A Forum on Neurorhetorics: Conscious of the Past, Mindful of the Future

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A Forum on Neurorhetorics: Conscious of the Past,
Mindful of the Future
David R. Gruber, Wendy K. Z. Anderson, Michelle Gibbons, Jordynn Jack,
Chris Mays, Tyler Snelling, Paige Welsh & Eli Wilson
To cite this article: David R. Gruber, Wendy K. Z. Anderson, Michelle Gibbons, Jordynn Jack,
Chris Mays, Tyler Snelling, Paige Welsh & Eli Wilson (2024) A Forum on Neurorhetorics:
Conscious of the Past, Mindful of the Future, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 54:4, 381-404, DOI:
10.1080/02773945.2024.2378019
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A Forum on Neurorhetorics: Conscious of the Past, Mindful of the
Future
David R. Gruber , Wendy K. Z. Anderson, Michelle Gibbons, Jordynn Jack, Chris Mays,
Tyler Snelling, Paige Welsh, and Eli Wilson
ABSTRACT
Fourteen years after the special issue on neuroscience and rhetoric in this
journal (Neurorhetorics, vol. 40, no. 5), we turn back and look forward. We
assess what has been accomplished in neurorhetorics in that time frame,
examine what has changed in rhetorical studies and in the neurosciences,
and oer suggestions for future research. Eight contributors detail the
importance of neurorhetorics for their work and engage a range of topics.
Those include neurodiversity, neuropolicy, neurogastronomy, and interdisci-
plinary collaborations, among others. Ultimately, the forum points toward
the need for more critical cultural approaches in neurorhetorics, more policy
discussions, new methodologies, and new philosophies that can stretch
beyond the “neuro-” prex and enroll insights from New Materialisms and
Global Rhetorics.
KEYWORDS
Brains; cognitive;
neurorhetoric; rhetorical
criticism; rhetoric of science
Introduction
David R. Gruber
Thomas Edison reportedly once said, “The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around”
(“Brain” 2010). That quip proliferates across the internet. In the past few months, I have seen it on
a website selling brain health vitamins (“Wild”) and on Providence College’s promotionals for “Brain
Awareness Week” (“PC”). Although the quote is, in one way, just a cute underscoring of the brain’s
importance, its continued circulation also to some extent demonstrates the longevity and presumed
truth of brain/body dua lism. The quote reminds us of just how entrenched popular thought about the
brain has been and how much the brain continues to be associated with dominance and control.
Despite notable challenges to the dualistic thesis by more recent posthumanisms (Boyle), extended
and embodied cognition (Clark), as well as re-invigorations of relational Indigenous worldviews
(Clary-Lemon; Wildcat and Voth), rhetorical scholars nevertheless confront the seemingly endless
prioritization of the brain in “neurohype,” “neuro-realism,” “neurofuturism,” and “neuroCapitalism.”
1
Each is grounded in hierarchy and opposition as much as promise and possibility, situating political
and economic functions as somehow naturally subservient to neural examination, neural extensions,
neural extractions, and neural enticements of all kinds. Historically contingent symbolicity,
entrenched infrastructures, embodied suasions, namely entangled materiality, can quickly flatten
under a giant, heavy foot called the brain.
This forum refocuses scholars on how the brain rhetorically slides into position as an arbiter of
futures and can serve as both the hero and the villain in a sociopolitical drama about human
betterment and development. The brain can be blamed for “bad” behavior and poor functioning
and, as Eli Wilson notes in this forum, be rhetorically positioned as in desperate need of protection; the
David R. Gruber is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 S.
Maryland Pkwy. 4th floor GUA bld., Las Vegas, NV 89154. E-mail: david.gruber@unlv.edu
1
See Racine et al. and Weisberg et al.
RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY
2024, VOL. 54, NO. 4, 381–404
https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2024.2378019
© 2024 The Rhetoric Society of America

brain can also, as I explore in my contribution, be propped up as the magnanimous solution once
technologized, regulated, or remediated. Overall, this forum reinforces and revisits Jordynn Jack’s
2010 call for rhetorical scholars to galvanize an area of study called “neurorhetorics.” Collectively, the
contributors consider futures for neurorhetorics and seek fresh approaches. Indeed, for many of us,
neurorhetorical inquiry feels even more pressing today than in 2010.
Examinations of cognition and the brain pop up tactically and discursively around so many
contemporary cultural crises that rhetorical scholars hope to better understand and confront. The
brain or brain sciences become integral to situating “a mental health crisis” (not only in America),
excessive criminalization, social media platforms that promote outrage (Rice), fragmented political
arenas rife with tribalisms and fascist “perversions” (Gunn 407). Likewise, rhetorics of the brain play
a central role in generative artificial intelligence (Halbryt) and the development of neural interfaces
(Valeriani, Santoro, and Ienca), staging a sense of inevitability and obligatory change. Invocations of the
brain can, of course, provide necessary insights, but they can also propel naïve transhumanist discourses
that replay High/Low, Then/Now themes present in the old mind-body dualism (see Galvañ).
A salvation narrative of neuro-humanism and scientific positivism is never far away (“DraperTV”).
In preparing for this forum and reading through the contributions, I have been particularly struck
by the way that appeals to the brain have a seemingly inexhaustible power to resolve social and
economic problems. To take one example, this past year, researchers at Rice University circulated
a multimillion-dollar federal proposal challenging the US government to build a “brain capital
industrial strategy.” The move recalls George H.W. Bush’s “Decade of the Brain” initiative from
1990. At that time, Bush aimed to advance the development of the neurosciences for innovation and
the good of the American economy (see Thornton para. 2). The Rice University researchers reinvent
the effort, recalling space exploration and utilizing a rhetoric of “the frontier” to foreground the
urgency of solving both “brain and mental health-related disorders” and the “threat to fundamental
aspects of human identity, human dignity, freedom of thought, autonomy, (mental) privacy and well-
being” resulting from artificial intelligence.
2
The “core mission” is to build “a powerful industrial
strategy” with a “brain capital workforce” framed as “critical to boosting America’s competitiveness,
creativity, well-being, and economy” (Eyer and Meidl). In brief, with and through neuroscience, we
hear about hopes and human needs. Hopes for an escape route. The need for salvation, from ourselves.
I jump start this forum by repeating what Jack said in 2010 when she expressed serious concern about
the rise of “the neurosciences” and the dominance of the brain/body dichotomy. As she noted then,
neuromarketing seeks a “buy-button” in the brain; neuropolitics attempts to explain political decision
making reductively through appeals to enhanced fear and threat responses; neuroeducation churns out
“brain training” apps and sells “peak performances” (406). In like manner, we continue to see neu-
roscience deployed, at times speciously and unfairly, to inform court cases and social deviation treat-
ments (Hart; Morse). Likewise, as Jack noted in 2010, and as Wendy K. Z. Anderson reminds us in this
forum, neuroscience is still routinely used to “naturalize or construct social classifications, especially
along lines of sex and gender” (Jack, “Neurorhetorics” 406). Consequently, with this forum, we
collectively assert that critical examinations of technologies of control, technologies of the self, discourses
of power, and neuroscience’s relationship to social and political movements remain an urgent matter.
As the reader will discover, those participating in this forum continue to be motivated by the call “to
investigate the rhetorical appeal, effects, and implications of this prefix, neuro-, as well as to carefully
consider collaborative work between rhetoricians and neuroscientists” (Jack, “Neurorhetorics” 406).
They build on the successes of rhetorical scholars from the last fourteen years. Some enliven critical
cultural analyses (Snelling; Wilson), while others suggest new embodied methods and reflective field
methods that have gained popularity since 2010 (Anderson). In addition, there is an renewed interest
in policy discussions (Davis) as well as in how rhetorical theory might be able to spend less time
lamenting a lack in neuroscience discourses and, instead, explore “terminological overlaps” for
interventional purposes (Mays).
2
See Ceccarelli for analysis of a frontier rhetoric.
382 D. R. GRUBER ET AL.

