get agrippa

Music: Future Sound of London: Lifeforms (1994)

In general, if you publish scholarship, someone will likely critique your work. Getting used to getting critiqued takes some time (the review process helps a great deal, I must confess). I remember the first time someone came after me in print I was still a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. When the editor told me she was going to publish an attack of my work (and something of an ad hominem, since the punning of my name was involved) I got really upset, teared-up, and felt like I was going to puke. Ed Schiappa, who shall remain the best Director of Graduate Studies Ever, sat me down and had a heart-to-heart talk in which, with much patience, he explained that getting attacked in print was a good thing. It means, he said, someone is taking your work seriously.

Not long after that talk I was sitting on a porch with Barry Brummett sipping bourbon (now my chair, but then "only" a friend and mentor), who said I should get excited about getting attacked. "Respond back!" he said. "Rick Cherwitz and I gave each other tenure by arguing with each other in print!"

So, you know, I've come around to this way of thinking, and now understand the value of agonism: not only do ideas get hashed out, but just what is at stake in a disagreement gets framed. Moreover, if you have your response to being attack peer-reviewed, it really can help jump-start a publishing program. Now, I'm not saying you should pick a fight (although sometimes that is totally warranted), I'm just saying disagreeing in print is ok. In fact, I've become friends with the three folks who have critiqued my work (even co-authors with Chris).

All of this is to preface that my current project is a response to someone who critiques my book, Modern Occult Rhetoric. Instead of seeing this as an good chance to have a conversation, to promote my work, and so forth, however, I'm just annoyed. I'm annoyed I feel compelled to respond, not because I think this person furthers our thinking about magic and rhetoric, but rather because he plays dirty. Basically, this fella lumps my work with Daddy Burke, Bill Covino, Brian Vickers, says we are all of a mind, and then says we have it all wrong. Now, aside from the fact that my take (Derridian) is very different from Burke's (anti-magic), Covino's (pro-magic) and Vickers' (historical), he says we all impose this rigid binary on magic in order to be dismissive of it. Dude: that's so not what my argument is, and it's so not what Bill's is either. Hell if anyone truly knows what Burkes' view is. And if Vickers' historical work is sloppy, then I'm having a baby. Tomorrow.

What angers me about the critique is that my critic sets-up a straw person. I've been reading the stuff he critiques of my colleagues, and he de-contextualizes like crazy. It was this kind of dirty arguing that led me to leave policy debate: cards are stripped of context, and so you don’t really know what the argument is, you just have to work at the level of claims.

David Blakesley's hopped on board with me to help defend Burke. Vickers' begged off, but I'll try to get him to hop on board if I can once the thing is drafted. Covino said he may join in at a later stage of writing. And I met an awesome graduate student at Purdue who knows Agrippa well and is thinking about joining in the response. Here's something of a teaser below. Do tell me if it's too, um, too nasty in its own right:

When I was thirteen years of age we all went on a party of pleasure to the bath near Thonon; the inclemency of the weather obliged us to remain a day confined to the Inn. In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory he attempts to demonstrate and the wonderful facts which he relates soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm.
---Victor Frankenstein[1]

Musing on the origins of his interest in science, the protagonist of Mary Shelley's famed novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus identified the occult philosophy of the fifteenth century magician Henry Cornelius Agrippa as his earliest inspiration. When the young Frankenstein shared his enthusiasm for magic with his father, however, the elder responded "My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash."[2] Eventually, confesses junior, his interest in the modern sciences would eclipse his passion for occultism, thereby better enabling him to penetrate the "secrets of nature" and become something of a secular god. Of course, we know how that story ends.

After reading Chris Miles' recent essay, "Occult Retraction: Cornelius Agrippa and the Paradox of Magical Language," we couldn't help but recall Frankenstein senior's advice to his son.[3] More importantly, however, Shelley's spiel also helps us to summarize by analogy Miles' critique of recent work in rhetorical studies on magic and the occult: according to Miles, Kenneth Burke, William Covino, Michel Foucault, Joshua Gunn, and Brian Vickers represent contemporary Frankensteins, forsaking the true understanding of magical rhetoric in favor of secularist monstrosities. In a spirit homologous to the hegemony of science and atrophy of faith in Frankenstein, Miles argues these scholars have misapplied a contemporary understanding of language to pre-modern magical texts. The consequence of this anachronism, he concludes, is a gross misreading of the rhetoric of the Western magical tradition. In this rejoinder we argue that had Miles taken the time to read the work he dismisses as closely as he purports to read Agrippa, perhaps he would find himself in a conversation and not an opportunity.

Reduced to its most basic structure, Miles' argument is as follows: (1) The shared linguistic assumptions of Burke, Covino, Gunn, and Vickers (with Foucault) fail to account for Agrippa's contradictory and paradoxical rhetorical strategies; (2) Agrippa was the most influential and widely read Renaissance magus; therefore, (3) Burke, Covino, Gunn, and Vickers' work on magic and rhetoric is fundamentally flawed. We address each claim in turn.

According to Miles, the dominant understanding of occult rhetoric relies on a flawed distinction between "fluid" and "fixed" views of language. Because Burke, Covino, Gunn, and Vickers address occultism as representing a "fixed" discourse, magical language has become a "stereotyped caricature."[4] A close reading of Agrippa's work, however, reveals a "slyly occulted theory of language" that can account for "a great deal of paradoxical and ambiguous play" in Agrippa's prose: human language cannot impart ultimate (spiritual) truths.[5] Miles argues that Agrippa's occult rhetoric "is instructional in the sense that it marks language itself as untrustworthy and unreliable" by its own example.[6] Because Agrippa's discourse cannot be characterized as harboring a correspondent theory of magical language, Miles concludes contemporary scholarship on occult rhetoric is "simple" and "misleading" and based on "illusory assumptions."

We have no quibble with Miles' reading of Agrippa's work, nor with the suggestion that Agrippa's rhetoric is instructive and intentionally paradoxical. Indeed, in a book-length treatment of magic and rhetoric that was unfortunately overlooked, Covino anticipates a number of Miles' observations about Agrippa's contradictory prose.7 "Repeatedly," writes Covino, Agrippa "insists that because human language is susceptible to multiple interpretations, it becomes matter for strategic contentions instead of truth . . . ."[8] For Covino, Agrippa's "contradictions inform the magician's truth, a truth located in the motion of the imagination . . . ." Convino and Miles' reading is further supported by Gunn's argument that the Western magical tradition is fundamentally Platonic in character because it stresses the inability of human language to communicate spiritual truth.[9] Insofar as Agrippa was a Neo-Platonist, it makes sense that his rhetoric of paradox and contradiction formally resembles the function of Platonic dialectic, as both are designed to catapult the spiritual aspirant into "perfect transparency by supra-linguistic communication with God" by using language against itself.[10]

Where Miles missteps, however, is by uncharitably decontextualizing the work he critiques. His straw-person construction of the distinction between "fixed" and "fluid" views of language is particularly underhanded. Throughout his attack Miles assumes that the fixed view of language is a theory of correspondence (or in Vicker's terms, "identity"), which is only one of many forms that it might take.[11] Perhaps a better way to frame differing views on the relationship between language, truth, and the world is by recourse to a television show that trucked in the occult, The X-Files. The motto of this cult favorite, "the truth is out there," is a succinct summation of the fixed view: something external to the human mind-some presence-guarantees meaning and truth (e.g., the "transcendental signified," God, creation, and so forth). To say that a magician adheres to a fixed view of language is simply shorthand for saying that he or she believes there is a kind of "anchor" external to language that stabilizes meaning, that is productive of spiritual insight or truth, and so on. Such a belief could lead one to assume magical words vibrate at the same frequency of the material object they denote. Such a belief could also set one in pursuit of correspondent vocabulary or "pure language" that better communicates the "truth" than extant vocabularies, the kind of "alphabet of nature" pursued by Giovanni Pico, the Kabbalalists, and the Theosophists just to name a few.[12] Conviction in a spiritual anchor, however, might also lead one to believe that it is inaccessible to human language, as was the case with Plato and Agrippa. Unfortunately-and despite book length treatments that cover a range approaches by Covino and Gunn-Miles reduces the fixed view of language to a correspondent or "identity" theory for the convenience of generalization and summary dismissal.

Even if we grant that our understanding of magical rhetoric was reducible to the pursuit of a pure language, does this mean our work is fundamentally flawed? Miles reasons:

Agrippa is the most influential of all Renaissance magicians, and yet his understanding of magic and its relationship to language (and rhetorical practice) cannot be characterized [as fixed] . . . . And if Agrippa's understanding cannot be characterized in such a way, why should the understanding of those who follow him or build on him?[13]

Presumably, "those who follow him or build on him" concern every magician in the Western occult tradition subsequent to Agrippa! In light of numerous counterexamples before and after the Renaissance magus made his mark (e.g., alchemists, Kabbalists, some famous modern Wiccans), however, Miles advances a classic exception fallacy[14]: a class is said to share the same qualities of an individual member. Insofar as Agrippa believes in God, we're not convinced his rhetoric is particularly exceptional. And in light of Covino's work on Agrippa over a decade ago---not to mention I. Lehrich's close reading of Three Books---we're not sure Miles' reading is exceptionally novel, either.[15]

Notes [1] Mary Shelley, Chapter Two, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), para. 6. The Literature Network. Available http://www.online-literature.com/shelley_mary/frankenstein/2/ accessed 21 December 2008. [2] Shelley, Frankenstein, para. 6.

[3] Chris Miles, "Occult Retraction: Cornelius Agrippa and the Paradox of Magical Language." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 (2008): 433-456.

[4] Miles, "Occult Retraction," 435.

[5] Miles, "Occult Retraction," 439; 438.

[6] Miles, "Occult Retraction," 438.

[7] William A. Covino, Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 46-60.

[8] Covino 55.

[9] Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 56. [10] I. Lehrich, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy (Boston: E.J. Brill, 2003), 208.

11 It is instructive to underscore how Vickers opens the essay that Miles argues outlines the "assumptions" Burke, Covino, and Gunn apparently also share: "It is my contention that the occult and the experimental scientific traditions can be differentiated in several ways: in terms of goals, methods, and assumptions. I do not maintain that they were exclusive opposites or that a Renaissance scientist's allegiance can be settled on an either/or, or yes/no, basis. Rather, in many instances, especially the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a spectrum of beliefs and attitudes can be distinguished, a continuum from, say, absolutely magical to absolutely mechanistic poles, along which thinkers place themselves at various points . . . ." Such remarks are hardly an index of a "binary opposition" which Miles argues is common to all the authors he critiques. Brian Vickers, "Analogy Versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580-1680." Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 95. Owing to the fact that each author critiques different eras of the occult tradition toward very different ends, it also seems to us rather irresponsible to assert Vickers' "assumptions" are shared by all. Miles, "Occult Retraction," 449.

