Bell Hooks and the Untenable Mutual Exclusivity of Domination and Love

In Foss, Foss and Trapp’s presentation, bell hooks’ work militates against domination as a mode of organization that runs through our entire culture and every institution within it. She sets domination up in opposition to love, saying: “There can be no love when there is domination,” (272). Furthermore, hooks notes that in her experience, the male-over-female domination has been primary and points to her and her family’s experience under her father’s domination as the principal example from her own childhood. My question to hooks, then, is: Does she endorse the seeming implication that, if her father was engaged in domination over her, her mother, and her sisters, he must not, then, have loved them? Perhaps, in hooks’ particular case, she would fully endorse this entailment (or perhaps not), but the general argument that any relationship of domination excludes love necessarily and by definition is thoroughly untenable, especially since hooks specifically includes the domination of a parent over a child: "Usually, individuals experience and learn to accept domination, whether the experience is one of domination of parent over child," (271). Unless hooks is playing fast and loose with the meanings of the words ‘domination’ and ‘love’ (which could easily be the case), this argument is demonstrably invalid. Surely the coercion (being a form of domination) a parent deploys to get a recalcitrant child to brush his or her teeth does not rule out the possibility that this parent loves his or her child. In fact, common sense would dictate that it is, in fact, the parent’s love that motivates him or her to coerce the child to care for the health of his or her teeth in the first place. A refinement of hooks' theory that made special exemptions for the domination of a parent over a child could perhaps save her theory. It seems that the reason we countenance the coexistence of domination and love in the case of a parent-child relationship is simply that the child lacks the mental and physical resources to fully care for him or herself. We think this, generally, justifies the parental coercion. In a relationship between adults, however, hooks' claim about the mutual exclusivity of domination and love is not patently false. It is curious, then, what reasoning led her to specifically identify the parent-child relationship as an example of exactly the sort of relation of domination she militates against.

Jean Baudrillard and Simulation

In Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulation is made up of four stages. The first stage is referred to as "Symbolic Order," which is characterized by "clear, referential, stable" signs that "reflect basic reality" (308). This first stage Baudrillard identifies with the feudal period in Europe. From this point the second stage, referred to as "Counterfeits" arises, which is associated historically with the period extending from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution. In this stage a single degree of separation exists between the sign and the reality it is supposed to signify: "Signs are recognized as mimicking reality, but there is still a connection between the two spheres" (308). The third stage in simulation is referred to as "Production," and is identified with the era of the industrial revolution. In this stage, "signs and the ability to control the code have overtaken production itself," which reverses the hitherto traditional hierarchy between humans and signs. In the fourth (and final?) stage of simulation--also simply known as "simulation"--there is supposedly a complete rupture between reality and the realm of the sign. Baudrillard points to Michael Jackson as an exemplar of the complete disconnection from reality that supposedly takes place in this stage. There are two questions I would want to raise against Baudrillard here. First, how should this model be extrapolated backwards to ancient Greece and Rome? How should it be extended (or not extended?) to the Middle East and Asia? Second, it is unclear whether Baudrillard intends these four stages to be utterly sequential or whether they exist stacked on top of one another in some way. There are surely regions, even within the West, whose cultural development and mode of life reflects earlier stages in this progression. How is the fact that Western society does not universally resemble modern American/European cities accounted for by Baudrillard?

The Public Sphere and "Gangs and Their Walls"

In Cintron's piece "Gangs and Their Walls," he draws attention to the ways in which the identification and differentiation methods deployed by street gangs depended upon the material products and cultural content of mainstream society. Specifically, Cintron notes that street gangs would, in an effort to mark themselves as members of their own gangs, amass and wear items of clothing whose mainstream "meanings" served an alternate purpose. Thus, a member of a gang whose colors are black and gold might wear a sports jersey from a well-known professional team whose colors are also black and gold. His intent seems to be to point out how the street gangs appropriation of mainstream cultural material for their own particular purposes parallels their very raison d'etre, which is to create a situation (a society) that allows for them to acquire the respect denied them from mainstream society. Although Cintron does not phrase it in this way, but this is very close to the Hegelian notion of determinate negation. Street gangs, in their attempt to break from mainstream society, are nevertheless inextricably tied to it by that very negation; they are determined not to be part of a specific other society and all their efforts are accordingly still oriented towards that which they seek to break from. Not only in the clothing choices of street gangs was this apparent, but even in the grammatical conventions of their graffiti, which Cintron says, "suggests that convention in signaling respect was the baseline on which a transgressive order was manufactured" (169). Cintron ties this observation to Habermas' notion of the public sphere, but then remarks that the model provided by Habermas is not without its difficulties. Turning to Stanley Aronowitz, Cintron draws attention to the fact that "because Habermas' model is dependent on rationality as a "presupposition of public communication," the public sphere is understood as a "restricted space" rather than a participatory one" (174). The general idea is that this is supposed to line up with the efforts of the street gangs, who have been "restricted" from mainstream society, yet continue to orient themselves toward it in their actions. However, the suggestion that the public sphere excludes street gangs on the basis of their lack of rationality strikes me as patently false. As Cintron himself notes, the methods employed by the street gangs are numerous and subtly intelligent. In other words, they manifest rationality. This entails that Cintron has either misunderstood or misapplied Habermas' theory (although perhaps Aronowitz is partly to blame?). Street gangs might exist on the fringes of mainstream society, and they might even be excluded from the public sphere, but if they are, it wouldn't be due to their non-possession of rationality.

