love is shit

Music: Cocteau Twins: Victorialand (1986)

I started to work again on the love essay. This I plan to finish this week. Here is the third stage leading-up to a critique of Foss and Griffin's "invitational rhetoric."

I give myself to you, the patient says again, but this gift of my person---as they say---Oh mystery! is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit---a term that is also essential to our experience.
--Jacques Lacan[1]

Speaking of cheese, let us return once again to the amorous dialect of Kenny and Dolly for a second set of verses: "I cant live without you if the love was gone/Everything is nothin' if you got no one/And you did walk in tonight/Slowly loosen sight of the real thing." Aside from the grammatical improprieties, here we are reminded of Harry Nilsson's cultural truism that one is the loneliest number, which, of course, Lacan would suggest is actually the truth of "them two" and which I have suggested is the foundational drive of persuasion. The last verse---which is sung by Dolly---also adds "sight of the real thing," cuing not only an understanding of love as the power of identification through recognition (e.g., "I see you") but also the objet a or object-cause of desire. In the imaginary scenario of the song, Kenny is the "real thing" for Dolly in two senses: (1) in the mundane sense insofar Kenny is a real human being, a person whom Dolly believes that she loves; and (2) in the psychoanalytic sense that a glimpse of Kenny---that observing "something more" about him, his voice, his well-groomed beard encircling his moist mouth, his smooth gestures---stimulates her desire. For Lacan, the singular objet a that sets desire into motion is in fact a "real thing" insofar as it resides in that part of human experience which he refers to as "the Real."[2] In the fantasy of "Islands in the Stream," the mundane real ("I love Kenny!") runs cover for an encounter with the Real ("Kenny and I cannot become One"); again, the objet a cannot be produced or obtained, nor can two human beings transcend their singularity to become One. Rehearsing Lacan's understanding of the objet a as token of the Real is thus important for understanding the love of rhetoric as both an impossible ideal and a screen for an unbearable state of abjection.

According to Lacan, for humans there are three basic modes or "orders" of human experience: (1) the symbolic, or that order concerned with representation and language, broadly construed; (2) the imaginary, or that order concerned with imagery, illusion, and fantasy; and (3) the Real, an undifferentiated and unsymbolizable realm of being, alternately understood as a void, gap, or "persistant traumatic kernel" in the symbolic order itself.iii Although Lacan was deliberately unclear about his conception of the Real (perhaps in order to emphasize its elusiveness), the concept took on an increasing importance over the course of his writings. Slavoj Zizek has suggested that one approaches the Real only in respect to the objet a, a sort of non-existant touchstone of sorts, which "is simultaneously the pure lack, the void around which the desire turns and which, as such, causes the desire, and the imaginary element which conceals this void, renders it invisible by filling it out."[4] In other words, the objet a resides in the Real but has imaginary effects (e.g., inspires fantasies of love). Insofar as love is both the term for a failed relationship and the desire set into motion by the objet a, then, love is simultaneously an indirect confrontation with the Real and in inability to reckon with the Real, the promise of unification as an imaginary shield from Real a impossibility. In short, love is a screen for shit, or more simply stated, love is shit.

The Second Tear

Of course, there is some deliberate equivocation with the term "shit." With the phrase "love is shit" I mean to denote first that the Western fantasy of transcendent love is for shit; love is impossible to actualize. I also mean to cue the more negative assessments of love for those among us who have failed, time and time again, to sustain a loving relationship in a more mundane sense of the term ("love stinks! yeah yeah!"). In this sense---notwithstanding cloacal ambiguities---one could say that "Islands in the Stream" is pure bullshit. Most importantly, I mean to stress here the understanding of love as a desire caused by the objet a, an object "without properties that lacks existence."[5] Insofar as that object is identified as such, it becomes, as Lacan suggests, "the gift of shit," a worthless thing that lost value because it become a specific object. The objet a is a token of the Real because it represents something non-representable that is experienced as terrible or horrible by human beings (and this is because it escapes re-presentation). Hence, for Lacan the "objet a is the anal object" in the

precise sense of the non-symbolizeable surplus that remains after the body is symbolized, inscribed into the symbolic network: the problem of the anal stage resides precisely in how we are to dispose of this leftover. For that reason, Lacan's thesis that animal became human the moment it confronted the problem of what to do with its excrement is to be taken literally and seriously: in order for this unpleasant surplus to pose a problem, the body must already have been caught up in the symbolic network.[6]

Shit is a reminder that there is a horrible, un-nameable excess or gap in our symbolic reality---that something always eludes us. This is why Milan Kundera asserts that "the objection to shit is a metaphysical one," and its register is the imaginary:

The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner. It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. "Kitsch" is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century . . . . Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.[7]

And here Kundera causes us to confront the reason why rhetoricians have avoided theorizing love, because love's object is an impossible excess, because "Islands in the Stream," like the fantasy it bespeaks, is kitsch!

If falling in love is a stupidity in respect to a radical disjunction, a ruse of identification in respect to an objet a, the pursuit of which screens us from the unacceptable in human existence, then our failure to theorize love in respect to rhetoric is born of fear. Traditionally conceived, love is kitschy, but few of us want to confront the lovers cooing on a park bench, for it would mean to reckon with impossibility of realizing our own transcendent fantasies. Even fewer of us want to be thought of as sentimentally stupid, or as Kundera might put it, few of us want to be caught crying in public: "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running in the grass!"[8] I would suggest that Burke's reluctance to mention love and his tendency to abstract persuasion to a "hierarchical principle" depersonalizes rhetoric in an effort to avoid sentimentality. Although few would voice an objection in print, some scholars have worried that Brockriede's suggestion that the loving rhetorician "wants power parity" is an impossible pipe dream (and by extension, so too is Habermas' ideal speech situation). Ervin's admirably frank admission that Corder's arguments for rhetoric's love are too "touchy-feely" and cast in "sentimental soft focus" reflects the same fear of kitsch. Perhaps no other essay, however, has been more roundly criticized for its tears than Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin's "Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for An Invitational Rhetoric." An understanding of the interrelation between love and kitsch not only helps to explain the visceral responses to Foss and Griffin's theory, but also helps us to better discern a major fault-line among rhetorical theories: the locus of love's presumed antithesis, hate.

Invitational Rhetoric, or, the Gift of Shit

Stay tuned for this part soon!