Signs of protest rhetoric: From Logos to logistics in Luther's Ninety-Five Theses

ABSTRACT

Our paper conceptualizes protest rhetoric in order to theorize the underlying relationship between communication and subjectivity. We do this by highlighting how rhetorical protest challenges the sovereignty of voice. Our argument is that Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses is an example of a sign that protests. To make this argument, we use a materialist method from media studies that simultaneously examines the formal capacities of a sign that protests and maps its historical transformation. Our analysis opens with the two prevailing accounts of Luther's theses: disputation and dissemination. We extend both disputation and dissemination by placing them in a “universal history” of protest rhetoric that grounds many accepted critical rhetorical theories in specific systems of representation. Drawing together our findings, we conclude by urging the replacement of logos and logocentrism with the logistics of protest rhetoric in order to link together disputation and dissemination as a mechanism for both change and subjection.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetoric
• protest
• logocentrism
• space and place
• logistics
• Martin Luther

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the patience, insight, and support of their respective life partners, Eva Della Lana and Michelle Gajda. They also extend their thanks to the reviewers for many helpful insights, and a special thank you to Barbara Biesecker for her generous feedback and support.

Notes

1. Lionel Scott, “When Luther Argued,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 20, no. 1 (1942): 20–26, 23.

2. Kenneth Burke's section on “Identification,” draws together the performances of opinion, attitude, and value to elaborate on how persuasion works. “For the orator, following Aristotle and Cicero, will seek to display the appropriate ‘signs’ of character needed to earn the audience's good will.” Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 55–59; 55–56. Critical rhetoricians tend to follow Burke's contribution with Charland's argument that identification does not move far enough toward a consideration of individuals and groups of individuals as effects—effectivities produced by and through discursive strategies. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133. The notions of a dramatistic landscape, a performed reality, and a complex theory of persuasion are attractive, but such a defense of identification still posits an essentialized subject, audience, and message. Burke continues: “(T)hese rhetorical forms would involve “identification,” first by inducing the auditor to participate in the form, as a ‘universal’ locus of appeal, and next by trying to include a partisan statement within this same pale of assent.” Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 59.

3. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965). Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, eds. J. O. Urmson & Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997).

4. Martin Luther, Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, trans. Adolph Spaeth, L. D. Reed, Henry Eyster Jacobs, et al. On-line, 1517, accessed August 2015, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Disputation_of_Doctor_Martin_Luther_on_the_Power_and_Efficacy_of_Indulgence

5. Mark E. Wildermuth, “The Rhetoric of Wilson's Arte: Reclaiming the Classical Heritage for English Protestants,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22, no. 1 (1989): 43–58. Also see Andrew D. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), vi.

6. Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric” in Explorations in Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, ed. Ray McKerrow (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1982), 23–48.

7. The long-term impact of Luther's Theses points to a materiality that really drives the rhetorical arrangement of a sign that protests. The text at the heart of this context is only made up of written words, not weapons—words that made a demand for change with the only threat of force coming from verbal promises of damnation (the roots of the words Reformation and Protestantism should not be disassociated from those movements). This demand, regardless of whether the author of the Theses himself would support the consequence of the act of protest, has been represented, symbolized, and canonized as a mythical moment where Truth was nailed to the door of human fallibility by a devoted monk, a Doctor in Biblia, compelled to speak up and speak out. This very specific act—the nailing of demands to a public space—is a sign of protest (it is a historical event that marks an effective clash between a single unyielding individual relying on a commitment to values outside the authority of other humans), and it is a sign that protests (it reminds us that the power to protest is the power not just “of” words, but to convert words into worlds). More importantly for our argument, Luther's Theses exposes a territory that initiates the materiality of the dispute involving debt, sacrifice, and the corruption of greed—perhaps even as a strike against capital accumulation, the precursor to liberation theology. This sign, although rhetorical, is not simply a reflection of Luther's specific rhetorical flair, exemplified by Neil Leroux's detailed analysis of Luther's prose in terms of its syntax and style, any more than it mirrors other criticisms of indulgences at the time. For an account of Luther's use of overlapping and conjoining words to add emphasis to his argument, see Neil R. Leroux, “Luther's Use of Doublets,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2000): 35–54. In terms of the statement itself, Luther was not alone. Wicks writes about other public complaints levied against the practice of indulgences during those years, including a 1518 decision by the Sorbonne “to inform the king and the bishops of France about abuses due to indulgence preachers” and the censure of a proposition that conferred automatic “effectiveness for indulgences gained for the deceased” by theologians in Paris. Jared Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther: The First Year (1518),” The Catholic Historical Review 69, no. 4 (1983): 521–62, 522. There is something unique in Luther's particular act that really catapulted its sign of protest and made this event the starting point—the signal—for seismic movements that took place in Christianity and throughout society from that time forward. “Why Luther?” is not as important for us as “How Luther?”

