There Is Already Something Wrong”: Toward a Rhetorical Framework for Aging

“There is Already Something Wrong”: Toward a Rhetorical Framework for Aging Rick Wysocki University of Louisville Present Tense, Vol. 6, Issue 2, 2017. http://www.presenttensejournal.org | [email protected] “There is Already Something Wrong”: Toward a Rhetorical Framework for Aging Rick Wysocki In a special issue regarding the movement to highlighting how their rhetoric extends and end aging in the Journal of Aging Studies, John A. intensifies familiar biomedical metaphors—the Vincent, Emmanuelle Tulle, and John Bond “military metaphor” and the “body-as- enjoin scholars to consider how a resistance to wetware”—and in so doing stigmatizes the aging, when accepted uncritically, occludes a aging body. While Hailee M. Gibbons has number of non-empirical, ethically-charged powerfully argued that “system[s] of compulsory conversations, including the “nature of the youthfulness” integrate both ageism and human condition,” ageism and attitudes toward ableism, framing “old and disabled people [as] the elderly, biogerontological classification, the failures” (7), I claim that the integration of the benefits and limitations of a biological basis for anti-aging sentiment with transhumanism is social policy related to the elderly, and personal particularly damaging because it lifestyle choices (292). Indeed, as we look toward renders all bodies as inherently “disabled.” In my a future in which the aged population of the conclusion, I emphasize the need to identify and United States increases (Heller, Gibbons, and develop counter-rhetorics that critique the Fisher 329), it is critical that scholars explore not stigmatization of age and aging. only the emergent movement to end aging but also the phenomenon of aging itself, and that My suggestion for a rhetorical framework for they do so from humanistic as well as scientific aging consists of three arguments. First, because perspectives. However, while readers of Present aging tends to be framed as a deviation from Tense would surely agree that rhetoricians are the solid, stable, supposedly “normal” state of well equipped for such a task, aging remains an the body, aging and its effects are frequently under-discussed topic in our field. linked implicitly or explicitly to disability and/or disease, often by way of metaphor. I will In response, I offer in this essay a conceptual illuminate this by examining two specific framework for analyzing rhetorical constructions metaphors below, but would first like to declare of age and aging. Drawing from both disability my methodological stance toward metaphor studies and the rhetoric of health and medicine, more generally. Much of our discipline’s I take as a guiding assumption that aging is, to discussion of metaphor has been influenced by some degree, constructed and negotiated Lakoff and Johnson’s Cognitive Metaphor through the linguistic articulation of the body. Theory (CMT), which argues from a cognitivist After explaining this framework, I employ it to perspective that “the way we think, what we provide a brief rhetorical analysis of two experience, and what we do every day is very transhumanist proponents of the anti-aging much a matter of metaphor . [and this] is not movement, Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil, something we are usually aware of” (3). Scholars 1 of disability studies, however, have critiqued temporarily) able-bodied individual” and acts as certain ableist assumptions of CMT. Amy Vidali, a “normative mandate . to uphold the fiction for example, criticizes the “preponderance of of perfection and to generate the systematic ablebodied metaphors”—which CMT tends to self- and other-surveillance and bodily discipline draw from and works to naturalize—and argues of normative processes” (23). Gibbons, that CMT reflects “a refusal to recognize and furthermore, has reworked these concepts to include disability, both as human experience address aging specifically and to theorize and metaphoric phenomenon” (41). Similarly, compulsory youthfulness, “the social mandate Sami Shaulk writes that CMT “assumes that there to maintain the ideals of youthfulness in regards can be no common cultural metaphors based to ability, memory, health, appearance, activity, upon the experiences of tremors, stuttering, or energy, sexuality, and social roles throughout using a wheelchair because these experiences the life course, including in later life” (5). While it are regarded as random, accidental, and is misleading to conflate disability and aging, 1 I idiosyncratic.” My approach to examining the do find that disability studies offers a useful rhetoric of aging, taking these insights into conceptual apparatus for addressing the consideration, emphasizes that there is nothing rhetoric of aging. Specifically, I suggest that “natural” or