going blind

Music: The Beatles: Live at the BBC Well, in my post-finals-week-haste-post-haste I've been scurrying somewhat to get this RSA conference paper composed; I hit the slipstream of my shadow (the one who masturbates, of course) and churned out some more. Here's stage two of the argument, prefaced with a nugget from the introduction:

As the emissary running before--or catching up to, take your pick--the body, I admit that the crisis of opening(s) is indeed one of discipline: whence this repetitious compulsion to measure or recover or remove or insert this thing "rhetoric," and how might we read the seemingly immeasurable (discussion of our) supplementary as a rhetorical symptom itself? In psychoanalytic terms, the question could be rendered this way: do we identify the uncanny persistence of the "big rhetoric" debate at scholarly conferences and in rhetorical literature as a productive neurosis central to our unique brand of scholarly invention? Insofar as the last decade has registered numerous self-assessments in edited collections and journals, one can easily argue our neurosis has been productive-at least on the page.9 Yet it can also be argued that this neurosis has been milked for too long, especially because a number of scholars recognize that, for better or worse, rhetoric has already "globalized" or got "big." Perhaps, then, we can interpret these seemingly never-ending moments of self-measurement as something more-perhaps something Other-than an institutional or political quandary. Perhaps our own brand of narcissicsm betokens a psychical structure? Drawing on the psychoanalytic understanding of the symptom, in this essay I argue that the obsession with size has become an enjoyable, apocalyptic perversion.10 The reason this discussion about disciplinary identity and its discontents refuses to die is that it feels good to dwell in the pain of end times, even when the end is over.11 Recognizing our perverse enjoyment of the academic apocalyptic has an important implication for rhetorical studies: it is now time to obsess about something else, lest our perversions blind us to the political realities inside and outside of the academy.

GOING BLIND, OR, SYMPTOMOLOGY AND THE DRIVE THING

As de Man has said of close reading, so we might say of rhetorical studies as a composite field: "Critics' moments of greatest blindness with regard to their own critical assumptions are also the moments at which they achieve their greatest insight."12 Although de Man warns that too much blindness can lead to (critical) suicide, the point is well taken: critical or scholarly success as a field, whether it is defined as "good criticism" or recognition from college and university administration, requires a degree of un-self awareness about its many problems. I would suggest that too much self-reflection could also lead from a "healthy" self-awareness to a suicidal blindness to unconscious motives, thereby threatening the perversion of institutional irrelevance. To understand the character of this threat, as well as its implications, it is helpful to describe the relationship between the symptom and the drive. In "classical psychoanalysis," or in the tradition that never repudiates Freud's understanding of human motivation, humans are goaded to thinking and behavior by drives that "pulsate" or aim toward certain objects. For example, the human infant's "oral drive" aims toward the breast, the "anal drive" the feces, and so on. Although in some accounts the drives derive from hard-wired "instincts," the characteristically classical psychoanalyst tends to distinguish the drives from the instincts for two reasons that implicate the import of rhetoric: first, unlike other animals, humans at best have "incomplete" instincts in the sense that they must resort to symbolic/representational resources to satisfy them (e.g., an infant's cry for its mother's breast); second, the object of the drive is ultimately determined by nurture or culture, not by "nature" (e.g., if the hunger cries of an infant produce a bottle or a breast is of little consequence to the satisfaction of the oral drive). Drive theory thus refers to psychoanalytic enterprise of how people "get off" on various objects, from whole people or others, to parts of people or the self, or "part objects." Drive theory also provides explanations for how symbolic resources determine or overdetermine the direction of the drives, and how, in general, people substitute one object for another to derive satisfaction in ways that are conscious and unconscious.

For Freud, human drives were fundamentally sexual, collectively comprising "the libido," and this was easiest to observe in the behavior of the very young--who are driven to eat, shit, and touch themselves--and the symptoms of the perverted adult.13 Returning to the case of the petulant prepubescent, we have a double whammy: not only is he young and a pervert, but his masturbation is taboo and he doesn't care. The young pervert has substituted the object of his libido, the young girl, with his own penis. As Freud explains, most of us caught and prohibited from touching ourselves would comply with a neurotic act of substitution: we might masturbate less and certainly more secretly, we might seek out a new sex partner, or we might sublimate our desire into other more socially acceptable expressions (e.g., people watching, dancing at a club, writing for publication like a maniac, and so on). The classic symptom of perversion, however, is outright obstinacy, even if one's behavior is painful or "beyond the pleasure principle." The preteen pervert has learned to enjoy his symptom beyond "the law" in three important ways: (a) he enjoys his symptom even though it hurts, meaning that he violates the basic animal law of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure; (b) he enjoys his symptom despite social or cultural prohibition, or rather, precisely because painful pleasure is derived from someone laying down the law; and (c) he enjoys his symptom in way that are beyond human representation or that is somewhat ineffable (viz., beyond the symbolic). The pervert simply won't behave, and at some level, s/he wants you to push him or her for it.

Understanding perversion in terms of the drives yields an understanding of the symptom that is somewhat counter-intuitive. Typically in Western culture we think of symptoms as signifiers for a disease, disorder, or problem, as an outward manifestation of an occulted process that, with the right diagnosis, can eventually be eliminated. Freud teaches us, however, that symptoms are actually "substitute" or "compromise" satisfactions for our drives, and as such, are often temporary.14 Yet, as the case of the pervert demonstrates, sometimes the satisfaction of one's symptoms can be painful, which creates something of a terminological problem, as Bruce Fink explains:

"Satisfaction" is, however, perhaps too "clean" or "clean-cut" a term to describe the kind of pleasure symptoms provide. We all know people who are ever complaining of their lack of satisfaction in life, but who never seek therapy. This is because they obtain a certain satisfaction from their very dissatisfaction, and from complaining: from blaming others for their lack of satisfaction. So, too, certain people derive a great deal of pleasure from torturing themselves . . . . The French have fine word for this kind of pleasure in pain, or satisfaction in dissatisfaction: jouissance. . . . Most people deny getting pleasure or satisfaction from their symptoms, that they "get off" on their symptoms in a way that is too round-about, "dirty," or "filthy" to be described as pleasurable or satisfying. The term "jouissance" nicely captures the notion of getting off by any means necessary, however clean or dirty.15

Jouissance is translated as "enjoyment," but only in that John Cougar Mellancamp way, as "hurting so good." So enjoyment is the name for the ultimate purpose and dirty political work rhetoric's contemporary apocalyptic, and we have now arrived another explanation, in addition to the historical, conceptual, and institutional causes that many have already advanced, for why rhetoricians have devoted so much time and space to the discussion of rhetoric's end: like the masturbating preteen, measuring our rhetoric gets some folks off, big time.16 The perverse core of the "Big Rhetoric" debate is that we want to be told about our irrelevance as an academic discipline over and over and over again, for it allows us to produce substitute satisfactions over and over again in neurotic, sado-masochistic frenzy of which this essay is not exempt. The question then becomes: jouissance in itself is not such a bad thing (nor is perversion, as we all must harbor an inner pervert), so what is the problem of our contemporary Chicken Little routine? The answer, as de Man has hinted, is political suicide.

Coming up next, stage three: ON A NOT-SO-RECENT APOCALYPTIC TONE ADOPTED IN RHETORICAL STUDIES, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO GIVE UP THE BOMB AND EMBRACE DECONSTRUCTION