size matters
Music: Brian Eno: Compounds + Elements
I finally found a moment to do a little writing, although I regret this moment is almost gone. Tomorrow I get a new stack of papers to grade. Anyhoo, the RSA conference in Memphis is coming up. Here's a little teaser for my paper:
the usual result of the fright of castration . . . is that, either immediately or after some considerable struggle, the boy gives way to the threat and obeys the prohibition either wholly or at least in part (that is, by no longer touching his genitals with his hand). In other words, he gives up, in whole or in part, the satisfaction of the drive.[2]
The boy did not respond as most of us do when we are caught with our pants down: instead of succumbing to the "law of the father" or the prohibition heard as "thou shalt not," instead of finding another object to play with or substituting his penis with the love of a parent, instead of getting down with the neurosis, the kid got downright perverse, compulsively choking, choking, chocking the chicken without any qualms of conscience, commandments be damned!
It is with the pettish preteen in mind that we re-encounter the arrival of another figure, Dilip Gaonkar, and the perverse reaction to the tablets that he brought (on loan, of course, from Derrida), as well as the exodus that he sanctioned.[3] Presumably keeping all the burning bushes for himself, at least as Edward Schippa tells the story, Gaonkar threatened to take our happiness away too: [insert quote of Schiappa's "Second Thoughts on Big Rhetoric" article.]
In what has come to be known as the aptly named "big rhetoric" debate, Gaonkar is accused of brining the law as well as the truth. It is for this reason that he is, however unwittingly, the architect of this year's conference theme, which purports to size-up rhetoric's prowess despite the now widely experienced trauma of truth: rhetoric was castrated to begin with, and it only becomes visible when a trauma is (re)membered: "A crisis, discursive or otherwise, makes rhetoric visible; that is, a crisis brings to the fore the incipient rhetorical consciousness."[4] Rhetorical consciousness is necessarily one that retrojects, most especially in retrospecting.
The crisis of which Gaonkar speaks is that traumatic event that functions to formulate a constitutive outside, a characteristically apocalyptic point that I will return to for help explaining the recent revival of interest in psychoanalysis among rhetorical scholars. But as the emissary running before--or catching up to, take your pick--the body, I should stress the traumatic crisis of opening(s) is not so much forced entry as it is the discipline's lack of discipline: whence the repetitious compulsion to measure or recover this thing "rhetoric," and how might we read this seemingly immeasurable (discussion of) supplementary as a symptom? In psychoanalytic terms, the question could perhaps be rendered this way: do we identify the uncanny persistence of the "big rhetoric" debate, here registered in the RSA conference theme "Sizing Up Rhetoric," as a productive neurosis central to our unique brand of scholarly invention, or has it become a symptom of perversion?
[3] See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science." In Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 25-85. I mean to suggest that the exodus was sanctioned in both senses: there are consequences for the enjoyment rhetoric's supplementarity, a point Gaonkar earlier developed in terms of the uncanny. See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double: Reflections on the Rhetorical Turn in the Human Sciences." In The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 341-366.
[4] Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double," 363.
As I continue to think about the book project on "voices as ghosts," friends and colleagues continue to forward websites and stories to me about haunting voices: from NPR stories on hurricane Katrina emergency phone calls to personal stories about harrowing answering machine messages, it really does seem that the recorded voice is the ghost of our time.The most 
Presumably because Freud's 150th birthday is this weekend, yesterday the New York Times published a fantastic editorial titled 
Teen lust novelist Kaavya Viswanathan was on The Today Show this morning with the mea culpa routine, trying to salvage her credibility after 
Last night I had dinner with my neighbors, all of whom are wonderfully Left (and identify with neither of our political parties). Two of the folks gathered were my new neighbors immediately next door, a happy couple from Canada (and one by way of Germany), who just moved in last week. "I heard you are a teacher at UT," said the pregnant wife. "What do you teach?" Oh dear, I thought, here we go. Might as well have fun with it. "I teach about popular culture, usually how to be critical of popular culture." Everyone smiled, I felt a non-verbal push for elaboration. "So, right now I’m teaching a class on religion and popular culture, and we're looking at narratives, namely, spiritualism, demonic possession, apocalypse, and alien abduction." I then related how we were currently reading and discussing Whitley Strieber's Communion. The new neighbor-wife looked incredulous: "So, what do students who take your class get a degree in? Occult studies?" she teased. "No, communication studies or cultural studies," I said. "I'm sure his classes are electives," added her husband. "Thank god," she replied with a characteristically, no-nonsense sense of relief. 
