IT'S HAAARRDDD TO PUBLISH PSYCHOANALYTIC STUFF
IN RHETORICAL STUDIES:
AN EXETENDED EXEMPLAR
This webpage and its contents are intended for graduate students in my "Psychoanalysis and Rhetoric" seminar, per their request, as an illustration of the kind of resistance psychoanalysis has met in our home field of "rhetorical studies," centered in larger field of "communication studies," which is institutionalized in Communication Studies and Speech Communication departments across the country. I created it on the assumption that the essay in question is generally decent, despite flaws, and suitable for a "revise and resubmit" and eventual publication. Over two years and many revisions later, the essay has yet to find a home. Each link takes you to an exemplar PDF file that illustrates the discussion (various versions of the essay, submission and rejection letters, and so forth).
A'ight, hopefully this webpage will give y'all insight into (a) the evolution of a journal manuscript; and (b) a little background regarding the resistance to psychoanalysis in our field (per Meredith's request on the first day of class).
ORIGINAL INVENTION: In the spring of 2004, I was asked to participate on a panel dedicated to Southern Public Address at the Southern States Communication Association Conference in Tampa. Unfortunately I was doing archival research in Berlin, but I sent a dear friend and colleague, Shaun Treat, in my stead and he read my paper/presentation, which was entitled, "Why Huey's 'New State Capitol Building' Ain't a Penis, or, Dispelling the Demagogic Phallacy" (pdf of presentation here). Apparently the paper was a hit, and friends encouraged me to pursue it as an article.
So I did.
I worked on it all summer, and then I finished up the penultimate draft and sent it Marty Medhurst (submission letter here), editor of Rhetoric and Public Affairs. The new title was, "Hystericizing Huey: Psychoanalysis, Charismatic Monumentalism, and Southern Demagoguery," and it had a lot more phallus theory stuff in it. I regret I no longer have a copy of the manuscript in it's 1.5 version. Nevertheless, R&PA is regarded as a largely "conservative" journal and I knew that it would not be accepted for publication. However, I sent it there because (a) Marty is very fair and ethical, and would give the essay a good shake; (b) Marty is fast, and I would have it back in three weeks; and (c) I could use the initial feedback for information about how the most conservative folks in the field would respond. I got my rejection in three weeks, read over the very helpful review comments, and revised (surprisingly, they were quite nice). I don't have the comments handy, but it came down to there being "too much theory" and not enough application.
It so happens in the fall I was invited to join a panel on the Long family of Louisiana, and I was asked to do Huey. Actually, this was not a panel on necrophilia. I was asked to write about Huey, and although the panel idea was James Darsey's, I ended up putting it together. For this panel, I did an essay on an animatronic Huey Long that stands in a museum in Baton Rouge. The title of that one was "Reanimating the Dead: Robo-Huey and the Political Uncanny" (pdf of conference paper here). Again, the paper went over well and I was encouraged to turn it into a paper for publication.
I started to notice a pattern, but then figured: ah-ha! My "Hystericizing Huey" paper was lacking "application," so why don't I take out some theory and add some of my analysis of Robo-Huey? So that's what I did: I cut out pages and pages on what the phallus is, and instead, stuck in a couple of pages about robo-huey. I streamlined and kept the same title (a pdf of the second version of the essay is here). I sent it off to John Sloop, editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (the submission letter is here). It took a few months, but by the time summer arrived I had my reviews: one reviewer recommended acceptance, and one review, immediate rejection. I actually have a copy of the rejection letter, but it's not PDF-able, so I'll paste it here:
Review of Manuscript #05-007 “Hystericizing Huey”
Although I think this piece is very well-written and engages with some interesting literature, I find the execution lacking and the specifics of the project to be misguided in a way that wouldn't benefit from even substantive revision
I want to divide up my comments into two camps, one in which I lack sympathy to the psychoanalytic tradition, and one in which I am [in sympathy with the tradition]. I don't know the readership of [journal name] just yet, but I suspect that more of its readers will fall into the first camp, so I'll start there. I suspect the author believes the same, since he/she spends a large amount of time in theoretical exposition.
As far as this camp goes, here are four objections/ questions: First, I do not think that the piece offers a significant or substantive justification for using psychoanalysis as a critical tool. In the lengthy explanation given regarding the dynamic between obsession and hysteresis, there is nothing that offers much insight into the particulars of the situation or context at hand. In effect, the claims are far too universal, something somewhat required of psychoanalytic concepts. Given that everyone shares obsessive and hysterical tendencies, and given that all discourse is marked by a certain sense of fort-da, why isn't everyone a de facto demagogue? To argue, like the author does, that current efforts to understand charisma or even eloquence “lack a theory of desire” may be true, but it does not follow that a theory of desire is a valuable contribution
Given the universal or potentially universal nature of this theory of desire, and given the obvious fact that not everyone has demagogue status or that certain “it” factor of charisma, the critic must eventually move from the universal theory of desire expounded within this essay to the specific discourses of the demagogue, where the status of demagogue is determined by historical assignation rather than by psychic structure. The problem is though, once you've moved from the general to the particular, it seems obvious that the particular is a necessary and necessarily rhetorical component, and that the psychical concern is largely superfluous.
