rhetoric and modernity

Music: Elbow: Cast of Thousands (2003)

I've been reading and writing for two days, which I recall would have, at this point, produced an entire term paper for a graduate class. Somewhere between graduate school and professorship the time required for invention and composition lengthens. I hope this is because the "product" is better; I worry, however, if it's also because my brain is getting slower . . . certainly it is more addled.

On tap: a talk to be given at the first meeting of "The Modern Rhetoric Project," a collective my friend David Beard of the University of Minnesota at Duluth convened to think/work through what, exactly, "modern rhetoric" or "modern rhetorical theory" are, and then, what that portends for future teaching and research. Dave charged us with a series of questions, some definitional, some about pedagogy.

Frankly, I'm not sure I know what modernity is (I really like David Antin's famous definitional quip, but I fear it may be apocryphal, because it does not appear in the boundary 2 essay everyone cites). I recall in graduate school modernity and modernism were supposed to be bad things, but of course, I am now so thoroughly confused I think I'm just going to follow the lead of art, poetry, and Fred Jameson: it's a time period, and we're not in it now. I've read so much stuff this past week that makes these sweeping claims about the "modern" and "modernity" that the only thing I know for sure is that it's not "postmodernity" (whatever that is). How easily I forget "modern" is in the title of my first book!

Ok. So, here is a teaser of my talk. If you want to hear the whole thing, you'll just have to come to Minnesota at the end of the month. Alternately, stay tuned for the re-worked, revised, and amended version at RSA next May. Something smart will happen between October and May, I just know it!

HEARING THE SPEECH DEFECTIVES: MODERNITY AS PATHOLOGY IN RHETORICAL THEORY

Joshua Gunn
University of Texas at Austin

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 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, the first part 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 cocking crows can go to hell.

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. Moreover, as Professor Aune has noted elsewhere and then again last evening,[2] the institutional politics of rhetorical studies concerns 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 hold on. We go, reluctantly, slumping toward Sodom,[3] which means, of course, that we go backwards, 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, those postal projects and slums of structuration-a storm that has got caught in our wings, carrying us into the Hills of Foucault and Lands of the Lost, I mean Lacan.[4]

All of this is to say I like the 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, figure on 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.

Professors Aune and Keith have corroborated that the subject body emerges in modernity as autonomous. Following the work of Esther Sánchez -Pardo on "modernist melancholia," my argument today 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.[5] This implicates, in turn, an alteration in the attitudinal relation between subject and object: mastery. But mastery over what? And what is the object of rhetoric in modernity?

At first blush we are tempted to say that the object of rhetorical theory in modernity is speech or writing, and the imaginary of theory concerned the idealized delivery of this object from, as Aune put it last night, "an autonomous self to an audience of autonomous selves." As Pat Gehrke argues in his forthcoming book on the history of communication studies, however, an attention to the imagined scenes of rhetorical scholarship at the turn of the century reveals the "audience . . . became an object for the speaker to conquer, a target for the sharp words of a great orator."[6] As the subject body moved toward apotheosis at the height of modernity in the mind twentieth century, in the academic imaginary the object metamorphosed from the audience to the student. And it did so in the argot of pathology.

ENDNOTES

[1] Elvis Costello, "Watching the Detectives." My Aim is True. Hip-O Records (Universal), 2007 (1977).
[2] James Arnt Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies: A Piacular Rite." Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 69-76.
[3] 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).
[4] 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.
[5] Ester Sánchez-Pardo198.
[6] Pat Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 16.
[7] Benjamin, "Concept," 390.