determined about the metaphors, or compulsory pressures similar to those produced the language generally, we use to discuss aging. by certain rhetorics regarding disability are Rather, our language reflects, and to some operative in arguments for resisting aging. More degree (re)inscribes, understandings of the broadly, and drawing on McRuer, Dolmage, and aging body. Gibbons, I assert that this language can work to construct and circulate particular Second, neither age nor the aging process understandings of age and aging, making those contains fixed meanings, values, or possible understandings more or less visible. interpretations, but is capable of shifting and being shifted, often through rhetorical Third, any particular rhetoric of aging, though performance. As Robert McRuer points out, never existing in a vacuum or outside relations “Visibility and invisibility are not . fixed of power, is contestable precisely because it is attributes that somehow permanently attach to not a natural phenomenon. Therefore, these any identity”; they are moved by forces such as articulations should not be regarded as politics, economics, and—of course—language determined or deterministic. I will return to this (2). Theorizing “compulsory able-bodiedness,” last point in my conclusion as a way of charting McRuer argues that individuals are compelled to futures for how we, as rhetoricians, might shore up and demonstrate their own supposed attempt to approach questions of aging in our lack of disability, foregrounding “ability” as a work in productive and potentially ameliorative performative act rather than an objective matter ways. Primarily, however, I will illustrate the first of being (9, 19). Visible disability, then, becomes two points of my framework by providing a brief coded as a flaw in character, an inability to fulfill rhetorical analysis of the anti-aging rhetoric of the demands of able-bodied identity flexibly de Grey and Kurzweil and considering their (23). Jay Timothy Dolmage does similar work uptake of biomedical metaphors. In doing so, I with the term normate, which “designates the outline how the authors construct a particular subject position of the supposedly (or 2 (and potentially dangerous) rhetoric that links categorizing it into a simple value system” and aging to disability and disease. the latter asserting that the use of the military metaphor works to persuade patients and Both de Grey and Kurzweil are representative of doctors to employ increasingly invasive a “transhuman” turn in scientific-medical treatment procedures (Sulik 75; Segal [Health] thought that posits a moral imperative for 124). ending not only senescence—the deleterious effects that accompany old age—but also the It is unavoidably clear that de Grey and Kurzweil aging process itself.2 Their arguments, repurpose the military metaphor in their furthermore, highlight key features of the discussions of the aging body. De Grey framework discussed above, as their use of vociferously critiques mainstream metaphor makes certain conceptions of the biogerontology’s attempt “to dissect the aging aging body visible in ways that are often process in order to understand it—just not in problematic, in this case wedding aging to a order to combat it” and claims that “scientists form of biologically-ordained disability and/or could solve the problem of mitochondrial disease that must be eradicated and mutations by copying mitochondrial DNA from “normalized.” Though the prolix public its vulnerable spot at ‘ground zero,’ within the discourse produced by de Grey and Kurzweil is free radical generating mitochondria, into worthy of analysis, I focus here on each author’s the bomb shelter of the cell nucleus, where seminal text: Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation damage to DNA occurs far less frequently” (22, Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in 39, all emphases mine). In doing so, he clearly our Lifetime 3 and The Singularity is Near: When associates both senescence and aging generally Humans Transcend Biology, respectively. By with acts of violence and terrorism. The attending to these monographs, rather than the metaphoric relation of ending aging with public discourses themselves, I treat the texts as military action becomes almost suffocating, points of rhetorical formation, as sites where the however, in de Grey’s brief final chapter, “War ideas now promoted more publicly by their Bonds for the Campaign Against Aging.” As the authors were inscribed. title suggests, de Grey makes use of incredibly bellicose rhetoric in the chapter, writing, for One rhetorical feature of their inscriptions, the example, that “Once the War on Aging begins, it military metaphor, has been well discussed both must end in victory, and the future of indefinite

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