[12] Covino, Magic, 51; Gunn, Modern, 70-76.

[13] Miles, "Occult Retraction," 453-454.

[14] Miles treatment is particularly unfair to Gunn, who argues in Modern Occult Rhetoric that the rhetorical dynamics of occultism change dramatically in the 19th and 20th centuries as a consequence of mass media technologies. Although understanding Agrippa's "slyly occulted theory of language" from the fifteenth century does little to explain the particular rhetorical challenges faced by the modern magus, this doesn't prevent Miles from complaining his favorite magical fellow has been fatally ignored. Apparently failing to address the rhetorical theory of one, influential Renaissance magus is to misapprehend magic in modernity entirely! See Chris Miles, Rev. of Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century by Joshua Gunn. The Pomegranate 9 (2007): 193-194.

[15] Miles misapplied conclusion first appears in Lehrich's study in the context of a discussion of Derrida's philosophy: " . . . it is not intrinsically odd that the sixteenth century philosophical movement which was almost entirely destroyed by modern philosophy and science---I refer of course to magic-still haunts the margins of philosophical memory. . . . it is worth considering the periodic surfacing of magical thought in philosophy after Descartes . . ., which might provoke us to wonder whether magic has always played the role of modernism's ghostly other." Lehrich, Lanugage, 222.

wtf?

Music: Coil: The Ape of Naples (2005)

texas: stalking by electronic communications - SB1139

Signed by the governor June 15, 2001. Effective September 1, 2001.

AN ACT relating to the prosecution of and punishment for the offenses of harassment and stalking. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS:

SECTION 1. Section 42.07, Penal Code, is amended to read as follows:

Sec. 42.07. HARASSMENT.

1. A person commits an offense if, with intent to harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, or embarrass another, he:

1. initiates communication by telephone, in writing, or by electronic communication and in the course of the communication makes a comment, request, suggestion, or proposal that is obscene;
2. threatens, by telephone, in writing, or by electronic communication, in a manner reasonably likely to alarm the person receiving the threat, to inflict bodily injury on the person or to commit a felony against the person, a member of his family or household, or his property;
3. conveys, in a manner reasonably likely to alarm the person receiving the report, a false report, which is known by the conveyor to be false, that another person has suffered death or serious bodily injury;
4. causes the telephone of another to ring repeatedly or makes repeated telephone communications anonymously or in a manner reasonably likely to harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, embarrass, or offend another;
5. makes a telephone call and intentionally fails to hang up or disengage the connection;
6. knowingly permits a telephone under the person's control to be used by another to commit an offense under this section; or
7. sends repeated electronic communications in a manner reasonably likely to harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, embarrass, or offend another.

2. In this section:

1. "Electronic communication" means a transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic, or photo-optical system. The term includes:
   1. a communication initiated by electronic mail, instant message, network call, or facsimile machine; and
   2. a communication made to a pager.
2. "Family" and "household" have the meaning assigned by Chapter 71, Family Code.
3. "Obscene" means containing a patently offensive description of or a solicitation to commit an ultimate sex act, including sexual intercourse, masturbation, cunnilingus, fellatio, or anilingus, or a description of an excretory function.
4. An offense under this section is a Class B misdemeanor, except that the offense is a Class A misdemeanor if the actor has previously been convicted under this section.

SECTION 2. Subsection (b), Section 42.072, Penal Code, is amended to read as follows:

*An offense under this section is a felony of the third degree, except that the offense is a felony of the second degree if the actor has previously been convicted under this section.

SECTION 3.

1. The change in law made by this Act applies only to an offense committed on or after the effective date of this Act. For purposes of this section, an offense is committed before the effective date of this Act if any element of the offense occurs before the effective date.
2. An offense committed before the effective date of this Act is covered by the law in effect when the offense was committed, and the former law is continued in effect for that purpose.

SECTION 4. This Act takes effect September 1, 2001.

on oprah and postracial preposterousness

Music: Closedown: Nearfield (1994)

I realize it is almost inexcusable for a professor of speech to pass over the inaugural address last week, but I'll take refuge in the "almost" and pass over it. Instead, I have a few things to say about the other "Big O," and more specifically, about her unprecedented influence on national politics. One of them is that some scholars estimate Winfrey's endorsement garnered Obama an additional million votes. It seems what some economists were calling the "Oprah Effect" has traveled from book endorsements to political candidacy. Another of them is that Newsweek named Oprah one of it's fifty "global elite" under the blurb, "There's a bigger 'O' in the world now. But don't worry, she's got his ear too." The third thing I want to say is that Oprah is the exemplar of the "postracial," and if you want to understand who stands in the way of the naysaying, be sure to tune into her new cable network channel, "OWN," debuting sometime in 2009. (There's an Ayn Rand joke to be made here, but I shall pass over that too.)

I'm led to think about Oprah for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most outrageous was a television program last week that assessed Obama's cabinet choices. At the end of the segment Winfrey was featured as a sort of shadow advisor to our new president, a segment that made me shudder. Over a decade ago my colleague and friend detailed the reasons why the public figure (that is, the imaginary "character") of Oprah should be critiqued: she functions as the racial "token" that helps to buoy the fantasy that the American Dream is available to everyone irrelevant of systemic, structural limitation and disadvanges (download the article here). The image of Oprah alongside the president (first in Chicago after the election was won, then at the inauguration) is seared in the popular imaginary, which is quite the double-whammy of tokenism. What was once said about Oprah on her way to the "global elite" was quickly said of Obama; they ride the same wave of popular desperation. Yet unlike Oprah's influence, which is in the zone of self-help and make-believe, Obama is stuck in a biopolitical morass, and his speech and deeds are literally issues of life and death.

Don't get me wrong peoples; I'm thrilled W is gone and that Obama is our president. I'm just saying this fantasy-train is going to crash; just give it time.

On all the talk shows this past week, the question was raised was if Obama has successfully "transcended race," and frequently so that commentators---usually black---could quickly quip "no!" (Hats off to Michael Dyson for making that no vocal this past week.) The power of this race-less ascent to wealth, however, is plain just by observing how both answers---yes and no---come out of the same mouth. For example, in Gwen Ifill's new book, Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, many of Ifill's interviewees apparently stress that Obama's success must not be read as race-blind or postracial. Even so, the postracial fantasy flies high with Ifill: just today on a re-airing of Washington Week Ifill aired a super-sentimental segment in which she interviews a weeping woman at the inauguration who proclaims "the sky's the limit" for black people, as if the moment of swearing-in dismantled decades old racist scaffolding. As Eleanor Clift said this morning on The McLaughlin Group, Obama's election is not going to get the black guy a cab downtown anytime soon.

Yet the intensity of the weeping woman on Ifill's show is perhaps at some level a recognition that a representational politics is always bound to fail, that not much is going to change for her. Here we confront the affective underbelly of the postracial fantasy, as it's bound-up in soul-deep longings to transcend the logics of projective identification upon which our mighty union is built (there's always a goat; right now it's "the terrorists," of course, and to some extent "the illegal immigrants"). On the level of representation, the postracial fantasy is that racism is an individual, psychological problem, not a cultural or social structure. Oprah's approach to social ills has been an absolutely relentless advocacy of individual responsibility (the height of which, I think, is the endorsement of The Secret, which promises to help you conjure away life's problems---even world wars!---by changing your fantasy life and thinking optimistically). Combined with the American Dream (and now the financial dream of effortlessly produced value, which has caused our crash), Oprah's postracist tokenism is a powerful ideological inducement, not simply because of the fantasy, but because of the way it is packed in love and hope and segments designed to make us cry.

The mawkish media displays this week are precisely the kind of thing that elevated Winfrey to prominence (the euphemism here is "inspiration" and "inspirational"). Oprah's so wedded to the postracial fantasy that she has a track record of embracing the "inspiration" without checking her facts: the latest flap is that the holocaust-era "love story" she's been pumping on her show, a book by Herman Rosenblat titled The Flower of the Fence, is a complete hoax. Of course, we all remember the lies James Frey told in A Million Little Pieces. Variety reports that another book endorsed by Misha Defonseca was also revealed as a hoax (Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years), but Harpo people pulled the episode before it could air. All these books, of course, tell the story of "survivors," people whose mental outlook helped them endure horrible things.

Even if the horrible things didn't happen.

What does it say about a person that she's so committed to individual responsibility she has repeatedly endorsed fabrications as the true path? It says that she has been insulated from the daily realities of most people of color for a very long time. Fortunately, I don't think we can say the same about Obama, but the longer he's in the White House, the distance will grow. This troubles me because he also relentlessly intones "personal responsibility" and has been repeatedly saying that government cannot solve our problems. Therein's the ironic consistency of his current, "somber" message. And never forget, Oprah has his ear.

political capital

Music: American Idol

Exhibit A: Obama Logo. This design helped to forge the double-entendre of "the Big O," which originally referred to my beloved Roy Orbison but now apparently only refers to that Sexual Being the President. In addition to being a ring, perfect circle, symbol of wholeness and completeness as well as any sundry erogenous zones, the stripes resemble the stripes of a flag, the furrows of freshly tilled land (something's about to sprout), and so forth. A fecund logo, to be sure.

Exhibit B: New Pepsi Logo.

mawkish media merchandise mlk, obama

Music: Coil: Love's Secret Domain (1991)

I've been nursing a sick foster kitty and laboring under some deadlines and took a brief trip to Waco to see my peeps Roger and Amanda, so I have not been bloggish, and I'm having withdrawal symptoms. I have to jet to a meeting, then workout, then up to the lodge for our "stated" (e.g., our business meeting), so this will be brief.

The inauguration tomorrow has been on my mind, and not only because of its historical significance. It's been on my mind because television, facebook, and phone calls (props to Shaun, I'm calling back soon) have been not letting us think about anything else. It's been on my mind because yesterday I saw an advertisement for a $7,500 piece of glass with Obama's face etched into it (in the New York Times magazine). It's been on my mind because I saw an Obama plate for sale in the coupon section of the Sunday paper. It's been on my mind because every network television station has been packaging their prophetic news coverage and pimping it in commemorative DVDs (the 60 Minutes DVD is particularly self-congratulatory). It's been on my mind because Anne Curry almost shed a tear after a maudlin segment last night on NBC in which John Legend certified Obama's presidency was historically very important. It's been on my mind because montages of Martin Luther King juxtaposed with Obama have been aired to the sound of one of my most favorite soul songs, "A Change is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke. It's been on my mind because my mother worried on the phone last night that there might be an assassination attempt. It's been on my mind because NBC re-aired their Saturday Night Live presidential spoofs last night. It's been on my mind because Obama gets sworn in while I am teaching class, and I'm worried we will not be able to stream it because the technology always fails in the auditorium.

