on discerning a field

Music: Phillip Boa & the Voodoo Club: God (1994)

Over on The Blogora I have already posted the entry that follows. Please go on over there to make a comment to help encourage discussion. You can comment here, however, for a more "private" audience, I reckon. Comments here will be seen by about 15-50 people (I never understand why some posts spike and others don't). Comments over there will be read by potentially hundreds.

Here goes (again):

Rhetorical studies in the United States developed from an "innate bisexuality," as Freud might say, but with nods to Judy Butler, not before the law. The law is, "rhetoric is not that!" or as Robert L. Scott might say, "in the beginning was the error!" With its drives focused on the erogenous zones of English and Speech, rhetorical studies has been an interesting partial object to say the least.

Alternately stated, I discern a parallel between bisexuality and rhetorical studies because of the often-irrational anxieties folks in the field have about its imminent demise (elsewhere I've described this as apocalyptic, but we've been reading Butler in class so my mind is on identity politics). There's no mistake in noting our academic attractions aim in different directions; and there's no question many would have us "choose" only one. Put yet another way: rhetorical studies has always been interdisciplinary, and it's only becoming more so. In fact, the Rhetorical Society of America is attractive to many of us because it provides a kind of umbrella (what the Alliance of Rhetorical Societies did) and exposes us to the very different ways those who identify as "rhetoricians" pursue teaching and scholarship. And for a number of us who attend NCA or the 4C's, increasingly RSA is feeling more like "home."

Nevertheless, I constellate two events this week that point up the anxieties of rhetoric's "innate bisexuality." First, a faculty meeting. Early this week the governing faculty met to discuss our department's publication standards. We discussed how NCA journals were no longer the appropriate "center" and that journals like RSQ or Communication Review should count as prestigious venues, not just The Quarterly Journal of Speech. We decided that we would try something different: faculty will now submit a three-year plan of their publication and teaching goals. Part of this plan will include a discussion of what venues a faculty person plans to publish in, and an explanation for why the venue is appropriate. We all agreed our larger field (communication studies) was becoming so interdisciplinary that such a document would be helpful for the senior faculty making judgments on annual reports and merit pay.

Second, a job market-related controversy. After class yesterday, some graduate students asked me if I had seen "he hubbub on the communication-rhetoric job wiki." I said no, whereupon a student explained there was some upset concerning Northwestern's recent hires (two folks) for a single rhetorical studies position. When it was announced NWU hired Jasmine Cobb and C. Riley Snorton, a person posted the following anonymously:

As an NU alum, I am impressed with the accomplishments of these hires, and I have no doubt that they will be successful in their fields--too bad their fields are not rhetoric. I can say, too, as someone who will be chairing rhetoric search committees in the next few years, I will no longer consider NU PhDs.

Another anonymous person followed-up with this:

(I second the poster above in praise but also concern. There seems to be a growing trend where "rhetoric" programs are not hiring "rhetoric"-trained faculty. While interdisciplinary is a good thing, I find this disconcerting for the rhetorical tradition, which might be falling to the wayside...)

Robert Harriman, chair of the department of Communication Studies, responded to these comments by noting he was "stunned by the apparent ignorance and complete lack of professionalism" of the anonymous alum. Hariman said he was willing to have an "open, candid, and serious" discussion of the NWU program as well as the "prospects for rhetoric in the 21st century." Perhaps this venue can provide such a space?

Now, here's the issue for me: both criticisms of the recent hires at NWU are warranted by the belief that there is something stable called "rhetoric," that there is some standardized curriculum in rhetorical studies, or that there is a consensus about its methods or objects. There is a failure here to reckon with rhetorical studies' "innate bisexuality," its rootedness in multiple institutional histories and it's ever-debated status as "big" or "small" or "global" or what have you. There is no clear or discernable "rhetorical studies" other than its institutional histories.

I wish every graduate student working in the areas of speech-side rhetoric were made to read and study Pat Gehrke and Bill Keith's books on the history of rhetorical studies in communication. These institutional histories quickly dispel (like, in chapter one for each) any sense of conceptual continuity or intellectual "tradition" in "the field." I welcome my colleagues on the English side to recommend institutional histories for me to catch-up on, too. I'd like to know the story from my other side!

I consider my own work under the rubric of "rhetorical studies," however, I have a fat file folder full of manuscript reviews that say, "this is not rhetoric" or "this is not communication studies!" An especially nasty, recent attack on my scholarship asserts that my approach to theory and method is to blame for a contemporary incoherence in "the field," but, again, I would say any cursory understanding of the history of our fields would reveal, like turtles, it's incoherence all the way down.

I applaud my department here at the University of Texas for thinking about changing its evaluation methods for publication. What this signals is a recognition that communication studies (and by extension, rhetorical studies) is protean, dynamic, and ever changing, and one might say fiendishly adaptive; our service courses, in fact, encourage us to be this way.

Our interdisciplinarity may have been a liability in the 20th century (for explaining what we do to deans, etc.), but this quality of our field is emerging as a real asset in the postmodern and corporatized university. It seems to me the ceaseless yearning for a rhetorical studies that is, well, "straightened out," not only ignores our fundamental queerness as a field, but would closet that asset of intellectual dexterity we have learned to wield so well.

What do you think?