Today’s Plan:
- Demagoguery Feedback
- Categorical Identity
- Building a Heuristic
- Thursday’s Class: Ross 1240 Computer Lab
Demagoguery Feedback
Categorical Identity
I wanted to share a few passages from Annamarie Jagose’s 1997 book Queer Theory / An Introduction. See: 62-63, 68-69, 77-78 & 82.
Kenneth Burke,
“We need never deny the presence of strife, enmity, factions, as a characteristic motive of rhetorical expression. We need not close our eyes to their almost tyranneous ubiquity in human relations; we can be on the alert always to see how such temptations to strife are implicit in the institutions that condition human relationships; yet we can at the same time always look beyond this order, to the principle of identification in general, a terministic choice justified by the facts that the identifications in the order of love are also characteristic of rhetorical expression.” (20)
—
“Insofar as the individual is involved in conflict with other individuals or groups, the study of this same individual would fall under the head of Rhetoric. . . . The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the War of Nerves, the War.” (23)
Burke-identity *by* division. What Vitanza would refer to as negative dialectic (something *is* by way of what it *is* not). Heterosexual only enters the lexicon after the clinical establishment of homosexual, which itself represses a wide range of sexual questions and phenomena, reducing it simply to “object choice).
Vitanza (indebted to Burke but also skeptical):
“While the negative enables, it disenables. As I’ve said, it’s mostly a disenabler because it excludes. Something is by virtue of Nothing, or what is not. The negative–or negative dialectic–is a kind of pharmakon, and in overdoes, it is extremely dangerous (e.g., a little girl is a little man without a penis! Or an Aryan is not a Jew! And hence, they do not or should not–because in error–exist.) The warning on the label–beware of overdoses–is not enough; for we, as KB says, are rotten with perfection. We would No [kNOw]. That is, say No to females, Jews, gypsies, queers, hermaphrodites, all others. By saying No, we would purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions, threatens our identity. (We have, Burke says, “the motives of combat in [our] very essence” (1969, 305). Hence, we build gulags and ovens so as to have a great, good place. It [the standard, Aristotelian, school-book History of Rhetoric] is a momument built by ways of exclusion. I am against monuments, edifying pretensions.
Borges’ short fable. Baudrillard, opening of Simulation and Simulacra.
Let’s Build a Heuristic
Using our reading as a guide, let’s develop some guiding questions for the upcoming demagogic rhetorical analysis paper.
