driving home

Music: The Wrens: The Meadowlands It was still in the nineties like a blanket when I got into the car, and I didn't think to turn on the air conditioner on the short drive home. I was reading a friend earlier today who didn't think much of the Austin landscape, nothing remotely deciduous you know, and everything grows low, and scrubby, and may stay green or go brown but it doesn't fall off. And as I reared out the driveway and made it through the police barricade (some roadwork) I was noticing how the low lying trees gave good view, across the foothills in which the city sat, with large, elevated and curving highways and I was on one of them and it was dark outside and few of us were out there on the highway and I was heading due due east, and there was I think a glorious view (it reminded me of the cover of Jackson Browne's Running on Empty). Off in the distance beyond all the cars as I was driving and feeling like I was in a contemplative scene in some cliché listening to the Wrens (I'm still listening to the Wrens) there were bursts and flickers of lightning in the clouds, flashy reminders summer had come a month too soon. She's not really right, Austin does have its own beauty and maybe it takes doing three years time in a small town to get you to the point of appreciation, you know, but I've since met three people who still are down on Austin and I'm not so sure I get it; it seems so pretty in that Western way, although it is hot and there are annoying wealthy people and too many SUVs but its not so bad because I have faith there are more of us here. And then I had another one of those moments when I thought to myself I could keep driving, because this was nice, and pass up my exit and just go and go and go. But then I knew as soon as the album was over I wouldn't feel that way anymore. And I have to teach tomorrow, and meeting a new friend for lunch to talk about alchemy and poetry and rhetoric (maybe). So I should try to sleep through this, you know, the insomnia thing . . . .

father's day

Music: Okkervil River: Black Sheep Boy

A relatively accurate reconstruction of that telephonic mourning glory:

MOM: "Here comes dad now, he's coming up the stairs. He got your stuff yesterday; he said the cat book is really funny."

33 YEAR OLD MOOK (33YOM): "Yeah, I thought it was a trip."

MOM: "He won't let me look at it; said it's his gift [laughs]. I'll look at it tonight. Here's your father."

FATHER (self-dubbed "FEARLESS LEADER" or FL): "Fruit of my loins: how goes it?"

33YOM: "It goes like Sunday; happy Father's Day pop!"

FL: "Thank you, thank you."

33YOM: "So are y'all gonna go out for dinner or something special?"

FL: "No, of course not. I've got a bunch of paperwork to do. Trying to redo my fee schedule, need to make some more money. It ain't working well right now."

33YOM: "Bummer; well, I was just sitting down to work too, thought I'd give you a call before I got all into it, you know?"

FL: "So, how's the love life?"

33YOM: "Jesus H. Christ. You ask me that every time I talk to you. Haven't I-–"

FL: "Me and your mother don't want you to be 40 and without a nookie."

33YOM: "Well, as I've said, neither do I. I daresay I don't know anyone who wants to die alone. But you know, every time you ask me that it sounds like 'what's wrong with you?' I know you don't mean it that way, but you're really laying it on thick this past year and it reminds—-"

FL: "Oh, no no no. You are interpreting it wrong. But you know, you should have had some pretty significant relationships by now, and—-"

33YOM: "Look pop, things are pretty damn good in Austin. I have a great job, I own a home, I live in a city with tons to do with live music, you know, at a stones throw. I've now got a pretty good circle of friends and folks to love and depend on, and I'm getting out more. Life is good—"

FL: "I know it is son, me and your mother want to come visit in—"

33YOM: "—You know you're welcome anytime; and, you know, once I get granny's furniture I'll have a place for y'all to sleep."

FL: "Son, will you take some unsolicited advice?"

33YOM: "Sure, pop."

FL: "You should go online and comparison shop for furniture. Do you know how much it's going to cost to rent a van to get her stuff? Have you checked into it?"

33YOM: "Um, not yet, I was going—"

FL: "Well, it may be cheaper to buy new stuff. Have you seen granny's furniture? I mean, it's not exactly—"

33YOM: "--Pop, you know it's not about the furniture. I want her to know that I came and got it, and that I have it. She wants me to have it and keeps reminding me of that, and I want her to know that I have it, you know? It's not about the furniture."

FL: "I didn't think so. Ok. Ok. Oh, you know, I had a lady interested in you last night at this wedding. Smmmmaaaaarrrrrt woman, she's a consultant."

33YOM: "Well, she'd have to move to Austin before I would even consider dating, cause—"

FL: "Yeah, that was her sticking point. She didn't seem to hip on relocating to Austin."

33YOM: "Look, life's good in Austin. I have every faith I'll meet someone, and if you keep pushing it I'm going to start hitting on black men. The family would love that on Christmas."

FL: "[laughs] me and your mother would not be surprised. We just want you to be happy."

33YOM: "I'm happier than I was this time last year and two years ago, and life is good here. And it's not like I wouldn't like someone to share this goodness with, of course I do. But even alone it's ok, dig? I mean, the last thing someone wants is some needy, insecure guy who—"

FL: "[laughs] I guess you're right. You know me and your mother haven't [expletive] in years, and we're pretty happy. Eh, so, those cats are really funny [laughs]. I think I'm going to take Tye to a rescue people because he has just become so—"

33YOM: "Irritating? What's he doing?"

FL: "You know, I come up from work and sit down to relax, and he's in your face, you know, right here. And he meows really loudly, it's like a bitchy ol' woman in my face, and I've just had enough."

33YOM: "Oh, Psappho does that."

[etc. for 10 minutes]

engastrimyth

Music: Colder: Again It's been another full day, teaching, then lunch with colleagues, then back home to write my ass off (gotta love deadlines). I was supposed to hie my butt to the Highland 12 to see The Da Vinci Code, but I was writing away and noticed I was almost an hour late for the movie . . . so I'll go tomorrow night. Not that I'm anxious to see it, really, it's just I'm going to write about Code frenzy with Captain Frenzy—or Capt. Frentz—sometime soon and I gots to see the damn movie.

Ok, so, I've finished a draft of the forum essay. It's tighter, but plays somewhat fast and loose with Derrida. All you deconstruction mavens need to tell me if I'm going to look like a fool. I don't think so (I'm already a fool), but . . . you know, I'm open to suggestions and objections. I was told to write a "provocation." Gee, I've done enough of that already, but I do think joining hands with Frank Dance should raise some eyebrows. I also worry if my "tone" is too snotty. I want to be provocative, but not a "little shit."

Here goes:

Gimme Some Tongue: On Speech and the Voice Abject
Joshua Gunn
University of Texas at Austin

[A]ttanâ zabiné pi ten té iche tarvini mabûré nubé téri zée atèv Astané ezi dabé fouminé ni ié ti takâ tubré ne bibé ti ze umêzè!
--Ramié the Martian, as channeled by Hélène Smith[1]

For many years the psychiatrist Theodore Flournoy endured the mystical, sometimes creepy, babble of Hélène Smith, a controversial Swiss medium who achieved fame in the nineteenth century by claiming she took astral trips to Mars.[2] During numerous séances Flournoy documented a number of Smith's "dramas," which frequently featured glossolalia or speaking in tongues after the psychic had fallen into a self-induced trance. Despite Smith's insistence that she was channeling the Martian speech of three übergalactic beings (Astané, Esenale, and Ramié), Flournoy concluded that the Martian language was "only an infantile travesty of French."[3] Following William James' speculations about the "automatisms" of prophecy,[4] Flournoy argued Smith's gifts of the tongue represented repressed, infantile desires and wishes that reside on the "subliminal strata" of the psyche, which "autohypnotization . . . puts in ebullition and causes to mount to the surface."[5] For the Swiss psychiatrist, speaking in tongues is that voice beyond word that originates in infantile emotions and memories. In short, glossolalia is the speech of the unconscious.[6]

After five years studying the Martian-channeling medium, Flournoy reported that "all things become wearisome at last, and the planet Mars is no exception to the rule. The subliminal imagination of Mlle. Smith, however, will probably never tire of its lofty flights in the society of Astané, Esenale, and their associates."[7] Analogously, one may be tempted to dismiss yet another forum discussion on disciplinary identity (this time in the guise of writing a history of Speech Communication) as so much wearisome, printed prattle and "radical reflection" on the not-so-lofty status of communication and rhetorical studies in the academic imaginary.[8] One would be tempted, I say, were it not for Gerry Philipsen's intriguing insights on the use of "speech" as a "substance term" that made the diverse practices in our "field" coherent for over fifty years.[9] Why did speech last as long as it did, and why does it continue to linger?[10] Although his history indicates that speech was chosen as the titular object for pragmatic reasons (e.g., explaining one's motley department of critics and social scientists to the dean), I would supplement Philipsen's history by suggesting that the concept was embraced because of a general human tendency to fetishize speech as a magical object.[11] More specifically, from a psychoanalytic vantage I argue that human speech as such seems to harbor an uncanny, seemingly magical quality that inspires "primitive" or infantile memories and feelings of fear and love. Reckoning with this quality of speech, something that I shall term the "voice abject," not only better helps to explain the appeal of "speech" to our disciplinary forbears, but also the reason why speech continues to haunt us despite repeated death knells. Like the seemingly involuntary, other-worldly twitter of Hélène Smith, we cannot help speaking about speech because there is something beyond the word, something discernable in the phonetic excess of nonsensical babble, that was used to ground our discipline for decades.

THIS SOMETHING MORE IN SPEECH THAN SPEECH

It is sometimes said that Herbert A. Wichelns' 1925 essay, "The Literary Criticism of Oratory," helped to advance an important rationale for the discipline of Speech Communication. In that essay Wichelns distinguishes the criticism of oratory from literary criticism: the former is concerned with the adaptation of speech to audiences, while the latter is concerned with artful expressions of, and reflections on, the human condition.[12] What is sometimes forgotten is the reasoning behind such a distinction: although Wichelns admits that "oratory is no longer the chief means of communicating ideas to the masses," there is nevertheless "no likelihood that face to face persuasion will cease to be a principle mode of exerting influence . . . ."[13] The "here-and-now personal presence" of orality, to borrow Walter Ong's phrase, is featured throughout the essay as the unique purchase of the new discipline.[14] A closely related and widely read touchstone text is Carroll C. Arnold's "Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature" (1968), which extended parts of Wichelns' argument but updated and abandoned others. Although Arnold opposes treating oratory as literature, like Wichelns he grounds the study of speech in the "intimacy" and contingency of interpersonal encounter.[15] Arnold's primary disagreement with Wichelns seems to be that even nonsensical speech, like speaking in tongues, can be meaningful and moving: "orality . . . is itself meaningful" beyond signification, he argues.[16] Perhaps what is most interesting about Arnold's argument, however, is the apocalyptic tone in which he characterizes the suasive dimensions of the interpersonal speech situation: he repeatedly stresses that the spoken word always entails "risk" and "danger."[17] For example, "the extensive commitments extracted by orality," argues Arnold, "superimpose special dimensions of risk upon every action consciously or unconsciously directed to the eye and ear of an other."[18] The instability and "risk" of interpersonal encounter in speaking situations is, of course, obvious to almost every student in a public speaking classroom. But what is the cause of speaking anxiety, and what is the source of speech's danger? Arnold answers somewhat obliquely: the terms "'speaking,' 'spoke' or 'speech' can, and often do, function for us as terms stipulating something more subtle than an acoustic transmission . . . ."[19] This subtle "something more" of speech, this voice beyond word that is linked but not reducible to "here-and-now personal presence," danger, contingency, and risk, is what we might term the "something more" in speech than speech. It is this ever-elusive "something more" that I suggest at least partially motivated the embrace and subsequent rejection of speech as central, disciplinary object.[20]

