Crowley Carnival: Rhetoric and the Gut

Welcome, carnival-goers! Hold onto your funnel cakes: I want to begin my response to Sharon Crowley's book by citing another response to the book, this from the "Accuracy in America" group's Campus Report Online, whose mission it is to "document and publicize political bias in education." It's probably no surprise that the folks at AIA, where the name, like Fox's slogan "Fair and Balanced," perhaps protests too much, nabbed Crowley's book before it was published. Which is to say that the person documenting and publicizing Crowley's work has really only read the blurb included on the back cover (and hence on Amazon) and has, shall we say, contorted Crowley's points beyond recognition. Consider what the article, which may be found here, says of Toward:

~Begin Excerpt~

Fundamentally Muddled Rhetoric, Animal Ethics and other Stuff
by: Malcolm A. Kline, December 07, 2005

If Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism by Arizona State University English professor Sharon Crowley is academia’s latest attempt to understand Red State voters, the Ivory Tower has a long way to go. “Crowley asserts that rhetorical invention (which includes appeals to values and the passions) is superior in some cases to liberal argument (which often limits its appeals to empirical fact and reasoning) in mediating disagreements where participants are primarily motivated by a moral or passionate commitment to beliefs,” according to the book’s publisher—the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Are these the same empirical, factual and reasoned liberal arguments that conclude that tax cuts hurt the poor despite a multitude of economic data that shows otherwise?

~End Excerpt~

Okay, carnivalers, settle down.

I begin with this excerpt because I want to bring to the fore certain "moments" or "positions" (both terms are defined by Crowley on p. 60) in order to try to simulate the difficulty of the task Crowley set for herself (and by extension for us): the difficulty, that is, of the book's urge to move "toward a civil discourse"--i.o.w, the impulse to engage with apocalyptism or fundamentalism at all.

The CRO excerpt really does, in a most stark way, prove some of Crowley's major points. Apparently in this case, the mere phrase "liberal argument" has prevented Kline from reflecting at all on what the blurb's sentence might mean--that Crowley is trying to take seriously the forces that would prevent someone from engaging a certain stripe of argument (or a sentence)--thereby yielding such an at-first-glance dismissal. And the excerpt works in the other direction equally well: if reading Kline's last line caused the outrage for you that it caused for me, perhaps that also suggests that affect cuts across all manner of convictions--even a faith in statistics and a certain interpretation of those statistics.

Crowley has a strong sense that emotion is too cognitive a way to formulate appeals, given some arguments' capacity to cut right to the viscera. This is likely why Crowley uses the term affect instead of emotion (esp. in chapter 3): affect allows for the cut-to-the-gut force of belief and conviction that this book regards as so crucial for understanding contemporary rhetorical practice.

In addition to Crowley's elaboration of affect as appealable (ch 3), the chapters on apocalypticism (4 and 6) are compelling to me, insofar as they set up one of the book's most surprising claims: "that academic and scientific skepticisms may in fact accelerate the spread of fundamentalisms, may be one reason that apocalyptic beliefs of all kinds are embraced by more and more Americans" (169).

We can see small bits of evidence that the antagonistic relation between academic criticism and critics of academia is doing nothing but strengthening the conviction (and perhaps spread) of the latter. In the AIA/CRO report excerpted above, the strategies of dismissal (as terribly weak as they might seem to our belief, values, and knowledge making habits) are used to effectively reinforce existing convictions; a wave of the hand meets the already-knowing nod of the head, working to further sediment resolve.

I have more to say on this score and am especially interested in what directions Crowley's book might (tacitly) suggest for subfields like science studies and for emerging work on bodily rhetoric (Donna, I'm betting you have something to say on this score--looking forward to that), and even, yes, pedagogy, for which the theories of invention presented early on (ch 2) hold interesting implications.

Comments

[gvcarter]

In a recent an interview appearing in –Deconstructing Derrida-, Greg Ulmer explores the interconnections between his first trilogy of books, -Applied Grammatology-, -Teletheory-, and –Heuretics-. Likewise, on Victor Vitanza’s website, there reference to his forthcoming trilogy that will have included -Negation, Subjectivity and the History of Rhetoric-, -Chaste Rape-, and -Design as Dasein-. To be sure, in both writer’s there are other projects (like Ulmer’s recent -Electronic Monuments- and Vitanza’s -The Coming Peculiar Pedagogies-), but these initial three works, we might imagine, provide something of a core that will have paradoxically allowed these different works to emerge.

In turning to Crowley’s –Toward a Civil Discourse-, my question is how we might situate this work with regards to trilogies. For those who have read Crowley’s earlier efforts, how might TCD be situated in relation to -The Methodical Memory-, -A Teacher’s Guide to Deconstruction-, -Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students-, and -Composition in the University-? Where along the arc of these earlier works might we begin to think some of Crowley’s core concerns that will have allowed differences to emerge and diverge from this thought?

For me, in encountering TCD, I am reminded of one of Gilles Deleuze’s ruminations on his collaboration with Felix Guattari. Rather than focus on the particulars of what they did together, Deleuze reminds us of an ascesis that we direct at our own thought. As Deleuze writes, “In Guattari there has always been a sort of wild rodeo, in part directed against himself” (Dialogues 11). Trying to think of Crowley’s work is in terms of a trilogy, I think, gets us to something of this wild rodeo that is taking place, as she so evocatively puts it, “in the purple shadow of the Superstition Mountains” (xii).