Notably, the contributors were charged with thinking specifically and strategically about
ways to extend neurorhetorics while reflecting on the past fourteen years of scholarship. They
were asked to share what they believe could or should be done today, and why. After reading
through the various contributions, I suspect neurorhetoricians will in the future do more to
follow Karma Chavez’s call for rhetoric to reach beyond a presumed goal of social “inclusion”
and aim not to merely correct the content of neuroscience discourses but focus more on the
structure of those discourses, or how rhetoric more broadly, comes to be a rhetoric. Scholars
likely will focus on the structure of bodily performances, and as Chavez says, build out “a
discipline constituted through non-normative, non-citizen, non-Western perspectives and ways
of knowing and being” (163). Where neuroscience is positioned prominently seems both
a difficult and exciting place to do that work. Then again, where neuroscience is positioned
prominently may well always prove a challenge for rhetorical scholars, but as always, our task
is to discover critical approaches adapted to the intensities of the rhetoric and to the
circumstances of the scene while being aware of the material constraints and circumscriptions
that we enable and perform.
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An Ontological Neurorhetoric
David R. Gruber
Over the past decade, rhetorical analyses have given greater emphasis to bodies and embodied
methodologies, aiming to diversify what counts as rhetoric (Chavez; García and Cortez) while seeking
New Materialist approaches that maintain an emphasis on power dynamics, symbols, and cultural
situations (Plugfelder; Rice; Rickert). The neurosciences in that timeframe reflect some parallel
changes. For example, there is a much stronger exigence for “real world” and multisensory studies
of the brain (see Matusz et al.; Stangl et al.) and many more disciplinary camps promoting embodied
cognition; extended, embedded, or enactive cognition; or some combination (see Clark; Meling; Roth
and Jornet). Those deserve more attention in rhetoric, especially for the ways they center bodily
relativity and context.
In some ways, the neurosciences have become better aligned with rhetorical inquiry. Duke
University has since 2010 created a Neurohumanities Institute (“Neurohumanities”), Cornell has
developed a Gender and the Brain course for neuroscience majors together with the Program of
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (“Class”), and McGill now regularly hosts Culture, Mind, and
Brain workshops (“Culture”). In addition, skepticism about neuroscience framings may have risen as
a result of neurohype and several publicized replication crises, reinvigorating a need to study rhetorical
positioning and communicative over-extensions (Thibault 2–3). Alternatively, of course, the dom-
inating idea that “the brain is the basis for all our thoughts and behaviors” (3) functions to attenuate
too much critical digging into the details of individual findings and treatments. Nevertheless, several
developments in recent years bode well for rhetoricians interested in complexifying scenes and
understanding how enculturation connects to various positionalities, embodiments, and points of
view.
I start my contribution asserting that a critique of power in the neurosciences is complicated by
resisting the critical urge to pass judgment on the neuroscientist, or even the popularizers, journalists,
and brain book writers who traffic in brain boosterism; instead, turning to a complex entwinement
among technologies, genres, institutions, and affects attunes to rhetorical studies seeking a multiplicity
of complicated agencies. An “ambient rhetoric” (Rickert 5) alongside of a “micro-rhetoric” (Plugfelder
441) and concepts such as “intra-action” (Barad 97–102) and the “nonconscious” (Hayles 9), refocus
scholars on overlooked, even molecular, influences that were previously considered unimportant.
Applying these concepts to the neurosciences feels overdue in neurorhetorics.
Although neurorhetorical scholars can productively critique neurodiscourses for reifying brain/
body dualisms and ignoring environmental factors, linguistic-centric scholarship risks the hypocritical
when not recognizing how bodies and environments play a role in the thought processes of neuros-
cientists and in the technical formations of neuroscience. Looking across the scholarship produced
since the 2010 special issue (Neurorhetorics, vol. 40, no. 5), I have noted four consistent themes, all of
which tend to foreground discursive criticism. Those themes are: (1) Applications of Neuroscience to
Rhetoric, (2) Critiques of Neuroreductionism, (3) Critiques of Neuroinflationism, and (4) Critiques of
Neuroassimilation (see Gruber, forthcoming). The first takes Jack’s recommendation to explore
rhetoric’s terms and assumptions through the brain sciences. Jack (“Mapping”), Harris (“A
Cognitive”; “The Rhetoric”), Littlefield (“Being”; “The Lying”), Mitrovi´c et al., and myself (Gruber,
“Multiple”; “Suasive”) have all completed projects to this effect. Such work is, to my mind, most
aligned with the effort to “challenge human exceptionalism by prioritizing ontological relationality,
recognizing the active force of all matter” (Gries et al., 138). Working side by side with neuroscientists
384 D. R. GRUBER ET AL.

and putting neuroscience and rhetoric on a conceptually even playing field, as much of this work does,
aids holistic thinking about institutional constraints, the technological requirements of neuroscience
methodologies, and the bodies of the participants in the labs, and so on.
The remaining three categories—where the most rhetorical study has been accomplished—con-
cerns what Jack calls a “rhetoric of neuroscience” (407). To be brief: neuroreductionism analyzes cases
where subject positions are reduced down to neuroscience categorizations, often to the detriment of
the subjects involved. Neuroinflationism addresses neurohype, including exaggerations and miscom-
munications using the neurosciences. Neuroassimilation examines the tactical use of brain science as
evidence to enhance the appeal of a position or gain legitimacy. For each, there are now excellent case
studies.
3
The question for me, now fourteen years since I read the special issue and was inspired to
apply rhetoric to neuroscience, is: How can neurorhetoricians think more ecologically and complexly
about neurorhetorics?
A special emphasis on rhetoric’s ontological dimensions, I believe, requires a turn toward the
multiple environmental influences that come to bear on complex conditions studied by neuroscientists
and thus stages a more benevolent view of their work. In other words, aligning ideas about what
rhetoric is with what rhetoric does and says when analyzing neuroscience protects against a purely
negative critique where linguistic determinism marches onto the scene to do the disciplinary work of
deciding what is Right/Wrong, Healthy/Unhealthy, Good/Bad—those very dichotomies that rhetor-
icians themselves disavow and hope that neuroscientists would complicate. In promoting rhetoric’s
ontology as a jumping off point for neurorhetorics, I bring neurorhetorics into conversation with calls
from Nathan Stormer and Bridie McGreavy to think “rhetoric as an emergent, materially diverse
phenomenon” (1) as well as from Catherine Chaput and Joshua Hanan to not see affective relations as
outside of reinvention or beyond what material engagements can newly capacitate (339). In both cases,
the focus is on bodies and emplacement, networks and long-term patterns that congeal with social
shifts and structures of power.
If I were to propose my own future for neurorhetorics, I would say that its task should be to
dislocate brains, become itself a “body without a brain,”
4
make exceptional and outlandishly marbled
revealings, not being afraid, on the one hand, of the speculative and inventive power of ambiguity nor,
on the other, of forwarding claims made from a holistic study recognizing the complexity of rhetorical
ecologies extending far beyond humans. My hope is that neurorhetoricians, as Thomas Rickert says,
see rhetoric as “grounded in the material relations from which it springs, not simply as the situation
giving it shape and exigence” (x). He goes on to say, “Rhetoric impacts the senses, circulates in waves
of affects, communes to join and disjoin people,” and I will add: to such an extent that “the brain” will
never suffice as an explanation for the corporeality that Rickert invokes (x). Notably, things impact the
senses, support circulations, and provide exigencies for communions, slews, stews, flows, and speeds
stirring outside of a brain-body that feels joined or disjointed.
The brain, so-called, is always lagging behind itself and always something other than what it
appears to be in any representation, any technology or discourse. Here I enroll Dennett’s (2017)
view that consciousness is not the producer of content tout-court but a constructive outcome of
environmental encounters that enable survival. The reversal of the typical “brain out front” view that
Dennett captures also reminds me of Crick’s ideas about rhetoric, namely, that “rhetoric always thrives
in a certain eventful environment whose totality is always beyond our powers of representation, an
environment in which events are surprising, unanticipatable, and always entail a reversal of
a relationship of forces” (254). The outcome stages another event and another subject that can or
does respond to the next event—an endless line of co-constitutions (254–55).
What thinking about rhetoric as ontological can do is complicate human agency and reorient the
critic away from brains and toward what capacitates a neurorhetoric before its appearance. The
3
See Jack’s “Extreme Male Brain” article as an example of neuroreductionism, Thornton’s Brain Culture for neuroinflationism, and
Gibbons’s “Dr. Spock” for neuroassimilation.
4
See Gruber, “There is No Brain.”
RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 385