To follow the logic of the piece, by contrast, means understanding charisma and eloquence as non-rhetorical concepts and practices, a practice that hardly seems compelling for an audience of communication scholars. In other words, here is a theory of charisma that removes entirely the importance of rhetoric. As much as I might appreciate the author's investment in the philosophical precepts of psychoanalysis, I don't believe that it warrants publication in an NCA journal. [Look at 36, for example, wherein the symbolic is conflated with rhetoric, a revealing lack of differentiation.]
Second, the substantial but not obviously relevant take on desire and gender, adds little to the piece other than problems for those not already inclined to believe Lacan. One fairly obvious problem that isn't addressed in the piece, for example, comes once more with the issue of context. The author seems content, a la Lacan, to say that cultural assignations of gender are supposed to be psychical, yet the neuroses that define those assignations clearly presuppose culturally assigned values for women – the idea that woman are more naturally hysteric, for example. It makes just as much sense, given the lack of empirical data in this section, to believe that hysteresis is a socialized phenomenon, in that girls are often “taught” to be self-effacing.
Third, and I know this claim might irk critics invested in Lacan, but it seems to me as if the piece ignores certain specificities of the media environment in which demagoguery emerges. Most notably, with the way it's written, it seems as if the proper process of manipulating the sense of presence, of generating charisma, can only come about through oral encounters and oral broadcasts, which is a ridiculous claim, given the lengthy world history of demagoguery, or the role of the written in some of the more famous propaganda campaigns. I suspect this must just be a slip in characterization, given the fact that most of the evidence comes from the monuments themselves, rather than actual oral exchanges.
Fourth and finally for this set of objections, the fixation on the monuments provide at best post hoc explanations for Long's hold on Louisiana state politics – they do nothing to provide empirical data for the functional analysis of the dialectic of demagoguery. Indeed, for the first twenty-or-so pages of the piece it seemed as if Long and the monuments were more important as excuses to discuss psychoanalysis, rather than a study of demagoguery made better or more valuable through the inclusion of a psychoanalytic theory of desire. The idea that the theory is in this case necessarily linked to the case study seems more than suspect, and if I begin with a suspicion of the jargon and tropes and reversals required in psychoanalysis, this piece will do little to overcome that initial bias.
Now, let's say that I wasn't going to worry about that bias, and I think there are reasons that might be a valuable starting point, even if I don't find those reasons ultimately convincing. The problem is, that even if I did follow a general sympathy towards psychoanalysis, I believe that assessing the paper on its own terms also comes with problems.
The major problem here is that, at best, the study of the monuments shows only that after Huey, the public had such an hysterical impulse that they immortalized their own hysteresis in the robo huey and the monument at the capitol; it tells us nothing about the actual functioning of charisma. And this could just as easily be explained by the effects of the assassination, with little to do with the actual functioning or performance of anything we might label charisma. As with Christ, so with Long (a comparison that smacks a bit more of Zizek than Lacan, perhaps). This postmortem sense pf hysteresis, or guilt, tells us nothing about how Long is able to generate or manifest his charisma, much less his ability to manipulate obsessive and hysterical impulses. For that, one would need to tie it to his discourse, but this would be an entirely different project.
The readings of the monuments themselves, independent of any question of charisma and demagoguery, are valuable but also plagued with problems. The monuments are phallic yes, in an obvious sense, but that fact in and of itself indicates nothing other than their status as generic monuments, all of which are phallic in construction. Indeed, even with the discussion of the phallus in this piece, it makes no sense to qualify the monument's phallic status as strange or anything less than phallic, since all monuments face a threat to their sense of presence precisely because of what the purport to represent – the absent figure of a great man or woman. But to say that the buildings or statue are phallic, while correct and even comedic and interesting to note, does not provide the sort of evidence or interest needed to sustain reader interest. No attempt is made to discuss the architectural features; instead, readers are left to what amounts to an analogical argument (visualized on p. 20), which is I think, a very weak form of psychoanalytic critique.
The most interesting monument is the Robo-Huey, but it's clear from its placement in the essay that even Robo-Huey in and of him/itself is an insufficient object of analysis, insufficient even as an objet a. There's really no attempt to explain how Robo-Huey can be seen as any more interesting, and more indicative of the discourses of Huey long than might the animatronic greek gods in Caesar's palace indicate the supplications of Nevadans, or the various other animatronic statues of presidents and other historical figures that litter the countryside. To take the concern further, what about the animatronics is so important in the first place? What makes an animatronic so much more monumental than some other monument? These are questions that are, I think
obvious, but that remain unanswered in the essayMore annoyingly, in an otherwise well-written essay, the line in which readers are told that the animatronic statue reminds us of the “danger of demagoguery, that fascism is ultimately underwritten by death” is, I'm sorry, absurd. Fascism is underwritten by death, yes, but so is every other political system. Fascism is underwritten by death, something history recognizes as truth, and does so largely without the assistance of Robo-Huey. Indeed, I have difficulty even discerning a relationship between Robo-Huey, or the subject of the essay in general, and the sudden insertion of the word fascism. This sort of line, devoid of warrant and unrefined, isn't worthy of the rest of the essay, much less an NCA journal.
