more holes, god-shaped and otherwise
Music: a.c. acoustics: Understanding Music (2000)
In addition to grading, I've been reading Mark A. Smith's The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society. This is not something I'd normally be interested in, but as a favor to a new friend and an editor I've agreed to write something about it for print pronto (look at the next Rhetoric Review for it). By way of a preview, let me just say I haven't been this bored reading a rhetoric book since I slogged through Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (with the exception of the chapter on "taste") in graduate school.
Like a number of historians, a handful of philosophers, and more than a few postmarxists and psychoanalytic gear-heads, a trained political scientist has discovered rhetoric! Presumably writing for an audience of political scientists, Smith argues that we should take rhetoric seriously, and that attending to certain PR-moves among the Right (which apparently is synonymous with Republications, though I would beg to differ---William Jefferson Clinton, anyone?) reveals that the common wisdom about the ascent of the Right is flawed. The Right has expanded its electorate because of various cultural and moral issues, right? Nothing galvanizes better than pictures of aborted fetuses, right? Nope. Smith argues the Right has gained political power and enacted sweeping policies by reducing every issue, cultural, moral, or automotive, to economics. With an arsenal of graphs (and very little close reading) and poll data he writes a 200 page book to predict [brace yourself] that successful political rhetoric will mention economic growth.
Apparently Smith doesn't get out much, and certainly hasn't been caught slumming through his colleague Jodi Dean's work. Hasn't reducing everything to the market been the ideology emanating out of the Chicago school, then the Harvard Business School, for decades? Hello, Milton Friedman and The Secret? I mean, most especially after the Clinton administration's rhetoric, are we surprised at all to see everything couched in terms of "investments" and "human capital?" Smith is apparently unaware of the large swath of political theory that takes on neoliberalism, not to mention the folks in rhetorical studies who have been all over this like flies on poop (e.g., Ron Greene's excellent work on neoliberal governance). Where's the news here? And for whom is this news relevant or helpful?
This trained rhetorican thinks that Smith has overplayed rhetoric's hand. Speech is comprised of two parts: voice and signification, the body that enunciates words, and the words themselves. Smith completely ignores the body, and the feelings and emotions that come and are associated with it. His theory of rhetoric is thus lop-sided, incomplete, with no answer to the "so what?" question, nor an answer to the "why?" question. Why do people invest in their own unhappiness? Why do folks still support so-called supply-side economics when clearly only the suppliers are getting more supplies? Because they can enjoy beyond pleasure, because pain can be pleasurable, because we have rubber-necks (and, well, rubber dicks too, poles and holes, as the OTHER Uncle Tom would say, poles and holes).
Exhibit A: Nine-eleven. Only one mention of it in the whole damn book. You cannot explain the success and power of Right rhetoric without reference to this monumental trauma.
Exhibit B: Christian fantasies of violence. Stay tuned to Chris Lundberg's work on this in the journals. You cannot explain the appeal and seduction of Right rhetoric without some passing reference to The Passion of the Christ and Mel Gibson. And the death drive. Nope.
Exhibit C (closely related to B): Pornography. Shoe-tapping in a Minneapolis bathroom. Powerful evangelicals with conference calls to the White House snorting crank and sodomizing muscle-stud "escorts." You cannot explain the emotional appeal of Right rhetoric without some understanding of all that pent-up libidinal energy.
Exhibit D: Deity. The central tactic of Right discourse, seems to me, concerns the way they have figured out how to fill that god-shaped hole we all have by wedding B and C in the wake of A into D. A, then B + C = D. Money is the bi-product in this equation, the remainder, and certainly the whole engine that sets it into motion. The "common wisdom" is right if you factor in sex and religion as nodes of human motivation and affect. Money is definitely important, but its root is anal erotism and lust. Right-ist rhetoric is religious pornography (whereas we might say Left-ist is pornographic religion).
I'm tired of people explaining things rhetorically without any reference to or understanding of the affective life. Rhetorical studies has done this for years. Smith continues the trend. The guy even says his theory is homologous to rational-choice theory! I reckon that's no different than the study of informal logic and good reasons, in a sense.
Anyway, the first sentences of my review are thus: "Smith's The Right Talk is an impotent expose simply because there's no fucking or god in it (or rather, there is no fucking god at all). Let me explain." I doubt the editor will want to print that, but that's how I feel!