islands in the stream and the second hand emotion

Music: Duran Duran: The Singles 81—85 Okie blogrovers, I have completed a draft of my talk for this afternoon. I'm posting it in here for your entertainment. If any of y'all see something easily co-authorable with these ideas and would like to pursue it further as a joint venture, please lemme know. I couldn't get to it until next semester, but I think there is a nice paper in here on love, rhetoric, and the Deleuzian critique of identity in Difference and Repetition, but the latter makes my brain hurt more than reading Lacan does.

Oh, two more preliminaries: the roses in my patio have 'sploded, so I'm using them to illustrate my love . . of flowers (send me some!). Also, I'm trying to use the expandable post feature to save space (and because I'm such a tease, you know). Lemme know if the "read more here" link is working or what not [edit: for some reason this feature will NOT work for Firefox users; anyone know why? Is it my template?]

Okie, here we go!

[play song clip] I've opened by playing a portion of Dolly Parton and Kenny Roger's duet "Islands in the Stream" for two reasons. First, the opening two lyrics must be some of the stupidest ever penned in the name of love: "Baby, when I met you there was peace unknown/I set out to get you with a fine tooth comb." Now, if you think about it, such romantic prose is like telling your partner you found her or him much like one does fleas on a dog, or the hidden evidence of a crime scene. In this instance love is an examination, a search for minutiae, an obsession with the intricate details of another. Let us call this obsessive love, or the love of interrogation. Although the fine tooth comb quest for love makes for good fun poking, it also helps to underscore the relationship of other-knowledge to love.

The second reason I've opened with "Islands in the Stream" is that it evokes the most powerful conception of love that resides in the popular imagination. That the title of the song is lifted from a Hemmingway novel about a lonely, hard drinking man in search of reconciliation with himself and his lover is not coincidental. Islands in the stream betoken the other side of love, which is not hate, but rather, loneliness and a fear of death. "Islands in the Stream" evokes the 17th Mediation by John Donne, who, upon hearing a bell tolling softly for another, recognized that what the bell really said was "Thou must die." In meditating on they way in which the death of others portends our own, Donne wrote: "No man is an island, entire to itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Now, to return to our pop stars, the sentiment is the same as that of Dolly and Kenny, who sing, " Islands in the stream/That is what we are/No one in-between/How can we be wrong." The islands are connected or mediated as one by the common substance of love.

I want to begin by suggesting, with apologies to Kenny and Dolly, that this sentiment is, in fact, WRONG, that the argument that we are One, that in solitude we are lacking, and that lovers can be united in knowledge of each other, is the essence of rhetoric as we have received it in the West. In other words, today I will argue that rhetoric is love, but I will suggest that it is nevertheless a false love. I want to suggest that, in the pop song repertory of U.S. culture, Tina Turner is right in the end: rhetoric is a second hand emotion, or rather, a supplement to a more fundamental, ontological division between two subject positions.

As a supplement--as opposed to, say, an affect--love is more often used to obscure or hide or even obliterate difference in the name of the same. This hankering for oneness in the same is what we rhetoricians have termed "identification." Identification or identitarian logic, this logic that abandons difference for SAMENESS, is the most powerful fantasy of human kind, and the center of our understanding of persuasion. In short: as Nietzsche has suggested, rhetoric traditionally conceived is a lie.

In order to make the argument that rhetoric is false love, I'll be taking us, first, to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic understanding of love, then swing back through work on love in rhetorical studies, and then, finally, I'll close with a few suggestions about true love.

WHAT IS LOVE? (make Roxbury boys joke)

In what is his last and perhaps most famous seminar of 1972 and 1973, Lacan introduced his theory of love. Now, this stuff is complicated and I won't pretend to understand it with any sense of mastery, but two important observations are key.

