back from denton

Music: XTC: English Settlement (1982)

Sunday I returned from a student conference at the University of North Texas in Denton, but have only this morning had time enough to report on my travels. I still feel a tinge of exhaustion after the Central States conference, then hosting RLS here, and then turning around and prepping and leaving off again. To top it all off, I'm hosting a Walpurgisnacht party this Saturday (so we can get our witchy dances on!). Perhaps because I'm an only child, I'm feeling a bit over-socialized. I recall reading Debbie was doing non-stop rock star gigs for months; I have no idea how she does all that traveling and stays sane.

The conference in Denton was put on by the Department of Communication Studies, and is intended for both graduates and undergraduates. They drew in folks from around Texas, and had a variety of panels focused in a number of different areas of communication (e.g., not just rhetoric, but comm. theory, performance studies, and curriculum and pedagogy). Brain Lain's students in his "Rhetoric of War" seminar blew me away with their papers (and I hope some of them will apply here at Texas). The department is an impressively smart and friendly bunch, and I really enjoyed hanging out with everyone---and the most important hanging-out was with Shaun, who just landed a tenure track job there! Shaun is the host with the most (a good supply of Shiner, comfy bed, thirsty towels, Guitar Hero for PS2, etc.).

I delivered my first keynote address, although I probably didn't follow directions. Apparently a keynote address sets the "tone" of a meeting or conference. My talk, the full title of which was "For the Love of Communication, or, Love is Shit, with Continual Reference to Kenny and Dolly," didn't overlap much with the papers I heard there. Regardless, this was my first time ever using PowerPoint, and I think I did a fairly decent job of that (it's pretty intuitive to use, even if you want sound clips). I think I prefer the look of Apple's Keynote software, but few universities support macs these days . . . .

Normally I'd post my talk in this blog space, however, I have hopes to give it a few more times over the course of a year, so don't want to blow my speech. I will, however, disclose a highlight: I've had students walk out of class before; I've had panel-goers leave the room; but I've never had people angrily walk out of a talk I was giving! In the middle of my hour-long talk a young woman and (apparently) her mother stood up---getting me to lose my concentration---and noisily left the room. The mother was apparently so offended that she slammed her soft-drink in a waste basket right outside the door. "Well, it's a good thing they left, because the talk is going to get really shitty," I said (or something like that).

After the talk Shaun patted me on the back, telling me I should be really proud of myself for scaring off the easily offended. "It's a good thing they left before you got to the kitsch of Jesus part," said Lori Byers. Another faculty, Jenny Warren, seemed excited that I offended someone and was especially pleased with my kitschy Jesus. At one part of the talk I show a series of pictures as examples of kitsch; Jenny said she kept saying to herself, "he better show Jesus, he better show Jesus." "Of course I was going to show Jesus," I said. "Every talk needs a money shot."

Later that evening a bunch of us went out for a nice (steak!) dinner, and then good times on Frye Street (a gallery of the evening is here). We attempted to determine what it was about my presentation that the mother and daughter team were upset about. It must have been the assless chaps photo, we concluded. Although the chair of the department was quick to correct me: "All chaps are assless," he said, "and crotchless too." Alright, "assless chaps" is redundant. But it's fun to say.

an email conversation

Music: The Black Keys: Rubber Factory (2007)

Cho's creep-out prose:

http://newsbloggers.aol.com/2007/04/17/cho-seung-huis-plays/

Gee: what should one do when we encounter disturbing work? I remember I felt this way about [a student's] stuff a little . . . .

Somebody should do research on all these discursive ways to make chaos and the void seem rational and controllable after the fact. The truth of the matter is that there are all kinds of people wearing black Matrix dusters.... writing anguished and angry prose, verse, drama.... without friends.... you name it. Very few of them will snap. Snapping is part of Life's Great Uncontrollable. But there is a huge theme in our (whose? the West? dunno, that's why research is needed) culture and discourse of control. Hence this mania to pass one law after another to control xyz, regardless of what that may be. So the Texas Youth Commission guys go bugger the teenage inmates.... who knew? Let's pass a law... as if there weren't laws already on the books against that sort of thing. So somebody goes and kills a bunch of people....tragic, but this happens. Let's pass a law....as if the next maniac will pay attention to THAT law rather than the laws already on the books against running amok.

Lets, someday . . . perhaps we'll have it done before the next massacre! [edit for tone: this is irony, folks]

What gets me is all the "this is unthinkable" and "unbelievable" rhetoric--which is all just horseshit. These fantasies are thick in our culture; if you build a sandcastle, some shit wants to jump on it. The motives and fantasies that fuel these kind of things are not difficult to discern, and I think you're also right to suggest there are patterns of re-framing for chaos (remember my and David's Columbine essay? NYT and other media outlets are doing the VERY SAME aerial shots and timelines and massacre maps to prolong the chaos). What is +tough+ to think-through is what you call the Life's Great Uncontrollable, which in people is known simply as "psychosis."

As a culture (media) we do well with obsession, neurosis, and to some degree phobias. We cannot handle psychosis.

Well, to call it psychosis privileges order. Makes it seems as if order is the default, and craziness sneaks in unexpectedly. What if we assumed that order was aberrant, or if not aberrant, then just a thin veneer laid on top of a constantly churning mass of craziness. Don't we see that in all these pathetic calls for doing this or that (lay another thin wash of order down) as if that could control the default of chaos that we all know is out there?

On this side of psychosis it's read as "order," however, order is achieved, not a default. I think this would be few of my agreements with Deleuze and Guattari: the default IS schizophrenia. The much-ado about the chaos is the tacit recognition of precisely the "churning mass of craziness" that lay just beneath civilization.

In a sense, psychosis = "the real," that gap or tear in the symbolic that trauma always reintroduces. Thereafter you get ideological interpellation--signaled by, no doubt, the re-arrival of "law and order" and the new sovereignty.

I sense a new blog entry in the making!

sanctuary

Music: Today

Responding to the massacre at Virginia Tech yesterday, President Bush echoed the disbelief of millions when he said: "Schools should be places of safety and sanctuary and learning. When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community." I do not know who wrote those remarks, but they echo my sentiment when I learned the news from Blacksburg, Virginia. Although the history of my own institution, as well as numerous others, are exceptions, I have always thought of colleges and universities as "safe spaces": campuses are places of protest and disagreement; classrooms are places to voice opposition; controversy is the norm at the university. Echoing Kenneth Burke's life's project, ad bellum purificandum, it seems to me the achievement of the college campus is peaceful warfare---here we fight among each other, but that fighting is with words, ideas, concepts. The reason the massacre at Virginia Tech is so startling and so terrible is that (a) 33 people are dead; and (b) people should not be killed at school. Murder is a violation of the "pure warfare" that happens here. The university is sanctuary. The violation of sanctuary is consequently a spectacular sin.

I vehemently disagree with people who decry "the unthinkable has happened" or "the unfathomable has occurred"; insofar as the university has achieved sanctuary, fantasies of its destruction are inevitable. If you build a giant sandcastle, someone on the beach is thinking about jumping on it. The "movtive" of someone who kills dozens is not difficult to understand; it's the psychosis that leads to actualizing that motive that baffles us. The thing is, I think we're living in a time in which psychosis, however temporary, is sometimes encouraged.

Defiling the academic temple is a profanity so spectacular that one can guarantee "real-time" media coverage for weeks, of course. Today we're dealing with the motive of publicity. I've spent some time reading myspace.com pages, and it's not difficult to find evidence to support the claim that some young people do not believe they "exist"---that is, some folks do not think they have a social life---unless they have become a public spectacle of sorts. Warhol's quip on steroids.

As with all massacres, real-time coverage and speculation fuels the mass media maudlin machines, machines that will continue to churn out story after (stupid, paranoid) story: the shooter was not a legal resident; should we allow foreigners to attend the university? is it time for gun reform, again? Is your child safe at school? Is there a "profile" for crazed youth (other than being Korean)? How do you protect your college student from university massacres? What can you do to avoid a crazed sniper? Why didn't the shooter's friends see the "signs?" We have reason enough to dread the television for the next two weeks.

One final thought about profanity: Already the god-like real-time coverage is beginning to hover: As with the Columbine High School massacre, The New York Times is publishing aerial overviews of the the crime scene. Elsewhere David Beard and I have argued the first move of mass media outlets is the video-game-ification of atrocity: aerial views, maps, and time-lines of mass murder create the kind of critical distance that allows one to lord over a bloody scene. Ironically, this is the same kind of detached, critical distance that allows one to assassinate 32 human beings.

sunday absolutions on imus

Music: Not Drowning, Waving: Tabaran (1990)

One of my favorite rituals is Sunday morning with coffee, the newspaper, and political talk shows. Yesterday morning I was somewhat astonished to see Meet the Press devote 45 minutes to a discussion of race and Imus, or rather, a discussion of Imus rather than race. I was astonished by the time devoted to the issue, not that the discussion predictably directed the country's racial atrocities into one, solitary man with a history of slurring.

Over at Working Blue Jenny advances a compelling argument about how Imus' name-calling represents the cruelty of redescription. Rorty suggests that "cruelty" is to describe another person or group with a vocabulary that is exclusively foreign or exclusionary (which helps to explain, for example, why a person traditionally the victim of the n-word uses it in a politically resistant way, while another white person using the word just continues a cruelty). In a sense, this is the clash Gates discusses in terms of "signification" versus "signifyin'"---and in some sense the fantasy of traversal that underwrites a lot of political discussion these days (if not the Gates project itself).

Because well-meaning cruelty can result from enacting the fantasy of semiotic traversal (sound bite: Rodney King's tearful plea), I found myself cringing watching Russert field questions from his experts. The discussion was interesting but not terribly productive. Gwen Ifill was on the program as---well, lets just say it---as the token, credentialed victim of Imus' racist language. The gist of the discussion revolved around David Brooks' assertion that capitalism and comedy were the root motives of Imus' statement and Gwen Ifill's smug indignity to those suggestions. She came off as too righteous and unable to suggest anything positive, while Brooks' attempts to "move on" came off as "that white guy who just doesn't get it." The show concluded in that mode of sentimentality that Kirt Wilson's recent research has worked to critique. Russert, clearly proud that NBC allowed the roundtable to go on for almost an hour about the topic, concluded the show in a series of self-congratulatory phrases and gestures that sigalled---perhaps as Whitney Houston might have sung today---the greatest cruelty of all: back to television business at usual. Or, it's like what Barthes' says about photography: let Gwen Ifill get angry for forty-five minutes so that you can "take a sound-bite" and forget it.

Outside of the classroom and blogsphere, is a dialogue and/or discussion about racial problems in our society possible? Clearly it's not possible on television: whither the discussions of race and Katrina?

Whither the discussion of race on this blog? What more can I say?

grindlousing: more on spoiling self-righteous ecstasy

Music: The Wolfgang Press: Funky Little Demons (1994)

On Wednesday NBC/Universal pulled the cameras from Imus, and yesterday CBS pulled the plug. After a week of public outcries, Imus was finally fired, and presumably, because he violated the moral majority's will. I agree with William Houston: Imus was fired for financial reasons. Sure, moral outrage (1) caused the deep pocketed advertisers to pull out (2), but CBS fired Imus for (2), not (1).

This week I have been arguing that firing Imus was the quick-fix business-based solution that would, effectively, sweep the discussion of race under the proverbial rug, again. My argument was based on the logic of what Melanie Klein, following Freud, termed "projective identification." Projection is a psychical defense mechanism whereby a person attributes unsavory characteristics or beliefs or shortcomings onto someone or something else. Identification is the attribution of feelings of love or hate onto a person that reminds one of an earlier, parental figure in life. Projective identification is thus a kind of dehumanizing process: a person or thing is made to embody something that is innermost to ourselves. We "project" our sins and shortcomings onto this goat and send it out into the wilderness, taking our problems with it, away from our now more harmonious community. In groups, acting out in this manner is especially common during cataclysm and crisis (and not just with the enemy; it also happens with leaders as well).

The self-righteous outrage and demand that Imus be fired is at least on some level a response to guilt about Katrina.

I don't have time to develop and support that claim except to say that the rhetoric about and around Imus seemed "much ado" about something we already know is deep-seated in our culture. Take, for example, Quentin Tarantino's much ballyhooed work, especially the most recent Grindhouse double-feature. Brooke and I screened it yesterday. It was gross throughout, and as a zombie movie nut I really enjoyed Rodriguez's Planet Terror, and especially appreciated this current squeeze Rose McGowen (I mean, that scene where she descends upon a military gang guarding a helicopter and shoots a rocket out of her right leg is so over-the-top absurd I laughed myself silly). Tarantino's follow up, Deathproof, is an excellent example of white people calling people "nappy headed hoes," but in a way that somehow escapes public moral censure.

Deathproof begins with a lot of banter (Tarantino's indulgent, stupid dialogue has always gotten on my nerves; Mamet less-so, but he's so much more clever) among women talking about their boyfriends or getting a boyfriend. There is more banter. Banter banter. Rose McGowan's character needs a ride home. She meets up with "Stuntman Mike." Banter banter. More banter. Stuntman Mike gets Rose into his car. She is trapped. He terrifies her by driving recklessly. Then he brutally kills her (in un-fake looking broken face bones). Then he decides to run straight on into a car full of the women bantering at the bar. No explanation, just that he is death-proof and wants to kill the women. The moment of impact is stretched out and repeated for what seemed like two minutes. Tarantino shows how each woman dies. One woman's leg comes off and bounces in the road. Another gets thrown from the car in a heap. Another has her neck broke (which is shown in excruciating detail).

Jump cut to the hospital: Sheriff theorizes Stuntman Mike deliberately killed the women, but cannot prove it.

Jump cut to new set of women. Two black, two white. Two are stunt women. They banter about the size of their men's dicks, what they do with them, and so on. Banter banter. One of the black women calls everyone a "nigga,"—a lot, even the white girls are "niggas." They call each other "bitches." But this name calling is in the tradition of black vernacular, so it's "ok." I guess. The women somehow manage to get a hot rod, race about. Stuntman Mike decides to play with them. Rams them. They are terrified. He almost kills them. The women vow revenge. They decide to chase after Stuntman Mike. They beat him with a pipe upside the head, joust-style. They keep "ramming" him "up the ass like a bitch." "I'm going stuff a nut up that ass," screams the driver, likening the car ramming to anal rape. "How you like that, bitch?" They scream and call the man a bitch. The film ends when three women beat Stuntman Mike to death. The final film shot is of one of the women caving in Stuntman Mike's face with her foot.

Now, the psychoanalytic argument about films like this goes something like this: by film going, we get to "project" otherwise unacceptable feelings and desires onto the screen. Unquestionably Deathproof was Tarantino's idea of a "feminist" turn on his unabashedly misogynistic repertoire; it's clear he was going for a positive female response (watch these tough-as-nails ladies bash in Patriarchy's face! woohoo!). True, I found the car chase pretty thrilling, but everything else in the film was a racist, (hetero)sexist send-up of "everyday life" (as opposed to the properly PC lives we live on screens, pages, and . . . classrooms?). I have never really liked Tarantino (I liked Pulp Fiction, but that's about it), and maybe that's because as a projective technology it reminds me of things in myself that I hate and that I cannot "give up" or exorcise in the movie theatre---I'm not sure. But watching the racist stuff come out of these women's mouths, seeing the ecstasy of violence, I kept thinking in the theatre: firing Imus is something like watching a Tarantino film. Once the deed is done, the lights come up and you go home, freed from the burden.

Jenny and Jaime, I do very much recognize the symbolic gesture of firing Imus, how it sets up the moral benchmark for public behavior, and so on. I understand how not firing him appears as some sort of commercial sanction. I suppose what I would point to is the phantasmic nature of our social reality, that in some sense that firing represents a distinction between "real life" and, well, the movies. It's fantasies all the way down. The Imus scandal might as well be Stern's Private Parts. And I predict in two week's time the dialogue on race will be absolutely gone---like we just walked out of the theatre.

double standards?

Music: For Against: Echelons (1986)

Don Imus is to meet later today with the women of the Rutger's basketball team whom he dehumanized. The meeting will be moderated by a Baptist minister from New Jersey (at least one of the players is in his congregation). One can only imagine how the conversation will go. Speaking out yesterday and today in various venues, the team and their coach have been underscoring their complex personhood ("we are people," "we are students") and have stopped short of calling for Imus' job. Watching the women on television this morning, the response is unquestionably smart and strategic: it is clear the women and their coach are recognizing an opportunity to dialogue on "race" and are making lemonade of this---or at least trying to do so. How long this discussion can be sustained is questionable (e.g., Katrina coverage has sort of proved the point that the mass media will not sustain a race discussion beyond the point of eyeballs with the dollar-signs in them). Although a couple of commentators have suggested Imus is over-apologizing and thereby losing his main audience, I do think his quick admission of fault has spared him the worst outcome (remember a certain Senator from Mississippi?) and encouraged a larger conversation about the issues of racism and sexism (classicism has definitely been packed away, as the "Rutgers = elite" card was played).

The Today show aired a lengthy segment this morning, with learned and reasonable statements from experts afterward, about the "double standard" of denigration and dehumanization. The leadoff was Imus' assertion yesterday that "nappy-headed hoes" is a phrase from the African American (implied "hip-hop") idiom and the tacit assertion that he was the victim of a double standard. Folks were interviewed who tried to explain why blacks can refer to each other with the "N-word," while white people cannot. Those are the "rules," explained one of the interviewees. Another professor from somewhere in Florida sharply remarked that people need to attend to the complexity of voice---but her remarks were so tightly edited it seemed almost nonsensical.

Not one of the experts interviewed---with a significant time allotment, I might add---even attempted to explain the African American vernacular tradition, or how the "rules of voice" here refers to some extent to "doin' the dozens." Never mind that Henry Louis Gates Jr. has made a career out of explaining the "rules" of black vernacular gaming, beginning with The Signifying Monkey and continuing through many articles, essays, and interviews written for a broader audience, like the stuff he wrote about 2 Live Crew's lyrics. The "rules" are, well, something like a white perception of black vernacular practice in which language is used against itself, on the paradigmatic axis and associatively, to confront whiteness; the practice is rooted in the double-consciousness (and double-speak), and cannot be understood as some "linear" rhetoric in which white folks are subject to a "double standard." To call black vernacular "insults" part of a double standard is to miss the point, and in some sense, become party to "signification" (as opposed to "signifyin'")---a rigged language game from the get-go.

Beverly Daniel Tatum, the president of Spelman College (a historically black women's college in Atlanta) was one of the experts on the show this morning. She stressed the systemic nature of sexism and racism, and noted that the problem is with all communities of speakers. She noted the practice of calling others names should stop in the black community as well as the white community (and, of course, the argot of hip-hop was blamed). Although I do not disagree with the claims that sexism and racism within the black community is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, I'm somewhat taken aback at the lack of references to what is a rather robust research tradition on black vernacular speech practices: calling someone a bitch or ho in a hip-hop song is not meant to be taken literally, or at least, it wasn't back in the early explosion of "rap" when Ice-T exhorted white suburban teens to kill cops. The issue between Imus and, say, a black man calling someone a "nappy-headed hoe" has something to do with figuration. Imus was signifying; when a hip-hopper is boasting of his exploits, well, it's closer to signifyin'---figuration, that is, association and poetics, certainly not the domain of the syntagmatic and the literal.

I worry, Angela, that you may very well be right in your comments on the previous post. But those of us who teach issues that touch on popular culture can at least bring the issue into discussion in the classroom. Fortunately, I'm teaching Gates next week!

nappy-headed hoes

Music: My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: The Filthiest Show in Town (2007)

The rage on morning television this week is Don Imus' racist statement on his daily radio (and television simulcast) program, that the women of Rutger's successful basketball team were a bunch of "nappy-headed hoes." Despite his insistence on context, the statement is hard to describe as anything but racist: "What I did was make a stupid, idiotic mistake in a comedy context,” said Imus. But the context was disbelief and incredulousness; Imus was observing a television clip and said “that’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos." His producer responded, "some hardcore hos" [sic]. “That’s some nappy-headed hos there," replied Imus, "I’m going to tell you that."

In various public apologies Imus has insisted that he is a good person who went "over the line." CBS and NBC/Universal has suspended Imus for two weeks as the jockey makes a tour of apologies, often in dialogue with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who are calling for Imus' head.

Watching what some journalists have termed the "dialogue on race" last night and this morning is painful: newspaper columnists debated whether Imus should be fired on the Lehrer News Hour, while James Carville offered an apologia for Imus on the Today show this morning. No matter how you slice it, though, Imus' comment was many things in addition to racist: the remarks about tattoos, looking rough, and nappy are also claims about (low) class and femininity (that is, they are not proper women), and so on. Ultimately the comment is dehumanizing, and so it's a little troubling to me that race has been singled out of host of –isms encapsulated by "nappy-headed hoes."

I say "troubling," but not surprising: it makes perfect sense that the "dialogue on race" is transformed to a monologue for the interests of dollars-a-second television spots. If anything, timed-air is an amplify-to-reduce agency, turning the most complex, systemic ideological issues into, well, one man's racism. That Sharpton called for Imus' immediate firing and for others to adopt the posture of righteous indignation is a televisual logic. The dehumanization of capitalism shifts the momo-monster of isms to another spinning car, when we should underscore, as bell hooks has done, that dehumanism is the name for a singular structure of which racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of Other-hate are constantly moving parts. Televisual news and radio cannot permit dialectical thinking.

Although I recognize the trouble with Imus' mouth---that he has an audience of millions, that he bears some responsibility since he uses what the FCC still defines as a public resource, and so on---I have some sympathy with his claim "it's not me, it's my culture." Like many radio personalities, Imus is a switchboard: what comes out of his mouth are scripts writ large. When he says "nappy-headed hoes" is a demeaning comment that originated among African American males, he is right in the sense that no one "owns" the sentiment. The distinction to be made here is one of responsibility: all of us are responsible for the ideologies we, however unwittingly, promote. I didn't say what Imus said, nor did most of the readers of this blog, but that does not mean that we didn't immediately recognize what he meant. Recognizing what he meant implicates all of us in meaning; "we" are responsible. That's why firing Imus is the wrong idea; it just makes the dialogue---and our burden---go away.

tagliciousness on daily success

Music: NBC's Today

Debbie tagged me and four others with the impossible-to-answer question, "what are five things you do every day to contribute to your success?"

1. I bathe and apply deodorant; 2. I keep a clean(er) desk, or, get smaller jobs done before the bigger jobs (e.g., I review articles within two weeks of getting them); 3. I touch myself or have someone else touch me (in that Divinyls sense); 4. I avoid doing any kind of research that I do not find personally very interesting (e.g., I've never written on something that bores me); 5. I play hard; I admit I work very hard, but I allow myself some playing on non-school nights. If you cannot play hard, there is no sense in working hard.

Oh, I probably should add a sixth: I usually do not tag or complete online quizzes and memes.

robert lee scott

Music: The Late Great Daniel Johnson (2004)

Last week my advisor, Robert Lee Scott, came for a visit. By all accounts it was a good time. We hung out at Barry's, went to museums, had margaritas at the Oasis, had a potluck at my house, and rounded out the visit with a Last Supper on Easter Eve. Jesus didn't come (he was hung up, apparently). Here is a photo gallery that chronicles Scott's visit. Featured is dinner at Barry's, a visit to Lake Travis at the Oasis, bar time at the Carousel, dinner at Fonda San Migeul, a trip to the Herb Gardens at Fredericksburg, wine tasting in the Texas Hill Country, photography exhbit, potluck at Joshie Juice's, final dinner at Barry's . A picture of Psappho with her preventative clown gear is thrown in for a bit of comic relief.

Of course the exigency for Scott's visit (in other words, the ruse) was a talk that he delivered to the department on Friday. Before he began I'm delighted to report it was standing room only in the LBJ Conference Room. The title of Scott's talk was "An Aesthetic Turning: Body Through Which the Dream Flows." In the talk Scott argued for more scholarship that investigated the relationship between speech/rhetoric and the brain, and detailed newer ways of understanding social constructivitism with the "news" of cognitive neurobiology. Scott also addressed "postmodernism" in respect to his celebrated essays, "On Viewing Rhetoric As Epistemic" and "On Viewing Rhetoric As Epistemic: Ten Years Later." From what I understood, Scott didn't see what he was arguing in the 70s as all that different from what so-called pomo scholars are arguing today. The big caveat here, however, is that one must take cognition studies seriously (a point Zizek also makes in his recent book).

I'm not terribly certain what I think about this push toward our colleagues in the brain sciences. Celeste Condit made a similar case in her Carroll Arnold lecture at NCA some years ago. I think the difference between Condit and Scott on the issue is ethics: Scott seems taxed with the ideological imperative underwriting brain research (capitalism, the invention of dis-ease, and so on). I also get the (uneasy) sense that Condit's call for common cause with the biologistic horde is something like the tail wagging the dog (funding and grants, anyone?).

And I have a second reservation, which I voiced in the form of a question after Scott's talk: what's so terribly wrong with dualism? I mean, everyone knows that it is naughty to maintain a dualistic line—but why? Why is what Scott advocates not simply, to carp on an Ed Schiappa-style turn of phrase, "sophisiticated dualism?" It seems to me that if most of us agree that Searle on mind/body is really full of shit---that we'll never be able to understand why red is loud as a trumpet, though Searle has faith!---then we must admit of some fundamental, ontological dualism, a dualism that helps to explain how language colonizes the body.

Finally, a throwaway: if we're really going to theorize "body" we have to look at all of it, not just the brain. Shit is body too!

teaching feminism

Music: Nine Horses: Snow Borne Sorrow (2005)

This week in my Introduction to Rhetorical Theory class I am teaching "feminism." On Tuesday my lecture was on the history of misogyny in Western culture, and today I'm lecturing on Sarah and Angelina Grimké. For Tuesday's lecture I detailed the sexism of the ancient Greeks, a few medieval theologians, and then a number of contemporary folks. After this "history," I think usually field the class for "popular" understandings of feminism. Usually one gets the "feminazi" and "butch lesbian" definitions, as well as few definitions that involve man-hating. Once these things are voiced, usually I set about to describe "feminisms" and give a short history of feminism as a social movement and as a counter-ideology (e.g., as a form of hegemonic politics).

When I got to the part when I field these stereotypical definitions from students, there was silence. So I got to saying them aloud myself. In retrospect (and with most excellent feedback from my TAs) this was a bad idea--it's better to have the students articulate the stereotypes because coming out of my mouth they could be read as an "endorsement." I regret that happened to some folks on Tuesday, so today I'm going to be careful to underscore I am against the stereotypes of feminism! A lecture on unstable irony is coming too.

In any event, when teaching classes about feminism and race, I have still have that deep-seated discomfort that comes with being a white male. I know the white male apologia is sooooo overdone, but still, I get the "I am the material source of bad things" feeling when I teach these classes. Taking "systemicity" seriously means I should embrace this affect as a guide, I think. It's hard to admit to oneself that he participates in the very misogyny he decries; such is the price of believing in the unconscious.

grumps

Music: Fleetwood Mac: Mirage (1982)

If you are going out of town, this will happen: your pet will have an emergency; the firemarshall will cite your office as a fire code violation and demand you have your posters removed yesterday; you'll have fifteen dialing-computers leaving messages on your answering machine about (presumably) late bills or exciting gambling opportunities; you'll have forgotten to make a flyer for your visiting advisor and it should have been made yesterday; you'll have fifteen emails about various deadlines that you (accidentally) missed; it will be raining; and so on.

And if you're lucky like me, you'll have an amazing girlfriend to catch the pieces as things fall apart (thank you!).

anticipation of departure

Music: Fad Gadget: Best of Fad Gadget (2001)

I'm sitting at Mirko and Tim's kitchen table and thought I might like to travelogue a bit more before I depart early tomorrow morning. I've had a great visit, however, my naked putty Psappho has had an emergency back at home that has me worried. While visiting with Mirko's mother on Friday Brooke called to report she was at the vet with Psappho, whose forearm had re-swelled up from some sort of infection or injury we first dealt with last Sunday. Last Sunday we took her to the emergency vet, got some meds, drained her grossness and then on Monday things seemed much better. When I left town on Wednesday she looked pretty normal. Brooke said on Friday her whole arm had swelled up. The vet operated this time to "flush out" her arm. Brooke sent a picture of Psappho with her clown collar on that looked ridiculous . . . jeez, I hope she's ok. I'm worried. I know my sweetie has it all under control---it's just hard to be so far away and not being able to do anything.

Despite worry, I'm visiting and trying to enjoy my the company of friends. Yesterday Mirko and I went to the Mall of America and had lunch at Hooters (for the wings, of course) and were treated to an Elvis impersonator contest, as well as throngs and throngs of mullet-headed young men from rural Minnesota, and lots of teenage girls. After a fun-filled day of non-shopping we went to Zornitsa and Ron's for a wonderful dinner. We were joined by Naida and Karlyn and Bob (my advisor, who wants me to call him Bob, but who I feel more comfortable calling "Doc" or "RL"). Delicious organic salmon was followed by waves of wine and lots of fun stories (and a little gossip about the "musical chairs" that is my field; you readers at UGA need to send me the real skinny of what's goin' on down yonder).

Over dinner we talked at some length about the decline of the regional conference. Although I loved the people at Southern, I never thought much of the conference itself (always seemed in a bad place); Central was much the same for me. I think regionals are important, and think encouraging grads to go is a great thing, but . . . they seem more insular and more expensive. One thing that really pissed me off about Central this year is that the "Awards Luncheon" was paid for by all, but you could only go if you checked the "Business Meeting Luncheon" box on your registration. Now, having not been to Central in five years, I did not know "business meeting = awards meeting," so I didn't know to check the box. RLS, however, got a lifetime achievement award and, though I paid for said luncheon, I didn't get to see him get it. You have to be "in the know," as they say, to know how to go. That irks me the wrong way (and sealed the deal: Central never again for me).

Anyhow, though I have not been impressed with the conference I'm having a lovely time in Minneapolis! Oh, I forgot to mention Mirko toured the Guthrie with me yesterday---a really groovy building. I cannot believe all the condos that have sprung up on every corner; Minneapolis is almost unrecognizable.

Today RL and I are getting some brunch and spending the day together. Tomorrow morning his daughter will take us to the airport; we should arrive in Austin early afternoon. We'll be dining at Barry's tomorrow evening.

Eh, I'm anxious to get home to see the beautiful ladies.

central states commie conferencing: day one and two

DAY ONE Music: Gene Loves Jezebel: The House of Dolls (1987)

Location: Hyatt Regency, Minneapolis, Nicollet Mall, 8:45-9:00 a.m.

I'm sitting in the lobby of (a sorta-run-down) Hyatt, near the front entrance with a squirting fountain and every-so-often a cold draft from the revolving doors. I sense the laser beam stares of strangers squinting to read nametags (I fantasize: what if you could smoke up the room like thieves stealing giant diamonds from museums do? What would the configuration of laser-beams look like? A grid? A vortex?). Unlike the SSCA or NCA, I don't recognize a single face and so the hope of socializing over coffee before my 9:30 panel has been dashed.

I arrived yesterday somewhat frazzled but, eventually, all the hassles of traveling melted when I met up with Karlyn. A big hug rejuvenates! We went back to her place, dumped my luggage, grabbed a salad in a skyway eatery, and then went back to her place and played with her two, brand new Burmese kitties. They are soooooooooooooooooooo cute! They are two brothers, about four months old and 3.5 pounds each, very playful with hypnotic, gold eyes. Their Japanese names are Tye and Taka (I'm not sure how to spell these, the names sound like "tie" and "tak-ah"), meaning "persistent" or "perseverance" and "the hawk" respectively. Nothing makes your day like playing with two very cute kittens (if Brooke is reading this, I know you are immediately jealous!). The gallery of the kitties is here.

After romping on the floor with kitties and a ribbon and "catching up," we went to dinner at my favorite Thai restaurant, Sawatdee (ooh, the curry is yummilicious). Afterwards, Karlyn retired and I spent some time at a coffee shop, and then hit the sack by 10:00 p.m. I have trouble sleeping as of late, but surprisingly I slept right through until four or so.

It's cold here. I mean, six years in the "south" has re-set my body such that I probably should have brought a heavier coat, but then, I would have looked ridiculous on the street. High 40s is still chilly to me, though. Oh well.

So, yeah, I'm in the lobby. Central States seems like the smallest conference I've attended in many, many years. There are not many folks here--or it seems like there's not many folks here. You can tell, though, that this is a communication studies conference: the women to men ratio is two-to-one, and most folks are dressed fairly well. Except, perhaps, for the portly middle-aged men with tweed jackets. For some reason we have a lot of those in comm studies too. Barry Brummett always makes fun of the "pompous theoreticians in black clothes," but what he doesn't realize is that black is slimming (and if you wear all black at conferences, packing is joyfully mindless).

I peeked in a few sparsely attended sessions trying to find my "room." Three or four to a room, tops, and I spied one bearded man delivering about the "downloading revolution" in highly animated gestures. It's hard to feel very important or to take anyone (or myself) seriously at conferences (especially the smaller ones like this; heavy gesturing for three people seems sort of silly). So far, the pretension meter has not been set off, however---only slightly with the DL Rev guy, which is a good sign.

Heh: well, it feels like I've been away from Minneapolis too long. Walking down Nicollet toward the hotel this morning, I ran into an old friend and colleague, Joe Jacobs. We chatted it up for a block until he turned left with a pack of Target people (Minneapolis is Target HQ). I sez, "Yo, are you with the Target peeps now?" "Yeah," he called back, "let's catch up later." I thought he was at the conference. Nope. Looks like Joe has left the academy. He's like the seventh person I know who got the degree and split with the rat-race for a living wage.

______

DAY TWO

Music: Underworld: A Hundred Days Off (2002)

Location: Caribou Coffee, Nicollet Mall, 8:30-55 a.m.

The panel yesterday went Old Kinderhook: I overprepped for an audience of three, if you don't count the four panelists, the time-keeper, and the respondent. I should have just came with talking points, instead of winnowing down a fifty page manifesto into ten pages of something quasi-coherent. Ah, well. The respondent was great, if not visibly a little nervous about responding for the first time (a very nice and well-groomed grad from BGSU). He did something very generous: each one of the panelists got a page or two of single-spaced feedback from him about their papers.

After the (too early) panel, I managed to catch a friend/mentor for lunch, whereupon we discussed the demands of "service" to the field. How much is too much? What should one do to repay the debts one incurs (many of those debts in area of affective investment).

My dilemma at the moment is that my computer battery is running on 25 minutes; every table in the joint with a nearby plug is occupied by the computerless. Argh.

Last night Karlyn and I ate at the new Loring Pasta Bar in Dinkytown [ah-ha! couple at a be-plugged table just left: I have juice!]. The Loring Café used to be on Loring Park at the edge of uptown, a funky eatery and French Café sort of place with fichus trees everywhere and very weird architectural stuffs. David Beard and I used to go there religiously to people watch and drink martinis. All the hot art-student kids with asymmetrical hair (before that sort of thing was cool) and outlandish shoes used to go there. It was like drinking in a W magazine fashion ad. Well, for some reason toward the end of my tenure here the Loring closed down. But they've opened a new joint right off campus (with the coolest bathrooms you've ever seen). The food is actually much better, the drinks are more expensive, but it is truly a delightful joint.

After dinner Karlyn and I retired to her place, talked about love and academic careers, played with her kitties, and went to bed. I hope it is alright to admit the kittens are one of my trip's highlights. Sure, I mean, panels are great and all . . . but kittens!. Kittens are better.

I'm getting ready to jet to my next presentation. It's on the iPod essay I wrote with Mirko. For the presentation I'm talking a good bit about the OhMiBod vibrator, which should be fun for that early-to-rise crowd and something of a surprise for the respondent (but who doesn't enjoy surprises, right?).

After the presentation, there is a luncheon where my advisor is getting the lifetime achievement award. Hooking up with Mirko and David and Kate later for dinner at Brit's Pub, perhaps post dinner drinks . . . or my favorite goth-a-dustrial haunt of old, Ground Zero. Gawking at half-naked people in corsets and garters would be fun. They don't do that in Austin much.

Good times.

minneapolis or busted

Music: Social Distortion: L.A. Prison Bound (1988)

Location: Dunn Bros. Coffee, Downtown Minneapolis on Washington Street

Reconstructed fragments of a very sweaty morning, long long long line, plane's boarding first class:

"Sir, this suitcase is too heavy. You need to lose seven pounds or it'll cost you $25."

"Oh, that's not good. It must be all those gifts of Kinky Friedman's 'Politically Correct' Salsa."

"Well, you cannot take that out for carry on, as it is a liquid; the Jim Beam definitely cannot go on. You should leave that in your suitcase."

"Can I take this over to the side and figure it out, so I don't hold up other people?"

"Yes, next . . . ."

"Ok, I took out my toiletry bag [meter shows 49 pounds]"

"Do you have any hair gel or toothpaste in your bag?"

"Uh, yeah."

"You can't take that on the plane with you either, put it back in the suitcase." [miraculously it's still not quite fifty pounds]

"ID please"

"Take your shoes off please"

BEEP!

"Sir, walk back out and take off your belt."

BEEP!

"Sir, we need to do a manual search. Please step over here to the left."

[using finger in belt loop to hold up pants, half-naked, I sit]

"Hello sir. Pursuant to [Peanuts' teacher voice] . . . I need to alert you that we have private screening available. This can be embarrassing to some people."

"No, that's ok. I'm pretty sure I don't have anything up anywhere."

"Well, just a so you know I offered. Please face the fall, arms out, palms up."

[10 minutes later, dressed]

"Now boarding sections one through six. Final call for flight blah blah to Dallas/Fort Worth"

nominate someone!

Music: The Church: Somewhere Else (2000)

It's been something like whiplash the past few days: a whirl of deadlines, kitty emergencies (Sappho went to the emergency vet on Sunday; it's ok now, but it was upsetting then; Cosmo the Wonder-Rescue is back), and conference prepping. I leave tomorrow for Minneapolis, where the Central States Communication Association meets for their annual hoo-hah. For many years I've been attending Southern, so it'll be interesting to be back at Central. I think Western is in Alaska next year (or something like that), so I might try that in 2008.

One of the many items on my plate is nomination letters. Today I'm sending off a couple for various awards for people I admire. I really didn't take a lot of time to write them, and I know if the folks I nominate win they will certainly appreciate it. Since this is award nomination season—and the deadline for many NCA awards is April 1—I wanted to encourage readers to take the time to nominate a friend or simply someone you admire. Tomorrow is probably the last day to get things in the mail (unless you DHL it).

Of course, as chair of the Rhetorical and Communication theory awards committee I'd like to see those nominations roll in (the "New Investigator" and "Distinguished Scholar" nominations are not due until May first). But I also think it would be nice to have some free-spirited nominations of one's friends and colleagues. Did you know that a lot of those awards go to people who get others to nominate them? I know professionally that may be necessary for some people, but c'mon: aren't awards supposed to be from the goodness of someone who thought to nominate without being told to do so by the awardee? I think so. Let's stop this business of the same people getting all of the awards because they lobby for them. So to be good citizens we must do our part and take a little time to write in favor of someone you think is deserving; let ours be the generation of scholars that has a spontaneous "award culture" and lets deep-six this back-stage jockeying!

That said: I did ask the University of Alabama press to nominate my book for the Diamond Anniversary thingie. But that award is different (I swear!).

Finally, here's the crucial part: don't tell the person you've nominated that you are doing so, unless it's absolutely crucial (e.g., to procure the vita or something). Why? Well, because they may not win. I've nominated probably as many as ten people for awards they did not win. They have no idea, of course, and there's no harm done 'cause they don't know. It's a bummer not to get something.

Anyhoo, here's the charge: go to the NCA Awards Call website (if you are an NCA person, of course---or even an RSA person) and read through the call. Find one that you know someone would have a good chance, and then write that letter of nomination. Read a great article this year? Nominate it for a "Golden Monograph." Is your advisor an old timer and great teacher? Nominate her for the "Bacon Lifetime Teaching Award." Did you miss the call for the RCT awards? Email me for a copy. C'mon folks: time is running out! Get crackin'!

Okie dokie [gets off of soap box]. I'm taking my laptop with me to Minneapolis. I hope to find time to blog on the conference with some free wifi somewheres.

deity?

Music: Arcade Fire: Neon Bible (2007)

The question reserved for second dates is usually something like, "do you believe in god?" There are variations, of course: "what is god to you?" or "what is deity?" Before we were dating, or in our not-dating dating (or the prelude to a date)---regardless, before our first kiss on August 17, 2006---I remember going to Barfly's here in Austin and asking Brooke this question. Initially I think she thought I was being cynical, but I think when she knew I was earnest her response was impressive: "Can I respond to that later? I don't know what I would like to answer."

Answering varieties of this question---second only to "am I gay?"---occupied me until well after puberty and the achievement of a driver's license. On this side of Heidegger, learning how to ask the question of deity is now part of the problem.

I surprise myself when I find myself talking about deity in class, like yesterday when we were discussing Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense." We read the opening remarks about the arrogance that is the possibility of knowledge, and I recall fielding the class: "where have you heard this argument before, the notion of human arrogance vis-à-vis knowledge?" Well, there was Kant, but we didn't "go there." Instead we went to church: "isn't this often the argument of preachers, that to deny the existence of deity is horribly arrogant?" I doubt Nietzsche would have liked that comparison (or maybe he would have?). But I think the students were more willing to take Nietzsche seriously as a result.

As I was lecturing I remembered a question my shrink asked me in our first or second session: "what is your spiritual life like?" I responded that I was a Mason, and this helped to quell my thirst for ritual. She then asked me the question of deity. My response was Nietzschean, in a sense: "I am not so arrogant to assume there isn't deity; I just don't know." She then said this was similar wording in some sort of Jewish ceremony she had just participated in.

And this week I picked up Arcade Fire's most excellent sophomore effort, Neon Bible, a brilliant exploration of the question of deity (and theodicy). I mean, this album is very, very good---very smart, very open, and very thoughtful. The organ on a "Intervention," recorded live in one take, is pure pop music genius ("working for the church while your family dies . . . "). I was reading an interview and Win remarked that Neon Bible "is addressing religion in a way that only someone who actually cares about it can. It's really harsh at times, but from the perspective of someone who thinks it has value." My sentiments about religion, exactly, especially my evangelical Baptist background.

I am agnostic. I became that way when I watched someone I considered a "father" die slowly and painfully from cancer. Jesus became, well, "just alright with me" that night, when Sonny died. Jesus became a real asshole when I was helping pick out the casket (because the family was too distraught to do it). I stopped being angry about Jesus when I started reading more philosophy. Now I don't really know what I think about Jesus or the other important prophets. I don't think, however, there's any urgency in making up one's mind. I was forced to be absolutely certain about Christ by the age of 13, so I'll take my sweet time, thank you.

I'm not inclined to think Jesus is god, though, because he said so. More and more I think the Buddhists have got it right ("what's the frequency, Kenneth?").

It has always struck me as strange how some people describe me as a "spiritual" person, and others, as an atheist. I suppose either label has to do with one's attitude toward the question of deity, how it is asked and how one is predisposed to answer. Can I claim to be spiritual as an agnostic, because I leave open the possibility of spirit (I mean, as a music-lover I absolutely must leave open the possibility of spirit to listen)? And some of the best people I know are born-again.

I have always admired the Quakers. I have told my parents and lovers that if I die before I really want to (which is, well, likely I suppose) that I would prefer a Quaker service. Deity sounds safer---and certainly more egalitarian---with the Quakers.

stupid love

Music: Rufus Wainwright: Want One (2003)

This weekend I've been taking it easy to get over my cold. I've cooked a little, cleaned a little, tried to find Cocteau's Orpheus Trilogy at three different video stores and the school library (the school library was closed yesterday, inexplicably; I may try again today). And I've written a little.

Dale works apace on our co-authored/channeled book chapter on Jack Spicer. It's going so well on his end that I suspect we'll reverse the authorial order (well, we all know it's Jack's ghost, but after that, Dale is steering this puppy). I'm excited with what he's generating: leave it to a poet to write pretty. More details on that strange piece of prose soon.

Meanwhile, I squeezed out some new paragraphs on the love essay, which will also be the topic of my talk at the UNT student conference next month, and probably an "on the road" talk for another year or so. Now that I have a copy of Avital Ronell's Stupidity in front of me, that concept is taking on a much larger role in the essay. What I find exciting about Ronell's rumination on love's stupidity is that it sort of jives with that Kierkegaard said about "Socratic love" in his dissertation on irony: love is irony, the mismatch of form in an unstable way, which is why, as Lacan says, "it's not working out." So the paper will flow with introduction, Lacan on Love as a "failed" relationship; the false promise of love as identification in rhetoric; love as another word for kitsch; and a conclusion that argues we need to reimagine love as irony and abandon the promise of unification that structures most contemporary understandings of rhetoric. I'm pasting in the essay thus far, with new name and all:

For the Love of Rhetoric, or, Love is Shit, with Continual Reference to Kenny and Dolly

Islands in the stream/That is what we are/No one in between/how can we be wrong/Sail away with me to another world/And we rely on each other uh huh From one lover to another uh huh
--Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, "Islands in the Stream"[1]

Although the Bee Gees originally penned "Islands in the Stream" as an R&B single for Diana Ross, they awarded the ditty to Kenny Rogers who subsequently released it as a country duet with Dolly Parton in the late summer of 1983. Had the song remained a rhythm and blues disco-dance number, it is still likely that it would have made it into the Billboard Top 100 list, yet its chicken-fried version by Kenny and Dolly catapulted the tune into the pop and country cross-over stratosphere, earning both artists another number one spot on the Billboard pop chart and the Gibb brothers recognition by the BMI as the authors of the most licensed song of 1984.[2] The irony of the success of "Islands in the Stream" is that the tune is roundly recognized today as one of the worst pop songs of all time, now a kitschy favorite at karaoke bars across the country and a handy cultural reference for a superficial and naive brand of puppy love.[3]

I open this essay with reference to Kenny and Dolly's pop-love for three reasons. First, the opening lyrics are among the stupidest ever penned in the name of love: "Baby, when I met you there was peace unknown/I set out to get you with a fine tooth comb." Such a sentiment is like telling one's lover that s/he was discovered much like one does fleas on a dog or the hidden evidence of a crime scene. Because the lyric is unquestionably idiotic, it represents what love often does to us: it renders us dumb, it pushes us to the limits of representation. Love is the name for a special kind of stupidity. Certainly the sentiment, driven for rhyme as much as meaning, is stupid in a more mundane sense, however, there is a way in which the lyric registers the frequent effect of love as something that makes us trip over ourselves, stutter, or fall into a thorny hedge posturing in front of a desired lover.[4] "Islands in the Stream" is thus doubly stupid in a way that I will argue has important implications for rhetoric.

Although the fine-toothed quest for love makes for good fun-poking, it is also symptomatic of a powerful conception of love that resides in the popular imagination: the love of pure identification through complete and total knowledge of another. Searching for one's lover with a precise instrument characterizes love as an examination, or as a search for the hidden secrets of another, an obsession with his or her intricate details. Let us call this obsessive love, or better, the love of interrogation--a love intensely focused on the Other as an object of scrutiny.[5] In this respect, a second reason I've opened with reference to Kenny and Dolly is that "Islands in the Stream" reflects the soul-deep desire to escape death in the arms of an all-knowing beloved. It is not coincidental that song's title is the same as a lesser-known Hemmingway novel about a lonely, hard-drinking man in search of himself and a reconciliation with his lover. Perhaps for Kenny, Dolly, and Hemmingway, "islands in the stream" evokes the seventeenth meditation by John Donne, who, upon hearing a bell tolling softly for another recognized the bell also had a message for him: "you too will die." In working through the way in which the deaths of others portends our own, Donne wrote "no man is an island, entire to itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Is this not this Kenny and Dolly's sentiment and the secret wish of Hemmingway's protagonist? "Islands in the stream/that is what we are/No one in-between/How can we be wrong?" Although Kenny and Dolly's understanding of "the main" is much more isolationist than Donne would prefer, it suggests the lovers identify themselves as islands connected by the common substance of love.

Finally, a third reason that I've opened with reference to Kenny and Dolly's song is that the song itself is a rhetoric that continues what is arguably the most entrenched rhetorical theory of love: the transcendent unification of souls first advanced in Plato's Phaedrus (except without the pensile breasts). Relaxing in their loosely fitting togas under a plane-tree by the Ilissus, Socrates and Phaedrus flirtatiously discuss the merits of the "true art" of discourse, eventually concluding that the more instrumental and manipulative approaches to oratory taught by Sophists like Lysias are a sinful affront to the gods. For Plato's Socrates, good persuasion speaks to the soul of the hearer by appealing to some underlying, spiritual commonality (indeed, we are all part of the main!). Good rhetoric is that which attends the spiritual needs of an individual, sometimes even against what he would prefer, by appealing to memories of the divine (anamnesis).[6] As John Durham Peters observes, for "Socrates the issue is not just the matching of minds, but the coupling of desires. Eros, not transmission, would be the chief principle of communication."[7] In the critique of writing at the end of the dialogue, Plato's Socrates worried that new technologies of communication would weaken the import of desiring, further alienating individuals from each other. True persuasion, understood as an act of both erotic (eros) and transcendent love (agape), promised to bridge individuals faced with the "potential for distance and gaps."[8] Understood as a form of love, for Plato true or good persuasion traverses or bridges a division or gap with a touch of madness (a stupidity of sorts, to be sure), which is precisely what the lyrics of "Islands in the Stream" betoken.

Stupidity, identification, and transcendent unification: these are the three rhetorical dimensions of love that are often yoked to modes of seduction--erotic and otherwise--in the centuries since Plato advanced his theory. Unfortunately, today there are few rhetorical theories that explicitly attempt to detail a relationship between rhetoric and love.9 In contemporary rhetorical scholarship, the most widely read and well-known theories that might be said to link them are threefold. The first is Wayne Brockreide's suggestion that rhetors adopt the ideal of "arguers as lovers," which entails a mutual respect for one's interlocutors and a valuation of the relationship over the outcome of rhetorical encounters.[10] The second is Jim Corder's call for understanding "argument as emergence" within an over-arching ethic of accommodation such that we better understand why "rhetoric is love."11 The third is Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin's "invitational rhetoric" paradigm, which opposes a presumed, agonistic link between patriarchy and persuasion with a feminist posture of hospitality.[12] Although these approaches share Plato's concern with the importance of sensual encounter for bridging gaps, they seem to ignore love's stupidity and to abandon the metaphysical promise of identification and spiritual transcendence that underlies the entrenched view.

In the decade since Foss and Griffin introduced the invitational paradigm, however, theories of love have become increasingly common in the theoretical humanities: beginning with 2000's All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks has written numerous books and has become one of the most visible contemporary theorists of love.[13] In her influential Witnesing: Beyond Recognition, Kelly Oliver has called for imagining "love beyond domination" and a new ethic of "response-ability."[14] Even Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "the world-renowned authors of Empire" who are more renowned for their celebration of the "new barbarians" and the agonistic uprising of "the multitude," have argued "a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude."[15] Yet despite what appears to be a larger theoretical trend in humanities scholarship,[16] few rhetoricians have endeavored to develop Brockereide and Corder's propositions further,[17] nor has the invitational view been elaborated beyond what some scholars see as a relatively facile and misguided rejection of agonism.[18]

Are rhetoricians reluctant to take the "turn to love" that has been made in the theoretical humanities? I think so, and this essay endeavors to explain why with continual reference to Kenny and Dolly's song, "Islands in the Stream." More specifically, in this essay I argue that rhetoricians have failed to theorize love for two, interrelated reasons. First, love has been avoided in theoretical discussions because it is already the assumed dynamic underwriting persuasion; love has been indirectly theorized already in terms of identification and the (tacitly) transcendent promise of unification. I suggest that this is demonstrable in the widely taught concepts of identification, division, and "consubstantiality" found the work of Kenneth Burke. The dominant idea of persuasion as the creation of identification or other-knowledge over some common, shared substance is the implied love theory of rhetorical studies, and to better theorize an explicit theory of love, I will argue that we must overcome the indwelling, Platonic idealism of Burkean identification in favor of a more psychoanalytic understanding of persuasion.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, I argue that rhetoricians have avoided theorizing love because of the stupidity it necessarily entails. We have avoided love because of its close proximity to naive idealism or "kitsch" in Western culture-that to speak of love in theoretical scholarship (or at least in work that does not concern literary art or film) risks being thought of as Kenny and Dolly are today, that one will appear trite or cheesy.[19] Originally understood as artwork that is worthless, pretentious, and overly sentimental, kitsch is a German concept has gradually come to denote something that covers-over or hides an unpleasant truth.[20] Insofar as the dominant fantasy of love in the West is, in fact, the impossible Platonic ideal of transcendent unification (e.g., "you complete me," or, "no one in between/how can we be wrong?"), to invoke love in theory necessarily tempts kitsch. We have been afraid to approach love as a theoretical endeavor because we do not quite know how to reckon with its idiotic dimension, that part of love that makes us stutter or shudder. It is also in this respect that dismissals of Brockriede and Corder's calls, or criticisms of Foss and Griffin's invitational paradigm as "utopian," are akin to the cynical repulse of gaudy Valentine's Day decorations: both theory and red cardboard hearts are criticized for attempting to cover-over, deny, or disguise the ugly truth of human alienation, aggression, and evil. Any theorization of the relationship between love and rhetoric must consequently address love's stupid utopian intimation or risk its immediate repudiation.

In order to explain how (a) rhetoric assumes love; and (b) how this assumption tempts kitsch, this essay proceeds in three parts. In the first part Lacan's understanding of love as a (stupid) fantasy of unification is explained and then compared to Kenneth Burke's theory of persuasion as identification. Understood in relation to what Lacan terms the objet a, identification concerns a gesture toward an elusive but tantalizing "something more" in others that is reducible to the promise of transcendent love. Once the tacit connection between persuasion and love is made explicit, I then turn to an explanation of kitsch in part two. A comparison of the well-known duet by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton to the paradigm of invitational rhetoric shows how both are homological representatives of a Platonic idealism better described as kitsch. Finally, the third part concludes the essay by arguing a rhetoric of true love entails a rejection of kitsch and reckoning with the ontological dualism that grounds rhetorical studies, a dualism that reduces love to its true and bare, minimal formal relation: irony.

I. On(e) the One

What constitutes the basis of life, in effect, is that for everything having to do with the relations between men and women, what is called collectivity, it's not working out. It's not working out, and the whole world talks about it, and a large part of our activity is taken up with saying so.
--Jacques Lacan[21]

In what is perhaps his most famous seminar of 1972 and 1973, Lacan elaborated what was to become his most well known arguments about love.[22] According to Lacan, the enigma of love has endured for centuries because humans have trouble admitting that it is "not working out," and so we talk about the possibility of its working out endlessly, as idiots, dumb before the truth. Like Gibb's opening lyric in "Islands in the Stream," love renders us stupid because we cannot speak about it without sounding silly.[23] As easy as it is to find popular music that blindly asserts the possibility of a transcendent love in idiom of idiocy, it is also just as easy to find a recognition of Lacan's seemingly cynical assertion: from the Main Ingredient's 1972 gold single "Everybody Plays the Fool" to Leo Sayer's classic "Fool for your Love," love's stupid dimension is well-acknowledged-or as the J. Geils Band would have it in "Love Stinks," flatly rejected. Yet despite the fact that at some level we acknowledge that "it's not working out," the stupidity of love is allowed to continue, as Avital Ronell explains:

There is an undeniable pleasure seeking in the empire of the idiotic, a low-burning delight in stupid behavior and activity. One needs only to be reminded of the pleasure domes of the stupid by which constructed delights are dosed out. Does one really need to be reminded of watching embarrassingly stupid shows on TV, vegging out, cultural studies . . . . when is the prohibition on stupidity lifted and when, finally, can one be stupid? When you're in love, for instance. When you call each other by stupid names, pet names, summoning declensions of your own private idiolect in amorous discourse. Love indicates one of the few sites where it is permitted publicly to be stupid.[24]

"Islands in the Stream," of course, presumably represents the publicization of a private amorous idiolect, a song once received-as Steve Perry of Journey once sang-with "open arms," but now recognized as benchmark of stupidity.

Given Lacan's hard line against the possibility of love "working out," Dylan Evans suggests that "it might seem surprising that Lacan himself dedicates a great deal of his seminar to speaking about love."[25] Yet he does so for a number of reasons that are encapsulated in Lacan's statement that "the only thing that we do in analytic discourse is speak about love."[26] First, the babble of the therapeutic setting between the analyst and analysand is always about relationships with other others, since subjectivity as such emerges dyadically in childhood (usually between the child and the mother). Second, even though love cannot be talked about, the impossibility of doing so motivates our (somewhat foolish) attempts to do so; in the Lacanian register, motive as such is a reaction to some negative or absence (e.g., "lack"). Third, stupidity denotes a state in which we are not (fully) aware of what we are saying, that something speaks from us beyond us (viz., the subject of the unconscious)-like the line about the "fine toothed comb"; in clinical practice, psychoanalysis works through the transference to produce the stupidity-that is, the short-circuiting of full consciousness and rationality-that leads to insights about one's self and one's analyst. In this respect "stupidty" is not always a bad condition, but the proviso of love that leads to potential insight.[27] Finally, and most importantly, love is the center of analytic discourse because it denotes a fundamental, structural truth to human subjectivity we stupidly (and stubbornly) repress: "the truth, the only truth that can be indisputable because it is not, that there's no such thing as a sexual relationship . . . ."[28]

There is No Sexual Relationship

In early seminars until the very last, Lacan insisted on the fundamentally illusory character of all forms of love, platonic, erotic, and spiritual. Although courtly love represents one of the most visible fantasies of love,[29] love as such references a fundamental, ontological disjunction between two kinds of experiences in the world (e.g., "subject positions"). In this respect love is a supplement, not an affect.[30] For Lacan love is a function or a consequence of a radical disjunction between two people.[31] "What makes up for the sexual relationship is," notes Lacan, "quite precisely, love."[32] Although we associate affect with this thing love, the thing as such is the epiphenomenon of an impossible relationship; to speak of it is a reminder that I am not you, and that you are not me-that, in fact, there is no relationship between us, only endless symbolic reminders of that impossibility. When speaking of Lacan on love, argues Alain Badiou, "it is necessary to keep the pathos out of passion, error, jealousy, sex, and death at a distance. No theme requires more pure logic than love."[33] The name for the logic of love is "disjunction." What do we mean, then, by disjunction?

Musically, a disjunction is a shift in the notes of a melody. In logic, it designates the function of the term "or" that leads to truth statements. And then there is the disjunction of informal logic, which implies "one or another." What seems common to these uses of the term is that disjunction implies an absolute choice between two things, a fundamental binary. For Lacan, there is a fundamental binary choice made for us at birth: either you are a man or you are a woman. You had no choice in this choice, and once it is made (e.g., by you parents, by "society"), you cannot undo it. In other words, for Lacan sexual difference is ultimately a forced choice in the symbolic between two categories of experience. Now, it is important to underscore this forced choice is not determined by one's biology, for it is entirely possible to changes one's biological sex (and the mutability of the body, or the parasitic nature of the symbolic, is a topic that interests Lacan).[34] Even when one elects to do so, as is the case when one attempts to resolve gender dysphoria via sexual reassignment (e.g., transexuality), it is almost impossible to escape the symbolic tokens of choice that were forced upon you. In short, sexual difference or "sexuation" is a symbolic process.

Of course, Lacan's statement, "there is no sexual relationship," seems prima facie absurd. "Sure there is a sexual relationship," readers may be thinking (and with luck, about last night!). What is key here, however, is the equivocation with the word "sex": the act of physical intercourse marks the supposed unification, or Oneness, of each sex. In other words, sexual relationship denotes both the cultural fantasy of the unification of two souls, as well as the possibility of a conjuction between the two sexes. Fetching a more stark logic from Lacan, Badiou explains the formal structure of love in terms of a series of theses:

1. There are two positions of experience. "Experience" here is to be taken in its most general sense, presentation as such, the situation. There are two presentative positions: the two positions are sexuated, and one is named 'woman,' the other 'man.' . . . 2. The two positions are absolutely disjunct. "Absolutely" must be taken literally: nothing in experience is the same for the positions of man and woman. Nothing. That is to say: the positions do not divide up experience . . . . Everything is presented in such a way that no coincidence can be attested to between what affects the one position and what affects the other. We will call this state of affairs 'disjunction.' The sexuated positions are disjuncted with regard to experience in general.[35]

That is, the experience of male and the experience of woman do not overlap, but are wholly distinct from birth to death. Badiou continues that, consequently, the disjuction cannot be known directly. If that were the case, then a "third position"--a mediation--would be possible. "The idea of a third position engages an imaginary function: the angel," continues Badiou, which connotes the possibility of a transcendent vantage, a psychic mind-meld, that is materially impossible.[36]

So, when Lacan says that "there is no sexual relationship," he means both that (1) the experience of the sexes, and by extension people in general, are radically disjunct; and (2) sexual intercourse is not a practice where whereby two become "one" in the act.[37] The impossibility of this relationship is why love and sexual intercourse are frequently commingled, if not outright confused--why both meanings of "sex" are implicated in the same logic. That there is no sexual relationship means not only that the "male" experience cannot be the "female" experience and vice-versa, but also that sexual intercourse is frequently a means by which individuals attempt to overcome or hide or repress their radical disjuction. One is tempted to believe that this much is obvious, however, any viewing of Divorce Court or, as is likely, any recounting of one's own romantic past (especially that of one's teenage years), quickly reveals that "it's not working out," but we keep trying anyway. Hence, "what makes up for the sexual relationship is, quite precisely, love."[38] This is to say, love is the token of a failure of reconciliation. Love is failure. Love is the impossibility of becoming One.

Identification and the Gesture of Something More
When we understand that love is the supplement of a failed or impossible relationship, then we can begin to decipher courtly or romantic love as a kind of deception. Falling in love is a dumbness toward the impossibility that another person can "complete me" or "make me whole" by recognizing me, by knowing me through and through, by identifying with my soul. In this respect, Lacan asserts that,

as a specular image, love is essentially deception. It is situated in the field established at the level of pleasure reference, of that sole signifier necessary to introduce a perspective centered on the Ideal point, capital I, placed somewhere in the Other, from which the Other sees me, in the form I like to be seen.[39]

For Lacan love is specular because it involves a kind of recognition or acknowledgement from another. On one level, this recognition concerns the ability of another to "reflect" my ideal self back to me, her ability to "see" me as I want to see myself. Yet, on a deeper level the recognition of love concerns a "paradoxical, unique, specified object we call the objet a," an object that provokes the idea that there is something more to one's lover than the lover him or herself, something "beyond" them that Lacan explains is the fundamental dynamic behind psychoanalytic treatment: "the analysand says to his partner, to the analyst, what amounts to this---I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you---the objet petit a . . . ."[40] Describing love's deception vis-à-vis this "something more" or objet a is especially significant for rhetoric, for it explains the fundamental link between persuasion and love: persuasion is the promise that a rhetor/lover can produce the objet a. In short, all rhetorical appeals concern the gesture of something more.

Whenever we are concerned with the gesture of something more---the deceptive promise that I can recognize you and produce something more in me than me---we are in the domain of desire. Kenny and Dolly's lyrics, "you do something to me that I can't explain/ hold me closer and I feel no pain," signals this inexplicable "something" that is beyond each of them that stimulates their desiring for each other. For Lacan, desire must be understood in relation to the objet a, which is its cause, and in strict distinction from two related forms of human motivation: need and demand. Human need refers to, more or less, basic biological needs (e.g., food, shelter, and so on). Demand, however, refers to a request for something (an object, an action, a gesture, and so on) from another human being. As Joan Copjec explains, the distinction between need, demand, and desire orbits the status of the object that is requested or that sets motives into motion:

On the level of need the subject can be satisfied by some thing that is in the possession of the Other. A hungry child will be satisfied by food-but only food. . . . It is on the next level, that of demand, that love is situated. Whenever one gives a child whose cry expresses a demand for love, a blanket, or food, or even a scolding, matters little. The particularity of the object is here annulled; almost anything will satisfy-as long as it comes from the one whom the demand is addressed. Unlike need, which is particular, demand is, in other words, absolute, universalizing.[41]

Demand thus represents a push for "something more" from another than a particular object (as any object will do)-something paradoxically tantalizing but unattainable. When the person making the demand begins to realize that this "something more" is impossible to describe or to get, she transitions from demand to desire (e.g., "you do something to me that I can't explain"). For Lacan, desire is a continual pulsation of motivating energy; the object that stimulates desire, the objet a, cannot be possessed or desire would cease.

Sexual desire is the most familiar form of desiring that is stimulated by various objects. For example, the woman's breast is a classic sex object that also can function as an objet a: for the "tit man," in love-making a breast will inevitably end up in his mouth (except if, of course, it belongs to Dolly). Now, unless one is truly perverse, the point of sucking a breast not to get or possess it (e.g., by literally eating it), but precisely the opposite: one sucks and licks and teases the breast to pleasure one's partner and stimulate one's own desire for the something more in the breast than the breast. Becoming sexually aroused by the sight or touch of a woman's breast has to do with what the breasts are not. Significantly, Copjec explains that desire is kept in play precisely because the objet a is unattainable, "the Other retains what it does not have and does not surrender it to the subject."42 Love is thus not only the supplement to an impossible or failed relationship, but it also denotes the demand and/or desire for recognition from another though the production of the objet a. Love is fundamentally deceptive because it is a kind of open promise to desiring: in courtship, a lover presents him or herself as an agent of recognition, as the promise of something more.

The significance of Lacan's understanding of love is that it is also a theory of persuasion: rhetors are like lovers, promising audiences a coming unity and stimulating their desire for that unity with various substitute objects: an end to their suffering and loneliness; a re-united union; better welfare reform, and so on.43 In rhetorical studies love's deception has been held-out as the promise of the "ideal speech situation"---a situation in which arguers meet as equals in a space of mutual recognition. (write here about Brockreide, then Corder). What ties these theories together is, of course, the stupidity of identification as the recognition of commonality or "consubstantiality," as Kennenth Burke coined. In fact, other than Aristotle's enthymeme (a tacit theory of identification), one is hard-pressed to identify a concept more ubiquitous in contemporary rhetorical theory than Burke's understanding of identification, an understanding that is arguably none other than the promise of love.

According to Burke, blah blah blah . . .

End of this section: detail Oliver's point about subject/object distinction. Say that this is the ultimate promise/push of rhetoric's many loves, and the basis upon which Griffin and Foss make their critique. This will make for a nice transition to the next section.

II. Them Two, or, Love is Shit

I give myself to you, the patient says again, but this gift of my person---as they say-Oh mystery! is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit---a term that is also essential to our experience.
--Jacques Lacan[44]

Notes

2 "'Islands Honored as Top BMI Song; WB Leads Pubbers." Variety 315 (20 June 1984): 57. 3 For examples of the sentiment, see Roy Kasten, "Blond Ambition: That Titanic Contradiction Dolly Parton is a Whore, a Saint, a Poet and a Preacher Disguised as a Dumb Blonde Country Girl" Riverfront Times (21 August 2002): n.p.; and John Nova Lomax, "The Dirty Thirty; The Worset Songs of All Time From Texas." Houston Press 16 (29 April 2004): n.p. The contemporary reaction is doubly ironic, for as I argue below, the song is regarded as kitsch precisely because hearers secretly identify with its Platonic concept of love as spiritual unity; see Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989): 50-52. 4 See Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 89. 5 Perhaps the most famous theory of the love of interrogation is that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who characterized love as a strategy to undermine the Other by knowing him or her thoroughly, both "biblically" and intellectually. See Jean-Paul Satre, Being and Nothingness, trans. ( ): . For an excellent overview of theories of love from the ancient Greeks to present day thinkers, see The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991). 6 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995. 7 John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 37. 8 Peters, Speaking, 37. 9 See, for example, . 10 Wayne Brockriede. "Arguers as Lovers." Philosophy and Rhetoric 5 (1972): 1-11 11 Jim W. Corder, "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love." Rhetoric Review 4 (1985): 16-32. 12Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, "Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric." Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2-___. 13 bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William and Morrow, 2000); bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (Harper Paperbacks, 2002); bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (Harper Perennial, 2001); 14 Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), esp. 217-224 15Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 351. Also see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Nicholas Brown, Imre Szeman, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, "'Subterranean Passages of Thought': Empire's Inserts." Cultural Studies 18 (2002): 193-212. 16 Also see Luce Irigaray, I Love to You (New York: Routledge, 1995); Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek (New York: Continuum, 2002); Heidi Bostic, "Luce Irigaray and Love." Cultural Studies 16 (2002): 603.-610; Judith Hamera, "I Dance to You: Reflections on Irigaray's I Love to You in Pilates and Virtuosity." Cultural Studies 15 (2001): 229-240; Della Pollock, "Editor's Note on Performing Love." Cultural Studies 15 (2001): 203-205. 17 See Jay VerLinden. 2000. "Arguers as Harassers." Paper read at the 86th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 9-11 November, Seattle, Washington; available http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~jgv1/ME/harassers.html accessed 9 January 2007. For recent work that touches, however indirectly, on the relation between love and rhetoric, see Jeremy Engels," Disciplining Jefferson: The Man Within the Breast and the Rhetorical Norms of Producing Order." Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (2006): 411-435; Eugene Garver, "The Rhetoric of Friendship in Plato's Lysis." Rhetorica 24 (2006): 127-146; and Dave Tell, "Beyond Mnemotechnics: Confession and Memory in Augustine." Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 233-253. 18 Dana Cloud. 2004. "Not Invited: Struggle and Social Change." Paper read at the 90th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 11-14 November, Chicago, Illinois; Nina M. Reich. 2004. "Invite This! Power, Material Oppresssion, and Social Change." Paper read at the 90th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 11-14 November, Chicago, Illinois; Nina M. Reich. 2004; and Julia T. Wood. 2004. "The Personal is Still Political: Feminism's Commitment to Structural Change." Paper read at the 90th Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, 11-14 November, Chicago, Illinois; Nina M. Reich. 2004. 19 "When the talk turns to love," argues Elizabeth Ervin, "things immediately move out of the realm of reasonable consieration and into sentimental soft focus or visceral cynicism . . . . I'll admit, the first time I read [Jim Corder's] essay 'Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love' I largely dismissed it as too touchy-feely." Elizabeth Ervin, "Love Composes Us (In Memory of Jim Corder)," Rhetoric Review 17 (1999): 322-323. 20 Or as Milan Kundera eloquently puts it, "kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence." The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (New York: HarperCollins/Perennial Classics, 1999), p. 248. Also see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "kitsch." 21 Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 32; hereafter cited XX. 22 Lacan, XX. 23 Lacan, XX, 17. 24 Ronell, Stupidity, 89. 25 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 103. 26 In Evans, An Introductory, 103. 27 See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essay in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. 3-19; 102-141; and Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 28 Lacan, XX, 12. 29 Lacan, XX, 86. 30 I mean "supplement" in the Derridian sense fetched from Rousseau; see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 141-164. 31 The term "disjunction," however, is Badiou's. My reading of Lacan on love is informed by Badiou. See "What is Love?" Sic 3: Sexuation, edited by Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 263-281. 32 Lacan, XX, 45. 33 Badiou, "What is Love?" 266. 34 See Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 289-290. 35 Badiou, "What is Love?" 266-267. 36 Badiou, "What is Love?" 267. Badiou's answer to the angel is to posit "humanity is one" in pursuit of the possibility of "transpositional knowledge"--the knowledge made possible by love. 37 It is possible for some to conclude that my extension of the heterosexual binary to "people in general" is a heteronormative move. What Lacan would stress, however, is that all difference (e.g., race) is based on this fundamental binary; it is only the Symbolic differentiation of "male" and "female" that we first learn of difference. Consequently, Lacan's remarks on love still apply to same sex difference: the yearning for the One, though established in a binary disjunction, begins with a fundamental distinction between one and then another. For a discussion of a similar pickle, see Heidi B_____ (article on Irigaray). 38 Lacan, XX, 45. 39 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 268. 40 Lacan, XI, 268. To this phrase Lacan adds, "I mutilate you," which I have excised for simplicity. The idea here is that in loving that quality or element "in you more than you," in a sense your person, body, and so on become mere objects for me to get at this "something more." In loving, then, I disfigure my love to resemble something she is not; I mutilate him. 41 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), 148. 42 Copject, Read My Desire, 148. 43 For a more detailed explanation of this argument, see Joshua Gunn, "Hystericizing Huey: Emotional Appeals, Desire, and the Psychodynamics of Demagoguery." Western Journal of Communication 71 (2007): 1-27. 44 Lacan, XI, 268. 45 Lacan, XX, 6. 46 Corder, "Argument," 27.

grant grubbing, part IV

Music: Arcade Fire: Neon Bible (2007)

First a plea: if you're posting to my blog and don't see your comment appear, please tell me via email (slewfoot@mail.utexas.edu). My spam filter has been a bit aggressive lately, and five posts today and yesterday didn't appear until someone gave me the heads-up. Lemme know, folks!

Now: although I respect Jim's warning about publicizing the remarks of blind reviewers, I want to share with y'all the evaluations of my NEH Summer Stipend application, which I received today. I am sorry to report that despite getting the coveted top junior application slot at the university level, at the national competition I did not quite make it. Only 80-something of 800 something got funded. I had four reviewers; apparently it only takes one stick in the mud to tank your case. I had one such stick in the mud (who, nevertheless, said my proposal was "very good" to "good").

I know this competition is super tough, so I don't feel terrible or anything (although I very seriously doubt my university will select my application to send up again; I feel like they give you one chance and then that's it). In fact, I found a number of the comments very encouraging, especially the one that says (to paraphrase) "at first blush this is weird and tabloidy, but then . . . ." Hah! That's the reaction I've been trying to elicit ever since I started writing. I've been trying to show how the initially "ghoulish" is really quite normal and commonplace. I'm encouraged, in other words, that three of my four reviewers read what I am doing as serious and worthwhile. I may not have won the grant, but having some anonymous peers say---in effect---"keep it up!" is nice.

The reviews are short, which suggests the reviewers are going through a rather large number of applications. I suppose this is something to keep in mind for those of you doing the NEH SS things. I also do get the impression that folks from our field are actually reviewing these, which is a most excellent sign (if any of you reviewers are reading this: thank you!). Finally, yes, I'm aware that some of you think that sharing this is narcissistic, and it is to a degree, but I also hope some folks find it helpful and demystifying. One thing I can say about the NEH is that they work hard to be transparent, which I appreciate. Anyhoo, here we go:

TO: Applicants for 2007 NEH Summer Stipends
FROM: Leon Bramson, Senior Program Officer
NEH Division of Research Programs

Thank you for requesting additional information on the review of your 2007 NEH Summer Stipends application. We received 814 applications and were able to make 84 awards.

As with all applications submitted to the NEH, your proposal was read and discussed by knowledgeable persons outside the agency, who advised the Endowment about its merits. NEH's staff commented on matters of fact or on significant issues that otherwise would have been missing from these evaluations and made recommendations to the National Council on the Humanities. The National Council meets at various times during the year to advise the NEH chairman on grants. The chairman took into account the advice provided during the review process and made all funding decisions, as is prescribed by law.

Copies of the panelists' ratings and written evaluations of your proposal are included with this memorandum. The range of possible ratings is Excellent (E), Very Good (VG), Good (G), Some Merit (S) and Not Recommended (N). Please keep in mind that panels are the first stage of NEH review and that the panelists sent us their evaluations and comments online.

The panelists' names and references to other panelists or applicants have been omitted. Additional excisions reflect the Endowment's policy to hold in confidence the contents of letters of recommendation.

Comments by Panelist 1
Rating: VG
This proposal takes the human voice seriously. It will examine recorded voices of World Trade Center victims on September 11, 2001 in order to develop and refine a theory of mourning. This is a fundamental human activity largely ignored in humanistic scholarship. The work is oriented, however, more to disciplinary issues (the relative significance of visual vs. verbal rhetoric) than to the broader concerns of the humanities in general. And how the author will get from 9/11 to the nature of mourning is not laid out very well in the proposal.

The applicant is a young but extremely prolific scholar, well trained in rhetorical theory and practice. He has published an essay on the same theme as this project, and the strength of that essay suggests that he is well qualified to interpret these aspects of the humanities.

The result of this work will be a chapter in a larger book. The overall book project is described reasonably well, but exactly how this chapter will fit in is somewhat unclear. What analytical categories are used will be determined intuitively, as the applicant begins to engage the recorded texts. While the outcome of this analysis is obviously uncertain at this point, the applicant's track record makes it no cause for concern.

Since the project envisions an article that will become a chapter in a book, and the applicant is a highly prolific scholar, there is no question that the work will be completed, and probably well within the time period of the NEH fellowship.

Comments by Panelist 2
Rating: VG/G
How would this build on previous article in Text and Performance Quarterly? Notion of these voices as „haunted speech‰ trivializes them by comparison with TV laugh tracks. Lots of academic theorizing here, seems grounded in Media Ecology. The whole enterprise seems ghoulish rather than enlightening.

Comments by Panelist 3
Rating: E
The applicant proposes a study of the tape recorded voices of 9/11 victims. Though I have read and admired some of the publications of the applicant (I do not know him personally), I at first feared that perhaps this was simply a morbid and sensationalist project. The proposal itself convinces me otherwise. The applicant clearly describes how he will approach the materials, how this part of his project fits into his book-length project, and how that project fits both into his own field and the world of interdisciplinary humanities scholarship. He has been a highly productive young scholar, publishing in first-rate presses and journals. Highly recommended.

Comments by Panelist 4

Rating: E/VG

Different and interesting--from many disciplinary perspectives. The applicant is clearly up to the task of this project, and it is a refreshing take on a subject that has been well-deconstructed.

publishing peccadilloes revisited

Music: DJ Yeshu: For Cheree (2007)

This morning I received a rather startling email from someone who I considered one of three foes: a senior editor at Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought. Some readers may be familiar with my essay "Publication Peccadlloes and the Idioms of Disposition" in Communication Studies (vol. 54, Fall 2003: 370-377), in which I openly discuss the politics of rejection (here's a PDF of that essay). At least 70% of the email and comments I receive from readers about my work concerns this essay and the (shocking to some) opening example of a rejection letter:

You stupid fuck! How can you submit to us an article with thius [sic] increduibly [sic] stupid footnote? And you i [sic] "As an associate editor of Telos [entire footnote is quoted]." You obviously have not learned anything. Not even how to spell Schmitt's name. Kleep [sic] playing around with Benjamin and you will have a brilliant career among assholes such as yourself.

During a recent and (somewhat surprisingly) successful panel at NCA, "Manuscript Rejection Letters: A Reader's Theatre," I read this and related exchanges between the editor and me---to audible gasps from the audience.

Here's the problem: I identified the editor as Lauren Alleyne, the signatory of said rejection letter. The message I received this morning was from Lauren, who was horrified. You see, Lauren was the editorial assistant of senior editor Paul Piccone. Mr. Piccone, widely known for his sharp thinking, bombastic style, and for introducing English translations of key works from the Frankfurt School, deliberately misled me into thinking the message was from Lauren (read more about Piccone here). Although she credits Piccone for being good to her in many ways, Lauren is quick to acknowledge his meanness. In her message Lauren said, "It's funny, but I recall a day, when he laughed out gleefully, and I asked what was so funny. He responded 'you just sent an angry email to someone,' I was suspicious, but I nodded and went back to work . . . . I'd bet anything it was this email to you that he'd just sent!" Apparently it was.

Lauren shared with me an essay that she also wrote about Mr. Piccone titled "A Letter To The Old Fart Who Thought A Grab Would Cure My Feminism," which you can read here.

I am still a little blown-back by the meanness of this (sometimes) celebrated editor. Not only did he deliberately set out to squash the ego of a junior trying to figure out the publication game, but also subject Lauren to the misjudgement of strangers. I feel terrible for Lauren, and would hope this story gets out there and is told every time my essay is read.

I have apologized the Lauren. She gave me permission to post her email here in full. Read on, I suppose, as we contemplate the ethical dimensions of scholarship and professional comportment.

To: slewfoot@mail.utexas.edu
From: Lauren K Alleyne
Subject: Publishing peccadilloes and idioms of disposition: Views from the habitus of scholarly adolescence
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:21:37 +0300

Or, "Thank God for Google!"

Mr. Gunn,

Greetings of the day. My name is probably familiar to you; I am Lauren Alleyne. What is probably going to shock you as much as it shocked me, is that although I did work for Telos Press for over a year, I am not the person who penned the awful note you published in your article in Communication Studies.

I was horrified to discover this article on the internet one day; I was engaged in the narcissistic activity of googling myself. Going past the first few pages, I found that Lauren Alleyne is also an accomplice to a murder in Boston (she has since been sentenced) and, yes, the rude and incoherent author of the rejection letter from hell. The latter worried me more than the former (I've never been to Boston), because there was a grain of truth, which disturbed me greatly.

The masthead of Telos, in those years, show that I was the Circulation Manager, which was a generous title the boss bestowed on his nineteen-year old intern who'd never actually read the journal she worked for. My job was to mail out the journal, update subscription lists, and get bagels and coffee for my boss before he got too grumpy.

Said boss, was the senior editor, Paul Piccone, and it was he who vetted and distributed all the manuscripts for review and corresponded with the authors. I am certain he authored this letter; I recognize the tone.

It's funny, but I recall a day, when he laughed out gleefully, and I asked what was so funny. He responded "you just sent an angry email to someone," I was suspicious, but I nodded and went back to work, because often when I had particularly complex exchanges with non-payers and/or belligerent subscribers, I would forward them to him to deal with - he was better at that stuff. The incident always remained with me, and returned with such force as I read your article, and I'd bet anything it was this email to you that he'd just sent!

In any event, I've moved through such a range of emotions regarding this situation. Horror, that this was out there as something I'd written (I'm now a young academic myself, and a writer); pure fury at Paul's cowardice, and abuse of his situation; frustration at having no one to direct this fury toward - it's not your fault that you've made this horrible document public, and, well, Paul is dead; and helplessness.

What can I say, maybe this is a follow-up article to the one you wrote. It certainly has some connections in terms of abuse of power, and the vulnerability of the young, as well as possible repercussions -- what if you'd been on a hiring committee for a job I'd applied for?

I don't know what I'm hoping this email can accomplish -- but at the very least, I wanted to clear my name with you. I'm a poet now, and I have to deal with rejection all the time, and honestly, I never get used to it. so I can't imagine what it must have been like to receive such a virulent one! I'm truly sorry for that.

I've attached some links, which will tell you more about Paul and one, which is, ironically, an essay I wrote about a dealing with him as well. A revision of it will appear in the next issue of Womens' Studies Quarterly. What can I say, it's ironic how his attempts to silence and shut down only resulted in this proliferation of words!

Best wishes to you, Mr Gunn.

Lauren K. Alleyne

As I said to Lauren in an exchange, "I'm terribly sorry over this and hope that you'll accept my apology . . . and friendship. Kindness between strangers is frequently forged in the shadow of a mean Other." Funny way to make a new friend, I know, but it is one great way to repair meanness when it happens.

birthday card and its (dis)contents

Music: Prince and the Revolution: Purple Rain (1984)

From Fifteen False Propositions Against God, "VII" by Jack Spicer.
Trees in their youth look younger/Than almost anything/I mean/In the spring/When they put forth green leaves and try/To look like real trees/Honest to God my heart aches/When I see them trying/Comes August and the sunshine and the fog and only the wood/grows/They stand there with big rough leaves amazed/That it is no longer summer/The cold fog seeps in and by Novemeber/They don't look the same (the leaves I mean) the leaves fall/Such a hard reason to seek. Such heart's/ Timber.

The images are clickable.