“To attempt a journey into the body as a way of knowing is to invite a languor of the ineffable.” So begins D. Robert Dechaine’s ground-breaking essay, “Affect and Embodied Understanding in Musical Experience.”Footnote1 Rob, in so many ways, attempted the ineffable journey into the body throughout his scholarship, his editorship of this journal, and beyond. Consequently, affect that transcends words has framed my responses to Rob’s passing on August 9, 2018.
Indeed, as I reread much of Rob’s scholarship for this remembrance, I feel in my own body—in a dropping sensation in my stomach, in the tightening of my chest, in the swelling of my sinuses—ineffability. “What led me to feel so simultaneously connected to those around me and yet so utterly cocooned in my own subjectivity,” Rob wondered of his embodied experience at an R.E.M. concert. “What kind of timeless time,” he continued,
was I experiencing? I realized that night that I could never again think myself innocent in the passion, that there existed beyond the musicians themselves a great complicity of knowledge and emotions and ideology that effectively birthed this music, and that I was part of the conspiracy. Now, all of these years later, I add bodies to this mélange, as I’ve become increasingly convinced that the problem of talking about music—of being able to locate and articulate its power—is hopelessly, or gloriously, compounded by the body as a site of musical experience.Footnote2
My conversations with Rob began before I met him. They started when I first read “Affect.” But they grew into a fully embodied friendship as we organized panels together and served in various capacities in the Western States Communication Association. Our conversations deepened over sandwiches and noodles one semester when I was living in Los Angeles for a sabbatical, and he took time out of his busy working days to show me wonderful places in his city. And over the last two years, as we planned the transition from his editorship of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies to mine, our friendship extended even more.
Rob’s powerful concern with affect, bodies, and rhetoric beyond the symbolic undergirded not only his writing about music but also his extraordinarily important consideration of borders. “The time has come,” Rob writes at the end of his introduction to Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, “to treat the rhetoricity of borders seriously.”Footnote3 Rob, in a series of essays written over a decade, urged rhetorical scholars and others to shift from a static understanding of borders to a rhetorical one that he called “bordering.”Footnote4 Crucially, bordering is a rhetorical enactment that enlists mind and body, that functions symbolically and materially, and that engages audiences through affect and meaning. Here, as in the essay on music, Rob richly complicates what we can write about as scholars standing within cultural studies, communication studies, and rhetorical studies.
Indeed, Rob’s writing well performs these relationships. Refusing to border them (as all too many do—you need not dig deeply into this or other journals to see folks wanting to cordon off communication/cultural/rhetorical studies), Rob was far more interested in the friction of relationality. Drawing widely and generously from cultural studies and its interests in power and spatiality and from rhetorical studies and its attention to symbolic and material world- and sense-making, Rob’s work always expanded what all of us tilling these fields can do. We can write, he reminds us, of and from our body. We can write, he asserts, of and from our locations in and on borders that (as Josue David Cisneros writes) cross us.Footnote5 And we can write with passion and commitment, energy and wit, clarity and evocativeness.
This careful and playful crossing of borders is one of the characteristics that made Rob a wonderful editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. His was a steady hand leading a boundary-crossing journal, committed to ways of writing, thinking, and seeing that often imagine themselves at risk in relation to the other. Rob’s education in communication and cultural studies at Northwestern University and then the Claremont Graduate School and his own capacious reading across cultural theory, cultural studies, rhetorical studies, affect theory, and other areas made him a disciplinary nomad unwilling to shutdown conversation because the work may be from a particular camp.
His life as an educator exemplifies his resistance to borders. He held a joint appointment at California State University in Liberal Studies and Communication Studies. Liberal Studies is a profoundly interdisciplinary department (I had the distinct pleasure to teach as an adjunct faculty in Liberal Studies in the late 1990s), and so too is Communication Studies as conceived of at CSULA. Rob was deeply committed to his undergraduate students in both departments and a remarkable mentor to graduate students in the Communication Studies program. Nearly every time I saw Rob at NCA or WSCA conventions, he was going to panels with or presented by his graduate students. He devoted far more time to their experience of the conferences than his own.
Teaching at CSULA was an enactment of Rob’s commitment to the intersections of cultural studies and communication studies in other ways as well. CSULA educates Angelenos that come from the campus’s immediate neighborhoods and from across the metropolis. A deeply diverse university, it is a place that conceives of and dismantles borders in resistance to reactionary majoritarian discourse.
This final issue of Rob’s editorship embodies these commitments. The first essay on food, ethics, and taste comes out of cultural studies’—and Rob’s—long commitment to everyday practices. As Rob writes, “Symbolic and material, affective and performative, the border is an omnipresent force in our everyday lives, materializing and shifting across registers of geography, history, politics, economics, citizenship, identity, and culture.”Footnote6 You will see that Ekstein and Young’s essay is exploring a very different kind of everyday border—between edible and inedible, useful and waste(d)—but like so many other borders, this demarcation is one fraught with ethical and political considerations.
The bulk of the issue is devoted to a forum that engages Lisa Flores’s field-remaking essay “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism.”Footnote7 Edited by Matthew Houdek, the forum is composed of multiauthored responses to Flores’s compelling argument. Each essay is itself border-stretching in form and content; each exhibits the heat created by pushing up against boundaries with energy and verve.
The authors and I dedicate this issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies to D. Robert DeChaine. The next pages put into words and form the traces of our relationships with Rob. But we know, in the end, these relationships are ineffable, beyond words, woven deeply into our individual and collective bodies. The words published here are efforts “to capture and focus that which readily escapes ‘pure’ rationality, discursivity, and cognition.”Footnote8 I wish to not feel grief, and yet I also wish to keep feeling Rob’s presence in my stomach, my chest, my sinuses. I prefer the grief to imagining a world that did not, at one time, include Rob’s presence. I do not want this knot of affect in my belly. And yet I also desire it, wish for it to remain as an embodied marker of Rob’s presence in myself. “The knot [of affect] is in the center of this clearing,” Rob writes, “still gloriously tight.”Footnote9
Notes
1 D. Robert DeChaine, “Affect and Embodied Understanding in Musical Experience,” Text and Performance Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2002): 79.
2 DeChaine, “Affect,” 80.
3 D. Robert DeChaine, “Introduction: For Rhetorical Border Studies,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 14.
4 DeChaine, “Introduction,” 3.
5 Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014).
6 DeChaine, “Introduction,” 1.
7 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism.” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24.
8 DeChaine, “Affect,” 81.
9 DeChaine, “Affect,” 96.