The Presidential Debates
Via Metafilter come these saddening links (second link PDF) about tomorrow night’s debates.
I’m trying to figure out how, years down the line, I might tell my kids, “Yes, we used to live in a democracy, once.”
Election Politics & Rhetoric
I was delighted, after the ridiculous, stupid, and sustained Republican duckspeak about “flip-flops,” to hear George W. Bush pronounce the so-called “war on terror” to be unwinnable, and to then declare the very next day that the United States would win that so-called war. I’ve heard all sorts of Republican pundits trying to spin what the President said, to no avail. It’s a huge, idiotic, and disingenuous reversal, and anyone who tries to explain it is showing her or his absolute contempt for the intelligence of the American public. But of course, that’s what Karl Rove’s crew excels at: the rhetoric of assertion that contends, If you say it forcefully enough or often enough, it’ll be true.
So here’s some counterspin for the conservatives stupid enough or duplicitous enough to perpetuate the “flip-flop” nonsense:
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George Lakoff on Rhetoric
A while back, Chris suggested that I check out George Lakoff’s Moral Politics, and I added it to my to-read list, where it’s sat since, having taken secondary priority to my more economically-oriented dissertation reading. Today, I came across a link to an interview with Lakoff that made me wish I’d checked him out sooner. Basically, he’s a linguistics professor who examines the way conservatives have done a far better job than democrats in rhetorically framing national political debates. An excerpt will give you the flavor, but the whole thing is worth checking out, especially for people interested in rhetoric and politics.
You’ve said that progressives should never use the phrase “war on terror”
Ethics and Surveillance
Lunch yesterday was slow-roasted kalua pig, wonderful and tender and savory and maybe even better than East Carolina pulled pork, which is the closest analogue I can come up with from my experience. Only not at all vinegary like that fine Carolina stuff: just rich, moist, a hint of spice. Dinner today, from a tiny little side-street takeout joint, was three substantial slices of furikake-crusted ahi, cooked rare and eaten from a styrofoam tray. It was incredible, and tasted like it had just come out of the ocean. For all I know, it probably had, since the ocean’s only a few blocks away. If the food here in Kailua is this good and this cheap, I won’t even bother taking the half-hour drive back to any of the Honolulu restaurants. And the takeout joint has a grilled ono sandwich that I’m going to try tomorrow.
Anyway: I’ll start by attempting to adequately describe the best presentation I saw at the conference, for which I was fortunate enough to serve as moderator. Christopher Carter and Teddi Fishman constituted a panel titled “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Surveillance” for the first session of the conference.
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RSA Presentation
I timed an out-loud reading of this, and it clocked in at way too long, so I’m in the process of cutting it by about a third. The presentation, ten hours from now, will be the radio edit; consider this the extended dance mix. I’d be more than grateful for any gripes, critiques, disagreements, or suggestions.
[Note: links added to clarify references and make the essay a little more Web-friendly. Feel free to point me to additional sources.]
Moral Vernaculars
The featured speaker at RSA’s opening session tonight was Gerard Hauser, who gave a fantastic talk on “Moral Vernaculars and Rhetorics of Conscience” that examined how rhetoric functions in the discourse of human rights. Hauser suggested that the moral universals of general declarations of human rights stand opposed by local moral vernaculars, and those moral vernaculars flow from the orientation of the vice to which they respond. In other words (if my hasty notes have got this right), local moral vernaculars focus on a single vice, amplified and extended to permeate society, whether that vice is cruelty become genocide, avarice become exploitation, or snobbbery become racism. But the uses of local moral vernaculars presuppose the existence of universal human rights, so that “The globalization of human rights is a function of the localizatioon of the moral vernacular”.
In fact, our inaction in the cases of Rwanda and Bosnia came because we had no moral vernacular with which to understand those circumstances. There was pity and outrage, but pity is a spectator sport that may in its attention to the difference of circumstances work against empathy rather than towards it. The spectacle of the body in pain may create pity, but empathy and a sense of obligation to act are harder to come by unless our understanding moves from the spectacle itself to the reasons, causes, and circumstances that brought such a spectacle into being. As long as we remain fixated on the images of Abu Ghraib, rather than the causes that lay behind them, we may find ourselves able to morally empathize, but lacking the moral vernacular with which to formulate a response: instead, we remain in a moral panic, demanding courts-martial for all, demanding immediate withdrawal of forces, demanding national unity, demanding the demolition of Abu Ghraib — but none of these are remedies that will prevent such horrors from occurring again. We have yet to develop the moral vernacular that will help us understand their causes.
