The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Hamza Ahmad, University of Washington

[Watch companion piece of videographic criticism.]

 

       They not like us, they not like us, they not like us
       They not like us, they not like us, they not like us
       —Kendrick Lamar (2024)

In a Rhetoric of Motives (1969),[1] Kenneth Burke proclaimed that persuasion is tied to belonging. Burke tells us that to convince someone we need to speak our interlocutor’s “speech, gesture, tonality, image, attitude, idea” (p. 55). It falls on the one seeking to persuade to identify with their audience. Diane Davis (2010) helpfully calls our attention to what Davis terms “a more fundamental affectability, persuadability, responsivity,” all of which exist “prior to and in excess of symbolic meaning” (p. 2). Thomas Rickert (2013) points out (in a reading of Kristeva) that rhetoric’s relationship is not just with epistemology but rather with ontology, highlighting that affect is prior to the symbolic, and (in a reading of Heidegger) that contrary to what we often teach our students, pathos becomes the grounding of logos as the focus draws on “originary, material affectability, an ecological sensibility” (p. 53) all of which ground the material, the informational, the other than human. Davis and Rickert, along with other posthumanist scholars, contend with the long-standing privileging of the human over non-human emphasizing the ecological and “bioplurality,” and intend to build on critiques of humanism from minoritized perspectives (Johnson, 2023). What they don’t necessarily deal with is what I see as the grave danger of flattening the experiences of “Man” — those whose humanity is not in question — and those of the “human?,” i.e., those minoritized subjects who have to argue for their humanness to contend with necropolitics enmeshed in our world. In her critique of the coloniality of being, Sylvia Wynter (2003) uses the term “Man” to refer to our “present ethno-class genre of the human” (p. 329).  In response to this and other minoritized critiques of humanism, we must remember that while it is all too easy to reject the idea of the human, “Man” still has the power to, in Achille Mbembe’s words, “define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2003, p. 27). A change in terms after all does not mean a change in systemic practices. Minoritized political praxis is shaped in response to being deemed disposable, i.e, becoming a subject of necropolitics; therefore, political praxis for the “human?” aims to create identification between “Man” and the “human?.” In light of this, I argue for a need to rethink identification from minoritized perspectives. I argue that rhetoric’s focus on ontology must not elide the fact that the ambient affectability, persuadability, and responsivity that posthuman rhetoricians speak of is often that of “Man.” Posthumanism, therefore, if it is not attentive to minorized voices, runs the risk of continuing the Western humanist practices of stonewalling minoritized suffering that “humans?” have had to contend with generationally in order to be recognized and addressed by “Man.” In few situations are the stakes of this stonewalling higher than in the case of genocide and war. This inquiry highlights our field’s failure to contend with the ongoing genocide against Palestinians who have for nearly a hundred years been marked as disposable by “Man.”  It argues that the task of rhetoric in our time is to forge new ways of identification between “Man” and “human?” in a world increasingly shaped by conflict and climate-change. For this end, I turn to how multimodality creates new possibilities for identification between “Man” and “human?” that the work of activists involved in changing the discourse on Israel-Palestine exemplifies.

If pathos becomes the ground of logos, then in what ways does, despite the rejection of the term human, posthumanist thought still ground the affectability, persuadability, and responsivity of “Man”? This core question is what this inquiry is thinking through. I must not be the only one who wonders if pathos and affect are not homogenous across the many cultures of this world? Are we talking about a capital E Ecology here or many divergent ecologies of meaning, relationality, kinship? In what ways are affect and culture tied together, and in what ways is affect, dare I say, universal? Is logos therefore entangled with culture(s) which themselves are dynamic, interconnected, always informing each other, and are themselves informed by the material? What is the role of the symbolic in mobilizing the affective into narratives that speak to the diversity of the “human?”? These questions aim to draw from decolonial criticisms of epistemology of zero-point and feminist standpoint epistemologies to think through the interconnectedness of the symbolic and the material in a way that is sensitive to what Walter Mignolo has termed “the geopolitics of knowledge” (2002, p. 63). My work has been informed by rhetoric’s material turn but also diverges from it to ask questions that our field’s focus on the material elides. The issues that concern me include but are not limited to: the possibilities for identification between “Man” and “human?”; the varying ways climate change is geared to accelerate necropolitics by deeming many of the poorer “humans?” of the world as disposable; the growing rise of a politics of enmity and homogeneity around the world as exemplified by how migration has triggered existential fears amongst so many, pardon the word, developed nations of the world; the possibility of an ontological focus as enabling the distancing of “Man” from politics and feeding into isolationism from the suffering of the “human?”; posthumanism as a manifestation of a post development sensibility which is inaccessible to the vast majority of “humans?” still waiting for the fruits of modernity; the need for geopolitical thinking within our field that can offer alternative ways of engaging with the world which is headed towards a neo-cold war model of geopolitics; and the necessity of reminding “Man” that his existence is sustained by far too many “humans?” exploited by international systems and corporations. These concerns are informed by my own life, identity, location, race, language, and a contentious relationship to the dominant culture I inhabit as a Pakistani scholar in the United States. While it may not be apparent in this inquiry, I draw inspiration for my work from Black, Indigenous, and other minoritized scholars. I echo the Cherokee philosopher Brian Burkhart’s thinking that expanding on areas where non-hegemonic knowledge systems are ill-fitted within the hegemonic knowledge making practices offers an opportunity to listen and learn, a wondrous gift.

