fear of the unknow-Able

Music: Public Image Ltd.: Compact Disk (1985) I've been reading Adriana Cavarero's intriguing For More Than One Voice, and find her engagement with speech, voice, and Levinas fairly compelling. This led me to re-read the debate between Diane Davis and John Muckelbauer in recent issues of Philosophy & Rhetoric. I think Muckelbauer misses the boat Davis is attempting to launch here, and in part this is because he equates the "non-appropriative relation" to both language and "asignification." Perhaps in a future post I'll better detail my own take, but, I’m starting to find the notion of "the saying" or what Cavarero calls "the voice" compelling in a way that challenges my Lacanian dualism. Could it be what I am calling an "ontological dualism" is simply a product of "the Said." Hmm. Well, I am enjoying thinking about it and reading today.

Speaking of trauma of non-appropriate relations, I was annoyed by Herbert Simon's introduction to the recent issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, which is dedicated to the rhetorical chicanery of the Bush II Deathstar. Cris and I have talked about this issue both on and off-blog, but: what is this weird aversion to psychoanalysis?. It persists for decades. Exhibit one is from Wayne Brockriede's "Arguers as Lovers," in Philosophy and Rhetoric 5 (Winter, 1972): 1-2.

One can easily read many of the landmark studies of argument . . . without any need to consider who the arguers are or how they relate to one another. That people are doing the arguing, of course, is assumed throughout, but when the writer on argument gets to his primary business of classifying and explicating evidence, forms, of reasoning, fallacies, . . . and the like, people become irrelevant. One sometimes reads an explicit statement that this state of affairs is desirable, to avoid falling into the pit of debasing psychological analysis. Why debasing? What is debasing about realizing that one of the proper studies of human transaction is a psychological analysis of the people who are doing the transacting?

Brockriede never ventures to answer his own question, since he offers it up as a rhetorical one. What's frustrating about this is that contemporary readers have no way of knowing what the "obvious" reason was back in 1972.

Similarly, Herbert Simons makes the same sort of move in an issue that's not even been mailed out yet. Exhibit two is from "Introduction," in Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007): 178.

Robert L. Ivie reframes America's "war on terror" and preemptive invasion of Iraq as indicative of a deep-seated sense of national insecurity, manifested in seemingly inexhaustible capacities for rationalization, projection, and denial, coupled with predilections for unprovoked aggression. These symptoms might appear to require the services of a Freudian or Jungian psychoanalyst, except that the "patient" in Ivies' view is not an individual but a culture---America's own "culture of war." Hence Ivie's turn to culture theories, including Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of religion, as a way of understanding our collective proclivities, including our use of scapegoat mechanisms in a recurring but futile quest for redemption.

WTF? Ok, aside from the well-known but widely repressed fact that Burke's understanding of identification (and by extension scapegoating—aka "projective identification") is lifted directly from Freud, again we have the "but duh" rhetorical gesture. I have not read Ivie's essay because it is not yet available on Project Muse. Even so, I don't doubt Simon's summery is accurate: psychoanalysis is mired in the individual and therefore has nothing to say about collective life. I understand that this is the most important theoretical challenge to psychoanalysis from a rhetorician's point of view; what annoys me about its continual assertion is that it's offered up as common sense. No one reads friggin' Freud---or the later Freud of Group Psychology---except, of course, Burke (but shhhhh), where he clearly states that the collective psyche operates in homologous ways (and this because the individual psyche is an enfoldment of the exterior) such that powerful leaders come to stand-in for the Superego. Duh. What else is Bush but such a Hitlerian figure?

Nevertheless, with this rant out of my system, I was thinking today that if we think about "voice" as this thing Levinas terms "the Saying"---if its sphere is some in-between, the blind-spot between body and language, of non-appropriative relation and the Said---then the reason NCA-style rhetorical studies was willing to go along with the abandonment of "speech" was because of this troubling character of the Saying. Insofar as psychoanalysis fetches the Said of Me via the Saying (the talking cure), it too is implicated at some (ethical) level with an originary sonority. Maybe---I'm thinking, and this is tentative thinking---maybe psychoanalysis is too closely associated with speech? After all, with the re-rearrival of so-called rhetorical-hermeneutics, Text is King (and props to the King of the Cosmos of Katamari Damacy, who speaks in vinyl scratches).

the voice object

Music: Michael Brook: Albino Aligator (1997)

I'm still reading and writing, and can sort of see the end of the present review essay project. Alas, I still have one more book to read before I can finish, but I do think this project has helped me to think about my own book writing and how I might organize the opening chapters.

It's time to walk Jesús, get some exercize myself, bathe, and head to the chiropractor. Speaking of spines: I rarely have any time to read when I go to the chiropractor's office; I swear this is the most timely doctor I've ever had. And speaking of doctors, I'm not sure what to make of the chiropractor. I've been tight and sore from the workouts, and I'm sure the "adjustments" are doing something, I’m just not sure what. Like the lot of you who are suspicious of psychoanalysis, I'm still suspicious of these adjustments (and, yes, my shrink too). Is chiropractics just quackery? I dunno what I think about it yet. I started going as a sort of experiment, and it's cheap with my insurance, I just dunno what I think about his claims to be "resetting" my nervous systems and so forth.

Hell, lets face it: I just want massages.

Well, anyway, here's more of the review essay:

From Word to Voice: Speech as the Voice Object

Although he never mentions Ong's work directly, Dolar begins A Voice of Nothing More by banishing Ong's God. The book opens with reference to Walter Benjamin's famous parable of the automaton and the dwarf in "On the Concept of History" in order to underscore the "implicit teleology" of the voice explicit in Ong's work: the religious ambassador is really only the vocal vehicle of God's Word (logos).[1] Dolar then cites a passage from St. Augustine in which "the voice gradually loses its function as the soul progresses to Christ" in order to suggest that "there is only a small step from linguistics to theology."[2] Dolar argues that we must break with the implicit "theology of the voice as the condition of revelation" in the opposite direction, from

the height of meaning back to what appeared to be mere means; to catch the voice as a blind spot of making sense, or as a cast-off of sense. We have to establish another framework than that which spontaneously imposes itself with the link between a certain understanding of linguistics, teleology, and theology.[3]

Dolar then moves on to argue that what Ong specified as the uncanny presence of the word is really the voice, or rather, something more in voice than voice, the "voice object." Dolar compares both the word and the Word alike to the attempt of linguistics to repress the voice object in semiology and phonology. Because the voice harbors a mysterious and elusive quality, "the voice is the impeding element that [linguists] have to be rid of in order to initiate a new science of language."[4] Just as Augustine urged the eclipse of the voice of John the Baptist by God's Word, so did Saussure and Jacobson jettison the voice with the signifier and phoneme respectively. After this interesting set-up in chapter one ("The Linguistic Voice"), A Voice and Nothing More emerges as an attempt to recover the un-recoverable, something that human speech evokes yet which is beyond our ability to represent it, something that is conveyed by voice yet which is beyond meaning: the voice object.

So what is the voice object? Dolar's answer to this question is almost two-hundred pages in length and assumes a modest background in psychoanalytic theory. Although space limits any thorough discussion, to understand Dolar's argument about the "voice object" it is important to mention that in psychoanalysis an "object" usually refers to a person, either directly or indirectly, and more specifically, to an outside other that makes it possible for a subject to become self-conscious as a subject. For example, the first "object" for an infant is a parent, often the mother, and the infant only becomes conscious of itself as a discrete being when it realizes that "I am not my mommy." When the infant realizes there is more than one parent (the end of so-called primary identification), her object domain begins to expand concurrently with her sense of self. Eventually things can represent objects or others for the infant, becoming "part-objects." A classic example of a part-object is the breast, of course, which re-presents "mommy" in the form of a part of her. In this respect the voice object is a kind of part-object, a thing that represents another person in the abstract, or the Other.[5]

The voice object is experienced in one's own voice as well as that of another, but it is not a substitute. Rather, for Dolar there are substitutes for the voice object, or things that repress this disturbing and elusive element of voice. These consist of anything that disciplines voice in respect to meaning. In the history of Western music-making, for example, Dolar argues that "music, and in particular the voice, should not stray from words which endow it with sense; as soon as it departs from its textual anchorage, the voice becomes senseless and threatening-all the more so because of its seductive and intoxicating powers."[6] Musical instruments, something like a flute, for example, represent a literal, material substitution for the voice in a manner that buries the ambivalence of the voice object.

Dolar's description of the voice object as both a seductive and threatening object is an indirect intervention in a psychoanalytic debate between those who advocate "the drive model" and those who advocate the "relational model" of human motivation. Dolar sides with the (presumably) more "radical" theories of Jacques Lacan, who advocated a revised version of Freud's theory of the drives.7 This debate concerns the function of objects and part-objects in respect to what energizes people to work, reproduce, live, and destroy. So-called object-relations theorists like W.R.D. Fairbairn argue that human motivation is hard-wired toward specific objects, and is, thus, not sexual in character.[8] In the school of thought that maintains a link to Freud ("classical psychoanalysis"), including Lacanians, part-objects are at the center of pleasure-seeking drives; they are things that energy pulsates around which set the psychical apparatus into motion (e.g., they are what make us "go," or as Mick Jaggar might put it, things that start us up so that we never stop). So, for example, the "oral drive" pulsates around the breast, the anal drive the feces, the invocatory drive the voice, and so on. Lacan later revised the theoretical function of the part-object in Freud's model with what he calls the objet petit a or simply the objet a, which is a formal term that refers to any object that causes desire or starts-up and maintains a drive. For Dolar, the voice object is, first and foremost, the most important objet a, something that both stimulates desire and sets drive into motion. Unlike the part-objects that can represent another as an inanimate object, sometimes even becoming fetishized (e.g., a woman's high-heel shoe: "Shoes. Oh My God!"), the voice object is neither seen nor heard. We can only know of its effects.

Dolar clarifies his understanding of the voice object as an attempt to advance a vocabulary for voice in a way that does not reduce it to "the vehicle of meaning" or "the source of aesthetic admiration":

[T]here is a third level [to voice]: an object voice which does not go up in smoke at the conveyance of meaning and does not solidify in an object of fetish reverence, but an object which functions as a blind spot in the call and as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation. One shows fidelity to the first by running to attack [when called to war]; one shows fidelity to the second by running to the opera. As for fidelity to the third, one has to turn to psychoanalysis. [9]

As with Ong's focus on the sensorium, Dolar's psychoanalytic approach to this third element is phenomenological and additive, so the way in which the voice object is described shifts from on perspective to another chapter by chapter. After Dolar demonstrates that the voice object is not reducible to the signifier with various examples (hiccups, infantile babble, screams, and laughter), he then locates its function in philosophy and musicology in chapter two ("The Metaphysics of Voice"); its relation to the body and the materiality of sound in chapter three ("The 'Physics' of Voice"); its guise as the "voice of reason" and the "voice of conscience" in chapter four ("The Ethics of Voice"); its role vis-à-vis the law and governmentality in chapter five ("The Politics of Voice"); its centrality to psychoanalytic practice in chapter six ("Freud's Voices"); and finally, as the skeleton key to Kafka's bizarre stories in chapter seven ("Kafka's Voices").

In every chapter the voice object is discerned as a paradoxical inbetweenness that upends common assumptions and facile binaries. For example, while Dolar admits that "there is no voice without a body," disembodied voices are nevertheless ever-present, especially in the wake of various technologies of speech telepresence like the cell phone. In cinema voices often seem to come from nowhere, or don't quite match up with the bodies they are associated with, like the mother's voice in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, the wizard's voice in The Wizard of Oz, or the English overdubs in some martial arts films (the "acousmatic voice" of Michel Chion).[10] In fact, Dolar even goes so far as to suggest a "basic quality of the voice" is that "it always displays something of an effect emancipated from its cause."[11] Although there is a material basis for the voice, the voice object is not reducible to the body because we cannot see the origin of any given voice,

it [the voice] stems from an undisclosed and structurally concealed interior, it cannot possibly match what we see. This conclusion may seem extraordinary, but it can be related to banal everyday experience: there is always something totally incongruous in the relation between the appearance, the aspect, of a person and his or her voice before we adapt to it. It is absurd, this voice cannot possibly stem from this body, it doesn't sound like this person at all, or this person doesn't look at all like his or her voice. Every emission of the voice is by its very essence ventriloquism.[12]

The voice consequently is both inside and outside, something that fires "like a bodily missile which separates itself from the body" at the very same time as it indexes an interiority, that "hidden bodily treasure beyond the visible envelope."[13]

The ambivalence of the voice object helps Dolar to confront directly the now widely assumed critique of the dreaded "metaphysics of presence" by Jacques Derrida.[14] Originally published as a chapter in one of the SIC collections helmed by Slavoj Zizek,15 Dolar's compelling critique of Derrida amounts to the late deconstructionist's lack of Lacanian know-how (so to speak). According to Derrida, the Western thought can be characterized as metaphysics of presence based on the Platonic assumption that speech presences the thought of the speaker. "The voice is heard (understood)-that undoubtedly is what is called conscience-closest to the Self as the absolute effacement of the signifier," argues Derrida, as a "pure auto-affection that . . . does not borrow from the outside of itself."[16] This "logocentric" conceit "offered the illusion that one could get immediate access to an unalloyed presence . . . a firm rock against the elusive interplay of signs which are anyway surrogates by their very nature, and always point to an absence."17 Dolar argues, however, that Derrida overlooks the bad and threatening voice in Western thought, the voice that upsets and troubles, from the terrible voice of God to the sexual frenzy threatened by music. "[T]he history of 'logocentrism' does not quite go hand in hand with 'phonocentrism,'" argues Dolar, for "there is a dimension of the voice which runs counter to self-transparency, sense, and presence: the voice against logos, its radical alterity." Contra Ong, Dolar agrees with Derrida that the presence of speech is an illusion, yet he refuses to equivocate the voice with logos.

An Ontology of Voice

For Dolar the voice is ultimately "an opening to radical alterity" that Heidegger suggested issues "a call eluding self-appropriation and self-reflection."[18] In a qualified sense, Dolar advances an understanding of the human voice that provides an ontological basis for ethical being toward others:

The voice is the element which ties the subject and the Other together, without belonging to either, just as it formed the tie between body and language without being part of them. We can say that the subject and the Other coincide in their common lack embodied by the voice, and that "pure enunciation" can be taken as the red thread which connects the linguistic and ethical aspects of the voice.[19]

Locating a non-appropriative relation to the Other in the "pure enunciation" of voice is Adriana Cavarero's project in For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression.

Notes

[1] See Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," translated by Harry Zohn. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, edited by Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 289.
[2] Dolar, A Voice, 16.
[3] Dolar, A Voice, 16.
[4] Dolar, A Voice, 17.
[5] This is a necessary oversimplification of the term. The Other is frequently capitalized to emphasize that it is not simply another person, but a special "not me" that is, for example, worthy of justice or hospitality (Derrida, Levinas), or the principle figure of the symbolic order (Lacan), and so on. [6] Dolar, A Voice, 43.
[7] See Dolar, A Voice, 71-74.
[8] See W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1976).
[9] Dolar, A Voice, 5.
[10] Dolar, A Voice, 60. Also see Chion, The Voice.
[11] Dolar, A Voice, 67.
[12] Dolar, A Voice, 70. In fact, Steven Conner would describe this uncanny awareness the product of "vocalic bodies," fantasy bodies that we mentally conjure for the voices we hear. See Connor, Dumbstruck. [13] Dolar, A Voice, 71.
[14] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
[15] Mladen Dolar, "The Object Voice." SIC 1: Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 7-31.
[16] Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20.
[17] Dolar, A Voice, 37.
[18] Dolar, A Voice, 102.
[19] Dolar, A Voice, 103.

speech: godstuffs

Music: Haujobb: Freeze Frame Reality (1995)

Today, with Baby Jesús at my feet, I worked a bit more on my review essay. I thought Ong would be much easier to gloss than he turned out to be, a testament to the uniqueness of his thought. I started reading Ong for The Book; his sense of wonder and curiosity is infectious. Unlike McLuhan, who is a bit too Nietzschean for my tastes (in aphoristic style, in smugness, and so on), Ong has that "kid in God's Candy Store" sort of read---smart as hell, but still wide-eyed and immune to cynicism. As I wrote today, all I could think of is Tron and the evil MC's demand that prisoners give up their belief in their "Users." The Presence of the Word is really like Tron circa 1967. I'd say that in the essay, but I fear there's probably only a narrow window of generational consciousness that would register the reference. [sigh] I'm a 27-year-old trapped in a 34-year-old's body. Ong gives me the sense he felt the same way (a 40 year old in a 60-something body, you know, same dealie-O).

Have I ever mentioned that I have two more big-thingie-in-my-house wishes? In addition to my fortune teller Tara, I would like an old-fashioned jukebox (with bubbles) and a stand-up Tron coin-op video game for my living quarters. I suspect when I turn 45 I can make this a reality (much better than buying a sports car, no?). Nevertheless, here goes:

Speech: The Link Between Media Ecology and Religion

Because The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History precedes the more widely read Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by over a decade, it reflects a different focus and approach: whereas the latter is more programmatic and helped to found so-called Orality-Literacy studies, the former advances a more phenomenological understanding of the object of human speech that underwrites much of Ong's subsequent work.[1] Presence is a masterful expansion of a series of lectures delivered at Yale in 1964 into six, meaty, wide-ranging chapters that take up the human voice in respect to pre- and post-typographic economies, the "electronic age," sound, the sacred and the profane, world politics, and, of course, religious thought. Although Ong concedes to Heidegger that "language itself is at its deepest level not primarily . . . a system of sounds," the book opens with the argument that "communication, like knowledge itself, flowers in speech."[2] This is because, Ong suggests, "words are primarily spoken things" as well as the basic unit human communication. Later in the book the author reveals the reason why spoken words are considered the most fundamental unit of human communication is because sound as such connotes "presence":

Sound, bound to the present time by the fact that it exists only at the instant when it is going out of existence, advertises presentness. It heightens presence in the sense of the existential relationship of person to person (I am in your presence; you are present to me), with which our concept of present time (as against past an future) connects: present time is related to us as is a person whose presence we experience. It is "here." It envelops us. Even the voice of one dead, played from a recording, envelops us with his presence as no picture can.[3]

The example of the dead voice is crucial to Ong's argument because it underscores the significance of the perception and experience of presence, contrary to critics who have suggested his understanding of speech is "animistic."[4] The uncanny experience of feeling the presence of a dead person after hearing a recording of her voice does not necessarily mean a ghost has been conjured: "Presence does not irrupt into voice," clarifies Ong, voice "simply conveys presence as nothing else does."[5] He then traces the fate of this affect of interpersonal here-and-nowness through three stages of human technological development: the "unrecorded word" of oral culture; the "denatured word" of print and typology, and the electronic "sensorium" of the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Readers are probably more familiar with Ong's interest with the advent of typography and the shift from an oral to written culture it (literally) marked, however, in addition to providing a frame for historical work, Ong's signature move in Presence is his elaboration of the concept of the "sensorium":

Sound and the word itself must be . . . considered in terms of the shifting relationships between the senses. These relationships must not be taken merely abstractly but in connection with various cultures. In this connection, it is useful to think of cultures in terms of the organization of the sensorium. By the sensorium we mean here the entire sensory apparatus as an operational complex. The differences in cultures [regarding notions of "taste" geographically and over time] we have just suggested can be thought of as differences in the sensorium, the organization of which is in part determined by culture while at the same time it makes culture.[6]

Much of Presence is dedicated to mapping changes in the sensorium through the examination of speaking and reading practices. For example, Ong relates an anecdote from the Middle Ages that he suggests indexes a shift from oral to writerly forms of thought: "Augustine makes special note of the fact that when he once dropped in on Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, he found Ambrose reading to himself without making a sound. Augustine's note shows that silent private reading was not entirely unknown, but it also shows that it was certainly singular and deserving of comment."[7] Presence is teaming with similar such anecdotes and stories as Ong trances the sensorium to the middle of the twentieth century, where he finally locates a "new orality" and organization of the senses hastened by "the present electronic media," which are "bringing the whole globe into continual contact with all of itself at once and thus tending to minimize ingroup feelings."[8] Perhaps in distinction from the central thrust of another book also published in 1967, Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle,[9] for Ong the shifting openness of people to exteriors, to the world outside and to foreign cultures (that which Ong's teacher Marshall McLuhan and co-author Quentin Fiore would dub the "global village"),10 was catalyzed by the telepresence of speech. Spectacle may represent one culture to the next, but because of the way in which speech alone conveys presence, it imbues cross or trans-group communication with a feeling of intimacy that no image possibly can.

Over the next decade, Ong recast the sensorium as an "ecological concern" that called attention to interactivity, to an emergent form of consciousness intercoursing with an increasingly electronically mediated environment. Attention to this congress

echoed earlier thinking culminating in Darwin's work, which has shown how species themselves . . . are not fixed but develop though natural selection brought about by open interaction between individuals and environment. The new philosophical attention to openness appears not unrelated to the opening of previously isolated human groups to one another fostered by electronic communications media, telephone, radio, and ultimately television.[11]

In other words, nascent in Ong's notion of the sensorium is a focus on what Neil Postman eventually termed "media ecology," defined as "the study of media as environments."[12] Although Ong's work bears the mark of bio-evolutionary thinking, we would be remiss to ignore the theological import of his thought. For Ong, the ways in which we listen with and through electronics---and by extension, the digital gadget---bears directly on our relation to God.

Ultimately the Presence of the Word is an evocation of God's presence, an attempt to show how the "modern means of communication . . . have annihilated time and space" in such a way that "man's word [,] . . . as a primary point of entry for the divine," has enlarged and intensified the feeling of God's here-and-nowness.[13] Although Ong admits that the human feeling of presence is nevertheless a perception, among a gathering of true-believers such perceptions in concert furnish "the matrix, the womb for his [Christ's] coming, as Mary once did."[14] At the conclusion of the book Ong warns such an auditory matrix can be lost to "visualism" if we are not careful, for we are already insensitive to the "auditory character of the word," a character which marks the specificity of human utterance.[15] Whether or not one believes in Deity, Ong's final remarks about the inherent mystery of the word are central for understanding not only why the fantasy of speech as "presence" has only intensified in our time (and perhaps why Weber's "secularization thesis" was misguided), but also why there has been a modest, contemporary revival of interest in the object of speech that runs counter to the misleading reduction of "word" to "sign":

In the strict sense, the word is not a sign at all. For to say it is a sign is to liken it to something in the field of vision. . . . The word cannot be seen, cannot be handed about, cannot be "broken" and reassembled. Neither can it be completely "defined." To want to define the word . . . is somehow to want to remove it . . . from its natural habitat and place it in a visual field. . . . the word remains for us at root a mystery, a datum in the sense-world existing in closest association with that other mystery which is understanding itself.[16]

The word denotes a blind spot that contemporary technologies of telepresence help to amplify but fail to capture, a blind spot that locates speech at the intersection of the human and the divine, a mysterious locality that both inspires and eludes. The word needs speech to animate it, and yet, as St. Augustine argues, when it is His Word the voice of enunciation, that specific, human medium of articulation-the Preacherman and the Revelator-should recede.[17] What is left is either that Absolute Presence of Plato or, as Mladen Dolar argues, just more and more of the blind spot, something that he designates as the topography of the "voice object."

From Word to Voice: Speech as the Object of the Subject

Dolar begins is psychoanalytic study, A Voice of Nothing More, by ridding himself of Ong's theological passion. The book opens with reference to Walter Benjamin's famous parable of the automaton and the dwarf in "On the Concept of History" in order to underscore the "implicitly teleology" of the voice made so explicit in Ong's work: the religious ambassador is really only the voice, while God is the word (logos).18 Dolar cites a passage from St. Augustine in which "the voice gradually loses its function as the soul progresses to Christ" in order to suggest that "there is only a small step from linguistics to theology."19 Dolar argues that we must break with the implicit "theology of the voice as the condition of revelation" in the opposite direction, from

the height of meaning back to what appeared to be mere means; to catch the voice as a blind spot of making sense, or as a cast-off of sense. We have to establish another framework than that which spontaneously imposes itself with the link between a certain understanding of linguistics, teleology, and theology.[20]

In a sense, Dolar then moves on to argue that what Ong specified as "the word" is really "the voice," or rather, something more in voice than voice which he terms the "voice object." Dolar compares "the word" and "God's Word" to the attempt of linguistics to avoid the voice object though semiology and phonology. Just as Augustine urged the eclipse of the voice of John the Baptist by God's Word, so too did Saussure and Jacobson jettison the voice object with the signifier and phoneme respectively. After the first chapter A Voice and Nothing More thus emerges as an attempt to recover the un-recoverable, something that human speech evokes yet which is beyond our ability to represent it, something that is conveyed by voice yet which is beyond meaning: the voice object.

So what is the voice object? [Stay tuned . . . er, read?]

Notes

[1] For an excellent overview of Ong's career vis-à-vis that of others associated with Media Ecology, see Lance Strate, "A Media Ecology Review." Communication Research Trends 23 (2004): 3-48.
[2] Ong, Presence, 2, 1.
[3] Ong, Presence, 101.
[4] U. Milo Kaufmann, review of The Presence of the Word by Walter J. Ong, S.J., Journal of Aesthetic Education 3 (1969): 162.
[5] Ong, Presence, 114.
[6] Ong, Presence, 6.
[7] Ong, Presence, 58.
[8] Ong, Presence, 301.
[9] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (New York: Zone Books, 1995).
[10] See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2005).
[11] Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 324.
[12] Strate, "Media Ecology," 4; also see Neil Postman, "The Reformed English Curriculum." High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in Secondary Education, edited by Alvin C. Eurich (New York: Pitman), 160-168. For exemplary rhetorical work conducted from a media ecology perspective, see Kenneth Rufo, "The Mirror in the Matrix of Media Ecology." Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2000): 117-140.
[13] Ong, Presence, 312-313.
[14] Ong, Presence, 311.
[15] Ong, Presence, 322-333.
[16] Ong, Presence, 323.
[17] See Dolar, A Voice, 16.
[18] See Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," translated by Harry Zohn. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, edited by Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 289.
[19] Dolar, A Voice, 16.
[20] Dolar, A Voice, 16.

all hail jesús, king of the indoor poo

Music: Autumn Continent: Between Interval (2006)

This is Jesús. He is my new friend. He is neither miraculous nor planned, although he is very sweet and slowly learning to poop and make pittle outdoors. He is undergoing a two-week trial at Chez Joshie; if he does not get along with the putties he cannot stay. But I have faith in lil' baby Jesús, as he has not had an accident in the house for two days, which means he learns quickly. Jesús is a Xoloitzcuintli, also known as a Mexican Hairless dog. He is a rescue dog, and we suspect he was "dumped" by a back-yard breeder in the Austin/Dallas corridor. The rescue folks know her M.O.: she breeds hairless of all sorts, often outcrossing them inappropriately (a bad outcross can lead to worse genetic dispositions), and then when she cannot sell the dogs she dumps them in parks near shelters. Boo for unethical people. Yay for Jesús, who is recovering from 6 months of shock and un-discipline fairly well. He's swaddled in a blanket at my feet just now, resting peacefully. We're expecting three magical, gift-bearing Mariachi any day now. Gallery here.

death by text

Music: Ulrich Schnauss: Far Away Trains Passing By (2001)

News broke yesterday that Bailey Goodman, a recent high school graduate, was text messaging a friend as she was driving four friends to her parent's vacation home in New York state. Distracted and speeding---apparently responding to a message that inquired, "what are you doing?"---Goodman plowed the SUV into an oncoming tractor-trailer, killing herself and her fellow high school cheerleaders.

The news coverage of this accident has been characteristically tragic because of the underlying subtext: five very attractive, no doubt "popular" young women (signaled, of course, by the detail they are "cheerleaders") from well-to-do families had a charmed future. Their confident gazes in their latest class photos are paraded across the public screen as a symptom of upper-middle class status. The framing of the story suggests that their social privilege and the ease of life afforded by beauty and popularity comprised the tragic flaw, blinding them---or at least the driver---to the basic laws of physics. This framing is nothing new, as it participates of course in the "youth in crisis" narrative as the naive obverse to the knowing evil of the Columbine massacre: characteristic teenage invulnerability blinded the cheerleaders to common sense, and so death arrived, the news stories seem to suggest, as the assertion of the law of karma.

Texting is unquestionably yoked to "youth" in the United States (I gather not so much in Europe and Japan---there folks text instead of call to save money more than circulate cultural allegiance). What strikes me in the key of Jungian synchronicity is that I have been reading Walter Ong for the last week or so in preparation for a review essay focused on media ecology and the human voice, and in that reading, Ong has a lot to say about communicative technology and homeostatic response. Writing in the 1960s, Ong argues that voice, once "muted by script and print, has come newly alive." He's speaking in particular about "recordings and tapes" that have "given sound a new quality, recuperability." On the very next page, however, he stresses the newly alive vocality also abides a newly alive textuality:

Now that we have electronic communication, we shall not cease to write and print. Technological society in the electronic stage cannot exist without vast quantities of writing and print. Despite the activation of sound, it prints more than ever before. One of the troubles with electronic computers themselves is that often the printout is so vast that it is useless: there are not enough attendants to read more than a fraction of it . . . . What we are faced with today is a sensorium not merely extended by the various media but also so reflected and refracted inside and outside itself in so many directions as to be thus far utterly bewildering. Our situation is one of more and more complicated interactions.

Texting while driving is complicated indeed, and reflecting on Ong's prescience one cannot help but think about the inertia of the new textuality in an age of mobility: while Kayne West says that Jesus walks, clearly in our time, Text now drives.

Two relevant theoretical ideas some to mind in concert with Ong's assertion: first, Paul Virilio on the idea of "the crash." New technologies herald new accidents at the advent of their being. Few would have prophesied that "text driving" would be the new accidental death of our time, however, new accidents that emerge with new technologies are frequently associated with youth. Second, there is what Lacan has to say about the "agency of the letter," that language uses us, determines us in a certain, qualified sense---the signifier puts us in our place (e.g., Poe's purloined letter). One must think about the compulsion to text message someone while driving: if you've ever gotten a text message, you feel like you must respond sometimes, and in kind. The power of text (again, like Jesus) "compels you!" Unlike drunk driving where you must go to the booze, in text driving, the letter hails you.

speech is dead; long live speech

Music: The Pixies: Bossanova (1990)

Just at the terminal again today, doing my job while escaping the heat. It is honestly a relief to be doing my job, and not worrying about a hole in the wall. Now it's almost time to do a little exercise and prepare for watching the new Harry Potter movie! Until I can post more, eat yer heart out Debbicilious!

Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xxv + 264. $25.95

Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), viii + 216. $19.95.

Clifford Nass and Scott Brave, Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), xvii + 296. $17.95.

Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, reprint (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), + . $37.00

For the Latvian-born student of Carl Jung, Dr. Konstantin Raudive, "dead air" was not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps with the exception of local college and National Public Radio station broadcasts (respectively with their untrained "uh"-prone disk jockeys or those commonly cold, slow-speaking commentators), dead air is that unfortunate if not often startling moment when a radio or video broadcast falls unexpectedly silent, rupturing the charged "flow" of broadcast with an audible buzz of ambient hiss and/or a blank screen.[1] As one of the earliest pioneers and popularizers of capturing "electronic voice phenomenon" or "EVP," however, for Raudive dead air registered faint and often nonsensical messages from the deceased, ghostly voices discernable only with an ear finely tuned to rapid and rhythmic streams of multilingual speech.[2] Inspired by the spirit voices accidentally discovered in the 1950s bird-song tape recordings the Swiss artist Friedrich Jürgenson, Jeffrey Sconce reports that Raudive devised a series of experiments in the 1960s in which he used a microphone and tape recorder "to record the ambient sound in an apparently empty room. The experimenter then replayed the ten-to-fifteen-minute section of the tape several times, listening very closely for voices that emerged only with intense scrutiny and concentration."[3] Raudive eventually moved on to finding EVP in radio broadcasts, and published his findings in English as Break Through: Electronic Communication with the Dead May Be Possible in 1971, inspiring "psychic researchers around the world."[4]

Of course, many have dismissed EVP as the aural equivalent of the Rorschach inkblot test based on a human tendency to find patterns in otherwise nonsensical sensory stimuli. The same tendency to hear voices coming from one's coffee pot is also what led thousands of otherwise intelligent people to believe that rock bands, such as Judas Priest, Ozzy Osborne, and Led Zeppelin, were encoding subliminal messages on their 70s and 80s record albums that encouraged hormone-riddled teens toward drug use, Satanism, and suicide.[5] What should interest communication scholars about dead voices on air or demonic ones from the groove is not so much the possibility of life after death as much as our susceptibility to such beliefs, particularly in response to increasingly desolate views of subjectivity in the academy. "Even if their messages were often bleak," argues Sconce, "the Raudive voices did speak of an immortal essence that transcends the alienating modes of Darwin, Freud, Sartre, and all other demystifying assaults on the transcendental dimension of the human psyche."[6] As both John Durham Peters and Sconce have argued, the fantasy of communication as this transcendent unification with another in meaning or spirit, alive or dead, has paradoxically only intensified as communicative technologies advance and proliferate.[7]

In the spirit of the work of the late Walter J. Ong, in this review essay I extend this argument about the appeal of transcendence beyond the visual order to suggest that new communicative technologies have "stepped up the oral and aural" in pursuit of Ong's now famous thesis: "Voice, muted by script and print, has come newly alive."8 Although much labor has been devoted recently to theorizing the visual in rhetorical studies, by rehearsing Ong's major project in the recent reprint of The Presence of the Word, followed by a review of a series of books devoted to the relationship between voices and machines, I hope to resound the seldom-heeded call for studying speech as a complex, robust, persistent-and in our times, altogether haunting-object of culture and daily life.

Notes

1 Raymond Williams, "Television and Representation." In The Raymond Williams Reader, edited by John Higgins (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001): 179-187.
2 Konstantin Raudive, Break Through: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1971).
3 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 85.
4 Sconce, Haunted Media, 85.
5 See Joe Banks, "Rorschach Audio: Ghost Voices and Perpetual Creativity." Leonardo Music Journal 11 (2001): 77-83; and Michael Shermer, "Turn Me On, Dead Man." Scientific American Online (May 2005): available http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000EB977-12BE-1264-8F9683414B7FFE9F accessed 13 July 2007. For recordings of a coffee pot ghost, see http://www.coffeepotghost.com accessed 13 July 2007.
6 Sconce, Haunted Media, 90.
7 See John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), esp. 63-108.
8 Ong, Presence, 88.

concluding the love of rhetoric

Music: Collection d'Arnell-Andrea: Les Marronniers (1992) I finished a draft of the love essay this afternoon. There is still much work to be done in the editing department, although I think I should have it out for review by the end of the week. At least I hope to, so that work can begin on The Book.

Invitational Rhetoric as Kitsch

Drawing heavily on the bio-essentialist work of Sarah Miller Gearhart, Foss and Griffin argue that for centuries rhetoric has been construed as "persuasion," which they suggest is a patriarchical enterprise geared to dominating the minds, bodies, and lives of others. Although they stop short of disowning the necessity of appeals for change, they propose invitational rhetoric as a "feminist" alternative to persuasion:

Invitational rhetoric is an invitation to understanding as a means to create a relationship rooted in equality, immanent value, and self-determination. Invitational rhetoric constitutes an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor's world and to see it as the rhetor does. In presenting a particular perspective, the invitational rhetor does not judge or denigrate others' perspectives but is open to and tries to appreciate and validate those perspectives . . . .[i]

Although invitational rhetoric has many similarities to Brockriede's arguers-as-lovers ideal and Corder's understanding of persuasive encounter as a loving dialogue (all three, for example, strive toward understanding and value the relationship over what is accomplished in words), Foss and Griffin's perspective is distinct because "rhetors refuse to impose their perspectives" on others, but rather, "invite" others to see the world from their eyes. "Invitational rhetoric offers an invitation to understanding," they argue, "to enter another's world to better understand an issue and the individual who holds a particular perspective on it" (my emphasis). Whereas Brockriede and Corder seem to maintain a polite respect for the other, Foss and Griffin advance a theory that seems designed to transcend the self into the Other. Although "love" does not appear in their essay, "invitational rhetoric" is the most extreme iteration of rhetoric as transcendent unification: first one invites, then she unites. The dominant concept of identification as recognition assumed in Brockriede and Corder's theories is thereby completely bypassed by Foss and Griffin as a patriarchical conceit.

A number of scholars have criticized Foss and Griffin's theory of invitational rhetoric for many reasons. Julia T. Wood has charged that the authors have misrepresented "feminism" as a monolithic perspective and "rhetoric" as a coercive practice.[ii] Bonnie J. Dow has argued that Foss and Griffin's perspective is needlessly essentialist and biologistic.[iii] Dana Cloud has criticized invitational rhetoric for its "problematic assumptions of liberal individualism," namely, that it "assumes shared interests between oppressor and oppressed, so that conflicts can be solved through mutual invitation."[iv] All three scholars condemn invitational rhetoric for its stance against conflict and struggle, which has been crucial for the social changes that made the West better for women (and men). The world has been an inhospitable place for women, they argue, and the invitational paradigm thus functions as a denial of shit by excluding the unacceptable from its purview. In this respect the individual liberalism of invitational rhetoric has been criticized as kitsch: invitational rhetoric aims toward an impossible unification at the same time as it denies the ugliness of human existence.

Owing to their reliance on the work of Gearhart, Foss and Griffin's invitational paradigm is unquestionably rooted in biological essentialism. Yet, understanding invitational rhetoric as kitsch also implies that it is a theory of love, and I would argue one of the first theories in rhetorical studies to challenge the division or agonism central to the traditional rhetorical subject. If we think of invitational rhetoric as a theory of love, then the absolute-if not evangelical-rejection of "control and domination" is not so much a biologically essentialist position as it is an anti-Hegelian one. In her masterful study of the subject of the theoretical humanities, Kelly Oliver explains that "contemporary theory is still dominated by conceptions of identity and subjectivity that inherit a Hegelian notion of recognition. In various ways, these theories describe how we recognize ourselves in our likenesses as the same or in opposition to what is (or those who are) different from ourselves."[v] What is the Hegelian notion of recognition? It is the idea that subjectivity is a consequence of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is only possible by the simultaneous recognition of a "not-me," an other or another, by means of re-presentation. So, for example, psychoanalysis posits that subjectivity emerges when an child comes to the realization that it is not one with its mother. When a child beholds herself in a mirror and jubilantly says, "that's me!" she is also saying "I am not my mama."[vi] Insofar as the recognition of another objectifies him or her as an object (hence the subject/object relation), Oliver argues that such recognition is inherently agonistic (that which Burke locates in terms of the "hierarchic principle").vii Like Burke's views on hierarchy and identification, theories that conceive of the subject as Hegelian, "like Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler," Oliver says, "maintain that social oppression and domination are manifestations, or repetitions, of the oppression and domination at the heart of subjectivity itself."viii Alternately cast, if rhetoric concerns a Hegelian subject, then it is inherently deceitful; if, however, rhetoric concerns a subject that begins in some pre-symbolic unity, then we can speak of true love.

Only by making it a critique of the traditional rhetorical subject can we begin to rehabilitate invitational rhetoric. Cast as a theory of love, invitational rhetoric is an attempt to break-out of the perceived straight-jacket of "identification," which, for Burke, is the recognition of consubstantiality with another person or people because of some prior division (biological, symbolic, or otherwise). For Brockriede and Corder, "rhetoric as love" is an attempt to reverse this default alienation by finding common cause or interest. Burke, Brockriede, and Corder assume from the outset a Hegelian subject for whom self-reflection is the recognition of a "not-me" or division among people. For Foss and Griffin, however, invitational rhetoric only makes sense when we supplement it with a positive ontology of prior unity, responding to the "objection to shit" with an objection to the agonism assumed to be central to subjectivity itself. Consequently, invitational rhetoric would reject the Lacanian understanding of love as well, and replace it with some pre-representational or pre-rhetorical form of identification (or perhaps not identification at all insofar as identitarian logic is premised on same and different).ix For rhetorical studies, the stakes of kitsch are thus the stakes of love, and as Lacan maintained, both concern a way of seeing: are the islands in the stream of speech connected to "the main" before the speech came rolling down? Or are the islands only self-consciously that because of the speech that flows between them?

III. The Irony of Love, or, On (Not) Working Out

Love, a metonymy of community, was itself ironic-or irony, truly, is love-which is to say that it preempts the exchange of self-identical rings . . . and is based, rather, on the unrepenting recognition of difference, separateness, and . . . nonunderstanding. Exorbitantly summoning the infinite at the limit of finitude, love, no matter how "free," is irony. There is no such thing as a free love.
--Avital Ronell[x]

Rhetoric is love, and it must peak a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities.
--Jim W. Corder[xi]

"Islands in the Stream" begins in the key of agonism and division, however, by the end of the song the lyrics shift to denying there ever was a divide. The song ends with a promise from Dolly built on a foundational, ontological unity: "No more will you cry/ Baby, I will hurt you never/We start and end as one, in love forever." For Kenny and Dolly, love is thus a sing-song recognition of some eternal, pre-symbolic unity that I have suggested provides the basis of Foss and Griffin's theory of invitational rhetoric. Using Kenny and Dolly's duet as an allegory for rhetorical theory, however, I have also argued that the dominant theory of love concerns transcendent unification by means of identification, ultimately understood as a Neo-Hegelian form of recognition based on a fundamental (biological or otherwise) division. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan, I argued that identification is fundamentally a lie: the gravity or pull of love is the promise that a rhetor can conjure unity or make one "whole" though the production of an impossible to produce object, the objet a. Understood as the process of recognizing consubstantiality, rhetoric is consequently a theory of love, and a false love or kitsch, to be more precise. The dominant understanding of rhetoric, in other words, reflects an inability to reckon with shit of Creation.

I want to bring this essay to a close by underscoring where the recognition of the love of rhetoric takes us: to the question of subjectivity and the heretofore cherished concept of identification. Diane Davis has argued that "identification is not simply rhetoric's more fundamental aim; it's also and therefore rhetorical theory's most fundamental problem."[xii] Coming to terms with the love of rhetoric is one way to address-as opposed to solve-this fundamental problem, implicating two directions that theory might take. First, following the work of Kelly Oliver and the path originally forged by Foss and Griffin, we might begin to rethink the rhetorical subject though a new metaphor of seeing as "connection" or mediation, which obviates or at least significantly modifies our understanding of identification:

From a new conception of vision as connection, notions of recognition and subjectivity are transformed. If space is not empty, then vision does not have the impossible task of crossing an abyss between the subject an the world of others. Subjects do not have to be motivated to control the world in order to compensate for their separation from it. If the abyss is an illusion, so is the need to dominate objects that lay always on the other side.[xiii]

For Oliver, seeing as connection is fundamentally an ontology of true love based on a non-representational consubstantiality. Like the recent work of Luce Irigaray, Oliver argues for a conception of subjectivity that is neither lacking nor alienated but rather fundamentally connected, like Kenny and Dolly in a stream of song.xiv Similarly, Davis has argued that "identification surely does not depend on shared meaning" because, as neurological evidence bears out, "a mimetic rapport precedes understanding, affection precedes projection."[xv] The gulf or gap between two people or a rhetor and audience assumed by rhetorical theory-indeed, the abyss central to the notion of "communication" itself-simply does not exist, and consequently, the love of rhetoric-a good or true love-would concern "an a priori affectability or persuadability" that is previous to and in excess of any shared meaning."[xvi]

If one thinks that the anti-Hegelian tack tempts kitsch---and precisely because it seeks to avoid the second tear by cutting out crying altogether---then a second direction for theory is toward a reconceptualization of identification not only as love, but also as a form of dualism. With a little help from Lacan, this is the direction that I advocate. Although embracing dualism is not very fashionable in the theoretical humanities these days, rhetoric's tacit theory of love assumes a mismatch between minds and bodies, as well as a priori alienation ("division"), so we might as well come clean (about our/this shit). If one accepts that love makes up for a radical disjunction between two or more individuals who will never truly relate, then rhetoric is borne aloft by the promise of a coming relateability that never arrives, both the lie of invitation and persuasion as well as the screen from a terrible, horrible, void that eludes symbolization. Rhetoric, like love, is fundamentally a false promise.

Recognizing deceit as the affective stimulus of persuasion, however, does not mean rhetoric is unnecessary or that we can avoid---or even would want to avoid---our bad love. A false promise does not reduce to false hope. There is also a sense in which understanding rhetoric's love is a reckoning with alterity, or as Ronell puts it, "an unrepenting recognition of . . . nonunderstanding." Accepting the love of rhetoric, and therefore the neo-Hegelian subject this love assumes, requires the embrace of irony and the comic frame, that communication as shared meaning and love as unification are homologous and impossible. Embracing rhetoric's love is like stupidly singing "Islands in the Stream," full-throated and passionately, at the local karaoke bar. Even deceit can bring us much joy; it is the logic of what many term "fun." Sometimes rhetoric's love produces a better smelling deodorizer. And sometimes stupid fools change the world.

Endnotes

i Foss and Griffin, "Beyond Persausion," 5.
ii Wood, "The Personal is Still Political."
iii Bonnie J. Dow, "Feminism, Difference(s), and Rhetorical Studies." Communication Studies 46 (1995), 110-111.
iv Cloud, "Not Invited," 1-3.
v Oliver, Witnessing, 4.
vi Lacan, Ecrits, 3-9.
vii Burke, Rhetoric, 138-142.
viii Oliver, Witnessing, 4.
ix For a nuanced approach, see Diane Davis, "Identification."
x Ronell, Stupidity, 150.
xi Corder, "Argument," 27.
xii Davis, "Identification," 19.
xiii Oliver, Witnessing, 222.
xiv See Irigaray, The Way.
xv Davis, "Identification," 8. Also see Benjamin D. Powell, "Neural Performance: Reconsidering Agency as the Embodiment of Neural Nets." Text and Performance Quarterly 27 (2007): 107-123.
xvi Davis, "Identification," 9.

love is shit

Music: Cocteau Twins: Victorialand (1986)

I started to work again on the love essay. This I plan to finish this week. Here is the third stage leading-up to a critique of Foss and Griffin's "invitational rhetoric."

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[1]

Speaking of cheese, let us return once again to the amorous dialect of Kenny and Dolly for a second set of verses: "I cant live without you if the love was gone/Everything is nothin' if you got no one/And you did walk in tonight/Slowly loosen sight of the real thing." Aside from the grammatical improprieties, here we are reminded of Harry Nilsson's cultural truism that one is the loneliest number, which, of course, Lacan would suggest is actually the truth of "them two" and which I have suggested is the foundational drive of persuasion. The last verse---which is sung by Dolly---also adds "sight of the real thing," cuing not only an understanding of love as the power of identification through recognition (e.g., "I see you") but also the objet a or object-cause of desire. In the imaginary scenario of the song, Kenny is the "real thing" for Dolly in two senses: (1) in the mundane sense insofar Kenny is a real human being, a person whom Dolly believes that she loves; and (2) in the psychoanalytic sense that a glimpse of Kenny---that observing "something more" about him, his voice, his well-groomed beard encircling his moist mouth, his smooth gestures---stimulates her desire. For Lacan, the singular objet a that sets desire into motion is in fact a "real thing" insofar as it resides in that part of human experience which he refers to as "the Real."[2] In the fantasy of "Islands in the Stream," the mundane real ("I love Kenny!") runs cover for an encounter with the Real ("Kenny and I cannot become One"); again, the objet a cannot be produced or obtained, nor can two human beings transcend their singularity to become One. Rehearsing Lacan's understanding of the objet a as token of the Real is thus important for understanding the love of rhetoric as both an impossible ideal and a screen for an unbearable state of abjection.

