substitution
Music: Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Welcome to the Pleasuredome
My Austin dog Roger got us guestlisted for the Hank III show tomorrow, and I'm very excited! I've not been to a live show since fall semester; plus, a punk-country twang is just what I need, and Hank Williams III will provide it in buckets (yeeeeeehaaaaawwwww!!!). Ministry is coming July, and that is also a must-see (the new Ministry album is the most Bush-hating of them all-it's angry!). Following the show tomorrow, the next highlight is a reading group meeting. I've really missed having a reading group of some sort, so it's nice to be invited into one. We're tackling Lacan's last seminar, which I've read in bits but admit it's hard to get through without a "group effort" (more brains are always better than one).
Finally, I'll be heaving out on Saturday for the biannual meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, one of my favorite conferences--at least it used to be before the leadership doubled the fees and starting holding its conferences in upscale hoity-toity places like the Peabody. Jesus H. Christ: rhetoricians don't make this kind of money, people. C'mon!
Anyhoo, yes, I've finally finished my "piece." I think it's as good as it's going to get without some feedback, so, I stopped tinkering on it and mailed it to the respondent. I know the company of the panel and the respondent will be good for what I have to say (and surely I'll have my pee pee cut right off), but I dunno about the rest of the audience. One thing I've noticed, especially after discovering Zizek and Lacan about four years ago, is that I'm quite comfortable with the "taboo" (I mean, holes and poles and various modes of stuffing is what its all about anyway)--so much so that I no longer have reliable (disciplinary) censors. Anyhoo, for all zero of you who have been anxious awaiting the conclusion, here it is:
ON SEEKING SUBSTITUES, OR, THE ARRIVAL OF THE ALWAYS ARRIVING
If we understand the traditional apocalyptic as a characteristically phallogocentric enterprise, the analogies of the pervert and the apocalyptic prophet interpenetrate: it feels good to discriminate in the tone of impending catastrophe, even when told to stop. Consequently, I have suggested that the debates over Big Rhetoric can be alternately approached as sounding an apocalyptic tone that is symptomatic of perversion. Such a conclusion suggests that those who continue to address the identity of rhetoric's field or undisciplined discipline might attend more studiously to the role of affect and emotions via the symptomology of tone. It also suggests that those who continue to prophesy the castration of rhetoric's prowess are themselves committing a kind of violence by excluding those who reject the monotony of death knells.
In the key of postfeminism, some might argue that phallogocentric character of traditional apocalyptic suggests the primary exclusion effected by rhetoric's version was the work of feminism, and that we seem to have overcome misogyny thanks to important, critical work by "feminist" critics. For example, in 1994 Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter argued in a controversial essay, "Disciplining the Feminine," that a "masculinist disciplinary ideology" governed the norms of scholarship in rhetorical (and Communication) studies, especially the "demand for a refined, ahistorical, smoothly finished univocality" (383). They critique of a 1992 report on the "Active Prolific Female Scholars in Communication" and the remarks of blind reviewers regarding their criticism of the report (see Hickson, Stacks, and Amsbary 350-356). Blair, Brown, and Baxter castigate the report for, first, advancing a postfeminist rationale that works to obscure masculinist ideology (e.g., that because there are "prolific females" working in communication studies, we no longer need to scrutinize male privilege), and second, for advancing a "male paradigm" that excludes thought and work that is not impersonal and abstract, that does not heed strict boundaries between disciplinary territories, that does not promote the centrality of individual autonomy, and that does not reify dominant social hierarchies. This paradigm is signaled by its chief figure, the phallus:
Equally offensive is [the authors'] description of their report as an attempt to establish a "yardstick for active, female researchers in communication." Hickson et al.'s report-as-yardstick hearkens to the vulgar (and frequently brutal) political arrangements characterizing dominant/non-dominant group relations in times we have come to believe were "less enlightened." The yardstick (along with its metonymic associates, such as "the ruler" and "the rod") often functioned as the instrument used to "articulate" and reinforce the punitive politics of domination and oppression. . . . the yardstick (or its equivalent) is used by one individual to discipline another. In so doing, discipline and those traditionally charged with its preservation, are maintained. (393)
The authors criticize the responses to their critique by showing how cruelly the rod was used to dismiss their arguments as un-scholarly.After Blair, Brown, and Baxter's important exposé, some rhetoricans may be tempted to argue that our phallogocentric apocalyptic has been tempered by this and similar critiques (e.g., Biesecker 140-161). That the conference planners of the most recent RSA meeting in Memphis chose "Sizing Up Rhetoric" as the conference theme should temper any such optimism, as should an understanding of the apocalyptic tone as monotonously perverse. Blair, Brown, and Baxter's critique has been misheard, for the critique is not leveled at the level of the word. Insofar as prohibitions and protests have failed to put an end our apocalyptic perversion, then, I shall come to an end by diagnosing why our strange brand of enjoyment is overdetermined, and next by suggesting that there is another, more cheerful apocalyptic tone we might sound from time to time, in chorus with Blair, Baxter, Brown, Gaonkar, and others more wary of "discipline."
