the accursed tone of slash

Music: Tegan & Sara: So Jealous (2004) The end of the semester crunch is cramping my blogstyle, but stacks upon stacks of papers to grade and a nasty Trojan virus has made it difficult to update as much as I would have liked this past week. I’ve also been trying to develop and practice a new talk that I’ll be giving on Thursday at Purdue. The talk is drafted, it’s just about ten minutes too long and I have to figure out what gets the slash.

And speaking of slashing, I thought I’d share a semblance of my last lecture for the rhetorical criticism class, which concluded on Thursday. Up until last week, we had investigated fairly “traditional” rhetorical approaches. The last seminar was reserved for the “critical/cultural” turn in rhetorical studies, which began with a reading of McKerrow’s critical rhetoric essay and went from there. (Let me just say as an unrelated aside that the problem with fish oil supplements is burping.) This isn’t actually what I said, but something of a reconstruction:

Sentimentality Under Siege

In 1994 Guns and Roses began work on a new album titled Chinese Democracy. Unfortunately, the lead singer and major creative force behind the band, Axl Rose, was increasingly self-centered and messianic. Eventually, Rose’s ego would become so inflated all but the keyboardist would be either fired or would quit the band. The seminal guitarist and counter-part to Rose’s more funk and soul groove was the biting guitar of “Slash.” Slash left the band in disgust in 1996, saying he could not longer be part of a “dictatorship.”

Since Slash was slashed, Rose would pour 13 million dollars into the new album, hire dozens of session musicians, artists, and producers to work on the album. Never satisfied, Rose tinkered and tweaked and dubbed the album until it was completed sometime in 2007. He signed a contract to have Best Buy the exclusive distributor of the album. It came out Tuesday. The early reviews are in.

Folks just don’t know what to make of the album. It’s not coherent, it’s terribly overproduced, and in the hodgepodge of pro tool tweakage it’s rare to hear a moment of musical singularity. It’s a wall of sound in search of a Slash, a procedure, a way into the body.

At the opening of the course I stated that rhetorical criticism could be likened to an approach to a body: overly mechanical approaches are like slicing into a cadaver without a sense of care, like Dr. Frankenstein on a mission. Overly reverential approaches risk a worshipful posture, fetishizing the body. I want to begin class today by suggesting Chinese Democracy is a good analog to the critical/cultural work in our field that has lost its Slash, lost its ability to even carve out a body in the first place. We might say Chinese Democracy represents, at some level, the embrace of “discourse,” the abandonment of textualism and the steely, de Manian gestures of violence that goes with it. In the palimpsest of fashionable French concepts, the memory of argument is erased, polemic gives way to something called “nuance” and “subtly,” and the mantra that “rhetorical studies is fifteen years behind everyone else in the humanities” begins.

We begin detailing this turn in disciplinary history and procedure by taking-up the signature essay oft held to be symptomatic of a turn that pivoted, unquestionably, on widespread (mis)reading of Michel Foucault. Everyone and their brother was reading Foucault, but McKerrow’s Foucault made it to print first (indeed, he made it in Communication Monographs, just prior to that editorial board’s purging of rhetorical scholarship).

“Critical Rhetoric”: Oh, what has McKerrow wrought? In 1989 McKerrow, penned and published his essay on so-called “critical rhetoric” at a watershed moment. The band Guns and Roses had just released the successful sophomore album Lies, and was working on Use Your Illusion, volumes one and two. The career of Guns and Roses models very closely the critical/cultural turn. Carole Blair was turning heads as a young rock star and inspiring a new generation of scholars interested in continental philosophy. She once camped out on Foucault’s doorstep, we’re told. So, too, was Barbara Biesecker wowing an older generation, publishing an explication of Derrida’s work and showing just what kind of Pandora’s box the “arrival of the text” was (later, of course, Barb would publish a widely read essay on Foucault, which corrected what was to that point a rather erroneous reading). It was in 1989 that Barbara arrived at Iowa---inspiring and teaching, of course, John Sloop, Kent Ono, and other well-known and beloved scholars in the critical/cultural tradition.

So McKerrow’s critical rhetoric essay arrived---as do all signature essays---at the opportune moment. The publication of this essay started a debate. First, folks didn’t quite know to do with the essay, and didn’t quite understand what McKerrow was calling for. Second, given Foucault’s critique of the universal, McKerrow’s principled statements at the end of his essay seemed contrary to Foucault’s project. Nevertheless, the name stuck: “critical rhetoric” became the term for a shift in rhetorical theory toward posthumanism.