I believe that in our turn to the material we must not forget to engage actively in the world. In other words, in a Spinozaist age, we must not forget that the goal of knowledge-production is not simply to understand the world but to change it. My concerns I am afraid are much too human and are focused on the category of the “human?” who must persuade normative humans—Global North? First-world? Elite? Rich? Or simply those safer from necropolitics? Feel free to have your pick — of their humanity. My concern is with necropolitics and overlapping forms of colonial, neo-colonial, militaristic, and economic domination that at times by action and at times by inaction drives “humans?” to premature death. Mbembe (2003) tells us that in our age of necropolitics “power (and not necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy” (p. 24). Mbembe expands on how the late modern occupation of Palestine embodies Fanon’s spatial reading of colonial occupation in Gaza. While Mbembe is writing before the beginning of the current genocide, his thinking showcases the convergence of early and late modern technologies of colonialism such as war becoming the pharmakon of our time, a rhetoric of enmity where the Other’s very existence is perceived as an attack on one’s being, global scale creation of a state of exception, and especially peace taking the form of a war without end. Of particular importance to my work here is Mbembe’s emphasis on the role of racism in deciding this global state of exception in defining what lives matter and how the loss of those lives is embedded into different ecologies of pathos around the world. However, the ecologies of pathos that matter are the ones of “Man” and not “humans?” and are shaped by racism: “Despite all the horrors of the Negro slave trade, colonialism, fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and other massacres and genocides, Western nations especially—their bowels bloated with all sorts of gases—continue to mobilize racism in aid of all manner of more or less harebrained and murderous histories (Mbembe, 2019, p. 61). “Man” therefore was able to put into effect the global state of exception allowing him to dispel the near unanimous global-South criticism for Israeli abuses prior to October 7th to begin historical narration at the apartheid state’s[2] “ground-zero” on October 7th. Additionally, racism was mobilized through specific ideographs, e.g., that of the terrorist that I discuss later, to identify with Israelis lives and narratives to the exclusion of Palestinian lives and narratives.

And so, every discussion on the subject within Europe and the United States began with a condemnation of Hamas as nations composed mostly of “Man” issued promises of undying loyalty and support to the State of Israel. Despite the incommensurate loss of Palestinian life, it has proven difficult to broker identification between “Man” and Palestinians despite a death toll of over 40,000 people and the maiming and precarity of all the rest to get only some European nations to begin the process of identification with Palestinians. This identification of “Man” with Israeli loss of life, terrible as that is, at the expense of Palestinian loss of life speaks to how deftly the Israeli state has mobilized identification with “Man” as “the only democracy,” “space for queerness,” and “civilization” in the “Middle-East.”  Part of this process has been finding ways to identify with Christian Zionists through Bible tourism and making biblical claims to land. This situation speaks to the importance of the symbolic intervention in creating ambient conditions for the possibilities for identification in the future. Identification in this case is brokered by reinforcing mutual narratives, histories, antagonisms, and shared aesthetic sensibilities such as European and American nations' own narratives of WW2, histories of antisemitism, settler-colonial identifications, histories of orientalism and Islamophobia, war on terror, and histories of racism. The interaction between the symbolic and the material therefore creates an ambient difficulty of identification between “Man” with his Palestinian Other.

