for the love of invention

Music: Judge Judy

Writing this week has been difficult, and I reckon this is because I'm sort of pooped: holiday family goodness (er, drama) followed by two preps, letters of recommendation, and a revise and resubmit has simply tuckered me out! I have four or so days before the new semester and its requisite pile of shit descend, and so I thought I would hammer out a manuscript I have been envisioning for over a year now. I have been so excited to write this! I assembled all my sources, reviewed my notes, made outlines and . . . I have sat for almost three days in front of this screen and only as many paragraphs to show for it. [sigh]

Well, at least it's something. Because it creates the illusion of productivity for myself, I’m posting in what I've managed:

For the Love of Rhetoric

Plato's Phaedrus advances one of the few rhetorical theories that are explicitly premised on the promise of love. Relaxing in their loosely fitting togas under a plane-tree by the Ilissus, in the language of lovers Socrates and Phaedrus flirtatiously discuss the merits of the "true art" of discourse, eventually concluding that the more instrumental and manipulative approaches to communication taught by Sophists like Lysias are an affront to the gods. For Plato's Socrates, good persuasion speaks to the soul of the hearer by appealing to some underlying, spiritual commonality. Good rhetoric is that which attends the spiritual needs of an individual, sometimes even against what he would prefer, by appealing to memories of the divine (anamnesis).[1] As John Durham Peters observes, for "Socrates the issue is not just the matching of minds, but the coupling of desires. Eros, not transmission, would be the chief principle of communication."[2] As the critique of writing at the end of the dialogue makes plain, Plato feared that new technologies of communication would weaken the import of desiring, further alienating individuals from each other. True persuasion, understood as an act of both erotic (eros) and transcendent love (agape), promised to bridge individuals faced with the increasing "potential for distance and gaps."[3] Understood as a form of love, for Plato true or good persuasion traverses or bridges division.

Although rhetoric has been described as a form of seduction---erotic and otherwise---in the centuries since Plato advanced the relation, today there are few rhetorical theories that attempt to detail a relationship between rhetoric and love.[4] In contemporary rhetorical scholarship, the most widely read and well-known theories that might be said to link them are two fold. The first is Wayne Brockreide's suggestion that rhetors adopt the ideal of "arguers as lovers," which entails a mutual respect for one's interlocutors and a valuation of the relationship over the outcome of rhetorical encounters.[5] The second is Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin's "invitational rhetoric" paradigm, which opposes a presumed, agonistic link between patriarchy and persuasion with a feminist posture of hospitality.[6] Although both approaches share Plato's concern with sensual encounter and bridging gaps, they seem to abandon the metaphysical promise of spiritual transcendence that underlies Plato's theory.

In the decade since Foss and Griffin introduced the invitational paradigm, theories of love have become increasingly common in the theoretical humanities: beginning with 2000's All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks has written numerous books and had become one of the most visible contemporary theorists of love.[7] In her influential Witnesing: Beyond Recognition, Kelly Oliver has called for imagining "love beyond domination" and a new ethic of "response-ability."[8] Even Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "the world-renowned authors of Empire"--who are more renowned for their celebration of the "new barbarians" and the agonistic uprising of "the multitude" than their feminist sympathies--have argued "a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude."[9] Yet despite what appears to be a larger theoretical trend in humanities scholarship, few rhetoricians have endeavored to develop Brockereide's proposition further,[10] nor has the invitational view been elaborated beyond what many scholars see as a relatively facile and misguided posture toward agonism.[11] Are rhetoricians reluctant to take the "turn to love" that has been made in the theoretical humanities? I think so, and this essay endeavors to explain why.

More specifically, in this essay I argue that rhetoricians have not theorized love for two, interrelated reasons. First, love has been avoided in theoretical discussions because it is already the assumed dynamic of persuasion. I suggest that this is demonstrable in the widely taught concepts of identification and "consubstantiality" found the work of Kenneth Burke. The dominant idea of persuasion as the creation of "identification" over some common, shared substance is the tacit love theory of rhetorical studies. To better theorize an explicit theory of love, I argue that we must overcome the indwelling, Platonic idealism of Burkean identification in favor of a more psychoanalytic understanding of persuasion.