Unfortunately, theoretical trouble began with “critical rhetoric.” The approach or turn was dubbed by those unsympathetic to Foucault as a “postmodern” approach to rhetoric. What is postmodernism? No one knows. Foucault himself often snubbed the label. But with critical rhetoric came the pesky, almost meaningless term and, thus, handy epithets to throw at authors who did work that you did not like.

In her 1992 essay on Foucault, I think Biesecker better characterized what this term “critical rhetoric” should mean: there is an inversion of focus. Instead of understanding individuals as instrumentalists, using rhetoric for this or that end, we should understand discourse as using---as producing---us. Such a shift in thinking is not postmodern, but posthuman. That is to say, such a view displaces the human individual as central, self-transparent, autonomous, and so forth.

The posthumanist turn that flew under the aegis of “critical rhetoric” brought a new crisis. Dilip Gaonkar, the prophet of rhetorical studies for a good twenty years, announced this crisis was the “text,” a Trojan horse of sorts, in 1988 at the first Public Address Conference (published in 1989 in the Texts in Context collection). McKerrow’s essay was timely, then, because it offered an escape: we could trade out the text and its deconstructive messiness and embrace the scientistic notion of “discourse!” Barb was there to help (and she did). Immediately, however, this crisis of textualism seemed to widen: McGee offered his famous text-is-a-fragment thesis. Derrida was being read now, in addition to Foucault. A new familiarity and friendship was struck-up between Communication Studies rhetoric and English-program rhetoric, and this owing to the increasing prominence of RSA.

Our English colleagues had already steeped in Derrida and Lacan, and folks like Victor Vitanza and Greg Ulmer were dragging rhetoric into the performative domain. Critical rhetoric arrived precisely at a disciplinary moment when the critical object---that is to say, the body---was losing its coherence. Of course, we’ve been saying all along that the body was never a coherent thing, that the object of speech has always been unstable and that negotiating this object is the foundational neurosis of the field. Nevertheless, as the immortal hair band Cinderella once sang, “you don’t know what you got until it’s gone.” The arrival of the slash, the critical/cultural turn, was a violent event; it was our “November Rain.”

New Bodies, New Hells

The posthumanist inversion, then, went hand in hand with refashioning of the object. Since landing at Iowa, Barb publishes a series of philosophically-minded essays that undermine disciplinary pieties, including a watershed argument with Karlyn Campbell in print over the posthumanist challenge. Two students of Iowa, Sloop and Ono, publish a widely read essay defending the study of vernacular discourse in 1995. The groundwork for this sizemic shift was already laid in the 70s and 80s with Barry Brummett’s push toward popular culture, not to mention Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas Frentz’s work on film (heck, even Marty Medhurst was writing about film until the “arrival of the text” moment in the late 80s). So with “critical rhetoric” and the posthumanist turn we have an exploding object---the process of which could take a whole semester of study.

At the heart of the critical/cultural turn, of course, is the shift to the materiality of discourse. The turn bears the strong imprint of Michel Foucault, and it is his work more than any other thinker that forced the shift toward posthumanist thinking in rhetoric. Recall that Foucault was a student of Louis Althusser, and that his understanding of materiality comes directly from both Althusser and, perhaps more importantly, Georges Canguilhem, a philosopher and historian of science. You’ll remember Althusser argued for the materiality of discourse in terms of ideology, which he held was the “imaginary representation of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” or something like that. (This notion was is informed, in turn, by Lacan . . . about which more shortly). The idea here is that ideas are functionally material---Marx always said thinking was a form of human productive capacity; in Capital he always seems to pair the labor of muscles with “brains,” careful to not ideas are a form of labor. So, the debate between Dana Cloud and everyone else might be said to hinge on this very point in Althusser’s thinking, a point passed through Foucault’s work on discourse. The appeal of the notion of discourse is that it harbors whiffs of precision and scientism, of material facticity.

New Surgeries: Tone is a Scalpel

The culmination of this “turn” is rendered permanent with the establishment of a critical and cultural studies division in the NCA, and finally its own journal in 2004: Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies The journal title is admittedly dreadful, no doubt a compromise or title dreamed up by a committee. Nevertheless, that the slash makes a material appearance in the title is significant, as the violence of disciplinary “turning” and the shift toward posthumanist thought is materialized in symbol: the slash is symptomatic of a certain critical tone. And this tone scared people.

