Today I learned that, pending the approval of the regency (aka rubber stamping in May) I am to be promoted with tenure in the fall of 2010. While we were all expecting this outcome, still, I cried with the news. I'm thrilled! It's just an enormous symbolic weight to have off of one's shoulders. In celebration, I will be drinking some Bulleit Bourbon this evening. And, I offer the following interpretive dance of the tenure and promotion process:
Music: Marconi Union: 13 (2008)
The semester is winding to a close and the grading season (referred to some as "the holiday season") has commenced. Earlier this week we've discussed Facebook and its relation to what we might term a "psychotic turn" in contemporary communication. The absence of limitation so noticeable (and amplified) in network technologies, the enflamed fantasies of omnipotence, are making their way to the classroom. Not only has the petulant demand arrived, but like that booger man in the Mucinex commercials, it's decided to make itself at home. I can grouse and complain about it all I want, but the fact remains that entitlement culture is here to stay, there ain't no decongestant for it, and it's time to start thinking about teaching strategies that can accommodate the inevitability of the petulant demand.
I first blogged about the petulant demand three years ago, after my first semester at the University of Texas. By "demand" I mean to refer to a Lacanian notion, but basically, demands are always for recognition (at base, what goes by the name of "love"). The irony of the demand is that while it does produce results, it rarely results in recognition because of its internal contradictions (think Hegel on the Master/slave here). Of course, Laclau has theorized the demand as the basis of hegemony politics---and I kind of agree with some of what he has to say---but I am not dealing with the collective there. I'm referring to the individual psyche and a tacit infantilism: "mine!" "gimme a cookie!" and so forth.
Although I had experienced irrational student demands as a graduate student at Minnesota at least twice, I wasn't quite prepared for the very personal, ad hominem attack from this first semester student in 2005. I've noticed the frequency of petulant demands have increased the longer I have been here. 95% of my students have been great, respectful, hardworking (or at least not prone to complaint), and the suggestion by my colleague John Daly that complaining and testing boundaries is part of the job of being a student is well taken. But that five percent is growing, and they're becoming more conspicuous. I had four incidents this semester and it wouldn't be wise to discuss them now; trust me when I say that they were all of a similar character: the charge is that I am "punishing" or "being punitive" or violating some sort of "right" (and usually over .8% of a grade or something like this). Again, this is a very small percentage of my overall student "load," but the character of the petulant demand, of course, is that you take notice: it's about recognition, it's not about learning or content or product.
I spoke at some length with one of our academic advisors in her office today. She speaks with hundreds of students a semester and has noticed the trends. I learned a few days ago that next January she's having a workshop with our graduate students to discuss "today's student," and so I popped in her office to get her take, to see if my perception that "this semester was the worst ever" was shared, and so on. Both of us have read the studies that have been coming out these past few years on "entitlement." The consensus seems to be, first, "email" is the enabler: The immediacy of email and the ability to send it at any moment one has a question (say, about the syllabus)---and now, the ability to do so standing in the elevator on one's phone---has enabled a situation in which the ritual value of office hour is rapidly losing its purchase. No longer does a student have to wait for a teachers office hours to approach her to ask a question. No longer does she need to go to the teacher. She can email quickly; and now, this student often expects an immediate response.
There's more to the issue than the ease of email, however. It was pointed out to me that, from an advisors perspective, universities are often responding to the demands of students by placating them. Some universities have moved toward "instant message advising" instead of the face-to-face discussion. The shift to a customer service model, unfortunately, is only increasing, as opposed to stemming, the demands.
I'm also hearing from some of our grads that the "grade grubbing" and righteous indignation of that 5% is disenchanting them from teaching; it's seeming less rewarding for some of them. I'm noticing something of a morale problem as a consequence.
Our academic advisor made a good point to me today: this is not going away. Either we learn how to teach with and among this "new student," or we don’t teach. We have to figure out ways to manage, as opposed to "get rid of," entitlement culture. I confess I think she is right. I regret that is the case, but I do relent. When I was trained to teach, I just didn't experience this much. In Louisiana, that culture is so geared toward a respect of one's elders that I never encountered it from undergrads (their parents would call me, but the students were rarely confrontational). But in the last four years, I am noticing a trend---and while without question my personality has something to do with it, others who are teaching are having similar experiences. Our students are changing. Again, I will say that I think our culture is moving from neurosis to psychosis, from Taylor Swift to Tom Cruise, and this is showing up in class: "Don't be glib Josh!" I can hear student saying in the near future, wagging a finger. Ok, that's a joke, but y'all know what I mean.
So, I guess the question is this: given the realities of the "new student"---and understanding that petulance is an expression of culture, not some innermost essence---how do we change our teaching practices to accommodate? I don't know the answer here. We don't only need to adjust ourselves, but we also need to adjust how we teach the teachers. How do we teach the teachers of tomorrow to manage this emergent culture of the demand?
Some years ago Katherine Hayles gave a talk here that really stuck with me. I think about it a lot, actually, which . . . has made me quite the fan. Her talk was about pedagogy and the need for multi-modal teaching styles (think about lectures like "surfing the net") to accommodate the ADD-learning modes of newer generations. She did not advance an argument for the tail wagging the dog, but called for a sort of hybridity: hold on to the hard won, centuries long achievement of scholarly "depth," but also try to teach in newer ways that engage students "where they are at." I actually tried to do this with my new Celebrity Culture class this semester (we'll see what the students say on the evals). I mean, I thought hard about this class; it was public sphere theory with Paris Hilton. Dunno if it worked--we'll see. But, my point: Is there a way in which understanding emergent epistemologies can help us, in turn, deal with demands (the latter, again, having more to do with power and recognition, less to do with learning). Is there a pedagogy for the age of the demand that does not collapse onto the dominant "customer service" model? I mean, I've had a student go directly to the dean to complain about my course policies three times now---it's akin to asking for the manager. How can we teach in such a way that displaces customer service with something else? Contract-based grading? What?
All I have are questions. I look to those of you who are smarter and more experienced than me in teaching and student interaction: what is to be done?
Music: And Also the Trees: Listen for the Rag and Bone Man (2008)
Some months ago I summarily "de-friended" all my colleagues associated with my job from my Facebook account, both graduate students and faculty. To make a complicated story simple, this move was in response to the second time someone at work contacted me about events on my Facebook account in a way that was not social, but professional. Because I am in a promotion year, and because I've been trying to "lay low" (you may have noted a decrease in posts, and less controversial posts at that), I thought severing the awkward social/professional implosion that is Facebook from my life, however temporary, was a shrewd move. Now I'm not so sure. I suspect it's a move that communicates, however unwittingly, I'm not "with it."
Gradually a number of grads contacted me, mostly on phone or in person, to inquire if I was angry with them or if something was terribly amiss. When I explained the situation( "tenure year, sorry, nothing personal"), most seemed understanding but remained, at some level, hurt. Recently I "defriended" a friend for spoiling the end of Battlestar Gallactica on my "status feed" because, after all, my status feed was something like, "Off to watch the final season of BSG; don't spoil it!" "I hate to break it to you," he commented, "they're ______." "Commence defriend sequence now!" I said. And poof, not a "friend" on Facebook. He emailed to apologize and went on, for some paragraphs, how my deeply wounded he felt that I would defriend him so callously. When I responded I was surprised, he reasoned that it was laughable that someone who reads "Derrida and Foucault" wouldn't understand the significance of social networking.
Well, laugh away. I confess I am still sort of surprised at how important Facebook has become to those around me. I now realize I am not as deeply networked as they are.
I consider Facebook a social trifle, a fun way to waste time. Upon occasion I see it as a locus of political mobilization, but ultimately, I think Facebook is a place for the mediated organization of sentiment, and much of this sentiment is intimate in character. I am annoyed by colleagues who message me to conduct business there, and routinely tell them to use my official email address (if you message me on Facebook about business, you run the serious danger of never getting a response). I do not own an iPhone or Crackberry, nor do I suffer from a compulsion to "text" or to update my status with the funny thing someone just said. I don't have, to alter a phrase from Derrida, network fever.
