A Vow to be Faithfully
Ironic:
Materialism and
the
Magical Rhetoric of Feet
ABSTRACT: This essay mediates
the two most prominent kinds of materialism in rhetorical studies
with the concept of irony. Although a materialism of instrumentality,
represented in the work of Dana Cloud, and a materialism of immanence,
represented in the work of Ronald Walter Greene, are fundamentally
incompatible, I suggest that both can be understood as helpful
and productive modes of criticism if held in ironic tension with
one another. Ultimately, I argue for the necessity of both materialisms.
KEYWORDS: Materialism, Marxism,
Cloud, Greene, Irony, Mediation
The mystification which
dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from
being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive
and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It
must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within
the mystical shell.
---Karl Marx (1990, p. 103)
The story is told of an old
Italian woman who arranged a hotel room in such a way that she
could materialize spirits of the dead, even though her hands
and feet were secured by three scrupulous observers from the
Society for Psychical Research (Feilding,
Bradley & Carrington,
1909). On eleven different 
occasions in 1908, Eusapia Palladino
sat at one end of the table and in front of a so-called "séance
cabinet," which consisted of a pair of dark-colored, cashmere
curtains hung across a corner of the darkened room. Although
the British investigators were absolutely certain that there
were no accomplices inside the room, during the séances
a number of supernatural events occurred, from the movements
of objects within the cabinet (such as a tambourine or guitar
placed behind the curtain for this purpose) to the complete levitation
of the séance table. Actually, it has been argued that
Palladino was extremely skilled in the ways of misdirection and
limb-substitution: all spiritualist phenomena were produced by
Palladino's extremely dexterous and "sapient foot"
(Polidoro
& Rinaldi, 1998).
One can imagine a critical counterpart to this investigation.
The foot called "materialism" is to win all the time.
It can easily be a match for any critic if it enlists the services
historical materialism, which today, as we all know, is
wizened and has to keep out of sight.[1]
Or so Dana
Cloud (2001) would
have us believe, arguing that the so-called "poststructural"
materialism favored by some contemporary rhetorical theorists
is best characterized as either "linguistic materialism"
or abstract "matterism." These are fighting words,
and they bespeak a current debate among rhetorical scholars about
what materialism is and should be. Cloud argues that some rhetorical
scholars who claim to do materialist work have abandoned fundamental
Marxist principles and, hence, are not true materialists.
For example, she suggests that scholars like Ronald Walter Greene
have replaced class antagonism and the ontological primacy of concrete
praxis, a fundamental Marxist concept that can be defined as human productive
activity, with an attention to the "stuff"
of bodies and inanimate objects becoming in discourse.
Because of these substitutions, she claims that the ideological
critique of materialist scholars has become too idealist, able
to claim materialism only to the extent it misapprehends or simply
ignores the true historical materialist tradition of Marx and
Engels. Resigned to an "affirmative masquerade" for
the sake of "progressive credibility," Cloud charges
that self-identified materialist scholars are left settling for
"playing with our identities in a mood of irony, excess,
and profound skepticism" (2001, para. 26). Theirs is not
an interest in the labor of feet, but the feats of a kind of
idealist, rhetorical magic, the cause of which is "immanent
in its effects" (see Althusser
& Balibar, 1977,
p. 189).
Such a characterization reduces materialism to a narrow understanding
of critical practice, obviating the necessity of critical dialectics
as the theoretical mediation of, for example, text and class
struggle. In other words, such a characterization is antidialectical
because the production of critical thought is forced to take
a backseat to the production of class warfare. In this essay
I argue against such one-sided (ultimately monolithic) materialism
by suggesting that there is a way in which more orthodox Marxian
and so-called "poststructural" materialists can converse
with one another, particularly in the speakeasy of the ironic,
but only insofar as both are drunk with the collaborative logic
of mediation. Indeed, I characterize the rhetoric's competing
materialisms as a challenge of critical mediation, as a contest
between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a cartography of faith
(Ricoeur, 1970, pp. 28-36), for which there
is no direct rapprochement.
To this end the essay proceeds
in five sections. First, I detail the debate over materialism
among rhetorical scholars by recounting Cloud's critique of the
materialist position of Ronald Walter Greene. Although Cloud
and Greene's positions are not representative of the discipline
as a whole, detailing the ways in which their positions differ
helps to explain the debate to the unfamiliar. Having detailed
the debate as a dialectic of sorts, I then explain the concept
of "mediation," which is central to dialectical thinking.
Next, I describe how a trope very familiar to rhetoricians, irony,
teaches us how to engage in the project of mediation. Finally,
after I explain why the possibility of a socialist revolution
is dead, I conclude by stressing the mutually constitutive (ironic)
necessity of competing materialisms, as well as the need for
faith in magical visions, in ghosts of the coming revolution.
Dancing with Professor
D.