8. Erwin Iserloh, The Theses Were Not Posted: Luther Between Reform and Reformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

9. Elizabeth L. Eisensten, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

10. Disputation will have greater value when extracted from a theological perspective that focuses on doctrinal debates (an extraction that will open up disputation as communicative combat, debate, logistics, and the operations of protest).

11. Because we need to indicate the communicative transubstantiation of subjectivity, the best term is the “sign.” The sign is the mark, the object-image, that says “notice this” or “attention: meaning resides here.” It is a sign-post-sign, hyphens optional.

12. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). Also see, Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), 158–64.

13. N. Katherine Hayles, “Riposte: What Cybertext Theory Can't Do,” electronic book review 12 (2006), accessed September 5, 2015, http://web.archive.org/web/20060313112924/http://www.altx.com/EBR/riposte/rip12/rip12hay.htm

14. By looking for perspectives other than just disputation and dissemination, we recognize the risk of conflating the sign of the Theses with the particular speech-act of Luther in terms of Luther's own life and resistance. Raymond Williams discusses the split between an author and the author's messages in his work on “Signs and Notations,” but we do not want to vacillate between his terms of “personal experience” and “formalism.” Williams, Marxism and Literature, 165, 178. Instead, we take Williams's contention that “‘subjective’ experience . . . can be contrasted with its ‘objective’ social effect” (Williams, Marxism and Literature, 178) as a departure for our argument that Luther's Ninety-Five Theses certainly relates to the life and experiences of Martin Luther himself, but our overriding claim is that the Theses, as a sign of protest, enacts a resistance both independent of persuasion theory and distinct from the life of Luther the person. We are not staking a claim about the sign's source, but we are saying that the sign itself can protest without appeals to traditional notions of identification in rhetoric (and by producing networks and configurations that are not exclusively defined by subjectivity).

15. Leif Grane, “Luther and Scholasticism,” Luther and Learning: The Wittenberg University Luther Symposium (Cransbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985), 52–68. Also see Heiko A. Oberman, “‘Iustitia Christi’ and ‘Iustitia Dei’: Luther and the Scholastic Doctrines of Justification,” The Harvard Theological Review 59, no. 1 (1966): 1–26.

16. Luther, Disputation, §32.

17. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer, II, 2), trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007/2011), 210–11.

18. Romans 8:7–12 (English Standard Version).

19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 197.

20. Luther, Disputation, §68.

21. Wildermuth, “The Rhetoric of Luther's Arte,” 45.

22. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 81–86.

23. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1–23.

24. Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” 20.

25. Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” 20.

26. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 202–3.

27. Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).

28. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 145–53.

29. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 40, 200–10.

30. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 210–13.

31. Eugene W. Holland, “The Schizoanalytic Critique of Althusser on Ideology,” Nomad Scholarship (2015), accessed January 23, 2015, https://nomadscholarship.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/the-schizoanalytic-critique-of-althusser-on-ideology/

32. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 202–5.

33. Holland, “The Schizoanalytic Critique,” 77.

34. This is how Deleuze and Guattari use historical materialism to locate Lacan's fundamental definition of desire as the desire of the Other. Deleuze and Guattari anthropologically locate this desire in relation to the historical development of sovereignty. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 214–15.

35. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 214–15.

36. For a balanced social history of the modes of sovereignty born out of the conflict between Lutherans and the Catholic Counter-Reformation in the founding of the Early Modern state, consult Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State a Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (July 1989): 383–404.

37. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 211.

38. Malcolm O. Sillars, “Rhetoric as Act,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 50, no. 3 (1964): 277–84.

39. Sillars, “Rhetoric as Act,” 282.

40. Some scholars note that Luther did not intend to submit the Ninety-Five Theses as incontrovertible or absolute, let alone as definitive of his own “views and convictions.” This argument points to Luther's continued work in justifying particular points from the Ninety-Five in his Resoluciones, a piece that was “still in the press” when some of the Roman clergy began lashing out at Luther's heresy. Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther,” 530. It was too late for Luther to question his own text, the uptake was already in motion and gathering steam. The writing was on the wall. Luther's intent is not what we are after, however, in fact such a focus on the author's biography is counterproductive to the notion that the Theses is a sign that protests. How could one know, as Deleuze and Guattari observe, that Luther would cross the line from accusation to betrayal? It only feeds the larger narrative that Luther himself, after posting his statement against the selling of forgiveness, turned toward self-reflection and pondered the veracity of his own work instead of stating, “What a grandiose dream! I will be the last traitor.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 126.

