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Abstract
“The Good Will Hunting Technique” analyzes and enacts rhetorical paradigms present in popular culture. The main objects of examination are Gus van Sant's film, Good Will Hunting, and Eminem's music video “Mosh.” The author extracts positive aspects of popular culture to feature a rational-affective approach to rhetoric. The notion of mind–body rhetorical collaboration, which stems from Behavioral Doctrine developed during Germany's Weimar era, combines an emphasis on exteriority with traditional notions of rhetoric to establish a method for progressive action in lived reality.
Notes
1. All translations from German are mine unless otherwise noted. In Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2004), 33.
2. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 16.
3. See more at About Voltron, http://www.voltronforce.com/aboutvoltron.html (accessed 17 February 2005).
4. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 113.
5. de Certeau, 32.
6. William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings (1907; New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 8.
7. James, 9.
8. Iris Marion Young defines the pragmatic activity: “By being ‘pragmatic’ I mean categorizing, explaining, developing accounts and arguments that are tied to specific practical and political problems, where the purpose of this theoretical activity is clearly related to those problems. Pragmatic theorizing in this sense is not necessarily any less complex or sophisticated than totalizing theory, but rather it is driven by some problem that has ultimate practical importance and is not concerned to give an account of a whole.” In Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 16–17.
9. Caroline S. Hornstein, Grenzgänger (Frankfurt am Main und Basel: Sroemfeld/Nexus, 2003), 40.
10. George Saunders, “Jon,” The New Yorker, posted 20 January 2003, http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fiction/030127fi_fiction (accessed 17 February 2005).
11. Lynn Ahrens, “Schoolhouse rock—Grammar Rock,” http://www.postdiluvian.org/∼gilly/Schoolhouse_Rock/HTML/grammar/noun.html (accessed 17 February 2005). We should admire Ahrens for following Roman Jackobson's schema for verbal communication (below), something which many intellectuals are unaware of or choose to ignore. Not Ahrens though—she knows that her “addressees” are probably mostly elementary students and therefore does not include “idea” as a category for noun; drawing on the “which-one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other principle” from Sesame Street, she anticipates the difficulty of paring an intangible category with three tangible ones. However, Ahren's text is sufficiently open to allow “idea” to be brought in under the umbrella of “thing.”
12. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York: Columbia Unversity Press, 1993), 59.
13. Bonnie Honig, Deomcracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 101.
14. Power relations are everywhere. Even among friends there are shifting pecking orders that help determine such things as what bar to go to, which movie to see, whose girl- or boyfriend is favored, and whose is not.
15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus: Werkausgabe Band 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 9.
16. I use “you” here to connote the enemy who might be made an adversary and hopefully a friend. The class “enemy” is unfortunately indispensable; there are some who will never consent to respecting alternative viewpoints. The “you” here is the saddest sort of enemy, similar to Schiller's Good-for-Nothing (Nichtswürdiger), who has traded “courageous will and lively feeling” for effete erudition. In Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästehtische Erziehung des Menschen, 1793 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2000), 19–31.
17. Gottfried Benn, Doppelleben (Stuttgart: Kletta-Cotta, 1984), 142.
18. Benn, 92.
19. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), 514.
20. My notion of “better” follows Kenneth Burke's discussion of William James, who saw no attainable best, but only progressive degrees of better. In Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1937) 12. A “better liberal democracy” then is what Chantal Mouffe describes in the Democratic Paradox as “a commonality strong enough to institute a ‘demos’ [based on exclusions] but nevertheless compatible with certain forms of pluralism [based on inclusion].” In Chantal Mouffe's, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 55.
21. Roland Barthes’ “what-goes-without-saying” has many names—the status quo, the bourgeois norm, conventional wisdom, the (unquestioned) hegemonic order, etc. In Roland Barthes and Annette Lavers, trans., Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 11.
22. I refer here to Burke's discussion of Ibsen's, When the Dead Awaken, in Attitudes 66.
23. Good Will Hunting, dir. Gus Van Sant, perf. Benn Affleck, Matt Damon, and Minnie Driver, Miramax, 1997.
24. When male members of our “we” go to bars, we do not look for “young women,” we look for “girls.” When we meet colleagues at conferences, we talk to “women.” The inverse is also often true. However much PC zealots might seek to protest, we imagine that even some women among them have tried to pick up “guys.” In addition, we refuse to rewrite the film scene, so that every person of every romantic persuasion might feel perfectly represented.
25. “Literally, a person's or a thing's sub-stance would be something that stands beneath or supports the person or thing,” Burke, Gramma, 22.
26. Skyler calls him “a Michael Bolton Clone.” Good Will Hunting, “Fun at a Harvard Bar,” 20 min 50 s.
27. It seems Chantal Mouffe emphasizes only half the equation when she points out that power is “constituting identities themselves.” Identities, or people, institutions, etc., constitute power, too. Mouffe 21.
28. Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehre der Kälte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 103.
29. Good Will Hunting, “Fun at a Harvard Bar,” 19 min 35 s.
30. Successful and unsuccessful sounds more like “normal” language than J.L. Austin's “happy/unhappy”or “felicitous/infelicitous” distinctions. In J.L. Austin and J.O. Urmson and Marina Sabisà, ed., How to do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
31. Heinz von Foerster, Wissen und Gewissen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993) 288.
32. Therefore, when we engage the mainstream, discussing the ontological status of truth should figure pretty far down on our agenda.
33. Jodi R. Cohen, Communication and Criticism (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1998), 109–14.
34. Good Will Hunting, “Fun at a Harvard Bar,” 19 min 35 s.
35. Please remember that the spirit of this paper stems from both the American and German academic traditions. And in Germany, it is not yet forbidden to make reasonable generalizations from lived experiences. Therefore, it is not some vile insult to human dignity to say, “The vast majority of NASCAR dads we have met don't get irony, and the vast majority of security moms believe their privilege renders them invulnerable to irony's sting.” Except most Germans would not qualify a generalization with “the vast majority” or “that we have met.”
36. Cohen, 115.
37. Cohen, 115.
38. Cohen, 115.
39. For example, someone could take our reading of Good Will Hunting as a misapplied example and attempt to undermine the whole thing, but then we would use the GWHT technique on this person, beginning from the rational Grid and mention all the other life, film and literary protagonists who use a rational, bodily and libidinal rhetoric—Tyler Durden, Lara Croft, Tom Cruise, Madonna, Don Gately, Ulrich, etc.—to reestablish and expand the legitimacy of our reading; then we would try to seduce them; finally we would chuck them in a trash can.
40. “Coca-Cola C2” Advertisement, http://www.cokec2.com/home.html (accessed 17 February 2005).
41. Good Will Hunting, “A Retainer, Please,” 1 h 20 min 20 s.
42. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Robert E. Innis, ed., Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 150.
43. For a compelling discussion of the awful lack of political consciousness among white-collar, middle-class workers, see Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974).
44. Mouffe, 15.
45. Mouffe, 22.
46. See the Lewis Hyde's reading of Odysseus in Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (New York: North Point Press, 1998), 62.
47. A 2005 anti-war demonstration at Indiana University attracted young republicans with signs directed at the demonstarators that read: “How does it feel to be irrelevant?”
48. Road House, Rowdy Herrington, dir., perf. Patrick Swayze, Ben Gazzara, Kelly Lynch, and Sam Elliott, MGM, 1989.
49. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 402.
50. Michel Foucault, Power (New York: The New Press, 1994), 18, 33–39.
51. Foucault, 39.
52. Lethen, 36–37.
53. Sloterdijk, 443.
54. Please review Robert Jensen's discussion of the need to speak harsh truths that will make people uncomfortable. Also note that my reference to people as dumb, lazy, and selfish is not meant to imply these qualities as unalterable states. Following Jensen, I see these as correctable problems; unlike Jensen, I spread the blame to the people themselves where he limits it to the politicians, the media, and the marketing industry. In Robert Jensen, Citizens of the Empire (San Francisco: City of Light Books, 2004), 121.
55. Good Will Hunting, “Cruisin’ for a Bruisin,” 11 min 19 s.
56. Jensen, 91.
57. Jensen, 91.
58. de Certeau, 32.
59. Karen Ludewig, Die Widerkehr der Lust, Körperpolitik nach Foucault und Butler (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag GmbH, 2002), 118.
60. Ludewig, 119.
61. Foucault, 121.
62. We justify “subtler” by comparing Will's handling of the Grad Student to an earlier scene in which he beats up the above-mentioned kindergarten enemy who says nothing to instigate the fight.
63. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 5.
64. Eminem, “Mosh,” http://mosh.eminem.com/video/ (accessed 17 February 2005).
65. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 40–41.
66. William Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004), 93.
67. Wu-tang Clan, “Can it all be so simple/Intermission,” Enter the Wu-Tang, BMG Music, 1993.
68. We encourage women to think of their own examples—but we males imagine male archetypes for ourselves. We mention our desire to include women in our technique again because women intellectuals are probably prone to many of the same vanities as their male counterparts, and we expect a careless reader to posit the absence of women model figures as a lacuna of this technique. One further thing—we are not suggesting that a man could not model himself after a woman or vice versa—we simply have not taken that step.
69. In publicity appearances surrounding the release of his latest album, Encore, he has been wearing apparel with the logo “Shady '08.” This alludes to the “Shady National Convention,” which he held on 28 October to launch Shade 45, his Sirius hip-hop radio station. He also used this public venue to stage a mock presidential campaign. Whether or not Eminem's intimations of an intent to step onto the political stage are serious or not is irrelevant. The important thing is that they trouble the power structure. For more, read The Drudge Report, “SECRET SERVICE PLANS INTERVIEW OF EMINEM AFTER ‘PRESIDENT DEAD’ RAP,” http://www.drudgereport.com/mattmm.htm (accessed 17 February 2005).
70. “Secret Service ends Eminem probe,” BBC News World Edition, posted 9 December 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3296397.stm (accessed 17 February 2005).
71. Eminem, “White America,” The Eminem Show, Aftermath Records, 2002.