Or perhaps not tracing (pushing, exploring - not a moving beyond, because we are trying to incorporate those marginal elements, what before was unexamined, unheard).

RL Scott: “Finally even pure certainty, if we may use such an oxymoron with straight faces, or pure silence, if we can imagine that for an instant, mark the borders of rhetoric. Between the borders we shall constantly strive to make space for our humanness and will often find arguing one tool for that accomplishment” (110).

Perhaps this examination is to push back the borders. Scott here is setting rhetoric between poles of certainty, absoluteness, and unknowable, all-meaning.

Derrida, Jacques. "Spectors of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, adn the New International." Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

"If it-learning to live- remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between two, between all "two's" on linkes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost. So it would be necessary to learn spirits. Even and especially if this, the spectral, is not. Even and especially if this, which is neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never present as such. (xviii)

Final Paper for Josh Gunn's "Rhetoric and Psychoanalysis" course

John Cage and the Psychoanalytic Rhetoric of Silence

In 1952, experimental composer John Cage debuted his landmark work 4’33”, a silent composition that upset received musical conventions by extending them to the extreme margins of sonorous possibility. The piece was performed by a single player taking the stage with a stopwatch, sitting before a piano without touching the keys and simply opening and closing the lid to signal the beginning and end of each movement. The audience, entrenched in the concert hall environment, is confronted with four minutes and thirty-three seconds of non-performance, a performative silence from the stage that was intended to invert the attention of the listener from an expected musical foreground to the environmental soundscape of the background.

This response was written for Diane Davis' "Performative Rhetorics" course

In the chapter “Analytic Speech: From General to Restricted Rhetoric” of his 1993 book The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, Mikkel Borch-Jacobson outlines a trajectory within rhetorical studies that oscillates between the field’s emphasis on primary and secondary rhetoric, the poles of an impressive and expressive rhetoric. He aligns primary rhetoric, or the impressive pole, with the considerations of rhetoric as an “art of persuasion,” whereas the more restricted secondary and expressive form encompasses the “art of speaking well.” Borch-Jacobson’s goal is to reopen a space within rhetorical studies to account for affect, the intangible effects of impressive rhetoric within communication that since Plato have been held in a position of distrust because of a lack of technē that can be applied to its understanding. But, as Borch-Jacobson claims, psychoanalytic theory as developed in the 20th century under Freud offers the possibility for an applicable technique that may help account for rhetorical affect. The problem, however, is that that “psychoanalytic ‘rhetoric’…is in reality restricted rhetoric, rhetoric restricted to figures of speaking well (or, in this case, the impossibility of speaking well), and also, therefore, language amputated from its effective, pragmatic, or persuasive dimension” (64). So Borch-Jocabson’s goal it two-fold: 1) to expand the scope of rhetorical studies by moving it from a restricted rhetoric of simply expressive analysis to a general rhetoric that can account for the affective qualities of communication; 2) to reclaim psychoanalysis as a model for understanding and analyzing the impressive effects of affect within persuasive rhetoric. This move requires that we look beyond the Lacanian Symbolic of linguistic analysis to an understanding of affective power of the Zauberwort that “designates a power which is not that of the truth, not a knowledge” (68) or even “the self-knowledge of consciousness” (69). Rather, psychoanalytic rhetoric should attempt to provide a method for uncovering the unconscious influence of affect. Yet, even as he acknowledges the need for psychoanalysis to provide such a technique, he recognizes that actual affectability is not induced, but at best invoked: “Paradoxically, the phenomenon of transference reveals that the influence of the hypnotist and/or analyist is based not on a particular technique or power, but rather on an a priori affectability (a “spontaneous receptivity”) in the patient – that is to say, on the rhetoricity of the affect as such, a rheotoricity anterior to any verbal persuasion and also any metaphoric expression of passions” (71). It seems that it is the engagement with the rhetorical situation that allows affectability to arise and affect to be realized. We may even recover Lacan from Borch-Jacobson’s restrictive rhetoric by allowing that it is the subject’s break from wholeness and entrance into the Symbolic that opens the capacity to affect by entering into a constant discourse that is always based upon lack – what cannot be regained, expressed, re-realized from the mythic position of wholeness. The entrance into the Symbolic is the forced acceptance of a rhetoric based on alterity and a necessary openness of communication, the affective receptivity that is perhaps not spontaneous but always functioning and waiting to be filled (though always insufficiently and in constant adjustment).

Schwarz, David. Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.

Schwarz would be a really good lead-in to studying Cage as he attempts to offer a rhetorical analyis of music based on psychoanalytics and affect, but does not consider silence in his work. It's a similar oversight as the spiritual intentions that often are brought up in reading Cage, but that don't take us very far in understanding how his pieces work or their rhetorical affects.

Schwarz establishes a notion of the acoustic mirror in music that corresponds to an aural mirror stage that is pre-Lacanian visual mirror. Music can play into the rupture of identity and self that occurs in pre-linguistic recognition of seperation from the world (or mother).

Kahn, Douglas. Noise Water Meat. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999.

In his chapter on Cage, Kahn is interested in exploring the social and political implications of Cage's theoretics (ultimately calling Cage to task for not carrying his musical revolutions into his social activism).

In "Lecture on Nothing," however, Cage articulates his plans for "Silent Prayer" and it certainly has a social resistance to the "big noise" of war, commercialization and capitalist industry. Is in fact seeking to rupture and expose cultural norms, etc.

Kahn attests that Cage actually "silences the social"

Dyson, Francis. "The Ear That Would Hear Sounds in Themselves: John Cage 1935-1965." Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde. ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992.

