Joshua Gunn

Zombie trouble : A propaedeutic on ideological subjectification and the unconscious

In order to help frame a current theoretical impasse, in this essay we forward the figure of the zombie in Western cinema as an allegory for the reception of the concept of ideology by communication scholars. After noting parallels between (a) an early academic caricature of ideology and the laboring zombie, and (b) the subject of ideological interpellation and the ravenous, consuming zombie of more recent cinema, we suggest that rhetorical scholars have yet to move beyond an obsession with the laboring zombie. To escape the connotation of a totalizing determinism that haunts ideology critique, we urge an acceptance of the category of the unconscious and a focus on ideology as a force of subjectification.

Refitting fantasy: psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and talking to the dead

This essay works toward an integration of psychoanalysis and rhetorical theory in response to the poststructural critique of mediation. I argue that the concept of communication, usually understood as the mediation or reconciliation of Self and Other, is based on what Lacan termed the “fundamental fantasy.” Distinct from the conscious fantasies usually analyzed by rhetorical critics, the fundamental fantasy is an underlying psychical structure that channels desire, usually a subjects desire for the Others desire. I argue that conscious fantasies yield a sense of agency, but only as iterations of this more fundamental fantasy thriving in the unconscious. To illustrate this psychoanalytic understanding of fantasy and subjectivity, I examine the rhetoric of John Edward, a popular television psychic and medium who persuades people that he can talk to the dead.

Speech Is Dead; Long Live Speech

There is something about speech that defies theory. After all, the Greek theoria bespeaks ‘‘a viewing of,’’ and perhaps this meaning explains the longstanding tendency to transcribe speech when we study it. Even when rhetorical scholars attempt to detail the affective dimensions of the human voice in terms of inflection, tone, pitch, volume, and so on, we are still condemned to use the ‘‘poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective.’’ Obviously, in moving from one mode of communication to another*from the musical to the linguistic or logico-mathematical*something gets lost in translation. With reference to current departmental nameplates, a case can be made that this lost something is speech itself: in the move away from speech communication toward departments of communication and communication studies, scholars and teachers have literally*perhaps inevitably* envisaged speech to death. As each of the books reviewed below makes plain, however, the titular death of ‘‘speech’’ suggests only a displacement of scholarly attention in word, for if we listen more closely to conversations about communication technologies, we discover that

For the Love of Rhetoric, with Continual Reference to Kenny and Dolly.

Few contemporary scholars have explicitly discussed the relationship between love and rhetoric. This essay draws on the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that rhetoricians have been reluctant to theorize love for two reasons: first, it is already implied in the widely accepted concept of identification; and second, any explicit discussion of love tempts kitsch. Once we understand love and kitsch as homologous constructs, it is argued, we are better able to engage rhetoric more directly as a form of love or, alternately, as a form of deceit.

Hystericizing Huey: Emotional Appeals, Desire, and the Psychodynamics of Demagoguery

Drawing on the theories of Jacques Lacan, this essay advances a psychoanalytic theory of demagoguery and charisma. I argue that demagogic rhetoric represents the dialectical interplay of the psychical structures of obsessional neurosis and hysteria, which is animated by desire. This theory is illustrated with an analysis of the discourse of and about one of the most famous US demagogues of the twentieth century, Huey Pierce Long.

On dead subjects: a rejoinder to Lundberg on (a) psychoanalytic rhetoric

Owing to a longstanding commitment to the autonomous, self-transparent subject, many roads have not been taken in rhetorical studies. Our present conversation about Lacanian psychoanalysis represents one of those roads, which is the most radical route stemming from the little traveled thoroughfare of the “rhetoric of the interior.” Insofar as its central category is the dynamic unconscious, psychoanalysis in general represents a theory of an inside or interiority that has largely been ignored, and sometimes attacked, in favor or defense of surfaces and exteriorities (e.g., fantasy themes and rhetorical visions, rational argument in ideal speech situations, and so on). Despite the pioneering work on Jung and mythic criticism by Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, despite articulate calls for psychoanalytic research by Barbara Biesecker, Michael J. Hyde, and Loyd S. Pettegrew, and despite the remarkable, interdisciplinary work of Henry Krips, among NCA-style rhetorical studies scholars, psychoanalysis has been the place of dead roads, indeed, the place of dead subjects. Christian Lundberg’s welcome and insightful critique of “Refitting Fantasy” ought to be read as a road sign of sorts, indicating not only an exciting route for research, but also the number of places it might go. In general, Lundberg argues that a critical perspective that begins in the imaginary overlooks the master’s focus on the Symbolic order, thereby missing the true locus of rhetoric in Lacan’s work (principally, “tropology”). Further, Lundberg argues that a critical attention to fantasies is limited to discrete texts and intersubjective encounters, thereby avoiding an opportunity to do true Lacanian rhetorical criticism. The consequence of an approach focused on the criticism of (pre-)conscious and unconscious fantasies, he implies, is twofold. First, it promotes a perspective akin to the project of “ego-psychology” and, thus, relies on the “naive psychologism of solely intersubjectively mediated accounts of subject formation,” which bars scholars from the pursuit of a deeper, more