The inauguration has been on my mind because of the oversentimentalization of Obama's presidency, and the extreme willfulness of the mainstream media to turn a historical event into a Spielberg movie (I'm sure America's Favorite Director is already writing a script for the soon-to-be-released echo). The inauguration has been on my mind because the official aesthetic of the Obama campaign and presidency was created by Shepard Fairey, the artist most famous for his big-brother "Obey" art which is plastered all over the United States in urban areas. Fairey's website touts his mission as creating "propaganda engineering."

The inauguration has been on my mind because the mass media has become a mawkish merchandiser, but a merchandiser for what? Demagoguery, of course. Is it only me that smells the fascism in all of this pomp and circumstance and tear-jerking? Is it just me who thinks MLK is rolling over in his grave at the way in which the dream has been deferred? Is it just me who notices a dangerous combination of circumstance: sentimental propaganda with a fascist aesthetic + idealism unleashed + dour economic times + two failed "wars" + a truly dazzling public speaker as the leader of the free world, but a dazzling public speaker who is willing to abandon "his people" for higher office (I'm thinking here of Rev. Wright). We are witnessing demagoguery on a stick, the yearning for a New Daddy who will restore order.

While all the conditions are right for an even bigger power-grab by the presidency, there is a tiny glimmer of hope in me that Obama will not do such a thing. Still, this inauguration---or more specifically, the way in which the mainstream media is covering it---makes me nervous.

the petulant professor?

Music: Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001)

Referencing recent discussions here of the entitled student, Dave sent me a link to a recent editorial in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled, "How to be Happy in Academe," an oxymoronic title for many. In the essay Gregory Pence argues that the current, emerging professoriate have their expectations for employment set too high. He concludes to be "happy" as an academic,

You need a tenure-track job, and then you need to work hard at the three things we are expected to do: teach students who want to learn, publish about things you care about, and be a good academic citizen through service to your institution and field. That's the deal.

To reach that conclusion, Pence draws on his own experience as an overloaded adjunct who eventually got lucky with a position in Birmingham, Alabama as a bioethicist.

In general, I think Pence's caution to the new professoriate should be well-taken. No matter what your field, students should not expect to land a research one job right out of the gate; you have to publish and teach your way there. I have also heard matriculating students say that they will not take a job in such-and-so a place or (my personal favorite) "at Anything State" because their personal worth is more weighty than such places can carry. I either laugh or get mad, depending who says such a thing, and then try to correct perceptions: we are fortunate to have jobs at all, and as Pence says, this dire economy will only help to underscore that fortune.

I don't go so far as to say you shouldn't expect a job, however. Pence's field is philosophy, a notoriously difficult field to get a job in. I was lucky when my undergraduate advisor in philosophy repeatedly told me not to pursue graduate study because there are no jobs in it. Or rather, my advisor did the ethical thing by discouraging me from becoming a philosopher. And this gets at my beef with Pence's closing remarks, "that's the deal." A "deal" refers to a contract, and a contract refers to an agreement made between two parties. Who are these parties, and what are the conditions of the deal? Answering this question helps to uncover what Pence overlooks.

While I agree that graduate students on the market should not expect a top-of-the-line job, they should expect a job because a graduate program admitted them on that tacit promise. Placement success should always be the barometer of a program, and if that program is not placing, admissions should decrease. I recognize I am woefully ignorant of college administration---and frankly, I hope I stay that way for my life---but there is a quid pro quo here that everyone knows: in exchange for being underpaid and overworked, a graduate program trains a student to take a job. The assumption of a job resulting from "the deal" is built into the apprentice model and the academic degree system.

The problem Pence overlooks is that the tacit dimension of this contracting has remained in place while the terms of the deal have changed. My philosophy advisor pointed this out and, thus, I didn't go that route---I didn't want a raw deal. I think many graduate programs are offering raw and rigged deals, contracting with students to teach the bulk of their courses with the knowledge many of them will not get jobs. Of course, this represents the coporitization of the academy and the logic of the wage, but stretched toward barter: "yes, dear graduate student, you will be underpaid for your labor while you are here, but you will be paid tenfold upon completion of your degree with a job!" If there are no jobs, then the deal is unquestionably dirty.

In Communication Studies, we are fortunate to have jobs as the field continues to expand. There was, apparently, a contraction in the 1990s, but I'm sensing lots of growth in recent years, and this is in part because we continue to teach skill-based courses to meet the everyday needs of the average (working class) student. In other words, unlike philosophy or literary studies or similar fields marked with the connotation of "elite," the previously inferior field of "Speech" is now thriving because of its attention to students (and the shift of the university to a consumer model). If, however, professorships start to decline, it seems my colleagues and I are ethically compelled to stop admitting as many graduate students.

So, Pence is right and wrong. He is right that sometimes expectations for that first job are way too high; we all "pay our dues," so to speak, and that's working hard wherever you begin. He is wrong, however, to assume what is true of his field is true of others. How ironic is it that the discipline most explicitly concerned with ethics doesn't do right by its graduate students?

the business sense of speech

Music: Seely: Winter Birds (2000) I've been reading the early issues of the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking for a short project I'm working on with Jenny Rice. This week I've also been discussing the corporitization of the university with colleagues and friends, and in particular, how my own college is making strong moves toward the business model. A prescient quote brought these streams together:

Certainly no teacher of public speaking will ever suffer from a surplus of knowledge. But unfortunately emphasis upon means often obscures a proper appreciation of ends. Too often when research work is conducted for its own sake, or to increase scholastic standing, the resulting separation from the interests of the world at large allows theory to become dogma, knowledge to become pedantry, and technique is elevated to the position of supremacy.

The source? Everett Lee Hunt, "The Scientific Spirit in Public Speaking," published on July 15th, 1915. The essay is a pretty "spicy" (to use a term from Winans' response) indictment of the "Midwestern" approach to Speech Communication that stresses the necessity of scientizing the field for academic respectability. We know who won this debate, and it weren't "us." Of course, since the word "grant" entered the scene in the 1980s, Hunt has spinning in his grave like a top.

That alliance of science and finance, Jenny and I are arguing, killed off creativity and an interest in feeling, emotions . . . love in the field formerly known as speech communication. Here's a teaser:

About Face

Joshua Gunn and Jenny Edbauer Rice

Creative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass; it is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree, what puts language in a state of perpetual disequilibrium . . . .
---Gilles Deleuze, "He Stuttered"

Deleuze explains the genesis of great writing as the ability of a writer to "make the language system stutter," to stretch human expression to the limit, to "make language itself cry, to make it . . . mumble, or whisper." Just how one does this escapes precise description, but one is assured she feels it when she reads it (or as we would have it, when she hears it). Stuttering signifies the limits of language, but with feeling (so to speak). Although Deleuze's use of the metaphor of stuttering figures as "an affect of language instead of an affection of speech"—that is, as a poetics—there is a sense in which stuttering can signify creativity in any system, particularly if we widen our understanding of language to the symbolic as such, and "speech" to the meeting place of the symbolic and affect. For example, take discipline: in what sense does grappling with the object of affect represent a form of scholarly stuttering, an attempt to capture and understand states of being that are not sewed-up in advance, states that anticipate yet nevertheless elude the language of feelings, states that are beyond discipline?

In this brief provocation we answer affirmatively and advance the example of the field formerly known as "Speech Communication." We argue that the academic field of Speech Communication was founded in the early twentieth century on the meeting place of affect and the signifier, but that it stuttered in the face of science. Uncomfortable with the instability of its chosen object, and desirous of institutional approbation, the stuttering discipline muffled the voice of feeling, renaming itself "communication studies" and turning its back on the study of affect represented by the object of speech. Consequently, any discussion of an "affective turn" in communication studies is more properly described as (an) "about face."

kitsch/lost causes

Music: Not Drowning, Waving: Circus (1993)

I am a sensitive person, which sometimes makes watching television a weepy experience. While ironing and cleaning tonight, I watched (listened to) two PBS documentaries, a Frontline piece on New Orleans after Katrina, and Sherry Jones' Torturing Democracy, both of which are devastating critiques of the Bush II administration, both of which make me feel small and helpless, and both of which invite disbelief: did I just live through all this? did my government just do this? I know it's naïve to read, and it does feel stupid to type out these questions, but these programs leave me at loss for words to describe how they make me feel, how they resurrect buried astonishments. I had a little workplace drama today that had my stomach all churny, but then when I see programs like this I realize how humane my day-to-day life really is. I recognize such a reaction means that the idealist in me is much more prominent than the cynic, though both are closely related.

For some months I have been thinking about humor and the mournful work it does, and how cynicism has become our dominant mode of humor (even in painfully violent sorts of ways, e.g., South Park or Sarah Silverman). I finally ordered Alenka Zupancic's The Odd One In: On Comedy, because I think she will help provide a vocabulary for the sobriety of things like documentary. While I'm far from finishing the second book in progress (which is on mourning, a reason why it's taking some time, I reckon), I think my third book will be on humor. Oh, no, it's on music. But humor after that.

Humor aside (but it returns, inevitably like a Delcon Shield), the images from Abu Ghraib shown tonight reminded me of Kirsch's recent hit job on Slavoj Zizek's In Defense of Lost Causes and Violence, both of which I have not yet read (if you can keep up with Zizek, you get a gold star; with teaching and writing and administrivia I cannot). Zizek apparently discusses torture in each volume at some length. I gather from the reaction of Jim Aune and others, Zizek is at the peak of his most contrary, arguing for a reconsideration of communist violence vis-à-vis liberal democratic solutions. I'll wait to pass judgment since I've not read these books yet (I thought I would gouge out my eyes reading the Parallax), except to note something about their rhetorical surfaces: that two books on violent, lost causes appear in the same year from our resident contrarian should give us pause. At what point does talk about violence and the radical embrace of futility become "cute," become kitsch?

Exhibit A: I was reading the paper on Sunday, as I am wont to do, listening to This Week and Meet the Press. I was clipping coupons when I ran across an insert from "The Bradford Exchange," a full-page ad for the "Echoes of Glory" coo-coo clock. It's a Confederate States of America clock that has Robert E. Lee seated on top, and a canon that comes out and booms each hour. The copy reads thusly:

The Pride of the South: In the South's hour of need, a gallant gentleman soldier named Robert E. Lee took command, and against all odds won timeless glory for himself fighting men of Dixie. The Pride of the South left a record of courage and audacity that endures to this day, and now a limited edition clock reminds you of that history every minute and hour.

Ok, so you're thinking this is a joke---"Humor Shield, Activate!"---but it's not. This is a legit product, just as legit as the Rushmore-esque carving of Lee on the side of Stone Mountain near my hometown in Georgia, the side that they do a "laser show" on and have Lee and gang march about to the tune of "Dixie." While the on-line advertisement doesn't do the print circular justice, point your browser here to see the real thing.