In the essay "The Affirmative
Masquerade" published
in this journal, Cloud (2001) retraces the so-called "ideological
turn" in rhetorical studies in order to show how the disciplinary
adoption of ideology critique downplayed the materialist aspects,
in particular the "economic determination of human action,"
a key premise of orthodox Marxism (para. 4). Of central concern
in this renarration is the work of Michel Foucault, which Cloud
argues is an outgrowth of an Althusserian structuralism that
provides for the "relative autonomy" of superstructural
elements from the economic substratum. Cloud argues that Althusserian
(or "post-Marxist") theory was ultimately responsible
for an "idealist shift" in materialist thought away
from the empirically real toward ideology and discourse as a
field of power (paras. 4-14).[2] Because Foucault, like Althusser,
completely evacuates the subject of autonomy, materialist critique
is rent from real people in real struggle and, consequently,
from an analysis of the successes and failures of a rhetorical
agent in a given "rhetorical situation." Cloud's general
renarration is ultimately designed to lead us to her critique
of the work of Ronald
Walter Greene (1998;
2002, 2003a, 2003b), a scholar whom Cloud argues has "recommended
that criticism eschew teleological concerns entirely" (para.
14).
Although Greene's (1998) conception of materialism
is complex, in broad strokes one could characterize it as an
attempt to posit a Foucauldian and Deleuzian notion of immanence
in place of critical modes premised on surface/depth (viz., interpretive)
logics. Gone is the logic of representation, which Greene suggests
requires critics to understand critical objects as deceptions
that must be exposed to liberate a more hidden, primordial substance
or truth. In its place is a logic of articulation (how different
elements of reality at multiple levels of abstraction are connected
to one another, by either force or chance), which enables the
critic to map the governance of populations (which could be a
given class) by a "governing apparatus." Gone is the
traditional communication model, which seeks a "reconciliation
of self and other" through instrumental rhetorics. In its
place is a monistic, Spinozian web of power comprised of circulating
"bodies, texts, and forms of cultural literacy" within
which we are constituted as subjects (indeed, there is no
outside). Although the economic becomes one of many modes
of governance, and although class becomes subsumed by the more
flexible category of "population," such an understanding
of criticism remains material because discursive formations and
governing apparatuses are real; the evidence is in the effects.[3]
Cloud's critique of Greene's conception resembles the criticisms
often made of Foucault: insofar as subjects are constituted in
discourse, there can be no account of agential instrumentality,
nor can any critical standard emerge with which to adjudicate
competing truths, however contingent we may deem them to be (the
problem of rhetorical agency after the invasion of poststructuralism
has been obsessively written about; see Biesecker, 1992; McKerrow, 1993). The result, Cloud points
out, is a dehabilitating, defeatist brand of relativism. Once
one embraces a hermeneutic (or rather, a cartography) of faith,
that there is no determining logic behind materialism,
one must abandon precisely that element of historical materialism
that Burke held was the central, persuasive source of class awakening:
the "scientific" inevitability of the coming crisis
and consequent revolution (Burke, 1969b, p. 101). Greene's urging
us to abandon a hermeneutic of suspicion means that there is
"no truth underlying discourse," that all we are left
with is the machine of productive discursive formations. Because
"discourses manufacture what is 'in the true,'" Cloud
argues Greene's materialism "does a disservice to people
who struggle against exploitation and oppression." In the
end, Cloud urges, "we need to call a lie a lie," lest
critical praxis abandon the political and become "pessimistic."
Cloud is not, however, enlisting the services of Platonism by
insisting on the ontological fact of the lie, that people can
and do deceive. Her recourse is to Marx in a Nietzschean moment:
Humans "must prove truth, that is, the reality and power,
the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice" (Marx, 1978b, p. 144). Truth is not an
outcome of power/knowledge, but a product of struggle born of
naked will-to-power that begins in "practical, human-sensuous
activity"--that begins in human praxis (Marx, 1978b, p. 144). She clarifies with the example of
Nixon's lying to the public in his "Vietnamization"
speech. Because "Greene's approach assumes that what is
in the text is 'in the true,'" argues Cloud, "there is no relevant extra-textual evidence
against which textual truths can be weighed and evaluated."
It does not follow that, therefore, Nixon did not lie, but rather,
that Nixon's presentation of the "truth" was but one
of many other possible presentations. This troubles Cloud. "We
need extra-discursive reality checks," she argues, or criticism
goes nowhere (2001, para. 19). We need to be able to call Nixon
a liar.
Notwithstanding the problems of understanding just what a materialist
praxis is (there is, again, no consensus among scholars), what
Cloud offers is not so much a defense of the moral imperative
of communication--the reconciliation of self and other through
rhetoric, the communing of souls--but the possibility and necessity
of a "this-sidedness" critical activism premised on
the alienation of selves from themselves, an activism of pissed-off-ness
based on a lived experience of alienation. As Marx notes, "the dispute over the reality or non-reality
of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic
question" (1978b, p. 144). Cloud bids us to return to
this Marxian dictum, that human productive activity is the ultimate
basis of any theoretical and critical project, that action should
precede theory. In this light, Cloud's praxis becomes a criterion
of truth in the same sense popularized by Engels: "before
there was argumentation, there was action . . . . The proof of
the pudding is in the eating" (Petrovic, 1998, p. 440).
On Mediation as the Central Problematic of Rhetorical Materialism
What is ultimately
at stake in this debate is the practice of rhetorical criticism
itself. Cloud's pointing up the centrality of lying is particularly
apropos because the practice of rhetorical criticism is unavoidably
suspicious. As a fundamentally explanatory and interpretive practice,
rhetorical criticism is necessarily premised on the notion of
rhetoric as deception or misdirection, and in this sense
Plato was, of course, right. As C.
