Music: Bob Mould: Workbook (1989)
Yesterday was my first graduate seminar ever in rhetorical criticism. I was nervous.
It's becoming my own tradition to open my seminars with a provocative meditation (or rather, a rambling burst of stale, hot air). Here's a semblance of what I said, though not exactly what came out, as I'm sure those who were there will tell you. Half-baked, but not boring:
I want to open the course today with some prepared remarks, as I am wont to do, which should be received as a rhetorical gesture. Prepared remarks have the luxury of precision, which, as many of you know, is not my habit. Prepared remarks are thus a rhetorical gesture of precision. I use the term gesture and precision quite deliberately.
Gesture betokens the body. As Nietzsche has suggested, rhetoric as such is gestural and rhythmic, for it is a bodily act. Yet rhetoric is not merely to be understood as emanating from a body---that is, rhetoric is not simply embodied---for it is also bodied forth, or sends forth bodies, or as the saying goes, rhetoric is the process of "word made flesh." One might think, then, that rhetorical criticism is "flesh made word," a transmutation of sensorial effects into, say, mathematical formulas or generic patterns or what have you. If there is a specter haunting the art and practice of rhetorical criticism, it is precisely this false supposition: that rhetorical criticism concerns the flesh made word or word made flesh, or put alternately, a body left for dead. This much, I submit, is for science or religion. Our task as critics, new and seasoned, is to do violence to a body, to violate a given corpus, without killing it. To God or science we leave cadavers. To art, well, to art we leave something to be desired.
In addition to the word "gesture," the term "precision" is also selected with some care. The word is derived from the Latin verb, "praecisio," which means to "cut off," "break off," or to trim with a degree of exactitude. Precision is consequently a surgical term, and one that connotes the separation of bodies---for example, as in the event of slicing off a mole or amputating a limb. Hence, there is something redundant or oxymoronic in the phrase "gesture of precision."
"Gesture of precision" is alternately oxymoronic or redundant in the sense that it denotes something bodily and embodied on the one hand, but a separation of bodies on the other. Depending on your outlook on dualism, either something presumed whole becomes multiple, or something presumed whole is revealed to be "always already" multiple. Such ambivalence over bodies as singularities or multiplicities is not limited to our physical corporeality, but to all objects qua objects, as Kenneth Burke once hinted in his commentary on the "paradox of substance." Whole or fragmented? Complete or Incomplete? The critical act, from the ancients to the German Romantics to the New Critics, must contend with the being of the body, the condition of the corpus, the state of the word.
But I don't mean to loose you entirely to the abstractions of formal association, so I have bodied forth self-evidence in the midst of my pretension: the idea and presence of "prepared remarks" is a condensation symbol, or an illustration if you want, for rhetoric as a bodily gesture and criticism as a form of amputation. The critical act disembodies, inasmuch as speech understood gives itself over to the signifier and meaning. In other words, the critical act is a violent act toward or against bodies.
In this respect the seemingly random medical image of a child who has inserted a foreign object into her ear is rather overdetermined: I like the way in which the image organizes amputation through the conflation of hearing and writing, through the conflation of speech and the hand-held instrument. Note the deposit into the ear canal is a leaden body, something like a dead weight, a sharpened but nevertheless lifeless point. This is the fate of bad rhetorical criticism, the body amputated or lost in translation, "mere rhetoric," an abortion in the ear canal.
One might say preventing such losses or closures is the task of deconstruction, or perhaps that the illustration of the child with the pencil in her ear denotes the difficulty of distinguishing writing from speech. One might say this, or rather, I just did, but it's just as easy to assert the simple incongruity of a medical image in a course on rhetorical criticism. It poses to us the familiar Aristotelian distinction between an art and a science, and through its violence, suggests which of these is closer to death.
Regardless, whenever we are called to attend to presumably prepared and precise remarks, we are enjoined toward critical listening, the counterpart to critical reading. Critical reading is, of course, the topic of this course, and we shall be investigating how critical reading has come to eclipse critical listening, how the Catholic Ear has been sub-planted by the Surgical Eye. At the most fundamental level, we might say that this course is concerned with the hegemony of the Eye, and how that hegemony has been achieved disciplinarily. At a more mundane level, this course will trace this hegemony from our field's initial obsession with oratory to its current preoccupation with so-called visual rhetoric. The struggle has been a century-long struggle, and its achievement has been specialization, and to some degree, academic respectability. At the level of theory in this room, however, we are also confronting your bodies within an academic field, subjecting you to a sort of violence in the attempts to move you from the ear to the eye, so that your bodies will see, mimic, and produce.