According to Lacan, for humans there are three basic modes or "orders" of human experience: (1) the symbolic, or that order concerned with representation and language, broadly construed; (2) the imaginary, or that order concerned with imagery, illusion, and fantasy; and (3) the Real, an undifferentiated and unsymbolizable realm of being, alternately understood as a void, gap, or "persistant traumatic kernel" in the symbolic order itself.iii Although Lacan was deliberately unclear about his conception of the Real (perhaps in order to emphasize its elusiveness), the concept took on an increasing importance over the course of his writings. Slavoj Zizek has suggested that one approaches the Real only in respect to the objet a, a sort of non-existant touchstone of sorts, which "is simultaneously the pure lack, the void around which the desire turns and which, as such, causes the desire, and the imaginary element which conceals this void, renders it invisible by filling it out."[4] In other words, the objet a resides in the Real but has imaginary effects (e.g., inspires fantasies of love). Insofar as love is both the term for a failed relationship and the desire set into motion by the objet a, then, love is simultaneously an indirect confrontation with the Real and in inability to reckon with the Real, the promise of unification as an imaginary shield from Real a impossibility. In short, love is a screen for shit, or more simply stated, love is shit.

The Second Tear

Of course, there is some deliberate equivocation with the term "shit." With the phrase "love is shit" I mean to denote first that the Western fantasy of transcendent love is for shit; love is impossible to actualize. I also mean to cue the more negative assessments of love for those among us who have failed, time and time again, to sustain a loving relationship in a more mundane sense of the term ("love stinks! yeah yeah!"). In this sense---notwithstanding cloacal ambiguities---one could say that "Islands in the Stream" is pure bullshit. Most importantly, I mean to stress here the understanding of love as a desire caused by the objet a, an object "without properties that lacks existence."[5] Insofar as that object is identified as such, it becomes, as Lacan suggests, "the gift of shit," a worthless thing that lost value because it become a specific object. The objet a is a token of the Real because it represents something non-representable that is experienced as terrible or horrible by human beings (and this is because it escapes re-presentation). Hence, for Lacan the "objet a is the anal object" in the

precise sense of the non-symbolizeable surplus that remains after the body is symbolized, inscribed into the symbolic network: the problem of the anal stage resides precisely in how we are to dispose of this leftover. For that reason, Lacan's thesis that animal became human the moment it confronted the problem of what to do with its excrement is to be taken literally and seriously: in order for this unpleasant surplus to pose a problem, the body must already have been caught up in the symbolic network.[6]

Shit is a reminder that there is a horrible, un-nameable excess or gap in our symbolic reality---that something always eludes us. This is why Milan Kundera asserts that "the objection to shit is a metaphysical one," and its register is the imaginary:

The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner. It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. "Kitsch" is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century . . . . Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.[7]

And here Kundera causes us to confront the reason why rhetoricians have avoided theorizing love, because love's object is an impossible excess, because "Islands in the Stream," like the fantasy it bespeaks, is kitsch!

If falling in love is a stupidity in respect to a radical disjunction, a ruse of identification in respect to an objet a, the pursuit of which screens us from the unacceptable in human existence, then our failure to theorize love in respect to rhetoric is born of fear. Traditionally conceived, love is kitschy, but few of us want to confront the lovers cooing on a park bench, for it would mean to reckon with impossibility of realizing our own transcendent fantasies. Even fewer of us want to be thought of as sentimentally stupid, or as Kundera might put it, few of us want to be caught crying in public: "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running in the grass!"[8] I would suggest that Burke's reluctance to mention love and his tendency to abstract persuasion to a "hierarchical principle" depersonalizes rhetoric in an effort to avoid sentimentality. Although few would voice an objection in print, some scholars have worried that Brockriede's suggestion that the loving rhetorician "wants power parity" is an impossible pipe dream (and by extension, so too is Habermas' ideal speech situation). Ervin's admirably frank admission that Corder's arguments for rhetoric's love are too "touchy-feely" and cast in "sentimental soft focus" reflects the same fear of kitsch. Perhaps no other essay, however, has been more roundly criticized for its tears than Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin's "Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for An Invitational Rhetoric." An understanding of the interrelation between love and kitsch not only helps to explain the visceral responses to Foss and Griffin's theory, but also helps us to better discern a major fault-line among rhetorical theories: the locus of love's presumed antithesis, hate.

Invitational Rhetoric, or, the Gift of Shit

Stay tuned for this part soon!

the way i are

What does it say about me, that I looooovveee a top-40 dance track? I first heard it in a friend's car on the way to Jesus Christ Superstar last weekend. I mean, I already cop to Justin (he is better than Michael Jackson, dig?), but Timbaland? The shoes suck, but this tune is pure . . . roller skating bliss! McDonald's knows it, too, as I just saw a commercial featuring this song (with people at the skating rink!).

amplified heart

Music: And Also the Trees: Evening of the 24th (1987) "Haunted Voices," the book in progress, opens thusly:

"Today there has grown out of and around the spoken word a vast network of artificially contrived media---writing, print, electronic devices such as sound tapes or computers in which the informational content is implicitly or explicitly tied in with verbal explanation far beyond the experience of early man---and other complex contrivances. These media are a great but distracting boon. They overwhelm us and give our concept of the word special contours that can interfere with our understanding of what the word in truth is, and thus can distort the relevance of the word to ourselves."

---Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word

But what if distortion, like "grease," is the word?

My mother gave me disks.

I remember I was seven and the tone-arm was white plastic; the chassis was a box of cardboard with a faux-plaid paper laminate, a sort of working-classy mélange of pinks and blues that bled into a swath of pretend blue-jean (very 80s, the era of Mead notebooks and pencils with real, chew-worthy erasers). I could close the lid and latch the box and take it with me to the next room by toting a clear, plastic handle; I would coil the chord improperly inside and inevitably I couldn't get the lid to shut without the plug dangling. A small plastic volume knob controlled the voices that came out of the box.

In retrospect, there was a subtle homology between the faded and scratched black paint on the plastic volume knob and the tinny voices that came out. But, sound quality matters little to a seven year old, and most especially because my most prized records were once my mother's, recorded in mono somewhere in Memphis over a decade before I was born in 1973. I was obsessed that kind of writing, always perplexed by the way in which the grooves on record could conjure voices from no-place: out of this needle-machine came the most transformative spiritual effects for me. I remember listening to the phonograph and dancing on my bed, jumping, collapsing and pretending to weep when a mournful ditty changed the mood. I remember boredom banished by the impassioned pre-pubescent sign-a-long. I remember praying to some deity or another (sometimes the Dark one) that one day I might be able to sing and move and amplify hearts, that I might become a rock star. For me, listening to my records was like going to church.

Today there is little magic in music, or at least, in the shift from records to compact disks and, today, digital encoding formats like the mp3, something has been lost. There was something hallowed in the touchability of the vinyl record that left its mark in sound. Erik Davis recalls that, for decades, the record drew "living spirit into matter" in a way that musicians and their fans recognized as enchanting---so much so that in the 1970s many rock records became the literal embodiment of magical spells (as was the case with Led Zepplin and other concept album rockers).[1] Experimental musician David Toop notes that the magic of the phonograph, like the nostalgic heart, has swelled in our new century: "Frozen in time within the grooves, a voice, an instrument, a sound, becomes the living dead and is worshipped in the way that a loved one, deceased, may be adored for years by the bereaved."[2] Owing to the fetishism of vinyl, now coupled with the mystifications of nostalgia, in the last decade vinyl records have made a modest come-back, with a number of contemporary artists pressing records again alongside their digital disks and Internet music files.

My early encounters with the writing of sound were religious and largely obsessed with the voice of a mysterious man: Roy Orbison.

things that kick my ass

Music: Brian Eno: Night on Earth (2006)

1. Crunches on the exercise ball. Yowee!

2. Chapter one of Zizek's The Parallax View.

Speaking of number two (pun intended, of course), the reading group met yesterday to finish up our discussion of Zizek's first chapter. Fortunately, some of us read up through the second chapter and discovered it's not as dense and difficult as the first. Nevertheless, chapter one lays out all the toys Slavoj is going to use for the rest of the study.

A lot of territory is covered in chapter one, and most of it to: (a) "rehabilitate" dialectical materialism; (b) square Hegel with Kant in a way that is not as oppositional as folks tend to assume; (c) introduce, elaborate, and critique the work of Kojin Karatani, a neo-Kantian from whom Zizek gets the notion of parallax; and (d) criticize the so-called "cultural turn" in post-Marxian theory as insufficiently dialectical.

Our discussion ended yesterday with some confusion over Zizek's stance on the real. He introduces the "parallax real" in distinction from Lacan's Real at one point, and then in a footnote has a curious statement: is the only response to "naïve realism" a thoroughly "methodological idealism?" The latter seems to indicate Zizek's disappointment with the party-line reading of Lacan's "real" as a kind of non-existent yet nevertheless necessary referent. The parallax real is not a "gap," but rather what we might call "the gapping" or the "gap-movement," the shifting of which either side gives an alternative viewing. Understanding the real as a kind of blind spotting (that is, the knowing of such a spotting after one moves from one view to another), as opposed to a thing, allows Zizek thus to call for a constant movement regarding "the real" in a way that the party-line reading of Lacan does not.

Of course, I'm not sure about that. We tried to parse this distinction for some time, and finally settled on the idea that the "parallax real" is indicative of the book as a whole: After Gender Trouble Judith Butler had to write Bodies that Matter in order to confront the "methodological idealism" through which her theory was read. Similarly, after The Ticklish Subject Zizek suggests it is necessary to move to the "object"---to stress the materialism behind his views, to acknowledge that, yes, bodies do matter.

Jillian helped us come to this reading after all my bitching and moaning about being sore. About doing too many crunches on the exercise ball. "Thanks for reminding me," she said, "what this business is about." Indeed: it's about sore-ness.

going dark

Music: Otis Redding: Don't Let Go (1976)

On Monday I had lunch with a colleague and we discussed our plans for the summer: she was going to brave "dissertation camp" with a number of grads, while I was going to work on The Book. I told her the story about how I communicated to all the journals I was vetting manuscripts for that I would be unavailable for two months. I have written all the promised letters, and read all the theses and dissertations I had promised to read. There are still revisions to do for a book chapter and the essay on Masonry for Heredom, as well as a pending request for revision or a rejection from a journal, but for the most part I think the pressing loose ends have been singed. I'm ready to focus, with delicious selfishness, on my own work.

My colleague said that I was "going dark." What? I asked. It's a reference to the television 24, she said. Whenever a spy is going incommunicado, she "goes dark." Well, I never watch the show, but I like the sound of the term---as if it's like entering a cave.

So, if any of my peeps who need feedback on this or that thing, letters of recommendation, and so on, are reading this: you better get the request in before July 4. Independence day will be celebrated as just that: my class will be over and my paper grading will be concluded. I am also giddy just thinking about it.

Unfortunately, my home has still yet to be completely repaired. They have been working all week. We ran into a snag with the tile splash back wall (the grouting was loose and needs to be redone). Also, they cannot hook up my dish washing machine, so I'll have to hire the 28th person to do that. And it continues . . . .

