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Abstract
In order to help frame a current theoretical impasse, in this essay we forward the figure of the zombie in Western cinema as an allegory for the reception of the concept of ideology by communication scholars. After noting parallels between (a) an early academic caricature of ideology and the laboring zombie, and (b) the subject of ideological interpellation and the ravenous, consuming zombie of more recent cinema, we suggest that rhetorical scholars have yet to move beyond an obsession with the laboring zombie. To escape the connotation of a totalizing determinism that haunts ideology critique, we urge an acceptance of the category of the unconscious and a focus on ideology as a force of subjectification.
The authors would like to thank Ronald Walter Greene for his generous comments on previous versions of this essay, as well as Barry Brummett, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, David Henry, Chris Lundberg, and Laura Sells for their suggestions.
Notes
Different versions or parts of this manuscript were delivered at the 2003 National Communication Association Conference in Miami and the 2002 Popular Communication Association Conference in New Orleans.
1. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 6.
2. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 6. For more information regarding Burke's relation to Marxism, see Kenneth Burke, “Auscultation, Creation, and Revision: The Rout of Esthetes Literature, Marxism, and Beyond,” in Extensions of the Burkean System, ed. James W. Chesebro (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), esp. 97–111; Greig E. Henderson, “Aesthetic and Practical Frames of Reference: Burke, Marx, and the Rhetoric of Social Change,” in Extensions of the Burkean System, 173–85; Andrew King, “Disciplining the Master: Finding the Via Media for Kenneth Burke,” American Communication Journal 4 (Winter 2001): http://acjournal.org/holdings/vol4/iss2/special/king.htm; and Edward Schiappa and Mary F. Keehner, “The Lost Passages of Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change,” Communication Studies 42 (1991): 189–98.
3. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 28. Also see Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 166–67.
4. Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 1995), 442. Also see Michael Calvin McGee, “Not Men, But Measures: The Origins and Import of an Ideological Principle,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 64 (1978): 141–54.
5. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 452.
6. For a book-length example see Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
7. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Pueple Québécois,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133–50.
8. Edward Schiappa, “Second Thoughts on the Critiques of Big Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34 (2001): 260–74.
9. See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), esp. xi–xv, 1–31; Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. 59, note 15; Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), esp. 3–44.
10. This shift began with the introduction of cultural studies in the 1980s, but was most vocally announced by David J. Sholle in “Critical Studies: From the Theory of Ideology to Power/Knowledge,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5 (1998): 16–41.
11. Sharon Crowley, “Reflections on an Argument That Won't Go Away: Or, a Turn of the Ideological Screw,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 459.
12. Philip Wander, “The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 1995), 106–24. Also see Philip Wander, “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,” Central States Speech Journal 25 (1984): 197–216; and Philip Wander and Steven Jenkins, “Rhetoric, Society, and the Critical Response,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 441–51.
13. Wander, “The Ideological Turn,” 107.
14. Wander, “The Ideological Turn,” 120. We also should not neglect to mention Raymie McKerrow's early call for ideology critique; his 1983 call for the development of a rhetorical concept of ideology, made in a review essay, seems to have fallen on deaf ears. See Ray E. McKerrow, “Marxism and a Rhetorical Conception of Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983): 192–219.
15. We are not ignorant of the significance of Wander's charge: the critic is part of the same social fabric as those whom s/he critiques. Indeed, it is often the case that the critic is party to the same oppressive ideological forces she decries (such is the paradox of any form of resistance: to call something into question also affirms its place).
16. Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, “Integrating Ideology and Archetype in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 385–406.
17. For an exemplary, exhaustive bibliography of relevant literature, see Margaret Zulick, Sources in Ideological Rhetoric, http://www.wfu.edu/%7ezulick/454/bibideograph.html.