Michel Foucault once defined disciplinarity as "a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of elements, its gestures, and behavior." Let me repeat that: Foucault once defined disciplinarity as "a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of elements, its gestures, and behavior." We mean here disciplinarity-as-policy broadly construed, which is particularly apropos given your first reading for today was Hart and Daughton's Modern Rhetorical Criticism. I did not assign this text deliberately, although it has been a tradition here, in this class, for some decades. I promise you after the second week of September, when James Darsey and Rod Hart debate the purposes and character of criticism, my reasons for not assigning this text in its entirety will be much clearer.
Even resisting an impulse toward critical precision, we must not be not mistaken: a course in rhetorical criticism is a schooling in disciplinary protocol and policy. Moreover, as you will soon learn, in our field disciplinarity is an extension of scientific pretense, and the technologies of such a pretense are termed "method." You cannot disassociate method from discipline, nor disciplines from institutional histories. A course in rhetorical criticism is consequently a course in disciplinarity as such.
Of what, then, does our particular form of disciplinarity consist? So far I have deployed both explicitly and implicitly, four objects, four practices that orbit them, and a term for their arrangement. The objects are the Ear, the Eye, the Mouth, and the Hand. The practices are listening, watching, speaking, and writing. And the ways in which these objects and their corresponding practices are coordinated will be referred to as disciplines. From the largest frame, in this seminar we are concerned with the discipline of "Rhetorical Studies." Thus, for the remainder of the semester we will be examining how rhetorical studies maintain a dynamic policy that organizes eyes and ears and mouths and hands by governing gestures and behaviors. Some of those gestures and behaviors pertain to a housing institution, such as a department, and in this context disciplinarity is comprised of two kinds: departments of English and/or Rhetoric and Composition, and those formerly known as departments of Speech Communication. Of principle concern to both is the behavior of criticism, or the critical act.
If we agree---if only for the sake of argument---that the critical act is at the center of disciplinarity for all rhetorical studies, if it is the primary behavior that is subject to a certain policy of coercions, then we must come to terms with the fundamental character of that act. By the end of my remarks today I hope the contours of that character will be clearer, but let us go ahead and say it bluntly: the critical act is a form violence.
This statement, that the critical act is a form of violence, raises two interrelated questions: First, what do we mean by violence? and second, toward what is one violent in the critical act? Let us discuss each in turn.
In contemporary culture, violence is what Burke would dub a "devil term," as it usually denotes the destruction of things and/or the injury of people. We do not want to jettison this more common meaning of violence, for it is central, however, we also need to think about violence more generally in relationship to the Law. And here I don't mean law in the mundane legal sense (e.g., that it would be illegal for me to expose myself in a crowded movie theatre or, god forbid, a seminar classroom). Rather, I mean law in the sense of codes and prohibitions. The fire code, for example, prohibits more than 25 students in this room. Law in this sense represents anything that is established to regulate behavior. Violence is thus a violation of a law, some recalcitrance, or even social norms. In this respect we can discern many modes of human expression that are "violent": think here, for example, of Norwegian Death Metal and its embrace of a certain form of sonic violence.
To say, then, that the critical act is violent is to say criticism violates norms or established boundaries. The critical act steps beyond what is traditionally allowed or permissible from its object; it is a transgression. There is no such thing as a non-violent critical act, for such a behavior would not confront what a given object announces itself to be. A non-violent critical act is simply a kind of faith. Let us take, for example, René Magritte's famous surrealist painting, "This is not a Pipe," or as I rather prefer, "This is not a Peep." A non-violent appreciation of the painting would apprehend a representation of a yellow, sugarcoated marshmallow in the semblance of a bird, and this in a darker-shaded field above the caption, "This is not a Peep." A more violent interrogation of this image would be led to question the code of the caption. The code is X is not Y, or rather, you should not read X as Y. One must violate the affirmative statement of the signifier to deny, or negate, its meaning in reference to the image. In a very simple sense, denying the law represented here by the signifier is a minimal form of violence, a minor violation.
And yet, upon further reflection, there is a sense in which the truth statement, "X is not a Y," is in fact accurate, if we suppose "Y" to be an actual peep, a real-world referent, and "X" to be the painted representation of the referent. Even this interpretation, however, is arrived at only through the negation of the critical act; only by violating the most superficial rule of interpretation offered by the painting are we led to the more insightful point of Magritte's artistic genius: sometimes "no" does not mean no.