On the apocalyptic columbine

In this essay we argue that mass media coverage of crises has begun to adopt an emerging social form or subgenre of theological discourse that we term the “apocalyptic sublime.” The apocalyptic sublime is characterized by the forwarding of an immanent temporality without promise of relief and by the promotion of an unstable subjectivity (in this case, a disoriented spectator) that is fruitfully described as an experience of sublimity. Our exemplar is the coverage of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which has yet to fall from public view. The essay proceeds by first describing the apocalyptic sublime in relationship to technologies of representation and the logics of perception that they create. Then, both broadcast and online representations of the massacre are analyzed. We conclude by arguing that mass media versions of the apocalyptic sublime are ideally suited to the logics of late or “millennial” capitalism.

Coming Home to Roost: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the (Re)Signing of (Post) Racial Rhetoric

In the spirit of apologia, this essay illustrates how the rhetoric of Reverend Jeremiah Wright can be better understood when set in relation to the black vernacular tradition of Signification or signifyin(g), the Racial Contract, and Whiteness. A sustained contextualization of Wright’s “controversial statements” reveals a complex performative rhetoric that is highly dependent on elements of delivery, especially tone. We argue that reporters in the mainstream media as well as Barack Obama deliberately maligned the performative dimension of Wright’s rhetoric, thereby misrepresenting it in the service of generating controversy and political expediency, respectively.

Gimme Some Tongue (On Recovering Speech)

It is sometimes said that Herbert A. Wichelns’ 1925 essay, ‘‘The Literary Criticism of Oratory,’’ helped to advance an important rationale for the discipline of speech communication. In that essay Wichelns distinguishes the criticism of oratory from literary criticism, but what is sometimes forgotten is the reasoning behind such a distinction: although Wichelns admits that oratory ‘‘is no longer the chief means of communicating ideas to the masses,’’ there is nevertheless ‘‘no likelihood that face to face persuasion will cease to be a principal mode of exerting influence.’’ The ‘‘hereand-now personal presence’’ of orality, to borrow Walter Ong’s phrase, is featured throughout the essay as the unique purchase of the new discipline. A closely related and widely read touchstone text is Carroll C. Arnold’s ‘‘Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,’’ which extends parts of Wichelns’ argument but updates and abandons others. Although Arnold opposes treating oratory as literature, like Wichelns he grounds the study of speech in the intimacy and contingency of interpersonal encounter. Arnold’s primary disagreement with Wichelns seems to be that even nonsensical speech can be moving because ‘‘orality . . . is itself meaningful.’’ Perhaps what is most interesting about Arnold’s argument is the apocalyptic tone in which he characterizes the persuasive dimensions of the interpersonal speech situation by repeatedly stressing that the spoken word always entails ‘‘risk’’ and ‘‘danger.’’ The instability of interpersonal encounter in speaking situations is, of course, obvious to almost every student in a public speaking classroom. But what is the cause of speaking anxiety, and what is the source of speech’s danger? Arnold answers somewhat obliquely: the terms ‘‘ ‘speaking,’ ‘spoke’ or’speech’ can, and often do, function for us as terms stipulating something more subtle than an acoustic transmission.’’ This subtle ‘‘something more’’ of speech, this voice beyond word that is linked but not reducible to ‘‘here-and-now personal presence,’’ danger, contingency, and risk, is what we might term the ‘‘something more in speech than speech.’’ I submit that our field embraced speech as a substance term for over fifty years because of this something more.

On a violence unseen: The womanly object and sacrificed man

The consideration of the relation between rhetoric and violence calls for attention to the object of woman. At first blush, we do not mean biological women, although female bodies do matter and have been made to suffer as objects of violence because of what they are imagined to signify. For the moment we mean the object-as-woman, or more crudely, the womanly object, which we argue is part of a pervasive rhetorical mechanism of violence in our shared (popular) culture. We begin with a startling, introductory example that demonstrates a theoretical quandary rather quickly. In the summer of 2010, the Internet celebrity gossip magazine Radar Online publicized a series of telephone and answering machine recordings made by Russian pianist Oksana Grigorieva. The recordings feature a number of astonishingly angry, hateful rants by Hollywood actor, director, and producer Mel Gibson about the dissolution of their romantic relationship and an emerging dispute over the custody of their daughter Lucia. Gibson repeatedly insults Grigorieva as a ‘‘whore’’ and ‘‘cunt,’’ telling her in a panting rage that she looks ‘‘like a fucking pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n gers, it will be your fault.’’ At one point he threatens, ‘‘I am going to come and burn the fucking house down . . . but you will blow me first.’’ Gibson has become infamous for his enraged, hateful outbursts against women, Jews, the elderly, people of color, and the LGBTQ community (basically, anyone cast as Other to his white maleness), and many commentators and cultural critics have underscored the affinities between the verbal violence of Gibson’s personal life and his obsessive celluloid fantasies, most notably his numerous anti-Semitic remarks