Jan Swearingen (1991)
has noted,
Dissimulation and deceit, alluring fiction, pretty lies, cunning
duplicity, strategic understatement . . . : these avatars embody
traits and themes our Western literate-textual culture has traditionally
viewed as being imparted by rhetoric, inherent to literature,
pervasive in public discourse, and intrinsic to language itself.
(p. x)
The last line here is a nod
toward Nietzsche's assertion that language itself is a lie "in
the nonmoral sense," which is widely assumed among rhetorical
scholars, or at least in the fairly innocuous notion that representation
has its limits (Nietzsche, 1982). Even in the absence of such
a belief, the existence of the critic as such demands a logic
of representation; the critic exists to articulate the "this-sidedness"
of the critical object better than the object itself (Godzich, 1983).
Considered in this light, Cloud's critique of Greene's materialism
returns us to an important question. The question is not whether critics
should be "political activists," as one may be misled to
pose in a moment of Adamite temptation (Kuypers, 2000). The question is an older one, best
and first posed by Barnett
Baskerville (1977): "must
we all be rhetorical critics?" (my emphasis). Greene's
answer, which curiously remains overlooked, is a resounding "no."
Although the question is not addressed directly, I'm not so sure Cloud
would disagree. Insofar as rhetorical criticism is framed as a demystifying
practice, however, Cloud certainly believes that the rhetorical has an important role
in any critical materialism: "critical scholars," she argues,
"bear the obligation to explain the origins and causes of exploitation
and oppression in order to better inform the fight against them"
(2001, para. 27). For Cloud, it seems that rhetoric is one of the
most conspicuous means by which oppression is maintained and potentially
overcome.
Although the term is virtually absent in her most explicit discussions
of materialism, Cloud (1994; 2001) calls for a critical/rhetorical
practice of mediation. Of course, James Aune noted over twelve years ago that mediation is precisely the
"rhetorical problem" of Marxism: "Marx did not explain
the psychological and rhetorical prerequisites for revolution,"
nor did he prescribe a mode of criticism that helps to "fill
the gap between what we might call structure and struggle"
(1990/1999, p. 542), or as Jameson (1981) describes it, a brand of criticism that
consists of the unmasking of relations between a formal analysis and
its socio-cultural context. Insofar as one wishes to retain "rhetoric"
as titular concept in any mode of criticism, the fundamental and primary
problem of criticism and interpretation is indeed that of mediation--of
exposing the relations between different levels of material
reality through or with the critical object.
Abstracting this problematic to the level of interpretation as such,
the critical difficulty of mediation is not unfamiliar to textual
critics: the problem can be simplistically reduced in formalist terms
to the text/context problematic that so interests scholars of political
rhetoric (e.g., Leff & Kauffeld, 1989). To avoid being captured by the illusionary
unity of a given text, falling prey to what Robert
L. Scott (2000) characterizes
as the "nihilism and anarchy" that are "just around
too many corners" in worshipful attention (e.g., textual
fetishization; see Lucas
& Medhurst, 1999),
however, there must be the ground of a kind of essence, a constitutive
outside--that is, a context--with which to mediate lest one fall prey
to the endless spiral of meaning that so aptly characterizes the project
of deconstructionism. In other words, the logic of interpretation
is inherently a logic of interiors and exteriors, of internals and
externals that posits an outside for a sense of purpose and to stabilize
meaning, however momentary and contingent. The outside posited by
more orthodox materialist critics like Aune and Cloud is characteristically
economic, and the task of critical mediation is either that of demystifying
rhetorics that obscure the economic determination of human action
(in the sense of establishing limits) or showing how particular rhetorics--especially
those of the subclasses--are ultimately inspired by the kinds of alienation
caused by late capitalism (for scholars of immanence, there is, of
course, no outside to begin with; or rather, everything is outside).
Does critical mediation need to posit, however, the determination
of the economic base as the ultimate outside? Walter Benjamin argued against the affirmative answer
over sixty years ago, suggesting that the quest for homologies
or overly formalistic parallels among multiple levels of social
reality in fact obscured the instrumental possibilities of collective
fantasy (utopics) with a plodding determinism, thus offering
either resignation or blind eschatology as the only possible
choices for those for whom the revelations were intended (for
Benjamin, one does not motivate activism by arguing for a better
world for one's grandchildren, but by reminding people of their
past enslavement; 1968, p. 260; also see Gunn, 2001). Benjamin undoubtedly committed himself to
navigating the empirical reality of real people in concrete struggle;
but he also believed that agency was articulated by the ideological
world of social forms, which one can crudely reduce for the purposes
of brevity to the possibility of agency of the subject on the
one hand, and the ideological articulation of the subject on
the other.[4] Benjamin navigated this familiar
pickle by denying any transparent homologies between the superstructure
and the base. In The Arcades Project, one finds that Benjamin explicitly denied the homology as
a conceptual pursuit:
It seems, at first sight,
that Marx wanted to establish here only a causal relation between
the superstructure and infrastructure. But already the observation
that ideologies of the superstructure reflect conditions falsely
and invidiously goes beyond this. The question, in effect, is
the following: if the infrastructure in a certain way (in the
materials of thought and experience) determines the superstructure,
but if such determination is not reducible to simple reflection,
how is it then--entirely apart from any question about the originating
cause--to be characterized? As its expression. The superstructure
is the expression of the infrastructure. The economic conditions
under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure-precisely
as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection
but its expression in the content of dreams, which, from a causal
point of view, it may be said to "condition." (1999a,
p. 392)
The utility and consequences
of replacing reflection with expression are well known. Culture
expresses or represents the arrangement of the base, and determines
it in the sense of establishing limits. It is here, at the
question of homology, that rhetoricians have the most potential
for contribution: If mediation is simultaneously a project of
articulation and demystification, and if the relationship between
a text and its social ground is necessarily deceptive in
character, then the critical mechanism that articulates the two
cannot be singularly symbolic, a translation of this for that,
a facile assertion that this or that rhetorical act is, in the
end, in response or in reaction to exploitation. Rather, critical
mediation must be dialectical and in this sense doubtful of
its own articulations, concerned especially with the possibility
that these articulations can harden or ossify into ineffectual,
one-sided dogmas that obscure the real experience of real people
in struggle. In other words, Benjamin urges us not to be too
sure of our mediations.
