Rhetorical Criticism as Violence

Music: The Rumor Said Fire: Crush (2018)

After months of travel and unexpected meetings, I've finally managed to get in something of a rhythm for my book in progress.  The working title is "Perverse Rhetorics: Political Aberration in the Age of Trumpeteering."  The book is also somewhat unexpected, as I didn't realize I had written so much about perversion over the past few years.  But, there you are.  Trying to get it all down.

In the theme of the unexpected, as I was completing the introduction I realized I was writing a bit too much about rhetorical criticism itself, as if to justify it as an academic subject (as a friend and mentor recently said to me, publishers don't see rhetorical or cultural studies as places of "knowledge production"). So I cut the intro in twain. It's turning out to be a chapter on "method without method," on doing psychoanalytic rhetorical criticism, drawing on many of the metaphors and heuristics I teach in the Ph.D. seminar of the same.  Taking after my mentor Karlyn Campbell, I often repeat that rhetorical criticism is not a method, it is a perspective or craft.  

Given the early, scientific ambitions of Freud, the key critique offered up here, ironically, is the way in which criticism was turned into a "science," or something like it, which is how Edwin Black opens his landmark book on rhetorical criticism: we're not a science, but we should be more like scientists.  That's a bit too simplistic, because he also insists the critics take is to judge and make sense of the human condition (taking on, then, much more of a burden than social scientists, he suggests).  I mean to work through this tension in the chapter--not quite there yet.  And, of course, I cannot share it all here or no one will publish it!

Anyhoo, here is a teaser from the introduction of the chapter, tentatively titled "On Psycho-Rhetorical Criticism."  The original title, "On Critical Violence," seemed a bit too, uh, jarring.  

Because in Deconstruction there is always a disparity between the conscious intention of the author and the actual function of the text, a text is like Frankenstein's monster: it acquires a life of its own that is, from the standpoint of its creator, both independent and malevolent.

--Edwin Black       

Even the most dismissive gesture betokens a body.  As Friedrich Nietzsche once taught, as a craft or producerly art (techne), the stuff of rhetoric is gestural and rhythmic, a bodily act, a kind of singing and dancing that is perhaps most familiar to us as music.  And yet the ancients taught us that rhetoric is not only to be understood as emanating from a body—that is, rhetoric is not simply embodied—because it is also bodied forth and sends forth bodies, or as the holy Saint(s) John once evangelized, the ultimate, über-rhetoric is the "word made flesh" (which some liberals eat, by the way, perversely perpetuating the cycle).  It may be tempting to declaim, then, that criticism is "flesh made word," an alchemical transmutation of sensorial effects into tropes and logic and generic patterns in what amounts to a form of amputation.  Indeed, the study of rhetoric has always concerned itself, in one way or another, with the disposing of bodies, or at least with a gesture of precision regarding a body's parts.      

By way of a vivi(secte)d analogy, pace Black, I begin with a decomposed illustration that is particularly demonstrable of a default, disciplinary disposition toward the critical act and its object, albeit in a more conspicuous, perverse manner. Had I the space and patience, I would describe two visual metaphors, the first from Peter Greenaway's renowned 1996 film, The Pillow Book, which depicts an obsession with the painted body and the sensuous pleasures of writerly gestures and cross-cultural love.  As would be typical of a Freudian, though, I prefer to focus on a grotesque counterpoint: if we've learned anything from the 60s and 70s, in the Age of Aquarius and Nixon, pathology is the place where the sun shines in.  My interest here is an offensive and hilariously gruesome autopsy scene in Paul Morrissey's infamous 1973 B-movie, 3D-schlockfest, Flesh for Frankenstein (Flesh).   Whereas The Pillow Book explores interpretation through the gentle caress of a body, Flesh exploits bodies for a Master, leaving them lifeless.  

Erroneously marketed as Andy Warhol's Flesh for Frankenstein (Warhol had little to do with the film), Morrissey's comedic take on Shelley's classic is a critique of the ideologies of racial purity and eugenics as well as the excesses of commercial romanticism.  The film depicts the sexually repressed but ambitious Barron Frankenstein and the hedonistic exploits of his insatiable sister and spouse, Baroness Katrin Frankenstein.  Driven by a perverse compulsion to build two "perfect" zombies to breed and proliferate a superior race that he alone commands, the Barron sews together the most attractive body parts of multiple cadavers while, nevertheless, expressing a complete detachment from his own compulsions.  Sexual and bodily pleasures have nothing to do with the inner-life of others; Frankenstein is obsessed with body parts for slaves who never quite unify into whole persons, despite all the sutures.      

In an incisive scene, the Baron begins to open the abdomen of a nude woman to inspect her internal organs. As the Baron is preparing the body and snipping stitches, his assistant Otto looks on in overacted, wide-eyed jealously.  Once the bowels are opened, the Baron slips his hands inside, feeling and squeezing and naming the organs:

Baron: Beautiful, we are very fortunate to find such a perfect torso in one piece! . . . Ready?

Otto: [nods yes]

Baron: I go into her digestive parts. [snips sutures, blood gushes]

Otto: [stares at the Baron and wipes his forehead with gauze.]

Female cadaver: [opens her eyes, revealing she is really not dead.]

Baron: Separate. Spleen. [heavy breathing.]. Kidneys. Gall bladder!  Liver! [pulls out the liver and caresses it.] Umm. Umm. Umm.

As the Baron plays with her "organs" he appears to climax in a paradoxically clean headshot (we only see a face in ecstasy).  Soon thereafter Frankenstein molests his "zombie" again and, having climaxed a second time, proclaims triumphantly, "to know death, Otto, you have to f--- life in the gallbladder!"  Such an absurd statement is pivotal because of a gag at the film's end, in which Otto also molests the female monster and kills her, a violation of the paternal authority and alternative necrophilic, primal order sought by the Baron.

In addition to its critique of sexual indulgence (gore is just pornpourri), Morrissey's critique of commercial romanticism is that its sexual excesses trend toward the fetishization of objects, not people, and the parts of people, not whole people, such as the exposed breast focused on for the duration of this scene, or even less conventionally, the gall bladder! As an allegory for the critical act, Baron Frankenstein's perversion issues a warning about the excesses of fixation and the aggressivity of criticism: approaching an object too surgically, too methodically or mechanistically, eviscerates it, amputates it, dissolves the whole into something offal.