This essay extends Barbara Biesecker’s rhetorical concept of “lines of intelligibility” as a point of inquiry by revisiting Michel Foucault’s analysis of the institutionalization of madness during the Classical period of the mid-17^th century to 18^th century. The essay attempts to locate the ways in which lines of intelligibility constitute our perception by forming a grid of representation and recognition. The essay first attends to Foucault’s “The Great Confinement” in History of Madness, and critically demonstrates the ways in which the representations of madness interpellated the perception of madness as misery. It argues that this shift in the system of recognition constituted new meanings of madness that ultimately determined the experience of madness itself. The essay then interrogates how the lines drawn between madness and reason operate. With a critical reading of the Cartesian skepticism discussed by Foucault at the beginning of the chapter, the essay depicts madness as an idea that emerged through delineating the limits of reason. Also, by illustrating the ways in which reason appropriates unreason as its exterior, it argues that power for Foucault holds productive dimensions. Finally, the essay reattends to “The Great Confinement” and attempts to clarify the power of lines that constitute the categories of reason and unreason by forming a grid of making sense. By visualizing a particular arrangement of lines that constituted a particular experience of madness, the essay hopes to reveal the rhetoric of “lines of intelligibility” that regulates what can be represented and perceived within a particular system of recognition.

In recent years, the fields of human sciences have witnessed growing interests in understanding the elusive nature of matters and the porous process of materialization. In response to the new intellectual trend that is often labeled “new materialism,” this paper critically argues that “Android Lincoln,” the prototype of audio-animatronics that Walt Disney invented in 1964, can be best understood as an “anthropomorphic machine of rhetoric”: it literally embodies a new materialist conception of human-speaking practice. Viewing the apparatus as a mechanical chimera that materializes humans’ technē of speech, this paper marks a first step toward a genealogy of the mechanical embodiment of rhetoric and promotes a theoretical reconfiguration of the relationship among rhetoric, materiality, and culture.

This paper revisits rhetorical scholars’ academic controversy on Richard Nixon’s 1969 “Vietnamization” address to explore the agential ethics of rhetorical criticism. Reviewing different theoretical positions of ethical criticism in the field of rhetorical studies and offering a close textual analysis of Nixon’s address, this paper argues that rhetorical studies needs to encounter a possibility of the paradoxical articulation of ethics, responsibility, and war. This new approach to the ethics of rhetorical criticism, which uses Jacques Derrida’s deconstuctive theory as a frame of reference to reanimate rhetorical agencies, reveals how the idea of the “ethics in the state of war” can enhance radical transformation of rhetorical scholar’s subjectivity and practice.

Coaching is increasingly regarded as a useful method for personal growth and professional achievement. It is now an industry, and it has experienced significant growth especially in the last decade. Whereas academic inquiry into coaching can be interdisciplinary, the present paper studies coaching as a collaborative narrative practice carried out between two individuals. This study is based on dialogic analysis of recorded and transcribed data from an actual coaching session. Specifically, this paper analyzes how metaphor (re)shapes the way in which narratives unfold, contributing to the collaborative and interactive transformation of a story. That is, this paper sheds light on the way in which metaphor can create a pivotal point at which collaborative narratives expand and allow for (re)creating a meaningful story.