The upshot of this move can be expressed in terms of a critical
vision: this self-doubting or reflexive dialectical materialism
must abandon the almighty metaphor in favor of the duplicity
of irony. Mediation is no longer the task of replacing this for
that, or articulating this textual remnant to that economic stimulus,
of ferreting out the lie in relation to a universal. That is
Progress (or in Burkespeak, a rotten perfection). Rather,
critical mediation becomes a dialectic of fetching the truth
(or the positivity) from the lie (the negation), placing irony
as the privileged ontological form of critical praxis. In this
sense, irony reflects a dialectic with no sublative or no transcendent
moment.
Towards the Ironization
of Form
The irony articulating
our competing materialisms is secured with a common negation of what
Gaonkar
has termed "the arrival
of the text" (1989). Cloud argues against the "textual politics" underlying
the "discursive turn," suggesting that absent a reference
to the reality of exploitation in the Real, there can be no progressive
political program. Similarly, in his championing the productivity
of power, Greene argues against textualism, which is understood as
a continual unmasking of rhetorics of domination. On the one hand
the floating city of textualism lacks grounding in blood, muscles,
and brains; on the other, textualism produces predictable criticisms
and becomes caught in its own deconstructive devolutions.[6] Similar materialist battles have been waging in other disciplines
for some time--notably cultural studies--and one only need consult
the most recent work of Lawrence Grossberg for the broad strokes.
Insofar as one resists the Romantic exodus from text and finds
some value in retaining the notion as a commonly accessed reservoir
of meaning on multiple levels of abstraction (see Fornäs, 1999), and insofar as the category
of the Real is indispensable, then our task remains one of mediation,
of discerning the relations between rhetorics as representational
artifacts and non-representational "recalcitrance,"
to borrow a term from Burke. As Gaonkar has noted
The issue [the problem of mediation] cannot be resolved by a
mere methodological gesture . . . that acknowledges the existence
of non-discursive practices, but proceeds to unpack discursive
practices in relative isolation. The pressing task, for which
'textual studies' are ideally suited, is to offer an understanding
of 'contexts' (non-discursive formations) through a reading of
texts (discursive formations) while allowing the text to retain
its integrity as a field of action. (1989, p. 275)
Of course, Gaonkar's understanding
of text is much broader than that of more traditional rhetorical
critics, functioning much like a form (or discursive formation)
arbitrarily bounded by the critic in the act of criticism. Regardless
of how one conceptualizes the text, however, the traditional,
materialist way to mediate, so elegantly outlined by Fredric Jameson, is to dissolve the inside/outside
dichotomy by ferreting out contradictions in the empirical text
(deconstruction), which in turn allows for a series of sublative
thrusts into new "horizons" of critical thought (reconstruction),
which, ultimately, culminate in the identification of the "ideology
of form," which in turn contains the residue or ghosts of
cultural revolution (the most significant detritus being that
of late capitalism itself; 1981). Such a project, of course,
requires a constellation of texts and, in the end, book-length
projects.
Is there a way to condense "textualist" logic, however,
to a critical nubbin? With nods to Burke and Benjamin, I suggest
that irony is an apt but necessarily imperfect condensation.
As the master trope of dialectical criticism, a return
to the ironic has the added benefit of bringing more rhetorical
scholars into the project.
Irony is a figure of speech that demonstrates, with considerable
clarity, the logic of dialectic and the power of language to
undermine agency and intent, even when intentionally deployed.
The concept is rooted in the Greek eirõn, which
means "dissembler" or one who disguises and conceals.
Since Plato's attack on rhetoric as the art of flattery and deception,
there has been a longstanding association of rhetoric with irony
(Swearingen, 1991).