Whether from its institutional and political history or rhetoric's centuries-long status as a supplement, rhetorical studies is foundationally and fundamentally an apocalyptic and perverse discipline. As the Blair, Brown, and Baxter essay demonstrates, rhetoricians have been prohibited from this or that perversion many times and in many ways in the past thirty years. We can locate many more examples in meta-arguments about disciplinary identity: reacting to the rather grand (if not globalist) gesture of Lloyd Bitzer and Edwin Black's edited collection of papers from the Wingspread Conference, The Prospect of Rhetoric, Robert L. Scott warned that any project to "define rhetoric" would castrate its multiple prospects (Bitzer and Black; Scott 81-96).i As the scene of violence shifted from defining rhetoric as a thing to that of Big Rhetoric, apocalyptic warnings continue to issue forth from ever bolder prophets: Steve Fuller has decried the emasculation of rhetorical studies by "upstart disciplines" (he means the nebulous "cultural studies") and warns of our imminent demise without some sort of "rhetorical reclamation" and disciplinary protectionism (paras. 18; 32-43). Herbert W. Simons counters that without a more "hospitable" attitude toward "cultural studies," rhetorical studies is cut off from academic, political, and cultural realities ("Rhetorical Hermeneutics"; "Globalization"). Michael Leff continues to insist that in the reality of globalization, the rhetoricians in Communication Studies have failed to "develop and interpretive frame supple enough" to mediate texts and contexts and, therefore, comes impotent on/to the "interdisciplinary table" (91). In Communication Studies at least, the phallogocentric tone of apocalyptic absolutism is nigh ubiquitous.