Before I delve further into this, let me add that, like Edward Said and Achille Mbembe, I see antisemitism  and Islamophobia as if not mimetic counterparts—Mbembe’s terms (2019, p. 6)—at the very least closely resembling each other as co-constituents of modern European identity—(Said, 1978). The supposed “reconquista” of Spain 1492 following which Muslims in Spain were converted and Jews in Spain were expelled illustrates this relationship. Jeraldine Heng in her The Invention of Race in The European Middle Ages (2019) persuasively demonstrates how in the European Middle Ages religion was seen as the source of ontological differences between people, e.g., the famous scene in the 12th century English romance where a “Saracen” king converts to Christianity and his skin transforms from Black to White. This legacy of an entanglement of race and religion continues. Even today surges in antisemitism are followed by surges in Islamophobia. As a Pakistani, I recognize how the idea that a state should be equated with a religion or an ethnicity is a formula for fascism; after all, only two states were ever built on religious nationalism, Pakistan and Israel. Most classically liberal subjects would recognize this, if not for the state of exception in the case of the State of Israel. Given that I emphasize the politics of location within knowledge production, I must be honest about my personal experiences and dispositions and how they have led to writing this piece. While most minoritized scholars rightly emphasize positionality and personal experience within their writing, my decision to share these experiences was not an easy one. Like Mbembe, and Arjun Appadurai, I am cautious of a politics of identity and lived experience that cloaks rhetorics of incommensurability that needs to be thought about in terms far more nuanced than ones available to this author; the South Asian experience of British colonial census counting, homogenizing, and bounding our “indigenous ideas of difference” that at present  “have become transformed into a deadly politics of community” is all too present a fear for this author. Additionally, I recognize Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s argument that the United States settler context is “a site of contradictory desires” (2012, p.7). According to Tuck and Yang, the politics of minoritization in every case revolves around what is or can be commensurate and much that is incommensurate: “There are portions of these projects that simply cannot speak to one another, cannot be aligned or allied” (p. 28). I agree with Tuck and Yang that incommensurability, i.e., where the postcolonial, decolonial, Black studies, Asian American studies, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, and other minoritized projects diverge has to be the ground for any kind of resilient solidarity; however, I am also aware that given that if anything the climate crisis attunes us to is that modernity’s violence exceeds the reparations it can make. All of that being said, let me finally introduce the location of this articulation.

While articulated in the city of Seattle, this inquiry follows Moten and Harney’s thinking on permanent fugitivity (2013). I see it as an undercommon refusal of the academy. It is written by someone with a Pakistani passport whose entire family is in Pakistan and who do not wish to leave their land; and yet, this piece is written within the United States. These words can be seen as a settler move to innocence given that paradoxically I do not desire settlement in the United States but do desire a United States passport to be safe within my home country of Pakistan. In other words, I am part of a different flow of migrants who have been pushed out of their home countries after centuries of exploitation and environmental degradation. At the same time, I resist the pull of a Something-American identity much like the Mexicanos en Extranjero in  René Agustín de los Santos’s work that focuses on migrants as actors in their own right (2023). It’s likely that in the near future I might find myself in a different country, maybe even on a different continent due to a variety of push-pull factors. An American passport therefore is not the promise of citizenship but rather an opening up of the world to me which today is marked by closed borders. Although with time I am learning from cold blooded murders such as the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh in Israel that the protection that passport offers is flimsy at best. In any event, I recognize that I am writing on native land and am playing a role in the settler-colonial project that is the United States. It is written by someone who finds himself, God knows how, in an English department working on the intersections between Urdu literary public, rhetorical studies, and composition, but is a part of a community of sentiment which begins in Pakistan and intersects with many parts of the world, especially the United States. It is from a location of “diasporas of hope, diasporas of terror, and diasporas of despair” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 6). This inquiry has a relationship with José Muñoz’s idea of disidentification (1999), which refers to queer folk of color being in constant negotiation with the many influences that shape us, with the many cultures and influences that have shaped me.

This project is both past-oriented and future oriented. The past that I speak of cannot at length be discussed here but I’ll offer a moment that’s etched in my memory. This was around fifteen years ago, when I was 13, and the idea that one day I would leave Pakistan was unimaginable to me even though Pakistan was burning in the aftermath of the US war on terror. Extremists whose arms were not big enough to retaliate against the United States waged a war on the Pakistani state, the victims of whom were, unsurprisingly, ordinary people. Every city became militarized, all of which failed to stop that daily suicide bomb blasts that brought life to a halt and the images of torn, bleeding bodies into the purview of every child. My Mamu had dragged me to the Mosque near his home in Islamabad. I was in a crisis of religion at that time from which I might never recover but I remember before leaving for the Mosque I saw on TV that a US drone strike within Pakistan had killed a suspected commander of a terrorist organization. The report followed that a few kids playing cricket outside the location also perished in the strike. At this point in my life if someone had told me that all Americans had fangs, I would have believed it because I had only ever heard of Americans in the context of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drone strikes. Fifteen years later, I have at least answered one of my many questions: only some Americans have fangs. I joke because sometimes when I fail to turn things into jokes, I start crying. It was Ramadan and the fervor of sentimental devotion was contagious that night. I remember in that Mosque when my face touched the red prayer mat I asked myself who are these people (Americans) and why have they unleashed such death onto people they have never even met. It was of course a naive question in a world of war machines and necropolitics (Deleuze et al., 1977). And yet, despite learning about necropolitical logics of Empire and impersonality of war machines, I have on some affective level retained the naivety of that question. The future oriented part of my inquiry is located at the intersection of critique and imagination because both are necessary to contemplate a world that is not hell-bent on destruction. A core facet of my argument is that Kenneth Burke’s thinking on identification has to be re-thought from a minoritized perspective to recognize how violence on perceived Others is normalized and channeled into Mbembe's politics of enmity to unleash war without end on the Other. This is a concern that rhetoric’s focus on the ecological, ontological, and material has so far inadequately considered.