And this triple negative, "no" does not mean no, brings us to the second related question: if the critical act is violent, then what is the object of violence? In the context of rhetorical studies, the object of criticism has been the source of much anxiety, as Dilip Gaonkar's essay makes plain. I should confess that I did not assign Gaonkar's "Object and Method in Rhetorical Criticism" because I thought you would understand it completely. Unless you're already familiar with rhetorical criticism and its politics, there's simply no way that you could. This is why I also assigned Jasinski's piece, because it steps back at a further remove to give you a broader glance. Yet neither essay will make complete sense to you until the end of the course. What I wanted you to glean from these essays is a sense of the deep anxiety caused by concept of the object: what is the object of rhetorical criticism? What should it be?
If the phrase---"no" does not mean no---has any purchase today, then we know already what the object is: woman. In the widest cultural frame, the object is overdetermined as "woman" because woman is the default representative of the Other. In other words, the object of critical violence tends to be feminized. This is something you will rarely see acknowledged in the history of rhetorical criticism, although it is well-known among literary theorists in terms of the "woman-as-text," and in the humanities in terms of the symptamology advanced by Freud in answer to his infamous question, "what does a woman want?" Despite the silences more specific to our field, I would enjoin you to see the feminized object nonetheless: in a given critic's approach to an object, always ask, "in what way is this object described or discussed?"
For example, the undisputed master of what is called "close reading," Michael Leff, frequently describes the critical object in bodily terms. In an important essay titled "Interpretation and the Art of the Rhetorical Critic," Leff describes the critical act in the following way:
The act of interpretation mediates between the experience of the critic and the forms of experience expressed in the text. To perform this act successfully, critics must vibrate what they see in the text against their own expectations and predilections. What the critics are trained to look for and what they see interact in creative tension; the two elements blend and separate, progressively changing as altered conceptions of the one shape the configuration of the other.
Those of you familiar with literary theory will no doubt catch a whiff of the Romantics here, for the critical act is conceived of as an intercourse with the object---in fact, a perfecting of the object through the critical act.
From the vantage of the Romanics, or even, to some extent, the New Critics, Leff's understanding of the critical act is a gesture of grace. Unquestionably, Leff's account is pervaded by the notion of the object---in this case, the text---as a something of beauty. His approach to criticism is a "recovery of the object," as Gaonkar says, but of course not just any object. Rather, the object of the critical procedure must be "iconic" or aesthetically privileged in some way. It must be, in other words, a body of beauty. That violence or violation of the critical act is thus a penetration of textual secrets harbored by a beautiful body. One might term this the criticism of textual caress, and its idiom is, not surprisingly, the body as text, the text as flesh. Today I would argue the critical enterprise of rhetorical studies centers the close reading of a body is the disciplinary, dispositional default.
There is opposition to the Leffian caress, of course, an opposition that would point out that however you dress it, the critical act is a violent one. To cut to the chase, those of us who maintain, and even embrace, the violence of criticism tend to be on the left side of the materialist/idealist divide. In the coming weeks we will spend a predominant amount of our time in the idealist register, for this is what informs our current modes of critical comportment.
By way of vivid analogy, I wish to turn to an illustration, a sample object, or a visual metaphor for the default disciplinary disposition toward the critical act and its object. Had I the time and patience, I would show two visual metaphors, the first one ambivalent yet nevertheless sympathetic to the Leffian view. This would come from Peter Greenaway's renowed film, The Pillowbook, which depicts an obsession with the illustrated body. We only have time, however, for the counterpoint, a scene from Paul Morrissey's infamous B-horror, 3-D schlockfest, Flesh for Frankenstein. Released in 1973 as an art house film sanctioned by Andy Warhol, Flesh for Frankenstein was intended as a social commentary, but sold as a comedic horror film. The movie depicts the hedonistic life of Barron Frankenstein, who is married to his oversexed sister, the Baroness. Driven by a hedonistic abandon to build two perfect mating partners by sewing together the best parts of multiple cadavers, Baron Frankenstein displays a complete detachment from his emotional life: sexual and bodily pleasure have nothing to do with the soul or inner-life of others. He is obsessed with his objects:
[PLAY SCENE: WARN ABOUT ITS GROTESQUENESS]
In addition to its critique of sexual indulgence, Morrissey has said Flesh for Frankenstein was also intended as a critique of the excesses of commercial romanticism. Obviously, for Morrissey popular romanticism tended toward the fetisization of objects, not people, and parts of people, not whole people, such as the breast here, or even less conventionally, the gall bladder.