It was an excellent talk, far more sophisticated, considered, insightful, and engaging than my scant and inadequate notes here might indicate.
The Uses of Metaphor
Carlin Barton cites Caligula’s remark to his grandmother Antonia: “Bear in mind that I can treat anyone exactly as I please” (Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, 166), and concludes that “The will of the king was law, and the will of the king was [. . .] no law at all” (106).
In Guantanamo, we have a space where no laws apply, American or international: the prisoners there are subject solely to the whims of the princeps, and have no human rights whatsoever.
Suetonius writes of Caligula the following: “a gladiator [. . .] against whom he was fencing with a wooden sword fell down deliberately; whereupon Gaius [Caligula] drew a real dagger, stabbed him to death, and ran about waving the palm-branch of victory” (168).
George W. Bush, having entirely avoided combat in a time of war, lands a jet on the flight deck of a carrier, and in front of a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished”, declares the end of “major combat operations”.
Rome died from the inside, entirely corrupt. There were no invaders to destroy the empire: in CE 476, Augustulus simply turned over the keys to Odoacer, the army and empire having grown too much, and having assimilated those who were to have been conquered.
Instead, the assimilated overturned the empire.
Guilt Versus Shame
Good signs so far from Carlin Barton’s Roman Honor. I’ve read several chapters of this previously, as background for a seminar paper on ethos, audience, and rhetorical coercion in Cicero’s Pro Ligario, and it’s as fine as I remember it. Before looking at the implications of a few early quotations, let me try to propose what I’m after here: I want to use the concerns of Tacitus about power, subjectivities, and truth-production to metaphorically address the potentialities and pitfalls of democratic discourse on the Web, especially in relation — again — to power, subjectivity, and truth-production, but with today’s added economic component, and Barton can help me in understanding how the Romans publically and rhetorically constructed individual and social subjectivities. The missing part of the equation — the donut-hole of a hypothesis I’ll be working towards, with the help of Hardt & Negri — is how we, today, on the Web, publically and rhetorically and economically construct individual and social subjectivities, and whether such constructions have political consequences that were absent under the Roman empire.
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End of Combat Operations
I leave for the conference in Austin on the 27th. I was hoping to have time to draft my paper and run it past the head of the Classics department here, who’s a Tacitus specialist and who was kind enough to do a directed study with me a couple years as a lead-up to being one of my examiners on Roman rhetoric, but it’s end-of-the-semester grade-crunch time, and I don’t think it’d be fair to ask her to look over the paper in the space of three days. (Despite the fact that she’s a wonderfully kind and witty person who makes me wish I still had coursework to do, so I could take another couple of Latin seminars with her and get back into the groove of translating.) Maybe I’ll use the comments at the conference to revise it, and show her a better version afterwards, with some questions about where I might submit it. I was thinking PRE/TEXT might be the best option, but their broken links suggest that the journal may now be defunct — anybody know? JAC might work, I suppose, if I tried to frame it as a call for adding Tacitus to the rhet/comp canon: while I wholly believe in rhet/comp’s feminist “reclaiming” project associated with the classical tradition, it bugs the hell out of me that Aspasia, from whom we have no original writings whatsoever and whose entire history is questionable, gets ten pages in Bizzell and Herzberg, while Tacitus gets zip.
Let me offer one long quotation as further evidence of his relevance. I leave making the concrete and specific connections to our contemporary situation as a perhaps overly facile exercise for the interested reader.
“Tacitus is less concerned with the specific secrets of long-dead emperors and their officials than with the way in which language is used to disguise the truth and deceive the unwary. Calgacus comments that the phrase Pax Romana disguises much violence, and Cerialis warns the Gauls that the Germans use the rallying cry of ‘Freedom’ and other ‘deceptive terms’ (speciosa nomina) merely in order to become their new masters. Tacitus relishes the exposure of official lies and the misuse of language. [. . .] Galba calls his stinginess ‘economy,’ and his cruelty ‘severity.’ Elsewhere defeats were celebrated as triumphs; ‘facts were scorned in favor of appearances.'” (Mellor 94)
Rhetorical Self-Production
Hardt and Negri write that “the manifestos of Machiavelli and Marx-Engels define the political as the movement of the multitude and they define the goal as the self-production of the subject” (63). While they use Spinoza to refine and extend this perspective into an ultimately hopeful “materialist teleology” (66), they do not argue with the perspective itself. Today, the politicized production of self — in the writing classroom and on the web — is an increasingly public practice.
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