But I have hope! I have hope of a me-ness and independence I have not known for eight months. I have hope for an ability to pick up and travel---to leave this godforsaken, dirty, paint-on-the-tile-floor-because-the-construction-workers-do-not-use-dropcloths-when-they-paint condo---whenever I choose. I will blog in these dark months, rest assured. I have hope, however, my blogging locations will be various and far and possibly away at some point.

Away.

on positivist pricks

Music: Bryan Ferry Boys and Girls (1985)

Oxford English Dictionary, "prick": I. To pierce or indent with a sharp point.

One of my favorite literary critics, Frederick C. Crews, used to be quite friendly to psychoanalytic approaches to literature, but then quickly repudiated it in a series of sharp critiques (mostly directed at Freudians). In his hilarious send-up of rhetoric/English casebooks, The Pooh Perplex, In Which it is Discovered that the True Meaning of Pooh Stories is Not as Simple as is Usually Believed But For Proper Elucidation Requires the Combined Efforts of Several Academicians of Varying Critical Persuasions: A Casebook (1963), there is an enjoyable chapter by "Myron Masterson" titled "Poisoned Paradise: The Underside of Pooh," in which the psychoanalytic critic asserts that Christopher Robin was "attracted by [a] fetishistic . . . striptease" by Piglet, eventually leading to a mock orgy of homoerotic desire with Roo and Tigger. Crews lampoons what I would agree is the very difficult to read, tortuous, and implausibly stupid psychoanalytic essay (one by Rey Chow on Walter Benjamin comes to mind). Here Crews' critique is rhetorical and is the counterpart to what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has dubbed "zero theory": "psychoanalysis is a content-free nebulosity, a perpetually moving target. It is like Lévi-Strauss’s 'zero symbol,' a thingamajig that can designate fill-in-the-blank as one sees fit." Now, before one starts to think that, with this assertion, Borch-Jacobsen is repudiating psychoanalysis, she should stop short: he is responding to the claims of some practitioners that "psychoanalysis is an empirical science." Lacan said that it was a science, but he meant that in a very peculiar (well, non-scientific) way. Nevertheless, that Crews' parody of psychoanalytic criticism is funny at all is a testament to its "zero" status as an empirical theory. Although unquestionably for the uninitiated psychoanalysis has a built-in authority appeal because Freud made such claims, most folks in the humanities that read and study the stuff are not interested in making scientific claims.

While I admire both Crews and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's work, I do not like how Crews tends to contextualize Borch-Jacobsen's in his gradually righteous crusade to remove psychoanalysis en toto from the known universe (of course, there is no unknown universe for Crews). As far as I can tell (well, at least based on The Freudian Subject and The Emotional Tie) Borch-Jacobsen has written numerous monographs on psychoanalysis as a theory and philosophy. Borch-Jacobsen does the work of psychoanalysis, does a kind of psychoanalytic criticism, in a philosophical and cultural project. So when Crews tries to enlist him as somehow supporting a positivistic cause I am nervous. I cannot speak for Borch-Jacobson because I'm new to his work---but I don’t think he'd join Crews in his fetishized strip-tease for reasons I briefly detail below.

Unquestionably many of the empirical claims of classical psychoanalysis (which usually denotes drive theory and Freud-derived approaches) have been scientifically disproved. Many of the significant claims of psychoanalysis, however, are not empirical claims and subject to testing. Psychoanalysis is a way of describing the social world, a narratology, if you want, that gives otherwise incomprehensible events meaning. In analytical philosophical terms, it is a vocabulary interested in coherence, not correspondence. Its claims are limited to the domain of meaning and its underside, but does not cross the horizon of "the human." One time classical adherent Viktor Frankl published a book, Man's Search for Meaning that sort of specified why psychoanalysis is not a science: there is something redemptive, truthful, and specifically human in suffering and in the confrontation with death that no science can specify. Of course, this project is philosophical too, which is why we might characterize psychoanalysis as a philosophical hermeneutic, what Ricouer termed a suspicious mode of interpretation.

Psychoanalysis is thus more like a perspective and approach, and less like a singular, unified theory, that orbits the concepts of the dynamic unconscious and defense mechanisms. One is hard-pressed to argue that psychoanalysis is monolithic, or to suggest that one can generalize about "all psychoanalytic theory" by isolating, for example, the work of Freud as the common denominator.

This said, then, I'm always somewhat baffled when I come across the positivistic argument---there is no empirical evidence to support psychoanalytic claims and so on---in rhetorical scholarship. Once I gave a paper at NCA that argued Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project was influenced by Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, and if we understood the arguments about condensation and displacement in chapter 6, then Benjamin's wild organization scheme for his masterwork started to make sense. A respected colleague told me my work was invalid because of the "voodoo of the unconscious," which just sorta surprised me because I was basically providing a "reading" of a text that really had nothing to do with the validity of condensation and displacement [it was more or less a history of influence paper]; even if the theory was not empirically verifiable that had nothing to do with my claims. When I asked why the "unconscious" was a bad concept, I got more of the Crews-like appeals to empirical science.

What's so strange to me about these appeals to science is that they are made to invalidate a method of reading that appeals to a vocabulary, a name for dynamics (and usually in a text in relation to a generalized psyche). So, for example, you don't have people criticizing ideological criticism because it decerns a structure, and "structures don't march in the street!" You don't have folks criticizing genre theory because science cannot empirically verify the existence of form. Genres are learned organizing schemes—narrative structures, basically. I suppose Freud's pretension to the discernment of "laws" is partly to blame, but still, it just seems wrong-headed to me to insist an organizing principle and hermeneutic approach to a text is immediately idiotic and embarrassing to a field because there's no way to empirically test one's claims.

Over two thousand years ago Aristotle divided the project of knowing into the camps of the sciences and the arts (techne, not art as we think of it today necessarily). And he said rhetoric was an "art" particularly because it was crafted by humans toward (somewhat) blind ends; his favorite brand, deliberative rhetoric, was always about arguing for an action in face of an uncertain future. If one sees psychoanalysis as a method for interpreting rhetoric, it too is faced with a similar uncertainty: the unconscious. It's the category of the dynamic unconscious that gets in the way of "testing" and such---its what gives the enterprise this "zero theory" factor. To force psychoanalysis into the domain of universal laws across contexts is like arguing rhetorical success can be taught from a textbook, or as Isocrates says, "like an alphabet." Or put alternatively, to make psychoanalysis an empirical science is to make rhetoric soothsaying. It's just not a fair move, and grossly misunderstands what a psychoanalytic approach is really about.

burke on love

Music: Cassius: Rock Number One (2007)

For the past couple of days I've been able to work---albeit slowly---on my love essay. It is my hope that I can wrap this essay up shortly after the summer school session ends; it's been in the works for a couple of years now. I figure now that psycho-babble friendly editors are seated in the major journal outlets for my field, now is the time to send this out for review.

In any event, the part of the paper I've been working on is on Kenneth Burke. Folks frequently suggest that Burke shifted (or helped to shift) the focus in US-style rhetorical studies from rhetoric as argument to rhetoric as courtship. So I'm trying to argue that Burke's theory of persuasion in A Rhetoric of Motives is actually a theory of love. But to make the case, love is defined in a very specific, structural sense as "the supplement to a failed relationship." Basically, I'm fetching Lacan through Burke. I think it works ok. My next move will be to show how both Burke and Lacan's understanding of persuasion/love is "neo-Hegelian," or is premised on an understanding of specular recognition (e.g., "the gaze"). I will then argue that the critiques of rhetoric offered by Foss and Griffin in their invitational rhetoric stuff are actually critiques of the Hegelianism undergirding rhetorical theory since Burke. It seems to me that, more than Freud or Marx, Hegel is the ghost in Burke's work.

Anyhoo, here's a teaser:

Thus far love has been described as (a) a supplement to a failed relationship, or the name we give to the impossibility of overcoming a fundamental disjunction between two experiences in the world; and (b) as a persuasive gesture of "something more," or as an emotional appeal whereby someone causes the desiring of another by the tacit or explicit promise to produce the objet a. The significance of this twofold understanding of love for rhetorical studies is that it is fundamentally a theory of persuasion: rhetors are literally lovers, promising audiences to a coming unity (to "make them whole") 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; a war "to show'em that we can do it"; and so on.[1] In other words, Lacan's understanding of love helps us to redescribe the persuasive process as a desirous one that is necessarily deceptive (but, with regards to Nietzsche, in a non-moral sense): insofar as the objet a is merely the label for this excessive "something more" to a person betokened by a substitute object (e.g, the breast, a voice, whatever it is about a rhetor that appeals to us), any pretense to satisfying the desires of the audience is a ruse. Not only is it impossible to produce the object cause of desire, but as Lacan insists with his claim that "there is no sexual relationship," it is also impossible to unite an audience or a people "as One." As Lacan puts it, "love is impotent, though mutual, because it is not aware that it is but the desire to be One, which leads to the impossibility of establishing the relationship between 'them-two.'"[2] Alternately stated, this "desire to be One" is the underlying logic of persuasion as transcendent unification, a promise that only works, of course, if one is stupid enough to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that a rhetor has this impossible power. From this vantage, our received understanding of persuasion in rhetorical studies is fundamentally idealist, or rather, premised on the transcendent fantasy of spiritual unification by erotic means originally advanced in Plato's Phaedrus.

The Platonic ideal of persuasion is perhaps no more explicitly extended than in the much studied work of the Mac-Daddy of modern rhetorical studies, Kenneth Burke. In his A Rhetoric of Motives Burke argued that the default condition of all persuasion is "identification," which helped to eclipse a centuries-long obsession with rational argumentation and deliberation. "Here is perhaps the simplest case of persuasion," explains Burke. "You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his."[3] Yet for Burke identification is not merely the flattery of walking and talking like a duck when amongst ducks; rather, one is persuaded by another because of a deep seated desire to become "as One," a desire cued by some common substance---speech, gesture, tonality, and the like. "Consubstantiality," argues Burke, is a condition of persuadability that is only possible because "identification implies division."[4] Rhetoric is thus implicated "in matters of socialization and faction," or in the processes of subjectification and human conflict, which implies that identification or states of consubstantiality are the consequence of some prior alienation or division.5 For Burke this division is fundamentally biological, for as Barbara Biesecker explains, "prior to the identifications and divisions of rhetoric, there is the biological division of one nervous system from another."[6]

At this juncture the parallels between Lacan's understanding of love and Burke's understanding of rhetoric are starting to emerge: First, insofar as love is supplement for an impossible sexual relationship, rhetoric is the promise of unity through consubstantiality; rhetoric is thus the supplement for what Burke terms division, or rather, the impossibility of pure consubstantiality. The key difference between these two different understandings of what persuasion is, however, concerns essentialism: For Lacan disjunction is wholly a symbolic relationship, irrelevant of biology or any other essentialist facticity; one simply must fiat an unbridgeable gap among subjects in the world, a gap that cannot be thought or known precisely because the experience on either side will never overlap.[7] Love is thus a failure to reckon with this disjuncture. For Burke, however, division is fundamentally biological, the fact that human beings are neurologically discrete entities; rhetoric thus becomes the way in which these separate neurological beings "induce cooperation" through representation (of course, such a view has essentialist implications for understanding sex and gender).[8] Second, insofar as love's desire is caused by an object that betokens a "something more," identification is the promise that this mysterious and elusive X can, in fact, be produced. Consubstantiality is thus a term for a state of desiring, a longing for the "something more" of a persuasive, attractive, or charismatic individual.

