Deliverance

Abstract

This essay proposes thinking about civic wounds as assemblages. It draws on the historical case of antebellum Cincinnati, where the physical contagion of cholera entangled with the social contagion of slavery in ways that articulated across both cultural and physical domains of activity at once. Taking this approach reveals the ways rhetoric’s pharmakon mediates the operations of delivery within assemblages; I further suggest that the intersecting figural movements of catachresis and metonymy account for the granular pharmacological work of a given wound/assemblage’s historical emergence. Along the way we see how both rhetoric and liberal democracy are toxic enterprises wherein goods and bads commingle in fateful ways.

Whatever else they may be, civic wounds are assemblages composed of a social surface and historical layers of unresolved suffering which compound and fester over time (DeLanda, 2016, pp. 19–23). Rhetorical exigencies and the kairotics of grievance ebb and flow, as Jenny Rice’s contribution to this issue attests, and so democratic accountings are rarely complete or just. Civic wounds are thus open patchworks of recalcitrant antagonisms over maltreatment, invisibility, voicelessness, immobility, and unacknowledged trauma. Moreover, as we have seen in the bizarro world of protective face masks, civic woundings find ambivalent expression (Höpfl, 1995; Massumi, 2002) through both cultural and physical structures at once. The discursive articulation of disease (and its remedies) and the distribution of physical illness (and its treatments) are inseparable phenomena: the mediums of cultural formation intersect with the structures of bodily circulation in pluripotent ways. This double articulation across cultural and physical domains of structuration cuts to the heart of two legacies pertinent to our understanding of civic wounds: that liberal democracy is inherently contaminating and that contamination as such is enlivened by the “polyvalent production” (Conley & Eckstein, 2020, pp. 7–10) of rhetoric’s pharmakon. Working historically, I aim to expound these legacies by tracing the polyvalent operations of delivery within a specific wound assemblage.

Delivery is rhetoric’s ancient infamy, the embodied mechanics of masking the worse as the better case (Porter, 2009, pp. 209–210). The original Greek word for delivery, hypokrisis, is most closely translated as acting. Acting refers to both the taking of action and the masking of that taking, and so delivery-as-acting yields a multiplicity of pretensions like the sending of objects (your package was delivered), the giving of birth (she’s going into delivery!), the presenting of things like jokes or speeches or sales pitches (his delivery needs work), the mastery of “flow” (she really delivers!), and the administering of medicine (here are your suppositories). By contrast deliverance slides in the direction of bads, as a release from some insufferable agent (deliver us from evil). Morey (2016) puts it well:

What delivery best delivers is not an information of literate logic, but affect produced by a larger network of associations between bodies, objects, and environments . . . delivery contends with desires, providing an interface for affect to produce a particular kind of communication designed to solve problems. (pp. 3–4)

Delivery/ance thus describes a given transferential operation within the charged space between (at least) two points of contact. Moreover, this operation is catachrestic in that delivery’s pretensions take shape on the slippery ground between goods and bads (Bizzell & Herzberg, 2001, p. 267; Laclau, 2014, p. 64). And this space of slippage—this exteriorizing space where inventio manifests in the birthing of new formations—is precisely what accounts for rhetoric’s pharmakon.

