Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Catherine Chaput

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781611179958
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Retórica

What explains the "triumph of capitalism"? Why do people so often respond positively to discussions favoring it while shutting down arguments against it? Overwhelmingly theories regarding capitalism's resilience have focused on individual choice bolstered by careful rhetorical argumentation. In this penetrating study, however, Catherine Chaput shows that something more than choice is at work in capitalism's ability to thrive in public practice and imagination—more even than material resources (power) and cultural imperialism (ideology). That "something, " she contends, is market affect.Affect, says Chaput, signifies a semi-autonomous entity circulating through individuals and groups. Physiological in nature but moving across cultural, material, and environmental boundaries, affect has three functions: it opens or closes individual receptivity; it pulls or pushes individual identification; and it raises or lowers individual energies. This novel approach begins by connecting affect to rhetorical theory and offers a method for tracking its three modalities in relation to economic markets. Each of the following chapters compares a major theorist of capitalism with one of his important critics, beginning with the juxtaposition of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who set the agenda not only for arguments endorsing and critiquing capitalism but also for the affective energies associated with these positions. Subsequent chapters restage this initial debate through pairs of economic theorists—John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich Hayek and Theodor Adorno, and Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith—who represent key historical moments. In each case, Chaput demonstrates, capitalism's critics have fallen short in their rhetorical effectiveness.Chaput concludes by exploring possibilities for escaping the straitjacket imposed by these debates. In particular she points to the biopolitical lectures of Michel Foucault as offering a framework for more persuasive anticapitalist critiques by reconstituting people's conscious understandings as well as their natural instincts.

1

Affect as Capitalist Being

Bridging the Materialist Traditions

The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.

Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”

Since the eighteenth century, capitalist materiality has signaled a set of political economic processes that produce and distribute surplus wealth according to spontaneous market operations. Spontaneity, however, does not exist outside the procedures that funnel motion along particular trajectories. Involuntarily jumping to one’s feet at the site of a spectacular sporting accomplishment or the inability to prevent oneself from tearing up at a sentimental scene represents the cultural habituation of spontaneity and not raw biological instinct. From this perspective, capitalism requires the market’s invisible orchestrating force to circulate throughout the world’s many dynamic unfoldings and imprint itself onto this vast complex so that its desired responses spring forth as if by nature. Reinforcing such a conjecture, theorists like Stephen McKenna and Mark Longaker assert that the production of capitalist nature emerged as a consequence of rhetorical practices that trained Enlightenment subjects in the belles lettres tradition. Enculturation into bourgeois style saddled the individual with a stable identity that predicated other practices, including economic decision making. One could argue that the process of repetitive instruction transformed raw affect into a semiautonomous capitalist judgment. Indeed, capitalist theorists consistently stage arguments at this level—the market’s ability to organize a frenetic world through the unwitting cooperation of instinct-riddled human beings. Alternatively, critics of capitalism tend to censor market ideology as a fiction that contributes to the uneven distribution of material resources. In short, market thinkers accept agency as the unconscious alignment between economic responses and market signals while antimarket thinkers call on agentive subjects to consciously manipulate the political economic field.

These debates reflect a rhetorical asymmetry wherein critics use reason to fight advocates who rely on passion. Even those post-structuralist thinkers who locate the possibilities for change in the discursive process of performative practices subjugate bodily spontaneity to carefully reasoned cause-and-effect dynamics. Much of the materialist scholarship that came out of the 1990s, for instance, highlighted the signifying practices of material texts from memorials and museums to bodies and the genetic code. Overwhelmingly, such objects were studied as a visual display that produced rhetorical effects or as the material effect produced from the rhetoric of popular representations, public policy, or disciplinary knowledge. These artifacts, according to the scholarship, participate in a relationship between discourse and materiality that, although it may be reciprocal, remains confined to a linear diagram of power: discourse produces reality and reality determines discourse. So conceived, rhetoric subscribes to what Barbara Biesecker has famously called the “logic of influence.” Informed by a range of new materialist thinking that views the human as hybrid (Haraway), bodies as entangled (Barad), and environments as unconsciously priming our dispositions (Rickert), this project locates materialism not at a structural level nor at a local level, but at the level of circulating affect. This shift in perspective places the capitalist debate on a single materialist plane—the invisible force that informs our ostensibly instinctual economic behaviors.

This standpoint does not object to anthropomorphizing the market (acknowledging a living undercurrent to economic choices) but does object to locating market forces beyond human intervention. Such positioning transforms humans into biological conduits who synchronize themselves to the currents of their environments by following the imperceptible tug of affect. Anticapitalist theories often highlight this unthinking subject and call for critical agency tied to rational, if not scientific, economic policies and practices. In doing so, they commit themselves to the founding principles of Aristotelean rhetoric (rational deliberation in organized arenas among fully agentive subjects) and abandon those practices that lie on the outskirts of this tradition (the circulating passions of becoming and the philosophical practice of world making). Because, as market discourse never tires of expounding, humans are animals whose efforts at rational behavior often fail, we need to recraft rather than quarantine, quell, or outreason our instinctual bodies. So, while I locate world-making prospects within the affective realm, I neither abdicate reason nor ground myself in it; instead, I reimagine reason as that which must be practiced, negotiated, and transformed as a living, embodied training. Such production falls within a broadened terrain of rhetorical arts that includes bodily instincts and the discernment of truth.

The possibilities for alternative political economic paradigms exist in the energetic becoming of our rhetorical being. As Jane Bennett describes it, “an active becoming, a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new, buzzes within the history of the term nature. This vital materiality congeals onto bodies, bodies that seek to preserve or prolong their run” (Vibrant Matter 118). If this is so, capitalism’s recalcitrant nature—its adaptability within an evolving historical terrain and its capacity to absorb difference into niche commodity markets—cannot be pinpointed in political structures, cultural representations, nor even in human beings themselves. Its endurance stems from the rhetorical work of the vibrant materiality moving through each of these layers to constitute an invisibly entangled infrastructure that merges myriad moments into a single, though dynamic and differentiated, force. This rhetorical constitution of being predisposes individuals to capitalism even though the circulating being, at its core, remains “ontologically multiple” and thus open to different becomings (Bennett, Vibrant Matter 8). Raw affect contains innumerable potentialities unactualized by the rhetorical training of habituated being. Although not obviously present, these forms of being are neither destroyed nor lost to history, but they lie untapped in the materiality of affect. Capitalist instinct will only give way to a new instinct, one that must be symbolically crafted but biochemically and energetically circulated.

What I am proposing is perhaps an additional materialism but only in the sense of locating and engaging the rhetorical energy moving throughout the nesting dolls of other materialisms.¹ Traditional materialism positions its critique of capitalism at the largest scale—those political economic structures that ensure the production and consumption of commodities as well as the social relations they engender. Discursive approaches narrow the scope by focusing on particular sites of materialization. Another materialism studies the biopolitics of capitalism or the communicative labor that produces human beings with particular capacities to affect and be affected. New materialism goes to the flesh of the matter, exploring the physical relations among bodies, things, and spaces. This project maintains each of these materialisms by adding another: a circulating affective materiality whose accumulating traces ossify into particular rhetorical dispositions. As the energetic substance that creates order out of the world’s chaotic materiality, affect attests to the rhetorical being that both maintains life as it is and reminds us of the freedom to become other than we are. The soil in which rhetorical responses take root, affect inscribes rhetoric’s discursive template of ethos, pathos, and logos onto bodies that emote and calculate according to deep-seated, though evolving, modes of being-in-the-world. This rhetorical being pervades the political economic world, and although it cannot be directly altered through structural changes or positively asserted by the demand for recognition, it can be nudged, modulated, and motivated by ancillary practices that break its rhythmic waves and build up different patterns. If the critic’s task, as Bruno Latour says, is to assemble arenas in which to gather, then this proposition could be understood as a new assembly of old formations. What were separate materialist passages that led us in different directions become fused through affective circuits that illuminate an entirely uncharted cartography.