18. These scholars run the gamut from radical postmodernists to liberal pragmatists. Deleuze and Guattari, for example, jettison ideology in favor of immanent desire as an explanation for the agapic embrace of fascism: “Repressing desire, not only for others but in oneself … that is what arouses, and it is not ideology, it is economy.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 346. From an alternate perspective, Richard Rorty argues, “it would be a good idea to stop talking about ‘the anticapitalist struggle’ and to substitute something banal and untheoretical—something like ‘the struggle against avoidable human misery.’ … I suggest we start talking about greed and selfishness rather than about bourgeois ideology.” Richard Rorty, “The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume Three (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 229. In rhetorical studies, the abandonment of ideology has rarely been called for directly, yet its evidence is clearly discernable in practice over the last decade.
19. This is the first of two essays devoted to the unconscious work of ideology. In this essay we attempt to frame the problematic in theory. In the second essay, with an analysis of the 2001 zombie film 28 Days Later, we illustrate our solution and provide a method of psychoanalytic/ideological criticism keyed specifically to the ideological work of racism.
20. Eagleton, Ideology, 5. Also see Mark P. Moore, “The Rhetoric of Ideology: Confronting a Critical Dilemma,” The Southern Communication Journal 54 (1988): 74–92.
21. Marx, Capital, 166–67.
22. Eagleton, Ideology, xiii. We are hesitant to offer a single definition of ideology, because each different definition could be said to do a useful kind of work. Our working definition of ideology, however, is the following: the collective beliefs, attitudes, and values of a given community or population that serve those who have the most power and resources. Later in the essay we will complicate this definition by incorporating its unconscious dimension.
23. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1938–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 101–133.
24. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
25. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 50, 52.
26. F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Cambridge, UK: The Minority Press, 1930).
27. Leavis, Mass Civilization, 9–10.
28. See Shearon A. Lowery and Melvin L. DeFleur, Milestones in Mass Communication Research: Media Effects, 3rd ed. (White Plains, NY: Longman Publishers, 1995), 21–67.
29. See Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of Ideology: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” in Culture, Society, and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch (New York: Routledge, 1988), 56–90; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997); Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (Maulden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 10–24; and Raymond Williams, “The Masses,” in The Raymond Williams Reader, 42–64.
30. The most well known media effects theories in this respect have been dubbed the “magic bullet” and “hypodermic needle” theories. See Jeffrey L. Bineham, “A Historical Account of the Hypodermic Model in Mass Communication,” Communication Monographs 55 (1988): 230–46; and J. Michael Sproule, “Progressive Propaganda Critics and the Magic Bullet Myth,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989): 225–46.
31. Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” trans. Anson G. Rabinbach, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 100.
32. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–136.
33. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 98.
34. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 106.
35. For example, in his article “Rethinking Critical Theory: Instrumental Reason, Judgment, and the Environmental Crisis,” Environmental Ethics, 23 (Fall 2001): 307–26, Kevin Michael DeLuca “rethinks” critical theory by expunging the psychoanalytic contribution to the notion of “instrumental reason” (largely by focusing solely on Horkheimer's contribution), which partakes in the libidinal economy of fascism. DeLuca's de-psychologized notion of judgment and instrumental reason, however, is a very common move among rhetorical scholars who are uncomfortable with the confounding variable of the unconscious; see, for example, Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91–111, which completely drops the unconscious from critical theory in favor of a Foucauldian idiom. Adorno's commitment to psychoanalysis is no more powerfully illustrated than by his break with Eric Fromm, who Adorno believed had put him “in the paradoxical situation of defending Freud.” See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 265–73; also see Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Culture Industry, 132–57.
36. For a brief overview, see Walter Benjamin, “A German Institute for Independent Research,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 307–16; also see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
37. See Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to the Theories of Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 51–85.
38. See Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 120–22.
39. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 103–106.
40. One excellent and notable exception of brief but careful writing is Jere Paul Surber's gloss; see Jere Paul Surber, Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 128–54. For a helpful discussion of the erroneous reductionism of critics of the concept, see Richard Leppert, “Introduction,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 42–61.
