Ideology's Absent Shadow: A Conversation about Rhetoric

Abstract:We have been asked to engage in a conversation about the current role of ideology—as critique, as rhetoric, as a framework within which academics operate. Our approach will not seek to write the history of rhetorical critique from an ideological perspective, nor work from extant literature as one might in a traditional research essay. Still, we reference ideas emanating from that literature; instead of the normal "source citation in text," we will list references at the end. Our ideas do not exist in a vacuum—they are stimulated by our own reading/writing in the area of ideology critique—from the original "ideological turn" to the present day. Hence it seems appropriate to acknowledge where ideas, especially about missing elements or future trajectories in research, come from. This conversation touches on the Cold War afterlife of the public as an ideological force, whiteness's role in gatekeeping the field, and how political liberalism and those interpellated by it constrain the field's future(s).