Thirty years after his death, it will be far too easy to find flaws in Burke’s thinking particularly his emphasis on the primacy of “Man” as a symbol using animal. That the thinker of the “terministic screen” should also be a victim to it is something Burke himself never denied; however, thirty years after his death and almost a hundred after he started writing, the fact that we find much in his work to admire speaks volumes of the autodidact’s vision. Despite Burke’s overarching frame of an unapologetic humanism being easily critiqued for its “blind spots,” Burke's work does not fail to speak to the political world we still inhabit globally.

And such inducements are particularly here, so long as factional division (of class, race, nationality, and the like) make for the ironic mixture of identification and dissociation that marks the function of the scapegoat. Indeed, the very "global" conditions which call for the greater identification of all men with one another have at the same time increased the range of human conflict, the incentives to division. (Burke, 1969, p. 34)

While it is difficult to argue with Davis’s critique of Burke for an unceasing faith in reason, such criticism downplays how much of Burke’s thinking on identification was shaped by his work in “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” (1957). In other words, the backdrop of identification as a concept idea is not simply a denial of intersubjectivity but the factuality of fascism and World War 2 which adds context to Burke’s focus on the social. It doesn’t surprise me that in Davis’s critique of Burke human difference is homogenized and the “human?” is left in the same ontological standing as the Western Man. While I am grateful for closing the gap between human and animal, as a minoritized subject, I am skeptical of this flattening of the human, which while claiming a post-humanness assumes that all have arrived at something to go past it. While posthumanism offers us a new “descriptive statement” for us in Sylvia Wynter’s terms, in the field of rhetoric the lack of minoritized perspectives on humanism and posthumanism should raise alarms. In “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” Burke recognizes four core moves made by Hitler:

          1. “Inborn dignity” which refers to a hierarchy of difference between superior and inferior races. 
          2. “Projection device” where all ills are projected onto the existence of an Other. 
          3. “Symbolic rebirth” which creates a futurity where the “superior” race claims its birthright by following its messiah. 
          4. “Commercial use” which deflects noneconomic interpretation of economic ills.

This formula still forms a part of the playbook of fascism around the world from Franco’s Spain to US during the war on terror, to Modi’s India, to Pakistan in 1971, to the military junta in Myanmar, to the increasing right wing movements of Europe, and of course Netanyahu’s Israel, which I will return to soon. However, my goal here is not to defend Burke but to reclaim identification for the politics of our age from a minoritized position. Here, I agree with Davis’s idea of a pre-symbolic rhetoricity that exceeds the intentional subject. What’s most interesting about identification is that Burke characteristic of White Humanism forgets how the pre-symbolic rhetoric of human difference occludes persuasion, which requires “always prior openness to the other’s affection” (p. 3). My own criticism of Burke here is how his terministic screen fits neatly into the United States’ own national history project. While his affectability extends to the Holocaust in Europe, it remains at best apologetic for the many genocides of colonialism, a symptom of Christian bourgeoisie of the 20th century, as illustrated by Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) in his Discourse on Colonialism:

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distin­guished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the "coolies" of India, and the "nixxxxx" of America. (Césaire & Pinkham, 1950, p.36; emphasis mine)

In other words, the fact that identification is rarely readily possible between “Man” and “human?” makes the intervention of rhetorical criticism all the more necessary. It is in this context of stonewalling the Other that the impossibility of identification is weaponized by the Empire for necropolitical aims against the “human?” as I illustrate in what follows, along with the work of activists who are on the front lines of resisting this weaponization of difference. The ambient closed-offness to the Other I believe must be a task taken up by rhetorical studies.

This inquiry is in alignment with Lisa Flores’ call to think through how racialization creates the ground for deportability and disposability by the sovereign with an important difference. The state of exception that is at the heart of this inquiry is the colonial exception. Empire in other words for me is the power to declare exceptions. Following Partha Chatterjee (2012), I therefore recognize that this colonial exception is not limited to just the United States as a sole imperial power (p. 338). However, I do want to bring into focus how ascribing varied values on life and enmeshing them in selective memory and narratives at the expense of Others’ realities is central to maintaining the state of exception. This state of exception is particularly prominent in the case of Israel which enjoys a state of exception unlike any in the global order: “A plethora of exceptional practices, for instance, surround the place of Israel as the most recent European settler colony in Asia and the corresponding denial of the political rights of sovereign nationhood promised to Palestinians by the League of Nations mandate (every other mandated territory is now an independent nation-state and UN member)” (The United Nations, 2016). In our time, the fact that almost the entire global South recognizes Palestine and that the UN Security council’s 10th of June 2024 resolution for “Immediate, Full, and Complete” ceasefire have been ignored by the Israeli state just as other past resolutions demanding the end of territorial dispossession of Palstinians by settlers such as resolution 2334 were ignored. Mbembe reminds us the lawlessness of the colony stems from this “racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native” (2019, p. 77). Robbing the native of “their specifically human” character is therefore key to deploying the “absolute hostility” against an absolute “enemy” that Mbembe foregrounds as a core part of colonial warfare (2003, p. 48). Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ conception of racialization is a particularly illustrative example of how questioning the humanity of an Other is necessary for the ego conquiro, which “provides the ground for the articulation of the ego cogito” (2007, p. 252). Necessary for this state of exception is a lack of affectability of the “present ethno-class genre of the human” to Palestinian suffering. The difficulty of identification between Third & Fourth world peoples and this ethno-class presents might question us to ask to what extent it is possible to push against this pre-symbolic lack of affectability to the suffering of the Other is a question we can hardly be certain of; and yet, if we don’t at least attempt this, who are we? If this task were an impossibility, projects that seek identification between Israel and the world such as Birthright Israel would be obsolete. Not to mention the millions of dollars the Israeli state has spent on social media campaigns since October 7th to justify its collective punishment of Palestinians for Hamas’ actions.

