ABSTRACT
The “turn” (linguistic turn, critical turn, new material turn, etc.) is a prominent concept in the production of rhetoric’s intellectual history. This essay argues that academic turns are commonly figured through tropes of classical physics that portray time as linear, the field as an empirical path, and turns as discrete, progressively patterned events that can be reflected upon as determinate moments in time. This figuring of reflection reconditions a representationalist orientation to discourse even while scholars may be developing nonrepresentationalist theories of rhetoric. Simultaneously, academic turns figured through classical physics are sutured with neoclassical assumptions of neoliberalism, the prevailing political economy of the modern academy, which promotes accumulation and quantitative growth above other values. This infusion of neoliberalism in academic writing, however, can be disrupted through tropes of quantum physics, such as entanglement and indeterminacy, and can cultivate a performative orientation to discourse that attunes students of rhetoric to how history is continuously written anew. Engaging the centennial issue of Quarterly Journal of Speech as an assemblage of turns, the essay considers the ethical implications of troping rhetoric’s intellectual history through academic writing practices and concludes by attending to the way we figure rhetoric when conceptualizing what rhetorical scholars study.
