name that tone
Music: FPU: Traxxdata A'ight, I think I have completed a draft of stage three of my "Size Matters" paper. I am toying with changing the title to, "Intoning Rhetoric's Perversion: Size Matters" or "Rhetoric's Perverse Apocalypse: The Tone of Size Matters" or something like that. I know, I know, the dick jokes are silly. But, I'm trying to fetch something serious from the silly, so lets see if a good dose of Derrida can help.
Oh, but a little dose of insecurity before I do: yesterday, as I was proofing what I wrote for the day at the kitchen table, I got to thinking that my scholarly contribution to my field, if anything, is "creativity," which is a thoroughly associative mode of invention. Like everyone, when I write I worry "oh, this is so obvious" but, also, I struggle with putting my thinking into language that makes an argument. I riff. How to craft associative riffing into something other than masturbation is the goal . . . and with that said, here's a (facile) wad, proceeded by some introduction/transitionish stuff:
Nevertheless, the perverse core of the Big Rhetoric debate is that we want to be told about our demise or irrelevance as an academic discipline over and over and over again, for such mock revelations allows us to produce substitute satisfactions over and over again in a kind of sado-masochistic frenzy (of which this essay is delightfully not exempt). If, however, jouissance in itself is not such a bad thing, in we all harbor an inner pervert at some level, then what is the problem with getting off on our contemporary crisis-speak? Part of the answer, as de Man has hinted and Gaonkar has whispered, is that loving our symptom too much tempts a kind of suicidal, kool-aid-drinking revivalism, a process of self-understanding that James Arnt Aune has likened to a "piacular rite" that distracts us from the "humble work of teaching speaking and writing."1 Another and closely related part of the answer is that, as a disciplined scene of enjoyment, the Big Rhetoric debate is often misheard as monotonous, or worse, as monotone. I address each answer below.
ON A NOT-SO-RECENT APOCALYPTIC TONE ADOPTED IN RHETORICAL STUDIES
Ruminating on the "politics of rhetorical studies" and the civil pedagogy of democratic participation, James Arnt Aune notes that an "experience of loss and mourning pervades discussions of rhetoricians, a feeling-tone perhaps unique to the modern university."2 He argues that our lost loved thing-dead and buried-is the "presence of rhetoric at the summit of the humanities," and that the consequent mournful "feeling-tone" evident at the 2003 Alliance of Rhetorical Societies conference expressed a "piacular rite" whereby a community flagellates, beats, and bruises themselves to restore a sense of solidarity through pain.3 To be truly mournful, however, such a rite would have achieved solidarity, came to terms with the loss of the interred, and moved on to newer objects to fall in love with.4 Instead, we find ourselves again at the Rhetorical Society of America Conference in a kind of masochistic rehearsal, which is much more indicative of the jouissance of melancholia--an inability to mourn and let (it) go! So perhaps "mourning" is not quite right. Aune's observation that our present mood also "accompanies an ongoing sense of quest" and progress suggests a different, perhaps supplementary, label for this paradoxically simultaneous mood of melancholy and hope: apocalyptic.
The apocalyptic is, of course, an eschatological genre of discourse with important discriminatory functions. Barry Brummett notes that "apocalyptic . . . is a mode of thought and discourse that empowers its audience to live in a time of disorientation and disorder by revealing to them a fundamental plan within the cosmos."5 Empowering a community through the revelation of a secret plan requires identification at the level of tone-a felt recognition of urgency, that something is coming, and that one should know about this coming something (e.g., the explosive arrival of a big, big, rhetoric). There are those who "get it," recognizing the truth of revelation, and then, of course, those who do not. It is in this sense of "tone," something intimately tied up in the rhetoricity of utterance, however, that the apocalyptic extends beyond meaningful structures in way remains within the domain of classic rhetoric.6 The point here, if one can be said to retain a point when speaking of tone, or at least a point in the key of logos, is that to characterize the Big Rhetoric discussion as an apocalyptic is easily done: we merely replace the allegory of the preteen pervert with Chicken Little and show how a given participant in the discussion speaks or writes in the revelatory mode, surrounded by this or that sign of impending catastrophe. What is less obvious are the politics implied by the adoption of an apocalyptic tone. What is, then, an apocalyptic tone, and how does it relate to enjoyment and rhetoric?
