Rhetoric for Becoming Otherwise

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts RHETORIC FOR BECOMING OTHERWISE: LIFE, LITERATURE, GENEALOGY, FLIGHT A Dissertation in English by Abram D. Anders © 2009 Abram D. Anders Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2009 ii The dissertation of Abram D. Anders was reviewed and approved* by the following: Richard M. Doyle Professor of English and Science, Technology and Society Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Jeffrey T. Nealon Liberal Arts Research Professor of English Xiaoye You Assistant Professor of English and Asian Studies Robert A. Yarber, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art Robert R. Edwards Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature Department of English Graduate Director *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT Rhetoric for Becoming Otherwise begins with the Isocratean premise that thought, speech, writing are best understood as bridges between the already said of language and the emerging circumstances that are the occasions for their production. This argument is rehearsed across a variety of domains and instances following Isocrates exhortation that the rhetorician or practitioner of philosophia can only model the movement of discourse without expecting to provide any “true knowledge” or “absolute theory” for how to encounter the problematics of an endlessly deferred present. As a matter of rhetoric, becoming otherwise is the continually renewed task of creating something new from the resources of language and for the demands of an ever deferred present—Presocratics versus Classicists (Chapter 1). As a matter of health, becoming otherwise is the necessity of overcoming limitation and suffering in order to achieve new norms of health and pursue the ever changing opportunities of a self‐developing capacity for producing new capacities—Normativity versus Normalization (Chapter 2). In terms of literature, becoming otherwise is the diagnosis of constraint in the form of the orientations of habit and the contestation of the socializing force of all interpretive schemes as the means of multiplying possibilities for action— Countergridlock versus Gridlock (Chapter 3). As genealogy, becoming otherwise requires the patient examination of the forces of the past that seek to colonize the future in order to discover new modes of ethical subjectivity for the present—the reoccurrence of the body and the repetition of its difference versus the rule of law and the right to desire (Chapter 4). As an ecstatic practice, becoming otherwise is the affirmation of the impossible task of discovering a way through fields of force and lines of flight that offer no intelligibility outside of their unfolding paths of discovery and experimentation—sorcerers versus priests (Chapter 5). Ultimately, my dissertation seeks to multiply and intensify available tools for navigating imbrications of power/knowledge, to map a series of ways through reactive formations of thought, to affirm the impossible task of becoming otherwise. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES …………………………………………………………….. v LIST OF FIGURES …………………………………………………………… vi INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1: GYMNASTICS OF THE SOUL ….……………………………. 32 Isocrates/Socrates ……………………………………………………... 34 Isocrates/Aristotle …………………………………………………….. 39 A Creative Task ……………………………………………………….. 42 Rhetoric/Health ……………………………………………………….. 44 Chapter 2: THE RIGHT TO LIFE ……………………………………. ……. 48 The Failure of Rights Discourse ……………………………………… 57 The Normalizing Technology ………………………………………… 67 Institutional Critique and Continued Dangers …………………….. 78 Becoming Otherwise ………………………………………………….. 84 Health/Possibility ……………………………………………………... 87 Chapter 3: EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING …………………………………… 92 Belief/Orientation ……………………………………………………… 100 Perspective by Incongruity …………………………………………… 113 Counter/Gridlock …………………………………………………….... 123 Possibility/Ethics ……………………………………………………… 133 Chapter 4: BECOMING ‘WHAT ONE IS’ ………………………………… 137 Care of the Self: the Recovery of the Body ………………………….. 141 Will to Power – A Discipline of Health ……………………………… 154 The Dread of Destiny, Approaching Thanatos ……………………… 170 Nietzsche’s Becoming History and the Question of the Real …….. 182 Ethics/Flight …………………………………………………………… 194 Chapter 5: ECSTATIC PRACTICE ………………………………………… 200 “Did I really fly?” ……………………………………………………… 203 Authority/Passion – The Regime of Apprenticeship ………………. 211 Rhythm/Refrain – Techniques of Non‐Ordinary States …………… 220 The Castaneda Series ………………………………………………….. 236 CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………….. 240 WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………….. 264 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1: CHAPTERS AS SERIES ……………………………………………. 