The Israeli state and major US media have presented October 7th as the ground-zero of a Hamas offensive against Israel. There has been a forceful insistence that the story begins with October 7th in isolation from any larger historical or material context. This narrative that providing context equates to sympathizing with Hamas obfuscates the heinousness of Israeli occupation and “flagrant violations” of international law and human rights abuses that have been part and parcel of the Israeli occupation. The United Nations Security council explicitly recognized in 2016 that Israeli settlement activities were illegal. Human Rights Watch has for years documented how the Israeli state has been engaging in collective punishment of the Palestinian population, which is a fact documented even by the June 2022 CCCC Statement Against War Crimes. Given that Palestine was one of the sites for Mbembe’s argument for necropolitics, my goal is not to document but rather to entextualize it within the larger conversation about imperialism and the global order that allows for in Rob Nixon’s terms “slow violence.” Slow violence refers to structural violence which is rendered invisible in our global order but steals life away from the have-nots of the world: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2013, p. 2). Of course slow violence is a term focused on environmental degradation, which is an important but not the only or most salient feature of how Palestinians are made to suffer. Borderization, forced humiliation to continued exercise of biopolitical control to Gaza being turned into an open air prison to settler only roads are all facets of this slow violence. Slow violence is not a perfect concept in this context and my aim in invoking it is in fact to urge a question because I cannot assume my readers’ familiarity with the Pakistani sources and experiences that have shaped what I am trying to say. The question I am hoping to invoke was first asked by the Pakistani academic Eqbal Ahmed about whom Edward Said said, “perhaps the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist analyst of the post-war world, especially in the dynamics between the West and the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa” (Eqbal). The question Ahmad asked was in a two page article published in 1986 in Middle East Report and goes: “Who is the terrorist?” In terms of critical rhetoric, what Ahmad was attempting to get at was that the word terrorist is an ideograph or what McGee defined as:

an ordinary language term found in political discourse. It is a high-order abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal. It warrants the use of power, excuses behavior and belief which might otherwise be perceived as eccentric or antisocial, and guides behavior and belief into channels easily recognized by a community as acceptable and laudable.” (McGee, 1980, p. 378)

Ahmad’s point here of course is that the word terrorism in itself solicits a specific ideological reaction that cements the exercise of the state of exemption. Ahmad follows with how even in his time the word was invoked unilaterally by the United States irrespective of context: “We seldom ask what produces terrorism. There is no connection, said Secretary of State George Shultz, with any cause” (p. 38 ).  Ahmad here is not excusing terrorism but rather pointing to the hypocrisy in invoking the work with respect to certain actors and not invoking it in the face of the same actions if sponsored by Superpowers. Ahmad reminds us that in the 1930s Jewish underground in Palestine was referred to as a terrorist organization until the British found their sympathies with Jewish people. Ahmad makes a distinction between two kinds of terrorism, official and non-official. Official terror in Ahmad’s thinking refers to terror by the state. While Ahmad doesn’t have a word for it, he is referring to the distinction between slow, structural violence which is rendered invisible and its more rapid, visible counterpart “terrorist” violence which catches headlines. Ahmad adds that it’s strange how given that official terrorism has claimed so many more lives than unofficial terrorism, we don’t have a vocabulary to discuss this violence. Unofficial terrorism too for Ahmad invokes a specific ideograph of someone who is Muslim and by extension an irreconcilable Other to the ethno-class of genre of human invoking the ideograph.