movement is similar to Jenny Rice’s as she grapples with the insufficiency of “representation,
signification, ideology” for “explaining how evidence operates” and turns instead to “rhetorical
constellations” and histories of affective environments (Intro 16–17). As Gibbons articulates in this
forum, the “neuro-” prefix that introduces “neurorhetoric” is itself a kind of monument to what was
happening in the world in 2010 and, as a result, offers a false foregrounding for rhetoricians who seek
to look at capacitations beyond “the neuro” while pursuing invention. For me, neurorhetoric is
simultaneously at its beginnings and its end once we start to understand rhetoric as ontological.
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The “Neuro-” in Neurorhetorics
Michelle Gibbons
When Jordynn Jack and L. Gregory Applebaum published their neurorhetorics piece in 2010, they
made an important disciplinary intervention. Their articulation of neurorhetorics lent coherence to
a still-emergent research area, connected it to other associated research enterprises (neuroscience, and
also all the other neuro-enterprises, neurohumanities, neuroeconomics, neurolaw, and so forth). It has
been highly generative in my own research and in the discipline at large. It is central to this forum and
why I am writing this piece. But I am taking the opportunity that the forum provides to reflect on the
“neuro” in neurorhetorics—and to reconsider it, even. As I do so, I wonder if it may be time for
another intervention.
Neurorhetoric’s very existence reflects the nervous system’s centrality in human experience,
comprising the seat of so much that makes us distinctive as a species. But the nervous system is also
one of many human systems, which also include skeletal, cardiovascular, endocrine, muscular, and
immune systems, to name a few examples. These also matter for human life, as do the discourses
around them. “Gut rhetorics” is a more recent terminological intervention, introduced as reflection of
the prevalence and consequence of the digestive system and discourses around it (Kalin and Gruber
269). But there is no cardio-rhetoric that I know of, nor a musculo-rhetorics. We are rife with
embodiments and whether, what, and how we name our rhetorical work regarding them is of real
disciplinary consequence.
We have drawn neuro- from the neuroscientists, who have thus designated their own field. The
term “neuroscience” emerged in the mid-twentieth century, as scientific inquiry coalesced around
advances in understanding the nervous system, especially the brain. Its introduction was, in part,
a purposeful attempt to unite several different enterprises under one terminological banner (Rose; see
also Mehta et al.). As David R. Gruber outlines in the introduction to this forum, neurorhetorics
emerged alongside and in direct response to neuroscience’s somewhat dramatic ascendance, both
scientifically and culturally, in the late twentieth century. If we are to take a rhetorical lens to such
work, then it makes sense to adopt that prefix, to affix it to rhetoric so as to denote our engagement
with it. At the same time, adopting the “neuro” prefix in the way that we have positions our research
on the terms of that history.
In some ways, neurorhetorics’ emergence as a rhetorical subfield reflected the fervor around
neuroscience at the time, with its rampant proliferation of all things “neuro.” It took shape as an
instance of the very trends it also called into question. We might thus pause to consider if the “neuro”
in neurorhetorics valorizes the brain and associated processes, overemphasizing their constitutive role
in human affairs (and perhaps at the cost of other embodiments); although, of course, that sort of
questioning has always been part of neurorhetorics, which has been centrally concerned with addres-
sing overstatements and hype around the brain (e.g., Gibbons, Thornton). More importantly, and
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where my reconsideration of the “neuro” in neurorhetorics ultimately lies, is in the matter of how it
centers neuroscience itself.
Neurorhetorics, in its prevailing formulation, centers science. It is conceived as encompassing two
lines of inquiry, the rhetoric of neuroscience and the neuroscience of rhetoric (see Jack and
Appelbaum). By this formulation, the “neuro” in neurorhetorics is best understood not as
a reference to the nervous system itself, but more specifically, to a scientific field that studies it.
Because of this, the neuro now feels a bit confining. That is, it does not so readily terminologically
house a broader-based rhetoric of the nervous system, which is what I argue for here. So perhaps it is
time for another intervention, to fold neurorhetorics, as currently conceived, into something larger
and more capacious, which includes and encompasses neuroscience but is not limited to it, but which
also includes the other discourses that are also—although differently—concerned with neural systems.
It is time to reimagine the “neuro” in neurorhetorics in reference to neurality writ large rather than
neuroscience in particular; that is, to set loose neurorhetorics from neuroscience and pin it instead to
a more capacious sense of neurality, of which neuroscience is still a key part. Neurorhetorics does not
have to remain bound to its early articulation, useful and productive though that has been. A thusly
reformulated neurorhetorics offers a more encompassing disciplinary configuration around rhetorics
of the mind/brain more broadly, to include not only neuroscience, but also psychology, psychiatry,
and mental health discourses, as well as those concerning the neural nets of artificial intelligence and
others. A capacious neurality is also more inclusive of vernacular brain/nervous system discourses,
which can be far removed from the scientific study of neuroscience, as for example in lay discussions
of athletic injuries in professional sports. A thusly reimagined “neuro” aligns with a more transdisci-
plinary research enterprise (Jack, Raveling 180), in which the rhetoric of neuroscience and neu-
roscience of rhetoric still play a vital role but where the language and arrangements of the sciences
do not necessarily dominate the critical effort to understand complex bodies and a multitude of
embodiments.
Works Cited
Gibbons, Michelle. “Seeing the Mind in the Matter: Functional Brain Imaging as Framed Visual Argument.”
Argumentation and Advocacy, vol. 43, no. 3–4, 2007, pp. 75–188. doi: 10.1080/00028533.2007.11821673 .
Jack, Jordynn. Raveling the Brain: Toward a Transdisciplinary Neurorhetoric. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2019. Print.
Jack, Jordynn, and L. Gregory Applebaum. “‘This Is Your Brain on Rhetoric’: Research Directions for Neurorhetorics.”
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 5, 2010 pp. 411–37. doi: 10.1080/02773945.2010.516303 .
Kalin, Jason, and David Gruber. “Gut Rhetorics: Toward Experiments in Living with Microbiota.” Rhetoric of Health &
Medicine, vol. 1, no. 3–4, 2018, 269–95. Print doi: 10.5744/rhm.2018.1014 .
Mehta, Arpan R., et al. “Etymology and the Neuron(e).” Brain, vol. 143, no. 1, 2020 pp. 374–79. doi: 10.1093/brain/
awz367 .
Rose, Steven. “50 Years of Neuroscience.” The Lancet, vol. 385, no. 9968, 2015, pp. 598–99. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)
60224-0 .
Thornton, Davi. Brain Culture: Neuroscience and Popular Media. Rutgers UP, 2011. Print.
Critical Neurorhetorics and False Justications
Eli Wilson
Neurorhetorics provides a useful starting point to critically unpack the ways in which we are
conditioned to see emotion and feeling as in direct opposition to logic, reason, and normative
belonging. Thus, we open up pathways for understanding how the brain is bound up in
discursive power struggles: “ . . . the goal of neurorhetorics—if such a term can be used—
would be to investigate the rhetorical appeal, effects, and implications of this prefix, neuro-”
(Jack 406). The brain itself becomes a nodal point in a much larger conversation of how
bodies are hierarchized in order to establish which bodies are ab/normal and valuable/not
388 D. R. GRUBER ET AL.

(Dolmage). For my purposes, I would like to focus on conversations around brains that feel
and minds that are developing. I seek potential pathways in contemporary discourse that are
worth examining by using an approach that combines critical theory and methods with
neurorhetorics, specifically focusing on how affects about the developing brain impact the
negotiation of identity politics in the current cultural milieu.
While neurological discourse may not seem like a natural entry point for a critical con-
versation about cultural and political issues, I argue that the felt unnaturalness is exactly why
we ought to do so. Rhetorical scholars such as Raymie McKerrow push rhetoricians to
critically question the boundaries of our practice. Scholars like James Jasinski remind us
that the role of the rhetorical critic is to chart “political judgment and the relationship
between judgment and discursive practice,” (259). Thus, it is part and parcel of the practice
of rhetorical criticism to search for new avenues of inquiry; new conversations that can shed
light on how the circulation of particular discourses create “contexts that make critical
meaning, judgment, and action expansive, provocative, generative; in a word, powerful”
(Morris 32).
In a deeply fragmented world, focusing critical rhetorical attention on the prefix “neuro-” and
related sociocultural discourses provides benefits. First, it allows scholars to examine how
normative notions of the mind and its development are deployed within rhetoric. For example,
when looking at the discourses surrounding legislation that would ban critical race theory from
the school curriculum, it is clear that how minds are educated is of utmost concern. Some White
parents cite worries that their children will feel disturbed by the content or feel too guilty to
properly learn in the classroom (see “Introducing”). Others claim that minds that are blissfully
and willfully ignorant of racial matters are preferable, because it allows for a happier life (see
Cabrera, Franklin, and Watson). Implicit references to the neurological abound: knowledge is
needed to shape young minds, but one presumably must be careful of the kind of knowledge
with which we saddle them. Rhetorical appeals of safety and protection become bolstered by an
affective discourse that claims that talking about race is simply too bound up in feelings of guilt
and shame for White children to endure in their educational environment. An examination of
how race and the neurological work together in this rhetoric is made possible from a critical
neurorhetorical standpoint that unpacks the empirical manifestations and circulations of ideol-
ogy in argumentation.
Additionally, a critical neurorhetoric is able to provide insight into how discourses of civility and
appropriateness reinforce hierarchical notions of what minds matter. To give an example, legislation
aimed at banning drag shows contains and reflects an affectively anxious discourse of exposing
children to the “inappropriate” too early in their lives; drag shows supposedly harm development,
and the legislation seeks to “protect” cis/straight children but at the expense of queer children and
adults (see Hernández). Claiming drag shows are too sexually expressive for children, or that drag
queens are sexually deviant/perverse individuals sets up an argument that young minds must suppress
sex and expressions of sexuality and gender that stray too far from the normative. Such arguments
prioritize the development of heteronormative children, while young queer minds receive the message
early that they have somehow been contaminated.
These examples represent only some of many competing cultural discourses that draw on
neurorhetorics. Crucially, discursive frameworks help to uphold current regimes of power. Thus,
I take a moment to draw our collective attention to the ways that we might use rhetorics of
mind and childhood development to critically engage with complex and often highly contested
cultural and political issues as rhetorical scholars. As McKerrow states in his landmark piece on
critical rhetoric, “The aim is to understand the integration of power/knowledge in society—what
possibilities for change the integration invites or inhibits and what intervention strategies might
be considered appropriate to effect social change” (91). Neuroscience and the brain invite modes
of rhetorical resistance, especially when initially staged as a shabby support structure for
unfounded claims.
RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 389

