In this chapter I will examine some of the theories about mass culture that were contemporary with the beats, and some of the literature they were examining in order to provide a full picture of the beats as rhetorical. Although many of the mass culture theories that I will discuss did not directly influence the beats, the exigencies of these scholars are based on similar exigencies — most notably concern about making the world intelligible and valuable for others.
Their concern for appropriate human communication led to the development of a latent rhetorical theory for the preservation of human society. For the most part, many of the critiques that both Kerouac and Ginsberg make of the modern situation is that the human presence is absent.
This means that interactivity is replaced with some intermediary element, be it technology, distance, or the illusion of immediacy. The critique is long-ranging, and covers a number of different works from each author.
Study this light. This is the light that you feel. Pic brings us the comments of the preacher mediated through his observations, almost as if the older media were viewing a critique of the newer media.
The preacher notes prominently that the light from the television is information, not just a neutral passageway for information to reach audiences. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the content of any medium is always another medium.
The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. Most central is the idea that the machinery itself changes the way information is processed. McLuhan suggests that there is no bottom to a medium. The closest one can get is abstract thought. Light from the television — which the preacher wants us to study — is information.
Nobody knows! The prose here is suggestive of connection, but the direction remains ambivalent. According to Pic, everyone in the crowd, stopped paying attention and thought about the relationship of the new technologies, unconcerned about the more traditional religious message that followed.
But casting television as one of the potential exigencies that constitute a rhetorical situation is helpful in identifying the beats as responding to this exigency. Of course, television only represents a small proportion of the mass mediation of the period. The confluence of mass media technologies and anxiety about their connections created an exigence that demanded explanation. For other scholars writing around the same time, like Marshall McLuhan, the period represented a change in the manner of information transfer and production.
Radio in particular has encouraged the return to the panel discussion and the round table. I think that the beats can be seen as discussing some of these changes as well. The rhetors that I am discussing as the sources of the beat rhetorical theory, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, attempted in many works to point out the forms and meaning offered by mass culture, attempting to account for dangerous linkages.
The exigence is always a combination of shared events in the society and culture as well as internal choices and positioning by the rhetor.
As Consigny points out, the rhetor can be evaluated by how well he or she moves the fixities of the situation around through the contingency of the moment. Are you going to let your emotional life be run by time Magazine? Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. The entire stanza is direct address at America, and ends with self-criticism, furthering the anxiety about the effects of mass mediation — not even the previously obvious distinctions between speaker and audience seem to hold steady.
The critic cannot be attentive to every aspect of the text. Any inclusion is an exclusion, ad infinitum. All the rhetorical critic can do is indicate how well the text identifies, conveys and speaks to the exigence that is chosen. In this case the poem highlights and brings forward the anxieties of dependence on mass mediated sources. The poem might also offer implicit critiques or ironic reads of other poetic styles, however the concern in this study is not poetic form, but rhetorical theory.
And it has to preserve terms for honoring the sheer exemplary impact of distinctive eloquent performance. In rhetorical criticism, the critic can and should seek out these moments. His concern, after all, was with criticism, not empirical measurement. Focusing criticism on effects meant that the questions critics were to ask were about the relationship between the text and its possible effects.
What does the text reveal about the effects its author might have been seeking? How does the construction of the text invite certain reactions and discourage others?
What frame of reference does the text assume and how does this compare with the frame attributed to the audience? What role might this specific text play in a more comprehensive campaign to modify attitudes or behavior?
Who are the various possible audiences for the speech? These are examples of critical questions that relate to effects.
They involve interpretation and judgment, not measurement. They are answerable not by empirical observation but by reasoned argument. If it is only limited to the effect that it has on the audience, we can lose implications in the text such as relations to discourses that have come before it, are contemporaneous with it, or are implicitly drawn upon.
I do agree with the idea that rhetorical criticism is an argument, but it should not be limited to merely effects that the audience embodies.
Instead, the argument should be a construction of the importance of a reading of the text, which connects rhetorical criticism to hermeneutics.
In their essay calling for a re-assessment of the hermeneutic tradition and rhetoric, Michael J. Hyde and Craig R.
Rhetoric is the working out of understanding, as they trace from the hermeneutic tradition through life lived in language. If this understanding of the hermeneutic and rhetoric is combined with the understanding of exigence and rhetoric that I argued earlier, a sense of the function of criticism can be established.
Criticism can be seen as advocacy of meanings from within a text based upon the understanding of the text. This activity can be extended quite far — as Burke would have it to all living things — but rhetorical criticism has a more narrow focus.