That even to this date the word terrorism is not typically used in the context of White male is evidence enough for Ahmad’s point about official terrorism that describes imperial necropolitics. Ahmad distinguishes official terrorism from its counterpart unofficial terrorism, terrorism not sanctioned by the Empire and often a response to official terrorism, and yet almost always garners more attention than official terrorism. To our present ethno-class genre of the human, unofficial terrorism, despite being a response to official terrorism, appears as an originary event or the first cause. Thus, through the eyes of Western European and American media, October 7th appears as an originary event and not a response to the Israeli state’s decades long necropolitical assaults on Palestinian life. While ideographs such as the word terrorism are dynamic, I am calling attention to how they offer a false understanding of the situation that creates the impression of closure but in fact sustains sponsored uptakes. The invocation of the ideograph terrorist functions in a manner similar to invoking Satan in an Abrahamic context. The terrorist-like Satan acts out of compulsion without any provocation or cause. The only legitimate response therefore is to dedicate whatever it takes to kill, e.g., the famous promise of revenge that President Bush swore against “evil” on 9/11; Satan, like the terrorist, acts simply because he is the embodiment of an absolute evil which makes a question about context seem ridiculous at best and “evil” itself at worst. The materiality and sociality that compel someone to commit terrorism are dissolved within the ideograph, e.g., the fact the United States bolstered militant Islamism as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. The following statement from the Israeli PM’s account on Twitter (deleted a day later) illustrates that this is no hyperbole: “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle” (October 16, 2023). Given that this statement was also a part of the speech Prime Minister Netanyahu also gave at the Winter Assembly of the 25th Knesset's Second Session, a few questions arise for me that are relevant to our field: How does posthumanism and its ecological expansion of Burke’s identification reckon with such a statement? What resources and responsibilities do scholars of rhetoric have in recognizing genocidal rhetoric that circulate around us and to call it out as such? I wonder if posthumanist inquiry is possible only for our present ethno-class genre of the human?

Partha Chatterjee’s The Black Hole of Calcutta (2012) offers a different way of reading October 7th. Chaterjee brings our attention to the mythical story of the Black Hole of Calcutta which the British deployed in order to wage their first war of conquest in India in 1757. The logically impossible and now discredited story goes that the Nawab of Bengal Siraj-ud-Daulah commanded both the French and British East India companies not to fortify their positions. The French complied, the British did not. In response, the Nawab raided the fort and had the 146 British prisoners of war thrown in a dungeon measuring 14 x 18 feet, 123 of whom died. This was seen by the East India Company (EIC) as ground for war between them and the Nawab following which the Nawab was defeated (through treachery) and EIC control was cemented in India. Serious historians doubt the veracity of any of this but the narrative of an act of incommensurate violence that testified to the savagery of the natives became the mythical history of the British Empire in the East. Much like the weapons of mass-destruction in Iraq or the 40 beheaded babies on October 7th, most of what we know about this black hole is colonial fiction. Chatterjee asserts that the narrative structure of this story still forms a part of imperial “repertoire of practices” (p. 333). Every manifestation of this repertoire of practice is different but what remains consistent throughout is how human difference is mobilized to construct an Other, a “human?” or in Burke’s terms a scapegoat. This other at times is a racial Other, a classed Other, a Other with a different caste, a Other with a different gender, a Other who thinks differently from us, a Other with a different body-mind (Price, 2011). Essential to the formation of this Other is the confinement of the Other to the sub-ontological realm of the “human?,” i.e., outside the bounds of human kinship. This mapping of difference onto bodies, practices, repertoires, and even geographies that interweave human difference with the material world and present it as if it were ontological must be a subject of critical rhetoric. Fanon’s spatial reading of colonialism as applied by Mbembe in his reading of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank that exhibit vertical settler sovereignty exemplify my point. Most Israeli settlements are built in gated communities on higher terrain which reiterate who has power over whom, i.e., “a symbolics of the top” (2019, p. 82 ) that creates two distinct geographies within the same landscape. While settler-only roads offer mobility for Israelis, checkpoints police harass and force Palestinians to petition for mobility.

The material landscape with time begins to speak of ontological differences between the two peoples, the one on top and the one on bottom as symbolic ideas of difference are mapped onto the very land itself. I believe that it is the task of critical rhetoric to not only use critique to debunk this Othering but also to forge new ways of identifying different peoples of the world with each other. Posthuman and post-critique knowledge must be mobilized not to create fantasies of non-complicity by dispersed accounts of agency but rather should be employed for the task of identifying different peoples with each other. Only in doing so can we imagine futurities for us and our planet. I believe that the “human?” will have a major role to play in helping us through our present crises; after all, the present environmental crisis can easily be confined to the realm of matter but has roots that are all too social. In her 2003 poem “No,” the Mvskoke/Creek poet Joy Harjo evokes the scene of a Native American soldier in the Iraq war: “Yes, that was me you saw shaking with bravery, with a government issued rifle on my back. I’m sorry I could not greet you, as you deserved, my relative” (Tuck and Yang, 2012, p. 31).[3] This recognition of the relatedness, i.e., the convergence of the many different narratives of the “human?” opens up a space for radical change. Leela Gandhi’s reading of friendship between the “Western” and South Asians is an important intervention (2006); academic postcolonial theory must take a page from anticolonial thinking of the Bandung Conference 1955 to recognize that friendship between the “humans?” is far more effective at political change because of the deeper affectability of the minoritized which opens up new communities of sentiment that are identified with each Others’ stories. It is this convergence of affectability that has been key to forging new forms of identification that has allowed the global movement for ceasefire and an end to Israeli onslaught and occupation.

