Chapter 15
Lessons from the YMCA
The material rhetoric of criticism, rhetorical interpretation, and pastoral power
The problematic situation of rhetoric’s materiality emerges from within the desire of rhetorical scholars to maintain rhetoric as a practical art situated in time and space while also advancing rhetoric as an interpretive art robust enough to isolate the influential character of nearly anything. As a practical art, rhetoric’s materiality is registered in how humans craft discourse for the purpose of making public decisions. As an interpretive art, rhetoric’s materiality is often recorded in the growth of objects that exhibit social influence. From speeches to soap operas and from movies to sculpture, rhetoric’s materiality proliferates with every means of persuasion. As an object of rhetorical interpretation, the available means of persuasion are limitless. Between the practical and the interpretive dimension of rhetoric, rhetoric’s materiality tends to be registered in three ways: “a traditional one that insists upon considering the material conditions of discourse, another that focuses upon the lived-in body as a condition and consequence of rhetoric, and still another that understands rhetoric as itself material” (Blair 2001: 287–288).
To imagine rhetoric as itself material encouraged rhetorical scholars to explore different material modalities of persuasion (sculpture, city space, and media form) as well as to attend to “the signifier and its constitutive effects” prompting a “shift of theoretical and critical interest in the field from rhetorical materialism to rhetoric’s materiality” (Biesecker & Lucaites 2009: 4). My own contribution to rhetoric’s materiality was to advance a view of rhetoric as a multidimensional human technology of governance (Greene 1998). As such, rhetoric’s materiality is a result of an institutional combination of rhetorical form (speeches, film, debate, and discussion) and rhetorical purpose (persuasion, collaboration, and education) directed toward a population. To isolate rhetoric’s materiality in this way highlights Michel Foucault’s (1988, 1991) later work on human technologies and the art of governance more so than his notion of discourse.
However, my project does not assume the need to abandon a rhetorical materialism to highlight rhetoric’s materiality. First, it advances a rhetorical materialism less concerned with discovering the determinative conditions of discourse than one oriented toward the articulation and uptake of rhetorical practices into an apparatus of power. Second, it advances a material approach to subjectivity as the outcome between the elements of a material rhetoric and the relations of forces traversing a mode of production (Greene 2009). The argument advanced in this chapter is that the isolation of rhetoric’s materiality as an object of the study, absent of a rhetorical materialism, supports a will to power of rhetoric as an interpretive art. Without rhetorical materialism, a material rhetoric is simply a way to offer objects to a rhetorical hermeneutic documenting the constitutive effects of objects/forms of social influence. This is especially the case as the materiality of rhetoric is less registered in the signifier and more in the bodies, buildings, and media of persuasion. To claim that rhetoric is material without understanding how rhetorical interpretation is a cultural technology (a material rhetoric, in my terms) risks cultivating a blindness to how rhetorical criticism partakes in an apparatus of power.
To isolate how rhetorical criticism partakes in an apparatus of power, this chapter will start by returning to the Young Men’s Christian Association’s (YMCA) use of movies in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter isolates movies as a material rhetoric. As a material rhetoric, movies are approached as a cultural technology for affecting the conduct of specific populations. The first part of the chapter will document the institutional reasoning for the YMCA’s Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits (BMPE) use of movies. The purpose of this history is to explain how the YMCA used film exhibition and distribution to modernize subjectivity via pastoral relationships of care. In the second part of the chapter, I will describe how the material rhetoric of film criticism transformed the pastoral dimension of YMCA film exhibition into a technique of democratic citizenship. In the final section of the chapter, I return to the emergence of rhetorical (film) criticism as cultivating similar pastoral relationships of power.
Film exhibition as pastoral power
Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, the International Committee of the YMCA invested in the power of film as a way to address a mobile and diverse public. At the heart of this investment was the use of Y buildings as sites of film exhibition and the creation of the YMCA BMPE as an institution for distributing and exhibiting movies. The BMPE was initially an arm of the YMCA Industrial Department. As Thomas Winters narrates, the YMCA Industrial Department, founded in 1903, was tasked with the job of setting up “Industrial YMCAs” in factories and company towns to bring uplift programs to working men “with the goal to overcome class tensions and mitigate industrial conflict” (2002: 32). Under the guidance of Charles Towson, the Industrial Department “extended its reach far beyond company towns and mining and lumber villages into the nation’s industrial centers, drawing urban associations everywhere into its fold” (ibid.: 34). The means of social welfare offered by the Industrial Department included “tournaments for shop men, factory athletic and baseball leagues, lectures on workplace safety, educational classes, talks on personal hygiene and neighborhood socials, and Americanization classes” (ibid.). Greene (2005) documents how the YMCA imagined movie exhibition and distribution as a way to attract people to the Y programs as well as a way for moving the Y secretary out into civic sites such as churches, schools, and industry. For example, in 1912, Association Men, the corporate journal of the YMCA Secretary, advised the Y Secretary that “if movie picture shows in your locality are drawing young men away from you, meet this competition by offering them better moving pictures in your association rooms” (1912: 9). The YMCA BMPE came into being to provide these better pictures.
The title of the first catalog of the BMPE (ca. 1920) emphasized the “Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures … in and out of the Association Building”. The movie genres were classified as Industrials, Educational, Scenic, American cities, YMCA at Home and Overseas, and Health and Safety. These mundane and didactic movie genres were the backbone of an emerging “nontheatrical” network oriented toward the educational uses of movies. While the number of films offered by the BMPE were modest in comparison to the 1001 films that Moving Picture Age (1920) found suitable for nontheatrical uses, by 1919, the BMPE could boast a distribution network that extended to 34 states comprising over 5000 unique exhibitions with 1.8 million people in attendance. As Diane Waldman (1986) notes, one cannot separate the BMPE from the YMCA’s more general role in the history of welfare capitalism before the New Deal. As the BMPE catalog put the relationship “Motion pictures … provide an unusual opportunity for developing the platform of mutuality between the managerial and working force in industry” (1920: 4). The YMCA hoped this “platform of mutuality” would soothe class tensions and industrial conflict.
Industrial sponsorship of nontheatrical genres pointed to a class bias inherent in the BMPE catalog. As Steven Ross notes about the 1920s: “the companies most active in crushing unions … were also the most aggressive in producing non-theatricals … shown at local YMCAs” (1998: 224). This class bias informed the exhibition of theatricals as well. Diane Waldman (1986) discovers that the Hollywood movies exhibited by the Industrial YMCA at Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company tended toward ideologically conservative genres and narratives. With 1001 nontheatrical films available by 1920, and the particular exhibition decisions of local Y’s waiting to be discovered in the archives, a vast opportunity exists for the rhetorical interpretation of the films distributed by the BMPE and exhibited by a Y Secretary inside and outside his building. However, it was not simply the ideological motive but the educational value of film that interested the YMCA. From class conflict to social hygiene to industrial education to teaching English, the YMCA believed that movies were an efficient and a vivid way to educate working-class men (Greene 2005). What requires closer attention is less the success or failure of the movie to manage a social problem (class conflict), but the Y’s reasoning for exhibiting film.
Greene (2005) claims that the YMCA invested in films’ “attraction effect” motivating the Y to use movies as a cultural technology for shaping conduct. Movies played a communicative role in what Foucault (1983: 425–426) calls a “block of capacity, communication, and power,” but the movies were not alone. Movies were often exhibited with a Y secretary providing interpretive and educational guidance for audiences. A favorite and oft-repeated example provides an illustration of this communicative role of the movie and the Y secretary:
At one Sunday meeting of 250 non-English speaking men, representing nine Nationalities, the picture used was a melodrama – the story of a moon-shiner, the United States revenue officer and, of course, a pretty mountain lass. For one hour the secretary talked with the picture, reading the titles in very simple English, composing short sentences from the picture action: such as, “the door opens,” “the man comes out,” “he looks around,” “he hears a noise,” “he grabs the gun,” “he shoots the man,” “he is a bad man,” “he breaks the law,” “he is not a good citizen,” “a good citizen will not break the law.” Those men went home that afternoon with higher ideals of citizenship, and best of all, they had been helped to think in English.
(BMPE 1920: 8)
The ideological purpose is rather transparent and the success of the message is assumed rather than proven. However, the talking secretary alongside the silent film suggests the use of the film for educational purposes with an emphasis on learning English and a proper civic disposition. Moreover, the exhibition site or rhetorical occasion transforms the abstract relationship between a text and an audience into intimate and concrete encounter between the Y secretary and the men in the audience. The cultural intermediary of the speaking secretary highlights how the exhibition site and discursive spaces cultivated by the Y requires attention to what Tony Bennett refers to as the “ensemble of practices (classification, commentary, pedagogy) which serve to organize and regulate a particular field of textual uses and effects” (1991: 283). In this case, the Y secretary, a melodramatic movie, and a Sunday meeting with 250 non-English speaking men materializes a rhetorical situation that, Greene (2005) argues, expresses the modernization of pastoral power.
Pastoral power is a mode of power, Foucault explains, “whose role is constantly to ensure, sustain, and improve the lives of each and everyone” (2007: 141). With the image of the shepherd and the flock, Foucault suggests that pastoral power took on a special significance after its encounter with Christianity:
In the Western world, I think the real history of the pastorate as the source of specific type of power over men, as a model and matrix of procedures for the government of men, really only begins with Christianity … The process by which a religion, a religious community, constitutes itself as a Church, that is to say, as an instruction that claims to govern men in their daily life on the grounds of leading them to eternal life in the another world and to do this not only on the scale of a definite group, of a city or a state, but of the whole of humanity.
(Ibid.: 148–149)
The YMCA’s use of movies provides a mechanism for understanding the modernization of pastoral power. For Foucault, the first step in pastoral power’s modernization is that it “is no longer leading people to their salvation in the next world, but rather ensuring it in this world” (1983: 214). The C in the Young Men’s Christian Association’s name reflects the spiritual roots of the YMCA, yet the history of the Bureau of Motion Pictures corresponds to the YMCA’s encounter with worldly social problems. A second way pastoral power modernizes is to “increase … the number and kinds of officials of pastoral power” (ibid.). Y secretaries were not priests or pastors, but they were men. As Thomas Winter documents, between 1877 and 1920, the Y secretary went through a period of professionalization built from a “language of manhood” setting “standards that regulated their behavior, as men from a wide range of social backgrounds congealed into a professional body of men, the secretaryship of the YMCA” (2002: 89). Finally, according to Foucault, pastoral power relies on the development of knowledge concerning both the “population (the many) and the individual (the one)” (1983: 215). It was the institutional use of film in an exhibition site that included the Y secretary, a movie, and an audience that provided the opportunity for the Y secretary to transform this rhetorical situation into a longer term pastoral relationship with each individual. A Y secretary was admonished to “know your group individually” (“Ten Suggestions for College Students Engaged in Industrial Service,” ca. 1915: 2). The modernization of pastoral power is partly accomplished by the “institutional role of the YMCA … and the articulation of film as a prosthetic supplement to the Y secretary’s voice and touch” (Greene 2005: 31).
The modernization of pastoral power provides one way to account for the deployment of film distribution, exhibition, and reception as material rhetorics in the production of modern subjectivity. The Y’s role in the production of modern subjectivity was noted by Antonio Gramsci as “the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man” (1971: 302). As the YMCA exhibits film, and the Y secretary provides textual commentary, its audiences are enlisted into the production of a new subject. A production process Gramsci names Fordism.
