Habit-Forming: Identity-Addiction and the Rhetoric of Humility
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presented May 26, 2012 at the Rhetoric Society of America conference in Philadelphia.
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Habit-Forming: Identity-Addiction and the Rhetoric of Humility
- 1. Habit-Forming: Identity-Addiction and the Rhetoric of Humility by Kendall Joy Gerdes presented for RSA 2012 “Re/Framing Identifications” May 26, Philadelphia
- 2. The bad pharmakon can always parasitize the good pharmakon, bad repetition can always parasitize good repetition. This parasitism is at once accidental and essential. Like any good parasite, it is at once inside and outside—the outside feeding on the inside. — Jacques Derrida, "The Rhetoric of Drugs”
- 3. What looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage… The entrance says EXIT. There isn’t an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage… It is the cage that has entered her, somehow… She’s lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about enjoying it, still. It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole. — David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
- 4. 1079 pages 388 endnotes 2 lbs. in print
- 5. …the singular staging of the imaginary—“literature” in the widest sense—has a tradition of uncovering abiding structure of crime and ethicity with crucial integrity… These works have always worked as informants but they were nobody’s fools—they talked to philosophers because they had inside knowledge.
- 7. …those whose subjectivity is lodged in refusals or deflections of (or by) the logic of the heterosexual supplement; in far less simple associations attaching to state authority; in far less complacent relation to the witness of others. The emergence of the first person, of the singular, of the present, of the active, and of the indicative are all questions, rather than presumptions, for queer performativity. — Eve Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity”
- 8. “Shame on you.” Invokes a “you” but no “I” Singular or plural? Past, present, or future? Agentive or passive? “verbless”
- 9. “ ” ?!
- 10. Reading involves the undoing of interpretive figures, to the extent that it questions whether any synthesis, any single meaning, can close off a text and adequately account for its constitution. In contrast to interpretation, which involves a development over the course of a narrative toward a single figure reconciling all its diverse moments, “reading states the logic of figure and the logic of narratives to be constantly divergent.”
- 11. I don’t even have time to explain anything that happens in Infinite Jest, but it’s like this
- 14. Works Cited • J.L. Austin. How to Do Things With Words. 1962. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Print. • Jacques Derrida,. Interview. "The Rhetoric of Drugs." Points… Interviews, 1974 – 1994. 1992. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Michael Israel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. 228-254. Print. • Avitall Ronell. Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania. 1992. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Print. • ---. Stupidity. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Print. • Eve Sedgwick. "Queer Performativity: Henry’s James’s The Art of the Novel." GLQ 1 (1993): 1-16. Print. • David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1996. Print.
Editor's Notes
- The destination I have my sights on today is something I’ve been calling a “rhetoric of humility.” What I mean by “rhetoric” in that phrase is sort of like a set of operating procedures, and that’s why I’ve aligned it here with “habit” – a habit is a reiterated behavior or a sustained practice. A rhetoric of humility, I’m proposing, is like the rules of rhetorical engagement for the post-modern subject. I mean, the subject that isn’t one: the consciousness that still thinks itself a self, individuated, coherent, and in charge, although the best insights of Freudian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction are plenty enough to undo the illusion. Now, I’m not interested in what those rules of engagement are, so much, today, though you will hear a bit about them. I’m more interested in how they actually do their work.
- The trope I have to offer you is about habit and habit formation, and I’m routing it through “The Rhetoric of Drugs.” In an interview by that name Jacques Derrida argues that bad and good repetition, the bad and good pharmakon, can always parasitize one another. He says, “This parasitism is at once accidental and essential. Like any good parasite, it is at once inside and outside—the outside feeding on the inside.” Now, because the project you’re seeing today is really a part of my completed master’s thesis, I’m routing the question of habit formation through yet another rhetoric of drugs: David Foster Wallace’s vast novel Infinite Jest. Compare Derrida to this passage from IJ:
- In this passage Wallace’s character, Joelle, is confronting the scene of her own addiction. She’s about to have what Infinite Jest calls Too Much Fun: an indulgence of one’s addictive Substance so intense and destructive that the fix kills or destroys you. In Crack Wars: Addiction Literature Mania, Avital Ronell argues that crack has the quality of "pure instance of 'Being-on-drugs,” because it "disappoints the pleasure a drug might be expected to arouse" (25), while nevertheless being highly addictive. What Ronell and Joelle are both describing is really an elegant logic of addiction: a pleasure that diminishes even as it intensifies the need for itself. Following Ronell, I argue that this logic of addiction extends to subjectivity, or to narrow it more precisely, to the illusion of self-identity that post-modern theory has shattered. I think we’re suffering from an identity-addiction.
- So in a minute I’ll turn to reading Infinite Jest in the tradition of speech act theorists reading performative utterances. This turn to a novel may surprise some, but Infinite Jest is not an ordinary novel. I’ve already called it a rhetoric of drugs, and unpacking that claim is the main work of this project, but let say briefly that Infinite Jest stretches the meaning of “novel” in plenty of ways. IJ has 1079 pages and 388 end notes, some of which themselves have end notes. IJ weighs 2 lbs. in print, and 18 years after its publication, its readers are still arguing over the story’s facts of what actually happens. I read Infinite Jest in three months, and when I finished reading it, only 24 hours lapsed before I started reading it again. As has been argued by ordinary readers, literary critics, and scholars alike, reading Infinite Jest may be habit-forming. But, what the lens of “reading” literature leaves out is the text’s performativity, that is, its doing things with words.