In what sense is this "Echoes of Glory" clock analogous to the aesthetic of Zizek's recent work? I'm very aware that I'm not engaging his argument, as I've not read it. But there is a certain aesthetic cultivation at work that's close to kitschy.

I don't know. I thought I'd have something coherent by the time I finished this entry. Instead, I'm yawing and dream of sleep, as I fend off cat after cat in search of lap time.

best of pop 2008, part two

Music: Susanna and the Magical Orchestra: Melody Mountain (2006)

This post continues my assessment of the best pop albums of this past year. So far I've noted some trends among my favorites: a return to thinking about music-making as the production of albums and the fashionability of male falsetto harmonics. I'm not sure what to make of the latter, but a lot of folks' favorites (like the Fleet Foxes) feature manly high-voices. Hmm.

Hercules and Love Affair: self-titled

The final track on this fantastic, intellectual dance record is an homage to the Muppets band, Dr. Teeth and Electric Mayhem. Need I say more? Well, I suppose so: this is a really interesting, upbeat-but-melancholic dance album that reminds one of the old acid/soul/house/electro-funk era (back when I was a high school clubber: think Inner City, Kyper, Egyptian Lover) with some slower grooves thrown in for variety. A number of tracks feature Anthony Hagerty (Antony and the Johnsons), like the opening "Free Will," overdubbed with a chorus of himself hitting some high notes at the end in desperation. Another track featuring Hagerty---one of my favorite vocalists these days---is "Bling," which features a Van Helden-esque disco-bass groove, brass riffs, and lots of tambourine. This album is super-queer in its sensibility, both danceable but earphone-on-the-plane friendly. You need it for your New Year's Eve party.

Aimee Mann: @#%&*! Smilers

Everyone usually has a superstar crush, and mine was Naomi Watts until I saw Mann perform this album live last fall and vowed to remove my right arm for a dinner and conversation with Aimee. When one sees a kick-ass show, it's tough to "hear" the album without evoking all those feelings one had at the show. Wow, this album is the best thing Mann has done since Bachelor, really smart (if not somewhat angry) lyrics backed by sweet melodies and harmonies. What makes this album stand out from the last two is the most excellent use of electronic elements to supplement the folk: some of the stripped down piano tracks like "Stranger Into Starman" go unaccompanied until, at the end, a mellotron (think the Moody Blues) chimes in. While a song or too ("Medicine Wheel") is perked up with a horn section, the bulk of the songs feature b3 organ or Moog sounds that really work well. The use of analog synths on this album is new for Mann, and it just gives the whole album a retro feel that is warm and sweet. The perfect album for another tear-jerky indie film.

Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago

I've been to Eau Claire, Wisconsin a number of times. It's a beautiful, small Midwestern town with charming, craftsman style bungalows everywhere that looks pretty in the snow. Justin Vernon's band is named for the "good winters" that encourage songwriting indoors, I suppose. The media-hyped story of this album does actually help associate the right mood and adjectives to the songs on it: dude holed himself up in a cabin in northern Wisconsin and, many weeks later, out came this album. It was created by a gazillion vocal overdubs, which gives Vernon's frequently falsetto voice an eerie, choral quality that would be tough to produce any other way. The stand out track is unquestionably "Skinny Love" (hear here), which has been featured in some dramatic montage segments in television shows. The lyrics are pretty cryptic throughout the album (which I really, really like), and Vernon's explanation impressed me: he sang the melody first in nonsense syllables or humming, and once the song was written we went back and put words to the melodies. In other words, the feeling dictated the word. Of course, Sigur Ros and Cocteau Twins wrote this way as well, and you get the same sensibility on Bon Iver's album. This album is about emotion, sometimes intensive, much gentle and a thread of melancholy runs throughout. Love love love it.

Brothers and Sisters: Fortunately

This Austin-based band's second alt-country/folk rock album is such an improvement on the debut that the contrast alone is worthy of a thousand hand-claps. Formed by Will and Lily Courtney, Brothers and Sisters combines two familiar pop sounds that combine to something unique: West Coast pop and classic rock (Eagles, Beach Boys) and Texas alt-country twang. Will's unsteady, sometimes-talky, high-pitched male vocals blend well to sister Lily's harmonies. The feel of Fortunately is both sweet and exuberant, rowdy and constrained. The musical strength here is also built on the lyrics Will penned, especially on the stand-out track, "I Don't Rely," which begins with an "I got something I need to say/yeah, it's hard to explain/it never comes out the right way/But you, you give me hope/that one day I'll know/one day I won't know when you swear/But I don't reeeeeeeelllllllliiiiieeeeeee . . . . " Ok, that don’t make much sense writing it out, but it works vocally very well and pretty much sums up my own perspective toward other people, especially the super-religious. This is a solid, well-written and cohesive alt-country/rock/pop album with a Mamas and Papas harmonic appeal, lots of twangy guitar and a sprinkle of power-chords.

Cut Copy: In Ghost Colors

The album begins with a wash of synth filters that sweep the listener into the first groove, "Hearts on Fire," my favorite 80s-style dance number (and the 12" Joakim remix is stellar). A rumbling bass riff is accented by a heavily treated vocoder melody that goes something like "bah bah bah bah boo beep [repeat]" as the vocalist sings about getting him some in a relaxed, white-guy voice. The following track is an acoustic guitar driving number with electronic swooshes; the album alternates from purely dance numbers to pop (think of New Order's typical approach to an album) with a short ambient track every two songs or so. This is an amazing record that will hold its own in many years time (like the Underworld, New Order, and like bands).

Jesca Hoop: Kismet

Technically, Hoop's debut album was released in 2007, but this "sleeper" hasn’t been receiving the attention it deserves until this year. My music-savvy buddy Eric Fuchs introduced me to this album back in March, and I've just been addicted ever since. Hoop has a sultry, grain-heavy voice that can sing high and low; the album is dripping with overdubbed self-harmonies that are goose-bump inspiring. The arrangements are sweet and upbeat, with an emphasis on polyrhythmic percussion and unusual background elements (spoons instead of tambourines, the crackling of a vinyl record; muted vibes with oboe flourishes). The stand out track is the rare sad one, "Love is All We Have," a strong, moving song about a widower who has lost his lover to the floods of Katrina:

The night before the night she came
katrina the hurricane
ohhh was calm
calm for a land untame
that spill the boarders of new orleans
ohhh was calm
the plow boys play their old favorite "the city's on parade"
on parade
but deep in the heart of
the ocean
their beds were made

love me now
now is all we have
love me now love is all we have

the rains that came
with the force of a runaway train
ohhh run away
and the waters rose and the levies the levies
broke
ohhh run away
and the cradle broke my beloved
the cradle broke
i must stay
for deep in the heart of our home
my beloved washed away

love me know now is all we have
love me now love is all we ever really had

You have to hear the song to really relate, but it's so very lovely. This is a smart, creative, different pop record by a future big, big, star. Remember when Sarah McLachlan started out she was doing weird goth/industrial music on the Nettwerk label? Well, Jesca's not that weird, but she is different . . . and very, very good.

Shearwater: Rook

Not to be outshone by the vocalist and key lyricist of former band Okervill River, Austinite Jonathan Meiburg finally released an album on his own with three buddies---actually, a bunch of albums if you count the first full-length and the EPs---and it is a melancholic melodic masterpiece. Meiburg's voice is somewhat reminiscent of Anthony Hagarty's, but also that of my favorite vocalist, Mark Hollis; he has a rich, frequently falsetto tone that also recalls the sustained notes of Roy Orbison. There are soft, piano-only folk reveries and songs that build to an operatic screamfest (the latter not often). This is a gentle, thoughtfully written album that is astonishing in its maturity (by which I mean restraint, and these guys could easily explode Mogwai style but thankfully do only twice) and grace. Emotionally rich and lyrically smart, it's an album that demands listening, and the kind of listening that, if paired with alcohol, can make you weepy. This album is simply outstanding.

Verve: Fourth

Although their last album, Urban Hymns, was hailed as their swan song masterpiece, the Verve's much anticipated return album frustrates expectations---and much to their credit. Instead of creating a radio-friendly pop-till-you-puke string of bittersweet symphonies, Richard Ashcroft and gang have returned to their early, debut sound and mixed it up with a few electronics, resulting in a number of long, fuzzy, psychedelic, guitar-driven grooves with plenty of lysergic room to get lost (tokers take note). The opening "sit and wonder" is a jazzy, funky, danceable rock song that folds you into the obvious (and brilliant) single, "Love is Noise," one of the best pop songs of the year. Full of yearning lyrics built on a loop of treated "ah-huh" vocals, "Love is Noise" brings to mind the best doom-mood-brood of U2 with a driving beat that delivers Ashcroft 's bluesy mood. Other songs veer toward the radio friendly, but it's notable nothing on the album is less than four minutes (most over five to six). This is an amazing record, and fans of the self-titled debut as well as the early druggy EPs will love how well gospel and R&B fold right into the psychedelics. I really had written off the Verve after Urban Hymns (which I confess I hated). This has a more friendly sensibility than the self-titled, but the wow-wow jamming and trippy effects on a number of the tracks brought me back to memories of getting stoned and dropping acid and listening to the Verve back in high school. While I've been drug free for, um . . . thirteen years (I'm not kidding), this music still makes my head all swirly. Yay: they're back!

Drive By Truckers: Brighter Than Creation's Dark

Every now and again I will buy a record because of its cover in an attempt to introduce myself to new music. Most of the time this doesn't work, but every now and again there is an excellent pay off (I remember buying my first Skinny Puppy album this way). DBT's latest was on an endcap and on sale at Waterloo Records, and I liked the dark cover and the title and the juxtaposition of the band's name: "goth country," I thought. Although Brighter is far from goth, it does have a Southern Gothic feel throughout the album, yellow wallpaper and deals with the devil. To a moving, minor-key round of banjo, the opening track tells the story of a man who suddenly finds himself dead and at the gates of heaven, but missing his "two kids and beautiful wife." The rest of the album alternates among three vocalists, three songwriters, and three speeds: slow and ballady, medium and poppy, and rock your ass out. Lots of steel guitar, lots of pickin', lots of banjo, occasional keyboard. Like a lot of the music I like, a thread of melancholy weaves through many of the songs here (e.g., "Daddy Needs a Drink"), but the lyrics are often not personal expressions of the bandfolk, but stories. This album was on my radio non-stop for three weeks until . . . until I bought every album they had from the cut-out bin at Waterloo. Having gone back through their catalog, it's clear this is a new high for the bad. It's a long, contemplative album, less rock-ish and more on the ballads and melodies than albums past, but . . . if you've got a road trip, this is the album to tag along. You have to be open to "country" music, as some of this stuff is straight up country (though always with a rock edge). It's moody stuff, to be sure, but also just damn fine music that rarely makes it to the radio. My number-one album of the year.

best of pop music 2008, part one

Music: Burial: self-titled (2006)

Before the new year, I like to post my annual "best of" for pop music (I don't include jazz, blues, or other genres). My evaluation criteria are twofold: (a) what I find myself listening to the most; and (b) what I find myself listening to the most. Years ago I included the criterion of "intellectual achievement," "well done," and so forth, but then I got to thinking that was pretentious: If I'm not listening to it a lot, that means at some affective level I'm not groovin' on it. For example, I'm supposed to like Of Montreal's attention deficit disaster, but I hate this album: perhaps it will grow on me with fifteen listens, but three was enough. I no longer have the patience for intellectual processing loops for music. The new Bauhaus album was technically very good, but I got bored with it. Same with a lot of stuff: Tracy Thorn (love her, album gets old), new Legendary Pink Dots, and so on.