As the ambivalent and productive reactions to Gaonkar's double whammy attest, locating the scene of apocalypse does not necessarily recommend muffling its tone. As the failure to reckon with Blair, Brown, and Baxter's critique of "masculine ideology" suggests, muffling this tone may be impossible. In fact, Caputo stresses that losing the apocalyptic is not even preferable, for there is "nothing more useful than the shrill voice of apocalyptic outcries when the killing curtain of censorship is about to close," nothing more stirring than "a black American eschatological apocalyptic who claims to have a dream . . ." (94). We need our protest apocalyptic-we need, in other words a tone urgency for our politics-disciplinary and otherwise. Certain apocalyptic tones, even those that reek of righteousness, are indispensable.ii The pickle at this juncture is not how to avoid the unavoidable logic of discrimination. As Kenneth Burke maintained, it seems as symbol-using creatures humans cannot help but discriminate between good and bad others. Given the human tendency toward enjoyment, there is only management and substitution, not abolition. The issue becomes, then, how do rhetoricians embrace or accept their disciplinary perversions via substitution or without always excluding alternative apocalpytics? In revisiting his arguments in favor of the globalization of rhetoric, I think Herbert W. Simons frames the problem well (at the same time as he, nevertheless, re-inscribes it):
What I most regret [about the Big Rhetoric debate] is the pressure from both camps [protectionists versus globalists] to choose sides. Much that they contribute is complementary or cross-cutting or mutually exclusive; very little requires choosing sides. Cultural studies lack traditional rhetoric's understanding of invention, argument, and style. Rhetoric lacks the understanding of power . . . . Why, then, can't those of us in Communication all get along? (paras. 40-41)
In light of Derrida's critique of Kant, the answer to Simons' questions is that neither side recognizes their old solidarity in the phallogocentric mode of apocalyptic, that false binary of big and small (when there never was the thing at all).So how better to escape the logocentric deadlock of Big Rhetoric, once we recognize from the start that forging a contract or agreement among very different kinds of parties only threatens the hidden premise of exclusion? First, we come to recognize our own perverse complicity in apocalyptic, which has been my primary goal in this essay. Just like a drug addict, the pervert must own her symptom to stop hurting the self and others. Of course, if the tenor of my remarks is any measure, locating the apocalyptic is in itself an apocalyptic gesture, which returns us again to Derrida's reading of Kant's apocalyptic tone:
Kant speaks of modernity, and the mystagogues of his time, but you will have quickly perceived . . . how many transpositions we could indulge in on the side of our so-called modernity. I will not say that today everyone would recognize him- or herself on this or that side, purely and simply. But I am sure it could be demonstrated that today every slightly organized discourse is found or claims to be found on both sides . . . . And this inadequation, always limited itself, no doubt indicates the densest difficulty. Each of us is the mystagogue and the Auklärer of an other. (142)
One tacit presumption of the Big Rhetoric debate is that rhetorical studies is alone in its inability to properly mourn its always-coming/always-already-have-been death, but Derrida teaches us that this has been the story of philosophy since the pre-Socratics. So too does a cursory search for apocalyptic in other disciplines-even those presumed to be "established"-yield lettered hand-wringing and up-bucking in dueling tones of urgency: summarizing the argument of Neil McLaughlin, Melanie White explains that "Canadian sociology is apparently in danger: it is in danger of losing its intellectual vitality and disciplinary viability as a consequence of structural shifts that threaten to undermine its unique contribution to intellectual life" (337). Such remarks from our sociologist friends up north do indeed sound familiar, and should provide some modicum of comfort that the apocalyptic is shared by many disciplines in the academy. I am tempted to argue that "the sky is falling" should abide the founding motto of any academic discipline ("in the beginning there was the error").iiiAnother reason to reckon with rhetorical studies as an inherently apocalyptic field is that we find the tone in our earliest, celebrated texts about rhetorical criticism. As is the case, perhaps, with any academic field, the notion of a "recent" or "just arrived" apocalyptic tone is wrong, for we can trace this sound of urgency to the origins of rhetorical studies before the English and Speech Communication trajectories ossified. In one of the foundational texts often taught to rhetoric students, "The Literary Criticism of Oratory" originally published in 1925, Herbert A. Wichelns establishes rhetorical criticism on the dying art of public speech-making, all the while insisting that "it's not dead yet!" "Oratory-the waning influence of which is often discussed in current periodicals," says Wichelns, "has definitely lost the established place in literature that it once had" (3). Moreover, it "is true that other ways of influencing opinion have long been practiced, that oratory is no longer the chief means of communicating ideas to the masses" (4). Nevertheless, in the din of those who have proclaimed the death of oratory, Wichlens makes a space for its study in the humanities. Since the beginning there was a death, be it "rhetoric" or "oratory" or "speech."