From a Lacanian perspective, Burke's understanding of identification comes very close to collapsing love and rhetoric. He likely did not do so-at least explicitly-because he objected to the psychoanalytic characterization of human motivation in sexual terms.[9] Nevertheless, Burke's theory of identification is unquestionably founded on the desiring subject.[10] As with Lacan, Burke agrees that "it is of the essence of man to desire," and this is because of a division (or disjunction) central to subjectivity.[11] Burke also seems to suggest that persuasion is a desirous event:

implicit in the perpetuating of persuasion . . . there is a need of 'interference.' For a persuasion that succeeds, dies. To go on eternally (as form does) it could not be directed merely toward attainable advantages. And insofar as the advantages are obtainable, that particular object of persuasion could be maintained as such only by interference. Here, we are suggesting, would be the ultimate rhetorical grounds for the tabus [sic] of courtship, the conditions of 'standoffishness.'[12]

Such an understanding of persuasion is similar to Lacan's explanation of desire: a desire that attains its object is not desire, but simple need. Desire desires only more desire, which is why various substitute objects come into play: for the toddler, her cries for candy are not really for candy, but for "something more" that the candy represents: love, the recognition of a parent. In the state of Burkean consubstantiality, then, the object of common substance is necessarily a ruse: the speech, gesture, tonality, image, and so on that invites feelings of desire and that creates the conditions of identification are actually forms of "interference" analogous to a love interest who is "playing hard-to-get."[13] Consequently, like Lacan, Burke downplays the object of identification in his account of persuasion by urging a focus on form, that which psychoanalysis locates in terms of repetition: the ultimate human motive or cause of human effort should be located "in a form, in the persuasiveness of the hierarchic order itself. And considered dialectically, prayer, as pure beseechment, would be addressed not to an object (which might "answer" the prayer by providing booty) but to the hierarchical principle itself, where there is an answer implicit in the address."[14] The missing link between Lacan and Burke in this respect is "the Other": whereas for Burke persuasion is ultimately understood abstractly as desirous repetition ("form"), for Lacan a person always gets in the way, or a person is usually mistaken as the cause of the pleasures (and pains) of repetition. In other words, Burke's "Soylent Green is people!" Although Burke is correct to point out that the presumed object of desire is ultimately interchangeable with something else (and thus the common substance of identification is really a ruse), persuasion necessarily situates an individual person into the field of desire as a representative of the so-called hierarchical principle. Alternately cast, persuasion can be redescribed as a simple but familiar query: "do you love me?" or as Lacan puts it, "what do you want from me?" To be persuaded, one must be asking at some level, "what can I do for you to receive your love?"

Insofar as one agrees that Burke is among the most widely read theorists of rhetoric in our time, then a theory of love is already tacit in the shift from rational deliberation, the supplication of good reasons, and so on, to the study of persuasion as "identification," thereby expanding the process into the domain beyond conscious awareness. Consequently, one of the reasons few rhetoricians have attempted to theorize love is because it is already assumed: I am suggesting that, after Burke, the default understanding of rhetoric is the promise and question of love. The evidence of this homologous relation is explicitly discernable, of course, in the essays that claim love in the name of rhetoric. In his "Arguers as Lovers" essay, for example, Wayne Brockriede . . . [here briefly explain how Corder and Brockriede's theories . . . .

NOTES

[1] Fischerspooner, "We Need a War" . . .. For a more detailed explanation of this argument [source withheld for the purposes of blind review].

[2] Lacan, XX, 6.

[3] Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 55.

[4] Burke, A Rhetoric, 45.

[5] Burke, A Rhetoric, 45.

[6] Barbara Biesecker, Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 204-205; also see Burke, A Rhetoric, 130.

[7] Slavoj Zizek's latest book is devoted to explaining the character of this gap. See The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

[8] Burke, A Rhetoric, 43.

[9] See, for example, Kenneth Burke, "Ausculation, Creation, and Revision: The Rout of the Esthetes; Literature, Marxism, and Beyond." In Extensions of the Burkean System, Ed. James Chesebro (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), esp. 103.

[10] Diane Davis, "Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are." Pre/Text [forthcoming]: 6. ASK DIANE FOR FULL CITATION.

[11] Burke, A Rhetoric, 275.

[12] Burke, A Rhetoric, 274.

[13] ". . . biologically it is of the essence of man to be sated," says Burke. "Only the motives of 'mystery' . . . are infinite in their range, as a child learns from himself when he first things of counting to the 'highest number.'" Such counting is the algebra of desire. Burke, A Rhetoric, 275.

[14] Burke, A Rhetoric, 276.

fan boy; secrecy

Music: Duran Duran: The Singles, 1986-1995 (2006) Yesterday had one of those exciting experiences that only my comrades in Geekdom can understand: I had an extended phone conversation with a scholar whose work I have admired for many years. I don't think I've felt quite this excited conversing with a scholar since I met Robert L. Scott and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell for the first time (oh, I take that back; I felt this way when I met Larry Grossberg for the first time as well, who told me not to go to UNC). It's this bizarre feeling, like you're in the presence of Moses or Mother Theresa or something. Talking with him Wednesday I was reminded, too, how those initial fuzzies are often banished by "down to earth" displays of commonness: the scholar turns out to be just another very human being who is obviously a heavy smoker and likes to talk about "chasing ass" like the rest of us.

The person I spoke to yesterday is Rex R. Hutchens, perhaps the United States' foremost authority on Scottish Rite ritual, Masonic symbolism, and the teachings of Albert Pike. Hutchens is the new editor of Heredom, the best scholarly research journal focused on Masonry, and he has decided to print a modified version of an essay I wrote. The original version of the essay is forthcoming in Rhetoric and Public Affairs, however, because it is an argument that is perhaps more relevant to Masons I revamped it and sent it to Heredom. After waiting for months I finally got an email from Hutchens: "I want to print this. Call me."

So after a couple of days of phoning I finally called and caught him. We spoke for over an hour, first on minor revisions and "pittly" things to prepare the manuscript, but then about the state of Masonry in general. It was really fun, because at times Hutchens would point me to passages in Morals and Dogma to illustrate his points and so on (in other words, it was something like bible study; I learned a bunch). What was so endearing about the conversation was finding someone who shared my opinion about what I see happening to the Masons; after I learned that, it was like talking to an old friend. I've shared this opinion with a number of my brethren, and mostly they politely disagree.

So what is it? In the past four years of so, a number of good Masons---folks whom I both admire and respect---have been appearing on television (in History Channel documentaries and so on) and publishing books in an attempt to give recent publicity (mostly owing to The DaVinci Code) a positive spin. What's astonishing to me is that a number of these folks have been saying "there are no secrets in Masonry," which just seems absurd. The essay I wrote for both RP&A and Heredom draws on the work of Habermas and Jodi Dean in order to argue that secrecy is central to a sense of community; I argue that it’s the secrecy of Masonry that makes it coherent and persist as a fraternity. For me, giving up the secrecy of Freemasonry is akin to a death knell.

Many folks do not agree with this opinion. The underlying assumption of those who disagree with me is that Masonry's numbers are on the decline, and so anything we can do to increase our membership is a good thing. This seems to me a bit like the tail wagging the dog. Hutchens and I seem to agree that if our numbers decrease, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Over the past fifty years, the charity-work of the fraternity has eclipsed Masonic philosophy---the study of the fraternity's history and symbolism. This is unfortunate; as Hutchens put it on the phone yesterday, "we're turning into the Elks."

Although republicanism was hatched in Masonic lodges, they were nevertheless exclusive; not everyone deserves to belong. Although I'm a relatively new Mason (going on four years—golly, and I cannot believe its been that long!) I do not think the current publicity campaign does the fraternity any good. I have often heard an older brother at a reunion or ceremony whisper into the ear of a newly made brother not to worry about symbolism, that "it's just a formality," hundred-years old "mumbo-jumbo." That kind of talk is both dangerous and deceptive.

parallactic stew

Music: Chemlab: Rock Whore vs. Dance Floor (2006)

Yesterday was the first meeting of my summer reading group, and we have decided to slog through Zizek's latest self-described "masterpiece," The Parallax View. As the (obscene) counterpart to The Ticklish Subject, Zizek's latest situates the "parallax object"---a rereading of the objet a---as constitutive of the subject, and in so doing, attempts to rehabilitate dialectical materialism, or at least wrestle it from the clutches of those who have wrongly conflated "new age polarity" (e.g., yin/yang) and contradiction as such. Again, we have Zizek's peculiar reading of Hegel, this time amplified (or should I say, chopped and screwed) to a level that really tries ones patience because the jokes are less frequent and the tone is serious. But something strange has happened, too: for the first time that I've ever encountered, at least, Zizek opposes a Lacanian concept with something new and improved: forget the Lacanian Real, 'cause we have a better dasDing-a-ling to tarry with . . . the parallax real!

We're not quite done with the first chapter. I read for many hours for three days, but I didn't manage to get beyond page 41! As I read, I kept having flashbacks of Will Forte doing a Bush impression on Saturday Night Live: ". . . being president is hard y'all. It's so haaaarrrrrdddd." Well, The Parallax View is a slog; I've got a freakin' degree in philosophy and I have much trouble following the complicated discussions of "the concrete universal" and "minimal difference in Hegel" vis-à-vis Kant, the true understanding of the noumenal and the antimony of freewill and nature, and so forth. My hope is that the first few chapters flog the reader and then implications follow in the easier to read chapters. Unquestionably this book is going to keep folks busy for a few years (so please, Slavoj, stop writing so that we can catch up).

Although I won't outline the first chapter, it is fascinating reading because of the figures that lurk between the sentences. Laclau is evoked and dismissed, and Derrida gets a shout-out---but Deleuze and Badiou are right there, ready to pop out . . . it's almost like a sort of tease. Unquestionably Hardt and Negri are implicated too (looks like he addresses their latest tomes later in the book). By far, however, what interests me most in chapter one is the way Zizek attempts to deal with the tension between transcendence and immanence. After a quick tour of Laclau on difference and equivalence, Zizek explains that "'transcendence' is a kind of perspective illusion, the way we (mis)perceive the gap/discord that inheres to immanence itself . . . ."

With that gesture obviously this book is responding, not simply to Zizek's critics, but to the Next French Philosopher. And in this respect, here's the real fire-poker statement that had us hooting:

If anything . . . this reappraisal [of Derrida's notion of difference] is intended to draw an even stronger line of demarcation from the usual gang of democracy-to-come-deconstructionist-postsecular-Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects. So . . . as usual, I would like to point out that, as usual (and as usual, several sensitive people I like will look huffy), the democracy-to-come delegation has not been invited. If, however, a resolute democrat-to-come manages to slip in, he or she would be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set here and there throughout the book.

Well, I happen to love a good number of that delegation, so much so Levinas is in the summer pile, and obviously this is a bit of calculated over-protesting. I mean, with a jab like that in the introduction, who doesn't want to keep reading? Nevertheless, while the damn book is proving as challenging as The Sublime Object of Ideology---and worse, its like 400 pages longer---I think the payoff will be much more than Jameson seemed to suggest in his first-out-of-the-gate review.

[insert barbaric yawp]

Music: The Orb: Cydonia (2001)

"Hello Kay, this is Josh. Did I just miss your call?"

"No. I did not call."

"Oh, I thought that was your voice on the answering machine."

"Is the work starting on Monday?"

"No m'am. I regret it's not."

"Why not!?!!"

"Well, neither me nor the contractor heard from the adjuster. I called him on Friday morning, so did the contractor. Neither of us heard from him, so I don't suspect we will until Monday."

"We have a problem, then [translation: I have a problem with you, Josh]. I think we need to get together and talk about this thing."

"What else is there possibly to talk about?"

"I have a $40 electric bill I have to get paid."

"All I can tell you to do is save the bill. If you have the one from last month, you'll have a point of comparison. You're free to call the adjuster and ask him directly. You're a claimant and separate from my side."

"What's his name and number."

[for the fifth time] "It's B----. His number is XXX"

"XXX . . . "

"Right, XXX-XXX-XXXX."

"XXX-XYY."

"No, let me do the whole thing again. XXX-XXX-XXXX."

"XXX-XXX-XXXX."

"That's right."

"Where is this?"

"Houston, I think. His fax number is a different area code, so I'm not sure where he's located."

"Ok, I'll call him. Now what are we going to do about the water thing?"

"What do you mean 'water thing'?"

"You know when them people first came out and dried up."

"The Steam Team?"

