Political Vocabulary Research Articles

Histoire du vocabulaire français: origines, emprunts et création lexicale par Olivier Bertrand

quartier, comme en écho reconnaissant, récitent les vers répétés autrefois après lui: “J’entends ta voix dans la voix des enfants” (175). Avec Parabole du failli, Trouillot compose un hymne éloquent au pouvoir des mots, à la survivance des poètes et à la capacité de l’artiste tombé à se relever comme “l’oiseau noir toucouleur [...] au bord de la fenêtre” (176). Pourtant, cette fois-ci, “tu ne tombes pas. Tu planes. [...] Tu n’arrêtes pas de planer” (176). Une belle parabole pour Haïti aussi. Earlham College (IN) Annie Bandy Linguistics edited by Stacey Katz Bourns Bertrand, Olivier. Histoire du vocabulaire français: origines, emprunts et création lexicale. Palaiseau: École Polytechnique, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7302-1581-7. Pp. 227. 17,80 a. This concise volume will delight any Francophile curious about etymology. With lucid, lively, sometimes witty prose, the author introduces the reader to the captivating history of many common (and some less common) words that have entered French via the language’s many and varied contacts with other languages, as well as words created in-house through derivation and other means. Most chapters begin with an overview, historical synopsis, or presentation and illustration of relevant linguistic terms and processes, before discussing representative lexical examples. The organization is roughly chronological, beginning with the Latin heritage to which French owes some 87% of its vocabulary, the few lexical vestiges of Gaulish (for example, chêne, mouton), and early Germanic influences (‘h aspiré’ words, guerre, blanc, bleu). The chapter on the languages of medieval France gives a solid summary of Occitan but, oddly, little discussion of how Occitan lexically influenced its neighbor to the north; here one could mention abeille or the pronunciation of amour. Particularly fascinating is the chapter on early borrowings from Arabic (chiffre, alcool, chimie, sirop, artichaut, even jupe).Chapters on emerging political vocabulary reflect the author’s more specialized interests; as French progressively replaced Latin in the legal sphere, its vocabulary swelled with appropriate terms (often Latinate) needed to fulfill the language’s expanding functions. The seventeenth century witnessed the beginnings of linguistic purism and codification, and the eighteenth saw further advances in science (units of measurement like litre and mètre) and changes in political thought (for example, anarchiste, from the long-attested anarchie). The chapter on modern borrowings centers entirely on English and a host of recent language planning efforts, such as the Loi Toubon of 1994, designed to stem this perceived incursion and bolster the use of French. Bertrand is careful to avoid angst and alarmism, affirming rather that active borrowing is a sign 282 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 283 of a healthy, living language (French) and that it occurs naturally when languages are in contact. Then follows a potpourri of borrowings from languages whose lexical contributions to French are relatively modest,including Spanish (for example,intégrisme, chocolat),Portuguese (mangue), Dutch (démarrer),Russian (bistrot), Polish (meringue), Persian (pyjama),Chinese (soja),and modern German (aspirine,vampire).Unfortunately, subsequent discussion of the regional languages within France is limited to Breton. Bertrand shows how French innovates from within, for example through derivation (prefixation,suffixation),indicating that many productive affixes (aéro-,ciné-,-gramme, -logie) are of Greek origin.A few captivating cases of disputed or mysterious etymologies (including rat and cochon) are the icing on the cake. The author never pretends to exhaustivity, and annotated references appear in each chapter for readers interested in greater detail or more complete accounts. Graduate students and researchers will want to dig deeper,but selections from this book could work well in a range of undergraduate courses: two possibilities include History of the Language and Introduction to French Linguistics. Overall, this introductory work offers a highly enjoyable, accessible survey of the French lexicon that contains considerable expertise and careful scholarship. University of California, Santa Cruz Bryan Donaldson Cerquiglini, Bernard. Petites chroniques du français comme on l’aime! Paris: Larousse, 2013. ISBN 978-2-03-588587-6. Pp. 351. 20,90 a. La couverture annonce déjà qu’il s’agit là d’un vrai régal: l’auteur accueille le lectorat avec un petit sourire malin auquel s’ajoute un...

Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani

According to the art critic Harold Rosenberg there is nothing religious about Barnett Newman’s series of fourteen roughly human-sized, black and white paintings, The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani. Rosenberg, countering Thomas Hess’s kabalistic reading of Newman’s work, argued that Newman’s The Stations should be understood in the context of Newman’s idiosyncratic, secular world view. This in some respect is correct—Newman was not religious in any traditional sense and railed against dogma of any kind—but Rosenberg surprisingly failed to understand fully that Newman’s recourse to a powerful religious symbol allowed him to point to the political import of his subject when other aesthetic and political vocabularies failed him.

Peaceful Kings: Peace, Power, and the Early Medieval Political Imagination, by Paul J. E. Kershaw

Peaceful Kings: Peace, Power, and the Early Medieval Political Imagination, by Paul J. E. Kershaw. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2011. xviii, 313 pp. $120.00 US (cloth). In Wim Wenders' haunting film, Der Himmel uber Berlin (1987), an old man who personifies the ancient Greek poet Homer ruminates on the topic of peace in human history, while leafing through a copy of August Sander's book of photographs, Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. He laments that no poet has ever succeeded in singing an epic of peace: Was ist denn am Frieden dass es nicht auf die Dauer begeistert und dass sich von ihm kaum zu erzahlen lasst? [What is wrong with peace that its inspiration does not endure and that it is almost untellable?] This sentiment is particularly appropriate for the early Middle Ages. Paul Kershaw's book is the first comprehensive study of the theme of peace in the imagination of the court advisors, imperial biographers, and royal panegyrists who formulated and promoted the ideals of Christian rulership in the period between the end of the western Roman Empire in the late fifth century and the waning of Carolingian authority at the close of the ninth century. This study argues forcefully that the theme of peaceful kingship was pervasive in political discourse throughout the early Middle Ages. Moreover, it demonstrates clearly that this discourse drew upon a centuries-old lexicon of literary models from Roman antiquity and from the Hebrew scriptures, most notably the examples provided by King David and his son Solomon. But political ideals do not always translate into political practice. In this respect, Kershaw's well-researched book falls short of the mark that it sets for itself. This study catalogues many references to peace as res regia business of the king) in this period, but there is no attempt to reconcile this prevalent political ideal with the equally abundant evidence that the primary political activity of most early medieval rulers was warfare. Looming behind this study is a larger, unanswered question: given the persistence of peace as an attribute of idealized kingship in the early Middle Ages, why did its inspiration not endure as a tenable political reality? The scope of Kershaw's study is admirably broad. The introduction lays out the premise that many early medieval thinkers linked peace with power and explored this connection in many different genres, from epic poetry to historical annals to peace treaties, for a wide range of personal and political purposes. Chapter One looks for definitions of peace in early medieval sources (the Latin pax and its many vernacular equivalents) and ranges widely from Northumbria, where Bede defined the peace of Edwin's reign in terms of freedom from robbery, rape, or violence [and] security to travel at will (p. 31), to Rome and Constantinople, where the notion of the pax Romana endured in monuments like the Ara Pacis and the Church of Hagia Eirene, and in the prayers preserved in the Old Gelasian Mass. Ultimately, it was biblical models like Hezekiah, Solomon, and Christ to whom early medieval authors would turn when they described the peaceful qualities of their kings. Chapter Two surveys the use of peace in the political vocabularies of the barbarian rulers of Vandal North Africa, Gibichung Burgundy, Ostrogothic Italy, Visigothic Spain, and Merovingian Francia, with a digression on the notions of peace found in the works of Pope Gregory the Great. …

The Resilience Complex

The Resilience Complex

O comércio civiliza, Portugal oprime: a História do Brasil de John Armitage e a linguagem do humanismo comercial

