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Productive criticism at the crossroads: interventions, trajectories, and intersections

When Jeffrey Bennett and Charles Morris invited me to write an epilogue for this special section on productive criticism, my first inclination was to review the nine editorials I wrote as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech over 20 years ago (1993–1995) plus the “tenth,” culminating essay I published in the American Communication Journal in 2001. I thought it would be a good idea to summarize the key themes of the editorials. My first summary produced more than 20 themes and subthemes. My sum of sums boiled down to five key points. I am not going to succumb to the temptation of listing those five points, at least not in the beginning. That would be a reductive rather than productive beginning. Trying to purify the notion of productive criticism would render a metaphor into a concept. I prefer a lively metaphor above a static concept. Purification means sacrificing detail, losing nuance, and forfeiting multivocality. It abstracts and systematizes, and systematizing privileges one way of doing rhetorical criticism. A lively metaphor should prompt rather than prescribe or proscribe, it seems to me. There are different ways of thinking about criticism as a productive act, just as there are ways of thinking about criticism other than as a culturally engaged practice. Reading the nine brief essays in this special section about productive criticism was like listening to a conversation at the crossroads. They intersect on their way to separate destinations. They converge and diverge. The image at their point of intersection might be regenerative or reinforcing, at least in some degree, and hopefully not obstructive or inhibiting. In some measure, these nine essays cohere around a notion of criticism as a rhetorical enactment of public culture. Yet, the entailments of that notion are manifold and multifarious, which is to the good. I appreciate the points raised, the questions asked, and the challenges issued by these articulate, perceptive, and committed rhetorical critics and practitioners. They infuse the subject with energy. I come away from them with a renewed and expanded sense of what it means to be deeply invested in a project of cultural critique that aims to enhance sociopolitical relations and build toward a more just world, to affirm and construct as well as resist and deconstruct, to reimagine troublesome social constructs, to theorize how various kinds of publics are evoked, enacted, and otherwise embodied, to move beyond the safety of cynicism and to reach out to nonacademic audiences, to explore the tensions between symbolic and physical structures and the relations