That being said, I think there are other roads that could have been taken with this material, but they are roads perhaps traveled best by critical methods not grounded in psychoanalysis. The concept of the gift, introduced early in the piece but never significantly developed, is a very real possibility, though it would be a path defined by names other than Lacan, Evans, and Fink. I applaud the author for his/her writing and her/his willingness to tackle complex issues and relationships, but in this instance, I do not think that the tackle is particularly well executed.
John said he called a third reviewer with experience in Lacanian theory. That reviewer urged rejection as well for a number of reasons I have typed out here (they were taken while on the phone from John). Here we butt-up against an issue that is curious: those that do not know psychoanalysis reject it out of hand. Those who do want to police and control how it is read; theory can become a "turf war," despite the fact that you can read these folks in many different ways (if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't have whole literatures devoted to figuring out what the heck Lacan was saying, right?).
The editor urged "revise and resubmit," but I didn't think I would ever be able to please reviewer B above. So, what I did was reduce all that reviewer B said to these handy notes, and then revised accordingly. I don't have a copy of that revision, I regret, so 2.5 is no more! In any event, because the thing was written in the Chicago style, I wanted to go with another Chicago style journal since converting things to MLA or APA would take a day's work. So I bit the bullet and submitted the thing to David Henry at the Quarterly Journal of Speech (submission letter is here; by the way, you may notice the letters follow with a title page. This is because most manuscript submissions require a "detachable title page," so I just type that after the letter and then let the ms. itself stand on it's own in a different document). It was submitted in July of 2005. It took Henry forever to get it back, but after almost FIVE MONTHS (it is only supposed to take six to eight weeks!) I heard from him. Fortunately, I do have copies of these reviews to share with you. Here is a copy of reviewer A's comments. Here is a copy of reviewer B's comments. Finally, here is a copy of Henry's cover letter rejecting the article.
Now you might think reviewer A's review is quite nasty and hostile, and you'd be right. I am so tired of these nasty people I went out on a limb and figured out who the reviewer was, because the reviewer keeps beating me up for not citing him. I emailed the guy and told him he was an asshole. You can read all about it here. ANYWAY, so, I licked my wounds and revised the essay again. [Edit many months later: the mean reviewer and I made up and are now friendly!]
Revising the essay at this point is getting difficult because of all the revisions done previously; it's starting to get out of hand, and the essay is now really quilt-like. It may have been better to collapse to the first version and send that one out again. But, I decided, heck, why not revise once more, this time incorporating newer work on demagoguery, and cutting a little. I decided to completely cut out Robo-Huey and turn that into a stand-alone article later this year, and then, add some stuff as examples and, again, excise a little more theory. I took a new tack on framing: ok, so, folks really hate the theoretical project here. So why not frame it as an attempt to promote a "new method." I hate method pieces--really, I do--but folks seem to like them. Reviewer B said as much. So I reframed and renamed.
Version 3.0 is now titled, "Hystericizing Huey: Toward a Psychoanalytic Rhetorical Criticism with the Example of Demagoguery." You can download a pdf version here. I sent it off 26 November 2005 to The Western Journal of Communication edited by Cheree Carlson. Sending it to Western is sometimes considered "not as good" as the landing it in one of the three previous journals, because they are "national." However, many in the field consider Western as having the quality work of a national, which is one of the reasons I chose it. Another reason was that Cheree Carlson is a fine editor, and I know this because I've reviewed a few things for her. She typically is very fair, and tries her best to send things out to the "right" people (e.g., not historians who naturally would hate the ahistorical structuralism of psychoanalysis). I sent that off on December 6 of last year, and have still yet to hear word. I asked about it at the eight week mark, and she said that it would have been back much sooner, but TWO of the three reviewers she sent it to reviewed it before for one of the previous journals, so she had to go back to the drawing board.
On February 27 I received word from Cheree at Western. One reviewer never responded (aptly, this is "Reviewer Y"). Reviewer X recommends rejection on the basis of method: psychoanlaysis is a bad way to do rhetorical criticism because it violates the unspoken tenents of good criticism. Reviewer Z recommends a substantial revision of the essay that requires a re-framing and working out a number of perceived contradictions. The editor said that if I could please the latter reviewer, than the concerns of the former will be addressed and there may be reason to publish. So I am in the process of revising and re-writing the essay for resubmission. If you'd like to read more about this process, read this page.
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