"Yet a serious commitment to letting sounds be themselves also involves a hubristic attempt to represent the unrepresentable and to confront not only the boundaries of music but the very demarcations that constitute the self" (374).
Cage's attempt to represent the unrepresentable is an attempt to move beyond the symbolic in music, and ultimately for the self. (Ultimately cannot escape the continual trajection towards the symbolic).

My final paper for Gunn's Pschoanalysis and Rhetoric class is going to try to read the work of John Cage through a psychoanalytic framework, primarily based on Lacanian theory. The correspondences between the Lacan and Cage seem really ripe for comparison, most notably in their emphasis on silence and it's representation of lack and absence - for the both psychologist and composer in respect to the analysand/listener.

Some questions that I seem to be working around right now:

The main thrust for Cage seems to break "music" out the Lacanian symbolic. But is he actually able to do this? Doesn't even silence, when performed, ultimately stand in as metaphor for lack, absense, the drive towards death? How might this silence work in relation to Real?

In the chapter 4 of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari apply their model of rhizomatic structures to theories of linguistics. The result is a reorientation of language from an operation of direct discourse of communicative information to one based within indirect discourse. They contend that “all discourse is indirect, and the translative moment proper to language is that of indirect discourse” (77). Following upon Derridean moves that have argued for the citationality and iterability of all language, Deleuze and Guattari also assert the speech act as the primary force within language. The performative no longer acts on the margins as a mere anomaly of a language established as the communication of information, but rather “the redundancy of the order-word is instead primary and …information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of order-words” (79). The boundaries between language and speech are dissolved because an extrinsic value of a primary signification can not be found. Language’s intrinsic iterabiltiy already marks it as a scene of indirect discourse, and accordingly, “each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement” (79). The breakdown of a notion of individual enunciation accompanies this necessary redundancy, and Deleuze and Guattari assert in its place the force of collective assemblages, partially defined as “the redundant complex of the act and the statement that necessarily accomplishes it” (80). The collective assemblage accounts for the social character of the utterance, but it can not limit itself to notions that are simply exterior. It must also incorporate the pluralized voices of indirect discourse, “the many voices within a single voice,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it. These assemblages of enunciation contain not just the possibility of infinite influence and forces, but are in fact that infinitude of forces that is enacted at once. Although the act becomes attributed to bodies, it is an incorporeal transformation, not located in a movement or historicity of time, but rather as the instantaneous enacting, “the simultaneity of the statement expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation produces” (81). At that moment, the collective assemblage acts, the multitude of many voices the voice and language’s multiplicity drops, eventually to only to be ineffectually delimited and embodied in an attempt to assign meaning. In setting up this performative force as primary within language, the “language-funtion thus defined is neither informational nor communicational” (85). Deleuze and Guattari have moved beyond the traditional model of communication as transmission of information, and with the notion of the collective assemblage, have circumvented the opposition that distinguishes information from noise. The noise/information binary becomes untenable within this formulation. What role then, does noise play in Deleuze and Guattari’s linguistic theory and what force does it enact? If, as they say, “Life does not speak; it listens and waits,” then what, in fact, does life’s listening hear?

A Reading of Derrida's Limited Inc across Bulter's Excitable Speech for Diane Davis' "Performative Rhetorics" course

In her 1997 book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler explores the political and affective implications of speech act theory by grounding the discourse in contemporary debates concerning hate speech. Butler offers a Derridian view of the speech act and language, and attempts to apply the theory by presenting an understanding of how hate speech operates as a harmful illocutionary act and also how it may possibly be overcome or countered. She ultimately concludes that adequate redress against hate speech can not be effectively imposed juridically by the state, but that it must be confronted and rebuked through the same linguistic cultural system that grants injurious language its power in the first place. The speech act carries the capacity for harm, Bulter contends, precisely because we are created and construct identity through language, and “it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible” (5). Language holds the capacity for actual physical abuse because the body is constructed through language even as the body simultaneously performs language in the speech act – an inseperable connection between body and speech that constructs both in the moment of the speech act. Furthermore, identity is first realized through language and the address of the Other. As Butler states, “One ‘exists’ not only by virtue of being recognized, but, in a prior sense, by being recognizable” (5). In the case of hate speech, the recognition is an imposing of a name or language upon another that perpetuates subordinating conventions, but even as that recognition denigrates, it provides possibility for response and reconstruction. Because language, as Derrida and Butler contend, is always somewhat out of our control, there exists possibility within the slippage for a reassertion of terms and meaning by the addressed. Hate speech, like all speech acts, is vulnerable to failure, especially in the insatiable possibilities of context that can never be fully determined or fixed, and Bulter insists that “it is that vulnerability that must be exploited to counter the threat” (12). Dependant upon forces of temporality, convention, and culture, hate speech is ultimately an invocation of ritualized context that attempts to repeatedly reassert the traces of subordinating language to maintain that subordination. There are, however, moments of instantiation of a denigrating term (though we shouldn’t think of these as original or primary as they are made possible already by the context surrounding their utterance). In exploring the “injurious action of names,” Bulter emphasizes that “one is dependent upon another for one’s name, for the designation that is supposed to confer singularity” (29). Although Butler turns her attention more the imposing of collectively denigrating terms in naming, the proper name given to one by another “is understood to exercise the power of conferring singularity.” It is this act of naming, of the imposition of a proper name upon another, that I wish to explore. And you may already guess where I’m headed with this investigation.