Whether we think of it as a discursive practice (public address
broadly construed to include everything from oratory to
photojournalism to television to film to hyper-mediated web sites) or
as a meta-discursive theory or techne, "rhetoric" has survived from
classical times to the present in large measure as a result of its
capacity to reinvent itself from one epoch to the next as a means of
serving the changing demands of collective judgment – i.e., social
judgment, political judgment, public judgment, etc. –  at a
particular historical moment.
“Judgment” or krisis is a problematic term which implicates and
articulates the dynamic and culturally presumed relationship(s)
between knowledge, understanding, and action in a world of
contingencies and probabilities.  Viewed from this
perspective,  “rhetorical theory" is always already an unstable
category, a discourse practice subject to and predicated upon the
changing conditions and configurations of judgment in collective life
at any given moment.  Such indeterminacy is a potential strength
rather than a weakness, however, for it positions rhetorical theory
as a potentially powerful heuristic for producing social and
political criticism designed to respond to and effect the problems
and possibilities of collective judgment.
The specific goal of this seminar is to examine the ways in
which “rhetoric” is being (re)invented as a heuristic for social and
political critique apropos the problem of collective judgment in late-
or postmodern societies.  By "late" or "post" modernity I mean to
make general reference to the rapidly increasing (and often
paradoxical) conditions of intellectual, political, and cultural
fragmentation precipitated by hyper-specialization, pluralism, multi-
culturalism, globalization, and high-speed electronic/digital
mediation, all of which contribute to what Lyotard calls
the "incredulity to metanarratives" and which we might identify as
the prevailing discourses of  “progress,” “sovereignty,” “the nation-
state,” “the liberal-democratic consensus,” and so on.
We will move to our task by framing the problematic within a
dialectic of hermeneutics and critical theory, and then examining
some of the more prominent ways in which rhetoric-as-judgment is
being constituted therein as a praxis designed to mediate the
contemporary demands of collective decision-making and action.  Key
topics will include the relationship between rhetoric and aesthetics
(and epistemology); constitutive rhetorics and public emotionality;
and phronesis and prudence. Throughout, we will focus attention on
specific, problematic instances of social and political judgment in
contemporary public culture.
This course will be of interest to anyone concerned with exploring
the possibilities of  “rhetoric” as heuristic to the performance and
transformation of public culture across media.  It should be of
particular interest to those studying the relationship(s) between
discourse and social/political theory, and especially those concerned
to retheorize the relationship between “liberalism” and “democracy”
in contemporary Western public culture.