I still think this is true, but not enough for the paper. So I'm blogging hoping to shake loose some invention juice, or rather (to stick with the metaphor), to shake the juice loose. Or in the Derridian key, to sing about coming, since what is to come is the apocalyptic, and calls for measurement or an assessment of the current state always betoken a death—an end, or if you prefer, an arrival (of death). In any case, my thinking about what to say on the panel must yoke the phallic and chicken little, a theme that I've been thinking about in relation to scholarly invention since my work with David Beard on the apocalyptic. Let's say, since this is a blog after all, that my project is how best to choke the chicken at the convention (. . . and is this not, as Zizek might say in a manic flight of pleasure beyond pleasure, the proverbial activity of all convention-going? Is this not the central complaint of panel-goers subjected to rhetorical theory?).
So, blogging this, I can now sort of see where I am going to go with the paper: a critique of the discourse of the master/mastery as those who herald ends and issue warnings. Again, I don't think it would be wise to "defend" psychoanalysis at the panel, although I suspect many will come with that expectation. What I can offer, however, is some sort of apsycho-deconstructo-reading of the scene of RSA (or better, the so-called "globalization of rhetoric" debates) . . . the trick is to figure out an "object." This might be a neat essay if I can figure out how to widen the scope. The only "tip" on that score is an essay I found on Project MUSE by Melanie White: "On the Recent Apocalyptic Tone Adopted in Canadian Sociology." No shit, get this opening:
New music Tuesday brought Amanda Palmer back into my life with the arrival of the new 
You can pick it up at Best Buy and Target (doh!) for $8. It's worth the price; lets support our artists that deserve supporting!
Today in the rhetoric of religion course we are discussing Whitley Strieber's Communion, a New York Time's bestseller for over twenty fives weeks back in the early eighties. As we read this novel, I am teaching a bit of Lacan on fantasy and das Ding, that the figure of the alien as a mutagenic human is that uncanny double of projection (the "stranger within," and so forth). Communion is really a love story, a object (objet?) lesson in jouissance, as a long section from the part we read for today demonstrates:
So in my life this Sunday morning I have four events sort of swirling in my consciousness: Lacan's "graph of desire," which I will lecture about tomorrow; the jibber-jabber of politicians on immigration from this morning's Meet the Press, the death of one of many of my mothers (but not just any other; she's a mother just the same), and scenes from a failed conference (I left SSCA early because I was spiraling into a depression I'd rather folks only read about, not see). I mean, this stuff is all about death and others, and the Other, so on one level Lacan definitely helps me put a language to my feelings: my failed romantic relationships have something to do with misplaced demands for love on both sides; my sorrow over the other death, the real one or the biological one, if you want, is also in some sense a recognition that she gave me love (in the sense of recognition; she cooked for me, schemed with me against my father—that is, my academic advisor—and so on); and this battle against Mexicans is about the racialized Other who took our happiness away, or who threatens it by, apparently, taking away my career in migrant farming. 
My own classes in rhetorical criticism at the master's and at the Ph.D. level were taught as a sort of "workshop of critical practice," where we did a series of smaller papers, and then tried to synthesize them into one big term paper at the end. My master's level introduction to rhetorical criticism was taught by R.L. Scott, and he used Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Thomas A. Berkholder as a textbook. This book advances what KKC and Burkholder term an "organic approach" to rhetorical criticism, which is a fancy way of saying the virtuoso/magical approach, but fortunately, they do provide some steps. Basically, it's phenomenological hermeneutics: first you pick an object to analyze. Then, you write a description of the object (structure and style). Then you write a short paper that contextualizes the object (history, etc.). Then you write a paper that details a theoretical approach that you think will help to unfold the inner-secrets of the object. Then you write a paper that analyzes the miraculated/Edenic text, and so on. 
