What is the essential tension in rhetorical studies? What can go wrong when “new disciplines” are trying to find their way to academia? The two camps, productive and interpretative rhetoricians, have different vocabularies, presuppositions, priorities, criteria, references and eventually audiences. In general different intellectual trajectories have different sub-cultures, and the difference is made worse, not attenuated, by the existence of superficial similarities, for instance identical words used with quite different meanings (pathos, ethos logos the present example). Because issues seem to be shared by two disciplines, scholars from each may seek, or at least welcome, interdisciplinary exchanges. More often than not, their expectation is not so much that they will learn much from the other discipline; it is that people in the other discipline can and should learn from them. It is much less challenging to think that one’s message has relevance beyond its usual audience than to think that one has been missing a message of great relevance to oneself. In fact, people like Gross seems to have tried to go out of their way and produce novel work, but more with the expectation that they would have a message to share than one to accept. Gaonkar on his part is willing to welcome “global rhetoricians” whom he expected to bow to the obvious superiority of his critique on the subject of agency “in light of larger structures such as language, economy, and the unconscious”. I would be inclined to argue that most of the times, many writers in many fields have participated in interdisciplinary encounters; public discourse on these occasions usually underscores their “bright” side, but, in private, frustrations and disciplinary tensions are commonly expressed. Most participants return slightly intrigued but otherwise unmoved, the way business people return to their American dreams and fancy living rooms after a self-awareness week-end retreat.

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King posits that rhetoric relies on the idea of the polis, an idea that he claims does not fit well with our current society. He talks about the “loss of the sense of place” and the need for the “return of the polis” (300). Likewise, he says that the problem with rhetoric is the “missing community” (311). Finally, he suggests that “the flowering of genuine political discourse belongs to community formation, not community maintenance” (313). To what extent does digital rhetoric deal with the formation of communities? Can communities such as Facebook be considered a “return to the polis”? If so, how can the Internet be seen as a valid place for the study of rhetoric?

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