Although different from ideological rhetorical analysis, affective analysis seeks to answer the same question: why do people experience and understand things in such vastly different ways? Louis Althusser’s “Preface to Capital Volume One” answers this query when he asserts that the working class endorse Marx more easily than the intellectual class because of their differing life experiences.² He goes on to describe ideology as an active agent that sabotages knowledge by causing people to be “literally blinded” to certain ideas (74). With this explanation, Althusser, the godfather of ideological critique, offers an implicit theory of affect—the material entity that circulates among people and everyday objects to enhance or impede their capacity to engage. It is no wonder that Althusser has reemerged in new materialism as well as the many posthumanist theories indebted to Foucauldian biopolitics: ideological analysis differs from, but is not incompatible with, affect studies.³

As I have said elsewhere, the resilience of capitalism against ideological critique requires rhetorical theory and criticism to enhance such analyses with attention to affect.⁴ However different in their approaches and regardless of the depths of their insights, critical rhetoricians espousing ideological analysis—Michael McGee, Raymie McKerrow, James Arnt Aune, and Dana Cloud, among others—work from the warrant that more and better information will energize audiences, who will then act in accordance with that knowledge.⁵ Assuming that increased consciousness prompts political economic change, critics work diligently to debunk and disarticulate deeply held ideologies. There is, however, a futility in this consciousness raising: one belief system gives way to another ad infinitum, preventing the actuality of a nonideological worldview. Even as we learn to see things differently, our practices resist adjusting to that knowledge, doing so inconsistently and at a snail’s pace. Recalibrating the critical lens from ideology to affect, a perspective that may be dormant in traditional theories of ideology, replaces the Sisyphean task of outpacing worldviews with the study of how the open-ended rhetoricity of instinctual capacities has sealed itself within capitalist being.

The goal here is to locate this agentive capacity in our traditional rhetorical theories, enhance it with contemporary materialist perspectives, and develop a practice through which to glimpse, and later engage, the affective sensibilities of political economic theories. I begin by skimming the rhetorical tradition, from the classical to the contemporary, for its implicit understanding of affect, arguing that the idea of an independent motivating force moving through bodies functions as a latent part of that history. Although barely puncturing the surface, this cursory review demonstrates how the question of an unnamed bodily force persists unanswered within the canon of rhetorical theory. This concern plays an important role, one I survey in more detail, in the work of rhetoricians who study the materiality of language and its relationship to political economy. Although diffuse, there exists a constant desire among such scholars to theorize rhetoric’s motivational energy and connect it to the political economic power relations of its production. Combining the key propositions of this rhetorical scholarship with insights from affect theory, the chapter ends by offering a flexible methodology for tracking how theorists of capitalism conceive this vibrant force—one that directs my investigations in subsequent chapters.

The Materiality of Affect: Reassessing the Rhetorical Tradition

Although only recently part of our critical vocabulary, affect speaks to crucial questions that have haunted rhetoricians since the classical era, during which both sophistic rhetoric and Platonic critique of such rhetoric offered materialist alternatives to the Aristotelian characterization of rationalized emotional appeals. Indeed, before Aristotle neatly codified pathos as one of his three rhetorical proofs, others described passion—what I call affect—as a powerful force moving among and working on embodied participants.⁶ Visceral and seemingly uncontrollable desires are, for Aristotle, beyond the purview of rhetoric as they reflect inartistic components of human motivation; nonetheless, rhetoric’s suasive powers cannot free themselves from the existence of seemingly compulsory responses. Persuasion gathers its strength from a force, an energy, or a charge within speech and so, across a range of explanations, the possibility prevails that rhetoric may require an uncodified and possibly uncontainable material power.