The downside to ditching the cerebral in evaluating tunes is that what you get is more an index of my tastes and moods---a pile of adjectives. Nevertheless, I reckon if our adjectives line-up, you'll enjoy some things you may not have heard of before. That's my goal: to turn like hearts on. I wanted to limit myself to ten, but failed. So I'll post about twenty. So, here goes the first ten:

The Cure: 4:13 Dream

Every four years Smith serves us up something, and regrettably that something is always regarded with more and more suspicion since Wild Mood Swings. 4:13 Dream improves on 2004's self-titled angerfest by ranging through a number of upbeat ballads and romantic epics. The lyrics are surprisingly sweet---at times too sweet---and the sound is much more punchy. Smith is known for giving his albums a sort of underwater feeling; this album is mixed in an unusual way, such that you can make out the recording studio room---like the drums are over there, in the corner. Smith's vocals are hammy and playful on a number of tracks. By far my favorite song is the first, "Underneath the Stars," which has a Disintegrationish feel and that "were taking our time to get to the lyrics" approach. I always love the Cure's longer songs more. This is a solid, well-done pop album.

The Watson Twins: Fire Song

As a huge fan of the album these Kentucky-born folksters did with Jenny Lewis, I confess I was somewhat disappointed it sounded nothing like it. By the second listen, however, I "got it" and fell into the understated grove. With Lewis, these sisters' harmonies were much more dramatic and gospelesque. On Fire Songs, the Watsons only employ the instrumentation and voices to do the job. The album is subdued, but not melancholy, sweet, but not sentimental. I'm particularly enamored with their cover of "Just Like Heaven," which is uniquely sedate. The song seems to demand a jump-out-of-your pants enthusiasm, but here the twins sing of a gentle, resigned love on Sunday. A brilliant album for quieter, contemplative moments.

Does It Offend You, Yeah? You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into

Now this is a dance album, the perfect fusion of electronic beats and alterna-punk guitar pop with a little funk thrown in for good measure. DIOYY are squarely within the blog/glitch rock movement (think here of Simian Mobile Disco combined with Ratatat), each song alternating from a purely electronic number and glitchy grooves to a euro-punk screamfest. Favorite tracks, "Let's Make Out," a tambourine-dripping command to tongue-kiss, and "Attack of the 50-foot Lesbian Octopus," a two-minute rock-a-billy organ mosh. But don't peg them: every now and again a sweet, bass-heavy ballad like "Dawn of the Dead" is thrown in for the slow-skate moment. FUN!

Guns and Roses: Chinese Democracy

Well, we're not supposed to like this album because Axel's ego is the Titanic, supposedly sinking under its own wealthy weight. This album is so damn weird I just had to like it. Chinese Democracy is the equivalent to a pro-tool slab-o-sound, the closest thing to a sonic palimpsest I can think of (Bon Iver's new album is the second closest; see below). What I find particularly endearing is that the sexual hang-ups and hypermasculinity so typical of G&R back then are gone, opening up a sonic archive ready to mine(field): Queen, Elton John, funk, and James Bond theme songs are all represented in strange combinations. The second track sounds like a KMFDM industrial dance number. It's a veritable aural candyland of musical playthings and dubliciousness. Here's the kicker, though: while not radio-friendly pop, these songs STICK IN YOUR HEAD, sometimes annoyingly so. This album may be too weird for folks to take now, but I do think in five years it will be held up as something important, something not-of-its-time, and something we're not ever likely to hear again. Even if you don't like the album, it will not bore you; it's interesting, trust me.

Black Kids:Partie Traumatic

The playbook for this kind of record has been out there for quite some time (Killers, Bravery, Young Ponies), but I admit I still love the bratty-80s-punk-new-wave-bandwagon gracing endcaps at Targets everywhere. I first heard about the Black Kids through kick-ass remixes that were apparently club staples this past year (e.g., remixes of "Hurricane Jane"), leaks to build up interest in their debut. This is a solid, kick-ass pop/dance album with whiney male lead vocals and bratty, bis-like scream-ish back up vocals, as with the fun track "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance with You." The genderbending/polysexual themes of the album are fun too (albeit not quite as convincing anymore). Equal parts of Pulp, the Cure, New Order, lots of bass fretting, so fun.

Marconi Union: A Lost Connection

Y'all know I'm a huge fan of ambient music, especially of the sort composed by our European friends Marconi Union. Apparently they had a run-in with Eno's label, which is a shame, as A Lost Connection is an mp3 download album only (I'm a audiophile snob sometimes, especially with earphone music). Nevertheless, this is the darkest of their three albums, at times even foreboding, as with the opening track, "Interiors," which recalls some of David Lynch's own soundtrack compositions. Minor keys; pulsating bloops; a simple plucked melody from an electronic guitar; a desert in the dark. This is a beautiful, meditative album for writing, Sunday mornings, or the post two-a.m. wind-down.

Sébastien Tellier: Sexuality

Two words: elegant cheese. Like a lot of albums I fall in love with, I really didn't get all the fuss about this album when I heard the singles that circulated before its release. Tellier is part of that 80s-recovery movement that rescues the slow sounds of Ultravox, Gary Numan, and so forth and then sexes them up in whispered vocals (English, but with a played-up French accent), contemporary synth riffs and hand-clap percussion. This is not a dance album per se. While there are a number of tracks that approach a dance tempo, its clearly intended as a slow, filter-sweep, synth-dripping album of sexy-ballads. All the songs hang in the same key and thematic, for the most part, giving it an overall cheesy cohesion. If your partner has a sense of humor, this might make for a good giggle-fest make-out session. Otherwise, play it at your next dinner party: older generations will think you're a sophisticated Human League aficionado, while younger generations will smirk at your understated irony.

Midnight Juggernauts: Dystopia

The MJ produce electronic music with a real drum kit, falsetto harmonies, and are clearly riding the 80s-new-wave revivalism. Can you tell I like that stuff? Again, the bass riffs are heavy in the mix, the synth riffs are thick and meaty, and the attention to lyrical harmonies gives their music a BeeGees disco undertone that is missing from similar artists like Cut Copy. The lead vocalist sometimes delivers his words in a gothic, Andrew-Aldrich voice, then will ascend to falsetto heights (as with the song "Twenty Thousand Leagues," my favorite track). The album also has a nice cohesive feeling, which is part of a trend this year: as with Hot Chip and Cut Copy (and even The Cure), there seems to be a desire to return to album-oriented music. Perhaps this is a response to iTunes culture, which has oriented attention to singles again (as in the 50s)? I'm not sure, but I think this album nevertheless sits squarely in the middle as the representative pop album of 2008, both a summary of trends but also prophetic in the sense that the new cool, "underground" or "trendy" thing to do as an alterna-artist is to make album-oriented music, not tracks for iTunes. Coheed and Cambria have already brought back the 70s concept album; I predict even more of that next year. Dancey at times, ballady at others, just the baby bear's porridge you're looking for.

The Black Ghosts: self-titled

This is an addictive, sample-heavy, electronic pop album that features the sweet, often falsetto male voice singing lyrics of love and its loss. The opening track, "Some Way Through This" sets the tone with a break-up ("Why did you leave that message on my phone/Was it from your head? Cause I don't what I done to earn it"); it’s a slow song that builds with string-arrangement samples, but then it delivers you to a 128 bpm harmonic dance tune, "Anyway You Choose to Give It." I love the way the vocalist overdubs the harmonies, and the fuzzy-guitar that is used as a percussive element on some tracks. Again, there's that typical heavy bass 80s-sound throughout, but unlike some of my other favorites, the distinctive element with the Black Ghosts is the attention to lyrics. On this score it's a very chatty album, the focus being on its sing-along quality, less so on what it makes your feet do. And besides, its on the awesome I AM SOUND label which has been putting out some stellar stuff this year!

Gutter Twins:Saturnalia

With all the praise of dancey, upbeat pop in my list so far, we can certainly temper it with the brooding darkness of this super-group duo. One part Greg Dulli of the Twilight Singers and one part Mark Lanegan of the screaming trees, the Gutter Twins debut album is a packaged, low-key growl; the overall album has the feel of a large, angry dog just about to bite your face off. The guitar grooves howl out tones, not really melodies, or songs are carried along by a single drone (as with "God's Children"). There is a occasional melodic strum characteristic of gothic music, but I wouldn't say this album is goth. It has something of a Mogwai-ish feel in the songs that build, but with Dulli's hushed and whispery vocals. It does call to mind the Twilight Singers more than the screaming trees, which suggests Dulli's melancholy is a driving force here. The production is crystal, the orchestration epic. It's a big sound, at once intimate ("Front Street") and epic ("The Stations"), with lots of backing vocals. It's a good soundtrack for a remake of Left Behind movie from the devil's point of view.

Whew, ok. I gotta shift to work that actually pays the bills, but I'll post my final ten in the next couple of days. Oh, and if you're wondering: yes, I'm "counting-down" to my favorite album of the year. The recommendations only get better and better . . . .

sanna es gimme presens?

My inner-child wishes everyone who celebrates Christmas a merry one, and more importantly, lots of presens!

(A classic Rosechron ghost from Christmas past)

i miss my dog (on holiday ambivalence)

Music: Archer Prewitt: White Sky (1999)

I've just returned from a delightful dinner with my friend Jay Childers at an old (I mean, very old) Little Five Points haunt, The Vortex. Jay is here and visiting with his folks west of Hotlanta, while I'm on the east. Convergence in the middle was a nice oasis. Jay and I talked about the similarity of our experiences and families, and laughed when I explained what "quality time" often means: sitting in a small "den" with my mother and father as the television blares a re-run of Law & Order; me, trying to read a magazine or book; mom, passed out; dad, snoring.

Now, given the fact my folks literally pass out when the sun goes down, you might wonder why I don't borrow a car and go do something. After I've been home for a few days, that's precisely what I do. But if I did it on the first few days, it would communicate to my folks I don't want to be with them. It's a difficult sort of guilt to explain, but it's a guilt particular to only children. Holiday at the Gunn's household is pretty much a primal Oedipal sandwich, where I regress to the state that I was when I left home (eighteen) and perform a role I've long, long, long outgrown.

