Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism,

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1 Reviews 715 authors and enjoyed the challenge of applying another interpretive frame to their works, I found myself in the margins of Durrant's text, scribbling an-other response. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, Sharon Crowley (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh P, pages). Reviewed by Jenny Edbauer, Pennsylvania State University In his article "Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America," Peter Coviello argues that in the earliest years of the republic, geographical or social unity alone could not force a sense of citizenship to emerge. However, certain founders such as Thomas Jefferson were able to imagine an "affective unity" forthe young nation, a unity that "pre-dates and so authorizes its political unity" (443) [Early American Literature 37 (2002): ]. More specifically, the sympathetic experience of pain sponsored (the capacity for) national citizenship, creating an emotional state of "the people" that Jefferson and other founders needed as a reference point. The loss of brotherhood with Britain, which led to the loss of a once firm national identity, became the sponsor of a new form of affective citizenship. Yet Coviello points out that Jefferson also used affect as a measurement of differences between whites and blacks. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson remarks that blacks do experience pain, yet those experiences "are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them" (qtd. in Coviello 447). An "improper quality" of feeling thus operates as a rationale for withholding citizenship from blacks. Coviello suggests that Jefferson did not believe that blacks could not feel, but rather that they were not capable of feeling with the proper "proportion, regulation, or intensity" that citizenship demanded. Since feeling

2 716 jac was the mode of civic production in Jeffersonian terms, therefore, blacks (who had a "different" kind offeeling than free whites) could not be seen as citizens. As we find in the earliest writings of the republic, American citizenship is arguably an affective citizenship. Many theorists have extended this kind of civic research into current scenes of "mood politics" and other emotional-political connections, such as the lesson AI Gore learned about the importance of seeming warm (see Lauren Berlant's Intimacy). Other scholars have begun to address the relationship between affect and civic life as a project for critical theory (see Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion). For rhetoricians, moreover, Coviello's research suggests a line of inquiry into how affect, passion, and feeling can lead to the expansion and contraction of the civic sphere. Jefferson's version of affective citizenship reflects a serious contraction of the citizen-subject, insofar as the affective experience of feeling was seen as a legitimation of valid citizenship. Meanwhile, the perceived absence ofthatfeeling was used as a rhetorical gatekeeper to limit the bounds of citizenship. This line of inquiry seeks to uncover the affective forces shaping the civic possibilities within particular historical moments. Stated broadly, interrogating the rhetoricity of affective citizenship poses the kinds of questions that Coviello asks about Jefferson's pain-based nationalism: how does feeling expand possibilities for some, while contracting possibilities for others? How does passion limit or expand what can be said-and heard-in public? It is this rhetorical inquiry that Sharon Crowley engages in her latest book, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, which is a remarkable examination of affective citizenship's expansions and contractions. In Toward a Civil Discourse, Crowley investigates the ongoing "culture war" between liberals and fundamentalists in American public life. Liberalism, which adopts an approach to civic argument that remains firmly rooted in an Enlightenment sense of rationality and understanding, is in tension with what Crowley calls "fundamentalism," or the discourses of moral, religious, and ethical

3 Reviews 717 absolutism that tend to see The Word as the final word on political and social issues such as abortion, women's rights, gay marriage, welfare, school financing, and so on. Crowley claims that this tension has generated some of the most serious limitations on current public discourse, insofar as liberals and fundamentalists often fail to engage in a truly rhetorical exchange. Without reducing liberalism and fundamentalism to a binary, she describes these two powerful forces as locked in something akin to Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard's differend, or two vocabularies that do not share any foundational reference point. Without the mediation of rhetoric, public discourse too often becomes empty and absolute disagreement. Crowley shows how both fundamentalism and liberalism are somewhat detached from a rhetorical ethic that recognizes the historical context of public argument. In the early chapters of Toward a Civil Discourse, Crowley explores the epistemologies of these two forces. Liberal thought, familiar to us through rhetoric's Enlightenment traditions, places a great importance on reasoning together with others, which is why tolerance has become an essential value within liberalism. Furthermore, liberal approaches to persuasion and debate in the civic sphere proceed through rational thought in order to avoid the unreasonable sway of mere feeling and passions. Reason is thus conflated with understanding, a combination that emphasizes the arts of communication. "In liberal epistemology understanding means something like 'grasping by means of reason,'" she explains (37). Calls for plurality, multiplicity, or democratic engagement similarly echo this liberal epistemology of reason. Furthermore, thanks to postmodernism's fanfare about contingent meaning, liberal rhetors have helped to rupture the foundational measures within social and political spheres. Fundamentalism, however, emerges as quite another register of American discourse. According to Crowley, radical fundamentalism can drift into apocalyptic narratives that feature a core belief: We are living in the "last days" before Christ's return. These narratives combine religious prophecy with social and political analyses that increasingly result in a powerful religious-conserva-

