concluding the love of rhetoric
Music: Collection d'Arnell-Andrea: Les Marronniers (1992) I finished a draft of the love essay this afternoon. There is still much work to be done in the editing department, although I think I should have it out for review by the end of the week. At least I hope to, so that work can begin on The Book.
Invitational Rhetoric as Kitsch
Drawing heavily on the bio-essentialist work of Sarah Miller Gearhart, Foss and Griffin argue that for centuries rhetoric has been construed as "persuasion," which they suggest is a patriarchical enterprise geared to dominating the minds, bodies, and lives of others. Although they stop short of disowning the necessity of appeals for change, they propose invitational rhetoric as a "feminist" alternative to persuasion:
Invitational rhetoric is an invitation to understanding as a means to create a relationship rooted in equality, immanent value, and self-determination. Invitational rhetoric constitutes an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor's world and to see it as the rhetor does. In presenting a particular perspective, the invitational rhetor does not judge or denigrate others' perspectives but is open to and tries to appreciate and validate those perspectives . . . .[i]
Although invitational rhetoric has many similarities to Brockriede's arguers-as-lovers ideal and Corder's understanding of persuasive encounter as a loving dialogue (all three, for example, strive toward understanding and value the relationship over what is accomplished in words), Foss and Griffin's perspective is distinct because "rhetors refuse to impose their perspectives" on others, but rather, "invite" others to see the world from their eyes. "Invitational rhetoric offers an invitation to understanding," they argue, "to enter another's world to better understand an issue and the individual who holds a particular perspective on it" (my emphasis). Whereas Brockriede and Corder seem to maintain a polite respect for the other, Foss and Griffin advance a theory that seems designed to transcend the self into the Other. Although "love" does not appear in their essay, "invitational rhetoric" is the most extreme iteration of rhetoric as transcendent unification: first one invites, then she unites. The dominant concept of identification as recognition assumed in Brockriede and Corder's theories is thereby completely bypassed by Foss and Griffin as a patriarchical conceit.
A number of scholars have criticized Foss and Griffin's theory of invitational rhetoric for many reasons. Julia T. Wood has charged that the authors have misrepresented "feminism" as a monolithic perspective and "rhetoric" as a coercive practice.[ii] Bonnie J. Dow has argued that Foss and Griffin's perspective is needlessly essentialist and biologistic.[iii] Dana Cloud has criticized invitational rhetoric for its "problematic assumptions of liberal individualism," namely, that it "assumes shared interests between oppressor and oppressed, so that conflicts can be solved through mutual invitation."[iv] All three scholars condemn invitational rhetoric for its stance against conflict and struggle, which has been crucial for the social changes that made the West better for women (and men). The world has been an inhospitable place for women, they argue, and the invitational paradigm thus functions as a denial of shit by excluding the unacceptable from its purview. In this respect the individual liberalism of invitational rhetoric has been criticized as kitsch: invitational rhetoric aims toward an impossible unification at the same time as it denies the ugliness of human existence.
Owing to their reliance on the work of Gearhart, Foss and Griffin's invitational paradigm is unquestionably rooted in biological essentialism. Yet, understanding invitational rhetoric as kitsch also implies that it is a theory of love, and I would argue one of the first theories in rhetorical studies to challenge the division or agonism central to the traditional rhetorical subject. If we think of invitational rhetoric as a theory of love, then the absolute-if not evangelical-rejection of "control and domination" is not so much a biologically essentialist position as it is an anti-Hegelian one. In her masterful study of the subject of the theoretical humanities, Kelly Oliver explains that "contemporary theory is still dominated by conceptions of identity and subjectivity that inherit a Hegelian notion of recognition. In various ways, these theories describe how we recognize ourselves in our likenesses as the same or in opposition to what is (or those who are) different from ourselves."[v] What is the Hegelian notion of recognition? It is the idea that subjectivity is a consequence of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is only possible by the simultaneous recognition of a "not-me," an other or another, by means of re-presentation. So, for example, psychoanalysis posits that subjectivity emerges when an child comes to the realization that it is not one with its mother. When a child beholds herself in a mirror and jubilantly says, "that's me!" she is also saying "I am not my mama."[vi] Insofar as the recognition of another objectifies him or her as an object (hence the subject/object relation), Oliver argues that such recognition is inherently agonistic (that which Burke locates in terms of the "hierarchic principle").vii Like Burke's views on hierarchy and identification, theories that conceive of the subject as Hegelian, "like Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler," Oliver says, "maintain that social oppression and domination are manifestations, or repetitions, of the oppression and domination at the heart of subjectivity itself."viii Alternately cast, if rhetoric concerns a Hegelian subject, then it is inherently deceitful; if, however, rhetoric concerns a subject that begins in some pre-symbolic unity, then we can speak of true love.
