Giving Way on One's Desire:

Abstract

In my article, “Coming to Terms with the Antagonism Between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency,” I argue that academic desire is inherently frustrated by motives in tension with each other (2012). As rhetoric scholars, we are supposed to explore what we find politically interesting or important by isolating a chosen element of the political in order to perform a systematic study of that element and generate some insight about it. Yet graduate students quickly learn that moral fervor and political commitment are not the same thing as studying something that they care about. And this moment of revelation is no less true for a partisan in the throws of a political campaign than it is for an academic shut away in an archive. For example, political campaign operatives charged with polling a subset of the electorate are not, in the act of designing and performing the poll, acting as political operatives. Rather, in their role as pollsters, they must resist their own wishes or expectations or they will not actually be of any service to their campaign or party. Instead, to be of service, they must apply methods that are intended to return results that would be valuable to anyone who might have access to them. This is why campaigns hide their internal polls from both the public and competing campaigns. They do not want either the public or competing campaigns to know what they have learned precisely because such malleable knowledge could be applied by others in ways that might thwart their own campaign's strategy.Nevertheless, the difference between a political campaign's internal polling operation and an academic should be clear. Like internal pollsters, academics engage in systematic study in order to produce results that anyone could potentially use. However, unlike pollsters, academics do not keep the results of their research hidden away for partisan advantage but rather make those results public because their research is intended to serve the interests of anyone who might engage the products of their analysis. Like internal pollsters, however, academics also do not need to be understood as “value-neutral.” Of course they aren't. They will have chosen what they want to study because they suspect that an inadequate understanding of some element of reality may be the cause of problems that they hope improved understanding might somehow contribute to ameliorating. Now, if an academic fails to deliver a product that is of use to anyone because it takes a form that no one can figure out how to use, and use in a relatively sophisticated way, then the academic might be considered to have failed. She will have failed insofar as she had hoped that improved understanding might potentially aid those directly involved in addressing the problem.Might we say that academics work amid a broader competition to enact particular policies, just as internal campaign pollsters work amid those directly competing to win elections? Hence, are not both academics and internal campaign pollsters “in” the contest but not “of” the contest? Might we say that faithful service to either of the two demands it? In Slavoj Žižek's language (following Lacan), attempting to cut the corner, to directly engage in the contest, would be an example of what he calls “giving way” on one's “desire” (1989, 117–18). In the language of my prior article, it is an example of refusing the challenge that constitutes the antagonism, in this case, the antagonism between reflection and action that constitutes the academic subject position. Recall, however, that antagonism does not mean simple opposition. Rather, it points to a state of affairs in which an ideology or subject position unavoidably contains elements that are in tension. And “tension” is the right word because it can mean both pressing together and pulling apart. Antagonism, in Žižek's sense, means inseparability paired with incommensurability (to be a politically effective internal campaign pollster one must forswear politics). At his most esoteric, Žižek writes that antagonisms do not exist in what he calls “the real” (which can mean something like reality in the absence of symbols), because antagonisms are products of language (2005, 249–54). No word or set of words can say everything, and what is left unsaid in any moment will continue to torment what is said, creating the experience of antagonism—or an anxiety-producing need to say two different things at the same time (1991, 154; 1989, 21, 43, 49; 1994, 21, 26). Yet, while both things must be said, those two things, within language, always manifest as in tension with each other (in the world but not of the world, wholly God and wholly man, the mysteries of the sublime).Effacing an antagonism by reducing the saying of one thing to the saying of another—and acting as if it “resolves” the antagonism—entails giving way on one's desire. It is the construction of a cheap substitute when what is needed is not exactly the real thing itself, but the pursuit of the real thing. Hence, the pursuit of the real thing entails refusing to take a shortcut to one's desire (1989, 117–18; 1993, 60). The very idea of an “academic as public intellectual” is just such a shortcut. In it's material manifestation, it is an unstable, unsatisfying compromise that is wholly committed to neither reflection nor action. And, because it is neither one nor the other, it also cannot be both.For example, consider Fuller's account of the plight of the public intellectual. First, he explains that the “rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums.” In order to reclaim their allegedly rightful place in public discourse, Fuller argues that academics need to more carefully consider what it takes “to compete with such ‘media elites’ as professional writers, journalists, and other ‘celebrities’ for prime-time television exposure.” And what it takes, he says, is the careful cultivation of a persona that keeps some of the affectations of the academic yet is entertaining enough to attract a wide audience. Walter Lippmann, Fuller argues, is an especially good model for aspiring academics as public intellectuals because, even though he was not