Rhetorical Evangelicalism

Two years ago the first meeting of the "Alliance for Rhetorical Societies" gathered in Evanston, Illinois to discuss a number of issues over the course of four days. One of the issues was framed as a question: "how ought we to understand rhetorical agency." Each participant was assigned to a 10 person discussion group, who met in a closed room to hash out answers to this and similar questions. Last summer, Cheryl Geisler composed a report on these meetings (you can download it here as a pdf file). To my surprise, my position paper was cited in this report as advocating some sort of postmodern nihilism. My collegue Chris Lundburg (whom I met as a result of his very smart critique of something I wrote) and I composed a response to this report. With hope, it should be published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly next fall. I'm pasting in an introduction to tease the academically inclined . . . . [meanwhile, I've got to get my butt to the doctor; this three-day "hangover" must not be a hangover]

"Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?"Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject,or, Continuing the ARS Conversation

Joshua Gunn and Christian Lundberg University of Texas at Austin and Northwestern University

No, I was NOT pushing that time. --Morrissey, "Ouija Board, Ouija Board"

The Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century marks an activist shift in Protestant religious practice in the United States, a turn from Calvinist fatalism toward an active, evangelical conviction in the capacity of humans to act morally and secure their own spiritual salvation. This conviction in moral agency catalyzed a growing belief in spiritualism, the idea that mere mortals could talk to the souls or "spirits" of dead people if they concentrated hard enough or employed the appropriate technological extension of the human sensorium. In the obvious idiom of the telegraph, originally nineteenth-century communiqués from the dead came in the form or "rappings" or "knocks" on tables or walls, which a given "medium" would count to discern if they denoted a "yes," a "no," or a letter of the alphabet (Braude 10-31). Excepting toddlers and accountants, counting is a somewhat tiresome exercise of agency, and so it was only a matter of time before a number of enterprising individuals would develop the "talking board" to ease the labor of mediation. Most familiar to us as Parker Brothers' "Ouija Board," a talking board was originally a device whereby one placed his or her hands on a heart-shaped planchette, which was then presumably directed by a spirit to glide across an alphabet painted on a wooden board, spelling out messages of requited love and approaching danger.

As a technology ultimately inspired by the Second Great Awakening, the Ouija Board illustrates the anxiety surrounding our many fantasies about human agency, particularly in respect to communication as a transcendent, or even transparent event (see Gunn, "Refitting"; Peters 63-108). However ironic, the belief that one or another could literally speak with the souls of the dearly departed reflects an evangelical subject enthusiastically wedded to a humanist gospel that has elevated agency to the status of the godly, lording over the material and spiritual universe. This transcendent sentiment, sometimes discussed as "ontotheology," was heavily critiqued by Heidegger, who lamented that "it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters himself," even beyond death (Heidegger, "Question" 332). Such a narcissistic "ideology of agency," born of grief, a fear of death, and dreams of divine omnipotence, manifests itself in a technology of instrumentality that treats even our spectral doubles as mere objects or extensions of the human subject's will (ghosts as Bestand, "standing-reserve"). From a Heideggerian vantage, the folly of spiritualism points to a critique of the humanist agent as autonomous, the so-called "transcendental subject" rooted in the philosophy of Kant.

The practice of a séance directs our attention to a problem implied in (but also somehow beyond) the transparency or transcendence of the moment of communication: the instabilities of the Cartesian self, or the self-transparent and self-possessed subject of thoroughly conscious intention (the cogito; see Descartes). Using a Ouija board, for example, demonstrates that while the exercise of agency takes place in the movement of the planchette, the status or existence of the agent who originates the action is undecidable. Consider a story from a March 28, 1886 edition of the New-York Daily Tribune, which underscores the way in which the uncanny talking board séance calls our accounts of our own and others' agency into question:

You take the board in your lap, another person sitting down with you. You each grasp the little table with the thumb and forefinger at each corner next to you. Then the question is asked, "Are there any communications?" Pretty soon you think the other person is pushing the table. He thinks you are doing the same. But the table moves around to "yes" or "no." Then you go on asking questions and the answers are spelled out by the legs of the table resting on the letters one after the other. Sometimes the table will cover two letters with its feet, and then you hang on and ask that the table will be moved from the wrong letter, which is done. Some remarkable conversations have been carried on until men have become in a measure superstitious about it. (quoted in "History of the Talking Board," par. 6)

As anyone who has "played" with a talking board will attest, the fun orbits suspicion: either one deceives, or is deceived by, the co-medium, or one is relatively unable to locate the seat of agency: is my partner moving this thing? Am I moving it without knowing it? Is it possible that some unseen spirit-a passed relative or worse, an evil genius-is moving the planchette (and therefore, us)? Although the somewhat admittedly perverse practice of talking to the dead is born of Kantian and Cartesian convictions, it nevertheless creates the possibility for an uncertain and unsettled subject position or disposition.

Indeed, the Ouija's capacity to demonstrate the unsettled subject becomes apparent as soon as one thinks about the variety of possible assumptions underlying the talking board séance. One could play the game presuming that living human subjects move the planchette, and that they do so either by conscious choice, unconscious choice, or in an act of mutual deferment to the conscious or unconscious movements of their partner. The players could also presume that there is an unspecified ratio of cooperation in moving the planchette between human subjects who sit at the table and dead subjects from the Beyond. Players could also invoke the idea of possession by a spirit who temporarily inhabits one or more of the players at the table and directs the movement of the planchette (viz., "channeling"). Yet, each of these options seems mildly inhospitable (the strongly inhospitable being that of packing up your Ouija board and going home). The idea that the game is solely played out among the living is inhospitable toward the spirits who may wish to join the living in communion; the idea that the spirits "possess" the body of one or more people at the table is inhospitable toward the participation of the living subject who is dispossessed. Finally, the ratio seems a hospitable compromise, but also contains the inherent inhospitality of specifying just how much influence living and dead subjects are allowed to have on the play ("sorry dead spirit, my turn to move the planchette"). Perhaps hospitality toward living and the dead implies that we give up our anxieties about the game and just play, never certain who will be manifest in the communion of the game, and never sure just how they will be manifest. Such an agnostic disposition does not imply that the players should ignore the moves of the planchette or the flows of the spirit; it simply means that players should pay attention to the movements of the game without prefiguring the meaning of the movements, reducing them to an absolutist causal account. This disposition openness to the Other-to an unconditional "what if" -is what Derrida eventually described as the posture of hospitality (see Caputo, Prayers; Derrida, Specters).

In joining the sometimes overly serious conversation concerning the question, "how ought we to understand the concept of rhetorical agency?" we would prefer that the answer was more hospitable to those of us who find "post-" theory useful, truthful, or productively troubling. We favor an uncertain posture towards the flows of agency and "agents" implied an open disposition toward the séance, a posture that embraces a restless and roving insecurity as an antidote or even perhaps a subversive supplement to any civil pedagogy. Although Cheryl Geisler rightfully notes that the discussion question of rhetorical agency often melds the ontological (what?) with the ethical (how?), she and others nevertheless seek to infer the former by presenting the latter evangelically, stressing the fundamental necessity of moral activism for civic salvation and charging those with poststructural and/or posthumanist sympathies as advocating a nihilistic brand of Calvinist passivity, often erroneously dubbed "postmodernism." In what follows, we argue that the humanist/evangelical discussion of agency in Geisler's report, published in last summer's issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, suffers from three, interrelated shortcomings: (1) the report repeatedly confuses the subject or agent and agency; (2) this confusion lends credence to a conflation of posthumanism and "postmodernism"; and (3) such a conflation contributes to a misleading account of agential fantasy as a mere "illusion." Insofar as few would deny agency "exists," we suggest the debate over status of the humanist subject is actually one-sided and phantasmic, serving to disguise the ghost of ontotheology.