu-
als reinvent the governing structures that invisibly produce and regulate life.
A model of this political orientation can be found, according to
Foucault, in the “dog philosophy” of the Cynics. As a group that “seeks
the truth of being human not in a doctrine but in a certain form of life”
(Agamben 2015, 103), the Cynics cultivate oppositional bodies by engaging
in unorthodox public behaviors. Committed to transforming established
social conventions, they follow only one principle: alter “the value of the
currency” (Foucault 2011, 227). The admonishment to revalue the currency,

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conceived as the invisible affective pathways animating existence within a

particular milieu, requires Cynics to transform themselves so that they might
also transform the larger material ecology. They reinvent their embodied
rhythms and their automated responses, constituting their somatic selves as
energetic conversion points that redirect the larger sociocultural and politi-
cal currency pulsating throughout a given milieu. If rhetorical hegemony
is the circulation of unconscious material relationships and the resulting
organization of those activities, the Cynics demonstrate an infrastructurally
based counterhegemony intended to intervene, antagonize, and reinvent
the material patterning of existence. By locating the practice of political
opposition in the ability to change the currency through which matter self-
organizes, orients, and provokes the contemporary milieu, Foucault extends
the political sphere into the entirety of materiality and suggests that it can
be rhetorically reconstituted at any point along its pathways. This is not,
as some have suggested, an abdication of political antagonisms, nor does
it centralize power within a few specialized individuals; on the contrary, it
radically democratizes political antagonisms within a new materialist ter-
rain and challenges easy distinctions among rhetoric’s discursive, subjective,
and affective manifestations.9
Giorgio Agamben, who has long theorized the relationship between
biopolitics and political power, bolsters Foucault’s claim that the trans-
formation of a milieu requires a reinvented subject, one that exists in the
constant process of self-subjectivation. Promoting an immanent ontology,
Agamben (2015) explains that the self is not a specific kind of being, but
a relational process of becoming constituent through being constituted.
One does not create a potential and then act on it, a conceptualization that
divides potential and use; rather, as a dynamic capacity, potential moves
through, remakes, and folds back into oneself vis-à-vis habituation within
an entangled milieu. Power circulates through and informs the subject’s
conscious and nonconscious behaviors. The body that intentionally habitu-
ates itself into and through “a zone of non-consciousness” (64) refuses to
separate its powers into externally produced ones (constituted) and ones
that arise from an internal, and purportedly authentic, self (constituent).
In doing so, it renders meaningless the chicken and the egg question of
whether nature or culture dominates the contemporary political economic
terrain. Characterizing the divide between ontology and epistemology as a
philosophical aporia that stymies political change, Agamben alternatively
locates potential within the self-constituting subject whose power derives
from “its own constitutive relation and remains immanent to it” (104).

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The subject’s agency stems from the ability to reconstitute its flesh by acting
on the modes of habituation out of which it is constituted. Understood in
this way, the human body plays an important political role—not as an ele-
ment to be read, but as a materiality that receives, produces, and transmits
power. Such power, of course, is not the sole province of human beings or
even of living things.
Elizabeth Povinelli, for instance, extends Foucauldian biopolitics to
explore the irrepressible and looping relationship between transcendence
and immanence within the materiality of nonlife. For her, the contempo-
rary world configures itself according to neoliberalism’s biopolitical and
geontological powers. Geontology, as she (2016) names it, includes a “set of
discourses, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape
the coming relationship between Life and Nonlife” (4). Planetary forces
like eroding mountains, drying rivers, and changing weather patterns do
not exist as a simple function of their being (or not being) mountains, riv-
ers, and weather. They exist as an always already evolving materiality that
turns, folds, and endures in one or another formation. Such materiality has
the power, as she (2016) speculates through the mountain range called Two
Women Sitting Down, to “turn [its] back on the world as it is being orga-
nized by becoming something that will potentially extinguish the world and
the way we exist in it” (56). Notably, this account engages the constituent-
constituted relationships unique to particular geontological assemblages,
but it does not project traditional rhetorical agency onto inorganic matter
nor does it deprive the world of agentive humans.
This theoretical intervention decenters humans and levels the hier-
archy that valorizes civilization above nature without erasing the deeply
uneven historical and contemporary realities that have given rise to theo-
ries of hegemony in the first place. Indeed, Povinelli asserts that the world
“must be viewed from the unequal forces redrawing and demanding certain
formations as the condition for an object’s endurance” (91). Contrary to
the prevailing Anthropocene argument, she reminds readers that “humans
have not exerted a malignant force on the meteorological, geological, and
biological dimensions of the earth, only some human societies” have done
so (116).10 Culpability, she says, lies with late liberalism and its historical
antecedents: capitalist exploitation of land, people, and things. Drawing
from a host of new materialist thinkers, she endorses practices that lure
existence away from its habituated paths and toward different modes of
being. In so doing, she lands in the same proximal zone as Foucault and
Agamben inasmuch as she values a politics that centers around the dynamic

