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Abstract
Andrew Ross has emphasized the importance of the precariat—the marginalized and constantly growing underclass of contemporary society—in understanding the communicative challenges of the 21st century. This essay explores how the work of the French spiritual philosopher, Simone Weil, can inform a constructive communicative response in an age of economic and social precarity. Intriguingly, Weil's notions of roots and rootedness suggest that the foremost challenge the precariat faces is not economic, social, or political but spiritual and ethical in nature. Using Weil's work as an inspiration and guide, this essay grounds a rhetorical response to precarity in what it calls attentive waiting, which provides an interpretive framework to help the precariat make sense of their lives and helps them to recover their rhetorical agency through practices of invitation and transformative resistance.
Notes
[1] Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Andrew Ross, “The New Geography of Work: Power to the Precarious?” Theory, Culture & Society 25 (2009): 31–49; Andrew Ross, “The Making of Sustainable Livelihoods,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 92–95.
[2] Karl Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” in Early Works 1835–1844, trans. Clemens Dutt, vol. 1 of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 224–63.
[3] Ross, Nice Work.
[4] Mark Lowen, “Crisis-hit Greeks chop up forests to stay warm,” BBC News, January 27, 2013, accessed March 6, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21202432.
[5] Ronald C. Arnett, “Levinas's Ethical Echo: Listening In and To Precarity” (paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Orlando, FL, November 15–18, 2012).
[6] Ronald C. Arnett, Dialogic Confession: Bonhoeffer's Rhetoric of Responsibility (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). See also Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, CA: University of Berkeley Press, 1996); Robert N. Bellah, et al., The Good Society (New York, NY: Vintage, 1991).
[7] Ronald W. Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37 (2004): 201.
[8] Ross, Nice Work, 210.
[9] Ronald C. Arnett, Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Rhetoric of Warning and Hope (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013).
[10] Greene, “Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-liberal Governance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2007): 327–31.
[11] Isaac Catt, “Communicology and the Precarity of Selfhood Under the Regime of Antidepressant Medicine” (paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Orlando, FL, November 15–18, 2012).
[12] Frank J. Macke, “Understanding Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Dehiscence in the Context of Precarity: Reflections on the Vulnerability of Self and Subjectivity” (paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Orlando, FL, November 15–18, 2012).
[13] Kristen Lucas, “Problematized Providing and Protecting: The Occupational Narrative of the Working Class,” in Who Says? Working-class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community, ed. William DeGenaro (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 180–99; Kristen Lucas, “Blue-collar Discourses of Workplace Dignity: Using Outgroup Comparisons to Construct Positive Identities,” Management Communication Quarterly, 25 (2011): 353–74; Kristen Lucas, “The Working Class Promise: A Communicative Account of Mobility-based Ambivalences,” Communication Monographs 78 (2011): 347–69.
[14] Ronald C. Arnett and Pat Arneson, Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 19.
[15] Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
[16] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
[17] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 231.
[18] T. S. Eliot, Preface to The Need for Roots, by Simone Weil (New York, NY: Routledge, 1952), v-vi.
[19] G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Francis of Assisi (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2002), 22.
[20] Eliot, vi.
[21] Eliot, vi.
[22] See also Diogenes Allen, and Eric O. Springsted, Spirit, Nature, and Community: Issues in the Thought of Simone Weil (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994); Eric O. Springsted, “The Religious Basis of Culture: T. S. Eliot and Simone Weil,” Religious Studies 25 (1989): 105–16.
[23] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. Arthur F. Wills (New York, NY: Routledge, 1952), 41.
[24] Joan Faber McAlister, “Material Aesthetics in Middle America: Simone Weil, the Problem of Roots, and the Panoptic Suburb,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John L. Lucaites (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009), 108.
[25] Weil, The Need for Roots, 45.
[26] Weil, The Need for Roots, 93.
[27] Weil, The Need for Roots, 222.
[28] Weil, The Need for Roots, 206.
[29] Weil, The Need for Roots, 142.