Rhetorical criticism is the passing of judgement on this meaning making, not just effect-itveness as Zarefsky indicates, but qualitative judgment as well. What equally well solicits our attention is that there is a second persona also implied by a discourse, and that persona is an implied auditor.
What the critic can find projected by the discourse is the image of a man, and though that man may never find actual embodiment, it is still a man that the image is of. This condition makes moral judgment possible, and it is at this point in the process of criticism that it can illuminatingly be rendered.
Using this idea of criticism, one can expose the implicit theories about who or what the rhetoric pushes the auditor or reader to be. Once that can be identified, then I believe a theory of rhetoric can be extrapolated from it.
This is not a universal claim about criticism, but more a method for studying the beat rhetoric. Some of the Ginsberg poem that I have been discussing in this chapter can be read through my understanding of criticism to get a sense of what I will do in future chapters.
Ginsberg produced a lot of prose in the form of essays that specifically reference the exigence of mass media. That is, Ginsberg critiques the mass media for limiting discursive options. This is a critique of the rhetoric of mass media, which Ginsberg responds to with his own poetic-rhetoric, as can be seen in the stanza discussed above. The poem and the essay both, through a mixed combination of style, and oddly combined concepts seem to push the reader not so much toward a particular political position, but a re-evaluation of political positions that are available.
Ginsberg and Kerouac were questioning not the position people took about issues such as mass culture, but instead how those positions were formed. They brought into question the manner in which people judged these issues. In order to read the beats as rhetorical theorists, an appreciation for some of their rhetorical environment should be established. The beats were writing in a complex period which hosted a huge number of discursive trajectories, from civil rights to mass media, and from consumer society to international nuclear politics.
What I will examine are the lines that are closely related to what Kerouac and Ginsberg were writing about, as well as some of the lines of rhetoric influencing them from other avenues. To begin I will examine the limits of the discursive, and what counts as discourse for the purposes of this study, as well as the terms communication and rhetoric.
All three terms and their understanding have important implications for this study. These distinctions are important because they provide a structure for the understanding of culture, society, and human motivation.
It is my contention that Ginsberg and Kerouac wrote as an intervention into rhetoric and communication as they saw it in the s. The study of communication has a very long and complicated history that I do not propose to wrestle with here. We assume that the origins of communication reside in necessity and utility. John D. Communication theory claims this zone. In this James was right. That we can never communicate like the angels is a tragic fact, but also a blessed one.
A sounder vision is of the felicitous impossibility of contact. Communication failure, again, does not mean we are lonely zombies searching for soul mates: it means we have new ways to related and to make worlds with each other.
My emphasis on the debt that the dream of communication owes to ghosts and strange eros is intended as a corrective to a truism that is still very much alive: that the expansion of means leads to the expansion of minds. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg left copious notes on their ideas about process, problems, and approaches to the art of getting what you mean across to others. In this study the term communication will refer to this rich and Peters, Peters, 9. I argue that these various modes of interacting and thinking, driven by the need to communicate, are rhetoric.
To challenge what is found to be good human interaction and good persuasion is itself rhetorical. The beats saw humans as communicative beings, fundamentally and centrally pressed to express their spirits and minds through expression, both performative and textual.
Their concern in the s was the evaporation of what they felt were necessary human means of interaction and communication. For John Lardas, this idea provides the exigence for the rise of the beats as a response to communicative corruption. George A. They believed that language, the substance of reality, had been corrupted. Still, the beats were cautiously optimistic that if a more conservative and human focus was given to mass communication it had the potential to save humanity from self- destruction.
Although not complete rejecters of the mass society, they participated only as a way of connecting with broader audiences. Kerouac had a deep commitment to Catholicism, although he read his belief through an autodidactic Buddhism. His interest in Buddhism was a continuation and rejection of his past beliefs, both Spenglerian and Catholic.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, , The Beats were interested in literature, art, and poetry but also politics, issues of class, sexuality and gender. The beats saturated themselves with philosophy and literature of all kinds. One way that rhetoricians can seek to understand connections between all of these different interests is to examine them using the concept of ideology. What is ideology?
This question has been examined from literary and philosophical perspectives by several influential theorists. I do believe, however, that each of us has erred to the extent that we have conceived the rubrics of symbolism as an alternative rather than supplemental description of political consciousness. Ideology and rhetoric are nearly inseparable in their function. The ideograph is an operationalized unit of ideology for the purposes of doing larger rhetorical criticism of society and cultural norms.
The beats, seen through ideographic moments, can be seen as rhetorically creating sites of contested meaning in order to bring attention to the problems they perceive in contemporary communication.