There was no deep desire in Luther to commit heresy even though the sign itself marks the triumphant rise of the heretic, a figure of protest and reform based not on the life of Martin Luther, but on his act of using words to defy a corrupt authority. “Then there was the Reformation: the extraordinary figure of Luther, as traitor to all things and all people” who used a scroll to open the floodgates of resistance to authority and propel the movement of signs:

There is an emission of the despotic signifier, and its interpretation by scribes and priests, which fixes the signified and reimports signifier; but there is also, from sign to sign, a movement from one territory to another, a circulation assuring a certain speed of deterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 126, 127.

The Bible inspired Luther's refusal to accept mere decree and mortal traditions, but the Bible also became the word of God written into the minds of its followers prior to adherence to the practices of the church “as a point of subjectification and again in the subject.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 127. At points before and after the protest of the Theses, the other text inscribing itself in these disputes is The Bible, a contention established in A Thousand Plateaus immediately prior to the outlining of enunciation, statements, and interpellation within regimes of signs. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 126–33. How did a simple request to engage in a debate over the value of indulgences become one of the most amazing whistle-blowing acts of all time? Luther had to struggle against contradictory approaches to his act of dispute: responding to adversaries that feared the radical implications of his statements and also responding to forces that deployed the message toward a much broader rejection of formal traditions than ever could have been predicted. Also see Andrew Edward Harvey, “Martin Luther in the Estimate of Modern Historians,” The American Journal of Theology 22, no. 3 (1918): 321–48. In extreme irony, an act meant as only the opening of a debate, governed by the appeal of persuasion to rationality (“in the course of which terms would be defined, evidence presented, and a determinate reached” Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther,” 530) would emerge as a powerful plea to recognize a forgone conclusion, the proclamation that a debate had already happened in the scripture over the righteousness of indulgences and the condemnation of such practices would be recognized as inevitable.

41. It is useful to note the connection between a rhetorical act and rhetorical movements. The problem, however, is the gravitational pull of “persuasion” and the conjuring up of different subject-positions within a description of what it means to be “an act.” Primarily for Sillars, it means a person exerting force on other individuals through the discursive representation of a particular movement in history. Such “rhetoric as act” theories overemphasize persuasion by making comparisons between persuasion and force or the threat of force. On the other hand, if we look at the set of characteristics being attributed to a rhetorical event (Sillars, “Rhetoric as Act,” 278), traits that we would want to attach to the operations of the sign prior to persuasion, we could talk about the sign as a forceful act defined by its context within a larger movement. That lets us begin the journey to an anthropology of disputation as protest and a geography of dissemination as logistics.

42. Some contrast with Friedrich Kittler (or even Jean Baudrillard) might help us crystallize our argument about influence and determinism, especially it terms of technology. The dissemination approach to Luther's Theses parallels the theory that technology has its own agency and that the growth of technology determines or even erases the human condition. Kittler says “style . . . is merely the switchboard of scannings and selections” and “each step is controlled by scanning . . . for the sign or its absence . . . it depends on . . . whether the machine keeps the sign or erases it, or, vice versa.” Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Winthrop-Young & Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 3, 18.

Baudrillard (1994, 107) says, “the neo-individual is . . . an interactive, communicational particle, plugged into the network, . . . an autonomous micro-particle.” Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 107. Our position, somewhat more aligned with Donna J. Haraway's “cyborg subjectivity,” is located in between technological determinism and McLuhan's position that technology is only an extension of human agency. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. For us, it is important to acknowledge both ends of the spectrum to show how multiple configurations are capable of protest and retrenchment. In short, a sign may exercise its agency, but that does not mean that humans are exclusively switch boards subordinate to technological progress. Our willingness to straddle the fence on technological agency reinforces our move from stark dissemination (the printing press is responsible for the Reformation) to the more variegated notion of logistics.

43. Barry Stephenson, “Luther's Thesenportal: A Case Study of a ‘Ritual-architectural Event,’” Material Religion 4, no. 1 (2008): 54–84.

44. Stephenson, “Luther's Thesenportal,” 61.

45. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 42, 43.

46. Foucault, The Order of Things, 43. Also see, Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 205.

47. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 452–60, 456.

48. Gilles Deleuze, What is Grounding? trans. Pierre Lefebvre (Grand Rapids, MI: The New Center for Research and Practice, 2015).

49. Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 240–43.

50. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 203.

51. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 3.

52. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 60.

53. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 113. For his lengthy discussion on the outside as the basis for subjectivity, see the chapter “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation),” 94–123. It is worth noting that Foucault traces the subjectivation process at least as far back as the Greeks.