Last week Kayla Rhidenour (a grad here) delivered a thought provoking reading response that used Derrida's Archive Fever to make sense of the compulsions of Facebook. Her argument was that social networking was ironically born by the death drive and a need to archive one's life as if to preserve every moment. Recently, I read an essay by my mentor and friend John Sloop on Facebook that took an alternative, Foucauldian tack: Facebook participates in an apparatus that brings two forms of governance into play: the logic of self-surveillance, whereby one's "friends" function as the imagined voyeurs, and the older logic of (institutional) discipline. If I follow him, the idea is that Facebook encourages the publicity of privates by various reward mechanisms, however, this paradoxically opens one up to institutional discipline. Moreover, as Kayla tacitly suggested, Sloop characterized networking as providing for "the expression of temporary emotions to a public which reads them as permanent, as part of one's identity." What was once a fleetingly human moment of frustration or anger becomes an archived dimension of self that, for others and oneself, persists, exposing one to discipline.
So, for example, let's say I complain on my status, "argh! tenure takes so long! what's wrong with all these committees!" The pleasures of confessional are clear, as immediately "friends" come forth to sympathize, to tell me to "hang in there," and so on. However, the pleasures of this kind of friendly policing come at a certain cost, for tomorrow my chair will email and say he heard I was discussing my tenure case and badmouthing my employer, and so on.
I think both Kayla and John agree that there is a certain sort of compulsion at play. It's this compulsion that interests me, as well as the relationship of this compulsion to feelings of injury and woundedness. How has "social networking" become a locus of identity so quickly and powerfully that people cannot keep themselves from tweeting or texting on the one hand, and from feeling deeply wounded when another person "deletes" him or her on the other? These are not idle or mundane feelings, but operatic affects. These responses are not the same of those watching, say, a film (although the latter can be pretty intense), and perhaps that's because "social networking" is not on the side of the imaginary (where it should be), but for many, real life. Perhaps the fundamental paradox of Facebook is that it is experienced as a window, but it is fundamentally a mirror? This would explain, in part, why those who hurl headlong into pure expressivity are shocked later when they are confronted with some kind of consequence.
I want to say that anything, any technology, that evokes powerful affect is tapping into deep, infantile recesses of the psyche---formative memories and events that none of us remember but which, nevertheless, predispose---as opposed to determine---(re)action. As Larry Rickels argues in his Nazi Psychoanalysis trilogy, communication technologies are deeply articulated to the "Psi-Fi," shorthand for the way in which gadgets trigger fantasies of omnipotence. Much like a two year old imagines herself the center of the world and that the world will bend to her will with magic, gadgets promise to bring the world to us, Jesus Jones style: "right here/right now."
The magic---that is to say, the trick---of social networking is the fact that it is not truly social. Rather, it is an interface for projection: one crafts a persona and attempts to maintain it, much like a character in a video game. Your "friends" on this interface are really just other characters in the fantasy of your "network." You add and delete friends much like you would manipulate people in a Sims world. Yet, the interface encourages users to forget it is a simulation of the social and, consequently, me-ness grows, unchecked, without a "no." Disagreements on Facebook are intensified because one is not only dealing with a disagreement, but an intensification of affect because one's crafted persona is in play---its my best me, and that me is not good enough.
Music: Neko Case: Middle Cyclone (2008)
Today I baked a turkey, and I ate some of it not too long ago. This morning, I had the luxury of time to grade and do laundry. I read the paper and sale advertisements. I enjoyed the parade on television while I read the paper, followed by a dog show (I did not listen to the dog show, but rather ambient music while the dog show flickered). I graded a few papers. I worked on editing a manuscript. I spoke on the phone with my mother. I read a part of a chapter of a book titled, The Monstrosity of Christ. I spent the day alone, by choice, and this was a welcome solitude.
Most of my non-blood family here is dispersed across the country with their own blood-families. Most of my blood-family is in Georgia, and in these harsh financial times, one must choose between the brief visit for Thanksgiving, or a more extended stay over the December holidays. I made my choice. Today it's just me, the dog, some cats, and a turkey. Oh, and a computer. And, I guess, some books. I could go on . . . .
I turned the television off by noon because the sentimental programming had finally summoned my inner cynic-demon. The cynic demon comes handy from time to time, but I try to keep him chained below on days like this. I confess to smiling more than once at the Neelys on the Food Channel (they have really grown on me; I think their upbeat mood is sincere, which both charms and frightens me). I did actually enjoy the tidings of comfort and family and joy until the commercials crowded them out with "buy." I even enjoy stuff, buying it, thinking about the stuff I could have, the stuff I could use. But this year the underlying desperation of "Black Friday" is too much; the subtext of many of the televisual messages today was that buying stuff was my moral duty. My mum said on the phone today that she was thinking about shopping tomorrow to support the economy.
I recall more than three people told me they enjoyed Thanksgiving because it was "not commercialized like Christmas," and I appreciate that. At the same time, it seems Christmas has crept into Thanksgiving, such that the two are now one big massive paean to consumption: one is about buying food, the other is about buying shit. Both are yoked to the conception of "the gift."
You know, it's not necessary to make everything an academic enterprise, but as someone who is supposed to be a critic for a living, I couldn't help thinking about Marcel Mauss' work on "the gift" today. I was rereading Mauss a few days ago in preparation for a course I'm teaching next semester titled, "The Object." I first became familiar with Mauss when I studied the occult; I was taken, in particular, by his arguments about class and its relationship to the occult: magic is particularly appealing to the poor because it promises effortless ascent, it promises to cut through class. If you want to understand the appeal of Oprah Winfrey or The Secret, you don't need psychoanalysis. Just read Marcel Mauss. He had it nailed.
Mauss' work on "the gift" is deeply insightful. We are taught since youth that it is "better to give than to receive." I have that teaching innermost, believe me. I take much pleasure in giving gifts---and often when I really cannot afford to give them (this is why I make many of them; the mix CD comes to mind). Mauss' insight, however, was that the gift is a relational gesture of power that always entails an element of reciprocity. To gift is to say to another not simply that you love them, but that you expect some form of love in return---usually recognition, just the appreciation that you gave the gift. And to receive the gift is also to accept a form of recognition. The truth of this complicated power dynamic is perhaps no better demonstrated than with the economy of humor that orbits "regifting," the jokes about the politics of gifting. Take the "Chia head," for instance: it's a gift that has the joke built-into it. All "gag" gifts are designed to call our attention to the politics of reciprocity inherent in the gift.
Thanksgiving differs from Christmas, and the holidays that have been sucked into its vortex, because it remains a harvest/fertility festival. The gift of food is at its center. Symbolically, that gift is most satisfying because it is a celebration of health. I remember the prayers my now mute grandmother used to give at Thanksgiving dinner: she always thanked God for the food about to "nourish our bodies." That's a gratitude marked by the Great Depression, unquestionably, but I suspect that sentiment is till widely voiced. It reenacts a very primal gratitude, in way: when we were all babes, we depended on our parents to feed us. We were helpless. Without our mother or father or whomever providing nourishment, we would die. Thanksgiving in many ways is the holiday of the gift of living.
82 miles from my home is an Army base that has deployed thousands of young men and women to the Middle East to fight wars instigated in response to a wound our country suffered on September 11, 2001. Just weeks ago an Army psychiatrist, himself deeply mentally wounded, killed twelve of them in a psychotic rage. Today, stories on the television and in the paper concerned "Thanksgiving at Fort Hood," banking on the irony of the gift. The subtext of these stories---although at times explicit---was that here are men and women that gifted their lives "for their country," and yet, that gift was not recognized by some "terrorist" who failed to comprehend the value of that gift. He violated the protocol. He was not thankful enough.
Cynicism aside, I have to agree with the underlying logic of these stories, even if I cringe at the consumerist ends to which it is put. Most of us, at this point, are very tired at the trauma-consumerism that has fueled the American economy since Nine-eleven. I think that's one of the many reasons we elected Obama. At the same time, and at the risk of sentimentality, I want to cut through the consumerist shit to acknowledge the men and women who are gifting their lives to fight for my country---an idea of my country, an ideal. It's an ideal that I don't even agree with, one, which, in fact, I think is a force of inhumanity in many ways. But I am thankful for the soldier nonetheless, and I don't say this because of blind patriotism or because it's fashionable. I say this because the gift of one's life demands recognition, even if the cause or reason or rationale is unjust.