Defenders of the rhetorical tradition, however, have tended to
describe irony as one of a number of rhetorical devices that
can be used to good effect. Cicero, who discussed irony with the Latin
equivalent, dissimulare, or "to dissimulate,"
defines irony as "the humor of saying one thing and
signifying another." He notes that using irony is especially
pleasing if one manages it well, but it can also have disastrous
consequences (1986, bk. 2, sec. 252). In her exemplary study
of the trope, Linda
Hutcheon (1995) locates
the "unbearable slipperiness of irony" in the fact
that some audiences fail to recognize when a rhetor or author
intends to be ironic, and further, that the "pleasing effect"
lauded by Cicero is derived precisely from that risk-"irony's
edge." Using irony as a verbal strategy is only successful
if it is "stable," which Wayne Booth (1974) defines as an ability to be "reconstructed"
by readers or an audience in a way that does not invite them
to impute unintended meanings. In the most straightforward
sense, as an ironist, the challenge is to make sure one supplies
enough reconstructive cues to the desired audience such that
they will not be encouraged to fabricate a meaning that is not
intended. Given the risk, obviously there are also unstable and
unintended ironies, situations when someone attributes humor
or dissimulation when it is not intended, thereby undermining
the control of the ironist. Chaïm
Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) describe this "unbearable slipperiness"
as a formal paradox:
Irony always presupposes supplementary information on facts,
or norms. . . . Thus irony cannot be used if there is uncertainty
about the speaker's opinions. This gives irony a paradoxical
character: using it implies that argumentation is necessary;
but in order to be able to use it, a minimum agreement is required.
. . . Irony is all the more effective when it is directed to
a well-defined group. Only by having some idea of the beliefs
held within certain social environments can we guess whether
or not a given text is ironical. (p. 208)
Uncertainty or simply a lack
of knowledge about the rhetor or author will likely guarantee
the failure of ironic strategy.
One can begin to see how irony as a textual feature can become
folded into a materialist project when reading Kierkegaard's (1989) treatise on the trope, The
Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Kierkegaard
suggests that verbal irony contains an implicit hierarchical
arrangement that is intimate with the social order. He says that
ironic figure of speech has [a] property that characterizes all
irony, a certain superiority deriving from its not wanting to
be understood immediately, even though it wants to be understood,
with the result that this figure looks down, as it were, on plain
and simple talk that everyone can promptly understand; it travels
around, so to speak, in an exclusive incognito and looks down
pitying from this high position on ordinary, prosaic talk. (pp.
248-249)
At issue in the deployment
of irony is power, especially that which would maintain or create
social order. Just "as kings and princes speak French, the
higher circles . . . speak ironically so that lay people will
not be able to understand them . . ." (Kierkegaard, 1989, p. 249). Hutcheon refers to this classed dynamic as
the "politics of irony," the social, structuring work
of irony. This politics is particularly dangerous because, unlike
"metaphor or allegory, which demand similar supplementing
of meaning, irony has an evaluative edge and manages to provoke
emotional response in those who 'get it' and those who don't,
as well as in its targets and in what some people call its 'victims'"
(1995, p. 2). The psychic pleasure of "getting it"
is inversely proportional to displeasure of exclusion. For these
reasons, Kenneth
Burke (1969a) associates
irony with "drama" and observed that, from a retrospective,
historical gaze, irony can be used as a prophetic formula among
the "characters" in an given social order. "There
is a level of generalization at which predictions about 'inevitable'
developments in history are quite justified," says Burke.
We may state with confidence, for instance, that what arose in
time must fall in time (hence, that any given structure in society
must "inevitably" perish). We may make such prophecy
more precise, with the help of irony, in saying that the developments
that led to the rise will, by the further course of their development,
'inevitably' lead to the fall (true irony always, we hold, thus
involving an 'internal fatality,' a principle operating from
with, though its logic may also be grounded in the nature of
the extrinsic scene, whose properties contribute to the same
development). (1969a, pp. 516-517)
Irony derives its power from
its risks--potential misfires and unintended victims--and thus
entails a degree self-destructive potential. Coupled with the
highly emotional response individuals have toward irony, it makes
sense that the anxiety of individuals who do not "get it"
would be more noticeable in reactive texts than with other figures
of speech. Because a cartography of discourse is most productive
when it successfully locates points of conspicuousness, an analysis
of the reactions to verbal irony seems a likely place for traces
of Other-anxiety.
Given its "prophetic" element, it is not surprising
that for Burke another god-term for irony is dialectic.
The significance of the association of dialectic with irony cannot
be over emphasized. For Burke
(1969a) the relationship
between irony and dialectic is twofold. First, although communication
itself is a dialogic phenomenon, verbal irony is an exaggerated
dialogic trope in the sense that its discriminating function
not only excludes others, but it necessarily needs "the
fool," as Burke put it. Insofar as irony is used to establish
authority among an elite group who "get the joke,"
for example, ironic authority needs disbelievers and the misunderstanding
rabble.
Second, "only through an internal and external experiencing
of folly could we possess," argues Burke (1969a) "sufficient 'characters' for some measure
of development beyond folly"--viz., "getting it."
Hence, the association of dialectic with irony also refers to
the power of its symbolic thrust, the ability of irony to push
the reconstructing audience to other places, other sites of meaning,
other texts, particularly past experiences of not getting
it or being played the fool, all of which are other realities
or texts not in the here-and-now. We can term the symbolic thrust
of irony its dialectical invitation or quality.
In an important parallel sense, the intertextual character of
irony can be used to describe the dialectical element of textual
criticism, the Gadamerian "merging" of the pre-understanding
and contextual horizon of the interpreter and the contextual
horizons of discourse: in the interrogation of texts and "the
Other," one ends up interrogating the self, the present
contextual field of consciousness. "What goes forth as A,"
Burke (1969a) professes, "returns
as non-A" (p. 517). Characterizing "dialectical thought,"
Jameson (1974) argues similarly that "the
essential movement of all dialectical criticism . . . is to reconcile
the inner and the outer, the intrinsic and the extrinsic, the
existential and the historical," which allows "us to
feel our way with a single determinate form or moment of history
at the same time that we stand outside of it . . . . " (pp.
