Orator-Communists

In the 2004 article “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor” [Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2004. ] Ronald Walter Greene outlines a materialist ontology of rhetorical agency. Drawing largely on the works of Hardt and Negri, Greene offers a way out of the forced choice between rhetorical models. Understanding rhetoric as communicative labor affirms “an alternative politics: a common creativity and invention, a productive excess and joy, the material immanence of democracy.” Greene argues that rhetoric is a form of immaterial labor that is productive of value.

Immaterial labor offers an alternative model for rhetorical agency. As a way toward a material ontology of rhetorical agency I would claim that the persuasive, aesthetic, and deliberative characteri stics of communication (elements associated with the information and cultural content of the commodity as well as the social networks of care) reside in the matrix of bio-political production.

The fact that neoliberal governance acts in a totalizing way by focusing on the reproduction of life and knowledge should not make the militant depressed. Greene argues that critical rhetoricians that support more deliberative, political-communicative models burden themselves with a “permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency” (188). Rhetoricians become ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (189) scolding each other rather than affirming their common struggle. Instead of constant battle over the proper signification of struggle, eludes this anxiety in favor of the invention of new forms of resistance as a “life-affirming constitutive power that embodies creativity and cooperation.”

Capital’s self-valorization occurs in the process of circulation and the consequent production of surplus-value. Affective energies are the connective tissues that are forge the pathways for creating value. In the essay, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energies” [Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2010], Catherine Chaput describes the relationship between rhetoric and economics.

[R]hetoric: its persuasive power can be seen as deriving from the repetition of values added and exchanged through disparate communicative acts. Indeed, I maintain that the economic and rhetorical circulatory processes work in tandem to sustain the vitality of late capitalism in much the same way that the muscular and skeletal systems work together to animate human motion (14).

Rhetoric’s power resides in its ability to produce value which “derives from its circulation of affect, a material energy exchanged within and among the many instances of a sign’s lifespan” (15). Rhetoric as communicative labor exposes the commons between us that constitute the immanence of lived democracy. There is no need to seek validation for rhetorical agency, it exists everywhere in the power to affect and be affected. The role of ‘orator communist’ is to manipulate power relations, block, redirect, stabilize or utilize them in order to seek a new democratic horizon. Recognition of our shared existence on an affective level lets us move beyond the reductive opposition between reason-emotion.

Chaput argues for a shift in rhetorical scholarship from Bitzer’s situated rhetoric to a model of a rhetorical circulation. She argues that the situated model of rhetoric maintains an affective force through its canonization within rhetoric studies that has made people think of rhetorical agents and audiences as discrete.

I believe that the premise of a rhetorical situation to which language responds, although an extremely valuable disciplinary tool, circulates an affectivity that makes rhetoricians less open to the full range of human interconnectivity primarily because it posits effective communication as a bounded practice. The rhetorical situation, that is, makes rhetoricians comfortable within the disciplinary status quo of rhetorical production understood as transpiring within discrete sociohistorical, political, and cultural situations (18).

Because of her historical analysis of the shifts in production in Neoliberal capitalism, rhetorical models must likewise be flexible and able to account for the multiple exigencies that saturate lived experience. Chaput argues that the theory of situatedness has left too many parts of neoliberal capitalism uninterrogated because the cultural forces that sustain the productive apparatuses of capital do not exist in static, fixed locations but always in movement. “[T]he affective energies maintaining contemporary life do not adhere to the boundedness of rhetorical situations; rather, they move across gaps from situation to situation” (19). The shifts in commodity production in Neoliberal capitalism are increasingly defined by fluctuations in immaterial labor. While capital is able to harness and exploit many of these forces by investing itself in a plurality of networked relations, this increasingly forces people into connective, cooperative working environments. The increased force of affective energies within economies is not something that is socially signified, it exists beyond class determinations. In this way the commonwealth is felt and lived in our social interactions universally.