Film criticism and the democratic subject
Ian Hunter (1988) provides a genealogy of modern criticism useful for understanding film criticism as a technology of governance. As for modern criticism, Hunter writes that
it takes the form of a contingent historical space in which the educative imperatives of a special ethical practice and a local “intellectual action” were available to appropriate “man” as an educable being made available by a powerful pedagogical apparatus.
(Ibid.: 213)
For Hunter, the special ethical practice of criticism was provided by the attachment of a romantic aesthetic to the imperative of popular schooling. This romantic aesthetic understood the “functions of criticism” as “primarily exemplary and educative … to secure the recognition of a specific kind of ethical obligation in relation to the shaping of the self” (ibid.: 186). On the other hand, “the appropriation of man” was made possible by the special knowledges supplied by “progressive education and educational psychology” (ibid.: 215) that secured a “division between his empirical behavior or consciousness and the unconscious laws which make this behavior or consciousness possible” (ibid.: 216). The discipline of education was imagined as making the latent laws manifest to the student. Hunter summarizes the emergence of modern criticism as an “unstable space between an aesthetico-ethical practice deployed as a pedagogical norm, and a reflexive intellectual action deployed as a pedagogical discipline” (ibid.). In this section, I want to argue that the YMCA investment in film criticism provides another relay point in modern criticism to participate in shaping a democratic subject.
The ability of film to attract an audience was a key motivation for its use by the YMCA as a way to forge pastoral relationships. Yet the attractiveness of the movies distributed by the YMCA seemed to rely on the lecture skills of those who exhibited the movies. As the 1930s commenced, George Zehrung (1931), the director of the Motion Picture Bureau, stated:
Many successful experiments have convinced us that it is not so much a matter of content, as it is appropriate application. The teacher who has the patience and ingenuity to discover a cubic content problem in a trail of coal cars, or to find the practical application of a laboratory experiment in hydraulics in a coal mining film, will inject new interests in otherwise dull subjects. The clergymen who finds a parable in the film story of an orange and conveys a practical application of Christ’s precepts will give his congregation new spiritual interpretation and information.
(Ibid.: 3–4)
The genres referenced by Zehrung are more likely than not “industrial” films produced by companies about their products and processes. From the company’s standpoint, the film was as much advertising as education. Zehrung’s emphasis on application over content indicates how cultural intermediaries might secure their pastoral relationship with their audiences by offering creative lessons. What was necessary for this act of rhetorical invention and repurposing was “a deliberate goal, careful preparation and wise selections” (ibid.: 4). In so doing, the cultural authority could make the dull subject interesting and spark a disposition toward learning/salvation in their audience.
Regardless of whether cultural authorities labored to make dull movie subjects interesting, the exhibition of movies with the aid of a cultural authority to guide the reception of the audience is central to what I have termed “pastoral exhibition” (Greene forthcoming: 208). This model of pastoral exhibition was made more robust by the inclusion of Hollywood genres into the relationship between the Y secretary and youth in the 1930s. However, unlike the talking secretary beside the silent film, the Y secretary reshaped his pastoral relationship with boys through a new block of capacity-communication-power: group leadership, the use of Hollywood genres, and the cultivation of kids that enjoyed movies. The key pedagogical intervention was to transform a movie into an object of film criticism. If the Motion Picture Bureau could not always guarantee “better movies,” then perhaps the Y secretary could make better audiences.
By the 1920s, the YMCA’s Industrial Department were forming and guiding group activities “to transform disruptive and destructive emotions of adult working men into constructive social impulses by giving outlet to their productive energies” (Winters 2002: 136). Like other programs designed by the Industrial Department, the goal was to defuse class conflict. However, as the Industrial Department closed in the later part of the 1920s, the use of group dynamics increased in the boys division of the YMCA by blending progressive educational psychology with group processes (Hopkins 1951: 550). The upshot of the uptake of educational psychology and group process moved the boys unit away from evangelical uses of the Bible “as an end in itself” and toward “fostering boys’ initiative in camping and club activity” (ibid.).