Only by making it a critique of the traditional rhetorical subject can we begin to rehabilitate invitational rhetoric. Cast as a theory of love, invitational rhetoric is an attempt to break-out of the perceived straight-jacket of "identification," which, for Burke, is the recognition of consubstantiality with another person or people because of some prior division (biological, symbolic, or otherwise). For Brockriede and Corder, "rhetoric as love" is an attempt to reverse this default alienation by finding common cause or interest. Burke, Brockriede, and Corder assume from the outset a Hegelian subject for whom self-reflection is the recognition of a "not-me" or division among people. For Foss and Griffin, however, invitational rhetoric only makes sense when we supplement it with a positive ontology of prior unity, responding to the "objection to shit" with an objection to the agonism assumed to be central to subjectivity itself. Consequently, invitational rhetoric would reject the Lacanian understanding of love as well, and replace it with some pre-representational or pre-rhetorical form of identification (or perhaps not identification at all insofar as identitarian logic is premised on same and different).ix For rhetorical studies, the stakes of kitsch are thus the stakes of love, and as Lacan maintained, both concern a way of seeing: are the islands in the stream of speech connected to "the main" before the speech came rolling down? Or are the islands only self-consciously that because of the speech that flows between them?
III. The Irony of Love, or, On (Not) Working Out
Love, a metonymy of community, was itself ironic-or irony, truly, is love-which is to say that it preempts the exchange of self-identical rings . . . and is based, rather, on the unrepenting recognition of difference, separateness, and . . . nonunderstanding. Exorbitantly summoning the infinite at the limit of finitude, love, no matter how "free," is irony. There is no such thing as a free love.
--Avital Ronell[x]Rhetoric is love, and it must peak a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities.
--Jim W. Corder[xi]
"Islands in the Stream" begins in the key of agonism and division, however, by the end of the song the lyrics shift to denying there ever was a divide. The song ends with a promise from Dolly built on a foundational, ontological unity: "No more will you cry/ Baby, I will hurt you never/We start and end as one, in love forever." For Kenny and Dolly, love is thus a sing-song recognition of some eternal, pre-symbolic unity that I have suggested provides the basis of Foss and Griffin's theory of invitational rhetoric. Using Kenny and Dolly's duet as an allegory for rhetorical theory, however, I have also argued that the dominant theory of love concerns transcendent unification by means of identification, ultimately understood as a Neo-Hegelian form of recognition based on a fundamental (biological or otherwise) division. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan, I argued that identification is fundamentally a lie: the gravity or pull of love is the promise that a rhetor can conjure unity or make one "whole" though the production of an impossible to produce object, the objet a. Understood as the process of recognizing consubstantiality, rhetoric is consequently a theory of love, and a false love or kitsch, to be more precise. The dominant understanding of rhetoric, in other words, reflects an inability to reckon with shit of Creation.
