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Music: Tori Amos: To Venus and Back Every year the First Vice President of the National Communication Association, the major professional association of my training, selects a "big name" scholar to speak at our national convention. Last year Celeste Michelle Condit, a rhetorical scholar who initially made a splash by incorporating articulation theory and British cultural studies into media and rhetorical studies, was chosen to be the speaker. For over a decade now Condit has been researching the rhetoric of science, and more narrowly, stuff in the biological and genetic sciences. Her talk last November was "How Should We Study the Symbolizing Animal?" and it was just published (it came packaged with the most recent NCA newsletter, Spectra.

I didn't get a chance to see the lecture, but I did receive a number of reports, and they boiled down to this narrative: "she said we needed to learn to talk to money better, and doing research that explores the language of human biology was one way to go about it." Having just read the speech, I can see where folks could get that idea, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a much more nuanced argument than this.

In "How Should We Study the Symbolizing Animal?" Condit argues that: (1) so called bio-humanists have been following a highly positivistic, if not internally contradictory, model of "consilience" that (in a manner not wholly dissimilar to the remarks of John Locke in An Essay on Human Understanding, in my humble opinion) is this sort of grand unified theory of knowledge; (2) this wouldn't be so bad if (a) those who subscribe to the model weren't getting all kinds of money and (b) humanists were so committed to the view that it's "text all the way down"; (3) to combat the encroachment of overly simplistic sociobiological causality and, thereby, guarantee our continued survival, humanists need to develop "alternative responses" to bio-humanism; (4) the first step in developing a better response is understanding what is at stake, and what is at stake is the overly simplistic model of "One Cause, One Effect" causality and the "Multiple Interacting Causes and Effects" models; and finally, (5) better, alternative responses should aim to integrate (theoretically) the processes of symbolizing and human animality, which may be achieved by: (a) studying the processes of amplification (how symbolization alters/enhances/and so on the biological); (b) moving to a model of symbolic circulation which is homologous to biological processes; and (c) studying fantasy.

Fantasy? Yes, you read me right: fantasy! But this is no complex model of fantasy, no sir. By fantasy Condit says "I mean loosely to demarcate those realms where symbolic flows specifically pretend to denote not being outside their own symbolic realities. In our culture these include fiction appearing in television, film, and novels, as well as games, including video-games and all viewer-oriented sports. The classical example of a fantastic being is the unicorn . . . ."

Ok, I'm repressing the urge to rant. But before I make the critical remarks that are inevitable, let me say that being tapped to do the Arnold lecture in our field is like winning a grammy, only that you have to speak to a very bright audience that is comprised of scientists and rhetoricians (a tough crowd). You have to craft a speech that is digestible when heard, leaving anything too complex to the side. You have to be provocative, perhaps even "stir it up." And above all, you cannot be a bore.

Despite these rhetorical challenges, I nevertheless have a number of reactions: I'm glad to see posthumanism get a nice shout-out here, and I'm pleased with the (largely implicit) critique of the transcendental subject here. The "post- theory" project is starting to pay off, at least in terms of a disciplinary visibility. But, dammit: did I read a shout-out to Deleuze and complexity theory? Nope, I didn't, which is a pity, because the recourse to the "flow" metaphor here could benefit from a coupling with the concept of emergence, which better focuses any project on "amplification" or "circulation." Second, it would seem the new form of jeremiad in our discipline is now the evolutionary apocalyptic: survival of the fittest the academy requires we talk to those who talk to money (see, there's an extra step that the reporters left out). Third, it is a straw-person to say that humanists have embraced "its text all the way down," and I cannot think of anyone who does say that (except perhaps Derrida, but even then, you cannot always take the man for his words! [wink wink]). As for fantasy: well, shit. It's like Ernst Bormann all over again-but this time fantasy is nothing but surface without any depth; it is opposed to the "real world," and so on.

There is no unconscious here; indeed, everything seems to take place on some kind of biological field of multiple causality (notice the fantastic being of the pink elephant in the living room here is that mac-daddy of all fantastic symbolizing, "the dream"). But if you keep pushing at fantasy, it seems to go "all the way down," doesn't it? What is hypnosis? Why do I keep picking at this scab because it hurts?

Is it just me, or do these intellectual battles with dualism-and the Searle-esque fiat of its magical disappearance--get tiresome?