Understanding rhetorical studies as always sounding or responding to an apocalyptic tone that provides a perverse satisfaction through discrimination should also lead us to ask new questions about our tone. Rhetoricians seem irrevocably wed to the apocalyptic because it is our innermost, traumatic scene of identity. So how do we keep from collapsing onto that monotone of phallogocentrism? Because Derrida's writings on apocalyptic register his recognition that he speaks in an apocalyptic tone, it is instructive to see how he distinguishes his tone from that of Kant and the other (good ol') boys. The first step is in understanding how the apocalyptic tone tends toward "death," a mood of gloomy endings. Fenves explains that, insofar as the apocalyptic is in some sense unavoidable because conflict is unavoidable, "tone" takes on an added significance:
The possibility that an announcement hides certain unspoken clauses lies in its tone; tonality is, in turn, the preeminent vehicle of catastrophic revelations. To hear tonality otherwise---to write in a tone and of a tone and with a tone without the key polemical categories of inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion-is, then, the task of Derrida's address [critique of Kant]. (3)
When detailing the binaries set up by Kant between "metaphor and concept, literary mystagogy and true philosophy" Derrida insists on not taking sides or to "come to a decision," to side with or against death (138). Indeed, barring scenes of dire consequence (that is, the possible real death or harm to an individual), it would seem that not taking sides on the issue of death, on a definitive and absolute end, seems the attitudinal and tonal prescription. Derrida's critical mode of deconstruction is an "apocalyptics to dislocate destinations, derail them, drive them verstimmt, break up concordants, . . . defy the postal police, be the outspoken advocate of what is taken to be inadmissible," says Caputo (94). "The apocalyptic tone recently adapted in deconstruction is upbeat and affirmative, expectant and hopeful,"iv and we might add, polytonal. This polytonal apocalyptic is, as Caputo puts it, "apocalypse without apocalypse."With this affirmative apocalyptic in mind, the one that (usually) refuses to "take sides" or enter into (definitional) contracts, rhetoricians can better reinvestigate the tablets that Gaonkar brought.v Speaking of the later tablet, "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science," Gaonkar reports he has been
criticized for opposing the globalization of rhetoric and for promoting a narrow and exclusive view of rhetoric as a civic art. This is a completely erroneous reading. I am neither for nor against globalization. I simply point out that globalization is an unavoidable consequence of the interpretive turn in contemporary rhetoric. ("Close Readings" 346)
Tellingly, rather than "take a side" and enter, of course, into the contract centered by a quest for mastery, Gaonkar proposes a "close reading of a third kind" that offers up the expanse of a body of water, alternately "opaque" and "translucent," as its guiding metaphor.vi Nevertheless, although acknowledging the unwillingness to be emplaced, Schiappa argues that Gaonkar "implicitly" takes Big Rhetoric to task (Schiappa 265). Simons argues that Gaonkar's use of the "rhetoric of science as the test case for Big Rhetoric" was "fallacious," and adds, "just why it is that Gaonkar was offering these arguments was left somewhat unclear," but that "he had serious misgivings about the movement toward globalization" ("Globalization" para. 20). Michael Leff has noted the general confusion over Gaonkar's stance, but discerns that "Gaonkar wants Communication-rhetoricians to distinguish their role within a discipline that sponsors grounded interpretive work and their position within a sweeping interdisciplinary movement" (91). As for me, I am not so sure what Gaonkar wants, but I do think that I catch his tone: it is devilish, it is anticipatory, it is blissfully perverse in a sense that substitutes one blindness for another-one that does not exclude. The polytonal, multi-voiced mystagogue is always announcing that something is coming--an alien encounter with exploratory probes, perhaps--but finds cause for celebration even if that thing never arrives.
iii [author reference removed for blind review]
iv Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 98.
v In other words, my argument is that a recourse to a traditional apocalyptic tone-one that tempts the logic of the Same at the expense of the other-may be justifiable as a political strategy to save lives. It seems to me less justifiable as a tone in academic discussion. This would imply not taking a side with either "little rhetoric" or "Big Rhetoric," but rather, taking up the question of definition and disciplinarity solely in the institutional or political context (e.g., how to keep the program getting axed by the dean).
vi I am reminded of Irigaray's Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche.