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Abstract
This essay explores the intervolvement of attentional practice and discursive action. Drawing on Michael Polanyi's phenomenology, I examine occasions when discourse does not sound like deliberate utterance and when attention does not look rationally focused—but when both are rhetorically inventive. Taking a cue from the growing (though conceptually and historically thin) self-help literature on attention and mindfulness, I examine the sometimes distracting speech of that paragon of attentiveness, the fictional detective. Dorothy Sayers’ witty sleuth, Wimsey, and The Wire's profane investigators, Bunk and McNulty, practice transgressive speech that seems nonsensical, but which animates and extends indirect attention for the sake of solving problems in bewildering conditions. These case studies in crime fiction strengthen rhetorical scholarship on embodiment, affect, and verbal inadvertency by locating deliberative dimensions in apparently indeliberate discourses. This essay concludes by conceptualizing the communicative practice that modulates indirect attention, referring to its transgressive nonsensicality as a rhetoric of idiocy.
The author would like to thank Dr. Biesecker and the two peer reviewers for their provocatively heuristic criticisms. The author also gratefully acknowledges a Trinity College course release that enabled sustained work on the essay. Special thanks go to Dr. Bethany Keeley-Jonker for the gifts of critical conversation and to Emma C. Mattson for patient copy-editing.
The author would like to thank Dr. Biesecker and the two peer reviewers for their provocatively heuristic criticisms. The author also gratefully acknowledges a Trinity College course release that enabled sustained work on the essay. Special thanks go to Dr. Bethany Keeley-Jonker for the gifts of critical conversation and to Emma C. Mattson for patient copy-editing.
Notes
[1] I use the term “discourse” in Michael Calvin McGee's sense of the term, as the “speech” by which a “speaker” pursues with an “audience” in a particular “scene” a “sought-for-change.” “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric,” (F)ragments. http://mcgeefragments.net/OLD/materialists01.htm.
[2] Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995), 230E.
[3] See Debra Hawhee's treatment of Aristotle's notion of phantasia in “Looking into Aristotle's Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14, no. 2 (2011): 140. See also Vico's account of how Cicero's attentional devices “jolted [hearers] from their apathy,” as well as and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's discussion of how discourse can make something absent seem present. Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco with The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence, trans. Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1990), 15. Chaim Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 117.
[4] A random sampling shows speech textbooks persistently teaching attention-grabbing. See Steven A. Beebe and Susan J. Beebe, Public Speaking: An Audience-Centered Approach (Boston: Pearson, 2006), 32; Dan O'Hair, Hannah Rubenstein, Rob Stewart, A Pocket Guide to Public Speaking, 4th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's: 2013), 126; Deanna D. Sellnow, Confident Public Speaking, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2005), 61. Stephen E. Lucas, The Art of Public Speaking, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 186–92.
[5] See Hawhee's theory of “rhetorical vision” which attempts to “notice the ways that language interacts with vision directly” or Kenneth S. Zagacki & Victoria J. Gallagher's discussion of “spaces of attention” in which material rhetorics summon a whole-bodied attention. Hawhee, “Looking.” Kenneth S. Zagacki & Victoria J. Gallagher, “Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (2009): 172.
[6] Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 20, 159; Eric Jenkins. “The Presence of Perelman: Attention and Selection in a Noisy World,” Conference Proceedings, National Communication Association/American Forensic Association, Alta Conference on Argumentation (January 1, 2007): 404–13; Marilee Mifsud, “On Rhetoric as Gift/Giving,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 1 (2007): 89–107.
[7] Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (New York: Prometheus, 2009); Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (New York: Crown, 2012); Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (New York, Penguin, 2009); Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (New York, Bloomsbury, 2005); Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Read, Think, and Remember (London: Atlantic, 2010).
[8] Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes (New York: Penguin, 2013), 73.