So what is this "something more" in speech than speech? At this juncture one may be tempted to say it is an illusion and make a Derridian turn by celebrating the abandonment of speech as an outmoded vestige of "logocentrism" and the dreaded metaphysics of presence.[21] Derrida's critique of the Platonic assumption that speech presences the thought of the speaker is well known: "The voice is heard (understood)-that undoubtedly is what is called conscience-closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier," argues Derrida, as a "pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from the outside of itself."[22] Arnold's discussion of speech and danger seems to suggest that this "something more" of speech is, in fact, that narcissistic core of a delusional autonomy, the very same illusion of self-transparency that Derrida has shown can lead to the symbolic and real destruction of alterity, often by alienating or killing others who are different.[23] Yet, Arnold's constant recourse to the dialogical "risk" of speech situations, to the fact a speaker must "stare his failure in the eye" when he or she misspeaks, his attention to the tacit, "acoustic bond" and relationship created between self and other in sonorous encounter, seem to suggest that the specificity of this something more in speech may not be of Self but from the Other. In other words, the implicit "something more" of Arnold's concept of speech is an ambivalent voice, one of danger and one of love, or in Kenneth Burke's terms, one that betokens both the recognition of identification and the rejection of division.[24]

How might we reckon with this ideation of an ambivalent voice? A psychoanalytic approach to human speech suggests at least a tentative answer, and that answer begins by admitting (as does Derrida, but not decidedly) the necessity of some modicum of auto-affection and self-consciousness rooted in the sound of the human voice. Hearing oneself speak--or as an infant, hearing oneself cry--"can be seen as an elementary formula of narcissism that is needed to produce a minimal form of self."[25] The "something more" in speech than speech, then, cannot be understood as one's "self." That "something more" in speech is something that comes from beyond self, and, of course, that which is beyond the Self is the province of the Other. One can easily identify the primary encounter with the Other as an infant's encounter with its mother, and not coincidentally, the primary vehicle of that encounter--at least to the degree such an encounter is consciously that--is the mother's voice.

Whence, then, the risk and danger of the something more of speech, if that something more is originally associated with that person loved most unconditionally by the infant, the mother? The answer has something to do with the Self-side of speech: human infants are born helpless and require the stranger other (mother) to interpret the meaning of its cries in order to have its needs met.[26] As an infant who cries but does not signify, the Other is responsible assigning meaning; the voice of the Other is consequently sign of dependency and helplessness as much as it is of coming comfort. Furthermore, the mother's voice is not always loving (e.g., scolding), and worse, her voice is sometimes painfully absent. The ambivalence of the mother's voice is compounded by the infant's identification with its own voice as "bad" as well: it cries out for food but the breast does not miraculously appear, and soon its own cry becomes associated with the horrible, self-frightening event of hunger. The babe's speech can become estranged and foreign, just as the surprising, stranger-voice that emits from our own mouths in adult moments of trauma or orgasmic release. In other words, the voice is not singular, but multiple, a complex of hearing one's voice and the Other's voice that can become confused. In one's own voice there are traces of the voice of the Other, the "bad voice," a voice that is uncontrollable, unpredictable, and does not necessarily come from "outside."[27] Dolar explains:

. . . for psychoanalysis, the auto-affective voice of self-presence and self-mastery was constantly opposed by its reverse side, the intractable voice of the Other, the voice that one could not control. But both have to be thought together: one could say that at the very core of narcissism there lies an alien kernel that . . . continually threatens to undermine it from the inside.[28]

Perhaps what is most uncanny about self-speech is that we can become startled to the "stranger" within it, as "something more" in our own speech than "our" speech.[29] It is in this respect that Flournoy characterized Smith's glossolalia as "infantile." Not only was he dismissing her tongues as the product of some primal brand of auto-affection (an infantile fantasy of Martian omnipotence), but also to stress that it is the adult counterpart to the cries of an infant, that glossolalia simultaneously registers the anxiety and joy of an infantile dependency on the Other.

The uncontrollable and threatening voice of the Other, be it of one's god or one's mother, is thus not simply a voice object, but also a voice abject: meaningful speech that does not signify, glossolalia, "the voice beyond logos, the lawless voice."[30] That the voice abject is lawless gets at the underside of the "risk" that Arnold discusses as the hallmark of speech as such: speaking to another risks missing "the private mood" of one's "correspondent," as well as the failure to persuade or communicate.[31] Yet speech also risks the violation of norms, tempting lawlessness, as in the sublime speech discussed by Longinus, or in an address that violates generic constraints, or by screaming at a rock concert in that transgressive, underwear-throwing ecstasy of abandon, or by preaching that incites a worshipful, charismatic riot.

For yet another example of the voice abject that is closely related to glossolalia, take the controversial case of the "gruntometer," a device invented by a British tabloid to measure the vocal outbursts of tennis star Maria Sharapova.[32] The tabloid's device measured Sharapova's top grunt at 101.2 decibels (about twice as loud as a police siren), and this number became a much discussed curiosity for the British in the summer of 2005. Although in the U.S. we expect tennis stars like Venus and Serena Williams to mindlessly grunt on court, apparently tennis fans in the U.K. are not so forgiving. Some theorized that the grunting is part of a deliberate strategy to startle opponents, thereby encouraging more offensive counter-grunts and risking a deafening, cacophonous orgy of gruntlicious groundstrokes and grandslams. In her defense, Sharapova has denied any grunting strategy, insisting that her traumatic speech is the natural consequence of energy exploding forth as the ball is whacked with all the force she can muster. Regardless of the explanation, what is of interest here is that in a number of British newspapers and television shows, "the grunt" has been granted an agency of its own and linked to issues of (self) control: are these grunting athletes in control of their grunting, or is the offensive speech involuntary, like speaking in tongues? It seems that many individuals (one is tempted to say the British en toto) are much more comfortable with the idea that the grunts are strategic and under control, that the grunts do not have an agency of their own, that these voices are ultimately pseudo-abject. Perhaps, then, speech has been abandoned as a substance term for "our field" because it is ambivalent, because of this "risk" and "danger" that Arnold insists is inherent to it? Perhaps we have abandoned speech, not because it betokens the illusion of presence, not because it promotes auto-affection, but because it threatens to undermine precisely those things? Perhaps we have abandoned speech because, understood as an ambivalent thing both infantile and mature, speech as such forever denies we are in control and "all grown up."

THAT MOURNFUL APHONIA

Contrary to the singularity of voice in Derrida's critique of logocentrism, Dolar suggests that psychoanalysis posits "a different metaphysical history of voice" alongside the metaphysics of presence, where at least one meaningful element of human speech "is considered dangerous, threatening, and possibly ruinous."[33] In this brief essay I have argued that this history concerns the voice abject of speech that finds its origin in the voice of the Other, and that while not necessarily consciously so, this "something more" in speech than speech was this elusive, fetishized, seemingly magical, and dangerous element that Wichelns and Arnold were attempting to articulate as the grounding substance of our studies. Understanding the voice abject as the "stranger" element of orality as such, at least part of the appeal of speech as a concept for disciplinary coherence is, appropriately, infantile (but in a non-judgmental, psychoanalytic sense). We love our speech. But, we fear it too, for although the disciplinary embrace of speech participated in the illusion of self-presence, there is also this alien voice, this element that speaks through us, this reminder of our fallibility, dependence, and limits, that informs the disciplinary rationales of our forbears.[34] Although the seeming magic of the interpersonal speech encounter seems to have found a new life in rhetorical studies in the guise of historical and contextual contingency-therein one finds a Benjaminian notion of contingent "danger" and possibility, that rhetoric cements what could have been otherwise-the dialogical ethic and hospitality encouraged by a confrontation with the speech of the unconscious seems to be eroding.35 I worry that the abandonment of speech as the central object has caused us to lose sight of an ethic of responsibility tied neither to meaning nor to law, but to the "acoustic bond" of interpersonal encounter that forces risk and tempts danger. "Over the years," argues Professor Dance, "there has been an erosion of the understanding and acceptance of the centrality of speech. I believe the decision was a betrayal of tradition and an abandonment of our disciplinary core."36 If Professor Dance is right, then we have erred on the side of text.

NOTES

1 The Martian language is translated thus: "Hidden world, very near to ours, coarse language, curious like the beings.-Astané, my powerful master and all powerful, alone is capable of doing it." Theodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Sonambulism with Glossolalia (New Hyde Park, NJ: University Books, 1963), 235.

2 Hélène Smith is a pseudonym. Catherine Elise Muller was the medium's real name. See Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1991), s.v. "Hélène Smith." 3 Flournoy, From India, 241.

4 See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor/Penguin, 1958), esp. 204-206; and 394-400. 5 Flournoy, From India, 259-260.

6 See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 31-106; and Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore 1972-1973, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 26-37.

7 Flournoy, From India, 261.

8 Robert Hariman, "Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory." Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 38; also see Michael Burgoon. "A Kinder, Gentler Discipline: Feeling Good About Being Mediocre." Communication Yearbook 18 (1995): 464-479.

9 Gerry Philipsen. "Notes and Queries on the Career of 'Speech' in Disciplinary Discourse: 1914-1928 and 1946-1954." Paper presented at the second preconference on the History of the Field at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association in Boston, Mass., November 2005.

10 Obviously, the title of this journal is evidence enough, but so are the departments of Speech and Speech Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Georgia in Athens, and at numerous, smaller colleges around the country. Frank Dance is the most vocal proponent of what we might term the "return to speech" campaign; see Frank E. X. Dance, "Speech and Thought: A Renewal." Communication Education 51 (2002): 355-359; Frank E.X. Dance, "Ong's Voice: 'I,' the Oral Intellect, You, and We." Text and Performance Quarterly 9 (1989): 185-198; and Frank E. X. Dance, "A Speech Theory of Communication." In Human Communication Theory: Comparative Essays, edited by Frank E. X. Dance (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 120-146.

11 "Speech is a powerful lord," argues Gorgias, "which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works." Gorgias, "Encomium of Helen." In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from the Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (Boston: Bedford Books, 2001), 45. Also see Jacqueline de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). The magic of speech continues today most especially in public address scholarship in regard to what Laura Sells terms the "miraculated text." See Laura Sells and Joshua Gunn, "Critical Public Address. Available: http://www.voxygen.net/soapbox/critpubad.htm accessed 12 June 2006.

12 Herbert A. Wichelns. "The Literary Criticism of Oratory." In Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, edited by Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 3-28.

13 Wichelns, "Literary Criticism," 4.

14 Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 113. The presence effects of speech in a particular, contingent moment is repeatedly mentioned as the ground of persuasion by many if not most of the essays anthologized as touchstones. For example, Wayland Maxfield Parrish argues that "one of the most important elements in persuasiveness is the impression made by the speaker's character and personality," and that "much of this impression is made, of course, by his appearance, voice, manner, and delivery, and cannot be recovered from study of the printed speech." Impressions are always representation of a fleeting but felt sense of presence in a speech situation. See Wayland Maxfield Parrish, "The Study of Speeches." In Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, edited by Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 34-46. 15 Carroll C. Arnold. "Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature." Some Edited Collection I Know Nothing About, edited by Some Dude and perhaps another Dude (Some city: Some Press, 19XX), 60-73.

16 Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 63. Like Hélène Smith, many charismatics who are gifted with tongues claim to be able to interpret their babble, or have religious leaders that claim to understand it.

17 Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 63.

18 Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 66.

19 Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 63.

20 In personal communication (14 June 2006), Professor Dance suggests the motive was also in part politically pragmatic (e.g., to make it easier to raise grant money), but also because of the "erosion of understanding and acceptance of the centrality of speech." To this I would also add the dogged drive for the "text" among some public address scholars, and the push to "textualize" everything under the sun as a part of that project--despite the explicit warnings of James Arnt Aune, Dilip Gaonkar, and others. Both the institutional-pragmatic and methodological motives are, finally, underwritten by the technological changes in mass communication explicitly discussed by Wichelns and better theorized by our colleagues in media ecology. Sadly, in the rush to examine all things new media and hypertext, we have forsaken Wichelns still sound argument that much suasive phenomena is interpersonal and takes place in a largely trans-discursive dimension of human encounter. See Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, edited Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989), esp. Aune and Gaonkar's essays, 43-51; 255-275.

21 Such a turn is a mistake, for Derrida notes "this illusion is the history of truth and it cannot be dissipated so easily." It is the precondition of self-consciousness. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 20.

22 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20.

23 See Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2003), esp. 63-82.

24 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 45-46.

25 Mladen Dolar, "The Object Voice." In SIC 1: Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 13.

26 This process is described as the "subjects submission to the signifier" by Lacan, an elementary stage of the "graph of desire." See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 291-293.

27 My discussion of "good voice" and "bad voice" here draws on Steve Conner's intriguing reading of Melanie Klein's theory of identification, splitting, and the maternal breast in infancy. See Steve Conner, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3-43.

28 Dolar, "Object Voice," 15.

29 Conner suggests one good example is hearing one's own recorded voice: many people are uncomfortable listening to their own recorded voices because it threatens the return of the repressed, that stranger within, those elements of Self we would rather keep repressed. See Conner, Dumbstruck, 7-9.

30 Dolar, "Object Voice," 18. By "voice abject" I mean to refer to the jouissance or unsymbolizable enjoyment of the terrible voice, as well as that tacit, creepy element of human speech that often escapes notice but is made more discernable in recordings of the disembodied voice, especially recordings of the speech of the deceased. I also mean to reference Kristeva's work on abjection, which she argues (persuasively I think) is associated with the maternal body. Insofar as the power to signify is associated with phallogocentrism in Western culture, it makes sense that woman is associated with phonetic excess (e.g., babble, gossip, speaking in tongues). Space limits any well-supported argument, but one could argue another reason why "speech" as killed off has to do with its association with the "feminine" in an unquestionably phallogocentric, academic enterprise. See Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

31 Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 69.

32 Megan Lane, "Why Do Women Tennis Stars Grunt?" BBC News Online, 22 June 2005, available http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4118708.stm accessed 26 June 2005.

33 Dolar, "Object Voice," 16.

34 I would speculate this recognition led to, in one way or another, what some have termed a dialectical or dialogical ethic of communication. See Leslie A. Baxter and Barbara M. Montgomery, Relating: Dialogues and Dialectics (New York: Guilford, 1996); Leslie A. Baxter, "Dialectical Contradictions in Relational Development," Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 7 (1990): 69-88 35 See Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," translated by Harry Zohn. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2003), 389-400.

36 Frank E. X. Dance, personal correspondence, 14 June 2006.

firing nude teachers and other hypocrasies

Music: AFI: December Underground A lead news story on one of the Austin television networks today—as well as a popular bulletin on myspace.com—is about an Austin high school art teacher who, by gosh, made some photo-art with a friend. Some of this photo-art featured her naked breasts and a handful of provocative poses, a little S&M, but none of it of the "turn on" sort. Heck, the stuff is mostly of the eroto-art genre that one becomes immune to after months of exposure to any college art program and their students wandering the halls with portfolios of sloppily yet artfully displayed flying, flaming penises and Warhol-eqsue silkscreens of vaginal interiors. An artist herself, Ms. Tamara Hoover's work is just as provocative as the photos taken of her (just substitute one part object for another). I mean, aren't chicks with dicks pretty accepted not-so-shock fare after the sex wars? I mean, Piss Christ took the cake, didn't it? And didn't Jane's Addiction proclaim that, after 1988, "nothing's shocking?"

In any event, it takes a case like this to remind one very quickly about the differences between the university and high school educational setting; high school is not quite in loco parentis yet. The parents have their talons in everything (but their kids real, acid-dropping, pot-smoking sex-filled lives . . . heh heh heh). Indeed, at my high school the neighboring church, First Baptist of Snellville, practically ran the school telekenetically. Anyhoo, the Austin Independent School District has began the process of firing her, as they consider a number of photos pornographic. The district has a legal right to make this determination, from what I gather, or otherwise they would not have made this pornographic statement: Although everyone has the right to freedom of speech, AISD holds their teachers to a "higher moral standard." [EDIT 14 June: here's the actual text of the AISD statement: "Please know that AISD has no intention of infringing upon a person's legitimate rights to free speech and expression. However, public school educators are legally held to a higher moral standard, in order to protect the young lives they influence."] I don't have the direct quote handy, but that's what was said: "higher moral standard." Of course, when anyone whips out morals instead of policy or the law, they either have the policy in the back pocket, or they have a grudge. Or both, as is the case here, I suspect. So from my armchair—or rather, computer chair—what would the grudge possibly be?

My prediction is this: first, Hoover ain't straight (if her art, and art of her, is any measure), and as we all know, if you're going to be a queer high school teacher, you better damn well be the art teacher, the P.E. instructor, or waaay back in the closet (you know, that literature teacher you had that loved Gone with the Wind). Second, you don't express your queerness in art for all the parents to see, especially art that features little girls with ding-dongs sans Little Debbie. I find it all quite wonderful myself, because, you know, I'm me and wear my affinity for the perverse—like my throbbing heart—on my sleeve. Anyhoo, what I’m suggesting is that many folks in the school probably wanted Ms. Hoover gone long before this flap; this flap was just what they needed to make her go away. Once this all blows over, I'm sure she'll "tell all."

More distressing is the more obvious: teaching, like preaching, being a cop, and any position that creates an immediate hierarchy in which the person "in power" has something you want (knowledge, recognition, love, pardon, salvation, and so on) is an erotic process. I don't mean "sexual" in that blatant sense, just, um, a bit charged. And a lot of folks, especially folks that teach kids below 18, don't like to be reminded of that. I know, I've written on this topic before and it's obvious and all that, but, it always amazes me how stupid the "analysis" of this kind of "story" on the television has become. The transference "problem" is why sleeping with your underage students is such an overdetermined transgression (the truth of the repressive hypothesis, in a sense): NO DUH! C'mon, folks: although David Lee Roth has lost every and all sense of any cool he had left, he did pen a song every generation in the last thirty years knows: "Hot for Teacher." And here we have an art teacher whose person and art rip back a relatively transparent curtain to disclose the erotic (and gendered) dynamics of the educational process. But isn't art a privileged process because it gets to point out the naked emperor obliquely with tongues in cheeks, whereas us essay writing hacks are not given similar license (goddamned thesis statements!)? The short of this is that Ms. Hoover is being punished for what she is supposed to be teaching, and, of course, for speaking—nay, showing—truth to/in power.

Is it just me, or are these kinds of cases getting more alarming, that is hyped up, on television. I worry worry worry that the university is next. I have learned since coming to UT that parents call professors here to bitch them out too—just like they did at LSU. The last glorious liberty of the university—freedom from the PTA and its publicity-blackmail tactics, surely a unit more dangerous that David Horowitz—needs to be defended.

[sigh: insomnia tonight]

1250 words

Music: Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians: Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars

Last Friday at dinner my guests inquired about the "life of the assistant professor in our department." I had to admit (in a roundabout way) that there wasn't much of a community among the junior faculty, and that I had an easier time socializing with my senior colleagues. I lamented that I didn't have any drinking pals to mull over research projects with, as I did in graduate school and, to a lesser extent, at my previous jobs. We discussed the general lack of thirty-something professors on campus in general and were trying to figure out why. The English department, for example, routinely hires thirty-somethings who then bail a year or two later.

Well, we never did come up with a satisfactory explanation, but I did report some of my "working out of ideas" has shifted from the pub to the blog. Earlier this year I was posting on a essay I was writing on sovereignty and the War of the Worlds remake, and received some very helpful suggestions from readers about Agamben's concept of "bare life." In any event, in retrospect I see the blog as serving the function of the coffee house discussion (besides, in coffee houses these days people are too busy blogging to talk to one another).

So, with that wind up, here's what I managed to work on today: part two of the glossolalia paper (somehow I have to squeeze all this verbiage into six pages; brevity, like subtlety, is not my signature):

THIS THING IN SPEECH THAT IS MORE THAN SPEECH

It is sometimes said that Herbert A. Wichelns' 1925 essay, "The Literary Criticism of Oratory," helped to advance an important rationale for the discipline of Speech Communication. In that essay Wichelns distinguishes the criticism of oratory from literary criticism: the former is concerned with the adaptation of speech to audiences, while the latter is concerned with artful expressions of, and reflections on, the human condition.[12] What is sometimes forgotten is the reasoning behind such a distinction: although Wichelns admits that "oratory is no longer the chief means of communicating ideas to the masses," there is nevertheless "no likelihood that face to face persuasion will cease to be a principle mode of exerting influence . . . ."[13] The "here-and-now personal presence" of orality, to borrow Ong's phrase, is advanced as the ground of the field.[14] A closely related touchstone text is Carroll C. Arnold's "Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature" (1968), which advances a rationale for the study of oratory on the presence-effects of speech. Although Arnold opposes treating oratory as literature, he grounds the study of speech in the "intimacy" and contingency of interpersonal encounter.[15] Furthermore, like speaking in tongues, Arnold stresses repeatedly that "orality . . . is itself meaningful" beyond signification, and that the spoken word always entails risk and "danger."[16] "The extensive commitments extracted by orality," argues Arnold, "superimpose special dimensions of risk upon every action consciously or unconsciously directed to the eye and ear of an other."[17] Arnold argues that the terms "speaking," "spoke" and "'speech' can, and often do, function for us as terms stipulating something more subtle than an acoustic transmission . . . ."[18] This subtle "something more" of speech, this voice beyond word that is linked to "here-and-now personal presence," danger, contingency, and risk, is that thing in speech more than speech.

So what is this "something more" in speech than speech? At this juncture one may be tempted to say it is an illusion and make a Derridian turn by celebrating the abandonment of speech as an outmoded vestige of "logocentrism" and the dreaded metaphysics of presence.[19] "The voice is heard (understood)-that undoubtedly is what is called conscience-closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier," argues Derrida, "pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from the outside of itself."[20] Arnold's discussion of speech may seem to suggest that this "something more" of speech is, in fact, the auto-affection and core narcissism of a delusional autonomy, the very same illusion of self-transparency that leads to the symbolic and real destruction of alterity, other others who are different.[21] Yet Arnold's constant recourse to the "risk" of speech situations, to the fact a speaker must "stare his failure in the eye" when he or she misspeaks, his attention to the tacit, "acoustic bond" and relationship created between self and other in sonorous encounter, all of these elements that characterize the charged and relational excitement of speech situations seem to suggest that, for Arnold, the specificity of this something more in speech than speech is not of self but of the Other-the unassimilatable voice beyond the word that keeps human evil in at bay.

Insofar as hearing oneself speak-or as an infant, hearing oneself cry-"can be seen as an elementary formula of narcissism that is needed to produce a minimal form of self," subjectivity to requires the illusion of self-transparency.[22] Aside from the obvious romanticism of contingency, Arnold's stress on risk and failure suggests that this "something more" in speech than speech is the voice of an alien other, an unconscious reminder that one must listen as much as one must speak, that at a fundamental level we must depend on others to survive. For example, human infants are born helpless and require the stranger other to interpret the meaning of our cries in order to have our biological needs met. As an infant who cries but does not signify, the Other is responsible for our meaning. It is in this respect that Flournoy characterized Smith's glossolalia as "infantile," not only to dismiss her tongues as the product of some primal brand of auto-affection, but also to stress that it is the adult counterpart to the cries of an infant: speaking in tongues is often associated with prophecy because it is an uncontrollable voice of the Other, both the cries of dependency and need as well as the nonsensical screams of the stranger within.

Because the dialectic of our own cries and the voice of our mother (or whoever is the primary caregiver) combine to form first object of identification as speech, the human voice takes on the status of a "partial object" that represents something more than itself, something that betokens both the promise of love and its absence.[23] Speech, in other words, is inherently ambivalent as an object of love, for it can inspire fear as well. Mladen Dolar explains that

. . . for psychoanalysis, the auto-affective voice of self-presence and self-mastery was constantly opposed by its reverse side, the intractable voice of the Other, the voice that one could not control. But both have to be thought together: one could say that at the very core of narcissism there lies an alien kernel that . . . continually threatens to undermine it from the inside.[24]

In other words, the developing infant internalizes both good voices and bad voices as objects of identification in the process of becoming self-conscious: the mother scolds as well as comforts; the infant coos in pleasure as well as yawps from pangs of hunger.[25] Contrary to the singularity of voice in Derrida, Dolar suggests that psychoanalysis posits "a different metaphysical history of voice" alongside the metaphysics of presence, where at least one meaningful element of human speech "is considered dangerous, threatening, and possibly ruinous."[26] The uncontrollable and threatening voice of the Other, be it of one's god or one's mother, is not simply a voice object but also a voice abject: meaningful speech that does not signify, glossolalia, "the voice beyond logos, the lawless voice."[27] Notes

[12] Herbert A. Wichelns. "The Literary Criticism of Oratory." In Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, edited by Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 3-28. [13] Wichelns, "Literary Criticism," 4. [14] Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 113. [15] Carroll C. Arnold. "Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature." Some Edited Collection I Know Nothing About, edited by Some Dude and perhaps another Dude (Some city: Some Press, 19XX), 60-73. [16] Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 63. [17] Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 66. [18] Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 63. [19] Such a turn is a mistake, for Derrida notes "this illusion is the history of truth and it cannot be dissipated so easily." It is the precondition of self-consciousness. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 20. [20] Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20. [21] See Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2003), esp. 63-82. [22] Mladen Dolar, "The Object Voice." In SIC 1: Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 13. [23] Word limits prevent a thorough discussion, but the proper name of this object is what Lacan termed the objet [petit] a, the causal stimulus of desire. [24] Dolar, "Object Voice," 15. [25] For an intriguing theory of how infants negotiate and internalize the "good voice" and "bad voice," see Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3-43. [26] Dolar, "Object Voice," 16. [27] Dolar, "Object Voice," 18. By "voice abject" I mean to refer to the jouissance or unsymbolizable enjoyment of the terrible voice, as well as that tacit, creepy element of human speech that often escapes notice but is made more discernable in recordings of the disembodied voice, especially recordings of the speech of the deceased. I also mean to reference Kristeva's work on abjection, which she argues (persuasively I think) is associated with the maternal body. Insofar as the power to signify is associated with phallogocentrism in Western culture, it makes sense that woman is associated with phonetic excess (e.g., babble, gossip, speaking in tongues). See Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

we ankled up the garbage sound

Music: Colder: Heat

. . . or as Ethel Merman once sang, everything is coming up roses, thanks to warm weather and my twice-a-day watering. The last week has been quite warm, dry, and cloudless, the temp overing around 100 with those crystal blue skies. The older rose bushes don't seem to mind, but the newer antique bushes I planted get droopy about two or three in the afternoon (even after I waste them with water in the a.m.). Gardening has to be done at night or early in the morning, because the outside heat can become pretty miserable after about ten minutes or so.

I mentioned that my favorite shop, Howard Nursery, is closing shop and that I was going to purchase something, but I never reported what I got. Here's my score: a squirty Lion head! How hawt is that? It weighs a ton and, brand new, is quite expensive, but they sold it to me for half price. His constant pittle reminds garden vistors of their urge to pee; I was wanting more of a burble sound, but Mr. Lion, he sounds like someone taking a whiz. I suppose that is fitting, although those readers who know me would agree the more appropriate sound is probably a hearty "plop plop."

Speaking of pittle, as I type this I am reminded the Tonys are on tonight for fifteen hours or something. That's a loaded sentence, but I won't unpack it since doing so—like watching awards shows in general—induces a yawn. And, in the key of excretion, I wrote a bit today and even managed to get to the library (god I hate that place; whoever designed UT's main library needs to be shot—it's all windowless, 70s catty-cornered architectural confusion zone, akin to Las Vegas casinos only instead of slots you find diagonal row after diagonal row of misshelved books arranged in counter-intuitive sequences, and instead of chain-smoking grannies you have clueless work studies that ask you, "have you checked the shelf?" when you report a book is missing). I won't besmirch this entry by detailing the paper, since I want to stay in the Rose Zone, so I need to escape from the library imaginary too . . . which brings me to this: I took a bunch of photos of my modest garden this morning and made a gallery! At dinner on Friday, the dean's wife remarked that she was impressed by the size of my peppers.

glossolalia

Music: Orange Sector: bassprodukt My boi David Beard and Bill Keith are putting together an essay forum on the history of "the field," or rather, that discipline formerly known as Speech Communication. I've been invited to contribute, and I suspect as a provacateur. Since I've already tackled shitting and masturbation as allegorical fodder, I've decided to go for babble. Here's a teaser:

[A]ttanâ zabiné pi ten té iche tarvini mabûré nubé téri zée atèv Astané ezi dabé fouminé ni ié ti takâ tubré ne bibé ti ze umêzè!
--Ramié the Martian, as channeled by Hélène Smith[1]

For many years the psychiatrist Theodore Flournoy endured the mystical babble of Hélène Smith, a controversial Swiss medium who achieved fame in the nineteenth century by claiming she took astral trips to Mars.[2] During numerous séances Flournoy documented a number of Smith's "dramas," which frequently featured glossolalia or speaking in tongues after the psychic had fallen into a self-induced trance. Despite Smith's insistence that she was channeling the Martian speech of three übergalactic beings--Astané, Esenale, and Ramié--Flournoy concluded the Martian language was "only an infantile travesty of French."[3] Following William James' speculations about "automatisms" of prophecy,[4] Flournoy argued Smith's gifts of the tongue represented repressed, infantile desires and wishes that reside on the "subliminal strata," which "autohypnotization . . . puts in ebullition and causes to mount to the surface."[5] For the Swiss psychiatrist, glossolalia is voice beyond word, and its primary meaning is located in infantile emotions and memories. In short, for Flournoy speaking in tongues is the speech of the unconscious.

After five years studying the Martian-channeling medium, Flournoy reported that "all things become wearisome at last, and the planet Mars is no exception to the rule. The subliminal imagination of Mlle. Smith, however, will probably never tire of its lofty flights in the society of Astané, Esenale, and their associates."[6] Analogously, one may be tempted to dismiss yet another forum discussion on disciplinary identity as so much wearisome, printed prattle and "radical reflection" on the not-so-lofty status of rhetorical and communication studies in the academic imaginary.[7] One would be tempted, I say, were it not for the insightful research of Gerry Philipsen on the use of "speech" as a "substance term" that made the diverse practices in our so-called field coherent for over fifty years.[8] Why did speech last as long as it did, and why does it continue to hang around?[9] Philipsen's research suggests that "speech" was a concept that served as the primary and central object of study, but has subsequently been removed from most departmental nameplates in the United States. His history indicates that speech was chosen as the titular object for largely pragmatic reasons (e.g., explaining one's department to the dean), however, I wish to supplement this explanation by arguing that human speech as such harbors an uncanny quality that inspires "primitive" or infantile memories of fear and love. Reckoning with this element, which I term the "voice abject," not only better helps to explain the appeal of "speech" to our disciplinary forbears, but also the reason why speech continues to haunt us despite its presumed death. Like the Martian speech of Hélène Smith, we cannot resist speaking about speech because there is something beyond the word that eludes and haunts us in daily life.

NOTES

[1] The Martian language is translated thus: "Hidden world, very near to ours, coarse language, curious like the beings.-Astané, my powerful master and all powerful, alone is capable of doing it." Theodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Sonambulism with Glossolalia (New Hyde Park, NJ: University Books, 1963), 235.

[2] Hélène Smith is a pseudonym. Catherine Elise Muller was the medium's real name. See Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1991), s.v. "Hélène Smith."

[3] Flournoy, From India, 241.

[4] See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor/Penguin, 1958), esp. 204-206; and 394-400.

[5] Flournoy, From India, 259-260.

[6] Flournoy, From India, 261.

[7] Robert Hariman, "Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory." Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 38; also see Michael Burgoon. "A Kinder, Gentler Discipline: Feeling Good About Being Mediocre." Communication Yearbook 18 (1995): 464-479.

[8] Gerry Philipsen. "Notes and Queries on the Career of 'Speech' in Disciplinary Discourse: 1914-1928 and 1946-1954." Paper presented at the second preconference on the History of the Field at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association in Boston, Mass., November 2005.

[9] Obviously, the title of this journal is evidence enough, but so are the departments of Speech and Speech Communication as the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Georgia in Athens, and numerous, smaller colleges around the country.

capitalism

Music: Red Lorry Yellow Lorry: Blow

the beautiful people

Music: Judge Joe Brown

Oi! I'm feeling a little hurty today. My boi Christopher has been in town the last few days taking in Austin as a virgin encounter. Christopher and I were stationed in the Tundra for a couple of years together (he got his master's at the U of MN) and, after seven years of separation, we have been reunited in the same geographic region! I'm thrilled that he landed a job at Texas A&M, less than two hours away from Austin. I anticipate many weekends of evening rewards for good writing days. I suspect such weekends will occur mostly in Austin, but I'm not averse to trying the work-and-reward program in College Station.

The truth is, having Christopher so close is both a delight and a threat to my liver.

Anyhoo, we toured various Austin places. Yesterday we went to "Hippie Hollow," apparently a nudie beach without sand on lake Travis (we didn't go in 'cause it was $12, too much to see normal people naked), and ended up at the Oasis, a restaurant on the cliffs overlooking Lake Travis. The view was awesome. We looked for naked people, since Hippie Hollow was in view, but didn't see anything. Too bad, 'cause da google hits on this blog would have shot through the virtual ceiling.

Last night we did a mini pub-crawl, beginning with dinner at Mother's (the best vegetarian place in town), then to Lovejoy's, the Gingerman, and finally, the Whiskey Bar, where Amber was tending like a crazy fiend (my girl must make some bucks, but man, she was really working hard and the place was packed). At the Whiskey, as I was snapping shots of our posse, after a well-said comment Christopher made (he's good at that), I realized that my "new" friends here in Austin are quite beautiful. Marilyn Manson's song "the beautiful people" was playing in my head (not so mucht the stuff about steeples), and then I got to thinking: what's up with the matching hypothesis? According to researchers in my own discipline, attractive people tend to run around with other attractive people, while us less attractive people tend to hang with the, well, not as attractive people. However, this research ignores the power of token. As last night's token, I had a blast!

Here's a gallery of Christopher's visit and an extensive documentation of last night's shenanigans. Last night the truth of my having endured a year here finally set in. As a neurotic obsessive prone to abject loneliness in new places, last night I realized I was happy: I finally have some people to hang with and not be self-conscious around, and one of my best friends is moving a quick car ride away! Yay!

Now it's time to plan for dinner tonight for colleagues. I think I will prepare my signature gumbo over rice, cornbread, and green beans. The starter will be shrimp Creole over lettuce, I think. I would go all fancy French, but, I have a feeling very few of my new peeps here have had decent gumbo. I'd like to be known for something other than my magical token fetish-power.

rearrival of the petulant demand: the bitcher is back

Music: Siouxsie & the Banshees: Hyaena Last March I posted about the increasing, confrontational style of students who understand education only in terms of the customer service model (and the shift of teachers from their role as parental surrogates—and therefore authorities often afforded some degree of respect). In my post titled "the arrival of the petulant demand,"  I provided an example: a nasty email from a student who cut corners (you know, plagiarized himself) in a journal assignment, and consequently, received a grade that compromised his desire for graduate school. I won't rehash the story except to say there is something of a "mental case," or a case to be made for mental instability (well, mine is well known; this guy seems to tempt violence).

Apparently he's not willing to "let it go and move on." He emailed my dean early this week; the dean responded as deans are wont to do (with sympathy toward the student, but punted to the chair). Of course, I contacted my chair and the college dean of students after I had a phone conversation with this student and he metamorphosed from a smart, if not petualnt, guy to a raving hysteric (I told my chair I had a slight worry this guy might go "postal"--just a slight one).  I'm having dinner with the dean this week, so hopefully if the issue comes up I can detail the whole blow by blow saga. Regardless, as further proof of the Notorious Ph.D's thesis that I am (however wittingly) a "weird shit magnet," I present exhibit B:

Fwd: Re: In regards to Dr. Joshua Gunn

Doctor______, my name is _____ and i was a student in Dr. Joshua Gunn's rhetoric of popular music class last semester. I am writing you this email to express my displeasure with him as a professor. I'm sure you've gotten many emails about his "anti-establishment" behaviour and his propensity for foul language during lecture, these are not where my concerns lie. In fact, i think those characteristics make him an entertaining and effective lecturer. Dr. Gunn demonstrated a complete lack of ethical principals in my personal dealings with him, the details of which are long and arduous and will be provided upon request (my aim is not to get my grade changed or anything like that, simply to voice my opinion that he is not a professor of the caliber that the college should be employing) He is perfectly willing to flat out lie to his students (only to unwittingly reveal his lies when he calls your home to rudely dismiss your problem wiuthout even knowing what it is and then hang up on you),and in fact, his general attitude seems to be to coast by without actually doing any work on his was to a nice fat tenur. Which, by the way, he actively campaigns for during course evaluations, encouraging students to give him good evaluations so that he may make tenur quickly. This, i believe, is not only extremely unethical but also presumptious and highly premature considering it was his fist semester at UT. This email is already long enough and you no doubt are a very busy man, so feel free to contact me if you would like further details about his unethical behaviour, otherwise i would just like to reiterate my extreme dissatisfaction with him as a teacher. Thank you, --petulant student.

Now, the dean is a very smart man and skilled at reading rhetoric, so surely he smells the nutty-goodness here. When you tell students that evaluations are important because they are used to make tenure decisions, and that if they evaluate me poorly, they should take time to explain why and the reasons for lowballing so I can improve, that's usually not construed as an active campaign for good evaluations. It's a smart kid making snide. Surely this student knows about the pizza or donuts on the last day routine, which, I have never done. Surely the guy realizes spell checking is a good idea with missives to the dean? Regardless, this is an attempt at character assassination . . . um, five months later? He must've not gotten into grad school.Clearly his plagiarism is my fault. I have no ethics or morals. I'm a complete fake, a pretend anti-establishment sham.  Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain (he was always a little man; the student has made a false assumption from the get go)!

all hail Lucifer, light bearer

Music: Electric Hellfire Club: Electronomicon Having taken the oath of Ipsissimus some years ago, I am not at liberty to disclose a number of secrets, although I admit no one would be too upset about the truth in these cynical times. Like love, the date is just a number. From the preterist vantage, presumably it was a magical sigil of Nero, for we have learned St. John of Patmos had opened the sixth seal of Enoch with the wrong call (atleast if Sir John Dee and his faithful Kelley are to be trusted). Nevertheless, six months ago she was chosen and marked and told (presumably by Asmodeus, a fallen angel, now the poster boy of wrath) unto her a “demon seed” would be born. Since Dee's language of Angels has been perfected (our thanks to Levi and Crowley), the proper calls have been made and the seals have been opened, the consequence of which many occultists believe was the Second World War. The ascent of the United States as the world hegemon (and the evils done in the name of "freedom," which we all know is economic liberty for a few, the New Libertarianism or "neoliberalism" if you want) is an unmistakable index of the rearrival of a certain, strange temporal field.

What is more important than the number is the day of the week; as Einstein and his ilk knew, the mathematics of physics should be reconceived in terms of fields; analogously, the “mark of the Beast” should really be understood as the moment of the beast, which is why it is not so much Nero's number as it was his station or emplacement in a certain temporal field. The number is overdetermined only during certain periods of time and symbolic convergences (that is, when mathematically mapable moments in time and the symbolic interpenetrate, Crowley showed us in his many commentaries on The Book of the Law). Lacanian psychoanalysis has a similar concept derived from set theory and associative technique: the "button tie." Scottish Rite masonry falls short on this count: when the divine name of the coming god is revealed in the thirty third degree, the corresponding time was deliberately repressed (it was a conspiracy wrought by Albert Pike, fearful that he would live to see the time; he didn't, of course).

So, we should reckon with the fact that the End of Days begins on a day, not so much a number (that number is merely a signifier; it could have been 678). Gabriel is the host who ministers and messages on Mondays (which is why Shamain “rules” first heaven on Mondays as well). Tuesdays are the province of Camael (Macon is the heavenly mirror), a do-er, not a thinker, and basically cleans the heavenly house. Eyes averted, Francis Barrett reported in cipher that Ophis and the Spirit of the Antichrist (with the protection of Astaroth and Mammon) are able to penetrate the secular sphere and work some influence. Today is one of those days, as was April 10, 1904 and April 30, 1969 (for information on the latter, read about the Eagle's strangely successful and foreboading album, Hotel California).

The truth of the revelation--which, I would underscore, is widely known and felt but dismissed as "superstition"--is vouchsafed by the fact that today is a Tuesday. What to read more? I recommend the teachings of Michael A. Aquino and The Temple of Set, as well as the writings of Stephen E. Flowers. Yankee Rose!

postcoiltal

Music: Love & Rockets: Lift Today I am going to visit my favorite garden shop, Howard's Nursery, which Roger and Amanda said is electing to "go out of business." I'm sad to see this place go, as it is a sort of "a little more pricey" mom and pop shop where people know your name. In any event, perhaps I'll pick up a neglected bit of statuary (I've already got all of the gnomes, though), but I do know I need to buy my third garden hose. The first one sucked, and the second, despite its price and overblown self-touting packaging, sucks even worse. Where do I get a friggin' decent garden hose in this town? How does that Bright Eyes song go? "I want a hose I don't have to love, I want a flexi-pipe that doesn't suck."

Speaking of hoses, my legs are cold (why doesn't air-conditioning ever have a "medium" or "baby bear's porridge" setting?). And, I'm happy to report the long, winding history of my "Hystericizing Huey" essay has come to an end, the kink in the line has, well, straightened out.

Some of you long-time faithful readers--all two of you--may remember my journey with this essay began almost three years ago. After a successful conference paper on Huey Long as a phallic master, I whipped up the thing into a psychoanalytic critique of demagoguery (which is really about Bush II . . . duh) and sent it to Rhetoric and Public Affairs, where it was rejected, and then to Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, where it was rejected, and then to the Quarterly Journal of Speech, where it languished for six months and, then and only then, was it rejected. I finally sent it to the Western Journal of Speech, where it was recommended that I revise and resubmit it, which I did, and now, finally, the damn thing will see print. Whew. I knew it was a decent essay, I just knew it was. I just needed some reviewer to actually take the time to read it and give the thing a fair shake. Which Barb Biesecker did; all hail "the Barb." She reads what she reviews, and if what she reads has potential, she'll help you realize it.

Anyhoo, you two may also remember I've documented the journey of this manuscript to print, at the behest of my students. I've updated the web pages that chronicle the invention of an essay to its publication. For the first part of the story, click this link. For the second part of the story (focused solely on Western), you can click this link. These pages have PDF scans of various cover letters, essay reviews, drafts and revisions of the essay, and so on. You're free to point your students to it, or to live vicariously through my failure, whatever. Just don't cite the pages in anything without checking with little ol' me, okie? Anyhoo, I was hoping the story would end in publication so the thing will do that teacherly thing that network television does: you know, pay homage to that song by Sly and the Family Stone, "you can make it if you tryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy." To which we should add: "it just may take some time" and "people may be mean along the way." Not that people are intentionally mean. Except maybe one certain blind reviewer from Penn State. But he and I made up and made friends; I kinda like him now.

I've not heard the comment "oh, but publishing is so easy for you" in almost a year I think. I don't know why, but maybe I've bitched and moaned enough in public about the process that people started to get the idea they shouldn't say that. For whatever the reason, I will underscore again that publishing is not easy, but it does happen. One must be persistent and resign oneself to the process taking many months, or in the case of "Hystericizing Huey," many years. Regardless, I've said it before and I'll say it again: for tenure you must be a terrier dog, not an Einstein.

Alright, the rose bushes are thirsty, the petunia looks sickly, and the car needs a good wash. Time to buy a hose and squirt stuff.

good times/long play

new pages

Music: Lehrer NewsHour

I finally got around to revamping--and downsizing--my main webpages. I would gladly welcome comments and suggestions. Since I work entirely in a macintosh environment, I'm never quite sure what the pages look like on a windows-based machine. Does everything look okie dokie?

deflation

Music: Coil: Moon's Milk

TWO DEATHS

Last Tuesday Roger scored four guest list spots for a posse at the Hank 3 show, so we went expecting yodelish twang for hours. I had been told he did throw in some punk covers, but I had no idea that there was going to be a massive bait-and-switch maneuver. The crowd was promiscuous: rednecks and cowboys were littered about with their rebel ball caps and gallon hats; goth chicks with tattoos downed Lone Star while bubbas hooted and hollered along with Hank's country musings (mostly about getting "fucked up" and why "pop country sucks"). The bassist had a Mohawk and looked menacing. Hank himself was a lanky boy with tattoos all over and a long ponytail . . . Yeehaaaaawwww we were getting' down.

About an hour into the show, however, this black-clad tattoo guy comes out and starts doing some screaming; it's like this thing Linkin Park started where one guy sings and then the other "comments" in between, like call and response, but, you know, screaming. It was a strange "country-punk" sound. Then, we were told a new artist was going to join them on stage. Hank left and this dude with a black long-sleeved shirt and a rebel had with long hair came back and started screaming in song too. The music gradually became more aggressive, and eventually a rock/funk bass replaced the stand up bass, and the drumming picked up to a double-barreled death metal litany of thuds. Soon the music was unabashed death metal. The bubbas and cowboys went to the back of the floor, while the metal heads and gothy types started crowding the stage. Roger says to me, "when's Hank coming back?" And I says, "Roger, that's Hank—he just changed his shirt, put on a different hat, and let down his hair."

It was a hilarious scene and very fun. I thought that the music would return to twang, but after a half hour they were still pummeling the crowd with uber-macho "GRRREWWWAAAARRRRRRR!" barbaric yawpage, and so we left. It was truly a trip seeing all those different kinds of fans in one room.

SELF IMPORTANCE

I enjoyed the Rhetoric Society of America conference in Memphis this past weekend. The weather was quite humid, and I was amazed at how easily my body has adjusted to the Austin "dry heat," as it was quite uncomfortable to be outside there. As is the case with most southern meeting places, the Peabody had the air conditioning jacked up to near frigid levels, and without a sport coat one was likely to get frostbite.

I didn't do many panels; the ones I saw with Longhorns speaking were great, but some of the others I saw were not. Part of the problem is that rhetoricians in my institutional affiliation—Communication Studies (or "Speech," to hear an outsider say it)—have very different questions than rhetoricians in English departments. I try to read stuff across both fields, but obviously not everyone does. It can be annoying hearing calls for "civic engagement" and for teaching rhetorical criticism to undergraduates when, well, when "Speech" people have been doing that for fifty years. Also, I'm simply amazed at how poorly some people present their work. I'm far from "great" myself, but I do practice my stuff—a lot—before I offer it at a conference. I also try to consider my likely audience, and craft what I say to the audience, even if I must compromise this or that subtlety or complexity. Let's just say far too many people do not follow such a model. Some folks speak for twenty minutes after they should; some think everyone has read some obscure text from the time of Columbus; and worst of all, some people take themselves way too seriously and have no sense of humor whatsoever. I detest panels where no one laughs. I can see a place for the somber if one's panel is on atrocity or something, but c'mon folks: LAUGH.

Our panel on "Sizing Up/As the Symptom" went fairly well, although Ken had to stay home with his sick munchkin and Barb was attending the nuptials of a friend. Chris and I began with a humorous homage to Beavis and Butthead (the room we were in was the Cockage Room, or something like that). The room was also freezing, so a bunch of folks bailed toward the end to warm up. I've posted a draft of my complete manuscript (not the one I presented) here: "Size Matters: Polytoning Rhetoric's Perverse Apocalypse." I've sent it off for review, although I suspect getting this essay in print will not be easy, at least if the RSA gossip about how "vulgar" and "inappropriate" "ShitText" is any measure. The problem with psychoanalytic theory is that "it goes there." Few people like to "go there" (I mean, I don't on the therapist's couch myself).

Anyhoo, the worst part of the conference was waiting for the elevators. They were very slow. Sometimes you had to wait an hour. Yes, that's right, an hour. You see, the Peabody has a fountain in the middle of the lobby that has ducks paddling around in it. In the morning and the evening, a red carpet leading to the elevator is rolled out for them. A huge crowd swarms around the elevators and fountain for this event . . . their freakin' ducks, for Christ's' sake! It was cute the first time I saw it, but then it quickly became annoying. By the end of the weekend, I wanted to poison the ducks and gouge out my eyes. The ducks were everywhere and on everything: soap, pats of butter, stationary, matchbooks, etc. They only thing the Peabody lacks for each room is an alarm clock that quacks!

The best part of the conference was talking with friends, often one-on-one, hiding from the conference traffic. And I met a few new faces, which was great.

BLOGCRASTINATION AND THE VOICE ABJECT

A'ight, I need to get started on the next project and stop what I shall term "Blogcrastination." Blogcrastination is using blogging to stave off working and researching, especially of the writerly sort. So to get in the mood: I'm now working on a short forum essay tentatively titled "Speech Melancholia, or, the Stuttering Discipline." This is also something related to the issue of disciplinarity owing to a special thingie David Beard and Bill Keith are putting together on the history of Speech Communication. My argument is that Speech was founded on the death of oratory, which makes the discipline fundamentally mournful. The problem, however, is that every few years or so "speech" as an object comes back and sometime tries to re-center it. Currently it's back in terms of "voice," but it will be killed off again (oh, as the logocentric abuse of self-affection or something). So the idea here is that we cannot mourn speech properly, but rather, cycle through its death and rebirth (melancholia) such that the field "stutters." Now, I'm not sure what the consequence to this observation will be: is this a good or bad thing? I don't know. I'm prepared to argue we could do more work that seeks to integrate speech, not as a "rhetorical situation" or something existential, but as a love object that we are uniquely suited to theorize into the twenty-first century. As I am trying to suggest in the book project, speech is the ghost of our postmodern times.

jukebox teacher

Music: Indochine: Alice and June I am returned home, only to find this message in the inbox:

Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 18:36:07 -0500 (CDT) From: Lazyass@HOTMAIL.COM To: jukebox_teacher@pushbutton.com Subject: [2006_summer_72885_CMS_367] 1st day?

When is the 1st day of class?

Thank you,

Lazy A. Student

My response: "Go to the frontpage of the UT website and click 'academic calender.'" Incidentally, class starts on Thursday, but I didn't tell him that. Report on Memphis, Hank III, and my alcoholic friends once I recover from my conference hangover.

conference cooing and other crap

Music: Wolfsheim: Casting Shadows I’m hailing from my hotel room at the Peabody in downtown Memphis. I’ve stolen way (or hidden) just to decompress and relax without name-tagged people milling about. The first day of such socialization is enjoyable, but after a while, you sort of go into this “zone”: withdraw to the hotel room for a “breather” or leave the conference for some alone time with a friend. I was musing about how hotel rooms at conferences become decompression chambers . . . .

I’ve re-engaged some dear friends and have been having a marvelous time just catching up. Last night a number of us went to Pat O’Brian's, which is an exact replica of the New Orleans establishment. It was a very strange feeling being there, for many reasons. Shaun pulled out the Baudrillard theory hammer and went to town, which encouraged us to start thinking critically about the Beale street scene . . . it is definitely Disney-fied. Creepy, sort of sad. The Bourbon street imaginary has traveled up the Mississippi and state-i-fied too: Beale street is exactly (scarily) like Bourbon street, only cleaner and with dozens upon dozens of cops policing the scene with naughty stares. As we left for the evening there was a barricade where people coming into the street were padded down and/or scanned with a metal detector. We agreed that if New Orleans gets rebuilt (they say little to nothing has been done), it will come to resemble Beale Street. It’s really sort of sad.

Well, I must head downstairs for the Grand Ho-Hah Luncheon. There is going to be a speech by Patricia Bizzell on “Rhetoric and Religion.” A good topic, though, she’s done some talks before at RSA that were not so good. I wish it was Kirt Wilson. Last night his talk was sold out, so I didn’t get to go, but reports were of the “best keynote I’ve ever seen” variety. Anyhoo, will blog next week (I must remember to report on Hank III: god was THAT a weird show). . . . UPDATE: Ok, I left the Bizzell talk before it ended because it was so unbearable and I had to document my agony. A dreadful speech about contemplative mysticism, basically, but it went on too long, and the cadence really make it hard to focus on what was being said, and this was the wrong audience . . . it was indulgent and awful.  Gotta love conferences.  Now to prep for my panel here in an hour.

substitution

Music: Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Welcome to the Pleasuredome

My Austin dog Roger got us guestlisted for the Hank III show tomorrow, and I'm very excited! I've not been to a live show since fall semester; plus, a punk-country twang is just what I need, and Hank Williams III will provide it in buckets (yeeeeeehaaaaawwwww!!!). Ministry is coming July, and that is also a must-see (the new Ministry album is the most Bush-hating of them all-it's angry!). Following the show tomorrow, the next highlight is a reading group meeting. I've really missed having a reading group of some sort, so it's nice to be invited into one. We're tackling Lacan's last seminar, which I've read in bits but admit it's hard to get through without a "group effort" (more brains are always better than one).

Finally, I'll be heaving out on Saturday for the biannual meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, one of my favorite conferences--at least it used to be before the leadership doubled the fees and starting holding its conferences in upscale hoity-toity places like the Peabody. Jesus H. Christ: rhetoricians don't make this kind of money, people. C'mon!

Anyhoo, yes, I've finally finished my "piece." I think it's as good as it's going to get without some feedback, so, I stopped tinkering on it and mailed it to the respondent. I know the company of the panel and the respondent will be good for what I have to say (and surely I'll have my pee pee cut right off), but I dunno about the rest of the audience. One thing I've noticed, especially after discovering Zizek and Lacan about four years ago, is that I'm quite comfortable with the "taboo" (I mean, holes and poles and various modes of stuffing is what its all about anyway)--so much so that I no longer have reliable (disciplinary) censors. Anyhoo, for all zero of you who have been anxious awaiting the conclusion, here it is:

ON SEEKING SUBSTITUES, OR, THE ARRIVAL OF THE ALWAYS ARRIVING

If we understand the traditional apocalyptic as a characteristically phallogocentric enterprise, the analogies of the pervert and the apocalyptic prophet interpenetrate: it feels good to discriminate in the tone of impending catastrophe, even when told to stop. Consequently, I have suggested that the debates over Big Rhetoric can be alternately approached as sounding an apocalyptic tone that is symptomatic of perversion. Such a conclusion suggests that those who continue to address the identity of rhetoric's field or undisciplined discipline might attend more studiously to the role of affect and emotions via the symptomology of tone. It also suggests that those who continue to prophesy the castration of rhetoric's prowess are themselves committing a kind of violence by excluding those who reject the monotony of death knells.