What does this rodeo mean for this carnival? In part, I think it means sorting out the tension Crowley creates in her Teacher’s Guide/Ancient Rhetoric textbook and her disavowal of EDNA in MM and the cash cow status of first-year composition in the university. The former is a concern for teachers and “how to” teach, whereas the ladder is concerned institutionally without “how we should not allow” certain approaches to teaching (EDNA) or administrating (making FYC a cash cow). Crowley’s rodeo ride, in these early works, consists of what might work for the teachers/students and how we might work against certain institutional practices.

Where does Toward a Civil Discourse, situate itself with regards to what I am suggesting are the forces of Crowley’s earlier rodeo? For me, part of what falls away from TCD is the direct challenge to the R/C institution as MM and Comp.in.Univ seem to be directed at. What emerges, instead, is a challenge to the liberal arguments that make teaching stasis theory and ideology from Ancient Rhetorics un/just so difficult. I do not have the cites for these, but what stands out in reading TCD are the encounters Crowley has in the classroom with students who refuse to budge beyond the commonplace “Well, that’s just her opinion.” This is the commonplace that Crowley’s pedagogical praxis is most at odds with.

For me, TCD is addressed to a sense of a composition classroom that is post-Methodical Memory and post-Composition in the University. What is crucial, I think, is that Crowley’s title contains the word “Toward” that is moving towards giving more theoretical context to her textbook. So far as the trilogy is concerned, I would align this latest effort of Crowley’s with her early encounters with P.J. Corbett and his -Classical Rhetoric- textbook. She cites this work, but it is not indexed, and I would be curious to know what she says directly about this effort. One could imagine that if one were to use Corbett’s text, instead of Crowley and Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics, that TCD may serve as something of a teacher’s companion to the kinds of arguments that one might expect to find in a class given over to civic argument.

Here then, I would argue, is Crowley’s rodeo ride that takes place more in the classroom with students than institutionally with R/C. The difficulty in the classroom, for Crowley, is in convincing students that they can make argument. It’s an argument against what Crowley sees as the liberal argument that, paradoxically, everything is just someone’s opinion. Without convincing students of the civil discourse argument, it is difficult to teach argument. In other words, the rodeo ride here is using argument to make and unmake arguments.

My question to Crowley’s work has less to do with what Crowley perceives as fundamental(ist) mindset and more to with what we might call a more elementary(ist) mindset. Vitanza, in his encounter with Deleuze and Agamben discussion of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, considers the sense of students that are less pone to rely on the liberal commonplace of everyone having her own opinion, and more on the strange stutter that they “would prefer not to” argue at all. How might we think of “preferring not to” argue with regards to liberal arguments and conservative “fundamentalism”? Where does this third term take us?

In closing so as to allow others to re-begin, I see Crowley’s Methodical Memory and Composition in the University making a space for the sense of “would prefer not to” in ways that Ancient Rhetorics and TCD does not. This is to simplify matters, and I hasten to add that I have taught (and may once again teach) Ancient Rhetorics, and I certainly think that TCD is important for anyone who wishes to teach argument in a post-MM or post-CU classroom. Nevertheless, I regard TCD as sharing a trajectory in Crowley’s trilogy that I find difficult to reconcile entirely with my interest in other trilogies such as Ulmer’s and Vitanza’s. It was the best book I’ve read in the past year, however, and I look forward to hearing what people make of this work and contributing as I can to the discussion. Without Crowley’s work it impossible for the field of rhetoric and compition to re-begin thinking the sense of argument.

[gvcarter]

... opps, the above post appears in full on Jenny's site. Wasn't sure how the carnival posts were to go, so I posted here and at Jeff's site. I'll confine any big posting to one site from now on. thanks, g

[Chris Geyer]

I’m really late joining the carnival, but if anyone is still interested, my comments are now posted on my own blog (which I think links from here?)

[dhawhee]

I posted the following comment over at dawgnotes in response to some of the things folks have been saying about SC's book. It might be useful to bear in mind that Crowley herself doesn't espouse liberal politics but is rather a radical, a position that's almost impossible--i.e., barely legible--given our bipartisan system. I think the book is important for its acknowledgement that existing modes of argumentation don't really work when belief and conviction are in play (and radicals or liberals for that matter, as my post tried to point out, aren't free from such convictions, though Crowley doesn't suggest they are). Crowley's openness about her problem with fundamentalists is, I think, an admirably honest disclosure, one that still doesn't prevent her from trying to imagine the possibility of achieving stasis through more plausible means--i.e., that set aside a faith in rational argumentation. And if Sharon's admitted bias against fundamentalism draws folks into the conversation productively, then I think the book has achieved one of its primary aims.

The lacklustre quality of this carnival has been intriguing to me from the start, and I wonder whether it has to do with the assumption that talking about belief is bad (less likely), or with the assumption that blogging about a star academic's book is dangerous (more likely), or with everyone's April-induced insanity (most likely). Though there could be an interesting combination of conspiring forces.