41. Strinati, An Introduction, 74–81. For a similar negative portrayal, see Will Brooker, Teach Yourself Cultural Studies (Lincolnwood, IL: NTC/Contemporary Publishing, 1999), 16–21. The accusation of a lack of empirical evidence is wrong for two reasons. First, while they critiqued social scientific approaches to research, many scholars associated with the Frankfurt School were involved in a number of empirical studies in support of their more speculative and philosophical researches. Second, insofar as some theories, like that of the culture industry, have drawn from the insights of psychoanalysis, then the empirical base is locatable in clinical experience and practice. The latter “fact” may be a weak support, but it is enough to demonstrate a basis for the “real world” relevance and rooting of critical theory.
42. Stephen W. Littlejohn, Theories of Human Communication, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1996), 343. Also see Sproule, “Progressive Propaganda,” 225–46.
43. Richard Campbell, Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), 464–65.
44. See John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Telepresence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
45. Steve Shaviro, “Capitalist Monsters,” Historical Materialism 10 (2002): 288.
46. William B. Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1994).
47. See Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: Pathfinder, 1972). The study of the family structure in relation to economic crisis was one of the major shifts in emphasis Horkheimer urged among Frankfurt School scholars in the early 1930s. See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 137–56.
48. Peter Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2001), 148.
49. Concern about fascistic authority widely circulated during this time, and we think a study examining this figure would benefit scholars interested in the history of rhetorical agency. For example, the Frankfurt School scholars originally termed this authority the “fascistic character,” but eventually settled on the “authoritarian character,” a politically invested version of what Freud, and later Karl Abraham, termed the “anal character.” Dr. Caligari, Dr. Legendre, and Dr. von Alterman possess the three qualities typical of the anal character (avarice, pedantry, and obstinacy) and are demonstrative of the type of “character structure” that typifies a susceptibility to anti-Semitism, at least according to the Fascism scale or “F-scale” developed by Frankfurt scholars. According to Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 414: “The fascist's ego went about on the crutches of stereotype, personification and discriminatory prejudice; he identified himself with power, and appeals to democracy, morality, and rationality only in order to destroy them; he satisfied his instincts while upholding moral condemnation of them and their suppression in out-groups and outsiders.” See Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906–1908), ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 169–75; Sigmund Freud, "On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism," trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919), ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 127–33; and Karl Abraham, “Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character,” trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey. Selected Papers of Karl Abraham (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1927), 370–92.
50. Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, 7.
51. Again, in a companion essay on the film 28 Days Later, we take up this important part of the zombie allegory in order to demonstrate ideological criticism from our point of view. We recognize ideology at work in our repression of this thread.
52. Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric.”
53. For further discussion of this point, see Joshua Gunn, “On Dead Subjects: A Rejoinder to Lundberg on (a) Psychoanalytic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 501–13.
54. Hence the title of a chapter in Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology: “You Only Die Twice.”
55. It is therefore overdetermined that the next step in the evolution of the creature formerly known as the zombie is the living dead baby, an innovation that finally occurred in the 2004 remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
56. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162.
57. See Christian Lundberg, “The Royal Road Not Taken: Joshua Gunn's ‘Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead’ and Lacan's Symbolic Order,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 495.
58. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978), esp. 53–64. For an elegant explanation of the Lacanian bases of Althusser's formulation, see Henry Krips, Fetish: An Erotics of Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 73–95. Also see Barbara Biesecker, “Rhetorical Studies and the ‘New Psychoanalysis’: What's the Real Problem? Or Framing the Problem of the Real,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 222–39.
59. Althusser, Lenin, 171–73.
60. Althusser, Lenin, 174.
61. We recognize how annoying cleverness with parentheses can be. Regardless, we qualify structuralism with “(post)” to underscore that old school structuralists and more hipster poststructuralists can mutually benefit from the category of the unconscious. We also mean to stress that poststructuralism is a form of structuralism, a persuasive argument offered by Peter Caws. See Peter Caws, Structuralism: A Philosophy for the Human Sciences (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1997).
62. Farrel Corcoran, “The Widening Gyre: Another Look at Ideology in Wander and his Critics,” Central States Speech Journal 35 (1984): 55.