In what follows I develop these formulations through the historical case of an antebellum wound/assemblage. In the early 19th century, Cincinnati was the capitol of the emerging west. The influx of new bodies to “The Queen City” wrought the spread of both literal disease, in the form of two cholera pandemics, and cultural fears of infestation by conspiratorial Catholics, debased European infidels, and most especially impure blacks. As waves of new bodies spread into the southern Ohio region, their geographic collision birthed a public health crisis and a racial reckoning at once. I thus track the emergent assemblage of woundedness through the “raveled relations” (Stormer & McGreavy, 2017, p. 3) between cholera and slavery. First, I sketch the contours of rhetoric’s pharmakon, and its relation to woundedness, through the historical articulations (DeLuca, 1999) between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Cincinnati’s 1832 and 1849 cholera pandemics. Together, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and cholera illuminate the ways rhetoric’s sensorium operates, polyvalently, within an assemblage of fateful structures—of borders that must be transgressed and necessary transgressions that “kill.” Second, I trace some of the ways cholera articulated across cultural and physical domains of structuration through Lane Theological Seminary’s encounter with slavery. In 1834, Lane student Theodore Weld and his young colleagues organized a 2-week debate on the question of immediate emancipation, which was roundly embraced, and local community leaders responded with the language of contamination and quarantine. They charged the young scholars with polluting Lane’s institutional mission, and they sought to purify the seminary of its transgressive elements. The executive response was to “bloodlet” the school body, to expunge the students, and thus rid the institution of both its lifeblood (empathetic character) and the impurities that the slavery debate had exposed into the system (racial empathy). What the case of antebellum Cincinnati illuminates is the messy assemblage of diseases and cures at all levels of social organization, from the physical and material “up” to the cultural and symbolic (Baker et al., 2020). The cholera pandemic and the antislavery agitations of the “Lane Rebels” remind us that liberal democracy is toxic in precisely the sense that contrary sentiments—goods and bads—are required to commingle within enclosed spaces like hearts, novels, schools, or the pretensions of togetherness that go by names like “civic culture” and “community.”

Contagious cultures

Little Eva St. Clare in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s (1994/1852) blockbuster, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is two things: she is the angelic paradigm of Christian liberalism (love thy neighbor) and she is dying. The novel depicts Eva with no shadings of gray: “the child’s whole heart and soul seemed absorbed in works of love and kindness” (p. 229). Eva alone is able to transgress the boundary structures (chains, fences, dogs, laws, norms, attitudes) that slavery erected between whites and blacks, masters and slaves, parents and children, northerners and southerners, abolitionists and apologists. So effective at spreading her transgressive love, Eva manages to melt even the heart of Topsy, the young slave girl assigned to Eva as both servant and narrative counterpart. When Topsy arrives in the St. Clare home, she is as wicked and debased as Eva is pure and righteous, volunteering for whippings simply because “I’s used to whippin’; I spects it’s good for me” (p. 217). Topsy functions narratively as a marker for slavery’s most horrid excesses, a self-hating Black child who has been so thoroughly poisoned by the institution’s routine cruelties that she cannot even see her own abuse for what it is. In fact, she almost gleefully accepts it, confessing “I’s wicked,–I is. I’s mighty wicked, anyhow. I can’t help it” (p. 212). This last sentiment, I can’t help it, underscores the notion that Topsy’s wickedness is not due to an internal stain; rather, her poisoned soul is the metonymic expression of slavery’s institutional and cultural racism. Stowe is figuring Topsy as the contaminated “reduction” (Burke, 1945, p. 506) of a befouled institution; so polluted by racialized self-hatred that she accepts violence as a perverse form of treatment.

The fact that little Eva’s Christian liberalism manages to “cleanse” Topsy’s contaminated soul is therefore of the highest symbolic importance, for it suggests that slavery’s most wicked evils are curable through the sacrificial heart of liberal love. The purity of Eva’s heart finds its counterpart in the contamination of Topsy’s soul, and the two extremes effectively cancel one another: rhetorically speaking, Eva’s life is taken so that Topsy’s might be saved. She is killed by the miasma of slavery itself. How many times, after all, does Eva declare of slavery’s ills, “these things sink into my heart, Tom. . . they sink into my heart” (p. 190); “No, papa, I’m not nervous . . . I’m not nervous, but these things sink into my heart” (p. 204, original emphasis). The figures of Eva and Topsy thus illustrate how rot and redemption occupy the same space of dwelling. To cure the diseases of slavery is to risk contamination by it, and to be cured is to risk further spreading its poison. This messy, contradictory sameness of cure and poison is precisely what forms the inventional kernel of rhetoric’s pharmakon. According to Tormey (2018),