What I want to suggest here is that the slash represents a decisive shift in critical tone, away from the fetishism and religiosity of massage and worship and toward the surgical approach to the object, to “discourse.” In other words, the shift toward critical/cultural studies is decidedly aggressive. Reading Foucault’s work makes this easier to see: the connotation of the critical rhetorical turn is “cold.” A lot of folks regarded it as mean or somewhat ruthless. The slash has connotations of exclusivity. What we might call the tone of the slash is what people sense from afar, why social scientists may see rhetoricians as arrogant or haughty or aggressive. In part, this tone is borrowed from the activity of debate, which has, gradually, become completely autonomous. But the arrival of posthumanism in rhetorical studies was a violent one---and one that was related, however indirectly, to sizemic shifts in the field. Until the mid-nineties, UC-Davis was a rhetorical powerhouse, however, the decision was made (by whom it is unclear) to shut down rhetoric and transform the program into a social science haven. Carole Blair, at that point a major figure of the style of rhetorical studies, was sent to the DC satellite campus. Rhetoricians like Kent Ono, another major figure of the posthumanist shift, interviewed at the University of Minnesota, where I was a graduate student.

The slash, in a sense, deepened a fissure between social science and rhetorical studies. Other programs got rid of rhetoric, or dissolved altogether (UVA’s program folded; Michigan purged rhetoric; and there are lots of other stories about the 1990s). I don’t want to suggest the arrival of critical rhetoric directly caused departments to change, but I do think there was something of an indirect effect. Posthumanist theoretical approaches are not easy to read, the have the smell of (mostly) French arrogance, and their uptake in rhetorical studies had to have had the effect of making some rhetoricians seem even more foreign to our scientific colleagues (despite the scientistic appeal of Foucault). The slash could also be said to divide among the rhetoric camp: Indiana University fled to the hills of cultural studies, purging its public address scholars. The arrival of the slash and its aggressive tone thus represents some division, some animosity, and a certain tone many regard with suspicion.

The Unconscious: The Final Frontier?

Earlier I mentioned that Althusser’s understanding of ideology was indebted to Lacan. At the time he was composing many of the essays in his Lenin and Philosophy volume, he was reading Lacan, even had some correspondence with the man if I recall correctly. This tidbit, however, is not frequently discussed among rhetorical scholars. For a number of reasons, the critical/cultural turn deliberately slashed the psychoanalytic from its purview. Barbara Biesecker’s 1998 review essay on Zizek and Copjec is the only exception (and notably, it could only get published because it was not peer reviewed; this is telling).

In part, the posthumanist turn didn’t include psychoanalysis because it is saddled with Freud, and in the American context, Freud doesn’t have much street cred. Insofar as Communication Studies harbored a flank (Woolbert’s “Midwestern school”) that pushed for scientism, it makes sense that rhetoric scholars would regard the domain of the unconscious with some suspicion. A certain misreading of Foucault---and in particular his critique of the repression hypothesis---also led a number of folks to pass over psychoanalysis as relatively unimportant. This was, I think, a mistake.

For good evidence for my claim that psychoanalysis got the slash, I’d encourage you to read Kevin Michael DeLuca’s work on critical theory. The Frankfurt School, you’ll recall, was heavily invested in psychoanalysis (especially Adorno). This strand of critical theory is often left-out or passed over in DeLuca’s work, as if the psychological insights of critical theory have nothing to add to rhetorical understanding. Examples of this sort of thing are, in fact, numerous (some of Condit's work, McGee, Blair's stuff, heck, just about all the folks who ushered in criticial rhetoric)---but for the moment you’ll just have to take my word for it.

With the obvious exception of Barb, however, only recently have we begun to go back and recover psychoanalysis. Our argument is that you cannot understand contemporary theory without psychoanalysis. You cannot read Foucault without a solid background in psychoanalytic theory. You cannot read Deleuze and Guattari---or as my friend Gretchen would say, Dolce and Gabbana---without some understanding of basic psychoanalytic principles. Indeed, all the fashionable “theorists” that contemporary rhetorical studies seem to index have either gone through or built upon the psychoanalytic enterprise. Or to put this otherwise, critical/cultural theory without psychoanalysis is missing its dash, that connection between the critical and the cultural, between the interior and the exterior. It got the slash, and critical/cultural lost its dash.

This, of course, is the focus of my seminar next semester: Why did we “skip,” as it were, the necessary trauma of psychoanalysis in rhetorical studies, and what can a recovery of this repressed theoretical orientation do for us? If you want to work-through the answers with me, there’s still a few seats left.