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production of infrastructures and modes of habituation. “The height of

semiotic r­ eason is not,” Povinelli claims, “the decoding of existents but the
formation and coordination of the habits of being, which are continually
becoming otherwise” (137). This theoretical positionality rejects all divisions
between the symbolic and rhetorical, on the one hand, and the material and
extra-rhetorical, on the other. Material relationality, in all its modes, lays
the groundwork for ideas, actions, and subjectivities and thus “provides the
precondition for reflexive and instinctual action” (139). As the organization
of fluid and entangled infrastructural relationships, these practices cannot
be coordinated according to a precise and predetermined matrix. They must
be enacted through imprecise and inventional behaviors intended to rede-
sign the subject-milieu relationship into one of a constant counterhege-
monic becoming otherwise.
Take, for instance, the funding for a national border wall that has ani-
mated so much political gameplay. Like all materiality, this wall and the
decision making surrounding it unfold according to moving infrastructures.
The showdown around the wall reflects human deliberation, juridical struc-
tures, and the production of a material thing, but not in any clear linear
way. Likely responding to criticisms by such anti-immigration pundits as
Ann Coulter, President Trump’s last-minute veto of a bipartisan funding
bill that failed to finance what he calls his border wall suggests a looping
material power that turns him toward some and not others. Responding to
those he views as necessary supporters, Trump instinctually calculated that
his refusal to sign the bill would maintain affective alliances. While those
who oppose Trump are quick to belittle his knee-jerk reaction as illustrative
of his muddled thinking, their response—the often-repeated assertion that
Trump plays checkers while they play chess—belies an equally recalcitrant
infrastructural orientation. Following the tug of empirical data, such critics
privilege long-term strategizing over tactical maneuvers as though these
two forms of acting are inherently different rather than entangled orienta-
tions that are as imbricated with each other as they are with deeper geon-
tological powers of existence.
This constituent-constituted spiraling of materiality can be evidenced
further by the multilayered resistance to the wall. The border wall that
Trump and his followers imagine—whether brick and mortar or steel
slats—will be resisted by the geological terrain, the wildlife, and the human
bodies that move along and across the U.S.-Mexican border. The border
cuts across deserts, rivers, flood plains, habitats of endangered species, as
well as federal, state, and tribal lands, all of which are regulated by national
and international law. A wall cannot be easily built in the middle of the Rio
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Grande, but building it on the U.S. side of the river cedes the w ­ aterway
to Mexico and building on the other side requires Mexico’s authorization.
Moreover, the daily border crossers and the migrant caravans that reach the
border from distances as far away as El Salvador and Honduras suggest,
contra Beasley-Murray and other post-hegemony scholars, that exodus
moves in multiple directions and that its life-affirming value can be worn
thin by a wide range of biopolitical and disciplinary processes that are sys-
temically racist, ablest, classist, patriarchal, heteronormative, and speciest.
To emphasize, the geopolitical and the biopolitical cannot be sepa-
rated in any pragmatic way. Neither a legal document nor an imaginary
boundary, the border that calls the wall into existence materializes as an
active relationship among diverse materiality, none of which functions
independently and none of which serves as a center. Physically, discursively,
and infrastructurally, borders exist “in constant motion and have a mate-
rial nonhuman political agency of their own” (Nail 2018, 194). From this
perspective, it is not sufficient to oppose the wall. The counterhegemonic
project must also reinvent the prevailing forces of the wall’s multiple intra-
animated materialities. Such an approach does not attempt to conserve
the human being as the center of power vis-à-vis reason, but engages the
body’s material affordances to produce critical subjects as decentered nodal
points in a larger matrix of material and ecological powers. Disrupting the
predictable pathways of power through matter and its relationship to the
governing logic of the milieu forces the entire complex and its dynamic
resonances to reorganize.
Several examples of contemporary activism indicate the materialist
mesh of power that undergirds this infrastructural approach. Social move-
ments and counterpublics like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter,
Standing Rock, and Me Too disrupt the hegemonic order of politics by
reinventing the prevailing flows of acceptable behavior (Happe 2015).
Inserting bodies into key junctions so as to redirect the infrastructural flows
of the capitalist political economy simultaneously produces critical subjects
and different material orientations. After one has relied on the generosity of
strangers for food during Occupy Wall Street, faced the police in the streets
of Ferguson, endured the hardships of a North Dakota winter, and dis-
closed one’s most vulnerable moments to the American public, one’s body
becomes less capable of turning away from a border that imprisons asylum
seekers and separates children from parents. In addition to reconstituting
themselves, these protestors also reinvent infrastructure’s invisible govern-
ing order. Even as these examples reflect an immanent politics not easily
replicated, they suggest a new materialist practice that can be transferred
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to other political locations. Located at the material juncture between the