[9] Though Jackson, Gallagher, and Cain all agree that we can create new habits for better attention, not all the self-appointed gurus of concentration agree that attentiveness is acquirable. See Zengotita's resigned comparison of mass-mediated life to living inside “the Blob” (25–27). See also Carr, who ruefully admits that, despite a brief restoration of his attentional powers while writing his book, by the end he was already “backsliding” into his erstwhile condition of multifarious webstreaming owing to the massive appeal of digital media (199–200).
[10] Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990), 5, 59–60. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001).
[11] Crary, Suspensions, 13–14, 33–35.
[12] Crary, Suspensions, 15, 37, 65–72, 101–102.
[13] See Lance Brown, “New Harvard Study Shows Why Social Media Is So Addictive for Many,” WTWH Media, http://marketing.wtwhmedia.com/new-harvard-study-shows-why-social-media-is-so-addictive-for-many. See, further, Diana I. Tamir and Jason P. Mitchell, “Disclosing Information about the Self Is Intrinsically Rewarding,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109, no. 21 (May 22, 2012) http://wjh.harvard.edu/∼dtamir/Tamir-PNAS-2012.pdf. See also Maggie Jackson's representative description of children's trance-like engagement with videogames in her account of a portion of Elinor Ochs video data of contemporary domestic life. Distracted, 60–1.
[14] Davi Johnson, “Mapping the Meme: A Geographical Approach to Materialist Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2007): 27–50.
[15] Joshua Gunn, “On Speech and Public Release,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (2010): 1–42.
[16] Greg Dickinson, “Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2002): 5–27.
[17] Christian Lundberg, “Enjoying God's Death: The Passion of the Christ and the Practices of an Evangelical Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 4 (2009): 387–411.
[18] Celeste M. Condit, “Pathos in Criticism: Edwin Black's Communism-as-Cancer Metaphor,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 1 (2013): 1–26.
[19] Samuel McCormick and Mary Stuckey, “Presidential Disfluency: Literacy, Legibility, and Vocal Political Aesthetics in the Rhetorical Presidency,” Review of Communication 13, no. 1 (2013): 3–22.
[20] A conspicuous exception would be the above-mentioned discussion by Condit of deliberate rhetorical action effected by pathos in discourse. Condit, “Pathos.”
[21] Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), 55–57. See also Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1983).
[22] Richard Rorty, Philosophy as a Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1979). For a non-representationalist account of perception, see M. Merleau-Ponty, “‘Attention’ and ‘Judgement,’” Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2001), 26–51. Note especially his discussion in the section in Personal Knowledge labeled “Skills,” (49ff) as well as the references to problem-solving in the section labeled “Articulation” (69ff).
[23] By focusing on how utterance can affect subsidiary attention, my essay diverges from most Polanyian scholarship, which has tended to focus instead on how the tacit is the basis of the explicit. See Dale Cannon, “Construing Polanyi's Tacit Knowing as Knowing by Acquaintance Rather than Knowing by Representation: Some Implications,” Tradition & Discovery 29, no. 2 (2002–2003): 26–43.
[24] See David Acord's Success Secrets of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Perigee Trade, 2011), Kindle edition; Kate Rafa, “A Sherlockian Scandal in Philosophy,” Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy: The Footprints of a Gigantic Mind, ed. Josef Steiff (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2011); Stephen Kendrick, Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes (New York: Vintage, 1999). These authors, admittedly, use Holmes to address many things besides attention and distraction. Acord does argue that “[t]he clues to success are all around us. We just have to learn to see them,” while also commending Holmes’ “attention to details, unswerving confidence, and laser-like confidence” (Kindle) Similarly, Rufa commends the capacities of Holmesian rationality for achieving control over one's inner life and Kendrick explores Buddhist-like contemplative capabilities in Holy Clues.
[25] Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York: Doubleday/Penguin, 1930), published online by Camden House, http://168.144.50.205/221bcollection/canon/scan.htm.
[26] Authors following Dorothy Sayers have followed her lead in linguistifying detective attention. From P. D. James's Commander Adam Dalgleish, who is a publishing poet, to Alexander McCall Smith's stories about Botswanan detective Mma Ramotswe, whose investigations proceed in cross-linguistic registers, to Donna Leon's Venetian Commissioner Guido Brunetti, who keeps up a running literary conversation with his Jane-Austen scholar spouse, crime fiction authors have for decades been exploring the relationship between what their investigators note and what they say. Crime fiction screenwriters have similarly complicated representations and saying by making their sleuths comedically talkative. Think of Eddie Murphy's Beverly Hills Cop, Mel Gibson's Detective Riggs in Lethal Weapon, Adrian Monk in Monk, and Psyche's Shawn Spencer.
[27] Joseph Christopher Schaub, “The Wire: Big Brother Is Not Watching You in Body-more, Murdaland,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 38, no. 3 (2010): 122–32.
[28] William Desmond, God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 36.
[29] Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). Also, note similarities between Polanyi's account of inarticulate energies animating speech and Kennedy's description of “the energy inherent in an utterance.” George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5.
[30] Regarding pathos' role in inquiry, Polanyi believes “that scientific passions are no mere psychological by-product, but have a logical function which contributes an indispensable element to science” (Personal 134).
[31] William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1918), 403–404.
[32] James, Principles of Psychology, 462.
[33] Freud recommends that the therapist “induce a psychic state which is in some degree analogous, as regards the distribution of psychic energy (mobile attention), to the state of the mind before falling asleep—and also, of course, to the hypnotic state. On falling asleep the ‘undesired ideas’ emerge, owing to the slackening of a certain arbitrary (and, of course, also critical) action, which is allowed to influence the trend of our ideas; we are accustomed to speak of fatigue as the reason of this slackening; the emerging undesired ideas are changed into visual and auditory images.” Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 3rd ed. (Seven Treasures Publications, 2008), 64.
[34] Freud, Interpretation, 64, 159.
[35] Freud, Interpretation, 159.
[36] Polanyi, Tacit, 4; Personal, 95. All human cultural accomplishment, he explained, depends on the use of language; but human speech depends on something that precedes language; therefore, human cultural capacities must rely on barely perceptible, largely tacit powers (Personal 70).
[37] Polyani, Tacit, 87 “Sometimes attentional conditions are too obvious to see: when someone gives driving directions, her language and your attention cooperate inconspicuously,” because “the tacit is co-extensive with the text of which it carries the meaning” (87).
[38] Polyani, Tacit, 95.
[39] Polyani, Tacit, 94.
[40] One particularly effective Polanyian illustration of peripheral attention depicts a medical student watching two veteran doctors discussing a pulmonary x-ray with distracting ribs stretching across the image. What enables the student to “forget about the ribs and begin to see the lungs” is listening and watching the radiologists locate subtly present elements in the images. Polyani, Tacit, 101.
[41] Polyani, Tacit, 143.
[42] Polyani, Tacit, 95. In regards to the passionate nature of this attention, Polanyi gives pathos, or “intellectual passion” as he calls it, a significant role in the speech of problem-solvers, who must rely on such passion as a cue for discovery. Polanyi, Personal, 134.
[43] Richard Lanham, Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, MA: Yale University of Press, 1976), 1, 6.
[44] Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Scandal in Bohemia,” The Classic Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (Stamford, CT: Longmeadow Press, 1987), 11.
[45] Illustrations of detective taciturnity are ready to hand. In the company of the verbose Prefect, for example, Dupin falls asleep behind his green eyeshades. Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Mystery of Marie Rouget,” The Omnibus of Crime, ed. Dorothy Sayers (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929), 121. Behind opaque glasses, Father Brown, though rarely asleep, keeps quiet when others grow vehement. G. K. Chesterton, “The Hammer of God,” The Omnibus of Crime, ed. Dorothy Sayers (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929). The house steward in The Moonstone describes Inspector Cuff as having “kept his thoughts shut up from me.” Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (The Collection of Mystery Classics. Toronto: Bantam, 1982), 101.
[46] Conan Doyle, “The Crooked Hand,” The Classical Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, 275.
[47] Agatha Christie, Peril at End House (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1931), 5.
[48] Sayers, “Introduction,” The Omnibus of Crime, ed., Dorothy Sayers (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929), 26–27.