Works Cited
Cabrera, Nolan L., et al. “Whiteness in Higher Education: The Invisible Missing Link in Diversity and Racial Analyses.”
ASHE Higher Education Report, vol. 24, no. 6, 2016, pp. 7–125. doi: 10.1002/aehe.20116 .
Dolmage, Jay T. Disability Rhetoric: Critical Perspectives on Disability. Syracuse UP, 2014.
Hernández, Amanda. “As Drag Shows Go ‘Mainstream,’ Some Red States Look to Restrict Them.” Stateline.org, 1 Apr.
2024, https://stateline.org/2024/04/01/as-drag-shows-go-mainstream-some-red-states-look-to-restrict-them/.
Accessed 20 May 2024.
“Introducing: Nice White Parents.” New York Times, 23 Jul. 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-
white-parents-serial.html. Accessed 1 May 2024.
Jack, Jordynn. “What Are Neurorhetorics?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 5, 2010, pp. 405–10. doi: 10.1080/
02773945.2010.519758 .
McKerrow, Raymie E. “‘Research in Rhetoric’ Revisited.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 101, no. 1, 2015, pp. 151–61.
doi: 10.1080/00335630.2015.994915 .
Morris, Charles E. “(Self-)portrait of Prof. R. C.: A Retrospective.” Western Journal of Communication, vol. 74, no. 1,
2010, pp. 4–42. doi: 10.1080/10570310903463760.
No Recovery in Sight: Opacity as the Ethical Core of Neurorhetoric
Paige Welsh
Neurorhetorics has an opportunity to engage discussions on the ethical implications of thinking
through materiality while yet holding suspended space for opacity. While the existing technology of
the neurosciences—think everything from brain scans to psychiatric pharmaceuticals—has perhaps
been overhyped and oversimplified, we must contend with how the neurosciences trace out in
definitive form the materiality of the symbolic world within our bodies. Such tracing feels oxymoronic
in a philosophical framework that makes a sharp cut between the symbolic and bodily, treating them
not as mutual friends but as opposing foes. Consequently, as I grapple with neurorhetorics and its
attempt to recompose material-symbolic symbiosis, I feel a pleasant frustration akin to trying to see
the back of my own head. Consider Inessential Solidarity, where D. Diane Davis describes mirror
neurons illuminating within myself as I watch others move (24). I read this description, and it registers
as a fleeting recovery. I am a reply to others as manifested in these neurons! But then, what does that
mean? I argue this lurch between recovery and disorientation comes out brushing against an opacity.
Judith P. Butler describes an opacity at the core of our being for which we cannot give an account
(39). In their words, “There is a history to my body of which I have no recollection” (34). When I am
asked, “why am I?” I can fabricate an account of why after the fact, but in truth, I am a lyric in a song
I do not know. Anything I assemble is provisionary. The question I pose about the meaning of mirror
neurons is immediately dissatisfying because I am using them to give another account of myself that
attempts to escape how I do not know or control this aspect of my bodily history. The opacity remains.
Butler is aligned with Édouard Glissant in the acceptance of opacity as a route to more ethical
relations (Butler 136). As Glissant points out in his defense of colonized peoples’ right to opacity over
endless explanations to and from colonizers, acceptance of opacity in Others may be “the real
foundation of Relation” (Poetics 190). If we accept the impossibility of fully explaining one another,
perhaps we may learn to sit with difference and forgiveness. Opacity is helpful for understanding the
materiality implicit in neurorhetorics, a subarea that Jack helpfully outlines as investigation of “the
rhetorical appeal, effects, and implications of this prefix, neuro-,” adding that rhetorical scholars can
also “carefully consider collaborative work between rhetoricians and neuroscientists” (406). Her vision
of neurorhetorics acknowledges the limits and affectedness of cognition but without hoping to fully
define the parameters. In theory, a deep exploration of the materiality of cognition in rhetorical
exchange could prove illuminating and potentially exonerate us from the guilt of failing to live up to
idealized forms.
Yet we know from history that drawing attention to the materiality of persons has often had the
opposite result. More idealized forms and new typologies. Sylvia Wynter’s work on the question of
390 D. R. GRUBER ET AL.

Being, for example, identifies the trouble with Western philosophy as a continual insistence on “non-
homogeneity” in matter (274–80). What started as a cut between the divine and the carnal was
unsettled by the recalcitrance of the material world: Earth does indeed move around the sun, and
later, the evidence for evolution becomes too overwhelming to deny. However, the material world’s
proddings did not disrupt the initial divine/carnal cut. Rather, those proddings recongealed into
disturbing new formations. The divine moving over the earthly was substituted in the Enlightenment
with lawful, reasonable Man moving over and inflicting violence on those racialized as not White as
well as “the mad” (304). Calling Others a material type has functioned as a warrant for abuse. Yet
Wynter ultimately proposes that humanity claims its autonomy as self-inscripting through a new
science that accepts the fusion of the symbolic and material worlds to resolve colonial violence (330).
Here I see a key parallel between Wynter’s history of colonial being and the topoi of neurorhetorics.
Neurorhetorics have laid out abundant warnings about flattening science into pithy axioms and
examined how fantasies of race, sex, disability, and class have become sites of invention in neuro- and
psych research (Condit; Gibbons; Jack; Jackson; Thornton). We have thus become aware that science
opens a needed dialog across the cut of the material and symbolic, but the dialogue itself will inevitably
be shaped by whatever abstractions and orientations have shaped the world. With this awareness
comes an anxiety: what if inquiries into the materiality of our bodies will be transformed into license
for oppression on the grounds of difference? Historically, that is what the West does. I read this
understandable anxiety stirring in some scholarship in neurorhetorics, for example, when Chris Mays
interrogates the larger field’s easy admittance of neuroscience into composition pedagogies (see Mays;
Mays and Jung). Simultaneously, however, neurorhetorics is attempting to sit with neuroscience as an
opportunity for new materialist inquiry and investigation into the sensuous aspects of communication
(Gruber “Suasive”; Marinelli). What can we say about this doubled neurorhetorical impulse?
Thinking with Wynter’s provocation to seize the master codes, I maintain that a materialist
orientation in neurorhetorics has much to offer questions of justice, so long as we do not explain
away opacity. We are diverse in our materiality. The denial of difference is itself a tool of oppression as
it looks away from the diverse needs of beings to thrive along with unequal distributions of debility
(Puar). Acknowledging material difference will be part of recognizing injury and reconciliation. I want
to see a future for neurorhetorics that invents by allowing opacity its space. I advocate for an
orientation rooted in reflexive curiosity such as I see, for instance, modeled in Jenell M. Johnson’s
inquiry into the history of lobotomy. The oppression wrought on “the mad” in Johnson’s work was not
revealed with a single, dramatic truth but could only be explored through multiple public discourses of
lobotomy. Although Johnson does not directly name opacity, it is present in how she permits the
discourses of lobotomy to emerge and unsettle each other without losing sight of the people most
gravely harmed. To quote Glissant, “Relation struggles and states itself in opacity. It defers self-
importance” (Poetics 186). Humility in the presence of opacity allows room for the complexity of
difference, a deeply ethical rhetorical inquiry. Indeed, if opacity is at the core of being, as Butler says,
then opacity is, as Glissant notes, an acceptance and ethical practice about not always pursuing or
demanding a complete inscription nor pretending to be perfectly inscribed.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith P. Giving an Account of Oneself. 1st ed. Fordham UP, 2009. Print.
Condit, Celeste. “How Bad Science Stays that Way: Brain Sex, Demarcation, and the Status of Truth in the Rhetoric of
Science.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 26 no. 4, 1996, pp. 83–109. doi: 10.1080/02773949609391080 .
Davis, D. Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations. U of Pittsburgh P, 2010. Print.
Dolmage, Jay T. Disability Rhetoric: Critical Perspectives on Disability. Syracuse UP, 2014.
Gibbons, Michelle G. “Beliefs about the Mind as Doxastic Inventional Resource: Freud, Neuroscience, and the Case of
Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 5, 2014, pp. 427–48. doi: 10.1080/02773945.
2014.957411 .
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. U of Michigan. 1997. Print.
RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 391

Gruber, David R. “Suasive Speech: A Stronger Affective Defense of Rhetoric and the Politics of Cognitive Poetics.”
Language & Communication, vol. 49, Jul. 2016, pp. 36–44.10.1016/j.langcom.2016.05.001
Jack, Jordynn. “‘The Extreme Male Brain?’: Incrementum and the Rhetorical Gendering of Autism.” Disability Studies
Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 2011. doi: 10.18061/dsq.v31i3.1672. Accessed 1 Jun. 2024.
Jackson, John P. “Whatever Happened to the Cephalic Index? the Reality of Race and the Burden of Proof.” Rhetoric
Society Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 5, 2010, pp. 438–58. doi: 10.1080/02773945.2010.517233 .
Jasinski, James. “The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism.” Western Journal of Communication, vol. 65,
no. 3, 2001, pp. 249–70. doi: 10.1080/10570310109374705 .
Johnson, Jenell M. American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History. U of Michigan P, 2014. Print.
Marinelli, Kevin. “Revisiting Edwin Black: Exhortation as a Prelude to Emotional-Material Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society
Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 5, 2016, pp. 465–85. doi: 10.1080/02773945.2016.1151927 .
Mays, Chris. “Who’s Driving This Thing, Anyway?: Emotion and Language in Rhetoric and Neuroscience.” JAC, vol. 33,
no. 1/2, 2013, pp. 301–14. Print.
Mays, Chris, and Julie Jung. “Priming Terministic Inquiry: Toward a Methodology of Neurorhetoric.” Rhetoric Review,
vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, pp. 41–59. doi: 10.1080/07350198.2012.630957 .
Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. Print.
Thornton, Davi Johnson. Brain Culture: Neuroscience and Popular Media. Rutgers UP, 2011. Print.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its
Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337. doi: 10.
1353/ncr.2004.0015.
Neurorhetorics as Dialogic Neurodiversities: Reenvisioning Agency, Advocacy, and
Argument
Wendy K. Z. Anderson
As one of many adult women recently diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD;
Jargon), identifying as “neurodiverse” offered me agency unlike the deficit model term “learning
disability” (Jack et al. 424; Livingston et al. 81), and I have consequently developed an interest in
diagnostic and treatment equity. After being labeled “hypersensitive” and incapable for so long, I felt
diminished and too often acquiesced to others, finding my value in “helpfulness” to others. As an
adult, a colleague reflected that I read people well— an act that defined my survival.
Neurorhetoric scholars have researched autism (Ballentine et al.; Jack; Sarrett; Sochacka), yet, for
this forum, I would like to focus on ADHD as the most common neurodevelopmental diagnosis in US
children (Li et al. 1; Owens 191; Sikov et al. 1632). Intersectional narrative reflections
(“Neurodivergent Voices”) help illustrate the dialogic challenges associated with neurodiverse assess-
ment and treatment. Thus, I explore the definition of neurodiversity through autoethnographic
reflection and postulate areas for future research on neurorhetorical agency within a dialogic praxis.
Dening Neurodivergence Processing through Agency
Neurodivergence is defined as “a cultural identity or a descriptor for non-normative ways of being,
thinking, sensing, communicating, and learning” (Livingstone et al. 80). As a “catch-all” term,
“neurodivergence” can include autism, ADHD, down syndrome, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, dyslexia,
dyspraxia, mixed receptive and expressive disorder, Prader-Will syndrome, social pragmatic commu-
nication disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, Williams syndrome, among other diagnoses, lacking type
specificity. As a processing experience, ADHD in particular interrupts one’s ability to concentrate on
tasks and is further categorized into combined-type ADHD (ADHD-C), predominantly inattentive-
type ADHD (ADHD-I), and predominantly hyperactive/impulsive ADHD (I-Cheng et al. 1067771).
Binary gender diagnoses have purported men tend to externalize ADHD symptoms, women/girls tend
to internalize them (Winter et al. 416, 430), making diagnoses and treatments culturally specific
processes related to socialization, yet scientific research has yet to detail diagnosis typography for
nonbinary; trans; Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC); and other populations.
392 D. R. GRUBER ET AL.