330-331). Thus the methodological problem of moving from a given
text into the intertextual order can be wed at the site of an
ironic knot; the relationship between the content of texts and
their collective meaning in discourse is formal. As Jameson (1974) puts it, "form is itself
but the working out of content in the realm of the superstructure"
(p. 329). Irony is not merely a trope, but a formal, social dynamic
of discrimination that has the power to move consciousness to
different levels of abstraction.
Insofar as textual irony is discriminatory, insofar as it is an essential
double in the realm of meaning, irony is the most conspicuous location
of contradiction--that place in any given text where social discrimination
might disclose precisely the residue of some underlying social structure
as well as the ways in which that structure is concealed. What is
most noticeable in the deployment of irony is precisely the development
of textual identities: these can be "classed," but not necessarily,
as race, gender, and other nodes of identity formation might also
delineate the "Other" of the text. More importantly, however,
is the irrecoverability of the determining structure in the temporality
of the text (a break with historicism), the irony of investigating
the past. The past, of course, only makes sense in relation to consciousness
of the present, our consciousness. As Benjamin (1968) put it, criticism in this sense stops
"telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead,
[the historical critic] grasps the constellation which his own era
has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception
of the present as the 'time of the now' . . . " (p. 263). In
the context of irony as the master trope of a rhetorical materialism
of mediation, another way of putting this is that as human beings
who happen to be critics, most of us have been "played the fool"
in "real life." In this way we are united with the excluded
Other of the text--those whom the text negates--in a kind civil pedagogy
of humiliation. This is the motor of materialist criticism, if not
criticism in general, this notion of the elusive oppressed Other.
The problem is that the Other changes over time; our attempts to essentialize
the Other as an oppressed class, for example, is an inescapable (but
necessary) tendency of abstraction when placed within the framework
of instrumentality, of struggle.
The Dispiriting
Floundering of Revolutionary Resurrections
[Fanaticism] was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange
to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world
also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and
nations from the dead--an instrument of resurrection.
--Eric Hoffer, from The True Believer (1989, p. 168)
During a group presentation in one of my courses recently, three
undergraduate students posed a very difficult question to the
class: "Why does Hegel think [that] as a society and the
state become more progressively civilized, the systematic completeness
of the understanding is gradually eroded and, in this respect,
language becomes poorer and less refined?" Whole dissertations,
if not lives, could be spent answering this very question, not
to mention the thorny problem of deciding just what is being
asked (as Hegel might insist, answering the question depends
on what one means by progress, civilized, systemic completeness,
understanding, refined, and language). Presumably, a general
response would be something like the following: Insofar as civilizations
become increasingly cognizant of absolute knowledge--an awareness
of the movement of World Spirit--the necessity of differentiation
(of negation) would cease in some super-duper sublation; history
would end in the achievement of universal freedom. One student's
stab at an answer, however, was more interesting: "Doesn't
this understanding have something to do with intelligence and
stupidity?" she asked rhetorically. She went on to make
the case that Hegel's understanding of self-knowledge was something
like intelligence, and that at the end of history "dumb
people" would become smart. "I mean," she continued,
"didn't Hegel say [that] he had absolute knowledge and [that]
it was the job of us dummies to figure it out?" Scholars
"young" or "left" and "old" or
"right" are, of course, divided on the issue.
What is particularly interesting about this student's response
to Hegel's frequently impenetrable prose is its resemblance to
Cloud's critique of "critical" and "materialist"
rhetorical theory: these newer materialisms are too "idealist,"
which is code for the inability of theoretical abstractions to
capture a sense of real people in real struggle. Rather than
helping individuals formulate political blocs, Cloud claims (voicing
Said) that these new materialisms have an "astonishing sense
of weightlessness," resulting in "a kind of floundering
about that is most dispiriting to witness" (Cloud, 2001, para. 14). To wit: governmental
apparatuses do not march in the street; rather, they function
as difficult rhetorical schemes that replicate class divisions
within the academy, largely on the basis of "getting it"
or "not getting it," at the expense of the uninvited
colleague and/or the oppressed and beguiled undergraduate.
This critique of idealism goes much deeper than the fetishism
of theory itself, however. It begins with Marx's critique of
the Hegelian dialectic as a closed-system of self-alienated ideation:
If we begin with Mind, then the subject of becoming "emerges
as a result . . . [and] real man and real nature become mere
predicates--symbols of this or that unreal man and of this unreal
nature" (Marx, 1988, p. 162). Such a model forecloses
the possibility of an objective human being that is not always
already self-alienated (Marx, 1988, p. 155), or at least, as my
student noted, insofar as an individual is incapable of mastering
Hegel's verbose and tortuous achievement of absolute knowledge.
Against the Hegelian negation of being with the no-thing internal
to it, Marx forwards a Feuerbachian substitution of real being
for the abstract. Besides, insists Marx, "a being which has no object outside of itself
is not an objective being" but a "nullity," and
with the evaporation of Spirit, God, and the rest of it, nullity
in this sense is absurd. For Marx, Hegel's dialectic was "standing
on its head"; returning it to feet entails a complete denial
of the split between the spiritual being and natural being in
consciousness, replacing it with praxis, the materiality of the
production of such a thought prior to the self-consciousness
of such a division. Just as the use-value of a commodity only
obtains such value after use (Marx, 1990, p. 126), so a self-consciousness of thinking
must necessarily be the product of material, human productivity.
