Chapter 13

Vitalism, animality, and the material grounds of rhetoric

Byron Hawk

This desire to investigate and rearticulate “life” does not escape the field of rhetoric any more than the disciplines Agamben identifies. Rhetoric typically saw vitalism as a form of romantic individualism centered on individual, human, unconscious ability or as a mystical, immaterial force that informed the material world. Both were seen in opposition to explicit, identifiable, and teachable rhetorical strategies. If rhetoric were grounded in individual talent or immaterial force, it could not be studied, understood, or taught (Young 1976, 1978). Such a position, however, not only ignores the fact that vitalism is an array of historically situated philosophies that cannot be reduced to these two generic positions, but it continues to operate through a division between the immaterial and material. Vitalism is cast as privileging the immaterial, which puts rhetoric in the position of privileging the material, in either reductive positivist terms or in terms of the human and the social. A traditional model of rhetoric continues to uphold divisions between language (as immaterial or abstract forms) and the world (as material realities that language represents), which situates human being (sometimes individual sometimes social) as the central agent of mediation between material world and immaterial language. But these divisions continue to create difficulties in theories of representation as well as politics that more contemporary versions of vitalism are attempting to rethink.

George Kennedy, a central figure in contemporary rhetorical studies, initially subscribed to the negative view of vitalism (1988). By the late 1990s, however, he begins to change his views of vitalism in relation to rhetoric, but only to a certain extent. In Comparative Rhetoric, Kennedy begins his historical narrative with the rhetoric of social animals and sees a grounding energy, a certain rhetorical vitality, in animal life. He wants to extend the traditional definition of rhetoric as a conscious, human art or techne to something that can be grounded in the more habitual or innate aspects of nature (1998: 3). He writes:

His position rests on the concept of conservation of energy. If a stag, for example, can “persuade” a rival to back down through vocal and gestural display, then he can establish dominance in the herd with less expenditure of energy than physical violence (13–14).

On the one hand, Kennedy is making a posthumanist move by seeing rhetoric cut across animal life as well as the human, and making a vitalist move by seeing rhetoric as a tacit form of mental energy or an emotional, relational force that flows between embodied life and its environment. In doing so, he directly rejects forms of Enlightenment humanism that draw a clear divide between human and nonhuman life (in particular Noam Chomsky who sees the human as a higher form). But on the other hand, he falls back on humanist and universalist perspectives, reading animal rhetoric backwards from human rhetorical categories. In his examples he regularly interprets animal acts across traditional, western rhetorical concepts: the section headers in his chapter are broken down across the traditional rhetorical categories – deliberative, judicial, epideictic, eloquence, and arrangement; he reads the stag’s display across the traditional canons of rhetoric (14–15); and he reads bird songs in terms of arrangement and style (23–4). His comparative goal is to see rhetoric’s “common source in nature” (13), but he supports this commonality by universalizing the western tradition of philosophical rhetoric and implying a progressive development of human rhetoric from animal antecedents.

By continuing to privilege nature and individual embodiment in either human or animal form, Kennedy continues to uphold the traditional divisions in rhetoric among language, reality, and humanity, which sidesteps the rhetorical and political issues that come with various redefinitions of life. As Agamben notes, the concept of life has never really been settled. Philosophers and scientists have continued the debate beyond the nineteenth century versions of vitalism that argued life could not be reduced to mechanistic laws of physics and chemistry alone to contemporary understandings of evolution that see life as self-organizing and emergent.¹ These more contemporary definitions of life have shown up most explicitly in the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, which work to develop more complex models that do not see the immaterial (language and force) and material (objects, humans, animals) as a grounding opposition. Languages such as statements, gestures, images, and songs are incorporeal but not immaterial. Incorporeal phenomena are real, actual, and material, but they are neither embodied in individual human or animal bodies nor an all-encompassing nature that can be set against culture. Songs, for example, are the actualization of the virtual potentials of specific assemblages – vocal chords, sound waves, molecules in the air, and the auditory capacities of various animals and humans. They have materiality in the molecular vibrations of the air, but not corporeality because they do not take up extension in space. Neither embodied in individuals nor a holistic nature, they can operate in conjunction with various parts and functions of both nature and culture.

