castration + invention = casvention? oh, it's convention!

Music: Meat Beat Manifesto: Armed Audio Warfare Ken Rufo put together a fine panel for the biannual Rhetoric Society of America conference in Memphis next month. Titled "Sizing Up and/as the Symptom: The Inclusion of Psychoanalysis and the State of Rhetorical Theory," the panel addresses the designated theme of the conference, "Sizing Up Rhetoric." Now, you have to admit this is one of the most stupid conference themes of all time (right up there with SSCA's "Our Family Values" theme this year); the announcement of the convention planners that theirs was an Oedipal anxiety demands (and guarantees) castration. I mean, "if you have to ask . . . " is the phrase here. Hence, the titles of my and Chris' papers, overdetermined: "Whose Rhetoric is Bigger?" and "The Biggest Rhetoric of All." Ken's paper has a changed titled, but, admirably, he didn't go for the slice (or at least he decided not to sing along with Trent Reznor, "with teeth"). Speaking of the proverbial Oedipal fear: did I mention the uber-super-duper smart Barb Biesecker is responding?

Regardless, Ken's write-up details the challenge nicely:

Our panel title is intentionally ambivalent, in that it includes within it several perspectives on the same theme. Is RSA's desire to 'size up' rhetoric . . . symptomatic of some deeper anxiety about the state of the field, an anxiety and a symptom that perhaps can be explored by recourse to psychoanalysis? Or might we suspect that the turn towards psychoanalysis is itself symptomatic, a consequence of a shift in material culture, mediation, or even theoretical trendiness?

Now, my issue today is to write something; originally my paper addressed the former statement of the symptom: "In this paper," I said in the abstract, "my aim is not to defend psychoanalysis, but to suggest that arguments for and against it concern a deeper fixation on the so-called 'rhetorical turn' in the humanities across the board (e.g., "big rhetoric"). . . My suspicion," I continued, "is that the secret wish behind 'sizing it up' . . . is ultimately a confirmation of disciplinary impotence."

I still think this is true, but not enough for the paper. So I'm blogging hoping to shake loose some invention juice, or rather (to stick with the metaphor), to shake the juice loose. Or in the Derridian key, to sing about coming, since what is to come is the apocalyptic, and calls for measurement or an assessment of the current state always betoken a death—an end, or if you prefer, an arrival (of death). In any case, my thinking about what to say on the panel must yoke the phallic and chicken little, a theme that I've been thinking about in relation to scholarly invention since my work with David Beard on the apocalyptic. Let's say, since this is a blog after all, that my project is how best to choke the chicken at the convention (. . . and is this not, as Zizek might say in a manic flight of pleasure beyond pleasure, the proverbial activity of all convention-going? Is this not the central complaint of panel-goers subjected to rhetorical theory?).

I'm thinking here of a speech Derrida gave (at a conference on disciplinarity, if I recall correctly) by in the 1980's titled "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy." The speech is hard to read, but it is a very interesting rumination on tone and an essay Kant wrote titled something like "On a Recently Overlordly Tone Adopted in Philosophy." I read the essay—gee, almost a decade ago! shit I'm old—and have been haunted by it ever since, mostly because I'm haunted by things I don't understand anyway (who isn't?). Derrida obsesses therein about the ineffability of "tone"—that when evoked the notion of "tone" seems to betoken the abstract voice of mastery ("I AM THAT I AM")—that is, the atonal—and that this is the voice of apocalyptic, the voice of philosophy. (Now, it's hard for me not to related "tone" to Lacan's notion of the "voice" as a object-cause of desire; I'm thinking here, too, of how many times that word has been used to critique my work as "arrogant"). The gist is a critique of Kant's Aufklarer-style gestures—decrying philosophical mystigogues for castrating reason by harboring secrets—as similarly "overlordly" (e.g., that practical reason is held up as the uber-secret). No one gets out alive; smoke 'em if ya got 'em; and so on. The Derridian move is familiar, but with this difference: Derrida makes these arguments by aligning sexual taboo (law of the father, and so on) and apocalyptic revelation in the bible, or at least by riffing on these Freudian thematics.

So, blogging this, I can now sort of see where I am going to go with the paper: a critique of the discourse of the master/mastery as those who herald ends and issue warnings. Again, I don't think it would be wise to "defend" psychoanalysis at the panel, although I suspect many will come with that expectation. What I can offer, however, is some sort of apsycho-deconstructo-reading of the scene of RSA (or better, the so-called "globalization of rhetoric" debates) . . . the trick is to figure out an "object." This might be a neat essay if I can figure out how to widen the scope. The only "tip" on that score is an essay I found on Project MUSE by Melanie White: "On the Recent Apocalyptic Tone Adopted in Canadian Sociology." No shit, get this opening:

Canadian sociology is apparently in danger: it is in danger of losing its intellectual vitality and disciplinary viability as a consequence of structural shifts and organizational movements that threaten to undermine its unique contribution to intellectual life.

Good lord: that sounds like Michael Leff on rhetorical studies. So perhaps the object is this pattern of argument in other disciplines? That may be a neat project: locate debates "of an apocalyptic tones" in other fields in order to make the meta-argument that Derrida's understanding of "tone" or the utterance, "Come," is the name for the jouissance of scholarly invention itself.