[49] Lanham's description aptly captures Wimsey's performance of detection: “Rhetorical man is an actor; his reality public, dramatic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily histrionic reenactment. He is thus centered in time and concrete local event. The lowest common denominator of his life is a social situation. And his motivations must be characteristically ludic, agonistic. He thinks first of winning, of mastering the rules the current game enforces.” The Motives of Eloquence, 4.
[50] Of course even the gravest classical detectives sometimes committed acts of eloquence. Dupin talked his way copiously through pages of deductions; Poirot asked quirky questions; Holmes dropped witty remarks about “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” and “enriched English literature with more than one memorable aphorism and turn of speech” (Sayers, “Introduction,” 30).
[51] Aristotle refers to a huperoche, or a trope of “heaping up,” that a speaker might use when wanting to enumerate the many ways “that a person has broken many norms of justice and gone beyond [a single crime], for example, [breaking] oaths, handshakes, promises, marriage vows.” On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, 2nd ed., trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.14.5.
[52] I am grateful to conversation with Michael VanderWeele for noting the similarity between Wimsey's prattle and stream-of-consciousness prose.
[53] Robert Hariman, “New Wine in Old Bottles: Quotations and the Rhetoric of Fiction,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013): 236.
[54] Similarly, Polanyi speaks of how his own language tries to capture reality while “reflecting on the ultimate failure of this attempt.” Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 91.
[55] Hariman, “New Wine,” 236.
[56] F. D. Leavis condemned Wimsey's capacity to “talk like a P. G. Wodehouse moron.” F. D. Leavis, “The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers: Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon,” A Selection from Scrutiny, Vol. 1 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 141. Edmund Wilson complained of his “awful whimsical patter.” Edmund Wilson, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycroft (New York: Biblo & Tannen Booksellers & Publishers, 1976), 392. Julian Symons judged that sometimes Peter's “self-conscious humour is excruciating.” Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (New York: Mysterious Press, 1992), 100. Even Sayers admitted Lord Peter's “everlasting breeziness does become a bit of a tax at times!” Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 214. Sayers also had Lord Peter himself dismiss his piffle, treating it like a minor disability: “I got the habit at my mother's knee and I can't break myself of it.” Whose Body? (New York: Harper & Row, 1923), 80–81.
[57] Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers, 175. Similarly, other critics claim “the concoction of Lord Peter out of Bertie Wooster and Sherlock Holmes is ingenious.” R. D. Stock and Barbara Stock, “The Agents of Evil and Justice,” As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1979), 15. Carolyn Heilbrun positions “the conversation of Lord Peter and his associates … in the best tradition of the comedy of manners” and claims that his readers “don't want to be Lord Peter, only to know him, for the sake of hearing him talk.” Carolyn Heilbrun, “Sayers, Lord Peter, and God,” American Spectator 37 no. 2 (1968): 325. Heilbrun sounds like no one so much as the character Harriet Vane, who tells Lord Peter, “If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle.” Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison (New York: Harpertorch, 2006), 128.
[58] Denis Donoghue, On Eloquence (New Haven, MA: Yale University Press, 2008), 20.
[59] For example, in Gaudy Night Sayers uses the detective story to explore questions about the relationship between professional and domestic life. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” Titles to Fame, ed. Denys Kilham Roberts (London: Thomas Nelson, 1937). Crime fiction writer P. D. James celebrates Sayers’ literary move as “one of the most successful marriages of the puzzle with the novel of social realism and serious purpose,” and as a demonstration “that it is possible to construct a credible and enthralling mystery and marry it successfully to a theme of psychological subtlety.” P. D. James, Talking about Detective Fiction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 112. In Murder Must Advertise, Sayers uses the story, at least in part, to examine mass media's role in modern life. Busman's Honeymoon (New York: HarperCollins, 1995) speaks to questions about capital punishment.