As Jack (1–2, 8) and others (e.g., Dumit 5–6) have pointed out, medical diagnoses influence popular
and educational neurorhetorics. Identity attributions rhetorically coconstitute the agency of people
with ADHD. While stereotypes abound about ADHD as related primarily to [White] hyper “reactive”
young boys unable to sit still (Musser et al.), [White] girls and women are labeled as “hypersensitive”
or “overthinkers,” and both can benefit equally from medications. Additionally, continued diagnostic
discrepancies of disenfranchised people (women/girls, nonbinary, trans, BIPOC, international, and
people with linguistic barriers) (Shi et al. 1; Sikov et al. 1633, 1641) complicates intersectional under-
standings. Many students of color, women, and/or students from working-class backgrounds have
approached me with fears of diagnostic repercussions. When neurotypical people in positions of
power attribute identity characteristics to neurodivergent people, differences in intellectual processing
can be reduced to “laziness” (Hawthorne 505) or a lack of “choice.” Given the social and discursive
factors at play, qualitative researchers and critical rhetoricians are well suited to describe experiences
more equitably.
Reection through Dialogic Advocacy
In addition to diagnostic inequity, educational support depends on how educators understand
neurodiversity. During a fall parent-teacher conference, our 9-year-old’s (also diagnosed with
ADHD) fourth-grade teacher confidently asserted the words, “It is 100% ‘he’ does not want to do
the work.” Recognizing a difference in how our child processed their work, I requested a visual
reminder to ask the teacher questions and bring unfinished homework home. The teacher insisted on
revising the instructions to include “look on the board” and “check your peer’s desk.” I cringed,
mirroring the agency I felt contained by her misunderstanding. The experience demonstrates how
future scholarship can ask questions like, “How does an educator’s ‘narrow conceptions of intention-
ality and expression’ (Demo 280) influence their educational agency when dialogic barriers are
asserted by their teacher?”
Rhetorical scholarship on agency offers insight for neurodivergent research. Although a well-
developed concept in rhetorical studies (Bastian et al.; Campbell; Cooper; Miller; Rand; Sowards),
neurodivergent work would benefit from a social-cultural, dialectical agency-based framework
between willing, reflective, and adaptative social actors. As “a critical response to problems and/or
conditions requiring us to tinker with, exploit, and/or bypass knowledge system limits using outsider
expertise and/or tools” (Demo 279), agency resides in spaces between people where social conventions
are challenged, constraints are renegotiated (Rand 300). For neurodiversities like ADHD, agency is
constrained by those in power (Gunn and Cloud 71), which requires dialogic work and advocacy, like
working with an ally and accomplice.
In a recent conference, our 12-year-old child’s (also diagnosed with ADHD) science teacher
mentioned “his” missing lab notes. I requested to see the PowerPoint and note forms required by
their 504 plan. When asked to find the definition required by the notes within the slide’s three
paragraphs of text, our child could not. Their surprised teacher then showed the definition and
thanked us for telling him. We talked through strategies (e.g., following the underlined word in the
first paragraph) and our tween looked relieved. My questioning and the teacher’s willingness to dialog
afforded our child agency, and we witnessed how insider knowledge changed advocacy and research
(Bernard et al. 16; Demo 292). Agency exists within dialog between neurotypical and undiagnosed
neurodivergent and diagnosed neurodivergent people as they engage processing assumptions and
differences.
As our oldest child advocates for their educational needs, I see choices that constrain their ability to
thrive, especially with digital technology. For example, many schools use iPads or tablets for research
purposes. Students with ADHD can experience other neurodivergences, such as dysgraphia and
dyslexia, making technology useful when trying to compose papers, yet a double bind exists in that
digital distractions can also amplify ADHD symptoms (Sriwaranun et al. 976–77). Half of our child’s
teachers allow them to leave their iPad on his/her teacher desks. The vignette shows how instead of
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being within an individual, agency “is something that one might exercise within a set of conditions that
exceeds one’s control” (Rand 12). Neurodivergent agency remains contained within a dialectic invol-
ving neurotypical interpretations, decisions, and environmental choices, which warrant further
investigation.
Engaging in more cultural, situated neurorhetorical analysis may expand scholars’ awareness of
dialectical agencies for people living with neurovergences. Neurodivergent diagnoses require dialogi-
cally equitable assessment and treatment processes, as well as a shared affect. Reflective engagement
with those diagnosed can also present new argumentative framings to shift processing assumptions
beyond choice-based binaries and into dialogic agency, establishing a neurorhetorical foundation for
research of and advocacy for neurodivergent people.
Works Cited
Ballantine, Jacquie, et al. “A Distinct Rhetoric: Autistic University Students’ Lived Experiences of Academic
Acculturation and Writing Development.” College English, vol. 86, no. 2, 2023, pp. 136–61. doi: 10.58680/
ce202332759 .
Bastian, Heather, and Jennifer Nish. “Toward Disruptive Agency.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 75, no.
2, 2023, pp. 389–417. https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/ccc/online-archive/v50-4. Accessed 15 Apr. 2024.
Bernard, Liana, et al. “Not Your ‘Typical’ Research: Inclusion Ethics in Neurodiversity Scholarship.” Industrial and
Organizational Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1, 2023, 50–54. doi: 10.1017/iop.2022.100 .
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An Aperitif toward Neurorhetorics and Gastronomy
Tyler Snelling
Whether nested under the framework of behavioral neuroscience, nutritional neuroscience, or neu-
rogastronomy, many researchers have devoted significant attention over the last thirty years to the
relationship between health, food, and the brain. The growth of these interrelated subfields reflects
a broad interest in neuroscience alongside new equipment and social problems warranting additional
research. Recently, for instance, fourteen scientists spanning institutions like Texas A&M, Harvard
Medical School, and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) met for the 2022 Marabou
Symposium on the “Neurobiology of Eating Behavior.” They concluded the conference’s report by
suggesting that “cross-fertilization” among communities interested in nutrition and brain mechan-
isms “offers the opportunity to incorporate knowledge of eating behavior into nutrition practice,
policy, and education to enhance their adherence and effectiveness” (Stover et al. 599). This “knowl-
edge” includes topics such as the neural pathways activated when eating. It also includes environ-
mental influences on taste and medical interventions to control consumption. Determining the
interventions and their appropriateness, the means of control and which bodies to control, as well
as the policies that mark the healthy from the unhealthy spurs a need for critical digestion from
neurorhetoricians.
I cannot, at this time, draw direct lines from neuroscientific research to policy outcomes; yet
rhetoricians should assess scholarship like that completed at Marabou, as it circulates insights that
encourage people to change their habits and eat “better.” As rhetorical scholars, we are well positioned
to investigate and trouble what “better” entails in this context, as others from fat studies have done
(Cooper, “Fat Studies,” 1020–34). But the translation of neuroscience into policy recommendations
illustrates more generally where neurorhetoricians can intervene to minimize unethical arguments
seemingly supported by cutting-edge research.
I offer this forum contribution as an aperitif on neurorhetorics and gastronomy to stimulate an
interest in evaluating the circulation of discourses entangled with claims about brains, appetites,
cravings, hunger, wellness, and health. I argue that neurodiscourses about food demonstrate that
issues embedded in food policy stretch well beyond law and governance and necessarily include
people’s everyday decisions and concerns about what to eat. Future work in neurorhetorics should
thus attend to both the consequences of neuroscience informing legislation or expert guidance—as in
Marabou or USDA’s “MyPlate”—but also consider more mundane impacts that occur when people
discuss neurodiscourses and make choices in their local grocery stores or kitchens. In the remaining
space, I will defend the value of neuropolicy as a continued heuristic for scholarship, but I primarily
aim to illustrate the need for a greater focus on neuropolicy as encompassing everyday rituals and
gastronomical spaces outside of legal institutions.
Neuropolicy and Neurogastronomy
Rhetorical attention to “neuro-policy”—what Eric Racine et al. define as claims that motivate reg-
ulatory or legal action (161)—has opened up scholarship on how neurodiscourse circulates among
publics. Jordynn Jack and L. Gregory Appelbaum, for one, caution scholars against uncritically
RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 395