O principal objetivo deste artigo consiste em apresentar a linguagem do humanismo comercial como horizonte historiográfico interpretativo para John Armitage na escrita de sua História do Brasil, publicada em 1836. Esta linguagem é definida por John Pocock como a junção dos conceitos de virtude e comércio, os quais compunham vocabulários políticos opostos antes do século XVIII, no intuito de formar uma nova linguagem em que a esfera do social adquiriu centralidade. Nesse sentido, o desenvolvimento das virtudes desse novo homem social deveria ser dado justamente no contato com pessoas e coisas propiciado pelo comércio. Armitage tendeu a caracterizar a história nacional brasileira como o inverso do que seria a história de uma sociedade comercial, principalmente pela restrição comercial que enfrentava e pela falta de estímulo de Portugal, tido como um país estagnado. Aliado a isso, Armitage também apresenta a figura de D. Pedro I como propícia a fomentar guerras ao invés de estimular o comércio e as interações sociais.

Ottoman Concepts of Empire

Empire was never an important concept in Ottoman politics. This did not stop Ottoman rulers from laying claim to three titles that may be called imperial: halife, hakan, and kayser. Each of these pertains to different translationes imperii, or claims of descent from different empires: the Caliphate, the steppe empires of the Huns, Turks, and Mongols, and the Roman Empire. Each of the three titles was geared toward a specific audience: Muslims, Turkic nomads, and Greek-Orthodox Christians, respectively. In the nineteenth century a new audience emerged as an important source of political legitimacy: European-emergent international society. With it a new political vocabulary was introduced into the Ottoman language. Among those concepts was that of empire, which found its place in Ottoman discourse by connecting it with the existing imperial claims.

Holding the lotus to the rock: Creating dance community in Red-State America

In describing the dedication necessary to transplant Buddhism to North America, the Japanese Zen master Sokei-an Sasaki (1882–1945) famously said ‘it will be like holding a lotus to a rock, expecting it to take root’. Since 2001, the Texas Tech University Vernacular Music Center (VMC) (whose mission statement includes ‘teaching, research, and advocacy in the world’s vernacular traditions’) has grown a community of collegiate dancers and musicians in the American Southwest, one that cuts across boundaries of class, age and ethnicity. Paradoxically, in this socially and culturally conservative part of the world, while receptivity to music and dance is very high – Texas is the only state in the Union that still maintains required music and art in the public schools – awareness of the art forms’ available stylistic and cultural diversity is very low. Here, vernacular music communities are separated, insulated and cut-off from one another: alienated both geographically, stylistically and sociologically. At the same time, university music programmes, while recognizing the benefits to all of inclusive and diverse excellence, struggle to actualize this recognition: lacking resources, personnel, materials and/or community engagement. Drawing on musicology, ethnography, arts advocacy and mass communications theory, this article investigates the history, goals, means and methods by which the VMC has developed a series of student-centered, boundary-crossing participatory arts communities in the American Southwest, and provides both a practical toolbox, a political vocabulary and a philosophical framework for building like bridges elsewhere

Sanctuary

Over the last decade, sanctuary has been evoked as an alternative to the problems associated with an exclusionary statist asylum regime. In Canada, the United States, and Europe, a “cities of sanctuary” movement has emerged, articulated through various political vocabularies. This movement conceives of sanctuary not simply as a church-based site where asylum seekers may be secured but offers a host of welcoming practices within and beyond cities. This article specifically explores the UK-based City of Sanctuary movement, with a focus on the case of Glasgow, which has widely been read as exemplifying hospitality toward an empowerment of asylum seekers. It has been argued that while a statist discourse of fear—a “politics of unease”—posits migrants as a threat to be policed, the City of Sanctuary stimulates a softer approach. Yet, this article illustrates how the City of Sanctuary is also mobilizing a deeply troubling “politics of ease.” Based on an ethnographic investigation, I show how a politics of ease renders intractable the serious problem of protracted waiting that many controls many asylum seekers. In doing so, I demonstrate how the seemingly hospitable City of Sanctuary in fact contributes to a hostile asylum regime by indefinitely deferring and even extending a temporality of waiting.