On McGee's Notion of "Ideograph"

McGee's argument is premised on "a brute, undeniable phenomenon: Human beings in collectivity behave and think differently than human beings in isolation" (McGee 2). McGee notes a pair of apparently conflicting explanations of this phenomenon, which, nevertheless (purportedly) agree that "the only possibility of "mind" lies in the individual qua individual". The result of this agreement is that the phenomenon of the apparent agency of human collectivities must be explained in terms of the agency of individuals, since a collectivity cannot (ex hypothesi) have "mind". Thus, the rival explanations revolve around opposing ways of conceiving how individuals are engaged in collective action. On one hand, the "symbolist" camp maintains that collective action involves "a voluntary agreement [on the part of the individuals] to believe in and participate in a "myth"" (ibid). Materialists, on the other hand, contend that the participation of (most?) individuals in a collectivity must be premised on a calculated deception about the existence of an ideologically grounded unity, which is "foisted on all members of the community by the ruling class" (ibid). McGee's response to this opposition between symbolist and materialist camps is that neither side, strictly speaking, is wrong because they are pursuing two different goals. McGee's proposition, then, is to conceive of the two sides as supplemental to one another rather than mutually exclusive explanatory frameworks. The synthesis of the two results in McGee's account of "Ideographs". However, it is unfortunate for McGee that he explicitly bases this account on the following commitment: "If a mass consciousness exists at all, it must be empirically "present," itself a thing obvious to those who participate in it" (McGee 4). Why it is that McGee (who is surely not alone in making this assumption) believes such a claim warranted is not immediately obvious. All consciousness is the consciousness of a collectivity. Human awareness is the product of a human brain, which is a complex network of highly specialized cells working in concert. How those cells produce the singular phenomenon of consciousness is, of course, still an enormous scientific mystery, but however it is produced, it remains clear that it emerges out of the collective activity of millions of individual cells participating in the same endeavor. Our conception of a human mass-consciousness and its characteristics ought to be based on what we know about the paradigmatic consciousness of individual persons. If there is a human mass-consciousness, our relation to it would be the relation of one of our neurons to our own consciousness. What kind of relation could that be? What seems certain is that pronouncements of the kind McGee makes here about what that relation must be like are unfounded, and invalidate any argument that follows from them. At the very least we can say that any mass-consciousness must be immediately obvious to itself (cogito ergo sum) but whether its constitutive participants must be immediately aware of it is far from clear.

On Biesecker's "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Differance"

In this piece, Barbara Biesecker seeks to highlight a contradiction within the debate between Bitzer and Vatz over what constitutes the rhetorical situation (or, perhaps, whether there even is a rhetorical situation). She notes that "Vatz's ostensive purpose is to propose an alternative to Bitzer's definition of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation...Nevertheless...even as it questions the validity of Bitzer's central proposition, Vatz's essay simultaneously confirms it" (Biesecker 114). In other words, Biesecker is drawing attention to the fact that Vatz's reply, which attacks Bitzer's main claim that the rhetorical situation takes pride of place over the rhetor, seems to play right into this main claim itself. Vatz, the rhetor, is responding to the exigence created by Bitzer's essay, and this is precisely the way that Bitzer characterizes rhetorical situation. At the same time, however, Vatz's claim that the rhetor's position is originary, since it is the rhetor who frames the situation through his or her choice and arrangement of the facts outlining the rhetorical situation, also appears to be confirmed, and Biesecker's target is resolving this apparent conundrum: "After all, Vatz's statement is a response to Bitzer's essay...itself a situation with an exigence that invites a response. And yet, is not Vatz's own article an effect of arbitration on the part of a choosing individual? So, then, is Bitzer right or is Vatz right? Is a situation or speaker the origin of the rhetorical discourse?" (ibid). Biesecker's solution is to destabilize the hierarchical structuring of the question itself, and she attempts to do this via Derridean deconstruction and his notion of differance. Eventually, this approach arrives at the claim that the source of the problem, of the hierarchical structuring of the issue of primacy in rhetorical situation, somehow turns on our ideas about the human subject. Specifically, Biesecker appears to be asserting that it is our belief that individual subjects are stable in a way that the meaning of language (perhaps) is not. This would seem to be what she has in mind when she writes: "Derrida recommends that we think the subject not as a stable presence constituted and operating outside the play of differance, but instead as a production or effect-structure of differance" (Biesecker 125). In other words, the fundamental ambiguity we may acknowledge in language does not exist only there but actually produces, or structures through its effects, our subjectivity. But, isn't this setting up the kind of hierarchical structure Biesecker was ostensibly trying to dissolve? That is, Biesecker wants to switch the ordering from (Apparently) Stable Subject >>Produces>> Ambiguous Symbolic Systems (Differance?) to Differance (Ambiguous Symbolic Systems?) >>Produces>> Subject (With an Illusory Sense of Stability).