adopting the “weak analogies” in neuro-popularization that can make their way into policy discus-
sions; as they say, imagery when parts of the brain “light up” on functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) scans can misrepresent the relationship between neurons and cognition as somehow
naturally ingrained (426–27). Sociologist Matthew Wade has warned against “hyper-reflexivity
whereby our conscious selves induce propensities to ‘good’ action at the neurological level,” which
could result in “looping effects” that function to cement a particular “ethics” as “fixed and rigid” while
subjects try to maintain neuroscientific ideals (155). Accepting that my purpose is not to settle a debate
about what people do with neurodiscourses, I rather turn to these scholars to argue for a particular
focus on neuropolicy and its entrance into gastronomical discussions. Overall, neuropolicy warrants
consideration given how Jack claimed it represents “the very basis for argument within the neuros-
ciences” around the question “what do we do about it?” (6). Yet, despite efforts by different scholars,
few have examined whether or how nutritional guidance incorporates neuroscientific insights that
informed regulation or policymaking and how those then, in turn, affect audiences at the level of the
everyday. Indeed, scholarly attention concerning neuropolicy should veer toward quotidian situations.
Rhetorical study of neurogastronomy can expand how rhetoricians research bodies by connecting
habit (repeated human behavior) with materiality (neuroprocessing/food) with discourse (language/
memory).
5
After taking a bite, taste buds scattered across the tongue and throat feed information
about food’s texture, saltiness, sweetness, bitterness, sourness, and savoriness to the brain. The data
from food breaking down as we chew mingle in our minds with what we have observed, smelled,
heard, and recollected when eating it or something similar. Together, the composite of these sensa-
tions construct what neuroscientist Gordon M. Shepherd describes as a “mental image” through the
“human brain flavor system” that cannot always be divorced from culture, space, and place (155–60).
The subfield of neurogastronomy orients scientific inquiry toward the many organs, cognitive
processes, and social contexts that enable people to construct images perceived as taste and flavor.
Donovan Conley’s work on the rhetoric of taste is similar and useful here, since it suggests that people
eat based on “aesthetic judgment and corporeal longing” where socially enculturated desires meet
physiological needs (223). Rhetoricians can draw on this vocabulary to engage neurogastronomy with
a shared set of terms that attends to the many layers of persuasion involved in compelling people to eat
this or not eat that, or eat or not eat.
Knvul Sheikh’s article in The Atlantic suggested that “rewiring our brains into thinking that
broccoli tastes more delicious and chocolate cake less so” indicates that “neurogastronomy . . .
found the secret to nudging people into eating more healthily” (par. 3). Sheikh’s language of “nudging
people” raises questions; it risks forwarding assumptions about people’s capacity to ignore foods as
well as their structural access to vegetables or healthy foods, which may well be a privilege.
Furthermore, it is unclear what “secret” in neurogastronomy could cause such a reversal in people’s
perception. Conversely, Jennifer Peace Rhind and Gregor Law’s Cooking for the Senses: Vegan
Neurogastronomy provides an alternative path, thinking about neurogastronomy as a kind of creative
mindfulness. While any attempt to distill neuroscience into eating fairly specific foods seems risky,
Cooking for the Senses interprets neurogastronomy as a way to “help us transform our time in the
kitchen into a form of mindfulness and . . . wellbeing that this can offer” (15). I read Rhind and Law’s
work through my previous scholarship on culinary practices, which identified “small, intimate
moments where eating, cooking, and farming result in care by strengthening cultural and communal
relationships” (Snelling 297). Important to this framing, Rhind and Law’s “Afterword” notes that
neighborly collaboration helped develop many of the book’s recipes. Whereas the neuropolicy of
neurogastronomy might subtly convince us to change habits or perform mainstream health and
wellness discourses, the “neuro” may also offer a radical break from an industrial food system that
wants us to pay as little attention as possible to what we eat. In that sense, thinking about the brain, or
the life of the mind, or mindfulness, holds potential for transforming everyday practices.
5
For more on the idea of habit, see Simonson.
396 D. R. GRUBER ET AL.

An aperitif should stimulate desire without the eater feeling complete in their experience. This
essay, like an aperitif, offers an initial course. I aim to stimulate the audience into wanting a deeper
analysis of neuropolicy as politicians and broader publics pick up neuroscience. If Cliodhna O’Connor
and Helene Joffe correctly identify audiences as active evaluators of information rather than uncritical,
passive puppets, then some of my concerns about how discourses travel in everyday spaces to affect
change may warrant less interest. Yet the continuous presence of diet culture despite years of
messaging about the failures of diets may demonstrate the need for additional concern about how
subfields of neuroscience are wielded to prime audiences to act in specific ways. The future of
neuropolicy as a concept animating work in neurorhetorics may prove advantageous for under-
standing small moments where people adapt to and adopt subcultures of consumption but sometimes
also realize mind-body insights fit for resistant purposes.
Works Cited
Conley, Donovan. “M/Orality.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2012, pp. 223–27. doi: 10.
1080/14791420.2015.1014187 .
Cooper, Charlotte. “Fat Studies: Mapping the Field.” Sociology Compass, vol. 4, no. 12, 2010, pp. 1020–34. doi: 10.1111/j.
1751-9020.2010.00336.x .
Jack, Jordynn. “What Are Neurorhetorics?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Vol 40. no. 5, 2010, pp. 405–10. doi: 10.1080/
02773945.2010.519758 .
O’Connor, Cliodhna, and Helene Joffe. “How has Neuroscience Affected Lay Understandings of Personhood? A Review
of the Evidence.” Public Understanding of Science, vol. 22, no. 3, 2013, pp. 254–68. doi: 10.1177/0963662513476812 .
Racine, Eric, et al. “fMRI in the Public Eye.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 6, no. 2, 2005, pp. 159–64. doi: 10.1038/
nrn1609. Accessed 15 May 2024.
Rhind, Jennifer Peace, and Gregor Law. Cooking for the Senses: Vegan Neurogastronomy. Singing Dragon P, 2018. Print.
Sheikh, Knvul. “The Science that Could Make You Crave Broccoli More than Chocolate.” The Atlantic, 13 Feb. 2017,
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/neurogastronomy/516267/. Accessed 1 Jun. 2024.
Shepherd, Gordon. Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why it Matters. Columbia UP, 2012. Print.
Simonson, Peter. “Postconstructivisms and the Promise of Peircean Rhetoric.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 56, no. 3–4,
2023, pp. 215–41. doi: 10.5325/philrhet.56.3-4.0215 .
Snelling, Tyler. “Beyond Biomedicine: Finding Care in Embodied Memories about Food.” Rhetoric of Health &
Medicine, vol. 6, no. 3, 2023, pp. 277–303. doi: 10.5744/rhm.2023.3003 .
Stover, Patrick J., and et al. “Neurobiology of Eating Behavior, Nutrition, and Health.” Journal of Internal Medicine, vol.
294, no. 5, 2023, pp. 582–604. doi: 10.1111/joim.13699 .
Wade, Matthew. “Neuroethics and Ideals of the Citizen-Subject: A Sociological Critique of an Emerging Discipline.”
Refereed Proceedings of the Australian Sociological Association 2015 Conference, edited by Theresa Petray and
Anne Stephenson, Queensland, 23–26 Nov. 2015, pp. 150–58. Print.
Borrowed Commonplaces: Making New Uses of Well-Worn Spaces
Chris Mays
Again and again, it has been pointed out in neurorhetoric scholarship—as well as in broader rhetoric
scholarship—that scientific disciplines often deploy key terms without much explanation or examina-
tion. Back in 2010, Jordynn Jack and L. Gregory Applebaum noted that many complex terms, such as
“emotion,” which has a long history of rhetorical scholarship attached to it, were being deployed in
neuroscience scholarship without any context or explanation, on the assumption that “readers already
shared a common, disciplinary definition” (418). In the same vein (and around the same time), Julie
Jung and I warned of “disciplinary god-terms” that went uncontested in neuroscientific discourses
(55). More recently, Kathleen Daly Weisse, Julie Jung, and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins have articulated how
an “epistemology of abstraction” in math and science discourses masks the inequitable social-material
effects of cutting-edge technologies (284–85). In short, scientific discourses’ tendency toward abstrac-
tion and underspecification, as well as the accompanying pernicious social consequences of that
tendency, has been a longstanding source of frustration for rhetoricians and neurorhetoricians alike.
RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 397