intentional and the unintentional, such politics shifts concerns over hege-
mony and counter-hegemony into inventional practices concerned with the
rhetorical production of material infrastructures. This reorientation, as we
discuss in the conclusion, has multiple consequences for how rhetoricians
approach critical theory and its political opportunities.

Rhetoric, Material Infrastructures, and the Politics

of Invention
This essay has drawn on Foucault to rethink hegemony through new mate-
rialist rhetorics. Placing his genealogical period (focused on disciplinar-
ity and biopolitics) in conversation with his late period (focused on askēsis
and self-subjectivation), we argued that Foucault offers important insights
for understanding and engaging hegemony as the entangled relationship
between materiality and power. Viewed from this larger theoretical arc, his
work illuminates how the mesh of power that goes by the name of capi-
talism stems from transactional realities operationalized through material
practices that habituate, regulate, and transform the milieu according to
fluctuating political economic dynamics. Approaching the materiality of
capitalism in this way also revealed pathways for resisting hegemony. As
a transpersonal process that moves through materiality at the physiologi-
cal level, unconsciously habituating and calibrating behavior, political eco-
nomic power, as we have shown, can be modulated through consciously
designed techniques for reinventing the instinctual orientations that silently
inform practices of being. Using this notion of infrastructural production,
rhetorical hegemony embraces embodied practice as the biopolitical and
geontological production of alternative materialities. Such a Foucauldian-
inspired perspective on hegemony has several implications for scholars
whose research moves through the intersections of philosophy and rhetoric.
First, it offers a new way to theorize rhetorical agency beyond the
impasse of hegemony and post-hegemony debates. Whereas hegemony
conceptualizes rhetorical agency through a repeated cycle of failed identity
formation and post-hegemony approaches rhetorical agency as an affec-
tive process divorced from governing structures, our Foucauldian-derived
model foregrounds an account of rhetorical agency that can intervene
into the richly textured ecological and affective landscape of the capitalist
milieu. By starting with the entangled postulate of transactional realities
and exploring how these realities are given normative structure through
disciplinary practices and managed by biopolitical and geontological
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governing structures, we arrive at a posthumanist account of rhetorical