I want to bring this essay to a close by underscoring where the recognition of the love of rhetoric takes us: to the question of subjectivity and the heretofore cherished concept of identification. Diane Davis has argued that "identification is not simply rhetoric's more fundamental aim; it's also and therefore rhetorical theory's most fundamental problem."[xii] Coming to terms with the love of rhetoric is one way to address-as opposed to solve-this fundamental problem, implicating two directions that theory might take. First, following the work of Kelly Oliver and the path originally forged by Foss and Griffin, we might begin to rethink the rhetorical subject though a new metaphor of seeing as "connection" or mediation, which obviates or at least significantly modifies our understanding of identification:
From a new conception of vision as connection, notions of recognition and subjectivity are transformed. If space is not empty, then vision does not have the impossible task of crossing an abyss between the subject an the world of others. Subjects do not have to be motivated to control the world in order to compensate for their separation from it. If the abyss is an illusion, so is the need to dominate objects that lay always on the other side.[xiii]
For Oliver, seeing as connection is fundamentally an ontology of true love based on a non-representational consubstantiality. Like the recent work of Luce Irigaray, Oliver argues for a conception of subjectivity that is neither lacking nor alienated but rather fundamentally connected, like Kenny and Dolly in a stream of song.xiv Similarly, Davis has argued that "identification surely does not depend on shared meaning" because, as neurological evidence bears out, "a mimetic rapport precedes understanding, affection precedes projection."[xv] The gulf or gap between two people or a rhetor and audience assumed by rhetorical theory-indeed, the abyss central to the notion of "communication" itself-simply does not exist, and consequently, the love of rhetoric-a good or true love-would concern "an a priori affectability or persuadability" that is previous to and in excess of any shared meaning."[xvi]
If one thinks that the anti-Hegelian tack tempts kitsch---and precisely because it seeks to avoid the second tear by cutting out crying altogether---then a second direction for theory is toward a reconceptualization of identification not only as love, but also as a form of dualism. With a little help from Lacan, this is the direction that I advocate. Although embracing dualism is not very fashionable in the theoretical humanities these days, rhetoric's tacit theory of love assumes a mismatch between minds and bodies, as well as a priori alienation ("division"), so we might as well come clean (about our/this shit). If one accepts that love makes up for a radical disjunction between two or more individuals who will never truly relate, then rhetoric is borne aloft by the promise of a coming relateability that never arrives, both the lie of invitation and persuasion as well as the screen from a terrible, horrible, void that eludes symbolization. Rhetoric, like love, is fundamentally a false promise.
Recognizing deceit as the affective stimulus of persuasion, however, does not mean rhetoric is unnecessary or that we can avoid---or even would want to avoid---our bad love. A false promise does not reduce to false hope. There is also a sense in which understanding rhetoric's love is a reckoning with alterity, or as Ronell puts it, "an unrepenting recognition of . . . nonunderstanding." Accepting the love of rhetoric, and therefore the neo-Hegelian subject this love assumes, requires the embrace of irony and the comic frame, that communication as shared meaning and love as unification are homologous and impossible. Embracing rhetoric's love is like stupidly singing "Islands in the Stream," full-throated and passionately, at the local karaoke bar. Even deceit can bring us much joy; it is the logic of what many term "fun." Sometimes rhetoric's love produces a better smelling deodorizer. And sometimes stupid fools change the world.
Endnotes
i Foss and Griffin, "Beyond Persausion," 5.
ii Wood, "The Personal is Still Political."
iii Bonnie J. Dow, "Feminism, Difference(s), and Rhetorical Studies." Communication Studies 46 (1995), 110-111.
iv Cloud, "Not Invited," 1-3.
v Oliver, Witnessing, 4.
vi Lacan, Ecrits, 3-9.
vii Burke, Rhetoric, 138-142.
viii Oliver, Witnessing, 4.
ix For a nuanced approach, see Diane Davis, "Identification."
x Ronell, Stupidity, 150.
xi Corder, "Argument," 27.
xii Davis, "Identification," 19.
xiii Oliver, Witnessing, 222.
xiv See Irigaray, The Way.
xv Davis, "Identification," 8. Also see Benjamin D. Powell, "Neural Performance: Reconsidering Agency as the Embodiment of Neural Nets." Text and Performance Quarterly 27 (2007): 107-123.
xvi Davis, "Identification," 9.