primarily an academic in the institutional sense of the word, he nevertheless played the part. He cultivated the public persona of “the calming presence of an all-knowing insider” as his authorizing—and entertaining—hook or gimmick, which permitted him to exercise a high degree of individual political agency. In contrast, John Dewey's problem, according to Fuller, was that he remained too singularly focused on maximizing effective citizen political participation, through various forum movements and improved public education, to the detriment of maximizing the reach of his own political voice. Thus, while Dewey may have thought of himself as something like what we call a public intellectual, he actually was not one in Fuller's sense of the word because either Dewey refused to perform a broadly entertaining persona or was simply, as a matter of temperament, not amusing or entertaining enough to effectively playact the role of the wise, trustworthy, plain-spoken professor for a mass audience.This is the same advice Stephen Hartnett gives academics who aspire to be public intellectuals. They must, as I noted in the prior article, learn to “speak clearly and look authoritative” while offering “mass-media-shaped tidbits” (2010, 81–83). The academic as public intellectual must look authoritative (play the part of an academic) while saying things that could just as well be said by a celebrity guest. The bait-and-switch quality of the academic playing the role of an academic on TV is apparent in a number of those whom Fuller identifies as public intellectual “exemplars,” particularly Noam Chomsky, Niall Ferguson, and Cornel West. Chomsky's “public intellectual” work, for example, bears only a passing resemblance to the academic research for which he is known. Hence, whatever a public audience might get from Chomsky's books about whatever the current outrage is, they should not be afforded special attention due to his renown as a professor of linguistics. Ferguson's August 2012 cover story in Newsweek arguing against the reelection of Barack Obama is a particularly egregious example of this bait-and-switch technique: he lures the audience in with the promise of rigorous academic intelligence but instead writes a deceptive account of the Affordable Care Act; no one expects the Harvard professor to be plainly dishonest (Ferguson 2012; Krugman 2012). Cornel West, the former Harvard professor who has cultivated what Fuller calls a “righteous politicized persona,” has definitely been adept at competing for the media spotlight, but it is not at all clear that his current persona promotes anything resembling what an academic is supposedly uniquely equipped to offer public discourse—namely, some sort of intellectual contribution. Together, all three become caricatures in line with the worst of what the public believes about academics—that they are unstable ideologues who pursue political agendas under the auspices of higher education.Each of them also fulfills Fuller's academic-as-public-intellectual obligation “to exploit the distinctive communicative resources afforded by all the media.” What he means by this, here and elsewhere, is that academics who want to be public intellectuals have to not only be ready with but must also promote the nickel, fifty-cent, and ten-dollar version of their “ideas” in order to maximize each idea's public reach, appeal, and effectiveness. Yet how different is the nickel version of any intellectual idea from what many other similarly minded commentators, politicians, or protestors are already saying? Is the nickel version of Chomsky much different than what is printed on T-shirts outside of World Trade Organization meetings? And, in the case of Chomsky, does his actual academic expertise intellectually ground those slogans? And how is the talk radio or morning television version of any idea ever an “intellectual” contribution to public discourse? All that is left of the intellectual is the wise or iconoclastic professor persona cultivated by the professor doing the speaking; recall the number of conservative “thinkers” on television who enact their thoughtfulness by their choice in neckwear (always a bowtie).Is Fuller not recommending something like an ironic inversion of the classic advertising line “I'm not really a doctor, but I play one on TV,” except now the professor says, “I am really a professor but, until the next commercial break, I'm just going to play one on TV”? Just as celebrities trade on their stardom to play the game of political winning and losing, academics as public intellectuals ought to trade on their scholarly persona. In other words, one plays the part of the academic intellectual but must not supply what the persona promises to deliver. And this, Fuller says, is what it means for academics as public intellectuals to adopt a style in the tradition of Voltaire and Sartre, “marked” as “thinking things through for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others”? And it therefore follows, then, in a line Fuller likes to repeat, that it is the traditional academic who is little more than “a proud ventriloquist's dummy” (2005, 100)?Yet perhaps the deeper problem is bound up with idea that the spirit of broader academic arguments or intellectual syntheses continues to live inside their stripped-down nickel versions. However, as I argued in the earlier article, every academic conclusion drawn from however rigorous or voluminous the research will necessarily (should it ever come into contact with public discourse) be reduced to a simplified metaphor or simplifying shorthand term (Welsh 2012, 17). Still, in its simplified form, it is never simply a short or a nutshell version. Rather, it is a discursive resource in its own right that becomes immediately detachable (and is detached) from its origins and takes on new and unanticipated forms, which is to say that it immediately becomes available for diverse, often opposing forms of appropriation.Consider, for example, the term “social capital” that emerged among Dewey and his followers at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly as discussed by the political scientist James Farr (2004). “Social capital,” a term that continues to be