4 718 jac tive voting force. Such political and social effects prompt Crowley to identify apocalyptic discourse as a serious threat to civic life. Her research exposes the ways thatthis kind offoundationalism strains civil discourse to the breaking point, causing a dangerous contraction of possibilities within public life. Fundamentalisms are dangerous because they rely on what Crowley calls bad rhetoric, which "posit[s] unities that transcend temporal and local contexts" (56). This transcendent context strongly differs from liberalism's emphasis on contingency. Instead of negotiated reason, fundamentalism upholds foundational measures by which to gauge civic life. Forthis reason, writes Crowley, "the more I study apocalyptism, the more intense becomes my desire... to warn others of the ideological dangers it poses to democracy" (ix). As presented in Toward a Civil Discourse, fundamentalism is nothing short of antidemocratic. If Crowley believed in the efficacy of liberalism, then the book might have ended after these first few chapters. She could have simply explained the dangers of fundamentalism, provided "good reasons" for avoiding it, and concluded with a call to persuasion. However, since Crowley does not fall back on a liberalist means of argument, making the case for a rhetorical ethic is more complicated than giving good reasons. "While I do not doubt that the achievement of understanding would greatly assist the resolution of disagreements," she writes, "I sufferfrom a failure of imagination regarding its feasibility in the really hard cases of disagreements that Americans face today" (43). The notion of "reasoning" about abortion with a fundamentalist pro-lifer seems futile, as does trying to "reason" with committed pro-choice activists. We are thus left with two difficult questions: (1) Why does liberalism's reasoning often fail in the face offundamentalisms? (2) How does fundamentalism maintain such a persuasive power, in spite of its antirhetorical character? Crowley devotes her final chapters to exploring these very questions. For one thing, the differences between liberalism and fundamentalism involve more than a matter of competing epistemologies. They are also tightly bound up in different complexes of body,

5 Reviews 719 emotion, affect, thought, discourse, and social relations. It is not merely that fundamentalists think differently than liberals about civic matters; they feel differently in their body. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's habitus, which signals a kind of material-affective enculturation of our subjectivities, Crowley argues that our body enfolds "correct beliefs" about how the world should be. "Subjects are formed by embodied habits drawn from culture, such as shaking hands and not blowing one's nose at the table," she writes (62). Similarly, certain fundamentalist bodies shudder at the "incorrect" beliefs of non-fundamentalists, and this shudder serves as feedback or reinforcement for fundamentalist epistemology. The feeling of correctness, in other words, is a guarantee of correct belief. Crowley spends quite a lot oftime discussing the body in this fine level of phenomenological detail because of its implications for belief. Drawing on Bourdieu, Lawrence Grossberg, Chantal Mouffe, and Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard's concept of libidinal investments, Crowley persuasively argues that ideologic discourses possess an intensity that exists apart from the epistemic. Crowley draws on the theory of acoustic resonance to help explain how beliefs and discourses become intensified in the social habitus-and, by extension, within individual bodies. When multiple beliefs are linked together in an affective-bodily sense, the layers seem to reduce into quasi-unity. Like resonating sound waves, beliefs can vibrate together in order to amplify their intensity. For example, apocalyptic Christian discourse often resonates with biblical prophecy, Middle East politics, popular American entertainment culture, multinational conspiracy theories, and conservative politics. These kinds of articulations that resonate together in a given apocalyptic habitus can have various degrees of density. "The more densely beliefs are articulated with one another in a given belief system or across belief systems," she writes, "the more impervious they are to rhetorical intervention" (78). Belief gains reinforcement through those "sympathetic vibrations" of tropes in close proximity. Feeling and belief can resonate so tightly that they conflate into one another, making rhetorical intervention difficult to achieve.