From this perspective, I am interested in examining and extending Kennedy’s vitalist turn through the works of Giorgio Agamben and Deleuze and Guattari, who take different approaches to the concept of animality and different redefinitions of life that impact our understanding of rhetoric and attempts to expand it beyond a human-centric position. Humanism privileges human thought and embodiment over other aspects of the world and builds rhetoric on models of representation and persuasion that uphold these distinctions. Antihumanism, in Agamben’s formulation, privileges apparatuses that dominate humans and sees rhetoric largely as a corrupting force. Agamben defines bare life as the natural energy that fuels human apparatuses, ultimately defining apparatuses as machines created to capture and exploit that life, which leaves little room for rhetorical or political change outside of a return to individualistic humanism or a romantic elevation of nature. Posthumanism, as articulated in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the refrain, privileges assemblages that are multiple, open, and always in the process of transformation. It acknowledges specific human capacities but importantly sees them as parts of specific assemblages and particular flows of life. This more emergent model that emphasizes reterritorializing specific assemblages avoids Agamben’s more static and deterministic model by seeing rhetoric as material (both incorporeal and corporeal) emergences that open avenues for transformation and change.

The anthropological machine (humanism)

In his book The Open, Agamben examines the way that questions of animal life ground the elevation of the human, a general procedure he calls the “anthropological machine.” The problem is not animal ethics or the value of animals versus humans per se, but about the ontological status of living beings as such. Agamben provides a brief genealogy from Aristotle, through Bichat and Linneaus, up to Foucault on the ways defining life has produced the distinction between humans and animals, citing two general instances of it: ancient and modern, both of which are based on exclusion. The ancients produce the human through the humanization of the animal – the slave, barbarian, and the foreigner were all figures of the animal in human form that were categorically distinct from the fully human citizen. This ontological status allowed them to be exploited for labor or excluded from the city and its privilege. The moderns produce the human by animalizing the human – they identify the animal elements in humans such as NAZI depictions of the physical characterizations of Jews as animalistic or even American identifications of suspected terrorists as suspending human reason for animalistic behaviour. These characterizations categorize humans as forms of life outside of national or democratic norms and justify the suspension of their rights as citizens. For Agamben, both operate through a “zone of indifference” or “state of exception” that is neither animal life nor human life but “bare life” (38). In Homo Sacer, Agamben makes it clear how this state of exception allows these people to be treated as if they had no life beyond the bare minimum, which makes the atrocities perpetrated on them possible.

Agamben considers Heidegger as the last philosopher to put forward a version of the anthropological machine that divides the human and animal in order to produce the human. Heidegger is following the work of a number of thinkers in the first part of the last century who were investigating life but most importantly Jakob von Uexküll, who is considered the founder of ecology.² Uexküll supposes an infinite variety of worlds for each species of animal that are separate but linked together to produce a functional unity with an environment. Each animal type has a body with specific capacities for functional connections to its environment, or what Uexküll calls “carriers of significance” (Rüting 2004: 41, 46). Two of Uexküll’s examples are the spider and the tick. The spider and the fly do not know each other, they do not “communicate” directly, but the spider’s body builds a web perfectly to trap the fly – the spider web is constructed at a level of scale that the fly’s eyes cannot detect and is constructed with the right amount of play and tension to keep the fly’s body from escaping. They “communicate” by proxy through their interconnected bodily capacities and environmental conditions of possibility. Similarly the tick’s body has the capacity to experience three primary carriers of significance: touch, odor, and temperature. Ticks are eyeless. They find their way to branches by the sensitivity of their skin to light. They have no ears, but can smell the butyric acid emitted by mammals. When they smell it, they drop off of their perch. If a tick manages to fall onto a mammal, it has an organ that perceives the mammal’s precise temperature. In short, the tick is the relationships its carriers make possible (47) – bodily capacities plus ecology. Uexküll was investigating “the communicative unity of the organism and the world sensed by it” (Rüting 2004: 66), and can be read as articulating an ecology in which life communicates with itself. But he still maintained that humans are “able to ‘make experiences’ (Erfahrungen), to ‘acquire’ (erwerben) an umwelt and to ‘understand’ at least some aspects of their being-in-the-world” in ways that make humans distinct from other animals (Cheung 2006: 232).