First, a word on tone without apocalypse: as the first edition of Thomas Sheridan's A Course of Lectures on Elocution points out, the notion of tone is central to rhetoric/eloquence because, along with gesture, all that is humanly "pleasurable, or affecting in elocution" depends on it.7 Because the effect of tones is fundamentally affective, tone is not reducible (or even related) to its linguistic vehicle, and yet, tone nevertheless requires the medium/materiality of speech. In this respect, tone is perhaps the rhetorical symptom par excellence, most especially for locating cites of (dis)satisfaction the symbolic. Owing to its expressive, sonorous quality, tone has been more thoroughly (and mathematically) theorized in terms of melody, pitch, keys, and the like, which is one consequence of shifting the source of tone from the modulation of the human voice to the more stable-and therefore less apocalyptic-site of the musical instrument.8 In the rhetorical tradition tone seems to have been reduced to the relay of mood in sound, such as the tone of one's voice in speaking, or trope, such as the tone of one's voice in writing (e.g., the use of irony may invite a sarcastic tone, a snide tone, a tone of levity or humility, and so on). The relative paucity of discussion of tone among rhetoricians-banished to either poetics or our lamentably understudied elocutionary tradition-is symptomatic of the symptomology of tone: it slides, not just up and down, but also from side to side. Peter Fenves details the slipperiness of tone by noting it is
not synonymous with style. It is doubtless linked with style insofar as it designates the manner in which a statement is made as opposed to the stated meaning, is far stable, far more given to unexpected interruptions and disruptions of, for instance, the very opposition between the manner in which a statement is made and its meaning. For the tone of a discourse is not infrequently precisely its meaning. Not only does tone have a highly determined function in the register of sound and a less clearly defined one in the register of sight; it can also designate an utterly and indeterminate and undefinable "atmosphere": the overall arena in which an event takes place.9
Fenves argues the remarkable indeterminacy of the "whatness" of tone intrigued Immanuel Kant's, who shifted the concept to a "figural dimension of cognitive language" in a late essay he titled," On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy." Arguably, Kant's attention to tone in this essay marks it as a kind of rhetorical criticism particularly relevant to our times, which has been overcome with deafening, superior tones speaking in the key of the apocalyptic.In Kant's essay, Fenves explains, the concept of tone is "displaced from its . . . position in the register of aural sensation" in order to designate "an insensible-unmeasurable if not immense-dimension of discourse. The term thus traverses the cleft separating the sensible from the intelligible."10 The reason the mediation is to get at both the rhetorical (here defined as expressive and affective) and philosophical or "rational" dimensions of certain "mystagogues" or Neoplatonic philosophers that were becoming fashionable at the end of Kant's career. Arguably, Kant attempts to use the "tone" of the "mystagogues" against them in order to suggest such a rhetorical tone will destroy philosophy (an apocalyptic, indeed). Nevertheless, as John D. Caputo tells the story, the mystagogues were "purveyors of secret, supernatural visions who dispense with the necessity for public argumentation and use their private visions to establish their 'gogic,' 'ductive,' seductive power over others."11 These figures wrote in a rather "lordly and undemocratic" tone, claiming to have a revelation that would end the project of philosophy. Kant counters in a similar (yet insincere) "tone," but also expands the concept to recommend a "low" or more reasoned and deliberative tone of thinking. After Kant's rumination on tone, says Fenves, "hearing tones, which is indissociable from paying attention to the dispositional and rhetorical character of every discourse, names the task of thinking in the future . . . ."12 Not only does Fenves assessment underscore the utility of attending to and thinking through tone as the site of dispute, change, enjoyment, and so on, but it also marks another degree in the rhetorical turn in continental philosophy.