54. Stephenson, “Luther's Thesenportal,” 70.

55. The many events, symbols, images, myths, adornments, and passages of the Thesenportal are described by Stephenson as a rollicking place, “as the diverse action out front of it reveals, . . . a window on to the complexities and tensions within contemporary . . . society.” Stephenson, “Luther's Thesenportal,” 81.

56. We both reinforce and diverge with Ronald Walter Greene who contends that “the question that haunts rhetorical materialism is how to account for the representational politics of rhetorical practices.” Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 38. We agree with the question, but do not want representational politics to outflank materialist theory and circumvent the need to critique an overemphasis on subjectivity. Yes, the hope has to be for a world that is “less exploitative” and “more loving,” but multiple archipelagos must be charted alongside this “intellectual invitation to approach the material modalities of rhetoric (as public address, as technology, as discourse, as labor) as means and relations of production for building a common life” noted in Ronald Walter Greene, “More Materialist Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2015): 414–17. The invitation must also be extended to bypass the gravity of subjectivity altogether as a force still operating within criticism based on rhetoric as a technology of deliberation and governmentality as pastoral power. If the call is for a “rhetorical cartography” (Greene, “More Materialist Rhetoric,” 14), we must engage in more than different ways of mapping subjectivity so that “the diagram . . . has lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomena of resistance . . . but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 531.

57. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” 39.

58. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 364.

59. The split between disputation and dissemination followed an earlier division in the accounts by historians of the role of Luther, actually substituting two views of the person for the monumental effects of his event as a sign: the “supernatural” view and the “great person” view. According to Harvey, the former conception of Luther-as-Saint was as unscientific as it was enthusiastic to report on his divine stature, only tempered slightly over time by more “impartial” histories of his greatness and heroism embodied in his “God-inspired spirit.” Harvey, “Martin Luther,” 326. All this is to say that we cannot peel away the layers, whether it is the skin of hero-worship or of demonization, to find the “true Luther” or the “whole Luther” even if we wanted to do so. The fake core of such a method would only be another version of the intentionality and personality of Martin Luther, not a chorography (in the sense of an animated place of experience, or khora) of the territory disrupted and reclaimed by the Theses as a sign of protest. Khora demonstrates an “incapacity for naming” and a “problem of rhetoric.” Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Press, 1995), 89, 92. There is such a place of protest at the door of the Wittenberg Church attached to an arrangement of logistics that is not enveloped in the historical quest for a certain Luther, but is instead a place-making moment that projects the nailing of these demands, the Thesenportal, as a physical promise that resists the decaying greed and corrupt practices on the other side of the side door. This is a sacred place, a place of promise, and a place of clash between inspired words and sovereignty, a sign not simply of speaking truth to power, but of locating the truth of power. It is not the side door of the church itself that generates the Thesenportal, it is what is posted on its surface.

60. Deleuze, What is Grounding?, 175.

61. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 284–85. It is worth mentioning that Deleuze's “transcendental empiricism” specifies a radically a-subjective experience of the encounter.

62. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 270.

63. Deleuze, What is Grounding?, 21–25.

64. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 270.

65. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 270.

66. Deleuze, What is Grounding?, 175–6.

67. Noll and Howard, “The Reformation at Five Hundred,” 48.

68. Noll and Howard, “The Reformation at Five Hundred,” 48.

69. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 227–53.

70. The Catholic Church is “unique in history” for institutionalizing pastoral power. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 199. Foucault devotes four complete lectures to tracing the metaphor of shepherding through the Middle East, Greece, and the Christian Church. Foucault, “Security, Territory, Population,” 126–325. Corresponding to our argument about pre-persuasive protest, such a form of power produces subjects without recourse to linguistic, communicational, or socioeconomic forces. Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and Production of Subjectivity, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), 65.

71. Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 133. Since Charland, Deleuze has entered into the conversation sporadically, but without the necessary positioning outside subjectivity. See Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 294, 296. Even their nod to Lawrence's Grossberg's cartography references the territorial machine as a means of mapping people: the places people occupy, how they occupy them, and how they move in Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies and/in New Worlds,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10, no. 1 (1993): 15.

An exemplary use of Deleuze's contribution to rhetoric is Freya Thimsen's elaboration of the Deleuzian notion of sense in A. Freya Thimsen, “The People Against Corporate Personhood: Doxa and Dissensual Democracy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 4 (2015): 497. She builds from the work of Jean-Jacques Lecercle, who systematized Deleuze and Guattari's linguistics, such as Deleuze and Language (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009).

72. Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, 60.

73. Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, 39.