Pharmakon referred to a powerful substance intended to make someone better, but which might just end up killing him or her. This sense of Pharmakon as both a poison and a cure was intrinsic to the meaning of the term . . . Perhaps the body will live; perhaps it will die. Life and death, good outcomes as well as bad, were fully acknowledged in its use. Intrinsic to the concept of the Pharmakon is, as Derrida relates, uncertainty or contingency—the unknowability of an outcome based on the properties of the substance in question. (p. 261)

Worth emphasizing is how the designation of goods and bads is an uncertain and therefore provisional affair, and so what delivery delivers are pretensions: bids, proposals, assertions, wagers—“solutions” (Morey, 2016, p. 4) in the broadest sense. Provisional designation in turn describes the figural movement of catachresis which, Laclau (2014) adds, involves “giving a name to something that is essentially ‘nameless’, to an empty place . . .catachresis is inherent to the figural as such—it becomes the trademark of ‘rhetoricity’ as such” (p. 64). Rhetoric-as-delivery, then, is fundamentally catachrestic in that its pretensions aim to fill an absence with (provisional) meaning and sensation. In saying this, we must also note both the incessantly productive and extra-linguistic dimensions of rhetorick’s pharmakon.

In his account of pharmacology and technoculture, Stiegler (2013) highlights the contrast Plato sets up between the autonomy of pure thought (anamnesis) and the heteronomy of written thought/memory (hypomnesis); adding, “while Plato opposes autonomy and heteronomy, they in fact constantly compose” (p. 2). Yes, and this constant composition plays out historically between the oneness of thought and the manyness of thought’s expression (Massumi, xxix). Moreover, these expressions take shape, as pretensions, through the intersecting figural movements of catachresis and metonymy. Metonymy is a mode of reduction, according to Burke (1945), in which the incorporeal is made corporeal (p. 506). When we say “the pen is mightier than the sword,” pen and sword represent incorporeal notions of talking versus violence. Not all reductions are expressed representationally, however, so we should also embrace Grossberg’s (1979) account of metonymy as the trope of differential reduction. He asserts, “If metaphor is the figure of identity and transcendence, of totality and unity, metonymy is the figure of difference and immanence, of the denial of totality and unity, the figure of dispersion” (p. 246). Adding Grossberg to Burke, metonymy becomes the localized expression of a dispersed reduction, and, as Laclau further refines the point, these expressions need not be strictly linguistic: “There is no possibility of any strict separation between signification and action,” he observes, adding, “Even the most purely constative of assertions has a performative dimension, and, conversely, there is no action that is not embedded in signification” (p. 65). Type 2 diabetes does not “represent” our poisonous food system in any conventionally symbolic fashion, but a given body with this particular affliction metonymically expresses that higher order system all the same.

These two figural movements thus help account for the ways delivery articulates within and across assemblages: “vertically” (metonymy) within orders of in/corporealization, in the production of displaced objectivities (bodies, things) and “laterally” (catachresis) across registers of signifying praxis, in the production of meanings and sensibilities. Together, these intersecting figural dynamics illuminate the granular operations of rhetoricity within the ongoing articulations that compose a given assemblage. What matters for thinking about the emergent dynamics of civic wounds, and their available transgressions, is the specific delivery structure of rhetorical mediation: what pretensions are produced, what pretensions are inhibited from production, and how do these in/visibilities become valenced with specific values?