I blend both concepts in my method because the beats were very conscious of the material. Kerouac highlights the geography of America in his writings, often using materiality or the trace of material practices around him in order to develop his work. I would like to situate these rhetorical understandings of ideology with Sacvan Bercovitch, who offers a unique formulation of the relationship between rhetoric and ideology within the United States. Bercovitch is interested in the particular operation of ideology, language, and literature in the United States.
This is not toward exceptionalist ends per se, but more toward the ends of how and why exceptionalism rises as a discursive form in America. For Bercovitch, the primary motivating force in human affairs is ideology. For him, ideology serves as the terrain in which culture can be best understood: In its usual meaning ideology precludes dialogue.
It implies a programmatic exclusivism, a closed system developed in opposition to alternative explanations and militantly committed to its particular set of truths.
To deny the links between ideology and art is one such form of exclusivity. To see the problematic inescapability of those links may enable Johnson, Davi. This, as we shall see, puts Bercovitch in conversation with Kenneth Burke, and also with the Beats. The common link is rhetoric — as Bercovitch explains, the way ideology holds its key place of exclusivity is through defining the alternatives out via persuasive framing: Ideology, we have seen, arises out of historical circumstances, and then re-presents these, rhetorically and conceptually, as though they were natural, universal, inevitable, and right; as though the ideals promulgated by a certain group or class.
The act of representation thus serves to consecrate a set of cultural limitations, to recast a certain society as Society, a certain way of life as utopia in process.
For it is framing that leads to the success of any ideology. Ideology must portray itself as fact, truth, or nature or else is allows for a space of reconsideration. Ideology is at its best when it does not appear to be ideology. Bercovitch argues here that the currency of ideology is the symbolic — that is, the realm of the standing in for, standing up for, or standing in place of.
It [rhetoric] is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America New York: Routledge, , The rhetorical critic identifies and explicates these connections by attending to both ideographs and memes as they emerge in practices and texts. Bercovitch argues that ideology, as he defines it would be at the heart of the symbol- using-animal, as Burke calls human beings: In each case, freedom is a function of consensus.
And lest I seem to have exempted myself form that process, I would like to declare the principles of my own ideological dependence.
I hold these truths to be self-evident: that there is no escape from ideology; that so long as human beings remain political animals they will always be bounded in some degree by consensus; and that so long as they are symbol-making animals they will always seek to persuade themselves and others that in some sense, by relative measure if not absolutely, the terms of their symbology are objective and true.
In the previous quotation Bercovitch points to literary and poetic texts as the exemplars of ideological thought and action. It secularizes the scope and direction of the auto-machia; it recasts self-creation in terms of exegesis; and it obviates the traditional dialectic between secular and sacred selfhood by fusing both in the framework of auto-American-biography.
For both Edwards and Emerson, the image of the New World invests the regenerate perceiver with an aura of ascendant millennial splendor. This is a connection throughout American history since colonization.
He argues instead that it serves as the prototypical social ritual performed to make sense of situations for Americans. But through all change the persistence of the rhetoric attests to an astonishing cultural hegemony, one that the rhetoric itself reflected and shaped. This is the way Bercovitch sees rhetoric — as the maintainer of cultural beliefs and a cultural practice in itself.
The answer is in the special status of American ideology, an ideology constructed upon and around consensus to argue: The American ideology suggests something almost allegorical — some abstract corporate monolith — whereas in fact the American ideology reflects a particular set of interests, the power structures and conceptual forms of liberal society in the United States, as these evolved through three centuries of conflict, upheaval, transformation, and discontinuity.
For all its manifold contradictions, it is an example par excellence of the successful interaction between restriction and release. The American consensus model works so well, he argues because there is discursive play between key words. No matter if a text is conservative or radical, the consensus model of ideology means that both sides will use the same terminology at the root of the difference. The beats are writing and working within a rhetorical environment that will terministically limit their project.
It has to do, in other words, with being for or against intelligence itself. A thousand conferences, agencies, committees, and newspapers alerted the country to the danger. Juvenile delinquency was the only rebellion around, and it had to be stopped. It demonstrates the capacities of culture to shape the subversive in its own image, and thereby, within limits, to be shaped in turn by the radicalism it seeks to contain. The pliability of his call, since it is rooted in the consensus-driven American ideological discourse, allows some play to more radical notions — such as communitarianism — but only if they remain within the confines of the American consensus ideology.
How radical, individualistic notions of the American subject could be motivated at the root by an implicit decision as to what is central and important seems paradoxical. Here Bercovitch clarifies how consensus works to raise the fences of the American ideology. And, there should be little surprise that rhetoric is involved: Hence the importance of the rhetoric of consensus. It served then, as always, to blur such discrepancies. But in doing so, the rhetoric provides us with a map of social reality that is no less accurate in its way than any quantitative chart.