agency located in the relational practice of what Agamben (2015) calls “the
autoconstitution of being” (105). As we demonstrated in the last section of
our essay, this rhetorical hegemony works through the circulation of power,
its ability to cull particular dispositions, and the human body’s capacity to
reinvent those dispositions through new infrastructural circuits. From this
perspective, the importance of the counterpublic activities of movements
like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and Me Too
lies in their ability to redirect hegemonic energies and thus reinvent the
pathways configuring material relationships. These “evental rhetorics” share
a common effort to falsify the affective circuitry that facilitates the political
and economic production of binary oppositions—such as whiteness and
blackness, public and private, and human and nonhuman.11 By acting on
the transactional realities that produce subjectivity within the open milieu
of capitalist biopolitics, the militant subjects that resist capitalism seek to
revalue themselves so that they can revalue the infrastructural pathways
that configure hegemonic ways of inhabiting the world. Such work must
be pulled into our rhetorical theories and practices so that its invention
lies side by side with discursive invention. Just as discursive topoi gener-
ate future arguments, material topoi—one’s bodily relationality—generate
future affective potentialities. This terrain is ripe for rhetorical investigation.
Second, our essay offers a new materialist interpretation of Foucault’s
contribution to rhetoric that pushes beyond standard receptions in the field.
Since the earliest publications on his contributions to rhetoric, Foucault
has been imported into the discipline as a theorist of discourse (Blair 1987;
Blair and Cooper 1987; Foss and Gill 1987; McKerrow 1989; Biesecker
1992a, 1992b). Although his (1971, 1972) early writings on the episteme, the
statement, and the archive foregrounded discursive practices and reinforced
this interpretative strategy, Foucault’s middle and late work—the biopo-
litical and ethopoetic periods—often get cast in these same terms (Tell
2010). Equally troubling is the tendency to use Foucault’s thin engage-
ment of traditional rhetorical history to dismiss his significance to the field
(Walzer 2013). No doubt, Foucault’s inconsistent commentary contributes
to his vexed position within rhetorical scholarship; yet, readings of Foucault
that bifurcate matter and meaning prevent scholars from appreciating the
entangled rhetorical universe that Foucault inhabits. Building on the philo-
sophical traditions of Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Marx, and Althusser, he
views the movement of matter as radically contingent and, thus, as literally
(and not just figuratively) rhetorical. Nevertheless, scholars of rhetoric have
been hesitant to assert readings of Foucault that push beyond the discursive
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and enter into the fray of matter’s inherent ­rhetoricity.12 In ­conversation

with the new materialist turn in rhetorical studies, we believe that, when
it comes to the rhetorical interpretation of Foucault, appreciating the
rhetoricity of matter itself matters (Barad 2007; Rickert 2013; Gamble and
Hanan 2016; Davis 2017b; Happe 2018). There is much room for extending
this hypothesis.
Third, and finally, by situating Foucault in conversation with both hege-
mony and new materialism, we have shown how his framework helps trace
the complex material practices and processes that produce and reproduce
bodies in ways that are always political, economic, and affective. Whereas
recent scholarship on new materialism has been critiqued for ignoring the
uneven production of bodies within the human social realm (Chen 2012;
Weheliye 2014; Bost 2016), as well as for overlooking the way ecologies and
bodies come together rhetorically (Stormer 2016; Stormer and McGreavy
2017), our essay supports a new materialist reading of rhetoric that accounts
for the ecological and entangled asymmetries of power. By conceptualizing
rhetoric as both the material vitality of disciplinarity and the biopolitical
management of the milieu, we arrive at a conclusion similar to Stormer
and McGreavy (2017): “The question is not whether tides are rhetorical,
for instance, but rather how they participate at any moment in multiple,
different rhetorics emerging from entanglements” (17). For us, the notion
of hegemony as a Foucauldian power complex offers a way to grapple with
the crucial insights of new materialism while highlighting infrastructure
as the cooperation between the energetic and ecological modes of mate-
riality. Additionally, by stressing rhetoric’s productive ability to intervene
into these entangled material processes, we have forwarded an account
that remains sensitive to the political, economic, and affective modalities
of “biopolitical capitalism” (Greene 2004). A new materialism that fails to
account for the intersections among capitalism’s environmental, social, and
mental materializations will overlook a crucial rhetorical vector for politi-
cal transformation. As rhetoricians, we must experiment with this vector to
better engage the different affordances of material bodies as they struggle
in the world through differently situated capacitations.