This rhetorical model is based on a total vision of the way that power operates. Biopolitical production is increasingly unable to capture the creative activities of individuals engaged in immaterial production. This characterization points to a larger overall tendency of life to exceed exploitation that authors like Hardt & Negri and Greene see as central to caesura dividing modernity from post-modernity. The forces of production have shifted such that the society of control is not characterized in a vertical, hierarchical relationship between the bourgeoisie and the factory line worker. Today it is the schoolteacher nestled in the suburban district, the manager, the janitor and the nurse. Sociality is increasingly dispersed within network power relations rather than existing in a distinct center. These changes in the division of labor require us to abandon rhetorical models that maintain a strict distinction between the social and the political. And instead opt for rhetorical models that open cultural theory to the circulation that bleeds through the stratified layers that divide the social.

Towards a Thinking-Feeling Cultural Theory

Jenny Edbauer defines affect as “the experience of having the ground pulled out from under our feet” (11). This reminds me of the old Tom and Jerry or Wiley Coyote cartoons in which a character runs off the cliff but does not fall until they realize that they are no longer standing on solid ground. There is a split second in which the character still attempts to run and move before they realize they have been slighted. There is a break in the narrative of the chase. There is a moment in which a sense of shock is registered and visibly felt before the character falls.

Edbauer offers several other illuminating ways to theorize affect: “as the sensation of the periphery” (12), “a feeling of excess and exposure” (13), and “the experience of relationality” (13). The mixture of characterizations (sensation, feeling, experience) demonstrates the ways that affect is an irreducible force. It is a challenge to commonsense modes of understanding subjectivity. It shows us that “we are not a/lone(ly), but that we exist in relations beyond what we may recognize or even wish” (11) and that we “already exist in zones of indetermination” (16). Conceiving of the self as existing always already in relation transforms the grounds upon which cultural theory can analyze why subjects develop attachments within the realm of ideology or qualification.

Edbauer also shows the ways in which affect is an impersonal and social force. (14) Since affect is something that precedes indexical qualification or cognitive interpretation “The visceral registering of excess is not necessarily a positive or negative phenomenon” (20). For these reasons Edbauer offers an alternative interpretation to understand why Bush’s fumbling speeches actually move people. She writes, “Before we can like, love, or loathe Bush—before the space of critique is even opened to us—we encounter his potential for affect(ation)” (16). We are “sensually involved” (16) in our experience of the Presidential event in such a way that we cannot stay removed.

Bush is an exemplary case for Edbauder because the so-called Bushisms are perfect demonstrations of the ways in which cultural theory’s representational or ideological explanations alone are insufficient. While Bush’s speaking ability in many ways is opposite of Teflon Ron’s, there is a similar dynamic at work in both. Although, Massumi’s citing of Oliver Sacks’ work challenges certain conceptions of Reagan as the Great Communicator, there is still an obvious difference in the polished or professional quality of their mannerisms. Massumi sees Reagan’s jerky movements and erratic rhythms of speech not as deficiencies but supplementary communicative forces. The affective events that implicate the audience in Reagan’s speeches were the reason why he could be so many things to so many people.

In many respects I find Massumi’s explanation for why Reagan moved people much more satisfactory than Edbauer’s explanation for Bush. While she does a great job of descriptively translating Bush’s idiosyncrasies into the vocabulary of affect theory, I’m still left wondering about exactly what is the specific connection between Bush’s jolts and the audience’s experience. Reagan was a very popular figure among people while Bush was seen in a less than favorable light. I’m not sure that Bush even really moved many people in his speeches.