Although physical matter in motion--a component but not the whole
of the Real--is in the last instance the basis of all materialisms,
as an orthodox Marxist Cloud's critique of competing perspectives
must be based on that interiority which is external to any given
economic system: concrete or useful labor, which, for Marx, is
the essence of human becoming (or at least insofar as labor is
alienated productivity, as he would later come to believe). For
Marx (1990) there is something like brute
labor, which results in "being," and there is useful
labor, which transforms "motion" into something
objectively real ("material"; p. 296). Hence human
productivity is essentially telic: it is the expenditure
of human productive power toward some material end. In
traditional Marxian terms, when this end is situated within the
modern economic mode of production, it becomes a commodity.
Although the premise that
history is the chronicle of class struggle seems far removed
from the transformation of concrete labor into the commodity,
both are, in the end, intimately related. In a capitalist mode
of production, the objectification or materialization of useful
labor into the commodity is the precondition for exploitation
because of the abstraction (variously "objectification"
or "transformation") or movement from quality to quantity--from
concrete labor to its homogenization as "labor-power"
measured in terms of "labor-time." The move allows
for a kind of slight of hand by the capitalist that helps to
generate surplus value. Although Marx's (1990) theory of value has been hotly
contested and continues to invite debate, it is this mismatch
between compensation and the expenditure of labor, enabled by
the material processes of abstraction (or "transformation"),
that simultaneously fuels the expansion of capitalism (globalization)
and widens the gap between the ruling class and the subclass.
In a contrapuntal fashion, the potential for revolutionary consciousness
increases as Capital continues to expand. Reduced and admittedly
simplified to its most naked predictive logic, the end of false
consciousness will be heralded by Capital's last crisis of overproduction,
that moment in which the capitalist can neither expand nor exploit
any further. In other worlds, the revolution of the free association
of producers is an outcome of Capital's ceasing to move, of not
being able to forestall or recover from crisis.
I believe this traditional Marxian narrative forms the basis of Cloud's
understanding of historical materialism. In print, however, she rarely
engages the ontological commitments of Marx's theory of value. Productive
doing or praxis is maintained consistently as the ultimate outside
(the Real), and theorizing is held--as it was by Aristotle--in tension
with it. Although she is more measured elsewhere, in "The Affirmative
Masquerade" Cloud tends to valorize the historical progressivism
or "science" behind The Communist Manifesto, conflating
the "historical" of historical materialism with that of
class at the expense of the inner-logic of the inevitability of struggle,
the dialectical or philosophical component of materialism as a logic
or law of movement premised on the mismatch of concrete labor and
abstract labor as detailed in the first volume of Capital.
The result is an elision of a fundamental point at which completing,
so-called "post-structuralist" materialisms begin: not only
has the objectification of labor become literally immaterial by definition
(e.g., "information"; see Hardt
& Negri, 2001), but the coming crisis of all crises has
been absorbed, not as an event, but as a condition of Capital's
continued stability, particularly in the age of neo-liberalism.
Thinkers like Greene and Grossberg consequently maintain that this
radical transformation can only make sense in equally radical terms.
Crudely put, these terms should be immanent and anti-transcendent
insofar as there is no where for Capital to go, for example.
There is no sublative moment in dialectic precisely because we are
already "there," or better, "here." Having achieved
global status, "Capital no longer looks outside but rather inside
its domain, and its expansion is thus intensive rather than extensive"
(Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 272). Capital is not a transcendent
force.
Of course, geographical locations do remain open to expansion,
and the post-Marxist move to a totalizing globalism is a bit
premature on empirical grounds. Yet from the vantage of keeping-pace
with the transformations in our life-worlds, the move seems as
warranted as any. The move is not, as it would seem, an abandonment
of the "really real" in pursuit of the abstract ideal,
but rather, the acknowledgement that objectification or abstraction
is, in fact, the really real that older vocabularies fail to
grasp. As Althusser reminds us, for Marx abstraction is as material
as the concrete (e.g., concrete and abstract labor are real).
Cloud rightly observes that "poststructuralist
discourse theories have left behind some of materialism's most
valuable conceptual tools," namely, standpoint epistemology,
the interests of class, and, most fundamentally, the "extra-discursive
reality checks on ideological mystification and economic contextualization
on discursive phenomena" (2001, para. 27). Yet these "tools"
have been abandoned for reasons that were well known by the Frankfurt
theorists over seventy years ago: The proletarian revolution
did not happen. Auschwitz happened. Our task as materialist critics
is to figure out why this is the case, why the science of Marx
was a theology, why revolution traditionally conceived is
impossible, and why hope cannot be located in the chronicle of
humanity or the register of the Real. The totalizing domination
of discourse seems as good of an answer as any.
Concluding Remarks:
Toward a Utopic of Theological
Foolishness
All social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which
lead theory towards mysticism find their rational solution in
human praxis and in the comprehension of this praxis.
