UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title I'm (Not) Listening: Rhetoric and Political Rationalities of Self and Other Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/46f6484f Author Hunt, Richard L. Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE I’m (Not) Listening: Rhetoric and Political Rationalities of Self and Other A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Richard Lewis Hunt August 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Vorris L. Nunley, Chairperson Dr. Steven Gould Axelrod Prof. Nalo Hopkinson Copyright by Richard Lewis Hunt 2016 The Dissertation of Richard Lewis Hunt is approved: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express appreciation to the entire graduate community in UCR’s Department of English, including graduate students, administrators, and faculty alike, all of whom helped make the department feel like home; I am truly grateful to have been a member of such an incredibly professional, collegial, and engaged academic community. The same must be said of my time working at the Graduate Writing Center and with GradSuccess. My deepest thanks to all of my committee members, past and present. Your contributions have made this dissertation what it is (with the exceptions, of course, of any foibles, mistakes, or inaccuracies, which are entirely my own). Finally, none of this would have been possible without my incredible, supportive family and my loving and wildly patient partner Pam. An entirely separate and equally long manuscript would need to be written to begin to catalogue the many ways I have been and continue to be enriched by having each of you in my life. Without a doubt, this dissertation is yours, too. iv For Doran Ray Hunt, who always, I believe, saw me with a PhD and who never let me forget it For Peter John Eiden, the landmark/rock who helped keep me from drifting too far up the coast in the heavy south swell of doctoral study and For Lorraine Kay Jolley, simply my hero without whom, not. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION I’m (Not) Listening: Rhetoric and Political Rationalities of Self and Other by Richard Lewis Hunt Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, August 2016 Dr. Vorris L. Nunley, Chairperson In “I'm (Not) Listening: Rhetoric and Political Rationalities of Self and Other,” my primary aim is to explore and theorize the collective, social nature of listening, with a particular emphasis on the role that power plays in shaping listening processes and practices. While a robust body of scholarship is currently being developed around numerous aspects of listening, few of these studies seek to understand the social, political, and ontological forces shaping the processes of public, collective, democratic listening. Over four chapters, I attempt to make legible these forces and their effects through analyzing various representations and instances of listening in a wide variety of subject matter, including (in this order) poetry, science fiction novels, African-American rhetoric, and public discourse surrounding race. Centrally, I investigate the possibilities of communication across perceived differences, such as those of race, gender, and culture, emphasizing how our very understandings of the nature of human being govern which vi persons and groups are commonly given a listening and whose voices are effectively rendered inaudible in the public sphere and everyday life. A central aim of my dissertation is to analyze key political rationalities in public discourse that govern what it means to listen and what is sayable, as well as who is authorized to speak and under what terms. In this vein, I argue that listening must be understood as not merely a physiological effect, but as thoroughly ontological, always- already historically situated, and invariably inflected by power. And if indeed listening must be understood as ontological, as bound up with particular understandings of being and the human, then any given conception of listening plays a role in constituting a particular kind of subjectivity and buttressing that subject’s borders against the ontologies of the other. In one important sense, then, to listen is to necessarily expose the self to some measure of risk and to expose one’s ontology to the possibility of transformation. This project overall, therefore, works to outline the fundamentals of a grammar of listening and to analyze the complex interrelationships among language, listening, subjectivity, and human sociality. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................. IV ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ......................................................................... VI INTRODUCTION: I’M (NOT) AFFECTED: REASON, THE SUBJECT, AND THE DANGERS OF LISTENING .............................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE: ‘NEWSPAPER HEADLINE RADIO BRAIN’: GINSBERG, LOWELL, AND THE MEDIATED SUBJECT ............................................................... 26 CHAPTER TWO: SCIENCE FICTION, COMMUNICATION, AND THE REPRESENTATION AND NEGOTIATION OF DIFFERENCE .................................. 87 CHAPTER THREE: MAKING A WAY OUT OF NO WAY: AFRICAN-AMERICAN RHETORIC, ONTOLOGY, AND THE RHETORIC OF BECOMING ....................... 164 CHAPTER FOUR: MECHANISMS OF NOT-LISTENING: THE BLACK TROPE AS RHETORICAL VIRUS IN THE KILLING OF TRAYVON MARTIN ........................ 238 CONCLUSION: MAKING WORLDS TOGETHER: IMPLICATIONS AND APPLICATIONS FOR THE POLITICS OF LISTENING ............................................ 290 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 319 APPENDIX ..................................................................................................................... 334 viii INTRODUCTION: I’m (Not) Affected: Reason, the Subject, and the Dangers of Listening “We are the instruments of our instruments. And we are necessarily susceptible to the particular ills that result from our prowess in the ways of symbolicity. Yet, too, we are equipped in principle to join in the enjoying of all such quandaries, until the last time” (Burke, Language as Symbolic Action viii). “That which is to be grasped by the eye makes itself normative in knowing” (Heidegger, “Science and Reflection” 166). Listening offers a conceptual wealth of semantic and analytic possibilities. The term evokes, on one hand, a space of pleasure, of possibility, of connection, of immersion in a perceptual openness, an affective receptivity that registers not only aurally, but as broader somatic resonances affecting our emotions, our consciousness, our very sense of being in/with/against-the-world. On another hand, listening implies a chore, a deliberate effort, a kind of being-present that often entails discomfort, and perhaps even an ethical commitment, a vow, and an investment in a particular ontology, a particular presence of Being.1 Broadly speaking, these are the preoccupations that drive this project. To what are we given to listen, and why? To whom, and when? How? To what effects, for cultural production, for human relationships and communities, and for our very understanding of 1 For my discussions of ontology as it relates to rhetoric and listening, I have in mind specifically Heidegger, for whom human being (Dasein) is always an interpretation, and the interpretation of being human is fundamental to that Being (25-7). This is, in a certain sense, a fundamentally rhetorical insight. Heidegger thus resonates deeply with (literally) ancient lines of rhetorical thought, as represented by Protagoras’ famous dictum, “Man is the measure of all things,” for example. 1 Being and “the human?” If, as Kenneth Burke has argued, literature is equipment for living, what might it mean to think of literature and rhetorical theory as equipment for listening, and as tropological terrain for Being? This dissertation begins with intersections between rhetoric, ontology, ideology, subjectivity, and various tropes and theories of listening. I then deploy some of the insights generated at these intersections to a range of texts from Allen Ginsberg’s poetry through discourses on race and violence that circulated around the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. In this introduction, I will: provide an overview of my theoretical framework; outline key concepts, methods, and aims; suggest a series of integral research questions guiding the project; and finally sketch out a trajectory for this dissertation across four interrelated chapters. Theoretical Framework Broadly speaking, this project posits the concept of listening as a receptive, affective, physiological, and ideological practice. Fundamentally, I seek to engage listening as both methodology and subject of inquiry. According to Adrienne Janus, Jean- Luc Nancy’s focus in his brief but penetrating book Listening “is to suggest the conditions of possibility for an ontology, an epistemology, a philosophical style of thinking and writing based in listening as a mode of attending to the resonances that penetrate, reverberate between,