on rhetorics and modernities

Music: Nina Simone: High Priestess of Soul (1966)

I await my flight in an airport. I am reflecting about my weekend with a gang of familiar and friendly faces, as well as some new ones---graduate students, friendly, smart grads. David Beard, long time best buddy, graduate student mate, co-author, and intellectual inquisitor par excellence, dreamed up a conference on the question of "modern rhetorical theory." I would say the folks he brought together were determined to find answers, but what we got, of course, were different ways to formulate the question. We didn't happen upon an answer, although R.L. Scott said he had no difficulty discerning the modern. It was electric refrigeration. And modern rhetorical theory? Well, the holy trinity of George Campbell, I.A. Richards, and Kenneth Burke, of course (this during a hilarious mid-lunch "provocation").

The conference was low-key and laid-back. Folks were very friendly, and what I like in particular was there was no sense of peacock feathers---that the discussion was expected to explore ideas, not "show-off." I worried some of the grads might get the wrong idea about conferences, but then maybe they saw a model of what things could be like. Then again, David Beard hand-picked the group, so you have to credit that too . . . .

All of the papers I heard were intriguing. Bill Keith's keynote on rhetoric as a "hybrid" field really helped frame the tone for the rest of the weekend (Latour's theory of modernity seemed hegemonic after that opening paper). Jim Aune was there, always brilliant (what hasn’t Jim Aune read?). My favorite papers were Debra Hawhee's on Burke and Aristotle (the oft-heard suggestion that Burke posed identification against persuasion proved wrong, at least according to Burke's marginalia in his Loeb edition of Rhetoric), and David Beard's on religious identity. David argued that, rather than think of religion as an epistemological issue, what if we thought of it as a dispositional one (identify first, justify later)? It made sense to me, and helps us make better sense of contemporary political squabbles, too.

My favorite moments in the conference were scenes: peering out the window to see giant flakes of snow to the backdrop of brightly colored fall leaves. Watching R.L. Scott and Alan Gross playfully spar over the value of the magisterial gesture. David getting an award in gratitude for his intellectual, community-building successes at Duluth. Shop-talk with Besty, Brett, and Ken the final night in a cheesy "Irish" pub with a bad, teen cover band. . . perfect ending.

They taped the whole thing, and snippets of papers will be uploaded to the InterTubes. I declined because I cannot stand to see myself on film; I know it doesn't creep out others as much as it does me, but still. And my paper was and remains half-baked---truly a work in progress. But I did distribute the paper to conference goers, and don't mind sharing here as long as: (a) you don't see me deliver it; and (b) you will not cite this. It is really half-done, not a complete work of scholarship, and written with the idea it would be orally delivered and not studied.

HEARING THE SPEECH DEFECTIVES: MODERNITY AS PATHOLOGY IN RHETORICAL THEORY

Joshua Gunn
University of Texas at Austin

DO NOTE CITE! DRAFT ONLY! CITERS WILL SUFFER AN UNPLEASANT VOODOO CURSE. TENTATIVE CLAIMS ONLY. THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS NOT TO BE CITED, ETC., AND SO ON. BLAH BLAH ARGH!

____________________________________________________

You think you're alone until you realize you're in it/
Now fear is here to stay, love is here for a visit.
---Elvis Costello, "Watching the Detectives"[1]

I begin my remarks today by referencing Costello's lyricism for a number of reasons. The first is because the vivid image the song evokes is classically noir and chiaroscuro, a femme fatale is watching hardboiled fedora-headed flatfoots on television instead of making love to her man. The song is visually evocative. And, I regret, the scenario is depressingly familiar.

The second reason is that, under the aegis of death, Costello's lyrics provide something of a cutesy transition from Professor Pfau's fears to the scene of visitation, that first event of a funeral in which the body of the deceased love one is on morbid display. The strong emotions of fear and love exhibited at any wake are, of course, muted in our present mourning. That pun is intended, particularly because I'm never up and speaking this early; to say I am a mourning person only pertains to my penchant for the sentimental-the reason I join you here. The crowing cocks can go to hell (incidentally, this phrase reduces my remarks this morning to one handy motto).