[30] Courtine-Denamy remarks that Weil's relationship with religion, especially the Catholic Church, was always complex. In a letter to the French Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, Weil wrote that while she found elements of the Catholic faith strongly attractive, she nevertheless believed her true calling was “to be a Christian outside the Church” because of what the she saw as the tendency of Catholicism—indeed, any organized religion—toward imperialism and authoritarianism. See Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest, trans. Arthur F. Wills (London: Routledge, 1953), 11.
[31] Joan Dargan, Simone Weil: Thinking Poetically (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); Ronald C. Arnett, “Interpersonal Praxis: The Interplay of Religious Narrative, Historicality, and Metaphor,” Journal of Communication and Religion 21 (1998): 141–63.
[32] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 173.
[33] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 172.
[34] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 171.
[35] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 174.
[36] Courtine-Denamy, 46–47.
[37] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 170.
[38] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 176.
[39] Diogenes Allen, “Simone Weil on Suffering and ‘Reading,’” Communio 11 (1984): 297–304; Ann Pirruccello, “‘Gravity’ in the Thought of Simone Weil,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1997): 73–93; Peter Winch, Simone Weil: “The Just Balance” (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[40] Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie (Amherst, MA: University of Amherst Press, 1973), 78.
[41] Allen and Springsted, 64.
[42] See, for example, Michael K. Ferber, “Simone Weil's Iliad,” in Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life, ed. George Abbott White (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 63–85.
[43] Weil, Oppression and Liberty, 87.
[44] Ross, “Sustainable Livelihoods.”
[45] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1951), 119.
[46] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 132.
[47] Courtine-Denamy, 44.
[48] Christopher Frost and Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Simone Weil: On Politics, Religion and Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998); Ann Loades. “Eucharistic Sacrifice: Simone Weil's Use of a Liturgical Metaphor,” Religion and Literature 17 (1985): 43–54; Tanya Loughead, “Two Slices From the Same Loaf? Weil and Levinas on the Demand of Social Justice,” Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network 14 (2007): 117–38.
[49] Emmanuel Levinas, “Simone Weil Against the Bible,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Head (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 139–41.
[50] Kristen Lucas, “Problematized Protecting,” 185.
[51] Allen and Springsted, 182.
[52] Richard H. Bell, Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Compassion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
[53] Weil, Waiting for God, 146.
[54] Weil, The Need for Roots, 288.
[55] See Frost and Bell-Metereau; Louis Patasouras. Simone Weil and the Socialist Tradition (San Francisco, CA: EMText, 1991).
[56] McAlister, 122.
[57] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 45.
[58] See Pirruccello.
[59] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 216.
[60] Allen and Springsted; Bell; Frost and Bell-Metereau; Conor Cruise O'Brien, “Patriotism and The Need for Roots: The Antipolitics of Simone Weil,” in Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life, ed. George Abbott White (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 95–110; Meirlys Owens, “The Notion of Human Rights: A Reconsideration,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1969): 240–46.
[61] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 216.
[62] Simone Weil, “Human Personality,” in Selected Essays: 1934–1943, trans. Richard Rees (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1962), 21.
[63] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 190
[64] Weil, Oppression and Liberty, 167.
[65] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1951), 111.
[66] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1951), 112.
[67] Loughead, 134.
[68] Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” 201.
[69] Weil, The Need for Roots, 190.
[70] Weil, The Need for Roots, 179–80.
[71] Weil, The Need for Roots, 190.
[72] Weil, The Need for Roots, 190–91.
[73] Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2–18.
[74] Weil, The Need for Roots, 192–93.
[75] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 193.
[76] Weil, The Need for Roots, 196.
[77] Weil, The Need for Roots, 200.
[78] See Janie M. Harden Fritz, Professional Civility: Communicative Virtue at Work (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2013). Though she addresses a different context, Fritz's work on professional civility establishes that communicative micropractices—small acts that embody encouragement, respect for others, and so on—can have a profound cumulative effect on communicative life as they are enacted and reenacted over time.
[79] Robin P. Clair, Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), 147.
[80] Kris Acheson, “Silence as Gesture: Rethinking the Nature of Communicative Silences,” Communication Theory 18 (2008): 547.