It's terribly complicated, in the abstract, to be thankful for thousands upon thousands of men and women who gift life. I recently saw a PBS documentary that was about a tattoo parlor on the outskirts of Fort Hood. It filmed soldier after soldier getting a tattoo and talking about his or her impending deployment. It was a moving documentary because it humanized the soldiers. Most of them were from poor families. Many of them had poor educations. Many of them talked frankly about not returning. These are not stupid people; they understood, very deeply, the risk---and that's why the tattoo is homology on a stick. The tattoos were clearly marks of sacrifice, and inscriptions of hope (of survival; there is power in the signifier). I can only understand this gift with an encounter with the individual giving it.
The injustices of our government are increasingly coming to light, and it's nauseating. Say what you will about the Obama administration, but the recent decision of the president to be photographed with returning dead soldiers is more than a photo opportunity; I want to believe its more than politics, or perhaps more precisely, it's what politics should be: a recognition of the gift. Today I am thankful for the men and women who give their lives for my country, whatever that is, and I am thankful for a president who understands why it is important to publically recognize that gift.
Music: Pete Namlook and Tetsu Inoue: 2350 Brodway, Volume Four (2006)
On Friday Oprah Winfrey announced that her popular daytime talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, will end on it's 25th anniversary on September 9th, 2011. Thus concludes one of the most successful, decades-long rhetorics of tokenism upon which the contemporary neoliberal subject was fashioned. As my colleague Dana Cloud concluded over thirteen years ago, "tokenist biography," such as Oprah's famous rags-to-riches story, "serves to blame the oppressed for their failures and to uphold a meritocractic vision of the American Dream that justifies and sustains a more troubling American reality" (download her extremely prescient essay here). Oprah's show is, in fact, synonymous with her biography, and so it is difficult to imagine what she will become or do without it.
Regardless, we should celebrate the demise of The Oprah Winfrey Show, as no other media production has done so much to promote a widespread investment in general unhappiness: suffer from racism? It's your fault. Don't make enough to feed your children? It's your fault. Neoliberalism hasn't a better poster child than Winfrey. As she brings her direct guidance to a close (we still have Drs. Oz and Phil, as well as the nauseatingly insincere Rachel Ray), it's particularly eye-opening (or, well, not at all) to underscore where she attributes her success:
That's right: magic. Forget the civil rights movements, feminism, and other social changes brought about by collective effort, thinking positive thoughts is the only way to make this life worth living.
Oprah, of course, is yet another easy target, and we can almost write the critique of neoliberalism in our sleep. But when we think about Oprah's influence, we also think about care and love, we are reminded of her tearful and swollen face. It's not simply that Winfrey is a product and vehicle of neoliberal ideology, it's also that she feels it, and that this feeling is not fake. Her own "magic" is the sense of presence she has across the screen, and, of course, the talk-show is emplaced in one's living room (we encounter her there, in intimate places). Her power is one of intimacy.
The only way to understand her appeal and power is in terms of the classic notion of eunoia; she exudes goodwill, from her first foray into politics (testifying before Congress on behalf of abused children) to her visible charity work. Despite however much we might critique Winfrey for her ideology, there's no question her "heart is in the right place." It's in our living rooms, after all.
Although I am not well versed in Foucauldian approaches to cultural critique (in graduate school, you pick your theorist and dig deep; Foucault was not my pick---Fred Jameson and Kenny Burke were), I have taken much interest in Foucault's later work, especially that on the care of the self and governmentality. I've been especially excited by the more recent work of Foucault being published, work that reveals a much more psychologically interested Foucault than previously assumed. Ron Greene recently presented a paper on the history of the field of Speech Communication in which he argued that "pastoral power" better characterized how the speech hygiene movement worked. Since I heard Ron's paper I've been thinking a good bit about pastoral power, even reading up a little here and there. "Pastoral power" is Foucault's concept for how Christian forms of management have "traveled," so to speak, into the biopolitical domain: at once individually and collectively focused (one works toward individual salvation while simultaneously attending to "the flock"), the pastoral helps to describe, I think, the imaginary adopted by figures like Winfrey. It puts power and religion on the same plane---and that helps me better figure why I have been so obsessed these many years with theological forms. The conception of the pastoral also seems to provide a space for psychoanalytic insight.
Conceptually, I'm drawn to the intersection of eunoia and the pastoral, the site at which a viewer of Winfrey's show is sutured to a pastoral vision in feeling. I'm thinking aloud here, and my ideas are admittedly half-baked, but I'm wondering about the link between the living room and the pulpit. Is there a way in which Winfrey and Obama help us to see better how the pastoral operates in contemporary politics, and in turn, in my kitchen? How is it that Oprah's tearful confessions on television translate into a regime change in Washington?
I betray my reading habits of late. I've been obsessed with Lauren Berlant's work. I've been trying to educate myself on the research on affect. Oprah's recent announcement strikes me as incredibly important, tied up at once with the intimate recesses of our homes and the Obama presidency all at once. I wonder, too, if the end of her talk show signals a new new: it all but sounds the death knell of broadcasting. Period. Politics is become narrow . This is why I think the "pastoral" is so fecund a concept . . . both individual and collective, it captures the ministry of Apple, Inc.
Music: Talk Talk: Laughing Stock (1991)
I arrived home from Chicago on Sunday only to begin work anew on Monday. Prior to my Wednesday departure I cleaned house in a major way, and I cannot express how refreshing it was to return to a clean and tidy home (minus the cat pee accidents, the consequence of vengeful putties angry to be so lap deprived). I promptly dirtied it up rushing to catch up with paperwork and promised labor. As I type there is a dirty crock-pot, stacks of crusty dishes, and heaps of laundry sitting here and yon ready for pretreatment.
I missed my dog. It was nice to see someone so happy I had returned home. Jesús the break-up dog has turned out to be such a blessing. Who knew? (You dog lovers did.)
By unexpected foresight, I managed to schedule two guest speakers for my undergraduate class this week. This is especially welcome for two reasons. First, I came home with a touch of laryngitis, and so the less talking the better. I also did a guest talk with my friends at Southwestern University this afternoon, so saving my voice for that worked out especially well. Second, I'm not currently prepping a new lecture. This semester I have been up on Monday and Wednesday nights trying to prepare brand new lectures for my Celebrity Culture class. I realized that it's my first new undergraduate prep in five years---my, how I forget the work involved in thinking about structure, and how much students appreciate structured lectures. Unlike preps of the past, however, I've been learning Apple's Keynote slide program and developing slides for my lectures. The result is a very pretty, "television-like" presentation, but a few extra hours of labor. It's nice to be spending those hours reflecting and blogging tonight, chatting on Crackbook, and reading trashy celebrity gossip blogs.
A number of folks have asked "how was NCA?"---a question that refers to this weekend's annual meeting of the National Communication Association, the largest professional organization of my field. My response has been, typically, "it was a blur." "Blur" is defined as "to make or become less distinct," and it's accurate. My memory of the conference is episodic, little snippets of conversations and events that seemed to have whooshed by, both exciting and . . hard to pin-down. Clearly I did too much, and I hope I appear much less frequently on the program next year. One of my best friends in the world and I were only able to figure ourselves together in a two-hour window in four days! When conference duties overwhelm the ability to see my best friends, I know I'm doing too much.
Thanks for the dinner E. You helped me recharge more than you know.
NCA increasingly disappoints me as a professional organization for its calculated and strategic silences on issues of major humanitarian import. I also hate the fact that people are fearful of speaking out about basic human decency; it seems there's something particular about NCA that makes people afraid to speak their minds. I cannot put my finger on it quite yet. I'm thinking. Nevertheless, at the same time, I enjoy going to NCA because it puts me in contact with people who share my concerns. Mostly, my experience of NCA is joyful because of the love I feel for my friends and colleagues, despite the frustrations with being a member of a ever-huge, pulsating brain in the widening corporate academiverse. While I am ambivalent about my professional organization, I am not about my colleagues. I am very fortunate to be in communication studies, I think. We are not like other fields; in general, I think we take care for one another, and I'm especially proud of how well we care after our students. You hear so many horror stories about how grads are treated in other fields. Torture-loving republichristians aside, I think you can measure any community by how well it takes care of its youth (broadly defined).
Anyway, I'm rambling (and also glad to have the time to ramble, for once this semester!). This is been one of the busiest semesters of my career. I don't think if every semester was like this I could continue as a professor (I am simply not happy being so busy), but I do think the combination of four trips, a new prep, promotion and tenure, car repair, and textbook preparation/writing is not the norm. At least I hope so! Perhaps the anxiety about promotion is making things more stressful, I don't know. (I'll find out if I am "vested" here at UT in about four weeks or so.)
So, anyway. We're heading into the home stretch. I'm looking forward to getting back to some writing. I have high hopes for a quick essay revision, a textbook chapter draft, and a brand-new, from-the-ground-up essay by the time school begins in January. And, hopefully, a couple of co-authored drafts completed along the way. It's amazing what you can get written when you can devote weeks at a time, day after day, of concentrated thinking and writing without meetings, defenses, letter-writing, strategic planning, conferences, and so forth. And for all you grads reading this: that's what I'm learning the average professorial life is like. Semesters are for teaching and service; breaks are for scholarship. The early assistant professor life is less clogged-up with service; take advantage of that! Write! Make babies! Do whatever! But around the associate years, you're carrying much, much more than you can imagine. 60 hour weeks? Hah! Try 80 hours . . . .
Just sitting here in anticipation of writing, I'm getting a little excited. Surprisingly, scholarship feels like a luxury, like a time for vacation. It's sort of like going to a movie: once you get into writing or composing something, you're not thinking about laundry, or errands, nor are you worrying about letting others down. It's almost a selfish pleasure.
I'm listening to Talk Talk's later music now. Gosh it's good. Music is good. Music still gets me by on a daily basis. Yesterday I picked up the 20th year anniversary of NWA's landmark "gansta" album---what memories that brings. And let me just say this year brought us some excellent albums. I'm looking forward to writing my yearly best-of sitting at the kitchen table in my parent's home.
And I'm looking forward to visiting my friends in Athens. And my peeps in Atlanta.
And I'm looking forward to watching the final season of Battlestar Galactica, which seems to be my indulgence for the holiday seasons in years past.
Can you tell I'm ready for break? "So say we all!"
Music: Pieter Nooten: Ourspace (2006)
I think this is my first blog post written at 35,000 feet in the air.
Moving through hotels this weekend I have been amused by the media blitz for Carrie Prejean’s new book, Still Standing: The Untold Story of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, and Political Attacks. Just as I was about to leave the house for Chicago I happened to catch Prejean in an interview with Meredith Vieira on the Today show. Vieira plays the soft and friendly counterpoint to Lauer's more pointed questioning and Curry's ass-kissing, something like the baby bear's porridge of morning pabulum. Prejean was incapable of answering questions that required her to actively think; she only spit-back ready-made scripts about the liberal MSM's double standards. At one point she accused Vieira of asking inappropriate questions and attempted to pick a fight, which was somewhat surprising given Vieira's soft and friendly demeanor (I mean, c'mon---this is the morning talk show person voted most likely to give you bail money). Apparently Prejean has been acting similarly outraged on the talk-show circuit, as I spied another clip of her in the Hilton hotel elevator television feed. This morning I saw that she had a tantrum on Larry King's show, removing her microphone and threatening to leave the set because he was asking inappropriate questions (she didn't actually storm off the stage, though; a self-styled "Professor of Popular Culture" on CNN rightly observed that if you're going to make threats like that, you'll sell more books if you actually follow-through). From the snippets I've heard, Prejean's handlers helped her with a "talking point list" that she memorized, and which goes something like this: (1) talk about the double-standard of the media; (2) defend marriage for straights only (not heteros---there is a difference); (3) discuss censorship by the Miss USA people; (4) redefine the masturbatory sex-tape as "sexting" and confess it was wrong; (5) accuse the interviewer of being inappropriate. Rinse. Repeat.
Of course, Prejean is a very easy target, which led me to dither about whether I should even bother posting this (stay tuned, however). Whenever I saw her speak, all I could think about was Perez Hilton's post-pageant video blog in which he screamed Prejean was booed for her comments about gay marriage, not because of her politics, but because she "is a dumb B*&^5!" I stopped reading Hilton because I think he is mean---downright cruel at times---and when I first heard his rant I thought it was simply unabashed misogyny. I still think he is a hater, however, when watching Prejean all I could think was (er, ok, yes, she's very hot, I won't lie) . . . all I could think about was Hilton's sound bite: "Miss California lost because she's a dumb . . . ." I now sort of think he called it, with an emphasis on "dumb." I'm also rethinking what Hilton said, because if you subtract this dude's own narcissism, he's right: it's not really about gay marriage. The subtext is that she said that because she's remaining consistent to a platform, a network of scripted positions (pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, anti-health care reform, and so on; we can list the issues in our sleep, right?). And the case for stupidity is manifest in other ways. For example: trying to fashion oneself into a role model for conservative young people by selling your body and taking out a loan from a beauty pageant for breast implants isn't really going to work, even if you groom your nether bits in the shape of a cross. (I mean, Hooters is a family boobie bar, but that did work because they're open on Sunday.) It's also simply not smart to accuse the MSM's milquetoast contingent of being unfair and inappropriate. The only thing I can imagine that would be even stupider is to accuse Ellen Degeneres of being hater (and I'd LOVE to see that interview).
Reading reviews of her book, however, I started to feel a teensy guilty about my smug enjoyment of Prejean's confused publicity campaign: she's barely 22. She looks (to me, at least) much older, and her discussions on television also help to create this impression. For example, when responding to questions about a "sex tape" she made for a boyfriend, she noted that was when she was a "kid" and she's grown up now. And how many 22 year olds do you know who have made a sex tape? Right, no fingers left to count on. But what about a memoir? Yeah, I know what you're thinking. So, how many 22 year olds do you know who have had a memoir ghost-written from a stack of notes on ruled "college" paper? None, I would hazard a guess.
I don't know about you (and most of you are closer to my age than Prejean's), but I was un-smart at 22. I was also young and full of . . . dung (to put it truthfully, I'm still pretty much full of it, or at least I'm told so). Knowing her actual age, I think I'm much less critical of how un-smart and dull her media appearances have been. Yes, she's dumb or stupid, but in a more technical sense, not in the sense of some intrinsic or essential deficiency, not in the commonplace sense of "dumb," not in the angered sense that Hilton probably meant it (and, well, I think we could also say Perez Hilton is calling the kettle black).
As soon as I discovered she was 22, I couldn't help but think of a certain form of student behavior I am noticing, a behavior becoming more common (but thankfully, not commonplace). You know this student behavior, longtime readers, as . . . [DUN! DUN! DUNNNNN!] the petulant demand!
The staging: I teach large lecture classes, and one method of evaluation I like is the "pop quiz." I learned this from a mentor as both a way to encourage reading and attendance. Over the course of the semester, I give 10-15 surprise, 5 question, multiple-guess quizzes on the previous evening's readings. My policy is to let students drop three quiz grades, which helps to correct for excused absences, traffic, oversleeping, athletic events, obscure Buddhist holidays, doctors appointments, and other legitimate and not-so-legitimate reasons to skip class. I always give the quizzes at the beginning of class, and late students are often super-bummed and always want to take the quiz late. My policy is not to allow this (and for all sorts of legit reasons). Since coming to Texas, it never fails that at least once a semester a student arrives late to class, demands to be allowed to take the quiz, and then makes a big scene when I say no. For example, recently a student did this, huffed, slammed the door, and so forth (drawing audible gasps from other astonished classmates). After class he came to "apologize." The apology included mention of an injury, others having swing flu, the distance from one class to the next---anything he could think of. When I mentioned that in general it was rude to make a scene like that for an audience of 150 some-odd students, he told me that I was, in fact, the rude one for refusing to let him take the quiz.
It seems to me Prejean's talking-point script and the petulant demand are vehicles for the same affective hormones, if you will. Rhetorically each is very different---the MSM have a liberal bias, teachers who don't let late students take quizzes are rude fascists---but the sense of entitlement is the same at the level of disposition and, quite literally, anality (footnote to Karl Abraham). The cultural catch phrase is, I underscore, "sense of entitlement," which is not about justice, but a certain feeling, or as Nietzsche might put it (footnote to the genealogy of morals here), a certain sense of debt. Whereas the debt Nietzsche describes is masochistic (guilt), however, in the recent evangelical turn the debt is the other's (think, here, of the Bush II administrations "bankruptcy reform" bill, which actually deregulated credit card companies; the moral behind the bill was it was the debtor's fault, their inability to live within their means).
Strictly speaking, entitlement is a formal right to something, like compensation for one's labor. Entitlement hormones, however, are not about rights in the formal sense, but an economics of affect. Feelings of entitlement produce an inherently conservative outlook, which seems homologous, if not identical, to emergent forms of narcissism tied to spectacle and celebrity (I'm thinking here that the desire to be "on camera" is analogous to the desire to make a scene in front of 150 of one's peers at the teacher's expense). The disposition of entitlement is skewed toward the psychotic: others are merely objects in the show of my life, a fantasy played out nicely in The Truman Show; I have little or no understanding of limitation.
The contemporary "sense of entitlement" is autonomy run amok. Now, enlightenment autonomy concerned the entitlement of right, be it natural or political. And I think all of us are entitled to certain basics, such as life, liberty, and . . . affordable healthcare. Righteousness is well served by certain forms of enlightenment autonomy, and I don't dispute this as a political necessity. What troubles me is this postmodern form of entitlement that is an embodied anger toward those who tell you "no."
Prejean and the petulant student are good examples of this postmodern sense of entitlement and autonomy. Prejean feels she has a right to express her opinion in the sense expressed by the oft-heard phrase, "well, that's my opinion and I have a right to express it," or, "well, that's my opinion and you can take it or leave it." The petulant student feels he has a right to demand special treatment because he has worked so hard, because he is a good person (and for the teachers out there: how many times has a student tried to "argue" he or she feels entitled to X, not that he or she thinks X is warranted because of Y?). Prejean's entire publicity premise is that she has been ridiculed for expressing her opinions (regardless of what they are). What's missing from this reasoning is, of course, the critical faculty of judgment and this crazy thing Persig terms "value": not all opinions are worth listening to, and not all effort is worth reward. And let's face it: it's not so clear that Prejean's opinions are even her "own" in the sense that she cannot articulate her scripts---leading to contradictions and the ecstasies of Gotcha Culture© (I've copyrighted that phrase, thank you; I'm entitled to a citation if you use it).
What we have in the sense of contemporary entitlement is a sense of feeling, an embodied feeling, an anality (think of tensing-up, of squeezing yourself closed and hunching-inward, fists shaking), a disposition that, arguably, is rooted in deep, infantile demands. Now, I'm not saying Prejean or the petulant student are infantile and I'm therefore better. I have those feelings too---we all do (I mean, the guy sitting next to me in the airplane is hogging the armrest and his elbow is in my seat-space; I'm fantasizing about ripping his arm off and beating his head with it, his glasses askew and cracked across his face . . . ). We all have these feelings and fantasies, and it used to be the case that fictional entertainment provided us an "escape" with which to "feel them out," so to speak. This contained infantalism has become "reality" ("reality television," anyone?). In our contemporary environment, it would seem that the entitlement-of-right has transformed into an affective conviction that masquerades as an entitlement of right: "You" or "They owe me X" because "I'm a good person" doesn't really even work here. It's a feeling, born in infantile omnipotence that is beyond reason.
For example, there's nothing I could say to the petulant student that would ever right the wrong my "no" has done to him. Once, I asked one of these students, "what would you like me to do?" He responded, "well, I'd like you to let me take the quiz."
"But it's a pop quiz, and we've already gone over the answers in class." I said. Why don't you just let this be one of the three quizzes we dropped? It's reasons like this that I've created the 'drop-three' policy, in fact."
Instead of responding to my statement, the student stormed out of the auditorium without responding. Now, how different is this from how Prejean has handled her interviews: when the prepared scripts of her talking-point memo don't work, she refuses to engage, but rather, accuses interviewers of asking inappropriate questions:
Settlements do not preclude answering King's questions, of course. Vocal tone and facial gestures betray the brand of righteousness that replaces good reasons with conviction. It used to be the case that "love is all you need." Now it's just conviction.
Well, it appears my airplane is on it's decent into Austin---we're only 100 miles away---so I should work on wrapping this up. Let's do so with a recap and a question. So far I've been reflecting on my amusement with Carrie Prejean's publicity campaign for her new book, which I've suggested reveals a certain inability to think on one's feet; the contradictions commentators (well, all of us) are pouncing on reveal a very scripted Prejean who is incapable of reconciling competing scripts. My first conclusion was that Prejean was simply not very smart, but when confronted with her young age I noted some similarities to the unreasonable, affective demands of students. It then occurred to me that if we think about stupidity structurally (a la Avital), there's a connection between contemporary notions of affective entitlement and what folks recognize as "stupid." So, the question: is stupidity simply another name for affective entitlement? If stupidity means "lacking intelligence or common sense," then stupidity is not simply lacking the conceptual repertoire to express oneself, low "cognitive complexity," and so on, but also the absence of a common sensibility. In other words, "lacking common sense" means that one does not have a group-minded disposition, an understanding of "right" as a tacit contract to behave in a certain public in a particular way. Prejean's interaction with her interviewers this week is a great illustration: the interviewers she's selected are known for being particularly warm and friendly, very "other-oriented." King is especially renowned for his disarming demeanor. Yet even with these people, she cannot seem to play the game of give-and-take. It's all take. It's all entitlement. It's a fundamental inability to negotiate difference; she can only interact with "same," that is, with herself.
I'm starting to think that if we understand psychosis properly as a psychical structure or disposition (orientation, tendency, habit, whatever) that has not opened fully to the social (for your Lacan-heads out there, I'm thinking about the failure to admit of the paternal metaphor), then Prejean is yet another example of an obsessional neurotic (that is, classic narcissist a la Tom Cruise or Christian Bale) become celebrity. If this is the case, one would expect that Prejean has come from a broken home. And lo and behold, I just found this. More father trouble, indeed.
Psychosis. Stupidity. Narcissism. Entitlement. These are all intimately related. I'm sensing a new academic project, and I think it has everything to do with social movements. Righteousness is a problem in Gotcha Culture. If modernity was neurotic, postmodernity is psychotic. Thinking aloud. Thinking thinking. My tray table must be returned to its upright position. Closing. Computer. Now.
Music: Talk Talk: Live in London (1986)
I had hoped to steal away a few moments to blog a bit about the conference I’m currently attending, the National Communication Association Conference in Chicago. Unfortunately, to attend everything that I was assigned to meant . . . there was no time. I’m currently late for a “party” (departments sometimes host parties in conference rooms for friends, alums, and hopefuls).
I do have this “late” moment to blog this: as exhausting as these conferences are, they’re also energizing. Also, this year more than any other, I’ve noted much less cynicism and more goodwill going around. The mood of the conference is upbeat and friendly. Perhaps that’s just because my friends are upbeat and giving. Or perhaps it’s because we like Chicago. Or perhaps it’s because Obama is president.
I don’t know the answer, but tonight that will be my questions for the parties: (1) how would you characterize the mood of this conference? and (2) how would you account for it? Report forthcoming, and likely from an airport.
Sorry, I'm really busy with travel and all, but, you know, at least I remembered before I hit the sack:
Music: David Bowie: Lodger (1979)
Yeah yeah: so you were wondering if Dr. Juice would blog the NCA. I’ll do my best. I’ve got free wifi, afterall. The problem is, after this evening, I don’t have a lot of free moments.
It’s nice to be back in Chicago. I don’t know if I’ve confessed this before, but: Chicago is my favorite city. Austin is fabulous. Minneapolis is Amazing. But Chicago is the shit: food, mass transit, music, trees, even. The Bean. How can anyone not like Chicago?
I arrived a few hours ago and basked in the brilliant presence and optimistic love of a dear friend en route to the hotel. It’s a surprisingly nice joint, the Blake Chicago. Shh. Don’t tell anyone about this hotel. It may be my Chicago go-to sleep place for perpetuity.
Riding up the elevator, David Bowie’s “China Girl” was playing. It got me into the proper mood. When I got to the room I put the ghetto blaster (I always bring one for travel) on to Bowie. Lodger seemed appropriate. I’m heading out now to meet my mentors and a friend for dinner. This, of course, is the whole reason for coming. As for the panels . . . .
Music: Amon Tobin: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005)
Last week was among the most overwhelming of my career: I returned home last Sunday from a conference in Minneapolis, but with my advisor in tow. The following day I picked up a guest speaker from the airport, dined, and whined, then the next day was playing host. Factor in two, brand new lectures. Wednesday I spent the day with my advisor, made a visit with some friends from Minnesota who now live in Leander, and then high-tailed it back to the university for guest number three, who was also giving a lecture. Two things happened in the midst of this busy Wednesday: first, my laptop hard-drive died. Just up and died. I lost two weeks of lecture materials. Bummer. Second, some shit put nails under my tires on the passenger side; between the guest speaker and dinner, my kindly advisor hung out in the Sears tire place who repaired one of my tires (the other was not repair-able and so we used my spare). Then, the following day I woke up with my eye-swollen shut: stye in my eye. Painful, but I had a new prep, then errands, then dinner with advisor and friends. So, come Friday I was completely toast. I went to the doctor. Got some meds. Didn’t make the presentations that day.
Given the heavenly hell that was last week, I really wasn’t in the mood for throwing a party, but I picked up the keg and threw it anyway. That was a wise move. As soon as it got underway my mood changed, and I was feeling better. By 4:00 a.m. I was feeling quite good, in fact, and the mood of positivity has carried me to this Friday. Of course, I was back in the car repair shop today and have another $1,500 estimate (I’ve spent almost $6,000 on the car already in the past four months). But I am not going to let it phase me; party vibes will get me through. Now, all of last week is honestly a blur---and the lack of blogging is a testament to the hectic pace of life lately. I’m having a cigar and catching up on email messages on the back patio. I shall sleep in tomorrow. And if I start to feel overwhelmed (I have five presentations to prep between now and Monday for our annual conference next week in Chicago), I can always look at the gallery of party photos to cheer myself up and remember what’s really important. Dancing. Dancing is important. And costumes. And smiling. Smiling is good. And friends. All these papers . . . well, these papers can go to Hades.
Barry Brummett turned me and some others on to this song. Della Pollock just gave a transformative talk about the black church, faith, belief, and the ineffability of affect. Gotta go to bed; here's a lullaby:
Music: Nina Simone: High Priestess of Soul (1966)
I await my flight in an airport. I am reflecting about my weekend with a gang of familiar and friendly faces, as well as some new ones---graduate students, friendly, smart grads. David Beard, long time best buddy, graduate student mate, co-author, and intellectual inquisitor par excellence, dreamed up a conference on the question of "modern rhetorical theory." I would say the folks he brought together were determined to find answers, but what we got, of course, were different ways to formulate the question. We didn't happen upon an answer, although R.L. Scott said he had no difficulty discerning the modern. It was electric refrigeration. And modern rhetorical theory? Well, the holy trinity of George Campbell, I.A. Richards, and Kenneth Burke, of course (this during a hilarious mid-lunch "provocation").
The conference was low-key and laid-back. Folks were very friendly, and what I like in particular was there was no sense of peacock feathers---that the discussion was expected to explore ideas, not "show-off." I worried some of the grads might get the wrong idea about conferences, but then maybe they saw a model of what things could be like. Then again, David Beard hand-picked the group, so you have to credit that too . . . .
All of the papers I heard were intriguing. Bill Keith's keynote on rhetoric as a "hybrid" field really helped frame the tone for the rest of the weekend (Latour's theory of modernity seemed hegemonic after that opening paper). Jim Aune was there, always brilliant (what hasn’t Jim Aune read?). My favorite papers were Debra Hawhee's on Burke and Aristotle (the oft-heard suggestion that Burke posed identification against persuasion proved wrong, at least according to Burke's marginalia in his Loeb edition of Rhetoric), and David Beard's on religious identity. David argued that, rather than think of religion as an epistemological issue, what if we thought of it as a dispositional one (identify first, justify later)? It made sense to me, and helps us make better sense of contemporary political squabbles, too.
My favorite moments in the conference were scenes: peering out the window to see giant flakes of snow to the backdrop of brightly colored fall leaves. Watching R.L. Scott and Alan Gross playfully spar over the value of the magisterial gesture. David getting an award in gratitude for his intellectual, community-building successes at Duluth. Shop-talk with Besty, Brett, and Ken the final night in a cheesy "Irish" pub with a bad, teen cover band. . . perfect ending.
They taped the whole thing, and snippets of papers will be uploaded to the InterTubes. I declined because I cannot stand to see myself on film; I know it doesn't creep out others as much as it does me, but still. And my paper was and remains half-baked---truly a work in progress. But I did distribute the paper to conference goers, and don't mind sharing here as long as: (a) you don't see me deliver it; and (b) you will not cite this. It is really half-done, not a complete work of scholarship, and written with the idea it would be orally delivered and not studied.
HEARING THE SPEECH DEFECTIVES: MODERNITY AS PATHOLOGY IN RHETORICAL THEORY
Joshua Gunn University of Texas at Austin
DO NOTE CITE! DRAFT ONLY! CITERS WILL SUFFER AN UNPLEASANT VOODOO CURSE. TENTATIVE CLAIMS ONLY. THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS NOT TO BE CITED, ETC., AND SO ON. BLAH BLAH ARGH!
____________________________________________________
You think you're alone until you realize you're in it/ Now fear is here to stay, love is here for a visit. ---Elvis Costello, "Watching the Detectives"[1]
I begin my remarks today by referencing Costello's lyricism for a number of reasons. The first is because the vivid image the song evokes is classically noir and chiaroscuro, a femme fatale is watching hardboiled fedora-headed flatfoots on television instead of making love to her man. The song is visually evocative. And, I regret, the scenario is depressingly familiar.
The second reason is that, under the aegis of death, Costello's lyrics provide something of a cutesy transition from Professor Pfau's fears to the scene of visitation, that first event of a funeral in which the body of the deceased love one is on morbid display. The strong emotions of fear and love exhibited at any wake are, of course, muted in our present mourning. That pun is intended, particularly because I'm never up and speaking this early; to say I am a mourning person only pertains to my penchant for the sentimental-the reason I join you here. The crowing cocks can go to hell (incidentally, this phrase reduces my remarks this morning to one handy motto).
Crowing is, of course, an expression of happiness and triumph, and this is hard to muster when asked to mutter about modernity for all the reasons-that is, instrumental reasons-that we know.[2] Moreover, as Professor Aune has noted elsewhere and then again last evening,[3] the institutional politics of rhetorical studies concern the passing of two commingled yet alloyed bodies, modernity and rhetoric, and working though those corpora forestalls any final burial. We seek to prolong the visitation, but we cannot stay put. We go, reluctantly, slumping toward Sodom,[4] which means, of course, that we go bassakwards, perhaps something like Benjamin's "angel of history." Our faces are turned to the past; we would like "to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed." But a storm is blowing from the project of the posts-or, if you prefer, the postal projects and slums of structuration-a storm that has got caught in our wings, carrying us into the Hills of Foucault and the Lands of the Lost, I mean the Lands of Lacan.[5]
All of this is to say I like Costello's song because it allows for word play-as most lyrics do-and it is particularly demonstrative of our thinking about the intersection of modernity and rhetoric, cynical and romantic in equal measure. Like Costello's conception of relationships and Benjamin's concept of history, all rhetorical theories, antimodern, modern, or postmodern, are foisted upon a mental image of bodies arranged in space. These bodies are commonly typed into two sorts-subject and object-and modern theories of love or history or rhetoric might be said to rest on the characterization of the relation between these typed bodies.
Now, professors Aune and Keith have corroborated that the body we term "the subject" emerges in modernity as an autonomous and free body. Following the work of Esther Sánchez -Pardo on "modernist melancholia," my argument is that in the domain of theory, modernism also represents a shift from philosophy as a route to knowledge toward psychology as a route to knowledge. The dominance of the Kantian subject becomes, by the twentieth century, an obsession with the psyche.6 This implicates, in turn, an alteration in the attitudinal relation between subject and object. My remarks today attempt to evoke the mental image or fantasy-something akin to Benjamin's angel or Costello's noir bedroom-that seems to underwrite the rhetorical theory of late modernity in a way that will help us think further about it in relation to our present predicament.
I. THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT
John Rajchman reminds us of Wittgenstein's observation that "when we think of the world's future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going now; it does not occur to us its path is not a straight line, but a curve, constantly changing directions."[7] In addition to its impressive image-work, I evoked Benjamin's concept of history because it asks us to take a messianic stance toward the curves of the past, to seek out subversive moments that would otherwise be lost to seeing straight. For the materialist historian, however, redemptive research is deeply rhetorical in its reportage of what Benjamin termed "dialectical images." A dialectical image mediates the past and the present in a way that captures both the utopian hopes and material circumstance in a "flash" or instantaneous "pathos of nearness."[8] When researching history, these synchronous flashes are fleeting, but must nevertheless be captured poetically in tone.[9] Benjamin's vivid allegory of the angel of history is in this sense a dialectical image, or better put, the representation of a dialectical image (which in itself is not a representation), both capturing the hope of modernity in the reconstruction of the Weimar Republic and the very real, looming doom approaching its back door.
Although I recognize significant dissimilarities, Gilles Delueze's conception of what he termed the "image of thought" also speaks to an awakening by means of an image. Like the dialectical image, the "image of thought" is
not a picture or representation of something . . . . It can never be simply deduced from the contexts or concepts of a philosophy; instead, it is a tacit presupposition of the creation of concepts and their relation of what is to come. There is no method to arrive at it and it is never completely explicit . . . . [10]
Strictly speaking, Deleuze's image of thought concerns thinking, and philosophical thinking in particular. Any given philosophy rests, argues Deleuze, on a certain structuring image, which prejudges the "distribution of the object and the subject."[11] Such images of thought, at least as they are received, tend to ossify into illusions about the initial image and have become "dogmatic, orthodox or moral" in character.[12] Deleuze's philosophy is an attempt to begin without illusions, with something akin to an image of thought that does not already predispose its "modes of address."[13] It is in this sense that I understand Professor Keith's recourse to the work of Latour on modernity: the image of thought ensconced in modernity-and in particular, in the sciences-concerns a tension or contradiction between the tidiness of purity and the exciting defilements of hybridity.[14] If you'll permit me a slight equivocation in the service of provocation, as I will suggest momentarily, this purity/danger pair so typical of modernity also implies an ideational distribution of the subject and object in respect to pathology.[15]
Of course, ours is not a philosophical project, but something like a conceptual history to better discern the relation of what is to come, but without determining what that is. (In echoes of Derrida, Jesus is going to come. It won't be long. But how long it is taking.)[16] If Benjamin and Deleuze are guides, however, at the core of our project is an awakening procedure that is ultimately ineffable. After the blindness of insight, the best we can have are instructive illusions or representations of that image of thought-basically, in the argot of that Mac Daddy of Modernity, Sigmund Freud, dreams or fantasies of some kind of disciplinary unconscious and not-so-secret wish. At least, not secret to us now, in hindsight.
II. SHIFTING OBJECTS OF THE DISCIPLINARY DREAM
On the surface of things, the disciplinary dream of "modern rhetoric" at any one time is discernable by attending to the distribution of subject and object in the scholarly imaginary. I think it is indisputable that the subject of modernity is autonomous and that this conception has held sway until relatively recently. In turn, at first blush one is tempted to say that the object of rhetorical theory in modernity has been speech or writing, such that the image of thought is, as Professor Aune put it last night, "an autonomous self [addressing] . . . an audience of autonomous selves." An attention to the imagined scenes of rhetoric reveals that in the early twentieth century, the attitude toward audiences was not necessarily respectful of their autonomy, but quite the opposite. As Pat Gehrke shows in his marvelous new book The Ethics and Politics of Speech, the "audience . . . became an object for the speaker to conquer, a target for the sharp words of a great orator."[17] For example, in his 1902 treatise How to Attract and Hold an Audience, Joseph Esenwein, friend and contemporary of non-other than Dale Carnegie, argued that "for the audience to master the speaker is a failure. For the speaker to master the audience is success."[18]
It is in this formative image of thought that we find the classical reasserted in the modern land-grant university, precisely, I think-well, I was told! -the tension that drove Professor Beard to bring us together. Insofar as the subject is autonomous in modernity, however, we cannot claim the image of thought of modern rhetoric is the same; it is, as Professor Keith might suggest, a hybrid. Cast as an object to be manipulated, the audience is subject to the autonomous will of the speaker. The image of thought here (better described I suppose as a dogmatic image or fantasy) is classically Hegelian, an echo of the master/slave dialectic or, in Lacan-o-speak, it is allied with the Master's Discourse.[19] Moreover, the oft-discussed shift in rhetorical theory from a more classical focus on the speaker or subject to the modern concern with the object of audience paralleled a larger, intellectual interest in psychology, both behavioral and interpretive. Mastery was thereby amplified as the ability to psyche-out the audience, so to speak, with an understanding of emotional appeals. In effect, public speaking was a hypnogogic.[20]
What happens in the 20s and 30s, however, is that as the subject moved toward an apotheosis of Mastery at the height of modernity, in the academic imaginary the object gradually migrates from the undifferentiated mass of audience to the maladapted student. Because of length constraints I will confine my remarks here to the research and the explicit pedagogy of scholars in departments of speech, however, I suspect there are analogies to be made for written rhetorical studies as well.
In departments of speech, pedagogy was seen as a fruitful avenue for establishing a research trajectory in the 1920s and 30s. Culturally, Herman Cohen suggests the two most prominent influences on the new field at that time "were those of the new psychology, principally that of Sigmund Freud; and the new theories of social adjustment, particularly those of John Dewey."[21] Here in the United States, however, Freud's theories were shunted through the work of Heinz Hartmann and what is known as "ego psychology," an application of Freud's theories that promoted therapy as a process of the client's rational and affective adaptation to his or her environment.[22] Read through ego psychology, one can see how Dewey's ideas about social adjustment were conceptually wed to psychical adaptation. In communication, that wedding is conceptually manifest in the field's turn toward "mental hygiene."
Mental hygiene is the nineteenth century precursor to what we now discuss as "mental health," and it entered the field under the aegis of "speech hygiene" in the late 1920s. Gehrke notes that in Speech, "the primacy of scientific methods and the interest in making speech an applied psychology fostered attempts to construct purposes for speech education other than persuasion or transmission."[23] Many of those attempts hailed from the University of Minnesota and the theories of Bryng Bryngelson and his colleagues. In fact, it could be argued that the University of Minnesota was the seat of the speech hygiene movement, since many in the department were vocal proponents, including John Hamilton, Franklin Knower, and Wayne Morse.[24] Although regarded today as a pioneer of the treatment of stuttering, Bryngelson's repeated statements about the purpose of speech education became a mantra for a host of scholars until the arrival of the World War II. "The goal in fundamentals courses should extend to adequate speech adjustments outside the classroom," argued Bryngelson. He continued:
If our work be thorough, it is not enough to see adequate changes effective in class. Society today is suffering as a result of inadequately adjusted personalities at war with each other's inferiority feelings. Our speech . . . is symptomatic of a lack of adequate personal evaluation and contentment at the emotional level.[25]
In other words, the speech classroom should be a therapeutic space in which the teacher "diagnosed" the student's emotional stability and proper adjustment to society. To this end, one of the more infamous techniques promoted by Bryngleson for so-called speech failures was redemption through humiliation. The speech teacher could help readjust students by having each one stand before a mirror in the classroom:
Standing there looking analytically and self consciously at the red hair, the big nose, the big feet or so on, he would talk about the . . . characteristic so long neglected. The members of the class all participated in the discussion, calling attention to the difference as well as remarking about the more normal parts of their persons. Nicknames befitting the differences were adopted, or if the sensitivity was about a name, that name was sounded in drill fashion at each day's session.[26]
This detailed image of the adjustment of Howdy Doody to social normalcy is a rather perverse, behavioral twist in the years-long process of psychotherapy, and time permitting there would be much to say here about the connection of the mirror to speech in the classroom. For the moment, however, I point out this imagined scene to note how the subject and object is differently distributed from the imagined scene of speech just a decade prior: Here, of course, the Master is no longer a hypnotist, but a therapist, a Master who has the power to assist the student-the object-in discerning his or her deficiencies relatively quickly, over the course of the semester. The mirror, of course, is a key metaphor for an important role of the therapist in the psychoanalytic imaginary. What is particularly modern about this imagined scene is not, however, the thereapeutic subject as such. Rather, it is speed.