63. Michael Calvin McGee, “Another Philippic: Notes on the Ideological Turn in Criticism,” Central States Speech Journal 35 (1984): 43.
64. Krips, Fetish. Also see Dale Cyphert, “Ideology, Knowledge and Text: Pulling at the Knot of Ariadne's Thread,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 380.
65. See Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric”; Krips, Fetish.
66. Rushing and Frentz, “Integrating Ideology,” 385.
67. For example, see Bonnie J. Dow, “Hegemony, Feminist Criticism, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (1990): 261–74.
68. For example, see V. William Balthrop, “Culture, Myth, and Ideology as Public Argument: An Interpretation of the Ascent and Demise of ‘Southern Culture,’” Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 339–42.
69. McGee, “Another Philippic,” 45. For the steps involved in ideological criticism, see Karen Foss, Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice, 3rd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 2004), 239–48. Not even McGee could prevent his views on ideology from becoming methodologized. See, for example, the “Ideographic Criticism” section in Carl R. Burgchardt, ed., Readings in Rhetorical Criticism (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 1995), 441–77.
70. See Joshua Gunn and Barry Brummett, “Popular Communication After Globalization?” Journal of Communication 54 (2004): 705–21.
71. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1891–1937 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
72. For one of the better uses of hegemony in our field, see Dana L. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in ‘Oprah’ Winfrey's Rags-to-Riches Biography,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13 (1996): 115–37; and Dana L. Cloud, “Concordance, Complexity, and Conservatism: Rejoinder to Condit,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14 (1997): 193–200.
73. Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Boston: Unwin Hymen, 1990), 208. See George Bagley, “The Television Text: Spectatorship, Ideology, and the Organization of Consent,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 4 (2001): 436–51; Dow, “Hegemony,” 261–74; Raymie McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 91–111.
74. Todd Gitlin in Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement Since 1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 11 and Celeste Michelle Condit, “Hegemony in a Mass-mediated Society: Concordance About Reproductive Technologies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11 (1994): 205–18.
75. See Anne Makus, “Stuart Hall's Theory of Ideology: A Frame for Rhetorical Criticism,” Western Journal of Communication 54 (1990): 495–514; and Charles Lewis, “Making Sense of Common Sense: A Framework for Tracking Hegemony,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 9 (1992): 277–92.
76. Cloud, “Concordance,” 194. We also agree with Cloud's assertion that Condit's version of hegemony is toothless; it is, perhaps, what we might term a “gummy hegemony.”
77. Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of Ideology,” 56–65.
78. Celeste Michelle Condit, “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989): 103.
79. See David Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially Chapter 7, in which the author outlines what was being taught at the Birmingham school (e.g., Barthes, Freud, and Lacan on pleasure).
80. Condit, “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy,” 116–17.
81. Although she is certainly no enemy to psychoanalysis, even Barbara Biesecker's contributions to articulation theory in rhetorical studies downplay the unconscious and skirt the pressing issue of determinism. See, for example, Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Différénce,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 110–30. Given her argument in favor of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, perhaps the avoidance of interiors was (and remains) a deliberate and necessary strategy to get new concepts on the table?
82. The irony here is that Lacan's notion of the quilting point or point de capiton yields much more specificity than the ideograph, and could be more fruitfully employed for ideology critique keyed specifically to subjectification: ideology overdetermines where the “normal” subject is quilted in the fabric of the socious. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993): 293–70; and Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 87–92. Our thanks to Chris Lundberg for stressing this point.
83. Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford, 1999). For yet another example, see Nathan Stormer, “Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 257–84. Also see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2001). Laclau has written about rhetoric directly; see Ernesto Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 229–53.
84. Summarily dismissing the universal has also been an unfortunate move in rhetorical studies since the incorporation of post- theory. See Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (New York: Verso, 2000).