6 720 jac Woven throughout the book's chapters, then, is a warning about the dangers posed by a lack of risk in discourse. To stage a "rhetorical intervention" within any belief system, there must be some open spaces where belief and commitment have not yet hardened into a calcified knot of sympathetic vibrations. Civil discourse between fundamentalists and liberals is nearly impossible because of the unwillingness to risk any changes in our habit(u)s. Instead of shouting down others, or walking away from the hope of civil discourse, Crowley suggests that we must enact the rhetor's subjectivity. The rhetor is a subject of risk, she explains, who is always on the lookout for the inventive and kairotic possibilities of argument. More importantly, a rhetorical subject(ivity) relinquishes her own claims to inerrancy. "An ethical rhetor can never foreclose the possibility that an opposing argument will open new lines of rhetorical force," Crowley writes (56). This does not call for a turn to "rational discourse" over affectivity. Instead, an ethical rhetorical intervention risks the work of disarticulation, or the loosening of affects and beliefs that are so tightly bound together that they prevent expansion in public life. Disarticulation requires "time and patience" from rhetors and their audiences, yet the results seek to open a space within densely articulated belief systems (201). This is where Crowley's project makes such an important contribution to rhetorical studies. Although Toward a Civil Discourse is an excellent study of the fundamentalist rhetoric that is gaining such powerful influence in American culture, Crowley also reaffirms the power of rhetoric within the civic sphere. Reading her detailed discussions of fundamentalist rhetoric, I begin to see the danger of over-articulating feeling, belief, and discourse. Yet, the more I read herwords, the more I realize that it is not just religious apocalyptic rhetoric that risks such danger. Fundamentalist thought is nothing but the contraction of discourse and subjectivity. This is the same contraction imposed through Jefferson's racist rhetoric, which denied the possibility of a black citizen-subject who appeared not to "feel pain" in the same manner as whites. Our best hope for civil discourse and public life exists in finding openings

7 Reviews 721 within our own articulations and habit(u)s. A civic sphere driven by rhetorical ethics encourages expansion over contraction: expansion of discourse, subjectivity, and the bounds of risk. Finally, Toward a Civil Discourse makes a strong contribution to the field for a number of reasons beyond its investigation into the current state of American civil discourse. The book's final chapters leave open a number of larger questions for readers to consider. One of the biggest questions I find myself still considering is the issue of all "fundamentalisms," including the fundamentalist gestures of liberals and the political left. Although it is easy to identify how apocalyptic discourse is often severely limited, Crowley's argument left me wondering about our own discursive contractions. How do we limit who can speak about what to whom? What kinds of legitimating practices do we use? Most difficult of all: do our particular affective knots, our dense resonations, promote the expansion of civic possibilities? Another opening generated in Crowley's argument relates to her brief mention of disarticulation as a rhetorical strategy. Where any kind of fundamentalism or reification exists, we are likely to find a dense bundle of articulations that need to be loosened from one another. (Jefferson's racist rhetoric, for example, demanded a disarticulation of the concept of citizenship from expressions of pain.) I welcome an extended treatment of disarticulation by Crowley or other readers who will continue this project. For now, however, I am left with questions that open up plenty of inventive space: what is disarticulation, and what are the ethics that would guide such a practice? How do we engage in disarticulation without falling back into liberal rationalism? Is disarticulation specifically within the realm of rhetorical work? Questions such as these are what make Crowley's work so rich, for her argument encourages inquiry that goes beyond rhetorical critique. By challenging her readers to raise these questions, she agitates for us to become inventors of possibilities. And this is what makes Toward a Civil Discourse a work of expansion.