 

Identification in a digital world: Multimodality, activism, and disrupting uptakes

It is perhaps the first time in American history that so many Americans and other “Western” subjects have embraced a critical stance towards the Israeli state’s actions. The discourse on Palestine within the field of rhetoric and composition is scant with notable exceptions, e.g., Mathew Abraham’s scholarship, an edited collection Toward a Critical Rhetoric on Israel Palestine, and activism, Aneil Rallin’s activism, Karma Chávez’s advocacy, Harriet Malinowitz’s activism and scholarship (2015), and Anis Bawarshi’s essay on genre and Israel-Palestine conflict (2016). I want to extend Anis Bawarshi’s thinking on how conversations about Palestine have had to contend with a series of “seemingly habitual, totalizing pattern of uptakes” (p. 44) which is in part responsible for this lack of discourse. My extension of Bawarshi’s work is in recognizing how digital activism and technologies have been instrumental in new “communities of sentiment” (Appadurai, 1990) that have been instrumental in challenging these totalizing uptakes. Aviva Freadman defines uptake as “the bidirectional relation that holds between genres” (2001, p. 40).

The most challenging totalizing uptake that for a long time created the conditions for erasure of Palestinian narratives and suffering is of course the strategic and totalizing uptake that equates any criticism of the Israeli state or call to humanize the Palestinians as anti-semitic. Jewish scholars such as Judith Butler and Norman Finklestein have argued that the Israeli state’s actions are in sharp disagreement with Jewish values. As Butler famously said, “no, it’s not anti-semitic” (2023). And yet, and yet, this totalizing uptake historically has rendered conversations about the increasing settler violence and Gaza being transformed into an open-air prison invisible. Additionally, in a US national context, traditional media such as the New York Times have long failed their own purported values of journalistic objectivity in the case of reporting on geopolitics (Othman and Johnson). The most clear evidence of this in this case is how the New York Times highlighted Israeli deaths by using words such as “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” and reporting Palestinian deaths as “were killed” or simply “died.” The New York Times’ tagline “All the news that’s fit to print'' should in fact read "All the news that our present ethno-class of human is identified with." This is of course no surprise as these publications have long been complicit in the exercise of necropolitical power and in maintaining the fictionalized notion of the enemy that such power thrives on. Added to that is the fact that the materiality of the Palestinians is difficult for our ethno-class of human to identify with. Palestine is overshadowed therefore by the ideograph of the “Middle-East” which is enmeshed in rhetoric of perpetual chaos as a place containing all manner of inhumanness or the law of jungle in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s words—no wonder even the White House retweeted the lie that 40 babies were beheaded and then burned by Hamas; this is not a surprise since the ideograph of “Middle East” sponsors a series of uptakes that make any action no matter how heinous in the “Middle-East” all too believable. Another facet of this coverage of course is that for our present ethno-class of the human, Israel is much easier to identify with as Europe, US, and Israel have a similar shared aesthetic vocabulary. A massacre at a music festival carries far more affectability that facilitates identification with Israel whereas the realities of open air prison do not. This is of course particularly salient in the context of homonationalism (Puar, 2007) and queer necropolitics (Ritchie, 2014).

In contrast, the prosumer based digital public sphere of our time Social Media has provided an indispensable space in creating communities of sentiment across people previously not identified with each other. David Sheridan et al urge us, following Michael Warner, to emphasize the “poetic world making” or “poesis” in shaping the public sphere of our time which is in part digital (Sheridan, 2012, p. xxiv). Additionally, the possibility of using many different modalities, such as gestures, visuals, and/or digital technologies to communicate” has been essential in forging new identifications which traditional media has stalled (Gonzales, 2018). These modalities create the possibility of affectivity which is a particular affordance of these modalities as this affectivity and persuadability exceeds “those of the letter, the text-based, the author, the composed” (Alexander and Rhodes, 2014, p. 4). Consider the Palestinian social media activist Wizard-Bisan, whose videographic coverage of the indiscriminate bombing, displacement, food scarcity, and violence Palestinians have faced since October 7th has disrupted the routinized uptake of a rhetoric of incommensurability for her millions of followers. Central to the creation of this new community of sentiment that has shifted the affectability of millions of young people around the world is how this creates new ways of engaging with the world. These posts immerse the viewer in a multisensory landscape that, in sound focused multimodal scholar Steph Ceraso’s words, enables new “affective, bodily and lived experiences of multimodality” that are central to this shift (2018, p. 9). Bisan’s posts very well could be a video call from a friend. In these posts which could have been posted by a friend, sounds of bombs often reverberate as Bisan shares updates of the horrific violence unleashed on Gaza. Often Bisan’s posts share some of what she's thinking at the moment. She feels so very next to us until we turn off our phone and it’s quiet again.