The antebellum Ohio River was a specific delivery structure that articulated across both cultural and physical domains at once. It operated both narratively and historically much the same as Eva’s death in Stowe’s novel: to establish the fateful urgency of transgressing boundaries and disrupting thresholds. Harriet Beecher Stowe moved to Cincinnati in 1832 when her father, Lyman, accepted the Presidency of the city’s new theological school, Lane Seminary. Four years after their arrival Harriet married one of her father’s colleagues, Calvin E. Stowe. Living in Cincinnati during this period schooled Harriet in the fateful power of boundary structures, as the city was built on the bank of the Ohio River separating the North from the South. According to Ammons (1994),

[T]hese years in Cincinnati, a river’s width from the slaveholding state of Kentucky, forced [Harriet] to confront the issue of slavery at close range. Race riots in the city, the presence of runaway slaves and the underground railroad, the spectacle of bounty hunters carrying escaped slaves back into captivity, the fear and anger of freedmen, the activism of abolitionists, white and black: all were inescapable for Stowe in Cincinnati in the 1830s and 1840s. (p. vii)

Indeed, the geological cross-currents of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers led to an explosion in the delivery of goods, bodies, ideas, and sensibilities between the northeast states of Pennsylvania and New York; the northwest states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; and the southwest states of Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and even Louisiana. Antebellum Cincinnati was a hub, a port, and a geographically pivotal through-way. It was the symbolic boast of the nation’s growing industrial strength and the crude reality of an adolescent frontier town. It was an axial point between not only the east and the west but also the north and the south; the industrial and the agrarian, and the rapidly modernizing and the defensively traditional.

These historical particulars are materially relevant to the emergence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1849, the Stowes suffered the death of their eighteen-month old child, Charley, in a cholera pandemic that ravaged Cincinnati. The devastation Harriet experienced at the loss of her young child compelled her to imagine the emotional trauma of mothers losing children to the slave market (sold down the river; these things sink into my heart). The year following the death of their child the Stowes moved back east to Maine; another year later, in 1851, Harriet began publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in serial form for the antislavery paper, The National Era. Having lived eighteen years by the riverbank of slavery’s northern boundary, Stowe was finally prodded by her child’s death to deliver a fictionalized account of border transgression. The Ohio River, then, brought opportunity and growth at the same time as it brought pestilence and mass death at the same time as it brought transgressive hope from a wicked institution. Pharmacologically, this all makes sense: “In liquid, opposites are more easily mixed. Liquid is the element of the pharmakon. And water, pure liquidity, is most easily and dangerously penetrated then corrupted by the pharmakon, with which it mixes and immediately unites” (Derrida, 1981, p. 152). I would only add that rivers are structured liquidity, and so they admit all these mixtures between goods and bads while also functioning as mediums of conveyance between and across different domains of contrariness.

Indeed, while the cholera pandemic influenced Uncle Tom’s Cabin through Stowe’s personal trauma, the disease also operated pharmacologically in the delivery of pro- and antislavery discourses. The 1849 pandemic, after all, was the second scourge of this disease through the new west. The initial outbreak occurred the same year the Beechers first moved to Cincinnati, 1832, as it spread wantonly through the country’s industrial channels (Berdan, 1993; Hutslar, 1996; Rosenberg, 1962). (The disease originated in India, then came to the United States via the influx of western European immigration during the early 1830s.) The source of contamination was usually drinking water, resulting in an acute infection of the small intestine. Symptoms included diarrhea, vomiting, muscle cramps, dehydration, and collapse, and there was a roughly 50% death rate in untreated cases. Because the disease ravaged the insides of its victims, one extreme method of treatment involved bloodletting the patient: expunging the virus by literally draining the body of its contaminants. As a cure, bloodletting involves purging the body of not only its most threatening but also its most essential elements. It poses as much risk as it promises hope; the hope and the risk are raveled in a brutal act of care. The procedure thus typifies the messy inseparability of maladies and treatments taking shape within a wound/assemblage. Cholera was a vulgar, nasty affliction that provoked risky cures, a potent combination that wreaked havoc on not only the individual body but, as we see next, the local body politic.

