Ghost in the Wire

Josh Gunn has a post up about teaching rhetorical criticism that points (somewhat implicitly) to a serious problem facing our discipline: the texts that have been developed and marketed for the teaching of rhetorical criticism are, overall, insufficient for the task. Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric, by Campbell and Berkholder, with its "organic model" is a) out of print/difficult to find, and b) host to a number of theoretical assumptions/arguments that I (and others) find problematic. In addition, and perhaps more seriously, there is no model or perspective contained therein that would allow for, much less demonstrate, synthetic critiques that are not predicated on close textual analysis. The examples in the text, for all of its lauding of historical-contextual analysis, remain about a single artifact (a particular speech or television episode) or species of artifact (a group of speeches by the same individual or a television series from which several anecdotal episodes are selected). This sort of organizational and methodological strategy is particularly useful for doing historical acts of public address, but much less useful if one is trying to chart the effects of contemporary discourse. And I won't even get started on the book's slavish treatment of Kenneth Burke.

Sonja Foss has an introductory book, but as Josh notes, it really is intended for beginners, and it sacrifices the organic approach's emphasis on critical thinking in favor of an extremely rigid methodological endeavor. The text is extremely useful for undergraduates trying to understand the whats and hows of a class that many students find difficult, but the unfortunate byproduct is that the text also lends itself to cookie-cutter criticisms that give students the capacity to get a good grade without necessarily assisting them in thinking differently about language. In addition, this rigid methodological adherence is lacking in content, as the book has little appreciation for trends and methods that have been of massive importance for the field of late. For example, the idea that there's a method or perspective called "postmodern rhetorical criticism" is certainly untrue, even if I can understand why, when the posties first started to surface in the field, there were those who gouped together their perspectives under a particular methodological heading. But simply because different authors (the ones who provide the examples of this sort of essay/method) use the word postmodern to describe the phenomena to which they are responding, it hardly implies that a strict homology is at work that offers up something like methodological insight. There is no appreciation for psychoanalytic arguments, little to no perspective or insight for negotiating mediated texts, and again, as with Campbell and Berkholder, few of the modes of criticism explained here would allow for synthetic critiques or for a way of understanding the ebbs and flows of contemporary discourse. All this while keeping a chapter on Fantasy Theme Analysis? Just weird.

Critical Questions, by Northstine, Blair, and Copeland, is probably my favorite text, though it, too, is difficult to find lying around (Amazon says it will ship in 2-3 weeks). This text doesn't pretend to demonstrate an organicism that isn't really there (or that looks like an organic redux of Kenneth Burke), nor does it attempt to write up a menu of methodological entrees. Instead, it has various rhetoricians discuss how it is that a particular piece of criticism came into existence, with a focus on invention and critical creativity. I like this approach significantly better than the other two dominant choices, but alas, the text still suffers from an impoverished selection of criticism, i.e. I still find a variety of important perspectives lacking. This is more forgivable here, as it's easier to forgive a particular method's omission when the text never purports to be a primer on method, but it still means that significant supplemental work has to be done if one is going to talk about contemporary patterns of discourse.

I keep saying "contemporary discourse, contemporary discourse" as if everyone knows what I'm talking about or as if everyone agrees with my concern. Many don't. And many of those that don't are the same people who are old enough, wise enough, and field-specific enough to be writing or using these textbooks. The younger generation of rhetorical scholars has different tastes and different sensitivities (not better, necessarily, simply responsive to different field and cultural conditions). When I say that these texts don't help us much when dealing with contemporary discourse, for example, I'm saying that it's difficult to understand the growth of fundamentalism within politics, or to understand the value of Bush's speeches, by looking at particular texts in and of themselves, or even looking at their historical and political conditions of emergence/invention. What matters increasingly is the circulation of the texts, the manner in which a text is broken into fragments (and, in fact, written for the express purpose of controlling which fragments will achieve the highest circulation), and the spin with which these fragments will be disseminated/circulated. These "technologies of circulation" (Dilip Gaonkar's expression) aren't the only determining or important factor for contemporary discourse, but they're a big part of it, from political discourse to Hollywood entertainment to flash cartoons, and it's a shame that not a single text offers insight into this reality. And it's not like these technologies just showed up in the last handful of years. A related concern is the lack of explicit theoretical precepts, by which I mean a lack of sustained reflection on the terms that comprise the contemporary critical vocabulary: public and publicity, the subject, time/timing/history, mediation, the political, and so on and so forth.

At some point, sooner rather than later I hope, these gaps will need to be addressed, and I don't mean by supplying ever larger supplemental reading packets.

Because it was requested: below is a later section of the paper on Katrina and Fascism, and it follows not only the introductory section I posted previously but also a section discussing Laclau and the ontological structure of populist demands as well as a section that analyses the use and force of satellite photos of the storm and their relation to argument's about the storm's perfection and abnormal force.

Cue the Blame Game

Whatever the veracity of Katrina's exceptional status, the wreckage and ruin that it produced could hardly be thought as anything other than monumental. Parishes flooded, bodies floating through the streets, one of America's most famous cities all but washed away, possibly never to return. A dispirited army of displaced Americans, often referred to as refugees, began to make its way to new homes and new lives, as if such a thing were possible after such widespread devastation. Even Trent Lott's house was destroyed, an event that required Presidential attention.

But more alarming, more maddening than the Hurricane itself, was the response. The intensity of the storm seemed positively correlated to the incompetency of the relief efforts. Delays, mismanagement, forgotten people, abandoned homes. Television news programs showed video after video of those left behind, primarily poor, black and creole faces, locked into the Superdome, hiking along submerged highways, swimming to stores in the hope of finding clean water and food. A consistent refrain emerged, one that exposes the extent of the debacle and perhaps also explains the pathetic nature of the response. Kenyan author Mukoma Wa Ngugi summarized this chorus-like punditry well:

"New Orleans is a scene from the Third World", "like the Third World", "US Handles the crisis like a third world country", "bodies floating on water reminiscent of Africa" etc. This has been a constant with news commentators, analysts, members of the senate and congress and other sections of America commenting on New Orleans. The accompanying statements to this have been "I cannot believe this is America" or "This is not supposed to happen in America". It is supposed to and can only happen somewhere else. Attending a food festival event in Madison, Wisconsin I overheard a joke – "Where is New Orleans again?" New Orleans is next to Somalia.

The politics of race are crucial here to be sure, and the role that racism plays in the history of fascist propaganda is well-noted. As such, we need to highlight the role that race and the production of the xenos plays in characterizations of Katrina's aftermath, the functional othering of both the population and the place, a two-fold reduction in the sense of ethos (as both character and dwelling place). This racial dynamic no doubt determined some affective level of the response, but it does not explain ultimately where responsibility for the failure lies, nor does outrage over it do much to interrupt the fascistic momentum generated by Katrina. Racism has provided the ground for many empirically successful fascist mobilizations, but racism, both explicit and implicit, has been at work in all sorts of government structures and all sorts of demagogic arrangements. Race, then, plays a massively influential role, but not a determining one.