While exposing the potential reductivity of neuroscientific discourse is an important avenue for
scholarship, I contend that much can be gained from flipping the issue around. Instead of focusing on
un- and underdefined commonplaces in neuroscientific (and scientific) discourses, that is, what if we
looked for terms and commonplaces that are well defined in these discourses, and explored the
possibilities of their use in rhetoric scholarship?
Kenneth Burke, in Attitudes Toward History, describes a phenomenon he calls “the stealing back
and forth of symbols.” This rhetorical move, Burke argues, has been used throughout history as “the
approved method whereby the Outs avoid ‘being driven into a corner’” (328). Burke gives the example
of the concept of “rights,” which the late eighteenth-century bourgeoisie rhetorically deployed to claim
power from the aristocracy and the state. Later, Burke explains, one of these rights—“freedom”—was
“stolen” by Karl Marx as a rhetorical means to swing the balance of political power from the
bourgeoisie to the proletariat (328). In each of these historical moments, a disempowered group (a
group on the “Outs”) was able to claim a bit of the rhetorical momentum of the group in power by
appropriating for themselves that in-group’s key terms.
What I’m proposing is not so much trying to swing the balance of power between academic
disciplines, even though there is certainly a disparity (see Condit). Rather, mine is a move focused on
invention, one that would explore the possibilities of terminological overlap with the (neuro)sciences,
with the goal of finding productive interdisciplinary commonplaces. Not exactly “stealing,” but rather,
borrowing a term for a new use. Sara Ahmed describes such a process as “picking up” a term, which
gives it new life. When words are “picked up,” she writes, “you can hear the buzz, how they are
becoming busy” (32).
Coincidentally, Ahmed uses the neuroscientific concept of plasticity to underline the difficulty of
this move, since the more often a term is used, the more established the (neural) pathways associated
with that use becomes, and the harder it is to use the term a different way (42). Such “deviant” use (in
other places Ahmed also calls this “queer use” [44]) opens up more pathways, and allows the term to
take on new shapes.
Importantly, Ahmed then inverts this image of a term’s shape changing with new use, explaining
that it is the shape of the space the term occupies that shifts, and it is this change that allows more users
to inhabit and make use of the space. As she explains, the shape of a space conforms to the
particularities of repeated similar uses, creating lasting “impressions” that “you can witness [. . .]
rather like you can witness an indent on the surface of a chair; an indent is created when a body leaves,
telling us someone was there once they have gone” (43–44). Rhetoric, too, thinks of key terms as
particular spaces of meaning shaped by repeated use. Commonplaces are those terms used most often
by members of a particular community, and, via repeated use, acquire the “indent” of those users.
Neuroscientific commonplaces are terms that are spaces shaped by the repeated uses of the neuros-
cientific community.
What we in neurorhetoric would be doing by “picking up” and thus adopting neuroscientific terms
would, then, be inhabiting the spaces of neuroscience differently, finding new applications for those
(to us, un)common terms. Such inhabitation could benefit neurorhetoric in a conceptual sense, in that
the new uses of these terms could generate new rhetorical theory, new methodologies, and new
perspectives on neurorhetoric. As well, neurorhetoricians inhabiting unfamiliar spaces would benefit
the field in a practical sense, as this practice could create chances to work with scholars in other fields
around what would be, now, shared terms. These collaborations could strengthen interdisciplinary
connections and create exciting new research opportunities across disciplines.
Jack and Applebaum’s finding that “emotion” was poorly defined in neurorhetoric research serves
as a point of departure for the method advocated here. Instead of focusing on terms that may be well
defined in rhetoric or neurorhetoric scholarship but are less so in neuroscience, in this case, the
neurorhetorician would choose a term that was precisely the opposite: clearly articulated and fre-
quently explored in neuroscience scholarship, but lacking much specific research in rhetoric or
neurorhetoric. This method starts, following Burke, with the symbol of a different group (a common-
place), and then, following Ahmed, tries to inhabit differently that commonplace-space. It would be
398 D. R. GRUBER ET AL.

the well-worn terms of neuroscience—those terms they mostly have already figured out—that would
be the terms we would be happy to borrow for a while.
Such a move might risk confounding neuroscientists, but it would avoid the risk of slipping into the
reductionisms that may (or may not) be attached to those terms. Of course, neurorhetorical explora-
tions of such terms might not directly inform neuroscientific debates (although they very well might),
but these explorations could provide a new perspective for (neuro)rhetoricians that reorients our
views on language, or neurorhetoric, or rhetoric. In short, this version of neurorhetoric asks what
rhetorical inquiry would look like if we started in a new and (at first) un-rhetorical place. Starting our
inquiries with scientific commonplaces means starting our inquiries from spaces we do not typically
inhabit. Scholarship generated from these inquiries, though, has the potential to add new vitality to
neurorhetoric. To create a buzz; to become (productively) busy.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use. Duke UP, 2019. Print.
Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes toward History. Hermes Publications, 1959. Print.
———. “How Should We Study the Symbolizing Animal?” National Communication Association Carroll C. Arnold
Distinguished Lecture. Pearson, 2004. Print.
Jack, Jordynn, and L. Gregory Appelbaum. “‘This Is Your Brain on Rhetoric’: Research Directions for Neurorhetorics.”
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 5, 2010, pp. 411–37. doi: 10.1080/02773945.2010.516303 .
Mays, Chris, and Julie Jung. “Priming Terministic Inquiry: Toward a Methodology of Neurorhetoric.” Rhetoric Review,
vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, pp. 41–59. doi: 10.1080/07350198.2012.630957 .
Weisse, Kathleen Daly, et al. “Algorithmic Abstraction and the Racial Neoliberal Rhetorics of 23andMe.” Rhetoric
Review, vol. 40, no. 3, 2021, pp. 284–99. doi: 10.1080/07350198.2021.1922800.
Reections on Neurorhetorical Futures
Jordynn Jack
The Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ) special issue on neurorhetorics was published in 2010, but it was
not born in a day. Its origins are not singular, either. One origin story: sometime in 2006 or 2007, I was
at a dinner party at a colleague’s house. I had met her husband, Greg Appelbaum, before, so it was not
our first meeting. But something happened that day that proved fateful for the next 15 years of my
career. “I think there’s some rhetoric happening in my field,” Greg said to me that night. (Of course
there’s rhetoric happening in your field, I thought. There’s rhetoric happening in every field). What
Greg was referring to was a controversy that had erupted over the statistical methods used in fMRI
research—a controversy that had the potential to upend hundreds of published research studies
because it cast doubt on how those statistical methods might be incorrectly finding statistical
significance among patterns of data that could be simply due to happenstance. The article “Voodoo
Correlations” (Vul et al.) launched a series of blog posts, letters, and commentaries—including
a follow-up study that showed how “spurious” findings could be identified when conducting an
fMRI study on a dead salmon (Bennett), if proper precautions were not followed. I was fascinated by
this conversation, so Greg and I resolved to work together to study this debate. We did not realize that
it would take months for us to lay the groundwork needed for truly interdisciplinary scholarship (see
Johnson and Xenos; Lambrecht). By the time I had taught Greg something about rhetoric, and he
taught me something about neuroscience, the moment had passed and there did not seem to be much
of an impetus to write up our work.
Origin story two: In 2008, I presented on a panel at the Rhetoric Society of America convention in
Seattle with John P. Jackson and Katie Rose Guest Pryal oriented around mind/brain rhetorics. Some
time after the conference, Debra Hawhee emailed me to ask whether I would be interested in turning
our panel into a special issue for RSQ. And she suggested a neat title that would bring the disparate
panel presentations together: Neurorhetoric. The special issue presented the perfect opportunity for
RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 399

Greg and me to do something with the work we had done the year before. How about writing
something for my field, I asked? Greg did much of the work in the essay explaining how neuroscience
research works; he also pointed me to three articles that prompted our thinking: Racine et al.’s “fMRI
in the Public Eye”; Weisberg et al.’s “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” and David
P. McCabe and Alan D. Castel.’s “Seeing is Believing: The Effect of Brain Images on Judgments of
Scientific Reasoning” (see Raveling the Brain 79–82). All of these articles helped me to understand that
neuroscientists were themselves interested in how their work functioned rhetorically and how it might
shape decision making and persuasion in broader societal debates. These texts helped to shape the
nature of neurorhetorical inquiry; for my part, I figured that if neuroscientsists were themselves
interested in this problem—a rhetorical problem—then there was an opening for work across
disciplines to address it. The article is admittedly a bit of a patchwork, reflecting initial musings of
two collaborators who were just beginning to get on the same page.
Meanwhile, it is now quite apparent to me that other origin stories are possible. The 2010 special
issue would have benefited from a richer review of work that had approached rhetoric, psychology,
cognitive science, and neuroscience in the preceding decades, such as Mike Rose’s “Narrowing the
Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism”; Jeff Walker’s “Of Brains and
Rhetorics”; Jeanne Fahnestock’s “Rhetoric in the Age of Cognitive Science”; Daniel Gross’s book,
The Secret History of Emotion; and Jeff Pruchnic’s 2008 article titled “Neurorhetorics: Cybernetics,
Psychotropics, and the Materiality of Persuasion.” We might have stretched further back to consider
the cognitive process theories of writing (Flower and Hayes), or we could look back even further to
Gorgias’s “Encomium of Helen” and its interest in “the power of speech upon the condition of the
soul” or “the effect of drugs over the bodily state” (Gorgias 133). For instance, consider Pruchnic’s
definition of neurorhetoric as “an investigation into the interaction between the force fields of
persuasion and neurological matter” (172)—a definition that provides a different central direction
for neurorhetorical inquiry.
In the context of the early 2000s, I was perhaps overly worried about what other scholars were
calling neurohype or neuromania (Legrenzi) as well as the temptation to simply attach the prefix
neuro- to a variety of disciplines, cite a few popular books, and come up with new cross-disciplinary
endeavors (e.g., neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, neuroliterature) (see Johnson and Littlefield for
a critique of this type of appropriation). For the most part, in rhetorical studies, I think we mostly
avoided simple adoption of neuroscience and instead took a different path more in keeping with
traditional approaches to rhetorical history: case studies, analyses of popular, scientific, and other
kinds of texts; and especially, with the growth of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, a concern with
disability, neurodiversity, and mental health. While some of what Johnson and Xenos call “white-
coating” (113)—the tendency to use science for epistemic authority—has happened, it has happened to
a much lesser extent than I expected. The disciplinary expertise in our field has perhaps limited the
naïve use of neuroscience as a simple marker of scientific authority; instead, we have had scholars
drawing on insights from the rhetoric of science, technical communication, disability studies, feminist
and gender studies, and other areas working in a more nuanced manner on the critical questions raised
by studies of the mind and brain.
As the short essays in this forum indicate, there are productive overlaps as well as points of tension
within the area of research that we might call neurorhetorics (or should perhaps call something else, as
Gibbons suggests). Should we focus of the “neuro” in neurorhetoric narrowly—with relation to
neuroscience—or think more broadly? Neuroscientists point out that their field is itself disciplinary;
as a discipline, neuroscience draws on expertise in a wide range of fields (such as physics, computer
science, statistics, developmental biology, and more). We might consider the nervous system and brain
to be useful boundary objects for this interdisciplinary work rather than assuming these areas of
inquiry to be constrained by the limits of the brain or nervous system. Alternatively, while “neuro”
may do important boundary work or help to define an interdisciplinary area of inquiry for scientists,
that does not mean, as Gibbons points out in this forum, that we need to define our inquiry similarly.
Seriously considering what to call this area of inquiry is especially important given increased interest in
400 D. R. GRUBER ET AL.