[60] Sayers made Wimsey question his own legitimacy explicitly when, for example, he asks a priest if he did right to carry out his amateur investigation: “Started in like a fool to help somebody who'd got in trouble about the thing through having suspicions himself. And my beastly interference started the crimes all over again.” Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 210–11. In another story, Wimsey comments, “I'm beginning to dislike this job of getting people hanged.” Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison, 121. In The Nine Tailors (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962) he unwittingly contributes to the death of the victim whose murder he is called upon to solve; and in Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter weeps over the execution of a criminal that he himself had caught.
[61] Lanham, Economics of Attention, 20, 159.
[62] Hariman, “New Wine,” 239.
[63] Freud, Interpretation, 159.
[64] Gary Saul Morson, Long and Short of It (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 110.
[65] See Polanyi's discussion of knowledge's sociality in his exposition on tradition, communication, conviviality, and society (Personal, 53, 203–14).
[66] Sayers, Clouds of Witness & The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (New York: Harper & Row, 1928), 69.
[67] Sayers, Clouds of Witness, 69.
[68] Sayers, Murder, 284.
[69] Dorothy L. Sayers, Four Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Novels (New York: Avenel, 1982), 412.
[70] Robert Kuhn McGregor and Ethan Lewis, Conundrums for the Long Week-end: England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000), 36–37.
[71] McGregor and Lewis, Conundrums, 202–203.
[72] Sayers notes “the difficulty about allowing real human beings into a detective-story. At some point or other, either their emotions make hay of the detective interest, or the detective interest gets hold of them and makes their emotions look like pasteboard.” Sayers, “Introduction,” 33.
[73] Dorothy L. Sayers, “Problem Picture,” The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 139. Note that her use of the term “wits”—a term that comprises not only logical intellection but also rhetorical invention—helps explain why Sayers bestowed on her detective a notably discursive attention.
[74] James, Talking, 184–85.
[75] Simon, “Letter to HBO,” The Wire: Truth Be Told, ed. Rafael Alvarez (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009), 37.
[76] Simon, “Introduction,” The Wire: Truth Be Told, 1.
[77] Simon, “Introduction,” 11.
[78] Simon, “Introduction,” 23–24.
[79] Simon, “Introduction,” 25.
[80] Mark Bowden, “The Angriest Man in Television,” Atlantic (January 1, 2008), http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/01/the-angriest-man-in-television/306581/1/.
[81] Tapping the Wire. Directed by Steven Hore. FX Exclusive. Viewable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = O-yziyKwC44.
[82] Perhaps without noticing, however, Simon highlights an irony in political endeavors in a mass-mediated society: the politically invested mode of engrossment that his show invites is difficult to distinguish from the binge-watching other less politically ambitious shows invite. As Crary might say, sometimes engrossments are indistinguishable from distraction.
[83] For an examination of some of the show's short forms, see James Borowski's rhetorical analysis of the show's metaphors and epigraphs. “The Rhetoric of the Wire,” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 1 (2010). http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/contents/rhetoric_of_the_wire.pdf. For Weisberg's discussion of the show's slangy utterances, see “The Wire on Fire: Analyzing the Best Show on Television,” Slate (September 13, 2006), http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_big_idea/2006/09/the_wire_on_fire.html.
[84] As Alessio Franko notes on a University of Chicago course blog that “profanity in the show is not just there because it's HBO and it's allowed … Trying to write an episode of The Wire without regular swearing would be a fool's errand—it just wouldn't be the same show.” “One Response to ‘The “Fuck” Scene,’” American Television from Broadcast Networks to the Internet (November 11, 2012) http://americantelevisionblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/the-fuck-scene/.
[85] Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 11–20.
[86] Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language used as Shield and Weapon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4.
[87] Foucault, Fearless Speech, 11, 13, 17–18.
[88] Allan and Burridge, Euphemism and Dysphemism, 95.
[89] “The Pager,” Season 1, Episode 5. The Wire. HBO. Quoted in Peter Honig, “The Pager,” The Wire Blog, http://www.thewireblog.net/season-1/1-–5-the-pager/the-meaning-of-brandons-profanity/.