In the key of postfeminism, some might argue that phallogocentric character of traditional apocalyptic suggests the primary exclusion effected by rhetoric's version was the work of feminism, and that we seem to have overcome misogyny thanks to important, critical work by "feminist" critics. For example, in 1994 Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter argued in a controversial essay, "Disciplining the Feminine," that a "masculinist disciplinary ideology" governed the norms of scholarship in rhetorical (and Communication) studies, especially the "demand for a refined, ahistorical, smoothly finished univocality" (383). They critique of a 1992 report on the "Active Prolific Female Scholars in Communication" and the remarks of blind reviewers regarding their criticism of the report (see Hickson, Stacks, and Amsbary 350-356). Blair, Brown, and Baxter castigate the report for, first, advancing a postfeminist rationale that works to obscure masculinist ideology (e.g., that because there are "prolific females" working in communication studies, we no longer need to scrutinize male privilege), and second, for advancing a "male paradigm" that excludes thought and work that is not impersonal and abstract, that does not heed strict boundaries between disciplinary territories, that does not promote the centrality of individual autonomy, and that does not reify dominant social hierarchies. This paradigm is signaled by its chief figure, the phallus:

Equally offensive is [the authors'] description of their report as an attempt to establish a "yardstick for active, female researchers in communication." Hickson et al.'s report-as-yardstick hearkens to the vulgar (and frequently brutal) political arrangements characterizing dominant/non-dominant group relations in times we have come to believe were "less enlightened." The yardstick (along with its metonymic associates, such as "the ruler" and "the rod") often functioned as the instrument used to "articulate" and reinforce the punitive politics of domination and oppression. . . . the yardstick (or its equivalent) is used by one individual to discipline another. In so doing, discipline and those traditionally charged with its preservation, are maintained. (393)

The authors criticize the responses to their critique by showing how cruelly the rod was used to dismiss their arguments as un-scholarly.After Blair, Brown, and Baxter's important exposé, some rhetoricans may be tempted to argue that our phallogocentric apocalyptic has been tempered by this and similar critiques (e.g., Biesecker 140-161). That the conference planners of the most recent RSA meeting in Memphis chose "Sizing Up Rhetoric" as the conference theme should temper any such optimism, as should an understanding of the apocalyptic tone as monotonously perverse. Blair, Brown, and Baxter's critique has been misheard, for the critique is not leveled at the level of the word. Insofar as prohibitions and protests have failed to put an end our apocalyptic perversion, then, I shall come to an end by diagnosing why our strange brand of enjoyment is overdetermined, and next by suggesting that there is another, more cheerful apocalyptic tone we might sound from time to time, in chorus with Blair, Baxter, Brown, Gaonkar, and others more wary of "discipline."

Whether from its institutional and political history or rhetoric's centuries-long status as a supplement, rhetorical studies is foundationally and fundamentally an apocalyptic and perverse discipline. As the Blair, Brown, and Baxter essay demonstrates, rhetoricians have been prohibited from this or that perversion many times and in many ways in the past thirty years. We can locate many more examples in meta-arguments about disciplinary identity: reacting to the rather grand (if not globalist) gesture of Lloyd Bitzer and Edwin Black's edited collection of papers from the Wingspread Conference, The Prospect of Rhetoric, Robert L. Scott warned that any project to "define rhetoric" would castrate its multiple prospects (Bitzer and Black; Scott 81-96).i As the scene of violence shifted from defining rhetoric as a thing to that of Big Rhetoric, apocalyptic warnings continue to issue forth from ever bolder prophets: Steve Fuller has decried the emasculation of rhetorical studies by "upstart disciplines" (he means the nebulous "cultural studies") and warns of our imminent demise without some sort of "rhetorical reclamation" and disciplinary protectionism (paras. 18; 32-43). Herbert W. Simons counters that without a more "hospitable" attitude toward "cultural studies," rhetorical studies is cut off from academic, political, and cultural realities ("Rhetorical Hermeneutics"; "Globalization"). Michael Leff continues to insist that in the reality of globalization, the rhetoricians in Communication Studies have failed to "develop and interpretive frame supple enough" to mediate texts and contexts and, therefore, comes impotent on/to the "interdisciplinary table" (91). In Communication Studies at least, the phallogocentric tone of apocalyptic absolutism is nigh ubiquitous.

As the ambivalent and productive reactions to Gaonkar's double whammy attest, locating the scene of apocalypse does not necessarily recommend muffling its tone. As the failure to reckon with Blair, Brown, and Baxter's critique of "masculine ideology" suggests, muffling this tone may be impossible. In fact, Caputo stresses that losing the apocalyptic is not even preferable, for there is "nothing more useful than the shrill voice of apocalyptic outcries when the killing curtain of censorship is about to close," nothing more stirring than "a black American eschatological apocalyptic who claims to have a dream . . ." (94). We need our protest apocalyptic-we need, in other words a tone urgency for our politics-disciplinary and otherwise. Certain apocalyptic tones, even those that reek of righteousness, are indispensable.ii The pickle at this juncture is not how to avoid the unavoidable logic of discrimination. As Kenneth Burke maintained, it seems as symbol-using creatures humans cannot help but discriminate between good and bad others. Given the human tendency toward enjoyment, there is only management and substitution, not abolition. The issue becomes, then, how do rhetoricians embrace or accept their disciplinary perversions via substitution or without always excluding alternative apocalpytics? In revisiting his arguments in favor of the globalization of rhetoric, I think Herbert W. Simons frames the problem well (at the same time as he, nevertheless, re-inscribes it):

What I most regret [about the Big Rhetoric debate] is the pressure from both camps [protectionists versus globalists] to choose sides. Much that they contribute is complementary or cross-cutting or mutually exclusive; very little requires choosing sides. Cultural studies lack traditional rhetoric's understanding of invention, argument, and style. Rhetoric lacks the understanding of power . . . . Why, then, can't those of us in Communication all get along? (paras. 40-41)

In light of Derrida's critique of Kant, the answer to Simons' questions is that neither side recognizes their old solidarity in the phallogocentric mode of apocalyptic, that false binary of big and small (when there never was the thing at all).So how better to escape the logocentric deadlock of Big Rhetoric, once we recognize from the start that forging a contract or agreement among very different kinds of parties only threatens the hidden premise of exclusion? First, we come to recognize our own perverse complicity in apocalyptic, which has been my primary goal in this essay. Just like a drug addict, the pervert must own her symptom to stop hurting the self and others. Of course, if the tenor of my remarks is any measure, locating the apocalyptic is in itself an apocalyptic gesture, which returns us again to Derrida's reading of Kant's apocalyptic tone:

Kant speaks of modernity, and the mystagogues of his time, but you will have quickly perceived . . . how many transpositions we could indulge in on the side of our so-called modernity. I will not say that today everyone would recognize him- or herself on this or that side, purely and simply. But I am sure it could be demonstrated that today every slightly organized discourse is found or claims to be found on both sides . . . . And this inadequation, always limited itself, no doubt indicates the densest difficulty. Each of us is the mystagogue and the Auklärer of an other. (142)

One tacit presumption of the Big Rhetoric debate is that rhetorical studies is alone in its inability to properly mourn its always-coming/always-already-have-been death, but Derrida teaches us that this has been the story of philosophy since the pre-Socratics. So too does a cursory search for apocalyptic in other disciplines-even those presumed to be "established"-yield lettered hand-wringing and up-bucking in dueling tones of urgency: summarizing the argument of Neil McLaughlin, Melanie White explains that "Canadian sociology is apparently in danger: it is in danger of losing its intellectual vitality and disciplinary viability as a consequence of structural shifts that threaten to undermine its unique contribution to intellectual life" (337). Such remarks from our sociologist friends up north do indeed sound familiar, and should provide some modicum of comfort that the apocalyptic is shared by many disciplines in the academy. I am tempted to argue that "the sky is falling" should abide the founding motto of any academic discipline ("in the beginning there was the error").iiiAnother reason to reckon with rhetorical studies as an inherently apocalyptic field is that we find the tone in our earliest, celebrated texts about rhetorical criticism. As is the case, perhaps, with any academic field, the notion of a "recent" or "just arrived" apocalyptic tone is wrong, for we can trace this sound of urgency to the origins of rhetorical studies before the English and Speech Communication trajectories ossified. In one of the foundational texts often taught to rhetoric students, "The Literary Criticism of Oratory" originally published in 1925, Herbert A. Wichelns establishes rhetorical criticism on the dying art of public speech-making, all the while insisting that "it's not dead yet!" "Oratory-the waning influence of which is often discussed in current periodicals," says Wichelns, "has definitely lost the established place in literature that it once had" (3). Moreover, it "is true that other ways of influencing opinion have long been practiced, that oratory is no longer the chief means of communicating ideas to the masses" (4). Nevertheless, in the din of those who have proclaimed the death of oratory, Wichlens makes a space for its study in the humanities. Since the beginning there was a death, be it "rhetoric" or "oratory" or "speech."

Understanding rhetorical studies as always sounding or responding to an apocalyptic tone that provides a perverse satisfaction through discrimination should also lead us to ask new questions about our tone. Rhetoricians seem irrevocably wed to the apocalyptic because it is our innermost, traumatic scene of identity. So how do we keep from collapsing onto that monotone of phallogocentrism? Because Derrida's writings on apocalyptic register his recognition that he speaks in an apocalyptic tone, it is instructive to see how he distinguishes his tone from that of Kant and the other (good ol') boys. The first step is in understanding how the apocalyptic tone tends toward "death," a mood of gloomy endings. Fenves explains that, insofar as the apocalyptic is in some sense unavoidable because conflict is unavoidable, "tone" takes on an added significance:

The possibility that an announcement hides certain unspoken clauses lies in its tone; tonality is, in turn, the preeminent vehicle of catastrophic revelations. To hear tonality otherwise---to write in a tone and of a tone and with a tone without the key polemical categories of inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion-is, then, the task of Derrida's address [critique of Kant]. (3)

When detailing the binaries set up by Kant between "metaphor and concept, literary mystagogy and true philosophy" Derrida insists on not taking sides or to "come to a decision," to side with or against death (138). Indeed, barring scenes of dire consequence (that is, the possible real death or harm to an individual), it would seem that not taking sides on the issue of death, on a definitive and absolute end, seems the attitudinal and tonal prescription. Derrida's critical mode of deconstruction is an "apocalyptics to dislocate destinations, derail them, drive them verstimmt, break up concordants, . . . defy the postal police, be the outspoken advocate of what is taken to be inadmissible," says Caputo (94). "The apocalyptic tone recently adapted in deconstruction is upbeat and affirmative, expectant and hopeful,"iv and we might add, polytonal. This polytonal apocalyptic is, as Caputo puts it, "apocalypse without apocalypse."With this affirmative apocalyptic in mind, the one that (usually) refuses to "take sides" or enter into (definitional) contracts, rhetoricians can better reinvestigate the tablets that Gaonkar brought.v Speaking of the later tablet, "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science," Gaonkar reports he has been

criticized for opposing the globalization of rhetoric and for promoting a narrow and exclusive view of rhetoric as a civic art. This is a completely erroneous reading. I am neither for nor against globalization. I simply point out that globalization is an unavoidable consequence of the interpretive turn in contemporary rhetoric. ("Close Readings" 346)

Tellingly, rather than "take a side" and enter, of course, into the contract centered by a quest for mastery, Gaonkar proposes a "close reading of a third kind" that offers up the expanse of a body of water, alternately "opaque" and "translucent," as its guiding metaphor.vi Nevertheless, although acknowledging the unwillingness to be emplaced, Schiappa argues that Gaonkar "implicitly" takes Big Rhetoric to task (Schiappa 265). Simons argues that Gaonkar's use of the "rhetoric of science as the test case for Big Rhetoric" was "fallacious," and adds, "just why it is that Gaonkar was offering these arguments was left somewhat unclear," but that "he had serious misgivings about the movement toward globalization" ("Globalization" para. 20). Michael Leff has noted the general confusion over Gaonkar's stance, but discerns that "Gaonkar wants Communication-rhetoricians to distinguish their role within a discipline that sponsors grounded interpretive work and their position within a sweeping interdisciplinary movement" (91). As for me, I am not so sure what Gaonkar wants, but I do think that I catch his tone: it is devilish, it is anticipatory, it is blissfully perverse in a sense that substitutes one blindness for another-one that does not exclude. The polytonal, multi-voiced mystagogue is always announcing that something is coming--an alien encounter with exploratory probes, perhaps--but finds cause for celebration even if that thing never arrives.