Surprisingly, when I returned from dinner mom and pop were awake and watching television. So I tried to join them and visit. Unfortunately, one is only allowed to talk during commercials. Mom shared with me one of the recipes in her Southern Living magazine, but this annoyed pop, who then turned up the volume to the television program he was watching (some show called The Mentalist) so loud that we got the message. I decided to retire to the guest bedroom and bang out a blog post.

This morning I went with my mother to the grocery store. That was actually a nice visit with her. Then, my father wanted me to go with him to buy presents for my mother, so I went along. We also had a generally pleasant discussion. My "politically correct" ears only had to endure a couple of racial slurs and irritating racist complaints (mostly about Hispanic people and the Spanish language). My favorite: pop points to an interracial couple (yes, in public, he points) and says, "Salt and Pepper." I just ignore this stuff, but I was puzzled how I was supposed to take this: "salt and pepper is bad," I think. But I didn’t inquire further.

Ah, the ambivalence of the holiday always hits me at night; affective memories sink most quickly in the soft tissue swamp of memory. I'm looking forward to lunch with loving friends tomorrow in Athens. I've been asked to cook again for the Christmas dinner, so I'll do that tomorrow night. These are fun and good things. Christmas day will be nice, as we'll meet-up with the extended family. On the way home from that gathering we will see my grandmother in the nursing home. That will be very hard. But I picked her up the new Josh Groban CD, and she will love that. She will remember that. She will remember me, despite what my mother says.

And I miss my dog.

joshcast: tunes for the holidaze!

Music: The Allman Brothers: Live at Fillmore East (2008 remaster). I recently picked up the remaster of the Allmans' Fillmore East and am simply blown away. I've been playing it all day today because I remember that Greg breaks into "Joy to the World" in the "You Don't Love Me" extended jam (remember?). How quickly I forget how easily these guys just blow the Grateful Dead out of the water; hands-down, this is the best jam-band record of all time. And it's got a forgotten Christmas song riff buried on the first disk. Amazing, and timely!

And speaking of music, I hope to have my annual "best of" music posts done this week. We had some amazing albums drop in pop this year, and my challenge is going to be narrowing my recommendations. I do know that my number one worst album of the year is the new Of Montreal, which is an overhyped, attention deficit disaster. Why that guy gets praise for never writing a complete song is beyond me.

Anyway, I'm sipping tea, doing laundry, and in general tying up loose ends in preparation for traveling next week. Starting tomorrow I'll get to see family in Lilburn, Georiga and friends in Athens, Atlanta, and Snellville. Alas, this means I'll be away from the Tubes for some hours. To tide y'all over, I thought I'd share this year's holiday music mix! Woohoo!

You can download the entire, seventy-minute mix as a mp3 file by clicking this link. Should you prefer to burn the file to a disk, you can print out the cover art for a regular CD jewel case by clicking on this link. The track listing is as follows:

1. coil: the snow (driftmix)
2. cranes: here comes the snow
3. enya: o come, o come emmanuel
4. the hacker: electronic snowflakes
5. sufjan stevens: sister winter
6. sarah mclachlan: silent night
7. loreena mckennitt: noel nouvelet!
8. cocteau twins: how to bring a blush to snow
9. tori amos: little drummer boy
10. low: just like christmas
11. trembling blue stars: snow showers
12. sixpence and none the richer: angels we have heard on high
13. siddal: in the bleak midwinter
14. robin guthrie and harold budd: snowfall
15. aimee mann: calling on mary
16. sufjan stevens: what child is this, anyway?

Of course, this holiday music mix is offered for preview purposes only, and if you like an artist you are morally compelled to go out and buy their music. Specifically, I give the Sufjan Stevens Christmas music box set, as well as the Sixpence None the Richer CD, very high marks. The Enya and McKennett holiday specials are just that, a bit too special and you can only take about three songs before you're totally annoyed. The Aimee Mann album is awesome, but you really have to love Aimee Mann (cause all her music does sound the same)---oh, and by the way, her regular 2008 release will make my "best of" list this year. Finally, one more thought: does anyone else miss Elizabeth Frazer? I thought she was releasing a solo album . . . aside from a few of you readers appearing nude on my doorstep (you know who you are!), all I want for Christmas is a new Elizabeth Frazer album . . . and the courage to get tattoo sleaves.

sex (and death) in public: adieu, dearest bettie (1923-2008)

Music: Rosewater Elizabeth: Faint (1994) I had been meaning to post for some days about the death of Bettie Page, which was both a surprise (I didn’t know she was alive) and saddening. Administrative demands interfered, but now with my grades turned in I wanted to rehearse what I have been thinking about her. Bettie's passing is a significant event, mournful to be certain, but also a kind of memorial to the unquestionable arrival of a certain viral intimacy made possible by the circulatory successes of popular counter-cultures.

My thinking yokes two recent memories. First was the recognition that not three weeks ago I purchased a series of Bettie Page thank-you note cards to send to friends who would enjoy such a thing. It's perhaps a pointless and obvious confession that I have always had a "thing" for Bettie Page (what former goth kid, straight, gay, or in-between doesn't?). I was surprised to see the set promptly displayed on a shelf in Half-Price books because of the way such a display normalizes the fetish (particularly Bettie's bangs and classic shoes; as everyone knows, her breasts and ass are incidental). Part of the appeal of Bettie Page as an icon is the connotation of secrecy; although lingerie clad hotties are the norm on prime time television today---not to mention the mainstreaming of the titty bar as a "family restaurant" with Hooters---I still was a little surprised to spy Bettie's crotch in a white bread bookstore.

Second, a few days ago I watched Sean Penn metamorphose into Harvey Milk in what will probably be regarded as Gus Van Sant's best film (I'm partial to Drugstore Cowboy). I thought the movie helped to capture the public difficulties of gay men in the 1970s in a way that no textual account can capture. I was particularly struck with how our openness toward discussions of sex and sexuality in the academic humanities functions as a kind of amnesia to affective history, that palpable "archive of feeling" that Milk effectively mines for a comfortable affective buffer (that is to say, if the film was about gayness today it would not have been embraced as it has been). Nevertheless, I found myself emotionally torn between the critiques of "coming out" and gay liberation and the practical necessities of having as many people "out" as possible to combat the accusation of public deviance. Perhaps our (seemingly) contemporary embrace of multiple sexualities in the mass media (sometimes good, often bad) is a profound testament to Milk's public circulation?

Bettie Page figures in these memories as a symptom of "sex in public," and how sexual identity is mediated. While ostensibly a signifier of heternomativity (and particularly the privacy of intimacy), there's something about her acceptance today---her normalization---that is queer. I am having difficulty putting my finger on that "something," which is perhaps my problem: queerness is not a something, but a cultural form of being, and somehow the figure of Bettie Page is caught up in that form. Yes, I think kitsch (and thus camp) is part of the answer, but there's more to it---something much more Foucauldian and much less Freudian. This got me to thinking about Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's fascinating essay, "Sex in Public," which was published in Critical Inquiry in 1998. Post Nine-eleven, publicity has radically changed, as have public intimacies. It might be interesting to think about how. So, here's a working-through.

A TROPISM TOWARD THE TOILET

In "Sex in Public," Berlant and Warner argue for a "queer culture building" though the critique of a "national heterosexuality," a mechanism "by which a core culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship." National heterosexuality is achieved through processes of cultural amnesia and "a privatization of citizenship and sex." The former, of course, is what "mainstream" films like Milk help to recover (however problematic we might argue that recovery is; the movie certainly downplays his radical spectacularity). The latter is achieved more or less though various tactics of censorship and displacement that continuously locate "intimate life" as the "elsewhere of political public discourse."

The authors also argue that privatization of intimacy central to heternomativity is achieved not simply on the bodies of queers, but also in the increasing public dissatisfaction with heternomativity itself:

Intimacy . . . has a whole public environment of therapeutic genres dedicated to witnessing the constant failure of heterosexual ideologies and institutions. . . . We can learn a lot from listening to the increasing demands of love to deliver the good life it promises. . . . Recently, the proliferation of evidence for heterosexuality's failings has produced a backlash against talk-show therapy. It has even brought William Bennett to the podium; but rather than confessing his transgressions . . . we find him calling for boycotts and for the suppression of heterosexual therapy culture altogether. Recognition of heterosexuality's daily failures agitates him as much as queerness. "We've forgotten that civilization depends on keeping some of this stuff under wraps," he said. "This is a tropism toward the toilet."

Divorce Court, in other words, is part of the hegemonic cycling of heteronormative tactics of privacy.

This is where Berlant and Warner leave us in the article---or rather, they abruptly shift to an account of two straight friends discussing their anal explorations and catalog ordering habits, and then a description of "erotic vomiting" in a gay bar. These practices refuse the "redemptive pastoralism of sex" and to "pretend privacy was their ground," instead creating queer-counterpublics that utilize sex to explode normative privacy. (Queer) sex in public, in other words---group sex, to be more precise---is subversive. It is not, however, radical.

I've rehearsed Berlant and Warner's argument because I like the way in which it stages publicity as a necessity, but not in a way that attaches itself to gay liberation. Or to put this differently, I like their have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach. The distinction between gay liberation ("I have an inner gay essence that needs to be unleashed!") and "sex in public" is the abandonment of individualism and the embrace of collective desiring, a position that is similar to the one Grindstaff advances in Rhetorical Secrets and that Morris and Sloop advocate in their essay on queer kissing.

I'm thinking this relates to Bettie Page in a number of ways, some that are complicit with heteronormal hegemony, and some which are not. That I purchased the mainstreamed cards of Bettie's fetishized body does sort-of lock me into the individualism of consumerism, but that I bought them to share---that I would be disclosing some degree of my sexual enjoyment to another in gratitude---at least gets me somewhere beyond narcissism in the gesture's tacit request for an audience. That what was once very hush-hush in the 1950s can now be circulated somewhat freely (not on my office door, mind you, but certainly through the privatized sanction of personal mail) also indexes a newer, more permissible public. In light of the relatively rapid ascent of public sex in the token of the presumably private "sex tape" deliberately made public, I do think we're living in a time that is very different from when Berlant and Warner were writing: there is a new enjoyment, a new permissibility, in the tropism toward the toilet. Many months ago Kim Kardashian appeared on Regis and Kelly to promote a new line of clothing. Regis kept asking, over and over, "why are you a celebrity?" in different ways. He knew the answer. So did the studio audience.