Department of English
University of Nevada, Reno

Department of Communication Studies

University of Denver

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NOTES
1. For the particulars of this dispute, see Laclau (2006) and Žižek’s (2006) rather
combative exchange in Critical Inquiry; for a rhetorical intervention into their divergent
readings of Lacan, see Cates, Bruner, and Moss (2018).
2. Rhetorical hegemony serves as a kind of placeholder for a range of new materialist
rhetorical practices designed specifically to engage the invisible infrastructures that silently
nudge us toward some behaviors and away from others. The concept is not intended to
privilege a unified or homogeneous rhetorical framework; rather, it is meant to encourage
multiple and heterogeneous experimentations with infrastructural politics.
3. The resilience of such identifications has compelled a range of rhetorical schol-
ars—from Christina Foust (2010) and Michael Kaplan (2010, 2012) to Elizabeth Povinelli
(2012) and Laura Collins (2014)—to explore the affective work of politics more closely.
4. Hegel long ago characterized such loops as “bad infinity.” See Science of Logic.
5. This notion of environmental, social, and mental ecologies comes from Félix
Guattari (2005).
6. See Lemke (2015, 2016) for a careful discussion of how Foucault’s notion of the
milieu includes the government of things and not just subjects.
7. Not grappling with this dynamic is, for Foucault, the main error of state socialism.
He (1997) says socialist theory has reimaged capitalist disciplinary power, but has yet to
offer a viable “critique of the theme of biopower” that provides the freedom to deviate from
idealized practices (261).
8. Foucault asserts, for instance, that modernity “does not ‘liberate man in his own
being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself ” (2007a, 109).
9. Some political theorists view Foucault’s return to the subject as a conservative ges-
ture (Zamora and Behrent 2016); others bemoan the abandonment of collective political
action (Brown 2015); some rhetoricians chafe against the apparent privileging of an elite,
all-knowing subject ( Jarratt 2014); and others take issue with Foucault’s subordination of
rhetoric to philosophy (Walzer 2013).
10. For an articulation of the capitalocene, see Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of
Life (2015).
11. Biesecker (2010) describes evental rhetoric as an act that forces an uncanny dis-
placement between the timely and the untimely and the possible and the impossible.
Although our Foucauldian approach differs from evental rhetoric (she emphasizes subli-
mation and the exorbitant demand), we share her critique of Laclau and her commitment
to a politics of the impossible (see also Biesecker and Trapani 2014).
12. One important outlier to this approach is Ronald Walter Greene (1998, 2004), who,
as Matthew May (2015) rightly notes, reads Foucault through a Spinozist/Althusserian
strain of immanent causality. Other scholars who appreciate Foucault’s contribution to
rhetoric in materialist terms include Kendall Phillips (2002), Catherine Chaput (2010),
and Jamie Merchant (2014). However, none of these thinkers have approached Foucault on

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new materialist grounds, nor have they sought to situate Foucault’s project in relationship
to a larger rhetorical universe. For a reading of the universe as irreducibly rhetorical, see
Diane Davis (2017b).

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