size matters

Music: Brian Eno: Compounds + Elements I finally found a moment to do a little writing, although I regret this moment is almost gone. Tomorrow I get a new stack of papers to grade. Anyhoo, the RSA conference in Memphis is coming up. Here's a little teaser for my paper:

   Whose Rhetoric is Bigger? or On a Recent Apocalyptic Tone Adopted in Rhetorical Studies  One begins with a set of objects, or rather, a series of objects that betoken a figure, and for the moment that figure is inevitably one of speech.[1] So let me begin with an allegory related by another important figure in a posthumously published piece about a petulant prepubescent and his penis. Apparently, Freud tells us, this young boy who had enjoyed sex with a slightly older girl is suddenly cut off from the fun. To compensate he masturbated like crazy, even after the nanny caught him and told him to stop or his father will "cut it off." Fucking fathers! Freud says

the usual result of the fright of castration . . . is that, either immediately or after some considerable struggle, the boy gives way to the threat and obeys the prohibition either wholly or at least in part (that is, by no longer touching his genitals with his hand). In other words, he gives up, in whole or in part, the satisfaction of the drive.[2]

The boy did not respond as most of us do when we are caught with our pants down: instead of succumbing to the "law of the father" or the prohibition heard as "thou shalt not," instead of finding another object to play with or substituting his penis with the love of a parent, instead of getting down with the neurosis, the kid got downright perverse, compulsively choking, choking, chocking the chicken without any qualms of conscience, commandments be damned!

It is with the pettish preteen in mind that we re-encounter the arrival of another figure, Dilip Gaonkar, and the perverse reaction to the tablets that he brought (on loan, of course, from Derrida), as well as the exodus that he sanctioned.[3] Presumably keeping all the burning bushes for himself, at least as Edward Schippa tells the story, Gaonkar threatened to take our happiness away too: [insert quote of Schiappa's "Second Thoughts on Big Rhetoric" article.]

In what has come to be known as the aptly named "big rhetoric" debate, Gaonkar is accused of brining the law as well as the truth. It is for this reason that he is, however unwittingly, the architect of this year's conference theme, which purports to size-up rhetoric's prowess despite the now widely experienced trauma of truth: rhetoric was castrated to begin with, and it only becomes visible when a trauma is (re)membered: "A crisis, discursive or otherwise, makes rhetoric visible; that is, a crisis brings to the fore the incipient rhetorical consciousness."[4] Rhetorical consciousness is necessarily one that retrojects, most especially in retrospecting.

The crisis of which Gaonkar speaks is that traumatic event that functions to formulate a constitutive outside, a characteristically apocalyptic point that I will return to for help explaining the recent revival of interest in psychoanalysis among rhetorical scholars. But as the emissary running before--or catching up to, take your pick--the body, I should stress the traumatic crisis of opening(s) is not so much forced entry as it is the discipline's lack of discipline: whence the repetitious compulsion to measure or recover this thing "rhetoric," and how might we read this seemingly immeasurable (discussion of) supplementary as a symptom? In psychoanalytic terms, the question could perhaps be rendered this way: do we identify the uncanny persistence of the "big rhetoric" debate, here registered in the RSA conference theme "Sizing Up Rhetoric," as a productive neurosis central to our unique brand of scholarly invention, or has it become a symptom of perversion?

ENDNOTES (so far)   [1] The first object of desire is not the mother's breast, but the mother's voice. See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirrror; Schwarz, Listening Subjects; etc. [2] Sigmund Freud, "The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence." In the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 277.

[3] See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science." In Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 25-85. I mean to suggest that the exodus was sanctioned in both senses: there are consequences for the enjoyment rhetoric's supplementarity, a point Gaonkar earlier developed in terms of the uncanny. See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double: Reflections on the Rhetorical Turn in the Human Sciences." In The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 341-366.

[4] Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double," 363.