rhetoric = bad love

Music: Japan: Gentlemen Take Polariods The string of command performances continues as I ease explode into the UT scene, but not entirely by choice, of course. Two short weeks after the guest talk in Rod Hart's class, I hosted a small party for the "Rhetoric and Language Area" folks in my department (photos of Friday night are here). Now, in a couple of weeks I share the stage with Barry Brummett on a title I proposed, "Rhetoric: What's Love Got to Do With It?" for the department colloquy. I had assumed that we would cheekily reenact speeches from Plato's Phaedrus dialogue, but was warned that this may not go so well for a room full of new students that are not in the rhetoric area. Instead, we ought to share tidbits of recent work and develop some relatively straightforward arguments to provoke discussion.

For many months I've been simmering an idea on the back burner: rhetorical studies has been, to borrow a phrase from Ian McCullough and the Bunnymen, "breaking the back of love." I like the phrase (and the song, with those staccato "wreeenkk wreeenkkk" riffs in the chorus, just like whiplash) because it captures the ambivalence of loving; love and anger, or love and hate, are homologous expressions of the same desiring fueling the fantasy machine. Unfortunately, outside of Wayne Brockreide's "Arguers as Lovers" essay and the work done on "invitational rhetoric" by Foss and Griffin, there really little work on the "front side of love;" most of the work tends to focus on rhetoric as hate.

So I'm working with the idea of using Lacan's theories of love and sexuation ("there is no sexual relationship") to characterize rhetoric, traditionally conceived, as essentially a deception (this would mean Brockreide's take is extended, while that of Foss and Griffin, premised falsely on a misrecognition of the fundamental disjunction). For Lacan, that there is no sexual relationship means that the "two" individuals who are in a relationship more traditionally conceived (friendship, romantic, teacher-student, analyst-analysand, etc.) are radically disjunct. This is Robert Smith's recognition in the song "Why Can't I Be You?" in the classic Cure song: if you have to ask the question, then there is at some level a tacit recognition that unification or transcendent love-that which is marketed by the Walt Disney Corporation-is an illusion. Alain Badiou describes the illusion of transcendent unification as "The One." The more authentic reckoning with love-that is, true love-is to think of it not as a thinking but an outworking of the experience and recognition of radical disjunction, what Lacan terms "them-two" in the last and most famous seminar in 1972-73.

Anyhoo, the idea here is that rhetoric as it has been understood and practiced is always an illusion of "The One." Conversely, we might also say that it is a reconciliation of "the Two" by some mediating thirdness. So, we have: rhetoric as (bad) LOVE and rhetoric as mediation, two answers to disjunction that folks find very persuasive.