Edbauer writes that, “Bush hacks our experience of narrative so easily, and with such a degree of intensity, because we are already in a kind of relationality with this executive body” (12). What sort of relationality are we already in with Bush? After listening to speeches from Bush during multiple campaigns and speech conferences are the interruptions really that interrupting? In other words, after Bushisms become a predictable part of his narrative do the “incorrect statements, tautologies, malapropisms, mispronunciations, and bewilderings remarks” (6) really “stage a jolt, causing intensity to build around them” (6)? Or are audiences so used to them that they glide over the surface of the skin relatively unnoticed? I think that Edbauer would say that the question is not whether they are cognitively registered but what these sticky associations do in experience of the Executive body. Is it just the fact that there are jolts and interruptions that “exposes the “productivity” of affect as a relational capacity” (7)? It’s difficult for me to reconcile the idea of affect as impersonal yet always already social.

It is here that I would like to compare Edbauer’s account of affect with a reading of Kristeva’s work on affect. I’m not sure exactly if Edbauer would disagree with all of it, but in the very least I think it offers an additional way of theorizing the question. I think that Kristeva’s reading of Plato’s chora from the Timaeus very closely resembles a lot of writings surrounding affect studies. The chora is the third principle that mediates the between matter and ideas. It is understood as a sort of receptacle or maternal space. Cecilia Sjoholm in “Kristeva & the Political” (2005) writes,

The chora is the space outside of being because it engenders transformation, mobility, motility, novelty, not a psychic site but a site of investments. Although it may be a container of affects and memories, it is not immediately translatable as the body, but rather the quasi-transcendental condition that makes corporeal mediation possible. The chora is a term of mediation irreducible to the terms of negativity and signification, not governed by law, but by a kind of organization. (19)

Much of this description of the chora is similar to the ways that Edbauer and Massumi describe the necessary condition of potentiality that allows affects to emerge, transfer, and transform. The above description attempts to distinguish the chora from theories of affect that conceive of affect in a reductionist manner as directly translatable to bodily experience.  I think that the ways that Edbauer describes the process of thinking-feeling demonstrates that Sjoholm’s distinction is not applicable to her account. Another one of Sjoholm’s definitions of the chora is strikingly similar to descriptions of affect, “that which cannot be named but shown in the form of rhythm, form, excess” (19). The chora is the space of generativity and poesis, the irreducible zone of indiscernability in which “the alterity of the other will make itself known through the excesses of signification known as the semiotic” (19).

Sara Ahmed’s essay “The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation” in the collection “revolt, affect, collectivity: the unstable boundaries of kristeva’s polis” also offers an interesting account of affect to dovetail with Edbauer’s. I think her account can help explain some of the reasons why Bush moves people, but perhaps at the expense of giving up too much ground to explanations that exist within the realm of meaning. Ahmed writes,

The transformation of this or that other into a border object is over-determined. It is not simply any body that becomes the border; particular histories are reopened in each encounter, such that some bodies are already read as more hateful and disgusting than other bodies. Histories are bound up with attachments precisely insofar as it is a question of what sticks, of what connections are lived as the most intense or intimate, as being closer to the skin. Such an encounter moves us both sideways and forwards and backwards (the histories that are already in place that allow these associations and not others stick, and that allow them to surface in memory and writing) (106).

I find it hard to account for the reasons why Bush move’s people without bringing in the question of memories and histories in relation to the Executive body. It seems that Edbauer is so concerned with theorizing affect as purified from the realm of meaning that it comes at the expense of analyzing contextual factors influencing people’s experience of Bush. The sticky associations surrounding the speaker such can act as blockages or heightened sensitivities to the affective forces of a speech in ways that lead to dramatically different experiences on the part of the audience. While I agree with the importance in situating affect as preexisting the grid of ideological et. al. forces, I think it is likewise impossible to leave these factors out. I also do not mean to do an injustice to Edbauer’s theory in my reading of it and simply criticizing it for leaving something out. I think that this is a question she is conscious of when she writes, “this is not to say that the sensual experience of affect marks a return to a primal scene of origination” (16). Nonetheless, perhaps this is simply begging the entire question of affect studies that continues to haunt me. Which is how can a theory of affect toe the threshold between talking about something which exceeds qualification yet productively analyze its force without qualifying it. The aporia strikes back.