Second, I argue that rhetoricians have avoided theorizing love because of its close proximity to naive idealism or "kitsch" in Western culture-that to speak of love in theoretical scholarship (or at least in work that does not concern literary art or film in some way) risks being thought of as trite or "cheesy." Originally understood as artwork that is worthless, pretentious, and overly sentimental, kitsch is a German concept has gradually come to denote something that covers-over or hides an unpleasant truth.12 Insofar as the dominant fantasy of love in the West is, in fact, the impossible Platonic ideal of transcendent unification (e.g., "you complete me"), or as Jacques Lacan has put it, insofar as love is the fantasy of a nonviable sexual relationship, to invoke love in theory necessarily tempts kitsch. In this respect I suggest we have been afraid to approach love as a theoretical endeavor. It is also in this respect that criticisms of Foss and Griffin's invitational paradigm as "utopian" are akin to the cynical dismissals of gaudy Valentine's Day decorations: both are criticized for attempting to cover-over, deny, or disguise the ugly truth of human aggression and alienation. Any theorization of the relationship between love and rhetoric must consequently address love's utopian connotation or risk its immediate repudiation.

In order to explain how (a) rhetoric assumes love; and (b) how this assumption tempts kitsch, this essay proceeds in three parts. In the first part Lacan's understanding of love as a fantasy of unification is explained and then compared to Kenneth Burke's theory of persuasion as identification. Understood in relation to what Lacan terms the objet a, identification concerns a gesture toward an elusive but tantalizing "something more" in others that is reducible to the promise of transcendent love. Once the tacit connection between persuasion and love is made explicit, I then turn to an explanation of kitsch in part two. A comparison of the well-known duet by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, "Islands in the Stream," to the paradigm of invitational rhetoric shows how both are homological representatives of a Platonic idealism better described as kitsch. Finally, the third part concludes the essay by arguing a rhetoric of true love entails a rejection of kitsch and reckoning with the ontological dualism that grounds rhetorical studies.

I. On the One

II. Them Two, or, Love is Shit

III. On Them Two, Working Out, and the Love of Rhetoric

Notes

[1] Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995.
[2] John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 37.
[3] Peters, Speaking, 37.
[4] See, for example, .
[5] Wayne Brockriede. "Arguers as Lovers." Philosophy and Rhetoric 5 (1972): 1-11
[6]Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, "Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric." Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2-___.
[7] bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William and Morrow, 2000); bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (Harper Paperbacks, 2002); bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (Harper Perennial, 2001); [8] Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), esp. 217-224
[9] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 351. Also see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Nicholas Brown, Imre Szeman, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, "'Subterranean Passages of Thought': Empire's Inserts." Cultural Studies 18 (2002): 193-212.
[10] See Jay VerLinden. 2000. "Arguers as Harassers." Paper read at the 86th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 9-11 November, Seattle, Washington; available http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~jgv1/ME/harassers.html accessed 9 January 2007. For recent work that touches, however indirectly, on the relation between love and rhetoric, see Jeremy Engels," Disciplining Jefferson: The Man Within the Breast and the Rhetorical Norms of Producing Order." Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (2006): 411-435; Eugene Garver, "The Rhetoric of Friendship in Plato's Lysis." Rhetorica 24 (2006): 127-146; and Dave Tell, "Beyond Mnemotechnics: Confession and Memory in Augustine." Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 233-253.
[11] Dana Cloud. 2004. "Not Invited: Struggle and Social Change." Paper read at the 90th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 11-14 November, Chicago, Illinois; Nina M. Reich. 2004. "Invite This! Power, Material Oppresssion, and Social Change." Paper read at the 90th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 11-14 November, Chicago, Illinois; Nina M. Reich. 2004; and Julia T. Wood. 2004. "The Personal is Still Political: Feminism's Commitment to Structural Change." Paper read at the 90th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 11-14 November, Chicago, Illinois; Nina M. Reich. 2004.
[12] Or as Milan Kundera eloquently puts it, "kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence." The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (New York: HarperCollins/Perennial Classics, 1999), p. 248. Also see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "kitsch."
[13] Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 32; hereafter cited XX.