NOTES   i For a more modest reengagement with the project of defining both rhetoric and rhetorical studies as a field, see Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill edited collection, The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition.ii In The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America, James Darsey has suggested that erring too much on the side of deliberation emasculates protest politics and reformist rhetorics of social change (see esp. 199-210).

iii [author reference removed for blind review]

iv Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 98.

v In other words, my argument is that a recourse to a traditional apocalyptic tone-one that tempts the logic of the Same at the expense of the other-may be justifiable as a political strategy to save lives. It seems to me less justifiable as a tone in academic discussion. This would imply not taking a side with either "little rhetoric" or "Big Rhetoric," but rather, taking up the question of definition and disciplinarity solely in the institutional or political context (e.g., how to keep the program getting axed by the dean).

vi I am reminded of Irigaray's Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche.

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?

NOTES 1 Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies," 74. For more on this evangelical riff, see Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn, "Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?' Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (Fall 2005): 83-105. 2 Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies," 71. 3 Aune, The Politics of Rhetorical Studies," 74. 4 See Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXIV. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1995), 238-258. 5 Barry Brummett, Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric (New York: Praeger, 1991), 9-10. 6 For the endnote readers or "bottom feeders" such as me, the suggestion here is that "tone" marks an intersection of psychoanalysis and rhetoric; tone is unquestionably a "rhetorical" quality, but it is not a word. Tone also registers the sound of desire and enjoyment. 7 Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution [excerpt], in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (Boston: Bedford Books, 2001), 881. 8 For a Lacanian riff on a similar point ("mode"), see Mladen Dolar, "The Object Voice," in SIC 1: The Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), esp. 19-20. 9 Peter Fenves, "The Topicality of Tone." Introduction to Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, edited by Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 3. 10 Fenves, "The Topicality of Tone," 11. 11 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 89. 12 Fenves, "Topicality of Tone," 15. 13 Immanuel Kant, "On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy," translated by Peter Fenves. In Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, edited by Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 64; this is a Derridian reading of this essay; see Jacques Derrida, "On a Newly Arisen Apocalptic Tone in Philosophy, translated by John Leavey, Jr. in the same collection, 138-139. 14 Derrida, "On a Newly Arisen," 138. 15 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 90. 16 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 90. 17 Kant, "On a Newly Arisen," 64-65. 18 Derrida, "On a Newly Arisen," 138. 19 Derrida, "On a Newly Arisen," 139. 20 See Luce Irigarary, Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press , 1985), esp. 28-30; and Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), esp. 68-85. 21 Derrida, "On a Newly Arisen," 139.

going blind

Music: The Beatles: Live at the BBC Well, in my post-finals-week-haste-post-haste I've been scurrying somewhat to get this RSA conference paper composed; I hit the slipstream of my shadow (the one who masturbates, of course) and churned out some more. Here's stage two of the argument, prefaced with a nugget from the introduction:

As the emissary running before--or catching up to, take your pick--the body, I admit that the crisis of opening(s) is indeed one of discipline: whence this repetitious compulsion to measure or recover or remove or insert this thing "rhetoric," and how might we read the seemingly immeasurable (discussion of our) supplementary as a rhetorical symptom itself? In psychoanalytic terms, the question could be rendered this way: do we identify the uncanny persistence of the "big rhetoric" debate at scholarly conferences and in rhetorical literature as a productive neurosis central to our unique brand of scholarly invention? Insofar as the last decade has registered numerous self-assessments in edited collections and journals, one can easily argue our neurosis has been productive-at least on the page.9 Yet it can also be argued that this neurosis has been milked for too long, especially because a number of scholars recognize that, for better or worse, rhetoric has already "globalized" or got "big." Perhaps, then, we can interpret these seemingly never-ending moments of self-measurement as something more-perhaps something Other-than an institutional or political quandary. Perhaps our own brand of narcissicsm betokens a psychical structure? Drawing on the psychoanalytic understanding of the symptom, in this essay I argue that the obsession with size has become an enjoyable, apocalyptic perversion.10 The reason this discussion about disciplinary identity and its discontents refuses to die is that it feels good to dwell in the pain of end times, even when the end is over.11 Recognizing our perverse enjoyment of the academic apocalyptic has an important implication for rhetorical studies: it is now time to obsess about something else, lest our perversions blind us to the political realities inside and outside of the academy.

GOING BLIND, OR, SYMPTOMOLOGY AND THE DRIVE THING

As de Man has said of close reading, so we might say of rhetorical studies as a composite field: "Critics' moments of greatest blindness with regard to their own critical assumptions are also the moments at which they achieve their greatest insight."12 Although de Man warns that too much blindness can lead to (critical) suicide, the point is well taken: critical or scholarly success as a field, whether it is defined as "good criticism" or recognition from college and university administration, requires a degree of un-self awareness about its many problems. I would suggest that too much self-reflection could also lead from a "healthy" self-awareness to a suicidal blindness to unconscious motives, thereby threatening the perversion of institutional irrelevance. To understand the character of this threat, as well as its implications, it is helpful to describe the relationship between the symptom and the drive. In "classical psychoanalysis," or in the tradition that never repudiates Freud's understanding of human motivation, humans are goaded to thinking and behavior by drives that "pulsate" or aim toward certain objects. For example, the human infant's "oral drive" aims toward the breast, the "anal drive" the feces, and so on. Although in some accounts the drives derive from hard-wired "instincts," the characteristically classical psychoanalyst tends to distinguish the drives from the instincts for two reasons that implicate the import of rhetoric: first, unlike other animals, humans at best have "incomplete" instincts in the sense that they must resort to symbolic/representational resources to satisfy them (e.g., an infant's cry for its mother's breast); second, the object of the drive is ultimately determined by nurture or culture, not by "nature" (e.g., if the hunger cries of an infant produce a bottle or a breast is of little consequence to the satisfaction of the oral drive). Drive theory thus refers to psychoanalytic enterprise of how people "get off" on various objects, from whole people or others, to parts of people or the self, or "part objects." Drive theory also provides explanations for how symbolic resources determine or overdetermine the direction of the drives, and how, in general, people substitute one object for another to derive satisfaction in ways that are conscious and unconscious.

For Freud, human drives were fundamentally sexual, collectively comprising "the libido," and this was easiest to observe in the behavior of the very young--who are driven to eat, shit, and touch themselves--and the symptoms of the perverted adult.13 Returning to the case of the petulant prepubescent, we have a double whammy: not only is he young and a pervert, but his masturbation is taboo and he doesn't care. The young pervert has substituted the object of his libido, the young girl, with his own penis. As Freud explains, most of us caught and prohibited from touching ourselves would comply with a neurotic act of substitution: we might masturbate less and certainly more secretly, we might seek out a new sex partner, or we might sublimate our desire into other more socially acceptable expressions (e.g., people watching, dancing at a club, writing for publication like a maniac, and so on). The classic symptom of perversion, however, is outright obstinacy, even if one's behavior is painful or "beyond the pleasure principle." The preteen pervert has learned to enjoy his symptom beyond "the law" in three important ways: (a) he enjoys his symptom even though it hurts, meaning that he violates the basic animal law of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure; (b) he enjoys his symptom despite social or cultural prohibition, or rather, precisely because painful pleasure is derived from someone laying down the law; and (c) he enjoys his symptom in way that are beyond human representation or that is somewhat ineffable (viz., beyond the symbolic). The pervert simply won't behave, and at some level, s/he wants you to push him or her for it.

Understanding perversion in terms of the drives yields an understanding of the symptom that is somewhat counter-intuitive. Typically in Western culture we think of symptoms as signifiers for a disease, disorder, or problem, as an outward manifestation of an occulted process that, with the right diagnosis, can eventually be eliminated. Freud teaches us, however, that symptoms are actually "substitute" or "compromise" satisfactions for our drives, and as such, are often temporary.14 Yet, as the case of the pervert demonstrates, sometimes the satisfaction of one's symptoms can be painful, which creates something of a terminological problem, as Bruce Fink explains:

"Satisfaction" is, however, perhaps too "clean" or "clean-cut" a term to describe the kind of pleasure symptoms provide. We all know people who are ever complaining of their lack of satisfaction in life, but who never seek therapy. This is because they obtain a certain satisfaction from their very dissatisfaction, and from complaining: from blaming others for their lack of satisfaction. So, too, certain people derive a great deal of pleasure from torturing themselves . . . . The French have fine word for this kind of pleasure in pain, or satisfaction in dissatisfaction: jouissance. . . . Most people deny getting pleasure or satisfaction from their symptoms, that they "get off" on their symptoms in a way that is too round-about, "dirty," or "filthy" to be described as pleasurable or satisfying. The term "jouissance" nicely captures the notion of getting off by any means necessary, however clean or dirty.15

Jouissance is translated as "enjoyment," but only in that John Cougar Mellancamp way, as "hurting so good." So enjoyment is the name for the ultimate purpose and dirty political work rhetoric's contemporary apocalyptic, and we have now arrived another explanation, in addition to the historical, conceptual, and institutional causes that many have already advanced, for why rhetoricians have devoted so much time and space to the discussion of rhetoric's end: like the masturbating preteen, measuring our rhetoric gets some folks off, big time.16 The perverse core of the "Big Rhetoric" debate is that we want to be told about our irrelevance as an academic discipline over and over and over again, for it allows us to produce substitute satisfactions over and over again in neurotic, sado-masochistic frenzy of which this essay is not exempt. The question then becomes: jouissance in itself is not such a bad thing (nor is perversion, as we all must harbor an inner pervert), so what is the problem of our contemporary Chicken Little routine? The answer, as de Man has hinted, is political suicide.

Coming up next, stage three: ON A NOT-SO-RECENT APOCALYPTIC TONE ADOPTED IN RHETORICAL STUDIES, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO GIVE UP THE BOMB AND EMBRACE DECONSTRUCTION