the political turn in commie rhetoric

Music: American Music Club: Mercury

A friend was teasing me yesterday because I said I was doing research instead of enjoying my holiday. I often feel like I'm "missing out" on the holiday, but then again, I'm also a bachelor and attending to the needs of others (well, with the exception of spoiled pets) is not a pressing issue. And I have come to expect working on the holidays as a part of the basic research academic lifestyle: during the semester, one focuses on teaching (my priority last semester with a new prep, that's for certain), traveling, guest lecturing, and conferencing. The breaks between the semesters is when one attempts to get serious writing and research done (oh, and grading: hey gang, I'm working on them, but progress is slow). So, the past few days I've been reading and writing on a new project. I can't disclose this entire project, as I've become somewhat paranoid about scholarly plagiarism, but I did want to share an argument that came to me yesterday---and discuss how weird the process of invention sometimes works.

I'm working on a project that thinks through the role of politics in scholarship. This week I was hangin' out with Christopher Swift and we were talking about his work in this area. He gave a very smart and exciting talk on the disagreement between Adorno and Marcuse on the political in scholarship (it's coming out next year in RSQ) for us here last spring. He recommended I go back and read the Adorno essay on Brecht and Sartre in Jameson's Aesthetics and Politics collection, so I did.

Fast forward two days.

So, I get up in the morning and a song is playing in my head: The Rolling Stone's "Gimme Shelter." It's a very dark, apocalyptic song that Jagger admitted was about the Vietnam war, and it has this amazingly powerful vocal by New Orleanian Merry Clayton on the top that is almost terrifying (like a scream). They wrote it in the wake of Altamont, which I am always prone to argue was a death knell for 60s idealism. After that disaster, black metal took over---and from what I gather Jagger and Richards slumped into a kind of drug-hazed depression. (If you've seen the film Performance, this mood is very clear.)

I listened to the song a couple of times as I drank my morning coffee. I then started thinking about Vietnam and Richard Nixon, and then I remembered in grad school I read a debate between Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Forbes Hill presumably about Nixon's Vietnamization speech. "What the hell," I thought, "why not go back and read that today?" So I did.

Rereading the debate had an immediate resonance with the Adorno essay Christopher pointed me to: for Campbell, any choice in the critical act is a political choice, and to downplay one's politics is a politics. Adorno agrees, however, Adorno warns outright politics runs the danger of propping the very conditions that gave rise to evil leaders in the first place. After Bush II, I am personally ambivalent about where I stand here and worry Adorno is right.

Regardless, in the exchange, Hill critiques Campbell for having an political interest in Nixon's deceptions. He prefers an "objective" Neo-Aristotelian approach to speech criticism that limits observation to an assessment of the immediate effects on the intended audience. Campbell responds that Hill's approach:

hardly qualifies as objectivity. It is, in fact, to chose the most favorable and partisan account a critic can render. For example, it is to accept the perspective of the advertiser and applaud the skill with which, say, Anacin [a brand of caffeinated aspirin] commercials create the false belief that their product is more a more effective pain reliever than ordinary aspirin. As a consequence, the methodology produces analyses that are at least covert advocacy of the point of view taken in the rhetorical act---under the guise of objectivity.

Hill responded that "rhetoric is the study of our use of the means, not our commitment to ends."

It seems to me Campbell's argument in these four sentences was the right thing to say at the right time, thereby eclipsing the functional dominance of the good of "civic engagement" with a scholarly acknowledgement of political engagement. Yes, there were self-consciously political essays before this debate, and the Forbes/Campbell controversy comes at the end of about five or six years of critiquing Nixon's rhetoric (Newman had a pretty barbed one in '69). But this was the polemical exchange that created what we might call the "political turn" in communication-style rhetorical studies.

Campbell's argument came at what must have been a very, very scary moment. "Gimme Shelter" really does capture the affect of the time I think---listen to it. That ominous key, and then Merry's very scary and soulful wails, and the lyrical chant "War, children, it's just a shot away." The Golden Age of Television was arguably the 1960s, the first presidential debates were televised, and we had embedded journalists in Vietnam. Suddenly the media sped up as more and more graphic depictions of the war showed up in people's living rooms. Nixon was a doing very bad things. Students were rioting and protesting---the war, misogyny, sexism. If we can imagine all of this, it must have been something akin to Nine-eleven in cultural tone. Taking this into account, Karlyn's argument reads much differently to me now than it did in 1998.

It not only changed how we do rhetorical criticism by making our politics explicit, but like much of Karlyn's work in the 1970s onward, it yoked critical work to socio-cultural exigencies in a way that sounded the death knell for disinterested critique. Suddenly studying texts or speeches for their own sake seemed less responsive or engaged (causing a struggle over object that culminated in the first public address compromise over "text"; the first attempt at one via genre theory didn't work). Four sentences became a representational voice for what must have be a common sentiment of fear and desperation. I wonder if those of you who lived through the 60s implosion can remember what it was like, and if there is any comparison to be made to the apocalyptic mood after Nine-eleven?

In short, I'm arguing Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's essay, "'Conventional Wisdom—Traditional Form': A Rejoinder" is my field's "Gimme Shelter."