First: Love and Hate are two sides of the same coin of human desiring. In other words, the traditional assumption that love and hate are apposed is wrong, insofar as BOTH are born of desire for the other--a desire to be completed by absorbing or negating the other. A perfect illustration of this was Dr. Vangelisti's clip from The War of the Roses last week, when Barbara told Oliver that she felt happiness over the fantasy that he was dead. So Paul McCartney got it all wrong from the beginning. We should look, instead, to John Cougar Mellencamp who lamented "Sometimes Love don't' feel like it should so, baby, make it hurt so good," or to Nazareth who sings "Love Hurts." Indeed, a better understanding of the role of desire in loving means that "Love Hurts" is the better motto here. To put it most succinctly, love is fundamentally ambivalent.

The second observation of Lacan's view of love is this: Love is a supplement, not an affect. For Lacan love is a function or, as he says, a consequence of a radical disjunction between two people. Although we associate affect with this thing love, the thing as such is the epiphenomenon of an impossible relationship; it is a reminder that I am not you, and you are not me-that, in fact, there is no relationship between us, only endless symbolic reminders of its impossibility. So let me unpack this idea of love as a supplement to radical disjunction a bit more, however, because it's not as obvious as it may sound.

First, we have this concept of disjunction. What does Lacan mean by disjunction? Well, the annoying thing about Lacan, or rather, the signifier of Lacan the author, if you wanna remain properly poststructural, is that he usually means to signify many things (and then, of course, nothing) with a concept like disjunction. Musically, a disjunction is a shift in the notes of a melody. In logic, it designates the function of the term "or " that leads to truth statements. And then there is informal logic, where a disjunction implies one or another. I won't go too much into this except to say that disjunction consequently implies a choice between two things, a binary, and that for Lacan, the fundamental binary choice of our identities was made for us at birth: either you are man or woman. You had no choice in this choice, and once it's made, you cannot undo it. In other words, sexual difference is ultimately a forced choice in the symbolic between two categories of being. Let me underscore this is NOT biological, for it is entirely possible to change one's biological sex. But, even when one elects to do so, it's almost impossible to escape the symbolic tokens of the choice that was forced upon you. What we're talking about here is the symbolic.

Now, with the notion of disjunction as an "either this or that" logic in mind, we are ready to wrestle with Lacan's argument that Love is a supplement to radical disjunction.

In the twentieth seminar, in respect to the domains of love and knowledge, Lacan proclaimed, "there is no sexual relationship." Now this statement, that "there is no sexual relationship," seems patently absurd. "Sure there is a sexual relationship," you may be thinking, perhaps about last night (though I assure you in my case this is an undeniable and horribly lamentable truth). But what is key here is the many senses in which Lacan means "sex."

By "sexual relationship" Lacan is referring to the categories of male and female, a fundamental cultural disjunction: as my colleague Amber Rademacher put it last week, "this society machine only computes ones and zeros," meaning that in our culture difference is reducible to a single disjunction, that of sex.

Yet by "sexual relationship" Lacan is also suggesting that sexual intercourse is a biological act in which TWO ISLANDS in the STREAM remain islands. The cultural fantasy of sexual intercourse as a unification of souls is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it privileges penetration as THE condition of oneness.

So, when Lacan says that there is no sexual relationship, he means both that (1) the sexes-and by extension, people in general-are radically disjunct; and (2) sexual intercourse is not a practice whereby two become "one" in the act. Love and Sex, in other words, are frequently commingled because they both are fields of fantasy. As a matter of fact, Lacan is saying that sexual intercourse is frequently a means by which individuals attempt to overcome or hide or repress or forget their radical disjunction.

So when Robert Smith of the Cure sings, "Why can't I be you?" The answer is, WELL, IF YOU HAVE TO ASK . . . . Now, you would think this is obvious, but all you need to do is watch Divorce Court, or perhaps chronicle your own, personal series of attempts at that failed, hopelessly romantic, Vulcan mind-meld, and you'll feel the problem.

So, to bring this back to Tina Turner, love is "second hand" because the first hand is, as Burke put it, "division." In this respect, Lacan says: "what makes up for the sexual relationship is, quite precisely, love." This is to say, love is the token of a failure of reconciliation. Love is failure. Love is the impossibility of becoming One.

And here is where the answer to the "so what?" question, or perhaps the "no shit Sherlock" dismissal, comes. Insofar as love is a token or sign or epiphenomenon of the failure of unity, it's very clear we don't like to think about love this way. Rather, in the West we tend to think of love in one of two ways:

1. Love as unification: love is the process whereby two individuals become one. This is the notion of a soul-mate: "reunited because it feels so good." The promise of returning to the womb, finding your safety net or bean bag chair, using the other to "make you complete and whole." This is inclusive of love as interrogation, the notion that you are using a fine tooth comb to discover the mysteries of your partner, so that you can know them so deeply you can complete his sentences.

2. Love as mediation: love is the mediation of the two by some third. There is a third that can yoke the two. This would be a cause, or God, or the church, or the institution of a family, or some other entity that seemingly reconciles or bridges the disjunction, like a psychic. Indeed, this is the "thirdness" or presumed meditation of sexual intercourse-that somehow you can screw yourself back into unity or fuck yourself "up the chain of being." Another way to put this is that this is the psychic theory of sexual intercourse, that somehow an orgasm is a spiritual event. It is, in yet other words, the lie of Hegelian sublation.

The Lacanian critique of love, then, concerns the fantasies that the disjunction of "the two" can somehow be transcended and become "the one," or reconciled by some mediating third. False love is love as a cover or fantasy or shield, protecting us from the trauma of the truth that we are, in fact, islands unto ourselves.

So where does rhetoric come in?

PRETTY PERSUASION: ON RHETORIC AS LOVE (play R.E.M. song)

Ok, so, before I push this argument to the final stage, let me take a moment to summarize. So far I have suggested that for Lacan love is a supplement for a radical disjunction or difference at the center of every relationship, the most primary being that of sexual difference, and we mean this as a cultural distinction, not a biological one. Lacan has critiqued love by suggesting that "true love" is a token of failure, and false love is any promise of transcendence or unity.

Now I am prepared to argue that rhetoric, traditionally conceived, is the promise of false love and therefore a fundamental misrecognition of difference. In short, rhetoric is bad love.

Dr. Brummett has already mentioned the Platonic dialogues, which suggest that the true art of discourse is dialectic, the apprehension of divine truths by means of mediation (the magical third of the forms). From the ancients forward, rhetoric, defined as the art of persuasive oratory and later writing, has been taught as an art of unity and transcendence.

Time prevents any through account, but we could characterize the situation as this: some speaker (male) addresses an audience (female) and seduces or persuades them to identify with his or her position, vision, and/or desires. Now, whether appeals consist of outright lies, or identity-nuggets of pretty persuasion, is inconsequential. The point here is that almost all theories of persuasion orbit the promise of transcendence or mediation. As our own Rod Hart has written, persuasion is akin to lovers cooing on a park bench. In other words, our theories of persuasion in rhetorical studies have been theories of false love.

For example, let me reference a modern darling of rhetorical studies: Kenneth Burke. Uncle Burke defined rhetoric as: "the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." Cooperation can be read here as amoral love, neither good nor bad. Cooperation is, at some level, a recognition of a fundamental failure or division. Yet Burke's theories of persuasion seem to hinge on identification and the evocation of common substance, of saying, in effect, that all islands in the stream of strife are but united by an underwater continent. Persuasion is, in effect, the seduction of an impossible unity or mediation (and as an aside, we can therefore say that the best persuaders NEVER deliver; not delivering, in fact, is the undercurrent that persuades).

In this view, the Kenny and Dolly Duet "Islands in the Stream," then, is a ideal example of how rhetoric has been thought if in content and form: musically in brings you along, back to the tonic. The message that it promulgates is Oneness, unification in the medium of love. The song itself is a supplement, it is in and of itself the cover or repression of a failure; it is rhetoric.