PUBLIC SEX POST NINE-ELEVEN, OR, QUEER MOURNING

Really, I've just been thinking aloud here, as I don't think I have anything close to a coherent argument. I'm just happy I could make some time to blog and share some of the things I think about in my free time (I don't think this thinking is trending toward an article or scholarship). I've been suggesting that Bettie Page as a permissible public figure today is symptomatic of a different "National heterosexuality" that is more inclusive of queerness. I'm also suggesting the logics of privitization discussed by Berlant and Warner have changed and that new, public intimacies are permissible. I think I would agree that queer public intimacies still carry the "mark" Chuck and Sloop discuss---they still harbor the threat, otherwise, why the need for the film Milk and its Oscar-buzz impact? And I've suggested there's something about Bettie that's queer. What is that?

I hazard the that is dying or death and a form of sexual melancholy or a kind of queer mourning. I mentioned I thought Page was already dead, and was somewhat surprised to learn last Thursday she was still alive, living a quiet and reclusive life (apparently hard-won but happy) somewhere in Florida. At some level Bettie Page is associated with death---that is, assumed to be dead, now dead/undead undead undead---and her erotic images were consequently linked to a kind of mournfulness. Personally, I was introduced to her growing up as a goth-loving club kid; her images circulated in S&M clubs and gay bars, on t-shirts, as tattoos, and many "goth" and "rockabilly" teen women adopted her bangs and black-clad look. My individual association of Page with mournfulness is primarily and personally contextual, then, but it is also by extension formal: While Page admitted to finding the S&M poses she did laughable and "ridiculous," these are the images that we remember---the spanking at the top of this post, for example---and these images are the ones that make the "death drive" associated with the libido quite obvious. She started as a pin-up girl, but as she become more buxom-ish and full figured she also started donning a whip, a tropism toward the dominatrix . . . wielding the threat of castration, the threat of a certain death.

What is queer about the intimacies associated with the figure of Page, then, is not so much the sex as it is the death, that the threat of her sexual imagery was the locus of her titillation, not so much her body, that she dared to publicize private perversities. Similarly, the film Milk is a staged as a tragedy, not a comedy (though we have to admit Milk would prefer the latter, right?), and its appeal is resolutely humanist-liberal in the sense that queer desire, while present, takes a backseat to death. Milk, after all, is a sad film and the vehicle of its liberal politics is mourning. Look, I wept like a baby at the end---and the crying makes you forget the queer kissing earlier in the film (not to mention the complete lack of any gay sex). Don't get me wrong: I really enjoyed the film; I'm saying its deadliness is doing some political work.

So is that politics progressive (in the sense of getting queer desire on the screen) or regressive (in the sense that it encourages an amnesia to the queer desire underwriting the mourning). Well, damn: I'm not sure. Perhaps the point I’m making (I admit I'm not sure) is that after Nine-eleven, the new permissibility of affect is mourning, feelings of loss. The politics of closeting is thus battled through the vehicle of mourning, through the staging of feelings of loss, and hitching those to queer desire. I'm just confused as to the decency of this politics.

In a sense, I really want my optimism: I want to suggest that post-nine eleven it is easier to hijack if not invert and queer the Christian narrative of sacrifice, something that started with horrific murdering of Matthew Shepard, continued among the LGBT community in response to the AIDS epidemic (e.g., the AIDS quilt), and that is now fully mainstreamed in Milk and the embrace of Betty Paige. Mournfulness has become a vehicle for queer---non-individualized and public---desiring. If this is the case, what do we do with it?

the uncanny: an object lesson

(killing) the romance of traveling

Music: Eluvium: Talk Amongst the Trees (2005)

I are returned (I swear Timbaland has ruined my grammar) from the beautiful state of Indiana. I had a marvelous time visiting with Jenny Bay and Thomas Rickert and their peeps. The talk seemed to go well, the crowd was pro-Walter Ong (who knew?), and I got to see some snow . . . right after the snow fell here. Purdue was a fun and energetic place, and I was amused by the mascot, Purdue Pete. The grad students were super sweet and wicked smart. What a program!

Since I’ve got a grading backlog I regret I have to keep this short. There were many moments of enjoyment, but two are prominent. The first was my last night there, having drinks with Thomas, Sam McCormick, and Bob Marzec: each time I got ready to leave, another bourbon appeared magically in front of me. Delightful time, I’m sure I was very chatty, and getting up the next morning was something of a problem.

Second, on the plane ride there I was caused to remember a passage from Thomas’ book about jouissance. He says in the “retrospective” at the end:

In a restaurant the other day, I saw someone eating quesadillas, and there was something in the ritualized manner in which the food was eaten, the relish with which it was chewed, that raised my hackles. Yes, you might say I am being irrational. But that is precisely the point. Jouissance emerges anywhere, everywhere, and it is something that eludes our conscious control. It inspires reactions in us about what we do and how we see ourselves and it provokes reactions in us concerning others.

Perhaps nothing more quickly kills the romance of traveling alone, flying on a plane solo, than someone who cannot contain her enjoyment. About two rows behind me was a woman who was talking VERY LOUDLY. Her voice sliced through the recycled air like a razor sharp knife. She was talking to a man across the aisle from her, an obvious stranger, about how she wants to buy her own home so that “I DON’T HAVE TO HEAR WHAT MY NEIGHBORS ARE WATCHIN’ ON TELEVISION.” She spoke of the snowfall in College Station, where she lived, how her best friend works out “AT LEAST AN HOUR EVERY DAY; GOD, I JUST CAN’T DO THAT!” She related the stories of her ill grandparents, how her husband proposed, how she hated politics. I learned so much about her. For two and a half hours I tried to drown her out with ambient music on the head-phones. I tried to review an article for a journal, to read, but nothing was muting this stranger’s sheer delight in broadcasting her life.

The difference between plane cabin captivity and blogging is that even if the air is stale here, you don’t have to read the words. The joy of an open ear is stranger empathy and understanding; the loving recognition of listening. The terror of the open ear is that you cannot close it; the invocatory drive always cycles, even in your sleep.

The memory of this woman’s violent voice sticks, somewhat irrationally, in my memory. So too does my wonderful trip, but more with a warm tone---a relaxed murmur. It is interesting how easily we forget things like the hours of irritation on the plane in the afterglow of our own enjoyment---how we depress the internal erase button on witnessing the enjoyment of strangers.

the accursed tone of slash

Music: Tegan & Sara: So Jealous (2004) The end of the semester crunch is cramping my blogstyle, but stacks upon stacks of papers to grade and a nasty Trojan virus has made it difficult to update as much as I would have liked this past week. I’ve also been trying to develop and practice a new talk that I’ll be giving on Thursday at Purdue. The talk is drafted, it’s just about ten minutes too long and I have to figure out what gets the slash.

And speaking of slashing, I thought I’d share a semblance of my last lecture for the rhetorical criticism class, which concluded on Thursday. Up until last week, we had investigated fairly “traditional” rhetorical approaches. The last seminar was reserved for the “critical/cultural” turn in rhetorical studies, which began with a reading of McKerrow’s critical rhetoric essay and went from there. (Let me just say as an unrelated aside that the problem with fish oil supplements is burping.) This isn’t actually what I said, but something of a reconstruction:

Sentimentality Under Siege

In 1994 Guns and Roses began work on a new album titled Chinese Democracy. Unfortunately, the lead singer and major creative force behind the band, Axl Rose, was increasingly self-centered and messianic. Eventually, Rose’s ego would become so inflated all but the keyboardist would be either fired or would quit the band. The seminal guitarist and counter-part to Rose’s more funk and soul groove was the biting guitar of “Slash.” Slash left the band in disgust in 1996, saying he could not longer be part of a “dictatorship.”

Since Slash was slashed, Rose would pour 13 million dollars into the new album, hire dozens of session musicians, artists, and producers to work on the album. Never satisfied, Rose tinkered and tweaked and dubbed the album until it was completed sometime in 2007. He signed a contract to have Best Buy the exclusive distributor of the album. It came out Tuesday. The early reviews are in.

Folks just don’t know what to make of the album. It’s not coherent, it’s terribly overproduced, and in the hodgepodge of pro tool tweakage it’s rare to hear a moment of musical singularity. It’s a wall of sound in search of a Slash, a procedure, a way into the body.

At the opening of the course I stated that rhetorical criticism could be likened to an approach to a body: overly mechanical approaches are like slicing into a cadaver without a sense of care, like Dr. Frankenstein on a mission. Overly reverential approaches risk a worshipful posture, fetishizing the body. I want to begin class today by suggesting Chinese Democracy is a good analog to the critical/cultural work in our field that has lost its Slash, lost its ability to even carve out a body in the first place. We might say Chinese Democracy represents, at some level, the embrace of “discourse,” the abandonment of textualism and the steely, de Manian gestures of violence that goes with it. In the palimpsest of fashionable French concepts, the memory of argument is erased, polemic gives way to something called “nuance” and “subtly,” and the mantra that “rhetorical studies is fifteen years behind everyone else in the humanities” begins.

We begin detailing this turn in disciplinary history and procedure by taking-up the signature essay oft held to be symptomatic of a turn that pivoted, unquestionably, on widespread (mis)reading of Michel Foucault. Everyone and their brother was reading Foucault, but McKerrow’s Foucault made it to print first (indeed, he made it in Communication Monographs, just prior to that editorial board’s purging of rhetorical scholarship).

“Critical Rhetoric”: Oh, what has McKerrow wrought? In 1989 McKerrow, penned and published his essay on so-called “critical rhetoric” at a watershed moment. The band Guns and Roses had just released the successful sophomore album Lies, and was working on Use Your Illusion, volumes one and two. The career of Guns and Roses models very closely the critical/cultural turn. Carole Blair was turning heads as a young rock star and inspiring a new generation of scholars interested in continental philosophy. She once camped out on Foucault’s doorstep, we’re told. So, too, was Barbara Biesecker wowing an older generation, publishing an explication of Derrida’s work and showing just what kind of Pandora’s box the “arrival of the text” was (later, of course, Barb would publish a widely read essay on Foucault, which corrected what was to that point a rather erroneous reading). It was in 1989 that Barbara arrived at Iowa---inspiring and teaching, of course, John Sloop, Kent Ono, and other well-known and beloved scholars in the critical/cultural tradition.

So McKerrow’s critical rhetoric essay arrived---as do all signature essays---at the opportune moment. The publication of this essay started a debate. First, folks didn’t quite know to do with the essay, and didn’t quite understand what McKerrow was calling for. Second, given Foucault’s critique of the universal, McKerrow’s principled statements at the end of his essay seemed contrary to Foucault’s project. Nevertheless, the name stuck: “critical rhetoric” became the term for a shift in rhetorical theory toward posthumanism.

Unfortunately, theoretical trouble began with “critical rhetoric.” The approach or turn was dubbed by those unsympathetic to Foucault as a “postmodern” approach to rhetoric. What is postmodernism? No one knows. Foucault himself often snubbed the label. But with critical rhetoric came the pesky, almost meaningless term and, thus, handy epithets to throw at authors who did work that you did not like.