Extracting Features from the On-Line News for Making Templates Used in the Process of Educating the Next Generation of Politicians

This paper presents an application for extracting features used in the process of education of politicians based on Open Source technologies, for extracting features from the public press; it enables the user to analyze data from text files and from the Internet. The analyzed data are from the field of politics, a topic which is both a current one and a cyclic process, occurring every four years for the parliamentary elections and every five years for the presidential elections. A specific political vocabulary was compiled for feature identification and analysis and for the interpretation of results obtained.

Turkish politics: raison d’État versus republic

Turkey is still far from having reached the level of advanced representative democracies. Turkish social and political life oscillate between the two modes of modern unfreedom: tryranny of majority and soft despotism. The logic of raison d'État is observed as the dominant state of mind in Turkey both in power circles and among the ruled. The article explores the literature of the sociology of Turkish politics paying special attention to the evolution of political vocabulary. After examining the impacts of the latest developments and considering contemporary challenges of authoritarianism, it argues that a Tocquevillian tension of freedom/unfreedom is shaping the framework of Turkish politics.

Different Manifestations of the Concept of Empowerment: The Politics of Urban Renewal in theUnitedStates and theUnitedKingdom

AbstractOver the course of the 1990s the concept of empowerment became firmly established within the vocabulary of urban politics in several different national contexts. This article analyzes the spread of this concept by looking at the politics of urban renewal in theUnitedStates and theUnitedKingdom. It shows that even if (and possibly because) the definition of empowerment remained vague, the turn to empowerment came out of and contributed to a shift in the nature of urban politics and to a reconfiguration of governmental methods, the role of the state and, consequently, to changes in civil society, all of which were associated with a rise to prominence of a neoliberal perspective.

La Constitution économique parmi les Constitutions européennes

Notre (hypo) thèse est que la constitutionnalisation européenne peut être divisée en périodes, chacune d’elles étant marquée par une Constitution spécifique. Étant donné la primauté temporelle et fonctionnelle de l’intégration économique, la première vague de constitutionnalisation a procédé sous les auspices de la Constitution économique. L’accent s’est déplacé vers la Constitution juridique lors de la deuxième phase et vers la Constitution politique lors de la troisième phase. Finalement, depuis le Traité d’Amsterdam (1998) jusqu’à aujourd’hui, c’est la Constitution sécurité qui prime. Ceci étant dit, il ne faut pas déduire de cette succession temporelle que chaque aspect constitutionnel émergeant remplace ou supplante les précédents ; au contraire, les différents aspects se complètent les uns les autres. Ainsi, l’histoire de la Constitution économique ne se termine-t-elle pas lors de la première période de constitutionnalisation. Celle-ci a gardé sa primauté fonctionnelle, et les dimensions constitutionnelles non économiques se sont développées en tant que réponses aux demandes ou aux conséquences de la dimension économique. Pourtant, les relations entre les différents aspects de la Constitution peuvent aussi être de nature conflictuelle. Devant la Cour de justice, ces conflits se présentent souvent sous la forme de conflits entre différents types de droit : entre, d’un côté, les droits liés à la liberté du marché et, de l’autre côté, les droits politiques et sociaux.

Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry (review)