According to Thomas Cole’s history of ancient rhetoric, for instance, Gorgias, perhaps the most studied sophistic practitioner, understood rhetorical persuasion as tapping into an innate capacity for bodies to manipulate one another. For Gorgias, the “state of being persuaded does not have to be externally, or even self-, induced. It is more like the natural state of humankind” (Cole 148). Rhetoric, part and parcel of the human condition, exists separate from but works through speech to inspire individuals. Speech, in Gorgias’s view, is “a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity” (41). Two aspects of this description stand out: first, rhetoric works through an invisible agent within the speech itself that evokes and modulates the hearer’s emotions and, second, that invisible agent has a body. An invisible, though material, entity contained within words, passes from speaker to auditor in order to effect its energetic charge. Further, according to Gorgias, “the effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also is the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion” (41). The agent of change within speech is not only a material thing but one that alters the bodies of its recipients. Like a drug, it triggers corporeal processes that ignite emotional valences. By affecting the embodied state of its audience, a rhetorical agent unleashes psychological states that motivate rhetorical effects. The varied responses of an audience derive from rhetoric’s ability to change bodily disposition.

There is no need to privilege the sophists for this definition of rhetoric, however. More detailed and less evaluative, this sensibility parallels Plato’s well-known comparison of rhetoric to a spice. According to Plato’s “Gorgias,” rhetoric is a “habitude” intended to produce “gratification or pleasure” (70). Even as this dialogue positions Socrates in opposition to Gorgias and his rhetorical instruction, it proposes a definition of rhetoric quite similar to the one posed earlier by Gorgias: rhetoric has an ontological existence that adjusts and infuses the setting so that an audience is more disposed to accept a given proposition. The practice of orienting an audience contains multiple branches, including such things as rhetoric and cookery. The unifying characteristic of these branches is the fact that they change the essence of a thing through shortcut alterations that change bodily reception. Like a drug, a spice changes our instinctual response to something else—we detest even our favorite foods if they have been oversalted but accept our least favorite ones if they have been creatively seasoned. Similarly, rhetorical persuasion materially alters one’s body so as to convince quickly, replacing arduous and time-consuming logical propositions with familiar commonplaces. If Plato’s “Gorgias” outlines his suspicions about rhetoric’s ability to redesign the material capacities of its listener, his “Phaedrus” concedes a role for these passions if properly tethered to philosophy—a practice of accommodation mimicked by medieval theorists of rhetoric who sought to redirect bodily desire toward Christian doctrine.

In the Christian era, both rhetoric and the philosophical tradition so antagonistic to it suffered—one for its attention to the earthly world and one for reliance on a panoply of pagan gods. Although their reputations waned, these pursuits and their engagement with the passions did not disappear. Instead, they were appropriated for the pedagogical and ascetic practices of the Church. In the process, rhetoric and philosophy were transformed into pursuits that, like other bodily desires, should be replaced with religious zeal. The idea that passions are to be corralled and guided can be found as early as the second century’s “On the Sublime.” This treatise, generally attributed to Cassius Longinus, explains that “the great passions, when left to their own blind and rash impulses without the control of reason, are in the same danger as a ship let drive at random without ballast. Often they need the spur, but sometimes also the curb” (13). The problem, of course, is that true passion “bursts out with a kind of ‘fine madness’ and divine inspiration, and falls on our ears like the voice of a god” (17). Whether writing, preaching, or practicing a monastic lifestyle, one must be careful to align one’s passions with an emergent Christian faith. This shift takes its quintessential form in the fourth and fifth centuries with the work of St. Augustine and St. Jerome. After their respective conversions, each man replaced ancient rhetorical and philosophical texts with biblical study and kept a vigilant eye on bodily yearnings. Although one could never shed these nagging impulses, constant self-assessment could reorient earthly desire toward heavenly contemplation....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Genealogy of Affect in Market Thinking
• 1 Affect as Capitalist Being: Bridging the Materialist Traditions
• 2 Adam Smith and Karl Marx: The Founding Fathers and Their Foundations
• 3 John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen: Reimagining the Founding Legacies
• 4 Friedrich Hayek and Theodor Adorno: Reactions from Displaced Capitalist Subjects
• 5 Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith: The Battle for Public and Political Influence
• Conclusion Rhetoric, Biopolitics, and the Capacity for Anticapitalist Agencies
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index