Instead of turning Uexküll’s analysis into a more open, ecological model of life, Agamben reads Heidegger as turning it into an anthropological machine that upholds a human/animal distinction. For Heidegger, life is a particular kind of being that is only accessible to humans. A stone is worldless; an animal only experiences the particular environment it has access to; humans are world forming (Agamben 2004: 50–1). Humans are not animals plus language or rationality. They are animals that recognize their animality: they are the beings that have the capacity to see beyond their limited environments and both imagine and produce their worlds. In Heideggerian terms, animals cannot see the as-structure – they can’t see something as something as else (53). For Heidegger, animals are captivated by their own “carriers of significance” – they are trapped by their own body’s limits for experience and relation. The spider cannot see the fly as a fly (or as a living being): its body is simply adapted to fill a functional space in its environment. This space between animality and its recognition as such is what Heidegger calls the Open. It is the space where possible futures beyond the limits of animal or bodily capacities can be seen that allows humans to see life as a larger world and strive toward those future possibilities.

This reading of Heidegger’s elaboration of Uexküll continues to privilege the human, which limits rhetoric to human life and relegates it to a position outside of a functional ecology. Humans can see their limited environments via the critical distance that language provides. This division between humans and world places rhetoric outside of life and necessitates a model of representation – rhetoric becomes something that stands in for a particular human understanding of reality or becomes transparent to reality if the role of language is ignored.

Apparatuses (antihumanism)

Rather than take up a humanist reading of life from Uexküll’s ecological model as Heidegger does, Agamben goes even further with Uexküll’s notion of captivation, connecting it to his own definition of bare life. Agamben argues that humans too can fall prey to their own forms of captivation. For him,

In Uexküll’s experiments with ticks, he was able to disconnect a tick from its environment and keep it alive for 18 years. Typically once a tick drinks the blood of a mammal it will fall off, lay its eggs, and die. Being suspended from its “carriers of significance” and cut off from its environment, it is neither animal nor human but in a state of suspension, without world (47) – just a living being, bare life (70). For Agamben, this is what Uexküll’s ecology and Heidegger’s humanism are not ready to confront and it is precisely the predominant nature of our posthistorical moment – contemporary institutions and technologies captivate human bodies and cut them off from their environments like the tick in Uexküll’s experiment, making the last historical/first posthistorical task to manage this bare life on a model of Foucault’s bio-power. The problem is not simply to undo the anthropological machine and its exclusions, but doing so in favor of bare life is antihuman and has become the predominant form of contemporary exploitation.

In “What is an Apparatus?” Agamben extends his analysis in The Open into the world of contemporary media apparatuses. In one of Foucault’s interviews he defines an apparatus as the network of relations established among “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions” in a particular historical moment (qtd. in Agamben 2009: 2). For Agamben, the posthistorical dissolution of the anthropological machine means that there is no inherently or distinctly human life, only living beings and the apparatuses that captivate them. With no pre-existing, unified human subject, apparatuses have to create a subject that corresponds to the functioning of their networks of relations and captures human bodies. Agamben sees almost no moment in which living beings are not oriented by these processes, extending management and control beyond the traditional prisons and schools to anything that has the capacity to “capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (14). Any object, from cigarettes to fountain pens; any technology, from computers to cell phones; any practice, from agriculture to navigation; any discourse, from literature to technical documentation, carries with it an apparatus with a corresponding subjectivity. Posthistorical society fills the Open with these objects, technologies, and discourses all of which come to bear on the same body producing multiple subjectivities: “the user of cellular phones, the web surfer, the writer of stories, the tango aficionado, the anti-globalization activist, and so forth” (14–15). For Agamben, the specific purpose of the apparatus is to exploit the body’s desire for happiness through the capture and subjectification of this energy or vitality – the becoming-tick of the posthistorical human in terms of Uexküll’s experiment not just his articulation of functional ecologies in nature.