Reviewed by: Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry Mac Marshall Peter Benson, Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 336 pp. Compared with alcoholic beverages and most other drug substances, tobacco is remarkably understudied by medical anthropologists. And yet, tobacco exacts more morbidity and mortality on human beings than any other pharmacologically active substance, a harmfulness that increased markedly with the spread of industrially manufactured cigarettes beginning in the late 19th century. Given the widespread interest and frequent formal training of medical anthropologists in public health this tendency to ignore the study of tobacco is all the more strange. For reasons such as these, Peter Benson’s investigation of tobacco growing and the tobacco industry in North Carolina provides a welcome addition to the literature. It is especially welcome because he connects the specifics of his US-based ethnographic research to larger issues in global public health. This book is a contribution to what Benson calls “the anthropology of capitalism” (58). He concentrates on the establishment, history, transformation, and decline of tobacco farming in North Carolina, although he is also concerned with the broader political economy of tobacco growing in the US. At multiple points in his text the author recounts his goals in writing this book, and reminds his readers what it is about. Arguing that most tobacco research has been on consumption via smoking and chewing, he maintains that “production and supply issues, as much as health behavior, are important public health matters” (10–11). In this vein he states that “My goal is to open up the crucial role of corporations in modern public health to more rigorous analysis and to develop critical reflection about the inadequacies of contemporary public health approaches that do not attend to the harm caused by industry and the role of corporations in the [End Page 617] social management of harm” (41). But Benson has other goals as well: “At a more general level, this book is about racial power and racial projects, and the meaning and politics of innocence and responsibility in the United States” (5). He goes on to state that “This book is about the active construction of morality in a historical context influenced by industry…” (14), and that “One of the central arguments of this book is that white farmers call black people sorry to reroute blame onto them, and justify illegal but economical dependence on undocumented migrant labor” (31). Critical medical anthropology provides a general framework that Benson uses to address structural violence, neoliberal economics, structural adjustment programs, and public health approaches to smoking. He writes that his “book expands tobacco’s public health picture beyond a focus on smoking to include critical perspectives on the global tobacco industry and the social and health issues and forms of structural violence that are related to industrial agriculture and labor migration” (11). His book is an effort to combine a study of Big Tobacco and globalization with local issues and perspectives in the ethnographic context of North Carolina. In so doing, he introduces several key concepts to construct his argument. These include “plighted citizenship,” “faciality,” and “sorriness.” Plighted citizenship refers to hardworking people who are seen to be inherently worthy and unfairly damaged by the federal government or other circumstances beyond their control. It is “a vernacular form of the politics of imperiled privilege and backlash,” and “The plighted citizen is an innocent citizen and others are to blame” (21). In short, a plighted citizen is an innocent victim. Using his mentor, Arthur Kleinman’s, notion of an explanatory model, Benson describes plight as “an explanatory model and cultural model of citizenship that became dominant in the vocabulary of tobacco farm politics in the last several decades,” and goes on to observe that “plight refers to a situation of misfortune and disadvantage where these conditions absolutely do not index personal or familial blameworthiness” (21). Benson contends that North Carolina tobacco farmers have become plighted citizens, aided and abetted in this view of themselves by the tobacco industry cynically exploiting their fears that threats to their way of life are cultural or...

The “Arab Spring” Has Toppled Some Despots and Enriched the Arab Political Vocabulary. But What Are Its Limits and What Should Western Democracies Do to Help It Achieve Its Objectives?

ABSTRACT The author argues that the Arab Spring is a popular quest for freedom in all its manifestations. In this pursuit, sectarian feuds have been minimal and Islamists have been cut down to size. This does not mean that Arab Muslims do not care about religion, but they see it in the context of a personal moral code within a wider cultural context. Although it is by no means certain that the Arab Spring will succeed, the threat to the revolt will come more from the remnants of despotic regimes, especially the military and the police, than from Islamist groups. To forestall this from happening, the West could help with a package of diplomatic and economic support. The confusion about the uprising that is unfortunately widespread in Western capitals is due to old “Arab hands,” stuck as they are in their time warp, desperately clinging to dead and dying certainties.

Dimensões do governo subalterno da Ilha de Santa Catarina (1738-1821)

The purpose of this article is to understand the formation of the colonial unit of the island of Santa Catarina (later expanded to the mainland) in 1738, when a government subordinated to the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro was established. This subordinate government lasted until 1821, when it became an independent province. There was also an attempt to identify the legal status and size of this establishment in the eyes of different colonial agents, based on the analysis of the political vocabulary used by the authorities in documentation from the time.