This strange proximity mixed with the inescapable distance between the viewer and Bisan creates a form of identification that is difficult to establish with print. The materiality of the digital in the form of photographs of the occupation, Israeli West Bank barrier, and scenes of the constant harassment Palestinians face at the hands of Israeli soldiers facilitates radical identification between those marginalized in their own contexts. While Archbishop Desmund Tutu had to travel to Israel himself to recognize the ongoing apartheid in Israel, Black South Africans who survived apartheid have found today’s images circulating on social media from Gaza and the West Bank all too familiar, some even calling Palestinian enclaves bantustans. Images of the Israeli West Bank barrier speak to millions in the global south who have been robbed of their mobility by visas and borders. This materiality of the digital complicates the idea of the ecological and the material. On the one hand, in the digital prosumer-based economy of content, presence is disembodied and time is flattened to create a simultaneity of experiences across different ecologies where the relationships formed are not restricted to the biological sense of ecology as the relationship of organism to its surroundings. On the other hand, post-humanist approaches for multimodal rhetoric that emphasize circulation and an object’s “thingpower” or its ability to be an “actant” in its own right across the various genres of the internet offer a valuable resource for understanding our networked digital world (Gries, 2015). Posthumanism offers exceedingly productive ways of reading the afterlife of semiotic resources in their own right; however, so far, in my perspective it falls short of helping us think how power-differences facilitate the brokering of specific identifications at the expense of others.

Another way that digital technologies have been central in identification with the Palestinian cause is disrupting the uptake that conflates Jewishness with the nation-state of Israel. Despite the long history of Jewish activism that sees the oppression of Palestinians as a flagrant violation of not just international law but Jewish values, the totalizing uptake of “self-hating Jew” made Jewish activism on this scale difficult. This uptake erases even Israeli citizen criticism of the Netanyahu regime, more unpopular than popular even in Israel.  This conflation has long erased Jewish activism, criticism of Israel, and resistance to the Netanyahu regime. Multimodal Jewish activism disrupts this uptake. Consider the self-description of the organization IfNotNow: “American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for Israel's apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future for all.” This organization is one of many Jewish-led organizations that see the injustices committed by the Israeli state and military as threats to our humanity itself. This new found large-scale identification with the Palestinian “human?,” i.e.. the subject of Israeli domination is part of the global movement of re-writing politics and attempts of identification between the Others of modernity “human?” and “human?” &  between “Man” and “human?”. It is this new found affectability of the multimodal digital public sphere that has created the conditions for even some European states (Spain, Norway, Ireland) to recognize a Palestinian state.

Palestinians like Bisan and Jewish-led organizations such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace have deployed diverse semiotic resources to disrupt the narratives sponsored by conventional media. In this shift, once again, we Rhetoric and Composition scholars must admit that the students have become the “masters.” While the professional organization of our field CCCC has refused to identify with Palestinians in calling out this ongoing genocide, our students have reminded us that we have to learn much from them in recognizing the ethical and social responsibilities of intellect. More Rhetoric and Composition scholarship needs to focus on how multimodality can encourage forms of identification that are unique to our time and we are encountering for the first time in human history. These new forms of identification have played no small role in pressuring the Biden administration to pass the ceasefire resolution in the UN Security Council. While this multimodal public sphere comes with its own dangers, it has the potential to disrupt routinized uptakes, create new communities, and engage with the world differently. All of this being said, we have failed Gaza. So many comments on Bisan’s posts share this sentiment. And yet, new uptakes such as mass student protests in support of Palestine all across college campuses in the United States, Jewish folk and queer folk marching with protest signs saying “not in my name,” and indigenous folks blocking ports carrying weapons to Israel testify to the fact that while we have failed, our failure proves that identification with the “human?” subject of necropolitics is not an impossibility but is for a lack of trying. We must learn from our failures and emphasize multimodal pedagogy that makes it a point to learn from our students because they recognize that they will inherit our failures. We must not allow for our ontological theories to do away with the word human and call it a job well done but ask ourselves in what way does this word create possibilities for different peoples of the world to identify with each other.

I do not know what you will take away from this inquiry. But I hope you know the whole world is watching. Our field’s  hypocrisy and failure to call out this genocide will always be remembered. It is a failure that lingers in our very bodies. I will end with Edward Said who, addressing an Israeli audience, once said: “One day you’ll wake up and ask ‘What the fuck am I doing?’”

 

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Hamza Ahmad is a Pakistani PhD student and instructor at the University of Washington's English Department. Hamza is a lover of Urdu poetry and is enthralled at the prospect of bringing his interests in Urdu to the study of rhetoric with particular attention to locating this work in post and decolonial conversations.