The production of subjectivity, however, simply covers over the complementary process of desubjectification. On one hand, subjectivity is not wavering (as some humanists argue) but intensifying. On the other, Agamben argues that an apparatus also reduces living beings to bare life. This process does not dialectically produce a new subject (a worker, the bourgeoisie), which could be governable with traditional disciplinary apparatuses. Desubjectification actually increases the need for apparatuses of control over living beings rather than political discipline over subjects. The cell phone user does not acquire a new autonomous subjectivity but a number through which his body can be traced and monitored. The TV viewer does not become a subject of culture but simply a couch potato, or maybe a tally in the calculation of ratings (21). By accepting and even touting these media subjectivities, living beings are actually participating in their own captivation and exploitation. For Agamben, those who argue humans can use an apparatus toward their own ends are simply caught in the contemporary media apparatus that uses the production of subjectivity to cover over the control of bare life. Living beings cannot destroy the system, because in a very real sense it is systems all the way down. Even dropping out of the system, becoming even more docile, does not produce a revolutionary subject: either way living beings are still being reduced to bare life – “the incessant though aimless motion of [the] machine” (23).

Agamben’s project is centered on redefining life as bare life to both make the particular contemporary problem of captivation and control show up and to propose the beginnings of a response to it. Bare life, paradoxically, is both the reduction of life for the purposes of exclusion (fascism) and exploitation (capitalism) and the ground of alternative lines of flight – means without end (both without conclusion and without purpose or use value). For Agamben, these profane excesses of life are outside of or beyond capture. In Homo Sacer, bare life is paradoxically both sacred and profane, which means a person could be killed without penalty (as with sacred sacrifices) but could not be sacrificed in a proper or sanctioned ritual (because bare life is ultimately profane and common). Profanation is a part of the problem – using bare life like any common, profane object leads to concentration camps. Similarly in “What is an Apparatus?” the dual role of subjectification and desubjectification, like the sacred and profane in Homo Sacer, creates the problem of captivation rather than concentration camps, holding bare life suspended between the celestial and terrestrial realms – a kind of suspension or detachment from the natural world. But in The Open and at the end of “What is an Apparatus?” profanation also provides a potential solution. As neither sacred nor profane, profanations can take someone out of this suspension (in human culture and media captivation) and return him or her to the profane, natural world. Agamben hints at this direction early in The Open, quoting Kojeve:

If religious sacrifices take everyday objects and elevate them into sacred objects, profanations are the “counter-apparatuses” that return them to the free or common (2009: 17–19). Agamben is preserving a form of Bataille’s “negation without use” that survives the end of history.³ This remains in an epilogue to history via “eroticism, laughter, and joy in the face of death” (Agamben 2004: 7). In privileging nature against technology, Agamben is arguing that media apparatuses cut humans off from the natural environment like the tick in Uexküll’s experiment, so profanations would bring us back to a natural, common use.