- My turn to IJ as an example of a performative utterance follows a similar turn made by Avital Ronell in Crack Wars. Ronell argues in part that literature "has a tradition of uncovering abiding structures of crime and ethicity with crucial integrity" (11). She cites Hegel's relationship to Antigone, and Freud's to Oedipus Rex, claiming these literary works "have always worked as informants but they were nobody's fools—they talked to the philosophers because they had inside knowledge" (11). Elsewhere IJ may be talking to literary scholars and even to philosophers, but we are "go[ing] the way of literature” -- and of Ronell's question of "Being-on-drugs” (11) -- to get to a rhetorical question: What does IJ, as the performative utterance, perform?
- My claim that IJ performs a rhetoric of humility follows a substitution made by Eve Sedgwick in her germinal 1993 “Queer Performativity.” In it, Sedgwick swaps out J.L. Austin’s example of a performative utterance—the marriage vow—for the utterance of shame—”Shame on you.” Austin makes the marriage vow central to his theory of performativity, the typifying example of what performativity looks and sounds like. Of course, he spends the lectures that comprise How to Do Things With Words carving out so many exceptions that the theory is not stable—but this is precisely what creates the opening that Sedgwick follows him through. “I do,” and so the performative, appears in the first person, in the present, in the singular, in the indicative, in the active. These grammatical forms define a subject, an utterer of the utterance, whose intentions are stable, transparent, and act as guarantor of the speech act. But Segdwick points out the gender trouble lodged in Austin’s marriage vow.
- The trouble is for "those whose subjectivity is lodged in refusals or deflections of (or by) the logic of the heterosexual supplement; in far less simple associations attaching to state authority; in far less complacent relation to the witness of others. The emergence of the first person, of the singular, of the present, of the active, and of the indicative are all questions, rather than presumptions, for queer performativity" (4). So in the place of “I do”, Sedgwick inserts “Shame on you.”
- Shame’s force, argues Sedgwick, is its ability to constitute identity. Reading the force this utterance through the scene of queer childhood, Sedgwick argues that shame "delineates [identity] without defining it or giving it content" (12). The performativity of shame queers performativity, argues Sedgwick, because "it generates and legitimates the place of identity—the question of identity—at the origin of the impulse to the performative, but does so without giving that identity-space the standing of an essence. It [queer performativity] constitutes it [identity] as to-be-constituted" (14). Queer performativity may still find some political leverage in identity, but it must do so through the constitution of identity, its very historicity and mutability. I follow Sedgwick’s queer performativity because it gives us identity not as a given, but as the to-be -- as the very possibility of intervention into identity's production.
- So I have time left for one quick glimpse into my substitution, following Sedgwick, of humility in the place of shame. Except the example of the utterance I’ve given is Infinite Jest, a rhetoric of drugs, in which “bad pharmakon can always parasitize the good pharmakon,” as Derrida argues. But in Infinite Jest’s literally compelling stories of addiction and recovery, the good pharmakon can just as easily parasitize the bad pharmakon. That is, humility shares shame’s complication of the performative subject. It’s not clear if the subject who utters is you or I, singular or plural, past, present, or future, agentive or passive.
- And reading this utterance, in the sense of “reading” that Ronell offers us in her “The Rhetoric of Testing” from Stupidity, is not a literary reading at all, but a performative reading. Ronellian reading “involves the undoing of interpretive figures, to the extent that it questions whether any synthesis, any single meaning, can close off a text and adequately account for its constitution. In contrast to interpretation, which involves a development over the course of a narrative toward a single figure reconciling all its diverse moments, “reading states the logic of figure and the logic of narratives to be constantly divergent.”
- And this undoing of interpretive figures, this fracturing of any single meaning, this refusal to reconcile all its diverse moments, is precisely the logic of Infinite Jest. It trips and tropes but it refuses to disclose even the basic events one spends 1100 pages reading about, no less the identifiable meanings and secret conspiracies you become convinced must be concealed. But actually when the utterance refuses your jones for interpretive mastery, it produces what Ronell calls a “rush of interference that produces gaps and unsettles cognition” that itself “must be seen as a force that weighs in performatively and must be read. The interruptive moment of interference itself calls for a reading.” (101)
- The failure to grasp the novel through interpretive resolution is a rupture in the logic of addiction, because, in Ronell’s words again, “the disruption of knowing cannot be understood in terms of absence, default, or deficiency, as if something could be filled, completed, or known by being brought out of its state of absence into unconcealedness” (101). In fact there’s nothing there but the endless play of difference, of “textual communication based on tropium,” as Ronell says in Crack Wars. There Ronell maintains that the exposedness to the influence of drugs is a condition of possibility for exposedness to any influence at all. She calls this “Being-on-drugs,” in Derrida’s terminology, “the outside feeding on the inside.” But the addiction to meaning, stable interpretation, and identity is not an exit. It’s actually the bars of the cage. “It no longer delimits and fills the hole.” But it’s not, for Ronell, Derrida, or Infinite Jest, some kind of caricatured post-modern dystopia where there’s no way out (or no way in). If, with Ronell, we allow that all being is Being-on-drugs, then the influence of drugs is an influence we are all exposed to, and there is no simple “sobriety,” no freedom from exposure to influence. But there is more than one kind of habit, and I’ve proposed that the habit which learns how to pleasure in its vulnerability and exposure, to read rather than interpret, to perform the very failure of intentionality to govern the scene of the utterance—that habit is one I’ve called humility. Thank you.