As an allegory for the critical act, Baron Frankenstein's perversion is a warning about the excesses of critical violence. Approaching the object of criticism too surgically, too methodically, eviscerates it, amputates it, detaches the whole into so many lifeless parts. Approaching the object of criticism too lustfully violates it in such a way that it is uncomfortable, if not excruciating, to watch. As we shall see in the weeks to come, we will encounter rhetorical readings of texts that do both, criticisms whose obsequious praise make them painful to read, and criticisms whose procedures are so mechanical that one is bored to death.
Whence this anxiety over the object? I would say it is an anxiety rooted in infantile life, but for more on that score, you should enroll in the Rhetoric and Psychoanalysis seminar next semester. If its not already clear by now, I think at least a partial answer as to the cause or original of object-anxiety is that objects betoken bodies. This association is not merely coincidental, but can be taken back to the basic distinction between subject and object in philosophy: the subject is that being or place from which an object is perceived. It is, in fact, the perception of the object that yields the subject self-awareness. "I am not that object" might be the basic formulation. Nevertheless, in psychoanalysis and some forms of psychology, the object is usually another person. In short, an object is an Other, another.
Obviously in the critical act the object is not typically a person. It is, however, the representative of a person---a statement, a speech, an image, something created by or about a person. When we engage objects, we are indirectly relating to people, sometimes ourselves. Freud described the tacit realization of confronting ourselves in the critical object as "the uncanny." And in a certain sense, the critical act as such is an uncanny reckoning, something the film clip I showed helps us to see better. Of course, in the film Flesh for Frankenstein the Barron's object is literally a person, but he is blind to her (and therefore himself) because he is obsessed with her many parts. Analogously, the humanness behind the critical object can be lost with too much of a critical attention to its many parts, and destroyed as a mere part of a larger body. Regardless, I would submit to you that the anxiety over the object in rhetorical criticism is in fact an anxiety over and about other people. Consequently, critical faculties swerve toward two tendencies: a deification or fetishization of the object, or clinical dissection of the object, the religious and the scientistic impulse respectively.
Ok: at this juncture I have thrown an awful lot, or rather, a lot of offal, at you, so let me take a moment to review the broad strokes before I continue. Thus far I have suggested rhetoric concerns bodies, and rhetorical criticism concerns objects. I have argued that the object of criticism is intimately tied to bodies because objects that concern us in criticism are representatives or tokens of other people. In advancing a transition from body to object, the critical act is a kind of violence, alternately an amputation or a penetration. Although by definition violence is "negative" in the sense it is a negation of the law, broadly construed, I have also suggested there are appropriate and inappropriate uses of critical violence. The task of the critic concerns the objectification of a body without killing it. One can kill a body in two ways:
First, you kill a body by fetishizing it. Fetishization, at base, is the attribution of magical powers to an object it does not itself possess. Shoes, for example, are often fetishized in popular culture, as are sports cars. As Walter Benjamin observed in his "Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility," art was similarly fetishized as having an "aura." For him, the critical act contributed to the decay of aura, the de-fetishization, if you will, of the object. Criticism goes wrong, he would suggest, when it faithfully apprehends the object without suspicion, with a kind of reverential devotion incapable of questioning the codes the object bodies forth.
Second, you kill a body by destroying it, cutting it up into atomistic bits. Cold, detached, and surgical approaches to a given object loses site of its fullness in the critic's field of pleasure. Like Baron Frankenstein, the detached critic fails to understand the object is a representative of another person or people, failing to grasp it's human dimension.
Together, the religious and scientific impulse lie at either end of a continuum, both of which, metaphorically speaking, are dead. We might say, then, that the anxiety over the object concerns how best to navigate these poles, how best to approach the object in order not to kill it? In this respect, we might think of the "how" as method, and method as either tending toward massage or torture, neither of which, of course, result in death.
In the theoretical humanities, one approach to the object has tended to dominate the critical impulse. This approach, which can be traced back to the influential literary magazine Tel Quel, figures the object as a certain body. This approach figures the object as a text. It is the concept or notion of the "text," nurtured and developed in French literary theory and then expanded beyond the confines of the literary in other critical domains, that we have been better enabled to navigate the violences of scientism and religion. And it is to the concept of text and the methodologies texualism betokens I now turn.
[it was continued . . . the monstrosity of the text, blah blah blah . . . ]
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