understanding “bodyminds” (not just bodies, not just minds), a term Margaret Price defines as “a
sociopolitically constituted and material entity that emerges through both structural (power- and
violence-laden) contexts and also individual (specific) experience” (271). Further work can continue to
consider the scope and circumference of this area, and the terms it uses as boundary objects.
Second, should we take a critical approach to this work, a more invention-oriented one, or should
we approach this by way of interdisciplinary collaborations? The essays included here set out a range of
opinions on this issue. Mays and Gruber both see an invention-oriented approach to neurorhetoric as
productive. Mays suggests an inventional cross-borrowing of neuroscientific terms for rhetoric. In this
line of work, I would be interested to see more scholars grappling with scientific literature (not
popularizations) as it can give us deeper insight into how concepts are defined and operationalized in
research and the debates that ensue about them. Many borrowings risk flattening the richness of these
terms (see Lambrecht 196). As Mays suggests here, “inhabitation could benefit neurorhetoric in
a conceptual sense, in that the new uses of these terms could generate new rhetorical theory, new
methodologies, and new perspectives on neurorhetoric.” What would it mean to inhabit these
discourses versus just picking them up? Similarly, Gruber argues for a more “benevolent” relationship
between rhetoric’s ontology and neuroscientific rhetoric; this view might best coincide with work on
embodied cognition, cognitive ecologies, and other alternative theorizations, as Gruber suggests. In
my own work, I have found these perspectives productive in thinking through rhetorical enactments
(Jack, “Redefining Rhetorical Figures”). In Raveling the Brain, I also sought to locate possibilities for
productive overlap among those working more narrowly within neuroscientific disciplines while
trying to offer new paradigms, such as Lisa Feldman Barret and Kirsten Lindquist’s approaches to
emotion, which highlight symbolic and linguistic interrelationships with affects. As Lindquist,
Gendron, and Satpute put it, “language might not just translate feelings into words, but might help
shape the nature of those feelings to begin with” (2). Barrett goes further to argue that “[y]ou construct
emotions as experiences or perceptions—they emerge from complex dynamics within your nervous
system, which is constantly in dynamic interaction with the surrounding context, often including
other creatures who each have a nervous system” (43). Neuroscientific work on emotion and affect,
I point out, helps rhetoricians to consider anticipatory or feed-forward models that embed affect in
linguistic, cultural, and historical patterns rather than remaining beholden to a stimulus-response
model that strips affect of the cultural or symbolic (Raveling 165).
Yet it is worth noting that these alternative perspectives on cognition themselves launch disagree-
ments or dismissals from neuroscientists narrowly defined; when I asked a preeminent neuroscientist
about the work of Andy Clark (a philosopher who has done much to promote an extended mind
model of cognition), he stated simply that he had not heard of this person and expected his influence
on neuroscience was “minimal.” (He held a similar view about Lakoff, was more complementary about
Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, and Daniel Kahneman, but was not fond of some others whom he
considered “popularizers.”) Thus, the disciplinary boundary-drawing is itself interesting to consider
for those pursuing a “rhetoric of neuroscience,” but may be less interesting for those whose goal is not
to use neuroscience (or other scientific evidence) to validate a rhetorical model of cognition but,
instead, to generate our own theories of cognition without desiring strict adherence to scientific ways
of knowing.
Other essays in this forum seem a bit more cautious about the opportunities for working with
neuroscientific and other scientific sources; while not closing off these possibilities, Walsh, Snelling,
and Wilson all offer caveats about the potential limitations of neuroscientific thinking when viewed
from a humanistic perspective. For Walsh, for instance, the neuro-disciplines hold interesting
potential for inventive thinking, but Walsh rightly cautions against the kind of reductions that can
end up dehumanizing people. Walsh’s use of the term opacity, which is drawn from the work of
Glissant, is interesting here because its resonances might be explored in different avenues within
neurorhetoric. While Glissant uses opacity to designate (according to commenter Eric Prieto) “that
which remains inaccessible to outsiders” as well as “the fundamental core of our identity” (Prieto, qtd.
in Murdoch 881–82), the goal of neuroscience has often been to open up the shrouded cover of the
RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 401

brain, to expose it (whether via the scalpel or the fMRI machine), to create artificial neural networks so
that we can model and thereby know the brain, and to explain complex concepts such as conscious-
ness, identity, or empathy as a matter of neurons and no more. How might we engage in a “deep
exploration of the materiality of cognition in rhetorical exchange” (as Walsh puts it here) without
falling prey to the all-powerful will to know that Donna Haraway refers to as the god-trick, or “the false
vision promising transcendence of all limits” (582) promised by technoscientific “instruments of
visualization” (581)—of which she names magnetic resonance imaging as one among a list of
examples. Glissant’s notion of opacity seems to invoke productive tensions when contrasted with
the desire in neuroscience and other scientific disciplines to see all and thereby know all.
Snelling and Wilson also seek to maintain a critical perspective on neuroscientific rhetorics.
Snelling argues for more work on neuropolicy.
6
Snelling’s focus on gastronomy specifically relates
to the broader point that neuroscience is “informing legislation or expert guidance.” Similarly,
Wilson’s call for critical neurorhetorics argues for continued importance of studying how “[n]euro-
science and the brain invite modes of rhetorical resistance, especially when initially staged as a shabby
support structure for unfounded claims.” Wilson’s focus is on how assumptions about the mind
emerge in debates about critical race theory; we might see similar forces working in perhaps less
obviously political realms, as in the “science of reading,” which typically involves quite loose references
to any particular scientific findings when invoked in debates and policy discussions (Darova 556).
Finally, some essays included here argue for a broader view of neurorhetoric less constrained by the
way the brain is understood in neuroscience. As Gibbons aptly puts it, “We are rife with embodi-
ments” and might orient neurorhetoric toward “a more encompassing disciplinary configuration
around rhetorics of the mind/brain more broadly.” Indeed, the special issue from 2010 took this
approach, with three of the four essays included focusing on mind/brain topics—which attests to the ill
fit of the moniker neurorhetoric. Since then, continued work in the field has approached questions of
mental health and mental disability, and it is important to continue this work along new lines of
inquiry. To take one example, Anderson’s foray into ADHD suggests that a broader rhetorical history
of ADHD and its genderings/racings/other shapings would be fascinating indeed; a rhetorical history
of the term neurodiversity and its circulation would also make an enthralling project.
Reading through these essays and reflecting on the last decade and a half of work in this area leads
me to wonder: is there such a thing as neurorhetoric? In my own work, I’ve explored various avenues of
inquiry, for instance by examining the broader question of neurodiversity with relation to autism and
its gendering (Jack, Autism and Gender). I’ve examined areas of tension and overlap between rhetoric
and neuroscience across fields such as affect, sex/gender, politics, and persuasion itself (Jack, Raveling
the Brain); I’ve drawn on work in cognitive ecologies and embodied cognition to understand how
participants in a wind turbine controversy articulate perspectives using rhetorical figures (Jack,
“Redefining Rhetorical Figures”); and I’ve drawn on disability studies to critique the “normative
mandate” (Dolmage 10) in “habits of mind” policies in composition (Jack, “Cognitive Vernacular”).
One response to this variety might be to argue for more specific terminology and goals—when are we
talking about neuroscience as a discipline versus psychology or cognitive science; do we mean
cognition when we talk generally about minds and brains; are we interested in what scientific research
can tell us, or are we more interested in generating our own theories?
In addition, much work in neurorhetorics (broadly construed) has focused on Western perspec-
tives, as Gruber alludes to above, but it could begin from a different place, quite literally. To take one
example, Manuli Ailuli Meyer writes that Hawaiian epistemology is grounded in place, understood not
simply in terms of physical location: “[Land] is an idea that engages knowledge and contextualizes
knowing. . . . It is not about emptiness but about consciousness. It is an epistemological idea because it
conceptualizes those things of value to embed them in a context. Land is more than just a physical
locale; it is a mental one that becomes water on the rock of our being” (5, emphasis added). Hui Wu
and Tarez Samra Graban’s recent collection, Global Rhetorical Traditions, provides multiple points of
6
See related claims laid out in Racine et al. regarding neurorealism and neuroessentialism.
402 D. R. GRUBER ET AL.

departure for a more globally focused approach to neurorhetoric. What might this neurorhetoric look
like—and how might it be done ethically rather than via appropriation?
Rather than seeking to pin down these concepts or establishing a single research paradigm, I find
myself taking a “multiple ontologies” approach, one that perhaps could also describe both the area of
inquiry we have been calling “neurorhetoric” and the broader array of disciplinary perspectives on the
mind, bodymind, and brain across other disciplines. Rather than arguing for one correct way to pursue
this area of inquiry (or even one correct term for it, even as neurorhetoric seems to have become
a useful placeholder), I imagine a future for this work that recognizes (and investigates) multiple
ontologies. AnneMarie Mol writes that realities are “enacted” through different practices that make
things “visible, audible, tangible, knowable” (The Body Multiple 33). The brain, mind, or bodymind are
all different examples of these multiple ontologies; from this perspective, multiplying (and perhaps
“raveling together”) the various perspectives included in this forum might offer a productive pathway
forward for future research in neurorhetorics.
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ORCID
David R. Gruber http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2133-4870
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