[90] Ruth Wajnryb, Expletive Deleted: A Good Look at Bad Language (New York: Free Press, 2005), 72.
[91] Indeed, profane dysphemism's focus on the erotic and the cloacal can actually narrow vocabulary to fewer terms, or at least fewer kinds of terms.
[92] Simon, “Introduction,” The Wire: Truth Be Told, 20. Television critic Alan Sepinwall identifies another possible motive for the excess when he notes that this “goddamn symphony of profanity” is a “shockingly funny” send-up of HBO crime drama as well as an “unexpectedly brilliant” indicator of Bunk and McNulty's investigative skill. Alan Sepinwall, “The Wire, Season 1, Episode 4, ‘Old Cases’ (Veteran's Edition), What's Alan Watching? June 20, 2008, http://sepinwall.blogspot.com/2008/06/wire-season-1-episode-4-old-cases_20.html.
[93] “Illocution” here indicates the “act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something.” Perlocution indicates the achieved effect of an illocution. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Jurmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 99–101.
[94] Samuel McCormick and Mary Stuckey, “Presidential Disfluency: Literacy, Legibility, and Vocal Political Aesthetics in the Rhetorical Presidency,” Review of Communication 13, no. 1 (2013): 3–22. As McCormick and Stuckey explain, their use of symbols like these appropriates Gail Jefferson's well-known coding system.
[95] Verbing derives from the method of some theatre actors who apply infinitive phrases to each spoken line in a script in order to name their characters’ motives.
[96] David Simon and Ed Burns, “Old Cases,” The Wire, teleplay by David Simon, directed by Clement Virgo. The scene was transcribed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 1lElf7D-An8.
[97] Cannon, “Construing,” 26–43.
[98] Mark Bowden notes that Simon has “conjured the city onscreen with a verisimilitude that's astonishing” but with a political vision that is too angry to be transformative. The dismal politics of the program “suggests that his political passions ultimately trump his commitment to accuracy or evenhandedness.” Bowden, “Angriest.” Similarly, Matthew Yglesias notes that “part of what gives The Wire such great power is its creator's conviction, wrong though it is, that his tragic vision constitutes telling it like it is. … The result is the creation of a world—Simon's Baltimore—that feels eminently real, but is imbued with all the artifice of Greek tragedy.” Matthew Yglesias, “David Simon and the Audacity of Despair,” The Atlantic, January 2, 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/01/david-simon-and-the-audacity-of-despair/47692/.
[99] Simon, “Introduction,” 3.
[100] Schaub, “The Wire,” 122–32.
[101] Desmond, God and the Between, 36. Interestingly for this essay's emphasis on a “middle space” for rhetorical invention, Desmond has thoroughly conceptualized a metaphysics of “the between” in three books: Being and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), Ethics and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), and the already cited God and the Between.
[102] Desmond, God and the Between, 36–37.
[103] See Desmond's discussion of solipsism in God and the Between, 36–37.
[104] Michael J. Hyde, ed., The Ethos of Rhetoric (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), xiii. See also Michael J. Hyde, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgement (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006), 60–97.
[105] See Elliot Gaines, “The Narrative Semiotics of The Daily Show” Semiotica 2007, no. 166 (2007): 81–96; Ronald A. Placone and Michael Tumolo, “Interrupting the Machine: Cynic Comedy in the ‘Rally for Sanity and/or Fear,’” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (2011): 10–21; Priscilla Marie Meddaugh, “Bakhtin, Colbert, and the Center of Discourse: Is There No ‘Truthiness’ in Humor?” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 4 (2010): 376–90; Robert Hariman, “In Defense of Jon Stewart,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 3 (2007): 273–77; Trischa Goodnow, ed., The Daily Show and Rhetoric: Arguments, Issues, and Strategies (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2011); Geoffrey Baym, “Representation and the Politics of Play: Stephen Colbert's Better Know a District,” Political Communication 24, no. 4 (2007): 359–76; and Geoffrey Baym, “The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism,” Political Communication 22, no. 3 (2005): 259–76.