fear of the unknow-Able

Music: Public Image Ltd.: Compact Disk (1985) I've been reading Adriana Cavarero's intriguing For More Than One Voice, and find her engagement with speech, voice, and Levinas fairly compelling. This led me to re-read the debate between Diane Davis and John Muckelbauer in recent issues of Philosophy & Rhetoric. I think Muckelbauer misses the boat Davis is attempting to launch here, and in part this is because he equates the "non-appropriative relation" to both language and "asignification." Perhaps in a future post I'll better detail my own take, but, I’m starting to find the notion of "the saying" or what Cavarero calls "the voice" compelling in a way that challenges my Lacanian dualism. Could it be what I am calling an "ontological dualism" is simply a product of "the Said." Hmm. Well, I am enjoying thinking about it and reading today.

Speaking of trauma of non-appropriate relations, I was annoyed by Herbert Simon's introduction to the recent issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, which is dedicated to the rhetorical chicanery of the Bush II Deathstar. Cris and I have talked about this issue both on and off-blog, but: what is this weird aversion to psychoanalysis?. It persists for decades. Exhibit one is from Wayne Brockriede's "Arguers as Lovers," in Philosophy and Rhetoric 5 (Winter, 1972): 1-2.

One can easily read many of the landmark studies of argument . . . without any need to consider who the arguers are or how they relate to one another. That people are doing the arguing, of course, is assumed throughout, but when the writer on argument gets to his primary business of classifying and explicating evidence, forms, of reasoning, fallacies, . . . and the like, people become irrelevant. One sometimes reads an explicit statement that this state of affairs is desirable, to avoid falling into the pit of debasing psychological analysis. Why debasing? What is debasing about realizing that one of the proper studies of human transaction is a psychological analysis of the people who are doing the transacting?

Brockriede never ventures to answer his own question, since he offers it up as a rhetorical one. What's frustrating about this is that contemporary readers have no way of knowing what the "obvious" reason was back in 1972.

Similarly, Herbert Simons makes the same sort of move in an issue that's not even been mailed out yet. Exhibit two is from "Introduction," in Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007): 178.

Robert L. Ivie reframes America's "war on terror" and preemptive invasion of Iraq as indicative of a deep-seated sense of national insecurity, manifested in seemingly inexhaustible capacities for rationalization, projection, and denial, coupled with predilections for unprovoked aggression. These symptoms might appear to require the services of a Freudian or Jungian psychoanalyst, except that the "patient" in Ivies' view is not an individual but a culture---America's own "culture of war." Hence Ivie's turn to culture theories, including Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of religion, as a way of understanding our collective proclivities, including our use of scapegoat mechanisms in a recurring but futile quest for redemption.

WTF? Ok, aside from the well-known but widely repressed fact that Burke's understanding of identification (and by extension scapegoating—aka "projective identification") is lifted directly from Freud, again we have the "but duh" rhetorical gesture. I have not read Ivie's essay because it is not yet available on Project Muse. Even so, I don't doubt Simon's summery is accurate: psychoanalysis is mired in the individual and therefore has nothing to say about collective life. I understand that this is the most important theoretical challenge to psychoanalysis from a rhetorician's point of view; what annoys me about its continual assertion is that it's offered up as common sense. No one reads friggin' Freud---or the later Freud of Group Psychology---except, of course, Burke (but shhhhh), where he clearly states that the collective psyche operates in homologous ways (and this because the individual psyche is an enfoldment of the exterior) such that powerful leaders come to stand-in for the Superego. Duh. What else is Bush but such a Hitlerian figure?

Nevertheless, with this rant out of my system, I was thinking today that if we think about "voice" as this thing Levinas terms "the Saying"---if its sphere is some in-between, the blind-spot between body and language, of non-appropriative relation and the Said---then the reason NCA-style rhetorical studies was willing to go along with the abandonment of "speech" was because of this troubling character of the Saying. Insofar as psychoanalysis fetches the Said of Me via the Saying (the talking cure), it too is implicated at some (ethical) level with an originary sonority. Maybe---I'm thinking, and this is tentative thinking---maybe psychoanalysis is too closely associated with speech? After all, with the re-rearrival of so-called rhetorical-hermeneutics, Text is King (and props to the King of the Cosmos of Katamari Damacy, who speaks in vinyl scratches).