31 Table 2: SEVERAL PLANES OF IMMANENCE …........................................ 263 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: INTRODUCTION ………..………………………………………. 1 Figure 2: CHAPTER 1 ………………..……………………………………… 32 Figure 3: CHAPTER 2 …………………..…………………………………… 48 Figure 4: CHAPTER 3 ……………………..………………………………… 92 Figure 5: CHAPTER 4 ………………………..……………………………… 137 Figure 6: CHAPTER 5 …………………………..…………………………… 200 Figure 7: CONCLUSION …..……………………………………………….. 240 1 INTRODUCTION Figure 1: INTRODUCTION∗ ∗ Each major section of this dissertation begins with a figure portraying the differential forces of individual word incidences in that section. All figures have been produced using the web service, http://www.wordle.net: “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text” (Feinberg). 2 Though the present study deals with a set of topics common across recorded human history (rhetoric, health, ethics, thought), the historically unique contexts and materials by which they are explored lead into and out of the 1960s. Writing in the midst of the social and political upheavals of their day, the primary conceptual personae of each chapter (Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and Carlos Castaneda) sought to construct a means of becoming otherwise as the solution to an impossible task: to overcome the recursive, self‐reinforcing imbrications of Western regimes of power and knowledge.1 The most obvious version of the primary problematics of this period might be schematized as follows: the need to become otherwise arose out of both collective and individual rejections of the paternalist interventions of a state form dedicated to governmentality and its mechanisms of scientific/rationalist control. Together they comprised a technology of normalization which sought simultaneously to reproduce itself on the basis of its own effects and to regulate the health of the socius through mechanisms of 1 “It is possible that the conceptual persona only rarely or allusively appears for himself. Nevertheless, he is there, and however nameless and subterranean, he must always be reconstituted by the reader … conceptual personae carry out the movements that describe the author’s plane of immanence, and they play a part in the very creation of the author’s concepts” (What is Philosophy? 63). 3 quarantine and intervention. Popular expressions of discontent developed along two divergent but complementary trajectories: counter‐political demonstrations sought to contest the effects of power, while counter‐cultural experimentations and provocations sought new means of producing meaning effects. Contestations of political power tended towards mass protestations against overt forms of political power and claims for inclusion and protection of excluded identity groups. Counter‐cultural efforts inaugurated an insurrection against hegemonic forms in art, music, popular culture, and above all lifestyle choices. On one hand, a molar, collective resistance against the form of the law and on the other, a molecular, individuated insurrection against rational modes of understanding the self. Meanwhile, emergent forms of poststructuralist or postmodernist theory became increasingly focused on the problem finding a way out of the impasse of working within the resources of a language and tradition of thought that seemed to offer only the repetition of the same: the pursuit of the logocentric imperatives of rationalism, truth, and identity with their concomitant dependence on a host of binary oppositions that were becoming increasingly problematic. Furthermore, thinkers like Foucault and Deleuze recuperated Nietzschean thought, leading to a renewed interest in the tools of genealogy, the analysis of differentials of power, and a fundamental 4 recognition of language, itself, as force. All told, across a wide range of practices of resistance to power (individual, political, theoretical, etc.), it became clear that the primary task for the future was to learn how to become otherwise using the forces as well as the semantics of language, i.e. rhetoric. As the story is often told of the United States, while counter‐political efforts had success in influencing popular opinion and government policies and in securing a wider range of social and legal accommodations for many Other‐ed identities, the molecular pursuit of an anti‐rationalist politics of the self and the molar politics of resistance were ultimately a dead end. Co‐opted through the fetishizations of consumerist markets and often too disorganized and undisciplined to “make a difference,” the Yippies of the 60s are often understood as transforming themselves all too easily into the Yuppies of the 80s.2 However, it might be more accurate to say that through

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