Frankly, I think teaching criticism the magical way at the undergraduate level would be a disaster, because students at that level have yet to develop a strong tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty. Teaching criticism at the undergraduate level does benefit from the series-of-papers approach, but not without, well, a good dose of the "cookie cutter." Now, Campbell has written a textbook that attempts to teach the "organic" or occultic method at the undergraduate level, and it's titled The Rhetorical Act. I've used this book in argumentation and advanced public speaking classes with some success, but I don't know how helpful it would be for "rhetorical criticism" proper, because the book is divided between criticism and invention. Another book that I've used, at the wise suggestion of Michael Bowman, and with a better degree of success, is Michael Real's 
So, I guess the question for me is how would I teach a rhetorical criticism class to undergraduates? I think I personally would go with Foss' book for one reason: it makes rhetoric appear less scary, and it is more likely to encourage critical thinking. Foss' textbook is for beginners and should be understood in that context! Depending on the size of the class, I would teach the course with Foss differently. If it were a small class, I would teach the "workshop" way like Campbell does, writing a series of papers that try on different hats and approaches (and in this scheme, Foss' book would step in at the "theoretical approach" level), but not assigning the Campbell text. If it were a larger class, I'd teach the Foss book and supplement it with examples from the field, and then have students do mini-papers and exercises with each approach that are easy to grade, and then, have them select their favorite "method" and use it for a term paper at the end of the semester.
Now, I've had some disagreements with colleagues about what texts should be assigned: some argue for primary texts; others, for conceptual digestions; and others, for a combination of both. There are textbooks aplenty for each of these approaches, but I have always assigned primary text collections, and in part, this is because such collections are also organized historically. To date I've always used Bizzell and Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition, and it's a massive tome that students love to complain about (there was always that book in college; mine was one on constitutional law). My reasoning for teaching primary texts is that it is college level reading, bi-gosh! I always begin my theory class by stating (after my teacher, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell) that most textbooks are written for the eighth grade level, and that they are about to do college level reading and that it'd good for them. I explain that reading tough materials is good for all sorts of reasons, but the upshot is that I’m teaching them to be curious and to give up trying to "master" texts—that although mastery is better for math and science, it is a bad goal for critical thinking and the negotiation of ethics. So my choice of the primary texts collection is built on a sort of "humility of the text" gesture, I guess. 
Next spring I'm teaching this survey class again, and I'll be assigning Barry Brummett's 
One of my best friends has become another target of the petulant demand, but this time in an unfortunately public way. Like many of us, from time to time he complained about his students in his blog (unlike my blog, however, his was fairly anonymous), although never by name and always in terms of generalities. He has 
Upon reflection, the newspaper decided not to run the story by the student. Instead, one of the editors wrote and 
In the past two years there has been no shortage of stories in the blogosphere about the complexities of on-line self-disclosure and venting by professors, and as someone who has groused about students in a public blog, of course, I'm personally invested in the issue (as are many others; check out the "rate my students" link on the blogroll). Unlike the demanding and righteous emails from students, however, the tactic of publicity is something that I hadn't really thought about in this context: the rhetoric of the misguided columnist who wrote the 
This week's Newsweek cover-story is titled 
There is a
"Yes, it's Sigmund Freud, still haunting us, a lifetime after he died in London in 1939," begins the Newsweek article, and continues on the next page "that he retains any life at all is remarkable. To innocently type his name into a search engine is to unleash a torrent of denunciation . . . ." The Freudian answer to such puzzlement is to note that love and hate are precisely the same affective force (the one we greet our parents with as children, no?), and, as Erasure sings, "I love to hate you" is not a contradiction in terms. When figures like Freud and Bush the Second emerge in the language of Mastery, one is compelled to take a side. I mean, the article's answer to the question, "why does Freud haunt?" is more correct than the reporter realizes: Polarizing figures derive their power from the promises that are impossible to fulfill—failure is the source of the Fatherly Mystique. Forget Freud's ideas about the drives, or dream intepretation, and so on; you need to look at how Freud made sense of his own noteriety with his later work, like that in Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and so on. It's less about his ideas and more about his figure as a master, as an ideal father, as an intellectual tyrant. Copjec continues: "If everything the Other says or does fails to deliver the accreditation we seek, if all the Other's responses prove inadequate, then our difference is saved . . . ." And in this sense Freud has become a master of desire, for, the only way to be that, Copjec rightly observes, is "to be impotent or dead." Dead Not Dead: this is also the logic of the uncanny persistence of George W. Bush.
It's been a social week; last week for SXSW I wrote for the most part, but as the weekend approached folks started to filter into town. 
Tom is one of my absolute favorite people in the world; he's been an awesome mentor and role model as well (some of y'all may bridle at the "role model" label, as Tom has been a baaaaaad boy in the past, but he's a good guy in his "dotage," as he says). He gifted me a copy of Janice Hocker Rushing's posthumously published book,