--Karl
Marx (1978b, p. 145)
. . . an unsparing look
at our losses can do more than depress. It gives us a sense both
of what a possible post-Marxist radical movement won't and can't
look like, and what, if there is to be one, it will look like.
. . . a movement aiming at significant change will be a politics
of identity as well as a politics of social structures and power.
. . . a new radical movement will abandon the notion that it
is theoretically and practically focused on a single decisive
area of human oppression . . . .
---Ronald
Aronson (1995, pp.
179-180)
Although Cloud's critique of rhetoric's
many materialisms--especially those offered by Raymie McKerrow and
Ronald Walter Greene--is deliberately polemical and provocative (and
in this sense productive), it also reflects a modernist conceit as
typical of orthodox Marxist scholars as it is philosophical realists:
this is my position, it does not evolve, and you should adopt it.
Unlike Capital, which, in the orthodox formulation, must move, expand,
and continuously exploit the producing animal to avert the always-looming
crisis of overproduction (Marx, 1978a), agonistic materialism favors
the ossification of struggle all the way up: fighting for ideas
is homologous to the antagonism of class; academic disagreements begin
to simplify into "two great hostile camps," the (petty?)
bourgeoisie intellectual dancing rounds at a "postmodern . .
. masquerade ball," and the (old-school Marxist) proletarian
busy watching the work of shuffling feet. Even given my own "modernist"
commitments (e.g., my need to retain the categories of rhetoric, the
unconscious, and so on), I think it is a mistake to dismiss the critical
labor of post-Marxists; theirs is an attempt to comprehend praxis
too, even if it is no longer located in human essence. Besides, most
who claim materialism would agree that the end of human suffering
is the goal, that this identification with the ungraspable Other is
the motivation. Ultimately we begin, then, not with history, but with
a shared moral ground. In this respect, there is room enough for multiple
materialisms.
Even though there is a speakeasy, the work of mediation is more often
to occur in the company of social lubricants in real-space than in
the neatly edited pages of our journals. There is no reconciliation
between an instrumentality that needs an interior and exterior, and
a plane of immanence that maps movement in horizontal terms. My argument
for an ironic mode of mediation attempts to incorporate the instrumentalist
and the discursive turn as incommensurate yet indispensable modes
of criticism; one interpretative, the other, cartographic. In light
of the explanatory power of newer materialisms, in my view only a
non-sublative meta-dialectic will be able to hold on to rhetoric at
all.
My argument for an ironic mode of mediation is also dialectical,
but not in the Hegelian sense that deflated the rhetorical promise
of Marxism itself (or rather, precisely in the largely unreceived
Hegelian sense of "the negation of the negation"; see
Zizek, 1989, pp. 173-178): although
there is a thrusting, there is no moment of sublation; there
is no moment of reconciliation; there is no revolutionary turn;
there is no way out. Post-structural modes do seem Romantic
at times in terms of their "radical break," but I am
admiring of these efforts in precisely the way Richard Rorty (1989) argues that we should be:
new languages mark new possibilities. Sometimes, it is refreshing
to move into new idioms of critique because fretting over agency
gets tiresome.
I suspect part of my own suspicion of productive/spatial materialisms
is marked by my own horizon of optimum complexity, a problem
that I undoubtedly share with--to borrow something else from
Rorty--the bulk of us worker bees and ants. Just because I do
not understand some of it does not mean I must disagree with
it. Like Cloud, however, I cannot let go of instrumentality,
even after the crisis of hope and the resulting impossibility
of a large-scale revolutionary praxis. I am, in the end, a comrade.
After
monumental atrocity, the failure of Communism, and the ascent
of neo-liberalism, after our existential awakening in that familiar,
coppery stench, we must admit that the potential for macro-political
movements is actually (literally) dead. Where, then, should a
materialist hope be cultivated? There are reasons for replacing
Benjamin's
Turk with a maternal
trickster, for replacing the new and strange with an all-too-familiar
that deceives us with conjuring tricks. Yet these reasons should
not be mapped symmetrically lest we fall prey to the promise
of paradise and the hardening of will in the service of sleuthing
and slaughter.
To conclude: In the eleventh sitting with Eusapia Palladino,
Everard Feilding was astonished by the seemingly "supernormal"
movements of the curtains of the séance cabinet. After
noting that a "little stool" was placed beside Palladino
at her request, Fielding wrote:
I saw the curtain move then on to the medium. I could see a perfectly
clear space between the chair of the medium and the curtain.
. . . This was the first time I have seen the curtain blow out
under such absolutely evidentiary conditions. I was sitting beside
it; I had at 10:11 [p.m.] pulled it right away from the medium
so that a clear space of a foot was between it and her, visible
right down to the carpet, the bottom of the curtain being gathered
together in a bunch away from her foot. . . . I watched the curtain
continuously throughout, and suddenly the whole of the left edge
of the curtain, i.e., the edge nearest her right shoulder,
rushed out and completely enveloped her right side. (1963, p.
249)
The mention of feet in both senses
provides an ironic clue. At some level Feilding knew the spiritual
phenomena were produced by Palladino's skillful feet, and yet he maintained
for the rest of his life that her productions were "playthings
of the [supernormal] agency which they reveal." The very incompatibility
of fraud and faith, of feet and phantoms, then, is productive, indeed,
is instrumental, but only when the one locates utopia in the materiality
of consciousness and history.
Notes, References