{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026785714285714284, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.698969072164949, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Rhetorical pedagogy as a postal system: Circulating subjects through Michael Warner's “publics and Counterpublics”

D the past century, the linguistic turn in the human sciences and the anxiety over new communication technologies (radio, television, computers, satellites) focused intellectual attention on communication's role in organizing the interaction between self and other. On the one hand, communication was given ontological priority and, on the other, communication was invested with a normative privilege. The ontological and the normative force of communication generates a strong political imperative to assert itself as the most democratic principle to guide human interaction. From this perspective, to recognize oneself as a subject who communicates is the first step toward the democratic reconciliation of self and other. The ability of communication to assert an ontological, normative, and political priority makes abundantly clear why, according to Briankle Chang, the "enemy of communication is indifference." Indifference is the biggest threat because communication is advocated as a pedagogy for the soul, and without one's full attention to how communication cares for the soul, all is lost. No concept of modernity escapes the force of communication. The public is no exception; it has been thoroughly reformulated as a problem of communication. Rhetorical studies is saturated with the "public," for example, public speaking, public argumentation, public interest, public knowledge, public affairs, public communication, public sphere, public address, public discourse, and public philosophy. The public and its problems, to steal a phrase, are the central research questions of rhetorical studies. For this reason, Michael Warner's conceptualization of the public demands serious attention. Yet his essay will come with some peculiar challenges to the received tradition. The primary challenge is Warner's resistance to the vocabulary of communication to guide the relational norms and forms of a public. In so doing, no particular genre of speaking or practice of communication (debate, dialogue, rational-critical argumentation, conversation, reading) can be offered as the universal normative foundation for regulating, improving, and/or critiquing the problems and possibilities of a public. In this way, Warner is interfering with the moral pedagogy of communication studies and rhetoric to fashion the souls required for a public life. A normative belief in the power of rhetoric to correct the soul of a citizenry damaged by liberalism, television, the market, technocratic reasoning, therapeutic discourse, and consumer culture transforms rhetorical scholars into moral entrepreneurs of public life. Whether a rhetorical scholar fashions his or her project on the normative terrain of a neo-conservative Platonist, an advocate of neo-Puritan political communication, a Ciceronian civic humanist, an invitational rhetorician, a dialogic liberal, or a red Republican, communication becomes the technique for transforming the soul of citizens and society. Rhetorical studies is infused with the desire to advocate the normative capacity of communication to provide the foundation for public life. Although Warner's