Fadrique Furió Ceriol's Machiavellian vocabulary of contingency

Over two decades ago Helena Puigdomenech demonstrated that Niccolò Machiavelli's political treatises circulated openly in Spain for roughly thirty years in the second half of the sixteenth century. Despite the Roman Index of 1559, Machiavelli was not prohibited in Spain until Quiroga's Index of 1583. Soon after this date, Machiavelli's fortune in Spain would become inevitably linked to the Spanish anti‐Machiavellian tradition, which Pedro de Ribadeneyra inaugurated with his Tratado de la Religion y Virtudes que deue tener el Principe Christiano, first published in 1595, and which lasted throughout the first half of the seventeenth century. The question of what Spaniards took out of their reading of Machiavelli continues unanswered. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that Furió Ceriol not only appropriated Machiavelli's political vocabulary in general and adapted it to Philip II's monarchical ideology but also borrowed extensively from Il Principe in order to advise his king on the best way to deal with the rebellion in the Low Countries.

From Sustainable Community to Big Society: 10 years learning with the Imagine approach

Community is a key word in the current UK political vocabulary. As part of Big Society or as a sustainable means to develop social coherence, community has been an area of focus that has attained UK political party interest since 2003. In 1999, the Imagine method was first hinted at in the Earthscan book: “Sustainability Indicators: measuring the immeasurable”. The approach allows citizens to learn about and self-evaluate their own sustainability by developing their own sustainability indicators in a manner which is participatory and evidence based. Communities could make use of the approach, not in an attempt to arrive at some “absolute” value of sustainability but in striving to achieve a self-knowing sense of how sustainable they are, by their own measured indicators, and to use this evaluation in discourse with other agencies such as local and national government. The tone of Imagine is to empower citizens to own their own sustainability and to plan for sustainable futures. The method, developed for spatial and temporal sustainability assessment, has been trialled by countries in the Mediterranean region within Coastal Area Management Programmes (CAMPs). Building off this engagement with geographically and culturally diverse communities, the method has been supported by the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) in the UK and developed into a teaching module that has been subsequently tested at undergraduate, postgraduate, continuing professional development (CPD), Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and working with practitioners, as a hands-on Masterclass. The resulting course Creating Sustainable Communities (CSC) has now been introduced to 20 UK universities and has seen use by seven of them. This paper tracks the development of the Imagine method, explores its major elements and sets out the learning impacts it has had to date.

Concept drift and how to identify it

This paper studies concept drift over time. We first define the meaning of a concept in terms of intension, extension and label. Then we study concept drift over time using two theories: one based on concept identity and one based on concept morphing. A qualitative toolkit for analysing concept drift is proposed to detect concept shift and stability when concept identity is available, and concept split and strength of morphing chain if using the morphing theory. We apply our framework in four case-studies: a political vocabulary in SKOS, the DBpedia ontology in RDFS, the LKIF-Core ontology in OWL and a few biomedical ontologies in OBO. We describe ways of identifying interesting changes in the meaning of concept within given application contexts. These case-studies illustrate the feasibility of our framework in analysing concept drift in knowledge organisation schemas of varying expressiveness.

Confronting Communism with Christian Ethics: The Ethico-Religious Motivation of Eastern European Dissidence

The present study aims to argue that concepts like ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘political religions’ are still an important part of the political science vocabulary and should not be abandoned. Although they were adopted by many important scholars, these concepts went under fire starting in the 1960s. They were accused of being too broad, too vague, trying to constrain under an artificial conceptual umbrella a diverse and heterogeneous reality. Most of all, some found irritating the historical comparison between National Socialism and Communism and the use of term ‘totalitarian’ for both of the regimes. Therefore, ‘totalitarianism’ was considered a propaganda tool of the Western world against the Soviet Union and not a scientific concept. Similarly, ‘political religions’ was seen as a weapon invented by conservative thinkers and not a valid instrument of political theory. As a ground for our research, we employed an analysis of the self-understanding of those involved in the resistance against Communist totalitarianism, choosing some important figures of Central and Eastern European dissidence. Dissidents felt they were confronting a political system which aimed to be the sole source of values for the individuals' public and private lives, and the word ‘totalitarian’ was thoroughly adequate to describe it. We also underline that ethics, as a mandatory prerequisite for any political opposition, was a common feature in the intellectual dissent's thought. However, the main contribution of this article is the attempt to reveal the common ground of dissidence ethics and Christian values, although those presented here were lay intellectuals. Describing Communist regimes in religious terms and adopting a strategy of opposition rooted in Christian ethics seemed to be the self-evident solution for the lay dissidence.