However, it is not clear that this return to nature is a return of Uexküll’s tick-as-captivation to tick-as-ecology. By emphasizing the antihuman aspects of contemporary life, Agamben continues the human/animal and culture/nature distinctions that are part of the problem with the anthropological machine and continues to privilege the embodied human individual rather than ecological transformations. One of Calarco’s critiques of Agamben is that the animal remains his blind spot. When speaking of bare life, he is still essentially speaking of human life caught up in the definitions created by the anthropological machine. He is not concerned with animals or ecologies, but with the exploitation and freedom of humans. In placing culture and technology as the dominating apparatus, Agamben has no place to go with his response but a romantic version of nature and individual freedom. And his reading of bare life beyond control as a form of profanation remains anarchic and individual, leaving the apparatus unchanged. Given his logic, the more work the apparatus does to turn humans into bare life, the more elusive bare life becomes (2009: 23). Agamben wants profanations to extend this elusive nature of bare life as abandonment, as a line of flight from its captivation. However, it’s not clear how these profanations might be collective and communicative, and thus how they might enact change within or among apparatuses rather than just flights from them – put simply, it is not clear how Agamben’s turn to nature in opposition to the captivation of contemporary culture would constitute a return of the tick to its ecological and relational being rather than just a free, autonomous individual, embodied life. The human is either captivated by culture and community or naturalized and individual.

Ultimately, Agamben’s antihumanist position either makes language a manipulative force within media apparatuses, or increases the distance of language from the system, leaving rhetoric to retreat into an outside. Rhetoric, as a part of media, culture, and institutional discourse functions as a part of the captivating apparatus through advertising, propaganda, entertainment, and even technical documentation. The retreat of profanations into nature is a turn away from language, communication, and the social. Language as immaterial culture is opposed to materiality and nature.

The refrain (posthumanism)

I turn to Deleuze and Guattari because they give a more collective and materialist response that accounts for change and ultimately opens a place for rhetoric – they give us assemblages rather than apparatuses and the refrain instead of bare life. These perspectives would not see the tick-as-captivation or nature in opposition to culture. Instead they provide a way of thinking about tick-asecology that could include rhetoric as incorporeal, material aspects of any assemblage. Rather than perpetual constraint, they see transitional possibility; rather than romantic individual transgression, they see collective assemblages; rather than a flight from apparatuses, they see lines of flight toward future assemblages; rather than the open as human recognition, they see the open as material transformation; rather than dismiss the animal in favor of human concerns, they develop the beginnings of a “bestiary” through their many appeals to animal life (Genosko 1997). Life is open not bare.

The most important example for rethinking animality, materiality, and rhetoric is their discussion of Bower Birds such as the brown stagemaker in relation to the movements of territorialization and deterritorialization in A Thousand Plateaus (1987: 311–25). For Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are part of a constant process beyond a more deterministic notion of system or apparatus with three particular kinds of movement:

Rather than linear moments in a chain, however, “they are three aspects of a single thing, the Refrain” (312). A refrain is any recurring pattern of sounds, positions, actions, or qualities that simultaneously marks a territorial center from its outside, internally organizes the assemblage, and opens it to other functions and assemblages. A monk’s chant, for example, separates his space for meditation from the outside world; organizes his thoughts and regulates his body’s position, heart rate, blood pressure; and connects him to another plane of thought or existence (meditation is a different mode of existence than running a marathon or cleaning house).

Importantly, these refrains are not restricted to the human world. Each morning the brown stagemaker (a bird native to Queensland, Australia) drops leaves from its tree and then turns them upside down around the tree so the lighter sides contrast with the ground and establishes his territory as distinct from the territories of other brown stagemakers and as a territory for his own activities (feeding, courting, and nesting) (315). Such a territory not only keeps the forces of chaos at bay by creating distance between two beings of the same species, but it also opens spaces for other species to fill ecological niches at other levels of scale around the tree, opening the space to other assemblages (319–20). Birds can also assemble a variety of these refrains into a “full song.” The wren family, for example, assembles a whole set of territorialized functions:

This collection of refrains not only performs a “nesting function” that establishes the male’s territory in distinction from other males but it also performs a “courtship function” that opens the territory to various females through changing the song’s intensity. These kinds of intra-assemblages hold together materials, colors, sounds, odors, and postures, while simultaneously opening the assemblage to other configurations.