An important figure linking the group work of the boys division with the practice of film criticism was Able Gregg. After joining the National Staff in 1919, Abel Gregg quickly began to use natural social groups among the boys as a way to promote active learning. By the mid-1920s, Gregg was organizing the “Christian Citizenship program” relying more on group dynamics and club activities while “Bible study, so important earlier, virtually disappeared” (ibid.: 551). The popularization of the Payne Studies in Henry James Foreman’s (1933) Movie Made Children provided the impetus for using film texts to organize group activities and to align these group activities with the film appreciation movement in the early 1930s.
Foreman’s Movie Made Children presented the Payne Studies in such a way as to magnify the dangers that movies posed to children (Jowett et al., 1996: 101–108). For Eric Smoodin, the dangers of movie reception relied on “a notion of childhood and adolescent spectatorial passivity, of a mass audience that because of its immaturity could generate little resistance to what they saw on the screen” (2004: 94). One solution to this problem was to enlist the audience into a more active form of movie reception. Lea Jacobs names this pedagogical imperative the “film education movement” and describes it as
a series of efforts to regulate the conditions and effects of film viewing … by loosely related organizations which sponsored the development of film appreciation courses in an attempt to alter the film going habits of children and adolescents.
(1990: 29–30)
So, in the wake of the Payne Fund Studies, a film education movement emerged in the United States emphasizing character education, group process psychology, and film appreciation (Morey 2003: 148–189).
Abel Gregg used Foreman’s book to introduce the Payne Fund Studies to the YMCA and to nominate the YMCA as an agent in the film education movement. Gregg represented the study of motion pictures as a way to redeem movies from a purely economic motive:
To bring about the rescue of this modern medium of amusement and education from the hands of a group which seeks to use it for selfish economic ends may take some little time. But it will be done. The pathway to this rescue is increased understanding of the motion picture as art and as education on the part of all who go to the movies.
(1933: 1)
Drawing on a host of resources, especially Edgar Dale’s “How to Appreciate Movies,” Gregg encouraged group leaders to organize groups and lead those groups in discussions about film.
The use of group discussion is an important adjustment in the YMCA’s deployment of the Secretary’s voice associated with its exhibition of movies. More than anything it shifted the locus of truth telling. Earlier, occupying the standpoint of the lecturer, the Y secretary provided the truth about the movie. Now as a group leader, the youth/audience would increasingly become the locus of truth telling. For example, group leaders were encouraged to ask the members of the group: “How many movies they went to last week … Ask why he went to each movie attended the past week and to list any other reasons people have for going to the movies” (ibid.: 4). In so doing, the group leader was supposed to lead the group members toward the evaluation of the movies they attended.
As a pastoral technique, the group discussion techniques deserve special consideration. First, the shift in the locus of truth telling from the lecturer to the student provides a mechanism by which the student becomes a citizen: As White and Hunt remark
To be a free citizen obliges us to not only to tell the truth, but also requires us to engage in practices that reveal certain truths about ourselves. Truth telling is crucial to citizenship because it is what enables one to produce specific truths about oneself [and] … makes one subject of government.
(2000: 95)
Put differently, pastoral power of film is democratized through the use of discussion techniques to inculcate in the student/boy the practice of truth telling about his movie reception. Second, the use of group discussion techniques was advanced as a democratic method. The point of the group work at the YMCA was to use the group leader to help the boys make a judgment about the quality of the movies they enjoy. A lecturer in a pastoral relationship was too closely aligned with an autocratic model of citizenship because he told the audience the truth, while the use of group discussion provided a more active and democratic method of judgment. For Gregg, a Y Secretary should use a democratic method to guide discussion because
The democratic method provides experience with a method which the boy is called upon to know and understand, because of his living in a country governed in a democratic way. He must learn how to judge by practicing judgments with satisfaction, in situation after situation, from boyhood to manhood, and be thus prepared to carry his share of his country’s responsibilities and government.
