Overview

Post-Weird: Fragmentation, Community, and the Decline of the Mainstream is an ambitious look at how communities form when old forms of authority and meaning seem to be collapsing around us. This book goes beyond the fraying of contemporary American culture to ask how communities that used to be considered “fringe,” for better or worse, come together. Dr. Matheson examines far-flung groups from Appalachian serpent-handling churches to Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists, pro-anorexia Internet forums to reactionary pseudoscientists, finding consistent parallels amidst their diversity. The key trend he identifies is anti-rhetorical discourse: the insistence that the symbols shared by each community represent a hidden truth that cannot be questioned or interpreted but is revealed through signs-words, images, videos, and texts. Against these rigid worldviews, Dr. Matheson calls for a revival of the art of rhetoric, not just as a set of techniques, but as a creative, curious orientation towards the world in all of its ambiguity and uncertainty.  

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9781978840164

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Reviews

""Post-Weird is an intricate account of how radically different interpretations of potent symbols like 'science' are made possible by very similar psychic structures shaping our social worlds. Matheson produces a psychoanalytic rhetorical theory that adapts Jacques Lacan masterfully to our new media environment. Using cases as diverse as Sandy Hook denialists, snake handlers, and anti-trans rhetorical agents, Post-Weird asks readers to think about anti-rhetorical reading practices; at stake is our capacity to tolerate the actual, real ambiguity and contingency of being human in community with others.""--Eric King Watts ""author of Postracial Fantasies and Zombies: On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World"" ""Life is weird--and getting weirder. Matheson's Post-Weird should be heralded a keystone in having anticipated, through careful attention to 'fringe' rhetorical communities, how weirdness envelops our culture and eventually comes for us all. With humor, sensitivity, and a critical eye, Matheson revivifies rhetorical concepts like propriety and dignifies psychoanalytic concepts like psychosis to help us better understand our mediated 'weird' age.""--Robert McDonald ""author of Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life"" ""Matheson raccoons through the recesses of internet subculture so we don't have to. But to the reader's surprise, Post-Weird illustrates the ubiquity of delusion by documenting how the fragmentation of consensus reality and the emergence of paranoid reading practices expose the anti-rhetorical psychotic structure that unites us in our difference.""--Casey Kelly ""author of Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment""

Author Information

Calum Lister Matheson is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh and faculty at the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age (2019).

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