Critical affect theory continues to hold promise for rhetorical theory and criticism. This article revisits the so-called affective turn in rhetoric and addresses subsequent critiques of the idea of a turn. Accounting for scholarship published since 2010, this article then groups critical affect work into six subareas of research in rhetorical studies: feminist, queer, trans, and crip affects; race and affect; Black women’s affective labor; affective publics and counterpublics; new materialism, materiality, and affect; and affective economics. This article outlines affective methodologies in rhetorical studies and highlights the affective dimensions of “theories of the flesh” in rhetorical inquiry. It ends by considering what is critical about affect theory in rhetoric.
This article argues that the US War in Afghanistan, given its status as a Long War, must contend with a specific visual form that threatens to disclose that the war is an irreversible failure: the ‘visual quagmire’. A visual quagmire is a visualization of a nation’s catastrophic, self-inflicted entanglement in war. In ‘Cluster fuck: The forcible frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure’ (2010), Linda Williams argues that the ‘cluster fuck’ is the ‘most eloquent figure of the American entanglement in Iraq’. This essay proposes that the ‘visual quagmire’ is an eloquent figure of the failure of America’s networked war in Afghanistan. To support this, this essay analyzes the widely criticized PowerPoint slide depicting counterinsurgency dynamics in Afghanistan, which was presented to the then Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley A McChrystal in summer 2009. Elaborating on the form of the ‘visual quagmire’ underscores the importance of theorizing the processual emergence of quagmires and indexes that US military forces are responsible for strategic misguidance through how they visualize war.
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