85. Thomas S. Frentz, “Reconstructing a Rhetoric of the Interior,” Communication Monographs 60 (1993): 83–89.
86. The fear of determinism is, in part, the result of a misreading of interpellation as a mechanical, airtight determinism (a misreading no doubt encouraged by the scholarship of those associated with the journal Screen). Turner notes that it “is not unusual for cultural studies' adoption of Althusserian models of ideology in the 1970s to be represented as utterly deterministic, utterly mechanical. Within such accounts, the similarities between Althusser and Gramsci are glossed over and the differences are exaggerated to legitimate the adaptation of Gramsci's theory of hegemony as a necessary correction to Althusserianism.” In British Cultural Studies, 198.
87. Hence the insistence on the part of a number of media scholars that hegemony tends toward domination, but this is never guaranteed. Owing to a disciplinary tendency to read the provision of zombies into anything “post,” just as we do in this essay, rhetorical scholars who use the concept of hegemony are compelled to repeat the same, tiresome defense of the concept as undeterministic; see DeLuca, Image Politics, 93–95; Dow, “Hegemony,” 261–74; and McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 91–111.
88. See Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (New York: Routledge, 1984). Because dominant ideology only holds sway over the elite classes, they argue, the class basis of ideology is false.
89. See Slavoj Zizek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in The Zizek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 55–86.
90. Condit and Lucaites, Crafting Equality, xiv–xv.
91. Condit and Lucaites, Crafting Equality, n. 22, 255. Elsewhere Condit has not been so skittish; see Condit, “Hegemony in a Mass-mediated Society,” 205–30.
92. See Hall, “The Rediscovery of Ideology,” for a historical account of the pluralist paradigm in media studies.
93. This approach is clearly discernable in the program outlined by Michel Foucault in the English forward and the preface to The Order of Things, which has subsequently led to a number of Foucauldian approaches (we stress the manner of Foucault's up-take in the discipline, however, and not Foucault's work itself; see Barbara Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 [1992]: 351–364). Of course, Foucault's thoroughly materialist approach is an extension of Althusser's assertion that the ideational is material; however, unlike Althusser, who seemed to identify the ideational/imaginary realm with ideology, Foucault abandons any notion of false consciousness, and this is precisely because he denies a rhetoric of interiors. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970).
94. Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985): 100.
95. For an explicit example of this problem, see Ernest G. Bormann, John F. Cragan, and Donald C. Sheilds, “Defending Symbolic Convergence Theory from an Imaginary Gunn,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 366–73.
96. Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (London: Hogarth, 1995), 172.
97. See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 330–412; Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis,” trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XII (London: Hogarth, 1995), 260–66; Sigmund Freud, “Some Elementary Lessons in Psychoanalysis,” trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXIII (London: Hogarth, 1995), 281–86; and Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
98. Freud, “Some Elementary Lessons,” 283–84.
99. Freud, “Some Elementary Lessons,” 284–86.
100. See Bormann, Cragan, and Sheilds, “Defending Symbolic Convergence Theory,” 366–73.
101. Ernest G. Bormann, “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: Ten Years Later,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): 290.
102. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 313.
103. Bormann, “Ten Years Later,” 291.
104. Perhaps Jean Baudrillard would fit the bill here; however, he does only insofar as consciousness and the unconscious have “imploded.”
105. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 330–412; and Sigmund Freud, “Repression,” trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (London: Hogarth, 1955), 146–58.
106. Freud, “Repression,” 147.
107. Stephen Frosh, Key Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 2003), 11.
108. Of course, the psychoanalytic caveat to be made here is that there is some pleasure in pain, that some of us (if not most) enjoy our oppression. Alas, there is not space enough to detail the complexities of pleasure, desire, and enjoyment here. Rhetoric sorely needs to theorize desire.
109. This implies, of course, an epistemic dimension, which relates to an earlier preoccupation with propaganda that links the efforts of scholars like J. Michael Sproule with the Marxian agenda of Cloud and Aune. The concern over propaganda is that it warps minds and makes it impossible to realize something called democracy. Similarly, Marxian approaches to rhetoric have been interested in making sharp distinctions between “true” and “false” consciousness. Although we believe it is possible to bring ideological evils to consciousness, discerning and judging them is matter of politics (taking a stand) and always subject to debate; there is no objective criterion with which to adjudicate ideological work. See J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
110. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 33.