(1927: 67)
By creating movie going groups and deploying this discussion technique with the rating tools developed by the advocates of film appreciation, the group leader was able to encourage the boy/adolescent to speak the truth about his popular desires while also making the boy accountable to the group’s discussion of the aesthetic and moral value of good films. In this way, the material rhetoric of film criticism was articulated to a pastoral relationship as a technique of democratic subjectification.
Rhetorical criticism and pastoral power
The first two sections of this chapter describe the pastoral dimensions of the YMCA’s involvement in film exhibition and modern film criticism, but, this history also provides a way to contextualize rhetorical criticism as an interpretive art of social commentary. What such a history reveals is how the materiality of rhetorical criticism participates in the production of modern subjects. The rationale for rhetoricians to turn their attention to film was provided by Hendrix and Wood: “Just as orators arise to meet our social crisis, film makers continue to show us their representations of social reality and thus to influence our perceptions and attitudes” (1973: 122). While discussing the need for rhetorical critics to attend to different media forms, Medhurst and Benson highlight the importance of such interpretive labor to promote democratic citizenship: “As we start to understand the complex interactions of medium with content, we take one more step toward the preservation of democratic forms of government where the people, through their collective ability to persuade rule” (1991: viii). The move toward popular media forms generated a shift away from viewing rhetoric as a specific kind of text to a more general “social function that influences and manages meaning … enabling scholars to think of some aspects of experience as rhetorical … that might not otherwise be so considered” (Brummett 1991: xii). As rhetoric becomes a dimension of (popular) culture, its object domain proliferates, even as that object domain returns as a social text worthy of commentary. Like Y secretaries narrating the moral lessons of a film, the rhetorical critic is encouraged to speak of the democratic lessons of popular media by exposing how they influence an audience’s social reality. The purpose of rhetorical criticism takes on pastoral dimensions when a critic is called upon to “empower those who are disadvantaged by rhetorical influences of which they have been unaware because those influences hide in seemingly innocuous artifacts of culture” (ibid.: xiii). The rhetorical criticism of culture is advanced as a means of political uplift; an empowerment of democratic citizenship by making manifest influences unacknowledged by an audience.
The role of rhetorical criticism as a pastoral mode of democratic subjectification puts pressure on the claims of rhetorical criticism to advance itself as a generalizable interpretive art capable of critical and aesthetic commentary on unlimited means of persuasion. To learn the ways of rhetorical interpretation is to be encouraged to become a critic. While addressing student/readers, Barry Brummett describes becoming a critic as
a kind of calling … committed to close reading, to paying attention … on a mission to inform self and others about what messages and experiences are doing to us so as to shape how we think and act.
(2009: 19)
The techniques of close reading suggest a mode of rhetorical inquiry in which messages and experiences are subject to what Colin Mercer once described as a “street wise semiosis which will transport all social forms and practices into manageable – because readable – domains of representation” (1991: 63). Yet, for Mercer, the investment in reading a “text” as a means of social commentary too easily displaces the techniques by which the text is put to use. The call to be a critic is one such use of the art of rhetorical interpretation. So too was the pastoral relationship of film criticism put into practice by the Y secretary as a group leader. To be a participant in this street-wise semiosis is to invite the student into an ethical obligation to read social texts wisely and share that reading with others. It is, at the same time, to participate in a “political economy of the sign whose principal mode of analysis in not to be found in semiotics but in human resource management” (ibid.: 64).
To recognize textual commentary less as a generalized art of rhetorical interpretation and more as a pastoral technology is to pay closer attention to the institutionalization of rhetorical criticism. The intellectual priority of rhetorical criticism as a professionalized mode of knowledge production interpreting cultural forms, displaces the teaching of rhetorical criticism within the more pastoral context of the classroom. The desire to produce rhetorical critics is not so far removed from group techniques as a technology for making citizens. Approaching rhetorical criticism in light of the modernization of pastoral power offers a rhetorical materialism of the forms and purposes rhetoric might take (rhetoric’s materiality). It also puts into relief the use of rhetorical interpretation as a will to pastoral power.
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