Now, a number of scholars in our field have worked to combat the false love central to rhetorical instruction in the past two thousand years. Among the first was Wayne Brockriede, who argued in a widely read essay, "Arguers as Lovers," that too much persuasion was premised on what I have characterized as "false love." Brockreide said there were three kinds of arguers (or persuaders):

1. the unfortunately termed arguing rapist: this is the arguer that berates their audience until they give in.

2. the seducer: this is, for Brockreide, the liar who uses deception to persuade.

3. Finally, we have the "lover": this is the persuader who addresses the other as an equal, shares power, values the relationship over the outcome of the message, and so on.

Clearly Brockreide was onto something, insofar as the lover valued a recognition of disjunction over transcendence and becoming "one." But the false love still lurks insofar as equity or parity here betokens sameness: that is, the rhetor and audience share a common substance; argument, therefore, becomes the avenue of recognizing this common cause in the pursuit of unity. Argument here is used as false love, the mediating third, an instrument of connection.

What Brockreide did contribute to, however, is a less adversarial or "sexual relation" approach to rhetorical love in favor of a cooperative vision. This push toward cooperation can also be seen in the "Invitational" model of rhetoric offered by Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin. Foss and Griffin argue-and rightly, I think-that persuasion seems too tightly wed to patriarchical notions of "change, competition, and domination." Or to put it differently, persuasion in the field has been much too Kenny: it sets out to analyze lovers with a fine tooth comb in order to take them over, dominate, and assimilate them into the Borg of Phallic-Man Love. Although they acknowledge that persuasion, or in my terms, instrumental rhetoric, with a stress on instrument-although they acknowledge that persuasion is necessary sometimes, they nevertheless retreat to the fantasy of unity: "Invitational rhetoric is an invitation to understanding as a means to create a relationship rooted in equity, immanent value, and self-determination." In other words, invitational rhetoric plays into the idea of a complete and self-transparent subject respecting other complete and self-transparent subjects.

So, what I am suggesting is that attempts to change how we think about rhetoric in favor of recognizing difference and alterity continue to fail. The attempts of rhetoricians, in other words, to inject postmodern or poststructural theory into rhetorical studies continues to meet resistance because as a field we are too enamored of our transcendent fantasies of love. So, to use the Barry's language of homology, the third thing that yokes love and rhetoric is transcendence and mediation. Or as John Durham Peters has argued in his history of the idea of communication, Speaking Into the Air: "The problem of communication is not language's slipperiness, it is the unfixable difference between self and the other." He continues that "At best, 'communication' is the name for those practices that compensate for the fact that e can never be each other." And to add my own spin on this, good communication is a recognition of failure.

So, you may be thinking: Ok Josh, you have just told me that rhetoric is bad love, that rhetoric is a cover or ruse or about repression difference. And now you've even suggested that COMMUNCATION is, in some sense, a kind of bad love too.

So what is to be done? Are we to abandon rhetoric? Are we to stop communicating? What is a good or true love, and how do we rethink rhetoric or communicate in keeping with true love?

The argument I have been making against Dolly and Kenny in favor of Tina does not lead to the conclusion that the transcendent fantasy of love, or false love, should be rejected or avoided. This is why my theoretical pursuits in rhetorical studies frequently differs from my pomo friends: the rhetoric of bad love saves lives, and often makes people feel better, and its ok to make people feel better sometimes. For example, I may be critical of the song "Islands in the Stream" as an exemplar of bad love, BUT, the song is catchy, it makes me smile, and it feels good to sing along. More seriously, appealing to a common humanity often can save the lives of others who are about to be killed. To abandon bad love and the feelings it inspires, in light of imminent death, seems stupid. In other words, although we should be mindful of its potential abuses, and although we should avoid the endless and obsessive quest of a love of interrogation, we should nevertheless take and claim love whenever and wherever we can get it.

[note: the below link should take you to the rest of the talk, but, you can only read the rest using Safari or Internet Explorer; for some crazy reason Firefox only presents gobbledegook. sorry!]