The business of bloodletting routes us back to the Beecher family’s 1832 arrival in Cincinnati. Having traced through Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Ohio River the parameters of rhetoric’s pharmakon, we turn to the city’s premiere delivery system of cultural therapeutics: the formal institution of learning. If Stowe’s depiction of slavery raises the problem of fateful borders that must be transgressed, the antebellum school-building effort sought to deliver progressive (if not transgressive) liberal values through the purification of youthful character. By 1834, Lane Theological Seminary had so successfully delivered on these pretensions that its students transgressed their own structures of racial division (laws, norms, policies, codes, spatial borders), which provoked a bloodletting of the student body. Indeed, Lane’s border skirmish confirms Stiegler’s (2013) point: “The Pharmakon is at once what enables care to be taken and that of which care must be taken . . .. This ‘at once’ characterizes what I call a pharmacology” (p. 4).

Civic pharmacologies

Of the antebellum period’s extensive efforts in social reform, the advocates of popular education were notably zealous. This zeal is best understood as a delivery campaign of cultural inoculation in the face of turbulent demographic change. If Cincinnati’s experience with cholera was so acute because of its unique geographical standing, the same set of conditions fated the city to become a site of civic pretensions in the form of liberal character-building. Few institutions were as celebrated for their inoculating promise as Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary. In early 1829 Ohio’s Board of Education formally granted Lane the opportunity to build the state’s eighth institution of higher learning (Barnes, 1933; Lesick, 1980). The school commenced with four driving principles in its charter: first, to combine literary and theological instruction, so as to populate the emerging nation with ministers of elevated character, and second, to operate under a system of manual labor, whereby students would work to pay their dues to the school. Third, it would eliminate class divisions by acquainting the students with their immediate community. Finally, it would inspire the students, “with the independence of character, and the originality of investigation, which belongs peculiarly to self-made and self-educated men.” (Lesick, 1980, p. 8) Lane’s pretensions thus championed liberal virtues of integrity, self-reliance, and empathy as the immunities of future strength. In doing so, the school’s founders reduced the incorporeal fantasy of civic health into the autoimmune body-of-character.

If Lane Seminary was heralded as an outpost of cultural inoculation, the school would have to reckon with the miasma of slavery at some point. That happening arrived in the fall semester of 1834 when, for 2½ h over each of nine evenings, eighteen students debated a pair of questions: “Ought the people of the Slave holding States to abolish Slavery immediately?” and “Are the doctrines, tendencies, and measures of the American Colonization Society, and the influence of its principal supporters, such as render it worthy of the patronage of the Christian public?” (Lesick, 1980, p. 79). The majority of the student population (less than one hundred) attended the debates, as did a number of prominent local figures. As it happened, every one of the debate participants had been born, raised, or lived for at least six months in the South. The arguments against slavery thus came from direct accounts of the institution’s savagery, demonstrating again how transgression is birthed from risky exposure. In the end, at least 13 of the participants affirmed the debate’s first question on immediate abolition, or “immediatism,” and only a single student upheld to the end the ideals of the American Colonization Society.

Accordingly, as soon as the debates concluded, the students organized an abolition society and delivered the following proclamation:

Immediate emancipation of the whole colored race, within the United States; the emancipation of the slave from the oppression of the master, the emancipation of the free colored man from the oppression of public sentiment, and the elevation of both to an intellectual, moral, and political equality with the whites. (Lesick, 1980, p. 88)

The Lane students acted on these pretensions with swift organizational prowess. In the summer following the debates, they began delivering lectures to crowds of 250 to 300 people at the Black-supported, biweekly lyceum, for which they helped secure a circulating library and reading room. They offered reading lessons three nights a week to local Black community members, ranging in age from fifteen to sixty; they organized three Sabbath schools and Bible classes; and they published and circulated their new doctrine through a number of antislavery forums—emergent delivery systems, all. In short, the Lane students implemented their newly adopted policy of immediatism with a fervor that transgressed the rigid comforts of Lane’s executive board.