"Yeah, the Steam Team. I already paid them half."

"Well, I called the lady, S---. and gave her my claim number and stuff. They should bill my insurance."

"They didn't! They billed me!"

"I will call them back today and see later today."

"And I have a serious problem with you. Your answering service, it's all goobledy gook."

"So you did call?"

"I couldn't understand it. You need to change it."

"Ok."

"You cannot understand a word of it."

"Kay, I'm not changing my answering machine. I like it the way it is."

"YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING YOU MUST CHANGE IT UNTIL THIS SITUATION IS OVER!"

"I'll do no such thing, and it's none of your damn business what I do with my phone. I'm tired of being harassed today. Goodbye."

[click]

updates on stuffs

Music: Mansun: Kleptomania (2004)

Today Eddie Stout who runs Dialtone Records here in Austin is coming to speak to my popular music class. Dubbed by DJ Smokehouse Brown as "the ambassador of Texas blues," Eddie is hailed for tracking down and recording Texas blues and gospel folks whom many have forgotten; he's a true Austin legend, and I'm pretty excited to see what he has to say to day. Props to Smokehouse for making this possible!

I received word last night that my home is "mold free." I can commence the rebuild. The trouble with this is that I have not found someone to rebuild the walls, cabinets, and other things yet. I had three folks out to provide me estimates. The first guy called on Sunday and said he couldn't find a carpenter, so he couldn't do the job. The second guy pitched roughly 2,500 for the rebuild (both sides). I put him in contact with my adjuster, who must green light the estimate. If he does, rebuild may begin on Monday. The third guy has still yet to send me an estimate, which means he may simply be too busy for the job.

This morning Feisty Neighbor called for another update, upon which I repeated the above paragraph. "Yeah, but does that include my carpet?" she asked. "No m'am," I said, "that estimate includes replacing your carpet pad and re-stretching the carpet."

"But my carpet is ruined! It has rust colored stains all over it."

"Kay, when they did the inspections none of the contractors, including the mold people, recommended a complete replacement of your carpet. It doesn't have mold."

"But it looks terrible! Can't you tell them to replace it?"

"I don't think my insurance will cover that. You'd have to have the whole house's carpet replaced if we did that---and I can tell you they won't go for it."

"Can't you at least mention it?"

"I could, but the guy who may start on Monday will have to do a whole new estimate, which will put us back to square one. And he doesn't do carpet, so he'd have to hire a carpet person. I'll mention it to the adjuster, but . . . . "

"I think they should replace the carpet."

So, why this new demand couldn't have been made at the on-set I don't know, but it is irritating to get this phone call at 8:30 a.m. Regardless, with luck by the time July 1 rolls around maybe my house will be put back together and I can use my kitchen again. Did I mention I liked to cook?

Last night Brooke and I discussed Paris Hilton. We both feel some empathy for her. Brooke suggested maybe I ought to see Sarah Silverman's "roast" at the MTV Music Awards. She said Silverman is particularly brutal. I'd rather not watch it. Silverman is a bully and mean; I'm sorry all you Silverman fans out there, but the woman turns a buck by being mean. Boo on Silverman.

Also, my paid leave of absence to write the book begins on July 1 and ends on September 1. In preparation, I've been saying "no" to a lot of stuff. Saying "no" is really hard: students and colleagues want feedback on papers, and I have to say, "I'm sorry, but I'm unavailable from July 1 until September." I am now on the editorial boards of like six journals I think (two of which I thought I'd never get anything, but I am), and I review regularly for like three more. Many of them are on "Manuscript Central," so I went on to that interface and set up an "unavailability" date. Presumably this tells the editor I'm not available to review stuff with a little message. Anyway, two days after I did that not one, not two, but THREE articles landed in my lap to review. Hah hah! I said I'm gonna review them, but come June 29 no more.

Which reminds me: I've lost count, but I think I have reviewed 15 essays this past academic year. That seems like a lot to me. I guess it's par for the course---and warning to y'all newbie assistant professors. "Service" is often invisible, and get ready for the onslaught!

Off to teach!

richard rorty is dead

Music: Killing Joke: Willful Days (1995) Just minutes ago I discovered that on Friday, American pragmatist philosopher and liberal ironist Richard Rorty died of pancreatic cancer. Amazingly, Rorty's Wikipedia entry already reflects his death; if you're not familiar with his work, I think the entry does a fair job of characterizing his contributions to philosophy and liberal thought.

Largely at the behest of one of my mentors, Edward Schiappa, I read a great deal of Rorty's work during my graduate education. Rorty's thought was very influential to my own work. Although I am not as moved by the pragmatist line as I once was, my first book draws liberally from Rorty's view of language, and by extension, Donald Davidson's work on events and action theory. Rorty's work was always refreshingly frank and unflinchingly bold, especially when he took up the political; even when he was ridiculously wrong he always argued so damn well you just wanted to give into his claims for their elegance.

Despite the genius of his very good book, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, I think the work of his that influenced me the most is a lesser-known essay titled "Trotsky and the Orchids," which is collected in Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities, edited by Mark Edmundson, and later reprinted in one of Rorty's own essay collections. What is often more helpful and instructive to me about this so-called life of the mind are role models who demonstrate an attitude toward living, scholars who evince visions of community that are hopeful and humane. You can read the essay online here. If you don't find this essay's attitude toward scholarship compelling, then you're probably better off working a more mainstream job or better served going to business school.

il n'y a pas La femme

Music: Martha Wainwright: [self-titled] (2004)

On Thursday Paris Hilton was released from jail because of an undisclosed medical condition; the sheriff claimed it is in the right of the police department to determine where she serves her sentence. Enraged, Thursday night the court of the judge that sentenced Hilton held a press conference designed to lure the district attorney into discussions. The talk on Friday morning's "news" shows was that Paris would be returning to jail; Saturday morning I learned she was back behind bars.

The debate among pundits this weekend is whether Paris is receiving "special treatment" or being "singled out" (of course the drama is symptomatic of both). I've marveled at the righteous anger of some commentators, who are jubilant after seeing images of Paris in handcuffs, Paris in tears, and so on. I'm not sure when I've seen so much smugness on the screen for quite some time.

As I've argued elsewhere, owning to the transgressive foundation of celebrity, there is no way to treat Paris like---as one commentator this morning put it---"a black guy from Compton." Similar to Martha Stewart, Paris had to be singled-out for our all-too-familiar pedagogy of patriarchy: women are always subject to the law, and even more precisely, transgressive women will always be subject to re-circulation. In our media-saturated age of surveillance and publicity, what was once the economy of women has now become the circulatory network of women, a spectacle in which the image or figure of a certain transgressive woman is "reset" into the imaginary of state power (the ruse of what Patemen calls "male sex-right"). Prior to Stewart and Hilton, the most conspicuous fantasy of re-circulation was the so-called runaway bride, the woman who got away.

The older idea of the economy of women is usually traced back to Levi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology---a book used to bore poor undergraduates in phenomenology classes to tears, but which said undergraduates eventually learn to appreciate because, despite fabricated data, the theory is useful. Owing to their status as bearers of culture (think here of deBeauvoir's riffs in The Second Sex), in a relatively famous passage Levi-Strauss compares the function of women in various kinship systems to words:

We may now ask whether, in extending the concept of communication so as to make it include exogamy and the rules flowing form the prohibition of incest, we may not, reciprocally, achieve insight into a problem that is still very obscure, the origin of language. . . . It is generally recognized that words are signs; but poets are practically the only ones who know that words were also once values [he neglects Nietzsche here, of course]. As against this, women are held by the social group to be values of the most essential kind, though we have difficulty in understanding how these values become integrated in systems endowed with a significant function. This ambiguity is clearly manifested in the reactions of persons who, on the basis of the analysis of social structures referred to, have laid against it the charge of 'anti-feminism,' because women are referred to as objects. Of course, it may be disturbing to some to have women conceived as mere parts of a meaningful system. However, one should keep in mind that the processes by which phonemes and words have lost . . . their character of value, to become reduced to pure signs, will never lead to the same results in matters concerning women. For words do not speak, while women do; as producers of signs, women can never be reduced to the status of symbols or tokens. (pp. 61-62)

Of course---and I'm sure you can see where this is going---my point is that in the shift from economy to network women are precisely that: they are reduced to the status of a token of value and exchange. In his characteristically faux-offensive way, Lacan charged that Levi-Strauss hedged a bit too much here: "It is as a result of the same mechanism that women in the real order serve [viz., primary/imaginary identification with the maternal phallus], if they'll forgive me saying so, as objects for the exchanges required by the elementary structures of kinship . . . (Ecrits p. 207)." As the primal or "elementary" bearers of value, women are figured in Freud's second Oedipal story of the primal horde, that gang that kills the father devours him, pissed off about the Mac-Daddy's unbridled enjoyment and hoarding of women. Lacan's reading of the whole situation is that these mythic stories outline the notion of an economy broadly speaking---any system of the exchange of values, and the most fundamental that of language itself. The equivocation of women, the phallus, money, and words thus speaks to a logic of symbolic (and imaginary) circulation that effects the lives of real women in ways that have been thoroughly discussed (e.g., Luce Irigaray's work, Judith Butler on Lacan, and so on).

When confronting the complicated French theory on sexuation and the status of woman in psychoanalysis, one is frequently tempted to dismiss the whole lot of it as high-fahlootin' hogwash. Yet when I see stories like the imprisonment of Hilton—her release, her return to prison, and so on—it is not difficult to see Levi-Strauss in all of this, to see the machinations of the symbolic order, to see Hilton as figure or token value exchanged among communities of men as yet another civic lesson over the real body of a woman. The public punishment of Hilton is more than ironic, of course, because Hilton has freely submitted to her own reduction; I suppose the double irony of the drama---to me, anyway---is the Paris-hatred of other women legal experts. They seem to regard Hilton as a universal type when, of course, the publicity of her disciplining exposes the logic of re-circulation for what it is: an economy of exchange.

If not Hilton, then someone else: Lindsay Lohan, the Runaway Bride, Madonna, Hillary Clinton. Men can, though rarely do, get inserted into this re-circulatory spectacle (I cannot think of a situation off hand, but he would be somewhat hysterical; heck, I think children fit the bill here too, in some disconcerting ways). And in this sense we'd do well to heed Levi-Strauss when he says that "as producers of signs, women can never be reduced to the status of symbols or tokens," to which we would add "completely" for our times. Unlike men, real women are not subject to generalization; they cannot be universalized. It is the general unwillingness to admit that Freud's woman as a "dark continent" is in some sense right that leads to the hostility and anger. What I find particularly instructive in Lacan's re-reading of Freud's misogyny is that he argues that, yes, "male" is the paradigm of the symbolic, but not necessarily so, and that this phallogocentrism is a problem (and also why the male is universalized). These public spectacles of re-circulation/valuation that attempt to reduce women to "coins that have lost their embossing"---to the purity of the phoneme---both re-assert patriarchy and deny the ungeneralizability of woman (as a figure outside of discourse except in terms of token). I recall that at her sentencing Hilton pleaded that she just did "what my publicist told me to do"---which, of course, is no different than becoming a ward of the state (moving from agent to guard, from one Daddy to another). Am I a woman? is the question Hilton seems to betoken. The answer is that communication as such is impossible.

Well, I realize this rumination on Paris and the question of woman isn't quite coherent—I'm just blogging aloud. Perhaps I'll "pull it together" in a more essayistic way sometime. I guess the lesson here is that one can neither be, nor control, the Word. Poets know this; Jack Spicer spent his life trying to teach us this (and drinking because he had trouble with his own lesson); and to some extent I think Judith Butler is a "chair of rhetoric" to help us with a similar kind of reckoning.

I've been reading Walter Ong this week. A new favorite quote seems to sum it up: "These media are a great but distracting boon. They overwhelm us and give our concept of the word special contours which can interfere with our understanding of what the word in truth is, and thus can distort the relevance of the word to ourselves" (Presence of the Word, p. x).