"The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra": A Reply to Ron Greene

Being in Common: In Celebration of Ronald W. Greene's Woolbert Award

“…18 With friends, we share in common the struggle for freedom from oppression. And it is this engagement with the work of friends, or in Greene's words, "comrades," 19 in which he presents us with a landscape of the problem: "an anxiety over rhetorical agency," 20 and does so by what I like to imagine as a latenight discussion 21 with James Aune and Dana Cloud to determine if "communicative labor" is the answer to understanding rhetorical agency today.…”

Orator-Machine:

“…I refer here to Cloud 2009, Greene 2004, Cloud, Aune, and Macek 2006. I refer here to Cloud 2009, Greene 2004, Cloud, Aune, and Macek 2006.…”

Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism

“…The most widely known, explicitly dialectical positions on agency in rhetorical studies, however, are those of James Arnt Aune, Dana Cloud, and other Marxist critics. For example, critical of certain posthumanist theories of agency (namely, those of Greene 1998; 2004; 2007), Cloud, Macek, & Aune (2006) argue that social groups, especially class‐based groups, harbor a capacity for political action grounded in their material circumstances:…”

“…Cloud, Macek, & Aune (2006) argue not only that ordinary people must mobilize collectively in order to pressure or overthrow employers and institutions, but also that it is the intersection of consciousness and experience that is generative of agency. In other words, as Cloud (2005) explains, working class agency is a product of both the experience of embodied labor and explicit political intervention and collective organizing.…”

“…Either workers and their allies claim the real agency of that they possess and take the chance of making a world in which they are free in body as well as mind; or they resign themselves to generation after generation of grinding exploitation, settling for the meaningful but insufficient consolations of sporadic, creative, ungrounded, and symbolic resistance. (2006, p. 81) Cloud, Macek, & Aune (2006) argue not only that ordinary people must mobilize collectively in order to pressure or overthrow employers and institutions, but also that it is the intersection of consciousness and experience that is generative of agency. In other words, as Cloud (2005) explains, working class agency is a product of both the experience of embodied labor and explicit political intervention and collective organizing.…”