Crowing is, of course, an expression of happiness and triumph, and this is hard to muster when asked to mutter about modernity for all the reasons-that is, instrumental reasons-that we know.[2] Moreover, as Professor Aune has noted elsewhere and then again last evening,[3] the institutional politics of rhetorical studies concern the passing of two commingled yet alloyed bodies, modernity and rhetoric, and working though those corpora forestalls any final burial. We seek to prolong the visitation, but we cannot stay put. We go, reluctantly, slumping toward Sodom,[4] which means, of course, that we go bassakwards, perhaps something like Benjamin's "angel of history." Our faces are turned to the past; we would like "to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed." But a storm is blowing from the project of the posts-or, if you prefer, the postal projects and slums of structuration-a storm that has got caught in our wings, carrying us into the Hills of Foucault and the Lands of the Lost, I mean the Lands of Lacan.[5]

All of this is to say I like Costello's song because it allows for word play-as most lyrics do-and it is particularly demonstrative of our thinking about the intersection of modernity and rhetoric, cynical and romantic in equal measure. Like Costello's conception of relationships and Benjamin's concept of history, all rhetorical theories, antimodern, modern, or postmodern, are foisted upon a mental image of bodies arranged in space. These bodies are commonly typed into two sorts-subject and object-and modern theories of love or history or rhetoric might be said to rest on the characterization of the relation between these typed bodies.

Now, professors Aune and Keith have corroborated that the body we term "the subject" emerges in modernity as an autonomous and free body. Following the work of Esther Sánchez -Pardo on "modernist melancholia," my argument is that in the domain of theory, modernism also represents a shift from philosophy as a route to knowledge toward psychology as a route to knowledge. The dominance of the Kantian subject becomes, by the twentieth century, an obsession with the psyche.6 This implicates, in turn, an alteration in the attitudinal relation between subject and object. My remarks today attempt to evoke the mental image or fantasy-something akin to Benjamin's angel or Costello's noir bedroom-that seems to underwrite the rhetorical theory of late modernity in a way that will help us think further about it in relation to our present predicament.

I. THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT

John Rajchman reminds us of Wittgenstein's observation that "when we think of the world's future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going now; it does not occur to us its path is not a straight line, but a curve, constantly changing directions."[7] In addition to its impressive image-work, I evoked Benjamin's concept of history because it asks us to take a messianic stance toward the curves of the past, to seek out subversive moments that would otherwise be lost to seeing straight. For the materialist historian, however, redemptive research is deeply rhetorical in its reportage of what Benjamin termed "dialectical images." A dialectical image mediates the past and the present in a way that captures both the utopian hopes and material circumstance in a "flash" or instantaneous "pathos of nearness."[8] When researching history, these synchronous flashes are fleeting, but must nevertheless be captured poetically in tone.[9] Benjamin's vivid allegory of the angel of history is in this sense a dialectical image, or better put, the representation of a dialectical image (which in itself is not a representation), both capturing the hope of modernity in the reconstruction of the Weimar Republic and the very real, looming doom approaching its back door.

Although I recognize significant dissimilarities, Gilles Delueze's conception of what he termed the "image of thought" also speaks to an awakening by means of an image. Like the dialectical image, the "image of thought" is

not a picture or representation of something . . . . It can never be simply deduced from the contexts or concepts of a philosophy; instead, it is a tacit presupposition of the creation of concepts and their relation of what is to come. There is no method to arrive at it and it is never completely explicit . . . . [10]

Strictly speaking, Deleuze's image of thought concerns thinking, and philosophical thinking in particular. Any given philosophy rests, argues Deleuze, on a certain structuring image, which prejudges the "distribution of the object and the subject."[11] Such images of thought, at least as they are received, tend to ossify into illusions about the initial image and have become "dogmatic, orthodox or moral" in character.[12] Deleuze's philosophy is an attempt to begin without illusions, with something akin to an image of thought that does not already predispose its "modes of address."[13] It is in this sense that I understand Professor Keith's recourse to the work of Latour on modernity: the image of thought ensconced in modernity-and in particular, in the sciences-concerns a tension or contradiction between the tidiness of purity and the exciting defilements of hybridity.[14] If you'll permit me a slight equivocation in the service of provocation, as I will suggest momentarily, this purity/danger pair so typical of modernity also implies an ideational distribution of the subject and object in respect to pathology.[15]

Of course, ours is not a philosophical project, but something like a conceptual history to better discern the relation of what is to come, but without determining what that is. (In echoes of Derrida, Jesus is going to come. It won't be long. But how long it is taking.)[16] If Benjamin and Deleuze are guides, however, at the core of our project is an awakening procedure that is ultimately ineffable. After the blindness of insight, the best we can have are instructive illusions or representations of that image of thought-basically, in the argot of that Mac Daddy of Modernity, Sigmund Freud, dreams or fantasies of some kind of disciplinary unconscious and not-so-secret wish. At least, not secret to us now, in hindsight.