Lane’s Board of Trustees initially tolerated the students’ idealism. When by September it was obvious that students were still spending their time mingling in Black neighborhoods, mediating and advocating and organizing, an executive committee of Lane’s Board finally reacted by closing the school and passing a series of resolutions in the Cincinnati Journal. Their deliverance begins, “RESOLVED, That rules should be adopted, prohibiting the organization in the Seminary, of any association or society of the students, without the approbation of the faculty,” and continues to enumerate the prohibitions:

*Prohibiting the calling or holding of meetings, among the students without the approbation of the faculty; prohibiting students from delivering public addresses or lectures, at the Seminary or elsewhere, without the leave of faculty;

*Prohibiting public statements or communications to the students, when assembled at their meals, or on ordinary occasions, without the approbation of the faculty;

*Requiring the anti-slavery society, and the colonization society of the Seminary to be abolished, and prohibiting any students to act as members thereof;

*Prohibiting any student from being absent from the Seminary, at any time, in term time, without the leave of faculty, or of such person as they shall designate for that purpose; and,

*Discouraging and discountenancing, by all suitable means, such discussions and conduct among the students, as are calculated to divert their attention from their studies, excite party animosities, stir up evil passions among themselves or in community, or involve themselves with the political concerns of the country.

The committee also, finally, provided for “the dismissal of any student neglecting to comply with these regulations” (Lane Seminary Executive Committee, 1834, p. 5). When the seminary reopened in mid-October, the students, in compliance with the executive committee’s “approbation” requirements, petitioned for the granting of a meeting to discuss these orders. Three different groups of students submitted three separate requests and all were denied. By the end of that year, 95 out of 103 students either left or never returned, and a total of 75 were officially branded the “Lane Rebels.”

This messy outbreak of liberal empathy at least confirmed previous boasts of Lane’s national prominence, for as Barnes notes, “the Lane debate reverberated throughout the nation” (p. 69). Of interest was a reaction published by the popular Western Monthly Magazine in the spring of 1834, entitled “Education and Slavery.” The author was the magazine’s editor, James Hall, a lawyer, district judge, state treasurer, and man of letters who was one of Cincinnati’s most accomplished literary statesman and cultural entrepreneurs. Hall delivered the following rebuke:

There certainly ought to be some spot hallowed from the contests of party, sacredly protected from the contamination of the malignant passions, where the mind might be imbued with the lessons of truth, and peace, and honor, unalloyed with prejudice. Such sanctuaries should all our seminaries of learning be. Youth should be a season of repose to the passions, and improvement to the mind; all inflammatory excitement and corroding prejudice should be carefully removed from contact with young intellect. (p. 267)

Hall is, in effect, calling for a racial quarantine (sacredly protected) under the mask of civic purity (truth, peace, honor, repose). We thus see rhetoric’s pharmakon again yielding a catachrestic slippage where Lane the social cure becomes Lane the political contagion. And there is more to Hall’s missive, as he draws extensively on the language of contamination:

We consider the purity of our public schools of every grade, as a matter of the highest interest. Whatever else may crumble under the withering touch of party spirit, let us preserve our schools. If our other institutions shall be polluted by the schemes of ambition, let us keep the fountains of public sentiment pure, and not suffer the poison to be poured into the springs at which our children must drink, and our young men imbibe intellectual vigor. No good can be gained by the discussion of such questions by students, or by the establishment of political clubs in colleges. (pp. 270–271)

Lane Seminary was to be the premiere delivery system of cultural immunities into the wilds of frontier civic life. As it goes with rhetoric’s pharmakon, however, Hall wound up accusing the students of being themselves polluted and of polluting their school in turn. These were the very characters meant to immunize the nation against its riskiest social contaminants. How insidious must the contagion of slavery be, then, implies Hall, to infect even these purest of bodies. The contrast he wants to establish between a purified source and a contaminating agent reveals once more the animating slippage at the heart of rhetoric’s pharmakon.