III. ON SPEEDY SPEECH RECOVERIES
In high modernity the United States was both a pragmatic and impatient culture, which helps to explain how the relatively long process of psychotherapy was reduced to techniques of adaptation on the one hand, or abandoned in favor of behavioral conditioning on the other. Bryngelson's mirror of humiliation is a good illustration of the ways in which modern therapeutics orient the speech subject into techniques of self-discipline and control, a project Ron Greene and Darrin Hicks have argued is part of a larger discourse of liberal citizenship in modernity.[27] I agree with Hicks that an investigation of the past speech pedagogies is important "to understand better how . . . pedagogical techniques organize the forms of democratic subjectivication available in the present," and my task here today has been to touch on the imagined scenes that distribute subject and objects in ways that predetermine theory.[28]
My own interest in the speech hygiene movement orbits two related questions: why was the so-called new psychology abandoned? And how do we account for the hostility psychoanalytic approaches have received in rhetorical studies until relatively recently? I think the answers have something to do with the image of thought that flashed, horrifically, in the mental hygiene movement. Unquestionably the governmental apparatus operative in the academy was productive of the liberal citizen-subject, but it also contributed to an assumption of Mastery that is almost evangelical in character, if not fiendishly instrumental in attitude toward "the object" (arguably, an attitude that gets transferred to "the text").
If we crystallize modern rhetorical theory in Speech the decade before the clean slate of war, the mental image of Bryngelson's mirror metamorphoses into an ice pick. The cultural obsession with speed and efficiency driving speech hygiene is more vividly illustrated by the legacy of psychosurgery, and particularly the transorbital lobotomy. Neurologist Walter Freeman and surgeon James Watts became the first physicians in the United States to perform a prefrontal lobotomy in 1936. By inserting a ice pick into the eye of someone afflicted with a "personality disorder," Freeman would cause massive trauma and damage to the prefrontal lobe-the area of the brain involved in personality and social behavior. Although these mutilations did relieve some victims of their dehabilitating symptoms, a large number of Freeman's patients were seriously injured or effectively zombified, and many died.
Over the next two decades Freeman would perform thousands upon thousands of lobotomies, promoting his new procedure by driving around the country in his "lobotomobile"-and for various reasons the procedure was accepted until the introduction of psychotropics in the 1950s. Gradually, the medical community turned against Freeman as a publicity-crazed zealot, eventually revoking his medical license.[29]
The image of Freeman tapping an ice pick into a young person's brain is visceral and chilling, yet demonstrative of the hopes and dreams of a certain form of medical instrumentality: the subject is a benevolent Master who wanted to banish suffering, but in his zeal to promote his knowledge the object of his gaze doubly suffered. Although it remains unspoken in the journaled record, I suspect speech hygienists may have been regarded similarly, not as ruthless lobotomists, of course, but rather as well-meaning fanatics whose convictions about the symptomology of speech and personality were seen to damage those whom they would presumably help. (We certainly know today the cause of stuttering is not emotional blockage.)
As Darrin Hicks and Ron Greene note, after World War II the field of speech seems to take a turn into general semantics and meaning on the one hand, and the speech sciences and interpersonal communication on the other.[30] Notably, it seems to me it is in the aftermath of war and the hygiene movements that the "object" both starts to proliferate and disappear. From a psychological vantage, all objects represent, in one way or another, significant people in the psychical life of a person. In the history of rhetoric, the object consists of autonomous individuals or audiences or students, but people nevertheless. Yet in the move to meaning-or as Kenneth Burke would have it, forms and principles-the object is no longer a person, but an idea or concept; consequently it both dissolves and proliferates. It will take the posthumanist turn for the Master-subject to similarly dissolve and proliferate, but not before existentialism and the thinking of figures like Jean-Paul Sartre elevate it to the status of a secular god, with the responsibility for creating (the meaning of) all objects, not before an autonomous, self-transparent rhetor is fashioned and condemned to make choices and define all of humanity with his or her every utterance.
The scholar and poet David Antin is often quoted as saying "depending on which modernism you choose, you get the postmodernism you deserve." It seems to me our contemporary interest in a form of poststructual thought that is purged of psychology is in some sense the legacy of an ossified and dogmatic image of thought whose disturbing subject is represented by the lobotomist. It took a distancing from the speech sciences to remove rhetoric from a discourse of pathology. The task for those of us who find the psychoanalytic idiom fruitful for understanding rhetoric today is to redeem the object as a subject, to show how the interpretive or hermeneutic tradition of classical psychoanalysis was lost, and to demonstrate how contemporary applications of psychoanalytic concepts concern a dismantling of mastery-not the opposite, as so many scholars in the speech tradition have assumed.[31] In short, I'm suggesting one way to understand rhetoric's modernity is to discern and critique the dogmatic images of thought in our history because, without a doubt, I think we deserve better.
Notes
[1] Elvis Costello, "Watching the Detectives." My Aim is True. Hip-O Records (Universal), 2007 (1977). [2] For example, see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Routledge, 1990). [3] James Arnt Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies: A Piacular Rite." Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 69-76. [4] This is an oblique reference to the project of the critique of liberalism from the left, Sodom being the more radical counterpart to Bork's more conservative Gomorrah. See Robert Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). [5] Walter Benjamin, "The Concept of History," trans. Harry Zohn, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume Four, 1938-1940, eds. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 2003 [1940]), 392. [6] Ester Sánchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 198. [7] John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 58. [8] John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 249. [9] To my knowledge, the best rumination of on the tonal qualities of the dialectical image is indirectly, though sound. See Mirko M. Hall, "Dialectical Sonority: Walter Benjamin's Acoustic of Profane Illumination," unpublished manuscript (revised and resubmitted and, I expect, soon to be published in a journal near you). [10] Rajchman, Deleuze, 32. Also see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129-167. [11] Deleuze, Difference, 131. [12] Deleuze, Difference, 131. [13] Rajchman, Deleuze, 37. [14] See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). [15] There is more to be said here about the defilements of hybridity and cultural taboo: the progress of modernity is also a problem of waste management. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966); and Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002). [16] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 4. [17] Pat Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 16 [18] Joseph Berg Esenwein, How to Attract and Hold an Audience: A Practical Treatise on the Nature, Preparation, and Delivery of Public Discourse (New York: Hinds, Noble, and Eldredge, 1902), 5. Also see Gehrke, Ethics, 16. [19] See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 129-131. [20] See Diane Davis, "Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 (2008): 123-147. [21] Herman Cohen, The History of Speech Communication: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1914-1945 (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1994), 119. [22] See Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, trans. David Rappaport (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1958). [23] Gehrke, Ethics, 21. [24] For example, see John L. Hamilton, "The Psychodrama and Its Implications for Speech Adjustment," Quarterly Journal of Speech 29 (1943): 61-69; Franklin H. Knower, "A Suggestive Study of Public Speaking Rating-Scale Values," Quarterly Journal of Speech 15 (1929): 30-42; Franklin H. Knower, "Psychological Tests in Public Speaking," Quarterly Journal of Speech 15 (1929): 216-223; Wayne L. Morse, "The Mental-Hygiene Approach in a Beginning Speech Course," The Quarterly Journal of Speech 14 (1928): 543-554. [25] Bryng Bryngelson, "Speech Hygiene," The Quarterly Journal of Speech 22 (1936): 612-613. [26] Bryng Bryngelson, "The Re-education of Speech Failures," The Quarterly Journal of Speech (1933): 231. [27] Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, "Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Citizenship," Cultural Studies 19 (2005): 100-126. [28] Darrin Hicks, "The New Citizen." Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 358. [29] For a grizzly account, see Jack El-Hai, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007). [30] Personal communication with Ron Greene. See, however, Darrin Hicks and Ronald Green, "Speech and Biopolitics," a paper to be delivered at the upcoming National Communication Association meeting in Chicago on a panel titled "Ad Bellum Purificandum: The Therapeutic Turn in Mid-century Rhetoric and Communication Theory," Friday, Nov. 13th at 9:30 a.m. at the Hilton Chicago, Meeting Room 5G. Professors Beard and Keith will also be presenting on said panel! [31] In this respect, Strachey's much criticized "scientistic" translation of Freud's works is partially to blame.