II. SHIFTING OBJECTS OF THE DISCIPLINARY DREAM

On the surface of things, the disciplinary dream of "modern rhetoric" at any one time is discernable by attending to the distribution of subject and object in the scholarly imaginary. I think it is indisputable that the subject of modernity is autonomous and that this conception has held sway until relatively recently. In turn, at first blush one is tempted to say that the object of rhetorical theory in modernity has been speech or writing, such that the image of thought is, as Professor Aune put it last night, "an autonomous self [addressing] . . . an audience of autonomous selves." An attention to the imagined scenes of rhetoric reveals that in the early twentieth century, the attitude toward audiences was not necessarily respectful of their autonomy, but quite the opposite. As Pat Gehrke shows in his marvelous new book The Ethics and Politics of Speech, the "audience . . . became an object for the speaker to conquer, a target for the sharp words of a great orator."[17] For example, in his 1902 treatise How to Attract and Hold an Audience, Joseph Esenwein, friend and contemporary of non-other than Dale Carnegie, argued that "for the audience to master the speaker is a failure. For the speaker to master the audience is success."[18]

It is in this formative image of thought that we find the classical reasserted in the modern land-grant university, precisely, I think-well, I was told! -the tension that drove Professor Beard to bring us together. Insofar as the subject is autonomous in modernity, however, we cannot claim the image of thought of modern rhetoric is the same; it is, as Professor Keith might suggest, a hybrid. Cast as an object to be manipulated, the audience is subject to the autonomous will of the speaker. The image of thought here (better described I suppose as a dogmatic image or fantasy) is classically Hegelian, an echo of the master/slave dialectic or, in Lacan-o-speak, it is allied with the Master's Discourse.[19] Moreover, the oft-discussed shift in rhetorical theory from a more classical focus on the speaker or subject to the modern concern with the object of audience paralleled a larger, intellectual interest in psychology, both behavioral and interpretive. Mastery was thereby amplified as the ability to psyche-out the audience, so to speak, with an understanding of emotional appeals. In effect, public speaking was a hypnogogic.[20]

What happens in the 20s and 30s, however, is that as the subject moved toward an apotheosis of Mastery at the height of modernity, in the academic imaginary the object gradually migrates from the undifferentiated mass of audience to the maladapted student. Because of length constraints I will confine my remarks here to the research and the explicit pedagogy of scholars in departments of speech, however, I suspect there are analogies to be made for written rhetorical studies as well.

In departments of speech, pedagogy was seen as a fruitful avenue for establishing a research trajectory in the 1920s and 30s. Culturally, Herman Cohen suggests the two most prominent influences on the new field at that time "were those of the new psychology, principally that of Sigmund Freud; and the new theories of social adjustment, particularly those of John Dewey."[21] Here in the United States, however, Freud's theories were shunted through the work of Heinz Hartmann and what is known as "ego psychology," an application of Freud's theories that promoted therapy as a process of the client's rational and affective adaptation to his or her environment.[22] Read through ego psychology, one can see how Dewey's ideas about social adjustment were conceptually wed to psychical adaptation. In communication, that wedding is conceptually manifest in the field's turn toward "mental hygiene."

Mental hygiene is the nineteenth century precursor to what we now discuss as "mental health," and it entered the field under the aegis of "speech hygiene" in the late 1920s. Gehrke notes that in Speech, "the primacy of scientific methods and the interest in making speech an applied psychology fostered attempts to construct purposes for speech education other than persuasion or transmission."[23] Many of those attempts hailed from the University of Minnesota and the theories of Bryng Bryngelson and his colleagues. In fact, it could be argued that the University of Minnesota was the seat of the speech hygiene movement, since many in the department were vocal proponents, including John Hamilton, Franklin Knower, and Wayne Morse.[24] Although regarded today as a pioneer of the treatment of stuttering, Bryngelson's repeated statements about the purpose of speech education became a mantra for a host of scholars until the arrival of the World War II. "The goal in fundamentals courses should extend to adequate speech adjustments outside the classroom," argued Bryngelson. He continued:

If our work be thorough, it is not enough to see adequate changes effective in class. Society today is suffering as a result of inadequately adjusted personalities at war with each other's inferiority feelings. Our speech . . . is symptomatic of a lack of adequate personal evaluation and contentment at the emotional level.[25]

In other words, the speech classroom should be a therapeutic space in which the teacher "diagnosed" the student's emotional stability and proper adjustment to society. To this end, one of the more infamous techniques promoted by Bryngleson for so-called speech failures was redemption through humiliation. The speech teacher could help readjust students by having each one stand before a mirror in the classroom:

Standing there looking analytically and self consciously at the red hair, the big nose, the big feet or so on, he would talk about the . . . characteristic so long neglected. The members of the class all participated in the discussion, calling attention to the difference as well as remarking about the more normal parts of their persons. Nicknames befitting the differences were adopted, or if the sensitivity was about a name, that name was sounded in drill fashion at each day's session.[26]

This detailed image of the adjustment of Howdy Doody to social normalcy is a rather perverse, behavioral twist in the years-long process of psychotherapy, and time permitting there would be much to say here about the connection of the mirror to speech in the classroom. For the moment, however, I point out this imagined scene to note how the subject and object is differently distributed from the imagined scene of speech just a decade prior: Here, of course, the Master is no longer a hypnotist, but a therapist, a Master who has the power to assist the student-the object-in discerning his or her deficiencies relatively quickly, over the course of the semester. The mirror, of course, is a key metaphor for an important role of the therapist in the psychoanalytic imaginary. What is particularly modern about this imagined scene is not, however, the thereapeutic subject as such. Rather, it is speed.

III. ON SPEEDY SPEECH RECOVERIES

In high modernity the United States was both a pragmatic and impatient culture, which helps to explain how the relatively long process of psychotherapy was reduced to techniques of adaptation on the one hand, or abandoned in favor of behavioral conditioning on the other. Bryngelson's mirror of humiliation is a good illustration of the ways in which modern therapeutics orient the speech subject into techniques of self-discipline and control, a project Ron Greene and Darrin Hicks have argued is part of a larger discourse of liberal citizenship in modernity.[27] I agree with Hicks that an investigation of the past speech pedagogies is important "to understand better how . . . pedagogical techniques organize the forms of democratic subjectivication available in the present," and my task here today has been to touch on the imagined scenes that distribute subject and objects in ways that predetermine theory.[28]

My own interest in the speech hygiene movement orbits two related questions: why was the so-called new psychology abandoned? And how do we account for the hostility psychoanalytic approaches have received in rhetorical studies until relatively recently? I think the answers have something to do with the image of thought that flashed, horrifically, in the mental hygiene movement. Unquestionably the governmental apparatus operative in the academy was productive of the liberal citizen-subject, but it also contributed to an assumption of Mastery that is almost evangelical in character, if not fiendishly instrumental in attitude toward "the object" (arguably, an attitude that gets transferred to "the text").

If we crystallize modern rhetorical theory in Speech the decade before the clean slate of war, the mental image of Bryngelson's mirror metamorphoses into an ice pick. The cultural obsession with speed and efficiency driving speech hygiene is more vividly illustrated by the legacy of psychosurgery, and particularly the transorbital lobotomy. Neurologist Walter Freeman and surgeon James Watts became the first physicians in the United States to perform a prefrontal lobotomy in 1936. By inserting a ice pick into the eye of someone afflicted with a "personality disorder," Freeman would cause massive trauma and damage to the prefrontal lobe-the area of the brain involved in personality and social behavior. Although these mutilations did relieve some victims of their dehabilitating symptoms, a large number of Freeman's patients were seriously injured or effectively zombified, and many died.

Over the next two decades Freeman would perform thousands upon thousands of lobotomies, promoting his new procedure by driving around the country in his "lobotomobile"-and for various reasons the procedure was accepted until the introduction of psychotropics in the 1950s. Gradually, the medical community turned against Freeman as a publicity-crazed zealot, eventually revoking his medical license.[29]

The image of Freeman tapping an ice pick into a young person's brain is visceral and chilling, yet demonstrative of the hopes and dreams of a certain form of medical instrumentality: the subject is a benevolent Master who wanted to banish suffering, but in his zeal to promote his knowledge the object of his gaze doubly suffered. Although it remains unspoken in the journaled record, I suspect speech hygienists may have been regarded similarly, not as ruthless lobotomists, of course, but rather as well-meaning fanatics whose convictions about the symptomology of speech and personality were seen to damage those whom they would presumably help. (We certainly know today the cause of stuttering is not emotional blockage.)

As Darrin Hicks and Ron Greene note, after World War II the field of speech seems to take a turn into general semantics and meaning on the one hand, and the speech sciences and interpersonal communication on the other.[30] Notably, it seems to me it is in the aftermath of war and the hygiene movements that the "object" both starts to proliferate and disappear. From a psychological vantage, all objects represent, in one way or another, significant people in the psychical life of a person. In the history of rhetoric, the object consists of autonomous individuals or audiences or students, but people nevertheless. Yet in the move to meaning-or as Kenneth Burke would have it, forms and principles-the object is no longer a person, but an idea or concept; consequently it both dissolves and proliferates. It will take the posthumanist turn for the Master-subject to similarly dissolve and proliferate, but not before existentialism and the thinking of figures like Jean-Paul Sartre elevate it to the status of a secular god, with the responsibility for creating (the meaning of) all objects, not before an autonomous, self-transparent rhetor is fashioned and condemned to make choices and define all of humanity with his or her every utterance.