Arrival

The trouble with assemblages, from a critical perspective, as that they yield too many associations (Latour, 2005) and open up too many possibilities for continued analysis, and so closing the discussion of a wound/assemblage requires a forced finish. Still, we may note a few implications for thinking about how rhetoric animates civic wounds as historical assemblages. First, as assemblages civic wounds are open, evolving, and therefore at least partially opaque from an historical perspective. To quote DeLanda (2006), assemblages are “wholes constructed from heterogeneous parts” (p. 3), and so wound/assemblages are polysemic just as their pretensions are formalized through polyvalent possibilities. Second, as assemblages civic wounds take their formal character through the articulations of delivered goods/bads across both cultural and physical domains of structuration at once. Here, we find the intersecting figural movements of catachresis and metonymy, the X and Y axes of rhetoric’s pharmakon. Catachresis illuminates the maddening twists and turns whereby one’s “poison” and another’s “cure” coexist, opaquely, within the same enclosure; while metonymy identifies displaced objectivities (bodies, things) sliding hither and thither. Articulations firm up when metonymic objects take on catachrestic assignations, as when Topsy takes on Eva’s vitality, or when the Lane Rebels take on characters of empathy. What attends these formal operations, and third, is the challenging realization that wound/assemblages are contaminated by their own remedies. Civic wound/assemblages are historical compositions characterized by the slippage between contaminating agents and purifying agencies. They are dirty, and dirtying, and so are their remedies. This holds true at the level of “macro structures” like institutions and laws and policies, but also at the level of “micro structures” like cultures, habitudes, sensibilities, affects, and mobilities. Indeed, as Stielger exclaims, “Fire is the pharmakon par excellence” (p. 24), as it can give or take life within the same momentary flicker. Historically, culturally, politically, morally: we should always anticipate some goods with our bads and bads with our goods. As Tsing (2015) puts it,

We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. (p. 27)

Later adding, “transformation through collaboration, ugly and otherwise, is the human condition” (p. 31).

It follows that liberal democracy is unavoidably toxic to the extent that liberal virtue realizes itself through mutual infection. As Rice (2015) describes the sensorium of (liberal) publicness, “we are bound by a thin strand of pierceability,” and thus “contamination risks run high” (p. 38). The compositional space between pure thought (anamnesis) and thought’s expression (hypomnesis) is replete with ungainly, malformed pretensions like the rhinoceros. As Adam Gopnik (2019) observes,

No living thing is ideal. A rhinoceros is just a big pig with a horn on it. The ideal of the unicorn is derived from the fact of the rhinoceros . . . People idealize unicorns and imagine unicorns and make icons out of unicorns and write fables about unicorns. We hunt them. They’re perfect. The only trouble with them is they do not exist. They never have. The rhino is ungainly and ugly and short-legged and imperfect and squat. But the rhinoceros is real. It exists. And it is formidable. (p. 14)

A social order composed of rhinos is replete with contingent structures, like protective face masks, that cure and kill at once. The transgression of border structures and the disruption of thresholds thus becomes both risky and required within the “rhino” tradition of civic virtue. Eva’s death—and the Lane Rebels’ abolitionist resolve—showcase the historical rigidity of borders and boundaries, as well as the civic urgency to transgress these very rigidities. Stowe’s own rigid sentimentalism prevents her from tracing the implications of this wounding entanglement: that slavery infects and liberation kills. Nevertheless, historically, change plays out in just such mutually contaminating, structurally re-forming ways. We find conceptual kernels of this historical fact in rhetoric’s most transparent ancient treatise, dissoi logoi, which provides a robust sampling of catachrestic slippage and, thus, articulatory possibility. Dissoi logoi commences with an immediate declaration of rhetoric’s pharmakon:

some say that what is good and what is bad are two different things, others that they are the same thing, and that the same thing is good for some but bad for others, or at one time good and another time bad for the same person. (Bizzell & Herzberg, 2001, p. 48)

The author proceeds to lay out a catalog of topological contingencies and thereby provides an early sampling of rhetoric-as-delivery’s polyvalent possibility. The displacements and slippages of which wound/assemblages are composed leave us mere civic subjects in postures of constant compromise. The question, the challenge, becomes what we’re willing to sacrifice, even let die, to live with whatever level of im/purity we can tolerate from one another.