My second book, Inessential Solidarity, will re-examine the intersections among rhetoric, writing, and community (all broadly conceived) in a postfoundational era. The first chapter distinguishes between a modernist (Freudian/Burkean) conception of community as a "work" to be produced, and a more postmodern sense of it as that originary sociality from which any "subject" necessarily extracts itself. This originary "community" would be exposed not in re-presentation or figuration--not in the "work," in other words--but in the unworking (désoeuvrement) that is associated with rhetorics of dis-identification and dis-figuration. A version of this chapter came out in JAC in 1999 under the title: "'Addicted to Love'; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity."
The second chapter argues that rhetoric's "hermeneutic turn," which posits understanding as both the end goal of rhetoric and as the unquestioned basis for the production of community, is a humanist re-turn that ignores rhetoric's purely performative dimension. Language's tendency to deterritorialize its own (cognitive) territories, this chapter suggests, exposes the radical inappropriability of meaning (and even of Being). And because this inappropriability is precisely what "we" share, it is an exposition of community. The first half of chapter three offers a rhetorical analysis of the 1998 HomeNet report, which concluded that cyber-activity has antisocial consequences. In a reading the report's tropological symptomatology, this chapter first attempts to indicate the extent to which the study is grounded in nostalgic presumptions about community. The second half of the chapter proposes that the question today is not, as the report suggests, whether cyber-activity supports "pre-existing ties"; it is, rather, whether cyber-communications on the Net can in any way expose Being-as-(re)tying, whether they manage to interrupt the narratives of being-together based on identity and open the possibility for another kind of "social contract."
Chapter four examines the rhetorics of recovery promoted in the top-ranked addiction recovery programs today and suggests that they operate as a pedagogy of citizenship that promotes self-sufficient subjectivity as the goal, seting "recovery" in opposition to community. Finally, the last chapter proposes a rhet/comp pedagogy that goes the other way: that invites students to embrace their own ineffability and (so) to affirm the originary non-belonging that precedes any/every condition of belonging.