It locates the sources of social revitalization and integration. It helps explain how the majority of people kept the faith despite their day-by-day experiences. It reminds us that although the concept of hegemony involves the dialectics of change, the directions of change Teichgraeber, Richard.
New York: Basic Books, , He suggests a complex model of ideology and rhetoric as a sort of feedback loop: Ideology sets the limitations and the constraints of permissible action within the society.
Rhetoric frames these limits persuasively as natural, good, or even paradoxically as revolution, revolt or escape. Rhetoric supplies the necessary pliancy within the grip of ideology that prevents the complete turnover of the ideology of the society on a daily basis. For without it, the cracks in the ideological regime would provide stark inconsistencies, contradictions and impossible limitations that would prohibit people from getting on with their day.
In short, this would lead to the destabilization of society and the inability for community to form at all.
Americans honor their Revolution as the shaping influence in their history, ye they shrink from accepting revolution as a defining American characteristic; or more typically, they accept it by contrasting the American Revolution with other modern revolutions. Bercovitch argues later in his book that the key move for radicals is to dispense with having the debate or discussion come down to consensus- driven American values.
In his example of early feminist argument, Bercovitch points out that it is nearly impossible to bend the key terms away from the superstructure of ideology no matter how the argument is offered: Probably some of these feminists believed that they were merely using patriotism, manipulating the rhetoric of the republic for ulterior radical ends. But if so, they were miscalculating the relation of ends and means. In effect as events proved , they were conforming to a ritual of consensus that defused all issues in debate by restricting the debate itself, symbolically and substantively, to the meaning of America.
This is a problem we will see when it comes to what the Beats offer. However, the Beats come up in what is quite literally a discursive stew of rhetorical commonplaces in the discursive stew of explanations and accounts in the post-war U. Their works are characterized by an unmediated relation between the facts of American life and the ideals of liberal free enterprise.
Confronted with the inadequacies of their society, they turned for solace and inspiration to its social ideals. It was not that they lacked radical energies, but that they had invested these in a vision which reinforced because it emanated from the values of their culture.
In these and other key instances, the autonomous act that might have posed fundamental alternatives, imaginative or actual, became instead a mimesis of cultural norms. The reason why, as he elucidates in this David Harlan. Instead, only surface ideological conflicts come under examination, and one can never work around the pervasive rhetorical typology Bercovitch identifies.
The post-war crisis of American rhetoric, identity and ideology was the moment where two of the founding members of the Beat Generation articulated their ideological vision for America, Americans and humanity within the technological, cultural and social whirlwind that the United States found itself in after As Gerald Nicosia frames the situation from the perspective of Jack Kerouac: On a ride to Grand Island, Nebraska, listening to an old rancher talk about men who rode the rails during the Depression, Jack noted that his own life was falling in with another American tradition, that of the man who moves on out of necessity, when living conditions in one place become unbearable, or when the land itself can no longer support life.
The power of the atomic bomb made America both great and threatening. No matter how complex and self contradictory the social text, the individual was supposed to read it and choose correctly. New York: Grove Press, Scott and Christopher D. Geist, eds. Henriksen, Dr. Durham and London: Duke University Press, , The atomic bomb could be seen as the ultimate of these contradictory rhetorical commonplaces. The bomb ensured peace by guaranteeing ultimate destruction. The building of extremely efficient weapons of death was seen as only appropriate to preserve American purity and goodness against external threats: The chaos of a world threatened by disease, poverty, and an expanding Soviet sphere of influence impelled America toward interventionism and military preparedness.
A war-torn world swarming with displaced and destitute persons was perceived as vulnerable to the revolutionary doctrines of Soviet communism, and such vulnerability imperiled America: the only way to preserve the security of a free and pure American way of life in an era of lost geographic isolation was to create a world amenable to American ideologies. People faced a situation where it was necessary to praise the destructive as the thing that would prevent devastation.
As Henriksen explains, the Truman administration was quite good at developing the foundations of this rhetoric: Truman crafted an American conception of the cold war world which precluded any other response than the one he offered: a limitless American defense of freedom whenever and wherever it was threatened by the enslaving forces of communism.
Truman spoke gloomily of a world frighteningly and dangerously but clearly divided between the purveyors of good and evil, light and darkness. Having cleaved the world into diametrically opposed camps, Truman committed America to a policy of containing the communist camp and defending the democratic camp against contamination; in this world there was no middle ground, and Truman reiterated his pledge to brook no compromise with evil.
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