On "The First Sophists: History and Historiographers"

In the first chapter of her book, Susan Jarratt suggests an alternative historiographical methodology based loosely on the practices and epistemology of the early sophists of ancient Greece. By employing antithesis and parataxis--two of the characteristic tactics of the sophists--Jarratt suggests that the rhetorical historiographer can disrupt "the continuity of the given historical narrative," and thereby open up a space within which new historical narratives can be considered (Jarratt 17). As an example of the type of exercise she has in mind, Jarratt points to Gorgias' Encomium of Helen, which suggests that Helen's abduction ought not--perhaps--to be blamed on her. The idea here seems to be that Gorgias' contemporary Athenians (and possibly the wider ancient Greek world) placed the onus for the entire Trojan War on the actions of Menelaus' queen, and Gorgias is able to call into question this forgone (and highly dubious) conclusion through his deployment of sophistic rhetorical techniques (e.g., antithesis and parataxis). Jarratt suggests that the modern sophistically inclined rhetorical historiographer can similarly cause his or her contemporaries to reconsider what they think they know about their collective (and individual?) historical narrative. Through a creative approach that draws on various disciplines and techniques, the rhetorical historiographer "plays with the material like Frankenstein with body parts," the point of which "is not exposing or discovering the unknown, but rearranging the known" where "rearrangement is revaluation"(28). Jarratt frames this point in terms of disrupting the teleology of the current historical narratives, by which she seems to mean the notion that we already know where the history has to end up. The assumption Jarratt seems to be operating under is that shaking up our sense of what our history is constitutes a boon. Surely there are revaluations that could be made through rearrangements of the known that would constitute an improvement, but there are just as surely many other revaluations that could only be described as moral disasters. How are we to determine which is which? Here is the charge leveled at the first sophists by Plato and Aristotle, which seems just as valid here and now: Rhetoric does not possess the mechanism for determining better from worse. To the extent that rhetoricians deploy value theories that would allow them to judge better from worse revaluations, they are no longer engaged in rhetoric but philosophy.

On the excerpt from The New Rhetoric

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca in The New Rhetoric assert as their starting point that “men and groups of men adhere to opinions of all sorts with a variable intensity, which we can only know by putting it to the test.” (1376) This assertion is supposed to the form the basis of their own position, which they mark as distinct from a position based on “definitive, unquestionable truths.” Since Olbrechts-Tyteca and Perelman do not (at least in this section of the text) identify in more detail—by linking it to some particular theorist—the opposing view supposedly based on definitive and unquestionable truths, it is difficult to determine exactly what their own position is, inasmuch as they provide an outline by pointing to what their view is not. Nevertheless, the main focus from this passage, at least, would seem to be the practice of putting the intensity of belief-holding to the test. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca note that the beliefs they are interested in may be implicit and unformulated until the occasion for a disagreement prompts these individuals to articulate the basis of their disagreement. The question I want to raise here hangs on the significance of this belief strength testing for Olbrechts-Tyteca and Perelman’s position. Later in The New Rhetoric, the authors claim that they see their position as offering a way around the dualistic aporia presented by a foundation of “definitive, unquestionable truths.” They write: “It is because of the possibility of argumentation which provides reasons, but not compelling reasons, that it is possible to escape the dilemma,” (1378). What should we make of this claim? The suggestion seems to be that the practice of argumentation—of practicing a disagreement that forces one to formulate one’s implicitly held beliefs and immediately test their strength—offers a viable method to provide “the justification of the possibility of a human community.” Now my question becomes: What about all the theorists whose models for justifying the possibility of a human community are not captured by the schematic drawn of the opposing position based on “definitive, unquestionable truths,” of which there are certainly some worth taking seriously (Hegel, Rawls, etc). And, furthermore, insofar as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca must have a starting point of some kind, how would they answer the charge that their own starting point is functionally indistinct from a “definitive, unquestionable truth?”