111. Butler's critique of Althusser is precisely that he requires the subject's recognition for interpellation, which ignores the fact that “the linguistic constitution of the subject can take place without the subjects knowing, as when one is constituted out of earshot, as, say, the referent of a third-person discourse.” Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 33.
112. Butler, Gender Trouble, 187.
113. Butler, Excitable Speech, 33.
114. This argument begs the question of whether or not we advocate idealism (also see Note 108). Although we resist the more recent attempts to de-Hegelize rhetorical theory (it seems to us that mediation is the primary function of rhetoric), politically we do not wish to disavow materialism—quite the contrary. We do not believe, however, that there is an objective plane of meaning or an ultimate essence to which one can appeal. There is no place from which one can discern the true and false interests of this or that population; there is only politics (taking a stand), and it goes all the way down. Perhaps a better way to characterize our position on epistemic issues is by recourse to ontology: while it is certainly unfashionable, we recommend that rhetoricians seriously reconsider the jettisoning of dualism. Of course, everyone knows that claiming dualistic positions is naughty and wrong-headed, and that Descartes really screwed things up for everybody. Yet this nugget of well-worn common sense is ideologically motivated, and we worry that too much rhetorical theorizing contorts to reach the proper, anti-dualistic conclusions. It may well be the case that defending a certain form of ontological dualism is the only way to keep rhetoric from evaporating as a disciplined pursuit and a meaningful category into the thin (hot) air of the academy.
115. Butler, Excitable Speech, 33.
116. Butler, Excitable Speech, 34.
117. Edwin Black, “A Note on Theory and Practice in Rhetorical Criticism,” The Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (1980): 334.
118. Although space limits the development of this argument, we suggest that when one understands ideological criticism as the tracking of unconscious or repressed structures of subjectification, two rhetorical approaches to discourse collapse into the same method: fantasy theme criticism and ideographic criticism. These cartographic approaches read narrative elements as symptoms of some deeper, unconscious structure animating public discourse. Indeed, the findings of each type of criticism fail to make sense absent the unconscious.
119. The work of Ronald Walter Greene and Bradford Vivian are good examples. In Greene's unique application of a Deleuzian reading of Foucault, primarily in terms of apparatus theory, the “subject” is a fold of the exterior; for his approach to agency, see Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37 (2004): 188–206. For an exemplary apparatus criticism, also see Ronald Walter Greene, Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999). From a different angle keyed more directly to subjectification as a problematic, Bradford Vivian works from a perspective of immanence in his attempt to shed the autonomy and transparency of Cartesianism. See Bradford Vivian, “The Threshold of Self,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33 (2000), 303–18. Vivian's remarkable, book-length project draws more from Foucauldian and Derridian approaches to the subject, but a focus on immanence is sustained throughout; see Bradford Vivian, Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).
120. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. 20–27; and Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1999), esp. 32–123.
121. Louis Althusser, “The Discovery of Dr. Freud,” trans. Jaffrey Mehlman, in Writings on Psychoanalysis, ed. Olivier Corpet and François Matheron (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 114.
122. Althusser, “The Discovery,” 114.
123. Althusser, “The Discovery,” 114.
124. In addition to Crafting Equality, Lucaites and Condit's epilogue to their and Sally Caudill's Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999) is also demonstrative of a liberal pluralist brand of absolute consciousness.
125. Such questioning has occurred over and over in numerous guises, but collectively as a kind of “poststructural turn.” For examples, Barbara Biesecker's work is particularly exemplary in content and style. See especially Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 140–59; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26 (1993): 153–59; and Barbara Biesecker, “Negotiating with Our Tradition: Reflecting Again (Without Apologies) on the Feminization of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26 (1993): 236–41.
126. See, for example, the forum sections of the last issue of Volume 34 (1983) and the first issue of Volume 55 (1984) of the Central States Speech Journal.
127. See Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of American Culture,” Western Speech Communication Journal 54 (1990): 274–89.
128. Zizek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” 71.
129. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 100–102.