In her 1992 essay on Foucault, I think Biesecker better characterized what this term “critical rhetoric” should mean: there is an inversion of focus. Instead of understanding individuals as instrumentalists, using rhetoric for this or that end, we should understand discourse as using---as producing---us. Such a shift in thinking is not postmodern, but posthuman. That is to say, such a view displaces the human individual as central, self-transparent, autonomous, and so forth.

The posthumanist turn that flew under the aegis of “critical rhetoric” brought a new crisis. Dilip Gaonkar, the prophet of rhetorical studies for a good twenty years, announced this crisis was the “text,” a Trojan horse of sorts, in 1988 at the first Public Address Conference (published in 1989 in the Texts in Context collection). McKerrow’s essay was timely, then, because it offered an escape: we could trade out the text and its deconstructive messiness and embrace the scientistic notion of “discourse!” Barb was there to help (and she did). Immediately, however, this crisis of textualism seemed to widen: McGee offered his famous text-is-a-fragment thesis. Derrida was being read now, in addition to Foucault. A new familiarity and friendship was struck-up between Communication Studies rhetoric and English-program rhetoric, and this owing to the increasing prominence of RSA.

Our English colleagues had already steeped in Derrida and Lacan, and folks like Victor Vitanza and Greg Ulmer were dragging rhetoric into the performative domain. Critical rhetoric arrived precisely at a disciplinary moment when the critical object---that is to say, the body---was losing its coherence. Of course, we’ve been saying all along that the body was never a coherent thing, that the object of speech has always been unstable and that negotiating this object is the foundational neurosis of the field. Nevertheless, as the immortal hair band Cinderella once sang, “you don’t know what you got until it’s gone.” The arrival of the slash, the critical/cultural turn, was a violent event; it was our “November Rain.”

New Bodies, New Hells

The posthumanist inversion, then, went hand in hand with refashioning of the object. Since landing at Iowa, Barb publishes a series of philosophically-minded essays that undermine disciplinary pieties, including a watershed argument with Karlyn Campbell in print over the posthumanist challenge. Two students of Iowa, Sloop and Ono, publish a widely read essay defending the study of vernacular discourse in 1995. The groundwork for this sizemic shift was already laid in the 70s and 80s with Barry Brummett’s push toward popular culture, not to mention Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas Frentz’s work on film (heck, even Marty Medhurst was writing about film until the “arrival of the text” moment in the late 80s). So with “critical rhetoric” and the posthumanist turn we have an exploding object---the process of which could take a whole semester of study.

At the heart of the critical/cultural turn, of course, is the shift to the materiality of discourse. The turn bears the strong imprint of Michel Foucault, and it is his work more than any other thinker that forced the shift toward posthumanist thinking in rhetoric. Recall that Foucault was a student of Louis Althusser, and that his understanding of materiality comes directly from both Althusser and, perhaps more importantly, Georges Canguilhem, a philosopher and historian of science. You’ll remember Althusser argued for the materiality of discourse in terms of ideology, which he held was the “imaginary representation of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” or something like that. (This notion was is informed, in turn, by Lacan . . . about which more shortly). The idea here is that ideas are functionally material---Marx always said thinking was a form of human productive capacity; in Capital he always seems to pair the labor of muscles with “brains,” careful to not ideas are a form of labor. So, the debate between Dana Cloud and everyone else might be said to hinge on this very point in Althusser’s thinking, a point passed through Foucault’s work on discourse. The appeal of the notion of discourse is that it harbors whiffs of precision and scientism, of material facticity.

New Surgeries: Tone is a Scalpel

The culmination of this “turn” is rendered permanent with the establishment of a critical and cultural studies division in the NCA, and finally its own journal in 2004: Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies The journal title is admittedly dreadful, no doubt a compromise or title dreamed up by a committee. Nevertheless, that the slash makes a material appearance in the title is significant, as the violence of disciplinary “turning” and the shift toward posthumanist thought is materialized in symbol: the slash is symptomatic of a certain critical tone. And this tone scared people.

What I want to suggest here is that the slash represents a decisive shift in critical tone, away from the fetishism and religiosity of massage and worship and toward the surgical approach to the object, to “discourse.” In other words, the shift toward critical/cultural studies is decidedly aggressive. Reading Foucault’s work makes this easier to see: the connotation of the critical rhetorical turn is “cold.” A lot of folks regarded it as mean or somewhat ruthless. The slash has connotations of exclusivity. What we might call the tone of the slash is what people sense from afar, why social scientists may see rhetoricians as arrogant or haughty or aggressive. In part, this tone is borrowed from the activity of debate, which has, gradually, become completely autonomous. But the arrival of posthumanism in rhetorical studies was a violent one---and one that was related, however indirectly, to sizemic shifts in the field. Until the mid-nineties, UC-Davis was a rhetorical powerhouse, however, the decision was made (by whom it is unclear) to shut down rhetoric and transform the program into a social science haven. Carole Blair, at that point a major figure of the style of rhetorical studies, was sent to the DC satellite campus. Rhetoricians like Kent Ono, another major figure of the posthumanist shift, interviewed at the University of Minnesota, where I was a graduate student.

The slash, in a sense, deepened a fissure between social science and rhetorical studies. Other programs got rid of rhetoric, or dissolved altogether (UVA’s program folded; Michigan purged rhetoric; and there are lots of other stories about the 1990s). I don’t want to suggest the arrival of critical rhetoric directly caused departments to change, but I do think there was something of an indirect effect. Posthumanist theoretical approaches are not easy to read, the have the smell of (mostly) French arrogance, and their uptake in rhetorical studies had to have had the effect of making some rhetoricians seem even more foreign to our scientific colleagues (despite the scientistic appeal of Foucault). The slash could also be said to divide among the rhetoric camp: Indiana University fled to the hills of cultural studies, purging its public address scholars. The arrival of the slash and its aggressive tone thus represents some division, some animosity, and a certain tone many regard with suspicion.

The Unconscious: The Final Frontier?

Earlier I mentioned that Althusser’s understanding of ideology was indebted to Lacan. At the time he was composing many of the essays in his Lenin and Philosophy volume, he was reading Lacan, even had some correspondence with the man if I recall correctly. This tidbit, however, is not frequently discussed among rhetorical scholars. For a number of reasons, the critical/cultural turn deliberately slashed the psychoanalytic from its purview. Barbara Biesecker’s 1998 review essay on Zizek and Copjec is the only exception (and notably, it could only get published because it was not peer reviewed; this is telling).

In part, the posthumanist turn didn’t include psychoanalysis because it is saddled with Freud, and in the American context, Freud doesn’t have much street cred. Insofar as Communication Studies harbored a flank (Woolbert’s “Midwestern school”) that pushed for scientism, it makes sense that rhetoric scholars would regard the domain of the unconscious with some suspicion. A certain misreading of Foucault---and in particular his critique of the repression hypothesis---also led a number of folks to pass over psychoanalysis as relatively unimportant. This was, I think, a mistake.

For good evidence for my claim that psychoanalysis got the slash, I’d encourage you to read Kevin Michael DeLuca’s work on critical theory. The Frankfurt School, you’ll recall, was heavily invested in psychoanalysis (especially Adorno). This strand of critical theory is often left-out or passed over in DeLuca’s work, as if the psychological insights of critical theory have nothing to add to rhetorical understanding. Examples of this sort of thing are, in fact, numerous (some of Condit's work, McGee, Blair's stuff, heck, just about all the folks who ushered in criticial rhetoric)---but for the moment you’ll just have to take my word for it.

With the obvious exception of Barb, however, only recently have we begun to go back and recover psychoanalysis. Our argument is that you cannot understand contemporary theory without psychoanalysis. You cannot read Foucault without a solid background in psychoanalytic theory. You cannot read Deleuze and Guattari---or as my friend Gretchen would say, Dolce and Gabbana---without some understanding of basic psychoanalytic principles. Indeed, all the fashionable “theorists” that contemporary rhetorical studies seem to index have either gone through or built upon the psychoanalytic enterprise. Or to put this otherwise, critical/cultural theory without psychoanalysis is missing its dash, that connection between the critical and the cultural, between the interior and the exterior. It got the slash, and critical/cultural lost its dash.

This, of course, is the focus of my seminar next semester: Why did we “skip,” as it were, the necessary trauma of psychoanalysis in rhetorical studies, and what can a recovery of this repressed theoretical orientation do for us? If you want to work-through the answers with me, there’s still a few seats left.

coming to an end

Music: Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001)

Today is the last day of class, and there's so much to do, so much to praise, so much to purge and, as Foetus/Thirlwell once sang, so much to "Wash [it] Off." I am reminded of this clip from Begotten, and all its confusing, haunting ambivalence:

club 367

Music: Namlook: Music for Urban Meditation (2004)

Every time I teach "Rhetoric and Popular Music" (CMS 367), the class before Thanksgiving is reserved for a very special lecture. The reading for the class that day is an ethnography of "clubbing as ritual performance," and this is nested in a unit on music and space framed by Henri Lefebvre's work. Some of you may recall that Lefebvre's monumental study The Production of Space makes a handy (if not at times confusing) distinction between "representations of space" and "spaces of representation." A representation of space is an idealization of space that is a materialization of hegemony (e.g., a classroom building looking and feeling like a prison), while a space of representation is a space in which "real life" occurs, sometimes in conformity with a representation of space, sometimes not (e.g., pot smoking circles at a Dave Matthews show).

So, what happens on "clubbing" day is that I bring in my DJ lights and set them up before class. I lecture on Lefebvre and we discuss the club as space in which music helps to create a consumptive atmosphere. I then discuss how music can help transform spaces into different kinds of places, like the classroom, for example. I launch into a lecture on the "history of the beat," in which I discuss dance music as a surrender to the music---fundamentally, a masochistic form of enjoyment. I tell them to notice how in dance music, one is often commanded to "move that body" or to "give it up." As I'm talking, one of the rockin' TAs slowly builds the volume of music playing in the background. I start stressing how the students secretly desire to give into the beat. Then the lights go out and the DJ lights start flashing. I mash the fog button and the auditorium fills with fog and colored light beams. The students are astonished; their jaws drop. They laugh nervously. No one dances except me and the TAs. Then, I tell the class there is a sign up sheet for a freebie quiz grade, but they must show me their best dance move first.

Now, the best possible scenario for Club 367 is that students think "what the hell?" and get down and have a good time. That never happens, I suspect, in part, because of the powerful ideology of the auditorium, not to mention the fear of leaving their laptops. What happens is a core group of 20-30 students (out of 130) decide to get into it. Here's a photo gallery of those die-hard students.

It's such a blast, though, to turn an auditorium into something that was never intended. If you decide to do this, however, I recommend contacting the fire safety people and telling them what you're up to. They can turn off the fire alarms. There is a problem if you don't do this, as I learned the last time I taught this course.