Appropriate Indecorum Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Political Theory of Jacques Rancière

Appropriate Indecorum Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Political Theory of Jacques Rancière Ethan Stoneman Jacques Rancière is one of France's leading intellectuals and a recent addition to the who's who of Continental philosophy. Since his time as a student at the Ecole normale supérieure, Rancière has generated a body of work that is at once wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and consistent. His arguments for a postfoundational and postliberal democratic understanding of politics have influenced, echoed, or demanded critical response from such other Continental luminaries as Slavoj Žižek (1999, 2004) and Alain Badiou (2005). Much of this cachet is no doubt due to Rancière's central thesis regarding the sources, uses, and ends of politics. According to this argument, politics does not derive from putative a priori truths about knowledge, human nature, or social interaction; it is not a function of particular forms of government, and it neither establishes nor ensures socioeconomic order. Rather, for Rancière politics is a dissensual activity consisting solely in the demonstration of equality. But rather than designating something to be attained, preserved, or balanced against competing factors, Rancière's equality names an assumption that political subjects must presuppose on their own account and exhibit through their own actions. Insofar as a given social arrangement is hierarchical, the egalitarian presupposition will be necessarily agonistic and symbolically disruptive of that order. [End Page 129] In a word, Rancière champions a politics from the ground up, one that defends without patronizing the down-and-out, the disenfranchised, the unseen, and the unheard. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, while Rancière was formulating his theory of politics, American rhetoricians began to assert the continued relevance of decorum to the analysis of contemporary social phenomena (see, e.g., Fantham 1984; Leff 1987, 1990; Rosteck and Leff 1990; Hariman 1992, 1995; Smith 1992; Deem 1995). These efforts were concurrent with other attempts to foreground the aesthetic capacity of rhetoric to create, sustain, and transform perception via the symbolic manipulation of appearances (see, e.g., Farrell 1993; Whitson and Poulakos 1993; Vitanza 1997; Greene 1998). It is surprising, however, that these efforts to revitalize decorum and aesthetics have largely fail to reference recent Continental theories of aesthetics, many of which have tacit but unexplored bearing on decorum and rhetoric in general. Equally surprising is the tendency, within rhetorical studies, to discuss aesthetics without so much as broaching the subject of decorum. One exception to this trend is Robert Hariman (1992, 1995), who makes a convincing case for the conceptual intimacy between decorum and aesthetics. The classical theory of decorum, he argues, "blended significant aspects of rhetorical practice, social awareness, and political structure into an aesthetic sensibility that directed the selection of diction appropriate to one's subject or situation" (1992, 152). According to this account, decorum in the classical era engendered an aesthetic orientation toward one's sociopolitical environment and the rhetorical practices therein. I contend that Rancière's political theory makes significant strides toward bridging the gap between decorum, aesthetics, and politics while at the same time focusing attention on the role of equality and the empowering potential of indecorum. Although rhetoricians have tended not to address the inventional possibilities of indecorum per se, there has been a recurring effort among those writing on decorum to explicate the conditions of rhetorical performances of confrontation, nonadjustment, and resistance—performances that would eschew a logic of influence and assent for a tactics of opposition and disturbance. This trend has been accompanied by periodic attempts to account for rhetoric's potential to interrupt dominant modes of discourse and rationality and to identify its countervailing forces and formal constraints (Scott and Smith 1969; Windt 1972; Campbell 1973; Phillips 1996; Doxtader 2000). It is my contention that Rancière's political vocabulary can extend this line of inquiry by [End Page 130] expanding the possibility for indecorum to subvert the symbolic structures of oppression and domination while avoiding the pitfalls of adaptation and co-optation, that is, the reconstitution of decorum via dialectical syntheses of competing codes of conduct. Specifically, rhetoricians may interpret Rancière's political theory as answering Melissa Deem's...