These refrains also provide the mechanism for change, transition, or transformation among assemblages. A single refrain from one assemblage can perform another function in a different assemblage, providing a passage to a new assemblage. For example,

In its transition among these different practices and subspecies, the “grass stem” is not simply a leftover of nesting behavior. The grass stem is an element of passage from the territorial assemblage to the courtship assemblage and is expressed differently in each case. It becomes what Deleuze and Guattari call an “assemblage converter” that functions as a structural component in territorialization and as a gestural component in courtship, opening a space for the male’s song to take on a stronger territorial role and producing two distinct assemblages (325). The grass stem is not an isolated object but a fulcrum that participates in multiple assemblages or alliances – the stem, the beak, the song, the flapping of wings, the nest, the tree, the female, other males, and more. In courtship assemblages the stem functions incorporeally as gesture, in nesting it functions corporeally as a structural component of nesting. These performances, assemblages, and movements are not rituals in the traditional, human sense of profanations in Agamben, but rhythms within the material, in/corporeal flow and evolution of situations, species, and milieus – life (Bogue 1991).

If Kennedy’s understanding of rhetoric is still humanist, and Agamben’s is ultimately antihumanist, then I would characterize Deleuze and Guattari’s as posthumanist – recognizing the specific capacities of humans as they would any animals, but always within the context of specific assemblages and processes of re/territorialization. Rather than tick-as-captivation, the refrain would see tick-as-ecology as an alternative form of the open – possibilities for change are there precisely because the environments are open, accessible, changing, and language is something that circulates through these ecologies, not something else controlled by or controlling humans. This would put rhetoric in a materialist flow that acknowledges both corporeal and incorporeal aspects and functions of rhetoric’s role in emergence – the way song, color, and gesture are as vital to transformation as any corporeal possibility and constraint. Thinking in terms of the refrain, rhetoric would be a fundamental capacity for such relations that functions as relays for enacting rhythms and performing emergences. Such rhetorics of (non)communication operate in the movements and relations of bacteria, the swarms and flows of bees and ants, the birds’ transitions among territorial and courtship assemblages, and the movements of people through Chicago’s Millennium Park. If ceaselessly redefining life goes hand in hand with rhetoric and politics, I would redefine life not as animal, human, or bare, but emergent – the complex production and circulation of in/corporeal assemblages through which refrains emerge and life communicates with itself.

Notes

References

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.

Agamben, G. (2004) The open: Man and animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.

Agamben, G. (2009) What is an apparatus? and other essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.

Bogue, R. (1991) “Rhizomusicosmology,” SubStance, 66: 85–101.

Calarco, M. (2008) Zoographies: The question of the animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cheung, T. (2006) “Cobweb stories: Jakob von Uexküll and the stone of Werder,” Place and Location: Studies in environmental aesthetics and semiotics, 5: 231–253.

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987) A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Genosko, G. (1997) “A bestiary of territoriality and expression: Poster fish, bower birds, and spiny lobsters,” Canadian review of comparative literature, 24(3): 529–542.

Hawk, B. (2007) A counter-history of composition: Towards methodologies of complexity. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Kennedy, G. (1988) “Some reflections on neomodernism,” Rhetoric Review, 6(2): 230–233.

Kennedy, G. (1998) Comparative rhetoric: An historical and cross-cultural introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lovejoy, A. (1911a) “The meaning of vitalism,” Science, 33(851): 610–614.

Lovejoy, A. (1911b) “The import of vitalism,” Science, 34(864): 75–80.

Lovejoy, A. (1912) “The meaning of Driesch and the meaning of vitalism,” Science, 36(933): 672–675.

Rüting, T. (2004) “History and significance of Jakob von Uexküll and of his institute in Hamburg,” Sign Systems Studies, 32(1/2): 35–72.

Young, R. (1976) “Invention: A topographical survey,” in G. Tate (ed.) Teaching composition: Ten Bibliographic Essays. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian UP.

Young, R. (1978) “Paradigms and problems: Needed research in rhetorical invention,” in C. Cooper and L. Odell (eds.) Research and composing: Points of departure. Urbana, IL: NCTE.