The scholar and poet David Antin is often quoted as saying "depending on which modernism you choose, you get the postmodernism you deserve." It seems to me our contemporary interest in a form of poststructual thought that is purged of psychology is in some sense the legacy of an ossified and dogmatic image of thought whose disturbing subject is represented by the lobotomist. It took a distancing from the speech sciences to remove rhetoric from a discourse of pathology. The task for those of us who find the psychoanalytic idiom fruitful for understanding rhetoric today is to redeem the object as a subject, to show how the interpretive or hermeneutic tradition of classical psychoanalysis was lost, and to demonstrate how contemporary applications of psychoanalytic concepts concern a dismantling of mastery-not the opposite, as so many scholars in the speech tradition have assumed.[31] In short, I'm suggesting one way to understand rhetoric's modernity is to discern and critique the dogmatic images of thought in our history because, without a doubt, I think we deserve better.

Notes

[1] Elvis Costello, "Watching the Detectives." My Aim is True. Hip-O Records (Universal), 2007 (1977).
[2] For example, see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[3] James Arnt Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies: A Piacular Rite." Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 69-76. [4] This is an oblique reference to the project of the critique of liberalism from the left, Sodom being the more radical counterpart to Bork's more conservative Gomorrah. See Robert Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).
[5] Walter Benjamin, "The Concept of History," trans. Harry Zohn, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume Four, 1938-1940, eds. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 2003 [1940]), 392.
[6] Ester Sánchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 198.
[7] John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 58.
[8] John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 249.
[9] To my knowledge, the best rumination of on the tonal qualities of the dialectical image is indirectly, though sound. See Mirko M. Hall, "Dialectical Sonority: Walter Benjamin's Acoustic of Profane Illumination," unpublished manuscript (revised and resubmitted and, I expect, soon to be published in a journal near you).
[10] Rajchman, Deleuze, 32. Also see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129-167.
[11] Deleuze, Difference, 131.
[12] Deleuze, Difference, 131.
[13] Rajchman, Deleuze, 37.
[14] See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
[15] There is more to be said here about the defilements of hybridity and cultural taboo: the progress of modernity is also a problem of waste management. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966); and Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002).
[16] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 4.
[17] Pat Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 16
[18] Joseph Berg Esenwein, How to Attract and Hold an Audience: A Practical Treatise on the Nature, Preparation, and Delivery of Public Discourse (New York: Hinds, Noble, and Eldredge, 1902), 5. Also see Gehrke, Ethics, 16.
[19] See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 129-131.
[20] See Diane Davis, "Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 (2008): 123-147.
[21] Herman Cohen, The History of Speech Communication: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1914-1945 (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1994), 119.
[22] See Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, trans. David Rappaport (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1958). [23] Gehrke, Ethics, 21.
[24] For example, see John L. Hamilton, "The Psychodrama and Its Implications for Speech Adjustment," Quarterly Journal of Speech 29 (1943): 61-69; Franklin H. Knower, "A Suggestive Study of Public Speaking Rating-Scale Values," Quarterly Journal of Speech 15 (1929): 30-42; Franklin H. Knower, "Psychological Tests in Public Speaking," Quarterly Journal of Speech 15 (1929): 216-223; Wayne L. Morse, "The Mental-Hygiene Approach in a Beginning Speech Course," The Quarterly Journal of Speech 14 (1928): 543-554.
[25] Bryng Bryngelson, "Speech Hygiene," The Quarterly Journal of Speech 22 (1936): 612-613.
[26] Bryng Bryngelson, "The Re-education of Speech Failures," The Quarterly Journal of Speech (1933): 231.
[27] Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, "Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Citizenship," Cultural Studies 19 (2005): 100-126.
[28] Darrin Hicks, "The New Citizen." Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 358.
[29] For a grizzly account, see Jack El-Hai, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007).
[30] Personal communication with Ron Greene. See, however, Darrin Hicks and Ronald Green, "Speech and Biopolitics," a paper to be delivered at the upcoming National Communication Association meeting in Chicago on a panel titled "Ad Bellum Purificandum: The Therapeutic Turn in Mid-century Rhetoric and Communication Theory," Friday, Nov. 13th at 9:30 a.m. at the Hilton Chicago, Meeting Room 5G. Professors Beard and Keith will also be presenting on said panel!
[31] In this respect, Strachey's much criticized "scientistic" translation of Freud's works is partially to blame.