used today among certain liberals as well as conservatives, tends to be understood as a call to look for cultural, educational, institutional, and economic “investments” that might support integrated and healthy communities. At its best, it frames social life in morally rich terms of connectedness and interdependence, taking the place of morally debilitating visions of “survival of the fittest” or “winner take all.” Farr argues that that the term's continued resonance has to do with the artistic twist it gives to common words and meanings. Yet it offers more than momentary delight. It invokes a revised world with modified priorities. It is morally suggestive and a richly heuristic play on words.Hence, people can do with it something very much like what Robert Putnam (1995) suggested in his widely read article “Bowling Alone” and invest in community groups and gatherings, treating social connections as a form of capital requiring steady investment. And certain kinds of conservatives can also use the term to rationalize cohesive communities—built on the exclusion of outsiders. At the same time, opponents of social capital in either of these senses could reframe the term in order to recommend forms of community ruled by the demands of capital accumulation. Efforts at building social capital in either of the two prior senses could be cast as impeding the production of the “real” social capital, which such opponents might argue is the economic output of the members of a society. Time spent at “social clubs” and “off the job” could be presented in terms of lost economic growth or diminished hard capital, the same capital needed to pay for the social “get-togethers.” Money doesn't grow on trees, you get what you pay for, there is no such thing as a free lunch.More economically progressive uses of the term “social capital,” others could say, is just code for “socialism” (a word that has a constant presence in American political discourse, complete with images of Stalin), a tactic designed to scare citizens away from progressive reforms. All of these arguments are already in place, ready to be marshaled into service should the term “social capital” begin to seriously challenge prevailing ways of speaking in any particular way. It could even be that those most sympathetic to the diverse uses to which the term can be put should argue for setting it aside because it is simply too fraught with difficulty. Is there any other two-word combination that draws attention to the dominant political and economic tension of the twentieth century more than “social capital”? Could there be?Fuller's argument, however, is that academics can, and must try to, actively “control the public reception” of their messages. Yet once an academic's “message” is reduced to a central metaphor, control is already lost. And, in addition to it no longer being in any respect a complicating “intellectual” message or discourse, in that same moment everyone is granted the freedom to pick it up and use it quite differently than intended—all the while continuing to tout the authority of its academic provenance. Thus, once one moves from academic discourse to public discourse, the scholarly product becomes a rhetoric, and once it becomes a rhetoric it becomes just one more rhetorical pivot point susceptible to leveraging competing policies. It becomes what C. Wright Mills called a part of the sociological imagination (2000, 4–5, 48, 71).However, is this not precisely the place where rhetorical scholarship becomes most relevant to public affairs? Any rhetorical analysis or critique worthy of the name must be rooted in the recognition that private terms are more likely to become public rhetorics when diverse groups of people can imagine using them in pursuit of a wide variety of goals. Hence, there is no teacher of rhetoric that has ever claimed to have found the political message that needed to get out. Rather, as Fuller himself argues in The Intellectual, the earliest teachers of what we tend to think of as rhetoric, the Sophists (whom Fuller also refers to as the first public intellectuals), did not advance particular ideas but, instead, offered training in using ideas as rhetorical instruments in light of a student's aims (2005, 7). Fuller argues that “the sophists never understood themselves as ‘idea merchants,’ as one might characterize think-tank dwellers today or, in more elevated tones[,] … Voltaire.” “No,” Fuller clarifies, “the sophists were purveyors of certain skills and perhaps even tools” (2005, 9). Moreover, Fuller explains how “the sophists mainly wanted to help clients win lawsuits and sway public opinion, to take greater control of their fate, as befits citizens in a democracy” (2005, 9). My argument is that rhetoric scholars should see themselves in just this way—as devoted to understanding public discourse, which entails weighing the shifting and unpredictable assets and liabilities of the wide range of rhetorical resources. By seeing themselves in such a light, they provide a service to all citizens, activists, and politicians engaged in unpredictable and constantly evolving rhetorical contests for power (Welsh 2013).Perhaps the key distinction here concerns whose agency academics should be interested in promoting. Fuller says that we are doing a bad job if we are not constantly thinking about how to win support for our own particular visions of what is good or just—the academic thus needs to be a political campaign's internal pollster, strategist, and messenger all in one. Hence, Fuller is comfortable arguing that Dewey's fundamental problem was that Dewey did not see his role as either “constructing” or “bidding” for citizens' inherently malleable “beliefs and desires,” a quality of human beings that Dewey clearly recognized. Rather, like the Sophists, Dewey remained committed, as a scholar and educator, to serving the political agency of all, even if that meant not fully maximizing his own. Yet, considering the influence that the tedious, boring old Dewey had on politics and education alone, I think we can say he also did pretty well for himself—because he refused to efface the antagonism that structures academic desire and, therefore, did not give way on it.