The problem with Kant's critique of the superior or overlordly tone of his enemies is that if we understand the superior (or "high") tone of expression and thought as one of many apocalyptic tones, then Kant's warnings about the crypto-rhetorically induced death of reason are just as apocalyptic, only in a different key.13 If tone is any measure, Derrida is careful to point out, then the apocalyptic "scene" in the rhetoric of Kant and his enemies is a repetition of a familiar contest between "metaphor and concept, literary mystagogy and true philosophy," "poetry and philosophy," and we might add, rhetoric and philosophy, that are nevertheless united in a very "old solidarity."14 Kant teaches us, by way of argument and example, the inescapability of apocalyptic in the space of dispute and disagreement (someone must always threaten some coming "end"), as well as to be suspicious of "those who declare the end of this or that" because, as Caputo puts it, "they have their own ends in view, and we must stay alert as to where they are going to try to lead us . . . ."15 More often than not, the adoption of an apocalyptic tone leads to the creation of a closed community, and therefore, a discrimination between those who hear properly and those who do not:
If we imagine, by a kind of provisional fiction, that there were but one apocalyptic tone, instead of a generalized derangement (Verstimmung) and unmasterable polytonality of apocalypticisms . . ., it would sound something like this: I have come to unveil the truth for you about the end of the world. The end is near and I can see it; we are going to die . . . . I alone can reveal the truth, the destination. We must form a closed community of those who stay awake while the others sleep.16
Traditional apocalyptic politics is the scene of othering, the rejection of alterity.What attracts Derrida's attention to Kant's apocalyptic tone--what accounts for the secret solidarity between Kant and the mystagogues--is that it operates at the level of the "Same," or what Derrida has termed "logocentrism," at the expense of difference and alterity. Following Derrida's analysis yields important insights about the trouble with enjoying apocalypse-at least in traditional terms. Not coincidentally, Derrida penetrates Kant's text the site of a curious figure central to the apocalyptic dispute that bears directly on our anxiety over Big Rhetoric: "Consider now that Kant first proposes the word or the image of castration . . . as one example of those 'analogies' . . . that this 'new mystical-Platonic language abuses to manipulative ends." Kant singles out the writing of one of his mystagogic enemies, Johann Georg Schlosser, who argued that "metaphysical sublimation" and the abandonment of esoteric wisdom in Western thought posed the "danger of emasculating . . . a faculty of reason that . . . can hardly maintain itself in the struggle with vice."17 Derrida argues that Kant finds castration "an inadmissible" and "scandalous" analogy for it is "those who adorn themselves with this new tone in philosophy . . . who emasculate and make a corpse of reason."18 Consequently the dispute staged in Kant's essay concerns which "of the two parties facing each other most surely castrates reason?"19 The issue here is not the answer to the question of castration, but rather, what the metaphor of castration portends for philosophy: Kant accuses the mystagogues for perverting philosophy by unfairly wielding the apocalyptic tone of the Father, "you better stop it'll get cut it off!" With nods to Luce Irigaray,20 Derrida critiques these dueling monotones as logocentric and discriminatory:
And into this debate, phallogocentric on both sides, therefore throughout, we could put Freud on the scene as a third robber procuring the key (true or false), "sexual theory," namely, that for this stage of reason in which there is only male reason, only a masculine or castrated organ or canon of reason, everything proceeds in this just as for that stage of infantile genital organization in which there is definitely a masculine but no feminine. . . . No sexual difference . . . as opposition, but only the masculine! This strange logic . . . unleashes what Freud calls . . . the drive for mastery.21
Although Derrida means to critique phallogocentrism as a figural logic, his critique certainly can be brought to bear on exclusive "boys game" of philosophy and the real-world discrimination of the apocalyptic tone in general: the problem is not so much who claims to possess the phallus, but rather, who claims a coming castration. Is it not the same sound and call for mastery the Big Rhetoric discussion continues to echo?